Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture / Edition 1

by Salim Tamari

Overview

This groundbreaking book on modern Palestinian culture goes beyond the usual focal point of the 1948 war to address the earlier, formative years. Drawing on previously unavailable biographies of Palestinians (including Palestinian Jews), Salim Tamari offers eleven vignettes of Palestine's cultural life in the momentous first half of the twentieth century. He brings to light the memoirs, diaries, letters, and other writings of six Jerusalem intellectuals whose lives spanned (and defined) the period of 1918-1948: a musician, a teacher, a former aristocrat, a doctor, a Bolshevik revolutionary, and a Jewish novelist. These essays present an integrated cultural history that illuminates a watershed in the modern social history of the Arab East, the formulation of the Arab Enlightenment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251298
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/03/2008
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology at Birzeit University, Palestine and Director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Palestine's Conflictual Modernity
2. The Mountain against the Sea? Cultural Wars of the Eastern Mediterranean
3. From Emma Bovary to Hasan al-Banna: Small Towns and Social Control
4. Bourgeois Nostalgia and the Abandoned City
5. A Musician's Lot: The Jawhariyyeh Memoirs as a Key to Jerusalem's Early Modernity
6. Lepers, Lunatics, and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and His Circle
7. Sultana and Khalil: The Origins of Romantic Love in Palestine
8. The Last Feudal Lord
9. Ishaq Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine
10. The Enigmatic Bolshevik from the Holy City
11. The Vagabond Café and Jerusalem's Prince of Idleness

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Essay after essay is enriched with arresting descriptions, illuminating anecdotes and intriguing details. . . . An erudite and original contribution to the history of the Middle East and an inspiring and enjoyable piece of scholarship."—Times Higher Ed Supp (Thes)

"A strong contribution to scholarship on Jerusalem in English."—Middle East Journal

Editorial Reviews

A strong contribution to scholarship on Jerusalem in English.

Middle East Journal

Essay after essay is enriched with arresting descriptions, illuminating anecdotes and intriguing details. . . . An erudite and original contribution to the history of the Middle East and an inspiring and enjoyable piece of scholarship.

Times Higher Ed Supp (Thes)

"Essay after essay is enriched with arresting descriptions, illuminating anecdotes and intriguing details. . . . An erudite and original contribution to the history of the Middle East and an inspiring and enjoyable piece of scholarship."--Times Higher Ed Supp (Thes)

"A strong contribution to scholarship on Jerusalem in English."--Middle East Journal

From the Publisher