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History Lessons in the City of Dawud:Jordan's Past and Complexities ofIdentity beyond SilwanElena D. CorbettPublished online: 26 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Elena D. Corbett (2011) History Lessons in the City of Dawud: Jordan'sPast and Complexities of Identity beyond Silwan, Middle Eastern Studies, 47:4, 587-603, DOI:10.1080/00263206.2011.589665

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History Lessons in the City of Dawud:Jordan’s Past and Complexitiesof Identity beyond Silwan

ELENA D. CORBETT

One day in Amman, a Jordanian archaeologist happened to be at his mother’s housewhen a repairman arrived. Mother informed the archaeologist that the repairman,like their own family, was originally from the Palestinian village of Silwan. Thearchaeologist wanted to offer the man something to drink.

‘Ya Abu Dawud (Hey, Father of David)!’ the archaeologist called.‘Aiwa (Yes)!’ the repairman called back.Mother was surprised. ‘How did you know his name was Abu Dawud?’ sheasked.The archaeologist explained to me how he knew. ‘If you’d go to Silwan’, he said,‘stand on that staircase binding upper Silwan with lower Silwan and wouldshout ‘‘Dawuuuuud!’’ there would probably come . . . two hundred people.’1

It is impossible these days to escape the confluence of archaeology and politics inSilwan. Ancient structures and artefacts are uncovered with exponential rapidity inthis part of shrinking Arab East Jerusalem just outside what many residents still referto as Bab al-Magh�ariba.2 Silwan is increasingly a flashpoint where the aspirations ofPalestinians collide with Israel’s expansionist settler movement, which operates herewith the support of government at both the state and municipal levels.3

Archaeological work in Silwan’s vicinity has always stirred controversy, whether itwas Charles Warren’s tunnels of the late 1860s, Frederick Jones Bliss’s excavationsof the 1890s, or Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s in the 1960s.4

Referred to by early western explorers as the ‘holy basin’, excavations continuedthere between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, but have taken a dramatic turn over thepast decade.5 Although under various aspects of Israeli law it appears to have nomeans to do so, since 1986 the NGO called the Ir David (City of David) Foundation,or El’ad, which promotes and funds the religious settler movement, has garneredauthority over an increasing amount of land that it claims has connections to thebiblical King David.6 The City of David, as El’ad and its supporters envision it,continues to encroach on Silwan. It is in reality a settlement that exists under theauspices of the Israel Parks and Nature Authority. Within the park are

Middle Eastern Studies,Vol. 47, No. 4, 587–603, July 2011

ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/11/040587-17 ª 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2011.589665

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archaeological sites above- and below-ground and a series of tourism-relatedcomplexes on land obtained by questionable purchases, confiscations of residentialproperty and evictions of Arab residents.7 Excavations are legally conducted withpermits granted to a number of renowned Israeli archaeologists from both academicinstitutions and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), whose work is supportedwith money raised by El’ad. Most of these archaeologists claim no overt biblicalconnections to their work. Eilat Mazar, however, has claimed that a large stonestructure dated to the tenth century BCE may, in fact, be the palace of King Davidhimself, and the signage describing the architecture is thus labelled.8

The many deeds of David and his son Solomon are told in the books of 1 and 2Samuel and 1 Kings in the Hebrew Bible. Chief among these are the building of theFirst Temple and the creation of a United Monarchy composed of Israel (thenorthern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom). It is the story of the UnitedMonarchy that forms the perennial, historicist basis of Zionism, connecting modernJews and the geography of the state of Israel to the geography and events of theHebrew Bible. It is in this context that we are meant to understand Israeli PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to calls for settlement freezes in Jerusalem.‘The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish peopleare building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement; it’s our capital’, hedeclared at the American–Israel Public Action Committee’s (AIPAC’s) annualconvention in Washington, DC on 22 March 2010.

The situation in Silwan, like any aspect of the conflict over Palestine, can beviewed in the context of dominant narratives competing with one another. Just asIsrael has, at official levels, used cultural heritage to frame exclusively Jewishnarratives of Jerusalem and Palestine as a whole, Palestinian politicians of thesecularist PLO have gone on record refuting any Jewish presence in the narrative ofPalestine’s ancient history generally, and Jerusalem’s ancient history in particular.9

As discussed further below, this development – the denial of Jewish history inPalestine – was not a normative view throughout most of the twentieth century. Itmanifested itself most acutely after the 1967 war, and was a consequence of twointer-related things: 1) the PLO’s institutionalization of a distinct Palestinian – asopposed to pan-Arab – political identity and nationalism; and 2) the growth of thesettler movement and religious nationalism in Israel within the context of theoccupation, and its obtainment and appropriation of cultural heritage.10 As itemerged during the First Intifada (1987–93) to challenge both the secular leadershipof the PLO and the Israeli occupation, the Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS,by contrast re-inserted Jews into Palestine’s ancient history. In doing so, HAMASappropriated figures like David and Solomon and ‘true believers’ among theChildren of Israel, referring to them as their Muslim forefathers engaged in a longpolitical–religious struggle against the Jews who denied such claims.11 HAMAS thuscreated a narrative of perennial strife that fit the national struggle in which it asserteditself and the ideological and leadership struggle in which it engaged with the PLO.Narratives outside that woven by HAMAS that deploy an ancient Palestinian past tospeak to contemporary Palestinian national aspirations are probably the leastdisseminated at either the official or popular levels.12

What none of these narratives relates, however, are the more intimate andnuanced narratives of ancient historical memory in Palestine reflected in anecdotes

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like that which opens this article. Silwan, a locale reported in the diaspora as thehome of countless Dawuds is critical to Palestinians for their own overtly expressedconnections to the same history and traditions that motivate groups like El’ad, whichseek to erase the locals’ narrative from memory and their physical and juridicalpresence from the land.

The archaeologist and Jordanian son of Silwan offers various levels at which toexplore a number of sensitive, overlapping issues related to identity and intimateperceptions of identity that are bound up in his joke and in his own biography. In thefirst place, the archaeologist and his family have a story familiar to so manyJordanians with ties to Palestine. Between those Palestinians displaced into Jordanfrom the lands that became Israel and those residing in what Jordan occupied andcalled the ‘West Bank’, more than 700,000 Palestinians became Jordanian citizens inthe wake of the war of 1948. These numbers grew over the course of Jordan’soccupation of the West Bank, with another influx after Israel occupied the WestBank in 1967, and yet another when many Gulf states either expelled theirPalestinian workforces or, euphemistically speaking, strongly encouraged them toleave during the Gulf War of 1990–91. The relationship between Jordanian citizensof Palestinian descent and Jordanian citizens of Transjordanian descent has notalways been easy, to say the least.13 This relationship comprises an erroneousnarrative of civil war fought strictly along Palestinian–Transjordanian lines duringBlack September and its aftermath (1970–71), and has in many ways built thefoundations of the organization of Jordanian life since, in high and low politics, inthe realm of government and economic development.14

Archaeology, furthermore, the foundation of this Jordanian’s career, has played nosmall part in the mounting tensions in the place from which his family hails. As anarchaeologist, he is part of an elite intellectual circle for which the facts exposed in theground initially speak a set of unpopularized data. It is the archaeologist’sinterpretation of the data that can become popularized, within and outside thescholarly community. Since the advent of scientific archaeology in the period ofEuropean colonial expansion (from the late eighteenth century until before the FirstWorld War) archaeological work has been seized upon by others, such as elites andinterest groups, to popularize and embed selective narratives of antiquity intocontentious political or social discourse. It is in this way that, funded by an NGOwithan exclusivist, nationalist agenda, an archaeologist who excavates structures andartefacts dating to the tenth century BCE attributes them to David and Solomon. Atits best, this process produces excellent scholarship in the liberal, humanist tradition.At its worst, it is used to define who is not part of the nation, further subjecting thoseof that unfortunate designation to the institutionalization of their ‘otherness’.

A joke about the proliferation of contemporary Davids speaks to an under-standing of narratives of identity that lay beyond the archaeologist’s profession whilesimultaneously speaking to complex, sometimes unpopular truths of the narrativeshe lives through his multi-layered identity – Arab, Jordanian, Ammani, Palestinian,Silwani. And each of these personal and professional interests is inescapablyembedded in conflict. Another Jordanian archaeologist with family origins inPalestine said, ‘I am proud that my ancestors were Jewish. It means they weren’t

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pagans. It means they were Muslims.’15 And another, ‘I have more right to claim theJewish heritage as my own than a Jew from Europe does. But I can’t say that.’16

It goes without saying that this is a bold and potentially explosive statement. Thisarchaeologist’s sense of identity, comprised of a multitude of personal andprofessional layers, resembles at its core that of the Dawuds of Silwan and thosewho joke about them. The first part of his claim is not expedient academically orpolitically, either for those who espouse an exclusively Jewish national narrative ofPalestine’s ancient history or for those who deny one. The archaeologist’s furtheradmission that such a claim to heritage is taboo is equally incendiary. Within andbeyond the realm of professional archaeology and heritage politics, it questions theexistence of a safe space in which to broach the subject of narratives of sharedantiquity – biblical or otherwise, at home or abroad – that include Jews andMuslims, Palestinians, Israelis and non-Palestinian Arabs.

As alluded to above, the disappearance of a safe space in which to have such adiscussion is a relatively recent occurrence, a departure from nationalist narrativesthat, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, wove intricate nuances ofboth pan-Arab and nation-state nationalisms out of the ancient Arab past generally,and with special reference to that past in Palestine. Before discussing these in greaterdetail, however, it is important to understand the traditions that bind Silwan and itspeople specifically, and Jerusalem generally, to David and Solomon. While theimportance of such an association for followers of Jewish or Christian traditions isobvious, particularly to a ‘western’ audience, the scriptural association for Muslimsis equally significant. Silwan sits just outside al-

_Haram al-Shar�ıf (the Noble

Sanctuary, in what Jewish tradition is known as The Temple Mount), overlooked byMasjid al-’Aqs�a (al-Aqsa Mosque), which, from the perspective of Silwan, sits in theforeground of Qubbat al-

_Sa

_khra (the Dome of the Rock). Scholars and pundits have

offered numerous explanations as to why the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik builtthe Dome of the Rock at the end of the seventh century, ranging from expressions ofpersonal largesse and piety, to an alternative place of pilgrimage at a time whenrevolt made travel to Mecca dangerous, to something with which to spiteChristendom.17 Whatever the Caliph’s reasons, in the first place it commemoratesthe lives and deeds of prophets such as Ibrahim (Abraham) and Suleyman andMuhammad. The location is long identified in Abrahamic scriptures and relatedliteratures as the place where the Patriarch nearly sacrificed his son (Is

_haq/Isaac or

Ism�a’il/Ishmael, depending on one’s beliefs), and the location upon which Suleymanbuilt the First Temple. These were linked to the revelation of the Qur’an and theprophethood of Muhammad by means of the Night Journey (al-’Isr�a’), the ProphetMuhammad’s epic trip from his home in Mecca on a winged steed to ‘the farthestmosque’ (al-masjid al-’aqs�a) (Q 17:1) before ascending to the Heavens and meetingwith God. In related literatures, Jerusalem is taken to be what is referred to as ‘thefarthest mosque’, as Muhammad ascended to Heaven from the locale of Ibrahim’ssacrifice and Suleyman’s Temple, leaving his footprint in the bedrock upon which‘Abd al-Malik would have the Dome of the Rock built. Muhammad’s genealogy as itwas later canonized reflected his direct descent from Ibrahim.18

Like the stories and personalities of the Children of Israel generally, Dawud,Suleyman and the Jerusalem and Palestinian geographical realia with connections tothem have figured prominently in the Qur’an, the Hadith and associated literatures.

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In the hagiography, Dawud and Suleyman are endowed with a range of personalqualities and supernatural gifts. One of the first writers to provide a comprehensivehistory of Jerusalem, native Muj�ır al-D�ın al-‘Ulaym�ı al-

_Hanbal�ı, a q�a

_d�ı (judge),

identifies in his late fifteenth century work numerous traditions linking particularlocales and structures near Silwan, including Mt. Zion and al-

_Haram al-Shar�ıf, to the

lives and deeds of Dawud and Suleyman.19 His is just one example of a genre ofliterature known as fad�a’il al-quds (the virtues of Jerusalem) which, together withsimilar genres, demonstrate the connections and geographical parameters by whichArabs conceived of Jerusalem and Palestine, and their own links to the past.20

Something of these traditions made its way into the work of explorers from the West.As reported around the mid-nineteenth century by American CongregationalistEdward Robinson, the first western scholar to undertake a systematic, toponym-based survey of the Holy Land, a mosque and tomb for the Prophet Dawud lay on anearby hillside.21

Beyond its geographical connections to the Dawud and Suleyman legends, Silwanstraddles the Kidron Valley, known locally as the Wad�ı Sitt�ı Maryam (Valley ofMary, the mother of Jesus). It and its water sources, famous as the biblical pools ofSiloam and the Gihon Spring (also known as Mary’s Spring), are likewise imbuedwith traditional meanings for locals. Mary’s spring is, according to some traditions,the location of the Angel Jibril’s (Gabriel’s) annunciation to her of Jesus’s impendingbirth.22 Silwan is critical to the narratives of the very ancient past spoken forPalestinians and Arabs of all faiths.

Like the archaeologist whose anecdote opens this discussion, much of Jordan’spopulation has family ties to Palestine. For most of its existence, Jordan’s royalfamily, the Hashemites, have claimed their own – and Jordan’s – legitimacy topossess large parts of it. Not the least of these parts is Jerusalem.23 During andbeyond Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from 1950 to1967, Jordanian history writers of all origins were enlisted to provide narrativessupporting such claims.24 Most pointedly this was done in school textbooks, ofwhich Jordan began producing its own in the early 1950s.25 Textbooks incorporatednarratives of Arab history that had been disseminated broadly in pan-Arab thoughtsince the 1920s, and in Arab literary and scientific societies and their publicationssince the last decades of the nineteenth century.26 These meta-narratives ‘Arab-ized’virtually all of the ancient peoples who had roamed the pre-modern Arab world –Hebrews included – finding their origins in various waves of Arab Semites whoemerged from the Arabian Peninsula. Antiquity thus served as the necessaryprecursor for the legitimacy of a self-determined nation-state, demonstrating thatArab antiquity was older than Zionist antiquity and accounting for the diversity ofthe Arab states’ populations.

Jordan’s textbook writers during the period of Jordan’s occupation of Palestineoperated, however, in a tricky political and ideological context. While pan-Arabismwas characteristically anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist in its conception, and whileGamal abd al-Nasser emerged to control so much of its message, Hashemite Jordanowed its existence to cooperation with Britain, was understood to have been acollaborator with the Zionist Movement (and later with Israel) and was often viewed

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as a roadblock to Palestinian self-determination and identity expression. In thiscontext, subsuming important components of Palestinian identity more generallyand Jerusalem’s identity more specifically was critical.27 In terms of utilizing Jordan’stextbooks for this task, their authors harnessed the same biblical narrative that spoketo Palestine’s ancient Jewish past, using it to speak instead to Jordan’s past andconnecting Jordan’s royal family to the Arabs’ past.

Jordan as the Hashemites imagined it stood on three pillars of legitimacy:Hashemite leadership of the Great Arab Revolt, Hashemite descent from theProphet Muhammad, and the perception of the Hashemite kings’ patriarchal statusas fathers of a large ‘national tribe’.28 It is the second – the descent from theProphet – that is of concern here.29 As the scriptural significance of Jerusalem andthe exigencies of pan-Arab nationalist legitimacy are discussed in greater detailbelow, it is clear that unlike Egypt, Iraq or non-Arab states like Turkey and Persia,Jordan has an ancient past that is ultimately inseparable from Abrahamic scripture.In this respect, in terms of a national narrative rendered by artefacts of the ancientpast, Jordan’s is by necessity most like Israel’s.

Arab nationalism, in all its diversity, is unimaginable without an anti-colonialethos, and it is the protest against colonialism in which the stance against Zionismmust be understood. As the shape of the post-First World War order emerged,earlier strands of intellectual inquiry into the Arabs’ ancient past were consolidatedand promoted to serve the cause of Arab nationalism and combat Zionism.Deploying the ancient past for this purpose required a formulation of the ancientlandscape of the modern Arab world, its history and its monuments that wasprimordially Arab. Such a formulation furthermore had to fulfil three goals: 1)demonstrate a shared ethnicity for all Arabs; 2) demonstrate that an ancient Arabnation or nations existed before that of an ancient Jewish nation; and 3) account forthe shared ethno-linguistic, religious and historical connections between Arabs andJews and the diversity of Arabs.30 Denial of Jewish history was difficult, for denial ofJewish history equalled denial of Muslim and Christian history. Devising anappropriate narrative of ancient history thus required an Arab framework that fit thecontemporary geopolitical context, a solution that would be found in an Arab-centric pan-Semitic narrative.31 This narrative and its goals are perhaps most easilydiscerned in school textbooks. In overlapping historical narratives that espouseparticular nuances of both pan-Arab and nation-state nationalism, Arab textbooksearly established a paradigm by which all Semitic peoples come in waves out of theArabian Peninsula to populate what is the contemporary Arab world, giving rise tothe panoply of ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. The Hebrews are among theseSemitic Arab peoples, who were preceded by their Semitic Arab cousins in Palestine,the Canaanites.

This formulation of pan-Semitic history was internationalized in no small way byAncient Times, the textbook written by American Orientalist James Henry Breasted,first published in English in 1916.32 Breasted contended that Arabia was theancestral home of all the Semites, who, throughout history, have given up theiroriginal Bedouin ways of life and developed successive urban-based civilizationsthroughout the Middle East. The rough-hewn Hebrew nomads, he claimed,wandered over time out of Arabia into the urban Palestinian society built by theSemitic Canaanites, who had earlier wandered out of Arabia to settle Palestine.

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Upon seeing the comfortable and prosperous urban life that the Canaanites hadcreated, Breasted says that, much like immigrants in our country – meaning theUnited States in the early twentieth century – the Hebrews adopted Canaanitecivilization as their own.33

Speaking about ancient peoples as Arabs and in terms of Semitic waves fromArabia was nothing new. Western Orientalists had been publishing such theories fordecades.34 Arab intellectuals had been reading and translating them, reinvigoratinginterest in Arabic classics such as fad�a’il al-quds (the virtues of Jerusalem) literature,and offering their own perspectives in books and journals that were secular andreligious, scientific and popular, and that circulated throughout and beyond theArab world.35 These included, among others, al-Muqtataf (founded 1876), al-Hilal(founded 1892) and al-Manar (founded 1898). In publishing his comprehensivesynthesis intentionally as a school textbook at the same time that post-Ottomanborders began to materialize, and in Arabiz-ing both the Canaanites and theHebrews within a broader, widely accepted ethnic origin narrative, Breasted offeredpost-war Arab textbook writers a pan-national narrative with roots in Palestine thatpre-dated, and thus countered, the narrative of ancient history deployed by theZionist movement.

These ideas were put to re-cast purposes given the new colonial and nation-staterealities after the war. In 1919 Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib published a synthesis of theSemitic Wave Theory in a Damascus newspaper.36 In 1920, an editorial in thePalestinian newspaper al-Quds al-Sharif espouses the Canaanites–Hebrews narrativein the context of developing relations between the Zionist movement andPalestinians in Jerusalem, differentiating between Palestinian Jews, who wereconsidered part of the community, and European Jews, who were consideredoutsiders.37 By 1923, ‘Umar al-Salah al-Barghouthi and Khalil Tutah had publishedthe first of what would be many editions of their textbook, Tarikh Filastin (TheHistory of Palestine), which was used for many decades in classrooms throughoutthe Arab world.38 Al-Barghouthi and Tutah provide a detailed account of Jewishhistory based on Muslim, Jewish and Christian sources, all within the framework ofa detailed pan-Semitic narrative of shared origins.39 As for Breasted’s book, itsearliest Arabic edition was published in Beirut in 1926, from which it wasdisseminated for decades in the Arab world.40 Palestinian writers MuhammadDarwazeh, Darwish al-Miqdadi and Akram Zu‘aytar, who first published theirtextbooks in the late 1930s, certainly drew upon all these available narratives whenproducing their seminal textbooks, which were disseminated widely and in multipleeditions across the Arab world.41 The late 1940s’ textbook by Iraqi Jewishintellectual Ezra Haddad, although written in its particular national context, did soin similar pan-Semitic terms as established three decades before.42 Some textbooksavailable in Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s followed suit. While many writers whoproduced them relate the narrative without reference to more recent sources in anylanguage and rely on references to scripture, others refer to or directly quote theArabic editions of Breasted’s al-‘U

_s�ur al-Qad�ıma (Ancient Times).43

It may appear paradoxical that literature of a pan-national movement that wasanti-imperialist and anti-Zionist at its core would present a narrative to its ownaudience within the framework produced by western scholarship. Such scholarship,along with western strategic interests, ultimately aided and abetted the delineation of

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unnatural post-First World War national boundaries that Arab nationalism stroveto supersede while existing in a complex relationship with emergent nation-statenationalist ideas and institutions. There are, furthermore, as discussed at lengthabove, Arab and Muslim paradigms for understanding the continuum of ancienthistory, including Jewish and Christian scriptures and associated literatures, pre-Islamic traditions, the Qur’an,

_had�ıth, tafs�ır, poetry, prose, history and geography.

Why would Arab textbook writers thus make the choice to write as Breasted andother western scholars wrote, sometimes even quoting them directly, and to claim theOrientalist paradigm of Arab origins authentically as their own?

As their encounters with the West developed over the course of the nineteenthcentury, educated Arabs had enthusiastically engaged in the discourse of newknowledge which those encounters presented them.44 Much of that knowledge wasproduced within the rubric of scientific method and the classification and definitionof things and people. The work of many commentators demonstrates that educatedArabs were active in learning about their past, were open to western approaches to itand well understood the power of antiquity for both good and ill.45 In the age of thenation-state, antiquity was old evidence of new geographic realities. Demonstratingthe perennial nature of the imagined national community within the geographicalboundaries of state was a prerequisite for self-determination. Nationalist writerswere not simply borrowing and creating new knowledge; they were framing theirdiscourse within a paradigm of knowledge that best fit the political andsocioeconomic organizational context in which they found themselves. Tarif Khalidiand William Cleveland have argued that George Antonius wrote The ArabAwakening to show his readers, primarily in the West, that the efforts andcircumstances of contemporary Arabs rendered them worthy of self-determination.46

Perhaps, as Khalidi suggests, the authors whose books are mentioned herein wrotewith a similar purpose, showing their readers in the Arab classroom that the ancientArabs met the criteria by which ancient historical relationships were an importantcomponent for staking the legitimacy of modern nation-states.47

Jordan’s production of its own textbooks came with a multi-phased effort in the1950s to standardize Jordanian public and private education after Jordan’sannexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.48 In keeping with the threepillars of Hashemite legitimacy described above, Betty Anderson has identified fourstrands of the Hashemite Jordanian national narrative woven into Jordan’stextbooks of the 1950s and 1960s: ‘the Hashemites as vigilant fighters againstimperialism; the Hashemites as the leading Arab nationalists in the region; theHashemites as the sole protectors of the Palestinian people and nation; and . . . theHashemites as patron-fathers of the Jordanian people’.49

The Jordanian Hashemite family, however, was a locus of contradictions which ithad to reconcile publicly. In the age of Arab nationalism, it had to show support forthe spirit of Gamal abd al-Nasser’s popular stances while simultaneously promotingits own Hashemite vision and the survival of its own dynasty as the answer to Arabunity. This meant that against Nasser’s support of Cold War non-alignment and hisvehement anti-imperialist rhetoric, the Hashemites had to defend their abjectopposition to communism and their dependence on the British, and soon theAmericans. In an age of defiant anti-imperialism, the Hashemites’ long relationshipwith Britain was glaring. The Hashemites lived under the shadow of having colluded

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with Zionist leaders while Nasser and many of the Free Officers spent weeks in 1948taking heavy fire in the trenches of Palestine’s battlefields. While Nasser rallied theArab world against Israel, the Hashemites faced sharing an enormous and veryunstable border with its new national neighbour. Publicly the Hashemites had tosummon support for Palestinian national aspirations despite the fact that Jordan hadannexed most of what remained of Palestine and its people after 1948, referring tothe land as Jordan and the people as Jordanians, subsuming its cultural and spiritualheritage as Jordanian and banning the use of the term ‘Palestine’ to refer to theterritorial unit they named it ‘West Bank’.50

Jerusalem was crucial for helping the Jordanian Hashemites mitigate the intel-lectual dissonances arising from the political discussion described above. Nasser mayhave had the Free Officers’ Revolution, a victory in the Suez War and the High Damat Aswan, but King Hussein had Jerusalem. And Jerusalem, with all of its meaningsat home and abroad and all of its components, including the holy sites of the threeAbrahamic faiths and artefacts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, was the ultimate prize,its history the best fodder for books weaving together strands of a narrative that wassimultaneously pan-Arab and Jordanian, with the Hashemites at its core.

A text illustrative of this is Adnan Lutfi Uthman’s Al-Wa_tan al-‘Arabi (The Arab

Homeland) published in at least two editions (1965, 1967).51 Its intended audiencewas high school students in their second year.52 In it, Uthman tackles thecontemporary geopolitical landscape with not-so-subtle metaphors drawn fromancient history and directly confronts the ancient Jewish presence in Palestine andJerusalem in a way that mirrors the earlier ideas and texts of the 1920s, 1930s and1940s. His formulation of the history of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) contains twocritical aspects of national history-writing: glorifying the nation on one hand andusing lessons of history to warn the nation on the other.53

According to Uthman, the waves of Arab Semites who settled in Bilad al-Shambegan coming around 3000 BC and stopped in the seventh century AD when theMuslim Arabs left the Arabian Peninsula, ‘for the salvation of the human race fromthe tyranny of the Romans’.54 Over the course of those three and a half millennia,the peoples of Bilad al-Sham rose victorious against numerous conquests andcolonization at the hands of non-Semites, disallowing their permanent mark on theland and its people. Bilad al-Sham was home to an urban civilization that flourishedunder the Canaanites, Amorites, Phoenicians and Arameans, until the Hebrewsbecame divided among themselves into two states. Uthman writes:

This well-known political situation made Bilad al-Sham like a football seized atthe hands of conquerors from Babel, Ashur and Iran in the east, Egypt in thewest, and Asia Minor in the north.

The kings between the two rivers were in a constant struggle with the Pharaohsof Egypt for mastery of Bilad al-Sham and control over its strategic location.This strong rivalry between eastern and western powers brought Bilad al-Shamno peace or stability throughout the historical epochs; not only at the hands ofthe Semitic nations, but also at the hands of the Aryan empires that followed.55

The heading under which the passages cited above appears is, ‘Bilad al-Shambetween the Grindstones’, and could not have been more appropriate or timely.

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Uthman’s lesson for his 1960s’ audience of young Jordanian citizens is that theArabs of Bilad al-Sham have an inherent predisposition for resisting colonization byoutsiders. What was true in the Bronze and Iron Ages and beyond thus providesinspiration for modern times. It is only when the Arabs of Bilad al-Sham becomedivided amongst themselves – as did the Hebrews – that they have been dominatedby others. The point is not that Uthman does not adhere to a strictly chronologicalhistorical narrative – a common feature of this genre – nor that, given his ownformulation, both the Hebrews and most of the others mentioned – at least until thecoming of the Persians, Greeks and Romans – are themselves Arab Semites.Contained herein are three strong national and transnational messages that Uthmanwanted to convey about the consequences of division among the Arabs. First, whenthe Arab people become divided as the Hebrews did, they are likely to fall victim todomination by another power. Secondly, the Hebrew people, even the ancient ArabHebrews, have a long history of fomenting division among the Arab people. Finally,domination even by another Semitic Arab people – Hebrew or Egyptian – is not self-determination and could be a path to self-destruction. Uthman describes LateBronze Age Pharaonic imperialism in Bilad al-Sham thus: ‘Despite the system thatTuthmoses III established for his Empire, no sooner did he blink than rebellions rosein Bilad al-Sham, the most important parts of the Empire, costing Egypt the greatestpart of its soul, its fortune and materiel.’56 The Hashemite King of Jordan, standingin the crosshairs of Nasser’s popularity and propaganda machine, surrounded onnearly all sides by leftist, often hostile regimes and long since rendered without hisHashemite cousins in Iraq, most acutely felt the modern-day threats to whichUthman speaks in historic terms.

Uthman proceeds to give a detailed history of the Hebrews in Palestine, but dropsthe use of the term ‘Hebrews’ for ‘Jews’.57 The Jews, Uthman says, make their firsthistorical appearance upon their arrival in Palestine. He alludes to their Arab-ness,saying, ‘They belong to a small Semitic tribe among those said to have comeoriginally from the Arabian Peninsula’, and, ‘Among them are those who are said tohave come from Iraq.’58 Uthman describes their lifestyle as originally like that of theBedouin, but they adopted the ways of the various people with whom they came incontact, including the worship of Baal, one of the Canaanite gods. They weresteeped, he says, in the magic and superstition that characterized ancient religiouspractice, until the time of the Prophets Musa (Moses) and Harun (Aaron). It wasMusa who led the Jews to their true, monotheistic religion. Uthman writes:

when the Jews arrived in the desert of Sinai, Moses began reciting his divineinstruction to them. But they returned to rebellion and insubordination, anddisunion on account of war. This is a characteristic that plagued themthroughout the ages, just as they returned to worshipping the calf when he[Musa] left his brother Harun among them and went to talk to his Lord. Godpunished them; they wandered in the desert for forty years, then enteredPalestine under the leadership of Joshua.59

According to Uthman the 12 tribes settled in Palestine at the Canaanites’ expense.He describes the age of the Judges and that of the Kings, which was founded withSaul, consolidated under the Prophet Dawud and achieved its apex under the

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Prophet Suleyman, under whose rule the Jews were united, their affairs wereorganized, and they were able to eliminate the Philistine threat. But after the death ofthe Prophet Suleyman, Uthman says, the old religious and political divisionsreturned. Jewish unity under Dawud and Suleyman had not lasted more than 70years. The union split into northern and southern kingdoms. The northern kingdomof Israel had its capital at Samaria and its people stopped worshipping Yahweh, andreverted to worshipping Baal. The southern kingdom of Judah had its capital atJerusalem. Israel fell to the Assyrians and later Judah fell to the Babylonians, whotook many of its people into captivity.

After describing beliefs common to the three Abrahamic faiths that originatedwith Judaism – such as creation, resurrection, the Last Day, and the existence ofangels and the devil, Uthman offers a lengthy description of the Babylonian Exileand the return to Jerusalem:

And perhaps the continued suffering that repeatedly afflicted the Jews madethem more aware than before of the meaning of monotheism, and moreunderstanding of what their prophets such as Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah hadtaught them. The triumph of the Assyrians over them, the destruction of theFirst Temple and their exile to Babylon were the price of Yahweh’s anger,because they were unfaithful to him, and did not worship him with clean andpure hearts. And their return from Babel to Jerusalem at the hands of thePersians had a great effect on Jewish identity, especially in the priestly class, forwhom authority and respect grew among the Jews, especially when theyundertook the idea of renewing the Second Temple and recording the Torah onthe foundation of prophetic texts, the Ten Commandments of Mosaic law andwhat they added to it from study in conformity with the new life.60

While parts of Uthman’s discussion, both those included in and left out of what ispresented herein, paint neither a neutral nor flattering picture of the life of theHebrews/Jews in Palestine or later in the diaspora, it is important to note that it is apicture and, like its textbook predecessors of the 1920s–1940s, a fairly detailed one atthat. The parts of the historical narrative presented here are, furthermore, whenremoved from the political context, fairly normative renderings of that narrative. InJordan, despite having borne the brunt of Arab encounters with Israel’s military, itremained feasible in the mid-1960s to write about Arab history and the history ofPalestine in the pan-Semitic Arab idiom. For older audiences of schoolchildren, theJewish and Christian history of Arabs and Muslims is not denied, even so many yearsafter the establishment of the State of Israel. It is, in fact, stated repeatedly and in somany words, and Uthman, like the authors of the aforementioned textbooks, usesthe terms ‘Hebrews’ and ‘Jews’ interchangeably and recognizably to mean part of theSemitic Arab family. Just as the State of Israel was ‘Juda-izing’ and ‘Israel-izing’ thelandscape of Palestine and Jewish history to fit is contemporary national context,Arab writers – and in a highly nuanced way the Jordanian writer Uthman – werelikewise and without intellectual difficulty ‘Arab-izing’ the ancient Israelites.61 Theuse of this book in the mid-1960s coincides with a series of what it has been arguedelsewhere were highly calculated manoeuvres undertaken by Jordan with Jerusalem’santiquities, including the nationalization of the Dead Sea Scrolls housed in the

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Palestine Archaeology Museum (known since the 1967 war as the Rockefeller), thepoliticization of Jerusalem archaeology more broadly, the appointment of individualswith nationalist agendas to various bodies and offices responsible for antiquities and,ultimately, the nationalization of the Palestine Archaeology Museum.62

But why would a Jordanian writer in particular give so much attention to thehistory of the Hebrews/Jews in Palestine? It made sense for earlier Arab writers suchas al-Barghouthi and Tutah and Darwazeh to ‘Arabize’ – just as Breasted had – theancient Israelites along with the rest of the Semites. There were significant ArabJewish populations in a number of the new national states who were national andpan-national patriots. A ‘pan-Semitism’ spoken to by history was almostinterchangeable, at least for a while, with pan-Arabism, especially as Jewish Arabssuch as Ezra Haddad, among others, were important to its articulation.63 Certainlythe creation of the State of Israel and the incomprehensible decision of many Arabgovernments to expel their Jewish populations wrought a change in that. But therewas no indigenous Jewish population in Jordan, and by the time Uthman publishedhis books the expulsions had left few Jews in the Arab states.

In undertaking to confront the ‘Jewish issue’ head-on, Uthman sought to do twoparticular, interrelated things. First, he provided a framework by which accusationsof Hashemite collaboration with Zionism could be addressed. From their earliestencounters with the Zionist movement in Palestine after the First World War andamidst talk of various schemes of Hashemite confederations in the Arab world thatmight absorb Palestine, the Jordanian Hashemites and Zionist representativesapproached their interactions and negotiations in terms of the historicity of theJewish presence in Palestine as related by scripture and shared history. In early 1924,a prominent delegation of leaders from the Yishuv, composed of Colonel F.H.Kisch, David Yellin and Rabbi Jacob Meir, met in Amman with Amir Abdullah ofTransjordan on the occasion of the visit of his father, Sharif Husayn.64 The delegatesof the Yishuv appealed to the Hashemites openly on the basis of the common Semiticheritage of Arabs and Jews and their shared role in the advancement of learningduring the medieval period. Sharif Husayn proceeded to reassure the representativesthat he was ready to share his territory with the Jews. Amir Abdullah was insistentthat the Zionists recognize the political rights of Palestine’s Arab population, butspoke in terms of the paradigm of shared history: ‘I feel and I understand the feelingsof the Jewish people which longs for its homeland and its country, and I would havebeen very glad had it not been expelled from its country 2000 years ago.’65

It was critical, from the earliest days of the establishment of Transjordan in the1920s until Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, for theHashemites to speak of history in such terms. While certainly they owed theirposition of prominence in the Hijaz to their relationship with Istanbul, theHashemites’ eligibility to be protectors of the holy cities was, as noted above, basedon their descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his great-grandfather,Hashim, who plays an important role in canonized genealogy.66 This is the onlyaspect of antiquity as a basis of their legitimacy to lead to which the Hashemitescould refer, especially given that they were literal outsiders in both places they wereinstalled on Mandatory, and later national thrones – Transjordan/Jordan and Iraq.

Fortunately for the Hashemites, the ancient basis of their legitimacy was viscerallylinked to the realm of the spiritual and therefore widely applicable outside the place

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in which they were not outsiders – Arabia – the very same place in which they hadinstalled themselves on a throne that they quickly lost to Ibn Saud. It was perhapstheir misfortune, however, that adherence to faith tradition as the primordial leg oftheir legitimacy thus required recognition of ancient Israelites – and at least somerecognition of the ancient historical narrative deployed by the Zionist Movement –on what had become recently contested land. The United Monarchy of the greatProphets Dawud and Suleyman, after all, was as foundational a ‘political’ coup formonotheism in the traditions of Muslims and Christians as for Jews. Arab historywriters like Uthman wrote as much. Denying its foundational importance for Jewswas thus impossible for the Hashemites. Not only did their genealogical positiondepend on its acceptance; so did their background. The Hashemites clearlyunderstood that it was critical to incorporate a panoply of modernist, nationalistcredentials into their narrative of legitimacy – such as leading the Great Arab Revolt,touting Faisal’s and Abdullah’s membership in urban-based intellectual circles andliterary societies and hearkening to their tribal Arabian desert experiences.67 While itis easy to be cynical about the necessities of political expediency, it should not beforgotten that the Hashemites – Husayn, Faisal, Abdullah and in many waysHussein – were traditionally learned, and pious traditionalists at heart. WhenHusayn, Abdullah and Hussein made evocative claims to the ‘Holy Land’ west andeast of the River Jordan, it was not just politically motivated, but from their point ofview well within their pious and familial responsibilities to care for holy places andall ’Ahl al-Kit�ab (Peoples of the Book). Just as they never stopped asserting their ownpersonal prominence in the age of the Arab nation-state, couching it in whateverterms necessary, they did so by holding fast to the primacy of more traditionalaspects of legitimacy, including pious and patrimonial leadership.68 It so happenedthat Jerusalem, a focus for those pillars of legitimacy, was a symbol that wasmalleable for tweaking nationalist narratives as Jordan’s elastic bordersexpanded and contracted, changing the dynamics of interaction with Palestiniansand Israelis.

Sites and objects of religious antiquity, particularly those connected to Jerusalem,are the only kind of physical antiquity that evokes real passion in official discourse asseen in Jordan’s textbooks and in speeches of King Abdullah’s heir, the late KingHussein.69 Most of the antiquities sites that were contained within Jordan’s Mandateborders were prehistoric, classical and Islamic. While the history of exploration andtourism demonstrates that these, particularly classical antiquities, were of greatinterest to westerners, they were only cursorily presented to Jordanian students, if atall.70 Jordan did not have the ziggurats of Iraq, the pyramids or temples of Egypt,the massive heads of Turkey’s Mount Nemrud or a Persian Persepolis. A look at itsmodern landscape suggested that the ancient ages of great civilizations had largelypassed Jordan by, and with the important exception of Petra, large monuments onthe landscape that people wanted to visit were linked in the first place to westernoccupiers – Rome and the Crusaders. As Magnus Bernhardsson has observed,archaeology was a luxury in the new Arab states after the First World War; richeswere invested in it where riches were perceived and resources were vast.71 This wasnot the case in Transjordan’s Mandate. And while ancient Egypt, Anatolia, Iraq andPersia are certainly important components of the Semitic scriptural narrative, theextant record of their civilizations lay mostly outside the Bible and the corpus of

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Semitic scriptural texts, due to both their own surviving archives and the extensivearchaeological record of their civilizations.

Unlike the great civilizations of which western archaeologists were so enamoured,the story of ancient and modern civilization in Jordan, both in conception andpractice, is ultimately dependent on a story as told by scriptures. This renders thenarrative of Jordan as told by archaeology much like that of Israel. The sensitivity andproblematic nature of that fact was never lost on the Hashemites. While the events of1948 no doubt made the pan-Semitic narrative of Arab nationalism(s) more difficultfor whomever wanted to espouse it, the war of 1967 and the ensuing development ofthe settler movement has left little safe space for many Arabs to publicly claim adetailed narrative of Jewish history as part of their own. Yet it can be read between thelines of anecdotes like that which opened this discussion. Unlike the exclusionistnational narratives espoused in today’s official discourses, in the age of the great battlefor hearts and minds between Nasser’s, Hussein’s and others’ visions of Arabnationalism, historians like Adnan Lutfi Uthman had a job to write a nationalnarrative that worked for every Dawud and Suleyman, in and beyond Silwan.

Notes

1. Interview with Dr. Anonymous One, Amman, 19 Aug. 2006.

2. This is more popularly known today as the Dung Gate. One of the two gates known as Bab al-

Magh�ariba (one serving as an entrance to the Old City and the ohter as an entrance to al-Haram al-

Sharif), it takes its name from the Magh�ariba Quarter. The Quarter was a religious endowment

established in the twelfth century for use by visitors from the Maghreb, or Northwest Africa. The

Quarter, its homes and monuments were leveled after the capture of Jerusalem by the IDF in 1967 to

clear a plaza for veneration of the Western Wall. N. Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological

Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2001), pp.163–9.

3. Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, ‘Israeli Settlement in Palestinian Communities in East

Jerusalem’ (Aug. 2009), http://apjp.org/illegal-israeli-settlements-in/ (accessed 3 Oct. 2009); M.

Rapoport, ‘Fifteen Minutes of Hate in Silwan’, The Guardian, 31 Aug. 2009; A. Eldar, ‘The Very Eye

of the Storm’, Ha’aretz, 2 April 2009; M. Green, ‘Digging Too Deep?’, The Jerusalem Post Online

Edition, 2 March 2008, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid¼120421400097&pagename¼JPost%2FJPArtic. (accessed 3 Oct. 2009); H. Watzman, ‘Deep Divisions’, Nature, No.447 (2007), pp. 22–4.

4. Regarding Warren, see J.J. Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and

British Interests in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), pp.78, 80 and 82. For

Bliss, see R.S. Hallote, Bible, Map and Spade: The American Palestine Exploration Society, Frederick

Jones Bliss, and the Forgotten Story of Early American Biblical Archaeology (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias

Press, 2006), pp.124–34. Regarding Kenyon, see the PEF/BSAJ (records of the British School of

Archaeology in Jerusalem, now the Kenyon Institute of the Council for British Research in the

Levant, or CBRL, held in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London, England) and

Colonial Office and Foreign Office records found at the National Archives, Kew Gardens, London

(esp. FO 371/121594). Of particular interest is the correspondence relating to Dame Kathleen

Kenyon’s proposals to excavate in Jerusalem under the auspices of the BSAJ, beginning in 1960.

5. For the earlier excavations of the City of David, see Y. Shiloh, City of David (1978–1982 Interim

Report), 6 vols., Vol.1 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1984).

6. R. Greenberg, ‘Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem: The Case of Silwan/the City of

David’, Public Archaeology, Vol.8, No.1 (2009), pp.38–44.

7. Fearing the division of Jerusalem between Israel and a Palestinian state in final status negotiations as

outlined by the Oslo Accords in 1993, settlers began to make more claims on vacant houses in Silwan,

purchasing or outright occupying them and petitioning the courts for their legal right to take them

(Eldar, ‘The Very Eye of the Storm’). Legal and municipal measures are further applied to undertake

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renovations of these properties that, because they sit on an archaeological site, require concomitant

salvage excavations (also Watzman, ‘Deep Divisions’). Complaints involving Palestinian Silwani

homes said to be in violation of various municipal codes are brought to the courts’ and the

municipality’s attention. In some instances these homes have been bulldozed and/or the inhabitants

removed: J. Rowland, ‘Outcry over Silwan Demolition Plan’, al-Jazeera.net, 24 June 2009. Bulldozers

involved in the archaeological excavations move the earth to and fro around other Silwani homes.

Below ground, excavations in new and pre-existing tunnels have destabilized Palestinian homes and

Silwan’s above-ground infrastructure: A. Eldar, ‘Watch: Organizer Admits City of David Endangers

Arab Homes’, Haaretz.com, 6 Oct. 2009.

8. E. Mazar, ‘Did I Find King David’s Palace?’, Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2006), pp.

16–27, 70.

9. H. Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from Solomon to the Golden Dome (New York: Continuum,

2007). The quotes contained herein are attributed to Yasser Arafat, Nabil Sha’ath and Mahmoud

Abbas, among others. With one exception, Shanks cites the Middle East Media Research Institute

(MEMRI), the controversial DC-based non-profit media monitoring organization that provides what

have been criticized as selective, sensationalist and inaccurate translations of Arabic-language media.

One of the founders of MEMRI is a former IDF intelligence officer.

10. C.D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, a History with Documents, 7th ed. (Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010); R.S. Hallote and A.H. Joffe, ‘The Politics of Israeli Archaeology:

Between ‘‘Nationalism’’ and ‘‘Science’’ in the Age of the Second Republic’, Israel Studies, Vol.7, No.3

(2002), pp. 84–116; I. Zertal and A. Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlements in the

Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007).

11. M. Litvak, ‘Palestinian Nationalism and Islam: The Case of Hamas’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics,

Vol.2, No.4 (1996), pp.510–11.

12. A.E. Glock, ‘Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past’, in T. Kapitan

(ed.), Archaeology, History and Culture in Palestine and the near East: Essays in Memory of Albert E.

Glock (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); G.W. Bowersock, ‘Palestine: Ancient History and Modern

Politics’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.14, No.4 (1985), pp. 49–57.

13. By citizens of Transjordanian descent I mean the descendants of the villagers, rural agrarians, nomads

and semi-nomads as organized firstly within a framework of state during Late Ottoman period, in the

second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

14. J.A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2001), see esp. Chapter 5; P. Moore, Doing Business in the Middle East: Politics and

Economic Crisis in Jordan and Kuwait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), see esp.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

15. Interview with Mr. Anonymous One, Amman, 31 May 2006.

16. Interview with Dr. Anonymous Two, Amman, 23 Aug. 2006.

17. See O. Grabar, ‘Kubbat Al-Sakhra’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Vol. 5

(Brill, 2010) p. 298; A. Elad, ‘Why Did ‘Abd Al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock? A Re-

Examination of Muslim Sources’, in J. Raby and J. Johns (eds.), Bayt Al-Maqdis: ‘Abd Al-Malik’s

Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from Solomon

to the Golden Dome, Chapter 2, pp.9–31.

18. D.M. Varisco, ‘Metaphors and Sacred History: The Genealogy of Muhammad and the Arab ‘‘Tribe’’’,

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol.68, No.3 (1995), pp. 139–156.

19. R. Schick, ‘King David in Muj�ır al-D�ın’s 15th-Century History of Jerusalem’. Forthcoming. Muj�ır al-D�ın’s book is al-Uns al-Jal�ıl bi-Tar�ıkh al-Quds wa-al-Khal�ıl [The Splendid Recognition of the History

of Jerusalem and Hebron].

20. R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1997), pp.29–30.

21. E. Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea. A Journal of Travels in

the Year 1838, by E. Robinson and E. Smilth. Undertaken in Reference to Biblical Geography. Drawn up

from the Original Diaries with Historical Illus. By Edward Robinson, 3 vols. (Boston: Crocker &

Brewster, 1841), Vol.1, pp.390 and map.

22. A.J. Wensinck, ‘Maryam’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Islam.

23. K. Katz, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces (Gainesville: University Press of

Florida, 2005).

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24. B.S. Anderson, Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State (Austin: The University of Texas

at Austin Press, 2005), pp.194–202 ; B.S. Anderson, ‘Writing the Nation: Textbooks of the Hashemite

Kingdom of Jordan’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol.XXI, No.1–2

(2001), pp. 5–14.

25. Prior to this, Jordan used schoolbooks produced in Lebanon, Syria, Mandate Palestine, Iraq and

Egypt.

26. O. Bashkin, ‘The Arab Revival, Archaeology, and Ancient Middle Eastern History’, in G. Emberling

(ed.), Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East 1919–1920 (Chicago: The

Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010).

27. Katz, Jordanian Jerusalem.

28. Anderson, ‘Writing the Nation’, p.10.

29. It is the Hashemites’ geneaological connections to the Prophet Muhammad which rendered them

eligible to serve as Sharifs of Mecca, essentially protectors of the holy places appointed by the

Ottoman sultan, in the first place. It is because of Sharif Husayn’s position that the British approached

him about the possibility of mounting a revolt against the Turks.

30. E.D. Corbett, ‘Jordan First: A History of the Intellectual and Political Economy of Jordanian

Antiquity’ (PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 2009), p. 291.

31. C.E. Dawn, ‘The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years’, International Journal of

Middle East Studies, Vol.20 (1988), pp. 67–91.

32. J.H. Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the EarlyWorld, 2nd ed. (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1944).

33. Ibid., pp.136–9.

34. N. Hurvitz, ‘Muhibb Al-Din Al-Khatib’s Semitic Wave Theory and Pan-Arabism’, Middle Eastern

Studies, Vol.29, No.1 (1993), pp. 118–134; S.D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the

Ages (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), Chapter 2.

35. Bashkin, ‘The Arab Revival, Archaeology, and Ancient Middle Eastern History’; T.

Philipp, ‘Language, History, and Arab National Consciousness in the Thought of Jurji

Zaidan (1861–1914)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol.4, No.1 (1973), pp. 3–22; T.

Khalidi, ‘Palestinian Historiography: 1900–1948’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.10, No.3 (1981),

pp. 59–76.

36. Hurvitz, ‘Al-Khatib’s Semitic Wave Theory’. p.120.

37. A. Jacobson, ‘From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem in the Transition between Ottoman and British

Rule, 1912–1920’ (PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 2006), p.179.

38. Dawn, ‘The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years’. p.68.

39. U. al-Salah al-Barghouthi and K. Tutah,Tarikh Filastin (Jerusalem:Matba’a Bayt al-Muqaddis, 1923).

40. C. Breasted, Pioneer to the Past: The Story of James Henry Breasted, Archaeologist (New York:

Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1943), pp.231–2 ; Dawn, ‘The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the

Interwar Years’. p.69.

41. Dawn, ‘The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years’; N. Alosh (ed.), Mukhtarat

Qawmiyya Li Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-Arabiyya, 1988).

42. O. Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2009), see esp. Chapter 7.

43. Corbett, ‘Jordan First’, p.289.

44. A.A. Ziadat,Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism, 1860–1930 (New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1986).

45. Bashkin, ‘The Arab Revival, Archaeology, and Ancient Middle Eastern History’. p.100.

46. T. Khalidi, ‘Palestinian Historiography’, pp. 59–67; W. Cleveland, ‘The Arab Nationalism of George

Antonius Reconsidered’, in J.P. Jankowski and I. Gershoni (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab

Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp.65–86.

47. Khalidi, ‘Palestinian Historiography’. pp.70–76. Regarding the consumption of the Arabic-language

scholarship of Arab intellectuals in Palestine, see A. Ayalon, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy,

1900–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

48. Katz, Jordanian Jerusalem, pp.97–9.

49. Anderson, ‘Writing the Nation’, p.10.

50. Katz, Jordanian Jerusalem, p.54.

51. A,L, Uthman, Al-Watan Al-Arabi [The Arab Homeland] (al-Quds: Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wa al-Ta’lim

(The Ministry of Education, Jordan), 1965, 1967).

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52. Schoolbooks intended for younger children tend not to broach the subject matter, and certainly not

with Uthman’s nuances.

53. I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Commemorating the Nation: Collective Memory, Public Commemoration

and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Chicago: The Middle East Documentation Center,

2004), p.8.

54. Uthman, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, pp.45–6.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Given the extensive sample of Jordanian textbooks the author has read (from about 1951–72), the

terms ‘Hebrews’ and ‘Jews’ are used interchangeably when writing of ancient peoples.

58. Uthman, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, p.60.

59. Ibid., pp.60–61.

60. Ibid., p.62.

61. Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground.

62. Corbett, ‘Jordan First’, Chapter 5.

63. Bashkin, The Other Iraq, see esp. Chapter 7.

64. N. Caplan, Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917–1925 (London: Frank Cass, 1978), pp.179–82.

65. Ibid., p.180.

66. It is important to note that Hashim, descended of the ‘northern Arabs (those of Ishmael’s line)’, by

patriline, is shown in canonized genealogy to have married a woman outside of that patriline – and

from that of the ‘southern Arabs (those of the ancestor Qahtan’s line, known in the Bible as Joktan,

son of Shem and grandson of Noah)’. As Varisco notes, this ‘internationalizes’ the Prophet

Muhammad’s (and the Quraysh’s) lineages, linking the two branches of Arabs as delineated according

to mythic ancestors. Varisco, ‘Metaphors and Sacred History’, pp.144–50. By extension, in narratives

of Arab nationalism, this serves to internationalize the Hashemites of Iraq and Jordan.

67. M.C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), Chapter 2.

68. Y. Alon, The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State (London and New York:

I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp.150–51. Alon is drawing on T. Dodge, An Arabian Prince, English Gentlemen

and the Tribes East to the River Jordan: Abdullah and the Creation and Consolidation of the

Transjordanian State (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1994). Dodge calls Jordan as it

developed during the Mandate a ‘hybrid state’, one that governed by combining aspects of modern

western states and more traditional models of interaction with tribal groups.

69. Corbett, ‘Jordan First’, see esp. Chapters 4–6. Petra is indeed important, but for different reasons

heavily embedded in the rhetoric of Arabism as linked to tribalism, Bedouinism and tourism, all of

which deserve extensive discussion that cannot be undertaken here.

70. Ibid., Chapter 4.

71. M.T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), Chapters 1–3.

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