Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948

Preface

ix Preface Did the invention of printing mark the beginning of a “revolution”? If so, has it been properly acknowledged as such? Scholars passionately debate these questions. But even those who feel uncomfortable with the label for one reason or another do not dispute the immense historic importance of the new device. Indeed, it is hard to think of any aspect of human existence that has not been profoundly influenced by it. The mass popular access to texts, which printing made possible, affected political relations by furnishing rulers with better tools of control while availing their subjects of channels for voicing their own views. Printing had an impact on social relations by turning knowledge of new types into a vehicle of social mobility and status. It modified relations between the community’s spiritual pastors and their disciples and, more broadly, changed the role of religion in society. It also transformed modes of transmitting knowledge, managing daily affairs, and spending leisure time. Such changes occurred in all societies in which printing was introduced. In the Middle East, the changes were perhaps the more dramatic because of the condensed process in which they took place. Everything happened within a short spell: the adoption of printing, the massive production of written texts, the emergence of a periodical press, the development of distribution channels, the mass imparting of reading skills, and, consequently, the turning of the written word into a central organizer of people’s daily routine. All of these changes appeared more or less simultaneously, as one package that was offered to these societies after having evolved more gradually in other places. Historians of Arab societies have hitherto given limited attention to some vital aspects of these processes. The cultural realm within which written texts and their reading acquired such an essential functional value is yet to be charted: the manifold levels of literacy, the uneven circulation of printed and other texts, the evolution of access mechanisms such as bookstores, literary clubs, public and lending libraries, and the various modes devised by largely uneducated societies for circulating the written knowledge that came flowing in large quantities. The present study seeks to address some of these questions in twentieth-century Palestine, here treated within its man- r e a d i n g p a l e s t i n e x datory boundaries (i.e., between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean). It highlights the story’s main contours and suggests possible directions and sources for further exploration. In its modest scope, however, it is no more than a preliminary incursion into the subject. Palestine has often been the theater of momentous events, fateful for its own inhabitants, for those of its neighboring lands, and sometimes for humanity . The developments it witnessed during the twentieth century were no doubt among the most dramatic in this history. They were the more striking because they came after an era marked more by continuity than by change. During the first half of that century, the country experienced shifts in every sphere, from demography to politics, from infrastructure to education . Even without the 1948 historic watershed, this would have been a period of profound makeover in Palestine, affecting the life and daily routine of everyone. The 1948 breakdown violently disrupted these trends, turning the change into a cataclysm. One victim of the 1948 upheaval was historical evidence. Private and public collections of books, newspapers, and documents perished. Personal stories were lost with the people who had carried them in their memories. And just about everything subsequently written on the country, politically or otherwise—by Palestinians, Israelis, and others—came to be slanted and tainted. The student of that society is thus confronted with an unusually intricate challenge, both in obtaining the evidence and in weighing it in a balanced way. A Palestinian effort to recover the past has begun recently, unearthing neglected documents and publishing recently recorded memoirs . Accounts of the latter type, especially, are not free of shortcomings, mostly of the kind that typifies retrospective accounts. Employed with the proper filters, however, they add an indispensable insight into the story. Along with extant contemporary sources—archival materials, Palestinian periodicals, books and leaflets, photographic evidence, and oral testimonies —they allow us to draw a fairly solid sketch of the scene, if not a detailed portrait of it. Its principal outlines are presented and examined in the pages below. In transliterating Arabic, I have followed the accepted practice in the field of Middle...