Showing posts with label British Library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Library. Show all posts

Friday, December 4, 2015

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta) 130-Year-Old Testimony of Jewish Life in Shiloah (Silwan), Jerusalem

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta)



Posted: 03 Dec 2015

An annotated picture found in the British Library's Endangered Archives collection

Annotated picture of Shiloah (Silwan) from the Bonfil albums digitized by the British Library (circa 1890s)
The Shiloah (Silwan) village south of Jerusalem's Old City dates back to Biblical times. Water from its spring was used in the Jewish Temples. Jewish royalty was buried in its caves with Hebrew inscriptions naming the deceased. Over the centuries the hill was inhabited by Christian monks and Arab families.

Below is one of the first photographs taken in Palestine in 1844 showing Silwan's small size.  It was taken by Girault de Prangey, a student of  the inventor of photography, Louis Daguerre.  View more of de Prangey's photographs here. Many of his photographs are now online at the French National Library.


The village of Shiloah (Silwan) in 1844 and the Kidron Valley (Smithsonian Magazine)
The 3,000 Maison Bonfils photographs from the Fouad Debbas Collection in Beirut digitized by the British Library have the barest of captions -- with the exception of one album with lengthy English annotations. The first photograph above provides an example. It describes the Yemenite Jewish community that moved into the Shiloah village in the 1880s.  Below is the handwritten caption.


The caption on the photograph reads, "The village of Siloam on the east bank of the Kidron Valley.  The Pool of Siloam is opposite to the village on the west bank.  The inhabitants are Mohammedans except at the extreme south (right hand of picture) where the Yemenite Jews live in a small colony of tiny stone buildings as shown in a long low patch of white."

On the right side of the picture, adjacent to the Jewish housing, the album owner wrote, "The Yemenite Colony."

Photographers of the 19th century focused their lenses on the Yemenite residents, especially the photographers from the American Colony where the Yemenites' arrival in 1882 was viewed as the "Gaddites" returning home and as a messianic harbinger.






We had the privilege of providing an essential detail to the Library of Congress' picture in its archives of the "village of Siloah" (circa 1901). The man, we explained after consultation with Yemenite historians, is a Yemenite Jew, originally from Habani in Yemen.

He was probably among the residents of Shiloah.

The American Colony photographers took scores of pictures of Yemenite Jews and helped provide food and shelter to the poor immigrants.
Poor Yemenite Jewish family (circa 1890s). An American
Colony caption read "Group of Yemenite Jews" 



"A scene in a Jewish Yemenite Quarter," according to the Library of 
Congress caption. The picture, possibly shot in Shiloah, was taken in 
the 1930s when the Jews of Silwan (Shiloah) were suffering 
from attacks from their Arab  neighbors. They eventually fled
 their homes. Today, Jewish families have returned to Shiloah.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Israel's History - a Picture a Day - Maison Bonfils' photographs

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta)


Posted: 24 Aug 2015

A preview of Bonfils' photographs

Three thousand pictures taken by the Maison Bonfils photographers of Beirut from 1867 to the 1910s are part of the private Fouad Debbas collection in Beirut. Last year, the collection was digitized and posted online by the British Library's Endangered Archives Program.  

We have posted several Bonfils' photographs in the past from the Library of CongressGetty, and New York Public Library collections. But nowhere in the world has such an extensive collection of Bonfils' photographs been collected and made public.  We thank the Debbas family and Ms. Jody Butterworth, the curator of the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, for their efforts. 

We present here just a preview of this very important collection:



Jews praying at the "Wailing Wall" (Debbas Collection, British Library)
Rachel's Tomb on the way to Bethlehem (Debbas Collection, British Library)

Rachel's Tomb, not the village of Sanur

Elsewhere in the Debbas Collection this picture is captioned "Village of Sanur in the modern-day West Bank."

Obviously, it is another Bonfils photo of Rachel's Tomb.






The bustling Jaffa Gate outside of Jerusalem's Old City. The Hotel Fast was built in 1891. The photo was
taken prior to 1898 when a breach was made in the wall for the German Emperor's carriages.
(Debbas Collection, British Library)

We plan to present more of the collection in coming weeks accompanied by our historical essays.

Click on pictures to enlarge. Click on caption link to view the original.