The Jews of Palestine 1850-1948

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

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New Series and Site Launch -- The Jews of Palestine 1850-1948 Posted: 18 Nov 2013 01:53 PM PST E-zine #1 of the "Jews of Palestine" series   Editor's note: Israel Daily Picture now contains more than one thousand pictures and 350 photo essays on the Holy Land.  We will continue to add more vintage photographs as more and more historic pictures are digitalized in the libraries and archives around the world.   We present today an "E-zine" experiment, an electronic magazine "Jews of Palestine" in which we group the publication around specific topics.  Today's topic focuses on America's role in the life of the Jews of Palestine.  Future E-zines will focus on World War I in Palestine, the synagogues of Jerusalem, Yemenite immigrants of the 19th century, the Gates of Jerusalem, Jewish holidays and festivals, Jewish industry, the building of the Jewish state, and more.  The series will show the Jewish life inEretz Yisrael years before Theodore Herzl's Zionist manifesto and well before the founding of the State of Israel.  Here is our first edition.  Please let us know your opinion in the comment section below. America and Palestine's Jews Photographic History of American Involvement in the Holy Land 1850-1948 The secret identity of American preacher Mendenhall John Dennis (Mendel Diness of Jerusalem) In 1988, John Barnier visited a garage sale in St. Paul, Minnesota.  There he found and purchased eight boxes of old photographic glass plates.  Fortunately, Barnier is an expert in the history of photographic printing. He had little idea that he had uncovered a historic treasure. Later, he viewed the plates and saw that they included old pictures of Jerusalem.  He contacted the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for its large collection of old photographs from the Middle East. On some of the plates they found the initials MJD. Until then the name Mendel Diness was barely known by scholars.  It was assumed that with the exception of one or two photos his collection was lost.  Click to see more American volunteers helped the British liberate the Holy Land from the Turks   The history of the Jewish Legion that fought in Palestine in World War I is relatively unknown. Many of the soldiers were recruited from the ranks of the disbanded Zion Mule Corps, Palestinian Jews exiled by the Turks in April 1917 who were recruited in Egypt, or from Diaspora Jewry recruited in Canada and the United States. As many as 500 Jewish Legion soldiers came from North America; many of them were originally from Poland or Russia. One Legionnaire was Pvt. Click to see more Who knew Calvin Coolidge met the Chief Rabbi of Palestine in the White House? Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) was a renowned Talmud scholar, Kabbalist and philosopher.  He is considered today as the spiritual father of religious Zionism, breaking away from his ultra-Orthodox colleagues who were often opposed to the largely secular Zionist movement. Born in what is today Latvia, Rabbi Kook moved to Palestine in 1904 to take the post of the Chief Rabbi of  Click to read more  Click on pictures to enlarge Mark Twain in the Holy Land, 1867, and the Innocents Abroad Are these Photographs of Mark Twain's Companions from The Innocents Abroad?  "The Pilgrims and the Sinners" in the Holy Land Mark Twain was a relatively unknown writer in 1867 when he visited Palestine in the company of 64 "pilgrims and sinners" and wrote these words: Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies....Click to read more    Celebrating July 4th in the Holy Land 1918 The founders of the American Colony in Jerusalem in  1881 were proud of their American roots. The group of utopian, millennialist Christians were later joined by Swedish-American and Swedish believers.  The American Colony set up clinics, orphanages, cottage industries and soup kitchens for the poor of Jerusalem, earning favor with the Turkish rulers of Palestine. Click to read more       Why was an American flag flying on a Jerusalem steamroller 100 years ago? The Library of Congress archives includes  two photographs of a steam roller on the streets of Jerusalem. No explanation was given for the American flag; nor was a definitive date provided. Click to read more   U.S. Aid to the Jews of "Palestine" Was Essential 100 Years Ago   Click picture to enlarge During the first years of the 20th Century the Jewish population of Eretz Yisrael -- Palestine -- suffered terribly. A massive plague of locusts, famine and disease hit the community hard.  Ottoman officials harassed, tortured, imprisoned and expelled Jews, especially "Zionist" activists. An account of life in Palestine during the first world war was presented to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 by the London Zionist  Click to read more  Congressional Visits to Israel Are Not New. Pictures of a Senate Delegation in 1936, a Critical Year April 1936 was the start of a vicious anti-Semitic and violent "Arab Revolt" in Palestine that would last through 1939. The murderous attacks against Jews, Jewish communities and Jewish property were widespread throughout Palestine.  British government offices, banks and railroads were also attacked. Coming so soon after the 1929 massacres of Jews in Palestine and under the looming shadow of the Nazi threat, the attacks against Palestine's Jews alarmed friends of the Zionist Click to read more What Lincoln Would Have Seen in Jerusalem Abraham Lincoln "said he wanted to visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footprints of the Saviour. He was saying there was no city he so much desired to see as Jerusalem," Mary Todd Lincoln told the Springfield, Ill. pastor who presided at Abraham Lincoln's funeral.  She explained that the 16th president told her of his desire before he was fatally shot in Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. Truth or Mary Todd Lincoln's imagination?  We can only Click to read more Click to see Jews of Palestine

Walls & Gates of Jerusalem -- More Pictures from the Emory University Collection

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta) It's the final countdown... 1,000,000 visitors to Israel Daily Picture Tell us why you enjoy viewing Israel Daily Picture in the comment section below. Recommend Israel Daily Picture to your friends and family. The Walls & Gates of Jerusalem -- More Pictures from the Emory University Collection, Part 3 Damascus Gate 1. (Emory Collection, circa 1905) Note shops on the right. Was this the first "strip mall?" We present part 3 of the digitalized photos of the Underwood & Underwood stereoscope collection, Palestine through the Stereoscope, from Emory University's Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology. In this feature we present the pictures of Jerusalem's walls and gates. By comparing the photos to the photo essays presented here over the last two years we are able to date the pictures. Click on pictures to enlarge. Click on captions to view the original pictures. Damascus Gate 1: The shops on the right of the square belonged to a Jewish banker name Chaim Aharon Valero (circa 1905). The domes of the Hurva and Tiferet Yisrael synagogues are on the horizon on the left of the picture. Both were destroyed by the Jordanian Legion  in 1948. Read more about Valero here.  Damascus Gate 2. photographed by Mendel Diness. Note how barren the area outside of the wall was. (Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, circa 1856) Damascus Gate 2: Mendel Diness, a Jewish watchmaker,  became Jerusalem's first Jewish photographer and is credited with photographing the Damascus Gate in the 1850s. Later he left Palestine and became a Christian preacher in the United States named Mendenhall John Dennis. Read more about Diness/Dennis and his photo collection  found in a Minnesota garage sale.  Damascus Gate 3 Construction of the row of Valero's shops outside the gate. (Library of Congress, circa 1900) Damascus Gate 3: The picture shows the construction of Valero's shops. In the 1930s, the British authorities ruled that the area should be zoned for use as "open spaces" and they demolished the shops in 1937. The Valeros were not compensated. View pictures of the demolition here. MOREL http://www.israeldailypicture.com/

Jerusalem's First Photographer

Who Was the 19th Century American Preacher Mendenhall John Dennis?

Actually, He Was a Jerusalem Watchmaker Named Mendel Deniss, Jerusalem's First Photographer

Mendenhall John Dennis in the center surrounded by his family in 1885. After 1860
he lived in Ohio, Massachusetts and Washington. Before 1860 he was Mendel
Diness of Jerusalem  (With permission of Special Collections, Fine
Arts Library, Harvard University)

A version of this article appeared in the Times of Israel on December 26, 2012

In 1988, John Barnier visited a garage sale in St. Paul, Minnesota.  There he found and purchased eight boxes of old photographic glass plates.  Fortunately, Barnier is an expert in the history of photographic printing.

He had little idea that he had uncovered a historic treasure. Later, he viewed the plates and saw that they included old pictures of Jerusalem.  He contacted the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for its large collection of old photographs from the Middle East.

On some of the plates they found the initials MJD. Until then the name Mendel Diness was barely known by scholars.  It was assumed that with the exception of one or two photos his collection was lost.


The Western Wall, photographed by Diness. Unlike most early
photographers of the Wall, Diness pointed his camera to the south
 and not to the north. (With permission of Special Collections,
 Fine Arts Library, Harvard University. 1859)



 

 

Thanks to the research of historians and curators Dror Wahrman, Nitza Rosovsky and Carney Gavin, the Diness collection was saved from obscurity, and an amazing tale was revealed:  American Christian preacher Mendenhall John Dennis and Jerusalemite yeshiva student and watchmaker Mendel Diness were one and the same. 

Diness was born in Odessa in 1827 into a religious Jewish family. As a boy he apprenticed as a watchmaker; as a teen he went to study in Heidelberg and was influenced by the anti-religious "enlightenment movement."  His concerned father sent him to Palestine in 1848 to a yeshiva to strengthen his Jewish faith.

But in 1849 he met a Christian missionary who started him on his path to Christianity. His conversion caused a major controversy in the Old City of Jerusalem.  Diness was excommunicated from the Jewish community, lost his business, and was forced to divorce his wife, Shayndel Reisa, who was from a hassidic Chabad family in Hebron.

Enlargement of Jews at the Wall



Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem under construction, beneath
Moshe Montifiore's windmill. The building project was the first
Jewish neighborhood built outside of the Old City (1860,
Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.)










Diness was taken in by Christian missionaries and families, including the British Consul, James Finn, who baptized the new convert.  His wife, Elizabeth Finn, a fan of the new photography art, was close to a Scottish missionary, James Graham, who taught Diness the new field of photography.  It was not simply a question of learning to press a button on a camera, but it involved a lengthy and difficult process of preparing emulsions and plates (not film), mastering light, exposures and the science of developing the pictures.


A portrait of missionary James
Graham taken by Diness. It is
not a portrait of Diness as
claimed by some collections
(1857)

By 1856, Mendel Diness was photographing on his own.  By the end of the decade, however, other photographers had flocked to Jerusalem, and Diness found the competition daunting.  In 1861, he moved to the United States with his new wife, the daughter of a Jewish doctor who had converted to Christianity.  Diness was unsuccessful as a photographer in Cincinnati, Ohio and became a peripatetic preacher, renamed as Mendenhall John Dennis.

How did the Dennis/Diness' collection end up in St. Paul?  When he died in 1900 his belongings were apparently sent to his daughter in New Jersey. When her daughter died, a grandson cleaned out her attic and took the crates to Minnesota.  The family was unaware of Dennis/Diness' Jerusalem photography background.


The Damascus Gate photographed by Diness (Special
Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, circa 1856)


A footnote: Diness was not the only Jewish photographer in the Holy Land who converted to Christianity.  Peter Bergheim, a German Jew who converted in the 1830s in England, arrived in Palestine in 1838. He worked as pharmacist and then opened a bank. In 1859 he became an accomplished photographer, apparently working for the British Ordnance Survey team. (His works appear frequently in these pages.) 

Elijah Meyers
(circa 1910)

 

 

 

 

 

Several years later Elijah Meyers, a Bombay, India Jew who converted to Christianity, appeared on the scene.  He was the founder and director of the American Colony Photo Department in 1898, but "he had been taking photographs before he became connected to the American Colony," according to a Colony publication.  He trained a team in the art of photography and documented the visit of the German Kaiser in 1898 with pictures sold around the world.  According to sources at the Library of Congress, Meyers was hired by Theodor Herzl to photograph Jewish settlements prior to the 1899 Zionist Congress in Basel.

 

 

 

 

 

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