Picture a Day: Arab Weddings in Judea and in Samaria over 100 Years Ago. (Not in the "West Bank")

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Arab Weddings in Judea and in Samaria over 100 Years Ago.
(Not in the "West Bank")

"A [Arab] wedding procession in Judea. Palestine" (1903)

Clarity of words and terminology is often the first casualty in political conflict. That is certainly the case in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Using the geographic terms "Judea and Samaria" today is often mistakenly attributed exclusively to Jewish residents of the "West Bank" or their advocates.

"A [Arab] wedding procession in Samaria" (1903)

The Library of Congress' photo archives prove otherwise.

These 1903 pictures of an Arab "wedding procession in Judea, Palestine" and an Arab "wedding procession in Samaria" use the correct geographic names of the region -- well before the British Mandate, before the political division of the west and east banks of the Jordan River, and before the Arab-Israeli conflict.

2 comments:

lessie pfeifferAugust 9, 2012 at 11:13 AM
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a9acacb2-df64-11e1-bf44-000bcdcb8a73August 9, 2012 at 11:20 AM
That's so interesting. I wonder if they've already started hiring Perth wedding photographers during those times.
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Published by Lenny Ben-David

About the title photograph of Jerusalem

The photograph, from the Library of Congress collection, was taken between 1860 and 1880 by Frank M. Good, according to the Library. But we can narrow down the dates a little further. The photo shows the Churva Synagogue dome on the left horizon between the two mosques' domes. The Churva was finished in 1864.

Most of the Library of Congress pictures are from photographers from the "American Colony" in Jerusalem, a group of Christian utopians -- often eccentric -- who lived in Jerusalem between 1881 and the 1940s. They returned to the U.S. and bequeathed their massive collection to the Library of Congress in 1978. The photos were digitalized in recent years.

A history of the American Colony Photography Department can be found in Jerusalem's American Colony and Its Photographic Legacy by Tom Powers and in an Institute for Palestine Studies article, Western Consumption and "Insider" Commercial Photography. Unfortunately, the latter article pays little attention to the photographs of Jews and Jewish sites.

Click on the photos to enlarge. Click on the captions to see the originals.

According to the Library of Congress, "there are no known restrictions on publication" of their photographs.