The Real Bethlehem
The ‘little town’ of Bethlehem celebrated by western Christians as the location of the Nativity is much more than a stylised depiction evoked in Christmas cards.
Every Christmas Christians the world over come together to celebrate Jesus’ birth in the ‘little town of Bethlehem’. In western countries Bethlehem is particularly prominent at this time of year, reproduced in countless nativity scenes and sung about in traditional carols. But during these celebrations how much do people think of it as a living, breathing town with a history beyond the birth of Jesus? Singing lines, such as ‘how still we see thee lie’ and ‘once in royal David’s city’, do we ever pause to contemplate the lives of Bethlehem’s other inhabitants over the last two millennia? The reality is that, for most Christians, Bethlehem is a timeless hilltop village, an imaginary, abstract place upon which we project our own versions of the nativity. With a religion as old and as globalised as Christianity, it is inevitable that foundational stories are reworked into localised contexts. But what do we find if we look at Bethlehem as historians, rather than through the distorting lens of western Christian culture?
This is not just a fascinating local history. A more detailed study reveals a remarkably vibrant and diverse town that has been in a constant state of flux and interaction with the outside world for millennia. Three interrelated aspects of Bethlehem’s character help illuminate its history: Bethlehem the Arab-Palestinian town; Bethlehem the Roman Catholic town; and Bethlehem the global town. Exploring it from a three-dimensional perspective throws up many surprises and raises fresh questions about the way we think about Middle Eastern history more broadly.
An Arab-Palestinian town
The most immediately noticeable feature about Bethlehem is its Palestinian identity. Christians elsewhere often ignore this, preferring to imagine the idealised Christmas card notion of it. But travellers arriving in the town today are confronted with an urban sprawl that is unmistakeably part of the West Bank. In fact Bethlehem is on the fault line of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and all the problems that entails. For visitors coming from Jerusalem, just six miles to the north, it is often their first experience of the Occupied Territories. A sense of Palestinian Bethlehem comes across both physically, as tourists pass through the eight-metre high concrete Separation Wall that snakes its way around the town; and culturally, as it emerges through the sounds, sights and smells that this is a quintessentially Arab town.
The Arab element of Bethlehem’s character is not new. Ever since the Muslim caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab captured the town in 637 as part of his conquest of the wider Jerusalem area, Bethlehem has been integrated into the Arab-Islamic world, only to be briefly severed from it in the 12th century under European crusader rule. Despite the Muslim conquest of 637, the majority of Bethlehem’s population has remained Christian, and it took at least 200 years after the Muslim invasion for Arabic to cement itself as the town’s primary language. But for most of the past millennium Bethlehem, or Bayt Lahm in Arabic, has been as much a part of the Arab world as anywhere else in the Middle East.
A defining feature of this Arab identity is tolerance. The caliph Omar famously guaranteed that the Church of the Nativity be preserved for Christian use, commissioning a mosque to be built nearby to make sure the church would not be converted into an exclusively Muslim shrine. Ever since the earliest Muslim community was established in Bethlehem the town has contained a Muslim minority that has actively contributed to its development. From the early stages of the Ottoman era (1517-1917) that minority has been formalised in the so-called Harat al-Fawaghreh, the Muslim quarter of Bethlehem that comprises one of the seven ‘historic quarters’ of the town. Each of these areas has been inhabited by an extended group of interrelated families known as a hamuleh, or clan. In the case of the Muslim Fawaghreh quarter, certain families were traditionally appointed by the Ottoman district governor as the town sheikhs, thus acting as mediators between the imperial state and the local population on issues such as tax collection, military service and land sales. Many examples can be found in the Jerusalem Sharia Court records in which these sheikhs formed alliances with prominent Christian families in the town to repel external threats, such as Ottoman attempts at fiscal extortion or tribal raids on the town.
The Christian communities of Bethlehem have regularly reciprocated this ethos of co-operation. Today Muslims can still be found praying inside the Church of the Nativity, as they, too, hold Jesus to be a prophet. Likewise the sound of the Muslim call to prayer punctuates the day in central Bethlehem, resounding around Manger Square from the 19th-century Mosque of Omar. The pressures of life under Israeli occupation have produced inevitable strains in some areas of community relations, but the overriding atmosphere in the town remains one of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.
Sense of belonging
The glue that holds these religious communities together today is a shared sense of being Palestinian. From the end of the 19th century onwards an increasingly strong Arab Palestinian identity took hold in Bethlehem, as it did elsewhere in the region. At first this was expressed in terms of greater demands for Arab autonomy and expressions of cultural identity within the Ottoman Empire. More locally, a distinct sense of Palestinian identity was simultaneously emerging, which revolved around the holy status of Jerusalem and its neighbouring area. In Bethlehem this was most notably manifested in the struggle, beginning in the 1870s, to gain greater representation for local Arabs in the clergy of the Greek Orthodox Church. Underlying campaigns such as this was the wider notion of belonging to a distinct, Arabic-speaking Palestinian national community, one which included Christians as much as Muslims.
By the 1920s the sense of being Palestinian was complemented by a growing idea of belonging to the ‘Arab world’, thanks in large part to the birth of Arabic popular culture. This was received as enthusiastically in Bethlehem as it was in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad. The childhood autobiography of the best known writer from Bethlehem, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-94), describes how the town’s central plaza, ‘Manger Square’, was adorned in the late 1920s with posters of Umm Kulthum and Muhammad Abdul-Wahhab, two of the earliest superstars of Egyptian popular music: ‘Their music would often be heard playing from a gramophone with a big horn directed towards the street that had been set up outside Abu Zaki’s restaurant in the corner of the square.’
Under British rule (1917-48) the Palestinian national movement became more specifically focused on the struggle against Zionism, as well as the demands for independence from British colonial rule. In the 1920s and 1930s men from Bethlehem, such as the Arab-Christian intellectuals Isa al-Bandak and Yuhanna Dakkarat, were at the forefront of the independence movement, establishing new political parties, newspapers and literary societies in the town.
Women, too, became increasingly visible in public life during this period, emerging as leading lights in previously male-dominated fields, such as journalism, photography and political activism. Several Christian women from Bethlehem attended the Palestine Arab Women’s Congress held in Jerusalem in 1929, which has been heralded by historians as the first organised expression of Palestinian women’s political consciousness. In a different way, the work of a Bethlehem resident, Karimeh Abbud, the first professional female photographer in Palestine, has left an enduring portrait of life in the town in the interwar years.
Violent conflict
Through the subsequent upheavals of the 1948 war, the period of Jordanian rule (1948-67) and the Israeli occupation (since 1967), Bethlehem has remained at the vanguard of the Palestinian national movement. As with Arab nationalism more generally, Palestinian nationalism has, until recently, retained a distinctly secular character, with Christians being able to assume prominent roles in the movement.
Instances of Bethlehem-led resistance to the Israeli occupation include the ‘No taxation without representation’ campaign initiated in Beit Sahour (part of the wider Bethlehem conurbation) in 1989. This helped kickstart the Palestinian campaign of civil disobedience that marked the early stages of the First Intifada (1987-93). Bethlehem took dramatic centre stage in April 2002, during the Second Intifada (2000-05), when dozens of Palestinian fighters sought refuge in the Church of the Nativity. The ensuing Israeli military siege lasted 39 days, trapping around 200 monks inside the church in the process. When the dust settled, nine of the Palestinian fighters had been killed as well as the church bell-ringer.
Today around 90,000 people live in the wider Bethlehem conurbation, an area incorporating three refugee camps, whose original occupants were displaced during the war of 1948. Though the town retains an international flavour due to the high number of religious groups and NGO’s operating there, the restrictions imposed upon residents’ freedom of movement by the Israeli occupation mean that Bethlehem in recent years has been placed under severe pressure, both economically and socially.
Problems have been compounded by the Israeli Separation Wall running around the northern edge of the city (completed in Bethlehem in 2003), over two miles inside Palestinian territory as defined by the internationally-recognised ‘green line’ that formed the pre-1967 border. This has involved the expropriation of several acres of farmland and has significantly reduced the flow of tourists and goods into the town. All of this means Bethlehem continues to stand on the front line of the Palestinian national movement, a far cry from the town’s Christmas card image.
A Roman Catholic town
While Bethlehem is strongly defined by its Arab- Palestinian identity, there are other distinct aspects of its modern history that render it a unique and fascinating case study. Most unusual is the high proportion of Catholics (or ‘Latins’, as they are known locally) among the town’s population. Records from parish churches in the area show that for about the past 250 years the majority of Bethlehem’s Christians have been Catholic. These are not the ‘Uniate’ Catholics found in other areas of the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the Maronites of Lebanon or the Melkites, who originate in Syria. Rather, Bethlehem’s Catholics are direct adherents to the Roman Catholic Church, while simultaneously retaining their Arabic-speaking, Palestinian identity.
One significant explanation for this is the presence of the Franciscan community, which has had a base in Bethlehem ever since the Mamluk sultan granted the friars a concession to operate there in 1333. The Franciscans’ success in converting the local population in Bethlehem was unparalleled anywhere else in the Middle East. Records of the Vatican’s missionary wing, the Propaganda Fide, show that by the late 17th century there were more Catholics in tiny Bethlehem (whose population before 1900 never exceeded 6,000) than in any other town in the entire region, including major Christian centres such as Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo.
Education appears to have played a crucial role in the growth of Catholic Bethlehem. Established some time in the early 16th century, the Franciscans’ Terra Sancta College was instrumental in bringing large numbers of locals under Franciscan influence. The resulting connections between Bethlehem’s local population and Catholic Europe have produced a fascinating history of travel, trade and artisanship.
From the 16th century onwards virtually every European travel account describing Bethlehem mentions the existence of a vibrant trade in religious devotional objects. With growing numbers of the town’s residents learning Italian (then the lingua franca of Catholic Europe), interaction with visiting pilgrims and tourists had become much easier for inhabitants. They had also learned, through contact with the Franciscans, to adapt local styles of olive wood and mother-of-pearl carving to the tastes of the European market. The result was a boom in the production and sale of religious goods.
We may think of the mass production of souvenirs as a phenomenon of today’s global tourism and industrial manufacturing, but in Bethlehem it was already flourishing in the early 1500s. Visitors to the town mention the thousands of trinkets (crucifixes, rosaries, crowns and figurines) produced locally. Many of these goods were purchased by the Franciscans themselves, who in turn shipped them to Europe to raise revenue or to present as gifts to benefactors. To give one example, after visiting Bethlehem in 1769 Friedrich Hasselquist, a Swedish student of Linnaeus, wrote:
The procurator [the financial officer of the Franciscan convent in Bethlehem] informed me that 15,000 piasters-worth [of religious souvenirs] were held in the Jerusalem convent, which seemed almost unbelievable. They are sent to all the Catholic countries of Europe, but above all to Spain and Portugal.
At times production appears to have outstripped demand as growing numbers of Bethlehemites took up souvenir production. Most notoriously, in 1771 one of the Bethlehem artisans presented himself at the Franciscan headquarters in Jerusalem demanding payment for an array of handicrafts he had brought with him. According to contemporary accounts the friars informed the man they were unable to purchase his wares as the storehouse was already full of unsold goods. In response (say the Franciscan sources) the man is said to have thrown his own son into a cistern where the boy drowned. His father blamed the incident on the friars.
Whoever was to blame for this incident, the crisis of supply and demand appears to have been only a temporary setback for the industry, most likely caused by a relatively brief dip in pilgrim numbers in the early 1770s, the result of political upheaval in Acre, Palestine’s principal port at that time. By 1776 Italian accounts once again speak of a thriving souvenir industry in Bethlehem. As Giovanni Mariti, who spent time with the Franciscans there, wrote:
In the town of Bethlehem no other trade is known than that of making wooden crowns and crosses, ornamented with mother of pearl ...The European merchants of Acre are the ones who purchase the majority of those works which are packed into boxes and transported to Venice from where they are sent to Germany.
At the high end of the souvenir business were the exquisite replica models of Holy Land churches and shrines. These, too, were commissioned by the Franciscan friars, using the first scale drawings of the original buildings produced by an eminent Franciscan clergyman, Bernardino Amico, between 1593 and 1597. Carved from olive and pistachio wood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and camel bone, these models are among the finest works of art produced anywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period. Mostly carved in Bethlehem, they represent a fusion of Arab-Islamic traditions of workmanship with Renaissance Europe’s thirst for material tokens from the Holy Land. Only scant information exists regarding the Bethlehem artists who carved these models, but their work should be viewed as expressions of the wider artistic and commercial achievements of the town from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as well as the town’s intimate ties to Catholic Europe. Today examples can be found in museums and stately homes throughout Europe, from the Palazzo Pitti in Florence to the British Museum. They routinely fetch up to £20,000 in the auction rooms of London, Paris and Vienna.
A global town
By the mid-19th century the Bethlehem souvenir industry was reaching a peak. This was the era of Europe’s ‘rediscovery’ of the Holy Land, in which pilgrims, scholars and tourists flocked to Palestine in larger numbers than ever before, especially from Russia and the Protestant countries of northern Europe and North America. Bethlehem was now established as an obligatory stop on the pilgrim trail around Jerusalem and the surrounding area. It was in this period that many of today’s Christmas carols were composed, bringing a vision of Bethlehem into people’s living rooms in the faraway Christian west. The American Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, for example, was moved to pen ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ after visiting Bethlehem in 1865, while the equally famous ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ was originally written as a poem in 1848 by the Irish writer Cecil Frances Alexander.
By the late 19th century, profiting from the rise in Bethlehem’s international status, workshops in the town were employing increasing numbers of the local population in the souvenir trade. The use of mother-of-pearl, now adopted by the carvers, was crucial to the continuing expansion of the industry. The mostly wooden, embellished models of the 17th and 18th centuries were now superseded by a fashion for immensely detailed and intricate scenes carved entirely out of mother-of-pearl. The new heights of craftsmanship and levels of production scaled by the souvenir industry in this period produced shifts in the fabric of Bethlehem society that would connect the town to a truly global network of trade, ideas and migrations.
The shift took root when local Bethlehem merchants began to seek their own ways of exporting the religious souvenirs directly, rather than selling through intermediaries, such as the Franciscans. The advent of steam ships and railways, combined with the rise of an increasingly prosperous middle class, meant that local merchants were now in a position to take their products directly to lucrative new foreign markets. By the end of the 19th century merchants from Bethlehem were trading in a vast range of countries, from Brazil to France, Haiti to Russia, the Philippines to Mexico. In pursuing these new opportunities they were capitalising on the ‘Holy Land’ theme and the unique position it afforded Bethlehem in Christian imagination around the world.
New perspectives
A detailed study of the migratory routes forged by Bethlehemites in the 19th century sheds new light on our wider understanding of the Ottoman period. It is well known that Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians began to migrate away from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the century, particularly to the Americas, but the movements of the Bethlehem traders reveal that these shifts began considerably earlier than was once thought, dating back to the 1850s at least. Furthermore, the broad sweep of countries in which Bethlehem merchants set up shop (quite literally) demonstrates that this was a far more wide-reaching global phenomenon than has previously been thought, incorporating trade routes in the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as the better known paths across the Atlantic.
In reality, merchants from Bethlehem had been seeking ways to export their products long before the 19th century. Files in the Propaganda Fide archives contain letters written as early as the 1690s by Bethlehem traders wishing to travel to Rome to sell their wares. It appears these efforts were frustrated by Franciscan leaders in Jerusalem, who had a vested interest in restricting the freedom of their parish members in Palestine. But these exchanges also hold important clues about how and when ‘modernity’ emerged in the Middle East.
For so long scholars have described the 19th century as a time of profound rupture and transformation, in which a previously ‘dormant’ Arab society was ‘awoken’ by heightened contact with northern Europe and North America. In contrast, the letters in the Vatican archives show us that Middle Easterners had already acquired the skills and the desire to forge their own brand of globalisation in the late 17th century. Written in near-perfect Italian, the letters employed a range of tactics to convince the Roman Catholic clergy to grant the Bethlehem traders permits to travel, including referencing European Catholic saints and situating their case within specifically Catholic codes of morality.
Certainly by the 19th century merchants from Bethlehem were marketing their products all over the world. Spanish immigration records from the Philippines in 1881, for example, record the entry of Bethlehem traders Gubra’il Dabdoub and Antun Sa’idi, selling ‘goods from their country’ in the Binondo district of Manila. One probable reason for their presence in the Philippines was to source and buy the pinctada maxima species of mother-of-pearl shell found in the South Pacific, a larger shell that enabled more detailed types of carving back in Bethlehem.
Many similar stories of the ingenuity of these merchants are still proudly recounted by Bethlehem families today. They range from the travelling salesmen who came to dominate the market in religious wares in Kiev, to the success enjoyed by citizens from Bethlehem at the world fairs of the late 19th century, such as in Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893). The net result was the establishment of a considerable Bethlehem diaspora by the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in Central and South America.
Increasing restrictions
On-going ties to this diaspora are an important part of everyday life in Bethlehem today, as well as in the neighbouring towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. The economic, architectural, political and social character of the area has been indelibly shaped by its close connections to far-flung foreign communities. Whether it is Bethlehem’s distinctive, early 20th-century pink-stone mansions, built with the money made abroad in the mother-of-pearl trade, or the new forms of political activism that took root there in the 1910s and 1920s, inspired by experiences in South America and Asia, Bethlehem is today a product of its global connections.
By the 1920s these links were beginning to weaken, as the new British colonial state imposed much stricter immigration and nationality laws, while the Great Depression and the political upheavals of the interwar years took their toll on global commerce. This in turn heralded a new era in which the residents of Bethlehem would find themselves increasingly restricted in their movements as the 20th century wore on, culminating in today’s ‘cantonisation’ of the West Bank in which ‘islands’ of urban Palestinian areas are separated by a complex system of checkpoints, Israeli military zones and Jewish settlements.
The more fluid sense of movement and space that persisted in the Ottoman era stands in stark contrast to this: an era in which Bethlehem’s identity was constantly being refashioned by new waves of migration, both outward and inward. In this period Bethlehem was emerging as a distinctly Arab-Palestinian town, but also a ‘global village’, shaped by a wide range of influences, both European and non-European. When Christians around the world create their own nativity scenes or sing carols about the birth of Jesus, they might also reflect on the rich history that has derived from that foundational Christian event. Not a cardboard image of an imaginary hilltop village, but a real town with a surprisingly diverse past that challenges the way we think about the Middle East.
