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Framework
The Journal of Cinema and Media

Edward Said’s Nazareth

Susan Slyomovics

Forty-five years after the Said family was forced to depart Palestine for Egypt toward the end of 1947, Edward Said traveled for his first return visit in 1992, a journey that included a brief stay in Nazareth. In his impressions quickly published that same year in the London Observer, he noted: “Nazareth jolted me startlingly back to life. . . . Of all the Palestinian sites I visited, it is among the richest in significance and the dimmest memory.”¹ Said’s memories and writings about pre-1948 Palestine coexisted in complex heterogeneous ways, with place sometimes recalled incompletely, obviously never forgotten, and frequently a subject of his large, eloquent corpus. Ties to Nazareth were centered on his mother and her illustrious Nazareth-based family: “My maternal grandfather Shukri Musa-Bishouty died (in the late twenties) and is buried there, after having founded and built the Baptist church and brought up a gifted, perhaps even remarkable brood of children: my mother, Hilda and four boys—a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, and a banker—all charming, all fluent, all musical.”² Although Said would carry on the family inheritance as a music critic and accomplished amateur pianist, this essay considers his interventions in the fields of visual studies and photography exemplified by the ways in which he experienced Nazareth—writing from afar and with no actual physical presence in his mother’s hometown. In this essay, Nazareth becomes an object of the photographic eye over decades, but also a way to consider Said’s writings in terms of his reflections both about representation as well as the lives of Palestinians before and after 1948.³

In the early 1980s, after thirty-five years of exile and with no foreseeable opportunities of returning, Said was inspired by a “witness,” the renowned German-Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, enabling his “interplay of text and photos” (Said’s terms).⁴ Mohr and Said’s joint book and photography project, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, published in 1986, emerged from a novel form of censorship directed against writing about Palestine, but not against displaying images of Palestinians:

The idea of this book [After the Last Sky] grew out of the peculiar circumstances that first brought Jean Mohr and me together. In 1983, while I was serving as a consultant to the UN for its International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP), I suggested that photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva. I had of course known and admired Mohr’s work with John Berger, and I recommended that he be commissioned to photograph some of the principal locales of Palestinian life. Given the initial enthusiasm for the idea, Mohr left on a special UN-sponsored trip to the Near East. The photographs he brought back were indeed wonderful; the official response, however, was puzzling and, to someone with a taste for irony, exquisite. You can hang them up we were told but no writing can be displayed with them. No legends, no explanation. A compromise was finally negotiated whereby the name of the country or place (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, West Bank, Gaza) could be affixed to the much-enlarged photographs, but not one word more. When Jean and I met it was this strange and inflexible formula that we confronted.⁵

By engaging with selected images from Mohr’s journey throughout historical Palestine, Said produced a fragmented, interpretative text profoundly marked by the fact of absence from what he was looking at in particular and, in general, by his desire to restore critical political engagement to the process of image making. Said’s texts—denied exhibition display no less than the anthropological imprimatur of authentic ethnographic presence—took on the functions of an extended caption once in book format, as in the example of words surrounding Mohr’s photo of Nazareth.⁶

Captions in photography serve to steer viewers to an appropriate emotional response: not merely how to look at a picture but what to feel when looking at a picture. In Regarding the Pain of Others, critic Susan Sontag highlights the acts of captioning images and the “didactic” nature of texts surrounding pictures to conclude: “All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”⁷ Sontag’s example is James Agee’s eloquent prose accompanying Walker Evans’s images in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, whose aim was “to deepen the reader’s empathy with the sharecroppers’ lives.”⁸ While most agree that an image is open to multiple interpretations, in contrast, Sontag emphasizes that words in captions close in to disambiguate meanings. Said, following Sontag, will in addition plead for photography’s potential insurrectionary role:

Every photograph, therefore, is the result of a choice (of the instant to be photographed), although its meanings depend on the viewer’s ability to lend it a past and a future, to reinsert the discontinuous instant into the durational continuum. The photograph’s ambiguity can thus either be acknowledged—at which point interpretative words supplied for the photograph lift it from the level of fact to the level of suggestion and ideas—or denied.⁹

Said’s text-as-extended-photographic-caption grappled with the image itself in paradoxical fashion. Apprehending Mohr’s panorama of Nazareth in his New York City exile, Said saturated the view with historical and political interpretations:

Even a picture of an Arab town—like Nazareth where my mother was born and grew up—may express this alienating perspective. Because it is taken from outside Nazareth (in fact, from upper Nazareth, a totally Jewish addition to the town, built on the surrounding hills), the photograph renders Palestine as “other.” I never knew Nazareth, so this is my only image of it, an image of the “other” from the “outside,” Upper Nazareth.¹⁰

Exile had forced Said to stand figuratively on the heights above Nazareth at multiple removes, as if looking over the photographer’s shoulder, while Jean Mohr (and I too) are free to visit annually and offer images of the town from “the ‘other’ from the ‘outside,’ Upper Nazareth.” Hovering in this way above Palestine is often embodied in Palestinian poetry in the form of a bird flying over the beloved land, a symbol for the expelled refugee who writes or dreams, as many refugees do, from a high vantage point where the native village can be seen or imagined at a distance. Recall that the poet Kamal Nasir, a distant relative of Said, imagined a journey throughout Palestine while perched on the wings of an eagle.¹¹ By invoking a mentally reconstructed Palestine from the distanced bird’s-eye view, Nasir, exiled in Beirut there to be assassinated in 1973 by Ehud Barak, surveyed his aesthetic creation while summoning memories and ideals surviving in the individual psyche. Indeed, Jean Mohr as photographer functions within well-known literary tropes: he assumes the role of the bird, a metaphor inherited from the classical Arabic poetic tradition as nature’s go-between for the refugee and the beloved homeland. Yusuf al-Khatib’s poem, “Buhayrat al-zaytun” (The Lake of Olive Trees), uses the convention of the poet’s pleading with the birds to convey messages to his stone house fallen into disrepair and despair at its owner’s absence:

Oh our village!
I sent to you flocks of birds
I said to them:
“When you reach our village by the river
alight and tell our home
about our grief.”¹²

Birds return; Palestinians cannot. No longer a nostalgic vision of a place lost forever, Said joins his contributions to the literature by the refugee in exile producing exile literature with a difference. In the case of the Edward Said-Jean Mohr joint project, the difference is that photography carries the messages, while Said was unable to alight in the homeland.¹³

In 1992, when Said visited Nazareth after his forty-five-year absence, he initially retained the panoramic overview of the hovering Palestinian flying above Nazareth but for purposes of looking down and accurately delineating the town’s current fractured politicized condition:

Nazareth today is really two towns; one, the bustling Arab madina where the Musas once flourished, and two, upper and Jewish or new Nazareth set ostentatiously on hills that command the Arab, or lower, city. For Mariam and myself, Arab Nazareth was the only place we visited where we could quickly feel at home, so similar was it to a small-scale Amman or Beirut, the only pre-1948 site not totally violated and interrupted by subsequent history.¹⁴

Then Said descended to Nazareth and walked through the core downtown areas arriving at the nexus of the town’s crisscrossing main streets. He alighted at the town’s central holiest site of the Virgin’s Fountain (what the and locals often call St. Mary’s Well), a location mere steps from his mother’s family home and the Baptist seminary founded by his maternal grandfather:

Then as we entered the main square I almost instinctively made out St. Mary’s Well very close to where my mother was born and where she grew up. The topography has remained unchanged. . . . Unlike West Jerusalem [the location of the Said paternal household] Nazareth was in effect the same place it was in 1948.¹⁵

How are we to understand Said’s observation that “Nazareth was in effect the same place it was in 1948”? Certainly, the Baptist Church founded by Said’s maternal grandfather, Shukri Musa, is at the same location. Much enlarged and rebuilt, it still stands on the opposite side of the street and down the road from the Virgin Mary’s Fountain, to the extent that the Baptist seminary compound and Said’s maternal home effectively form the eastern extension of the square that was and still is the central meeting point for Palestinian Arab Nazareth. For Said, the square of St. Mary’s Well would also evoke memories of his mother, Hilda Shukry Musa, at the site famously venerated as the emblematic place of pilgrimage to Christianity’s transcendent figure of maternal love. Standing in the neighborhood of the wells, Said experienced multiple layers of geographical, religious, historical, political, and emotional time insistently framed in terms of the Nakba. For Said, post-1948 catastrophic realities had created two Nazareths: a Jewish Israeli Upper Nazareth that rises above and encircles the Palestinian Arab “madina.”

Through photography and the return visit, Said’s fleeting presence in Nazareth compels us to reflect about facts on the ground concerning Palestinian lives before and after 1948. Nazareth’s current situation is foregrounded against Said’s avowed sense of his own inaccurate yet vivid memories. His subjective interpretations both acknowledge everyday political realities and also engender his “jolt of confused familiarity.” Despite exile, multiple adult displacements, and the painful recollection of his mother’s unceasing laments for her beloved Nazareth birthplace as she lay dying in exile,¹⁶ Said’s “confused familiarity” about Nazareth’s unchanged topography is best elaborated by architect and Nazareth native Samir Srouji:

The city [Nazareth] today has all the makings of an architectural, cultural and social ghetto. It has no cinemas and its only cultural center is inactive. A public library was built only recently with money from the Israeli lottery, Hapayis. Attempts at constructing public gardens and public squares resulted in empty spaces without a public and, in the case of the central City Square (Shhab El-Din), pitted Muslim and Christian residents against each other. The city is dense with unfinished grey breeze-block houses and congested with traffic. It is a construction site without end. Its residents refer to it in Arabic as Joret-El-Hamm (the “Pit of worries”).¹⁷

By looking from the heights of Jewish Israeli Natseret Illit down to Palestinian Arab Nasira in the company of Edward Said and Jean Mohr, visual and historical intersections connecting Said’s two themes of Orientalism and the Nakba are brought together, occasioned by his 1992 Nazareth visit. The poles of Said’s writings traverse both the European imagined and photographed geographies of the Virgin Mary’s Well of Nazareth as well as the status of Nazareth’s Palestinian citizens of Israel since 1948.

To address histories of visual representations of Nazareth, it is important to draw on Said’s question (originally directed to Jean Mohr and John Berger’s prior book and photo project, Another Way of Telling):

True, the media, advertising, and the “experts” have cornered the market on “objective truth” but the rediscovery of subjectivity as a social value, and of time and timelessness as embodied in the photograph, are feeble bulwarks against the encroaching sea of cement. As passionately as Ruskin, Berger seems to believe that a proper schooling of the visual faculties will make for a more effective counter-hegemonic cultural practice. . . . Can one really undertake aesthetic/intellectual projects in the private sector, so to speak, and then launch from there directly into politics?¹⁸

Said’s reply in his book review of Mohr and Berger’s work was that “there can be no unilateral withdrawal from ideology. Surely it is quixotic to expect photographic interpretation to serve such a purpose.” In what follows, Said’s challenge to what constitutes “a proper schooling in the visual faculties” and his insistence on an image’s ideological point of view are taken up. By first revisiting imagined geographies of Nazareth, the question of Palestine becomes linked to the larger phenomenon of Orientalism in its enduring

historical and visual aspects. I begin with a photograph of the current state of the Virgin’s Fountain on the main square of the city of Nazareth, Israel’s largest Palestinian Arab urban center and the cultural capital for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Since the late 1990s, the well is dry; there is no water. Indeed, states of enforced dryness are cultural and geographical hallmarks of Nazareth. Addressing the town’s layered histories as headquarters of Shukri Musa’s Protestant Baptist mission to Palestine, its focal point at the square of the Virgin Mary’s Fountain, and the background of water’s absence, I reflect on the ways in which Nazareth appeared in 1992 to Said as a town unchanged since 1948. Topics touched on in this essay are tourism and pilgrimage, architecture and preservation, intra-church politics, and Edward Said’s memories of Nazareth.

“Bursts of Meaning”¹⁹

What is arguably new since 1948 are the contrasts between Palestinian-Arab Nazareth and Jewish-Israeli Upper Nazareth. The post-1948 creation of two entwined towns sharing a name provides a striking parallel structurally analogous with the ways in which current histories of dividing and doubling owe much to prior and potent historical divisions and doublings of place. Currently there are two Nazareths, one populated predominantly by Arabs and the other by Jews. Despite the singularity of the miracle of the messianic Annunciation, two churches built in Nazareth each vied to preserve a unique moment in mankind’s history at a precise locale that marks when and where the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary in fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” For Roman Catholics, the divine-human encounter enacted through Gabriel to Mary occurred within the courtyard confines of the Basilica of the Annunciation. Built as late as 1730 as a Franciscan church, demolished in 1955, and constructed anew by 1969, the Basilica is a Nazareth landmark labeled the largest house of Christian worship for Roman Catholics in the Middle East. The Basilica stands in contrast to parallel claims of the Greek Orthodox location of the Annunciation. As with two Annunciation sites in Nazareth, there are also two, if not three, wells associated with the Virgin Mary where Mary, accompanied by the child Jesus, drew water for her everyday needs: one located within the enclosure walls of the Roman Catholic Basilica,²⁰ and a second, within the Greek Orthodox St. Gabriel Church in the Chapel of the Spring, both sites renowned as tourist and pilgrimage destinations for centuries. Sectarian differences focus on the geography of the Annunciation, less so sustained by core theological divergences. Each church claims to possess the actual geographical feature of Mary’s Well, just as each church maintains the association of the Virgin Mary symbolically and mythically with water.²¹

Despite the location of Mary’s well in the crypt of Greek Orthodox St. Gabriel’s Church, popular belief conflates this miraculous event to yet a third site hydrologically connected to the second at Nazareth’s central spring known also as the Virgin’s Fountain or St. Mary’s Well Square. Differences between the two churches are doubly spatial: not only the dispute over the precise spot of the Annunciation, but a set of spatial differences in which Greek Orthodox popular belief gives prominence to the public space of Nazareth’s meeting point as opposed to the private, intimate, domestic female space described by Latin Christian texts. Nazareth’s Muslims and its community of Protestant Baptists, among them Said’s maternal family the Musas, follow Greek Orthodox tradition concerning the location of Mary’s Well. According to As’ad Mansur, a local historian and Anglican pastor who performed the marriage ceremony of Said’s parents, Wadie Sadie and Hilda Shukry al-Musa, Mary’s Well is the third opening for water flowing from three springs originating at much higher elevations of around 560 meters in the system of hilly ridges to the north of Nazareth at Jabal al-Sikh.²² In subterranean fashion, the well that once united early Nazareth’s spring water supply was derived from the base of the northern slope overlooking the town, then flowed 54 feet through a rock-cut channel into the crypt of the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel in order to pass through an underground aqueduct to reappear at the Virgin’s Fountain on the square approximately 500 hundred feet below and to the southeast.²³ Hydrologically and religiously, water and belief flow in clear currents to align Palestine’s indigenous Arab Christian and Muslim communities in opposition to the sacred geography claimed by a perceived interloping, Rome-based, Latin Catholic (“Lateen” in local dialect) church. A pamphlet produced by the Orthodox Community Council of Nazareth emphasizes the historical claims for local control derived from the 1741 official decree by the Ottoman regional governor, Emir Dahir Omar, who maintained Greek Orthodox ownership despite appeals from the rival Greek Catholic Melkites allied to Rome:

It is of particular interest to note that, among all the holy sites in the Holy Land, the Orthodox church of the Annunciation is perhaps the only place where the local Christian community owns and exercises full rights and responsibility. This is in sharp contrast to other holy places in this area which are in most cases owned and completely dominated by foreign church organizations and clergy.²⁴

My interest lies with the second geographical and social division of spaces that designates Nazareth’s well in the square, sacred to its local Arab Christian population, in a public space versus the private, largely invisible interior well claimed by Latin Christianity. This is because the two conflicting well sites (representing Nazareth’s historical rivalry between Western Latin Christian versus native Arab Christian and Muslim places of authentic revelation) became mapped directly onto Europe’s protean Orientalist discourses of a feminized exotic Nazareth.

Historical Mary Was a Woman

One of the earliest Western images of the Virgin’s Fountain, sketched by David Roberts on April 21, 1839, was widely and cheaply reproduced between 1840 and 1845 in the form of fascicules of bound lithograph plates. Most visitors to the Holy Land marveled at the beauty of Nazareth’s women, as did David Roberts, who noted in his Journal:

The figures introduced were all drawn on the spot and convey an accurate representation of the female figure. . . . They wear rows of gold and silver coins, which relieved by their jet-black locks have a remarkable and graceful novel appearance to the European eye. The younger women were in general remarkably beautiful; and as they perceived in this instance that the strangers were Christian, they made no attempt to conceal their faces.²⁵

Increasing tourism and population growth by 1862 led to the construction of an extensive stone arch structure surrounding the well.²⁶ Wells are constitutive of public sociable space, a practice that underpins local Arab Christian beliefs that the location of Mary’s Well lies in the Greek Orthodox church precincts and emerges at the Virgin’s Fountain. Wells are watering spots where men and women mingle, animals and children meet, news is exchanged, and rumors circulate. Biblical stories informed believers that a stranger may address an unknown woman at a spring or well, according to accounts of Abraham’s servant who found a bride for Isaac, Jacob who met Rachel, and Moses who saw Zippora at the well.

So potent and far-reaching was and is the miracle of Nazareth initiated by the Annunciation at the well that far-flung locations proliferated geographically to host the figure of the Virgin Mary, who continues to preside over fountains and wells throughout Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.²⁷ Cults to take her waters were the foundation of Marian pilgrimages. Mary and her associated wells and springs gained fame in the ancient Mediterranean world for healing properties, specifically for curing eye afflictions and female infertility. The space surrounding wells is concerned with sociability, while the substantive content of wells is water. Water was associated with chastity in the ancient world. According to historian Gloria Ferrari, a powerful connection linked virginity and water in which a generalized “female nature is represented as wet and unbound, in contrast to the dry and sober male.”²⁸

Ferrari notes that affinities between chastity and water characterized ancient times—affinities that were and are represented metaphorically and artistically by the female uterus imagined as a vessel, a container or upside—down jug that mixes male and female elements. Consider extending this ancient Mediterranean corporeal metaphor of oppositions germinating productively within the uterus (a human being is created), then transposed emblematically upward and outside the body to the woman’s water jug (nourishing a household), and, finally, outward spatially towells. Various Christian denominations, adapting water’s chaste properties, endowed water with the symbolism of life and purification. Notable are the cleansing waters of baptism whose immersion rituals bring forth a reborn, re-created human being as does the symbolism of Virgin Mary, supremely pure and chaste among women.²⁹

Nineteenth-century European Orientalism, whose paradoxes were famously unpacked by Said in his path-breaking book, envisioned cultural and historical stasis characterized by exotic females when viewing Nazareth’s women at the well. Specifically, while European women’s physical cleanliness was equated with sexual purity, in the context of Victorian Orientalist travel literature and “biblification” photography from which accounts and images are drawn, “cleanliness in [Oriental] women was a symbol of impurity and disorder.”³⁰ European chroniclers depicted ablutions and drawing well water in public as sensuous and sexual acts of display and lasciviousness, thereby characterizing the Virgin Fountain, sacred to Nazareth’s Arab Christians and Muslims, as the site of promiscuous mixing of social classes and sexes, of humans and beasts, and of native women and European voyeurs. Water, thus, was a pure and cleansing element unless attached to the bodies of Arab

women who wash in public view, in which case the native woman, not the water, is rendered impure. As an example, the Scottish clergyman Cunningham Geikie (1824–1906) visited Nazareth in 1887, then populated by 6,000 people divided, he noted, among 2,000 Muslims, 1,000 Roman Catholics, 2,500 Greek Christians, and 100 Protestants. His reactions to the women of Nazareth, the disposition of the town’s water, and the fact of water in open and visible spaces are familiar and information-rich tropes of Orientalist descriptions and image-making:

The water of Nazareth is mainly derived from rain-cisterns, for there is only one spring, and in autumn its supply is precarious. A momentous interest, however, gathers around this single fountain, for it has been in use for immemorial ages, and, no doubt, often saw the Virgin and her Divine Child among those who frequented it morning and evening, as the mothers of the town, many with children at their side, do now. The water comes through spouts in a stone wall, under an arched recess built for shelter, and falls into a trough at which a dozen persons can stand side by side. Thence it runs into a square stone tank at the side, against which gossips at all hours delight to lean. The water that flows over the top of the trough below the spouts makes a small pool immediately beneath them, and there women wash their linen, and even their children; standing in the water, ankle-deep, their baggy trousers—striped pink or green—tucked between their knees, while those coming for water are continually passing and re-passing with their jars, empty or full, on their heads. The spring lies under the town, and as the Nazareth of ancient times, as shown by old cisterns and tombs, was rather higher up the hill than at present, the fountain must in those days have been still farther away from the houses. . . . This spring bursts out of the ground inside the Greek Church of the Annunciation, which is modern, though a church stood on the same site at least as early as A.D. 700. They say that it was at this spot the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin; and if there is nothing to prove the legend, there is, of course, nothing to contradict it. Indeed, the association of such a visit with the outflow of living water from the rock has a certain congruity that is pleasing. The church is half below ground, and the spring, rising freely, is led past the high altar, where it fills a well for the use of pilgrims, and then flows along a conduit to the stone arch and covered tank, to pour out from the wall through the metal spouts. The Christian women, by the way, wear no veils, though they have a gay handkerchief lying over the head, the hair falling down the back from beneath it in long plaits. The Mahommedan women, on the contrary, are veiled; but all the sex, alike, have drapery so slight that, though it covers their whole persons, the figure is displayed with a clearness very strange to Western ideas, though perfectly modest. . . . Women still fill and carry jugs on their heads at the city well while their small children play near them. The two times I have visited Nazareth I have been struck by the sight of this ancient practice. The water is pure as it streams from the hills and mountains in the north.³¹

Nineteenth-century Western travel accounts uniformly marvel at the improbable visual phenomenon of Nazareth’s Muslim woman, like her Christian sister, who veils her face but reveals her body by scanty dress. The fecundity and overabundance of Arab female flesh is allied with sexuality and liquidity, while counterposed to the Holy Land geography of aridness and barren climate. Colonial and Orientalist discourses constructed the image of the Oriental/biblical woman of Nazareth as the prototypical traditional Arab woman who still fetches water at the well, an image in which each element she embodies—water, nature, female fecundity—must be harnessed, contained, and resisted sexually. Edward Said’s discussions of the “feminization” of the Orient described familiar, European discursive formations that produced such gendered metaphors of the naturalized Oriental woman in general, but in addition burdened the women of Nazareth with the belief that they were living embodiments of the biblical Virgin Mary at the well. Figure 7 belongs to the Underwood Company’s wildly popular, 100-card set of stereoscopic photographs of Palestine produced in 1900. Jesse Hurlbut, a Methodist minister and author of the explanatory introductory booklet, declares that images are “more than mere representations in their power to teach and influence us . . . when properly looked at they always affect in some measure as would the very realities which they represent. . . . These representations are infinitely accurate in detail and proportion, and are therefore marvelously realistic.”³² Photographing Palestine in order to view images stereoscopically with the aid of special glasses tricked the human eye into perceiving two flat-surface photographs as three-dimensional, life-size representations. Another reason for promoting photographic three-dimensionality was that Western Christian travelers termed the land and geography of Palestine the “Fifth Gospel.” Since the Bible (consisting of four gospels) is full of obscurities, ambiguities, and contradictions, Hurlburt enlists photography into the tradition of biblical exegesis. In the absence of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, stereoscopic images “help make the Bible real to us.”³³ Thus, because photography is more than representational, it does not require endless reinterpretation by experts: we can all see, Hurlbut assumes, and stereoscopic photography makes us probe to the depths by depicting the real and the reliable (both in the sense of documentation and explanation). Consequences of these views are elaborated by Said in his general statement to depict the pictorial predicament of Arab natives of Palestine: “We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce and stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us.”³⁴ Nonetheless, the sum of numerous visual and written descriptions cumulatively inform us of facts on the ground as well as facts below the ground: Nazareth’s water supply was underground; the water tasted pure and flowed at the rate of 1,000 gallons per hour by winter’s end (250 in summer); the flow was seasonal and subject to attrition or disappearance, as was the reservoir; the water’s above-ground manifestation at the well was the chief source for the town’s water supply, although there were smaller springs scattered through the region; many inhabitants possessed household cisterns; the well was a place of promiscuous and sensual social mixing; and, finally, the domestic water delivery system was literally in the hands and upon the heads of Nazareth’s beautiful mothers.

Memoirs, guidebook maps, and photographs, the latter images frequently featuring the iconic unveiled Nazarene woman with a water jug on her head, serve to chart visually and in memory the development of the town as it moved to engulf the area surrounding the public space of the Virgin’s Fountain in the form of increased construction and congestion.³⁵ Yet the square and its waters retained the important role of nodal urban meeting point. Edward Said’s sister, Jean Said Makdisi, author of a memoir that draws on their mother’s writings about the Shukri Musa family in Nazareth before 1948, presents a doubly embedded memoir in which the daughter’s published book, Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women, frames her mother’s handwritten diary. Through the lens of loving memory, Said Makdisi’s nuanced, intergenerational, and gendered account draws out the sweeping changes overtaking Nazareth as they are documented in family photography and unpublished papers. She weaves together her mother’s words and her own commentary, for example, to describe her mother—young, unmarried, and well born—slipping away to the Virgin’s Fountain: “Mother [Edward and Jean Said’s mother] used to go with Halimeh to draw water from the Virgin’s Well in Nazareth, where, of course, the women would meet to gossip.” A direct quote from the notebooks of her mother, Hilda Shukry al-Musa Said, vividly describes the pleasures and constraints of female public space in pre-1948 Nazareth:

The ’ain [fountain] was the same place where the Virgin Mary used to draw water, and it was the only source of drinking water for the people of Nazareth. People would carry the long black or brown earthenware jarra very gracefully on their heads, and take it home where it would be emptied into smaller jars, and once again be filled at the fountain, sometimes daily, or else two or three times a week. . . . I was never allowed to go alone [to draw water from the well]. Halimeh was our constant companion except when going to church.³⁶

British Mandatory Nazareth, Café Society, and the Post-Nakba Era

In the two decades before the Nakba, Britain was in control of Palestine from 1918 (through its military administration of 1918–20, civil administrations in 1920–22,and the Mandate era of 1922–48). Figure9, dated tothe 1920s, serves as a bridge from European Orientalist image-making about Nazareth’s exotic women by documenting graphically and materially British Mandatory rule over Palestine and the subsequent social evolution of Nazareth’s middle-class Christian families. The photograph captures transitions—a poignant record when the indigenous, curvilinear earthenware jar coexists with but is soon replaced by the imported, modernizing tin or jerry cans. Such images point

to gendered colonial encounters that substituted Nazareth’s former Orientalist inflected essence as a “feminized outpouring of nature” with the advent of the foreign engineer and technocrat in the form of the British administration, an important employer for members of Edward Said’s extended family whose English-language educations made them valuable administrators throughout the colonial empire.

The British Mandatory administration inherited and kept some provisions of the Mecelle, or 1870 Ottoman Civil Code water law, that famously declared: “Water, grass, and fire are property not owned by any one person but owned jointly by all members of mankind. Groundwater is also considered ownerless and likewise, public wells not dug by any known person are (ownerless) property of all people.”³⁷ Ottoman Mecelle and British water legislation governing administrative practice maintained that flowing water was incapable of private ownership, thereby placing legislation of water management entirely under state control. In pursuit of clean drinking water for Nazareth—as the town’s population doubled from approximately 7,500 to nearly 15,000 inhabitants³⁸—Palestine’s British high commissioner pleaded for loans

to build a municipal reservoir, thereby eliminating serious and embarrassing recurrent water shortages. The British constructed two new reservoirs in the hills northwest of the Salesian orphanage to aid Nazareth’s water supply that relied on the Virgin’s Fountain and numerous domestic cisterns; they also erected, alongside the reservoirs, military watchtowers to encircle the northern approaches to town.

Under the Mandate and beginning in 1926 on behalf of Palestine’s Jewish sector, the British High Commissioner and the Administration of Palestine granted the Jewish-owned Palestine Electricity Corporation a seventy-year concession to exploit the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers for electricity. This transaction (known after the name of the company’s founder, Pinchas Rutenberg, as the “Rutenberg Concession”) produced far-reaching consequences. The Rutenberg Concession and the Palestine Electricity Corporation functioned as a pre-state, de facto ministry of agriculture and water, when, for example, Palestinian Arab farmers needed permission from the company to access water upstream from the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers.³⁹ During the Mandate, large-scale water projects were undertaken to sustain primarily the Yishuv (Jewish sector) at the expense of the Arab population.⁴⁰

The Rutenberg Concession and the founding of Mekorot, the public water company, exemplify not only core aspects of the segregated Jewish economy but also the ways in which British rule aided the formation of viable, lasting structural forms and institutions that produced agency and self-government for Palestine’s Yishuv. In contrast, British watchtowers policing Nazareth’s hills and reservoirs removed the possibility of creating incipient, effective structures for Palestine’s Arabs, even at the local level. By the 1930s, the management of water contributed to, and was an indicator of, growing disparities in power between Jews and Arabs, with the decisive shift by the British in favor of granting internal autonomy to the Yishuv, the latter “amounting to a para-state within, dependent upon, but separate from, the mandatory state.”⁴¹ Presciently, already two decades before the Nakba, the two traditional competing Christian wells (irrespective of their native or foreign provenance) were both effectively replaced by two incompatible, unequal, ethnically divided water systems. Additional outcomes were the reduction in use of the Virgin’s Fountain as Nazareth’s primary water source: the pre-1948 water infrastructure, instigated and built by the British, laid the groundwork for separate Jewish and Arab social services.

Under the British, piped water for household needs began to furnish the labor-saving underpinnings to domestic modernity. An extensive ethnographic and anecdotal literature considers the ways in which these new and individualized water delivery systems, instituted under British rule for urban Palestine, diminished women’s presence in public spaces. In societies with strong spatial sex-segregation, once public well and bath attendances were deemed unnecessary, women lamented the social isolation imposed by the household faucet and showerhead despite recognizing material conveniences. In addition, the Virgin’s Fountain at Nazareth’s central plaza was transformed from a female dominated square into male spaces of sociability, specifically to outdoor cafés. Although Nazareth’s landscape in pre-1948 British maps retained rural elements within the compact city center—orchards, fields, and gardens—by the 1920s the area around the Virgin’s Fountain was populated by cafés for a clientele of educated, male, predominantly Christian rather than Muslim urbanites, representatives of an emerging class of Nazareth bureaucrats fostered by British rule.⁴²

Photography by local Nazareth practitioners serve to reconstruct histories of pre-1948 male café life that sprang up around the Virgin’s Fountain. Since photography between the two world wars was effectively a globally disseminated medium, European Orientalist representations of Nazareth cohabited with indigenous images manufactured locally by professionals and amateurs that encoded memories both in commercial postcards and family albums. Physician Nakhle Bishara (interviewed in Nazareth, January 30, 2006) authored a pictorial history of his hometown after decades of amassing a photography collection both from local families and his research visits to overseas missionary headquarters.⁴³ The snapshot below, dated to the 1930s,

depicts the outdoor area of the Jneineh Café photographed by Bishara’s father, owner of a Kodak camera with no flash, thereby producing images exclusively of Nazareth exteriors. In 1924, in the vicinity of the Virgin’s Fountain, the Jneineh Café was established by Kamil Boulos, who learned his trade by first working in a British soldiers’ canteen in Nazareth. Oral interviews provide descriptions of the Jneineh Café around the fountain: it seated 200 male clients outside, and in winter two small rooms held 50 more; it was furnished with small chairs and tables (for cards, tawla, and pipe-smoking) and equipped with a radio; and the owner served only beverages (herbal, e.g., camomile or yansun, coffee, and soft drinks). By 1948 there were cafés in every quarter of Nazareth; today most no longer exist. Gone are Qahwat al-Fahum (Nazareth center), the original Jneineh (seen in the photo), Sakhnini (circa 1945–60 in the Greek Orthodox quarter, it later became the former Communist Party headquarters, now vacant), and Nadi al-Adabi (1935–54, moved to Nimsawi, 1954–62).⁴⁴

Post-Nakba, the story of Nazareth, water, and both Mary’s wells becomes muddier. The Jneineh Café in the vicinity of the Virgin’s Fountain was forced to close in 1968 and moved across the street due to a malfunctioning, incompetent, municipal public works project that helped destroy the water supply not only to the Jneineh Café but also to the adjacent fountain. In the 1970s, the familiar five-sided structure of the Virgin’s Fountain, wide and low

to the ground (reproduced in so many commercial photographs and postcards), was replaced by a significantly taller, new architectural structure depicted in the 1973 guidebook and then rebuilt again to return to the early model of the wide and low-to-the-ground fountain in preparation for the Nazareth year 2000 festivities. Although the well on the plaza had always been a shrine in its own right,⁴⁵ to eliminate confusing the devout, who were directed on pilgrimage to the interior well in St. Gabriel’s Greek Orthodox church crypt away from the exterior central plaza well of popular belief, drastic measures were taken to cut the water flow from the church to the public space of the well on the square:

The community supported replacing the structure, because then pilgrims and tourists could note that because of its newness it was not a traditional site. [Fu’ad] Farah, [the general secretary of the Greek Orthodox Christian Council, the lay organization of Greek Orthodox Christians in Israel] took action to further ensure that pilgrims visited the correct site by personally cutting the pipes leading down to Mary’s Well. Hygiene was also a factor in redirecting the flow. The pipes were not under anyone’s control and the cleanliness of the water could not be controlled as it now can within the church.⁴⁶

In the early post-1948 years, there were many consequences from the Nakba and Israeli military occupation to Nazareth’s open spaces and movement, to café life and the social life at the Virgin Fountain’s square—among them erosion to Palestinian cultural life, loss of leisure, and the loss of an urban elite. The population of post-1948 Arab Nazareth increased greatly, swelled by urban and rural Palestinian refugees fleeing the fall of Haifa, Tiberias, Beisan, and Nazareth’s surrounding villages.⁴⁷ In 1954, Israel began expropriating Arab lands northeast of Nazareth, the sole area suitable for expansion, to establish by 1957 Natseret Illit, Jewish Upper Nazareth.⁴⁸ What flowed downward from the higher ground of Natseret Illit to the densely populated, constricted, and strangled Nazareth Arab “madina” are hydrological pollutants such as untreated hazardous household, industrial, and agricultural sewage that leak into the groundwater.

The Nakba’s less visible effects were on the internal structure of the Nazareth municipality. In terms of an evolving religious sensibility, shaped by the identity of being Palestinian in Israel, there emerged a distaste for unorthodox or heterodox practices exemplified by pilgrims praying at the well, a fear of spiritual pollution, and, among Nazareth’s Christian leadership, a prescriptive understanding of pilgrimage behavior, all of which contributed to and found material parallels in the genuine water threat from Jewish Israeli hydraulic and environmental practices. This lethal combination spelled the end of the Virgin’s Fountain as a meeting place and reduced the well to its present status as a traffic-producing irritant, a triangle (albeit a female shape) suspended between two central belt roadways that traverse Nazareth and cross each other at the well that has no water, no supplicants or pilgrims, decrepit greenery, dust, and noise.

When Edward Said came to Nazareth in 1992, as yet unknown to him and Nazareth’s inhabitants was that even the sacred crypt water of Mary’s Well in the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel was not spared. In 1989, the Greek Orthodox Community Council was forced to connect the remaining well beneath the church to the water supply piped in from Israel’s national water grid. At the time of Said’s visit, knowledge about the new source for the well’s water was not yet widespread. When the news emerged in 1995 that for more than five years, holy church water was no different than Nazareth’s regular household tap water, the council was forced to defend itself to the public according to their interpretation that “once the water entered the church it still became holy water.”⁴⁹ A cascading series of urban disasters was recounted to me about Nazareth, for many tellers culminating in the elimination of pure and cleansing holy water, the source of water as life and piety, the disappearance of sacred communal enactments of meaning, and the lack of urban spaciousness and pilgrimage, all of which were crystallized by the hidden substitution of fraudulent holy water. Causes were multiple, reflecting complex internal Christian church organizational decisions faced with external, Israeli state-imposed, economic and spatial strangulation, and, finally, by pollution flowing downward from Jewish Israeli Upper Nazareth to the Virgin Mary’s Fountain.

Recourses to Miracles and the Law

During my presentation of this essay at Columbia University in November 2008, the panel discussant, Lila Abu-Lughod, asked me what effects I hope for with this kind of systematic interrogation of representations that is itself a new form of documentation. Where could the interrogation of photography, water, and representations of Nazareth over time lead? In other words, acknowledging the ambiguities of photography and representation returns us to Edward Said’s questions concerning the role of photography, a medium that characteristically “deals with memory and the past. What of the future?”⁵⁰ And therefore, how do aesthetics and representation connect to action? I responded that it may be that there will be no vision of a community united in the pursuit of conservation of water resources without creating a new people with a new way of thinking. In other words, I am not alone in Nazareth in asking for another miracle. Nineteenth-century Western Christians came tothe Holy Land because it was the “FifthGospel”;they remapped geographical places into a canonical text to be read, understood, traversed, worshipped, and cherished. Perhaps even their religious pieties coupled with an unfashionable Orientalism may point, nonetheless, to thoughts about land use and the idea of a land ethic in which we might arrive at a moral obligation to the land. Although for Fuad Farah, the hydraulic engineer forced to cut the connection from the church’s sacred waters to the Virgin’s Fountain square due to pollution, the land may be the “Fifth Gospel,” he declares that it is Nazareth’s inhabitants, the “Arab Christians [who] are the living stones of the holy land, ‘al-hijara al-haya,’”⁵¹ even as the numbers of Christian Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have diminished proportionally since 1948. Today the Arab Christian community hovers around 10 percent, whereas in 1948 they constituted 25 percent of the Palestinians in Israel, a minority that is itself 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Yet according to Farah’s unshaken belief, he hopes that land, people, and even water will miraculously merge, making possible a resurgence of all three:

“The actual water source for Mary’s Well . . . is a spring about 30 yards northeast of St. Gabriel’s Church. Until 1972, we didn’t know anything about the water source,” [Farah] said. “But then we rediscovered the spring head in a strikingly beautiful crystal white cave.” Although dry, Farah believes “overflows from Mary’s Well are now flowing along a new underground course,” he said, “unknown and undiscovered so far.”⁵² Waters will burst forth again, clear and pristine, some place in Nazareth, although when and where is yet unknown, but I am told that the water will flow again.

In the meantime, one noteworthy indication about water and its miraculous properties has already occurred in Nazareth. In 1993 while digging up his waterlogged basement, shopkeeper Elias Shama, owner of the Cactus Gift Shop adjacent to the Virgin’s Fountain, discovered what he believes was once the bathhouse where Jesus and Mary performed their ablutions. Archeologists speculate that Shama’s discovery lends credence to the indigenous Greek Orthodox and Muslim sitings as opposed to Roman Catholic claims.⁵³ To map hydrologic relationships among the spring, the well, and the recently excavated bathhouse, in 2003 and 2005, Philip Reeder, geography professor at the University of South Florida, began to delineate the gradient that once furnished Mary’s Well but also Shama’s basement bathhouse with abundant water.⁵⁴ The latest photographic technology, namely high-resolution, ground penetrating radar (GPR) techniques, were employed to produce the newest images that indicate a Roman period bathhouse may exist (immediately below the known Crusader-era one). Researchers propose that “one theory suggests that this lower bathhouse would likely be the place where Mary and her family would have come to bathe and draw water and therefore indeed the place where the Angel Gabriel spoke to Mary.”⁵⁵

Even if, as yet, no clear archeological proof places Mary and Jesus drawing water from this specific well on the square, other avenues for Palestinian citizens of Israel are the legal remedies addressed to the national and international scene. In August 2001, a petition filed on behalf of the Municipality of Nazareth asked for “equality in distribution of grants to the local councils in the country” informed by the increased 7 percent in the service budgets to Jewish municipalities by the Ministry of Interior while Arab ones were deprived of 200 million NIS (Israeli currency). If Nazareth were a Jewish municipality, petitioners noted that its 2001 budget would be 11 million NIS, or 50 percent more than it actually was in 2001. Defenders of the Israeli government acknowledge disparities between Arab and Jewish municipal services, but cite “the existence of special needs in the Jewish local councils such as religious councils, security, and the absorption of new immigrants which place a heavier financial burden on Jewish local councils than on their Arab counterparts.”⁵⁶ Moreover, water issues were not initially considered in urban planning of Jewish Israeli Upper Nazareth. The price of Israel’s speedy industrialization has been lax governmental oversight. Factors such as local industries’ uncontrolled use of dumping sites and the limited use, if not the absence of collecting systems for the removal of sewage, serve to contaminate water sources and soil. The discourse of legal and human rights, which highlights unfair divisions of resources between Israel’s Jews and Arabs, calls for remedies based on violations of the human rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, should access to water be interpreted as a basic right as well as a social and collective right derived from water’s necessity for human survival.

Another measure pursued is one in keeping with Said’s plea for a future Palestinian-Jewish reconciliation effected through a one-state solution that establishes a secular, democratic, bi-national state for all the citizens of Israel and Palestine. Local Nazareth-based initiatives have emphasized parallel local solutions for water, sewage, and pollution problems. The concept of “spatial justice” is evoked in order to create a larger, democratic, and integrated regional approach by connecting Jewish Upper and Arab Lower Nazareth into a single amalgamated “mixed” urban area.⁵⁷

Recourses to Photography

If we regard the photographs produced by Nakhle Bishara’s father, Edward Bishara, that depicted his circle of middle-class friends as they pursue leisure activities at the pre-1948 Jneineh Café, viewers note that images usually consist of tightly focused, group shots of the photographer’s peers and age mates. His images exhibit little in the way of background or visible context, unless gleaned through oral interviews and memoirs. Similar encounters with family photography are described by Edward Said’s 1999 memoir Out of Place, image productions that led him to decry the emotionally laden act, always paternally instigated, of being photographed in pictures that reproduced obsessively context-free framing and a focus on family. Consequently, his memoir attempted to uncover memories that contextualized places, subjects, and experiences, although as a child he acquiesced to “the familial gaze”—the term used by literary critic Marianne Hirsch to encompass “the multiple looks that circulate within a family positioning them in relation to one another . . . and the conventions and ideologies of family through which they see themselves.”⁵⁸ As it was with Bishara’s father’s Kodak camera, picture making, Said recalled, was an obsession of his own father, “the proud owner, one of the very first in Egypt, of a Kodak 8-millimeter camera.”⁵⁹ Decades later when revisiting the family photos interspersed throughout his memoir—a different enterprise than the impassioned visual critic’s engagement with Jean Mohr’s Palestine images—Said imbued the afterlife of pre-1948 Palestine pictures with mixed emotions of sadness and loss. He also expressed his irritation because photography excluded what mattered:

It was not so much that I was disappointed at how badly they were shot or how jerky and unsatisfying the sequences they contained were, or at how the print was either too light or too dark, but rather that the films exclude so much, seem contrived and rigid as they positively ban any trace of the effort and uncertainty of our lives. The smiles on everyone’s faces, the impossibly cheery and at times even sturdy presentation of my mother . . . highlight the artificial quality of what we were, a family determined to make itself into a mock European group despite the Egyptian and Arab surroundings that only hinted at as an occasional camel, gardener, servant, palm tree, pyramid, or tarbushed chauffeur is briefly caught by the camera’s otherwise single-minded focus on the children and assorted relatives.⁶⁰

The exclusions characteristic of family photography may indeed have contributed to Said becoming a consummate practitioner of a critical nostalgia. In his 1986 After the Last Sky, while still in exile and looking at Mohr’s 1979 photograph of Nazareth, Said composed this passage:

Palestine is exile, dispossession, the inaccurate memories of one place slipping into the memories of another, a confused recovery of general wares, passive presences scattered around in the Arab environment. The story of Palestine cannot be told smoothly. Instead the past, like the present, offers only occurrences and coincidences. Random. The man enters a quiet alley where he will pass cucumbers on his right, tomatoes on his left; a priest walks down the stairs, the boy dashes off, satchel under arm, other boys loiter, shopkeepers look out for business; carrying an airline bag a man advances past a display of trinkets, a young man disappears around the corner, two boys idle aimlessly. Tomatoes, watermelons, arcades, cucumbers, posters, people, eggplants—not simply there, but represented by photographs as being there—saturated with meaning and memory, and still very far away. Look more closely and think through thesepossibilities. The poster is about Egypt. The trinkets are made in Korea or Hong Kong. The scenes are surveyed, enclosed, and surrounded by Israelis. European and Japanese tourists have [more] access to Jerusalem and Nazareth than I do. Slowly, our lives—like Palestine itself—dissolve into something else. We can’t hold to the center very long.⁶¹

In contrast, in his 1999 memoir Out of Place, written after his 1992 return, Said assigned new post-1948 deployments for remembered childhood photography sessions that had single-mindedly produced his family snapshots. Said would extend the range of the ostensibly trivial family photo self-representations to address the magnitude of Palestinian historical and political losses powered by visual modalities. Especially images taken in Jerusalem under the stern eye of noted photographer Khalil Raad, he observed, now form an archive, a veritable treasure trove of graphic documentation. The same pre-1948 Palestinian lives depicted in Raad’s family portraiture have become what anthropologists term salvage ethnography that permit the formation of new contexts and analyses for photographic artifacts from the pre-1948 past:

It is as if my father’s camera subverted the even more demanding rigor of Khalil Raad’s hooded tripod camera, always summoned by my aunt and her sons to an important family occasion. A slightly built white-haired man, Raad took a great deal of time as he arranged the large group of family and guests into acceptable order. At such moments, endlessly prolonged by the man’s finickiness and disregard for his subjects, standing still seemed by common agreement to be a required ordeal. No one then knew that Raad’s photos would become perhaps the richest archival resource for Palestinians’ lives until 1948.⁶²

In their respective memoirs, both Jean Said Makdisi and Edward Said deploy imagesfrom family albumsbecause they are relevant tothe history of the Nakba and to representations of pre-1948 Palestine no less than their own emotional memories. In Said Makdisi’s family history, she contemplates the picture of her maternal grandmother, photographed before her death in 1973 in Beirut:

I have a photograph of Teta taken before her final descent into the irredeemable debasement of her last days: she is staring at the camera, with the merest hint of a smile. Wisps of long white hair peep out from under the black turban; a cameo brooch is neatly pinned on to the collar of the blouse under the black coat, dead centre on the throat. There is a kind of repose in her face: I feel as though she looked on this taking of a picture as a kind of respite, a clear reason, for the moment for being. The old beauty is clearly discernible—the clear complexion, the soft skin, the large grey eyes. Mother often said that Teta had been a beauty, “mitl al-qamar” (like the moon).⁶³

Said Makdisi’s account assigns emotional and existential powers to a specific act of being photographed—“I feel as though she [grandmother] looked on this taking of a picture as a kind of respite, a clear reason, for the moment for being.” Their grandmother had once been the active and resourceful helpmeet to the leader of Nazareth’s local Protestant community. By pushing aside the intimate, familiar struggle by families for control over photographs and memory of the past, both Jean Said Makdisi and Edward Said made a turn to culturally informed critiques and histories that encompassed visual ethnography, in order to appropriate family photography as one component of Palestinian cultural and historical memory with which to reconstruct the Palestinian national narrative:

At the intersection of past and future stands the disaster [Nakba], which on one hand reveals the deviation from what has yet to happen (a unified collective Arab identity) and on the other reveals the possibility of what may happen (Arab extinction as a cultural or national unit) . . . for the Arabs to act knowingly was to create the present, and this was a battle for restoring historical continuity, healing a rupture, and most important, forging a historic possibility.⁶⁴

Pictures are material traces of a distant past. Whatever stories we read into images are inevitably structured by what has been lost and whom we have loved. Yet photographs have always been known for their connection to evidence, and to the materiality and reality of that past—to family, to history, and to constituting the histories of a people—as long as viewers are determined to collaborate reciprocally in the acts of looking, telling, and writing.

Susan Slyomovics is professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among her works are The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005); and (as coeditor) Waging War and Making Peace: The Anthropology of Reparations (2008).

Notes

1. Originally published as Edward W. Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” Observer, October 25–November 1, 8, 1992, but page references drawn from reprinted chapter in Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 183–84.

2. Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” 184, in which Said concludes that his father was “very different despite or perhaps because of their father’s unrelenting Baptist fundamentalism.” Contrast with the Baptist Convention of Israel, “History of the Baptist Convention in Israel,”: Although some earlier survey work had been done, the single greatest catalyst for Baptist work in the Holy Land was Sukri Mussa, a resident of Safed who went to the US to study in the early 1900s. While there, he came to faith under the preaching of George Truett at First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Supported by Baptist churches in southern Illinois, he returned to the Holy Land in 1911. According to Fuad Sakhnini, pastor of the Nazareth Baptist Church since 1960, “He bought a horse and began preaching in the villages. It wasn’t easy because people were fanatically loyal to their communities. The first Baptists here were persecuted by the other traditional Christian communities.” He witnessed in Turan and Eilabun, villages with large nominal Christian populations—the kind of background he was from. Mussa organized Bible studies and people met in homes for a time, but in 1926 the new believers built Nazareth Baptist Church. Mussa died in 1928, but there was already a vision to start planting churches in the Galilee, Sakhnini said. Sakhnini, born the same year the church was built, was among a group of young men who continued starting new works “in obedience to the Great Commission.” Many of them went out on donkeys to preach. Churches were established throughout the Galilee, in villages such as Jaffa, Kafr Kanna, Turan, Eilabun, Acre, and Rama. More recently, two Baptist churches have been established in Nazareth. On the Shukri Musa (also spelled Shukri al-Musa) family of Safed, Nazareth, and the Galilee, see the family history by Edward Said’s sister, Jean Said Makdisi, Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 246.

3. This essay is revised from my presentation originally prepared for the conference “1948–78: Orientalism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Columbia University, November 7–8, 2008. I thank Saree and Usama Makdisi for suggestions; in particular, my profound thanks to the conference discussant, Lila Abu-Lughod. On Said and visual studies, see also Joseph A. Massad, “Beginning with Edward Said,” in Belonging and Globalization: Critical Essays in Contemporary Art and Culture, ed. Kamal Boullata (London: Saqi, 2008), 119–30.

4. Edward Said with photographs by Jean Mohr, “Introduction: Palestinian Lives,” After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 6.

5. Ibid., 3. Nubar Hovsepian confirms the prohibition against writing around the image in his “Connections with Palestine,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 5–18. For the exhibition catalog of Jean Mohr, see Side by Side or Face to Face (Geneva: Editions Labor et Fides, 2003), based on fifty years of Mohr’s photography of Palestinian refugees.

6. See image and text about Nazareth in Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 40.

7. The notion of captions as “didactic” is from Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 7, and her argument from explanations is in Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 10.

8. Sontag, On Photography, 72.

9. Edward W. Said, “Bursts of Meaning,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 151 (originally published in The Nation, December 4, 1982).

10. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 40.

11. On the conceit of poet as bird, see Ahmad L. Tibawi, “Visions of Return: The Palestine Arab Refugees in Arabic Poetry and Art,” Middle East Journal 17, no. 5 (1963): 516. On Nasir as Said’s relative, see Said, “Introduction,” The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Random House, 1995), xiv.

12. Yusuf al-Khatib, “Buhayrat al-zaytun” (The Lake of Olive Trees), al-Adab 10 (1957): 17.

13. This image appears in plays and folklore anecdotes: the predicament of the flying Palestinian who chooses to fly away or hover above the beloved land rather than kill or be killed. See Susan Slyomovics, “To Put One’s Fingers in the Bleeding Wound’: Palestinian Theatre under Israeli Censorship,” Drama Review 35, no. 2 (1991): 20–22.

14. Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” Observer, 184.

15. Ibid.

16. See “In Search of Palestine,” a 1998 BBC documentary about Edward Said’s return to Jerusalem: “Said recalls that his parents were married in Nazareth, where his mother was born. His mother, on her deathbed in Washington, D.C., would cry out that she wanted to return to Nazareth.” Available here.

17. Samir Srouji, “Nazareth: Intersecting Narratives of Modern Architectural Histories,” Third Text 17 (2006): 355–71.

18. Said, “Bursts of Meaning,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 152.

19. Said also wrote in relation to Jean Mohr’s photographs and John Berger’s narrative about these images that “narrative has been replaced by a constellation of experience (what Gerard Manley Hopkins would have called bursts of meaning) that convey the privacy and the context”; in Said, “Bursts of Meaning,” 149.

20. Current images of the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation, Nazareth, and Mary’s Well in St. Gabriel’s Greek Orthodox church.

21. For Greek Orthodox believers, the Protevangelium of James (11:1ff), a non-canonical and apocryphal gospel of the second century, emphasizes Angel Gabriel’s appearance before Mary in a public place. The Greek Orthodox version rests on the text: “One day Mary took the jug and went out to draw water. And suddenly a voice said: ‘Hail you that are highly favored, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.’ She looked all around wondering from where the voice might have come. Trembling, she returned home, put down the jug, sat on her stool, took up the purple and began spinning yarn.” Complete text available in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

22. For the story of Said’s parents’ wedding in Nazareth, see Jean Said Makdisi, Teta, 306.

23. See As’ad Mansur, Tarikh al-Nasira (Cairo: Matba’at al-Hilal, 1924).

24. Fuad Farah, The Orthodox Church of the Annunciation and Mary’s Well, undated pamphlet (Nazareth: The Orthodox Community Council), 10.

25. David Roberts, Journal, quoted in George Croly, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia. From drawings made on the spot by David Roberts, with historical descriptions by the Rev. George Croly. Lithographed by Louis Haghe (London: F. G. Moon, 1842), vol. 1: [28].

26. Roof structure depicted in the wood engraving titled “The Fountain of the Virgin, Nazareth: on the eastern side of the town. A Bedouin sheikh with his attendant in the foreground. . . .” In Charles William Wilson, Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt (New York: D. Appleton, 1881–83), vol. 1: 274.

27. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (New York: Random House, 1976); William A. Christian Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Susan Slyomovics, “Algeria Elsewhere: The Pilgrimage of the Virgin of Santa Cruz in Oran, Algeria and Nimes, France,” in Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes, ed. Regina Bendix and Rosemary Levy Zumwalt (New York: Garland Press, 1995), 337–54.

28. Gloria Ferrari, Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 66–67.

29. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 221–23.

30. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 133, and Issam Nassar, “Biblification in the Service of Colonialism: Jerusalem in Nineteenth-century Photography,” Third Text 20 (2006): 317.

31. Cunningham Geikie, The Holy Land and the Bible: A Book of Scripture Illustrations Gathered in Palestine.

32. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, Traveling in the Holy Land Through the Stereoscope: A Tour Personally Conducted by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut (New York: Underwood, 1900), 4–5. 33. Ibid., 6.

34. Said, “Introduction,” After the Last Sky, 6. Parenthetically, an early noteworthy photographic project brings together water, visual representations of the Holy Land, and British imperialism, namely the 1865 British Royal Engineers survey of Jerusalem’s water system. Despite the survey’s use of the contemporary cumbersome technology—wet glass plate negative process—photography was smoothly integrated into the actual work of surveying and map-making the city’s drainage, cisterns, and sewage; see photos in Charles William Wilson, Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (London: H. M. Stationery Off., G. E. Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1865), and Kathleen Stewart Howe, Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997), 29–46.

35. Figure 8 is a black-and-white postcard captioned on the front, “Nazareth, Virgin’s Fountain,” circa 1921. The unsigned image is attributed by residents interviewed in Nazareth to Fadil Saba, the well-known, professional photographer from Nazareth who along with his father, Nasir Saba, are considered pioneers of commercial photography and postcards in Nazareth. Their Nazareth photography studio, opened in 1897, is currently a grocery store after Fadil Saba left Nazareth with his family to settle in the United States around 1960.

36. Makdisi, Teta, Mother and Me, 246.

37. C. A. Hooper, The Civil Law of Palestine and Trans-Jordan (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt, 2000). See also A Survey of Palestine prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991), 389–404.

38. Dan Rabinowitz, Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24–27.

39. Jad Isaac, “The Essentials of Sustainable Water Resource Management in Israel and Palestine,” Arab Studies Quarterly (2000): 13–32. To this day, Israel invokes the British-era concession in the current context of post–Oslo Accords water negotiations. Although 80 percent of the recharge basin (defined as the area in which rain and streams trickle down into the aquifer) of the Western Aquifer, the region’s largest of three aquifer water sources, lies under Palestine’s West Bank, its waters flow underground westward into Israel where most of it is pumped. Palestinians claim ownership over the water arguing for the internationally recognized fact of water’s point of origin versus its natural flow across national boundaries. Israelis invoke the Rutenberg Concession or the rights of colonial precedent and historic use.

40. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website on the history of water: The first concerted effort to build a large-scale project was in 1935. The leaders of this project were Levi Eshkol, later Prime Minister of Israel, and Simcha Blass, an engineer who became prominent in the design and development of all the main water projects in the country. The project was designed and carried out between 1935 and 1938 by Mekorot, the newly established public water company. The water came from three wells drilled into the western flanks of the valley of Jezreel. The main features of the project were: Conveyance of water in metal pipes under high pressure, allowing uninterrupted supply over long distances. Incorporation of two concrete tanks and two open reservoirs, instrumental in providing a constant water supply. See Israel, Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: “FOCUS on Israel—Development of Limited Water Resources-Historical and Technological Aspects” (September 20, 2003).

41. Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 37.

42. Few Christian women in Mandatory-era Nazareth frequented cafés. Exceptions were described (by those I interviewed beginning in the 1990s) and defined as the category of women who could not lose their reputations: senior or unmarried women, and those who held prominent positions, such as the formidable Sitt Wassila Riziq, headmistress of the Girls School (Madrasat al-Banat).

43. Nakhle Bishara, al-Nasirah: Suwar wa-basamat min al-tarikh (Nazareth: Mazzawi, 2005), 133. According to my interview with Dr. Bishara, in 1984, his medical residency at the Edinburgh Missionary Medical Society (EMMS) in Scotland yielded images from the archives of doctors assigned to Nazareth: Kaloust John Vartan, founder of Nazareth Hospital in 1861, Frederic John Scrimgeour, 1908–21 (see Frederic John Scrimgeour, Nazareth of Today [Edinburgh: William Green, 1913]), and William Bathgate (1921–56).

44. Still existing are Abu Andraos and Qahwat al-Attal (a porters café) in the Souk quarter. My larger project inquires into the rise and fall of cafés in Palestine and the close relationships to dislocations in Palestinian society (first World War II, then 1948). See my Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), chapter 4.

45. Eugene Hoade, Guide to the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1973), 847.

46. Chad F. Emmett, Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 83–84.

47. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 414–20.

48. Rabinowitz, Overlooking Nazareth.

49. Emmett, Beyond the Basilica, 84.

50. Said, “Bursts of Meaning,” 152.

51. Fuad Farah, al-Hijarah al-hayyah: al-Masihiyun al-‘Arab fi al-diyar al-muqaddasah (Nazareth: Taqdimah min Wizarat al-‘Ulum wa-al-Thaqafah wa-al-Riyadah, 2003).

52. Elaine Ruth Fletcher, “Mary’s Well Waters Down to a Trickle: Pilgrims Still Visit, Pray in Church Grotto,” Times-Picayune (April 26, 2003).

53. On Shamas’s struggle to convince the Israel Antiquities authority of the authenticity of his archeological find, see articles by Jonathan Cook, “Jesus’s Bathhouse,”. See also Frances Grandy Taylor, “Nazareth in a Different Light: University of Hartford Team Leads Study of Ancient Bathhouse in Nazareth,” Hartford Courant (December 25, 2003).

54. I thank Philip Reeder for his unpublished paper, “Mapping Near Mary’s Well, Nazareth, Israel: July 2005.”

55. Harry M. Jol, Jenifer Bode, Richard A. Freund, Maha Darawsha, Paul D. Bauman, Christeen Nahas, Philip Reeder, and Carl Savage, “Nazareth Excavation Project: A GPR Perspective,”.

56. Arab Association of Human Rights, “A Petition to Balance Grant Payments between Arab and Jewish Localities,” Press Review 81, no. 11 (June 18, 2002). For a historic overview, see Majid Al-Haj and Henry Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), and more recently David A. Wesley, State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel (New York: Bergahn, 2006).

57. Rassem Khamaisi, Merhav Natseret: misgeret metropolinit le-nihul, tikhnun u-fituah/The Nazareth Area: A Metropolitan Outline for Governance, Planning, and Development) (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 2003); and Environmental Spatial Policies and Control of the Arab Localities Development, 2004. On critiques of already existing “mixed cities,” see Haim Yacobi, “In-Between Surveillance and Spatial Protest: The Production of Space of the ‘Mixed City’ of Lod,” Surveillance and Society 2 (2004): 55–77, and Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yacobi, “Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli ‘Mixed City,’” Society and Space 21 (2003): 673–93.

58. Marianne Hirsch, “Introduction: Familial Looking,” in The Familial Gaze (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), xi; but especially her Family Frames: Narrative, Photography and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Issam Nassar, “Familial Snapshots: Representing Palestine in the Work of the First Local Photographers,” History & Memory 18, no. 2 (2006): 139–55.

59. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 1999), 74.

60. Ibid., 76.

61. Said, After the Last Sky, 31–32.

62. Said, Out of Place, 76–77. On the importance of Khalil Raad, see Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984); Issam Nassar, “Familial Snapshots: Representing Palestine in the Work of the First Local Photographers,” History & Memory 18, no. 2 (2006): 139–55; Badr al-Hajj, “Khalil Raad: Jerusalem Photographer”, Jerusalem Quarterly 11–12 (2001); and Annelies Moors, “Presenting Palestine’s Population: Premonitions of the Nakba,” MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 1 (May 2001).

63. Makdisi, Teta, 132.

64. Edward W. Said, “Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47–48.