Well, here's something I found by chance, while waiting on line at the Jerusalem Municpality's Archives to xerox some material.
It's from the reports of James Finn, Britain's Consul-General in Jerusalem:
and it tells the sad story on one Gershon ben Avraham who disappeared on the eve of the Shabbat. He had money owed him by a Muslim or perhaps Muslims.
And his body was found in a well, actually a cistern I presume. The body displayed evidence of stabbings and of "horrible" injuries due to torture:
So was the tranquil coexistence between Jews and Arabs - before Zionism.
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6 comments:
This is an interesting example but not compelling since it is not clear whether the victim was killed because he was a Jew or for some other reason, such as robbery, or as the article suggests, to eliminate a debt.
Bill, Let's not be simplistic. It is not either or. Maybe a Muslim debtor did not want to pay back a debt. If his creditor had been a Muslim, he might have felt the same way. He still would not have wanted to pay it back. But if the creditor were a Muslim, would he have murdered him?
Of course Jews were very badly treated in Jerusalem up until the 1860s. Even Karl Marx said so. See links:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2005/06/karl-marx-on-ottomanmuslim.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2005/06/karl-marx-on-treatment-of-jewish_16.html
Horrible torture usually meant the cutting off of one's testicles and stuffing them in the victim's mouth as was done to the "35" of Etzion Bloc in 1948 and other Jews murdered in Hebron in 1929.
While logic could allow for one of your propositions, the reality is that he was killed because he was a Jew, and brutally dealth with only because he was a Jew. Ibn-Balad - children of death the Jews were called.
Very interesting.
Regarding James Finn in general, he and his wife Elizabeth were philosemites.
Arnold Blumberg, in his book "Zion before Zionism", made effective use of Finn's despatches (and those of other consuls in Eretz Yisrael) to demonstrate how sparsely populated the land was at the time.
Absolutely. I have his book, among others (and there is his "Stirring Times") and he is the father-in-law of my friend, Noam Livnat.
I'm an admirer of his work. It's many years since I read those books - the first is in this book-cluttered house somewhere - and I must re-read them.
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