Jerusalem divided: the demise of a Cosmopolitan Friendship
What happens when a vibrant intercultural friendship collides with the violent emergence of ethnonationalism? This central question brings to life Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s meticulously researched study of five intellectuals whose bonds were severed by the catastrophe of 1948 Palestine. The book’s haunting cover—featuring two Muslims, two Christians, and a Jew posing together while smiling—serves as a poignant visual counterpoint to the title’s grim declaration of impossibility.
Mejcher-Atassi reconstructs the brief flowering of an “ecumenical circle” that gathered regularly at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel during the British Mandate era. This cosmopolitan quintet—Walid Khalidi, Rasha Salam, Sally Kassab, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer—shared passions for modernist literature, artistic expression, and intellectual exchange that transcended religious boundaries. Their gatherings at the YMCA Arts Club and contributions to the literary magazine Forum embodied a passing moment of cross-cultural possibility in late-colonial Jerusalem.
The author skillfully positions this friendship against the backdrop of Palestine’s shifting sociopolitical landscape. Their intellectual exchanges occurred during what Mejcher-Atassi, borrowing from Ussama Makdisi, terms the fading glow of an “age of coexistence” (p. 225). This period between the world wars represented the twilight of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, when Jerusalem’s neighborhoods still formed an intricate patchwork of religious and ethnic communities. These young intellectuals—university-educated, multilingual, and culturally open—navigated between Western modernist influences and local traditions, creating a distinctive intellectual milieu that defied easy categorization.
The narrative pivots on 22 July 1946, when the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel—just one day after the group’s final meeting. This act of terrorism serves as both literal and metaphorical demolition of their shared space. What follows is a carefully traced diaspora, as the five friends scatter geographically and ideologically across continents, never to reunite as a group. The January 1948 bombing of the Semiramis Hotel near Jabra’s home becomes another defining moment, forcing Palestinian members into permanent exile.
Beyond the friendship’s dissolution, Mejcher-Atassi examines how the physical city itself transformed. Jerusalem’s previously porous boundaries between neighborhoods hardened into security checkpoints; identity cards replaced face-to-face recognition; and the communal spaces that had facilitated cross-cultural exchange were systematically dismantled. Through this lens, the book offers not just biography but urban history, tracing how political violence reconfigured spatial relations and everyday interactions in ways that rendered the previous cosmopolitanism increasingly “impossible.”
Methodologically, the book employs what Hartman calls “critical fabulation” (p. 14)—a deliberate working against the silences of archives to recover histories otherwise lost. This approach is particularly evident in Mejcher-Atassi’s treatment of the female members, about whom documentary evidence is sparse. For Sally Kassab, the most elusive figure, we glimpse primarily her artistic talents and romantic connection to Hildesheimer. Her subsequent relocations—first to Beirut, then to England during the Lebanese Civil War—sketch a life persistently disrupted by regional conflicts. Rasha Salam emerges more fully through unpublished memoirs that reveal her educational achievements at King Fuad University, her family’s nationalist commitments, and her complex feelings toward her Jewish friend.
Jabra’s trajectory from impoverished Bethlehem youth to Cambridge scholar to exiled Iraqi intellectual reveals a man who refused the “refugee” label while producing literary works that processed displacement through modernist aesthetics. His declaration that “it is ironic that the new wanderers should be driven into the wilderness by the old wanderers themselves” (p. 179) encapsulates the bitter historical irony that shadows the narrative. Khalidi’s transformation into a preeminent historian documenting Palestinian cultural heritage destroyed in the Nakba represents intellectual resistance against erasure. His scholarly publications, particularly All That Remains, meticulously catalog the Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948, creating an archive that counters historical oblivion.
Perhaps most complex is Hildesheimer’s evolution from Jewish refugee in Palestine to reluctant witness of Palestinian dispossession. Born into a “Jewish family imbued with German culture” (p. 103), his immigration to Palestine in 1933 was a flight from Nazism rather than a Zionist journey. His father’s margarine factory, which exclusively employed Jews, exemplified the separate economic development encouraged under the Mandate. After returning to Germany post-war, Hildesheimer’s silence about the devastation of Al-Majdal during a 1953 visit reveals the uncomfortable position of German Jews caught between Holocaust trauma and witnessing new injustices. Mejcher-Atassi thoughtfully explores how Hildesheimer’s work as a Nuremberg trials translator shaped his pessimistic worldview without leading to public denunciation of Israel’s actions.
The book’s strength lies in its refusal to romanticize the friendship circle, acknowledging their elite detachment from everyday Palestinian life while still recognizing the genuine connections that formed across religious and cultural lines. Unlike romanticized narratives of cross-cultural harmony, Mejcher-Atassi presents these relationships with all their complexities and contradictions—including Hildesheimer’s father’s business practices that undermined local Arab industries and Jabra’s Anglophile tendencies that initially blunted criticism of British colonial administration.
This groundbreaking social biography merits attention from diverse readerships. Scholars of Palestinian history will appreciate the granular reconstruction of intellectual life before the Nakba. Those focused on Jewish diaspora studies will find in Hildesheimer’s story a nuanced exploration of German-Jewish identity navigating between Nazi persecution and Zionist nationalism. For specialists in Arab literary modernism, the trajectories of Jabra and Khalidi illuminate how exile shaped transformative cultural production. General readers unfamiliar with either tradition will discover accessible entry points through these intertwined life stories, which humanize a conflict often flattened into impersonal political narratives.
The book’s extensive documentation would translate beautifully to digital humanities formats—interactive maps tracking the protagonists’ movements, timelines of their publications and collaborations, and galleries of the visual materials that enrich the text. Such a presentation could further expand the audience for this important contribution to understanding how national trauma fractures personal bonds. Mejcher-Atassi’s rich archival research—drawing on unpublished memoirs, correspondence, artistic works, and oral histories—provides a foundation that could support multimedia engagement with this material, allowing readers to trace connections across disciplines, languages, and geographies.
Literary scholars will particularly appreciate Mejcher-Atassi’s attention to the modernist sensibilities that bound these intellectuals together. Their shared fascination with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland takes on prophetic dimensions as their own world fragments into ruins. The book’s attention to the group’s literary productions demonstrates how creative work became both memorial to lost connection and vehicle for processing collective trauma. Hildesheimer’s inclusion of a line from Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in his later novel—“What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present” (p. 223)—suggests how these literary touchpoints continued to frame understanding of historical rupture decades later.
As contemporary headlines report on the war in Gaza and escalating violence in the West Bank, Mejcher-Atassi’s study gains urgent relevance. The photograph of five friends from different faiths appears not merely as historical curiosity but as evidence of alternative possibilities. Through meticulous biographical reconstruction, the author demonstrates how political catastrophe destroyed not only lives and property but also fragile intercultural connections that might have offered different futures. In recovering these lost friendships, the book itself becomes an act of memorial imagination.
The book ultimately offers a form of counter history to the conventional histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and contributes to the creation of a language of historical reconciliation. This is not reconciliation as political compromise or historical erasure, but rather a more profound reckoning with the human dimensions of nationalist violence. By recovering these five intertwined lives—their shared passions, their divergent fates, their complex responses to catastrophe—Mejcher-Atassi reminds us that before borders hardened and identities calcified, there existed spaces of genuine intellectual exchange across the very lines that would later become impassable boundaries.
