Experts or Witnesses

Jewish Intelligentsia from Jerusalem and the Levant in the Beginning of the 20th Century

Amos Noy

The book tells the story of a circle of Mizrahi intellectuals who were active in Jerusalem of the late 19th century and through the 1930s, the best known of them being Yossef Meyuhas, Abraham Elmaleh, and Yitzhak Yehezkel Yahuda. Their upbringing, education, intellectual coming-of-age, and scholarly activity unfolded in the period of the waning of the Ottoman Empire and into the early days of the British Mandate in Palestine, and they saw themselves as harbingers of an intellectual elite that would combine “European” education and enlightenment with an indigenous and “Oriental” self-awareness. Organized around a discussion of their works, the book seeks to restore these scholars and their wide and mostly forgotten opus to the scholarly and public agenda.