‘Irrespective of Community or Creed’: Charity, Solidarity and the 1927 Jericho Earthquake

In the months after the Jericho earthquake of July 1927,¹ which killed over 250 people in Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan, tables appeared regularly in the English, Arabic and Hebrew newspapers published in Palestine. The lists named those who had donated to the relief fund for victims of the earthquake, alongside the amounts given. Placing the names and sums of charitable donations in the public domain, especially by listing them in newspapers, was not an uncommon practice at the time and was bound up with issues of personal, familial or institutional prestige. As scholars such as Amy Singer, Melanie Tanielian and Keith David Watenpaugh have shown, in the Middle East, as in other societies and cultures, charity and giving was never neutral, but entangled with social and political power, legitimisation and ideology, although the manner of giving and of displaying one’s generosity changed over time and place. A cross-cutting insight is that of Disaster Studies, which proposes that moments of catastrophe, especially rapid and unexpected ones such as an earthquake, offer the chance to observe dynamics in a society which might otherwise lie undiscovered; this chapter thus shifts away from the focus on large-scale poor relief which is the subject especially of Singer and Watenpaugh’s research, but looks instead at the comparatively small but discursively significant example of the Jericho earthquake