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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2023, pp. 62-63

Middle East Books Review

The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka

By Jacob Norris, Stanford University Press, 2023, paperback, 290 pp. MEB $25

Reviewed by Ida Audeh

THIS WONDERFULLY readable book describes the development of Bethlehem’s international trade routes and their impact on the town during the last half of the 19th century and early 20th century through the history of one Jubrail Dabdoub. In the 1850s, Bethlehem’s leading families were involved in manufacturing mother of pearl and hand carved rosaries and crosses, which they sold to pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. The patriarch of the Dabdoub family realized that they would remain small-time operators as long as they relied on pilgrims to come to them, and so they took their wares and headed for the Jaffa port, from there to sail to the unknown—Paris, Manilla, Chicago, San Salvador, Havana, Brazil. There they made their fortunes and set up businesses that later would prompt family members to settle in these new lands. The story ends in 1930, with the economic crash and the death of Jubrail. By then, Bethlehem had been completely transformed.

That is the storyline in brief. The author’s style makes this history of Bethlehem’s transformation read like a novel. To hold to the narrative line, Jacob Norris uses end notes to provide the basis for events, sometimes presented fancifully, and dialog that will sound authentic to Arabic speaking readers (like the use of the spelling “Amerka,” consistent with the spoken form). In the notes, Norris describes his reasons for adopting a magical realist approach to the writing of this book: it captures “the sense of wonder and confusion” that simple townspeople experienced as they explored the globe and tried to convey to their kin and friends back home what they saw, which inevitably sounded like a tall tale. The author views “storytelling as an essential part of doing history,” and in this work he had to deal with a main character about whom little was directly known. 

So why choose Jubrail Dabdoub? The answer lies in one of the many sources on which the author relied to reconstruct Bethlehem during this period: the notebooks of a Bethlehem nun, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas, who kept good daily records of her life, including the miracle that the book’s title alludes to. In 1909, Jubrail was stricken with typhoid and was believed to have died; the family called for the nun, she prayed to the Virgin Mother for his recovery, and soon the apparently-not-really-dead man showed signs of life. (This nun was later canonized in 2015, and Jubrail’s recovery was cited as evidence of her saintliness.) She recorded the incident matter-of-factly, and her community believed that he had truly been brought back from the dead. (Norris discovered from his eclectic and disparate sources that Bethlehemites believed that in their town, “miracles of every kind…seemed to be occurring with great frequency.” His ability to capture the townspeople’s belief in divine intervention in daily life lends the book much of its charm.) 

Take this description of Jubrail’s return to Bethlehem after making inroads in the Philippines: “His stories had the air of the khurafiyya [tall tale] about them, opening with the young hero leaving his village on a quest to find a great treasure on a mysterious, faraway island. To get there, he had to outsmart various kinds of ghouls, jinn and wicked rulers. Captivating his listeners with tales that stretched even the most fantastical of imaginations, he spoke of floating cities that glided through deserts, giant monsters of the deep and enchanted lands of magical temples.”

Storytelling aside, 19th century Bethlehemites were shrewd, trailblazing entrepreneurs. They traveled to international expositions in world capitals to sell their goods and make connections with importers—and eventually set up businesses to be run by family members. Their greatest successes were in Honduras and Chile, and there they set roots, requesting brides be sent to them from Bethlehem. By 1909, Norris tells us, Bethlehem was the richest town in Palestine, and the major merchant families built magnificent mansions with the wealth their foreign trade provided. 

The townspeople were very practical, and Norris describes conversions to Catholicism to promote their business dealings with foreign (Catholic) clergy. His description of Muslims praying to Mary in a church alongside their Christian neighbors is touching in its simplicity; the author notes that people of both faiths believed in her with equal passion, and an observer seeing them both at prayer would be unable to tell them apart. Foreign clergy found this comingling of religions incomprehensible.

Using a range of sources—the nun’s notebooks, parish records, interviews with descendants of the Bethlehem merchants who were active at the turn of the century, memoirs written during those years, other supplemental material to provide context, and his imagination—Norris has written an account that brings to life a town on the cusp of transformation and a population that bravely stepped into the unknown to secure their fortunes. 

Ida Audeh is a contributing editor of the Washington Report.