Wasif Jawhariyyeh
He is known for his memoirs, The Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, that spans over six decades from 1904 to 1968, covering Jerusalem's turbulent modern history, including four regimes and five wars.
[3] His father, Jiryis (Girgis), was the mukhtar of the Eastern Orthodox community in the Old City (1884) and a member of Jerusalem's municipal council, serving under the Mayors Salim al-Husseini and Faidy al-Alami.
He worked briefly as a government tax assessor, but later turned to private business, becoming a successful silk farmer in Ezariyyeh and proprietor of a public café over the Jraisheh River.
At the age of nine Wasif developed an interest in music (particularly the 'uod ) the Jawhariyyeh's hosted a birthday celebration that featured a performance by Qustandi al-Sus.
Around the same time, Wasif's father had him apprenticed to a local barbershop among other apprenticeships that, "supplemented his formal education and often furthered his evolving music career.
The writings of Wasif reflected, "...a substantial degree of formal schooling... His polished language, rich poetic imagination.
The Dabbagha School (governed by the Lutheran Church) until 1909 and his studies included: basic Arab grammar, dictation, reading and arithmetic.
The turn of the twentieth century ushered in an era of modernity within Jerusalem, manifested by advances in technology, industry, government, infrastructure, the arts, and education.
"[13] The modernization of Jerusalem resulted in the proliferation of new classes of society such as "absentee landowners" and "the establishment of municipal councils in cities around the Ottoman Empire, by the close of the nineteenth century.
"[12] Societal interaction among the people of Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth-century has been argued by many scholars as defined by, The ethno-confessional division of four communities: Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish.
In these quarters, conventional accounts argue, social nodes were more or less exclusive, physically defined and reinforced by mechanisms of mutual aid, craft specialization, ritual celebrations, internal schooling systems and, above all, the rules of confessional endogamy.
In the case of pre-war Ottoman Jerusalem... the city fostered a communitarian identity, a pre-nationalist confessional consciousness competing with emergency but vigorous Arab nationalism and localized (Syrian Palestinian) sentiments as well as an embryonic Jewish Zionist movement.
"[16] Tamari's argument serves as a rejection of the constructivist narrative, and argues in favor of a structural model in understanding society in Jerusalem at the turn of the century.
