PHOTOGRAPHYLara Marlowe looks at two newly published photographic books, one dedicated to the Palestinian people, the other to the Jewish diaspora'The landscape and the people were often more powerfulthan the eye of the photographer. Their images are living; they resist. Theycannot be reduced to an abstraction; they're troubling' - Elias Sanbar
Could there be a more tragic, hellish fate than for two peoples to live, fight and die in an endless struggle for the same piece of land? Yet we've started the century without a glimmer of hope for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That was why I was fascinated to receive two newly published photographic books, one dedicated to the Palestinians, the other to the Jewish diaspora.
The diaspora is not Israel, as the French photographer, Frédéric Brenner, would be quick to point out. But the promise of Israel, and its disappointments, are an integral part of Jewish identity.
Brenner and the Palestinian academic and writer Elias Sanbar spent close to three decades taking and collecting the hundreds of photographs which make up these magnificent volumes. Brenner, a practising Jew, might say as Sanbar does at the end of his preface, "This is my family album." Palestinians and Jews are absent from each others' books, as if the rival claimant to each promised land in no way infringed on the other's identity. Sanbar includes several pictures of Jews at the Wailing Wall - to show that Jews too were victims of stereotypes imposed by 19th-century European photographers.
Brenner's book asks what is the meaning of Jewish identity, and concludes there is no answer. He seeks the universal in his subjects, while Sanbar focuses on what is specifically Palestinian. The rites of Judaism figure strongly in Brenner's book. Religion is strangely absent from Sanbar's, perhaps because he is a Christian from a predominantly Muslim society.
The first images in Sanbar's book are mid-19th century photographs of Jerusalem, holy to both peoples, claimed by both as their capital. Francis Frith was a British photographer who used the Bible as if it were a Michelin guide to the Middle East. His Views of Sinai, Palestine, Egypt and Ethiopia was a bestseller. In Frith's 1857 vista of Jerusalem, Sanbar was particularly impressed by the massive olive tree in the foreground.
Nineteenth-century Anglicans believed they were the true descendants of the Hebrews and that they would "redeem" the Holy Land. The British consul to Jerusalem, a certain James Finn, moved his staff out into the fields in the springtime, according to Biblical prescription, and delivered sermons in Hebrew.
French Catholic visitors were more interested in vestiges of the Crusades than scenes from the Bible. But French and British alike found the inhabitants of Palestine disappointing "from whence developed the idea that they didn't belong there - which prepared the way for their displacement in the 20th century," Sanbar says.
And yet, Sanbar adds, despite the distorting clichés, "The landscape and the people were often more powerful than the eye of the photographer. Their images are living; they resist. They cannot be reduced to an abstraction; they're troubling" - for instance, the 1880 portrait of a young Palestinian in full costume, taken in the studio of the French photographer Bonfils.
Palestinian photography was more authentic. Khalil Raad's 1920 portrait of a young Palestinian woman (right), smiling with her veil tucked between her teeth, an infant in her arms, is startlingly fresh and alive.
By 1920, the Balfour Declaration which foresaw "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" was already three years old. Yet Sanbar sees 19th and early 20th-century Palestine as idyllic. "It was a very simple country, on the sidelines, without gold or oil. The tragedy of this country was to find itself at the centre of a huge knot: the Holocaust; the Jewish question; the Russian pogroms; the second World War; colonisation; the British Empire ... This little country ended up at the centre."
The photo which Sanbar finds most moving shows the border post between British mandate Palestine and Lebanon, with the words "IN" and "OUT" posted in English, Arabic and Hebrew. "That is where I became an 'absentee', he laughs bitterly, using the Israeli term for Palestinians who were driven into exile.
The first Arab-Israeli war led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Sanbar has published several rare photographs of Palestinians leaving Jaffa by sea, wading into the water, carrying their possessions. "It is little known that many of the Palestinians chased off their land in 1948 had to leave by sea," he says. "Imagine their fury in the 1950s when they were accused of wanting to 'throw the Jews into the sea'!" With the advent of the guerrilla movement, Palestinians created their own clichés of the 'noble fighter' and the Ashbâl ("lion cubs") - teenagers taught to fight Israel. Many of the images chosen by Sanbar were shot by Hani Jawhariyyeh, a photographer with a cinematographic eye who was shot dead while filming a clash in southern Lebanon in the early 1970s.
For Sanbar, the achievement of a half-century of Palestinian nationalism has been to reclaim a specific identity which the Israelis tried to efface.
The first Israeli government changed the names of places from which the Palestinians had 'disappeared', he notes. Golda Meir used to say there was no such thing as a Palestinian.
Though Israel is the infinitely more powerful party to the conflict, Frédéric Brenner describes his portrait of the Jewish people as being "about paradox, ambivalence and discontinuity." Discontinuity is conveyed through the incredible variety of Jewish societies photographed by Brenner. How many people know that Stalin created Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region of the Soviet Union? When Brenner travelled to this far-flung corner of Mongolia in 1989, the Jews of Birobidzhan were still publishing the only Yiddish-language newspaper in the Soviet Union.
The Marranos, a Jewish sect in Portugal whose ritual is based on secrecy, are another little known curiosity explored in Brenner's book. His portraits of Edwin Aaron and Moses Elias, Jewish merchants in Calcutta whose ancestors emigrated from Baghdad in the 19th century, are among his finest.
As André Aciman, one of the eloquent commentators who contributed texts to the accompanying volume entitled Voices, writes: "A Jew is always someone about whom one asks: Why on earth isn't he where he belongs?" Brenner's before and after photographs of Jews who emigrated to Israel repeat a theme he addressed in his 1997 book Exile at Home. We see Lewi Faez as a boy, studying in his grandfather's jewellery workshop in Yemen.
Ten years later, the teenage Faez, his young bride and their baby are living in a centre for immigrants in Israel.
Brenner reunites a group of Jewish barbers, first photographed with their Muslim customers in Tajikistan, standing in the Dead Sea eight years later with Jewish clients.
These new Israelis, including a family from Golders Green, London, and an Ethiopian woman, are often bitterly disappointed by what they find in Israel. "I was trying to question the very ideas of this promise attached to a land," says Brenner. He is pleased that his subjects "dared to say what they said" about Israel. "The dream they have and reality don't coincide," he explains.
Any one of the thousands of Jews photographed throughout the world by Brenner is free to emigrate to Israel, whereas Palestinians, like Elias Sanbar, who was born in Haifa, cannot live there. Brenner, though a humane, articulate man, does not want to talk about this injustice. "I haven't thought about that," he says. "It's too complex and it's not the purpose of this interview." Brenner alludes to the topic a few minutes later, almost pleading for understanding. "My function is really to be criss-crossed by all these questions, to follow my path. I make images to break images. My photographs are not statements," hesays.
One of the most striking things about the book is the way Brenner's Jewish subjects come to resemble their gentile neighbours in the diaspora.
"Roberto Disegni, a Roman Jew photographed among busts of Roman emperors, looks like a Roman emperor," he notes.
Brenner asks: "How far does one become the other and still remain oneself? "This book could be called Between Acculturation and Assimilation," he continues. "It's a very fine line. The Jew, as I understand him, is a tight-rope walker." Several commentators compare Brenner's photograph of a Rabbi leading a dance for the Sukkot celebration in the Hasidic Jewish quarter of Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, to a Rembrandt painting. Why is it that the Hasidim, who dress like 17th-century Polish aristocrats, are often considered more truly Jewish than others? Brenner says their customs prove his theory that diaspora is a metaphor for cross-fertilisation "for becoming the other and remaining oneself." But, he adds, "It is very much against what Judaism is about to elect one frozen representation." Many Jews have made the Holocaust the "defining paradigm of their identity," Brenner continues. "While a very large majority of Jews and non-Jews know how Jews died, they don't know how Jews live," he says. That was the purpose of his book.
Ask any European what Jews or Muslims are like, and he is bound to have an answer. Ask the same question about Christians, and he's likely to say the question is too vast, too vague.
With this book, by showing so many different way of Jewish life, Brenner challenges our preconceptions.
Les Palestiniens; La photographie d'une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours, by Elias Sanbar, is published in France by Editions Hazan, price €59 and is available on www.amazon.fr.
Diaspora: homelands in exile, by Frédéric Brenner, is published by Bloomsbury in Britain (£60) and HarperCollins in the US.