Work and Customs in Palestine
Work and Customs in Palestine (ASP) is the main work of the evangelical biblical scholar and Palestine researcher Gustaf Dalman . The multi-volume work was created in Greifswald from 1928 to 1942 and is based on material that Dalman, director of the German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies of the Holy Land (DEIAHL), collected in Palestine after 1902 . It comprehensively depicts the life of rural Palestinians before World War I because Dalman believed it would be useful for understanding the Bible. Seven volumes appeared during Dalman's lifetime; the fragment of volume eight ( Domestic Life, Birth, Marriage, Death ) was published from the estate in 2001.
Content (see Wikisource)
- 1.1 Course of the year and course of the day: autumn and winter
- 1.2 Course of the year and course of the day: spring and summer
- 2 Agriculture
- 3 From harvest to flour
- 4 bread, oil and wine
- 5 woven fabric, spinning, weaving, clothing
- 6 Living in a tent, cattle and dairy farming, hunting, fishing
- 7 The house, chicken breeding, pigeon breeding, beekeeping
Palestine as a geographical term
A seven-month stay in Aleppo from June 1899 to January 1900 familiarized Dalman with the conditions in northern Syria, with Aleppo providing illustrative material for traditional urban life. The impressions from northern Syria are used again and again as reference material in Dalman's portrayal of everyday Palestinian life. A round trip through “all of Palestine”, as Dalman was able to undertake in the spring of 1900, took him from the village of Balāṭ (located between southern Lebanon and Hermon ) through the West Bank to Hebron and En Gedi on the Dead Sea and then northwards in the East Bank to Damascus .
Dalman's way of working
The assumption that aspects of everyday life at the beginning of the 20th century are more or less the same as 1900 years earlier is problematic from today's perspective. But Dalman proved to be a very attentive observer, who tried to get to know the various topics comprehensively: “Anyone who does such work as a theologian will therefore not be tempted to focus the research on those things where a quick and perhaps very superficial view is biblical Believes in perceiving relationships. ... It is also not allowed to post in the presentation only what contributes to the explanation of biblical expressions and statements. "
As a rule, Dalman noted the place where he had made an observation, thus documenting the diversity of Palestinian culture.
One example is the tannūr oven , just one of several types of ovens that Dalman described. It was a clay cylinder about 70 to 100 cm high, which was 60 to 70 cm wide at the bottom and narrowed towards the top. The reader learns that a tannūr i n may or may not be buried in the ground; it can be cylindrical, ovoid, pointed or domed; if necessary, you can convert a large water jug into a tannūr . Dalman lived for a month in the village of Balāṭ in Northern Galilee and had the opportunity “ not only to observe the baking in the underground tannūr , but to try a little yourself.” A ball of dough is stretched into a flat cake and stuck to the inner wall of the tannūr . “Both stretching and clapping require no small skill. If I stretched it inappropriately, as I managed to do when I tried to bake it, the cake tears ..., if it is clapped it falls into the coals ... ”It goes without saying that Dalman asked all the bread recipes that were known in Balāṭ: folded ones Flatbreads filled with a spinach and onion mixture, or a quark and onion mixture, or with raisins and pine nuts, and so on.
In a separate, separate chapter, Dalman worked on what was to be found in the Bible, in rabbinical literature and in ancient writers on the subject of baking in tannūr .
reception
“Knowledge of the language and an interest in detail have ... handed down a treasure trove of cultural heritage that can no longer be easily ascertained in the relevant area today. The extensive cuts that were / are caused by industrialization and no less by the current political situation are too severe. "
The work became public domain in 2011. A joint project of the University of Vienna, the University of Haifa, the Gustaf Dalman Institute of the University of Greifswald and the German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies of the Holy Land in Jerusalem is translating Dalman's work into English and Hebrew and is preparing a new edition with commentary in German, which includes the historical, relates archaeological and ethnographic research results to Dalman's work.
literature
- Work and Customs in Palestine, Volume 8: Domestic Life, Birth, Marriage, Death (fragment). Ed .: Julia Männchen. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001 (partly online in the google book preview )
- Alex Winder: Dalman for All Seasons. Book review . In: Jerusalem Quarterly 55, pp. 97-99. ( PDF )
- Jawad Anani: Work and Customs in Palestine . In: The Jordan Times, February 6, 2018.
- Ilan Ben Zion: The beauty of Ottoman Palestine, lovingly explored and documented . In: The Times of Israel, May 12, 2014.
Web links
- Julia male: Dalman, Gustaf
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ilan Ben Zion: The beauty of Ottoman Palestine .
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman: Autumn and Winter . In: ASP . tape 1 , no. 1 , p. III .
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman: Autumn and Winter . In: ASP . tape 1 , no. 1 , p. VII .
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman: Bread, Oil and Wine . In: ASP . tape 4 , p. 104 .
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman: Bread, Oil and Wine . In: ASP . tape 4 , p. 105 .
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman: Bread, Oil and Wine . In: ASP . tape 4 , p. 114-115 .
- ↑ Work and Customs in Palestine (ASP) 1, 2 Course of the year and course of the day: spring and summer. In: Publications of the Ideagora for the History of Religions, Classical Studies & Theology. Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, accessed on April 2, 2018 .
- ^ Palestine: Life and Work at the Beginning of the 20th Century. In: media portal. University of Vienna, September 20, 2011, accessed on April 2, 2018 .