‘To ‘strengthen Mediterranean resistance’? Albert Antebi and the porous boundaries of cultural identification in Ottoman Jerusalem (1896-1919)

Albert Abraham Antebi (Ibrahim Entaibi) was animated by the desire to ‘régénérer les Orientaux par les Orientaux’ and ‘strengthen Mediterranean resistance’ to a German model in the Levant. Director of the AIU (Alliance Israelite Universelle) vocational school in Jerusalem from 1896 until 1913, vice-president of the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce, Antebi was also a community leader in Ottoman Jerusalem, an engineer, adviser to Djemal Pasha from early 1915 until October 1916, a representative of the French AIU and of the Jewish Colonisation Association.
Deconstructing imperial and proto-national policies via the complex experiences of Albert Antebi offers a glimpse into the porous boundaries of cultural identification, the diversity of daily life in Jerusalem before WWI, the links between Syria and Palestine, and the beginnings of Zionism. The article draws mainly on the AIU archives and some of his personal correspondence to trace and question the French paradigm through which he continued to perceive the local and transnational situation of Palestine and to examine his complex positioning towards the proto-national scene in Ottoman Palestine.