Jerusalem Under Siege:
FRANK, M. Z.
Jerusalem Under Siege The Faithful City. By Dov Joseph. Simon and Schuster. 356 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by M. Z. Frank Editor, "Sound the Great Trumpet"; columnist, "National Jewish Post" When...
...Abdullah was determined to win Jerusalem...
...Perhaps this added to the historical association which always attracted deeply religious people...
...Dov Joseph's book is strictly historic drama, meticulously authenticated and faithfully recorded, with occasional flashes of strong, but severely disciplined emotion...
...The Faithful City, for all its lack of melodrama, is a moving account of an important moment in Israeli history written by one who helped shape it...
...In the end, most of Jerusalem (except for the Old City) remained in Jewish hands and eventually became the Capitol of the new state...
...Deepest of the layers for me," Joseph writes, "is the mingling of legend, fable and fact which has kept Jerusalem through two thousand years the chief symbol of his religion for every Jewish child...
...The first 30,000 copies were sold out in a matter of weeks...
...But it is Joseph's intense love for Jerusalem that moulds his account of the city's struggle...
...Exodus, on the other hand, had better luck in New York than in Tel Aviv...
...The best-trained of all Arab armies was pitted against the Holy Land's largest conglomeration of otherworldly mystics—many of whom could hardly lift a shovel, let alone a gun—clerks and officials, professors and other academicians, and doctors and nurses...
...When the State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the Provisional Government appointed Joseph Military Governor...
...second, the way Dov Joseph, as military governor, turned that devotion into an effective resistance...
...The main theme is the 1948 siege of Jerusalem by the British-officered Arab Legion of the late King Abdullah of Transjordan, and the endurance of the city's 100,000 Jews...
...His was essentially a prosaic task: "As early as January, I had a survey made of the food supply situation in the city and a table drawn up by nutrition experts of Jewish Jerusalem's weekly needs item by item...
...Israel's frontiersmen and pioneers were to be found in other parts of the country...
...If the Jews had not defended it, the city would have fallen to Transjordan...
...What he has to tell about it is merely an individual variation of what has long been felt by millions of Jews...
...Israeli Premier David Ben Gurion was faced not only with the problem of an arms shortage but also with a divided Cabinet: The majority of Jewish leaders felt that since the United Nations had voted to internationalize Jerusalem, anyhow, its defense was not vital to saving the Jewish State...
...In his feeling for Jerusalem, Joseph is not unique...
...they constituted no more than onetwelfth of Palestinian Jewry's fighting strength and an even smaller fraction of its arms...
...And it is his ability to project vividly this deep emotion which lifts the book from the level of ordinary chronicle...
...Even some of his bitterest critics, who have since found fault with his subsequent roles as Minister of Rations, Minister of Transport and Minister of Development in several Israeli governments, concede that there is probably no man in Israel who could have organized the Jews of Jerusalem as well as Joseph...
...The English edition, published simultaneously in New York, waited six months for its second printing...
...It was as Chairman of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee and Military Governor that Dov Joseph played his historic role in the siege of Jerusalem...
...At the time, Jerusalem's Jews represented a little less than one-sixth of the Jewish population of Palestine...
...The UN was, in fact, not at all ready to govern Jerusalem under an international regime...
...Typical of Joseph's lyric passages about the city is the following: "Jerusalem is a city built of rosecolored limestone, and the sun and the stone combine to give it a very special kind of light in which the mountain and the sky seem to run into each other...
...columnist, "National Jewish Post" When Dov Joseph's account of the siege of Jerusalem appeared in Israel it created a sensation...
...Obviously, the American reader, Jew and nonJew alike, is interested in the historic drama of Israel, but prefers to read about it as melodrama...
...While Joseph does not say so explicitly, it is clear that he played a decisive role when the time came for the wavering Jewish leadership in Israel to decide whether to hold on to Jerusalem or to wait for the UN to implement its resolution internationalizing the Holy City...
...Following the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the partition of the country into Jewish and Arab states, Joseph was made Chairman of the city's Emergency Committee...
...There are two major reasons for Jerusalem's victorious survival of the siege: first, the passionate love that Jews have for the city...
...Canadian-born and educated, Dov, or Bernard, Joseph joined the Jewish Legion to fight for Palestine during World War I, and eventually settled in Jerusalem...
Vol. 44 • August 1961 • No. 30
