ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

I

n 2009 in Memphis, Tennessee, 
70-year-old Suzie Lazarov was 
busy cleaning out the accumu-
lated stuff in her home as she pre-
pared to move. Her husband brought 
boxes down from storage in the 
attic, including one white box with 
the mysterious message: “Important 
papers do not throw away!” 
 That box contained memorabilia 
from her Uncle David: his diary, 
more than 60 of his letters (each five 
to 10 pages long), telegrams, cables, 
photographs, all from the mid- to 
late-1920s. 
David Shainberg, at age 22, 
had left Memphis to study at the 
Yeshiva of Hebron. His weekly 
letters to his parents describe the 
beautiful, serene city, where Jews 
and Muslims live together in peace 
and had lived together in peace for 
centuries. He feels at home in the 
yeshivah, in the community of pious 
Ashkenazic Jews, immigrants, mostly 
from Europe, and of pious Arabic-
speaking Mizrahi Jews, who look and 
dress like the Muslims of Hebron. 
We know what will happen, 
though; of course, David does 
not. His last letter to his girlfriend 
indicates that he had begun feel-
ing uneasy. He writes that the Jews 
need guns. On Aug. 24, 1929, 3,000 
Muslim men marched through the 
Jewish areas of Hebron, maiming, 
raping, killing, mutilating the corps-
es of men, women and children. The 
mob murdered 67 Jewish individuals 
on that day; among the dead, David 
Shainberg. 
But about 500 Jews survived the 
massacre. Perhaps half that number 
were overlooked by the mob or were 
not discovered in their hiding places 
or appeared dead already. Just as 

many, though, were saved by their 
Arab neighbors. 
Among the saved: Rabbi Yaakov 
Yosef Slonim. He and his family lived 
in a house belonging to an elderly 
Muslim farmer, Abdul Shaker Amer. 
As the mob approached the house, 
the landlord’s wife, Umm Shaker, 
told her son, “Go get your father! 
They’re killing our Jews.” Abdul 
Shaker had been harvesting grapes. 
He rode his horse home from the 
vineyard and stood in the doorway, 
shouting, “You will not kill here.” 
One of the assailants drew a knife 
and sliced Abdul Shaker’s leg; unde-
terred, the old man declared, “Kill 
me. I will not move.” Miraculously, 
the mob then left. Malka Slonim, 
the rabbi’s wife, tried to bring Abdul 
Shaker into the house to tend to his 
wounds, but he refused. “Maybe oth-
ers will come,” he said. “My job is not 
yet over.”
Two weeks after the killings, 
Jewish survivors wrote to the British 
Governor of Hebron that they were 
alive only because heroic Arabs had 
risked their own lives to protect 
their Jewish neighbors. Otherwise, 
the survivors wrote, “Not one Jewish 
soul would have survived in Hebron.” 
Yardena Schwartz’s Ghosts of a 
Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in 
Palestine That Ignited the Arab-
Israeli Conflict begins with the 
story of David Shainberg. After that 
beginning, Schwartz guides us back 
through the long chain of events that 
led to the massacre in Hebron. 
She tells the modern history of 
Jewish presence in the Holy Land, 
a small community enhanced by 
immigration from the diaspora, and 
its changing relations with Muslim 
Arabs in the land. She recounts the 

complex results of the British rule, 
which promised the land separately 
to Arabs and to Jews and mostly 
reneged on both promises. 
The mob in Hebron was not the 
first Arab uprising against Jews in 
Palestine. Egged on by their leaders, 
an Arab mob had attacked the Jews 
of Jerusalem in 1920, killing five, 
wounding 216, raping, and burning 
buildings. Arab mobs attacked Jews 
in other areas in 1929. Yet Schwartz 
asserts, in the subtitle of her book, 
that the 1929 massacre in Hebron 
“ignited the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 
Perhaps that claim counts as an 
exaggeration; a history of the conflict 
could start at some other point, but 
Schwartz makes a strong case for 
starting here. 

THAT DAY IN 1929
In 1929, the mob in Hebron did not 
just spontaneously arise. Arab lead-
ers, most notably Grand Mufti Haj 
Amin al-Husseini, proclaimed the 

need to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque 
against Jewish efforts to destroy it. 
He further proclaimed that Jews had 
already begun attacking Muslims 
in Jerusalem. The allegations were 
effective without having to be true. 
On that day in 1929, other ways of 
managing the conflict, other voices 
in the Palestinian Arab leadership, 
proved unable to compete with the 
seductive call to violence from indi-
vidual leaders. Promises from British 
authorities to rein in the violence 
proved worthless. Specific Jewish 
leaders relied on ties of friend-
ship between Muslims and Jews in 
Hebron that had lasted for decades, 
for generations; those ties now failed. 
Schwartz provides evidence of the 
individuals involved in each of these 
failures. She then presents eyewitness 
accounts of the events of the massa-
cre in greater detail than I wanted to 
know. 
“In 1929, Zionism,” Schwartz 
writes, “was not a mainstream Jewish 

YAIR GOLOV

Drawing Historical Parallels

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

50 | NOVEMBER 14 • 2024 
J
N

Ghosts of a Holy War author explores 
two massacres of Jews — in 1929 and 2023. 

Yardena 
Schwartz 

