Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By Yardena Schwartz (Union Square & Co.)

Politicians, historians, activists and others have spent decades trying to pinpoint the big-bang moment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Was it the 1970s settlement movement or the Six-Day War in 1967? Was it earlier, with Israel’s establishment in 1948 and its corollary, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or the 1947 United Nations vote on partition? Or maybe the British 1939 White Paper, the 1936 Arab uprising, the League of Nations Mandate in the 1920s or the Balfour Declaration in 1917?

Add in the Roman expulsion of the Jews from Judea in the first century C.E. and you have an unending stream of starting points.

One event left out here of the ever-expanding list is the brief, explosive and blood-curdling 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron, the divided and contested city 25 miles south of Jerusalem. That is the focus of journalist Yardena Schwartz’s recent book, Ghosts of a Holy War.

Schwartz opens her historical narrative with the lively but ultimately tragic tale of David Shainberg, an idealistic, 22-year-old American Jew from a secular family who leaves a comfortable existence in his hometown of Memphis in 1928 to study in a yeshiva in impoverished Hebron. Access to an extensive set of letters Shainberg had sent home, letters that sat untouched in a family attic for decades, enables Schwartz’s writing to sparkle with crisp descriptions of life in Mandatory Palestine. She details Shainberg’s unlikely journey, his passion for Jewish learning and his magical time in Hebron—until it crashed down on him in August 1929.

She deftly contrasts the brief life and death of the young American with the longer career of the corrupt and murderous mufti of Jerusalem. Amin al-Husseini, barely a decade older than Shainberg, used a toxic brew of unscrupulous tactics and charisma to gain power and whip up Muslim resentment of Palestine’s Jews. He later infamously became a pet propagandist for Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Schwartz spares no details in her account of the grisly Arab attacks on Hebron’s Jewish community and of the belated and poor response of British Mandate officials. She writes, “3,000 Muslim men armed with swords, axes, and daggers marched through the Jewish quarter of Hebron,” killing around 70 Jews, traumatizing hundreds and causing the 800-strong Jewish community to flee to Jerusalem.

Most of the Hebron victims were pious Sephardim, Schwartz notes, and politically and culturally far from the secular Zionists building Tel Aviv and other new Jewish communities in Mandatory Palestine. She also highlights some of the Arab residents of Hebron who protected Jews from harm, and her journalistic doggedness enables her to track down and speak to descendants of those righteous individuals.

The book’s second half profiles today’s tiny but passionate Jewish community in Hebron—and the barbed wire, Israeli soldiers and 100,000 Palestinians that surround it. Schwartz injects herself into the story in vivid prose as she reports on the ground what life is like for the Jews and Arabs who would speak to her.

Schwartz began writing Ghosts of a Holy War in 2019, yet the parallels between the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the events of 1929 are disturbing. The final chapters spare no details in describing Hamas’s savagery. But Schwartz is a journalist, not a historian, and her attempts to connect the dots between 1929 and 2023 are not especially convincing, despite surface similarities.

Ultimately, pinpointing any ground zero for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an impossible task. Whichever moment one picks, someone else will say, “Then? No. Jews and Arabs lived peaceably side-by-side back then.” There is plenty to pick and choose in the history of the much-promised Holy Land. Indeed, the shocked survivors of the Hebron attacks, as Schwartz ably recounts, said all was well in the days before the 1929 massacre.

Ghosts of a Holy War offers engaging profiles of protagonists and antagonists, poignant tales of loss and struggle, and inspiring sketches of rare bright spots of heroism and idealism. It might have been a better choice to limit the book’s focus to those people and events in Hebron yesterday and today.

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Alan D. Abbey is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is writing a novel set in the Roman Judaea of the first century C.E., much of which