Campos|313arrived with some capital of his own, David was able to purchase tenancy rights
for several Muslim-owned courtyard properties in Bab Hitta, a predominantly
Muslim neighborhood where other Ashkenazi Jews had taken up residence. He
then rented out these properties to fellow Jews, and this rental income provided
the family with a comfortable and stable stream of revenue.
With his financial position secure, David became a stalwart of the grow-
ing Ashkenazi community over the next few decades. Through his philanthropic
work, David befriended the new British consul in Jerusalem, James Finn; together
they purchased land in the village of Artas, near Bethlehem, and also established
a training colony for Jews outside the city walls of Jerusalem. From the fam-
ily’s earliest years in Palestine, then, it was deeply involved in Jewish communal
and philanthropic work, land purchases, and mediating between European for-
eigners and benefactors and the city’s Jews. David Tuvia’s descendants continued
this trajectory, in the process becoming successively more embedded in the sur-
rounding Ottoman and Arab context.
David’s only son, Yehoshuɇa (b. 1843), first stepped outside the Ashkenazi
Jewish enclave of his father through his marriage to Sarah, the daughter of
Shlomo Yehezkiel Yahuda, a wealthy Baghdadi merchant recently settled in Jeru-
salem, and his wife Rima-Reina, learned in her own right in both Jewish religious
and Arabic literary texts. Yahuda had been impressed by the intelligence of the
young Yehoshuɇa when they met at the annual pilgrimage to the grave of the
prophet Samuel in the village of Rama; Yahuda decided to marry off his children
to Ashkenazi brides and grooms, virtually unprecedented at that time, as a way
of “bringing the tribes of Israel closer together.”
It bears emphasizing that the Yellin-Yahuda marriage was extremely un-
usual. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi and Sephardi
communities in Jerusalem lived in separate areas and worshipped in different
institutions, and there was little interaction between them because of linguistic,
cultural, and political differences. Struggles over community taxes and charity,
ritual slaughter, and representation in communal offices were typical complaints
of the numerically smaller and politically marginalized Ashkenazi community.
At the same time, however, the Ashkenazi congregations received regular and
substantial donations from abroad, had powerful European patrons, and were
joined by a steady and increasing influx of immigrants—all of which would
change the balance of power within the Jewish community by century’s end.
Through his marriage, the teenage Yehoshuɇa gained crucial access to the
Sephardi Jewish community as well as to the broader Arab population and Ot-
toman government in Palestine. One of the stipulations of the wedding contract
was that the young groom would live in his bride’s parents’ home for two years
so that he could learn Arabic as well as Sephardi rituals and customs. Ye h o s huɇa
soon undertook business ventures with Arabs in the Jerusalem region as well