The Khalidi Family's Private Library and Mosque

As a surprise, Max and Brooke took me today to meet Hefa Khalidi in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Hefa is the heir and conservator of the Khalidi Library (al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya), which was established in 1899 by her great grandfather, Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi. The Khalidi family have lived in the Old City for centuries and members of the family have served as judges, administrators and leading aids to the Ottoman Empire. The library is based on family holdings of manuscripts and books collected by the family over many centuries.

We went first to Hefa's house, which is entered by an unobtrusive green door along the narrow streets of the Muslim Quarter. She was expecting us, and took a ring of keys and invited us about two doors down the street. Inside a stone structure we were shown a family mausoleum with graves of three of her ancestors. In an adjoining room we were shown the private family mosque, with bookshelves and family photographs along one wall, a spiral staircase in the corner, and the marble niche facing Mecca on the opposite wall. She gave me a history of her family, dating back many centuries to days when her forefathers were prominent in Ottoman Empire affairs. She then took us up the spiral staircase to the manuscript collection. Here on steel shelves were many thousands of manuscripts. She showed us a half a dozen of these. The were all richly illustrated, and written in Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish. Most were at least 4-500 years old and at least one of the manuscripts she showed us was more than 1,000 years old.

Hefa's family has lived in this house, very near the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for centuries. Interestingly, she also told us that her family previously owned vast tracts of land on Mount Scopus, which were taken away from the family upon Israeli Independence, and the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies is now built on former Khalidi land. Max later told me that while the family never received compensation for its Mount Scopus holdings, the University has been very generous in offering scholarships to Palestinians over the years, in part because of the Khalidi family. Max also told me that one of Hefa's cousins is a renowned Palestinian scholar living in the United States, now teaching at the University of Illinois.

One of the impressions I take away from meeting Hefa Khalidi is the rich heritage of Islam.