Summary
Rural clan which moved from al-Balqa to the Marj Ibn Amir plain around 1670 and became the undisputed leading clan among Jabal Nablus’s subdistrict chiefs, basing its power on the Jenin district, its peasant militia and its formidable fortress in Sanur village, which controlled access to Nablus from the north (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 496-526).
Details
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The Jarrars were the only subdistrict chiefs until the 1820s to achieve the post of mutasallim, albeit briefly (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 496-526).
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In 1735 the Jarrars were defeated by Zahir al-Umar over Marj Ibn Amir and Nazareth and their leader Shaykh Ibrahim was killed (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 534-576).
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Shaykh Yusuf Jarrar led the rural camp opposing the Tuqan family’s centralization drive at the turn of the nineteenth century (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 367-409).
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The Jarrars led, with the Qasims, the victorious anti-Tuqan coalition of 1817-1823, but in 1825 their Sanur fortress was destroyed by the combined forces of Abdullah Pasha of Acre and Amir Shihab of Mount Lebanon, with the Ottoman government’s blessing, irreparably damaging their power in Jabal Nablus (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 534-576).
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Around the turn of the twentieth century Ibrahim Khalil Jarrar was a regular customer of the textile merchant Hajj Isma’il Arafat; his letter of December 26, 1899 orders a caftan and scarf, addresses Hajj Isma’il as “sir” and “our father,” and warns him to hand nothing to his sons without a sealed letter from him, implying they ran up their father’s tab (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1366-1491).
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The clan split into two factions in 1848, just before the first of Jaba’s collective Salam contracts was signed; Mahmud Beik Abd al-Hadi, who supported one faction, replaced Sulayman Beik Tuqan, who supported the second, as qa’immaqam of Nablus six weeks before the Jaba petition reached him (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3100-3159).
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Ahmad al-Yusuf Jarrar, chief of Mashariq al-Jarrar, sent cavalrymen at the oil merchant Muhammad Abu Hijli’s complaint to collect a village Salam debt from Asira al-Shamiyya, imprisoning villagers in Nablus; the village’s February 1852 petition to the governor of Jerusalem accused him of acting “in a criminal and corrupt manner” and outside the rule of law, and the council’s memorandum backed him, branding the peasants’ resistance “insolence toward the government” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3280-3339).
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In the same year the Nablus Council made excuses for not sending a member of the Jarrar family accused of murdering villagers to Beirut for trial, and lamely justified why witnesses against another member, also accused of murder, could not be sent to testify (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3280-3339).
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A rich Jaba villager’s suit of April 29, 1864 reversed the historic roles: he had advanced Shaykh Ibrahim Jarrar 5,000 piasters in a silent partnership (sharikat mudaraba) and recovered the principal plus 1,300 piasters — half the profits — in the Nablus court (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3280-3339).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Yusuf Jarrar, Jenin, Jabal Nablus, Hajj Isma’il Arafat