Peasant Agriculture in the Jerusalem Hills

Lucjan Turkowski’s first-hand account of peasant life in 1940s British Mandate Palestine explores farming, food, language and craft production. He examines cultivated crops, the role of animals and the division of labour, highlighting its material culture in a vivid portrait of rural life.

While preserving Turkowski’s original ethnographic and agricultural research, this book offers a rare historical, botanical and anthropological resource. Rich with first-hand observations, it provides scholars and general readers with valuable insights into Palestinian peasant life near Jerusalem in the 1940s. His meticulous fieldwork records farming, food, language, agricultural tools and household utensils, exploring the long-term effects of Ottoman land reforms and the introduction of new crops. Original drawings and period photographs collected in Jerusalem illustrate the volume. The book opens with two introductory chapters by editor Carol Palmer, who situates Turkowski within his historical and intellectual context and highlights his ambition to document peasant material culture and its integration into Palestinian life. The main text comprises eight translated chapters of Turkowski’s writing, followed by bibliographical annexes. The volume deepens understanding of rural life amid shifting political and economic forces, contributing to studies of resilience, agriculture and cultural continuity.

This book is a fundamental resource for scholars in Levantine and Palestine studies, linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, archaeology and agricultural history. It also contributes to understanding the region’s historiography and changing academic approaches to Palestine. For those connected to the communities described, it offers a tangible link to the past and shows how carefully gathered knowledge can preserve cultural memory and bring lived experience into view.

Carol Palmer is an honorary research fellow at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology and former director of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), a British International Research Institute (BIRI) funded by the British Academy. Her research combines interests in rural lifeways and ecology, ethnobotany, the anthropology of food, and the transformation of landscapes in response to ecological, social and political change.