SOAS Research Online

Abstract

For centuries, Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem wrote their names on the stones of the Western Wall as part of their devotional practice. This custom was abruptly outlawed by British colonial authorities in 1930, after the Western Wall became the epicenter of the emerging Zionist-Arab conflict. Under the new circumstances, Hebrew graffiti assumed a new political dimension and was interpreted as a subversive intervention that could no longer be tolerated. British colonial rulers, Arab and Muslim leaders, and even the Zionist champions, all viewed the graffiti as sedition. In the aftermath of the uprising, graffiti was therefore banned, erased from both the stones and Jewish cultural memory.