Albert Antébi

Antébi, who was born in Damascus, and sent to study at the Institute of Technology of Paris and was, then, engineer at Arts-et-Métiers (Chalons-en-Champagne, and then Angers), spoke fluent French, Hebrew, Arab, English, and was competent in three or four different systems of law – Beth Din, Charia, French Law, Ottoman Law. We told his story and the story of the era i (L’homme du Sérail, NiL, 1996), or The little Jewish Pasha of Jerusalem : English rights and translated manuscript are held by the Crawford Publishing Cy, Adelaide, Australia..

To the left, the visit of Djemal Pasha, in 1915, to Rishon-Le-Sion, near Jaffa. The tall elderly man in black, behind the left shoulder of the tyrant, is one of the Bilou pioneers from Kharkov, Meir Meierovitch. The second on the left in the photo is Antébi. Photo on the right : Antébi is far left, beside the military Governor in Palestine during the First World War. To the right, Meir Dizengoff, founder and first mayor of Tel Aviv.

A very long time buried in the silence of the archives, for political reasons, but also because most of the researchers … don’t speak French (the language in which most of the letters and documents are written), the man whom his friends and enemies used to call « the little Jewish pasha of Jerusalem »
now has his own street in Jerusalem (in the Orthodox district!), ,
and another in Tel Aviv , with a car park named after him.


> Anthology and quotations of Antebi, from his letters