Who Did It?

PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA THE UNITED STATES LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / PHOTO: G. KRIKORIAN

Whose studies of Levantine village life identified folklore and traditions that extended back to biblical times?

Answer: Tawfiq Canaan

Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) was a Palestinian physician who spent his career in Jerusalem. He was a gifted and prolific medical researcher, authoring nearly 40 studies ranging from tuberculosis and malaria to health conditions in Palestine; he also contributed to research that led to a cure for leprosy.

Parallel to his medical career, however, Canaan was deeply engaged in the study of Palestinian folk traditions and culture, producing several books and more than 50 articles in this field. He stood at the heart of an intellectual circle that understood rural communities to be the inheritors of the region’s cultural legacy dating back to pre-biblical times. Publishing regularly in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society in the 1920s and ’30s, Canaan developed a rich, vibrant, and sensitive body of knowledge about the beliefs and traditions of the residents of the southern Levant that he believed was essential to understanding the earlier Canaanite, Israelite, Philistine, Nabatean, Aramean, and Arab inhabitants of the region.

Canaan’s upbringing was steeped in the German Lutheran tradition; his father, the first Arab pastor for the German Protestant Palestine Mission, founded the first Lutheran church, YMCA, and co-ed school in their home village of Beit Jala, near Jerusalem. Thanks in part to this background, Canaan was able to maintain close ties with European intellectuals over the course of his career, including biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth, and his lifelong friend, archaeologist William F. Albright, who headed the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem during the 1920s.