Haifa and Beirut in a Comparative Perspective: Jewish Entrepreneurship between the British

Abstract

This study compares and contrasts the Jewish entrepreneurs working under colonial rule in Beirut and Haifa towards the end of the first decade of the neighboring French and British mandates. The patterns of Jewish immigrant entrepreneurial activity were influenced by local mandatory economic policies that created different opportunities.

The French economy leaned toward opportunities in regional trade and services, while the British supported an industrial and military environment. Entrepreneurial activity was also based on the ethnic composition of the two native populations, and the different skills, whether commercial or industrial, that Jewish immigrants brought with them.

Beirut’s Jewish entrepreneurs during the first decade of the French mandate operated within a multicultural environment led by the dominant ethnic Christian community, who had developed an urban commercial tradition. Jewish entrepreneurs operated in a relatively limited range of sectors, mainly concentrated in the banking and commercial trading services. Unlike Muslim dominated colonial states, where Jews served as intermediaries between the majority local population and the Western colonial regime in the early mandatory period, the French government in Beirut did not need French-speaking Jewish go-betweens. The sectorial structure of Jewish businesses in Beirut was also influenced by the size of the Jewish population and its relative proportion in the local ethnic mix. The dominant Christian majority in Beirut’s cosmopolitan population made the Jews’ traditional functions as middlemen superfluous. Under the British mandate in Eretz Israel, where the entrepreneurial environment was relatively open, Jewish immigrants behaved like a ‘national majority’ even before the Jewish community became a majority among the population. Unlike in Beirut, the Jewish entrepreneurs who settled in Haifa came from Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, where they had experienced industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were well equipped to introduce new manufacturing opportunities in and around Haifa Bay. The combination of their professional skills and the pro-industrial policy of the British mandatory authorities led to the urban expansion of Haifa, particularly in the area of heavy industry. These Jewish entrepreneurs laid down Haifa’s industrial foundations during the period before the determination of rigid borders between the new nation-states.