26 Facts About Tawfiq Canaan

1.

Tawfiq Canaan was a pioneering Palestinian physician, medical researcher, ethnographer, and Palestinian nationalist.

2.

Deeply interested in Palestinian folklore, popular beliefs, and superstitions, Canaan collected over 1,400 amulets and talismanic objects held to have healing and protective properties.

3.

Tawfiq Canaan's published analyses of these objects, and other popular folk traditions and practices, brought him recognition as an ethnographer and anthropologist.

4.

Tawfiq Canaan published works in Arabic and was fluent in Hebrew.

5.

Tawfiq Canaan was arrested by the British authorities in 1939.

6.

Tawfiq Canaan managed to re-establish his life and career in East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule.

7.

Tawfiq Canaan attributed his love of, interest in, and dedication to the people, culture and land of Palestine to his upbringing and the influence of his father who regularly took the family with him on his trips around the country.

8.

Tawfiq Canaan was sought as a manager at the German-Jewish Hospital.

9.

Tawfiq Canaan met his wife, Margot Eilender, in an Esperanto class on his first trip there.

10.

In that home, Tawfiq Canaan opened the only Arab clinic operating in Jerusalem at the time.

11.

One of the physicians Tawfiq Canaan collaborated with in Germany was Hans Much, head of a mission to Palestine whose 1913 report on tuberculosis included three research papers authored by Tawfiq Canaan.

12.

Tawfiq Canaan served patients at the Arab General Hospital in the hilltop village of Sheikh Badr next to Jerusalem.

13.

Tawfiq Canaan was working in the German Hospital in Jerusalem in 1914 when World War I began in October.

14.

Tawfiq Canaan was appointed Head of the Laboratories on the Sinai Front by the German chief physician in charge there, a position that allowed Canaan to travel between Bir as-Saba, Beit Hanoun, Gaza, and Shaykh Nouran, as well as Damascus, Amman, and Aleppo.

15.

Tawfiq Canaan contracted both cholera and typhus during the war and survived, though his brother Wadia was killed in the fighting and buried at the Zion cemetery in Jerusalem.

16.

Tawfiq Canaan was one of a number of physicians from Jerusalem to examine Sherif Hussein of Mecca in Amman before his death in 1931, and removed a bullet from the thigh of Abu Jildah, a notorious Palestinian rebel, in 1936.

17.

In "The Calendar of Palestinian Peasants," published by the Journal of the German Palestine Society in 1913, Tawfiq Canaan focused on traditional beliefs organizing the agricultural practices of Palestinian fellaheen.

18.

Tawfiq Canaan played a very active role in the Palestine Oriental Society, serving as a member of the board, as well as secretary and sometime treasurer from early in the 1920s through until 1948, though the last article he published in its journal was in 1937.

19.

Tawfiq Canaan noted how people with fevers, many from malaria, would drink from al-Suhada cistern in Hebron and bathe in springs in Silwan, Kolonia and Nebi Ayyub and a well in Bayt Jibrin for al-Sheikh Ibrahim.

20.

Tawfiq Canaan noted that after washing in its water, women seeking to conceive would offer a present to al-Sheikh Ibrek.

21.

Tawfiq Canaan devoted a chapter to an ethnographic study of the Lijatne tribe, and politely dispelled their erroneous identification as "Simeonites or other Beni-Israel" by non-Arabic speaking authors, due to their sidelocks, noting it just happened to be a recent fashion among them at the time.

22.

Tawfiq Canaan delves more deeply into the Palestine problem and deconstructs the alleged benefits.

23.

Tawfiq Canaan was co-signatory to a document sent to the Higher Arab Committee on 6 August 1936, and there is reason to believe that he supported Arab armed resistance.

24.

From 1936 onward, Tawfiq Canaan, clearly expressed his rejection of British policies, in particular the policy of Zionist immigration to Palestine.

25.

Tawfiq Canaan was arrested by the British Mandate authorities the same day that Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939.

26.

Tawfiq Canaan was a founding member of the Higher Arab Relief Committee, established on 24 January 1948, to receive aid coming to the country and supervise its distribution.