| Summary/Abstract |
This article discusses the offer made by Cemal Pasha in 1915 to Albert Antébi to sell the area in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in order to dismantle the nearly thirty houses owned by the Moroccan inhabitants of the Maghrebi Quarter and create a space ‘reserved for the prayers of the Jewish people’. European Jews had already sought to purchase the same area from the Ottomans for several decades but had been denied, a situation that did not change under British rule despite the support given to the Jews with the Balfour Declaration. After the 1929 riots in Palestine, any possibility of acquiring the Western Wall or converting the Maghrebi Quarter into a plaza was postponed. This article will address relevant correspondence available at the Zionist Archives that chronicles this decades-long effort and discuss the questions relating to failure and secrecy. The individuals involved took an oath promising never to discuss this business out of concerns about revealing divisions among Zionists in relation to holy places and symbols.
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