Tawfiq Canaan (; 24 September 1882 – 15 January 1964) was a Palestinian physician, medical researcher, ethnographer, and Palestinian nationalist. Born in Beit Jala during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, he served as a medical officer in the Ottoman army during World War I.
During British rule, he served as the first President of the Palestine Arab Medical Association founded in 1944, and as the director of several Jerusalem area hospitals before, during, and after the 1948 war. Over the course of his medical career, he authored more than thirty-seven studies on topics including tropical medicine, bacteriology, malaria, tuberculosis, and health conditions in Palestine, and contributed to research that led to a cure for leprosy.
Interested in Palestinian folklore, popular beliefs, and superstitions, Canaan collected over 1,400 amulets and talismanic objects believed to have healing and protective properties. His published analyses of these objects, and other popular folk traditions and practices, brought him recognition as an ethnographer and anthropologist. The several books and more than 50 articles he wrote in English and German serve as valuable resources to researchers of Palestinian and Arab heritage. Canaan also published works in Arabic and was fluent in Hebrew.
An outspoken public figure, he also wrote two books on the Palestine problem, reflecting his involvement in confronting British imperialism and Zionism. He was arrested by the British authorities in 1939. The last two decades of his life were lived in the shadow of several personal tragedies: the loss of his son in an accident at Jerash, the loss and destruction of his family home, and of his clinic in Jerusalem during the 1948 war.
Canaan managed to re-establish his life and career in East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule. First taking sanctuary in a convent in the Old City for two years, he was appointed director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, where he lived with his family through his retirement until his death in 1964.
Early life
Canaan was born in the village of Beit Jala in Palestine during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. As a child, he studied at the Schneller School, an institution founded by German missionaries in nearby Jerusalem. His father, Bechara, who was also schooled there, founded the first Lutheran church, YMCA, and co-ed school in Beit Jala and the first Arab pastor for the German Protestant Palestine Mission.Abdullah, June 2000. His mother, Katharina, was raised in a German orphanage in Beirut and met Bechara while working at a hospital in Jerusalem.
In 1898–99, Canaan went to Beirut to study medicine at the Syrian Protestant College. Obliged to work while studying as his father died of pneumonia shortly after his arrival, he graduated with distinction in 1905. His valedictory speech, "Modern Treatment", was likely his first published piece and broached the use of serums, animal organs and X-rays.
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.. "We used to go with my father on short and long trips all over the country in order to get acquainted with the country and the people. This continuous contact with the people nurtured in all of us, and particularly in me, love for the country and the people. This feeling of belonging and unshaken loyalty remained with me till this day." In the Jerusalem Quarterly, Khaled Nashef suggests Canaan's knowledge of nature in Palestine as exhibited in writings such as "Plant-lore in Palestinian Superstition" (1928) among others were informed by these trips.
Medical career
Returning to Jerusalem from Beirut, Canaan began work in the German Deaconesses Hospital [German], co-administering it with Dr. Adalbert Einsler (1848–1919) during a senior physician's absence in 1906. He was also sought as a manager at the German-Jewish Hospital (Shaare Zedek). His first published medical article as a practicing physician, “Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis in Jerusalem" (1911), was based on studies he conducted with the director there.
Between 1912 and 1914, Canaan travelled to Germany several times to further his knowledge of microbiology and tropical diseases. He met his wife, Margot Eilender, in an Esperanto class on his first trip there., note 146. Margot's father was a German importer and she was born and raised in Palestine. They were quickly married, having their first child Yasma that same year, and built their family home in the al-Musrarah district of Jerusalem in 1913, where their three other children (Theo, Nada, and Leila) were born. In that home, Canaan also opened the only Arab clinic operating in Jerusalem at the time.
One of the physicians Canaan collaborated with in Germany was Hans Müch, head of a mission to Palestine whose 1913 report on tuberculosis included three research papers authored by Canaan. That same year, he was appointed director of the Malaria Branch of the International Health Bureau, a world center for medical research and microscopic examination founded by The German Society for Fighting Malaria, The Jewish Health Bureau, and The Jewish Physicians and Scientists for Improving Health in Palestine. He served patients at the Arab General Hospital in the hilltop village of Sheikh Badr next to Jerusalem.
World War I, end of the Ottoman empire, beginning of the Mandate for Palestine Canaan was working in the German Hospital in Jerusalem in 1914 when World War I began in October. As a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which administered Palestine at the time, he was drafted as an officer into the Ottoman army. First assigned as a physician to a contingent in Nazareth, he was transferred that same year to 'Awja al-Hafeer. He 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. During this period, he collected more than 200 amulets to add to a collection he had begun in the early 20th century.
He 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. Soon after the end of the war, in 1919, Canaan was appointed Director of The Leprosy Hospital (Asylum of the Lepers Jesushilfe, now Hansen House) in Talbiyyah, the only leprosy hospital in Syria, Palestine, and the Transjordan. Considered an incurable disease at the time, Canaan contributed to research in the fields of bacteriology and microscopic examination that resulted in the discovery of a cure using chaulmoogra oil.
With the reopening of the German Hospital in 1923, Canaan was appointed head of the Internal Medicine Division, a position he held until the hospital had to cease operations in 1940.After 1948, Israel took over the hospital building and its part of the Bikur Cholim Hospital. Between 1924 and 1927, Heráclides César de Souza Araújo led a word-wide inquiry on leprosy, for which Canaan wrote the report about Palestine, establishing his reputation in as an expert in this pathology at the international level.Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel. United Kingdom, University of California Press, 2012. Pg 114.
Over the course of his medical career, Canaan treated people from all classes and segments of Palestinian and Arab society. He 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. An entry on Canaan is included in the book Famous Doctors in Tropical Medicine (1932) by Dr. G. Olpp, director of the tropical medicine center in Tübingen, indicating he was well known & regarded within the medical community.
1936 revolt, nationalist writings
Canaan's politics and strong sense of nationalism find clear expression in two of his published works: The Palestine Arab Cause (1936) and Conflict in the Land of Peace (1936).
Published in English, Arabic, and French, The Palestine Arab Cause was a 48-page booklet that collated a series of articles Canaan authored for the local and foreign press following the outbreak of the 1936 Arab revolt. Canaan described British policy in Palestine as, "a destructive campaign against the Arabs with the ultimate aim of exterminating them from their country." He questioned the nationality laws enacted by the Mandatory authorities which prevented Palestinian immigrants in the Americas, who had been citizens of the Ottoman Empire, from obtaining Palestinian citizenship in Mandate Palestine. Directed at influencing British public opinion, the writings were seen by the Mandatory authorities as subversive.
Conflict in the Land of Peace was penned to respond to an anonymous rebuttal of "The Palestine Arab Cause" that claimed European Jewish immigration to Palestine brought benefits, such as improvements in agriculture and the general health of the peasantry. Canaan delves more deeply into the Palestine problem and deconstructs the alleged benefits. For example, he concedes that Zionist settlers did contribute to controlling the malaria epidemic in Palestine through the draining of swamps, but notes that the workers who performed the actual task were Arabs, who thus transformed lands purchased by Zionist owners at very low prices into more valuable agricultural lands for their exclusive benefit. Recalling that dozens of the Egyptian labourers employed to dig the drainage channels died in the process, Canaan writes: "Baron De Rothschild supplied the money and the Egyptians gave their lives." Canaan further notes that the anonymous pamphleteer ignores that Palestinians and Arabs drained swamps in dozens of sites throughout Palestine, under the supervision of the Department of Health, with Arab financial support and volunteer labour, caring for and improving their own lands and lives.
Canaan was also 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. From 1936 onward, Canaan, clearly expressed his rejection of British policies, in particular the policy of Jewish Zionist immigration to Palestine. Imprisonment of Canaan, his wife, and his sister The onset of World War II meant that most German citizens had either left Palestine or been arrested by the British Mandatory authorities as enemy aliens. Canaan was arrested by the British Mandate authorities the same day that Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Ordered released at his second court session, the Criminal Investigation Department intervened and had him imprisoned for nine weeks in Acre. His wife Margot and his sister Badra were also arrested, and imprisoned at a women's facility for criminal prisoners in Bethlehem; Margot for nine months, and Badra for four years. They were then held in Wilhelma, a German colony turned British detention camp for German Palestinians until their release in 1943.
Though Margot's arrest was primarily because of her German ancestry, both women were politically active, having helped found the Arab Women's Committee in Jerusalem in 1934. This charitable society took strong political stances, calling for civil disobedience and the continuation of the general strike that kicked off the 1936 revolt. Badra also served as the assistant secretary in the Palestinian delegation to The Eastern Women's Conference that was held in support of Palestine in Cairo in October 1938. These arrests of the Canaan family were part of the general British policy of suppressing Palestinian resistance to Zionism & British rule.
Research & writings on Palestine