“Rachel Our Mother” Tapestry. Jerusalem, Torah ve-Melakhah (“Torah and Crafts”) Weaving House, ca. 1900–1920

Woven in the professional workshops of the Jerusalem Torah ve-Melakhah (“Torah and Crafts”) school—an institution that predated the Bezalel carpet works by nearly a decade—this rare textile belongs to one of the earliest documented phases of Jewish rug production in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Under the leadership of Avraham Albert Antebi (1870–1919), the Alliance Israélite Universelle–affiliated school developed a thriving weaving department supported by Damascus-trained craftsmen and staffed by Yemenite and Persian weavers; by 1900, more than forty artisans were active in its halls. Rugs from this period, produced on mechanical looms and sold both locally and abroad, form a distinctive corpus of “Alliance Jerusalem” textiles.

The present composition, known as “Rachel Our Mother,” is a rare surviving design in the early twentieth-century Rachel series. Rendered in subtle shades of silver-gray and beige, the image presents a strikingly Europeanized Rachel performing a veil dance atop a raised oriental-carpeted platform, surrounded by Arab musicians in tarbushes and turbans. A distant mosque, lush vegetation, and a decorative border incorporating Stars of David with “Zion,” the Tablets of the Covenant, and crescent motifs situate the work firmly within the multi-cultural visual vocabulary of turn-of-the-century Jerusalem. The inscription “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget” reinforces the rug’s symbolic and devotional intent.

Long understood to have been inspired by a late nineteenth-century Orientalist painting—likely French—the composition reflects the eclectic artistic sources circulating in Jerusalem’s Jewish workshops at the time. Examples of the “Rachel Our Mother” rug are preserved in the Wolfson Museum, Heichal Shlomo, Jerusalem, and in noted private collections. This textile represents one of the most evocative survivals of early Jewish design in Palestine, blending European imagery, local craftsmanship, and biblical symbolism into a uniquely Jerusalemite artifact.

 Woven wool; 126 x 119 cm.

LITERATURE

Ofrat, Gideon. The First Beginning: "Torah u-Melacha". Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly / 2008 PP. 4-13.