Rahlo Jammele

Very little is known about Rahlo Jammele, who performed so-called Moorish dances at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition) “Turkish Village” pavilion. Fair materials described her as “a native of Jerusalem,” which was then part of the Ottoman Empire; she was purportedly an adept belly dancer. The midway at the World’s Fair included quasi-ethnographic displays of communities and cultures throughout the world. Jews as a collective were not represented among these sometimes vaguely specified communities, but around 80 percent of the Turkish Village’s inhabitants were actually Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, including Jammele. At the World’s Fair, they were tasked with representing and performing Near Eastern or “Oriental” identities that American audiences associated with the Ottoman world, the Levant, and specifically the Holy Land.