Diary Excerpt: Of a Sephardic Palestinian Soldier in the Ottoman Army

Born in Monastir (Ottoman Macedonia) to a traditional family, Ḥayim Naḥmias immigrated to Palestine as an adolescent. Settling in the Naḥalat Tsiyon neighborhood of Jerusalem, he found work as a shoemaker. As of 1914, Naḥmias was an active member of the city’s Sephardic community and was married with five children. Although he managed to avoid military service for the first years of the war, after his wife died in 1917, he enlisted in the Ottoman ranks and was conscripted into a labor battalion. After the war, Naḥmias returned to Jerusalem; he died in 1948, during the battle for Jerusalem. His diary, which chronicles his life in the Ottoman army, initially remained in the possession of his son but was subsequently lost, until it surfaced in a storeroom in 2004.