August 24th is the anniversary of the 1929 massacre of the Jews of Hebron by local Arab marauders.
One of the farmers I volunteer with is the daughter of the last Jewish baby born in Hebron before the 1929 pogrom and massacre of the Jews by Hebron Arabs who'd been incited to violence by the anti-Jewish polemics of Haj Amin al-Hussein, the British appointed mufti (Islamic religious leader) of Jerusalem, and a prominent anti-Semite who later allied himself with Adolf Hitler and aided in the annihilation of Jews.
Jews and Arabs both lived in Hebron, but the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of Judaism's most sacred shrines, was controlled by Islamic religious authorities who had turned the site into a mosque and banned Jews from coming any closer than the 7th outside step, as a sign of humiliation instituted during the Mamluk period towards Jews (and other non-Muslims) for not converting to Islam. Some of the Arab clans in Hebron maintained this fiercely disdainful attitude toward Hebron's Jewish community while others had cordial relations with the town's Jews.
My farmer friend's mother was a tiny young baby in 1929. Her family only survived the massacre because their Arab neighbours were friendly to the Jewish community and came to warn them that they had heard other Hebron Arabs planning a massacre of Hebron's historic Jewish community. Their Arab neighbours dressed them in Arab style clothing and smuggled them out to Jerusalem on a wagon, escaping the horrific massacre.
Seventy Hebron Jews were murdered in the pogrom, many others were injured. A few brave Arab families from clans friendly towards the Jews protected their Jewish neighbours and hid them in their homes. The Jewish community was forced to flee Hebron, not just by the Arab violence against them, but because the British decided that the best way to "defuse" the "situation" was to remove all of Hebron's Jews from their homes and expel them. The British enforced similar expulsions of Jews in response to Arab anti-Jewish riots in parts of Jerusalem's Old City and elsewhere in mandatory Palestine.
My farmer friend's family ended up refugees bumping around to various places before finding a new home at the edge of Jaffa and the new city of Tel Aviv. As native Arabic speakers they soon made friends with both the local Jewish and Arab communities, engaging in commerce with both and establishing themselves as pillars of the local community.
One night, just a few months after they arrived in their new home, they heard a noise at the front door and found a baby wrapped in a blanket. One of the family thought they glimpsed an Arab man running away but they were unable to catch up with him. My farmer's friend grandmother picked up the baby and started to breastfeed him alongside her own baby, who would grow up to be my farmer friend's mother.
Just like that my friend's grandmother became a mother to "twins", despite the difference of several months between the two babies noone commented or seemed to notice, as luck would have it my farmer friend's mother was a small baby and the foundling left outside their door was on the larger side.
My farmer friend told me that to the best of her understanding the baby had been left with the Jewish family because he was born out of wedlock to an Arab couple from Jaffa who's parents did not approve of their union, and so marriage was not a choice for them. She told me that her mother's family worked out who the baby probably belonged to, a couple who would have been killed for "family honour" if the pregnancy had been discovered, but despite not being able to be together they wanted to save the baby they had created out of love for each other. The new Jewish family in the neighbourhood who already had a nursing baby seemed like their best option to give a good life to their illicit son.
The farmer's grandmother named the baby Abraham, because Jews and Arabs are both descended from Abraham. He grew up as one of her children, part of this Hebron refugee Jewish family. He married, had children and to my farmer friend was simply "Uncle Abraham" - she never learnt the story of his origins until after his death when her mother explained his history. "I, the last Jewish baby born in Hebron, was saved from an Arab massacre against the Jews by our friendly Arab neighbours. This is why God sent baby Abraham to us, so that we were able to save an Arab baby from an honour killing, the secret baby son of an Arab my father knew. Our lives were saved and we merited saving another life."