The community depicted in the TV series “The Jewish Quarter” was an open community, with relationships based on civil grounds, not on beliefs. Today, six decades later, this community hardly exists.
Yet drama is different from historical documentation, in that it provides an artistic vision, as opposed to a recording of historical facts. Despite that, the series has been widely criticized.
Drama creates a beautified world that relates to reality, but is not necessarily identical to it, for art uses fantasies, metaphors and symbols in handling any subject. Historical drama tactfully combines imagination and reality in a beautiful and artistic mold.
Historical drama is often influenced by the artist’s intellectual tendencies and political affiliations, involving bias about certain interpretations of historical events that bear different readings. What is important here is that it should contain an artistic value, which is the first criterion it is evaluated with.
This is what the critics of the series failed to realize, when they dealt with it as if it was a documentary film and not a work of art.
But historical drama should not counterfeit facts that are already controversial for the mere sake of presenting a certain intellectually or politically-oriented artistic vision.
“The Jewish Quarter” series did not do this.
Another thing a historical drama should do is maintain full accuracy of the pattern of life of the time period it depicts, in terms of the clothes that the actors wear, the tools they use, the places they are filmed in and so forth.
With only a few exceptions, such as certain buildings that were too modern for the time period of the series, and the scene in which the actress sold Paco Rabanne perfume, a brand that was founded in 1966, the series has maintained the pattern of life of the time to a great extent.
Among the most controversial issues that we saw in the series was the relationship between the Zionist Movement and the Jews of the Egyptian Communist Movement, for although the Communist Movement was against Zionism, there were stories about some of its members encouraging emigration to Israel when Palestine was divided.
Another issue was the violent acts carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood against properties in the Jewish quarter, which some interpreted as an intrinsic trait of the Brotherhood since its inception, while others considered it a reaction to Zionist atrocities committed in Palestine.
The third issue was that of the broken weapons, for it was never discovered whether the arms dealers knew they were not working or they bought them because they had no experience in this field.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
