(Photo By: Clinton Bailey)
By: Naama Barak - April 4, 2021
Israel’s Bedouin community has undergone major shifts in the past decades, transforming from a nomadic people into a more modern one complete with town dwelling, formal education and technology.
But this change came with the danger that the ancient Bedouin traditions could become completely forgotten with the passage of time.
Luckily, a new collection in the works at the National Library of Israel preserves 50-odd years of documentation of the Bedouin community carried out by a world-renowned expert. It will be made freely available online within the next year.
The collection will be based on the archives of Clinton Bailey, a US-born Israeli Middle East expert who for 50 years collected materials from the last Bedouin generation to grow up in the pre-modern period, making them an invaluable source of an orally transmitted ancient civilization.
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