הבית הנעלם: נחשוניות יהודית ועיוורון היסטוריוגרפי בצפון יפו

Since the 1960s the house of Aharon Chelouche, still standing in Neve Tzedek, was widely depicted as the first Jewish house outside Jaffa. According to the commonly accepted narrative, the house was built four years before the establishment of Neve Tzedek, the first Jewish neighborhood outside Jaffa, in what was then uninhabited surroundings. The story originated from a memoir published in 1931 by Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, a son of the original builder. Comparing his text to other written sources, as well as historic photographs and maps, leads to the conclusion that the house described by Chelouche in his memoir was actually an earlier house built by his father in what would become the heart of the Manshiya neighborhood in Jaffa. That house was later sold to another Jewish dignitary, and eventually became the Manshiya police station until blown up on May 1, 1948 by Irgun fighters at the climax of the battle for Jaffa. Unfolding the reasons for its absence from local history reveals how and why the misleading myth of the house in Tzedek was created and why it successfully persisted until the present day without ever being contested