A Brief History of Shuk HaCarmel

As Shuk HaCarmel nears the one hundredth anniversary of its loose beginnings, it continues to be a vital strand of Tel Aviv’s connective tissue. According to Tel Aviv historian and tour guide Yossi Goldberg, legend has it that the land edging the top of the shuk was purchased by Russian Jews before World War I. After losing their fortunes during the Bolshevik revolution, they managed to immigrate to Palestine and discovered that their property actually had value. A few years before, the Yemenite Quarter had been established on land owned by Aaron Chelouche, a prominent French–North African Jew who lived in nearby Jaffa. In the early 1920s, as Tel Aviv grew, pushcart vendors began hawking produce and dry goods on Allenby Street, near what is traditionally considered the top of the shuk.

Over time more vendors flocked to the area, filling in the storefronts and setting up bastot, the free-standing stalls that line both sides of the shuk. Arab vendors from Jaffa, which at the time was still part of Tel Aviv, began setting up stalls in the southernmost portion of the shuk, and the northern portion remained more Jewish, though everyone coexisted in relative harmony. The shuk had the freewheeling feeling of a Levantine market, very much opposed to the modern vision of a European-style capital the founders of the city were trying to establish. The poet Esther Re’ev described the market as a place of “camels with backs weighted down with watermelons.”

Around this time, there were efforts to consolidate vendors at another market on Bezalel Street, a few blocks northeast, but eventually vendors and customers settled on Independence in 1948 and the founding of the modern state, when many Arabs fled or were expelled from nearby Jaffa, and the shuk became predominantly Jewish-owned. Many other iconic institutions have been uprooted by gentrification and development, but the shuk has held fast to its traditions and neighborhood, defying the odds to remain the city’s main produce market. In the process, restaurants and bars have opened in and around the shuk, and there have been hole-in-the-wall Yemenite eateries on the outskirts of the shuk for decades. There have been rumors that renovation and redevelopment are on their way; the shuk could use better sanitation and a unified canopy to protect it from the elements. But many vendors and customers, myself included, fear what will happen if modernity takes hold too fast. Only time will tell.