Nablus Soap: Cleaning Middle Eastern Ears for Centuries

An authentic bar of Nablus soap arrived to me via JFK Airport from Amman, Jordan, following an order placed with www.dunestore.com.

The soap is from a soap factory in Nablus (also known as Shechem in the Old Testament), Palestine, a 4,000 year old city in the Levantine interior 30 miles to the north of Jerusalem, 25 miles from the Mediterranean, and 30 miles to the south of Jenin. Nablus is surrounded on all sides by rugged rounded mountains at around 2,500-2,900 feet above sea level. The city itself, nestled in the east-west trending U-shaped valley, is about 1,600 feet above sea level. It sits strategically astride ancient crossroads that connect the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River, and Damascus in the north to Jerusalem and Mecca in the south. Pilgrims passed through Nablus on their way from Damascus to Mecca and back again.

The soap wrapper, which is 9 by 9 inches, is crinkly white with a waxy feel on the top side and a papery feel on the underside next to the soap. Bright Arabic lettering on the wrapper is in two colors: what I call “Mediterranean blue” and “Nubian sandstone”. In the center of the wrapper is a placid-looking one-humped camel (Nubian sandstone color) standing beneath a thick symmetrical blue arch with white Arabic lettering. The wrapper, secured with a single dot of some adhesive, hugs the soap. The soap has been hand-wrapped: the corners are uneven and puffed up in places.

The chunk of soap inside the wrapping is the color of the page of an old book. The chunk is 1 and ½ inches tall and 2 ¼ inches by 2 ¼ inches wide. It is not exactly a “bar” of soap and not exactly a “cube” of soap. It fits well in the palm of my hand. I can grip it with my fingertips just reaching the edge of the top of the soap. The soap is firm and unyielding, but easily scraped with a fingernail. There is a seal hammered into the top surface of the soup, showing a camel inside a circle that is 1 ¾ inches in diameter. The soap’s smell is very distinctive, somewhat like the original Ivory soap from the 1950s--that is, NO perfume whatsoever--only the smell of the cooked and dried Nabulsi ingredients. The Nablusi workers who make this soap are proud of its unique smell, which signifies to them the quality and purity of its ingredients.

Nablus’ Soap Economy

Soap-manufacturing was Nablus’ dominant and most dynamic economic sector in the 19th century when some 30 soap factories manufactured tons of soap for regional markets, especially Egypt and her military. (1) Nablus soap was made out of olive oil, the primary agricultural produce of Nablus and its environs (together known as Jabal Nablus). Nablus soap has long had a fine reputation. For example, in the 14th century, Shaykh Shams al-Din al-Ansari al-Dimashqi (1326-1327 AD) said: “The city of Nablus…was bestowed by God Almighty with the blessed olive tree.

Its olive oil is carried by Bedouins to the Egyptian and Damascene lands, to the Hijaz, and the steppes…In it a superior soap is produced and sent to the above-mentioned destinations and to the islands of the Mediterranean Sea.” (2) In the 1830s, John Bowring wrote that “Nablous [sic] soap is highly esteemed in the Levant.”] The Syrian historian Muhammad Kurd Ali wrote in the 1930s that “Nablus soap is the best and most famous soap today for it has, it seems, a quality not found in others and the secret is that it is unadulterated and well produced.” (2)

Nablus is near the River Jordan (which is at sea level) on whose eastern banks the barilla plant grows abundantly. This plant, after the olive tree, is the second most important raw material of Nablus soap. Until the introduction of caustic soda in the 1860s, large numbers of Bedouins from the Bani-Sakhr, Huwaytat, and Adwan tribes gathered barilla in the valleys of M’an, especially around Salt and Tadmur (Palmyra). In the summertime they piled these plants in towering stacks, burned them, gathered the ashes and coals into sacks, and carried them to Nablus in large caravans. (3) Once in Nablus, the ashes and coals were pounded into a fine natural alkaline soda powder called “qilw”.

Physical Layout of a Nablus Soap Factory

The expensive assets of a typical soap factory in Nablus in the 19th century were one huge building, deep wells under the ground floor where the olive oil was stored, and the large copper vat in which the 5 tons of soap was cooked at a time. So much olive oil was stored in the wells that the soap factories sometimes doubled as banks with olive oil serving as the currency of exchange. At last one very old soap factory—Yusufiyya—remained in operation as of in 1994. 

The olive oil wells buried beneath the ground floor of the building numbered from 3 to 7, and their capacity ranged from an astonishing 5 to 30, or even more, tons. (4) The entire ground floor of the building was devoted to the soap cooking process. In the center of the room was a huge copper vat weighing one ton. It was not manufactured locally and Doumani does not say where they originated. Under the vat was the furnace reached by a short set of stairs. Next to the furnace room was an olive oil well called the “adjacent” well, which held exactly one copper vat’s worth of olive oil (250 jars of olive oil, which weighed about 5 tons). The “adjacent” well was the smallest well of the factory. The largest well was called “the lake”. While the copper vat was busy cooking one batch of soap, the “adjacent” well was warming up to produce the next batch. Along the sides of this vast room were areas for storing qilw (barilla ashes), lime (shid), wood and crushed olive pits (jift) to feed the furnace. On the second floor of the building the cooked soap was spread, cut, dried, and sometimes, but not always, packaged in the wrapper described above. A set of steep stairs connected the ground floor with the second floor. Workers carried wooden buckets of cooked soap up these slippery stairs.

Soap Production in the Factory

The first phase of Nablus soap production was preparation of the qilw/shid mixture. “The qilw (barilla ashes) was put into a stone urn or mortar and pounded into a fine powder with a wooden pestle. Meanwhile, the shid (lime) was spread in a shallow pit and soaked in water until it coagulated and dried. Then it was rolled and crushed into a fine powder. The two powders were then combined and put into a row of [3-6] fermentation pits,” which were also located on the first floor. (5) Each fermentation pit was about 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 8 inches deep.

Hot water from the bottom of the copper vat (the oil-soap rose to the top, leaving the water on the bottom) was drawn through a spigot and directed to the fermentation vats containing the combined qilw/shid powder mixture. As the hot water absorbed the chemical content of the powdery mixture, it sank through the mixture and dripped into identical but deeper pits UNDER the fermentation pits. Slowly the chemical composition of the water in the deep pits concentrated to the point that it was the right strength to add it back to the copper vat so that the oil would absorb the chemicals, closing the cycle.  This cycle was repeated an average of 40 times while the hot, liquid soap in the copper vat was stirred continuously with a “long, oarlike piece of wood called the dukshab.” (5)

The art of making fine Nabulsi soap was controlling the soda content and the coagulation process, which was the job of the supervisor. If the soap was removed from the vat too early, it did not dry well. If it was cooked too long, it was very hard and difficult to cut. The supervisor could tell when the soap was ready based on the smell of the soap on a round, two-foot long wooden pole dipped into the vat. “If the supervisor thought it was ready, he passed the stick to the soap-factory owner for consultation. In the case of disagreement, an expert was called in to render an opinion.” (5)

This cooking process to produce one batch (tabkha) took 8 days! Each tabkha consumed 250 jars of olive oil (5,128 kilograms or 11,305 pounds), 7 qintars of qilw, 10 qintars of shid, and about 25 jars of water. 1 qintar is equal to 1 camel load.  One tabkha equaled 20-25 qintars (roughly 6 tons) of soap or 20-25 camel-loads of soap.

When the soap was cooked just right, laborers carried it upstairs in wooden barrels, where it was poured into a large frame made of planks of 1 inch wood laid out on the large floor. “After the soap firmed up, the uneven top layer was shaved off with a scraper to smooth the surface.” Then strings dusted with white powder, according to Doumani, were stretched across at regular intervals and plucked to form lines on top of the soap. By the looks of my bar of Nablus soap, the chalk on the string was red, not white. Workers then followed the lines with a stick with a sharp metal blade at the end and cut the soap into pieces. Each piece of soap was stamped with a metal seal attached to a wooden hammer. The seal on my piece of soap has a camel on it, as previously noted.

Next, workers carefully stacked the pieces of cut soap in beautiful tall conical, hollow structures from the floor to the ceiling of the second floor, being careful to leave spaces between each piece of soap so that it could continue to dry. The drying could last from 3-12 months. Not all soap was wrapped in paper. Indeed, it was often exported in specially-made stiff sacks designed to minimize friction between the soap cubes so that they would maintain their weight and shape over the long trip to Egypt and other regional markets. Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza, Lydda, and Ramla together manufactured 500 tabkhas of soap in a good year. Nablus was by far the largest soap producer of these Palestinian cities, and the Palestinian cities together were the largest producers of soap in the Ottoman Empire.

Nablus Soap Manufacture Today

Nablus is again making soap, amidst peace and war. On September 13, 1993, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the “Declaration of Principles”, which outlined a six-year timetable for achieving permanent and comprehensive peace between Israel and the Palestinians. On May 4, 1994, Rabin and Arafat initialed an accord implementing the first stage of that agreement: self-rule for Gaza and Jericho under the administration of a Palestinian Authority (PA). On September 28, 1995, the Interim Agreement was signed, calling for a phased Israeli withdrawal from certain areas of the West Bank. By 1999, six West Bank cities (Nablus, Tulkarm, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Qalqilyah) had been turned over to the PA. (6)

The transition to governance of Nablus by the Palestinian Authority has not been smooth. Nablus terrorists have made bombs and then trained, loaded, and dispatched suicide bombers, including teenaged girls and boys as young as 12 and 13 years, to Israel to self-detonate. (7-8) As a result, Israeli forces have bombed Nablus, including one of her oldest soap factories in the city’s Casbah area used to manufacture bombs. Rebuilding the useful and honorable tradition of soap manufacturing in Nablus would help build a peace, instead of a war, economy.

Sources:

1. Besahra Doumani: “Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900. University of California Press, 1995, p. 184.

2. Ibid, p. 185.

3. Ibid, p. 203.

4. Ibid, p. 252.

5. Ibid, p. 253.

6. Global Security: “Nablus” available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/palestine/nablus.htm; accessed September 20, 2006.

7. “Israel arrests 50 Palestinians” (August 2, 2002) available at: Nablushttp://www.cbc.ca/story/news/national/2002/08/02/mideast_nablus020802.html; accessed September 20, 2006.

8. “Arrest of two teenage girls from Nablus planning suicide bombing. June 16, 2004. Available at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terrorism+and+Islamic+Fundamentalism-
/Arrest+of+two+teenage+girls+planning+suicide+bombing+16-June-2004.htm; accessed September 20, 2006