The Unlikely friendship of a King and a Carpenter

Sufyan Jan … 03 June 2025

In an age where the very notion of Arab and Jew sharing bread is met with sneers or suspicion, the story of King Abdullah I and the Jewish carpenter Mendel Cohen stands as a rebuke to the cynics and a testament to the power of personal loyalty. Adaia and Abraham Shumsky’s chronicle is not merely a historical footnote—it is a gleaming shard of hope, polished by time, proving that even in the furnace of the Levant’s hatreds, friendship could yet endure.

Here was a bond defying the crude arithmetic of nationalism: the Hashemite monarch, that shrewd survivor of desert politics, and the humble craftsman who became his confidant. Cohen, with his carpenter’s hands and a Jew’s wary wisdom, served not as a courtier but as a friend—unburdened by the weight of crowns, yet trusted in matters both intimate and imperial. The king, ever mindful of his grandfather’s maxim that “a man’s worth is measured by his word,”found in Cohen what few rulers ever do—a man who spoke truth without flattery.

The Shumskys render this tale not as hagiography, but as a quiet epic of mutual respect. We see Abdullah, that lion of Arabia, sharing meals with Cohen in Amman’s palace, discussing everything from the grain of cedar wood to the follies of the British. Here, the monarch who would fall to an assassin’s bullet revealed a side seldom seen by diplomats: a man who, for all his regal bearing, valued simplicity and steadfastness above the sycophancy of courts.

What lessons does this friendship offer our fractured present? First, that trust between Arab and Jew was never impossible—only inconvenient to those who profit from strife. Second, that the true architects of peace are seldom statesmen, but rather those who build bridges not of treaties, but of shared humanity. When Cohen, in the king’s darkest hour, warned him of plots against his life, only to be met with Abdullah’s fatalistic resolve, the tragedy is Shakespearean in its weight. The king’s trust was absolute; the carpenter’s loyalty, unwavering.

Verdict: A slender volume, yet one that towers over the libraries of Middle Eastern polemics. The Shumskys have given us not just a history, but a beacon—proof that even in the darkest of times, some men chose kinship over bloodshed. Would that their heirs today had such courage.