Moshe Sakal was born in Tel Aviv in 1976 into a Jewish-Arab family of Damascene and Cairene descent. He has lived in Paris and, since 2019, in Berlin, where he became a German citizen. He is the author of six Hebrew novels, including the best-selling Yolanda, and a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His essays have also appeared in Le Monde, Libération, and Haaretz. He is the cofounder of Altneuland Press, the first secular Hebrew literary publisher established outside Israel since 1948. A two-time Sapir Prize nominee and recipient of the Levi Eshkol Prize, a Fulbright Scholar, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Sakal was also awarded the Berlin Senate Grant for Non-German Literature in 2021.
Jessica Cohen is a freelance translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Israeli prose, poetry, and other creative work. Her translations include David Grossman’s critically acclaimed A Horse Walks into a Bar (winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), and works by major Israeli writers including Etgar Keret, Rutu Modan, Dorit Rabinyan and Ronit Matalon, as well as Golden Globe-winning director Ari Folman. She is a past board member of the American Literary Translators Association and has served as a judge for the National Translation Award.
In this revised edition of a novel of exile, inheritance, and return, the fates of two families—one Palestinian, one Jewish—intertwine across generations and borders.
In 2011, Fareed Jabbali, a young Palestinian from Damascus, crosses the border into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa, in search of his grandparents’ lost homeland. He carries in his pocket a rare blue diamond—once a gift to a celebrated chanteuse who sang for the Ottoman sultan—and intends to return it to its rightful owners. More than a relic, the stone is an unsettled debt between two families, waiting to be claimed.
In Tel Aviv, Menashe Salomon, a Jewish jeweler born in 1949 to a family of Damascene jewelers, runs a modest shop, unaware that a long-lost piece of his family’s past is about to resurface. His mother, Adela, once lived in Damascus, where she fell in love with a Palestinian woman, Laila Jabbali—Fareed’s grandmother. As Menashe and Fareed’s paths converge, they confront a question that lingers over the novel: Can what was lost ever truly be restored?
A mosaic of characters and cities—Damascus, Jaffa, Beirut, Tel Aviv—The Diamond Setter bears witness to the Arab-Jewish world destroyed in 1948 and to the long shadow of the Nakba. Now revised with a new preface, this edition recenters the novel on the Palestinian journey of return and on the vanished Levantine world the twentieth century erased.
“Richly evocative.” —Booklist
“A kaleidoscopic journey into the Middle East of the present and the not-so-distant past…As the mystery of the diamond unfolds, characters’ paths cross in unexpected ways—reminding the reader that we are all, in some way or another, connected.” —Kirkus Reviews
“If you enjoy richly plotted intergenerational stories inspired by true events, Moshe Sakal’s The Diamond Setter offers bountiful pleasures…a gloriously immersive journey into different cultures.” —Forward
“…what’s best is the unselfconsciously sensuous writing (with a range of sexuality easily accepted) and the beautifully depicted sense of a time gone by when borders were open and Jew and Arab commingled.” —Library Journal
“[An] essential read…a vital depiction of queer life in the Middle East.” —Entertainment Weekly
“There are…sparkling, beautiful passages in this novel…The Diamond Setter is very relevant: Jaffa and Tel Aviv represent a modern city’s role in justice, the quest for equality, and continuing rationality in a very irrational area of the world.” —Huffington Post
“Sakal makes room for his narrative to encompass huge issues: the geopolitics of the Middle East, gentrification, sexuality, borders, aging, and the bonds of family. Yet this book never feels ponderous: Sakal keeps things moving briskly throughout…the charm of the novel’s characters and the humanism with which Sakal tells this story go a long way.” —Words Without Borders
“A spellbinding saga of love and family secrets…an artful reminder that in some way or another, we are all linked together.” —Foreword Reviews
“This inventive, engaging novel…offers a fascinating glimpse into Israel’s attitude toward homosexuality…A quietly affecting novel, it offers an unusual perspective on a thorny part of the world.” —Gay & Lesbian Review
“Well written, masterfully translated by Jessica Cohen, and rewards rereading.” —New York Journal of Books
“Lush, imaginative, and seductive, Moshe Sakal’s The Diamond Setter offers a perfect combination of passion, suspense, insight, and beauty. Jessica Cohen’s brilliant translation only further enhances the reading experience, making it into a true literary treat.” —Ruby Namdar, author of The Ruined House
“A fascinating glimpse into an early twentieth-century Middle East, where familial entanglements and intimacies of all kinds still flourished between Jews and Arabs.” —Judith Frank, author of All I Love and Know
“Moshe Sakal’s books make me miss a life I never lived. In The Diamond Setter, he surpasses himself [with] the blue diamond’s wonderful journey across continents and nations. A rare book by a rare writer.” —Ari Folman, Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for Waltz with Bashir
“The blue diamond ‘Sabakh’ becomes the underlying common thread that interweaves fascinating and beautiful characters, bridging different generations and countries in this captivating novel from Moshe Sakal. The Diamond Setter is a mystery that unfolds brilliantly. I cannot recommend it enough.” —Hasan Namir, Lambda Literary Award–winning author of God in Pink
“Moshe Sakal’s The Diamond Setter is an ambitious novel that is epic in scope (even while most of its geography comes back to a small section of Tel Aviv/Jaffa) and at the same time tightly focused on the intergenerational lives and loves of its characters. Like one of the titular multi-faceted gemstones, it’s reflective and refractive—actively twisting and weaving our perceptions of history and myth (personal myths and national myths) and even the very notions of narrative itself, breaking the fourth wall of the novel as it explores activism, politics, pinkwashing, and the Arab Spring, love triangles, and the notions of home and the right(s) of return.” —Lawrence Schimel, two-time Lambda Literary Award–winning author and translator
“With beautiful and loving language, Sakal looks through the eyes of [his characters] to tell a story of Jaffa and Damascus in the early part of the last century, and today. The pages exude the aromas of a vibrant life that has since vanished.” —Haaretz
PREFACE TO THE 2026 EDITION
The Diamond Setter revolves around Fareed, a young man from Damascus who longs to know, firsthand, his grandparents’ homeland of Palestine. He crosses the border from Syria into Israel and, with a few steps that seem to erase that border as if it had never existed, reaches Jaffa. Fareed’s personal journey unearths geographical, political, and human layers of a space that, until 1948, was shared by Palestinians and Jews from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and other Arab cities, who spoke Arabic and were part of the same cultural and linguistic landscape. This space is not an imagined project of “coexistence,” but simply a shared life characterized by both intimacy and difference—a life encompassing travel, work, passions, and a profound affinity with land and people.
I come from a Jewish family of Damascene jewelers — part of that Arab world that all but ceased to exist in 1948. The stories I was told, which are wholly incongruent with our current reality, live inside me. Increasingly, I understand that they must serve as testimony. This book seeks to turn our gaze back to that shared Arab space and to salvage what is left of it: movement between generations, reminiscences, and a human reality that endures in memories, languages, and place.
The previous English-language edition of this novel, which was published in 2018, while I was still living in Israel, created a broad mosaic of characters who populated the stories of two families — the Palestinian traveler Fareed’s and the Jewish jeweler Menashe’s — as well as the fabled diamond that connects their histories. These are the stories I feel an urgent need to rescue, because they are, at times, all that is left. The book you hold now was my opportunity to revisit the characters and their tales through a contemporary lens, in which the wrenching events now unfolding in Palestine and Israel are refracted. Like gemstones passed from hand to hand, changing the fate of whoever holds them, they bear witness to a vanished world — and open the imagination to envision a future one.