Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  Paying more careful attention to religion and race as categories of mutual perception significantly alters our understanding of the early Zionist-Arab encounter in several respects. After so many decades of intensive local, regional, and global focus on the questions of whether and how to slice the pie of Palestine,8 it is common to presume, as one prominent historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed, that “the problem is, simply put, a dispute over real estate.”9 While Zionists and Arabs in the years before the Great War were surely becoming competitors for Palestine’s real estate, by expanding our view and becoming aware of the place of race and religion, we find that the Arab-Israeli conflict is “a dispute over real estate” as much as an inheritance fight between siblings is “a dispute over jewelry and china.” Yes, the inheritance might be jewelry and china, but these objects are laden with meaning and significance for the senses of identity and legitimacy of the inheritors. The Arab-Zionist or Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not merely been a dispute over the dunams of a land that can hardly be named without caveat or controversy. It has been a struggle over history and identity between people who regard themselves as acutely connected to each other—religiously and genealogically.10

  In other words, these communities understood one another not as complete strangers, engaging with each other for the first time in a modern nationalist struggle over a contested piece of land, but rather as peoples encountering deeply familiar, if at times mythologized or distorted, others. Regarding both religious and racial modes of categorization, the sense of commonality was as salient as the extent of difference. The fact that the “Zionist-Arab” encounter was one between Jews, on the one hand, and Christians and Muslims, on the other, such that the individuals involved were members of religious civilizations with long and complex histories of engagement, was not incidental but in fact crucial to how all parties experienced the encounter.11 Similarly, the fact that this was an encounter between Jews and Arabs, peoples who were imagined by race theorists to be members of a single ancient race or, at any rate, close racial (Semitic) relatives was not inconsequential to either Jews’ or Arabs’ experience of this encounter but rather, for many, central to it.12 Whereas a focus on nationalism and territory raises issues of possession and sovereignty that imply conflict, expanding and enriching our focus to include the parties’ ideas of religion and race permit a more nuanced and historically accurate story to be told. A number of thinkers regarded religion or race as elements of unity even as others understood them as grounds for hostility.

  Furthermore, by excavating the religious and racial elements of the early encounter, we are able to see more clearly just how complicated the eventual bifurcation in Palestine was between Zionist and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian. For a time, some perceived three groups—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—while others actually saw just one group—Semites. From multiplicity or singularity, a hardened binary emerged. Dividing the communities into two discrete nations, along the particular demographic lines that were ultimately drawn, was, however, neither obvious nor inevitable. Consideration of the place of race and religion helps expose not only the contingency of the eventual bisection but also its complexities.

  A JOURNEY OF INTELLECTUAL ENCOUNTER

  This book makes the case for the prominence of religious and racial modes of classification and explores the implications of these categories in Late Ottoman Palestine, by means of a journey through texts and among the individuals and communities that produced them. The journey begins in Jerusalem, the scene of the encounter between Ben-Yehuda and al-Khalidi (chapter 1). I situate the city in its multiple political, social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. By properly placing Jerusalem within these contexts—Palestine, the Ottoman Empire, the crossroads of Syria and Egypt, the target of European interest and influence—we are better able to understand why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Palestine’s communities would have perceived one another in religious and racial terms, and what they might have meant by these terms. After offering this historical contextualization, chapter 1 provides a survey of the communities present in Palestine in the final years before the start of the Great War and a discussion of some of the challenges in identifying and categorizing these communities.

  The journey continues with a focused study of an unpublished manuscript and its intriguing author, Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi (chapter 2). Al-Khalidi’s 120-page Arabic work, Zionism or the Zionist Question, was written in the final years of Ottoman rule. Through his composition, al-Khalidi sought to explain Zionism to his intended Arabic-reading audience. What is striking about this manuscript is that, though its subject is ostensibly Zionism—a phenomenon generally regarded by observers and practitioners alike as a modern and, especially in its early years, secular (even secularist), nationalist movement13—the author devoted much of his manuscript to describing details of the Jewish religion and Jewish history. For al-Khalidi, to understand Zionism, both its origin and, in his mind, its folly, his readers would have to understand Judaism. Religion was, at least for this prominent figure, central to the way in which he perceived Zionism in Palestine. These Zionists were, after all, Jews, and this author, trained in traditional Islamic studies as well as European scholarship, interpreted the Jewish nationalist movement through a distinctly religious lens.

  If al-Khalidi looked at Zionists and saw Jews, defined religiously, whom did Zionists see when they looked at their Arab neighbors? To address this question, I turn in chapter 3 to the Hebrew Zionist press published in Palestine in the years preceding the Great War. The Zionists in Palestine maintained a vibrant press with numerous newspapers, each of which represented a different political-ideological demographic of Palestine’s small Zionist population. Paying careful attention to the terminology used to describe the non-Jewish natives of Palestine in a sampling of Hebrew newspapers from three of the main Zionist groups, we will find that, though Zionist nomenclature frequently employed the term “Arab,” religious labels—“Christian Arabs,” “Muslim Arabs,” and terms such as “Christians” and “Muslims” that made no mention of the subjects’ “Arabness” at all—were also used regularly. I argue that the use of religious labels reflected what appears to have been a widespread belief that the way in which Palestine’s natives related to the Zionists not only correlated with, but was actually determined by, the natives’ respective religions. Muslims, members of a faith imagined to be inherently tolerant and decent, would welcome Zionists into Palestine, so it was argued, were it not for the instigation of Christians, whose religion is essentially intolerant, violent, and anti-Jewish. In the minds of Palestine’s Zionists in the Late Ottoman period, I contend, they were engaged in an encounter with Christians and Muslims as much as with a group they regarded as Arabs.

  In my study of the Hebrew newspapers, I focus particularly on the use of religious labels and the Zionists’ varying views regarding Christianity and Islam. However, in the course of this analysis, I show that race-language also appeared in unexpected ways. In one particularly curious passage, Zionist editors described an Arabic newspaper that opposed Zionism as the work of “the Christian Arab enemies, who hate us religiously and racially.” These “Christian Arab enemies” were distinguished from “our Muslim neighbors” who had always viewed the Jews “like brothers to the Arabs and members of the same race.” This is but one instance of the slippage between religious and racial categories employed by some Zionists as they perceived their non-Jewish neighbors in Palestine. Religion was just one category through which Zionists imagined Palestine’s Arabs; race, too, was considered by some to be a critical component of the nature and identity of their neighbors.

  Recognizing the utility of the press in exploring Zionist perceptions of the Arabs, I then turn back to the other side of the encounter. Here, though, I broaden the study beyond the geographic confines of Palestine, through an analysis of three of the wider region’s most influential Arabic intellectual journals (chapter 4). Because Palestine�
��s intellectual elite read and contributed to these journals—indeed, I conducted my research with copies of the journals that were present in Palestine during the Ottoman period—the journals are an essential source for discerning the ways in which Arab intellectuals in Palestine and beyond perceived the Jews and Zionism. In these journals—al-Hilāl, al-Muqtaṭaf, and al-Manār—and in other works by their editors, perhaps even more than in the Zionist newspapers, ideas concerning race, and particularly the Jews’ racial relationship with Arabs, were central to the way in which the Jews and Zionists were perceived. The focus on race, however, was certainly not to the exclusion of other means of categorization and interpretation of the Jews and Zionism; conceptions of the Jewish religion were crucial as well.

  Through my reading of the Zionist press as well as my research in Zionist archives, I found that I was far from the first to take an interest in the ways in which the Arabic press portrayed the Zionists. Rather, Zionists of the Late Ottoman period, especially in the final half-decade before the First World War, were themselves already deeply concerned by Arab perceptions of Zionism and the Jews. In chapter 5, then, I move from a study of perceptions to a study of perceptions-of-perceptions. I begin by investigating Zionist programs aimed at understanding and influencing Arab perceptions of the Zionists, including efforts to translate Arabic newspaper articles about the Jews, to write articles sympathetic to Zionism for the Arabic press, and to fund Arabic papers that were supportive of Jewish efforts in Palestine. Through studying these efforts, we will discover the crucial role played by Arabic-literate Sephardic Zionists because of their linguistic capabilities. This will lead us, finally, to two Arabic books about Judaism and the Jews written by members of the Palestine-born Sephardic Zionist community: Shimon Moyal’s at-Talmūd and Nissim Malul’s Asrār al-yahūd. The authors, Moyal and Malul, were also involved in the Zionist projects to translate and influence the Arabic press; these works of apologetics were another weapon in the battle against Arab opposition to Zionism. The books were written for non-Jewish Arabic readers with the explicit goal of diminishing “misunderstanding.” We will study these texts, then, to discern how certain Zionists, anxious about their native neighbors’ perceptions of Zionism, defended the Jewish religion and their community in the Arabic idiom of the fin de siècle. Through these works, the authors negotiated the complex terrain of bifrontal religious apologetics, directed at members of two religions, Christianity and Islam. Analyzing these texts permits us to understand how those raised in the Middle East, at home in Arab culture, and fluent and literate in Arabic, conceived of their neighbors and imagined how they might most effectively be persuaded to embrace Zionism. Tellingly, they chose to focus largely on religion.

  As I have noted, this book’s emphasis on the religious and racial categories of perception should not be taken to imply that these were the only categories employed in the fateful intercommunal encounter that occurred in Late Ottoman Palestine. Rather, what this book seeks to demonstrate is that, though often overlooked, religious and racial categories were prominent in the perceptions of this period, and that these categories prove essential for understanding the early encounter. Though for reasons that I will suggest relate to the new political discourse that emerged from the Great War (and was enshrined in the treaties signed at the war’s conclusion) these categories were often unspoken or even explicitly denied political relevance, they are also crucial, I argue, for making sense of later developments in Zionist-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian relations. I return to these more recent matters in the conclusion.

  TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

  This book sets out to study the intellectual encounter between Zionists and Arabs in the Late Ottoman period in Palestine and beyond. Though I began with an instance of this encounter, namely, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s 1909 interview of Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, records of face-to-face intellectual conversations (that is, discussions of ideas) between Zionists and Arabs in this period are scant. This lack of evidence, one suspects, is more a comment on the nature of the sources than on the frequency of such encounters historically, even if the latter were uncommon. Nevertheless, to discern how Zionists and Arabs perceived and understood one another, it is necessary to look beyond texts that specifically document or narrate personal encounters. Instead, we are led to texts that reveal—whether explicitly or through close, critical analysis—the ways members of the various communities in Palestine and beyond conceived of this encounter. Through these texts, we are able to shed light both on the encounter and on the way participants perceived it.

  While evidence of face-to-face intellectual encounters is elusive, through analyzing texts that reveal perceptions this book also studies what might be regarded as textual encounters, and of these there is ample evidence. In fact, most of the texts I analyze here were written with explicit reference to another text or set of texts. Consider the many points of contact. Al-Khalidi’s manuscript relies heavily on, and at times responds to and revises, both Shimon Moyal’s at-Talmūd and the Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry on “Zionism” by the American Zionist Richard Gottheil. Gottheil himself presumably read Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, a book on the history of the Jews written by al-Muqtaṭaf’s editor Shahin Makaryus (the copy I located bears the stamp of Gottheil’s private library).14 Rashid Rida, editor of al-Manār, reviewed Makaryus’s Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn in his journal. At-Talmūd, though written by Moyal, was a project envisioned by the Arabic journal al-Hilāl’s editor Jurji Zaydan and was written to counter the antitalmudic claims of European books that had recently been translated into Arabic and disseminated in the Middle East. The publication of Nissim Malul’s Asrār al-yahūd was announced in al Hilāl.15 Hebrew newspapers in Palestine, and soon the Zionists’ Palestine Office in Jaffa, translated and tried to influence the Arabic press. And Moyal wished to translate the Haifa-based editor Najib Nassar’s pamphlet on Zionism, which was itself a translation of Gottheil’s “Zionism.” In other words, the texts, if not always their authors, were in conversation.

  While they often addressed or were informed by one another, the texts on which this book focuses vary widely in numerous respects. They range from the most private (e.g., an unpublished and uncirculated manuscript) to the most public (e.g., newspapers, journals, speeches, and published books) and many others in between (e.g., archival material reserved for internal Zionist Organization consumption). Some of the sources are descriptive (e.g., accounts of day-to-day incidents in Palestine), while others are prescriptive and even polemical (e.g., religious apologetic literature). Finally, the texts were written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, German, and French).

  My aim in this selection is not to claim that these texts constitute a “representative sample,” a futile goal for an intellectual history project of this type, but rather to offer a wide variety of kinds of sources, each of which sheds light on another aspect of the mutual perceptions under review. For instance, through mining Zionist newspapers for references to the Zionists’ non-Jewish neighbors, I show how Zionist writers thought of their counterparts in Palestine when they were simply (that is, presumably reflexively and unselfconsciously) naming them. This is a type of observation that could not be obtained through the study of, for example, more philosophical or apologetic texts, such as those of Moyal or Malul. These latter—at-Talmūd and Asrār al-yahūd—allow us to understand how Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionism might be presented to non-Jewish Arabic-readers in a way that the Hebrew newspapers obviously could not. At the same time, though al-Khalidi’s manuscript provides a unique perspective on one influential Arab leader’s perceptions of the Jews and Zionism, fin de siècle Arabic journal articles offer insights into the way a far broader range of Arab intellectuals imagined the Jews and conceived of their relationship to them. Moreover, these articles were not generally concerned specifically with Zionism or even Palestine, so they permit us to view Arab perceptions differently from those proffered in a text explicitly focused on Zionism. T
he range of sources examined in this book, in other words, permits us to analyze perceptions in this encounter on both micro and macro levels.16

  BLENDED HISTORY AND THE SCHOLARLY TABOOS OF RELIGION AND RACE

  Two final points are in order about the significance of this book, both historically and historiographically. First, it is worth highlighting one broader way in which this project attempts to contribute to the study of Palestine. For political and linguistic reasons, the histories of the communities of Palestine have generally been studied as just that: separate histories. This exclusivity of focus and narrowness of vision have left a more blended history as a clear desideratum. Joining other recent historians,17 I have tried to explore the interconnectedness of these histories and to argue that there is much one can learn about this society when we view it as a whole, however complex and fragmented. This book, then, is meant to serve as a bridge in overcoming the false dichotomy between the “Jewish history of Palestine” and its “Middle Eastern history,” revealing Palestine’s central place in the nexus between Europe and the Middle East and that between Jews and Arabs—Christians and Muslims.

  Second, religion and race have, in different ways, been taboo subjects in the scholarship on the Arab-Zionist encounter, where nationalism is generally viewed as the critical category. Reasons for this include the blinding effects of secularization theory; the secularist nature of much nationalist historiography; the post-Holocaust Jewish inclination to obscure or ignore the pervasiveness of racial discourse among prewar Jews;18 the polemics surrounding the identification of Zionism with racism; and the reluctance to associate Arabs with race-thinking given this ideology’s prominent place in colonial discourses of oppression.19 Owing to these factors, scholars have generally shied away from exploring religion and race in the history of Jews and Arabs in Palestine. In defying these inclinations, this book joins a new wave of scholarship that has begun to examine the interplay of race and religion in the broader rise of nationalisms. Increasingly, in the words of one observer, scholars have contended that these categories must be viewed not merely as “interacting” or “intersecting” but as “inextricably linked” and “co-constituted.”20 While this scholarship has largely focused on the self-perceptions of groups, this book suggests that we can understand the nexus of race, religion, and nation only as part of a wider worldview, one in which the definitions and perceptions of others—neighboring and often competing groups—played an absolutely pivotal role. By reexamining the sources in which Zionists and Arabs of the Late Ottoman period depicted or addressed one another, the book not only reinflects their history of identity formation with the categories of religion and race; it also illuminates the often counterintuitive role of each of these categories in blurring perceived differences between members of the two groups.