Al-Khalidi’s decision to use an article written by an American Zionist (indeed, the first president of the Federation of American Zionists32) as a primary source for the history of the Jewish relationship to the Holy Land offers a number of clues about his purpose in writing this book. First of all, in constructing his “as-Sayūnīzm,” al-Khalidi did not aim to offer his readers a polemical screed against Zionism. Rather, his text was meant to provide his audience with a sophisticated, informed narrative of Jewish history and Zionism. For this reason, out of the many possible articles and books about Zionism, one that was meant to be encyclopedic, but still written by a sympathetic insider, was an ideal match.33 At the same time, al-Khalidi’s manuscript has its biases, and, as we shall see, they are not always subtle. Using the Jews’ own encyclopedia, and an avowed Zionist’s article, might be seen as part of an effort to establish legitimacy and credibility for al-Khalidi’s own critique of Zionism.
While al-Khalidi’s Arabic translation of Gottheil’s article serves as one structural core of his text, the manuscript is more than a simple translation of a single encyclopedia entry. It draws on many varied sources, several of which will be discussed in detail in this chapter. Notwithstanding al-Khalidi’s reliance on these various sources and the manuscript’s self-presentation as an objective historical treatise, a close reading of the text permits us to discern al-Khalidi’s own philosophy and perspective.
ASSESSING AUDIENCE
For whom would al-Khalidi have written such a book? Lacking any explicit statement in the text concerning the particular type of reader he expected, we are left simply to conjecture to whom the work was directed based on internal textual evidence. Given the manuscript’s language, of course, the intended audience would have been readers of Arabic. In the Late Ottoman period in the Middle East, including in Palestine, the qualification of literacy characterized but a small minority of the Arabic-speaking population.34 Al-Khalidi’s intended readers, by definition then, would have been among the intellectual (and, by extension, economic) upper class. But al-Khalidi did not assume that his readers would necessarily be as highly educated as himself, nor as familiar with European society and languages as he was. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of the manuscript. Al-Khalidi explains:
Zionism, in the European35 languages, is derived from the word “Zion,” i.e., Ṣahyūn, with the addition of the particle “ism,” which denotes a political view or a religious-philosophical idea. Zion is the name of the mountain upon which are located the fortress of Jerusalem and the tomb of David the son of Solomon, peace upon them, and is used as a general term for all of the holy city of Jerusalem and its surroundings.36
In defining Zionism, al-Khalidi betrays certain of his presumptions about his audience. The reader was not expected to know any European language, requiring an explanation of the suffix “ism”37 that would be superfluous for anyone who had studied in Europe or had been educated in European missionary schools in the Middle East. The text, in other words, does not aim toward the very highest level of Arab society’s educational elite. At the same time, the reader was assumed to recognize place names within Jerusalem as well as the biblical and Qurʾanic figures of David and Solomon—whose patrilineage is (accidentally?) reversed.38 The readers for whom al-Khalidi wrote his work, then, were basically educated Arabic-readers, especially those familiar with Palestine, though not necessarily themselves residents of Palestine.
Did al-Khalidi envisage Christian Arab readers, or only Muslims like himself? Would he have considered Arabic-reading Jews as a potential audience? As we will see, al-Khalidi generally writes respectfully of Christianity and emphasizes its commonalities with Islam; Judaism, on the other hand, is set in opposition to both religions, and not in Judaism’s favor. Because the text portrays Judaism as the outsider religion, and because a large portion of the manuscript consists of a retelling of the history of the Jews and their faith, it is unlikely that Jews were among the intended readership. Christian Arabs, on the other hand, might well have been desired readers; indeed, al-Khalidi, while crafting his text, had surely read the 1911 translation of and commentary on the Jewish Encyclopedia’s “Zionism” article by Najib Nassar, a Palestinian Orthodox Christian.39 Nassar and his fellow Christian Arabs in Palestine and the Levant were participants in al-Khalidi’s intellectual, social, and political milieu.
THE ANCIENT JEWISH LINK TO PALESTINE
Al-Khalidi accepts the historical link of the Jews to Jerusalem, whether he calls it ūrshalīm or al-Quds, and to the Holy Land, whether he denotes it as Ṣahyūn (Zion) or Filasṭīn (Palestine).40 This acceptance is in keeping with the precedent of al-Khalidi’s uncle and intellectual mentor, Yusuf Diyaʾ al-Khalidi (1842–1906).41 As mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Diyaʾ al-Khalidi sent a letter on March 1, 1899, to the chief rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn,42 asking that the note be passed along to Theodor Herzl. Even as he opposed Zionism, Yusuf Diyaʾ al-Khalidi, writing in French, conceded: “The idea in itself is only natural, beautiful, and just. Who can contest the rights of the Jews on Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”43
Like his uncle, Ruhi al-Khalidi never questions the basic historical claims of the Hebrew Bible concerning the Israelite kingdoms in the Holy Land, nor does he cast doubt on the direct link between his Jewish contemporaries and the biblical Israelites. On the contrary, consider these lines, in which al-Khalidi writes of the exiles to Babylonia: “The captives in Babylonia demonstrated their abundant yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. No nation among the nations reached their height of grieving over their homelands and the degree of their longing for it. They wandered along the banks of the Euphrates crying over Jerusalem and bewailing her in poems and psalms.”44 Al-Khalidi has read these “poems and psalms”; he cites their “style,” “allegories,” and “metaphors” as having served as models for such literary talents as Victor Hugo, the French writer about whom he was writing another book at the same time.45 Al-Khalidi proceeds to quote fifteen poetic lines of Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon,” followed by a “rhetorically superior” passage from Lamentations, 2:11–13. Next, in demonstrating that “the hope to return to Jerusalem and for the restoration of the ancient Davidic kingdom remained alive in the hearts of the exiles,” al-Khalidi quotes several verses from Ezekiel 37, including 21–22:
then say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all.46
Al-Khalidi continues for pages with this discussion, citing verse after biblical verse exhibiting the ancient aspiration of the Israelite return to Palestine. While the passages he cites sometimes overlap with those listed by Gottheil in his Jewish Encyclopedia article, as often as not they appear to be of al-Khalidi’s own choosing, or perhaps drawn on another source; this Ezekiel passage, for example, is not mentioned in Gottheil’s “Zionism” entry.47
Not only does al-Khalidi unreservedly offer biblical passages that stress the Israelites’ yearning to return to their land, but he sees this same desire continuing into postbiblical Jewish history as well. “The mystical part of the Talmud,” al-Khalidi explains, elaborating on Gottheil’s article,
is loaded with Zionist aspirations on the model of that which appears in the books of the Old Testament. It is pointed out in it [the Talmud] and in the midrashic writings48 that the messiah49 … will assemble the dispersed, and with them they will gain mastery over Jerusalem [al-Quds]. Among the rabbis [aḥbār]50 of the Jews, there are those who believe that the Messiah the son Joseph will collect the Children of Israel around him and march with them to Jerusalem, and he will gain mastery over the power of enemies and will restore the religious worship in the Temple [al-haykal], that is, al-masjid al-aqṣā [the al-Aqsa Mosque], and establish his dominion.51
Here al-Khalidi faithfully renders an uncensored tran
slation of the material Gottheil presents in his article, while adding further specificity that leaves no room for doubt as to the precise locations in question. The Temple to which these Jewish authors wish to restore the religious worship is, al-Khalidi explains, the al-Aqsa Mosque, or at least it would stand on the same site.52 And then al-Khalidi adds an explanation, not found in Gottheil’s entry, about what this “religious service” is. It is “the slaughtering of sacrifices,” he clarifies, “and burning them on the altar above the rock.” This term for “the rock,” aṣ-ṣakhra, refers to the one beneath the Dome of the Rock (qubbat aṣ-ṣakhra). Again, not only does al-Khalidi present postbiblical Jewish longing to return to Palestine in accordance with Gottheil’s text, but he also expands on Gottheil to emphasize that the places to which the Jews have sought to return are among the very holiest of places for contemporary Muslims, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque (shrines al-Khalidi could see from his window on Bāb as-Silsila Street).53
Al-Khalidi provides abundant examples as he portrays the enduring Jewish hope of the return to Zion through the course of history. He discusses, inter alia, the case of the second-century Jewish rebel leader Bar Kokhba; rabbinic predictions of the date when the Jews will be restored to their former glory; the medieval Andalusian poetic longing for Zion in the work of Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Halevi, and Judah Halevi; and the seventeenth-century Sabbatean immigration to Palestine.
On the other hand, al-Khalidi recognizes that this declared desire to return to Palestine was just part of the story of the Jewish Diaspora. In narrating the events of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, for instance, al-Khalidi notes that of the 185,000 refugees, 90,000 immigrated to the sympathetic and welcoming Ottoman Empire. “Of these,” al-Khalidi continues, “1, 500 families settled in Jerusalem, 1,700 families in Safed and 500 families in Damascus.” The number of émigrés who “settled in Syria and Palestine did not exceed 15, 000 individuals,” he estimates, emphasizing that this number represented only “one-sixth of the immigrants to the Ottoman kingdom. The rest spread out in Constantinople, Salonika, Edirne [Adrianople], Izmir, and so on.” This is not to mention the 75, 000 Jews, in al-Khalidi’s approximation, who immigrated to various European lands, or the 65, 000 who converted to Christianity. Al-Khalidi takes this opportunity further to expound on the condition of “justice and equality” as existed for the Jews under Islam, in contrast to the Jewish condition under Christendom.54 But what underlies these statistics is the relatively minuscule proportion of fifteenth-century Jews who actually chose to immigrate to Palestine and fulfill their purported longing when forced to choose a new home. Nonetheless, if al-Khalidi was wondering, given the small scale of actual Jewish immigration to Palestine over the centuries, just how meaningful were those frequent expressions of the dream of returning to Zion, he did not explicitly express this doubt in his manuscript.
“MENDELSSOHN’S THEORY”
To the extent that we may discern al-Khalidi’s position on Zionism from this ostensibly objective, academic text, however, it is not any insincerity in the historic wish of the Jews to return to Palestine that ultimately delegitimizes the modern Zionist movement. Nor, for that matter, does al-Khalidi even mention objections along the lines of those that his uncle, Yusuf Diyaʾ, had sent to Zadoc Kahn and Herzl more than a decade earlier. In the same letter discussed above, Yusuf Diyaʾ had concluded that “the reality is that Palestine now is an integral part of the Turkish Empire, and, what is more important, it is inhabited by others than the Jews.” Yusuf Diyaʾ, we see, articulated his argument against Zionism in pragmatic, political, and demographic terms.
For Ruhi al-Khalidi, the argument seems to be on another plane entirely—one internal to Judaism, Jewish discourse, and Jewish history. While the vast majority of Jews may not have chosen to return to Palestine in the many centuries following the Roman conquest and exile (just as was the case, al-Khalidi does not fail to observe, with the meager return from the Babylonian exile),55 al-Khalidi still does not impute any illegitimacy to the Jewish will to return. Rather, he respectfully presents the history of this ancient and long-lasting hope.
The Jewish relationship to Palestine changed, however, in the modern period, according to al-Khalidi, and the transition is linked to one man: the eighteenth-century German Jewish political and religious philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). In al-Khalidi’s rendering, with the advent of what he calls “Mendelssohn’s theory” (naẓariyyat Māndilsūn), Jewish identity underwent a radical transformation that indicted any manifestation of Jewish nationalism thereafter as a clear violation of its principles. Mendelssohn is a key figure in al-Khalidi’s narrative of Jewish history, and one finds various formulations of “Mendelssohn’s theory” at several points within the text, beginning on the second page of the manuscript. “Mendelssohn’s theory,” writes al-Khalidi,
separated the Mosaic religion from Jewish nationalism [al-qawmiyya al-yahūdiyya]56 and abolished this nationalism. It obliged the Jews to acquire the citizenship of the countries [jinsiyyat al-bilād] in which they were born, such as Germany, Austria, France, and England, to imitate57 the rest of the Christian peoples of these countries, and to enter with them [the Christians] into European civilization. It [Mendelssohn’s theory] made them forget the land of Palestine from which they left and the Hebrew language, which they stopped speaking two thousand years earlier.58
For al-Khalidi, what he called Mendelssohn’s theory was the bold disentangling of Jewish religion and Jewish nationality. This theory, according to al-Khalidi, embraced “the Mosaic religion” while it decisively and irrevocably disposed of the nationality and all its concomitant marks of distinction: Jewish language, land, and customs. Al-Khalidi asserts that “whoever looked upon” western European Jews—who, in al-Khalidi’s view, accepted and modeled Mendelssohn’s theory—“saw nothing other than Frenchmen or Englishmen, for example, without regard to their being Jewish or Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, due to the great degree of similarity between them.”59
Al-Khalidi mixes a sociological observation—that the Jews (at least in western Europe) did in fact acculturate among their Christian neighbors—with the doctrinal statement he names “Mendelssohn’s theory.” Strikingly, it is the latter, the theory, that is critical for al-Khalidi. Mendelssohn’s theory, in al-Khalidi’s conception of modern Jewish history, is not merely the translation of sociological reality into ideological terms. Rather, it has prescriptive, even binding, force. In a restatement of this theory, al-Khalidi writes, “it is not permitted for a Jew who was born in Prussia or Austria or France, for example, to consider himself anything but a Prussian or Austrian or Frenchman.” Moreover, “he does not have the right to call for Jewish nationalism…. It is not permissible to consider his nationality to be Jewish nationalism, nor his homeland Palestine.”60 The language al-Khalidi uses in describing Mendelssohn’s theory is strikingly legal in nature. This theory has the power to “abolish” nationalism; to “oblige” the acquisition of citizenship; to “not permit” Jews to think of themselves in particular ways; to deny Jews “the right” to make certain political or ideological proclamations.
MENDELSSOHN’S THEORY VERSUS AL-KHALIDI’S “MENDELSSOHN’S THEORY”
Before attempting to account for the immense power al-Khalidi ascribes to “Mendelssohn’s theory,” it is worth considering the extent to which al-Khalidi’s presentation of the theory corresponds to the views Moses Mendelssohn actually articulated in his philosophical, political, and polemical writings. In reality, Mendelssohn never claimed that the Jews were no longer a “nation” and that they were henceforth merely a “religion,”61 even if, as Leora Batnitzky has argued, he “invent[ed] the modern idea that Judaism is a religion.”62 In this sense, al-Khalidi’s rendering of Mendelssohn’s theory is not an accurate representation of the Jewish philosopher’s position. But this is not to say that al-Khalidi (or his source on this matter) was wholly unjustified in linking the distinction between Jewish reli
gion and Jewish nationhood to Mendelssohn.63
A primary assumption of what al-Khalidi labels “Mendelssohn’s theory” is the contention that there is a meaningful distinction between “religion,” on the one hand, and “nation,” on the other. For Mendelssohn, especially in his classic treatise Jerusalem, Or, on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), the relevant dichotomous categories were not religion and nation but rather religion and state. Mendelssohn argued for a distinction between these latter spheres and insisted that “religion” as such had no place in affairs of the “state.” He did not see this distinction as novel to his own day. Rather, he projected it into the biblical past: once the ancient Israelites accepted a monarch, “state and religion were no longer the same, and a collision of [civic and religious] duties was no longer impossible.”64 In this vein, Mendelssohn approvingly cites Jesus’s “cautious advice,” which he repeats numerous times in Jerusalem, that one must “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”65 For Mendelssohn, following the New Testament language, there were two realms: that of Caesar (the state) and that of God (religion).
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