Though the conceptual distinction between state and religion is obviously not identical to that between nation and religion, it is nonetheless important for our assessment of al-Khalidi’s reading of Mendelssohn insofar as it demonstrates Mendelssohn’s insistence on a separate sphere called “religion.” While Mendelssohn grants this sphere biblical vintage, scholars and theorists in the field of secularization have argued that it is rather a modern construction and, according to some, the hallmark of secularization. In his review of the various theories of secularization, José Casanova asserts that “secularization as differentiation” is “the valid core of the theory of secularization.” As Casanova writes in Public Religions in the Modern World:
The differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms remains a general modern structural trend…. Each of the two major modern societal systems, the state and the economy, as well as other major cultural and institutional spheres of society—science, education, law, art—develops its own institutional autonomy, as well as its intrinsic functional dynamics. Religion itself is constrained not only to accept the modern principle of structural differentiation of the secular spheres but also to follow the same dynamic and to develop an autonomous differentiated sphere of its own.66
Mendelssohn’s claim that religion, as such, may be differentiated from other spheres of life—be they the state, the nation, or something else—is in large part what makes Mendelssohn a useful figure for al-Khalidi. Even if al-Khalidi was not quite correct in attributing the separation of nation and religion to Mendelssohn, he was correct to note Mendelssohn’s assumption of and insistence on “differentiation.” If, as Charles Taylor puts it, in ancient societies, “religion was ‘everywhere,’ was interwoven with everything else, and in no sense constituted a separate ‘sphere’ of its own,”67 al-Khalidi recognized that Mendelssohn asserted both the conceptual distinction between religion and other spheres and the imperative to make this distinction. For al-Khalidi, concerned as he was with matters of nationalism and the nation in the very different environment of the early twentieth century (rather than Mendelssohn’s eighteenth-century Europe), the critical sphere from which to separate religion was the nation (as opposed to Mendelssohn’s state).
Differentiation, however, is only one way in which al-Khalidi’s version of Mendelssohn’s theory represents a fair reading of Mendelssohn (regardless of whether al-Khalidi actually read Mendelssohn). Al-Khalidi, as we have seen, highlighted the degree of acculturation effected by Jews, particularly those of western Europe, in the period following Mendelssohn. Though al-Khalidi perceived a direct, causal link between Mendelssohn and this acculturation, the latter was a social phenomenon that began before Mendelssohn and had numerous, complex causes (not merely a Mendelssohnian dictum). Nonetheless, Mendelssohn was a vocal and important advocate of certain aspects of acculturation.68 In the final pages of Jerusalem, he contended that there was “no wiser advice” that might be offered his fellow Jews than to “adapt yourselves to the morals and the constitution of the land to which you have been removed,” even while “hold[ing] fast to the religion of your fathers too.”69 Al-Khalidi would seem justified in reading these lines as a call to acculturation in all spheres of life aside from those explicitly deemed “religious.”
Finally, along with differentiation and acculturation, Mendelssohn’s theory, as articulated by al-Khalidi, severed the Jews from Palestine, renouncing the historic links between the people and the land that had been preserved over the previous centuries. Again, though Mendelssohn did not express this view exactly, this claim, too, has a basis in his writings, especially in his polemical exchange with Johann David Michaelis. In the early 1780s Michaelis, a Christian opponent of the emancipation of the Jews in the German lands, contended that the “messianic expectation of a return to Palestine” casts “doubt on the full and steadfast loyalty of the Jews to the state and the possibility of their full integration.” The Jews, Michaelis had written, “will always see the state as a temporary home, which they will leave in the hour of their greatest happiness to return to Palestine.”70 In his effort to counter Michaelis’s argument against Jewish emancipation, Mendelssohn claimed that Michaelis had misunderstood or misconstrued the impact of the Jews’ messianic expectation. Mendelssohn wrote that “the hoped-for return to Palestine” has “no influence on our conduct as citizens.” He continued:
This is confirmed by experience wherever Jews are tolerated. In part, human nature accounts for it—only the enthusiast would not love the soil on which he thrives. And he who holds contradictory opinions reserves them for church and prayer. In part, also, the precaution of our sages forbids us even to think of a return by force.71 Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.72
Mendelssohn explained that the Jewish hope for a return to Palestine could have no impact on the loyalty of the Jews toward states that tolerate them. In making his case, Mendelssohn appealed first to a psychological observation that people tend to love a place where they are able to live and flourish, and second to a rabbinic prohibition that, in his view, expressly forbade the Jews from restoring their nation in Palestine on their own, without the miraculous, divinely ordained redemption.73
Though Mendelssohn minimized the significance of the wish to return to Palestine (an attempt that must be understood in the context of the eighteenth-century political debate over Jewish emancipation), he never proposed severing the Jews’ link to Palestine or ceasing to pray for their return to the Holy Land. He argued, rather, that this link and hope had no practical influence on the way the Jews related to the states in which they lived. Al-Khalidi, or whatever textual or oral source he was using for his presentation of Mendelssohn’s theory, misunderstood (or interpreted liberally) the actual argument Mendelssohn made concerning Palestine. At the same time, it should be noted that in the subsequent debates over the “assimilation” of the Jews within European Christian society, both supporters and opponents pointed to the earlier figure of Mendelssohn as having heralded the “assimilation” they either desired or dreaded.74
THE POWER OF “MENDELSSOHN’S THEORY”
For our purposes, though, it is al-Khalidi’s understanding of Mendelssohn’s theory, not Moses Mendelssohn’s actual philosophy, that is most important. What is it that endows naẓariyyat Māndilsūn with such considerable power? The answer, I propose, lies in what al-Khalidi understands to have been broad rabbinic consensus on Mendelssohn’s principles. Again, beginning on the first page of his manuscript, al-Khalidi explains that the Torah, the Talmud, and Jewish medieval literature all foresee a Jewish return to Palestine, though the Jews were “not sufficiently powerful to realize” this aspiration. This ambition nonetheless remained until “the last centuries,” writes al-Khalidi, when with the advent of freedom, Mendelssohn “created a modern theory whose correctness was certified by the community75 of rabbis, ‘asqāmah. ’ ” At this early stage in al-Khalidi’s manuscript, we encounter a somewhat vague idea of rabbinic certification of Mendelssohn’s theory, an asqāmah, a term al-Khalidi initially leaves undefined.76 Later in his manuscript, al-Khalidi mentions the word again, in explaining why some rabbis religiously forbid Zionism. He notes that these rabbis rejected Zionism because of its violation of “Mendelssohn’s theory” and its “infringement of the rules of the religious assembly, ‘asqāmah. ’ ” The text proceeds to cite the 1908 proclamations of opposition to Zionism issued by various Ottoman Jewish religious and communal leaders, published in the Ottoman Turkish press. “We, your Mosaic citizens,” asserts one such Jewish leader from Izmir, “are the greatest opponents of Zionism.”77 Such, al-Khalidi infers, is the power of Mendelssohn’s theory.
The reader finally encounters al-Khalidi’s clearest explanation of this asqāmah halfway through the manuscript in yet another discussion of naẓariyyat Māndilsūn. “Mendelssohn’s theory,” al-Kha
lidi writes, “means that there is never again to be Jewish nationalism.”78 Al-Khalidi emphasizes that “Mendelssohn was not alone in this view.” Rather, all the Jews of western Europe agreed with his theory, and thus “it was certified by the community of rabbis.79 Their people resolved to accept it and they named this consensus with the term of their religious law80 ‘asqāmah,’ which means the consensus of the people. Their acceptance of this theory was not political only, but rather religious and religious-legal.”81 With this final explication of Mendelssohn’s theory and its binding “religious and religious-legal” authority over contemporary Jewry,82 we might finally decipher al-Khalidi’s theory of modern Jewish history and identity. Al-Khalidi notes a dramatic change in the ways in which Jews in the modern world conceived of themselves—and particularly of their national identity—and he is quite correct to do so. Though, as we have seen, he may have been mistaken historically, or at least overly simplistic, in linking this transformation directly to Moses Mendelssohn, al-Khalidi was hardly exceptional in associating Mendelssohn with an opposition to Zionism; Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists of al-Khalidi’s time did the same.83
What, though, did al-Khalidi have in mind when he wrote of this so-called asqāmah? While the term is presumably a corruption resulting from the Arabic transliteration of a European-language transliteration of the Hebrew term haskamah, or “agreement,” the particular historical agreement al-Khalidi had in mind is less certain.84 Given al-Khalidi’s many years in France, one possibility is that the broad rabbinic consensus to which al-Khalidi refers here is Napoleon’s 1806 Assembly of Notables, which declared that “in the eyes of Jews, Frenchmen are their brethren,”85 and the subsequent 1807 Paris Sanhedrin, which claimed that “the learned of the age shall possess the inalienable right to legislate according to the needs of the situation” and thus demanded of Jews “obedience to the State in all matters civil and political.”86 Beginning in 1898, al-Khalidi served as Ottoman consul general in Bordeaux, where he surely met Jews from the region’s highly acculturated Sephardic community that, a century earlier, had eagerly embraced Napoleon’s conditions for French citizenship.87 It is possible that al-Khalidi’s Jewish acquaintances in the French port city told him of this watershed event, which Herzl’s newly founded Zionist movement seemed to undermine.
Alternatively, al-Khalidi may have been thinking of the resolutions of the various Reform rabbinical conferences of the mid- to late nineteenth century that Gottheil mentioned in his encyclopedia article on “Zionism.”88 Gottheil had pointed to the 1845 “Conference of Rabbis” in Frankfurt-am-Main, the Philadelphia Conference of 1869, and the 1885 Pittsburgh Conference. The rabbis of the Frankfurt Conference, Gottheil writes, “decided to eliminate from the ritual ‘the prayers for the return to the land of our forefathers and for the restoration of the Jewish state.’ ” The language Gottheil cites from the Pittsburgh Conference’s resolutions even more closely matches al-Khalidi’s version of Mendelssohn’s theory: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” proclaimed these Reform rabbis, “and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor any of the laws concerning a Jewish state.”89 To al-Khalidi, these rabbinical assemblies—articulating what came to be known in modern Jewish historiography as “classical” Reform ideology90 and what al-Khalidi names with the shorthand “Mendelssohn’s theory”—irrevocably altered the nature of Judaism.
TRANSLATING CONSENSUS
Al-Khalidi’s theory of the illegitimacy of modern manifestations of Jewish nationalism, as I have thus far portrayed it, is remarkable for its concern with the internal dynamics and reasoning of Judaism. Yet his theory of the rabbinic consensus on “Mendelssohn’s theory” is curious, indeed, and may, at least in part, reflect the Islamic influences on al-Khalidi’s understanding of the way in which religious law is established.91 Consider once more the language al-Khalidi uses in defining the asqāmah:
wa-ajmaʿat ummatuhum ʿalā qubūlihā wa-sammū hādhā al-ijmāʿ bi-iṣṭilāḥ sharīʿatihim (asqāmah) wa-maʿnāhu ijmāʿ al-umma.
And their people [umma]92 agreed to accept it93 [i.e., Mendelssohn’s theory] and they named the consensus [ijmā‘] [which they had reached] “asqāmah”—a term from their religious law—which means the consensus [ijmā‘] of the people.
I highlight the Arabic terminology here because the word ijmā‘, which al-Khalidi equates with asqāmah, is of utmost importance. Ijmāʿ is the term used for the Islamic theory of “consensus,” one of the four recognized sources for determining law in Sunni Islam. As Wael Hallaq explains, ijmā‘
functions both as a sanctioning instrument and as a material source of law. Once agreement has been reached on an issue, usually a question of law, that issue becomes epistemologically certain and thus insusceptible to further interpretation…. The epistemological value attached to consensus renders this instrument so powerful in the realm of doctrine and practice in the community that it can override established practice as well as clear statements of the Qurʾan.94
This is precisely the function and power al-Khalidi imputes to the rabbis’ so-called asqāmah concerning Mendelssohn’s theory. In their consensus, their ijmā‘, the rabbis have overridden the established national nature of pre-Mendelssohnian Judaism and have thereby delegitimized any subsequent expression of Jewish nationality. “Mendelssohn’s theory” has become, to use using Hallaq’s words, “epistemologically certain and thus insusceptible to further interpretation.” Zionism, then, is not merely a violation of the opinion of a group of rabbis; it is a blatant contravention of now-unquestionable law.
This is not to say that al-Khalidi merely projected an Islamic concept onto Judaism without precedent or reason. Though it is not clear that al-Khalidi was familiar with this phenomenon, Jews especially of the medieval Islamic world (Maimonides, most famously) were apparently influenced by the Islamic notion of ijmā‘.95 Moreover, as we shall see in chapter 5, one of al-Khalidi’s textual sources, an Arabic work on the Talmud written by a Jewish contemporary, appeals to the tool of and the term ijmāʿ in its explanation of the composition of the mishnah. What is interesting, then, is not that al-Khalidi uses this concept but rather how he uses it: the stress he places on it, the term he claims it translates, and the contention that what happened with what he calls Mendelssohn’s theory represented just such an ijmā‘.
If, in al-Khalidi’s mind, the consensus, formal or otherwise, of the Jews in premodern Jewish history was that they were not merely a religion but a nation96 and that their nation retained historic links to Palestine, to which it wished to return, how could this new consensus adopting “Mendelssohn’s theory” overturn the earlier belief? To attempt to answer this question, we must consider in greater detail al-Khalidi’s particular religious milieu. While al-Khalidi was trained, as we have seen, in traditional Sunni Islamic studies, he and his family were intimately involved with a new religious modernist, reformist tendency within late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Islam that would become known as the Salafi movement.97 These modernists sought to reform Islam by looking to the model of the earliest followers of Muhammad (known as as-salaf aṣ-ṣāliḥ, “the worthy ancestors”). The fin de siècle Salafis contended that much of contemporary Islam did not conform to the practices of the original Muslim community and was burdened with habits and practices that had no justification in the religion. Islam thus could and should be creatively transformed to accommodate the new social and intellectual realities of the modern world, just as those original Muslims exercised judicious creativity in interpreting the Qurʾan and the Sunna for their own time.98
One of the most prominent and influential figures in the late nineteenth-century modernist reform movement was the Egyptian mufti Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905).99 ʿAbduh, according to George Hourani, “denied that priority in time necessarily meant superior wisdom, except in the case of the Companions and Successors” of Muhammad, that is, as-salaf aṣ-ṣāliḥ. As a result, ʿAbduh was open to
the possibility of modifying the legal rulings of earlier generations, whether because they can now be judged to have been mistaken or because, given new historical circumstances, the older views are obsolete or even harmful.100 In ʿAbduh’s words, a generation’s “obligation to obey consensus is due to the public interest, not to infallibility … and interest appears and disappears, and varies with different times and conditions.”101
Al-Khalidi—whose family library in Jerusalem contains many of ʿAbduh’s works, including one autographed by ʿAbduh himself—seems to have been influenced by this Salafi conception of evolving ijmā‘.102 If there had been an ijmāʿ among premodern Jews that held that the Jews were a nation, al-Khalidi might have explained, the consensus had evolved, given the “different times and conditions” in which post-Mendelssohnian Jewry lived. A new consensus declared that the Jews are now no longer a nation but rather purely a religion. That is to say, not only did al-Khalidi read an Islamic notion into Jewish history, he employed a particular theory thereof that Muslim thinkers were developing in his specific intellectual, religious, and social context.
In al-Khalidi’s own terms, though, might not Herzl’s Zionist congresses have represented the latest ijmā‘, now asserting that the Jews still are, or are once again, a nation wishing to return to Palestine, thereby overturning the imagined asqāmah concerning “Mendelssohn’s theory”? While, of course, it would have been inconvenient for al-Khalidi’s anti-Zionist case to concede that a new Jewish generation’s asqāmah had restored the Jews’ nationhood and their claim to Palestine, this political inconvenience is not necessarily what drove al-Khalidi’s interpretation. Notwithstanding the Zionist movement’s claim to speak on behalf of world Jewry, when al-Khalidi penned his manuscript in the years preceding the war, the Balfour Declaration, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, there was no Jewish asqāmah on Zionism to speak of. Many Jews, and particularly Jewish religious leaders of varied stripes including Reform and Orthodoxy, had rejected Zionism; al-Khalidi had no reason to imagine that Zionism constituted a new Jewish asqāmah.103
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