Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  This grouping of Christianity and Islam is suggestive of a move in Late Ottoman Palestine toward conceiving of the Arab population as a coherent body—even in religious terms—despite the apparent religious diversity among its constituent Muslims and Christians. Thus this passage on the Jews’ lack of faith in divine retribution and the afterlife is an illuminating piece of contemporary evidence that can inform the historiographical debates concerning the consolidation of Arab identity and Palestinian nationalism—and, in particular, the place of Zionism within this process.126

  This distinction between Judaism, on the one hand, and Islam and Christianity, on the other, in their theological or eschatological beliefs is of utmost importance as it has real consequences related to the ultimate subject of al-Khalidi’s manuscript. In reading the Jews’ Bible, writes al-Khalidi,

  one does not find any bit of the reports of the pleasantness of paradise nor of the torment of hell [jahannam] that appear in the Holy Qurʾan and no reports of the eternal life and the kingdom of heaven that appear in the Holy Gospels,127 but rather all of the excitement, intimidation, fascination, warning, promise, and threats that appeared in the Old Testament are limited to Zion. Religious happiness [in the Old Testament] is in possessing and ruling it [i.e., Zion], and using foreigners to cultivate its land and herd its livestock, and eat its general riches, and lord over their magnificence, and multiply in it through procreation and so on. Suffering is in its [Zion’s] destruction, the departure from it, and the rule of others in it.128

  It is not merely that Jews differ from Christians and Muslims—whose Scriptures, once again, are linked and, for these purposes, equated—in their theoretical beliefs about the afterlife and divine retribution. The Hebrew Bible and, it is implied, the People of that Book focus instead on Zion as the fundamental source of happiness and see punishment not in “the torment of hell” but in expulsion from Zion while others rule it. Al-Khalidi contends that the Jews, at least in the premodern period, were obsessed with the earthly possession of Palestine, while denying all otherworldly concerns. Thus he raises the lack of Jewish doctrine in the afterlife not necessarily to defame Jews in the eyes of those for whom belief in the afterlife, resurrection, and retribution is central to their self-identity but as part of the project of explaining to the reader the biblical basis of Zionism, and, consequently, the gravity of the dangers it portends.

  Indeed, as noted, al-Khalidi quotes the Hebrew Bible, in Arabic translation, frequently and extensively in his manuscript.129 The remarkable line above about Jews’ religious joy in “using foreigners to cultivate” the land of Zion, for example, is duly supported by al-Khalidi’s subsequent excerpt from the sixty-first chapter of the book of Isaiah (verses not cited in Gottheil’s encyclopedia article). Comforting the mourners of Zion, Isaiah predicts that they “shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations.” Isaiah offers a promise to Zion’s mourners (which al-Khalidi underlines) that “strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall till your land and dress your vines; but you shall be called priests of the Lord, you shall be named ministers of our God; you shall enjoy the wealth of the nations, and in their riches you shall glory” (Isaiah 61:4–6).130 While this Israelite prophecy may have been received in its biblical day as a fantasy of righting injustice and exacting revenge, to an Arab of Palestine in the early twentieth century it was understood as a threat of the gravest proportions. Zionist Jews have come not only to settle Palestine, al-Khalidi apparently concluded, but to exploit its population and use the Jews’ great wealth to do so. Isaiah’s prophecy was coming to pass before al-Khalidi’s own eyes: al-Khalidi had systematically surveyed the Jewish colonies and was intimately familiar with the Zionist moshavot (especially those that are known, in retrospect, as First Aliyah colonies) that depended on inexpensive Arab labor.131 The fact that, in his reading, the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish religion conceived of divine justice and religious satisfaction as enacted solely in the theater of Palestine had consequences too real and immediate to ignore.

  CHALLENGING THE INTEGRITY OF BIBLICAL PROPHECY

  Al-Khalidi’s concern with the Bible is not limited, however, to issues that explicitly pertain to Palestine and the problem of Zionism. Throughout his manuscript, for instance, al-Khalidi casts doubt on the divinity and antiquity of the Jews’ Torah. He begins a section of his text called “The Torah and Those Zionist Promises That Appear within It” with the following description of biblical prophecy:

  The People of the Book believe that the ideas of heavenly books were received by prophets in a state of revelation and that they [the prophets] gave expression to them [the ideas] in their usual speech after their return to the human state, in contrast to the Qurʾan, which was revealed in its words and its composition.132

  The implication that the words of the Jewish (and, indeed, Christian) prophets133 are not directly divine, as opposed to the unfiltered language—ipsissima verba—of God found in the Qurʾan, betrays something of al-Khalidi’s religious chauvinism.134

  Al-Khalidi was well aware that at least some Jews understood Jewish prophecy rather differently. In addition to Gottheil’s article from the Jewish Encyclopedia, one of al-Khalidi’s main sources for information about the Jews, and apparently his primary source for details of their religious beliefs, was a 148-page Arabic work called at-Talmūd: Aṣluhu wa-tasalsuluhu wa-ādābuhu (The Talmud: Its Origin, Its Transmission, and Its Morals). At-Talmūd, published in 1909 in Cairo, was the work of the Jewish intellectual Shimon Moyal, a member of a distinguished Sephardic family based in Jaffa. Moyal’s book, which will be dealt with in detail in chapter 5, sets out to introduce Arabic readers to the Jewish concepts of the written and oral Torahs before offering an Arabic translation of and commentary on the entire Talmud. In his section on prophecy, Moyal elaborates on the characteristics of prophecy as understood, in his mind, by Jews:

  The sign of prophecy was the loss, during the descent of revelation [nuzūl al-waḥy], of all senses except that of speech. The prophet would present his sayings and would recite his prophecy while he was absent from existence, like a dead person. But aside from the times of the descent of revelation upon him, he was rational, fully aware, and fulfilled all the religious and civil duties required by the Torah.135

  For Moyal, the Jewish prophets would receive revelation from God in an ecstatic, otherworldly state, but they would not wait until the cessation of the revelation before expressing their prophecy in language; this was done during the very moment of ecstatic revelation. Though he read Moyal’s account of biblical prophecy, al-Khalidi apparently rejected it, preferring a view that imagines a delay between the prophetic experience and the presentation of the prophecy in human terms. Moyal’s description of biblical prophecy136 closely accords with al-Khalidi’s account of Muhammad’s revelation—in both, the words of the prophet are the revealed words, unfiltered and with no delay. To insist on the superiority of Muhammad’s prophecy requires al-Khalidi to offer a different view of pre-Islamic prophecy. Whether it was to please his intended audience or to express his own beliefs and faith, al-Khalidi wrote his work with clear Islamic sensibilities.

  Al-Khalidi’s skepticism about the divinity of the words of the Torah extends beyond the imagined experiences of the scriptural prophets. In fact, following a long tradition of Islamic biblical criticism, al-Khalidi suggests that the true author of the Torah in its present form was not Moses, but rather Ezra the Scribe.137 Al-Khalidi inserts this view into sections of his manuscript that are adapted from Moyal’s book. Consider, for instance, the way in which Moyal describes Ezra: “Ezra the Priest and the Scribe, to whom is ascribed the script method known as the square or Assyrian method, and he is called the elder of that national renaissance [an-nahḍa al-qawmiyya].”138 A corresponding passage in al-Khalidi’s manuscript depicts Ezra and his biblical counterpart Nehemiah as follows:

  They were the ones who undertook that Israelite national renaissance [an-nahḍa al-qawmiyya
al-isrāʾīlīyya] and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple. They were the first to gather the books of the Torah and the Prophets, and they recorded them for the first time. The collection of the books of the Old Testament occurred in the fifth century bc, that is, after the return of the Children of Israel from the Babylonian exile. Ezra the Scribe, possessor of the book, had the greatest hand in the composition [tadwīn] of the Torah; to him is attributed the Hebrew script method, known as the square or Assyrian method.139

  Though al-Khalidi’s manuscript does not cite Moyal’s work here (it does do so, however, elsewhere in the text), this passage from “as-Sayūnīzm” seems to offer al-Khalidi’s elaboration and emendation of Moyal’s account in at-Talmūd. Several basic elements are present in both passages: Ezra the Scribe, the national renaissance, and the alternative names for the Hebrew script attributed to Ezra. What al-Khalidi has added to Moyal’s original, however, is of critical importance. Following an Islamic understanding of Ezra popularized by the great medieval Muslim polemicists ibn Hazm (994–1064) and as-Samawʾal (c. 1130–1180),140 al-Khalidi sees Ezra as the true author of the Jews’ Torah, which was thus written long after Moses’s death and far from Mount Sinai.141 As as-Samawʾal put it in his Silencing the Jews, “now this Torah that they have is in truth a book by Ezra, and not a book of God.”142 Given this long-standing polemical tradition, one cannot draw any definitive conclusions from al-Khalidi’s inclusion of this charge in his narrative. Nonetheless, one wonders to what extent al-Khalidi’s aversion to the latter-day “Israelite national renaissance” informed the way in which he perceived and portrayed Ezra the “nationalist” and Torah-forger.

  JEWS AND MONEY IN “AS-SAYŪNĪZM”

  Al-Khalidi asserted publicly that his antagonism was not against Jews but against Zionism.143 Nonetheless, elements of his manuscript betray a sentiment that is difficult to characterize as mere anti-Zionism.144 Such is particularly the case when it comes to his presentation of the relationship among Jews, money, and commerce. After quoting a number of Qurʾanic passages concerning the afterlife, al-Khalidi contrasts these with the beliefs of the Jews, for whom “religious happiness, rather, is worldly happiness, which, in their opinion, is abundant money and children. The holiest duties, for them, are two: the first is increasing descendants and children, and the other is the acquisition, accumulation, and increase of money.”145 This is not the first instance in which al-Khalidi describes what brings Jews “religious happiness.” As we found earlier, he contends that Jews find “religious happiness” in the possession of Zion. Now he adds two additional sources of Jewish religious happiness: the accumulation of wealth and the proliferation of offspring. Importantly, in accounting for the values of Jews, al-Khalidi appeals to their religion.

  The theme of the Jews’ obsession with money reappears throughout al-Khalidi’s manuscript. Writing of the Jews living under the rule of Alexander the Great, al-Khalidi contends that they “were infatuated with profit and money-changing and the rest of the commercial activities, as was their habit from antiquity in Egypt and Babylonia.”146 He perceives Jewish financial greed throughout Jewish history, and he seeks to highlight this phenomenon even when it does not appear in his literary source. Once more, a comparison of al-Khalidi’s manuscript to Moyal’s at-Talmūd is instructive. In a passage concerning Antiochus’s reign over Judea, Moyal writes:

  When the force of Antiochus’s oppression increased upon the Israelites in Judea, large groups [jamm ghafīr] of them emigrated to Egypt, where they found the freedom and safety that they lacked in their land, and where they enjoyed civil rights nearly equivalent to the rights of the Greeks themselves. So their numbers increased to the point that Alexandria itself came to have more than one million of them, i.e., approximately one-third of the population, if the Jewish scholar Philo’s estimate is correct.147

  Clearly utilizing Moyal’s work as his source, al-Khalidi offers a version of this account that is, for the most part, a verbatim reproduction of his source. The changes he makes, therefore, are of great interest:

  When the oppression of Antiochus, King of Syria, increased upon the Israelites, large groups [jamm ghafīr] of them emigrated to Egypt as there was safety and freedom there and they enjoyed civil rights nearly equivalent to the rights of the Greeks themselves. They worked in [the fields] that they loved—money-changing, resale for profit, monopoly, and all types of commerce and jewel trading—and they amassed much money. Their numbers increased to the point that Alexandria itself came to have more than a million of them, i.e., approximately a third of the population, if the Jewish scholar Philo’s estimate is correct.148

  As can readily be seen, al-Khalidi’s version takes Moyal’s text about the retreat of masses of Jews to Egypt, and especially Alexandria, and inserts within it a claim not only about the ways in which they earned their livelihood—namely, in commercial and financial fields—but also a statement that these were the economic spheres they “loved.”

  Moyal himself offers a different theory about the concentration of Jews in commerce. “The Jewish nation,” writes Moyal, “at the origin of its creation, worked in raising cattle and farming the land. It did not concern itself with commerce, which, in the period of this nation’s independence, was in the hands of the Canaanites.” The extent of Israelite aversion to commerce, he contends, is recognizable in the Hebrew prophets’ rebuke—“more than once”—of those who engage in trading. Acknowledging that the contemporary Jewish professional profile does not correspond with this supposed hostility toward commerce, Moyal concludes:

  And if we see that the members of the Israelite nation are now strongly inclined toward commerce and working with money, this is because of the bigotry of the nations in the Middle Ages. This is what forced them to abandon making a livelihood through crafts. Their fathers only found before them commerce and occupations in finance and commerce. They thus excelled in them [these fields] to the point that these became a talent passed from one generation to the next within the nation.149

  Moyal’s apologetic defense of Jews’ disproportionate involvement in finance and commerce points to the history of restrictions on Jewish professions, beginning in the medieval period.

  Al-Khalidi, in contrast, contends that the Jewish inclination toward commerce began long before the Middle Ages; indeed, this phenomenon already existed “in antiquity in Egypt and Babylonia” and resulted, it would seem, from Jews’ own preferences and interests. In Babylonia, the Jews “worked in usury and money changing and monopoly”; under the Islamic kingdoms, the Jews “amassed great wealth and they ascended to the highest salaries in the country”; in early modern Italy, “they worked in large trade and the sea trade and they amassed great wealth, which they hoarded. They were skilled in the works of the bank, and the production of loans and money-changing.” Al-Khalidi’s emphasis on Jews’ disproportionate presence in finance extends into his own period. “It is rare for Jews in Russia to work in agriculture and farming,” he explains, “because of their disinclination and unwillingness to do it and because of the prejudice of the laws that deal with their rights. Rather, they live mainly from commerce, then from manufacture. They are superior to the Christian in commerce because of their small expenses and [the fact that they are] content with [having] very little.”150 Like Moyal, al-Khalidi acknowledges, at least in the case of nineteenth-century Russia, the impact of laws that limit the areas in which Jews can seek their livelihoods. However, the first of the two explanations al-Khalidi offers for the Jews’ engagement in commerce is their own “disinclination and unwillingness” to participate in other fields. While he notes the legal restrictions on Jews’ economic activity, they are secondary.

  AN AMBIVALENT ASSESSMENT OF (RUSSIAN) ANTISEMITISM

  A close reading of this manuscript suggests that al-Khalidi was struggling with himself, or with his sources, in trying to account for the condition of the Jews. On the one hand, he is acutely aware of and sensitive to the effects of antisemitic prejudice and legislation in
Europe. On the other hand, he seems unable or unwilling fully to absolve Jews of responsibility for their situation.

  In a long passage on the position of Jews in nineteenth-century Russia, al-Khalidi details the various discriminatory laws imposed against the Jewish population151—additional taxes exclusively for Jews, fees for the right to wear certain types of clothing,152 duties on Sabbath candles and kosher slaughtering,153 prohibitions against Jews’ working on Sundays and Christian holidays,154 and regulations permitting a Jewish convert to Christianity to divorce his or her Jewish spouse. Al-Khalidi offers three explanations for Russia’s harsh treatment of Jews. The first is Russians’ “religious animosity and their Christian fanaticism [taʿaṣṣubuhum155] as they believe that the Jews killed Christ, peace be upon him.” Because the Jews murdered Christ, Christian eternally despise them, al-Khalidi explains. In this passage, al-Khalidi does not clearly denounce this religious hatred, but his use of the term taʿaṣṣub—fanaticism, bigotry, or chauvinism—in this context suggests his negative judgment of Christian religious antisemitism.

  The second cause al-Khalidi cites for these discriminatory laws is Russians’ “animosity based in economics,” their hatred of “people who are satisfied with small profit and insignificant prices compared to the Christian Russians.” When a Jew opens a store next to that of a Christian, al-Khalidi explains,