it does not take long before the Christian has no market for his merchandise and declares bankruptcy due to his inability to keep up with the Jews in the field of commerce. This is especially so because the Jew does not work in hard labor, agriculture, farming, or mining, which are the basis of the acquisition of wealth. Rather, the Jews acquire preexisting wealth and the children of the foreigner are his plowmen and his vine-trimmers as was mentioned earlier in the Book of Isaiah: and they shall enjoy the wealth of the nations and glory in their riches.156
Jews are described as aggressive businesspeople willing to accept low standards of living as they force their gentile competitors out of the market.157 In this second, economic explanation for Russian antisemitism, al-Khalidi does not quite blame Russian Jewry for the bigotry they face, but his analysis of their economic situation, and particularly his assessment of their resistance to those “productive” fields that are the actual “basis of the acquisition of wealth,” suggest that al-Khalidi perceived their plight to be at least partially self-inflicted. Importantly, even in his discussion of the economic motivation for anti-Jewish bigotry, al-Khalidi again cites Isaiah’s prophecy of Jewish exploitation of gentiles; the Bible remains central for al-Khalidi’s understanding of the Jews, even in his explanation of their economic activities and inclinations.
The third explanation for antisemitism that al-Khalidi proposes is Russians’ alleged “racial hatred” (‘adāwatuhum fī al-ʿunṣur wa-l-ʿirq) of Jews. “The Jewish race (al-ʿunṣur),” writes al-Khalidi, “is very populous, with many children. Where they settle, their numbers increase and they multiply in a short period. In the cities of Poland, for example, they are more numerous than the Christians.”158 The ever-increasing Jews differ from the gentiles not only in religion, al-Khalidi explains, but also “in their language, nationality (qawmiyyatihim), customs, and particular interests,” and thus Jews “consider the people among whom they live to be strangers.” “Therefore”—note the direction of the causality that al-Khalidi perceives to be driving this phenomenon—“the Russians look at them [the Jews] as foreigners and they do not bestow upon them all of the rights that are bestowed upon the Christian Russian people.”159 In pointing to Russian Christian’ “racial hatred,” al-Khalidi appears to evince a certain sympathy for Jews, yet that appearance is tempered by his suggestion that this racial hatred stems from the fact that the populous Jews perceive their gentile neighbors as “strangers.” The Russian government’s discrimination against its Jewish population is understandable, perhaps even justifiable, given Jews’ own chauvinistic attitudes. Moreover, the reader notices that these two supposed characteristics of Jews—their insatiable appetite for wealth and unceasing biological reproduction—are at once the cause of antisemitism and, as al-Khalidi explains earlier, that which provide Jews with true “religious happiness.” Even in al-Khalidi’s analysis of the economic and racial motivations of contemporary antisemitism, religion remains at its core.
JEWS FROM EAST AND WEST
Al-Khalidi recognized, however, that the condition of Jews was not uniform across all countries, even in Europe. When his presentation of Jewish history reaches its ultimate focus, “the Zionist Question,” al-Khalidi discusses the means taken by the Ottoman government to halt Jewish immigration through the so-called Red Slip policy. This policy allowed foreigners to enter Palestine with the equivalent of a three-month visitor’s visa. The foreigner would yield his or her passport to the Ottoman authorities upon entry and would receive, in its place, a red-hued permit that provided entry for up to three months. Some time before the end of the term, the visitor was expected to leave Palestine and retrieve his or her passport from the Ottoman authorities. Explaining that the Ottoman policy targeted Jews from Eastern Europe, al-Khalidi writes:
The Ottoman government took this measure against the Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania because the immigration of the Jews to Palestine came, for the most part, from Eastern Europe because of the humiliation and poverty in which they live. Those [Jews] who reside in western European countries, however, live comfortably with freedom and equality, and they are in control of finance and commerce.160 It therefore does not cross their minds to leave their profits and to settle in the arid lands of Palestine, deprived of most of the conditions of civilization.161
Al-Khalidi stresses the distinction between the Jews of Eastern Europe and those of western Europe. The former, he argues, live in squalid conditions under antagonistic regimes, isolated and alienated from their non-Jewish neighbors. These are the Jews against whom the Ottoman Red Slip policy is aimed, as these are the ones who are trying to immigrate to Palestine. The latter, the Jews of western Europe, al-Khalidi contends, are quite satisfied with their situation, enjoying full civic equality while they dominate the financial world and assimilate among gentiles. So content with their status, they have no interest in “backward,” “unfertile” Palestine. “Nevertheless,” al-Khalidi acknowledges, “the Zionists aroused the Jews of Italy, who have influence on the government because of their intermingling and assimilation among the people.” As a result of the pressure from powerful, assimilated Italian Jews, explains al-Khalidi, the Italian government “protested against the prevention of Jews from settling in Palestine and said that it does not distinguish between its Christian and Jewish subjects.”162 In these words about the Red Slip policy, the disparate elements of al-Khalidi’s perception of contemporary Jewry are united, however uneasily, and linked to the problem of Palestine and Zionism. First, al-Khalidi recognizes a distinction between the Jews of Eastern Europe and those of the West. Whether because of distinct external conditions—a more liberal and tolerant gentile host society—or because, in internal mindset, the Jews of western Europe were more prepared and eager to be accepted within their host society, western Jews have fully embraced “Mendelssohn’s theory.” They have shed their particularities in all but religion, “intermingling and assimilating” with their gentile neighbors. The fact that these western Jews continued and have succeeded in their efforts to dominate finance and commerce is only evidence that they have maintained their religion in which, as al-Khalidi sees it, amassing wealth is among the greatest religious joys. Though western European Jews have abandoned the age-old desire of a return to Palestine, the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe have not, and because of the wealth (and consequent influence) of the former, the Ottoman government faces pressure, such as that from the Italian government, to admit the latter.
In al-Khalidi’s appraisal, money is central to the Zionist effort. “With their money,” he explains, “they supported newspapers that defend Zionism and that broadcast the benefits of the colonization” of Palestine. He names a Turkish newspaper, for example, which, he alleges, takes from the Zionists’ Anglo-Levantine Bank “whatever it needs in terms of expenditures,” as much as “one hundred and fifty thousand francs per year.” It is thus no surprise that this newspaper’s office, its management, and its printing house are found in “one of the most famous and expensive streets of Istanbul.” This particular newspaper, moreover, is not the only one bankrolled by Zionists, al-Khalidi asserts; they support many others, “they compensated those authors and writers who served them,” and they bribed those governors and rulers who did their bidding.163
The immense wealth of the Jews, as al-Khalidi saw it, had an impact on Palestine in even more tangible ways than the Zionists’ suspected bribes of newspapers and government officials. Al-Khalidi had personally surveyed the Zionist colonies in Palestine; these “twenty-eight colonies covering 279,491 dunams” were founded “with the money of Rothschild and other rich men like him.”164 From al-Khalidi’s perspective, the Jews’ money was a direct threat to Palestine, as it was the means Jews employed to appropriate increasingly large tracts of Palestine. With this wealth, Jews
are still wandering in this gradually-expanding colony [istiʿmār tadrījī] on the lookout for opportunities to achieve a large colony, such as the purchase of the Bei
san Valley or taking a concession in the colonization of the Jordan Valley and the nearby vast, fertile lands and plains that resemble the land of Egypt and the Nile Valley, or the colonization of the district of Beer Sheba to the Egyptian borders and the Sinai Peninsula. They have already purchased substantial land in Beer Sheba and they are trying to purchase the Wadi Hawarith … and Kfar Saba in order to link these two colonies and take possession of all of the coasts from Haifa to Jaffa and the border of Egypt.165
In this passage, one observes al-Khalidi’s sense of gloom as he considered the predicament of Palestine. The Jews are engaged in a process of “gradual colonization,” and with boundless financial resources at their disposal, they will continue to acquire the most fertile and strategically valuable areas of the country, first in isolated locations, but eventually with expansive territorial contiguity. If Zionism’s efforts are not checked, so al-Khalidi implies, there will be no room for Palestine’s Arabs.166
Just as al-Khalidi raises the traditional Islamic polemical attack on Judaism concerning Jews’ lack of faith in the afterlife to account for their obsession with Palestine, so too does he employ the common European-Christian charge of Jewish money-hunger167 to explain to his reader how Jews have succeeded in advancing Zionism despite the apparent opposition of the Ottoman government and the local Arab population. In both cases, conventional prejudices from disparate sources are utilized not for the sake of defamation—or at least not only for this purpose—but as explanatory tools in al-Khalidi’s effort to understand Zionism.
NAJIB NASSAR, JEWISH TERRITORIALISM, AND “MENDELSSOHN’S THEORY”
Al-Khalidi recognized that Zionism was not the only Jewish movement seeking a new home for the Jews. Other movements—territorialism or non-Palestinocentric Jewish nationalism—sought refuge for Jews in regions outside of Palestine.168 Interestingly, al-Khalidi’s uncle Yusuf Diyaʾ, in the same 1899 letter to Theodor Herzl mentioned above, appeared to endorse the idea, at least in theory. “That one searches for a place somewhere for the unfortunate Jewish people—nothing would be more just and fair,” wrote Yusuf Diyaʾ. He continued: “My God, the earth is big enough. There are still uninhabited lands where one could place the millions of poor Jews who maybe would be happy there and would constitute a nation one day. This would perhaps be the best and most rational solution of the Jewish question. But, by God, leave Palestine alone.”169 Yusuf Diyaʾ was not opposed to the idea of an ingathering of impoverished and persecuted Jews from across their Diaspora to a single location. Moreover, he imagined the future possibility of these Jews’ becoming a “nation,” by which he appears to mean the creation of their own political state. Ruhi al-Khalidi’s uncle and intellectual mentor, in other words, did not insist on the inviolability of “Mendelssohn’s theory” eliminating the Jews’ sense of constituting a distinct nation;170 in fact, he believed that the migration of Jewish masses to an “uninhabited land” might well be “the best and most rational solution” to the problem of the Jews. Zionism’s flaw is that it has chosen a land that is decidedly not uninhabited. Jews, following Yusuf Diyaʾ’s reasoning, need not abandon their ambitions for an independent territory; they must simply shift their collective gaze elsewhere.
Before turning to the younger al-Khalidi’s position on this issue, we must recall that he was not the only Arab in Palestine to undertake a translation of Gottheil’s extensive “Zionism” article. In 1911 Najib Nassar, editor of al-Karmil newspaper in Haifa and an outspoken opponent of Zionism, published a sixty-four-page pamphlet called aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya: Tārīkhuhu, gharaduhu, ahamiyyatuhu (mulakhasan ‘an al-ensyklūbīdiyya al-yahūdiyya) (Zionism: Its History, Purpose, and Importance [excerpted from the Jewish Encyclopedia]). In publishing this translation, Nassar made his own purpose explicit: he sought to show that, contrary to the view recently expressed by the Ottoman grand vizier, Zionism was not merely a dream171 of fanatics, but a very real threat that required decisive and sustained opposition from the highest levels of the Ottoman administration. There could be no better source to demonstrate the serious nature of Zionist intentions and activities, Nassar reasoned, than the Jews’ own encyclopedia.
In his analysis of Nassar’s aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya, Neville Mandel contends that Nassar engaged in a systematic manipulation of Gottheil’s article. According to Mandel, Nassar slashed from his translation most of Gottheil’s references to internal discord within the Jewish and Zionist ranks and to Jewish territorial projects outside of Palestine.172 It strikes me that Mandel overstates his case. After all, Nassar acknowledges that Herzl’s Judenstaat proposed either Palestine or Argentina for the site of the Jewish state; he mentions the al-Arish suggestion as well as the East Africa considerations; and twice he even adds mention of a supposed English rabbinic decree against Zionism.173 Nonetheless, it is true that Gottheil’s article emphasizes these events and movements more than Nassar does. Nassar’s thesis—asserting that Zionism must be deemed a grave menace to the Ottoman Empire in general and to Palestine in particular—guided the way in which he selected the passages from Gottheil’s encyclopedia entry and led him to excise those parts that undermined his perception of the serious threat of Zionism.
Al-Khalidi’s aim in writing his manuscript was different from that of Nassar, as we have discovered, even though al-Khalidi certainly agreed that Zionism was a genuine danger for Palestine. One way to discern the difference between the two works is to compare them on the very issues that Mandel has highlighted concerning Nassar’s pamphlet. We have already seen that al-Khalidi writes unreservedly about Jewish opponents of Zionism. In contrast to Nassar, who leaves out from his translation Gottheil’s discussion of the Jewish Reform movement’s opposition to Zionism,174 “Mendelssohn’s theory” and the so-called asqāmah against Jewish nationalism are central to al-Khalidi’s narrative.
The comparison between Nassar’s pamphlet and al-Khalidi’s manuscript is somewhat more complicated when it comes to Jewish territorialist ventures beyond Palestine. While Nassar consistently minimizes these ventures, al-Khalidi discusses some extensively and downplays others. Just like Nassar, al-Khalidi does not give much attention to the explosive East Africa controversy, for instance, even though Gottheil’s entry deals with it at great length. Unlike Nassar, though, al-Khalidi presents a protracted discussion of Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s project of moving masses of Jews to Argentina, a scheme mentioned only in passing in Gottheil’s article. After laying out the details of the scheme and the 1892 negotiations with Russian officials, al-Khalidi takes pains to emphasize that de Hirsch’s Argentina plan was quite different from Herzl’s Zionism. “There was not the slightest Zionist attachment, neither morally nor politically,” in de Hirsch’s plan, writes al-Khalidi, “nor was there a thought in his mind of establishing a Jewish state, neither then nor in the future. Rather, his project was the incorporation of the Jewish immigrants into Argentinean citizenship quickly and easily.”175 De Hirsch, in other words, was a philanthropist who fully abided by “Mendelssohn’s theory” in all respects: he did not attempt to reconnect the severed link between the Jews and Palestine and he did not treat the Jews as a nation.176 He simply wished to transfer suffering Jews to a new country, the nationality of which they would immediately adopt.
Perhaps al-Khalidi passed over the East Africa plan because it complicated his theory of Jewish history. Al-Khalidi, like his uncle Yusuf Diyaʾ, recognized the suffering of the masses of Jews in Eastern Europe; as we have seen, he records their oppression under the czar in minute detail. He therefore understood the impulse to find a refuge for Jews wherever it might be. Yet, as one who acknowledged and comprehended the historical Jewish link to Palestine, the notion of the Jews’ seeking nationally to settle a territory other than Palestine (as was the case with the East Africa plan) must have been somewhat mystifying. The nationalist “territorialist” position undercut the premodern bond between the Jews and Zion, while simultaneously violating the modern “theory of Mendelssohn” by still maintaining Jewish peoplehoo
d and the will for Jewish self-rule.
Al-Khalidi treats de Hirsch’s Argentina plan sympathetically, yet he underscores its ultimate failure. In the end, it helped to sustain “1, 200 families, or twenty thousand people,” writes al-Khalidi, “which is hardly worth mentioning relative to the Jews who remained in Russia, whose numbers exceeded four million.” Al-Khalidi concludes, “If we add this example to the earlier examples of colonies in Palestine, we are able to foresee the destiny of the Jewish kingdom of which the Zionists dream.”177
CONCLUSION
In his manuscript, al-Khalidi was struggling with a number of competing, sometimes contradictory impulses, informed by the various components of his complex identity. He was a serious scholar; he had studied Jewish history from sources written by Jews in multiple languages, and he did not question the Jewish historical claim to Palestine. He was also a Muslim, highly educated in his own religious tradition. This religious heritage brought with it particular perspectives on how religious systems function as well as ideas (including rather unflattering ones) concerning Jews. At the same time, al-Khalidi had spent much time—both during his later education as well as during his professional life—in fin de siècle Europe, where he found yet another prevalent image of Jews. Indeed, al-Khalidi was in France during the Dreyfus Affair. Though he might well have sided with the Dreyfusards, the antisemitic stereotypes he encountered in Europe, willy-nilly, appear to have found their way into his thinking about Jews. Nonetheless, al-Khalidi was a liberal democrat, and he sympathized deeply with the suffering of Jews in Eastern Europe. Finally, he was a patriot of the Ottoman Empire, and he felt enduring loyalty to Palestine and its Arab population. He desperately sought to protect his homeland and its people from foreign domination. All these competing impulses find expression in al-Khalidi’s manuscript. Though the particular combination or configuration of these impulses cannot be generalized to the entirety of the Arab or Muslim population of Late Ottoman Palestine, many of al-Khalidi’s fellow Arabs and coreligionists would have experienced at least some of them. In al-Khalidi’s manuscript, then, we are able to witness how one individual negotiated these competing impulses as he tried to make sense of his new neighbors in Palestine and of Zionism, the political movement that brought them there.
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