* * *
1 ha-Ẓevi, November 2, 1909.
2 As a result, al-Khalidi’s position is often cited in the scholarship on the early Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionism. See Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 77; Beʾeri, Reshit ha-sikhsukh yisraʾel-ʿarav, 1882–1911, 146. On Ben-Yehuda’s motivations for the interview, see Lang, Daber ʿivrit!, 623.
3 On Ben-Yehuda’s disillusion with al-Khalidi by 1912, see Lang, Daber ʿivrit!, 615–16.
4 Asad, Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī.
5 I thank Rashid Khalidi for generously granting me access to this invaluable document.
6 The Jewish Encyclopedia (JE) was published by Funk and Wagnalls between 1901 and 1906. For a study of the encyclopedia and its significance in American Jewish history, see Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America.
7 See the preface to the JE.
8 These biographical data are gleaned from al-Khālidī, “Kitāb as-sayūnīzm aw al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya li-Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī al-mutawaffā sanat 1913”; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; Mannā‘, Aʿlām filasṭīn fī awākhir al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmānī (1800–1918); al-Khateeb, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi.”
9 The first Ottoman Parliament lasted for less than one year (March 1877 through February 1878) during the Ottoman Empire’s “first constitutional era” (1876–1878).The constitution was then suspended by the sultan and only restored three decades later, after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Shortly thereafter, elections were held for the new Ottoman Parliament. See Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 118–23, 150–67. Al-Khalidi successfully ran for a parliamentary position in the election of November–December 1908 and then again in the election of February–April 1912.
10 First published in 1904; republished in 1912. This book is actually a collection of articles al-Khalidi wrote in the journal al-Hilāl between 1902 and 1904. As Brugman notes, “despite its pretentious title, the work chiefly dealt with Victor Hugo, apart from some passages about the Arabic balāgha and about the literary connections between Arabic literature and the French and English literatures.” Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, 331. See also Kasmieh, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi 1864–1913,” 135–36.
11 Despite its hagiographic tone, Kasmieh’s article offers useful insights on al-Khalidi’s varied interests. See “Ruhi Al-Khalidi 1864–1913,” 132.
12 Though Shuly Rubin Schwartz is correct in pointing to Gottheil’s reference to Herzl as “a martyr to the Jewish cause” as evidence of Gottheil’s “decided slant in favor of the modern political movement [Zionism] to which he was devoted,” the bulk of Gottheil’s article on the history of Zionism is written more dispassionately. See Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America.
13 In the scholarship on the Arabs and Zionism, al-Khalidi is best known for his public broadside against Zionism in the Ottoman Parliament in May 1911. In response to an earlier speaker’s demand that the national and religious beliefs of all groups within the empire must be respected, al-Khalidi began by asserting that he was not an antisemite but simply an opponent of Zionism. He proceeded by offering a brief history of Ottoman Jewry since the Jews’ expulsion from Spain and then continued with an exposition on the intellectual roots of Zionism from the Bible onward. Al-Khalidi’s speech, the few others that supported it, and the general resistance his views encountered among the other Ottoman parliamentarians, were widely publicized in the contemporary Arabic press. See Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 112.
14 For a succinct review of the development of schools in Ottoman Palestine, and al-Khalidi’s own education, see Kasmieh, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi 1864–1913,” 123–31.
15 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 76–77.
16 Al-Khalidi studied at the ruşdiyye schools in Jerusalem and Tripoli and at the Sultaniyye schools in Beirut. See ibid., 76–77. For a concise overview of the development of various forms of education in Palestine, see Ayalon, Reading Palestine, 19–39. See also Khalidi, “Intellectual Life in Late Ottoman Jerusalem,” 225.
17 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 77. For an example of the schedule of subjects taught in the AIU Jerusalem school in the late nineteenth century, see the 1892 “Ecole de l’Alliance Israélite à Jérusalem: Programme des Classes,” bk. 2, p. 316, in CAHJP AIU Jerusalem archival file. The languages included in the academic program were Arabic, French, Hebrew, and Turkish. According to Ben-Arieh, “the first to recognize the importance of the [Alliance] school were not Jews but gentiles, among them the district governor and the Khalidi and al-Husseini families.” Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century: Emergence of the New City, 269. Of the Alliance school’s early history, Jeff Halper notes that, with one exception (David Yellin), “all the pupils attending were non-Europeans—Jews of Sephardi of Middle Eastern background and a number of Arabs.” Halper, Between Redemption and Revival, 174.
18 In 1885 Hartwig Derenbourg (1844–1908), son of Orientalist scholar Joseph Derenbourg, was appointed to the chair in Arabic and to the first chair in Islam at the École des Hautes Études. He studied, inter alia, the Arabic writings of the medieval Jewish scholar Saadiah and compiled a catalog of Arabic manuscripts in Spain. See “Derenburg,” EJ2.
19 The French version, “Statistique de l’Univers Musulman,” was published under “Rouhi el Khalidy.” For the Arabic version, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 237n.76.
20 See Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 73–78. Lockman employs the characterization of the homo islamicus—especially the nineteenth-century European Orientalist perception of the “Islamic man” as “something quite separate, sealed off in his own specificity”—set forth in Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, 60.
21 The Khalidi Library was formally founded at the end of the nineteenth century with manuscripts and books collected by members of the family over centuries. Today the library exists in two separate locations, both just outide of Bab as-Silsala in the Old City of Jerusalem. One location contains an extensive collection of Islamic manuscripts; the other, known as “the annex,” holds printed books, journals, and newspapers in Arabic, Turkish, and European languages. See Conrad, “The Khalidi Library.”
22 See al-Khālidī, “Kitāb as-sayūnīzm aw al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya li-Muḥammad Rūḥīal-Khālidī al-mutawaffā sanat 1913.” In this article, Walid Khalidi offers a biography of Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi and outlines the structure and content of the text. See also Kasmieh, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi 1864–1913,” 136–40, which relies entirely on Walid al-Khalidi’s article.
23 Comparing writing known to be from al-Khalidi’s own hand to the text of these smaller notebooks, Walid Khalidi has concluded that these are Ruhi al-Khalidi’s original composition.
24 The variations between the two versions are generally only minor, and, according to Rashid Khalidi, the copyist’s version was probably created during Ruhi al-Khalidi’s lifetime and supervised by al-Khalidi himself, permitting the scholar to use the more legible and organized version with reasonable confidence that it represents al-Khalidi’s work.
25 Here I follow Walid Khalidi’s chapter divisions, in “Kitāb as-sayūnīzm aw al-masʾalaaṣ-ṣahyūniyya li-Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī al-mutawaffā sanat 1913,” 42–43.
26 The first Jewish public library in Jerusalem (Midrash Abravanel) was founded in 1892 by the B’nai Brith organization. The Jewish National Library in Jerusalem was founded in 1894; this latter institution united the B’nai Brith library as well as the then-defunct library of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (beit ha-sfarim li-vnei yisraʾel). On these Jewish libraries of Late Ottoman Jerusalem, see Salmon, “ha-Yishuv ha-ashkenazi ha-ʿironi be-ereẓ yisraʾel (1880–1903),” 590–92.
27 Al-Khalidi, to be sure, was not the only Arab in Palestine to make use of this Jewish Encyclopedia article for his presentation and analysis of Zionism. See my discussion below of Najib Nassar’s articles and pamphlet on Zionism.
> 28 For a contemporary mention of Gottheil in Palestine, describing him as “the famous Orientalist … head of the School of Archaeology in our city,” see ha-Ḥerut 2:86 (April 20, 1910). The American School of Archaeology at Jerusalem (later renamed the American School of Oriental Research) was founded in 1900 by the American semiticist Charles Cutler Torrey.
29 According to Rashid Khalidi, Gottheil is listed among the Khalidi Library’s visitors in the library’s guestbook. The guestbook that was kindly shown to me by Haifa al-Khalidi appears to have been first used in the late 1920s, so there is no clear evidence that Gottheil visited the library during his 1910–1911 stay in Palestine. An intellectual biography of Richard James Horatio Gottheil, an American Zionist expert in Arabic and Muslim-Jewish relations in the medieval period, has yet to be written.
30 See Journal of American Oriental Society 18 (April 1897), 387. Unable to locate a list of participants at the 1897 International Congress of Orientalists in Paris, I am uncertain whether Gottheil attended that meeting.
31 This article was jointly written by Kaufmann Kohler and Ignaz Goldziher. Kohler (1843–1926) was born in Bavaria before immigrating to the United States where he became a leading Reform rabbi and president (1903–1921) of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College. In 1885, Kohler convened the so-called Pittsburg Conference, which will be discussed below. This Jewish Encyclopedia article provides evidence that Kohler was familiar with al-Khalidi’s scholarship; it is not clear, however, whether the two figures knew one another personally. If they were acquaintances, we might better understand al-Khalidi’s conception of Jewish history—and particularly the revolution of modern Jewish history—as laid out below. Goldziher (1850–1921), a Hungarian Jewish scholar, was an expert on, inter alia, the history of Islamic hadith and was among the initiators and contributors to the Enzyklopedie des Islam. See Conrad, “Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan.”
32 This was the umbrella organization of local American Zionist societies and the predecessor to the Zionist Organization of America.
33 Encyclopedic, but not necessarily pretending to complete objectivity. In his 1912 forward to his book called Zionism, Gottheil questioned the necessity and even the value of objectivity in historical writing: “It is sometimes held that an historian must be unbiased, and must stand vis-à-vis to his subject much as a physician does to his patient. Such detachment may be valuable for a mere chronicler, to whom dry dates and lifeless facts are all-important. But a people has a soul, just as individual human beings have. To understand that soul, something more is needed than mere dates and facts. If evolution is creative, as Monsieur Bergson holds, the attempt must be made to understand in what that creative spirit consists, and this can be attained only by active sympathy with the peculiar phase of the soul-life the historian has to depict. This need not prevent him from taking a broad view of the opinion of others who do not see the light in exactly the same fashion.” See Gottheil, Zionism, 14.
34 For an excellent study of Arabic literacy in Palestine, see Ayalon, Reading Palestine.
35 The word used here is ifranj, literally “French.” According to Ayalon, “ifranj, the Arabicization of ‘Franks,’ was originally attributed to that particular people as distinct from other European ethnic groups; by the eve of the nineteenth century, however, it had come to denote Christian Europe at large.” See Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East, 16.
36 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 1.
37 The suffix “-ism,” or a close equivalent, such as “-ismus,” is found in English, German, Russian, and the various Romance languages.
38 The reversal appears in both the original version and that of the copyist. David and Solomon are mentioned frequently in the Qurʾan, but there does not appear to be any ambiguity that Solomon is the son of David, and not vice versa. Sura 27 says that “Solomon succeeded David,” and Sura 38 claims that “We gave Solomon to David.” I assume that this was simply an accidental error (perhaps al-Khalidi intended to write abū rather than bin) that was not caught by the copyist.
39 Naṣṣār, aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya. This text will be discussed later in this chapter.
40 Though late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Arab anti-Zionist polemics have developed a discourse of denial of Jewish historical claims to Palestine (represented by Yasser Arafat’s famous, if apocryphal, “What Temple?” rhetorical quip), this denial, like all ideas, also has a history. Future research might seek to trace the historical development of the position, which has been informed by a complex array of political, religious, archeological, and, recently, genetic arguments.
41 On Yusuf Diyaʾ al-Khalidi, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 67ff.
42 The last governmentally-recognized Chief Rabbi of France, Kahn (1839–1905) was an early member of Hibbat Zion who sympathized with Herzl. See “Kahn, Zadoc,” in EJ2, 11:724.
43 The original seven-page letter is held in the Central Zionist Archives (CZA H197). For references to it, see, e.g., Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 74–75; Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 63; Marcus, Jerusalem 1913, 46–47; La Guardia, War without End, 205.
44 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 15.
45 The book on Hugo was published the year before al-Khalidi’s Death. al-Khālidī, Tārīkh ‘ilm al-adab ʿind al-ifranj wa-l-ʿarab wa-Fīktūr Hūgū.
46 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 15. Unless otherwise noted, I use the New Revised Standard Version for translations of biblical texts into English.
47 Nor, for that matter, are they found in Nassar’s aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya, which appears to list only those passages mentioned in Gottheil’s “Zionism” article.
48 Al-Khalidi uses the phrase al-kitābāt al-midārjiyya in translating/transliterating Gottheil’s phrase “midrashic writings.”
49 Al-Khalidi first transliterates “messiah” into Arabic script and then translates it: al-massayā ay al-masīḥ.
50 Gottheil uses the term “philosophers.”
51 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 23.
52 This passage is found as well in Naṣṣār, aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya. Nassar, however, inserts al-Ḥaram ash-Sharīf (the Noble Sanctuary), i.e, the Temple Mount, as opposed to al-Khalidi’s al-masjid al-aqṣā, in identifying this location. This difference may be connected to the different religious affiliations of Nassar and al-Khalidi, the latter preferring the unambiguously Qurʾanic term while the former offers a more general name relating to the area’s holiness. Given the common presumption that the ancient Jewish temple stood at the center of Herod’s Temple Mount, approximately where the Dome of the Rock now stands, it is curious that al-Khalidi identified the Temple with al-Aqsa rather than with the Dome.
53 In chapter 4 we will find that al-Khalidi was not the only one of his Arab intellectual contemporaries to equate the Temple and al-Aqsa. See al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 726.
54 Tracing the history of this idea, Mark Cohen explains that “already at the end of the Middle Ages one encounters among Jews the belief that medieval Islam provided a peaceful haven for Jews, whereas Christendom relentlessly pursued them.” Later, in the nineteenth century, “the fathers of modern, scientific study of Jewish history transformed this perception into a historical postulate.” Cohen describes the way in which both Christian and Muslim Arabs used this notion in the twentieth century, especially in their opposition to Zionism. See Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 3–8.
55 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnizm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 28.
56 Al-Khalidi uses the term qawmiyya, which, in the early twentieth century, could mean either nationalism or nationality. See P. J. Vatikiotis, M. Brett, A.K.S. Lambton, C. H. Dodd, G. E. Wheeler, F. Robinson, “Kawmiyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam.
57 Al-Khalidi uses the term at-tashabbuh, li
terally “imitation,” though perhaps “acculturate among” would more accurately match the sense implied here.
58 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 2
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 On the absence from Mendelssohn’s oeuvre of a “direct explicit statement … that the Jews are not a nation, but only a religion,” see Barzilay, “Smolenskin’s Polemic against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,” 18.
62 See Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion, 13–28.
63 Nor is this to say that al-Khalidi was the first to make this claim. The early Zionist thinker Peretz Smolenskin (d. 1885) understood Mendelssohn very similarly. Isaac Barzilay has described the ways in which Smolenskin, who wrote a generation before al-Khalidi, misunderstands or misrepresents Mendelssohn’s belief in Jewish nationhood. Though Mendelssohn “can be defended as a believer in Jewish nationhood, it is not a strong defense,” Barzilay contends, as the claim “is only formally correct, but not substantially, especially not in the framework of Judaism of Mendelssohn’s own time.” Barzilay, “Smolenskin’s Polemic against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,” 18–28.
64 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Or, on Religious Power and Judaism, 132.
65 Ibid.
66 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 212.
67 Taylor, A Secular Age, 2.
68 Mendelssohn advocated elements of acculturation even as he attempted to combat acculturation in other respects (e.g., by reintroducing Jews to their linguistic and religious heritage and by arguing against the rejection of Jewish law).
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