Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  69 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Or, on Religious Power and Judaism, 133.

  70 “Johann David Michaelis’ Arguments against Dohm (1782),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, 43.

  71 That is, to attempt to bring about redemption through human effort.

  72 See “Moses Mendelssohn: Remarks Concerning Michaelis’ Response to Dohm (1783)” in ibid., 48–49.

  73 Mendelssohn was presumably referring to the passage in the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Ketubot 110b–111a in which the people of Israel are said to forswear “going up by a wall” and “rebelling against the nations of the world.”

  74 In the Jewish Encyclopedia article on Mendelssohn, for instance, the authors write that Mendelssohn’s “translation of the Pentateuch had an important effect in bringing the Jews to share in the progress of the age. It aroused their interest in the study of Hebrew grammar, which they had so long despised, made them eager for German nationality and culture, and inaugurated a new era in the education of the young and in the Jewish school system.” Similarly, fin-de-siècle Zionists also associated Moses Mendelssohn with anti-Zionism (via the Jewish Reform movement, of which Zionists considered Mendelssohn to be the founder). See, e.g., Nordau, Zionism. In this pamphlet Nordau insists that Jews’ prayers to return to Palestine were always meant literally until “towards the middle of the eighteenth century the so-called ‘movement of enlightenment,’ of which the popular philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, is recognized as the first herald, began to penetrate Judaism.” The followers of this movement, according to Nordau, saw “the dispersion of the Jewish people” as “an immutable fact of Destiny,” and they “emptied the concept of the Messiah and Zion of all concrete import.” The “Mendelssohnian enlightenment consistently developed during the first half of the nineteenth century into ‘Reform’ Judaism, which definitely broke with Zionism.”

  75 Al-Khalidi uses the term jumhūr. This might also be translated as “the majority of rabbis” or even “all the rabbis.”

  76 This term and its relationship to the Hebrew haskamah will be dealt with at length later in this chapter.

  77 See al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnizm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [author’s version].

  78 Al-Khalidi uses the phrase al-qawmiyya al-yahūdiyya.

  79 Jumhūr al-ḥākhāmīn wa-r-rabānīn. This phrase might also be understood as “most of the rabbis” or even “all the rabbis.”

  80 Al-Khalidi uses the Islamic legal term sharīʿa.

  81 The final words are “dīniyyan wa-sharʿiyyan.” al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnizm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 55.

  82 Or at least those in western Europe. There is an ambiguity in al-Khalidi’s presentation of this consensus: at times he portrays it as the agreement of all the Jews and their rabbis, whereas at other times he limits the claim to western European Jewry.

  83 Even al-Khalidi’s Zionist neighbor Ben-Yehuda linked the claim that the Jews are “not a people” to Mendelssohn. “Even in countries where the Jews never heard of the name Moses Mendelssohn or his teachings,” Ben-Yehuda wrote in 1880, “Jewish youth is repeating the pattern of the Jews in Germany by turning away from its people and the language of its forefathers. The Maskilim of Berlin wrote many books and created elaborate theories to prove that we are not a people.” See Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 163.

  84 I refer to this as a “corruption” not only because of the loss of the initial h but also because of the use of a q in place of a k.

  85 See Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 128–32.

  86 See ibid., 135–36.

  87 See Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 2–15, 41ff.

  88 The first of these conferences, the 1844 Brunswick Conference, considered ratifying the Parisian Sanhedrin rulings. See Meyer, Response to Modernity, 134–35.

  89 Interestingly, the Pittsburgh Conference was convened by the German-born American Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. Kohler, who strongly opposed Zionism, was coauthor of the Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry on “Islam” that, as noted above, referenced al-Khalidi’s article on Muslim demographics. I am not aware of any evidence that suggests that Kohler and al-Khalidi knew one another personally, but each was certainly familiar with the other’s work. For a comparison of the definition of Jewishness articulated in the “Pittsburgh Platform,” on the one hand, and in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s charter of the 1960s, on the other, see Gribetz, “ ‘Their Blood Is Eastern,’ ” 143.

  90 See Meyer’s chapter on “classical” Reform in Response to Modernity, 264–95.

  91 As we shall see, though, the Islamic principle that al-Khalidi projects onto Judaism was actually integrated into Judaism by way of Islam in the medieval period.

  92 The term umma could also mean ‘nation’ as well as ‘religious community.’ On the use of this term, see Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, 32; Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East, 21–22.

  93 Wa-ajmaʿat could also be rendered: “decided unanimously.” See below on ijmā‘.

  94 “Consensus,” OEMIW. On ijmā‘, see also Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 75–81; Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, 77–80.

  95 See Libson, Jewish and Islamic Law, 9, 24, 198n.65. Judith Romney Wegner contends that ijmāʿ has a Jewish precedent as it is “conceptually equivalent to that expressed in the Talmud by the word ha-kol.” Wegner, “Islamic and Talmudic Jurisprudence,” 42–43.

  96 To understand al-Khalidi’s theory, we must overlook the anachronism he employs in imagining the antiquity of this dichotomy.

  97 The standard narrative of the birth of the Salafi movement has been provocatively challenged by Henri Lauzière, “The Construction of Salafiyya.” Muhammad Qasim Zaman, however, contends that Rida and his associates employed the term Salafi as a self-designation. Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, 7. In highlighting the close relationship between the Khalidi family and the key figures of the Salafi movement, Rashid Khalidi points to a photograph of the formal opening of the Khalidi Library, in which the prominent Salafi Shaykh Tahir al-Jaza’iri appears. Al-Jaza’iri collaborated with Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi in the creation of the Khalidi Library. “Several of al-Jaza’iri’s books, some in multiple copies,” adds Khalidi, “are found in the [Khalidi] Library, together with many examples of the writings of other salafis such as al-Sayyid Rashid Rida.” See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 43–45; Khalidi, “Intellectual Life in Late Ottoman Jerusalem,” 224.

  98 Commins, Islamic Reform.

  99 On ʿAbduh, see, e.g., Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, 130–60; Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism, 16–22; Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt.

  100 Hourani, “The Basis of Authority of Consensus in Sunnite Islam,” 39.

  101 Muhammad ʿAbduh, Tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ḥakīm, ed. M. Rashid Rida (Cairo, 1927–1936), cited in ibid., 40.

  102 On Rida’s interpretation of ijmā‘, see also Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, 47–53.

  103 After al-Khalidi’s death, the situation obviously changed dramatically, and there gradually developed among Jews something resembling a consensus, though still not unanimity, on Zionism. As far as I am aware, though, no subsequent Palestinian or Muslim thinker has taken up al-Khalidi’s ijmā‘-asqāmah theory. Its time, too, has passed. On the persistence of anti-Zionism on the fringes of the American Jewish Reform movement in the mid-twentieth century, see Kolsky, Jews against Zionism.

  104 As Libson writes, “the appeal to consensus as a legal source is in effect Gaonic innovation … the Geonim accord it, in practice, quasi-formal status as a legal source and a major element in deciding the law.” Libson, “Halakhah and Reality in the Gaonic Period,” 94. See also Neusner and Sonn, Comparing Religions through Law; Neusner, Sonn, and Brockopp, Judaism and Islam in Practice.

  105 According to Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, the first haskamah of this sort appear
ed in the fifteenth century, in the Agur by Jacob Landau. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, “Haskamah,” EJ2. I thank Elisheva Carlebach and Malachi Beit-Arié for sharing with me their knowledge about such haskamot.

  106 The ascamot were a close parallel to the taqanot in the Ashkenazic communities of Europe. On the Sephardic usage, see Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, 51–52; Angel, “The Responsa Literature in the Ottoman Empire as a Source for the Study of Ottoman Jewry,” 656–76.

  107 Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger offers yet another definition of haskamah, as “rabbinic approval and approbation of the legal decisions of colleagues, usually attached to the original legal decision and circulated with it.” This, too, does not fit al-Khalidi’s image of a mass, unanimous agreement of rabbis to a particular position. See Carmilly-Weinberger, “Haskamah,” 444–45.

  108 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, “Haskamah,” in MBY, 2:1136–37. One of these definitions is “agreement between two things, such as ideas and the like—accord, Einverständnis.” Carmilly-Weinberger seems to be referring to this same usage of haskamah when he notes that “in the philosophical literature of the Middle Ages,” the word can mean “ ‘consensus,’ ‘harmony between entities,’ ‘pre-established harmony.’ ”

  109 See Ackerman-Lieberman, “Comparison between the Halakha and Shariʿa”; Neusner and Sonn, Comparing Religions through Law; Neusner, Sonn, and Brockopp, Judaism and Islam in Practice.

  110 Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” 482.

  111 Taʿalluqihim bi can also be translated as “attachment to,” “devotion to,” or “connection with.”

  112 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 24.

  113 Al-Khalidi’s footnote here references Abu al-Fidaʾ, the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century compiler of history, who quotes ash-Shahrastani.

  114 Here al-Khalidi uses two of the classical Qurʾanic terms for this concept: al-baʿath and an-nushur.

  115 Ibid.

  116 In the 124 pages of the copyist’s text, there are only thirteen source footnotes, at least two of which are the sources cited in Gottheil’s Jewish Encyclopedia entry.

  117 Van den Berg, Petite histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient. This small volume can still be found in the Khalidi Library.

  118 See Perlmann, “The Medieval Polemics between Islam and Judaism,” 123–24.

  119 Unless otherwise noted, the translations of the Qurʾan provided here generally follow Abdel Haleem, The Qurʾan.

  120 While the Qurʾan here suggests that only a subgroup of People of the Book fails to believe, al-Khalidi implies that this quality applies to the Jews broadly. On the possible inclusion of Jews among Muhammad’s category of believers, see Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, especially 68–74. On the apocalyptic orientation of the Qurʾan, see 59, 78–82.

  121 As polemics scholar Moshe Perlmann explains, “the polemic literature of Islam is directed, for the most part, against the far more numerous and powerful Christians; the Jews are considered only in passing.” Perlmann, ed., “Samauʾal al-Maghribī,” 18.

  122 See Waardenburg, Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions, 9.

  123 Ibid., 40.

  124 Ibid., 49–51.

  125 See ibid., 77–79.

  126 On the formation of Palestinian identity and nationalism, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity. See also Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.

  127 Al-Khalidi uses the term al-injīl ash-sharīf here, while in other instances he refers to kutub al-ʿahd al-jadīd (the books of the New Testament).

  128 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 11. Emphasis added.

  129 The Khalidi Library holds more than ten copies of various Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible. By comparing al-Khalidi’s quotations from the Hebrew Bible to the various available Arabic versions, I have found that al-Khalidi used an Arabic Bible published in Beirut. The title of this pocket-sized volume reads: al-Kitāb al-muqqadas ay kutub al-ʿahd al-qadīm wa-l-ʿahd al-jadīd (The Holy Bible, i.e., The Books of the Old Testament and the New Testament). Beneath the title, a note indicates that this Bible was “translated from the original languages, namely, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Greek.” On the history of Arabic translations of the Bible, see Griffith, The Bible in Arabic. Though Griffith focuses on premodern translations, see 204–7 on the nineteenth-century versions.

  130 These lines are underlined in both al-Khālidī’s, original draft and the copyist’s version. al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [author’s version], 4; al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 12.

  131 See Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914; Morris, Righteous Victims, 39.

  132 Al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 6.

  133 Al-Khalidi appears to be referring not merely to the biblical books known as “the Prophets” but to the Pentateuch as well.

  134 See William A. Graham, “Scripture and Qurʾan,” in EQ, 4:558–69. On the common Jewish and Muslim views of ipsissima verba, see Peters, The Children of Abraham, 5.

  135 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 14.

  136 This view, it should be noted, might itself have been informed by Islamic perspectives on prophecy, given Moyal’s upbringing in Muslim-dominated society and culture.

  137 Jewish rabbinic literature sees Ezra as having played the central role in restoring the Bible after the Babylonian exile. Certain early modern and modern European biblical critics, most famously Benedict Spinoza, supported this view. See, e.g., Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 127–28.

  138 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 26.

  139 al-Khālidī,“as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-mas ʾala aṣ-ṣahyū niyya”[copyist version], 7.

  140 On as-Samawʾal aṣ-Maghribi, see Perlmann, ed., “Samauʾal al-Maghribī,” 5–136.

  141 Moyal, in his exposition on Pirkei avot, emphasizes the centrality, for the talmudic rabbis, of the belief in Moses’s reception of the Torah from the heavens. It is for this reason, Moyal explains, that the first line of Pirkei avot is “Moses received the Torah from Sinai.” Moyal writes that “the basis of saving faith is the faith in the truth of the descent of the Torah to Moses from the heavens, because the religious leaders decreed salvation for the Israelite who does not believe in the descent of the Torah from the heavens.” Moyal, to be sure, ascribes an important role to Ezra in “preserving” the Torah. In discussing the figure of Rabbi Akiba, Moyal writes: “After the destruction of Beitar, only he [Rabbi Akiba] remained among all of the scholars of the Children of Israel. And the Roman government forbade the Israelites from studying Torah [an-namus is the term Moyal typically uses for Torah study]. He [Rabbi Akiba] risked his life and taught five exceptional young men…. Thus Akiba’s relationship to the Talmud is like the Ezra’s relationship to the Torah.” In other words, in Moyal’s view, Ezra perpetuated knowledge of the Torah, though he certainly did not write it ex nihilo, just as Rabbi Akiba perpetuated the study of the Talmud, though he was not its author nor even its compiler. Another line concerning Ezra that al-Khalidi takes from Moyal nearly verbatim is “And it is said that there are three fathers to the Torah—the first is the prophet Moses, the second is Ezra the Scribe, and the third is Judah the Nasi.” Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 60, 136, 49, respectively. The corresponding line in al-Khalidi’s manuscript reads: “it is said that there are three fathers to Torah—the first is Moses peace be upon him, the second is Ezra the Priest, and the third is Rabbi Judah the Nasi, the compiler of the Mishna.” al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 29.

  142 Perlmann, “Samauʾal al-Maghribī,” 55 (English), 51 (Arabic).

  143 This was the case, for instance, in his speech before the Ottoman Parliament. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 80–81, 238n.88.

  144 On the complicated question of the
origins of antisemitism among twentieth- and twenty-first-century Muslims, see Cohen, “Muslim Anti-Semitism.”

  145 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 14.

  146 Ibid.

  147 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 52.

  148 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 30.

  149 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 77–78.

  150 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 28.

  151 Ibid.

  152 In al-Khalidi’s description of this particular tax, one finds a fascinating insight into the way he perceived the Jewish population in his native Jerusalem: “And if a Jew wishes to wear a fur hat and a jubbah [a long outer garment, open in front, with wide sleeves], that is, the dress of the Polish nobles and their neighbors in the country, he must pay another tax of five rubles a year. Therefore, you see the Ashkenazim [saknāj] in Jerusalem and the rest of the cities of Palestine dressing up in this clothing on the Sabbath and holidays and they do not pay the tax.” It is not clear to which Russian law al-Khalidi refers here. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on “Costume” notes that, in nineteenth-century Russia, one of the taxes specifically targeting Jews “was that collected for wearing jarmulkas, which seems to have been collected in various places in an irregular manner, but was finally compounded, by a special decree of Feb. 11, 1848, for a tax of five rubles annually, the proceeds to go to the fund of the ‘korobka’ (basket tax).” Perhaps this is the law al-Khalidi has in mind.

  153 Al-Khalidi explains for his reader the concept of kosher slaughtering: “A tax was also imposed on slaughtering performed according to the Mosaic law of separating between ‘the kosher and the tref’ [transliterated into Arabic] as the Jews do not eat any [meat] other than their own slaughtering commissioned [supervised?] on the part of the rabbi, who permits them to eat it. That which he does not permit them to eat, they sell for a fifth of the price to non-Jews.”