Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  154 “In 1882,” al-Khalidi recounts, “a law was issued that forbade Jews from engaging in commerce on Sundays and Christian holidays. Through this [law] they forced the Jews to be idle for two days each week and during Christian and Mosaic holidays.”

  155 Taʿaṣṣub can also have a more benign sense, of solidarity. It is the term Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani uses for the force that binds a society together. Expounding on the tenuousness associated with this term in al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh’s al-ʿUrwa al-wuthqā, Albert Hourani writes: “Like all human attributes, it [taʿaṣṣub] could be perverted; it was not a law unto itself, it was subject to the principle of moderation or justice, the organizing principle of human societies. Solidarity which did not recognize this principle and was not willing to do justice turned into fanaticism.” Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, 117. It would seem that in al-Khalidi’s mind, Christian Russian solidarity, lacking the “principle of moderation or justice,” had become plain fanaticism.

  156 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 68. This is another reference to the previously cited passage from Isaiah 61.

  157 This accusation has a lengthy history in Christian Europe. Writing of a particular form of European Christian economic antisemitism, Derek Penslar explains that “Jewish competition was particularly distressing because of the alleged Jewish practices of cutting margins to the bone, selling a wide variety of wares and engaging in many different enterprises simultaneously, and aggressively seeking customers.” Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 16. Cf. Theodor Herzl’s explanation of the causes of antisemitism: “For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce competition with the middle classes.” Herzl, The Jewish State, 22.

  158 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 69.

  159 Ibid.

  160 Literally: “they hold the monetary and commercial reins.”

  161 Ibid. Cf. Gottheil, “Zionism,” 676, and Naṣṣār, aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya, 29.

  162 Al-Khalidi took this final quotation from Gottheil’s “Zionism” entry. Gottheil, however, did not discuss the assimilation or financial power of Italian Jewry; this was al-Khalidi’s explanation.

  163 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 4–5. The reference to the specific Ottoman paper, Jeunes Turcs, does not appear to be in al-Khalidi’s original draft; it seems to be present only in the copyist’s version. See chapter 5 below on Zionist “subventions” for sympathetic Arabic newspapers.

  164 The copyist’s version adds bitterly that these lands were purchased “at a very low price with the assistance of the governors and the wealthy of the region.” The Arabic press from Cairo and Beirut is peppered with articles about the Rothschilds; this fascination with this wealthy Jewish family is explored in chapter 4. On the place of the Rothschilds in the European gentile imagination, see Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 47–48.

  165 al-Khālidī, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 5.

  166 In Europe, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there developed the “myth of the powerful Jewish Landfresser (landgrabber)” as fear spread that Jews were “descending on indebted peasant holdings and wresting them from their rightful owners.” Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 46. While the Landfresser myth is similar to al-Khalidi’s claims about Jews in Palestine, Zionists were indeed engaged in a systematic effort to purchase land in Palestine.

  167 In labeling this charge Christian (and not merely European), I follow Derek Penslar’s understanding of the Christian element of European economic antisemitism. Penslar argues that “in Europe, where culture was profoundly influenced by Christianity, economic antisemitism was in part the product of the representation of Jews in Christian texts as the embodiment of avarice. This representation began with the Gospels, in which the critique of the Pharisees as legalistic and hypocritical is undergirded by accusations of greed and materialism. Through certain stories, such as that of Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the Temple compound, or of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, not only the Pharisees but the Jews as a whole were associated with a stifling and pernicious materialism.” Ibid., 13. Of course, Christianity was not the only factor involved in the common economic antisemitism, and it may be argued that the Christian religion and its sacred texts were manipulated, misconstrued, and misused for antisemitic ends. Nonetheless, whether or not Christianity served any sort of causal role in creating European economic antisemitism, it was certainly important in this discourse.

  168 For a collection of primary sources on the subject, see Rabinovitch, ed., Jews and Diaspora Nationalism.

  169 CZA H197.

  170 Following Ruhi al-Khalidi, I use this phrase here as a shorthand for the claim that Jews in the modern period constitute only a religious group, not a national one. There is no reason to assume that Yusuf Diyaʾ al-Khalidi would have recognized this view as “Mendelssohn’s theory.”

  171 Riwāya. Literally: “a play, story, or drama.”

  172 Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 108–9.

  173 Mandel acknowledges these two references in a footnote. See ibid., n.68.

  174 See ibid., 108n.64.

  175 al-Khalidi, “as-Sayūnīzm, ay al-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 75.

  176 This was perhaps merely accidental, though, since Ruhi al-Khalidi emphasizes that de Hirsch rejected the settlement of Palestine for economic and political (i.e., not necessarily ideological) reasons.

  177 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Concerning Our Arab Question”? Competing Zionist Conceptions of Palestine’s Natives

  In a 1913 internal Zionist memorandum, “Concerning Our Arab Question,” the Galician-born Hebrew writer and educator Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann, who had immigrated to Palestine in 1907, explained that “in Palestine we can hear two contradictory opinions: the one underrating the Arab question, the other perhaps exaggerating it.”1 Indeed, in the final years of Ottoman rule in Palestine, there was regular discussion in Zionist circles about what it meant for Zionist ambitions that there were hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish natives in the Land of Israel.2 Radler-Feldmann’s simple assertion, however, was not merely a description of reality; it was an interpretation of that reality. For Radler-Feldmann, the “question” was an Arab question. The problem the Jews faced in Palestine, his choice of words presumed, was their confrontation with “Arabs,” a group that constituted the majority of Palestine’s population. Radler-Feldmann was certainly not alone in interpreting the question as he did, and subsequent history and historiography have generally reified his view regarding the fin de siècle as the first years of the Zionist-Arab conflict.3 But in the Late Ottoman period, there were other, competing interpretations as well.

  In this chapter I explore the various ways in which Zionists of Late Ottoman Palestine conceived of their non-Jewish neighbors,4 primarily through a study of three Zionist newspapers in the five years preceding the Great War. I read these newspapers with an eye to the ways in which their respective editors and authors identified and classified the Zionists’ non-Jewish neighbors. My analysis reveals that, in these years, there was no clear consensus among Zionist writers about whom Zionists had found in Palestine; there was no agreement, that is, about the natives’ defining characteristics and how they might best be classified and conceptualized, and, in turn, how Zionists ought to relate to them. While for some the category of “Arab” was meaningful, even central, for others religious divisions (between Muslims and Christians) were more consequential and thus the primary way in which to perceive their neighbors. Many of Radler-Feldmann’s Zionist contemporaries perceived his “Arab Question” as actually a “Christian and Muslim Question” or even two separate Christian and Muslim question
s. Zionist authors, in other words, often deemed religion to be the relevant social category to describe the non-Jewish natives of Late Ottoman Palestine. In other cases, the non-Jews of Palestine were characterized in “racial” terms—terms that linked some of those non-Jews to the Jews while further distancing others. Toward the end of the chapter, I will discuss a racial theory concerning the natives of Palestine that first emerged during the prewar years but began to be articulated most clearly in the period immediately following the war by none other than the leaders of Palestine’s Zionist community. This theory, we shall see, questioned both the Arab and the Muslim nature of those who were generally viewed as Muslim Arabs and asserted that the majority of these were, in fact, Jews.

  We will discover in this chapter that the boundaries between the various categories—indeed, the ways in which the categories themselves were to be defined—were contested and in flux. Zionists were struggling, sometimes explicitly and at other times implicitly, with the questions of what it meant for one to be an Arab or a Muslim or a Christian—even with what it meant to be a Jew or a Hebrew. Where did these categories overlap and when did one exclude another? I contend that Zionists’ varying conceptions of themselves—as Jews, Zionists, Hebrews, Ottomans, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and so on—were often linked to the ways in which they imagined and defined their neighbors (hence the double meaning of this book’s title, Defining Neighbors, as groups both define and are defined by their neighbors). Through my analysis of the three newspapers, I will suggest that while Ottoman Sephardic Zionists and First Aliyah Ashkenazim often conceived of their neighbors in religious terms, the socialist nationalist ideologues of the Second Aliyah were apparently less comfortable doing so. In the minds of those Second Aliyah Zionist ideologues, they were engaged in a national-class encounter; as in their own self-conception, religion for these materialist-secularists could not be a “real,” defining feature.

  These terminological variations have important implications for our understanding of the early years of the Zionists’ encounter with the natives of Palestine. Knowing whom the Zionists believed they had met in Palestine—rather than taking one particular categorization of this population for granted—is critical for comprehending how Zionists related to Palestine’s natives, then and later. To begin to understand the ways in which the editors, authors, and, ultimately, readers of these three newspapers conceived of Palestine’s native non-Jews, it is valuable to look carefully at the specific terminology the newspapers use in referring to them. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued, “a categorization is a natural way of identifying a kind of object or experience by highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others.” This means that “when we give everyday descriptions, for example, we are using categories to focus on certain properties that fit our purposes.”5 If asked whether an individual was “an Arab,” a Zionist may have answered affirmatively, but we learn something about how the Zionist views his or her world if, unprompted, he or she identifies that individual as “a Muslim,” for instance, or as “a Christian.”6 Indeed, though I make use here of a wide variety of types of articles—including explicitly politically oriented pieces—I draw extensively from daily reportage and other nonprogrammatic accounts. I take these relatively unguarded descriptions of quotidian events as key windows into how their authors viewed their world (rather than how they may have wanted others, for more self-consciously political reasons, to view this world). While I would caution against presuming a precise equivalence between the terminology Zionists used to describe their non-Jewish neighbors and the ways in which they perceived these neighbors, studying the terminology is critical in discerning those perceptions.

  NEWSPAPERS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS

  Zionist newspapers represent an exceptionally useful source for this discussion. Though each was edited by a different small group of intellectuals, many people from across Palestine’s Jewish society and beyond participated in them—as correspondents, advertisers, letter-writers, and, of course, readers (as the Jewish population enjoyed a high literacy rate). From the earliest period of Jewish nationalist settlement in the Holy Land in the 1880s (the First Aliyah), Zionists established newspapers that combined news reports from Palestine, Diaspora Jewish communities, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and elsewhere, along with opinion pieces that argued for a variety of political, religious, ideological, or cultural positions. The Zionist press in Palestine was especially vibrant and expansive in the years following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the bloodless political uprising in Istanbul that restored the Ottoman Constitution and Parliament and promised increased freedoms, including freedom of the press. Given the loosened restrictions on the press and the new wave of Zionist immigration that had begun in 1904 (the Second Aliyah), the final years of Ottoman rule in Palestine witnessed a marked expansion of Zionist papers: new newspapers were founded, and veteran weeklies became semiweeklies and even dailies.

  The three papers I have chosen to analyze here offer certain insights into the worlds and worldviews of the three main Zionist communities in Late Ottoman Palestine: Sephardim, Ashkenazic immigrants of the First Aliyah, and the more recent Ashkenazic arrivals of the Second Aliyah. ha-Ḥerut was founded and edited by Sephardic Zionists in Jerusalem, beginning in 1909; ha-Ẓevi (which at various times also went under the title ha-Or or Hashkafah) was founded by the Ashkenazic First Aliyah immigrant Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and edited by members of his family beginning in 1884;7 and ha-Aḥdut was founded in 1906 and edited by leading members of the socialist Poʿalei Ẓiyon (Workers of Zion) Party, including individuals who came to play central roles in the history of the Yishuv and the State of Israel such as David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Rachel Yanaʾit Ben-Zvi.

  Though I have chosen these particular papers as a cross-section of the prewar Zionist community, we should not assume that the Zionist subgroup that led the editorial board was representative of the elements of the Zionist community that participated in writing the paper or, all the more so, of the population that read the paper. Consider, for example, ha-Ḥerut, which scholars often regard as a “Sephardic newspaper.”8 Though ha-Ḥerut was run by Sephardic Zionists and on occasion the Sephardic identity of the newspaper’s leadership was proudly displayed,9 as scholar Yitzhak Bezalel has noted, labeling ha-Ḥerut a “Sephardic newspaper” is a complicated matter and cannot be done without qualification. First of all, in its self-definition the paper was not explicitly Sephardic. In the paper’s mission statement, published in its first issue in May 1909, the editor, Avraham Elmaleh, declared that the paper would be a “Hebrew and general paper.” As a Hebrew paper, he explained, ha-Ḥerut would try to “give voice to the feelings and hopes of our people and, with a powerful hand, to raise the Zionist flag.” Moreover, ha-Ḥerut would “devote large space to matters concerning Jerusalem, the four holy cities [i.e., Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed] and the colonies, the development of trade, industry, and agriculture in the Land of Israel, the cradle of our ancestors.” As a “general paper,” ha-Ḥerut would strive to provide news from around the world with a particular focus on issues concerning “Turkey” (i.e., the Ottoman Empire) at “the historic moment in which we live.”10 The paper would be “free,” that is, independent, and would be bound to “no person or party,” only to “the truth.” Of course, part of this “truth,” for the editors of ha-Ḥerut, was the righteousness of the Zionist movement (or their particular interpretation thereof), but it is worth noting here that the words “Sephardic” and “Ashkenazic”11 are absent from ha-Ḥerut’s stated mission. The paper was meant to be “an important Land of Israel newspaper [ʿiton ereẓ yisraʾeli],” not a “parochial” Sephardic organ. Furthermore, as we shall see, though the editors remained Sephardim throughout the run of the newspaper, several of ha-Ḥerut’s regular contributors were actually Ashkenazim.12 Bezalel, in his monograph on Sephardic Zionists in Ottoman Palestine, aptly describes ha-Ḥerut not as a Sephardic newspaper but rather as “a na
tional newspaper with Sephardic ownership.”13 While one must not disregard the Sephardic identity of the owners, editors, and many of the writers of ha-Ḥerut in analyzing this newspaper, one would be mistaken to link the views presented in the paper exclusively with Palestine’s Sephardic community. For this reason, I endeavor to highlight the identities of the authors of particular articles when they are noted; at the same time, it is important to read these articles in the contexts of the papers in which they appeared and the cultural worlds of the leaders of those papers.

  In the pages of ha-Ḥerut, the Christians of Palestine are often denoted simply as “Christians,” even when religion—as we might understand it14—does not appear to have any connection to the story. For instance, in August 1909, ha-Ḥerut reported that “many families of Jerusalem’s youth from among our nation [i.e., Jews] left our city this week. Many Christian youths from Bethlehem also left our land and traveled to America [or] to Argentina to seek work.”15 Indeed, Palestine’s Christians were a disproportionately urban community and shared a number of socioeconomic characteristics with their Jewish counterparts. While these similarities bred competition and, at times, strife, they also led, or at least permitted, Jews and Christians to act in similar ways—such as emigrating in response to economic hardships. Jews and Christians were also similarly affected by the Young Turk Revolution, after which both communities were legally subject to Ottoman military conscription. In this context, ha-Ḥerut reported on the drafting of many Bethlehem Christians: “The number of Greek, Latin, and Protestant Christian residents of Bethlehem whose time has arrived to serve in the army has reached four hundred.”16 In another 1909 article, ha-Ḥerut reported on a young man who drowned off the coast of Jaffa. The Jaffa correspondent refers to the victim not as an Arab but as “a Christian lad.”17 In these examples, the matters discussed are not in any apparent way related to religion (whether theology or practice). Rather, they would seem to be “secular,” worldly matters: levels of emigration to the Americas, conscription rates, and an accidental death. That the individuals discussed were Christian, that they prayed in churches rather than mosques, might seem inconsequential. But in the minds of the authors, being Christian was relevant far beyond the narrow domain twenty-first-century Westerners might impute to religion. For these authors, that is, Christianity was a primary mark of distinction, not a modifier of some other, supposedly more fundamental characteristic.