The same is often the case in Ben-Yehuda’s papers from this period. For instance, in a report in a November 1910 issue of ha-Or, we read of the beating of an elderly Jew by “a rash gentile” in Jerusalem in broad daylight. Hearing the screams of the victim, many came to the aid of the old man, “but the Christians who were there stood from afar and watched how the seventy-year-old man was beaten by the wild youth.” (The author does not limit the accusations to the Christian bystanders; the article immediately notes that “to our shame, there were also two Jews who, out of fear, did not dare to protect their brother.”18) Similarly, a letter to the editor in an earlier issue (when the newspaper was called ha-Ẓevi) reports on “Hebrew among the Christians.” The writer requests that Ben-Yehuda, who was already renowned for devising neologisms in his attempt to modernize the Hebrew language, “create a fitting Hebrew word for the French word Papeterie,19 as we have been asked here by misters Sayegh et Selim,20 who would like to use it for the ‘stamp of their business’ and are not satisfied with only the French and Arabic. The Jews should know that the Christians consider Hebrew a living language more so than do the Hebrews themselves.”21
This example is particularly informative as it reveals that, in this newspaper, “Christian” is not a code word for European. When individuals are described simply as Christians, after all, there is at least the possibility that European Christian residents of Palestine are the referents; as discussed in chapter 1, in the Late Ottoman period there were small populations of European Christian missionaries and other settlers in Palestine.22 The fact that the “Christians” who were seeking the Hebrew word for “stationery” are named Sayegh and Selim suggests that they were not Europeans.23 In these cases, and numerous others, residents of Palestine are classified as “the Christians” when religion or religious identity would appear to be irrelevant to the incidents described.
It is worthwhile noting here that the letter to Ben-Yehuda was signed by David de Boton, a member of an illustrious Sephardic family. There was not, as is sometimes imagined, a rigid separation between the social, intellectual, and cultural worlds of Sephardim, on the one hand, and Ashkenazim, on the other; the Sephardic de Boton knew of and respected the Ashkenazic Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew language project, and he clearly read Ben-Yehuda’s newspaper. Because of the Sephardic identity of its author, this letter can obviously not be taken as a direct indication of the perceptions of First Aliyah Ashkenazim. However, the title provided for it by the First Aliyah Ashkenazic editors—“Hebrew among the Christians”—uses the same terminology.
Just as ha-Ḥerut and ha-Or / ha-Ẓevi frequently identify the Christians of Palestine solely by their religious affiliation, the same is often true of their discussion of Palestine’s Muslims. In midsummer 1910 there was a stabbing in Jerusalem. ha-Ḥerut reported that “the Jew Shlomo Babel stabbed a young man who was from among the Muslim notables in our city.”24 In December of that year ha-Ḥerut reported on the elections for an administrative council (the majlis ‘umumī) in the mutasarriflik of Jerusalem. Here, too, the categories the article cites are Muslim (or, more precisely, “Ishmaelite”), Christian, and Jewish: “from Jerusalem, two Ishmaelites, one Christian, and one Jew were elected”; “from Hebron, three Ishmaelites and one Jew”; “from Jaffa two Ishmaelites and two Christians”; and “from Beersheba four Ishmaelites.”25
Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers use this religious mode of classification of Palestine’s Muslims as well. In a November 1908 article titled “Killed,” we read of the spread of rumors about a man who had been murdered. At first, the author explains, the man was believed to have been a Jew. “One hour later,” however, “the rumors had changed.” In fact, the victim was not a Jew. “Then who was he?” asks the author rhetorically. He was actually “a Muslim!”26 A report from Hebron in December 1908 proudly tells of the happiness shared “by all” in the celebration of “the holiday of freedom” (ḥag ha-ḥerut) that followed the Young Turk Revolution. In Hebron, the correspondent relates, “Jews and Muslims walked together arm-in-arm, in brotherhood.” The correspondent, listed simply as “R,” notes that this scene was all the more exceptional given the fact that an anti-Jewish boycott was ongoing in Hebron. “We hope,” he concludes, that “beginning today, after the celebration, they will cancel it. This boycott has deprived several of our brothers of a livelihood.”27
The term Ishmaelite also appeared in Ben-Yehuda’s papers. For instance, in the “Jerusalem Daily” section of a late 1910 issue of ha-Or, the author describes a piece of prime Jerusalem real estate (including the Carmel Hotel) that was owned by “more than thirty Ishmaelite families.”28 Later that same month, also in the “Jerusalem Daily” feature, an article reported on “The Sale of a House from a Jew to Ishmael [sic].”29 This article also comments on the unfairness of the land-purchasing system, pointing to “the speed and swiftness” with which the transaction was completed in the court (“in three hours”), while “in cases of transactions between Jews, and all the more so from an Ishmaelite to a Jew … many days are wasted running back and forth to court and much money spent unnecessarily.” Interestingly, the author does not object, on principle, to the sale of land by a Jew to a non-Jew; the article does not mention this issue.30
Intriguingly, in the Second Aliyah paper ha-Aḥdut, such singularly religious categorizations—neither qualifying nor qualified by any other terms—are much less prominent in the paper’s descriptions of the non-Jewish natives of Palestine. The relative absence of such categorization is particularly remarkable when seen in the context of their regularity in ha-Ḥerut and ha-Ẓevi / ha-Or. I shall return to ha-Aḥdut below. For now, let us simply note that to the extent that we can gauge perceptions by terminological usage, at least at times, this is how the authors of ha-Ḥerut and ha-Ẓevi / ha-Or authors perceived their world: the Jews of Palestine were living among Christians and Muslims; that they were also Arabs often seems irrelevant or unworthy of mention.
But not always, to be sure. At other times, even in ha-Ḥerut and ha-Ẓevi / ha-Or, the non-Jewish natives of Palestine are referred to simply as Arabs. In Hebron in June 1909, for example, there was a public celebration on the visit of a high-level official from the Russian Orthodox Church. According to ha-Ḥerut’s correspondent, Arabs and Jews joined in the celebration (a fascinating scene of Palestinian social history in its own right), and all was proceeding delightfully. The festivities were interrupted, however, when an intoxicated “Arab” with “a good heart” shot his pistol and accidentally killed a young Jewish woman. The details of this incident are intriguing—vigilante pursuit of the killer, threats of revenge and counterrevenge, and so on—but the important point for the present discussion is that the killer is identified merely as “one of the Arabs.”31 The fact that he was intoxicated perhaps suggests that he was not a Muslim—or not a strictly observant one32—but, regardless, for this ha-Ḥerut author’s purposes, he was simply an Arab. The same is true in multiple other ha-Ḥerut reports, including, for instance, a brief account from the Galilee of “the Arabs of the region” who allegedly planted the “body of a murdered Arab” in the Jewish Kinerret colony near Tiberias in order to accuse the Jews of being “the Arab’s murderers.”33 In these cases, ha-Ḥerut’s authors use the term Arab without reference to the subjects’ religious identity.
As with ha-Ḥerut, Ben-Yehuda’s papers also often refer to non-Jewish residents of Palestine simply as “Arabs.” In a report entitled “The Arabs in Jaffa,” published in January 1909, ha-Ẓevi explains that, in the wake of the newspaper’s earlier notice about “an Arab” who allegedly poisoned young Jewish girls, “there erupted among the Arabs great excitement, and on Thursday they burst into the store of a Jewish shopkeeper and beat him murderously, accusing him, the Jewish shopkeeper, of poisoning Arab girls.”34 The next month, ha-Ẓevi reported on another event in Jaffa, in which “an Arab entered one of the houses in [the neighborhood of] Neve Shalom and kidnapped a young woman.” When the “Arab” was finally ca
ught, he brazenly declared, in the language of the Young Turk Revolution, that “there is freedom [ḥuriyya] today!” The author of this report asks rhetorically: “Where are the Jaffa police? And if they are not to be found, where are the enlightened of the Arabs? Why are they not teaching the masses knowledge and ethics [deʿah u-musar]?”35 The problem is identified here as the absence of enlightened and ethical Arabs. The journalists who wrote for Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers, like those in ha-Ḥerut, sometimes defined their neighbors as “Arabs,” displaying no interest in distinguishing between Arabs of different religions, even concerning matters of ethics, when one might have expected religion to enter into the discussion.
How might we account for this alternation between nonreligious categorizations of Palestine’s natives (as Arabs), on the one hand, and religious classification (as Christians or Muslims), on the other? A regional explanation does not fit; there does not appear to be a geographical pattern of terminology choice, correlated, for instance, to whether the location described included both Muslim and Christian populations. Moreover, because articles from these newspapers are frequently written anonymously or signed merely with initials, it is difficult to determine any pattern related to characteristics of the authors: Ashkenazim versus Sephardim, religious versus more secular Jews, Arabic-speaking versus non-Arabic-speaking Jews, or Jews more familiar with native life in Palestine versus those less versed in such affairs.
Simpler explanations might apply. Perhaps, if authors knew the religions of the individuals involved, they would note them; otherwise, “Arab” would have to do. But even this explanation is unsatisfactory, as illustrated in a ha-Ḥerut article entitled “A Christian Stabs a Hebrew” from 1910.36 The article describes an incident in Jerusalem in which Jewish schoolchildren were allegedly surrounded by “Arab youths,” one of whom stabbed a Jewish boy in his side, inflicting a deep wound. The article never mentions the religion of the assailant; the two times he and his friends are identified, they are denoted as “Arab youths” or simply “Arabs.” That the perpetrator was Christian appears only in the article’s title, suggesting yet another possible explanation for variations: the newspaper’s editors, who presumably titled the article, may have been more likely than other writers to view their neighbors in religious terms. Regardless of the explanation, for some of Palestine’s Zionists, at least at times, their encounter with Palestine’s natives was an encounter with members of two religions.
MENDEL KREMER AND THE “ISHMAELITES”
A curious fact in this regard is that the author of many of the reports concerning Palestine’s natives in ha-Ḥerut (the newspaper often characterized simply as “Sephardic”) was a journalist named Mendel Kremer, an unambiguously Ashkenazic name. Though he wrote frequently for ha-Ḥerut and occasionally for other Zionist papers in Palestine, little is known about Kremer.37 One source we do have about Kremer is Theodor Herzl’s diary entries from his visit to Palestine in 1898. During the trip Herzl met Kremer. Just after Herzl’s much-anticipated audience with the German kaiser, who was also visiting Jerusalem, Herzl records that “outside stood the secret-service agent and supposed Zionist Mendel Kremer, who has been accompanying us since Jaffa—by order of the Turkish government, it seems to me.”38 Later, in Jaffa, Herzl explained his preference to remain on a ship so as to stay “out of reach of the Mendel Kremers, Mazies,39 and all those people who, with good intentions or bad, might have got me into trouble with the Turkish misgovernment—whether in order to save imperiled Jewry, earn their thirty pieces of silver, or get into the good graces of Rothschild or some pasha.”40 Herzl perceived Kremer as an Ottoman spy in Zionist guise, a claim that may reveal more about Herzl’s paranoia or ignorance of the realities of Ottoman Palestine than it does about Mendel Kremer himself.41 Herzl’s suspicions about Kremer do, however, suggest that Kremer was highly familiar with Ottoman culture and presumably spoke Ottoman Turkish, if not Arabic as well.42 This impression is confirmed, it would seem, by the fact that one decade later, Kremer was one of ha-Ḥerut’s main correspondents on issues concerning Palestine’s native non-Jewish population, further indicating that there were Ashkenazim who were viewed by the Sephardic editors of ha-Ḥerut as experts on the affairs of Palestine’s natives. For the present discussion, it is relevant to note that Kremer typically used religious categorizations of Palestine’s Arabs in his articles.
Kremer was in fact the author of the ha-Ḥerut article, noted above, that listed the representatives elected to the Ottoman Parliament as Jews, Christians, and Ishmaelites. Though the term Ishmaelite does not necessarily have religious connotations, in these newspapers it is used interchangeably with Muslim.43 In an issue of Ben-Yehuda’s ha-Or printed just ten days after ha-Ḥerut’s report on the elections, there is a small notice on “the Holiday of the Sacrifice” (the Hebrew translation of the Islamic holiday ‘īd al-qurbān, i.e., ‘īd al-aḍḥā): “Monday will be the first day of the holiday of ‘the Sacrifice’ for the community of the Ishmaelites. The holiday will last four days.”44 This notice may also have been written by Kremer, as it is signed with his initials M.K.45 In 1909, also in ha-Ẓevi, Kremer published a letter with his full name that insisted that under the new Ottoman regime, the Jews had the same right to serve in the highest levels of government “just as all [other] Ottomans.” In this letter, Kremer was particularly concerned that in Jerusalem’s administrative council—in which “all important matters” of government would be addressed, including “many issues that affect the Jewish community [‘edat ha-yehudim] of Jerusalem”—“there is not a single Jew, but there are seven from the community of Ishmaelites and five from the community of Christians.”46 Kremer, an influential journalist in both the Sephardic-edited and Ashkenazic-edited Zionist newspapers, was interested in religious distinctions and brought these matters to the attention of the readers across Palestine’s diverse Zionist community.
DUAL LABELS: MUSLIM ARABS AND (NOT QUITE) ARAB CHRISTIANS
In addition to characterizing native non-Jews either by their religion or simply as Arabs, certain Zionist journalists elected at times to use both, with the phrases “Christian Arabs” or “Muslim Arabs.” Such terms are also found in ha-Ḥerut articles from the period, usually in the context of comparing the communities’ attitudes toward Jews and Zionism. Relative to other Hebrew newspapers in Late Ottoman Palestine, ha-Ḥerut was exceptionally concerned with the anti-Zionist Arabic press. While the paper had already published many notices and warnings about the Arabic press in Palestine—especially concerning the newspaper al-Karmil, edited by Najib Nassar, a Greek Orthodox Arab in Haifa—ha-Ḥerut’s full-scale, front-page literary war against this phenomenon began in earnest in November 1910 with a two-page article titled “The Great Danger.”47 ha-Sakanah ha-gedolah, “the Great Danger,” subsequently became ha-Ḥerut’s watchword for the problem of the anti-Zionist Arabic press. Nassar, as discussed in chapter 2, was the journalist-activist who, like Ruhi al-Khalidi, translated Gottheil’s “Zionism” encyclopedia entry. In describing Nassar, ha-Ḥerut’s editorial claims that his paper was the work of “the Christian Arab enemies, who hate us religiously and racially.” The true problem, asserts ha-Ḥerut, is that the effects of anti-Zionist agitation among the Christian Arab papers extend to “our good Muslim Arab neighbors.” ha-Ḥerut accuses these Christian Arab enemies of using all sorts of tactics to cause “our Muslim neighbors to come in conflict with us, to awaken among them a hatred against the Jew who had always been considered like a brother to the Arabs and a member of the same race [neḥshav le-aḥ u-le-ven gezaʿ le-ha-ʿarviyim].” ha-Ḥerut’s editors saw a marked distinction between the natural attitude toward Jews and Zionism of Christian Arabs, on the one hand, and of Muslim Arabs, on the other. The former, owing to their “religious and racial hatred” of Jews, were deemed instinctively antagonistic; the latter, because of their feelings of common race with Jews, were regarded as welcoming and supportive. Only on the instigation of the “Christian Arab enemies” and the decept
ion they perpetrate might otherwise naturally sympathetic Muslim Arabs turn against Zionism.
There is something peculiar, and noteworthy, in this editorial’s racial reasoning. Christian Arabs hate Jews religiously and racially, ha-Ḥerut explains, whereas Muslims view Jews amiably because Jews and Arabs are thought to be racially linked.48 There is no systematic racial theory articulated in this article (though, as we shall see, such theories were being developed by certain Zionist ideologues at the time), but one wonders whether ha-Ḥerut considered the Christian Arabs to be not “fully Arab” in racial terms. It is not clear what sort of definition ha-Ḥerut’s editors had in mind when they used the term “Arab” for Christian Arabs. Is it, in the Christian case, merely a linguistic quality as opposed to Muslim Arabs, who are “racially” Arab? There is in fact some evidence suggesting that, at least in the minds of some of ha-Ḥerut’s contributors, Christian Arabs were not seen as being “authentically” Arab. In one article, for instance, a new orphanage in Egypt is described as being designed as a shelter for “abandoned Arab, Jewish, and Christian children.”49
This occasional distinction between Arabs and Christians was not unique to ha-Ḥerut. In a front-page essay in his ha-Ẓevi newspaper in November 1908, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda discusses the new policy of military conscription for non-Muslims. As “heavy and difficult” a burden conscription is for Muslims and Christians, Ben-Yehuda writes, it is all the more so for Jews. After all, “nearly all the Christian natives of the land here,” he explains,
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