are similar in their way of life to the Arabs. Nearly all speak Arabic, and they are all accustomed to the Arabs. And there is no doubt that every Christian among the people of the army feels himself almost as though among people of his own age and his own nation (benei ʿamo). As for the Jews, they are so distant, at least for now, from the life of the natives of the land. They do not even know the Arabic language nor the Turkish [language]. Certainly, a Jewish man would feel himself to be totally strange among his fellow Christian and Muslim members of the army.50
Ben-Yehuda’s essay presumes that Palestine’s Christians are not quite Arabs. Though he is not perfectly explicit, Ben-Yehuda seems to take Arabs to be, by definition, Muslims.51 We infer this assumed definition not only by process of elimination—if “true” Arabs are neither Christians nor Jews, they must, in the context of Late Ottoman Palestine, be Muslims—but also because the essay is about military service, which had previously been the exclusive domain of Muslims. Palestine’s Christians, Ben-Yehuda contends, share many cultural traits with “real” Arabs, not least their common Arabic language, a commonality that Ben-Yehuda (who perceived the Hebrew language as a sine qua non of Jewish nationality) did not underestimate. But ultimately, as much as Palestine’s Christians shared with Arabs, as similar as their way of life and customs might be, they were nonetheless something other than proper Arabs.
The distinction between Arabs, on the one hand, and Christians, on the other, was not employed consistently. As we have already seen, ha-Ḥerut reports not infrequently on a group deemed to be “Christian Arabs”; the same is true in Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers.52 For example, in a December 1908 issue of ha-Ẓevi, the anonymous editor of the “Special Telegrams” section follows up on an earlier report about the Ottoman interior minister and “the Christian Arabs.”53 The minister had refused to fulfill “even part of the demands” of “the Christian Arabs” concerning “ ‘the holy grave’ ” (i.e., the Holy Sepulcher).54 This refusal, writes ha-Ẓevi, “aroused among Jerusalem’s Christian Arabs great agitation.”55 In 1909 a ha-Ẓevi correspondent with the initials Sh. R. reported on a violent incident in Jaffa: “Old Jews on their way to pray in the synagogue at sunrise were beaten by a group of drunken Christian Arabs who were returning from the bars56 in which they drank excessively and ran wild.” The particular way in which this author conceives of these “Christian Arabs” is highlighted in the article’s conclusion, in which he warns that if this phenomenon is left unchecked, it will prove to be “a disgrace to the nation of Arabs [‘am ha-ʿarvim] or to Christianity [noẓriyut].” While the author closes optimistically—“We are moving forward, toward the light, toward natural progress, toward a future of peace and fraternity”57—he is concerned that the “Christian Arab” leadership is not acting appropriately to stem the tide of anti-Jewish attacks in Palestine.58
DIVIDING NEIGHBORS: MUSLIMS VERSUS CHRISTIANS
Later, in May 1909, one of ha-Ẓevi’s Jaffa correspondents reported on the response of the city’s residents to violent events two hundred kilometers to Jaffa’s north. “On Saturday in Beirut,” Ben-Yehuda’s paper reports, “they hanged the Muslim army soldier who killed the Beirut delegate, the Christian Arab. The Christian Arabs spread the word in our city [Jaffa], a rousing call to go see the hanging of the enemy.”59 The article explains that they60 hired sailors to transport people from Jaffa to Beirut and back, “and thus those who went were many.”61 Here we encounter not only ha-Ẓevi’s use of the phrase and concept of “Christian Arabs” but also the rather unsubtle implication that Muslims and Christians are enemies. The view that the natural pair of antagonists in Palestine, and beyond, were Muslims and Christians—and not, that is, Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim, Christian, or both)—was at once, it would seem, a description of perceived reality as well as a prescriptive claim, a statement of what should be. This descriptive-prescriptive position is a subtext of many Late Ottoman Zionist newspaper reports concerning the non-Jewish natives of Palestine.62
The (welcome) antagonism between Christians and Muslims was imagined not merely in the Middle East but far beyond as well. Consider, for instance, ha-Ẓevi’s 1908 report on a rumor in Russia that alleged that seventeen Jewish students in Odessa “took upon themselves the Mohammedan religion in order to be accepted to university.”63 Ha-Ẓevi’s report relates that three Muslims sent an open letter to a Moscow newspaper, Moskovskie vedomosti, expressing their anger against those Jews “who wish to penetrate Islam and destroy it, as they have destroyed Christianity.”64 What is fascinating and telling about the way in which the ha-Ẓevi article treats this controversy is that it transforms what is reasonably understood to be a problem between Muslims and Jews into a clash between Muslims and Christians.65 The article does this by quoting at length the response of Russkoe znamia, a conservative Christian Russian newspaper, to the Muslims’ letter of protest. “The Mohammedans,” the Russian paper insisted, “are not like us, the Christians.” Rather, the article declared:
They are all66 haters of humanity and haters of all forms of freedom…. About humanity67 they know nothing (about this [inserts the Hebrew author sarcastically] only the Russkoe znamya knows!), they respect their faith and demand respect for themselves. And not just “the masses”68 who have never seen the walls of a school but also the intellectuals who have received higher education. Now that they hear sounds of happiness from the Jews upon the acceptance of Jewish-Muslims to the university, three Muslim intellectuals publish this letter to the editor of Moskovskie vedomosti.69
By including this extensive quotation, the author suggests that the real adversaries of Muslims in Russia in this matter were not Jews but Christians70 (and, read in ha-Ẓevi, the implication would seem to be that the same was true in Palestine as well).
IDENTITY AT THE BORDERS
Regardless of the political implications involved in emphasizing distinctions between groups, found in the pages of Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers in the postrevolutionary years is a strain of interest in and anxiety concerning the borders of identity in Late Ottoman Palestine. Consider, for instance, the small, rather cryptic paid notice71 in ha-Ẓevi in an issue from November 1908 (mentioned in chapter 1) that reads: “To the Arab Hebrew woman [la-ʿivriyah ha-ʿarviyah]! If you are a Hebrew, you are not an Arab. If an Arab, not a Hebrew. So, you are neither a Hebrew nor an Arab. C.Q.F.D.”72 The author who submitted this note appears to be writing to question, on logical grounds, an earlier note that was signed by “an Arab Hebrew woman.” Just six notices below this dismissal, there is yet another enigmatic notice that reads: “To M.M.: I saw you, I knew you, I respected you. I will leave you, I will remember you, and I will not forget you,” signed “Arab Hebrew” (‘ivri ʿarvi).73 These brief, mysterious notices suggest that, at this point in Palestine’s history, the borders between “Hebrew” and “Arab” were still being delineated.74 Though there were surely those who forcefully disagreed, whether on logical, political, cultural, or other grounds, some clearly did not consider Hebrew and Arab to be mutually exclusive.
Hebrew and Arab were not the only categories to be questioned in Ben-Yehuda’s papers. In one issue of ha-Or from 1910, a report is found with the title “A Christian Muslim Woman.” Ha-Or’s correspondent explains that there was great commotion in the market after a peasant woman, “a Christian from Ramallah, who had been persecuted relentlessly by the residents of the village, decided to leave her faith and enter under the wings of Islam.” This only aroused further fury among her former coreligionists, who wished to execute her for her betrayal. Brought before the court, she repeated her desire to enter, as the author puts it, “the religion of Ishmael” and beseeched the judges to protect her from the wrath of “her nation” (benei ʿamah).75 The author and the editor who titled the article were clearly intrigued by the possibility of a Christian Muslim, a concept, like the Arab Hebrew, that angered many by challenging the exclusiveness of supposedly contradictory categories.
Yet another such liminal figure in Lat
e Ottoman Palestine was the Karaite. Karaites were members of a Jewish sect that had separated from the dominant Jewish community beginning around the ninth century. In the early twentieth century, the largest single population of Karaites was found in the Russian Empire, but communities existed in a number of Middle Eastern cities, including Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Cairo. Those Karaites who spoke Arabic and had been living for generations in Arabic-speaking lands generated some identity confusion, as is evidenced on the pages of ha-Or in 1910. In an article titled “The Arabic76 Theater,” ha-Or informs its readers that
the troupe of the famous Arab77 actor, Rahamim Bibas—a Karaite Jew—performed several shows in Jerusalem with great success. Among the actors, there are also many women, and this is undoubtedly the first time in Jerusalem that an Arab audience hears such beautiful words from both men and women together. Anyone interested in the Arabic language, in its advancement and development, is well served to head to the theater across from Jaffa Gate…. It is fitting for the members of our nation (benei ʿameinu) to give Rahamim Bibas a round of applause.78
Here ha-Or describes the actor, Rahamim Bibas, as both an Arab and a Karaite Jew.79 Several days later, ha-Or felt compelled to issue a correction. In fact, “the Arab actor” is not a Karaite but “a Jew like all others, who takes pride in his Jewishness and follows his religion.” By referring to “the excellent actor” as a Karaite, ha-Or emphasizes, it meant no offense. “For us,” the author explains, “the Karaites are also an important part of the greater Jewish race [ha-gezaʿ ha-yehudi ha-gadol], and we hope that the day will yet come … when the Karaites will join us in all of our hopes and deeds.” After all, the article concludes rhetorically, “Are we not one nation?”80 In these early years of Zionist national formation and consolidation in Palestine, Middle Eastern native-Arabic-speaking Karaites presented Zionists with the quandary of whether they belonged to the Jewish nation. While Jewishness defined by a shared religion—or the perception of such—might exclude the Karaites from the Jewish nation, the Karaites, despite any religious deviance, nonetheless retained their place within the “greater Jewish race,” at least for this author. Especially for those Zionists who, perhaps like the ha-Or author, viewed their own Jewishness in nonreligious terms, expanding the bounds of Jewishness to groups whose religious practice diverged from what was understood to be “normative” Judaism was not an insuperable challenge. In fact, as we shall discover below, some prominent Zionists claimed for their “greater Jewish race” far more unlikely groups than the Karaites.81
But even certain Rabbinate (i.e., non-Karaite) Jews had the potential to test the boundaries of Jewishness, at least in the minds of European Zionists in Palestine. Karaites were not the only ones who had lived for generations in the Middle East, shared customs associated with Arabs, and, not least, spoke Arabic. Consider, for instance, the report in ha-Ẓevi about an encounter with a Jew from Gaza. “By chance,” writes the correspondent, “we met this week one of those Jews about whom we were unsure whether they are members of our nation [mi-vnei ʿameinu] or children of the land [mi-vnei ha-areẓ], Arabs descended from Arabs.” Such ambiguous figures are, just like Arabs, “tall-statured, sun-tanned, slightly thin but nevertheless healthy, and quite proud.” The author explains that this was a Jew from Gaza, a city that seemed to most Jews in Palestine more distant than America and less familiar than Australia. The article reports that this Arab-like Jew noted that, in Gaza, “the Arabs and Jews live in brotherhood” and complained only that the Jews there lack a synagogue and a cemetery.82 Likewise, after the immigration of about 150 Yemenite Jews to Palestine, ha-Ẓevi explained that “in their customs and their ways, they are similar to the Bedouin Arabs, and some also have four wives.”83 The writers in this newspaper were struck by the similarities between Arabs and certain Middle Eastern–born Jews. These liminal types challenged Zionists’ preconceptions of what constituted a Jew, on the one hand, and an Arab, on the other. In Late Ottoman Palestine, ethnic, racial, national, and religious categories were all in some degree of flux.
CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
Earlier we found that one of ha-Ḥerut’s explanations for what it perceived to be more intense animosity toward Zionism among Palestine’s Christians than among its Muslims was that Muslims and Jews were linked by race, while Christians, of another race, “hated the Jews racially.” More common than racial arguments, though, are discussions of religious differences in ha-Ḥerut’s attempts to account for the perceived divergent approaches of Christian and Muslim Arabs toward Jews and Zionism. In an article called “The Enemies of Judah,” published in early 1911, Mendel Kremer argues for the founding of a Jewish newspaper in Arabic and Turkish that would set out to prove that the Christian opponents of Zionism were motivated not by concern for the Ottoman government and the integrity of the Empire, as the Christians claimed, but rather by “the religious hatred that they have for the Jews.”84 In another issue of ha-Ḥerut, a reader sent a letter to the editor concerning the oft-repeated proposal for a Jewish-edited Arabic-language newspaper. “It will be the responsibility of the newspaper,” writes this reader, “to show the source of the hatred” against the Jews of Palestine. The paper would have “to explain that it is not the benefit of the nation and the land”85 that motivates the new enemy press, but rather “Christianity’s hatred of Judaism.” “It will be possible to prove this,” the reader concludes, “from the fact that the Muslim Arabs, who are far from religious hatred, understand the benefit that the Hebrew settlement has brought.”86 In other words, Christian Arabs oppose Zionism because of their religion’s hatred of Jews’ religion. Muslim Arabs, members of a faith that, according to this author and others in ha-Ḥerut, is by nature tolerant of other religions, acknowledge the supposed material benefit that Zionism bestowed on Palestine.
Recent scholars have questioned the claim commonly expressed by Zionists during the Ottoman period (and later) that Palestine’s Christians were more resistant to Zionism than were their Muslim counterparts.87 We might further wonder whether any differences that did exist stemmed from religion or, alternatively, from Christians’ socioeconomic status as competitors with Palestine’s Jews or from a more developed nationalist consciousness engendered by European-style education. Nonetheless, in the minds of many Zionists, the Christians’ motivation for opposing Zionism was religious.
One wonders to what degree Zionists may here have been projecting their own religious hostility onto others, as evidence in the Hebrew press suggests that among some of Palestine’s Zionists, there was indeed religious antipathy against Christianity. Take, for example, an article provocatively titled (in large, bold letters) “Jesus of Nazareth Never Existed” in a March 1910 edition of ha-Ḥerut.88 “Neither a fire nor an earthquake nor even a plague could inflict such terror and fear upon the Christians of Germany as did the actions of Professor Arthur Drew[s],” a German intellectual who enraged and scandalized many within Germany and the broader Christian world with his claims that Jesus had actually never lived, that is, that there was no historical Jesus. The article reports on a public lecture Drews delivered in Berlin the previous month to an audience of “tens of thousands,” in which he contended that the Christian idea of a “half man, half God” was simply “impossible.”89 Great scholars in the audience, writes ha-Ḥerut’s correspondent, A.B.G. Triwaks, attempted to counter Drews’s argument, but he “stood and showed, with historical evidence, that ‘Jesus never existed’ and that all faith in him was as meaningless as the dust of the earth.” The author explains Drews’s position in terms with which ha-Ḥerut’s readers would comfortably relate: “Professor Drew[s] is one of those Christians in Germany who believes only in the verse: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ ” (Deuteronomy 6:4).90 One readily detects the glee in ha-Ḥerut’s account of the women who fainted “upon hearing Professor Drews’s heresy.” Even after one woman reached toward the heavens and called on her Lord to send a plague upon Drews
’s head, “a plague,” the author notes wryly, “did not fall on his head and so he continued on with wisdom.” The article’s author felt heartened by this “excellent lecture,” seeing how “great, learned men are finding within themselves sufficient strength to come out against Christianity and the so-called ‘Son of God’ based on historical research.” The news was not unambiguously rosy, however; it was not clear, the author acknowledged, whether Drews was motivated by opposition to Christian orthodoxy—an apparently praiseworthy impulse—or by an antisemitism that could not stomach the notion of a Jew at Christianity’s core.91
This article, ostensibly concerning events nearly three thousand kilometers from Palestine, must be understood within the context in which it was meant to be read: Palestine, 1910. It is one small piece of evidence of Jewish hostility toward Christianity in Late Ottoman Palestine. Just a few months after the Drews article appeared, ha-Ḥerut opened with an editorial titled “Heresy or Incitement?”92 The editorial describes “a new danger.” Whereas previously Christian missionaries had preached to Jews by pointing to concepts within the Hebrew Bible—such as the lamb, Adam’s sin, or an atoning sacrifice—as proof of Christianity, they have, ha-Ḥerut asserts, recognized that such methods have failed. Now the missionaries are engaging in a new tactic: using Jews, former yeshiva students, to perform their mission. As proof, ha-Ḥerut’s editorial cites an article published in the newspaper ha-Poʿel ha-ẓaʿir in which a Jew declared that “the New Testament is our book, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh,” contending that “the ascetic worldview and the submission to the God of the prophet from Anathoth [i.e., Jeremiah] and [the God] of the prophet from Nazareth [i.e., Jesus]—they are from the selfsame source.”93 The goal of this article, asserts ha-Ḥerut, is not simply heresy but the conversion of Jews to Christianity. How, ha-Ḥerut’s editor wonders, can a Jew accept “the fabricated stories, the nonsensical myth of ‘the son of God’?” After all, in the Jews’ historic determination “not to believe such nonsense, we have been slaughtered, killed every day until now.”
Defining Neighbors Page 17