On the one hand, there is nothing surprising about a Jewish writer opposed to the threat of Christians proselytizing to Jews. The threat was real. After all, the Jews of Palestine were a primary target of the Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews (SPCJ), along with other less descriptively named missionizing organizations. In 1908, assessing the accomplishments of his organization in its first hundred years, SPCJ president John Kennaway wrote proudly: “More remarkable perhaps than everything else is the evidence of the changed attitude of the Jews toward Our Lord. No longer is He denounced and cursed as an impostor, but He is held up by the thoughtful among them as one of the highest types of humanity, an inspiring ideal of matchless beauty.”94 Clearly, early twentieth-century Christian missionizers were eager for Jews to think positively of Jesus. That there were Jews who were expressing such views—and in the Hebrew Zionist press in Palestine, no less—was thus a source of anxiety for those Jews who considered it critical to keep Jews entirely alienated from Christianity. Recognizing the contemporary Jewish fear of Christian proselytizing, then, is necessary for understanding the strong response to the appearance of sympathetic words about Jesus in a Zionist newspaper. On the other hand, the language ha-Ḥerut’s editor uses in describing Christianity—fabricated stories, nonsense, myth, the derisive quotation marks surrounding “the son of God”—is indeed the language of anti-Christian polemics and appears to reflect a severe, visceral aversion to Christianity.95
Reports of this kind are not the exclusive domain of ha-Ḥerut. In February 1909 Ben-Yehuda’s ha-Ẓevi published a brief report on a “Rabbi for the Jews and Christian Devotee” (rav la-yehudim ve-ḥasid noẓri).96 The article describes a certain Rabbi Fleisher in New York who is alleged to have sermonized in support of Christianity and even claimed that “Jesus was the greatest of Israel’s prophets.” The article notes that the American Jewish newspapers criticized this rabbi and all those “liberal rabbis who have recently begun to praise Christianity in their synagogue sermons.” That the author shares the sentiment of the American Jewish press is demonstrated in the article’s description of the offender: “Fleisher, rabbi, so to speak, of a community of liberal Jews.” The contempt here is not quite as vivid as in ha-Ḥerut, but “so to speak” (kivyakhol) leaves little room for doubt that, in this author’s view, a rabbi worthy of the title would never praise Jesus or Christianity.
That one finds no parallel anti-Islamic polemic in these newspapers can be ascribed, at least in part, to the context of the Ottoman Empire: the editors and contributors might well have self-censored criticism of Islam, fearing the newspaper’s closure and the editors’ imprisonment should an article deemed offensive to Islam have been published. Such fears would not have been baseless paranoia. In August 1909, for instance, after ha-Ẓevi’s editors were taken to court for criticizing the Ottoman government’s alleged neglect of the welfare of Palestine’s Jews, Mendel Kremer reminded the readers of ha-Ḥerut that articles in the Hebrew press were translated into Arabic and Hebrew by government officials. It is thus the responsibility of newspaper editors, warns Kremer, to know the proverb “Wise people, be careful with your words, and especially in your newspapers!”97
At the same time, it is unlikely that the distinction drawn repeatedly between the natural propensity of Muslims toward religious tolerance and that of Christians toward religious bigotry was simply lip-service paid to the paper’s Ottoman censor. After all, there was no need to raise the issue of religious differences between these communities in the first place. Rather, for Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire in particular, this distinction was central to their collective memory and identity. In expressing his loyalty to Hebrew as the national Jewish language, for instance, ha-Ḥerut’s editor smeared Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish that was presumably among his native tongues, as “the language of the Inquisition and Torquemada.”98 For this community, a reference to the Inquisition was guaranteed a strong negative reaction.
And as descendants of refugees from Christian religious intolerance who found safety in an Islamic empire,99 the Sephardim associated not just the Ottoman regime nor even Muslims but Islam itself with tolerance and respect. Consider these words, quoted approvingly by ha-Ḥerut:
It is known that in all Christian countries, they hate the Jews with the deepest religious hatred…. But the Muslim world has not known such feelings and never will. Islam was born on the knees of Judaism. These two nations [Jews and Muslims] are close to one another in blood and language, and the religion of Islam is filled with Jewish traditions. Because Islam recognizes all monotheistic religions, it is not possible to enroot in the heart of its believers hatred and animosity toward the very nation that first taught monotheism. This is the reason that the Jews living among Muslims did not suffer religious persecution by Muslims such as the oppression they experience in the Christian countries. The Inquisition, the auto-de-fé and other horrors are entirely unknown in the Muslim context.100
Note the stark contrast between this laudatory language about Islam and the derogatory words and tone the newspaper used regarding Christianity. Whereas Christianity is an essentially bigoted religion, it implies, Islam is fundamentally tolerant (this, in addition to racial proximity, the shared “blood,” of Jews and Muslims). Christians and Muslims have treated Jews differently because Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different, explains the author, and ha-Ḥerut’s editor agrees. Because of this religious difference, anti-Zionism—or, as ha-Ḥerut often dubs it, antisemitism—has taken root specifically within the Christian Arabic press.101
Though the claim that essential religious differences between Islam and Christianity largely accounted for the respective communities’ attitudes toward Zionism is found most prominently in ha-Ḥerut, Jerusalem’s Sephardic-edited newspaper, it was not only Sephardim who held this view. In fact, as we have seen, Ashkenazim—such as Mendel Kremer—perceived the same distinction between Palestine’s Muslims and Christians and also attributed this disparity to their respective religions.102 And this, too, is understandable, for, perhaps no less than Sephardic natives of the Ottoman lands, Ashkenazic Zionists from Europe who had recently arrived in Palestine were well aware that they themselves had sought refuge from persecution in countries ruled by Christians in a land governed by Muslims. For those Zionists who imagined that their non-Jewish counterparts in Palestine acted in accordance with their respective religions, it was only reasonable to link Christian opposition to Zionism to the Christian faith and Muslim goodwill to Islam.
SOCIALIST ZIONISTS AND ARAB DIFFERENCES
Not all Zionists in Palestine attributed the divergent treatment of Jews under Christendom and Islam to the greater tolerance supposedly inherent in the Islamic faith. In the newly founded ha-Aḥdut (Unity) workers’ newspaper, David Ben-Gurion, a recent immigrant to Palestine and a leader of the Second Aliyah socialist Zionist group Poʿalei Ẓiyon (Workers of Zion), wrote:
Among all of the lands of the Diaspora to which members of our nation were dispersed, Turkey was the only one in which a “Jewish Question” did not arise. In all of the lands of Europe, the Jews were imprisoned in the narrow and suffocating ghetto, lacking rights, ceaselessly pressed and persecuted103 by the governments and nations among which they lived. At the same time, the Jews in Turkey enjoyed complete freedom and knew nothing of special limitations and oppression. The entire land, in all directions, was open to them, and they were permitted to settle and work as they chose. And when the Jews of Spain were expelled from their land, they found in the Ottoman kingdom a place of refuge and personal treatment that they did not find anywhere else. The Turkish nation did not only open the gates of its land to the Hebrew exiles; it also offered them all civil rights. Aside from military service, which was reserved [mukdash] for the “believers,” the Jews were able to attain all of the government and public positions, from the lowest level to the very highest.104
In this opening paragraph to his article “Clarifying Our Political Situation,”
Ben-Gurion points to the same discrepancy ha-Ḥerut noted between the treatment of Jews in Europe, on the one hand, and in the Ottoman Empire, on the other. But there are key differences between the ways in which these two articles identify and account for this divergence. In ha-Ḥerut, “Christian countries” are juxtaposed with “the Muslim world.” In other words, the societies were labeled by their dominant religious affiliations. The explanation for the difference between the Jewish condition across the two societies is, correspondingly, tied to religion: Jews were respected in the “Muslim world” “because Islam recognizes all monotheistic religions,” whereas in “Christian countries” they were hated “with the deepest religious hatred.” In contrast, Ben-Gurion presents the distinction as one between “the lands of Europe” and “Turkey” or “the Ottoman kingdom,” geographic and political designations. That Europe was a predominantly Christian society and Turkey and the Ottoman Empire were ruled by Muslims was not relevant to Ben-Gurion in his assessment of the political situation. Indeed, religion is almost completely absent from his discussion, except in one instance. In the (prereform) Ottoman Empire, Ben-Gurion explains, the Jews were not deemed proper “believers” (maʾaminim, a term he places in apparently derisive quotation marks105) and thus were prohibited from joining the military. Ben-Gurion’s single allusion to religion, that is, points to an intolerant aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic identity, which he does not appear to take particularly seriously. Overall, however, he does not conceive of the two “civilizations” in religious terms. The contrast between the article in ha-Ḥerut and Ben-Gurion’s piece in ha-Aḥdut thus could hardly be more pronounced.
To be clear, Ben-Gurion, like the authors in ha-Ḥerut, also considered the Christian-edited Arabic press to be exceptionally anti-Zionist. “Just as freedom had been declared and newspapers were able to write about whatever they pleased” as a result of the Young Turk Revolution, he writes, “immediately, the Christian press began strong propaganda against the Jews.” While this hostility was evident elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, he contends, it was especially so “in the newspapers of the Christian Arabs,” opposing “the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.”106 However, when he tries to explain what he perceives to be anti-Jewish hatred in Palestine, Ben-Gurion has difficulty accounting for why it has taken root in one religious community more so than in another. “The source of this hatred,” he insists, is
the Arabs who work in the [Jewish] colonies. Like every worker, the Arab worker also hates his taskmaster and exploiter. But because there is not only a class opposition here but also a national difference between the workers and the farmers—this hatred takes the shape of a national hatred. In fact, the national element dominates the class element and so in the hearts of the Arab working masses, a fierce hatred flares against the Jews.107
There is an obvious disconnect between Ben-Gurion’s class and national theory of Arab opposition to Zionist settlement in Palestine, as he articulates it above, and his perception that Christian Arab journalists and intellectuals (not undifferentiated Arab laborers) were the ones who most forcefully opposed Zionism. The “Arab workers” about whom Ben-Gurion writes were, after all, mostly Muslim, not Christian.
As ideological secularists and materialists,108 the socialist ideologues of the Second Aliyah tended to perceive themselves and others in a way that minimized categories and phenomena, such as religion, that they regarded as nonbasic cultural superstructures. A most extreme example of this approach, to which I briefly alluded above, is a theory held by Ben-Gurion but articulated most clearly by his senior partner in the leadership of Poʿalei Ẓiyon, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ben-Zvi (originally Shimshelevich) was born in 1884 in Poltava in the Ukrainian region of the Russian Empire. A socialist Zionist from an early age, he immigrated to Palestine in 1907, during the Second Aliyah. In his first years there, Ben-Zvi founded the Bar Giora (1907) and ha-Shomer (1909) defense organizations as well as the socialist Zionist newspaper ha-Aḥdut, which he coedited with his wife Rachel Yanaʾit and Ben-Gurion.109 In 1913 Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion relocated to Istanbul to study law in the university, though they were soon to return to Palestine upon the outbreak of the Great War. Suspicious of all nationalist movements in their midst, the Ottomans imprisoned and then deported the two, and by 1915 they were in New York. There they cowrote a Yiddish book, Erets yisroel in fargangenheit un gegenvart (The Land of Israel in the Past and the Present), to which we shall return shortly.110 Toward the end of the Great War, the pair joined the Jewish Legion and returned once more to Palestine, where they soon resumed leadership of the Zionist community.
Shortly after the war, Ben-Zvi published a small booklet of his own about the Arabs of Palestine, ha-Tenuʿah ha-ʿarvit (The Arab Movement). Like Ruhi al-Khalidi in his conception of his Jewish contemporaries, Ben-Zvi turned to distant history in seeking to understand his Arab neighbors. While he devotes much of his analysis to the various nationalist movements among Arabs in the Middle East, it is his ethnographic survey of Palestine’s Arabs that is most relevant here. He divides the Palestinian Arabs into several different categories. The Bedouin, in Ben-Zvi’s view, are the only element in Palestine that is of “pure Arab racial origin” (she-moẓʾo mi-gezaʿ ʿarvi naki).111 “The same,” he asserts, “cannot be said of the rest of the elements—the fellahin and the urbanites—who are, of course, Arabs in terms of language and culture, but by origin and race (moẓʾam ve-gizʿam) are mixed and composed from different elements.” “The Arabs who conquered the Land of Israel,” Ben-Zvi explains, “did not destroy the earlier settlement, nor did they themselves engage in colonization. They simply seized lands and levied taxes upon the residents.” Along with the Bedouin, some of these “racial” Arabs, he suggests, did remain in Palestine, settling primarily in the larger cities and mixing with the natives.
But who are the fellahin, the masses that account for the vast majority of the residents of Palestine? “The fellahin,” Ben-Zvi writes, “are the descendents of the laborers of the land who remained in Palestine from before the Islamic conquest.”112 And who were those pre-Islamic fellahin of Palestine? Here Ben-Zvi draws on the argument he had made in his Yiddish collaboration with Ben-Gurion.113 “The primary source of this agricultural settlement was the ancient Jewish agricultural settlement.” This settlement “certainly absorbed a mix of blood from all of the conquerors of Palestine who left their traces within it: among them the Byzantines, the Mongols, the Syrians, the Bedouin, and the Crusaders. However, the core of the present agricultural settlement has its source in the fellahin, Jews and Samaritans, the ‘people of the land’ (‘am ha-areẓ) then and always, who remained connected to the land and did not go into exile.”114 Ben-Zvi explains that these Jews “were torn from the Jewish nation through wars and revolts—lasting six hundred years, always ending in slaughter and plunder—and finally submitted to their conquerors and became servants to tribute.”115 Under Christian rule, “they ultimately accepted, if only in appearance, the Greek religion that was … the majority religion of the Palestinian community in the generation before the conquest of ʿUmar. After this conquest, they accepted Islam.” However, Islam “has not penetrated into them even until the present day. [Rather] they have a mix of customs: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Canaanite all together.”116 Those seemingly Muslim Arab peasants, Ben-Zvi argues, are hardly Muslim or even Arab beneath the surface, neither in faith nor in racial origin. “The fellahin were material that was dragged toward the conquering religion,” he explains, and this means that their identity remains malleable at present as well. “They might become a distinct nation (‘am meyuḥad), or they might be dragged toward one of the nations (eḥat ha-umot) that are established in the Land of Israel in the process of national differentiation (ha-proẓes shel ha-diferenẓiya ha-leʾumit) that has begun in our time.”117 The fellahin, understood here as a mass of people still lacking national affiliation, might just as easily—and all the more naturally—join the Jewish nation as they might any Arab or Mus
lim nation, if only the right efforts were made.
The political interests that inform and motivate this eccentric—though not unprecedented nor uncommon118—theory are sufficiently clear: if the majority of the seemingly Muslim Arab population of Palestine was in fact Jewish in “racial” origin and could consciously become Jewish by nationality once again, then the Zionist project instantaneously attained greater demographic feasibility. But what is most intriguing about Ben-Zvi’s theory in this context is not the politics that may have driven it but what it suggests about this Zionist’s encounter with the Arabs of Palestine. Ben-Zvi glanced at his Arab neighbors—not the more politically conscious Christians and Muslims in the cities but the peasants working the land—and found hidden Jews. Indeed, he did not merely find hidden Jews; these were the ideal Jews, the prototypes of the treasured New Hebrew, Jews who had never abandoned the Land of Israel and never stopped tilling its soil. Ben-Zvi identified only the land-working Palestinian peasants as Jews, explicitly denying the city-dwelling elites any substantial Jewish heritage. If European Jewry was overly bourgeoisie for this socialist, the Zionist project would not only restore Europe’s Jews to their homeland but would also reintegrate the truly Jewish fellahin of Palestine into their natural nation—the Jewish nation—thereby making this nation natural, that is, endowing it with the demographic building blocks for its missing worker class.
Defining Neighbors Page 18