Defining Neighbors
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129 ha-Ḥerut 3:7 (November 7, 1910), 3. This anonymous article was probably written by the then-editor, Hayyim Ben-Attar. The parenthetical question mark is found in the ha-Ḥerut article, indicating the author’s or editors’ apparent (if perhaps feigned) bewilderment as to what is meant by “this movement.”
130 See ha-Or (November 7, 1910).
131 For an analysis of the Ben-Yehuda anniversary celebration, see Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 202ff.
132 Jacobson, “The Sephardi Community in Pre–World War I Palestine,” 31.
CHAPTER 4
Imagining the “Israelites”: Fin de Siècle Arab Intellectuals and the Jews
“Among the peculiarities of history is that Egypt has today become a place of refuge for the Jews coming from Palestine,” notes the author of “The Jews and the War,” an article published during the First World War in the Egypt-based Arabic journal al-Hilāl. After all, “in antiquity,” the author elaborates, “Palestine was the place of refuge for those who escaped after their exodus from Egypt.”1 During the Great War, many Jews fled Palestine while others were expelled by the Ottoman authorities who were suspicious of all nationalist activity within their realm.2 Between 1914 and 1915, in the months before the al-Hilāl article was published, more than eleven thousand Jews who had been expelled from the district of Jaffa by the local Ottoman commander sought refuge, if only temporarily, in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez.3 The irony of Jews’ escaping Palestine and fleeing to Egypt—an Exodus-in-reverse—was not lost on the author of this wartime Arabic journal article.
The unsigned article was likely written by al-Hilāl’s new editor, Emile Zaydan, the son of the journal’s founder, Jurji (George) Zaydan (1861–1914).4 Writing during the tumultuous early years of the First World War, Emile Zaydan observed the mass emigration of Jews from Palestine to Egypt and wondered what would become of the Zionist colonies that had been established there over the previous three decades. Though he expected his readers already to know about Zionism,5 Zaydan reminds them that it is the movement through which “a group of Jewish leaders set out to assemble their scattered [brethren].” The Zionists have created “colonies [mustaʿmarāt] in Palestine to realize their hopes.” So successful were the Zionists in their propagandistic efforts, Zaydan asserts, that by one estimate they raised “at least one hundred million guineas [pounds].”6 The current war, however, had radically altered the situation, such that “no one knows the fate of the approximately forty colonies that were founded in Palestine.” Zaydan contends that according to “the Jewish intellectuals,” “the war has crushed their hopes, especially after the oppression by the rulers in Turkey [i.e., the Ottoman Empire] that led to the mass migration [of Jews] to Egypt.” Despite Zionism’s early accomplishments—whether in fundraising or in the colonization of Palestine—the movement, in Zaydan’s view, now had a most uncertain and tenuous future.
What is most important about these comments for our purposes is what they reveal about how Zaydan perceived and interpreted contemporary Jewish history. The Zionists were, for Zaydan (consistent with the claim of the Zionists themselves), the descendants of the biblical Israelites; indeed, “Israelites” (rather than yahūd, i.e., Jews) is the term he prefers in this article.7 The current fortunes, or misfortunes, of the Jews and especially of Zionism are thus read through the prism of the Bible.
Not unlike Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, who, as we discovered in chapter 2, attempted to explain—and counter—Zionism through an understanding of Judaism and Jewish history, Zaydan also interprets Zionism, and notes the irony of its condition, through the lens of Jewish scripture. While important and influential, al-Khalidi was only one man, and his “as-Sayūnīzm” never reached the wide audience for which it was intended. This chapter analyzes many of the themes and arguments concerning Jews and Zionism that did reach Late Ottoman Palestine’s literate, intellectual Arabic-reading public through regional Arabic journals. In so doing, the chapter widens the scope of this study and shows that alKhalidi’s contemporaries were reading and writing about many aspects of the Jews’ religion and history, proposing theories and perspectives no less fascinating than those we discovered in “as-Sayūnīzm.”
In an effort to understand what Arab intellectuals in Palestine and beyond knew and thought about Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, I examine three of the most widely read and influential Arabic journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—al-Hilāl (The Crescent), al-Muqtaṭaf (The Digest), and al-Manār (The Beacon)—as well as a monograph on Jewish history written by one of these journals’ editors. Jews, we will find, were a frequent topic of interest for the journals’ editors and readers.8 No single, consistent image of Jews emerges from the varied pages of these journals; they were presented sympathetically by some and more hostilely by others. Nonetheless, certain problems and themes recurred frequently; these, I suggest, both reflected and informed the ways in which the journals’ readers, including those in Palestine, perceived Jews and understood the Zionist project in Palestine. The themes were as varied as the racial relationship between Jews and Arabs; the origins of the Hebrew Bible and the historicity of its stories; the morality of the Jewish religion; the causes of antisemitism; the conditions of Jews in Christendom vis-à-vis those in the Islamic domain; the link between Jews and finance; and, increasingly as time progressed, the Zionist settlement of Palestine.
Ultimately, in presenting this analytical snapshot of the variety of Arab intellectual conceptions of Jews during the Late Ottoman period, this chapter aims to unearth and explore the complexities of the intellectual encounter between Arabs and Zionists in Palestine. For the editors, contributors, and readers of these Arabic journals, Zionists were not a foreign, unfamiliar group of European colonists; in fact, as we shall see, even those from Europe were generally not considered “European” at all. Rather, as Jews, the Zionists were known from the Bible and the Qurʾan, and they were often viewed as relatives—racial or otherwise—of the Arabs. Traditional religious polemical tropes were certainly incorporated into the way Jews and Zionists were perceived, but so too were the arguments of modern biblical criticism. In this analysis, we again discover the fluidity between self-perception and the perception of the other; that is, we find that the way in which an author defined himself was often intimately connected to the way in which he defined the Jew. To the extent that we may distill a general sense of the Jews from the wide variety of texts studied below, we might conclude that Jews and, not least, Zionists were viewed with a striking combination of respect and fear, sympathy and resentment.9
REGIONAL JOURNALS AND THEIR REACH IN PALESTINE
First, a word about the journals and editors I have chosen to analyze. Al-Muqtaṭaf was founded in 1876 in Beirut but was restarted in Cairo in 1884; al-Hilāl, which began in 1892, and al-Manār, the first issue of which appeared in 1898, were also based in Cairo. At first glance these three journals may seem a peculiar source for a book primarily concerned with the mutual perceptions and intellectual encounters among Zionists and Arabs. Not only were they all published outside of Palestine, the presumed center of the Zionist-Arab encounter, but their founders and editors were themselves not from Palestine. Rather, they were all Syrian-born (originating from areas in current-day Lebanon); al-Hilāl’s Jurji Zaydan and al-Muqtaṭaf’s founders Yaʿqub Sarruf, Faris Nimr, and Shahin Makaryus were Christians from around Beirut, while al-Manār’s editor Rashid Rida was a Muslim from a village near Tripoli.10 In other words, these journals were not intended to represent nor to address Palestine’s Arabic-readers in particular.
As I argued in chapter 1, however, attempting strictly to isolate Late Ottoman Palestine’s Arab intellectual life from that of the broader Middle East, especially Egypt and the Levant, is a problematic, even futile, endeavor. The biographies of many of Palestine’s intellectuals in this period include close connections with figures and movements beyond Palestine, and it was common for these individuals to spend significant periods of their lives studyin
g or working in surrounding lands. Late Ottoman Palestine’s Arab intellectuals were part of a wider intellectual community and culture; understanding what members of this same community—even those without origins in Palestine—thought about the Jews is therefore helpful in gaining a more complete picture of the general discourse in which Palestinian Arab intellectuals participated. It is for this reason that I have also included in this study a monograph on Jewish history written by Shahin Makaryus, one of al-Muqtaṭaf’s editors. This recognition of a broader fin de siècle Arab Nahḍa culture, of course, does not discount and must not obscure the fact that Palestine’s Arabs necessarily had particular concerns about the Jews, most notably the question of Zionism, even if, as we shall see, those based outside of Palestine were becoming increasingly interested in the Jews and their nationalist movement as well.
Beyond revealing the broader, regional Nahḍa discourse on the Jews, these journals also represent a rich source for an understanding of the knowledge and beliefs of the Arabic-speaking and Arabic-reading society in Palestine. First, as Ami Ayalon has noted in his work on literacy in Palestine, one finds evidence of Palestinian readership of al-Muqtaṭaf and al-Hilāl in the noticeable number of letters to the editor of the respective journals that were signed by readers who lived in Palestine.11 Other evidence confirms that these three journals were certainly present in Palestine during the Late Ottoman period. All likely had agents in Jerusalem. We know of al-Hilāl’s agent by name: Eftim Effendi Mashbek is mentioned in one of the journal’s 1910 volumes.12 Near-complete sets of the journals are extant in the Khalidi Library and the al-Aqsa Library, the two Jerusalem libraries where I read them while researching this book.13 Palestine’s intellectuals, such as Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, surely followed these journals, and the journals, in turn, followed al-Khalidi and his counterparts in articles on Palestinian society and politics.14 Al-Khalidi wrote articles for these journals, typically under the pseudonym “al-Maqdisī,” “the Jerusalemite.”15 The journals, then, are a critical source for an analysis of not only the broader Middle Eastern intellectual environment during the Late Ottoman period but also that of Palestine in particular.
Before proceeding to the analysis of the journals, we might highlight one important implication that emerges from this study. It is commonly claimed, as discussed in chapter 3, that Muslims were more sympathetic to Jews (and perhaps even to Zionism16) than were Christians. A close reading of these journals suggests that greater nuance must be acknowledged in the sharp distinction that is often drawn between Muslim and Christian intellectuals in this period vis-à-vis Jews.17 Al-Manār, which was edited by a devout, if reform-minded,18 Muslim, regularly expressed deeply anti-Jewish views, while the Christian editors of al-Hilāl and al-Muqtaṭaf repeatedly came to the Jews’ defense when readers questioned Judaism’s decency.19 To be clear, this study does not argue for the opposite claim—that this period’s Muslims were less sympathetic to Jews than were Christians. First of all, these journals cannot be taken as representative of the religious communities of their editors (al-Muqtaṭaf and al-Hilāl, for example, fashioned themselves as modern, scientific journals and included non-Christian contributors). Second, one sometimes finds anti-Jewish views expressed in the Christian-edited journals and tolerant perspectives articulated in the Muslim-edited journal. A more nuanced view—one sensitive to the complexities and contradictions associated with these communities—is clearly necessary.
WHO IS A YAHŪDĪ? WHO IS AN ISRĀ’ĪLĪ?
To understand the various perceptions of Jews exhibited in these journals, we must begin by investigating what precisely was meant by the term “Jew” (or its frequent alternative, if not equivalent, “Israelite”) in this journalistic discourse. At least for some writers, there was a meaningful distinction between the terms Jew and Israelite. In an al-Muqtaṭaf article on “The Jews of France,” the author explains that
some members of the Israelite nation [al-umma al-isrāʾīliyya] consider labeling them “Jews” to be an insult to them. They prefer to be called “Israelites” following the example of the Jews of France.20 But their scholars and writers disagree with this view and, from antiquity until the present, always called themselves “Jews” in all their books and letters. Despite this, we will use the label “Israelites” in this article because most of them who reside here in Egypt prefer this name.
The author later explains that technically, “Israelite” refers specifically to “the ten tribes that were exiled during the first exile [by the Assyrians in the eighth century bce] and whose location is now unknown,” and that “it is likely that contemporary Jews are not [descended] from them but rather from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.”21 Even al-Muqtaṭaf, however, did not uphold this terminological distinction with any consistency. In a brief entry in August 1916 entitled “New York: Capital of the Nations,” al-Muqtaṭaf opens by identifying New York as “the largest Jewish city [madīna yahūdiyya] because it has a million Jews.” Just two months later, though, al-Muqtaṭaf published another short article on New York. This time it opened by stating that “New York is the largest Israelite city.”22
The question that had by that point been discussed in Europe for over a century—are the Jews a religion, a nation, a race, or something else?23—concerned the authors of these fin de siècle Arabic journals, whether they referred to their subjects as Jews or Israelites. Consider, for instance, the view proposed in al-Hilāl’s five-page piece on “The Jews and the War: Their Influence on It and Its Influence on Them,” the same article that noted the irony of Jewish migration from Palestine to Egypt. The essay opens by identifying the Israelites:
The Israelites are distinguished from among the rest of the peoples [ash-shu‘ūb] by their preservation of their nationality [jinsiyyatihim] and their customs and practices, despite the passage of time and their subordination to different states. Israelitism [al-isrāʾīliyya24] is simultaneously a religion [dīn] and a nationality [jinsiyya], unlike Christianity and Islam.
The author perceives a distinction between the categories of religion and nationality. A Christian Frenchman would thus be Christian by religion and French by nationality, and a Muslim Egyptian would, likewise, be Muslim by religion and Egyptian (or, depending on the ideology of the classifier, Arab) by nationality. But for Jews, this author contends, there is no such dichotomy; “Israelitism” is both religion and nationality. This unique nature of Israelitism is relevant for an article on “The Jews and the War” because, the author explains, “if we are surprised by fighting between Christian and Christian in this war, we are all the more shocked by fighting between Jew and Jew.” The implication here is that the solidarity among Jews, who share both religion and nationality, is, or would be expected to be, stronger than that among Christians (or among Muslims), who are united solely by religion. How strange, then, Zaydan suggests, to find Jews on opposing sides of the battlefields of this war.25
For Emile Zaydan and, as we saw earlier, Ruhi al-Khalidi, the question was whether Jews were a nationality or a religion. According to Zaydan, Jews constitute both a religion (dīn) and a nationality (jinsiyya), while al-Khalidi contended that in the past Jews had possessed both national and religious qualities, but they had permanently abandoned their national qualities in accepting “Mendelssohn’s theory.” For still other Arab intellectuals, however, there was yet another category—namely, race—that was even more decisive in defining Jews. As addressed in chapter 1, race entered the discourse of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle East through multiple sources: (1) European—the centrality of race-thinking in fin de siècle European intellectual and nationalist thought (including varieties of Zionism);26 (2) Ottoman—the question of the dominance of Turks, defined racially, in the Late Ottoman Empire; (3) Egyptian—the place of race in contemporary debates about Egypt’s relationship to the Sudan; and (4) Syrian—the role of Darwinian and Social Darwinist theories in the formative experiences of the Syrian-born editors of the major Arabic inte
llectual journals of the period.
One of those Syrian-born intellectuals who moved to Egypt in the wake of the controversy over Darwinism was Shahin Makaryus, a founding editor of al-Muqtaṭaf.27 In 1904 Makaryus published a monograph called Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn (History of the Israelites). The introductory chapter of this 270-page book, published by al-Muqtaṭaf’s press, is called “The Origin and Lineage of the Jews” (aṣl al-yahūd wa-nasabuhum). The chapter opens with this statement describing what Makaryus considered to be the current state of race-thinking:
Most scholars say that mankind is divided into four branches [furū‘] to which all sects [ṭawāʾif] and generations may trace their origins. Their evidence of this division is the differences that exist in moral, intellectual, and physical qualities. These four branches are the Caucasian [qawqāsī], Mongolian [manghūlī], Negroid [zanjī], and Malay [malqī].28
Though he employs certain medieval Arabic terminology,29 Makaryus follows a conventional European breakdown of the races of humanity that began to be developed in the eighteenth century.30
As is generally the case with race-thinking, Makaryus’s brand was not simply a mode of classification; he asserted a hierarchy.31 “Clearly,” Makaryus insists, “what is meant by the history of humanity is actually the history of the Caucasian branch. This is because the rest of the branches did not influence civilization [al-ʿumrān] as did [the Caucasians]. Civilization [al-madaniyya] is indebted to it [the Caucasian ‘branch’] as to no other branch for the way in which it has developed.”32 Of the four races, the most influential in the rise and development of human civilization, Makaryus claims, is the Caucasian race.
Given his acceptance of the claim that the Caucasians are the most advanced of the races, it is hardly a surprise that Makaryus, a Christian Arab from Syria, regards “Semites” as one of the three large constituent groups of Caucasians, along with “Arians or Indo-Europeans” and “Hamites.”33 According to Makaryus, Semites include “the Hebrews or Jews, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Arabs, the Babylonians, and the Chaldeans.”34 Indeed, Makaryus not only classifies Semites among humanity’s superior race, Caucasians, but he also locates Semites at the creative, spiritual helm of their many fellow Caucasians. “It is clear,” he asserts, that “the Semites have an important place in the history of civilization and the state of contemporary human society. From them, the three great religions emerged among the civilized: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam…. The Aryans and similar groups borrowed these religions from them.”35 The Semites, with whom Makaryus would certainly have identified not only the Jews (the subject of his book) but also himself, as an Arab, are the source of the world’s most important “civilized” religions. Even the “Aryans”—who, in the minds of many nineteenth-century European race-writers, were the most superior of all races—borrowed their religions from their Semitic originators.36