Concluding his discussion of the place of Jews among the races, Makaryus explains that “the Jews, then, are Caucasian Semites.” He traces the Jews’ lineage “back to Shem the son of Noah.” Makaryus, notably, does not question contemporary Jews’ direct descent from the ancient Semites. “During the days of the expansion of their sovereignty in Palestine,” he writes, the Jews “preserved their lineages and recorded them in books that were kept for this purpose.” When Israel was exiled and scattered, these lineage records were lost, according to Makaryus. “Despite this,” he contends, “they preserved their existence. Wherever they went, they did not assimilate much [wa-lam yukthirū min al-ikhtilāṭ] among the foreign peoples who surrounded them.” The Jews avoided assimilation to such an extent that “it is said that those of them who settled in Europe many centuries ago still have a distinct pronunciation of European languages from that of Europeans, even to the present day.”37 In other words, for Makaryus, the Jews of his day—whether his Jewish neighbors in the Middle East or those farther off in Europe—were authentic, racial Semites, the progeny of the biblical Israelites, and were best understood in this racial context.
Like Makaryus, Jurji Zaydan, founder of al-Hilāl and father of Emile Zaydan, also came to embrace race-thinking. Indeed, as mentioned briefly in chapter 1, the elder Zaydan published a full book on the subject of human races in 1912. In this book, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya (Classes of the Nations, or Races of Man), Zaydan explained that, while throughout history people have been interested in understanding the different nature and morals of man in different places, it is only in recent decades that these can be studied not through “fables and exaggeration,” but rather as “a true science (‘ilman haqīqiyyan) based on observation and research.”38 Zaydan relies on a number of English-language scholars in crafting his book; indeed, much of the book is a translation of A. H. Keane’s The World’s Peoples, published just four years earlier in New York in 1908.39 Zaydan explains that, of the five books he reviewed in order to write his book, he preferred Keane’s because “it organized the peoples [al-umam] by classes, meaning that it graded them on the ladder of humanity as per the laws of evolution [nāmūs an-nushūʾ wa-l-irtiqāʾ].”40 In his work, Zaydan translates faithfully most of Keane’s section on the Jews, including the Irish scholar’s argument against those who claim that, given the variety in color and height among contemporary Jews, “the Israelite race [al-ʿunṣur al-isrāʾīlī] has been lost,” leaving only “the Jewish sect [aṭ-ṭāʾifa al-yahūdiyya].” Though some believe that Jews no longer constitute a race but rather a religious community of mixed racial characteristics, Zaydan follows Keane in insisting that they remain racially distinct. He highlights their shared features, “the most important of which are the large, hooked nose and the prominent, watery eyes,” along with “a protrusion under the chin and coarse, curly hair.”41 Jews are not all the same, to be sure, as “among them there is a sect42 in the lands of the Maghreb and Palestine that is distinguished for its beauty and these [general] features have already left them.”
Keane was particularly interested in what he considered to be the Jews’ remarkable adaptability; he referred to them as the “most versatile perhaps of all peoples.”
Originally pure nomads, the Israelites became excellent husbandsmen after the settlement in Canaan, and then they have given proof of the highest capacity for poetry, letters, erudition of all kinds, philosophy, finance, music, and diplomacy. The reputation of the medieval Arabs as restorers of learning is largely due to their wise tolerance of the enlightened Jewish communities in their midst. In recent years the persecutions, especially in Russia and Rumania, have caused a fresh exodus, and flourishing agricultural settlements have been founded in Argentina and Palestine. Efforts have also been made to direct the current of migration to the British possessions in East Central Africa.43
Zaydan reproduces nearly all these lines in close Arabic translation, openly praising the Jews for their intelligence and resourcefulness. There are two noteworthy changes Zaydan makes in his rendition of this narrative. First, while he notes the British efforts to “transplant” Jews to their East Africa protectorate, he omits mention of the “flourishing settlements” in Argentina and Palestine. Later in this chapter we will return to the issue of the presentation of Zionism by these journalists; for now, we might simply note that Zaydan apparently preferred not to broach the topic here. Second, while Keane presents Jews as the ultimate source of the revival of scholarship and culture in medieval Arab society—crediting Arabs with nothing more than not interfering with the Jews’ intellectual creativity—Zaydan offers a different perspective. For him, Jews merely “had a hand in the renaissance [nahḍa] of the Arabic language during the Islamic civilization.”44 Zaydan acknowledges the role played by Jews in medieval Arabic culture, but he is loathe to attribute all of this culture’s accomplishments exclusively to Jews.
JEWISH AND ARAB RACE AGAINST EUROPEAN PREJUDICE
Implicit in these journalists’ conception of the Jews in racial terms is the link between Jews and Arabs. Five years before publishing his monograph on human races, Jurji Zaydan was already considering the relationship between Jews and Arabs and the phenomenon of Jewish Arabs. In a 1903 volume of his al-Hilāl, Zaydan published an article entitled “The Jews in the Lands of the Arabs” (al-yahūd fī bilād al-ʿarab) in response to a reader’s inquiry about “the Arab tribes who converted to Judaism before Islam.” Under the rubric of “Jews in the Lands of the Arabs,” Zaydan includes both people of biblical Israelite origin who immigrated to the Arabian Peninsula as well as natives of these bilād al-ʿarab, the “lands of the Arabs,” who converted to the Jewish religion. He explains that “Judaism is ancient in the Arabian Peninsula, for Jews continued to immigrate to Arab lands from their earliest period, whether fleeing violence or searching for livelihood.” This “earliest period” of Jewish history in Arabia may well have begun as early as the pentateuchal period. “It is not unlikely,” he claims, “that a group of them immigrated there during their wanderings in the wilderness at the time of Moses.” A Jewish presence in the “lands of the Arabs,” in other words, could be as ancient as the Jewish presence in the Holy Land.45
Relying on traditional sources composed between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Zaydan presents his readers with three possible origins of the Jews in Arab lands. The first source he cites is Abu al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (ninth–tenth centuries). In Kitāb al-aghānī, Zaydan explains, alIṣfahānī notes that the first Jews in Arab lands were those who fought the biblical Amalekites. In sparing the Amalekite prince, these Jews failed to annihilate the people completely as had been commanded and thus were refused entry to “ash-Shām,” i.e., Greater Syria (including the Land of Israel). They decided to settle the land of those they had decimated, and this included the city of Yathrib (i.e., Madina). Next, Zaydan discusses the theory of al-Maqrizi (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) that Jews arrived in Yathrib during the time of Samuel the Prophet, and again after the Roman conquest. At the latter time, al-Maqrizi suggests, Jews undertook to spread their religion among the native peoples. “By the eighth century ce,” he writes, “the Jewish religion was widespread in many Arab lands.” Finally, Zaydan mentions the position of Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), who argued that the first to bring the Jewish religion to the Arabs was Dhu Nuwas, a king of Yemen who, along with his people, converted to Judaism at the end of the fifth century, “though in a different version, the people of Yemen converted to Judaism at the beginning of the fourth century.”46 Whether through immigration or by native conversion, there had been Jews living among Arabs, and even Arabs living as Jews, Zaydan argues, beginning no less than a millennium and a half earlier.
The same year in which Zaydan published his article, Makaryus addressed the question of the relationship between Jews and Arabs in a fascinating footnote in Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn. Identifying the biblical figure Abraham as the paterfamilias of
the Jews, Makaryus writes that “some European writers think that the Jews [come] from the Arabs.”47 Makaryus highlights the merits of this position, explaining:
The ancestor of the Jews after Abraham was Isaac his son, and the ancestor of the Arabs was Ishmael, the son of Abraham and the half-brother of Isaac. The kinship [between the Jews and the Arabs] is thus clear. Some of the Arab tribes were Jewish, both before and after [the advent of] Islam…. Abraham somewhat resembles a leader [shaykh] of an Arab tribe as is made clear from his biography in the Torah…. His morals and customs that are recorded are similar to the customs and morals of the Arabs, such as hospitality, pride, courage, bravery, generosity, protecting neighbors, and other such customs and ways of life.48
The biblical patriarch Abraham, in other words, might well have been an Arab himself; his son Ishmael, after all, is “the ancestor of the Arabs.” The Jews, according to this theory, are simply an Arab tribe that broke off from the rest of the Arabs in the biblical era, at the time of Abraham’s two sons, though even then not fully so; there remained Arab tribes that professed the Jewish religion in the periods both before and after the rise of Islam. Ultimately, however, the biblical narrative is just one piece of evidence of the familial kinship between the Jews and Arabs, and perhaps not the most compelling one at that. Makaryus insists that his discussion of Abraham and his two sons “is besides the fact that the Jews and Arabs are of one species and one race [jins wāḥid wa-farʿ wāḥid]. The relationship between the two [i.e., Jews and Arabs], according to science, then, is apparent and clear, and it is confirmed by the religious histories and the traditional stories.”49 It is the “science” of race that, for Makaryus, proves the link between Jews and Arabs; “religious histories and traditional stories” merely corroborate this connection.
Investigating and highlighting the relationship between Jews and Arabs was not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity for these journal editors. There were certain practical or ideological concerns that made Arabs’ association with Jews especially important and useful at this particular moment. The fin de siècle was the age of the Nahḍa, the Arab renaissance in which various influential Arab thinkers, exposed to European culture, were eager at once to embrace elements of that culture and to show that Arabs were just as capable of societal progress as their European counterparts, if not more so, even if Arabs at present were not as advanced.50 The problem was that race-thinking, which was then so deeply embedded in European thought, and which these intellectuals duly accepted, suggested that, as members of a non-European race, Arabs might inherently lack the capacity for the intellectual, social, and cultural progress that Europeans had experienced.
To solve this conundrum, the Jews became a critical link.51 Claiming a close association with Jews offered Arabs proof that members of their own race, as they conceived it, could be as successful and “advanced” as Europeans. This logic is evident in an extended al-Muqtaṭaf article about the Egyptian Jewish businessman Felix Suares that was written just after his death in 1906.52 (Though unsigned, the article was probably written by Makaryus, who dedicated his monograph on Jewish history to his friend Suares in a preface that is markedly similar to this article.) The introduction to the article, part of a series on the world’s leading businesspeople, offers us some insight into the way in which the author—and al-Muqtaṭaf more broadly—viewed Jews in relation to Easterners, or, in the language of the day, “Orientals.” At times, the author writes, circumstances demand that one “silence the arguments of some Europeans who claim that the nations of the East [umam al-mashriq] are inferior to them, or that they [these nations] have aged, that their demise is nearing, and that they will not endure.” For this author, the most compelling refutation of such a claim is found in the example of “the Israelites,” that is, the Jews. After all, the Jews who settled in Europe and were granted full civil rights “nearly equaled or even excelled beyond” their non-Jewish neighbors in the areas of science, philosophy, manufacturing, and commerce. Especially in the fields of philosophical sciences and financial activities, “every European bows” to the Jews because “the balance of money is in their hands, despite their small numbers.” This is the case not merely in one country but “in every country in which they are given equal civil rights to others, as is clear in France, Austria, and America, and as is obvious as well in Egypt,53 since security has been strengthened and the rights of foreigners preserved.”54 To use European Jewry as proof of the potential for Easterners to excel even beyond Europeans—so as to encourage his fellow Easterners and to rebuff the condescension of Europeans—the author must assert the fundamental “Eastern-ness” of Jews, including and especially the Jews of Europe.
This was a theme to which al-Muqtaṭaf returned in greater detail in 1913, in an article on “The Jews of France”:
Our purpose in publishing these lines is for Easterners to see that a group of them, i.e., the Israelites who immigrated to Europe and settled France—the mother of the sciences and arts and civilization—matched or even surpassed the French in every pursuit. Given this, we do not know how the Europeans can claim that the Eastern mind is inferior to the Western mind and that if an Easterner were to compete with a Westerner with equal means, the Westerner would prevail.55
For evidence of Jewish success in France, al-Muqtaṭaf relies on an article by the French author Eugene Tavernier.56 The article describes the spread of Jews throughout the various parts of French public life, from the military to the government to the police to the press. Tavernier’s article, it seems, caught the eye of al-Muqtaṭaf’s editors because it showed that “the Israelites, who are a pure Eastern nation,” are able to excel in France to a degree far disproportionate to their small numbers, with Jews holding positions of prominence in “the sciences, literature, politics, and finance.” And this success came “despite the fact that their history in France is one of continuing oppression,” from medieval slaughters to ritual murder accusations to economic discrimination to, most recently, the Dreyfus Affair.57 If the Jews, “a pure Eastern nation,” could achieve such feats of success even while suffering persecution and deprivation, other Easterners (especially, for al-Muqtaṭaf’s purposes, Arabs) could have confidence that they too have the ability to excel in the modern world.
What was implicit in the 1906 article on Suares is explicit in this 1913 article on the Jews of France: the Jews can be viewed as role models for the Arabs especially (if not only) when Jews are defined in racial terms. Here, explains the author, “we consider the Israelites as an Eastern people [shaʿb sharqī] in the sense that they are a race of humanity [jins min ajnās al-bashar] and not as a people with a particular religion [ahl dīn khāṣṣ bi-him].” As a result, there is, for these purposes, no distinction between Jews who practice Judaism and “those who have converted to Christianity or Islam.”58 For example, “the rise of [Benjamin] Disraeli to prime minister of England is the rise of a member of the Jewish nation [al-umma al-yahūdiyya] or of an Eastern nation, even though he was born a Christian.”59 The same is true for all Christian “scholars and ministers in European countries whose origins are Jewish [aṣluhum yahūdī] and for those with Jewish origins who converted to Islam in Muslim countries. All of these people have Eastern blood [damuhum sharqī] and are of the Semitic race like Arabs, Assyrians, Syrians and others of the Semitic nations.”60 Viewing the Jews in racial terms, even deeming their religious affiliation irrelevant to their fundamental identity, the author asserts an Arab-Jewish connection that is intrinsic and irrevocable. “If researching this topic does nothing more than convince the readers of their natural ability as an Eastern people who are not prevented from reaching the highest ranks of the advanced nations,” such a result would be “more than enough.” For al-Muqtaṭaf, the Jews were a model of a successful “Eastern nation” and “Semitic race”61—at once inspiration and proof that success was within reach.
This perspective on the close familial kinship between Jews and Arabs was not the interest exclusi
vely of al-Muqtaṭaf or its Christian coeditor, Shahin Makaryus. In 1910 Rashid Rida, editor of the Islamic journal al-Manār, noted in passing the relationship between Jews and Arabs in his discussion of the Jewish role in finance. Rida remarked that it is well-known that finance is concentrated “in the hands of the Jews and [that] they are [part] of us (i.e., the Easterners) in kinship [nasab] and homeland [mawṭin].” Moreover, in Europe, the Jews’ “skill in establishing justice and freedom has become clear.” In fact, Rida concludes, Jews “are superior to the rest of their Syrian and Palestinian brethren in their abilities.”62 For Rida and al-Manār, as for other contributors to these journals, Jews were a model of modern success to be respected and emulated by other “Easterners” and fellow members of the “Semitic race.”
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