Before returning to his discussion of the corruption of the Torah, Rida allows himself one further remark on contemporary events: a warning, or threat, concerning the consequences of Zionism’s success. The Jews’ desire to rule Palestine is so intense, and the danger so alarming, because “Jerusalem [bayt al-muqaddas] holds great importance for both Muslims and Christians.” If Jews succeed in gaining control there, Rida contends, “they will establish Israelite sovereignty and transform the al-Aqsa Mosque (the Temple of Solomon)—which is the direction they face when praying107—into a temple exclusively for them.” And this, Rida suspects, will “ignite the fires of riots, prophesied clearly in the traditions regarding the End of Days.” Rida insists that “the Ottoman nation [al-umma al-ʿuthmāniyya] must strive to prevent” this Jewish attempt to gain control over Palestine. If not, “this will prove lethal to Ottoman power, may God protect us.”108 And with this, Rida resumes his exegetical discourse on a Qurʾanic sura that deals with the Jews’ corruption of their scripture.
For Rida, Zionism represents the Jewish effort to replace the al-Aqsa Mosque with a new Jewish temple. Jews are willing to use any means at their disposal, and in particular illicit, sinister financial means, to gain control of Palestine. Rida portrays the potential consequences of Zionist success in terrifying, explicitly eschatological terms. Critical to note here is that for Rida, as for al-Khalidi, the Zionist movement was a religious phenomenon—i.e., Zionists were acting out of religious motivations109—and, especially for an Islamic scholar such as Rida, the movement was most appropriately understood and assessed through a Qurʾanic exegetical lens.
One month later, in al-Manār’s final issue of 1910, Rida once more turned to the subject of Zionism in his opening Qurʾanic commentary. He writes not only of the Jews’ desire “to restore their dominion to Jerusalem and its surroundings” but also of their intentions to “evict the Muslims and Christians from that holy land and to leave them with nothing.” The Jews have sought to accomplish this mass eviction of Palestine’s natives—identified, significantly, in religious categories—by “cutting off the means of livelihood” from non-Jews. Because of the financial assistance of the Jews’ political and philanthropic organizations, Jews are able to work, Rida claims, at lower prices than non-Jews, and thus exclude Christians and Muslims from the workforce.110
Rida again addresses the question he expected to be on readers’ minds: will the Jews succeed in their ambition of “restoring their dominion” in Palestine? To the disappointment, no doubt, of his readers in Palestine, the Qurʾanic verse under analysis in this issue of al-Manār leaves such an eventuality as an open question. “The verse neither confirms nor denies it,” Rida explains, though there are numerous factors militating against the realization of the Jews’ goals, especially those he had already mentioned in his earlier commentaries: “they are scattered and consumed with their money in all countries,” and they lack “abilities in war and agriculture.” Nonetheless, insists Rida, Jews “believe with religious faith that they will eventually establish sovereignty in the Holy Land.”111 In other words, while this Qurʾanic verse lacks assurances of the ultimate success or failure of Zionism, Jews themselves are certain, with religious faith, that they will eventually achieve their aims. Because of this religious certainty, and the Jews’ consequent decisive moves toward achieving their Zionist ambitions, Ottoman citizens must take the threat seriously. The Jews “have already amassed a great deal of money” for these purposes, writes Rida, who concludes his commentary on the Qurʾanic phrase with this exhortation: “the Ottomans must not give them [the Jews] power over Palestine, nor should they facilitate their purchase of its land and their mass immigration to it.” This movement represents “a great danger,”112 insists Rida, “as we have recently warned in the exegesis of the previous verses.”113
While Rida argues forcefully against Zionism, he, like al-Khalidi, does not cast doubt on the fundamental Jewish historical claim that, in antiquity, a Jewish state existed in Palestine. Even in the course of polemicizing against the Jews, Rida consistently accepts this historical assertion. For instance, in September 1907 Rida’s Qurʾanic commentary confronted “the two great specious arguments that the Jews used against Islam.” The first concerns the Jews’ alleged accusation that Muhammad could not possibly be part of the prophetic tradition of Abraham, given that Muhammad sanctioned the consumption of foods—such as camel meat—prohibited in this tradition. The second “specious argument” relates to Muhammad’s privileging of Mecca over Jerusalem. “God promised Abraham that his blessing would come in the progeny of his son Isaac,” claimed the Jews, “and all of the prophets from Isaac’s seed privileged Jerusalem and prayed toward it.” Jews are thus alleged to have reasoned that if Muhammad were truly part of this tradition, he too would have favored Jerusalem; by selecting Mecca as his qibla (direction of prayer), “he contradicted all of them.”114 The answer Rida cites to the latter accusation is that
the Sacred House,115 to which we direct our prayers, was the first building that was made a temple for man. It was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, peace be upon them, exclusively for worship. Then, the al-Aqsa Mosque [al-masjid al-aqṣā116] was built in Jerusalem [bayt al-muqaddas117] centuries later by Solomon the son of David…. It is thus correct that Muhammad was [part] of the religious community [al-milla] of Abraham and in his worship he faced [the same place] where Abraham and his son Ishmael had faced.118
In this passage, Rida exhibits no interest in denying the Israelite link to Jerusalem. Like al-Khalidi and other Muslim intellectuals of his day, Rida freely acknowledges that the Temple was built by the Israelite king Solomon, as recounted in the Bible and in Islamic tradition, even if Rida chooses to refer to the Temple as al-masjid al-aqṣā, the distinctively Qurʾanic name for Jerusalem’s central sanctuary.119 Rida opposed Zionism because it threatened to dislodge Muslims and Christians from Palestine and to replace the al-Aqsa Mosque with a new Jewish temple. He questioned aspects of the Jews’ religion, to be sure—even aspects as fundamental as the provenance of their Torah—but he took for granted that Jews once had a sovereign state in Palestine.
THE BIBLE IN AL-HILĀL AND AL-MUQTAṬAF
Like Rida in al-Manār, the editors of al-Hilāl and al-Muqtaṭaf were keenly interested in the Bible. As Christians in less overtly sectarian journals, however, they approached the text in a way that was rather different from Rida’s approach. They frequently reported on contemporary scholarship and discoveries that either confirmed or cast doubt on biblical claims. In July 1906, for instance, al-Muqtaṭaf presented a six-page article called “The Exodus and Number of the Children of Israel.” The article is a selective summary of a chapter by Egyptologist and archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie in the newly published Researches in Sinai.120 The chapter, “The Conditions of the Exodus,” argues that the number of Israelites generally believed to have departed Egypt in the biblical Exodus is grossly exaggerated. Among the different proofs cited, al-Muqtaṭaf mentions the claims that there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus, that sources suggest that the Israelites were in Palestine (not Egypt) at the time of the Exodus, and that the Sinai Peninsula does not contain enough water to sustain the millions of people and their animals that, according to the traditional view, fled Egypt with Moses.
If one initially suspects that this article aims to argue that the entire Exodus story was a nonhistorical fabrication, and thus to undermine an important element of the Jews’ historical claim to Palestine, one soon realizes that this is not the intention of Petrie or al-Muqtaṭaf’s editors. Instead, Petrie proposes a theory that interprets the census numbers offered in the Bible in a radically different way, reading the Hebrew word typically rendered “thousands” instead as “tents,” that is, families, thus yielding only a small fraction of the number of Israelites traditionally believed to have participated in the Exodus. Petrie’s opinion in this “most difficult question,” al-Muqtaṭaf predicts, is likely to be “rejected and
discredited” by “most religious biblical scholars.” Such scholars, al-Muqtaṭaf writes derisively, routinely “reject any new idea,” but “it is not long before they return to it and accept it.”121 The author finds Petrie’s theory—that many fewer Israelites actually entered Palestine in the biblically recounted Exodus than is generally believed—to be compelling and anticipates that it will eventually gain wide acceptance. This particular view, to which the journal offers such extensive space and attention, is interesting in that it at once challenges traditional beliefs about the Bible while still accepting (through reinterpretation) the Bible’s literal claims.
To be sure, these journals also often highlighted what contributors believed to be confirmatory evidence of traditional biblical claims. Several examples might suffice. In 1895 al-Muqtaṭaf offered a brief note on “The History of the Torah.” The author cited an article from the English Fortnightly Review, which contended that archeological discoveries in Egypt, Assyria, and Canaan had proved that, “in contrast to what biblical critics say,” the Children of Israel were literate before they settled the Land of Canaan. Apparently responding to assertions that Moses could not have written the Bible owing to his and his people’s illiteracy, the al-Muqtaṭaf article declares that “the attribution of the Five Books to Moses is no more unreasonable than its attribution to anyone else.”122 A decade later, in 1906, al-Muqtaṭaf published an article on “The Excavation of the Antiquities of Palestine.” Here the author reports on the recently convened annual meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London and recounts the speech of its director, R. A. Stewart Macalister, on the discoveries in the ancient city of Gezer. The article emphasizes the implications of these excavations for an understanding of the death of the biblical figure of Samson and mentions, inter alia, the unearthing of the fortress of Simon the Maccabee.123 In 1912–1913, al-Hilāl published a brief article on the origins of the Philistines, the people mentioned in the Bible who “resided in Palestine and against whom the Israelites fought.” Recent research “conducted by the English scientific expedition,” al-Hilāl reports, “has shown that their origins are in the island of Crete.”124 A 1913 piece in al-Muqtaṭaf, also translated from an English-language journal, discusses archaeological discoveries in Jericho, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives. The author relates the Jericho findings to the story of Rahab in the biblical book of Joshua.125 At least some al-Muqtaṭaf writers not only accepted the historicity of biblical narratives but were eager to show that there was compelling, “scientific” reason to do so.126
On the other hand, the journals’ editors and writers did not uniformly accept the historicity of biblical accounts. One al-Hilāl reader in 1907 inquired of the journal’s editors as to whether they had found “in the history of ancient Egypt anything that corroborates the Torah’s writings about the stories of Joseph and Moses.” This prompted an extended discussion in which the editors cite, among others, the ancient Christian and Jewish authors Eusebius and Josephus from Palestine and concede that the archaeological evidence is wanting.127 Similarly, in a review of a 1907 book by the British orientalist scholar David Samuel Margoliouth, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, al-Muqtaṭaf notes that “though the Torah records the history of the Jews and their ancestors in detail, from Creation until around the time of Christ [al-masīḥ],” nonsectarian historians (“neither Jewish nor Christian nor adherents of any other religious community”) “treat the Torah’s historical accounts as they do the historiographical writing of Herodotus.” That is to say, such historians “only accept from either [the Bible and Herodotus] that which is corroborated by [archaeological] remains, conforms to reason, and does not contradict science.” In their work, explains al-Muqtaṭaf, these historians are comparable to “doctors, astronomers, chemists, and physicists.”128 For this reviewer, Margoliouth, described as “our dear friend, professor of Arabic at Oxford University,” represented a biblical scholarly approach that (quite rightly, in this review-er’s opinion) refused to presuppose the accuracy or historicity of the biblical text.
Al-Muqtaṭaf’s discussion of this work by Margoliouth, the son of an English Jewish convert and missionary to Anglicanism, may indicate an interest on the part of the reviewer in portraying the Jews’ connection to Jerusalem as more limited than Margoliouth claimed. Jerusalem, which the reviewer describes as “the capital of the Jews and the qibla [the direction of prayer] of the Christians,”129 is the subject of the only paragraph of Margoliouth’s book that al-Muqtaṭaf’s article translates in its entirety. Though the translation is placed in quotation marks, there is a significant difference between the original English and the Arabic translation. Margoliouth writes that “the period during which the city could claim the title imperial was very short, extending no longer than the reigns of David and Solomon, the former of whom appears to have brought several of the surrounding peoples into subjection.”130 In this sentence, he is commenting on the imperial position of Jerusalem, a status defined by the subjugation of non-Israelite peoples under the power of the Israelite sovereign. In al-Muqtaṭaf’s rendering, the sentence reads: “The period in which this city was the capital [‘āṣima] of the country of the Jews was extremely brief, limited to the reigns of David and Solomon.”131 Al-Muqtaṭaf’s reviewer, in other words, translates Margoliouth’s line as a statement of the limited nature of the historical claim on Jerusalem as the Israelite capital. One wonders whether this mistranslation may have resulted from a deliberate misconstrual of Margoliouth’s statement to serve a particular political (perhaps anti-Zionist) interest.
These journals thus exhibited a strong interest in the Bible, biblical archaeology, and the question of the historicity of biblical narratives. Like the (usually European) researchers on whose work they reported, some of the articles aimed to prove the reliability of biblical accounts, while others were more skeptical. For most, the fact of an Israelite past in Palestine was accepted without question, though, as we find in the mistranslation of Margoliouth’s text, opposition to Zionism at times may have colored the way in which the Bible and related research were presented to readers.
MAKARYUS AND THE STATELESSNESS OF THE JEWS
The journals and their editors, as we have already seen in al-Manār, also addressed Jewish ambitions in Palestine more explicitly and directly. Even before Herzl founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897, al-Muqtaṭaf considered the prospect of a Jewish return to Palestine. In 1895, in its “Opinions of Scholars” section, al-Muqtaṭaf included an extended discussion on a proposal by a certain “Dr. Mendes in a North American newspaper.”132 Mendes, the journal reports, argued that “the only way to bring about the end of wars and disputes between the world’s countries and to link the nations with bonds of love and brotherhood is to return Palestine to the Jews.” According to al-Muqtaṭaf, Mendes offered a number of different arguments in defense of this proposal. Among other benefits, granting Palestine to the Jews would solve the “Eastern Question,” he claimed, by removing Palestine—“the primary ambition of European countries”—from the claws of the European powers. It would also end the quarrel between the various Christian sects in Jerusalem, as the goal of dominance for any one of them would be rendered unrealizable. Finally, it would solve the “Israelite Problem,” that is, the problem of antisemitism in Russia, Germany, and France. Mendes’s arguments are presented without comment or criticism until the last revealing line: “Perhaps, were he [Dr. Mendes] to consult with the Jews about their return to Jerusalem, he would find that many of them do not want this.”133 For this al-Muqtaṭaf author, the utopian idea of a Jewish return to Palestine was unrealistic because Jews themselves were uninterested in pursuing it (a fair assessment, no doubt, in 1895).
At least one of al-Muqtaṭaf’s editors—Shahin Makaryus—looked more favorably on the Jewish nationalist movement to return to Palestine. Let us return to Makaryus’s History of the Israelites, the text in which Makaryus described Jews in explicitly racial terms. Perhaps related to his ra
cial perspective on Jews, Makaryus evinces a discernible sympathy for their desire to restore their sovereignty in Palestine. To write the history of the ancient Israelites, Makaryus employs “the Torah,” a term that by Arabic convention includes the entire Hebrew Bible, as his primary source. The Torah, he explains, narrates the Jews’ “slavery and oppression as well as the power, success, and sovereignty that they achieved.” In this sense, the Torah is the book of the Jews’ “consciousness, their beliefs, and religious and civil laws.” For the Postbiblical period, or, as he names it, the period “after the destruction of Jerusalem,” Makaryus contends that the history of the Jews is not found in any one book; rather it is “dispersed among the histories of the nations [al-umam] among which they resided as a people without a homeland or country [shaʿban lā waṭan lahu wa-lā bilād],” a people with nothing but “the memory of the past and their beliefs.”134 Makaryus presents this statement about Jewish history, one surmises, to explain to readers the challenges he faced in writing the Jews’ history. But the way in which he describes postbiblical Jewish history is significant for our understanding of his perception of the Jews and, in particular, their relationship to Palestine. The lack of “a homeland or country” is, in Makaryus’s view, a—perhaps the—defining feature of the history of the Jews after the Bible. Moreover, this lack not only defined but necessarily limited their history. All that Jews had left during their many centuries of exile was the “memory” of their former political achievements and their beliefs. Makaryus appears to assume that the history of the Jewish Diaspora was not a genuine history because it lacked national, political sovereignty (an assumption Makaryus shared, it should be noted, with many Jewish nationalist historians of the fin de siècle period and beyond).135 The Jews’ history, he suggests, must be culled, in a most undignified way, from the “proper” histories of other nations that had their own states.
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