Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

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  1 al-Hilāl 24 (1915–1916), 404.

  2 As Justin McCarthy explains, “some 600 [Jews] had been deported from Jaffa to Egypt by the end of 1914, later to be joined by their families, who were transported on the American warship Tennessee. The deported Jews were considered political threats by the Ottoman government because they were subjects of Russia (at war with the Ottomans) or because they were Zionists who, it was believed, advocated the separation of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. For a time, it appeared as if all Jews who had retained their Russian nationality would be deported. However, the German and American governments prevailed upon the Ottomans to allow the Russian Jews to become Ottoman subjects.” McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, 20.

  3 See Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952, 10–11. See also Krämer, A History of Palestine, 151–52; Rachel Simon, “Zionism,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Simon, Laskier, and Reguer, 169.

  4 See Philipp and Zaydān, Ğurğī Zaidān, His Life and Thought.

  5 “The readers know about the Zionist movement,” writes Zaydan. See below for an analysis of the ways in which Zionism was addressed in al-Hilāl over the preceding decades.

  6 On the guinea and the history of Egyptian currency, see Goldschmidt and Johnston, Historical Dictionary of Egypt, 119–20.

  7 See below for a discussion of those who insisted on the distinction between the terms.

  8 The interests of readers, while obviously difficult to determine with any certainty, might be gauged not only by what the editors published (based on their assessment of their readers’ interests) but also by letters to the editor, which will be discussed in some detail below.

  9 The pioneering study of the image of the Jew in the Arabic press is Sehayik, “Demut ha-yehudi bi-reʾi ‘itonut ʿarvit beyn ha-shanim 1858–1908,” which reviews tens of Arabic journals from the half-century preceding the Young Turk Revolution. Sehayik seeks to portray this period as “ ʿa golden age’ in relations between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.” In so doing, he overlooks or minimizes evidence to the contrary. Moreover, to explain what he perceives to be a marked and abrupt deterioration in attitude toward the Jews after 1908, he points to the rise of Zionism. However, 1908 was a transformational year not for Zionism but rather for the Ottoman Empire, as it was the year of the Young Turk Revolution. In other words, any dramatic change in attitude, if there had been one, would more reasonably be attributed to changes that came with the revolution, including (and most important in this context) the liberalization of the Ottoman censorship regime. Even the opposition to Zionism that was expressed in the Arabic press, Sehayik contends, was limited exclusively to the political realm. He asserts that “even this opposition did not, at that time, stem from a religious or racist background, but rather from a fear of creating a political problem in a period of the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, which symbolized Arab-Islamic pride. In addition, the local Christian zealots feared that the Zionist movement would harm them and their economic and political position in the region.” Sehayik is unwilling to see in early Arab opposition to Zionism anything other than the expression of political or economic interests, notwithstanding his characterization of the post-1948 Arab-Israeli conflict as “the war of annihilation that the Arabs declared against the state of Israel that is accompanied by an extreme, uncompromising Islamic-religious, anti-Jewish flavor” (221).

  10 See Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, 52–55.

  11 Ayalon writes that “during the 24 years of its publication until 1900, al-Muqtaṭaf handled 81 queries from Palestine, while al-Hilāl, launched only in 1892, responded to queries of 20 different Palestinian readers.” Ayalon acknowledges, though, that “the extent of Palestinian presence in the questions-and-answers sections was, unsurprisingly, markedly smaller than that of Lebanese and Egyptian readers” and, in fact, “also smaller than the presence of queries sent from Damascus, aleppo, or even Baghdad.” Nonetheless, “though limited in scope, such involvement did reflect active Palestinian interest in the fruits of the nahdah.” Ayalon, Reading Palestine, 52–55. Suggestive of the wide reach of these journals, letters arrived from as far off as Natchez, Mississippi. See al-Hilāl (October 1910–July 1911), 53–54.

  12 al-Hilāl (October 1910–July 1911), 21.

  13 On the presence of these journals in these libraries, see also Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 54–55. According to Rashid Khalidi, the copies in the Khalidi Library likely belonged to Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi.

  14 See, for example, al-Hilāl (October 1908–July 1909), 177.

  15 The revelation of al-Maqdisī’s identity as al-Khalidi occurs in al-Hilāl (October 1908–July 1909), 181–82.

  16 Rashid Khalidi has convincingly challenged this dichotomy vis-à-vis Zionism in Palestinian Identity, 134ff. Cf. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I.

  17 Noting the role of Christians in discussions found in the Islamic journal al-Manār, Daniel Stolz has commented on “the confessionally porous boundaries of Islamic discourse” in this period. Stolz, “ ‘By Virtue of Your Knowledge,’ ” 224.

  18 On Rashid Rida and the Salafiyya movement, see Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, 222ff. See also Adams, Islam and Modernism; Commins, Islamic Reform.

  19 While the editors of al-Hilāl and al-Muqtaṭaf were Christians, these journals were not “Christian journals” in an exclusive sense, even as matters related to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament occupied significant space in them. Internal evidence within the journals confirms that their contributors and readers included many Muslims. al-Manār, in contrast, may more reasonably be regarded as an “Islamic journal” insofar as it devoted much space to Qurʾanic commentary that would be more likely to alienate non-Muslim readers (leaving aside the potentially disturbing substance of that commentary relating to non-Muslims). On the relationship between Rida and the editors of al-Hilāl and al-Muqtaṭaf, see Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity, 76–86.

  20 Phyllis Cohen Albert has investigated the history of the uses of these terms in the French context. Cohen Albert rejects the conventional wisdom that “in the wake of the Revolution emancipated French Jews began calling themselves Israélites, in preference to Juifs, thus indicating that they had denationalized their Jewish identity, and limited it to a newly narrowed definition in the religious sphere.” Instead, she contends that this distinction was first articulated in 1890 in an article entitled “Juifs et Israélites.” See Cohen Albert, “Israelite and Jew,” 91–96.

  21 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 561.

  22 See al-Muqtaṭaf 49:2 (August 1916), 205, and 49:4 (October 1916), 409.

  23 A brief but useful survey of this discussion can be found in Silberstein, “Religion, Ethnicity, and Jewish History.”

  24 In more familiar parlance, we might render this term as “Judaism” or, perhaps more precisely, “Jewishness.” Given the ambiguity, however, and the fact that each of these terms has different nuances, I have chosen to use the more literal though obviously more cumbersome “Israelitism.”

  25 Cf. al-Muqtaṭaf 46:3 (May 1915), 504, for the editor’s response to a question about what happens when Freemasons find themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield.

  26 Certain Zionists employed race-thinking in making the argument for a Jewish race (and, by extension, nation). Zionist race-thinkers were compelled, though, to consider the implications of the Jews’ race for their relations with Palestine’s Arabs, ostensible racial relatives. One of Efron’s subjects, Jewish race scientist Elias Auerbach (b. Posen 1882; moved to Palestine 1905), employed the Jews’ Semitic race as an argument for the “appropriateness of a mass return to the Middle East,” to be in their natural racial environment. “Buoyed by ample anthropological evidence and by theories of Semitic unity, Auerbach’s Zionist vision,” Efron explains, “projected a peaceful and harmonious future for Jews and Arabs in the Land of Israel.” In other words,
the Jews’ race was, in Auerbach’s case, an argument for Zionism, but for a Zionism that stressed peaceful coexistence with Palestine’s Arab natives. Efron, Defenders of the Race, 139–40. On race-thinking among Jews and Zionists, see also Hart, Jews and Race; Falk, “Zionism and the Biology of the Jews,” 587–607.

  27 See discussion of the Lewis Affair in chapter 1. On Makaryus’s racial thought, see also Gribetz, “ ‘Their Blood Is Eastern,’ ” 143–61.

  28 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-Isrāʾiliyyīn, 1.

  29 On the negative image of the so-called zanjī in medieval Arabic writing, see Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 31–34, 50–53, 92–95. On the zanjī in medieval Jewish imagination, see also Goldenberg, “ ‘It Is Permitted to Marry a Kushite.’ ”

  30 Cf. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a professor of anatomy at Gottingen University, who classified humanity into five groups: Caucasian, Mongol, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. For key passages of Blumenbach’s 1775 dissertation On the Natural Variety of Mankind, see Bernasconi and Lott, The Idea of Race, 27–37. For a contemporary review of the work, see Augstein, Race, 58–67.

  31 As Eric Weitz notes, “unlike ethnicity, race always entails a hierarchical construction of difference.” Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 21.

  32 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 2.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Ibid., 3.

  36 Cf. Ernest Renan, who credits the Semites “with bringing about the discovery, ‘without reflection nor reasoning,’ of the purest religious form humanity had ever known. This discovery,” explains Gil Anidjar, “was, to be sure, anything but an invention…. Rather, a kind of ‘primitive intuition’ enabled the Semites to part from the world in a unique way and arrive, ‘without any effort’ or meditation, at the notion of the Supreme God.’ ” Anidjar, Semites, 31.

  37 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 3.

  38 Zaydān, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya, 5.

  39 On Zaydan’s work on race and his use of Keane, see El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 58–60.

  40 Zaydān, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya, 6. See Keane, The World’s Peoples. On Keane, see “Dr. A. H. Keane,” Nature 88 (February 8, 1912), 488. The other works Zaydan cites are Bettany, The World’s Inhabitants, or Mankind, Animals, and Plants; Bettany, The World’s Religions; Moncrieff, The World of to-Day; Tylor, Anthropology.

  41 Zaydān, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya, 235. Keane’s original reads: “One observer even asserts that there are all kinds of Jews—brown, white, dark, tall, short—so that there is no longer any question of a Jewish race, but only a Jewish sect. Nevertheless certain marked features—large hooked nose, prominent watery eyes, thick pendulous under lip, rough frizzly lusterless hair—are sufficiently general to be regarded as racial traits.” Keane, The World’s Peoples, 331.

  42 For consistency, I translate ṭāʾifa again here as “sect” as I do earlier in this passage, but in this case “group” or “part” might be more precise.

  43 Keane, The World’s Peoples, 332.

  44 Zaydān, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya, 235.

  45 For a modern scholarly account of the Jews in pre-Islamic Arabia, see Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia.

  46 al-Hilāl (October 1903–July 1904), 85–86.

  47 The Arabic reads min al-ʿarab, which might be rendered as “are among the Arabs” or “are of the Arabs.” The example Makaryus offers of this perspective is Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 political novel Tancred, which had been translated into Arabic by Makaryus’s own journal al-Muqtaṭaf.

  48 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 4.

  49 Ibid.

  50 On the Nahḍa, see the classic work on the subject, Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. In 1899, the editors of al-Muqtaṭaf wrote that “the West borrowed from us when we were once great and now it is our turn to take from the West.” “The Egyptian Princess,” al-Muqtaṭaf 23 (1899), 66. Cited in Elshakry, “Darwin’s Legacy in the Arab East,” 111.

  51 On other Arabic journal responses to European condescension toward the Arab/Islamic world—including highlighting the glorious past of the Arab world, the intolerance and violence of medieval European/Christian society, as well as self-critique—see Sehayik, “Demut ha-yehudi bi-reʾi ‘itonut ʿarvit beyn ha-shanim 1858–1908,” especially 43–52.

  52 Suares died in April 1906, and the article about him appeared at the opening of the May edition of al-Muqtaṭaf.

  53 Literally: “in this region.” al-quṭr, in the Egyptian context, though, generally refers exclusively to Egypt.

  54 al-Muqtaṭaf 31:5 (May 1906), 361.

  55 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 561.

  56 Tavernier’s 1913 article “The Jews of France in the XIXth Century,” 393–407, is mentioned in Philipp, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 120. On Tavernier’s view of France as “the daughter of the Grand Orient,” see Kedourie, “Young Turks, Freemasons and Jews,” 98.

  57 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 563.

  58 Ibid., 564.

  59 The author’s choice to highlight Disraeli in particular from among all of history’s converts from Judaism was not accidental, for Disraeli himself, “a Romantic Orientalist” in the words of scholar Ivan Kalmar, held this racialist view. Kalmar, “Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist.”

  60 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 564.

  61 Ibid.

  62 al-Manār 13:5 (1910), 355.

  63 al-Muqtaṭaf 33:2 (February 1908), 125.

  64 Samuel bin Hofni (d. circa 1034) is regarded as the last Gaon of Sura. On the Geonic period, see Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture.

  65 The author writes that the expulsion took place in 1494. It is not clear why the author identifies this date, rather than 1492, as the date of expulsion.

  66 al-Muqtaṭaf 33:2 (February 1908), 127.

  67 Mark R. Cohen dubs this “the ‘myth of an interfaith utopia’ in Islam,” which was propagated by both Jews and Arabs (especially, though not exclusively, Muslims) for various purposes at different times. “Frustrated by the tortuous progress of their own integration into gentile society in what was supposed to be a ‘liberal’ age of emancipation,” writes Cohen of nineteenth-century European Jews, “Jewish intellectuals seeking a historical precedent for a more tolerant attitude toward Jews hit upon a time and place that met this criterion—medieval Muslim Spain,” and, more broadly, the Jewish experience under Islam. Cohen contends that this myth has been employed more recently “by Arabs as a weapon in their propaganda war against Zionism.” He explains that “according to this view, for centuries, Jews and Arabs lived together in peace and harmony under Islamic rule” and thus “modern antipathy toward Israel began only when the Jews destroyed the old harmony by pressing the Zionist claim against Muslim-Arab rights to Palestine.” He claims that Christian Arabs “have felt a need to affirm historical Islamic

  68 For these two terms, I follow the translation of Yūsuf ʿAlī, The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾan.

  69 al-Manār 10:11 (January 1908), 814.

  70 See Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. See also Commins, Islamic Reform.

  71 al-Manār 13:8 (1910), 572.

  72 Rida does not provide the full Qurʾanic passage here but cites the beginning and end with the equivalent of an ellipsis (“—until his words—“) in the middle.

  73 al-Manār 13:8 (1910), 573.

  74 Cf. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (1779). On Rida’s place within the Nahḍa, the Arab Enlightenment, see Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, 222–43. Hourani points to Rida’s attempts to revise and moderate certain conventional rulings in Islam. Related to the issue of religious freedom, Hourani writes of Rida’s position on Muslim religious apostasy. Rida, Hourani explains, “gave up the traditional view that the Musl
im who abandoned Islam should necessarily be put to death. Instead, he made a distinction between the apostate who revolts against Islam and is therefore a threat to the umma, and him who abandons it quietly as an individual: the first should be put to death if captured, the second not. His reasoning in favor of this conclusion shows the principles of his thought. The condemnation of the apostate to death is supported, it is true, by the unanimous ijmaʿ of the jurists; but one must go beyond this, and ask if the ijmaʿ is based on a clear text of the Qurʾan or not. In this case, there is no text of the Qurʾan stating that all apostates should be killed; on the contrary, there is a text [Qurʾan 2:256] condemning all compulsion in religion (lā ikrāh fī ad-dīn). The ijmaʿ is therefore in contradiction with the principles of Islam, and must be rejected.” Ibid., 237. Hourani shows the way in which Rida similarly limited other Islamic concepts and practices, such as that of jihād. For more recent studies of Rida’s perspective on other religions, see Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity; Wood, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs. On the relationship between Jews and the Nahḍa, see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East.”