75 al-Manār 6:5 (May 1903), 196. In this discursive context, the term jinsī seems most appropriately translated as racial. Sylvia Haim has read this passage as evidence that Rida “sometimes imputed to the Jews the faults with thich they are usually taxed.” Haim, “Arabic Antisemitic Literature,” 309.
76 This was not the first time al-Hilāl published an article on “the House of Rothschild.” See, e.g., the brief report on “the origin of the House of Rothschild,” focusing on the six purported elements of Amschel Rothschild’s will to his children, al-Hilāl (1904–1905), 492.
77 al-Hilāl (October 1906), 5–6.
78 Literally: the period of Arab “ignorance.”
79 As this article was anonymous, the religious affiliation of its author is unknown.
80 al-Hilāl (October 1906), 6.
81 Though not only Christians wrote for or read al-Hilāl, this is not the forum in which one would find explicitly proselytizing arguments on behalf of Islam.
82 al-Hilāl (October 1906), 6.
83 See chapter 3 and Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross.
84 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 564. Cf. Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1897), 655–656.
85 Asher Kaufman claims that they had converted from Maronism. See Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, 41. However, Rashid Khalidi noted, in private correspondence, that they came from the Marjeyoun region where there was no Maronite community. Khalidi contends that they were originally Greek Orthodox or Catholic.
86 al-Muqtaṭaf 43:6 (December 1913), 564.
87 Presumably, this refers to the city in Massachusetts, though there are places by the same name in New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Maryland, and Pennsylvania as well.
88 al-Muqtaṭaf 28:9 (July 1903), 616.
89 A potentially fruitful area for future research would be an investigation of the participation of American (or Arab American) readers in these Arabic intellectual journals.
90 Identified here not as Passover but as “the great holiday.”
91 al-Hilāl (October 1910–July 1911), 53–54.
92 In this regard I differ with Sylvia Haim, who discounts the anti-Jewish references in al-Manār. Though Rida “writes of the wealth of the Jews, their meanness, their treacherous relations with the prophet, their danger to the Ottoman Empire, etc.,” Haim contends that “this usually occurs in his commentary on the Koran when he is trying to expound some sura or hadith which refers to the Jews and to illustrate the superiority of Islam over Judaism.” Haim, “Arabic Antisemitic Literature,” 309. In my view, there is no reason to discount Rida’s comments about Jews, whether ancient or contemporary, regardless of the genre of texts in which these comments appear. In a later essay, Haim acknowledges Rida’s “ambivalent attitude towards the Jews.” Haim, “Islamic Anti-Zionism,” 49.
93 al-Manār 10:2 (April 1907), 83.
94 This, of course, was not an original theory of either Rida or al-Khalidi; the notion that the Torah was not written by Moses has ancient precedents. My point here is simply to highlight that both Rida and al-Khalidi chose this same theme in their early twentieth-century writings about the Jews and Judaism.
95 al-Manār 10:2 (April 1907), 84.
96 Rida offers both the Arabic masīḥ and the transliteration of the English “messiah.”
97 On this apparently early modern pseudepigraphic text and Rida’s Arabic edition of it, see Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity, 213–42; and Sidney H. Griffith, “Gospel,” EQ.
98 al-Manār 10:11 (January 1908), 814–15.
99 al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 723.
100 Ibid., 724.
101 The work cited here is Rahmat Allah ibn Khalil ar-Rahman [al-Hindi], Iẓhār al-ḥaqq (Cairo, 1877).
102 al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 727. See Clarke, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments.
103 al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 727.
104 Ibid., 725.
105 Rida presumably refers here to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and Spain’s so-called Glorious Revolution of 1868.
106 al-Manār 13:10 (November 1910), 725.
107 al-masjid al-aqṣā (haykal Sulaymān) wa-huwa qiblatuhum. Clearly, al-Khalidi’s equation of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Temple of Solomon, discussed in chapter 2, was not entirely idiosyncratic in this historical and cultural context.
108 al-Manar13:10 (November 1910), 726.
109 al-Khalidi, however, viewed the movement as a violation of the proper understanding of modern Judaism, as we saw in chapter 2.
110 al-Manār 13:11 (December 1910), 806. It is typically assumed that Jewish immigrant laborers demanded higher wages than Palestine’s non-Jewish population. If this particular aspect of Rida’s accusation is correct, i.e., if Jews were indeed working for lower pay than their non-Jewish neighbors in Palestine, this would require a significant revision of the commonly held views of the economic relations between Zionists and Arabs in the Late Ottoman period. On labor issues during this period, see Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914.
111 al-Manar, 13:11 (December 1910), 806.
112 Khaṭaran kabiran. Cf. the term used by ha-Ḥerut to describe the anti-Zionist press in Palestine and beyond (ha-sakanah ha-gedolah).
113 al-Manar 13:11 (December 1910), 806.
114 al-Manar 10:7 (September 1907), 482.
115 This title is used to refer to the Kaʿba in Mecca.
116 Literally: “the furthest place of worship.”
117 Literally: “the Holy Temple.”
118 al-Manār 10:8 (September 1907), 485.
119 Rida often identified the Temple of Solomon with the al-Aqsa Mosque. In 1903, in his discussion of the secret Masonic associations, Rida explained that the founders included Jews and Christians, and, as a result, its symbols are taken from their “shared book called the Holy Bible” and the founders “traced these [symbols] back to the construction of the Holy Temple, the Temple of Solomon, peace be upon him. This is the al-Aqsa Mosque.” al-Manār 6:5 (May 1903), 197.
120 Petrie and Currelly, Researches in Sinai.
121 al-Muqtaṭaf 31:7 (July 1906), 541.
122 al-Mutaṭaf 19:21 (November 1895), 876.
123 al-Muqtaṭaf 31:7 (July 1906), 614.
124 al-Hilāl (October 1912–July 1913), 444. There appears to be a typographical error here, as the article actually indicates that the Philistines came from the “newspaper” (jarīda) of Crete rather than the “island” (jazīra).
125 The article was by Harold Shepstone in The World’s Work. al-Muqtaṭaf 42:3 (March 1913), 272.
126 On the role of Protestant missionaries—such as those who taught al-Muqtaṭaf’s editors at the Syrian Protestant College—in promoting the idea of science as a buttress for faith, see Elshakry, “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism in Late Ottoman Beirut,” 173. “Education in the natural sciences was promoted as one way to aid pupils on the path to God,” Elshakry explains (183).
127 al-Hilāl (October 1907–July 1908), 172–74.
128 al-Muqtaṭaf 33:1 (January 1908), 81.
129 Though referring to Jerusalem as the Christian qibla is unusual, the idea is grounded in a long-standing tradition and connected, one presumes, to the eastward orientation of many churches. As Reuven Firestone noted in private correspondence, the ninth- to tenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari mentions in his commentary on Q. 2:145 that both Jews and Christians prayed facing Jerusalem. See also Firestone, “Rituals: Similarities, Influences, and Processes of Differentiation,” 703.
130 Margoliouth and Tyrwhitt, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, Three Chief Cities of the Egyptian Sultans, 295.
131 al-Muqtaṭaf 33:1 (January 1908), 81.
132 Neville Mandel suggests two possibilities as to the identity of this “Dr. Mendes”: either Henry Pereira Mendes or Frederick de Sola Mendes, brothers and Sephardic rabbis in New York. Mandel, The
Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 40n.35. Henry Pereira Mendes was one of the founders of the Federation of American Zionists. See Sefton D. Temkin and Eugene Markovitz, “Mendes,” in Ej2.
133 al-Muqtaṭaf (October 1895), 795.
134 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 77.
135 On this subject, see the work of David N. Myers, including Re-Inventing the Jewish Past and Resisting History.
136 See Ami Ayalon’s discussion of these two terms and the relationship between them. Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East, 48–52.
137 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 77.
138 al-Hilāl (October 1906), 9.
139 Though the adjective ‘aẓīm typically has positive connotations, I render it here as “significant,” that is, fairly neutrally, so as not to prejudice the analysis and because the term occasionally is used in a negative sense.
140 One wonders whether Makaryus intentionally avoided the subject so as not to upset readers of one political perspective or another; the anticipated second edition never appeared.
141 The Jewish Colonization Association’s purchase of al-Mutallah (Hebrew: Metullah) and the removal of its primarily Druze residents from the land sparked a significant controversy among Zionists concerning the impact of Zionist colonization on Palestine’s natives and the ways in which the negative effects might be mitigated. The conflict with the Druze fellahin of al-Mutallah after the purchase of the land was a primary subject of Yitzhak Epstein’s 1905 speech, published two years later as “A Hidden Question.” See Dowty, “ ʿA Question That Outweighs All Others.’ ”
142 Makaryus, Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn, 202–3.
143 For a critical examination of this trope, see George, “ ‘Making the Desert Bloom.’ ”
144 On Felix Suares and his family, see Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952, 39ff.; Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 256.
145 Strangely, the dedication page is missing in one of the two copies of Makaryus’s book that I was able to locate (though the dedication is listed in the table of contents). The tattered copy found in Columbia University’s Butler Library includes the dedication page.
146 Makaryus uses the term umma here in reference to the Jews, suggesting that he was not quite consistent in his distinction between umma and shaʿb and in his insistence that the Jews no longer constitute an umma.
147 The religious leaders described are Rūfā’īl Hārūn bin Shim’ūn (the hahambaşi of Egypt), Iliya Ḥazān (the hahambaşi of Alexandria), and Mas’ūd Ḥāy bin Shim’ūn. Makaryus also provides biographical sketches of members of the following families: Menashe, Qatawi, Rolo, Moseiri, and de Lathermeres.
148 On “Early Zionism in Egypt,” see Landau, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 115–24.
149 Without any remark, Rida renders the title Tārīkh al-yahūd (History of the Jews) instead of the actual title Tārīkh al-isrāʾīliyyīn (History of the Israelites). This substitution points to the synonymous nature of “Israelite” and “Jew” in the Arabic lexicon of this period, even though some did highlight the distinction between the two terms.
150 al-Manār 7:12 (August 1904), 472–73.
151 al-Muqtaṭaf 44:1 (January 1914), 51.
152 al-Muqtaṭaf 51:3 (September 1917). Masterman’s article includes the line: “It is useless for any to settle in Palestine who are not prepared to be themselves practical agriculturalists and also to face, especially in the immediate future, very many difficulties. There will not be immediate openings on an extended scale after the war.” Masterman, “Palestine,” 26. On the concept of “absorptive capacity” in Palestine, see also Reichman, Katz, and Paz, “The Absorptive Capacity of Palestine, 1882–1948.”
153 In 1914 Tishʿah be-Av was observed on August 2, the tenth day of Av (the ninth day of Av fell on August 1, but this was a Sabbath). Zaydan’s confusion can likely be explained by the fact that he had presumably encountered a Jewish source that noted that the war began on this Jewish day of mourning (a claim that has indeed become part of modern Jewish lore). For Russian Jews (among whom, one assumes, this calendrical coincidence was first observed), the war did effectively begin on the ninth of Av, as Germany declared war on Russia on August 1. For Zaydan, however, living in British-occupied Egypt, August 4 was understood to be the beginning of the war, namely, the day Britain declared war on Germany. Thus Zaydan, having heard the Jewish claim that the war began on Tishʿah be-Av, appears to have mistakenly assumed that this referred to August 4.
154 See, e.g., the caricature of de Rothschild on the cover of Le Rire: Journal Humoristique Paraissant le Samedi, copied in Albert Lindeman’s entry on “Rothschilds” in Levy, Antisemitism, 625; of a Jewish monster holding a globe, from the 1901 Vienna newspaper Kikeriki (1901), copied in Arie Stav, Peace, 41.
155 Literally: “a symbolic picture or image.”
156 al-Hilāl 24 (October 1915–July 1916), 401.
157 Der Groyser Kundes (January 20, 1911). I thank my colleague Eddy Portnoy for his help in finding the source of this cartoon. On Lola, see Portnoy, “The Creation of a Jewish Cartoon Space in the New York and Warsaw Yiddish Press, 1884–1939,” chap. 3.
158 al-Hilāl 24 (October 1915–July 1916), 401–2.
159 Ibid., 402–4.
CHAPTER 5
Translation and Conquest: Transforming Perceptions through the Press and Apologetics
And now, the known Christian enemy, owner of al-Karmil, published a pamphlet that he claims is drawn from the English Jewish Encyclopedia. He is spreading it among the masses and sending it to the officers of the government and the representatives so that they deal with it in the upcoming meeting of parliament!
I would like to translate this book into Hebrew and print it in Hebrew periodicals so that our brethren will see the extent of our Arab enemies’ hatred. I am also ready to accept responses from anyone who wishes to answer it and to assemble all of the ideas along with my own and to make from the material one forceful answer.1
One could hardly fathom a more evocative example of the complex role of language and translation in the encounter between Zionists and Arabs in Late Ottoman Palestine: an urgent call in Hebrew by a Palestine-born, Arabic-speaking Sephardic Zionist for a Hebrew translation of an Arabic translation prepared by a Palestine-born Christian Arab of an English text by a British-born Ashkenazic American Zionist. The three individuals involved in this 1911 affair are already familiar to us from previous chapters. The original, English text in question was Richard Gottheil’s 1906 entry on “Zionism” in the Jewish Encyclopedia, one of the main sources for Ruhi al-Khalidi’s manuscript analyzed in chapter 2. “The known Christian enemy” referred to here was Najib Nassar, whose 1911 Arabic pamphlet entitled Zionism: Its History, Purpose, and Importance (Excerpted from the Jewish Encyclopedia) served as a point of comparison in our analysis of al-Khalidi’s text and whose al-Karmil newspaper sparked ha-Ḥerut’s “Great Danger” campaign, studied in chapter 3.2
Finally, the author of the exhortation cited above was Shimon Moyal, whose at-Talmūd of 1909 was, as we have seen, another of al-Khalidi’s sources for information on Jewish history and beliefs. Although it is unclear whether he had already read Nassar’s Zionism or had simply heard about it, Moyal was in any case certain that it was no mere literal Arabic rendering of Gottheil’s article but rather a willful distortion designed to misrepresent and vilify Zionism. Moyal, a native of Jaffa, believed it to be of critical importance that his fellow Zionists—most of whom could not read Arabic—were made aware of this slander disguised as translation because of its potential to influence how its readers perceived Zionism.3 So Moyal decided to translate it—again.4 Translation was thus a tool used to expose Arabs to the dangers of Zionism, on the one hand, and to expose Zionists to the dangers of Arab perceptions of Zionism, on the other—both ostensibly based on the same text.
The translation and retranslation of the Jewish Encyclopedia’s “Zionism” entry is an acute case of th
e central and problematic place of language and translation in Late Ottoman Palestine and in the Arab-Zionist encounter more broadly. While the contested nature of language in internal Zionist debates is well-known and well studied,5 the position of language and translation in the encounter between the Zionists and Arabs of Palestine has received relatively little scholarly attention.6 Through a study of two very different but related projects—the varied attempts to make the Arabic press more sympathetic toward Zionism and the publication of two Arabic books about the Jews and Judaism—this chapter argues that translation served not only as a means of relating information in a different language but also as a tool of influence, defense, persuasion, apologetics, and polemics.
A THIRD CONQUEST: THE ARABIC PRESS
The years of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) are associated with two Zionist projects of “conquest,” namely, “conquest of labor” and “conquest of land.”7 The former denotes the effort to have Jewish-owned farms and places of employment exclusively employ “Hebrew” (that is, Jewish, as opposed to Arab) laborers; the latter refers to the attempt by Jews and Zionist organizations to purchase as much of Palestine’s territory as possible. There was, however, another project of Zionist “conquest” during this period, one that aimed to “conquer the Arabic press.”8 This third conquest had a number of different versions and permutations and generated passionate discussion and debate among Palestine’s Zionists. Translation, as we shall see, was at the center of this discourse.
After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, Arabic-reading Zionists in Palestine began to notice a disturbing trend. With the liberalization (though not cessation) of the Ottoman press censorship regime, there was an explosion of new Arabic newspapers throughout the empire. Some of these new papers openly challenged Ottoman government policies and criticized other populations within the empire, acts that were generally proscribed before the revolution.9 The newly voiced criticism included among its targets the mass Jewish immigration to and settlement of Palestine and the imperial government’s inability or unwillingness effectively to oppose Zionism.10
Defining Neighbors Page 28