Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  Regardless of the antagonists’ motivations, the debate dragged on for a couple of years until finally Moyal and Malul succeeded in founding a short-lived Arabic newspaper. In 1913, under Moyal’s leadership, Ṣawt al-ʿuthmāniyya (The Voice of Ottomanism) was created. For Moyal, the paper was meant to fulfill the desire he articulated the previous year to

  explain to the Arabs that our ambitions as Hebrew nationalists do not oppose their ambitions, and that we have the necessary qualities to work hard together for the sake of the shared homeland and to enhance the prestige of the Ottoman nation under whose shadow we stand at the same time as we seek to be a distinct Jewish nation concerned for its language, character, past, future, and customs.53

  Highlighting the consistency between “Hebrew nationalism,” defined in distinctly cultural terms—language, character, past, future, customs—and Ottomanism, Moyal hoped, through Ṣawt al-ʿuthmāniyya, to allay fears about the Zionists’ separatist political ambitions.

  Some have seen Moyal and Malul’s effort to create an Arabic newspaper as an emblem of a unique Sephardic respect for their Arab neighbors and Arab culture (in contrast to an alleged Ashkenazic disregard, or worse, for Arab culture). It is worth noting, though, that Malul, in a 1913 series of articles defending his Arabic-language activities against charges of assimilationism, including his work for the Zionist Arabic newspaper, explains that the Arabic language could never “penetrate our hearts and destroy the aim of our souls.” On the contrary, he insists, “the mind cannot imagine the possibility that this minor culture [tarbut peʿutah] will act upon us so much so that it would push us backward.”54 It is difficult, surely, to consider Malul’s description of Arab culture as “minor” to be an expression of deep respect and admiration for Arabs. While the cultural experiences of Palestine’s Sephardic Zionists were obviously different from those of their European counterparts and thus may have helped foster somewhat different Zionist ideologies, the evidence, as we discovered in chapter 3 as well, does not support the thesis that these ideologies were uniformly or unqualifiedly tolerant and respectful of the land’s Arabs.

  DEFENDING ZIONISM BY TRANSLATING JUDAISM: A STUDY OF TWO APOLOGETICS

  “Conquering” the Arabic press was not the only way by which Zionists sought to influence Arab views about the Jews and Zionism, though it appears to have been the approach to which the most time and resources were devoted in this period. In the pages that follow, we turn to a different sort of translation project carried out by two of the same individuals involved in the Arabic press efforts: Shimon Moyal and Nissim Malul. In a span of less than three years, each at the moment of his return to Palestine from Egypt in 1909 and 1911, respectively, Moyal and Malul wrote books in Arabic about Judaism and Jewish history. As they translate Judaism and the Jewish experience into Arabic, these texts, I argue, highlight the perception among some Zionists that the Arabs’ resistance to Zionism and Jewish settlement in Palestine was aggravated by inherited religious prejudices, and that a proper translation could effectively dispel the misperceptions and alleviate the tensions.

  MOYAL’S AT-TALMŪD

  We turn now to the first (and ultimately, the only) volume of what Shimon Moyal intended to be an Arabic translation of the entire Talmud, a 1909 text entitled at-Talmūd: Aṣluhu wa-tasalsuluhu wa-ādābuhu (The Talmud: Its Origin, Transmission, and Ethics).55 In analyzing this text, which as we saw in chapter 2 served as a source for al-Khalidi’s understanding of Judaism, I aim to uncover the ways in which Moyal sought to portray Judaism and Jewish history to non-Jewish readers of Arabic. I argue that Moyal used his exposition in two different, complementary if subtly competing, ways. On the one hand, I contend that Moyal tried to make Judaism appear less foreign and more congenial to Muslim and Christian readers by highlighting, explicitly or implicitly, areas of apparent similarity between the respective faiths and by describing Jewish principles in familiar language and terminology. In this sense, Moyal’s work can be understood as part of the broader genre of apologetics—though, on occasion, the text betrays certain indirect polemical aspects as well, especially in relation to Christianity. On the other hand, at-Talmūd is not merely a latter-day apology for Judaism (though even if it were, its effort simultaneously to apologize in both Christian and Islamic terms in the fin de siècle Middle East context would surely recommend it for sustained examination). Rather, while painting Judaism in the most benign fashion, Moyal continually and consistently recounts Jewish history in distinctly nationalist terms; in so doing, he portrays Jewish nationalism as having ancient and, by implication, legitimate roots. This text, in other words, is a work of religious apologetics enmeshed within a nationalist (or Zionist) reading of ancient Jewish history. Moreover, by his choice of terminology as he describes the Jews’ antique national past in the contemporary Arabic idiom of nationalism, Moyal may have been suggesting that not only Judaism but Zionism itself (in a particular form) gave Ottoman Arabs little to fear. Analyzing at-Talmūd, then, offers a fascinating window into the Arab-Zionist intellectual encounter of the Late Ottoman period.

  At first glance, Moyal’s at-Talmūd, 148 pages long, appears to be a simple and dry introduction to Jewish Oral Law. After his preface, Moyal presents an account of the transmission of the Oral Law from Moses until the compilation of the mishnah. In broad outline, the text proceeds as follows. It begins with a section about the various biblical judges, the prophets, the Great Assembly, and the tannaitic rabbis. It then identifies each tractate of the mishnah. Next, several pages are devoted to a discussion of the ancient Israelite synagogue in Alexandria. Finally, Moyal introduces, translates, and comments on the first three chapters of the book of Pirkei avot (known in English as “Ethics of the Fathers”), with a brief interruption before the third chapter for a discussion of the mystical book of the Zohar.

  Aside from a number of contemporary Ashkenazic and Sephardic rabbis whose insights Moyal tapped for this work (particularly an Ashkenazic rabbi in Egypt by the name of Mendel Cohen), Moyal acknowledges several literary sources on which he drew. These include Maimonides’s introduction to his mishnah commentary,56 the Judeo-Arabic commentary on Pirkei avot attributed to Maimonides’s grandson David ha-Nagid (published for the first time in Alexandria in 1901),57 and Gedalia ibn Yahya’s sixteenth-century Shalshelet ha-kabbalah.58

  In contrast to the works on which Moyal relied, his own text was directed at a non-Jewish audience. “This is the fruit of my great labor,” writes Moyal in his preface, “which I present to the speakers of Arabic.” The “speakers of Arabic” (an-nāṭiqīn bi-ḍ-ḍād) whom Moyal had in mind were not other Jews, like himself, who spoke Arabic natively. After all, Moyal explains that the underlying aim of the work is “to remove misunderstanding between them” (that is, Arabic-speakers) and “the most ancient race among them, namely the Israelite race, the source of the prophets.”59 The categories here (“Arabic-speakers” and “the Israelite race”) are interestingly ambiguous—mutually exclusive in one phrase, overlapping in the next. The “them” of “misunderstanding between them” appears to refer exclusively to non-Jewish Arabic speakers, whereas the “them” of “the most ancient race among them” appears to include Jews (at least Arabic-speaking ones) within the broader category of an-nāṭiqīn bi-ḍ-ḍād. Regardless of this ambiguity,60 it is clear that the readers Moyal wished to reach were non-Jewish Arabic-readers, whom the book was meant to disabuse of certain “misunderstandings” they had about Jews. The language of Moyal’s work is thus not incidental but rather central to its purpose and message.

  THE CHARGE OF JEWISH RITUAL MURDER

  Part of Moyal’s agenda in translating the Talmud—which had never been translated in its entirety into Arabic—may be illustrated with a brief line Moyal includes in his review of the ancient Israelite judges. When he reached the figure of Jephtah, who, according to the Bible, slaughtered his own daughter in accordance with his vow to sacrifice the first thing that came to greet him from his home if he was victorious i
n battle, Moyal writes: “It is said of him in the Torah that he killed his only daughter with his own hands, in fulfillment of his vow.61 There is a long discussion about him in the Talmud that will be mentioned in the appropriate place. Many have protested against him for having killed his daughter due to the impermissibility of human sacrifices in Jewish law.”62 Moyal was undoubtedly correct in insisting that many biblical interpreters and commentators have criticized Jephtah for fulfilling his vow. Yet, in asserting “the impermissibility of human sacrifices in Jewish law,” Moyal was not merely continuing an internal Jewish exegetical debate about this story, nor was it the biblical tale that he likely had foremost in mind. More recent events were paramount.

  Accusations of ritual murder perpetrated by Jews, though common in medieval and later Christian Europe, were generally unknown in the Arab Middle East.63 With the increasing presence and influence of European Christians in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, however, the blood libel began to penetrate into Christian Arab discourse. The most famous of Middle Eastern blood libels was the Damascus Affair of 1840, in which a group of Jews were accused and convicted of having ritually murdered an Italian monk and his Muslim servant who had disappeared together in Damascus.64 This was not the first such case in the Middle East, though. The accusation had already struck the Jewish communities of Aleppo (1810), Beirut (1824), Antioch (1826), Hama (1829), Tripoli (1834), and Jerusalem (1838). Nor was Damascus the last such incident. The blood libel was repeated multiple times throughout the Middle East, extending into the twentieth century.65 Declaring—in Arabic, and in a work explicitly directed at a non-Jewish audience—that “human sacrifices” were proscribed by Jewish law in the context of a biblical tale, Moyal subtly countered ritual murder accusations against fellow Jews living in Arab lands.

  The fact that this implied defense against blood libel accusations appears in a Jewish writer’s Arabic commentary on the Talmud alludes to another, related phenomenon in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle Eastern history. In this period, Arabic polemics against Judaism and the Jews began to conscript the Talmud as weapon, serving as evidence of the Jews’ iniquity. This appears to have occurred through the translation of European antitalmudic texts and myths into Arabic, usually by Christian Arabs. Among the earliest was Habib Faris’s Ṣurākh al-barīʾ fī būq al-ḥuriyya (The Call of the Innocent with the Trumpet of Freedom).66 Faris’s book, published in Cairo in 1890, accuses the Jews of ritual human sacrifice (adh-dhabāʾiḥ al-bashariyya) and points to a number of European as well as recent Middle Eastern cases of Jews’ alleged horrific acts. Faris, following European sources, ascribes this phenomenon directly to talmudic teaching. Similarly, in 1899 Yusuf Nasrallah published an Arabic translation of a French version of August Rohling’s 1871 German work Der Talmudjude. In Nasrallah’s al-Kanz al-marṣūd fī qawāʾid at-talmūd (The Awaited Treasure concerning the Laws of the Talmud),67 which also includes a translation of Achille Laurent’s 1846 anti-Jewish work on the Damascus Affair,68 the author claims that the Jews engage in ritual murder according to the demands of “the laws of the Talmud.” Moyal’s attempt to assert that human sacrifices are prohibited by Jewish law in his own Arabic work specifically focused on the Talmud must then be understood in this new polemical context.

  In fact, the immediate impetus for Moyal’s writing at-Talmūd came from a Christian Arab intellectual. Curiously, however, and highlighting the complexities of interreligious relations in the fin de siècle Middle East, the instigator was not Faris nor Nasrallah nor any other Christian anti-Jewish agitator. Rather, it was Jurji Zaydan, the markedly philosemitic Christian editor of the Arabic journal al-Hilāl, discussed in chapter 4.69 Zaydan had fielded numerous letters from readers inquiring about the Jews’ mysterious Talmud, which Zaydan consistently defended as nothing more than “a large book made up of a number of volumes containing the Jews’ laws, rituals, traditions, history, morals, sciences, and personal and civil rulings.”70 Protestations of the Talmud’s decency and harmlessness were clearly insufficient, however, as readers’ inquiries about the perniciousness of the Talmud continued to arrive at the editor’s office. Finally, Zaydan suggested that Moyal, whom he met in Cairo, translate the Talmud into Arabic to dispel the slanderous rumors about the text once and for all.

  WHO HAS “A SHARE IN THE WORLD TO COME”?

  Even as it seeks often rather blandly to review post-Pentateuchal Israelite history so as to explain how the Oral Law received by Moses was transmitted until it was recorded by Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi, at-Talmūd is, I contend, a deliberately apologetic (and at times subtly polemical) work. Consider Moyal’s choice to begin his Talmud translation project not with the first tractate of the mishnah, Berakhot, but rather with Pirkei avot. This choice highlights Moyal’s desire to trace the chain of Oral Law transmission (found at the very beginning of Pirkei avot) as well as to show that the Talmud is indeed an ethical work (evidenced by the rabbis’ ethical exhortations recorded in Pirkei avot), not the sort that would guide its adherents to kill innocents. This no doubt accounts for the prominent place of ethics (al-ādāb) in the very title of Moyal’s work.

  Moyal immediately hits a snag, though, because the line traditionally printed and read before the first mishnah of Pirkei avot—“All Israel have a share in the World to Come”—does little to refute the accusation that the Talmud privileges Jews over non-Jews. Clearly cognizant of this challenge, Moyal historicizes the choice of that line as the fātiḥa (opening words) of Pirkei avot.71 He insists that this opening was selected “during a period of successive acts of oppression and persecution against the Israelite nation” because “it promises the grace of another world to this world’s most oppressed people, those lacking in all human rights [al-ḥuqūq al-bashariyya].” He is not content, however, merely with historicizing the fātiḥa; he seeks to disprove the charge that “the Israelite religion” claims “a monopoly on the blessing of the world to come and eternal salvation.” On the contrary, Moyal insists, “the Israelites have opened the gates of heaven to all of humanity as long as they follow the ways of moral excellence and kindness.” After all, he explains, this one talmudic line does not negate another that says, as Moyal puts it: “Anyone who has merit from among the nations of the world has a share in the world to come.”72 This statement, as Moyal renders it, seems to be based on a line not from the Talmud but from the Tosefta (Sanhedrin 13:2), and, more so perhaps, on Maimonides’s famous formulation ḥasidei umot ha-ʿolam yesh lahen ḥelek le-ʿolam ha-ba (the righteous of the nations of the world have a share in the world to come).73 Just as Judaism does not discriminate against gentiles in the world to come, Moyal seems to imply, Jews do not discriminate against gentiles in this world.

  Moyal emphasizes Jews’ obligation to treat all of humanity kindly in his commentary on a line of Pirkei avot attributed to the sage Hillel. “Be of the disciples of Aaron,” Hillel is reported to have said, enumerating the particular qualities he considered to be associated with the priestly brother of the biblical Moses. One of the traits Hillel ascribes to Aaron is “a lover of creatures.”74 In his phrase-by-phrase discussion of this mishnah, Moyal expounds on this line as follows: “ ‘A lover of creatures’: not excluding foreigners (al-ajānib), for if this were not so, then [Hillel] would have said ʿa lover of your brethren’ or ʿa lover of your countrymen [muwāṭinīka]’ as they say in those instances in which they wish to specify [only] members of the Israelite nation.”75 Moyal presents this egalitarian, nondiscriminatory perspective not as his own view but rather as his interpretation of Hillel’s aphorism. However, given the variety of ways in which Moyal might have interpreted the words of this mishnah (and all the others as well), we may infer another element of his agenda through these interpretations and comments. Moyal’s choice to offer this particular explanation suggests—especially when read in the context of the broader work—that this is indeed the message about Judaism that Moyal was attempting to deliver.

  In at-Talmūd, Moya
l’s apologetic agenda extends beyond simply showing that Judaism does not discriminate against gentiles—neither in its understanding of their place in the afterlife nor in the way Jews are instructed to relate to them. In fact, the effort to make Judaism not just palatable but also familiar to Christians and Muslims runs throughout Moyal’s text. Whenever he touches on a figure or practice comparable or related to one found in either Christianity or Islam, we will see, he is quick to note the commonality.

  CHRISTIANITY AND MOYAL’S TALMUD

  Given three factors—the conspicuous role of Christian Arabs in the propagation of antitalmudic allegations, the fact that it was a sympathetic Christian (Zaydan) who initiated this Talmud translation endeavor, and the disproportionate number of Christians in the Arabic-reading public76—it is perhaps unsurprising that Moyal frequently focuses on Judaism’s similarities (and especially those of the Talmud) with Christianity and the New Testament. About the Jewish custom of reading a section of Pirkei avot each Sabbath between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot, for instance, Moyal explains in a footnote that this tradition is comparable to “the custom of spiritual devotions [practiced] by the Christians [ar-riyāḍāt ar-rūḥiyya ʿind al-masīḥiyyīn].”77 More strikingly, consider the way in which Moyal develops his apologetic explanation for the statement, discussed above, that “All Israel have a share in the world to come.” “all Israel,” he claims, refers exclusively to “those who deserve the description ‘Israelite,’ owing to their good deeds, flawless intentions, and proper morals.” In other words, this is not a blanket (chauvinistic) claim that a special place is reserved in the world to come for all Jews. Moyal contends that, on careful examination of the Torah,78 one finds that the prophets refer to “their nation with the name ‘Israel’ in matters of encouragement, consolation, and praise,” whereas, in instances of “censure and rebuke,” the names “House of Jacob,” “Children of Jacob,” and “Jacob” are used. Pirkei avot does not offer a share in the world to come to all of the Children of Jacob (that is, all Jews), but rather only to “all Israel” (that is, all who are worthy).