Defining Neighbors

by Gribetz, Jonathan Marc

  There are more explicit ways in which Moyal sought to link Judaism with Islam. Consider, for example, his commentary on Hillel’s maxim, in the second chapter of Pirkei avot, that “one who increases women, increases witchcraft.” Moyal explains that “increasing women” refers to polygyny (taʿaddud az-zawjāt). Elaborating, he provides the context:

  It was permitted earlier for each Israelite [man] to take [the number of] wives permitted by the Qurʾan to Muslims, until some leaders [ayimma] put an end111 to this. [But] not all of the nation follows it [the restriction]. There are, even now, a number of places where it is still permitted for any Israelite who wishes to marry two, three, or four women. But what is meant by this maxim [about wives and witchcraft] is clear and does not require elucidation.112

  Although we might be curious to know what Moyal intends in this final line (is it “clear” to Moyal that polygyny leads to witchcraft or is it simply “clear” that Hillel thought so?), our concern here is rather with the first part of this passage. Moyal plainly identifies and equates the Jewish laws concerning polygyny with those of the Qurʾan’s limit of four wives.113 It must be noted that Moyal somewhat overstates the similarity. The Talmud does record “sound advice” that recommends that men limit the number of their wives to four,114 but other rabbinic opinions permit as many wives as a man can afford to sustain.115 Moyal’s exaggeration of the correspondence between Islam and Judaism in this regard, I would argue, is another aspect of the apologetic nature of at-Talmūd. In his attempt to make Judaism feel more familiar and less threatening to his non-Jewish readers, in this case Muslims, Moyal not only describes Judaism in Islamic terms but even simplifies (or distorts) his presentation to conform to his argument of similarity.

  THE CHALLENGE OF TWO TARGET AUDIENCES

  As a work of religious apologetics, Moyal’s at-Talmūd is particularly intriguing in that, in a single text, it simultaneously addresses both Christians and Muslims. Thus far we have analyzed aspects of the text that appear to be concerned with only one or the other of the religious traditions. In addition, there are instances in which Moyal refers to both religions at once, highlighting the commonalities shared by all three faiths. Twice in the course of his introductory review of the transmission of Jewish Oral Law, Moyal stresses that the individuals mentioned are common to all three traditions. Of the biblical prophet Elijah, for instance, he explains that this “famous prophet, who never died but ascended alive to the heavens in a chariot of fire” is the “saint ilyās of the Christians and a legendary figure for Islam.”116 The insertion of this line serves to provide both Christian and Muslim readers a sense that this story is one that they share. Similarly, Moyal identifies the biblical Jonah as the one “who is mentioned in the Arabic translation of the Bible by the name Yūnān and in the Qurʾan by the name Yūnis.”117 Once more, through these insertions, Moyal attempts to convince his reader, whether Christian or Muslim, that Judaism is not a foreign or shadowy religion. It actually shares some of the same “saints” and “legendary figures” of Christianity and Islam.

  The three religions’ commonalities are not limited to biblical characters. In his discussion of the book of the Zohar118 (which Moyal contends, contra one of his rabbinic advisors, is a medieval text, not one written by the tannaitic Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai),119 Moyal defines Kabbalah, somewhat critically, as “inherited customs, that is, a strange mixture of imaginary, hypothetical ideas concerning divinity and the spirit and what lies beyond the grave.” It is akin, he explains, to the ideas of the Christian “Mystics,” that is, “people of secrets,” and the “teaching that is transmitted by the scholars known in Islam as Sufis.”120 In other words, not only are all three religions related in their shared reverence for the same ancient prophets, but they have also experienced comparable religious movements through the course of their parallel histories (even if the rationalistically inclined Moyal was not particularly sympathetic to such mystical movements).121

  MOYAL’S NATIONALIST READING OF JEWISH HISTORY AND ITS OTTOMAN IMPLICATIONS

  Even as he works to present Judaism as favorably and familiarly as possible to Christian and Muslim Arabs, Moyal nonetheless writes of Jewish history in distinctly nationalist terms. While seeking to remove, as much as possible, elements of religious difference between Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors in the Middle East, he makes no effort to conceal what he perceives to be the Jews’ history of nationalism and their defiant will for political independence. Indeed, he translates Jewish history and concepts not only into Christian and Islamic terms but also into the still-developing language of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism in the Arab world, language that pervades at-Talmūd.

  Consider, for instance, the way Moyal describes the biblical prophet Isaiah and the leaders Ezra and Nehemia. Of Isaiah, Moyal writes that “this prophet was sharp-tongued and bitter in speech, but he was extremely patriotic [kāna waṭaniyyan shadīd al-waṭaniyya], as is obvious to anyone who looks closely at his wonderfully eloquent sayings.”122 Here Moyal uses the term waṭaniyya, derived from homeland, waṭan.123 In reference to the biblical figures Ezra and Nehemia, the leaders of the Israelite return to the Holy Land from the Babylonian Exile, he generally uses a word even more analogous to the then-current concept of nationalism, qawmiyya, from the word that was beginning to be used for the modern sense of “nation,” qawm.124 Moyal writes that Ezra and Nehemia were in the “vanguard of the Israelite national awakening [muqaddimat tilka an-nahḍa al-qawmiyya al-isrāʾīliyya] that brought about the rebuilding of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem and the return of the ancient people [ash-shaʿb al-qadīm] to its land to govern itself by itself under the protectorate of King Cyrus.”125 Patriotism and nationalism, in Moyal’s view, are not new sentiments for Jews; rather, they are of antique vintage, central to Jews’ views and goals over two millennia earlier.

  Moyal’s particular presentation of the Jewish national past may reveal elements of the hopes he had for the contemporary Jewish national project in Palestine. Discerning the precise nature of these hopes from a text of this genre is difficult, not least because Moyal’s historical reconstructions suggest more than one model for Jewish independence. Given the Ottomanist political philosophy with which Moyal is associated in recent historiography,126 especially because of lines like the one cited above in which he wrote of the compatibility of Zionist ambitions and those of “the Ottoman nation under whose shadow we stand,”127 we may interpret his view of an Israelite awakening (nahḍa) “under the protectorate of King Cyrus” as his precursory model for a contemporary Jewish renaissance under the Ottoman sultan. Indeed, Moyal describes the period of the Second Temple as one of “partial independence [ba‘ḍ al-istiqlāl] under the rule of an Israelite governor appointed by the decree of the Persian king.”128 In his account of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Judea, Moyal uses a more specific phrase, describing the Greek ruler’s decision to preserve Judea’s “internal (or domestic) independence [istiqlālahā ad-dākhilī].”129 Employing the central terms of the modern Arabic political-ideological lexicon130—waṭaniyya, qawmiyya, shaʿb, nahḍa, istiqlāl—Moyal projects them onto the distant Jewish past, implying, perhaps, that such a national awakening, nahḍa qawmiyya, is possible again. This may well have been how Moyal was able to unite his Zionism with his Ottomanism, how his newspaper Ṣawt al-ʿuthmāniyya (The Voice of Ottomanism) could serve to defend Zionism. Just as the Israelites returned to their land with “partial independence” (ba‘ḍ al-istiqlāl) as a Persian protectorate in the Second Temple period, or with “internal independence” (al-istiqlāl ad-dākhilī) under Alexander’s Greek regime,131 so too in Moyal’s own day the Jews might return to Palestine and live there, this time as an Ottoman protectorate. Moyal’s particular vision of Zionism, then, could be perfectly consistent with his commitment to the Ottoman Empire.

  However, this interpretation of Moyal’s reading of Jewish history is complicated by other aspects of his presentation of
Jewish history. For instance, he also writes admiringly about the Maccabees, during whose rule “the Israelite nation achieved complete independence [tamām al-istiqlāl] and power.” Indeed, “the neighboring nations feared its [the Hasmonean state’s] might.”132 Such a description could hardly have been intended to relax the anxieties of those Arabs who saw a threat in Zionist ambitions. If the precedent of the Jews under Cyrus or Alexander could be understood to imply, in modern times, a semiautonomous Jewish community under the Ottomans, the precedent of the Maccabees would suggest something quite different and, from the Arab read-er’s perspective, far more insidious.

  Moyal is even more explicit in his admiration of yet another historical advocate of the “full independence” of the “Israelite nation,” namely, Bar Kokhba. In his introductory rendition of the transmission of the Jewish Oral Law and of Israelite history, Moyal ultimately reaches Rabban Gamaliel. Among the “famous contemporaries” of Rabban Gamaliel was

  Rabbi Akiba, the great teacher, leader of the famous nationalist party [al-ḥizb al-waṭanī ash-shahīr], who had twenty-four thousand rebels [under his control]. He created an army with them and placed them under the leadership of Bar Kokhba, whom Josephus, the biased historian [al-muʾarrikh al-muḥābī], names Bar Koziba, that is, the son of the liar. This was a shameful appellation from which the truth exonerates him. This Bar Kokhba was among the greatest leaders…. He rose up against the Roman conquerors who had subjugated Judea after they conquered Jerusalem and burned the Temple.133

  This passage is one in which Moyal’s voice (or, perhaps, that of an unnamed text on which he chose to rely) is most clearly discernible in the course of his historical exposition. Here Moyal unequivocally affirms his respect for Bar Kokhba and his efforts to achieve Israelite independence. Moyal further describes “Bar Kokhba and his brave men [rijāluhu ash-shuj‘ān]” who fought the Roman armies in “heroic wars” in which they attempted “to restore the independence of their nation [ummatihim], emulating the Maccabees who preceded them.”134 Such overt approval for Bar Kokhba, imagined as a militant nationalist hero, is more difficult to mesh with a model of internal autonomy in an Ottoman framework.

  However, in his approval of Rabbi Akiba’s national party, Moyal may have had a more recent example in mind, suggesting a far more positive approach to the Ottoman Empire. Rabbi Akiba, according to Moyal, was the leader of the national (or nationalist)135 party (al-ḥizb al-waṭanī) of the Israelites. Having spent many years in Egypt, Moyal could not have written these words without thinking of political parties with this very name in contemporary Egypt. In the three decades preceding the 1909 publication of at-Talmūd, there had already been two incarnations of parties named al-Ḥizb al-waṭanī.136 The first such National Party was founded in 1879 and had some role in the ʿUrabi movement against European domination in Egypt (known by the slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians”).137 “The leaders of the ʿUrabi movement,” write historians Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “repeatedly expressed their loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan, ‘the Sultan of the Islamic Milla,’ [and] emphasized their desire to see ‘Islamic-Ottoman Egypt’ continue under formal Ottoman sovereignty.” After the British invasion of Egypt in 1882, this National Party disintegrated.

  A decade later, in 1893, this party (or one with the same name, in any case) was revived, first as a secret society, and eventually as an open party. Importantly, this second incarnation of al-Ḥizb al-waṭanī had strong ties to the Ottoman government; its leader, Mustafa Kamil, was a firm proponent of Egyptian solidarity with the Ottoman Empire. The members of al-Ḥizb al-waṭanī, explain Gershoni and Jankowski, “were consistent advocates of Egyptian political collaboration with the Ottoman Empire.”138 This position concerning the Ottoman Empire was certainly not unanimous among Egyptian political movements in the first decade of the twentieth century. A rival party, Ḥizb al-umma (the People’s Party139), “unambiguously rejected the idea of a continuing Egyptian political bond with the Ottoman Empire.”140 It would seem to be of some importance that Moyal chose to label Bar Kokhba’s movement, which he described in the most laudatory language, not as Ḥizb al-umma but as al-Ḥizb al-waṭanī. This terminology might suggest that Moyal did not, ultimately, wish to have Bar Kokhba’s “full independence” movement seen as a paradigm that would demand a complete separation from the Ottoman Empire.

  Regardless of Moyal’s precise political intentions, he wrote about the Jews and Jewish history in unmistakably nationalist terms. In this sense, at-Talmūd can be read not only as a religious apologetic-polemic but also as a subtle argument for the historical antiquity of Jewish nationalism in its various forms. The phenomenon that his Arab readers were witnessing in Palestine, Moyal may have been suggesting, was not wholly modern or novel; rather, it was one with historical precedents extending back nearly two millennia. It remains unclear, however, if Moyal believed that knowledge of the precedents might allay Arab fears about the Zionist movement in the present. The goal of Moyal’s religious apologetic project is, in the end, much clearer than is the political vision driving his translation of Jewish history into Arab nationalist terminology.

  However tempting it may be to see Moyal’s political views as the ignored and forgotten key to Arab-Zionist cooperation and amity, the picture Moyal paints of ancient Jewish nationalism does not offer a model for anything less than “internal independence.” To the extent that we may infer a political stance from his presentation of Jewish history, Moyal advocated neither binationalism nor the sublimation of Jewish nationalism for the sake of coexistence with Palestine’s non-Jewish residents. For Moyal, Jewish sovereignty in ancient Palestine was limited only to the extent that the ruling empire was too powerful to be overthrown; the presence of non-Jews in the land did not represent an obstacle to the Jews’ political independence. In other words, this was a vision that may well have been articulated to be consistent with loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, but it could hardly have been designed to promote sacrificing particularist Jewish nationalism on the altar of peace with Palestine’s Arabs. Perhaps this was because Moyal, like many of his Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries in Palestine, considered Zionism’s relationship to the Ottoman Empire (rather than to Palestine’s Arabs) to be the truly pressing concern in the minds of the empire’s Arabs.

  And yet Moyal had the linguistic tools, cultural knowledge, and political interest to reach out directly to his Christian and Muslim neighbors and present them with an apology for Judaism sensitive to their particular religious traditions and sensibilities, even as he subtly made the case for Jewish nationalism. It is this combination of capabilities and concerns that made Moyal and his fellow Sephardic Zionists a critical community for the broader Zionist efforts to understand and to instruct the non-Jewish natives of Late Ottoman Palestine.

  NISSIM MALUL’S SECRETS OF THE JEWS

  Whereas discerning Moyal’s particular intentions is challenging owing to the subtlety of his presentation, such subtlety is not a characteristic of the work of Moyal’s younger colleague, Nissim Malul. Just two years after Moyal published at-Talmūd, Malul published his own short Arabic book aimed at answering contemporary Arab concerns about Jews and Judaism. Compared to Moyal’s book, Malul’s 1911 Kitāb asrār al-yahūd (The Book of the Secrets of the Jews) is more explicitly a work of apologetics. Through his sixty-four-page text, Malul tried to show that Judaism is not the foreign, insidious phenomenon that many Arabs believed it to be. Malul’s book uses both philosophical discussion and historical analysis to set forth a sustained, if somewhat meandering, argument about the essential sameness of all religions, especially the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Given the shared values and goals of these religions, Malul sets out to explain the hatred and violence that nonetheless developed between the various religious communities. The cause, Malul contends, has little to do with the religions’ beliefs and principles; rather, it is economic jealousy that produces hostility between religious groups. While Malul’s focus
on financial competition may strike the reader as simplistic, it is, I argue, essential to understanding Malul’s interpretation of Arab opposition to Zionism.

  Before analyzing the text itself, it is instructive to consider the title Malul chose for it: Secrets of the Jews.141 In 1893 in Beirut, Najib al-Hajj published Fī az-zawāyā khabāyā aw kashf asrār al-yahūd (Clandestine Things in the Corners, or Unveiling the Secrets of the Jews). This antisemitic book is an Arabic adaptation of Georges Corneilhan’s 1889 Juifs et opportunistes: Le judaisme en Egypte et Syrie.142 Because Malul knew of al-Hajj’s book—he mentions it, though not by its title, in Asrār al-yahūd143—one suspects that he wished to have his own book understood as, at least in part, a rebuttal of al-Hajj’s. Al-hajj, he implies, failed to reveal truly the Jews’ secrets; to understand the Jews properly, rather, one must read Malul’s book.

  After the book’s dedication to his father, Malul immediately begins his broadside against critics of the Jews and Judaism. He contends that there are three types of knowledge-seekers: those who seek it without regard to its consequences; those who seek it in order to improve human society;144 and those who seek it to satisfy their own ambition. It is people of the third category—a type Malul detests and regards as “the root of the misfortune of humanity and the cause of human atrocities”—who