recently rallied their forces and energies and published books the purpose of which was to oppress the Jews. Some claimed that the Talmud commands them [Jews] to offer human sacrifices each Passover. Others went so far as to say that the Israelites devote all of their interest now to the restoration of sovereignty [al-mulk] to Israel. Their proof of this is their [Jews’] colonization of Palestine. Some of the primary, ignoble leaders of this group do not refrain from publishing newspapers and despicable leaflets to popularize their beliefs among the classes of the people in order to attain their wicked goals.145
Though al-Hajj’s book may have informed Malul’s title, it was an article written in the widely circulated Cairo newspaper al-Muʾayyad that was, according to Malul, the primary impetus for penning this book.146 This article, which was reprinted in the Beirut-based newspaper al-Ḥaqīqa, claimed “that the Israelites are trying to engage in agriculture and manufacture in Palestine because they aim to restore sovereignty to Israel and they rebel against the countries to which they belong.” This article’s author, Malul reports, warned “the government to look at them [the Jews] with a cautious and watchful eye.”147 Malul’s response to this article was published in al-Ḥaqīqa itself, but he determined that a more sustained and vigorous rejoinder was necessary. “We wrote this book,” he explains, “in order to disprove those accusations and to respond to the lies hurled at the Israelite nation by those ignoramuses and their ilk.”148
If Malul was troubled by the allegations he read concerning Zionism’s aims in Palestine, he chose to leave specific refutation of these matters to a planned subsequent volume of Asrār al-yahūd, which was meant to be a three-volume series. The second volume was conceived as an evaluation of the true—and, in Malul’s mind, decidedly inoffensive and unthreatening—goals of Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine,149 while the third volume would have addressed the accusation that the Talmud prescribes human sacrifice, that is, the problem of the blood libel.150
In the end, Malul published only the first volume, which offered more general observations on the nature of religion, the characteristics of monotheistic religions, and the history of religious persecution. As he begins his discussion of religion, he acknowledges the perils of the task. “Religion is among the most difficult subjects of study,” he asserts, “and the most dangerous.”151 Undeterred, however, Malul engages the subject directly. With an apparent penchant for categorization, he divides humanity first into those who “believe in the existence of a creator,” including “Jews, Christians, Muslims, Magi, Confucians, Buddhists, and Brahmins,” and those who do not believe.152 He then further separates the first group into the monotheists, namely Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and the remaining polytheistic peoples [al-mushrikūn]. Arguing for the superiority of the monotheists, Malul claims that “if we look at human society in terms of [level of] civilization and progress, we see that the monotheists are ahead.”153
“ALL RELIGIONS HAVE THE SAME GOAL”
Despite these divisions, Malul insists early in his text that “all religions have the same goal, to order what is right and to forbid what is wrong (al-amr bi-l-maʿarūf wa-n-nahy ʿan al-munkar),” a phrase he repeats often throughout the book.154 This refrain, significantly, is borrowed from the Qurʾan. It is used to describe the believers’ moral mission. “You are the best community singled out for people,” God tells believers in Q. 3:110, “you order what is right [and] forbid what is wrong” (taʾmurūn bi-l-maʿrūf wa-tanhawn ʿan al-munkar). This verse concludes by contrasting the believers with (most of) the People of the Book. “If the People of the Book had also believed, it would have been better for them. For although some of them do believe, most of them are lawbreakers.” The Qurʾan, in this sura, highlights that segments of the People of the Book are considered to be among the believers.155 “They are not all alike,” continues Sura 3, as “there are some among the People of the Book who are upright,” who “believe in God and the Last Day, who order what is right and forbid what is wrong” (Q. 3:113–14).Malul boldly expands this Qurʾanic description to all monotheists, not merely to Muslims or a subgroup of the People of the Book.
In his book, Malul appears to be arguing not only against critics of the Jews but also against those who would delegitimize religion altogether. “Religion,” he declares, “is the foundation of human society because it demands moral excellence and beneficence. It is the source of justice and integrity.” Given religion’s vital role, Malul contends that one must not abandon religion just because of the existence of “religious superstitions” or even the fact that religion “causes its radicals and extremists to use violence and force against those who disagree.”156 Because he devotes a great deal of attention in the book to acts of violence and persecution carried out in the name of religion, Malul is keen not to be misperceived as an opponent of religion broadly. Aiming to allay the concerns of both Muslim and Christian Arabs about the Jews and Judaism, Malul apparently recognized that he would have little effect were he to be perceived as harboring a bias against religion more generally.
Malul next presents his readers with brief descriptions of the three monotheistic religions (diyānāt al-muwaḥḥidīn), “in the order of their appearance” historically.157 Beginning with “the Israelite religion,” the term he generally uses for Judaism, Malul claims that this was “the first religion to be based on [the principle of] monotheism [at-tawḥīd].”158 This religion’s scripture, “the Torah,” he elaborates, was “the first religious book in which the rules and duties of religion are written.” Interestingly, in noting the diversity of Jewry, and particularly the distinction between Rabbanites and Karaites, Malul cites a medieval Islamic source, al-Milal wa-n-niḥal, the work of the eleventh- to twelfth-century Muslim author ash-Shahrastani (the same scholar whom al-Khalidi cited, as we saw in chapter 2).159 Currently, Malul explains, “the Israelites are scattered throughout the world” as a result of “the Babylonian exile and the expansion of their dispersion by Titus the Emperor of Rome, who destroyed the Temple and demolished Jerusalem.” Malul’s account of Judaism concludes with the demographic estimate that the Jews of his day numbered “about ten million people around the world.”160
Malul’s concise presentation of “the Israelite religion” aims, in a number of ways, to prove that Judaism and Jews are not to be feared by Arabs. First of all, Jews are monotheists, just like Christians and Muslims; indeed, theirs was the very first monotheistic religion. The Jews, moreover, are a People of the Book, an ahl al-kitāb, and their Bible, the first scripture of its kind, guides their actions. Malul’s appeal to ash-Shahrastani is certainly curious. While it highlights Malul’s familiarity with certain medieval Islamic literature, it also may be part of his argument that Jews have been known to Muslims for centuries, and their religion was generally not viewed as any sort of threat. Finally, Malul at once acknowledges the Jews’ history in Palestine but also emphasizes both their dispersion and their relatively small population. Especially when compared to the demographic estimates Malul offers later for Christians and Muslims, the implication may well be that Jews hardly merit anxiety.
Malul then moves from the relatively secure terrain of Judaism to the more sensitive topics (for a Jewish author) of Christianity and Islam. In his presentation of Christianity, Malul is keen from the first line to show the religion’s close relationship to Judaism, an eagerness similar to that of Moyal in at-Talmūd. “The Christian religion,” Malul writes, “was founded from the Israelite and it spread initially among the Jews and then among the rest of the nations.” The primary principle of Christianity, he explains, is “that people are brothers and God is the father of all humanity.” Like the other religions, Christianity demands that the faithful act kindly and it prohibits evil. In obvious parallel to his presentation of Judaism’s holy texts and its factions, Malul explains that “the rules and teachings of this religion are based on the Four Gospels, the Book of Acts, and the Epistles,” and that “Christianity is broadly divided
into two churches: the eastern and the western.” Finally, he notes that the Christians are at present “about five hundred million” in number.161
Entering the more precarious territory of Islam—given Muslims’ political power and the fact that Muslims constituted the majority of the population in the societies in which this text would be read—Malul begins his presentation gingerly with a literal definition of the word Islam: “ ‘docility,’ ‘submission,’ ‘obedience’ to the commands and prohibitions of the commander without objection.” Again, in parallel to his presentations of Judaism and Christianity, Malul notes that Islam is also based on a scripture, namely, “the Qurʾan and the Sunna,” and it “demands complete monotheism [tawḥīd],” a concept he already linked to Judaism. As he did with Judaism, Malul again cites the medieval Muslim author ash-Shahrastani as he explains the internal but, in his view, fairly insignificant sectarian divisions within Islam. He then lists the five pillars of Islam and concludes with a demographic estimate of about three hundred million Muslims worldwide.162
The precisely parallel form in which Malul presents these three brief descriptions matches the content of his ultimate claim, namely, that these religions are, in essence, identical.163 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he argues, share much common ground, and are in harmony in the most important respects. “Broadly,” Malul concludes, “the monotheistic religions mentioned above declare the unity of the Creator, that He is the creator of existence and engineer of reality.164 The people of these religions and their adherents believe in the afterlife, resurrection, doomsday, and the Final Day, and that there is punishment for evil and reward for goodness.”165 Especially in light of our analysis of al-Khalidi’s manuscript and its understanding of the grave implications for Palestine of the lack of a Jewish belief in the afterlife, Malul’s insistence that Judaism shares these beliefs with Christianity and Islam is especially significant.
The question necessarily arises: if these religions are so patently in unison, why is there so much discord between them? It is in anticipation of this issue that Malul highlights the internal divisions within each religion:
If you find that members of the same religion divide themselves due to selfishness, self-love, egotism, and politics (such as the division of the eastern and western churches in Christianity, and the divisions that arose since the illness of Islam’s prophet in Islam, and the divisions of the tribes of the children of Israel in Israelitism [Judaism]), it is no surprise that one finds divisions between different religions.166
In other words, the tensions between religions are the result of “selfishness, self-love, egotism, and politics,” no different from the tensions among members of the same religion. The tensions are decidedly not the consequence of essential differences between the religions or between religious beliefs.
TRANSLATION AND THE “MICROBE” OF ANTISEMITISM
Malul now turns again specifically to the case of antisemitism in a section of the book entitled “Those Who Rise Up against the Jews.” Here he sets out to identify the roots of antisemitism in the contemporary Middle East. Malul cites a number of recent, late nineteenth-century European antisemitic works, including Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive (1886), Kalixt de Wolski’s La Russie Juive (1887), Georges Corneilhan’s Juifs et opportunistes (1889, mentioned above), along with the classic antitalmudic, anti-Jewish polemic Entdecktes Judenthum (1700) by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger.167 Malul blames these European antisemites for the advent of antisemitism in the modern Middle East, tracing the phenomenon to Arabic translations of these types of works. “This microbe” of antisemitism, carried by “the wind of the sandstorm to some of the children of the East,” ultimately “entered their veins and mixed with their blood.”168 Antisemitism, in Malul’s view, is a foreign, European import to the Middle East, a disease that has regrettably infected the consciousness and sensibility of many Arabs. Importantly, Malul refers to the source of the phenomenon as “European,” not “Christian,” highlighting the regional or cultural origins, but not the religion, of its practitioners. Antisemitism is a disease in Malul’s rendering,169 unrelated to theological or religious principles. Particularly relevant for our discussion in this chapter, antisemitism is a disease that has spread through translation.
In one paragraph of his rendition of Jewish history, Malul seeks to explain two aspects of the Jewish experience that he believes are widely misunderstood. The first concerned Jews’ loyalty to the governments of the lands in which they lived; the second related to the perception that Jews were exceedingly wealthy and obsessed with money.
Both matters were obviously of great consequence to Malul as they represent two of the central rationalizations for hatred of the Jews.
After the second destruction of Jerusalem, by Titus, the Jews were scattered throughout the world. They all came to belong to the authority [sulṭa] to which the land that they settled submitted. The lesson that the Israelites learned from the destruction and time, which is the best teacher, is that their destruction and the fall of the crown of their kingdom happened in order to spread their word. They also saw from the differences of the peoples, nations, and tribes in the Dark Ages that there was no better path to follow than to amass money in order to preserve their existence among those peoples.
Here Malul insists not only that Jews have consistently submitted to the authority of their host governments, but also that their loss of their own sovereignty and their subsequent dispersion served a positive function: “to spread their word.” In his inversion of the traditional Jewish perspective on the exile as an unmitigated evil, a punishment for the Jews’ sins, it is not clear to what extent Malul had in mind the nineteenth-century Reform movement’s concept of the “Jewish mission” in the Diaspora, a concept that informed Reform’s later rejection of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. The similarity of Moyal’s view to classical Reform’s transvaluation of the Diaspora view strikes the reader as markedly non- or even anti-Zionist.170 But this book was published the very year Malul returned to Palestine and became an employee of the Zionist Organization. It is thus difficult to determine precisely where Malul stood on the matter. Did he believe that there was a value in the dissemination of Jewish ideas that resulted from Jewish dispersion, but that now that this had occurred, a Jewish return to Palestine was appropriate? Or did Malul, like many except the most radical Zionists of the time, see no contradiction between the perpetuation of Diasporic Jewish communities, on the one hand, and the growth of a Jewish community in Palestine, on the other? The explanation of the apparent discrepancy notwithstanding, there is no ambiguity or ambivalence with regard to the latter part of the paragraph. In the Diaspora, Malul contends, the Jews recognized that the only means of combating the existential threat posed by dispersion was to attain wealth and, with it, power.
ECONOMICS, ANTI-JEWISH PERSECUTION, AND ANTI-ZIONISM
Though the acquisition of wealth helped to preserve the Diasporic Jewish communities, it also set the stage for the rise of antisemitism. The Jews, Malul writes:
mostly worked in commerce and manufacture, but many paid attention to agriculture as well, aside from those who went to the sciences and the arts where they advanced ahead of their contemporaries. This caused envy among their contemporaries, who exerted effort to attack them and to plant the seeds of slander and groundless fabrications defaming them and their religion.171
In these lines, Malul at once impugns antisemitism and anti-Judaism as being driven by nothing more than base envy, while he also implicitly defends the Jews against the accusation that they exclusively engage in “unproductive” economic activities. The Jews are not involved merely in commerce; they participate in manufacture, agriculture, sciences, and arts as well. Indeed, as Malul sees it, it was particularly in the arts and sciences that the Jews distinguished themselves (in other words, not in commerce or banking).
In his text, Malul seeks to expose religious bigotry and persecution of varied sorts and in numerous contexts. He focuses heavily on
religious persecution committed by Christians. In fact, he devotes fifteen of the book’s sixty-four pages to enumerating the anti-Jewish policies of the Spanish Inquisition, a period in which he was interested owing in large measure, no doubt, to his own Sephardic heritage.172 Though he concentrates most on the persecution suffered by Jews, Malul also highlights periods in which Christians persecuted Muslims. In his discussion of the Crusades, for instance, he cites the alleged slaughter of ten thousand Muslims perpetrated by Christians in Jerusalem.173 However, he does not limit his discussion to discrimination carried out by Christians; he refers as well to the taxes levied on non-Muslims in the Muslim Umayyad state (the jizya and the kharāj). Moreover, even in his passages about the violence perpetrated by Christians in the course of the Crusades, Malul emphasizes that this “fanaticism” was driven by the fact that the “Christians remembered the advance of the Muslims and their oppression of them.”174 In his conclusion, Malul insists that “Muslims and Jews are beaten in Christian countries, while Christians and Jews are humiliated in Muslim or Arab countries.”175 Religious persecution, in other words, is not the monopoly of any one religion; Jews, though, are conspicuously absent from the series of aggressors.
Malul returns one last time to his thesis as he brings his book to a close. “The biggest reason for these oppressions is money.” This was the case, he repeats, with the persecution enacted by, among others, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Crusaders. Indeed, Malul contends, “what the Arabs did to the Jews of Yathrib [Madina] was also for money, due to jealousy and envy. And this is the main impetus for the Russian Revolution that took place a few years ago.”176 For Malul, the motivation for intercommunal persecution is universal and timeless, the same at the founding moment of Islam in the medieval Arabian Peninsula as in the contemporary Russian Revolution. Neither the Muslims of seventh-century Yathrib nor the Christians of nineteenth-century Russia had reason to hate the Jews other than financial envy and resentment.
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