Malul applied this argument to his interpretation of Arab opposition to Zionism in his own time. Like all other cases of anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination in history, anti-Zionism, Malul contended, could also be explained by the economic interests of the Zionist movement’s most outspoken critics. In his extended analytical review of “the Arabic Press,” which he published in the Odessa-based Hebrew journal ha-Shiloaḥ in 1914, Malul wrote about the rise of the anti-Zionist press in Palestine. He attributed the inception of this press (in the form of the newspaper al-Karmil) to an incident about five years earlier involving “a Christian man named Najib Nassar who dealt in real estate in Tiberias.” Malul explains that Nassar—the same Nassar who would later translate Gottheil’s Jewish Encyclopedia article on Zionism—served as an agent in the sale of “hundreds of dunams of land” to the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) settlement company. “One time,” Malul alleges, Nassar:
came to an official of this company and requested his commission for a sale, claiming that he had previously told this official about the availability of these lands, so he deserves a commission even though the sale had been completed without his involvement. Of course, the JCA official did not want to treat the company’s money as one would treat his own and so he did not want to pay him [Nassar] anything given that this [Nassar’s claim] was a fabrication, on the one hand. On the other hand, if the sum that the man requested had been small, perhaps he would have given up some of the rights of the company. But the sum was not small at all, so it was impossible to fulfill this strange demand. When Nassar saw that his hope was disappointed, he went and joined with a well-known author (Rashid Haddad, who is the editor of one of the large newspapers in Beirut) in Haifa, and together they produced the newspaper al-Karmil. Nassar’s sole purpose was to write against the Hebrew settlement in the Land of Israel, so that Arabs would no longer sell land to Jews.177
Nassar’s anti-Zionism, in Malul’s interpretation, had nothing to do with his Christianity nor with his beliefs about the future of Palestine. Rather, “Nassar began writing harsh articles against ‘the Zionists’ and thought that the Jews would be frightened of him and fulfill his [monetary] demands.” When he discovered that he was unsuccessful and that the Zionists were not taking him seriously, “he continued his war, and so he is fighting against the Yishuv until today.”178 According to Malul, Nassar, “the known hater of Israel” who stood at the center of the anti-Zionist Arabic press that ha-Ḥerut’s editors and writers regularly railed against as the “Great Danger,” was simply a self-interested man seeking financial gain. Had he continued to profit from the Zionist movement, Malul implies, Nassar would have happily supported Jewish immigration, and the entire phenomenon of the anti-Zionist Arabic press might not have evolved. If certain Arabs considered the Jews to be obsessed with the pursuit of money, the feeling, for Jews like Malul, was mutual.
THE INFLUENCE AND PERSISTENCE OF THE ECONOMIC VIEW OF ANTI-ZIONISM
In this chapter we have encountered a variety of ways in which influential Zionists of Late Ottoman Palestine sought to understand how they were perceived by their Arab neighbors and to influence those perceptions. We found that the Zionists were particularly interested in the Arabic press, viewing it as both a gauge and a generator of Arab public opinion. Moreover, we noted the multiple roles of translation in this encounter—in defending against anti-Zionism and in promoting a more sympathetic view of Judaism and Jewish history (to combat antisemitism that was, itself, spread through translation).
In concluding this chapter, I should note a revealing irony that has emerged, especially in the study of the figure of Nissim Malul. Malul, to be sure, was not a political leader of the Zionist movement, neither in Palestine nor elsewhere. He was, however, highly influential in shaping the views of Zionists—both the leadership and the broader readership of Zionist periodicals—as regards their understanding of Arabs’ perceptions of them.179 Whether through his writing for ha-Ḥerut in Palestine and ha-Shiloaḥ in Odessa or his press reports for the Zionist officials in Jaffa, Constantinople, and Berlin, Malul’s assessment of Arab views of Zionism in the Late Ottoman period was broadcast throughout the Zionist world. Given his central role in informing Zionists of how they were viewed by Arabs (or, more precisely, how he thought Zionists were viewed by Arabs), we should consider how Malul’s assessment of Arab perceptions of Zionists accords with the argument of this book about religion and race. Concerning race, Malul says little, though in his call for Zionists to embrace the Arabic language as a basis for developing the Hebrew language and “a real Hebrew culture,” he refers to the Jews as a “semitic nation” (leʾum shemi) that, through Arabic, can reinforce its “semitic nationhood” (leʾumiyuteinu ha-shemi).180 This, however, concerns his understanding of the Jews, not how he believed they were viewed by Arabs.
The question is still more complex concerning religion. On the one hand, Malul would seem to have recognized the importance of religion in how Arabs viewed Jews and Zionism; after all, he wrote a book about religion in his effort to defend them. On the other hand, in his own book about intercommunal tension and persecution ostensibly motivated by religion, he insists that religion is never the “true” motivator behind the hostility and that what is really underlying the intolerance and violence is economic jealousy. For Malul, as for Moyal, religion—when “properly” understood—would naturally unite people within individual religions as well as across different religions. Problems arise only when religion is misunderstood. That actual substantive differences between religions could themselves cause hostility between practitioners of the respective religions was unfathomable. For some Zionists—then and since—it was perhaps easier to imagine a resolution to the tensions if economics, rather than religion, were seen to be at the heart of Arab opposition to Zionism. How and why both Zionists and Arabs tended to move away from the perception of religion and race at the core of their encounter in Palestine are questions I will address in the conclusion.
* * *
1 ha-Ḥerut 3:157 (September 22, 1911), 2.
2 Naṣṣār, aṣ-Ṣahyūniyya.
3 Although it contained anti-Zionist commentary and was selective in the passages it chose to translate, the pamphlet was a reasonably faithful rendering of Gottheil’s original. In this regard I disagree with Neville Mandel, who reads the pamphlet as a more extreme polemical distortion. See Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 108–9. See my critique in chapter 2.
4 On the politics of translation, see Seidman, Faithful Renderings.
5 The so-called Language War of 1913 surrounding the language of instruction at Haifa’s Technion is the most obvious example. See, e.g., the chapter “Language Wars and Other Wars” in Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 213–37.
6 One notable exception is Halperin, “Orienting Language.”
7 See, e.g., “From ‘Conquest of Labor’ to ‘Conquest of Land’: The Identity of Soldier and Settler, 1907–1914,” in Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, 135–45; Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict, 65–66.
8 Shimon Moyal uses the phrase “conquest of the Arabic press” in his argument against Abraham Ludvipol, ha-Ḥerut (October 25, 1911). See below.
9 On the flourishing of the Arabic press in this period, see Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East.
10 For a detailed analysis of the various positions on Zionism articulated in the Arabic press, see the chapter “Elements of Identity II: The Debate on Zionism in the Arabic Press,” in Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 119–44.
11 Moshe Smilansky, “Maʿaseinu yekarvunu, maʿaseinu yeraḥakunu,” ha-ʿOlam (January 1914).
12 See Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, ha-Mavo ha-gadol, MBY. See also Avishur, “ha-Markiv ha-ʿarvi ba-lashon ha-ʿivrit bat zemanenu u-vi-sifrutah me-Eliʿezer Ben-Yehuda ʿad Netivah Ben-Yehuda (ve-Dan Ben-Amoẓ),” 9.
13 There were certainly efforts to introduce Arabic instruction in Jewish schools in Palestine. See L
ang, Daber ʿivrit!, 626.
14 On the Yemenite immigration to Palestine, for instance, see Druyan, Be-ein “marvad-kesamim.”
15 On Arabic literacy in Palestine, see Ayalon, Reading Palestine.
16 See Beʾeri, Reshit ha-sikhsukh yisraʾel-ʿarav, 1882–1911, 53. Louis Fishman challenges the presumption that most of Palestine’s Sephardic Jews spoke Arabic. See Fishman, “Palestine Revisited,” 140–44.
17 These included Ashkenazim (members of the so-called old yishuv) as well.
18 On Moyal and Malul, see also Jacobson, “Jews Writing in Arabic.”
19 As discussed in chapter 3, recent scholarship has focused great attention on an alternative (less exclusivist) version of Zionism espoused by certain Sephardic Zionists. See especially Campos, Ottoman Brothers; Jacobson, From Empire to Empire. The particular views of Moyal and Malul are analyzed below.
20 According to Beʾeri, Reshit ha-sikhsukh yisraʾel-ʿarav, 1882–1911, 188; Bezalel, Noladetem ẓiyonim, 390; Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 197. Ya’qub Yehoshua’, however, claims that Moyal was born in 1870. See Yehoshuʿa, Tārīkh aṣ-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya fī filasṭīn fī al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmānī, 1908–1918, 123.
21 Esther al-Azhari Moyal survived until 1948. She is a primary interest in Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East.”
22 For some of Malul’s biographical details, see the obituary-commentary: Yisraʾel Ben-Zeʾev, “ha-ʿItonaʾi ve-ha-ʿaskan d”r Nissim Malul z”l.” See also Jacobson, “From Empire to Empire,” 183–184; Naṣṣār, Mawqif aṣ-ṣiḥāfa al-miṣriyya min aṣ-ṣahyūniyya khilāl al-fatra min 1897–1917, 110–12.
23 The supplement featured the editor’s interview with Shimon Moyal. ha-Ḥerut 1:4 (May 21, 1909), Supplement.
24 See, for instance, ha-Ḥerut 1:24 (July 23, 1909), 1.
25 ha-Ḥerut 2:60 (February 14, 1910), 2.
26 On the Palestine Office and its head, Arthur Ruppin, see Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, 77, 80–102.
27 See Ruppin’s “Concerning the Establishment of a Press Bureau” letter to the Zionist Central Bureau in Berlin, October 6, 1911, CZA Z3.1447. Though the Press Bureau’s primary responsibilities related to the Arabic press, it was also charged with reviewing the Turkish and French Press in Constantinople and, “if possible,” sending letters to large European newspapers as well. See also L2.26.2 for the 1911/1912 Palestine Office budget, including the expenses for the press Bureau.
28 Unfamiliar with the Arabic press, the Zionist leadership requested that Malul present a list of the important newspapers and journals to which he wished to subscribe. Such a request was made by Yehoshua Feldman on June 3, 1914. See CZA L2.94.1b. In one budget report from the Press Office, Malul is listed as receiving 1, 200 francs for his services. See CZA L2.167. Malul was relieved of his duties in September 1914 because of budget constraints resulting from the war. He appealed the decision directly to Ruppin, pointing to both the achievements of his press work and his poor financial situation. See CZA L2.72.2, September 20, 1914, and September 27, 1914. After the war, Zionist officials once more demanded Malul’s Arabic translation services. See CZA L4.999, January 23, 1920.
29 Hundreds of pages of these reports are extant in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. See, inter alia, CZA L2.94.1a, L2.94.1b, and L2.94.2. A letter on May 7, 1914, from the Zionist representative Victor Jacobson in Constantinople requested even more detailed and timely reports on the Arabic press. CZA L2.94.1b.
30 See, for instance, ha-Ḥerut (September 22, 1911).
31 For a useful early scholarly article on the subject, see Roʾi, “Nisyonoteihem shel ha-mosadot ha-ẓiyonim lehashpiʿa ʿal ha-ʿitonut ha-ʿarvit be-ereẓ yisraʾel ba-shanim 1908–1914.”
32 On Zakka’s an-Nafīr, founded in Alexandria and then moved to Jerusalem and then Haifa, see Yehoshuʿa, Tārīkh aṣ-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya fī filasṭīn fī al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmānī, 1908–1918, 50–53.
33 ha-Ḥerut 2:98 (May 25, 1910), 1–2.
34 Zakka’s knowledge of Russian was likely acquired during his studies in the Russian teachers’ institute in Nazareth. See Yehoshuʿa, Tārīkh aṣ-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya fī filasṭīn fīal-ʿahd al-ʿuthmānī, 1908–1918, 52. ha-Ḥerut noted that the classes will be immersion-style, “Arabic-in-Arabic according to the modern method.” ha-Ḥerut 3:9 (November 11, 1910), 2.
35 ha-Ḥerut 2:133 (August 16, 1910), 2.
36 Yehoshuʿa, Tārīkh aṣ-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya fī filasṭīn fī al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmānī, 1908–1918, 52. See also Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 58.
37 See, e.g., Jacobson to Frank, October 28, 1913, CZA Z3.1642. For Zionist financial documents naming Zakka, see CZA L2.167. See also CZA J15.6175 for an-Nafīr receipts. Given the prevalance of bribery in Late Ottoman Palestine, perhaps these “subventions” should be understood in this context. Before Zionist immigrants even took their first steps in Palestine, while still on their ships, they already found the need for bribery. As Neville Mandel writes, “they simply resorted to the common expedient of bribing the port authorities and anyone else … who tried to block their way.” “Everything,” Mandel asserts, “had its price: entry and release of baggage at the ports, permits to buy land and to build on it could all be bought.” Such a culture, he notes, was not unfamiliar to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Mandel, “Ottoman Practice as Regards Jewish Settlement in Palestine,” 35.
38 See, e.g., the translation of one of Malul’s al-Muqaṭṭam articles from October 1912 in CZA L2.167. See also Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 249n.35. According to Khalidi, Malul wrote thirteen pro-Zionist articles for al-Muqaṭṭam and nine for al-Ahrām. On Malul as the Jaffa correspondent for al-Muqaṭṭam and his April 1914 interview of the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow, see Tauber, “Jewish–non-Palestinian-Arab Negotiations,” 165.
39 See Moyal to Ruppin, 5 January 1912, about the meeting Moyal was set to organize concerning his own work in the Arabic press. Moyal requested that Ruppin attend the meeting. CZA L2.167.
40 On the founding of Agudat ha-Magen, see CZA L2.94.1a. This retrospective quote is from Chelouche, Parashat ḥayai 1870–1930, 149–50. On Elmaleh’s role in the short-lived organization, see Bartal, Kaniel, and Ẓaḥor, eds., ha-ʿAliyah ha-sheniyah, 22.
41 ha-Ḥerut 4:13 (October 25, 1911), 2.
42 Ibid.
43 In addition, as some advocates hastened to highlight, a Zionist newspaper in Arabic would also serve to address Arabic-reading Jews. See Malul, ha-Ḥerut (June 18, 1913).
44 See ha-Or 3:2 (October 4, 1911), 1; and ha-Ḥerut 4:9 (October 19, 1911), 1–2.
45 ha-Ḥerut 4:9 (October 19, 1911), 1–2.
46 ha-Ḥerut 4:13 (October 25, 1911), 2.
47 ha-Ḥerut 4:9 (October 19, 1911), 1–2.
48 See Getzel Kressel, “Ludvipol, Abraham,” EJ2. Ludvipol had initially moved to Palestine a decade earlier, in 1897, but he did not remain for long; he returned to Europe for the first Zionist Congress. Tidhar, EḤY, 2:673–74. See also Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs 1882–1948, 53n.14.
49 See Ruppin to Warburg, September 24, 1911, in which Ludvipol is described as “head of the bureau, correspondent for French newspapers”; Ruppin to the Zionist Office in Berlin, October 6, 1911, CZA Z3.1447. See the Palestine Office’s accounting book from January 31, 1912, CZA L2.167, in which payments to both Malul and Ludvipol are listed.
50 “Meeting of the Committee on the Arabic Press, 24 Tevet 5672,” January 14, 1912. CZA L2.167.
51 ha-Or 3:2 (October 4, 1911), 1.
52 In contrast, Yosef Gorni presents this controversy as a case of opposed “ideological outlooks in Palestine.” See Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs 1882–1948, 53–54. Another factor in this dispute may be connected to the reason Ludvipol came to Palestine in the first place. He had been sent by Hibbat Zion to found a new Hebrew newspaper. Having failed to do so, Ludvipol may not have been eager to see the founding of a newspaper in a different language. On Ludvipol’s Hibbat Zion mission, see T
idhar, EḤY, 2: 674.
53 ha-Ḥerut 4:70 (February 2, 1912), 3.
54 ha-Ḥerut 5:221 (June 17, 1913), 2.
55 The cover page of the book offers an English translation of the title as “The Talmud: Its Origine and its Morals.” On at-Talmūd in its Nahḍa context, see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 199–213. See also Gribetz, “An Arabic-Zionist Talmud.”
56 Moyal’s version of this text would seem to be a translation back into Arabic from the Hebrew translation of Judah ben Solomon al-Harizi. In any case, it is different from the Arabic version edited by Kafah. Cf., for instance, Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 54–57, to Maimonides, Zeraʿim, 29–31.
57 Maimuni, Pirkei avot. Scholars have challenged the attribution of this text to David ha-Nagid on both stylistic and paleographic grounds. See Fenton, “The Literary Legacy of David Ben Joshua, Last of the Maimonidean Negidim,” 13–14n.23. I am grateful to Elisha Russ-Fishbane for directing me toward this scholarship.
58 On the “resurgence of Jewish historical writing in the sixteenth century,” including Shalshelet ha-kabbalah, see Yerushalmi, 57–75.
59 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd: Aṣluhu wa-tasalsuluhu wa-ādābuhu, 3.
60 Levy offers a somewhat different reading of Moyal’s formulation here, highlighting Moyal’s presumption that the relationship between Arabic-speakers and Jews was one “not between two different peoples, but between the whole and one of its parts or elements [‘anāṣir].” Levy concludes that “even as Moyal emphasizes and defends his own Jewishness, he deliberately naturalizes Jewish identity into a history of Arabness, describing Israelites [al-ʿunṣur al-isrāʾīlī] as the oldest strain, element or race [aqdam ʿanāṣirhim ʿahadan] of Arabic speakers.” My reading suggests that, for Moyal, the relationship was more ambiguous. Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 207–8, 205n.162, 216n.179. This terminological ambiguity may be considered in the context of recent scholarly discussions of the “Arab Jew.” See, e.g., Shenhav, The Arab Jews; Gottreich, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,” 433–51; Levy, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” 452–69; Levy, “Mihu yehudi ʿarvi?”
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