61 The author’s footnote refers the reader to Judges 11:34.
62 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd: Aṣluhu wa-tasalsuluhu wa-ādābuhu, 11.
63 With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and eastern regions of Europe, the incorporation of these lands’ populous Greek Orthodox Christian communities into the Islamic empire introduced the Ottomans to the blood libel. But even then it tended to be used almost exclusively by Christians. See Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 132.
64 On the Damascus Affair and its historical and historiographical implications, especially in Europe, see Frankel, The Damascus Affair.
65 See Landau, “ʿAlilot dam u-redifot yehudim be-miẓrayim be-meʾah ha-teshaʿ ‘esreh.”
66 An edited version of this work appeared as Fāris, adh-Dhabāʾiḥ al-bashariyya at-talmūdiyya.
67 Landau appears to misidentify this book as “an apologia on the laws of the Talmud.” Landau, ha-Yehudim be-miẓrayim ba-meʾah ha-tesha‘-ʿesreh, 111; Landau, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 101. It is possible that Landau did not actually see the book but rather relied on a mention of it in al-Hilāl.
68 Laurent, Relation historique des affaires de Syrie depuis 1840 jusqu’en 1842. Nasrallah identifies the author as Shārl Lūrān.
69 On the Beirut native Zaydan and his al-Hilāl, see Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, 53–54. On al-Hilāl’s Palestinian readership, see Ayalon, Reading Palestine, 50. On Zaydan’s central role in the attempt to translate the Talmud, see Sehayik, “Demut ha-yehudi bi-reʾi ‘itonut ʿarvit beyn ha-shanim 1858–1908,” 105–7. Levy has also carefully reconstructed the relevant exchanges in al-Hilāl and the course of events that led to the Zaydan-Moyal translation project; see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 199–204.
70 “At-talmūd wa-tarjamatuhu ilā al-ʿarabiyya,” al-Hilāl 13, 5 (February 1, 1905), 303–5. I translate ādābuhum here as “moral and ethics,” though the term could also mean “literature.” Cf. Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 203.
71 The term fātiḥa, which Moyal uses here, has obvious Qurʾanic resonance as the name used for the first sura.
72 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 58–59.
73 Maimonides uses this phrase several times in his writings; e.g., Hilkhot Teshuva 3:5/13, in Maimonides, Sefer mishneh torah, vol. 1. On this Maimonidean phrase, see Nehorai, “Ḥasidei umot ha-ʿolam yesh la-hem ḥelek le-ʿolam ha-ba”; Korn, “Gentiles, the World to Come, and Judaism.”
74 Moyal’s Arabic translation renders this muḥibban li-l-khalq.
75 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 80.
76 On the difference between Christian and Muslim literacy rates in Palestine, see Ayalon, Reading Palestine, 16–17.
77 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 59.
78 Following common convention in Arabic, Moyal often uses the term Torah to refer to the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, though he is certainly aware of the sense of Torah as the Five Books of Moses. See ibid., 25n.1.
79 Ibid., 59. Perhaps Moyal has in mind Romans 9:6, in which Paul the Apostle claims that “not all Israelites truly belong to Israel.”
80 Ibid., 122. See Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25.
81 For a recent scholarly work on the subject, see Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud.
82 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 70–71.
83 This apologetic strategy of denying the identity of the Talmud’s Jesus and Christianity’s Jesus is known from—and perhaps informed by—the positions of the Jewish disputant (Yehiel of Paris) in the so-called Paris Disputation of 1240. See Maccoby, ed., Judaism on Trial, 153–62. In response to the accusation that “the Talmud contains blasphemies against Jesus,” Yehiel is reported to have said: “Wherever Jesus is mentioned in the Talmud, it is the Jesus who was the pupil of Joshua ben Perahiah who is meant. It is quite possible that the Christian deity was also called Jesus, and there were thus two Jesuses, and possibly even two Jesuses from the same town, Nazareth.”
84 A segment of Nasrallah’s introduction appears to be lifted from Faris. Cf. Fāris, adh-Dhabāʾiḥ al-bashariyya at-talmūdiyya, 45–46; Rohling, al-Kanz al-marṣūd fī qawāʾid at-talmūd, 10–11.
85 This might mean “excrement.” See Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 13, 85–93.
86 In both Faris’s and Nasrallah’s texts, these allegations are explicitly associated with the Paris Disputation of 1240.
87 The term kanīsa might also be translated as “synagogue” and, in Christian contexts, as “church.”
88 The presumed site of the Temple of Onias was first excavated in 1887 and, more extensively, in 1905, just four years before the publication of Moyal’s book. Moyal presumably wrote most of at-Talmūd while still in Egypt and mentions Alexandrian Jewish communal leaders, so it is likely that he was particularly interested in, and familiar with, the history of ancient Alexandria.
89 Concerning Moyal’s claim that the Israelites in Egypt “enjoyed civil rights similar to the rights of the Greeks themselves,” cf. Graetz, History of the Jews, 1:503.
90 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 52. Moyal transliterates the word “allegory” into Arabic.
91 This would seem unlikely, however, given Moyal’s pride in expressing views not consistent with those of the Jewish religious establishment. See, e.g., Moyal’s discussion of the compilation of the Zohar in ibid., 119.
92 Moyal uses the term al-injīl here. Though translated literally as “the gospel,” al-injīl is used by Moyal (not exceptionally) to refer to the New Testament more broadly.
93 Ibid., 53.
94 Levy has correctly noted that Moyal “borrows freely from the Islamic theological lexicon” in his description of the Jews and the Jewish religion. Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 209. My aim here is to propose an explanation for this borrowing.
95 For example, I would argue that Moyal’s use of terms related to the word fatwā (a formal statement of legal opinon in Islam) falls under this category. Moyal explains that “after the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel from its land,” Israel “no longer worked in agricultural work and so the study and fatwas (fatāwā) on these topics [of agriculture] decreased.” Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 40. While a Muslim reader would recognize this word from his or her own tradition, Moyal likely used the term as the most appropriate Arabic word for “religious legal decision.”
96 Ibid., 29.
97 Ibid. See Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, “Taḥrīf,” in EI2.
98 The question of the accuracy and authenticity of Bible translations was on the minds of fin de siècle Arab intellectuals. There were two major Arabic Bible translations undertaken in the nineteenth century: the first by Protestants (1856–1865) and the second by Catholics (1876–1880). The respective merits and faults of each were debated widely in Arabic journals through the end of the nineteenth century. See Sehayik, “Demut ha-yehudi bi-reʾi ‘itonut ʿarvit beyn ha-shanim 1858–1908,” 98–102.
99 Lazarus-Yafeh, “Taḥrīf.”
100 The genre of Jewish succession lists was apparently initially adapted from the Greco-Roman literary genre of scholarly successions. See Amram Tropper, “Avot,” EJ2.
101 An isnād is the chain of transmission supporting a ḥadīth, a traditional report concerning the life and teachings of the prophet Muhammad. As Cyril Glass explains, “the authority, and character, including moral probity, of every member of a chain in the transmission of a given Ḥadīth, and the existence of alternative chains of transmission for a saying, were fundamental criteria for accepting Ḥadīth as authentic.” See Cyril Glassé, “isnād,” Nei. See also J. Robson, “isnād,” EI2. Moyal uses the term isnād in reference to the transmission of a particular mishnah in at-Talmūd, 108.
102 See “idjmā‘” in EI2.
103 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 7. Moyal also employs this concept in his exposition on the Sanhedrin: “All these great men in Israel gathered and consented (ajma‘ū) to enact the appropriate laws for the life of the nation and they determined the daily prayers.” See ibid., 26, 28, 48. Cf. Maimonides
’s introduction to Mishneh Torah. Maimonides does not appear to use the term ijmāʿ here, though he does claim that Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi taught the mishnah “to the scholars in public and it was revealed to all of Israel and they all wrote it down.” On the notion of ijmāʿ or parallels to it in Judaism, especially in Middle Eastern Judaism, see chapter 2. Above, as well as Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:65–66; Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, 51; Fishman, “Guarding Oral Transmission.”
104 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 37.
105 See S. Nomanul Haq, “Rukn,” EI2.
106 The term rukn (pl. arkān) can also be translated as “basic element.”
107 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 112.
108 Ibid., 135.
109 See, e.g., Maimonides’s Hilkhot melakhim (Laws of Kings) 5:1. On the evolution of the concept of “holy war” in Judaism, see Firestone, Holy War in Judaism.
110 Tellingly, there is no entry for jihād in Joshua Blau, MTAY. I thank Benjamin Hary for confirming, in private correspondence, that he too had not encountered this usage in the Judeo-Arabic literature he has edited.
111 The word ḥadd could also mean “restriction [of number].” Either sense of the word provides the same basic meaning here.
112 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 104.
113 Qurʾan 4:3 reads: “If you fear that you cannot treat orphans with fairness, then you may marry other women who seem good to you: two, three, or four of them.” For ʿabduh’s and Rida’s approach to polygyny, see Gätje, The Qurʾān and Its Exegesis, 248–61.
114 b. Yevamot 44a records that “sound advice was given: only four [wives] but no more, so that each may receive one marital visit a month.”
115 See B. Yevamot 65a.
116 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 10.
117 Ibid., 18.
118 For a discussion of this passage of Moyal’s at-Talmūd, see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” 210–12.
119 It seems likely that Moyal was informed here by the scholarship of the nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, whether by actually reading Graetz’s writings or by learning of his conclusions indirectly. Graetz argued that the thirteenth-century Moses de Leon “forged” the Zohar, claiming that it was the work of Shimon bar Yoḥai. See Graetz, History of the Jews, 4:11ff. On the influence of Graetz’s scholarship on the Jews of the Middle East, especially via curriculum of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools, see Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 83; rodrigue, Jews and Muslims, 110.
120 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 119.
121 On Moyal as a rationalist and participant in Enlightenment discourse, see Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East,” especially 210–12.
122 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 21.
123 The Egyptian al-ḥizb al-waṭanī was founded in 1879. See Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East, 125–26.
124 Although here I distinguish between waṭaniyya and qawmiyya, Eliezer Tauber has argued that, in the fin de siècle, there was not a “conceptual division of qawmiyya versus waṭaniyya.” See Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements, 245.
125 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 25.
126 See, e.g., Campos, Ottoman Brothers.
127 ha-Ḥerut 4:70 (February 2, 1912), 3.
128 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 25.
129 Ibid., 66.
130 See Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East.
131 Mūyāl, at-Talmūd, 66.
132 Ibid., 31.
133 Ibid., 36.
134 Ibid., 36
135 Again, it is difficult to translate this term precisely. It may also be taken as “patriotic.” See Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements, 124.
136 Moyal was clearly not thinking of Palestine’s al-ḥizb al-waṭanī al-uthmānī, which was formed in 1910—that is, after the publication of at-Talmūd. See Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, 82.
137 On the ʿUrabi movement, see Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians! On the development of nationalism in Egypt more generally, see Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs
138 Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, 5–7.
139 As umma may also be rendered “nation,” the name of this party might also be understood as the Party of the Nation.
140 Ibid., 8.
141 While the phrase asrār al-yahūd is reminiscent of the Islamic notion of asrār al-qurʾān, the “secret meaning of the Qurʾan,” Malul, I presume, had more recent anti-Jewish polemics in mind. On the concept of the Qurʾan’s secret meanings, see Shigeru Kamada, “Secrets,” EQ.
142 See Norman A. Stillman, “Arab Antisemitic Literature,” in Levy, Antisemitism. See also Haim, “Arabic Antisemitic Literature,” 307–8.
143 Malūl, Kitāb asrār al-yahūd, 1:19.
144 Malul affiliates himself with this second category. Ibid., 8.
145 Ibid., 7
146 On al-Muʾayyad, see Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, 57–59.
147 Malūl, Kitāb asrār al-yahūd, 7.
148 Ibid., 8.
149 In June 1913 Malul insisted in ha-Ḥerut that the Jews who immigrated to Palestine “came here to build a new nation.” Cited in Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, eds., Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought. Apparently Malul believed that this motivation, if properly understood by Arabs, would be recognized as unproblematic.
150 Malūl, Kitāb asrār al-yahūd, 8.
151 Ibid., 9–10.
152 Ibid., 10.
153 Ibid., 13.
154 See, e.g., ibid.
155 On the different groups associated with this quality, see Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, especially 13–14, 14n.5. On the relationship between Muhammad and those referred to in the Qurʾan as “the believers,” see Donner, Muhammad and the Believers.
156 Malūl, Kitāb asrār al-yahūd, 12.
157 Ibid., 12.
158 Ibid., 13.
159 Ibid., 14.
160 Ibid.
161 Ibid., 14–15.
162 Ibid., 15–16.
163 Compare Malul’s attempt to harmonize Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with Jurji Zaydan’s contemporaneous attempt, “when dealing with the relationship between Islam and Christianity,” to “play down any tension between both religions” and, as Umar Ryad puts it, to “show that Christians during most of history lived in harmony with their Muslim compatriots.” Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity, 77.
164 Alternatively: “the universe.”
165 Malūl, Kitāb asrār al-yahūd, 16.
166 Ibid., 16–17.
167 Malul renders Eisenmenger as “Armenger.”
168 Ibid., 19.
169 It is unclear whether Malul had in mind here Leon Pinsker’s 1882 Autoemancipation, in which the idea of antisemitism as a disease was a centerpiece of the author’s proto-Zionist theory.
170 Cf. the nineteenth-century neo-Orthodox position of Samson Raphael Hirsch on the mission of Israel in exile: “Israel accomplished its task better in exile than in the full possession of good fortune. Indeed, improvement and correction were the chief purposes of the Galuth—exile.” See Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel, 82.
171 Ibid., 26.
172 See ibid., 27–41.
173 Ibid., 49.
174 Malul contends this twice. See ibid., 44, 46.
175 Ibid., 54.
176 Ibid., 57.
177 ha-Shiloaḥ 31 (July–December 1914), 446.
178 Ibid.
179 Cf. Yoav Gelber’s dismissal of Rashid Khalidi’s reference to Malul as having “played an important role in the Zionist movement.” See Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 103; Gelber, “The Iron Cage.”
180 ha-Ḥerut (June 19, 1913), 2. See also Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, 69.
Conclusion
Ultimately this book has explored the ways in which the categories of religion and race functioned within a complex of categories used by Zionists and Arabs to define one another in the
increasingly nationalizing environment of Late Ottoman Palestine and the broader region. I have argued that while there were deep concerns about land in the encounter between these communities, the parties related to one another not as perfect strangers competing for territory, but rather as groups with intertwined histories, cultures, beliefs, even blood. These points of intersection and commonality could at times produce a sense of shared interests while at other times they could generate hostility and fear.
“ENEMIES OF THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS”: RELIGION AND PALESTINIAN IDENTITY
My argument—that religion and race were central modes of perception and identification of others in the Arab-Zionist encounter—has a number of important implications for our understanding of the emergence of nationalisms in Palestine. First, it is worth highlighting the way in which the use of Judaism as a counterpoint facilitated the construction of a Palestinian Arab national identity that unites Christians and Muslims on religious/textual grounds. In my analysis of al-Khalidi’s discussion of the absence of the afterlife in Judaism, I noted how al-Khalidi linked the New Testament and the Qurʾan, in contrast to the Jews’ Torah. This association of Christianity and Islam, in explicit contradistinction to Judaism, is a phenomenon that developed further in the years immediately following the Great War. This was evidenced by, inter alia, the rise of groups called Muslim-Christian Associations in Palestine.1 For instance, at an anti-Zionist rally in February 1920, one of the Muslim-Christian Association movement’s leaders, Maronite vicar Paul ʿAbboud, reminded his audience that Palestine, “this blessed land,” is the “sanctuary [mazār] of Christianity and the direction of prayer [qibla] for Islam.”2 In perhaps the most evocative line in his speech, ʿAbboud beseeched his audience: “Do you want our holy places of worship, our noble sanctuaries, our glorious antiquities to be at the mercy of those enemies of the cross and the crescent?”3 The designation of the Jews as “enemies of the cross and the crescent,” if not unprecedented, is surely a rarity,4 and its appearance here is indicative of a transformation in relations between Muslims and Christians in Palestine, and between those two groups and the Jews as the political situation transformed after the rise of Zionism and, still more, after the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate.5
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