Defining Neighbors Read online

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  1 The classic work on Zionist-Arab relations during the Late Ottoman period remains Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I. See also Roʾi, “The Zionist Attitude to the Arabs 1908–1914”; Roʾi, “Yeḥasei yehudim-ʿarvim be-moshavot ha-ʿaliyah ha-rishonah”; Roʾi, “The Relationship of the Yishuv to the Arabs”; Beʾeri, Reshit ha-sikhsukh yisraʾel-‘arav, 1882–1911; Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914; Marcus, Jerusalem 1913; Campos, Ottoman Brothers; Jacobson, From Empire to Empire.

  2 The book draws on texts written beginning in the mid-1890s through the years of the Great War; the bulk of the sources examined were produced during the final decade of Ottoman rule. The same period, in Zionist-centered historiography, would be denoted as the age of the first two aliyot (waves of Zionist immigration). In identifying the period studied in this book, I will also refer to it as pre–World War I or, conscious of its connections to contemporary trends in Europe, as the fin de siècle. On the use of fin de siècle in the Ottoman Middle East, see Hanssen, Fin de siècle Beirut.

  3 For differing views on the rise of a uniquely Palestinian Arab nationalism, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism; and Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People.

  4 By referring to elites such as Ben-Yehuda and al-Khalidi as “representatives” of Palestine’s Zionist (or Jewish) and Arab (or Muslim) communities, I do not mean to suggest that they shared the qualities, life conditions, or experiences of the nonelites. Rather, they represented the various communities in the sense that each saw himself, and was seen by others within and beyond his own community, as speaking on behalf of the community. This was literally so in the case of al-Khalidi, as he was elected to represent the Jerusalem region in the Ottoman Parliament, and more figuratively so for Ben-Yehuda, who was recognized as a leader of the early Zionist community, even as he differed from other Zionists more focused on land and labor (rather than language and culture). On Ben-Yehuda, see the recent biography by Yoseph Lang, Daber ‘ivrit!. On al-Khalidi, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; Kasmieh, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi 1864–1913”; al-Khateeb, “Ruhi Al-Khalidi.”

  5 I borrow the phrase “a study of reciprocal attitudes” from Israel Yuval’s work on “Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” the subtitle of his Two Nations in Your Womb. Yuval explains that his book is “intended to be a study of reciprocal attitudes of Jews and Christians toward one another, not a history of the relations between them.” Rather than presenting “a systematic and comprehensive description of the dialogue and conflicts between Jews and Christians, with their various historical metamorphoses,” Yuval aims “to reveal fragmented images of repressed and internalized ideas that lie beneath the surface of the official, overt religious ideology, which are not always explicitly expressed.” His objective, in other words, “is to engage in a rational and open discussion of the roles played by irrationality, disinformation, and misinformation in shaping both the self-definition and the definition of the ‘other’ among Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages” (1). While I, too, am interested in the place of “irrationality, disinformation, and misinformation,” I am as interested in the place of rationality and “accurate” information in the ways in which the communities I study understood one another.

  6 Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 13. On the modernity of the notion of religion, see most recently Nongbri, Before Religion. As Nongbri writes, “it has become clear that the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life separated from politics, economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. In fact, in the broad view of human cultures, it is a strikingly odd way of conceiving the world” (2–3).On the complexity of the Arabic term generally translated as “religion” (dīn), as well as milla and umma, see Nongbri’s discussion (39–45). While the view of nations as “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson famously named them, has dominated recent scholarship on nationalism, there are theorists, such as A. D. Smith, who see certain essential features as defining the nation. See Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

  7 On the connections between conceptions of race and nation, see the chapter “Race and Nation: An Intellectual History” in Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 16–52. Michael Banton has aptly noted that “imprecision in the nineteenth-century use of the word race was assisted by the upsurge in European nationalism and the readiness to see that sentiment as an expression of race, so that race was often equated with nation as well as type.” Banton, Racial Theories, xiv. The challenge of distinguishing between these categories is, of course, not merely terminological but conceptual as well. Some, for instance, have seen nationalism as a modern form of religion. As Carlton Hayes has argued, “since its advent in western Europe, modern nationalism has partaken of the nature of a religion.” Identifying the role of a national state, writes Hayes, “it is primarily spiritual, even other-worldly, and its driving force is its collective faith, a faith in its mission and destiny, a faith in things unseen, a faith that would move mountains.” Hayes, Nationalism, 164–65.

  8 The 1937 Peel proposal, the 1947 United Nations partition plan, and the variety of post-1948 peace plans are well-known. There were, however, other lesser-known such suggestions. For a discussion of a proposal in 1924 and mention of others, see Gribetz, “The Question of Palestine before the International Community, 1924,” 66, 76n.54.

  9 Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd ed., 2–3. Gelvin, of course, recognizes the conflict’s greater complexity. I cite his succinct formulation here to stand in for the territorial approach to the conflict.

  10 On the social implications of genealogical thinking, see Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives.

  11 In the historiography of this period, religion typically features in two limited arguments: first, whether the Christian Arabs of Palestine were more politically or nationalistically conscious and more anti-Zionist than their Muslim counterparts; and second, widening the geographical scope, whether Christian-edited Arabic newspapers in the Levant were more anti-Zionist than those edited by Muslims. See, e.g., Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, 130; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 134; Bickerton and Klausner, A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 30.

  12 On the concept of Semites, see, e.g., Anidjar, Semites; Gabriel Bergounioux, “Semitism.”

  13 In this sense, Zionism is not unique, of course, as the phenomenon of nationalism is broadly regarded as secular in nature. Describing a view he challenges as overly simplistic, A. D. Smith writes that “it is usual to see in nationalism a modern, secular ideology that replaces the religious systems found in premodern, traditional societies. In this view, ‘religion’ and ‘nationalism’ figure as two terms in the conventional distinction between tradition and modernity, and in an evolutionary framework that sees an inevitable movement—whether liberating or destructive—from the one to the other.” Smith, Chosen Peoples, 9.

  14 Gottheil’s name is handwritten on the first page of the copy available in Columbia University’s collection.

  15 The book is described in a brief notice as “a book in defense of the Jews and their religion, written by Nissim Effendi Malul. The first part has been published and is available from the author in Egypt.” al-Hilāl 19 (October 1910–July 1911), 448.

  16 Because of the radical transformations that occurred in Palestine with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the British Mandate—not least the significant increase in intercommunal tensions—retrospective accounts of the Late Ottoman period are exceedingly problematic for a study of mutual perceptions. Therefore, though I appreciate the considerable utility of autobiographical memoirs and oral histories in certain historiographical projects, I have consciously avoided these sources here. For the potential benefits of such material, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 11–12. On the need for cautious skepticism, se
e Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews.

  17 An early effort in this regard was undertaken in Ben-Arieh and Bartal, Shilhei ha-tekufah ha-ʿot’omanit (1799–1917). See also Lockman, Comrades and Enemies; LeBor, City of Oranges; Jacobson, From Empire to Empire; Campos, Ottoman Brothers.

  18 This inclination has been challenged by scholars such as John Efron and Eric Goldstein. See Efron, Defenders of the Race; Goldstein, “The Unstable Other”; Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness. For a recent, important collection of primary sources on this subject, see Hart, ed., Jews and Race. See also Falk, “Zionism and the Biology of the Jews.”

  19 On the “culture of silence—the refusal to engage in discussions on slavery and racial attitudes” in the Maghrib, see el Hamel, “ ‘Race,’ Slavery and Islam in Maghribi Mediterranean Thought.”

  20 See Goldschmidt and McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, 6–7.

  CHAPTER 1

  Locating the Zionist-Arab Encounter: Local, Regional, Imperial, and Global Spheres

  When Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda sat together that Saturday in October 1909, they met in Jerusalem. Where, though, was Jerusalem in the autumn of 1909? Attempting to answer this seemingly simple question is in fact a complicated task, and the challenge highlights the numerous geographical, social, cultural, political, and intellectual levels of encounter that are studied in this book. The following pages place Jerusalem in its local setting in Palestine, and Palestine more broadly in its Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and European contexts. As we shall see, the categories of religion and race employed by the communities of Palestine in their mutual perceptions are best understood within these multiple contexts.

  JERUSALEM, PALESTINE, AND THE HOLY LAND

  When late nineteenth-century Jewish nationalists began to immigrate to the land they viewed as their biblical and/or historic patrimony (they generally called it the Land of Israel or Palestine interchangeably), the region was governed by the Ottoman Empire, which, but for a decade earlier that same century (1831–1840), had ruled the area since 1517. Under the Ottoman regime, there was no official, administrative unit called Palestine (nor, for that matter, the Land of Israel).1 The region had officially been named Palaestina under the Romans in antiquity and Jund Filasṭīn after the Arab conquest until the Mongolian invasion,2 and there was a land legally called Palestine after the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the Great War, when the country was under British Mandate. Between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries, however, the region’s rulers did not treat it as a separate political or administrative entity, and it was not formally called Palestine.3 In other words, notwithstanding the increasingly common scholarly preference for the term “Late Ottoman Palestine”4 (a term I also use in this book), al-Khalidi’s native and Ben-Yehuda’s adoptive city of Jerusalem was, more precisely, in the larger territory the Ottomans named—forgive the confusion—Jerusalem, or in Ottoman and Arabic, al-Quds.

  Jerusalem had not always been the name of an independent Ottoman administrative unit. Though the idea had been proposed earlier, this was an innovation fully enacted by the Ottomans only in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.5 Earlier in the century, the region we know of as Palestine (today’s Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip) was part of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Syria, three sanjaks (districts) of which were Acre (in the north), Nablus (in the center), and Jerusalem (in the south).6 Due in part to their recognition of the growing international (especially European) significance of Jerusalem and the interests of powers beyond the empire in the Holy Land, the Ottoman central authorities in Istanbul, seeking to maintain a closer grip on the region, finally separated the sanjak of Jerusalem from the vilayet of Syria in 1874.7 The Jerusalem region was given the special status of a mutasarriflik, a district whose administrators answered directly to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul rather than to the governor of a province. In 1887 the remaining two sanjaks of Palestine—Acre and Nablus—were also separated from the vilayet of Syria, though they were joined not to the mutasarriflik of Jerusalem but rather to the newly established vilayet of Beirut.8

  Thus when we think of al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda’s Jerusalem as having been located in Late Ottoman Palestine, in Ottoman administrative terms we mean the mutasarriflik of Jerusalem as well as the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre. That Palestine was not a single administrative unit is important for our purposes because recognizing that it was part of several provinces and the way in which it was integrated into a vast empire highlights the extent to which this region must be understood in its broader Ottoman context. Considering wider events and changes in the Ottoman Empire is critical for fully comprehending phenomena in these three small Ottoman districts.

  “Late Ottoman Palestine,” though, is more than a convenient but inaccurate shorthand for the distinct regions of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. For the primary subjects of this book, namely, the residents of these Ottoman regions and their contemporaries in the Middle East and Europe, Palestine (or the Land of Israel) as such was indeed a meaningful unit. In other words, to acknowledge the lack of political boundaries around a land called Palestine is not to imply that such boundaries, however imprecise and flexible, did not exist in people’s minds. Moreover, noting the absence of official borders should not be taken to suggest that an “imagined” territory is any less significant historically than one that was politically, legally, or sovereignly bound. This was, after all, the “Holy Land” as understood by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, those within the land and, no less, those far beyond its imagined borders. Its general territorial contours were known to Jews and Christians from the Bible and to Muslims from the Qurʾan and later Islamic commentary.9

  In fact, the notion of a place called Palestine, as a single entity, was especially meaningful precisely in the fin de siècle period. Three phenomena sparking renewed interest in the Holy Land during this period are worth highlighting here: the dramatic increase of European Christian missionary activity (especially in the wake of European intervention in response to Muhammad Ali’s conquest of the Levant);10 the rise of Zionism, a Jewish nationalism that focused its ambitions on Ereẓ Yisraʾel (typically translated into European languages by Zionists themselves as Palestine);11 and the beginning of a distinctly Palestinian identity among the land’s Arab majority.12 The primary location of the encounter analyzed in this book, then, may indeed be called Palestine.

  JERUSALEM, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, AND INTERCOMMUNAL DIFFERENCE

  Ben-Yehuda and al-Khalidi’s Jerusalem was not only the central city of the district that shared the city’s name, or of an imagined place called Palestine; it was also part of the Ottoman Empire. That this encounter took place within this vast, if shrinking, empire is hardly incidental to this story.13 Ben-Yehuda wished to interview al-Khalidi, after all, precisely because of the latter’s political role in the Ottoman Empire. But to understand how the encounter between al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda, and the communities they represented, was conceived, the Ottoman imperial context is critical far beyond the particulars of al-Khalidi’s parliamentary position. The way in which people relate to one another is informed (though of course not wholly determined) by the systemic, structural categories offered by the societies in which they live. Put somewhat differently, how a state formally defines its subjects necessarily affects how the people themselves define and relate to one another, even as the influence may not be unidirectional. Moreover, it is in periods when the formal definitions are challenged or in flux that one may expect to see the relationship between legal definitions and informal perceptions most acutely, and the era surrounding the period of study in this book was perhaps the most significant such moment of flux in Ottoman history.

  For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire formally defined its diverse subjects by their religions. Through an arrangement that eventually came to be known as the “millet system,”14 the Ottoman government related to its various religious minority populations via their religious leadership. It was once im
agined that each millet’s religious leader in Istanbul had always been the representative of the community throughout the empire, such that, for instance, the Istanbul hahambaşi (chief rabbi) represented all the empire’s Jews from the earliest years of Ottoman Jewish history. More recently scholars have discovered that the system was, until the nineteenth century, much more localized and ad hoc, in contrast to the later claims of centralization and stability.15 This important historiographical revision notwithstanding, the fact remains that imperial authorities defined Jews, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and of course Muslims in religious terms. In a society in which the state formally distinguishes16 between its communities based on religion, we might not be surprised to find that the communities themselves perceived their neighbors in religious terms as well.17