Defining Neighbors Read online

  We must also keep in mind that these foreigners, whether diplomats or missionaries, brought with them contemporary European ideas about how to define and categorize people, including the developing notions of race. These were, after all, part and parcel of the ideology of the civilizing (i.e., Christianizing) duty that drove the missionaries out into the distant frontiers of the Ottoman Empire.58 The European presence in Palestine, then, only accentuated concerns with both religion and race that were already prominent there from other more “indigenous” sources.

  Finally, many European Jewish intellectuals and scientists were influenced by and even involved in the development of race-thinking in European science and anthropology. In fact, there was a strong element of race-thinking among certain European Zionists, including some who immigrated to Palestine. As John Efron and others have shown, identifying the Jews as a race was useful for the purposes of establishing the Jews as a distinct nation (at a time when the terms and concepts of “nation” and “race” were often used interchangeably). In the course of this book, we will see the implications of European race-thinking not only on Jewish self-perception but also on Zionists’ perceptions of others, especially the Arabs of Palestine.59

  PALESTINE’S POPULATION

  Having placed al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda’s Jerusalem in its Palestinian, Middle Eastern, Ottoman, and transnational contexts, we must now turn to the question of who was living in Palestine during this Late Ottoman period. For a variety of reasons both methodological and political, Palestine’s historical demographics are hotly contested.60 First, though the Ottomans registered their populations, primarily for the purposes of taxation and conscription, non-Ottoman subjects were excluded as they provided neither taxes nor conscripts.61 Because the large majority of immigrant Jews from Europe chose to retain their European citizenship or subject status, so as to benefit from the legal and tax advantages of the Capitulations62 and to avoid the Ottoman military draft, Ottoman records are not terribly useful for gauging the size of the Jewish immigrant population. Second, the Ottoman registers did not count Bedouin as they too were considered irrelevant for taxation and conscription. These records are thus imprecise for ascertaining the number not only of Jews but also of Arabs in Palestine. Third, given the problems associated with the sources and thus the necessity for estimation, the numbers scholars offer often indicate as much about the scholar’s political inclinations vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as they do about the number of residents of Palestine at any given moment. Zionists and their supporters tend to prefer higher estimates of the Jewish population and lower estimates of the Arab population, while Palestinians and their advocates have the opposite preferences.

  For the purposes of this study of intellectual history, it will suffice to provide rough population estimates intended solely to offer the reader a general, if admittedly imprecise, sense of the size of the populations of Late Ottoman Palestine.63 In 1881, before the first large Jewish nationalist immigration, Palestine’s population was likely about 462,000, consisting of 400,000 Muslims, 42,000 Christians, and 20,000 Jews (including perhaps 5,000 Jews without Ottoman citizenship). By the start of the Great War, the population had increased to about 740,000, including 600,000 Muslims, 80,000 Christians, and somewhere between 60,000 and 85,000 Jews (of whom fewer than 40,000 were Ottoman citizens).

  In other words, the vast majority of the population throughout the Late Ottoman period consisted of Arabic-speaking Muslims. Of these, most were Sunnis, though there were also small pockets of Shiites and Druze, especially in the northern regions bordering on present-day Lebanon.64 Though the majority of Palestine’s Sunnis belonged to the Shāfiʿī madhhab (jurisprudential school), the most influential mufti (expounder of Islamic law) was that of the Ḥanafī madhhab, as this was the school followed by the Ottoman rulers and applied in the Islamic courts. The various muftis, as well as the naqīb al-ashrāf (the representative of the local descendants of the prophet Muhammad, plural nuqabāʾ), were selected from the families of Palestine’s ‘ulamāʾ, the religious-scholarly (and usually also economic) elite. Whereas the muftis and nuqabāʾ al-ashrāf were generally drawn from the local Muslim population, the quḍāh (Islamic court judges, sing. qāḍī) were usually foreigners (though there were some exceptions in the early nineteenth century). The qāḍī of the Ḥanafī court in Jerusalem was a much respected position, appointed by the highest religious official in Istanbul, the shaykh al-islām.65 The leaders of Palestine’s rural population, which constituted the majority of the Muslim community, were village and regional shaykhs and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new Ottoman position called the mukhtār.66

  Among the Christian population, about half were Arabic-speaking members of the Greek Orthodox faith, an Eastern Orthodox church led by a patriarch (who was, by ecclesiastical law, always Greek in origin) in Jerusalem. The remaining half of the Christians in Palestine consisted of members of a variety of denominations, including Greek Catholics (especially in the Galilee), Latin Catholics (led by a patriarch in Jerusalem under the Vatican’s jurisdiction), Maronites, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholics, and Copts, in addition to a small but growing (due to conversion by British missionaries) population of Protestants, particularly Arab Episcopalians.67 While the Muslim population was overwhelmingly rural, about three-quarters of the land’s Christians lived in urban environments.68

  Like the Christians of Palestine, the Jews both before and after the Zionist immigrations were primarily urban. The pre-Zionist Jewish communities were concentrated in the so-called Four Holy Cities—Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed.69 Though Zionists founded a number of agricultural moshavot (colonies such as Petah Tikva,70 Rishon Le-Zion, Rosh Pina, and Zikhron Yaʿakov) and kevuẓot (collective settlements, the first of which was Deganiah, established in 1909), the Jewish residents of these rural communities constituted no more than 20 percent of the total Jewish population at the end of the Ottoman period.71 Most Jewish immigrants, in other words, moved to Palestine’s towns, especially Jerusalem and, increasingly as the years progressed, Jaffa.

  Critical scholarship over the past several decades has contested certain received assumptions about the “Zionists” of pre–World War I Palestine. In earlier historiography, which followed the dominant nomenclature of the period itself, Palestine’s Jewish community was seen as composed of two broad units: the “old yishuv” and the “new yishuv.” The old yishuv was imagined to be the Jewish religious population of Palestine—Ashkenazim and Sephardim—some whose ancestors had resided in the Holy Land for generations, others recent immigrants who wished to study the Torah and be buried in sacred soil. These individuals lived in Palestine because of the perceived holiness of the place but lacked any Jewish nationalist motivations and even forcefully opposed Zionism when it appeared. The new yishuv of Ottoman Palestine, on the other hand, was portrayed as composed of mostly secular, ideological Jewish nationalists who had immigrated to Palestine after 1881 in the course of the first two aliyot (waves of Jewish nationalist immigration to Palestine) out of the conviction that the Jews should—without waiting for the advent of the messiah or any other divine act—create a modern Jewish society in Palestine and even a state of their own.

  Recent scholarship has challenged this conventional distinction between the old and new yeshuvim on two main fronts. First, scholars have recognized that Jewish nationalist sympathies and tendencies were exhibited by members of the so-called old yishuv, among both Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Second, historians have noted that many of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1881 and 1914 chose to immigrate to Palestine rather than the United States not out of ideological commitment but because of more pragmatic concerns, such as the price of a ticket. In addition, many of these new immigrants were themselves religiously observant Jews.72

  Moreover, the traditional distinction between the First Aliyah and the Second Aliyah, the Jewish immigration waves to Palestine between 188
1 and 1904 and between 1904 and 1914, respectively, has also been compellingly problematized. The earlier view held that Second Aliyah immigrants arrived with much more ideological zeal—Zionist, socialist, agriculturalist—than their First Aliyah predecessors. Once more, scholars have since demonstrated that this perception of the Second Aliyah is rooted in generalizations from the experiences of this immigration wave’s outspoken, prolific, and influential minority, which ultimately came to dominate the politics of the yishuv and then, for decades, those of the State of Israel. The majority, however, were, like most immigrants at any time and place, motivated by the desire to improve their socioeconomic position rather than to participate in any ideological revolution.73

  I focus on the ideas of Palestine’s Zionists74 (rather than those of all yishuv residents) in my analysis of Jews’ perceptions of their non-Jewish neighbors in order to look particularly at those individuals and communities who we would imagine employed primarily nationalist modes of categorization. After all, we might not be surprised were we to find that antinationalist Jews did not conceive of their Arab neighbors in exclusively national terms—why would they think of others as members of nations when they did not even consider themselves as such? Ideological Zionists who believed that they were first and foremost members of a Jewish nation, on the other hand, would perhaps see not only themselves but also the world around them primarily in national terms. Thus it is especially interesting to discover the religious and racial aspects of committed Zionists’ perceptions of their neighbors in Palestine.

  The issue of national identity among Palestine’s Arabs is more complicated still. The loyalties and national identities of Palestine’s Arabs—that is, native Muslim and Christian Arabic-speakers—were at this stage multifarious and in flux. As Rashid Khalidi has shown, Arabs of Late Ottoman Palestine could simultaneously imagine themselves as loyal Ottomans, Muslims or Christians, Arabs, Palestinians, while also associating strongly with their hometown or village and extended family.75 While recent scholarship has argued that distinctly Palestinian national identity existed even before the First World War, because of the extent of the variety of Palestinian Arab identities at this early stage in the development and articulation of these notions, it would not be possible to write this book only about individuals who affiliated exclusively or even primarily as Palestinians. I therefore have chosen the category of Arabs of Palestine or Palestinian Arabs, which I use interchangeably, though of course I remain cognizant of the particular national identities of the subjects of this study, to the extent that they may be discerned.76

  Another segment of the population of Late Ottoman Palestine that has received substantial scholarly and popular interest in recent years is the community of Sephardim. The label sefaradi literally means Spanish and technically refers to Jews who emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula, especially in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. For a variety of reasons, however, the term came to be used as a catch-all for non-European, non-Ashkenazic Jews, that is, for “Easterners” (Hebrew: mizraḥim), whether or not they had any family history in Spain. Though the use of this term as an all-inclusive “Jewish other” category is partly attributable to Ashkenazic ignorance of or disinterest in the details of non-Ashkenazic difference, there is much more to the story. When the Spanish Jewish exiles came to the Ottoman Middle East, they found diverse Jewish communities, some of which had been in existence for centuries. These pre-Sephardic Middle Eastern Jews included Greek-speaking Romaniot, Ashkenazim, Italians, and Arabic-speaking mustaʿribūn.77 Over time the Sephardim came to dominate many of these communities, including in Palestine, both politically and culturally.78 In Palestine the Ottoman sultan regarded the Sephardic leadership as the central authority among local Ottoman Jews. By the mid-nineteenth century, these Jews came to be represented by an imperially appointed chief rabbi, always of the Sephardic rite, known in Ottoman Turkish as the hahambaşi and in Hebrew as the rishon le-ẓiyon.79 In other words, regardless of their place of origin, most Middle Eastern Jews in Palestine were officially affiliated with the Sephardic community.

  That there was a significant population of native Arabic-speakers among the Jewish community—even among the ideologically Zionist community—of Late Ottoman Palestine further highlights the intriguing complexities of identity in this historical setting. Focusing on this community, a number of scholars have recently raised the question of whether we might regard these Jewish Arabic-speakers as “Arab Jews.” Just as we speak of American Jews, German Jews, European Jews, and so on, should we not speak of Arab Jews? While the phrase Arab Jew might strike the early twenty-first-century ear as awkward if not oxymoronic, perhaps discomfort with the term is a result of the subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict, when Arab and Jew were presumed enemies, not qualifiers of single individuals or communities. Before the intensification of this conflict, could these not have been terms of potential hybridity rather than hostility? Determined to resist this political anachronism—the view that Arabs and Jews necessarily meet on opposite ends of a battlefield, not a hyphen—a number of recent scholars have taken to referring to this population as Arab-Jews.80

  In fact, appellations similar to “Arab Jews” were not unheard of in the Late Ottoman period. The phrase yahūd awlād al-ʿarab (Jews children of Arabs) appeared in certain Late Ottoman Arabic writing in reference to native Jews of Palestine, according to scholar Salim Tamari.81 Ashkenazic Zionists would, on occasion, criticize Middle Eastern Jews viewed as overly enmeshed in Arab culture as “Arabs of the Mosaic faith.”82 In late 1908 someone even signed a notice in Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew newspaper with the name “ha-ʿivriyah ha-ʿarviyah” (the Arab Hebrew woman).83

  Yet what I have found is that the response to that notice seems to represent a more typical view from the period: “To the Arab Hebrew woman! If you are a Hebrew, you are not an Arab. If an Arab, not a Hebrew. So, you are neither a Hebrew nor an Arab. C.Q.F.D.”84 Though hardly a cogent logical proof, this statement, read in the context of the variety of writing extant from the period, suggests that a blanket embrace of “Arab Jew” to describe Arabic-speaking Jews would represent a terminological anachronism. Because I share the desire to rethink complex identities and challenge oversimplified, presentist labels, the guiding principle I try to follow throughout the book in my choice of labels (when the choice is indeed mine) is to use appellations that I believe would have made sense to either the subject or the subject’s neighbors, and ideally both.85

  Beyond the way in which my study bears on the historicity of the Arab Jew concept, I raise it here for another important reason as well. The recent debate regarding the Arab Jew has served as a welcome call for greater self-consciousness in how we employ labels. As I argue in this book, the ways in which people labeled others tell us something about how they viewed and understood these individuals and groups. This contention can be no more correct for the subjects of our scholarship than it is for the scholars who write about them. I thus proceed with caution but also with the conviction that so long as we are aware of the challenge, we need not be paralyzed by it. As I hope this book demonstrates, a new and fascinating view of this early encounter emerges from a critical, self-aware reading of the sources.

  * * *

  1 On the so-called invention of the Land of Israel, see Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel. See also Bartal, “Me-ʿereẓ kodesh’ le-ereẓ historit—‘Otonomizm’ ẓiyoni be-reshit ha-meʾah ha-ʿesrim.”

  2 Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918–1929, 4–5.

  3 See Thomas Philipp’s discussion of the anachronistic use of “Palestine” in Acre, 1–8, 233n.1.

  4 Consider, for instance, Agmon, Family & Court; Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew; Ben-Bassat and Ginio, Late Ottoman Palestine; Perry and Lev, Modern Medicine in the Holy Land; Campos, “A ‘Shared Homeland’ and Its Boundaries”; Schidorsky, “Libraries in Late Ottoman Palestine between the Orient and the Occident”; McCarthy, The Population of Palestine; Kushner, ed., Palest
ine in the Late Ottoman Period. On debates in the historiography of the Late Ottoman period in Palestine, particularly concerning the attitude of the Ottomans toward Zionist immigration, see Reinkowski, “Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine.”

  5 There had been two earlier, short-lived moves (in 1841 and 1854) to separate Jerusalem from Damascus and to make it an independent sanjak. The final, lasting separation, however, took place in 1874. Abu-Manneh, “The Rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 42–43; Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 12–13; Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914, 6; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 35, 218n.37. The same had been done to Mount Lebanon in 1861 after intercommunal violence erupted the previous year. See Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 91. Benny Morris renders the year of the transformation of Jerusalem into an independent mutasarriflik as 1887. Morris, Righteous Victims, 7.