Defining Neighbors Read online

  69 On the pre-Zionist Jewish community of Palestine, see, inter alia, Bartal, Galut ba-areẓ; Eliav, Ereẓ yisraʾel vi-shuvah ba-meʾah ha-19.

  70 Petah Tikva was actually first founded in 1878 by Jews from Jerusalem—not new Zionist immigrants—but it was soon abandoned and then resettled by First Aliyah immigrants in 1882.

  71 Gelvin renders these 12, 000 Jews as 15 percent, but he is working with a total number of 85, 000, which is generally regarded as an inflated figure for the Jewish community before the First World War. See Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict, 69.

  72 An interesting popular, nonacademic work on the religious nature of early Zionist immigration is Finkel, Rebels in the Holy Land.

  73 See Bartal, “ ‘Old Yishuv’ and ‘New Yishuv’ ”; Kaniel, “The Terms ‘Old Yishuv’ and ‘New Yishuv.’ ” For a more recent revision, see Alroey, Imigrantim. See also Alroey, “Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience.”

  74 I include in this study individuals such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who, motivated by Jewish nationalist ideology, immigrated to Palestine in 1881. Technically Zionism as an official organization was founded only in 1897, with Theodor Herzl’s establishment of the Zionist Congress; while acknowledging the somewhat anachronistic terminology, I include in this study Jewish Palestinocentric nationalists in Palestine (e.g., those associated with the Hibbat Zion or Bilu movements) even before 1897.

  75 See especially the chapter “Competing and Overlapping Loyalties in Ottoman Jerusalem” in Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 63–88.

  76 In my use of the term Palestinian Arab, I follow Lockman, who writes: “Adding the term ‘Arab’ when referring to the people whom we would today simply call ‘the Palestinians’ may seem redundant, but in fact it avoids an anachronism, for it was really only after 1948 that the Palestinian Arab people came to call themselves, and be called by others, simply Palestinians. During the mandate period most Palestinian organizations and institutions (in today’s sense) officially called themselves ‘Arab,’ sometimes with ‘Palestinian’ as a modifier; hence the Arab Executive, the Arab Higher Committee, the Arab Workers’ Congress, the Palestinian Arab Workers’ Society, and so forth. Moreover, I want to be sure to distinguish between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine, and use of the term ‘Palestinian’ with reference to a period in which Palestine was still undivided might cause confusion.” Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 18.

  77 Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, 3–4. See also my entry on “mustaʿribūn” in the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, 2nd ed.

  78 On the waves of Sephardic immigration to Palestine, see Eliav, Ereẓ yisraʾel vi-shuvah ba-meʾah ha-19, 92–95.

  79 Elmaleh, ha-Rishonim le-Ẓiyon; Haim and Eliachar, Teʿudot min ha-osef shel Eliyahu Elyashar, 17–18.

  80 In the Iraqi context, Orit Bashkin has proposed using the term Arab Jew to refer not only to those who explicitly regarded themselves as such, but also to Jews who “practiced … Arab Jewishness, in that they wrote in Arabic, read Arabic texts, interacted with fellow Muslim and Christian Arabs, and enjoyed Arab cinema, music, and theater.” Bashkin, New Babylonians, 2. For a discussion of the concept of Arab Jews in different historical settings, see Levy, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq”; Gottreich, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib.” On Palestine, see Jacobson, “The Sephardi Community in Pre–World War I Palestine”; Jacobson, “From Empire to Empire.”

  81 Tamari cites “the autobiographies of Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh,” but he does not note particular pages in these texts. Tamari also mentions the title abnāʾ al-balad (sons of the country), also used in these texts to refer to “native Jews of Palestine.” Tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 164.

  82 See Kaniel, “Anshei ha-ʿaliyah ha-sheniyah u-venei ha-ʿedah ha-sefaradit,” 309n.17. Cf. Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith.

  83 ha-Ẓevi 25:42 (November 27, 1908), Supplement, 2.

  84 Ibid.

  85 Compare this discussion to the recent scholarship on the origins of the term Christian and the problematic distinction between Christian and Jew. See, e.g., Townsend, “Who Were the First Christians?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi’s “as-Sayūnīzm”: An Islamic Theory of Jewish History in Late Ottoman Palestine

  Eliezer Ben-Yehuda published his interview of Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi for the readers of Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew daily newspaper ha-Ẓevi.1 In the interview, al-Khalidi rejected the creation of Jewish colonies in Palestine and, while he would support the rights of individual Jews to immigrate if they were to accept Ottoman citizenship and assimilate into the Arab environment, he vigorously denounced mass Jewish nationalist immigration to Palestine.2 While the exchange recorded in ha-Ẓevi certainly reveals al-Khalidi’s hostility toward Zionism, it also offers other insights into how these two men understood one another, and the peoples they represented.

  For Ben-Yehuda, al-Khalidi was a respected intellectual colleague, “an author who had written articles in Arabic periodicals on Islamic and Arab issues, and who participated in academic conferences of Orientalists.” Moreover, Ben-Yehuda considered al-Khalidi “an acquaintance and friend from the bad days, when we needed to close the door behind us and whisper out of fear that the spies of [Sultan] Abd al-Hamid were secretly listening to our words.” Ben-Yehuda had held sensitive discussions with al-Khalidi in the past, conversations, we might imagine, in which these two individuals sought to understand each other and the various groups of which they were leaders. After seeking al-Khalidi’s view on the present Ottoman grand vizier, Ben-Yehuda’s interview then broached “the difficult point,” namely, Ottoman policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine. While emphasizing that Jewish-Arab fraternity is “most natural and most desirable,” al-Khalidi expressed his disapproval of separatist Jewish nationalism in Palestine. “We conquered this land,” he insists, “not from you [i.e., the Jews].” Rather, “we conquered it from the Byzantines who ruled it at the time,” and thus “we owe nothing to the Jews,” who, he emphasizes again, “were not here when we conquered the land.” Justifiably, these words are generally taken to demonstrate al-Khalidi’s fierce rejection of the contemporary Jewish claim to Palestine.3 Yet, when read closely, they implicitly acknowledge that, though the Jews “were not here when we [Arabs] conquered the land,” they had been in Palestine beforehand.

  For al-Khalidi, history, even that of remote times, was of real importance in the modern period. The Arab conquest of Palestine occurred over one thousand years earlier (638 ce), and yet al-Khalidi does not discount the contemporary relevance of the details of this historic conquest. If it had been the Jews (rather than the Byzantines) from whom the Arabs had conquered Palestine, one infers from al-Khalidi’s logic, the situation and the considerations of justice more than a millennium later would be quite different. But what, then, was the meaning of the Jews’ history in Palestine? Al-Khalidi, later dubbed a “pioneer of modern historical research in Palestine,”4 did not disregard the potential significance of the Jews’ ancient kingdoms in Palestine, and indeed, until his death, he struggled with this question through his still-unpublished manuscript on Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionism. It is to this manuscript that we now turn our attention.5

  READING THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA IN THE SHADOW OF AL-AQSA

  When Richard James Horatio Gottheil set out to write the new Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry on “Zionism” in the very first years of the twentieth century, he undoubtedly had a wide variety of potential readers in mind: Jews and non-Jews, native English-speakers, European intellectuals, and individuals who supported the nascent Jewish nationalist movement along with the many more who were indifferent or opposed to it.6 Gottheil, professor of Semitic languages at Columbia University, together with his coeditors on the encyclopedia board, believed that this broad range of readers would warmly embrace the landmark encyclopedia project, the first to synthesize the kno
wledge about Judaism and the Jews, from the Bible to the present day, that had been amassed over the previous century and a half of “scientific” study.7 One reader Gottheil might not have anticipated, however, was Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi.

  Al-Khalidi (1864–1913), though only two years younger than Gottheil (1862–1936), was born in Jerusalem, thousands of miles from Gottheil’s native Manchester, England, and across the world from the Jewish Orientalist’s adoptive New York. Al-Khalidi was the scion of one of the wealthy, elite Muslim Arab families (along with the Husseynis and Nashashibis) of Ottoman Palestine. He grew up in the Bāb as-Silsila neighborhood of the Old City of Jerusalem, steps away from the Dome of the Rock.8 Despite the geographical and cultural distance between al-Khalidi’s Jerusalem and Gottheil’s New York, Gottheil’s extended entry on Zionism in the Jewish Encyclopedia did indeed reach al-Khalidi’s eye. Al-Khalidi appears to have come across Gottheil’s article at some point during his own years shuttling between Jerusalem and Istanbul when he served, between 1908 and 1913, as one of Jerusalem’s representatives in the newly reconstituted Ottoman Parliament.9 As a native of Palestine and as a leader of its Arab population, al-Khalidi was deeply concerned and troubled by the increasing immigration of foreign Jews into his country, by the associated ideology that claimed his homeland as the Jews’ own, and by the political program that, as he saw it, was actively seeking to transform the land into a Jewish state. Al-Khalidi—whose intellectual curiosity and broad range of interests led him to write such varied scholarly treatises as al-Kīmiyāʾ ʿind al-ʿarab (Chemistry among the Arabs), Tārīkh ‘ilm al-adab ʿind al-ifranj wa-l-ʿarab wa-Fīktūr Hūgū (The History of Literature among the Europeans, the Arabs, and Victor Hugo),10 and al-Muqaddima fī al-masʾala ash-sharqiyya (Introduction to the Eastern Question)—wished to understand more deeply the phenomenon of Zionism.11

  Gottheil’s twenty-one-page encyclopedia entry offered al-Khalidi a unique window into the world of this movement. It was at once the work of a man deeply involved in and therefore familiar with the history of Zionism and, at the same time, an ostensibly nonpolemical account of the movement’s historical, religious, and political underpinnings.12 Having read Gottheil’s article and numerous other works on Judaism and Jewish history, al-Khalidi set out to write his own book—in Arabic—on Zionism, and Gottheil’s encyclopedia entry would serve as one of his central sources. Taking seriously Gottheil’s claim that “the idea of a return of the Jews to Palestine has its roots in many passages of Holy Writ,” al-Khalidi looked to the ancient history and texts of the Jews as he worked to understand and analyze Zionism. During the final years before his untimely death in 1913 at the age of forty-nine, al-Khalidi crafted a book manuscript that, while titled “as-Sayūnīzm ayal-masʾala aṣ-ṣahyūniyya” (Zionism or the Zionist Question), is actually an extended account of and commentary on the history of “the Israelites” from the Bible until al-Khalidi’s own day.13

  Al-Khalidi’s manuscript provides the historian with a veritable treasure trove of insights into the ways in which a native Muslim Arab of Late Ottoman Palestine perceived and comprehended Jews, Jewish history, and the emerging Zionist movement. In over 120 pages of handwritten text, al-Khalidi offers the reader a glimpse into his world and worldview—social, cultural, intellectual, religious, political—at this critical moment in the history of relations between Zionists and Arabs, between Jews, Christian, and Muslims in Palestine.

  In this chapter I closely analyze al-Khalidi’s manuscript, mining its pages for evidence of the ways in which al-Khalidi conceived of the Jews and Judaism, Jewish identity and Zionism, and the Jews’ historic and contemporary relationship to Palestine. I investigate the sources, in addition to Gottheil’s encyclopedia entry, that al-Khalidi employed to learn and write about the Jews. The author, we find, went to great lengths to gain an internal understanding of the Jews and Zionism, using their own sources, ranging from the Hebrew Bible to at-Talmūd (a 1909 Arabic book by a Sephardic Jew on the Jewish oral law), to learn how the Jews view themselves. At the same time, I argue that even in his sensitive, internal analysis of Jewish history, al-Khalidi read through a lens colored by his own particular fin de siècle Muslim up-bringing, by the long tradition of Islamic-Jewish religious polemics, and by the more recent introduction by Europeans in the Levant and by Arab visitors to Europe of European Christian antisemitic stereotypes and discourse into the Middle East. More generally, al-Khalidi’s manuscript represents a case study that reinforces a broader claim of this book, namely, that in the early encounters between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine, religion played a prominent, and generally underappreciated, role as a category and tool of understanding and interpretation.

  AN EDUCATION FROM AL- AQSA TO THE SORBONNE

  Considering his personal background and upbringing, it comes as no surprise that religion played a part in informing al-Khalidi’s understanding of Zionism. Al-Khalidi spent his childhood years in Jerusalem obtaining a traditional Islamic education in religious schools and at the al-Aqsa Mosque.14 The Shāfiʿī mufti of Jerusalem certified that al-Khalidi had completed training in all the classical subjects of the Islamic curriculum. His religious studies continued in Jerusalem as well as in Nablus, Tripoli, and Beirut, where his father Yasin took up Ottoman-appointed religious positions at various times during the son’s youth. By age fifteen, al-Khalidi had already been granted a scholarly title in the Ottoman Islamic religious hierarchy by none other than the shaykh al-islām in Istanbul.15 Al-Khalidi was well educated in Islam and steeped in Islamic tradition.

  At the same time, as al-Khalidi became a young man, he acquired those elements of a Western education that began to be offered in the new Ottoman state schools,16 and even at the Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school in Palestine, where he apparently studied briefly.17 Al-Khalidi’s secular education began in Palestine but continued, with much greater intensity, when he left the Levant. In 1887, at age twenty-three, al-Khalidi went to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where he studied at the Mekteb-i Mülkiye (School of Civil Service). Following more than six years in Istanbul, al-Khalidi, now nearly thirty, traveled to Paris, where he undertook a three-year course in political science and then enrolled in the École des Hautes Études of the Sorbonne. Under some of the most distinguished French Orientalists of the day, including the Jewish Arabist Hartwig Derenbourg, he studied the philosophy of Islam and Eastern literature.18 Al-Khalidi even went on to a brief career as an academic in France. He taught Arabic to students and scholars of Oriental studies and presented a scholarly paper at the 1897 International Congress of Orientalists in Paris on “Statistics from the Islamic World,” which he published in both French and Arabic.19

  It would clearly be wrong to reduce al-Khalidi to an essentialized image of “a traditional Muslim” or a homo islamicus20—not only because such an essentialized image could never be an accurate depiction of anyone but also because, as we have seen, he received an advanced Western education. It would be equally inappropriate, however, to disregard al-Khalidi’s religious identity and background altogether, especially when our concern is a religiously educated individual’s understanding of a people distinguished by, perhaps most prominently, a different religion, and all the more so when that other religion (Judaism) is one for which there is an inherited discourse. Al-Khalidi’s diverse backgrounds must all be considered, then, in analyzing his manuscript and his perceptions of the Jews and Zionism.

  THE MANUSCRIPT AND ITS STRUCTURE

  When al-Khalidi died in 1913, his manuscript was in the process of being transcribed by a professional copyist, presumably in preparation for publication. With the author’s passing and the traumatic world war that began several months later, however, the manuscript was placed aside and, it would seem, forgotten. Within only a few years, anyone who came across it in the Khalidi family’s Jerusalem library would likely have deemed it hopelessly outdated, a victim of the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the Mandate for Palestine that the new League of N
ations had granted to Great Britain.21 It would regain readers’ interest only as a relic of the past. The manuscript was discovered decades later by the scholar Walid Khalidi among his family’s papers, and he has written the only academic article, in Arabic, exclusively devoted to the text, offering a detailed summary of its content.22 Fortunately, Walid Khalidi located both Ruhi al-Khalidi’s original—a set of small notebooks containing somewhat scrawled, antiquated Arabic script23—as well as the copyist’s 123 numbered pages of neatly written text in more modern handwriting, thereby permitting scholars to analyze both.24

  Al-Khalidi’s composition may be divided into six chapters.25 The first offers an introduction to Zionism and lays out the general narrative to be explored in greater detail in the course of the book. The second chapter deals with the religious roots of Zionism in the Bible and the Talmud. Next, al-Khalidi offers a survey of the history of the Jews from the death of King Solomon through the destruction of the Second Temple. This is followed by a chapter on the dispersion of the Jews and the places in which they took refuge and settled over the ensuing centuries. The fifth chapter returns to the subject of Zionism, outlining the history of the modern movement. The final chapter looks at the major Jewish organizations of al-Khalidi’s time, explaining the various religious and ideological positions found among them.

  In constructing large portions of his book, al-Khalidi followed the basic outline of Gottheil’s twenty-one-page entry on “Zionism.” At points, al-Khalidi’s text is simply an Arabic translation of Gottheil’s words. That a Muslim Arab notable from Late Ottoman Palestine was familiar with the new Jewish Encyclopedia points to the often overlooked intellectual interchange between Jews and Arabs during this period. While it is not known where al-Khalidi found the copy of the Jewish Encyclopedia that he used (it is not currently present in the Khalidi Library, but it was presumably available in the nearby Jewish National Library26 in Jerusalem), it is possible that Gottheil himself shared his article with al-Khalidi.27 Between 1909 and 1910 Gottheil lived in Jerusalem, where he headed the American School of Archaeology;28 it is likely, given their shared Orientalist interests, that Gottheil and al-Khalidi came to know one another during that period.29 It is also possible that the two were known to one another—or had even met in person—more than a decade earlier. When al-Khalidi presented his academic paper on Muslim demographics to the 1897 International Congress of Orientalists, Gottheil was already professor of Semitic languages at Columbia University, an active member of the American Oriental Society, and head of the Oriental Department of the New York Public Library.30 Moreover, the editors and writers of the Jewish Encyclopedia were familiar with al-Khalidi’s scholarly work; the encyclopedia’s entry on “Islam,” for instance, notes that al-Khalidi’s article on the demographics of the contemporary Muslim world “should especially be mentioned.”31 Al-Khalidi, in other words, was an acknowledged colleague of Jewish scholars such as Gottheil, Kohler, Goldziher, and others in the international fin de siècle scholarly effort toward understanding Islam and the Arab world. They were reading his work and he was reading theirs.