RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 89apparent opposition of the Ottoman government and the local Arab
population. In both cases, conventional prejudices from disparate
sources are utilized not for the sake of defamation— or at least not
only for this purpose— but as explanatory tools in al- Khalidi’s effort to
understand Zionism.
Najib Nassar, Jewish Territorialism,
and “Mendelssohn’s Theory”Al- Khalidi recognized that Zionism was not the only Jewish movement
seeking a new home for the Jews. Other movements— territorialism
or non- Palestinocentric Jewish nationalism— sought refuge for Jews in
regions outside of Palestine.^168 Interestingly, al- Khalidi’s uncle Yusuf
diyaʾ, in the same 1899 letter to Theodor Herzl mentioned above, ap-
peared to endorse the idea, at least in theory. “That one searches for
a place somewhere for the unfortunate Jewish people— nothing would
be more just and fair,” wrote Yusuf diyaʾ. He continued: “My God, the
earth is big enough. There are still uninhabited lands where one could
place the millions of poor Jews who maybe would be happy there and
would constitute a nation one day. This would perhaps be the best and
most rational solution of the Jewish question. But, by God, leave Pales-
tine alone.”^169 Yusuf diyaʾ was not opposed to the idea of an ingather-
ing of impoverished and persecuted Jews from across their diaspora to
a single location. Moreover, he imagined the future possibility of these
Jews’ becoming a “nation,” by which he appears to mean the creation
of their own political state. Ruhi al- Khalidi’s uncle and intellectual
mentor, in other words, did not insist on the inviolability of “Mendels-
sohn’s theory” eliminating the Jews’ sense of constituting a distinct
nation;^170 in fact, he believed that the migration of Jewish masses to an
“uninhabited land” might well be “the best and most rational solution”
to the problem of the Jews. Zionism’s flaw is that it has chosen a land
that is decidedly not uninhabited. Jews, following Yusuf diyaʾ’s rea-
soning, need not abandon their ambitions for an independent territory;
they must simply shift their collective gaze elsewhere.
(^168) For a collection of primary sources on the subject, see Rabinovitch, ed., Jewsand
DiasporaNationalism.
(^169) cZA H197.
(^170) Following Ruhi al- Khalidi, I use this phrase here as a shorthand for the claim that
Jews in the modern period constitute only a religious group, not a national one. There
is no reason to assume that Yusuf diyaʾ al- Khalidi would have recognized this view as
“Mendelssohn’s theory.”