126 • CHAPTER 3
one religion or another if necessary, so long as they were able to re-
main on their land.^119 In his Yiddish collaboration with Ben- Gurion,
Ben- Zvi was responsible for the chapter called “history,” in which he
explained that the Jewish masses who remained in palestine after the
roman destruction of the Jewish commonwealth— the “Jewish fella-
hin,” as he calls them— “paid little interest to the refined, artful hair-
splitting argumentation [pilpulim] of the learned [class]. these peo-
ple of the land^120 used to neglect even the most basic commandments,
such as laying phylacteries and praying.” One can only assume that
Ben- Zvi shared these imagined Jewish fellahin’s antipathy toward such
religious pilpulim. In seeking to understand the Arabs of Palestine— to
study their history and their society— Ben- Zvi came to the radical con-
clusion, employing theories of race and genealogical origin, that these
were the real Jews.
The Arabic Press, the “Great Danger,” and
the Claim of a Sephardic- Ashkenazic DivideOne question that has interested recent scholars of this period in pal-
estine is whether Sephardic Zionists had a discernibly different atti-
tude toward the Arabs of Palestine from that of their Ashkenazic coun-
terparts. an increasingly common view is that the Middle eastern
Sephardim— given their knowledge of Arabic, their typically longer
heritage living among Muslims, and their deep- rootedness in the Otto-
man Empire— related to their non- Jewish neighbors differently from,
and more positively than, the way in which the Ashkenazic newcomers
to Palestine did. In making the case for this distinction between Sep-
hardim and Ashkenazim, Abigail Jacobson has pointed to the various
newspapers that each of these communities produced to argue that the
differences between the papers reflect “essential differences between
the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine,” and that, in contrast to
the Ashkenazim, “the Sephardim seem to have realized the importance
and necessity of coexisting and co- operating with the arab inhabitants
of palestine.”^121 In making her argument, Jacobson studied three news-
papers: ha-Ḥerut, ha-Aḥdut, and another Second aliyah Zionist paper,
(^119) On the “secularity” of this theory, see also Bartal, “ ‘ʿAm’ ve- ‘Areẓ’ ba- historiyo-
grafiyah ha- ẓiyonit,” 128– 29. Bartal highlights Ben- Zvi’s tenacious commitment to this
theory over the course of decades.
(^120) the phrase ameihoretz, which generally carries a negative connotation of ignora-
mus, here is subverted and regarded positively as those who remained on the land.
(^121) Jacobson, “Sephardim, Ashkenazim and the ‘Arab Question’ in Pre– First World
War Palestine,” 126– 27.