IMAGInInG ThE “ISrAElITES” • 139religion. how strange, then, Zaydan suggests, to find Jews on opposing
sides of the battlefields of this war.^25
For emile Zaydan and, as we saw earlier, ruhi al- Khalidi, the ques-
tion was whether Jews were a nationality or a religion. according to
Zaydan, Jews constitute both a religion (dīn) and a nationality (jinsiy-
ya), while al- Khalidi contended that in the past Jews had possessed
both national and religious qualities, but they had permanently aban-
doned their national qualities in accepting “Mendelssohn’s theory.”
For still other arab intellectuals, however, there was yet another
category— namely, race— that was even more decisive in defining
Jews. as addressed in chapter 1, race entered the discourse of the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Middle east through multiple
sources: (1) European— the centrality of race- thinking in fin de siècle
european intellectual and nationalist thought (including varieties of
Zionism);^26 (2) Ottoman— the question of the dominance of Turks, de-
fined racially, in the late Ottoman Empire; (3) Egyptian— the place of
race in contemporary debates about egypt’s relationship to the Sudan;
and (4) Syrian— the role of Darwinian and Social Darwinist theories
in the formative experiences of the Syrian- born editors of the major
arabic intellectual journals of the period.
One of those Syrian- born intellectuals who moved to egypt in the
wake of the controversy over Darwinism was Shahin Makaryus, a
founding editor of al-Muqtaṭaf.^27 In 1904 Makaryus published a mono-
graph called Tārīkhal-isrāʾīliyyīn (history of the Israelites). the in-
troductory chapter of this 270- page book, published by al-Muqtaṭaf’s
press, is called “the Origin and Lineage of the Jews” (aṣlal-yahūd
(^25) Cf. al-Muqtaṭaf 46:3 (May 1915), 504, for the editor’s response to a question about
what happens when Freemasons find themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield.
(^26) Certain Zionists employed race- thinking in making the argument for a Jewish race
(and, by extension, nation). Zionist race- thinkers were compelled, though, to consider
the implications of the Jews’ race for their relations with palestine’s arabs, ostensible
racial relatives. One of efron’s subjects, Jewish race scientist elias auerbach (b. posen
1882; moved to palestine 1905), employed the Jews’ Semitic race as an argument for
the “appropriateness of a mass return to the Middle east,” to be in their natural racial
environment. “Buoyed by ample anthropological evidence and by theories of Semitic
unity, auerbach’s Zionist vision,” efron explains, “projected a peaceful and harmonious
future for Jews and arabs in the Land of Israel.” In other words, the Jews’ race was,
in auerbach’s case, an argument for Zionism, but for a Zionism that stressed peaceful
coexistence with palestine’s arab natives. efron, Defenders of the Race, 139– 40. On race-
thinking among Jews and Zionists, see also hart, Jews and Race; Falk, “Zionism and the
Biology of the Jews,” 587– 607.
(^27) See discussion of the lewis Affair in chapter 1. On Makaryus’s racial thought, see
also Gribetz, “ ‘Their Blood Is Eastern,’ ” 143– 61.