186 • chapter 5
Finally, the author of the exhortation cited above was Shimon Moyal,
whose at- Talmūd of 1909 was, as we have seen, another of al- Khalidi’s
sources for information on Jewish history and beliefs. although it is un-
clear whether he had already read Nassar’s Zionism or had simply heard
about it, Moyal was in any case certain that it was no mere literal arabic
rendering of Gottheil’s article but rather a willful distortion designed to
misrepresent and vilify Zionism. Moyal, a native of Jaffa, believed it to
be of critical importance that his fellow Zionists— most of whom could
not read arabic— were made aware of this slander disguised as trans-
lation because of its potential to influence how its readers perceived
Zionism.^3 So Moyal decided to translate it— again.^4 translation was thus
a tool used to expose arabs to the dangers of Zionism, on the one hand,
and to expose Zionists to the dangers of arab perceptions of Zionism, on
the other— both ostensibly based on the same text.
the translation and retranslation of the Jewish Encyclopedia’s “Zi-
onism” entry is an acute case of the central and problematic place of
language and translation in Late Ottoman palestine and in the arab-
Zionist encounter more broadly. While the contested nature of lan-
guage in internal Zionist debates is well- known and well studied,^5 the
position of language and translation in the encounter between the Zi-
onists and arabs of palestine has received relatively little scholarly
attention.^6 through a study of two very different but related projects—
the varied attempts to make the arabic press more sympathetic to-
ward Zionism and the publication of two arabic books about the Jews
and Judaism— this chapter argues that translation served not only as a
means of relating information in a different language but also as a tool
of influence, defense, persuasion, apologetics, and polemics.
a third conquest: the arabic pressthe years of the Second aliyah (1904– 1914) are associated with
two Zionist projects of “conquest,” namely, “conquest of labor” and
(^3) although it contained anti- Zionist commentary and was selective in the passages it
chose to translate, the pamphlet was a reasonably faithful rendering of Gottheil’s orig-
inal. In this regard I disagree with Neville Mandel, who reads the pamphlet as a more
extreme polemical distortion. See Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I,
108– 9. See my critique in chapter 2.
(^4) On the politics of translation, see Seidman, Faithful Renderings.
(^5) the so- called Language War of 1913 surrounding the language of instruction at
haifa’s technion is the most obvious example. See, e.g., the chapter “Language Wars and
Other Wars” in Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 213– 37.
(^6) One notable exception is halperin, “Orienting Language.”