traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 189case, for many Sephardic Jews, Ladino (not arabic) was the language
spoken at home while hebrew was the language of prayer and most
writing.^16 Nonetheless, Sephardic Jews who were born in the Middle
east, including of course the Zionists among them, were generally able
comfortably to communicate at least orally in arabic.
Some of these native Middle eastern Jews, though, were in fact liter-
ate in arabic.^17 two such arabic- reading and arabic- writing Jews were
Shimon Moyal and Nissim Malul, both central figures in Zionist efforts
related to the arabic press and also the authors of the two arabic works
on Judaism that will be studied in this chapter. Moyal and Malul were
colleagues with similar life trajectories.^18 Both were Sephardic Jews
born in palestine who spent years in egypt before returning as passion-
ate Zionists to the holy Land toward the end of the Ottoman period.^19
Moyal was born in 1866^20 to a wealthy Moroccan Jewish family that
had recently arrived in Jaffa. Malul, twenty- six years younger, was
born in 1892 to a tunisian Jewish family in Safed. Moyal was edu-
cated in Jewish religious schools in palestine until the age of sixteen,
after which he traveled to Beirut to study arabic and French and later
to Cairo for medical school. During his years in egypt, he wrote for
a number of arabic newspapers and journals, as did his wife esther
al- azhari Moyal, herself an influential author and editor of an arabic
women’s journal. the Moyals returned to palestine in 1908, and Shi-
mon died there less than a decade later, in 1915, at the age of forty-
nine.^21 Malul and Moyal probably first met in cairo, where their lives
overlapped for several years. During his youth, Malul’s family moved
from Jaffa to tanta (in Lower egypt) so that his father, Moshe (Musa)
hayyim Malul, could take up the post of rabbi of the community. they
then moved to cairo, where Musa was appointed judge (dayan) on the
(^16) See Beʾeri, Reshit ha- sikhsukh yisraʾel- ʿarav, 1882– 1911 , 53. Louis Fishman chal-
lenges the presumption that most of palestine’s Sephardic Jews spoke arabic. See Fish-
man, “palestine revisited,” 140– 44.
(^17) these included ashkenazim (members of the so- called old yishuv) as well.
(^18) On Moyal and Malul, see also Jacobson, “Jews Writing in arabic.”
(^19) as discussed in chapter 3, recent scholarship has focused great attention on an
alternative (less exclusivist) version of Zionism espoused by certain Sephardic Zionists.
See especially Campos, Ottoman Brothers; Jacobson, From Empire to Empire. the particular
views of Moyal and Malul are analyzed below.
(^20) according to Beʾeri, Reshit ha- sikhsukh yisraʾel- ʿarav, 1882– 1911 , 188; Bezalel, Nola-
detem ẓiyonim, 390; Levy, “Jewish Writers in the arab east,” 197. Ya‘qub Yehoshua‘, how-
ever, claims that Moyal was born in 1870. See Yehoshuʿa, Tārīkh aṣ- ṣiḥāfa al- ʿarabiyya fī
filasṭīn fī al- ʿahd al- ʿuthmānī, 1908– 1918 , 123.
(^21) esther al- azhari Moyal survived until 1948. She is a primary interest in Levy, “Jew-
ish Writers in the arab east.”