traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 221nationalism in its various forms. the phenomenon that his arab read-
ers were witnessing in palestine, Moyal may have been suggesting,
was not wholly modern or novel; rather, it was one with historical
precedents extending back nearly two millennia. It remains unclear,
however, if Moyal believed that knowledge of the precedents might
allay arab fears about the Zionist movement in the present. the goal of
Moyal’s religious apologetic project is, in the end, much clearer than is
the political vision driving his translation of Jewish history into arab
nationalist terminology.
however tempting it may be to see Moyal’s political views as the
ignored and forgotten key to arab- Zionist cooperation and amity, the
picture Moyal paints of ancient Jewish nationalism does not offer a
model for anything less than “internal independence.” to the extent
that we may infer a political stance from his presentation of Jewish
history, Moyal advocated neither binationalism nor the sublimation
of Jewish nationalism for the sake of coexistence with palestine’s non-
Jewish residents. For Moyal, Jewish sovereignty in ancient palestine
was limited only to the extent that the ruling empire was too powerful
to be overthrown; the presence of non- Jews in the land did not repre-
sent an obstacle to the Jews’ political independence. In other words,
this was a vision that may well have been articulated to be consistent
with loyalty to the Ottoman empire, but it could hardly have been de-
signed to promote sacrificing particularist Jewish nationalism on the
altar of peace with palestine’s arabs. perhaps this was because Moyal,
like many of his Jewish and non- Jewish contemporaries in palestine,
considered Zionism’s relationship to the ottoman empire (rather than
to palestine’s arabs) to be the truly pressing concern in the minds of
the empire’s arabs.
and yet Moyal had the linguistic tools, cultural knowledge, and po-
litical interest to reach out directly to his Christian and Muslim neigh-
bors and present them with an apology for Judaism sensitive to their
particular religious traditions and sensibilities, even as he subtly made
the case for Jewish nationalism. It is this combination of capabilities
and concerns that made Moyal and his fellow Sephardic Zionists a crit-
ical community for the broader Zionist efforts to understand and to
instruct the non-Jewish natives of Late Ottoman palestine.
Nissim Malul’s Secrets of the JewsWhereas discerning Moyal’s particular intentions is challenging owing
to the subtlety of his presentation, such subtlety is not a characteristic
of the work of Moyal’s younger colleague, Nissim Malul. Just two years