traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 231Malul insists that “Muslims and Jews are beaten in Christian coun-
tries, while Christians and Jews are humiliated in Muslim or arab
countries.”^175 religious persecution, in other words, is not the monop-
oly of any one religion; Jews, though, are conspicuously absent from
the series of aggressors.
Malul returns one last time to his thesis as he brings his book to a
close. “the biggest reason for these oppressions is money.” this was
the case, he repeats, with the persecution enacted by, among others,
the Umayyads, the abbasids, and the Crusaders. Indeed, Malul con-
tends, “what the arabs did to the Jews of Yathrib [Madina] was also
for money, due to jealousy and envy. and this is the main impetus for
the russian revolution that took place a few years ago.”^176 For Malul,
the motivation for intercommunal persecution is universal and time-
less, the same at the founding moment of Islam in the medieval ara-
bian peninsula as in the contemporary russian revolution. Neither the
Muslims of seventh- century Yathrib nor the Christians of nineteenth-
century russia had reason to hate the Jews other than financial envy
and resentment.
Malul applied this argument to his interpretation of arab opposition
to Zionism in his own time. Like all other cases of anti- Jewish harass-
ment and discrimination in history, anti- Zionism, Malul contended,
could also be explained by the economic interests of the Zionist move-
ment’s most outspoken critics. In his extended analytical review of “the
arabic press,” which he published in the Odessa- based hebrew journal
ha- Shiloaḥ in 1914, Malul wrote about the rise of the anti- Zionist press
in palestine. he attributed the inception of this press (in the form of the
newspaper al- Karmil) to an incident about five years earlier involving
“a Christian man named Najib Nassar who dealt in real estate in tibe-
rias.” Malul explains that Nassar— the same Nassar who would later
translate Gottheil’s Jewish Encyclopedia article on Zionism— served as
an agent in the sale of “hundreds of dunams of land” to the Jewish Col-
onization association (Jca) settlement company. “one time,” Malul
alleges, Nassar:
came to an official of this company and requested his commission
for a sale, claiming that he had previously told this official about
the availability of these lands, so he deserves a commission even
though the sale had been completed without his involvement.
of course, the Jca official did not want to treat the company’s
money as one would treat his own and so he did not want to(^175) Ibid., 54.
(^176) ibid., 57.