Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

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fraternity is “most natural and most desirable,” al- Khalidi expressed
his disapproval of separatist Jewish nationalism in Palestine. “We con-
quered this land,” he insists, “not from you [i.e., the Jews].” Rather,
“we conquered it from the Byzantines who ruled it at the time,” and
thus “we owe nothing to the Jews,” who, he emphasizes again, “were
not here when we conquered the land.” Justifiably, these words are
generally taken to demonstrate al- Khalidi’s fierce rejection of the con-
temporary Jewish claim to Palestine.^3 Yet, when read closely, they im-
plicitly acknowledge that, though the Jews “were not here when we
[Arabs] conquered the land,” they had­been in Palestine beforehand.
For al- Khalidi, history, even that of remote times, was of real impor-
tance in the modern period. The Arab conquest of Palestine occurred
over one thousand years earlier (638 ce), and yet al- Khalidi does not
discount the contemporary relevance of the details of this historic con-
quest. If it had been the Jews (rather than the Byzantines) from whom
the Arabs had conquered Palestine, one infers from al- Khalidi’s logic,
the situation and the considerations of justice more than a millennium
later would be quite different. But what, then, was the meaning of
the Jews’ history in Palestine? Al- Khalidi, later dubbed a “pioneer of
modern historical research in Palestine,”^4 did not disregard the po-
tential significance of the Jews’ ancient kingdoms in Palestine, and
indeed, until his death, he struggled with this question through his
still- unpublished manuscript on Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionism.
It is to this manuscript that we now turn our attention.^5

Reading the Jewish­Encyclopedia

in the shadow of al- Aqsa

When Richard James Horatio Gottheil set out to write the new Jewish­
Encyclopedia’s entry on “Zionism” in the very first years of the twen-
tieth century, he undoubtedly had a wide variety of potential readers
in mind: Jews and non- Jews, native english- speakers, european intel-
lectuals, and individuals who supported the nascent Jewish nationalist
movement along with the many more who were indifferent or opposed
to it.^6 Gottheil, professor of Semitic languages at columbia University,

(^3) On Ben- Yehuda’s disillusion with al- Khalidi by 1912, see Lang, Daber­ʿivrit!, 615– 16.
(^4) Asad, Muḥammad­Rūḥī­al-­Khālidī.
(^5) I thank Rashid Khalidi for generously granting me access to this invaluable
document.
(^6) The Jewish­Encyclopedia (Je) was published by Funk and Wagnalls between 1901
and 1906. For a study of the encyclopedia and its significance in American Jewish his-
tory, see Schwartz, The­Emergence­of­Jewish­Scholarship­in­America.