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ijmāʿ.^102 If there had been an ijmāʿ among premodern Jews that held
that the Jews were a nation, al- Khalidi might have explained, the
consensus had evolved, given the “different times and conditions” in
which post- Mendelssohnian Jewry lived. A new consensus declared
that the Jews are now no longer a nation but rather purely a religion.
That is to say, not only did al- Khalidi read an Islamic notion into
Jewish history, he employed a particular theory thereof that Muslim
thinkers were developing in his specific intellectual, religious, and
social context.
In al- Khalidi’s own terms, though, might not Herzl’s Zionist con-
gresses have represented the latest ijmāʿ, now asserting that the Jews
still are, or are once again, a nation wishing to return to Palestine,
thereby overturning the imagined asqāmah concerning “Mendels-
sohn’s theory”? While, of course, it would have been inconvenient
for al- Khalidi’s anti- Zionist case to concede that a new Jewish gener-
ation’s asqāmah had restored the Jews’ nationhood and their claim to
Palestine, this political inconvenience is not necessarily what drove
al- Khalidi’s interpretation. Notwithstanding the Zionist movement’s
claim to speak on behalf of world Jewry, when al- Khalidi penned his
manuscript in the years preceding the war, the Balfour declaration,
the fall of the Ottoman empire, and the establishment of the British
Mandate in Palestine, there was no Jewish asqāmah on Zionism to
speak of. Many Jews, and particularly Jewish religious leaders of var-
ied stripes including Reform and Orthodoxy, had rejected Zionism;
al- Khalidi had no reason to imagine that Zionism constituted a new
Jewish asqāmah.^103
How, though, did al- Khalidi arrive at the term “asqāmah” in his
rendering of ijmāʿ? As noted, Jews in the medieval Islamic world, es-
pecially the later Geonim and even Maimonides, appear to have been
influenced by the Islamic principle of ijmāʿ.^104 The term, however, was
not typically translated into Jewish discourse as haskamah. While the
(^102) On Rida’s interpretation of ijmāʿ, see also Zaman, ModernIslamicThoughtina
RadicalAge, 47– 53.
(^103) After al- Khalidi’s death, the situation obviously changed dramatically, and there
gradually developed among Jews something resembling a consensus, though still not
unanimity, on Zionism. As far as I am aware, though, no subsequent Palestinian or Mus-
lim thinker has taken up al- Khalidi’s ijmāʿ- asqāmah theory. Its time, too, has passed. On
the persistence of anti- Zionism on the fringes of the American Jewish Reform movement
in the mid- twentieth century, see Kolsky, JewsagainstZionism.
(^104) As Libson writes, “the appeal to consensus as a legal source is in effect Gaonic
innovation . . . the Geonim accord it, in practice, quasi- formal status as a legal source
and a major element in deciding the law.” Libson, “Halakhah and Reality in the Gaonic
Period,” 94. See also Neusner and Sonn, ComparingReligionsthroughLaw; Neusner, Sonn,
and Brockopp, JudaismandIslaminPractice.