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the rabbis of the Jews repeatedly predicted this time, and the Jews
repeated in their prayers and at the end of every one of their Zi-
onist congresses the holy Hebrew phrase the Arabic translation of
which is:
“Next year in Jerusalem [al- Quds].”
This indicates their affection for^111 Palestine and the extent of
their desire to possess it.^112For al- Khalidi— relying as he does on Jewish sources as he traces the
Jews’ historic link to Palestine— the contemporary Zionist congresses
are just the latest manifestations of the ancient aspiration articulated
in the “holy Hebrew” prayer for “Next year in Jerusalem.” This aspi-
ration extends back to Sabbateanism, the medieval Jewish poets, the
Talmud, Bar Kokhba, and, originally, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible
themselves. For the son and nephew of Jerusalem mayors, and for one
of Jerusalem’s representatives in the Ottoman Parliament, Jews’ “af-
fection for Palestine,” and especially for Jerusalem, must have been
at once eerily familiar and profoundly threatening. Yet al- Khalidi does
not withhold this information from his intended readers. Nor does he
even question the legitimacy of the Jews’ attachment to the land, ex-
cept in the modern period when, as we have seen, he contends that the
Jews themselves declared their former ambition null and void through
a religious- legal pronouncement.
However, al- Khalidi does not limit his exposition of Judaism and
Jewish history to the Jews’ attachment to Palestine. Rather, his man-
uscript investigates a wide assortment of aspects of Jewish faith and
experience. In the pages that follow, I explore the ways in which al-
Khalidi’s understanding of Judaism is informed by the centuries- old
tradition of Islamic- Jewish polemics, on the one hand, and by very con-
temporary, pressing concerns about Palestine and Zionist ambitions,
on the other. despite its bold attempt to synthesize all Jewish history,
al- Khalidi’s manuscript is indeed well titled, for “the Zionist question,”
when not the explicit subject, is generally perceptible just beneath the
surface. This is the case, as well, in al- Khalidi’s ambivalent attempt to
explain european antisemitism. As I will argue, in addressing Russian
christians’ hatred of Jews, al- Khalidi undertakes the treacherous task
of sensitively accounting for a bigotry that has resulted not only in the
victimization of the Jews but also in the Jews’ efforts to take control
of al- Khalidi’s homeland. Al- Khalidi struggles to navigate between his
(^111) Taʿalluqihimbi can also be translated as “attachment to,” “devotion to,” or “con-
nection with.”
(^112) al- Khālidī, “as- Sayūnīzm, ay al- masʾala aṣ- ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 24.