110 • CHAPTER 3
The (welcome) antagonism between Christians and Muslims was
imagined not merely in the Middle east but far beyond as well. Con-
sider, for instance, ha-Ẓevi’s 1908 report on a rumor in Russia that al-
leged that seventeen Jewish students in Odessa “took upon themselves
the Mohammedan religion in order to be accepted to university.”^63 Ha-
Ẓevi’s report relates that three Muslims sent an open letter to a Moscow
newspaper, Moskovskievedomosti, expressing their anger against those
Jews “who wish to penetrate Islam and destroy it, as they have de-
stroyed Christianity.”^64 What is fascinating and telling about the way
in which the ha-Ẓeviarticle treats this controversy is that it transforms
what is reasonably understood to be a problem between Muslims and
Jews into a clash between Muslims and Christians.^65 the article does
this by quoting at length the response of Russkoeznamia, a conservative
Christian russian newspaper, to the Muslims’ letter of protest. “the
Mohammedans,” the Russian paper insisted, “are not like us, the Chris-
tians.” rather, the article declared:
they are all^66 haters of humanity and haters of all forms of free-
dom. . . . About humanity^67 they know nothing (about this [inserts
the hebrew author sarcastically] only the Russkoeznamya knows!),
they respect their faith and demand respect for themselves. and
not just “the masses”^68 who have never seen the walls of a schoolIn contrast to their views of Christians and Muslims, Jews generally lacked an inherited
discourse or approach to the Druze, members of an esoteric religious sect formed in
the eleventh century. On arslan, see McCullagh, TheFallofAbd-Ul-Hamid, 96– 97, 148;
Akarlı, TheLongPeace, 153; Prätor, DerArabischeFaktorinderjungtürkischenPolitik, 60.
On the Druze of Palestine, see Falah, “A History of the Druze Settlements in Palestine
during the Ottoman Period,” 31– 48. On the relationship between the State of Israel and
the Druze, see, for instance, Parsons, “The Druze and the Birth of Israel”; Frisch, “The
Druze Minority in the Israeli Military”; Gelber, “Antecedents of the Jewish- Druze Alli-
ance in palestine.” I am grateful to Jens hanssen for pointing out the Zionist newspapers’
mislabeling of arslan as a Christian.
(^63) Some version of this report was apparently first published in Hodha-zman, a peri-
odical published first in St. Petersburg, then in Vilnius.
(^64) the terms used here are muslimiyut, literally “Muslimness,” and noẓriyut, which
might be translated as either “Christianity” or “Christianness.”
(^65) even if this article was simply copied verbatim from Hodha-zeman, the fact that
this particular article was chosen (from among the countless others in the contempo-
rary press) for inclusion in ha-Ẓevi suggests that the editors appreciated its tone and
implication.
(^66) the text reads: “all of them— milvadbe-rosham— all of them are haters of human-
ity.” the phrase milvadbe-rosham is ambiguous but may mean “aside from their leader.”
I am uncertain whom the author has in mind here.
(^67) the term used is humaniyut, which might also be rendered “humanism.”
(^68) ha-ʿam: literally, “the people” or “the nation.”