114 • CHAPTER 3
and, not least, spoke Arabic. Consider, for instance, the report in ha-
Ẓevi about an encounter with a Jew from Gaza. “By chance,” writes the
correspondent, “we met this week one of those Jews about whom we
were unsure whether they are members of our nation [mi-vneiʿameinu]
or children of the land [mi-vneiha-areẓ], arabs descended from arabs.”
Such ambiguous figures are, just like Arabs, “tall- statured, sun- tanned,
slightly thin but nevertheless healthy, and quite proud.” the author
explains that this was a Jew from Gaza, a city that seemed to most
Jews in palestine more distant than america and less familiar than
Australia. The article reports that this Arab- like Jew noted that, in
Gaza, “the Arabs and Jews live in brotherhood” and complained only
that the Jews there lack a synagogue and a cemetery.^82 Likewise, after
the immigration of about 150 Yemenite Jews to Palestine, ha-Ẓevi ex-
plained that “in their customs and their ways, they are similar to the
Bedouin arabs, and some also have four wives.”^83 the writers in this
news paper were struck by the similarities between Arabs and certain
Middle Eastern– born Jews. These liminal types challenged Zionists’
preconceptions of what constituted a Jew, on the one hand, and an
arab, on the other. In Late Ottoman palestine, ethnic, racial, national,
and religious categories were all in some degree of flux.
Christians and Muslims, Christianity and Islamearlier we found that one of ha-Ḥerut’s explanations for what it per-
ceived to be more intense animosity toward Zionism among palestine’s
Christians than among its Muslims was that Muslims and Jews were
linked by race, while Christians, of another race, “hated the Jews ra-
cially.” More common than racial arguments, though, are discussions of
religious differences in ha-Ḥerut’s attempts to account for the perceived
divergent approaches of Christian and Muslim arabs toward Jews and
Zionism. In an article called “the enemies of Judah,” published in early
1911, Mendel Kremer argues for the founding of a Jewish newspaper
in Arabic and Turkish that would set out to prove that the Christian
opponents of Zionism were motivated not by concern for the Ottoman
government and the integrity of the empire, as the Christians claimed,
(^82) ha-Ẓevi 25:64 (December 28, 1908), 2. The author ends with what seems to be a cri-
tique of Jewish values: “How strange is the nation of Israel, satisfied with so little indeed:
prayer and death, death and prayer. For what does it need to live?”
(^83) ha-Ẓevi 25:75 (January 10, 1909), 1. On the waves of Yemenite Jewish immigration
to palestine in this period, see Druyan, Be-ein“marvad-kesamim”; Druyan, “ʿAliyatam ve-
hitʿarutam shel yehudei teiman ba- ʿaliyah ha- rishonah.”