“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 117ha-Poʿelha-ẓaʿirin which a Jew declared that “the New testament is
our book, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh,” contending that “the
ascetic worldview and the submission to the God of the prophet from
Anathoth [i.e., Jeremiah] and [the God] of the prophet from nazareth
[i.e., Jesus]— they are from the selfsame source.”^93 the goal of this ar-
ticle, asserts ha-Ḥerut, is not simply heresy but the conversion of Jews
to Christianity. how, ha-Ḥerut’s editor wonders, can a Jew accept “the
fabricated stories, the nonsensical myth of ‘the son of God’?” After all,
in the Jews’ historic determination “not to believe such nonsense, we
have been slaughtered, killed every day until now.”
On the one hand, there is nothing surprising about a Jewish writer
opposed to the threat of Christians proselytizing to Jews. The threat
was real. after all, the Jews of palestine were a primary target of the
Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews (SPCJ),
along with other less descriptively named missionizing organizations.
In 1908, assessing the accomplishments of his organization in its first
hundred years, SpCJ president John Kennaway wrote proudly: “More
remarkable perhaps than everything else is the evidence of the changed
attitude of the Jews toward Our Lord. No longer is he denounced and
cursed as an impostor, but he is held up by the thoughtful among them
as one of the highest types of humanity, an inspiring ideal of match-
less beauty.”^94 Clearly, early twentieth- century Christian missionizers
were eager for Jews to think positively of Jesus. That there were Jews
who were expressing such views— and in the hebrew Zionist press in
palestine, no less— was thus a source of anxiety for those Jews who
considered it critical to keep Jews entirely alienated from Christian-
ity. Recognizing the contemporary Jewish fear of Christian prosely-
tizing, then, is necessary for understanding the strong response to the
appearance of sympathetic words about Jesus in a Zionist newspaper.
On the other hand, the language ha-Ḥerut’s editor uses in describing
Christianity— fabricated stories, nonsense, myth, the derisive quota-
tion marks surrounding “the son of God”— is indeed the language of
anti- Christian polemics and appears to reflect a severe, visceral aver-
sion to Christianity.^95
(^93) The reference here is likely to Yosef Hayim Brenner. On the Brenner Affair, see
Govrin, “MeʾoraʿBrener”; Knaʿani, ha-ʿAliyahha-sheniyahha-ʿovedetve-yaḥasahla-datve-
la-masoret, 71– 81. See also Almog, “The Role of Religious Values in the Second Aliyah,”
240– 41.
(^94) Gidney, TheHistoryoftheLondonSocietyforPromotingChristianityamongsttheJews,
viii.
(^95) On the medieval antecedents of anti- Christian polemics in Islamic lands, see Lasker,
“the Jewish Critique of Christianity under Islam in the Middle ages.”