Chapter 4

Imagining the “Israelites”: Fin de Siècle

arab Intellectuals and the Jews

“a

mong the peculiarities of history is that egypt has today become

a place of refuge for the Jews coming from palestine,” notes

the author of “the Jews and the War,” an article published during

the First World War in the egypt- based arabic journal al-­Hilāl. after

all, “in antiquity,” the author elaborates, “palestine was the place of

refuge for those who escaped after their exodus from egypt.”^1 During

the Great War, many Jews fled Palestine while others were expelled by

the Ottoman authorities who were suspicious of all nationalist activity

within their realm.^2 Between 1914 and 1915, in the months before the

al-­Hilāl­article was published, more than eleven thousand Jews who

had been expelled from the district of Jaffa by the local Ottoman com-

mander sought refuge, if only temporarily, in alexandria, Cairo, and

Suez.^3 The irony of Jews’ escaping Palestine and fleeing to Egypt— an

Exodus- in- reverse— was not lost on the author of this wartime Arabic

journal article.

the unsigned article was likely written by al-­Hilāl’s new editor,

emile Zaydan, the son of the journal’s founder, Jurji (George) Zaydan

(^1) al-­Hilāl 24 (1915– 1916), 404.
(^2) As Justin McCarthy explains, “some 600 [Jews] had been deported from Jaffa to
egypt by the end of 1914, later to be joined by their families, who were transported on
the american warship Tennessee. the deported Jews were considered political threats
by the Ottoman government because they were subjects of russia (at war with the Otto-
mans) or because they were Zionists who, it was believed, advocated the separation of
palestine from the Ottoman empire. For a time, it appeared as if all Jews who had re-
tained their russian nationality would be deported. however, the German and american
governments prevailed upon the Ottomans to allow the russian Jews to become Ottoman
subjects.” McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, 20.
(^3) See Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914– 1952 , 10– 11. See also Krämer, A His-
tory of Palestine, 151– 52; rachel Simon, “Zionism,” in The Jews of the Middle East and
North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Simon, Laskier, and reguer, 169.