IMAGInInG ThE “ISrAElITES” • 133arabic journals. In so doing, the chapter widens the scope of this study
and shows that al- Khalidi’s contemporaries were reading and writing
about many aspects of the Jews’ religion and history, proposing theo-
ries and perspectives no less fascinating than those we discovered in
“as- Sayūnīzm.”
In an effort to understand what Arab intellectuals in Palestine and
beyond knew and thought about Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, I exam-
ine three of the most widely read and influential Arabic journals of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— al-Hilāl (the Crescent),
al-Muqtaṭaf (the Digest), and al-Manār (The Beacon)— as well as a
monograph on Jewish history written by one of these journals’ editors.
Jews, we will find, were a frequent topic of interest for the journals’
editors and readers.^8 No single, consistent image of Jews emerges from
the varied pages of these journals; they were presented sympathetically
by some and more hostilely by others. Nonetheless, certain problems
and themes recurred frequently; these, I suggest, both reflected and
informed the ways in which the journals’ readers, including those in
palestine, perceived Jews and understood the Zionist project in pales-
tine. the themes were as varied as the racial relationship between Jews
and arabs; the origins of the hebrew Bible and the historicity of its
stories; the morality of the Jewish religion; the causes of antisemitism;
the conditions of Jews in Christendom vis- à- vis those in the Islamic
domain; the link between Jews and finance; and, increasingly as time
progressed, the Zionist settlement of palestine.
Ultimately, in presenting this analytical snapshot of the variety of
arab intellectual conceptions of Jews during the Late Ottoman period,
this chapter aims to unearth and explore the complexities of the in-
tellectual encounter between arabs and Zionists in palestine. For the
editors, contributors, and readers of these arabic journals, Zionists
were not a foreign, unfamiliar group of european colonists; in fact, as
we shall see, even those from europe were generally not considered
“european” at all. rather, as Jews, the Zionists were known from the
Bible and the Qurʾan, and they were often viewed as relatives— racial
or otherwise— of the Arabs. Traditional religious polemical tropes were
certainly incorporated into the way Jews and Zionists were perceived,
but so too were the arguments of modern biblical criticism. In this
analysis, we again discover the fluidity between self- perception and
the perception of the other; that is, we find that the way in which an
(^8) The interests of readers, while obviously difficult to determine with any certainty,
might be gauged not only by what the editors published (based on their assessment of
their readers’ interests) but also by letters to the editor, which will be discussed in some
detail below.