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any consistency. In a brief entry in august 1916 entitled “New York:
Capital of the Nations,” al-Muqtaṭaf opens by identifying New York as
“the largest Jewish city [madīnayahūdiyya] because it has a million
Jews.” Just two months later, though, al-Muqtaṭaf published another
short article on New York. this time it opened by stating that “New
York is the largest Israelite city.”^22
the question that had by that point been discussed in europe for
over a century— are the Jews a religion, a nation, a race, or something
else?^23 — concerned the authors of these fin de siècle Arabic journals,
whether they referred to their subjects as Jews or Israelites. Consider,
for instance, the view proposed in al-Hilāl’s five- page piece on “The
Jews and the War: Their Influence on It and Its Influence on Them,” the
same article that noted the irony of Jewish migration from palestine to
egypt. the essay opens by identifying the Israelites:
the Israelites are distinguished from among the rest of the peo-
ples [ash-shuʿūb] by their preservation of their nationality [jinsiy-
yatihim] and their customs and practices, despite the passage of
time and their subordination to different states. Israelitism [al-
isrāʾīliyya^24 ] is simultaneously a religion [dīn] and a nationality
[jinsiyya], unlike Christianity and Islam.the author perceives a distinction between the categories of religion
and nationality. a Christian Frenchman would thus be Christian by
religion and French by nationality, and a Muslim egyptian would, like-
wise, be Muslim by religion and egyptian (or, depending on the ide-
ology of the classifier, Arab) by nationality. But for Jews, this author
contends, there is no such dichotomy; “Israelitism” is both religion and
nationality. this unique nature of Israelitism is relevant for an arti-
cle on “the Jews and the War” because, the author explains, “if we
are surprised by fighting between Christian and Christian in this war,
we are all the more shocked by fighting between Jew and Jew.” The
implication here is that the solidarity among Jews, who share both
religion and nationality, is, or would be expected to be, stronger than
that among Christians (or among Muslims), who are united solely by
(^22) See al-Muqtaṭaf 49:2 (august 1916), 205, and 49:4 (October 1916), 409.
(^23) a brief but useful survey of this discussion can be found in Silberstein, “religion,
ethnicity, and Jewish history.”
(^24) In more familiar parlance, we might render this term as “Judaism” or, perhaps
more precisely, “Jewishness.” Given the ambiguity, however, and the fact that each of
these terms has different nuances, I have chosen to use the more literal though obviously
more cumbersome “Israelitism.”