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harmful. For this reason, we find that this people is oppressed
by all peoples and nations that do not extend to it the tolerance
of the Muslims. have you not seen that those who have been ex-
pelled by countries and evicted from their lands overwhelmingly
have found refuge only in the countries of the Ottoman empire,
even in palestine, where they seek to become independent and
establish a new state?^75here, rida first alludes to the dual definition of the Jews, considering
them to be linked by both a “religious bond” and “racial solidarity.”
this twofold tie that binds the Jews together, rida claims, is excep-
tionally strong, and he appears to admire this. however, his is far
from a philosemitic proclamation. after all, the Jews are characterized
not only by a deep sense of unity but also by greed, an “excessive
self- love” that leads them to try to channel everything of value they
find among other peoples toward themselves. Writing in strikingly
psychological terms, rida asserts that “just like insufficient self- love,”
an overabundance of self- love is also harmful. and it is this excessive,
harmful self- love among Jews that, in rida’s rendering, accounts for
the way Jews are treated by non- Muslims rather than any condem-
nable Christian inclination toward intolerance. though rida is not ad-
vocating anti-Jewish persecution, this explanation of the phenomenon
treads closely to a justification. Muslims, by contrast, owing to their
deep- seated quality of “tolerance,” have dealt more favorably with
the Jews, despite the latter’s loathsome behavior. It is for this reason,
concludes rida, that Jews have so frequently fled from non- Muslim
countries and sought refuge in the lands of Islam. For the moment,
let us leave aside rida’s passing reference to palestine and the Zionist
movement; we might simply note that, in these revealing lines, he por-
trays Zionism as fitting into a broader pattern within Jewish history,
a movement of overly self- interested Jews from non- Muslim countries
migrating toward the lands of Islam because of the relative tolerance
found there.
rida’s premise of Jewish self- interest as the cause of antisemitism
was followed by a more developed theory of the Jewish psyche by a
different author in al-Hilāl in 1906. the context this time was not a
Qurʾanic commentary, as was typically the case in rida’sal-Manār,
but a lead story on what these journals found to be the ever- intriguing
(^75) al-Manār 6:5 (May 1903), 196. In this discursive context, the term jinsīseems most
appropriately translated as racial. Sylvia haim has read this passage as evidence that
rida “sometimes imputed to the Jews the faults with thich they are usually taxed.” haim,
“arabic antisemitic Literature,” 309.