180 • ChAPTEr 4
and their captivity— both the first time, by nebuchadnezzar the
Babylonian, and the second time, by titus the roman. Some of
them [the Jews] call this war [i.e., World War I] the third Jewish
captivity because it has increased their poverty and their disper-
sion and was even more woeful upon them and more thorough in
thwarting their dreams and hopes.according to Zaydan, august 4, 1914, marked both the start of the Great
War and the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the an-
cient Jerusalem Temples (Tishʿah be- Av, i.e., the ninth day of the lunar
month of av).^153 By linking the consequences of the Great War for con-
temporary Jews to the Jews’ ancient past and their religious calendar,
Zaydan displays a conception of his Jewish contemporaries that, as we
have found in this chapter, was common among arab intellectuals of
the time. Contemporary Jews were understood by these intellectuals in
light of their own perceptions of Judaism and Jewish history. Jews were
imagined to be living within a historic Jewish drama that began, in
many arab authors’ minds, with the Bible. Moreover, this passage from
Zaydan reflects the widespread acceptance on the part of these Arab
intellectuals of the basic Jewish claim to a historic link to palestine.
highly sympathetic to the Jews’ historic plight, Zaydan’s article em-
ploys one particularly interesting, uncommon medium to highlight the
challenges facing the Jews. In the middle of the first page, there is a
drawing of a Jew with a globe in his hands (see figures 3 and 4). The
image was a common motif of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century european antisemitic art and caricature that alluded to the
theory that Jews controlled, or at least sought to control, the entire
world. the cover of the French journal LeRire in 1898, for instance,
famously portrayed alphonse de rothschild, crowned with a golden
calf, grasping the globe in his taloned hands.^154 (above we encountered
(^153) In 1914 Tishʿah be- Av was observed on August 2, the tenth day of Av (the ninth
day of av fell on august 1, but this was a Sabbath). Zaydan’s confusion can likely be
explained by the fact that he had presumably encountered a Jewish source that noted
that the war began on this Jewish day of mourning (a claim that has indeed become part
of modern Jewish lore). For russian Jews (among whom, one assumes, this calendrical
coincidence was first observed), the war did effectively begin on the ninth of Av, as
Germany declared war on russia on august 1. For Zaydan, however, living in British-
occupied egypt, august 4 was understood to be the beginning of the war, namely, the
day Britain declared war on Germany. thus Zaydan, having heard the Jewish claim that
the war began on Tishʿah be- Av, appears to have mistakenly assumed that this referred
to august 4.
(^154) See, e.g., the caricature of de rothschild on the cover of LeRire:JournalHumoris-
tique Paraissant le Samedi, copied in albert Lindeman’s entry on “rothschilds” in Levy,
Antisemitism, 625; of a Jewish monster holding a globe, from the 1901 Vienna newspaper
Kikeriki (1901), copied in arie Stav, Peace, 41.