Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

182 • ChAPTEr 4

this sort of image expressed verbally in rida’s remark that Jews con-
trolled France “like a ball in their hands.”) Zaydan, however, chose this
image to express a rather different message. Beneath the picture there
is a caption in arabic that reads: “an old Israelite [shaykh­isrāʾīlī] asks
himself: Where is the promised land?” Zaydan interprets the drawing
as follows:

We have copied here a cartoon [ṣūra­ramziyya]^155 that portrays

an old Jewish man [aḥad­mashāyikh­al-­yahūd] holding the globe

in his hand, searching for a stable place where his people will be

safe. he says to himself: “In russia, they do not want me. Likewise

in France, england, america, and palestine! the world is vast and

beautiful, but it seems as though there is no place for me.”^156

Underlying Zaydan’s interpretation of the image are two elements.
First is his sympathy for the predicament of the Jews, unwelcome
throughout the otherwise “vast and beautiful” world. this sympathy,
to be sure, is not to be taken lightly in an era in which racial antisem-
itism was spreading in many regions of europe and, indeed, in the
Middle east as well. Zaydan, like his father (who, as we have seen, de-
fended the talmud against antisemitic libel), could hardly be accused
of antisemitism. however, the second important element of Zaydan’s
interpretation of the cartoon is its highlighting of the Jews’ willingness
to consider places other than palestine as their “promised Land.” In
asking “where is the promised Land,” the Jew might be understood to
be conceding either that he does not know where palestine is, that he
is so far removed from the land that he has to scour a globe to locate
it, or that the Jewish national movement is not truly concerned with
“returning” to the ancient homeland but merely with finding “a stable
place where his people will be safe.” For arabs unsympathetic to the
Zionist movement’s attempts to settle and control palestine, the Jews’
openness to other places could surely have raised suspicions as to the
sincerity of the Jewish claim of a “return” to their promised Land.
Zaydan’s selection and interpretation of this cartoon are especially
interesting when one considers the cartoon’s origins: the cover of a
January 1911 New York- based Yiddish- language satirical journal, Der
Groyser Kundes (the Big Stick).^157 the artist’s name, Lola, the pseud-
onym of Leon Israel (1887– 1955), is visible in english in the corner of

(^155) Literally: “a symbolic picture or image.”
(^156) al-­Hilāl 24 (October 1915– July 1916), 401.
(^157) Der Groyser Kundes (January 20, 1911). I thank my colleague eddy portnoy for
his help in finding the source of this cartoon. On lola, see Portnoy, “The Creation of a
Jewish Cartoon Space in the New York and Warsaw Yiddish press, 1884– 1939,” chap. 3.