198 • chapter 5
it is difficult, surely, to consider Malul’s description of arab culture as
“minor” to be an expression of deep respect and admiration for arabs.
While the cultural experiences of palestine’s Sephardic Zionists were
obviously different from those of their european counterparts and thus
may have helped foster somewhat different Zionist ideologies, the ev-
idence, as we discovered in chapter 3 as well, does not support the
thesis that these ideologies were uniformly or unqualifiedly tolerant
and respectful of the land’s arabs.
Defending Zionism by translating Judaism:
a Study of two apologetics“Conquering” the arabic press was not the only way by which Zionists
sought to influence arab views about the Jews and Zionism, though
it appears to have been the approach to which the most time and re-
sources were devoted in this period. In the pages that follow, we turn
to a different sort of translation project carried out by two of the same
individuals involved in the arabic press efforts: Shimon Moyal and
Nissim Malul. In a span of less than three years, each at the moment
of his return to palestine from egypt in 1909 and 1911, respectively,
Moyal and Malul wrote books in arabic about Judaism and Jewish his-
tory. as they translate Judaism and the Jewish experience into arabic,
these texts, I argue, highlight the perception among some Zionists that
the arabs’ resistance to Zionism and Jewish settlement in palestine
was aggravated by inherited religious prejudices, and that a proper
translation could effectively dispel the misperceptions and alleviate
the tensions.
Moyal’s at- TalmūdWe turn now to the first (and ultimately, the only) volume of what
Shimon Moyal intended to be an arabic translation of the entire tal-
mud, a 1909 text entitled at- Talmūd: Aṣluhu wa- tasalsuluhu wa- ādābuhu
(the talmud: its origin, transmission, and ethics).^55 In analyzing this
text, which as we saw in chapter 2 served as a source for al- Khalidi’s
understanding of Judaism, I aim to uncover the ways in which Moyal
(^55) the cover page of the book offers an english translation of the title as “the talmud:
Its Origine and its Morals.” On at- Talmūd in its Nahḍa context, see Levy, “Jewish Writers
in the arab east,” 199– 213. See also Gribetz, “an arabic- Zionist talmud.”