traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 217Moyal’s Nationalist reading of Jewish history
and its ottoman implicationseven as he works to present Judaism as favorably and familiarly as
possible to Christian and Muslim arabs, Moyal nonetheless writes of
Jewish history in distinctly nationalist terms. While seeking to remove,
as much as possible, elements of religious difference between Jews and
their Christian and Muslim neighbors in the Middle east, he makes no
effort to conceal what he perceives to be the Jews’ history of national-
ism and their defiant will for political independence. indeed, he trans-
lates Jewish history and concepts not only into Christian and Islamic
terms but also into the still- developing language of late nineteenth- and
early twentieth- century nationalism in the arab world, language that
pervades at- Talmūd.
Consider, for instance, the way Moyal describes the biblical prophet
Isaiah and the leaders ezra and Nehemia. Of Isaiah, Moyal writes that
“this prophet was sharp- tongued and bitter in speech, but he was ex-
tremely patriotic [kāna waṭaniyyan shadīd al- waṭaniyya], as is obvious
to anyone who looks closely at his wonderfully eloquent sayings.”^122
here Moyal uses the term waṭaniyya, derived from homeland, waṭan.^123
in reference to the biblical figures ezra and Nehemia, the leaders of
the Israelite return to the holy Land from the Babylonian exile, he
generally uses a word even more analogous to the then- current con-
cept of nationalism, qawmiyya, from the word that was beginning to be
used for the modern sense of “nation,” qawm.^124 Moyal writes that ezra
and Nehemia were in the “vanguard of the Israelite national awaken-
ing [muqaddimat tilka an- nahḍa al- qawmiyya al- isrāʾīliyya] that brought
about the rebuilding of the temple and the walls of Jerusalem and the
return of the ancient people [ash- shaʿb al- qadīm] to its land to govern
itself by itself under the protectorate of King Cyrus.”^125 patriotism and
nationalism, in Moyal’s view, are not new sentiments for Jews; rather,
they are of antique vintage, central to Jews’ views and goals over two
millennia earlier.
Moyal’s particular presentation of the Jewish national past may re-
veal elements of the hopes he had for the contemporary Jewish na-
tional project in palestine. Discerning the precise nature of these hopes
(^122) Mūyāl, at- Talmūd, 21.
(^123) the egyptian al- ḥizb al- waṭanī was founded in 1879. See ayalon, Language and
Change in the Arab Middle East, 125– 26.
(^124) although here I distinguish between waṭaniyya and qawmiyya, eliezer tauber has
argued that, in the fin de siècle, there was not a “conceptual division of qawmiyya versus
waṭaniyya.” See tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements, 245.
(^125) Mūyāl, at- Talmūd, 25.