26 • cHAPTeR 1
turk revolution. to understand how al- Khalidi and Ben- Yehuda con-
ceived of one another, then, it is critical to appreciate the religious
elements of the Ottoman system as well as the rise of racial discussions
in the period of their encounter.
Jerusalem between Beirut and cairoeven as al- Khalidi and Ben- Yehuda’s city was by the late nineteenth
century technically, politically separated from Greater Syria and in-
stead designated as part of the independent Ottoman mutassariflik al-
Quds, Jerusalem remained within the intellectual and cultural orbit of
the northern Syrian centers of Beirut and Damascus. this integration
was especially pronounced in the period of the fin de siècle, when the
Syrian cultural sphere expanded and became linked with that of egypt,
particularly with intellectual circles in the cities of Cairo and alexan-
dria. In this period, known in arab and Middle eastern intellectual his-
tory as the Nahḍa (the renaissance or reawakening), many important
journalists, authors, scholars, and activists from Syria moved south to
egypt. In egypt, a society ruled since 1882 by the British, these (mostly
Christian) Syrian transplants escaped Ottoman censorship and joined
forces with local egyptian intellectuals to produce, among other things,
widely read and highly influential scientific and literary Arabic jour-
nals, some of which were first created while the editors were still in
Syria. Though fin de siècle Jerusalem was hardly an intellectual cap-
ital on the order of Beirut or cairo, Palestine’s geographic centrality
between Syria and egypt meant both that intellectuals from north and
south passed through Jerusalem and that the literary and cultural elite
of arabic- reading palestine were necessarily engaged with the ideas
generated and published in the centers— including al- Khalidi, who
wrote on occasion in the Nahḍa journals.
Locating Jerusalem within the Syria- egypt cultural orbit highlights
other ways in which race was on the minds of intellectuals in al- Khalidi
and Ben- Yehuda’s city. Perhaps the most formative experience for one
circle of Nahḍa figures— the editors of the journal al- Muqtaṭaf— was
the controversy over Darwinism at the Syrian protestant College (SpC)
in 1882. This crisis, known alternatively as the “Darwin controversy”
or the “Lewis Affair,”^41 began when edwin Lewis, a young ameri-
can physics instructor at the SPc, delivered a speech at the college’s
(^41) This affair has been the subject of several scholarly studies, including elshakry,
“Darwin’s Legacy in the Arab east”; Jeha, Darwin and the Crisis of 1882 in the Medical
Department.