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

RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 41

together with his coeditors on the encyclopedia board, believed that
this broad range of readers would warmly embrace the landmark ency-
clopedia project, the first to synthesize the knowledge about Judaism
and the Jews, from the Bible to the present day, that had been amassed
over the previous century and a half of “scientific” study.^7 One reader
Gottheil might not have anticipated, however, was Muhammad Ruhi
al- Khalidi.
Al- Khalidi (1864– 1913), though only two years younger than Got-
theil (1862– 1936), was born in Jerusalem, thousands of miles from
Gottheil’s native Manchester, england, and across the world from the
Jewish Orientalist’s adoptive New York. Al- Khalidi was the scion of
one of the wealthy, elite Muslim Arab families (along with the Hus-
seynis and Nashashibis) of Ottoman Palestine. He grew up in the Bāb
as- Silsila neighborhood of the Old city of Jerusalem, steps away from
the dome of the Rock.^8 despite the geographical and cultural distance
between al- Khalidi’s Jerusalem and Gottheil’s New York, Gottheil’s
extended entry on Zionism in the Jewish­Encyclopedia­did indeed
reach al- Khalidi’s eye. Al- Khalidi appears to have come across Got-
theil’s article at some point during his own years shuttling between
Jerusalem and Istanbul when he served, between 1908 and 1913,
as one of Jerusalem’s representatives in the newly reconstituted Ot-
toman Parliament.^9 As a native of Palestine and as a leader of its
Arab population, al- Khalidi was deeply concerned and troubled by
the increasing immigration of foreign Jews into his country, by the
associated ideology that claimed his homeland as the Jews’ own, and
by the political program that, as he saw it, was actively seeking to
transform the land into a Jewish state. Al- Khalidi— whose intellectual
curiosity and broad range of interests led him to write such varied
scholarly treatises as al-­Kīmiyāʾ­ʿind­al-­ʿarab­(chemistry among the
Arabs), Tārīkh­ʿilm­al-­adab­ʿind­al-­ifranj­wa-­l-­ʿarab­wa-­Fīktūr­Hūgū­(The
History of Literature among the europeans, the Arabs, and Victor

(^7) See the preface to the Je.
(^8) These biographical data are gleaned from al- Khālidī, “Kitāb as- sayūnīzm aw al-
masʾala aṣ- ṣahyūniyya li- Muḥammad Rūḥī al- Khālidī al- mutawaffā sanat 1913”; Khalidi,
Palestinian­Identity; Mannāʿ, Aʿlām­filasṭīn­fī­awākhir­al-­ʿahd­al-­ʿuthmānī­(1800–­1918);
al- Khateeb, “Ruhi Al- Khalidi.”
(^9) The first Ottoman Parliament lasted for less than one year (March 1877 through
February 1878) during the Ottoman empire’s “first constitutional era” (1876– 1878).
The constitution was then suspended by the sultan and only restored three decades later,
after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Shortly thereafter, elections were held for the
new Ottoman Parliament. See Hanioğlu, A­Brief­History­of­the­Late­Ottoman­Empire, 118–
23, 150– 67. Al- Khalidi successfully ran for a parliamentary position in the election of
November– december 1908 and then again in the election of February– April 1912.