48 • cHAPTeR 2
standing Islam and the Arab world. They were reading his work and he
was reading theirs.
Al- Khalidi’s decision to use an article written by an American Zionist
(indeed, the first president of the Federation of American Zionists^32 ) as
a primary source for the history of the Jewish relationship to the Holy
Land offers a number of clues about his purpose in writing this book.
First of all, in constructing his “as- Sayūnīzm,” al- Khalidi did not aim to
offer his readers a polemical screed against Zionism. Rather, his text was
meant to provide his audience with a sophisticated, informed narrative
of Jewish history and Zionism. For this reason, out of the many possible
articles and books about Zionism, one that was meant to be encyclope-
dic, but still written by a sympathetic insider, was an ideal match.^33 At
the same time, al- Khalidi’s manuscript has its biases, and, as we shall
see, they are not always subtle. Using the Jews’ own encyclopedia, and
an avowed Zionist’s article, might be seen as part of an effort to establish
legitimacy and credibility for al- Khalidi’s own critique of Zionism.
While al- Khalidi’s Arabic translation of Gottheil’s article serves as one
structural core of his text, the manuscript is more than a simple trans-
lation of a single encyclopedia entry. It draws on many varied sources,
several of which will be discussed in detail in this chapter. Notwithstand-
ing al- Khalidi’s reliance on these various sources and the manuscript’s
self- presentation as an objective historical treatise, a close reading of the
text permits us to discern al- Khalidi’s own philosophy and perspective.
Assessing AudienceFor whom would al- Khalidi have written such a book? Lacking any
explicit statement in the text concerning the particular type of reader
he expected, we are left simply to conjecture to whom the work was
(^32) This was the umbrella organization of local American Zionist societies and the
predecessor to the Zionist Organization of America.
(^33) encyclopedic, but not necessarily pretending to complete objectivity. In his 1912
forward to his book called Zionism, Gottheil questioned the necessity and even the value
of objectivity in historical writing: “It is sometimes held that an historian must be un-
biased, and must stand vis- à- vis to his subject much as a physician does to his patient.
Such detachment may be valuable for a mere chronicler, to whom dry dates and lifeless
facts are all- important. But a people has a soul, just as individual human beings have. To
understand that soul, something more is needed than mere dates and facts. If evolution
is creative, as Monsieur Bergson holds, the attempt must be made to understand in what
that creative spirit consists, and this can be attained only by active sympathy with the
peculiar phase of the soul- life the historian has to depict. This need not prevent him from
taking a broad view of the opinion of others who do not see the light in exactly the same
fashion.” See Gottheil, Zionism, 14.