RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 53one beneath the dome of the Rock (qubbat aṣ- ṣakhra). Again, not only
does al- Khalidi present postbiblical Jewish longing to return to Pales-
tine in accordance with Gottheil’s text, but he also expands on Gottheil
to emphasize that the places to which the Jews have sought to return
are among the very holiest of places for contemporary Muslims, the
dome of the Rock and the al- Aqsa Mosque (shrines al- Khalidi could see
from his window on Bāb as- Silsila Street).^53
Al- Khalidi provides abundant examples as he portrays the enduring
Jewish hope of the return to Zion through the course of history. He
discusses, inter alia, the case of the second- century Jewish rebel leader
Bar Kokhba; rabbinic predictions of the date when the Jews will be
restored to their former glory; the medieval Andalusian poetic longing
for Zion in the work of Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Halevi, and Judah Halevi;
and the seventeenth- century Sabbatean immigration to Palestine.
On the other hand, al- Khalidi recognizes that this declared desire to
return to Palestine was just part of the story of the Jewish diaspora. In
narrating the events of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, for
instance, al- Khalidi notes that of the 185,000 refugees, 90,000 immi-
grated to the sympathetic and welcoming Ottoman empire. “Of these,”
al- Khalidi continues, “1,500 families settled in Jerusalem, 1,700 fam-
ilies in Safed and 500 families in damascus.” The number of émigrés
who “settled in Syria and Palestine did not exceed 15,000 individuals,”
he estimates, emphasizing that this number represented only “one-
sixth of the immigrants to the Ottoman kingdom. The rest spread out in
constantinople, Salonika, edirne [Adrianople], Izmir, and so on.” This
is not to mention the 75,000 Jews, in al- Khalidi’s approximation, who
immigrated to various european lands, or the 65,000 who converted
to christianity. Al- Khalidi takes this opportunity further to expound on
the condition of “justice and equality” as existed for the Jews under
Islam, in contrast to the Jewish condition under christendom.^54 But
what underlies these statistics is the relatively minuscule proportion
of fifteenth- century Jews who actually chose to immigrate to Pales-
tine and fulfill their purported longing when forced to choose a new
(^53) In chapter 4 we will find that al- Khalidi was not the only one of his Arab intellec-
tual contemporaries to equate the Temple and al- Aqsa. See al-Manār 13:10 (November
1910), 726.
(^54) Tracing the history of this idea, Mark cohen explains that “already at the end of
the Middle Ages one encounters among Jews the belief that medieval Islam provided
a peaceful haven for Jews, whereas christendom relentlessly pursued them.” Later, in
the nineteenth century, “the fathers of modern, scientific study of Jewish history trans-
formed this perception into a historical postulate.” cohen describes the way in which
both christian and Muslim Arabs used this notion in the twentieth century, especially in
their opposition to Zionism. See cohen, UnderCrescentandCross, 3– 8.