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

RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 75

This grouping of christianity and Islam is suggestive of a move in
Late Ottoman Palestine toward conceiving of the Arab population as
a coherent body— even in religious terms— despite the apparent reli-
gious diversity among its constituent Muslims and christians. Thus this
passage on the Jews’ lack of faith in divine retribution and the afterlife
is an illuminating piece of contemporary evidence that can inform the
historiographical debates concerning the consolidation of Arab identity
and Palestinian nationalism— and, in particular, the place of Zionism
within this process.^126
This distinction between Judaism, on the one hand, and Islam and
christianity, on the other, in their theological or eschatological beliefs
is of utmost importance as it has real consequences related to the ul-
timate subject of al- Khalidi’s manuscript. In reading the Jews’ Bible,
writes al- Khalidi,

one does not find any bit of the reports of the pleasantness of

paradise nor of the torment of hell [jahannam] that appear in the

Holy Qurʾan and no reports of the eternal life and the kingdom

of heaven that appear in the Holy Gospels,^127 but rather all of

the excitement, intimidation, fascination, warning, promise, and

threats that appeared in the Old Testament are limited to Zion.

Religious happiness [in the Old Testament] is in possessing and

ruling it [i.e., Zion], and using foreigners to cultivate its land and

herd its livestock, and eat its general riches, and lord over their

magnificence, and multiply in it through procreation and so on.

Suffering is in its [Zion’s] destruction, the departure from it, and

the rule of others in it.^128

It is not merely that Jews differ from christians and Muslims— whose
Scriptures, once again, are linked and, for these purposes, equated— in
their theoretical beliefs about the afterlife and divine retribution. The
Hebrew Bible and, it is implied, the People of that Book focus instead
on Zion as the fundamental source of happiness and see punishment
not in “the torment of hell” but in expulsion from Zion while others
rule it. Al- Khalidi contends that the Jews, at least in the premodern
period, were obsessed with the earthly possession of Palestine, while
denying all otherworldly concerns. Thus he raises the lack of Jewish
doctrine in the afterlife not necessarily to defame Jews in the eyes of

(^126) On the formation of Palestinian identity and nationalism, see Khalidi, Palestinian­
Identity. See also Muslih, The­Origins­of­Palestinian­Nationalism.
(^127) Al- Khalidi uses the term al-­injīl­ash-­sharīf here, while in other instances he refers to
kutub­al-­ʿahd­al-­jadīd (the books of the New Testament).
(^128) al- Khālidī, “as- Sayūnīzm, ay al- masʾala aṣ- ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 11. em-
phasis added.