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

RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 77

challenging the Integrity of Biblical Prophecy

Al- Khalidi’s concern with the Bible is not limited, however, to is-
sues that explicitly pertain to Palestine and the problem of Zionism.
Throughout his manuscript, for instance, al- Khalidi casts doubt on the
divinity and antiquity of the Jews’ Torah. He begins a section of his
text called “The Torah and Those Zionist Promises That Appear within
It” with the following description of biblical prophecy:

The People of the Book believe that the ideas of heavenly books

were received by prophets in a state of revelation and that they

[the prophets] gave expression to them [the ideas] in their usual

speech after their return to the human state, in contrast to the

Qurʾan, which was revealed in its words and its composition.^132

The implication that the words of the Jewish (and, indeed, chris-
tian) prophets^133 are not directly divine, as opposed to the unfiltered
language— ipsissima­verba— of God found in the Qurʾan, betrays some-
thing of al- Khalidi’s religious chauvinism.^134
Al- Khalidi was well aware that at least some Jews understood Jew-
ish prophecy rather differently. In addition to Gottheil’s article from
the Jewish­Encyclopedia, one of al-Khalidi’s main sources for informa -
tion about the Jews, and apparently his primary source for details of
their religious beliefs, was a 148- page Arabic work called at-­Talmūd:­
Aṣluhu­wa-­tasalsuluhu­wa-­ādābuhu (The Talmud: Its Origin, Its Trans-
mission, and Its Morals). At-­Talmūd, published in 1909 in cairo, was
the work of the Jewish intellectual Shimon Moyal, a member of a dis-
tinguished Sephardic family based in Jaffa. Moyal’s book, which will
be dealt with in detail in chapter 5, sets out to introduce Arabic readers
to the Jewish concepts of the written and oral Torahs before offering
an Arabic translation of and commentary on the entire Talmud. In his
section on prophecy, Moyal elaborates on the characteristics of proph-
ecy as understood, in his mind, by Jews:

The sign of prophecy was the loss, during the descent of reve-

lation [nuzūl­al-­waḥy], of all senses except that of speech. The

prophet would present his sayings and would recite his prophecy

while he was absent from existence, like a dead person. But aside

from the times of the descent of revelation upon him, he was

(^132) al- Khālidī, “as- Sayūnīzm, ay al- masʾala aṣ- ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 6.
(^133) Al- Khalidi appears to be referring not merely to the biblical books known as “the
Prophets” but to the Pentateuch as well.
(^134) See William A. Graham, “Scripture and Qurʾan,” in EQ, 4:558– 69. On the common
Jewish and Muslim views of ipsissima­verba, see Peters, The­Children­of­Abraham, 5.