Campos|315would combine Judaism, Zionism, and Ottomanism in a changing empire. Both
boys received their earliest education in the Jewish religious institutions close to
home, as was the custom. Their religious studies were supplemented by studies
in maskilic (Enlightenment) Hebrew language and literature, so much so that the
brothers eventually communicated with each other in that language; in addition,
both boys learned spoken Arabic at home from their mother and grandmother,
who quizzed them in their studies and regaled them with stories from the Thou-
sand and One Nights, and they studied literary Arabic with private tutors.
Upon completion of David’s religious education at seventeen, Yehoshuɇa
struggled to place his eldest son on firmer professional and financial footing than
he had found himself in his own adulthood. Taking note of the Christian Arab
and Armenian youth educated in Arabic and foreign languages who found steady
employment in government service and as clerks for the European consuls and
businesses in Palestine, Yehoshuɇa decided to send David to continue his stud-
ies in secular languages and topics. After a trip to London in which he failed to
secure the patronage of wealthy Baghdadi relatives, David returned to Jerusalem
and enrolled in the newly opened school of the French Jewish philanthropic soci-
ety, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU). Although Francophone and West-
ernizing, the AIU also was committed to educating Ottoman Jews within their
native environment, which included Ottoman Turkish and Arabic languages as
well as Ottoman geography and social studies.
David proved to be a remarkable student, and after a year or so of studies he
was employed on the faculty to teach Hebrew and Arabic. At an early age David
had begun writing columns on Jerusalem affairs for the important Hebraic En-
lightenment newspapers published in Europe, and the revival and expansion of
the language was his lifelong passion. As a young teacher and writer, David be-
came very active and made a name for himself in philological, literary, and peda-
gogical circles. Among his works published before World War I, David authored
studies of Jewish medieval figures, Hebrew texts and Bible stories for children,
and translations of Western and Arabic-language classics. He also contributed to
authoring the first modern Hebrew dictionary.
At the AIU, David taught students the Bible not simply as religious text but
as literature and communal history, and he took them on field trips to become
acquainted with the ancient-present and sacred-national landscape of the Land
of Israel. Within a few years, David’s vision of Jewish education as national edu-
cation began to clash with the outlook of the non-Zionist AIU director, and he
eventually left the AIU to take up employment at a school established by German
Jewish philanthropists. With his 1885 marriage to Ita Pines, the daughter of a re-
cently arrived Russian Zionist intellectual, David became more deeply enmeshed
in the nascent Zionist cultural and institutional politics of the city. He served as