"Reading Mendelssohn in Late Ottoman Palestine: An Islamic Theory of Jewish Secularism" in...

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Secularism in Question


JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with

the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

of the University of Pennsylvania

David B. Ruderman and Steven Weitzman, Series Editors


university of pennsylvania press

philadelphia

Secularism in Question

Jews and Judaism in Modern Times

Edited by

Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz


Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant

from the Martin D. Gruss Endowment Fund

of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of

the University of Pennsylvania.

Copyright � 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

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Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Secularism in question : Jews and Judaism in modern times / edited

by Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz.

pages cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4727-5 (alk. paper)

1. Judaism and secularism—History. 2. Religion and sociology.

I. Joskowicz, Ari, editor. II. Katz, Ethan B., editor, author.

BM538.S43S43 2015

296.09�03—dc23

2015005563


c h a p t e r 2

Reading Mendelssohn in Late

Ottoman Palestine: An Islamic

Theory of Jewish Secularism

jonathan marc gribetz

‘‘German Philosopher, translator of the Bible, and commentator; the ‘thirdMoses,’ with whom begins a new era in Judaism.’’ So opens the 1905 JewishEncyclopedia article on Moses Mendelssohn. The authors of this encyclopediaarticle did not specify the nature of the ‘‘new era’’ ushered in by MosesMendelssohn, but one of this encyclopedia’s readers believed he knew, andhe wrote an Arabic book about it called Zionism or the Zionist Question.During the final years of Ottoman rule in Palestine, Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi, a Muslim Arab from a distinguished family in Jerusalem, wrote amanuscript about Jewish history and Zionism; al-Khalidi’s understanding ofwhat he dubs ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ is central to the author’s narrativeand his argument. For al-Khalidi, ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ defined Judaismexclusively as a religion in contrast to its earlier status, as al-Khalidi saw it, asa religion entangled with a nationality. This change in the definition of Juda-ism or Jewishness plays a critical part in the thesis underlying al-Khalidi’sbook, namely that Zionism is an illegitimate movement not merely becauseof its impact on Palestine’s Arab population (though, as one of Jerusalem’srepresentatives in the Ottoman parliament, he was none too pleased aboutthis impact) but also and especially because Zionism was problematic froman internal Jewish perspective.


Reading Mendelssohn 49

This chapter explores al-Khalidi’s reading of Mendelssohn and drawsupon al-Khalidi’s perspective for insights into the role of religion in secular-ization, as well as the challenges and benefits of interpreting religious proc-esses through the lens of other religions. The essay begins by analyzing al-Khalidi’s rendering of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ in light of Mendelssohn’swriting. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of al-Khalidi’s inter-pretation of Mendelssohn, I suggest that al-Khalidi’s view is reasonablygrounded, especially in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. This piece further places‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ into the theoretical language of secularization the-ory. In particular, drawing upon the work of Jose Casanova, I argue that al-Khalidi’s conception of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ can be understood as anexpression of twentieth-century sociologists’ differentiation thesis. Finally,the essay draws attention to perhaps the most curious aspect of al-Khalidi’sreading of Mendelssohn: al-Khalidi’s perception that ‘‘Mendelssohn’s the-ory’’ was granted a universal rabbinic imprimatur and thus fundamentallyaltered the nature of Judaism thereafter. Though, as we shall see, al-Khalidimay have had several important moments from Jewish history in mind whenhe imagined this imprimatur, I argue that it was an Islamic theory of lawthat guided al-Khalidi’s misunderstanding of (European) Jewish history. Theconclusion will briefly consider what contemporary discussions of Jewish sec-ularism might nonetheless learn from al-Khalidi’s idiosyncratic reading ofMendelssohn.

Muhammad Ruhi Al-Khalidi

Born in Jerusalem, Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi (1864–1913) was the scion ofone of the wealthy, elite Muslim Arab families of Ottoman Palestine.1 Ruhi,as he was known, grew up in the Bab as-Silsila neighborhood of the OldCity, steps away from the Dome of the Rock. He spent his childhood yearsin Jerusalem obtaining a traditional Islamic education in religious schoolsand at the al-Aqsa mosque. His religious training continued in Jerusalem aswell as in Nablus, Tripoli, and Beirut, where his father, Yasin, took upOttoman-appointed religious positions at various times during Ruhi’s youth.At the same time, as al-Khalidi became a young man, he acquired thoseelements of a Western education that began to be offered in the new Otto-man state schools2 and at the Jewish Alliance Israelite Universelle school inPalestine, where he apparently studied briefly.3


50 Gribetz

Al-Khalidi’s secular studies began in Palestine, but they continued, withmuch greater intensity, when he left the Levant. In 1887, at the age of twenty-three, al-Khalidi went to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul where he com-menced a difficult, long-term course of study at the Mekteb-i Mulkiye (theSchool of Civil Service). Following more than six years of study in Istanbul,al-Khalidi, by this point nearly thirty, traveled to Paris, where he took athree-year course in political science and then enrolled in the Ecole desHautes Etudes at the Sorbonne. Under some of the most distinguishedFrench Orientalists of the day, including Hartwig Derenbourg,4 he studiedthe philosophy of Islam and literature. Al-Khalidi even went on to a briefcareer as an academic in France. He taught Arabic to students and scholarsof Oriental studies and presented a scholarly paper at the 1897 InternationalCongress of Orientalists in Paris on ‘‘Statistics from the Islamic World,’’which he published in both French and Arabic. Al-Khalidi’s remarkable curi-osity and broad range of interests led him to write such varied treatises (inArabic) as The Eastern Question; Chemistry under the Arabs; and The Historyof Literature among the Europeans, the Arabs, and Victor Hugo.5

An academic-cum-politician, al-Khalidi served as Ottoman Consul-General in Bordeaux beginning in 1898 and then, between 1908 and his deathin 1913, as one of Jerusalem’s representatives in the newly reconstituted Otto-man parliament in Istanbul.6 It was during these final years of his life (thoughhe was only in his late forties) that al-Khalidi began to write his work onZionism, a 120-page manuscript that appears to have been in the final stagesof copying and editing before imminent publication when its author diedand its contents were abruptly rendered outdated by the radical changes thatoccurred to the region during the course of the Great War.7

‘‘As-Sayunızm’’

Al-Khalidi’s composition may be divided into six chapters.8 The first offersan introduction to Zionism and lays out the general narrative to be exploredin greater detail in the course of the book. The second chapter deals with thereligious roots of Zionism in the Bible and the Talmud. Next, al-Khalidioffers a survey of the history of the Jews from the death of King Solomonthrough the destruction of the Second Temple. This is followed by a chapteron the dispersion of the Jews and the places in which they took refuge andsettled over the ensuing centuries. The fifth chapter then returns to the



subject of Zionism, outlining the history of the modern movement. The finalchapter looks at the major Jewish organizations of al-Khalidi’s time, explain-ing the various religious and ideological positions found among them.

In constructing large portions of his book, al-Khalidi followed the basicoutline of Richard James Horatio Gottheil’s twenty-one-page entry on ‘‘Zion-ism’’ in the newly published Jewish Encyclopedia. At points, al-Khalidi’s text issimply an Arabic translation of Gottheil’s words. At first glance, the fact thatthis English Jewish Encyclopedia article reached the desk of an Arab intellectualin Jerusalem, and that the latter used it as an authoritative source, may seemodd. Moreover, one would not necessarily suspect that an Ottoman Arab poli-tician would have used an article written by an American Zionist (indeed, thefirst president of the Federation of American Zionists)9 as a primary source forthe history of the Jewish relationship to the Holy Land. But both al-Khalidi’saccess to Gottheil’s article as well as his selection of it as one of his mainsources are not quite as extraordinary as one might suppose. In fact, that aMuslim Arab notable from Late Ottoman Palestine was familiar with the newJewish Encyclopedia points to the often overlooked intellectual interchangebetween Jews and Arabs during this period. While it is not known where al-Khalidi found the copy of the Jewish Encyclopedia that he used (it is not cur-rently present in the Khalidi family library, but it was presumably available inthe nearby Jewish National Library10 in Jerusalem), it is possible that Gottheilhimself shared his article with al-Khalidi. Between 1909 and 1910, Gottheillived in Jerusalem, where he headed the American School of Archaeology;11 itis likely, given their shared Orientalist interests, that Gottheil and al-Khalidicame to know one another during that period.12 It is also possible that the twowere known to one another—or had even met in person—more than a decadeearlier. When al-Khalidi presented his academic paper on Muslim demograph-ics to the 1897 International Congress of Orientalists, Gottheil was alreadyProfessor of Semitic Languages at Columbia University, an active member ofthe American Oriental Society,13 and head of the Oriental department of theNew York Public Library.14 Al-Khalidi’s scholarly work was known to theeditors and writers of the Jewish Encyclopedia; the encyclopedia’s entry on‘‘Islam,’’ for instance, notes that al-Khalidi’s article on the demographics ofthe contemporary Muslim world ‘‘should especially be mentioned.’’15 Al-Khalidi, in other words, was an acknowledged colleague of Jewish scholarssuch as Gottheil, Kaufmann Kohler, Ignaz Goldziher, and others in the inter-national fin-de-siecle scholarly effort toward understanding Islam and the Arabworld. They were reading his work and he was reading theirs.


52 Gribetz

Al-Khalidi’s decision to use Gottheil’s article as a primary source in hisown manuscript offers a number of clues about his purpose in writing thisbook. First of all, in constructing his ‘‘as-Sayunızm,’’ al-Khalidi did not simplyaim to offer his readers a polemical screed against Zionism. Rather, his textwas meant to provide readers with a sophisticated, nuanced narrative of Jewishhistory and Zionism. For this reason, out of the many possible articles andbooks about Zionism, one that was meant to be encyclopedic,16 but still writ-ten by a sympathetic insider (like Gottheil’s), was an ideal match. At the sametime, of course, al-Khalidi’s manuscript has its biases, and, as we shall see, theyare not always subtle. Al-Khalidi’s use of the Jews’ own encyclopedia, and ofan avowed Zionist’s article to boot, might be seen as part of an effort toestablish legitimacy and credibility for al-Khalidi’s own critique of Zionism;by using an internal Jewish document he could not readily be accused ofmisunderstanding or misrepresenting the Jewish national movement. Whileal-Khalidi’s Arabic translation of Gottheil’s article serves as one structural coreof al-Khalidi’s text, the manuscript is decidedly more than a simple translationof a single encyclopedia entry. It draws on many varied sources,17 and, thoughit essentially presents itself as an objective historical treatise, a close reading ofthe text permits us to discern al-Khalidi’s own philosophy and perspective.

‘‘Mendelssohn’s Theory’’ and Mendelssohn’s Theory

Al-Khalidi uncritically accepts the historical link of the Jews to Jerusalem,whether he calls it Urshalım or al-Quds, and to the Holy Land, whether hedenotes it as S. ahyun or Filast.ın.18 Consider these lines, which al-Khalidiwrites of the exiles to Babylonia: ‘‘The captives in Babylonia demonstratedtheir abundant yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. No nation among thenations reached their height of grieving over their homelands and the degreeof their longing for it. They wandered along the banks of the Euphratescrying over Jerusalem and bewailing her in poems and psalms.’’19 Al-Khalidi,it would seem, had read these ‘‘poems and psalms’’; he cites their ‘‘style,’’‘‘allegories,’’ and ‘‘metaphors’’ as having served as models for such literarytalents as Victor Hugo, the subject, as noted, of another book al-Khalidi waswriting at this same time.20

As sympathetic as al-Khalidi may have been to the legacy of Jewishattachment to Palestine, he was certainly not a Zionist. Contrary to other



contemporary Arabs’ arguments against Zionism that stressed the demo-graphic reality of an Arab majority in Palestine or Palestine’s central place inthe Islamic world and consciousness, al-Khalidi’s opposition to Zionism, asformulated in this manuscript, seems to be on another plane entirely: oneinternal to Judaism, Jewish discourse, and Jewish history. While the vastmajority of Jews may not have chosen to return to Palestine in the manycenturies following the Roman conquest and exile (just as was the case, al-Khalidi does not fail to observe, with the meager return from the Babylonianexile),21 al-Khalidi still does not impute any illegitimacy to the Jewish will toreturn. Rather, al-Khalidi exhibits what would seem to be a true respect forthis ancient and long-lasting hope.

The Jewish relationship to Palestine changed, however, in the modernperiod, according to al-Khalidi, who links this transition to the eighteenth-century German Jewish political and religious philosopher Moses Mendels-sohn (1729–86). In al-Khalidi’s rendering, with the advent of what he calls‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ (naz.ariyyat mindilsun), Jewish identity underwent aradical transformation that indicted any manifestation of Jewish nationalismthereafter as a clear violation of its principles. Mendelssohn is a key figure inal-Khalidi’s narrative of Jewish history, and one finds various formulations of‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ at several points within the text, beginning with thevery first page of the manuscript. ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory,’’ writes al-Khalidi,

separated the Mosaic religion from Jewish nationalism [qawmiyya]22

and abolished this nationalism. It obliged the Jews to acquire thecitizenship of the countries in which they were born, such as Ger-many, Austria, France, and England, to imitate23 the rest of theChristian peoples of these countries, and to enter with them [theChristians] into European civilization. It [‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’]made them forget the land of Palestine from which they left and[made them forget] the Hebrew language, which they stoppedspeaking two thousand years earlier.24

For al-Khalidi, ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ was the bold disentangling of Jewishreligion and Jewish nationality. This theory, according to al-Khalidi,embraced ‘‘the Mosaic religion’’ while it decisively and irrevocably disposedof the nationality and all its concomitant marks of distinction: Jewish lan-guage, land, and customs. Al-Khalidi asserts that ‘‘whoever looked upon’’Western European Jews—who embraced and modeled ‘‘Mendelssohn’s


54 Gribetz

theory’’—‘‘saw nothing other than Frenchmen or Englishmen, for example,without regard to their being Jewish or Christian, whether Catholic or Protes-tant, due to the great degree of similarity between them.’’25

Al-Khalidi mixes a sociological observation—that the Jews (at least inWestern Europe) did in fact acculturate among their Christian neighbors—with the doctrinal statement he names ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory.’’ Strikingly,it is the latter, the theory, that is critical for al-Khalidi. ‘‘Mendelssohn’s the-ory,’’ in al-Khalidi’s conception of modern Jewish history, is not merely thetranslation of sociological reality into ideological terms. Rather, ‘‘naz.ariyyatmindilsun’’ has prescriptive, even binding, force. In a restatement of thistheory, al-Khalidi writes, ‘‘it is not permitted for a Jew who was born inPrussia or Austria or France, for example, to consider himself anything but aPrussian or Austrian or Frenchman.’’ Moreover, ‘‘he does not have the rightto call for Jewish nationalism. . . . It is not permissible to consider his nation-ality to be Jewish nationalism, nor his homeland [wat.an] Palestine.’’26 Thelanguage al-Khalidi uses in describing ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ is overwhelm-ingly legal in nature. This theory has the power to ‘‘abolish’’ nationalism; to‘‘oblige’’ the acquisition of citizenship; to ‘‘not permit’’ Jews to think ofthemselves in particular ways; to deny Jews ‘‘the right’’ to make certain politi-cal or ideological proclamations.

Before attempting to account for the immense power al-Khalidi ascribesto ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory,’’ it is worth considering the extent to which al-Khalidi’s presentation of the theory corresponds to the views Moses Mendels-sohn actually articulated in his philosophical, political, or polemical writings.In reality, Mendelssohn never claimed that the Jews were no longer a‘‘nation’’ and that they were henceforth merely a ‘‘religion,’’27 even if, asLeora Batnitzky has argued, he ‘‘invent[ed] the modern idea that Judaism isa religion.’’28 In this sense, al-Khalidi’s rendering of Mendelssohn’s theory isnot an accurate representation of the Jewish philosopher’s position. But thisis not to say that al-Khalidi (or his source on this matter) was wholly unjusti-fied in linking the distinction between Jewish religion and Jewish nationhoodto Mendelssohn.29

A primary assumption of what al-Khalidi labels ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’is the contention that there is a meaningful distinction between ‘‘religion,’’on the one hand, and ‘‘nation,’’ on the other. For Mendelssohn, especially inhis classic treatise Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism (1783), therelevant dichotomous categories were not religion and nation but rather reli-gion and state. Mendelssohn argued for a distinction between these latter



spheres and insisted that ‘‘religion’’ as such had no place in affairs of the‘‘state.’’ He did not see this distinction as novel to his own day. Rather, heprojected it into the biblical past: once the ancient Israelites accepted a mon-arch, ‘‘state and religion were no longer the same, and a collision of [civicand religious] duties was no longer impossible.’’ In this vein, Mendelssohnapprovingly cites Jesus’s ‘‘cautious advice,’’ which he repeats numerous timesin Jerusalem, that one must ‘‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s andunto God what is God’s.’’30 For Mendelssohn, following the New Testamentlanguage, there were two realms: that of Caesar (the state) and that of God(religion).

Though the conceptual distinction between state and religion is obvi-ously not identical to that between nation and religion, it is nonethelessimportant for our assessment of al-Khalidi’s reading of Mendelssohn insofaras it demonstrates Mendelssohn’s insistence on a separate sphere called reli-gion. While Mendelssohn grants this sphere biblical vintage, scholars andtheorists of secularization have argued that it is rather a modern constructionand, according to some, the hallmark of secularization. In his review of thevarious theories of secularization, Jose Casanova asserts that ‘‘secularizationas differentiation’’ is ‘‘the valid core of the theory of secularization.’’ As hewrites in Public Religions in the Modern World:

The differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres fromreligious institutions and norms remains a general modern structuraltrend. . . . Each of the two major modern societal systems, the stateand the economy, as well as other major cultural and institutionalspheres of society—science, education, law, art—develops its owninstitutional autonomy, as well as its intrinsic functional dynamics.Religion itself is constrained not only to accept the modern principleof structural differentiation of the secular spheres but also to followthe same dynamic and to develop an autonomous differentiatedsphere of its own.31

Mendelssohn’s claim that ‘‘religion,’’ as such, may be differentiated fromother spheres of life—be they the state, the nation, or something else—is, inlarge part, what makes Mendelssohn a useful figure for al-Khalidi. Even if al-Khalidi was not quite correct in attributing the separation of ‘‘nation’’ and‘‘religion’’ to Mendelssohn, he was correct to note Mendelssohn’s assumptionof and insistence upon ‘‘differentiation.’’ If, as Charles Taylor puts it, in


56 Gribetz

ancient societies, ‘‘religion was ‘everywhere,’ was interwoven with everythingelse, and in no sense constituted a separate ‘sphere’ of its own,’’32 al-Khalidirecognized that Mendelssohn asserted both the conceptual distinction andthe imperative principally to distinguish religion from other spheres. For al-Khalidi, concerned as he was with matters of nationalism and the nation inthe very different environment of the early twentieth century (rather thanMendelssohn’s eighteenth-century Europe), the critical sphere from which toseparate religion was the nation (as opposed to Mendelssohn’s state).

Differentiation, however, is only one way in which al-Khalidi’s versionof ‘‘Mendelssohn theory’’ represents a fair reading of Mendelssohn (regardlessof whether al-Khalidi actually read Mendelssohn). Al-Khalidi, as we haveseen, highlighted the degree of acculturation effected by Jews, particularlythose of Western Europe, in the period following Mendelssohn. Though al-Khalidi perceived a direct, causal link between Mendelssohn and this accul-turation, the latter was a social phenomenon that began before Mendelssohnand that had numerous, complex causes. Nonetheless, Mendelssohn was avocal and important advocate of acculturation in certain areas of Jewish life.33

In the final pages of Jerusalem, he contended that there was ‘‘no wiser advice’’that might be offered his fellow Jews than to ‘‘adapt yourselves to the moralsand the constitution of the land to which you have been removed,’’ evenwhile ‘‘hold[ing] fast to the religion of your fathers too.’’34 Al-Khalidi wouldseem justified in reading these lines as a call to acculturation in all spheres oflife aside from those explicitly deemed ‘‘religious.’’

Finally, along with differentiation and acculturation, ‘‘Mendelssohn’s the-ory,’’ as articulated by al-Khalidi, severed the Jews from Palestine, renouncingthe historic links between the people and the land that had been preservedover the previous centuries. Again, though Mendelssohn did not exactlyexpress this view, this claim, too, has a basis in Mendelssohn’s writings. Inthis case, it is necessary to look beyond Jerusalem to Mendelssohn’s polemicalexchange with Johann David Michaelis. In the early 1780s, Michaelis, a Chris-tian opponent of the emancipation of the Jews in the German lands, con-tended that the ‘‘messianic expectation of a return to Palestine’’ casts ‘‘doubton the full and steadfast loyalty of the Jews to the state and the possibility oftheir full integration.’’ The Jews, Michaelis wrote, ‘‘will always see the state asa temporary home, which they will leave in the hour of their greatest happinessto return to Palestine.’’35 In his effort to counter Michaelis’s argument againstJewish emancipation, Mendelssohn claimed that Michaelis had misunderstoodor misconstrued the impact of the Jews’ messianic expectation. Mendelssohn



wrote that ‘‘the hoped-for return to Palestine’’ has ‘‘no influence on our con-duct as citizens.’’ He continued:

This is confirmed by experience wherever Jews are tolerated. In part,human nature accounts for it—only the enthusiast would not lovethe soil on which he thrives. And he who holds contradictory opin-ions reserves them for church and prayer. In part, also, the precau-tion of our sages forbids us even to think of a return by force.36

Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we mustnot take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and arestoration of our nation.37

Mendelssohn explained that the Jewish hope for a return to Palestine couldhave no impact on the loyalty of the Jews toward states that tolerate them.In making his case, Mendelssohn appealed first to a psychological observationthat people tend to love a place where they are able to live and flourish, andsecond to a rabbinic prohibition that, in his view, expressly forbade the Jewsfrom restoring their nation in Palestine on their own, without the miraculous,divinely ordained redemption.38

Though he minimized the significance of the wish to return to Palestine(an apologetic attempt that must be understood in the context of theeighteenth-century political debate over Jewish emancipation), Mendelssohndid not propose severing the Jews’ link to Palestine or ceasing to pray fortheir return to the Holy Land. He argued, rather, that this link and hope hadno practical influence on the way the Jews related to the states in which theylived. Al-Khalidi, or whatever textual or oral source he was using for hispresentation of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory,’’ misunderstands (or interprets liber-ally) the actual argument Mendelssohn made concerning Palestine. At thesame time, it should be noted that in the subsequent debates over the assimi-lation of the Jews within European Christian society, both supporters andopponents pointed to the earlier figure of Mendelssohn as having heraldedthe assimilation that they either desired or dreaded.

In the Jewish Encyclopedia entry on Mendelssohn, for instance, theauthors write: ‘‘The translation of the Pentateuch had an important effect inbringing the Jews to share in the progress of the age. It aroused their interestin the study of Hebrew grammar, which they had so long despised, madethem eager for German nationality and culture, and inaugurated a new erain the education of the young and in the Jewish school system.’’ Similarly,


58 Gribetz

fin-de-siecle Zionists also associated Moses Mendelssohn with anti-Zionism(via the Jewish Reform movement, of which Zionists considered Mendels-sohn to be the founder). Consider, for example, the perspective offered bythe Zionist leader Max Nordau, who insisted that the Jews’ prayers to returnto Palestine were always meant literally until ‘‘towards the middle of theeighteenth century the so-called ‘movement of enlightenment,’ of which thepopular philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, is recognized as the first herald,began to penetrate Judaism.’’ The followers of this movement, according toNordau, saw ‘‘the dispersion of the Jewish people’’ as ‘‘an immutable fact ofDestiny’’ and they ‘‘emptied the concept of the Messiah and Zion of allconcrete import.’’ The ‘‘Mendelssohnian enlightenment consistently devel-oped during the first half of the nineteenth century into ‘Reform’ Judaism,which definitely broke with Zionism.’’39 In imagining Mendelssohn as aproto-anti-Zionist, al-Khalidi was in good company.

Differentiation as a Religious Act

Seeing Mendelssohn as laying the philosophical groundwork for anti-Zionism is one thing; insisting that ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ is binding on post-Mendelssohnian Jewry is something else entirely. What is it, in al-Khalidi’sview, that endows ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ with such considerable power?The answer, I propose, lies in what al-Khalidi understands to have been broadrabbinic consensus on Mendelssohn’s principles. Again, on the very first pageof the manuscript, al-Khalidi explains that the Torah, the Talmud, and Jewishmedieval literature all foresee a Jewish return to Palestine, though the Jewswere ‘‘not sufficiently powerful to realize’’ this aspiration. This ambitionnonetheless persisted until ‘‘the last centuries,’’ writes al-Khalidi, when withthe advent of freedom, Mendelssohn ‘‘created a modern theory whose cor-rectness was certified by the community of rabbis, asqamah.’’ Later on in hismanuscript, al-Khalidi mentions this word ‘‘asqamah’’ again, in explainingwhy some rabbis religiously forbid Zionism. Al-Khalidi notes that theserabbis rejected Zionism because of its violation of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’and its ‘‘infringement of the rules of the religious assembly, ‘asqamah.’ ’’ Thetext proceeds to cite the 1908 proclamations of opposition to Zionism issuedby various Ottoman Jewish religious and communal leaders, published in theOttoman Turkish press. ‘‘We, your Mosaic citizens,’’ asserts one such Jewish



leader from Izmir, ‘‘are the greatest opponents of Zionism.’’40 Such, al-Khalidi infers, is the power of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory.’’

The reader finally encounters al-Khalidi’s clearest explanation of this‘‘asqamah’’ half-way through the manuscript in yet another discussion of‘‘naz.ariyyat mindilsun.’’ ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory,’’ al-Khalidi writes, ‘‘meansthat there is never again to be Jewish nationalism [al-qawmiyya al-yahudiyya].’’Al-Khalidi emphasizes that ‘‘Mendelssohn was not alone in this view.’’Rather, all of the Jews of Western Europe agreed with his theory, and thus ‘‘itwas certified by the community of rabbis.41 Their people resolved to accept itand they named this consensus with the term of their religious-law42 ‘asqa-mah,’ which means the consensus of the people. Their acceptance of thistheory was not political only, but rather religious and religious-legal [dıniyyanwa-shar�iyyan].’’43

With this last explication of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ and its binding‘‘religious and religious-legal’’ authority over contemporary Jewry,44 we mightfinally decipher al-Khalidi’s theory of modern Jewish history and identity.Al-Khalidi notes a dramatic change in the ways in which Jews in the modernworld conceived of themselves—and particularly of their national identity—and he is correct to do so. Though he may have been mistaken historically,or at least overly simplistic, in linking this transformation directly to MosesMendelssohn, al-Khalidi was hardly exceptional in associating Mendelssohnwith an opposition to Zionism; Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists of al-Khalidi’s time did the same.

What, specifically, did al-Khalidi have in mind when he wrote of this so-called ‘‘asqamah’’? This term appears to be a corruption resulting from theArabic transliteration of a European-language transliteration of the Hebrew‘‘haskamah,’’ agreement.45 Given al-Khalidi’s many years in France, one pos-sibility is that the broad rabbinic consensus to which al-Khalidi refers here isNapoleon’s 1806 Assembly of Notables, which declared that ‘‘in the eyes ofJews, Frenchmen are their brethren,’’46 and the subsequent 1807 Paris Sanhe-drin, which claimed that ‘‘the learned of the age shall possess the inalienableright to legislate according to the needs of the situation,’’ and thus demandedof Jews ‘‘obedience to the State in all matters civil and political.’’47 Al-Khalidihad twice lived in France for extended periods, first studying in Paris underHartwig Derenbourg and beginning in 1898 as Ottoman Consul-General inBordeaux; it is likely that he heard from French Jews about this watershedevent, which seemed to be challenged and undermined by Herzl’s newlyfounded Zionist movement.


60 Gribetz

Alternatively, al-Khalidi might have been thinking of the resolutions ofthe various Reform rabbinical conferences of the mid-to-late nineteenth cen-tury.48 These conferences are mentioned in Gottheil’s encyclopedia article on‘‘Zionism,’’ which cites the 1845 ‘‘Conference of Rabbis’’ in Frankfurt amMain, the Philadelphia Conference of 1869, and the 1885 Pittsburgh Confer-ence. The rabbis of the Frankfurt conference, Gottheil writes, ‘‘decided toeliminate from the ritual ‘the prayers for the return to the land of our fore-fathers and for the restoration of the Jewish state.’ ’’ The language cited byGottheil from the Pittsburgh Conference’s resolutions even more closelymatches al-Khalidi’s version of ‘‘naz.ariyyat mindilsun’’: ‘‘We consider our-selves no longer a nation, but a religious community,’’ proclaimed theseReform rabbis, ‘‘and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine . . .nor any of the laws concerning a Jewish state.’’49 To al-Khalidi, these rabbini-cal assemblies—articulating what came to be known in modern Jewish his-toriography as ‘‘classical’’ Reform ideology50 and what al-Khalidi names withthe shorthand ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’—irrevocably altered the nature ofJudaism.

Al-Khalidi’s theory of the illegitimacy of modern manifestations of Jew-ish nationalism, as I have thus far portrayed it, is remarkable for its concernwith the internal dynamics and reasoning of Judaism. Yet I would suggestthat al-Khalidi is actually reading this history through the lens of a traditionalIslamic understanding of the way in which religious law is established.51 Con-sider once more the language al-Khalidi uses in defining the ‘‘asqamah’’:

wa-ajma�at ummatuhum �ala qubuliha wa-sammu hadha al-ijma� bi-is.t.ilah. sharı�atihim (asqamah) wa-ma�nahu ijma� al-umma.

And their people [umma]52 agreed to accept it [Mendelssohn’s the-ory] and they named this consensus [ijma�] with the term of theirreligious law, ‘asqamah,’ which means the consensus [ijma�] of thepeople.

I emphasize the Arabic terminology here because the word ijma� that al-Khalidi equates with asqamah is of utmost importance. Ijma� is the term usedfor the Islamic theory of ‘‘consensus,’’ one of the four recognized sources fordetermining law in Sunni Islam. As Wael Hallaq, scholar of Islamic law,explains, ijma� ‘‘functions both as a sanctioning instrument and as a material



source of law. Once agreement has been reached on an issue, usually a ques-tion of law, that issue becomes epistemologically certain and thus insuscepti-ble to further interpretation. . . . The epistemological value attached toconsensus renders this instrument so powerful in the realm of doctrine andpractice in the community that it can override established practice as well asclear statements of the Qur�an.’’53 This is precisely the function and power al-Khalidi imputes to the rabbis’ so-called asqamah concerning ‘‘Mendelssohn’stheory.’’ In their consensus, their ijma�, they have overridden the establishednational nature of pre-Mendelssohnian Judaism, and have thereby delegitim-ized any subsequent expression of Jewish nationality. ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’has become, to use Hallaq’s words, ‘‘epistemologically certain and thus insus-ceptible to further interpretation.’’ Zionism, then, is not merely a violationof the opinion of a group of rabbis; it is a blatant contravention of nowunquestionable law.54

If, in al-Khalidi’s mind, the consensus, formal or otherwise, of the Jewsin premodern Jewish history was that they were not merely a religion but anation55 and that their nation retained historic links to Palestine, to which itwished to return, how could this new consensus adopting ‘‘Mendelssohn’stheory’’ overturn the earlier belief ? To attempt to answer this question,we must consider al-Khalidi’s particular religious milieu. While al-Khalidiwas indeed trained in traditional Sunni Islamic studies, he and his familywere intimately involved with a new religious reformist tendency withinnineteenth-century Islam, known as the Salafi movement.56 The Salafissought to reform Islam by looking to the model of the earliest followers ofMuhammad (known as as-salaf as.-s.alih. , ‘‘the worthy ancestors’’). These newMuslim thinkers contended that much of contemporary Islam did not con-form to the original practices of the Muslim community, and was burdenedwith habits and practices that had no justification in the religion. Islam, thus,could and should be creatively transformed to accommodate the new socialand intellectual realities of the modern world, just as those original Muslimsexercised judicious creativity in interpreting the Qur’an and the Sunna fortheir own time.57

One of the most prominent and influential figures within the latenineteenth-century Salafi movement was the Egyptian mufti Muhammad�Abduh (1849–1905). �Abduh, according to scholar George Hourani, ‘‘deniedthat priority in time necessarily meant superior wisdom, except in the case ofthe Companions and Successors’’ of Muhammad, that is, as-salaf as.-s.alih. . Asa result, �Abduh was open to the possibility of modifying the legal rulings of


62 Gribetz

earlier generations, whether because they could now be judged as having beenmistaken or because, given new historical circumstances, the older views wereobsolete or even harmful.58 In �Abduh’s words, a generation’s ‘‘obligation toobey consensus is due to the public interest, not to infallibility . . . andinterest appears and disappears, and varies with different times and condi-tions.’’59 Al-Khalidi—whose family library in Jerusalem contains many of�Abduh’s works, including one autographed by �Abduh himself—seems tohave been influenced by this Salafi conception of evolving ijma�. If there hadbeen an ijma� among premodern Jews that held that the Jews were a nation,al-Khalidi might have explained, the consensus had since evolved, given the‘‘different times and conditions’’ in which post-Mendelssohnian Jewry lived.A new consensus declared that the Jews were now no longer a nation butrather purely a religion. That is to say, not only did al-Khalidi read an Islamicnotion into Jewish history, he employed a particular theory thereof that Mus-lim thinkers were developing in his specific intellectual, religious, and socialcontext.

Al-Khalidi’s interpretation of Mendelssohn and his conception of mod-ern Jewish history are striking for, among other things, the way in which theypropose an alternate narrative of Jewish secularization. If we follow Casano-va’s understanding of secularization as the differentiation of realms and theconstruction of a religious realm separate and distinct from all others, thenin al-Khalidi’s view it may be said that Jewish secularization was enacted bya religious body. It was by rabbinic, religious-legal consensus that the formerlyintegrated spheres of ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘nation’’ were formally separated andJudaism rendered nothing more than a religion. Moreover, if we take thislogic further, Jewish secularization—understood as the differentiationbetween a private religious identity and a secular and national publicidentity—is legitimate, valid, and unassailable precisely because the act ofinstituting it followed religiously sanctioned guidelines and procedures (theijma� or asqamah of the rabbinic authorities). Secularization as differentia-tion, then, was not an act of rebellion against the hegemony of religiousauthority; it was an act of that religious authority itself.

Conclusion

Because his manuscript has remained unpublished, the theories al-Khalidipropounded in it had no discernible influence on subsequent politics or intel-lectual debates in Palestine or beyond. However, as this essay has suggested,



there are certain important implications to the study of al-Khalidi’s textbeyond the analysis of an idiosyncratic, forgotten idea of a bygone era. Inparticular, I would like to highlight two very different fields into which anunderstanding of al-Khalidi’s theories may contribute in useful ways: first,the study of Jewish secularization and of secularization more generally and,second, the study of Late Ottoman Palestine and the early engagement therebetween Zionists and Arabs.

Al-Khalidi’s understanding of the asqamah supporting ‘‘Mendelssohn’stheory’’ points to the real role of religiously legitimated authorities, i.e., rab-bis, in carving out a space called ‘‘religion’’ in the life of the Jews. Whetherwe think of signal events in nineteenth-century Jewish history, such as theNapoleonic Sanhedrin or the Reform rabbinical conferences, or more quotid-ian moments in the lives of European Jewish communities during thatperiod, al-Khalidi was right to notice the part played by rabbis in articulatingand reifying differentiation. Moreover, if we consider the case of the sup-posed theorist of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory,’’ we recall that Mendelssohn him-self wielded certain religious authority, by virtue not of rabbinic ordinationbut of renowned rabbinic (and philosophical) learning and religious obser-vance, and thus his notion of the distinction between spheres had an effect—granting communal and perhaps even religious legitimacy—that may havebeen impossible for earlier articulations of similar ideas, such as those of themore overtly iconoclastic Spinoza. This reading of al-Khalidi’s manuscript,then, may encourage us to think more carefully about the place of religiousfigures and authority—and not only those who opposed them—in the proc-esses of differentiation that are central to secularization.

Remarkably, al-Khalidi’s important insight into modern Jewish historyemerges from what seems to be a misunderstanding that stemmed from hisprojection of Islamic religious principles onto Judaism. A number of scholarsof secularism in recent years have begun to criticize those readings of non-Christian or non-Western religions and societies that are rooted in theassumptions of the Christian West. These critics are undoubtedly correct tocaution scholars against teleological approaches that see the European Chris-tian case as a universal and ineluctable model or against theories that presumeall societies to function in the same ways, regardless of historical, cultural,religious, or other particularities. At the same time, it is worth recognizingthat cross-cultural or inter-religious attempts at understanding others—however flawed and fraught—can produce, even through misunderstanding,crucial insights into societies that might otherwise be missed. In projecting


64 Gribetz

Islam onto Judaism, al-Khalidi read Jewish history in a problematic but none-theless perceptive and potentially enlightening way. While remaining cau-tious about cross-cultural interpretation, we are also reminded by al-Khalidiof its promise.

Finally, notwithstanding the preceding discussion, in writing this manu-script al-Khalidi obviously did not seek primarily to articulate a theory ofJewish secularization. He was chiefly concerned with Zionism (that is, withthe element of ‘‘nation’’ rather than of ‘‘religion’’ in his perceived dichot-omy). Al-Khalidi wished to account for the Jewish nationalist movement’sroots and to present an argument against its legitimacy in his day. His eyeswere focused more directly on Herzl than on Mendelssohn, more on Pales-tine than on Paris or Pittsburgh. What might we learn from al-Khalidi’sperspective about the encounter between Zionists and Arabs in the fin-de-siecle Middle East? Though al-Khalidi’s particular approach to the questionof Zionism was surely uncommon and probably sui generis, it reveals anaspect of the challenges that Palestine’s Arabs faced in trying to make senseof the Zionist movement of which they began to hear and whose membersthey began to meet in their homeland.60 Palestinian Arab interpretations ofZionism were, perforce, informed by political interests. Nonetheless, al-Khalidi’s account of ‘‘Zionism’’ and his peculiar notion of the rabbinic con-sensus on ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ reveal the extent to which some individu-als within the Arab-Zionist encounter undertook bold efforts to engage insubstantial and sensitive ways with the history and ideas of their counterparts,if necessarily on their own terms. Moreover, al-Khalidi’s manuscript remindsus that arguments against ostensibly or self-defined ‘‘secular’’ movements(such as Zionism) may be made in religious terms and, indeed, that suchreligious argumentation may constitute a central tenet of yet another ostensi-bly or self-defined ‘‘secular’’ movement. Article 20 of the Palestine LiberationOrganization’s National Charter—which declared Zionism illegitimatebecause Judaism is a religion and not an independent nationality—is but onepiece of evidence of this phenomenon. It is also testament to the persistentpower of ‘‘Mendelssohn’s theory’’ in the most unexpected of places.


330 Notes to Pages 43–49

‘‘close relationship between R’ Nachman Krochmal (Ranak) and Spinoza.’’ See Schweid,Toldot he-hagut ha-yehudit be-‘et ha-hadashah, 428f.16; Klausner, Historiyah, 4: 85.

64. Krochmal, Kitve Rabbi Nahman Krochmal, 187.65. A. Krochmal, Even ha-roshah, 7.66. Commentary to Genesis 1:26, in Ibn Ezra’s Commentary to the Torah [Hebrew],

ed. A. Weiser (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav, 1977), 1:19.67. See Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘‘God, the Demiurge, and the Intellect: On the Usage of

the Word ‘Kol’ in Abraham Ibn Ezra,’’ Revue des Etudes Juives 149 (1990): 77–111.68. See, for instance, the essays collected in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and

Ann Pellegrini (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).69. An example of this shift is found in the reception of Spinoza by the Zionist

philosopher Jakob Klatzkin, whose 1923 translation of Spinoza’s Ethics into Hebrew(unlike Rubin’s 1885 translation) remains even after subsequent translations the standardbearer. Klatzkin disputed the Maskilic assertion of a fundamental continuity betweenJewish monotheism and Spinozist pantheism and, more generally, the Romantic idea ofSpinoza as a deeply pious soul. He vouched for the Hebraic character of Spinoza’s thoughton purely linguistic grounds, claiming that there were certain Latin terms in the Ethicsthat posed difficulties when translated into most languages yet were illuminated oncerendered into their medieval Hebrew equivalent. See Jakob Klatzkin, Baruch Shpinozah:Hayav, sefarav, shitato (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1923); Spinoza, Torat ha-midot, trans. J.Klatzkin (Leipzig, 1923); and Schwartz, The First Modern Jew, 128.

chapter 2

I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and its director, DavidRuderman, for granting me a fellowship in 2009–10. My conversations with colleaguesabout ‘‘secularism and its discontents’’ that began there have had a great impact on mysubsequent research. I express particular thanks to Annette Aronowicz, David Myers,Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Daniel Schwartz, and Yael Zerubavel for their support through-out that year, and, of course, to this volume’s editors, Ari Joskowicz and Ethan Katz, fortheir careful reading of this chapter and for much more. Finally, I appreciate the thought-ful comments I received from Leora Batnitzky, Eli Sacks, and Sarit Kattan Gribetz. Thischapter draws on some of the same material as chapter 2 of my book Defining Neighbors:Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 2014).

1. These biographical data are gleaned from Walıd al-Khalidı, ‘‘Kitab as-sayunızmaw al-mas�ala as.-s.ahyuniyya li-Muh. ammad Ruh. ı al-Khalidı al-mutawaffa sanat 1913,’’ inDirasat Filast.iniyya: Majmu�at abh. ath wud. i�at takrıman li-d-Duktur Qust.ant.ın Zurayq, ed.Hisham Nashshabah (Beirut: Mu�assasat ad-Dirasat al-Filast.ıniyya, 1988); Rashid Khalidi,Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York:


Notes to Pages 49–50 331

Columbia University Press, 1997); �Adil Manna�, A�lam filast.ın fı awakhir al-�ahd al-�uth-manı (1800–1918), 2nd ed. (Beirut: Mu�assasat ad-Dirasat al-Filast.ıniyya, 1995); H. al-Khateeb, ‘‘Ruhi al-Khalidi: A Pioneer of Comparative Literature in Arabic,’’ Journal ofArabic Literature 18 (1987): 81–87.

2. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 76–77. For a concise overview of the developmentof various forms of education in Palestine, see Ami Ayalon, Reading Palestine: Printingand Literacy, 1900–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 19–39. See also RashidKhalidi, ‘‘Intellectual Life in Late Ottoman Jerusalem,’’ in Ottoman Jerusalem: The LivingCity, 1517–1917, ed. Sylvia Auld, Robert Hillenbrand, and Yusuf Said Natsheh (London:Altajir World of Islam Trust, 2000), 225.

3. Al-Khalidi studied at the rusdiyye schools in Jerusalem and Tripoli and at theSultaniye schools in Beirut. See R. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 76. See also YehoshuaBen-Arieh, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century: Emergence of the New City (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1986), 269. According to Ben-Arieh, ‘‘The first to recognize the importanceof the [Alliance] school were not Jews but gentiles, among them the district governor andthe Khalidi and al-Husseini families.’’ Of the Alliance school’s early history, Jeff Halpernotes that, with one exception (David Yellin), ‘‘all the pupils attending were non-Europeans—Jews of Sephardi of Middle Eastern background and a number of Arabs.’’Jeff Halper, Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv of Jerusalem in the Nine-teenth Century (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 174.

4. Hartwig Derenbourg (1844–1908) was a French Jewish Orientalist. In 1885, hewas granted the chair in Arabic and Islam at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.

5. This last book is actually a collection of articles al-Khalidi wrote in the journalAl-Hilal between 1902 and 1904. As J. Brugman notes, ‘‘Despite its pretentious title, thework chiefly dealt with Victor Hugo, apart from some passages about the Arabic balaghahand about the literary connections between Arabic literature and the French and Englishliteratures.’’ J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature inEgypt (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 331.

6. On the Ottoman parliament, see M. Sukru Hanioglu, A Brief History of the LateOttoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 118–23, 150–67. Al-Khalidi successfully ran for a parliamentary position in the election of November-December 1908 and then again in the election of February-April 1912.

7. The manuscript—to which Rashid Khalidi generously granted me access—wasdiscovered decades later by Walid al-Khalidi among his own family’s papers. He found(and I have analyzed) both Ruhi al-Khalidi’s original—a set of small notebooks containingsomewhat scrawled, antiquated Arabic script—as well as the copyist’s 123 numbered pagesof neatly written text in more modern handwriting. Unless otherwise noted, my citationsof the manuscript below refer to the copyist’s pagination. Walid al-Khalidi has written theonly academic article (in Arabic) exclusively devoted to this manuscript, offering a detailedsummary of the text’s content. See W. al-Khalidı, ‘‘Kitab as-sayunızm.’’

8. Here, I follow Walid al-Khalidi’s chapter divisions. W. al-Khalidı, ‘‘Kitab as-sayunızm,’’ 42–43.



9. This was the umbrella organization of local American Zionist societies and thepredecessor to the Zionist Organization of America.

10. The first Jewish public library in Jerusalem (Midrash Abravanel) was founded in1892 by the B’nai Brith organization. The Jewish National Library in Jerusalem wasfounded in 1894; this latter institution united the B’nai Brith library with the then-defunctlibrary of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Bet ha-sefarim livnei yisra�el). On these Jewish libraries ofLate Ottoman Jerusalem, see Yosef Salmon, ‘‘Ha-Yishuv ha-ashkenazi ha-�ironi be-erez.yisra�el (1880–1903),’’ in Toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-erez. -yisra�el: Me-az ha-�aliyah ha-rishonah: ha-tekufah ha-�otomanit, vol. 1, ed. Moshe Lissak, Gavriel Cohen, and IsraelKolatt (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1999), 590–92.

11. For a contemporary mention of Gottheil in Palestine, describing him as ‘‘thefamous Orientalist . . . head of the School of Archaeology in our city,’’ see Ha-Herut 2,no. 86 (April 20, 1910). The American School of Archaeology at Jerusalem (later renamedthe American School of Oriental Research) was founded in 1900 by the American semitic-ist Charles Cutler Torrey.

12. According to Rashid Khalidi, Gottheil is listed among the Khalidi Library’s visi-tors in the library’s guestbook. The guestbook that was kindly shown to me by Haifa al-Khalidi appears to have been first used in the late 1920s, so there is not clear evidence thatGottheil visited the library during his 1910–11 stay in Palestine.

13. See Journal of American Oriental Society 18 (April 1897): 387.14. As I have not yet located a list of participants at the 1897 International Congress

of Orientalists in Paris, I do not know whether Gottheil attended.15. This article was jointly written by Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926) and Ignaz Gold-

ziher (1850–1921). Kohler was born in Bavaria before immigrating to the United States,where he became a leading Reform rabbi and president (1903–21) of the Reform move-ment’s Hebrew Union College. In 1885, Kohler convened the so-called Pittsburgh Confer-ence, which is discussed below. This Jewish Encyclopedia article provides evidence thatKohler was familiar with al-Khalidi’s scholarship; it is not clear, however, whether the twofigures knew one another personally. If they were acquaintances, we might better under-stand al-Khalidi’s conception of Jewish history—and particularly the revolution of mod-ern Jewish history—as laid out below. Goldziher (a Hungarian Jewish scholar) was anexpert on, inter alia, the history of Islamic hadith, and was among the initiators andcontributors to the Enzyklopedie des Islam. See Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘‘Ignaz Goldziher onErnest Renan: From Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam,’’ in The Jewish Discoveryof Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. Bernard Lewis and Martin S. Kramer (TelAviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University,1999).

16. Gottheil’s article was encyclopedic but did not pretend complete objectivity. Inhis 1912 foreword to his book Zionism, Gottheil questioned the necessity and even thevalue of objectivity in historical writing: ‘‘It is sometimes held that an historian must beunbiased, and must stand vis-a-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 lifelessfacts are all-important. But a people has a soul, just as individual human beings have. Tounderstand that soul, something more is needed than mere dates and facts.’’ Instead,Gottheil advocates ‘‘active sympathy with the peculiar phase of the soul-life the historianhas to depict.’’ See Richard J. H. Gottheil, Zionism (Philadelphia: Jewish PublicationSociety, 1914), 14.

17. Among these was a book by a Jaffa-born Sephardic Jew named Shimon Moyal.On this book (the first of an intended multi-volume Arabic translation of the Talmud),see my ‘‘The Arabic-Zionist Talmud: Shimon Moyal’s At-Talmud,’’ Jewish Social Studies17, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 1–30.

18. Though late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Arab anti-Zionist polemicshave developed a discourse of rejection of Jewish historical claims to Palestine (epitomizedby Yasser Arafat’s famous, even if apocryphal, rhetorical quip, ‘‘What Temple?’’), thisrejection, like all ideas, also has a history. Future research might seek to trace the historicaldevelopment of the position, which has been informed by a complex array of political,religious, archeological, and, recently, genetic arguments.

19. Muh. ammad Ruh. ı al-Khalidı, ‘‘as-Sayunızm ay al-mas�alah as.-s.ahyuniyya,’’ n.p.,n.d., 15. This line is typical of al-Khalidi’s approach to pre-modern Jewish history, includ-ing his acceptance of what we might regard as conventional Zionist interpretation ofsacred Jewish sources.

20. This latter book on Hugo was published the year before al-Khalidi’s death.21. M. R. al-Khalidı, ‘‘as-Sayunızm,’’ 28.22. In the early twentieth century, the term qawmiyya could mean either nationalism

or ‘‘nationality.’’ See ‘‘Kawmiyya,’’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2002).23. Al-Khalidi uses the term at-tashabbuh, literally ‘‘imitation,’’ though perhaps

‘‘acculturate among’’ would more accurately match the sense implied here.24. M. R. al-Khalidı, ‘‘as-Sayunızm,’’ 2.25. Ibid.26. Ibid., 55.27. On the absence from Mendelssohn’s oeuvre of a ‘‘direct explicit statement . . .

that the Jews are not a nation, but only a religion,’’ see Isaac Barzilay, ‘‘Smolenskin’sPolemic against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,’’ Proceedings of the American Acad-emy for Jewish Research 53 (1986): 18.

28. See Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to ModernJewish Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 13–28.

29. Nor is this to say that al-Khalidi was the first to make this claim. The earlyZionist thinker Peretz Smolenskin (d. 1885) understood Mendelssohn very similarly. Barzi-lay has described the ways in which Smolenskin, who wrote a generation before al-Khalidi,misunderstands or misrepresents Mendelssohn’s belief in Jewish nationhood. ThoughMendelssohn ‘‘can be defended as a believer in Jewish nationhood, it is not a strongdefense,’’ Barzilay contends, as the claim ‘‘is only formally correct, but not substantially,



especially not in the framework of Judaism of Mendelssohn’s own time.’’ Barzilay, ‘‘Smo-lenskin’s Polemic Against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,’’ 18–28.

30. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism, ed. AllanArkush (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 132.

31. Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1994), 212.

32. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2007), 2.

33. Mendelssohn advocated elements of acculturation even as he attempted to com-bat acculturation in other respects (e.g., by reintroducing Jews to their linguistic andreligious heritage and by arguing against the rejection of Jewish law).

34. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 133.35. Johann David Michaelis, ‘‘Arguments Against Dohm (1782),’’ in The Jew in the

Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz,2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 43.

36. That is, to attempt to bring about redemption through human effort.37. See ‘‘Moses Mendelssohn: Remarks Concerning Michaelis’ Response to Dohm

(1783),’’ in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 48–49.38. Mendelssohn was presumably referring to the passage in the Babylonian Talmud,

Tractate Ketubot 110b–111a, in which the people of Israel are said to foreswear ‘‘going upby a wall’’ and ‘‘rebelling against the nations of the world.’’ On the interpretation andpolitical impact of the so-called ‘‘three oaths,’’ see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism,and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 211–34.

39. Max Nordau, Zionism: Its History and Its Aims, trans. Israel Cohen (London:English Zionist Federation, 1905).

40. See M. R. al-Khalidı, ‘‘as-Sayunızm,’’ page 6 in the copyist version and page 5in the original.

41. This phrase, jumhur al-h. akhamın wa-r-rabanın, might also be understood as‘‘most of the rabbis’’ or ‘‘all of the rabbis.’’

42. Al-Khalidi uses the Islamic legal term sharı �a.43. M. R. al-Khalidı, ‘‘as-Sayunızm,’’ 55.44. Or at least those in Western Europe. There is an ambiguity in al-Khalidi’s pre-

sentation of this consensus: at times he portrays it as the agreement of all the Jews andtheir rabbis, whereas at other times he limits the claim to Western European Jewry.

45. I refer to this as a corruption not only because of the loss of the initial h but alsobecause of the use of a q in place of a k.

46. See Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 128–32.47. See ibid., 135–36.48. The first of these conferences, the 1844 Brunswick Conference, considered ratify-

ing the Parisian Sanhedrin rulings. See Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A Historyof the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134–35.

49. Interestingly, the 1885 Pittsburgh Conference was convened by the German-bornAmerican Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. Kohler, who strongly opposed Zionism, was



the coauthor of the Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry on ‘‘Islam’’ that, as noted above, referencedal-Khalidi’s article on Muslim demographics. I am not aware of any evidence that suggeststhat Kohler and al-Khalidi knew one another personally, but each was certainly familiarwith the other’s work.

50. See Michael Meyer’s chapter on ‘‘classical’’ Reform in Meyer, Response to Moder-nity, 264–95.

51. A broader consideration is warranted regarding the way that certain religiousgroups may be led to fashion, via the terms of their own tradition, narratives of seculariza-tion about another group’s history and theology. One might compare, for instance, theinfluence of British colonialists’ Protestant ideas about language on their understandingof Hinduism in India, as described in Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment:Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2013).

52. The term umma could also mean ‘‘nation’’ as well as ‘‘religious community.’’On the use of this term, see Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1988), 32. See also Ami Ayalon, Language and Change in theArab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Arabic Political Discourse (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987), 21–22.

53. ‘‘Consensus’’ in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. JohnL. Esposito et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1:312. See also Wael B.Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni usul al-fiqh (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially 75–81, and Noel J. Coulson, A Historyof Islamic Law (Edinburgh: University Press, 1964), 77–80.

54. Though the particular source of al-Khalidi’s conception of this rabbinic asqamahremains unclear, Jews especially of the medieval Islamic world (particularly Maimonides)were apparently influenced by the Islamic notion of ijma�. See Gideon Libson, Jewish andIslamic Law: A Comparative Study of Custom During the Geonic Period (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2003), 9, 24, 198n.65. Judith Romney Wegner contends thatijma� has a Jewish precedent as it is ‘‘conceptually equivalent to that expressed in theTalmud by the word ha-kol.’’ Judith Romney Wegner, ‘‘Islamic and Talmudic Jurispru-dence: The Four Roots of Islamic Law and Their Talmudic Counterparts,’’ AmericanJournal of Legal History 26, no. 1 (1982): 42–43.

55. In order to understand al-Khalidi’s theory, we must overlook the anachronismhe employs in imagining the antiquity of this dichotomy.

56. In highlighting the close relationship between the Khalidi family and the keyfigures of the Salafi movement, Rashid Khalidi points to a photograph of the formalopening of the Khalidi Library, in which the prominent Salafi Shaykh Tahir al-Jaza’iriappears. Al-Jaza’iri collaborated with Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi in the creation of the KhalidiLibrary. ‘‘Several of al-Jaza’iri’s books, some in multiple copies,’’ adds Khalidi, ‘‘are foundin the [Khalidi] Library, together with many examples of the writings of other salafissuch as al-Sayyid Rashid Rida.’’ See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 43–45. See also Khalidi,‘‘Intellectual Life in Late Ottoman Jerusalem,’’ 224.



57. On the Salafi movement, see David Dean Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics andSocial Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

58. George F. Hourani, ‘‘The Basis of Authority of Consensus in Sunnite Islam,’’Studia Islamica 21 (1964): 39.

59. Muhammad ‘Abduh, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-hakim, ed. M. Rashid Rida (Cairo,1927–36), cited in Hourani, ‘‘The Basis of Authority,’’ 40.

60. For recent scholarship on this period in Palestine’s history, see Michelle U.Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Pales-tine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), and Abigail Jacobson, From Empireto Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse: Syracuse UniversityPress, 2011).

chapter 3

1. Stephane Moses, ‘‘Le fil de la tradition est-il rompu? Sur deux formes de modern-ite religieuse,’’ Laıcite et religions: Revue des deux mondes (special issue) (April 2002): 102–14. Cited in the text as (M, page number).

2. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Jewish History Revised,’’ in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed.Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 304–12. Citedin the text as (JHR, page number).

3. Moses quotes from Arendt’s essay on Benjamin: Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Walter Benja-min 1892–1940,’’ in Arendt, Men in Dark Times, trans. Harry Zohn (San Diego: Harcourt,Brace and Company, 1968), 153–206. Cited in the text as (WB, page number).

4. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1945; reprint, New York:Schocken, 1995).

5. Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, Der Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a. M.: Judi-scher Verlag, 2010). Cited in the text as (BW, page number). The correspondence betweenScholem and Arendt has not yet been translated in its entirety into English.

6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (NewYork: Viking Press, 1963).

7. Seyla Benhabib, Arendt’s Reluctant Modernism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Lit-tlefield, 2003), 45.

8. Hannah Arendt, Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Ubungen im politischenDenken I (Munich: Piper, 2000), 33. This reference is to the German edition of BetweenPast and Future, where this sentence differs from the English version.

9. The extent to which Scholem’s own thinking is dialectical is a matter of conten-tion. He repeatedly uses the term in his descriptions of manifestations of Jewish mysticism,but he does so in idiosyncratic ways that forego any synthesis or Aufhebung. As RobertAlter notes in his preface to the 1995 edition of Major Trends, dialectical, for Scholem,suggests ‘‘instability, unceasing change, transformation between opposite poles’’ (MajorTrends, xviii). Like Arendt, albeit for different reasons, Scholem rejects the materialist and


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