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“To the Arab Hebrew”: On Possibilities and Impossibilities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
Extract
“To the Arab Hebrew [la-ʿivriyah ha-ʿarviyah]! If you are a Hebrew, you are not an Arab. If an Arab, not a Hebrew. So, you are neither a Hebrew nor an Arab . . . C.Q.F.D.” This paid announcement, published by an anonymous reader of the Jerusalem-based Hebrew newspaper ha-Tsevi on 27 November 1908, reminds us that the idea of an Arab Jew (or, in the parlance of Palestinian Hebrew in the early 20th century, an Arab Hebrew) has been at once present and contested from the early years of Zionist settlement in Palestine. Moreover, the contestation was (as it remains) often more emotional than logical (ce qu'il fallait démontrer notwithstanding). But the category of Arab Hebrew was not constructed simply to be attacked; for some, including another personal advertiser on the very same page of ha-Tsevi, Arab Hebrew was a self-proclaimed identity. “To M. M.,” he or she wrote, “I saw you, I knew you, I respected you. I will leave you, I will remember you, and I will not forget you.” This mysterious, otherwise anonymous, apparent break-up letter—a succinct, public tweet a century before Twitter—was signed by “Arab Hebrew [ʿivri ʿarvi].”
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References
NOTES
Author's note: I thank Orit Bashkin, who, on behalf of IJMES, invited me to join this roundtable and generously offered critical feedback on this piece. I am also grateful to Beth Baron, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ethan Katz, and Sara Pursley for their helpful suggestions.
1 Ha-Tsevi 25, no. 42 (27 November 1908), Supplement, 2. C.Q.F.D. stands for ce qu'il fallait démontrer, the French equivalent of the Latin initials QED, used at the conclusion of a mathematical proof.
2 Ibid.
3 For differing views on when the conflict as such began, see, for example, Beʾeri, Eliezer, Reishit ha-Sikhsukh Yisraʾel-ʿArav, 1882–1911 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poʿalim, 1985)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Hillel, Tarpat: Shenat ha-Efes ba-Sikhsukh ha-Yehudi-ʿArvi (Jerusalem: Keter, 2013)Google Scholar.
4 See Gribetz, Jonathan, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “‘Their Blood is Eastern’: Shahin Makaryus and Fin de Siècle Arab Pride in the Jewish ‘Race,’” Middle Eastern Studies 49 (2013): 143–61.
5 On Zaydan and his role in the nahḍa, see, most recently, Zaidan, George C. and Philipp, Thomas, eds., Jurji Zaidan: Contributions to Modern Arab Thought and Literature (Bethesda, Md.: The Zaidan Foundation, 2013)Google Scholar.
6 For reference to this article, see Levy, Lital's expansive and thoughtful essay, “Mihu Yehudi-ʿAravi? ʿIyun Mashveh be-Toldot ha-Sheʾelah, 1880–2010,” Teʾoriyah u-Vikoret 38–39 (2011): 114, n. 32Google Scholar.
7 Cf. Newby, Gordon D., A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
8 Perhaps there is some significance in the article's labeling them yahūd al-ʿarab (Jews of the Arabs) rather than al-yahūd al-ʿarab (Arab Jews), but if so the implication is not obvious.
9 On Egyptian identity in this period, see Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James P., Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
10 Jacobson, Abigail, “Sephardim, Ashkenazim and the ‘Arab Question’ in pre-First World War Palestine: A Reading of Three Zionist Newspapers,” Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003): 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.