Chapter Three: A Free People?
The day of my high school graduation, as I walked the draft of the final chapter of my translation of Katz’s book over to the typist, I listened to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s address to the U.N. Security Council on my transistor radio. After presenting Israel’s account of the events leading to the war, Eban concluded with an appeal to Nasser, the heir of the “intelligent-looking young Egyptians” whom Herzl had observed in Alexandria:
As he looks around him at the arena of battle, at the wreckage of planes and tanks, at the collapse of intoxicated hopes, might not an Egyptian ruler ponder whether anything was achieved by that disruption? What has it brought but strife, conflict with other powerful interests, and the stern criticism of progressive men throughout the world?
During that same Security Council session, the Indian Permanent Representative, the distinguished journalist-diplomat Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, had not joined with the “progressive men throughout the world.” Instead, he called for a cease-fire with all troops returning to their prewar positions, erasing Israel’s gains, “based upon the sound principle that the aggressor should not be permitted by the international community to enjoy the fruits of aggression.” I was surprised that democratic India, whose independence leader Mahatma Gandhi had inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would take such a position. When I got back home, I wrote a letter about it to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
I received a reply, dated July 5, 1967, from H. Y. Sharada Prasad, Deputy Information Adviser to the Prime Minister. I assumed that this “deputy information advisor” was an obscure junior official, but while revising this chapter in June 2024, I discovered that Prasad had been one of PM Gandhi’s closest confidants as well as a prominent author and foreign policy thinker. He wrote:
The Prime Minister thanks you for your letter of June 14. She appreciates the candour and conviction with which you have written. But you are wrong to think that our disapproval of the actions of the Government of Israel means that we are against the State of Israel. We do not countenance the destruction of Israel or of any nation.
A country’s interests, as you will know are to a great extent determined by its location and its history. India is an Afro-Asian nation and the people of India have a traditional affiliation with Arab nationalism.
The Prime Minister is aware of the travails of the Jewish people, among whom she counts many close friends.[1]She is all admiration for their achievements in the arts and sciences. Her father was in the forefront of the world’s protest against Nazis. But it is difficult to understand how this sympathy for the sufferings of the Jewish people should be equated with approval of certain policies of the Government of Israel.
Prasad enclosed an excerpt from a 1946 article by Mahatma Gandhi:
…. I do believe that the Jews have been cruelly wronged by the world. “Ghetto” is, so far as I am aware, the name given to Jewish locations in many parts of Europe. But for their persecution, probably no question of return to Palestine would ever have arisen. The world should have been their home, if only for the sake of their distinguished contribution to it.
But in my opinion, they have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism. . . .
No wonder that my sympathy goes out to the Jews in their unenviably sad plight. But one would have thought adversity would teach them lessons of peace. Why should they depend on American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land? Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?
Gandhi instead recommend the “matchless weapon of non-violence . . . It will make them happy and rich in the true sense of the word, and it will be a soothing balm to the aching world.”
At the time I had no idea how people of “Afro-Asian nations” perceived history or why their perceptions should be different from mine. I filed away the letter for future reference.
In his 1963 speech Prinz had proclaimed that Jews shared Dr. King’s dream for the U.S. because of their history as beneficiaries of emancipation and their commitment to the ideal of equal rights for all. But though my mother and I regarded him, with his alliance with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a paragon of Jewish-American liberalism, he had once doubted that the dream of freedom could become reality. And it was his doubts about liberalism that made him a Zionist.
In 1934, while serving as a rabbi in Berlin under Hitler, Prinz published a pessimistic book, called “Wir Juden”: “We Jews.” To the Prinz of 1934 Berlin the life of post-emancipation Jews resembled a kind of sickness: they faced a choice between living on the margins of a society that did not accept them or abandoning their identity – and even that option was being closed off. The silence Prinz heard in response to antisemitism in Berlin convinced him that nationalism had defeated liberalism. Jews could not assure their security and survival by trusting in the spread of Enlightenment and equal rights. Faced with states based, as Prinz put it, “on purity of nation and race,” Jews could defend themselves only by establishing a state of their own. Left unsaid was whether that state too would be based on “purity of nation and race.”
Prinz therefore turned to another dream, descended from the wildly different visions of Napoleon, Rabbi Nahman, and various prophets and would-be messiahs, fused with the ethno-nationalism that swept over Central and Eastern Europe as the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires collapsed, and as Germany labored under the disabilities imposed the winners of the Great War. That was the dream of living, as the Israeli national anthem ha-Tikvah, puts it, in the phrase paraphrased by Rashid Khalidi, as a “free people in our own land.” As Herzl wrote in the epigraph to his utopian novel Old-New Land, “If you will it, it is no dream.”
But Prinz fled Germany for the U.S., not Palestine. As soon as Prinz arrived in the U.S. from Germany in 1937, he began lecturing for the United Palestine Appeal – the forerunner of AIPAC. He was one of the founders of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which he chaired from 1965 to 1967. He died in 1988, leaving no evidence that he ever considered the consequences for the Jewish people of the intractable opposition of ethno-nationalism to democracy and equal rights that he had lived in Berlin.
Prinz took the argument that the failure of post-enlightenment states to protect the Jews of Europe required Jews to seek a state of their own from Theodore Herzl, whom Prinz called, “the greatest Jew that the previous century produced.” He opened the final chapter of Wir Juden, entitled “Passage to Reality,” with a quotation from Herzl’s The Jewish State:
We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow-citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers. and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering. The majority may decide which are the strangers; for this, as indeed every point which arises in the relations between nations, is a question of might. I do not here surrender any portion of our prescriptive right, when I make this statement merely in my own name as an individual. In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots who were forced to emigrate . If we could only be left in peace. . . .
But I think we shall not be left in peace.[2]
On January 5, 1895, as a correspondent of the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, Herzl witnessed the “military degradation” of Alfred Dreyfus in the Ecole Militaire in Paris, an intentionally humiliating ceremony in which the wrongly convicted French Jewish officer was stripped of his rank before being deported to Devil’s Island, where he was held for five years for treason before being exonerated. Herzl also witnessed tumultuous anti-Semitic demonstrations in Paris, the city where the French revolution had first emancipated the Jews.
Later that year, Vienna, where Herzl had lived since moving from Pest (now part of Budapest) in 1878 at the age of eighteen, elected an avowed anti-Semite, Karl Lueger, as mayor. Lueger admired French anti-Semitic author Edouard Drumont, one of the populist drumbeaters against Dreyfus. He exploited the resentment of recently enfranchised lower middle-class artisans and shopkeepers against competition from Jews who had migrated into Vienna from the provinces of Galicia and Bukovina (today parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova) after the Hapsburgs gained control of these areas during the 1772-1795 partitions of Poland. Lueger seemed to use anti-Semitism mainly to get elected. During his thirteen years as mayor he did virtually nothing against the Jews and even employed Jewish advisors. When challenged on the subject, he replied, “Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich” – meaning roughly, “I’m the one who decides who is a Jew.” His election marked the end of liberal, if not ironic, Vienna.
For two years, until 1897, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who detested Lueger’s populism and anti-Semitism, refused to confirm him as mayor, an action used by Sigmund Freud to rationalize his decision to resume smoking cigars, which eventually led to his 1939 death from cancer of the jaw after fleeing the Nazis to London. Herzl responded to the events of 1895 with an even more momentous action: he wrote Die Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Published in February 1896, it became the founding document of modern political Zionism. Creating that movement killed Herzl faster than cigar smoking did Freud: only eight years later, in 1904, he died of a heart ailment at the age of forty-four, exhausted by his efforts to realize his dream since he became president of the Zionist World Congress, founded in Basel in 1897.
Herzl argued that fighting anti-Semitism in Europe was futile. Faced with the failure of liberalism in both the country of its birth and his own, Herzl accepted the logic and conceptual framework of nineteenth century European ethno-nationalism: every people could realize its destiny and defend itself only as a nation with its own state on its own land. My ancestors, like most of the masses, opted to escape to America, like the Huguenots that Prinz cited, rather than try to await or hasten redemption in either Europe or Palestine. In America a thriving settler colonial state had already rendered the land’s original inhabitants invisible on their reservations or in their graveyards. While many of the immigrants carried this or that bit of ideology in the baggage that crossed the Atlantic with them in steerage, their main goal was their own safety and prosperity, which they achieved beyond measure.
Zionism, however, did not capture the imagination even of all Jews who sought a political solution to the “Jewish question.” Others advocated the main alternatives to nationalism -- liberalism, socialism, or religious quietism. Zionists despaired that reform, revolution, waiting for the messiah, or trying to force the messiah to arrive before the appointed time would save the Jews of Europe. They used the messianic symbols and language deeply embedded in Jewish culture and liturgy and in the Hebrew language itself for secular political goals. [3]
The Viennese-Jewish writer Karl Kraus, who despised Herzl almost as much as he did Karl Lueger, may have been the first to accuse Zionism of abandoning the struggle for justice and equality and adopting the logic of anti-Semitism. In “A Crown for Zion,” a critique of the First Zionist Congress published in 1898, Kraus wrote:
The game of nations will last a little longer, and arm in arm with political partisans and fanfare music will go this romantically tinged Judaism, advertising its right, mordantly, to test these final months of the century to its limits. In so far as Zionists share a common world-view with the anti-Semites, nothing much more will happen . . .. Despite the foreseeable political dangers, good taste has the right of hearing the cry . . . , “Out with the Jews,” and Zionism replying with the echo, “Yes, out with us Jews,” which, apart from the more solemn tone, doesn’t exhibit the slightest difference.
Kraus recognized that the poor Jewish masses of Galicia, “where the epicenter of Zionist agitation [in the Austrian Habsburg Empire] is naturally to be found,” faced different problems than did assimilated, bourgeois Viennese of Jewish descent like him but argued:
The project to have the Jews leave Poland makes the enormous sentimental apparatus set in train by Zionists look more than ever out of place . . . . I can offer a remedy to the aches and pains of Basel. I believe that with systematic treatment it will not require more than two generations to transform a Galician cheder into a fancy casino . . . . The funds currently allocated for the Zionist cause would be sufficient to provide the students with a proper education.[4]
Two short generations after 1898 the cheders of Galicia became something else entirely, and the world centers of equal rights refused to take in the refugees or survivors. Kraus, an ironist more than a consistent ideologue, would not have been surprised. He called Vienna a “laboratory for world destruction” and expressed his own skepticism of Enlightenment ideals: “The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.” World War destroyed the old European order. America’s golden door clanged shut. The Western economies collapsed. The lands between Germany and Russia where most of world Jewry lived turned into the bloodlands.[5] Hitler settled the debate between Herzl and Kraus in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswięcim, Galicia) and the other extermination camps. Liberalism did not save the Jews of Europe. .
But right as the Zionists were about the fate of the Jews of Europe, they were blind to the realities of Palestine. The life of the inhabitants of Palestine was as invisible to them as the inner spiritual lives of Agnon’s characters were to their gentile neighbors. They know as little about the Arabs of Palestine as I knew about the outlook of “Afro-Asian nations” in 1967, at the age of 17, and like me, they did not even recognize this gap in both their knowledge and their empathy.
As Azmi Bishara has argued, “The first anti-Zionist stance came from within the chief Jewish religious currents,” not from Arabs. As he observed:
Zionism emerged following the creation of a new definition of Judaism that historically transformed the meaning of Jewishness. It is logical that the first reaction to this act would be Jewish. For the religious, Zionism reformulated Jewishness from the “chosen people of God,” “the people of the book,” or “a people unlike other peoples” into an ethnic nation that, like other nineteenth-century European nations, seeks to achieve national sovereignty in a national state (but outside Europe in this case). For secularists, Zionism reformulated Judaism and transformed it from a religion—which should not have prevented their integration into the nations of the secular states of which they were citizens—into an ethnic identity.
Most debates between Zionists and their Jewish opponents were no more about Palestinian Arabs than Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat” was about Mahmoud Abbas. But there was no avoiding them. Just as Rabbi Nahman encountered “Ishmaelites” on his messianic pilgrimage, Herzl encountered Arabs without speaking to them when he visited Palestine in October-November 1898. He recorded that trip in diary entries published a few months after the 1967 war by my editor at Commentary, Neal Kozodoy in The Generations of Israel, a coffee table book of excerpts from memoirs of important figures in the history of Zionism and Israel.
Herzl did not consider the Arabs living in Palestine as political actors. As a secular nineteenth-century European believing in progress, he considered colonialism as the benevolent result of the advance of European civilization, which would in turn bring bring progress to the rest of humanity. Zionism would both rescue the bankrupt Ottoman Empire and provide Europe with an outpost of progress in the Orient:
If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.[6]
In the later editions of his textbook, Katz and his co-author, Zvi Bachrach, depicted colonialism in the same light, as bringing industrial progress, education, and health care to backward societies. They did not describe the oppression and sufferings of the victims of the slave trade, or the colonized or compare them to the tribulations of Jews. Instead, the narrative emphasizes the uniqueness of Jewish suffering.
In their chapter on European imperialism, Katz and Bachrach mention briefly that Germany took over South West Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1894, but they did not mention (and Israeli students therefore did not learn) that in 1903 and 1904 one of Kaiser Wilhelm’s generals, Lothar von Trotha, crushed a revolt by the Herero people in the first genocide of the twentieth century, almost forty years before the Wansee Conference and the Final Solution. The world looked on with an indifference that is evidently not the fate of Jews alone.
I first learned of the Herero genocide from Thomas Pynchon’s 1961 novel, V., which I read in its eighth printing over one of my vacations from Yale. In the worn and yellowed Bantam paperback still on my shelf, I read:
In August 1904, von Trotha issued his “Vernichtungs Befehl,” whereby the German forces were ordered to exterminate systematically every Herero man, woman and child they could find. He was about 80 percent successful. Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official/German census taken seven years later set the Herero population at only 15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good.[7]
Pynchon wrote the chapter of V about the Herero genocide while following the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He regarded the Herero genocide as a “dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.”[8]
Herzl’s observations of Arabs in Palestine were byproducts of his effort to meet that same genocidal Kaiser Wilhelm, first in Istanbul and then in Jerusalem. Both the Jews of Europe and the international system had changed since the time of Napoleon and Rabbi Nahman. The rise of colonialism, and ethno-nationalist reactions to Jewish emancipation generated the new doctrine of “scientific” racism, which provided a secular rationale for anti-Semitism, just as Zionism provided a secular rationale for Jewish messianic striving. Europe’s political ferment of nationalism, socialism, and other revolutionary ideas agitated a new generation of increasingly urbanized Jewish youth, who began to mobilize against the restrictions and persecution they suffered. Educated in the main European languages and cultures, they began to imagine themselves as political actors in the modern order.
By the time Herzl made his proposals to the Sublime Porte, the much-weakened Ottoman Empire had lost territories to Russia and Austria. Revolts in the Balkans and Arabian Peninsula (Najd) reduced it further. The British had unilaterally made Egypt a protectorate. France had annexed Algeria and made Tunisia into a protectorate. Debt-ridden Turkey, the “sick man of Europe,” was pressed into concession after concession to European powers, including granting them special rights over minorities within the empire through agreements aptly called capitulations. These gave the citizens of these great powers immunity from the Ottoman legal system within the territory of the empire and allowed their countries’ consulates to intervene on their behalf. France granted French citizenship to Jews but not to Muslims in Algeria. The 1884-85 the Berlin conference carved up Africa among the European powers, recognizing the rising power of Germany by certifying its rule over South-West Africa and German East Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanganyika (the mainland part of today’s Tanzania). The Germans introduced European “scientific” racial theory to their African possessions, arguing that Tutsis and Hutus belonged to different “races.” They thus prepared the ideological ground for the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the related large-scale massacres in Burundi. Another colleague of mine at Columbia University, sociologist Mahmood Mamdani, documented this history in his evocatively titled book, When Victims Become Killers. [9]
Herzl’s strategy echoed the plans of David Reubeni and Napoleon’s call to the Jews of the East; he considered Zionism a national movement like that of other “civilized” nations, offering a realistic alternative to pseudo-messiahs. Though himself an atheist, he anticipated the rationale through which the Orthodox could frame Zionism as the fulfillment of the Divine plan. In his 1901 utopian novel, Altneuland, he depicts a rather Viennese Jewish Palestine in 1921. The main character, a stand-in for Herzl, attends a performance of the Opera “Sabbatai Zevi.” During a discussion at intermission, his guide and host reflects on why people follow such messiahs:
It was not that the people believed what they said, but rather that they said what the people believed. They soothed a yearning. Or, perhaps it would be more correct to say, they sprang from the yearning. That's it. The longing creates the Messiah. You must remember what dark days those were when a Sabbatai and his like appeared. Our people was not yet able to take account of its own situation, and therefore yielded to the spell of such persons. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when the other civilized nations had already attained to self -consciousness and given evidence thereof, that our own people-the pariah-realized that its salvation lay within itself, that nothing was to be expected from fantastic miracle-workers. They realized then that the way of deliverance must be paved not by a single individual, but by a conscious and alert folk-personality. The Orthodox, too, realized that there was nothing blasphemous in such a view . . . . God Himself, in His inscrutable wisdom, decides what instruments will serve His ends. Such was the sensible reasoning of our pious Jews when they threw themselves enthusiastically into the national enterprise of restoration. And so the Jewish nation once more raised itself to nationhood.[10]
Herzl implemented his secular messianism by seeking an Ottoman capitulation for Jews to migrate into Palestine in return for settling the Turkish debt. The latter promise depended for its force more on the stereotype of Jewish control of world finance than on any resources actually at the disposal of the Zionist movement – Herzl never discussed with Jewish financiers whether they were willing to off the Ottomans a bailout.
Herzl needed the support of a great power. He sought the support first of Germany and then of Britain. Soon after the first Zionist Congress in 1897, twelve years after the Congress of Berlin, Herzl developed a plan to take advantage of German aspirations to compete with the earlier colonial powers, in the Levant rather than Africa. Herzl tried to interest Germany in sponsoring Jewish colonization of Ottoman Palestine. A century earlier Napoleon, seeking to expand France’s influence eastward to counter British advances in India, may have experimented with mobilizing Jewish aspirations against Britain and its Ottoman allies. In Altneuland Herzl speculates that the overland route to Asia through Jewish Palestine (in that novel obtained through direct Turkish-Zionist negotiations) would replace the Suez Canal, apparently without provoking any response from Britain and France, owners of the Canal Company, on which the British counted to secure transit to its colonial possessions in India. When Nasser nationalized the canal in 1956, however, Britain and France did react – allying with the young state of Israel to try to seize back this strategic transit point. Herzl did not anticipate such events.
Herzl managed to obtain an interview with Wilhelm in Istanbul, where he asked the Kaiser to propose a “chartered company” for Jewish settlement to Sultan Abdülhamid II. Herzl then sailed on to Jaffa, where he worried that, like Rabbi Nahman, he might have trouble getting past the Ottoman customs authorities. Several members of his party had passport “irregularities.” But Herzl’s relationship to Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany’s relation to a weakened Ottoman Empire enabled him to avoid Nahman’s experience:
I had made my plans for the eventuality that the Turkish port authorities refused to let us pass. I drafted a telegram to the Kaiser informing him of the trouble that was being made for us. But it turned out differently . . .. I learned that German police would be at the pier [awaiting the Kaiser’s arrival]. I jumped ashore, and while the Turkish police were snooping about our tezkerehs [identity documents], I took the German official aside and told him that we were here on the Kaiser’s orders; the five white cork helmets [pith helmets worn by Europeans in the colonies] should be allowed to pass at once. This was done.[11]
After some difficulties in finding a conveyance, Herzl and his party drove to the French Jewish agricultural school Mikveh Israel and the Rothschild-funded agricultural colony Rishon le-Zion “through the countryside neglected in Arab fashion.” At Rishon a doctor preoccupied with malaria victims told Herzl that “only large-scale drainage operations and elimination of swamps . . .could make the country habitable.” Herzl saw the potential of Arabs, but only as native laborers who could work under the local conditions that were so difficult for Europeans: “It will cost billions but create billions of new wealth! Such Arabs as are immune to the fever might be used for the work . . . .”[12]
A few days later Herzl positioned himself along the Kaiser’s route from Jaffa to Jerusalem, in front of the Mikveh Israel School. Herzl called the local population, who he saw gathering along the Kaiser’s path, a “mixed multitude” (the Biblical term for the camp followers of the Israelites as they left Egypt) of beggars, old men, women and children.
The surprised Kaiser greeted Herzl from his mount. They discussed the need for water projects. The attempt to turn that encounter into a photo opportunity failed when one photograph showed, in Herzl’s words, “only a shadow of the Kaiser and my left foot,” and the other was “completely spoiled.” In a subsequent short, chilly meeting in Jerusalem, the Kaiser, punctuating his message with anti-Semitic remarks about German Jews, told Herzl that the Sultan had rejected the proposal.
Herzl next turned to the British empire, visiting London to see the colonial secretary and sending his London contact, Leopold Jacob Greenberg, to negotiate with the British-controlled Egyptian government in Cairo. The Egyptians offered to encourage and sponsor Jewish immigration, but only if the new arrivals adopted Ottoman citizenship, which Egyptians retained under the British Protectorate. Herzl insisted on a capitulation under which the Jews would enjoy British citizenship, which the Egyptian foreign minister, Boutros Ghali, the grandfather of UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, rejected.[13]
During an October 1903 sojourn in the port of Alexandria, after the already ailing Herzl had failed to obtain the support of the British protectorate authorities in Cairo for his scheme, he followed up his interest on water projects by attending a lecture by the world’s leading authority on irrigation. As he found the lecture “dreadfully boring,” he turned his attention to the audience:
What interested me most was the striking number of intelligent-looking young Egyptians who packed the hall. They are the coming masters. It is a wonder the English don’t see this. They think they are going to deal with the fellahin (peasants) forever.
This blindness of the British, he remarked, would “make them lose their colonies later.”[14] Herzl, who died only nine months later, on July 3, 1904, never understood the implication of his observation in Alexandria for the Zionist project in Palestine.
There is no record of Herzl having spoken directly to any Palestinian about his colonization plans, but but one Palestinian who was not only “intelligent-looking,” to judge by his photographs, but an intellectual and political leader, reached out to him. A few months after his visit to Palestine, Rabbi Zadoq Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France forwarded to Herzl a letter he had received from Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a member of the Ottoman parliament and former mayor of Jerusalem.
Khalidi was one of the first Palestinian notables to obtain a Western education. After completing his studies in the madrasa in al-Aqsa mosque he stole away to Malta at the age of seventeen against his family’s wishes.[15] He later served as Ottoman consul in the Romanian Black Sea port of Poti, close to the island where Rebbe Nahman was quarantined. After being dismissed in 1875 because of his reformist views, Khalidi moved to Vienna, where he taught Arabic and Ottoman Turkish at the Oriental Academy. He left Vienna in 1876, two years before Herzl’s family arrived from Pest. Khalidi also published a Kurdish-Arabic phrase book after serving as governor of a Kurdish province in southeastern Anatolia.[16]
In March 1899, while serving as a deputy in the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul, Khalidi wrote a letter to Zadok Kahn, the Chief Rabbi of France. Perhaps Yusuf Diya’s nephew, Ruhi al-Khalidi, the Ottoman consul general in Bordeaux, delivered it to the rabbi.[17]
Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi was quite a different mayor from Karl Lueger.[18] As he wrote in his letter:
All who are acquainted with me know well that I make no distinction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I am always inspired by the sublime words of your prophet, Malachi: “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?”[19] As far as the Jews[20] are concerned, I take these words literally. Besides respecting them for their high moral and intellectual qualities, I truly consider them to be relatives of us Arabs. For us they are really our cousins – we truly have the same father, Abraham, from whom we descend equally. There are many affinities between the two races;[21] we have almost the same language.[22] Politically, by the way, I am convinced that Jews and Arabs would do well to support each other in order to resist invasions by other races.
In other words, Khalidi, who was an acquaintance of Jamaluddin al-Afghani in Istanbul, the first thinker to formulate a doctrine of Islamic opposition to colonialism, suggested that Jews and Arabs become allies in opposition to European colonialism. Khalidi went further to show his good faith as a friend of the Jewish people: he acknowledged its historical claim to Palestine. In a passage sometimes quoted without context by Zionist advocates, he wrote:
My God, historically it is your country! And what a marvelous sight it would be if the Jews, gifted as they are, could once again form an independent, respected, happy nation that could render moral service to suffering humanity as in the past.
His main point, however, was:
[T]he reality is that Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and, even more serious, it is inhabited by others besides the Jews.[23] This reality, these established facts, this brute force of circumstance, do not leave Zionism geographically any hope of success, and what is most important, it poses a real threat to the Jews of Turkey.[24]
Khalidi warned of a violent reaction, which would stimulate heretofore-dormant anti-Jewish feelings and threaten the security of the Jewish communities in the Arab world:
Of course the Turks and Arabs are generally well disposed toward your coreligionists. Nonetheless, there are some fanatics among them who, as among all other nations, even the most civilized, are also not free of the feeling of racial hatred . . . . There is reason to fear a popular movement against your coreligionists, who have suffered for so many centuries, and which would be fatal for them. Even with the best intentions in the world, the Turkish government would find it hard to suppress it. It is this only too possible eventuality that places the pen in my hand to write you.
Recognizing the sufferings of the Jews of Europe, Khalidi suggested an alternative solution, which some in the Zionist movement would also consider a few years later:
Let us search for a place somewhere else for the unfortunate Jewish nation; nothing would be more just and fair. My God, the earth is vast enough, there are still uninhabited countries where millions of poor Jews could settle, perhaps be happy, and one day become a nation. Perhaps that would be the best, most rational solution for the Jewish question.
“But,” he concluded, “In the name of God, leave Palestine alone.”
Some Jews shared Khalidi’s idea of settling the persecuted masses of Russian and Galician Jewry elsewhere. The Jewish Colonization Association, founded in 1891 by French Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, was trying to turn Jews into gauchos on the Argentine pampas. Herzl considered the Argentinian proposal in The Jewish State. Later the Zionist Congress considered an offer to settle some Jews in British-controlled East Africa (the Uganda project). But Simeon bar Yohai, Rabbi Akiba, Samuel, Saul, Sabbatai Zevi, and Rabbi Nahman had never been to Argentina or Uganda. Of the 613 commandments, there were some that could be fulfilled only in the Land of Israel, but none that required a Jewish presence on the pampas or along Lake Victoria. The Jews had been exiled from Palestine and dispersed over much of the globe; their would-be messiahs always sought to bring them back.
Herzl replied to Khalidi in two ways. First. he wrote back on March 19, repeating the offer he was trying to make to the Sultan, that Zionism was “concerned with opening up new resources for the Ottoman Empire,” like an IMF stabilization package. While David Reubeni had offered Charles V the help of an army from a mythical Jewish kingdom against the Ottomans, and Napoleon may have toyed with the idea of raising a Jewish army for the same purpose, Herzl offered instead the Jews’ human and (exaggerated) financial capital. The Jews would bring “their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise,” which would benefit the entire country, and the tribute they would pay the Ottomans for the use of Palestine, described in some detail in Altneuand, would revive the state’s prospects. There was no reason to fear that Zionism would lead to violence:
As Your Excellency said very well in your letter to the Grand Rabbi, the Jews have no belligerent Power behind them, neither are they themselves of a warlike nature. They are a completely peaceful element, and very content if they are left in peace. Therefore there is absolutely nothing to fear from their immigration.
If the Sultan did not accept the Zionist proposals, Herzl wrote, the Jews would indeed go elsewhere, “but Turkey will have lost its last chance to regulate its finances and recover its economic vigor.”
Herzl’s second answer came in Altneuland, published in 1902, which he started writing soon after receiving Khalidi’s letter. The book depicts Palestine in 1923 as a sort of Jewish Dubai on the Mediterranean. A self-governing colony organized in utopian socialist cooperatives under the sovereignty of an invisible Turkish Sultan (no official of the Ottoman government appears), Jewish Palestine (Herzl used the term without inhibition) has replaced the now deserted Suez Canal as the main point of transit between Europe and the East via a railroad network. The British, who appear in Altneuland only as aristocratic visitors to a Jerusalem artist’s studio, apparently raised no objection to losing control of the communications to India.
The narrator, a Herzl-like figure from Vienna, enters Palestine twice: first, in 1903, as he departs on a twenty-year voyage, the literary purpose of which is to enable him to discover the Palestine of 1923 with fresh eyes. In neither case does the narrator encounter the problems with Ottoman customs officials that Rebbe Nahman and the historical Herzl did; nor did he pass through the border controls of any Jewish state. Instead Herzl entirely avoided the question of sovereignty over Palestine. His protagonist entered the country both times with no formalities whatsoever. The novel thus avoided entirely the issue that blocked all of Herzl’s efforts –the Ottomans refused to cede sovereignty over Palestine, including the right to regulate what foreigners could enter it.
The culture of Altneuland’s Jewish Palestine bears a strong resemblance to that of Vienna (there are no Jews from Arab or other Muslim countries there), even depicting the history of Sabbatai Zevi in the form of an opera. Herzl mentions that there is a professional Jewish army, but he does not explain its mission, and neither it nor the Ottoman military ever appears. The Jewish colonization society purchases land on the free market, enriching the native landowners and providing employment for the landless in new ventures. (The Labor Zionist doctrine of “Hebrew labor” did not figure in Herzl’s thought.) Herzl draws on the experience of his 1898 visit to describe the inhabitants of Palestine in 1903 with disgust: “The inhabitants of the blackish Arab villages looked like brigands. Naked children played in the dirty alleys.”[25]
By 1923, however, they are prosperous and happy. The visiting dignitaries were waited upon by a “liveried Negro,” and Jewish researchers were seeking a cure for malaria, which would make it possible to colonize Africa more effectively and repatriate the descendants of those Africans transported in the slave trade. Progressive colonialism was civilizing the world, and Zionism would be its crown jewel.
Since Khalidi, the only Palestinian Arab with whom Herzl is known to have communicated, did not provide him with the response he sought, Herzl created a fictional Palestinian, Rashid Bey, who, like Rabbi Judah in the conversation that forced Simeon bar Yohai to hide in the cave, expressed his appreciation for everything the modernizing immigrants had done for his country. The Rashid Bey of Herzl’s narrative, like Khalidi in reality, was among the first Palestinian Arabs to seek a Western education.
Herzl accurately depicted the agricultural, industrial and economic success that awaited an outpost of Europe that attracted massive flows of human and financial capital. He even understood the risk that such a settler population might wish to exclude others from the benefits of its development: in elections held in the course of the novel, a Jewish racist party with a leader modeled after Karl Lueger, campaigns on a platform of defining Palestine as an exclusively Jewish state. In the real Israel the Nation-State Law of 2018 did just that, but in Herzl’s novel, the party is soundly defeated, and the supporters of civic equality and secularism win decisively with the support of an enlightened rabbinate.
Herzl died in July 1904 at the age of 44, four months before Jacob Katz was born, as my grandparents were starting primary school in Philadelphia, and only a month before Kaiser Wilhelm’s General von Trotha issued his order to exterminate the Hereros. Khalidi died in 1906 at the age of 64.
Since this was before Birthright, I used the $750 I got from Neal Kozodoy to take my first international trip — to Israel.
On August 5, 1967, the Saturday night before my departure, four years after missing his performance at the March on Washington, I finally saw Josh White myself. my then girlfriend, now wife, Susan Blum, and I went to hear him at a coffeehouse called the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The opening act was an unknown singer with a well-known name, Arlo Guthrie, who performed the “Multi-Colored Rainbow Roaches” variant of “Alice’s Restaurant,” his as-yet unrecorded song about draft resistance. I had a ticket to Israel, and I might as well have been in Alice’s Restaurant. I had that feeling that finally, I could do anything I want.
Annex: Letter of Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, English translation and original French text
Constantinople, March 1, 1899
Pera, Khedwial Hotel,
Sir,
Knowing how much you are concerned by the fate of your co-religionists in the Orient, I take the liberty to write you the following lines:
I flatter myself to think that I need not speak of the feeling I have toward your people. All who are acquainted with me know well that I make no distinction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I am always inspired by the sublime words of your prophet, Malachi: “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?”[26] As far as the Jews[27]are concerned, I take these words literally. Besides respecting them for their high moral and intellectual qualities, I truly consider them to be relatives of us Arabs. For us they are really our cousins – we truly have the same father, Abraham, from whom we descend equally. There are many affinities between the two races;[28] we have almost the same language.[29] Politically, by the way, I am convinced that Jews and Arabs would do well to support each other in order to resist invasions by other races.
These are the feelings that make me feel comfortable enough to speak to you frankly about the great question that is now stirring the Jewish people.
You will well understand that I am speaking of Zionism.
The idea in itself is entirely natural, beautiful, and just. Who could dispute the rights of the Jews over Palestine? My God, historically it is your country! And what a marvelous sight it would be if the Jews, gifted as they are, could once again form an independent, respected, happy nation that could render moral service to suffering humanity as in the past.
Unfortunately, the fates of nations are not ruled solely by abstract concepts, however pure or noble they may be. One must take into account reality, facts established by force, yes, by the brute force of circumstance. And the reality is that Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and, even more serious, it is inhabited by others besides the Jews.[30] This reality, these established facts, this brute force of circumstance, do not leave Zionism geographically any hope of success, and what is most important, it poses a real threat to the Jews of Turkey.[31]
For ten years I was the mayor of Jerusalem and thereafter the representative of that city in the Imperial Parliament, as I still am; I now work for the benefit of this city, trying to supply it with clean water. I can speak to you on the basis of my personal knowledge and experience. We Arabs and Turks consider ourselves as the impartial guardians of the holy places of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So how can the leaders of Zionism imagine that that they will manage to take these holy places away from the other two religions, whose adherents are the vast majority? What material forces do at most 10 million Jews have, to impose their will on 350 million Christians and 300 million Muslims? The Jews certainly have capital and intelligence. But great as the power of money may be in this world, one cannot buy everything by means of millions. To achieve a goal such as Zionism proposes requires other, more powerful means, those of the cannon and the sword. But what great power would put such means at the disposal of Dr. Herzl? Russia? Or perhaps its ally, France? Do you believe that Kaiser Wilhelm will find it worth the bones of any Pomeranian soldiers?[32]Even the nations that are best disposed toward the Jews, such as the English and the Americans – I do not believe that they will ever agree to go to war against other nations to help the Jews settle in Palestine. It is true that the Americans have recently waged war against the Spanish for the independence of the Cubans and Filipinos. But the Jewish people, as a people, is in a much more unfortunate condition than the former, who are in their own countries, while the Jews are scattered and not concentrated in one place.
It is pure madness on the part of Dr. Herzl, whom I otherwise respect as a man and a talented writer, and as a true Jewish patriot, and of his friends, to imagine that even if they could obtain the consent of H. M. the Sultan, they could manage to take over Palestine. But I would not consider that I had any right to speak if I did not foresee that this movement would pose a great danger to the Jews of Turkey and, above all, Palestine.
Of course the Turks and Arabs are generally well disposed toward your coreligionists. Nonetheless, there are some fanatics among them who, as among all other nations, even the most civilized, are also not free of the feeling of racial hatred. Moreover, there are some fanatic Christians in Palestine, especially among the Orthodox and the Catholics, who think Palestine should belong only to them and are therefore very jealous of the advances made by the Jews in their ancestral country. They never miss an opportunity to whip up hatred of the Jews among the Muslims. There is reason to fear a popular movement against your coreligionists, who have suffered for so many centuries, and which would be fatal for them. Even with the best intentions in the world, the Turkish government would find it hard to suppress it. It is this only too possible eventuality that places the pen in my hand to write you.
For the sake of the security of the Jews in Turkey, the Zionist movement in the geographical sense must end. Let us search for a place somewhere else for the unfortunate Jewish nation; nothing would be more just and fair. My God, the earth is vast enough, there are still uninhabited countries where millions of poor Jews could settle, perhaps be happy, and one day become a nation. Perhaps that would be the best, most rational solution for the Jewish question. But in the name of God, leave Palestine in peace.
Our Prophet forced the Jews of Khaiba to accept his divine mission as a condition of peace. But no Muslim today demands that of the Jews who come to Palestine. They are welcome, but on the condition that they have no intention other than to become loyal Ottoman subjects, just as we are.
I believe that by sending this warning to the leaders of Judaism I am carrying out a sacred duty of conscience. I imagine that this could be painful for a Jewish heart. But believe me, Sir, I am speaking to you as a true friend of Israel. As your great and wise king said, “Wounds caused by a friend are better than the kisses of an enemy.”[33]
Please accept, sir, this expression of my brotherly feelings,
Youssuf Zia Alkhalidy
Representative of Jerusalem
Constantinople
Le 1 Mars 1899
Péra, Khèdwial Hotel
Monsieur
Sachant combien le sort de vos coréligionnaires en Orient vous touche au cœur, je prends la liberté de Vous adresser les lignes suivantes :
Je me flatte de penser que je n’ai pas besoin de parler de mes sentiments envers Votre peuple. Tous ceux qui me connaissent savent bien, que je ne fais aucune distinction entre juifs, chrétiens et musulmans. Je m’inspire toujours de la sublime parole de Votre Prophète Malachi, « n’est-ce pas que nous avons un père commun à nous tous? N’est-ce pas le même Dieu qui nous a créés tous ? » En ce qui concerne les israélites, je prends cette parole au sens de la lettre, car, en dehors de ce que je les estime pour leur hautes qualités morales et intellectuelles, je les considère vraiment comme parents à nous tous autres, arabes, pour nous ils sont des cousins. Nous avons vraiment le même père, Abraham, dont nous descendons également. Il existe beaucoup d’affinités entre les deux races, nous avons presque la même langue. Politiquement d’ailleurs, je suis convaincu que juifs et arabes feraient bien de se soutenir pour pouvoir résister aux envahissements des autres races.
Ce sont ces sentiments qui me mettent à l’aise pour Vous parler franchement de la grande question qui agite actuellement le peuple juif.
Vous Vous doutez bien, que je veux parler du Sionisme.
L’idée en elle-même n’est que toute naturelle, belle et juste. Qui peut contester les droits de juifs sur la Palestine ? Mon Dieu, historiquement c’est bien votre pays! Et quel spectacle merveilleux ça serait, si les juifs, si doués, seraient de nouveau reconstitués en une nation indépendante, respectuée, heureuse, pouvant rendre à la pauvre humanité des services dans le domaine morale comme autrefois.
Malheureusement, les destinées des nations ne sont point gouvernées seulement par des conceptions abstraites, si pures, si nobles qu’elles puissent être. Il faut compter avec la réalité, avec les faits acquis, avec la force, oui, avec la force brutale des circonstances. Or la réalité est que la Palestine fait maintenant partie intégrale de l’empire ottoman, et, ce qui est plus grave, elle est habitées par d’autres que d’israélites. Cette réalité, ces faits acquis, cette force brutale des circonstances ne laissent au Sionisme, géographiquement, aucun espoir de réalisation, et ce qui est surtout important menace d’un vrai danger la situation des juifs en Turquie.
J’ai été pendant dix ans maire de Jérusalem, et après député de cette ville au Parlement impérial, et je le suis encore ; je travaille maintenant pour le bien de cette ville, pour y amener de l’eau salubre. Je suis en état de Vous parler en connaissance de cause. Nous nous considérons, nous arabes et turqs, comme gardiens des lieux également sacrés pour les trois religions, le Judaïsme, la Chrétienté et l’Islam. Eh bien, comment les meneurs du Sionisme peuvent-ils s’imaginer qu’ils parviendraient à arracher ces lieux sacrés aux deux autres religions, qui sont l’immense majorité? Quelles forces matérielles les juifs possèdent-ils pour imposer leur volonté, eux qui sont 10 millions au plus, aux 350 millions des chrétiens et 300 millions des musulmans ? Les juifs possèdent certainement des capitaux et de l’intelligence. Mais si grande que soit la force de l’argent dans ce monde, on ne peut pas acheter tout à coups des millions. Pour arriver à un but comme celui que la Sionisme doit se proposer, il faut d’autres coups, plus formidables, ceux des canons et des cuirasses. Or, quelle est la Puissance qui voudrait bien mettre ces choses-là à la disposition de Dr. Herzl ? Est-ce la Russie ? Ou peut être son alliée la France ? Croyez-Vous que l’Empereur Guillaume trouvera que celà vaut quelques os des soldats poméraniens? Et même les nations les mieux disposées envers les juifs, comme les anglais et les américains, je ne crois pas qu’elles consentent jamais de partir en guerre contre les autres nations, pour aider les juifs de s’installer en Palestine. Il est vrai que les américains ont fait dernièrement la guerre aux espagnoles pour la liberté des cubains et philippins. Mais le peuple juif se trouve, comme peuple, dans un état beaucoup plus malheureux que ceux-ci qui sont dans leurs pays, tandis que les juifs sont dispersés et ne sont pas concentrés dans un endroit.
C’est donc une pure folie de la part de Dr. Herzl, que j’estime d’ailleurs comme homme et comme écrivain de talent, et comme vrai patriote juif, et de ses amis, de s’imaginer que, même s’il était possible d’obtenir le consentement de S. M. le Sultan, ils arriveraient un jour de s’emparer de la Palestine. Mais je ne me croirais pas en droit d’intervenir si je ne prévoyais pas un grand danger de ce mouvement pour les israélites en Turquie et surtout en Palestine.
Certes, les turques et les arabes sont généralement bien disposes envers Vos coréligionnaires. Cependant il y a parmi ceux aussi des fanatiques, eux aussi, comme toutes les autres nations mêmes les plus civilisées, ne sont pas exempts des sentiments de haine de race. En outre, il y a en Palestine des chrétiens fanatiques, surtout parmi les orthodoxes et les catholique, qui considèrent la Palestine comme devant appartenir à eux seulement, sont très jaloux des progrès des juifs dans le pays de leur ancêtres, et ne laissent passer aucune occasion pour exciter la haine des musulmans contre les juifs. Il y a lieu de craindre un mouvement populaire contre Vos coréligionnaires, malheureux depuis tant des siècles, qui leur serait fatale et que le gouvernement turc, avec les meilleures dispositions du monde ne pourra étouffer facilement. C’est cette éventualité très possible qui me met la plume dans la main pour Vous écrire.
Il faut donc pour la tranquillité des juifs en Turquie, que le mouvement Sioniste dans le sens géographique du mot, cesse. Que l’on cherche un endroit quelque part pour la malheureuse nation juive, rien de plus juste et équitable. Mon Dieu, la terre est assez vaste, il y a encore des pays inhabités où l’on pourrait placer les millions d’israélites pauvres, qui y deviendraient peut-être heureux et un jour constitueraient une nation. Ca serait peut-être la meilleure, la plus rationnelle solution de la question juive. Mais, au nom de Dieu, qu’on laisse tranquille la Palestine.
Notre Prophète, impose aux israélites de Khaïba, comme condition de paix, de reconnaître sa mission divine. Aucun musulman, cependant n’exige celà des juifs qui viennent au Palestine. Ils sont les bienvenues, mais à la condition de n’avoir aucune autre pensée que d’être, comme nous mêmes des fidèles sujets ottomans.
Je crois accomplir un devoir sacré de conscience en adressant cet avertissement à ceux qui sont à la tête du judaïsme. Je m’imagine que celà peut être affligeant pour un cœur juif. Mais croyez-moi Monsieur, que c’est un vrai ami d’Israël qui Vous parle et comme l’a dit si bien Votre grand et sage roi, les plaies causées pour un ami valent mieux que les baisers d’un ennemi.
Agréez, Monsieur l’assurance de mes sentiments fraternels.
Youssuf Zia Alkhalidy
Député de Jerusalem
[1] In 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a dinner for a thirty-year-old Indira Gandhi at her apartment in New York. Among the guests was Rabbi Joachim Prinz.
[2] Herzl, Theodor (2014-11-27). The Jewish State (Kindle Locations 47-57). . Kindle Edition.
[3] Scholem.
[4] Kraus, “A Crown for Zion.”
[5] Snyder, Bloodlands.
[6] Herzl, Theodor (2014-11-27). The Jewish State (Kindle Locations 326-328). . Kindle Edition.
[7] Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Bantam, 1968; first edition 1961), p. 227.
[8]https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553016/joycePeytonMeigs.pdf
[9] Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims become Killers.
[10] Herzl, Theodor (2014-08-26). Old New Land (Kindle Locations 1602-1612). David Rehak. Kindle Edition.
[11] Neal Kozodoy, editor, The Generations of Israel (A CBS Legacy Collection Book: n.p., n.d., probably 1967), p. 26.
[12] Ibid., 28.
[13] “Herzl in Palestine.”
[14] Ibid.
[15] The Khalidi family had come to Jerusalem with Salahuddin during the war against the Crusaders. The family’s most prominent contemporary descendant is Professor Rashid Khalidi, my former colleague at Columbia University. While Khalidi was teaching at the University of Chicago, his state’s senator, one Barack Husain Obama, attended a dinner where he spoke, leading John McCain to accuse Obama of associating with someone akin to a neo-Nazi. I later had my own problems with McCain. In 2011, when I was working as a State Department official on an agreement to transfer five Taliban detainees out of Guantanamo in return for the release of U.S. captive Bowe Bergdahl and the start of talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, McCain, one of the deal’s fiercest opponents, called the detainees (who were transferred in a much less advantageous deal on May 31, 2014) “the worst killers in human history.”
[16] Alexander Scholch, “An Ottoman Bismarck from Jerusalem: Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi (1842-1906) Jerusalem Quarterly 24: 65-76.
[17] The appendix includes the full text of Khalidi’s letter in French, with an English translation. Kahn is sometimes described as a friend of Khalidi’s but the letter has no salutation and I have found no record that they ever met.
[18] Like Lueger, though, Khalidi improved the public facilities and infrastructure of his city, particularly roads, and noted in his letter that as an Ottoman parliamentarian he was working to “supply the city with clean water,” which should have interested Herzl with his interest in water projects. Herzl told his diary that if he ever had the opportunity, his main goal for Jerusalem would be to “clean it up” and “empty the nests of filth.”
[19] Malachi 2:10.
[20] Khalidi employs the French term “Israëlites” to refer to Jews, as he does in other places in the letter. I have not used the word “Israelite,” as in English this denotes the ancient Israelites rather than contemporary Jews.
[21] The use of “race” to refer to an ethnic group or nation was standard at the time.
[22] He is alluding to the cognate structures and vocabularies of Hebrew and Arabic.
[23] Or: “inhabited by others than Jews”: habités par d’autres que d’Israëlites.”
[24] “Turkey” here refers to the Ottoman Empire, including most of the Arab world. The Jews living in those countries were the ones whom Khalidi knew.
[25] Herzl, Theodor (2014-08-26). Old New Land (Kindle Location 655). David Rehak. Kindle Edition.
[26] Malachi 2:10.
[27] Here Khalidi employs the French term “Israëlites” to refer to Jews, as he does in other places in the letter. This term had no political implication other than respect. I have chosen not to use the term “Israelite,” as in English this denotes the ancient Israelites rather than contemporary Jews.
[28] The use of “race” to refer to an ethnic group or nation was standard at the time, before the emergence of pseudo-scientific racism.
[29] He is alluding to the similar structure and overlapping vocabulary of Hebrew and Arabic.
[30] Or: “inhabited by others than Jews”: habités par d’autres que d’Israëlites.”
[31] Turkey here includes the entire Ottoman Empire, including most of the Arab world.
[32] Khalidi refers here to Herzl’s meetings with Wilhelm in Istanbul and Palestine in October-November 1898, four months before the date of this letter. He refers to Bismarcks statement that “The entire Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian greadier.”
[33] Proverbs, 27:6.