All right. So without wasting too much time. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome again.
This is our second meeting of the seminar this year.
I would say just a few words about the context of the seminar, and then I would introduce a speaker and then I will shut up.
So during this academic year, the Israeli Studies Seminar will explore what it means to widen the horizons of
conventional discourse about Israel by focusing on various perspectives of Israel.
The seminar is objective is to situate Israel within broader contexts,
including thematic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological and geostrategic.
All our speakers this year are invited to offer views of Israel from the socio political or historical vantage points of various traditions,
groups, cultures and states, or from varying epistemological perspectives.
We hope that by doing so, we will be able to illuminate topics that may be otherwise neglected in the field of Israel studies,
but nevertheless crucial for understanding Israel, Israeli amenities and politics at large.
I'm speaking today Dr. Michel BEHA of Manchester University, among the many fields he has already published and dealt with in his research.
I may know just the following. He's dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict with matters of Israeli society, politics and culture,
with Middle Eastern Jews before the 1950s and with the hanging Israel post 1950s,
with nationalism at large and with the mutual consolidation of Zionist and Arab nationalisms within a comparative framework.
I'm sorry.
He has recently edited and published with it been told beneath a truly groundbreaking volume on Mizrahi and modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought.
And he also edited a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,
dealing with the fusing of Arab Nada, European European scholar and Euro Zionism.
Eastern Jewish thought in late autumn and in post Ottoman Palestine.
The title of his talk today is Birth of the Ashkenazi Mizrahi Controversy on the Arab Question 1910 to 1912.
Dr. Berhanu, thank you for coming. All right. Should I close the door now for those who speak Arabic, I mean, I'm bored, so.
And the lecturer, Bob, is the guy that takes care of the door and the buildings in Cairo.
So that's what I also feel. Okay, thank you for having me.
It's not the first time I've come to visit, but it's nice to return notes of some friends.
Professor Glenda. That helped me so much with the recent article, my former student who is now in Cambridge.
So I don't know what you're doing here right now and some guests from Manchester that I haven't seen for some time.
So it's really lovely. So thank you for me. I feel a bit at home.
It can be good and bad, but yeah. So burnt of their skin.
Nothing is lovely. Controversy on the Arab question and some of the what is I going to present was already
published because when I was approached there were two options in terms of my current research.
One was to speak about the debate between Marxists after the 1967 war, which would be very contentious.
It's people who said define themselves as Marxists and debated what was going on after 1967.
I'm not going to discuss it today.
And the other option was to go back to the Ottoman period to try and see the beginning of what later would be called the Arab question.
Okay, so that's what I'm going to do today. And right, let me go straight into the issue.
I am trying to understand a controversy that emerged during these years, 1909, 1912 or even 1913.
And the main question that was debated by the participants was simple Sure,
the Hebrew Zionist movement in the 20th century in Ottoman Palestine, should it invest funds to publish a newspaper in Arabic?
That's the question. So you have the Jewish national movement.
And, you know, the day for the reinvention of modern Hebrew is a very important component in the national formation of Zionism.
Really developing the language is very important if you compare, for example, a Zionist.
In to, let's say, the Basque Country or Catalonia or or the Coptic Egypt.
All of these many national groups are attempting to reinvent and form a unified national language,
which is very important for the possibility of national consolidation.
And this is the time when this is taking place, especially before 1914.
Very strong emphasis on the development of people.
And here comes people say, no, we need to publish a newspaper in Arabic or not.
Should we invest money in this question?
So my what I suggest to you is that what started in 1909 is just one another obscure intra Zionist debate, which there were many.
But what started it is like the butterfly in China that produces a storm in New York.
I mean, that's the metaphor.
So what started initially is just a debate between some people who self-defined themselves as Zionists who thought are very heterogeneous, right.
Matured or developed into what I term the first Mizrahi Ashkenazi controversy.
Okay. And this is what I propose here.
And I think that this is why this moment is so important to understand what came next.
And I want to clarify a little bit my terminology here.
So the first thing is that this is a work that follows this book.
Everything that I discuss here is not included in this book.
This book was published in 2013, I think.
Right. But it does fall within still within the field, because we believe me, it's myself.
And to me, my colleague from NYU, we do believe that by coining this, that when we publish this collection of primary sources,
we do believe and of course, it will be a big read and an idealist that I don't know how you translate it to English.
I mean, I'm testifying in my own work, which is not a good thing to do.
But we do believe that we started to, in a way, chart a domain of scholarship that did not even exist in this way.
People did not think of modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought.
Modern Middle Eastern Jewish talk.
If I go out there to the street, whatever the street is, I just grabbed onto it and the graduate student hold him in the middle of the street and say,
and I'm saying the word Jewish intellectual right or Jewish intellectual history.
Chances are that he or she will know something about it because people have connotations
that links Judaism and intellectual activity because of all kinds of reason.
Being a minority group, I'm not getting into it.
So then we'll be able to say Einstein, Freud, there will be able to link intellectual activity and Jews.
Okay. Never mind why sociologically. But.
Nobody will be able to mention one modern Jewish intellectual who is not European.
You will be able to say to mention names of Jews before intellectuals.
But in the Middle Ages of before, I mean, the Rambam wrote his books in Arabic, so he was not exactly a European.
But if you go to the modern period, there is a disconnect.
And that's what we were trying to do, that there is no such thing that is called modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought.
And what I proposed today is what I am going to present now is part of this thing.
Although I ran into the sources after this book was published and.
What typifies modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought, because this is the one within which my talk today develops.
Okay, so I'm just saying it very simply.
The organising principles are these. First, what exactly do you do not do to your fellow?
This is not corroborated. The explanation. This is very famous, a sentence from the people looking.
I believe this is a feature of modern Middle Eastern Jewish could be geography.
Very important element in the story. Jews are Semites.
Okay. Any Jewish renewal, including Zionist renewal, must link itself to the East.
If European Zionist want to go back to their ancient homeland, East, European Jews, they need to be Semites there, not to be Europeans.
There is many of them. Well, during the first 14 years and also later of the 20th century, and Jews are Eastern Arabs, and as such,
they should contribute to the renewal of the Arab world too, so they can contribute to the renewal of Jews in Ottoman Palestine.
At the same time, they are supposed to also contribute to their renewal of the Arab world within which Palestine exists.
Okay, bilingualism, no problem.
Modern Jewish intellectuals in Ottoman Palestine said We have no problem with the project, the Zionist project of renewing the Hebrew language.
No problem at all. We like it, but we are not going to desert Arabic.
So modern Jewish intellectuals in the Middle East usually said If you move into Ottoman Palestine,
it is fine if you are going to reinvent modern Hebrew, but you also need to study Arabic.
And these are very clear sources that mentioned time and again the need for Jews to a to and be bilingual, not only speak Hebrew.
Okay. What romanisation do the modern Jewish intellectuals, including the ones that I'm going to discuss today,
strongly believe that everybody that moves into Ottoman Palestine should become an Ottoman subject.
I'm not getting into the system of capitulation that existed in the late Ottoman Palestine whereby individuals could move
into the Ottoman Palestine but still maintain a link to their countries of origin without taking legal document papers.
So I'm not discussing too much more than me. This decent Jewish thought usually said that it is better for Americans and Brits and English and
Russians that moved to Ottoman Palestine that they will become Ottoman subjects very important.
So automobiles there should is this is a plus and and that's just the context.
Remember that the controversy that we are discussing today takes place when the Ottoman Empire is still there.
Palestine is part of the Ottoman Empire for over four centuries.
And everything that happened later, like, for example, the Balfour Declaration we have I mean, nobody knows what's coming up.
But this is very important to not to view what I discussed today into a logical terms.
I mean, remember that the people that we are going to discuss today,
they have no idea about the upcoming war or they understand that our tensions already at this time in other places of the empire.
So that's the context now. Very, very important part.
Again, related terminology, am I permitted and Moshe permitted to use the word Mizrahi when discussing the pre 1914 period?
That's a big issue. And a Mizrahi ordinarily denotes the formation of a sociological collectivity that came into existence inside the state of Israel,
especially after the 1950s,
when Jews from nine different Middle Eastern states moved into what used to be mandatory Palestine and became the state of Israel.
This happened after 1949, 1950.
So after 1948, because of economic, cultural, demographic and other processes,
a new collectivity emerged that we call Mizrahi, Jews, Mizrahi and Eastern Jews.
And so here what I say is this It is true that, sociologically speaking, if we use the vocabulary of sociology,
it is true that a sociological collectivity emerged in Israel after the 1950s.
But what I propose to you is that Mizrahi or Eastern political thought and orientation and disposition and reasoning,
I mean, did exist in mandatory and also Ottoman Palestine even before Jews moved into the territory from known Arab states.
So that's why I do believe that it is permissible to use the word Mizrahi when I discuss the chapter of history that I discussing today,
and more than that, I'm a bit bolder and said, Hey,
this is the moment when the phrase or the label or the signifier Mizrahi Jews make sense for the first time in history.
That's the, you know, way sound a bit bold proposition that I'm trying to defend here today.
And now let's go back and see. People did use the word Mizrahi Jews before 1948.
This is a source that now was published by the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.
And this is the first time that this source is translated to English.
It didn't exist before. So let us take the words by Estelle Moir.
And this this was published in Hebrew, and that's what she writes last night.
I was fortunate to witness for the first time the clash between the views of Sephardim, whose perspectives and opinions are fully Mizrahi.
That's the word she uses. Mizrahi in the Hebrew right and the openness of their brother,
their skin of same saturated with the European way of thinking to cultural boas dominate according to Estelle Moya,
the ancient Mizrahi Mizrahi global history that we saw before us and the European, she says in 1909.
The letter from. Europe triumphed over the former and will through wash it away completely.
She can see that the clash between these two powers, but she uses the word mizrahim.
At the beginning of the dream, she describes a gathering of people like here in a room in Jaffa in 1909.
She said at the beginning of the gathering, I felt the anxiety one experiences when clouds are filled with electric currents before storms erupt.
This is a bizarre Ashkenazi tension there. Ethnic Jews that come from different places, she said.
Agony was visible on everyone's face. Everything is written in Hebrew.
Yet when a group spoke in Hebrew, mutual understanding was minimal.
Not everything that Europeans said was understood by the Eastern, whether European did not always comprehend the thought of the Eastern.
You can see already Mizrahi non Mizrahi dynamics that we know exist.
Of course, in 1959, in the Black Panther.
But we can see already there are elements that are very similar that resemble very much what we know for the past 1948 period.
Let's see what else she writes.
She says, The nature of the misery index, the what you usually think it is luckier, is to adhere to parts agreed in advance, he or she.
But its he desires to proceed very slowly in Palestine, where rushing tends to trigger his disengagement.
The result is moderate, very moderate.
And it is possible that this alleged shortcoming is actually superior to careless haste in it.
This all relates to the acts of the Zionists in Palestine.
What exactly to do and the European become excited more easily.
It's kind of funny. It's almost she's almost in Occidental, Istanbul, yet she described Europeans in a way in a such a generalised term.
But that's why it is interesting. The European becomes excited more easily.
She has in mind the Zionist in Ottoman Palestine.
He wishes to move forward in huge steps, notwithstanding Palestine's local obstacles over which he is not yet aware.
Okay, the European likes to being, even if you have already been articulated before him as being in a different star.
So you can see already, she points out, the different style of reasoning between the two ethnic groups of Jews.
Where is he? The European Churches Life Grants Principle of Think of Zionism, but it is more pertinent to discuss tangible issues,
and I hope that readers will not be quick to judge my words unfavourably without taking into account that I write in Arabic.
Right? A I write in Arabic and the person assembling them in Hebrew is not fluidity to the
person that translated these words from Hebrew to from Arabic to Hebrew is her husband,
Dr. Shimon Morgado, which we are going to discuss quite a lot.
Know my aim or Istanbul, yalla tells us in 1909 is not to judge the battles between our parties,
but to record the impressions that that a Jewish gathering in the land of Israel made on me.
And then that's how she says that defines her, said a Hebrew Arab woman every other year.
That's how she defines herself in 1909 in Jaffa.
Okay, so let me just recapitulated to what I'm going to say.
You can see here that it is not that I Moshe Maharis, imposing here vocabulary that developed after 1948 and throws it all into Ottoman Palestine.
I truly believe that actors in the time themselves were articulating, Mizrahi thought.
Okay, right now the last thing I want to say is what does it mean?
Ashkenazim is like controversy, because that's the part of the title that I'm using here.
So when I say controversy, it's a debate about social, political, cultural, economic or artistic topics that is comprised of these.
And this is the elements that need to exist in order for us to describe our controversy with the words asking us not to use lightly.
Okay, so what does it mean? A, the controversy must be public.
So if, like you, we see it on the large. Debate issues.
That's not a controversy, okay. Because nobody knows about it.
It must involve at least two individuals, each side, so to speak, but usually more in the controversy.
I'm going to discuss. I'm discussing today about 24 people were part of it and it was public.
It must involve at least one party said the finding is this friend is laughing and that's the case here.
It must last days, even weeks. And most crucially, when one says a mizrahi obscure as a controversy.
Right. By definition,
this means that he needs to address some element of the post 1882 a Palestine-Israel question and or its associated intra Jewish relationships.
It is about the question of Palestine solutions right now.
Make no mistake, so far the Jews and Ashkenazi Jews had disagreements about all kinds of issues,
even though Herzl in 1896 1890 said during the first and the first Zionist Congress there was a debate between him and of Shalom.
Shalom, Yehuda. I forgot. Yeah, it's an Iraqi Jew from Palestine.
Shami had a very famous professor that we know that they had a bit of a clash about these issues.
But that's not a controversy because nobody knew it.
It was not public. So it doesn't come in a way. Well, no, it was related.
And so what I suggest to you that according to the definition I provided,
the first ashkenazim is that a controversy took place only in 1909 in the way I defined it.
And more than that, it was in October 1911 that it truly assumed that thanks to Ashkenazim the radical groups or even clash.
Why? Because of the writing and the activities of two individuals.
Dr. Shimon Mariano happened to be the husband of Istanbul.
You are a Jew from Jeff and also a medical doctor and a very important Ashkenazi
intellectual and activist Doctor of Blue Report who has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne.
And also there's a street in Tel Aviv named after him, a very nice street to live in, by the way.
A very, very expensive real estate.
Right. So now I'm just going to simply read together with you sources from the period itself,
because I think that the sources speak for themselves better than I do.
Everything that is here was translated from Hebrew.
Okay. So for example, one participant writes the first bomb.
When he says the first bombs, he means the first Palestinian Zionist Koresh.
That was violent and threatening.
That's what he has in mind. He writes a memo representing one side of the controversy, the one that said defines itself as Mizrahi.
Okay. When we look at the Jews in Palestine predicting the first bomb before its actual appearance, we fail to anticipate how soon it would explode.
No, it hurts. He says that he communicates with Ashkenazi Zionist in Ottoman Palestine.
He asks, Did you hear it sound of my dozing Ashkenazi brothers, where your nerves are shaken following its explosion?
Or is it that, you know, confirm what I have long suspected,
namely that you're very sensitive, have been utterly destroyed already for such a long time.
He refers to the miserable, in a way, the terrible history of Jews in Eastern Europe in relation to anti-Semitism.
Of course, that oppressed them so much, he says.
And that is it possible that you have heard nothing over of recent news from Haifa regarding attacks on local Jews?
So this is a situation where in 19 oh ten Palestinians attack local Jews due to the conflict that is emerging relatively early.
And perhaps then he says, listen, this is again respectable music of Sephardic Jews in Ottoman Palestine.
That's what he said. Perhaps for you brothers, this come from Eastern Europe, right?
Such news means little because you have been long accustomed to physical persecution without in the Hebrew and witnessed in your body heads open,
stomach dismembered bodies. Of course he means pogroms right in Eastern Europe.
Yet do you have any idea how much these developments.
Then local Jews, they depress them not only because they Sephardic Jews or Mizrahi Jews,
are quite naturally extremely worried about Palestine's situation.
Peace and tranquillity have thus far dominated their lives in Ottoman Palestine as they are centuries distant from
such inhumane behaviour clashes between Jews and non-Jews that deteriorate to due to pogroms and the murders.
Right. Look, as Jews, Sephardic Jews in means also warned because they are significantly more familiar with the lands hard and dangerous conditions.
If, heaven forbid, it would also experience the pattern of pogrom suffered by best Jewish generation lookers.
Jews are so familiar with the spirit of the Arab people among whom they lived safely until now.
Those in brothers pay attention to our situation, learn thoroughly from this incident in Haifa and open your eyes that what he's
trying to say to the members of the Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine,
you who by moving to this peaceful land from Eastern Europe.
Right. A peaceful, tranquil land, escaped persecution.
Where where exactly will you run next?
If the situation deteriorates in Palestine, is it you who are to be blamed for your boycott of Palestinian labourers and goods?
Because there was a bit of a boycott that was going on in Mecca,
then you were issued to non Hebrew labourer and so he says you are to be blamed for your boycott.
The loud cacophony, a lot of big words.
Why do you think my generation and for terrorism are a strong word?
Where are you now? You who? The consequence of your impulsiveness placed more obstacles than bridges on our whole movement.
You mean Zionism? Because he is a Zionist and our last hopes and feel.
When will you hide from sight? He said. Your brothers are furthest from being in touch with the lands Ottoman or Arab masters,
while at the same time removed from the poisonous Arab writing, which will occasionally able to translate only fragments to you into Hebrew.
He means translating writings in Arabic in late Ottoman Palestine in relation
to the Zionist movement that are very hostile to everything that is going on.
So to conclude, this source, you can see here two camps in a way, both self-defined themselves as Zionists.
One is arguing that the mainstream Zionist movement in 1902 1911 is developing in a way that is very
antagonistic to the Palestinian national movement of the Palestinian directly in Ottoman Palestine.
Now this all relates to the question of whether the Zionist movement should publish a newspaper in Arabic to try and
engage with Arabic speaking individuals and with the Arabs in Palestine in order to form some common ground to debate,
discuss and discuss the issues.
And so I can tell you right now that back then the opposition to the Zionist movement, investing in a newspaper in Arabic was quite great.
And the person that in a way exemplified this position best was Dr. Reuben people.
I mean, he was quite there and that's what he writes.
I mean, that's what he says. I mean, he writes seven different articles about the issue.
And what I suggested, the principal contention for him is this if the newspaper is a Hebrew newspaper in terms of content,
if it discusses issues that relate to Jews in Ottoman Palestine, then it will not be an Arab newspaper.
And if it is an Arab newspaper, it is not going to be a Hebrew newspaper.
What I suggest to you here that you can see here a train of thought among intellectuals,
very important intellectuals, including people like Brenner and others, that in the period of before 1914.
Right, simply view Hebrew and Arabic.
Zionism. Palestinians hate it, but they view it in a very dichotomous way that they too cannot meet,
that there's no way to bridge between the two communities and even their languages.
And then this is what you would report, right?
Okay. Again, this is written in Hebrew. He says about you in relation to those who are interested in publishing a Hebrew newspaper in Arabic.
That's the way it is defined, he says. And here come our own Arab Jews.
Now a European Zionist refers to local Jews.
He says, Arab Jews. It's not, I don't know, all kinds of radical Arab Jews, Yugoslavian national targets, Arab Jews, he says.
Arab Jews. Okay. And he employs the signifier disparagingly.
They said it in the word. I mean, yeah, not in the positive way.
And he comes out. Arab Jews try to do what we did in Europe.
Publish tried to publish newspapers in the local languages of the communities within which we live.
Like, for example, the British Jews tried to publish in English and make their case in English.
That's what he said, you said. But it is one of the options, my friend.
Sephardic Jews.
If you wish to create a Hebrew newspaper in Arabic of the first European type I mentioned in a second, I'll explain what he means and come along.
And we Europeans will furnish you acknowledge education and wisdom on how useless this exercise is bound to be.
As was the case in Europe, such an initiative is stillborn by definition.
If you are to have made a newspaper in Arabic for intra Jewish purposes right, then permit me to laugh outright, he says.
For whom do you intend to create a newspaper in Arabic?
Thank God we have not sunk to such a level where we need to speak in Arabic, in the land of Israel, to the people of Israel.
I cannot understand if those two or three important, a brainless, assimilationist,
those that are in supporting the idea of the Jews will speak Arabic in Palestine are viewed as assimilationist.
I'm Sephardic Jews who push for a merger with Arabs in acceptance of their language at the expense of Hebrew language and literature.
Speak to us about creating a new state in Arabic. So I understand that a few exceptional individual among Sephardic Jews that think about this issue.
Right. And and. From one twisted minded individual human.
Dr. Murray I heard that it isn't worth setting one scientist seven men to finance an Arabic newspaper.
These are some kind of ideas that were around, you know, to find the resources needed to publish newspaper in Arabic.
But we should not argue with such people that think that is worth symbolically to say.
The one Zionist settlements in order to publish the newspaper in Arabic are my words.
The rights of the people are directly to all those young Saladin describing the sentence
nationalist Zionist founding and presenting itself to us as products of the new national revival,
the national Zionist Revival. Then we say, he says we and we says we means many European Zionist in Ottoman Palestine.
On Gentiles, namely Palestinians use that we have 000 effect for Jews.
We have no need for Hebrew newspaper Arabic. Okay.
So no, just read now the response.
But the other side of the controversy, the Israeli side.
And this is time, Shimon, we are in.
Okay. So this is not from 1911 and in Hebrew, right?
Nobody would think of me as his opponent because I do not follow his word with a man, he said.
And because I this the third thing is that this is the words that Shimon Moyal uses, not me.
So I think they have demonstrated that his European opinions and these experiences are insufficient for the proper assessment of Eastern affairs.
The contempt reflected in movement is visible.
The he issue is about against me in all enlightened Saladin, whom he derides with insults,
mocking, ridicule, laughter and yawning, and in doing so before brings in my goal.
I mean, I hope grandiose behaviour towards the Red-Headed youngster daily the sights, the devoted behaviour of girl yet visibly David in the Bible.
And now he says and this is again his word is a primary source that I read here.
It's not us. It's not position from a from the past 1940 Spirit into the Ottoman period.
He says she's one way of telling us our guest, Mr. Ludvig Booth.
Have you ever had the opportunity of embarking on a long journey to find yourself
suddenly caught in a heavy rain and then invited by a gypsy to be a guest in his tent?
The gypsies now are Sephardic Jews. Okay, that's the metaphor on your departure.
Did your education and manners guide you to condemn the tent owner for his poverty?
Was this an parochialism or instead thank you and leave you with gratitude and praise, even if you primarily views as mizrahim as easterners.
That's what Memorial says to love people who, even if you've been,
you ought to remember that you are a guest and that look at Jews in our ancestors, right?
Suffered many years to maintain their national identity.
He says right amidst the many national groups that generation after generation rule the land of Israel or the land of Palestine.
These are the lands of Israel as local Jews who you value as of zero worth,
but who are nonetheless the primary foundation for the Israeli national revival.
That's what he says to people. If those are the people who you deem assimilationist, look a Jew, that.
Whose job you describe as brainless and foreigners who are doubting their national zealous commitment when compared to your own you nationalism.
Right. Then, please tell us who are the nationalists according to your lucid European opinions.
Because I mean, that's the first thing. I think what happens here he is.
He's protesting the fact that an East European Jew with a Jew from the Sorbonne moves to
Ottoman Palestine and claims vis a vis Arabic speaking Jews that they are assimilationist.
And to be perfectly honest, there is some merit in this argument because it's a little bit odd if I with my,
you know, very bad English, would come to our Jewish or non-Jewish British students in your community.
I mean, it's just everything from the perspective of Israeli Jews is not about Palestine, is, oh, we are assimilationist.
We maintain a collectivity, Jewish collectivity here for so many centuries.
How can you say that we are assimilation is because we are Jews, as far as we know.
I mean, yes, Arabic speaking Jews, but we are Jews and we didn't become anything else.
That's the insult that he is experiencing. So he says no.
The third line here, from here, he says, we a people who are unreasonably marche immersion evidence from European Jewish newspapers.
Right. Written in the language of people whose chief national belief rests on melting everyone into the general society.
Well, considering that that applicable to an Ottoman society whose Chief Marshal indicates
that each tribe and race should remain within its own customs and languages,
provided that this idea is joined by the level of the Ottoman nation and knowledge of other group languages.
By the way, this is you don't understand how important this green sentence is,
because the term real right now describes two competing modes of nationalism.
He says that nationalism in Europe, including France in this country,
is a nationalist that aims to melt everyone and to turn, for example, Jews into good French or good English people.
Is that what he says? Basically what you need to understand, that's not nationalism in Ottoman Palestine.
In Ottoman Palestine, a national revival does not require one to lose their own parochial, so to speak, identity.
On the contrary, he points out, to defend the underdog of an empire.
You can be a nationalist, but you can still maintain your distinctive identity.
There's no need to assimilate or to become like everybody else.
That's why this is very important. So what are the conditions?
The conditions are these.
You can be national in order to make Palestine provided that you support and respect the empire which is multinational, right.
A And being provided that you are a you know, the culture and the language of other groups around.
If you do that, you can be nationalist. It's not a problem.
That's the view that the Israeli side of the controversy presents.
In three 1914, Palestine. In his narrow outlook about the condition of life,
we still lose people reminds me of that little fish swimming to the edge of its lake, and concluding is that is also the world.
And since life outside the lake is impossible, now the lake, he means Europe.
Here, of course, he said to me, What happens to you, not only you and new people, but the European Zionist,
you know, to and Palestine is that they think that the European lake is applicable everywhere.
And if Jews fail to advocate for the Jewish cause in Eastern Europe, for example, in Russian or in English,
they think that it is not possible to advocate for the Jewish cause in Arabic, in Autumn and Palestine, because that's their conclusion.
That's beyond their link. It's very hard to comprehend that one can be a native speaker of Arabic without assimilation.
And this is the argument in general. You also reminded Maria of that even on the kitchen peasant who was asked why he doesn't plant leather beans,
which is full of the national Egyptian food on his land.
And I said that it is because when such seeds were planted in Russia, they failed to grow.
Again, you see, the analogy said to me, Yes, if you take seeds of food and plant them in the ground in Russia, they're not going to grow.
But if you do it in Palestine or or in Egypt, you are going to have food.
It's not the same. He is trying to point out the difference between Ottoman Palestine and Eastern and also proper Western Europe.
That's the argument here. And there is a logical response to Moir and that saying that came was published in October of 1911, two weeks later.
He writes a certain man. It doesn't even mention it.
Dr. Murray has named a certain man among our Saudi brothers, for instance, insulted by my words.
His response did not and cannot teach me anything. It presents nothing they don't already know.
The brilliant idea of selling one to Jewish settlement, to an untruth,
to finance an Arabic newspaper, has not yet been endorsed by our Safadi Brothers.
We have not yet sunk to such a low level enough level of for the country.
So a lot of people interpret the symbolic suggestions of yes to say a Jewish settlement in order to find money to publish a newspaper in Arabic.
He sees it as a betrayal or or is an expression of the insufficient love for the land.
That's basically the argument.
And also, there is a bit of an attempt here. I mean, I think that there's also a little bit of an attempt is really never to divide and rule,
because what he's trying to do here is to try to no split Sephardic Ottoman Jewish intellectuals and say some are assimilationist and bad,
are not proper Zionists, whereas the others don't buy into these ideas,
but follow our leadership and our ideas about exclusive a renewal of Hebrew alone without dealing with Arabic.
Right. I don't know how much trouble he here was.
Oh, right. So it's not a lot. But I do want to read one more source against the primary source,
because I think they speak better for me than us in relation to the disaster of attention and controversy.
So I'm going to use them as a lump of a sign if I did the whole.
That's how he signs his writings. But he's not there.
I mean, he also signs his own name. So it's not that he only presents himself in a Sunni pseudonym.
I mean, he also cites under his own name 75 year old Sephardic Jew.
Sephardic, though, which is a pure Sephardi in northern Palestine.
Again, that's the sort of his Iraqi feeling.
Well, originally, but there are many Iraqis that moved into Ottoman Palestine in the early 19th century, for example, the shadow family.
I mean, so I mean, the guy can be Iraqi originally, but can also be in a frame that lives in Ottoman Palestine 100 or even more years.
So. Okay. But so anyway. And so now again, he writes In response to a lot of people, to the same individual, he says,
you know, people cannot understand the substance of and necessity for the newspaper,
which we Native Jews born in Jerusalem proposed the Arabic newspaper since arriving from the diaspora.
He says to all the Europeans, out of that time, if you remain distant from us.
Okay. You need a journalist or occurrence, write nor become involved in our lives, which you deem strange.
Now this is he speaks about Sephardi life in Ottoman Palestine.
Your observation of us remain diasporic in nature.
You said you bring the diaspora into Palestine. Your persistent Francophone vantage point.
Because again, it's a page from the Sorbonne. Yet your persistent Francophone Vulcan for religion to imagine the Arabs in European terms.
You interpret local newspaper as if they were European.
But you are wrong. One European newspapers in Europe, of course, are published by different political parties to specific audiences.
Learn from them or learning. But in the land of Israeli bias, the newspapers are generally nature.
Their number is limited, and they have few subscribers, even in the big trade centre Beirut capital of Greater Syria.
This is 1911. Yeah, there are no more than five or six.
Newspapers you wrote to argue that local Jews wish to replicate European activities, and as a European you are far from understanding us.
The newspaper we envision is not the one you describe.
It aims to be a general newspaper, not a Jewish newspaper, but a general newspaper whose editors and writers would be committed to the truth.
Professional journalism may mean such a newspaper does not exist here since the 1908,
a constitutional revolution in Istanbul, in Turkey, the ultimate aim.
But the government has begun to consider seriously what newspapers print.
There was a big opening in the Ottoman Empire after the 1908 revolution.
Today, journalism is the means and power between people and government.
You need a newspaper in Hebrew, newspaper in Arabic to make your case.
That's what you said. A judge can challenge your libel against Hebrew Arabic writers and young Sephardim,
whom you label assimilationist, of course, that they were very, very insulted to be called assimilationist.
I mean, the ways of life in which we were raised in the lands of Israel's bureau climate did not
evoke the assimilation controversy that has dominated some of our European brothers,
because assimilation is a big issue in Europe. Of course, our descendants settled in the land hundreds of years ago, living Jewish lives.
We have remained faithful to Judaism and other nationalities living with us
Palestinians to have likewise remained faithful to their wishes and religions.
Okay. And I repeat of diasporic brothers.
You mean Ashkenazi Zionists in Ottoman Palestine?
On settling this land refrain from viewing us paternalistic realistically looking down on us and alienating us.
We have had enough of the many errors your predecessor committed as a consequence of their unfamiliarity with the lands, life and nature.
Remember the context. I mean, it is the context whereby the beginning,
when the Zionist Palestinian clash emerges in the first moments where it begins to assume via a violent form,
it didn't and was not yet violent that much.
I conclude here, Alhamdulillah, as they say.
And so the newspaper was published not a lot, but this is in 1914.
First of all, to Maria, the subtitle to Mania, which is, of course, the boast of the Ottomans.
So you can see also that the title of the newspaper relates it's a generous newspaper.
It's not a Jewish newspaper, but a Jewish Hebrew newspaper in Arabic.
And in this specific page, we don't have a lot of the surviving copies of this.
I think that's the only, only page that remains.
And so it so happens that back then it was four pages, the newspaper.
It was just. And this first page doesn't say anything about Jews Palestine.
It discusses issues that relates to the Ottoman Empire in general.
But then, of course, the war broke and buried not only this newspaper, but many other people, too.
And the last thing I want to say is that I want to visually try to convey again and concretely,
what is it that the Sephardic Jews, modern Jewish intellectuals in Ottoman Palestine thought during that time?
What was it that they wanted? What did they see? Right. And what I believe is that this can capture this this thing.
It is it is a vision that combines everything but does not negate parochial identities.
So you can see, for example, this kind of a flag, right?
It's a flag that brings everybody together under a single flag, but without one needs to, for example, convert to Christianity or or Islam.
That's the big issue. I mean, so just to me, it's like a vision.
A vision of of of of of a fusion.
You know, this is something that is very. He's very different in the way that and by the way, these are Zionists.
That's also very important to bear in mind. These are not people that are don't self-defined themselves as Zionists.
And so yeah, that's the that's the.
The A visualisation in a way of the intellectual ideas of this group of intellectuals during the late Ottoman Empire.
I think that's the way that they should be. Understood. Thank you.
Thank you so much.