The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, 11 April 2022, https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13530194.2022.2064819 Conflicting German Orientalism: Zionist Arabists and Arab Scholars, 1926–1938 Amit Levy University of Wisconsin–Madison & Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected] Abstract: Founded in 1926 by a group of mainly German-Jewish Orientalists, the Hebrew University’s School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem was the primary site of the university’s efforts to achieve ‘rapprochement’ with Arab and Muslim scholars in the Middle East. Using previously unpublished archival material in German, Arabic, Hebrew and English, this article exposes the School’s endeavours in the first decade after its establishment to promote this goal, focusing on the attempts to recruit an Arab member to its ranks. Led by the School’s founder Josef Horovitz, these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful as a result of the inherent contradictions in its existence: an institute whose members are inflexibly committed to the German Orientalist legacy of a philological discipline now transplanted into the living Orient; and an aspired intellectual bridge between Jews and Arabs, built within a Zionist framework limiting its ability to attract local non-Jewish scholars. Following this failure, it was ultimately an Aleppo Jew, Isaac Shamosh, who was recruited to fill this role, his hybrid ArabJewish identity meant to bridge this political-cultural gap. Keywords: migration of knowledge; oriental studies; Josef Horovitz; Zionism; Isaac Shamosh 2 From its earliest days, the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have declared that this Jewish spiritual centre would welcome Arab scholars as well. Before and after World War I, Zionist leaders such as Menachem Ussishkin and Chaim Weizmann expressed the idea that the university would become ‘a true locus of political rapprochement’, for ‘members of all races and all religious affiliations’.1 However, by April 1925 – when the Hebrew University was officially inaugurated at a festive event with Lord Arthur Balfour as its guest of honour – it was apparent that no Arabs were among its designated faculty members. And while many participants in this event were busy celebrating this grand achievement of cultural Zionism – a moment of which European Jewish intellectuals had dreamt for decades – concerns about the possible negative impact of the University on Arab-Jewish relations were not entirely absent. The Frankfurtbased professor of Semitic philology Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), for example, expressed this concern already before the official inauguration. Having made a short stop in Cairo on his way from Frankfurt to Jerusalem, he reported to the Hebrew University chancellor, Judah Leon Magnes (1877–1948), that Egyptian scholars were ‘definitely hostile’ towards the idea of opening a Hebrew university, seeing it as a Zionist political move.2 * I would like to thank Aya Elyada, Liat Kozma, Abigail Jacobson, Adi Livny, Yfaat Weiss, and the participants of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow’s DokKreis for their useful comments on earlier versions of the text; and Ron Makleff and Anat Schultz for their assistance with translation and language editing. 1 Shalom Schwartz, Ussishkin be-Igrotav (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1949-1950), 151; ‘ha-Universita ha-ʻIvrit b’Yerushalaim’, Hatsfira, October 3, 1918, 9. Translations from non-English sources are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2 Diary entry from March 22, 1925, appears in Arthur A. Goren, ed., Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 231. 3 Upon his return to Frankfurt a few weeks later, Horovitz shared his concerns with the readers of a local newspaper. He argued that inviting Lord Balfour to the inauguration ceremony was a grave mistake that would identify the university with the British government and make it difficult to forge ties with the Arab world. He hoped, though, that this mistake would be mitigated by the establishment of an institute for Oriental Studies at the Hebrew University.3 The work done in this institute, he hoped sometime later, would indicate a ‘ground of intellectual interests common to Jewish and Arabic scholars’, therefore helping ‘to promote the good feeling between these two communities’.4 These were not empty remarks, but a plan already set into motion: in May 1925 Horovitz submitted to Magnes, per the latter’s request, a memorandum laying the foundations for an institute of Arabic and Islamic studies.5 The research institute established a year later under Horovitz’s leadership as the Hebrew University’s School of Oriental Studies (hereafter: HUSOS) was the primary site of the university’s institutional efforts to achieve what was mainly referred to as ‘rapprochement’ with Arab scholars. University officials and faculty considered Oriental Studies an intellectual bridge to the Orient and sought to engage Arab and Muslim intellectuals in joint scholarly activity, with the primary goal to recruit an Arab lecturer or professor to HUSOS. 3 Josef Horovitz, ‘Die Universität Jerusalem’, Frankfurter Zeitung, August 16, 1925. On this article and its context see Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, ‘“Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”: The German-Jewish Orientalist Josef Horovitz in Germany, India, and Palestine’, in The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism: Reversing the Gaze, eds. Suzannah Heschel and Umar Ryad (London: Routledge, 2018), 177–8. 4 Unaddressed letter by Josef Horovitz, March 28, 1928, Central Archives of the Hebrew University (hereafter CAHU), 91\I:1928. 5 Josef Horovitz, ‘Vorschläge für die Errichtung eines Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Jerusalem’, May 14, 1925, CAHU, 91:1925-27. 4 This article explores the attempts of HUSOS members to promote these goals from the institute’s establishment in 1926 and until the late 1930s, within the political context of its aspiration to intellectual rapprochement nevertheless overshadowed by the escalating ArabJewish conflict. Building upon various archival documents, many of which are studied here for the first time, it begins by portraying the successful initial steps towards establishing academic relations with Arab scholars and intellectuals in Palestine and beyond. Subsequently, the article delves into the search for an Arab/Muslim faculty member, and the actions of various parties – professors, students, and Zionist activists – in relation to this search. The political circumstances of the 1930s, combined with the German academic prism of the Jewish scholars, did not allow HUSOS to hire an Arab professor. Instead, the search ended with the recruitment of the first Mizrahi (‘Oriental’) Jew in HUSOS – the Aleppo-born Yitzhak (Isaac) Shamosh. Shamosh’s hybrid Arab-Jewish identity, with Arabic as his native language, made him, culturally, a sufficient substitute to the Arab lecturer sought at the Oriental institute. Furthermore, I argue that this hybrid identity accorded with the German-Jewish orientalist legacy of HUSOS, bridging the gap between its leadership’s academic commitments and critics’ demand for practical training, while also maintaining, albeit mainly on a declarative level, the political aspirations of Arab-Jewish intellectual rapprochement. Migration of knowledge – from Europe in general, and Germany in particular – played a crucial role in shaping the Hebrew University both academically and administratively.6 Being the flagship project of cultural Zionism and the first university in 6 The role migration of knowledge – especially from Germany – played in the history of the Hebrew University was studied from several intellectual and cultural angles. See, for instance: David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Shaul Katz, ‘The Scion and Its Tree: The 5 Palestine, the Hebrew University managed to attract European- and especially GermanJewish scholars; their flow increased after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and the subsequent implementation of racial policy. 7 HUSOS is among the best examples of that dynamic: its first generation of scholars was almost entirely comprised of Orientalists who received their academic training in German universities, a legacy with a crucial impact on this institute’s self-understanding, goals, and future development.8 The study of Arabic and Islam in German universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was text-oriented and philological in nature, natural for a relatively new discipline needing to prove itself in the German age of philology.9 As Edward Said famously claimed, Germany’s lack of the direct colonial, utilitarian interest in the nineteenth-century Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Its German Epistemological and Organizational Origins’, in The Institution of Science and the Science of Institutions: The Legacy of Joseph Ben-David, ed. Marcel Herbst (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 103–44; Yfaat Weiss, ‘Ad Acta: Nachgelassenes in Jerusalem’, Naharaim 13, no. 1–2 (2019): 99–115; Adi Livny, ‘Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus: The Pragmatic Binationalism of D.W. Senator (1930–1949)’, Studies in Cotemporary Jewry 31 (2020): 225–46. 7 Dan Diner and Moshe Zimmermann, ‘Israel’s German Academic Legacy. An Introduction’, in Disseminating German Tradition, eds. Dan Diner and Moshe Zimmermann (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009), 8; Weiss, ‘Ad Acta’, 104. 8 Katz, ‘The Scion and Its Tree’, 109. As the first Orientalist university institute in Palestine, HUSOS and its German-Jewish roots have raised some scholarly interest, especially by its own graduates. See Menachem Milson, ‘The Beginnings of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’, Judaism 45, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 168–183; and Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, ‘The Transplantation of Islamic Studies from Europe to the Yishuv and Israel’, in The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. Martin Kramer (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999), 249– 260. See also Johnston-Bloom, ‘“Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”’. 9 Ursula Wokoeck, German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945 (Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 211. 6 Orient shared by other European powers also contributed to these philological tendencies.10 However, with the establishment of the Hebrew University, which attracted young GermanJewish scholars of Arabic and Islamic Studies to Jerusalem, the textual encounter with the Orient was, arguably, transformed into a living one: the discipline studying the Orient – its religions, languages, and cultures – was translocated into the Orient itself. Transferred knowledge, to be sure, is no more static and unchanging than those who transfer it.11 However, the colonial implications of Zionism make this case of migrating knowledge particularly intriguing. Thanks to its supposed lack of colonial impetus, Said decided not to address German Orientalism; but perhaps this field of knowledge found its impetus in Palestine. The mostly German-Jewish Orientalists had to re-evaluate their methodology and conceptions when arriving in Palestine, their expertise in Arabic and Islam now also needed by various Zionist players to promote political and cultural causes related to the Arab-Jewish conflict.12 In that sense, their arrival in Palestine generated an ongoing tension between their German Orientalist heritage and local political demands. 10 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 19. Although this generalizing claim was used by Said’s critics to undermine his paradigm, scholarship on German Orientalism tends to agree with this part of his argument, as far as German universities until World War I are concerned. See, for instance, Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 446–7. 11 Mitchell G. Ash, ‘Wissens- und Wissenschaftstransfer – Einführende Bemerkungen’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 29 (2006): 183. 12 On this conflict between German Orientalist tradition and Zionist needs in the educational and cultural spheres of Mandate Palestine, see Yonatan Mendel, ‘From German Philology to Local Usability: The Emergence of “Practical” Arabic in the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa – 1913– 48’, Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 1 (2016): 1–26; Amit Levy, ‘A Man of Contention: Martin Plessner (1900–1973) and His Encounters with the Orient’, Naharaim 10, no. 1 (2016): 79–100; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Orientalism, Jewish Studies and Israeli Society: A Few Comments’, Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 237–69; and Hanan Harif, ‘The Orient between Arab and 7 Several studies have tackled aspects deriving from this question. Most of them did so through the prism of native figures who were active in the realms of Jewish education and journalism in Mandatory Palestine, and were often excluded, at least partially, from the ‘pure’ academic work in the Hebrew University – such as Israel Ben-Ze’ev (Wolfensohn, 1899– 1980) whose life and work attracted vast scholarly attention in recent years. 13 However, these studies have typically refrained from a thorough examination of the developments within the university itself, within the academic realm. Seeing the university as the locus of Orientalist knowledge production, where the discipline crystallised institutionally – shaping the image of Zionist Oriental Studies for many decades to come – it is therefore beneficial to ask what happened, in terms of Arab-Jewish intellectual relations, with those who were the decision makers in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Jewish National Revivals: Josef Horovitz, Shelomo Dov Goitein and Oriental Studies in Jerusalem’, in Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Borders, and the Search for Belonging, ed. Ottfried Fraisse (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 319– 36. On the political implications of the study of Arabic and Islam in Israel – mainly after 1948, and with a clear focus on questions of national security – see Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Yonatan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Political and Security Considerations in the Making of Arabic Language Studies in Israel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Eyal Clyne, Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice: Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (London/New York: Routledge, 2019). 13 Liora Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 142–221; Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016), 86–120; Aviv Derri, ‘The Construction of “Native” Jews in Late Mandate Palestine: An Ongoing Nahda as a Political Project’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 2 (2021): 253–71. 8 Delving into the question of Arab-Jewish intellectual relations and the declared Zionist aspirations for betterment, this article will demonstrate how the tension between migrating German knowledge and local Zionist expectations was a primary driving force behind the development of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Mandate Palestine. Attempts to forge ties with local Arab intellectuals and find among them a faculty member to recruit to the Hebrew University, shed new light on the history of German Orientalism as migrating knowledge, the significance of the German-Jewish legacy to Zionist and Israeli Oriental Studies, and the circumstances under which this discipline crystallized. Common Ground Opened in 1926, HUSOS was meant to ‘undertake work connected with [Arabic and Islamic studies] and to serve as a center for all those who are interested in the pursuance of these studies’. This would hopefully earn the appreciation of ‘savants of the Arabic speaking countries’ and serve as an intellectual bridge to them through research topics they are also interested in.14 The compilation of a concordance to pre- and early-Islamic Arabic poetry and the publication of the ninth-century Arabic work ʾAnsāb al-ʾAshrāf (Genealogies of the Nobles) by the historian ʾAḥmad ibn Yaḥyā al-Balādhurī – the research institute’s two earliest major projects – were ‘chosen purposely in order to show that the Hebrew University was concerned with the study of Islam and of Moslem peoples and their literature on their own account’, as university chancellor Magnes proclaimed.15 These philological projects embodied the German heritage of HUSOS: Horovitz, the founder, had a personal research 14 Unaddressed letter by Josef Horovitz, March 28, 1928. Named the School of Oriental Studies in its official English publications, in Hebrew, however, it was ‘ha-Makhon le-Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ’, the Institute of Oriental Studies. 15 Judah Leon Magnes, Addresses by the Chancellor of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1936), 71. 9 interest in the concordance, since pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was one of his areas of expertise;16 and the ʾAnsāb al-ʾAshrāf manuscript has been eyed by European (and in particular, German) Orientalists since the late nineteenth century. Photocopies, some of them made about twenty years earlier by Horovitz himself, were sent to Jerusalem from the Prussian State Library in Berlin. 17 German Orientalism, in other words, exerted direct influence on the topics studied at HUSOS. But Magnes’ remark implies another role for HUSOS that influenced its academic work, which greatly deviated from the strictly academic interest usually identified with German universities. While maintaining the work’s philological focus, the university founders hoped that HUSOS’s existence and activities would prove that the Zionist institution was not ‘accessible only to Jews’, as some of its Arab critics warned before its establishment.18 These two facets of the School’s political purpose – first, to establish a link with the Arab-Muslim intellectual world, and second, to dispel suspicion that the Hebrew University was to be exclusively Jewish – are entwined in its institutional history. Moreover, 16 Johnston-Bloom, ‘“Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”’, 169. 17 Sabine Mangold-Will, ‘Photo-Kopieren als wissenschaftliche Praxis? Technische Innovation und gelehrte Distinktion in der Orientalischen Philologie des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Kolossale Miniaturen: Festschrift für Gerrit Walther, eds. Gerrit Walther, Matei Chihaia and Georg Eckert (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2019), 60, 67. 18 Hugo Bergmann to Chaim Weizmann, January 2, 1922, Weizmann Archives, Yad Chaim Weizmann, 5-688. On the eve of the Hebrew University’s inauguration ceremony in April 1925, an editorial in the Jaffa-based Arabic newspaper Filastin condemned it as mere ‘political propaganda, since contemporary science does not use the dead Hebrew language’ (‘ʾiftitāḥ aljāmiʿa al-yahūdiyya’, Filastin, March 31, 1925, 2). Newspapers in Egypt shared the negative attitude towards the new Zionist university; see Mahmud Awad, …Waʿalaykum al-Salām, Cairo: Dār al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabī, 1984, 77–82, also cited in Shimon Shamir, ‘Cultural and Educational Links’, in ‘Discussion: The Relationship between Egypt and the Jewish Yishuv before 1948’, Cathedra 67 (1993): 97 (Hebrew). 10 these external political considerations, dictated by the new local context, sometimes stood at odds with the German Orientalist knowledge and its ethos of neutrality. Perhaps surprisingly, the expectation that HUSOS would cultivate a dialogue with the Arab-Muslim intellectual world was to some extent fulfilled. Archival documents and press excerpts, mostly from the Jewish side, reflect a wide-ranging network of connections between scholars from HUSOS and their colleagues in the Middle East during the Mandate period. These ties developed mainly out of shared spheres of interest and research. The professional ties – which often evolved into genuine friendship – can be divided into two main circles. The first, the literary circle, refers to a wide network of ties with Arab and Muslim scholars, which arguably represented Horovitz and Magnes’ academic vision for HUSOS. The focus on textual research encouraged the growth of a common language with Arabs who were themselves scholars of Arabic literature and Islam. These included wellknown literary scholars such as Issaf Nashashibi (1882–1948) from Jerusalem, whose sumptuous home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood served as a library and a meeting place for social gatherings, often welcoming Jewish intellectuals. 19 On one occasion, Nashashibi sent HUSOS member David Hartwig (Zvi) Baneth (1893–1973) his work The Eternal Hero Saladin and the Eternal Poet Ahmed Shawki, published in 1932, for his review.20 Baneth ‘Met Issaf Nashashibi’, Davar, January 23, 1948, 10. For Nashashibi's biography see Jihad Ahmad 19 Saleh, Muhammad Issaf Nashashibi (1882–1948), ʿAlāmat Filastīn Waʾadīb al-ʿArabiyya (Ramallah: Al-Ittiḥād al-ʿām lil-Kuttāb wal-ʾUdabāʾ al-Filastīniyīn, 2010). In 1947, as the battles in Jerusalem intensified, Nashashibi left Jerusalem for Cairo, where he died the next year. According to his nephew, Nashashibi's copious library was pillaged in 1948 by Jews and Arabs, and books it contained reached the National Library of Israel: Gish Amit, ‘Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s “Collection” of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem’, Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 4 (2011): 16–17. 20 Muhammad Issaf Nashashibi, Al-Baṭal al-Khālid Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn wal-Shāʿir al-Khālid Aḥmad Shawqī (Al-Quds: Bayt al-Maqdis, 1932). 11 responded with a carefully formulated letter in Arabic: while commending the work in general, he disputed some claims Nashashibi made about the subject of genius among Jews, which were based on the latter’s interpretation of Zionist leader Max Nordau’s writings.21 An even more influential intellectual who maintained contacts with Jewish orientalists in Jerusalem was Egyptian writer and central cultural figure Taha Hussein. Hussein was familiar both with Baneth and with his colleague and relative Shelomo Dov Goitein (1900– 85), the latter publishing an article in the literary journal Hussein edited, Al-Kātib Al-Maṣrī.22 In 1942 Hussein even made a special visit to the Hebrew University’s campus on Mount Scopus, accompanied by two other HUSOS members who showed him the concordance 21 [David Hartwig Baneth] to Issaf Nashashibi, [first half of the 1930s], Archives of the National Library of Israel (hereafter: ANLI), Arc. 4°1559/03/17. Baneth referred to Nashashibi’s discussion of the topic in Al-Baṭal, 50-1. 22 On the literary ties between Baneth and Hussein, see George J. Kanazi, ‘Ishaq Musa al-Husayni and His Memoirs of a Hen’, in Ishaq Musa al-Husayni, Memoirs of a Hen (Toronto: York Press, 1999), 11. As for Goitein, he wrote per Hussein’s request an article in Arabic about the life and work of the Hungarian-Jewish father of Islamic Studies, Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921): S.D. Goitein, ‘Goldziher Abū al-Dirāsāt al-ʾIslāmiyya’, Al-Kātib Al-Maṣrī 5, no. 14 (1947), 85–95. Funded by the Jewish Harari family of Cairo, this monthly journal appeared from 1945 until 1948. Facing accusations that the journal’s Jewish ownership meant it was a tool for spreading Zionist propaganda, Hussein insisted that the journal was completely apolitical. See Ali Shalash, ‘Taha Hussein wal-ʾAsʾila al-Murība’, Shuʾūn ʾAdabiyya 24 (1993), 16–39; Najat Abdulhaq, Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt: Enterpreneurship and Business Before Nasser (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 17. Hussein also had ties with University Chancellor Magnes, about whom Hussein was quoted saying he was ‘the most conciliatory person he ever met’ (Norman Bentwich, For Zion’s Sake: A Biography of Judah L. Magnes [Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1954], 187n). 12 files.23 Fearing that news of the Egyptian scholar’s visit to the Zionist university would stir political unrest in Palestine and Egypt, the Egyptian consulate in Jerusalem requested to keep the visit unpublicized. Accordingly, Arabic and Hebrew newspapers did not mention it, and its existence was revealed only in the late 1970s, following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.24 The final example is that of another renowned literary scholar, the Damascus-based Muhammad Kurd Ali (1876–1953). His relations with the Jerusalem scholars, while not mentioned in his memoir, are very well documented in Jewish archival sources. Kurd Ali is known for his early criticism towards European Orientalists and their approach to Islam, to the Arabs, and to Arabic culture; nevertheless, he had friendly relations with some of them, including Josef Horovitz, who was a corresponding member of the Arab Academy of Damascus, whose founder was Kurd Ali.25 The latter gave a warm welcome to Goitein when he visited Damascus in 1932, and a few years later sent to Jerusalem a letter praising the 23 E.S. [Eliyahu Sasson] to M.S. [Moshe Shertok], September 24, 1942, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter: CZA), S25\3102; Shlomit Shrybom-Shivatiel, ‘Meḥayei ha-Lashon ha-ʻAravit mul T’ḥiyat ha-Lashon ha-ʻIvrit’, in Studies in Arabic and Islamic Culture, Vol. 1, ed. Binyamin Abrahamov (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2000), 190. Hussein came to Palestine instead of vacationing in war-torn Europe, delivering a series of radio lectures from Jaffa as well (‘Muḥāḍarāt al-Doctor Taha Hussein’, Al-Difaa, September 24, 1942, 2). 24 ‘D. Husayn Fawzi.. Yuḥāḍiru fī Isrāʾīl!!’, October, October 28, 1979, 3. A late reference to the visit was also made by Yitzhak Navon, President of Israel in 1980, during an official visit to Egypt. Back in the 1940s, Navon was a student at HUSOS and was asked by its director, L.A. Mayer, to accompany Hussein on his visit, even taking him to see a Kibbutz par the latter’s request. Navon shared this story in one of the speeches he made during the 1980 visit, a copy of which is kept in his presidential archive: Israel State Archives, N-349/5. 25 Joseph H. Escovitz, ‘Orientalists and Orientalism in the Writings of Muhammad Kurd Ali’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 15, no. 1 (1983): 95–6. Kurd Ali’s close friendship with Horovitz was mentioned in a letter from the Hebrew University’s Moshe Ben-David to Frederick Kisch, September 4, 1930, CZA, S25\6727. 13 volume of ʾAnsāb al-ʾAshrāf that Goitein prepared; in a meeting with a Jewish journalist, he spoke highly of the entire project in general, and of HUSOS director at the time, L.A. Mayer, in particular.26 Nashashibi, Hussein, and Kurd Ali – three prominent figures in the textual circle of connections with scholars at HUSOS – contributed essays to the weekly Al-Risala, published in Egypt in the 1930s (at the outset Hussein even served as its deputy editor). According to Israel Gershoni, Al-Risala sought to cultivate an Arab-Islamic identity and a unified Arab culture, often engaging with Islamic studies and ancient Islamic history; however, these subjects were discussed in the spirit of modernist and reformist approaches to Islam and a rejection of orthodoxy, as well as support for liberal democracy. Al-Risala represented a general intellectual movement in Egypt in the 1930s that sought to integrate Islam and liberalism.27 26 Goitein to Levi Billig, October 26, 1932, ANLI, Arc. 4°1911/03/14; Kurd Ali to Goitein, March 23, 1941, ANLI, Arc. 4°1911/03/332; S[haul] Hareli, ‘Biḳur bi-Lvanon uv-Suria’, [1936 or 1937], CZA, S25\5570, 15. 27 Israel Gershoni, ‘Egyptian Liberalism in an Age of “Crisis of Orientation”: Al-Risala's Reaction to Fascism and Nazism, 1933–39’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, no. 4 (1999): 555. Nashashibi is not mentioned in Gershoni’s essay as a contributor to the weekly, yet an examination of its contents reveals that in 1937-1948 it published nearly 160 texts written by him. See also: Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 222–44, 324–40. The three were connected in other ways, too: Hussein and Kurd Ali delivered a series of lectures together in Cairo in the 1930s (Rainer Hermann, Kulturkrise und konservative Erneuerung. Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī [1876–1953] und das geistige Leben in Damaskus zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts [Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990], 65); and when Kurd Ali visited Jerusalem in 1941, he stayed at Nashashibi’s house (‘Melumad Suri B'Yerushalayim’, Haboker, September 25, 1941, 3). Nashashibi even held a reception for him, and according to an entry in Goitein’s diary, Mayer and he were among the attendees (September 27, 1941, ANLI, Arc. 4°1911/02/9). 14 This clarifies why scholars from HUSOS found much in common with the Arab intellectuals involved with the weekly: their approach to Islam was not at odds with the German-Jewish Orientalist tradition. On the contrary: Ignác Goldziher, for example, considered Islamic studies (Islamwissenschaft) a vehicle for bringing about an historicist reform in religion (particularly regarding Muslim law).28 This view is reminiscent, to some extent, of the emergence of Jewish Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums) in 19th-century Germany: at that time Jewish scholars attempted to assimilate the scientific outlook, and in fact to cast Judaism in the moulds of modern research. At the same time, they emphasized the need for scientific objectivity and discipline-based research methods, which could lend Judaism validity and legitimacy as a field of knowledge and as a cultural and historical phenomenon.29 28 Regarding Goldziher's reformist approach to Islam, as reflected in the establishment of the field of Islamic studies, see David Moshfegh, Ignaz Goldziher and the Rise of Islamwissenschaft as a ‘Science of Religion’, A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley, 2012); Ottfried Fraisse, ‘From Geiger to Goldziher: Historical Method and its Impact on the Conception of Islam’, in Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary: The ‘Science of Judaism’ between East and West, eds. Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilke (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 203–22. Compare with Lena Salaymeh, ‘Goldziher dans le rôle du bon orientaliste. Les méthodes de l’impérialisme intellectual’, in The Territories of Philosophy in Modern Historiography, eds. Catherine König-Pralong, Mario Meliadò and Zornitsa Radeva (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 89– 104. 29 Ismar Schorsch finds a ‘striking similarity’ between the historicization of Judaism and of Islam in 19th-century Germany. See idem, ‘Converging Cognates: the Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 55 (2010): 4. On the reasons that motivated German Jews in the 19th century to study Arabic and Islam, see also John Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, in Orientalism and the Jews, eds. Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 80–93; Susannah Heschel, ‘German Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-Orientalizing Judaism’, New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 91–107. 15 Also important, yet smaller in its geographic scale, was the ethnographicarchaeological circle, whose members shared an interest in the ethnography and folklore of Palestine. The connections constituting it stemmed mostly from the research interests of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish scholar of Islamic art and archaeology, Leo Ary Mayer (1895– 1959), who immigrated to Jerusalem in 1921 after studying in Vienna. Working at the British Mandate's Department of Antiquities and being an active member of the American-led Palestine Oriental Society, Mayer was able to enter intellectual and cultural circles in Jerusalem, where he became acquainted with several Arab-Palestinian ethnographers.30 These included figures such as Tawfiq Canaan, Stephan Hanna Stephan and Aref al-Aref. Stephan and Mayer, who worked together at the Department of Antiquities, cooperated in publishing a translated Turkish manuscript; Mayer’s work was praised by Canaan, who chaired one of his lectures; and in 1941, he invited al-Aref to deliver a lecture at HUSOS, which he did, in Hebrew.31 The decision to focus on classical subjects that could appeal to the Arab and Muslim intellectual community – an understandable decision, in light of the German Orientalist tradition of HUSOS – thus proved successful. Oriental Studies connected Mount Scopus to 30 On Mayer's exceptional ties with Arab intellectuals, see Mostafa Hussein, ‘Scholarship on Islamic Archaeology between Zionism and Arab Nationalist Movements’, in The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism: Reversing the Gaze, 184–208; Sarah Irving, ‘Stephan Hanna Stephan and Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels: Tracing cooperation and conflict in Mandate Palestinian translations’, in Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought and Literature, eds. Anthony Gorman and Sarah Irving (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 217–37. 31 ‘Call to Establish a Museum for Palestinian Dress’, Palestine Bulletin, July 26, 1931, 3; ‘Aref elAref Oreaḥ ha-Universita ha-ʻIvrit’, Haboker, May 9, 1941, 8. On the role Canaan and Stephan played in Palestinian ethnography in the first half of the twentieth century, see Salim Tamari, Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 93–112. 16 the broader region. In addition, the recruitment of L.A. Mayer opened the institute’s doors to scholars of Palestinian ethnography, a field that was not part of the classical Orientalist training in German universities. But for all their importance, the trait common to these circles of connections between scholars is that they remained, for the most part, non-formal. Developing in the shadow of the Arab-Jewish conflict, these ties of appreciation and friendship were unlikely to become formal, long-term relationships. The attempts to recruit an Arab/Muslim professor provide us with a good example of that course of fate. Maintaining Contact In Search of an Arab Scholar As previously mentioned, the wish to recruit an Arab or Muslim professor preceded the founding of HUSOS and aimed to promote both a vague notion of Arab-Jewish rapprochement, and the more concrete recognition of the Hebrew University by the international community. The most active member of HUSOS in this respect was Josef Horovitz: his aforementioned founding memorandum of HUSOS from 1925 insisted that the institute's director be an Arabist trained in Europe or the U.S., since ‘there is no Oriental scholar [orientalische Gelehrte] with a mastery of the methods of modern science’. However, he strongly emphasized that an Orientalist institute in Jerusalem, even if based on European methods (and, apparently, staff), could not simply imitate the institutes from which it developed: Here, in contrast to the West, Arabic is not studied merely as a ‘classical language’. As in Egypt and Syria – though perhaps more limited in scope – modern Arabic [Schriftarabisch] is used in Palestine as a means of expression of the higher intellectual existence [des höheren geistigen Lebens]. Fully separating scientific research from contemporary literary movement [der heutigen literarischen Bewegung] is unnatural and unwanted. The best way of maintaining contact between the two spheres is by including 17 an Arab scholar among the institute’s staff, who will not only be required to deliver his lectures in Arabic but also to teach exercises in the use of modern written and spoken Arabic.32 Alongside an Arab faculty member, Horovitz proposed hiring a lector (a lecturer who teaches his native tongue as a foreign language) versed in ‘European teaching methods’ to teach beginner courses in Arabic. He also suggested hiring, at some point in the future, ‘one or more Arab sheikhs of the old style [einen oder mehrere arabische Schaichs der alten Art]’ to teach various branches of Islamic theology. In this document, Horovitz made no mention of the preferred nationality or religion of the Arab faculty member or lector. However, he did propose the names of Kurd Ali, Hussein and Nashashibi, indicating the direction he had in mind, i.e., liberal scholars active in the Arab literary world of the 1920s. 33 While working as a teacher of Arabic at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, India (1907–14), Horovitz had already recognized the added value that an Arab faculty member familiar with ‘Arabic as a living language [Arabisch als lebende Sprache]’, not only classical texts, could bring to a university.34 However, he doubted whether the scholars he mentioned would agree to teach in Jerusalem, even if the institute offered generous conditions. 35 Although he did not elaborate, this could have been due to the fact that this was a newly founded university that had not yet proven its 32 Horovitz, ‘Vorschläge für die Errichtung eines Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Jerusalem’. 33 Sabine Mangold-Will, ‘Josef Horovitz und die Gründung des Instituts für Arabische und Islamische Studien an der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem: ein Orientalisches Seminar für Palästina’, Naharaim 10, no. 1 (2016): 30 n. 62. This study by Mangold-Will offers the most detailed analysis of the Horovitz memorandum. See also Milson, ‘The Beginnings’, 172–3; JohnstonBloom, ‘“Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”’, 177. 34 Mangold-Will, ‘Josef Horovitz’, 29. 35 A point he reiterated during the following year (Horovitz to Magnes, July 8, 1925, and Summary of a meeting at HUSOS, March 17, 1926, CAHU, 91:1925-27). 18 academic value, but also, quite likely, due to the negative feelings towards the Zionist university he had already sensed in Egypt. The memorandum reveals, for the first time, the limits of ‘intellectual rapprochement’: Horovitz did not propose appointing one of the Arab scholars as director of the future institute – a position reserved exclusively for Western scholars. Even so, his proposal constitutes a revolutionary precedent considering the German Orientalist tradition in which he was trained. German universities at the turn of the century, though welcoming students from Asia and Africa, nevertheless employed scholars from these regions only as ‘ill-compensated’ lectors, not as professors.36 Existing scholarship dealing with Horovitz’s memorandum usually did not explore the actions taken (or not taken) in Jerusalem to fulfill them. It is therefore important to point out that among HUSOS members, Horovitz was not the only one who acknowledged the need for an Arab lecturer. So did D. H. Baneth, who received his PhD in Berlin and taught Arab philosophy, and classical Arabic literature and Shi’a scholar Levi (Lewis) Billig (1897– 1936). However, while acknowledging the benefits of bringing together Jewish students with an Arab lecturer, both Baneth and Billig believed the top priority of HUSOS should be to open a preparatory program for its students. The two expressed their frustration from what they saw as their students’ insufficient knowledge of Arabic, and especially Arabic grammar, a result of their education in Hebrew schools in Palestine by ‘native lecturers’.37 In the eyes of European Orientalists, the Arabic lessons of the Jewish and non-Jewish native speakers of Arabic who typically taught Arabic in the Hebrew schools of the 1920s 36 Marchand, German Orientalism, 224; Mangold-Will, ‘Josef Horovitz’, 29. 37 Baneth to the management of the Hebrew University [undated; the letter notes that it was written in response to a letter from November 16, 1926], ANLI, Arc. 4°1559/03/17; Levi Billig, ‘Memorandum on Research’, [late 1926], CAHU, 91:1925-27. 19 lacked the necessary emphasis on Arabic grammar, and their lessons were thus hardly considered ‘proper training’.38 Consequently, on a visit to Frankfurt in early 1927, Baneth met Horovitz and persuaded him to support the idea of a preparatory program for HUSOS, which would require the hiring of additional instructors. Considering the limited budget HUSOS had, Horovitz agreed to postpone the appointment of a Muslim professor, since ‘a preparatory program is preferable’.39 The task of improving the students’ knowledge in Arabic grammar, it seems, was more urgent than helping them find a living connection to the Arab world. For this task, Horovitz proposed his former student from Frankfurt, S. D. Goitein (1900–85). The latter was joined by another former student of Horovitz, the Jerusalem-born Yosef Yoel Rivlin (1889–1971), and they were offered teaching positions in the preparatory program in early 1928.40 Both had experience teaching in Jewish secondary schools in Palestine, and more importantly, German Orientalist philological training, which presumably worked in their favour. In Goitein’s plan for the preparatory program in Arabic, he vowed to ‘address and amend the natural and temporary insufficiencies of secondary schools in Palestine’, which were unable to provide the ‘scientific proficiency achieved in humanistic education abroad [in European secondary schools]’. The curriculum would include, among other things, grammar courses, the reading of classical texts, and exercises in translation and grammar.41 38 Mendel, ‘From German Philology to Local Usability’, 8. See also Halperin, Babel in Zion, 198– 200. 39 Billig to Magnes, May 23, 1927; Shlomo Ginzberg to Billig, May 17, 1927; and Billig to Magnes, June 1, 1927, CAHU, 91:1925-27. 40 Billig to Ginzberg, January 29, 1928, CAHU, 91alef:1928. 41 Billig to Magnes, May 23, 1927, and Billig to Ginzberg, May 23, 1927, CAHU, 91:1925-27. 20 The records of the university’s archive indicate that other than a failed application to receive funding from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1928, no constructive steps were taken to further advance the recruitment of an Arab lecturer by HUSOS.42 The archival silence on this issue after 1929 may have to do with the political crisis that engulfed Palestine in general and Jerusalem in particular with the outbreak of the 1929 Riots, which greatly widened the rift between Jews and Palestinians. After the riots Magnes and other activists in Brit Shalom (‘Covenant of Peace’), a marginal Zionist group that called for Arab-Jewish cooperation supported by many HUSOS members, became even more convinced of the need for a solution to the conflict based on Arab consent; in this they diverged from the outlook of the Zionist leadership.43 For most of the Jewish public, as well as the Arab-Palestinian leadership and public opinion, the riots were a turning point followed by a process of radicalization, consolidation, and entrenchment of each side in its positions. They also heightened the identification of the Arab and Muslim world with the local Arab-Palestinians.44 The recruitment of an Arab member to HUSOS – a challenging task to begin with – became, politically, virtually impossible. 42 Nicholas Murray Butler to Magnes, November 3, 1927; ‘List of Proposals Considered by the University with regard to the Expansion of the School of Oriental Studies’, July 1, 1928; and Magnes to Cyrus Adler, November 12, 1928, CAHU, 91alef:1928. On the Carnegie Endowment, see Michael Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 156–71. 43 Joseph Heller, From Brit Shalom to Ichud: Judah Leib Magnes and the Struggle for a Binational State in Palestine (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003), 20–21 (Hebrew). 44 On these developments see Avraham Sela, ‘The “Wailing Wall” Riots (1929) as a Watershed in the Palestine Conflict’, The Muslim World 84, no. 1–2 (1994): 60–94; also note the telling title of Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2015). 21 Growing Criticism Nevertheless, the need for a lecturer with Arabic as his native tongue only grew. In the late 1920s and the 1930s, HUSOS absorbed criticism within Palestine’s Jewish-Zionist community (the Yishuv) for having remained essentially ‘European’ and failing to express, in its research and learning programs, its presence in the East. This sort of criticism was reminiscent of, and sometimes echoing the mixed feelings shared by many Sephardi and Mizrahi (i.e., of non-European descent) leaders and intellectuals towards the Zionist establishment and its endeavours in terms of what they saw as political, and just as important, cultural short-sightedness or negligence. As I will argue, it was not coincidental that eventually, attempting to appease Jewish critics, the university recruited a Mizrahi Jew, carrying a hybrid Arab-Jewish identity, as a politically possible replacement for the vacant slot of an Arab member in HUSOS. Sceptical of the original political purpose of HUSOS, the Jewish members of this institute eventually focused on a more modest form of cultural rapprochement, which could also appease some of their critics. Among the harshest critics of HUSOS in the Hebrew press was Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), a Jewish Palestinian native with Baghdadi and German roots once slated to be among the Hebrew University’s first professors but eventually left off its academic staff.45 A strong opponent of Weizmann and Magnes, Yahuda blamed the university for having neglected ‘all those native-born scholars who have obtained sufficient knowledge in the languages of the East […] preferring instead those who had just now completed their studies in Europe’.46 45 Yuval Evri, ‘Return to Al-Andalus beyond German-Jewish Orientalism: Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s Critique of Modern Jewish Discourse’, in Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context, 342. 46 Abraham Shalom Yehuda, ‘Maduʻa Nimnaʻ ha-Professor Yahuda Lehartsot ba-Mikhlala ha-ʻIvrit’, Doar Hayom, May 21, 1929, 4. 22 Another prominent critic was the journalist and Mapai (Labour Zionist party) member Michael Assaf (Osofsky, 1896–1984), a native of Lodz. Somewhat uncharacteristically to his political affiliation, Assaf cautioned that ‘we are in the physical, geographic East […] we strive towards the cultural-political, cultural-social, and cultural-spiritual East. Yet we are mute, truly mute: we lack the Arabic language’. Consequently, he argued, ‘established in Zionist Jerusalem […] the institute must join the ranks of the most practically-oriented departments [ha-maḥlakot ha-maʻaśiot be-yoter]’. As opposed to the current approach of HUSOS – which Assaf defined as ‘fossilized Orientalism [mizraḥanut ḳofet]’ – he called on it to teach ‘living Orientalism [mizraḥanut ḥaya]’, since it ‘must, if it only can – in the sea of hateful propaganda that surrounds us – break through to the Arab world to make live contact. This will be enabled by Arab teachers who can be easily found for this level [of teaching spoken Arabic rather than the classical language]’.47 Assaf, writing in 1933, reiterated somewhat the arguments made by Horovitz and others at HUSOS; yet while they suggested a balanced integration of the study of modern Arabic literature and intellectual collaboration, Assaf called on HUSOS to become an institution for practical training. The question of the institute’s practicality and relevance was posed forcefully in a report of the survey committee (the ‘Hartog Committee’), established in 1934 on the initiative of the Hebrew University’s board of directors to review its managerial and academic functioning.48 The report called for a comprehensive change of focus in both teaching and 47 M.A. [Michael Assaf], ‘ha-Makhon le-Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ’, Davar, March 30, 1933, 3. 48 Uri Cohen, The Mountain and the Hill: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem During PreIndependence Period and Early Years of the State of Israel (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006), 77 (Hebrew). The chairman of the committee was Sir Philip Hartog (1864–1947), a British-Jewish educationalist who served as a member of the Calcutta University Commission of 1917–19, that shaped higher education in India, thus equipping Hartog with colonial educational experience. He was also involved in the establishment of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 23 research at HUSOS: ‘Jewish Palestine is surrounded on all sides by the Moslem world, a thorough knowledge of which is of the greatest importance for the economic and political development of the country. For this purpose it is not the study of pre-Islamic poetry, nor the study of Old Arab historians that matters, but the study of the living Islamic world’.49 The committee believed that ‘[HUSOS] should be modelled on similar schools in Paris, Berlin and London, in which the student is made to know the living and not only the dead Orient’.50 The report lay blame for this situation with Horovitz and his political intentions, warning that ‘it is always dangerous to allow politics to interfere with education’, and harshly determining that ‘no Arab will change his political views on the Jewish question because of the preparation by the Hebrew University of a Concordance of Ancient Arabic Poetry’.51 The committee’s conclusion was clear-cut: HUSOS should take a more practical approach and add a professorship or readership in modern Arabic language and literature, as well as a lectorship in Arabic. The desired outcome of these changes was for graduates to achieve mastery of modern Arabic. To this end, committee members had ‘no objection […] to engaging Arab scholars’. Both Assaf and the Hartog committee envisioned a training centre that was modelled not on the ‘classic’ German university Oriental Studies, but on European training centres for in London. On Hartog’s career see ‘Obituary: Sir Philip Hartog’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 12, no. 2 (1948): 491–3. 49 Philip Hartog, Louis Ginzberg and Redcliffe Salaman, Report of the Survey Committee of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1934), 21–2. 50 This comment highlights the difference between the Hebrew and English names of HUSOS: in Hebrew, makhon means ‘institute’ rather than ‘school’. Being a ‘school’, it seemed to the committee that it should be oriented mainly towards training rather than research. 51 Hartog’s British background may help explain the call for political neutrality in education; the British government in Palestine believed that both Arab and Jewish educational systems were corrupted by nationalist endeavours. See Suzanne Schneider, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 129. 24 Orientalists, such as SOAS in London or the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin (Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, SOS). This institution was established at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1887 with the explicit aim of training students for conducting commercial and diplomatic ties with the Orient. 52 However, in Berlin the SOS was separate from the university's regular seminars of Oriental Studies, being an independent, nonacademic teaching institute;53 the Hartog Committee, by contrast, suggested that the Hebrew University establish a body that would combine the two aspects (i.e. a research department and a training seminar). The committee’s report was received with mixed feelings at HUSOS. Responding on its behalf, L.A. Mayer expressed not only his reservations regarding the committee's criticism but also a different understanding of the political reality in Palestine and the role of HUSOS therein. He explained that the political circumstances made it very difficult ‘to find any Moslem scholar of repute and integrity of character willing and capable of filling the post [of a lector/professor of Arabic]. For that reason a Moslem lecturer was not appointed there’.54 Mayer agreed, in the name of all the members of HUSOS, that ‘politics should not be allowed to interfere with education’, and that the concordance project was not expected to lead to political change. Instead, he explained, ‘it is [the School's duty] to see that our graduates in Islamic studies be considered by the Arabs as educated in this subject, and no 52 Marchand, German Orientalism, 350–56; Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 148–9. See also Gottfried Hagen, ‘German Heralds of Holy War: Orientalists and Applied Oriental Studies’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 145–62. 53 Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 148. 54 Untitled document by Mayer, attached to a letter from Ben-David to Gotthold Weil, June 27, 1934, CAHU, 226:1934. 25 student who masters, for example, the Palestinian dialect, but is not well-versed in the Arabic classics, will be considered by our neighbours as a man who knows the language’.55 Yet even Mayer, whose network of contacts with Arab scholars was particularly extensive, admitted that Horovitz's vision of HUSOS as a tool of Jewish-Arab intellectual rapprochement was, already in 1934, outdated and nearly impossible to realize. He understood that even if leading Arab scholars appreciated the work of HUSOS and maintained personal contacts with its members, the region’s complex political reality was overwhelming. Furthermore, Mayer’s letter reveals the inherent constraints of including only scholars ‘of repute and integrity of character’ – which meant the exclusion of those who did not fulfil the Orientalist standard set by the alumni of German universities among the potential candidates. In fact, HUSOS records do not show any direct archival evidence indicating that these Arab scholars, including the ones specifically mentioned by Horovitz, were ever approached with a concrete offer. Far from incidental, the reference to political interference in education appearing in both the committee’s report and Mayer’s reply reflects a professional ethos that, to a large extent, characterized the self-image of German academic circles in the 19th and early-20th centuries. This principle of separating politics from education was stated succinctly by Max Weber in his lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf (‘Science as a Vocation’), delivered before students at Munich University in 1918. 56 Mayer’s reply reflects that he and, apparently, other HUSOS members saw their work in accordance with Weber’s principle that any political motives behind the choice of research topics should have no influence on the conclusions of 55 Ibid. 56 Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1919). On this principle and its role in German scholarly ideology, see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 314– 21. 26 that research or the teaching contents accompanying it. Ironically, the Hartog Committee demanded that, in practice, HUSOS should do exactly what the committee opposed: allow ‘practical’ motivations to influence research and teaching – motivations that originated in Palestine’s political and social circumstances. Two years after its submission, the Hartog Report had failed to bring about any change in the field of Arabic studies at HUSOS or any significant expansion of the historical period studied there.57 And so, in 1936 HUSOS students, too, voiced their concern that the choice of subjects taught there was too theoretical. They sent a letter to this effect to the university’s executive committee, the rector, and the entire teaching staff of HUSOS.58 They also questioned the principal mission of HUSOS: ‘At various times the university’s management has stated that besides its scientific tasks, the university must also serve the essential needs of the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement. Our institute thus has a major role in our national life’. Accordingly, they described the institute's twofold role – training scholars and teachers, and just as importantly, ‘equipping individuals with a broad Orientalist education as future employees in the Jewish civil service, public advocacy, journalism, etc.’ To fulfil these roles, they elaborated, HUSOS must add to the curriculum modern and spoken Arabic (in the Palestinian dialect); the history of Arab and Muslim peoples from ancient times until the present day; and classes on contemporary political, economic, and sociological problems of the Near and Middle East. Based on this analysis, the letter puts forth several demands, 57 In 1936 an external teacher from the Jewish Agency’s Institute for Economic Research, Alfred Bonne (1899–1959), was invited to HUSOS to teach the economics and sociology of the contemporary Near East. See Milson, ‘The Beginnings’, 176. 58 Students of HUSOS to the Executive Committee, Feburary 9, 1936, CAHU, 226:1936. 27 including ‘expanding the study of modern Arabic by hiring a teacher whose native tongue is Arabic’.59 While these demands recall the criticism voiced by Assaf and the Hartog Committee, the students’ arguments are different. They did not see HUSOS as a tool of rapprochement between Jews and Arabs, nor as a body obliged to preserve political neutrality, but rather as an institution meant to serve the Zionist movement by providing practical training. This owed, as much as anything, to the students’ identity: the Yishuv’s younger generation, raised and educated in Palestine during the period of the conflict’s escalation, they came of age, furthermore, in an increasingly militarized society.60 HUSOS students were in full agreement with the distinction made by S.D. Goitein in an essay he published in 1935, between ‘education for the “Orientalist”’ and ‘education for the individual seeking to act in the Orient’.61 But while Goitein proposed separating the two courses of study within HUSOS – an arrangement similar, though not identical to the Berlin model – the students proposed a general and radical reform. Demand for a native speaker of Arabic, it seems, was higher than ever – but the political circumstances have significantly changed. ‘Practical Arabic’ and Practical Solutions Despite initial disapproval of the students’ letter, the repeated criticism of the lack of an Arab professor eventually broke through to HUSOS and the university administration.62 In late 1936, the university’s Executive Committee approved a new proposal from Mayer to appoint 59 Ibid. 60 Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 33. 61 S.D. Goitein, ‘Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ ba-Universita ha-ʻIvrit’, Davar, April 10, 1935, 12. 62 Mayer to Magnes, June 15, 1936, CAHU, 2261:1936. 28 a teacher of ‘practical Arabic’ (ʻaravit shimushit).63 The proposal’s approval, with its budgetary implications, was certainly related to the murder of the institute’s member Levi Billig on August 21st of the same year. Billig was murdered in his room in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighbourhood, one of the early violent events of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. The emotional turmoil among the university staff in response to the murder is apparent in the eulogies read at Billig’s funeral. Magnes mourned the ‘fateful irony that this man, of all men, was felled by the cruel bullet […] he had devoted his powers to Arabic studies and the understanding of Islam, and many Arabs knew of him’. Goitein, who had discovered Billig shot in his room, demanded revenge. Zionist leader Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who also eulogized Billig, attacked Arab scholars directly: ‘What have they done – those who boast of their humanity? They were close to Billig. Have we heard from them one word of condemnation?’64 In fact, condemnations of Billig’s murder did appear in the ArabPalestinian press.65 The next year saw the murder of Avinoam Yellin, the general inspector of education in the Hebrew school system who studied with Billig in England and was close with the staff of HUSOS. Along with the other violent events of those years, these episodes undoubtedly convinced the Orientalists of the futility of trying to recruit an Arab lecturer to be appointed to a permanent position at HUSOS. Many of the institute’s students did not share the political commitment of its founders. Some of them even believed that public opinion would reject 63 Mendel Schneerson to Mayer, January 6, 1937, CAHU, 2262:1937. This development is very shortly discussed in Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient, 70–1. The translation to English of ʻaravit shimushit here follows the one made by Yonatan Mendel in the context of Arabic teaching in Jewish schools (‘From German Philology to Local Usability’, 15). The meaning of ‘practical Arabic’ at HUSOS will be discussed later in this article. 64 ‘Levayato shel Dr. Levi Billig, Z"L’, Haaretz, August 23, 1936, 1–2. 65 Filastin, August 23, 1936, 3. 29 such an appointment in any case, and that ‘Jewish teachers of Oriental descent’ can teach Arabic properly, while the introduction of Arab teachers ‘will not be advantageous at this time and will only increase the turmoil in our camp’.66 The disenchanted students, it seems, saw Oriental Jews as the key for bridging the political gap between the knowledge these students demanded and the solutions the university was willing to provide. Considering the tragic circumstances under which Billig’s position was now vacant, HUSOS decided to offer it to a Jewish lecturer. Mayer presented this decision to the Standing Committee as follows: ‘We need an individual well-versed in Arabic, for whom Arabic is his native tongue, a good teacher, and not necessarily a scholar in this profession. We mean to offer him a position as a teacher in the School’s preparatory program’.67 After considering several candidates, HUSOS invited Yitzhak (Isaac) Shamosh (1912–68), a member of the Jewish community of Aleppo, Syria who had published various essays in the Arab press from an early age.68 Shamosh had completed a law degree at Saint Joseph University in Beirut and worked as a teacher in southern Syria. His fine style in written Arabic was evident in his studies at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Damascus University and from a literary award from the journal Al-Hadith for an essay about old and new Arabic literature. At first, Shamosh arrived in Jerusalem to deliver a two-month trial course, held between April and June 1937. He was required ‘to teach lessons in practical Arabic for 66 Shimon Garidi, ‘ʻAl Limud Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ ba-Universita ha-ʻIvrit (Divrei Student)’, Davar, April 2, 1936, 4. 67 Excerpt from a session of the Standing Committee, January 18, 1937, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. 68 Michael Assaf to Magnes, May 2, 1943, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. The biographical details presented below were compiled from various documents kept in Shamosh's personal file at CAHU. 30 beginners and advanced learners, mostly in natural speech as spoken by educated Arabs in their native lands, at universities, in radio broadcasts, etc.’ and to ‘prepare exercises and improve the style of our students’.69 This formulation makes it clear that HUSOS did not mean Shamosh to teach dialectal Arabic, Palestinian or other, but rather Modern Standard Arabic, both written and spoken – the very same Schriftarabisch mentioned in Horovitz's memorandum from 1925. Before Shamosh’s arrival, Goitein wrote to ask him to further prepare ‘a weekly onehour lecture on any topic he chooses, for example: Arabic literature after the World War’. In a letter to the Rector that was not sent to Shamosh, Goitein clarified that ‘this is not to be seen as a field of academic studies’. Shamosh was obviously not hired as a typical lecturer, and after the successful trial period HUSOS decided to make him part of its staff as a ‘lector of practical Arabic’.70 However, the position was not full-time, and Shamosh required an arrangement that would allow him to support his family, who had accompanied him to Palestine. The Jewish Agency’s Political Department was therefore supposed to provide Shamosh with work as a writer of Arabic texts, but the amount of work was less than promised, leading to frequent salary disputes. Shamosh, in any case, was the only staff member in those years to simultaneously work at HUSOS and the Political Department. Such an arrangement was more common with the HUSOS students. The staff viewed Shamosh’s recruitment as a success, providing students with the instruction they felt was lacking. 71 In 1942, six years after Shamosh had joined, Mayer 69 Ginzberg to Shamosh, January 29, 1937, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. 70 Goitein to Shamosh, March 2, 1937; Goitein to the rector, July 4, 1937; and Mayer to the rector, June 22, 1937, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. 71 Goitein to the university management, June 28, 1938, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. 31 praised him for teaching ‘one of the most important subjects in the faculty of humanities with such dedication and success’, noting that ‘the study of Arabic language and literature would not be whole without this instruction’.72 ‘Practical Arabic’ studies, Mayer noted, provided the Zionist education system with highly qualified teachers of Arabic, and the Jewish Agency with university alumni with a mastery of both written and spoken modern Arabic. To this he added: The need for this kind of instruction was recognized from the moment of the school's founding, but finding the right man for the role was very difficult. It was necessary to find an individual with a university education for whom Arabic is a native tongue, with a fine style in both spoken and written Arabic, as precise in his use of Arabic as the best Arab intellectuals, someone familiar with spiritual currents in the Arab world, and a talented pedagogue. After a search lasting several years, we found Mr. Shamosh, who fulfils all of these requirements: he is a native of Aleppo, a university graduate, an author with a mastery of written Arabic, involved in the spiritual life of the Arabs, particularly well-versed in modern Arab literature, very precise in his use of the language, and an experienced schoolteacher.73 In 1942, Palestine’s residents were following closely the events of World War II while recovering from the recent Arab Revolt. Under these circumstances, the university needed Shamosh, who represented a reasonable compromise between the German philological standard (‘a university education’, ‘precise in his use of the language’) and the demand of students and other critics for a lecturer with Arabic as his native tongue. 74 In this sense, Shamosh was a model of what Jacobson and Naor called a ‘hybrid Arab-Jewish identity’: 72 Mayer to Werner Senator, September 10, 1942, CAHU, personal file – Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967. 73 As shown above, the search that lasted ‘several years’ was mostly theoretical. 74 Regarding the correct usage of Arabic, Shamosh himself argued in the early 1940s that most teachers of Arabic in Palestine lacked the requisite skills for doing so. See Jacobson and Naor, Oriental Neighbors, 111. 32 Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews who could bridge between members of the older Yishuv generation and the younger one, as well as between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, thanks to their acquaintance with the political, cultural, and social aspects of both sides. 75 Jacobson and Naor’s use of this term echoes Homi Bhabha’s theoretical writing on the concept of hybridity, as well as its critical application to the study of Zionist history by scholars such as Yehouda Shenhav and Gil Eyal. 76 Eyal writes that the Yishuv aspired to ‘purify’ the Arab Jews, using them to mark the boundary between Jews and Arabs and designating them as either Jews or Arabs. In other words, it sought to abolish their hybridity and thereby amplify ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ as mutually exclusive categories. 77 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Hebrew University needed Shamosh’s hybridity as the nearest possible substitute for an Arab lecturer; his mixed identity was necessary not only as a teacher of Arabic but also as an intellectual familiar with the world of contemporary Arabic literature. Shamosh remained the only teacher at HUSOS whose native tongue was Arabic through the 1950s. Nevertheless, following Eyal’s argument, Shamosh’s hybridity was also ‘purified’ to some extent after he took up his position. His ability to bridge between Jewish students and intellectuals and the world of modern Arabic literature was destined to remain an unfulfilled promise – in fact, an excuse. We may recall Goitein's clarification that the lectures Shamosh would deliver on Arabic literature would not be considered academic studies. Moreover, Shamosh was denied a full position at the university even after obtaining a Ph.D. and, his 75 Ibid, 9. See also: Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 76 Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient. 77 Ibid, 7–8, 10. 33 university training and degrees notwithstanding, he was always underpaid.78 Born in the Middle East, one cannot but suspect that Shamosh’s not being the graduate of a European university had a hand in preventing his full acceptance at the Hebrew University.79 The search for an Arab lecturer, we might recall, was motivated by academic as well as ideological considerations. But once the academic needs of HUSOS were fulfilled, with the recruitment of a Mizrahi Jew, the idea of having an Arab lecturer to serve as a bridge to the non-Jewish Arab surroundings seems to have been completely pushed aside. In 1938, after Shamosh had fully and officially entered his position, the Hebrew University was approached by a Haifa native named Hasan Amin al-Habash. Boasting an academic degree, and a diploma from Al-Azhar University, he presented himself as a sheikh and proposed his candidacy for the position of lecturer of Arabic literature and history.80 University officials showed little to no interest in his services.81 Evidently, Shamosh’s arrival had made the recruitment of an Arab lecturer redundant. 78 Baneth to Edward Poznansky, May 11, 1959, CAHU, personal file – David Zvi Baneth, up to 1960. 79 While Shamosh’s case was not identical to those of A.S. Yahuda, Israel Ben-Ze’ev and Yosef Rivlin – since unlike him, the three of them were graduates of European universities – the experience of either partial or full exclusion was shared by all of these ‘native Orientalists’: Aviv Derri, ‘The construction of “Native” Jews’, 9. 80 al-Habash was certified as a qadi and worked as the secretary of the Shari'a court in Haifa and Tiberias. In 1948 he fled from Haifa to Nazareth, where he was appointed by the State of Israel as the qadi of Nazareth. See Alisa Rubin Peled, Debating Islam in the Jewish State: The Development of Policy Toward Islamic Institutions in Israel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 160. 81 Hasan [Amin] al-Habash to the Rector, January 22, 1938; Ben-David to al-Habash, February 15, 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, March 2, 1938; Senator to al-Habash, March 9, 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, March 20, 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, April 3, 1938; al-Habash to BenDavid, May 6, 1938, CAHU, 165:1938. 34 Epilogue: The Boundaries of Rapprochement In early 1946, the journalist and employee at the Jewish Agency Alexander Lutzky (later Dotan, 1911–1971) reported to the Agency’s Arab Department a conversation he had held with Ahmed Samih al-Khalidi (1896-1951), the director of the Arab College in Jerusalem. 82 Among other topics, the two discussed the Hebrew University. Lutzky reported that, according to al-Khalidi, Dr Magnes had presented to him [al-Khalidi] the view that the university shall serve the entire Near East. He was surprised by this assertion since the university, in fact, had its back to the East. In which language did the university intend to serve the Arabs – in Hebrew? Why shouldn't the language of instruction at the university be English? Why weren’t the Arabs afraid of teaching in English in Beirut and Cairo, while the Jews feared to do so here? […] He believed that the Jews sought to create a chauvinist culture in which Arabs would remain menial labourers, ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.83 Lutzky added that in response to these words, he explained to al-Khalidi the unique Zionist position, according to which the Jews do indeed provide the East with scientific and technical service. There was nothing new in this argument, which had been part of the Zionist-pioneer discourse from the enterprise’s very beginnings.84 But al-Khalidi’s statements – incisive at the time, and nearly prophetic in historical perspective – place a mirror before the declarations of the university’s leaders and the staff of HUSOS, while also illuminating the steps they did and did not take during the Mandatory period to realize the vision of Jewish82 On al-Khalidi and his (and other educators’) relations with Zionist figures, including Magnes, see Yoni Furas, Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History Under the Mandate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 66–7. 83 Alexander Lutzky, ‘Conversation with Ahmed Samah al-Khalidi, Director of the Arab College, Jerusalem’, December 5, 1946, from the private archive of Alexander Lutzky-Dotan. 84 Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlements in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3. 35 Arab rapprochement through the Hebrew University. HUSOS was supposed to serve as the primary instrument for achieving this goal. Through its research endeavours and the fields of knowledge they entailed, its founders hoped to build a bridge to the Arab and Muslim intellectual world and to establish productive ties with Arab scholars. This hope bore fruit on a personal level, but in the great majority of cases, these ties remained on an informal footing. The political circumstances under which the Hebrew University was founded – namely, its identification as a major Zionist project that received public, if not financial, support from the British government – did not go unnoticed by the intellectual world and the Arab public in Palestine and neighbouring countries. The escalation of the Arab-Jewish conflict beginning in the late 1920s served only to accentuate this fact. Thus, the aspiration to grant public and institutional expression to a community of Jewish and Arab scholars of Arabic and Islam went almost entirely unrealized. The most prominent example of this pattern was the unsuccessful effort to recruit an Arab lecturer. Considering its limited budget, the addition of such a lecturer – a step of much symbolic significance – might have been possible if the HUSOS directors had been willing to make certain compromises in their search and relax the German scientific standards of their own training. To be fair, the young institute, like the entire university, was struggling to establish its academic status at the time, and its scholars could not, of course, foresee future developments in Mandate Palestine. Still, they might have forgone the establishment of a preparatory program at the stage when the chances of finding an Arab lecturer who would agree to teach at Mount Scopus were somewhat better. Pressures within the Yishuv and the university, as well as the growing realization that the nature of the Arab-Jewish conflict would prevent HUSOS projects from fulfilling their political goals, changed its members’ approach. The School’s next large-scale project did not 36 have in mind the Arab and Muslim world but rather the Jewish community. This project was the compilation of an Arabic-Hebrew dictionary. The Jewish Agency was closely involved in the production of this ‘fundamental tool for the instruction of any language’, which was intended first and foremost to serve Jewish teachers of Arabic in schools and evening classes, as noted in the authors’ application to the Jewish Agency’s Political Department with a request for financial support. 85 Perhaps more importantly, a unidirectional Arabic-Hebrew dictionary conveys a certain statement of intent. It assists in teaching Arabic to beginners and mostly in translating from Arabic to Hebrew; the dictionary in question was particularly helpful in translating press items. Nevertheless, such a dictionary is relatively basic, its links with classical Arabic are weak, and it neither can nor should serve as a basis for intellectual ties between scholars of Arabic. The authors who led the project were former students at HUSOS – a new, younger generation of Jewish Orientalists in Jerusalem, who had more ‘practical’ goals in mind. During the 1940s, having witnessed the death of colleagues and students at the hands of the escalating Jewish-Arab conflict in Jerusalem, members of HUSOS lowered their expectations regarding the ability of their discipline to bring about political change and improve relations between Jews and Arabs. Some were pessimistic to the point of anxiety. Knowing of his connections to the Zionist establishment, D.Z. Baneth wrote to Michael Assaf in 1945 of his unsettling experience while visiting bookstores in Jerusalem’s Old City. He felt the sellers’ attitudes towards him to be very hostile: ‘something like this has not happened to me even in the worst of times’, he wrote. Later he chanced upon a gathering of youth, the 85 Moshe Brill, Pessah Schusser, and David Neustadt to Moshe Shertok, October 22, 1940, CZA, S25\22165. 37 nature of which he could not fathom. ‘I believe we are on the verge of serious developments’, he concluded, basing this appraisal on various contemporary press reports as well. 86 Baneth wrote these words as a concerned citizen, candidly apprehensive and cognizant of earlier violent outbreaks in Jerusalem. He even wondered ‘whether this situation was instigated deliberately during the Nabi Musa season’, perhaps recalling that the 1920 Jerusalem riots began after the Muslim prayer during the Nabi Musa festival of that year. However, his letter also portended a new stage in the nascent relationship between HUSOS and policymakers in the Zionist establishment and, later, in the State of Israel. 1948 marked the beginnings of this stage. With the establishment of Israel, the expectations from HUSOS, and Israeli Orientalists in general, changed; they were now required to act within the framework of a national university, the endeavours of which were supposed to meet the needs of the young state. For HUSOS, this meant greater cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as with Israel’s security establishment. Following the closure of the country’s borders and the tremendous geopolitical changes the region experienced, there was no longer any point in attempting rapprochement – which in any case proved impossible under the new circumstances – with scholars who had been neighbours, but now became intellectuals in enemy territory. 86 Baneth to Assaf, April 27, 1946, CZA, S25\9069. 38