Defining Neighbors by Gribetz Jonathan Marc

Author:Gribetz, Jonathan Marc
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

JEWISH AND ARAB RACE AGAINST EUROPEAN PREJUDICE

Implicit in these journalists’ conception of the Jews in racial terms is the link between Jews and Arabs. Five years before publishing his monograph on human races, Jurji Zaydan was already considering the relationship between Jews and Arabs and the phenomenon of Jewish Arabs. In a 1903 volume of his al-Hilāl, Zaydan published an article entitled “The Jews in the Lands of the Arabs” (al-yahūd fī bilād al-ʿarab) in response to a reader’s inquiry about “the Arab tribes who converted to Judaism before Islam.” Under the rubric of “Jews in the Lands of the Arabs,” Zaydan includes both people of biblical Israelite origin who immigrated to the Arabian Peninsula as well as natives of these bilād al-ʿarab, the “lands of the Arabs,” who converted to the Jewish religion. He explains that “Judaism is ancient in the Arabian Peninsula, for Jews continued to immigrate to Arab lands from their earliest period, whether fleeing violence or searching for livelihood.” This “earliest period” of Jewish history in Arabia may well have begun as early as the pentateuchal period. “It is not unlikely,” he claims, “that a group of them immigrated there during their wanderings in the wilderness at the time of Moses.” A Jewish presence in the “lands of the Arabs,” in other words, could be as ancient as the Jewish presence in the Holy Land.45

Relying on traditional sources composed between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Zaydan presents his readers with three possible origins of the Jews in Arab lands. The first source he cites is Abu al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (ninth–tenth centuries). In Kitāb al-aghānī, Zaydan explains, alIṣfahānī notes that the first Jews in Arab lands were those who fought the biblical Amalekites. In sparing the Amalekite prince, these Jews failed to annihilate the people completely as had been commanded and thus were refused entry to “ash-Shām,” i.e., Greater Syria (including the Land of Israel). They decided to settle the land of those they had decimated, and this included the city of Yathrib (i.e., Madina). Next, Zaydan discusses the theory of al-Maqrizi (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) that Jews arrived in Yathrib during the time of Samuel the Prophet, and again after the Roman conquest. At the latter time, al-Maqrizi suggests, Jews undertook to spread their religion among the native peoples. “By the eighth century ce,” he writes, “the Jewish religion was widespread in many Arab lands.” Finally, Zaydan mentions the position of Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), who argued that the first to bring the Jewish religion to the Arabs was Dhu Nuwas, a king of Yemen who, along with his people, converted to Judaism at the end of the fifth century, “though in a different version, the people of Yemen converted to Judaism at the beginning of the fourth century.”46 Whether through immigration or by native conversion, there had been Jews living among Arabs, and even Arabs living as Jews, Zaydan argues, beginning no less than a millennium and a half earlier.

The same year in which Zaydan published his

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