Ottoman History Podcast - Hebrew Orientalism in Late Ottoman and British Palestine

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

with Mostafa Hussein hosted by Chris Gratien | Zionism, as a cultural and political movement of Hebrew revival, sought to forge a connection between the modern Jewish people and a deep past located in the geography of late Ottoman and British Palestine. As our guest in this episode, Mostafa Hussein, explores in a new book, this revival in turn birthed an intellectual project of intimate and often contradictory engagement with Arabo-Islamic culture, a process that he describes as Hebrew Orientalism. As we discuss, Jewish orientalists from diverse backgrounds between East and West developed an interest in a variety of medieval Arabic texts, drawing on history, geography, botany, literature, and linguistics to forge cultural exchange in service of Zionist aspirations. Whether these scholars imagined a future of conflict or coexistence in Palestine, their work illuminates how Arab cultural heritage was integral to the remaking of modern Jewish identity.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman history podcast. I'm Chris Grayton, and here's our guest in this new episode titled Hebrew Orientalism. My name is Mustafa Hussein. I am an assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at the University of Michigan. I work on Jewish-Muslim intersections, focusing on multidimensional relations between Jews and Muslims. Hebrew Orientalism, Jewish engagement with Araboslamic culture in late Ottoman and British Palestine, is a new book published by Professor Mustafa Hussein. He challenges the view that Jewish thinkers were dismissive of Arab culture in Palestine,

as well as the view that their writing on the subject should be simply dismissed as ideological expressions of Zionist civilizational superiority. Instead, Professor Hussein argues that a range of Arabic sources, from medieval chronicles, travel narratives, and poetry, to place names and botanical knowledge played an important role in the remaking of Hebrew language and culture, culture and the development of a settler project that straddled the history of two empires and the state of Israel. In this podcast, we discussed the legacy of Jewish Orientalism in Palestine, the life and works of some of its most important practitioners, and how the transition from Ottoman to British

Dominion after the First World War reshaped Zionism's relationship with Arabislamic culture and the people of Palestine. Join us. Hussain, thank you for joining us on the podcast today to talk about your new book out this year from Princeton University Press, Hebrew Orientalism, Jewish engagement with Arabislamic culture in late Ottoman and British Palestine. This is a topic of great interest for our audience and connects nicely with a lot of what we've been covering on the program over the years. So let's jump right into it.

The title of the book, Hebrew Orientalism. Almost all of our listeners will understand something from the term Orientalism. But what are we adding with this term Hebrew Orientalism? How is it distinct from Orientalism and how is it related to what our audience knows as Orientalism? When we talk about Orientalism, the shadow of Edward Said usually looms very, very large, Rather than opening up and objectively explaining the Orient for European audience, Edward Said teaches us that Orientalism is a projection and a reflection of the West itself, and therefore during the colonial era,

Orientalism reflects the history of colonialism and imperialism rather than representing or talking about the East itself. As the object of Western imagination, the East is seen as the uncivilized, the savage, the underdeveloped, the weak, the feminized, while the West emerges as the superior, the powerful, the civilized, the masculine. Orientalism represents a simplistic labeling or stereotyping of people of the East. Hebrew-orientalism, by the same talking, concerns with the Arab, with the Islam, in the Palestinian context directed by nationalistic objectives, many of them were drawn from major issues prevalent in the Western context. We can name some of these issues such as the idea of nationalism, settler colonialism, anti-Semitism,

human movement, the immigration of people from one place to another, the transmission of knowledge from the east to the west through Orientalism and Oriental-Orentalist and also the transmission of knowledge from the west to the east through what some scholars may call Occidentalists. So they have Orientalist and Occidentalists. These major constituents, while they were devoutists, they were devoutists, developed in the West and also were advanced or promoted in the East, they were implemented by the Jewish thinkers or Jewish scholars in the Eastern context and yielded contradictory approaches to that Orient. So these contradictions, this miscellness is actually at the center, at the heart of Hebrew Orientalism that I try to explain in the book project. So rather than subjugation and domination over the East,

in the Jewish context of Palestine, the term Orientalism refers to an ambivalent approach towards the East. I'm trying to utilize the scholarly intervention of Homi Baba, where he talks about the hybrid identity, about hybridity. On the one hand, the Orient is uncivilized and backward. But at the same time, it is a subject of fascination and enchantment where Jewish settlers aspire to reinvent themselves, and they're coming back to history the way that they imagined it as the descendants of the ancient Israelites,

who, according to the Bible, had lived in the land, the land of Canaan or land of Palestine millennia ago. Early Jewish settlers, for example, while raising the banner of civilizing mission, which is a manner of colonial power, the banner colonial powers promoted or carried in coming to the east, starting from the Nebulum Bonaport. invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British afterwards. So the Jewish settlers, they were raising this manner of civilizing mission to educate backward native population in late Ottoman Palestine,

while they were adopting aspects of their lifestyle and their reincarnation of the old native Israelite. Also while doing so, they were, utilizing some orientalistic methods. Some of them are drawn from anthropology, some from ethnography, and also used literary and historical methods in understanding the origins and the history

of the Palestinian population. Thinking about the farmers, about the distinctions, the social-cultural distinctions between the peasants, fallaheen, and the Bedouins. the nomads and looked at both segments of populations as stockpile for the restoration of the patriarchs, who were nomads, were shepherds and peasants in light of what they found in the Jewish sources. One thing that really comes through very strongly in the book is actually the relationship between these Orientalists, practices and the revival of Hebrew as a language. As we know of Orientalism in the European

tradition, there's a strong philological dimension to a lot of what you're talking about. What I also found really valuable in the book is that you're not just interested in the ideas that are being produced out of this Hebrew Orientalism, out of this study of the Araboslamic world. but you also focus in on the day-to-day practices of what this project looked like. Can you tell us about some of the endeavors that these early pioneers of Hebrew Orientalism in late Ottoman Palestine were involved in? In Hebrew Orientalism, I'm stepping away from two approaches. One is the total dismissal of Hebrew works on Arabic and Islamic matters. This approach that identified these works with Zionism as a settler colonial movement or a colonial movement,

and this knowledge was not worthy of investigation. This is one perspective. Another perspective advocates for the absolute acceptance of the scholarship as an objective study of the people and the culture in the business. region and I try to chart a third way between these two opposing approaches, looking at the particularities of this scholarship or quasi-scholarship on Arabic and Islamic matters. And while again, going back to Saeed, while he focused on the big picture ideology, which you mentioned the ideas, the system of power in the represent.

presenting the East and making it speak, I'm zooming in on the actual grit and grind in essence of just looking at the politics of the text. I'm looking at the practices of the people, the practices of those Jewish writers who lived in Palestine, not those who developed ideas about the East, about the Arabs, about Islam while they were comfortably located in their ivory tower in the West. So I'm interested in Jewish scholars in Palestine who were doing the work on the ground. In the book, I refer to the actual activities and methods and routines of Jewish individuals

who engaged in the formal and the informal, they were engaged in the formal and the informal pursuit of Arab-Islamic culture and language in Palestine. The problem with choosing between its all colonialist propaganda or its all pure science is that you lose the human elements, which I was very much interested in. By focusing on the routines and the rituals, of these Hebrew writers, we get much clearer picture of how they actually functioned.

There weren't just abstract thinkers. They were individuals trying to build a new culture and advance Zionist aspirations. They were doing so through their social and culture interaction. with the local Palestinian populations in different localities, whether in the rural areas or in the urban centers, serving as intermediary

between the Ottoman authorities, between Jewish settlers that's in the Ottoman period, and later on between European Zionists who were not very much familiar with the landscape, with its culture,

and its people, particularities, and they try to intervene between these European Jewish politicians and Palestinian Arabs, and also looking at their projects of translation, like translating literary texts like 1001 knights, and not just the entire collection of the knights, but maybe a selective of the knights for a specific particular objectives. So I was very much interested in excavating these these practices and how are they related to some of the Jewish nationalistic ideas. And for our listeners, could you mention maybe one or two particular writers or figures who you found really embodied some of what you just talked about?

So, Davidjaline, he was born in Jerusalem in the middle of 19th century to a mixed family. his father was born also in Jerusalem, but to parents who immigrated from Poland at the beginning of the 19th century in Jerusalem. They were Ashkenazim coming from Eastern Europe to settle in Jerusalem. He is the product of a father originally of Ashkenazi descent and a mother of Iraqi descent. And, you know, he was a very interesting figure because he represented this confluence between the East and the West. And both local Palestinians and Ashkenazi Zionists found in him a role model for someone who could find a way between both communities to get together and to get along. One of the interesting things that his hybridity, his hybrid identity represents is the familiarity with the multiculturalism, let's say, that prevailed in Palestine at the time. When he talks in his memoirs about his interest in 1001 nights, for example, he brings this back to his interaction with his grandmother, the Iraqi grandmother.

He says that when I go to my grandmother, from my mother, she tells me about these folkloric tales about 1,001 nights, which ascertains his indigenity. He is part of the region. He is part of this cultural landscape. And at the same time, when he goes to his paternal grandmother, he listens to a story in Yiddish, about coming from the Jewish folkloric materials in Europe. And he takes pride in being connected to two worlds, the Western and the Eastern. De Vigalian also was involved in the acquisition of land, for the Jewish settlers.

And he saw himself in helping Jewish immigrants coming and settling in late Ottoman Palestine, a manifestation of his loyalty to the Ottoman, to the Ottoman Empire on the one hand, and also his fidelity to support his community, the Jewish community, seeking refuge in the Ottoman Empire from the pogroms in Eastern Europe at the time. It's amazing to think about just how much things changed from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century in the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Not just in isolation of this one dynamic in late Ottoman Palestine, but what's going on in the broader Middle East?

I mean, when this first wave of people is arriving, they're arriving in what you describe as a very acumenical space. in which the type of hybridity you just described isn't really that exceptional in people's mind and doesn't pose itself as an inherent problem. And as you chart, over time, this relationship between Orientalism and Zionism does become more ambivalent as a more ethno-national and eventually settler colonial dynamic really comes to the fore. So I was wondering if you have any examples from this earlier period in the 19th century

in your study that really surprised you and you thought would really surprise people born in the 20th century as we are about the cultural dynamics of that period. There is one example that I was struck by it many, many times and I think it's very much relevant to discussion today about anti-Zionnobstant. and anti-Semitism. There is a huge discussion about both notions whether anti-Zionist is anti-Semite. These Jewish scholars at the time, they, interestingly, were familiar of Arab enmity towards Jews, particularly Jewish settlers coming to Palestine.

And they were comparing between the Christian animosity towards Jews that led to their persecuting. in Eastern Europe, and Arab enmity that they found through their daily interactions with the Palestinian peasants, especially in the rural areas, because it was a competition over limited resources. So there is that scholar. His name is Ilyahu Saper, and he, in 1899, publishes an article titled Hasin Ali Israel, Pasifrutaharavit. Israel hatred, in Arabic literature. And in this, in his study, he says that they he compares between Christian hatred towards Jews, especially that hatred that translated into waves of persecution against Jews in Eastern Europe and also marginalization and dismissal in

Central Europe and other places like in the context of Dreyfus Affair and others. And also, he compares this with Arab hatred. And he says that there is a huge distinction between both. So he doesn't deny negative sentiments, Arab negative sentiments towards Jews. And he says, but those are not ideological. There are Arab negative sentiments towards Jews,

but those are not ideological, and those cannot be. perceived as anti-Semitic compared to what was happening in Europe. And he, in his study in this article, produces a nuanced understanding of different approaches among Arab population. So to him, not all Arabs were Muslims. He distinguishes between Christian Arabs versus Muslim Arabs. And also, within Muslims, he distinguishes between Muslim Arabs and non-Muslim Arabs.

Sorry, non-Arab Muslims. So with regard to Arab Muslims, he say, Muslim Arabs, he say, well, there is nothing in the Quran which he considers, compares to the Bible, for example. So the Bible talks about Jews being the killer of Jesus, which justified this, the belief of targeting Jews as the killer of God. But this accusation or this ideological belief doesn't exist in the Quran. So there is nothing essential, nothing ideologically essential in the Quran about Muslim hatred. And he cites some verses from the Quran that refer to the acceptance of the people of the book and to have daily transactions with them and to have relationship between. both, and he refers to Christian Arabs also harboring negative symptoms that were motivated

by ideology, you know, which was similar to also Christian Europeans targeting Jews. So I find this quite interesting for an article that was produced in late 19th century that talks in nuanced way about the various approaches of Arabs towards Jewish settlers. No, it's very fascinating. And it also speaks to this familiar theme in Orientalism, which is about exploring difference, right? So even anti-Semitism or even hate is going to be different in the Orient, according to these scholars. And again, you describe this engagement as very ambivalent, right, that comes out with these conflicting appraisals. But I want to pick up kind of a, I, on a different strand of what you were just talking about and ask you about these sections of the book that deal with trying to render the landscape in Hebrew. So not unlike many Euro-American people

who went to late Ottoman Palestine, the figures you're focused on are interested in the biblical connection that establishes some sort of relationship with Palestine. But in order to build that in the present, language becomes a very important tool, and especially language about the landscape, toponyms, place names. And I was very drawn to actually your discussion of plants, how there's an attempt to create a botanical lexicon in the Hebrew language for the native plants of Palestine, which was interesting to me because some of these plants

did not exist in that region in the time of the Bible. In the critical investigation of particularities of Hebrew Orientalism and how it differed from other Orientalisms, now it's better to talk about them in the plural sense, I attended to the Arab National or Nhadawi, as well as Zionist debate in the long 19th century about the relationship between man and nature. One of the major discussions at the time

emanated from European Enlightenment discussions around these issues. Herder was talking about the connection between man and nature, about the bond between the community and its surrounding landscape. And both Nhatawi intellectuals and Jewish thinkers, Jewish national thinkers picked up on that with two objectives. One, to instill a sense of belonging in the Jewish context because of the experience of estrangement.

Yes, even though we are coming back to the land of our ancestors, but it's strange to us, and we are strange to it. We are strangers coming to a strange land. So how can we build this sense of familiarity and rootedness in the land? So this is the first objective. Another objective is to create a unique cultural identity embedded in the natural landscape of that homeland. I'm fascinated by discussions, for example, of, you know, here I'm speaking to you from Michigan, of some Michiganders. when you talk about using the palm, when they refer to the map of Michigan. So that's fascinating.

So as if the body, the physical body of the speaker is embedded in the natural landscape. So in this man nature relationship, we see the intertwinement of both history and nature and their impact on the human sphere as humans in the national era continue to shape themselves again and again across different times and places. In the late 19th century, Zionist ideologues had sought means by which to strengthen Jews' ties to Palestine's habitat. In doing so, they developed a thorough epistemological system related to the spatial characteristics of Palestine, and they called it Idaat Ha'Arates, which means knowing the land or the knowledge of the land. And one would be mistaken, actually, to interpret Yidda'a'a Aritz this notion as a mere. superficial epistemological pursuit of language or the knowledge of nature. The Hebrew term deployed in this combination, Yidiata Aritz, refers to intimate relationship

between man and nature, as in the biblical term, Yadda, which means to know in the context of male-female relationship refers to an intimate connection. According to Genesis, for example, we read that Adam, knew Eve, his wife, and she bore a son. So Hebrew works on the landscape of Palestine revolved around the, not just like the identification of place names and plans, with those found in the Bible, but also with the signification, with the signification of the landscape. The textual exploration of the landscape that portrays its seas and valleys, mountains, and hills,

in addition to its flora and fauna. this textual exploration goes beyond a mere descriptive account to consider what these features signify about the landscape in which they live. About the flora, there is a very interesting story here to be told. In building their connection to the botanical world of Palestine, they were more. motivated by the revival of the biblical world of Palestine. You know, their ancestors lived in this land and they identified with its natural landscape. So if we are coming back to history, if we are reinventing ourselves, we better also identify

with this botanical, the same botanical landscape. Since the language with which local Palestinians, population identified the botanical world was Arabic. So we became, okay, but this plant, we know it as such in the Bible, but the Palestinian Arabs identified something different. Arabic then took a central place in this retrieval project. Hebrew Orientalists identified the Arabic name of a certain flora and then Hebraised the name of this plant.

with the belief that the name was originally Hebrew, then got Arabized. Through the Hebraization of certain plants, they meant to bring the plant back to its original appellation to build an authentic botanical landscape that ascertains their historical and biblical connection to the land. But there were, it was more than, it was more complicated than just hebrizing Arabic names. There were some cases where they were talking about similar, like the name of a plant comes actually out of similar experience between different communities who lived in the same land. Again, if I were to, in, invoke Elihu Sapir, he talks about, he claims that there are certain names of certain

plans that survived in Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac often exhibit similarities of the cultural and the social circumstances of those communities who spoke these languages. Plant name, for example, mentioned in the Bible, such as, Tina, Chita, Chura, Poul, Batsal, and Avatiyah. In his perspective, the reveal, the similarities because, you know, they sound the same in Arabic and Syriac. So Poul is ful, chita is hentah, Rimon is Raman, Tina is Tien. So they sound the same in Arabic and also in Syriac with slight different

And he concludes that, you know, the similarities of the names of these plans refer to mutual or shared sociocultural experience by these individuals, by these communities. And I think at one point in your book, this is described as Semitism. So the idea that because these words have shared Semitic roots, that they're basically interchangeable, you mentioned Ramon and Raman, the words for pomegranate. So saying like, hey, Ramon is a raman. It's the same thing. And you see what's going on here. I like, yeah, butza like for onion.

At the same time, I was very curious about the word for cactus. Because in Arabic, it's sabar. And Sabra in Hebrew became symbolic as well in Zionism in particular. So this plant has very important symbolism for both groups and is very tied to the geography of Palestine. Can you talk at all about that particular issue? Sure. So the cactus in the Palestinian context, for Palestinians, it refers to this, the roughness and the survivability in the desert and in the difficult circumstances. especially cacti, you know, spread in the rural areas, in the remote and less populated areas.

And for Palestinians who survived in the land for millennia, it was something organic, something symbolic of their survivability and their steadfastness in the land of their ancestors. So they have, unlike, you know, Jews who claim that. that we have gone into the diaspora because of the Romans or because of other historical circumstances, the Palestinians referred to the relationship to the cactus, a sabbar, as a manifestation of their indigenity and their steadfastness. So interestingly, because the Palestinians served as the role model for the Jewish pioneers, they also borrowed this notion of cactus. Sabbar to talk about themselves being rough and doing working in the settlements for them to work in the agrarian activities in the rural areas was that something

easy because they were initially professionals there were other physicians teachers they were of different nature they were accustomed to do different kind of labor and when they came to Palestine motivated by you know by by the idea of labor and ingrained themselves in the landscape, the idealized the peasants, the phallaheen, and their connection to the landscape, as it presented in the sabbar or in the cactus. Yeah, it's a fascinating story, especially because cactus,

as it turns out, is a plant that was introduced to Palestine relatively recently in history. It comes from the Americas. but of course spread as if it became indigenous through its own sort of organic spread without it necessarily being propagated here to there in every case, right? I just like the way that plants allow us to kind of move back and forth between antiquity and modernity in this story. I think you can say a similar thing about place names in this geography.

So part of the project of Hebrew Orientalism is also focusing on toponyms and sort of reconciling the contemporary names with the historical ones. Yes. So one of the interesting examples that come to my mind is that locating the sites mentioned in the Bible according to local narratives. So for example, so we read in the Bible about Aaron and about Moses and about their burial places that are not very much clear. So it is talked about in the Bible, but they're with less information. So we see someone like Israel Bilkin, for example.

So Israel Bilkin, he was a member of the Blue Movement. There were Russian students who decided to, because of the programs in Russia, decided to pack and leave without waiting for any political solutions to settle in Palestine. And they came in Palestine in 1882. And they were the first wave of what is called the first wave of Jewish immigration to lead Ottoman Palestine. So Israel Bilkin talks about the instrumentality of Arab legions and local narratives in identifying these Jewish sites. And he, you know, he rooms the land and try to identify based on what the local population say about specific sites. And based on this, he identifies, for example, a mountain named after Aaron, called Jabal Harun, and other places too.

So Israel Bilkin too, why did he take their narratives very, very seriously? Because deeply inside, he thought that these Arabs were originally Jews who converted to Islam to remain connected to the land. So he viewed them as indigenous population who converted to Christianity because of their connection to the land and also converted to Islam later on to remain where they are connected to their landscape and to the land. It's a great example of an aspect of the story that grows increasingly dissonant as the decades go on, particularly under the British mandate period. these scholars are approaching the people in places of Palestine as sort of repositories

of a past that can be linked to Hebrew or Jewish heritage. But at the same time, this is a region undergoing its own sort of indigenous revival of Arabic language, of Arabic letters, after centuries of Ottoman rule. That increasingly takes on a nationalist valence. And by the end of the Ottoman period, there is also the beginnings of a modern Arab-Palestinian identity. So the Hebrew Orientalists are encountering something that itself is changing. And so I want to turn our attention now in this last part of our interview to the British Mandate period. You described this period, I think quite correctly, is the collapse of an acumenical frame that had survived.

in at least the Arabophone, you know, Levantine regions of the Ottoman Empire up until its end and sort of emerges out of the problem that Great Britain in establishing its mandate establishes Palestine as a national home for two different people living in the same space. So how did this new political context transform Hebrew Orientalism? The continuities are there

as well, but what changes with this new dynamic? As I studied Hebrew Orientalism, I paid close attention to the regional transformations and the impact on the works and practices of Jewish scholars of Hebrew, moving from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the Mandate period ending with the Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. And throughout these three major transformations, I look at the deployment of Arabo-Islamic knowledge in the conestruction of Jewish indiginity in Palestine in three areas, the land, the people, and the language. During the mandate, Hebrew Orientalism pivoted to advance what you just referred to, a national enterprise, laid outside of the ecumenical frame that had provided the umbrella for cohabitation

between various religious and ethnic communities in the late Ottoman Empire, as Osama Makadisi refers to in his work, while being cognizant of their religious differences without leading to religious extremism. So they knew each other, they were familiar with each other, as other scholar Jonathan Grebbets writes in his book that they identify themselves as religious communities. While the interest in and the production of Arab-Islamic knowledge in the Ottoman period aimed to consolidate loyalty to Ottomania, to the Ottoman homeland, in the British period, this knowledge was appropriated. and became strategic in advancing the idea of Jewish national homeland in Palestine.

The acquired Arab and Islamic knowledge was instrumental in few areas one can think of. A well-known feature of the British colonial rule is the incorporation of Ottoman legal institutions into the management of Palestine's land regime. You refer to some aspects of continuity from the late Ottoman to the British period. So Arab-Islamic knowledge was very, very instrumental and useful here in the acquisition of land for Jewish settlement through helping Jewish institutions

like the Jewish National Fund, for example, or to help other Jewish buyers to understand the laws of the land and to take advantage of some of the loopholes found in the in the Ottoman land law the Ottoman land law was as known a hybrid of secular and Islamic laws and Islamic laws divided the land into several categories it was like a mulk private property mawat dead or abandoned land waf endowed land and also there's a mascha or a mere public land which all of these categories were drawn from religious texts such as the Quran or Hadith and from the

practices and the decisions and the policies of the subsequent rightly guided caliphs so the acquisition of of land helped of course that not knowledge helped the acquisition of land which increased the Jewish population in British Palestine, which grew threefold from the beginning of World War I, from 10% of the total population, to 30% by 1936. Another area where Arab Islamic knowledge was profitable and instrumental was to provide Jewish national institutions within the Jewish agency, for example, with information about the divisions within the Palestinian Arab communities.

This information was used to recruit Palestinian journalists, to promote Zionism, to create a lieship with what they perceived as moderate Palestinian Arab figures, as opposed to Palestinian Arab hardliners utilizing the familial rivalries between Palestinians. Also the knowledge was vital in developing separate Hebrew map of the landscape, disconnected completely from the Arabic map, which in of itself, mirrored the British policy of separation between both of both communities. as a classic colonial policy of divide and rule, rather than bridging between both communities and utilizing this knowledge also in polemics

with the Palestinian Arab nationalist. And we can see an example of this is, in the 1929, Hayat al-Burak rights or the Western Wall discerbances, where we see some Jewish thinkers or scholars such as David Yaline, Isaac Yehuda, these side evidence from Arab and Islamic sources to show their connection to that wall and to push back against the claims by Palestinian also Arab intellectuals who appeared before the British Commission that was

investigating the events at the time. You know, while all this is going on, there continues to be this engagement with Arabic literature and Proverbs and this type of material. And actually, on the eve of the foundation of Israel, there's a translation published of the 1001 Knights. You already mentioned it. Its title in Hebrew is Elif Leila Valela, almost identical to the Arabic title, El Fla Walela,

this very popular corpus of tales that, of course, has its own Orientalist history in Europe as well. I was very struck by the notion of the Hebrew 1,001 nights, right, because of the linguistic similarities, the abilities to capture some of the aspects of the original wording, and yet you point out that the Hebrew Orientalists you're describing are, this is by the 1940s, talking about the knights as, quote, a guide to the Arab, right?

The point of reading 1001 Knights is to understand Arabs. Can you talk more about that? Sure. You are referring to the translation produced by Yusuf U.S. U.R. Rivlin. So Yusuf U.R. Rivlin, he was a Palestinian Jew of Ashkenazi descent. He translated before translating 1001 Nights. He translated the Quran in 1936 and also provided the Hebrew translation of the biography of the Prophet based on translating Cilid Ibn Hisham from Arabic to Hebrew for the first time.

There has been before Rivland, it has been a fascination with the Arabianites by different scholars. Some of them were German Jewish orientalists and also local Jewish thinkers like Davidine, which I mentioned, whom I mentioned earlier. Yusuf Reveland's objectives, in my assessment of his project that started in 1940s and ended in 1967, because he translated the entire collection based on the Bulaquia edition of the Arabian Nights. So he first of all, which is this is like very important to understand, which is in line with the Zionist claim of coming back to history. So he wanted to make sure that or to convey the message that we have been here before.

So to push back against the Palestinian national. claims that those were outsiders who maybe spiritually have some connection to the land of Palestine based on the Bible, but they don't constitute an ethnic group of people that hasn't changed from millennia, which, you know, this idea goes back to the first, to the Aldein al-Qalidi's letter, which he sent to Herzl, after learning about Herzlian's plan. to settle in Palestine and send Jewish immigrants to Palestine. So this project of the Arabian Nights in Hebrew meant to show that we as the Jewish people have been here before. And an example or an evidence of this, of our pre-existence before the modern period,

which means that our connection to the land has not or to the Orient, generally speaking, has never been disrupted or never ceased to exist to exist. exist, we have always been connected to the Orient and to the land of our ancestors, is the stories where Jewish individuals are talked about. So there is a Jewish merchant, there is a Jewish physician, there is a Jewish, a beautiful Jewish woman, and so on and so forth. There are many, many examples. And surprisingly, he also, so he talks about the

themselves. So they talk about himself too, that we kind of like having changed, but we changed kind of like thing. We have been here for so long. And our existence today is an extension of the pre-existence before the modern period. And also, when we study the Arabian nights or read them, we get to know a great deal about the Arabs, especially after 1936 and the Arab revolt that created rupture between Palestinian or between Arabs and Jews. Generally speaking, there was some sort of distancediation and estrangement between both communities and they almost lost contact with each other. So Breivlin thought that by studying the Arabianites, we get to know more about the Arab and their lifestyle and their culture and so on and so forth, which in of itself is described to be as orientalistic, as if the Arab talked about in the Arabian nights long time ago has not changed a bit in 1940s. Right, this primordial view, as you elegantly just described there,

actually helps support the idea that the Jewish people also have a primordial presence in this region. I thought that was a very fascinating point. And, you know, as you said, the generation that produced this scholarship, particularly the last generation, lives through immense transformation in the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine. And the work they did required a certain level of intimacy, right, a certain level of appreciation for their Arab neighbors. It often entailed a certain amount of hybridity culturally, but they're living through a period of extreme sort of segregationist logic in which these two nations are completely separate. Did any of these authors lament what was taking place?

Clearly their work was bound up in this process, but did any of them comment or looking back in some of their writings reflect on what was lost after 1948? I can think of, like, again, the same author, Yusuf Rivlin. And Yusuf Rivlin, he existed in the Little Ottoman period throughout the mandate and the early years of the state of Israel. He is very much proud of his past living in this mosaic landscape, being in contact with Palestinians and also with Arabs elsewhere. where he talks about studying with very famous Palestinian students. Back in the day, he talks about studying with, in a Qatab sense of sitting,

studying Arabic and Islam at the hand of a Muslim sheikh, a Palestinian Muslim Sheikh. And he talks about getting in contact with Prince Faisal in Syria later on. But he talks about his experience now, the early years of the of the state of Israel as keys to understand the Arab mind and the Arab community rather than lamenting what happened. So he maybe there is some sort of lamentation in a sense that loss of life perhaps, but he never regrets, for example, the failure in implementation of the two state for example resolution plan of 181 we don't see such a thing because he he was at some point a follower of jabutinsky of revision as zionism which which sees that

the entire land of palestine belongs to the jewish people only but arabs can live in in this land not only between the river and the sea actually he he thought that also Jordan, part of Jordan, the eastern bank of the Jordan River, belongs also to a Jewish state. So he was like, it was a believer of a kind of like a larger Jewish state rather than the state given to the Jewish people or the Jewish agency according to UN 181, 1947. seven. So he talks about the Arab people, the Palestinian Arabs, as Amha Aritz, the people of the land, who should exist and continue to exist in the land, but without having any political rights. They can exist having civil, perhaps social, cultural rights, but not political rights, because this land belongs to the Jewish people. So I haven't seen any sort of,

lamentation of why things went this way, but perhaps to use this past, it's a usable past to produce further understandings or clarifications of the behavior and the practices of Arabs, either in Palestine or in the neighboring Arab states. That's fascinating that the translator of the 1001 Knights into Hebrew was aligned with revisionist Zionism, arguably the most clearly articulated vision of a land of Israel that is the political right of the Jewish people alone in that period. It speaks to the ambivalence that we started off with at the beginning of this podcast. Yeah, there is something that actually I want to think out loud with you about is this, there is actually a debate about the applicability

of the notion of settler colonialism to Zionism. And I utilize the connections between, I play with these two notions and the nods and the connections that might be between Zionism and settler colonialism without necessarily concretizing the connection between Zionism and settler colonialism. But one of the objections

in using or applying this framework of settler colonialism to study the history of Zionism and its advancement in Palestine is the fear of the notion of decolonization. So decolonization usually comes at the tail of thinking about settler colonialism, right? And the first example that comes to mind for many of those. critics is the Algerian example, which is that the decolonization has to happen through sheer violence between, you know, both communities. But, you know, I think if we, I think about another, yeah, I do think about decolonization, but I think about it as an epistemic decolonization. And in the context of the book, I want to, you know, my readers,

to understand that the Palestinian Arab is not the existential threat to Jewish culture in Palestine. The Palestinian culture and the Palestinian people were in fact, they were like they were a site of acceptance and ambivalence, let's say also. There is also ambivalence among Palestinians toward Jewish settlers. and because of their connection to the land and their connection to history, Jewish settlers were able to establish themselves in the land. So I think it is useful to go through this epistemic dequalization as thinking about the history of Jewish settlements in Palestine

and the relationship with the Palestinian. when we talk about aspects connected to the Jewish culture or Jewish history, like, you know, in today's context, like from the river to the sea or Intifada and the Kofia, for example, you know, I feel that there is a lot of intertwinement between the Jewish history in Palestine and the Palestinian history, which I try to share. show in this relational history investigation in the book right to summarize your point the idea that Palestinian culture is somehow antithetical to Jewish-Israeli culture is flawed in the sense that that culture was itself built on this intimate engagement with land plant people and as we've been talking about today language that there is no modern Hebrew culture in that sense without this Arabo-Islamic dimension that you're studying in your book. Well, there's a lot more we could discuss. The book is full of details for the readers who want to

check out more. It's available in paperback from Princeton University Press. You'll find a link on our website, Ottoman History Podcast.com, for easily. access to purchase or locate Hebrew Orientalism by Professor Mustafa Hossein. Professor Hossein, thanks so much for talking with us today. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate taking the time reading the book and also discussing some aspects from the book with me. As someone who has for years had to teach about the modern Middle East, including Palestine, in the university, I found this read really enriching. It taught me something new and made me think about the topic in new ways.

And I hope a lot of our listeners will have the same takeaway. So that's all for this episode. Thank you all for listening and join us next time on the Ottoman History Podcast.