Conflicting German Orientalism: Zionist Arabists and Arab scholars, 1926–1938

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 Using previously unpublished archival material in German, Arabic, Hebrew and English, this article exposes the School’s endeavours in the first decade after its establishment to promote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 Arab-Jewish identity meant to bridge this political-cultural gap.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Aya Elyada, Abigail Jacobson, Liat Kozma, 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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Shalom Schwartz, Ussishkin be-Igrotav (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1949–1950), 151; ‘ha-Universita ha-ʻIvrit b’Yerushalaim’, Hatsfira, 3 October 1918, 9. Translations from non-English sources are my own, unless otherwise noted.

² Diary entry from 22 March 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 Josef Horovitz, ‘Die Universität Jerusalem’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 August 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. Susannah Heschel and Umar Ryad (London: Routledge, 2018), 177–8.

⁴ Unaddressed letter by Josef Horovitz, 28 March 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’, 14 May 1925, CAHU, 91:1925–27.

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 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 Contemporary 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 Honour 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.

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 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 Neighbours: 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.

¹⁴ Unaddressed letter by Josef Horovitz, 28 March 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.

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, 2 January 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 al-jāmiʿa al-yahūdiyya’, Filastin, 31 March 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).

¹⁹ ‘Met Issaf Nashashibi’, Davar, 23 January 1948, 10. For Nashashibi’s biography see Jihad Ahmad 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).

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: Entrepreneurship 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], 187 n).

²³ E.S. [Eliyahu Sasson] to M.S. [Moshe Shertok], 24 September 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, 24 September 1942, 2).

²⁴ ‘D. Husayn Fawzi.. Yuḥāḍiru fī Isrāʾīl!!’, October, 28 October 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, 4 September 1930, CZA, S25\6727.

²⁶ Goitein to Levi Billig, 26 October 1932, ANLI, Arc. 4°1911/03/14; Kurd Ali to Goitein, 23 March 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, 25 September 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 (27 September 1941, ANLI, Arc. 4°1911/02/9). I would like to thank Hanan Harif for sharing this diary entry with me.

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.

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, 26 July 1931, 3; ‘Aref el-Aref Oreaḥ ha-Universita ha-ʻIvrit’, Haboker, 9 May 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.

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; Johnston-Bloom, ‘“Dieses wirklich westöstlichen Mannes”’, 177.

³⁴ Mangold-Will, ‘Josef Horovitz’, 29.

³⁵ A point he reiterated during the following year (Horovitz to Magnes, 8 July 1925, and Summary of a meeting at HUSOS, 17 March 1926, CAHU, 91:1925–27).

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 16 November 1926], ANLI, Arc. 4°1559/03/17; Levi Billig, ‘Memorandum on Research’, [late 1926], CAHU, 91:1925–27.

³⁸ Mendel, ‘From German Philology to Local Usability’, 8. See also Halperin, Babel in Zion, 198–200.

³⁹ Billig to Magnes, 23 May 1927; Shlomo Ginzberg to Billig, 17 May 1927; and Billig to Magnes, 1 June 1927, CAHU, 91:1925–27.

⁴⁰ Billig to Ginzberg, 29 January 1928, CAHU, 91alef:1928.

⁴¹ Billig to Magnes, 23 May 1927, and Billig to Ginzberg, 23 May 1927, CAHU, 91:1925–27.

⁴² Nicholas Murray Butler to Magnes, 3 November 1927; ‘List of Proposals Considered by the University with regard to the Expansion of the School of Oriental Studies’, 1 July 1928; and Magnes to Cyrus Adler, 12 November 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).

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, 21 May 1929, 4.

⁴⁷ M.A. [Michael Assaf], ‘ha-Makhon le-Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ’, Davar, 30 March 1933, 3.

⁴⁸ Uri Cohen, The Mountain and the Hill: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem During Pre-Independence 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) 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.

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, 27 June 1934, CAHU, 226:1934.

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.

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, February 9, 1936, CAHU, 226:1936.

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, 10 April 1935, 12.

⁶² Mayer to Magnes, 15 June 1936, CAHU, 2261:1936.

⁶³ Mendel Schneerson to Mayer, 6 January 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, 23 August 1936, 1–2.

⁶⁵ Filastin, 23 August 1936, 3.

⁶⁶ Shimon Garidi, ‘ʻAl Limud Madaʻei ha-Mizraḥ ba-Universita ha-ʻIvrit (Divrei Student)’, Davar, 2 April 1936, 4.

⁶⁷ Excerpt from a session of the Standing Committee, 18 January 1937, CAHU, personal file—Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967.

⁶⁸ Michael Assaf to Magnes, 2 May 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.

⁶⁹ Ginzberg to Shamosh, 29 January 1937, CAHU, personal file—Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967.

⁷⁰ Goitein to Shamosh, 2 March 1937; Goitein to the rector, 4 July 1937; and Mayer to the rector, 22 June 1937, CAHU, personal file—Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967.

⁷¹ Goitein to the university management, 28 June 1938, CAHU, personal file—Yitzhak Shamosh, up to 1967.

⁷² Mayer to Werner Senator, 10 September 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 Neighbours, 111.

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.

⁷⁸ Baneth to Edward Poznansky, 11 May 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 Towards Islamic Institutions in Israel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 160.

⁸¹ Hasan [Amin] al-Habash to the Rector, 22 January 1938; Ben-David to al-Habash, 15 February 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, 2 March 1938; Senator to al-Habash, 9 March 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, 20 March 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, 3 April 1938; al-Habash to Ben-David, 6 May 1938, CAHU, 165:1938.

⁸² 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’, 5 December 1946, from the private archive of Alexander Lutzky-Dotan. I would like to thank Hillel Cohen for sharing this document with me.

⁸⁴ Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlements in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3.

⁸⁵ Moshe Brill, Pessah Schusser, and David Neustadt to Moshe Shertok, 22 October 1940, CZA, S25\22165.

⁸⁶ Baneth to Assaf, 27 April 1946, CZA, S25\9069.