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Jonathan Marc Gribetz , Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter , Series on Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , 2014). Pp. 312. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780691159508
Contextualizing Community
In Defining Neighbors, Jonathan Marc Gribetz seeks to examine how Arabs and Zionists--particularly Arab and Zionist intellectuals and writers--conceived of each other during the last years of the Ottoman era, before the solidification of the Zionist project in Palestine and the consequent emergence of an apparently intractable political and national conflict. Making use of a variety of textual sources, Gribetz has produced an intellectual history arguing that Arab and Zionist writers during this period viewed each other not primarily as competing nations with oppositional political goals but as representatives of "deeply familiar" religious and racial categories.
After setting the stage with a chapter on Jerusalem's and Palestine's place within the broader Ottoman Arab sphere, Gribetz begins his analysis with a detailed look at Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi's unpublished manuscript Zionism or the Zionist Question, written just before al-Khalidi's death in 1913. In this manuscript al-Khalidi, a member of the prominent and politically active Jerusalem family and a representative in the Ottoman parliament from 1908 to 1913, expounded not only on the secular nationalist tenets of Zionism but also on Jewish theology and history, with an extensive and broadly sympathetic (though sometimes rather eccentric) recounting and interpretation of Jewish biblical history in Palestine.
The remainder of the book takes up an analysis of various press sources. In a chapter on Hebrew Zionist newspapers published in Palestine,...