Sheba

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20 SHEBA, ZIONISM, AND THE OLD TESTAMENT that Jewish racial exclusivity, dietary customs, circumcision, and other customs militated against widespread conversion to Christianity, and soon Judaism, which once seemed destined to become the principal religion of the Roman Empire, was peripheralized first by Christianity and then by Islam. Both of the two new faiths included beliefs hostile to Judaism, and thereafter life for Jews became increasingly difficult. As exclusion and massacres became an everyday occurrence, nostalgia grew for the world they had lost. Finally, after centuries of persecution and exclusion, many Jewish intellectuals in Europe embraced the concept of Zionism. The term Zionism, coined in 1893, is defined as the national movement of the Jewish people to return to their original homeland, the Promised Land of the Hebrew Old Testament. The word derives from Mt. Zion, traditionally believed to be a powerful fortress offering sanctuary in King David’s time. Theodor Herzl (1860 – 1904) was the visionary of Zionism. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he trained as a lawyer but worked as a writer, playwright, and journalist. He was fatalistic about anti-Semitism, believing it was too deeply ingrained in European culture to allow Jews to enjoy full participation in society. He concluded that Jewish salvation lay in establishing a Jewish state in Turkish-ruled Palestine. Herzl published his ideas in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. He argued that it was fruitless for Jews to continue to appease those whom they lived amongst because it won them no favors. Jews would continue to be persecuted, excluded, ostracized, or discriminated against. They had endured 1800 years of such treatment, and the time had come to recognize the inevitable. They were better off elsewhere, that is, in a country of their own. Herzl’s vision extended beyond recreating an Old Testament scenario. He wanted to establish a modern Jewish socialist utopia, harnessing modern science and technology. In this new country the impoverished Jewish tenant peasant farmers of Eastern Europe would own their own land in prosperous cooperatives. Initially led, in Herzl’s words, “by mediocre intellects which we produce so abundantly,” they would then be joined by emigrants “of a higher grade.” Herzl outlined practical guidelines for promoting Jewish emigration and for financing settlement through land acquisition and promoting trade and industry through investment. Disturbed by anti- Semitic pogroms in Russia, and the Dreyfus case in France, he considered temporary or permanent resettlement locations in Argentina and the Uganda-Kenya borderland. In chapter two of Der Juderstaat he rejected support for the promising Jewish settlement in Argentina and declared that Palestine was the only acceptable site for the new Zion. Herzl wrote:
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 21 Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering. Herzl emphasized that this scheme required international backing otherwise the native population would become increasingly hostile as more settlers infiltrated their land. His views reflected his times. He believed in the moral and racial superiority of technically advanced peoples and accepted without question the right of imperial powers to create colonies and states wherever they wished. He totally failed to realize that the nationalism sweeping nineteenth century Europe would be matched by Arabs living under Turkish rule. Even if he had considered such a phenomenon, doubtless, he would have shared the mistaken belief of early Zionist settlers in Palestine: that the local inhabitants would welcome them for their technological superiority and social progress. The First World War ended the Turkish Empire, but the victorious allies ignored and humiliated their Arab allies who had fought for independence. The French took control of Syria and crushed Arab resistance in Damascus. They agreed to let the British take control of Palestine as a mandate, partly because the British had captured it from the Turks and also because the British agreed to support French policy in the defeated German Rhineland. The rest of the former Turkish Arab territory also passed under British control. Faisal, the principal Arab leader in the revolt against Turkish rule, had hoped to establish an Arab state embracing Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq. Driven from Syria by the French, he grudgingly accepted the British offer of kingship of Iraq. He led his new nation to independence in 1932, but died the following year. During the First World War the chemical industrialist Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the Russian-born future president of Israel, won British gratitude for his process of extracting acetone, a vital component of
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Page 15 and 16: CHAPTER ONE Sheba, Zionism, and the
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CHAPTER SIX Western Arabia and the
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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