Jews of the East and Zionism: A.S. Yahuda in Spain and a lesson from WWI

• In Event: War and Nationalism: Sephardim/Mizrahim in Between

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, A.S. Yahuda, a scholar of the Bible and of Jewish and Arab literature, urged Zionist leaders to take into account the Jews of the East and the Arab population in Palestine in pursuit of the aims of the movement. In this paper I introduce Yahuda’s political activities and examine the way in which his views of Zionism are intertwined with his identity and ideology, focusing on his time in Spain as a chair of Hebrew literature at the Universidad Central de Madrid (1913-23). Born into a Baghdadi Jewish family in Jerusalem, Yahuda was proud of being an “Oriental Jew”, having both Hebrew and Arabic as his mother tongues. As an academic topic and a strategic tool for Zionism, he had a great interest in Spain, emphasising the deep connections between Arabs and Jews in al-Andalus. In 1913 Yahuda accepted an offer and became a royal chair at Madrid, and according to Max Nordau, he was the first Jew who received a state appointment in Spain since 1492. This paper first explores Yahuda’s engagement with the Zionist movement while in Madrid. Together with Nordau, who was also in Spain, Yahuda initially supported the movement and met Chaim Weizmann in Madrid, trying to persuade him to cultivate Arab-Jewish relations. Eventually, however, Yahuda left the movement in disillusion. This paper goes on to address the impact of WWI on Yahuda’s views of Zionism. In his writing in 1915, Yahuda dismissed nationalism as one of the “most abominable fruits” of the war. Using “we Jews of the East” as an example of being beyond a nationalistic perspective, Yahuda called on all Jews not to imitate this “patriotic unscrupulousness”. Through an examination of archival materials and personal correspondence, I suggest in this paper that Yahuda’s growing apprehension of Ashkenazi-oriented Zionism derives not only from his Eastern Jewish identity and belief in the close Arab-Jewish nexus, but also his attempt to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism, which for Yahuda was a lesson learnt from WWI.

author

• Saeko Yazaki, The University of Glasgow