In the minds of many Westerners there is little difference between being Arab and being Muslim. The fact that some Arabs are Christians does not impinge in any transformative way on this imagining of Arab-ness. It would also be very difficult these days if not well-nigh impossible to convince Westerners as well as Arabs that there was a time within living memory when Arab-ness as a category of affiliation included Jews.

In Palestine before the encroachment of Zionism as a European political ideology at the beginning of the twentieth century being Arab/Palestinian and Jewish was a real-life category without any of the contradictions that would be associated with it nowadays. Indigenous Palestinian Jews spoke Arabic in their daily lives reserving Hebrew for liturgical purposes.

In Jerusalem towards the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century Palestinian Jewish intellectuals stood shoulder to shoulder with their fellow Muslim and Christian Palestinians to resist the Zionist ideology of the incoming Ashkenazi Jews in the city who in fact continued to live as foreigners with European passports in their new provenance.

Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951) was one such Palestinian Jew. In his posthumously published book Dr Weizmann’s Errors on Trial (1952) he launched a trenchant attack on Zionism which he accused of having destroyed the relationship between the Arabs (Muslims and Christians) and Jews in Palestine.

Evidence of this rootedness of Jewish Palestinians in Arab culture can be found in the most unlikely of sources. Imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment the French statesman Adolphe Cremiéux established the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris in 1860 as a charitable organisation to promote secular values among Jews as well as to nurture self-reliance and professional development through education.

One of the most important achievements of this organisation was the setting up of European/French style schools for the children of Jews in various parts of the Ottoman Empire and in Morocco which was not under Ottoman rule. Alliance Israélite Universelle schools were established among other places in Morocco modern-day Turkey Iraq and Palestine.

In my research on the language situation in Palestine since the start of the twentieth century I have been keen to understand how Palestinian Jews imagined themselves or were imagined by other Jews using ‘language’ as a prism. In the course of this research I read parts of the archive of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s mission to establish a school in Safed in northern Palestine in the 1900s. Safed was a mixed city at the time. The majority of the residents were Muslim with smaller numbers of Christians and Jews.

The Alliance mission archives note this composition but devote a lot of space to describing the Jewish population of this small city. The archives note that the population consisted of two parts: Jewish Palestinians this is how they refer to them and new Jewish immigrants who came mainly from Russia with support from influential Jews back in back in their home country. Commenting on the miserable state of the indigenous Jewish population in ways that are reminiscent of nineteenth century Orientalist descriptions of Muslim Palestinians in the countryside the fellahin as they referred to them the archives go on to describe the festering enmity between the two Jewish communities.

It would be a distortion of history to ascribe the antagonistic relations between the two communities solely to different ethnic/national imaginings one Palestinian/Arab and the other Russian but the archives make clear that these different imaginings could not be excluded as a factor in inter-communal relations.

The Alliance archives comment on the language situation among the two communities and note that the Russian Jews had a much greater facility in Hebrew than Jewish Palestinians. The archive also reveals that Arabic was the dominant language among the native Jews of Safed. In one document the author concludes that Alliance should focus its attention on establishing a school that is aimed at Safed’s native Jews.

This same document goes on to discuss which language to choose as the medium of instruction at the school. It identifies three local possibilities: Turkish as the language of the Ottoman administration in Palestine Hebrew as the language of the Jewish faith and Arabic as the language of the majority. The document quickly discounts Turkish owing to what it says was the impending and inevitable demise of the Ottoman Empire. It then discusses the case for Hebrew but it quickly discounts it as being of little use to the native Jews of Palestine in their daily lives as well as because its promotion would entrench a ‘premodern’ ethos among native Jews that contradicts the enlightenment mission of the organisation.

Moving to Arabic the document acknowledges it as the main language of the Safed Jews and the most important tool for living productively in Palestine. In the end the author of the document recommends that the Alliance use French as the language of instruction this being a foregone conclusion given the provenance of the organisation and its commitment to a European-style Jewish enlightenment through the language.

The idea that a Jew could be an Arab may be seen as counter-intuitive from the perspective of the present but it should not be so as the discussion above suggests. In fact Arab nationalism in its proto-gestations in the nineteenth century was aware of this possibility and did allow for it. In fact Arab nationalism based around language history and culture was mooted precisely to override the divisions of faith in the Arab body-politic as Sati Al-Husri (1882-1968) one of the foremost thinkers in the pan-nationalist field reveals in his extensive output on the ideology. Had it not been for the devastating intervention of European Zionism a settler-colonialist movement in Palestine there would not be any contradiction between being an Arab and being a Jew today.

Arab nationalism was not built on race but on Arabism as a cultural edifice that can accommodate people of different faiths or of none. Arab nationalism accepted Judaism as an indigenous component of Arab life but it rejected Zionism as an outside force that sought to alienate the Arab Jews from their native cultural environment. It is therefore paradoxical that German Jews in Israel today can publicly display their German-ness in spite of the Holocaust but that sadly Arab Jews move in the opposite direction in spite of the fact that Arab-ness has been historically open to their incorporation with Christians and Muslims in one political culture.