The first Palestinians

In 1909, Shimon Moyal born in Jaffa but living in Egypt attempted An Arabic-Zionist Talmud. Moyal's project was to present "the Talmud" as a nationalist and Zionist text, and at the same time as congenial to Christians and Muslims.

"The Talmud" here would be the Iraqi text, not the Palestinian. That Iraqi Talmud was not Zionist, except incidentally. It came out of a diaspora community seeing itself as "Bavli" - the neo-exiles in a neo-Aramaic neo-Babylon. It was however nationalist. Katzenelson would understand.

Moyal was inspired, if you will, by Arabs who were spreading about that this Talmud saw goyim as something like semi-feral domestic beasts. Plus ça change. This fear was greatest in places like Jaffa which noticed a Zionist tendency among Jews outside Palestine. Some of which Jews were, like Moyal, Palestinian by birth.

Inasmuch as the Iraqis were free of a Christian state, the Jews there circa AD 500 had let some slanders against Jesus bar Maryam into their Talmud. There is also the occasional comment about the people the Jews lived around, some good, some... not so much. You can go to Unz for Israel Shamir's critiques of the worst of the worst, among several others'.

But I am not here to judge The Jews; especially not those of Late Antiquity, which era made monsters of everyone. (I believe the Jews are past that.) I am here to bear witness to what Palestinians circa 1900 might have heard about the Jews. If these modern polemics were around then, Palestinians would have worried about what a nativist and supremacist cult might do if put in charge over their home province. The Ottomans might have been multicultural in the 1700s; they were going Turk and Islamic by 1900. If non-Turks were to take over Palestine, these Farangi would not have the same pro-Muslim bias as the Turk had held. And they might prefer Jews over Arabs.

Some Muslims and Arabophones have not got past Late Antiquity, for whatever reason.

That, then, was the Palestinian Muslim project in 1900: to rally the non-Muslim Arabophones. They already had their common enemy.

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