The Nahḍa and the Haskala: A Comparative Reading of ‘Revival’ and ‘Reform’

Abstract

This article compares the modern Hebrew and Arabic ‘renaissance’ movements (the haskala and the nahḍa) to argue that the nahḍa can and should be studied comparatively, and to illustrate some of the insights gained through a comparative reading of non-Western cultural modernity. Much as the nahḍa is often read as the formative moment of modern Arab identity, the haskala is viewed as the originary moment of Jewish modernity. Comparative analysis sheds light on the ideas and psychology of the two movements as well their progenitors’ similar historical experiences. In particular, the contribution of Arab Jewish intellectuals to the haskala and the nahḍa opens new vistas into intersections of modern Arabic and Hebrew thought, further eroding long-standing assumptions about the boundaries between Arab and Jewish cultures. The textual output of Arab Jews in Arabic and in Hebrew illuminates the cross-cultural circulation of ideas and tropes of ‘modernity’ and ‘enlightenment’ underlying both the nahḍa and the haskala. I use the comparison to underscore that the nahḍa was at one and the same time an Arab movement, part of a multilingual regional discourse, and one of many global ‘enlightenment’ discourses that emerged contemporaneously in the colonial and post-colonial world.

Notes

1 In Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 36 (Sheehi's translation). As Sheehi explains, al-Bustānī (1819–1883), a foundational nahḍa thinker, tried to recuperate the history of Arab rationalist learning as exemplified during the ‘Golden Age’ of the Abbasid Empire in order to re-inscribe Arabs into universal history.

2 Ha-Magid 13, no. 22, cited in Hakak, Nitsaney ha-yetsira, 271.

3 For example, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 3; Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature, 7–8; and Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, 105.

4 By ‘Arab Jew,’ I mean Jews who were born and came of age in the Arab world and whose first language was one or another of the Arabic dialects (including the variants of spoken Judeo-Arabic). For more on the problem of ‘Arab Jewish’ identity, see Gottreich, ‘Historicizing the Concept;’ Levy, ‘Historicizing the Concept;’ and Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East.’

5 Stetkevych, ‘Confluence of Arabic and Hebrew Literature,’ 218.

6 From the root n-h-ḍ, nahḍa literally means to ‘get up,’ ‘stand up’, or ‘rise.’ Marilyn Booth translates nahḍa as ‘awakening’ and calls it ‘an intensive movement of intellectual self-searching on behalf of a variously defined larger community.’ Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, xxi. Many other writers avoid trying to define it. Albert Hourani never actually mentions the term nahḍa in his classic Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, considered the authoritative book on the subject. This, however, is because he focuses primarily on the movement's reformist (rather than literary) aspect, a sphere whose overarching frame of reference was iṣlāḥ (reform) rather than nahḍa. See Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.

7 As Nada Tomiche notes in her entry on nahḍa for the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914) speaks of nahḍa in his monumental ‘Literary History of the Arabic Language’ and associates the term with the contribution of Western thought to the East. See Zaydān, Tā'rīkh al-ādāb; and Tomiche, Encyclopaedia of Islam, ‘Nahḍa.’

8 Feiner, ‘Towards a Historical Definition.’

9 Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, 23–24.

10 Kurzman, Modernist Islam.

11 Pelli, ‘How a Cultural Renaissance Preceded a National Renaissance,’ 92.

12 See Hamzah, ‘From ‘Ilm to Sihafa.’

13 Aziz al-Azmeh critiques the aṣāla discourse as essentializing, and sees the ideological trope of the nahḍa more as ‘one of ontological irredentism, it being the attempt to retrieve an essence that the vicissitudes of time and the designs of enemies, rather than change of any intrinsic nature, had caused to atrophy.’ al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 43.

14 For a review of the nomenclature of reform in the nahḍa, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 25.

15 As Ilham Khury-Makdisi puts it: ‘one particularly influential historiographic trend has read the nahḍa as a precursor and maker of Arab nationalism.’ Khuri-Makdisi, ‘Levantine Trajectories,’ 8. Contesting this assumption, Khuri-Makdisi's study ‘emphasizes the contingency of the Nahda's nationalist “turn” and underlines its various aspects of contestation, including calls for social reform.’ Ibid., 9. See also Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean.

16 See Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, 6–11, for a succinct review of trends in the historiography of Arab nationalism, beginning with Antonius, of whom Kayali writes: ‘For more than two decades after it was published in 1938, this account of an awakening, or nahda, constituted the definitive history of the Arab nationalist movement.’ Ibid, 6. Sheehi notes that Antonius's book ‘has served as a catalyst for the revision of the historiography of Arabism’ and aptly suggests that its value ‘should be found not in its trustworthiness as a secondary source but in its eloquence and clarity as a primary source.’ Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 8–9.

17 Cf. Hourani, Arabic Thought; also Duri, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation. Hourani's work is now considered the standard work on the nahḍa; although it is not a comprehensive narrative and many scholars now consider it flawed, no one has produced a comprehensive counter-narrative. Stephen Sheehi's aforementioned Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, while more limited in scope, offers a theoretical reading and critique of nahḍa discourse.

18 I refer here to the first two generations of historiographers of the haskala; for example, Yosef Klausner, H. N. Shapira, Baruch Kurzweil, Shim'on Halkin, and Pinhas Lahover.

19 Alter, Modern Hebrew Literature, 6–7 and 40–61.

20 Regarding the teleology of haskala and Zionism, see for example Band's summation of the positions of various historians of the haskala, most (if not all) of whom construe haskala as a necessary first step culminating in Zionism. Band, ‘Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature,’ 8–9 (my emphasis).

21 Feiner and Sorkin, New Perspectives on the Haskalah, 1.

22 Levy, ‘Reorienting Hebrew Literary History.’

23 Feiner (a leading younger haskala historian) does note elsewhere that: ‘[the] branches of the east European Haskalah in some major North African communities are now being examined for the first time.’ See Feiner, ‘Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,’ 213. In this section, Feiner briefly considers some of the important characteristics of haskala in North Africa as well as the distinctive colonial context that helped shape them. He also touches on haskala in Jerusalem. Ibid., 213–215. He does not, however, mention haskala elsewhere in the mashriq, or in India. Elsewhere in the chapter he notes that a literary network linking centers of haksala in Europe had ‘by the end of the century extended to communities such as Salonika, Mogador, Tunis, Algiers, and Jerusalem.’ Ibid., 207.

24 For explicit representations of this viewpoint, see Meyer, ‘When Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?’, 336; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 4–5; and Gerber, ‘Jews of North Africa and the Middle East,’ 43.

25 Avrahami, ‘Tehiyat ha-safa ha-‘ivrit be-tunis,’ 9–10.

26 Ibid, 10; and Chetrit, ‘Moderniyut le'umit mul moderniyut tsarfatit.’

27 Halevi, ‘Ha-meshamrim hevley shav,’ 33. See also Goldberg, ‘The Maskil and the Mequbbal.’

28 Benbassa, ‘Process of Modernization,’ 92–93.

29 For more on these newspapers and on Middle Eastern Hebrew writing, see Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East,’ Chapter Five; and Levy, ‘Reorienting Hebrew Literary History.’

30 Indeed, Jacob Landau writes: ‘[V]ery few Jews actively joined the Egyptian nationalist movement. A notable exception was Jacob (James) Sanua, a journalist, writer, and playwright, who worked throughout his life for the cause of Egyptian nationalism. His activities, however, had so little Jewish content that they lie outside the scope of this book.’ Landau, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 12. The sole exception is in Moreh and Sadgrove, ‘Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Arabic Theatre,’ 17–31.

31 Norman Stillman notes that the Jews of the Arab world did not partake in the nahḍa, and were generally not uninterested in Arab cultural and intellectual life, calling Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʾ a ‘unique phenomenon.’ Stillman,The Jews of Arab Lands, 32–33. See also Masters, Christians and Jews; and Lewis, The Jews of Islam.

32 See Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs; and Behar and Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought. For some English-language recent works that help recontextualize Modern Middle Eastern Jewish intellectual history, see Levy, ‘Edification between Sect and Nation;’ Levy, ‘Jewish Winters in the Arab East;’ Levy, ‘Historicizing the Concept;’ Levy, ‘Partitioned Pasts;’ Levy, ‘Reorientating Hebrew Literary History;’ Bashkin, New Babylonians; and Campos, Ottoman Brothers.

33 There is an extensive body of literature on maskilic activity in North Africa, although much of it appears in Hebrew journals devoted to the study of Middle Eastern and North African Jewry (especially Pe‘amim and Mi-kedem u-mi-yam), with a handful of others appearing in French-language and English-language journals and anthologies. For English-language chapters on North Africa, see Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries. Yosef Tobi, ‘The Flowering of Judeo-Arabic Literature’ includes an extensive bibliography on the topic. See also Chetrit, ‘Jewish Languages Enter the Modern Age.’

34 Gottreich, ‘Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews,’ 443.

35 Ibid., 445.

36 Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions, 29–31.

37 See Levy, ‘Jewish Writers,’ Chapters 2 and 3.

38 Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions, 28.

39 Ibid., 9.

40 Farag, Dīwān Murād; and Farag, Ha-kodshiyot.

41 For more on Farag and on his newspaper, see Levy, ‘Edification Between Sect and Nation.’

42 Moyal, Tā'rīkh ḥayāt Imīl Zūlā. For more on Moyal, see Levy, ‘Partitioned Pasts.’

43 Moyal, al-Talmud.

44 Riḍā, Tā'rīkh al-ustādh al-imām al-shaykh; for more on the Association of Friendship and Understanding, see 819–829.

45 For example, Murād Mīkhā'īl, Mīr Baṣrī, Shalom Darwīsh, Ya‘qūb Bilbul and Anwar Shā'ūl. See Berg, Exile from Exile, esp. 29–39; Snir, ‘We Are Arabs Before We are Jews;’ and Snir, ‘Araviyut, yahadut, tsiyonut.

46 For example, the Kuwayti brothers, Salima Pasha (Murad), Dahud Husni, Togo Mizrahi, and Layla Murad.

47 For Mary Louise Pratt, transculturation is a phenomenon of the ‘contact zone,’ or the space of colonial encounters. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.

48 Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 25; see Chapters 1–2. For Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, reform is the central and defining impetus of the nahda; her dissertation ‘views the Nahda as primarily a conscious intellectual articulation, by thinkers belonging to a variety of categories, institutions and intellectual traditions, of the need to reform society.’ Khuri-Makdisi, ‘Levantine Trajectories,’ 9. Yoav Di-Capua agrees: ‘Whatever discussion took place on one level or another in literary salons, learned societies, welfare organizations, the burgeoning media, political clubs, colonial offices, Masonic lodges, and secret societies, it was driven by a social philosophy of progress whose mantra was reform, and it gradually replaced civilization with nation.’ Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, 26.

49 Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 27 and 35.

50 See Moyal, Tā'rīkh ḥayāt Imīl Zūlā, 10–11.

51 See Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East,’ Chapter 6, for a full analysis of this discourse, particularly in the writings of the Baghdadi maskil Shlomo Bekhor Husin.

52 This is also elaborated more fully in Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East,’ Chapter 6.

53 Stetkevych's essay is a succinct and elegant comparison of the parallel development of modern Hebrew and Arabic literatures, highlighting the formal qualities of each; it does not elaborate on the nahḍa or haskala as ideological/political movements.

54 See Bashkin, ‘Why Did Baghdadi Jews Stop Writing;’ and L. M. Kenny, ‘East versus West.’

55 Cited in Gendzier, The Practical Visions, 16.

56 Yehoshua, ‘Skira ‘al toldot ha-‘itonut.’

57 Sadgrove, ‘The Beirut Jewish Arab Theater;’ and Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions, 114–116.

58 For more on representations of Jewish themes in nahḍa discourse, see Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East,’ Chapter 2.