Past Perfect: Jewish Memories of Language and the Politics of Arabic in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

As Zionist institutions in Mandate Palestine discussed and promoted Arabic study in light of increasing Arab resistance to Zionist settlement,1 they not only speculated on the origins of this opposition and possible mechanisms of subduing it,2 but also crafted nostalgic – and often counterfactual – narratives of past coexistence. For the mainly Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlers arriving in a mainly Arabic-speaking land and seeking to reclaim Hebrew as a vernacular, Arabic offered a pathway to an alternative Jewishness, one rooted in a longlost Semitic identity. While these ‘new’ Jews worked to contain or suppress the local resistance to their settlement, Arabic became a symbol of a lost, harmonious past when Jews and Arabs did indeed coexist as fellow speakers of Arabic. In this chapter I hope to show that claims during the Mandate period about early Jewish settlers’ use of Arabic allowed descendants of the early Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot, sing. moshava) to craft an image of themselves as the bridge between pre-Zionist and Zionist Jewish Palestine and symbols of a non-political Zionism that transcended conflict – this at a time when all evidence pointed to an increasingly conflictual and provocative role for Zionism in Palestine. As scholars have noted in their works on nationalism and memory, rhetoric about the past – in this case about past language practices – serves political