At the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, in urban centers such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Jaffa, Jewish intellectuals participated in the modern Hebrew and Arabic enlightenment movements (the haskala and the nand&dotbelow;a). They immersed themselves in the ideological and political currents of their time, responding to the competing pulls of Ottomanism, Zionism, and territorial nationalism. Above all, they explored what it meant to be Arab, Jewish, and modern, reimagining themselves and their communities through the regional vocabulary of modernity and enlightenment. But the split between "Arab" and "Jew" was to become violently entrenched, socially institutionalized, and in time, historically reified. With these developments, Moyal and other Arab Jewish writers were cast out not only from the bygone world of the cosmopolitan Middle East, but from historical memory itself.
Arabs before we are Jews" (nahnu 'arab qabla an nakun yahudan).20 In
literature and history, the term was employed by the Egyptian Karaite Murad
Farag in his 1929 book al-Shu'ara' al-yahud al- 'arab (The Arab Jewish poets),
which traces ...
