Abraham S. Yahuda | |
|---|---|
 Yahuda in his youth | |
| Born | 1877 |
| Died | 1951 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Writer, Linguist, Teacher |
| Institutions | University of Madrid, University of Berlin, New School for Social Research |
Abraham Shalom Yahuda (Hebrew: אברהם שלום יהודה; 1877–1951)[1] was a Jewish Palestinian polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents.
Abraham Shalom Yahuda was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. During his early life he studied under his brother Isaac Ezekial Yahuda. In 1895, at the age of fifteen, he wrote his first book (in Hebrew) entitled Arab Antiquities. Two years later, in 1897 he attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Afterwards he began teaching in Berlin from 1905 to 1914. Later, during the First World War, he relocated to Madrid where he was appointed in 1915, by royal decree, chair of rabbinic languages and literature After participating in the First Zionist Congress in 1897, A. Yahuda distanced himself from political Zionism.
In 1896, Abrahm Yahuda first met the founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), in London. He asked Herzl to establish relations with the Palestinians to secure their support for the Zionist project. However, Herzl replied that he was directly addressing the great powers and did not need to engage with the Palestinians. Yahuda renewed his request during their second meeting at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, but his request was unsuccessful.[2] Reuven Snir explained Herzl's refusal by attributing it to Herzl's belief in the superiority of European culture.[3] In his memoirs, Yahuda expressed his disappointment with Herzl's reaction, interpreting it as another example of the arrogance of European Jews towards Arabs.[4]
In 1920, Yahuda delivered a lecture in literal Arabic in Jerusalem to an audience consisting of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. He discussed the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, which he aimed to promote as a model for inter-religious relations within a modern political entity. When reporting on this lecture, Yuval Evry cited the various reactions it provoked, both positive and negative, particularly from Muslim intellectuals (with objections related to the Balfour Declaration of 1917). He encouraged the active involvement of Palestinian Arabs in shaping relations with Jews, rather than denying or minimizing their place in the new political structure.[5] Within Zionist circles, Yahuda faced criticism for advocating the assimilation of Jewish culture into Arab culture, and his political vision for the revival of Judeo-Arabic culture was never realized.
In 1952, a posthumous work by Yahuda titled "Dr. Weizmann's Errors on Trial" was published. This work responded to the book "Trial and Error" (1949) by Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the State of Israel.[6]
Yahuda was not the only Mizrahi Jewish intellectual who strongly felt the damage caused by European Jewish Zionists to Jewish-Arab relations. Scholars like Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben Dor Benite associate him with other Palestinian Jews like Rabbi Hayyim Ben Kiki (1887-1935), who authored a text in 1921 criticizing the behavior of European Zionists in "The Question of All Questions: Concerning the Settling of the Land" (in Hebrew), and Nissim Malul (1893-1957), a Palestinian Jewish Zionist who advocated for mandatory Arabic language education for European Jews settled in Palestine to improve relations with non-Jewish Palestinians.[4]
In his 1993 play Hysteria, British playwright Terry Johnson created a character partly based on Yahuda's attempt to convince Sigmund Freud not to publish his final book, Moses and Monotheism.[7]
