Yusuf Diya-uddin al-Khalidi

Yusuf Diya-uddin Pasha al-Khalidi was born in Jerusalem into an illustrious Jerusalemite family. His father, Muhammad Ali al-Khalidi, was a senior clerk at the sharia (Islamic law) court in Jerusalem, and he had five boys (Yassin, Abdel Rahman, Yusuf, Khalil, and Raghib) and three girls. Yusuf’s maternal grandfather, Musa al-Khalidi, was the kadiasker, or chief justice, of Anatolia, a judicial position whose authority extended over the Asiatic part of the Ottoman Empire. Yusuf Khalidi and his wife had one daughter,

Khalidi first received a traditional religious education at al-Fakhriyya madrasa, an Islamic school located inside al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. However, he sought out a Western-style education for reasons he explains in his autobiography: he believed that Europeans dominated other peoples because they had superior education and their adversaries remained unenlightened. When his father refused him permission to travel to Europe, he ran away from home with his paternal cousin to the island of Malta, then under British control. There, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Samuel Gobat, arranged for him to enroll in the Protestant College. He remained there for two years, during which he studied arithmetic and foreign languages, including Greek, French, and English until his elder brother Yassin, decided that he should move to Istanbul to attend the Imperial School of Medicine there. However, studying medicine did not appeal to him, so he quit after one year and enrolled instead at the American Robert College of Engineering in Istanbul. He studied there for a year and a half, after which he left his studies and returned to Jerusalem in 1865, following the death of his father.

Thanks to the education he received in Jerusalem, Malta, and Istanbul, his proficiency in several foreign languages, and his family name, Khalidi caught the attention of some of the reformist statesmen of the Ottoman Empire, such as Mehmed Reshid Pasha, the wali (governor) of the province of Greater Syria, who was responsible for administering the sanjaq of Jerusalem before the establishment of the Jerusalem mutasarrifate in 1872.

The first activity Khalidi undertook upon returning to Jerusalem was to establish a public rushdiye (Ottoman-era non-religious school). He expected to be appointed principal of the school but instead a Turkish teacher was sent from Istanbul to take the post. His sense of disappointment was short-lived, however, as he was appointed mayor of Jerusalem, “by the support of the people of Jerusalem and the Turkish government,” as he writes. He held this position for five years (1870-74) and would later hold it for two more terms. With the support of Mehmed Reshid Pasha, Khalidi oversaw the implementation of a number of projects to develop the city, including the construction, repair, and maintenance of streets; the laying of a water supply network; and the construction of a road connecting Jerusalem and Jaffa suitable for carriage traffic.

When Reshid Pasha was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Ottoman government in 1874, he asked Khalidi to join him in Istanbul. There, Reshid Pasha assigned him to the ministry's translation bureau and then he was appointed as Ottoman vice-consul for the city of Poti, a port city on the Russian Black Sea; he held this post for only six months. After a two-month tour of Russia, during which he visited Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, he moved to Vienna at the start of 1875, where Reshid Pasha had become the Ottoman ambassador. With the latter's assistance, Khalidi was given a teaching post as instructor of Arabic and Turkish at the Royal Academy of Oriental Studies. During his stay in Vienna, he also showed interest in politics and the condition of the Jewish communities in Jerusalem. He wrote two articles that were published in the British newspaper Jewish Chronicle. In the first, he commented on a report by the newspaper's correspondent on the difficult living conditions of the Jews living in Jerusalem. In the second, he advised the wealthy British Jewish philanthropist and financier Moshe Montefiore, who was then visiting Palestine, to work on establishing schools to instruct the Jews in the techniques of agriculture, instead of waiting for the funds collected by the annual tax revenues to be handed out to them.

After spending eight months in Vienna, Khalidi returned to Jerusalem, where he again assumed the mayoralty for a brief time. Following Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s promulgation of the Ottoman Constitution in 1876, Khalidi was chosen the following year as a deputy to the Ottoman parliament, called the Chamber of Deputies (Mejlis-e-Meb’usan). This made him the sole representative from the Jerusalem mutasarrifate and one of only fourteen Arab deputies out of a total of 120 deputies. During the chamber’s two short sessions (1877–1878), Khalidi stood out as a gifted, eloquent orator, a prominent member of the opposition to Abdul Hamid’s policies, and a staunch champion of reform and the strengthening of the constitution in political life. The United States’s consul general in Istanbul described him as having “made an impact in parliament with his daring and articulate words.”

Following Sultan Abdul Hamid's decision on 13 February 1878 to suspend the constitution and dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, it was ruled that ten opposition members be expelled from Istanbul; Khalidi was one of them. On 14 March of that year, he arrived in Jerusalem and resumed his work as mayor once again. However, he fell out with the local governor of Jerusalem at the time, Mehmed Rauf Pasha, who had him dismissed as mayor. In October 1879, Khalidi traveled once again to Vienna, where he went back to teaching Arabic at the Oriental Academy. The following year, he compiled a critical edition of the diwan (collected poems) of Labid ibn Rabiʿa al-Amiri, the Arab poet who straddled the twilight of the pre-Islamic era and the early age of Islam. The first volume of the collection went to print in 1880; Khalidi wrote an introduction and commentary on the verses. This edition was subsequently translated into German and English.

In 1881, Khalidi returned to Jerusalem, where he was appointed qa’im maqam (sub-district governor) of Jaffa, and the following year for the district of Marjayoun (present-day South Lebanon). He subsequently took charge of governing the district of Motki in Bitlis Province (present-day Turkey), which had a Kurdish majority. While there, he became fluent in Kurdish and compiled a Kurdish-Arabic dictionary call al-Hadiyya al-Hamidiyya fi-l-lugha al-kurdiyya (The Hamidian Boon to the Kurdish Tongue’s Tune), published in 1892 in the Ottoman capital. The dictionary consisted of authentic Kurdish vocabulary words numbering in the thousands, as well as an introduction to the structure of the Kurdish language and the idiosyncrasies of its grammar. After its publication, the dictionary was greatly acclaimed by Kurdish intellectuals, who praised its compiler and considered that he had rendered an invaluable service to Kurdish language and literature that would endure for all time. Among his other achievements was his transcription of a copy of Risālat al-Ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness) by the renowned medieval Arab poet-philosopher Abu al-Alaa al-Ma‘arri, from the original manuscript preserved in the Köprülü Library in Istanbul. He intended to have it published in print, but his posting to the Kurdish regions prevented this.

After regaining Sultan Abdul Hamid’s favor, Khalidi returned to Istanbul in 1893, where he was promoted to the rank of Pasha. However, in the final years of his life, the Sultan placed Khalidi under virtual house arrest in Istanbul. He appointed him to several high-ranking posts without allowing him to actually take charge of them. While in Istanbul, Khalidi became a close friend of another virtual prisoner of the Sultan who espoused dangerous ideas: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the prominent religious reformer. At the same time, thanks to the presence of postal offices of western countries in Istanbul that were not subject to the censorship of the Sultan’s spies, especially the Austrian postal office, he managed to keep in contact with the eminent poet Ahmed Shawqi and Shaykh Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, as well as with a number of European intellectuals.

Khalidi also maintained a steady correspondence with his brother Yassin and nephew Ruhi, in whose education he had played a role. With the nineteenth century drawing to a close, Khalidi refers with increasing frequency in his letters to his declining health. He also made it clear that living in Istanbul under the surveillance of Abdul Hamid’s spies was not agreeable to him even though it gave him the opportunity to read extensively and constantly across a number of scientific and literary subjects in the multiple languages he was proficient in.

While serving as mayor of Jerusalem and qa’im maqam of Jaffa, Khalidi kept close track of how the project for Jewish immigration to Palestine was progressing. After the first world Zionist congress in August 1897, Khalidi emerged as one of the first to show an awareness of the danger the Zionist movement posed to the future of Palestine. On 1 March 1899, he sent a letter (in French) to Theodor Herzl, the head of the World Zionist Organization, via Zadok Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France. In it, Khalidi urges Herzl to take into account the then-existing concrete reality in Palestine. He writes:

The fact of the matter is that Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more significant, it is inhabited by people other than Israelites. This reality, these established facts, this brute force of circumstances leave Zionism, geographically speaking, no hope of realization. Even more importantly this poses a real danger to the Jews of Turkey.

What material forces do the Jews—who number at most ten million—possess to impose their will, against 350 million Christians and 300 million Muslims? The Jews certainly possess capital and intelligence. But however great the power of money may be in this world, one cannot buy everything with millions. To achieve a goal such as that which Zionism sets itself, other, more formidable swoops are needed: those of cannons and warships. And which Great Power could possibly place such things at Dr. Herzl's disposal?

It is therefore pure folly on the part of Dr. Herzl—whom I regard, for that matter, with great esteem as both a person and a writer of talent as well as a true Jewish patriot—and on the part of his friends, to imagine that they could one day succeed in capturing Palestine, even if it were possible to obtain the approval of His Majesty the Sultan. But I would not think I were justified in speaking up if I did not anticipate a great danger from this movement for the Israelites in Turkey, and especially in Palestine.

Certainly, the Turks and Arabs are generally well-disposed toward your coreligionists. However, there are also fanatics among them; they too, like all other nations, even the most civilized ones, are not exempt from feelings of hatred for other races.

[…]

There is reason to fear a popular movement against your co-religionists, who have been unfortunate for so many centuries. This would be fatal to them and the government, endowed with the best dispositions in the world, will not be able to quell easily. It is this very plausible eventuality that puts my pen in my hand to write to you.

Thus, for the peace of mind of the Jews in Turkey, the Zionist movement must cease, in the geographical sense of the word. Nothing could be more just and equitable than for a place to be sought out somewhere to house the unhappy Jewish nation. By God, the earth is vast enough; there are still uninhabited lands where millions of poor Israelites could be settled, where they might find happiness and one day form a nation. This would perhaps be the best and most rational solution to the Jewish question. But, for God’s sake, leave Palestine in peace.

On 19 March, Herzl sent a letter in reply to Khalidi, in which he stated that there was nothing to fear from Jewish immigration to Palestine, that he considered “the Jews to be friends of Turkey,” and that Zionism did not harbor feelings of hostility toward the Ottoman government. Rather, it was concerned with finding new resources for the latter through immigration. Herzl wrote:

The Zionist idea, of which I am the humble servant, has no hostile tendency toward the Ottoman Government, but quite to the contrary, this movement is concerned with opening up new resources for the Ottoman Empire. In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result. It is necessary to understand this, and make it known to everybody. [...]

The universal peace which all men of good will ardently hope for will have its symbol in a brotherly union in the Holy Places.

You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away? It is their well-being, their individual wealth which we will increase by bringing in our own. [...] That is what the indigenous population must realize, that they will gain excellent brothers, as the Sultan will gain faithful and good subjects who will make this province flourish – this province which is their historic homeland.

Herzl’s reply, however, did not alter Khalidi's opposition to Zionist immigration to Palestine.

Khalidi died in 1906 in Istanbul and was buried in that city. Until his final days, he remained under the surveillance of Sultan Abdul Hamid’s spies, as he continued to advocate for the pro-constitutional reform movement whose emergence he had been a part of, and in which he remained a firm believer until his death.

Yusuf Diya-uddin Pasha al-Khalidi is considered to be one of the leading figures of the Arab nahda, or cultural renaissance and one of the most prominent Palestinian personalities of the Ottoman era. He served as mayor of Jerusalem for many years and was the first representative of the mutasarrifate from Jerusalem in the Ottoman parliament. He was comfortable with European culture and become aware early on of the danger posed by the Zionist movement.

Sources

Abdul Hadi, Mahdi, ed. Palestinian Personalities: A Biographic Dictionary. 2nd ed., rev. and updated. Jerusalem: Passia Publication, 2006.

Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of a Modern National Consciousness. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Khalidi, Walid, ed. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987.

Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

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