“Send my regards to those working on the al-Balādhurī manuscript”: The study of Arabic and Islam in interwar Jerusalem as intellectual common ground

Founded in 1926 by a group of Jewish scholars with German Orientalist training, the Hebrew University’s School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem was the first university institute in Palestine to offer Arabic studies. However, these European Arabists’ experience with teaching and learning Arabic was limited to their own classical training, without sufficient knowledge of modern and colloquial Arabic or contemporary literature – a flaw acknowledged by them and attacked by their local Jewish and non-Jewish critics. This chapter offers an evidence-based inquiry into the development of Arabic studies at the Hebrew University as migrating knowledge, exploring the steps taken (and not taken) by university leadership and experts to improve the teaching of Arabic – first and foremost, an attempt to hire a native speaker of Arabic as a teacher. This attempt, which was also meant to serve a Zionist political agenda of Arab-Jewish ‘rapprochement’, proved difficult because of the Jewish scholars’ inflexible commitment to their German philologically oriented legacy; combined with the deteriorating political circumstances in Palestine, it ended with the hiring of an Aleppo-born Jew, whose hybrid Arab-Jewish identity was meant to bridge the political-cultural gap.