Sublime

At the beginning of 1911, the Jewish world and Ben-Gurion himself were scandalized by an article the Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner published in the newspaper Hapo’el Hatza’ir. The subject was Jews who had converted to Christianity.22 Brenner maintained that there was a Jewish national identity independent of religion and that this identity had

But Abbas never bothered to respond.

Brenner, complex though he was, was perhaps the cultural icon of the Second Aliyah. His work, still considered brilliant, surfaced issues with which Israel continues to wrestle. He would have undoubtedly done even more than he managed in his brief life, but he was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 Jaffa riots.

DURING THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, some seven hundred thousand Arabs had left Israel and

and then continued on to America to spread the word of

Yehudim

An organization that was at first based around social welfare services, dawah, now added political ambitions and jihad, a holy war.