Emanuela Trevisan Semi
Castello 3471
Venezia 30122
Italy
Emanuela Trevisan Semi

Abstract
In this paper  the correspondence between two friends, Jacques Faitlovitch, (1881-1955) the Polish Jew who worked on behalf of the Beta Israel and  their integrating into the mainstream Jewish world and planned to regenerate Western Judaism through the “true” oriental semitic spirit  and Farid Kassab, (1884-1970)  the  author of  Le nouvel empire arabe: la Curie romaine et le prétendu peril juif universel, réponse à M.N. Azoury bey (Paris 1906) the Greek Orthodox Christian who intended to regenerate the Ottoman Empire and later the Near East through the Jewish and semitic spirit will be examined. Through an exchange of letters written in French between these two special protagonists of  last century it will be possible to shed new light on the place that the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental semitic spirit’ played as a point of reference and identity not only for Jews but also for orthodox Christians  living in the Ottoman empire .

Keywords
East/ Orient, West, Western Jewry, orientalism, regeneration, national redemption, Ottoman empire

East and West through the conversations between Jacques Faitlovitch and Farid Kassab
In this paper we intend to examine the correspondence between Jacques Faitlovitch, the Polish Jew who planned to regenerate Western Judaism through the “true” oriental semitic spirit  and Farid Kassab, the Greek Orthodox Christian who intended to regenerate the Ottoman Empire and later the Near East through the Jewish and semitic spirit. 
 Jacques Faitlovitch (1881-1955), who worked on behalf of the Beta Israel and  their integrating into the mainstream Jewish world, was a scholar, a traveller, a Zionist and a missionary. Farid Kassab (1884-1970) was  the  author of  Le nouvel empire arabe: la Curie romaine et le prétendu peril juif universel, réponse à M.N. Azoury bey (Paris 1906) and worked as a dentist all his life. This correspondence shows  a real friendship that was underscored by a strong sharing of values, starting from the Parisian years of the beginning of the twentieth century, when Paris served as an incubator of ideas for many Jews who had come from the East of Europe full of dreams of personal and national redemption  and searching for an elsewhere located in the mythical ‘Orient’, a place of imaginative passion. Through an exchange of letters written in French between these two special protagonists of  last century it will be possible to shed new light on the place that the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental semitic spirit’ played as a point of reference and identity not only for Jews but also for orthodox Christians  living in the Ottoman empire .
Kassab in one of his letters (29th July 1906) quoting a friend of his from Jaffa writes: ‘ Our Orient…is  annihilated, humiliated, degenerated,  not aware of its identity, and  will be so even in the future because it has been crushed by its rulers, persecuted by the dominating powers. It will become like Egypt.  European progress has already penetrated it and sooner or later this will be its civilization while only a few morsels of its previous culture will be left. Now it’s the West’s turn. It is flooding all over the world with its spirit and its economic issues are throwing everything into confusion. The Orient is becoming Europeanized and nobody can stop these changes. The Arabs, split, too independent, lazy and mediocre will share the fate of the Algerians…’ Kassab goes on to add that his friend laughed at him when he spoke of  the views shared by him and by Faitlovitch about  a revival of the Semites and  the union of religions (Semitic religions), maintaining that all these were just dreams, ‘scaffoldings’ and constructions that will be destroyed by Turkey and that nobody will answer a Semitic appeal.
The concept of a ‘Semitic appeal’, whose meaning was an invitation to all the Semites to restore the ancient  ‘pure’ spirit of the Orient, the realm of the spirit versus the materiality of the West, is central in this correspondence. The key words in these letters are the moral values of the East, the common Semitic legacy of pure shared moral and behavioural codes, Eastern feelings,  common ethnic roots and the spiritual values of the Semitic race versus the Arian race.
During the years spent in Paris the two young friends were fantasising about the mystique of an imaginative East inhabited by the old Semites whose legacy can be found in the Bible, a shared  field of  identity, a reality  constructed in the Eastern space, the possible location of old-new nations. The ‘true’ values of the Bible, that is to say the religion associated with morals, have been contaminated in Europe by the powerful Catholic Church which influenced the Jews living in their territories.  In the eyes of Faitlovitch, the Jews in the East and, even more, those in Africa (the Beta Israel) had been less contaminated and alienated  by the spirit  Christian Europe so that they could help to restore the ancient biblical and Semitic spirit among all the world’s Jews. In the eyes of Kassab, Arab Christians in the Orient also kept some ancient biblical and Semite values lost in the West and together with the other authentic Semites, the Jews who were part of the same ethnic stock, they could bring a new breath of life to corrupted bodies. This is why he favoured the coming of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine. In his mind these Jews were not Western and Ashkenazi Jews but pure Oriental Jews, a view that reflected the orientalising attitude present also in a Christian from the East.
Yaron Peleg (2005:7), quoting the main character of a semi-autobiographical novel Tancred, or the new Crusade (1847) of Benjamin Disraeli, speaks of a young English nobleman who wishes to reinvent himself and revive his English society through a “spiritually rejuvenating journey to the Holy land” and adds that  the “ book suggests that the Semitic peoples of the East hold the key to the renewal of Western society” .  Half a century later we find  the same concept expressed through the conversations of two young people, one coming from a Jewish Ashkenazy context and the other from a Syrian Christian orthodox context.
In this paper we intend to examine seven letters written to Jacques Faitlovitch by Farid Djirdji Kassab, an Orthodox Christian who claimed to be a native of Syria, Lebanon and the Holy Land, by virtue of being born in Nablus in 1884. Four of these letters were written in Paris around one hundred years ago, one letter (maybe two, the one undated letter probably comes from the same year) is from 1906; two are from 1907; and three letters were written in Alexandria between 1928 and 1929, where Kassab worked as a dentist. The letters written in Paris refer to the period of writing and publication of Kassab’s first book Le Nouvel Empire Arabe, La curie romaine et le prétendu péril juif universel , a response to the book Le Réveil de la notion arabe by M.N. Azoury. In order to publish the book, Kassab asked Faitlovitch to indicate a small publishing house that might be interested. The letters of 1906 and 1907 concern the period when Faitlovitch had just returned from his first mission to Ethiopia, bringing back two young Ethiopians, Gete Yirmiahu and Taamrat Emmanuel, who were to study at the Alliance schools in Paris, before being sent to Florence under the guidance of Margulies.  The letter dated 16th April 1928 was written on occasion of the first meeting, in Alexandria, between the two friends, after 17 years apart.
In 1928 Faitlovitch had come to Alexandria from Tel Aviv and was about to undertake his seventh mission to Ethiopia. He was due to set off in July in the company of his sister Lea, who was to assist him as an English teacher at the school in Addis Ababa (1928-29). The letter dated 4 September 1928 was written a few months after Faitlovitch set off for Ethiopia, while Kassab believed he was still in Palestine. In the last letter in our possession (dated 11th April 1929) Kassab replied to Faitlovitch, on his way back from Ethiopia, to inform him of his passage to Port Said, apologising for not coming to see him due to a heavy dose of flu.
We know that Faitlovitch continued to receive news of Kassab from Taamrat Emmanuel (he probably met Faitlovitch’s friend while studying in Paris), who had fled  to Egypt having been forced to leave Ethiopia because he was wanted by the Italian authorities. Taamrat wrote to Faitlovitch in 1937  to tell him that Kassab had helped him find accommodation in Alexandria. He had met Kassab “by chance, having believed he was in Syria ” and he even offered him full hospitality.
In another letter dated 1940 , Taamrat passed on Kassab’s greetings to his friend Faitlovitch, telling him that he was shortly to visit him in Tel Aviv, accompanied by a relative.
We know from Wild (1988:627) that Kassab stayed in Egypt until 1964, when at the age of 80 he returned to Beirut, where he died in 1970. It is therefore highly likely that in 1944-1945, when Faitlovitch settled in Cairo as conseiller to the Ethopian Embassy in Egypt, he continued to see Kassab, even though there are no documents pertaining to this latter period of their lives.
What is interesting about this correspondence is above all the issues which emerge, shedding further light on the thoughts of Faitlovitch regarding what he considered to be the moral values of the East, as opposed to the decadence of the West.  
Faitlovitch and Kassab believed that it was necessary to ‘reawaken’ the people they refer to as “Semitic”, meaning both Arabs and Jews.
Although we do not have Faitlovitch’s replies to Kassab, Kassab may have ridden himself of this potentially risky material during the civil war in Lebanon, a theory which is supported by Wild  (1988: 607), the material we do have provides a clear picture of the influence that Faitlovitch, only three years older, had on the young eastern Christian.  
In the material consulted for the work  on Jacques Faitlovitch one is struck by his power of seduction and influence that he exerted on the people he met, though he rarely managed to maintain this initial rapport. In the letters it is interesting to observe the use of terms that reflect the language of the era; for example, the term “Semitic” refers to people and not just language, while “Eastern” is used to refer to anything which cannot be described as “Western”, and in the later letters the term “Semitic race” is used in opposition to the term “Arian race”.
Stefan Wild, who had access to material given him by Kassab’s daughter in Beirut and wrote about Kassab, provides some valuable biographical information (1988:607-627).
Kassab’s father was born in Nablus in 1847 and was an Ottoman civil servant before he became a  grain merchant and travelled widely. Some evidence of his activity can be found also in the two letters written in Arabic found in the Faitlovitch archive.  Farid Kassab studied in Jaffa, then at the Jesuits’ college in Beirut, which he left a few years later having rejected the type of education offered, viewing it as obscurantist and oppressive. The young man then attended the Greek Catholic Patriarchal College until 1902. The following year in Paris, while endeavouring to study philosophy but being forced to study dentistry by his father, he met Jacques Faitlovitch. And it is as a successful dentist in Alexandria that he resumed contact with Faitlovitch  17 years later.
Stefan Wild wrote  that in Paris the young Kassab frequented three different sets: the Orientalists, among whom he mentions Joseph Halevy, Faitlovitch’s teacher, which is probably how they met; the Lebanese and young Ottomans, and the Russian revolutionaries and French socialists (1988: 610-614). 
Kassab was basically a loyal subject of the Ottoman empire, something he viewed as undoubtedly superior to other scenarios which were taking shape in so far as it was well-established and offered greater stability than the emerging Arab nation, something Kassab viewed as dangerous and threatening.
In his letters dated 1906-7 Kassab  talks of a “Semitic appeal” (appel sémitique), a term which suggests the two friends shared the same ideas on the need to ‘reawaken’ those designated as “Semitic”, namely the Jews and the Arabs. The two populations were viewed as the heirs to a common legacy of shared pure moral and behavioural codes, which had been corrupted by Western decadence. This originally pure “East” had degenerated due to a kind of identity crisis, and had been influenced by the materialistic “West”, which could nonetheless still be saved and reborn. 
 Kassab wrote: "Who better than the Semite can teach morals? The Semite has experienced and felt morals. Everywhere else religion was separated from morals; only for the Semite were conduct and religion identical and inseparable". 
However in the eyes of Kassab and Faitlovitch the “Semitic East” lay dormant and required someone to awaken it from its slumber: they were the new prophets who would ‘preach as prophets’ (sermoner en prophète), to quote Kassab. The two friends were to share the task: the young Greek Orthodox Christian would preach to the Eastern Christian world, while the young Polish Jew would do likewise with the Jewish world.  Faitlovitch’s work was motivated by the need to introduce new lifeblood into a Jewish people corrupted by the spirit of the West, and this is was what led him to seek out the Jews of Ethiopia. The role of the prophet awakening the sleeping conscience was one which would not have displeased either Faitlovitch or Kassab. 
Much has been written on the role of this regeneration ideology in the founding of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in France, and in the development of the network of schools established by the Alliance for Jews from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Joseph Halévy had already widely used the term ‘regeneration’ and his teaching was not limited to academic learning but extended to a commitment to the Jewish cause, in this case the ideology of the education and regeneration of the Asian and African communities. Faitlovitch, greatly influenced by Halevy, was widely committed to the same line of thought and action with the aim of giving rise to a movement to reawaken the African Jewish communities from their long period of hibernation. He expected the Eastern Jews (which in his vocabulary included the Ethiopian Jews), who had preserved the pure values of the ancient Jewish tradition, to regenerate Western Jewish religion once awakened from their torpor. He expected a sort of circular process that would start moving towards the regeneration of the East but leads  back to the regeneration of the West.
This was the common ground between Kassab and Faitlovitch. Both looked down on Western materialism and believed that only their own people, the Eastern Christians and the Jews (according to  Kassab’s orientalistic view all Jews were Oriental), had the power to alter the increase of materialism in  the East and the loss of traditional values.
According to Kassab, the Ottoman empire would be able to guarantee that “Oriental” traditions and values were respected, but with the arrival of European powers these guarantees would be swept away. This is why Kassab looked favourably on the arrival of Jewish colonists from Eastern Europe in Palestine and feared the interference of the Pope and the Catholic world in his “East”, so much so that he even wrote a pamphlet against Azoury’s book, criticising the interference of the Church and the Roman Curia and the risk of developing Arab nationalism. He asserted in 1906 that the Jews had no wish to establish their own nation but merely to return to where they had started. Wild  (1988: 619) rightly noted that Kassab “may have been the only non-Jewish Arab who came out openly in favour of the Zionist movement at that time”  and quotes this phrase from Kassab’s diary, offering a significant insight into his thoughts: «  The Orient needed the Jews more than the Jews needed the Orient…Jews and Arabs, racially Semites and culturally Semites, ought to complement each other”(1988: 619).
Kassab (1906: 39), who had personally witnessed the first wave of Jewish immigration, wrote in his book  that the immigrants were “poor, humble, pacific Jewish families who had maintained their Eastern feelings and were fleeing oppression or massacre in deepest Russia or Poland” and that  “these Jewish populations are inoffensive, do immense good for the country, and are people animated by the same sentiments that animate the indigenous populations, and belong to the same origin, the Semitic race”. The belief expressed in the letters (even in those dating from the end of the twenties) was that Jews and Arabs belonged to the same ethnic stock, “la race sémitique”, and that the Semites, Jews and Arabs together had positive values to offer and the power to regenerate the West. 
Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century had been a seedbed for various ideas and ideologies, including pan-Semitism, pan-Hebraism and pan-Judaism as the author has highlighted (2007: 6-11). In that period in Paris much attention was paid to the teaching of Semitic languages, which was mainly carried out by Jewish academics. One of these, Joseph Halevy, Kassab’s teacher, was also the first to teach Hebrew in Hebrew, and was the proponent of the rebirth and therefore also of the regeneration of the Hebrew language. Halevy, who was convinced of the pre-eminence of the language question within the context of a national renaissance, undoubtedly had a great influence on the young students who attended his courses. Wild  (1988: 617) notes that: “Kassab had been very impressed by his Jewish professors in Paris” (quoting Bergson, Halevy, Derenbourg, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and Reinach in particular). Another Jewish professor that Kassab probably met was Nahum Slouschz, professor of Hebrew language and Hebrew and Jewish literature at the Sorbonne, and a friend of Faitlovitch. Like Kassab and Faitlovich, Slouschtz also dreamed of a Semitic East. He went looking for ancient traces in archaeological sites hoping to discover the great Semite empire on the shores of the Mediterranean whose language had been Hebrew or Aramaic. The Parisian context for the study of Semitic languages was favourable to ideologies propounding a recovery of Semitic roots, both linguistically, culturally and politically – a movement collectively known as pan-Semitism. This discourse undoubtedly influenced the two young men.
In his letter dated 29th July 1906 , Kassab, in terms which must have been common to both, writes of a ‘revival of the Semites’ ( relèvement des semites ), ‘union of  religions’ ( union des religions), ‘Jewish-semitic work’ ( oeuvre judéo-semitique ),  ‘ making peace between the Church and the Synagogue’ ( reconcilier l’Eglise et la synagogue ), another way of referring to the ‘semitic appeal’ ( appel sémitique ) I quoted earlier. It is strange that in the letters from the Parisian period, Kassab talks of his own “conversion to Judaism” or “Judaisation” , which as far as we can make out he views as a personal development. He writes about his ‘Judaism’ in the following terms: “my Judaism, all my conservative, gentle Judaism cannot deliver me from despair” . Although this conversion should be viewed in a metaphoric sense, as a sentimental and cultural introduction to Judaism, it is still one of the first examples of the proselytising and evangelical facet which later came to the fore in the life and work of Faitlovitch .  
In a letter from the Parisian period, Kassab writes about the influence that his friend had on him in the following terms: “You were the nourishment for my thoughts and dreams, the source I drank from for so long”. The “Judaism” Kassab refers to, and which in some way must have influenced his work against Azoury, undoubtedly came from Faitlovitch.
Faitlovitch is described by his friend in terms which do not correspond to how his personality emerges from the rest of the available materials: “firm, patient, hard-working, persevering, reflective and melancholic”. The terms “patient” and “reflective” just do not appear the most appropriate to describe someone like Faitlovitch. We could envisage a young Faitlovitch being more patient and reflective than he was in his later years, but it was in 1906-7 that the dispute with the Alliance began, and from the correspondence with Rabbi Zvi Margulies we know that the latter urged him to be more patient and reflective. This was therefore probably Kassab’s idealised image of his friend.
In the last letter from Alexandria in 1929 Kassab declares that he is ready to work on a project that Faitlovich, just back from Ethiopia, had set aside for him, but of which nothing more is known, as the letter describing it has been lost.
Kassab wrote: “the time has certainly come for us to work on the project we hold dear, and if we do not work for this idea, who will? and we are getting old!”. We know little about the project Faitlovich is talking about after his seventh mission to Ethiopia, but it may have been the initiative aimed at hosting and educating the young Ethiopian Jews that Faitlovitch always brought back from his missions, or it may have been a project promoting the Eastern Church or Judaisation in a broader sense, something Faitlovitch was very committed to.
To conclude, this correspondence offers valuable insight into the Judaising context of Semitic studies in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century and the discourse on pan-Semitism would have  on the young people of these years, even those who were not Jewish. 
The need to introduce new lifeblood into Jewish people corrupted by the spirit of the West and the search for the spirit of the East led Faitlovitch to seek out the Beta Israel of East Africa or other Jews of the same circles like Nahum Slouschtz in North Africa in order to discover the ‘great Semite empire’ on the shores of the Mediterranean whose language has been Hebrew or Aramaic, with Faitlovitch dreaming that this knowledge would benefit the political cause of the time.
The risk of the decline of the Ottoman empire, the birth of new nationalist movements, and the quest for new identities based on the reinvention of a legendary past formed the humus in which the generations of that period grew, and represented the phenomena they encountered. Faitlovitch and Kassab are a good example of this attitude and the context in which they moved freely as well with their bodies as with their minds was  a large space that included Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, that is to say the old Ottoman Empire and Paris.   

References

Kassab, Farid. 1906. Nouvel empire arabe: La curie romaine et le prétendu péril juif universel. Paris : V.Giard et E. Brière.  
Peleg, Yaron. 2005. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. New York : Cornell University Press.
Trevisan Semi, Emanuela, 2000. L’epistolario di Taamrat Emmanuel, un intellettuale ebreo d’Etiopia nella prima metà del XX secolo/La correspondance de Taamrat Emmanuel, intellectuel juif d’Ethiopie dans la première moitié du XXème siècle. Torino: L’Harmattan Italia.
Trevisan Semi, Emanuela, 2002. Judaising Movements. Studies in the margins of Judaism. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Trevisan Semi, Emanuela 2007. Jacques Faitlovitch and the Jews of Ethiopia. London: Vallentine Mitchell.
Wild, Stefan. 1988. “Ottomanism versus Arabism, the case of Farid Kassab (1884-1979).”  Die Welt des Islams, vol.28,  pp.607-627.