In all the post-Ottoman Middle East, the area that had to deal with the most severe problems of modern political organization, political identity, ambiguous territorial borders, and social fragmentation was the Levant, not to mention that it is home to the Zionist-Arab dispute and a largely diverse population. The ideologies emerging from that area, most notably Arab Nationalism, ultimately tried to address these questions, and the ideological success such ideologies had in the entire region led in effect to the Levantization of the political culture of the Middle East, meaning that those questions became the central questions for political and philosophical inquiry even for countries like Morocco and Egypt that more or less had stable territorial definitions and identity affiliations since the middle ages. The influence of German political thought on Levant ideologues happened due to five reasons: the international spread of nationalist and Marxist thought, the mutual antagonism towards England and France, the perceived similarities between the Levant’s conditions and those of pre-unified Germany, the appeal of the rising powerful Germany of the Third Reich, the centrality of a Jewish Question, and the seductive, compelling nature of German ideologies built on the philosophy of History. This last point must not be underestimated, for it will be a common feature between Arab intellectuals in the Levant and intellectuals in other Arab lands, such as Abdulrahman Badawi in Egypt or Messali Hadj, the father figure of nationalism in Algeria, and others. The Levant intellectuals of this period are often collectively called al-ra’eel al-arabi al-awal, the First Arab Generation, and were formed by admiration of the Wirtschaftswunder, the German Miracle. It is crucial to remember that “the Nazis found their greatest support among respectable, educated people. Their ideas were eminently respectable in Germany after the First World War and indeed had been current among large segments of the [German] population even before the war.”
I do not wish to leave the intellectual seduction in the abstract, but I want specifically to point to the seduction of the ideas of Romanticism, the new epoch, the new society, and the new man achieved through a total revolution, either nationalist or Marxist, and which will supposedly constitute a complete break with an undifferentiated corrupt present for the sake of an undifferentiated perfect future. It is the idea that the labor of the public history-making intellectual can bring about the total transformation of all reality of social life and everything we mentioned in our discussion of Hegelianism and Romanticism. Moreover, the theoretical loftiness and philosophical prestige can not be overstated. Those ideas were wrapped in very emotional, romantic literary forms, which, as Benda and Popper observed, filled European culture, which was the fountain from which Arab intellectuals sought nourishment. In the 1920s and then in the 1930s, those seductions were not merely attractive literary works, but they acquired realized forms in the rapidly developing Soviet Russia and Germany, the former Leninist-Marxist and the latter Nationalist Socialist to the extent that even contemporary British and American observers estimated that they would become the dominant superpowers. Both had a single party, a vanguard led by a philosopher-king who unified the role of the public intellectual with that of the political leader and led their nations from glory to glory in their struggle against the West.
The German model was of particular potency due to the fact that it attempted to create a super-ideology built from both romantic nationalism and anti-capitalist socialism in which nationalism provided the framework for the official ideology while socialism provided its social content. While both Nazism and communism are historical archenemies, one should not forget that their animosity was essentially a competition standing on a mutual ground of progressive philosophy and the German Enlightenment. One sought a dictatorship of the chosen class, the other of the chosen race. Moreover, the mystical nature of romantic nationalism made it a much more potent force than dry Marxist scholasticism, which held its appeal to many intellectuals who did not enjoy the massive, ever-expanding theoretical structures of Marxist thought. This ultimately led to the historical developments in which Nazism succeeded in barring German Marxists from fulfilling their dream of serving as the theoretical spearhead of mass revolutionary class struggle through the significant reliance on appeal to mass psychology and myth-making. This understanding of the importance of manipulating the irrational and subconscious was a genius Nazism inherited from the Volkisch movement’s secularized Christian liturgy and ritualism.
The intellectual conditions of the Levant were generally similar to those of Egypt, with the added complications of ethnic, sectarian, and religious fragmentation and the presence of Zionism. The Levant has been the largest recipient of European missionaries, many of whom harbored antisemitic sentiments. Already in 1840, European antisemitism made its first major appearance in the Middle East in the Damascus Affair, in which several Jews were arrested after they were accused of practicing ritual murder, an incident which had a major effect on the life of Moses Hess, one of the founders of Zionism. In 1899, local Jews wrote, complaining about how foreign missionaries and priests were heightening Arab feelings against Jews. Jesuit schools and books were particularly damaging, but the Protestant Syrian College was also known to spread antisemitic views. Most notably, the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, which started operating in 1882 and ran hundreds of Greek orthodox schools over Syria and Palestine and its attitudes to the Jews reflected the policies of Tsarist Russia to the extent that Jews were the only group that was barred from receiving its medical services. One of the most important institutions it operated was the Russian Teachers’ Seminary in Nazareth, known to locals as al-seminar, which operated from 1886 until 1914 and prepared generations of Arab teachers. These antisemitic ideas contributed to the increased agitation between Arabs and Jews that ultimately led to the fragmentation of Levant communism and increasing hostility.
Among all communist parties in the early 20th century Middle East, the Communist Party of Palestine was the largest, most educated, and closest to Russia due to the large numbers of Jewish emigres in Palestine. The party, despite being predominantly Jewish, often sought to recruit Arabs to its ranks and provide them with a Marxist education. One of the young Arabs who joined and ended up becoming a significant figure in the history of Levant communism was Mohamed Najati Sidqi. Sidqi (1905-1979) was born into a family of teachers and merchants in Jerusalem and traveled to different Arab cities with his father, who had participated in Sherif Hussein’s Arab Revolt and later in the Syrian campaign of Prince Faysal. In 1923, Sidqi was hired by the Palestine postal services in Jerusalem, where he was able to form friendships with many Eastern European and Palestinian Jews. He learned from them about “Bolshevism, anarchism, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Herzl.” In his diaries, he recounted how he was fascinated by all the arguments these Jews had, and “their conversations included theoretical discussions translated to us by those who knew spoken Arabic. They taught us about socialism seeking influence through syndicates and unions, how anarchism does not admit of governments and states, and how Bolshevism established a socialist rule through revolution and the Red Army. For us, these conversations were ambiguous and too far from our daily lives. What mattered for us and possessed us was the scary obscure future, British occupation, and the Balfour declaration.”