Spiritual Semetism

Extract

The following text is an extract from the Memoirs of Gaston Zananiri OP, of which copies of the complete text have been deposited in the Bibliothique Nationale, Paris, and the Dominican Historical Centre, Oxford. This extract allows us to relive the Jewish-Arab problem as it existed in the 1930s. Palestine was still under the British mandate, but its inhabitants were waiting for independence. This was the time when Pius XI declared, ‘Spiritually we are all Semites.’ Since then the Near East has witnessed political, nationalist and religious movements which have entirely changed the situation. We think it useful, in the present climate of renewed hopes and tensions, to publish this testimony from someone who was personally involved in this earlier period. The author, a Dominican priest in France since 1956, is an Alexandrian Melkite on his father’s side, and a Jew on his mother’s side.

My discovery of Semitism goes back to my first visit to Jerusalem in 1930, where I found the three religions derived from Semitic monotheism living side by side in the chaos of the Old City. I got the impression of a dense mass of people of various origins co-existing in mutual disdain, under the firm control of the British occupation. As soon as the British left Palestine, the fire hidden beneath the ashes broke out all over the region. A similarity of temperament on all sides, shaped by a common spiritual ancestry, became apparent, in which tenacity and terrorism were the salient features. Jews and Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian) had the same psychological reactions and instincts, shaped by their common inheritance derived from the mystical, spiritual and social teaching of the bible, the gospel and the Quran. These similarities could have provided a basis for mutual understanding, but in fact they led to disagreement, fostered by the interplay of international politics and local interests.