Translating the Arab-Jewish Tradition : From Al-Anadalus to Palestine/Land of Israel

This essay investigates the vision of two Jewish scholars of a shared Arab-Jewish history at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first part of the essay focuses on Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s (1877-1951) re-examination of the Andalusian legacy in regard to the process of Jewish modernisation with respect to the symbolic and the actual return to the East. The second part of the essay centers on the work of Yosef Meyouhas (1863-1942), Yahuda’s contemporary and life-long friend who translated a collection of Biblical stories from the Arab-Palestinian oral tradition, examining the significance of this work vis-à-vis the mainstream Zionist approach.