In the third chapter of A.B. Yehoshua’s 1989 novel Mr. Mani, the reader meets the enigmatic and intellectual Yosef Mani. He calls himself a homo politicus, who “drifts” among the identities of 1917 Jerusalem, developing his politics and acquiring languages as though they were a “batch of keys to a house with many doors” (172). In fact, a deep reading of this chapter shows that the singular speaker – Ivor Horowitz, a British Jew investigating Yosef for anti-British activity – also displays fundamental signs of being a homo politicus. Jerusalem, with its tangle of competing cultural and religious groups, engenders such persons. In this paper, I will argue through a close reading of the text that both Ivor and Yosef capitalize on their cultural, linguistic, and national affiliations to serve their own interests as homo politicus – a partial byproduct of the Western nationalist psyche rising in the Jerusalem at the time.

First, a close look at Horowitz’s comments to his British colleague display his nature as a homo politicus: he makes a conscious political decision to evade his inherited identity as a Jew in favor of serving Great Britain. It starts early in the text – with Horowitz’s repeated explanation of his name’s spelling: “Horowitz, Colonel, with two ‘o’s’” (150). Horowitz’s need to clarify this alienates him, as Colonel Woodhouse appears to not immediately understand his Jewish name. Almost in response to this awkward start, Horowitz’s ensuing description of fellow Jews demonstrates a subtle grammatical effort to set himself apart. He tells the Colonel, “We never thought we’d encounter such a stormy winter in Jerusalem, which our [emphasis added] British imaginations had pictured” (150). This use of the third person continues in Horowitz’s discussion of the Western Wall, which Horowitz calls “that big white wall they [emphasis added] stand in front of, which is supposedly a remnant of their Temple” (151). Horowitz also does not fail to mention his characteristically British law studies at Oxford and later military service. Horowitz’s political goal here, as prosecutor, is to establish a congenial relationship with the Colonel who will judge Yosef Mani’s alleged treason. So, he uses powerful references to his British identity to try and win the elder Brit’s favor.

The focus of the conversation, however, is on Yosef Mani’s nimble ability to navigate the complex cultural and political world of Jerusalem, eventually using what he learned to serve his Zionist political aims. Yosef’s local affinities and Zionist roots are displayed in the same paragraph on page 178, suggesting an intentional connection by Yehoshua. In a single day, he spends his mornings in the Arab coffeehouse, teaches Arabic grammar in the afternoons, visits his Sephardic synagogue for midday prayer and ends the evening at the Zionist Club (178). His local roots are further made evident in the prosecutor’s description of Yosef’s physical movement throughout Jerusalem, the city where his “father and grandfather” are interred (187). Yosef moves between innumerable holy sites and ancient city gates with an insider’s ease, flitting from the “Mohammedan coffeehouse” to the meetings of Jewish dignitaries who have come to witness the “redemption of Zion” (Yehoshua 187). The author thus quietly describes Yosef’s political birth as a Zionist, albeit from an angle usually unexplored; as Klein notes in his piece on Arab Jews, historical research has “barely touched on Arab-Jewish identity” (20). The British used Yosef’s linguistic abilities to announce their political proclamations to locals in Palestine, work which clearly irked him. Horowitz’s narrative language conveys several examples of Yosef’s annoyance at the British presence in Palestine. Horowitz describes the British armed forces as the “British juggernaut thundering across the Holy Land” and Allenby’s army as creeping slowly into the “mountains of Judea” (183-184). In both statements, religious Jewish terms are used to describe the land. Yosef goes on to subvert the British cause by clandestinely preaching to local Arabs, in pursuit of his homo politicus goal of instructing them to form an identity, which may serve his own political needs.

The reader is told that at night, Yosef “shut[s] his eyes and pictures himself orating to the Arab villagers … his heart bled for the Arabs …” (187). He speaks to the villagers in the local Arabic which even the British could not master, despite years of study at Oxford (Yehoshua 181,189). Addressing the group, he informs them of Balfour’s declaration, supplicating them to get “an identity, and be quick!” (Yehoshua 189). Detailing the declaration, he notes that the land will be divided in half – with one section “for us,” i.e., the Jews, and another for them (Yehoshua 189). He notes that the Englishman and Turk, while present then, would eventually depart – calling upon the Arabs to “sleep not” regarding their own interests. Clearly, as a Jew who attends daily prayer, avoids kindling fire on the Sabbath and has immersed himself in the Jerusalem meetings of passionate early Zionists, Yosef is conveying that the rapidly organizing Jews will overtake Arab claims to the same land. The fact that the Zionists meet at nighttime, forgoing sleep in their efforts to establish their national presence, only strengthens his call to his Arab brethren to “sleep not.” Far from acting this way to empower the Arab cause, Yosef symbolizes a homo politicus who knows that when competing groups establish their interests at the outset, it can reduce conflict. Yehoshua, writing some seventy years after these 1917 scenes, knows that the powerful Jewish organizing power in the land of Israel would eventually lead to bloodshed and conflict with local non-Jewish Arabs, whose practical national aspirations materialize decades too late.

Yosef toes the lines of a delicate political situation, navigating new nationalist predicaments. According to Klein, Ya’akov Yehoshua (the father of Mr. Mani’s author) described the residential courtyards of the Jews and Muslims of Jerusalem as “common,” before the British influence (21). Arab Jewish and Muslim relations were familial and friendly, bound by locale and language. The younger Yehoshua, our author, grew up in a Jerusalem where Jewish mothers poured their hearts out to Muslim women, and vice versa (21). Klein sums up these nostalgic recollections of a Jerusalem where local ties reigned supreme: “Nationalism suddenly intruded on their lives and those of their Muslim neighbors and imposed its hatreds and wars on them. The construction of the national “I” involved the rejection of prior identities, including that of being Arab Jews” (21). Yosef – a homo politicus at heart – appears to the reader as an early thinker on this issue, and he seeks to use his local and linguistic affinities to spread common knowledge about the national aims of Britain and European Zionism and the danger they pose to the peaceful, intercultural lifestyle which he likely views as integral to his Jerusalemite identity.

Works Cited

Yehoshua, A.B. Mr. Mani. 1989. Translated by Hillel Halkin, Doubleday, 1992.

Klein, “Arab Jews” (Class text, Prof. Behar)