Albert Antébi

Albert-Abraham Antébi (אלברט אברהם ענתבי; 1873 – 1919) was a Syrian Jewish public activist and community leader born in Ottoman Syria, who worked for the defense of the interests of the Jewish old and new settlement in Palestine during the Ottoman rule, especially in the realm of education, philanthropy and estate, as representative of the Alliance israélite universelle and of the Jewish Colonization Association founded by Baron Hirsch. He was engineer and teacher as professional formation.

Originating from the Sephardic Jewish community of Damascus, he was the scion of an old Jewish family. His grandfather, rabbi Jacob Antébi, had been one of the victims of a blood libel associated with the Damascus affair. After learning the craft of blacksmith at an Alliance professional school in Rue de Rosiers in the Marais – Paris' historic Jewish quarter, he studied engineering at the Écoles d'arts et métiers in province – at Châlons-en-Champagne, and Angers. In 1896 came in Palestine where he received an appointment as director of the Jerusalem professional school of the Alliance israélite universelle, a position he held until 1913.

French diplomats thereafter referred to him as "the consul of the Jews". He was throughout his life a passionate Francophile, and subscribed to the ideal of the Jewish emancipation under the Turkish rule and French cultural and political influence. He records experiencing difficulties in his dealings with both American and Ashkenazi Jews, denouncing the "arrogance" he thought characteristic of the former, and episodes of violence, such as a physical assault and death threat from a German representative of the latter when he refused to comply with a demand that he expel Muslim students from a school he ran. Antébi found that the Jewish communities in Jerusalem were riven by factional dissensions, and analysed in particular the antipathy he encountered among Jewish immigrants for Arabs and Jews, like himself who came from an Arab cultural background.

His fluency in French, Hebrew, Arabic and English, combined with his mastery of three or four different systems of law – Beth Din, Sharia, French Law, Ottoman Law, proved invaluable in assisting the early Jewish settlement in Palestine. In this regard, he was a key intermediary between Lord Rothschild and Arab notables in brokering the purchase of land for Jewish immigrants to the Rothschild settlements in Ottoman Palestine. He was held in high regard by several families of Arab notables, such as the Husayni, the Khalidi and the Nashashibi, with whom he negotiated land purchases. He cooperated closely with the Hovevei Zion movement.

Antébi however was opposed to the political Zionist project as developed by Theodor Herzl and his movement, regarding it as a threat to the slow incremental development of a Jewish homeland. As early as December 1901 he warned: "For the last few months Jerusalem has become the center of nationality struggles. Until then we were living peacefully. The Orientals were grateful to their European coreligionists for the help they brought to their moral and material misery. Zionism was created supposedly to bring about closer relations within Judaism; all it has succeeded in doing is to cause fighting between nationalities.'"

He disliked the idleness of many European immigrants, and thought their growing, subsidized presence in Palestine risked provoking an antisemitic reaction throughout the Ottoman world. Indeed he regarded the publicity surrounding Zionism as responsible for the rise of antisemitism in the Holy Land, and advised a strategy of silence if emigration were to continue without arousing local resistance. As early as 1901 he wrote: "Zionism has been created, its leaders say, in order to tighten the bonds of Judaism: the only result has been to stimulate the birth of struggles between (different) nationalities". He described his own labours in building up a renewed Jewish presence in the Holy Land in the following terms:"'I desire to achieve the conquest of Zion by economic means, not politically; the Jerusalem I would cherish is the Jerusalem of history and the spirit, not the modern temporal Jerusalem. I want to be a Jewish deputy in an Ottoman parliament, and not in the Jewish temple of Mount Moriah. Ottoman Jews should have the same rights, responsibilities and hopes as the Jews of England, Germany and France. I wish to create powerful Jewish economic centres embedded in universal democracies. I do not wish to be a subject of a Judean autocracy.'"In the First World War he served on the front line in the Caucasus in 1917, where he became acquainted with General Mustafa Kemal. On the eve of that war he wrote that Palestine would be the last province to be taken from Turkey. Political and commercial considerations suggested that control over the area would accrue to France and England. He feared that the high numbers of German and Russian immigrants would secure for those nations a powerful influence that would deal a mortal blow to the eventual securing of a Jewish majority. He died, aged 45, of typhus, in Istanbul, while engaged in directing a large rescue and repatriation operation. In his testament, he expressed the hope that Palestine would develop along the lines of the Swiss cantonal system, under an interallied protectorate or French-English condominium, which would allocate lands without proprietors to immigrants, while keeping the country free of German and Russian communists.