When the PLO Research Center Defended the Talmud

In 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) created a research center in Beirut, and among its tasks was trying to understand Jews, Zionism, and Israel (a far cry from the current situation, in which it is almost impossible to study Hebrew at an Arab university). The center’s publications included a translation into Arabic of an English-language anthology of key Zionist writings and a book called The Talmud and Zionism, whose author—after reading an English translation of the Talmud—provided a tractate-by-tractate summary and argued that it was not the nefarious text Arabs imagined it to be. With Dovid Bashevkin, Jonathan Gribetz discusses these and other surprising findings from his research into Palestinian perceptions of Israel.