A retraction. Not long ago I wrote this ⤵️ thread about a meme featuring a suspiciously jazzed-up quote by Abdallah al-Tal, and the self-referential chain of citation surrounding it that has gone years unchallenged 1/6
https://twitter.com/matthewteller/status/1394290628285149190
Al-Tal’s memoirs were published in Cairo in 1959, translated into Hebrew in 1960, but have never been translated into English 2/6
My Arabic and Hebrew aren’t as good as they should be, but I’ve now found this line by al-Tal (p138 of Arabic ed): “Old Jerusalem was cleansed of the Jews and not a single Jew was left for the first time in more than a thousand years.” 3/6 
(Al-Tal was wrong: there were a few - very few - Jews still living in the Old City & elsewhere in E Jerusalem; and the last expulsion of the Jews had been under the Crusaders, less than 1000 years before, but still) 4/6
The meme misquotes al-Tal; none of the books I highlighted cite the quote correctly; and I haven’t (yet?) found the rest of the purported quote, but the first part is close enough that I’m going to delete my original thread 5/6
After I wrote the thread I talked to historians & scholars, some of whom talked to others. None had heard of the quote in the meme and all doubted the “1000 years” part was real – the language seemed wrong. Turns out I was wrong. Al-Tal did write that. Sorry for misleading. 6/6
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