Early life Philip Khuri Hitti was born in the
Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, on 22 June 1886, into a
Maronite Christian family, in the village of
Shemlan some 25 km southeast from
Beirut, up in
Mount Lebanon.
Education and academic career He was educated at an American
Presbyterian mission school at
Suq al-Gharb and then at the
Syrian Protestant College. After graduating in 1908 he taught there before moving to
Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in 1915 and taught
Semitic languages. After
World War I he returned to Lebanon and taught there until 1926. In February 1926 he was offered a Chair at
Princeton University, which he held until he retired in 1954. During
World War II, he taught Arabic to servicemen at Princeton through the
Army Specialized Training Program (including future Ambassador
Rodger Paul Davies). Hitti was both Professor of Semitic Literature and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages. After formal retirement he accepted a position at
Harvard University. He also taught in the summer schools at the University of Utah and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He subsequently held a research position at the University of Minnesota. He died in
Princeton, New Jersey, on 24 December 1978.
Opinion on Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine In 1944 before a U. S. House committee, Hitti gave testimony in support of the view that there was no historical justification for a Jewish homeland in the Palestine. His testimony was reprinted in the
Princeton Herald. In response,
Albert Einstein and his friend and colleague
Erich Kahler jointly replied in the same newspaper with their counter-arguments. Hitti then published a response and Einstein and Kahler concluded the debate in the
Princeton Herald with their second response. In 1945 Hitti served as an adviser to the Iraqi delegation at the
San Francisco Conference which established the
United Nations. In 1946, Hitti was the first Lebanese-American witness at the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine.
Bartley Crum, an American member of the committee, recalled: Hitti... explained that there was actually no such entity as Palestine - never had been; it was historically part of Syria, and "the Sunday schools have done a great deal of harm to us because by smearing the walls of classrooms with maps of Palestine, they associate it with the Jews in the minds of the average American and Englishman." He traced the history of Palestine back 7000 years. All that time, he said, it had been the immemorial home of the Arabs. He asserted that Zionism was indefensible and unfeasible on moral, historic and practical grounds. It was an imposition on the Arabs of an alien way of life which they resented and to which they would never submit. ==Works==