Rupture And Return:

A Mizrahi Perspective On The Zionist Discourse

 

© Ella Shohat[*]

Eurocentric norms of scholarship have had dire consequences for the representation of Palestinian and Mizrahi history, culture and identity. In this paper I would like to examine some of the foundational premises and substratal axioms of hegemonic discourse about Middle Eastern Jews (known in the last decade as “Mizrahim”). Writing a critical Mizrahi historiography in the wake of colonialism and nationalism, both Arab and Jewish, requires the dismantling of a number of master-narratives. I will attempt to disentangle the complexities of the Mizrahi question by unsettling the conceptual borders erected by more than a century of Zionist discourse, with its fatal binarisms of savagery versus civilization, tradition versus modernity, East versus West and Arab versus Jew. This paper forms part of a larger project in which I attempt to chart a beginning for a Mizrahi epistemology through examining the terminological paradigms, the conceptual aporias and the methodological inconsistencies plaguing diverse fields of scholarship concerning Arab Jews/Mizrahim.

 

Central to Zionist thinking is the concept of “Kibbutz Galuiot”-- the “ingathering of the exiles.” Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably “outside of history,” Jews can once again “enter history” as subjects, as “normal” actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. In this way, Jews can heal a deformative rupture produced by exilic existence. This transformation of “Migola le’Geula” —from Diaspora to redemption—offered a teleological reading of Jewish History (with a capital H) in which Zionism formed a redemptive vehicle for the renewal of Jewish life on a demarcated terrain, no longer simply spiritual and textual, but rather national and political. Concomitant with the notion of Jewish “return” and continuity was the idea of rupture and discontinuity. In order to be transformed into New Jews, (later Israelis) the Diaspora Jews had to abandon their Diaspora—galuti—culture, which in the case of Arab- Jews meant abandoning Arabness and acquiescing in assimilationist modernization, for “their own good,” of course. Within this Promethean rescue narrative the concepts of “ingathering” and “modernization” naturalized and glossed over the epistemological violence generated by the Zionist vision of the New Jew. This rescue narrative also elided Zionism’s own role in provoking ruptures, dislocations and fragmentation, not only for Palestinian lives but also—in a different way—for Middle Eastern/North African Jews. These ruptures were not only physical (the movement across borders) but also cultural (a rift in relation to previous cultural affiliations) as well as conceptual (in the very ways time and space were conceived). Here I will critically explore the dialectics of rupture and return in Zionist discourse as it was formulated in relation to Jews from the Middle East/North Africa.  I will examine these dialectics through the following grids: a) dislocation: space and the question of naming; b) dismemberment: the erasure of the hyphen in the “Judeo-Muslim;” c) dis-chronicity: temporality and the project of modernization; d) dissonance: methodological and discursive ruptures.

 

DISLOCATION: SPACE AND THE QUESTION OF NAMING

 

In the comic film Sallah Shabbati (Israel, 1964), the protagonist, the stereotypical Levantine Jew, lands in Israel. He comes from the Levant, but within the film’s Eurocentric imaginary geography he comes from nowhere: first, in the literal sense, since his place of origin remains unknown; and secondly, in the metaphorical sense, since Asian and African geographies here are suggested to amount to nothing of substance. Within this view, Jews from the Middle East/North Africa arrive to Israel from obscure corners of the globe to the Promised Land to which they have always already been destined. In this way Mizrahim could be claimed as part of a continuous Jewish history/geography whose alpha and omega, or, to use the Hebrew, aleph and tav, is in the land of Israel, a land which the Zionist movement claimed to represent. While superimposing a nationalist discourse on the spiritual messianic idea of Jewish renewal, Zionist ideologues not only sought the physical transfer of Palestinians to Arab countries but also the transfer of Jews from Arab countries to Palestine. However, the physical dislocation was not adequate in the case of the Middle Eastern Jews. They had to undergo what the establishment, in a contemporary retelling of the biblical Exodus from Egypt, called “the death of the desert generation” (Moto shel dor hamidbar), in order to facilitate their birth as the new Israelis, that of the Sabra generation.

 

The question of continuity and discontinuity is central, therefore, to the Zionist vision of the nation-state. Yet, one could argue that by provoking the geographical dispersal of Arab-Jews, by placing them in a new situation "on the ground," by attempting to reshape their identity as simply "Israeli," by scorning and trying to uproot their Arabness, by racializing them and discriminating against them as a group—Israel itself provoked a series of traumatic ruptures. The Israeli establishment obliged Arab Jews to redefine themselves in relation to new ideological paradigms and polarities, thus provoking the aporias of an identity constituted out of its own ruins. The Jews within Islam always thought of themselves as Jews, but that Jewishness was part of a larger Judeo-Islamic cultural fabric. Under pressure from Zionism, on the one hand, and Arab nationalism on the other, that set of affiliations gradually changed, resulting in a transformed cultural semantics. The identity crisis provoked by this physical, political, and cultural rupture, is reflected in a terminological crisis in which no single term seems to fully represent a coherent entity: Sephardim, Jews of Islam, Arab-Jews, Middle Eastern/ North African Jews, Asian and African Jews, Third World Jews, “bnei edot ha mizrah’ (descendents of the eastern communities), blacks, Mizrahim, or Iraqi-Jews, Iranian-Jews, Kurdish-Jews, Syrian-Jews and so-forth. Each term implies a historical, geographical and political point-of-view.

 

Prior to their arrival in Israel, the self-designation of Jews in Iraq, for example, was different. They had thought of themselves as Jews but that Jewish identity was diacritical, playing off and depending on a relation to other communities. Hyphens were added in relation to other communities: Baghdadi-Jews (in contrast to Jews of other cities); Babylonian-Jews (to mark their historical roots in the region); Iraqi-Jews (to mark national affiliation); or Arab-Jews (in contradistinction to Muslim and Christian Arabs, but also marking belonging to the greater Arab nation). Even the concept of Sephardiness was not part of the self-definition. The term strictly referred to the Jews of Spain who retained their Spanishness even outside of Iberia, for example in Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, and Morocco. Of course, there was a kind of regional geo-cultural Jewish space from the Mediterranean to the Indian ocean, where Jews traveled, exchanged ideas, under the aegis of the larger Islamic world, into which they were culturally and politically interwoven even if they retained their Jewishness within that realm. They were shaped by Arab-Muslim culture and helped shape that culture in a dialogical process that resulted in their specific Judeo-Arab identity.

 

Upon arrival in Israel, shorn of any alternative passport, Arab Jews entered a new linguistic/discursive environment, at once geo-political (the Israel/Arab conflict), legal (citizenship), and cultural (East versus West). The normative term became “Israeli.” Whereas Jewishness in Iraq, for example, formed part of a constellation of co-existing and stratified ethnicities and religions, Jewishness in Israel was now the assumed dominant.  Arabness became the marginalized category and their religion, for the first time in their history, was now affiliated with the dominant power, equated with the very basis of national belonging.  Their ethnicity (their Arabness) became a marker of cultural otherness, a kind of embarrassing excess.

 

Within Israel, nevertheless, in ordinary everyday discourse as well as in the official discourse,[1] individuals and communities were designated by and referred to themselves by their country of origin: Moroccans, Libyans, Turks etc., — a designation that assumed the Jewish national belonging. Although the cultures of Jews from Iraq, Morocco, or Iran etc., were distinct, they also had cultural aspects in common, but more importantly they shared a new social and political situation that brought forth-new definitions of identity.[2] Non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel more specifically, were regarded and began to think of themselves as belonging to a larger group than their community of origin. While in the private sphere they maintained their Iraqi, Yemeni or Moroccan specificity, within the social sphere they gradually began to articulate a new collective existence not specifically related to their country of origin and yet which represent, on one level, the sum of their countries of origin.

 

The term Sephardi acquired a new meaning from the 50s through the 80s, which did not simply refer to its literal meaning of Spanish origin. Rather it came to mark a disadvantageous social positioning and, at times, a revolutionary stance, as with the 60’s efforts to form the Sephardi revolution movement (hamhapeikha ha-spharadit). In the meantime, the official term bnei edot hamizrah (descendants of the oriental communities) became a marker of special departments and programs meant to deal with the “Levantine element,” just as special departments were formed to deal with “hamiut ha’aravi,” the “Arab minority”—that is, the Palestinians who became citizens of Israel. Gradually since the 70s, the term “descendants of the oriental communities” was used by the Mizrahim themselves, especially those who were running for public office. Since the rise of Likkud to power in 1977, this term also pointed to an embrace of the integrationist ideology of “kulanu am ehad” (“we are all one nation”).

 

However, it was the Black Panther movement in the early 1970s, which loudly protested the racialized system, re-appropriating the negative connotation of blackness. Its name was a proud reversal of the anti-Mizrahi slur schwartze khayes, (Yiddish for "black animals"), and an allusion to the black liberation movement in the United States. While the concept of blackness is still invoked – and not just in relation to Ethiopian Jews - the term Mizrahim came into use in the early 1990s. Mizrahi leftist activists who were involved in the 80s in such organizations as “East for Peace,” “New Direction” and “the Oriental Front” felt that previous terms, such as “Sephardim,” apart from its imprecision, could be seen as privileging links to Europe while slighting their non-European cultural origins. The term "Mizrahim" still retains its implicit opposite—"Ashkenazim"—, which in the Israeli context means the hegemonic white elite—rather than simply a marker of an Ashkenazi Diaspora culture.  The Mizrahi critique of naming suggested that the official terminology placed non-European Jews as "ethnicities" in contradistinction to the silent unmarked norm of Ashkenaziness or Euro-Israeli "Sabraness," simply equated with Israeli. "Mizrahim," I would argue, condenses a number of connotations: it celebrates the past in the Eastern world; it affirms the pan-oriental communities developed in Israel itself; and it invokes a future of revived cohabitation with the Arab-Muslim East.

 

The question of naming is also problematic in relation to the movement across borders of Middle Eastern/North African Jews in unprecedented numbers from the late 40s to the 60s. Conventional paradigms fail to capture the complexity of this historical moment for Arab Jews. Perhaps due to the idiosyncrasies of the situation, being trapped between two national paradigms—Arab and Jewish—each term seems problematic. None of the terms—“aliya” (ascendancy) “yetzia” (exit), “exodus,” “expulsion,” “immigration,” “emigration,” “exile,” “refugees,” “ex-patriots,” and “population-exchange”— seem adequate. In the case of the Palestinians, the forced mass exodus easily fits the term “refugee,” since they never wanted to leave Palestine and have maintained the desire to return. In the case of Arab-Jew the question of will, desire and agency remains ambivalent and complex. This is even reflected in the proliferation of terminology, suggesting that it is not only a matter of legal definition of citizenship that is at stake, but also the issue of belonging within the context of rival nationalisms. Did Arab Jews want to leave? Can their will simply be seen as a free will? Did they want to go back? And were they able to? Each term implies a different assumption and suggests a different narrative about the question of agency, identity and space.

 

The displacement of Iraqi Jews for example was not, simply, a choice of the Arab Jews themselves.[3] Even if some Arab-Jews expressed a desire to go to Israel, or to "Zion," the question is why, suddenly, after millennia of not doing so, would they leave overnight? I would argue that Arab-Jewish displacement was the product of complex circumstances in which panic rather than desire for Aliya was the key factor. The “in-gathering” seems less natural when one takes into account the circumstances forcing their departure: the efforts of the Zionist underground in Iraq to undermine the authority of the community leaders such as that of Haham Sasson Khthuri;[4] Zionist attempts to place a "wedge” between the Jewish and Muslim communities, for example by placing bombs in synagogues to generate anti-Arab panic on the part of Jews;[5] the anti-Jewish Arab nationalism (Istiklal or independence party) that failed to clarify and act on the distinction between Jews and Zionists, and which did not work to secure the place of Jews in the Arab World; and the misconceptions, on the part of Arab-Jews, about the differences between their own religious identity or sentiments and the secular nation-state project of Zionism, a movement that had virtually nothing to do with those sentiments.

 

The official term “aliya” therefore, is multiply misleading. It suggested a commitment to Zionism, when in fact the majority of Jews-- and certainly Middle Eastern Jews-- were decidedly not Zionists. Within Zionist discourse the telos of a Jewish state was normalized; the move toward its borders was represented as the ultimate Jewish act. When the actual departure of Arab-Jews is represented—as in the 1998 TV series Tkuma that was produced for the 50^th anniversary of the State of Israel— it is narrated as merely an act of devotion on the part of Yemeni Jews. They are represented as willing to cross the desert and sacrifice their lives in order to get to the Promised Land, i.e. the State of Israel. In most Zionist writings a kind of natural inevitability is always highlighted, while the diverse Zionist tactics to actively dislodge these communities is erased. Even in the novels written by Mizrahim in Hebrew, we witness a structuring absence of that crucial moment. Mizrahi literature tends to focus either on life in Israel or on life prior to Israel as two disconnected spaces.  Such narratives, still, for the most part, manifest difficulty with articulating that actual moment of departure-- that moment whereby overnight one’s marker as an Iraqi or Yemeni ends and suddenly begins that of an Israeli. In Sammy Michael’s novel Victoria, for example, the heroine’s life in Iraq is described from the turn of the century until the 1950’s, after which she is magically transferred to her apartment in contemporary Ramat Gan of the 1990s (also known as Ramat Baghdad). Her move from Iraq to Israel forms a structuring absence, as though it were simply an obvious and transparent act in her life. In this sense, even relatively critical writers tend to assume the concept of “aliya” without interrogating its semantics within a specifically Arab-Jewish history.

 

The term “aliya” naturalizes both a negative pole and a positive pole: a negative will to escape persecution and a positive desire to go to the Jewish homeland. Yet this narrative excludes moments of refusal or of ambivalence toward being uprooted. The term “Aliya,” which literally means ascendancy, is borrowed from the realm of religion “aliya la’regel’ which originally refers to the pilgrimage to the Temple and later to the land of Zion. Yet within Zionist discourse the term “aliya” has been transferred to the realm of citizenship and national identity, suggesting spiritual and even material ascendancy, the opposite of what actually took place for devastated Mizrahi communities that experienced social descent – yerida-- rather than ascent. Zionist discourse about the transition of Arab-Jews to Israel deploys conceptual paradigms in which religious ideas such as redemption, ascent, and the in-gathering of exile are grafted onto nationalist paradigms.

 

At the same time the dominant Arab nationalist discourse sees the mass exodus as an index of the Jewish betrayal of the Arab nation. Ironically, the Zionist view that Arabness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse, placing Arab-Jews on the horns of a terrible dilemma. The rigidity of these paradigms has produced the particular Arab-Jewish tragedy, since neither paradigm has room for a crossed and multiple identities.[6] The displacement of Arab Jews from the Arab world took place, for the most part, without a fully conscious or comprehensive understanding on their part of what was at stake, and what was yet to come. Arab-Jews left their countries of origin with mingled excitement and terror, but most importantly, buffeted by manipulated confusion, misunderstanding, and projections provoked by a Zionism that grafted messianic religiosity onto secular nationalist purposes. Even at times Arab-Jewish Zionists failed to grasp this distinction, and certainly never imagined the systematic racism that they were about to encounter in the "Jewish" state. Therefore some Arab-Jewish Zionist activists came to lament the day that they set foot in Israel.[7] The incorporation of the non-Ashkenazim into a new culture was far more ambiguous than any simple narrative of immigration and assimilation can convey. Although the Mizrahi "aliya" to Israel is described by official ideology, and sometimes seen by Mizrahim themselves, as a return "home," in fact this return, within a longer historical perspective, can also be seen as a new mode of exile.

 

Arab Jews, in my view, could never fully foresee what the impossibility of return to their countries of origin would mean. The permission to leave—as in the case of Iraqi Jews—did not allow for a possible return either of individuals or of the community. Therefore, even the term "immigration" does not account for that massive crossing of borders since Arab-Jews did not have the right to return. In fact for at least four decades even the symbolic return of publicly expressing nostalgia for their Arab past was also taboo. Meanwhile, the description that what occurred was a "population exchange," which somehow justifies the creation of Palestinian refugees, is also fundamentally problematic because neither Arab Jews nor Palestinians were ever consulted about whether they would like to be exchanged. While the forced departure of Arab-Jews does not parallel the circumstances of the Palestinian traumatic exodus during the Nakba (catastrophe), one cannot also simply affix terms such as aliya or immigration, because the question of will, desire, agency remains extremely complex, contingent and ambivalent.

 

 

DISMEMBERMENT: THE ERASURE OF THE HYPHEN IN THE JUDEO-MUSLIM

 

The master-narrative of unique Jewish victimization has been crucial for legitimizing an anomalous nationalist project of "ingathering of the exiles from the four corners of the globe." Yet, this narrative can also be defined as legitimizing the generation of displacements of peoples from such diverse geographies, languages, cultures and histories-- a project in which, in other words, a state created a nation. And if it has been argued that all nations are invented, I would say that some nations are more invented than others. Zionism is certainly a case in point. The narrative of incomparable victimization has also been crucial for the claim that the "Jewish Nation" has faced a common perennial "historical enemy"-- the Muslim-Arab. This picture of an ageless and relentless oppression and humiliation, implies double-edged amnesia: one with regards to the colonial partition of Palestine which has led to the dispossession of Palestinians, and to the Palestinian antagonism toward Zionism; the second with regards to the Judeo-Islamic history which must be represented within a more multi-perspectival approach.

 

Zionist discourse has represented Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims as merely one more "non-Jewish" obstacle to the Jewish-Israeli national trajectory. Therefore, the historiography concerning Jews within Islam consists of a morbidly selective "tracing the dots" from pogrom to pogrom. The word "pogrom" itself, it must be noted, derives from and is reflective of the Eastern-European Jewish experience. I do not mean to idealize the position of Jews within Islam, rather I argue that Zionist discourse has in a sense hijacked Middle Eastern Jews from their Judeo-Islamic cultural-geography, and subordinated them into the European-Jewish chronicle of shtetl and pogrom.

 

The Zionist conception of “Jewish History” presumes a unitary and universal notion of history, rather than a multiplicity of experiences, differing from period to period and from context to context. The Zionist "proof" of a single Jewish experience allows little space for comparative studies of Middle Eastern Jews in relation[8] to diverse religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East/North Africa. Within the Zionist vision of a single Jewish experience, there are neither parallels nor overlaps with other religious and ethnic communities, whether in terms of a Jewish hyphenated and syncretic culture or in terms of linked and analogous oppressions of various groups. The selective reading of Middle Eastern history, in other words, makes two processes apparent: the unproblematized subordination of Middle Eastern Jews into a "universal" Jewish experience as well as the rejection of an Arab and Muslim context for Jewish institutions, identity, and history.

 

Contemporary cultural practices illustrate this process of dismemberment; i.e. the attempt to represent the Jews within Islam detached from Muslim-Arab culture, philosophy and institutions. Take for example the 1989 New York Jewish Museum exhibition of Turkish-Jewish costumes. The exhibition provided a vehicle for imaginary travel into distant geography and history via the costume of the “other” Jews, here completely isolated from the Muslim Ottoman context. However, beyond the issue of shared dress codes, various historical documents also reveal Muslim support for Jewish adherence to Jewish culture, during the period in question, while Westernized Ashkenazi Jews were attempting to install what was regarded as an alien culture in countries such as Iraq. For example one of the articles in the Judeo-Arabic newspaper Perah, published in India (Calcutta, Sept. 23, 1885)[9] reports on the Baghdadi Jewish leaders’ opposition to the power exercised by the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) toward the students. The AIU—the schooling system founded in Paris in 1860[10] - was meant to provide a French curriculum for the Jews of the Levant, and to carry the banner of enlightenment and the civilizing mission into the “backward” regions of the non-West. It began its programs by requiring its students to change their cloth and hairstyle, which were perceived as signs of backwardness. The Baghdadi Jewish establishment wanted the AIU to educate its children in the sense of providing a practical knowledge within a world of rising Western powers. However, they did not understand learning French culture and history as abandoning their Judeo-Arab culture.

 

Yet, this report, which outlined the opposition of the Baghdadi Jews to the practices of the AIU is particularly interesting for its discussion of the response of the Muslims to the changes they began to perceive among upper-middle class Jews: “From one day to the next the phenomenon [of shaving] is spreading so that the one who shaves his beard cannot be distinguished from the gentiles (Christians). It has also become the occasion of ridicule by the Muslims in the marketplace who say: “wonder of wonders, the Jews have forsaken their religion… See how the Jews have abandoned their religion (heaven forbid) before, not one of them would touch his beard and ear locks, and now they cut them and throw them into the dustbin.” In contrast to Zionism’s caricatured portrayal of a presumably inherent Muslim anti-Semitism, one sees in this example a Muslim investment in maintaining Jewish identity, as it had been known within the Muslim world. Jewish identity is seen by both Muslim and Jews as part of a larger and more complex Judeo-Islamic civilization while assimilation into Western style is seen as a betrayal of traditions at once culturally shared and religiously differentiated. In this respect, the Jewish-French action to assimilate Baghdadi Jews is regarded by the Judeo-Arabic paper and by the Baghdadi Jewish establishment, as a violation of these norms. The Judeo-Arab newspaper of the late 19^th century cites the Muslim response as invoking the same code that the Jewish Baghdadi establishment also believed in. In other words, the anxiety that Arab-Jews manifest here is not so much in relation to their perception in the eyes of French-Jews, but in the eyes of their Muslim neighbors. Ironically, it was not their neighbors who were seeking their assimilation.

 

The commonalties between Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims posed a challenge to any simplistic definition of Jewish national identity. The idea of a homogeneous national past precludes any “deviance” into a more relational and historicized narrative that would see Jews not simply through their religious commonalties but also in relation to their non-Jewish contextual cultures, institutions, and practices. In other words, in the same period that the idea of Zionism was being formulated within a Christian-European context, Jews in the Muslim world were in a different position that did not require a nationalist articulation of their identity. In this sense, one might argue that the concept of Jewish nationalism was irrelevant to their existence as Jews within the Islamic world. 

 

Thus a historiography that assumes of a pan-Jewish culture is often the same historiography that assumed the bifurcated discourse of "Arab versus Jew" without acknowledging a hyphenated Arab-Jewish existence. In this sense, the erasure of the Arab dimension of Arab-Jews was crucial to the Zionist perspective. The Middle Easterness of Jews questioned the very definitions and boundaries of the Euro-Israeli national project. The cultural affinity that Arab-Jews shared with Arab-Muslims was in many respects stronger than that they shared with European Jews—a fact that threatened the Zionist conception of a homogeneous nation, modeled on the European-nationalist definition of the nation-state.

 

As an integral part of the topography, language, culture and history of the Middle East, Mizrahim have also threatened the Euro-Israeli self image which sees itself as a prolongation of Europe, in the Middle East but not of it. Arab-Jews, for the first time in their history, faced the imposed dilemma of choosing between Jewishness and Arabness, in a geopolitical context that perpetuated the equation between Arabness, Middle Easterners and Islam, on the one hand, and between Jewishness, Europeaness and Westerness on the other. Thus the religious Jewish aspect of diverse interacted and interwoven Jewish identities has been given primacy, a categorization tantamount to dismembering the identity of a community. In other words, the continuity of Jewish life meant the ceasing of Arab life for Arab-Jews in Israel—at least in the public sphere. What was called by officialdom an “ingathering,” then, was also a dismembering, both within and between communities. But the Zionist reading of that dismemberment, both prior to and subsequent to the actual rupture, rendered it as a healing and a return.

 

 

DISCRONICITY: TEMPORALITY AND THE PROJECT OF MODERNIZATION

 

The ruptures provoked by Zionism were at once geographic— dislodging the communities and transferring their bodies to Israel – and historiographic, so that Arab Jews were separated off from their Arab-Muslim context and discursively integrated into a presumably universal culture. Underlying these conceptualizations was the discourse of modernization with its assumption of dischronicity, or the rupture of time, as though communities live in different time zones, some advanced and some lagging behind. The ideology of modernization thrives on a binary opposition of twinned concepts-- modernity/tradition, underdevelopment/development, science/superstition, and technology/ backwardness. In this sense, modernization envisions a stagist narrative that can paradoxically assume the essential superiority of one community over another while also generating programs to transpose the inferior community into modernity.

 

In the case of Israel, modernization has been a central mechanism of policy-making as well as of identity shaping within what I see as, in many ways, an anomalous national formation. The Zionist modernization narrative has projected a Western national identity for a state geographically located in the Middle East and populated by a Middle Eastern majority, including Palestinians and non-Ashkenazi Jews. The dominant discourse of Euro-Israeli policy makers and scholars suggests that Asian and African Jews come from "primitive," "backward," "underdeveloped," "pre-modern" societies and, therefore, need modernization. But here modernization can also be seen as a euphemism for breaking away from Arab culture.

 

In the 50s Prime Minister David Ben Gurion for example, repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: "We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve authentic Jewish values."[11] Abba Eban expressed similar concern: "One of the great, apprehensions which afflict us ... is the danger lest the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring world."[12] Golda Meir projected the Sephardim as coming from another, less developed time, for her, the sixteenth century and which for other Eurocentrics, was a vaguely defined "Middle Ages", and asked: "Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?"[13] Over the years Euro-Israeli writings and speeches have frequently advanced the historiographically suspect idea that "Jews of the Orient," prior to their "ingathering" into Israel, were somehow "outside of" history. This discourse ironically echoes 19th century assessments, such as those of Hegel, that Jews, like Blacks, lived outside of the progress of Western Civilization.

 

In the early fifties, some of Israel's most celebrated intellectuals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote essays addressing the "ethnic problem," and in the process recycled any number of colonialist tropes. For Karl Frankenstein, "the primitive mentality of many of the immigrants from backward countries," might be profitably compared to "the primitive expression of children, the retarded, or the mentally disturbed."[14] And in 1964, Kalman Katznelson published his openly racist book The Ashkenazi Revolution where he argued the essential, irreversible genetic inferiority of the Sephardim, warning against mixed marriage as tainting of the Ashkenazi race and calling for the Ashkenazim to protect their interests against a burgeoning Sephardi majority.

 

In ethnographic films and folklore books Eurocentric discourse takes a more patronizing "humane" form. For example, the book One People: The Story of the Eastern Jews (Dvora and Rabbi Menachem Hacohen, with an introduction by Abba Eban)[15] foregrounds "traditional garb," "charming folkways," pre-modern "craftsmanship," cobblers and coppersmiths, and women "weaving on primitive looms" as representative of the Eastern Jew’s way of life. An entire chapter is devoted to "The Jewish Cave-Dwellers." The historical record suggests that most Jews in the region lived in cities and towns. Moreover, the subject that dwelling in houses as opposed to caves is a sign of superiority is a matter for a deep philosophical debate about the meaning of “Progress.” The problem of this discourse, however, lies in its axioms. What is striking here is a kind of a "desire for primitivism," which feels compelled to paint the Mizrahim as innocent of technology and modernity. The pictures of Oriental misery are then contrasted with the luminous faces of the Orientals in Israel itself, learning to read and mastering the modern technology of tractors and combines. This book, amongst others, forms part of a broader national export industry of Sephardi "folklore," an industry that circulates (the often expropriated) goods— dresses, jewelry, liturgical objects, photos --among Western Jewish institutions eager for Jewish exotica. In this sense the “Aliya” to Israel signifies leaving behind pre-modernity.

 

In sociological and anthropological studies the dispossession of Middle Eastern Jews of their culture has been justified by the concept of "the inevitable march of western progress"[16]; that is that those who have been living in a historically condemned temporality would inevitably disappear before the productive march of modernity. Within traditional anthropology one detects a desire to project the Mizrahim as living "allochronically," in another time, often associated with earlier periods of individual life (childhood) or of human history (primitivism). As within colonialist discourse, metaphors and tropes played a constitutive role in "figuring" Euro-Israeli superiority. The trope of infantilization projects the colonized as embodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad cultural development.[17] In Israeli modernization discourse, the Mizrahim always seem to lag behind, not only economically but also culturally, condemned to a perpetual game of catch-up in which they can only repeat on another register the history of the "advanced" Euro-Israelis.[18] From the perspective of official Zionism, Jews from Arab and Muslim countries enter modernity only when they appear on the map of the Hebrew state, just as the modern history of Palestine is seen as beginning with the Zionist renewal of the Biblical mandate. In Israeli history text books Middle Eastern Jewish history is presumed to begin with the coming of Sephardi Jews to Israel, and more precisely with the "Magic Carpet" or "Ali Baba" operations which transported them to Israel from different countries in the Arab region. Borrowed from A Thousand and One Nights, the names themselves foreground the putative technological naiveté of the Sephardim, for whom modern airplanes were "magic carpets" transporting them to the Promised Land. Similarly, the major part of the Babylon Jewish Museum in Israel [19] exhibition is in fact not dedicated to the millennia of Jewish history between the rivers of the Dijla and the Frat but to the Zionist activism there. The converging discourses of the enlightenment, progress, and modernization are central to the Zionist master narrative. A series of mutually reinforcing equations between modernity, science, technology and the West has contributed to the civilizing mission not only in relation to Palestine but also in relation to Arab Jews. Science became crucial for legitimizing Zionist nationalism as part of the West and modernity.

 

Discourses off progress were crucial to the colonization of Palestine, while later playing a central role toward Mizrahim in the process of incorporating them into the Jewish Nation. The mystique of modernizing Palestine by "making the desert bloom" provided a claim to a land in an argument that was not exclusively based on Biblical evidence, but also on a secular idea of Progress. This mystique, similarly, justified the ingathering not only on a biblical messianic vision but also on the idea of modernization. The civilizing mission towards the ancient land and traditional Jews occupies a significant portion of Zionist discourse. The Eurocentric projection of Middle Eastern Jews as coming to the "land of milk and honey" from desolate backwater societies lacking all contact with scientific-technological civilization, once again set up an Eurocentric rescue trope. Rather than a traumatic rupture, we find a rescue narrative of saving people and objects. The narrative concerning the removal of the Cairo Gniza, for example, suggests that its dispersal to European and American universities and institutions was a heroic act of rescue— and indeed the Gniza was dispersed half a century before the dispersal of the community that produced it.[20] Zionist discourse portrayed Middle Eastern Jewish culture prior to Zionism as static and passive, and like the virgin land of Palestine,[21] lying in wait for the impregnating infusion of European dynamism. While presenting Palestine as an empty land to be transformed by Jewish labor, the Zionist "Founding Fathers" presented Arab-Jews also as passive vessels to be shaped by the revivifying spirit of Zionism.

 

 

DISSONANCE: METHODOLOGICAL AND DISCIPLINARY RUPTURES

 

In the scholarship about Arab-Jews that delineates their lives before and after their arrival to Israel, one notices a methodological oscillation or a conceptual shift, subliminally privileging a Zionist perspective. Books about the Jews of Yemen, for example, detail their oppression at Muslim hands relaying the kidnapping of young Jewish women and their forced conversion to Islam and marriage to Muslim men. When these same Yemeni Jews are studied within the Israeli framework, however, we find a discursive or methodological rupture. The writers abandon the historical account of victimization, and shift into an anthropological account of polygamy and gat chewing. A mixture of history and anthropology, Herbert S. Lewis’s After The Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel [22] begins by mentioning Muslim persecution, including the Decree of Orphans in the 17^th century, which forced fatherless Jewish children to be taken away by force from their community and converted into Islam. Yet, After The Eagles Landed deploys a selective tale of kidnapping. Although the book is written in the mid-nineties, it fails to mention one of the most traumatic kidnapping to afflict the Yemeni-Jewish community between the late 40s and the 60s, taking place not in a Muslim country, but in the Jewish State. Traumatized by the reality of life in Israel, Yemenis as well as other Jews from Arab and Muslim countries fell prey to a ring of unscrupulous doctors, nurses and social workers on the state payroll. These government representatives were involved in providing Mizrahi babies for adoption by Ashkenazi parents largely in Israel and in the U.S., while telling the natural parents that the baby had died. The conspiracy was extensive enough to include the systematic issuance of fraudulent death certificates for the adopted children and at times even fake burial site for the babies who presumably had died, although the parents were never presented the body of their baby. In this way, the government attempted to ensure that over several decades Mizrahi demands for investigation were silenced and information was hidden and manipulated by government bureaus. The act of kidnapping, I would argue, was not simply a result of financial interests to increase the revenues of the state; it was also a result of a deep belief in the inferiority of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, especially since Oriental parents were seen as careless breeders with little sense of responsibility towards their own children. In this sense, doctors, nurses and social workers saw themselves as incarnating Western Science and Progress, and believed in their duty of materializing its vision of modernization[23] within the Zionist rescue narrative. [24]Thus, within he discursive framework, detaching babies form their Oriental backward spaces and transferring them into the spaces of modernity where they would be raised according to Western values seemed only logical. What is certainly an issue of Human Rights violation was subjected to systematic silencing and censorship.[25]

 

Given that the kidnapping of their babies was not what Yemeni and other Arab-Jews expected in the Jewish State, one wonders about a scholarship that has not trouble articulating itself about kidnapping in the Muslim word, while remaining silent about the Jewish State. More critically perhaps, at a time when there had already been considerable agitation and mobilization and even some academic research [26] on the issue of the kidnapped Yemeni and Mizrahi children, scholarly work seems to remain oblivious to the diverse modes of oppressing Jews within the Jewish state. Instead, anthropological books tend to be typically organized around such concepts as kinship, marriage, attitudes, rituals, and values, religious and social attitudes. After the Eagle Landed, interestingly, does not attempt to speak about Yemeni Jews within a modernizing narrative. Rather it participates in the Romantic discourse of Eurocentric anthropology that longs for “simplicity” of its subjects. The author praises Yemeni culture for its simplicity and richness, presumably as a rebuff to the elitist attitude toward Yemeni Jews. Why in all this scholarly emphasis on the Mizrahi extended family structure (the hamula) is there barely any trace of the devastation of these families through the kidnappings performed with the complicity of certain sectors of the establishment?

 

The ideological rupture characteristic of Zionism, then, is not only reflected in the scholarship and its constant thematic reproductions, but also in an acute rupture in the method of analysis itself. To take another example, Moshe Gat’s book A Jewish Community in Crisis: The Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951[27] analyzes the Iraqi political and economic interests in at first keeping and then permitting Iraqi Jews to leave (only upon giving up their citizenship). The book also characterizes the active opposition to Zionism on the part of the Iraqi Jewish leadership of Baghdad, depicting Haham (the Sephardi equivalent of Rabbi) Sasson Khthuri as simply fearing the loss of his status and position to the Zionists. Yet this dissection of motives, interest and power is abandoned once the author moves to examine the activities of the Zionist movement in Iraq and the Israeli establishment. Here the author shifts into an idealistic and benign official discourse of “concern” for the Iraqi Jews, the very community being uprooted partly for the Israeli demographic and economic necessities: settling the country with Jews, securing the borders, getting cheap labor, and military personnel. As with any history writing, it is not simply the issue of “facts” that is at stake, but also the question of narrative structure and point-of-view, which here becomes absolutely central, since sympathies are not apportioned equally but according to an ideologized schema.

 

A rupture of a different nature operates in Amitav Gosh’s book In an Antique Land.[28] A hybrid of anthropology and history, the book ends up by splitting the subjects of ethnography and historiography; the first focusing on present-day Egyptian Muslims and the second on past Arab-Jews. Anthropological accounts of Ghosh's visits to Egypt are paralleled by his historiographical chronicle of the Judeo-Islamic world largely through the travels of Ben-Yiju, the Tunisian Jewish merchant whose existence is followed through the Gniza archive. The book vividly captures a geo-cultural Jewish space from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, where Jews traveled, exchanged ideas under the aegis of the larger Islamic world, into which they were culturally and politically interwoven, even if they retained their specific Jewish practices within that realm. Within this space the existence of Jewishness within Islam was not perceived as a philosophical and cultural contradiction. Ghosh’s anthropology, however, exclusively deals with Muslim-Egyptians, and produces silence about the lives of Egyptian, Tunisian and other Arab-Jews. On Ghosh's final trip to Egypt he learns that Mizrahi pilgrims from Israel are on their way to Egypt to visit the tomb of the cabbalist mystic Sidi Abu-Hasira, a site holy for both Muslims and Jews, with many similar festivities. Yet, for one prosaic reason or another, the anthropologist, Ghosh, ends up never meeting them. Ghosh, at the closure of his historiographical and anthropological Odyssey, somehow ends his narrative at the very point where the subject of his historiography could have turned into a subject of his anthropology.

 

Perhaps Ghosh's missed rendezvous, his packing up and leaving Egypt precisely as the Arab-Jews visit the Abu-Haseira's holy site, is revelatory of the difficulties of representing a palimpsestic diasporic identity; the dangers of border crossing in the war zone. It seems here that Arab-Jews continue to "travel" in historical narratives as imbricated within a legendary Islamic civilization. As the postcolonial story, however, begins to unfold over the past decades, Arab-Jews, suddenly, cease to exist. This split narrative seems to suggest that once in Israel, Arab-Jews have reached their final destination-- the State of Israel-- and nothing more remains be said about their Arabness. The historical episode described by Ghosh, and its aftermath, suggests that alliances and conflicts between communities not only evolve historically but also that they are narrativized differently according to the schemas and ideologies of the present. And as certain strands in a cultural fabric become taboo, this narrativization involves destroying connections that once existed. The process of constructing a national historical memory also entails the destruction of a different, prior, historical memory.

 

While for the purpose of the nationalist telos Mizrahim are detached from the Arab-Muslim context of their belonging, for the purpose of explaining their positioning within Israeli society, the re-attachment also takes place. The hegemonic scholarship concerning the Mizrahim entails a paradox that has to be understood in terms of the relationship among the disciplines. Zionist historiography dismantles the Judeo-Islamic world, centuries prior to the arrival of nationalism. At the same time, after their arrival to Israel, Mizrahim inhabit the pages of Euro-Israeli sociological and anthropological accounts as maladjusted criminals and superstitious exotics. Within this discourse Mizrahim are indeed extracted from their Arab history, which, paradoxically, firmly returns in the form of explaining Mizrahi marginalization. The Arab-Muslim past looms as deformed vestiges in the lives of Israelis of Asian and African origins. Sociology and Anthropology detect traces of underdevelopment, while national historiography tells the story of the past as a moral tale full of national purpose. Such scholarly bifurcation cannot possibly capture the complexity of an Arab-Jewish identity that is at once past and present, here and there.

 

The study of Mizrahim today is neatly divided among the disciplines in a narrative whose terminus lies within the territory of Zionism and Israel, as though there were only rupture without continuities with the Arab-Muslim world. Here geopolitical borders are superimposed on cultural paradigms; once within the borders of the state of Israel, Mizrahim usually are the subject of Sociology and Criminology. In Anthropology, where their rituals are studied, their affinity with the East is emphasized, usually within an exoticizing fashion detached from history and politics. In the present, Mizrahi culture tends to be narrated simply within the state of Israel, i.e. within the framework of a political geography that lacks a wider perspective of a border-crossing analysis. Contemporary Mizrahi culture is thus dismembered from the complex Arab cultural space it inhabits.

 

Producing a Mizrahi epistemology, we have seen, requires challenging a number of disciplinary assumptions as well as normative political discourses. To critique and even bypass the founding premises of Orientalist representation and Eurocentric discourse, one must challenge the folklorization and exoticization of Mizrahim within Zionist discourse, its self-idealizing narrative of rescue and the concomitant denigration of Arab Muslim culture. Such studies interrupt the modernization narrative in which anthropology renders Mizrahim as living “allochronically” in “another time”, in which sociology reduces Mizrahim to criminality, in which political science fails to discern the links between Mizrahi and Palestinian issues, and so forth. The interdisciplinary work of the kind I am calling for here hopes to relocate the issues in a much wider and denser geographic and historical context.