Finalist for the Graphite Submission Contest 2020
While the conflict between Israel and Palestine occupies a significant and deserved amount of attention, there are other, often overlooked, consequences of the Zionist project: one of them being the ever-diminishing existence of the “Jewish-Arab” identity and culture. Just a century ago, Jewish communities could be found all over the Arab world. Today, few remain. Yes, there have been attempts by certain countries to reintegrate Jewish communities into the fabric of society, but those attempts are infrequent in comparison to the attempts of Jews to distance themselves. For example, in Hebrew, the connection of Judaism and Arabness is written off using oversimplified terms including Mizrahi (meaning eastern) and Sephardi (meaning from Spain or Portugal) as labels for Jews that originated anywhere other than Europe. As the conflict and violence in Israel/Palestine and with the surrounding countries grows, a wedge has been driven further between Jewish people and Arab people.
I should make clear that, for the purpose of this article, I refer to the “Arab-Jewish” identity which should not be conflated with other ethnicities like Persian or Turkish, even though in different ways the Iranian Jews and Turkish Jews have also been targeted for their identity. One of the differences is that Turkish, Farsi, and Persian were not originally linked to the “enemy,” so they were not as anxiously marginalized originally, though those communities have been marginalized as well.
As a double major in the World Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies program and the Jewish Studies program, I sometimes feel as though, despite the crossover in topics and methodology, the two departments claim to be representative of two opposing entities. When I declare my areas of study to peers, it often elicits a response like, “wow” or, “how interesting,” as if my decision to combine the two (and yes, I do feel as though that is partly my motive) is exceptional. Sure, there are classes that do justice to the shared history or cultural similarities between Jewish-Muslim/Arab relations, but there are so many more aimed at highlighting the way that the relationship between the two groups has fractured. In many ways this is true; the ghosts of the once-thriving Jewish communities in Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and etc. raise the simple question: what happened and why?
For a millennium, Jewish people were integrated into the very foundations of these Arab societies. Sometimes they lived in isolated communities, but there were often sprinkles of Muslim, Christian, Armenian, or Kurdish individuals living among them, just as they lived amongst other ethnic groups. Jewish people spoke Arabic, usually a variation on the standard language of the country, but not in a way that was different from the other dialects being spoken like the Darija in Morocco or the ‘Ami of Baghdad. Many Jewish Arabs spoke enough dialects to be able to converse with different communities of people in their native tongues. During periods like the Golden Age of Spain, Jewish Arabs contributed prolifically to Arabic and Arab intellectual culture. Despite this, popular rhetoric seems to amplify the differences between the two peoples and claim that they are natural enemies.
About one year ago, the L.A. born journalist Massoud Hayoun reclaimed his “Jewish Arabness” by publishing an exquisite memoir capturing his family’s history. Raised by his Jewish Tunisian grandmother and his Jewish Egyptian/Moroccan grandfather, he learned from them the meaning of being Jewish in the Arab world. To honour their history, he recounts stories of his grandmother Daida and grandfather Oscar’s lives in their respective countries. What makes the book special is that Hayoun’s position on the question of “what happened” to Jews in the Arab world is explained through his well-researched observations on the historical context, without losing the intimacy of his grandparent’s personal narratives.
An anecdote from Hayoun’s grandmother’s childhood in Tunisia relays her love for the month of Ramadan (a month-long fast observed by many Muslims) because of its cultural intensity. She participated in the experience by not eating or drinking in front of her Muslim friends—for her it was more of a cultural event than a religious one. Oscar similarly felt at home in Egypt. While travelling in Tanta in 1948, after tensions began to build because of the newly established State of Israel, he was asked by local police to leave a hotel on account of his being a non-Muslim. He was defended by townsmen and the manager himself, who vouched for his good nature. What is most compelling is that these stories are not exceptional. The entirety of the first half of the memoir is full of memories of this sort. Reading these now, one notices the tone of nostalgia imbued in Hayoun’s words, as he clearly feels a yearning to know a lifestyle which has become entirely unavailable to him.
One of the reasons for the disconnect of Jewishness and the Arab/Jewish-Arab world was the attempt of Jews to distance themselves from their own “Arabness.” This was one of the goals of the implementation of the French Jewish school system, Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), among other programs in the Middle East and North Africa. European Jews offered up the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa as a possible kind of link to their “civilization.” They announced suddenly that Jews were a nation that should be seen as universal, faking the links between the European Jewish cultural-religious norms and North African/Middle Eastern cultural-religious norms hoping that one day they would simply merge. Many Jews living in North Africa, like Oscar’s grandparents, did not understand themselves to be part of this foreign Judaism, one that encouraged them to look down on their native culture. Arabic was replaced by French or English in many households, and many Jews were told not to identify with their “Arab” neighbours. The barriers that were founded between Jewish and non-Jewish Arabs took on linguistic, economic, political and social forms.
The Zionist nationalist project and eventual founding of the State of Israel only reinforced this trend. Massoud Hayoun takes a raw, definitive stance on Zionism and nationalism in general by saying, “French, British and Israeli administrations have repeatedly punished us for being Arabs. I’m Arab because this is what I and my parents have been told not to be.” For me, Hayoun is a powerful voice in a world where identity politics become more polarized by the day and narrow definitions of Judaism have taken center stage. Even more, his story and message are worthy of sharing with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab immigrants to Israel and the rest of the world who are told that they are not Jewish enough and are marginalized in so many ways.
In a way, the fact that Jewish Arabs have been targeted or misunderstood (on purpose mostly) by Jewish organizations, historians and academics, and the Israeli government is characteristic of a bigger issue articulated and coined by the late Edward Said in his pivotal book Orientalism. I believe that the goal of non-Arab Jews in attacking Jewish Arabs and their history takes the goals of Orientalism even further than just exoticizing or appropriating their culture to satisfy Western curiosity or fears. I feel as though the end goal is to erase their identity from the encyclopedia of Jewishness altogether. This would be devastating, to say the least. Considering Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples, the extent to which we have diverged from one another feels nearly ironic. Erasing the “Jewish Arab” would be giving in to the pressure that contemporary discourse on “Jewish-Arabness,” “Arab-Jewishness,” or “Judeo-Arabic” tries so hard to do in order to simplify and justify the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine.
It cannot be overstated that my attempt to shed light on this particular issue is not a criticism regarding any one particular historian, group of people, or organization, and it is not even complete. Rather it is more a lamentation on an erosion of a big, important part of Jewish history and history of Persian Jews, Arab Jews, Yemeni Jews, Moroccan Jews, Tunisian Jews, Egyptian Jews and so on. Every day I feel that I have a chance to learn more, because like everything else, opinion and understanding will always be in flux. While I cannot speak personally on this problem, I want to align myself with the groups that have felt targeted by colonialist attempts at silencing history.
I urge young Jews, Arabs, Jewish-Arabs, non-religious people and everyone else to indulge themselves in a history that is so often silenced. By reading When We Were Arabs, we are taking Hayoun up on his offer to teach us about his Arabness and experience, with the hope of being more inclusive and patient towards people that may stand out as different or analogous to the societal, cultural and dominant norms.
Eve Stein is an undergraduate at McGill University, where she is pursuing a double major in World Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Jewish Studies. Eve is interested in understanding the intersection between personal and historical narratives. After she graduates, she might have a job somewhere, depending on the status of the job market following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Feature Image Credit to Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
