The JIMENA Orientalist Divide and Conquer: Dr. Mijal Bitton’s “Expert Insights” into the Sephardic Tradition
David Shasha
The JIMENA Orientalist Divide and Conquer: Dr. Mijal Bitton’s “Expert Insights” into the Sephardic Tradition
Right before Rosh Hashanah, our very successful Ashkenazi friend JIMENA Sarah Levin sent out a very special e-mail newsletter.
It led off with an excellent White Jewish Supremacy institutional victory lap:
JIMENA's Executive Director Sarah Levin Invited to Vice President Kamala Harris's Pre-Rosh Hashanah Reception in DC
Tuesday evening, September 12, 2023, Vice President Harris and Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, welcomed approximately 150 Jewish leaders, celebrities and prominent figures to their Washington, D.C. residence for a pre-Rosh Hashanah reception.
We are deeply honored that our Executive Director, Sarah Levin, was invited to represent JIMENA and the Mizrahi/Sephardi community at this event. It serves as a testament to our ongoing efforts in collaboration with the White House to combat antisemitism.
Well done.
Check out the White Jewish Supremacy selfie!
Indeed, I wonder if Ms. Levin used her time with the VP to discuss her crusade against the California Ethnic Studies curriculum and Governor Newsom:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit
But the meat of the newsletter was an announcement involving an excellent Divide and Conquer video produced with the help of our other dear friend Dr. Mijal Bitton:
JIMENA Partner, Dr. Mijal Bitton, Provides Expert Insights in Jewish Unpacked Video: '5 Surprising Differences Between Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews'
Dr. Mijal Bitton, a valued partner of JIMENA, recently lent her expertise as a consultant for a video produced by Jewish Unpacked. This insightful video, titled '5 Surprising Differences Between Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews,' delves into the unique aspects and distinctions within these rich Jewish cultural and historical traditions. Dr. Bitton's contribution adds depth and understanding to this exploration, highlighting the diversity and nuances that exist within Sephardi and Mizrahi communities.
It is a case of the blind leading the blind, all for the purposes of making a buck.
The video was produced by what appears to be a HASBARAH group called Jewish Unpacked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5kqQB69SDY&t=6s
Here are their other posted videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@UNPACKED
The host of the JIMENA-approved video is someone called Adi Elbaz:
https://jewishunpacked.com/?s=adi+elbaz
It is a slick production with all sorts of Poptrash culture TV references, and in a brief eleven and a half minutes vainly tries to tell the story of Iberian Jews and Arab Jews.
It is a spurious binary.
Not once does the video mention that Andalusian Spain was part of the larger Arab-Muslim world, later to be taken over by the Catholic Church with its Inquisitions and Expulsions.
I have discussed the issue in articles on the contested term “Arab Jew”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LC0ZoLHGZ0a11m1AMTPdARmm3mpoHW3sarNI3d77-9U/edit
More than this, I have written extensively on the matter under the rubric of “The Levantine Option" and its profound implications for the future of the Middle East:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KNT3cG91CHYNf6ibRwp_gSQbcaDV1Irj/view?ths=true
It is therefore important to note that the New Christian Fascists continue to use the Catholic Reconquista as a bulwark against the polyglot culture of Andalus and the Sephardic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aT7q0lYjUC0dY03NHkdaU1uD6wmR8Gx1SbAUDyOPB_g/edit
We must never forget that the very foundation of Sephardic culture is rooted in the Arab-Muslim literary civilization, whose primary focus has been on poetry and language studies.
Here are a few handy resources to study this Arab Jewish literature and its impact on world civilization:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h1rQylUyxnTF7FcYWzDZbcushaUKgTxODvDyZYm6HsY/edit
https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Poem-Christian-950-1492-Translation/dp/0691121958
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0055.xml
https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-Renaisance-Taubman-Lectures-Studies/dp/0520065476
It is this Andalusian Arab synthesis, the culture of Adab, that has marked the classical Sephardic heritage.
https://www.britannica.com/art/adab-literature
As we have come to learn through bitter experience, this literary tradition has been erased, in Israel as well as the Diaspora. Its study is limited to an ever-shrinking group of academic specialists, its significance unknown to the Jewish masses.
Dr. Bitton is joined by her friends at the Sephardic Community Alliance as participants in the video, which makes the whole thing very Ashkenazi-friendly.
We have repeatedly seen how the SY Washington Heights front group SCA has abandoned the Sephardic heritage and embraced The Tikvah Fund:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QgaZGVpyA-vGsGUOhSX3bECgT4QbjeUErD3oWJi4hwY/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k1NebkmJYheC9WnK5HeEfDSQbDQ4fSZK/view?ths=true
The primary aim of the video is to Divide and Conquer, by separating Israeli Mizrahi Jews from the Iberian Jews in a micro way.
It is all about “nuance.”
The later Ottoman Jewish synthesis, with its critical ties to the Andalusian intellectual heritage, is also ignored, as it deepens the ties between Mediterranean Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a way that denies the HASBARAH imperative:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-gt2Q3uW7Wv7oxXCqZC5MHT0izQKNMj3EZ0QtYyzJQ4/edit
Unsurprisingly, the video begins with a barrage of food images and moves on to continue the “Bourekas and Haminados” ephemera.
We get the HENNA!
http://journeytothemizrah.org/lesson-4
We get the MIMOUNA!
https://www.jimena.org/the-sweet-magic-of-mimouna/
We get a lot of MUSIC!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Rp2kwRQcny_KeF1X24JQav3-an2edAl7lySF8nwv6w/edit
We even get the Israeli Black Panthers!
https://jewishcurrents.org/darkness-in-the-holy-land
There is a prominent attack on Israel’s socialist Founding Fathers and their Ashkenazi racism, but the tide, of course, changes when we get to the most important year for the Israeli Mizrahi Jews.
1977!
Begin, King of Israel:
Begin of course was a Polish Jew, not a Middle Eastern Jew:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Begin#Biography
And he was a Jewish Fascist under the sway of Vladimir Jabotinsky:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CrICShMs0qe2X5jW2smB1fPMExD4KIowhch_chKECqE/edit
Zionist Eurocentrism is not limited to either the Left or the Right, it is a malignancy that is part and parcel of the ubiquitous White Jewish Supremacy.
And, for the record, there has still been no Mizrahi Israeli PM.
The video then goes one step further and extols the Litvak Haredi SHAS Party, and its leader, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/pRnfkfaOgV4/m/9LVc9BXAKGsJ
The SHAS legacy remains in the corrupt hands of Aryeh Deri:
https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/the-crimes-of-aryeh-deri/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-732348
So there’s that.
But there’s more!
As the cascade of Orientalist images builds to a climax, we get a view of a movie poster for the racist classic “Sallah Shabbati”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DWMHfQ1U-RxTWoq6VLs9PHoYDEWML40J/edit
It is all about how Jews are One People, and how differences are being erased through Intermarriage and cultural mixing in the Holy Land.
In the end, what the video does not provide the viewer is any sense of the Sephardic literary heritage and its many complexities:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKBTQSn0dytn4AefatM1wTgG22DTMaz3sVCuYIxiJEY/edit
It never mentions Sephardic intellectuals like the late Rabbi Jose Faur:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8bgBmpENXW8UTmkkgZyOvVGZmz-UU84uyStJtO5ADA/edit
It does not engage the issue of Jewish Humanism and the ways in which the Ashkenazi Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, was deeply influenced by the classical Sephardic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zg7TwCy0jZKnZZOB2oIjdOSqNFxBuyZX2YTLYQgGLbo/edit
As I explained it in a collection of articles on the Meldola rabbinical dynasty:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G5DUuux6kzaxQoUyMoSHw3aiAgTSx07hFM0QgNbW684/edit
In addition, Dr. Bitton makes no reference to the split in Sephardic Judaism between Maimonideans and Anti-Maimonideans.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/killing-off-rational-juda_b_498846
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dangerous-mystic-motifs-i_b_637535
I have also focused on the split between Tosafist-trained Catalonian Jews like Moses Nahmanides and the Maimonidean Jewish Humanists in my article on Samson Raphael Hirsch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
Which has sadly led to the dangerous political implications of the “New Sephardic Jewish Binary”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EyglybEAkHmQ35sIU6XubsU92mLCM1FGO90ENj_NE-w/edit
In the end, the JIMENA-approved video is very cleverly designed to continue the diminution of the classical Sephardic intellectual-literary heritage and to reify the Orientalism presented in the Zionist racism by trivializing us in a clownish fashion.
Ms. Levin and Dr. Bitton are not interested in presenting the rich Sephardic tradition as a counterweight to the White Jewish Supremacy that they continue to be beholden to and monetize in critical ways.
David Shasha