Further Evidence on Sephardi Exclusion: "Is it an 'Arab,' is it a 'Jew,' or can it really be an 'Arab Jew'"?
David Shasha
Is it an “Arab,” is it a “Jew,” or can it really be an “Arab Jew”?
By: David Shasha
In May 2012 I was struck by two separate articles that ignored the existence of Sephardic Jews when it comes to the discussion of Israel and Palestine.
Most recently I had a tussle with the Progressive activist Rabbi Brant Rosen which showed the bitter contentiousness of the matter:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/7a8c76fe1cc77a4d
In theory many Liberal voices purport to pay lip service to anti-racist values, but in practice the matter of Ashkenazim and Sephardim remains a deeply troubling. Accusations of intentional racism and exclusion engender counter-accusations of anti-Ashkenazi racism and a hostile and sometimes hysterical assertion of privilege.
The truth is that the current American Jewish discourse does not include Sephardic voices. The gatekeepers of this discourse can hem and haw and prevaricate all they like, but the bottom line is that opinion articles and news reports do not take into account that there are Jews other than Ashkenazim.
The following article was prompted by two instances of Sephardi exclusion; one is an interview with Peter Beinart from Tikkun magazine, the other a posting from Open Zion, Beinart’s website that features discussions of the Israel-Palestine issue.
At first I simply raised the issue of Sephardi exclusion and was asked to write an article that was eventually rejected for publication on the grounds that it was “too scholarly.”
I elected to shelve the article until now.
But as the matter of Sephardi exclusion and invisibility has continued to be an important issue in the discourse, I now feel that it is important to publish it. Sephardim are routinely treated as if they do not exist, or that their existence is predicated solely on their connection to the Ashkenazi majority. Examples of this phenomenon abound and I have presented them regularly to SHU readers.
As I have written over and over, the problem of Sephardi exclusion is one that drains Jewish discourse of some very important and valuable conceptual, cultural, and historical resources that are germane to the ongoing discussion. Ignoring Sephardic life in the Middle East over the course of many centuries has served to transform our understanding of Jewish identity in profound ways. Divorcing Jews from the Arab-Muslim world asserts a primal division between the two groups when in reality Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East for a long time. It was Zionism and the founding of the state of Israel that changed this situation.
It is a situation that elevates and privileges the Ashkenazi Jewish experience and marks Jews and Arabs as alienated from each other. That another model of Jewish-Arab relations is possible based on the Sephardic experience, what I have called “The Levantine Option,” is not deemed possible given the forced silence of Arab Jewish voices.
It is only when Ashkenazi Jews come to accept their exclusionary racism that we will be able to have a truly substantial and productive discussion of Middle Eastern issues that will allow us to address the many problems that continue to face us.
My unpublished article is followed by two posts from Open Zion. The first article looks at the Haredi politician Rabbi Haim Amsellem whose Religious Zionism is seen as a contrast to the Ultra-Orthodoxy of SHAS. The second article discusses the matter of Arab Jewish reparations.
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As a Sephardic Jew whose family roots are firmly implanted in the Arab-Muslim Middle East I am often stymied by the cultural-intellectual limitations of a discourse that too often reflects the biases of the Ashkenazim.
The discourse on peace in Israel-Palestine is rooted in the idea that Jews and Arabs are separate categories both politically and culturally. It is not noticed that Jews lived productive lives in the Arab-Muslim world for many centuries.
While it is clear that many commentators and politicians on the Zionist Right have provocatively made big hay of the divisive issue of Arab Jews as refugees as a counterweight to Palestinian claims, it is not often noticed that there is a residual bias among those on the pro-peace Left when it comes to identifying Arab Jewish civilization and permitting Arab Jews to be heard amid what is a veritable din of voices promoting one conciliatory position or another.
Two recent examples of this Progressive attitude are striking:
First, a post on Open Zion (“No Easy Answers,” May 11, 2012) from the activist Jerry Haber states the following:
“Re-education and Fostering Understanding of the Other. Both sides, as unequal in power as they currently are, have to be re-educated to understand that at the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict are conflicting foundational claims that can no longer be adjudicated. Their goal should be to work gradually towards a reasonably fair compromise between the parties that will allow both peoples security and flourishing. The ultimate goal should not a sanctification of the status quo, including the Israeli regime established in 1948, but rather a willingness to re-think how both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples can have equal opportunities to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
There is no question that there is, indeed, a profoundly dangerous inequality that exists between Jews and Arabs in the Palestinian struggle for civil rights and the legitimate search for a Palestinian national home.
But historically the idea that the Arab is an “Other” to the Jew is a misnomer. Jews and Arabs lived, sometimes peacefully, sometimes contentiously, in the Middle East for many centuries.
While many of us are very familiar with the cache of documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, fewer of us are aware of an equally important set of texts found in what is known as the Cairo Geniza (a Geniza is that part of the Jewish Synagogue where scraps of paper with Hebrew writing are deposited as Jewish law does not allow such writings to be disposed of in the usual manner).
These texts have been the most important “secret” for the historical study of Jews and Arabs and provide us many important insights into what the great historian of the Geniza S.D. Goitein called “A Mediterranean Society.”
In his multi-volume opus of that name Goitein reconstructed a rich and complex world showing how Jews successfully negotiated the demands of a global economy and a startlingly modern intellectual system whose values profoundly affected the practice of Judaism and the way in which Jews understood their tradition.
Great figures like Se’adya Gaon (Egypt/Iraq, 882-942) and Moses Maimonides (Spain/Egypt, 1135-1204) were receptive to the Greco-Roman scientific and philosophical tradition in its Arabo-Islamic iteration. This synthesis can rightly be called “Religious Humanism”; a uniting of the Liberal Arts and Sciences with traditional Talmudic Judaism. The Religious Humanism of the medieval Judeo-Arab world had a decisive impact on European Jewish thinkers from Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) to Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972).
This “Mediterranean Society” marks a new era in Jewish history which represents a deep acculturation to non-Jewish ideas and values. More important is how it exemplifies the ways in which Jews were very much a part of the Arab-Muslim world in spite of their minority status and the strictures that were sometimes used against them in times of political and social crisis.
A recent collection of Geniza documents published by E.J. Brill informally known as “The India Book” (a venture begun by Goitein and completed by his student Mordechai Friedman of Tel Aviv University) is a veritable treasure trove of information that shows us the dense interconnectedness of this socio-economic world. It proves that there were many economic and commercial partnerships between all members of the “Geniza” world which reflected a dynamic society that developed new and challenging ways to embody the values of pluralism and tolerance.
The scholar Ammiel Alcalay has trenchantly addressed this issue in his seminal 1993 study After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture:
“In their roles as inhabitants of cities and travelers between them – whether as artisanal workers, scholars, medical professionals, traders, or administrators – Jews maintained certain positions and roles remarkably intact within the Levantine and Arab world until the colonial and nationalist period.”
The “Geniza” world was one in which social and religious barriers often gave way to a more flexible cultural and socio-economic entente that brought Jews firmly into the orbit of Arab-Muslim civilization.
A second example of the difficulty of identifying the “Arab Jew” comes from an interview in Tikkun magazine with Peter Beinart conducted by Michael Lerner (“Building a Jewish and Democratic State,” May 11, 2012).
As Lerner states in one of his questions:
“How do you respond to some on the Left who acknowledge the need of the Jewish people for safety but doubt that such a state should be in Palestine where there was already a culture and a people with a long history of their own and who got supplanted by the Jews moving there? Why not create such a state from the territory of those who previously oppressed Jews?”
While it is true that Ashkenazi Jews left Europe to come to the Middle East, it is not at all true that Jews as a whole were absent from historical Palestine and other Arab countries in the region.
The prevailing idea in the standard discourse is that there a binary opposition between Jews and Arabs that must be formally bridged in order to achieve peace. The idea that there might be both a historical and cultural connection between Jews and Arabs who lived as neighbors in the region over the course of many centuries is not seen in a way that might become a helpful part of our peace discourse.
An important recent study by the scholar Michelle Campos entitled Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine provides an insightful picture of a society comprised of members of the three monotheistic faiths working together to advance the political system in the wake of the constitutional reformation then occurring in the Ottoman world. This was the reality of pre-1948 Palestine that is largely absent from our current discussion.
These critical resources provide us with a robust picture that passionately argues for a more intimate connection between Jews and Arabs than mainstream discourse presently allows. It does not assume a binary opposition between the two peoples, but accurately presents a little-known history that shows Jews and Arabs as linked together culturally, economically, and socially in ways that might perhaps be startling to many observers of the conflict.
It is the lost voice of Arab Jews, a voice that has much to say regarding intercultural and interfaith relations between Jews and Muslims, that can open up for us a new way of processing the seemingly perpetual conflict and perhaps give us new and hopeful ways in which to address its intractability.
The historical experiences of Arab Jews can provide a more human dimension to our perception of reality and allow us to see that under the crude stereotypes lay a far richer and more complex understanding of religious and ethnic identity that harbors a cross-cultural pluralism that can, if deployed in the conversation, bring together those commonly seen as primordial enemies.
David Shasha
Books Cited
Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslim, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2010)
http://www.amazon.com/Ottoman-Brothers-Christians-Twentieth-Century-Palestine/dp/0804770689
S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Cairo Geniza, Five Volumes and Index (University of California Press, 1967-1993)
S.D. Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages, Two volumes (E.J. Brill, 2008)
Sephardic Resources for Progressives
For those who would like to learn more about the Sephardic Jewish tradition, please note that I have prepared a special edition of my weekly e-mail newsletter the Sephardic Heritage Update with a collection of useful articles that should prove helpful to you. The compilation features a numbers of previously-published pieces that cover history, culture, politics, social science, and issues of importance to the activist community.
Given the widespread ignorance of the Sephardic Jewish tradition these resources aim to provide a better understanding of the historical and socio-cultural relationship between Jews and Arabs in a way that can aid our ongoing discussions about religion, the Middle East, and our global political problems.
The special newsletter may be accessed on-line at the SHU Google Group site:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/165816afa4f8a52a
Article written at the request of Peter Beinart of Open Zion, May 14, 2012 and rejected for publication
White Like Me
By: Peter Beinart
In my youth, I noticed an odd dynamic in my extended family.
My Sephardi grandmother, born in Alexandria, Egypt,
often denounced “the Arabs,” a group toward which she felt a kind of intimate
hostility. When I said something about the Middle East
that she deemed naive, she’d insist that if I understood Arabic, as she did, I
too would understand the capricious, treacherous Arab mind.
Some of my Ashkenazi relatives shared similar stereotypes, but with one
noteworthy difference: When they talked about Arabs, they included my
grandmother and her Sephardi relatives in the definition. I remember one
Shabbat dinner, many years ago, during which my grandmother lustily denounced
Yasser Arafat. An Ashkenazi relative leaned across the table to me and
whispered, “She is Arafat.”
All this came flooding back when I noticed this weekend’s comments by Israeli
interior minister Eli Yishai about the Eritrean and Sudanese migrants whose
presence has sparked such ugliness in Israel
in recent weeks. “Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the
country doesn't belong to us, the white man," Yishai told the
Israeli newspaper Maariv.
“Us, the white man.”
Eli Yishai’s parents immigrated to Israel from Tunisia.
A little more Barack Obama than Mitt Romney, wouldn’t you say?
Yishai’s comments illustrate the awful paradox of contemporary Sephardi (or more accurately, Mizrahi) identity. As in my own family, Jews from Arab lands were long seen by their haughty Ashkenazi cousins as, well, Arabs. Intra-Jewish bigotry has certainly declined since Israel’s early years, when David Ben Gurion said that Israel’s Mizrahi immigrants had “no Jewish education.” But it persists. A Mizrahi friend who speaks Hebrew with the guttural pronunciation indigenous to the Middle East recently told me that he is routinely hassled at Ben Gurion airport because his Hebrew sounds too much like Arabic. In her fascinating book, We Look Like the Enemy, Rachel Shabi tells of swarthy Mizrahi Jews who in order to avoid being mistaken for Palestinians by the Israeli police begin wearing kippot or Jewish stars.
And historically, Israel’s Mizrahi Jews haven’t just been deemed Arabs. They’ve been deemed black. In Israel’s early years, Shabi notes, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews sometimes called their Mizrahi counterparts “Schwarz.” In 1971, a group of radical Mizrahi activists even appropriated the term, calling themselves the “Black Panthers.”
Now along comes Yishai, the leader of Shas--a party born to give voice to the very Mizrahi Jews long considered black--to declare that Israel must expel its African migrants because Israel is for “us, the white man.” (As you might imagine given the gendered language, Yishai doesn’t have particularly enlightened ideas about women either).
This is the same Eli Yishai who in 2010 denounced a lawsuit by Mizrahi Jews protesting their school’s decision to segregate Mizrahi girls from their Askhenazi classmates. The lawsuit, Yishai feared, would upset the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox leadership that Shas’s rabbis mimic. Partly out of disgust, a rebel Shas parliamentarian, Haim Amsalem, last year launched a new Mizrahi political party aimed at fighting discrimination and promoting a “unifying and tolerant Jewish approach” to social divides. Amsalem, an Israeli hero almost unknown among American Jews, represents a radically different Mizrahi spirit, freed from both hatred and self-hatred. His party is called Am Shalem (Whole Nation). Whole nation: black, white, Arab, Jew and yes, Arab Jew as well.
From Open Zion, June 6, 2012
Exploiting Jews from Arab Countries
By: Lara Friedman
The hubris of the Ashkenazi Jews seems to have made them ignorant of their own racism.
Here we have the brilliant picture of an Ashkenazi Jew writing an article in support of Arab Jews while Arab Jews have no say in the matter. The Arab Jew remains invisible with no voice and no presence other than being allowed to have Ashkenazim talk about them in a Jewish world where only Ashkenazim get to talk.
It is fascinating to see that Yehouda Shenhav, whose articles have appeared in the SHU, is being quoted by an Ashkenazi rather than having the opportunity to present his views under his own by-line.
The irony of course is that it is the exclusion of Sephardim from the Jewish discourse that has led to this objectification and manipulation of the issue as it is put to some despicable uses.
If this was a matter that involved African-Americans, or women, or Gays and Lesbians, or some other oppressed group, there would be little question that a member of that oppressed group would be afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves.
But not when it comes to the Sephardim. Ashkenazi paternalism is a way to enforce Sephardi invisibility: Sephardim can only be discussed by Ashkenazim in prominent places like Open Zion by the director of Americans for Peace Now.
There is no way that a Sephardic voice can ever be allowed to speak independently as would be the case with all the other minority groups. And there is no one who can speak out against this blatant institutional racism that comes from both the Left as well as the Right.
Rather than understanding the current question over “refugees” as a problem that is intimately tied to the oppression and persecution and cultural exclusion of Arab Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, the matter is contextualized solely in terms of the political ideology of whatever Ashkenazi writer is discussing the matter.
But unlike other minority groups who have attained a certain level of respect and recognition – especially from politically-correct Jewish liberals, the Sephardim remain invisible and excluded from participating in the discussion and not permitted to represent themselves with dignity and integrity in a Jewish world that does not acknowledge its own blindness and racism.
While decrying exploitation of Sephardic Jews, the writer of the piece and the publication that posted it are both guilty of the very same exploitation.
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Last month saw an assault in Congress on Palestinian refugees—an effort to use legislation to re-define the Palestinian refugee issue out of existence. This week the other shoe dropped, when a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced a new bill embracing the cause of “Jewish refugees from Arab countries” in a way that Congress has never replicated on the Palestinian side (for more info, see this list of all bills/resolutions dealing with Palestinian and/or Jewish refugees since 1989).
Perhaps not coincidentally, in what one Israeli paper described as a “sea change” in Israeli policy, the Israeli Foreign Ministry recently launched a diplomatic offensive focused on this very issue. The Foreign Ministry makes clear that its focus is not only (ore even primarily) seeking justice for Jews from Arab countries. The main goal is to impose new terms of reference on future peace negotiations—terms that place full responsibility on the Arab world both for Palestinian refugees of 1948 and for Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries in the wake of the creation of Israel.
Moreover, these terms propose that the grievances of Jews from Arab countries actually outweigh those of Palestinian refugees, based on their numbers and the value of the property they lost. Indeed, back in 2008, then-Religious Affairs Minister Yitzhak Cohen stated that:
The uprooted Jews' problem is equal to, if not greater than, the Palestinian refugees’ problem.
The implication of this argument is that in future peace negotiations, Jewish refugee claims can be used to cancel out or trump Palestinian refugee claims. Finally, according to these new terms of reference, Arab countries must immediately absorb Palestinian refugees into their own populations. This demand appears to reflect the belief that, just as Israel is the homeland of the Jews, any Arab country can be a homeland of any Arab, regardless of whether said Arab has any ties to the country in question.
This cynical exploitation of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries dishonors their history and tarnishes the legitimacy of their claims. The respective suffering and losses of Palestinian refugees and Jews from Arab countries cannot be denied, but neither should one be pitted against the other for cynical political purposes. The painful history of some Jews from Arab countries doesn’t negate the historic, moral and political responsibility—shared by Israel and the world—to address the plight and grievances of Palestinian refugees. Trying to use it do so is antithetical to the achievement of peace and the two-state solution. And make no mistake: Israeli-Palestinian peace is the only path to truly resolving the Palestinian refugee issue, and, by extension, to building relations between Israelis and the Arab world that will permit the resolution of claims of Jews who came to Israel from the Arab world.
The fact that, in the years following the establishment of the state of Israel, many Jews came to Israel from Arab countries is indisputable. Some emigrated voluntarily; others fled an atmosphere of growing discrimination, oppression, and threats. Unquestionably, many of these Jews have legitimate claims for property that was confiscated or left behind. For various reasons, including the absence of bilateral relations between Israel and most of the relevant Arab countries, as well as Israeli concerns about fueling Palestinian refugee claims, there has thus far been neither the mechanism nor the political will to address this issue.
But is the term “refugee”—and all that it implies emotionally and politically—an intellectually honest way to describe Jews from Arab countries living in Israel? Around the time of Israel’s creation, it indeed appears to have described many of them, referring to someone who:
...[o]wing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…
However, the term “refugee” connotes more than this. It brings to mind people forced by unmanageable circumstances to live, temporarily or sometimes permanently, as strangers in a foreign land, yearning in their hearts for their lost homes and homeland, hoping that they can someday return. Is this an appropriate way to describe Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries? Former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Alon Liel, doesn’t think so:
It’s true that many Jews found themselves in Israel without having made plans to come—they escaped from Arab countries. But they were accepted and welcomed here. To define them as refugees is exaggerated.
Do supporters of this effort inside Congress, and its backers outside Congress (including those who support a Jewish right to every inch of biblical “Greater Israel”) believe that Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries see themselves as unwilling exiles in a foreign land, dreaming of the day they can return to their true homes in, say, Yemen, Egypt, or Tunisia?
Clearly, this isn’t how Israeli governments—who actively encourage the immigration of Jews from around the world—have seen it. As one advocate of the rights of Jews from Arab countries admitted,
No doubt successive [Israeli] governments saw Jews from the Muslim world as Zionist immigrants, not refugees.
Writing in Haaretz in 2003, when the campaign around Jews from Arab lands was first picking up steam, Israeli professor Yehouda Shenhav, noted that:
As early as 1975, at the time of WOJAC's formation [an organization formed in the 1970s around this issue], Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu declared: “We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations.” Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: “I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists.” In a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: “I have this to say: I am not a refugee.” He added: “I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee.”
Again, this is not to suggest that Jews from Arab countries don’t have legitimate claims for their losses—they do. But Palestinian refugees aren’t responsible for what happened to them, any more than those Jews are responsible for what happened to Palestinians.
Both groups are victims of historical forces beyond their control. As Professor Shenhav notes:
The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.
Speaking at the United Nations last year, Prime Minister Netanyahu, delivered the following description of what Israel represents to Jews everywhere and throughout history:
…for those Jews who were exiled from our land, they never stopped dreaming of coming back: Jews in Spain, on the eve of their expulsion; Jews in the Ukraine, fleeing the pogroms; Jews fighting the Warsaw Ghetto, as the Nazis were circling around it. They never stopped praying, they never stopped yearning. They whispered: Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in the promised land. As the prime minister of Israel, I speak for a hundred generations of Jews who were dispersed throughout the lands, who suffered every evil under the Sun, but who never gave up hope of restoring their national life in the one and only Jewish state…”
So which is it? Is Israel the homeland of the Jews—the place where full citizenship is the birthright of any Jew born anywhere, or is it a generic country that magnanimously gave what has turned out to be permanent refuge to a group of foreigners (who happened to be Jewish) fleeing persecution in their native countries of the Arab world?
It can’t be both.
From Open Zion, August 4, 2012