New Article: Rabbi Daniel Bouskila on Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel: The Blindness of Self-Hating Sephardim When it Comes to Ashkenazi Racism
David Shasha
Rabbi Daniel Bouskila on Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel: The Blindness of Self-Hating Sephardim When it Comes to Ashkenazi Racism
Rabbi Daniel Bouskila is a prominent Ashkenazified Modern Orthodox rabbi who has been referring to the late Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel for some time now:
http://rabbidanielbouskila.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-rav-uziel-renaissance.html
http://www.jewishjournal.com/through_sephardic_lenses/item/rav_uziel_a_modern_sephardic_visionary
I have recently discussed the Sephardi “Whitening” process in relation to Rabbi Bouskila and his Modern Orthodox friends:
Careful readers will notice that Rabbi Bouskila, like his good friend Rabbi Marc Angel, chooses to present Rabbi Uziel not as a formal link in the long chain of Sephardic rabbis who mostly remain absent in these discussions, but as a perfect fit into the Yeshiva University world of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Bouskila goes to great pains to adopt the current Modern Orthodox ideological agenda in order to fit Uziel into that system.
In an article that Rabbi Angel just posted to his Jewish Ideas website, Rabbi Bouskila does something very interesting when viewed in light of Ashkenazi racism:
https://www.jewishideas.org/articles/sephardic-vision-arab-israeli-peace
The final paragraph of the article gives the game away:
It’s unfortunate that Rav Uziel was not appointed as a special political envoy to help establish political relations with Arab leaders in 1948. Had that been the case, relations between Israel and her Arab neighbors might have taken a very different course.
Until that last paragraph, the article sounds very much like something I could have written myself.
But the paragraph shows that what preceded it is truly delusional in the sense that it completely ignores the Ashkenazi racism that has effectively marginalized Rabbi Uziel’s thought, in spite of the fact that he was a loyal Zionist.
The absence of Uziel from the current Jewish discourse is not a matter of happenstance.
On the one side we have Ashkenazim, whether Zionist or Haredi, who have no use for a Sephardic Religious Humanist. It is indeed striking that Bouskila never uses that term to describe Uziel’s Judaism, but let’s set that aside for the moment.
But then there is the specter of the SHAS element which has effectively erased the name of Uziel largely because he adopted the values the classical Sephardic heritage.
It is well-known that over time the Porat Yosef rabbinical seminary became more and more Ashkenazi in its religious orientation, and with the elevation of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef that religious fanaticism became standard in a Sephardic world that is currently more Ponovitch than Cordoba. Rabbi Uziel found that he could not even teach classes on Judah Halevi’s classic book Kuzari, a philosophical defense of Judaism, in the Beth Midrash of Porat Yosef.
For both Bouskila and Angel, the Iberian tradition comes from Brisk and Washington Heights, rather than Cordoba and Lucena. Their Sephardic heritage is one that is filtered through the lenses of Soloveitchik and Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy. They are always extremely careful to maintain the ideological nomenclature and religious agenda items of the YU world and not to deviate from its conceptual language by using suspect terms like “Religious Humanism.”
So we have three Ashkenazi elements that have militated against the presentation of Rabbi Uziel and his peaceful vision of Judaism: The Haredi Yeshiva World, the SHAS fundamentalists, and the Religious Zionism of Modern Orthodoxy which rejects the Arab component of the classical Sephardic cultural identity.
In this Ashkenazi Jewish world there is no place for Sephardic rabbis, and no way to have them represent Judaism to the Arab-Muslim world.
So when Rabbi Bouskila expresses surprise that Rabbi Uziel was not given the chance to represent Judaism to the Arab world in the period of Israel’s emergence, we should chalk it up to his callous obliviousness to Ashkenazi racism against Sephardim, rooted in his firm commitment to the values of Modern Orthodoxy and his refusal to call out his good friends for their prejudice against our tradition.
It would seem to be impossible for Ashkenazified Sephardim like Bouskila and Angel to actually admit that their beloved Zionists practiced a form of cultural exclusion that would effectively eliminate our Sephardic rabbis from participation in Israeli political life. For the self-hating Sephardim such a thing is unimaginable because the Ashkenazim are too noble to stoop to such a debased level.
It is this refusal to accept the toxic effects of Ashkenazi racism that has strongly marked the self-hating Sephardim who continue to pretend that there is no problem, at the same time that they seek to duplicitously affirm their Sephardi bona fides.
David Shasha