Emily L. Hauser’s recent blogpost for the Forward, “How ‘De-Arabizing’ Christians Serves Israel” is another example of liberal Ashkenazi Jews showing their concern for Palestinian Arabs while at the same time ignoring Arab Jews.
The process of “De-Arabization” that is discussed in the article is actually one that began with the immigration of Jews from the Middle East in the 1950s. As I wrote in a discussion of the Yehouda Shenhav’s important book The Arab Jews:
It was here that the Jewish identification with Arabic culture began to tear apart.
The use of the term “Arab Jew” as a means of identifying those Jews who had adopted the cultural system of the Arab civilization became a political football.
Though it is completely clear that Arab Jews are identified as such because they speak the Arabic language, eat Arabic-style food, listen to Arabic music and generally exhibit the many cultural traits common to all Arab peoples, the term was isolated from the standard Jewish nomenclature – under strong Zionist influence – that had little difficulty identifying other Jews by their places of origin.
Indeed, Ashkenazi Jews continued to be identified as such with sub-divisions of German Jews, English Jews, French Jews, Polish Jews, Russian Jews, and the like continuing to be utilized as a means to name the various Jewish communities in the Ashkenazi world. In spite of the many tragedies experienced by these Ashkenazi Jews, they continued to identify themselves by their countries of origin. It is telling that even after the Holocaust Jews from the Rhineland could still be identified as German Jews.
The only nomenclature that had changed was that of the Arab Jews.
The term that was created after 1948 to identify Jews of the Middle East was “Jews from Arab lands.” There seemed to be a very careful elision of Jews from the Arabic cultural system that was marked by a strong political bias. Arabs had now become the enemy par excellence of the Jewish State which was now seen as the sole legitimate representative body of the Jewish people. With the traditional antipathy of the Ashkenazi Jews – and it should be remembered that Ashkenazi Jews dominated the Zionist movement and had once even considered making Yiddish the national language of Israel – towards the classical Sephardic culture in place, the adoption of a new anti-Gentile animus towards the Arabs similar to that sense of exclusion that had animated Ashkenazi culture for many centuries, caused the Arab nature of Jewish identification to find itself singled out for extinction.
It is for this reason that the only Jewry that has been forced to remove its adjectival prefix is that of Arab Jewry. There is no other Jewry that is called “Jews from such-and-such lands.”
The question of Arab culture and identity has largely taken a back seat to that of religion with Islam becoming the focus of the Interfaith Dialogue movement, rather than the shared Arab culture of members of the region. In my discussion of the great Arab singer Umm Kulthum I note the close ties between Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the region and present this cultural model as a more relevant paradigm for the ongoing attempt to bring a more human dimension to what has largely been a stiff and formal exchange of religious ideas. It is an approach that was adopted by Trude Weiss-Rosmarin in her article “Towards Jewish-Muslim Dialogue.”
In the context of unfolding events in the region it is important to note the reversion to a racist proclivity among Muslim religious extremists to reinforce restrictive laws and practices against non-Muslims and circumscribe Dhimmi statutes in a particularly limiting and often humiliating manner. We have seen this emerge in the ongoing oppression of Coptic Christians in Egypt (see this article by Louis Raphael Sako). There is a complex set of issues unfolding that makes this matter difficult to parse. On the one hand we have a serious threat emerging that affects non-Muslims in the contemporary Arab-Muslim world. That threat is real and should not be ignored. And yet we have the continuing Israeli oppression against the Palestinian community, and the attempt to exacerbate religious and ethnic tensions in a Palestinian context also represents a danger to the stability and well-being of that community. Israel’s aim is to peel off the Palestinian Christian community from the Muslim community by using the religious radicals as a wedge.
There are real and actual issues that are involved in this process that speak to nationalist chauvinism in both the Jewish and Muslim spheres. The process of “De-Arabization” is a classic ploy used by Colonialists that seeks to decouple the native culture of the region from the socio-religious communities who throughout Arab history were given what was called “Millet” status; each faith community functioned in an autonomous manner while remaining part of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society.
Leaving Arab Jews out of the discussion of “De-Arabization” gives us a misleading sense of just how pervasive this strategy was in Zionist thought and how the rejection of Arab culture by what was essentially a Eurocentric Ashkenazi elite served to undermine native Middle Eastern culture in Israel.
Adopting an Orientalist perspective, the Zionist cultural elites sought to both stigmatize and suppress this indigenous culture, largely based on the principles of Religious Humanism, social pluralism, and hybrid concepts of identity. While European nationalistic thought sought to homogenize peoples and ultimately oppress aliens, and in the case of Germany violently eliminate certain ethno-religious identities, the Arab-Muslim world over many centuries held to an inclusive process that, though certainly favoring Islam, sought to include non-Muslims in the larger body politic.
What Israel is now doing to Palestinian Christians is what it has already done to the Arab Jews and it is crucial for us to be aware that this cultural cleansing process is part of a larger Orientalist strategy meant to affirm Israel’s alienation from the historical culture of the region it resides in.
To his credit, Mahane is an Arab Kurdish-Jew.
As I understand it, many Arab Jews moved to Israel at Israel’s request, demand, under instigation — even because of Israeli terrorism — and then became 2nd-class citizens, discriminated against by Ashkenazis.
The scandal of the Yemeni orphans was where the Yemenis were spirited to Israel by airplanes and separated from (some of) their children which were thereafter adopted by the aforesaid Ashks and brought up without the true faith. For orthodox Jews, as the Yemenis were, the scandal was this last part, not the separation (even if they really WERE orphans). Israel was destroying Judaism.
Anyhow, it appears that these Sepharidis became sort of the rednecks of Israel, despising the Arab non-Jews in order to have someone else to look down on (as the Ashkenazis looked down on them). Also, the Ashks forced the Sephs to live on the borders with the Arab countries where they were (early on) subject to anti-Israel attack, which even more so created anti-non-Jewish-Arab feeling among these Sephs [whereas some anger should have been reserved for the Ashks who forced them to live as pariahs in the border towns].
It is very hard for people to turn against the hand that (now) feeds them even if they had it (in some respects) better before that hand intervened. Some of the Jews of the Arab world — such as Morocco — were slow to move to Israel and IMO had done better to stay at home. There are still Jews in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria (woe betides those still in Syria, I imagine), and this seems to me proof that aliah to Israel was not EVER necessary (except where force was applied) to Jews of the Arab world. The move to Israel forced Arab Jews to give up much of their culture, and that is a profound curse of any forced exile.
Thank you, David, for writing this.
The Ashkenazi fog of Jewish and especially Israeli Jewish identity needs to be dispersed.
The attempts to de-arabize Mizrahi and now Palestinian Christians of their Arab identity is far, far to rarely discussed.
Israel is not going to allocate extra resources to Palestinian Christians. It isn’t going to open the parts of Israeli society that are controlled by Jews to Palestinian Christians. The Israeli education system will still class them as inferior to Jews . So how does Israel think this is going to fly?
‘de- Arabization’ of any Arab is clearly racism, and denial of their cultural identity. It’s based on a grotesque push to demonize Arabs.
It’s wrong, and I don’t think many Palestinian Christians will embrace it, or fall to their collective knees in gratitude to the Apartheid State. I believe that the vast majority of Palestinians will choose to remain Palestinians above all else.