Trust Haaretz to choose the 30 November as the date to trash the Israeli government ‘s attempts to honour the history and heritage of Mizrahi Jews. It’s a distortion for propaganda purposes, argue two academics Dr Lior Sternfeld and Menashe Anzi. My comments are interspersed throughout the text in italics.
Lior Sternfeld, who teaches at Penn State University
In 1928, the Jewish historian Salo W. Baron published his essay on the dangers of writing Jewish history as a “lachrymose” narrative. In Baron’s article, called “Ghetto and Emancipation” and published in the Menorah Journal, he explored how a distorted perception of the past and poor understanding of historical context can be misused to advance political goals, which are not necessarily inevitable, despite the way willful parties present them. Baron was talking mostly about European Jewish communities, and his words carried different meanings during the interwar period in which it was written.
Today, however, in a similar way, we are witnessing a large-scale national project – the writing of a “lachrymose” history of the Jews of the Middle East, so as to justify contemporary Israeli policies, and to make up for a generations-long marginalization of Oriental Jews in Zionist historiography.
The increased attention being given to the history of the MENA Jews is not to justify contemporary Israeli policies, whatever they may be – but to tell the long repressed truth.
In 1999, the visual artist Meir Gal created an astonishing work called “Nine out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” In it, he is seen holding an Israeli history textbook; only 9 out of its 400 pages deal with non-European Jewry. Gal was aiming to make a statement about the lack of interest among both the Israeli public and the academic establishment in giving Middle Eastern Jews their proper share of the history.
In recent years, Israel’s ministries of culture and education, and others, have been investing efforts in rewriting early Zionist history. Even though during the course of most of Israel’s 71 years of existence, the country’s historiography became subservient to Zionist ideology and the worldview of the political echelon, it was not enough to justify the policies of the Israeli government.
Menashe Anzi of Ben Gurion University
It appears as if present attempts to rewrite history are meant to prepare public opinion for certain political moves by giving historical justification to current events. In this way, for example, emphasizing the purported inherent anti-Semitism of the Muslim world is used to justify Israeli reluctance to promote a peace process in the Middle East or even to advance Jewish-Arab coexistence in Israel.
On the contrary. By conceding that Jews from MENA countries were refugees, Israel is emphasising push factors, altering the narrative that they came as Zionists returning to their ancestral homeland. By lifting the veil on the MENA exodus Israel is actually advancing the cause of peace, because a one-sided view that only Palestinians were refugees will not achieve reconciliation. A peace settlement that is not based on truth will not fly wth the over-50 percent of the Israeli public who have a memory of real, not ‘purported’, antisemitism.
Earlier this year, Nir Hasson reported here how Jerusalem’s official street-naming committee had decided to name new streets in the Silwan neighborhood after Yemenite rabbis, in commemoration of the Yemenite Jewish minority who lived in the village in late 19th century and early 20th centuries. For hundreds of years, if not longer, Silwan’s population has been overwhelmingly Palestinian.
That’s because Silwan’s Jewish residents were forcible expelled in 1929 -31. This fact is glossed over by the authors.
They together with the extensive archaeological excavations intended to prove the ancient Jewish connection to the area, have incensed Silwan’s Palestinian residents. As one member of Jerusalem city council admitted, the move of naming the streets for the rabbis was intended to strengthen Israeli sovereignty, even though that had hardly been forgotten by any of the neighborhood’s Palestinians, even without the new street names.
The authors begrudge Israel’s right to name streets after rabbis. Would they object to ,Jewish street names and Jewish quarters in Arab countries have been renamed after Arabs/ Muslims?
The names of the Yemenite rabbis will not really get their place in the Israeli collective memory, since most Israeli Jews will never set foot in Silwan, to begin with. So, the “state” can try to wash its hands of decades of neglecting non-Ashkenazi history, since it has now paid lip service to that history and its legacy – but it is doing so in a location that assures that this history will never become part of the mainstream national story.
There are thousands of Jewish residents in the area today – there would be more had pro-Palestinian activists not tried to stop them moving back. The authors can’t have it both ways.
In fact, a site such as Silwan could have been the perfect location for a more balanced version of Jewish history. One of the rabbis whose name now adorns a street sign there, the late Yossef Madmoni, was among those who signed the following letter, from 1929: “We, the undersigned, residents of Shiloach village, publicly announce that we are indebted to the dear, good-hearted Mr. Hajj Muhammad Gozlan, one of the dignitaries of our Arab brothers, the residents of Shiloah-Silwan and his good-hearted friends that acted in an extraordinary, humane manner toward their Jewish brothers of Shiloach during the riots of 1929 […] we hope that this kind of courteous relationship will last between us for many years, and may the good God loyally repay them for their deeds.”
Of course there were ‘good’ Arabs who saved Jews, like Mohammad Gozlan. But there were many who did not. The ‘good Arabs’ are a footnote in a larger history, like the Righteous Gentile in the Holocaust, but they are not the story itself.
In recent years, Israel has invested tremendous resources in showcasing, albeit in a very partial way, the history of Middle Eastern Jews. But simultaneously, there are parallel efforts to adjust and compartmentalize this history under the umbrella of Zionist history. This is the lachrymose historiographical approach that depicts Jewish history, including that in Muslim lands, as a series of tragedies – from the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, to the expulsion from Spain and Portugal and through the pogroms in late 19th-century Russia, until the eventual forced migrations to Israel.
No matter how hard the authors try to introduce chinks of light there is no doubt that Jewish history is marked by dark tragedy. The end of Jewish life in Arab and Muslim lands cannot be denied. Jewish refugees did not all go to Israel, but Israel made it its mission to rescue vast numbers of Jews who had no chance of being given a refuge anywhere else.
Besides, the Israeli media has adopted the tendency to view contemporary Jewish life in Europe through Islamophobic lenses. This is most vividly seen in the obsession in Israel with seeing France as suffering from Muslim immigration and anti-Semitism, while imploring French Jews to rescue themselves and pursue Zionist redemption by emigrating to Israel, although this is actually part of a much bigger story of human tragedy and refugeeism.
The Israeli media is quite justified, given that French Jews have been the targets of Islamist terrorism and several have been murdered for being Jews. The bigger story of refugeeism does not detract from Israel’s role as a necessary haven for persecuted Jews.
It seems like, after decades of Middle Eastern Jewish history being overlooked, and the framing of most developments as being related to the greater conflict between Jews and Muslims, the project of historical revisionism has landed on the desk of the cynical Zionist historian. This approach, as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has tainted even scholars’ reading of Middle Eastern Jewish history. Much has already been written about the apparent lack of interest in the rich culture and history of the Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East, not to mention the highly problematic nature of lumping together the histories and cultures of Jews of more than 20 different lands in a single simplistic narrative.
The Jews in the Muslim world, so that narrative goes, lived humiliated lives as second-class dhimmis, just waiting for Zionist redemption. Once Israel was established, they immigrated there en masse – a story that also includes active deportation of Jews.This narrative is misleading in many ways. First, it ignores more than a thousand years of Jewish existence in the Muslim world, a reality that was neither good or bad exclusively, but one that included both aspects, and was characterized by complicated relationships with the majority population, with other minorities, and with the local and imperial political structures. This is the nature of all history.
It is misleading to ignore or minimise the dhimmi status, which defined the relationship between Jews and Muslims, even if it was not always strictly applied. Jews had few rights and could only ask for (or pay for) favours. There were times when they did thrive, but their situation was always precarious. The Jewish presence predated the Muslim world, and was responsible for a cultural symbiosis, but this is not the same as coexistence.
Second, the narrative denies the possibility that Middle Eastern Jewish communities were actually integral parts of their respective societies, and links the events and transformations those communities experienced to larger historical processes associated with Zionist history in Europe – rather than to developments that took place in the non-Western world. Third, this narrative subjugates the religious traditions of Middle Eastern Jews to the way Middle Eastern Jewry and Judaism was imagined by Israel society, while ignoring the immense variety of options that existed in that context as well, during the modern age: Orthodoxy next to local rabbinical traditions, communism with religious elements, Arab or Iranian or Turkish nationalism, and more.
The authors seem to ignore a major development: the advent of western colonialism, ending the dhimmi status. This was responsible for a golden age of cultural and economic blossoming, but other European ideas – including European and Nazi antisemitism – also penetrated the region at this point.
Can we talk about the immigration of Yemenite Jews the same way that we describe the experiences of the Jews of Morocco or Egypt? Is it accurate to say that Egyptian Jews were forcibly expelled for reasons of anti-Semitism while, in fact, their leaving was part of a much broader policy of the Egyptian government of deporting foreign nationals, and not Jews in particular?Yes we can. Although the Egyptian expulsion also affected other foreigners, it was antisemitic in many ways.Can we ignore the role played by Israel in the deterioration of relations between the Jews and the governments of the region? Did Iraqi Jews leave in the exact same manner as the Jews of Lebanon? The way this story of expulsion on anti-Semitic grounds is being told today suggests a history that’s been unified and simplified.
Yes we can talk about a broad policy of persecution, resulting in expulsion or compulsion to leave, although there were variations between countries. Inevitably, the authors hint that Israel is at least partly to blame for antisemitism in Arab countries.
In 2014, the Knesset passed a bill making November 30 (the day after the anniversary of the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine, in 1947) a Remembrance Day for the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran. Despite the name, Jews were never expelled from Iran. How do we reconcile the fact that Iran, just like Morocco and Tunisia, for example, still has a small but vibrant Jewish community? And that in Iraq and Egypt, discussions about Jewish history have become part of a vast public national conversation on local culture? Is it correct to echo Francis Fukuyama and declare that Jewish history in the Middle East came to an end with the creation of Israel?
The ‘small but vibrant community’ of Iran is one tenth of its previous size, the others one percent. This can only indicate that the community suffered a serious degree of persecution and antisemitism.
This past summer, the Eretz Israel Museum hosted an exhibition called, “Leaving, Never to Return: A Tribute to the Jews of Arab Countries and Iran.” The title raises many questions concerning the nature of this “tribute.” The exhibition told the story of 10 Jewish communities – in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Algeria and Lebanon. All were portrayed in the same way: Jews had lived for thousands of years in the same places; in recent generations, they suffered from harassment and riots, and in the end, they had to “leave, never to return.” The design of the space clarified the intent. The object repeated in different parts of the show was the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. But it was not presented as an object of sanctity or because of its use in worship, but as something Jewish prisoners in the Jadu labor camp in Libya used as a cleaning cloth during the Nazi occupation. Hence, the common denominator for all the Jewish communities is persecution and their being linked with the Holocaust.
Because that was what occurred. One can hardly talk of a thriving Jewish community of Libya because there is not one Jew left.
It appears that the “tribute” was really meant as a reminder of the bitter fate that awaited Mizrahi Jews had Zionism not rescued them. Each section of the exhibition was dedicated to the memory of one community and presented images and objects from it, often with a very Orientalist (as per the conception of Edward Said) simplicity, such as talismans and amulets for each community, as if superstitions were a signifier exclusive of Mizrahi culture. Each section ended with a list of events in which Jews were harmed, in an apparent effort to provide the necessary context for Zionist rescue, by presenting their lives as being lived in the shadow and threat of endless danger, plunder and persecution.
Apart from the general approach, the ideological thread in the exhibition was reflected in various details and objects on show. The display on Iranian Jews described their lives as sheer misery, when actually their situation was very much dependent on the time and place. For example, there were periods when many of the Jews experienced upward mobility, becoming integrated and successful, while others were still poor and marginalized.
This applies to the ‘golden age ‘ under the Shah, but dhimmi rules in Iran were only abolished in 1925.
Also, special attention was given to the “list of events in which Jews suffered harm” – from a massacre of Mashhadi Jews in 1839, to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. As proof of this lachrymose trend, the curators included a telegram that Tehran’s chief rabbi sent in 1874 to the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, in which he explained the hardships Iranian Jews faced. Nothing in this time line, however, conveyed the glorious history of some 100,000 Jews in Iran, up until the early 1980s – of their self-identification as proud Iranians, their connection to the language and culture, the vibrant Jewish press that numbered up to a dozen of newspapers in the 1940s and ‘50s, their poetry and literature, their disproportionately high representation in higher education and medical fields in the second half of the 20th century, their activism in communist and nationalist parties, or even of their many responses to Zionism.
Actually there were quotas on Jewish medical students, eg in Iraq.
The lay visitor to the exhibition learned about only six events, beginning with a massacre of Jews in 1839 and ending with the Islamic revolution. Also, one may ask, can we really consider Jewish life in Iran to have disappeared when there is still a community of some 20,000 Jews in the country? The same approach was reflected in the other displays as well, but a close and critical reading of history reveals the different faces of history.
Only then do we see the contribution by the Iraqi-Jewish merchant Avraham Jepani, a business associate of the country’s finance minister, Mohammad Hadidi, as part of the economic and cultural golden age of Iraq in the first half of the 20th century.
In the same vein, we suggest considering the story of the idolized Jewish musician Habiba Masika as part of Tunisian history, as Tunisia itself is trying to do these days, and not just a tragic Jewish story, involving a murder. It emerged from this show at the Eretz Israel Museum that Masika’s piano will soon be on display at a museum under construction in her memory in Tunisia.
Forgive my cynicism, Tunisia is trying to exploit Jewish memory for tourism purposes. The fact remains that only one percent of its Jewish community remains.
A similar lachrymose and simplistic history is presented in the book “The End of Judaism in Muslim Lands,” edited by sociologist Shmuel Trigano, and published in French in 2009. This volume, according to Trigano, was intended to offer for the first time a broad overview of developments that led to the expulsion of Oriental Jews from their countries. Trigano asserts as much while unifying the expulsion narratives of Jews from 10 different countries. His narrative claims that “the Jews of the Arab countries suffered from persecution and pogroms for many generations, hundreds of years prior to the emergence of Zionism […] Their situation deteriorated in modern times and the appearance of Arab nationalism in the 20th century. The narrative that describes their immigration to Israel as colonialism is the opposite of the truth. These were fleeing refugees who found home and shelter in the State of Israel.”
In fact, this is an overly generalized and narrow view, one that harnesses certain facts and omits many others, to suggest a process whose end is known and declared from the get-go. Israel today is undergoing profound sociological changes.
This exactly describes what the authors are doing – to support their own politicised agenda. They resent any attack on Palestinian exceptionalism. Their desire to raise the profile of Mizrahi heritage and history is confined to the positive, or points of connection between Muslims and Jews .
Population groups that have been pushed away and marginalized in the central discourse, such as the large Middle Eastern Jewish communities, now have increasing opportunities to stake a claim in society and in venues of public memory. The price they are required to pay, though, is enormously high – one that stipulates the linking of Mizrahi history to the Zionist narrative: Haskalah (enlightenment), Zionism, persecution, escape or expulsion, and at the end of it, “redemption” in Israel.
As already stated, a third of these Jews did not go to Israel.
There is not sufficient room here to tell the complex story more than a thousand years of relations between of Jews and Muslims. In general, though, it seems as if the erasure of Mizrahi or Oriental Jewish history from its Arab and Islamic context goes hand in hand with the eradication of Palestinian history from our surroundings.
As historians who study and teach the pasts of Jews in Muslim societies, we welcome the expansion of the narrative and the inclusion of Mizrahi Jews into the national story, but at the same time we call for the presentation of many voices and faces, so that the broad context of the history of the Jews of Muslim lands can be better understood.
The authors ignore broad historical and political trends and give the exception to the rule more importance than it deserves.
Selectively choosing facts and processes that serve narrow political objectives causes injustice to a magnificent tale of 2,000 years, that in many ways, is still alive and well. And half a truth is worse than a lie.
Dr. Lior Sternfeld teaches history and Jewish studies at Penn State University. Dr. Menashe Anzi teaches Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
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