Chapter 11

The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
Ben-Gurion University

N.B. This is an unpublished draft for Orientalism and the Jews, ed. by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (University Press of New England, 2004). Any published reference to this work without the author’s permission is a copyright violation and is strictly forbidden.

The orientalist paradigm is essential for the analysis of modern discourse by and about Jews.[1]

Employing the concept of orientalism in order to link Judaism and postcolonial studies enriches both fields and generates new perspectives, challenging the dichotomies upon which modern consciousness has been based. It also adds a new dimension to our understanding of the position of the Jew in modern sensibility. From the Enlightenment onward, the discussion of the civil status of the Jews has been formulated in clearly orientalist terms, while orientalist images have played an important role in the reshaping of Jewish identity. Of course, orientalism is not an exclusive category, and it does not encompass all the complex aspects of modern Jewish discourse. It is, however, a perspective that brings together many aspects of modern discourse on the status of the Jews, including ones that have led to their marginalization.[2]

The origins of this reformulation of Jewish discourse can be traced back to the early modern period, following the expulsion of the Jews and the Muslims from Spain and the origins of the Marranos. It was then that the Jewish-Muslim link, which had been first made earlier in the Middle Ages, was cast in terms of an ethnic and a religious difference. The discourse generated by the question of the Marranos who maintained or were perceived to maintain Jewish qualities despite conversion to Christianity, marked the transition from theological discourse and Christian-Jewish disputation to a discourse based on notions of ethnicity, race and culture. At the same time, religious elements re-appeared in later contexts. Hebraism, the study of Hebrew and Jewish literature by Christian scholars, was established at the same time and as part of orientalist studies in Europe.

The relationship between theological and orientalist discourse was reformulated within the context of the rise of nationalism and the Enlightenment. According to Jonathan Hess, orientalism was the main discourse informing the Dohm-Michaelis debate in Germany in the early 1780s over the civil status of the Jews. Hess points out that the debate over Jewish emancipation functioned “as a symbolic substitute for a foreign colony.”[3] He reveals the theological background of the debate over the civil status of the Jews as well as the implications of its accommodation to the scientific terminology of the emergent field of oriental studies. Thus Michaelis emphasized the Jews’ Semitic origin and presented them as an alien nation, in order to support the claim that they were incapable of integrating into Christian-European society. While Dohm argued that the annulment of certain limitations on the Jews would promote their “regeneration,” Michaelis rejected that supposition, emphasizing their inherent “oriental essence” instead. Both agreed upon the “degeneration” of contemporary Jews - the debate was whether their “oriental” attributes were inherent. This debate was considered to be parallel to the question whether the Jews formed a “confession”, and were thus capable of being integrated, or instead comprised a nation, with values alien to those of the European nations. As the contributions of this volume demonstrate, the terms of this debate were central to Jewish responses to the criticisms levelled against them and to the Jews’ own self-perception.

One can define the modern Jew as being located between “Europe” and the “Orient,” in a hybrid place that produced continuous tension and led to varying responses, be they “assimilationist” or “subversive.” The dialectics of assimilation were also the dialectics between West and East and between colonizer and colonized. This position between two poles of existence is relevant for the analysis of both the modern European and Middle-Eastern Jewish experiences within a colonial context. In each colonial context this condition took on different manifestations, and in each of them it was associated with other features to constitute a particular social reality. In western and central Europe, orientalist discourse was directed primarily towards Jews, whereas in Middle Eastern and North African countries it played out in the relationship between the European colonizer and the Arab colonized.

This growing awareness on the part of scholars of the place of the Jews in orientalist discourse is connected with a change of attitude toward Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism. Following its publication, Jewish scholars figured prominently among those who rejected Said’s thesis altogether, on the basis of the valid argument that Said ignored German orientalism in his analysis. Over the years, as part of a serious re-evaluation and revision of Said’s thesis, the argument that Said ignored German orientalism has remained, but this criticism has now received a completely different meaning: not that German orientalism represented a different perception, but that it should be included within the same framework of the colonial imagination, with the crucial difference that it was directed primarily against the Jews. The uniqueness of the Jewish case, and its complexity, particularly in the German context, illustrate the fundamental connection between Enlightenment and orientalism, while demonstrating the limitations of Said’s outstanding analysis.

An interesting example of the new interpretation of Said and its implications can be seen in a collective volume, edited by Martin Kramer and published by the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, under the title “The Jewish Discovery of Islam.”[4] According to Kramer, the purpose of the book is to pose the question: “Was there a Jewish discovery of Islam, distinct from Europe’s? Did the culture of central and Western European Jewry provide the foundation for a more accurate and sometimes more favorable assessment of Islam than the general culture of Europe?.” In response to these questions Kramer demonstrates that:

Jews found themselves in a Europe constructed upon a series of evolving dichotomies: Christendom and Islam, Europe and Asia, West and East, Aryan and Semite. The Jews posed a challenge to these dichotomies on practically every level. At first, their role was passive, as others debated their proper classification. By the nineteenth century, Jews had entered the debate, questioning not just their classification, but the very validity of the dichotomies. Such dichotomies were regarded as obstacles to assimilation, which remained the dominant project of central and western European Jewry from the French Revolution to the Holocaust.[5]

In other words, Kramer accepts the role of the orientalist paradigm in the construction of European discourse. Even the argument that Said ignored German orientalism is replaced here by the argument that he ignored Jewish scholars, who allegedly challenged orientalist dichotomies. Thus, interestingly, in arguing that Jewish scholars were different, a book dedicated to Bernard Lewis (one of the most vehement critics of Edward Said) is based on an implicit acceptance of Said’s main argument.

One might agree with Kramer that the position of the Jews produced a different kind of sensitivity, one determined by Jewish education and the knowledge of “oriental” languages, as well as by the fact that orientalist discourse was addressed also towards them. However, his conclusion that Jews in general subverted the dominant dichotomy is exaggerated. Jews did not necessarily challenge the dichotomies (or the classification itself) and in fact often reproduced them through an identification with the images and ideals attributed to the “West,” distancing themselves from the negative characteristics attributed to the “East.” The argument that Jewish approaches “rested upon a heightened empathy and sympathy for Islam” does not necessarily constitute a challenge to the orientalist paradigm, and in fact reproduces the distinction between “Europe” and “Islam,” locating the Jews among generators of the European gaze upon the Orient. Even if Jews assumed that “a Europe respectful to Islam and Muslims was more likely to show respect for Judaism and Jews,” as Kramer puts it, they still remained within the dominant orientalist discourse, reinforcing its role. Moreover, Jewish orientalist discourse was established as an attempt to distinguish between the Western Jew and the oriental Muslim. The process of assimilation was associated with an attempt to de-orientalize the Jew, or else to adopt the image of the East as a source of ancient Jewish wisdom and noble origins.

Jews did produce critical responses that challenged dominant scholarly trends as well as dominant images of the East. Susannah Heschel has pointed out the subversive aspects of Abraham Geiger’s scholarship on both Early Christianity and on Muhammad. [6] Indeed, in this context, Geiger may be seen as similar to other Jewish intellectuals who also subverted some aspects of modernity through the participation in the general discourse. However, it seems to me that Jews did not really offer an alternative approach to orientalism. Religious reform of Judaism by scholars such as Geiger was directed by the intention to divest the religion of its “irrational” aspects and was presented in obvious orientalist terms. Even if one can argue that Jewish orientalists expressed a more positive attitude toward the East than their Christian counterparts, the attempt within Jewish studies to distinguish Judaism from the Muslim East expressed a clearly orientalist dimension.

The contemporary potential of this challenge can be advanced within a critique of the role of orientalism in the shaping of Zionist discourse, as an important feature of the nationalization and so-called “secularization” of Jewish discourse.[7] In this context, Kramer’s argument cannot be accepted, and one cannot argue that Zionism “questioned the very validity of the dichotomy.” From the outset, Zionist discourse was premised upon the adoption of orientalist attitudes, and orientalism was essential to the nationalization of the Jewish collectivity and the ways in which the nation was imagined. While modern Jewish discourse produced expressions of ambivalence and resistance, Zionism was based on the explicit denial of that ambivalence. Despite the Zionist rejection of “assimilationist trends,” it can be read as an extreme expression of the desire to assimilate the Jews into the Western narrative of enlightenment and redemption. The condemnation of assimilation was, in fact, the rejection of the ambiguity and “in betweenness.” Generally, Zionist thought, in spite of very important differences from assimilationist ideologies, certainly did not challenge the dichotomy between Europe and the Orient, but rather was based on the desire to assimilate into the West. The process of Jewish colonization embodied the perspective of both the colonized and the colonizer, by transforming the colonized and assimilating the perspective of the colonizer. Indeed within the Zionist context, a variety of attitudes toward the Orient have emerged, and it would be misleading to ignore the possibilities for multiple perceptions of the concept of “East” and “West” that exist within this culture. Such attitudes promise to lead to alternative options of defining Jewish collectivity in Palestine. However, it is important nonetheless to emphasize the obvious orientalist dimension inherent in Zionist thinking and in the practices it produced. Zionists developed a range of attitudes toward the Orient and toward the Arabs, from Romantic desire to a total denial; but all of them remained within the framework of orientalist dichotomy, and served to create the “new Jew” which Zionism wished to define as a new European, and not an oriental.[8]

In this process, the same terms employed against the Jews in Europe (as manifested in the Dohm-Michaelis debate), were adopted in order to reshape the Jewish collectivity as a national one, and were applied, albeit in different ways, to the Palestinians and the Jews from Arab countries. Orientalism is intrinsic to all the categorical dichotomies commonly used to describe Israeli society: Jews/Arabs, Ashkenazim/Mizrahim, as well as secular/religious. A concurrent analysis of these interrelated issues, usually discussed separately, can point the way towards a critical redefinition of the Jewish collectivity in Palestine.

The orientalist nature of Zionist discourse is expressed through the different dimensions embedded in the concept “negation of exile.” This notion should be considered the core of Zionist consciousness, and embodies the concrete aspects of the Zionist myth. It shaped the image of the “new Jew” as opposed to the exilic Jew, described in obvious orientalist terms. To a certain extent, the “negation of exile” can be interpreted as the negation of all that was considered “Oriental” in the Jews, and at the same time demonstrates the desire to integrate the Jews and their history into the narrative of the West. The act of immigration was perceived as the transformation and regeneration of the Jew, that is, the overcoming of oriental elements.

“Negation of exile” (and its complementary “return to history”) demonstrates the theological dimension of Zionist national consciousness, and the orientalism inherent in so-called “secularization.” Essentially, “Negation of Exile” refers to the consciousness that deems the present Jewish settlement in, and sovereignty over, Palestine as the “return” of the Jews to the land believed to be their home, and imagined, prior to its “redemption,” as empty. The negation of exile appeared to be the “fulfillment” of Jewish history and the realization of Jewish prayers and messianic expectations. According to this perspective, the cultural framework that the Zionists wished to actualize and uncover was the “authentic,” original Jewish culture, as opposed to the exilic culture, described in blatant orientalist terms as stagnant, unproductive, and irrational. Secular Zionism was thus not separate from Jewish-Christian theology, but rather an interpretation of it based on the biblical promise and the Jewish prayer book. Not only was a theological dimension attached to the idea of the nation, but national secular consciousness itself was a kind of reinterpretation of the theological myth and the Messianic principle.

This is not to say that Zionism directly follows or represents the Jewish Messianic tradition. Clearly, Zionist thought was inspired by a number of Jewish traditional sources. However, the reformulation of the theological myth in modern romantic terminology marked a radical change in the Jewish perception of time, as embodied in the terms “exile” and “redemption,” and its adaptation to the Christian perception of history — the same perception upon the rejection of which Jewish consciousness was previously established.[9] Just as Christianity criticized Judaism as an historical anachronism, so did Zionism criticize the Jews in exile as having been left behind by history. Zionism came to “supersede” exilic Judaism just as Christianity purported to supersede Judaism.

On the theological level, the “secular” Jewish national ideal followed the theological imagination of Protestantism. The Zionist conception of return to the past was identical to the fundamental Protestant ideal, as was the context: the Holy Land of the Second Temple, the age of Jesus Christ. Likewise, the image of the ancient Jewish community was also concordant with the image of the early Church in Protestant thought, and formulated along similar lines. It is important to remember that the first to describe Jewish redemption in modern political terms (descriptions that were later adopted and re-articulated in Zionist discourse) were Christian millenarians in early modern Europe, who regarded the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the restoration of a Jewish polity as the precondition for Christ’s Second Coming. The attempt to redefine the theological as national underscores the colonial and orientalist aspects of Zionist consciousness. The return to Palestine was presented as the “return to history,” in the sense of a history of the West including both Jews and Christians, as opposed to, say, the Islamic East. Romantic terminology mediated between the theological and the colonial, engendering secular and nationalist sensibilities.

Thus, the European Jewish minority accepted the very notions of culture and history that enabled their exclusion on two different levels: the theological, in the form of Christian polemics against the Jews; and the cultural-colonial, in the terms that constituted modern identities and power relations. These two levels were completely integrated in what can be defined as a national-colonial theology/ideology. Paradoxically, the exodus from Europe and the aspiration to create a distinctly Jewish political entity in the East was a means of joining the Christian West, and an expression of identification with the latter’s self-perceptions. “Return” was directed toward an imagined East - the proverbial cradle of Western (Judeo-Christian) civilization - imagined and constructed in opposition to the real Arab-Muslim world.

The national-theological perception begot a mythical perception of “The Land” as the national motherland; “The Land” had no history outside its place in the Jewish-Christian theological myth, and was imagined as the land of the Bible in accordance with conventional orientalist imagery.[10] The land itself was considered to be in exile, until its return to its original “husbands,” the Jewish people who came to “redeem” it/her. Palestine was imagined solely as the source of the Jewish-Christian civilization, through the denial of its Arab-Islamic history. Jewish integration into the West was carried out by accepting Christian images, and the accommodation of Jewish concepts into the progressive myth of modernity. Palestine was clearly associated with the imagery of the land in European modern descriptions, through a distancing from its real existence as an Arab entity in the midst of its own process of change. In this context, the East - the concrete Arab existence on the land - was deemed inconsequential, and subsequently rejected to the point of obliteration. This mythical concept of the land continues to inform Israeli culture today, and the history of Palestine since the Second Temple is ignored in school curricula, both “secular” and “religious.” The image of the “new settlement” was based on the negation of the lands and its inhabitants, including the Jewish ones, the pre-Zionist Jewish communities that were considered as the old “Yishuv” [settlement].

This is not to say that Zionist thought ignored the Arab entity, or rejected it simplistically. Zionists developed a myriad of approaches to dealing with the so-called “Arab question,” and produced a variety of images of “the Arab.”[11] However, most of these remained within the confines of orientalist discourse: the East (as represented by the Arab population) was either violent, irrational, and evil, or authentic and antiquated - a culture some Zionists posited should be emulated. Both images had been established in various ways in Zionist-Hebrew culture from its earlier stages.[12] In the literature and praxis of the radical “Second Aliyah,” and also in subsequent Zionist visual representations, the image of the Arab as the embodiment of the ancient Hebrew was a salient possible model for Zionist values and culture: the noble savage meets the biblical Israelite.[13] These cultural manifestations demonstrate the complex and dialectical position of Zionism toward the Orient as a source of inspiration. Nonetheless, it should be made clear that both images of the Arab - be it depraved or uncorrupted - left no room for the Arabs themselves, their contemporary reality, and their rights.[14] By appropriating the "nativeness" of the Arabs, the Zionists assumed the role of natives and rendered the indigenous population obsolete.[15] Evidently, the real Arabs were never included in the Zionist vision of redemption, and from the outset were considered alien, an opposition in relation to which the Zionist self-image took shape. It is not surprising that the construction of the Arab as an ideal model coincided with the struggle for “Hebrew labor,” that is, the exclusion of Palestinians from the labor force in the Jewish colonies. Zionist culture emerged out of this dialectical attitude toward the Orient, a process that naturally left behind expressions of a desire to undermine dichotomies. However, the dominant culture was established on the basis of distinguishing itself sharply from the actual Arab, and negating Arab history and present. This received its full expression in the total negation of the destruction of Palestinian entity and the ethnic cleansing that was associated with the establishment of the state of Israel.

The orientalist dimension of the nation has found frequent expression in Zionist literature since its formulation, in turn determining Zionist policy (e.g., Herzl, claims that “for Europe we will constitute a bulwark against Asia, serving as guardians of culture against barbarism”). In his utopian novel, Altneuland, Herzl describes the transformation of the exilic Jew through his [sic] immigration to Palestine; a process of regeneration that will lead, ultimately, to the creation of “a Europe in the Middle East.” The Arabs are described as being grateful to the Jews for rescuing them from their state of barbarism. Herzl never attempted to conceal his contempt for the Orient, including its Jews.

Herzl’s “naïve” colonial imagination does not necessarily represent the main thrust of Zionist culture, yet it demonstrates the orientalist dimension inherent in most forms of Zionism, one that has been given a variety of expressions. The representation and imagining of Jewish collectivity as national took the form of its imagining from European models. This has been an obvious aspect of Zionist historiography of the Jewish people, and has shaped the development of Jewish studies.

“Negation of exile” is therefore the negation of the land, its culture, and its history. Again it followed Christian-orientalist imagery in a way that demonstrated identification with the West that associated the “return“ to the East, the place of origin. The “redemption of the land,” the term used to define the transfer of lands to Jews, was also its redemption from the East, and its reintegration into the West. The transformation of the Jew into the new Jew, was also the transformation of the land that attempted to preserve the Arab “view.” At the same time, it was the negation of Jewish exilic histories, and the different cultures within which, and in relation to which, Jews defined themselves as Jews. Jewish exilic tradition in general was perceived in Zionist writings as oriental, and as such rejected. This had dramatic implications for the Jews from Arab countries.

Unlike the attitude toward the Palestinians, who were systematically excluded and dispossessed, the official Zionist attitude toward Arab Jews was far more complicated. Zionism was obliged to include the Mizrahim, given its perception as the representative of the entire Jewish nation. But in order to integrate, Arab Jews were required to abandon their traditions, deny their past, and erase their memories, in order to assimilate into the dominant culture, representative of what was seen as modern, universal values. The binary Zionist distinction between Jew and Arab produced an impossible rupture between what were, up to the mass migrations following the establishment of Israel, congruent aspects of Mizrahi identity - Jewish and Arab. Suddenly, in order to be considered Israelis, Mizrahim had to forsake the culture and language in which they defined their Judaism - the Arab culture - and in some cases even give up their “religion” as they understood and practiced it.

Originally, “Oriental” Jews were neither included in the Zionist vision, nor in the category of “the Jewish people.” Zionist ideology was born in Europe, and its target audience was European Jews. In its early stages the Zionist attitude toward Arab Jews corresponded with the attitude toward the Palestinians: a combination of attraction and repulsion, with the essential difference being that they were Jews, and thus posed a serious problem to the Eurocentric conception of the Jewish nation. On one level, they were perceived as an abstracted ideal of the primordial Jew, but their present or concrete culture, was rejected, and described as oriental.

The orientalist-Hebraist disposition of Zionist discourse was manifest in the attitude toward Yemenite Jews who were described as the “authentic Jews” - the successors of the ancient Hebrews - but also as uncivilized primitives. Yemenite Jews were brought to Palestine by the Zionist movement in the first decade of the 20th century. While their own motivation for migrating was evidently religious, they were recruited not as partners in the colonization project, but as “Hebrew labor,” to supplant Arab workers, placing them on the front lines of the conflict between Jews and Arabs. Yemenites seemed to be a solution to the “problem,” since they could “work like Arabs.” Nevertheless, they were considered to be “outside of history.” A case in point is the Kinneret incident wherein Yemenite settlers were violently expelled to make room for Zionist “pioneers” who wanted to expand their land holdings. The Yemenites, who lived and died on that piece of land over the course of 20 critical years, were not even allocated a place in the narrative of Kinneret, one of the founding myths of the Zionist endeavor.

It is important to note that this Zionist ambivalence towards Mizrahim echoed the Christian ambivalence toward the Jews as, on the one hand, the carriers of the Hebraica Veritas or the ancient Hebrew truth, and, on the other, as those who rejected the gospel, in context of the Enlightenment and European culture. The Mizrahim were perceived as upholding the ancient traditions, but incapable of being conscious of its content, since they existed “outside of history.” The oriental Jews in Zionist discourse are “The Jews” in Christian theology.

Interestingly, in its initial stages, Zionist historiography was devoted to the Jews of the Arab world; the first series of the historical journal Zion was dedicated to the history of oriental and Palestinian Jewry, a project intended to provide the requisite knowledge for the formation of the new Jewish culture. Similarly, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, founded in 1906, continuously exhibited “authentic” Jewish arts and crafts, albeit displaced into a European frame. In both cases, the oriental Jew was not a subject, but an object of inspiration for the construction of the “new Jew” - the real heir to the ancient Orient. Later, this attitude shifted to a denial of Mizrahi history.[16] The second series of Zion, launched in 1936, was dedicated to Jewish history as the history of European Jewry. This scholarship was succeeded by a later division of labor in Israeli academe: historians contemplated European Jewish history, and anthropologists scrutinized the oriental Jews. The shift between the two series represents the change in the way the orientalist paradigm was employed. Interestingly, the scholarly interest in Jews from the Arab world continued only until they were included in Zionist planning.

Jews in the Arab world became a Zionist target for immigration only after the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. They were regarded as the human reservoir that would ensure a Jewish majority in Palestine. Their mass migration was rationalized in almost purely demographic terms.[17] Accordingly, after the establishment of the state of Israel and the immigration of Jews from Europe, most of whom were survivors, attention was shifted to the Jewish communities in Arab lands. The rise of the category of Mizrahim, and its transformation into a social reality and identity, grew out of this process. Zionists have not hesitated to assist the process of exclusion, such as in Iraq, where Zionist leaders supported the legislation that revoked the citizenship of Jews, in order to force them to immigrate.

The category “Mizrahim” came into use only after the Arab Jews arrived in Palestine, though the attitude towards them had already been defined during the process of their immigration. That attitude was expressed, for instance, in the debate over the “selection” of Moroccan Jews, namely in the form of the demand that Jews who were old or who for other reasons would not be able to help build the state, not be brought.[18] The collectivity referred to as the “Mizrahim” did not exist prior to the establishment of the state. Despite certain cultural and liturgical similarities among them, it remains a construct of the Ashkenazi elite who lumped all non-European Jews into a single group, at times called “Edot Hamizrah,” or “Jews from Asian and African lands,” and, most recently, “Mizrahim” (making “Israelis” synonymous with “Ashkenazim”). With time, “Mizrahim” came to denote a re-appropriated identity claimed by Arab Jews in response to their shared marginalization within the framework of the Jewish State on the basis of their origin - a hybrid identity produced by both assimilationist policy and the resistance to it.[19] Even today, the use of the category is often rejected, as being an attempt to raise illegitimate claims of deprivation on ethnic grounds, thus leading many Mizrahim to distance themselves from the category. However, it is also used as a resistance through a different kind of integration into society.

The Mizrahim were brought to a place founded on the explicit rejection of their culture and traditions. It was cultural oppression that ultimately determined their social marginalization. In other words, the conditions placed on their inclusion determined their exclusion. The requirement of cultural suppression stemmed from the general concept of the negation of exile. The condition for Mizrahi integration was de-Arabization, following the de-Arabization of the land itself in the 1948 war. In the words of Ben-Gurion, “We do not want the Israelis to be Arabs. It is our duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that ruins individuals and societies.”

The dominant attitude towards the Mizrahim was expressed in a series of articles published in 1949 by Arie Geldblum in Ha'Aretz: “This is immigration of a race we have not yet known in this country…We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is visibly one of absolute ignorance, and worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are also slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at even level than what we knew with regard to the former Arabs of Eretz Israel.” And he continues: “These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to the play of savage and primitive instincts…[20]

While this attitude was sometimes characterized at the time as extreme, it seems that what was condemned was the rhetoric, not the principles themselves, which had a crucial effect on the process of marginalizing the Mizrahim. Many studies have demonstrated the social mechanisms that produced the marginalization of Mizrahim and the dominance of the Ashkenazi elite. In Israeli society, Mizrahim remained outside of historical discourse and, under the guise of modernization, were victims of cultural oppression and social exclusion.

The entire deliberation over the status of the Mizrahim from the 1950s onward reproduced the terms of the Dohm-Michaelis debate over the civil status of European Jews. The displacement and projection of European discourse vis-à-vis its Jews onto the Mizrahim is probably best elucidated through an examination of Israeli educational discourse. The crux of the pedagogical debate was whether the oriental Jews were innately retarded, and it was thus useless to try to educate them, or whether the Mizrahim suffered from “secondary retardation” which originated in their surroundings. Discussing the possibilities of “regeneration” among Mizrahi children, Karl Frankenstein argued that their situation was not “absolute” but the result of oriental culture, which determined their stagnation. However he also described the “primitive mentality: of the Mizrahim and compared it to “the primitive expression of children, the retarded and the mentally disturbed.” He argued that some Mizrahi children could be rescued were they to be physically extracted from their traditional environs. Similarly, Reuven Feurstein argued that “the north-African should not necessarily remain a north-African.”[21] As in the European debate regarding the Jews, both sides to the debate shared the assumption that the Mizrahim had be changed, and could not be integrated as they were.[22] It should be emphasized that the educators mentioned above shared Dohm’s positive and assimilationist attitudes, and stood against those who argued that the attempt to educate Mizrahim was impossible.

The conclusion, still discussed seriously in some Israeli academic institutions today, was that the precondition for the “regeneration” of Mizrahi children was to distance them from their parents, families, and communities. The condition for their “integration” was the rejection of their history and “Oriental ways.” The culture they possessed was considered alien to the imagined “universal”, “modern”, “progressive”, and “democratic” Israeli one. Social barriers barred them from higher education, and reproduced their marginalization. Their histories were obliterated and are still not included in school textbooks. Jewish history, according to these textbooks, is the history of European Jews. The artist Meir Gal represented this reality in a piece titled “Nine out of Four Hundred” – a photograph in which he holds up the nine pages devoted to the history of Mizrahi Jews in a textbook by Shmuel Kirshenbaum,[23] illustrating the prevalent attitude in Israel culture towards Mizrahi Jews as a group without a history, as well as the dominant conception of Jewish history as Ashkenazi history.[24]

It should be clarified that the issue at hand is not whether the Jews from Arab countries saw themselves as Arab Jews or identified with Arab nationalism. Most of them identified themselves as Jews, but certainly not in opposition to Arab culture, to which they belonged quite organically. “Arab-ness” was not an identity - it was a cultural-linguistic reality, expressed first and foremost through language, but also through a deep sense of belonging that persisted long after their immigration to Israel (although sometimes secretly, given the disapproval on the part of the dominant society). In Israel, Mizrahim became the new Marranos, but in this case it was not their religion that had to be concealed, but their culture. People had to hide their Arabic culture, afraid to listen to the music which preserved their contact to a cultural framework considered hostile and primitive. In other words, they had to abandon the culture in whose terms they defined their Jewish identity.

Recently, Yehuda Shenhav has pointed out that Zionist emissaries who came to Iraq during the forties were disappointed to discover that Iraqi Jews were secular, and according to their description, without any deep roots in “Jewish tradition.” These statements are interesting ones coming from consciously secular and even atheist figures. It illustrates a central element of the Zionist attitude: Mizrahi “secularism” seemed threatening because it was Arab secularism and reflected a different model of secularization and modernization. The notion of the “secular” in Zionist discourse was thus a cultural identity, European by definition. On the other hand, the preference for viewing oriental Jews as “religious” was meant to preserve them as carriers of tradition, to which their Arab culture was external and non-essential. Yemenite Jews, who were described as “authentic,” did not threaten the orientalist image. This stereotype, however, did not keep them from being the victims of oppression, the most extreme example being the “disappearance” of hundreds of Yemenite children (and also other Mizrahi children) from hospitals during the fifties, many of them kidnapped and delivered to Ashkenazi parents for adoption.[25] However, the religious traditions and symbols of oriental Jewry were also suppressed, in the name of secular and “progressive” Zionism.[26]

On these grounds, one could claim that in Israel the Mizrahim found themselves caught in the traditional position of the Jews in modern European discourse: between West and East, between the European and the Arab. They were pushed to the margins, and subjected to blatant colonial attitudes and practices. Nor did they fit the secular-religious dichotomy, also orientalist by in nature.[27] Particularly marginalized were North African Jews, already residents of the Middle East, who thus came to the same location from which they had emigrated, while all aspects of their culture were denied in the name of the new cultural ideal. The physical location of the Mizrahim was determined through governmental practices of settlement in so-called development towns and agricultural cooperatives along the borders, between the Jews and the Arabs, and often in Arab homes that were confiscated following the expulsion of 1948. They were placed on the frontline, the boundary between Israel and its refugees, and required to develop an anti-Arab attitude in order to become “real” Jews, in other words: Israelis. Unlike in their Diaspora, they had no autonomous space to practice a Jewish culture separate from the state. As already mentioned, even their “Judaism” was rejected as “Oriental” and thus alien to the authentic Jewish spirit. Instead, they were obliged to identify with the national ideology and its cultural symbols. The dichotomy of Jew and Arab was the essence of the definition of the state as well as of citizenship.

But from this place of oppression also emerged new options, whose relevance is much wider than the experience of the Mizrahim themselves. The cultural oppression of Mizrahim exposed the contradictions of Zionist consciousness in a way that may lead to the generation of a counter-position. This unique position is also the source of the potential of Mizrahi discourse. The dialectics of assimilation took on in this case a new dimension, and the tension between integration and resistance led to new directions. Ashkenazi-Mizrahi discourse in Israel is, naturally, dynamic and complicated, and has generated different responses and modes of resistance over the years; yet all reflect the dialectics of West/East, Jew/Arab – and then Jew-Israeli, Jew-Western, etc. All of them contained a certain suppressive element. In all fields of art and thought, Mizrahi culture has produced a range of modes of resistance that provide us with the tools of redefining the Israeli-Jewish collectivity.

However, the only movement to achieve political power and to redefine Mizrahi collective identity has been Shas - a religious party established on the model of ultra-religious Ashkenazi parties.[28] This is not surprising, since a framework that posits Arab and Jew as binary opposites leaves only religion as a legitimate means of resisting an oppressive “secular,” liberal regime and exposing the contradictions of Zionist ideology while still remaining within the consensual boundaries of the larger collective. The other option would have been to emphasize the Mizrahim’s suppressed Arab-ness. Many Mizrahim would reject such a strategy as it would be taken as identification with the enemy. In other words, the suppressed “Arab” cannot be redeemed unless the definition of the “Jew” is discussed and challenged.

To a large extent, Shas represents accommodation to, and cooption by, the dominant ideology. However, it is important to recognize the challenge posed by the movement, particularly by Arieh Deri, its ex-convict leader, whose activism and beliefs have clearly subverted current definitions of the Jewish collectivity. Shas is a phenomenon that embodies a myriad of contradictions and a number of dangers, but also a critical feature that should not be overlooked. Its absolute rejection, as the symbol of evil in present Israeli politics, is a manifestation of the orientalist core of the identity of “secular” Israel.

Shas was modeled after the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox parties, but unlike them, under the leadership of Deri, it demanded full participation in government and decision making. As such, it offered a model of integration that was not based on self-negation, and one that required the modification of the entire political discourse. This is why it has received the broad support of non-orthodox Mizrahi Jewish voters, proving how irrelevant Western dichotomies like “secular/ “religious” are for the discourse of Mizrahi Jews. Whatever values it supports, it provides and generates a collective identity, challenging the foundations of the dominant culture. Arieh Deri (whose course has not necessarily been followed by his successors) has produced a critique of Zionism that focuses on the suppression of religion and Sephardic Jewish tradition. In a famous speech, Deri critiqued the Zionist secular ideology of “negation of exile,” pointing to its orientalist nature and its disparaging attitude toward oriental Jews, and called for a “return” to “traditional” religious practices. For Deri (unlike some other leaders of the movement), this critique also necessitates achieving equality between Jews and Arabs.[29]

The success of Shas has demonstrated that any Mizrahi approach must also be a “Jewish” one. Any other attempt will necessarily reproduce the Jewish-Arab dichotomy. It is only as a Jewish attitude that a Mizrahi perspective can effectively challenge the Zionist paradigm and its implications. That is why previous attempts to address the issue in terms of class or ethnicity have failed to have a significant impact. Otherwise, the phrase “Arab-Jew” remains meaningless, and has no function in the molding of Israeli discourse.

Of course, emphasizing the Jewish dimension alone is insufficient for the elaboration of a critical Mizrahi perspective. In that crucial aspect, Shas did not challenge the boundaries of the discussion, particularly after Deri was forced to leave the movement. In fact, it accepted the notion of “a Jewish state” as a Western entity, and the dichotomy Jew/Arab on which Israeli culture has been established (reformulated within the traditional distinction between Jew and Gentile). Essentializing the “Jewish,” in a way similar to reactions to colonialism in other contexts, is a contradictory attitude that negates the critical potential embedded in an awareness of the orientalist dimension of Zionism. To distinguish the “Jew” from the “Arab,” “religion” from “culture,” and so forth, means to reproduce the same terms that constitute the present reality. It is by resisting the dichotomy Jew/Arab that a Mizrahi perspective can become a “Jewish” perspective - a restoration of the critical potential of modern Jewish discourse. While Deri indeed alluded to a different approach that he has had no opportunity to elaborate, his followers and the spiritual leader Ovadiah Yosef - often adopted an extreme anti-Arab position. Some of Deri’s observations may serve as a starting point for a comprehensive discussion, since they include a universalist perspective rather than one exclusive to Israeli Jews of Arab origin.

As in other colonial contexts, Mizrahim can easily turn fundamentalist, but they can also make use of the in between position to advance a third way - one of critical resistance to the prevalent modes of representation and historical perception. The in between position of the Mizrahim embodies the possibility of a critical perspective toward Western-orientalist culture, as ell as Arab nationalism, which ignored the Jewish existence in the Muslim world, and particularly the departure of the Jews from the Arab countries. But the multiple perspectives the Mizrahim carry with them makes their cultural location particularly interesting, since it embodies the combination of the Jew and the Arab, within a complex colonial discourse, and within the framework of Jewish sovereignty. This location embodies the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized, as well as the interrelations between them.

Ella Shohat correctly emphasized the hyphen in the phrase “Arab-Jew” as the location of hybridity.[30] In fact, this hyphen is essential to any Jewish framework, as with the phrases German-Jew or Russian-Jew, highlighting the problem inherent in the attempt to define Jews as a political-cultural nation in the modern sense of the word. But the hyphen will be meaningful only where it leads to a change in the relations between the two identities, challenge the existing dichotomy, and creates a new discursive framework that initiates a different dialogic relation. The hyphen is the place from which Jewish history, that is to say history from a Jewish perspective, should be written. The hyphen is not exclusive to the experiences and histories of “Arab-Jews” (or Iraqi Jews, Moroccan Jews, Algerian Jews, etc.). It is the location of any Jewish history, and demonstrates the unique difficulty of the attempt to narrate Jewish history as one of a homogeneous nationality. The hyphen in the phrase “Arab-Jew” represents, in addition to the complex identity to which it refers, the place of the writing of Jewish history.

We should remember that in the present “Arab-Jew” does not refer to a concrete cultural political existence, but can be seen more accurately as a critical category, directed towards the suppressed and challenged Zionist dichotomies. Only a few individuals will define themselves as “Arab-Jews,” though among them are some prominent intellectuals and artists.[31] On the other hand, in the present, the phrase “Arab-Jew” does not refer only to the identity of Jews from Arab countries. It is the context of the discussion determined by the successful Zionist endeavour to establish a Jewish sovereign entity within the Arab world. It is the context of responsibility that was created by the Zionist project, and cannot be limited to the historical experience of Mizrahi Jews in Israel. Israeli reality is first of all the reality of Jews and Arabs, though the latter live in a state of apartheid and continuous dispossession and oppression. At the same time, it is the reality shaped by the rejection of the Arab and of Arabness. Therefore, the very distinction between the question of the suppression of the Mizrahim and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict is problematic. As such, the directions offered by Mizrahi Jews are crucial for the entire Jewish society, as an alternative to the concept of negation. It may also be directed against the concept of separation that has directed the peace process, and reflected an obvious orientalist vision of a European community, distinct from the Middle East. It may guide a dialectical process whose effects go far beyond the question of the Mizrahim in Israel.

To write Mizrahi history is not merely to write the history of the Mizrahim, nor to simply write them into history, nor to only include them in the master narrative; this would set them in contrast to both Arab and Jew, the two cultural sources from which their experience arises. Such an approach would mean to remain within the boundaries of colonial discourse, necessarily strengthening the modern notion of “History” and its implications:[32] Rather, to write Mizrahi history means writing Jewish history as critical history. This history must be written from the place where the Jews were defined as such: from the Orient, from that ambivalent place that combines the perspective of the colonizer with that of the colonized. This means liberating the dialectics of East/West and colonizer/colonized from their binary prison. Jewish critical attitudes towards the modern concept of history will thus be recharged with concrete meaning. To write Mizrahi history means to write “against the grain,” in a way that accords to Walter Benjamin’s perception of history as a new and concrete understanding. Such a history would be a counter-history in the way suggested by Amos Funkenstein, since it holds both perspectives, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized. It means taking advantage of the state of ambivalence, and writing history from the standpoint of the oppressed from within a unique and contradictory situation, in which Mizrahim are Jews in a Jewish state, but at the same time in a Jewish society that defines itself via a negation of their culture.

A Mizrahi writing of history would therefore mean, first of all, writing Zionist history from a Jewish perspective. A Mizrahi perspective is the framework from which a critique of Zionism can emerge and can take on constructive meaning, moving towards a comprehensive redefinition of the Jewish collectivity in Palestine. To write history from the oriental (as opposed to orientalist) perspective means to write against the present still de-Arabized consciousness, while at the same time overcoming romantic-idealistic perceptions of the Orient that inevitably reproduce the dichotomy. The “in-betweenness” of the Mizrahi condition holds the potential for a bi-national perspective; that is to say, one that combines the Jew and the Arab and thus challenges the West/East dichotomy. It challenges at the same time the Zionist perception of the land, and reveals Jewish images that are not based on the negation of “the land” and its inhabitants, and thus initiates a dialectic relation between “Eretz Israel” and “Palestine.”

Directions that have emerged in the last few years provide a framework for the comprehensive and complex discussion of these issues in all their complexity, moving towards what can be seen as de-colonization of Jewish-Israeli identity. Mizrahi writers like Shimon Ballas subvert the Jewish-Arab dichotomy, and as has been demonstrated by Meir Buzaglo, a Mizrahi Jewish perception can also reject the “secular”/”religious” dichotomy, another orientalist construct, in Jewish historical perception and contemporary thought.[33]

This perspective should be applied at several levels, and may be enriched by recent studies and directions in a number of different fields. The critique of Zionism from the standpoint of the Mizrahim means, on one level, searching for a Jewish collectivity that is based not on a critical position, but on a dualistic dichotomy between reaching out to the East and opposing the West. This purpose can be enriched by contributions to the histories of Jews in Arab countries in the modern and colonial age and their integration into – and contrast with – the dominant narrative of modern Jewish history. This may lead to a new analysis of Jewish history in Arab worlds, and a rewriting European Jewish history. It would be at the same time an attempt to de-colonize Jewish identity, and to take advantage of Jewish hybridity. And indeed, one can identify such a notion in many forms of Jewish critical studies, ranging from the new historiography of Jews in the Arab world during the colonial age to critical analyses of the place of the Jew in European culture. This is the framework in which the question of the Mizrahim in Israel takes on its true significance.

Thus a Mizrahi perspective provides us with the location of critical history from a standpoint of responsibility, not merely rejecting and condemning present presumptions, but also enabling us to pose questions differently and attempt to offer new perspectives.

Notes to Chapter 12