Rather than seeing itself as others saw it, the community rejected the veracity of Chafets’ report and continued to laud itself as a sterling example of a charitable and supportive Jewish enclave.

With last week’s troubling allegations of criminal misconduct on the part of prominent rabbis in the community, the continued attempt to disregard critical views of the community has been disastrous.

Apart from the ongoing revelations about the nature of the corruption and how deeply embedded it actually was in the community, we would do well to more carefully examine the cultural erosion of the Syrian Jewish tradition; a phenomenon that has become common to many Sephardic communities who have been unable to effect a cultural continuity allowing a perpetuation of their traditions to coming generations.

In the case of the Syrian Jewish community, the story goes back to the tumultuous upheaval of the immigrant years. Lacking a firm institutional base from which to reconstruct its traditional culture, the Syrian Jews were caught between two variant leadership models.

On the one side there was the rabbinical leadership cadre led by Hakham Matloub Abadi which extolled the traditional Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism of the Andalusian tradition. Abadi insisted that provisions be made for the community’s youth to learn the Sephardic heritage in an authentic manner.

On the other side of the equation was the vision of a wealthy businessman named Isaac Shalom who had a very different model of pedagogy and sense of cultural continuity. Shalom’s aim was to create a cadre of quiescent religious leaders who would follow his dictates rather than the ideals of the older tradition. Under the rubric of continuity, Shalom eviscerated the old system, viewed henceforth as antiquated and irrelevant to “modern” concerns, and in its place installed a form of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy that immediately transformed the climate of religiosity in the community.

The critical aspect for the current controversy is the way in which community leadership devolved from the rabbinical cadre to the lay cadre. Henceforth decisions vital to the community would not be decided in the rabbinical court, but in the private offices of the businessmen of the community.

Taking Hakham Matloub Abadi and what he represented out of the equation proved to be a disaster that the community has still not recovered from.

Putting unlimited power into the hands of laypeople meant that the religious institutions of the community would be administered along different standards than had previously been in place.

Matloub Abadi was effectively removed from public service and lived out his life as a businessman rather than a minister and rabbinical leader in the community. The current leadership is heir to the dominance of Isaac Shalom and his hand-picked protégé, Rabbi Jacob Kassin.

In effect, the new arrangement permitted the creation of oligarchic pockets in the community which could function as private fiefdoms dispensing largesse to their supporters.

An “in-group”/”out-group” mentality began to permeate the community. Those inside the leadership held sway over the decision-making process of the community which ceased to be monitored by an independent rabbinate. The lay-leaders and leading rabbis worked hand-in-glove to promote their own vested interests and were not limited by any outside interference. Strict canons of conformity permeated the leadership circles and deviation from their dictates resulted in social rejection.

Intellectuals and independent religious figures were closed out of the new system if they elected to remain critical of the system and its massive financial perquisites. No critical mechanism was made available to monitor the community’s public institutions.

The new model was enabled by the ongoing evisceration of the traditional Sephardic pedagogy. In its place, Shalom and his peers brought to their religious and social institutions the Ashkenazi Orthodox paradigm which had hitherto been marginal to community concerns. With the inclusion of this model the community was left without its native heritage and began to acclimate to the predominant American Jewish model, leaving it bereft of organic self-knowledge.

The new model enabled the promulgation of closed cadres of leaders who were not accountable to the community. Orthodoxy rigidly enforced specific ideational tenets that replaced the expansive culture of Arab-Jewish civilization. Intellectual attainment declined, material values burgeoned and the moral backbone of the community collapsed.

An ongoing debasement of Sephardic culture in both the secular and religious Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world has caused an upheaval in the Sephardic community; bringing us to the point where the community is showing itself prone to the type of unethical behavior that continues to plague a number of prominent Ashkenazi groups, particularly in the Orthodox world.

The current scandals that have just unfolded reinforce the fact that a breakdown in cultural continuity can often lead to the failure of communal authority and morality. Given the ongoing prejudices against Sephardic culture in Israel and the West, it is not at all certain that the current status quo will have the ability to reform itself. Within the Syrian Jewish community there is a moral collapse that has come from a cultural breakdown of monumental proportions. This has been reinforced by a Jewish world dominated by Ashkenazi interests which is often oblivious to the Sephardic minority.

Because of this cultural system, Sephardim such as the Brooklyn Syrians have come to comport themselves in a way that resembles the way in which business is often done in other sectors of the religious Jewish world.

Regardless of how the current corruption charges are adjudicated, until the older models of Sephardic Jewish leadership and critical self-examination are restored, it is highly unlikely that the current scandals will be addressed with the proper gravitas needed for true moral reform.

Cutting through the heaps of hysteria, blather and partisanship, Stewart in under 5 minutes cut to the very heart of the matter without pomp or pretense.

It put every other media outlet to shame and is essential viewing for those who have become tired of the endless propaganda being beamed out on the airwaves.

As our friend Yehouda Shenhav has pointed out so accurately, the issue of financial compensation for Arab Jews is a matter that cuts a number of different ways and often follows the path of unintended consequences.

On the one hand, the Right Wingers have embraced the issue with great gusto because it fits neatly into their anti-Arab agenda. These stories get to replay the horrors of the last years of Jewish life in the Arab-Muslim world; days that were ugly and nightmarish.

Absent from this agenda is a balanced understanding of how things came to be and who was responsible for what. The final days of Jewish life in the Arab world was complicated by a heady and carcinogenic stew of Arab nationalism, Western colonial failures, Zionist overreaching and intervention, and the weakness of the local Jewish communities in the wake of over a century of Colonialism.

But we will never hear of this complexity from the Right Wing sources.

In another rich vein for the Rightists, the matter sets up a counterweight to Palestinian claims for their own property restitution. In this sense, it is noteworthy that the Palestinians have tried to make their demands without denying the rights of Arab Jews to receive their own compensation. In spite of the attempt to use the Arab Jewish claims as a means to deflect Palestinian claims, there is no rational reason to reject one by accepting the other.

More to the point, as Shenhav points out in his discussion of WOJAC in his book The Arab Jews, the re-establishment of Arab Jewish memory can lead to some uncomfortable and confusing historical and cultural issues for those who seek to use the matter as a wedge issue.

As we see in this article, Arab Jews – in this case the Libyans – seek their compensation without acrimony. In fact, it seems possible that such compensation might lead to an improved relationship between Arab Jews and their Muslim hosts – particularly as it comes to the current conflict with the Palestinians.

I would not think that an increased liberalism and tolerance towards Arabs filtered through the lens of Arab Jewish history – a variant on my “Levantine Option” idea – is what the Arutz Sheva people and the Right Wingers had in mind when they thought of how this might work itself out.

Thus, there is an ideological chasm between those who have tried to co-opt the issue of compensation for Arab Jews (and, of course, Arab Jews are not called by that name – they are called “Jews of Arab Lands”) and the actual Arab Jews themselves.

Going back to Shenhav’s argument, we see that once the genie is let out of the bottle, anything can happen. WOJAC was eventually dissolved because the “natives” saw it as an opportunity to articulate their own historical experiences – and their grievances against Israel – in ways that were never intended when Israeli bureaucrats created the organization.

This time around, the group that has been created to oversee the process, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), is not a quasi-governmental organization and is not at all accountable to the Arab Jews in the way that the Israeli government found itself embarrassed by the evolution of WOJAC. JJAC is in control of the process, even as the Libyan issue develops in ways that may not necessarily reflect the same viewpoint.

In the end, there is the JJAC orthodoxy, based on an Ultra-Zionist view of Arabs and there are the actual members of the Arab Jewish world. That the Arab Jews are weak and disorganized is a fact, but there is always the wild card of unintended consequences. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Italy: Compensate Libyan Jews
By: IsraelNN TV

Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi has succeeded in reaching a deal with the Italian government according to which Italy will compensate Libya for damages caused during the colonial period during the World War II era. Italy will pay Libya approximately 5 billion dollars over a period of 20 years.
Following this agreement the World Organization of Libyan Jews decided that if Libyan Arabs deserve compensation, so do Libyan Jews. The organization sent a letter to the Italian president asking him to take the large Jewish community that lived in Libya during the time of Italian rule into account as well.
Meir Kachlon, Chairman of the World Organization of Libyan Jews told INNTV’s Teneh Samuel, “In the colonial period, the Italians cooperated with the Germans and so Libyan Jews suffered even more than the Arabs in every aspect, including pogroms and The Italians cooperated with the Germans, and so, the Libyan Jews suffered even more then the Arabs restrictions. In that time many Jewish girls were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, and all this happened especially in the time the Italians ruled there.”
Yosef Maimon, a signatory on the letter to the Italian President, explained, “More than 620 Libyan Jews were killed in the various camps in those days. Many were taken to Italy and died on the way to Bergen Belsen.”
“We think that the Italian government and Qaddafi owe us for the suffering and loss of property and lives,” stated Kachlon. “We strongly demand, this whether by ourselves or with the help of international authorities.”

The organization also called on Qaddafi to establish ties with the State of Israel. “Due to the fact that we are expatriates, speak the language and are even still connected with people in Libya, we offer Qaddafi the establishment of a group that will try to bring Libya closer to Israel. Libya presents itself as peace-seeking. They claim that they left terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. We say to Qaddafi: ‘If that’s true, let’s see you work on connections with Israel, we will help you normalize relations.’”

From Arutz Sheva, September 17, 2008

Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien. You must not be partial in judging: hear out the small and the great alike; you shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God’s.

Deuteronomy 1:16-17

The human mind may devise many plans, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will be established.

Proverbs 19:21

Pages turning
Pages torn and pages burning
Faded pages, open in the sun
Better bring your own redemption when you come
To the barricades of heaven where I’m from

Jackson Browne, “The Barricades of Heaven”

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused…

And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered.
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees.

But it’s all right, it’s all right
for we lived so well so long.

Still, when I think of the
road we’re traveling on,
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong.

Paul Simon, “American Tune”

As the Jewish High Holy days approach, I am reminded of a story that has stuck with me since I first learned it when I was a young boy. The story comes from the Hasidic tradition and it tells of a married couple who are preparing to go to Synagogue on Yom Kippur night. They have made arrangements to have their young child watched by a local girl, but as the time of the prayer comes nearer, the babysitter does not show up. The couple starts to become very worried: What will happen if they miss out on the most sacred night of the Jewish calendar? What will God think of them? How will they be able to face the other members of their community if they do not show up at their Synagogue on Yom Kippur night?

Tellingly, the couple decides to leave the baby alone in the house and take their chances.

They arrive in the Synagogue to a big hubbub. It seems that the sun is setting and the Grand Rabbi has still not arrived. The congregants wonder where the rabbi is and begin to worry about him. After much fretting, the Synagogue beadle leaves the hall to go look for the rabbi. Walking up and down the now-empty thoroughfares of the Shtetl, the beadle hears the cooing of a baby coming from an open window. Moving closer to the window, the beadle espies the Rebbe swaying in a rocking chair with the baby on his lap!

The beadle enters the dwelling and asks the Rebbe what is going on.

The Rebbe responds that as he was walking to Synagogue, he heard the cries of the baby and felt duty-bound to see what was happening. Upon discovering the apartment empty and the baby abandoned, he entered on his own volition to care for the child.

He states resolutely: “This is where God would expect me to be.”

Rather than sit at the head of the largest prayer service of the year, the Grand Rabbi elected to serve God by caring for a child – abandoned on the eve of the most Holy date of the Jewish calendar.

The reason I repeat this story is because it drives home the point that sincere monotheists believe: God is everywhere and all human beings – big or small – are made in the image of the Lord. God does not dwell in the Synagogue as if He was some magical spirit. The magnitude of God is beyond anything that human beings can imagine. What the Rebbe knew – and what most unthinking people do not – is that the way to serve God is to serve Man.

Behind the retelling of this story is my own personal story; something that over the past year has led me to abandon my Synagogue in order to try and deal with issues having to do with my own children.

As those who know me personally are by now aware, the work of the Center for Sephardic Heritage is filled with difficulties that many human beings could not bear. Little by little, it has become quite clear to me that the job of Sephardic Jewish renewal – the protection and dissemination of the classical Sephardic tradition – is one that must be accomplished by discipline and self-abnegation. Having begun this task many years ago, I had little idea how much pain would be involved in this undertaking.

But like the Rebbe who abandoned his pulpit in order to rock a little child to sleep and to protect it, I have understood all too well that the reality of God is one that is alienating when one lives in a culture of cruelty, hate and cynicism.

Just yesterday I was watching the movie version of Clifford Irving’s book “The Hoax.” Irving, for those who do not remember, was a struggling writer who decided that to succeed, he would have to come up with some great scam that would set the publishing world on fire. The scam he concocted was to pretend that he was on intimate terms with the notorious billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Irving sold a book project to McGraw-Hill that would present to the world Hughes’ personal memoir.

Irving played the scam to the hilt. Every time there appeared to be a snag in the road, he upped the ante on his lies and deceit. The web of lies became so gargantuan that Irving knew people would believe him. It seems that the bigger the lie, the more credulous people become because they would not dare to think that anyone would go to such extreme lengths to make a point.

But as we now know – and as Irving admitted – his project was to manipulate and alter reality to the point where nothing was what it seemed to be. Along the way, Irving ruined the lives of those around him. But while the scam was going on, he was what could be called a “Pious Degenerate.” Irving presented a public persona, a public image that was sanctimonious.

As portrayed by Richard Gere in the movie, Irving was always devoted to the purity of the lie; his demeanor and deportment was disciplined and precise. If one were to try to question Irving’s credibility, he would deploy his sanctimoniousness and raise the heat to a white-hot point.

Irving, of course, had many enablers. From the handwriting “experts” who affirmed the forgeries of Hughes’ writing as authentic way down to the person who cut the million dollar check in Howard Hughes’ name, only to re-cut the same check to the name of “H.R. Hughes” when Irving realized that he could not cash a check made out to “Howard Hughes.”

People believe what others want them to believe – when those others seek to appropriate the mechanisms of truth and to manipulate those “facts” to suit their own needs. This is the classically Greek understanding of the term “rhetoric” which is seen as the opposite of “reality.”

Extending this logic, in Judaism today there can be no expectation that in religious circles people actually believe in God. “Rhetoric” has replaced “reality.” Truth is subservient to an amoral expediency.

The very idea of repentance from sin goes back to the ways in which the great Sages, Hakhamim, sought to take the sacrificial system as practiced in the Jerusalem Temple and adapt it to a world that had no Sanctuary. In the Temple the guilty individual brought an animal as an expiatory offering that was slaughtered according to some very specific rules. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the Law had to account for new realities. There was no priest; no altar; no cleansing blood. All that we now had were words; words that became tangible in the dense textuality of the rabbinic tradition where prayer would replace blood.

The Hakhamim established that Jews were to beseech God with their words to forgive them of their ritual transgressions.

So far, so good.

But what of offenses between individuals?

In such cases, called in Hebrew ‘Aberot ben Adam le-Habero, transgressions between individuals, people were left without a liturgical system. So the Sages developed an idea that they called ‘Aseret Yemei Teshuba, the Ten Days of Repentance, which would be established to allow people to approach one another and request forgiveness.

The Ten Days of Repentance represent a massive advance in human civilization. Using the liturgical days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – commemorations that appear in the Bible – as parenthetical markers, the Sages marked the Ten Days of Repentance as a substantive expression of the values of humanity. According to the Sages, Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the Jewish calendar – only atones for ritual matters between Man and God. Individual human offenses are not expiated in the Kippur liturgy!

What an amazing idea.

What now comes to mind in the Jewish world that I live in is the sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy that remains a ubiquitous factor in our communities. As I have consistently argued, the Jewish world today is predicated along the Ashkenazi model where, in the words of Rabbi Jose Faur, irrational zeal for the Law has displaced respect for the learned traditions of our progenitors. I often hear that my attempt to restore the Sephardic tradition is impossible and that I should just throw in the towel.

Not having thrown in the towel, I can state clearly and unequivocally that the hatred for God and His Holy Law is now at an absolute peak. The movement known as The Maimonidean Controversy helped to suppress the old Andalusian traditions that were central to Sephardic civilization. Quoting Faur in his new book “The Horizontal Society”:

The triumph of the Church v. Galileo marked the end of Italian scientific thought until recent times. Anti-Maimonideans were not less successful. Their triumph marked the end of Jewish creative thought. It was not until modern times, when European universities opened their doors to Jews that Jewish genius flourished: invariably outside the Jewish quarters. Jewish inspectors of truth – or the “little foxes” – would not have permitted a Freud or an Einstein to flourish in their midst. Rabbis that dared to think suffered vicious persecution; e.g. Israel Moshe Hazzan, Elias Benamozegh, Isaac Abul’afya, Aaron b. Shim’on, et. al. (volume 1, p. 433)

Having now watched as my own life and my own family have been decimated by the liars and the evildoers, it has become all too clear to me that those who abide by the values of the Torah are sitting outside the Jewish Synagogue. Those sitting inside that Synagogue are wrapped in their piety and sanctimoniousness. They have marked themselves with the religious symbols of Judaism, even as they have in the inner sanctums of their wickedness elected to follow the ways of Satan and of inhumanity.

While watching Tyler Perry’s film “Daddy’s Little Girls” I was struck by an idea that has been known to me since I first saw Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” so many years ago: Our world is destroyed when those entrusted with enforcing the Law, choose to pervert it out of expediency. The expediency we are discussing here is the power that money brings to those who have it. At the very heart of evil in human history is the way in which money has served the powerful and enabled them to exert their tyranny over others.

In “Daddy’s Little Girls” we have a desperate father – someone who reminded me of myself – who is fighting the evils of money and power. Money buys the protection and support of the courts, where judges ignore the harsh reality of evil in the world, the evil of drug dealers and the evil of those who do violence – emotional and physical – to little children and to the weak. The frenzied father is forced to take the Law into his own hands – but of course we understand that the movie is a wish-fulfillment fantasy – real life is not so forgiving.

Polanski’s “Chinatown” ends with the triumph of evil as the rich and powerful rapist sees the woman he raped – his own daughter – shot and killed by the police and is left with his “other” “daughter” – the product of the incestuous rape that he perpetrated years before. Watching all this, a private investigator played by the great Jack Nicholson is left impotent as he sees the perversion of justice taking place right before his very eyes.

God gave to the Jews a set of Laws known as the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments. These Laws are the very foundation of Judaism. It is sad to say that those who have been entrusted to protect their communities using these Laws have now submitted to the lure of money and power. Like Clifford Irving, they have perpetrated a hoax of epic proportions. Enveloping themselves in the accoutrements of religion, such Pious Degenerates run their institutions according to the tenet of “Might makes Right.” The weak and the disenfranchised do not have a fighting chance.

You see, it is quite clear that the Jewish leaders in the world I live in do not believe in God – because if they did, they would have to – like the Rebbe of the Hasidic tale mentioned earlier – work to preserve the Laws and the values of God as expressed in the Torah. It is not possible for them to believe in God given that they so flagrantly disregard His Law.

These Laws are not obscure – the books that contain explanations of the Laws are quite plentiful and available in many places. It is not that the Laws are not known – it is that the Law is an inconvenient truth that serves to undermine the hoax being perpetrated on the public.

Religious hypocrisy is a form of dissimulation that depends on appropriating the rhetoric of authenticity – the outwardly visible symbols of Judaism – while abusing the very internal realities of the faith. When adultery, theft, immorality are promoted and protected as the values that such rabbis and leaders affirm, the situation of God’s place in this world is placed in jeopardy.

While watching Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with one of my intimate disciples who is deeply aware of the things and persons that have undermined my life, I remarked that Jefferson Smith took his profound belief in the American Scripture – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and reached out to God to affirm those sacred texts. In the end, Smith wins because America has remained true to those ideals. It has maintained a system of government that is predicated upon those documents.

But in the case of Judaism today, Torah is a relative matter.

Torah is, as Faur repeats ad nauseum in “The Horizontal Society,” now wrongly based on the private prerogative of the rabbi. There is no objective yardstick by which we are all measured. The Law is subjectivized and we are all left beholden to the corruption of a system that is run by the Pious Degenerates. The system is bought and sold to the highest bidder.

In order to ensure that change is off the table and the corrupt and venal status quo is maintained, voices of change are stifled and voices of compliance to the system as it is are lavished with material perks.

The system is self-censoring and has created a bubble of insularity where a plethora of voices and ideas are a priori rejected and where information generated outside the enchanted sphere of the bubble is ignored. Repentance within the Law is limited to those who are recognized as legitimate members of the bubble-world. Those outside the bubble are completely exposed to the most venal attacks and to an immoral treatment that is meted out to those considered “aliens.”

Such is a Jewish world of dissimulation, hypocrisy and illusions of tradition.

For Jews who still remain committed to the truth and to justice, the depredations of those who hold the strings of power are often too much to bear. The temptation to become degenerate is powerful. When you see others “getting away with it” and those committed to their integrity and dignity struggling mightily just to hold on to their lives, the rational thing to do is to go along with whatever gives you the least resistance.

But this Faustian bargain is the confirmation of Pious Degeneracy. It is an affirmation that God is dead and that justice is out of reach. As I discussed in my earlier essay on “Gaslighting,” those who hold to the truth and to justice now find themselves locked out of the system. We have been “gaslighted” by the Pious Degenerates.

But we can profitably recall the image of that great Rebbe who defied the expectations of his congregation – who thought that God could only be worshipped in the Synagogue – and did the simplest thing that he could do: Hearing the cries of a child, he heard the voice of the Lord and acted accordingly.

Those who would deny the cries of a child are not human beings.

Those who try to pass themselves off as Pious as they allow the cries to continue, are Degenerates. In spite of the fact that they themselves may not have caused those awful, piercing cries of the child, they live as witnesses to the pain of a child in need. It is most certainly true that those who have inflicted that pain are most to blame, but when crimes committed in so public a fashion are rationalized by those in power, the will of God is thwarted and Religious Hypocrisy triumphs.

Repentance is the option that Man has to mark his failings and to restore justice to the world. While God watches silently from on high, Man is left with the possibility of personal redemption. Looking at the history that Sephardim have had to face, the collateral damage left at the side of the road has led to a vicious circle. Those who have tried to break us out of the vicious circle are the ones who have most often been forced to pay the impossible cost demanded by the Pious Degenerates.

Towards the end of Ariel Sabar’s extraordinarily compelling retelling of his family’s history in Iraqi Kurdistan, he makes a brilliant observation that encapsulates his tale and is emblematic of the broken stories of so many Middle Eastern Jews. Recalling his father’s feverish memories of his fractured past; a past of rich traditions that were destroyed over the course of successive exiles, he states:

Dreams, I recalled now, had long been a refuge from his life’s incongruities. During his first year in the United States, he once told me, he dreamed he was in New York, all alone in Grand Central Station. All at once, the train doors swept open and all of Zakho’s Kurds poured out onto the platform. Dreams were a place where fragments could be made whole. (pp. 278-279)

These are the dreams, lost and found and then lost once again, that haunt our people. Having abandoned our ancestral homes in the Middle East , we were caught between the hate of an Arab world that treated us in our final years as unwelcome interlopers in a place where we had lived for centuries and the European racism of an Israel which insisted that we were mindless illiterates who had no culture or breeding.

The net effect of this double exile – the exile from the Arab world and the exile from our Israeli “homeland” – has de-centered us from the traditions and stories of the past and led to a lamentable internalization of that corrosive racism. Young Sephardim from the earliest stages of the exile – from the early part of the 20th century until today – have turned their backs on their stories, their names and their human realities.

In describing this aspect of our history as it related to the author’s father Yona Sabar, we read about the importance of names:

When a Kurdish family went out for a stroll, they didn’t walk in a bunch. They sorted themselves into a single-file line, a moving, horizontal totem pole. The eldest male led, followed by the eldest son, then the wife and the younger children. With Sara ahead of her mother and Yona behind with the youngest siblings, the column had fallen out of alignment. It was not a complete accident. Yona had dreaded joining his father at the front of the line that night. But something about this foolish clapping at cars deepened his feeling that he had to tell his father now, that he had good reason for his plan of action. He had grown tired of the Ana Kurdi jokes that tarred people from Zakho as bumpkins. But there was a grain of truth in them, wasn’t there? Walk through Katamonim and you could see for yourself. All you had to do was watch children applauding some jalopy as though it were a rocket to the moon.

He had gone over the talk many times in is head, softening the edges so it would do the least damage when it slid into his father’s heart. I love and honor my family very much, especially you and Saba Ephraim. But I am finishing the army now and preparing for college. I have to think about the future. Many of my friends have wanted to become real Israelis. And the way they have done that is with a new last name, an Israeli name. (p. 143)

The name-changing is a sign of a much larger problematic that Ariel Sabar has to deal with in his book: It is cowardice that has served to eviscerate an entire culture; a culture that is not, as we see so clearly in this rich work of reclamation, a monolingual entity, but a broad tapestry of interwoven languages and cultures that represented the larger Middle Eastern civilization.

You see, the main theme of My Father’s Paradise is the way in which the author’s father reclaimed his native Aramaic language and presented it in the face of an uncaring and largely apathetic world.

Unlike the vast majority of Arab Jewish communities from the onset of Islam many centuries ago, the Kurdish Jews clung tenaciously to a language that once served as the lingua franca of the region. After the near-universal adoption of Arabic as the language of civilization, those who lived in the mountainous region that is joined by the modern states of Turkey, Syria , Iran and Iraq continued to speak and write and think in the language of Jesus and of the Talmud.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

The internal problematic of the Arab Jewish community is one of self-loathing; of dreams that have been shattered and left inert. It struck me as I was reading this extraordinary book that its author lacks the “normal” Sephardic trajectory. He has abandoned Jewish praxis and is not a part of the organic Jewish community. His profession as a journalist is not one that is common to the members of our communities. But these two anomalies – his lack of formal Jewish identity and his training as a reporter – both serve him well in this case. It is sad to have to say it, but My Father’s Paradise is itself an anomaly among books written about the Middle Eastern Jewish experience.

While it is indeed true that in recent years we have been blessed to have excellent memoirs written by truly gifted people like Nissim Rejwan and Sasson Somekh and a more recent addition from Violette Shamash that was edited as a labor of love by her daughter and son-in-law, we almost completely lack third-party narratives from the children and grandchildren of the protagonists. The recent work of Lucette Lagnado tells the commonplace story of a bourgeois Arab Jew with all the attendant attention paid to the sort of details that speak of the intimate lives of people, but does not really provide for us the intimate struggle with history and culture that the memoirs give us.

My Father’s Paradise is a breakthrough work that provides the reader with a well-researched history of Kurdish Jewry intertwined with an intimate family saga, laid out in episodic fashion, overlaid with a critical eye towards the erosion of history and the ways in which history shapes who we are as human beings.

It is a work that could not have been written by someone who is now a part of the Sephardic community for reasons that I have continually discussed in my own writing. The disdain for our history and culture has reached a point of no return. The ways in which history has been wrenched out of its context and distorted has served to suppress the truths of a past that is increasingly distant and out of reach.

By working contrapuntally and in defiance of the norms of the Sephardic world, Ariel Sabar brings back to mind the Hasidic tale that is retold at the very close of Gershom Scholem’s magisterial study Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the subject itself retrofitting nicely back into the spiritual world of the author’s great-grandfather Ephraim Beh Sabagha:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer – and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers – and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient: and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he had told had the same effect as the actions of the other three. (p. 350)

Here we have the devotion of the rawi, the story-teller whose very life-blood is the tale:

Now, though, I was handing my father what I thought was a gift: the chance to make Zakho real. We could repair our relationship over cups of cardamom tea at cafés by the Habur River. We could walk together through streets of the old Jewish neighborhood, summoning the spirits of our ancestors. (p. 267)

This passion for telling stories is not merely some vain concern, but cuts to the very heart of the author’s belief system:

What was real were the stories of my father’s boyhood in Kurdistan. What gripped the rabbi and the worshipers that day were his ties to the Jews exiled to Assyria some three thousand years earlier. This was the original Judaism. This was flesh-and-blood history. This, I felt, was the covenant. (p. 257)

Under the “Field of Dreams”-like overlay that Sabar sets out here is a rather complex web of emotional, intellectual and psychological elements that make My Father’s Paradise a singular work of Middle Eastern Jewish history.

The book is structured in neat blocks that stack up through the breaks of history, what Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi has discussed in the final lecture of his classic work Zakhor:

Perhaps the time has come to look more closely at the ruptures, breaches, breaks, to identify them more precisely, to see how Jews endured them, to understand that not everything of value that existed before a break was either salvaged or metamorphosed, but was lost, and that often some of what fell by the wayside can become, through our retrieval, meaningful to us. (p. 101)

While it is clear that Yerushalmi writes from within a hyper-modern Eurocentric perspective which valorizes the very mechanisms that ghettoized and stigmatized the family history of the Beh Sabaghas, we can appropriate his idea and see in it a way to subvert and undermine the standard Jewish narrative and deconstruct its assumptions in ways that defy the exoticization of the Oriental. And it is here that Ariel Sabar’s outsider status in the Jewish world is most valuable.

In reconstructing the colorful and kaleidoscopic world of the Kurdish Jews at the time of Ephraim Beh Sabbagh, Sabar utilizes the values of the historical community:

The Beh Sabaghas were not nobodies. Their reputation, if you could call it that, was for spirituality. Not piety, mind you. But spirituality, a self-styled mysticism that derived from Ephraim’s overnight prayer vigils at the synagogue. Some townspeople claimed to overhear him conversing with angels. Others – Rahamim laughed when he thought about it – just shook their heads at the blue smudges on the pages of the prayer books and wondered why the man didn’t scrub his hands harder after his long days in the dye shop. His father was perhaps the only merchant in Kurdistan who stuffed books into his donkey’s saddlebags on peddling trips through the mountain villages. (p. 29)

The portrait of Ephraim Beh Sabagha is one of majesty and an awesome grandeur. This is a post-Zionist assessment of a man who would later be a shameful reminder of a world that would be best forgotten. Even today, young Jews would seek to dissect the person of such a man, a humble textile dyer and pious mystic, and determine what kind of Jew he was and what kind of human being he was. Rather than letting the traditional culture of the region determine such things, we are all too quick to act in a judgmental fashion about our progenitors by trying to impose our values and our way of seeing things on them.

And our own pitiful shame is that in being cynical about our progenitors we miss the moral genius and the human brilliance of who they were. Ephraim was a man who stood for the highest devotion to the principles of Religious Humanism: he was a firm believer in the ways of God and the laws of our tradition. He was a very special man who was beloved in his society who never relinquished his deep and abiding love and concern for his fellow human beings.

Tellingly, this was a culture where humanity was prized:

In the mountains, hundreds of miles from the religious fanaticism and nationalist movements of the big cities, the Kurdish Jews faced almost none of the virulent anti-Semitism that hounded Jews in Europe or even, to a far, lesser extent, in Baghdad. They went to work, prayed to a Jewish God, and spoke their own language without major disruption for some twenty-seven hundred years.

Seclusion bred fraternity. Muslim, Jew, and Christian suffered alike through the region’s cruel cycles of flood, famine and Kurdish tribal bloodshed. They prospered alike when the soil yielded bumper crops of wheat, gall nuts, and fragrant tobacco. In important ways, they were Kurds first and Muslims, Christians, or Jews second. Muslims sent Jews bread and milk after Passover. They ate matzoh, which they called “holiday bread,” as a delicacy. They sent their Jewish neighbors hot tea during the Sabbath, when Jews were forbidden to light fires. Some Muslims even asked the synagogue keeper to wake them early in the days before Yom Kippur: They viewed early rising on Jewish days of penitence as bringing good luck. And the Jews paid back the respect, forgoing cigarettes, for instance, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims may not smoke. (p. 69)

Zakho in Kurdistan was a place where people acted as civilized human beings and where the rhythms of life were infused into a society that respected the person of the individual. Ephraim was a holy man and a towering figure in his society.

But the times would change – for the worse. After the violence of the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad , the climate for the Jews of the region would deteriorate. The young people began to think of emigration while their elders tried to hang onto to what was left after Iraqi society turned against the Jews. As this complex turn of events was happening, there was little sense that Israel would not become a welcoming home to the immigrants.

But the reality of immigration to Israel from the Arab world was fraught with contradictions and complications:

Not surprisingly, the crusaders for a Jewish state were European intellectuals embittered by failed dreams of assimilation. Budapest-born Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, wrote his manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) after covering the Dreyfus trial as a correspondent…

Of the 480,000 Jews who immigrated to Palestine during the twenty-eight year British Mandate, some 90 percent were European. Herzl envisioned the future state of Israel as a kind of Vienna on the Jordan, complete with circuses, theaters, opera houses, and café-lined boulevards. The ideas of these early leaders, however resonant in Eastern Europe, would have struck the Jews of Zakho as outright bizarre.

The wider welcome mat for European Jews was not simply the result of fraternity among countrymen. Behind it lurked the belief that the Mizrahi Jews, the ones from Islamic lands, detracted from the dreams of a Viennese-style Paradise. What to do with them was debated at the highest levels of academia and politics. (p. 100)

So in spite of the complex feelings of hope for young men like Yona Beh Sabagha, the future of life in a Jewish state was not what it was cracked up to be.

And in swift fashion, the Kurdish Jews were relegated to the bottom of the Israeli ladder:

The Israeli absorption agency had settled the Sabaghs in Talpiot, a sprawling ma’abara, or immigrant shanty town, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The ma’abarot were Israel’s solution to its immigrant housing crisis and would soon become an embarrassing symbol of the state’s lack of preparation for its heavily trumpeted “ingathering of exiles.” Row after unrelieved row of tents — and later, corrugated tin sheds — was erected atop bare ground on more than one hundred hardscrabble tracts from the Galilee region in the north to the Negev desert in the south. The teeming settlements were often at a remove from the town and city centers where the new immigrants might actually find jobs, integrate into neighborhoods, or even catch a regularly scheduled bus. Isolated in wastelands of flimsy housing far from the institutions that had lured the immigrants to Israel in the first place, the ma’abarot became fertile ground for sudden epidemics, vermin, illicit markets for stolen goods, and sometimes explosive tensions among groups of immigrants with differing customs and languages. (p. 112)

It would not be long before many of the older immigrants – including the patriarch Ephraim – would lose all hope of their future and just give up and die.

But in this new world we see Yona and his siblings succeed where their parents and grandparents could not:

Yona’s siblings had lived up to his expectations in almost every way. Sara had graduated from high school and was eager to leave the strictures of home. She was soon off to a teachers’ college and an army hitch teaching immigrant school kids in Kiryat Gat, an hour and a half from Jerusalem. Avram was blossoming into the strapping young man who would one day join the Israeli Army’s elite paratroopers. Shalom won a citywide academic contest and, as his reward, a Hebrew translation of Louis E. Lomax’s The Negro Revolt. (p. 173)

Thus began the process that would eat away at the engine of the past. Like many other immigrants from the Arab-Muslim world, the now-rechristened Sabars held their progenitors at bay while acclimating and adapting to the new Zionist realities. It is important to keep this in mind when considering the future of Yona Sabar whose entry into the upper levels of Israeli society was achieved through the paradox of his Aramaic proficiency. Indeed, it was the intellectual and academic classes that ushered Yona into an exclusively European world where a language little-known and in its death-throes would become his meal-ticket.

After having won a prestigious prize named after former Israel president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, himself an eccentric devotee of Arab Jewish culture, Yona begins on the path to academic prominence. He applies to and is accepted into Yale’s Near Eastern Studies department as a doctoral candidate. He succeeds there and eventually marries an American Jewish girl and gets a teaching position at UCLA.

It is here that we first meet Ariel as a teenager, one who could care less about his father’s work:

Looking back on it now, I see it was a cold war. I never hit my father. I never ran away from home or told him I hated him. I never said I blame you for my olive skin, my hair, my name. I never said, directly, I am embarrassed by your bad haircuts and the funny way you speak English. I didn’t know how to confront my feelings that directly. So instead, I swore horribly in front of him, ridiculed him behind his back, and took pains to avoid him, to be nothing like him. (p. 234)

So we see two lives – Ariel and Yona’s – that are lived in separate tracks. Yona becomes an esteemed authority on a language that is little known either inside or outside the academy. In many ways the project that Yona Sabar took on was to restore not only the linguistic traditions of Zakho, but to bring the human civilization of Kurdish Jews back to the world. From his earliest interviews at the Hebrew University recording a storyteller named Mamo Yona Gabbay to his participation in an episode of the TV show “The X Files,” Yona carried the torch for this culture in a way that is unique and admirable.

Like any great yarn, Ariel returns to his father’s Kurdish world by proposing a trip back to Zakho and even to attempt to find Yona’s long-lost sister who as an infant was given to a Muslim wet-nurse who absconded without returning the baby.

We must keep in mind not only the sea-change in Ariel’s own consciousness, but the massive changes that were taking place in Iraq at the very time a few years ago when he proposed the book project and began to work on it.

From the past history of Zakho to the immigration to Israel and on to Yona’s move to America, we now square the circle and are returned to the proverbial scene of the crime. The idea of returning to a now war-torn land is something that gives the book’s final section a sense of drama that becomes tied to the existential complexity that has occasioned the book in the first place.

My Father’s Paradise thus closes on a note of deep conflict and the ways in which that conflict plays itself out and is to some extent resolved. As I said earlier, Ariel Sabar as a young man was deeply ashamed of his immigrant father and the cacophony of his Aramaic language. In this sense there are parallels between Ariel, his own father Yona and to a lesser extent his grandfather Rahamim. Each member of the three generations sought to break from their immediate past(s) and strike out on their own. But it was in the figure of Yona that the past reared its ugly head most pronouncedly.

The academic work of Yona Sabar has manifested itself in a book-lengthy study of Kurdish Jewish folklore culled from the many hours of interviews that he did over many years of arduous work and in a dictionary of the language published in 2002. It would not be an understatement to say that Yona Sabar – the hero of his son’s brilliant book – is a monumental figure in the contemporary intellectual history of the Middle Eastern Jews. He has almost single-handedly brought his community’s culture to the public square and has been a tireless champion of its civilization.

It is thus gratifying that after many years of cynicism, apathy and disdain – the standard lament of the contemporary Sephardim – Ariel Sabar has sought to lionize his father by elevating Yona’s often obscure academic work and presenting it in a deftly readable and emotionally rewarding book.

My Father’s Paradise is that rarest of things: A book written out of a sense of pure devotion and love of tradition that serves the average reader with a rich smorgasbord of memorable characters and stories. It will enchant and enlighten the reader at the same time. It is a book that is to be cherished and savored for its wonderful portrayal of a community whose history has been largely forgotten; a community that is part of the natural landscape of our Middle Eastern world.

In a marvelously fluid prose style, Sabar details the history and the culture of a society that is most definitely worth knowing. It is not merely another Middle Eastern Jewish memoir/history that recounts what we already know in a straightforward fashion. It is a work where fragments are indeed made whole.

Because Sabar is not himself a primary player in the history of Zakho’s Jewish community, he is able to look back at the past with both a loving and a critical eye and make the past not only come alive for us, but shows us the ways in which that past can still have meaning for us, as it has for him. His is not merely the dispassionate voice of the historian or the incestuous voice of the family chronicler showing off his relations like some tiresome and maddening tourist dusting off their holiday photos.

My Father’s Paradise is equally a work of cultural reclamation and historical investigation. It is in this sense a very rare and precious commodity: In a world of Sephardic exotic ephemera lost in a sea of Ashkenazi-centrism, the book plays the role of a primary source of information that is as lively as it is informative.

We should applaud such an achievement and hope that it is able to find a wide readership. Given its reader-friendly style and the critical information that it imparts, My Father’s Paradise is a masterwork that should be added to all our libraries.

Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Ed Koch, Alfred Kazin.

Katz’s Deli, Zabar’s, Pastrami Sandwiches, Lox and Bagels, Matzoh Ball Soup, Chopped Liver, Gefilte Fish.

The Lower East Side.

All one big Ashkenazi world.

I was once told a story by Mickey Kairey, one of the patron saints of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, that by now I have repeated many times, about his father’s experience on the Lower East Side in the first part of the 20th century. Mickey’s father was praying in an Ashkenazi minyan and was asked by the man sitting next to him, “Are you Jewish?” Mr. Kairey was praying donned in his tallit and tefillin and thought it a strange question. The “Are you Jewish?” question is a ubiquitous one among many Ashkenazi Jews – especially the Orthodox – and speaks to a sense of ethno-cultural prejudice that is endemic to the Ashkenazi condition. People are seen in gradations of ethnic acceptability: the Ashkenazi-Yiddish identity is central and all else is simply a drifting away from the core. Mr. Kairey made the mistake of not being able to speak Yiddish and was marked as suspect when it came to being a Jew. In fact, it should be remembered that the Yiddish language was even called “Jewish” by its native speakers.

Now in Israel , this idea that Ashkenazi culture is transcendent in the socio-political sense is one that is clear and needs little commentary. But in America , there is still the pretense that Jews – especially the fabled “New York Jew” – are filled with love and tolerance of their fellow Man.

So when I received the new catalog of events from the 92nd Street Y – it does not get more “New York Jew” than that – I carefully filtered out these Ashkenazi prejudices which are often thought by many to be a product of my own imagination.

Before I begin my argument, I should note that many events in the Y’s program series contain a plethora of non-Jewish figures. From the New York Mets’ Keith Hernandez to the African-American academic Cornel West to famed folksinger Joan Baez to Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to media celebrity Martha Stewart, the Y has diversity seemingly covered. It is just that this “diversity” is of a very specific kind; a “diversity” that excludes two critical components – Sephardim and Arabs.

While it is not always easy to prove a negative – that Sephardim and Arabs are not welcome in this place of “civilization” – I will try and outline what seems to me to be an ideological bias that speaks to the current condition of the “Jewish” condition here in America.

The central event of the massive series of programs is a day-long tribute to the Holocaust survivor and Ashkenazi activist Elie Wiesel (10/2/08). I cannot add much to the reams of material that has been written about Wiesel, who represents so perfectly the problem at hand. Wiesel is a humanitarian whose work is predicated on a single issue – the suffering of the Jews of Europe. Very often he uses this suffering as a means to comment on other events where his moral stance is taken as sacrosanct. As has been noted, Wiesel is quite vociferous on the issue of Zionism and Israel, and rarely, if ever, comments on Jewish violence against Arabs. His voice is perfectly attuned to the orthodoxies and rigid ideological posture of the Jewish community that maintains an almost complete silence about the Palestinian Arabs and their travails. Wiesel has been out front on Darfur and other tragedies in our time, but has remained silent on the Middle East conflict out of his own sense of personal Jewish loyalty. In other words, making a moral stand is acceptable, so long as that stand does not apply to your own community – the very thing Wiesel insistently demands of non-Jews.

There is precious little balance in terms of the Israel-Palestine matter on the program for the season: Rabbi Michael Lerner (10/30) and Gershom Gorenberg (2/5) appear to be the only critical voices that will be heard in the series. Not a single Arab or Palestinian voice is to be allowed into the discourse. From Right Wing ideologues like Bret Stephens and Abe Foxman (3/24) to Ed Koch (10/30) to Cynthia Ozick (10/29) to more moderate Zionists like Aaron David Miller (5/7) and a panel on the new liberal lobbying group J Street (3/16), the basic idea is to appear to be presenting a wide-range of ideas, but in reality only affirmations of Israel will be presented. It is important to note that Gorenberg will be presenting in a series on the media and Rabbi Lerner will be part of a four-person panel where he will likely be the only participant critical of Israel in any way. And by no means should we think that Rabbi Lerner’s voice can truly represent a Palestinian vision, even if it is sympathetic to that position.

Most importantly, the series will have two programs that deal with the hysteria over Israel and the sense of embattlement that is a central part of Zionist thinking at present. There will be (12/8) the now-obligatory panel discussion of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses – a panel loaded with Right Wing ideologues including a member of the U.S. Congress. There will be another panel called “Why Zionism has Become a Dirty Word” (3/24) that will in effect be another uncritical look at the current situation in the Middle East.

And here we must look at the program series specifically addressed to discuss Middle East issues. “Middle East Struggle” begins (9/16) with a program on Islam being given by an Ashkenazi rabbi named Reuven Firestone who is certainly not a Muslim. More to the point, the program continues with one of the only two programs that overtly deal with Sephardic Jews. Michael Fischbach (11/18), the author of a controversial study regarding the issue of Jewish financial claims against Arab countries, continues the negative basis upon which contemporary Jews deal with the Arab world. It is important to note – as we have when dealing with this subject – that the institutional and conceptual structure of this issue has been designed and thought out in an Ashkenazi context with Ashkenazim running the show and the Arab Jews simply playing their assigned role, having no real voice or decision-making role in the process. Native Sephardic approaches are either rejected, or calibrated to fit the Ashkenazi model that relies on a deep antipathy and hostility towards the Arabs.

Moving forward in this series we have a program on Radical Islam (12/1) co-moderated by Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens (the first of his two appearances at the Y this season) and finally a panel on Jewish philanthropy and Israel ’s Arab minority (3/3).

As one can easily see, the series is weighted towards pro-Israel commentators, with those who would be considered critical of Israel definitely in the minority. But what is most important for the political aspect of the discussion is that there is not a single Arab Muslim listed in any of the events on the 92nd Street Y calendar. This would mean, I think it is fair to say, that those attending the events will not get any alternative perspective from the “other” side. I note here the presence of two non-Arab Muslims on the schedule. Both Fareed Zakaria (10/15) and Azar Nafisi (1/6), moderate Muslim secularists, have been welcomed into the discourse as benign commentators who do not espouse any views that would be deemed by mainstream Jews as controversial or unacceptable.

Finally, we must well-note the ubiquitous presence of the Ashkenazi Arabic speaker Noah Feldman (9/11) who seems to “represent” Arabs for the Jewish community (and even for the U.S. government as Feldman has famously written the Iraqi constitution in the wake of the American-led invasion). Feldman may well be a “moderate” on many issues, but the fact that he remains an Ashkenazi Jew should not in any way blind us from the role he is deployed to play as “spokesman” for Arab concerns.

Now back to Sephardim.

The only real time the word “Sephardi” appears in the catalog is in a lecture called “Diversity, Dissent and Disunity” (12/8) given by someone called Rabbi David Kalb in a series on Jewish extremism. (For the sake of completeness I should point to the trivial use of the word buried in the blurb to a program on a Mexican film called “Like a Bride” (9/24) which is listed in the “Exploring Jewish Communities” series. The program is to be moderated by an Ashkenazi named Edna Eizenberg and the blurb for the film asks, “How do you grow up Jewish in a Hispanic culture?”)

Are we to take it that the use of the term “Sephardi” is itself – as many Ashkenazim would have it – a divisive element in contemporary Jewish discourse? The answer would seem to be in the affirmative as the only legitimate “Sephardi” program on the entire 92nd Street Y calendar – a program moderated by Arab Jews – is a screening of “The Last Jews of Libya” (3/15) which, as we have previously discussed, continues to fit into the larger anti-Arab paradigm that is being reflected in the aforementioned Michael Fischbach lecture. The “ Libya ” film is less a celebration of a rich and prolific Jewish past, and more about anti-Jewish sentiment in an Arab country that is shown as having persecuted Jews for many centuries.

In a Jewish world that is very often hypersensitive about “positive” portrayals of Jews and Jewish concerns, it is curious that the only way in which Sephardic Jewish history can be discussed is through its most negative and fatalistic elements. The history of the Sephardim is filtered through the Zionist lens where its sad trajectory leads to the triumphal return to the ancestral homeland and a glorious exodus from a hateful and corrosive Arab world – a place where we never really belonged in the first place.

Apropos of this point, the only lecture on a Sephardic figure in the series is on Maimonides (12/15), the Sephardi-Egyptian rabbi, which is being given by Edward Hoffman. The program listing does not mark Maimonides as Sephardi or Egyptian. We can safely assume that the larger political implications of the Arab Jewish question, elided throughout the event calendar, will not be given any role in this program.

Two lectures in the series are worth noting from a Sephardic perspective. The Sephardic academic James Kugel will be presenting a lecture on his recent book on the Bible (12/9). But Kugel’s lecture is not thematically Sephardic and he himself is not often noted as being Sephardic – given his Ashkenazi-sounding name (even though many of us know him as “Kaddouri”). And in the Literature series Peter Cole will be interviewed by Daniel Septimus (12/2). In the blurb for the Cole program, there is a brief mention of the work he has done in “Medieval” literature – the word “Sephardic” is left absent even as Cole’s work is exclusively in that area – and in “Hebrew” literature – even though Cole’s innovative publishing initiative Ibis Editions has also released many works translated from the Arabic and sees itself as an inclusive entity bridging the many cultures of Israel/Palestine.

The one brief mention of Arab culture in the entire series is a program on Egypt (3/18) that is listed in a larger series on Africa . I note that in this Egypt program – the presenter’s name is not listed – the novel The Yacoubian Building will be discussed. While the countries of North Africa will also be represented in this series, no mention of their Arab identity is provided.

So after carefully reviewing many of the relevant events in the massive series that is the 92nd Street Y’s ongoing cultural and intellectual programming, we see that the voices of Arabs – Jewish and Muslim – are left missing in action.

In my opinion this state of affairs represents a profound dilemma for the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world.

There is a formal pretense of diversity, but when more closely examined, this purported diversity is only masking a much more profound sense of cultural isolation, especially when it comes to the two most pressing issues in Jewish civilization – that of the Middle East conflict and that of internal Jewish pluralism. I have not even elected to enter into the part of the 92nd Street Y catalog that treats Jewish matters like prayer, Torah and Jewish life-cycle events. In these cases the events are all completely run and conceived within an Ashkenazi framework by Ashkenazim. In the context of Jewish life there are no Sephardim just as there are no Arabs in the context of the Middle East conflict.

If my “Levantine Option” framework is to have any saliency within the larger Jewish community, it would be necessary for this issue of diversity to be addressed.

When Sephardic Jews are exclusively represented in largely negative ways as if they lacked agency and an intellectual culture of their own, the corollary of a negative stance towards Arabs in general makes a good deal of sense. But here we can clearly see that there is simply no effort being made by the Ashkenazi community – the fabled “New York Jews” – to look outside itself. Sure, there is Toni Morrison and there is Mario Cuomo, but inside Judaism, where it truly counts, there is no good-faith attempt to deal with the endemic racism and insular pathology of an Ashkenazi world that wants to be catered to on its own terms. Jewish advocacy means falling in line with the orthodoxies of Ashkenazi thinking and remaining completely silent on the larger cultural issues that plague the Jewish world.

If we are to preach diversity in the Jewish community, that community must allow those with alternative views to be a part of the discourse. It is not enough to say that certain issues will be discussed – by Ashkenazim – even though the primary actors in those events will not have their voices heard.

In the epigram to his famous work Orientalism – a work that continues to remain off limits in most sectors of the Jewish world – the Palestinian scholar Edward Said uses a quote from Karl Marx (an Ashkenazi Jew!) that states of the colonized: “They cannot represent themselves – they must be represented.” Here too in our reading of a seemingly benign document like the 2008-2009 program catalog of the 92nd Street Y – a fairly accurate barometer of where Jews are at the moment – we see that the Sephardic Jews and the Arab Muslims are to be represented by others and not offered the opportunity to speak for themselves.

For those who continue to see the New York Jews as a “liberal” community, this reading points to the racism and ethnocentrism that such Jews would much prefer to have swept under the carpet. To show the New York Jew as someone who is unconcerned with critical reflection and tolerance for others is something that is quite unthinkable. And yet regarding the most explosive issues for the Jewish community at the present moment, the 92nd Street Y remains a reactionary institution which sets out the agenda for the larger world as it relates to Jews and Jewish concerns.

When non-Jews look to invite Jews to their events, the Jews are chosen from within this racist construct. If we look more carefully at the composition of panels at Peace conferences, we will see that Sephardim are not welcome. In addition, in many of the so-called “dialogue” programs there is a preponderance of non-Arab Muslims and a neutered discussion of Islam in general rather than a more nuanced and specific discussion of Islam, not as a religion, but as a civilization.

To better grasp the enormity of this racism, simply replace the term “Arab” with the term “African-American” and you will get the idea. It would be totally inconceivable to have non-Blacks speaking for the Black community. The outcry would be deafening because of the many advocacy groups representing the African-American community.

So too we constantly hear demands for Jewish representation from the very same Ashkenazi groups that have locked out the Sephardim and the Arabs!

“The Levantine Option” is thus stymied on the Jewish side by Ashkenazi racism and ethnocentrism and on the Arab side by a forced acquiescence to the Ashkenazi paradigms that we have seen so clearly in the 92nd Street Y catalog.

Over and over it is the same tired voices and the same failed approaches that are trotted out in conferences and events all over the world. More fruitful collaboration between Sephardic Jews native to the Middle East who maintain their ties to Arab civilization and the Arabs of the Middle East are not actualized because of the discursive calamity that has been demanded by an Ashkenazi-only policy.

For any real progress to be made, we first have to acknowledge that this Ashkenazi intolerance exists and then find substantial ways to remedy it. If this discursive impasse is not remedied, we will continue to find ourselves caught in the perennial vicious cycle of mutual incomprehension and intolerance; toxic elements that have led to endless violence and socio-political dysfunction. Given the continued absence of new possibilities that have been knowingly blocked off from the agenda by Jewish institutions run by Ashkenazim, there is little hope that we will ever be able to solve the intractable problems that face the Jewish community at present.

Since the emergence of multiple Diasporas over the course of two millennia Jews have found themselves assimilating in various degrees to the cultures of their adopted homelands. While the Jewish religion contains many proscriptions regarding ritual life and the details of human behavior, there is a tremendous amount of cultural variation that Jewish law does not speak to.

Jews, for instance, are required to maintain laws of ritual purity when it comes to food that may be eaten and even how that food might be prepared. But nowhere in the Kosher laws does it state how the permissible food may be combined. There are no recipes for Kosher food that are mandated, no ways to require that once a food product is deemed fit to determine its proper use in a specific way.

The same value applies to language use. Jews in their sojourns through places all over the world have been successful in maintaining and propagating the study of Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, and yet we know that within the two major Jewish sub-ethnic culture blocks, the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi, there have been a number of languages that have served as vernaculars – not supplanting Hebrew, but adding to it. These languages, Yiddish for the Ashkenazim, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish for the Sephardim, have themselves taken on a quasi-sacred status. These languages, and I would include Greek and Aramaic here from earlier stages of the Jewish history, served as conduits for many unlettered Jews to understand the language of Scripture as they all at one time or another have served to render the Bible in the vernacular.

Indeed, today we see the almost complete anglophonization of Western Jewry with English becoming a major force in Jewish expression. In the 19th century we saw the same thing taking place among German-speaking Jews who produced a major Bible translation, done by Martin Buber and Franz Rosezweig. This sense of cultural assimilation through translation has been one of the major elements of Jewish life in the Diaspora. The tradition of translation goes back to the earliest Aramaic renditions of the Bible, continued with the Greek Septuagint, peaking with the pioneering translations of Se’adya Ga’on into Arabic and on through history.

Judaism has from its very inception not been averse to finding ways to bring its native Hebraic culture into line with other non-Hebrew cultures and to find ways to exchange its ideas and texts with non-Jews.

Ethnic identification is a complex yet completely transparent thing. There are cultural ties, religious ties and other ties such as class and gender that make up the various parts of an individual’s relationship with his or her surroundings.

Jews throughout history have taken on as a moniker the name of their lands of birth or adopted homelands as a way to identify their culture. In spite of the fact that Jewish life was displaced into Europe after the dispersion from Roman Palestine, there was an identification of Jews as European that has gone on to this day. Jews were not native to Europe and yet such a term is widely used without objection. This was early on codified by the term “Ashkenazi” which is a Biblical identification that was utilized to apply in a wide sense to Jews who had gone from the Middle East to the European continent. The term “Ashkenazi” was then used to apply to the cultural traditions of its adherents. Specific rabbinic schools and ways of learning were associated with the term Ashkenazi Jew.

So too did there emerge the term “Sephardi” in the wake of the efflorescence of Jewish cultural life in Islamic Spain. Though Jews had lived in Visigothic Spain, there was no type of Hispano-Jewish culture that could be seen as unique. But with the development of Jewish life in a pointed way after the Arab conquest of Spain a sense of something special was noted and identified. This term “Sephardic,” another Biblicism, spread throughout the Middle East. For instance, the famed rabbi Moses Maimonides, whose family was prominent among the Spanish Jewish elite, moved to Egypt and continued to utilize the moniker Sephardi when signing his name. The movement of Jews from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Western Mediterranean and back was fairly fluid during the 9th-15th centuries when we can rightly identify a fairly homogeneous cultural entity that would rightly be termed “Arabic.”

The term “Arab” would historically have been used to mark the nomadic tribes of a place called “Arabia” but with the emergence of the Islamic religion the conception of “Arab” was greatly expanded to include those who lived and developed culturally under the umbrella of Arabo-Islamic civilization.

This civilization was one of the great world cultures forming a bridge between the dying Greco-Roman culture and the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Arabic civilization was not seen as limited to the Muslim people, nor was it now marked only by those nomadic tribes in the Arabian peninsula. The Arabic language had become a lingua franca not only in the Middle East, but throughout Spain, Sicily and the many educational institutions emerging in Christian Europe that looked to profit from the cultural and scientific inroads of Arabic civilization.

Arabic was thus seen as the language of culture at a time when Europe had largely been under the sway of disparate barbarian tribes which had overrun the last remnants of the Roman Empire. Under the rule of tribes like the aforementioned Visigoths, Gauls, Saxons, and the like, Jewish life in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages was a relentless hell and frequent persecutions and expulsions from European countries, culminating with the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, took place.

In the Arab world, the situation was far different. Jews were able to make their mark on Arabic culture in a number of different ways: With the adoption of Arabic as the language of culture, Jews found themselves immersed in the scientific and philosophical educational system of the Arab world. Figures like the aforementioned Maimonides, Se’adya Ga’on, the poets Moses ibn Ezra and Solomon ibn Gabirol, the statesman Samuel ibn Nagrela and so many others marked this transition into a Judeo-Arabic cultural universe that quickly established itself as the cutting edge of Jewish self-expression. Even when the poet Judah Halevi composed a biting critique of this Judeo-Arabic culture in its elitist philosophical formation in his classic book The Kuzari (written in Arabic, its original title was Kitab al-Radd w-al-Dalil fi al-Din al-Dhalil), he did so using the same Arabic language and couched his arguments in the same academic terms that would only be intelligible to a student well-versed in the philosophic rationalism of the time. And it should be well-noted that Halevi continued to produce Arabic-style verse until the very end of his life; never relinquishing the profane themes of the erotic and sensual that typified this cultural school.

In the main, Ashkenazi culture had developed in isolation from the dominant cultures in Europe. And for good reason: The Jews of Europe had been denied the basic autonomy and cultural freedoms that were commonplace in the Arab world. They were carefully monitored by the Christian authorities and were frequently the object of persecution, ridicule and a deep cultural intolerance. There was no comparable equivalent to Maimonides or Samuel ibn Nagrela among the Ashkenazi Jews. It would have been nearly impossible to imagine an Ashkenazi Jew producing a work such as Moses ibn Ezra’s Kitab al-Muhadara w-al-Mudhakara, a treatise on Hebrew poetics as its author contextualized it within the Arabic literary system.

Ashkenazi Jews had developed a deeply hermetic Talmudic scholasticism that had little if any room for extraneous influences.

The clash between the two value-systems, the Judeo-Arabic and the Ashkenazic, took its most pronounced form with the emergence of what has been called The Maimonidean Controversy; a bitterly fought intra-Jewish battle over the philosophical oeuvre of Maimonides after the publication of his Judeo-Arabic masterpiece Dalalat al-Ha’iran, better known as The Guide of the Perplexed. This controversy exposed the fault lines that separated the Sephardi and Ashkenazi cultures: Maimonides’ openness to the Arabic appropriation of Greco-Roman rationalism and his use of this culture in trying to understand the very foundations of a Jewish metaphysics was deeply disconcerting to Ashkenazi rabbis who had completely circumscribed the inclusion of non-Jewish influences within their cultural system.

But as we know, culture is a permeable construct and the Ashkenazim who rejected any overt cultural borrowing, were somewhat unsuccessful in shielding their Jewish culture from taking on many of the mental and social conceptions of the surrounding Christian cultures of Europe. Ashkenazi Judaism developed a keen sense of the mystical at the very time that mystical writings permeated European Christian religious thinking. The sense of rigidity and intolerance and exclusionary elitism that had characterized European Christianity and was to prove so damaging to Jews there was unwittingly adopted by many Jewish clerics in an Ashkenazi civilization which presented a much stricter and less open form of Jewish self-perception than that developed and promoted in Judeo-Arabic civilization.

The Maimonidean Controversy of the 13th and 14th centuries, already begun with attacks on Maimonides during his own lifetime and to which he was forced to respond to defend his doctrinal orthodoxy, exemplified the split that had separated the Ashkenazi form of Judaism from its Sephardic counterpart. Maimonides had combined an exacting Talmudism which he learned from the traditions emanating from the academies of the Judeo-Arab universe stretching from the Arab East to Spain through North Africa and Southern Europe along with the new Arabic learning. Maimonides’ own thought-patterns were similar to those of his Muslim peers, Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali who also sought to systematize their traditional religious teachings within a larger intellectual context having opened their minds to the new sciences and trends of the Arabic reading of Aristotle and the Greco-Roman traditions.

The Ashkenazim had frozen the Jewish tradition back into its Talmudic variant. Having lacked any substantial human or intellectual contact with the Talmudic academies of Babylonia as the Islamic era was developing, the Ashkenazim, as the great Sephardic political theorist Daniel Elazar had pointed out some years ago, were in the process of congealing a “Romantic” form of Judaism that was based on a novel reading of the traditional rabbinical sources that became suspended in time, thus forcing the Talmud into a limiting vise that lacked the ability to truly evolve and develop new ideas and assimilate into different and differing cultural contexts. Ashkenazi Judaism was thus caught in a bind that forced it to remain static.

The challenge of Maimonides and his incipient cultural creativity was a stark challenge to this Ashkenazi fundamentalism. What Elazar termed Sephardi “Classicism” was not a conservative reactionary understanding of the Jewish tradition, but was a free-flowing and dynamic symbiosis with the surrounding cultures in the places where Sephardim lived. This Classical form of Judaism was not a forced replication of an ideal past, but was an elegant series of reformulations of the Jewish tradition with a pronounced bent of rational ethics, an embrace of scientific currents, an adoption of an aesthetic system all combined with a deep reverence for the inherited wisdom of the ages.

Sephardic Jews in Spain, North Africa, Sicily, Syria, Provence, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean found themselves participating in a unique cultural system that was organized under the unifying umbrella of the Arabic language and Arabo-Islamic culture. Because of Islam’s embrace of the most pronounced ecumenical values at that time – though they were by no means perfect, they permitted to participation of non-Muslims in the larger society – Jews were able to produce a culture of great intellectual, aesthetic and ethical worth that had clearly eclipsed the dogmatism of an Ashkenazi culture that had lacked any facility with the Gentile world.

After the Spanish Expulsion, the Hispanic Jews returned to the Islamic world, this time as immigrants to the Ottoman Empire. Jews found themselves in Ottoman Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the Balkans and other locales of the Empire. The Ottomans had taken the Arab world by storm and had adopted its Islamic faith. There was little difficulty in the transition from the old cultural world of Mediterranean Arabo-Islam to the new Ottoman universe. Royal courts adopted the traditional Arab cultural values and literary standards, while intellectual thought and pluralism thrived in the Ottoman society.

After many centuries of cultural pluralism, the Ottoman system was brought to a crushing end after the destruction of the Empire at the hands of the European powers. Emerging from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire were individual Arab states. With the emergence of these states, Jewish statesmen like Haim Nahum Effendi sought to confirm Jewish loyalty to their Arab hosts and continue to maintain the cultural relationship that had tied Jews to Arabic civilization as we have already pointed out.

With the emergence of political Zionism, the Arab Jews were placed in a precarious situation: Having been deeply tied to and immersed in Arabic culture and civilization for many centuries and seeing themselves as a part of that civilization, they were now being forced to choose between their Jewish identity and their Arab culture.

Traditionally in the Arab world, culture was a unifying factor and religion a divisive one. Having used the term divisive, I do not mean to imply that the division was in any way seen as illegitimate or intrusive. Each faith community in the Arab world was provided with communal autonomy while the maintenance of Islam as the dominant and dominating religion was clearly affirmed. But under this system Jews were able to conduct their intra-communal affairs in relative ease having established internal institutions and entities to administer the affairs of the community without the interference of the Islamic authorities.

Haim Nahum had been a founding member of the Arabic Language Academy, a prestigious cultural organization that chose its members from the cultural and political elites, and became a crucial figure linking the Jewish community to its Arab host. Nahum was deeply troubled by the emergence of an exclusionary Zionist movement whose primary aim was to remove Jews from their lands of birth, physically and culturally, in order to have them return to the Biblical land of Israel. Nahum correctly understood that life for Jews in the Arab world was going to be shaken to its very foundation and he counseled the Jews of Egypt to take the formal steps of becoming citizens of the emerging independent country when they were given the opportunity.

But the machinations of Zionists and Arab nationalists conspired to begin a process that would lead to the destruction of the old pluralistic Levantine culture in the wake of the emerging mono-ethnic cultures that were soon to take over the region and lead to a tremendous amount of violence and bloodshed.

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.”

All sorts of petty and pedantic arguments attach themselves to this issue but it is quite clear that Jews participated in and were a part of Arabic civilization. They did not live in isolation from their Arab neighbors and had adopted many of the folkways and civilizational patterns of the Arabic culture. In an ethnographic sense the Jews who lived in Arab lands were ARAB JEWS just as Jews who live in the United States are American Jews. The modifying adjective “Arab” does not signify that Jews are not Jews but simply means that Arab Jews are a part of a larger cultural system that may be termed “Arab.”

It is clear why there is an objection to my use of the term “Arab Jews.” The attempt by the Zionists to oppose Arabs in every way possible, a value that was deeply embedded in the very foundations of the Jewish State of Israel, trapped Arab Jews and forced them to decide how they were going to see themselves and identify themselves. Such is not a linguistic or cultural consideration, but a political consideration that cares little about the historical facts at hand. In fact, such an elision of Arab Jewish identity is a completely specious falsification of the historical record.

At the very time that it would seem advisable for Jews – even Ashkenazi Jews – who live in Israel in the midst of the surrounding Arab world to reconnect with the regional culture – which is Arabic, we have a complete cultural disconnect. Rather than using the Arab Jewish traditions as a bridge back into the Arab world, Zionism has sought to occlude this Judeo-Arab culture and suppress any possible sense of its continuity. It has used language and naming to help it achieve this goal.

But it cannot change the cultural realities of the Arab Jewish tradition.

Arab Jews in Paris, Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, Montreal and elsewhere continue to sing Arab songs, continue to eat Arab food and continue to study the Judeo-Arabic texts of their progenitors. And while we have traced the ways in which this culture is dying out, one can still find its manifestation within the various markets in Israel and Brooklyn where the sounds, smells and attitudes of the Arab world continue to make themselves felt.

So while you can try and play games with names, and names are indeed very important, the external reality of the Arab Jewish communities remains what it is – any outsider would walk through Brooklyn’s Kings Highway and its many Arab Jewish food shops and restaurants – all Kosher – and without any doubt identify these places as part of Arab culture.

You can continue to browbeat me over my use of the term “Arab Jew” if you so choose. The historical and existential record is plain for all to see: Jews were not simply inert figures who came from “Arab lands” as the current politically correct Ashkenazi Jewish/Zionist nomenclature would have it. Jews were Arabs insofar as they developed their culture using the Arabic language and the civilization of the Arab world.

I understand all too well the reasons that lay behind the objections to the use of the term “Arab Jew.” It is yet another attempt to break off the ties of Jews to their nativity in the Arab world and replace that affiliation with a new non-Arab affiliation that would serve to tear asunder the links of native Middle Eastern Jews to their lands of origin and the cultural traditions that are so crucial a part of their heritage.