“…the mere notion of an Arab Jew, as some Mizrahis identify today themselves, is close to unthinkable in most mainstream media and consciousness. But the divide is not painful simply because it is denied. There is a history of political, economic and cultural oppression of Mizrahis and, as relatively recent scholarship establishes clearly, much of these elements are present to this day.”

When the late Egyptian president and Pan-Arabist Gamal Abdel Nasser led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, it may surprise people to know that it was the Egyptian singer and Mizrahi Jew Leila Murad who was chosen as the Revolution’s official singer. Murad was chosen over the much loved Egyptian singer and darling of the Arab world, Umm Kalthoum.

The reality is that Mizrahi Jews a.k.a. Arab Jews have played important roles throughout Arab history.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Mizrahi Jewish journalist and activist Mati Shemoelof. He and other Mizrahi Jews issued a special letter to the Arab/Muslim world this past summer — not only talking about their shared history but also to realize the positive message set forth by Pres. Obama earlier this year in Cairo, Egypt.

The Interview

Sherri Muzher (SM): Before getting into the letter, “A New Spirit: A Letter from Jewish Descendents of the Countries of Islam,” I was hoping that you could describe what being a Mizrahi Jew has meant to you and how has it shaped your outlook throughout your life?

Mati Shemoelof (MS): Being a Mizrahi Jew is a personal family matter, as well as a political issue. It is part of other identities I hold. Also to be Mizrahi Jew is part of my social struggle to change the values that stand in the covenant/treaty between the state and the society. Because Mizrahis are still oppressed, it is my task to fight against discrimination and look for a multi-cultural consciousness. I look for new structures that will create more tolerant ways to handle the diverse Identities in the Middle-East.

SM: Mizrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews. What is the major difference since both are Middle Eastern Jews?

MS: Sephardic Jews originated in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. This subgroup of Jews includes mainly the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain under the Alhambra decree of 1492. The Sephardic Jews are part of the Mizrahi Jews. The term “Mizrahi” means (in Hebrew) “East” and it is part of a powerful mechanism of classification.

Mizrahi Jews are historically Jews of Middle-Eastern descent whose families, in most cases, immigrated to Israel from Arab countries. They form about half of the Israeli Jewish population. The painful reality of Israel is the division within the society between Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) and Mizrahis. This reality often goes unnoticed by outside observers, who naturally focus on the more violent aspects of Israeli political reality and the division between Jew/non-Jew which the Israeli state draws.

In fact, in the mainstream of Israeli discourse there has long been a systematic avoidance/denial of this division, maintaining – as is perhaps “demanded” by the core of Zionist ideology and its ongoing nation-building project – that the Jews are a distinct people and that Israeli Jews have a unified ethnicity and a shared history.

Indeed, the mere notion of an Arab Jew, as some Mizrahis identify today themselves, is close to unthinkable in most mainstream media and consciousness. But the divide is not painful simply because it is denied. There is a history of political, economic and cultural oppression of Mizrahis and, as relatively recent scholarship establishes clearly, much of these elements are present to this day.

SM: What sorts of issues are unique to the Mizrahi Jews?

MS: Mizrahi Jews strive to bring about a meaningful change among the Israeli society and implement values of democracy, human rights, social justice, and equality and transform Israel to a multi cultural society.

As a poet, I want to see that the literature and poetry of the Arab Jews as part of the curriculum and the whole Israeli canon. Still, it is a long way in implementing those ideas inside the mainstream Ethno-National cultural realms.

SM: You are a member of Mimizrach Shemesh, an organization devoted to the Jewish tradition of social responsibility. How difficult is it in a climate of mistrust and anger to advocate this social responsibility?

MS: Your question shows that you are familiar with the difficulties that any social activist faces in their everyday activism. “Mimizrach Shemesh” is really a special institute trying to bring the theological and religious experiences of the Mizrahi Jews into the act of social change. For instance it re-constructs the world of the liturgical music of the Piyut (http://www.piyut.org.il) from the distant past to today’s scene. It isn’t the only place for Mizrahis to re-connect to their heritage – it is a place for every Jew and non Jew to sit together and learn melodies that sing to God almighty. After you learn, sing and rejoice together, you can use this social and cultural power to bring political change.

SM: The title of the letter is, “A new spirit.” Explain the significance of this title.

MS: Well, Ezéchiel Rahamim, a close friend, a talented author, scholar and the initiator/ entrepreneur of the letter thought that we should look for “New Spirit” in terms of universalizing our identity and re-create it in a different way to move in the Middle East. For example, for years the West has been trying to mediate between Israel and the Arab states. But the European thought is the one which brought nationalism and Eurocentric as well as Orientalist ideas into the Middle East. Those European constructions couldn’t imagine a broad Arab-Jew range of identities (in which separation isn’t needed). For a thousand of years, Jews and Arabs lived, created, and breathed from the Arab culture without having the need to build an Apartheid separation wall between Judaism and Arabism.

We thought that a “New Spirit” is needed as parallel to the “A New Beginning” name giving by President Barack Obama in his Cairo speech of June, 4, 2009.

President Barack Obama is the first African-American to be elected; we’d like to see an Israeli prime minister who has an Arab heritage, will take on social responsibility and talk about his/her identity with pride.

SM: Can you talk about why you and other Mizrahi Jews decided to issue this letter now?

MS: In 2007 I was one of the editors of a book that dealt with the third Mizrahi generation (those who grow up in the seventies and eighties). The name of the book was: “Echoing Identities: Young Mizrahi Anthology.” We use an autobiographical prose in order to identify a new and assertive political collective of writers. That cultural confrontation was part of the ongoing Mizrahi and social struggles that came before us like the Israeli “Black-Panthers” movement and the “Democratic Mizrahi rainbow” and others.

Right after the Obama speech in Cairo, Ezéchiel called me. He was totally enthusiastic. He had an idea that we should continue and widen his (President Obama) message as part of our Mizrahi Generation. Ezéchiel wanted to use our list of writers from the book and sign that call. I immediately agreed.

We published the call in the Israeli media but we couldn’t get it ran for long. It seems that it was hard for the media to speak about it and they didn’t deal with it in a significant way. Please understand that it includes a really great list of Influential creators who signed it. Still, it seems that Israeli politics wasn’t interested in broadening her cultural national border.

SM: In “A new spirit,” you and the other authors write about the Arabic culture being a “part of our identity, a part of it that we cannot sever and wouldn’t wish to sever, even if we could.” Can you talk more about this, and how receptive are non-Middle Eastern Jews to this reminder?

MS: In our communities, as in others, we find various responses and it is a long process of democratic dialogue. You must understand that it is a denial discourse and so it raises a lot of violent energy. You can’t learn about it in school so it’s really unspeakable outside academic or cultural spheres (i.e. in a political way).

The first reaction I received was that we were racist. Friends of mine who work as editors asked me why they should publish it if European Jews were not included. “Well it isn’t about race” I said. “It is about ethnicity.” However, they couldn’t understand that we have different histories and symbolic imagination. I also tried to explain that we stand as a united Mizrahi generation not because we want to erase other groups but because we do believe that the end to the silencing of our group is raising our voice. But in Israel I guess,even friendship can’t precede the national Zionist idea of: “One nation, One language, One Memory.” We still try to challenge it by those acts.

SM: Would it be fair to say that given the shared history with the Arabs, Mizrahi Jews are more likely to effective conduits in the pursuit of peace between Arabs and Israelis?

MS: This argument can lead to essentialism so I will be careful. We use the Mizrahi term which the country has used to label us to empower ourselves.

The Arab Jew’s narrative holds creative ways to handle the problems which the national idea brought upon each other in the Middle-East. It is sharing knowledge of the Arabic language, culture and diverse viewpoints. The Arab Jew’s narrative holds in its memory and history and religion. But it is also a shared struggle for social justice and a re-construction of the region with its original inhabitants. So we stand in that tension between awareness and symbolic belonging and identification. And yes by moving on this scale of possibilities we can contribute to de-colonize the Israeli culture.

SM: Who is your main target audience with this manifesto and why?

MS: The main target of this Manifesto is really first of all a call to the Arab World to show that the Israeli government and policy makers don’t speak in our language. It is really a multi-cultural universal call for social justice in order to integrate into the Middle East without colonization and oppression, and be a part of the interest of the region itself.

SM: If President Obama was sitting across from you, what would you say to him?

MS: “Mr. President, I am proud that a community organizer (as I was) reached the higher level of responsibility. Your social vision is an example to all of us.”

If he had more time I would ask about the influence that Malcolm X’s heritage had on him. I wrote a thesis about the connection between the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Spike Lee’s film. I hope that my academic work will lead to a personal talk about identity, poetry and Arab-Jew awareness as a tool for social change.

SIDBAR

Saturday, June 13, 2009

A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam

We, the daughters and sons of parents who immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries, hereby express our support for the new spirit presented by president Obama in his Cairo speech. A spirit of reconciliation, realistic vision, striving for justice and dignity, respect for different religions, cultures and human beings, whoever and wherever they are.

We were born in Israel and we are Israelis. Our country is important to us, and we would like to see it secure, just, and prosperous for the benefit of its inhabitants. Yet, the recent conflict into which we were born cannot erase the long history of hundreds and thousands of years, during which our parents and ancestors lived in Muslim and Arab countries. Not only they have lived in the region from time immemorial, but were also part of the fabric of daily life and have contributed to the development of the region and its culture.

Nowadays, the cultures of the lands of Islam, Middle East, and the Arab world, are all still part of our identity; a part which we cannot, and do not wish to repress nor uproot.

Surly, the Jews living in Muslim countries endured some difficult times. Nevertheless, those painful moments should not conceal nor erase the well known and documented history of shared life. Muslim rule over the Jews was much more tolerant and lenient compared with non-Muslim countries. The fate of Jews in Muslim regions cannot be compared with the tragic fate of Jews in other regions, Europe in particular.

One can view the last decades as a period during which a deep chasm has been opened between the Jews and Israel and the Arab and Muslim world.

We however, prefer to perceive these last decades as a painful yet temporary crack in a history that goes longer than that. We have a shared past and a shared future. Thus, when we look at the map, we see Israel as part of the Middle East, and not solely from a geographical perspective.

Judaism and Islam are not far apart from religious, spiritual, historical and cultural point of views. The alliance between these two religions dates back many generations. Yet the memory of this partnership and the unique history of Jews originated from the Muslim and Arab world (which today constitutes 50% of the Jewish population in Israel!) has unfortunately faded, both in Israel as well as in the majority of the Muslim world. In the necessary reconciliation process between West and East, oriental Jews can and should embody a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.

From our point of view the rift between Israel/Jews and the Arab/Muslim world cannot last forever, it is splitting our identities and our souls. As for the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we hope that a fair solution of mutual respect and mutual recognition will be reached very soon. A solution that considers the hopes, fears and pains of the Palestinian side, as well as those of the Israeli side.

We therefore, express our support for the new spirit set forth by President Obama in Cairo. We wish to join the vision for a future in which bridges of mutual respect and humanity will replace walls of suspicion, aggression and hatred. All this in the spirit of justice and humanism shared by both Judaism and Islam.

The Interview was first published on Media Monitor Network

CK: Your upcoming release, Intra-Jewish Ethnic Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews, builds on your last book, The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: 1948-2003, this time also taking an in depth look at the social and cultural implications of Mizrahi Jews in Israel. Tell us what brought you to this next stage in documenting Mizrahi life in Israel.

SSC: Intra-Jewish Ethnic Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews is an English version of the Hebrew, Hamaavak Hamizrahi Beyisrael (the Mizrahi Struggle in Israel). Being a Mizrahi myself, and an activist for many years, motivated me to write the political history of Mizrahim in Israel, simply because there wasn’t such a book for the young generation to learn their history. This is absent from the official curriculum.

CK: The book describes that, in the last 25 years, we’ve seen both the maturation of a Mizrahi radical political discourse, and the socio-religious movement of Shas. Tell us about how these different movements originated.

SSC: Well, one is a mass movement–Shas–and the others are many organizations, movements and individuals that, through the years, developed an alternative discourse to Ashkenazi-Zionism. Basically it means social justice for all (social-democracy), cultural freedom (against cultural racism and oppression of Mizrahim and Arabs) and end to the occupation and opening into the Middle eastern world and cultures. Radical Mizrahim see Mizrahim as the Jewish victims of Zionism (although most Mizrahim don’t think they are). Shas on the other hand officially aimed to restore Sephardic dominance in Jewish life, as their slogan goes: “to bring back the crown to its former glory”. In other words, they’re fighting against Ashkenazi religious hegemony. Of course Shas used the jargon of social activism, although never meant to act for universal social change, but only to support the needs of its communities. Shas is a non-Zionist movement, but instead of declaring that in the open, they declare: “We are the true Zionists.” This way they get votes from Mizrahim coming from the right wing Zionist side of the map.

CK: You are a poet, filmmaker, essayist, poetry, historian and educator — how, as an artist, do you decide which artistic form to use to tell your story?

SSC: I also published my first novel, Doll’s Eye. I wish I could only write poetry and make some films, but I still need to publish political essays and academic research. I still have some things to say in those areas. I like all forms of telling a story and I use them all. I found that documentary film is the most effective form to tell a story in our era.

CK: Tell us about the film you’re working on now, Come Mother.

SSC: I finished the film in January. It is a journey within a journey – I took my mom to reunite with her classmates from 60 years ago Morocco. The result is beautiful 70 year old women talking in Hebrew, Arabic and French about their memories in Morocco and Israel.

CK: You’ve done a great deal of historical work on the Israeli Black Panther Party. What do you think of the rise of the New Israeli Black Panther Party, founded by Ayala Sabag Marciano?

SSC: I love Ayala very much. She’s a true Panther from childhood. Unfortunately, you can’t bring back movements of the past to life. They had their role and share, mainly to function as the fuel that kick-started the Mizrahi resistance – they gave us the courage and language to follow their footsteps. Ayala is definitely a leader, in the legacy of the Israeli Black Panthers, which her brother the late Saadia Marciano was part of, but the entire struggle is in coma and she’s having a hard time with her movement.

CK: With Gaza’s borders still under siege, and Avigdor Lieberman likely becoming the next Foreign Minister of Israel, what are your thoughts about the state of Mizrahi Jewish life in Israel specifically, and the direction of Israel overall?

SSC: If you think the majority of Mizrahim in Israel care about the Palestinians in Gaza, then you have to think again. Most Mizrahim today are, unfortunately, of the new generations who believe that being a proud Mizrahi is waving a bigger Israeli flag than the Ashkenazim wave. I’m happy that Israel elected an extremist Zionist government which truly represents the state of mind of Israelis today. If the world wishes to impose an end to the occupation on Israel, then this is the right government. The idea that there was ever a Zionist Left in Israel was revealed as false in the latest elections.

CK: You’ll be speaking on Monday night. What are three insights you hope your audiences will walk away with?

SSC: Only one — Ashkenazi Zionism has destroyed Arab-Jewish life in the Middle East, almost to a point of no return.

Join Professor Chetrit tomorrow night for his lecture on:

Dr. Sami Shalom Chetrit is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Language, Literatures and cultures, in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures, at Queens College, CUNY. He is a Moroccan Jew raised in Israel. His recent books include, Yehudim (Jews), a poetry book (Nahar Books, 2008); Ein Habuba (Doll’s Eye), a novel (Hargol-Am Oved publishers, 2007); The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: 1948-2003 (in Hebrew) (Am- Oved / Ofakim 2004); and Shirim Be’ashdodit (Poems in Ashdodian), poetry form 1982 to 2002 (Andalus, 2003). Chetrit’s current research focuses on Mizrahi literature since 1948; in particular political poetry of second generation Mizrahim. The Intra-Jewish Ethnic Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews will be published by Routledge in 2010. Chetrit is also a documentary film maker. Together with Eli Hamo, he co-directed, “The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak,” and is completing “Come Mother,” which describes the generation of Moroccan women who grew in Israel.

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.

• ICE Raids hit the Bay Area a day after May Day, including scaring the shit kids at Berkeley schools
• After the exchange with Eden last week about transgender youth, I thought I’d plug this amazing, indepth interview series that NPR is doing right now on trans youth.
• Joseph Gindi gave one of the best talks I’ve heard in awhile about Israel, Palestine, and why ethnic nationalism strikes a discordant note in the goal of achieving true democracy at the Righteous Indignation conference. What I appreciated most about this panel was not that the ideas were new, but how much the panelists strived to use language that moved beyond the rhetoric we all often fall prey to that divides people.
• Police brutality in Philadephia has raised alarms, particularly because the vicious beating of three Black men, Brian Hall, 23, Pete Hopkins,19, and Dwayne Duches, 24, was caught on tape by FOX helicopters. Folks in the media world always say, that when it comes to talking about race and racism in the U.S. media and larger public domain, documentation is paramount.
• Before I headed to the RI conference, I had the pleasure of joining JVoices contributors’ Robin Washington and Rabbi Capers Funnye at the Be’chol Lashon think tank, which you can read a bit about in the Forward and JTA. On a personal note, it was BEYOND refreshing to be in a room with folks whose perspective on Jewish life was not limited to the U.S. mainstream-dominated narrative of intermarriage or continuity, but rather the breadth of Jewish life in Global Jewry. I should also say, a hearty mazel tov to Alysa Stanton for being the first African-American female to receive her semicha as a reform Rabbi in the next two weeks!
• And I’ll round this out by plugging a really great fact sheet on “Jews from the Middle East,” written by Sephardic scholar Ilise Cohen and up on Jewish Voice for Peace’s site. This sheet gives a much broader perspective on Jewish global migration, and the impact of the founding of Israel on Sephardi and Mizrahi communities. “Of a total Israeli population of 7 million, over 2.5 million (35-40%) are Mizrahim, about 1 million (15%) are Russian immigrants who came in the last 20 years, about 1.4 million (20%) are Palestinian Israelis, 154,000 (2.2%) are Ethiopian, and about 2 million (25-30%) are Ashkenazi Jews and others. This means 55-60% of the Israeli population is ‘non-white’; together, Mizrahim and Palestinian Israelis form a majority. Knowledge of these demographics has the potential to change the perception and treatment of these marginalized communities. Despite being the majority Jewish population in Israel, Mizrahim are represented in small numbers in the Israeli Parliament and in elite positions such as professorships. Many still live in poor ‘development towns,’ agricultural Moshavim, or urban peripheries such as South Tel Aviv that receive fewer municipal funds than more central and majority-Ashkenazi Jewish cities, towns, and Kibbutzim.”
• Oh, and of course I can’t leave out the conversion controversy sparked by the Israeli Rabbinate, could I? Some I’ve talked to actually see this as a “good sign” in the long-term, believing that the Supreme Court would totally strike the religious ruling down, further separating religion from rule of the state. While I commend this wishful thinking, this doesn’t change what, again, Gindi stated out so well, which is the inevitable and inherent tension, particularly amongst Jews in the U.S. who believe so strongly in a secular democratic state, still holding onto the idea that ethnic nationalism in Israel is OK–and not just OK, but possible to have along with a “true” full, and robust democracy for all of Israel’s citizens? Yeah, the irony is apparent, no? Saying a country is for a particular set of people, and yet being a “democracy for all” does seem problematic, no?