‘Arab Jews’ after structuralism: Zionist discourse and the (de)formation of an ethnic identity (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Arab Jew Debates: Media, Culture, Politics, History
Journal of Levantine Studies, 2017
For the past twenty-five years, and particularly during the last decade, the idea of the Arab Jew has been debated in multiple forums in different parts of the world. The Arab Jew is represented in literature and film, discussed in blogs and social media, and featured in live performances. It has informed scholarship in literary and cultural studies, sociology, and history, in Israel, the Arab world, Europe, and North America. Yet the term “Arab Jew” remains controversial, especially in Israel, where it is widely viewed as a left-wing political concept. This article surveys the Arab Jew’s full range of expression to date, emphasizing the reciprocal movement of ideas across different geographies and between discursive spheres. It argues that the Arab Jew idea has developed as both a project of political intervention into the present-day separation of Arabness from Jewishness and a project of reconstruction focusing on the Jewish past in the MENA region. Examining recent episodes in the Israeli public sphere, the article investigates how contemporary discussions about Arab Jewish identity and culture utilize competing views of history. It concludes by reconsidering the relevance of the “Arab Jew” to the burgeoning historical scholarship on Jews in the MENA region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Arab Jew: A History of a Concept
This course invites students to explore the debates around the term " Arab Jews. " A cultural, historical, and historiographical designation, the term encompasses a range of experiences for Arabic-speaking Jews. These Jews lived in diverse cultural worlds across the Middle East and North Africa, where they developed deep and enduring relationships with non-Jews, and were instrumental in shaping local, regional and national cultures and politics. Their identities and histories, which vary according to their place of origin, are presented, assessed, and debated in scholarly articles and monographs, political statements, personal testimonies and memoirs, poetry and fiction, music and cinema, as well as on websites and in blogs. This surge in research, which has become a prominent subfield of Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies, is the result of regional changes on the one hand, and growing interest in the history and culture of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa on the other. By engaging with the term " Arab Jews " in its various incarnations, the course offers new perspectives on questions of Zionism and nationalism, colonialism and geography, religion and secularization, as well as historiography and memory.
"What's in a name? Socio-terminological formations and the case for ‘Arabized-Jews'" (2009)
Social Identities, 2009
Until the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were roughly 750,000 Jews living in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Palestine/Israel. A comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers. The question I address is simple yet potentially foundational: which collective signifier can define and capture most productively, inclusively and comprehensively the socio-political and cultural experiences of those who comprised the Arab Middle East's ten indigenous Jewish minority communities prior to their dispersal (in the post-1949 armistice period)? I propose that the signifier ‘Arabized-Jews’ exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. As such, ‘Arabized-Jews’ denotes Jews who were culturally and/or linguistically Arab yet who did not self-define primarily as Arab, let alone in political terms. In exploring the dialectic interface between ethno-politics, terminological formations and the production of meaning, this article suggests that it makes sense for contemporary scholars to employ ‘Arabized-Jews’ to refer collectively to Jews across the modern Arab Middle East.
Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2007
This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis- a-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.
The Arabs in Israel—Hybrid Identity of a Stateless National Collectivity
Mediterranean Studies, 2021
The debate concerning the identity of Arabs in Israel involves a dimension that has not yet been studied—the hybrid identity of a stateless minority. The definition of Israel as a Jewish state, the fact that Arabs in Israel do not take part in the country’s Independence Day, and the emergence of a national movement among Arabs in Israel demanding cultural but not territorial autonomy are major factors that foreground this status of Arabs in Israel. The current study focuses on the influence of activist Arab groups—political, literary, and journalistic—within the Israeli Communist Party. The party operated as a group of “populist intellectuals” immediately following its consent to the Palestine Partition Plan. The goal of the Communist Party was to engineer the identity of the Palestinian collectivity in Israel as a hybrid identity adapted to the political and territorial circumstances in the aftermath of the War of 1948.
Palestine, Arabized Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National Formations
Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2007
This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in-and at other times excluded them from-their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis-à-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.
Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
Social consciousness forms in allegiance with the moral and political hegemonic power structures. Gramsci's organic ideology defines this condition of hegemonic system where societal leadership is practised by the dominant class. With the emergence of cultural studies the prevailing hegemonic discourses are challenged, but defining liminality in this spectrum is still an ongoing process. In this context, the essay aims to demarcate the problematic aspects of personal and national identities against the hegemonic power structures, specifically with the case of the Arab minority in the State of Israel. Apart from the fundamental facets of hegemony, the aberrant conflict between nationalism and citizenship emerging from Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish democratic State, places the Arab Israeli identity in question. These arguments are validated through the fictional life narrative of Israel's prominent Arab writer Sayed Kashua. His novel Dancing Arabs (2002) recapitulates the reality of being an Arab in Israel. The impeccable representation of identities in question hinges the repercussions of hegemony and social exclusion on both subjective and national levels. Standing on the critical platforms of Gramsci's political theory of "hegemony" and Stuart Hall's cultural theory of "identity", the text is closely read as an artefact of resistance with emphasis on personal, political and philosophical discourses on the identity of the Arab minority in Israel. The essay traverses through the ethnocentric status of Israel's social structure which disorders the recognition of Arab identity and identifies the conflict as a potential hindrance to peaceful coexistence in Israel's near future. Introduction:
This paper examines documents written by Jewish construction workers who won a public tender issued by the Anglo-Iranian Company in the early 1940s to build and maintain oil refining facilities next to the city of Abadan (on the Shatt al-Arab waterway). This group of 450 workers stayed in the region for more than three years and acted as the agent of the first concrete encounter between the Zionist movement and Arab-Jews at a time when the Jewish leadership was making serious plans to bring those Jews to Palestine. The emissaries’ descriptions of their day-to-day life make it possible to introduce their voices and create a history of their experiences. This paper examines two main themes: (1) the colonial context of this encounter, and (2) the politics of difference that emerged on site. Zionist emissaries perceived themselves as integral organs of the British colonial state and described their presence in the region in colonial language. This essay furthers the analysis of Zionism as colonialism by adding a phenomenological dimension to its interpretation. One of the main objects of the Zionist emissaries’ discourse was the Arabness of the local (Iraqi and Iranian) Jews. While the emissaries described their traits and customs as Arab, they simultaneously insisted on marking the ‘difference’ between the local Jews and the Arabs in order to recruit the former into the Zionist project. Thus, whereas they defined the Arab-Jews as part of the national collective they also left a colonial ‘marker’ (the difference) that later became an ethnic category within the Jewish nationhood. This paper concludes that a postcolonial theoretical framework, which is generally neglected in sociological and historical analyses, is essential for understanding the mobilisation of Arab-Jews into the Zionist project.