Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
REVIEW
How to Speak About Arab Jews
By David Shasha
The Arab Jews: A Post-colonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity, by Yehouda Shenhav. Stanford University Press, 2006.
In the Arab Jews, Tel Aviv University professor Yehouda Shenhav tells the story of Israel's Arab Jewish immigrants in a voice that Edward Said once promoted as the "subaltern" revolt in academia.
Eschewing the heatedly polemical style of writers like G.N. Giladi, Shenhav has written a brilliant book that adheres to the protocols of sociological inquiry with arguments that have been thoroughly documented. His voice is that of a modern intellectual who has broken into the system and articulated a position that responds directly to the endemic racism of Israeli scholarship, which once portrayed Arab Jews as inferior and culturally backward.
The structure of Shenhav's book is deceptively simple, yet quite effective. Unearthing a hitherto obscure episode in the history of Zionist activity in Abadan, a city at the cusp of the Iraqi and Iranian world(s), Shenhav reconstructs the ways in which Zionism first approached the reality of Arab Jewry. After this examination, Shenhav goes on to discuss Sephardic discourses about Abadan's history and how it functions within the larger context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The book opens with a fascinating anecdote that reveals the internal contradictions of the Arab Jew. Shenhav relates the odd tale of his father, Eliyahu Shahrabani, and his role in the Zionist usurpation of Arab Jewish memory. After Shahrabani's death, Shenhav is approached by a mysterious man who informs Yehouda about his father's role in the Israeli intelligence services:
When my father was seventeen, he moved with a group of Iraqi-born
friends to Kibbutz Be'eri, on the ruins of the Arab village of Nahbir.
In that same year, Avshalom Shmueli, a recruitment officer, came to
Be'eri and recruited them into Israel's intelligence community. There
is nothing surprising about this. They were part of an inexhaustible
reservoir of ambitious young people, loyal to the state, spoke perfect
Arabic, and looked like Arabs. They had the ideal profile. As an
intelligence man, my father worked hard and was sometimes gone for
lengthy periods. His absence enhanced my status as a boy in the
neighborhood. By working for the state against the Arab enemy, he
earned his entry ticket into Israeliness. I was able to benefit from
it vicariously. But this does not mean I was comfortable with his
Arabness. As a kid, I fought against my parents and their culture.
Employing creative tactics, I would shut the radio off or put it out
of commission when they wanted to listen to the great Arab singers Om
Kolthoum, Farid al-Atrach, or Abd-el-Wahab. The truth is that I was
greatly preoccupied with my own and my family's Arab Jewish origins
but kept the subject to myself. Those origins did not provide a valid
entry ticket to become an equal member of Israeli society, with its
basically orientalist mentality, then as now.
In the course of recounting this story, Shenhav shows how the dense, interstitial patterns of Sephardi Israeli identity were formed out of a paradoxical relationship between the need to retain and make use of Arabic culture and language, but in a way that negated that culture:
It may seem eminently reasonable for the new Jewish state to use
immigrants' Arab backgrounds as "expertise" and the basis for a
"career." As such, my use of Israel's spies to argue that the
incorporation of the Arab Jews into the Jewish collective was complex
and internally contradictory may seem facile. But first, though Arab
Jews were routinely used as spies, their cultural skills were never
used to forge positive links with Arab countries. This disjuncture
suggests that the state was after more than just practical help. Its
practices were used to separate Arab Jews from their Arab backgrounds.
The interconnectedness between the intrinsic Zionist need for "insiders" who could "pass" as the enemy and the Zionist rejection of Arab culture serves as the fulcrum upon which Shenhav's study turns. Zionism, which has generally sought to use Arab Jews for strategic purposes—for example, to populate Israel's border regions as a bulwark against Palestinian recidivism, after it was clear that Western Jews were not going to immigrate en masse to the fledgling country—maintained two mutually exclusive and contradictory positions. Arab Jews were needed to serve the new country, often using their cultural identities. But these very traits were marked as part of the "enemy" culture that Israel was determined to destroy.
For a young man like Shenhav, growing up in a hostile environment where Arab culture represented backwardness and incompetence, the process of "De-Arabization" was a socio-cultural mechanism that had been stitched into the very fabric of the nascent Israeli psyche. The attempt to restore the history of this Arab Jewish world would thus be an assault on the very socio-cultural mechanisms that served to define Israeli identity as European.
Zionism as Jewish Colonialism
The charge of colonialism against the Zionist movement has been one that is deeply contested by many Zionists. Contending that they were not settler-clients of an imperial power, Zionists have consistently sought to show how their relationship with the United Kingdom bristled with conflict. However, the reality of this situation was far more complex. Shenhav explains that as Zionism expanded in the region, the adoption of a non-Arab element would prove to be ultimately beneficial to Western interests. The Abadan context provided a perfect example of how deeply Zionism and colonial ideology were imbricated:
Indeed, on the ground, in their day-to-day lives, the emissaries
were well aware of the social divisions and hierarchies dictated by
color and ethno-racial differences produced by the colonial situation.
They could not help but be aware of them. Everywhere they looked these
divisions were ingrained in the fabric of their existence in Abadan,
from their segregated "whites-only" neighborhoods to their privileged
working conditions and positions of authority. The emissaries, who had
arrived as Zionists, came to identify themselves also—and even
mainly—as white Europeans. Those who had not arrived in Abadan
already in possession of a colonial consciousness had ample
opportunity to develop one on site. The emissaries' descriptions of
their day-to-day lives and an analysis of their point of view make it
possible to bring in their voices and create a history from below of
the colonial experience.
Though the process of colonization was not intrinsic to the situation, it nevertheless reinforced the Eurocentric elements inherent in Zionist thinking, building upon those ideas a new sociopolitical reality that fused Zionist theoretical ideality with the colonialist status quo.
And how did this affect the Jews who were native to the region?
Shenhav documents a series of detailed statements by the above-quoted emissaries, Zionist functionaries who, under the cover of the Solel Boneh project, looked to proselytize to Abadan's Jews and exhort them to immigrate to Palestine. In the course of this subterfuge, the emissaries were forced to hide their actual identities in order to fool those to whom they were preaching the Zionist message. Their innate contempt for these Arab Jews was barely concealed. In the words of Enzo Sereni, one of the European Zionist emissaries:
This material is not European material, it is material that is quick
to become enthusiastic, but also quick to despair ... unable to keep a
secret, unable to keep their word ... There are deep waters, and those
waters are not bad ... but there is the foam on the water, and it is
bad, of an Arab-Levantine sort ... Assimilation from a Levantine type
into a culture that does not yet exist or is at a nadir ... They can
be turned into "human beings," but we shall not be able to accomplish
that without the help of the people in the Land.
What is even more startling is the degree of intrigue that was undertaken in the process of trying to convince Arab Jews to leave Iraq and Iran, and come to Palestine. Sadly, this program implicated the figure of the revered Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who, as a hardened Zionist fighting his own internal Jewish battles against the Orthodox anti-Zionist Ashkenazi establishment, provided "cover" to emissaries like Sereni, who required a new identity in order to be permitted access to Arab Jewish communities.
What Kook did was to confer upon such envoys—all atheist socialists to a man—the traditional character of the shali'ah, or in Shenhav's term, shadarim. These shadarim concealed their true identities under the guise, ironically, of religious emissaries empowered to persuade the local Jews to come to Zion for spiritual reasons. This was no historical anomaly. During Israel's early years, such collaborations between secular and religious Zionists fostered the illusion that Zionism was indeed a logical extension of the Jewish religion.
Clearly, a good deal of Zionist outreach to Arab Jewry was based on a series of deliberately interlinked falsehoods that would serve to undermine the communal integrity of Arab Jews in ways that are felt to this day. In Shenhav's words, Arab Jews were "religionized" in ways that went well beyond the cultural norms of their respective Diaspora communities.
What Shenhav is pointing out here is the way in which Zionism manipulated religion as a means to undergird and reinforce a nationalist ideal that was understood in neo-Hegelian terms. For Zionism, religion was not a concrete reality; unlike the devotional practices inherent to the Arab Jewish tradition, Zionism was unconcerned with halachic praxis. What Zionism was concerned about was Judaism as the abstract basis of the national entity.
Such a transformation of Jewish praxis—and its cognitive realities—led to an undermining of the traditional customs and beliefs of Arab Jews, resulting in a fusion of Jewish customs with the Zionist ideological imperatives that privileged national over religious considerations. This transformation of Arab Jewish religious identity has served Israeli political interests extremely well over the years.
As Shenhav explores the paradoxical ways in which Zionism has had to be inclusive of a Jewish religion whose legal and textual strictures it has long since marked as defunct, we see how at its very conceptual root, Zionism is caught in a trap of religio-national ethnocentrism anchored in the Ashkenazi experience and its tragic history. In this regard, Shenhav cites kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem:
The people here [in Palestine] do not understand the implications of
their actions.... They think they have turned Hebrew into a secular
language, that they have removed its apocalyptic sting. But this is
not the case.... Every word that is not created randomly anew, but is
taken from the "good old" lexicon, is filled to overflowing with
explosives ...
It is here that Shenhav shows us the paradoxical nature of Zionism and how that paradox functions in the context of Arab Jewish history and identity. Forcing the richness of the Jewish past, its language, its religion, its culture, to serve at the altar of a monocausal identity—of Ashkenazi Hegelianism—can only serve to touch off the tripwires of history and its wide reserve of hidden energies and suppressed antinomianisms.
Between A Rock and a Hard Place: Sephardim as Zionist Victims
The Arab Jews is another significant chapter in the literature of Sephardic history and its relationship to Zionism. Its English-language publication recalls the final pages of Giladi's now out-of-print Discord in Zion, in which the author is insistent that, after decades of struggle and failure, Israel's Arab Jews are set to emerge from the cloud that they have been living under. And in the early 1990s, the work of Ammiel Alcalay, Ella Shohat, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and a few others made it appear as though this promise might actually be fulfilled. But the internal censoring mechanisms inherent in the Zionist project took hold of the Sephardic community, which resolutely rejected this activist approach and began to fulfill the "death of the Sephardim" project that Shenhav narrates as being a crucial part of the Ashkenazi Zionist mission.
With the eradication of Israel's Black Panthers and the socialist Matzpen organization, and the increasing movement of Sephardi activists into Israeli universities—a place where the vast majority of the great Sephardi "unwashed" remain deeply uncomfortable—the discourse of Arab Jewish activist scholars such as Giladi became increasingly esoteric and obscure. The malodorous realities of the ma'abarot are direct and immediately accessible in Discord in Zion in ways that elude the more reserved nature of the scholarly, even though the anti-Sephardi polemic continues on its harsh and merry way.
Like Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs, Shenhav's similarly titled book may prove too difficult for the average reader. The academic nature of its language marks it in the ranks of books by academic theoreticians of nationalism and culture that are widely read in universities, but whose arguments rarely enter into the common currency of the average person. This is not to stigmatize The Arab Jews ultimate social worth, which remains vast precisely because of its subject matter.
The argument I am making has to do with the way that knowledge is all too frequently marked as inaccessible and unusable in a non-academic context because it partakes of the technical lexicon of university scholarship. When Sephardim don't even know the most basic elements of their own history and culture, the complex discourse of such works may estrange them from the very people who so badly need to read them.
Paradoxically, part of the anti-Sephardi racism that has been endemic to the Ashkenazi Zionist argument is that Sephardim are primitive and less capable than Europeans. How better then to show the "other side" that Sephardim are as smart, if not smarter, than they are by approaching the subject of Sephardic culture from within the very scientific and intellectually sophisticated parameters of the European academic tradition?
The Sephardim thus find themselves between the proverbial rock and hard place. It must therefore be stated without hesitation that Yehouda Shenhav's The Arab Jews serves to articulate the Sephardic cause in ways that are bracingly innovative and intellectually challenging. As Sephardic readers, we must lift ourselves up to the rarefied heights of such books and not wallow in anti-intellectualism. The challenge of this work is to internalize the passions and emotions that often serve to fire up our conscience, and to see the ways in which the methods and protocols of social scientific discourse can serve to detail the glorious richness of our history and preserve the intensely human complexities of our culture.
David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. The Center publishes the weekly e-mail newsletter Sephardic Heritage Update as well as promoting lectures and cultural events relevant to Sephardic culture. He can be reached at davidshasha@aol.com
Source Citation
Shasha, David. 2007. How to Speak About Arab Jews[Review of the book The Arab Jews: A Post-colonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethinicity] Tikkun 22(1): 69.
