http://www.forusa.org/fellowship/fel0598-2.htm
Reflections of an Arab Jew
By Ella Shohat
May/June 1998
I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman
living, writing and teaching in the US. Most members of my family were
born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the US,
England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli
society in the '50s, she was convinced that the people who looked,
spoke and ate so differently-the European Jews-were actually European
Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated
with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and
still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of
"us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs.
For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been
"Muslim," "Jew," and "Christian," not Arab versus Jew. The assumption
was that "Arabness" referred to a common shared culture and language,
albeit with religious differences. Americans are often amazed to
discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic
possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a
well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the
history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a
tragic anomaly-for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and
an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more
difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our
Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to
our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.
It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led
some of us to escape elsewhere. Yet in an American context, we again
face a hegemony that allows us to narrate only a single Jewish memory,
i.e., a European one. For those of us who don't hide our Middle
Easterness under one Jewish "we," it becomes tougher and tougher to
exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.
As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the "mysteries" of this
oxymoronic identity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for
millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been
largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the our
intellectuals to "make it" into the consciousness of the West); and
that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and
North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew
prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial
codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern
women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted
of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of
British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If
you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris, or
London, you'll be amazed to hear the winding quarter-tones of our
music, which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque.
Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and
dislocated history-Iraq, Israel, and the US-have been involved in a
war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve
so as to facilitate "neat" national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety
and pain during the Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family
lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the
bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives.
War, however, is the friend of polarization, leaving little place for
complex identities. The Gulf war, for example, intensified a pressure
already familiar to the Arab Jewish diaspora in the wake of the
Israeli-Arab conflict: a pressure to choose between being a Jew and
being an Arab. For our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since
at least the Babylonian exile, who have been Arabized for millennia,
and who were abruptly dislodged to Israel forty-five years ago, to be
suddenly forced to assume a homogenous European Jewish identity based
on experiences in Russia, Poland and Germany, was an exercise in
self-devastation. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been
perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a
kind of logical paradox, even subversion of being. This categorization
has led many "Oriental" Jews (our name in Israel referring to our
common Asian and African countries of origin is Mizrahi or Mizrachi)
to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in
our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms.
Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian
tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the
Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-expulsion Spain (1492) and of
the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the
Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of
oppression and humiliation. Although I in no way want to idealize that
experience-there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even
violence-on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim
societies.
Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology.
In Iraq, while retaining a communal Jewish identity, we were generally
well-integrated and indigenous to the country, forming an inseparable
part of its social and cultural life. Thoroughly Arabized, we used
Arabic even in hymns and religious ceremonies. The liberal and secular
trends of the twentieth-century engendered an even stronger
association, which brought Jews into an extremely active arena in
public and cultural life. Prominent Jewish writers, poets, and
scholars played a vital role in Arab culture, distinguishing
themselves in Arabic-speaking theater, in music, as singers,
composers, and players of traditional instruments. Not only in Iraq,
but also in Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia, Jews became
members of legislatures, of municipal councils, of the judiciary, and
even occupied high economic positions. (The finance minister of Iraq
in the '40s was Ishak Sasson, and in Egypt, Jamas Sanua-higher
positions, ironically, than those our community had generally achieved
within the Jewish state until the 1990s.)
The historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their
property, lands, and national-political rights also dispossessed
Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and
rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants
(depending on one's political perspective), we were forced to leave
everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The process then
produced our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel
itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by
institutions that deployed their energies and resources to the
consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent
disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us,
leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception.
Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the
men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for
Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland
was a social aliya (literally "ascent") was for Sephardic Oriental
Jews a yerida ("descent").
Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation
to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public
sphere. The pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their
ancient homeland actively invalidates any affectionate memory of life
before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the
images of Iraq's destruction only intensified and crystallized for
some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic is
hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to
convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some
of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and Iran.
Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of
Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the
Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many convenient
oversights. From the outside, it is hard to get a sense of our
community, even harder to discover the diversity of our political
perspectives. Oriental-Sephardic peace movements, from the Black
Panthers of the 1970s to the new Keshet (a "Rainbow" coalition of
Mizrahi groups in Israel) not only call for a just peace for Israelis
and Palestinians, but also for the cultural, political, and economic
integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle East. And thus an end
to the polarization of war, an end to a simplistic charting of Middle
Eastern identities.
Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's
Studies at CUNY. A writer, curator, and activist, she is the author of
Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
(University of Texas Press, 1989) and the co-author (with Robert Stam)
of Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge
1994). Shohat co-edited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and
Postcolonial Perspectives (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and is
the editor of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in the
Transnational Age (MIT Press/The New Museum., 1998). A version of this
article was previously published in Emergences, issue 3/4.
