WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? FRAGMENTED CONSCIOUSNESS, “INESSENTIAL SOLIDARITY,” AND THE “COMING COMMUNITY”1

This study was prepared while I was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2009–10).

(PART 1)

Abstract

The title, as the study itself, has been inspired by four theoretical contributions: first, Stuart Hall's essay “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’” (in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. London: Sage, 1996); second, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, which opens with the sentence: “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness. But saying this, I do not mean to suggest taking on either or both unfinished identities necessarily exhausts subjective resources of any particular individual” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 1). Third, Diane Davis's question: “Is there a way to activate a sense of solidarity among singularities – a way to say ‘we’ – that doesn't automatically exclude, that doesn't just ask for trouble by simultaneously feeding this craving for … Gemeinschaft (in the name of which any number of ‘we's have committed the most horrific atrocities in recorded history)?” (“‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity,” in Jac: A Journal of Composition Theory 19.3 (1999), 639); and fourth, Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1993). The article consists of four sections, the first is a short theoretical background to the notion of identity. The second section is an examination of four major collective processes, two of them collective exclusionary operations and erasure, which Arabized Jews have undergone. The third section deals with the globalization and the search for inessential solidarities among Arabized Jews. The fourth section is the conclusion to the study, in which the notion of Arab-Jewish identity is revisited.

Notes

This study was prepared while I was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2009–10).

Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, 26–7.

Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel.

Carr, What is History? 32.

Chetrit, Politika mizraḥit beyisra'el; Hamaʾavak hamizraḥi beyisraʾel. The latter was translated into Arabic: al-Niḍāl al-Sharqī fī Isrā’īl.

Unless in a title of publication or within a quotation, I will use the terms “Mizrahi” and “Mizrahim” between quotation marks in order to refer to the problematics and ambiguity of the term. While it has been used, mainly by the systems of power as a monolithic category to allude to the Jewish immigrants from Arab, Muslim, and Mediterranean countries, it has also been used since the late 1970s as a subversive catchword by militant Middle Eastern and North African Jewish intellectuals and activists to express resistance to the conception of Israel as a Zionist and Western country. According to Ella Shohat, one of the first of these radical thinkers, the aim is “to re-link [our]selves with the history and culture of the Arab and Muslim world, after the brutal rupture experienced since the foundation of Israel” (Shohat, “Antinomies of Exile,” 121–43; the quotation is from 141, n. 4). See also Levy, “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History.”

Based on Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, Subjectivity, 1–23 (introduction). For tracing the history of some of the philosophical insights that have shaped current understandings of subjectivity, see Rorty, “The Vanishing Subject,” 34–51.

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

Ibid., 160–2, emphasis in the original.

The following section is based on Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives and Davis's Inessential Solidarity and “Addicted to Love.”

Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 28.

Miller, “Rhetoric and Community,” 91 (my emphasis).

Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity, 1 (my emphasis).

For the present study, I will use the term “Arabized Jews” following Brann, “The Arabized Jews,” 435–54. On the question of terminology, see Behar, “What's in a Name?” 747–71.

The first known Arabic literary text by an Arabized Jew are four verses by the Jewish female poet Sārra al-Qurayẓiyya, whose elegy for 350 noblemen of her tribe killed in a battle in 492 AD was frequently cited in Arabic sources (al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, XXII, 102–5; Bitton, Poétesses et lettrées juives, 43–6).

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 160.

Lifton, The Protean Self, 1.

Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 1.

Bauman, “Identity in the Globalizing World,” 1.

Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 21.

Frayn, Constructions, chapter 67 (my emphasis). Cf. “[L]anguage itself [is] perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face” (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? 14).

Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies,” 89–90.

Bauman, Liquid Modernity. See also his Liquid Times.

Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 4.

I use “modern” not in the temporal sense but as consisting of three dimensions: a preference for secular rationality, the adoption of religious tolerance with tendencies toward relativism, and individualism.

Kellner, “Popular Culture,” 141–77.

Kellner, “Popular Culture,” 141–3

Kellner, “Popular Culture,” 153–4.

Kellner, “Popular Culture,” 158 (my emphasis).

Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” 18 (my emphasis). Cf. Bauman, Globalization, 77–102.

Melucci, “Identity and Difference,” 61.

Sandel, Justice, 265.

Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 91.

Agamben, The Coming Community, 63.

Agamben, The Coming Community, 65.

See ten Bos, “Giorgio Agamben and the Community,” 22.

I use the term “culture” mainly to refer to “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure” (Said, Culture & Imperialism, xii).

Due to lack of space it is impossible in the present study to delve in detail into those subjectivities, but the reader is encouraged to use my previous studies on Arabized Jews, particularly my 2005 Hebrew book on the culture of the Iraqi Jews (Snir, ‘Arviyut).

Cited in Nicholson, “Introduction,” 12.

Ben-Naeh, Yehudim bemamlekhet hasultanim, 318–37.

See de Ṭarrāzī, Ta'rīkh al-Ṣiḥāfa al-‘Arabiyya, vol. 4, 486–7.

On the participation of Jews in Arabic press and journalism, see Snir, “Mosaic Arabs,” 261–95.

Mintz, “The Many,” 1.

Tauber, The Formation, 49.

Wilson, Loyalties Mesopotamia, vol. 1, 305–6.

Stevens, By Tigris and Euphrates, 261. Cf. Haim, “Aspects of Jewish Life,” 188.

Therefore, studies about the pre-1948 relationships between Arabs and Jews (for example, Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism,” 498) seem to use an anachronistic dichotomy that never existed in the Arab lands.

See al-Ḥuṣrī, al-‘Urūba Awwalan!, 12.

Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist, 63.

The original text was published in al-‘Irāq, 19 July 1921. For the text of the speech, see Fayṣal ibn al-Ḥusayn fī Khuṭabihi wa-Aqwālihi, 246–9.

Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq, 219.

Darwaza, Mudhakkirāt Muḥammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, vol. 3, 545.

Al-Akhbār, 21 July 1938; cited in Ma‘rūf, al-Aqalliyya al-Yahūdiyya fī al-‘Irāq, vol. 2, 70. It has been argued that notices published by well-known Jews in the Iraqi press during the 1930s declaring that they were loyal to their motherland and that they had no connections with Zionist activities were suggested by the authorities against the background of the anti-Jewish atmosphere created following the disturbances in Palestine (Kedourie, “The Break,” 28–9). The same, of course, might be said about Iraqi Jews Speak for Themselves.

See Darwaza, Mudhakkirāt, vol. 3, 51; Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, 45–6.

Marmorstein, “Baghdad Jewry's Leader Resigns.” The article deals with the resignation of Chief Rabbi Sassoon Khaḍḍūrī (1886–1971), the head of the Baghdad Jewish Community, following a demonstration against him by members of the community.

Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World, 104.

Landshut, Jewish Communities, 45.

Darwīsh, “The Relations,” 83.

Semah, “Mīr Baṣrī and the Resurgence,” 88–9.

Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 144.

See for example Snir, ‘Arviyut.

Writing under the pseudonym Bat Ye'or (“Daughter of the Nile”), the Egyptian-born Jewish scholar Giselle Littman argues that the myth of “peaceful coexistence” between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, especially the Andalusian “Golden Age,” propagated the Islamic version of the perfection of the shar‘a (Islamic law) and that this was to justify the elimination of Israel and its replacement by a “secular and democratic Arab Palestine, the multicultural Arab Palestinian State” (Bat Ye'or, Islam and Dhimmitude, 316–17).

See the debate in Tikkun: Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception,” 55–60; Stillman, “Myth, Countermyth, and Distortion,” 60–4. J. Beinin rejects both approaches and opts instead for a Marxist interpretation of the political events and the question of identity (Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, especially 1–28).

See, for example, Rabeeya, The Journey of an Arab-Jew, 27.

Abstract of his presentation in the conference Remember Baghdad (Vienna, 20–21 June 2004).

Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 11.

Ha'aretz, 22 April 1949.

Goldberg and Bram, “Sephardic/Mizrahi/Arab-Jews,” 227–56 (quotations 242 and 247 respectively).

DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews,” 3–43 (quotations from p. 4).

DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews,” 6–7; emphasis in the original.

DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews,” 9.

DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews,” 34.

See DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews,” 38–9.

Agamben, The Coming Community, 86–7.