‘Arab Jews’ after structuralism: Zionist discourse and the (de)formation of an ethnic identity

Abstract

We revisit the term ‘Arab Jews’, which has been widely used in the past to depict Jews living in Arab countries, but was extirpated from the political lexicon upon their arrival in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. We follow first the demise of this discourse and then its political reawakening in the 1990s, which was carried out mostly by second-generation Mizrahi intellectuals and activists. We review this surge of the 1990s, distinguishing between structural and post-structural interpretations of the concept, although we also show that they are often interwoven. According to the structural interpretation, the term ‘Arab Jew’ was founded on a binary logic wherein Jews and Arabs are posed as cultural and political antagonisms. The post-structural interpretation rejects the bifurcated form in lieu of a hybrid epistemology, which tolerates and enables a dynamic movement between the two facets of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’. We spell out the differences between these two heuristic modes of interpretation and speculate about their relevance to the political conditions in the Middle East today.

Keywords:

• ethnicity
• Arab Jews
• nationalism
• structuralism
• post-structuralism
• Zionism
• Arab nationalism
• Jewish studies
• postcolonialism
• Hebrew literature

Acknowledgements

We thank Louise Beth-Lehem, Yuval Evri and Lital Levy for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. We make an assumption that there is a discord between modern nineteenth century discourse and this of Muslim Spain in the Middle Age (Cohen, 1994). We focus therefore on ‘Arab Jews’ in the backdrop of modern nationalism, including the emergence of Zionism and National Pan-Arabism. Nevertheless, it is crucial to admit that in Andalusia (Muslim Spain) and in Christian Spain there was an intimate connection between Arabic and Hebrew. Arab culture was dominant and its influence on the Jewish culture was beyond question. It was manifested in literature, philosophical text, in the interpretation of ethics or in poetics. Major Jewish texts were first written in Arabic and were only then translated to Hebrew. The power relationships between the two languages were apparent, for example, in the translation of texts from Arabic to Hebrew and in the linguistic forms that were chosen. Mati Huss (1995) has pointed to the difference that existed in the Middle Ages between two forms of translations: the verbal form (verbum e verbo) of the Tibbonids, and the form of free translation that re-invents in the language, like that of Yehuda El-harizi. He attributes this difference to the power relations between the two languages as they are perceived by the translators: the dominance of Arabic in the verbal form, and the dominance of the Hebrew in the case of a free translation.

2. As becomes clearer below, we do not classify Shohat into this phase exclusively, as she has other works in which she promotes a post-structuralist perspective on several issues, including the ‘Arab Jewish’ option.

3. It is interesting to note that Somech's book was published first in Hebrew without the term ‘Arab Jew’ in the title which appeared only in the English version.

4. For an analysis regarding the German-Jewish option see Dinur (2009).