The mass immigrations to Israel: A comparison of the failure of the Mizrahi immigrants of the 1950s with the success of the Russian immigrants of the 1990s

Abstract

The two mass immigrations to Israel are compared, demonstrating the failure of the Mizrahi immigrants of the 1950s versus the success of the Russian immigrants of the 1990s. Almost in every respect the Russian immigrants had advantages over the Mizrahi immigrants: they arrived with greater human resources, the state was more affluent and less discriminatory against them, the society was more culturally open and socially tolerant, and their proportion in the total population was much smaller and hence not threatening. Whereas the Mizrahim lost their culture and ended up in the lower strata of society, Russian immigrants are in the process of entering the middle class and in control of the pace and rate of their assimilation.

Keywords:

• immigration
• Mizrahim
• Ashkenazim
• Russian immigrants
• Israeli society

Notes

 1. Berry, “Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation”; Marger, Race and Ethnic Relations; van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon.

 2. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.

 3. Faist, “Transnationalization”; Pedraza, “Assimilation or Transnationalism?”

 4. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism.

 5. Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State.

 6. Brubaker, “The Return of Assimilation?”

 7. Kymlicka, States, Nations and Cultures.

 8. The assimilation thesis does not seem to hold true for Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. They suffer from multiple handicaps, including their black skin, doubtful Jewishness, scant material and human capital, enormous cultural distance, and a high rate of broken families. Veteran Israelis tend to exclude Ethiopian immigrants despite the goodwill of the authorities. See Shabtai, “Lihiyot im zehut me'uyemet”; Kaplan and Salamon, “Ethiopian Jews in Israel”; Ben-Eliezer, “Becoming a Black Jew.”

 9. For a detailed account of immigration and immigrant absorption in Israel from 1948 to the end of the 1990s, see Hacohen, “Aliyah ve-klitah”. There are various theoretical approaches to immigrant absorption and to Jewish ethnicity in Israel. See, among others, Smooha, “Three Approaches”; Swirski, Israel; Ben-Rafael, The Emergence of Ethnicity; Shuval and Leshem, “The Sociology of Migration”; Hever, Shenhav, and Mutzafi-Haller, Mizrahim be-Yisrael; Yonah, Bi-zkhut ha-hevdel.

10. Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 2007, Tables 4.2 and 4.4.

11. Lewis, The Jews of Islam.

12. Smooha, Israel.

13. Almog, The Sabra.

14. Halper, “Afro-Asian Jews in Jerusalem.”

15. Lissak, “Ha-be'ayah ha-adatit.”

16. Shafir, “The Meeting of Eastern Europe and Yemen.”

17. For a detailed account of one of the most telling examples of the exclusionary and differential treatment of Yemenites during the Yishuv period, see Nini, He-hayit o halamti halom?

18. Behar (“Palestine, Arabized Jews”) conceives of Middle Eastern Jews as “a border-zone community” located between Ashkenazim and Arabs who hence could have possibly been included either in Arab nationalism and the Arab nation or in Zionism and the Jewish nation. “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” (581), namely, inclusion in the Jewish-Zionist collectivity and emigration to Israel.

19. Friedlander and Goldscheider, The Population of Israel.

20. Shohat, “Rupture and Return”; Shenhav, The Arab Jews; Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism.”

21. Cohen, “Ethnicity and Legitimation of Contemporary Israel.”

22. Lissak, Ha-aliyah ha-gedolah.

23. Lissak, “Dimuyei olim.”

24. Rosenfeld and Carmi, “Nikus emtza'im tziburiim.”

25. Bernstein and Swirski, “The Rapid Economic Development of Israel.”

26. Rosental-Marmorstein in Ha-nadon: Ashkenazim, discusses critically, from an Ashkenazi viewpoint, the Mizrahi narrative and criticisms.

27. Weiss, Wadi Salib.

28. For more details on the immigration during Israel's first decade, see Hacohen, Olim Bi-se'arah; Lissak Ha-aliyah ha-gedolah; Tzur, Kehilah kru'ah.

29. For a detailed account of the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi division in Israel in the 2000s, see Smooha, “Jewish Ethnicity in Israel.”

30. For discussion of marriage patterns, see Schmelz, DellaPergola, and Avner, Ethnic Differences; Shavit and Stier, “Adatiyut ve-haskalah.”

31. There are persistent intergenerational ethnic disparities in educational achievements. For instance, the proportion of Jews aged 18–25 with matriculation diplomas in 1995 varied considerably according to ethnic origin and generation. At the top were second-generation Ashkenazi youths with a rate of 80%, while at the bottom were foreign-born Mizrahi youths with a rate of 46%. Ashkenazi Sabras had on the average a lead of 20% over Mizrahi Sabras. For more details, see Dahan et al., “Ha'im ha-pa'arim ha-hinukhiim hitztamtzemu?” For other studies that demonstrate the persistence of the ethnic gaps, see Cohen and Haberfeld, “Second-Generation Jewish Immigrants”; Cohen, Haberfeld and Kristal, “Ethnic Gaps”; Bernstein, “Ha-aliyah ha-hamonit.” For an opposite view that emphasizes the closure of ethnic gaps and the success of the melting pot, see Ya'ar, “Continuity and Change.”

32. Peled, Shas.

33. For a detailed empirical examination of this evaluation, see Smooha, “Ethnicity as a Factor.”

34. Levy, Israel's Materialist Militarism.

35. In her book Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel, Khazzoom, drawing on postcolonial theoretical perspective, accounts for the maltreatment of Mizrahim in the 1950s in terms of the Ashkenazi self-identity as Western and the self-defense of Western Israel against its Orientalization by Mizrahi immigrants. Iraqi immigrants were better treated because they were more Westernized and could convince the Ashkenazi old-timers of being Western. Ethnic relations improved after the collapse of the Arab culture of Mizrahi immigrants and the state's neutralization of the Orientalism threat, which was labeled “Levantinization” at that time.

36. For various accounts of the Russian mass immigration to Israel, see Sicron and Leshem, Dyukan shel aliyah; Lissak and Leshem, Me-Rusiyah le-Yisrael; Leshem and Sicron, “The Soviet Immigrant Community”; Kimmerling, “Ha-yisraelim ha-hadashim”; Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents; Ben-Rafael et al., Building a Diaspora; and Gomel, Atem ve-anahnu.

37. For scrutiny of Israel's semi-Western nature, see Smooha, “Is Israel Western?”

38. Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness.

39. Shafir and Peled, Being Israeli.

40. For a review of the protest of some radical Arabs and Mizrahim against the Russian immigration and its suppression in order to preserve Israel's Zionist, hegemonic “ethno-republican ethos” and “Ashkenazi-Western supremacy,” see Yonah, Bi-zkhut ha-hevdel, 130–47.

41. Lissak and Leshem, Me-Rusiyah le-Yisrael.

42. The achievements of these Asian immigrants in Israel are appreciably lower than the performance of Ashkenazi immigrants from the same independent states. See Haberfeld, Semyonov, and Cohen, “Ethnicity and Labour Market Performance.”

43. The rate of downward mobility of the Russian immigrants to Israel was greater than that of Russian immigrants to Canada because Jewish immigration to Israel is not selective whereas in Canada immigrants are selected according to the needs of the labor market. See Lewin-Epstein et al., “Institutional Structure and Immigration Integration.”

44. For an analysis of the Russian immigrant vote to the Knesset, see Goldstein and Gitelman, “From ‘Russians’ to Israelis?”; Philippov, “1990s Immigrants.”

45. Al-Haj, Immigration and Ethnic Formation.

46. Remennick, “Transnational Community in the Making.” See also Elias and Zeltser-Shorer, “Russian Diaspora On-Line.”

47. Lissak expresses these fears in “Ha-olim me-Hever ha-Amim.”

48. During the initial period up to 1998 the Russian immigrants and their elite stressed cultural retention and social separation from old-timers (Al-Haj and Leshem, Immigrants; Al-Haj, “Ethnic Mobilization”), but toward the end of the 1990s they shifted toward integration (Shumsky, “Ethnicity and Citizenship”). The shift was evident in the increased acquisition of the Hebrew language among the young and middle-aged immigrants (Remennick, “Language Acquisition”), in the growing identification with Israel as a Jewish state, in their Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse and anti-Arab and anti-Mizrahi attitudes (Shumsky, “Post-Zionist Orientalism?”), and in the decline of separate Russian parties.

49. Gitelman, “The Decline of the Diaspora Jewish Nation”; Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro, “Religion and Ethnicity”; Licitsa and Peres, “Olei Hever ha-Amim be-Yisrael.”

50. Prime Minister Shamir planned to prolong peace negotiations for ten years to give time for a massive Jewish settlement, mostly by Russian immigrants, of the West Bank and Gaza in order to make partition of the Land of Israel/Palestine impossible. This goal could not be realized because the government did not control the new immigrants and because of the United States' objections.

51. Beginning in the 1820s, the WASPs had to cope with a large wave of Catholic Irish and Catholic German immigrants. The hostility toward them was much less than that toward the immigrants from southern-eastern Europe of the turn of the century because the former were Anglo-Saxon but not Protestant, whereas the latter were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant.

52. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity.”

53. While there is agreement that Ashkenazim have lost exclusivity and power, scholars are divided on the issue of Ashkenazi hegemony. Most scholars of both mainstream and critical schools of thought hold that Ashkenazim lost hegemony. Kimmerling, in Ketz shilton ha-ahusalim and The Invention and Decline of Israeliness, best conveyed this view. On the other hand, Yonah, in Bi-zkhut ha-hevdel, maintains that Ashkenazi hegemony, while weakening and changing its forms, has remained in effect.