MEMOIRS OF INCLUSION: ARAB JEWS AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY NATIONALISMS

Brenda Nelson

A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Department of History

University of North Carolina Wilmington

2014

Approved by

Advisory Committee

Kathleen Berkeley Jarrod Tanny ______

Lisa Pollard ______Chair

Accepted By

______Dean, Graduate School

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

DEDICATION ...... v

INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING TO MEMOIRS ...... 1

HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 6

TERMINOLOGY ...... 6

MEMOIRS AS PRIMARY SOURCES...... 18

CHAPTER 1: NATIONALISM AS ERASURE: OMISSION AND EXCLUSION ...... 24

OMISSION ...... 25

THE FIRST EXCLUSION: ARAB NATIONALISM ...... 30

I WAS THERE ...... 52

CHAPTER 2: THE SECOND EXCLUSION: ZIONISM AS MASCULINE AND EMASCULATING ...... 55

ZIONISM: RECONSTRUCTING JEWISH MASCULINITY ...... 56

EMASCULATION: ERASURE OF ARAB CULTURE ...... 64

RESPONSES TO EMASCULATION ...... 84

CHAPTER 3: WRITING THE ERASED: WE ARE HERE ...... 88

EXILE FROM PLURALISM ...... 103

PRESERVING ARAB IDENTITY ...... 107

WE ARE HERE AND THIS IS OURS ...... 109

CHALLENGES OF BEING A HYBRID ...... 114

EPILOGUE: BREAKING CATEGORIES OF PAST AND PRESENT FOR THE FUTURE ..123

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 129

APPENDIX ...... 135

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could not have written this thesis without the support and guidance of Dr. Lisa Pollard.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with me. Thank you for your graciousness and patience with me. Thank you also to Dr. Kathleen Berkeley and Dr. Jarrod Tanny for not sparing criticism and pushing me to formulate a specific argument. Thank you to my Covenant professors, Dr. Green, Dr. Follett, and Dr. Morton, who taught me how to write and how to critically think about the past. To my high school history teacher, Dr. Connell, thank you for giving me a glimpse of what history could be.

My friends, and especially my roommates, Heather, Katie, Ryan, and Heidi, thank you for putting up with me always working or talking about working. Thank you for cheering me on.

Thank you to my fellow graduate students, Whitney, Ryan, and Lettie, for going through this process with me.

To my brother, Stephen, thank you for always believing in me, even when I do not believe in myself. Thank you to my future in-laws, Rick and Liz Shafer, who provided a comfortable and quiet place to work. Thank you for being excited for me. Your excitement and encouragement helped me be excited again. To my fiancé, Daniel, thank you for helping me reach my goals and never doubting me. Thank you for putting up with me on a daily basis. You are a gem.

To my parents, words cannot express my gratitude for your support, love, and prayers for me over the years.

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DEDICATION

To my parents. Thank you for modeling empathy and hard work.

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INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING TO MEMOIRS

“We are Arabs before we are Jews.”1

-Ezra Haddad

“Nostalgia for a lost pluralism.”

-Deborah Starr

The conflict between Israel and the Arab states has redefined Jewish identity and Arab identity as oppositional, in Israel, in the Arab states, and in the watching world. Today, Arabs and Jews are considered separate nationalities and separate ethnic groups, and many believe they are eternal enemies. Historically, however, Arabs and Jews have not always been at war. They, also, have not always been separate nationalities or ethnicities.2 Before the establishment of

Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, there were many prosperous Jewish communities in the Arab world, from West Asia to North Africa. These communities lived in the Arab world for centuries, many before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century.3 Population estimates from

1 An alternate translation is: “We are Arabs before we became Jews.” Ezra Haddad (1900-1972), headmaster of the Shammash High School in Baghdad, Iraq, said this in the late 1930s. Nissim Rejwan quotes him in his memoir and his history of Iraq. Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985), 219. 2 Nationality and ethnicity are subjective and fluid concepts that are very contextual, but in our contemporary world, they can be portrayed as objective. One of the purposes of this essay is to show the fluidity of identity, ethnicity, and nationality. I subscribe to the theory that ethnicity and nationality are modern constructions, mostly developing through conflict or encounters with different cultures. By nationality, I am referring to a group of people identifying with a specific country, post 1850. By ethnicity, I am referring to a group of people identifying with a specific culture or heritage, also post 1850. However, nationality and ethnicity do overlap (Iraqi culture and nationality, American culture and American nationality). In this essay, I try to use the terms ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ because they are more concrete and they can be used to refer to pre-1850. Thus, when I use the term, Arab, I mean that these people identify with Arab culture or that their ancestors were culturally Arab. The term Arab developed as an ethnic term circa 1900 and gained popularity as a national term circa 1950. When I use the term Arab to describe something either before 1900 or after, I am using it as a cultural and linguistic term. However, many Arab Jews do use Arab as an ethnic or national term, but they are usually referring to their own lifetime, post 1900.When I use the term Jewish, I mean both ethnicity and religion. Both Arab and Jewish can refer to ethnicity at the same time. 3 This region has changed names through history. However, for simplicity’s sake, I am using the modern term Arab world, even when referring to the pre-modern era. Also, while referring to the longevity of these Jewish

circa 1900 range from 800,000 to 900,000.4 Today, only 4,000 Jews remain in the Arab world.5

Between 1948 and 1967, Jews left, fled, were deported, or forced to leave the countries their ancestors had lived in for centuries. Each country’s situation was slightly different. Some Jews left for Israel before 1948, but many waited. The majority of Iraqi Jews left between 1950 and

1951 through a coordinated airlift by the Israeli and Iraqi governments. However, some delayed, particularly in Egypt, until the 1967 war, when the Arab World was dealt another humiliating defeat. Some Jews went to Europe or the Americas, but the majority went to Israel.

One of the many tragedies of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that the Arabs’ and Jews’ shared past is hidden or ignored. Official historical narratives in Israel and the Arab world reflect the current conflict by writing about Jews and Arabs as if they were always separate people.

Consequently, there are important gaps in both the histories of Jews and Muslims in the Middle

East. Absent from the narratives of Islamic history, for example, is the presence of Jews who lived throughout the Middle Eastern world long before Islam and Arabic became the religion and language of the majority. When Islamic armies began conquering the Middle East in the seventh century, they encountered Jews who were natives and enveloped them into their Islamic empire.

When Christian Spain expelled Sephardic Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Empire welcomed them.

Also absent from Islamic history are the Jews who were active participants in the Islamic

World’s prosperity, in developing the economy, government, and education.6 The majority of these Jews considered themselves at home in the Islamic world, were proud of their native lands, and had no thought of leaving.

communities in the Arab World, I am not intending to make any arguments about Arab Jews before 1900. I am not arguing that they shared Arab ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationality’ before 1900, since that would be anachronistic. 4 “Statistics,” Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13992-statistics. 5 There are around 10,500 in Iran today, but I did not add that estimate in since they are not culturally Arab. The 4,000 are mainly in North Africa, with 3,700 in Morocco and Tunisia. “World Jewish Population,” Jewish Data Bank, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Reports/World_Jewish_Population_2010.pdf. 6 For examples, see Appendix A on Jewish participation in the Egyptian nation. 2

Likewise, Jewish history marginalizes the stories of thousands of Jews who lived under

Muslim rule in relative stability and who prospered when Muslims prospered. Such histories overlook the fact that over half of the population of modern Israel hailed from the Islamic world and have much in common with that world. Jews of the Islamic world prayed, sang, spoke, wrote, and expressed their emotions in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic. When these Jews came to Israel after 1948, rather than feeling as if they had come home, they attested to being in exile.

In the 1990s, Jews from the Arab world, now living in Israel, Europe and the Americas and calling themselves Arab Jews, began publishing memoirs about their experiences in the Arab world and Israel. By writing about their personal experiences, Arab Jews have problematized categories of identity, such as ethnicity and nationality, by demonstrating that they are simultaneously Arab and Jewish through culture, language, and religious heritage. Possessing histories that are both “Arab” and “Jewish,” Arab Jews illustrate how they have been omitted from official historical narratives by writing themselves back into the histories of Arab and of

Jewish history, including Israeli and Zionist history. Memoirs reveal how Arab governments excluded them from the Arab world and how Arab Jews have been marginalized in Israel and in

Jewish communities across the world. These memoirs indicate that before the emergence of

Zionism and Arab nationalism at midcentury, the binary of Arab versus Jew did not exist.

Arab Jewish memoirs overturn common perceptions of identity and belonging in the

Middle East. Reading stories of Arab Jewish anguish over leaving their homes in the Arab world upends the belief that all Jews wanted to go to Israel. Lucette Lagnado, an Egyptian Jewish woman who grew up in Cairo and New York, describes her father’s distress upon leaving Egypt in 1963:

We barely drifted out of Alexandria’s harbor when I heard my father cry, ‘Ragaouna Masr’ – Take us back to Cairo... ‘Ragaouna Masr,’ my father kept shouting. He had lost

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all inhibitions, and for a man whose life had exemplified elegance and propriety, any sense of decorum seemed gone. He would cry out when he sat alone, and he’d cry in front of other passengers, when we were with him and when we weren’t, inside the privacy of our lower berths and out in the open air. Oddly, no one seemed to mind – or even to find it strange – the sight of this irate old man, at times yelling, at times softly moaning, Take us back to Cairo. He was only saying what they felt in their hearts.7

Leon’s unwillingness to leave the Arab world is not unique. Lagnado was overwhelmed by the number of emails and letters she received from her readers declaring that Leon’s story was their story as well. She summarizes the response her book received in her postscript:

They wanted me to know that, even after all these years, the peculiar wounds that exile and loss inflict had not healed. They were also anxious to convey that I told not simply my family’s story but their own. They had watched their parents mourn the loss of Egypt, had seen how elderly relatives suffered the transition to new lands, and recalled how they’d echoed my father’s cry, Ragaouna Masr! – ‘Take us back to Cairo!’8

The outpouring of emotion from Lagnado’s readers also demonstrates that Arab Jews, many still mourning the loss of their homelands, are not used to seeing their story on paper. Arab Jewish history is not well known or well promoted.

The letters Lagnado received confirm the lack of official Arab Jewish history. One particular letter plagued Lagnado; it was written by Jaques Sapriel, an Egyptian Jew living in

Philadelphia. In his letter, Sapriel told the story of his father who had been exiled to France.

Despite swearing that he would not be buried in “the frozen Alsatian ground,” Sapriel’s father was buried in France because there was no way back to Egypt. Lagnado related this letter to her friend, an Englishman, wondering why it bothered her so much. “‘It was your history that was buried.’ He exclaimed at once. ‘The history of the Jews of the Levant – that is what was

7 Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 163,165. 8 Postscript, Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, 9. 4

buried.’”9 The history of Arab Jews has indeed been buried. When retrieved, that history will add new ways of critiquing the Arab versus Jew binary.

Since the historiography about Arab Jews is so limited, the first purpose of this thesis is to draw attention to the story of Jews from the Arab world. The mere sharing of their story challenges the Arab versus Jew binary with which the contemporary world, particularly the

West, is familiar. In particular, the existence of the category of Arab Jews disrupts common assumptions about identity and how identity is created. The memoirs of Arab Jews also disrupt how the narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been told. Uncovering the stories of Arab Jews adds a new dimension to the conflict and illustrates how the conflict divided people into constructed ethno-nationalisms. Thus, the second purpose of this thesis is to use the memoirs of

Arab Jews to contest the history of the modern Middle East, which assumes that there is an eternal separation between Jews and Arabs and which insists that citizenship or belonging has historically been based on static ethno-national identities. It is a common assumption that all

Jews went to Israel after 1948 because they saw a Jewish state as their “natural” home. On the contrary, Arab Jewish experience reveals that the creation of Israel did not necessarily precipitate the migration of Arab Jews to Israel. Rather, the conflict created a situation in which many were caught between two exclusive nationalisms and forced to leave their homes in the Arab world.

Prior to the 1940s, these Jews were living in peace with their Arab neighbors.

The third purpose of this thesis is to use Arab Jewish memoirs and various secondary sources to illustrate how Arab nationalists excluded Arab Jews from the Arab world and to reveal how Zionism has marginalized Arab culture in Israel. Memoirs mourn both the exclusive

Arab nationalism that developed post World War Two, which excluded Jews, and the exclusively Jewish Israel they encountered after 1948.

9 Ibid, 11. 5

This thesis, therefore, is a postnationalist critique of the claim that being Arab and Jewish is mutually exclusive. I am working from the assumption that a political conflict forced Arabs and Jews into two separate and opposing people groups. This thesis is, therefore, also a transnational history of identity, one which questions the essentialized categories of Arab and

Jew.

Historiography

Few historians have written about Arab Jews’ experience of the Arab-Israeli conflict as separate from Israeli history.10 Because Arab Jews ended up in Israel, historians categorize them as Zionist Jews, suggesting that their migration was inevitable. The study of Arab Jews apart from other Jews is a recent development in historiography, one which is largely due to current activists and memoirists bringing awareness to what they call Arab Jewish discrimination in

Israel.

What the historiography lacks in brevity, however, it makes up for in controversy.

Because of its association with the conflict, the study of Arab Jews is typically polarizing. Some scholars put the blame fully on Israel, while ignoring the part Arab governments played. Other scholars condemn the Arab world only. This thesis places responsibility on both the Arab and

Israeli governments, while trying to explain the reasons behind both of their actions. Scholars even debate what to call Arab Jews (Sephardic, Oriental, Mizrahi, Asian, Iraqi, Syrian, etc) and

10 For histories of Jews in the Muslim world before the twentieth century, see Shelomo Dov Goiten’s Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (1955) and his five-volume work, A Mediterranean Society (first volume in 1967, last in 2000). Also, see Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 6

what to call their movement from the Arab world (emigration, flight, exile, etc.). Despite the controversy, Arab Jews’ story is slowly being told through histories and through memoirs.

Scholars who have studied Jews from the Arab world include Norman A. Stillman, who asserts that the Judeo-Islamic tradition has a longer history than the Judeo-Christian tradition has.

Stillman’s two-volume Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times and Jews of Arab Lands is a survey of the various Jewish communities in the Arab world from pre-modern times to their emigration to Israel beginning in 1948.11 He presents an enormous amount of information on these communities and their interaction with the larger world. Stillman presents evidence of coexistence between Arabs and Jews for centuries, while at the same time taking note of the intermittent persecution Jewish communities faced from Islamic governments. He highlights the modernizing effect that Europe had on the Middle East, as he writes about how these Jewish communities were affected by the Alliance Israelite Schools and European imperialism in the late nineteenth century.12 Stillman asserts that the establishment of the state of Israel was the result of processes known as modernization, and the Jews of the Arab world were swept along with the changes.

Other scholars, such as Ella Shohat and Aziza Khazzoom study Arab Jewish interaction with Zionism. They write about what has happened to the Arab Jews since the creation of Israel and about the discrimination that Arab Jews have experienced in Israel. In contrast to Stillman, who argues that Arab Jews were excluded from Arab nationalism only to be included by

Zionism, Shohat and Khazzoom emphasize how Zionism has marginalized Arab Jews. They see the establishment of Israel as an Ashkenazi enterprise and synonymous with the demise of Arab

11 Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991); Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979). Stilmman is the Schusterman-Josey Professor and Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. 12 A Paris-based organization, the Alliance Israelite established schools beginning in 1865 throughout the Middle East, including Baghdad, Cairo, Alexandria, Fez, and Casablanca. 7

Jewish culture. While not historians, they incorporate the history of Arab Jews as well as integrating their own families’ histories. Khazzoom draws heavily from Edward Said’s theory of

Orientalism to advance her theory of Jewish Orientalism.13 She argues that just as Ashkenazi

Jews were the object of ‘othering’ in Europe, Ashkenazi Jews who subscribed to Zionism subsequently Orientalized Palestinian Arabs and Arab Jews. European Jews, Khazzoum suggests, internalized Orientalist stereotypes throughout history and then projected them onto the

Arab ‘other’ when they arrived in Palestine. As new immigrants poured into Israel, Ashkenazi

Jews, to whom Khazzoum refers to as the ‘Zionist gatekeepers,’ segregated non-Western Jews into development towns, thereby stunting integration in Israel. Khazzoom’s theory of Jewish

Orientalism places the experiences of Arab Jews in the larger context of East and West interaction.14 While her theory helps us to understand the progression of ‘othering,’ Khazzoom tends to conflate all Ashkenazim. She misses the step where elite Ashkenazi Jews, or Sabras, first ‘othered’ subsequent Ashkenazi immigrants to Israel before they began ‘othering’ Arab

Jews.

Ella Shohat condemns both Arab nationalism and Zionism for excluding Jews, but she mainly focuses on the recent history of Arab Jews in Israel. She proposes that studying Arab

Jews is studying a hybrid of East and West. She argues that studying Arab Jews is a “third way” to understand Orientalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She theorizes that a critical approach to

13 In 1978, Edward Said published his theory of Orientalism which has transformed how scholars define East and West’s interactions. Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism posits that the West stigmatizes the East as the ‘other’ and sets up binary opposites of civilized and barbaric, modern and traditional, rational and irrational, sexually normal and sexually deviant, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 14 Aziza Khazzoum, “Did the Israeli State Engineer Segregation? On the Placement of Jewish Immigrants in Development Towns in the 1950s” Social Forces 84, No. 1 (2005):115-134.; Aziza Khazzoum,“Orientalism at the Gates: Immigration, the East/West Divide, and Elite Iraqi Jewish Women in Israel in the 1950s” Signs 32, no. 1 (2006): 197-220. Aziza Khazzoum, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion” American Sociological Review 68, no. 4 (2003): 481-510. Khazzoum is the Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. 8

Mizrahi studies (her term) undermines both the Zionist left and right. Ella Shohat also uses the term Arab-Jews, emphasizing the hyphen which she claims represents the hybridity in which

Arab Jews live.15 She writes that studying Arab Jews “desegregate[s] intellectual spaces and relocates the issues in a much wider and denser geographic imaginary and historical mapping.”16

She further argues for “situating identities rather than proposing an essential core identity” for

Arab Jews.17 She creatively intertwines stories of her childhood in Israel with Orientalist theory, making her writing a primary source as well, in order to articulate both the personal and collective experience of Arab Jews. Both Shohat and Khazzoum, as Arab Jews and as scholars of

Arab Jews, provide helpful frameworks through which to analyze Arab Jews in the context of

Zionism.

In his monograph, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and

Ethnicity, Yehouda Shenhav questions how nationalism, religion and ethnicity are defined through the experience of Arab Jews. Like Shohat and Khazzoom, Shenhav faults Israel for the dissolution of Jewish communities in the Arab world. He makes a case for how Arab Jews were purposefully tricked into coming to Israel by Zionist operatives who posed as Shadarut, religious emissaries in Arab countries. Traditionally, the Shadarut traveled to the Arab world to collect money to fund the study of the Torah, and Zionist operatives agents used this precedent to visit

Arab Jewish communities. Zionists tricked many Arab Jews, especially Yemenites, into immigrating by painting Zionism as a religious enterprise and as the fulfillment of the long- awaited gathering in the Promised Land. Shenhav also argues that Zionists purposefully

15 Ella Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew,” In Women and the Politics of Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation, edited by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin, 262-276. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of Its Jewish Victims” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988): 1-35. Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Shohat is the NYU Professor of Cultural Studies. 16 Ella Shohat, “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 354. 17 Shohat, “Rupture and Return,” 336. 9

segregated Arab Jews once they arrived in Israel.18 Shenhav writes that Zionists only used Arab

Jews, such as Eli Cohen, who spied for Israel in Syria, in ways to separate Arab Jews from their background, when they might be used as cultural links for peace. Shenhav notes that when he read about Cohen as an Israeli hero in his school textbooks, Cohen’s Arab background was never mentioned. Yet it was his Arab identity that allowed him to spy for Israel. Shenhav claims that

Israel was supposed to be the place where Jews finally felt comfortable but that such comfort never became the reality for Arab Jews.19 Like Shohat and Khazzoom, Shenhav views the emigration of Jews to Israel as a tragedy and focuses on the discrimination they have endured.

Orit Bashkin’s recent work focuses on Iraqi Jews, particularly those who sought to be a part of the Arab National movement. In New Babylonians: A History of Modern Jews in Iraq,

Bashkin discusses the different political parties Iraqi Jews helped form, arguing that Jews were claiming Iraqi nationalism and communism as their own in the 1930s and 40s.20 She attributes the emigration of Baghdadi Jews to the Iraqi government’s failure to recognize Arab Jews’ loyalty to the Arab nation. Bashkin writes that the Iraqi government failed to promote democracy and pluralism and, instead, created an exclusive nationalism circa 1950 to undergird the fractured and unstable government. She relates how the Iraqi Jewish diaspora is currently at the forefront of promoting and preserving Iraqi culture, demonstrating that Iraqi Jews are still loyal to the Iraqi nation even in diaspora. Bashkin’s book illustrates that the definitions of Arab and Jew were still being negotiated by Jewish community leaders who pledged allegiance to the Iraqi state, Jewish communists who called for a secular socialist state, and Zionists who saw aliyah to Israel as religious redemption. Bashkin’s research on the Baghdadi Jewish community demonstrates that

18 Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 31. 19 Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 5-6. 20 Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 10

there were and still are multiple ways of being Jewish, and that one way of being Jewish was being Arab. The characteristics of being a Jew, she claims, cannot be defined as one ideal type then or now. Bashkin’s analysis of the malleability of identity in Baghdad’s politics complements Shohat’s and Shenhav’s analysis of Arab Jewish “schizophrenic” identity in Israel.

Caught between two nationalisms, the Arab Jewish experience, according to Shohat, Shenhav, and Bashkin, is defined by an ongoing identity crisis.

Gudrun Kramer’s The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952, is a survey of the origin, culture, and politics of the Jewish communities in Egypt from the Egyptian National movement in World War One to the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser.21 She astutely situates the Jews as one of many minorities in Egyptian society. Her study of Jewish integration and interaction, compared with other foreign minorities, illustrates that the Egyptian government’s persecution of

Jews happened alongside the persecution of other minorities who were not considered true

Egyptians.22 Kramer’s book illustrates that Jewish emigration was due to the escalation of the political conflict, not the creation of Israel, and because of the exclusive nationalism promoted by President Nasser. Kramer could bolster this argument if she extended her study to the 1956

Suez war, when most of the Jews migrated to Israel. The fact that the first Arab-Israeli War did not result in the full expulsion of Egyptian Jewry illustrates that the conflict had to escalate further to force the Jews from their homes.

Joel Beinin’s The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora further challenges the Zionist and Arab nationalist interpretations of Jewish history in Egypt.23 Beinin weaves together political and social history, postcolonial analytical

21 Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989). 22 The other minorities Kramer is referring to include Greeks, Armenians, Italians, French, English, etc. 23 Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998). 11

lenses, ethnography, oral history, and his own memory to construct the history of Egyptian Jews after 1948. Beinin’s handling of the malleable identities of these Egyptian Jews illustrates how historians can and should contextualize identity and nationality. Like Kramur, Beinin illustrates the diversity of Egyptian Jewry and attributes the tragedy of their exodus to both sides of the conflict.

There are several reasons why the historiography of Arab Jews is so brief. The major reason is that Jewish history has been subsumed under European Jewish history by those who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity that Arab Jews represent. Scholar and Arab Jew Loolwa

Khazzoom astutely notes that “People try desperately to reconfigure us, lest they should have to reconfigure fashionable uniting and dividing lives.”24 Arab Jews do not easily fit into the current categories used for historical study, such as nation, territory, language or ethnicity. Arab Jews are hard to categorize, name, and describe, and thus, their history is hard to write.

Though Arab Jews are difficult to explain, this complexity is the precise reason why these stories are important. The story of Arab Jews problematizes the categories used for speaking and writing about the Middle East. The complex experience of Arab Jews is also particularly suitable for questioning the semantics of movement and nomenclature.

Terminology

The language describing Arab Jewish movement is politically divisive and automatically comes with a certain connotation: “Aliyah” (ascendancy), “yetzia” (exit), “exodus,” “expulsion,”

“immigration,” “emigration,” “exile,” “refugees,” “expatriates,” and “population exchange.”

24 Loolwa Khazzoom, “Introduction” in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North Arfrican and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage Ed. Loolwa Khazzoom (New York: Seal Press, 2003), xi. 12

Each of these terms is inadequate to cover the complexity of Arab Jewish displacement.

Different terms apply to different groups of Arab Jews from particular countries, and for many groups, none of these terms are sufficient.

Each memoirist calls their own movement by a different name. While Sasson Somekh emigrated from Iraq so he could go to a university, he now simultaneously calls Israel “home” and “exile” because he cannot go back to Iraq. Ruth Knafo Setton uses the word “escape” to describe her leaving Morocco. Violette Shamash writes that she “fled” Iraq under cover of night because of persecution. Lucette Lagnado’s father was essentially “forced out” because he had no other options. Each experience cannot be summed up in one comprehensive term.

Even more complicated is the question of what to call Arab Jews. Terminology dominates any discussion, and Arab Jews are viscerally divided over what they call themselves.

Shohat, who self identifies as an Arab-Jew, provides a list of names that is overwhelming:

Non-Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardim; Jews of Islam; Arab-Jews; Middle Eastern, West Asian, or North African Jews; Asian and African Jews; non-European Jews; Third World Jews; Levantine Jews; Jews of the Mediterranean; Maghrebian and Mashreqian Jews (from the western and eastern part of the Arab World); Bnei Edot ha-Mizrah (descendants of the Eastern communities); yotzei artzot ‘arav ve- ha-Islam (those who left Arab and Muslim countries); blacks; Israel ha-Shniya (Second Israel); Mizrahiyim or Mizrahim; Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Palestinian Jews, Moroccan Jews, and so forth.25

Each of these terms has political, cultural, and geographical connotations. Some terms are more inclusive but really vague. Some overly generalize and stereotype, while others only refer to specific geographic locations. Sephardim or Sephardic is one of the oldest terms, referring to

Jews from Spain who then migrated back to the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from the

Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Thus, the Sephardic tradition contains both Spanish and Arab elements. However, technically, Sephardic does not cover the Jews who were in the Middle East

25 Ella Shohat, “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 334. 13

before the Sephardic migration, but since those Jews indigenous to the Middle East adopted a lot of Sephardic traditions, they tend to be conflated with Sephardic Jews. It is almost impossible to separate them from Sephardic Jews. Thus, the term Sephardic is too broad and essentially means non-Ashkenazi. Sephardic can be used to define what religious tradition a Jew follows, but it is inadequate term for modifying “ethnicity.”26

In Israel, the term Mizrahi is most commonly used, though it was created with the establishment of Israel. The Pioneers or Sabras, Ashkenazi Jews who were the pre-state settlers, grouped together all Jews from North Africa and the Middle East under the new term Mizrahim, or “Eastern.” Essentially any Jew who was not from Europe or Russia was “Eastern.” The term was reserved for the non-Ashkenazi. While seemingly benign, the term Mizrahi groups many different Jewish communities together into one static ‘Other.’ Mizrahi is used to define them as the opposite of Ashkenazi. Language shows the discrimination because the term, Jew, automatically refers to Ashkenazi Jews, while the Mizrahi Jew needs the modifier of ‘Mizrahi.’

Mizrahi has been essentialized into the ‘other’ of Ashkenazi, setting up an unequal relationship between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Mizrahi is code for a number of degrading stereotypes, and thus the use of this term, though general and comprehensive, can be contested as a way to challenge inequality.

One way that activists have challenged the degrading meanings of Mizrahi is to “take back” the name as a positive, empowering term. Mati Shemoelof stated, “We use the Mizrahi

26 Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have different holiday food traditions and prayer services. Sephardi prayer services use different melodies than Ashkenazi. Also, several memoirists remember singing and praying in Arabic, rather than in Biblical Hebrew. Sephardic Jews also eat a wider range of foods on Passover than Ashkenazi. Sephardic Jews may eat rice, corn, peanuts, and beans, while Ashkenazi usually avoid them. Another example is Hanukkah. Ashkenazi Jews eat latkes (potato pancakes), while Sephardic Jews eat sufganiot (jelly doughnuts). Judaism 101, “People,” http://www.jewfaq.org/ashkseph.htm 14

term which the country has used to label us to empower ourselves.”27 Rather than being ashamed of its “ethnic” connotations, activists within Israel have sought to urge Mizrahim to actively and proudly share their heritage but also claim that their Arab heritage is just as Jewish as a European heritage.

Another way Arab Jews have challenged the Orientalized Mizrahi term is by calling themselves Arab Jews. The history of the term is not much older than Mizrahi because the term

‘Arab’ was not widely used for Arabic speaking parts of the world until 1900. Historically,

Arabs were Bedouins who lived in the Arabian Peninsula; only during the late 1800s and early

1900s, in the wake of spreading Arab nationalism, did the term Arab refer to people who spoke

Arabic and lived in the Middle East and North Africa. Arab referred to Muslim, Christian, and

Jew alike. In the 1930s and 40s, Jews who were part of the Arab national movements were called

Arab Jews in Arab nationalist and literary circles, but the term was dropped upon the establishment of Israel.28

Scholars who use the term Arab Jew defend it constantly because of its controversy.

There is no other group of Jews who have to be called “Jews from such-and-such lands.”29 Lital

Levy writes that since these Jews were culturally Arab, they should be called Arab Jews, “They were Arab by way of language, culture, food, and custom; the rest is a question of semantics.”30

27 Sherri Muzher, “Mizrahi Jews reach out to the Arab World,” Sidbar, Tuesday, September 29, 2009, Originally published Saturday, June 13, 2009, “A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam.” http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/66751. 28 Salim Tamari. “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly File: Institute of Jerusalem Studies (2004):10-26. He writes, “In contemporary narratives of the late Ottoman period - such as in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh - native Jews of Palestine were often referred to as ‘abna’ al-balad’ (sons of the country), ‘compatriots’, ‘Yahud awlad Arab’ (Jews, sons of Arabs).” 29 David Shasha, “On the Use of the Term ‘Arab Jew,’” Jvoices, http://jvoices.com/2008/08/08/on-the-use-of-the- term-%e2%80%9carab-jew%e2%80%9d/#sthash.5h2PdVX8.dpuf 30 Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found its Wings,” In Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North Arfrican and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage Ed. Loolwa Khazzoom, 173-189 (New York: Seal Press, 2003), 176. 15

David Shasha writes that the term ‘Arab Jew’ is not debated because of accuracy but because

Israelis do not want ‘Arab’ attached to anything Jewish:

Looking at it from a dispassionate point of view, the hysteria over the term “Arab Jew” has less to do with its accuracy – Jews have lived in the Arab world for many centuries and have assimilated into its culture – and more to do with the fact that Arabs are now viewed as the most bitter existential enemy of the Jewish people. This construct of Jew vs. Arab is dependent on a sense of cultural exclusion that simply does not apply to any other Jewish culture extant…Jews can be called “German” in spite of the Nazi persecution of our people. Jews can be called “Russian” and “Polish” in spite of many centuries of oppression. Jews can be called “European” and “Western” in spite of the fact that Jews were expelled from European countries for many centuries. It is only the term “Arab” that is contested.31

The name ‘Arab Jew’ causes both controversy and confusion, as most people see Arabs and Jews as eternal enemies or at least mutually exclusive groups. However, using the term ‘Arab Jew’ is most helpful in conveying the hybrid identity of these people and of critiquing the status quo.

Besides the ‘shock value’ of using ‘opposites,’ Arab Jew is the most historically accurate term.

Arab is a linguistic and cultural term that correctly describes these people as speaking Arabic, eating Arab food, and listening to Arab music, while practicing Judaism or coming from a

Jewish heritage. Like the word, Ashkenazi, which denotes history, culture, and family ancestry, the word, Arab, indicates ancestry, geography, history, language, and culture. Palestinian scholar

Salim Tamari positively challenges the term Arab Jew by suggesting that one should really call them Jewish Arabs, which would indicate that they are “Arabs of Jewish background, in the same category of Christian Arabs.”32 Flipping the term challenges the status quo view of these people even further and illustrates how their historical identity has been fully Arab and fully

Jewish. Until the 1940s there was nothing complicated about being an Arab and a Jew

31 David Shasha, email to Sephardic Heritage Update group. 32 Salim Tamari, “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly File: Institute of Jerusalem Studies (2004):10-26,11. 16

simultaneously. Therefore, using the term Arab Jew is crucial to understanding the history of these people.33

The concern with using the term Arab Jew is that many Arab Jews reject the term outright because of its association with Israel’s enemy, the Arab Palestinians. Journalist Rachel

Shabi interviewed several Arab Jews in Israel, and was overcome with their reaction to the expression, Arab. She titles one of her chapters, “We Are Not Arabs!” In this chapter, she recounts several of her conversations with Arab Jews in Israel. Many of these Jews would proudly claim an Egyptian, Iraqi, or Yemeni heritage, but they would not identify as Arab.34 To them, using Arab was different than using Iraqi. They speak Arabic, eat Arab food, listen to Arab music, and were an integral part of the Arab world until their immigration. Because of the association between Palestinian and Arab, they will not identity as Arab Jews. Few in Israel identify as Arab Jews. Many Jews of Arab origin who live outside Israel accept the term. The fact that many Arab Jews reject the name of their own heritage illuminates how the term Arab has been stigmatized.

This thesis will primarily use the term Arab Jew because it is more historically accurate and illustrates the present hybridity of their situation. However, this thesis will occasionally use

Mizrahi when referring to contemporary activists. Mizrahi is slightly problematic because it is wider in scope, including all non-Ashkenazi, such as Iranian Jews who are not Arabs. However, the term Mizrahi will be used on occasion because it is what many contemporary activists call their movements.

33 For more discussion on using the term, see David Shash’s article “On the Use of the Term ‘Arab Jew,’” http://jvoices.com/2008/08/08/on-the-use-of-the-term-%e2%80%9carab-jew%e2%80%9d/#sthash.5h2PdVX8.dpuf 34 Rachel Shabi, We Look like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 218. 17

Memoirs as Primary Sources

I listen, analyze, and critique Arab Jewish memoirs written by first-generation and second-generation immigrants. The majority of these memoirs were written and published in the

1990s and 2000s, though some were written earlier. I also draw from various secondary sources, in order to construct the story of Arab Jews in the twentieth century. I mainly draw from Iraqi and Egyptian memoirs simply because these Jews have written the most memoirs, and the history of Iraqi and Egyptian Jews is better documented in secondary sources than the history of other Jewish communities. I also draw some from Moroccan and Yemenite experiences in Israel, because Moroccans make up the majority of Mizrahi in Israel and Yemenites immigrated in large numbers to Palestine circa 1900.

Iraqi Jews have written the most memoirs. The Iraqi Jewish community is significant because it was the oldest Jewish community, and it was the center of Judaism for a thousand years. The Jewish community was established in Babylon in 586 B.C.E., and after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in C.E. 70, Babylon became the center of

Judaism for centuries (until Spain became the center of Judaism in the 11th century). During this time, the Talmud was composed and compiled by Babylonian Jews. The Jewish community continued uninterrupted until the twentieth century. In the 1940s, Jews numbered 140,000, the majority of whom lived in Baghdad. In the first half of the twentieth century, Baghdad’s population was one-third Jewish. In 2003, there were only twenty Jews living in the city.35

Egyptian Jews have also written a considerable number of memoirs documenting the pluralism of Egyptian life in the first half of the twentieth century. Several of these memoirs are

35 Preface, in Morad, Tamar, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shash, eds., Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008). 18

written by Egyptian Jews who chose to go to Europe or the United States instead of Israel. These memoirs give a unique perspective of Arab Jews who are living outside of Israel. The Egyptian

Jewish community was very heterogeneous by class and religious sect, but these memoirs give a good sample of the different ways of life for Egyptian Jews in the twentieth century.

Using memoirs as primary sources can be problematic because memoirs are the deliberate publication of memory. In memoirs, authors are able to carefully construct memories in order to present themselves in a certain manner. Also, the passage of time between the events and writing make it difficult to trust the memory of the authors. Iraqi Jew Victor Sasson admits,

“Some of my memories of Baghdad are blurred by the passing of so many years. Others are so fresh as though the incidents they had recorded happened only yesterday.”36 Therefore, I read these memoirs along with secondary sources in order to compare the two. The stories and quotes

I included were representations of the common threads and themes that I found in the thirty some memoirs that I read.

I read these memoirs not just for what they say about the past but also what they are saying about the time in which the memoirists write.37 Arab Jewish memoirs are not written in a vacuum. Every memoirist writes about their past experiences from the perspective of their present circumstances. They also present themselves a certain way because of what is happening in the present. Many of the stories these Arab Jews tell are about their former homeland, but the stories that are emphasized make statements about their present home, usually Israel, and the present state of conflict in the Arab world. The language these memoirists choose to write in, whether Hebrew, Arabic, or English, demonstrates who they are speaking to and who they want to read their story. For example, many memoirs are written in Hebrew because authors want their

36 Victor Sasson, Memoirs of a Baghdad Childhood (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2011), 1. 37 In order to help readers know the specific time these memoirists are writing, I have made sure to keep the dates of memoirs in my footnotes even when shortening the reference. 19

children to read about their life in the Arab world, or they wrote their book in English because they want to tell the West a peaceful story about their interaction with fellow Arabs. Sasson

Somekh had short vignettes published in the Egyptian Arabic press, which conveyed to the Arab world his love of Baghdad and Arabic poetry. Even by telling their story in a particular language, these memoirs speak certain messages.

These memoirs construct a past that is very different from the present. They all seem to be pointing to the loss of pluralism and diversity in their life. Instead of these stories pointing to a harmonious past, they are using the pluralism of their past to illustrate how their present has become defined by the binary of Arab versus Jew. Memoirs are crucial to the study of the Jewish past because they expose the false assumption that Jews and Arabs have always been separate and oppositional people groups. One reviewer of Iraqi Jew Sasson Somekh’s memoir, Yair Huri, remarks,

It goes without saying that well-crafted memoirs are particularly adept at describing a complex historical reality and simultaneously offering a multi-layered personal take on these historical events. The artful use of literary language and the use of various literary devices not only make the memoir more interesting to read, but actually heighten the author’s ability to represent lived experiences.38

Memoirists add nuance and diversity to historical events, giving new meaning to how these events affected Arab Jews personally. Using memoirs provides the perspective of people who were affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict, rather than reciting the events that led to a new state.

While adding personal stories to supplement historical facts, Arab Jews complicate the

Israeli and Arab narrative by elaborating on experiences that are unfamiliar to most readers. The conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has become so entrenched that hearing about a past when Jews and Arabs lived together sounds impossible. Reading that thousands of people

38 Yair Huri, review of Baghdad, Yesterday: the Making of an Arab Jew, by Sasson Somekh, DOMES: Digest of Middle East Studies 17, no. 1 (2008):119-123. 20

were Arabs who practiced the tenets of Judaism does not make sense inside the present categories of identity. Memoirs illustrate the complexity and mutability of identity better than linear histories can.

These Arab Jewish memoirs problematize the categories of identity historians use to write about the past. Beinin writes:

The category[ies] of history is to some degree complicit with modern structures of domination, especially the nation-state. Therefore, in sympathetically representing the experiences, memories, and aspirations of subaltern groups, anthropological and literary techniques can be of great value. There is no single “proper” way to combine these genres.39

Using memoirs as primary sources is my attempt to “combine these genres” in order to represent the past in ways that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict occludes.

The conflict has created not just oppositional identities but stereotypes for each category of identity. Today in the Arab world, governments and the press present all Jews as European imperialists, Zionists, and overtly aggressive, while presenting themselves as victims of Zionist aggression. Zionists, in particular, and the West, in general, have come to define being Jewish as

European, civilized, masculine, and the opposite of Arab; Zionists and the West see Arabs as

Eastern, uncivilized, effeminate, and the opposite of Jewish. Arab Jewish memoirs do not conform to the categories of either Jewish or Arab or the stereotypes of masculine and effeminate, civilized, and backward. These memoirs serve as a way to express Arabness on their own terms, giving the authors an ability to explain their Arabness and normalize it. Memoirs also serve as a healing for Arab Jewish adults who felt ashamed as children for their Arabness but are now trying to understand their heritage. Memoirs humanize both “Arabness” and “Jewishness” and illustrate how these identities were interconnected and inseparable for Arab Jews.

39 Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998), 10. 21

As Arab Jews reconstruct the forgotten past and seek to reconcile it with their present, they create a new hybrid. Lital Levy states that, “there is no return to a lost collective past.”40

She uses the wordplay, “re-membering,” the idea of remembering the past but also reconstructing, like putting the members, or parts, of a statue back together. This wordplay illustrates that there is no return to any sort of authentic past. Levy warns that, “Nostalgia for

‘authenticity’ can be a self-defeating mechanism.” Mizrahim now are a hybrid of both Israel and their homelands and their past and their present, “Mizrahim today are not what our parents were and definitely not what our grandparents were.”41 Memoirs written by second and third- generation Arab Jews “re-member” their past and construct their present identity by interviewing family or friends and by digging up family history through photos and research. Kyla Wazana

Tompkins adds, “Like many children of immigrants, I have an imaginary homeland, a fictional

Morocco reconstructed out of family anecdotes, accents, tastes, smells, familiar gestures, and books.”42 Rather than disregarding these memories as inaccurate or suspect, Arab Jewish memories illustrate the identity crisis and sense of rupture. These second and third-generation

Arab Jews are searching for their identity because it has been subsumed under Ashkenazi Jewish identity and forgotten in the Arab world because of bifurcation between Arab and Jew.

These memoirists have written to preserve their particular language of Judeo-Arabic, their transnational history, and syncretic culture, and in doing so have provided a new and provocative critique on the status quo of identity in the Middle East. The mere existence of Arab

Jews problematizes the present ‘normative’ categories of nation, ethnicity, Arab, and Jew. These

40 Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found its Wings,” In Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North Arfrican and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage Ed. Loolwa Khazzoom, 173-189 (New York: Seal Press, 2003). Reuven Snir agrees with her analysis but takes it further when he writes that the true Arab Jewish generation is gone, and his generation that has grown up in Israel is claiming Arab Jewish identity as a reaction against Israel. 41 Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found its Wings,” In Flying Camel (2003). 42 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, In Flying Camel (2003), 132. 22

memoirs show that Arab Jews have been erased from national histories, neither belonging in the narrative of Arab nationalism nor in the grand Zionist narrative. However, with the recent publication of these memoirs, the revelation of Arab Jews’ hybrid identity provides a new look at the Arab-Israeli conflict and illustrates the diversity, malleability, and syncretic nature of identity and nationality. Lucette Lagnado’s father Leon represents this syncretism, as he was the epitome of both Arab and Jew. He claimed to be both Arab and Jewish, called Cairo his home, and attended synagogue devoutly. Leon did not run to Israel in 1948. He left Egypt wailing in 1963, and his cry needs to be heard.

23

CHAPTER 1: NATIONALISM AS ERASURE: OMISSION AND EXCLUSION

“I was Iraqi. That was it. I was Iraqi. I was Jewish Iraqi. The two always went together.”

-Valentine Balass

“I am Jewish because I am Egyptian. I am Egyptian because I am Jewish.”

-Jacques Hassoun

Arab nationalism and Zionism, like all nationalisms, are constructed identities. Since the

1983 publication of Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on the nation as an imagined community, historians have begun to dissect national identities rather than accepting the nation as a natural phenomenon.43 Anderson delineates how nation-states have been formed, what factors cause members of the nation to realize they are a nation, and how the historical categories of identity in the modern world have not always been present. Following Anderson’s model, much scholarship has been devoted to understanding what constituted both Zionism and various forms of Arab nationalism in order to discover the origins of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world.44

Arab Jewish memoirs add a new dimension to the study of national identity in Zionism and Arab nationalism. Memoirs illustrate that Arab Jews have been erased from both nationalisms through the formation of exclusive identities. First, Arab nationalism erased or excluded Jewish presence from the Arab world, and Zionism marginalized Arab culture in Israel.

43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983). 44 For scholarship on the formation of Zionism: Amos Elon, The Israelis, Founders and Sons (New York: Penguin Books, 1971); Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007); Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, Trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For scholarship on Arab nationalism: Sylvia G. Haim, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, 1976); Laura Bier, Revolutionary Manhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Ellen L. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920- 1948 (Berkeley: University of California, 2003); Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 24

Second, Arab nationalism and Zionism both erased Arab Jews by omitting Arab Jewish experience from their national narratives. Arab Jewish memoirs contest this erasure by writing about their experience as immigrants to Israel and as citizens of countries like Egypt and Iraq.

Memoirs serve as a reminder that Arab Jews are part of the Israeli collective and part of the Arab past. This chapter documents the Arab Jewish critique of both Zionism’s and Arab Nationalism’s historical omission of Arab Jews. At the same time, this chapter captures the Arab Jewish narrative of exclusion from Iraq and Egypt and attempts to explain how xenophobia and instability drove Arab Jews from their homes.45

Omission

The official histories of Israel and the Arab world reflect the status quo of modern national identities. Israelis tell the story of escape from European exile to redemption in the

Promised Land, where they found themselves at war with their Arab neighbors. Arabs tell the history of a glorious Arab civilization robbed of land by Colonial Zionism. Israeli history omits two critical facts. First, half of Israel’s citizens are from the Arab world. Second, Jews once lived in peace in the Arab world. Arab governments vilify the Jews by accusing them of robbing the

Arab world of Palestine, yet omit that they helped populate Israel by forcing their loyal Jewish population to leave after Israel was established in 1948. Since neither side acknowledges their shared past, each nation-state’s collective memory reflects Arab and Jewish identity as mutually exclusive. Arab Jews are thereby excluded from the history of Zionism and of the Arab states.

The omission of Arab Jews from history textbooks and collective memory gives the impression that the current separation between Jews and Arabs has always existed and that Arabs and Jews

45 The next chapter will focus on Zionism’s exclusion of Arab culture. 25

have been enemies for centuries. The omission of Arab Jews from the historical narrative solidifies a false binary between Arab and Jew.

For the past sixty years, the majority of Arab governments have censored their history, leaving out Jewish participation and contributions to the prosperity of the Arab world.46 Jews are often vilified as European imperialists who ‘took’ Palestinian land. Because Arab states have omitted centuries of symbiosis of Arabs and Jews living together, the Arab world today is tragically unaware of their own Jewish history. American scholar Lital Levy, of Iraqi Jewish origin, recalls a trip she and her sister took to Egypt in 1994:

My sister looks very Middle Eastern; as my mother says, ‘The map of Iraq is written all over her face.’ So in Cairo, many people addressed her in Arabic, which neither of us knew at the time. On the way back from seeing the pyramids at Giza, the taxi driver (actually, a moonlighting university student…) asked if she was Arab. ‘Our father is from Iraq,’ my sister offered hesitantly. ‘So you are Muslim!’ he exclaimed. My sister and I sent ‘uh-oh’ glances to one another. How are we going to get out of this one? ‘Uh, no,’ one of us said apologetically. ‘So you are Christian, then,’ he deduced, sounding a tad disappointed. ‘Well, no.’ ‘Not Muslim and not Christian? What are you then?’ he asked, truly perplexed. ‘Actually, we’re Jewish,’ said my sister. ‘Jewish? What’s that?’ he asked in dismay. At a loss, I decided to try the Hebrew term, thinking it might be similar to Arabic, and I was ever right. As soon as I said ‘Yehudee,’ accent on the last syllable, the driver turned all the way around in his seat. For a second I was sure he was going to rear-end the car in front of us, but at the last moment, he slammed on the brakes. ‘Yahudee?’ he repeated, accent on the second syllable, as pronounced in Arabic. ‘But this is impossible! You said that your father is from Iraq.’ ‘He is from Iraq, and he is Jewish – uh – yahudee.” ‘But all the yahud come from Europe!’ he insisted. For the remainder of the trip, he refused to believe our assertion that once upon a time, not even so long ago, there were Jews all throughout the Middle East.”47

46 Sami Michael, in Morad, Tamar, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shash, eds., Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008), 83. 47 Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found its Wings,” in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North Arfrican and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage Ed. Loolwa Khazzoom, 173-189 (New York: Seal Press, 2003), 180-181. 26

Levy’s taxi driver is an Egyptian university student, not an uneducated person. He is representative, however, of the ignorance in the Arab world regarding the Jews’ role in Arab history. Levy writes “such ignorance is, I now believe, the joint product of decades of Arab and

Israeli propaganda, both aimed at erasing Arab Jews (a category of identity and historic experience that threatens the clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’) from the collective memory of their people.” Iraqi Jew Sami Michael writes, "The Arabs erased it [history] because the Arab nationalist line after Israel’s establishment became that all Zionists and all Jews are monsters and thieves, and that you can’t make peace with them.”48

Because Jewish history has traditionally been associated with Ashkenazi Jewish history, many Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish history textbooks and classes focus on the story of Jews migrating to Europe after the destruction of Judea in 135 C.E. and then making aliyah in 1882.49

Memoirist Ruth Wahba, a Jew from Morocco, was shocked when she did not find any trace of her heritage in Jewish history books. In the 1990s in San Francisco, she enrolled in a class called

“The Jewish Life Cycle” and received a textbook on Jewish history that only told the story of

Ashkenazi Jews. Her Jewish Spirituality class led her to believe that Jewish mysticism began in

Eastern Europe, even though Sephardic mystics predate European mystic Ba’al Shem Tov.50

If Arab Jews are referred to in Israeli history, Israelis portray their story as one of rescue and redemption through Zionism. Zionist leaders, it is said, helped Jews from Arab lands shake off exilic Eastern traditions and taught them how to be properly Jewish. The Israeli children’s story, “The Little Yemeni,” for example, portrayed Yemenites as primitive cave dwellers, opportunistic, scary, and weird. Until the 1990s, this story was the only information in children’s

48 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 83. 49 Aliyah means “ascent.” Israelis say that Jews make aliyah and immigrants are called olim. The stories of lack of Arab Jewish history in textbooks are from as late as the 1990s. As far as the present, some activists say it has improved. Some say it has not. 50 Rachel Wahba, “Benign Ignorance or Persistent Resistance,” in Flying Camel (2003), 55. 27

textbooks concerning Yemenite Jews. When Mizrahi activists protested the story’s stereotypes, the story was taken out of the textbook by the Israeli Ministry of Education, but nothing was put it its place. A misconception was therefore replaced by silence. The message sent to the Arab

Jewish community by this historical exclusion was that they could exist in history on those terms or not at all.51

This marginalization is further illustrated by Mizrahi Artist Meir Gal’s photograph. “Nine

Out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest)” is a picture of Gal holding nine pages out of the four hundred page Israeli history textbook that he used when he was growing up in the 1970s.

These nine pages are the only ones that tell the story of Arab Jews out of four hundred pages of

European Jewish history.52 Gal’s photograph, more so than any words, clearly illustrates the marginalization of official Arab Jewish histories in Israel.

Since Israelis rarely document Jewish life in the Arab World, most Ashkenazi Jews, like the majority of Muslim Arabs in the Arab world, have no framework for understanding Jewish life in the Arab world prior to the establishment of Israel. Ruth Wahba relates one of several efforts to communicate her identity to her academic colleagues. One of her professors in graduate school, an Ashkenazi Jew, could not understand what Wahba meant when she identified as an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew. He asked her, “So your parents came from Russia or Poland and went to the Middle East from there?”53 Because his familiar paradigm was Arab versus Jew, he could not understand how her family could be indigenous to the Arab world.

When memoirist and scholar, Sasson Somekh, published several promotional articles about Shelomo Dov Goiten’s work on Jews in Medieval Egypt, he received feedback from his

51 Rachel Shabi, We Look Like the Enemy (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 34. 52 See Appendix C for the photograph. Meir Gal, Nine out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest), 1997, http://meirgal.squarespace.com/exhibitions/nine-out-of-four-hundred-the-west-and-the-rest-1997/5060044 53 Rachel Wahba, “Benign Ignorance or Persistent Resistance,” in Flying Camel (2003), 53. 28

readers asking if he was mistaken when he wrote that Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages wrote in Arabic. 54 Somekh explains that his readers thought he misspelled Hebrew, “in Hebrew, the spelling of the words ivrit [Hebrew] and aravit [Arabic] are somewhat confusing, with just two letters being switched around.”55 Somekh goes on to say, “Hearing such absurd questions about the medieval Jewish world only served to reinforce my sense of the Eurocentric and severely lacking education of these interlocutors. And thus grew my desire to write again about the world of the Geniza – or more precisely, about the cultural context of the Judeo-Arabic experience.”56 Experiences like Somekh’s reinforce to Arab Jews that they have been removed from history by exclusive nationalisms and that they must write their own histories.

Sami Michael writes that stories like his were expunged from Israeli history because they contradict the Zionist premise that all Jews wanted to come to Israel.

Israel also has tried its best to abolish this storyline from memory because it does not fit the Zionist narrative in which all the Jews sat on their suitcases and waited for the Zionist redemption. And it did not fit the reality of what was happening in Israel at the time. Few wanted to hear that Jews and Arabs have lived together in peace and harmony and, moreover, were ideologically aligned. Israelis have been brainwashed regarding the past in Iraq and the integration here in Israel to believe that the Zionist narrative is the main narrative. People have been led to believe that the Jewish community in Iraq was largely Zionist and readily picked themselves up and made aliyah. But the entire Zionist story is a myth that has no basis in reality, according to the reality I saw and experienced. The Iraqi Jews were like American Jewry of today, that is, we cared about the well-being of the Jews in Palestine but at the same time we enjoyed the lifestyle of the land in which we were born and had no intention of moving.57

Arab Jews saw the land of their birth as home.

54 Shelomo Dov Goiten, whose book Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (1955) and multivolume work A Mediterranean Society (first volume in 1967) examine thousands of documents in the Cairo Geniza. It can hardly be overstated how important the Cairo Geniza is for Arab-Jewish history. In the late nineteenth century, over 300,000 manuscripts were discovered in the geniza (storeroom) in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. Many were written in Judeo-Arabic from the Middle Ages. For more information and to explore some of the documents from the geniza, go to the Cambridge Digital Library, “The Cairo Genizah Collection,” http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah. 55 Sasson Somekh, Life After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000, translated by Tamar L. Cohen (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 116. 56 Somekh, Life After Baghdad (2012), 116. 57 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 83-84, 79. 29

Arab Jewish memoirists challenge the official national versions of history by writing themselves back into the story of their homeland. Memoirists recall their personal interactions with Zionism and Arab nationalism, making their memoirs both personal and political. These memoirs intertwine national histories with personal stories. Kazzaz began his memoir with,

“Integral to the story of my life is the story of Iraqi Jews.”58 Arab Jews write not just to tell their own story but the story of how they experienced and interacted with the story of their birthplace, whether it is Iraq, Egypt, or Israel. In telling their story, memoirists illustrate how the conflict changed the definition of identity and created the bifurcation between Arab and Jew.

The First Exclusion: Arab Nationalism

In the early twentieth century, both Zionist pioneers in Palestine and nationalists across the Arab world experimented with nation-building projects. Both groups, in conflict with each other, formed definitions of citizenship that excluded those who had lived in each region for centuries. Arab Jewish memoirs communicate that this binary of Arab and Jew did not materialize in their lives until the 1940s. Arab Jewish identity only became hybrid when Arab nationalism and Zionism defined each group against the ‘other’ as the conflict over Palestine escalated. Beginning in the late 1940s and intensifying in the 1950s, Arab governments rallied against Israel and vilified all Jews as European imperialists. Those governments also enforced restrictions on Jews’ movement and property, and forced thousands of loyal Jewish citizens to leave their home. After centuries of living together, Arab Jewish identities changed in a matter of

58 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound: Memoirs on the life and history of the Iraqi Jews (New York: Sepher- Hermon Press, INC, 1999), ix. 30

a few years because of the instability and xenophobia in the Arab world brought on by imperialism and the conflict in Palestine.

It is impossible to talk about Arab nationalism as one movement, as there were many different strains of pan-Arab and state nationalisms. The movements in Egypt and Iraq were not identical nor did they happen at the same pace. However, both Iraqi and Egyptian national movements included a strain of xenophobia that, combined with the instability of the region, ultimately excluded the Jews even though they had been part of the Islamic world for centuries.

Memoirists never fail to speak of their disappointment that the shape of Arab nationalism in Iraq and Egypt eventually excluded those of Jewish faith and heritage. Sami Michael reminisces about the Al-Wathba or “The Leap,” the rebellion against the Iraqi government for signing the

1948 Portsmouth Treaty with Britain. “We organized mass protests with rabbis, Muslim sheikhs and vicars, and Christian leaders, and we held hands and talked about Jewish-Arab brotherhood.”

Michael was a part of the Iraqi communist party, which consisted of Jews, Muslims, and

Christians. He points out that both the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Communist Party now deny former Jewish contributions:

So the Iraqi authorities used the Palestine conflict to divert attention away from the unrest at home and economic difficulties, and thus attempted to erase this piece of history [Jewish-Arab cooperation and rebellion against Iraqi government]. The Arabs erased it because the Arab nationalist line after Israel’s establishment became that all Zionists and all Jews are monsters and thieves, and that you can’t make peace with them. And the Iraqi Communist Party erased this chapter to avoid admitting that Jews and Arabs could cooperate.59

Nissim Rejwan, Naim Kattan, Victor Cohen, Selim Shallon, and Sasson Somekh are just a few other writers who speak of the part they played and of their disenchantment when they were excluded. However, before Arab nationalism had decided against the Jews circa 1950, Arab Jews were heavily involved in making plans for the new nation-states.

59 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 83. 31

Nation-states did not exist in the Middle East until after World War One. Nationalism and ethnicity as we currently understand them were unheard of in the Middle East prior to the late nineteenth century. Identity in the pre-modern world was categorized differently according to religion and not according to the modern concept of nation-states. In his memoir, Nissim

Rejwan tries to explain how nineteenth-century Middle Easterners conceptualized identity:

It is interesting to note here, in parentheses, that in Iraq – and presumably in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world – in those days the appellation Arab was never used to define a person’s identity, and the Jew-Arab opposition we constantly encounter today was never used either in writing or in daily discourse. A Baghdadian was usually said to be a Jew, a Muslim, a Kurd, a Christian, Armenian, Turk, Persian. An explanation for this is not hard to see, I think. The so-called “national” identity of a man or a woman was not only of no relevance but the concept itself was not known, and in those cases in which you needed to know a person’s identity in the wider sense of citizenship or geographical location you simply said he or she was a Syrian, an Egyptian, a Yemenite, and Iraqi, Persian, English.60

Rejwan’s explanation demonstrates that prior to the twentieth century religion was the primary marker of identity. There was no exclusive movement that called for states to be formed based on a religious identity or origin. Nationalism was nonexistent. Instead, a shared culture between all monotheistic religions flourished under the Ottoman Empire. However, centuries of shared culture did not prevent Arab nationalism from excluding Arab Jews in the face of European encroachment in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Muslim Arabs excluded the Jews because they associated them with European imperialism and Zionism, and Muslims saw

Europeanization as a threat to their independence and Islamic identity.

In the nineteenth century, European presence in the Ottoman Empire increased as the result of economic concessions, missionary efforts, and tourism, exposing the region to European economic and political ideas. Confronted with European power and technology, the Ottoman

Empire and its subjects were attracted to European culture and ideas but also wanted to separate

60 Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004),7. 32

themselves and regain their former status as a regional power. Circa 1900, thinkers, political activists, and clerics looked to their past to see what defined them and what was the key to their former greatness. Looking back to the Islamic Golden Age, intellectuals and clerics alike determined that Islamic reform was their way forward. Thinkers, such as Jamal al-Din al-

Afghani (1838-1897), argued that the Ottoman Empire needed to unite under Islam in order to gain respect and status again. Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), al-Afghani’s student, also promoted Islam but hoped that Islamic reform would get rid of superstition and tyranny in the

Middle East. Rashad Rida (1865-1935) was one of the first thinkers to emphasize the connection between Islam and the Arab civilization, implying that Arabs had a special connection to Islam that other Muslims did not.61 The beginning of Arab nationalism originated with the idea that those who spoke Arabic, the language of the Koran, and those who descended from Muhammad and tribes in the Arabian Desert were separate people who should govern themselves. These ideas created a distinction between Arabs and their Ottoman rulers but did not call for a separation or revolt until World War One. Thus, until the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World

War One, most Muslims, Jews, and Christians still espoused loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, even as they called for reform.62

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War One brought Arab nationalism to the forefront of politics in the Arab world. Nationalists across the Arab world petitioned the

World powers for an independent Arab state. Instead, Britain and France established mandate states by drawing artificial borders in the former Ottoman territory. Britain and France created the semi-independent states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Palestine, with the promise

61 Introduction, Sylvia G. Haim, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, 1976), 20. 62 Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Second Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 33

that once they built a state, they would achieve independence. During this time of transition,

Arab Jews, alongside Muslims and Christians, debated the nature of government, ideology, and economy of the new states, hoping that each state would soon attain self-government. Most importantly, Jews, Muslims, and Christians discussed and debated the nature of nationalism and what loyalty to a state should mean. About Iraq, Somekh writes, “The involvement of many young Jewish activists in political movements such as the Communist party epitomized two trajectories: the first involved the desire to act side by side with other Iraqis, and the second stemmed from a growing political awareness.”63 Iraqi Jews saw Iraq as their own and wanted to take responsibility for state building.

The first king of Iraq, Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi (r.1920-1933), emphasized

Arab unity before Islam and encouraged the participation of Jews in his government. “We are

Arabs before being Muslims, and Muhammad is an Arab before being a prophet.” In a speech in

Aleppo in June 1919, he said, “…there is neither minority nor majority among us, nothing to divide us. We are one body, we were Arabs even before the time of Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, and Abraham.”64 Similarly, in a 1938 speech, Lebanese writer Amin al-Rihani asserted, “The

Arabs existed before Islam and before Christianity. The Arabs will remain after Islam and after

Christianity. Let the Christians realize this, and let the Muslims realize it. Arabism before and above everything.”65 Arab nationalism, at this time, promoted common origin and language over religion.

63 Sasson Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday, The Making of an Arab Jew (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2007), 10. 64 Quoted in Faisal ib al-Husain in His Sayings and Speeches (Arabic) (Baghdad, 1945), 175, quoted in Introduction, Sylvia G. Haim, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, 1976), 35. 65 Amin al-Rihani, Essays on National Questions (Arabic) (Beirut, 1956), II, 160, quoted in Introduction, Sylvia G. Haim, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, 1976), 36. 34

Egypt’s transition after World War Two began with Egyptians organizing together to protest Great Britain’s presence in Egypt. Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882 and declared

Egypt a British protectorate in 1914. During and after the war, Egyptians called for independence, and a series of protests culminated in the 1919 Revolution. The revolutionary slogan included all who considered themselves Egyptians. “Egypt above all. Religion is for God.

The Homeland is for all.”66 Victor Cohen writes,

As a student I was a Wafdist and anti-British. We took part in street demonstrations shouting, ‘Long live Saad, long live the nation.’ When we heard a truck coming we dispersed, shouting ‘egri, egri’ [run, run]. We turned over and burnt tramcars. It was 1917. We sang nationalist songs in Arabic, ‘Netlaghou el-Engelize min baladina’ [‘We will throw the British from our country’]. It was a woman singer who had written this song, Latifa Abd el-Messih. She also wrote songs praising the King, ‘Yehia el-Malek’ [Long live the King’].67

In response to the uprising, Britain granted nominal independence to Egypt in 1922 and a constitution in 1923. Jewish writer Murad Beh Farag (1866-1956) helped author Egypt’s first constitution.68

In the interwar period, Arab Jews in Iraq flourished as nationalists promoted Arab solidarity based on common language and origin. One central aspect of the emerging Arab nationalism was the movement’s focus on Arabic. In the late 1920s, the newly formed Iraqi government mandated that all schools, public and private, have Arabic instruction. While all

Jewish and Muslim Iraqis spoke Arabic, many could not read or write unless they had formal or religious education. Therefore the last two generations of Jews who lived in Baghdad learned

66 Edward Said, “Historical Perspective,” in Liliane S. Dammond, ed., with Yvette M. Raby, The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First Person Accounts from Egypt’s Jewish Community in the Twentieth Century (New York: iUniverse, Inc, 2007), 10. 67 Dr. Victor Cohen, in Liliane S. Dammond, ed., with Yvette M. Raby, The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First Person Accounts from Egypt’s Jewish Community in the Twentieth Century (New York: iUniverse, Inc, 2007), 38. 68 Lisa Lital Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863- 1914” (PhD diss., University of California Berkley, 2007), (ProQuest LLC 3323508), Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=8Y3LZuEU3SEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. 35

how to read and write in classic Arabic, whether they went to public or private schools. This was not just a change for Jews because the previous official language of the empire was Ottoman

Turkish. The new language of the state and of the emerging nation was Arabic, and Jews were not excluded in the endeavor to promote Arabic. Rather, Jews took part in building the Arab nation. Naim Kattan wrote that Jews always received the best marks in government exams and were very proud of their competence in Arabic. A number of Arab Jewish writers became part of

Arabic literary circles, and through poetry, prose, journalism, and activism, they debated how the new state should be structured.

The first generation of Arab Jewish writers dedicated to Iraq as a nation, as opposed to loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, made their debut in the 1920s. Ezra Haddad (1909-1972), Murad

Mikha’il (1906-1986), Salman Shina (1898-1978), and Anwar Shaul (1904-1984) are just a few of those who worked toward a united Iraq. Al- Misbah (The Lantern) was the first Arabic weekly

(1924-1929) run by Salman Shina, who was a lawyer and member of the Iraqi parliament. Anwar

Shaul’s al-Hasid (The Reaper), from 1929-1938, was the most popular Baghdadi weekly in the

1930s.69 Shaul, a lawyer and legal advisor to the private royal treasury from 1935-1949, stood out among the men who sought to promote Iraqi nationalism. Shaul stated that he was proud to be both Arab and Jewish and considered himself a part of the Arab Iraqi nation. He not only edited his newspaper but also wrote patriotic poems expressing the connection between Jews and

Arabs. Rather than leaving in 1951 with the majority of Iraqi Jews, Shaul reluctantly migrated to

Israel in 1971 after the Ba’athist Coup.70 While in Israel, he wrote an autobiography in Arabic,

69 Sasson Somekh, “Arabic as a Jewish Language: Three Lectures,” Sephardic Heritage Update, May 2, 2012, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/b4Hp0NnvnCs; Joel Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xv. 70 “Shaul (Shaool), Anwar,” Jewish Virtual Library, last modified 2008, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0018_0_18241.html. 36

My Life in Mesopotamia.71 He dedicated his life and writing to the prosperity of the Iraqi nation.

He wrote against the British mandate, lauded the Iraqi monarchy, and encouraged women’s rights.72 A fellow memoirist, Sasson Somekh, analyses his autobiography chapter by chapter, asserting that literary autobiographies are never written spontaneously. They are a specific genre that it is very selective and symbolic of the author’s life. Somekh writes,

Two motifs are paramount in the work as a whole: that of the author's self-image and that of the rise and fall of the ambition of Iraqi Jews to join their voice to the fledgling modern Arabic literature of their country. …The author's identity as projected in these chapters is, therefore, that of a Jew with biblical roots, part of the modern Jewish people, but retaining deep roots in the Arab-Islamic ethos as well, an Arab-Jew who is proud of being both Jewish and Iraqi. …It is significant then, that the book does not betray a spiteful or bitter tone, although it was written after its author had to desert Iraq for good. To be sure, the bulk of the autobiography records fond memories rather than a sense of disappointment. The non-Jewish personages whom Sha'ul recalls are mostly portrayed as positive characters. In fact the only unpleasant ones in the book are those Iraqis who were in one way or another pro-Nazi.73

These writers were Iraqis of the Jewish faith, dedicated to making their country prosper.

During the 1930s, a second generation of Arab Jews published plays, poems, and short stories that incorporated European elements but were written in Arabic. Shalmon Darwish (1913-

1998) was lauded by both Muslim and Jewish critics as one of the most talented of Iraqi short story writers. He was also an activist in the National Democratic Party. Meir Basri (1911-2006), an economist who edited the journal of the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce from 1938-1945, was one of the first Iraqis to write sonnets. He later became the last president of the Iraqi Jewish community.74 Ya’qub Bilbul, who succeeded Basri as the editor and continued till 1951, wrote social realist fiction and published a book of short stories in 1938. Director Khadduri Shahrabani

71 Anwar Shaul, The Story of my life in Mesopotamia (Jerusalem, 1980). 72 Joel Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xv. 73 Sasson Somekh, “Arabic as a Jewish Language: Three Lectures,” Sephardic Heritage Update, May 2, 2012, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/b4Hp0NnvnCs. 74 See Appendix B for a picture of Basri and his family. 37

directed Corneille’s Le Cid which was performed in honor of King Faisal. Tragically, most of the play manuscripts written by Arab Jews have not been preserved.75

In the 1920s and 1930s, Egyptian Jews also focused on building the Egyptian state through Arabic. Yet the focus on Arabic was not as strong as it was in Iraq. Due to British occupation and economic opportunities, many foreigners resided in Cairo and Alexandria, resulting in a number of languages spoken in the cities, especially amongst the upper classes.

Lagnado writes that her father Leon knew English, Arabic, French, and Hebrew, Italian, Greek, and Spanish. When Leon went to his favorite cafes:

There were different languages spoken at every table – French and English of course, but also Greek, Italian, Dutch, Armenian, interspersed with the occasional Arabic. It was not unusual for people to use two or three languages in the same conversation – even in the same sentence – because this was Cairo, and it was the most cosmopolitan city in the world.76

The Egyptian upper classes, including Jews, Muslims, and Christians, were heavily influenced by British and French culture. Upper-class Jews, in particular, were mostly educated in French schools. The Egyptian state did not mandate that Arabic be taught in every school until 1954.

However, among middle and lower classes, Arabic was the primary language. Al-Shams, an

Arabic Jewish weekly published from 1934 to 1948, promoted Jewish life in Egypt. The

Karaites, a distinct sect of Judaism and the oldest Jewish community in Egypt, rarely spoke anything but Arabic. The Young Karaite Jewish Association published a biweekly called Al-

Kalim, edited by Yusuf Kamal, from 1945 to 1957.77

75 Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xv-xvi. Some writers from the first and second generation of Arab Jewish writers refused to leave Iraq in 1951 with the majority of the Jewish community and stayed with the few thousand left until conditions became unbearable under the Ba’ath party. Between 1971 and 1974, Anwar Shaul, Meir Basri, Salim al-Bassum, Murad al-‘Imar, and Na’im Tuwayq left. 76 Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 7. 77 Deborah A. Starr, “Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud” Prooftexts 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (2006): 138-162. 38

Murad Beh Farag, who helped author the first constitution, was a Karaite who espoused both Egyptian independence and Zionism. He wrote the poem, “My Homeland Egypt, Place of my Birth,” but he also defended the Jewish right to a state in his book, al-Qudsiyyat, which was written in Arabic. To him, being an Egyptian nationalist did not contradict his promotion of

Jewish nationalism.78

Jews were government participants and connected to the royal family. A number of

Egyptian Jews served in government and several Jewish ladies attended the queen.79 Yusuf

‘Aslan Qattawi (Cattaui) Pasha (1861-1942) was a two-time cabinet minister from 1924 to 1925 and president of the Sephardi Jewish community of Cairo from 1924 until his death. Isaac G.

Lévi was the secretary-general of the Egyptian Federation of Industries (1922-56) and vice- president of the Sephardic Jewish community of Cairo from 1943 to 1956.80 Two Jewish women,

Valentine Rolo and Alice de Cattaoui, served as first lady-in-waiting to Queen Nazli, second wife of King Faud from 1919 to 1936.81

Jews cooperated with Egyptian Muslims and Christians in Egyptian nationalist circles. Al

Ahram, the official Egyptian newspaper, quoted the slogan of 1919 during the Jewish/Palestinian clashes of 1929: “Egypt above all. Religion is for God. The Homeland is for all.”82 Egyptian Jew

Maurice Shammas writes in his literary memoir ‘Azza, Nefertiti’s Granddaughter that during the

1930s he was an activist in the Egyptian national movement. During a police raid of the party’s secret meetings, Lieutenant ‘Abd al-Ÿamid arrested Shammas, but to Shammas’ surprise, the lieutenant released him several blocks away. Al-Ÿamid secretly supported the movement, and

78 Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East.” 79 Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998). 80 Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry. 81 Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 230. 82 Edward Said, “Historical Perspective,” in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 10. 39

from then on, the two formed a partnership. Al-Ÿamid would warn the underground of approaching police by commanding his troops in a loud voice. At one point, Al-Ÿamid

83 imprisoned Shammas so that they could collaborate on new material for a leaflet.

The collaboration between Jews and Muslims during the interwar period ended with the onset of World War Two, the Zionist movement in Palestine, and the instability of post-colonial states. After attaining independence from Britain, Iraq struggled to keep a stable government.

From 1936 to 1941, the Iraqi government experienced seven coups d’état.84 Several political parties were struggling for power: British-backed National Constitutional party, Nazi-influenced

National Brotherhood, and the underground Iraqi Communist Party. A goodly number of Jews were heavily involved in the communist underground, so the government targeted Jews along with other communists. Many Jews were arrested and imprisoned for their communist activity.85

In 1941, Iraq was again occupied by foreign troops. Since British troops brought some stability and protection during the war, Jews welcomed them, but Jews also rejected foreign troops because they saw them as yet another wave of imperialism. The mere presence of foreign troops and any Jewish association with them, however, confirmed the propaganda of Nazi-influenced parties and exacerbated emerging xenophobia. At the same time, the Arab world was watching the Zionist movement grow in Palestine. While the majority of Iraqi Jews rejected Zionism, the small minority that accepted it caused trouble for the whole community and associated Jews with

83 Maurice Shammas,‘Azza, hafidat nifirtiti (‘Azza, Nefertiti’s Granddaughter; 2003), quoted in Deborah A. Starr, “Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud” Prooftexts 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (2006): 138-162, 149. 84 Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 184. 85 Sami Michael writes that the government waged a huge crackdown on Zionists in 1943, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008). 40

foreigners.86 The Farhud, the anti-Jewish riot in June 1941, occurred because of Jewish association with foreign powers.

On the eve of British troops returning to Baghdad and in the midst of the British-backed coup overthrowing the pro-Nazi leader Rashid Ali, Baghdadi Jews were attacked by Muslim mobs on June 1-2, 1941.87 Naeim Giladi explains what happened in the power vacuum:

On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in Baghdad between Jews who were still celebrating their Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who thought the Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British regent. That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus, removed the Jewish passengers, murdered one and fatally wounded a second. About 8:30 the following morning, some 30 individuals in military and police uniforms opened fire along el-Amin street, a small downtown street whose jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned. By 11 a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and clubs were attacking Jewish homes in the area. The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2. During this time, many Muslims rose to defend their Jewish neighbors, while some Jews successfully defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400 injured, according to a report written by a Jewish Agency messenger who was in Iraq at the time. Other estimates, possibly less reliable, put the death toll higher, as many as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to 1,300 stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were looted.88

Some Jews talk about the Farhud as the beginning of the end for the Jewish community in Iraq because it shattered their view of their fellow Iraqis. At the same time, many Iraqi Jews saw the

Farhud as an exception and blamed the British for causing it. Naim Kattan writes that the Farhud was perpetrated by Bedouins outside the city who saw a chance to loot. He writes that the Iraqi army, not the British army, stopped the riot and allowed Jews to recover property.89

Numerous stories circulate of Muslim neighbors and friends risking their lives to protect their Jewish neighbors. Eli Amir writes that his family’s former neighbor risked her life by going

86 Norman Stillman, Jews in Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 86. Upper class Jews were especially frustrated with the lower class who were more drawn to Zionism. 87 Rashid Ali was prime minister of Iraq from March 1933 to November 1933, March 1940 to January 1941, and April 1941 to May 1941. 88 Naeim Giladi, “Jews of Iraq,” Courtesy The Link 31, Issue 2 (April-May 1998). http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews- of-iraq.html. 89 Naim Kattan, Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad, Translated from French by Sheila Fischman (Vancouver: Raincoat Books, 1975, 2005). 41

across town to stand guard in front of Amir’s house. Amir writes that she screamed at the oncoming mob, “‘You will never touch these people! Jews are our neighbors in life. You will not touch them!’ She stood guard there for 48 hours and she cried the whole time. She was in shock.”90 Kazzaz writes that his neighborhood was protected because the chief of police’s Jewish girlfriend lived in their neighborhood.91 The Farhud was a tragic incident and shocked several hundreds of Jews into leaving Iraq. The majority of the community, however, went back to living in peace with their neighbors until 1948.

With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the First Arab-Israeli War, and the beginning of the Palestinian refugee crisis, the Iraqi government began passing restrictive laws on Jewish businesses, property, and movement. With the shock of losing the war in 1949, Arab governments were humiliated – a fledgling state defeated five Arab armies. Consequently, the

Iraqi government responded to its humiliation by further restricting Jewish travel, confiscating property, and even making arbitrary arrests. Despite Arab Jewish protestations and confessions of loyalty, the Iraqi government no longer distinguished between Zionists and Jews. The government assumed that their entire Jewish population would undermine them. Mordechai Ben

Porat, a leader in the Zionist underground, wrote that in September 1949, about 450 Jews were in prison, mostly communists or underground Zionists.92

With increasing xenophobia after the establishment of Israel, Arab nationalists developed a new inseparable link between Islam and Arabs. At a lecture in 1952, Abd al-Rahman al-

Bazzaz, Dean of Baghdad Law College, intertwined Arab civilization with Islam by arguing that since Islam was vouchsafed to Arabs, it made Arabs unique as a people:

90 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 231-232. 91 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 229-230. 92 Mordechai Ben Porat, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 137. 42

Islam although it is a universal religion suitable for all peoples,...it is undoubtedly a religion first revealed to the Arabs themselves; in this sense, it is their own special religion. The Prophet is from them, the Koran is in their language; Islam retained many of their previous customs, adopting and polishing the best of them.93

This new and final strain of Arab nationalism equated Arabs with Islam and Islam with Arabs, excluding Jews and Christians from the Arab nation.94

Arab Jews relate that despite government suspicion and persecution, the majority of their

Muslim neighbors continued to treat them with respect. Muslims’ personal and business relationships with non-Jews continued. Saeed Herdoon recalls, “I never had any problems with ordinary Iraqi Muslims throughout my life – they were my friends, neighbors, business associates. It was the government that created problems for us and forced a wedge between

Muslim and Jew.”95 Rejwan admits that he was not personally affected by persecution. “Baghdad of the mid-1940s and my own experience within the largely Muslim-Arab milieu in which I grew up and found the nearest thing to emotional and intellectual maturity and fulfillment… the general atmosphere of ‘tolerance’ in which we moved, read, loved, and just plain lived.”96

During this time, prominent Iraqi writers would come to the Al-Rabita bookstore in which

Rejwan worked to discuss literature and politics. Rejwan reminds his readers that during this time Palestine was partitioned, the Iraqi army was defeated by the new Israeli state, an unpopular treaty was conducted with Britain, and persecution of Jews was occurring. Even so, he writes,

“all these and many more developments occurred without relations between Jews and Muslims in our circle being in the least affected.”97

93 Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, quoted in Introduction, Sylvia G. Haim, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, 1976), 56. 94 This progression of Arab nationalism presented here does not mean there were no other ideas. There were many forms of nationalism in the Arab world. This strain was just the dominant presence in the 1950s and 60s and its rhetoric vehemently excluded the Jews. 95 Saeed Herdoon, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 155. 96 Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 139. 97 Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 144. 43

Rejwan also writes about two of his Muslim friends who were in his literary circle,

Khaldun Sati’ al-Husri and ‘Adnan Raouf. Both were pan-Arab nationalists and were troubled by what was happening in Palestine. Rejwan writes that he had several heated discussions with them about Zionism, but their friendship and shared interests overcame their arguments. The bookstore owner Rejwan worked for, Abdel Fattah Ibrahim, was also a pan-Arabist, but he was also sympathetic to the Jewish plight. He was, as Rejwan describes him, neither an anti-Zionist nor a

Zionist, and made several poignant and prophetic statements about the Jews. “‘You Jews,’ he said to me on another occasion, ‘are the salt of the earth. How do you think you are going to manage to live in a state of your own – all cooped up together in one place and having solely yourselves to deal with, depend on each other, earn your livelihood one from the other!’”

Another time, “he said in a gesture of mock-desperation mingled with his typical good humor:

‘All right! Have it your way! Have a bloody state of your own! Come to think of it, why should we be the only sufferers? You will soon discover what burden it entails!’”98 Rejwan depicts his life in Baghdad, even after 1948, as pluralistic and open.

Some Muslims took advantage of the political climate by settling old scores with Jews or saw the instability and lack of rule of law as a way to confiscate Jewish property and businesses for themselves. Kazzaz writes that one of the government’s repressive measures was that Jews could not leave the country if they owed Muslims anything. Kazzaz saw several Muslims accuse wealthy Jews of owing them even if they didn’t.99 At the same time, several Jews signed over their bank accounts to their Muslim business partners, so that the money could not be confiscated and so they could still access it.100 While not all Arab Jews experienced discrimination, they all knew Jews who did or heard stories of Jews being arrested. Somekh writes that he lived without

98 Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 148. 99 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 313. 100 Ibid. 44

any persecution from his fellow Muslims. His uncle was accused of Zionism, however, and sentenced to five years in prison in the middle of the desert.101 In spite of mutual friendship between neighbors and coworkers, a sense of growing fear and suspicion pervaded Iraqi life.102

Jewish life in Baghdad came to an abrupt end in 1950, mostly due to Zionist underground activity and secret negotiations between Israel and Iraq. On March 9, 1950, the Iraqi government passed the Citizenship Revocation Bill, which allowed Jews to leave Iraq only if they forfeited their Iraqi citizenship. Ben Porat writes, “I believe that passage for the Citizenship Revocation

Bill was a direct result of the corruption and chaos that we had helped create at the borders, which was a disturbance and an embarrassment to the government, as was the humiliation that the Jews were escaping to Iran, Iraq’s arch enemy.”103 Shlomo Hillel records how easily Zionist agents were able to strike a deal with the Iraqi government. Hillel contracted American pilot

James Wooten’s Near East Air Transport to fly Jews from Iraq to Israel. The Iraqi Prime

Minister, Tawfiq el-Suweidi, was on the board of Wooten’s Near East Company, so he quickly agreed to allow them to transport all the Jews knowing the revenue he and his company would bring in.104 Mordechai Ben Porat also mentions his dealings with Prime Minister Tawfiq el-

Suweidi. Ben Porat worked with Yehezkel Shemtob, the head of the community in 1949, who would work with el-Suweidi. Ben Porat would ask Shemtob to request certain prisoners be released, and el-Suweidi would send messages to Ben Porat through Shemtob. “In return,

Shemtob asked us to use our influences to bolster el-Suweidi’s government, and through Kol

Yisrael [Voice of Israel Radio, whose Arabic station could be heard in Iraq] we accused el-

101 Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday (2007), 26. 102 The majority of Iraqi memoirists write of their growing apprehension as they watched Iraq go to war with Israel, but they continued daily life normally. 103 Mordechai Ben Porat, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 139. 104 Shlomo Hillel, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 112. 45

Suweidi’s political opponents of corruption and bribery.”105 Despite being at war, the Iraqi and

Israeli government secretly worked together, ending Jewish life in Iraq.

A month after the law was passed, Kazzaz writes that no one had signed up to leave yet.106 In April 1950, several bombings occurred in Baghdad in places frequented by Jews, but care was taken so that no one was harmed. The British foreign office in Baghdad communicated back to Britain that they believed the Zionists placed the bombs. 107 Several memoirists mention the incidents and accuse the Zionist underground of placing the bombs to convince Jews that their home was not safe anymore. Shimon Ballas writes:

It was a well-known issue, but the Zionists have not admitted it yet. Ask any Iraqi, he’ll tell you. It’s a known fact that they threw those bombs. Of course, waves of people applied to leave. Within a year, the majority of the Jews had registered to leave the country.108

In the next year, 100,000 Iraqi Jews left for Israel, leaving a few thousand in Iraq.109

Many of those who left from 1950 to 1951 were caught up in the fear of being left behind. The common thread in Iraqi Jewish stories is confusion. Many cannot explain why they left, except, “I did what everybody did.”110 Segev writes that, “Others simply followed their families and friends. The movement was infectious. Some left because they feared to remain on their own when the rest departed and yet others went because there were no longer communal institutions left.”111 Oded Halamy writes,

105 Mordechai Ben Porat, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 139. 106 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 326. 107 British Foreign Office Document, “Trial of Jews at Baghdad, 20 December, 1951” In Minorities in the Middle East, Jewish Communities in Arab Countries 1841-1974 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 563. Historians are divided on whether Zionists or anti-Jewish Iraqis placed the bombs; some argue that it could have been fringe Zionist groups. 108 Shimon Ballas, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection, Directed by Samir Naqqash, 2002, Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion, 2003. DVD. 109 Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 117. 110 Segev quotes several Arab Jews he interviews, 114. 111 Segev, 1949, 114. 46

We left Iraq, our homeland, with deep sadness…no one from our family had ever been insulted or experienced anti-Jewish acts. People often ask me: ‘You recall Iraq with such love, so why did you leave?’ My answer is simple: when we saw relatives leave – two of my uncles left for Israel before 1951 – and then how tens of thousands of people were registering to go, including our friends and neighbors, we just felt we should not stay behind. It was a chain reaction in some way. 112

A majority of the memoirists do not clearly explain their reasons for leaving, or they skip over their departure in their story. This lack of clarity illustrates the traumatic rupture these communities experienced. However, Zionists and devout Jews viewed the rupture as less traumatic because they felt they were a part of Messianic times. Amir remembers that he could feel the energy in the air, “those were the days of Messiah, the days of redemption.” He remembers his father saying they no longer had a future in Iraq but that he had hope that Israel would be different, “If we are lucky and are able to go to Eretz Yisrael, I hope that the Jewish people there treat Arabs with equality and dignity, the way we want Muslims to treat us here in

Baghdad.”113 Amir’s father and uncle were Zionists, but his mother was apprehensive about

Israel, “She knew it wasn’t the land of milk and honey.”114 Many of these emigrants were swept up in a momentum they could not control.

Ilana Marcus, an Egyptian Jew, was the hostess the Mossad hired for the flights transporting Jews from Baghdad to Cyprus and Israel. She writes that the flights over were difficult for her and for the passengers.

Those flights were of course a very emotional moment for all the passengers, but I have to say, not a really happy moment for them except for those who were really Zionist and were delighted to be coming to Eretz Yisrael. Most were weighed down with worries about being destitute – about how they’d earn a living in a place they’d never been and where they don’t speak the language. They worried about whether they’d have a house and where children would be educated. They didn’t know what to expect and in many

112 Oded Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 65. 113 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 231-232. 114 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 231. 47

cases they didn’t know why they were going except that it was what everyone was doing.115

The majority of Iraqi Jews left because their family, friends, and neighbors were leaving.

Egyptian Jews’ experiences of persecution are similar to Iraqi Jews’ experiences. The story of Egyptian Jews’ emigration, however, differs from the story of Iraqi Jews’ abrupt departure. While the majority of Iraqis left from 1950-1951, Jewish emigration from Egypt was spread out over decades and coincided with the departure of foreign nationals.

Similar to Iraqis, Egyptians did not become wary of Jews and foreigners until World War

Two when Egypt became a staging ground for British troops.116 Dr. Loeb Sachs, who lived in

Cairo from 1914-1956, recalls that, “Egypt became xenophobic as of 1936, but not necessarily against the Jews. I was still accepted in Egyptian circles, and I never encountered violence or discrimination…I never found an individual Egyptian who was anti-Semitic.”117 Upper-class

Egyptian Jews were well connected with the British elite in Egypt, which associated them with imperialism in the minds of other Egyptians. Many upper-class Egyptian Jews had bought

European nationality or were “stateless.”118 Because of British occupation of Egypt, it was advantageous for Egyptians to hold a European passport or no passport because one would therefore fall outside the Egyptian legal system. Esther Webman writes that even though many of the Egyptian Jews she knew were stateless, “they felt Egyptian.” They were “part of the social fabric.” However, she writes that after World War Two, Egyptian Jews were more cautious in social circles.119

115 Ilana Marcus, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 120. 116 Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920-1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University, 1992), 98. 117 Dr. Loeb Sachs, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 45. 118 For more information on citizenship in the Arab world, see Gianluca Paolo Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin, Religion and Nation-State (Amsterdam University Press, 2009). For Egypt, see page 81. 119 Esther Webman, interviewed by Ben Silsbee, Diwaniyya Dayan Center. Podcast. 29 April, 2012. 48

As the conflict over Palestine escalated, Egyptian Muslims associated Egyptian Jews with the European Jews settling Palestine. Most Egyptians saw Zionism as an imperialist movement.

Most Egyptian Jews were sympathetic to the European Jewish plight but had no intention of moving. “Although in the first half of the twentieth century Egyptian Jews felt a connection to the Zionist project in Palestine, few were ardent supporters of any of the various Zionist movements.”120 Jaqueline Kahanoff, an Egyptian Jewish writer, recalls that Jews tended toward communism rather than Zionism. “Few of us were Zionists, because we believed that for humanity to be free, we had to give up our narrow individuality as other people were expected to or, at most, we argued that the Jewish people had a right to national existence as did all other people, as an inevitable preliminary to ‘international Socialism.’”121 Esther Webman’s family warned her to not have any contact with Zionists because it would cause trouble for their family.122

During the 1948 war with Israel, anti-Zionists targeted Egyptian Jews, and ironically,

Egyptian Jews were also in danger from Israeli bombings. Maurice Shammas writes that on June

20, 1948, Israeli bombs hit the old Jewish quarter, ÿarat al-yahud, and twenty Jews died. Weeks later, Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators turned violent in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Shammas emphasizes the “double bind” in which Egyptian Jews were caught.123 Webman writes that during the war, a Muslim family friend came and slept at their door so that no one would hurt them.124

Aline Salama Benzakein wrote that after the 1948 war things changed:

120 Deborah Starr, “Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud” Prooftexts 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (2006): 138-162, 150. 121 Jaqueline Kahanoff, “ One Childhood in Egypt,” Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh, eds., Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jaqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 12. The essay was first published in Israel in 1959. 122 Esther Webman, interviewed by Ben Silsbee, Diwaniyya Dayan Center. Podcast. 29 April, 2012. 123 Starr, “Sensing the City,” 150. 124 Esther Webman, interviewed by Ben Silsbee, Diwaniyya Dayan Center. Podcast. 29 April, 2012. 49

It is after the Israeli war that people began to be afraid of one another. We became guarded, even amongst Jews we had to be careful. I remember that there was a Jewish man in Cairo who was a traitor, everybody knew it, and when he came near we all said, ‘be careful.’ In fact, we left Cairo without even saying goodbye to anyone.125

Jacqueline Kahanoff writes that once her favorite theater closed down, she realized that Egyptian cosmopolitan life was also ending. She writes that all of Cairo would gather to watch the comic actor Najib Al-Riÿani at his popular theater.

In Cairo, Kishkish Bey’s popular theater provided the one setting where people of various backgrounds met and laughed together at themselves and one another. . . . Vivid, recognizable types were portrayed on the stage: The Greek grocer, with a rose or twig of jasmine behind his ear, having a passionate argument in Arabic pronounced with a funny lisp with his customers, the Jews from ÿarat al-yahud; and the middle-aged, veiled Moslem lady, venturing into a department store, entranced by western goods, asking the cheeky little Italian salesgirls whether one put a girdle over or under a petticoat, and at what moment one puts on or takes off a bed jacket in bed. Kishkish Bey reflected our simple origins stripped of pretence, and bound us together by its affectionate mockery. On my last visit to Egypt, just before General Naguib took power, Kishkish Bey’s theater no longer existed. It was the sign we could no longer laugh together.126

There were sporadic arrests in 1948, but Egyptian life did not radically change for Jews until the mid-1950s. Mostly poor Jews went to Palestine following 1948. Those who had assets to lose stayed in Egypt. In 1952, the Free Officer’s Party overthrew the Egyptian monarchy, an event Esther Webman marks as the first major turning point for Egyptian Jews. 127 The Free

Officers instituted land reform, sequestered European property, and seized the assets of the wealthy. Many wealthy Egyptian Jews, along with other minorities and foreign nationals, were affected by the sweeping changes. Victor Cohen writes,

Our life changed after the 1952 revolution. The government first started to nationalize all the assets of people who had over LE 100,000 in net worth. They nationalized the pastry shops Groppi and Koueder. There were protests: Cairo without Groppi was not alive. Groppi died without ever recovering his store. The movie houses were nationalized as well as the financial institutions, the drug companies. They named trustees who came to

125 Aline Salama Benzakein, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 28. 126 Jaqueline Kahanoff, quoted in Deborah Starr, “Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud” Prooftexts 26, No. 1-2, Special Issue: Literacy Mappings of the Jewish City (2006): 138-162, 155. 127 Esther Webman, interviewed by Ben Silsbee, Diwaniyya Dayan Center. Podcast. 29 April, 2012. 50

the directors and demanded the keys to their cars. Many Jews left, but since I was a doctor, my life was not affected. I had an office where I treated Jews and non-Jews.128

General Naguib, the first president after the coup, still acknowledged the Jews as part of Egypt,

“I only know Muslims, Christians, and Jews, brothers who are all Egyptians, all equal citizens before the law.”129 In 1953, the Free Officers chose a Jewish singer who had converted to Islam to marry, Layla Murad, to commemorate the revolution.130 In 1954, a government representative attended the Jewish High Holidays ceremony.131

When Gamal Abdul Nasser, who took part in the coup, seized power from General

Naguib in 1954, he instituted further changes in the economy and also singled out the Jews as foreigners. Lagnado writes:

Nasser’s speeches brimmed with venom. He vowed to rid Egypt of all ‘foreigners,’ to eliminate the Jewish state, and stamp out all vestiges of colonialism and the monarchy. People lost their jobs and livelihood overnight when the regime sequestered a business, placing Nasser’s officers and loyalists in charge.132

In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and Britain, France, and Israel went to war with him to gain it back. Lucette Lagnado records that “anyone holding British or French passports was given as little as forty-eight or seventy-two hours to leave the country. Families who had lived in Egypt for generations, whose children were born there and knew no other way of life, were escorted to the airport and, as squads of rifle-toting soldiers watched, put on planes bound for Europe.”133 Aline Salama Benzakein writes that her cousin, who had a French passport, had all his assets confiscated and he had forty-eight hours to leave. 134 Thousands of Jews were forced to leave in 1956.

128 Dr. Victor Cohen, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 39-40. 129 Edward Said, “Historical Perspective,” The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 11. 130 Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 84. 131 Edward Said, “Historical Perspective,” 11. 132 Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 92. 133 Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 92. 134 Aline Salama Benzakein, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 28. 51

President Nasser became the spokesperson for Arab nationalism, and he used the

Palestinian case against Israel as a rallying cry to wave before the Arab world in order to galvanize supporters. He led the Arab world to war in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel.

Egypt’s humiliating defeat propelled more Jews to flee, fearing repercussions. By the 1980s, a few hundred Jews were left in Cairo and Alexandria.135

“I was there”

Somekh uses a photograph in his memoir to illustrate how quickly life in Baghdad changed. The photograph was taken at his uncle’s wedding in 1927. Somekh describes each of the family members and what they were wearing, whether it was an Ottoman tarbush or the latest fashion from Europe. The mix of European, Ottoman, and Arabic fashion illustrated a rising

European influence, a dying Ottoman loyalty, and a growing loyalty to the Arab world.136

Somekh also talks about the different jobs that each family member had. He especially emphasizes the women who worked as clerks and teachers and which women had their head uncovered and which women wore hats. He mentioned which men married upper-class women because of their education and work opportunities. This picture displays Somekh’s family, a typical middle-class Jewish family, transitioning from an Ottoman Jewish identity to a secular

Iraqi Jewish identity.

Arab Jewish memoirists speak of their place of birth with love and longing. Somekh writes that he dreams of the Tigris. Iraqi Jews write of the horror of witnessing the Gulf War and

135 Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 4. 136 Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday (2007), 29. 52

the American Invasion that destroyed Baghdad.137 Several Egyptian Jews, with American passports, have traveled back to Cairo after the peace treaty Egypt struck with Israel and have written about how they wept at the sight of their old cafes and homes. Many of these memoirists appreciate their new homelands, whether Israel, the United States, Canada, or France, but all express that part of them feels as if they are in exile.

In spite of Arab Jewish longing to see their homes, many Arab Jews are wounded by their homelands’ failure to recognize their patriotism. Arab Jews lament that they were persecuted as

Zionists when they were, in fact, loyal to their homelands. About his literary circle, Naim Kattan writes, “There was nothing Jewish about what they were doing: they were writers, Iraqis.” 138

Similarly, Shammas writes, “It was natural at that time that our gatherings would bring together

Muslims, Christians, and Jews, without causing stares or attracting anyone’s attention.”139

These Arab Jewish memoirs illustrate that Jews were a part of national movements in the

Arab world. Lital Levy argues that even though national cooperation was short lived (because the national movements themselves were short lived), the history of Arab and Jewish cooperation is important because of the possibilities that the memoirs reveal:

Because the possibilities represented by the texts [Jews writings in Arabic] examined here demonstrate that the course of history was far from inevitable; because the possibilities represented in these texts demonstrate that the way histories were written, as histories of Jews and Arabs in “living in hermetically sealed spaces,” have influenced not only our perception of the past, but the limitations that we project onto our past and future.140

The picture these memoirists paint of cooperation between Muslims and Jews illustrates that

Jews and Muslims were united by their shared Arab culture and by their desire for their homeland to prosper.

137 Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday (2007), 12. 138 Naim Kattan, Farewell Babylon (2005), 98. 139 Maurice Shammas, quoted in Deborah Starr, “Sensing the City,” 156. 140 Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East.” 53

These memoirs also demonstrate that European Jewish experiences do not represent all

Jewish experiences: there are Jewish histories, rather than one Jewish history. The paradigm of persecution in Europe does not explain the relationship between Jews and the Islamic world. As

Arab Jews tell their story, new histories emerge.

54

CHAPTER 2: THE SECOND EXCLUSION: ZIONISM AS MASCULINE AND EMASCULATING

“In Israel, I saw, for the first time in my life, a world where Jews hated other Jews.”

-David Kazzaz

“All other vestiges of life in Iraq, including language And culture, were swallowed into the mud of the transit camp.”

-Lital Levy

“My voice was marginal.”

-David Rabeeya

Zionism was an all-consuming national movement that sought to remake Jewish culture while establishing a state. A main tenet of Zionism’s cultural and national movement was its imitation of European masculinity. Masculinity in Europe circa 1900 was largely defined through citizenship. European national movements sought to create a new order by shaping a new man and a new woman. Zionism was no exception. Zionists’ ideal citizen was the “new

Jew, the antithesis of the effeminate Diaspora Jew.”141

Zionist thinkers circa 1900, such as Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) and Max Nordau (1849-

1923), transformed European Jewry’s definition of masculinity by conflating masculinity with

European civilization, the strength of which lay in the nation-state. Nineteenth-century notions of the nation-state were based on land. Herzl, therefore, believed that by establishing a Jewish state in a new land, Jews could shed what they referred to as their diseased and effeminate exilic

141 Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, “The Complex Identity of Religious-Zionist Women in Pre-State Israel, 1921- 1948,” Israel Studies 11, no. 3 (2006): 83-107. Thus, Zionism is just like other nationalisms, including Arab nationalism, by delineating specific roles for men and women. For literature on Arab nationalism’s gender roles, see Laura Bier, Revolutionary Manhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Ellen L. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley: University of California, 2003). 55

culture, become “masculine” according to European standards, and form a civilized state. Zionist pioneers, Olim, the first Ashkenazi settlers in Palestine, established farming communities and militias there in order to transform the masculine ideal into national culture. In the first half of the twentieth century, these settlers self-consciously created a new masculine Jewish culture in

Palestine by adopting European standards of civilization and masculinity and by excluding what they saw as inferior and effeminate Arab culture. Arab Jewish memoirs illustrate that upon arrival in Israel circa 1950, the Israeli state worked to marginalize or to erase all traces of

“Arab.” The Olim accomplished this reformation of Jewish culture by redefining Jewish identity as masculine and by emasculating the Arab Jewish immigrants who did not conform to their vision of Jewish masculinity. As “masculine redeemers,” Zionists subjected Arab Jewish immigrants to discrimination and forced enculturation in order to purge the Arab and the

Diaspora from their Jewish bodies.

Zionism: Reconstructing Jewish Masculinity

Even though the ‘land of Zion’ is in the Middle East, Zionism as an ideology was developed in late nineteenth-century Russia and Europe and then later actualized in the geographic region known as Palestine. The fact that Zionism emerged in Europe distinguishes it from other Middle Eastern nationalisms – the land on which Zionism was formulated was not where Zionism was implemented. The fact that Zionism was imported from Europe has shaped

Arab States’ resentment of Israel. Because they are indigenous to the region, Arab Jews did not fit into the European Zionist paradigm. Zionism was created by and for European Jews in

56

response to local conditions, at a time when most Arab Jews were living comfortably with their

Arab neighbors.

Zionism was one of multiple responses to the forces that threatened European Jewry circa

1880. Unlike the symbiotic relationship that Jews had under the Islamic Empires, Jews in

Christian Europe suffered a long history of pogroms, blood libels, and social ostracism.

European Jewry’s responses to Christian attacks had either been migration within Europe or isolation from Christian communities.142 However, during the eighteenth-century European

Enlightenment, Western European governments began to integrate Jewish communities based on

Enlightenment ideals of equality. Jewish philosophers, such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), began to encourage Jewish participation in society. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment in

Western Europe, was one response to the tension between the promise of Enlightenment ideas and reoccurring anti-Semitism. Mendelssohn, the father of Reform Judaism posited that because

Judaism was a religion, not a nationality, Jews could integrate into European nation-states. While a goodly number of Jews did integrate into their home culture, just like their contemporaries in the Arab world, Zionists proclaimed integration a failure. Zionist thinker, Leon Pinsker (1821-

1891) cited the Russian pogroms in the 1880s in his book Auto-Emancipation as examples of failed assimilation. Herzl published his 1896 The Jewish State arguing that the trial of Alfred

Dreyfus (1859-1935) in France in 1894 revealed that Jews would never be able to assimilate.

Pinsker and Herzl promulgated that only by establishing their own state could Jews be free from persecution and anti-Semitism.

In many ways, Zionism could not have happened without the Haskalah. With integration, while many Jews adopted nineteenth-century European culture, they also adopted nineteenth-

142 Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16. 57

century European problems. European Jewry internalized the European tendency circa 1900 to speculate about the degeneration of civilization. Many European theorists diagnosed society as degenerate and many pointed to the Jews as the source of this decline.143 In the words of Arieh

Bruce Saposnik:

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the drive for reconstitution was given the added force of urgency by the now ubiquitous anxiety regarding the threat of social and racial degeneration, in which the Jews were heavily implicated, and in whose context they were assumed to suffer from a wide range of particularly acute physical, mental, and nervous disorders.144

Similarly, Jewish thinkers circa 1900 debated the state of European Jewry and sought solutions to the alleged European crisis.145 Many Jewish thinkers accepted the anti-Semitic critique that Jews were “anomalous, flawed, and even diseased” because of the widespread acceptance in non-Jewish society.146 By the eve of the sixth Zionist congress in 1903, Jews had internalized anti-Semitism. Speaking at the congress, writer Shai Hurwitz, “proposed that, given their state of decline and crisis, Judaism and the Jewish people had neither prospects nor the right to continued existence.”147 Zionists had not just internalized the crisis of European civilization, but they also had internalized the blame.

Zionist thinkers, circa 1900, diagnosed Jewish disease as stemming from galut, or exile.

Zionists believed they could eradicate Jewish disease by “eliminating” the diaspora.148 Similarly, they hoped to end diasporic qualities by producing a new Jew in a Jewish state. The diaspora

143 The crisis of the fin de siècle, literally French for “end of the century,” was the fear that European civilization was declining and was in need of reform. It was widespread in culture, art, and philosophy. 144 Saposnik writes, “The fundamental impetus for Zionism’s effort to bring about this radical transformation of Jewish life had sprung from a prevailing notion that Jewish life was anomalous, flawed, and even diseased.” He goes on to say that “the groundwork had been laid for the reception of such critiques within Jewish discourse, after having originated in the non-Jewish world.” Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 16. 145 John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-siècle Europe (Yale University Press, 1994). 146 Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 16. 147 Shai Hurowitz, quoted in Becoming Hebrew, 17 148 Herzl, Nordau, and David Ben-Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, used the terminology of “eliminate” when talking about the diaspora. 58

qualities that Zionists wanted to purge were the same qualities that both European anti-Semitism and Orientalism had targeted. Tragically, Zionists had internalized the anti-Semitism and

Orientalism that they were subject to in Europe.149 Jews were seen as the ‘Orientals’ in Europe.

Much of European anti-Semitism was structured through Orientalist binaries of masculine versus feminine, normative versus deviant sexuality, and the healthy, tall-standing body versus the hunch-over, deformed body. European society saw the male Jewish body as diseased, hunched over and deformed. Europeans designated the Jewish body as the site of deviant sexuality, either hypersexuality or a repression of sexuality.150 The stereotypes of Jewish sexuality were based on the actual differences between ideal Jewish masculinity and ideal European masculinity.151 The

Talmud upheld the rabbi as the ideal Jewish man. Compared to European standards of masculinity, the rabbi was a ‘sissy.’ While European society upheld the knight in shining armor,

Jewish communities idealized the studious rabbi. The Talmud presented the hunched-over rabbi as sexually attractive and as the ideal mate, but European society saw this effeminate Jewish man as sexless.152 Thus, according to European society, the ideal European citizen was respectable, virile, and dominant, while the Jewish man was passive, sexually deviant, and deformed.153

Zionist thinkers accepted this criticism of Jewish masculinity and the European definition of the ideal man, while rejecting their own religion’s standard for masculinity.

149 As mentioned previously, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism posits that the West stigmatizes the East as the ‘other’ and sets up binary opposites of civilized and backward, rational and irrational, active and passive, masculine and feminine, normative sexuality and deviant sexuality. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 150 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 151 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and The Invention of the Jewish Man (University of California Press, 1997). 152 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. 153 European society saw the Jewish male rite of circumcision as a sign of suspect masculinity. The Jewish man was incomplete and therefore, effeminate. He was hunched over and engaged in study, which was not a ‘manly’ activity. The Jew was impotent because he was physically deformed, because medieval Christians often misunderstood circumcision as castration. Gilman, The Jew’s Body. 59

This derision of the Jewish male as effeminate mobilized Zionists because late nineteenth-century European society conflated masculinity with being civilized and modern.

Zionists believed that the establishment of their own state was the answer to their exclusion from

European society. Herzl and Nordau began to conflate masculinity with establishing a Jewish state. In making Jews masculine, Zionists believed they could establish their own state free of persecution.

Herzl and Nordau redefined notions of Jewish masculinity through talking about the regeneration of the Jewish male body in connection with the nation-state. Zionists altered the idea of Jewish masculinity, now based off European standards, from the passive Talmudic student, hunched over in study to the bronzed, healthy, tall-standing farmer and fighter.154 Herzl connected the idea of manliness and national freedom. Herzl asserted that once the Jew had established his state, he would be regenerated into a complete man. The new Jew would live free:

The proletarian masses of Eastern Europe drop their peddlers’ packs to become straight- backed, sun-bronzed peasants and artisans. Then the Jew, degraded to less than man’s estate by anti-Semitism would regain full statue of manhood on his old soil, renewing it with his love and labor.155

Max Nordau, who helped Herzl found the World Zionist Organization in 1897, idealized masculinity in Degeneration (1892). Nordau argued that the modern world caused both moral and physical degeneration. What Nordau called the Muscular Judaism of Zionism would reform the degenerate Jewish body.156 Both Nordau and Herzl preached that only by rejecting the

Diaspora and creating a new state could the new Jew emerge and be masculine.157 These fathers

154 Herzl and other theorists used the term “Tall-standing” to define the new Jew. “Tall-standing” was the foil to the hunched-over rabbi. 155 Theodore Herzl, translated by Jacques Kornberg, Old-New Land (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publications, 2007), xxxv. 156 Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007). 157 Tamar Mayer, “From Zero to Hero: masculinity in Jewish Nationalism,” in Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Esther Fuchs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 115. 60

of Zionism constructed masculinity by giving the Jewish male a new body and by envisioning a state for the Jewish people.

Zionism was, therefore, “an effort to reinscribe the European Jew as male.”158 Zionist theorists spoke about normalizing the Jewish body, which meant conforming to ‘normal’

European standards.159 Raz Yosef argues, “The liberation of Jews and creation of a new nation were closely intertwined with a longing for the redemption and normalization of the Jewish male body. That body had to be rescued from anti-Semitic, scientific-medical discourse associating it with disease, madness, degeneracy, sexual perversity, and femininity.”160 For a Jew to be masculine, his body had to be redeemed by owning his own land, cultivating it, and being self- sufficient politically and economically. The Jew could only be virile in the new land once he had possessed and dominated the land; in this new land, the deviant sexuality of the exilic Jew would be healed. 161 Zionism was the ultimate form of assimilation, rather than being an alternate to the

Haskalah’s goal of assimilation, because it conformed to European standards for the nation-state and its citizenry.162 Transplanted to Palestine, the new Jew that Zionism created was the

European masculine ideal.

Believing the Jewish disease was terminal unless they could establish a homeland,

Zionist settlers, who referred to themselves as pioneers, consciously carried these ideas about masculinity with them to Palestine where they were intent on remaking the Jewish people.163 In

158 Hillel J. Kieval, “Imagining Masculinity in the Jewish fin de Siècle,” in Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy 142-154, Edited by Jonathan Frankel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 159 David Biale, “Zionism as an Erotic Revolution,” in Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed., People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 283-307. 160 Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 2. 161 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 162 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 166. 163 Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 16-17. 61

the New Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine from 1880 to 1948, the ideas of

Herzl and Nordau took shape: Zionist pioneers constructed new masculinity in militias and farming communities. Both these military and agricultural activities defined the early years of

Zionist settlement and set the standard for what Israelis would hold up as the “ideal Jew.”

Sabras, as the Zionist pioneers from the 1930s to the 1950s who established the state of

Israel were known, were the ideal Jews that Nordau and Herzl called for in early Zionist prescriptive literature.164 “The papers of the day printed photos of men and women pioneers, beautiful people, shot from the angle of the soil – as though against the backdrop of the future…a young couple – she full bodied, he muscular, people of labor – a map of the country in the background, with the inspirational line below: ‘Dawn is breaking now.’”165 The body of the

Sabra was strong, healthy, bronzed, and exposed to the land. He walked barefoot or in sandals in order to stay in contact with the land. The ideal Sabra was a male and blond with blue eyes because he was of European origin. He was without the facial distinctions of the exiled Jew, especially the Jewish nose and hunched back.166 The Sabra’s hair was unkempt, especially the

164 In the Hebrew lexicon, the word Sabra, taken from the name of a desert plant tsabar, denotes Jews born in Israel, also called native-born Jews. However, Oz Almog both expands and narrows this definition to a particular generation of Jews and to a literary heroic figure that was widespread in the fictional literature of the Yishuv and Israel. The Sabra is not just native-born Jews because then that would include everyone born in Israel since the establishment of the state and not include several founders who were the ideal cultural Sabra. He uses the definition of the Sabras as both the young emigrants and native-born Jews of first generation emigrants who were socialized in youth movements, kibbutzim, and the military from the 1930s to the 1950s. Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 165 Segev, 1949, The First Israelis, Arlen Neal Weinstein, English Language Editor (New York: The Free Press, 1986), x. 166 “Responding to a European discursive tradition in which the diagnosis of Jewish malady was attributed most obviously to the Jewish male, Zionism’s vision of the “new Jew” and of the Hebrew native of Palestine likewise often focused on the new Jewish male.” Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 72. For information on women’s place in Zionism, see Esther Fuchs, “The Enemy as Woman: Fictional Women in the Literature of the Palmach,” Israeli Studies 4, no. 1 (1999):212-233; “Netiva Ben-Yehuda,” in Yael S. Feldman, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Allison Rose, “Imagining the ‘New Jewish Family’: Gender and Nation in Early Zionism” In Families of a New World, ed. Lynne Haney and Lisa Pollard (New York: Routledge, 2003); Sachlav Stoler-Liss, “Mothers Birth the Nation: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents’ Manuals” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues no. 6 (2003): 104-118. 62

forelocks, representing his sensuous and open nature. Sabras looked down on washing as a feminine characteristic; they saw grunginess, even sloppiness as manly.167

Zionism was, therefore, not just a national movement but a civilization project: “In the

Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization.”168

Zionists, along with establishing a state, wanted to reform the European Jewish population.

Zionists called for the transformation of the diaspora’s culture and practices; they wanted to change language, holidays, art, songs, clothing, and “the very shape and comportment of their body.”169 Zionists drew from the Jewish tradition but filtered it through their masculine ideal.170

They extracted the traditions, legends, and history of Judaism that pointed to the manly Jewish warrior rather than the effeminate student of the Torah. Sabras held up King David, Judah

Maccabee, and Simon Bar Kochba as examples of Jewish masculinity. Zionist theorists and pioneers constructed a ‘civilizing’ enterprise to regenerate the Jewish people from a passive, studious people into courageous, masculine citizens of their own state.

Emasculation: Erasure of Arab Culture

Arab Jewish memoirists, both those who resent Israel and those who love it and call it home, tell how their culture was not welcome in Israel. Arab Jews realized quickly upon arrival

167 Almog, The Sabra. 168 Dana Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a “New Jewish Type” Journal of the Royal anthropological Institure 15, no. 3 (2009): 592-609. 169 Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 18. 170 There were several strains of Zionism, but the scope of this paper does not allow all of them to be discussed. It is important that several early Zionists called for the emulation of the Palestinian Bedouin and Sephardic Jews as examples of ancient Israelites, and emulation of Eastern traits was a way to further break with the diaspora. However, their idea of admiration was an exotic and static picture of a people trapped in biblical times. In the end, Westernization became the order of the day. They wanted to imitate the Bedouin’s natural connection to the land but wanted the culture of Europe. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 158. David Ohana’s “Where East Meets West,” in the edited compilation, Israeli Identity: Between Orient and Occident, gives a brief summary of Israel’s continual identity crisis. Other essays in the discuss Israel as caught between East and West in cinema, music, foreign policy, etc. David Tal, ed. Israeli Identity: Between Orient and Occident (New York: Routlege, 2013). 63

that the Sabra was the true Israeli and that Arab Jews were accordingly excluded from the centers of power. 171 Arab Jews became second-class citizens in the new state. The Sabra was masculine.

His body represented the new Israeli society and provided the means of forming the nation.172

The Arab Jewish immigrant, by contrast, was effeminate as his body was held up by Sabras as the site of disease, backwardness, and passiveness. Sabras first emasculated Arab Jews by exposing them to harsh transit camps and subjecting them to discrimination and stereotyping.

Sabras further emasculated Arab Jews by stripping them of their Arab identity and renaming them Mizrahi. Zionists enforced Sabra enculturation on Arab Jews but never allowed them to become Sabras.

At the end of World War Two, Israeli leaders turned to the Arab world because they were desperate for population: “The future of the state depends on immigration.” David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, wrote:

The main thing is the absorption of immigrants. This embodies all the historical needs of the state. We might have captured the West Bank, the Golan, the entire Galilee, but those conquests would not have reinforced our security as much as immigration. Doubling and tripling the number of immigrants gives us more and more strength…That is the most important thing, above all else. We have conquered territories, but without settlement they have no decisive value, not in the Negev, nor in Galilee, nor in Jerusalem. Settlement – that is the real conquest.173

With enemy states just over the border and the potential of continual war, the new state desperately needed more “bodies” or “human material.” 174 The Mossad, le aliyah bet, The

Organization for Illegal Immigration, sent emissaries to attract more Jews, as Zionism’s survival

171 Ella Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew,” in Women and the Politics of Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation, ed. Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 266. 172 Rosenberg-Friedman attributes the idea that the male body “had become the symbol of the new society and a means toward creating the nation” to Michael Gluzman, “Longing for Heterosexuality: Zionism and Sexuality in Herzl’s Altneuland,” te’orya Ve-Bikoret 11 (1997): 145-162 [Hebrew]. 173 David Ben-Gurion in Labor Party Archives and Diary, in Segev, 1949, 97-98. 174 Segev writes that potential immigrants were frequently referred to as bodies or human material in Mossad correspondence. 64

depended on demography. Memoirist Naeim Giladi, who was a part of the Iraq Zionist underground that smuggled Jews to Israel, writes that Arab Jews were brought to Israel because

Israel needed them for labor as well.

The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.175

The government saw demography as its answer to security and labor. Immigration would legitimize Jews’ right to a state.

Memoirist Marina Benjamin gets at the crux of the problem between the Zionist establishment and Arab Jewish immigrants: “The population that had then been rejected entirely by the Zionists now formed the basis for the establishment of a sustainable state.”176 Zionism was created for the redemption of the Ashkenazi diaspora. Ben-Gurion wrote, “the Islamic countries have, in the past few hundred years, played a passive role in the history of the nation,” and that Zionism was a movement for Jews from Europe and America, “the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel.” Zionist leaders only opted for recruiting Arab Jews because the European population was nearly depleted by the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion wrote that the

Holocaust “destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it.”177 The founders, therefore, were desperate for populations to people the fledgling state.

Members of the Mossad recognized that Arab Jews were content in Arab states. At their meeting on April 22, 1949, the Chairman of the Zionist Executive said that, “Even Jews who

175 Naeim Giladi, “Jews of Iraq,” The Link 31, Issue 2 (1998), http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html 176 Marina Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation (New York: Free Press, 2006), 133. 177 David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Segev, 1949, 156-157. 65

don’t wish to leave [their homes] must be forced to come…”178 Agents writing back to Israel wrote about the Jews who refused to leave their home: “There’s about 3,500 Jews here who are not thinking of emigrating to Israel in the near future. They are attached to their fleshpots…They will continue to play roulette, do business, eat meat and make money."179 Mossad agents realized that domestic distress would likely force Jews to emigrate. The Zionist underground in the Arab world spread propaganda and went to great measures to convince Jews to come to Israel.180 The early Israeli state bought, bribed, and traded with other countries for immigrants.181 Zionist agents, Shlomo Hillel and Mordechai Ben Porat, met with the Iraqi leaders Nuri Said and Tawfiq el-Suweidi as well as the Shah of Iran to bribe and arrange for smuggling from Iraq to Iran to

Israel.182

Between April 1948 and July 1950, the population of Israel increased by 50%. In the first six months of statehood, 100,000 immigrants poured into Israel from all over the world. In 1949,

250,000 refugees overwhelmed the new state, and by the end of 1949, there were one million

Israelis. The state was not ready for this kind of immigration. In May 1948, Labor, the ruling party, began drafting a budget for 150,000 immigrants in the next two years. Others thought they were underestimating and that 250,000 would come by 1950. The state was not ready for the

400,000 that would come by July 1950.183

Zionist leaders worried about what the influx of thousands of Arab Jews would do to the

Sabra culture they had established. David Ben-Gurion wrote, “Although we were an Oriental

178 Segev, 1949, 109-110. 179 About Jews in Libya, Segev, 1949, 139. 180 See chaper one’s discussion of the bombings in Baghdad. 181 They really struggled to get immigrants from Europe, so Israel made a trade agreement with Poland, and Jews were bought by the head (between $50-$1000) in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Segev, 1949, 98-106. See chapter one for the discussion on Hillel and Ben Porat’s deals with Iraqi ministers. 182 Segev, 1949, 98-106; Shlomo Hillel, in Morad, Tamar, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shash, eds., Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008), 112. 183 Segev, 1949, 95-96. About 30 to 40% of these refugees were from the Arab World. Many Arab Jews came later, in the 1950s. 66

people, we had been Europeanized, and we wanted to return to Palestine in the geographical sense only. We intended to establish a European culture here, as we were linked to the greatest cultural force in the world.”184 In an interview, Ben-Gurion proclaimed, “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies.”185 Israeli Education Minister, Abba Eban, stated that “the object should be to infuse [the Mizrahim] with an Occidental spirit, rather than allow them to drag us into an unnatural Orientalism…One of the great apprehensions which afflict us…is the danger lest the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring world.”186 Moroccan Jew Avi Picard writes that Zionist leaders’ solution to “the spirit of the Levant” was enforced enculturation of Arab Jews into Ashkenazi

Sabra culture.187

The new comers' traumatic departure from their exilic homes, followed by the strong and pervasive pressure they met in Israel to relinquish earlier identities, languages, memories, and culture, aggravated that sense of rupture. The expectation that new olim [pioneers] would personally embody the profound transformation from exilic Jews to native Israelis

184 David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (New York: The Third Press, 1973), 50. 185 David Ben Gurion, Interviewed by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde, 9 March 1966, In Sammy Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 88. 186 David Ben-Gurion and Abba Eban, quoted in Ella Shohat “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988): 1-35. 187 Zionists believed that Israel would be a melting pot, where Oriental culture would disappear. Academics comforted David Ben-Gurion by arguing that once the older generations died passed away, Israel would follow European culture. “Once the desert generation is gone, reflecting the prevailing belief of officialdom at the time, Israeli society will be uncontaminated by Levantine culture.” Avi Picard, Cut to Measure: Israel’s Policies Regarding the Aliyah of North African Jews, 1951-1956 (Hebrew) (Ben-Gurion University Press, 2013). Reviewed by Daniel Ben-Simon, “Book Review: Selection and Heartbreak: The Aliyah of North African Jewry,” Haaretz, September 20, 2013. http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/.premium-1.548014. Dana Hirsch writes that the “the term ‘mixed marriage’ referred to marriage between European Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi, or ‘Oriental’, Jews.” Medical Scientific discourse saw Ashkenazi and Sephardic as two separate races, but mixing was encouraged because it would ‘weed out’ the Oriental: “What, then, is behind the fantasy of the ‘snowball’ of mixed marriages? Undoubtedly, this is not a fantasy about solving social problems, but rather a liberal fantasy of ‘purification’– a fantasy about the disappearance of a certain group of people, not by coercion, but through a seemingly ‘natural’ process.” However, mixed marriage was and is promoted by the left as progressive. Dana Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type,’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 3 (2009): 592-609. 67

was largely accepted during the pre-state and early state periods as necessary for national revival.”188

The Sabras expected that immigrants would shed their exilic culture and adopt Israeli Sabra culture.

Initial Sabra perceptions of Arab Jews were both an orientalist attitude and a byproduct of difficult beginnings. Arab Jewish immigrants arrived in Israel after a harrowing journey. Many of them were smuggled to Israel illegally with only the clothes on their backs.189 Many of those who came legally also came penniless because most of their possessions had been confiscated by

Arab governments. These Jews came hungry, dirty, and distressed by the journey.

Upon arrival, immigrants were subjected to a humiliating experience. Upon arrival, many were forced to take their clothes off and were sprayed with DDT.190 “When we landed at Lod

Airport the Israelis sprayed us with DDT out of sheer ignorance, fearing that we’d brought parasites from an Arab land they didn’t know anything about.”191 Officials burned clothing that they thought was contaminated by disease.192 Samir Naqqash recalls, “Because we came from

Arab countries, they thought lice was eating us.”193 Indeed, some of the immigrants’ heads were shaved because of suspected lice. Others were treated for ringworm through the use of extreme measures like radiation.194 The stripping of clothing and spraying of DDT was not only functional: it represented the cleansing of the disease-ridden body of the exilic Jew. 195 For Arab

Jews, that redemption was humiliating. For the Jew to be redeemed in the Holy Land, the

188 Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 115-144. Emphasis mine. 189 Every memoirist that was smuggled in relates the trauma of only having the possession on their person. 190 Fortunately, officials ended this practice after a while when they realized that these immigrants were not carrying diseases. Somekh, Life after Baghdad (2012). 191 Oded Halamy, Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 65. 192 Segev, 1949, 183. 193 Samir Naqqash, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection, Directed by Samir Naqqash, 2002, Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion, 2003. DVD. 194 Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew,” 274-275. 195 Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy,” 274-275. 68

characteristics of the Diaspora had to be eliminated. The spraying of DDT is remembered by the

Iraqi immigrants “as the first humiliation.”196

More humiliation followed when Israeli officials loaded Arab Jewish immigrants into trucks and transported them to the desert to live in transit camps called ma’baras. Samir Naqqash remembers, “They put us in a lorry like cows, like animals and brought us to a land full of thorns. They brought us to a dirty land full of thorns. It was horrible, like a never ending nightmare.”197 Similarly, Oded Halamy writes that, “They put us on flat-bed trucks and brought us directly to the transition camp. It was winter. It was raining. We were given tents, one for the men, one for the women. The bathroom was far away. Harsh winds blew the tents away, and it was very hard work to keep them secured and maintained. The winter was very cold, living in tents with no heat, and we had no running water.”198 Arab Jews were in shock because of this treatment.

The ma’bara conditions were horrendous, and tragically, Arab Jewish immigrants languished in those camps for years.199 Kazzaz writes that his parents lived in a tin hut with no heating or indoor plumbing. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, but they didn’t complain.

His in-laws were seventy miles south in Ma’bara Sakiah. They lived in a canvas tent. There was no running water. They lived there so long that Kazzaz writes that they developed a Ma’bara culture of sharing in order to cope with the constant deprivation.200 Marina Benjamin writes, we were “surrounded by barbed wire fences, and guarded day and night by Polish commandants who apparently thought they were running concentration camps.”201 Kazzaz, who was not yet in

196 Segev, 1949, 118. 197 Samir Naqqash, Forget Baghdad (2003). 198 Oded Halamy, Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 65. 199 Aziz Khazzoom, “Did the Israeli State Engineer Segregation? On the Placement of Jewish Immigrants in Development Towns in the 1950s.” Social Forces 84, No. 1 (2005):115-134. 200 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 348. 201 Marina Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon (2006), 250. 69

Israel, did not want his fiancé to be in the camps, so he arranged for a family member already in

Israel to get her out. The guards would not let her leave, so she had to escape at night.202

While the Israeli government was lacking resources, they did not allocate the resources they had fairly.203 European Jews were disproportionately sent to the cities and the

Mediterranean coast, while Mizrahi Jews were sent to the periphery and Negev desert. Many

Arab Jews never left these camps because the camps turned into development towns. Over time, the immigrants’ tents were replaced by tin huts and then one- or two-room houses. In the early years of statehood, there was some sense among Arab Jews that everyone was in the same situation because many European immigrants were also in the camps. However, as Arab Jews’ situation did not improve and they saw Ashkenazim move out of the camps while they stayed behind, they doubted the government’s fairness. “We were in the ma’abara [transition camp] for almost a year. We were the lucky ones. I had relatives who stayed there for six or eight years.”204

Kazzaz knew immigrants who were in the ma’bara camps for ten years. In spite of his religious longing for Israel, Kazza questioned Israeli leaders:

Was it discrimination? Or was it an act of God to “toughen” us? Were the decision- makers, most of whom were of European origin, insensitive to the humanity of the Iraqis?

202 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 378. 203 Segev, While it was right for officials to accommodate Holocaust refugees first, their decisions reflect their disdain for Arabs, rather than special accommodation for Holocaust refugees. “The rejection of the exilic past was clearly reflected in the Sabras' attitude toward the Holocaust. The persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II represented the extreme evil of life in galut that was associated with the ‘others,’ the exilic Jews who did not realize the urgency of the Zionist agenda and stayed behind in Europe. This attitude of psychological distancing was tinged with an air of superiority toward the Holocaust victims who ‘went like lambs to the slaughter,’ although the Yishuv and its leadership did express concern for, and identification with, the fate of the Jews under Nazi-controlled regimes. The ambivalence toward the Holocaust survivors continued after their immigration to Israel, and Israeli public culture was slow in incorporating the commemoration of the Holocaust. The Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld, describes his difficulty in holding on to the elusive memories of his prewar childhood and war experiences soon after the war ended. Arriving in Palestine as a young adult, he felt the pressure not only to suppress those remnants of memory but also to change his personality and even his physiognomy in order to accommodate himself to the Mythological Sabra, ‘to become overnight a tall, blond lad with blue eyes, and, the main thing, sturdy.’” Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 115-144. 204 Oded Halamy, Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 66. 70

Or was the situation the result of a decision by God to prepare these exiles for a better, more wholesome return?205

Kazzaz, who wanted to come to Israel, was disillusioned by the Israeli government’s treatment of

Arab Jews.

These camps and development towns tended to be near borders, where attacks from surrounding Arab states occurred. This move put Arab Jews in danger, making them resent the

Arabs with whom they had recently lived. Putting Arab Jews in towns outside from the city prevented Arab Jews from being near centers of power; this also served to keep Arab Jews from bringing down the cultural level of European Jews. Moving Arab Jews to the desert also stunted

Arab Jews’ economic opportunities. The Ashkenazi elite allocated more resources to kibbutz and cities than development towns. Ironically, development towns did not “develop;” these towns provided wage labor for nearby kibbutz.206 Sderot, a development town next to the Gazan border, is seventy percent Moroccan today, for example. Sderot was originally a transit camp; officials delivered immigrants in the middle of the night so they would not see that they were being dropped off in the desert. The trucks tipped the first immigrants out because they refused to get out in the dark because they could not see where they were.207

In addition to enduring harsh conditions, Arab Jews were stripped of their Arab identity and labeled Mizrahi. Officials called all non-European Jews Mizrahi, which meant Eastern. Arab

Jews lost their particular identity of being a middle class Baghdadi or a wealthy cosmopolitan from Alexandria. Sabras grouped together heterogeneous Arab Jews, no matter their background, into one static and essentialized “other.” Mizrahi became code for “dirty, and starving new

205 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 347-348. 206 One theory was since they were from the desert, they could better withstand living in tents then European Jews who were used to cities. Ironically, the majority of Arab Jews had been city-dwellers. Segev, 1949; Shabi, We Look like the Enemy (New York: Walker & Company, 2008); and Aziz Khazzoom, “Did the Israeli State Engineer Segregation? On the Placement of Jewish Immigrants in Development Towns in the 1950s.” Social Forces 84, No. 1 (2005):115-134. 207 Shabi, We Look like the Enemy, 54-56. 71

immigrant,” “morally deficient,” “dangerous,” “superstitious,” “retarded,” “illiterate immigrants,” and “sexually immoral.”208 At the same time, Arab was coming to mean Palestinian or enemy. Both Mizrahi and Arab meant backward and uncivilized, but Mizrahi distinguished

Jew from Arab.

Arab Jewish individuals were labeled based on the prevailing stereotypes of their home country or region. These stereotypes were based on a lack of knowledge about the Arab world.

Eli Amir writes that it was clear that Zionists were ignorant about the Arab world:

When I came to Israel I found that those who absorbed us and who took care of us knew nothing about us. They thought to us as Arabs, and Arabs were Israel’s enemies. So they didn’t know how to handle us – didn’t know what preconceived category to put us in [sic].209

Not understanding who Arab Jews were, Sabras created the category of Mizrahi in which to place Arab Jews. Sami Michael writes that he was renamed Mizrahi the moment he stepped off the plane.

When I got off the plane from Tehran in Israel, an official speaking English asked me, ‘From where did this plane come?’ I told him, ‘From Iran.” He asked me, ‘Are you Iranian?’ I told him, ‘No, I’m not Iranian, I’m Iraqi.’ He said, ‘Ah, you’re Sephardi.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t come from Spain. I’m telling you, I’m an Iraqi who came through Iran.’ He said, ‘So you are Mizrachi.’ I told him, ‘No, I’m not from Poland or Hungary. I’m telling you, I’m Iraqi.’ I wasn’t being argumentative. I simply didn’t understand his categories. Later I understood that in Israel, Mizrachi means from an Arab country.210

The stereotypes Ashkenazim had about Jews from the Arab world are reflected in the strange questions they asked newly arrived immigrants. Iraqi Jews reported that the Ashkenazi Jews who

208 A conglomeration of many names for Mizrahi mentioned in the in Flying Camel (2003). 209 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 234. 210 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 86. Sami Michael explains the categories he grew up with: “In Iraq we didn’t know about the terms Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrachim. Those concepts didn’t exist: we thought Jews were Jews all over the world. When people spoke about the east we didn’t think they meant the Middle East. We thought in terms of the Cold War. To us, the east was Russia, Poland, Hungary, et cetera. Yet I arrived in Israel and saw two peoples: people that identify with the Ashkenazim and the other people like me, who look as if they came from the desert.” 72

lived in Israel before statehood were surprised to find out that the Iraqi Jews had forks, tables, and chairs in Iraq.211

Arabs were considered primitive, defeated. Their language was considered stagnant, their music monotonic and primitive. Israelis looked down upon them…the Arabs were seen as not independent enough to take care of themselves… So a Jew who came from such a country was immediately considered one of them. We were labeled in the opposite way in which an immigrant from America was labeled: you might be stupid, primitive, zero, poor, nothing, but if you’re from America, you’re a shining star!212

Arab Jews, renamed Mizrahi, were all considered backward and uncivilized, no matter their former social class or education.

The stereotypes attributed to the collective Mizrahim were confirmed because initial encounters between Sabras and Arab Jews took place in camps.213 Sabras saw them sleeping on mattresses in tents in the desert, not in their comfortable Baghdadi or Alexandrian homes. Hence,

Sabras believed the stereotype that the Mizrahim were “primitive.” Ashkenazi camp guards called Arab Jews dirty, but Arab Jews did not have access to water to wash. Because of the harsh journey, many Arab Jews fell sick, so health workers promulgated that they were “diseased” as a people. Their clothes, a mixture of European and Middle Eastern, were in tatters from the journey. The majority of the immigrants spoke Arabic, the language of the enemy. They hoarded food and stole silverware (so they could keep it kosher) for the next meal. Camp directors confirmed that they were “thieves.” Arab Jews were traumatized, helpless, and dependent on the state. The family patriarchs could not provide for their families, and mothers could not feed their children. Hence, the social workers declared them “unfit parents.” Men were not “manly”

211 Aziza Khazoom, “Orientalism at the Gates: Immigration, the East/West Divide, and Elite Iraqi Jewish Women in Israel in the 1950s,” Signs 32, no. 1 (2006): 197-220. 212 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 236. 213 Ibid. 73

enough to be considered full citizens and the women were “incapable mothers.”214 The

“gatekeepers,” Israeli transit camp workers, confirmed the stereotypes that Arab Jews were dependent, passive exilic Jews in need of Zionist regeneration.215

One example of initial encounters is the differences in clothing between Arab Jews and

Sabras. Ashkenazi elite misunderstood the clothing immigrants wore on the plane ride to Israel.

Many immigrants wore fancy clothing in multiple layers because they were only allowed one suitcase. Amir writes, “our outfits were the most modern style in England…Meanwhile, in Israel at the time, a tie and fancy clothing were things to be ashamed of: the ideal was the khaki clothes of the tough farmer.”216 Iraqis and Egyptians were influenced by the British while Moroccans were influenced by the French, and their fashion reflected this influence. Sabras, on the other hand, idolized socialist simplicity. Sabras dressed simply, rejecting bourgeois fashion as effeminate.217 The contrast continued as immigrants, in their best suits, lived in squalor in the transit camps. Amir explains that “it was the most unbelievable sight to see Iraqi immigrants walking around the transition camps in fancy English suits – though they quickly became dirty and worn.”218 Rather than presenting themselves as civilized, Iraqi immigrants looked like imposters to Israeli Sabras.

Arab Jewish immigrants’ first experiences with the Ashkenazim were marred not only by the camp conditions but also the camp dynamics and language differences. Somekh writes that

Ashkenazi immigrants were placed in charge of Arab Jewish immigrants, and neither could understand the language of the other:

214 Shohat, Shabi, and Segev all tell the sad story of hundreds of Yemenite babies being taken away from their mothers in the camp and given to Ashkenazi families. The story is denied by the Israeli government today. 215 Aziza Khazzoum,“Orientalism at the Gates: Immigration, the East/West Divide, and Elite Iraqi Jewish Women in Israel in the 1950s” Signs 32, no. 1 (2006): 197-220. 216 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 235. 217 Almog, The Sabra. 218 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 235. 74

The meeting took place between the speakers of Iraqi Arabic and speakers of Yiddish in the melting pot of Israel in the 1950s. Most of the Iraqi emigrants were temporarily housed…The clerks called this process siddur, which means literally, “arrangement.” The Jewish Agency personnel who dealt with the immigrants at that time were junior clerks, many newly arrived themselves from Eastern Europe. More than a few, I was surprised to see, had silver teeth. They spoke poor Hebrew, while the camp-dwellers spoke no Hebrew at all. Friction and angry exchanges were a daily occurrence. To my mind and the minds of the other immigrants, the most loathsome aspect of the experience was the very use of the word siddur. Because of the linguistic similarity between Hebrew and Arabic, the word siddur and its related forms sounded very much like the Arabic tasdir, which means “the exporting of goods.” We angrily protested the fact that overnight we had been transformed from people into goods, imported and exported by Yiddish- speaking clerks.219

The language barrier between immigrants furthered misunderstandings and stereotypes between the groups.

The first step in Israeli enculturation was stripping immigrants’ exilic identity from them by changing their names to Hebrew names. Sometimes, immigrants changed their name intentionally in order to assimilate. Frequently, however, Ashkenazi immigration officers changed newcomer’s names without their permission.

This "conversion" was often enacted by shedding off one's exilic foreign name and adapting a new Hebrew name, thereby representing the death of the exilic Jew and the rebirth of a Sabra. The profound symbolic meaning of name changing as an important Zionist ritual that represents the dis-identification with a discredited past becomes evident when compared to name changing as part of the traditional ritual of conversion to Judaism, and (perhaps even more evocatively) to an old Jewish folk custom of changing the name of the severely sick in order to guarantee their recovery.220

The pressure to assimilate was overwhelming, and Arab Jews knew that for their families to succeed in Israel, changing their name was necessary. Having an Arab last name hindered chances for success in every area of Israeli life. Yehuda Shenhav confesses that as a child in

Israel he grew up ashamed of his Arab background. Shenhav urged his father to change their

219 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007), 186. 220 Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 115-144. 75

name, but now he regrets it deeply.221 Eli Amir changed his name in 1960 because he was tired of explaining his name and how it was spelled. He was about to start attending Hebrew

University and did not want a repeat of his experience in the army when he was almost put in prison because he was so angry at his commander for making a joke out of his name. Amir’s other reason was that he wanted to date girls and “didn’t want to start conversations with them by spending time explaining my name.” His brothers and sisters eventually followed suit, but his parents did not.222 Henrietta Dahan Kalev writes that her German Jewish kindergarten teacher changed her name to Ahuva, saying that Henrietta was too hard to pronounce.223 Ariel Sabar changed his name so he could go to a university. He changed it from Sabagh to Sabar.224

Further enculturation occurred through learning Hebrew and disdaining Arabic. Shohat illustrates the extent to which she tried to rid herself of Arabic. She calls herself the language police – she would shush her parents and grandparents in public, not allowing them to talk when they rode the bus with her:

I vividly remember my first anxious days in kindergarten, when I was less terrified about the separation from my mother than about what Arabic words would slip into my Hebrew. Although no one had explicitly warned me, something in the social atmosphere made it clear to even a child like myself that Arabic was a taboo language.225

Shohat spent hours in front of a mirror working on her accent to push sounds to the front of mouth and try to get rid of the guttural sounds of ‘qa.’ta, ha, and ‘aa. She tried to shift to airy sounds of ka, ta, kha, and a. “This is it, I thought to myself, Hebrew is more like French.”226

Ironically, Shohat thought Hebrew was more like French than Arabic, though Hebrew and

221 Shenhav, The Arab Jews. 222 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 236. 223 Henrietta Dahan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 157. 224 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise (2009), 144. Changing his name to Sabar (a variation of Sabra) is the equivalent of an American changing their last name to “America.” 225 Ella Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew,” In Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation, edited by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin, 262-276. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 265. 226 Ibid. 76

Arabic are both Semitic languages. She later learned that Zionists revived the Hebrew language, and borrowed many words from Arabic, but then submitted Hebrew to Europeanization. In his

1930 essay, ‘The Hebrew Accent,” Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky asserts, “There are experts who think that we ought to bring our accent closer to the Arabic accent. But this is a mistake.

Although Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages, it does not mean that our Fathers spoke in

‘Arabic accent’…We are Europeans and our musical taste is European, the taste of Rubinstein,

Mendelsshon, and Bizet.”227 Hebrew was also deemed the only worthy language because it was masculine.

Zionists and many non-Zionists conceived of Hebrew as a distinctly ‘male’ language. Its revival in Palestine was geared in large measure toward redeeming the masculinity of the ostensibly feminized Jews, whose emasculation was in part conditioned by and reflected in his language.228

Since speaking Hebrew was a sign of being masculine, Arabic-speaking Jews were speaking both an effeminate language and the language of the enemy.

Kazzaz explains the degree to which enculturation was forced on Arab Jews. “Each group was encouraged – to the point of harassment – to disdain and even disown their ‘back-home’ culture. ‘Yours was a primitive Levantine culture. The sooner you shed it, the sooner you will become civilized [i.e. Europeanized].’”229 Yael Arami writes that in her school, she sang

Ashkenazi melodies, read from the Ashkenazi prayer book, and learned Ashkenazi history.230

The 1981 children’s book, Rumiah, the Little Nanny, by award-winning Israeli author, Levin

Kipniss, tells the story of a little Yeminite girl, “a dirty and starving new immigrant,” who was hired as a nanny for an Ashkenazi veteran’s family. They changed her name to Moriah, bathed

227 Ze’ev Jabotinsky, quoted in Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy”, 264. 228 Tamar Mayer, “From Zero to Hero: masculinity in Jewish Nationalism,” in Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Esther Fuchs (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 73. 229 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 349. 230 Yael Arami, “A Synagogue of One’s Own,” Flying Camel (2003), 102. 77

her, and combed her hair. The family believed “that in a very short time she will become a human being.”231 Arab Jewish children, especially, internalized what they were taught about themselves in school.

Henrietta Dahan-Kalev confesses that she was so ashamed of her Arab heritage that she created a new identity. When her family moved to Jerusalem from Holon, she decided to re- create herself as French to avoid the teasing she received at her old school. She changed her accent to a French accent. She forbade her mother from speaking Arabic. She never invited friends home. She asked her parents for extensive French history lessons (they had attended the

French Alliance Israelite in Morocco). Dahan-Kalev even lied to her friends about the extracurricular programs she was involved in so that she would appear to be from a wealthy

French family. Her friends asked her to perform a dance number so she improvised even though she had never taken dance lessons. She even made up an imaginary Habima Youth Theater

Company, and her teacher let her out of school early every Tuesday for it.232 Dahan-Kalev explores why she created this identity. All her life she was told, “You are so pretty; you don’t look Moroccan.” 233 She learned from a young age to associate beauty with Ashkenazim and ugliness with Moroccans: “My sense of alienation during my childhood turned upon this axis: I did not look Moroccan, and so I was ‘lucky.’ I did look Ashkenazi, and so I was ‘very lucky.’

Trapped between who I was and who people thought I was, my world view crystallized according to a clear dichotomy of good and bad, based on origin.”234 Dahan-Kalev’s experience reflects the immense pressure on children to reject their parents’ culture and to adopt Israeli

Sabra culture.

231 Levin Kipnis, Rumiah, the Little Nanny (Tel Aviv, 1981, Hebrew), Quoted in Henrietta Dahan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 162. 232 Henrietta Dahan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 159-160. 233 Dahan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” 157. 234 Ibid, 159. 78

The state, teachers, and social workers expected Arab Jewish children to fail in school, and therefore, the state allocated fewer resources to development town schools. Instead, the school system pushed the Mizrahim toward vocational schools and manual labor. Yael Arami writes, “I could not help but notice that an Ashkenazi from a ‘good family’ who received an average grade of seventy would be placed in the regular academic stream, while a Mizrahi with the same grade would be placed in the vocational stream.”235 When Arami told her Ashkenazi friend that she was taking the matriculation exams in biology and English, her friend exclaimed,

“I thought Mizrahim didn’t have the mental capacity to study subjects like that!”236 Mira Eliezer writes that her teacher told her mother, “Nothing good is going to come of your daughter.”237

Israeli researchers, Karl Fuerstein and M. Richel, advised teachers that Moroccan youth had only reached the stage of “intellectual development retardation.” They warned teachers to be careful mixing Moroccan youth with other children because of their “sexual immorality, which was the result of my North African way of life.” Moroccan youth, teachers were told, had a “religious problem,” were superstitious,” and had a problematic relationship with the father figure. 238 Ariel

Sabar had trouble finding a job because once employers realized he was an Iraqi Kurdish Jew, they assumed he was lazy, deceitful, and destined to fail. He encountered this stereotype every time he went to apply for a job or for university.239

Arab Jewish parents were told by teachers, health care workers, and social workers that they were unfit parents. Dahan-Kalev writes that her teacher called her mother a vulgar,

235 Yael Arami, “A Synagogue of One's Own,” Flying Camel (2003), 102. 236 Arami, “A Synagogue of One's Own.” 237 Mira Eliezer, “Breaking the Silence,” In Flying Camel (2003), 73. 238 Karl Fuerstein and M. Rochel, The Children of the Melha – The Cultural Retardation Among Moroccan Children and its Meaning in Education. Jewish Agency, 1953. Quoted in Henrietta Dhan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 164. For more information on scientific research done on Mizrahim, see Shohat’s discussion of Jewish thinker Kalman Katznelson’s 1964 The Ashkenazi Revolution, “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” 346-347. Segev also discusses scientific research done on Mizrahi Jews. Also several Flying Camel authors research what Israeli scientists have said about Mizrahi Jews. 239 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise (2009). 79

primitive street peddler because her mother had complained about how students were treating her.240 When they were still in the transit camp, Dahan-Kalev’s family was visited by health workers, the “nurse, dressed in white, who spoke of raising children as though it were a Zionist invention. She came to the immigrant camp to advise my mother on how to raise me, my sister and my baby brother who was born in our tent.”241 Ariel Sabar remembers that his parents and all of his friends’ parents had a difficult time doing anything but surviving. “Emasculated by their new culture, most fathers – and mothers – were too lost in depression or the exigencies of daily survival to play more than a spectator’s role in children’s lives.”242 Children could at least learn

Hebrew in school and use the military to succeed. Parents, however, tended not to learn Hebrew.

Even after an intensive Hebrew course, Somekh’s father struggled because of his age and his familiarity with Biblical Hebrew. Somekh, who quickly mastered Hebrew, found it difficult to explain Israeli Hebrew to his father and other Arab Jews his father’s age because Somekh would relate it to classical Arabic while his father would try to relate it to Biblical Hebrew. When his father was in school during Ottoman rule, they learned Biblical Hebrew, which did not help him learn modern Hebrew. Unlike Somekh’s generation who studied Arabic under the Iraqi state, the older generation did not learn classical Arabic which, ironically, helped in learning Hebrew.243

As a result, many adult Arab Jewish immigrants had to do manual labor the rest of their lives.

Arab Jewish children, immersed in Sabra culture in school, lost respect for their parents and their parents’ culture: “Their parents were their only link to the past. And what exactly was that past

240 Henrietta Dhan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 158. 241 Ibid, 157. 242 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise (2009), 131. In Iraq, Baghdadi Jews looked down on Iraqi Kurdish Jews, who tended to be poorer and spoke Aramaic amongst themselves. 243 Sasson Somekh, Life After Baghdad (2012), 52. 80

worth in Israel?”244 Sabra enculturation not only drove a wedge between Arab Jews and their past but also between Arab Jewish parents and their children.

Arab Jewish immigrants lost their dignity due to the socio-economic drop they endured.

Sabar’s great uncle, Eliyahu, and his brothers had been successful businessmen in Iraq. In Israel, they attempted to invest in construction but were taken advantage of. They, therefore, became construction workers. “May shit fall on Herzl’s beard for bringing us here,” Eliyahu used to say.245 Sabar’s grandfather Rahami worked at a book bindery, and after he got off work, he foraged though waste baskets for loose scraps of paper to take home for toilet tissue.246 Sabar’s father worked as a child cleaning out cement bags for 9 hours a day, then went to night school for four hours. David Kazzaz’s father was a successful businessman in Iraq. In Israel, however, he planted twigs for a reforestation project.247 Henrietta Dahan Kalev’s father was a senior bank officer in Morocco, but in Israel he worked in a cement factory and in the citrus harvest for several years. Esther Webman writes that it was a “big shock” to see her father, in his nice suit, walking around in the mud. Her family left a luxurious and cosmopolitan life in Cairo.248 Samir

Naqqash said, “We lived in palaces and they put us in tents. Instead of bringing us home after three thousand years, they sent us a hundred years back.”249 Eli Amir, the oldest son from a wealthy, educated Baghdadi family, writes that upon arrival in Israel he was stripped of all dignity, “But all of the sudden after arrival [in] Israel I felt like dust.”250 Arab Jewish immigrants were stripped of their former identity through losing their jobs and social status.

244 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise (2009), 130. 245 Ibid, 119. 246 Ibid, 125. 247 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 348. 248 Esther Webman, Interviewed by Ben Silsbee, Diwaniyya Dayan Center. Podcast. 29 April, 2012. 249 Samir Naqqash, Forget Baghdad (2003). 250 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 236. 81

While adults struggled, the elderly were completely destitute upon arrival. Lucette

Lagnado’s grandmother, Alexandra, would get lost wandering around:

She walked so much, and her manner was so distracted – mumbling to herself, holding on to a cigarette butt – that she attracted the attention of this immigrant community…They were sure she was mad, this hunchbacked old woman who was always muttering to herself as she paced…Alexandra became a figure of pity, or worse, derision. Children made fun of her and laughed in her face, and their parents weren’t much better. In the hardened society that was Israel of the 1950s, Alexandra’s fellow Jews showed her far less kindness, less of that wondrous quality the Egyptians call rahma – mercy, compassion – than she had encountered in Cairo at the hands of Arabs who’d seen her wandering around.251

Ariel Sabar’s great grandfather, Ephraim, was a devout Jew who cried and kissed the tarmac upon arrival in Israel. On the Sabbath, he got up at daybreak and searched till noon for a synagogue to attend. He had trouble finding a synagogue that he recognized – he mistook many of them for churches. He also got confused and thought he had mixed up his days because Jews were out working, driving, and smoking. From then on, he just sat in the corner of his son’s house, trying to stay out of the way. He could not even communicate with his grandchildren who only knew Hebrew.252

Many immigrants suffered from depression or had mental breakdowns. Ariel Sabar’s con his wedding night and another uncle lived in the hospital for a while.253 Growing up in Los

Angeles, Lital Levy’s parents talked about their Iraqi family in Israel with pity. Her father would often say, “That move finished them,” but as a child, Levy did not know what he meant, only that her aunts suffered from depression. When she asked why they were depressed, her parents always said it was the move to Israel. Having no other explanation than this, Levy associated

Israel with depression. She later learned that with the move, they suffered such a severe loss in

251 Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 98-99. 252 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise (2009), 109-111. 253 Ibid, 130. 82

socio-economic status and dignity that the majority of women and some men in the family suffered chronic depression.254

Responses to Emasculation

Arab Jews have reacted in various ways to their emasculation in Israel. The first generation of immigrants did not have much of a choice in how they reacted, as they lacked basic necessities for living. For the first decade in Israel, many Arab Jews were only focused on survival. Protesting discrimination was impossible without resources. Civil disobedience was near treason as Israel was constantly at war with her Arab neighbors. Naeim Giladi writes,

“There wasn't much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens to do much about it when Israel was on a war footing with outside enemies.”255 Since foreign policy was more important than domestic issues, Israelis ignored the Mizrahi plight. Thus, the first generation of

Arab Jews tried to make the best of their situation as best they could in order to seek social mobility for themselves and for their children.

Social mobility was nearly impossible, however, without some degree of cultural assimilation. Arab Jews had a difficult time finding jobs, pursuing education, and raising their standard of living without assimilating according to Sabra standards. Even those who were able to succeed economically or assimilate culturally were rejected because of their heritage. Victor

Sasson writes, “The notion of being or becoming Sabra is ephemeral, mere fantasy. What one becomes is pseudo-Ashkenazi, disdainful of one’s own Near Eastern roots. What one becomes is

254 Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found its Wings,” In Flying Camel (2003), 178. 255 Naeim Giladi, “Jews of Iraq,” The Link 31, Issue 2 (1998), http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html 83

a being devoid of cultural roots.”256 For the first two decades after Israel’s establishment, Arab

Jews were invisible.

Beginning in the 1970s, Arab Jews sought social awareness, political rights, and recognition of discrimination against them.257 In 1971, the Black Panther party organized to address Mizrahi concerns. This party was both a reaction to the passiveness of a previous generation and a resistance to the present discrimination they felt. The party drew inspiration from the American Black Panther party both in name and image.258 Naeim Giladi, former Zionist

Arab Jew, became an active member in the Black Panthers because of his disillusionment with

Israel’s policies:

We mounted the struggle so tenaciously and received so much publicity that the Israeli government tried to discredit our movement by calling us "Israel's Black Panthers." They were thinking in racist terms, really, in assuming the Israeli public would reject an organization whose ideology was being compared to that of radical blacks in the United States. But we saw that what we were doing was no different than what blacks in the United States were fighting against-segregation, discrimination, unequal treatment. Rather than reject the label, we adopted it proudly. I had posters of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and other civil rights activists plastered all over my office.259

The Black Panther party was shut down quickly by the Israeli government, but the party brought awareness to the ethnic divide in Israel and inspired many Mizrahim to work for change.

In the 1970s, the Mizrahim, as a whole, began supporting the Israeli right for both political and religious reasons. The right-wing Likud party, established in 1973, began to take up

256 Victor Sasson, Memoirs of a Baghdad Childhood (2011), 102. 257 Even Zionist Arab Jews have been disappointed with Israel. Many Zionist Iraqi Jews were disillusioned upon arrival because the Iraqi-led Zionist underground, the Halutz movement, was ignored in Israel. In 1963, former Halutz members held a protest against Zionists’ unwillingness to recognize Iraqi Zionists’ contribution to the establishment of Israel. Rejwan attended the protest to see what it was about. Rejwan writes that Ben-Gurion called the Halutz movement primitive, and Rejwan agrees they were a bit primitive because they were naïve enough to think that they would prosper in Israel. Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 191. 258 For more information, see an interview done with the sister of the Black Panther’s leader, Song Marciano, who started a new Black Panther Party in 2008: http://www.jerusalemite.net/blog/3112/a-conversation-with-ayala-sabag,- black-panther. See the Eulogy of Black Panther leader, Saadia Marciano, http://inmyheartblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/saadia-marciano-58-israel-morocco-black-panther-leader-dec-21/ 259 Naeim Giladi, “Jews of Iraq,” The Link 31, Issue 2 (1998), http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html 84

the cause of the Mizrahim, and the Mizrahim largely supported the Likud party as a reaction against the Labor party’s policies against them. Politically active Mizrahim also created the religious Shas party, literally meaning “Sephardi Guard,” in 1984, to promote both Sephardic

Judaism and civil rights for Mizrahim.260

Many Mizrahim, in supporting the Israeli right, support a hard line towards the

Palestinians in stark contrast to left-leaning Ashkenazim. Tragically, a prominent consequence of

Arab Jewish discrimination in Israel has been Arab Jewish hatred of non-Jewish Arab citizens of

Israel and Arabs outside of Israel. The establishment’s practice of sending Arab Jewish immigrants to border towns, putting them in danger, has contributed to this phenomenon, along with obvious resentment the Arab Jews have of being excluded from the Arab world. Journalist

Rachel Shabi interviews several Mizrahim concerning their view on Palestinians and Arab culture. They identify with Arab culture, food, and language, but they are adamantly against

“Arabs.” Many are willing to be called Iraqi, Egyptian, or Moroccan, but refuse to be called

Arab.261 For Mizrahim, “Arab hatred” is the ultimate assimilationist tool. Since Zionists called for a complete break with the past, hating Arabs was a way for Arab Jews to separate themselves from their parents’ past and to be more Zionist. Ultimately, “Arab hatred” is in place of self- loathing. Caroline Smadja writes that when she made aliyah to Israel after growing up in France, she was surprised at the amount of self-hatred she found among Mizrahim. “As soon as I learned enough Hebrew to get a sense of what was being said, I was shocked at how much self-loathing there was among the young slum-dwellers of Katamon Tet – the same self-loathing that I since

260 Beinin writes that Mizrahi went politically right because Labor put them on the fringes of society. Likud tried to help them be a part of national culture. The Labor party, in response, began to hold up their token Mizrahim. Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 23. 261 Shabi, We Look like the Enemy. 85

have felt coming from poor Black Americans, young men in particular.”262 Zionists taught

Mizrahim to hate their own Arabness. Now, ironically, the Israeli left condemns the Mizrahi political and religious right for hating Arabs and being an obstacle to peace.263

As Israel’s economy has grown, the socio-economic status of Arab Jews has improved overall and discrimination is not as blatant, yet ethnic inequality still exists today.264 Henriette

Dahan Kalev writes in 2003 that Israelis are “at most prepared to admit that once upon a time there was an ethnic problem in Israel.”265 In an interview on television in 2004, former Labour

Party MP Hagai Marom was asked whether it made sense to offer a separate, Mizrahi narrative of the history of Zionism. His response was: “Our children marry one another, this nation exists in a melting-pot framework, and I don't suppose there is a real problem.”266 Lital Levy went to an

Israeli and Palestinian Conference that showed the 1994 film The Flying Camel where an

262 Caroline Smadja, “The Search to Belong,” The Flying Camel (2003), 148. 263 Beinin discuss Arab Jewish hatred of Arabs as one way to push their own agenda: “Middle Eastern Jews living in Israel (commonly agglomerated as Mizrahim, or Orientals, sing. Mizrahi) generally shared the objective of reinforcing the Zionist case against the Arab world, but they also had their own agenda. A narrative emphasizing the unrelenting suffering of Jews in the Arab world established the claim of these Jews to a status in Israeli society comparable to the Ashkenazi survivers of the mass murder of European Jewry. Affirming their victimization in the Arab world allowed Mizrahim to distance themselves from any Arab cultural attachments, which are widely regarded in Israel as symptoms of backwardness. Sometimes the transformation of attitudes toward the Arab world was quite self-consciously understood as the price of admission to Israeli society… The neo-lachrymose interpretation of Jewish Arab history also allowed Mizrahim to claim a role as active members of the Zionist movement and thereby assert their full participation in the mainstream of Jewish national history as presented in the Zionist narrative. Until the 1970s, the dominant school in Israeli and Jewish history portrayed Zionism as the achievement of Ashkenazi Jewry. Minimal participation in the Zionist movement was considered yet another expression of the backwardness of Mizrahim. But if Mizrahim had their own long history of diasporic oppression, this could logically be linked to a claim to have independently arrived at the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. Asserting that Zionism was not merely a narrative about the crisis of European Jews and its resolution and that there had also been an independent Middle Eastern Zionist movement provided Mizrahim in Israel with a lever to reverse the negative evaluations of their history and culture that predominated during the years of MAPAI (Israeli Workers' Party, subsequently the Labor Party) rule and buttressed their claims to equal status with Ashkenazim. Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 15-16. 264 One example is that Ben-Gurion University, despite having sizeable Sephardi population, does not represent their Mizrahi population in faculty or in the kinds of classes offered. Barely any classes on Sephardi history were offered as of 1999. See Sara Leibovitz-Dar, “A Question of Class,” http://www.ha-keshet.org.il/english/question_class.htm Originally published in Haaretz 12.17.1999 265 Henriette Dahan Kalev “Illusion in Assimilation,” The Flying Camel (2003), 170. 266 Marom said this in a discussion on the popular TV program, Politics, 28 December 2004, cited in Dana Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type,’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 3 (2009): 592-609. 86

Ashkenazi professor partnered with an Arab Israeli.267 The film was hailed as progressive, promoting coexistence, and seeing individuals rather than stereotypes. However, in the film, the

Mizrahi family was the obstacle to peace. The mother was “fat and coarse, incapable of comprehending.” The father was “small, mean spirited, and weasely.” The two sons were “big, dark, bumbling dolts who, robot-like, carried out their father’s every command.” Levy writes,

Somehow, in a movie ostensibly about the breaking down of stereotypes, this one passed unchecked. Perhaps because such depictions of Mizrahi/Sephardi are so pervasive throughout Israeli culture they are simply taken for granted. Still, I naïvely thought to myself, who would have thought that such hackneyed representations would surface at a conference of Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals?268

As Levy demonstrates, Arab Jews are still in the process of creating their place in Israeli society.

267 Review, The Flying Camel (1994), The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/movies/movie/133930/The- Flying-Camel/overview 268 Lital Levy, “How the Camel found its Wings,” in The Flying Camel (2003), 174-175. 87

CHAPTER 3: WRITING THE ERASED: WE ARE HERE

“We are here and this is ours.”

- Loolwa Khazzoom

“We were born in Israel and we are Israelis.”

-Mati Shemoelof

“We live in, and love, our communities–in plural–because we live in many, and will not choose between them. That is a truth of our Jewishness.”269

Circa 1948, Arab governments excluded Jews from the Arab nation by defining them as

Zionists and imperialists and by forcing them to leave their homeland. After 1948, as Arab Jews arrived in Israel, Zionists marginalized them, along with all non-European Jewish immigrants, by grouping them into the category of Mizrahi, or Eastern. To the Ashkenazi elite, Mizrahi meant static, backward, effeminate, and in need of reform. Through this process of double exclusion and labeling, Arab Jews’ identity was split into two opposing identities. Beginning in the 1990s,

Arab Jews began to reconstruct their lost identity through writing memoirs, organization building, and reconnecting with other Arab Jews who have similarly felt exiled from their homelands. 270 By writing their stories, Arab Jews remake the category of Mizrahi into both Arab and Jewish. Memoirists seek to undo the grouping of ‘Eastern’ as a derogatory term by explaining their Arab past as peaceful, modern, and cultured. They assert their Arab identity by writing about their shared culture, their feelings of exile, and their attempts to connect with others from their former homes. Memoirists also assert their Jewish identity. Those living in

269 JVoices, “About JVoices,” http://jvoices.com/about/#sthash.3dcJXuc3.dpuf 270 Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, Interview with Jacques Hassoun. Jacques Hassoun, an Egyptian Jew living in France, articulates why it took Arab Jews a while to reclaim their identity: “The first [reason] is that it seems that the members of a persecuted group need twenty or thirty years before they can reappropriate their story. For example, look at what happened to the Jews in Europe…It wasn't until 1975–1980 that there was discussion once again about the Holocaust, the extermination camps, etcetera. In addition, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s in France, it was the order of the day to reconsider questions of identity. Moreover, several of us returned to visit Egypt between 1977 and 1979. Ibram Gabbai, André Cohen, Emile Gabbay, and I decided at that moment that we had to preserve the traces of a history that we feared was going to disappear.” 88

Israel assert their Israeli identity. In each case, memoirists declare Judaism to be multicultural.

Memoir writers assert their Jewishness by their loyalty to Israel and by their commitment to promoting their Arab Jewish history as part of Israeli history. By writing about their past and present, Arab Jews reinsert “Arabness” into Jewish identity and “Jewishness” into Arab identity.

When Arab Jewish writers assert their hybrid identity, they encounter challenges from outside forces, such as their governments, cultures, and communities. Arab Jews face discrimination, stereotypes, and ignorance. They also self-silence, however, after many exasperating attempts to explain their family’s origin. Arab Jews feel shame over belonging to the so-called “enemy” culture, associated with Palestinian Arabs. Similarly, they feel shame over disdaining their heritage. “We come from Arab country [sic]. We have guilty feeling that we are part of Arab national even though we are Jews, but we came from Arab country that Israel is against [sic].”271 This chapter documents how Arab Jews have reconstructed their identity as both Arab and Jewish, in spite of the accompanying challenges.

To assert their Arabness, memoirists write about the former friendship and kindness between their families and their Muslim neighbors. Even if Arab Jews had experienced persecution in their countries of origin, they also write about the times of prosperity. It is hard to find a memoir that does not have evidence of a shared culture. Egyptian Nobel Prize novelist,

Naguib Mahfouz, in a letter to Israeli Professor Sasson Somekh, speaks of their societies’ collaboration in the past:

Our two peoples knew extraordinary partnership for many years – in ancient days, in the Middle Ages, and in the modern era, with times of quarrels and disputes few and far between. Unfortunately, we have documented the disputes one hundred times more than the periods of friendship and cooperation. I dream of the day when, thanks to the

271 Interview with Balass’ uncle, Nana, George and Me. Dir. Joe Balass, http://www.blork.org/nana/bios.html#JoeBio 89

cooperation between us, this region will become a home overflowing with the light of science, blessed by the highest principles of heaven.272

Memoirs document the “periods of friendship and cooperation” between Muslims and Jews in the past. These stories illustrate the shared culture between Muslims and Jews and demonstrate that the separation that exists today was not inevitable. Memoirs illustrate what was no longer is.

Memoirs also reveal the hopes these memoirists have for the future.

This shared Muslim and Jewish culture looked different in each part of the Arab world. In the first half of twentieth-century Baghdad, the Jewish community’s relationship with their

Muslim neighbors was characterized by interdependence with the Islamic culture. Jews and

Muslims were separated by religion, but they were connected through common cultural practices, business partnerships, neighborhoods, language, and history. David Kazzaz writes,

“Relations with our Moslem neighbors were amicable, cooperative, and characterized by mutual respect.”273 Kazzaz describes the social dynamics of Iraq as interconnected:

The Iraqi world at that time was fairly multidimensional, allowing a variety of religious practices and customs to thrive. In many ways we were influenced by the free-flowing- relaxed Middle Eastern lifestyle…We regularly interacted with the Moslem community, and yet we maintained our own religion, traditions, and way of life. Our community was a healthy, vibrant example of successful acculturation.274

Arab Jews lived alongside Muslims, celebrated their holidays with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, lived the same way their Muslim and Christian neighbors did, shared language, and shared food.

In Egypt, the Jewish community was more heterogeneous, divided by class, sect, and language. There were the indigenous Karaite Jews and nineteenth-century Ashkenazi immigrants. But the majority were Sephardic Jews. Each of these sects was divided by class and

272 Sasson Somekh, Life After Baghdad (2012). 273 David Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 4. 274 Ibid, 39. 90

language. The diverse population of Egyptian Jews was just one of many minorities present in

Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. Egypt was home to many minority European communities and the established Egyptian Copts. Egyptian Jewry were part of a cosmopolitan atmosphere that increasingly encouraged pluralism, especially in the urban upper class. Joel

Beinin writes that because Egyptian Jews were more heterogeneous than other Arab Jewish groups, they had a more difficult time in Israel because they lacked a distinct community such as

Iraqi or Moroccan Jews had.

Among the Mizrahi communities in Israel, Egyptian Jews were often particularly invisible. They shared many of the obvious characteristics associated with this group: They came from the Middle East; the religious traditions of the majority were Sephardi; and they spoke Arabic or French, or both. However, the exceptional internal diversity of the Egyptians and their particular history distinguished them from other Mizrahi communities. The Egyptians included a small minority of Ashkenazim. The Karaites were a distinctively Egyptian group (except for a minuscule number of Karaite immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere) with a highly Arabized culture, like the Iraqi or Yemeni Jews. Although French served as a lingua franca for all Middle Eastern Jews, many Egyptians also spoke Italian, Greek, or English. Unlike Algerian Jews, who were all French citizens, Egyptian Jews possessed a plethora of passports and European cultural orientations, yet the majority of those who arrived in Israel were apatrides— residents of Egypt with no legal nationality. The religious, linguistic, social, and cultural diversity of the Jews of Egypt diminished their salience as a distinctive group after their arrival in Israel.275

Egyptian city life in the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by cosmopolitanism, and Iraqi life in Baghdad was defined by interdependence.

Iraqi Jewish memoirists remember the 1920s and 30s in Baghdad as an especially peaceful and prosperous time. The rhythm of life in Baghdad beat according to the Jewish week.

Shopping paused on Jewish holidays and every Saturday, rather than Friday, the Muslim holy day. Jews owned the majority of shops, but Muslim shops closed as well on Saturdays because not enough people came to the market. While there were Jewish quarters and Muslim quarters, there were a number of mixed neighborhoods. The middle and upper classes tended to live in

275 Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, chapter 8. 91

mixed neighborhoods. Sasson Somekh lived next to Armenians and Muslims and went over to their houses to play with the other kids or to do homework.276

Jews and Muslims were business partners and looked out for each other. Oded Halamy writes, “In Iraq, we had wonderful relationships with my father’s Muslim friends who were partners in his shop. We were always treated with great respect by our Muslim and Christian neighbors, and no one from our family had ever been insulted or experienced anti-Jewish acts.”277 Kazzaz’s father met a Bedouin boy who lived outside the city but came into town looking for a way to provide for his family. The boy’s father had just died. Kazzaz’s father bought the boy two cows and let him use the space next to the Kazzaz’s house so he could provide for his family. In exchange, the Kazzaz family received free milk.278 In the late 1930s,

Kazzaz’s father went into business with a Muslim named Ismaeel. His family invited the Kazzaz family to stay with them for a week. Knowing the Kazzaz family needed kosher food, Ismaeel allowed them to bring kosher pots, and Ismaeel brought the town’s shocket (ritual slaughterer) to kill chickens and lamb for them. The Kazzaz family returned the hospitality and Ismaeel’s family stayed with them for a week. As the Ismaeel family was leaving the Kazzaz house, the Kazzaz’s maid disrespected Ismaeel’s family by throwing rocks as them.279 When Kazzaz’s father heard about the incident, he apologized profusely and the families became even closer: Kazzaz’s mother became Ismaeel’s wife’s closest confidant.280 Kazzaz’s stories illustrate that Muslims and

Jews had close friendships that accommodated their differences in religion.

276 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007). 277 Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 65. 278 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 190-191. 279 Traditionally, sprinkling water as guests depart was a sign of goodwill, and throwing rocks was equivalent of wishing ill will. 280 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 199. 92

Kazzaz’s father worked in the same office as Hajji Yassin, who was a representative in the Upper House of the Iraqi Parliament. Yassin was a good man but had a temper with everyone except Kazzaz’s father. Yassin would get into fights often, and Kazzaz’s father would mediate for Hajji Yassin. When Kazzaz’s father got into trouble with the anti-Jewish government, “Hajji offered his standard response – ‘Those sons of bitches, I’ll break their necks’ – then proceeded to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, the Hajji died before the really hard times hit.”281 These stories illustrate that Muslims were a part of Jews’ everyday lives. They did not live separately, and Muslims and Jews took care of each other as friends and families take care of each other.

Naim Kattan’s grandmother lived in an all-Muslim neighborhood. Her son was a well- respected doctor; she was known as the “doctor’s mother.” She gave out remedies to all her

Muslim neighbors. Kattan once went to a Muslim circumcision celebration with her.282 Kattan writes that he was warned about the poorer classes, both Jews and Muslims. He was warned about bad language and rudeness – differences attributed to class, not religion.283 As a child,

Kattan broke his elbow and saw a doctor, but his elbow was not healing. His parents took him to a Muslim healer who set his elbow free of charge.284

A number of memoirists write about the consideration that Muslims extended to Jews so that they could practice the tenets of Judaism. Victor Sasson’s father was conscripted in the

Ottoman army and the Turkish officer made it a point to encourage him to continue his prayers, so he could be a faithful Jew even while in the army.285 Several Arab Jews recall celebrating their holidays with their Muslim neighbors. Muslims would share sweets with their Jewish neighbors during the holidays. During weddings, Jewish hosts would hand out desserts to their

281 Ibid, 192. 282 Naim Kattan, Farewell Babylon (2005), 43-44. 283 Kattan, Farewell Babylon (2005), 48. 284 Ibid, 50. 285 Victor Sasson, in Memoirs of a Baghdad Childhood (2011), 10. 93

Muslim neighbors. David Kazzaz’s Muslim neighbors brought them food to break their leavened bread fast on the last day of Passover. This gesture of friendship and generosity illustrates that

Muslims honored Jewish traditions.286

Baghdadi Jews lived similarly to their Muslim neighbors. Except for religious traditions, they shared similar lifestyles, dress, language, and food. Baghdadi Jews recall with fondness that city dwellers slept on the roof in the summer months in order to survive the heat.287 They visited the same coffee shops and smoked hookah together. There was respect and kindness between neighbors. Salim Sasson writes that his “father was a venerable, pious, and generous man – not only with his relatives but with strangers as well. He sported a long white beard and any time he passed his Muslim neighbors in the street they would bow in reverence to him.”288 Eli Amir writes that he and his brother were breastfed by their Muslim neighbor, Kheria, and Amir’s mother breastfed Kheria’s kids when one or the other needed to leave the house. Even after

Amir’s family moved neighborhoods, Kheria and his mother stayed close.289

Baghdadi Muslims and Jews shared the Arabic language and multiple European languages. All Jews spoke the Baghdadi dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which Somekh argues is an authentic Arabic vernacular. He cites Haim Blanc of Hebrew University, who writes in his 1964

Communal Dialects in Baghdad that an old Baghdadi Arabic tongue was embedded within the

Jewish dialect. Somekh goes on to explain that “In premodern times, this old Baghdadi language had been spoken by the city’s Muslims as well. But during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a mass influx of Bedouin arrived from the south, the speech of the newcomers

286 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound (1999), 80. 287 Sasson, Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 12. 288 Ibid, 42. 289 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 231-232. 94

came to dominate the local Muslim speech.”290 Baghdadi Jews, however, did not imitate the

Bedouins and kept the old Baghdadi language. To give an example of how multiple languages were a part of daily life in Baghdad, Somekh writes about his father’s daily life:

On a typical day, my father would switch linguistic codes a number of times. He would speak Jewish Arabic at home and move to Muslim Arabic on the street; at work, he spoke English with the bank’s British managers and various dialects of Arabic with customers. He wrote bank records in English, and then read English and French when he came home.291

The point is that Arabic did not belong exclusively to Muslims. The Muslim conquerors in the seventh century brought Arabic to the diverse people, Jews and non-Jews, living in Western Asia and Northern Africa. The descendants of this empire all spoke Arabic together, a practice that united them culturally.292

While Arab Jews describe their shared culture with the Arab world, they also describe how their culture was modern. Since the term Arab became synonymous with backward in Israel, these memoirs serve as a way for Arab Jews to express Arabness on their own terms, giving the authors a chance to humanize Arabness. Sasson Somekh continually emphasizes how his childhood was equally Arab, secular, and Jewish, and that he was neither backward nor uneducated as presumed by Ashkenazi elites. He emphasizes the brilliant literature written in

Arabic and how he fell in love with the richness of the Arabic language. 293 Violette Shamash uses food and religious traditions to explain how her life was both Arab and Jewish. Her writing is very detailed, and she makes comparisons to contemporary Israeli life, like she is trying to make parallels and explain the differences. Valentine Balass, in an interview, talks about all the

290 Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday (2007), 57. 291 Ibid, 58. 292 Sasson Somekh, “Arabic as a Jewish Language: Three Lectures,” Originally delivered as the Taubman Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, in April 2010. From Sephardic Horizons, Lecture I printed in issue 1:4 (2011), Lecture II printed in 2:1 (2012), and Lecture III printed in 2:2 (2012). Retrieved from Sephardic Heritage Update, May 2, 2012 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/b4Hp0NnvnCs 293 Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday (2007). 95

parties she attended and how she danced the twist and wore the latest fashions.294 These efforts to explain Arab Jewish way of life as legitimate are a direct reaction to the stereotypes that they have endured in Israel. Arab Jews want to promote their shared Arab culture as peaceful and modern and Jewish.

Many of these similarities Arab Jews had with their Muslim and Christian neighbors did not become evident to these memoirists until they encountered European Jewish culture. It was then that they realized how different they were from Ashkenazim and how similar they were to their former neighbors. Nissim Rejwan received a letter from his close friend, Elie, who wrote that the more time he was in London, the more he realized, “he was made in Baghdad,” and his

“deeper roots [were] dug firmly in the soil of Iraq.”295 Ironically, Nissim Rejwan’s Arab Muslim boss predicted the problems new Israelis would encounter. “‘If,’ he said to me on one occasion,

‘you imagine for a moment that you are nearer, in outlook and temperament, to a Jew, say, from

Germany, Russia, or Poland than you are to me or to Iraqis in general then you are quite simply mistaken. You just don’t know what you will be in for!’”296 Ibrahim, the boss, who was a pan-

Arab nationalist but also had sympathy for the Jewish plight, knew he shared culture with Iraqi

Jews.

Egyptian Jewish memoirs illustrate that Cairo and Alexandria’s population was even more diverse than Baghdad. Because of British control, foreigners flocked to Cairo and

Alexandria, creating cosmopolitan cultural centers. Nonetheless, there were still significant parts of town that did not share in the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Claudia Roden talks about the two different sides of Cairo.

294 Valentine Balass, Baghdad Twist, directed by Joe Blass (2007; Canada), DVD. 295 Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 152. 296 Ibid, 148. 96

Our Cairo had been two cities that turned their backs on each other. One looked like Paris, because Khedive Ismail, who ruled in the middle of the nineteenth century, had wanted to pull Egypt into Europe and had brought in European architects to build it. The other had narrow meandering streets, mausoleums, and public baths; fountains with curvy iron grilles and windows screened by wooden lattices; Coptic churches and mosques with minarets rising into the sky like delicately embroidered candles.297

Jews were central to both sides of town. The Jewish quarter in Cairo, ÿarat al-yahud, was part of the “meandering streets,” and middle and upper class Jews were a part of the Paris of the East.

Maurice Shammas’ literary memoir ‘Azza is centered on the ÿarat al-yahud, while most of the other Egyptian memoirs are centered on their middle-class homes in mixed neighborhoods. Only one memoir focuses on the ÿarat al-yahud because by the 1920s, only

3,300 Jews lived in the Jewish quarter. Most Jews had moved out into mixed neighborhoods.298

The ÿarat al-yahud was established during the Fatimid Dynasty in the tenth century, and it began to dwindle in the 1850s, when Khedive Ismail widened streets and built new Western neighborhoods.299 The Jewish population’s movement represented the urban Egyptian population’s movement as a whole, from cramped neighborhoods to European-style neighborhoods.

In the ÿarat al-yahud, Jews developed their Jewish practices within a wider Islamic culture, as can be seen by some of their rituals. The Jews who still lived in the Jewish quarter were more ‘Arabized’ then the cosmopolitan Jews outside the quarter.300 While middle and upper-class Jews spoke multiple languages, Jews in the quarter mainly spoke Arabic or Judeo-

Arabic. Egyptian Jews’ incorporated the native culture into their religious practices: “There were many Jewish religious ceremonies developed in Egypt that continue to be practiced in contemporary times. For example, the Seder el-Tawhid was celebrated on the night of the New

297 Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 4. 298 Starr, “Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud.” 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 97

Year. The traditional blessing selichot, often followed by hymns sung in Hebrew and Arabic, and composed in the Koranic style[sic].”301 Egyptian Jews’ traditions were heavily influenced by their Muslim neighbors’ practices.

Aline Salama Benzakein’s family exemplifies the urban upper-class Egyptians’ movement from a solely Arab influence to an Egyptian cosmopolitan life. Her father grew up in a village outside Alexandria. Her grandfather, who owned a goodly amount of property in the village, had built a mosque for the villagers. Her grandmother brought in a Sheikh to teach the children Arabic. Aline, however, was born and raised in Alexandria, but her father traveled back to the village every week and spent four days there. She went to an Italian Catholic school and then the French lycee, but her brother had a completely English education. He went to an English private school and then Victoria College, a prominent college in Alexandria established by the

British in 1902. Aline’s mother had a French passport, but Aline had a Czech passport. Her family lived in the Greek quarter in Alexandria, and their cooks were Italian. In 1941, Aline and her mother went to visit her father’s village (her father had died ten years earlier). All the village notables and sheikhs came to visit her mother. “They were very polite and respectful and they were near tears – they adored my father. My father had a very Egyptian life but was also very

European. He traveled a lot in Europe.”302 Aline’s life contained a mixture of influences and represents the changes in early twentieth-century Egypt.

The cosmopolitan nature of the middle and upper-class Jews did not mean that they were any less Egyptian or Arab. These middle and upper-class Jews were changing along with upper- class Muslim Arab Egyptians. At the same time Ismail Khedive brought European influence to

Egypt in the 1860s and 70s, the Alliance Israelite, a Paris-based Jewish philanthropic

301 Edward Said, “Historical Perspective,” in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 5. 302 Aline Salama Benzakein, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 22-23. 98

organization, established schools in Cairo, giving upper-class Jews a French education. Along with Arabic, French became the lingua franca of the Egyptian Jewish population by the beginning of the twentieth century.303 French was not the only European language prevalent, but it was the most popular among the Jews.

The multitude of languages in Cairo and Alexandria illustrates the pluralism of Egyptian life in the twentieth century. Kahanoff recalls, “When I was a small child, it seemed natural that people understood each other although they spoke different languages, and were called by different names – Greek, Moslem, Syrian, Jewish, Christian, Arab, Italian, Tunisian,

Armenian.”304 Dr. Victor Cohen writes that his mother only knew Arabic, while his father spoke

Italian, Arabic, French, Hebrew, and some English.305 Liliane S. Dammond writes that her grandmother would speak to her in Arabic and she and her brother would answer in French. She called what her family developed Egypto-French.306 Lucette Lagnado writes about Egyptian cafés she would visit with her father, “There were different languages spoken at every table –

French and English of course, but also Greek, Italian, Dutch, Armenian, interspersed with the occasional Arabic. It was not unusual for people to use two or three languages in the same conversation – even in the same sentence – because this was Cairo, and it was the most cosmopolitan city in the world.”307 Lagnado gives an example of a common Egypto-French phrase, “the house still bore what the Egyptians would call, in their characteristic mixture of

French and Arabic, Le riha du citron – the waft of lemon.”308

303 Beinin, Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 50. 304 Jaqueline Kahanoff, “ One Childhood in Egypt,” Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh, eds., Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jaqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1. The essay was first published in Israel in 1959. 305 Dr. Victor Cohen, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 35. 306 Liliane S. Dammond, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 14-15. 307 Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 7. 308 Ibid, 15. 99

Lagnado writes that since her father, Leon, knew multiple languages, he was able to interact with every kind of Egyptian:

Gifted with languages, he mastered seven – English, Arabic, French, and Hebrew, of course, as well as Italian, Greek, and Spanish. This enabled him to function as an interpreter, guide, and go-between, and he could take his British friends to the most obscure parts of Egypt and help them communicate with the most intransigent local characters. In a way, this was his first stint as a businessman, when he became a broker and middleman between two worlds – cosmopolitan colonial Cairo and mystical, sensuous Islamic Cairo.309

Since Jews usually were well educated and knew multiple languages, they were able to interact with all kinds of Egyptians.

Just like Baghdadi Jews, Jews from Cairo emphasize how modern their civilization was in their memoirs. Even though Aline Salama Benzakein’s family was immersed in Egyptian life, she claimed a Czech identity and emphasized that her ancestors were from Czechoslovakia.310

Rather than actually being from Czechoslovakia, her passport was for convenience, status, and protection later. Her emphasis on her Czech passport reflects her need to identify with Ashkenazi

Jews and distance herself from “backward” Arab civilization.

Several memoirists imply that their Egyptian upper-class identity was more important to them than their Jewish identity. Due to Egypt’s increasing secularization, it was not too uncommon for upper-class Egyptian Jews to marry into other religions.311 Lilette Salmona

Schual, an upper-class Egyptian Jew, did not see herself as Jewish until she felt sorry for Jews in

Nazi Germany:

I realized then that I was Jewish, that it was a part of me, notwithstanding the fact that we were not talking about it at home. I think my parents had a Jewish connection but a vague religious identity because all our friends were not Jewish. They were Italians, Maltese, and Greeks. Not only that, but we celebrated Christmas. My sister always had a present

309 Ibid, 24. 310 Benzakein, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 22. 311 Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989). 100

for me at Christmas. I did not even know about Hannukah, but we celebrated Passover, Rosh Hashana, and we fasted at Yom Kippur.312

Schual’s experience of celebrating both Jewish and Christian holidays illustrates that her

Egyptian upper-class cosmopolitan identity was more important to her than her Jewish identity.

She did not realize she was Jewish until later in life. Jacqueline Kahanoff writes that her parents allowed her to attend mass:

On Sundays, old Maria, our maid, sometimes took me with her to early mass in St. Joseph’s Cathedral, where fat little angels floated among the pink clouds painted inside the domed blue ceiling. Father said I could go because God was everywhere, but that I must never, never dip my fingers in Holy Water or make the sign of the Cross, because I was Jewish. Every people had its religion, he said, just as every bird had its song, and God loved and understood them all.313

Kahanoff’s parents taught her that all religions were equal, illustrating the pluralistic life that upper-class Egyptians led.

Egyptian Jewish memoirs emphasize that Jews and non-Jews interacted as Egyptians with each other. Dr. Loeb Sach was born in Cairo in 1914 and lived there until 1956. Henri

Curiel, an Egyptian Jewish communist, used Dr. Loeb Sachs’s office after hours for his clandestine meetings, and Sachs was called in for questioning in 1942. “I told them that I was like a barber: if a customer came in, I did not ask he if he was a communist, a capitalist, a Jew, or a Christian; I must see anyone who comes to me. They reluctantly accepted this explanation, but told me I would be put under observation.”314 Sachs said he treated Muslims, Christians, British officers, and even the son of the Lebanese president who was in Egypt for a time. Dr. Victor

Cohen says that his mother’s favorite doctor was a Copt, “she called Dr. Ibrahim Fahmi. He was

312 Lilette Salmona Schual, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 125. 313 Jacqueline Kahanoff, “ One Childhood in Egypt,” Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh, eds., Mongrels or Marvels (2011), 2-3. The essay was first published in Israel in 1959. 314 Dr. Victor Cohen, The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 48-49. 101

a Copt and was the favorite doctor of the Jews, even in the Jewish quarter.”315 “My aunt performed deliveries for both Jews and non-Jews. She wore the bor’ol, the veil that Egyptian women wore…There was nothing that separated Jews from non-Jews until 1947.”316

Before the 1950s, Egypt was characterized by pluralism and Jews were a central part of the diversity. Egyptian Jews were a part of both upper and lower classes, intimately involved in the social life of cosmopolitan Egypt and local Egypt. For upper-class Egyptian Jews, Groppi’s patisserie was the central meeting place. Lagnado describes Groppi’s as “part café and part patisserie, part bar and part trysting ground” and her father’s “paradise on earth.”317 For lower- class Egyptians, the meandering streets and market places near the ÿarat al-yahud were the meeting places of choice. Collette Rossant writes that she and her grandfather, “on Fridays, with ritual-like fervor,” would eat at Aboushakra, a tiny restaurant located near Gold Street, where her grandfather was a regular.318 Even though their meeting places were different, both lower and upper-class Egyptian Jews recall their old haunts with much nostalgia.

Exile from Pluralism

Several memoirists write about their life in Israel, America, and Europe as if they are in exile. Even if Arab Jews now call Israel home, they write about a lost pluralism and a loss of a stable community and identity. Arab Jews write with nostalgia of one being prevented from returning home. Their sense of love and longing for their past homeland reveals their disappointment in the present. Arab Jewish existence is now dominated by the Arab-Israeli

315 Cohen, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 35. 316 Ibid, 37. 317 Lagnado, Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), 31. 318 Colette Rossant, Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999), 40-44. Republished under the title Apricots on the Nile (New York: Atria, 2004). 102

conflict’s creation of narrow definitions of Jew and Arab. Another way that Arab Jews assert their Arab identity is through their nostalgia for their Arab homeland.

Many memoirists wax poetic when they talk about their old haunts or the beauty of their old country. Somekh concludes his memoir the way long-distance lovers stay connected, “But the same stars that flickered over our Baghdad rooftop are the same stars I can still see – on a cloudless night – from my balcony in Tel Aviv.”319 Baghdadi memoirists write at length about the Tigris. All the men took swimming lessons; the only one who did not enjoy swimming was

Nissim Rejwan, who had a slight frame. Somekh devotes an entire chapter entitled, “The River,” explaining how important the river was in his life and in the life of the city. His favorite memories were of his family and friends cooking out on al-Jazra, the Little Island, in the middle of the river. He would swim while fish was roasting over the bonfire.320 Oded Halamy writes,

“In my memories, everything about Baghdad is beautiful and colorful: the people, food, the city, and its museums and parks, its rivers and landscapes. I remember eating by the Tigris River and watching the beautiful palm trees sway in the wind…To me, Iraq was the most beautiful place on earth – a paradise. Its landscape is in my mind every day. When I left Iraq, I felt that I was leaving behind the Garden of Eden. Still today I feel that way.”321 Halamy, who left Baghdad as a teenager, illustrates how nostalgia translates into dissatisfaction with Israel. He moved to New

York because his artwork that represents the pluralism of Iraq was not accepted in Israel, “I eventually moved to New York, where I feel freer to explore my art. The irony is that my art is far more appreciated in the West than it is in Israel…Part of the reason for that is that Israel has few museums and also that the Israeli mindset still pushes the Iraqi Jewish experience to the

319 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007), 186. 320 Ibid, 39. 321 Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 60. 103

fringes of its consciousness.”322 Arab Jews’ nostalgia for the Arab world is one way they push back against an exclusively “Jewish” Israel.

Dr. Victor Cohen, who lived in Egypt till 1956 when he was forty, writes, “I remember everything in Egypt…I have no unpleasant memories!”323 This rather bold statement illustrates not that he had a worry-free life, but that his nostalgia for Egypt overrides his memories of difficult times. These pleasant memories define his Arab identity. He writes that he dragged his feet when his wife wanted to leave after Nasser took power. “It took me four years to make the final steps. I did not even want to think about leaving.”324 Lilianne Dammond writes, “I will always miss the exceptional characteristics of the ‘Egyptian’: warmth of feeling, an accommodating temper, a sense of humor, and an unfailing hospitality. This used to surround me in my everyday life.”325 Aline Salama Benzakein wrote, “I adored Egypt. It was my country. We had the best life in the world. My best friends were Egyptians, Copts, Italians, and French. There were Italian and Greek communities, and of course the local people with whom we lived without conflicts.”326

Many of the memoirists dream about returning to the place of their birth. Somekh writes,

“I can at least indulge in the hope that one day I might visit Iraq and stroll again along the back of the Tigris, the river of my childhood and early adolescence, and the site of my first efforts as a young Arab poet.”327 Those who have returned home have been both overcome with joy and sadness – joy because they are reconnecting with a part of themselves but also sadness because so much has changed and they do not recognize it. Lilianne Dammond, who visited Egypt in

322 Ibid, 67. 323 Cohen, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 41-42. 324 Ibid. 325 Dammond, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 17. 326 Aline Salama Benzakein, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 28. 327 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007), 12. 104

2002, writes, “There was a conflict between the twenty-five-year-old seeking the world I knew and the seventy-seven-year-old woman discovering a new and different Egypt. I had left a city of less than 2 million people and returned to a city of more than 18 million, with all the chaos and pollution one could expect.”328 Dammond recalls,

On our last evening we drifted on the Nile in a dahabieh. I asked the musician to sing one of Om Kalthum songs I knew – ‘a’ala baladi el-mahboub wadini’ (‘take me back to my beloved country’) – instead of the American pop songs he was belting. As he sang, he managed to graciously insert my own name in the song and envelop me once again in the warmth of Egypt.329

For the memoirists who could return, their nostalgia for their homeland quickly mixed with grief as many of them saw how their countries had changed and, worse, how their countries had been destroyed by war.

During the Gulf War in 1991, many Iraqi Jews write that their hearts broke as they watched the bombing of Baghdad. Ironically, many of the Scud missiles Saddam Hussein launched at Israel actually hit towns with heavy Iraqi Jewish populations. Several memoirists recall the joke that the missiles followed the scent of amba, a pickled mango sauce that was popular in Iraq. Oded Halamy visited Iraq during the war:

On my visit to Iraq in April, 2004, to document holy sites, I started photographing the landscape the minute I landed, and my camera was shooting nonstop…Although Baghdad is not as clean as it used to be because of the war, it still felt like the Garden of Eden to me…My dream to visit Iraq was realized, but it was sad to witness the destruction of the country I love so dearly.330

Arab Jews’ nostalgia for their homeland does not mean they want to move back to the Arab world. Their former countries have changed: Iraq has been destroyed by three wars and Egypt’s cities have become overpopulated and unwelcoming. Arab Jews’ nostalgia for their country has turned into a longing for the pluralism that formerly defined their life.

328 Dammond, in The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews (2007), 17. 329 Ibid, 18. 330 Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 68. 105

Preserving Arab Identity

To preserve Arab identity, memoirists have sought out others from their former homelands and formed organizations to preserve their culture. Kyla Wazana Tompkins writes that “Our entire culture is dying out, and I want to somehow fight this cultural death.”331 Somekh writes about how he pursues connections with other Iraqis, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. His memoir documents his networking, illustrates the continuity between the pluralism in his childhood Iraq and the pluralism of the Iraqi Diaspora. Just as he was friends with his Armenian and Muslim neighbors in Iraq, he seeks to befriend other Iraqis in Israel, New York, and London.

While at Oxford, Somekh was able to re-meet a Palestinian writer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who took refuge in Baghdad in 1949. At first, Jabra was hesitant to speak with Somekh, but when he heard

Somekh’s Baghdadi accent, he immediately relaxed. Somekh reminded him that they had met in a café on the banks of the Tigris twenty years earlier.332 Jabra was a part of the circle of writers with whom Nissim Rejwan spent his days. Rejwan writes that Jabra was the last to join the group and only infrequently attended because he had a full-time job, unlike the others. Rejwan, along with Najib and Buland, would visit him without warning and interrupt his studies.

Somekh and Sami Michael, an Iraqi Jewish novelist, lived in the same Bagdadhi neighborhood but did not become friends until Israel. Somekh had Christian neighbors to the right, with whom his mother chatted with often, but he did not get to know the children.

However, he became good friends with Azad, an Armenian boy who lived across the street, and would accompany Azad to the café nearby where he would meet and exchange books with

331 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Home is Where You Make it,” The Flying Camel (2003), 137-138. 332 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007), 41. 106

fellow book-loving Muslims. He searched for Azad on a trip to the United States because while he was still in Baghdad, Azad’s family immigrated to the United States.

Nissim Rejwan dedicates many pages explaining how he attempted to contact his Iraqi friends, especially Najib, Buland, and ‘Adnan. However, he had to be careful because he did not want to get them in trouble. They all became successful writers and worked in government; he did not want to ruin their reputation by contact with an Israeli Jew. When Najib died in London,

Rejwan contacted his sister to offer condolences, and Najib’s sister replied that Najib had talked of Rejwan often. Even though the conflict prevented communication to an extent, these Jews and

Arabs did not let their friendship and thoughts of each other sour.333

Many organizations have been established to promote and preserve Arab Jewish culture.

David Shasha publishes the Sephardic Heritage Update, which is an online newsletter that raises awareness of what is happening all over the world that concern Sephardim.334 One exceptional way that the Iraqi Diaspora has tangibly connected has been the establishment of the “Israeli-

Iraqi Friendship Committee” after the first Gulf War. An Iraqi Shi’ite Dhiaa Kasim Kashi flew to

Israel to meet with Sami Michael, Sasson Somekh, David Sassoon, and Dr. Shaul Sidqua to organize sending foodstuffs, medical supplies, and even doctors to help Iraqis who were suffering under Saddam. However, the Israeli government rejected their request to register as a non-profit and refused to support them because they could “be a cover for Saddam’s agents.”335

Iraqi Jews began organizing earlier than Egyptian Jews. Beinin writes that “although the physical connection to Iraq was broken, Iraqi Jewish culture was not extinguished when the great majority

333 Rejwan, Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), 182-187. 334 David Shasha, Sephardic Heritage Update. 335 Dhiaa Kasim Kashi and Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 246 and 88. 107

of the community immigrated to Israel.”336 Egyptian Jews in diaspora took longer to reconnect with each other because of their diversity. Many Egyptian Jews chose to settle in France or the

United States, spreading the diaspora out even further. In 1995, however, Egyptian Jews have galvanized support for preserving the old Jewish synagogues left in Cairo and supporting the

Jews left in Egypt. An Egyptian Jewish newsletter, Bassatine News, is the only information published by the few Jews still living in Cairo, the Jewish Community Council (JCC) of Cairo.337

We are Here and This is Ours

For Arab Jewish memoirists, preserving Arab culture does not negate their Israeli identity. Or, for those who live outside of Israel, their Arab identity does not repress their Jewish identity or their connection to Israel. Since their arrival in Israel, Arab Jews have attempted to assimilate to varying degrees and have attempted to assert their Arab identity through food and literature while at the same time assimilating. In their memoirs, assimilation is evident through

Arab Jews’ adaptation to Israeli life and their attempt to promote their Arab identity as another way of being Jewish or Israeli. Most importantly, they assert their Arab culture and past as a central thread in Israel’s historical narrative.

Oded Halamy writes, “We became dedicated to our new country, which we loved. My family bought a little house in Jaffa where our neighbors were Muslims and Christians. We felt comfortable in those surroundings, free to be ourselves and not feel the burden of having to hide

336 Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xx. 337 Jewish Community Council (JCC) of Cairo, Bassatine News, http://bassatine.net/bassai.php. Another Egyptian organization looking to help preserve the synagogues is Association Internationale Nebi Daniel, http://www.nebidaniel.org/index.php?lang=en 108

our roots.”338 Halamy’s family settled amongst other Arabs in order to continue their Iraqi life, but they also loved Israel and “became dedicated to our new country.” For the first few decades in Israel, as Halamy illustrates, Arab Jews hid their culture. Since the 1990s, however, they have been more vocal about their food and literature.

Preparing, eating, and writing about food is one of the main ways that Arab Jews cling to their culture and assert their identity in Israel. Arab Jewish cuisine is one of the only aspects of

Arab culture that has been accepted without question in Israeli life. By writing down recipes of former generations along with the meanings behind the rituals, Arab Jews can promote their history along with their meals. Iraqi Jew Violette Shammash centers her memoir on describing food and traditions. She gives the history and meanings tied to the food that all Israelis eat, reminding her fellow Israelis that they are benefitting from Arab Jewish history.339 Somekh dedicates an entire chapter to Amba, a pickled mango sauce that is popular in Iraq and India and is now popular in Israel.340 Oded Halamy cooks with Iraqi utensils, mainly the Hawan , mortar and pestle, in order to be connected with his heritage.341 Egyptian Jew, Colette Rossant, dedicates her entire memoir to documenting the recipes of her grandmother and her experience of Egyptian food with her grandfather:

My grandfather loved Egyptian food, especially street food, like ful medames, the traditional Egyptian dish of stewed brown fava beans, and he was a regular at Aboushakra, a tiny restaurant located near Gold Street. Its walls, vaguely illuminated by exposed bulbs, had been painted pink years before and were now faded to an indescribable color. There were long tables covered with paper tablecloths and surrounded by cane chairs. As we entered, the owner greeted him loudly, “Ahlen wa sahlen pacha” [sic]. On Fridays, with ritual-like fervor, we began our meal with hot ta‘amiyya—a felafel made with broad beans—spicy, moist, and dark green inside and crisp on the outside, covered with roasted sesame seeds. These were served with fresh,

338 Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 66. 339 Violette Shammash, Memories of Eden: A Journey through Jewish Baghdad (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 340 Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday (2007). 341 Halamy, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 67. 109

toasted pita and a tomato salad mixed with sliced red onions in vinaigrette. We then enjoyed an order of grilled, tender beef kofta—meatballs on skewers. Pink and green ceramic bowls of tehina—a lemony sesame sauce—and a dish of pickled vegetables graced every table.342

Sensory descriptions of Arab food like the above in Arab Jewish memoirs help both Arab Jews to connect with their past and help others understand their longing for their Arab homeland.

Arab Jewish literature has been a way for Arab Jews to remember their past, but it has also promoted Arab culture and Arabic literature. Arab Jewish novelists were the first to tackle their hybrid identity in Israel. While most memoirists did not write until the 1990s, Arab Jewish novelists and writers took the lead in the first few decades of life in Israel by recognizing and writing about the loss and rupture Arab Jews had experienced.

An entire generation of aspiring writers who came of age in Baghdad was forced to emigrate before they could firmly establish their careers. Upon arrival, these ambitious young

Iraqi writers learned Hebrew and began writing, incorporating Arabic literary themes, promoting the long and beautiful history of Arabic poetry, and writing novels based on their past. These include Esperance Cohen, Nir Sholet, David Tzemah, Naim Kattan, Nissim Rejwan, Salim

Fattal, Badri Fattal, Sasson Somekh, Sami Michael, Eli Amir, and Shimon Ballas, most of whom have also written memoirs in French, English, Hebrew, or Arabic.343

The Iraqi Jewish novelists Sami Michael, Eli Amir, and Shimon Ballas have written popular novels in Hebrew drawing on their background and the abrupt exile into which they were forced. Despite their love of Arabic, they all realized that to be successful and to reach their

342 Colette Rossant, Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir with Recipes (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999), 40-44. Republished under the title Apricots on the Nile (New York: Atria, 2004). For more food memoirs and cookbooks, see: Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 4; Irene Sax,“For the Love of Egypt: Tales and Recipes from a Childhood in Cairo and Paris,” 1999, http://www.epicurious.com/e_eating/e06_cookbook/egypt/egypt.html; Carol Bardenstein, “Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook‐Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles” Signs 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory, Special Issue, EditorsMarianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith (2002):353-387 University of Chicago Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/34101. 343 Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xix. 110

audience, they needed to master Hebrew. Sami Michael says that he worked hard to learn

Hebrew so that he could convey “the reality in Iraq for the Israeli reader, which I’ve done in order to show that the Jewish Iraqi past is part of the ordinary Israeli, and part of Israeli culture.

I’ve tried to introduce the reader to an otherwise unfamiliar world.”344 Michael’s first novel

Equal and More Equal (Hebrew 1974), which talks about life in the ma’abara camps, fiercely divided the Israeli reading public.

Half of the country hated me for it and the other half said ‘bravo’…I was almost lynched as a Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, the whole gamut. But luckily all the Ashkenazim who were familiar with the societal problems I described defended me. They said, ‘He’s right.’ And all of a sudden I became a hero to the Sephardim. I didn’t mean to be, and I don’t hate Ashkenazim. Many of those who read it and hated what I had to say wanted to turn me into an Ashkenazi-hater. Students don’t read it at school – it would be like teaching Torah in a Gaza mosque. For the same reason, I believe, there has never been much interest in translating it to English, because in the U.S. and overseas in general they prefer the idealist Zionist picture that depicts Jews in Israel as brothers and heroes.345

Once Eli Amir became fluent in Hebrew, he went on to publish his well-known novel trilogy. The first novel, Farewell Baghdad, uses his memories “of what Baghdad was like when

Jews and Muslims coexisted.” In the second novel, Scapegoat, Amir tells “the story of how the dreams of the Iraqi Jews fell to pieces upon coming to Israel.” In the thrid novel, Yasmin, he

“completes the story of the Jews of Iraq and their transition to Israel, a place where Arab and

Jew, again, must also coexist.”346 Now, Sami Michael reports that some Israeli high school teachers are incorporating his and Amir’s novel into their curriculums.347

Sasson Somekh dedicates a chapter titled, “Lovers of Arabic in the First Hebrew City,” to describing his first attempt to recreate a literary circle in Israel like the one he was a part of in

Baghdad. Somekh, along with Iraqi Jew David Semah, began “The Tel Aviv Arabic Literary

344 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 88. 345 Ibid, 87. 346 Eli Amir, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 234-236. 347 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 88, 236. 111

Circle” in 1954. Both Arabic and Hebrew writers joined the circle, hoping to bridge the gap between nationalisms through their writing. Eventually, the circle was renamed “The Tel Aviv

Hebrew-Arabic Literature Circle” because so many writers did not know Arabic and Arabic writers found it difficult to publish in Arabic because their readership would be severely limited.

Many Arabic writers thought that the best way to effect change was to write in Hebrew to reach the majority of Israelis while incorporating Arabic literary themes. In addition to writing in both

Hebrew and Arabic, Somekh devoted himself to translating Arabic poetry into Hebrew. In this way, he felt he could promote the beauty and sophistication of Arabic meter to Hebrew-only readers.348

Similarly, a group of Egyptian novelists began writing immediately after they were forced to leave Egypt. Maurice Shammas’ wrote a collection of short stories, al-Shaykh shabtaywa-ÿikayat min ÿarat al-yahud (Sheik Shabbtai and Stories from Ÿarat al-Yahud, 1979).

He focuses his stories on the Jewish quarter Ÿarat al-Yahud. Jacqueline Kahanoff and Raÿel

Maccabi began writing about their personal histories in the 1950s and 1960s, exploring Egyptian

Jewish past and present.349

One writer in particular, Jacqueline Kahanoff, was one of the first Arab Jewish writers to promote Israel’s incorporation into Middle Eastern culture. Kahanoff coined the philosophy of

“Levantinism” in her writings, asserting that Israel would not be at peace until it recognized it was in the Middle East and until it adapted to Middle Eastern culture. She was born in Cairo in

1917, left Egypt in 1940, and traveled to the United States, where she published her first stories

“Cairo Wedding” in 1945 and “Such is Rachel” in 1946. In 1951, she published Jacob’s Ladder.

In 1954, she moved to Israel, where she published essays about memorializing the

348 Somekh, Life After Baghdad (2012). 349 Starr, “Sensing the City.” 112

cosmopolitanism of Egypt and criticizing the lack of pluralism in Israel, including her 1958 article “Reflections of a Levantine Jew.” She went on to publish, “Childhood in Egypt,” “Europe from Afar,” “Rebel, My Brother,” and “Israel: Ambivalent Levantine.”350 Her novels and essays, written immediately after her exile, are now, seventy years later, getting Israelis’ attention.351

Challenges of Being a Hybrid

As Arab Jews assert both their ‘Arabness’ and their ‘Jewishness,’ they are met with multiple challenges. Loolwa Khazzoom illustrates the challenge of Arab Jewish hybridity when she describes her attendance of Israel’s first feminist conference for Mizrahi, Sephardi, and

Ethiopian women in 1996. While some Mizrahi women spoke in Arabic, others spoke in

Hebrew. During an open microphone time, Khazzoom’s friend Louise read a letter in Arabic.

The facilitators forced her to end early since those who spoke only Hebrew could not understand.

However, there were some Mizrahim in attendance who could not speak Hebrew and appreciated being able to understand. Some were religious, while some were offended by displays of religion. Some welcomed the Arab Druze women who attended, but others thought the presence of Druze silenced the Jewishness of their event. Some argued that an undivided Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, while others called that notion racist. Khazzoom, who was scheduled to lead a Shebbath song, was told she could only sing the song if it did not mention Jerusalem.352

350 Starr, “Sensing the City.” Kahanoff’s essays can be found in Mi mizrah shemesh (From East the Sun, 1978) and two posthumous collections of her writings Bein shnei ‘olamot (Between Two Worlds, 2005) and Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (2011). 351 David B. Green, “Levantism finds its place in modern Israel,” Haaretz, 25, August, 2011. http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/levantism-finds-its-place-in-modern-israel-1.380634 352 Loolwa Khazzoom, “We are Here and This is Ours,” The Flying Camel (2003), 209-232. 113

This experience illustrates that Arab Jews are not a united group of people. Rather, their hybridity presents multiple challenges for them. Khazzoom writes that the Mizrahi conference was not very different from her life experiences. It “was symbolic of the ways I have felt obliterated by other people’s constructs of who I am.”353 Memoirs are one way for Arab Jews to assert individuality without feeling silenced.

Rather than hybridity allowing Arab Jews to exist in both groups, it prevents them from belonging in either group. They are not fully ‘Jewish’ and not fully ‘Arab,’ at least according to the present definitions of these categories. Victor Sasson writes that “blatant discrimination against them, immense social pressure to conform to the Ashkenazi social and cultural model, the urge to advance in society, intermarriage, and so forth, have meant that our new generations have become hybrid beings, not belonging anywhere – or, if they do belong, they belong to a politically-dominant Ashkenazim.”354 Ruth Knafo Setton tells the story of an American book publisher rejecting her book, The Road to Fez, by saying, “You write well. Next time try writing about the real Jews.”355 Rachel Wahba writes that in Los Angeles, “Suddenly people questioned whether I was ‘really Jewish’ because I did not grow up eating bagels and cream cheese, or because my grandmother did not speak Yiddish. At best, I was marginalized and treated as exotic. At worst, I was made to feel invisible and irrelevant.”356 Kyla Wazana Tompkins explains, “If I tell people I am Jewish, they assume I am Ashkenazi. If I tell them I am

Moroccan, they assume I am Muslim. And if I say I am a Moroccan Jew, they ask which of my

353 Ibid, 232. 354 Victor Sasson, Memoirs of a Baghdad Childhood (2011), 102. 355 Ruth Knafo Setton, “The Life And Times of Ruth of the Jungle” The Flying Camel (2003). 356 Rachel Wahba, “Benign Ignorance or Persistent Resistance?” The Flying Camel (2003). 114

parents is Jewish and which is Moroccan.” She concludes that, “we are marginally everything – marginally Jewish because we are not Ashkenazi, marginally Arab because we are Jewish.”357

Iraqi Jew Sami Michael married an Ashkenazi and became friends with many

Ashkenazim in Israel. He writes that they did not filter their comments around him and derogatorily referred to Iraqis as Arabs. When he moved to Wadi Nisnas, an Arab neighborhood in Haifa, the Arabs there treated him like another Arab but referred to Jews derogatorily as non-

Arabs. “So I was in this bizarre in-between place. I came to the conclusion that I was living in a racist country where people considered Arabs inferior. It wasn’t simply a nationalist-based hatred. It was deeper than that – a condescending distaste perhaps. All my youth and adulthood was spent in a war against racism. Now I found myself in a state of racists. That is still my feeling today, despite my great love for Israel.”358 Loolwa Khazzoom reported that even though she befriended Arab Druze women who attended the Mizrahi feminist conference, they made her feel as if she did not belong. She was dancing with her new friend Amal to Mizrahi music, but then Amal found an Arabic cd and exclaimed, “Oh good, now we can listen to the real thing.”359

Similarly, Khazzoom was offended because Amal was claiming that Muslim Arab music was more Middle Eastern than Mizrahi music. Khazzoom argues that Arab Jews have a legitimate claim on Middle Eastern culture having lived and participated in that culture for centuries. Arab

Jews are just as indigenous to the Arab world as Muslim Arabs. According to the current categories, however, Mizrahim are not “Arab” enough nor are they the “real Jews.”

Ella Shohat confesses that she has felt schizophrenic at times because her identity was a part of two separate worlds.360 Caroline Smadja admits, “I have been a hybrid all my life, forever

357 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Home is Where You Make it,” The Flying Camel (2003). 358 Sami Michael, in Iraq’s Last Jews (2008), 86. 359 Loolwa Khazzoom, “We are Here and This is Ours,” in Flying Camel (2003), 232. 360 Shohat, “A Reluctant Eulogy: Fragments from the Memories of an Arab-Jew.” 115

caught between two or more worlds.”361 Kyla Wazana Tompkin confesses, “For a while in my twenties, I was starting to think I was crazy and alone, but I have discovered from rare articles and interviews that there are other ‘crazies’ out there.”362 Kyla Wazana Tompkins writes that she has “double vision” when evaluating Canada, “I strongly believe that the child of an immigrant learns the country with her immigrant parent. In many ways, although I was born and raised here, I see Canada as both my culture and a foreign country…I both ‘get it’ and don’t ‘get it.’”363 The ignorance Arab Jews encounter when they try to explain themselves often encourages them to be silent the next time.

When Arab Jews do attempt to explain their heritage, they tend to be met with resistance.

Julie Iny writes, “My Ashkenazi friends seemed resistant to my assertion that Arab and Jewish culture are not necessarily polarized, but for many intertwined.”364 Caroline Smadja writes that she has a number of Ashkenazi friends who are welcoming and unprejudiced, “but as a group,

American Jews have an ethnocentric view that ignores the very existence of people like me.

They assume all Jews originate from Eastern Europe; they think of Yiddish as the only Jewish language besides Hebrew; and they presume that all worthwhile Jewish leaders, artists, and thinkers are Ashkenazi.”365 Henrietta Dahan-Kalev writes, “For Ashkenazim, ‘Jewish Unity,’ seems predicated on a notion of sameness. The idea of Jews being a multiracial, multiethnic people somehow threatens Ashkenazi leadership.”366 Ashkenazi Jews react with incredulity and resistance because adding Arab Jews into the history of Zionism challenges the story Israeli

Ashkenazim have heard since childhood.

361 Caroline Smadja, “The Search to Belong,” The Flying Camel (2003), 141. 362 Tompkins, “Home is Where You Make it,” The Flying Camel (2003), 132. 363 Ibid, 135 364 Iny, “Ashkenazi Eyes,” The Flying Camel (2003), 83. 365 Smadja, “The Search to Belong,” The Flying Camel (2003), 155. 366 Dahan-Kalev, “Illusion in Assimiliation,” In Flying Camel (2003), 161. 116

Along with resistance, Arab Jews encounter stereotypes wherever they go – America,

France, or Israel. Moroccan Jew Ruth Knafo Setton was treated as backward and uncivilized when her family emigrated from Morocco to the United States in the 1950s. Her teacher asked her loudly in front of the class, “‘Is it true you eat people in Morocco?’” She was afraid to leave the house because the kids at school called her and her siblings Jungle Jews. Her family moved to the next town and told people they were French Christians. 367 Caroline Smadja grew up in

Nice, France and was teased by the children in her school for being a Jew, but she had no idea what a Jew was. Her family had never practiced Judaism.368

Setton, along with other Arab Jews who grew up in France, Canada, or the United States, traveled to Israel as adults in the hopes of finding a place of belonging among Israeli Jews.

However, the racism they encountered in Israel shocked them. When Setton came of age after the 1967 war, she decided to explore her Jewish identity by going to Israel. Upon arrival, she felt she had found her home. However, she writes that “I soon learned that Israel was an Ashkenazi nation constructed in the Middle East. We Mizrahim were, in Ben-Gurion’s words, their ‘coolio labor’ – monkeys from Africa; uneducated, primitive beasts with no need for education or plumbing.”369 Just as she had pretended to be a French Christian in the United States, she pretended to be an Ashkenazi Jew for a while in Israel until, “On a date, when the young Israeli man began mocking the accent Mizrahim have when they speak Hebrew, I said coldly, ‘I am

Moroccan.’ He thought I was joking.”370 More shocking is her experience looking for employment,

When I applied for a job as an English teacher – by far the most qualified person, holding a master’s degree in English – I did not get the job, but a high school graduate from

367 Ruth Knafo Setton, “The Life And Times of Ruth of the Jungle” in Flying Camel (2003), 5. 368 Smadja, “The Search to Belong,” The Flying Camel (2003), 146. 369 Setton, “The Life And Times of Ruth of the Jungle” The Flying Camel (2003), 7. 370 Ibid, 7. 117

California did. Why? Mr. Goldberg, the director of the language institute, told me bluntly, ‘I don’t hire Moroccans. Some of my best friends are Moroccans, but you’re not good workers. You’re not reliable.371

When Caroline Smadja was in Israel, she learned that Moroccans often claimed they were from

France to hide their origins, so no one believed her when she said she grew up in France.

“Ani mi Tzarfat (I am from France),” I replied. “Real France or, you know, the other France?” he sneered.372

Julie Iny went to Israel to visit her father’s family from Iraq and learn more about her heritage. She discovered that Mizrahi identity is still defined by those in power. Working-class

Mizrahi Jewish men “are under greater scrutiny regarding their materialism and sexuality than are members of their respective dominant cultures. For example, the pejorative word arsim, used to describe men who wear heavy gold jewelry, seem consumption-oriented, and are overtly sexual, is applied almost exclusively to Arab-Jewish men.”373 Iny, who is light-skinned and easily mistaken as an American Ashkenazi Jew, bore witness to these stereotypes being used by

Israeli Ashkenazim. When she tried to talk about it to her Ashkenazi friends, they “responded as if I was making a big deal out of nothing.” On the plane ride over, an Israeli Ashkenazi man asked Iny out on a date. Once he realized her father’s family was Iraqi-Indian, he began “with the cliché intro, ‘I’m not racist, my best friend’s Moroccan. [sic]’” He proceeded to explain to her the differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim:

Mizrahim teach their kids to emphasize material success, whereas Askenazim teach their kids simply to be good people. Moreover, Mizrahim and Arabs have no problem lying. They are much more violent, and they are prone to incest. Mizrahim are also racist and more extreme than Ashkenazim, tending to vote overwhelmingly for Likud and Tzomet (right-wing Israeli parties). His family, in contrast, was from Czechoslovakia, and it was no coincidence that Bohemia was in that country, given the intellectual capacity of its citizens.374

371 Ibid, 7-8. 372 Caroline Smadja, “The Search to Belong,” The Flying Camel (2003), 148-149. 373 Iny, “Ashkenazi Eyes,” In Flying Camel (2003), 95. 374 Ibid, 96. 118

Iny writes that, “I assume he continued to see me as essentially Askenazi even after I had revealed my family background, given that he felt so comfortable spewing his vitriol at me.

Precisely because the Arab Jew in me is often invisible to the naked eye.”375 Iny felt silenced by his assertions, “within seconds, I felt paralyzed and disembodied. I felt violated…All I could muster was to say that my dad’s family included the most generous and loving people I knew. I could not access my anger, even as the idiot replied that my father’s family most likely was influenced by the ‘nonviolent culture’ of India – the Hindus, of course, being nonviolent, as opposed to the inherently violent Muslims.”376 Kyla Wazana Tompkins traveled to Israel as a teenager, “In Israel, I heard Mizrahim and Sephardim referred to as barbarim (barbarians), and it is very clear to me that Mizrahim and Sephardim occupy a secondary place to Ashkenazim in

Israel, despite the fact that we have been the majority population for decades. Along these lines, many Mizrahi and Sephardi Israeli women, including some in my own family, marry Ashkenazi men – particularly, religious Ashkenazi men. These women are seen as marrying up.”377 These

Arab Jews, who traveled to Israel to avoid the stereotypes they encountered outside Israel, were disappointed to find that in Israel, their experience was the same, or even worse.

These stereotypes are so entrenched that Mizrahim sometimes encounter intense resistance and even anger. Mizrahi writer Mati Shemoelof explains that when he and his friend

Ezéchiel wrote an open letter to the Arab World in 2009, they had a difficult time finding a publisher and were called racists. Shemoelof explains:

The first reaction I received was that we were racist. Friends of mine who work as editors asked me why they should publish it if European Jews were not included. ‘Well it isn’t about race’ I said. ‘It is about ethnicity.’ However, they couldn’t understand that we have different histories and symbolic imagination. I also tried to explain that we stand as a

375 Ibid, 97. 376 Ibid, 97. 377 Tompkins, “Home is Where You Make it,” The Flying Camel (2003), 137-138. 119

united Mizrahi generation not because we want to erase other groups but because we do believe that the end to the silencing of our group is raising our voice. But in Israel I guess, even friendship can’t precede the national Zionist idea of: ‘One nation, One language, One Memory.’ We still try to challenge it by those acts.378

By admitting that half their identity is Arab, Mizrahi Jews seem to strike a chord with others.

Shemoelof writes about the visceral reactions he encounters, “it is a denial discourse and so it raises a lot of violent energy. You can’t learn about it in school so it’s really unspeakable outside academic or cultural spheres (i.e. in a political way).” What many Ashkenazi Jews do not realize is that Arab Jewish attachment to their former homes does not mean they are more Arab than

Jewish. Their way of being Jewish was being Arab – they did not separate these identities after their families arrived in Israel. To Arab Jews, Jewish does not mean Yiddish, pogroms, Pale of

Settlement. Being Jewish means Arabic, couscous, Cairo. Explaining this is difficult, because the separation between Arab and Jew is so entrenched. A century earlier, being an Arab Jew was not an oxymoron because being Arab and Jewish was the same thing in the Middle East. Arab Jews attempt to explain this syncretic relationship in their memoirs.

These memoirists have written to preserve their syncretic culture and to explore their hybrid identity, and in doing so, have provided a new and provocative critique on the

‘normative’ categories of Arab and Jew. These memoirs illustrate that before the conflict Arabs and Jews in the Middle East shared language, neighborhoods, cafes, food, dress, and traditions.

They lived together and both loved their homelands. Arab Jewish memoirs are layered with nostalgia, a sense of exile, and a feeling of rupture with the past. By simultaneously participating in Israeli life, these Arab Jews identity with Israelis and Jews worldwide and hope to make room in Israeli identity for themselves.

378 Interview with Mati Shemoelof, Sherri Muzher, “Mizrahi Jews reach out to the Arab World,” Sidbar, 29 September 2009. 120

The purpose of drawing attention to Arab Jews and their memoirs is not to create another static identity. Rather, by drawing attention to how both Israel and the Arab world have labeled and ignored Arab Jews, scholars can point out the problematic categories of Arab and Jew, East and West, effeminate and masculine that have been constructed through the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In addition to deconstructing these categories, however, historians writing about Arab Jews have to allow Arab Jews to be diverse: “As soon as we think we have found a singular answer for ‘the other’ facing us, we already have reduced her or him.”379 Scholars cannot define or create the idealized Arab Jew, or place them in a new category of their own making. There is no perfect hybrid or “mixture” of Arab and Jew. There is no continuum of “Arab to Jew” in which to place memoirists. The challenge for scholars is not to essentialize this group, but to illustrate the diversity of Arab Jewishness in diaspora. In doing so, scholars widen the definition of both Arab and Jew.

379 Judith Butler quoted in Tompkins, “Home is Where You Make it,” The Flying Camel (2003). 121

EPILOGUE: BREAKING CATEGORIES OF PAST AND PRESENT FOR THE FUTURE

“We have a shared past and a shared future.”

-Mati Shemoelof

The Arab-Israeli conflict has polarized Middle Eastern identity between Jews and Arabs.

The continuing perception that Arabs and Jews are opposite peoples further entrenches the conflict, making any peace treaty seem impossible. This polarization is so ingrained in society that any connection or cooperation between Jews and Arabs is portrayed as a groundbreaking moment by the media today. Even the existence of Arab Jews, people who originated in the Arab world and are simultaneously dedicated to their Jewish heritage, upends the perceptions much of the world has concerning Arab and Jewish identity. By writing memoirs, Arab Jews are slowly breaking the categories and stereotypes that the conflict has created. Viewing the conflict through the lens of Arab Jewish memoirs restructures the conflict’s categories of identity.

Accepted wisdom dictates that Arabs and Jews are two distinct people groups engaging in an eternal conflict. Arab Jewish memoirs, however, reveal that a recent political conflict sifted out

Arabs and Jews into opposing people groups, hybridizing Arab Jewish identity.

Arab Jewish memoirs also conceptualize peace between Arabs and Jews in a new way.

Lital Levy writes that the idea of peace “operate[s] on the assumption that ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ are inherently disparate identities to begin with: the restoration is therefore not of the respective categories themselves, but rather, of the harmony between them. Nowhere does this restoration take into account the fracturing of identity itself, as occurred in the dismemberment of the Arab

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Jew – an identity ripped like a torn book.”380 A peace treaty between Jews and Arabs would not be a historical anomaly but the beginning of a restoration of identity for Arab Jews.

Many Arab Jews express a desire to be a conduit for peace between their two “halves.”

They have attempted to do this by explaining Arab culture to fellow Israelis – hoping to transform Israelis’ perception of the Arab world from backward to civilized. Arab Jews illustrate that the first step to reworking the polarized identities in the Arab-Israeli conflict is to reverse the stereotype of Arabs as effeminate backward people who cannot make peace. By explaining that

Arab Jews lived alongside Muslim and Christian Arabs for centuries demonstrates that Arab

Muslims lived and can live in peace with Arab Jews. Arab Jews have also sought out relationships with Muslims and Christians in the Arab world to communicate their desire for peace. Arab Jews seek to explain to the Arab world that Israelis are not all from Europe. They write that many Israelis, like themselves, are from the Arab world, speak Arabic, and see the

Arab world as their home.

Iraqi Jew Sasson Somekh avidly looks for ways to connect with other Arabs. While at

Oxford, Somekh’s PhD advisor was Egyptian Mustafa Badawi, a prominent scholar in modern

Arabic literature. Somekh’s dissertation was on Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist who later became his friend. Somekh’s Baghdadi friend, David Semah, with whom he began an Arabic literary circle in Israel, also studied under Badawi. Somekh writes that, “We were never given the slightest feeling of foreignness of alienation for belonging to an enemy nation.”381 In 1967 right before the Six-Day War, Badawi promised that no matter the outcome, he would do everything he could to ensure that Semah and Somekh could continue their studies even if

380 Lital Levy, “How the Camel found its Wings,” in The Flying Camel (2003), 175. 381 Sasson Somekh, Life After Baghdad (2012), 80. 123

financial help ceased from Israel. As tension rose between Egypt and Israel, Somekh continued his friendship with Badawi and sought to create similar relationships:

These efforts to create an ongoing dialogue have continued throughout my adult life, and have involved great Egyptian writers such as Mahfouz, Idris, Fawzi, and others. With them I built relations of trust and true friendship…I have also been in a half-century’s dialogue with some of the Palestinian-Arab writers in Israel, such as Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola, Samih ha-Qasim, Siham Daoud, and Michel Haddad; and also with expatriate Iraqi writers sitting in London, such as Khaled Kishtaini and Buland Al-Haydri. Despite these efforts, there have also been Egyptian and other Arab writers, whose personal and ideological formation took place during the high tide of Nasserism, who have rebuffed my attempts to talk and even to meet with me for being a citizen of the State of Israel.382

Somekh has dedicated a majority of his life to Arab-Israeli relations by seeking out personal friendships and also by translating Arabic poetry into Hebrew (and vice versa) in order to promote cultural understanding.

Henri Curiel, a founder of the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation in 1943, was an Egyptian Jewish Communist who was exiled from Egypt to France for his political activities.

From exile, he helped coordinate informal talks, now known as the “Paris Talks,” between the

Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP) in

1976.383

After US President Barak Obama spoke at Cairo University in June 2009, Arab Jew Mati

Shemoelof and his fellow Mizrahi activist, Ezéchiel, wrote an open letter to the Arab world called, “A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam.” They begin the letter by introducing themselves as “the daughters and sons of parents who immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries,” and expressing their support for President Obama’s

“new spirit” of reconciliation. They follow with, “We are Israelis,” establishing that they are speaking as people who care about both the Arab world and Israel. They write that the “recent

382 Ibid, 75. 383 International Institute of Social History, “Comité Palestine et Israël Vivront Archives,” http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/c/ARCH01981full.php 124

conflict into which we were born” does not erase the history of their parents who were “part of daily life” in the Muslim world. Here, Shemoelof and Ezéchiel are reminding the Arab world that they were born into the conflict and did not cause it. They are also appealing to the shared history between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Arab world. Most importantly, they state,

“the cultures of the lands of Islam, Middle East, and the Arab world, are all still part of our identity; a part which we cannot, and do not wish to repress nor uproot.” Here, they claim an

Arab identity as part of themselves. Next, Shemoelof and Ezéchiel acknowledge that Jews were treated better in Muslim countries than in Europe. They hope that the “deep chasm” of these last few decades would only be a “temporary crack in a history that goes longer than that.” They write, “We have a shared past and a shared future.” Shemoelof and Ezéchiel make it clear that this shared future is a shared Middle Eastern culture: “when we look at the map, we see Israel as part of the Middle East, and not solely from a geographical perspective.” They go on to explain that the alliance between Judaism and Islam in the past has been forgotten, but Arab Jews can help the “reconciliation process” by embodying “a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.” Shemoelof and Ezéchiel’s vision is that Arab Jews can mediate by reminding the

Israelis and Muslim Arabs of their shared history. The solution Shemoelof and Ezéchiel hope for is one that “considers the hopes, fears and pains of the Palestinian side, as well as those of the

Israeli side.” They write that, “from our point of view the rift between Israel/Jews and the

Arab/Muslim world cannot last forever, it is splitting our identities and our souls.” 384 Shemoelof and Ezéchiel’s hope for a shared future is shared by many Mizrahim in Israel.

384 The full letter is in Appendix C. Sherri Muzher, “Mizrahi Jews reach out to the Arab World,” Sidbar, 29 September 2009, Originally published 13 June 2009, “A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam.” http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/66751. For more information: http://jvoices.com/2009/10/02/mizrahi-jews-reach-out-to-the-arab-world/#sthash.A9uMARib.dpuf 125

Many young Mizrahim signed this letter, hoping that “oriental Jews can and should embody a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.”385 When interviewed about this letter, Shemoelof further elaborated on viewing the conflict through the memories of Arab Jews:

The Arab Jew’s narrative holds creative ways to handle the problems which the national idea brought upon each other in the Middle-East. It is sharing knowledge of the Arabic language, culture and diverse viewpoints. The Arab Jew’s narrative holds in its memory and history and religion. But it is also a shared struggle for social justice and a re- construction of the region with its original inhabitants. So we stand in that tension between awareness and symbolic belonging and identification. And yes by moving on this scale of possibilities we can contribute to de-colonize the Israeli culture. [sic]386

Not only do Arab Jews share culture, language, and memories with the Arab world, Arab Jews are indigenous to the Arab world. The main grievance Arab states have with Israel is that they see it as an imperialist movement – foreigners took Arab land. Arab Jews take care to explain their native origins and their long history in the Arab World in order to further peace.

Arab Jews have a unique perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict and on the concept of identity in general. Further exploration of Arab Jews’ past by scholars could benefit the future of the Middle East. Awareness of Arab Jews reorients the watching world’s understanding of identity and explains how conflicts can create false binaries.387 Through scholarship on Arab

Jews, scholars discover new perspectives on the history of Middle Eastern identity. Historian

Joel Beinin writes:

Over a century of Arab-Zionist conflict has made it difficult for those with no direct experience of it to imagine Jews like Nissim Rejwan as an indigenous, indeed a vital, presence in Arab and Muslim societies and cultures. Nowhere were Jews more deeply rooted and culturally assimilated than in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The profound Jewish symbiosis with the other communities of what constituted as Iraq after 1921 – Sunni and

385 Ibid. 386 Interview with Mati Shemoelof, Sherri Muzher, “Mizrahi Jews reach out to the Arab World,” Sidbar, 29 September 2009. 387 For example, in 2008, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Jewish Center held a symposium on “The Idea of the Arab Jew,” on 3-4 February 2008. http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/Arab%20Jewish%20Brochure.pdf. Conferences like these spark discussions and interest in conceptualizing identity in the Middle East in a new way. 126

Shi’i Muslim Arabs, Kurds and Turcomans, Assyrian and Aramean Christians, and Yazidis.388

Conceptualizing the Middle East through Arab Jews like Rejwan constructs a new paradigm for identity, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and for peace negotiations.

388 Joel Beinin, “Foreword, Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction,” in Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews in Baghdad (2004), xi. 127

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APPENDIX

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APPENDIX A

Egyptian Jews

135

“A Jewish boxer. Isaac Amiel and Salonichio were national boxing champions. From the 1920s to 1956, Jews represented Egypt in international competitions in several sports and won national championships in boxing, wrestling, fencing, tennis, and golf; the Maccabi team won several national basketball titles. (courtesy of the Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d'Egypte and Editions du Scribe).” Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

“The last annual compilation of the colloquial Egyptian satirical journal Abu Naddara, founded in 1877 by Egyptian Jew Ya‘qub Sannu‘ (1839-1912). Sannu‘ was exiled from Egypt for his political and cultural activity and continued to publish Abu Naddara from Paris under several related names until 1910. He was the first to coin the nationalist slogan "Egypt for the Egyptians." (courtesy of the Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d'Egypte and Editions du Scribe).” Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

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“Cover page of the Karaite biweekly newspaper al-Kalim, published by the Young Karaite Jewish Association and edited by Yusuf Kamal from 1945 to 1956 (courtesy of the Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d'Egypte and Editions du Scribe).” Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

“Yusuf ‘Aslan Qattawi (Cattaui) Pasha (1861-1942), two-time cabinet minister (1924-25) and president of the Sephardi Jewish community of Cairo (1924-42) (courtesy of the Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d'Egypte and Editions du Scribe)” Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

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“Isaac G. Lévi, secretary-general of the Egyptian Federation of Industries (1922-56) and vice- president of the Sephardic Jewish community of Cairo (1943-56) (courtesy of the Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d'Egypte and Editions du Scribe)” Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

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APPENDIX B

Iraqi Jews

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First Finance Minister of Iraq (1921-1925): Sir Sasson Heskell (1860-1932)

Meir Basri (1911-2006) and his family. Basri was the last president of the Iraqi Jewish Community.

140

Nissim Isaac David and his family. Moved to New York in 1946. http://michaelrakowitz.com/projects/return/

Iraqi Jews on the flight over to Israel. 1950.

141

APPENDIX C

Arab Jews in Israel

142

Nine out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest) 1997.

Children in Ma’arbarot Camps, 1952. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/90/Maabarah_children.jpg

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“A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam”

We, the daughters and sons of parents who immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries, hereby express our support for the new spirit presented by president Obama in his Cairo speech. A spirit of reconciliation, realistic vision, striving for justice and dignity, respect for different religions, cultures and human beings, whoever and wherever they are.

We were born in Israel and we are Israelis. Our country is important to us, and we would like to see it secure, just, and prosperous for the benefit of its inhabitants. Yet, the recent conflict into which we were born cannot erase the long history of hundreds and thousands of years, during which our parents and ancestors lived in Muslim and Arab countries. Not only they have lived in the region from time immemorial, but were also part of the fabric of daily life and have contributed to the development of the region and its culture.

Nowadays, the cultures of the lands of Islam, Middle East, and the Arab world, are all still part of our identity; a part which we cannot, and do not wish to repress nor uproot.

Surly, the Jews living in Muslim countries endured some difficult times. Nevertheless, those painful moments should not conceal nor erase the well known and documented history of shared life. Muslim rule over the Jews was much more tolerant and lenient compared with non-Muslim countries. The fate of Jews in Muslim regions cannot be compared with the tragic fate of Jews in other regions, Europe in particular.

One can view the last decades as a period during which a deep chasm has been opened between the Jews and Israel and the Arab and Muslim world.

We however, prefer to perceive these last decades as a painful yet temporary crack in a history that goes longer than that. We have a shared past and a shared future. Thus, when we look at the map, we see Israel as part of the Middle East, and not solely from a geographical perspective.

Judaism and Islam are not far apart from religious, spiritual, historical and cultural point of views. The alliance between these two religions dates back many generations. Yet the memory of this partnership and the unique history of Jews originated from the Muslim and Arab world (which today constitutes 50% of the Jewish population in Israel!) has unfortunately faded, both in Israel as well as in the majority of the Muslim world. In the necessary reconciliation process between West and East, oriental Jews can and should embody a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.

From our point of view the rift between Israel/Jews and the Arab/Muslim world cannot last forever, it is splitting our identities and our souls. As for the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we hope that a fair solution of mutual respect and mutual recognition will be reached very soon. A solution that considers the hopes, fears and pains of the Palestinian side, as well as those of the Israeli side.

We therefore, express our support for the new spirit set forth by President Obama in Cairo. We wish to join the vision for a future in which bridges of mutual respect and humanity will replace

144

walls of suspicion, aggression and hatred. All this in the spirit of justice and humanism shared by both Judaism and Islam. [sic]389

389 Sherri Muzher, “Mizrahi Jews reach out to the Arab World,” Sidbar, Tuesday, September 29, 2009, Originally published Saturday, June 13, 2009, “A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam.” http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/66751. For more information: http://jvoices.com/2009/10/02/mizrahi-jews-reach-out-to-the-arab-world/#sthash.A9uMARib.dpuf 145