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Ishaq Al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine Salim Tamari

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Ishaq Al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine Salim Tamari Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine Salim Tamari In his retrospective personal memoirs of the 1930s and 40s, Ta’ir 3ala Sindiyanah (Bird on an Oak Tree), the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi discusses two groups of Jewish companions he encountered during his student days during the French Mandate in Lebanon.1 The first group consisted primarily of Arabic-speaking Jews from Syria and Iraq, several of whom took a prominent place in Arab nationalist, and anti-imperialist intellectual circles in the 1930s and 40s; the second he identifies as Yiddish-speaking Jews from Palestine, who exhibited marked Zionist sympathies.2 While the first group blended smoothly with Arab social circles (many of them being middle class and secular in outlook), the second - recollects Salibi - kept to their own, hardly spoke any Arabic, and viewed their host environment with suspicion.3 10 But this assessment does not fairly reflect Shohat). Like most of those writers, Shami the complex composition of Palestinian was never at ease with either his Jewish or Jews during this period. Towards the end of Arab identity. Ottoman rule, native Jewish communities In Palestine, the picture was more lived in the four ‘holy cities’ of Palestine: complicated than that in neighbouring Safad, Tiberius, Hebron and Jerusalem. In the Arab countries. At least in Yemen, Iraq and first three of these communities Arabic and Syria-Lebanon, the community was largely Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speakers constituted homogeneous in ethnic and confessional a substantial proportion of the Jewish terms, with the internal social diversities that population, perhaps even a majority. Only in were reflected in the Christian population in Jerusalem did Yiddish gain an upper hand, the region: rural and urban, rich and poor. In due to the large pietistic Ashkenazi migration Palestine, Jewish pilgrimage and European 4 from Russia and Eastern Europe. Christian colonial projects (mostly the The life and writings of Ishaq Shami, Templars in the latter category) in the late described by Arnold Brand (perhaps nineteenth century brought a large number of with some exaggeration) as “one of the Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe most significant Palestinian writers of and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey the [twentieth century],”5 shed important and North Africa. To these we should add light on one of the most contested of the smaller number of ‘native’ Jews who Levantine identities - that of the Arab Jew. traditionally resided in the four historic holy Or perhaps one should use the term Jewish cities. But ‘native’ Jews were not necessarily Arab - indicating that they were Arabs of of Iberian origins. They included also Jewish background, in the same category of substantial Yiddish speaking communities Christian Arabs.6 It is quite indicative that in who had established themselves in Palestine most places today this term is considered an centuries earlier. Language must have oxymoron. It designates a forgotten milieu played a crucial role in the formation of their of those Mashriqi Jews who identified identity. Of turn-of-the-century Hebron and themselves with the rising Arab national Jerusalem, Robert Cooper says this about the movement and its emancipatory programme, spoken languages of the Jewish communities, and who shared language and culture with relying on a report prepared by Luncz in their Muslim and Christian compatriots in 1882: greater Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, as early as Leaving aside the Karaites, a small the Ottoman administrative reforms of 1839. Jewish sect which rejected Talmudic The image of the Arab Jew became more Judaism, Luncz divided the Jewish poignant, first with the struggle for Ottoman population into Sephardim and decentralization and its accompanying Ashkenazim: the former were emphasis on Arab nationalism, and decades subdivided into Sephardim proper, later when Zionism began to challenge the who spoke Judaeo-Spanish, and affinities of Jews in Arab countries in favour Moghrabim, who spoke Arabic; the of a separate Jewish homeland. One recalls latter [Ashkenazim] differed from the Egyptian critic and satirical essayist the Sephardim, he said, by ritual and Yaqoub Sanou’ from an earlier period, by the fact that they spoke Judaeo- and Iraqi liberal and leftist writers who German. It is interesting to note that immigrated to Israel and Europe (Shim’on he found this language division to be Ballas, Sasson Somekh, Sami Michael, the major distinguishing characteristic Nissim Rejwan, and the cineaste Ella 11 of the communities. According to into the Turkish army as adequate reason to Luncz, [in Jerusalem] there were avoid naturalization and leave the country. 7,620 Sephardim, of whom 1,290 were There were rumors that the leaders of the Moghrabim, having come from the Yishuv had bribed Turkish officials to make Maghreb or North Africa. As a rule, departure difficult and enforce naturalization, they were natives of the city, Turkish for fear that no Jews would remain in subjects, and fluent in Arabic.7 Palestine”.10 This battle for naturalization What appears here is that while the majority was largely lost as the ferocity of the war of native Jews spoke Arabic, there was drove thousands of Ottoman Arabs, including a preponderance of Ashkenazi residents Jews and Christians, to evade service. whose mother tongue was either Yiddish or In his autobiography, Living with Jews, German.8 However in mixed cities like Safad Elie Elyachar suggests that - contrary to or Hebron, Arabic was the common language common perception - it was the Arabic between the Moghrabi, Sephardic and and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speaking Ashkenazi groups, as well as their essential Ottoman Sephardic families in Jerusalem, link to their fellow Muslim and Christian and not the conservative Ashkenazim, who Palestinians.9 spearheaded the move for secular education, for living outside the city walls in new By the turn of the century, one of the main modern neighbourhoods, and who mixed dividing factors among the resident Jewish and socialized freely with their Christian communities was the question of Ottoman and Muslim neighbours.11 One of the main citizenship. As long as the capitulations instruments of this integration were the granted Jewish immigrants privileges as Alliance Israelite schools (established in protégés of Britain and other European 1882) which introduced Jewish, and in powers, there seems to have been few some cases Christian and Muslim children incentives for their becoming subjects of the to secular education, and competed with Sultan. Two issues reversed this situation: Russian Orthodox, Anglican, Quaker and regulations stipulating that only Ottoman 12 subjects can purchase land, and the issue of Catholic schools. This view is confirmed loyalty to the regime once Istanbul went to by contemporary Palestinian writers such war in Crimea, and then against Britain and as Omar Saleh al-Barghouti who attended France in World War I. The first issue made the Alliance school with a number of his 13 some of the leading Sephardic families in Muslim compatriots. Another instrument Jerusalem of great asset to the Zionist project was the impact of Nizamiyyah public schools since they were able to act as intermediaries established by the Ottoman authorities in in the purchase of land from Arab absentee the last third of the nineteenth century in owners to the benefit of the Jewish bringing together in one classroom children colonizing activities. On the second issue, who had previously attended separate loyalty to the regime, the central question Qur’anic kuttab, or Talmud schools (heder).14 that arose was service in the Ottoman army. On this, the Jewish leadership of the Yishuv How Native Jews Ceased to be Arabs was divided, with the Sephardic community favouring naturalization (and implicitly, Writing several decades after the war, service in the army). Elyachar has already adopted the Zionist distinction between Arabs and Jews as if “Most Ashkenazim”, wrote a prominent they were binary ethnic identities. His family Sephardi leader, “regarded conscription 12 Eliahu Elyachar with his family in Jerusalem, WWI. Source: Courtesy of Julia Elyachar. moved to the Western suburbs from the Old seems to be the case. His family moved in City in 1902, and he had this to say about 1902 from the hybrid social atmosphere his mother tongue: “We knew Arabic and of the Old City to the exclusively Jewish conversed freely with our Arab neighbours, neighbourhood of Even Yisrael (and later but Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) was our mother to Beit Ya’akov near Mahane Yehuda).17 tongue. Until the British occupation, many With the exception of the Mea Shaarim Ashkenazim, as well as Arabs, spoke Judeo- neighbourhood, which was comprised of Spanish (Ladino). Hebrew, the holy tongue, a considerable number of Muslim families, was understood by Jews young and old, Jewish neighbourhoods in the New City since it linked Ashkenazi and oriental [i.e. were exclusively Jewish. Jawhariyyeh, who native] Jews in public life and business. Our lived in Mahallat al-Sa’diyyeh in the Old teachers at the Talmud Torah schools would City and wrote in approximately the same explain Hebrew texts by translating them into period, recalls considerable socializing, Ladino.”15 cultural activities, commercial partnerships, and even political alliances (for example in Most city residents experienced the move the Red Crescent Society) between Muslims, from the Old City to the new suburbs as 18 a rupture, a move from the communal Jews, and Christians. Elyachar is also confinement of the walled city into the aware of this extensive socializing, but in his retrospective consciousness it appears modernity of the planned neighbourhoods.16 as a formalized ritual between confessional In Elyachar’s narrative however, the opposite 13 groups. This is especially noticeable in his day-long activities of singing and rendition of Passover ceremonials: festivities in the picnic known as the Yehudia. The slopes of Sheikh Jarrah The beautiful custom of exchanging would be teeming with participants, as gifts between Jewish and Moslem well as with peddlers.
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