An Arab Jew Speaks

Reflections of an Arab Jew
by Ella Shohat
http://www.ivri-nasawi.org/

I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living,
writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and
raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and
Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the '50s,
she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so
differently--the European Jews--were actually European Christians. Jewishness
for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My
grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in
Arabic, had to be taught to speak of "us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs. For
Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been "Muslim,"
"Jew," and "Christian," not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that
"Arabness" referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with
religious differences.

Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or
charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a
well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history
of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic
anomaly--for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli
(European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to
communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern
difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious
difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.

To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a
contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical
paradox, even an ontological subversion.

It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of
us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an
American
context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish
memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don't hide our Middle
Easterness
under one Jewish "we," it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an
American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.

As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the "mysteries" of this
oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for
millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely
articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to
"make it" into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most
religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never
expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they
practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark
colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore
wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on
regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many
wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New
York, Montreal, Paris or London, you'll be amazed to hear the winding
quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming
from a mosque.

Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and
dislocated history--Iraq, Israel and the U.S.--have been involved in a war,
it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to
facilitate "neat" national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during
the Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel
out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I
also have relatives.

War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex
identities. The Gulf War, for example, intensified a pressure already
familiar to the Arab Jewish diaspora in the wake of the Israeli-Arab
conflict: a pressure to choose between being a Jew and being an Arab. For
our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since at least the Babylonian
exile, who have been Arabized for millennia, and who were abruptly
dislodged to Israel 45 years ago, to be suddenly forced to assume a
homogenous European Jewish identity based on experiences in Russia, Poland
and Germany, was an exercise in self devastation. To be a European or
American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an
Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological
subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel
referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin is Mizrahi or
Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first
time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms.
Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition,
yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of
North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of
the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often
been portrayed an an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation.
Although I in no way want to idealize that experience--there were occasional
tensions, discriminations, even violence--on the whole, we lived quite
comfortably within Muslim societies.

Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology. As
Iraqi Jews, while retaining a communal identity, we were generally
well integrated and indigenous to the country, forming an inseparable part
of its social and cultural life. Thoroughly Arabized, we used Arabic even
in hymns and religious ceremonies. The liberal and secular trends of the
20th century engendered an even stronger association of Iraqi Jews and Arab
culture, which brought Jews into an extremely active arena in public and
cultural life. Prominent Jewish writers, poets and scholars played a vital
role in Arab culture, distinguishing themselves in Arabic speaking theater,
in music, as singers, composers, and players of traditional instruments.
In Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia, Jews became members of
legislatures, of municipal councils, of the judiciary, and even occupied
high economic positions. (The finance minister of Iraq in the '40s was
Ishak Sasson, and in Egypt, Jamas Sanua--higher positions, ironically, than
those our community had generally achieved within the Jewish state until
the 1990s.)

The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their
property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the
dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property,
lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants
(depending on one's political perspective), we were forced to leave
everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also
affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself,
where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions
that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of
European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even
our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or
physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair
blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when
mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and
Poland was a social aliya (literally "ascent") was for Oriental Sephardic
Jews a yerida ("descent").

Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to
repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The
pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their ancient homeland
actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We
have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq's
destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural
creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli
schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we
actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq,
Morocco, Yemen and Iran.

Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of
Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the
Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the
outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the
diversity of our political perspectives. Oriental-Sephardic peace
movements, from the Black Panthers of the '70s to the new Keshet (a
"Rainbow" coalition of Mizrahi groups in Israel) not only call
for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for the cultural,
political, and economic integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle
East. And thus an end to the binarisms of war, an end to a simplistic
charting of Middle Eastern identities.
 

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Ella Habiba Shohatis Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's
Studies at CUNY. A writer, orator and activist, she is the author of
Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ.
of Texas Press, 1989) and the co-author (with Robert Stam) of
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge
1994). Shohat co-edited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and
Postcolonial Reflections (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and
is the editor of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a
Transnational Age, (MIT Press/The New Museum, 2000). She
writes often for such journals as Social Text and the Journal
for Palestine Studies.