The Possibility of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought
2014; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13530194.2014.878506
ISSN1469-3542
AutoresMoshe Behar, Zvi Ben‐Dor Benite,
Tópico(s)Islamic Studies and History
ResumoAbstractWhile the vast scholarly fields of modern Jewish thought and modern Jewish intellectual history effectively include no texts by Jews who are of non-European origin, the domain of modern Middle Eastern intellectual history includes no writings by native Middle Eastern Jews. Aiming to help remedy this dual void, this article presents the core premises and argumentation of several pre-1936 Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals. In filling in some of the contours and details of this rich—but significantly underexplored—history, it posits that a distinct Jewish intellectual school that unambiguously understood itself to be quintessentially Middle Eastern has been present since the beginning of European Zionism in the late nineteenth century. What contemporary scholars commonly recognise as post-1970s Mizrahi (Eastern) thought is thus better understood as an outgrowth of a Middle Eastern Jewish intellectual formation predating 1948. AcknowledgementsThe authors thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr Ewan Stein for their valuable input.Notes 1 Hayyim Ben-Kiki, ‘‘Al She'elat ha-She'elot be-Yishuv ha-Aretz’, Do'ar Hayom, 30 August 1921, translated as ‘On the Question of All Questions: Concerning the Settling of the Land’, in Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (trans. and ed.), Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture 1893–1958 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013), pp. 102–108. Henceforth we cite the English translation. 2 In 1922, 763,600 individuals lived in Palestine; Jews numbered 83,800, of whom about 40 per cent were non-European. See Roberto Bachi, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1976); Ruth Kark and Joseph Glass, ‘The Jews in Eretz-Israel/Palestine: From Traditional Peripheriality to Modern Centrality’, Israeli Affairs, 5(4) (1999), p. 85. 3 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’, p. 107. 4 Yitzhak Epstein, ‘She'ela Ne'elama’ [An Invisible Question], Ha-Shiloah, 17 (July–December 1907), pp. 197–206. For the controversy surrounding Epstein's essay, see Yosef Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 42–51 and Alan Dowty ‘“A Question that Outweighs All Others”: Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue’, Israel Studies, 6(1) (2001), pp. 34–54 (where Dowty gifted the scholarly community with full translation of Epstein's essay). As the essay became much celebrated, Epstein is now viewed as a ‘prophet’ and a ‘dissident’. See Adam Shatz (ed.), Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel (New York: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 35–52. 5 Yitzhak Epstein, She‘elat ha-She‘elot ba-Yishuv ha-Arets (Palestine: Hotsaʼat Ḥever Emune ha-Yishuv, 1919). 6 Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs, pp. 61–63. 7 Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs, pp. 48–51. 8 This point could be demonstrated in a book-length treatise, which our scope here does not allow. Note, for instance, that all the texts by outcast Jewish prophets included in Shatz's anthology originate in the Euro-American world. 9 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’, p. 106.10 For the merits and disadvantages of the qualifier ‘Arabised’, see Moshe Behar, ‘What's in a Name? Socio-terminological Formations and the Case for “Arabized Jews”’, Social Identities, 15(6) (2009), pp. 747–771.11 By way of illustration, the overwhelming majority of native Palestinian Jews who were Zionists were convinced that they must be wholly entrusted with all Jewish communication with the Arab world. Yet here too there were one or two exceptions who thought that the task should be left to the Ashkenazi-dominated Histadrut. See Shlomo Alboher, Identification, Adaptation and Reservation: The Sephardi Jews in Eretz Yisrael and the Zionist Movement during the ‘National Home’, 1918–1948 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Haziyonit, 2002), pp. 102–104.12 For reflections on the question of Arab Jews and colonialism, see the classical writings of Albert Memmi, Portrait of a Jew (New York: Orion Press, 1962); The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965); The Liberation of the Jew (New York: Orion Press, 1966); and Jews and Arabs (Chicago: J.P. O'Hara, 1975).13 For Zionism as the negation of the East, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective’, in Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (eds), Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), pp. 162–181.14 Since ‘modernity’ is understood as a ‘European’ phenomenon, modern Jewish thought too is conceptualised similarly. The historiography and sociology of modern Jewish thought reflect this position, as seen in Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).15 For comprehensive treatment of the subject of Jewish intellectuals, see Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, pp. 23–53, and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Kidmah ṿe-Naftuleha (Jerusalem: Am Oved, 2011), pp. 13–30. In his introductions to both books, Mendes-Flohr discusses several theories and approaches to the question of the Jewish intellectual. None encompasses Middle Eastern intellectuals.16 A case in point is sociologist David Aberbach's attempt to present an overarching trajectory of ‘turning points’ in Jewish intellectual history in his Major Turning Points in Jewish Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Aberbach begins with the ‘transition from idolatry to monotheism’ during the Iron Age, proceeding to count turning points in Jewish thought over the ages. Turning to the modern period, he moves from ‘Chassidic individualism’ to Marx and Freud and the rise of Hebrew and Jewish nationalism in tsarist Russia. The Middle East, present in the narrative throughout, disappears with the coming of modernity.17 For example, the word ‘Jew’ is absent in Israel Gershoni and Amy Singer, ‘Introduction: Intellectual History in Middle Eastern Studies’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28(3) (2008), pp. 383–389.18 ‘Cairo Jewish Community Elects René Cattaui as President to Succeed Father’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 12 July 1943. Qattawi's best known work is the translation of documents from the Russian archives of Egypt in four volumes: Le Règne de Mohamed Aly d'après les Archives Russes en Egypte Tome II [en 2 Parties], La Mission du Colonel Duhamel 1834–1837 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1933). With his brother Georges, Qattawi also published Muhammad ‘Ali wa-Urubba (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1952).19 Qattawi wrote Pour Mes Enfants (Paris: Ancienne Librairie, 1920), Le Régime des Capitulations en Egypte (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Institut Franc¸ais d'Archeologie Orientale, 1927), Coup d'Oeil sur la Chronologie de la Nation Égyptienne (Paris: Plon, 1931), and Le Khedive Ismail et la Dette Égyptienne (Cairo, 1935). See also Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt 1914–1952 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), pp. 44, 89–90, 101–106, 286. See also Gudrun Kra¨mer, The Jews in Modern Egypt 1914–1952 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), pp. 44, 89–90, 101–106, 286; Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Anthony Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003).20 Notable exceptions are Reuven Snir, Arviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut: Maʼavak Zehuyot bi-Yetsiratam Shel Yehude ‘Irak (Jerusalem: Mekhon Ben-Tsevi le-Heker Kehilot Yisraʼel ba-Mizraḥ, 2005) and Lital Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007).21 As an example see Gai Abuṭbul, Lev Luis Grinberg and Pnina Motzafi-Haller (eds), Kolot Mizrahiyim: Likrat Siah Mizrahi Hadash ‘Al ha-Hevrah veha-Tarbut ha-Yisreʼelit (Jerusalem: Masadah, 2005).22 This thick network of connections and movement can easily be seen through a prosopographical study of, for instance, the following people: Yacub Sannu‘, Avraham Elmaleh, Hayyim Ben-Kiki, Esther Moyal, Nissim Malul, Yusuf Qattawi, David Avisar, Henry Curiel, Marsil Shirizi and Jaqueline Kahanoff (see Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, pp. 2, 31, 62, 87, 114, 144, 174, 205). This is a small sample of a considerably larger group.23 Hayyim Ben-Kiki, ‘On European Culture in the East’, in Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, p. 88.24 Avraham Elmaleh, ‘Our Mission’, in Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, p. 2.25 We use the term ‘contact zone’ following Arif Dirlik, who in turn borrows it from Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Building on Said's concept of orientalism, Dirlik argues that ‘orientalism was a product of the circulation of Euro-American and Asian intellectuals in these contact zones, or borderlands’. Arif Dirlik, ‘Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism’, History and Theory, 35(4) (1996), p. 96.26 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’.27 That book was Arab Antiquities, which Yahuda published at the age of 15. See A.S. Yahuda, Kadmoniyot ha-‘Arvim: Bi-Yeme ha-Ba‘arut Asher li-Fene Muḥamad (Jerusalem, 1894).28 A.S. Yahuda, ‘Herzl's Attitude towards the Arab Question’, Hed ha-Mizrah, 10 July 1949, pp. 10–11. That Yahuda published his critical memoir in Hebrew in Jerusalem just five months after the first Arab-Israeli war ended is remarkable. Responding less than three years later to the 1949 book Trial and Error by his long-time nemesis Dr Chaim Weizmann (Israel's first president), Yahuda published a sharp critique of the Zionist treatment of Arabs. See his Dr. Weizmann's Errors on Trial: A Refutation of His Statements in ‘Trial and Error’ Concerning My Activity for Zionism during My Professorship at Madrid University (New York: Published privately by Ethel R. Yahuda, 1952).29 Yahuda, ‘Herzl's Attitude’.30 Yahuda's mother was German, and he was studying in Heidelberg at the time of the congress.31 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’, pp. 102–103.32 The European sense of supremacy at the time prevailed among Europe's oppressed groups as well, including women, workers and Jews. Ben-Kiki's 1920 essay cited above notes this dynamic.33 Nissim Ya‘acov Malul, ‘Ma'amadenu ba-Aretz: She’elat Limud ‘Ivrit-‘Aravit’, Ha-Herut, 17 June 1913, translated as ‘Our Status in the Land: The Question of Hebrew Teaching of Arabic’, in Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, p. 66. On Ha-Herut, see Abigail Jacobson, ‘Sephardim, Ashkenazim and the “Arab Question” in Pre-First World War Palestine: A Reading of Three Zionist Newspapers’, Middle Eastern Studies, 39(2) (2003), pp. 105–130. See also Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).34 Ya‘acov Rabinovitch, ‘Reshimot’ [Notes], Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir, 16 May 1913, pp. 4–7.35 Rabinovitch, ‘Reshimot’.36 The office of the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire (hahambaşı in Turkish) was established in 1840 as the Jewish equivalent to the offices of the grand mufti and the Greek Orthodox patriarch.37 This was neither the first time nor the last that non-Sephardic editors intervened with pedantic disclaimers in Mizrahi texts. It happened to Malul in 1913 and, for example, to Shimon Ballas in 1965 when he published (in the Hebrew journal Amot) a critical essay about Israel's treatment of non-Ashkenazi Jews.38 As popularised by Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979). See also Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations,1914–1918 (New York: Schocken, 1973).39 Articulation of positions similar to those of Israel's Black Panthers was evident outside Israel/Palestine as well as in, for example, the books by the Tunisian-French Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi (b. 1920) (Juifs et Arabes [Paris: Gallimard, 1974]), the British Iraqi Jew Elie Kedourie (1926–1992) (Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies [London: Cass, 1974]) and Moroccan anti-colonialist Avraham Serfaty (1926–2010) (E´crits de Prison sur la Palestine [Paris: Arcantere, 1982]).40 See Y. Ben Haim, ‘Rahamim Bivas: Arabic Jewish Actor and Singer’, Hed-Hamizrah, 17 May 1946.41 On this topic, see Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).42 Malul, ‘Our Status in the Land’, p. 66.43 The best evidence for this may be the scarcity of studies on the subject. It remains illuminating to study perhaps the greatest post-1948 Hebrew novel, Shimon Ballas's Outcast, trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2005). Originally published in 1991, the book's plot is based on the life of Ahmad (Nissim) Susa (1900–1982), an Iraqi Jewish historian who in the 1930s opted to convert to Islam and whose work ended up being used as Ba‘thist propaganda during Saddam Hussein's reign. See also Aline Schlaepfer, ‘Between Cultural and National Nahda: Jewish Intellectuals in Baghdad and the Nation-Building Process in Iraq (1921–1932)’, Journal of Levantine Studies, 1(2) (2011), pp. 59–74. On forced conversion, see Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman, ‘The Forced Conversion of Jewish Orphans in Yemen’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33(1) (2001), pp. 23–47.44 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’, p. 104.45 Scholarship on this subject is extensive. Jacob Katz, who would become a leading Jewish historian, addressed it in his 1935 dissertation, ‘Die Entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und deren Ideologie’ (Frankfurt a. M: D. Droller, 1935); see also Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) and Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).46 See Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).47 Malul, ‘Our Status in the Land’, p. 66.48 On Shami, see Salim Tamari, ‘Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 21 (August 2004), pp. 10–26.49Ha-Herut, no. 156 (1914). See also Abigail Jacobson, ‘Jews Writing in Arabic: Shimon Moyal, Nissim Malul and the Mixed Palestinian/Eretz Israeli Locale’, in Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal Ginio (eds), Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 165–182.50Ha-Herut, no. 178 (1914). While Ha-Herut fiercely supported Hebrew renewal, its contributors—exceptionally atypically for this camp—never viewed this undertaking as a negation of Arabic-Hebrew bilingualism. On 13 May 1923 Franco published in Do'ar Hayom a defiant article titled ‘We, the Frenks’, consciously reproducing the Mizrahim's derogative name. In politicised African-American English his title is best translated as ‘We, the Niggers’.51 Cited in Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs, p. 49.52 See Etan Bloom, ‘What “The Father” Had in Mind? Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), Cultural Identity, Weltanschauung and Action’, History of European Ideas, 33(3) (2007), pp. 330–349.53 Note that modern Jewish thought in Europe (rather than Zionist thought) had a more nuanced attitude towards Arab culture and Islam; see Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews.54 See, for example, Avraham Shalom Yahuda and Theodor Nöldeke, Bagdadische Sprichwörter von A[braham] S[halom] Yahuda (Giessen, Germany: Töpelmann, 1906); Avraham Shalom Yahuda, ’Ever va-’Arav (New York: ‘Ogen, 1946); Yahuda, Kadmoniyot ha-‘Arvim.55 A.S. Yahuda, Rabenu Sa‘adiyah Gaʼon veha-Sevivah ha-‘Aravit [Our Rabbi Sa‘adiyah Gaʼon and the Arabic Environment] (New York: Shulsinger, 1941). While some today could argue with Yahuda's perspective, recent studies on Rabbi Sa‘adiyah support his overall argument. See Robert Brody, Rav Se‘adyah Gaon (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 2006).56 Joseph Meyouhas's books include Ha-Falaḥim: Haye ha-Falahim be-Hashṿaʼah el Haye ha-Yehudim bi-Tekufut ha-Tanakh ṿeha-Talmud (Jerusalem: Devir, 1937), Bible Tales in Arab Folk-Lore (London: A.A. Knopf, 1928), Yalde ‘Arav, Sefer ha-Agadot (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1927, republished also in 1928, probably in Jerusalem) and Agadot ‘Arav ‘al ha-Yehudim (n.p., 1942).57 Meyouhas, Yalde ‘Arav (n.p., 1928), p. vii.58 David Moyal, ‘On the Arab Question’, in Kedma-Mizraha (ed.), Collection of Articles about the Arab Question [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Weiss Publication, 1936), pp. 69–75.59 We discuss these publications in the introduction to Behar and Ben-Dor Benite, Middle Eastern Jewish Thought, pp. xix–xxxvii.60 See also Moshe Behar, ‘Palestine, Arabized-Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National Formations’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13(4) (2007) pp. 581–611, and Moshe Behar, ‘One-State, Two-States, Bi-National State: Mandated Imaginations in a Regional Void’, Middle East Studies Online Journal, 5(2) (2011), pp. 97–136.61 Cited in Snir, Arviyut, Yahadut, Tsiyonut, p. 46.62 Ben-Kiki, ‘On the Question of All Questions’, p. 107.63 Elie Eliachar, ‘I Know the Arabs’, in ‘From the Israeli Press’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 5(1/2) (Autumn 1975/Winter 1976), p. 183.64Social Text, 19/20 (Autumn 1988), pp. 1–35.65 Peter Medding (ed.), Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 2008), p. xi.66 For more on the issue of Mizrahim and the broader questions of the Middle East, see Moshe Behar, ‘Is the Mizrahi Question Relevant to the Future of the Entire Middle East?’, News from Within, 13(1) (January 1997), pp. 68–85, and Moshe Behar, ‘Mizrahim, Abstracted: Action, Reflection and the Academization of the Mizrahi Cause’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 37(2) (Winter 2008), pp. 89–100.**Departments of History and of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University, 53 Washington Sq. So., New York, NY 10012, USA. Email: zvi@nyu.edu
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