Summary
Mizrahim (Orientals, sing. Mizrahi): the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa as a collective category in Israeli society, whose exclusion under the labor Zionist establishment, whose settlement on Israel’s margins, and whose 1977 turn to Likud the Introduction of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry uses to frame the place of Egyptian Jews in the Zionist national narrative (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197, 234-247).
Details
- “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 of unrelenting suffering in the Arab world claimed a status comparable to the Ashkenazi survivors of the mass murder of European Jewry, distanced them from Arab cultural attachments “widely regarded in Israel as symptoms of backwardness,” and supported a claim to have independently arrived at Zionism — levers “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” (see Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
- Most Mizrahim “shared little of the history in the diaspora or in the yishuv that informed the theory and practice of labor Zionism”: except for the descendants of the pre-Zionist “old yishuv” and several thousand Yemenis brought to mandate Palestine “by Zionist authorities seeking Jewish workers who would work for Arab wages,” only a small minority participated actively in the Zionist project before 1948 (Introduction, note 38: Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1989, pp. 91–122). The leadership of the Zionist movement and of the early state was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. Only after open Zionist activity became impossible in Nazi-occupied Europe did all the yishuv’s Zionist parties send emissaries to Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco and elsewhere; with the news of the mass murder of European Jewry and deteriorating conditions, Zionism became “a significant, though still a minority, orientation” for Middle Eastern Jews after the war (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 234-247).
- Some Mizrahim became active in labor Zionism, “but most had no links to the labor Zionist establishment and its key institutions. Hence, they had no patrons to ease their way into Israeli society.” Arriving in large numbers in the 1950s, “their customs and lifestyles were commonly discounted as “primitive,” and they were expected to adopt the modern, healthy, tzabar culture. By a conscious decision of the state and Zionist authorities, large numbers of Mizrahim were settled in “development towns,” moshavim (cooperative agricultural villages), or in the former homes of recently departed Palestinian refugees in cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, and Tiberias. Their role in the Zionist project was to establish a Jewish population in territories and neighborhoods previously inhabited by Palestinian Arabs and to occupy the bottom ranks of the Jewish labor force” (Introduction, note 39: Shohat; Swirski; Giladi; Cohen-Almagor) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 234-247, 294-467).
- “Alienation from the political ideology, cultural and social norms, institutions, and economic benefits of labor Zionism drove many Mizrahim and their children to provide the votes that brought the first Likud government to power in Israel in 1977.” The new regime extensively revised the Eurocentric history of Zionism — dozens of scholarly and popular books, articles, television programs and symposia asserting a Middle Eastern Zionist movement and Mizrahi contributions to the state; Mizrahi Hebrew accents began to be heard on news broadcasts and Arab-accented Hebrew music reached the top of the popular song lists; Labor and other parties then promoted “their” Mizrahi figures and revalorized Mizrahim in labor Zionist history. “The reassertion of Egyptian Jewish identity examined in Chapter 8 is both an expression of this broad movement of Mizrahi self-assertion and a particular phenomenon related to the course of Egyptian-Israeli relations” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 234-247).
- Aviezer Golan’s representation of the Operation Susannah prisoners “shares the common Ashkenazi expectation that the Jews of the Middle East would abandon their identities and cultures in order to be absorbed into a more modern, dynamic Israel”; the Egyptian Jewish writing examined in Chapter 2, from Jacqueline Kahanoff on, “contradicts this expectation” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history, The Jewish State: A Century Later, Mapam