Summary
Mark R. Cohen’s term for “a gloomy representation of Jewish life in the lands of Islam that emphasizes the continuity of oppression and persecution from the time of Muhammad until the demise of most Arab Jewish communities in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war,” whose leading exponent is Bat-Ye’or and whose critique organizes the Introduction of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
Details
- The term is Mark R. Cohen’s, from “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” Tikkun 6 (May–June 1991):55–60, revised as the first chapter of Under Crescent and Cross (1994) (Introduction, note 23) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 294-467).
- Its consecration as “the normative Zionist interpretation of the history of Jews in Egypt” is dated to the 1974 Hebrew edition of Bat-Ye’or’s Les juifs en Egypte (1971), published by Ma’ariv Library and the World Jewish Congress “on the initiative of the [Israeli] Ministry of Education and Culture with the participation of the Department for Sephardic Communities of the World Zionist Organization” (Introduction, notes 24–25). Before 1948, leading individuals and institutions of the Egyptian Jewish community, including self-described Zionists, “proudly embraced a more positive view of the long history of the Jews in Egypt”; the neo-lachrymose perspective “was expounded as a conscious challenge to this earlier self-image,” drew authority from Bat-Ye’or’s claim to authenticity as an Egyptian Jew, and was enabled by Egyptian Jews’ near silence about their lives from 1948 until the late 1970s (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
- Beinin amends Cohen: Cohen argues the thesis was generated by popular works published by Jews living outside Israel, but “minimizes and homogenizes two distinctly Israeli sources of the neo-lachrymose perspective”: the Zionist need to counter the resurgent Palestinian national movement after 1967 — by constructing a narrative of eternal Jewish suffering under Muslim rule and, in some versions, a population equivalence that would void Palestinian claims (note 27, on Gilbert’s Map 13) — and Mizrahi claims to redress for discrimination in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, for which affirmed victimization in the Arab world claimed a status comparable to Ashkenazi survivors of the Nazi mass murder and distanced Mizrahim from Arab cultural attachments. A woman at a July 1987 demonstration in Ramat Amidar (Ramat Gan) put the second source in one sentence: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them” (note 28) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197, 294-467).
- Yehoshafat Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972) is named another important Israeli source: its cataloging of Arab anti-Semitism and insistence that Arabs viewed the conflict as a clash of destinies “inclined Israelis and others to imagine the intense conflict over Palestine as one more instance of Arab and Muslim enmity toward Jews” (note 29) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
- The perspective is situated in “the emergence of a new school of Israeli historical writing that integrates the previously marginalized history of Middle Eastern Jews into the Israeli national narrative,” whose two central themes are “the relentless oppression and suffering of Jews in the diaspora and the modern secular redemption of Jews by Zionism.” Its broader scholarly penumbra is mapped in note 26: Martin Gilbert’s The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps (1976), judged “a propaganda tract rather than a piece of scholarship”; Norman Stillman’s The Jews of Arab Lands (1979) and The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (1991), which “embrace a similar perspective”; and Bernard Lewis’s The Jews of Islam (1984), judicious but tending “to degenerate into neo-lachrymosity in the final chapter on the modern period” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197, 294-467).
- The mirror image is rejected with it: the common Arab claim that Jews were always well treated in the lands of Islam — supported by an official Egyptian publication’s assertion that “Egypt, throughout its history, has been the shelter of persecuted Jews — no matter where they came from” (Introduction, note 30: Egypt, Ministry of Information, The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt, [1955], p. 5) — and the newer Arab nationalist and Islamist claim that the Jews betrayed Egypt by collaborating with imperialism and embracing Zionism. Against both: “there is nothing in medieval Jewish Arab history that can reasonably be compared to the expulsion of Jews from Spain,” and nothing in modern Jewish-Arab history comparable to the Nazi mass murder, but “more than occasional instances of socially structured discrimination against Jews in Egypt” are recorded, linked in the twentieth century to colonization, decolonization and the Arab-Zionist conflict (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 198-210).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Mark R. Cohen, Bat-Ye’or, Mizrahim, Gudrun Krämer