Summary
Historian who coined the term “the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history” in a 1991 Tikkun essay, the category around which the Introduction of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry organizes its critique of Bat-Ye’or and her school (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
Details
- The term comes from “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” Tikkun 6 (May–June 1991):55–60; a revised version, “with the force of its argument somewhat moderated,” appears as the first chapter of his Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) (Introduction, note 23) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 294-467).
- As Beinin presents Cohen’s argument, the neo-lachrymose thesis was generated by popular works published by Jews living outside Israel. Beinin’s disagreement: Cohen “minimizes and homogenizes two distinctly Israeli sources of the neo-lachrymose perspective” — Zionist concern to counter the resurgent Palestinian nationalist movement after 1967, and Middle Eastern Jews’ desire to redress the discrimination and mistreatment they suffered as new immigrants in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
- Norman A. Stillman’s reply to Cohen, “Myth, Countermyth, and Distortion,” Tikkun 6 (May–June 1991):60–64, is cited in Beinin’s note 26, which judges Stillman’s own books on the Jews of Arab lands to embrace a similar perspective to Bat-Ye’or’s despite his distance from her (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 294-467).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history, Bat-Ye’or