Arab Jews

See also: Maghrebi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Musta'arabi Jews

Arab Jews (Arabic: اليهود العرب al-Yahūd al-ʿArab; Hebrew: יהודים ערבים Yehudim `Aravim) is a term for the Arabic-speaking Jewish communities, or Musta'arabi Jews, that still live in or once originated from the Arab world. The term was originally theorized from within the frameworks of literary and cultural studies, building on earlier work that examined the "unique, syncretic cultures" of Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, or what Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis".

The Jewish communities living in Arab-majority countries historically mostly used various Judeo-Arabic dialects as their primary community language, reserving Hebrew for liturgical and cultural purposes (literature, philosophy, poetry, etc.). Many aspects of their culture (music, clothes, food, architecture of synagogues and houses, etc.) have commonality with local Arab populations. They usually follow Sephardi Jewish liturgy, and are (counting their descendants) by far the largest portion of Mizrahi Jews.

The use of the term 'Arab Jews' has been criticised for a number of reasons, and, outside of academic circles, has become subject to politicisation. Reflecting the academic origins of the term, Jews with origins in Arab-majority countries do not often self-identify as Arab Jews, though the analogous term musta'arabi was used by medieval Jewish authors to refer to the cultural and linguistic Arabized North Africa Jews in what would become the modern states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

In recent decades, some individuals with roots in Arabized Jewish communities have self-identified as Arab Jews, such as Ella Shohat, who uses the term in contrast to the Israeli establishment's categorization of Jews as either Ashkenazim or Mizrahim. In Israel, a separate discourse has emerged that categorises the more recent use of the term 'Arab Jew' as a function of post-zionist thinking that, in the words of David Tal, seeks to "separate the ethnic from the national".

Origins of the term

Prior to the creation of the State of Israel, between 700,000 and 850,000 Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa, but by the end of the 20th century, all of these communities had faced "dislocation and dispersal" and largely vanished, according to Lital Levy, who has noted: "These were indigenous communities (in some cases present in the area for millenia) whose unique, syncretic cultures have since been expunged as a result of emigration."

In Israel, these communities were subject to "deracination and resocialization", while in the West, the concept of Jews from the Arab World remains poorly understood. From a cultural perspective, the disappearance of the Jewish dialects of spoken Arabic, written Judeo-Arabic and the last generation of Jewish writers of literary Arabic "all silently sounded the death knell of a certain world", according to Levy, or what Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis" in his work Jews and Arabs, and which Ammiel Alcalay sought to recapture in her 1993 work After Jews and Arabs.

Historian Emily Benichou Gottreich has observed that the concept of the 'Arab Jew' is largely an identity of exile and “was originally theorized from within frameworks of, and remains especially prominent in, specific academic fields, namely literary and cultural studies”, and in the work of Ella Habiba Shohat, Gil Hochberg, Gil Anidjar and Sami Shalom Chetrit.

Gottreich has also noted that the term "implies a particular politics of knowledge vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and larger Zionist narrative(s)" and post-Zionist discourse. However, she argues that the discourse about Arab Jews remains largely "limited to the semantic-epistomological level, resulting in a flattened identity that is both historically and geographically ambiguous".

Salim Tamari has suggested that the term Arab Jew has also been used academically to refer to the period of history when some Jewish communities identified with the Arab national movement that emerged in the lead up to the dismantlement of the Ottoman empire, as early as the Ottoman administrative reforms of 1839, owing to shared language and culture with their Muslim and Christian compatriots in Ottoman Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.

Other notable writers on the subject of Arab-Jewish identity include Naeim Giladi and David Rabeeya.

Politicisation of the term

Today the term ‘Arab Jew’ is sometimes used in ways that gives rise to offense among members of the Jewish community. It has also become part of the language of a line of intellectual thought that has been labelled by some as post-Zionism.

Ella Shohat argues Zionist historiography could not accept a hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity and embarked on a program to remove the Arabness and Orientalness of the Jews from the Arab world after they arrived in Israel. To insure homogeneity Zionist focused on religious commonality and a romanticized past. She argues that the use of the term Mizrahim is in some sense a Zionist achievement in that it created a single unitary identity separated from the Islamic world. Which replaced older multifaceted identities each linked to the Islamic world, including but not limited to identifying as Arab Jews. She argues that when Sephardi express hostility towards Arabs it is often due to self-hatred. Another argument that Shohat makes is that Israel is already demographically an Arab country.

Yehouda Shenhav's works are also considered to be among the seminal works of post-Zionism. Shenhav, an Israeli sociologist, traced the origins of the conceptualization of the Mizrahi Jews as Arab Jews. He interprets Zionism as an ideological practice with three simultaneous and symbiotic categories: "Nationality", "Religion" and "Ethnicity". In order to be included in the national collective they had to be "de-Arabized". According to Shenhav, Religion distinguished between Arabs and Arab Jews, thus marking nationality among the Arab Jews.

David Rabeeya argues that while the Zionist movement succeed in creating a Jewish state it did irreparable harm to Arab Jews and Palestinians. He argues that Israel has already entered a post-Zionist era in which the influence of Zionist Ashkenazim has declined. With many Jews of European origin choosing to leave the country as Israel becomes less Western. He also self-identified as an Arab Jew, extends that identification back even further, noting the long history of Arab Jews in the Arab world that remained in place after the dawn of Islam in the 7th century until midway through the 20th century. He writes that Arab Jews, like Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, were culturally Arab with religious commitments to Judaism. He notes that Arab Jews named their progeny with Arabic names and "Like every Arab, Arab Jews were proud of their Arabic language and its dialects, and held a deep emotional attachment to its beauty and richness."

David Tal argues that Shohat and her students faced great resistance from Mizrahim with few choosing to identify as Arab Jews. He argues that Shohat in a sense tried to impose an identity in the same way in which she criticized the Ashkenazi for doing.

Lital Levy argues that post-Zionism did more than revive the concept of the Arab Jew. Instead it created something new in so far as it is questionable that a pristine Arab Jew identity which could be reclaimed ever existed. Levy suggest that the contemporary intellectual who declare themselves to be Arab Jews are similar to Jewish intellectuals who between the late 1920s and 1940s did likewise in both cases these intellectuals were small in number and outside the mainstream of the Jewish community. Likewise in both cases the term was used for political purposes. A view shared by Emily Benichou Gottreich who argues that the term was used to push back against both Zionism and Arab nationalism which tended to view the categories of Jews and Arabs as mutually exclusive and as a way to show solidarity with the Palestinians.

Criticisms of the term

The principal argument against the term "Arab Jews", particularly among Jewish communities originating from Arab lands, is that Jews constitute a diaspora and ethnic group, not simply a "religious" group, and that use of the term "Arab" suggests otherwise. Dario Miccoli states that he does not use the term, seeing it as an anachronism. Jonathan Marc Gribetz cautions against the uncritical use of term in historiographical works, viewing it as non-typical.

Proponents of the argument against "Arab Jews", including most Jews from Arab lands, do not seek to deny the strong Arabic cultural influence on Jews in those countries, but they argue is that "Arabness" referred to more than just a common shared culture.

One could therefore legitimately speak of “Arabized” Jews, or "Jews of Arab countries", just as one can speak of "English Jews" or "British Jews" or "Polish Jews", whereas many Jews would object to terms such as "Saxon Jews", "Celtic Jews", or "Slavic Jews" as the latter refer to ethnic groups and therefore, implicitly, deny the existence of a distinct Jewish ethnic identity. The term "Arab Jews" is seen as more akin to the latter, both by those who oppose it and, on occasion, by those who affirm it as a manner in which to deny so-called "Arab Jews" a distinct ethnic or national identity.

In 1975, Albert Memmi wrote: "The term 'Arab Jews' is obviously not a good one. I have adopted it for convenience. I simply wish to underline that as natives of those countries called Arab and indigenous to those lands well before the arrival of the Arabs, we shared with them, to a great extent, languages, traditions and cultures. [...] We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries the Moslem Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty. It is now too late for us to become Arab Jews."

Edith Haddad Shaked, Adjunct Faculty at Pima Community College in Arizona, has likewise criticized the concept of the Arab Jew, arguing that the terms Arab Jew or Jewish Arab "were never used in Tunisia, and they do not do not correspond/coincident to the religious and socio-historical context/reality of the Jews in Tunisia/the Arab world," while also pointing to the fact the Arab component of the North African society was introduced during the conquest of the seventh century, after the establishment of North African Jewish communities.

"Even when the Jewish community was culturally quite embedded in its Muslim Arab environment, Jews were always considered members of a socio-religious community minority, different and distinct from the Arab population, because of their Jewish cultural tradition, their common past, and the Judeo-arabic language - all of them separated them from the Arabs. And the Arabs saw the Jews, even the ones who spoke only Judeo-Arabic, as members of a socio-linguistic religious cultural community, different from theirs."

Finally, a third view is that the term "Arab Jew" has a certain legitimacy, but should only describe the Jewish communities of Arabia itself, such as the Banu Qaynuqa of the time of Muhammad and, possibly, the Yemenite Jews: see Arab Jewish tribes. This view is typically put forward as stemming from the view of Arab identity as a geographical rather than ethno-linguistic or cultural but, because it refers to a far more restricted understanding of "Arab" geography as referring to the Arabian peninsula, comes into conflict with the modern pan-Arabism exemplified by the Arab League.

History of applicable communities

Until the middle of the 20th century Judeo-Arabic was commonly spoken by Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa. However, the majority of the Arab-Jewish communities, as they are defined here, were ultimately left their home countries after the founding of Israel in 1948, and now reside in Israel, Western Europe, the United States and Latin America. In this period, the population of Jews in Arab countries decreased dramatically, and, upon arrival in Israel, the Jews from Arab lands found that use of Judeo-Arabic was discouraged, and its usage gradually fell into disrepair. Even those who remained in the Arab world tended to abandon Judeo-Arabic. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin argues that Jews from Arab lands were Arab in that they identified with Arab culture even if they did not identity as Arab Jews or with Arab nationalism.

Jews of Arabia before Islam

Main article: Jewish tribes of Arabia

Jewish populations have existed in the Arabian Peninsula since before Islam; in the north where they were connected to the Jewish populations of the Levant and Iraq, in the Ihsaa' coastal plains, and in the south, i.e. in Yemen.

There were three main Jewish tribes in Medina before the rise of Islam in Arabia: the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza. Banu Nadir was hostile to Muhammad's new religion. Other Jewish tribes lived relatively peacefully under Muslim rule. Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza lived in northern Arabia, at the oasis of Yathribu until the 7th century, when the men were sentenced to death and women and children enslaved after betraying the pact made with the Muslims following the Invasion of Banu Qurayza by Muslim forces under Muhammad.

Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine

Prior to the modern Zionist movement, Jewish communities existed in the southern Levant that are now known as the Old Yishuv. The Old Yishuv was composed of three clusters: Ladino-speaking Sephardi Iberian emigrants to the late Mamluk Sultanate and early Ottoman Empire following the Spanish Inquisition; Eastern European Hasidic Jews who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine during the 18th and 19th centuries; and Judeo-Arabic-speaking Musta'arabi Jews who had been living in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple and who had become culturally and linguistically Arabized. As Zionist aliyah increased, the Musta'arabim were forced to chose sides, with some embracing the nascent Zionist movement and others embracing the Arab nationalist or Palestinian nationalist causes. Other Arab Jews left the Ottoman Empire entirely, joining Syrian-Jewish/Palestinian-Jewish emigrants to the United States. The descendants of the Palestinian Musta'arabim live in Israel, but have largely assimilated into the Sephardi community over time.

Arab-Jewish diaspora

Argentina

Arab Jews were part of the Arab migration to Argentina and played a part as a link between the Arab and Jewish communities of Argentina. Many of the Arab Jews in Argentina were from Syria and Lebanon. According to Ignacio Klich, an Argentine scholar of Arab and Jewish immigration, "Arabic-speaking Jews felt themselves to have a lot in common with those sharing the same place of birth and culture, not less than what bound them to the Yiddish-speakers praying to the same deity."

France

France is home to a large population of Arab Jews, predominantly with roots in Algeria.

United Kingdom

According to the 2011 United Kingdom census, 0.25% of Arabs in England and Wales and 0.05% of Arabs in Scotland identified their religion as Judaism.

United States

Many Arab-Jewish immigrants have settled in New York City and formed a Sephardi community. The community is centered in Brooklyn and is primarily composed of Syrian Jews. Other Arab Jews in New York City hail from Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Morocco. Arab Jews first began arriving in New York City in large numbers between 1880 and 1924. Most Arab immigrants during these years were Christian, while Arab Jews were a minority and Arab Muslims largely began migrating during the mid-1960s. When Syrian Jews first began to arrive in New York City during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews on the Lower East Side sometimes disdained their Syrian co-coreligionists as Arabische Yidden, Yiddish for "Arab Jews". Some Ashkenazim doubted whether Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East were Jewish at all. In response, some Syrian Jews who were deeply proud of their ancient Jewish heritage, derogatorily dubbed Ashkenazi Jews as "J-Dubs", a reference to the first and third letters of the English word "Jew". In the 1990 United States Census, there were 11,610 Arab Jews in New York City, comprising 23 percent of the total Arab population of the city. Arab Jews in the city sometimes still face anti-Arab racism.

Notable individuals who use the term

• Ella Shohat, who criticizes aspects of Zionism and uses the term in contrast to the Zionist establishment's categorization of Jews as either Ashkenazim or Mizrahim; Arab Jews, she believes, have been oppressed as the non-Jewish Arabs have.
• Sasson Somekh, professor at Tel Aviv University, in a recent memoir.
• André Azoulay, adviser to Moroccan King Mohammed VI.
• David Shasha, Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage;
• Jordan Elgrably, director of the Levantine Cultural Center;
• Ammiel Alcalay, a professor at Queens College in New York who began emphasizing the importance of his identity as an Arab Jew in the 1990s.
• Ilan Halevi, described himself as "100% Jewish and 100% Arab."
• Rachel Shabi, journalist and author who has criticized the stigmatization of Arab-Jewish culture in Israel.

See also

• History of the Jews under Muslim rule
• Jewish ethnic divisions
• Palestinian Jews
• Yemenite Jews
• Mozarabs

External links

• Reuvin Snir The Arab Jews: Language, Poetry, and Singularity
• Judeus dos Países Árabes