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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
Much work has been done in recent decades on the histories of the Jews of Arab lands across a variety of time periods, reflecting an increasing interest in the historical past of the Jews of the “Orient.” While diverse, this literature may be divided into several general groups. The first comprises studies written by Western and Israeli scholars and encompasses a broad spectrum of Arabic-speaking countries. This literature has explored, among other things, issues relating to the way of life and administration of ethnically and culturally diverse Jewish communities, their approaches to Zionism and the question of their national identities, their positions regarding the Zionist–Israeli–Arab conflict in its various phases, and the phenomena of anti-Semitism, particularly in light of the increasing escalation of the conflict. It includes works by Israeli intellectuals of Mizrahi heritage, some of whom came together in the late 1990s in a sociopolitical dissident movement known as the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition. The target audience of this movement was Mizrahi Jews: refugees and emigrants from Arab countries as well as their second- and third-generation offspring. The movement, which was not ideologically homogeneous (particularly regarding approaches to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict), took a postcolonialist approach to the Zionist narrative and enterprise, and was critical of the entrenchment of the Ashkenazi (European-extraction) Jews among the elites of the emerging Israeli society. The movement had scant success in reaching its target population: the majority of Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews living in Israel. Nevertheless, it brought to the fore the historical socioeconomic injustices that many Jews from Arab countries had experienced since arriving in Israel, whether reluctantly or acquiescently.
1 See, among many others, Bashkin, Orit, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Rejwan, Nissim, The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Somekh, Sasson, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2007)Google Scholar; Gat, Moshe, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1997)Google Scholar; Laskier, M. M., The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970 (New York: New York University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Beinin, Joel, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Cultural, Politics and the Formation of the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Landau, J. M., Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Shamir, Shimon, ed., The Jews of Egypt: A Mediterranean Society in Modern Times (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Krämer, Gudrun, The Jews in Modern Egypt: 1914–1952 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989)Google Scholar; Roumani, Maurice M., The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Simon, Rachel, Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1992)Google Scholar; De Felice, Renzo, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Schulze, Kirsten E., The Jews of Lebanon: Between Coexistence and Conflict (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 Shohat, Ella, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, nos. 19/20 (1988): 25Google Scholar. On the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, see Rosmer, Tilde, “Israel's Middle Eastern Jewish Intellectuals: Identity and Discourse,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 9 (2014): 62–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Stephanie Schwartz, “Double-Diaspora in the Literature and Film of Arab Jews” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2012), 14.
4 Shenhav, Yehouda, “How did the Mizrahim ‘Become’ Religious Zionists? Zionism, Colonialism and the Religionization of the Arab-Jew,” News From Within 20 (2006): 73Google Scholar. See also idem, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). For ruminations on the complexities of using the term “Arab Jews,” see Lisa Lital Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkley, 2007), 10–17. See also Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday.
5 Lital Levy, “Jewish Writers,” 13.
6 My father was a descendant of the eminent Jewish philologist Jonah Ibn Janah (990–1050), who lived in Muslim Spain and wrote his pioneering works in Arabic; my maternal grandmother was Egyptian from Alexandria.
7 Abu Al-Ghar, Muhammad, Yahud Misr min al-Izdihar ila al-Shatat (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 2004)Google Scholar.
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10 Shirizi, Marsil (Israel), Awraq Munadil Itali fi Misr (Cairo: Dar al-ʿAlam al-Thalith, 2002), 12Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., 45–47.
12 Quoted in Ginat, Rami, A History of Egyptian Communism: Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2011), 248Google Scholar.
13 Shirizi, Awraq, 47–50.
14 Harun, Shahata, Yahudi fi al-Qahira (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1987), 9–14Google Scholar.
15 Ginat, A History of Egyptian Communism.