Arab + Jew = true

.
Last weekend I was at a guided tour in Jerusalem in order to learn more about the Middle Eastern Jews in Israel, a group often called Mizrahi. Rotem Mor, the Israeli guy that was giving the tour, told us about the rich history of Jews in the Middle East. Throughout this history, there have been many cultural links between the Arab and the Jewish culture. For instance, in Andalucia in the Middle Ages, the Hebrew language was changed so that one could write poems in the Arabic style and structures. And the great Jewish Medieval philosopher, Rambam (in the West often called Maimonides), actually wrote in so called "Jewish Arabic", meaning Arabic with the Hebrew alphabet.

In general, life for Jews was easier in the Middle East than in Europe, Rotem told us. Although they were not equal with Muslims, in most cases they did not suffer persecutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there lived around one million Jews in the Middle East. They were not very much involved in Zionism, but the tensions that were growing in Palestine, were also felt by Jews living in the rest of the region. This, and the second world war, made the Mizrahi start to ask whether there was a place for them in the Arab countries anymore. Israel also actively tried to make Middle Eastern Jews immigrate through different policies.

In many ways, however, the Mizrahi ended up in an underprivileged position in the Israeli society, living near the borders, where it was more difficult to stay regarding both economy and security. Besides, the majority ended up doing physical work, while the European Jews (Ashkenazi) dominated the universities. A reaction to this was the movement The Israeli Black Panthers (inspired by the Black Panthers in the USA), who were active in the early 70s. Rotem told us the story of the Black Panthers while showing us a previously Mizrahi -now mixed- neighbourhood in Jerusalem. After the conquest in 1948 it had been named Morasha by Israeli authorities, but the Mizrahi preferred to use the Arabic name, Musrara, as most of them were more familiar with Arabic than with Hebrew.


From the Morasha/Musrara neighbourhood.

Because of a comment I had on one on my blog posts (one from December called "An image in captivity"), I was interested in knowing more about how and why the Mizrahi Jews left their countries in the late 40s and in the 50s. The writer of the comment made a connection between the Palestinian refugees and what he saw as Jewish refugees from the Arab countries: As Arab Jews had been received in Israel, Palestinians should be integrated in their "new homeland". So I asked Rotem: Were the Middle Eastern Jews expelled? Is it valid to think of the Mizrahi and the Palestinians as an exchange of refugees? An interesting conversation followed.

Rotem said that it was more correct to say that the Middle Eastern Jews were questioning their future in the Arab countries rather than that there was an expulsion. And he referred to the stand of The Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow, an umbrella group for Middle Eastern Jews, who do not accept the idea of a refugee exchange. The reason for this is that the two groups in question did not benefit from it. The property left by Mizrahi in Arab countries is not in the hands of Palestinian refugees, and the old Arab houses that the Palestinians left, now are the homes mostly of Ashkenazi families. And, (this is my own argument) this exchange was not chosen by the two groups.

If you want to read more about the Mizrahi, see the website of The Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow. They have several interesting articles, among others one about Iraqi-Israeli literature and one about the relationship between the Mizrahi issue and the Palestinian issue, written by professor Jehouda Shenhav, who is also a Mizrahi Jew.

One of the things that Mizrahi seem to have struggled with, was their Arab cultural background. For them, as Arab Jews, it was their own culture, but as Israelis, it was the culture of the enemy. I think this is very well captured in the this poem, "Baghdad, February 1991" by Ronny Someck:

Along these bombed-out streets I was pushed in a baby carriage.
Babylonian girls pinched my cheeks and waved palm fronds over my blond down...
What's left from then became very black like Baghdad and the baby carriage we removed from the shelter the days we waited for another war.
Oh Tigris, oh Euphrates, pet snakes in the first map of my life,
how you shed your skin and became vipers.
.