Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History

Ashkenazi Prejudice at the Forward

by Joachim Martillo

 

According to Rejecting the 'Arab Jew' in the Forward.com (Philologos, Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008), former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal recently made the following comment in a discussion of the hypothetical state of relations between Israel and the Arab world once Israel withdraws from all occupied Arab territories after the signing of a peace treaty.

"We will start thinking of Israelis as Arab Jews rather than simply as Israelis."

In reply to Turki's rather silly statement, Philologos took the opportunity both

• to take a nasty pot shot at NYU professor Ella Shohat for rejecting the Ashkenazification of Arab Jewish history (see below) and also
• to show either willful ignorance or typical Zionist mendacity.

He wrote the following.

It's true that Jews lived for hundreds and even thousands of years throughout the Middle East, and that after the Arabization of the region that started with the spread of Islam in the seventh century, they became linguistically and culturally Arabized, just as Jews in America have become linguistically and culturally Americanized. But it's also true that, in the course of these centuries, no Middle Eastern Jew, if asked whether he was an Arab, would have said yes, no matter how at home he felt in his environment. And for that matter, no Arab would have called his Jewish neighbor an Arab either. Jewishness and Arabness were perceived as antonyms in the sense of denoting two mutually exclusive ethnic identities, just as "Jew" and "goy" were antonyms in Eastern Europe. It was only in the 20th century that small numbers of Jews — most of them communists or on the Anti-Zionist political left — in cosmopolitan Arab cities like Cairo and Baghdad began to argue on behalf of an "Arab Jewish" identity as a way of repudiating Jewish nationalism and justifying their participation in Arab revolutionary politics.

Despite the assertion, from the Medieval until the Modern period, Jewish Arabs frequently identified themselves as Arabs in contexts of interaction between non-Arabic and Arabic speakers. There is no significant difference between Arab Christian, Arab Jewish and Arab Muslim behavior in this regard.

 

On page 358, The Jew in the Medieval World, A Source Book: 315-1791 by Jacob R. Marcus provides a translation of a ninth century Persian language example, in which the Persian ship captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar describes a conversation between a Jewish merchant and a Himalayan king as related by the Jewish merchant.

"The King of this city was a powerful and respected prince. When I presented myself before him, he was seated on a golden throne encrusted with rubies, he himself being covered with jewels like a woman. The Queen was at his side still more richly apparelled. He had on his neck necklaces of gold and emeralds of inestimable value such as no kings of East or West possessed. Near him there were about  500 young girls of all colors attired in silk robes and jewels. I saluted him.

 

"'Oh Arab,' he said, 'have you ever seen anything more beautiful than this?' He showed me a necklace adorned with enamels."

The text continues with a discussion of a transaction between the king and the Jewish merchant. Nothing indicates that it was at all unusual for Jewish Arabs to identify themselves or be identified as Arabs in such contexts.

 

In contrast, S. D. Goitein recounts that Jewish Yemeni Arabs usually referred to ethnic Ashkenazim and German Jews as Christian Jews, for like other Jewish Arabs, Jewish Yemenis perceived European Jews as belonging to an ethnicity distinct from themselves just as Irish and Sicilian Catholics agree that they share a common religious identity despite different ethnic identities.

 

In general Jewish Arabs, unless indoctrinated by European Zionists, had little interest in the Zionist Jewish national identity that had replaced the Jewish religious identity among some German Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazim,

 

Not only is Ella Shohat is completely correct that the destruction of Jewish Arab communities and the murder of Arab Palestine (the Nakba) have a common origin in the genocidal program of Zionism (see below), but Zionist crimes against the native Palestinian population in combination with Zionist incitement in claiming the equivalence of Judaism and Zionism managed to create hostility where none existed previously.

 

Not only have Zionists attempted to erase the native Palestinian population from Palestine, but they have also attempted to erase and rewrite the history of Jewish Arabs and the history of interactions among Jewish, Christians, and Muslim Arabs.

 

The combined erasure of people and history is the Holoexaleipsis, which is the archetypal crime of genocide and far more disturbing that the Holocaust, which was for the most part an unjustifiable but understandable reaction to the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide in whose planning and execution far too many Soviet Ashkenazim were involved during the creation and consolidation of the Soviet Union.

 

While the behavior of Arab states toward Jewish Arabs could have been better, the destruction of Arab Jewish communities is a crime that must be ascribed to Zionists and that has much similarity to the destruction of Yiddish culture within the Soviet Union by the Yevsektsia (ЕвСекция) or Jewish Section (Еврейская секция) of the Soviet Communist Party.

 

http://www.forward.com/articles/12561/

 

Rejecting the 'Arab Jew'
On Language

By Philologos
Wed. Jan 30, 2008

'A senior Saudi royal has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories," a Reuters dispatch reported last week, citing an interview with former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal. In the course of this interview, the prince was quoted as saying, "We will start thinking of Israelis as Arab Jews rather than simply as Israelis."

Some vision of cooperation!

Needless to say, Prince Turki's use of the term "Arab Jews" reflects either a comically naive misunderstanding on his part of who Israelis are, or the more sinister hope that they will one day cease to be who they are. In the best case, the prince's remarks are ignorant and patronizing, and they reveal how even many supposedly sophisticated Arabs haven't a clue that Israelis, although they live in the middle of an Arab expanse, are a people with a unique language, culture, history and identity of their own. If Prince Turki thinks that once peace is declared, Israelis will cheerfully agree to become another ethnic minority in the Arab Middle East, he is living in a cloud of nargileh smoke.

On the whole, however, one doesn't come across the term "Arab Jews" in this context. Rather, it is used — mostly by Arabs but also by some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist intellectuals in the West — for the close to 1 million Jews who lived in Arab lands prior to the establishment of Israel, after which they left or were expelled from their native countries and immigrated to Israel or elsewhere. Thus, for instance, Ella Habiba Shohat, a professor of cultural and women's studies at New York's City University, writes of herself in an essay titled "Reflections by an Arab Jew":

"I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S…. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion [leading to] a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms…. The same historical process [that is, the establishment of Israel] that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries…."

There is, of course, a cynical absurdity in blaming Israel for the wholesale plunder of Jewish property by Arab regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and other countries that forbade Jews to take money or possessions with them when they emigrated from or were thrown out of these places. But apart from this, what is it that makes one wince at the term "Arab Jews"? After all, don't Ms. Shohat and others like her have a point? If a Jew living in America is an American Jew, and a Jew living in Europe is a European Jew, why isn't a Jew living in an Arab country an Arab Jew? Is not the objection to calling him that a form of Arabaphobia?

I think not. Anti-Arab prejudice has nothing to do with it. Historically speaking, Ms. Shohat is simply dead wrong.

It's true that Jews lived for hundreds and even thousands of years throughout the Middle East, and that after the Arabization of the region that started with the spread of Islam in the seventh century, they became linguistically and culturally Arabized, just as Jews in America have become linguistically and culturally Americanized. But it's also true that, in the course of these centuries, no Middle Eastern Jew, if asked whether he was an Arab, would have said yes, no matter how at home he felt in his environment. And for that matter, no Arab would have called his Jewish neighbor an Arab either. Jewishness and Arabness were perceived as antonyms in the sense of denoting two mutually exclusive ethnic identities, just as "Jew" and "goy" were antonyms in Eastern Europe. It was only in the 20th century that small numbers of Jews — most of them communists or on the Anti-Zionist political left — in cosmopolitan Arab cities like Cairo and Baghdad began to argue on behalf of an "Arab Jewish" identity as a way of repudiating Jewish nationalism and justifying their participation in Arab revolutionary politics.

One speaks of "American Jews" and "European Jews" rather than of "Jews living in America" or "Jews living in Europe," because Jews in these places think of themselves as Americans and Europeans. But traditionally, Jews living in Arab lands never thought of themselves as anything but Jews living in Arab lands, and I challenge Ms. Shohat to produce a single pre-20th-century text that suggests otherwise. To refer to these communities as "Arab Jews" is not only to imply that Zionism tore them away from their true homelands for the false lure of a Jewish state; it is to demean them by denying them their own sense of themselves. It's a term that justly deserves to be rejected.

Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.

Wed. Jan 30, 2008

 

 

 

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