Mizrahi Jews

קשה להפריז בתרומתה של הפרדיגמה של האזרחות המרובה לניתוח ההיסטורי-פוליטי של החברה והמדינה בישראל, אותה הציע יואב פלד כתשובה לגישת "הלאומיות המתודולוגית", ששלטה בכיפה וראתה בתהליכי בינוי האומה כפריזמה הבלעדית להבנת התפתחותה ההיסטורית של החברה בישראל. הדיון באזרחות היה לכר פורה למחקרים על משטר האזרחות, על מעמד האזרחים, ובמיוחד על אופני הקצאתן של זכויות האזרחות בחברה. כיום נדמה מאמרו המקורי של פלד כאירוע השייך לזמן היסטורי אחר. מטרתו של מאמר זה היא לבחון את מידת הרלוונטיות של המודל כתיאוריה חברתית-ביקורתית בהקשר הישראלי, ומעבר לכך לשאול מהי תכליתה של התיאוריה של האזרחות כחלק מסדר יום פוליטי פרוגרסיבי עכשווי. לאחר שאציע ביקורת למודל האזרחות המרובה אדון בקצרה בפוליטיקה המזרחית ויחסה לסוגיית הדת בישראל על מנת להציע נקודת מבט חדשה על האזרחות כתופעה חברתית וכפריזמה תיאורטית.

Iraq was once home to one of the oldest and longest-standing Jewish communities in the Arab world, and the center of Judaism for over a thousand years. Between 1948 and 1951, following the establishment of the State of Israel, around 130,000 Jews fled Iraq and the 2500 year old diasporic Jewish community in the Middle East ceased to exist. The mass displacement is puzzling given the high level of cultural integration, coupled with the traumatic nature of departure, which make Iraqi-Jewish history a contested site of memory that is particularly subject to politicized narratives. While Iraqi Jewish experiences are narrated in terms of coexistence and persecution and used to bolster Zionist and anti-Zionist agendas, Iraqi-born Jews— those who experienced these events firsthand— are often the last to articulate their own stories and views.
My thesis presents oral history interviews of 25 Iraqi-born Jews regarding questions of identity, emigration, and relationship with Zionism. I argue for alternative narratives that acknowledge the dualities in identity and pluralities within communities, and reject simplistic narratives of Iraqi-Jewish experiences. My project aims to preserve the experiences in firsthand form from the last generation of Iraqi-born Jews, by incorporating oral history interviews as a focal point to explain and understand complicated and conflicting identities, address the gap left by existing literature in this area, tell previously untold narratives, and to preserve and give precedence to Iraqi-Jewish voices.

This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Iraqi Jewish author, Shimon Ballas (and edited by Almog Behar and Yuval Evri). The essay examines how Ballas, who was himself in exile from Iraq, relates the experiences of other exiles. Considering Ballas’ oeuvre, I detect his tendency to draw literary portraits—that is, to dedicate each novel to a detailed literary portrait of a single, forgotten historical figure. Unlike Albert Memmi, another Arab Jewish author who was fond of portraits (“portrait of the colonizer,” “portrait of the colonized,” “portrait of a Jew”), Ballas’s portraits were never abstract. They were based rather on true biographies of forgotten historical figures, ones who were never at home in a single nation or culture. The gallery that Ballas forms by amassing together these various portraits allows him to challenge the necessity of the Zionist narrative and to reintroduce other historical possibilities. Focusing on Ballas’ novel Locked Chamber (1980), which sketches a portrait of a Palestinian in Israel, I argue that in trying to convey Palestinian experiences Ballas does not draw on the content of Palestinian literature but rather on its form—particularly as it has been refined by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose work Ballas had researched and translated. By reading Edward Said’s thoughts on the episodic form of Kanafani’s writing, I show how Ballas borrows this technique both to convey the rupture introduced by 1948 into Palestinian and Arab time and to insist that he, too, is part of the Arab world.

The paper address the history of use of surnames by Jews in Iraq. It discusses the main patterns of forming surnames, the phonetic, graphic, and morphological peculiarities of these surnames that are primarily based on the Judeo-Arabic dialect spoken by Jews of Baghdad.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ

The article analyzes short stories by Eliezer Smoli (1901-1985), a recipient of the Israel Prize for children’s literature. The works discussed here, dating from the early years of the state to the 1980s, feature immigrants from Islamic countries as their main protagonists. After my initial review of the ways in which Mizrahim are depicted in historical and literary studies, I delineate my own methodology for exploring their characterization both as individuals and as a group. Smoli’s portrayal of immigrants from Islamic countries is complex and largely free of the negative stereotypes that prevailed during the early decades of the state. In his stories, Mizrahim are featured as Zionist pioneers with a culture of their own. Smoli portrays their family life and the Jewish cultural capital they brought to Israel in a positive light, conveying their perspective to his young readership while exposing the failure of the establishment to assimilate them. The article contributes to the scholarship of image and representation in general, and in particular, and to study of the depiction of immigrants from Islamic countries in Israeli children’s literature.

ספר בגדאד – מבחר שירים, סיפורים וחלומות 2017-2003 להורדה חינם כקובץ פידיאף


בימות מלחמת אמריקה-עיראק השניה ב-2003 הייתי הולך ברחובות ירושלים ומתכנן בראשי ספר שיקרא "החיפוש אחר הרומן העיראקי הגדול" וטווה עלילותיו. תכננתי שכל אחד מפרקיו ילך בעקבות מה שנכתב על בבל, עיראק, בגדאד,  החדקל והמעברה, מגן העדן ומגדל בבל, דרך הנביא יחזקאל ומסעות בנימין מטודלה ועד חורחה לואיס בורחס, אמירה הס, סמי מיכאל וסמיר נקאש. לספריה במחשב שבה קיבצתי את הטיוטות קראתי "בגדאד שבספרים", ובה אספתי ציטוטים והתחלות סיפורים.

בסופו של דבר לא כתבתי את הספר ההוא, אך רעיונותיו התגלגלו לנובלה "אמירה בת סלימה", לסיפורים "איכה ישבה בגדאד" ו"אנא מן אל-יהוד", למסה "חלומות באספניה", לרומן "צ'חלה וחזקל" ולעוד שירים, סיפורים, מסות וטיוטות.

ועתה אני מנסה לשחזר את אותו ספר נחלם ונעלם, מתוך הטיוטות.

בחרתי להתחיל אותו מהשיר שנכתב בלילה הראשון של המלחמה ההיא, מלחמת המפרץ השניה. קבעתי לי את אותו לילה ירושלמי של תחילת המלחמה כלימוד של נבואות הזעם על בבל בתנ"ך ונבואות הנחמה לגולים השבים מבבל, והייתי הולך ברחובות ירושלים ומסכת גז באריזת הקרטון שלה על כתפי. בסוף אותו הלילה כתבתי את השיר "איכה ישבה בגדאד".

בדברים הבאים אנסה להשיב על שאלות אלו על בסיס קריאה ביקורתית בספר "מזרחים בישראל". ניסיון זה לגבש מענה לשאלות אלו על בסיס הקריאה של ספר זה מתבקשת ולו רק בגלל העובדה שאחד האתגרים המרכזיים שעמם הוא מתמודד הוא ניסוחה של נקודת מבט מזרחית ביקורתית על החברה בישראל. יתרה מזאת, ההתמודדות עם אתגר זה מעידה יותר מכל על אופיו של הספר ועל כותביו, המציבים את עצמם לא רק כחוקרים וחוקרות אקדמיים, אלא גם כפעילים בעלי תודעה פוליטית קונקרטית ביחס למושא המחקר שלהם (המזרחים בישראל). לפיכך, ניתן לראות בהופעתו של הספר כאחת מתוצאות הלוואי של הקמת הקשת הדמוקרטית המזרחית ושל פעילותה. לא זו בלבד שחלק נכבד מהמאמרים המופיעים בספר נכתבו על-ידי חברים פעילים בקשת, אלא שגם חלק ניכר מהנחות היסוד העיוניות והערכיות הכלולות בו מהדהדים בפעילותה הציבורית של התנועה. החיבור הזה, בין ידע תיאורטי לבין ידע פוליטי, הוא לדעתי תעודת הזהות של הקשת, המחויבת לא רק לעשייה הפוליטית, אלא גם להוביל בניסוח הידע אודות השאלה המזרחית בישראל.

גרשם שלום -- תולדות התנועה השבתאית // 
History of the Sabbatian Movement was the first attempt by one of the giants of scholarship on Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), to present a comprehensive picture of Sabbatianism as a single narrative. The book is based on the series of lectures given at the Hebrew University during 1939-1940, which are of special importance in that they laid the foundation for all of Scholem’s research in the years to come, including his extensive monograph Sabbatai Sevi: the mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, first published in 1957. What follows is a sketch of the massive History of the Sabbatian Movement, over which Gershom Scholem toiled his whole life but never completed. The lectures are presented here for the first time based on the original manuscripts, alongside the text of an additional series of lectures that Scholem gave as part of the “Month of Study” organized by Berl Katznelson in 1941. These long-hidden texts reveal new facets of the Sabbatian movement and its history, as well as of Gershom Scholem as a historian, and serve as prologue to any further study of this most stormy and complicated episode in Jewish history. The new edition includes a comprehensive introduction by the editors on all of Gershom Scholem’s studies on Sabbatianism. //---//

Table of Contents:
“The Open Book” - Jonatan Meir and Shinichi Yamamoto /
Introduction /
Chapter One: The Faces of the Generation /
Chapter Two: The Messianic Movement from its Beginnings to its Height /
Chapter Three: The Twists and Turns of the Sabbatian Movement /
Chapter Four: The Historical Development of Sabbatianism /
Appendix A: Messianism from the Spanish Expulsion to the Eve of Emancipation (Month of Study, 1941) /
Appendix B: The Sabbatian Movement: Its Roots, Its Development, and its Aftermath (Introduction, 1942-45 /
Appendix C: Bibliography of Works by Gershom Scholem on Sabbatianism /
Index /
Notes on the Cover Image (from the collection of Paweł Maciejko)

//--// Order The BOOK
http://www.schocken-jts.org.il/english/bookstore/prodView.asp?idproduct=408

Offered at Cornell University, Spring 2022. COURSE DESCRIPTION: This class examines modern articulations of identity by and about two distinct Jewish diasporas: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Sephardic Jews trace their origins to the Iberian Peninsula prior to the end of the 15th century. Mizrahim are Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa until the mid-20th century, and their descendants. We will explore Sephardic and Mizrahi identities in works of fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry and films produced from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will trace routes of migration across generations, paying particular attention to how texts construct identity in relation to language and place. Works will be drawn from wide geographic distribution including the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and produced in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Ladino, and Spanish.

My sincere thanks to Edgar Xavier (https://independent.academia.edu/EdgarXavier2) for kindly pointing out some errors of fact in this paper. On page 70, the Herald is incorrectly identified as an Indonesian Catholic newspaper. The newspaper is Malaysian. And, of course, Kuala Lumpur (as mentioned in footnote 49), is the capital city of Malaysia - not Indonesia. So the phrase in parenthesis at the end of the second paragraph on page 70 should read "(an Arabic loanword in Malay [Bahasa Melayu])".  Again, sincere thanks to Edgar for his close reading of the paper and his taking the trouble to point out these errors.

Jonathan

Until the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were roughly 750,000 Jews living in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Palestine/Israel. A comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers. The question I address is simple yet potentially foundational: which collective signifier can define and capture most productively, inclusively and comprehensively the socio-political and cultural experiences of those who comprised the Arab Middle East's ten indigenous Jewish minority communities prior to their dispersal (in the post-1949 armistice period)? I propose that the signifier ‘Arabized-Jews’ exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. As such, ‘Arabized-Jews’ denotes Jews who were culturally and/or linguistically Arab yet who did not self-define primarily as Arab, let alone in political terms. In exploring the dialectic interface between ethno-politics, terminological formations and the production of meaning, this article suggests that it makes sense for contemporary scholars to employ ‘Arabized-Jews’ to refer collectively to Jews across the modern Arab Middle East.

After 1948, Israel’s governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four-part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.

יש מן המזרחיות: על הרישום לאחור של תוכני הזהות

יצחק בנימיני

במסה זו יצחק בנימיני מציע מסגרת תיאורטית ייחודית להבנת שאלת המזרחיות. טענתו היא שאין לאתר את המזרחיות בתכנים פוזיטיביים כלשהם, מהותיים, סוציולוגיים או היסטוריים. תחת זאת, יש לפנות אל צורת פעולתו של המסמן ״מזרחיות״ בשיח הפוליטי העכשווי. בנימיני גורס כי הפנייה העכשווית אל ה״מזרחיות״ נעשית על פי מבנה הבדיעבד של פרויד; לפי מבנה זה, אירוע טראומטי נחווה רק דרך הסימפטומים המאוחרים שלו, ולכן הוא נחווה ואף מתקיים לראשונה רק בדיעבד, כאירוע משני, על פי אופני רישומו. באופן דומה, טוען בנימיני, העבר המזרחי נרשם רק מעמדת ההווה, שמכוננת אותו באיחור. לכן במקום לשאול על אמיתותם של התכנים המוכלים היום בעמדות מזרחיות שונות, ותהיה זו עמדה לאומית קהילתנית של ״ישראל השנייה״ או עמדה אנטי-לאומית של היהודי-ערבי, יש לעקוב אחר כינונו המאוחר של המקור המזרחי; לעקוב לא על מנת לבטלו כתחבולה אידיאולוגית ותו לא, אלא על מנת לפתוח את המרחב הפנזטמטי הרוחש אל מעבר למונוליתיות הכמו-עובדתית של הזהות המזרחית.

In the following article we will examine at length some of the dynamics by which R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad—the renowned Ben Ish Hai (1834–1909) - integrated Kabbalah into daily life, and the complex way that he combined the teachings of the Rashash with simplified, esoteric practices meant for the general public. Needless to say, the relationship between the Kabbalists of Jerusalem and R. Yosef Hayyim illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Kabbalah in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/148.short?rss=1

This paper focuses on the Jewish magical tradition as practiced in the Islamicate world in the Middle Ages. It begins with a bird’s-eye survey of the available evidence – both the extant magical texts and objects, and the discussions of such texts and practices by non-practitioners – and turns to a survey of the aims and techniques of the magical rituals themselves. It then examines the sources from which medieval Oriental Jews borrowed their magical texts and practices, including the continuous transmission of Jewish magical texts from pre-Islamic times and the borrowing and adaptation of numerous Arabic and Muslim magical texts and practices. Two specific practices, namely, rituals for summoning demons and the manufacturing of astrological talismans, are discussed in greater details. Next, an attempt is made to sketch the profile of the practitioners and their clients, who clearly included both men and women – but far more men than women! – and came from all strata of Jewish society. This also helps explain the vehement polemics against Rabbanite magical practices by the Karaites, as well as Maimonides’ repeated objections to most of these practices. Finally, the wide-spread recourse to magical practices, and the many debates about them, cast an interesting light on the problem of distniguishing between “magic” and “religion” in the Jewish world, where the two supposedly-separate spheres constantly interact with each other.

For the past twenty-five years, and particularly during the last decade, the idea of the Arab Jew has been debated in multiple forums in different parts of the world. The Arab Jew is represented in literature and film, discussed in blogs and social media, and featured in live performances. It has informed scholarship in literary and cultural studies, sociology, and history, in Israel, the Arab world, Europe, and North America. Yet the term “Arab Jew” remains controversial, especially in Israel, where it is widely viewed as a left-wing political concept. This article surveys the Arab Jew’s full range of expression to date, emphasizing the reciprocal movement of ideas across different geographies and between discursive spheres. It argues that the Arab Jew idea has developed as both a project of political intervention into the present-day separation of Arabness from Jewishness and a project of reconstruction focusing on the Jewish past in the MENA region. Examining recent episodes in the Israeli public sphere, the article investigates how contemporary discussions about Arab Jewish identity and culture utilize competing views of history. It concludes by reconsidering the relevance of the “Arab Jew” to the burgeoning historical scholarship on Jews in the MENA region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Construction and De-construction of the Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic/Mizrahi Dichotomy in Israeli Culture: Rabbi Eliyahou Zini vs. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef Authors(s): Joseph Ringel Source JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

This dissertation was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the MA Israeli Studies, SOAS, University of London.

This dissertation analyses the relationship between young Jewish intellectuals and activists of Middle Eastern and North African descent (mizraḥim) and broader Israeli society. In particular, it seeks to understand the ways in which younger mizraḥim think about their relationship(s) with Zionism, with Israel’s geographical neighbours and, especially, with what it means to be mizraḥi and Israeli in contemporary Israel. Intertwined with these questions are a number of historical, socio-political and cultural issues; consequently, this dissertation draws upon a theoretical framework integrating both the literature on ‘Arab Jews’ in relation to modern mizrahi identity and older visions of a more inclusive Israeli Levantine polity. It explores the above through an ethnographic exposition of components of a young mizraḥi (or, as the dissertation will argue, Levantine) identity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with mizraḥi activists young and old, the paper will discuss activism through cultural production, the use of Arabic, the relationship with Zionism and efforts to engage with Israel’s immediate environs.

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

The question was simple: should the Hebraist Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine invest in publishing a newspaper in Arabic and, if yes, should it be communitarian Jewish or general in its topics? What began as yet another obscure intra-Zionist deliberation gradually crystallized into what I argue merits the label of the earliest, explicitly Ashkenazi–Mizrahi ethnic controversy. This is with the smallest risk of the superimposition in hindsight of the terms and signifiers usually associated with Israel’s post-1971/Black-Panthers era onto the Ottoman period. Lasting between 1909 and 1913, the spirited exchange regarding the Arabic newspaper involved two dozen writers, mainly of the Sephardi–Mizrahi Haherut newspaper, and about one third of ethnic Ashkenazim writing elsewhere. It was nonetheless October 1911 that encapsulated the peak of the controversy, mainly due to writing by Mizrahi intellectual and activist Dr Shimon Moyal (1866–1915) and Ashkenazi intellectual and activist Dr Avraham Ludvipol (1865–1921). My decision to let primary texts speak for themselves at greater length than is customary results from my conviction that – in this case – extensive recourse to source material can convey best to twenty-first-century readers why the exchange is effectively “the mother” of all ensuing Mizrahi–Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. While clear definition for what constitutes such a controversy is provided, I close by offering a sample of views about the Arabic newspaper by four prominent Ashkenazi Zionists.

Nasreen Qadri is an Israeli pop singer of Palestinian-Arab origin whose professional achievements came in return for her loyalty to Israel. Successfully crossing cultural lines, Qadri claims Mizrahi identity, challenges the Ashkenazi-Zionist definition of Jews and Arabs as antagonistic ethnonational binaries, and helps Mizrahim reclaim their Judeo-Arabic heritage. However, following her controversial attempts to convert to Judaism, she fell short of crossing into religious-national privilege in Israel-Palestine. Qadri’s failure to overcome colonial segregation testifies to how Israeli racism is based on a perceived religious blood community, which is anchored in state laws and to which non-Jewish women are mostly exposed. Qadri’s case demonstrates how racialized politics of conversion are related to demographic considerations that show the fragility of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Finally, this article suggests that Palestinians in Israel may face elimination, if they seek racial and religious equality with Jews based on a shared Arab culture with Mizrahim.

To tell you the truth, there's something strange in coming to a conference about Arab-Jews in Cambridge. We, my generation, were born in Israel, descendants of parents who were born in the Middle East under the colonial powers—Britain, in the case of Iraq, France and Italy in other cases. We come to England to speak about our Arab-Jewish past, its present, and perhaps the possibility of its future: we come to speak in English about the Arab-Jew who was torn between Hebrew and Arabic, and England is not a neutral place in the twentieth-century history of the Arab-Jew. In the context of the Arab-Jewish community of Iraq, it was a place to oppose, as a colonial power, but also a place to look up to, to aspire to, even to imagine oneself as its descendant in a dream, for example in one of the poems by Amira Hess, the Iraqi-born Jerusalemite poet: " I am the daughter of Baghdad / I'm ready to swear / I was born in London. " 1 Our photo albums are filled with photographs of our grandfathers in British suits; some of our grandparents had British names. The colonial phase in Iraqi Jewish history is the main phase of the modern, secular, national Arab-Jew after the years of Ottoman rule, with its multinational character that stressed religious and communal identities. This modern " project " of the Arab-Jew (which can be seen in literature and politics, for example in the works of Anwar Shaul) was one in which the Arab-Jew was supposed to take part, in the design and building of a modern Iraqi nation having secular and liberal concepts. Some of the Arab-Jews participated in the growing Arab national movement, in particular the local national movements in various countries, and in the resistance to colonial rule.

This essay investigates the vision of two Jewish scholars of a shared Arab-Jewish history at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The first part of the essay focuses on Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s(1877-1951) re-examination of the Andalusian legacy in regard of the process of Jewish modernisation with respect to the symbolic and the actual return to the East. The second part of the essay centers on the work of Yosef Meyouhas (1863-1942), Yahuda’s contemporary and life-long friend who translated a collection of Biblical stories from the Arab-Palestinian oral tradition, examining the significance of this work vis-à-vis the mainstream Zionist approach

During Israel’s first decades, conflict between immigrants from Islamic countries and the Israeli establishment focused on questions regarding equality. The immigrants protested against discrimination in the labor market, against poor housing conditions, and against police brutality. The question of Mizrahi culture and identity was barely mentioned. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the ethnic discourse in Israel shifted from economic issues to cultural issues. Different groups challenged the school curriculum, asking for more attention to the history and literature of Jews from Islamic countries. Mizrahi music started to develop on the fringe of the Israeli musical scene and moved slowly into the mainstream. Political parties (Tami and Shas) identified with Mizrahi identity and emphasizing it, started to appear and to achieve success. This article provides examples of the expression of identity and culture in different fields and analyzes the causes of this change.

This study explores the previously unstudied anti-Jewish Persian polemic Anbāʾ al-anbiyāʾ by the Jewish convert to Twelver Šīʿī Islam, Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī, the father of Ḥāǧǧī Bābā Qazvīnī Yazdī. It examines Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī’s discussion of a medieval Jewish controversy concerning the four-kingdom schema in the book of Daniel and Ibn Ezra’s interpretation of the dream-vision in favor of Islam as the fourth kingdom. The study shows that Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī, besides his reference to Muslim works in Persian, relied on different (partly printed) Jewish textual sources in the original Hebrew and Aramaic (Miqraʾot Gedolot, Neḇuʾat ha-yeled, Sefer haš-šorašim, Sefer Josippon), from which he quoted in his own Persian translation/adaptation. He thus made internal Jewish debates accessible to native Muslim scholars, such as Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī, who borrowed from Anbāʾ al-anbiyāʾ. Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī was a cross-cultural intermediary and go-between who expanded the traditional range of Šīʿī polemical arguments against Judaism in pre-modern Iran.

Review
"This excellent study is [...] recommended for academic libraries."
Daniel Scheide, Florida Atlantic University, Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews, Volume VII, No. 2
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Abstract
It is difficult to ignore the diversity of the kabbalah or both its modest and coarse manifestations over the course of the twentieth-century – phenomena that have latterly garnered considerable attention in both the lay and research literature alike. That said, it appears that the historical background for these current developments, namely the world of the kabbalists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, has yet to merit an in-depth study. The dozens of hagiographies that are now being written by the progeny and admirers of the said kabbalists paint a romantic picture of a “glorious past.” In these books, the early twentieth century is described as a kabbalistic renaissance that is on equal footing with the days of Isaac Luria in Safad. Surprising as it may be, the Hebrew and Yiddish belles-lettres and, following in their footsteps, the research literature from Gershom Scholem onwards has left the impression that kabbalah deteriorated in the beginning of the twentieth century to the point of nearly vanishing of the world stage. According to this same narrative, only the efforts of a few surviving kabbalists—a sort of dying elite—kept the flame from expiring. On those rare occasions in which scholars bring up these practitioners, they are referred to as “the remnants of the kabbalists” or similar epithets. This characterization was painted in even louder colors upon describing the era’s Jerusalem-based kabbalists. At one and the same time, then, there are descriptions of both a great awakening and steep decline. The author’s attempt to make sense of this contradiction is one of the catalysts behind the present study. Its origins aside, the book focuses on the kabbalah seminaries (Yeshivot or academies) in Jerusalem from 1896 to 1948 as well as the various manifestations of kabbalah within traditional Jewish society.
Kabbalistic Circles in Jerusalem breaks new ground on the robust activities of Jerusalem’s kabbalistic yeshivot, foremost among them Beit el, Rehovot haNahar, and Sha'ar haShamayim. By virtue of these institutions’ publications and the unearthing of tens of documents and manuscripts that were deposited in sundry archives, the book surveys the daily schedule and methodology of these yeshivot; their methods for disseminating kabbalah books; the dynamics between revelation and concealment that undergirded all the kabbalists’ endeavors; the arrangement of the RaShaSh Siddur’s first print run; the messianic outlooks that were espoused in this community regarding the attempts to discover the Sambatyon River and the lost tribes; and the content and assorted roles of the Tikkunim literature. What is more, the author explores the disagreements between competing groups—most notably, the feud over the extent to which occult wisdom should be exposed to the general public—and the various gradients of Jewish mysticism within these seminaries.
Against this backdrop, shedding light on Jerusalem’s kabbalist circles between the years 1896 and 1948 opens a door to the wider world of the myriad kabbalistic streams in East Europe and Arab lands, the Maghreb included. The foundations that were laid by these yeshivas in the early twentieth century also paved the way for the contemporary blossoming of kabbalah in many and manifold circles. In this sense, retracing the pertinent developments in the Land of Israel at the outset of the twentieth century is imperative not only for repairing the distorted picture of the past, but for understanding the ongoing surge in kabbalah study
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This book endeavors to fill a lacuna in the literature on early twentieth-century kabbalah, namely the lack of a comprehensive account of the traditional kabbalah seminaries (Yeshivot) in Jerusalem from 1896 to 1948 as well as the various manifestations of kabbalah within traditional Jewish society. The foundations that were laid in the early twentieth century also paved the way for the contemporary blossoming of kabbalah in many and manifold circles. In this sense, retracing the pertinent developments in Palestine at the outset of the twentieth century is imperative not only for repairing the distorted picture of the past, but for understanding the ongoing surge in kabbalah study.

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