Month: June 2017

Tunisians urge boycott of ‘Zionist’ Boujenah

Tunisians are calling to boycott the celebrated comic Michel Boujenah, who is due to appear on 19 July at the Carthage Festival.

Michel Boujenah: born in Tunis

In an open letter addressed to the minister of culture and festival director, the boycotters, from the Tunisian branch of the BDS movement,  claim that Boujenah, who was born in Tunisia but lives in France, is not only a proud Zionist but also considers himself part of the ‘Israeli people’.

The signatories call on the Tunisian government to assume its responsibilities vis-a-vis ‘normalisation’ and reaffirm the country’s historical, unconditional support for the Palestinian people.

Tunisian social media surfers are evenly divided on the issue. Hundreds think that his apearance on the stage at Carthage should be cancelled. Others are surprised at the fierce reaction against Michel Boujenah. Yamina Thabet of the Tunisian Association for the Support of Minorities (ATSM) denounced the campaign against the comic as ‘bullying behaviour’ and ‘antisemitic’.

Boujenah is scheduled to perform in Israel on 25 July.

Enrico Macias, the pro-Israel Algerian born singer, cancelled several planned visits to his country of birth after fierce popular protests.  

Read article in full (French)

Using language to advance politics (updated)

The anti-Zionist academic Ella Shohat, who is no expert in this field, is politicising the study of linguistics by denying the existence of separate ‘Judeo-Arabic’ languages. To her they are all Arabic, with minor variations. Lyn Julius blogs in The Times of Israel following Shohat’s lecture at SOAS in London:

Ella Shohat: advancing an agenda

‘A language is a dialect with an army and navy’.

How best do you delegitimise a nation whose existence you despise?

The answer, according to Ella Shohat, an academic from New York University, is to downgrade a language to a dialect.

Ella Shohat is the high priestess of ‘Mizrahi
anti-Zionism’. In London recently to give a talk at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, she has made her name by applying the
theories propagated by the Palestinian author of ‘Orientalism,
Edward Said, to Jews from Arab lands. She is best known for inventing
the expression ‘Arab Jew’ to denote a creature torn from its natural
habitat by Zionism – itself deemed an extension of western colonialism.
Thus Jewish nationalism stands accused of destroying what she terms
‘Arab-Jewish culture’.

To follow Ella’s logic, an ‘Arab Jew’ does not
speak a separate Jewish language called Judeo-Arabic: he or she speaks
Arabic, albeit with minor variations. In order to reinforce her argument
she downplays these differences. The only real distinction, according
to her, is that Judeo-Arabic is written in the characters of
‘liturgical’ Hebrew.

It is possible to argue that a speaker of
Judeo-Arabic uses enough Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, Persian and English
terms, as well as idiosyncratic syntax and proverbs, to make himself
unintelligible to a regular Arabic speaker. And then there is the Jewish
accent, which would not only make a Jew a figure of fun to the Muslim
listener, but instantly give his ethnicity away.

In her eagerness to assimilate the Jewish
dialects to ‘regular Arabic’, Ella is forced to minimise the differences
in the ‘regular’ Arabic spoken across the Arab world.  From a
linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken
varieties of Arabic differ from each other about as much as French
differs from other Romance languages. Moroccan Arabic is as
incomprehensible to Arabs from the Middle East as French is
incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers ( but relatively easily
learned by them). It is even suggested that the spoken varieties of
Arabic may linguistically be considered separate languages.

In Israel,  the last generation of Jews who
were born in Arab lands are dying off and their children and
grandchildren have all shifted to speaking Hebrew. You would have
thought that Ella, who deplores the ‘suppression’ of Arabic in Israel’s
early years because it was the ‘language of the enemy’ –  would welcome
the revival of interest in, not just Ladino or Yiddish, but Judeo-Arabic
( eg Iraqi-Jewish or Moroccan-Jewish). A Facebook page called
‘preserving the Iraqi-Jewish language’ has over 30, 000 followers.

But no. To Ella,  there is no need to consider
Iraqi-Jewish endangered or to preserve what is still living and spoken
by the non-Jewish neighbours. Emphasising the ‘Jewish’ character of
these dialects becomes a distasteful political act.  Not only – as the
controversial academic Shlomo Sand claims –  has a separate Jewish
people been invented, Israel has invented ‘Jewish languages’.

But it is Ella who is manipulating language to
advance an agenda. As the saying goes,’ dialect is just politics.’ And
this is the abysmal level to which the teaching of Middle Eastern
studies in our universities has sunk today.

Read article in full 

Postscript: during her lecture Ella Shohat quoted from Naim Kattan’s book Farewell Babylon to illustrate an episode when Jews and Muslims began speaking the same Jewish dialect together, indicating that there was no difference between them. In actual fact, Shohat was misquoting the passage (p27 in Adieu Babylone) : the Jews did the speaking and the Muslims listened with respect.

‘At the end of the evening, we’d won. We were wearing our own clothing…we were not assimilated by force to a collectivity with vague contours. We were not poured  into a mould.. the masks had fallen. We were there in our luminous and fragile difference. And it was neither a sign of humiliation nor a symbol of ridicule…Our traits were emerging from the shadows and their outlines discernible. They were unique. Our faces were uncovered for all to see and recognise.’

Not only did Ms Shohat misquote Naim Kattan, but he wrote the complete opposite to what she claimed.

Interfaither: Why do Moroccans treat Jews so well?

There is something disturbing about Yael Eckstein’s grovelling paen of praise for Morocco in The Times of Israel. Here is a country whose Jewish population is one percent of what it was in 1948. Yet for interfaither Eckstein, it is a shining example of Jews, Muslims and Christians coexisting in mutual respect! Why do you treat Jews so well? she keeps asking,  ignoring the fact that Jews have been threatened by pogromsmob violence and forced conversions and have abandoned their homes and businesses at times of tension.  Eckstein answers her own question: it is because of the king. The Jews – abetted by starry-eyed interfaithers –  have been instrumentalised as part of Moroccan foreign policy.   The restoration of synagogues and cemeteries is a small price to pay for US support of Morocco. But if the king goes, so do the Jews. What value is coexistence if it is only skin deep ? (With thanks: Boruch, Daniel, Lily, Imre). 

It just didn’t make sense. It seemed too good to be true. But as I quickly learned, it was just another day in mystical Morocco, a country that defies norms, defines tolerance and is home to a dwindling population of 2,500 Jews.
Though Morocco is a Muslim country, the bellboy at my hotel told me with a loving smile, Jews were actually in Morocco 600 years before Muslims—when they were sent out of Jerusalem following the destruction of the First Temple.
“This is your home,” the bellboy said, while pointing to a picture on the wall of the Atlas Mountains. “Your people were here before mine.”

 This respectful attitude was the prevailing sentiment in my communications with every Muslim I met throughout my stay during the end of Ramadan. Moroccans are genuine in their respect for the Jewish people, love for Moroccan Jews, and awe for the holy rabbis who walked their streets and are buried in the Jewish cemetery. I nearly cried when I saw how well the locals preserve the Jewish cemetery.
“Why do you treat the Jews so well?” I asked a Muslim teenager who works for an organization called Mimouna, whose members are Muslim youths passionate about spreading Jewish history. Mimouna made history by starting a Jewish studies program at a Moroccan Arab university, along with the Arab world’s only Holocaust education program.

“Why wouldn’t we treat them well?” he responded.
Indeed, it is illogical for local Muslims to suddenly turn on native Jews who have lived in their country for thousands of years. But we live in an illogical world. Morocco is one of the few places where Christians, Muslims and Jews coexist in peace and mutual respect. Why?
One night I attended a Ramadan fast-breaking event—organized by the inspiring local Chabad rabbi at an Orthodox synagogue. Dozens of Jews and Muslims gathered to celebrate. King Mohammed VI’s representative for the entire Marrakesh region also attended. He sent blessings from the king to the Jewish community and closed his eyes with intent—and answered “amen”—when the Chabad rabbi said the traditional Jewish prayer for kings.
Why are Jews in Morocco treated so well?

Yael Eckstein

Simply put, it’s because of the king. During World War II, when the Nazis asked the king of Morocco to put together a list of Jews in his country, he boldly answered, “We don’t have Jews, we have Moroccans,” and refused to comply (this is debatable – ed).
Today’s king, Mohammed VI, is the grandson of King Mohammed V, who protected his country’s 265,000 Jews. Like his grandfather, Mohammed VI believes Jews are just as Moroccan—and just as important—as Muslims, Christians and everyone else. If anyone in Morocco messes with Jews, they are messing with the king.

 Many project that in a decade, there won’t be any Jews left in Morocco. Most of the Moroccan grandmothers who read Psalms all day have moved to Israel. Moroccan Jewish youths have largely moved abroad. The remaining Jews are the gems of ancient times.

What legacy do Jews want to leave in Morocco? What pillars do Jews want to set up in Morocco that will carry on long after there are no Jews left?
After my four-day journey representing Christian and Jewish supporters of The Fellowship, I deeply understand why it’s so important that our organization partnered with Chabad and Mimouna to distribute thousands of food parcels from the country’s ancient synagogues to local Muslims for Ramadan.

 It is clear to me why we must set up a Jewish information center in central Marrakesh and make sure the Jewish cemetery will keep being preserved by local Muslims.
I realize how critical it is that we also continue to distribute food parcels to poor Jews on a monthly basis, so they aren’t neglected or looked at as beggars, but rather serve as a shining example of the fact that all Jews, Christians and Muslims are responsible to look out for one another.

In a country that lives on ancient spiritual stories of holy men and women who once walked its streets, this is our final opportunity to leave an eternal legacy on behalf of the millions of Moroccan Jews who came before us.
What legacy should we leave? That the Jewish people came in peace, left in peace and were only known for peace. This is what it means to live in the vision of God.

Read article in full

A Tunisian wartime story with a happy ending

Abridged from an article in two parts on Harissa  (French)

 Sheikh Roubine was a leader of the Judenrat
(Jewish leadership council) during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia between 1942-3. He would sign
attestations on behalf of Jews who were forced to work in the Nazi
labour camps (presumably so that they were later eligible for
reparations). When he was accused of treason by his predecessor,
however, the case was adjudicated by the Tunisian courts who cleared
Roubine of any wrongdoing. A relative, Abraham Bar-Shay (Benattia),
tells this curious story.

“We called him Baba Roubine. The friends of the family called him Sheikh Roubine. His whole demeanour invited respect. He held a beautiful baquita (cane) which he did not need for walking. The end of the cane only touched the ground after he had taken four steps. After the first two steps, he pointed the end of the cane at a 45-degree angle in front of him. It was only after two other steps that he pointed it towards the ground. When I was a teenager, I tried to imitate his gait.

He was not rich but comfortable.
When my nuclear family lived in a single room, with several other
families, around a large yard, he had a ‘large’ house with three
bedrooms and a courtyard.
He lived in a house twice the size of that of the great Rabbi Haim Houry. I had not forgotten these little details, even after we had moved to the capital in late 1947.

Baba Roubine ran a transport company
between Gabes and Tunis ( a distance of 450 km) and often travelled
with the goods he shipped between the two cities.
When he was in Tunis, he came to see us and taste the food my mother was preparing for him. He often  teased her, that she cooked almost as well as Aunt Bhila, his wife.

Knowing our economic situation, he
took advantage of each visit to bring with him all the provisions that
we lacked – enough to last several days.
He returned towards noon with his bottle of red wine for a family meal.

For us it was a festive and memorable day – until the next visit. These meals strengthened the ties we had with Baba Roubine more than with the other members of the family.

The Sheikh Roubine family made its Aliya in 1964, seven years after ours. We were already well established in Israel. We settled in southern Israel, in Kiryat Gat, a new immigrant city and administrative center for the Moshavim of the region.

The immigration authorities knew nothing of the services he had rendered to the community in the old country.
This octogenarian was no more than the shadow of his former self in my
memory, but he still kept his dignity as a sheikh and his “chechia”
(Tunisian red hat) always had the long plume of black threads that fell
on his shoulder.

In Israel he continued until the end of his life what he had done in Tunisia : to sign attestations for all Jews who had been sent to work in the Nazi camps of Gabes. 

It was only since my arrival in
Israel, that I learned from my cousin Nissim (six years my senior) 
that Sheikh Roubine (his uncle) was accused of having betrayed his
community during the Nazi occupation of Gabes.
The case was brought before the courts in Tunis, who acquitted the sheikh of all the accusations. He could not show me any document on this chapter in the history of our family.

Nearly a year ago, I received a mail
from a Tunisian scholar, Professor Mohsen Hamli, who asked me for
details about Sheikh Roubine Ben-Attia.

He was researching the Jewish Sheikhs in Tunisia during the Nazi
occupation and I owe him thanks for his service to my ‘tribe’ and the
history of our community.

After a few months I received the
documents (one is presented here). There was  urgent need to make these
documents public, here, and then pass them on to the archives of Yad
Vashem.

The Sheikh’s role was, among other
things, to represent the Jewish community before the local authorities
and to deal with the rights and duties of individuals and the community
as a whole.

In the 1930s, Houati Haddad  served as a sheikh of the Jews of Gabes.
His service was not good enough for the notables of the city (judgment
was passed by the Governor) who dismissed him and appointed Baba
Roubine in his place.
It was just before the invasion of Tunisia by Rommel’s Afrikakorps and their retreat from Libya.
Gabes was a city located not far from the Libyan border and a
strategic point. There was a French military base with an airport in
operation.

Sheikh Roubine and Chief Rabbi Haim
Houry, who were in fact neighbors, were charged with fulfilling the
most abject tasks the Nazis had inflicted on the Jews of Gabes, from
the seizure of personal wealth (jewellery and bank accounts) to the
forced recruitment of Jewish workers in the Nazi camps.

I understood that the Nazis had forced Baba Roubine to fulfill the role of the Judenrat of the community of Gabes. A complaint of treason had been filed against him, by the person who had fulfilled his role before the Nazi invasion. The Tunis court ruled that the complaint was a blow against Roubine and acquitted him of any suspicion.

With these documents I was able to trace the history of the time, personalities and the happy ending for Baba Roubine.

After the victory of the Allies and
the departure of the Nazis from Tunisia, a group was organized,
probably under the instigation of Mr. Houati Haddad, and filed a
complaint of five accusations against Sheikh Roubine.
These indictments “were” supposedly “based on investigations and testimonies of the notables of the community.”

Baba Roubine in local costume 

The governor, who subsequently
investigated the case, discovered that the facts cited were null and
void, congratulated Roubine on his moral fibre and granted Houati
Haddad the compliment of being “a man of questionable morality and lack
of scruple.”

Our story had a happy ending, which even Shakespeare would have judged incredible for “Romeo and Juliet”. Verona is not Gabes and Kippur returns every autumn to erase the grudges of yesterday’s generations.
Despite the controversies and tense relations between the sheikhs
Roubine and Houati, the grand-daughter of the first married the youngest
son of the second.
They lived 50 years together, until the husband’s death a few months ago.

 Below: letter by French Captain Le Bourhis vouching for Baba Roubine’s good character.

Cross-posted at Clash of Cultures, Jerusalem Post

Saved by a liqor glass, betrayed by friends

How I, a Libyan antisemite, became a Jew

 Ed Elhaderi went from pinning up posters of Yasser Arafat in his native Libya in  the 1970s, to marrying a Jew and converting to Judaism. Jewish Journal charts his remarkable spiritual journey (With thanks: JIMENA):

Ed and Barbara Elhaderi (far right) at their son’s Barmitzvah

That hot afternoon seems like
yesterday, but it was 50 years ago this month. I was 15 and living in
Sabha, a small city in the Sahara Desert of southern Libya. An older
cousin told me about the reports on Cairo Radio about the dire situation
facing the Egyptian army.

“We’ve got to do something,” he said.

I didn’t fully understand the politics of what would come
to be known as the Six-Day War, but I knew that what was happening was
bad for us as Arabs and Muslims. All around me were other teenagers
absorbing the tense mood and looking to vent their rage at the Jews.

I followed the crowd to the only
Western-style establishment nearby, a bar. It was early afternoon and
the place hadn’t opened yet. A few older boys broke down the door, and a
crowd stormed in, breaking bottles and dumping alcohol onto the street
outside.

Standing in a crowd, I joined the chants: “Death to the Jews!” “Drive the Jews into the sea!”

The truth is that I had never actually met a Jew. I grew
up in a small nomadic village of 20 families, a collection of mud huts
with palm-frond roofs that wouldn’t have looked much different 2,000
years earlier. Health care was so primitive that by the time I was a
young boy, my parents had lost three children to illness.

Sunni Islam was the only way of life I knew. My preschool
was in a mosque, where an imam taught us to read and write by drilling
us with verses from the Quran. After that, our education was more
secular — I went to mosque, going through the motions, but I was hardly
devout. I never was exposed to any alternatives or avenues to question
the life we had.

Our textbooks didn’t mention Israel, and people used the word Yahudi,
Jew, only as an insult. The Jews had rejected the Prophet Muhammad, so
they were considered to be condemned. The only Jews I saw were in
Egyptian movies, in which they were portrayed as menacing, monstrous
characters — hunched over and speaking with high-pitched nasal accents.

I did know Palestinian Arabs. My elementary school had
once hired a young Palestinian as a teacher. Because he was Palestinian,
the community welcomed him warmly and supported him generously.

Read article in full

Forgotten revolt against Rome by Alexandria’s Jews

Contrary to popular belief,  the Jews of Hellenised Alexandria were loyal to their people and in their 2nd century rebellion against Rome, suffered thousands killed and the destruction of the Great Synagogue in Alexandria. Eli Kavon explains in the Jerusalem Post (with thanks: Imre):

 Ancient Alexandria (Jewish Encyclopedia.com)

 

The caricature of the civil
war that was a major component of the events that we celebrate on
Hanukka is one of loyal, Jewish, Torah-true guerrillas fighting against
Hellenized Jews who were all turncoats who rejected
Judaism. It is time to discard this portrait of Hellenized Jews as all
wrestlers in the Greek gymnasium who underwent surgery to reverse their
circumcision.

In fact, one of the reasons Judah Maccabee succeeded in liberating
Jerusalem and rededicating the Temple was the support he received from
moderate Hellenized Jews who were acculturated and influenced by Greek
philosophy and culture but nevertheless were loyal
Jews who rejected the extreme edicts and worldview of Seleucid King
Antiochus IV.

The reality of the ancient world is that of millions of Jews living in
the Hellenistic Mediterranean and Middle East who made significant
contributions to Jewish life and thought, despite knowing no Hebrew and
having to read the Hebrew Bible in the Greek Septuagint.
These Hellenized Jews, like many Jews throughout our history, were
highly acculturated but did not assimilate and forfeit their Jewish
identity and faith.

The greatest Jewish community in the ancient Hellenistic Diaspora was in
Alexandria. In the Egyptian port city founded by Alexander the Great
during his conquests of the known world in the fourth century BCE,
250,000 Jews were a significant part of the population
by the Roman period in the 1st century CE. First under the rule of the
Greek Ptolemies, then under Roman domination, Jews occupied professions
from bankers to artisans. The Jewish intellectual elite adopted the
genres of Greek literature – the epic poem, drama,
the writing of history, the penning of the novella and philosophy –
always writing in Greek but focusing on biblical and Jewish themes. In
this highly acculturated environment, Jews did not assimilate but rather
asserted their identity, especially when faced
by the hatred of the Greeks when Rome ruled Alexandria. This animus
would later lead to rebellion.

The greatest figure to emerge from the elite of the Jews of Alexandria
was philosopher and political activist Philo (c. 25-c. 50 CE). The scion
of a wealthy banking family with ties to the monarchy in Judea, Philo
read the Torah as both law and philosophy.
While he did read the Torah from a literal standpoint and was a pious
Jew, Philo added a layer of philosophical allegory on to the text that
understood anew the meaning of the text. He reconciled the Torah with
the philosophy of Plato. Philo was first great
Jewish philosopher and, although he is a harbinger of Saadia Gaon and
Maimonides, his writings – in Greek – were embraced by a Church that
skewed Philo by focusing solely on his use of allegory. Philo never
meant for Jews to abandon the Torah and ritual; he
merely took the ideas of the day and recalibrated them for Judaism.

Another great Hellenized Jew writing in Greek was Josephus (37- c. 100
CE). He composed his important works in Rome but had strong connections
to the Jewish community in Alexandria. His origins were in Judea and his
surrender to Rome while leading the Great
Revolt in the Galilee was not simply the act of a turncoat.

In his The Jewish War, Josephus described the 66-70 revolt against Rome
using the tools of Greek historiography, taking that insurrection
seriously though he often is an apologist for the Roman overlords. In
his later work, Jewish Antiquities, Josephus makes
Judaism and Jews the heirs of a great civilization and attempts to
explain the Jews to pagans by painting a portrait of Judaism as a
philosophy. Finally, he penned polemics against enemies of the Jews.
Apion, a scholar of Homer, was a Greek in Alexandria who
accused the Jews of ritual sacrifice and argued that the ancient
Israelites were ejected from Egypt because they were lepers. These
libels that were believed by pagans were challenged by Josephus who,
although he abandoned the fight against Rome and had as
patrons the Flavian emperors, still was proud of his Jewish identity
and Jewish heritage. Not exactly a Hellenized traitor.

Yet, the greatest proof that the Hellenized Jews of the Mediterranean
and the Middle East were loyal Jews was the rebellion against Rome
staged by the Jews against the Emperor Trajan in 115-117 CE, the Kitos
War. Little is known of this revolt. There was no
Josephus to record the conflict. And there were no letters like those
discovered by Israeli military hero, statesman and archeologist Yigael
Yadin that shed light on the Bar-Kochba Rebellion 60 years after the
first failed revolt. There is a paucity of sources
on the Jewish revolt against Trajan and this fight against Rome is
overshadowed by the earlier and later revolts in the Land of Israel.
While this conflict began in Babylonia with Jews participating in
rebellion against Rome’s ambitions in the east, revolt
spread to Jews living in the Greek-speaking world, including in
Alexandria.

Tensions between Greek and Jew in the Egyptian port city exploded into
war and the Roman overlords punished the Jews. The Great Synagogue of
Alexandria was destroyed by the Romans and thousands of Jews were killed
in the conflict. Jewish memory recounts the
devastation of the destruction of the Jews of Alexandria by describing a
Mediterranean that turned red with the blood of the Jewish victims. It
was a bitter battle that ended the glory and vitality of Jewish life in
Alexandria.

Read article in full

‘Minority status’ has not benefited Indian Jews

A year after India passed a law giving minorities enhanced status, nothing much has changed for the 5,000 Jews of India. The Hindustan Times reports: 

Young Jews visiting Israel from India do a Bollywood flashdance in Jerusalem

Exactly a year ago on June 24 , the Jews of Maharashtraembraced the minority statushoping
to find wider recognition in the society with better opportunities.
While the provision has successfully made its way to the official
records, not much has changed in the lives of the people from the quaint
community.

As per the census of 2011, there are 4,650 Indian Jews in India with Maharashtra still holding 53% of it with 2,466 Jews. In Pune,
which houses two prominent synagogues (building where Jews meet for
religious worship), the Ohel David Synagogue and the Succath Shelomo Synagogue, their numbers dwindle to less than 200.

Dr
Irene Judah, who has recently released her book – ‘Evolution of the Bene
Israels and their Synagogues in the Konkan’ – expressed, “A minority
status like this affects every section of the community from the most
basic level, recognition of our religious holidays being one of them.
The fact that we don’t even get optional leaves on the days of our
religious festivals is not very pleasing. We have to attend them by
using casual leaves, which we could have preserved and used in case of
an urgency. This, especially, when other religions in the country are
not devoid of that privilege is disheartening.” 

She further adds
how the thought of this provision in India, is not a new concept, and
existed some decades ago, rather successfully. “It’s surprising now
because in the olden days till the 60s almost, optional holidays on
Jewish festivals were given. I don’t know why it all stopped,” Irene
said.

While it has been a year since Maharashtra bestowed this
status to the Jew community, West Bengal with only a Jewish population
of 43, had presented the minority status to them almost a decade ago.

Read article in full

Why Judaism is reverting to the Middle East

When the 12th century rabbi Benjamin of Tudela wrote The Book of Travels, over 80 percent of Jews lived in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  Judaism’s sojourn in Europe will prove to be only a twinkling of an eye in the grand sweep of history, argues Ben Judah in the Jewish Chronicle.

Ben Judah: in Judaism what was will be

 

Reading The Book of Travels one
is left with one conclusion. Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism, rather than
a curio, is in the greatest sweep of Jewish history the mainstream.
Ashkenazi Judaism was the flickering. Next to non-existent in the early
middle ages, ballooning suddenly, only to almost vanish from Europe in
less than five centuries.

None were more aware of this than the
Rabbis, when the 15th century Rabbi Mosses Isserles ruled his commentary
on the Shulhan Arukh he was enshrining in Krakow specific distinct
customs and traditions, what he saw as a branch, not the trunk of
Judaism. These rulings – as if for an offshoot – came to define the
Ashkenazi rite.

Piecing through texts and cemeteries, historians
have estimated the historical Jewish population. As Benjamin travelled
in the 12th century over 80 percent of Jews lived in Mediterranean and
the Middle East – scholars estimate less than 12 percent were living in
Europe. Until the 16th century, after the expulsion from Spain, the
majority of Jews lived in Islamic lands – they were Mizrahi or
Sephardi.

The history we know only too well meant the centuries
of a Judaism centered in Europe are historically brief. In 1880 nearly
90 per cent of Jews were Europeans. In 1939 about 57 per cent were. Come
1960, still, some 27 per cent of Jews lived in Europe. Today barely 10
per cent of Jews are European. Jews in Europe have fallen from 2m in
1991 to less than 1.4m today.

We remember why European Judaism
collapsed. But why did it boom? Demographic historians explain that
Europe entered “a demographic transition” centuries before the
Mediterranean and the Middle East. The very basics of sanitation came to
the shtetl centuries earlier: clumsy plumbing, rudimentary medicine and
basic sanitation – allowed the Ashkenazi mortality rate to fall whilst
the fertility rate stayed high.

Historically this lucky
plumbing was only to be a flash in the pan. Judaism is now slowly
returning to what it always was: a primarily Middle Eastern phenomenon
that Benjamin would have recognized better than the shtetl. Today
roughly 45 per cent of the world’s Jews in Israel (which has overtaken
the United States, where some 40 per cent live). With the Israeli Jewish
population booming, with an average of three children per family, and
the US Jewish population ageing and declining the majority of the
world’s Jews will again be Middle Eastern by 2050.

In Judaism, what was will be, and Europe was but a twinkling of an eye.

Read article in full

Read article in full

 

‘Mizrahi’ is an artificial construct of the 1970s (updated)

In response to Norman Berdichevsky’s attempt to clarify the confusion about the difference between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, Point of No Return commenter Sylvia puts forward her explanation:

I’ll
try to address that question while at the same time explain how we call
ourselves as well as show that there is much in common between Asians
and Sephardim.

Family of Iraqi Jews. Edot Ha’Mizrah?

ASHKENAZIM Jews from Germany (Ashkenaz) or whose
religious centers were in Germany. Also known as Jews of the North in
the Middle ages.

EDOT HAMIZRAH (The communities of the East) Jews
of the Middle East and the areas formerly dependent of the Babylonian
Geonate as religious center before that center moved to North Africa
(Kairouan). This includes communities of the Middle East and Asia as far
East as the Indus as far North as Samarkand including Egypt, Lebanon
Iraq, Iran, etc. It is in the plural because they lived among different
peoples with different languages, laws and customs. Not all knew
Judeo-Arabic which has become by the 8th century the language of
communication of the Gaon and many go by different names.

HA’EADAH
HA MA’ARAVIT (The Maghreban community or Western Community) of North
Africa including Morocco Algeria Tunisia and Western Libya.

It is in
the singular because they lived among one single people (the Berbers)
who dwelt from Morocco to Egypt and ruled in parts of Spain for a while.
Yet the religious rulings came from Babylonia just like for all the
other communities of the East, people some of the youth went to study in
those academies (for example Dunash Ibn Labrat, born in Fez) until the
center of learning passed to Kairouan(today Tunisia) and from there to
Fez with the Rif (Rabbi isaac El Fassi) then to Spain where the Rif
founded the Academy of Lucena (where Maimonides fathers has studied)

SEPHARAD
From Hesperia (the West), as the Romans used to call Spain. That is
where the two currents of Sephardi religious philosophy-the mystic and
the rational met and developed. They studied the Babylonian Talmud and
worshipped in Babylonian synagogues (The synagogue institution was
founded by the leadership in Babylon).

MIZRAHIM (ORIENTALS). This
is an artificial construct that was imposed by a Knesset education
committee in the mid 1970s, without our consent and without us being
consulted, without even our knowledge. It was done mostly for campaign
purposes, but there were many other reasons. Contrary to what the author
of the article believes, we North African Jews have never accepted the
name Mizrahi, which is nothing more than an unrelated geographic
designation and without a history or heritage.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

The term “Mizrahi heritage”, purposedly in the singular yet meant to
include the heritage of the various Jewish communities of the East,
North Africa and the dispersed Sephardim, was an artificial construct
imposed on March 21, 1976 by the Culture and Education Committee of the
8th Knesset.

What was billed as a Seminar or Study day on Jews
from Muslim countries following calls for cultural pluralism turned out
to be an ambush.

Despite fierce opposition to the absurd wording
on the part of academics, the committee stood its ground and the formula
passed as worded and academic Israel obeyed. The subtitle of the
journal Peamim of the Ben Zvi Institute, for example was “Studies in the
Cultural Heritage of Oriental Jewry”.

Yet historians were in a bind:how does one teach and write about the heritage without mentioning the heirs?

There
was much criticism from abroad as well and there were those who
compared the new orders to the institution of Black Studies in the
United States. All this turmoil was confined to the academic community
and took place over the head of the general population.

Historian Shaul Shaked thus expressed the complexity of the dilemma:

Even
if we ignore the public dimension of the issue as well as the external
pressure on the universities and research institutes to give voice to
the human cultural and Jewish equality of the “Oriental” half of the
Israeli people, introspective debate is still necessary.”

The late Historian Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson was less forgiving:

The
topic presented to us today, as it is worded, is based on the
assumption that the Jews of the East had a common background. This is
not true. This was not true in the past, this is not true in the
present.[…]
Anyone speaking of “Oriental Jewish Heritage” in the
singular as of one concrete bloc is committing an injustice toward the
many heritages and their living differences, and by setting them in the
splint of something artificial, prevents them from contributing all they
can contribute to their sons and to the global national culture.

The Jews who are neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi

 There is still much confusion about the difference between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. Norman Berdichevsky provides some useful definitions in Heritage Florida Jewish News. (With thanks: Michelle)

Any serious student of Jewish history and tradition knows that the
only authentic Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews expelled from
Spain and Portugal. They went on to settle in Western Europe including
England, Holland, Denmark, North Western Germany, colonial America, the
Caribbean and Brazil as well as in lands dominated by Islam, throughout
North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans and across the Levant.
There are thus many Sephardi Jews who have always lived in Europe and
many Jewish communities around the world composed of both Sephardim and
Ashkenazim, who lived together and intermarried, notably in Italy,
Egypt, Syria and Bulgaria, where later Ashkenazi immigrants arrived and
were welcome by Sephardi residents. This has also been true in the
Caribbean, South America and modern Israel.

 Kurdish Jews being airlifted to Israel

Just as America’s
Afro-American population has gone through several self-designations
indicating a search for their authentic identity ranging from Black to
Colored to Negro and then Afro-American and for some, back to Black
(originally a term of disparagement used by whites), Israel’s Jews of
Afro-Asian origin have shifted from Sephardi to Mizrachi (Oriental). For
religious purposes, “Sephardi” describes the nusach (“litugical
tradition”) used by most non-Ashkenazi Jews in the Siddur (prayer book).

In
reality, there are also many Jews who are neither Ashkenazi nor
Sephardi. These include the Jews of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran,
Yemen, the Caucasus region (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
Armenia), all of whom are recognized as being of Afro-Asian origin yet
have nothing to do with the original Sephardim. They are the descendants
of the Jews who fled into exile following the Assyrian, Babylonian and
Roman conquests of ancient Israel. No doubt, they were later joined by
numerous converts who were attracted to the high moral and ethical
principles that distinguished Judaism in ancient times from pagan and
polytheistic religions.

There is indeed a serious social and
geo-cultural cleavage in Israel’s diverse Jewish population groups,
precisely because all the four divisions overlap to a considerable
degree. Most of the Jews from Africa and Asia arrived in Israel after
1948 and being relative newcomers had to adjust to difficult conditions.
Most of them arrived destitute and unlike many of the Ashkenazim never
received any reparations for their confiscated property.

They
still tend to have larger families and as a rule are much more
religiously observant than the Ashkenazim who established the secular
norms and institutions of the Zionist movement and later of the State of
Israel. It is only human nature that the new arrivals from Asia and
Africa resented the more established veteran European settlers and those
new immigrants from Europe who immediately found more personal
connections and sympathy with the veteran Ashkenazi settlers through a
common knowledge of Yiddish and shared political and social backgrounds.

A
list of new army recruits will probably reveal names like de Leon,
Toledano, Castro, Franco, Mizrahi, Dayan, Gabbai, Abulafia, Kimhi,
Shar’abi, Sassoon, Azulay, Kadouri, Marziano, Ohana, Aflalo and Hasson,
as often or more than Schwartz, Goldberg, Wolf, Guttmann, Rabinowitz,
Berdichevsky, Kaplan or Finkelstein. So how then can they then be one
people? They are, because history, traditions and their faith (whether
they are orthodox observant or secular) have instilled in them the idea
of sharing a common peoplehood.

Read article in full

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This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, of the Middle East and North Africa, documenting the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution.

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