Langues et mémoires juives-arabes
This work, a compilation of text from essays by Ella Shohat, serves as a timely reminder of just how complex identities can be, contrary to what nationalists of all stripes, the identity movement and far right but also, very often, broad swathes of the general public picking up on these received ideas would have us believe. It is fair to say that it is well worth a read on its own merit, even though some might disagree with the translator’s ideological decision to impose an “inclusive” writing style on the text, which makes it harder to read, in my personal opinion. The quotations that follow (which we have translated into English) omit this style choice.
Shohat, a lecturer at New York University, focuses in her teaching and research on Eurocentrism, post-colonialism and cultural diaspora. But what principally sets her apart is that she is a woman born into a Jewish family living in Baghdad, who grew up in Israel before emigrating to the United States. Furthermore, she insists on her Jewish-Arab identity, despite the many years of experience of other people’s incomprehension, intolerance and discrimination, in some cases even going as far as outright rejection and anti-Semitic hostility.
“My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still largely communicates in Arabic, had to learn to say ‘we Jews’ and ‘those Arabs’. For the people of the Middle East, the operative distinction had always been ‘Muslims’, ‘Jews’, ‘Christians’ and not ‘Arab’ as opposed to ‘Jew’. The supposition was that Arab identity referred, albeit with differences in religion, to a shared and common culture and language”, the author writes. She goes on to state that “Americans are often flabbergasted to discover the possibilities, with the existential nausea yet exotic charm they bring, of this type of syncretic identity. I remember a very well-established colleague who, despite my lectures on the history of Arab Jews, always struggled to understand that I was not some tragic anomaly, the daughter of a (Palestinian) Arab and a (European Jewish) Israeli woman. When you live in the United States, it is even harder to get across the point that we are Jewish and yet still entitled to our Middle Eastern otherness. And that we are Arabs and yet still entitled to our religious otherness, in the same way as Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs are. It is precisely this policing of cultural borders in Israel that prompted some of us to seek refuge in large cities where syncretic identities live side-by-side. In the United States, however, we are once again faced with a hegemony that allows us the narrative of just one single Jewish memory – a European memory. For those of us that do not hide their Middle Easternness behind a single Jewishness, it is becoming increasingly difficult just to exist, in the context of an America that is hostile to the very notion of East”.
“As an Arab Jewish woman, I am often put in the position of having to explain the ‘mysteries’ of this oxymoronic entity”, Shohat adds. “The fact that we speak Arabic rather than Yiddish; that for millennia, our cultural creativity, be it sacred or profane, was expressed largely in the Arabic language (Maimonides being a very rare example of an Arab Jewish intellectual who ‘broke through’ into the Western conscience) [it is worth noting that, and without wishing to cast doubt on anything stated by the author, the reference to “millennia” here implicitly makes the Arabic language and culture, which have become dominant in the Middle East in their various expressions, into the source of the common identity, whereas Arab, like Hebrew, can also be identified etymologically as dialectal versions of a single Semitic source, with a predominant Aramaic language and culture] and that even the most observant members of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa have never prayed in the form of Hebrew spoken with the Yiddish accent, any more than they have cultivated the liturgical and gestural norms of Poland from centuries ago, or its dress codes favouring dark colours. That, similarly, Middle Eastern Jewish women did not wear wigs; if they chose to cover their hair, they chose different varieties of regional costume (and, in the wake of British and French imperialism, many of them chose to dress in the western style). If you visit our synagogues, even in New York, Montréal, Paris or London, you would be surprised to hear our mesmerising, meandering melodies sung in quarter-tones, which to the uninitiated sound very much like what you might hear in a mosque”.
“For our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since at least the Babylonian exile [when the Judeans were deported under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II and his successor, Zedekiah, between 597 and 538 BC], lived as Arabs for millennia and were then abruptly moved to Israel 40 years ago, the fact of suddenly having to adopt a homogenous European Jewish identity, forged on the basis of experiences of life in Russia, Poland and Germany, was simply devastating. The fact of being a European Jew or an American Jew is not seen as a contradiction, but being an Arab Jew is seen as a kind of logical paradox, if not ontological subversion. This binary thinking pushed many Eastern Jews (the word ‘mizrahim’, meaning ‘Eastern’, which is used to describe us in Israel, refers to our countries of origin, located in Asia and Africa) into a profound and visceral feeling of schizophrenia, because, for the first time in our history, Arab identity and Jewish identity had become antonyms”, she writes. She goes on to state that “in the West, the intellectual narrative stresses a Judeo-Christian tradition and only rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Islamic culture of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain prior to the expulsion (1492) or the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world is often represented as a never-ending nightmare of oppression and humiliation. It is not my intention to idealise this experience – there has on occasion been tension, discrimination and violence, but overall, we lived generally comfortably in Muslim societies. However much George Bush drew a parallel between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler, it is worth stressing that for the Jews of the Muslim world, there was no equipment of the Holocaust. In the case of Inquisition (1492), it was Christian fanaticism to which Jews and Muslims fell victim”.
“The historic process that stripped the Palestinians of their goods, lands and their national and political rights is also related to the dispossession suffered by Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, who were stripped of their goods, lands and roots in Muslim countries. As mass refugees or immigrants (depending on your political point of view), we were forced to leave everything behind and to give up our Iraqi passports. A simple evolution marked our uprooting and the ambivalence of our position in Israel itself, where we suffered systematic discrimination at the hands of institutions whose efforts and material resources were consistently deployed in favour of European Jews and at the expense of the Eastern Jews. Even our physical appearances gave us away, which led to forms of internalised colonialism on the one hand and errors of perception based on our appearances on the other. And so Sephardic and Mizrahim women dyed their hair blonde, while the men, who were mistaken for Palestinians, were frequently arrested or beaten up. For the Ashkenazy immigrants from Russia and Poland, it was a social ‘aliya’ (literally ‘ascension’) while the Sephardic Eastern Jews, they experienced a ‘yerida’ (a ‘descent’, loss of social status)”, Shohat writes.
“If it is true that all nations are invented, then some are more invented than others. After all, the Zionist project of ‘bringing together the exiles’ set in motion the machinery of transplanting people ‘from all four corners of the earth’ as part of a non-standard national/colonial project about which it can be said that the State created the nation by bringing about a physical demographic presence on the territory”, the author argues, going on to point out that “like most Arab Jewish families, [her own] was forced to flee Iraq in the 1950s, after the colonial partition of Palestine, and ended up settling in Israel, in what was elegantly referred to as an ‘exchange of populations’, with Palestinians and Arab Jews crossing borders en masse in both directions”. She goes on to add that “in Israel, we became the ‘schwarzes’ (‘Blacks’ in Yiddish) of the Euro-Israelis. Our Asian identity was redefined by the bureaucracy. In the highly centralised Israeli State, every aspect of our lives – school, work, health care – was fatalistically determined by a box to be ticked on official documents: ‘of Asian/African origin’”.
This is followed by a scathing comment about her experience in America: “in the United States, I quickly learned that the old scars from the partition and the traumatic memory of crossing the border between Iraq and Israel/Palestine drew very little sympathy, when they were not simply censored. I also learned that in America, not all double-barrelled ideas were allowed to enter the official lexicon of ethnicities and races. I saw a kind of classificatory confusion pass over people’s faces at the idea of inserting a hyphen between Iraq and Israel, with the result that the confusion always immediately dissipated at the emergence of an identity they could understand: ‘Ah! So you’re Israeli’. There is only one geography you can join: the ‘made in USA’ pitfall of the single hyphen. Although we were never exactly ‘from here’ when we were in Israel, in the United States, we are just ‘from over there’. ‘Over there’, we are ‘immigrants from countries of Asia and Africa’, while here, in the United States, our Asian identity dissolves in the dominant and Eurocentric definition of Judaism (equated to Europe) and Arab identity (equated to Islam) as antonyms. Millennia of existence in Iraq are swept away by three decades of Israel. I remember during the Gulf War reading an article in the New York Times literary supplement in which the author, a Euro-American Jewish critic, referred to something is being ‘as rare as a synagogue in Baghdad’. He was quite clearly unaware that until the 1950s, Baghdad was 25% Jewish and had countless synagogues that were very much frequented. (And where does he think the major text of Judaism, the Talmud of Babylon, was written?)”. (Olivier Jehin)
Ella Shohat. (Translated by Joëlle Marelli), Langues et mémoires juives-arabes. Éditions EHESS. ISBN: 978-2-7132-3400-2. 189 pages. €15,00
How Authoritarian Politics, Media, and Lies Join Forces
In this article, which was published in the Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, the journalist Xhabir Deralla looks at Russia’s influence in the countries of the Western Balkans, stressing the degree to which authoritarian politics, control of the media and endemic corruption contribute to this. Relating his own experience in North Macedonia, he goes on to explain that journalists and intellectuals who contribute to progressive publications are often described as foreign agents, even “traitors”. “For many journalists and activists, death threats have become a sinister part of everyday life. Over the last five or six years, I have probably been one of the most insulted and threatened individuals in the country. The threats against me range from sentences like ‘the bullet will get you’ or ‘a bullet in your head’ to grotesque calls for me to impale myself […]. Threats made publicly on Facebook, the online media and on one of the national television channels, Alfa TV, amongst others”, the author explains, also referring to a gagging order brought against him by the Prime Minister, Hristijan Mickoski.
“While many diplomats in the West believe that offering political and financial support – or turning a blind eye to authoritarianism and corruption in return for stability – to the Western Balkans can help to stabilise the region, this approach neglects one essential element. The fact is that Russia – as with what is going on in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and other countries and even EU member states such as Hungary and Slovakia – has shown that it is capable of instrumentalising instability within societies and authoritarian tendencies that are taking nations hostage. Instead of promoting proper democratic development in Western integration, Russia is intensifying the divisions, supporting corruption and perpetuating (and reinforcing and expanding) authoritarianism. In so doing, Russia is infiltrating these States to make them into forces of destabilisation within their regions in the long run […]. And all of this is being unwittingly paid for by the taxpayers of the West”, writes Deralla, who in particular stresses how much Serbia supports the Russian influence and how Russia is stepping up divisions between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians. (OJ)
Xhabir Deralla. How Authoritarian Politics, Media, and Lies Join Forces. Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, 06/24. ISSN: 0340-174X. 96 pages. €15,00
Femmes et finance
Edition 157 of the French financial economy review takes us to the very centre of the challenges for women in the financial sector. Despite significant progress, women remain underrepresented in this sector, particularly in directorship roles and asset management. Whilst stressing the benefits of greater diversity innovation and economic competitiveness, the article proposes specific initiatives to boost gender equality within this strategic sector. (OJ)
Sylvain de Forges (editor). Femmes et finances (available in French only). Revue d’économie financière. Edition 157, Q1 2025. ISBN: 978-2-3764-7109-7. 255 pages. €35,00