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Between Others and Brothers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
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Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”
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1 http://meirgal.squarespace.com/nine-out-of-four-hundred-the-w/ (accessed 14 March 2014). Gal's work was part of a broader political challenge issued by activists, intellectuals, and artists in Israel who the previous year had organized themselves into the “Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow,” which viewed the Zionist state through the lenses of Franz Fanon and Edward Said and linked the historiographic erasure of Mizrahim with contemporary social and political inequalities. See Shohat, Ella, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19–20 (1988): 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sami Shalom Chetrit, “The Ashkenazi Zionist Eraser,” News from Within, December 1997; and Piterberg, Gabriel, “Domestic Orientalism: The Representation of ‘Oriental’ Jews in Zionist/Israeli Historiography,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1996): 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Daniel Schroeter's and Gudrun Krämer's books stood out for the way they normalized and contextualized Jews rather than exceptionalized them. Schroeter, Daniel, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krämer, Gudrun, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989)Google Scholar.
3 Alcalay, Ammiel, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Bahloul, Joelle, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Beinin, Joel, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 1998)Google Scholar.
4 Alcalay, Ammiel, “Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs,” in Memories of our Future (San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights, 1999)Google Scholar.
5 Campos, Michelle U., Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
6 Cohen, Julia Phillips, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ginio, Eyal, “Mobilizing the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Awakening from the Ottoman Dream,” War in History 12 (2005): 156–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vangelis Constantinos Kechriotis, “The Greeks of Izmir at the End of the Empire: A Non-Muslim Ottoman Community between Autonomy and Patriotism” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2005); Ueno, Masayuki, “‘For the Fatherland and the State’: Armenians Negotiate the Tanzimat Reforms,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 93–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Petrov, Milen V., “Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, 1864–1868,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 730–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Bassat, Yuval, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014)Google Scholar.
7 These early works include Lockman, Zachary, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–48 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 1996)Google Scholar; Kimmerling, Baruch, “Beʿayot Kontseptualiot ba-Historiografiah shel Erets u-va-Shne ʿAmim,” in Erets Ahat u-Shne ʿAmim bah [One Land, Two Peoples], ed. Yaʿakobi, Danny (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Tamari, Salim, “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 21 (2004): 10–26Google Scholar. Recent scholarship includes Jacobson, Abigail, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Büssow, Johann, Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem, 1872–1908 (Leiden: Brill, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louis Fishman, “Palestine Revisited: Reassessing the Jewish and Arab National Movements, 1908–14” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007); Yuval Ben-Bassat, “Local Feuds or Premonitions of a Bi-National Conflict? A Reexamination of the Early Jewish-Arab Encounter in Palestine at the End of the 19th Century” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007); and Jonathan Marc Gribetz, “Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early ‘Zionist-Arab’ Encounter” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010).
8 See, for example, Mills, Amy, “Critical Place Studies and Middle East Histories: Power, Politics, and Social Change,” History Compass 10 (2012): 778–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zandi-Sayek, Sibel, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840–1880 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Gottreich, Emily, The Mellah of Marrakech: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and the ongoing work of Paris Papamichos-Chronakis (on Salonica), Murat Yildiz (on Istanbul), and Dina Danon (on Izmir).
9 Bashkin, Orit, The New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Behar, Moshe and Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor, “The Possibility of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41 (2014): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lisa Lital Levy, “Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007); Jackson, Maureen, Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starr, Deborah, “Masquerade and the Performance of National Imaginaries: Levantine Ethics, Aesthetics, and Identities in Egyptian Cinema,” Journal of Levantine Studies 1 (2011): 31–57Google Scholar; Wagner, Mark S., Like Joseph in Beauty: Yemeni Vernacular Poetry and Arab-Jewish Symbiosis (Leiden: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar.
10 A healthy debate has emerged about the nature and meaning of Sephardi vs Ashkenazi Zionism(s) in this time period. See, for example, Jonathan Gribetz's comments on Abigail Jacobson's work in this roundtable, and also the work of Arieh Saposnik. More broadly, see the debate between Benbassa, Esther and Bezalel, Yitzhak in Pe'amim 73 (1997): 5–40Google Scholar.
11 Levy, Lital, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 452–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gottreich, Emily Benichou, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 433–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.