To gain a fuller understanding of modern Mizrahi literature, it must be examined against the background of the literary systems in which Jews in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the diverse paths via which these systems developed in the Middle East and North Africa, based on their various linguistic, cultural, and political relations and interactions with the Arab awakening (Al-Nahḍa), the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), the European enlightenment, French and British colonialism, local nationalism and Zionism, and modern Arab and Hebrew literatures. Under the decisive influence of the new world orders created by colonialism and nationalism, this period saw far-reaching changes in Jewish literature in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world. It may be profitable to view all those connections as part of the process via which Mizrahi literature was formed. Due to its many areas of interaction with various literatures, it began or was created repeatedly, in different ways that reflect its diversity. Only by looking at the whole is it possible to avoid narrowing the narrative of modern Mizrahi literature to a single perspective or single process.

Samira Farwaneh interrogates the largely unquestioned and untested assumption in linguistics that languages are all equally complex. Again, the indelible mark of diglossia in Arabic on theorizing about language colours the analysis, specifically with the notion that the formal Arabic of writing and declamation is necessarily more complex than the natively spoken varieties of the language. Starting from the assumption, shared by native speakers of Arabic and many linguists studying Arabic alike, that spoken varieties are simplifications of a more structurally complex and presumably chronologically older Arabic, represented by the Arabic of classical writing and its modern written descendant, she demonstrates that Arab dialects are in some ways more structurally complex than the Arabic of writing, specifically respecting the tense, mood, and aspect systems of spoken Arabi, the manifestations of indefinite noun constructs and object marking, and specifically in the so-called ‘dialectal tanwin’, co-referential and ethical dative marking, and in negation.