Reclaiming Identities: Racialization, Representation, and Resistance of MENA Jews Before and After 1948
Panel VI-20, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, December 2 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
While most critical research on the MENA Jews is focused on post 1948 Israeli racist policies, this panel offers a multi-temporal, pre/post comparative perspective and traces moments of transition and reconceptualization of the commonly used category of Mizrahim. Though Jewish MENA communities originally viewed themselves as Jews in their Arab and Muslim homelands, they were racialized and Israelized by Zionist officials to form the category of Mizrahim or Edot Hamizrah (the ethnic groups of the East). This process was reinforced by multiple official policies aimed at increasing their immigration to Israel/Palestine to meet the demographic urgent need of establishing a Jewish majority in the area.
intersecting gender, race, and nationalism theories with narratives of Arab-Jewish rupture, oppression and resistance presenters on this panel bring together historical, textual and visual testimonies that demonstrate and materialize the racialization of MENA Jews.
Building on personal testimonies, official documentation, and practices of representation including contemporaneous museum exhibitions, films, and media text, that cement the official commemoration of the “pasts” of MENA Jews today, each presentation offers a critical reading that defies Israel’s official meta-narrative.
We especially unfold, challenge, and resist the official narrative that depicts the Arab-Jewish immigration to Israel as a ‘rescue Immigration’ (Aliyt Hatsala) and reframe it as a forced migration largely manipulated by Zionist ideology and policies; this included agreements with MENA states officials, sometimes ‘above the heads’ of Arab-Jewish community leaders and while ignoring their authority.
Resisting official narratives of unified Jewishness and exposing silenced narratives of MENA Jews prior to Zionism, this panel reexamine MENA Jews communities as a minority that does not neatly fit within any national, ethnic, or racial category nor in Israel/Palestine or in their Arab and Muslim countries of origin but rather, offers an approach that evades any of these categories altogether.
We ask: What do comparative cultural studies about the racialization of MENA Jews before and after 1948 tells us about the construction of Arabness vs. Israeliness in each period? What can we learn from it about the intersection of race and nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa? And what are the strategies used by second and third generation Arab-Jews to resist and challenge the master narrative while reclaiming their own histories and identities?
The paper focuses on two museum displays that commemorate the Jewish life in the MENA pre-1948, currently on view in Casablanca and Jerusalem: The display at The Museum of Moroccan Judaism of Casablanca, and the Moroccan exhibit in the exhibition Costume and Jewry A Matter of Identity, on view in The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
By interweaving everyday objects and ceremonial costumes created and used by the Jews of Morocco before their migration to Israel, both exhibitions are aiming to offer a glance at the cultural heritage of this community. However, both exhibitions are using different visual means to support contrasting narratives.
The exhibition in Casablanca describes the Moroccan Jewish community as an immanent part of the Moroccan modernization and nationalization process and focuses on the immense contribution of Jews to today’s Moroccan culture, science, and politics, while the visual rhetoric in the Jerusalem exhibit revolves around the rescue narrative which constructs Israel as the savior of Morocco Jewry and its material heritage from extinction, by its hostile Muslim homeland.
Moreover, by dedicating an official museum to the material culture of the Jewish community that once lived in Morocco, the exhibition in Casablanca restores and rebuilds the continuity between the past and the present and between the country and its former citizens aggressively cut after 1948. Therefore, it allows the descendants of this community, like me, to reconnect with their lost homeland.
However, by presenting the material culture of the Moroccan diaspora in Jerusalem as rescued remains, the Israeli national museum maintains the rupture between Morocco and its Jews, presenting it as irreversible and inevitable. By doing so it implies the end of the Jewish- Moroccan entity as an Arab-Jewish community depicting the state of Israel as its only natural homeland.
The exhibitions serve as a departure point for a broader discussion on the “Zionization” and racialization of MENA Jews at the transition period before / after the establishment of the state of Israel. It reshapes the national, ethnic and racial categories that were standardized by western colonial powers and offers an approach that evades any of these categories altogether.
In Formation: Contemporary Visualizations of the Making and Becoming of the Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jew, explores contemporary films that examine the racialization of the Middle Eastern Jew between 1880-1948 – years of mass political shifts formative of the Middle East, including the decline of the Ottoman Empire, emerging nationalisms in the region, and the Zionist colonization of Palestine leading up to the Nakba and foundation of Israel. This presentation will examine several exemplary pieces out of the growing body of film work by Jewish and non-Jewish artists in the Middle East who, especially in the past two decades, cultivate non-nationalist and anti-nationalist depictions of the realities of the transition of MENA Jews from inhabitants of various faith-based identifications and local belongings to racialized Jews placed within the sealed containment of Jewish ethnicity allegedly inherently longing for the “true” homeland of Palestine/Israel. Such films as Rola Khayyat’s From Brooklyn to Beirut, Yamin Masika’s Voices from Istanbul, and Kathy Wazana’s They Were Promised the Sea employ and enact the theme of returning to the homeland of Beirut, Istanbul, or Marrakech, to critically reflect on the liminal times and racialized transitions that took hold of elders and ancestors in the filmmakers’ family or community. The filmmakers examine the ways that they still feel and embody the repercussions of these transitions while holding on to residues of various pasts pre-racialization.
Yemeni Jews arrived in Palestine as early as 1881. But while their initial migration to Palestine was mainly motivated by a religious and spiritual “longing to Zion,” their racialization by the Zionist institutions in Palestine turned them into a cheap labor force and subjected them to harsh, oppressive and exclusionary policies. Decades of oppression, marginalization and abuse resulted in multiple whitewashed narratives that are still contested by the state or altogether absent from the official history. This paper traces the connecting threads among these narratives and deconstructs the commonly used portrayals of Yemeni Jews as “obedient” and “nice.” These depictions, I argue, were deliberate and part of an ideological power structure employed first by the Zionist institutions in Palestine, and later by the Israeli state, in order to exclude, weaken and marginalize them. Following Stuart Hall’s seminal work on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1997), this paper focuses on the link between contested histories and identity formation. I argue that decades of mainstream media representation manipulated, distorted, and often vilified the Arabness of Yemeni Jews perpetually ignoring and erasing their many attempts to protest and challenge Jewish institutions before and after 1948. In the process of co-opting and molding these histories to fit the Zionist political agenda, most of these accounts remain glossed over and ignored by historical records. This paper also emphasizes the return to Arabness by the second and third generation Arab-Jews utilizing social media and the global stage as a means to bypass the state and reclaim their families’ narratives and their cultural identity.
