In his Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, Aamir Mufti posits the Jewish Question as a “quintessential European Problematic” thereby opening it up for a broader discussion relating to other religious minorities elsewhere in world. Whereas Mufti’s book focuses on Hindu-Muslims relations in India, this paper uses it as a point of departure to think about the Middle Eastern Jews during the period between 1850 and 1950. It does so in two ways. First, and more broadly, by looking again at how the European Jewish question affected Middle Eastern Jews and their histories. Second, it focuses on local instances indicating the articulation of a “Middle Eastern Jewish question” by Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals writing in Arabic and in Hebrew. The paper ends with a reflection on the place of the Middle Eastern Jewish Question between the European Jewish Question and the Question of Palestine.

In the heart of the dual absence of Middle Eastern Jews from Jewish history and from modern Middle Eastern history, the Jews of Palestine occupy a strange position. On the one hand, the history of Jewish communities of Palestine before the 20th century received far more attention than that of any other Jewish community in the Middle East; and as Beshara Doumani has argued, they have been studied more closely than any other group in Palestine. And yet the study of these communities was framed by Zionist historiography, which saw them as a prototypical Jewish national community, separated from its social environment, connected to the Jewish diaspora, and anchored in ancient continuous presence in Palestine and in yearning for a future Jewish return to Zion. Accordingly, this historiography paid almost no attention to the 20th century history of these communities, as they supposedly cleared the stage for the Zionist “New Yishuv”. At the same time, and other than very general references, Palestinian historiography largely ignored these communities as well. Finally, and most interestingly, the Jews of Palestine also did not feature much in the scholarship on “Arab Jews” since the 1990s, as critical Mizrahi work focussed primarily on Jewish communities in other Arab countries and their fate in Israel. And so, the Jews of Palestine were more visible than any other Middle Eastern Jewish community, and yet absent from 20th century history of Palestine, absent from the history of Zionism, and absent the history of Mizrahi Jews. This presence-absence, however, is changing in the past decade, with important publications (such as Abigail Jacobson, Michelle Campos, Yuval Ben Bassat, Salim Tamari), that shifted attention to the Jews of Palestine in their local Arab and Ottoman environment. In this paper I will examine the reasons for the presence-absence of the Jews of Palestine from the historiography, and the reasons for the renewed interest in them. I will review the recent contributions that have reshaped the field, and articulate a research agenda that seeks to position the Jews of Palestine in their local Arab environment; and finally, I will consider if and how that Jewish Palestinian viewpoint can help to rewrite the discussion on the questions of Zionism, Palestine and Israeli society.

In his 2001 article “’A Question That Outweighs All Others’: Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue,“ Alan Dowty gifted the scholarly community with a full translation of Yitzhak Epstenin’s 1907 essay “A Hidden Question.” In his accompanying commentary on this important primary source Dowty additionally names Ahad Ha'am, Menachem Ussishkin, Leo Motzkin, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Ber Borochov as Zionists who dealt with what was then dubbed the “Arab question.” Curiously, neither Epstein – nor Dowty a century after him – mentions a non-Ashkenazi Jew, or newspaper or any social or political organ that is non-Ashkenazi in origin, identity, composition or form. The prime aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the crucial debate over the “Arab question” was indeed situated exclusively within Euro-Zionist circles. It suggests that arguments by non-Ashkenazi intellectuals are scant in the otherwise gigantic body of scholarship scrutinising the Palestine/Israel question, as conjointly produced on a global scale by Jews, Arabs, Zionists, anti-Zionists, post-Zionists and others. This otherwise heterogeneous, polarised body of scholarship is rather uniformly Ashkenazi-centric in its scholarly approach. As such, it tends to collectively ignore historical Middle Eastern Jewish views capable of fracturing the coherence that commonly typifies nationalist-informed teleological narratives. This paper’s reappraisal of the “Arab Question” within Zionism marshals evidence from four forgotten pre-1937 controversies between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi intellectuals: the 1896/1897 controversy between Prof Avraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951) and Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); the 1913 controversy between Dr Nissim Malul (1893-1957) and Ya‘acov Rabinovitch (1875–1948); the 1921 controversy between Hayyim Ben-Kiki (1887-1935) and Yitzhak Epstein (1863-1943); and the 1936 controversy between advocate David Moyal (1880-1952) and Labour leader Berl Katznelson (1887-1944).

This paper examines the political thought of left-leaning Middle Eastern Jewish (or Mizrahi) intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s. Underlying the examination is the contention that there is a serious need to revisit and perhaps reconstruct the historical understanding of early Mizrahi political thought in Israel. Seeking to rectify what Palestine-born Eliyahu Eliachar termed as the ‘original sin of Zionism’, Iraqi-born intellectuals like Latif Dori and Gideon Giladi posited that the State of Israel needed to unequivocally identify and engage with its neighboring countries, both in cultural and socio-political terms. While most of the native Arabic-speaking intellectuals discussed believed in the necessity of a Jewish State, they struggled with its expansionist and Westernization projects; which they viewed as colonialist in nature and, by definition, exclusionary against Palestinian citizens and Mizrahi immigrants. This paper is based on research conducted in journals catering to the Mizrahi community and written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Specifically, the paper reviews the political stances espoused in Dori’s weekly piece ‘On the Margins’; Giladi’s writings in the socialist journal Al-Mirsad; and Eliachar’s English-language journal Israel’s Oriental Problem. The paper begins with the contention that the political marginalization of Mizrahim in Israel fostered a shared sense of Oriental identity opposed to the European nature of Zionist thought. In turn, Mizrahi intellectuals promoted an alternative form of Zionism. Unlike European Zionism, this alternative was culturally and politically rooted in the Middle East and sought a non-exploitative relationship with the indigenous peoples of Israel/Palestine and the Arab World. The Middle Eastern Zionism promoted by the figures discussed held an anti-colonial stance and encouraged the equal participation of the Palestinian and Mizrahi communities within the political, labor, and social sectors of Israeli society. The paper concludes with a reflection on how this alternative Middle Eastern Zionism formed the ideological basis for a Mizrahi Civil Rights Struggle in Israel.