In 1940s Iraq, of the roughly 150,000 Jews residing there, 2,000 of them participated in the illegal Zionist movement and 300 participated in Iraq’s illegal Communist Party (ICP) (which was roughly 3,000 members strong overall). Despite being a tight-knit, thoroughly Arabized community where in many cases, Communists and Zionists lived side by side in Jewish neighborhoods, the Jews of these two political persuasions were diametrically opposed to one another. Zionists considered Communists a danger to Jewish unity. Communists considered Zionists imperialist tools who prevented Iraqi autonomy following the British Mandate and sustained British influence in the region. What can be made of the divide between Communism and Zionism as well as the rhetoric, idioms, and summations that were used to articulate this divide? Using the analytic of race to answer this question, my paper contends that what characterized the gulf between the ICP (including its Jewish members) and Zionists in Iraq was not hollow hyperbole, superficial quibbling, or mere political difference. Given that discourses around women’s status in Iraq and within these two movements were often central to the critiques, actions, and ideologies each of them espoused, my paper sees centering women’s voices and experiences as particularly fruitful. Sources I draw on include memoirs, biographical dictionaries and personal letters. Thus, employing the analytic of race to understand Jewish Communist and Zionist opposition in Iraq, my paper argues that a parallel study of Jewish women's participation in these illegal movements shows that due to influence from British imperialism and political Zionism, Zionist Jewish women longed for imperial whiteness as a way to rescue them from what political Zionism (influenced by racial conceptions of nationhood and theories of scientific racism) labeled a degenerating existence as Jews and Jews in Iraq specifically. Communist Jewish women, in their rejection of Zionism and imperialism and due to overall Iraqi Communist attempts to at least not make religion or ethnicity a barrier for entry into their movement, rejected whiteness. All of this matters not only because it gives specific definition to a case of Iraqi Jewish communal division which provides a more complete picture of the community and Iraq overall, but because it shows that racializations, rather than a single racialization, occurred for the community during the mid-20th century. This in turn, reveals that Iraqi Jews were informed by an Iraqi racial logic that, while stratified, did not pointedly and immediately racially oppress them.

From the moment of its discovery in African-American patients in the early twentieth century, the inherited condition of sickle cell disease became a tool for anthropological speculation. American physicians quickly came to believe that the gene for sickle cell disease was a racial trait unique to Africans. When white patients were found to have the disease, physicians argued that this was evidence of African admixture in their family trees. In the 1940s, research on sickle cell disease expanded to colonial Africa, where medical geneticists hoped to discover the evolutionary origins of the gene. However, Middle Eastern scientists suddenly captured the attention of the international sickle cell research community in the early 1950s. Reports that sickle cell disease had been discovered in the “white” inhabitants of Israel, Egypt, Aden Colony, and southern Turkey challenged the assumption that the gene was “essentially African” and a definite indicator of African ancestry. Using scientific publications, archival documents, and oral histories, this paper traces the discoveries of sickle cell disease across the Middle East during the 1950s and 60s. Like in North America, sickle cell research in the Middle East unfolded along the fractured social politics of race. The disease was discovered predominantly in Arabic-speaking populations, and often in religiously or socially marginalized communities. Middle Eastern, British, and American geneticists attempted to create evolutionary hypotheses that reconciled the black-white racial dichotomy ascribed to sickle cell disease with historical and sociological boundaries between Arabs, Turks, and religious minorities. Researchers in some countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, embraced historical explanations of African-Arab admixture. Others, based in Israel, Yemen, and Lebanon, favored alternate racial formulations that posited a non-African origin of the gene. Finally, Turkish researchers accepted any possible hypothesis that erased Arab identity and ancestry from their research subjects. As the parameters of Turkish and Arab nationalism shifted in the Cold War-era Middle East, so did the favored explanatory narratives for the presence of sickle cells in different communities, which assigned different degrees of importance to African ancestry, social segregation, and evolutionary adaptations to malaria.

In 1966 Palestinian poet and activist Mahmoud Darwish published two essays, one titled, “Letter to a Negro,” and the other titled, “Second Letter to a Negro.” In them Darwish, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, wrote about how the writings of black Americans such as James Baldwin resonated deeply with him. But Darwish also insisted on distinguishing between the overt forms of racialized oppression experienced by black Americans and the more covert forms of oppression he faced at home. While a number of recent scholarly works have shed new light on how Palestinians and black Americans have compared their respective struggles for freedom with one another, the dominance of English-language sources in this body of scholarship has meant that important Palestinian perspectives have not yet been brought to the fore. In particular, the writings of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel who saw clear parallels between their own positionality as minoritized citizens and the positionality of black Americans have not yet been adequately investigated. I address this gap in the literature by tracing the ways in which Palestinian intellectuals in Israel engaged with multiple facets of the black American struggle for freedom through a close reading and analysis of Darwish’s two essays. I argue that Palestinian citizens of Israel understood that they, like black Americans, faced a modern, racialized system of oppression that had similar internal logics, albeit with different external manifestations. More importantly, I argue that these Palestinians drew upon the experiences and perspectives of black Americans in order to push back against the structures of racialized oppression they faced at home while seeking to connect transnationally to other minoritized and colonized peoples who were engaged in similar struggles. By showing how Palestinian citizens of Israel compared and contrasted the intertwined logics of racialized oppression both at home and abroad, this paper elucidates the deep transnational engagements of Palestinian citizens of Israel during an important—and often overlooked—period of history. By focusing on Palestinian writings in Arabic, this paper also provides fresh insights that can contribute to important and timely discussions developing among scholars in Middle Eastern studies, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, decolonization studies, and American studies.

In the documentary film, “Race the Power of an Illusion,” historian James Horton notes that “you could walk across a state line and literally, legally change race.” The comment refers to the different percentages that defined a person’s membership in the “Negro race” in Virginia, Florida, and Alabama, but it also points to the broader issue of how taxonomies of race vary locally within national contexts. This paper explores the question of racial variation as it applies to Arabic-speaking, primarily Syrian, migrants and their children in the US-Mexico borderlands in the early 20th century. Using census schedules, border crossing cards, directories, and other sources I analyze the ways in which Syrians moved in and out of racial categories: as whites, as Asians, as Mexicans, and as Arabs. The paper develops the concept of racial reassignation – a bureaucratic attempt to impose white supremacist categories of difference onto Arabic-speaking populations, particularly those whose lived experience cohered around hybrid, liminal, and mixed-race relationships.