Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

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WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY?

FRAGMENTED CONSCIOUSNESS, “INESSENTIAL
SOLIDARITY,” AND THE “COMING COMMUNITY”
(PART 2)

Reuven Snir

To cite this article: Reuven Snir (2015) WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? FRAGMENTED
CONSCIOUSNESS, “INESSENTIAL SOLIDARITY,” AND THE “COMING COMMUNITY” (PART
2) , Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 14:2, 299-314, DOI: 10.1080/14725886.2014.997486

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Reuven Snir

WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY?

FRAGMENTED CONSCIOUSNESS,
“INESSENTIAL SOLIDARITY,” AND THE
“COMING COMMUNITY” (PART 2)†

3. Globalization and the search for inessential solidarities

The contemporary political, social and cultural circumstances during the middle of the
twentieth century had prepared the Arabized Jews to gradually develop a negative sen-
sitivity towards the notion of stable collective identity, whatever the identity. After they
had experienced the tribulations of a collective exclusion in their beloved Arab home-
lands, followed by their collective uprooting from their soil, mostly against their
will, they witnessed a hasty immigration to the Promised Land—the newborn State
of the Jews—only to face another collective exclusion whose perpetrators sometimes
hastened to ascribe derogatory collective identities to them. Following this double
exclusion, both before and after their immigration, and after adjusting to the new
Israeli-Hebrew society, many of them found themselves, separately rather than collec-
tively, preferring to distance themselves from any stable collectivity and instead assert
their own singularities and, at the same time, reject any essential identity. If we para-
phrase a declaration by writer Sami Michael (b. 1926), many of them chose to build
their own unique “State,” each consisting of only one citizen—himself.1
The accumulated effect of the double collective exclusion on the subjectivities of the
Arabized immigrants has been ignored in general, to the point that their identities were
interpreted in a traditional essentialist sense, which means that there is an essential
content to any identity which is defined by common origin or common structure of
experience.
Also, for political and ideological reasons, most scholars preferred to emphasize
only one part of that double exclusion: either the one exercised in the Arab countries
before the Jews’ immigration, or the one exercised in Israel after their immigration.
Measured only in their combined effect, the significance of both collective exclusionary
operations cannot be underestimated. The Iraqi case is very illuminating in this regard: if

†
The first part of this article was published in JMJS 11.2 (2012)
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2012.684864) and in Sites of Jewish Memory: Jews
In and From Islamic Lands (2014).

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 14, No. 2 July 2015, pp. 299–314
ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online © 2015 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2014.997486
300 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

it were only the exclusion in Iraq, it would have sufficed for the Jews to be aware that
belonging and identity were not set in stone, and that they were not secured by a lifelong
guarantee. What could one expect after they were excluded again in their promised
homeland, “promised” by both those who collectively pulled them—the Zionists—as
well as by those who collectively pushed them—the Iraqi authorities and the national
Arab activists?2 Was there any reason for them to think that belonging and identity
were set in stone?
During less than half a century, the Iraqi Jews had witnessed a rapid process by
which their Iraqi–Arab identity was firmly consolidated, to be followed by another
process which resulted in its speedy fragmentation. The Jews’ sorrow was great,
some refusing to believe that they were collectively excluded from Iraqiness and Arab-
ness and consequently chose to remain in their ancient homeland, hoping that the anti-
Jewish atmosphere would change (Kazzaz 2002, 33–65). Many hoped that their uproot-
ing from their Iraqi homeland might be a blessing in disguise, dreaming that their immi-
gration to the new Jewish land would guarantee their full integration into an Israeli–
Jewish collective identity without renouncing their Iraqiness and Arabness. However,
the fragmentation of their identity left them, instead, excluded from both old and
new identities. Their shock was even greater when they realized that this time they
were excluded by their coreligionists. The political circumstances in the Middle East,
which were the direct cause of that double exclusion, accelerated a tendency among
many of the immigrants which, at the time, was in its infancy, to reject in principle
the notion of stable and fixed identities, to assert their particular singularities and to
search for alternative forms of identification, mostly various kinds of inessential and
not fixed solidarities and belonging. These local, regional and global developments,
sometimes simultaneous and overlapping, served as fertile ground for the construction
of a form of subjectivity that responded to the natural human need for identification and
belonging and, at the same time, was flexible enough to provide them with some shield
against additional frustration and disappointment.
It was thus the absurdity of both exclusionary operations that paved the way to the
rejection of the notion of a fixed identity, particularly because each of these operations
aimed at the heart of a major component of their identity: in Iraq, for example, precisely
when the Jews felt themselves more Arabs and Iraqis than Jews—the supremacy of culture
and nationality over religion—they were excluded as the “Other” Jews in a way that left
most of them no alternative but to immigrate to the State of the Jews. In Israel, precisely
when they should have felt themselves more Jews than Arab and Iraqis—Jewishness as a
religion and nationality—they were excluded as the “Other” Iraqis and Arabs. But,
now, unlike the first exclusion, at least for the most of them,3 there was no other
place that could serve as a new promised haven. This double exclusion prepared
them to understand the fragility of collective identities, and here, in my view, the
notion of stable and fixed identity began to be looked upon with some mistrust. The
fact that at the same time another overlapping process of interpellation—the constitu-
tive process by which individuals acknowledge and respond to ideologies—and this time
a global one, was at work inevitably created the propensity among Arabized Jews for
inessential solidarities.
Living in a democratic state, if for the Jewish majority at least—and no one has ever
questioned their Jewishness4—the intellectuals among the Arabized Jews could choose
their own way of belonging. Because of their disappointment in the ideologies, both
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 301

great and small—Marxism, Communism, Capitalism, Arab Nationalism, Zionism and

so on they, as sophisticated people, sensed, consciously or unconsciously, the need to
seek other ways of identification and belonging, which would not lead them once
again into a dead end where they might have faced a third, bitter exclusion. The
process of globalization, in addition to the openness of Israeli culture to, and partici-
pation in, contemporary trends of globalized culture (Regev 2000, 231–235), found
them at such a critical moment of fragmented identity whose components, in each indi-
vidual case, were difficult to reassemble in a way that would produce another collective
identity. Singularity has been the preferred option, but not by default. It has been a con-
scious choice, which fits the local, global, and, in most cases, the personal circumstance
of the Arabized Jews.
I argue that many of the Arabized Jews and their offspring have been adhering to the
notion of inessential solidarities, no matter which identity is ascribed to them, especially
against the background of the globalization of Israel and at a time when social unity is
crumbling. In a study of Americanization in Israel, Anat First and Eli Avraham
present findings that illustrate the high degree to which American imagery has pervaded
the various spheres of Israeli society. By analysing advertisements published during the
1990s and 2000s in the Israeli daily papers, they suggest that “this is not a marginal,
superficial or insignificant phenomenon” (First and Avraham 2009, 120). Uri Ram’s
The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (2008) serves our argu-
ment in this regard as well. The book’s front cover photo depicts the new business dis-
trict in Tel Aviv, along the Ayalon Highway. In the preface, Ram recounts that the initial
reaction of the publisher’s staff to the photo was somewhat disapproving, because the
photo “is not particularly recognizable as Israel” and “looks to us like it could be any
city.” Ram was delighted as he could not have phrased a better motto for a book that
showed Israel to be a capitalist society in the global era (2008, vii). The book argues
that, under the impact of globalization, Israel is being bifurcated into two polar oppo-
sites—capitalism versus tribalism, or “McWorld” versus “Jihad”—that contradict and
abet each other dialectically. It is not the aim of the present article to discuss this
new paradigm for the study of contemporary Israeli society, but one thing is beyond
any doubt: Israeli society has gradually become one of the major centres of globalization.
Three major socio-economic processes are the spearheads of Israeli globalization, in fact
three major revolutions: postindustrialism, consumerism and a bourgeois revolution
(Ram 2008, 29–73).
The development of information and communication technologies, the leading
component in the postindustrial revolution, is an illustration: Israel has become one
of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots as it has more high-tech startups
per capita “than any other nation on earth, by far,” writes David Brooks.

It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks

second behind the US in the number of companies listed on the NASDAQ. Israel,
with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany
combined. (The New York Times, January 12, 2010)

In Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (2009), Dan Senor and Saul Singer
write that Israel, at the time of their study, had a classic innovation cluster, a place where
high-tech obsessives worked in close proximity and fed off each other’s ideas: global
302 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

companies and investors “are beating a path to Israel and finding unique combinations of
audacity, creativity, and drive everywhere they look.” It

may explain why, in addition to boasting the highest density of start-ups in the world
(a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis), more Israeli companies are
listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European con-
tinent. (Senor and Singer 2009, 11)

Senor and Singer devote more than 10 pages at the opening of their book to the success
(at the time of their study) of Shai Agassi as entrepreneur: he is one of the brightest
justifications for describing Israel as “Start-Up Nation.” Agassi is the son of an Arabized
Jew: his father, Reuven, immigrated to Israel along with his family at the beginning of
the 1950s, when he was only nine. Their immigration was by no means due to Zionist
considerations, but a result of the previously mentioned exclusionary operations exer-
cised by the Iraqi systems of power: they were suddenly no longer “good” Iraqis and
Shai’s grandfather, an accountant for the Basra port authority, lost his job. After their
immigration, while Reuven was serving as the representative of the Israeli company
Tadiran in South America, Shai studied in an American school in Argentina. At the
age of 15, he returned to Israel and later became one of the leading high-tech Israeli
entrepreneurs. Speaking about the exclusion of the Agassi family in Iraq, Senor and
Singer mention that, like Shai and Reuven Agassi, there were also millions of Israelis
with roots in the Arab Muslim world (2009, 129–132), but the authors make no
mention of the second exclusion in Israel. All studies referred, for example, to the
speedy process by which the Iraqi Jews succeeded in adapting to Israeli society, at
least in comparison with other Arabized-Jewish communities (Meir-Glitzenstein
2009). They managed to face cultural exclusion by letting their identity become fluid
and elusive, emphasizing education in order to increase the chances of social mobility,
hebraizing their family names, joining the security services and military intelligence,
serving in various governmental Arabic media and education, using their knowledge
of English in the jobs market, and not letting religion play a dominant role in their lives.
My arguments are not expected to evoke resentment if applied to those Arabized
Jews immigrating to Western countries, such as the USA, Britain, France or
Canada.5 But most of them ended up in Israel where they shaped their new identities.
Only “few if any of us are exposed to just one ‘community of ideas and principles’ at a
time,” writes Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 13), let alone immigrants with the experiences
of the Arabized Jews. If we return to the Iraqi Jews, most of them have collectively
shared some basic senses of belonging in Israel and their subjectivities contain some
layers in common, and but others as well. In 2005, I published a book in Hebrew entitled
Arviyut, yahadut, tsiyonut: màavak zehuyot biytsiratam shel yehude ‘iraq (Arabness, Jewish-
ness, Zionism: A struggle of identities in the literature of Iraqi Jews). If I were to
publish the book today I would entitle it: “Arabness, Jewishness, Iraqiness, Zionism,
Communism, Israeliness, Hebrewness and so on: a struggle of identities in the literature
of Iraqi Jews.” The idea that the subjectivities of the Iraqi Jews were an arena of struggle
among only three identities, no matter how substantial they were, was too naïve,
although the book itself speaks of many other components of identity and belonging.
All the subjectivities I have investigated are of writers and intellectuals; yet, I argue
that their attitude to the notion of identity is not due only to their being unique as
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 303

writers and intellectuals but also because of their idiosyncratic experiences both in their
native land and in Israel. For example, there are not as many attitudes towards notions of
identity and belonging among Israeli-Hebrew intellectuals even if they are immigrants or
the offspring of immigrants. I have attempted to map only a few of those “identities” that
compose the subjectivities of the Iraqi Jews:

(1) They were Jews in Iraq and have been Jews in Israel but not only as an identity
ascribed to them. Jewishness is only one layer of their subjectivities, no matter
the role this layer plays in their emotions, thinking and active lives. The secular
Iraqi Jews never attributed much importance to their adherence to the Jewish reli-
gion, but almost none of them has ever rejected this cultural component of his/her
own identity. Even in the golden age of the integration of the Jews into the Iraqi
nation and state during the 1920s and 1930s, only few cases of conversion to Islam
were recorded (Snir 2005, 639 [index: “hamarat dat”]).
(2) They are Israeli citizens and feel part of Israeli–Hebrew society. The fact that all of
them accepted Israeli citizenship based on the Law of Return has gradually made
the subjectivities of even the most anti-Zionist among them (and there were many
in the 1950s) (Snir 1991, 153–173) assume a significant layer of Israeliness.
(3) Arabic has remained the mother tongue of those who arrived in Israel as adults.
Some of those who arrived at a young age have gradually lost the sense of Arabic as
mother tongue, but even they still retain a true sense of Arabic in their subjectiv-
ity. Only a few of those born in Israel consider Arab culture as their own culture.
This means that although the immigrants were culturally Arab, they thrust their
offspring into the centre of Israeli–Hebrew culture.
(4) Hebrew has gradually become their language, even if for those who came fully
developed emotionally and intellectually, it was only a second language. Even
those few who insisted on adhering to Arabic became fluent in Hebrew as a
result of their living in Israeli-Hebrew society. For most of their Israel-born off-
spring, Hebrew is the major component of their own subjectivities.
(5) Not one of them has ever denied being an Iraqi. The great majority dismiss the
notion of Arab-Jewish identity, but they have never been dismissive of the Iraqi
layer of their identity. However, none of them is prepared to return to Iraq—
their Iraq has been lost forever.
(6) For those who immigrated from Baghdad, the Baghdad layer of their identity, the
Jewish-Baghdadi vernacular included, has similarly never been denied. Any casual
meeting between a Baghdadi Jew and another from Mosul or Basra or other places
proves it. Immigrants coming from other Iraqi towns developed a similar local
pride.
(7) Zionism has played a significant role in shaping Iraqi Jews’ subjectivities. Even
those who were anti-Zionist or paid no significant attention to this movement
in Baghdad could never ignore it after their immigration. Those, for example,
who joined the Communist Party, have shaped their identities against the
Zionist Other. Even that was for a very limited period during the 1950s
because they would soon be excluded from the Communist Party, which was
gradually being controlled by Muslim and Christian Palestinians. For the Iraqi-
Jewish communist immigrants, it was a third painful exclusion, which explains
why they have been interpellated and hailed into inessential solidarities much
304 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

more easily than other Arabized Jews. Since the 1940s, the Zionist issue has cap-
tured the attention of the Baghdadi Jews, and whether or not they rejected
Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem (as most of them did while in
Iraq) or adopt it (as most of them have done after immigrating to Israel),
Zionism has been one of the factors that shaped their political consciousness.
Zionism fundamentally changed the life of the Iraqi Jews and not one of them
could remain indifferent to its interpellating power.
(8) Most of the Iraqi-Jewish intellectuals have some sort of cosmopolitan conscious-
ness. While in Iraq, the secular Jewish intellectuals were part of the Iraqi intelli-
gentsia who were in the process of developing some sense of cosmopolitan
sensitivity. Their secular culture was flavoured by Englishness as a result of the
British occupation, and by Egyptianness because of Egypt’s role as the centre of
Arab culture at the time. After immigrating to Israel they became familiar not
only with Hebrew culture but also with world culture through translation, not
to mention their connections with immigrants from other parts of the world.
(9) It seems that none of the Iraqi Jews is comfortable with such collective terms as
“Mizrahim”, Sephardim, or any other binary categories, which have been imposed
on the Arabized Jews as a whole by various systems of power.
(10) In addition to all the aforementioned layers of belonging and subjectivity, each of
the Iraqi Jews has adopted other specific layers of identity and belonging, some of
them simply because of their being human beings, but others due to their double
exclusion, be it personal, social, political, cultural, professional or all of these.
Among more than 100 of the Iraqi-Jewish writers and intellectuals I have
studied (see Snir forthcoming), I could not find even two whose subjectivities
are similar: each component occupies a different position in each subjectivity.
Additionally, confronting the identities ascribed to them unwillingly (Mizrahim,
Sephardim, ‘Edot Mizrah, Orientals, Levantines and so on), their subjectivities
reacted in general by consolidating, in each case, specific layers and adding new
ones. We have not yet mentioned the various modes of interaction between the
different layers of each subjectivity. The film Forget Baghdad is an excellent mani-
festation of that: apart from the common Iraqi ethnic source, the five personalities
who participated in the film, Mūsā Ḥūrı̄ (1924–2010), Sami Michael (b. 1926),
Shimon Ballas (b. 1930), Samı̄r Naqqāsh (1938–2004) and Ella Habiba Shoḥat
(b. 1959) have hardly anything essential in common.

My argument is that from the 1950s the secular Iraqi Jews, mainly the Baghdadis among
them, began to behave, if we use Alberto Melucci’s words as “migrant animals in the
labyrinths of the metropolis” (Melucci 1997, 61). They have participated, in reality
or in imagination, in several worlds, local, regional and universal, and each of these
worlds has a culture, a language and a set of roles and rules to which they had to
adapt. As immigrants ousted, against their will, from an Arab-Muslim society to a
Western-Jewish one which, in turn, pushed them to its margins, they were subjected
to mounting pressures and temptations to change and adjust, to transfer and translate
what they had been just a short while ago into new codes and forms of relationship.
Against that backdrop, it is no wonder that the tendency towards inessential solidarities
has been a natural refuge for the Iraqi Jews. Their experience in both Iraq and Israel
prepared them to independently manage their affairs, showing mistrust of promises
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 305

and pledges for the future. The double exclusion they had experienced forced them, in
Kant’s words, to enter the gates of Enlightenment. They had the resolution and courage
to use their understanding without the guidance of others (Kant 1996, 58–64. Quota-
tion from page 58).
Referring to black Britons who exist between (at least) two great cultural assem-
blages, Paul Gilroy states that striving to be both European and black requires some
specific forms of double consciousness. Saying this, adds Gilroy, does not mean to
suggest that “taking on either or both unfinished identities necessarily exhausts subjective
resources of any particular individual” (Gilroy 1993, 1). Like the black Britons, the Iraqi
Jews stand between at least two great cultural assemblages—the Israeli-Jewish and the
Arab-Muslim—but these assemblages were not necessarily unified and distinguishable in
their subjectivities but an accumulation of various layers, Jewish, Israeli, Arab, Hebrew,
Zionist, ethnic (Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian and so on) which require some specific forms of
multiple consciousness without exhausting the subjective resources of any particular
individual. For example, secular Iraqi Jews who had not shown any strong adherence
to religion while in Baghdad, might have developed some Jewish religious consciousness
after their immigration because their Jewishness had been the dominant factor in their
exclusion from Iraqi-Arab society, even more so, having immigrated to an Israeli-Jewish
cultural space where they were encouraged to strengthen their religious consciousness.
Also, for the same immigrants, the vernacular Baghdadi consciousness is still inseparable
from their cultural identity even if they arrived at a specific cultural space that demanded
another specific consciousness for their cultural and social survival. In addition, the
encounter with the “Arab-Palestinian question” in Israel has required some adaptation
of their rooted Arab consciousness to the purposes of the new place. No matter that
the immigrants adopted a Zionist ideology or an anti-Zionist one (generally represented
by Communism) in the 1950s, their Arab consciousness had to undergo changes, such as
the distinction some of them made between their cultural preferences and hostile Arab
ethnicity.
I believe that the present analysis of the subjectivities of the Iraqi Jews is applicable
as well, in one way or another, to other immigrants in Israel, primarily to those from
Arab countries. There are, of course, significant differences between the secular Iraqi
Jews, mainly the Baghdadis among them and other Arabized immigrants, regarding
the attitude to Arabic language and culture. I have found, however, that the tendency
towards inessential solidarities had nothing to do with the Iraqi Jews’ preference for Arabic
language and culture; it has been due mainly to the two processes of exclusion, which
most, if not all the Arabized, Jews had undergone. Already in the 1950s, three
decades before the global/local dialectics could be discerned in Israel as well, most of
the intellectuals among the Arabized immigrants felt the same dialectics but tripled
—global/regional/local—and this dialectics involved their very existence: they spoke
Hebrew as part of Israeli-Hebrew society, but they were also part of the Arabic-speaking
Middle East, and they could not escape the global developments, especially the tendency
towards inessential solidarities. Whoever lived that double exclusion could not have
adhered to any notion of stable identity and felt the need to be flexible and adapt to
the changing circumstances, emphasizing their own singularity in which each of the
layers of the collective identities in their subjectivity (Arabness, Jewishness, Hebrew-
ness, Israeliness, Zionism, Communism and so on) plays a different role, in addition
306 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

to various more specific components such as gender, profession, leisure pursuits and
local environment.
As for the new generation of Neo-Arab-Jewish intellectuals, those leftist Mizrahi
scholars such as Yehuda Shenhav (born 1952), Ella Shohat (born 1959), Sami Shalom
Chetrit (born 1960) and their followers,6 it seems that most of them have adopted
Arab-Jewish or “Mizrahi” identity as part of identity politics in Israel, which is not iso-
lated from what seems to be following the changing winds of fashion during the last
decades (see Shenhav 1999; Shohat 2006; Chetrit 2010).7 Bearing in mind Edward
Hallet Carr’s advice “to study the historian before you begin to study the facts,” I
have studied their “identities” in the same way as I have studied the subjectivities of
the Iraqi Jewish writers and intellectuals during the last century. For lack of space, I
cannot discuss their arguments as well as their subjectivities in detail, as they have
been expressed in their words and behaviours through which they have represented
themselves to themselves and others (see Snir forthcoming). But the tendency
towards inessential solidarities exists, in one way or another, among all of them. A
brief word about Yehuda Shenhav (born 1952): when he was young, so he tells us,
he pressured his father to change their family name from Shaharabani to Shenhav: “I
said [to him] it is ruining my life, my career, that people have stereotyped [us]
because of his name, that it isn’t associated with good standing.” The father initially
refused but the son was persistent. Many years later, Shenhav, formerly Shaharabani,
said: “One of the saddest things in my life now is to go to my father’s grave and see
the headstone and see ‘Shenhav’ there rather than ‘Shaharabani’” (Shabi 2008, 223–
224). This narrative about his surname, whether true or fictional, is important
because identities arise from the narrativization of the self, but the fictional nature of
this narrativization in no way undermines its discursive, concrete or political effective-
ness. Two facts are undoubted: first, the name was changed and, second, Shenhav says he
regrets that action. In both cases, the narrativization of the self plays a major role not
only in defining his identity but also in defining his political and social role in society.
Increasingly, we find Arabized Jews acting like Henrik Ibsen’s hero Peer Gynt who is
obsessed throughout his life with finding his “true identity”: “I tried to make time stand
still by dancing!” (1998, 105). What Peer Gynt was afraid of more than anything else
was “to know you can’t ever free yourself ” and “to be stuck as a troll for the rest of
your days” (Ibsen, 1998, 46). That is why he decides to keep his freedom of choice,
“to know that behind you there is always / a bridge, if you have to beat a retreat”
(Ibsen, 1998, 77. cf. Bauman 2004, 90–91). Any discussion about the identities of Ara-
bized Jews, which involves an attempt to combine the experiences of all Arabized-Jewish
communities, faces the challenge of how to say something homogenous and at the same
time meaningful about all of them. Take, for example, the Iraqi-Jewish and North
African communities, which always seem to be two poles creating an obstacle to any
attempt to situate the Arabized Jews under the same umbrella. The umbrella suggested
here however is a conceptual one: the tendency towards inessential solidarities.

Conclusion
In the preface to The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy mentions two aspirations that he would
like to share with his readers before they embark on the voyage that he would like his
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 307

book to represent. Concluding my study, I have three aspirations, two of them are essen-
tially Gilroy’s adapted to my own journey: the first is my hope that the research project
of which the present article is a part articulates the notion of the intermixture of ideas of
all communities and individuals and at the same time the dangerous obsessions with
essential purity and exclusionary operations which have been occurring for over a
century inside and outside Zionist-Jewish and Arab-Muslim national politics and
cultures.
The second is my desire that the project’s heartfelt plea against the closure of the
categories with which we conduct our cultural and political lives will not go
unheard. The history of the Arabized Jews during the last century yields lessons
about the instability and mutability of identities that are always unfinished and unfinish-
able, always being remade.
My third aspiration, a meta-scholarly one, is my wish that scholars of Jewish, Israeli,
Muslim and Arab cultures and identities, who have produced excellent studies based on
philological, literary and historical methods, will benefit from the theoretical insights of
thinkers and philosophers working during the last decades on notions of culture, identity
and belonging. In this scholarly context, fresh identity debates based on genetic studies
(Balter 2010, 1342), or controversies regarding the invention of peoples and nations,
such as the controversy evoked by Shlomo Sand (2009), are totally unrelated (see
also Shapira 2009, 63–72; Begley 2010). There is, instead, an urgent need, to quote
Diane Davis, to “shoot for a thinking of fluidity and a fluidity of thinking” (2000,
15). After all, to borrow Georges Bataille’s saying which appears as a motto to the
present study, we, as experienced scholars who guide the young generation of scholars,
must find ways to stop regulating the movement that exceeds us with the same methods
and notions we used in our dissertations 30 or 40 years ago (Bataille 1988). As migrant
animals in the labyrinths of the global metropolis, participating in an infinity of worlds,
in the words of Alberto Melucci, we are subjected to mounting pressures, relationships
and information which far exceed that of any previous culture (1997, 61). This is why,
when we investigate any phenomenon, be it historical, social, cultural or other, we are
looking, says Hélène Cixous, for the thing that is both known and unknown, the most
unknown and the best unknown: “We go toward the best known unknown thing, where
knowing and not knowing touch,” says Cixous,

where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be
afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the
inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is
trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.
(1993, 38)

Over 70 years after Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), Zygmunt Bauman
suggested “The Man without Bonds” as the hero of our modern society. Having no
unbreakable bonds eternally attached, people must now establish whatever bonds
they want to use to engage with the rest of humanity by their own efforts, with the
help of their own skills and dedication. Unbound, they must connect, but none of
the connections that come to fill the gap left by absent bonds is, however, guaranteed
to last. Anyway, they need to be only loosely tied so that they can be untied again,
with little delay, when the circumstances change—as in fluid modernity they surely
308 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

will. In other words, “if you wish ‘to relate’, keep your distance; if you want fulfillment
from your togetherness, do not make or demand commitments. Keep all doors open at
any time” (Bauman 2003, vii, x). We frequently hear the word “identity” and we will
certainly hear it in the future but, then, always, as Bauman rightly says, “you can be
sure that there is a battle going on. A battlefield is identity’s natural home” (2004,
77). On whatever battlefield, identity is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, its edge
is turned against collective pressure by individuals who resent conformity; at another
time, it is the group that turns the edge against a larger group that is accused of
wanting to destroy it. In both cases, identity appears to be a war cry used in a defensive
war: an individual against the assault of a group, or a weaker group against a stronger
totality (see Bauman 2004, 76). But is Arab-Jewish identity currently a war cry at all?
First, Arab-Jewish identity is no longer shared by segments of any society: currently,
there is no group that turns its Arab-Jewish identity edge against any other group accused
of a wish to destroy it, simply because such a group does not exist. There are several
“Mizrahi” Jewish academics and intellectuals of Arab origin who use such an identity
as a war cry against Zionism. Yehuda Shenhav admits that he uses the “category” of
Arab Jews only to “challenge a discourse,” but even his statement that “once upon a
time there were Arab Jews, and this category was erased or vanished from discourse”
(Shabi 2008, 232), is not based on fact: such a category never existed as there has
never been a group that identified itself as Arab-Jewish. There were Jews who felt them-
selves to be culturally Arab, but no Jewish community has ever identified itself as Arab-
Jewish. There are only retrospective allusions to Jewish communities who lived in Arab
societies. Contrary to all other components of identity among Arabized Jews, Iraqi Jews
included, Arab-Jewish identity is an identity created in the present and attributed to the
past. All current references to such a historical identity do not aim to celebrate the past,
only to express present and future ideological and political desires and aspirations.
Second, paradoxically, all the radical “Mizrahi” intellectuals are by no means Arab in
the sense that Sāṭi‘ al-Ḥuṣrı̄ argues that every person who is related to the Arab lands and
speaks Arabic is an Arab. There is no society in which such an Arab-Jewish identity is
celebrated and those intellectuals who celebrate it are, in fact, highlighting their separate
singularity. They speak in favour of Arab culture and Arabic, but they are among the
examples of the gradual disappearance of Arabic as a language mastered by Jews. All
of them refer to the standard literary Arabic ( fuṣḥā) as a dead language: none of
them can write Arabic and, as Jaroslave Stetkevych once said, “if we don’t write in
Arabic, we don’t think in it either. Not thinking in it implies that we are emotionally
unengaged as well” (1969, 154). Also, as their activities show, none of them wants to
be emotionally engaged with Arabic more than with Hebrew, at least as revealed by
their inner life processes and affective states expressed in words, images, institutions
and behaviours through which they represent themselves to us. They are not excep-
tional, as proficiency in Arabic among Jews today can be traced mainly to two cases:
Jews who immigrated from Arab lands having already mastered the language (and
their number is rapidly decreasing), or those who make a living from their knowledge
of Arabic whether in the Israeli governmental, educational or security services (and their
number is always increasing: of the Jewish students studying Arabic in high schools, 63%
said that they do so in order to “serve in the intelligence” (Ha’aretz, November 30, 2006,
1). Jewish or Israeli canonical circles, the “Mizrahi” intellectuals included, do not see
Arabic language and culture as an intellectual asset. A good illustration of this is the
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 309

structure of the departments of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Israeli univer-

sities where there is not one tenured scholar of modern Hebrew literature or compara-
tive literature who knows Arabic or has studied its literature. Comparative studies can
be undertaken with many languages, but not with Arabic literature in the original.
Moreover, most of the Jewish academics who study the history of Zionism do not
read Arabic, in an unprecedented consensus between Zionist, anti-Zionist and post-
Zionist scholars. A scholarly discipline has emerged of writing about Muslim and
Arab culture while hardly knowing Arabic. In his review of God Has Ninety-Nine
Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East by the New York Times reporter Judith
Miller (1996), Edward W. Said (1935–2003) neatly encapsulates this:

Writing about any other part of the world, Miller would be considered woefully
unqualified. She tells us that she has been involved with the Middle East for
twenty-five years, yet she has little knowledge of either Arabic or Persian. It
would be impossible to be taken seriously as a reporter or expert on Russia,
France, Germany or Latin America, perhaps even China or Japan, without
knowing the requisite languages, but for “Islam,” linguistic knowledge is unnecess-
ary since what one is dealing with is considered to be a psychological deformation,
not a “real” culture or religion (al-Jadı̄d [Los Angeles] II.10 [August 1996], 6).

Third, Arab-Jewish identity has been paradoxically reinvented precisely when those who
could have been interpellated as Arab Jews are in the process of desperately escaping
such a recruitment. Moreover, unlike the process which had interpellated Arabized
Jews as Arab in the 1920s and the 1930s, the interpellating machine is now being admi-
nistrated by those who pretend to be Arab but lack the potentiality of such an identity. I
refer to the Jamaican-born scholar Stuart Hall’s confession about his own invented
identity:

People now speak of the society I came from in totally unrecognizable ways. Of
course Jamaica is a black society, they say. In reality it is a society of black and
brown people who lived for three and four hundred years without ever being
able to speak of themselves as “black.” Black is an identity which had to be
learned and could only be learned in a certain moment. In Jamaica that moment
is the 1970s (Quoted in Scott 1995, 6).

If Hall’s “real” black identity was invented and “had to be learned” at a certain moment in
Jamaica in the 1970s—and no one could doubt that at that crucial moment Jamaica was
a black society—the fictional Arab-Jewish identity was invented in the late 1980s and
early 1990s in a society that was not Arab or Arab-Jewish mainly for the purpose of
identity politics. Only few want to “learn” it.
Fourth, the “Mizrahi” intellectuals have succeeded in provoking “real” Arabized
Jews, mostly Iraqis—such as Nissim Rejwan (born 1924), Shimon Ballas (born
1930), Sasson Somekh (born 1933) and Shmuel Moreh (born 1933)—to “reclaim”
their Arab-Jewish identity and to use it as a war cry against those radical intellectuals
themselves. These intellectuals rightly feel that, if there is any credit to be had for pos-
sessing such an identity, they deserve it more than anyone else. Interestingly enough, for
both the “new” and the “veterans,” an Arab-Jewish community is not among their
310 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

present or future priorities. They are all looking nostalgically to the past but emphasiz-
ing their uniqueness. The adherence to singularity exists not only between the two
groups but, and even more fiercely, between members of the same group.
Fifth, the way the “Mizrahi” intellectuals refer to Arab-Jewish identity implies con-
ceiving the notion of identity as essential, and at the same time downplaying the fluidity
of the immigrants’ subjectivities whoever they are. If we follow such a line of thought,
the Jews in the Arab lands were Arab and when they migrated to Israel, they kept their
Arabness without letting any other influences affect their subjectivities. Such a con-
ception undervalues the weight of the external factors and plays down the resilience
of the immigrants’ subjectivities.
Sixth, it is somehow paradoxical that my investigations into the “identities” articu-
lated by Arabized or “Mizrahi” intellectuals have led to the conclusion that most of them
have been recycling their identities according to changing circumstances and preferring,
one way or another, to adhere, each in his/her own way, to inessential solidarities. Most
of them are moving towards what Giorgio Agamben has described as the “Coming Com-
munity,” a community of people devoid of any stable or fixed identity. They are not
defined as being with or without this or that quality. In other words, they are not
viewed, and do not see themselves, as belonging to a particular group by virtue of
some essential feature. The fundamental idea of the “Coming Community” is the sup-
pression or non-existence of identity, and the supremacy of existence over essence.
Seventh, most of the scholarly contributions to the study of the identities of Ara-
bized Jews since the late 1980, mine included, could not have been possible without
the activities and the pioneer work of the radical “Mizrahi” intellectuals. Their challen-
ging, sometimes provocative, arguments, inessential in character, were fertile ground
for students of the topic and similar topics.
Eighth, Muslim and Christian Arab intellectuals do not pay any attention to the
recent emergence of the new “fashion” of Arab-Jewish identity. If they do so, it is
mostly for political reasons and as a tool against Israel and Zionism, sometimes as a
protest against the absence of pluralism in their own societies.
Finally, this is the answer to the question posed in the title of the present article,
there is now no necessity for Arab-Jewish identity, simply because there is no need in
our contemporary fluid societies for the traditional notion of identity. The processes
which the Arabized Jews and their offspring have undergone are not exclusive.
Against the background of the fluidity of identities and globalization at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, I believe that the traditional notion of identity has gradually
been wearing off. This by no means implies that there are no significant differences
between the elite—that is, the intellectuals whose subjectivities are the main subject
of my research project and who are intensely affected by the global tendency towards
inessential solidarities—and other segments of society whose members are more
liable to adhere to the traditional notions of identity. First, unlike the irreconcilable
gap, in my view, between the radical “Mizrahi” post-Zionist elite and the masses, the
above tendency may be considered to be a vanguard in the sense that it is expected
to precipitate a similar large-scale tendency in these masses, even if in this stage it is
still far removed, politically, socially and mentally, from it. The recent revolutions in
the Arab world have proved inspirational to many because they offer a new sense of col-
lective identity built on the idea of citizenship and not on any essential solidarity such as
clan, religion, race or ethnicity. Second, global phenomena such as mass migration and
 WHO NEEDS ARAB-JEWISH IDENTITY? 311

the Internet, which are no longer limited to the elites, have broadened those segments in
society that are influenced by the universal inclination towards inessential solidarities.
Singularity, not identity, is now the major war cry in our contemporary fluid societies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. In the documentary film Forget Baghdad (2002), made by the Iraqi-Swiss director Samir
Jamal al-Din, Michael says:

When I first arrived here in Israel, I decided to found a state called ‘Sami Michael.’
[There has been] an ongoing fight between [the State of] Israel and [the State of]
Myself. Of course, both the State and Myself wanted to be [victorious]. But today I
can say that I have won.

This is the written translation which appears in the subtitles of the film with necess-
ary modifications. The exact wording of the original Arabic spoken text is slightly
different.
2. Zionist activists were accused of taking part in the “pushing” as well, especially with
regard to the still unsolved cases of bombing Jewish gatherings in Baghdad in the
hope of urging the Jews to leave Iraq (see Snir 2005, 445–446, n. 117). Writing on
these cases, Fritz Grobba, the German chargé d’affaires in the German Consulate in
Baghdad during the 1930s, relates that ‘Abd al-Jabbār Fatḥı̄ (1953), the head of
Baghdad police, published a book entitled Sumūm al-Af‘ā al-Ṣihyūnı̄ [The Poisons of
the Zionist Adder], which dealt with details of the cases. However, “Dieses Buch is
im Irak nicht mehr zu haben. Es ist dort offenbar von interessierter Seite aufgekauft”
(Grobba 1967, 163). For updated details on these cases and their influence on the
immigration of the Jews from Iraq, see Meir (2005, 141–147, 265–276) and Meir-Glit-
zenstein (2004, 256–257). In an interview with Yehuda Tagar (b. 1923), an Israeli agent
who had operated in Baghdad, he says that at least one activist from the Zionist under-
ground, Yosef Beit-Halahmi (Habaza), did apparently carry out several terror attacks
after the arrest of his comrades, in the hope of proving to the Iraqi authorities that
the detainees were not involved in these actions (the interview with Tagar, who
spent about 10 years in an Iraqi prison, appears in Neslen 2006, 58–66). This is the
first time that a Zionist agent confirms that members of the Zionist underground
did commit bombings in Baghdad.
3. Some sporadic attempts, in reality or imagination, were made, the famous one by Samı̄r
Naqqāsh (1938–2004) (Snir 2005, 442–452). I do not know of any study of the motives
of the immigration of Arabized Jews from Israel to other countries since 1948; I assume
most of the immigrants did it for material reasons, work, family, studies and so on. One
cannot, however, exclude the readiness of those immigrants to choose new identities,
or better to add new layers of identity to their own subjectivities.
312 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

4. The existence of a large Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, which has always consti-
tuted a demographic “threat” against the Jewish nature of the state, has helped to con-
solidate the status of the Arabized Jews as part of the majority.
5. In a study of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the USA, Aviva Ben-Ur tries to explain why they
are “either entirely ignored or relegated to a tangential remark” (2009, 188). She does
not refer to the changes and developments in the notion of identity among the Ara-
bized-Jewish immigrants in the USA, which have led most of them to search for ines-
sential solidarities. American society, for reasons which could be understood from the
aforementioned arguments, is an excellent space for that new kind of inessential
belonging.
6. See the list of the young intellectuals who signed the open letter sent in April 2011 to
“Arab peoples” following the revolutionary uprisings in the Arab states and, at the same
times, those who argued that they represented only themselves. They referred to them-
selves as “the descendants of the Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world, the
Middle East and the Maghreb, and as the second and third generation of Mizrahi Jews in
Israel.” They recalled a previous letter written following Obama’s Cairo speech in
2009, in which they “called for the rise of the democratic Middle Eastern identity
and for our inclusion in such an identity.” It is, however, interesting that they by no
means referred to Arab-Jewish identity, but mentioned that “the culture of the
Islamic world and the multigenerational connection and identification with this
region are an inseparable part of our own identity” (www.haokets.org, April 12, 2011).
7. See the various contributions included in Pe‘amim 125–127 (Autumn 2010–Spring
2011), particularly by Shaul Shaked (17–36), Yaron Tsur (45–56), Hannan Hever
and Yehudah Shenhav (57–74) and Reuven Snir (97–155).

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Reuven Snir is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and a professor of Arabic
language and literature at the University of Haifa. He has published articles and books
in Hebrew, Arabic and English on various aspects of Arabic literature and the culture
of Arab Jews. He is also a translator of poetry between Hebrew, Arabic and English.
Address: Faculty of Humanities, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel.
[email: rsnir@univ.haifa.ac.il]