Waters of Babylon

Reviewed by Yitzhak Dahan

The Arab-Jews: Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity
by Yehouda Shenhav
Am Oved, 2003, 291 pages, Hebrew.

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To get a sense of just how flawed Shenhav’s work is, one need only look at Hayyim J. Cohen’s classic work from 1969, The Zionist Activity in Iraq, a comprehensive and fascinating study which is bizarrely absent from Shenhav’s bibliography. It is useful to compare the accounts presented by the two authors. Shenhav cites the many examples of Iraqi Jews voicing public opposition to Zionism; what he does not mention, which Cohen describes in extensive detail, is the harsh sanctions, including outright violence, which the Iraqi government and population used against expressions of Zionism in their country. Cohen shows, for example, how a number of anti-Zionist statements published by Iraqi Jews in 1929 were written purely out of fear. “Our Jews were frightened and have lost hope,” wrote one Zionist activist from Basra who had moved to London. “We were forced to publish a declaration opposed to Zionism and the Balfour Declaration to avoid being massacred by the Muslims.”

Cohen further reveals that Iraqi Jews were forced to give “donations” in support of Arabs injured during the 1929 hostilities in Palestine; and that although there were indeed almost no active Zionist clubs in Baghdad during the early 1930s, the existence of such clubs was made nearly impossible by the Iraqi government. Letters and newspapers from Palestine or worldwide Zionist institutions were either confiscated or censored, and Zionist activists were constantly under threat of deportation. Finally, while Cohen confirms that a number of key figures in the Jewish community expressed opposition to Zionism, including Iraqi Finance Minister Sassoon Heskel, he also shows compellingly that this opposition originated in the fear “that the hate Arabs feel towards the Jews would increase.”

Shenhav ignores this aspect of the history completely, as well as the long line of scholars and former-Iraqi Jewish writers who have drawn a direct connection between their oppression in Iraq and their acceptance of Zionism. He is aware of this lacuna and even justifies it, but not in the way one would expect from a high-ranking scholar. In his view, it is generally a bad idea to give too much weight to anecdotal evidence, which is always subject to manipulation—and he even suggests, bizarrely, that history should be written without too much dependence on historical fact. “I suggest that we should free ourselves from the attempt to empirically examine constructions of reality,” Shenhav explains. “I do not intend to investigate historical facts… of interest to us are the frameworks of the debate and type of narrative that is carried within the rhetorical toolbox of the nation.” But by preferring “rhetorical constructs” to “historical facts,” Shenhav merely ends up indulging in precisely the kind of manipulation and self-referential theoretical construct against which he cautions, and reaching his own predetermined conclusions regardless of their correspondence with what really happened.

Nor is his efficiency with facts the only flaw in Shenhav’s book. Another problem is theoretical and methodological. Like most other radical Sephardi theorists, Shenhav is inspired by post-colonial theory, which attempts to expose the structures of oppression employed by Western societies. To be sure, he rejects the “essential approach” to cultural studies identified with anthropologists like Moshe Shokeid and Shlomo A. Deshen, since it “ignores the political and cultural context within which Sephardi identity is manufactured.” He also distances himself from the class-conscious, neo-Marxist approach of scholars like Shlomo Swirski and Deborah Bernstein, since it “ignores and even obliterates the Arab history of Jewish Arabs.” But like other “new” historiographers and sociologists, he exchanges the conceptual system unique to a specific context for a ready-made theoretical apparatus—one that he is determined to apply no matter the cost. Inspired by the work of Benedict Anderson, Shenhav claims that Zionism created an “imagined community” and invented its history, tradition, and national identity. In this respect, his arguments echo the academic attacks on the traditional Zionist narrative that have become so common in the past decade:

Bringing Jews to Palestine/the land of Israel was not necessarily the result of an ancient longing for Zion by Jewish communities in various diasporas, as Zionist historiography asserts, but of the activity of Zionist activists and intellectuals who performed “national engineering” and “invented” for that purpose a historical tradition as an inseparable part of the national meta-narrative. Pre-existing religious motifs of longing for Zion were added to the same narrative retroactively and were given a national meaning in the context of the narrative.

But the construction of Jewish nationalism did not, according to Shenhav, make Sephardi Jews full partners in the Zionist enterprise. Shenhav employs post-colonial terminology to emphasize what he sees as an ethnic “otherness,” which fixes Middle Eastern Jews in a position of inferiority with regard to their European counterparts. “The colonial site is the locus from which the Sephardi discussion should begin,” he writes. “As post-colonial theory suggests, the remnants of a colonial exchange continue to exist within Israeli culture and politics.” By attempting to use a theoretical model applied more successfully to colonial experiences in Europe, Asia, and South America, Shenhav flattens all the complexities of the Jewish experience in the Middle East. Ironically, while Shenhav protests against the erasure of Middle Eastern Jewish history, he himself denies the reality of the Sephardi Jews’ unique relationship to Zionism and the State of Israel.

It is hardly surprising that Shenhav’s denial of Sephardi history is paralleled by a similar denial of the Sephardipresent. For starters, he rejects any religious component of Sephardi identity. “On a social and psychological level,” he asserts, “it is common to encounter Sephardi Jews who wear the kippa in order to set themselves apart from Muslim Arabs.” In other words, Sephardim who wear a kippa do so not as an expression of religious belief, but as a means of denying their Arab nationality. With a wave of his pen, Shenhav dismisses a central form of religious expression as little more than Zionist brainwashing, and those who wear the kippa as bearers of a false Zionist consciousness.

Beyond the religious denial, however, Shenhav delegitimizes Sephardi forms of political expression, as well. This is seen most clearly from his accusation that wojac betrayed Jewish-Iraqi interests. He neglects, however, to explain just what these “Jewish-Iraqi interests” might be, and ignores the possibility that the interests of the Israeli government and those of wojac members coincided. At the end of the day, Shenhav treats the Sephardim of wojac with the same patronizing attitude he reserves for the policies of the Zionist establishment. He hints (and, at some points, makes plain) that the political representation of Sephardim is compromised by their lack of social and political consciousness. Yet this charge places him in precisely the same position of superiority and blanket insensitivity of which he accuses classic “Orientalist” Zionism. He even goes so far as to refer to the Sephardim as “passive people, led unaware, and conscious only in retrospect.”

Shenhav criticizes Israeli scholars for losing sight of the complexity of Sephardi identity. “Sephardiness, much like Ashkenaziness,” he writes, “is a place with wide margins, a lack of consistency and continuity, and many different faces.” But it is precisely this lack of consistency that characterizes his own book. He sets out to explore the “specific cultural context” within which Sephardi identity is manufactured, but applies imported theoretical models with universal pretensions. He complains about the passive image the Zionist establishment has attached to SephardiJews, but ultimately describes them in the same way. Finally, he claims to speak for the voiceless Sephardim, but rejects all those Sephardivoices with which he does not agree. For a work that tries so hard to uncover narratives of oppression, Shenhav’s book reveals much of the same “oppressive” arrogance it means to expose.

Yitzhak Dahan is a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis explores the political culture of development towns in Israel.

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