Who Is an Arab Jew? A Comparative Inquiry into the Question, 1880-2010

This paper seeks to resituate the question of Arab Jewish identity within a comparative framework integrating theoretical and historical perspectives. Through its invocation in academic and public discourse, the contemporary idea of the “Arab Jew” emerged as a political project of intervention into Zionist discourse and the terms of Israeli identity. The pre-1948 history of Arabic-speaking Jewry (which doubles as the “pre-history” of Mizrahim in Israel) has been largely overlooked, leading to recent questions concerning the historicity of the term “Arab Jew.”  In addressing this lacuna, rather than probing the “reality” or “authenticity” of the Arab Jew, I explore the “Arab Jew” as the history of an idea, of the very question, “Who is an Arab Jew?”

 Reading the changing valences of the “Arab Jew” as both a cultural option and a political position, I examine historically contextualized constructions of Arabness by Jewish intellectuals in three historic periods: the late nineteenth-century nahda, or modern Arab renaissance; the interwar period, which was the heyday of Jewish involvement in modern Arab thought, culture, and politics; and finally, expressions of “Arab Jewish” identity from the 1990s to 2010. I conclude by suggesting that what ascribes meaning (and as follows, “reality”) to Arab Jewish identity is not exclusively the historical experience of Jews in the region, but first and foremost, the publicly articulated desire of Jewish intellectuals in different times and places to identify themselves as “Arab Jews” — be the target of that identification the broader Arab collective, the idea of Arabness, or the Arab Jewish past.