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I see, however I was under the impression that Jews in Arabic countries (including Palestine) spoke primarily Arabic, and it was only after they migrated (or we

I see, however I was under the impression that Jews in Arabic countries (including Palestine) spoke primarily Arabic, and it was only after they migrated (or were otherwise absorbed into) Israel when they converted to Hebrew. And that the modern Hebrew language was a Zionist effort (a European colonial enterprise) to convert all immigrants to Israel to Hebrew speakers. So even though today most Israeli Jews speak Hebrew, the only reason for that is the colonial prospects of European settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Arabic_dialects#Present_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Arabic_dialects#Present_...

tptacek 3y ago
It is hard to understand the point you're trying to make here. Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans". I don't know that trying to sort out whether Hebrew is European or not is an especially productive enterprise.
- racional 3y ago
  Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans." I'd recommend you also start reading more carefully, please. This (the idea that "MENA are European") is very clearly not what runarberg is saying. Nor are they even remotely suggesting that "Hebrew is European".
  - tptacek 3y ago
    You're responding to a comment that opens up "it is hard to understand what point you're making". You can tell me what the point he's making is, if you're confident in it. In turn, I'll be more careful about using quotation marks. That's an HN tic that I sometimes forget. While I have both of your attention --- you all get that this is the same group of like 4-6 people talking to themselves, over and over, right? On HN, a 2-day-old threat is necrotic. As I've said elsewhere, I only really have two angles on this issue: (1) that Israelis aren't European and Gazans aren't Hamas, and (2) that none of this is ever going to get settled on HN.
    - runarberg 3y ago
      The thing that sparked my interest here is a sidenote in one of the cited Wikipedia articles: > Not all Jews immigrating to Israel from European countries are of Ashkenazi origin (the majority of French Jews are of Sephardic, and some Jews from the Asian Republics of the USSR are Mizrahi), and the Israeli government does not distinguish between Jewish communities in its census. [1] That is how the Israeli government doesn’t track European vs. MENA ethnicity, instead leaving it up to studies to guess. And it took me on a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why that is. It feels very odd to separate between Arabs and Jews, but not allow Jews to identify as Arab-Jew in the population statistics. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- runarberg 3y ago
  What I’m trying to argue is that Israelis of middle east and north African ancestry are also victims of European colonization. That their cultural identity was erased and absorbed into the dominant European identity. The introduction of Modern Hebrew was unmistakably a Zionist enterprise (which it self is a breed of European colonialism). As I’m reading through the linked sources in the Wikipedia article I cited I see how much of a cultural pressure Arabic speaking immigrants were put into speaking Hebrew, not Arabic, in public. As if their language (and by extension their cultural identity) was dirty somehow: > “I wanted people to speak Hebrew,” she said. “Kids who had Yiddish in their house felt the same. It was more so for those of us coming from the Islamic world, since Arabic was identified as the language of the enemy.” [1] Now Yiddish speaker probably experienced something similar, but at least they had other aspects of their culture accepted: > But the builders of the Israeli state faced a major ideological challenge with the Jewish population of the Middle East, who were encouraged to mass migrate to Palestine and used as cheap labour to build Zionist settlements. What the European colonisers found particularly “disturbing” about the Mizrahi Jews was their “Arab character”. > As Israel’s first female prime minister, Golda Meir, declared: “Every loyal Jew must speak Yiddish, for he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew.” > That is, the only true Jewish identity was the one that the Ashkenazi elite had brought from Europe; the Jewishness of the Mizrahim (or Sephardim) was “impure”. Because of that, they were deemed susceptible to “Arab influence” and their loyalty questioned. Action had to be taken swiftly to control this “suspect” Jewish community which soon became half of the Israeli population. [2] This kind of reminds me of modern day California, how many Latin American immigrants (first and second generation) don’t feel comfortable speaking Spanish in public, instead speaking the language of the dominant culture, and having a part of their cultural identity erased as a result. 1: https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/recovering-judeo-arabic/ https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/recovering-judeo-ar... 2: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/21/singing-in-europes-last-middle-eastern-colony https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/21/singing-in-euro...
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I took this to #judaism on a Slack I'm on (I'm not Jewish; I'm Irish/Slavic Catholic) and got an earful about how complex the history is here: * The people of the Old Yishuv spoke Yiddish and Ladino, European languages, as well as Israeli Arabic; European language influence long predates Zionism. * The European character you're imputing to Modern Hebrew is its pronunciation, but Hebrew itself is the common character of all those languages, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Arabic. * Jewish people in the Middle Eastern diaspora generally spoke Hebrew-inflected dialects of the regional languages (as you noted with the Judeo-Arabic page). * Israel is a melting pot of influences from the Jewish diaspora; for instance, Morrocan Jewish people determined the way Passover is celebrated (with Mimouna). Everything cuts in every direction. I'm not doing all this stuff justice (in case anyone from that Slack is reading this comment); just to say, all of this stuff is super complicated. What I'd like to understand better is: the comment you were responding to was defending the proposition that significant numbers (a plurality, I think?) of Israelis are indigenous MENA people. I get that there was probably cultural pressure to adopt Hebrew, and that modern Hebrew is associated with the Zionist cause. The Mizrahim generally arrived in Israel after the Nakba (in a series of counter-Nakbas), and were poorer, more rural, and less privileged than the Israelis who met them there. Sure, that rings true. But what difference does that make to the point the parent commenter was making? I'm just trying to understand the argument. (This I guess is a second reason I pop up on these threads: to get an excuse to get my head blown off with historical and linguistic facts from friends on Slacks).

tptacek 3y ago

It is hard to understand the point you're trying to make here. Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans". I don't know that trying to sort out whether Hebrew is European or not is an especially productive enterprise.

racional 3y ago
Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans." I'd recommend you also start reading more carefully, please. This (the idea that "MENA are European") is very clearly not what runarberg is saying. Nor are they even remotely suggesting that "Hebrew is European".
- tptacek 3y ago
  You're responding to a comment that opens up "it is hard to understand what point you're making". You can tell me what the point he's making is, if you're confident in it. In turn, I'll be more careful about using quotation marks. That's an HN tic that I sometimes forget. While I have both of your attention --- you all get that this is the same group of like 4-6 people talking to themselves, over and over, right? On HN, a 2-day-old threat is necrotic. As I've said elsewhere, I only really have two angles on this issue: (1) that Israelis aren't European and Gazans aren't Hamas, and (2) that none of this is ever going to get settled on HN.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    The thing that sparked my interest here is a sidenote in one of the cited Wikipedia articles: > Not all Jews immigrating to Israel from European countries are of Ashkenazi origin (the majority of French Jews are of Sephardic, and some Jews from the Asian Republics of the USSR are Mizrahi), and the Israeli government does not distinguish between Jewish communities in its census. [1] That is how the Israeli government doesn’t track European vs. MENA ethnicity, instead leaving it up to studies to guess. And it took me on a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why that is. It feels very odd to separate between Arabs and Jews, but not allow Jews to identify as Arab-Jew in the population statistics. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
runarberg 3y ago
What I’m trying to argue is that Israelis of middle east and north African ancestry are also victims of European colonization. That their cultural identity was erased and absorbed into the dominant European identity. The introduction of Modern Hebrew was unmistakably a Zionist enterprise (which it self is a breed of European colonialism). As I’m reading through the linked sources in the Wikipedia article I cited I see how much of a cultural pressure Arabic speaking immigrants were put into speaking Hebrew, not Arabic, in public. As if their language (and by extension their cultural identity) was dirty somehow: > “I wanted people to speak Hebrew,” she said. “Kids who had Yiddish in their house felt the same. It was more so for those of us coming from the Islamic world, since Arabic was identified as the language of the enemy.” [1] Now Yiddish speaker probably experienced something similar, but at least they had other aspects of their culture accepted: > But the builders of the Israeli state faced a major ideological challenge with the Jewish population of the Middle East, who were encouraged to mass migrate to Palestine and used as cheap labour to build Zionist settlements. What the European colonisers found particularly “disturbing” about the Mizrahi Jews was their “Arab character”. > As Israel’s first female prime minister, Golda Meir, declared: “Every loyal Jew must speak Yiddish, for he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew.” > That is, the only true Jewish identity was the one that the Ashkenazi elite had brought from Europe; the Jewishness of the Mizrahim (or Sephardim) was “impure”. Because of that, they were deemed susceptible to “Arab influence” and their loyalty questioned. Action had to be taken swiftly to control this “suspect” Jewish community which soon became half of the Israeli population. [2] This kind of reminds me of modern day California, how many Latin American immigrants (first and second generation) don’t feel comfortable speaking Spanish in public, instead speaking the language of the dominant culture, and having a part of their cultural identity erased as a result. 1: https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/recovering-judeo-arabic/ https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/recovering-judeo-ar... 2: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/21/singing-in-europes-last-middle-eastern-colony https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/21/singing-in-euro...
- tptacek 3y ago
  I took this to #judaism on a Slack I'm on (I'm not Jewish; I'm Irish/Slavic Catholic) and got an earful about how complex the history is here: * The people of the Old Yishuv spoke Yiddish and Ladino, European languages, as well as Israeli Arabic; European language influence long predates Zionism. * The European character you're imputing to Modern Hebrew is its pronunciation, but Hebrew itself is the common character of all those languages, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Arabic. * Jewish people in the Middle Eastern diaspora generally spoke Hebrew-inflected dialects of the regional languages (as you noted with the Judeo-Arabic page). * Israel is a melting pot of influences from the Jewish diaspora; for instance, Morrocan Jewish people determined the way Passover is celebrated (with Mimouna). Everything cuts in every direction. I'm not doing all this stuff justice (in case anyone from that Slack is reading this comment); just to say, all of this stuff is super complicated. What I'd like to understand better is: the comment you were responding to was defending the proposition that significant numbers (a plurality, I think?) of Israelis are indigenous MENA people. I get that there was probably cultural pressure to adopt Hebrew, and that modern Hebrew is associated with the Zionist cause. The Mizrahim generally arrived in Israel after the Nakba (in a series of counter-Nakbas), and were poorer, more rural, and less privileged than the Israelis who met them there. Sure, that rings true. But what difference does that make to the point the parent commenter was making? I'm just trying to understand the argument. (This I guess is a second reason I pop up on these threads: to get an excuse to get my head blown off with historical and linguistic facts from friends on Slacks).