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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
by 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 agoI 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).
- runarberg 3y agoI actually don’t think this is related. I entered this thread by misunderstanding my parent and getting the numbers wrong. Then I stated: > What is also interesting to me is the lack of official statistics from the Israeli government about this ethnic brake down. I saw this in one of the cited Wikipedia article (and my anti-colonial bells started ringing) which brought me down this rabbit hole (see other post).
- tptacek 3y agoGotcha. This is like 80% me nerding out at this point.