The lives of Jews in the pre-expulsion Islamic world has long been a rich field of scholarship, but their lives in the modern world less so. This absence is particularly significant considering that Mizrahi Jews may comprise forty percent or more of Israel’s population today. It is also lamentable because so much of the evidence of the hundreds of years of Jewish life in the Islamic world no longer exists. The people are gone, the synagogues are gone, the culture almost eradicated.
This volume seeks to address this lack by examining the Mizrahi Jewish experience, primarily in the post-Ottoman world, through five themes: social class, gender, creativity, national identity, and memory, with an emphasis on identity and memory. Identity is framed in memory, and memory is anchored in nostalgia, and in nostalgia there is longing. To paraphrase the editors, there is not only longing and belonging, there is a longing for belonging.
How, for example, would someone conceived in the Ottoman Empire, born under British rule and growing up in the British Mandate, living in Jordan and dying in Israel without ever leaving the same house make sense of identity except through memory? There are fuzzy edges to the definition of Mizrahi.
The authors are keenly aware of the hegemonic overtones that the term “modernity” can have and point out that modernism in non-European countries cannot be easily separated from the impact of colonialism on social and mental structures. But the tangle of terminology — modern, modernity, modernism — the particular nuances and contrasts with a European concept, and the terms’ applicability to the times and places of the book’s subjects, are not quite resolved.
Different chapters are rooted in countries from Morocco to Iraq, from Turkey to Yemen, and the political and social turmoil that some of these countries have experienced can make general theses hard to maintain. The historical span also makes it challenging to go beyond a phenomenological account of experience. Nevertheless, the themes of memory and identity, of longing and belonging, are clear and remain deeply relevant today.
The volume adds to the growing body of scholarship, although it may not quite achieve its aim of reframing Jewish Studies and Ottoman-Arab-Islamic Studies (sic) and putting the experience of Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ottoman Jews at its center. As a volume of separate chapters it does not have a methodological consistency, but it does have a thematic core, and.t will be of interest to scholars across disciplines.
