Arab Jews

Arab Jews (Arabic: اليهود العرب‎ al-Yahūd al-ʿArab; Hebrew: יהודים ערבים‎ Yehudim `Aravim) is a term referring to Jews living in the Arab World, or Jews descended from such persons.

The term was occasionally used in the early 20th century, mainly by Arab nationalists, to describe the 1 million Jews living in the Arab world at the time. Most of this population has either been forced out, or voluntarily left, after the founding of Israel in 1948, for the new Jewish state or Western Europe, and to a smaller degree the United States and Latin America. They spoke Arabic, using one of the many Arabic dialects (see also Judæo-Arabic languages) as their primary community language, with Hebrew reserved as a liturgical language. They usually followed Sephardi Jewish liturgy, making them one of the largest groups among Mizrahi Jews.

In recent decades the term has come back into some usage by Jews who self-identify as Arab Jews, such as Ella Shohat, an anti-Zionist who uses the term in contrast to the Zionist establishment's categorization of Jews as either Ashkenazim or Mizrahim; the latter, she believes, have been oppressed as the Arabs have. Other public figures who refer to themselves as Arab Jews include David Shasha, Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage, Jordan Elgrably, director of the Levantine Cultural Center, and Ammiel Alcalay, a professor at Queens College in New York who began emphasizing the importance of his identity as an Arab Jew in the 1990s. André Azoulay, Jewish adviser to Moroccan King Mohammed VI, also defines himself as an Arab Jew, as does Sasson Somekh in a recent memoir