Arab Jews - Criticisms of The Term "Arab Jews"

Criticisms of The Term "Arab Jews"

The principal argument against the term "Arab Jews", particularly among Jewish communities descended from Arab lands, is that Jews constitute a diaspora and ethnic group, not simply a "religious" group, and that use of the term "Arab" suggests otherwise.

A related argument is that Jewish communities in Arab lands never referred to themselves as "Arab Jews" and that it is only after the exit of most Jewish communities from such lands that the term has been proposed. Hence, in most North African and Near and Middle Eastern communities, people spoke of Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, but never of Arab Jews: the Jews were regarded and regarded themselves as an ethnic as well as a religious minority, similar to other ethnic minorities such as the Assyrians, Berbers or Kurds (although the latter two are not defined by religion either, as they may include Berber Muslims and Kurdish Muslims, Berber Christians and Kurdish Christians, and Berber Jews and Kurdish Jews), and none of these are today referred to or refer to themselves as "Arabs". Indeed, some of the communities referred to originated as early as the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE), antedating the Arab Muslim conquest by a millennium. (To underscore this point, Iraqi Jews on some occasions prefer to call themselves "Babylonian Jews"). Rather, "Arab Jews" as a term was created no earlier than the rise of secular ethnic nationalism in the early twentieth century, when many Jews sought integration into the new national identities (Iraqi, Tunisian etc.) as an escape from their previous minority status, in much the same way as some nineteenth century German Jews preferred to identify as "Germans of the Mosaic faith" rather than as "Jews" and, even then, identification in national terms (with respect to the country) was far more common among Jews of this intellectual stream than was affinity to a pan-Arab identity.

Edith Haddad Shaked, a teacher based at Pima Community College in Arizona, has criticised the concept of the Arab Jew, arguing that there are Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, but there was not such a thing as an Arab Jew or a Jewish Arab, when the Jews lived among the Arabs. Arab Jews or Jewish Arab are false terms and false notions, according to born expert on Maghrebian Jews, Professor Jacob Taieb, Sorbonne University, France.

Tunisia-born historian Paul Sebag has stated that “these terms were never used in Tunisia, and they do not do not correspond/coincident to the religious and socio-historical context/reality of the Jews in Tunisia/the Arab world.” Nowadays, one distinguishes between a Moslem Arab and a Christian Arab, and I think this caused some to invent, to facilitate matters, the terms: Arab Jew or Jewish Arab = Juif Arab or Arabe juif. The historical fact is, that the Arab component of the North African society was introduced during the conquest of the seventh century, after the establishment of North African Jewish communities.

In 1975, Albert Memmi wrote: "The term "Arab Jews" is obviously not a good one. I have adopted it for convenience. I simply wish to underline that as natives of those countries called Arab and indigenous to those lands well before the arrival of the Arabs, we shared with them, to a great extent, languages, traditions and cultures."

In Arab countries, there are Jews among the Arabs, like in European and other countries, there are Jews among the French, Italian, Polish, German, American ... people. In North Africa, some Jews are arabophone, speaking a Judeo-Arabic language, and others are francophone, speaking French; and in some areas there are “arabized” Jews who dress quite like Arabs. The fact is that even when the Jewish community was culturally quite embedded in its Muslim Arab environment, Jews were always considered members of a socio-religious community minority, different and distinct from the Arab population, because of their Jewish cultural tradition, their common past, and the Judeo-Arabic language - all of them separated them from the Arabs. And the Arabs saw the Jews, even the ones who spoke only Judeo-Arabic, as members of a socio-linguistic religious cultural community, different from theirs.

Similarly, Edith Shaked argues that the Jews in Tunisia were able to maintain and reproduce their autonomous administrative, cultural and religious institutions, preserving intact their religious and communal identity, as a cohesive, well-organized and structured Jewish community, who remained a separate entity from the Arabs and the French:

“For the generation born under the protectorate, the French language replaced Judeo-Arabic as the Tunisian Jews' mother tongue. As a consequence, a confused Memmi's daughter (born in France to a non-Jewish mother) pondered her own, and her father’s, identity when asking, “are you Arab, father? Your mother speaks Arabic. And I, am I Arab, or French, or Jewish/a Jew?”... clearly reflecting the Tunisian reality of three distinct social identity groups— les Français, les Arabes, les Juifs— which are, at the same time, national and religious.

Proponents of the argument against "Arab Jews", including most Jews from Arab lands, do not seek to deny the strong Arabic cultural influence on Jews in those countries. In North Africa, some Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic languages while others spoke French; and in some areas there are still Jews who dress quite like Arabs. Their argument is that “Arabness” referred to more than just a common shared culture. One could therefore legitimately speak of “Arabized” Jews, or "Jews of Arab countries", just as one can speak of "English Jews" or "British Jews" or "Polish Jews", whereas many Jews would object to terms such as "Saxon Jews", "Celtic Jews", or "Slavic Jews" as the latter refer to ethnic groups and therefore, implicitly, deny the existence of a distinct Jewish ethnic identity. The term "Arab Jews" is seen as more akin to the latter, both by those who oppose it and, on occasion, by those who affirm it as a manner in which to deny so-called "Arab Jews" a distinct ethnic or national identity. A better translation of the traditional term Musta'arabim (Arabizers), used to distinguish the older Arabic-speaking communities of those countries from post-1492 Sephardim, would provide those who wish to refer to Jews from Arab lands with respect to linguistic and cultural markers, but do not wish to assert that there exists no Jewish diaspora or Jewish people.

Finally, a third view is that the term "Arab Jew" has a certain legitimacy, but should only describe the Jewish communities of Arabia itself, such as the Banu Qaynuqa of the time of Muhammad and, possibly, the Yemenite Jews: see Arab Jewish tribes. This view is typically put forward as stemming from the view of Arab identity as a geographical rather than ethno-linguistic or cultural but, because it refers to a far more restricted understanding of "Arab" geography as referring to the Arabian peninsula, comes into conflict with the modern pan-Arabism exemplified by the Arab League.