The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab history

Bat-Ye’or (Daughter of the Nile, pseudonym of Giselle Littman) is an Egyptian Jew living in Switzerland since 1956 and a leading exponent of what Mark Cohen has termed “the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history”: a gloomy representation of Jewish life in the lands of Islam that emphasizes the continuity of oppression and persecution from the time of Muhammad until the demise of most Arab Jewish communities in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.^[23] Bat Ye’or was one of the earliest authors to adopt this perspective as a comprehensive understanding of the history of the Jews of Egypt, which she first presented in a short book, Les juifs en Egypte: Aperçu sur 3000 ans d'histoire.^[24] An expanded Hebrew version of the book was published in 1974 by Ma‘ariv Library and the World Jewish Congress “on the initiative of the [Israeli] Ministry of Education and Culture with the participation of the Department for Sephardic Communities of the World Zionist Organization.” ^[25] The imprimatur of major institutions of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement, world Jewry, and the publishing house of a mass circulation newspaper signified the consecration of Bat-Ye’or's neo-lachrymose perspective as the normative Zionist interpretation of the history of Jews in Egypt.

Prior to 1948, leading individuals and institutions of the Jewish community, including those who considered themselves Zionists, proudly embraced a more positive view of the long history of the Jews in Egypt. The neo-lachrymose historical perspective of Bat-Ye’or and others was expounded as a conscious challenge to this earlier self-image. Drawing its authority from Bat-Ye’or's claim to authenticity as an Egyptian Jew, this historical vision has won broad acceptance among both scholars and the general public in Israel and the West.^[26] The prominence and credibility of the neo-lachrymose view of Egyptian Jewish history were enabled, at least in part, by the near silence observed by Egyptian Jews about their lives in Egypt from 1948 until the late 1970s.

Building his argument around the role of Bat-Ye’or, Mark Cohen argues that the neo-lachrymose thesis was generated by popular works published by Jews living outside Israel. But Cohen minimizes and homogenizes two distinctly Israeli sources of the neo-lachrymose perspective: Zionist concern to counter the claims of the resurgent Palestinian nationalist movement after 1967 and the desire of Middle Eastern Jews to redress the discrimination and mistreatment they suffered as new immigrants in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s.

Palestinian Arab claims of dispossession by Israel, relegated to the bottom of the international agenda since the mid-1950s, began to receive considerable international attention once again after the 1967 war. The neo-lachrymose interpretation of Jewish Arab history distracted attention from Palestinian claims by constructing a narrative focusing on the eternal suffering of Jews under Muslim rule. Some adherents of this approach suggested that even if it were true that the Palestinian Arabs had been dispossessed, a roughly equivalent number of Middle Eastern Jews had fled their homes and lost their property. Consequently, the Palestinians had no valid claim against Israel.^[27]

Middle Eastern Jews living in Israel (commonly agglomerated as Mizrahim, or Orientals, sing. Mizrahi) generally shared the objective of reinforcing the Zionist case against the Arab world, but they also had their own agenda. A narrative emphasizing the unrelenting suffering of Jews in the Arab world established the claim of these Jews to a status in Israeli society comparable to the Ashkenazi survivers of the mass murder of European Jewry. Affirming their victimization in the Arab world allowed Mizrahim to distance themselves from any Arab cultural attachments, which are widely regarded in Israel as symptoms of backwardness. Sometimes the transformation of attitudes toward the Arab world was quite self-consciously understood as the price of admission to Israeli society. For example, at a demonstration protesting a racist assault on Palestinian Arabs living in the Ramat Amidar neighborhood of Ramat Gan (colloquially known as Ramat Baghdad because of its high concentration of Iraqi Jews), one woman spontaneously remarked to me, “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.” ^[28]

The neo-lachrymose interpretation of Jewish Arab history also allowed Mizrahim to claim a role as active members of the Zionist movement and thereby assert their full participation in the mainstream of Jewish national history as presented in the Zionist narrative. Until the 1970s, the dominant school in Israeli and Jewish history portrayed Zionism as the achievement of Ashkenazi Jewry. Minimal participation in the Zionist movement was considered yet another expression of the backwardness of Mizrahim. But if Mizrahim had their own long history of diasporic oppression, this could logically be linked to a claim to have independently arrived at the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. Asserting that Zionism was not merely a narrative about the crisis of European Jews and its resolution and that there had also been an independent Middle Eastern Zionist movement provided Mizrahim in Israel with a lever to reverse the negative evaluations of their history and culture that predominated during the years of MAPAI (Israeli Workers' Party, subsequently the Labor Party) rule and buttressed their claims to equal status with Ashkenazim.

Another important Israeli source for the neo-lachrymose perspective was the work of Yehoshafat Harkabi. Shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he published a book arguing that the Arabs completely rejected any negotiated resolution to the conflict with Israel (in fact, they rejected resolutions on terms acceptable to the activist current in Israeli politicomilitary thinking promoted by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion).^[29] Although Harkabi addressed only Arab-Israeli relations since 1948, his cataloging of instances of Arab anti-Semitism and his insistence that the Arabs viewed the conflict as a fundamental clash of destinies that allowed for no compromise encouraged his audience to believe that a conflict so intense must have deep historical roots. Although this was not his primary purpose, Harkabi's work inclined Israelis and others to imagine the intense conflict over Palestine as one more instance of Arab and Muslim enmity toward Jews.

The broad political and cultural context for the translation and subsidization of Bat-Ye’or's work by the Israeli government in 1974 is the emergence of a new school of Israeli historical writing that integrates the previously marginalized history of Middle Eastern Jews into the Israeli national narrative. The two central themes of that narrative are the relentless oppression and suffering of Jews in the diaspora and the modern secular redemption of Jews by Zionism. When Israeli public culture began to consider accepting Mizrahim as something other than primitives who should assimilate to Ashkenazi and tzabar (native Israeli) norms, the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish Arab history provided a readily acceptable basis for acknowledging the history and culture of Middle Eastern Jews as a permanent, though not fully equal, element of Israeli society.