The Mizrahi Nation

This balanced and well-documented essay written by Matti Friedman a couple of years ago, Mizrahi Nation, adds a very welcomed perspective on the sometimes very fierce and subjective debate between the Jews of Middle Eastern versus European descent.

Although there are many facts and personal stories that sometimes support a narrative favoring a discrimination-based narrative, in the last decade the gap is rather tends to narrow. There are many more mixed families - although having a darker skin might burden you with additional identity controls - and although there is still no prime-minister of Middle Eastern descent, at least there are more people in the Israeli government with such a background - I am not talking about Aryeh Deri (whose family was not religious and in fact got his religious training in very Askenazi learning institutions). Nothing is set to stay like this and sooner or later things will rather improve if not the rift will be completely overdone by other new realities. 

The Orientalism-based perspective does not offer too many chances (if any) of a change, but the reality on the ground is a bit faster and fairer that the academic minds would like it. In reality, the ethnic realities are permanently changing and you might need new theories to grasp and codify them according to the facts and not to a reality that suits a certain ideological mindset.

More explorations and book reviews on such topics in coming posts (including the much recommended book by Friedman: Spies of No Country. Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, featuring the stories of those Jews of Middle Eastern origin that served the new Jewish state serving as spies in their countries of origin.

What Ben Gurion dreamed

It is said that David Ben-Gurion said at the beginning of the state of Israel:

'Within the State the differences between various kinds of Jews will be obliterated in the course of time, the communities and tribes will sooner or later fuse into one national and cultural unity. Common education, the Hebrew language, universal service in the Israel Defense Forces, the establishment of a common minimum standard of living, the entry of workers from various countries and communities into a single labour federation, mixed marriages between the various tribes, common political action in non-communal parties, and so on, will produce a new type of Jew with the favourable qualities and characteristics of all the tribes of Israel'. 

quoted in J. Isaac, 'Israel: A New Melting Pot?' in W.D.Borrie, ed. Cultural Integration of Immigrants (Paris: UNESCO, 1959) p. 266

Well, the man plans and G-d laugh. I will not start right now to write an academic article about identity in the state of Israel, but what can I say is that, for sure, David Ben-Gurion's assumption did not turn into reality. And, in a way, it is better that we have nowadays a diversity of cultures, traditions, accents and people that all of them are part of the same country: the state of Israel. More than the 'goldene medina', Eretz Yisrael is a laboratory for all cultures and traditions from the world: from the serious yekke to the Shanghai yidden, to the delicious food served by Iraqi families to the messy Russian lifestyles. How can you be not proud that each day you can discover something new about yourself? You won't learn it in school or at a PhD program: you go on the street of Jerusalem and try to find a good restaurant to eat. Or in the Army, where you need to accommodate different lifestyles, from the secular to the religious. Even the voting patterns are following the ethnic lines and most likely it will continue to be so for a long time from now. Nothing to be ashamed, nothing that we would need to change. It can get complicated sometimes and the mixed marriages are not encouraged, at least not in the traditional families and sometimes 'we' vs. 'them' is not a pleasant episode of our everyday lives. 

But, in any case, Ben Gurion was not right, and not all the dreams, including the political ones, should be true.