Do Arabic Jews not identify as Arabic? spinoff

Raisin

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 6:49 am

mazal555 wrote:

You do realize that anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? I edit Wikipedia all the time and my English isn't even so wonderful. Wikipedia is definitely not a valid source if you want to have a technical scholarly discourse. Don't play it both ways and say ' we are having a technical debate' and bring in Wikipedia.

And I am by no means the only person here saying that we are Arab Jews. At least half the women on this thread are saying that the level either applies to them or is pretty widespread. So why are you fighting this so hard?

You might want to edit the current wikipedia entry on arabs. It says this right now:

Code:

Arab ethnic identity does not include Christian, Jewish and other ethnic groups that retain non-Arabic languages and/or identities within the expanded Arab World. These include the Jews, Assyrian people of Iraq, north east Syria, north west Iran and south east Turkey, the Syriac Christians of western Syria, Armenians around the entire Near East, and Mandaeans in Iraq and Iran—though many of these peoples speak Arabic as a first or second language. In addition, Copts and Maronites espouse an ancient Egyptian and Phoenician identity respectively, rather than an Arab one. A number of other indigenous peoples living in the Arab World are equally non-Arab, such as Berbers, Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Azeris, Yezidis, Circassians, Shabaks, Turcomans, Romani, Chechens, Kawliya, Mhallami, Samaritans, nor migrant groups from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

ora_43

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 7:43 am

mazal555 wrote:

I didn't say we were having a scholarly debate. I said we were debating terminology. Not to start yet another terminology debate, but that's not the same thing.

I quoted Wikipedia rather than specific authors because the Wiki quote was the most neutral quote I could find. Some of the others are more openly critical. And my goal wasn't to criticize.

Quote:

And I am by no means the only person here saying that we are Arab Jews. At least half the women on this thread are saying that the level either applies to them or is pretty widespread. So why are you fighting this so hard?

I'm not "fighting this." I'm fighting you calling people racist for disagreeing with you on a matter of linguistics.

Actually, for the past several posts I haven't been arguing my point at all, so much as just trying to respond to various accusations. No, I'm not accusing you of being anti-Zionist, no, I don't care how you define yourself, and now, no, I'm not fighting you re: your self-definition.

ora_43

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 7:56 am

amother wrote:

Also, I am angry. My relatives were irradiated in Israel as part of medical experiments in the 50s. They were ringworm children and it was authorized by Dr Chaim Sheba. And then the Ashkanazim went and named a hospital after him! They, as a group, honored the person who did this. And I find that hard to come to terms with.

"The Ashkenazim"??

I'm not going to call you racist based on a single post, but I do think this is a dangerous approach to take.

Also, the idea that it was medical experimentation is not clear cut to say the least. Some mizrachi activists have claimed that there was US-funded experimentation involved, but several inquiries have shown that Dr Sheba - and other doctors - used what was the standard treatment at the time. If the Israeli government honored Dr Sheba, it wasn't in spite of experimentation on mizrachi children - it was because the government believes Dr Sheba was never guilty of that.

Dandelion1

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 9:04 am

ora_43 wrote:

Apparently these evil "Ashkenazim" had a pretty far reach, as this treatment was the standard medical approach across the world for many years.....

shacn

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 9:37 am

This is totally the way we should be behaving the day before the 9 days right? Wrong.

Enough with this thread. It's really NOT what hashem wants out of us during this tishabav time

And for the record I'm Sephardic and my parents did not associate themselves as an Arab Jew. And they did not live in troublesome times, the Jewish quarter were actually the richest in the land and the Muslims were the butlers of the Jews. The Muslims and Jews were actually best friends. But there was a clear segregation between the "Arabs" and the "Jews". My parents left when it started to be dangerous, but my dad always tells stories of how life was way better over there.

bigsis144

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 5:47 pm

I'm finding this spinoff thread fascinating, but I'm not sure what it branched off from. Could someone post a link?

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I'm interested that apparently there are women who do identify as Arab Jews. It's an interesting Venn diagram intersection IMHO because AFAIK "Arab" is an ethnicity, rather than a shared language, culture or location.

It's like --

Hispanic and Latino/a have different definitions. Hispanic means "Spanish-speaking" and Latin@ means "from Latin America". So a person from Spain would be Hispanic but not Latin@. A person from Brazil (where they speak Portuguese) would be Latin@ but not Hispanic.

Or --

I get annoyed when people conflate all Arabs with Muslims. You can have non-Arab Muslims (ex. Indonesian Muslims are 95% of the country's population, over 190 million people). You can have non-Muslim Arabs (ex. people of Arab extraction who are Xtian, Jewish, etc.). They you can have people who speak Arabic as a language but are neither Arab nor Muslim.

Judaism is tricky because we're both an ethnicity (shared gene pool) and a religion (converts join the family and are 100% the same as a Jew-from-birth).

So as I understood it, Arab Jews would have to be genetically similar to non-Jewish Arabs?

But language is a fluid thing, so maybe even Jewish-all-the-way-back-all-the-way-to-the-Churban would identify as "Arab" because of a shared culture and language?

octopus

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 6:38 pm

"Simply put: if someone says, "I am an Arab Jew," it's not okay to reply, "No, you're not." -quoting sequoia

Same token, if a sefardic Jew takes offense being called an arab jew, it is not okay to call them such. I will never forget when a long time ago, in the "jew of color" thread, someone posted how sefardim are jews of color. And when I posted that my persian relatives would take offense, I was called a racist. My persian relative told me that is simply not true and checks off the box "white" on those survey things. I thought the person on that thread who accused to me as racist, was quite racist themselves. You can't call people a group if they don't want the label. sorry. There is nothing wrong with the label itself, but if someone doesn't identify as such, it is offensive to place the label, no matter how liberal your agenda.

Volunteer

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 10:55 pm

octopus wrote:

I agree with what you say here.

Here is a fascinating article from Times of Israel in which the author advocates that all Jews (regardless of origin) should most accurately identify as non- white. She makes some convincing arguments, but, ultimately, people identify however they want. It is not clear cut.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com.....icle/

I, for one, used to check off "white" but now I feel more comfortable checking off "other." I wouldn't be surprised if someone got offended, and said, "you look white enough to me, how can you appropriate a non- white identity? "

I think what this boils down to is that racial and ethnic terms are loaded words. Terms like "white," "black," "_ of color," "Arab," and so on have a geographic, cultural, biological/ genetic, and historical (past and present) meaning. It gets thorny when someone doesn't fit all those categories neatly. As jews, we often don't fit into any one category perfectly. For example, a Jew from Russia may identify with certain elements of Russian culture and language, yet is closer genetically to other Jews and Middle easterners than non- Jewish Russians. Or, a Jew from Egypt might not look much different from his neighbors, yet feel separate from Egyptian history, and consider himself a non- Egyptian minority within Egypt. Or a Jew from Germany might be proud of his German heritage and identify freely as such, even while acknowledging he is part of a sub- culture there.

As jews, we have diversified into many different ethnicities, and we've become part of many different world cultures and histories. Yet we remain distinct in many ways as well.

tichellady

Wed, Aug 03 2016, 11:05 pm

Volunteer wrote:

I remember reading a book in college about how and when Jews became " white" in America.it was fascinating !

imasoftov

Sun, Aug 14 2016, 5:11 pm

I was looking for something else, and came across this post from last year, containing an interview with Ronit Elkabetz about her film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem where she refers to her family as Arab Jews.

Q. Everyone in “Gett” seems to be Sephardic or Mizrahi. I don’t think I saw a single Ashkenazi character in the film. What is the significance of that?

A. It’s of personal significance. It’s not like no women from the Ashkenazi community are being refused divorces by their husbands; it’s the same for all of them. But I come from a background of what we call Arab Jews. My parents were born in Morocco, got married there, and came to Israel in the mid-1960s, and as Arab Jews we had to put aside our culture. Because this is the culture of the enemy, the language of the enemy, the sounds, the songs and the smells and food, whatever belongs to them we have to push away. In building the identity of this place, one of the main tools was erasing the memory of what came before. But one thing very important to me was to represent this culture in Israeli cinema, because as a kid, I never saw it in cinemas. I never saw my mom, I never saw my grandmother, I never saw people I know from my neighborhood.

http://www.imamother.com/forum.....64603