ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY 481 The Great Chain of Orientalism… › sites › default › files › savvy › images › ... · 2016-04-29 · ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY

ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITYORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITYORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITYORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITYORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY 481481481481481

The Great Chain of Orientalism:

Jewish Identity, Stigma Management,

and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel

received little empirical attention. Currently,the literatures on immigration and racial-ization are concerned primarily with chart-ing the processes by which group boundariesare created, strengthened, or weakened.Within this work it is not always clear whydefinitional moves are initiated, why bound-aries take particular forms when others areavailable, or how the emergence of ethnicdifference is related to the emergence of eth-nic inequality.

Here, I use one instance of rapid transfor-mation in ethnic boundaries to explore theseissues. Contemporary Jewish Israeli societywas formed in the 1950s as the result of amassive immigration of Jews from manycountries. Despite significant heterogeneityamong the immigrants, a bifurcated social

everal features of race andethnicity are now abundantly clear to

sociologists. First, racial and ethnic bound-aries are mutable social constructions. Sec-ond, they are relational constructs in that de-scribing a “self” by implication describes an“other.” Third, these moving boundaries thatform ethnic groups are real in their conse-quences as they are fundamental buildingblocks of social hierarchies.

But while sociologists care about shiftingboundaries largely because they are so oftenrelated to exclusion, precisely this connec-tion between boundaries and exclusion has

S

Direct all comments to Aziza Khazzoom, Soci-ology Department, UCLA, Los Angles, CA90095-1551, [email protected]. I thankRoger Waldinger, Rogers Brubaker, Gil Eyal,David Lopez, Adrian Favell, Emanuel Schegloff,Yehouda Shenhav, Nancy Chodorow, Mike Hout,Yossi Shavit, David Biale, the ASR Editors, andfour anonymous reviewers for their incisive anddetailed comments on early drafts. This paper isbased on dissertation research, funded by a Na-tional Science Foundation Doctoral DissertationImprovement Grant, and by a UC–Berkeley

American Sociological Review, 2003, Vol. 68 (August:481–510) 481

Aziza Khazzoom

University of California–Los Angeles

This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequalityamong Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a functionof Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within anearlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colo-nialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-overhad been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted thisstigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as“western” and uncomfortable with anything identified as “eastern.” It is the im-peratives of this westernization “identity project” that account for the initial impe-tus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emergingIsraeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewishworld appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with thecurrent focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy.

Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Fellowship. AnIsraeli-specific version of this article was pub-lished in Hebrew in Israeli Sociology and wasrewritten for publication in English with the ISEditor’s permission. The Hebrew article was writ-ten while on a postdoctoral fellowship at Tel AvivUniversity, and was funded by the University andby the David Horowitz Foundation.

482482482482482 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEWAMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEWAMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEWAMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEWAMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

structure emerged in which Ashkenazim(European, primarily East European1 Jews)were the dominant group and Mizrahim(Middle Eastern and North African Jews)were subordinate (Amit 2001; Nahon 1987).It has been argued that one of the waysAshkenazim acquired their domination ofJewish Israeli society was to “orientalize”Mizrahim. That is, Ashkenazim used the pre-viously-existing east/west dichotomy to ad-vance a binary construction of ethnicity inIsrael in which the heterogeneity of the ar-riving cultures was simplified into two, ho-mogenous categories: Ashkenazim, whowere fully “western,” and Mizrahim, whowere fully “eastern” (Shohat 1988, 1989).This bifurcation in the realm of representa-tion, it is argued, both shaped and justifiedan unequal distribution of resources(Bernstein and Swirski 1982). As a result,the binary ethnic division has become en-trenched, such that across a range of impor-tant contexts Israel can now be said to haveonly two Jewish ethnic groups.

The imposition of new ethnic boundariesin Israel was clearly a first step in the pro-cess of exclusion. However the dynamicsmost often invoked to explain thesemoves—competition for scarce material re-sources and the natural tendency to helpone’s own—cannot account for the choice ofthese particular ethnic boundaries over oth-ers or for their emergence as central axes ofexclusion. I suggest that a far better expla-nation lies in an expanded and historicizedaccount of orientalism in the Jewish world.

Based on a review of secondary sourcematerials, and building on the works ofGoffman (1963) and Said (1978), I arguethat the past two centuries of Diaspora Jew-ish history in Europe and the Middle Eastcan be conceptualized as a series of oriental-

izations. Through this history, Jews came toview Jewish tradition as oriental, developedintense commitments to westernization as aform of self improvement, and becamethreatened by elements of Jewish culture thatrepresented the oriental past. Self-classifica-tion then drove how others were classified—perceived levels of westernization becamethe primary determinant for evaluating otherJewish communities, and exclusion resultedwhen a putatively less western group threat-ened the westernization project of another.In Israel, I argue, the Ashkenazi move to cre-ate Mizrahim, and the move to exclude themand Middle Eastern non-Jews, both devel-oped from this historical need to manage a“spoiled identity.” (Goffman 1963).2 Thus itwas not the formation of ethnic groups perse that accounts for the emergence of ethnicclosure but the content of the identitiesaround which they were formed.

This argument has two local implicationsand one global one. First, a large scholarlyliterature on a Jewish inferiority complexhas only begun to interpret that complex asa historical reaction to Orientalism or inter-nal colonization (Heschel 1999; Hess 2000;Khazzoom 1998; Kramer 1999) or to con-nect it to communal relations within the Jew-ish world (Aschheim 1982; Khazzoom 1998;Raz Krakotzkin 1989; Rodrigue 1993), andthen only in limited local instances. In con-trast, this work demonstrates that the effectof orientalism on Jewish identity was mas-sive. Group boundaries informed by orien-talism served not only to integrate Jews intotheir host hierarchies but also to integratedisparate Jewish communities into a hierar-chical, transnational structure that shaped in-teraction both before and after immigrationto Israel. Second, although I focus on Jew-

1 It is difficult to talk about constructed enti-ties in ways that avoid reification but also attendto their de facto reality as a result of daily prac-tice. The problem comes up in things as simpleas capitalization. I this paper, I capitalize “east-ern” and “western” when they refer to geographi-cal entities (i.e., to the Middle East, Eastern Eu-rope, and Western Europe), largely because thisis common practice. In all other cases, theseterms are written in lower case. I also capitalizemost group names, such as Jews, Mizrahim, orAshkenazim.

2 For the purposes of this paper, identity refersto two related dynamics: the experience of be-longing to a group (what is often referred to assubjective identity) and the set of characteristicsgroup members use to describe their group. It isthe second dynamic that is the focus of analysishere. I produce a history of what those who con-sidered themselves to be Jewish wanted the Jew-ish collectivity to become (or to appear to be).An “identity project” is an effort to change groupcharacteristics, or perceived characteristics, thatis widely shared by those who see themselves asbelonging to that group.


ish Israel, one implication is that the “inter-nal ethnic” (Mizrahi/Ashkenazi) and the“external national” (Israeli/Palestinian) di-vides are intimately related, and that analyz-ing them together is necessary (also see RazKrakotzkin 1998; Shohat 1989). Third, whenthe Israeli case is reinterpreted, ethnic cleav-ages in the Jewish world appear to have ahistorical stability and consistency that is atodds with the current focus on contingencyand historical indeterminacy.

THEORETICAL PROBLEM

Why does one group move to exclude an-other from access to socially valued re-sources (Parkin 1979)? This venerable socialstratification question is here married towork on racialization and the creation of dif-ference (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994).Clearly, exclusion cannot occur without theprior articulation of group difference. Thosecases Jenkins (1994) termed “categoriza-tion,” in which the more powerful imposeboundaries on the less powerful, should beof particular interest. But stratification workgenerally has been limited to asking whenone axis of difference predominates over an-other or how several axes interact (Grusky2001; Parkin 1979), treating group bound-aries themselves as stable. Similarly, workon categorization has asked how identitiesare imposed and institutionalized (Espiritu1992; Omi and Winant [1986] 1994),adopted and resisted (Espiritu 1992; Lopezand Espiritu 1990; Omi and Winant [1986]1994; Portes and MacLeod 1996; Tefft1999), or undermined by internal diversity(Kibria 1998), treating exclusion as a con-stant background force. I combine these re-lated concerns by asking why, in the Israelicase, categorization prefigured exclusion.

Said’s (1978) work suggests that the rela-tionship between categorization and exclu-sion can be illuminated by casting categori-zation as a relational process.3 Orientalism,

for Said, is a system of thought that first pos-its an opposition between Occident and Ori-ent and then builds on that opposition toconstruct the orient as inferior, to “dominateit, restructure it, and have authority over it”(p. 3). The process of orientalization is rela-tional not simply because one category im-plies another but because constructing theeast is how the west produces itself. It is thefact that one group has the ability to classifyanother that makes orientalization an exer-cise of power, and this form of power islinked to the monopolization of resourcesand group conflict in several ways (also seeSaid 1993). First, European orientalistthought developed in reaction to fear ofMoslem invaders; it was an attempt to do-mesticate those invaders by producing themas inferior. Second, orientalist thought inpart inspired Napoleon to invade Egypt in1798. Third, that invasion led to a sharp turnin orientalism, which began to justify colo-nialism by producing the east as incapableof ruling itself. Much work on colonialismand classification has followed these basicconnections, either on the same grand his-torical scale (Wolff 1994) or on a smallerscale (Anderson 1991; Heschel 1999; Hess2000; Mitchell 1991; Stoler 1992). Simi-larly, the assertion that the power to classifyis an important form of domination is a guid-ing insight of the U.S. literature on racial-ization (Espiritu 1992; Jenkins 1994; Kibria1998; Omi and Winant [1986] 1994).

The Israeli case suggests two broad con-tributions to this framework. First, Said(1978) historicizes orientalism on a macrolevel, writing a history of the orientalist dis-course and its use by westerners as a tool ofdomination, but he does not write a historyof the people who used it. Thus even as heargues that the east/west distinction is cen-tral to western identity, westerners appearunaffected by it, able to reshape the dis-course at will in response to changing needsfor domination or self definition (also seeGal 1991; Wolff 1994). However power isknown to be a much more complex activity,and its exercise constrains both dominators

3 There are two reasons to use Orientalism,Said’s (1978) study, as an analytical frameworkfor this paper. The first is empirical: Categoriza-tion in Israel referenced the orientalist discourse,and Said’s text-based historical survey of thecontent, scope, and use of that discourse remainsthe defining work. The second reason is theoreti-

cal: One of Said’s driving interests was to dem-onstrate the connection between categorizationand exclusion. I summarize Said’s main argu-ments in the text.


and the dominated. I historicize orientalismand its effect on group relations by askinghow it becomes anchored in identity. I focuson a specific set of actors: members of agroup that was classified as eastern by theorientalist discourse but that was given achance to westernize. That “transformationoption,” I argue, is what caused Jews to bothaccept their own negative evaluation and usethe east/west dichotomy to classify others.Jews were participating in their own domi-nation when they imagined new selves basedon a discourse that was used to classify themas inferior, and the categorization and exclu-sion of others was an integral part of this selfdomination.

To build these arguments, I draw onGoffman’s (1963) classic work, Stigma. Tosome extent, this is an obvious choice. Thisperiod of Jewish history has long been ana-lyzed as one in which Jews struggled withstigma and self-hatred, and Jewish reactionsto the Enlightenment follow Goffman’s mapof stigma-management strategies. From thisperspective, orientalist stigmas may beunique in their content, and perhaps in theirreliance on a systematic discursive structurefor their representational power, but they arenot unique in their effect on the self.

There are also deeper reasons for thechoice of Goffman’s work, however. Jewishorientalism is a story of interaction andstrategic self-presentation. Orientalist im-ages of Jews, whether produced by Chris-tians or by other Jews, were often explicitlyproduced for eastern consumption, often inthe form of specific demands for change.4

Representatives of the momentary western

group were usually available to evaluate theexpected transformation, and westernizingJews oriented private and public behaviortoward these evaluating others. Goffman(1963) often compared social life to theatri-cal performance, in which individuals,sometimes, after significant “backstage”preparation, present carefully crafted selvesto each other. He saw stigma as a specialcase of this dynamic, in which self presen-tation is shaped by the belief that an other iseither aware or could become aware of acharacteristic of the self that is despised orthat is not consistent with the self’s adver-tised role.5 It is by reference to this interac-tional dynamic that one can explain notonly why the stigma came to shape identityamong specific groups of Jews, but alsohow it traveled from group to group, and

4 The nature of the Jewish stigma, and list ofcharacteristics that had to be changed, were dis-seminated among individuals through face-to-face interaction and through the print media. Formost Jewish groups, the orientalization of otherswas simultaneously a way of westernizing theself and stimulating change among the oriental-ized group. Thus representations could be pro-duced for at least three groups: the western other,the eastern other, and the self. The relationshipsconsidered here frequently crossed language bar-riers and national and physical borders. The ini-tial communication across such borders appearsto have been largely through elites, and it wasthrough internal communication that the stigmawas disseminated to the larger communities.

Note that for Said (1978), the orientalist dis-course is an internal conversation. Those whoconstruct themselves as western do so by produc-ing images of the east that are largely for west-ern consumption; the putative easterners do notcontribute to the images that cast them as other,and circulation of the images among theeasterners is less of a priority than circulationamong westerners. In the Jewish case, imagesmay have been produced for eastern consump-tion, but orientalized Jews were still not invitedto contribute to their production. They may nev-ertheless have shaped orientalist images (Kramer1999).

5 This second possibility is less important inthe Jewish case. Note that Goffman’s (1963) em-pirical focus was face-to-face interactions, whilethe Jewish case entails more attention to the“backstage” and to indirect interaction (such aswritten media). Note also that while Goffman didnot focus on relations between groups, he did ar-gue that stigma could either create or reinforcegroup boundaries (e.g., gays and Jews, respec-tively), and he connected individual stigma man-agement strategies to the self awareness of suchgroups. Finally, the Jewish case reflects back onGoffman’s notion of the self. Goffman was neverentirely clear about the extent to which inner andouter selves could be analytically separated fromeach other, particularly because the inner self isalso a product of social interaction. What is clearin the Jewish case is that Jews wanted the innerand outer self to merge. They wanted to be west-ern when “backstage” and when they were in per-formance. Perhaps more correctly, they wantedthe western self no longer to be a performancebut a reality.


how the resulting need to present a westernself to the world mediated between twin im-pulses to exclude and to change groups ofJewish others.

The post-colonial literature is also con-cerned with articulating the experience ofthe classified and often uses similar notionsof stigma and interaction. This paper is verymuch in the post-colonial vein. However thefocus of post-colonial scholarship has beenon the relationship between the colonizerand the colonized, not on the relationshipbetween different groups of stigmatized oth-ers (e.g., Heschel 1999; Hess 2000; Memmi1965; Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Trinh 1989).6

As such, the kind of chain I elaborate herehas not appeared before. Goffman (1963), bysimultaneously attending to relations with“normals,” more stigmatized others, and lessstigmatized others, anticipates such a chainmore closely.7 His elaborate road map of po-

tential stigma-management strategies de-scribes a series of contradictory, ambiva-lent,8 moves and countermoves, includingthe tendency to assimilate to the normalother as well as separate from it, and the ten-dency to exclude similarly stigmatized oth-ers as well as missionary-style attempts tohelp them normalize. This approach blendswell with the distinctions often made in theUS literature between “assimilable” and “in-assimilable” minorities (Blauner 1972; Ogbu1987) as well as the tension between assimi-lation and cultural preservation (Brubaker2001; Waldinger n.d.).

A second broad contribution of the presentpaper concerns fluidity and stability in racial/ethnic formations. Recently, sociologistshave focused on showing contingency(Brubaker 1994), which can be defined as thehistorical indeterminacy that is generated bymultiple sources of stability and change inethnic formations (also see Omi and Winant[1986] 1994), or by the susceptibility of dis-course to multiple uses and interpretations(Gal 1991). But what stands out in the longerhistorical view of the Israeli case is not inde-terminacy but stability—stability in the useof the east/west contrast to classify self andother, in the use of specific cultural charac-teristics to establish that contrast, and in theresulting patterns of hierarchy and exclusion.I explain this stability, however, without ref-erence to primordialism. Instead, it extends

6 This is true even though the literature oftenmentions the Euro-philic stance of many of thecolonizers’ former protegee groups. The out-standing exception is Fanon’s (1967) Black SkinsWhite Masks, which posits that access to Frenchculture becomes a resource for power and pres-tige among blacks in Martinique. HoweverFanon’s analysis is less oriented toward elabo-rating the multiple possibilities for social actionthan is Goffman’s, and so is less useful for ask-ing when exclusion occurs. Similarly, Fanon’s(1963) The Wretched of the Earth considerscleavages among natives. But he is focused onrejection of the less assimilated native, ratherthan Goffman’s complex vacillation between re-jection and missionary behavior (also seeGilman’s [1986] use of Fanon to describe theGerman Jewish case); similarly, Fanon is con-cerned with material interests rather than stigma.Bhabha’s (1994) notion of hybridity is specifi-cally intended to disrupt the colonizer/colonizeddichotomy. But his interest is the possibility ofundermining colonial practice, not relations be-tween the self consciously hybrid and those theyconstruct as fully native. Bakic-Hayden (1995)showed that identity in the former Yugoslavia ischaracterized by a series of nested oriental-izations, but this piece is primarily descriptive.

7 Note that I am generating a conceptual splitbetween the “first” exercise of power on the partof Western Europeans, whom I am leaving as in-dependent of the discourse as Said made them,and those who were the objects of the first exer-cise of power and who exercise power later butwith far less control over their tools. While this

perspective is helpful in structuring the paper, itmay be an artificial distinction, and it is likelythat the point about power is applicable to West-ern European Christians as much as to Jews. Forexample, works by Heschel (1999) and Hess(2000) suggests that Western European Chris-tians were aware that since Christianity emergedin the east, they too could be seen as eastern. Ori-entalization of Jews, by positing enormous dif-ferences between Jews and Christians, could beseen as an attempt to deemphasize this debt.

8 Bhabha’s (1994) concept of ambivalence isdifferent from Goffman’s (1963). Bhabha is con-cerned with the twin reactions of repulsion anddesire, or recognition of difference and its dis-avowal, in contrast to Goffman’s twin reactionsof exclusion and missionary behavior. Goffman’sform of ambivalence is most salient in the spe-cific literature I am considering, and is alsocloser to the dynamics studied in the U.S. litera-tures on immigration, race/ethnicity and assimi-lation.


from two dynamics. First, the internalizationof a stigma among Jews pushed in consistentdirections across time and space. Second, be-cause the strategy Jews used to become west-ern was to produce other groups as eastern,consistency in patterns of identity formationled to consistency in patterns of ethnic rela-tions. Said (1978) has long been criticizedfor positing an “essence,” to orientalism, aninternal coherence that survives the chang-ing uses to which the discourse is put(Behdad 1994; Bhabha 1994; Young 1990).But when, as in the Israeli case, one posits acore self-definitional concern as driving thecategorization of others, such consistencymight be expected.

This point, then, returns us to Said’s useof categorization as relational to connect itto exclusion. Recent work has argued thatbecause identity is relational, ethnicity mustbe treated as a system of interdependentparts, rather than, say, as a characteristic ofindividuals (Becker 1998; Eriksen 1993; seeButler [1990] 1999 for a similar argumentregarding gender). In the reinterpretation ofthe Israeli case presented here, such a movedoes yield greater explanatory power. Bymarginalizing Mizrahim, Ashkenazim wereproducing themselves and their state aswestern. This not only explains why Miz-rahim were excluded but also the precise de-tails of the distributive system. Examples ofsuch details include: Poles and Rumanianswho spoke Yiddish (a marker of easternness)received lower returns to education,Yemenites and Moroccans were moved togeographically isolated new towns or ruralareas (Khazzoom 1998). Similarly, under-standing what is behind marginalization sayssomething about the circumstances underwhich ethnicity might become less relevantto the distributive system.

But rather than confirming the general ne-cessity of a “relational” approach to ethnic-ity, the Israeli case also suggests its limits.All constructions of the other are simulta-neously constructions of the self, but onlysometimes does the need to define the selfin a particular way cause moves to constructand exclude an other. Israel can serve as anexample of such a “relationally-driven” sys-tem, as, it has been argued, can the black/white line in the United States (Roediger1991). In these cases, majorities may be

deeply invested in a particular contrast be-cause their own identities are implicated.But in other cases, as when Espiritu (1992)in part credits administrative efficiency forthe imposition of an Asian category in theUnited States, the fact that categorizationalso shapes borders around the self appearsless relevant, and majorities appear, if notless invested in particular categorizations, atleast differently invested. It may be that thedistinction between those instances of cat-egorization driven by the identity concernsof the powerful and those that are not is im-portant in understanding racial/ethnic sys-tems generally.

Why Israel?

Sociologists have underestimated the rel-evance of Jewish ethnic formation to thestudy of ethnicity. The case is important for anumber of reasons. In this paper I build pri-marily on one: Jews constituted a large,loosely organized, multinational set ofgroups that maintained near-constant contactover time. Because specific subgroups’ loca-tions on the east/west dichotomy shifted, it ispossible to observe the long-term impact ofusing the orientalist discourse to structuresocial relations. I allude to other sources ofrelevance in this paper. First, the assimila-tion of Jews into post-Enlightenment Europeconstituted the test case for newly emergingideas on national/ethnic belonging in themodern nation state. What happened to theJews as they faced Europe’s Jewish questionthus provides important background materialfor contemporary debates about assimilationand preservation (Roger Waldinger, personalcommunication). Second, western colonialpowers usually ruled through intermediarieswho were generally groups that had beenmarginalized prior to colonial arrival and sohad ambivalent reactions to colonial inva-sion. In the Middle East, Jews tended to besuch an intermediary group, in some cases toa greater extent than Christians. BecauseJews were more often considered assimilablethan inassimilable, and because they estab-lished their own state predicated on the west-ernization project that resulted from their in-termediary status, the Jewish case sheds lighton the complex ways these intermediarygroups have supported and resisted western


domination. Third, and relatedly, it can beargued that by representing itself as a west-ern entity within a solid east/west dichotomy,Israel has been a participant in the recent po-larization of the Christian and Moslemworlds when it could well have functioned asa powerful resistor. The history articulatedhere can account for Israel’s choice.

The Israeli Case: The Construction

of Ethnic Difference in the 1950s

Two related practices—the classification ofIsraeli Jews into two ethnic groups and theapplication of an east/west distinction to de-scribe those groups—have only recentlybeen critiqued by Israeli academics. Earlierresearchers approached data using the binaryclassification as a neutral analytical tool andfound that ethnic inequality resulted fromcultural, educational, and occupational dis-advantages the Mizrahim brought with them.For these researchers, the east/west distinc-tion was not problematic. On the contrary,the Oriental origins of the Mizrahim ex-plained their lower skills and apparent in-ability to compete in Israel’s modern indus-trialized society (e.g., Eisenstadt 1967;Lissak 1965). Then the focus of mainstreamsociological work shifted, and researchersbegan supplementing information on Miz-rahi disadvantage with that on Ashkenazi so-cial closure behavior in housing, politics, theeducational system, and the labor market(e.g., Herzog 1985; Kraus and Hodge 1990;Levy 1997; Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov2000; Segev 1986; Shafir 1989; Shalev1992; Shavit 1990; Smooha 1978; Smoohaand Kraus 1985; Swirski 1989; Yaish 1998).Much of this work, including the most re-cent, differs only in that it conceives grouprelations as conflictual and not in its basicconception of group boundaries. But the fo-cus on social closure also highlighted “east-ern” and “western” as categories of socialand political practice (e.g., Herzog 1985;Shafir 1989; Swirski 1989). Concurrently, agroup of sociologists, historians, and literarycritics attacked the east/west categories di-rectly by arguing for their inaccuracy(Alcalay 1993; Anidjar 1996; Lavie 1992;Nahon 1987), linking them to exclusion(Bernstein and Swirski 1982; Eyal 1996;Piterberg 1996; Raz Krakotzkin 2002;

Shenhav 2002a, 2002b; Shohat 1988, 1989),and suggesting that social scientists werekey agents in their dissemination (Anidjar1996; Eyal 1996; Piterberg 1996; RazKrakotzkin 1998; Shohat 1988).

These latest works made the assertion thatIsrael did not receive Mizrahim and Ash-kenazim but rather created them, producingtwo ethnic groups when in fact it started withmany more. Nahon (1987), for example,found that among older immigrant men, edu-cational attainments varied widely amongtheir 10 major countries of origin with noobvious clustering of Middle Eastern andEuropean countries. Among younger Israeli-born men, however, educational attainmentsdid in fact cluster into the two groups. Simi-lar arguments about the 1950s immigrantshave been made regarding occupation andincome (Amit 2001; Darwish 1982, 1985a,1985b, 1987; Khazzoom 1998), as well asprior access to Western European societiesor adoption of their institutional and behav-ioral forms (Goldberg 1996a, 1996b; Haddad1984; Laskier 1983; E. Meir 1993; Y. Meir1989; Rodrigue 1993; Rejwan 1985;Schroeter 1988; Schroeter and Chetrit 1996;Yehuda 1996).9 Studies such as Shohat’s(1989) classic survey of Israeli film, Eyal’s(1996) history of the Arab village concept,Shenhav’s (2002b) study of European Zion-ist emissaries and Middle Eastern Jews, andPiterberg’s (1996) analysis of history text-books can be seen as building on this work,tracing the east/west construction’s dissemi-nation on specific sites.

In connecting the formation of Israel’s eth-nic hierarchy to orientalism, this literaturemakes an important advance, but it leavesopen the question of why Ashkenazim, spe-cifically, would exclude Mizrahim, specifi-cally, when arguably neither group existed in

9 Less work has been done regarding similari-ties of language, history, and even behavior, thatcould underlie a Mizrahi/Ashkenazi distinction.But particularly with language and behavior, in-ternal differences within each group may havebeen greater that those between the two groups.For example, even though all Middle Eastern im-migrants probably understood Arabic, and mostEuropeans Yiddish, the upper classes both geo-graphical regions tended to speak Western Euro-pean languages, while the lower classes spoke ei-ther Yiddish or Arabic.


the first place. Two explanations can beculled from the literature. The first concernscompetition for scarce resources. The con-struction of Mizrahim as eastern, primitive,and uneducated was explicitly linked withthe notion that they needed less: less pay,less immigrant or socialist worker benefits,less attention paid to the quality of theirhousing. The newspaper HaTsvi argued,

[The Yemenite worker] is the simple, natu-ral worker, capable of doing any kind ofwork without shame, without philosophy,and also without poetry. And Mr. Marx is,of course absent from both his pocket andhis mind. (Quoted in Shohat 1988:14)

Ben-Gurion noted,

We need people who are born workers. . . .The Oriental Jews[’] . . . standard of livingand their needs are lower than the Europeanworkers’. (Alcalay 1993:43)

Similarly, characterizations of Yemenitesas nonintellectual, quantity workers (as op-posed to intellectual, quality workers) under-lie a proposal that only 1,000 francs need bespent on each Yemenite family’s housing, asopposed to 2,000 for each Ashkenazi family(Shafir 1989). Also, Swirski (1989) arguesthat Ashkenazim built on their constructionof Mizrahim as inexperienced to use them asa ready-made proletariat, on the backs ofwhich the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli in-dustries gained their strength and sophistica-tion.

But this is ultimately an unsatisfactory ex-planation for the specific boundaries thatformed. It would have been the veteran elite,who took up positions as everything fromimmigrant placement officials to universitypresidents, who would have established theinitial contours of social closure. But havingalready obtained the most valued positionsfor themselves, this group had little to gainby handing out other positions according toa binary ethnic criterion. Certainly theywould want to divide resources according togroup boundaries that included them; cer-tainly the orientalist discourse had wide cur-rency, making it a readily available, effec-tive, and possibly already-tested (Shafir1989; Smooha 1978) basis for group forma-tion and exclusion; and certainly it was thediscourse, not the gatekeepers, that invented

the distinction between those from the Mos-lem and Christian worlds. But this argumentis also tautological, as it assumes the dis-course’s currency. The Zionist discourse alsoheld wide currency, and Zionist condescen-sion, even disgust, toward “weak” Holocaustsurvivors, “backward” Yiddish-speakersfrom East European ghettos, “non-ideologi-cal” refugees, and Diaspora Jews generally(Zerubavel 1995), in addition to a heartfeltcommitment to ethnic equality, all providedalternate axes for social closure and miti-gated against the kind of ethnically basedsolidarity that would make preference for allEuropeans an obvious response.10

The second alternate hypothesis, the vanden Berghe (1987)–style argument thatpeople naturally select and protect their own,is also problematic because it assumes thediscourse’s currency. In Israel, it is argued,Ashkenazim gave important jobs to Ash-kenazim, not to create ethnic inequality butto people their offices with those with whomthey felt comfortable.11 But again, this argu-ment seems weak in the face of evidence thatthe Mizrahi/Ashkenazi distinction was cho-sen out of a series of viable alternatives. In

10 In fact, as I have shown in other work onimmigrant attainment in 1961 (Khazzoom 1998),preference for all Europeans may not actuallyhave been the response. Among the examples, itappears that Ashkenazim who spoke Yiddish astheir primary language did, in fact, have had aharder time translating prior educational attain-ment into Israeli occupations. It is my contentionthat gatekeepers, conditioned by the orientalistdiscourse, did in fact see two ethnic groups.However, because their concern was actuallywesternization/modernization, and not the forma-tion of ethnic inequality, there was room forMizrahim to prove their westernness, and thusavoid exclusion; similarly there was room forAshkenazim to inadvertently demonstrate insuf-ficient westernness (e.g., by speaking Yiddish)and thus become victims of exclusion.

11 This hypothesis tends to be written into in-troductions of scholarly work on Israel, and tomy knowledge it has never been directly exam-ined (e.g., see Kraus and Hodge 1990). Other hy-potheses that have been articulated in the Israeliliterature explained the emergence of ethnic in-equality but without reference to social closure.These include the argument that Mizrahim ar-rived with lower human capital than Ash-kenazim.


fact, I argue that the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi dis-tinction structured feelings of similarity. Ialso argue, however, that the longer histori-cal perspective is necessary to explain whythat was the case.

METHODOLOGICAL NOTES

The secondary sources I use in this studyconsist of the historical literature, publishedprimarily from the 1940s through the currenttime, on Jewish communities in Germany,France, Eastern Europe, the Middle East,and North Africa. The literature affords twoforms of “data”: quotations from primarysources, and historians’ descriptions of thediscourses, identities, and interactions of thetime. In several cases, these scholars explic-itly consider the role of the east/west di-chotomy in shaping Jewish identity or inter-communal dynamics (Aschheim 1982;Heschel 1999; Hess 2000; Kramer 1989;Rodrigue 1993; Yehuda 1996) but do notconsider this process as part of a larger dy-namic of orientalism (but see RazKrakotzkin 1998); in other cases, the themeof westernness is either not raised or is rel-egated to the background.

The use of secondary sources can be seenas introducing a form of sampling bias to thestudy, as I am dependent on data that weregathered to answer empirical questions dif-ferent from my own. Nevertheless, the his-torians cited were concerned with issues thatoverlap those I consider here, such asEurope’s Jewish questions and the changeswrought by the Enlightenment on Jewishculture and identity. Moreover, there is littledisagreement among the scholars themselveson the details that are central to my argu-ment. My “concern” is thus not with the rep-resentativeness of data that was collected inthe past, but with how that data can be dif-ferently interpreted.

A JEWISH HISTORY

OF EAST, WEST, AND

COLONIAL DOMINATION

The series of orientalizations that can be dis-cerned from available secondary sources isdiagramed in graphic form in Figure 1. Be-ginning with Western Europe’s Enlighten-ment, French and German Christians cast

Jews in their countries as their eastern foils.Probably soon after that, German Jewsorientalized East European Jews, but thetrend became pronounced during the mid- tolate-1800s. It was also at about that time thatFrench Jews established the Alliance schoolsystem in the Middle East, the main vehicleby which Middle Eastern Jews were exposedto orientalization. Once the westernizationproject had circulated among Middle East-ern Jews, they, and probably Western Euro-pean Jews as well, orientalized Arabs. Fi-nally, as many have argued (see esp. Shohat1988), Israel has a three-tiered structure, asthe primarily East European Ashkenazim arecast as western, the Mizrahim as assimilableeasterners, and Palestinians and other Arabsas inassimilable easterners.

Orientalization of Jews in France

and Germany

I begin the history of ethnic exclusion in Is-rael with Western Europe’s Enlightenmentand the first two orientalization episodes.The history itself is well known (Aschheim1982; Barzilay 1955; Bayme 1981; Gold-scheider and Zuckerman 1984; Greenberg1944; Heschel 1999; Hess 2000; Katz 1973;Lichten 1986; Mendelsohn 1983, 1986,1989; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980;Raisin 1913; Zipperstein 1985). Beginningin the late 1700s, influential groups of eliteGerman and French Christians resolved toallow Jews full social and economic integra-tion, but at a price.12 Jews were expected to“prove their fitness for equal rights”(Aschheim 1982:5), by shedding their“backward” traditions, dismantling theirseparate communal infrastructures, andmoving forward into “modernity.”13 Most

12 The Enlightenment also affected the Jewishposition in England, but because this line of ori-entalization did not extend to other Jewish com-munities with the same intensity, I have not in-cluded it in this account.

13 The terms “modern” and “western” wereprobably used in a variety of ways by the variousactors in this history, and the meanings probablychanged across time and space. But because Jew-ish orientalism is a new subject, there are nocareful analyses of the meaning of each term inJewish thought or of the relationship between thetwo terms. For the moment, it is safe to say that


Jews accepted this deal and launched numer-ous transformation projects designed tomake Jewish life more compatible with theChristian ideal.14 Both the Enlightenmentand the Jewish reaction to it differed greatlybetween Germany and France, as did the le-gal process of Jewish emancipation and theease with which Jews were integrated intothe larger society. But in the characterization

of the Jews, the nature of the demands forchange, and the overall effects on Jewishidentity the dynamics in the two countrieswere very similar.

Christians demanded that Jews, “those un-fortunate Asiatic refugees” (Dohm quoted inGreenberg 1944:13),15 reform their lifestyle,values, and social, economic, and educa-tional structures. Friends and foes alike weredisgusted by Jewish poverty, by their dark,

IN DIASPORA

From Late Eighteenth to Late-Nineteenth Century

German Christians French Christians

From Late-Nineteenth Century to Mid-Twentieth Century

German Jews French Jews

East European Jews Jews of Arab Lands(“Ostjuden”) (“Oriental,” “Eastern” Jews)

(in Eastern Europe) (in Arab Lands)

Arabs(In Arab Lands)

IN ISRAEL

From Early-Twentieth Century to Present(Critical Period, Early Statehood, 1950s)

East European Jews(“Ashkenazim”)

Jews from Arab Lands(“Orientals,” “Mizrahim”)

Palestinians and Other Arabs

Figure 1. Intercommunal Orientalization in Post-Enlightenment Jewish History, and ApproximateTiming of the Most Intense Periods of Orientalization

Note: Arrows denote direction of orientalization.

both terms were used to refer to the set of char-acteristics I elaborate below.

14 These projects varied along a number ofaxes. Among them were the level of tradition thatJews wanted to retain and the role thatJewishness, in some form or another, should playin individual identity. But in France and Ger-many, there were few explicitly anti-westerniza-tion projects. In addition, even projects that pre-

served tradition sought to mold it into somethingmore compatible with western Christian obser-vance. The modern orthodox, for example, addeddecorum to their services, while the conservativeand reform sought to update Jewish ritual itself.

15 See Appendix A for a description of the in-dividuals quoted in this paper.


disorderly ghettos with the “narrow streets,dirt, throngs of people, . . . and ceaselesshaggling” (Aschheim 1982:6, paraphrasingand quoting Goethe’s description). Jewishappearance, particularly the beards andsidelocks, were attacked (Goldscheider andZuckerman 1984), and Goethe disliked therabbis’ “fanatic zeal . . . wild gesticulations. . . [and] piercing outcries” (Barzilay 1955:221). Special animosity was reserved for theYiddish language. Not only, argued the en-lightened, was it “the incarnation of linguis-tic ugliness” (Miron 1973:45), it was alsotoo underdeveloped to support high-poweredthoughts (Miron 1973). Jewish economicstructure accounted for what everyoneagreed was their dishonesty and parasitic na-tures. To solve the problem, Jews needed toreduce their numbers in commerce, espe-cially peddling (Barzilay 1955; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980). Christians at-tacked Jews for their particularistic orienta-tion, their “state within a state.” Finally,Jewish education had to be completely re-formed. The heder, the primary educationalinstitution, was dismissed as crowded, unhy-gienic, and chaotic. Children, it was said,were taught by rote rather than by rationalthought. And the subjects of their education,particularly the Talmud, were denounced aseverything from superstition to sedition(Barzilay 1955; Heschel 1999).

As noted, this history is well known andgenerally not disputed. What has only re-cently been added to the analytical picture,however, is that Jews in Western Europewere not simply constructed as being back-ward, but as backward because they wereOriental, Eastern, or Asian (Khazzoom1998; for analyses regarding Jews in Ger-many, see Biale 2001; Heschel 1999; Hess2000; Kramer 1999; Raz Krakotzkin 1998).My own characterization of the French andGerman stigmatization of western Jews asthe first orientalizations is based on threeobservations: (1) Jews were considered Asi-atic, (2) the package of deficiencies said tocharacterize them was already part of a dis-course of Western European superiority(Fredrickson 1981), and (3) the discoursethat constructed Orientals as inferior alreadyexisted (Said 1978). Thus Dohm, quotedabove, appeared to clearly connect the dis-like of Jews to their origins in Asia, Voltaire

was of the opinion that “the [ancient] Jewswere vagrant Arabs infested with leprosy”(Barzilay 1955:190), and many believed thatJews operated as a fifth column for the Mos-lem enemy (Cutler and Cutler 1986).

Of course it is empirically true that Jewishghettos were small, crowded, and noisy, thatJews were located in commerce, and thatthey had a separate institutional infrastruc-ture. This is part of the reason that, until re-cently, Jewish historians approached this pe-riod as a time of needed reform rather thanas a period in which Jews were subject to apower play. But the superficial accuracy ofthe construction is misleading. For example,there is nothing inherently backward aboutnarrow, twisting streets; today, many parts ofEurope are popular precisely for their ro-mantic, intimate sidelanes. In addition, whileDohm complained that Jews overbuilt, colo-nists to the Americas asserted that NativeAmericans did not build enough. Denounc-ing Jews for their particularistic orientationis also suspicious because Jews were ini-tially attractive to the Western Europeanpowers precisely because of their lack of in-vestment in the internal European powerstruggles (Barzilay 1955). Finally, with theincreasing importance of commerce to theWestern European economies, and indeed tothe Enlightenment itself, Christians shouldhave been delighted to have a skilled com-mercial group in their midst.

From this perspective, straight streets, de-corum, and even a peddler-free occupationaldistribution, have little to do with practicalquestions of advancement or with economicand social efficiency. They are, rather, char-acteristics that are given value by a groupwith power, often because perceived culturalsuperiority can make economic or politicalprivilege appear deserved (Bourdieu 1984,Bourdieu and Darbel 1991). The argumentthat lifestyle can be a tool in the monopoliza-tion of resources can be traced back to Weber([1921/1922] 1978), and it has been taken upin different ways in research on social strati-fication and inequality (in addition toBourdieu, see DiMaggio 1982; Ridgeway etal. 1998). Said (1978) and the post-colonial-ists can be said to be arguing for a particu-larly pervasive form of lifestyle-as-legiti-mization. They define the broad referentialsystem in which “east” and “west” are con-


nected to other binarily opposed characteris-tics—straight/not straight, quiet/not quiet,rational/emotional and Christian/non-Chris-tian—as a discourse. Nearly every possiblesocial and personal characteristic becomesassociated with one side of the discourse’sdichotomy. It is because of this power-by-association that something as trivial as streetwidth can appear to indicate something ascomplex as social development.

Importantly, Weber ([1921/1922] 1978)presented the choice of cultural/lifestylecharacteristics used to demarcate groupboundaries as not, in the main, predeter-mined (e.g., chap. 5). He did argue thatsome markers, such as language, are morelikely to be chosen because they tend to beeffective, and that others, such as puttingbutter in the hair, are chosen because theyare highly distinctive. Generally, though,the goal tends to be differentiating one pu-tative group from another and so any dis-tinction will do. For the post-colonial litera-ture, on the other hand, one central observa-tion is consistency in the characteristicsused across time and space to construct dif-ferent groups of others as backward. Sets ofcharacteristics similar to the “orientaliza-tion package” described here have beenused with relatively little variation to de-scribe societies as diverse as Chinese, Afri-cans, North American Indians, and even theIrish (also see Fredrickson 1981). For post-colonialists, cultural characteristics docome to evoke visceral reactions, but in themain this consistency is seen as a form ofconvenience. Having become part of widelyknown discourses of difference, these pack-ages resonate with people and so becomeeffective bases for new, often unrelated,distinctions. In the Jewish case, consistencyis again salient but for different reasons.What will become clear is that the lifestylefeatures that were used to build stigmacame to have enduring meaning for Jews, inand of themselves. These characteristics—religiousness, traditional clothing, narrowstreets, even employment in sales—werelater used to create other distinctions, not somuch because distinction was the goal butbecause observing these features on otherJews induced panic among those who be-lieved they had made some progress inbringing them under control.

Jewish Acculturation and

the Development of a

Stigmatized Identity

Jews initially engaged in the required accul-turation for practical reasons. Equality andintegration meant less violence against themas well as increased educational and occu-pational possibilities. In addition, rabbinicalhegemony within the Jewish world leftmany Jews searching for a way to under-mine its strength (Barzilay 1955). Howeverin losing their separate infrastructures, Jewsalso lost the boundaries that had protectedthem from their stigmatized place in Chris-tian society (Bayme 1981). This was a mo-ment whose negative consequences wouldchange Jewish history. Jews became vulner-able to self hatred, as they began to seethemselves from the orientalizers’ eyes.Even further, they placed the legitimatejudges of Jewish acceptability outside theJewish world. Over time, the goal was lessto produce a Judaism that Jews liked than itwas to produce a Judaism that the Christianscould tolerate.

Goffman’s (1963) discussion of stigmacan be used to explicate this process. He de-parts from Weber’s ([1921/1922] 1978) in-sight that, when stigmatized ethnic groupsare segregated, a separate sense of honor canshield them from the effects of exclusion andstigmatization. He then argues that in theUnited States, because

. . . separate systems of honor [are] on thedecline the stigmatized individual tends tohold the same beliefs about identity that wedo. . . . The standards he has incorporatedfrom the wider society equip him to be inti-mately alive to what others see as his fail-ing, inevitably causing him . . . to agree thathe does indeed fall short of what he reallyought to be. Shame becomes a central possi-bility, arising from the individual’s percep-tion of one of his attributes as being a defil-ing thing to posses. (Goffman 1963:7)

Although Goffman’s focus was on interac-tions between normal and stigmatized dyads(“mixed contacts” [p. 12]), it is clear thatknowing one is stigmatized continues toshape self-evaluation and behavior outsideof the interaction in anticipation of futureinteractions:


The immediate presence of normals is likelyto reinforce this [sense of inadequacy], butin fact self hate and self-derogation can alsooccur when only he and a mirror are about.(Goffman 1963:7)

One reaction to such a process, saysGoffman, is to attempt to rid the self of thestigmas to gain the acceptance of “normals.”

Spurred by the promise that change wouldeffectively destigmatize them, Jews acceptedand propagated the negative image devel-oped by others (Aschheim 1982; Boyarin1997; Cuddihy 1974). They decried the nar-row Talmudic world of the Heder, Berr IsaacBerr exhorted his fellow Jews “to divest our-selves entirely of that narrow spirit, of Cor-poration and Congregation” (1807, reprintedin Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:108),Eduard Gans wanted to destroy Jewish par-ticularism, “the obstinate, self-centered in-dependence of the Jews” (1882, reprinted inMendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:191),Heinrich Graetz called Yiddish a “half bes-tial language” (1895, quoted in Miron1973:36). And they simply loathed peddlers(Aschheim 1982).

Jews told each other about their individualresponsibility to change these specific char-acteristics of themselves. Walter Rathenau’swords to his fellow Jews in 1897 illustratethe self-contempt they often expressed:

Look at yourselves in the mirror! . . . Assoon as you have recognized your unathleticbuild, your narrow shoulders, your clumsyfeet, your sloppy roundish shape, you willresolve to dedicate a few generations to therenewal of your outer appearance. (Quotedin Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:232)

Importantly, the articulation of the Jewishstigma as an Oriental stigma specificallymay have solidified over time, possibly asthe orientalist discourse itself and the no-tion of a Semitic race became more centralto Western European thought. In fact, itmay be that it was only when western Jewsorientalized other Jewish communities inthe mid- to late-1800s that the characteriza-tion of their own pasts as Oriental crystal-lized. It was about that time that the FrenchJew, Naquet, told the Chamber of Deputiesthat, through Aryanization, contemporaryFrench Jews had lost “that inferiority whichI find in all Oriental people” (Marrus

1971:23–24), and German Jews believedthat East European Jews represented the“Asian form of Judaism” (Aschheim1982:20) that was the German Jews’ ownpast.

As they increasingly adopted the east/west dichotomy and its hierarchy of cul-tures, a number of concepts became fusedin the Jewish world view. These included:enlightenment, progress, modernity, secu-larism, rationality, reason, and non-JewishWestern European culture. As in the larger,non-Jewish European community, theseconcepts were translated into binary, oppo-sitional categories, under the umbrella ofthe east/west dichotomy, and given a moralconnotation. But, since Jews initially placedthemselves on the nonprogressive, ignorantend of the east/west dichotomy, it was theirown origins that became the central sym-bols of degeneracy and backwardness. SaysAschheim (1982), “The ghetto symbolizedthe distinction between enlightenment andsuperstition, progress and reaction, evenbeauty and ugliness” (p. 6). This kind oftransformation project tends to create a pro-tracted liminal state. As Goffman (1963)wrote, even when “repair” of the stigma ispossible, “what often results is not the ac-quisition of fully normal status, but a trans-formation of the self from someone with aparticular blemish into someone with arecord of having corrected a particularblemish” (p. 9). Because of their own am-biguous location within the dichotomy,Jews continued to fear regression until verylate in the process of westernization(Aschheim 1982; Rodrigue 1993).

Group Formation and Social

Closure; The Production of

“Ostjuden” and “Oriental Jews”

In Goffman’s (1963) schema, the internal-ized stigma affects one’s perception of othergroup members:

The stigmatized individual exhibits a ten-dency to stratify his “own” according to thedegree to which their stigma is apparent andobtrusive. He can then take up in regard tothose who are more evidently stigmatizedthan himself the attitudes the normals taketo him. Thus do the hard of hearing seethemselves as anything but deaf persons,


and those with defective vision, anything butblind. (P. 107)

But the less-stigmatized not only excludethe more-stigmatized, they also feel at-tached to other members of the stigmagroup. This is partly because normals areinsensitive to differences among the stigma-tized and partly because the less-stigma-tized experience empathy. “In brief, he canneither embrace his group nor let it go”(Goffman 1963:108). Goffman argues thatin an attempt to free themselves from thisambivalence, normalizing members of thestigmatized group may simultaneously pushother members to normalize, and also dis-tance themselves from them.

As they moved into the Western Euro-pean world, German and French Jews beganorganizing their identities around the east/west dichotomy, evaluating themselves andothers according to conformity with thewestern cultural model. Their discomfortwith their Oriental past became particularlyimportant when they were placed in directcontact with other, unwesternized, Jewishpopulations. For German Jews, East Euro-pean (particularly Polish) Jewish communi-ties became an orientalized “other” againstwhich the German Jews measured their ownadvancing westernization. Aschheim (1982)argues that it was at this point that an east/west distinction first began to shape Jewishintercommunal relations, as German Jewsdubbed East Europeans “Ostjuden,” liter-ally “Eastern Jews”:

East European Jews . . . were regarded asimmoral, culturally backward creatures ofugly and anachronistic ghettos. In large partthis was a view formulated and propagatedby West European and especially GermanJews, serving as a symbolic construct bywhich they could distinguish themselvesfrom their less fortunate, un-emancipatedEast European brethren. In this sense, thevery notion “Ostjude” was the product of themodernization of Jewish life and conscious-ness, for before the penetration of Enlight-enment thinking, Jews did not divide them-selves into radically antithetical “Eastern”and “Western” components. (P. 3)

Only a short time later, French Jews oriental-ized Jews in Arab lands (dubbed at this point“Oriental,” and later in Israel also

“Mizrahim” [lit. “easterners”]) as part ofFrench colonial expansion into that part ofthe world (Rodrigue 1993).

Both of these orientalization-driven rela-tionships simultaneously contained elementsof exclusion and attempts to westernize theoriental group and bring it into the fold. Butthe balance differed, depending, I argue, onthe type of contact between the western andthe orientalized group. In Germany in thelate 1800s, Jews’ still-shaky status aswesterners was threatened by massive immi-grations of these orientalized East EuropeanJews (Aschheim 1982). Concerned that inte-gration of so many Ostjuden would disrupttheir acculturation process, German Jews re-acted primarily with exclusion, funneling thewould-be immigrants to the United States orPalestine (Aschheim 1982). In France, onthe other hand, contact with Middle EasternJewish communities was probably lessthreatening. It took place physically outsideof France, and by constructing the interac-tion as facilitating the French colonial enter-prise, French Jews were actually able to usethe relationship to strengthen their own“Frenchness” (Goldberg 1996b; Rodrigue1993). In this case, orientalization did notresult primarily in exclusionary activities butin missionary-style projects aimed at west-ernizing the Oriental population. FrenchJews formed the Alliance school system, anintensive, and highly successful, westerniza-tion enterprise.

Orientalization of

East European Jews

The influence of Haskalah (Jewish Enlight-enment) ideology on Eastern European Jew-ish communities and identities can be di-vided into two historical periods. In the late1700s, students and business people wereexposed to the changing German self-con-cept (Fishman 1995). At that time, however,the Haskala took root primarily in larger cit-ies such as Odessa and Vilna (Goldscheiderand Zuckerman 1984; Zipperstein 1985).Then, in the early- to mid-1800s, twochanges sped up the East European Haskala.First, a new Russian Czar opened the socialsystem to Jewish penetration (Greenberg1944; Raisin 1913). Second, German andGermanized maskilim (proponents of the


Haskalah) began orientalizing in earnest.They wrote a series of Yiddish novels,whose intent was to show East EuropeanJews the decaying and backward nature oftheir own culture (Miron 1973; Rischin1962). These novels, characterized byRischin as “paper pogroms” (persecution orattacks), were very influential. As Gold-scheider and Zuckerman (1984) put it, the“winds of change” had soon reached nearlyeverywhere.

And those winds meant the acceptance ofstigma and the launching of westernizationprojects. Israel Singer, the brother of IsaacBishevas Singer, wrote:

See what Jews look like—stooped, despon-dent, living in filth. Watch them drag theirfeet as they walk. Listen to them speak. It’sno wonder everyone else thinks of them asAsiatics. And how long do you think thatEurope will stand for this clump of Asia inits midst? (Quoted in Selzer 1967:35)

Substantively, both Jews and non-Jews, pro-and anti-Semites, Germans and East Europe-ans, agreed on the nature of Jewish defi-ciency. The filthy, chaotic, uncultured ghet-tos with their narrow twisty streets wereprominent. The German Jew Zunz com-plained that the Hassidim (Jewish mystics)of Sklow “screamed and raved and sang likethe savages of New Zealand” (Aschheim1982:14). East European maskilim re-quested that the Russian government outlawHassidic clothing (sidecurls and long blackcoats) (Seltzer 1967) and urged Jews tospeak local languages rather than “our cor-rupted jargon that grates on the ears and dis-torts” (Osip Rabinowich 1861, reprinted inMendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:322). Andthe Ostjuden were attacked for their largefamilies. Marx complained that Polish Jewsbred “like lice” (Aschheim 1982), the anti-Semitic Vilna Journal reported that “in thesame dwelling may be found four, five, oreven six families, each of them having anumber of children of tender age” (quotedin Rischin 1962:30), and in a MendelMoicher Sforim story:

Observe the miserable conditions of the pau-per, . . . the way his wife lies pregnant, theway his children roll about, the way they areclothed, and the way they are raised.(Quoted in Rischin 1962:40)

Eastern Authenticity, Western

Futures, and Variation and

Limitation in Reactions to

Orientalization in Europe

European Jews did not react with one mindto their orientalization; they rather re-sponded with a variety of identity projects,including anti-westernization projects(Bayme 1981; Katz 1986) and romanticiza-tion of the orient (Aschheim 1982; Kramer1999). Nor would the stigmatized have seenthemselves as an undifferentiated group ofOrientals; in addition to the well-researchedreligious/secular division in Eastern Europe,numerous internal stratification systemswould have either arisen or been reinter-preted along orientalist lines. Yet structuringthe variety of responses and relationships, atleast in Europe, was an opposition betweenoriental authenticity and western modernity.Once a group had internalized the orientalstigma, identity projects—whether advocat-ing retention, transformation, or rejection ofJewish tradition—and relations with groupsperceived as less western—whether vilifyingthem as culturally backward, romanticizingthem as carriers of unspoiled culture, or bothsimultaneously—were organized around thediametric opposition of a new, modern, secu-lar, west and an old, traditional, religious,east.

This is important because few westerniza-tion projects had full acculturation as theirgoal; rather most, including Zionism, aimedfor a synthesis between “old” and “new.”But having also accepted the diametric op-position, most groups experimenting withsynthesis wanted to be seen as fundamen-tally western with oriental features, not asfundamentally Oriental. Several conse-quences are of interest. First, syntheses hadto be undertaken with care, and delicate bal-ances could be easily upset. Eyal (1996, per-sonal communication) suggests that Jewsbecame more adventurous in their syntheseswhen they were confident in their western-ization. Thus, later groups of German Jewsbuilt synagogues with oriental architecture;similarly early Zionists experimented withArab dress and other forms of“Arabization.” Second, for westernizingJews who wanted to connect to the past,preservation of other populations’ eastern-


ness may have become important (for simi-lar dynamics in the colonial context, seeBhabha 1994; Trinh 1989). Work on GermanJewish romanticization of the Osjuden(Aschheim 1982; Brenner 1996) suggestssuch a dynamic, as does the combination, inIsrael, of admiration for the purity and au-thenticity of Yemenite Jewry with exclusionfrom central areas of the country andeconomy (Raz Krakotzkin 1998; Segev1986).

Finally, the reaction to at least one pieceof the orientalization package differed sig-nificantly among Western Europe, EasternEurope, and the Middle East and may havebeen critical to interaction later in Israel.Secularization was correlated with western-ization projects in all three areas. There wasvariation, however, in the extent to whichdiffering levels of religious observancetranslated into social movements and relatedto the larger task of acculturation. First,movements with formally articulated philo-sophical stances on how Jews should alterreligious observance (such as Germany’s re-form or conservative movement) emerged inEurope but not the Middle East. Westerniz-ing Middle Eastern Jews did become lessobservant (Goldberg 1996a), but there is evi-dence that they did not see religious changeas necessary (Goldberg 1996a; Stillman1995; Zohar 1986, 1996) and may have evenplayed it down to preserve communalunity.16 In Europe, in contrast, specificchanges in religious thought and practice be-came highly salient, visible, and even requi-site symbols of adherence to westernizationprojects. Haskalah thinkers placed the elimi-nation of older forms of thought and prac-tice high on the list of priorities and wereoften virulent in their attacks. As the Yiddishwriter Israel Aksenfeld proclaimed, “wemust find instruments for ridiculing [theHassidim] . . . so that the common peoplewill jeer at them in the streets” (quoted inMiron 1973:53).

These divergences are significant because,given the delicacy of the east/west synthesesAshkenazim tried to produce, the apparentreligiousness of the Mizrahim may have it-self been enough to trigger stigma-relatedpanic among veteran Ashkenazi settlers. Inthis respect, it is important that as the projectmoved to Eastern Europe, it graduallyshifted from religious reform to seculariza-tion, increasing the distance between MiddleEastern behavior and East European percep-tions of what constituted westernness andmodernity. In Germany, the Haskalah projectinvolved both thought and practice, includ-ing bringing the logic of justification for in-dividual religious belief in line with Chris-tian thought, stressing the voluntary natureof belief and ritual observance, abandoningor privatizing conspicuous religious behav-iors (particularly dress), and inventing newtraditions more in line with Christian prac-tice (Katz 1973). In Eastern Europe, twoshifts occurred: “The Haskalah became lessreligiously-oriented and more overtly po-lemical against the established Orthdoxy”(Bayme 1981:179), and orthodoxy explicitlyredefined maintenance of tradition as resis-tance to westernization (Katz 1986;Kimmerling 1999). Finally, while East Eu-ropean maskilim continued to favor transfor-mation over secularization (Bayme 1981;Katz 1973), their Zionist inheritors were of-ten explicitly non- or even antireligious(Shimoni 1995), as was the larger Jewishpopulation (Greenberg 1944).

Orientalization of

Middle Eastern Jews

The French interaction with Middle EasternJews is best understood within the larger his-tory of Western European colonization of thenon-west. To manage conquered societies,colonizers often used previously marginal-ized ethnic groups as mediators betweenthemselves and the mainstream of the con-quered society. In return, the marginalizedgroups were provided with social and eco-nomic opportunities, and often themselvesbecame pro-western elites. In the Arabworld, Jews and Christians (collectivelyknown as “Dhimma”) provided this mar-ginalized population. Within this framework,French Jews used the Alliance school sys-

16 This is one of those statements on whichmost scholars agree but on which there has beenlittle direct research. The argument weavesthrough the work cited above, from Stillman(1995), Zohar (1986, 1996), and Yehuda (1996).In the in-depth interviews that I am currentlyconducting with Iraqi immigrants, this strategy ismentioned as well.


tem, established in the 1860s, to simulta-neously reinforce their French and Jewishidentities. First, French Jews would advancethe French cause by westernizing Arab Jewsand developing them as an inroad for cul-tural colonialism. Second, they would helpfellow Jews by teaching them the languagesand skills that would enable them to take fulleconomic advantage of the European pres-ence in the Arab world. But there was a thirdgoal as well. By westernizing this “oriental”component of world Jewry, French Jewswould be eliminating a potential source ofembarrassment (Goldberg 1996; Laskier1983; Rodrigue 1993).

The leaders of the Alliance network didorientalize Middle Eastern Jews, just as theGerman Jews had orientalized East EuropeanJews. But, perhaps because Middle EasternJews were not threatening to immigrate intoFrance, as the Ostjuden were threatening toimmigrate to Germany, French Jews did notreact with exclusion. Rather, their goals wereto: regenerate the degenerate eastern Jews,to shape them, and “inculcat[e] them withuseful knowledge” (Maïr Levy 1892, re-printed in Stillman 1991:204), such as read-ing, writing, and new languages (Rodrigue1993; Yehuda 1996). As Middle Eastern stu-dents graduated, many traveled to Paris forfurther education and returned to teach in theschools themselves.

There were probably at least some differ-ences in the perceived “orientalness” ofOstjuden and the Orientals (also see Wolff1994 for the non-Jewish parallel). Neverthe-less, the characterizations of the twoorientalized populations are largely similar,and at least some western Jews consciouslyand explicitly connected the two popula-tions. As late as 1927, a visitor to Libyancave dwellers, who arrived with the localrabbi, reported:

The most prominent men of the village tookadvantage of our presence [the visitor ar-rived with the local rabbi] to bring up fortrial a dispute . . . which was dividing thecommunity . . . —for all the world like anorthodox Polish community. (NahumSlouschz 1927, on his 1906 visit in NorthAfrica, quoted in Stillman 1991:217)

Similarly, in his 1930 biography of SabbatiZvi, the German, Kastein (1930), remarked

that western Jews “regarded [Sabbateanism]from a more worldly, concrete, and politicalpoint of view than the Oriental and PolishJews” (Kastein 1930:228; translated quotepresented here is from Biale 2001:93).17

As with Eastern Europe, for practical rea-sons Jews from Arab countries initially tookon westernization projects—in this caseadopting languages, institutional forms, andoccupations. Colonialism generated signifi-cant economic possibilities, including ca-reers in colonial enterprises and interna-tional business opportunities (Goldberg1996; Stillman 1991). Eventually, however,many came to see themselves from theirorientalizers’ eyes.18 Westernization becamea central goal, at least among the wealthy,educated, or urbanized. Said Naim Kattan of1940s Baghdad, “The rich Jews nevermissed a chance to slip a few words of En-glish or French into their conversation”(Kattan 1975, quoted in Stillman 1991:281).And a Gallacized Tunisian wrote of his boy-hood prior to World War I,

They had tried to give me some religious in-struction. A rabbi, not too famished-lookingand not too threadbare, would come to teachme to read the sacred books three times aweek. . . . How rudimentary was the good

17 Sabbati Zvi lived in the seventeenth century,not in the 1930s, and so Kastein’s remark is theo-retically about how Oriental, Polish, and westernJews perceived Sabbateanism in the seventeenthcentury. I argue, however, that Kastein is read-ing contemporary constructions back into history.In fact, the time of Sabbatai Zvi predates thewesternization of even the western Jews, and sowithout the assumption that Kastein is using con-temporary constructions, his argument would notmake sense at all.

18 In contrast to Europe, where there is generalagreement that Haskala ideology came to shapeidentity in most communities (including opposi-tional identities), almost no research has beendone on the extent to which the westernizationproject actually reached which Middle Easterngroups. But some empirically based theorizingsuggests that a good portion of urban Jews hadhad at least one year in an Alliance or other mod-ern school, and therefore was exposed to propa-ganda about the need for westernization. More-over, even uneducated Jews used hospitals, so-cial services, and old age homes that were builtand run by westernized or modernized Jews, andso were probably exposed to the westernizationproject as well.


man’s pedagogy, how mediocre his culture!Comparing him to my French teachers madehim look ridiculous. (P. 252)

Jewish Orientalization of

Arab Non-Jews

For all their progress, their European net-works, and their fluency in western lan-guages and culture, “there remained alwaysthe nagging suspicion that the process hadnot gone far enough, that the truly western-ized self remained always at a remove, andcould not be totally captured” (Rodrigue1993). Just as German Jews had reacted tocultural insecurity by orientalizing East Eu-ropean Jews, so many westernizing MiddleEastern Jews became invested in discursiveand symbolic separation from their own Ori-ental other, Moslem Arabs. Over time, thesegroups developed identities in which, at themost extreme, Jewishness meant non-Arabness.19 This move is important not justbecause it would later facilitate Middle East-ern Jewish acceptance of the oriental stigmain Israel, but because it may have set thestage for orientalization of non-Jewish Arabsthere as well. It thus adds another piece inthe evolving relationship between oriental-ism and social closure in Israel.

In this sense, it is significant that Jewishdistance from Arabs appears to have been atleast as important to French Jews as it wasto westernizing Middle Eastern Jews. In fact,

the first group to use the Arabs as foils wasprobably the French Enlightenment–orientedJews.20 In their diaries and reports home,Alliance teachers underscored Middle East-ern Jewish success at westernization by pit-ting it against the continuing Oriental natureof the Arabs:

The Arab has a plodding mind and is slowto comprehend; his religion and traditionsmake him a creature of habit and his ideasare desperately slow in changing. The Jew,on the other hand, now that he has beenfreed of the chains that had reduced him tothe status of pariah through the ages, hassuddenly taken flight. . . . Today [he] is afree man, capable of keeping step with theEuropean in his dress, manners, and the de-velopment of his mind. (Rodrigue 1993:218)

In an important variation on this theme, anAlliance secretary wrote in 1903 that “nu-merous communities have imitated the Ar-abs, who . . . marry off their children at anage when they should still be sitting at schoolbenches (Jacques Bigart 1903, quoted inStillman 1991:200). In this case, Arabs are“blamed” for the orientalness of the OrientalJews, despite the fact that the orientalizationpackage of European Jews also mentionedearly marriage. In his turn of phrase, the Al-liance secretary presents Oriental Jews as nottruly of the Orient, but as some lost groupthat has only to find its true western self.

Westernizing Middle Eastern Jews thenused the orientalization package in their eth-nic struggles with Arabs. Said a gallicizedMoroccan Jew in 1926, “Was it not Judaismwhich spread among the Berber tribes,bringing them the first glimmers of civiliza-tion?” (reprinted in Stillman 1991:302). Andin 1918, two leaders of the Iraqi Jewish com-munity used the dichotomy in a more subtle

19 Scholars such as Shohat (1988), Shiblak(1986), Alcalay (1993), and Shenhav (1999) ar-gue that the non-Arab identity was neither popu-lar nor indigenous among Jews in the Arabworld. They suggest instead that Ashkenazi Zi-onists exacerbated and often even created divi-sions between Middle Eastern Jews and their hostsocieties. That western Jews were themselves in-vested in Mizrahi distance from Arabs is consis-tent with these scholars’ contention. Recent sug-gestions that the Iraqi Jewish anti-Zionist (EstherMeir, personal communication) and communist(Kazzaz 1991, 2002) movements were larger andmore important than previously acknowledgedalso suggests strong currents of Middle EasternJewish identification with Arabs rather than thewest. Nevertheless, it is difficult to know how tointerpret anti-Zionist statements from MiddleEastern Jewish leaders in a context in which pro-Zionist statements could lead to imprisonmentand death.

20 Because the literature is not oriented towardunderstanding the history of orientalization, thestory of how Middle Eastern Jews came to useArabs as foils must be built with logic and avail-able historical information. Within the literatureI reviewed, the technique appears first in Alli-ance documents, and so appears to have been ofFrench origin. Middle Eastern Jews had been ineconomic competition with Arabs for centuries,but, although they appear to have nurtured asense of superiority to Arabs, they would nothave had the discursive equipment to orientalizeArabs prior to the arrival of the French.


way, when they requested that the Britishgovernment restrict Arab political power inIraq. The Arabs, they said, were too inexpe-rienced “to undertake with success the man-agement of their own affairs” (Stillman1991:256–57). They would set up a reli-gious, rather than a democratic, government,and since they had so few scientific institu-tions, they were unqualified. Conversely, thewesternness of the Jews is suggested whenthe community leaders declare that theirgoals and orientations are commensuratewith those of the British: “Two centuries ofactive commercial relations with Great Brit-ain have slowly cemented a community ofinterests” (President of the Jewish LayCouncil and Acting Chief Rabbi, reprinted inStillman 1991:257).

Zionism and the Orient

Zionist ideas first began to appear in the late1800s, as small segments of European Jewsbecame convinced that the integration prom-ised as a result of the Enlightenment wouldnot be forthcoming. Borrowing from othernationalist movements in Europe, the Zion-ists argued that the respect Jews soughtcould not be attained by assimilating intoEuropean society but instead by striking outon their own, in their own country, buildingtheir own nationalist pride. This constituteda rejection of the Haskalah’s integrationproject and so had the potential to challengethe stigmatized identity adopted by Euro-pean Jews. Instead, however, the stigma wasembedded in the Zionist enterprise and trav-eled to Israel with the settlers.

Zionists were almost obsessed with creat-ing a culture that was new, unaffected by the“medieval” religious culture most had onlyrecently left behind (Even-Zohar 1981;Zerubavel 1995). The following quote fromTheodor Lessing is startling because itcomes from a pamphlet problematizing Jew-ish self-hatred:

Who you are? The son of the slovenly Jewishpedlar Nathan, would you think, and of lazySarah whom he had accidentally slept with?. . . No! Judah Macabee was your father,Queen Esther your mother. . . . They havebeen there all the time and tomorrow theirspirit could be revived. (1930, reprinted inMendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:238)

Lessing’s discomfort with Nathan and Sarahis acute, and he wants to make them disap-pear. But this escapism leaves Jews vulner-able. Because Nathan and Sarah are, in fact,parts of the Jewish past, considerable energywould have to be spent constantly denyingtheir existence.

That Zionists tried to replace the old cul-ture with a new one is known, and much hasbeen written about it (e.g., Even-Zohar1981; Penslar 1991). What has not been ar-ticulated, except by Selzer (1967), and morerecently by Raz Krakotzkin (1998), is theextent to which the Zionist transformationproject was a westernization project, specifi-cally. It is in Altneuland, written by TheodorHerzl, that this is most clear. In the story, Dr.Friedrich Loewenberg travels to Israel withhis companion. He is disappointed. Thetown of Jaffa

. . . was pitifully shabby. . . . The narrow al-leys smelt to heaven; they were dirty and ne-glected, full of motley oriental misery. . . .A strange odor, as of mold and open graves,made breathing difficult. (Selzer 1967:43)

Jerusalem was no better:Shouts, smells, tawdry colors, people in ragscrowding the narrow airless streets, beggars,cripples, starveling children, screamingwomen, bellowing shopkeepers. (Selzer1967:43)

In other words, says Selzer, Israel was asOriental as an East European Jewish ghetto.But in Altneuland, 20 years of Jewish stew-ardship changes Israel greatly. Haifa “looksjust like America” (Selzer 1967:46); inJerusalem, “modern suburbs had arisen,”(Selzer 1967:46) and the Jews had even wid-ened and straightened the streets.

Zionism was in many ways a move di-rected toward Europe, a final bid for accep-tance as equals in the European family.When Herzl wanted to “form a portion of therampart of Europe against Asia, an outpostof civilization as opposed to barbarism”(1896, reprinted in Mendes-Flohr andReinharz 1980:425), he was trying to placeJews on the European side of the fence, onthe western side of the east/west dichotomy,and to argue that the Jewish project and theEuropean project were one and the same.Similarly, David Ben Gurion famouslystated, “[W]e do not want Israelis to becomeArabs. We are duty bound to fight against


the spirit of the Levant.” And Abba Eban ar-gued, “[T]he object should be to infuse theSephardim with an Occidental spirit, ratherthan allow them to drag us into an unnaturalOrientalism” (both quoted in Shohat1989:116–17). These quotations reveal theextent to which the Zionists were trying toestablish themselves as the west’s outpost inthe Middle East. Ahad Ha’am’s words, how-ever, are the most startling: “What Herzl un-derstood is that only by leaving Germanyand settling in the Jewish state could the Jewfinally become a real German” (as quoted inIlam 1998:4).21

But Zionism is a complicated ideology,and its stance toward the Oriental, and to-ward Jewish tradition as part of the Orientalpast, often has been complex and ambiva-lent. Zionism, after all, also sought to returnJews to their roots in the Middle East. SomeZionist strands romanticized and partiallyadopted the Arab way of life as a model of aland-rooted peasant that was more appropri-ate to Israel than the models available in Eu-rope. Nevertheless, argues Even-Zohar(1981), these models were problematic pre-cisely because they were also Oriental, andthus simultaneously “heroes, men of the soil. . . [and] inferior and almost savage” (p.173). In a similar vein, Cordova (n.d.) ar-gued that an internal movement aimed atfully adopting an Oriental identity did notsucceed because it was too far out of therange of the Zionist discourse.

Zionism in fact struggled with the samefundamental tension between stigmatizedauthenticity and new western identities thatplagued most European Jewish identityprojects. It brought Jews to their ancientroots in the east in order to westernize them;it advocated a revival of Jewish life and cel-ebration of uniqueness, but saw Jewish tra-dition as incompatible with modernity(Zerubavel 1995). Zionists clearly wanted tointegrate both Judaism and the Middle East

into Israeli culture, but these were handledlike dangerous, potentially polluting sub-stances, and maintaining control was key.One common strategy was to transform tra-dition into a series of symbols that wouldpreserve the uniqueness of Jewish life andprovide rallying points for Israeli unity butleave Jews largely secular. An example is theIsraeli flag, whose blue stripes are meant tosymbolize the Jewish prayer shawl. The re-vival of Hebrew shows a similar concernwith maintaining a delicate balance(Kimmerling 1999). The care with whichthese projects attempted to combine traditionwith a continuing cultural connection withEurope is critical, because it was into thisdelicately balanced project that the massiveimmigrations of Jews from the Arab worldarrived.

ORIENTALIZATION AND ETHNIC

INTERACTION IN ISRAEL

With a deeper understanding of the meaningof westernness to European Jewish commu-nities, I now take a closer look at the appli-cation of the east/west dichotomy to thepost-state immigrants to Israel. What standsout is the similarity between the GermanJewish orientalization of the Ostjuden (i.e.,East European Jews)22 in Europe, and theOstjudisch orientalization of the Mizrahimin Israel less than a generation later. Inorientalizing the Mizrahim, the Ostjudensimply took the arsenal of images and sym-bols that had been used to exclude them andapplied them, wholesale and nearly un-changed, to the Mizrahim. They thus pre-sented themselves as the westerners that theyhad, up until that point, never been.

In Israel, ethnic differences in Zionist phi-losophy and orientation comprise one of themost commonly raised examples of theeasternness of the Mizrahim, as well as oneof the most effective justifications for Ash-kenazi supremacy. The common conception

21 Note, however, that Berkowitz’s (1997) ac-counting of “western” Jewry’s attachment to Zi-onism does not require reference to the western-ization project. Berkowitz argues, in part, thatwestern (Berkowitz does not unpack the concept)Jews liked Zionism because it could alleviate thepoverty of the Ostjuden; he does not mention al-leviation of their easternness.

22 Currently, the term “Ashkenazi” refers to allJews whose recent (last 100 years or so) back-grounds are on the European continent and whoare not descended from Spanish Jews (these Jewsare “Sephardic”). Most Ashkenazim in Israel areof East European background, and so most comefrom the group that was called “Ostjuden.”


is that Mizrahim, being non-western andthus not self-consciously philosophical,were not intellectually Zionist. Rather, theirZionism is understood to have emerged fromtheir deeply religious orientation, to havebeen felt but not thought, inspired by mysti-cal and messianic tendencies (e.g.,Eisenstadt 1967). This construction is, inter-nally, an extraordinarily powerful justifica-tion for Ashkenazi dominance in Israeli poli-tics; the argument is that Ashkenazim, beingthe “better” Zionists, were uniquely quali-fied for stewardship of the state. Following,however, is a 1920s’ description of the Zi-onism of the Ostjuden, according to Nordau,a prominent Zionist thinker:

[Nordau] distinguished the Western Zionismof the “educated and free Jewish elite” fromthe East European version. There the attach-ment to the Zionism of the uneducated tra-dition-bound masses was a matter of instinctrather than of reasoned reflection; they werestill partly influenced by “mystical tenden-cies.” (Aschheim 1982:87)

Theodor Herzl, another prominent Zionistleader, made similar comments after speak-ing to a gathering of East European Zionistsin 1896 (Hertzberg 1984). In fact, Herzl re-mained deeply disdainful of the East Euro-pean Zionists throughout his career(Goldstein 1986).

Orientalization in Israel also focused onMiddle Eastern educational practice prior toimmigration. It was portrayed as religiousrather than intellectual, with children beingtaught by rote in large, uncontrolled classes,by teachers “whose only method of teachingis the whip” (Organization for Youth Immi-gration in Morocco and Algeria, quoted inSegev 1986:110). These descriptions paral-lel Enlightenment descriptions of the Euro-pean heder, as described by Aschheim(1982):

This institution, above all others, was heldto be at the root of the “distortions” of East-ern Jewry [i.e., Ostjuden]. Dark, dank, over-crowded, chaotic, as indeed it was, it washere that the seeds of spiritual and physicaldegeneration were sown. (P. 19)

Other important parallels exist as well.Just as the peddler—dark, shifty-eyed, anddishonest—was the symbol of the degener-ate Ostjude (Aschheim 1982; Avineri 1981;

Katz 1973), so was the peddler regularly in-voked to demonstrate the backwardness ofMizrahi immigrants. In 1951, a Jewish Is-raeli journalist wrote of recent immigrantsfrom Morocco: “They all say that in Africathey were ‘merchants.’ What they reallymean is they were peddlers. And they allwant to settle in the city [as opposed to pe-ripheral areas]. What can be done withthem? How are they to be absorbed?” (Segev1986:160). The status of women, the extentof rabbinical authority, and early marriagewere also cited as problems with both theOstjuden and the Mizrahim. Finally, Israelischolarly and media publications constantlyevoked the large families of the Mizrahim(Ginor 1979; Kraus and Hodge 1990;Smooha and Kraus 1985;) as a primarysource of ethnic disadvantage in Israel, de-spite the statistical weakness of this effect(Kraus and Hodge 1990).

A Plausible Story

But while the quick conversion of yester-day’s easterners into today’s westerners mayhelp to classify the formation of ethnic in-equality in Israel as a process of social clo-sure, it cannot explain why Israel’s gate-keepers would have used the orientalist dis-course, specifically, to draw lines aroundgroups of arriving immigrants. The historyof stigma, by connecting social closure toprocesses of self-classification and their con-sequences, explains this choice and adds anew dimension to the complicated story ofethnic formation and exclusion in Israel. Thecare with which Ashkenazi groups, fromMaskilim to Zionists, sought to balance theireastern heritages with their western futures,and the ferocity with which they often foughteach other over this balance, shows howtricky their project was and how easily itcould get out of control.

A passage from Segev’s (1986) The FirstIsraelis demonstrates how high the stakeswere. On the first anniversary of Israeli in-dependence, a parade was planned. Thecrowd was huge and unruly, and at somepoint a scuffle broke out.

Among the scufflers were some who heldtickets to the guest podium—governmentMinisters, Members of the Zionist Execu-tive, Members of the Knesset and foreign


diplomats. A judge was seen to climb over abarrier, a foreign ambassador leapt overbenches. By the time they all reached theplatform, it was already filled. A senior of-ficer was seated in the place of anAmbassador’s wife and refused to vacate it.A Consul took the place of a Minister’swife. The Minister’s Director General triedto help her, but the Consul was stronger thanhe. Everybody was shouting and cursing andwaving their invitations. . . .

The following day Maariv’s chief editor,Azriel Karlebach, wrote that people weptlike children with bitter disappointment,fury and shame “about the disgrace, aboutthe impression abroad, about the disordersand failure, the demonstration of our inca-pacity on the day of our strength.” (Segev1986:266)

The incident, as described by Segev, can beseen as one of the first opportunities for thepublic self-presentation of Israel to the Eu-ropean “normals” since the establishment ofthe state. Most of the honored guests wouldhave been veteran Ashkenazim, many ofwhom had been recently orientalized by thevery people they were trying to impress.That lack of decorum—a central tenet ofJewish orientalization since the German En-lightenment—made the moment a failure,and the level of shame that resulted from thisfailure demonstrates again how important itwas to veteran elites to be seen as western inthe eyes of the now physically distant West-ern Europeans.

For these uncertain Israelis, the Jews fromArab countries, whatever contact with thewest they might previously have had, werefrighteningly Oriental. They were dark, theyhad large families, their language had theguttural characteristics that GermanMaskilim had carefully removed from theHebrew language, and they adhered to aform of religious practice that in Europe wasone of the stronger and more meaningfulmarkers of pre-westernization lifestyles.This left the state’s elite torn between twocherished identity projects. On the one hand,they were deeply invested in westernization,and the massive influx of Jews from the Le-vant, as they saw it, could drag Jewish soci-ety back to its not-at-all-distant Orientalstate. On the other hand, they were deeplycommitted to the free immigration of all

Jews, and were hoping to make the new Ori-entals the state’s Jewish laborers, and thuscould not solve the westernization problemby restricting immigration from the MiddleEast. Struggling to find a way to incorporatethe new immigrants without losing groundon the westernization project, the elite re-solved the dilemma by integrating the mostoriental of the Middle Easterners into themargins of Israeli society, where their im-pact on the emerging culture and societywould be minimal. Very quickly, new immi-grants from Eastern Europe would then havebuilt upon the initial lines of closure, tostrengthen their advantaged position in thecompetition for resources.

For their part, Jews from the Middle East,at least the educated among them, were alsodeeply invested in westernization and wereintent on underscoring their social distancefrom Israel’s Arab neighbors. To constructthem as Oriental, the Ostjuden used the samesymbols that the Middle Eastern elite hadthemselves adopted, symbols which reso-nated for them. And, even if they did com-plain about uneven distribution of re-sources—and they did (Herzog 1985)—toorganize along ethnic lines would highlighttheir ethnic distinctiveness from Ashkena-zim and underscore their cultural similarityto Arabs. For a group that had spent almosta century distancing from Arabs, this wouldbe unacceptable.

CONCLUSIONS

Since the formation of the Jewish state andsociety in Israel and the arrival of the firstimmigrants from the Arab world, the ques-tion of whether Ashkenazim discriminatedagainst Mizrahim has been a central one inIsraeli politics and academics. Reversalssuch as the one discussed here, in which agroup of Jews recently tagged as easternsuddenly tagged another group as eastern, aswell as evidence that the Mizrahi/Ashkenazidistinction itself was an Israeli creation,have been for many evidence of discrimina-tion. In this paper, I have tried to push theorientalism/exclusion connection further byasking why gatekeepers would categorizeand discriminate along the lines of theorientalist discourse specifically, when otheroptions were available.


A long history of orientalism in the Jew-ish world, I argued, contextualizes Israelidynamics and explains the abiding attach-ment to orientalism as a framework for clas-sifying people. Within this history, the sud-den transformation of East European Jewsfrom easterners into westerners appears notas a reversal but as an extension. Enlighten-ment-era acceptance of an oriental stigmamade the orientalist discourse the primaryframework for self-classification amongJews in Western Europe. Self-classificationthen led to categorization of other groups ofJews, who themselves accepted the stigma.But this chain of orientalizations did not au-tomatically result in social closure. To man-age the discomfort caused by the existenceof other, apparently less western, Jewishpopulations, westernizing Jews had alwaysreacted with both exclusion and moves towesternize the oriental. In the history re-viewed here, it was when one group’s west-ernization project was threatened by thephysical presence of a putatively less west-ern group that the balance shifted and the re-lationship was characterized primarily byexclusion.

Ironically, this casts the extensive trans-formation in Israel’s group boundaries as anexample of stability in ethnic formations. Ihave argued, however, that this is one waythat the history of Jewish ethnic formationis relevant to contemporary literature. Ele-ments of both fluidity and stability are ob-served by most scholars, but in general, thenew emphasis on fluidity stems from twoobservations. First, although new formationsare always related to old formations, the pre-cise nature of the new formations is unpre-dictable, because they emerge from the in-teraction of numerous pressures from above(e.g., the state) and below (e.g., social move-ments) (see Omi and Winant 1986). Second,once a semiotic reference structure is foundto effectively establish distinctions, it islikely to be used for a number of unrelatedpurposes. In the Jewish case, I argue, stabil-ity and fluidity are again both present. How-ever the always-unfinished westernizationproject, and its accomplishment through thedefinition of ethnic others, pushed ethnicityin consistent directions across time, space,and political formations. It is of more thanpassing interest that this stability emerges

when the historical window is widened; fo-cusing on specific sites of orientalization, asdoes most Israeli scholarship, or on one in-tergroup relationship, as does new work onJewish history, are both relatively morelikely to produce a picture of fluidity.

More specifically, three observations canbe made from the longer history told here.First, despite the scale of change in Israel,the new group boundaries that emerged areentirely consistent with those that shapedJewish identity and communal relations formore than a century before the mass immi-gration, and long before the development ofZionist ideology. Second, not only the east/west contrast, but also its uses, were consis-tent as new group boundaries became thebasis for exclusion or for missionary out-reach. Finally, and most important, there is agood theoretical reason for the consistencyin characteristics used to establish the sameeast/west contrasts in different situations. Itis not, as much discourse analysis would im-ply, because people apply previously estab-lished semiotic structures to new sites as theneed arises, but because those “stigma sym-bols” that had been used to cast Jews asbackward—religiousness, traditional dress,street size, peddlers, and so on—resonatedwith Jewish selves in deep, even uncon-scious ways. The presence of stigma is al-ways frightening and always generates theimpulse to distance oneself; Goffman (1963)himself notes that normals fear stigma byproxy. But for those who were once stigma-tized, the discomfort is stronger and morethreatening. That Jews had established par-ticularly delicate projects—in which theywanted not to eliminate the eastern butrather retain it in neutralized or marginalizedform, and in which they moved the western-ization project to the geographical MiddleEast—only intensified the dynamic further.

In positing the management of a spoiledidentity as the fundamental dynamic behindgroup formation and exclusion in the Jewishcase, I cast Jews as both in control of andcontrolled by what has been identified as oneof the central justification systems for in-equality worldwide. It is largely acceptedamong sociologists that the powerful arethemselves constrained by the tools they useto dominate others. In the case I have exam-ined, Jewish orientalizers occupied a com-


plex position vis a vis orientalism because itwas out of their own experience of beingclassified that the move to classify othersarose. Dominating others, in other words,was an integral part of, and a direct reactionto, the experience of being dominated.

I began this paper by first arguing that Icould “unpack,” in the Jewish case, the rela-tionship between the elaboration of groupdifference, on one hand, and moves to trans-late that difference into social inequality, onthe other. I suggested several alternate waysof articulating what is essentially the samecategorization/exclusion relationship; I re-produce two here. First, categorization andexclusion were connected because bothemerged from the same need to present theself as western to critical others. Here,changing that need23 should theoreticallyeliminate both the salience of an east/westdichotomy in forming group boundaries andthe use of east/west lines as an axis of ex-clusion.24 Building on Said (1978), Roediger(1991), and the Israeli case itself, I sug-gested that, more generally, those instancesof categorization that are driven by the iden-tity concerns of the powerful are usefullygrouped together analytically because both

the depth of majority commitment to thespecific racial/ethnic boundaries they im-pose, and the relationship between categori-zation and exclusion, will follow similar pat-terns.

Second, I argued that it was not the fact ofgroup boundaries becoming salient that ex-plained exclusion, but the content of theidentities around which these boundarieswere formed. Jews wanted to be western,and they wanted Western European Chris-tians to see them as western. That they ac-complished these two goals in part by com-paring themselves to other groups of Jewsled to ethnic groupings, and even rankings,but not necessarily to concerted moves toexclude. On the contrary, the need to be seenas western also led to investment in western-izing, and incorporating, these Jewish others.Exclusion became the main reaction whenthe possibility of representing the self aswestern appeared threatened. The physicallocation of Israel in the Middle East, and thesize of the indigenous Middle Eastern popu-lation (Jewish and non-Jewish), presentedsuch a threat.

Future Research

Among the many issues that future researchon Jewish orientalism could address, two areof particular interest. Orientalization wasalso a method for the exclusion of non-Jew-ish Arabs (Alcalay 1993; Eyal 1996; Lavie1992; Shohat 1988), and clearly, elaboratingthe historical antecedents of that relationshipis important. From the perspective of thispaper, one dynamic stands out. Historically,orientalized relationships between Jewishcommunities appear to have involved somebalance between exclusion and proselytiza-tion, while the pre-immigration orientaliza-tion of Arab non-Jews appears to have beencharacterized by exclusion alone. This isconsistent with Goffman’s (1963) analysis;it would have been the German and FrenchJews’ identification with Ostjuden andMizrahim, be that identification externally-or internally-imposed, that drove the compli-cated dynamics I have discussed here. Thisdistinction between the stigmatized’s reac-tion to an internal and external other thenmay make sense of a detail that has oftenbeen noted: Israel has a three-tiered orien-

23 There are currently moves in Israel toreconceptualize Israel as part of the Middle East,rather than a western country. Some are drivenby second-generation Middle Eastern Jews (e.g.,the intellectual group Keshet), others by secularAshkenazim. At the same time, recent commentsby Tommy Lapid suggest a far stronger move toreassert Israel’s non-Middle-Easternness. Lapidis the head of the self-consciously secular andmiddle- to upper-middle-class political party,Shinui, which was highly successful in the recentIsraeli elections. It is of note that Lapid is in fa-vor of the Oslo accords. From a December, 2002article in the left-leaning newspaper Ha’aretz:“We are in a corrupt, lazy, backward MiddleEastern environment. . . . What keeps us abovewater is our cultural difference. The fact that weare a forward outpost of Western civilization. Ifour Westernism erodes, we won’t have a chance.If we let the Eastern European ghetto and theNorth African ghetto take over, we will havenothing to float on” (Ari Shavit, www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=243072).

24 Although once the mass immigration hadsettled into the new ethnic hierarchy, material in-terests in its preservation probably joined thecontinuing concern with westernization.


talization-driven hierarchy, in whichMizrahim emerge as the transformable limi-nal group between western Ashkenazim andunredeemably oriental Arabs. To the extentthat relations with non-Jewish Arabs con-tinue to be driven by Jewish reaction to anoriental stigma, the history discussed heremay help illuminate some aspects of the cur-rent Arab/Israeli conflict. More generally,Israel is a central player in the current world-wide polarization of Moslem and westernworlds, and it is worth asking if this role re-sults from a continuing complex relationshipto orientalism.

Finally, the specific argument I makeabout social closure among Jews—that,through the first years of statehood, exclu-sion occurred when westernizing groups ex-perienced a serous threat to their own newlyminted statuses as western—can be furtherexamined with primary research. Because Ihave relied on secondary sources, it was ableto analyze group relations only along the

Ahad Ha’am (orig. Asher Ginsberg) (1856–1927).Russian, Jewish. In contrast to Herzl’s political Zi-onism, Ahad Ha’am believed that, in the project ofregenerating the Jewish people, spiritual rebirthshould come before the political formation of a Jew-ish state. However, he did see Israel as the appro-priate place for a renaissance of Jewish culture, andthus as the center and model for Jewish life in theDiaspora.

Ben Gurion, David (orig. David Gruen) (1886–1973). Polish, Jewish. First Prime Minister of Isra-el, oversaw the establishment of the state. Attendedcollege in Istanbul, Turkey, but did not finish.

Berr, Berr Isaac (1744–1828). French, Jewish.Well-to-do merchant and banker from Nancy. Oneof the leaders in the Jewish movement to obtainemancipation in France.

Bigart, Jacques. French, Jewish. Secretary of theAlliance Israelite Universelle from 1892 until hisdeath in 1934. Eradication of child marriages was acentral goal of the AIS in the early twentieth century.

Eban, Abba (orig. Aubrey Solomon) (1915–2002).British, Jewish. Studied Oriental languages andclassics and lectured at the University of Cam-bridge, served as an aide to the British minister of

largest, generally national, axes. Clearly,however, adopting the east/west dichotomywould have produced or assigned new mean-ing to numerous internal distinctions, bothamong Jewish communities and betweenJews and non-Jews. This would have pro-duced a complex tree of nested orientalizedrelationships. These relationships then pro-vide a larger pool of data with which re-searchers can examine the changing balancebetween exclusion and proselytization , aswell as between fluidity and stability in theuse of the orientalist discourse to make spe-cific ethnic contrasts.

Aziza Khazzoom is Assistant Professor of Soci-ology at UCLA. Her doctoral work traced theformation of ethnic inequality among Jewish menin Israel, combining quantitative and qualitativemethods. Her current work examines how immi-gration and changes in ethnic classificationshaped life goals among educated Iraqi and Pol-ish Jewish women who immigrated to Israel dur-ing the same time period.

APPENDIX A

Historical Figures Quoted in the Text

state in Cairo in 1941. Served as Israel’s represen-tative to the United Nations and ambassador to theUnited States, minister of education and culture,president of the Weizmann Institute of Science dep-uty, prime minister, and foreign minister.

Gans, Eduard (1798–1839). German, Jewish. Dis-ciple of Hegel. Co-founded the Society for JewishCulture and Science with Leopold Zunz (see below)and Moses Moser. Converted to Christianity in 1825to avoid glass ceiling at University of Berlin. Pro-moted to Professor of Law a year later.

Graetz, Heinrich (1817–1891). Prussian-born, Jew-ish. Famous for his 11-volume History of the Jew-ish People (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Soci-ety of America, 1941–1956, c1891–1898). Taughtat the conservative Breslau seminary, believed that“Jewish theology should attempt to moderate be-tween Orthodox literalism and Reform liberalism(“Graetz, Heinrich,” Encyclopedia Britannica, re-trieved July 26, 2003 <www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=38348>).

Herzl, Theodor (1860–1904). Hungarian (moved toVienna with his family at age 18), Jewish. Founderof “political Zionism,” first president of the world

(Continued on next page)


Zionist organization. Organized first world ZionistCongress in Basel, Switzerland (in 1897). “Regard-ed assimilation as most desirable [direction for theJewish people] but, in view of anti-Semitism, im-possible to realize. Thus, he argued, if Jews wereforced by external pressure to form a nation, theycould lead a normal existence only through concen-tration in one territory (Encyclopedia Britannica).”

Kattan, Naim (1928– ). Iraqi, Jewish. Involved inthe communist movement in Baghdad. Left Bagh-dad in 1947, studied literature at the Sorbonne, im-migrated to Canada in 1954. Currently professor atUniversity of Quebec in Montreal, department ofliterary studies. The excerpt is from his book Fare-well Babylon Taplinger Publishing, NY, NY [1976]1980.

Lessing, Theodor (1872–1933). German-Jewishphilospher. Initially converted to Lutheranism, thenlater became a Zionist.

Levy, Maïr (1869–?). Moroccan, Jewish. Allianceofficial from 1887. Became director of Tripoli Alli-ance in 1900.

Moicher Sforim, Mendel (pen name of Shalom Ja-cob Abramowitsch, 1835–1917). Russian, Jewish.Known as the creator of modern literary Yiddish,the literary tradition that sought to inspire East Eu-ropean Jews to accept the “Haskalah,” or JewishEnlightenment, by poking fun at their traditionalways (or, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, hisstories are “written with lively humour and gentlesatire” [“Mendele Moykher Sforim” EncyclopeadiaBritannica www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=53270. Accessed July 26, 2003]). Began publishingunder this pseudonym in 1897. First Yiddish storypublished in 1864.

Naquet. French, Jewish. Appears to have been amember of Parliament. Quote is from the late 1800s.

Nordau, Max (orig. Max Simon Südfeld) (1849–1923). Hungarian, Jewish. “Physician, writer, andearly Zionist who was instrumental in establishingrecognition of Palestine as a potential Jewish home-land to be gained by colonization” (“Nordau, Max”Encyclopaedia Britannica www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=57504. Accessed July 26, 2003). Sup-porter of Herzl.

Rabinowich, Osip (1817–1869). Russian (Ukranian)Jewish. Educated in both traditional Judaism andsecular studies, he decided not to study law becauselaw careers were generally closed to Jews at thetime, and became a notary instead. Moved to Odes-sa in 1845, and after establishing himself profes-sionally began to publish articles and literature, aswell as the Russian-language Jewish newspaperRazsvet.

Rathenau, Walter (1867–1922 [assasinated]). Ger-man, Jewish. Statesman, industrialist, organizedGerman economy after World War I and foundedthe middle-class German Democratic party.

Singer, Isaac Bishevas (1904–1991). Polish-born,Jewish. Yiddish writer, became a United States citi-zen. Was the 1978 recipient of the Nobel Prize forLiterature.

Singer, Israel Joshua (1893–1944). Polish-born,Jewish. Yiddish writer, older brother of Isaac Bish-evas Singer. Began writing tales of Hassidic life in1915, immigrated to United States in 1933.

Slouschz, Nahum (1872–1966). French, Jewish.Jewish historian and writer of Travels in North Af-rica (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society ofAmerica [1927] 1944), the result of a series of ex-cursions into North Africa, from 1906 to 1916, insearch of Jewish communities. The Jewish Week,(January 26, 2001) asserts that Slouschz originallytraveled to Tunis in 1891, at Herzl’s request, to finda possible Jewish homeland; the 1906 excursion wasfunded by the Alliance and the Academie des BellesLettres of Paris.

Voltaire (pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet)(1694–1778). French, non-Jewish. Satiric writer,Enlightenment thinker. In addition to the standardEnlightenment ideals, such as the value of reasonand objective science, he was also a proponent ofDeism.

von Dohm, Christian Wilhelm (1751–1820). Ger-man, non-Jewish, Enlightenment thinker. In 1781 hewrote “On the Civil Improvement of the Jews,”pleading for Jewish emancipation. A friend ofMoses Mendelsohn.

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832). Ger-man, non-Jewish. Romantic playwright, poet, nov-elist, natural philosopher.

Zunz, Leopold (Heb. Yom-Tob Lippmann) (1794–1886). German, Jewish. Historian of Jewish litera-ture, co-founder of “Wissenschaft des Judentums”(“Science of Judaism”), which “stressed the analy-sis of Jewish literature and culture with the tools ofmodern scholarship” (“Zunz, Leopold,” Encyclo-paedia Britannica <www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=80601>).” Wrote a biography of Rashi, the me-dieval biblical commentator.

Zvi, Shabbatai (1626–1676). Born in Ottoman Em-pire, Jewish. Known as the only false messiah togain a strong following. His following extendedwell into Western Europe and North Africa, and re-mained large long after his death. He converted toIslam, probably under pressure, in 1666.

(Appendix A continued from previous page)


REFERENCES

Alcalay, Amiel. 1993. After Jews and Arabs: Re-making Levantine Culture. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.

Amit, Karin. 2001. “The Binary Ethnic Classifi-cation and the Economic Assimilation of Firstand Second Generation Immigrants in the Is-raeli Labor Market” (in Hebrew). Ph.D. disser-tation, Department of Sociology and Anthro-pology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communi-ties. London, England: Verso.

Anidjar, Gil. 1996. “Jewish Mysticism Alterableand Unalterable: On Orienting Kabbalah Stud-ies and ‘Zohar of Christian Spain.’” JewishSocial Studies 3(1):89–157.

Aschheim, Steven E. 1982. Brothers and Strang-ers: The East European Jew in Germany andGerman Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923.Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Avineri, Shlomo. 1981. The Making of ModernZionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jew-ish State. New York: Basic Books.

Bakic-Hayden, Milica. 1995. “Nesting Oriental-isms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia.”Slavic Review 54:917–31.

Barzilay, Eisenstein. 1955. The Enlightenmentand the Jews: A Study in the Haskalah andNationalism. PhD. dissertation, Political Sci-ence Department, Columbia University, NewYork.

Bayme, Steven. 1981. “Conflicting Jewish Re-sponses to Modernity.” Pp. 177–98 in GreatSchisms in Jewish History, edited by R. Jospeand S.M. Wagner. New York: Ktav Publish-ing House.

Becker, Howard S. 1998. Tricks of the Trade.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Oriental-ism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berkowitz, Michael. 1997. Western Jewry andthe Zionist Project, 1914–1933. Cambridge,England: Cambridge University Press.

Bernstein, Deborah and Shlomo Swirski. 1982.“The Rapid Economic Development of Israeland the Emergence of the Ethnic Division ofLabour.” British Journal of Sociology 33(1):64–85

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture.New York: Routledge.

Biale, David. 2001. “Shabbtai Zvi and the Seduc-tions of Jewish Orientalism.” Jerusalem Stud-ies in Jewish Thought 17(2) (English sect.):85–110.

Blauner, Robert. 1972. Racial Oppression inAmerica. New York: Harper and Row.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A SocialCritique of the Judgement of Taste. London,England: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu, Pierre and A. Darbel (with D.Schnapper). 1991. The Love of Art: EuropeanArt Museums and Their Public. Cambridge,England: Polity.

Boyarin, Daniel. 1997. Unheroic Conduct: TheRise of Heterosexuality and the Invention ofthe Jewish Man. Berkeley and Los Angeles,CA, and London, England: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Brenner, Michael. 1996. The Renaissance of Jew-ish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press.

Brubaker, Rogers. 1994. “Rethinking Nation-hood.” Contention 4:3–14.

———. 2001. “The Return of Assimiliation?Changing Perspectives on Immigration and ItsSequels in France, Germany, and the UnitedStates.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24:531–48.

Butler, Judith. [1990] 1999. Gender Trouble. Re-print, New York: Routledge.

Cordova, Abraham. N.d. “Hasolel.” Departmentof Sociology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv,Israel. Unpublished manuscript.

Cuddihy, John Murray. 1974. The Ordeal of Ci-vility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jew-ish Struggle with Modernity. New York: BasicBooks.

Cutler, Alan Harris and Helen Elmquist Cutler.1986. The Jew as an Ally of the Muslim: Medi-eval Roots of Anti-Semitism. Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press.

Darwish, Tikva. 1982. “Economics of Minorities:A Case-Study of the Jewish Minority in Iraq,on the Eve of Their Immigration to Israel.”Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Economics,Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.

———. 1985a. “Changes in the EmploymentStructure of Iraqi Jewish Immigrants to Israel.”International Migration 23:461–72.

———. 1985b. “The Economic Structure of theJewish Minority in Iraq vis-à-vis the KuznetsModel.” Jewish Social Studies 47:255–66.

———. 1987. “The Jewish Minority in Iraq: AComparative Study of Economic Structure.”Jewish Social 49:175–80.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. “Cultural Capital andSchool Success: The Impact of Status CultureParticipation on the Grates of US High SchoolStudents.” American Sociological Review 47:189–201.

Eisenstadt, S. N. 1967. Israeli Society. London,England: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 1993. Ethnicity andNationalism. London, England: Pluto.

Espiritu, Yen Le. 1992. Asian American Pan-ethnicity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UniversityPress.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1981. “The Emergence of aNative Hebrew Culture in Palestine: 1882–1948.” Studies in Zionism 4 (October):167–84.

Eyal, Gil. 1996. “The Discursive Origins of Is-


raeli Separatism: The Case of the Arab Vil-lage.” Theory and Society 25:389–429.

Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth.New York: Grove Press.

———. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans-lated by C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove.

Fishman, David E. 1995. Russia’s First ModernJews: The Jews of Shklov. New York: NewYork University Press.

Fredrickson, George. 1981. White Supremacy: AComparative Study in American and South Af-rican History. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Gal, Susan. 1991. “Bartòk’s Funeral: Represen-tations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rheto-ric.” American Ethnologist 18:440–58.

Gilman, Sander L. 1986. Jewish Self Hatred:Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of theJews. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Univer-sity Press.

Ginor, Fanny. 1979. Socio-Economic Disparitiesin Israel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-sity Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on theManagement of Spoiled Identity. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Goldberg, Harvey E., ed. 1996a. Sephardi andMiddle Eastern Jewries: History and Culturein the Modern Era. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

———. 1996b. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–55 inSephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: Historyand Culture in the Modern Era, edited by H.E.Goldberg. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer-sity Press.

Goldscheider, Calvin, and Alan S. Zuckerman.1984. The Transformation of the Jews. Chi-cago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Goldstein, Yossi. 1986. “Herzl and the RussianZionists: The Unavoidable Crisis?” Pp. 208–26 in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 2.,edited by P.Y. Medding. Bloomington, IN: In-diana University Press.

Greenberg, Louis. 1944. The Jews in Russia: TheStruggle for Emancipation. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

Grusky, David B., ed. 2001. Social Stratification:Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Per-spective. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Haddad, Heskel. 1984. Jews of Arab and IslamicCountries: History, Problems, and Solutions.New York: Shengold.

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. 1984. The Zionist Idea: AHistorical Analysis and Read. New York:Temple Books.

Herzog, Hanna. 1985. “Ethnicity as a NegotiatedIssue in the Israeli Political Order: The ‘Eth-nic Lists’ to the Delegates’ Assembly and theKnesset (1920–1977).” Pp. 159–78 in Studiesin Israeli Ethnicity: After the Ingathering, ed-ited by A. Weingrod. New York: Gordon and

Breach Science Publishers.Heschel, Susannah. 1999. “Revolt of the Colo-

nized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft desJudentums as a Challenge to Christian Hege-mony in the Academy.” New German CritiqueIssue 77:61–85

Hess, Jonathan M. 2000. “Johann David Michae-lis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalismand the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism inEighteenth-Century Germany.” Jewish SocialStudies 6(2):56–101.

Ilam, Yigal. 1998. “Deconstruction and Recon-struction” (in Hebrew). Ha’aretz Book Review,November 11, p. 4.

Jenkins, Richard. 1994. “Rethinking Ethnicity:Identity, Categorization, and Power.” Ethnicand Racial Studies 17:197–223.

Kastein, Josef. 1930. Sabbatai Zewi, der Messiasvon Ismir (The messiah of Ismir, SabbataiZevi). Berlin, Germany: E. Rowohlt.

Katz, Jacob. 1973. Out of the Ghetto: The SocialBackground of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

———. 1986. “Orthodoxy in Historical Perspec-tive.” Pp. 3-17 in Studies in ContemporaryJewry, vol. 2, edited by P. Y. Medding.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Kazzaz, Nissim. 1991. The Jews of Iraq in the20th Century (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, Israel:Ben Zvi Institute.

———. 2002. The End of a Diaspora: The Jewsof Iraq after the Mass Immigragtion (1951–2000) (in Hebrew). Or Yehuda, Israel:Babylonian Heritage Institute,

Khazzoom, Aziza. 1998. “The Formation of Eth-nic Inequality among Jews in Israel.” Ph.D.dissertation. Department of Sociology, Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, CA.

Kibria, Nazli. 1998. “The Contested Meanings of‘Asian American’: Racial Dilemmas in theContemporary US.” Ethnic and Racial Studies21:939–58.

Kimmerling, Baruch. 1999. “Elections as aBattleground over Collective Identity.” Pp.27–44 in Elections in Israel: 1966, edited byA. Arian and M. Shamir. Albany, NY: StateUniversity of New York Press.

Kramer, Gudrun. 1989. The Jews in ModernEgypt, 1914–1952. Seattle, WA: University ofWashington Press.

Kramer, Martin, ed. 1999. The Jewish Discoveryof Islam. Tel Aviv, Israel: Tel Aviv University,Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern andAfrican Studies.

Kraus, Vered and Robert W. Hodge. 1990. Prom-ises in the Promised Land. New York: Green-wood.

Laskier, Michael M. 1983. The Alliance IsraÈliteUniverselle and the Jewish Communities ofMorocco: 1862–1962. Albany, NY: State Uni-


versity of New York Press.Lavie, Smadar. 1992. “Blow-Ups in the

Borderzones: Third World Israeli Authors’Gropings for Home.” New Formations 18(winter):84–106.

Levy, Yagil. 1997. Trial and Error: Israel’sRoute from War to De-Escalation. Albany,NY: State University of New York Press.

Lewin-Epstein, Noah and Moshe Semyonov.2000. “Migration, Ethnicity, and Inequality:Homeownership in Israel.” Social Problems47:425–44.

Lichten, Joseph. 1986. “Notes on the Assimila-tion and Acculturation of Jews in Poland, 1863-1943.” Pp. 106–29 in The Jews in Poland, ed-ited by C. Abramsky, M. Jachimczyk, and A.Polonsky. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.

Lissak, Moshe. 1965. “Patterns of Change in Ide-ology and Class Structure in Israel.” JewishJournal of Sociology 7(1):46–63.

Lopez, David and Yen Le Espritu. 1990. “Pan-ethnicity in the United States: A TheoreticalFramework.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13:198–224.

Marrus, Michael R. 1971. The Politics of Assimi-lation: The French Jewish Community at theTime of the Dreyfus Affair. Oxford, England:Oxford University Press.

Meir, Esther. 1993. Zionism and the Jews in Iraq,1941–1950 (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv, Israel: AmOved.

Meir, Yosef. 1989. Social-Cultural Developmentof the Iraqi Jews. Naharaim, Israel: Center forthe Expansion of the Culture of Iraqi Jews.

Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and theColonized. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. 1983. The Jews of East Cen-tral Europe between the World Wars.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

———. 1986. “Interwar Poland: Good for theJews or Bad for the Jews?” Pp. 130–39 in TheJews in Poland, edited by C. Abramsky, M.Jachimczyk, and A. Polonsky. Oxford, En-gland: Basil Blackwell.

———. 1989. “Introduction: The Jews of Polandbetween the Two World Wars—Myth and Re-ality.” Pp. 1–8 in The Jews of Poland betweenTwo World Wars, edited by I. Gutman, E.Mendelsohn, J. Reinharz, and C. Shmeruk.Hanover, NH: University Press of New En-gland.

Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. and Jehuda Reinharz.1980. The Jew in the Modern World: A Docu-mentary History. New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press.

Miron, Dan. 1973. A Traveler Disguised: A Studyin the Rise of Modern Jewish Fiction in theNineteenth Century. New York: SchockenBooks.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Colonising Egypt. Ber-keley, CA: University of California Press.

Nahon, Yaacov. 1987. Patterns of EducationalExpansion and the Structure of OccupationalOpportunities: The Ethnic Dimension. Jerusa-lem, Israel: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

Ogbu, John. 1987. “Variability in MinoritySchool Performance: A Problem in Search ofan Explanation.” Anthropology and EducationQuarterly 18:312–34.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. [1986] 1994.Racial Formation in the United States. Re-print, New York: Routledge.

Parkin, Frank. 1979. Marxism and Class Theory:A Bourgeois Critique. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Penslar, Derek. 1991. Zionism and Technocracy.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Piterberg, Gabriel. 1996. “Domestic Orientalism:The Representation of ‘Oriental’ Jews in Zi-onist/Israeli Historiography.” British Journalof Middle Eastern Studies 23:12545.

Portes, Alejandro, and Dag MacLeod. 1996.“What Shall I Call Myself? Hispanic IdentityFormation in the Second Generation” Ethnicand Racial Studies 19:523–47.

Raisin, Jacob S. 1913. The Haskalah Movementin Russia. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publica-tion Society.

Raz-Krakotzkin, Amon. 1998. “Orientalism,Jewish Studies, and Israeli Society: SomeNotes” (in Hebrew). Jama’a 3:34–61.

———. 2002. “A National Colonial Theology—Religion, Orientalism, and the Construction ofthe Secular in Zionist Discourse” (in German).Tel Aviver Jahrbuch ruer Deutsche Geschichte31:312–26.

Rejwan, Nissim. 1985. The Jews of Iraq. Boul-der, CO: Westview.

Ridgeway, Celia, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, KathyJ. Kuipers, and Dawn T. Robinson. 1998. “Re-sources and Interaction in the Development ofStatus Beliefs.” American Sociological Review63:331–50.

Rischin, Moses. 1962. The Promised City: NewYork’s Jews 1870–1914. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Rodrigue, Aron. 1993. Images of Sephardi andEastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers ofthe Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1860–1939.Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of White-ness: Race and the Making of the AmericanWorking Class. London, England and NewYork: Verso.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York:Vintage.

———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. NewYork: Vintage.

Schroeter, Daniel J. 1988. Merchants ofEssaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism inSouthwestern Morocco, 1844–1886. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.


Schroeter, Daniel J. and Joseph Chetrit. 1996.“The Transformation of the Jewish Commu-nity of Essaouira (Mogador) in the Nineteenthand Twentieth Centuries.” Pp. 99–116 inSephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: Historyand Culture in the Modern Era, edited by H.E.Goldberg. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer-sity Press.

Segev, Tom. 1986. The First Israelis. New York:Free Press.

Selzer, Michael. 1967. The Aryanization of theJewish State. New York: Black Star.

Shafir, Gershon. 1989. Land, Labor, and the Ori-gins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Shalev, Michael. 1992. Labou and the PoliticalEconomy in Israel. Oxford, England and NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Shavit, Yossi. 1990. “Arab and Jewish Minori-ties in Israeli Education.” American Sociologi-cal Review 55:115–26.

Shenhav, Yehouda. 1999. “The Jews of Iraq, Zi-onist Ideology, and the Property of the Pales-tinian Refugees of 1948: An Anomaly of Ac-counting.” International Journal of MiddleEast Studies 31:605–30.

———. 2002a “Ethnicity and National Memory:The World Organization of Jews from ArabCountries (WOJAC) in the Context of the Pal-estinian National Struggle.” British Journal ofMiddle Eastern Studies 29:27–56.

———. 2002b. “The Phenomenology of Colo-nialism and the Politics of ‘Difference’: Euro-pean Zionist Emissaries and Arab-Jews in Co-lonial Abadan.” Social Identities 8:521–44.

Shiblak, Abbas. 1986. The Lure of Zion: TheCase of the Iraqi Jews. London, England: AlSaqi Press.

Shimoni, Gideon. 1995. The Zionist Ideology.Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.

Shohat, Ella. 1988. “Sephardim in Israel: Zion-ism from the Point of View of Its Jewish Vic-tims.” Social Text 7:1–36.

———. 1989. Israeli Cinema: East/West and thePolitics of Representation. Austin, TX: Uni-versity of Texas Press.

Smooha, Sammy. 1978. Israel: Pluralism andConflict. Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-nia Press.

Smooha, Sammy and Vered Kraus. 1985. “Eth-nicity as a Factor in Status Attainment in Is-rael.” Pp. 151–75 in Research in Social Strati-fication and Mobility, vol. 4, edited by R.V.Robinson. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the SubalternSpeak?” Pp. 271–313 in Marxism and the In-terpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson andL. Grossberg. London, England: Macmillan.

Stillman, Norman. 1991. The Jews of Arab Landsin Modern Times. Philadelphi, PA: Jewish

Publication Society of America.———. 1995. Sephardi Religious Responses to

Modernity. Luxembourg, Luxembourg:Harwood Academic Publishers.

Stoler, Ann. 1992. “Sexual Affronts and RacialFrontiers: National Identity, ‘Mixed Bloods,’and the Cultural Genealogies of Europeans inColonial Southeast Asia.” Comparative Stud-ies in Society and History 34:514–51.

Swirski, Shlomo. 1989. Israel: The Oriental Ma-jority. London, England: Zed Books.

Tefft, Stanton K. 1999. “Perspectives on Pan-ethnogenesis: The Case of the Montagnards.”Sociological Spectrum 19:387-400.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1987. The Ethnic Phe-nomenon. New York: Praeger.

Waldinger, Roger. N.d. “The Sociology of Im-migration, Second Thoughts and Reconsidera-tions.” Department of Sociology, University ofCalifornia–Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.Unpublished manuscript.

Weber, Max. [1921/1922] 1978. Economy andSociety. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Yaish, Meir. 1998 “Opportunities, Little Change.Class Mobility in Israeli Society: 1974–1991.”Ph.D. dissertation, Nuffield College, Oxford,England.

Yehuda, Zvi. 1996. “Iraqi Jewry and CulturalChange in the Educational Activity of the Alli-ance IsraÈlite Universelle.” Pp. 134–45 inSephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: Historyand Culture in the Modern Era, edited by H.E.Goldberg Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress.

Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies. NewYork: Routledge.

Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collec-tive Memory and the Making of Israeli Na-tional Tradition. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press.

Zipperstein, Steven. 1985. The Jews of Odessa:A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford,–CA:Stanford University Press.

Zohar, Zvi. 1986. “Halakhic Responses of Syr-ian and Egyptian Rabbinical Authorities to So-cial and Technological Change.” Pp. 18–51 inStudies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 2, editedby P.Y. Medding. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

———. 1996. “Traditional Flexibility and Mod-ern Strictness: Two Halakhic Positions onWomen’s Suffrage.” Pp. 119–33 in Sephardiand Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Cul-ture in the Modern Era, edited by H. E.Goldberg. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress.

Documents

ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY 481 The Great Chain of Orientalism… › sites › default › files › savvy › images › ... · 2016-04-29 · ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY