Ethnic Change and Non-assimilating Minority Status: Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel (1981)

Abstract

Non-assimilating minorities, more commonly described in this volume as religious minorities in non-secular states, reside in countries where the identity and political mission of the state are formally tied to the religion or ethnicity of the majority. Minorities in such situations have an unavoidably inferior political status, as do the three minorities considered in this chapter: Jews in Tunisia, Jews in Morocco, and Arabs in Israel. Drawing on both historical information and original public opinion data, including data from a matched sample of Muslim citizens in the case of Tunisia, the analysis develops a four-part typology based on whether communal solidarity is increasing or decreasing and whether the primary referent for normative orientations is a domestic or an external cultural system. The cultural orientations, political orientations, and views of national identity expressed by minority group members are considered in developing the typology and assigning individuals to one of the four categories. Demographic and social structural attributes are then used to account for the between-group and within-group variation that the typology captures and to develop inferences about causality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the typology for other minority groups and of the potential generalizability of the observed explanatory relationships.