Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

The hyphenated phrase in our title, “Jewish-Muslim Crossings,” might seem surprising given that, according to institutional perspectives in U.S. and international politics, Jews and Muslims bear constitutively antagonistic religions and incommensurable identities. Certainly Jews and Muslims have crossed in the Americas, but the hyphen suggests something a little different, a crossing that is simultaneously a combining, or perhaps an encounter that is overdetermined by some prior encounter and mutual constitution. This special issue considers a literary and cultural history in the Americas of Jews and Muslims, two identities originating in Spain, Portugal, and the Middle East and North Africa, with complex stories of cohabitation and cultural overlaps. The post-1492, post-exilic re-formations of Jewish communities in the Muslim world as well as the Iberian and other European conceptions of Jewish-Muslim identities and crossings have all been exported, displaced, and re-signified in the Americas, with considerable literary, cultural, and political consequences, all of which have been largely ignored in U.S. Jewish Studies. The issue seeks to remedy this gap and change the terms through which Jewishness and Jewish-Muslim identities are typically discussed.For most of Jewish history, being Jewish involved some kind of engagement with other ethnicities, religions, or cultures, while maintaining an often difficult coexistence with a dominant sovereign, imperial, or national identity. And for nearly half of the world’s Jews, that remains true. This fact alone poses a challenge to the periodic attempts by Jewish Studies scholars to consolidate histories, cultural biographies, or literary canons of “the Jews,” and, indeed, scholars are increasingly identifying Jewish synchronic relations—lateral relations of Jews with others in the place and time wherein they live—as the more salient or at least documentable way to understand Jewishness, in contrast to the constrained diachronic accounts that seek to chart some consistently Jewish subject persistent over a long period of time. Still, for all the increase in a salutary refraction of the identity “Jewish,” the study of Jewish American literature has only just begun to explore the “inter-ethnic imagination” involved in being Jewish, while the plurality of national origins remains significantly understudied.1Specifically, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish literatures and cultures are considerably and consistently disregarded or relegated to discussions of early American Jewish writing from the period when the preponderance of Jewish settlers to the continent had Sephardic origins. The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, for instance, largely confines Sephardic writing to its opening section, “The Literature of Arrival, 1654–1880,” and the story it tells about Sephardim in its prefatory materials suggests Sephardic literature all but disappeared after what it calls “The Great Tide.”2 Similarly, the otherwise diverse and eclectic volume Jewish in America answers its opening question—what does it mean to be Jewish in America?—with almost no consideration for the experiences, not to mention the art and culture of, Sephardim and other Middle Eastern and North African Jews.3 The sole exception is Richard Kostelanetz’s essay “Sephardic Culture and Me,” which laments the paucity of representation of Sephardi authors in Jewish anthologies, but which follows up with the simple suggestion that “Sephardic Jews” place “lesser value . . . on advanced education,” and the anecdotal observation that “many American Sephardim grew up in houses devoid of books.”4 No New York Intellectuals, Kostelanetz’s Sephardim have no place in the oft-told, celebratory story of Jewish American assimilation and achievement or its literature and culture.5At a moment when prevailing accounts of Jewishness are gravitationally absorbed by the black hole that is the Zionism/BDS debate, now more than ever we need to track those understudied Jewish identities and experiences heretofore beyond notice but illuminating upon observation. Taking up that task in her critique of Zionism, Parting Ways (2012), Judith Butler makes a series of salutary claims about the diversity of Jewish geographies, undermined only by her failure to play them out across the course of her argument.6 Celebrating Said’s observation in Freud and the Non-European that “Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people,” Butler posits, “Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab.”7 Besides all that is wrong in that statement (the retrograde leapfrog over Freud’s point to claim “origins” for Judaism, the anachronism of “Jewish” and “Arab”), the spirit is clear: “for some, Jew and Arab are not finally separable categories, since they are lived and embodied together in the life of the Arab Jew.”8However, all of Butler’s Jewish “resources” (as she calls them) are European Jews, writing deeply in the grain of continental theory (Arendt, Benjamin, Levinas). Beyond a few paragraphs on Moses, Butler largely overlooks a vast history and geography of non-Ashkenazim, even as she writes knotted theoretical speculations about what it would mean for Jews to “cohabit” with non-Jews, on the way to theorizing Jewish and Palestinian bi-nationality.9 If, as Alex Lubin puts it in his contribution to this volume referring to Butler’s Parting Ways, “diasporic politics requires a binational archive,” then the archive must include and even privilege the Jewish archive that is already imbricated in Arab and Muslim worlds, from the Arabic writings and thought of medieval Spanish Jews to contemporary, critical Mizrahi art and creativity. The collection of essays gathered in this special issue are testament to the varieties of Jewish languages, national origins, and ethnicities, as well as to the complex play of recognition and indeed the inseparability of Jews, Muslims and Arabs, especially for Jews whose culture originates in Muslim or Arab countries.After all, Jews have been cohabiting with Muslims and Arabs (among others) for centuries, and not only under the retroactive banner of convivencia, or coexistence. Although the discourses surrounding the Palestine-Israel crisis and the Occupation have destructively and erroneously transformed “Jew” and “Muslim” (or Arab) into oppositional entities whose enmity is eternal and whose shared memories are “taboo,10 well into the mid- to late twentieth century in the Middle East and North Africa, Jews shared languages, cultures, governance, and an archive of religious texts with Arabs and non-Arab Muslims, and some continue to do so in Turkey, Iran, and Morocco.11Even after actual cohabitation, Jewish communities have continued to be marked by the Muslim contexts in which they had longstanding and profound roots. The earliest migrations to America’s European colonies, whether of the conversos, or the normative Jews, from Iberia, brought cultures nourished for centuries by Muslim Spain, though this is rarely acknowledged in the stories of early Sephardim in the Americas. The intellectual and artistic wealth that distinguished Sephardim owed much of its splendor to the Spain of Islam during long centuries (in addition to the influence of Christian Spain). Nineteenth-century Jewish Moroccan migration to South America and Ottoman Jewish migrations to destinations all over the continent up through the early twentieth century were of Jews whose identities were forged in the Muslim world for centuries or even longer, but this remained largely obscured from view under the various ethnoracial regimes of nation-states and of Jewish communities in the Americas. For those Jews who migrated to the United States from Arab and Muslim countries since the 1950s, establishing a Jewish American identity involved more than a matter of assimilation or hyphenation. Arab and Sephardic Jews emigrating to the United States discovered that a complexly coded Jewishness already existed, based on Ashkenazi experiences. Racial features, languages, differences in religion, structures of family life and values—all the vectors of identity that are complicated enough to begin with for minorities in the United States—meet up with an American Jewishness whose trajectory across the century has been toward white normativity. As Aviva Ben-Ur has put it,These are the discomfiting links, signaled in the hyphenated “Jewish-Muslim,” that our issue has set out to explore, focusing specifically on Jewish-Muslim crossings and interactions in the United States but with transnational reference points and counterpoints in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While there are many studies of Judeo-Muslim cultures in medieval Iberia as well as of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, the Middle Eastern and North African Jewish diaspora in the Americas and especially Jewish-Muslim crossings in the continent as a whole have been examined even less than the Sephardic presence in Jewish American identity discourses we refer to above.The essays included in this issue address the wide gap in knowledge about Middle Eastern and North African Jews and Jewishness within the United States and the Americas as well as about the proximity, conjunctures, and overlaps of the histories and categories of “Jewish” and “Muslim.” Through the lenses of diaspora, empire, and postcolonial studies trained on writing, media, national performance, and anti-imperial critique, they also bring to light the transnational reach of these internally varied identities: Leah Mirakhor and Joyce Zonana show the ways in which the knowledge, history, and experience of the Middle East and North Africa, including the mutual experience of Jews and Muslims, are transmitted through multiple Jewish dispersals across countries and cultures, from Iran and Egypt to the United States. Internationalist linkages come to light in Alex Lubin’s article on the bridges between the U.S. Black Panthers and the Mizrahi Black Panthers of Israel and Palestine. The complex revival of Sefarad and Al-Andalus across the Atlantic in Brazilian thought that Ella Shohat and Robert Stam analyze and the early twentieth-century connections between American empire and Zionism revealed in Keith Feldman’s essay also point to how Jewish-Muslim histories cross and connect in ways uncontained by conventional geographic or ideological boundaries. Our issue is not motivated, then, by an insular conception of Sephardic and Mizrahi community studies, but by a need to understand better how the millennia of Jewish-Muslim coexistence is reflected in its transatlantic displacements and continuities in the past century. Further, our contributors engage the U.S., European, Middle Eastern, and Latin American discursive constructions of “the Jew” and “the Muslim,” which appear as identical and oppositional at different conjunctures, critiquing and complicating fixed and instrumentalized conceptions of Jews and Muslims, Judaism and Islam, Jewishness and Muslimness.Where does one start with this work of putting together Jews and Muslims in the United States and Americas when there seems to be little existing scholarship to build on? Most studies of Jewish-Muslim crossings and overlaps are about other regions and periods (mostly Iberia in medieval times and the Middle East and North Africa in the modern era) but not their re-formations in the Americas. First, we begin by recognizing that our topic is pertinent to vital issues in multiple fields, including U.S. American Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern American studies, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, empire studies and more. Our essays draw from all these fields, sometimes all at once. Decolonial and diasporic approaches and relevant key works from these fields are perhaps too numerous to mention, though Edward Said’s work remains foundational for understanding the ongoing practices and discourses of Orientalism, which informs Jewish-Muslim history as conceived in the West as well as in the Middle East and North Africa and continues to shape Jewish-Muslim relations, especially in the context of Zionism.13 Moreover, key scholars have paved the way by treating our topic directly and have influenced the work of many of our contributors as well as our own. Ella Shohat is the most prolific and prominent one of these, renowned both for her scholarship on Mizrahi Jews and Arab Jewish identity in Israel as well as for her inventive and rigorous bridge-building between scholarship on the Middle East and the Americas. Shohat’s indispensable essay “Taboo Memories: Columbus, Palestine, and the Arab-Jews,” in which Columbus and the indigenous of the Americas are complexly associated with the confiscation of the Cairo Geniza documents and with Zionism, is exemplary in its decolonial analysis of racial states, diasporic framing of nations, and emphasis on the global circulation of colonialities.14 It is essential reading for those doing work on Jews and Muslims in the Americas. In Shohat and Robert Stam’s essay included here as well as in Shohat’s other publications, the Iberian Judeo-Muslim era is not simply a remote, if iconic, period, idealized and demonized in turns, but one at the foundation of the Americas. Coupled in the European imagination as enemies of different kinds, Jews and Muslims (or Moors) were the models that served the domination and oppression of the indigenous and African slave populations of the Americas (see, e.g., Shohat and Stam).15 The “two 1492s,” that is, the expulsion and the conquest, typically commemorated and studied separately, have much to do with the formation of the present.16 Shohat examines in her work enduring occlusions and colonial thinking that shape-shift and re-present themselves in different periods of crisis. As well, she and Robert Stam emphasize in the essay included in this issue the discursive continuities (e.g., indigenous and African “enemies” in the Americas as Jews and Muslims) and formative parallels (e.g., between the “Columbus master narrative” and Zionism in the United States), which generate entirely new prisms through which to understand Jewish-Muslim crossings in the Americas in their larger context. Shohat’s analysis links processes in the Middle East and North Africa that are seemingly unrelated to discursive phenomena in the Americas, indicating how the partition of Muslims and Jews intersects with historical Orientalism (dating to the conquest of the Americas, as she argues) as well as with contemporary representations of that conquest, which informs U.S. national identity. Shohat’s work, re-bridging the forced split of Jewish and Arab worlds with reference to the Middle East is also vital for reimagining and understanding the travels and diasporas of these braided worlds to the Americas, particularly in the U.S. and Brazilian contexts.17Another important model for examining the relations of Jews and Muslims in the Americas is Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs.18 In this magisterial book, which also serves as a seemingly inexhaustible catalog of both well-known and neglected literary works of Judeo-Muslim worlds, Alcalay develops the concept of Levantinism, recuperating, after Jacqueline Kahanoff, the Egyptian Jewish author who wrote in English, the term of depreciation “Levantine” (see Ben Gurion on “the Levant” in Alex Lubin’s essay). Alcalay defines “Levantine aesthetics” as “mobility, transfer of styles, ease of exchange,” with examples ranging from Arabic maqams in Jewish liturgy and Halevi’s poetry in popular Egyptian sharqi melodies to the Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and his own.19 The Levantinism of After Jews and Arabs is similar to Said’s critical perspective in Orientalism in that it is a mode of reading that can be applied beyond its region of origin, including the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and North Africa. As Said’s book launched postcolonial studies for areas also lying outside of the Middle East and the Muslim world, After Jews and Arabs likewise provides a model of reading, based on interaction and exchange for the particularities of these Americas. One only has to try a little to find what Alcalay calls “Levantine heterogeneity” in much contemporary writing in the Americas by authors ranging from Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Gelman, and Teresa Porzecanski in Latin America to Kathleen Alcalá and Diana Abu-Jaber in the North. As well, Iberian musical, literary, culinary, and other traditions transformed and kept alive in the Middle East and North Africa are performed and practiced all over the Americas today, with Brazil- or Brooklyn-based Jewish and Muslim Arab musicians performing together muwashah and Judeo-Spanish music from coast to coast. Thanks to Alcalay’s work, we recognize in these and so many other recent expressive productions the shifting meanings of “Levantine” and “Andalusian,” defined variously across the Middle East and traveling through the Americas.The practices and ideas around Judeo-Muslim culture and Jewish-Muslim connectivity as explored in these pages are very much in the spirit of, and often in direct reference to, the decolonial, connective work of Ella Shohat and Ammiel Alcalay and the many artists and activists who have endeavored to tear down the historically, culturally, and politically untenable separation wall drawn between Muslims and Jews in most dominant discourses, with the “Eastern” Muslims on one side and the “Western” Jews on the other. Many of the essays turn on its head an East constructed by Western Orientalism, deployed more than ever now, in our current age of wars. Instead, from the pages of this journal another “East” emerges, one in which Jewish existence and identity figure large, Jewish experience in Muslim countries is a transformative force, and Muslim-Jewish life is not an oxymoron, despite all the endings wrought by twentieth-century racisms and nationalisms.20Our contributors’ serious engagement with other ways of thinking about Jews and Muslim in the United States and the wider Americas remedies the gap in North American Jewish Studies in addressing empire and colonialism. Jewish American Studies, primarily focusing on ethnicity and religion, is left outside of the current of American Studies, which is shaped as much by empire and decolonial studies as it is by ethnic and racial studies, in a scholarly tradition long in development, from William Appleman Williams to Amy Kaplan, Vicente Rafael, Ramon Grosfoguel, and countless others. That the two paradigms of empire and ethnicity are densely interwoven is a point that hardly needs to be made in much of American Studies, but Jewish American Studies still needs to begin to forge a space in which the study of empire and colonialism goes hand in hand with ethnic and religious analyses. The omission is problematic first because it obscures the ways in which empire shapes U.S.-Israeli relations and their impact on Jewish American ethnicity. Surely, Jewish Americanness and the position of Jewish Americans conceived internally and externally have much to do with the fact that the world’s only superpower is the upholder of the Jewish state, but this is not readily evident in much of Jewish American Studies. Keith Feldman’s essay included here, linking racializing Orientalist representations of Jews and Muslims to empire and Zionism, is a step toward acknowledging and problematizing the formation and overlap of Jewish-American identity, empire, and the encounter between Muslims and Jews. Leah Mirakhor’s article on Iranian Jewish writing outlines contemporary debates around empire and an imperial “neo-Orientalism” that some Iranians, of various religious backgrounds, are accused of perpetuating, and Mirakhor explores the ways in which these debates impact Iranian Jewish American identity and writing. Further, the experience of Jews in the United States who have been subjects of European colonial regimes, including in Muslim-majority countries, needs to be registered within the academic treatment of “the Jewish American historical experience.” Even more importantly, the critical analyses of these experiences can illuminate the continuities and differences between European racial colonialism and the ethnoracialized class system within the United States, as explored by Joyce Zonana’s article in this issue. Alex Lubin’s contribution also illustrates the refractions of anti-imperial discourse from African America to Arab Jewish Israel. As Shohat and Stam posit in their postcolonial critique of the erasure of the Sephardi-Moorish inheritance in the Americas, Orientalism and empire have been interwoven since 1492, and national and imperial discourses continue to draw on new Orientalisms as a resource in ways that affect Muslim and Jewish identities in the Americas in key ways.The essays comprising this special issue represent the breadth of our topic and the innovative work being done on it. The issue begins with Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s essay, “Genealogies of Orientalism and Occidentalism: Sephardi Jews, Muslims, and the Americas,” which provides a broad historical and conceptual analysis of the origins of Orientalism in the Americas and the denigration and “cleansing” of Iberia’s Moorish-Sephardic heritage, from a critical postcolonial perspective. With twentieth-century Brazilian thinker Gilberto Freyre’s work as their case study, Shohat and Stam explain both the beginnings and the afterlives of “the Moor” and “the Sephardi” in racial thinking in the Americas and the later re-formations of older Orientalisms through ambivalent recuperations of the Sephardi Jew and the exclusion of Muslims. Their reading of Freyre alerts us to the ideological, historical, and political conditions under which “the Sephardi” and “the Moor” are joined as an “allegorical unit,” later detached in the Americas, but still surviving as “the Sephardi-Moorish unconscious,” including in national identities. In a different but related consideration of the union and separation of Sephardic and Arab/Muslim identity categories, “Enta Omri, You Are My Life: Embracing the Arab Self in André Aciman’s Harvard Square,” Joyce Zonana draws from Alcalay’s work on Levantine Jewish identity to explore the fiction and nonfiction of André Aciman. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Aciman has written memoirs and fiction that chart both his relocation across countries and his coming to consciousness of the impact of Arabness on his Jewish identity. Zonana traces these relocations and dislocations in her essay and examines how Aciman ultimately affirms a Levantine Jewish self. Leah Mirakhor’s essay “After the Revolution to the War on Terror: Iranian Jewish Literature in the United States, 1979” also focuses on recent generations descending from a Muslim country, Iran. Mirakhor’s essay surveys a broad range of Iranian Jewish American writing and examines the historical and cultural forces animating it. Iranian Jewish literature in the United States describes struggles with Jewish identification, American assimilation, and the ambivalent regard many Iranian American Jews feel toward their country of origin. Neo-orientalism, neoliberalism, and the War on Terror exacerbate these strains, Mirakhor demonstrates, while popular culture—notably, the TV series The Shahs of Sunset—obscures Iranian Jewish identities, complicating readers’ reception of Iranian Jewish American literature.Tracking the global circulation of revolutionary ideology, Alex Lubin’s essay “Black Panther Palestine” explores the Arab Jewish (that is, Mizrahi) formation of the Israeli Black Panther Party in the 1970s in the struggle to combat the racialist exclusion of Mizrahi Jews from full-fledged Israeli citizenship. The Israeli organization formed connections and sought strategic advice from both the U.S. Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Lubin’s essay discusses the global dimensions of the Israeli Black Panther Party and explores the implications for rethinking Jewish diaspora. Similarly disruptive of the assumed dialectical relations of Israel and the Jewish diaspora, Keith Feldman’s contribution, “Seeing Is Believing: U.S. Imperial Culture and the Jerusalem Exhibit of 1904,” considers the historical proximities and parallels locating Jews and Muslims in the U.S. imperial imaginary. Examining the Jerusalem Exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Feldman argues that the exhibit commonly Orientalized Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the region, establishing a colonialist agenda and analog between the United States and the Middle East. Feldman analyzes how American imperialism informed the presentation and reception of the Jerusalem exhibit, and explores the consequences for U.S. imperialism and the eventual Jewish settlement of Palestine.Through transnational and historically connective perspectives and analytics of diaspora and empire (the latter remedying a tremendous lack in Jewish American studies), the essays offer novel ideas and approaches to the transamerican dimensions of Muslim-Jewish crossings and Judeo-Muslim histories and cultures. It is our intention that this issue will inform readers of an understudied body of cultural and literary productions and discourses and serve as a challenge to the conventional ways we usually read “Jewish,” “American,” and Muslim-Jewish histories and relations. We hope this challenge will open up pathways for new scholarship and new ways of seeing our troubled times.