The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries – In Tribute to Yaron Tsur; Merav Alush Levron, Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries—In Tribute to Yaron Tsur by Aviad Moreno, and: Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema by Merav Alush Levron Dario Miccoli (bio) Aviad Moreno, Noah Gerber, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Ofer Shiff, eds., The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries—In Tribute to Yaron Tsur (Sede Boker, 2021) 551pp. [Hebrew]. Merav Alush Levron, Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema (Tel-Aviv, 2020) 421pp. [Hebrew]. In an essay published twenty years ago, Ella Shohat—one of the scholars who contributed most to the birth of Mizrahi Studies—argued that owing to the conceptual limitations of the term Mizrahim, scholars should develop a more critical understanding of the continuities and discontinuities entailed by Middle Eastern and North African Jewish cross-border movements to and from Israel. Yet as Mizrahi Studies have developed over several decades with an almost exclusive focus on Israel and the post-1948 period, Shohat’s call to view Mizrahim through a “multi-chronotopic and palimpsestic notion of time and space” becomes a difficult challenge.1 And nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars today are examining the history of the Mizrahim from a transnational and diachronic perspective. Bryan K. Roby’s study, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, distinguishes several ideological junctures between the African-American civil rights movement in the United States and the Mizrahi protests of the 1960s and 1970s in Israel.2 Yuval Evri attempts to unravel a more complex genealogy of Mizrahim in The Return to Al-Andalus through the connections between Hebrew and Arabic and Jews and Arabs during the first half of the twentieth century, using Sefarad as a central category of Middle Eastern Jewish heritage.3 These studies extend the spatial framework and timespan in which Mizrahi history takes place beyond the notion of Israeli exceptionalism and inevitable associations between common events and dates like 1948, the Wadi Salib riots [End Page 190] of 1959, the founding of the Black Panthers in 1971, the electoral victory of the Likud party in 1977, and the creation of Shas in 1984. But does the era of the Mizrahim begin with the birth of the State of Israel, or should it include the pre-1948 period, or should the mass migrations of the 1950s and 1960s be our point of departure? And more importantly, how should we define Mizrahim and the past and present of a Jewish collective that did not define itself as such until the second half of the twentieth century? These are some of the issues raised in two recent works on Mizrahi history, culture and identity: The Long History of the Mizrahim: New Directions in the Study of Jews from Muslim Countries, edited by Aviad Moreno, Noah Gerber, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein and Ofer Shiff, and the monograph Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema by Merav Alush Levron. The first is a collection of studies in honor of Yaron Tsur, one of the most prominent Israeli historians of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish history before and after the advent of the State of Israel; the second is a monograph treating contemporary Mizrahi documentary cinema. Although these two books are very different in focus and objective, both raise questions about the perspective of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies today and in the future. Taking a cue from the seminal reflections of social scientists like Ella Shohat, Yehudah Shenhav, Henriette Dahan-Kalev and Sami Shalom-Chetrit and of historians such as Michael Laskier, Norman Stillman and Tsur himself,4 these two volumes explore places and events from the diasporic past of the Mizrahim until Aliyah and after. As novelist Abraham Yehoshua wrote so eloquently in The Tunnel (2018), there is a “genetic strand” that binds together the generations of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, and Israel of the present day with the Sephardi and Arab Jewish worlds of old.5 The Long History of the Mizrahim is divided into three parts: the first is dedicated to inter-ethnic relations in...