"Till Spring Comes": Arabic and Hebrew Literary Debates among Iraqi-Jews in Israel (1950-2000)

Abstract

In modern times Iraqi Jews, writing in Arabic, were producing literary works that quickly became part of the mainstream of modern Arabic literature. Following the establishment of the state of Israel, many Iraqi-Jewish intellectuals, poets, and writers emigrated to the new state. On their arrival in Israel they faced a new linguistic situation in which the language (Hebrew) imposed upon them was limited to a single religion, a single nation, and a single ethnic entity, as opposed to the situation in Iraq, where Arab cultural and national identity encompassed Jews together with Muslims and Christians. Advocates of Western-orientated cultural identity also bewailed the "danger" of the "Arabization" of Israeli society. The immigrants thus faced a fierce clash between their original Iraqi-Arab narrative and the Jewish Zionist Western-oriented dominant master narrative—the natural Iraqi Jewish-Arab identity was split into Arab versus Jew. As a result, the literature 20th-century Iraqi Jews produced in Arabic has been gradually disappearing. The demise of Arabic literature among Jews has precipitated a controversy regarding whether Arab culture can be considered a "correct" source of inspiration for the Israeli Hebrew culture.