Mizrahi, Arab Jews, Critique of Zionism

קשה להפריז בתרומתה של הפרדיגמה של האזרחות המרובה לניתוח ההיסטורי-פוליטי של החברה והמדינה בישראל, אותה הציע יואב פלד כתשובה לגישת "הלאומיות המתודולוגית", ששלטה בכיפה וראתה בתהליכי בינוי האומה כפריזמה הבלעדית להבנת התפתחותה ההיסטורית של החברה בישראל. הדיון באזרחות היה לכר פורה למחקרים על משטר האזרחות, על מעמד האזרחים, ובמיוחד על אופני הקצאתן של זכויות האזרחות בחברה. כיום נדמה מאמרו המקורי של פלד כאירוע השייך לזמן היסטורי אחר. מטרתו של מאמר זה היא לבחון את מידת הרלוונטיות של המודל כתיאוריה חברתית-ביקורתית בהקשר הישראלי, ומעבר לכך לשאול מהי תכליתה של התיאוריה של האזרחות כחלק מסדר יום פוליטי פרוגרסיבי עכשווי. לאחר שאציע ביקורת למודל האזרחות המרובה אדון בקצרה בפוליטיקה המזרחית ויחסה לסוגיית הדת בישראל על מנת להציע נקודת מבט חדשה על האזרחות כתופעה חברתית וכפריזמה תיאורטית.

This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Iraqi Jewish author, Shimon Ballas (and edited by Almog Behar and Yuval Evri). The essay examines how Ballas, who was himself in exile from Iraq, relates the experiences of other exiles. Considering Ballas’ oeuvre, I detect his tendency to draw literary portraits—that is, to dedicate each novel to a detailed literary portrait of a single, forgotten historical figure. Unlike Albert Memmi, another Arab Jewish author who was fond of portraits (“portrait of the colonizer,” “portrait of the colonized,” “portrait of a Jew”), Ballas’s portraits were never abstract. They were based rather on true biographies of forgotten historical figures, ones who were never at home in a single nation or culture. The gallery that Ballas forms by amassing together these various portraits allows him to challenge the necessity of the Zionist narrative and to reintroduce other historical possibilities. Focusing on Ballas’ novel Locked Chamber (1980), which sketches a portrait of a Palestinian in Israel, I argue that in trying to convey Palestinian experiences Ballas does not draw on the content of Palestinian literature but rather on its form—particularly as it has been refined by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose work Ballas had researched and translated. By reading Edward Said’s thoughts on the episodic form of Kanafani’s writing, I show how Ballas borrows this technique both to convey the rupture introduced by 1948 into Palestinian and Arab time and to insist that he, too, is part of the Arab world.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ

(from the Introduction)
Being the final product of his doctoral studies, Paul Wilkinson’s book, For Zion’s Sake, intends to reveal how John Nelson Darby’s detractors have distorted Christian Zionism while directly challenging academics who believe dispensationalism has little theological or historical value.  The purpose of this review is not to critique dispensationalism directly but to summarize and evaluate Wilkinson’s research and conclusions. In the end, Wilkinson’s ideological agenda and prejudicial research presents a thoroughly one-sided and indefensible case for Christian Zionism. In addition to his shameful demonization tactics against anyone who disagrees, Wilkinson’s research capabilities demonstrate a deliberate bias with little intention of conducting a fair and honest assessment of the subject. His style of writing amounts to nothing more than inflammatory claptrap, engaging in a puerile smear campaign against nondispensationalists that panders to the rhetoric of pseudo-intellectual prophecy pundits and apocalyptic hysteria. His research and conclusions are elementary at best, if not outright disgraceful.

Until the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were roughly 750,000 Jews living in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Palestine/Israel. A comparative electronic survey of some 900 journals reveals that when scholars referred to these individuals collectively during the last 200 years they employed some twenty different signifiers. The question I address is simple yet potentially foundational: which collective signifier can define and capture most productively, inclusively and comprehensively the socio-political and cultural experiences of those who comprised the Arab Middle East's ten indigenous Jewish minority communities prior to their dispersal (in the post-1949 armistice period)? I propose that the signifier ‘Arabized-Jews’ exhibits explanatory properties that outweigh those of its alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. As such, ‘Arabized-Jews’ denotes Jews who were culturally and/or linguistically Arab yet who did not self-define primarily as Arab, let alone in political terms. In exploring the dialectic interface between ethno-politics, terminological formations and the production of meaning, this article suggests that it makes sense for contemporary scholars to employ ‘Arabized-Jews’ to refer collectively to Jews across the modern Arab Middle East.

יש מן המזרחיות: על הרישום לאחור של תוכני הזהות

יצחק בנימיני

במסה זו יצחק בנימיני מציע מסגרת תיאורטית ייחודית להבנת שאלת המזרחיות. טענתו היא שאין לאתר את המזרחיות בתכנים פוזיטיביים כלשהם, מהותיים, סוציולוגיים או היסטוריים. תחת זאת, יש לפנות אל צורת פעולתו של המסמן ״מזרחיות״ בשיח הפוליטי העכשווי. בנימיני גורס כי הפנייה העכשווית אל ה״מזרחיות״ נעשית על פי מבנה הבדיעבד של פרויד; לפי מבנה זה, אירוע טראומטי נחווה רק דרך הסימפטומים המאוחרים שלו, ולכן הוא נחווה ואף מתקיים לראשונה רק בדיעבד, כאירוע משני, על פי אופני רישומו. באופן דומה, טוען בנימיני, העבר המזרחי נרשם רק מעמדת ההווה, שמכוננת אותו באיחור. לכן במקום לשאול על אמיתותם של התכנים המוכלים היום בעמדות מזרחיות שונות, ותהיה זו עמדה לאומית קהילתנית של ״ישראל השנייה״ או עמדה אנטי-לאומית של היהודי-ערבי, יש לעקוב אחר כינונו המאוחר של המקור המזרחי; לעקוב לא על מנת לבטלו כתחבולה אידיאולוגית ותו לא, אלא על מנת לפתוח את המרחב הפנזטמטי הרוחש אל מעבר למונוליתיות הכמו-עובדתית של הזהות המזרחית.

In the following article we will examine at length some of the dynamics by which R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad—the renowned Ben Ish Hai (1834–1909) - integrated Kabbalah into daily life, and the complex way that he combined the teachings of the Rashash with simplified, esoteric practices meant for the general public. Needless to say, the relationship between the Kabbalists of Jerusalem and R. Yosef Hayyim illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Kabbalah in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/148.short?rss=1

"What Norman Finkelstein has done in exposing the political foregrounding of the Holocaust Industry, what Giorgio Agamben has done in extrapolating the contemporary implications of homo sacer from the horrors of the concentration camps, Terri Ginsberg is doing with astonishing command and competence about Holocaust cinema. Ginsberg s voice is clear, concise, liberating, and the harbinger of an entire new generation of scholarship in cinema studies. Groundbreaking, challenging, judicious, theoretically ambitious, and analytically lucid, HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY begins from the ground zero of the unspeakable and works its way meticulously up towards the long shot of a take that will remain definitive to generations of scholarship it anticipates." -- Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University; Editor, DREAMS OF A NATION: ON PALESTINIAN CINEMA

"Terri Ginsberg's HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY is a much needed intervention in the field of Holocaust Studies in general and in Holocaust Cinema Studies in particular. What Ginsberg has fashioned is a reading of the Holocaust that is both immanent and materialist and much needed in these times when Holocaust scholarship is being shanghaighed by both ends of the political spectrum. It is Ginsberg's achievement that Holocaust cinematic texts are here restored to their historical moment in a way that must be accomplished if there is ever to be an understanding of how these texts might grasp the original moment of the tragedy. Her painstakingly thorough scholarship and theoretical rigor ensures that her work at least will not serve to promote the type of easy, knee-jerk response that simply adds flame to the fire and in the name of scholarship contributes to the perpetuation of other tragedies in the present Israeli-Palestinian situation." -- Dennis Broe, Graduate Program Coordinator, Media Arts Department, Long Island University

"Ginsberg ably demonstrates how the subgenre known as Holocaust cinema has been co-opted by the culture industry. Bypassing the usual Hollywood touchstones, she focuses on four relatively neglected films that illuminate several key motifs that permeate many films on the subject: the 'Christianization' of Jewish oppression, the commodification of genocide by both commercial and art house cinema, and the ethnocentric appropriation of the Holocaust by filmmakers with reactionary agendas. Eschewing the conformist platitudes of previous studies, Ginsberg s book is a salutary and necessary provocation." -- Richard Porton, Co-editor, CINEASTE; Author, FILM AND THE ANARCHIST IMAGINATION

"Hollywood has produced more than 175 films on the Holocaust since the1980s, and in fact by now the category is considered by some to constitute a virtual genre. Ginsberg challenges the under-examined status of these films and analyzes the work they perform to construct a revisionist discourse. Ginsberg's astute understanding of cinematic strategies in addition to her confidence in distilling and unpacking even the most fraught of ideological discourses promise a groundbreaking and eminently useful study. Hers are important contributions which we very much need." -- B. Ruby Rich, University of California-Santa Cruz; Author, CHICK FLICKS: THEORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

"The importance of the Holocaust is beyond doubt. The importance of continuing the analysis and wide-ranging discussion of it is, at least in some circles. Here, in response, is an extremely scholarly andinsightful treatment of Holocaust films and the aesthetic ideology that informs them. Sheds much light on several controversial problems connected to these horrific events. Highly Recommended." -- Bertell Ollman, New York University; Author, DANCE OF THE DIALECTIC

This timely monograph takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust “art” films (KORCZAK [Poland, 1990], THE QUARREL [Canada, 1990], ENTRE NOUS [France, 1983], and BALAGAN [Germany, 1994]), this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today’s global arena.

מאמר ביקורת על מאמרו של גור אלרואי שהתפרסם בכתב העת 'ציון',  פ
תשע"ה, עמ' 551–581 - אני מודה לאנשי כתב העת 'ציון' והחברה ההיסטורית הישראלית על שיתוף הפעולה הפורה, על עזרתם בניכוש שגגות במאמר והסבת תשומת לבי לסוגיות נוגעות.
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מהדורה ראשונה נובמבר 2018
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תיקוני המהדורה השניה, ראתה אור במאי 2022, כוללים: עימוד, תקלדות כתיב, שיפור הצגת התמונות, תיקון כותרת

For the past twenty-five years, and particularly during the last decade, the idea of the Arab Jew has been debated in multiple forums in different parts of the world. The Arab Jew is represented in literature and film, discussed in blogs and social media, and featured in live performances. It has informed scholarship in literary and cultural studies, sociology, and history, in Israel, the Arab world, Europe, and North America. Yet the term “Arab Jew” remains controversial, especially in Israel, where it is widely viewed as a left-wing political concept. This article surveys the Arab Jew’s full range of expression to date, emphasizing the reciprocal movement of ideas across different geographies and between discursive spheres. It argues that the Arab Jew idea has developed as both a project of political intervention into the present-day separation of Arabness from Jewishness and a project of reconstruction focusing on the Jewish past in the MENA region. Examining recent episodes in the Israeli public sphere, the article investigates how contemporary discussions about Arab Jewish identity and culture utilize competing views of history. It concludes by reconsidering the relevance of the “Arab Jew” to the burgeoning historical scholarship on Jews in the MENA region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

The question was simple: should the Hebraist Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine invest in publishing a newspaper in Arabic and, if yes, should it be communitarian Jewish or general in its topics? What began as yet another obscure intra-Zionist deliberation gradually crystallized into what I argue merits the label of the earliest, explicitly Ashkenazi–Mizrahi ethnic controversy. This is with the smallest risk of the superimposition in hindsight of the terms and signifiers usually associated with Israel’s post-1971/Black-Panthers era onto the Ottoman period. Lasting between 1909 and 1913, the spirited exchange regarding the Arabic newspaper involved two dozen writers, mainly of the Sephardi–Mizrahi Haherut newspaper, and about one third of ethnic Ashkenazim writing elsewhere. It was nonetheless October 1911 that encapsulated the peak of the controversy, mainly due to writing by Mizrahi intellectual and activist Dr Shimon Moyal (1866–1915) and Ashkenazi intellectual and activist Dr Avraham Ludvipol (1865–1921). My decision to let primary texts speak for themselves at greater length than is customary results from my conviction that – in this case – extensive recourse to source material can convey best to twenty-first-century readers why the exchange is effectively “the mother” of all ensuing Mizrahi–Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. While clear definition for what constitutes such a controversy is provided, I close by offering a sample of views about the Arabic newspaper by four prominent Ashkenazi Zionists.

Studies of the Arab-Zionist matrix are ordinarily written from what may be termed as a territorially Palestine-centric vantage-point; this -obviously -makes sense since the conflict"s sorrows, battles, deaths, expulsions and displacements clearly emerged there. But this approach means something else too: that regional dimensions surrounding the Palestine/Israel question are often undervalued both historically and in terms of the region"s ongoing ethno-politics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ever-expanding controversy between proponents of a One-State, Bi-National-State or Two-State solution to the Palestine/Israel question (1S2S). This neglect leads the numerous participants in 1S2S exchanges to debate (and devise) solutions that rest on what I term here "mandated imaginations", that is, scholarly spheres that ultimately conceive of the (post-1922) Britishmandated territory of Palestine/Israel as a secluded island in both historical and contemporary terms. The problem is that this neither was, nor is, the case. The Palestine/Israel question acquired a potent regional dimension from at least the time of the Palestinian anti-colonial revolt of 1936-9 and the historic 1937 pan-Arab gathering in Bludan, convened to overturn the first Two-State solution proposed by the royal Peel Commission. It logically follows that if prevailing diagnoses of the very question itself are incorrect or partial -due to mandated imaginations, a Palestine-centric outlook and a neglect of historical and contemporary regional variables -then the corresponding socio-political prognoses (One-State, Two-States or Bi-National-State) may also be flawed in all terms other than rhetorical-ideational. To substantiate these propositions, this article is three-fold.

Using Israel’s land-grabbing practices alongside its demographic classifications as a conceptual lens, this article advances two claims: one about biospatial strategies, including the construction of space as a racialized category, and the other historical. The article shows that the particular biospatial scaffolding underlying Israel’s colonial project has deployed similar strategies of dispossession and settling across the entire territory located between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Simultaneously, it draws a connection between these strategies and statistical classifications and techniques of enumeration to delineate Israel’s efforts to racialize the appropriated space. Historically, the article identifies a boomerang trajectory, beginning with the massive confiscation and Judaization of Palestinian land in the wake of the 1948 war, then extending and duplicating many of the practices originally developed inside Israel to the West Bank in 1967, and finally turning back inward to solidify the racialization of land within Israel.

Review
"This excellent study is [...] recommended for academic libraries."
Daniel Scheide, Florida Atlantic University, Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews, Volume VII, No. 2
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Abstract
It is difficult to ignore the diversity of the kabbalah or both its modest and coarse manifestations over the course of the twentieth-century – phenomena that have latterly garnered considerable attention in both the lay and research literature alike. That said, it appears that the historical background for these current developments, namely the world of the kabbalists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, has yet to merit an in-depth study. The dozens of hagiographies that are now being written by the progeny and admirers of the said kabbalists paint a romantic picture of a “glorious past.” In these books, the early twentieth century is described as a kabbalistic renaissance that is on equal footing with the days of Isaac Luria in Safad. Surprising as it may be, the Hebrew and Yiddish belles-lettres and, following in their footsteps, the research literature from Gershom Scholem onwards has left the impression that kabbalah deteriorated in the beginning of the twentieth century to the point of nearly vanishing of the world stage. According to this same narrative, only the efforts of a few surviving kabbalists—a sort of dying elite—kept the flame from expiring. On those rare occasions in which scholars bring up these practitioners, they are referred to as “the remnants of the kabbalists” or similar epithets. This characterization was painted in even louder colors upon describing the era’s Jerusalem-based kabbalists. At one and the same time, then, there are descriptions of both a great awakening and steep decline. The author’s attempt to make sense of this contradiction is one of the catalysts behind the present study. Its origins aside, the book focuses on the kabbalah seminaries (Yeshivot or academies) in Jerusalem from 1896 to 1948 as well as the various manifestations of kabbalah within traditional Jewish society.
Kabbalistic Circles in Jerusalem breaks new ground on the robust activities of Jerusalem’s kabbalistic yeshivot, foremost among them Beit el, Rehovot haNahar, and Sha'ar haShamayim. By virtue of these institutions’ publications and the unearthing of tens of documents and manuscripts that were deposited in sundry archives, the book surveys the daily schedule and methodology of these yeshivot; their methods for disseminating kabbalah books; the dynamics between revelation and concealment that undergirded all the kabbalists’ endeavors; the arrangement of the RaShaSh Siddur’s first print run; the messianic outlooks that were espoused in this community regarding the attempts to discover the Sambatyon River and the lost tribes; and the content and assorted roles of the Tikkunim literature. What is more, the author explores the disagreements between competing groups—most notably, the feud over the extent to which occult wisdom should be exposed to the general public—and the various gradients of Jewish mysticism within these seminaries.
Against this backdrop, shedding light on Jerusalem’s kabbalist circles between the years 1896 and 1948 opens a door to the wider world of the myriad kabbalistic streams in East Europe and Arab lands, the Maghreb included. The foundations that were laid by these yeshivas in the early twentieth century also paved the way for the contemporary blossoming of kabbalah in many and manifold circles. In this sense, retracing the pertinent developments in the Land of Israel at the outset of the twentieth century is imperative not only for repairing the distorted picture of the past, but for understanding the ongoing surge in kabbalah study
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This book endeavors to fill a lacuna in the literature on early twentieth-century kabbalah, namely the lack of a comprehensive account of the traditional kabbalah seminaries (Yeshivot) in Jerusalem from 1896 to 1948 as well as the various manifestations of kabbalah within traditional Jewish society. The foundations that were laid in the early twentieth century also paved the way for the contemporary blossoming of kabbalah in many and manifold circles. In this sense, retracing the pertinent developments in Palestine at the outset of the twentieth century is imperative not only for repairing the distorted picture of the past, but for understanding the ongoing surge in kabbalah study.

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Contents

Preface pp. ix-xii

Introduction: The Imagined Decline of Kabbalah pp. 1-17

Chapter One: The Kabbalistic Yeshivot of Jerusalem  pp. 19-73

Chapter Two: Searching for the Lost Tribes  pp. 74-108

Chapter Three: The Renaissance of Print  pp. 109-140

Chapter Four: Prayers and Ritual Literature pp. 141-166

Chapter Five: Critique, Parody and Controversy pp. 167-175

Concluding Remarks p. 176

Appendix: List of Proclamations pp. 177-184

Bibliography pp. 185-230

Index pp. 231-243


"Reviews:
(1) Tomer Persiko, 2012, הרחובות ממריאים ‘The streets of Kabbalah’, Beit Avichai Journal, (Hebrew)
(2) Tomer Persiko, 2012, הרחובות ממריאים ‘The streets of Kabbalah’, Lula’at ha-El: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Blog (Hebrew)
(3) Avishai Elboim, 2011, חיפוש עשרת השבטים ‘Searching for the lost Tribes’, Shabat be-Shabato, no. 1405, p. 6 (Hebrew)
(4) Yaniv Mezuman, 2012, רחובות הנהר ‘Rehovot ha-Nahar’, Makor Rishon, Shabat, pp. 12-13 (Hebrew)
(5) Yehudah Mirsky, 2012, ‘Gershom Scholem, 30 Years On’, Jewish Ideas Daily.
(6) Eliezer Baumgarten, 2013,נהר שלום  ‘Nahar Shalom’, Pa'amim 133-134, 7 pages (Hebrew) http://www.ybz.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Pea133_134eyunim.pdf


1) Evening book at the Ben Tsvi Jerusalem, with the guests: Moshe Idel, Ronit Maroz, Yoram Bilu Hanan Gafni, Zeev Griss, 10 March 2012
http://www.ybz.org.il/?CategoryID=141&ArticleID=849

2) Evening book at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, with the guests: Haim Beer, Elhanan Reiner, Zeev Griss, Boaz Huss 12 June 2012
http://in.bgu.ac.il/Pages/events/Streets-of-the-river.aspx





"""

Contents

Preface pp. ix-xii

Introduction: The Imagined Decline of Kabbalah pp. 1-17

Chapter One: The Kabbalistic Yeshivot of Jerusalem  pp. 19-73

Chapter Two: Searching for the Lost Tribes  pp. 74-108

Chapter Three: The Renaissance of Print  pp. 109-140

Chapter Four: Prayers and Ritual Literature pp. 141-166

Chapter Five: Critique, Parody and Controversy pp. 167-175

Concluding Remarks p. 176

Appendix: List of Proclamations pp. 177-184

Bibliography pp. 185-230

Index pp. 231-243


"Reviews:
(1) Tomer Persiko, 2012, הרחובות ממריאים ‘The streets of Kabbalah’, Beit Avichai Journal, (Hebrew)
(2) Tomer Persiko, 2012, הרחובות ממריאים ‘The streets of Kabbalah’, Lula’at ha-El: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Blog (Hebrew)
(3) Avishai Elboim, 2011, חיפוש עשרת השבטים ‘Searching for the lost Tribes’, Shabat be-Shabato, no. 1405, p. 6 (Hebrew)
(4) Yaniv Mezuman, 2012, רחובות הנהר ‘Rehovot ha-Nahar’, Makor Rishon, Shabat, pp. 12-13 (Hebrew)
(5) Yehudah Mirsky, 2012, ‘Gershom Scholem, 30 Years On’, Jewish Ideas Daily.
(6) Eliezer Baumgarten, 2013,נהר שלום  ‘Nahar Shalom’, Pa'amim 133-134, 7 pages (Hebrew) http://www.ybz.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Pea133_134eyunim.pdf


1) Evening book at the Ben Tsvi Jerusalem, with the guests: Moshe Idel, Ronit Maroz, Yoram Bilu Hanan Gafni, Zeev Griss, 10 March 2012
http://www.ybz.org.il/?CategoryID=141&ArticleID=849

2) Evening book at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, with the guests: Haim Beer, Elhanan Reiner, Zeev Griss, Boaz Huss 12 June 2012
http://in.bgu.ac.il/Pages/events/Streets-of-the-river.aspx





"""

According to Command of Arabic among Israeli Jews, a report by Shenhav et al. (2015), the vast majority of the Jews in Israel neither speak nor understand the Arabic language. Proficiency in Arabic has declined dramatically with succeeding generations. While slightly more than half of the participants in the study believe that knowledge of Arabic is important, the majority of the participants also stated that its importance is security related. This bleak picture of Arabic as a vanishing language among Israeli Jews is related to the protracted ethnonational conflict, which has divided “Jews” from “Arabs.” This is in contrast to the recently expanding number of Jewish Israeli musicians, mostly of the third generation (the grandchildren) of migrants from Arab countries, who sing in Arabic and receive wide local and international exposure. In this article I examine the discrepancy between the low rates of proficiency and interest in the Arabic language and the growing number of singers and audiences in Israel who appreciate music sung in Arabic. I first summarize the findings of the report. I then examine Jewish Israeli musicians who perform in Arabic, focusing on Neta Elkayam and Ziv Yehezkel, to consider the possibilities of a cultural dialogue between Israeli musicians and local Palestinian, as well as regional, Arab audiences. I discuss the political significance of these performances, both in the context of Mizrahi identity among the third generation and in relation to local and regional Arab audiences. In the last section, I tie these musical performances to the policy of the right-wing government in Israel and the rise of a new Mizrahi Zionist discourse in relation to the Arabic language and culture. Finally, I point to the possible negative consequences of this cultural shift for Palestinians.

This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis- a-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the  post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.

This paper explores the anti-Jewish heart of Modern Political Zionism. It is asserted that modern Zionism is a racist, anti-Semitic ideology and movement in a double sense. Zionism is most clearly racist in the obvious sense that it is an ideology invented for the specific purpose of displacing the native inhabitants of a land in favour of an external group that claims sole title to that land, as a superior, so-called ‘Chosen People’. At the centre of this worldview is a profound pessimism: anti-Semitism is eternal, because it is impossible to eradicate.

Paru dans: Création(s) en exil Perspectives interdisciplinaires Sous la direction de Loreto NÚÑEZ Collection du CLE -2018.
À travers l’examen de plusieurs occurrences provenant de la poésie, de la chanson et du cinéma, je cherche ici à rendre compte de la présence et de la pertinence de différentes manières de thématiser l’idée d’exil sans en faire un pôle négatif, constituant ainsi une alternative culturelle à ce que l’historien Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin considère comme l’un des plus puissants motifs idéologiques de la pensée sioniste, la « négation de l’exil ». Je cherche ainsi à identifier des occurrences esthétiques d’un pôle thématique qui, comme l’ont montré, sur le versant théorique, Edward Said, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin ou Judith Butler, associe à l’idée d’exil des valeurs affectives positives et y trouve une voie de subversion de l’entreprise d’arraisonnement des identités juives dans le projet nationaliste.

This paper seeks to examine and deconstruct two groups and the relationships between them: the Israeli national-religious settler movement and the Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or mizraḥim. In academic, journalistic and popular literature, these groups are rarely placed in the same discursive space. Rather, they frequently find themselves implicated at divergent ends of the relationships of power that define the Israeli Jewish polity and socioeconomic structures. How has the image of the settler as white, ashkenazi, middle-class, religiously and ideologically driven been produced? Conversely, how has the critical scholarship on mizraḥim in Israel, which locates mizraḥim both spatially and economically at the periphery of Israeli Jewish society, constructed an imagined mizraḥi subject with no relationship to the image of the settler above? This essay will seek to understand the real overlap between these two contrasting pictures and discuss the participation of mizraḥim in the neo-Zionist project. While these questions demand a much fuller theoretical discussion than this short piece will be able to detail, I seek to propose in this paper a new way of ‘thinking’ mizraḥim and neo-Zionists, and, by extension, mizraḥi participation in and reproduction of ashkenazi hegemony.

The Mistaʿarvim are Jewish undercover agents who masquerade as Arabs in order to infiltrate Palestinian and other Arab societies in the service of the Israeli military. The first Mistaʿarvim unit, which served in the pre-1948 Palmach Zionist militia, was based on Jews of Arab origin. Arabs in appearance and in speech, these undercover Jewish agents masqueraded as Arabs to blend into Arab communities without raising suspicion. They successfully executed their operations only by transforming their Arab selves into a performative imitation of ‘Arabs’ as Others. Complying with the Zionist binary separation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ as two different identities, they broke their originally hyphenated Jewish-Arab identity, and in return they gained heroic acceptance into the exclusively Jewish nation in Israel. In this article, we examine how the military-oriented tactic of histaʿarvut (the infinitive form of acting as Mistaʿarvim) sheds light on performative acts in the field of popular music, whereby a Jewish Israeli identity is asserted through a ‘masked’ performance of Arabs. As an act of self-imitation, ‘cultural histaʿarvut’ includes symbolic borrowing of visual, linguistic, or musical elements from Arab and Palestinian cultures in order to stage a masked performance that ‘crosses’ the cultural lines to ridicule or demean Arabs and their culture, as a means of Jewish Israeli entertainment. Drawing on this, we introduce the term ‘sonic masquerading’ to elaborate on the specific performative uses of the Arabic accent and musical features as an example of cultural histaʿarvut in the work of the Israeli musicians Shefita, Daniel Saʿadon, and Tuna.

The television show Our Boys (HBO and Keshet Studios, 2019) revisits the July 2, 2014 kidnapping and murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, the 16-year-old Palestinian boy from Shuafat, Jerusalem who was killed at the hands of three Jewish Israeli young men. An act of vengeance, the horrendous burning to death of Muhammad in the Jerusalem Forest took place right after the three kidnapped Jewish Israeli boys were found dead. In 'Our Boys: A Travelogue," I argue that the show grounds us in an experience of rethinking recent memory by reconsidering the events, asking us to pay close attention to what we are seeing, watching, hearing, and listening to, and to how we process and archive events through sensorial and affective absorption. As actual footage from the summer of 2014 blends with a fictional retelling, we are invited to look and closely experience powerful scenes of Palestinian and Mizrahi representation.

From the Bible, this book does the history of the abolition of feminine and masculine sexual mutilation at the time of Akhenaten’s hedonist utopia. It also proves, by the Bible alone, that Abraham (Genesis 15: 8) and Moses (Deuteronomy 29: 1-5) were pharaohs, and the Hebrews Egyptians. This time, the immense discovery of Messod and Roger Sabbah in Secrets of the Exodus (2000) is indisputable. The two authors had proceeded on a double observation. Firstly, the absence of archaeological proofs of the presence of an important foreign population kept into slavery for hundreds of years; the Hebrews left no trace plainly because they were Egyptians, belonging to the sect founded by Akhenaten, namely, Abraham, that went into exile to colonize Palestine. Secondly, they backed upon numerous intercultural comparisons. A journalistic smear campaign attacked their book under the pretext that it would lack “scientific” proofs. But implying that history is not an exact science, Desroches Noblecourt ended the libelling, in two times. In 2004, by multiplying the intercultural connexions between the Hebrews and the Egyptians in Le fabuleux héritage de l’Égypte, she adopted the Sabbah’s approach of compared historiography. In 2005, she brilliantly declared in an interview : “The Egyptians brought us... the alphabet…” Finally, in 2009, Davidovits discovered an absolute archaeological proof that the authors of Genesis also drew hieroglyphs in Karnak. The real reason for the outcry provoked by Secrets of the Exodus is its incompatibility with Zionism.

However, making pharaoh the unique God rather strengthened the pharaonic power. But we reinforce the thesis of Secrets of the Exodus by an exegetic discovery that shows that the great reason for the exile of the Hebrews was less their monotheism than their abolition of feminine and above all masculine sexual mutilation. The pharaonic tyranny rightly deemed it essential for maintaining the people in quasi-slavery. The faithful of Akhenaten went into exile because the feudal lords and the religious wanted, after thirty years of abolition of sexual mutilation in Akhetaten, to re-establish circumcision by submitting the babies to it. The matter was to impose the reason of force on helpless beings by engraving it into the unconscious in the indelible way of a trauma operating through terror and for life. Moses maintained that abolition during the forty years of the Exodus but Seti 1st, in Gilgal, ended that of circumcision, neglecting excision. The consequence is to transform four great Judaic dogmas into myths: the deity of the “Lord”, the divine election, the circumcision by divine order, and the divine gift of Canaan. Nevertheless, the reinterpretation of the whole great passages of the Bible about circumcision shows that in order to put it back into force after Moses' death, the religious elite, submitted to the pharaohs, falsified, very obviously in Genesis 34, the Second Commandment that forbids it. Historical truth makes circumcision incompatible with the religion of the great humanist liberators that Abraham and Moses were; the Egyptian fathers of Judaism were altogether opposed to the antique tradition of sexual mutilation. So, we explain why Abram and Moses were not circumcised and how the vizier Amenhotep forcibly imposed circumcision on Abraham and, once a pharaoh, on Moses' son. Abram-Akhenaten abolished the brand of slavery in the city he ruled for thirty years or so. By depriving him of his title of pharaoh in his old age, the feudal lords of the 18th dynasty resettled it for both sexes. The Hebrew maintained the abolition of excision but circumcision was the price to pay for the help of Sety 1st (Joshua) for invading Palestine.

We also strengthen the thesis of Secrets of the Exodus by reminding a few intercultural comparisons; several exegetic arguments put in relation to Egyptian culture confirm Messod and Roger Sabbah's thesis. First, we highlighted the identity of the name: “The Eternal” for the Egyptian God, namely the pharaohs, and the Biblical God, notably in two passages of the Bible in which “the Eternal” can only be a pharaoh: Abram's father in Genesis 15: 18, Moses himself in Deuteronomy: 29: 1-5. Then, we reminded two Biblical passages that directly link, on the one hand, the Hebrews, and, on the other hand, the followers of Akhenaten or the pharaonic power: the identity between the Joseph of Genesis 41: 42 and Amenophis son of Hapu, the similarities between the psalm 104 and Akhenaten's “Great hymn to the Aten. The identity between the history of Joseph and the pharaoh's wife and the Egyptian tale of the two brothers goes in the same way.

Jews have always been present to participate in the
construction of Middle Eastern society and culture. However for many, their relationship with the Middle East was cut short with the end of World War II and the creation of the state of Israel, which prompted the immigration of almost all Middle Eastern Jews. While many made new lives for themselves in Europe and North America, many more participated in the mass flood of immigration to Israel, where they would experience a re-orientation in the memory of their native countries. This reconstructed memory and identity contrasts the memories exhibited by Middle Eastern Jews that chose to immigrate to Europe and North America. I examine the memories that Middle Eastern and North African Jews in Israel choose to share in their published memoirs and note the contrasts to the memoirs published by Jews that immigrated to France, England, Canada, and the United States.

Religious Zionism and the Mizrahi Immigrants, between positive and negative labeling: a case study from the first years of the state
Malka Katz


Abstract
The article focuses on the deep currents of religious Zionism’s fears regarding the mass Mizrahi Aliyah in the early years of the State, referred to by Prof. Yaron Tsur as the "carnival fears". An analysis of the pamphlet Kedma v. Kidma by D. Zeira, the pen name of Dov Rosen, who held positions in both the Israeli absorption establishment and the religious-Zionist establishment, reveals the character of the Orientalist Orthodox European discourse. This discourse is characterized by the tension between the colonial paradigm and the principle of national equality and unity, which formed the basis of the national Zionist program and in turn for religious Zionism which was an inseparable part of it.
The symbiotic relationship between nationalism, religion and ethnicity  in Zionist ideology has already been closely examined by Yehouda Shenhav. His well-known conclusion was that the Orientalist perspective held by the secular Zionist movement’s leadership led to the religionization of the Mizrahim as a process of decline in the course of their absorption in Israel. A close examination of Kedma v. Kidma sheds light on an important aspect of ethnicity in the national-religious context, which manifested itself not necessarily in religionization but rather in religious Orientalist discourse that was directed towards the nationalism and religiosity of the Mizrahim.
The encounter between religious Zionists and Mizrahi immigrants, two groups that view the traditional way of life as legitimate, constitutes a clear case study of a complex symbiosis of religiosity, nationalism and ethnicity, which has yet to be fully explored.

מאמר זה מתמקד בזרמי העומק של חששותיה של החברה הציונית-דתית מקליטת העלייה המזרחית הגדולה בשנותיה הראשונות של המדינה, 'אימת הקרנבל' (בעקבות שם מאמרו של פרופ' ירון צור). ניתוח תכניה של החוברת קדמה מול קידמה מאת ד' זעירא, שם העט של דב רוזן, שמילא תפקידים בממסד הישראלי הקולט ובממסד הציוני-דתי, חשף את השיח האוריינטליסטי האורתודוכסי האירופאי, אשר נשזר במתח שבין הפרדיגמה הקולוניאלית לבין עקרון השוויון והאחדות הלאומיים, שעמדו ביסוד הסדר הלאומי הציוני והציונות הדתית כחלק בלתי נפרד ממנו.
הקשר הסימביוטי בין לאומיות אירופאית ביסודה, לדת ואתניות, שלוש הקטגוריות המרכיבות את החבילה האידיאולוגית הציונית, כבר נבחן בעבר בהעמקה על ידי יהודה שנהב בקרב הנהגת התנועה הציונית החילונית. מסקנתו הידועה הייתה כי ההיבט האוריינטליסטי הוביל להדתת המזרחיים כתהליך הנמכה במהלך העלאתם ארצה. העיון ב'קדמה מול קדמה' איפשר לראות פן אחר, חשוב לא פחות, של האתניות בהקשרה הדתי הלאומי, שאינה מתבטאת בהכרח בהדתה, אלא בשיח אוריינטליסטי שהתנהל כלפי לאומיותם ודתיותם של המזרחיים. המפגש שהתרחש בין הציונות הדתית לעולים המזרחיים כקבוצות שהמשיכו לראות באורח החיים המסורתי כלגיטימי גם בעידן של מודרנה וחילון הוא מקרה בוחן מובהק של שילוב סימביוטי מורכב בין דתיות, לאומיות ואתניות, שהיו לו השלכות רבות על מקומם בחברה הציונית הדתית ובכלל החברה הישראלית, שטרם נבדקו לעמקם.

Israel and Turkey are, no doubt, the vivid centers of popular music cosmopolitanism. Both realities are interesting and puzzling at the same time, reflecting their challenging geography and history. To name their geographical location as Asia or Europe, the Mediterranean region or the Middle East evokes ideas and contexts, not free from political or stereotypical judgments. Popular music and its products - songs tell the stories of people and their culture. But they are also one of the best and most efficient tools of political engineering and creating cultural identity and national particularity.
Resemblances between Turkish and Israeli popular music of the last couple of decades are stunning. They are far more than the idea of a shared Mediterranean vibe of nightclubs, taverns, and casinos with dinner, music, and belly dancers. The mechanisms behind the creation of popular Turkish and Israeli music, from the 60s until the 2000s, reflect striking correlations in the process of re-establishing identities with exclusions and inclusions of specific cultural patterns.
As usually in my work, I will let the women speak and present the fascinating story of adaptations and sources in Turkish and Israeli music. No music is apolitical and naive. I will try to trace the essential contexts - including musical, religious, ethnic, and political ones. Following Marshall McLuhan's famous statement that the medium is the message, "A Drop of Luck" also explores a story of a medium – vinyl, cassette, and CDs and their impact on societies through mass-production and distribution of music and cultural messages. The invention of a portable cassette recorder was a political and social breakthrough for many communities worldwide.

This article explores the relations between European Zionists, Sephardim, and Oriental Jews in late Ottoman Palestine by narrating the story of A. Yehudai, a Bulgarian Jewish teacher in the Sephardi community of Gaza in 1913. Reading through Yehudai’s ambitions, deliberations, and frustrations, the article makes two main arguments: First, it challenges the inclusivity often attributed in scholarly literature to the category of “Sephardi,” suggesting that as a practical category used by historical figures, especially in the context of national discourses, it was regarded as much more bounded and rigid. Second, the article points to the period before European Zionist domination over Middle Eastern Jews. Through the case of late Ottoman Gaza, the article shows that Jewish communities in Palestine were essential for institutional Zionist bodies, were aware of their situation, and even used this power structure for their own gain. Taken together, both arguments testify to the fact that communal demarcations are essential for human society in the sense that the crossing of boundaries always entails the delineation of new ones.

מה נותר ממחאת האהלים, ומהו חותמה על החברה והפוליטיקה בישראל?

מרבים לדון בסיבות למחאת האהלים ב-2011, אך מעט בהשלכותיה.
המחאה הא-פוליטית לכאורה כמשחק אגוני, שבו התמודדו שני שחקנים פוליטיים - הגמונים וכפיפים – עם השלכות הסדר הנאוליברלי.
הניתוח והדיון מתמקד בקבוצת הפעולה לא נחמדים-לא נחמדות הפועלת כחלק מהמחאה שלאחר המחאה

What means GaLUT (Exile), a metaphor for disconnectedness, in relation to the artist Joseph Sassoon Semah, a Babylonian Jew who emigrated to the West (Amsterdam)? He is part of GaLUT, an endless cycle of diaspora and return. Semah is born in Baghdad (1948), the grandson of Rabbi Hacham Sassoon Semah (1886-1971).

Sephardic Jews and Jews from Arab lands are the majority Jewish demographic in Israel today.  While some came to Israel with different motivations, the majority of Sephardim were motivated to make 'aliyah through traditional understandings. By adding their important contributions as a component to pedagogy, educators can enhance the diversity of voices in their instruction on the polyphonic texture of Israeli history and society.

This book does the history of the abolition of feminine and masculine sexual mutilation at the time of Akhenaten’s hedonist utopia. It proves by the Bible, rather than by the intercultural comparisons of Secrets of the Exodus (2000), that Abraham (Genesis 15: 8) and Moses (Deuteronomy 29: 1-5) were pharaohs, and the Hebrews Egyptians. This time, the immense discovery of Messod and Roger Sabbah is indisputable. The two authors proceeded on a double observation. Firstly, the absence of archaeological proofs of the presence of an important foreign population kept into slavery for hundreds of years; the Hebrews left no trace plainly because they were Egyptians, belonging to the sect founded by Akhenaten, namely, Abraham, that went into exile to colonize Palestine. Secondly, they back upon numerous intercultural comparisons. A journalistic smear campaign attacked that book under the pretext that it would lack “scientific” proofs. But implying that history is not an exact science, Desroches Noblecourt ended the libelling, in two times. In 2004, by multiplying the intercultural connexions between the Hebrews and the Egyptians in Le fabuleux héritage de l’Égypte, she adopted the Sabbah’s approach of compared historiography. In 2005, she brilliantly declared in an interview : “The Egyptians brought us... the alphabet…” Finally, in 2009, Davidovits discovered an absolute Egyptological proof that the authors of Genesis also drew hieroglyphs in Karnak. The real reason for the outcry provoked by Secrets of the Exodus is its incompatibility with Zionism.

            However, making pharaoh the unique God rather strengthened the pharaonic power. But we reinforce the thesis of Secrets of the Exodus by an exegetic discovery that shows that the great reason for the exile of the Hebrews was less their monotheism than their abolition of feminine and above all masculine sexual mutilation. The pharaonic tyranny rightly deemed it essential for maintaining the people in quasi-slavery. The faithful of Akhenaten went into exile because the feudal lords and the religious wanted, after thirty years of abolition of sexual mutilation in Akhetaten, to re-establish circumcision by submitting the babies to it. The matter was to impose the reason of force on helpless beings by engraving it into the unconscious in the indelible way of a trauma operating through terror and for life. Moses maintained that abolition during the forty years of the Exodus but Seti 1st, in Gilgal, ended that of circumcision, neglecting excision. The consequence is to transform four great Judaic dogmas into myths: the deity of the “Lord”, the divine election, the circumcision by divine order, and the divine gift of Canaan. Nevertheless, the reinterpretation of the whole great passages of the Bible about circumcision shows that in order to put it back into force after Moses' death, the religious elite, submitted to the pharaohs, falsified, very obviously in Genesis 34, the Second Commandment that forbids it. Historical truth makes circumcision incompatible with the religion of the great humanist liberators that Abraham and Moses were; the Egyptian fathers of Judaism were altogether opposed to the antique tradition of sexual mutilation. So, we explain why Abram and Moses were not circumcised and how the vizier Amenhotep forcibly imposed circumcision on Abraham and, once a pharaoh, on Moses' son. Abram-Akhenaten abolished the brand of slavery in the city he ruled for thirty years or so. By depriving him of his title of pharaoh in his old age, the feudal lords of the 18th dynasty resettled it for both sexes. The Hebrew maintained the abolition of excision but circumcision was the price to pay for the help of Sety 1st (Joshua) for invading Palestine.

We also strengthen the thesis of Secrets of the Exodus by reminding a few intercultural comparisons; several exegetic arguments put in relation to Egyptian culture confirm Messod and Roger Sabbah's thesis. First, we highlighted the identity of the name: “The Eternal” for the Egyptian God, namely the pharaohs, and the Biblical God, notably in two passages of the Bible in which “the Eternal” can only be a pharaoh: Abram's father in Genesis 15: 18, Moses himself in Deuteronomy: 29: 1-5. Then, we reminded two Biblical passages that directly link, on the one hand, the Hebrews, and, on the other hand, the followers of Akhenaten or the pharaonic power: the identity between the Joseph of Genesis 41: 42 and Amenophis son of Hapu, the similarities between the psalm 104 and Akhenaten's “Great hymn to the Aten. The identity between the history of Joseph and the pharaoh's wife and the Egyptian tale of the two brothers goes in the same way.

פורסם במדור דעות, הארץ - 07/09/2013 שעה 20:00
המגדר המזרחי שצמח בארץ בעשור האחרון אינו אלא המשך להשקפות אוריינטליסטיות של עמים קולוניאליסטיים באירופה. האוריינטליסט מסתכל על מה שמחוץ לאירופה בגישה פטרונית, חביבה אך מזלזלת: ממרומי תרבותו הגבוהה האוריינטליסט דאג לכך שהעמים הנכבשים, הילידים, ינציחו את הפולקלור שלהם כתחליף לתרבות. העמים הקולוניאליסטיים שמו בשק אחד את כל מי שלא דומה להם מבלי להטריח את עצמם להבחין בהבדלים ביניהם. המגדר המזרחי בישראל מצדו אינו מבחין בין מזרח למערב, בין מרוקו לפרס, בין תימן לטורקיה ובין ספרד לעיראק. "כולם אותו דבר", אומר המזרחי, ומבטל במחי יד הבדלים לשוניים, גיאוגרפיים ותרבותיים של ארצות מוצאם של הישראלים. ובעיקר - "אל תבלבל
אותנו בפרטים ועובדות", הוא אומר.
האינטלקטואל "המזרחי" פיתח ראיה מניכאית - מזרחים מול אשכנזים, אויבים לנצח. עולמו נחלק לאשכנזים רעים ומזרחים טובים, או לאשכנזים מתקדמים ומזרחים מפגרים. "המזרחי" הזה משקיף על
סביבתו בראייה אתנוצנטרית שאינה מותירה מקום רב להבדלים בין־אישיים: הפרט נעלם מהשקפת עולמו. הוא מתעלם מן ההבדלים האישיים בין בני אדם וזורק הכל לפח המוצא האתני; הכל עובר דרך הפילטר של המגדר, עד כדי כך שהוא נשמע לעתים כדוגמט המדקלם קלישאות.