The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa
Under the influence of Western imperialism and colonialism, Mizrahi Jews negotiated modernity and became increasingly Westernized.
The “Eastern” Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire, Maghreb, Levant, and Asia and Their Languages
To speak of “Jews of the Muslim world,” or “Jews of the Middle East” circa 1880 is to speak of roughly one million Jews who in fact belonged to numerous, quite different communities. Though bound together to some degree by a shared Sephardic rabbinic and textual tradition, the Ladino-speaking Sephardim of the Ottoman Balkans lived quite distinct lives from Judeo-Arabic speaking communities of the Arab world in the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Ottoman-run Arab Levant or Mashriq, who were themselves by no means one single community but an assemblage of many—although migratory circuits bound them in important ways. And there were many smaller, more isolated communities scattered across the Indian Ocean basin or far into Central Asia.
Modern Cultural Creativity
Yet one thing that bound these disparate “Eastern” Jewish communities together in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century was that they negotiated their relationship to cultural modernity under the unique pressure of spreading West European colonial and imperial control or influence throughout the region. The dizzying complexity of Middle Eastern Jewish cultural creativity in this period—a creativity undertaken in Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Hebrew, but also in French, Italian, English, mainstream literary Arabic and even, marginally, Turkish—cannot be adequately understood without taking into account both West European imperial and colonial rule in North Africa coupled with great economic, political, and cultural influence in much of the Ottoman Empire and the political, cultural, and religious reactions this domination spurred in the region’s states and societies.
Negotiations with Western Culture and Internalized “Orientalism”
The dramatic influence of the West on the cultural lives and outlooks of many inhabitants of this diverse region, including not least Jews, was at one level mediated by straightforward economic determinations. In a world where trade and production were being reoriented by the economic power of Western capitalists and banks backed by the influence of their states, it was simply natural that many “locals” would see the learning of Western languages, the emulation of Western lifestyles, and contact with Western culture as key to finding new economic opportunities.
Beyond economic considerations, the dramatic extension of West European power in the region was widely understood both by the dominators and the dominated as demonstrating that Western Europe’s version of political, economic, and cultural modernity was superior, or at any rate demanded response. While Western imperial thinkers elaborated Orientalist views of the Middle East as intrinsically decadent or stagnant (with a growing helping of racialist theories thrown in), many people in the Mediterranean world felt compelled to undertake what historian Aron Rodrigue calls “an open-ended phenomenon of mimesis, emulation, adoption, or adaptation of Western ways”—a process also shadowed by some internalization of the view that one’s own local culture was indeed inadequate and by the paradox that no matter how much one self-Westernized, one would not really be accepted as a Frenchman or Englishman.1
This multifaceted process of negotiating a relationship to Western culture played out with great force in Jewish communities across the Middle East and the Mediterranean world, first among merchant elites but quickly reaching more middling strata. This Jewish encounter was mediated, shaped, and even imposed less by European administrators than by Jews from Western Europe, particularly through institutions affiliated with the French Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle. Founded by French Jews in the mid-nineteenth century to aid “less fortunate brethren” elsewhere, the Alliance found its true métier in the 1880–1918 period in the project of “regenerating” Jews of the Middle East. In nearly two hundred schools from Tangiers to Izmir, Baghdad, and Tehran in Qajar Iran, thousands of Jewish boys and girls were taught a curriculum rich in French culture, European languages, a modern approach to Judaism, and the idealization of “Western civilization.”
Concretely, Westernization in the Middle East meant a profound transformation in the cultural and textual order of the region in our period. Even as traditional lifeways and forms of culture persisted, new forms of cultural creativity associated with the West flourished in every language of the region, including the languages of the region’s Jews: the modern press, new literary forms, and new kinds of scientific and social criticism. At the same time, many in the region—particularly urban strata, among whom most Jews of the region could be counted—invested great cultural energies in learning and using the languages of Western culture and power: Italian in some places, English in others, and above all French.
It should be noted that not all historians would place quite so much emphasis on Westernization—both imposed and chosen—as the chief force remaking Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultural life in our period. Where Ottoman power remained robust, particularly in the Asia Minor and Balkan core of the empire, Sephardic cultural life was reshaped not only in relation to a sense that Western culture was the path to modernity but also in relation to a reforming Ottoman state that in the name of modernization offered—and demanded—new forms of patriotism, self-modernization, and social participation from all of the ethnoreligious groups that made up the empire. These included Greeks and Armenians (whom the state also increasingly targeted for terrible violence), Arab elites both Muslim and Christian in the Levant, and Jews. There was much Jewish cultural engagement with the question of how to be a good Ottoman citizen, a question shadowed by the issue that loomed large in the Russian and Austrian Empires too: how exactly were Jews supposed to maneuver between imperial belonging and rising nationalist challenges to imperial rule? Some historians of the Arab world (both the parts that were under Ottoman rule and the parts that were not) similarly emphasize indigenous processes of social change in accounting for cultural change, particularly the transregional emergence of a new multireligious urban middle class ready to rethink old hierarchies, beliefs, and roles. This small but rapidly emerging stratum entertained new visions of an Arab identity defined not by religion but by the shared Arabic language and culture. It produced an outpouring of avowedly modern Arabic journalism, criticism, scholarship, and literature in centers like Cairo, Beirut, Jaffa, and, toward the end of our period, Baghdad. Although few Jews had the linguistic wherewithal and cultural disposition to take part in this endeavor in these decades, a small coterie did so and thus opened the door to yet another distinctive Jewish trajectory in the Middle East.
Yet the presence and power of the West as something that could be emulated or resisted but neither simply joined nor simply ignored was a central feature of Jewish cultural change across the Middle East. In addition to changing how many Jews thought of themselves and what kinds of cultural products they valued and consumed, Western cultural influences provoked increasingly sharp internal Jewish struggles regarding traditional Jewish norms of religious belief and social order, not least as these related to traditional gender roles. At the same time, Jewish cultural change and concrete Jewish economic, legal, and political connections to Western colonial powers, chosen and unchosen, had mixed impacts on Jewish relations with their Arab Muslim neighbors. In some places, Europeanization positioned Jews to play outsized roles in mediating new cultural forms to majority-Muslim societies; this was the case in Egypt, where the remarkable emergence of an immigrant Jewish banking and mercantile elite linked to European colonial capitalism laid the groundwork for the next generation to stand at the center of Egyptian cultural modernity in realms like cinema and music. But in other places, outsized Europeanization among Middle Eastern Jews opened widening cultural rifts between them and their Muslim neighbors.
It is also important to note that new forms of Jewish communitarian self-understanding, including Zionism, were not absent from the Middle Eastern scene, though full-fledged Jewish cultural nationalism attained a far smaller cultural footprint than in Eastern Europe. But even these positive agendas of Jewish communal reformation were in many ways dialectical responses to the challenge of the West in which already-Westernized Eastern Jews negotiated new syntheses of modern ideals and practices with a selective revaluation of their own indigenous cultures.