The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times

572 Pages·2003·17.79 MB·English

by  Reeva Spector Simon

JME/Simon/pp.i-554 1/2/03 12:27 PM Page i
The Jews of
the Middle East and North Africa
in Modern Times
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JME/Simon/pp.i-554 1/2/03 12:27 PM Page iii
The Jews of
the Middle East and North Africa
in Modern Times
Reeva Spector Simon,
Michael Menachem Laskier,
and Sara Reguer, Editors
Columbia University Press
New York
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Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester,West Sussex
© 2002 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Jews ofthe Middle East and North Africa in modern times / Reeva Spector Simon,
Michael Menachem Laskier,and Sara Reguer,editors
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-231-10796-X (cl.:alk.Paper) — ISBN 0-231-10797-8 (pbk.:alk.Paper)
1.Jews—Middle East—History—Congresses.2.Jews—Africa,
North—History—Congresses. I.Simon,Reeva S.II.Laskier,Michael M.,1949– III.
Reguer,Sara,1953–
DS135.L4 J49 2002
956'.004924—dc21 2002073451
©
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Introduction vii
Contributors xiii
PART 1: THEMES
1. History of the Jews in the Middle East and
North Africa from the Rise of Islam Until 1700
Jane S.Gerber 3
2. Europe in the Middle East
Reeva Spector Simon 19
3. Economic Life
Michael Menachem Laskier and Reeva Spector Simon 29
4. Community Leadership and Structure
Michael Menachem Laskier,Sara Reguer,and Haim Saadoun 49
5. Religion:Rabbinic Tradition and the Response to Modernity
Zvi Zohar 65
6. Intellectual Life
Ammiel Alcalay 85
7. Jewish Languages Enter the Modern Era
David M.Bunis,Joseph Chetrit,and Haideh Sahim 113
8. Education
Rachel Simon 142
9. Zionism
Rachel Simon 165
10. Beliefs and Customs
Issachar Ben-Ami 180
11. Material Culture
Esther Juhasz 205
12. Music
Mark Kligman 224
13. The World ofWomen
Sara Reguer 235
v
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vi CONTENTS
PART 2.COUNTRY-BY-COUNTRY SURVEY
14. Ottoman Turkey
Jacob M.Landau 277
15. The Ottoman Balkans
Aron Rodrigue 292
16. Turkey
George E.Gruen 303
17. Syria and Lebanon
Michael Menachem Laskier 316
18. Eretz Israel/Palestine,1800–1948
Ruth Kark and Joseph B.Glass 335
19. Iraq
Reeva Spector Simon 347
20. Iran and Afghanistan
Haideh Sahim 367
21. Yemen
Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman 389
22. Egypt and the Sudan
Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim 409
23. Libya
Harvey E.Goldberg 431
24. Tunisia
Haim Saadoun 444
25. Algeria
David Cohen 458
26. Morocco
Michael Menachem Laskier and Eliezer Bashan 471
Appendix 505
Index 529
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Introduction
T
his volume began with an informal discussion by the three editors at
the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1992.
Recognizing the proliferation in the United States of college and university
departments in both Middle Eastern and Jewish history, we noted the
increasing interest in the role of Middle Eastern and North African Jews in
shaping their societies.However,even with the significant monographs that
have appeared since the 1980s highlighting aspects of the history and cul-
ture of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire,Eretz Israel (Palestine),Iran,North
Africa,and their successor states of the twentieth century,we,like many of
our colleagues,were frustrated that no one had done a coherent synthesis to
present to our students in our courses on Jews of the modern Middle East.
This lacuna in both Jewish and Middle Eastern studies is partly because
general histories of the region write Jews out of the standard narrative.As
part of the religious and ethnic mosaic that was traditional Islamic society,
Jews were but one among numerous minorities.As dhimmis, they played a
subordinate role in the dominant Muslim society and appear intermittently,
most notably as individuals who participated in certain economic niches.
Until modern times the story of the Jews in the region appeared in trav-
elers’ accounts and responsa literature (decisions from rabbis in response
to submitted queries).With the development in the West of a scientific ap-
proach to the study of the Jewish people,however,Jewish historians of the
nineteenth century analyzed their society in the context ofthe “Jewish ques-
tion”posed by the Christian West.From a Eurocentric perspective the Jews,
along with the non-Christian peoples in the Middle East and Asia, were
perceived as the Other.
But just as European Christians touted the superiority of the West over
the “Orient,” European Jews examined their own history Eurocentrically
and praised the aristocrats of European Jewry,the Sephardim who achieved
parity in multicultural medieval Spain, and in turn lamented the plight of
Ashkenazi Jewry, persecuted and exiled from community to community.
European Jews marginalized the other (non-European) Jews and Sephardim
who settled in Europe and examined them in all their Otherness and
vii
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viii INTRODUCTION
exoticism. This orientation has continued, even in Israel—the locus of the
majority of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewry today—in the context of
the dominant Ashkenazi culture.We hope that this book will counteract the
stereotype that has evolved of Middle Eastern Jews as primitive premodern
people and recast them as possessors ofdensely textured and creative public
and private intellectual lives.This volume is an attempt to reclaim modern
Middle Eastern Jewish material,cultural,and spiritual existence,not just to
prove that such a history existed.To that end we invited leading scholars in
their fields to an international conference at Columbia University, where
they presented their papers,discussed them,and ultimately submitted them
as chapters of this book.
The communities under discussion lived in the Islamic world.Although
this is the political and cultural context in which the Jews lived,our empha-
sis in this book is specifically on Jewish society.A community subordinate
to the dominant Muslim elite,Jews had economic mobility despite their lack
of political power.Thus until two centuries ago Jews were at the bottom of
the political and religious hierarchy, but at times and in some places they
could be better off economically than the Muslim majority,who were pri-
marily peasants in a largely agricultural society.Spain exiled both Jews and
Muslims in 1492. Other societies did not always impose discriminatory
practices,which also varied in time and place.While Jews in Morocco and
Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century were in dire straits,those in
Cairo and Baghdad flourished.
The faith-based communities of Muslims,Christians,and Jews had lim-
ited interaction. Men dominated all segments of society, and these groups
interacted only in public spaces such as the marketplace and the coffee shop.
Home and family were private.Jewish religious and educational institutions
and social welfare organizations were under the aegis of the community,
which over time had developed the means for surviving in the Diaspora.
Exiled from their religious and cultural center in Eretz Israel after the
destruction of the First Temple (586 B.C.E.), Jews lived primarily in
Babylonia (Mesopotamia). By the time they returned to Eretz Israel at the
time of the ancient Persian Empire,they had developed some tools of sur-
vival as a minority group.They used these tools when Rome destroyed the
Second Temple, and they began their long diasporic history. One branch
went from Eretz Israel to Rome, north to the Rhineland, and then east
through Germany to Eastern Europe.This is the Ashkenazi branch of Jews.
Others stayed in the Middle East.Faith continued to be their way of life,the
community was centered on the rabbi and the synagogue,and all normative
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INTRODUCTION ix
Jews used the same Torah (written law),Talmud (oral law),and methodol-
ogy for solving halakhic (legal) problems.Hebrew became the language of
scholarship and prayer.Vernacular dialects such as Judeo-Arabic developed
based on the language of the community, interspersed with Hebrew and
Aramaic words and phrases; this is paralleled in Eastern Europe by the
development of Judeo-German (Yiddish).
Their faith, Judaism, signifies a mode of life based on adherence to the
teachings of the Torah given by God.Traditional Jews accept that the Torah
came in written form with oral interpretation. The latter evolved through
the millennia into a vast sea of legal, ethical, and philosophical writings
based mainly on the Talmud, which determined the lifestyle of the Jews
wherever they lived. The commonality of law was modified by local and
regional customs or praxis, which reflected both the acculturation of the
Jews and the realities of life as a minority group. Popular religion, always
paralleling rabbinic norms, manifested itself in part in the Hasidic move-
ment in Eastern Europe and in “saint worship” in the Middle East. In the
Middle East,a region where living areas are determined by religion,ethnic
group,tribe,or occupation,Jews were not really a people who lived apart,as
they had in Europe,where they were the dominant minority and singled out
under Christian rule as a people who lived apart.
Persian rule had already established an autonomous way of life for com-
munities to enable them to practice their religions. Religious law was to
decide personal status issues,an arrangement maintained under Islamic rule
well into modern times. The period of the Enlightenment in Europe,
changes wrought by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and
the period of reform in the Ottoman Empire (Tanzimat), accompanied by
the stresses of modernization, colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism,
affected Jewish communities not only in Europe but in the Middle East as
well.How these societies coped with these changes is the subject ofthis book.
To address these issues we take a double approach.The country chapters,
which cover history and politics,economic life,society,and culture,analyze
local diversity.Thematic chapters,on the other hand,cut across the region
to highlight trends and overarching generalizations of sameness. The two
parts of the book complement each other to provide a picture of life in a
region where transnational threads remain despite the creation of nation-
states,which in many cases occurred less than a century ago,and extend to
Europe,the Far East,and the Americas.
The definition of the Middle East and North Africa that we use here is a
traditional one and includes the Arabic-speaking lands, the Ottoman