LOcATING THe ZIONIST-ARAB eNcOUNTeR • 37so on, should we not speak of arab Jews? While the phrase arab Jew
might strike the early twenty- first- century ear as awkward if not oxy-
moronic, perhaps discomfort with the term is a result of the subse-
quent Arab- Israeli conflict, when Arab and Jew were presumed ene-
mies, not qualifiers of single individuals or communities. Before the
intensification of this conflict, could these not have been terms of po-
tential hybridity rather than hostility? Determined to resist this po-
litical anachronism— the view that Arabs and Jews necessarily meet
on opposite ends of a battlefield, not a hyphen— a number of recent
scholars have taken to referring to this population as arab- Jews.^80
In fact, appellations similar to “Arab Jews” were not unheard of in
the Late Ottoman period. the phrase yahūd awlād al- ʿarab (Jews chil-
dren of arabs) appeared in certain Late Ottoman arabic writing in ref-
erence to native Jews of palestine, according to scholar Salim tamari.^81
ashkenazic Zionists would, on occasion, criticize Middle eastern Jews
viewed as overly enmeshed in arab culture as “arabs of the Mosaic
faith.”^82 In late 1908 someone even signed a notice in Ben- Yehuda’s
hebrew newspaper with the name “ha- ʿivriyah ha- ʿarviyah” (the Arab
hebrew woman).^83
Yet what I have found is that the response to that notice seems to
represent a more typical view from the period: “to the arab hebrew
woman! If you are a Hebrew, you are not an Arab. If an Arab, not a
Hebrew. So, you are neither a Hebrew nor an Arab. c.Q.F.D.”^84 though
hardly a cogent logical proof, this statement, read in the context of the
variety of writing extant from the period, suggests that a blanket em-
brace of “Arab Jew” to describe Arabic- speaking Jews would represent
a terminological anachronism. Because I share the desire to rethink
(^80) In the Iraqi context, Orit Bashkin has proposed using the term arab Jew to refer not
only to those who explicitly regarded themselves as such, but also to Jews who “prac-
ticed . . . Arab Jewishness, in that they wrote in Arabic, read Arabic texts, interacted
with fellow Muslim and christian Arabs, and enjoyed Arab cinema, music, and theater.”
Bashkin, New Babylonians, 2. For a discussion of the concept of Arab Jews in different
historical settings, see Levy, “Historicizing the concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq”;
Gottreich, “Historicizing the concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib.” On Palestine, see
Jacobson, “The Sephardi community in Pre– World War I Palestine”; Jacobson, “From
empire to empire.”
(^81) Tamari cites “the autobiographies of Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh,” but
he does not note particular pages in these texts. tamari also mentions the title abnāʾ al-
balad (sons of the country), also used in these texts to refer to “native Jews of Palestine.”
tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 164.
(^82) See Kaniel, “Anshei ha- ʿaliyah ha- sheniyah u- venei ha- ʿedah ha- sefaradit,” 309n.17.
Cf. Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith.
(^83) ha- Ẓevi 25:42 (November 27, 1908), Supplement, 2.
(^84) Ibid.