Arabic as a Jewish Language

BY AMOS

Earlier today, Professor Emeritus Sasson Somekh (b. 1933) delivered the first of three lectures held under the auspices of the annual Taubman series at the University of California - Berkeley. Somekh, who was born in Baghdad and came to Israel with the airlifts of Iraqi Jewry in 1951, at the age of 17, is Israel's foremost authority on contemporary Arabic literature. In his Taubman lecture he spoke about "Arabic as a Jewish Language," beginning the series with background about Judeo-Arabic and a survey of the two greatest Iraqi Jewish writers.

Somekh's brief sketch of the history of Judeo-Arabic will probably be familiar to most of our readers and can be found in several sources, including his own publications. The highlight of his talk was Somekh's discussion of Iraqi Jewish literature in the twentieth century. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked the onset of a linguistic revolution for the Jews of Iraq. Until then, Jews in the various Arab countries spoke some form of Judeo-Arabic, which they recorded in Hebrew letters using a relatively standardized system of transcription. But in the twentieth century, an increasing number of Iraqi Jews learned what Somekh calls "Arabic-Arabic" - for the first time, they wrote literary Arabic in Arabic letters. In North Africa and Egypt, on the other hand, Jews tended to be literate primarily in French, while in Yemen, Jews continued to write Judeo-Arabic until very late.

For a brief period of a few decades, Iraqi Jews wrote for an audience of non-Jewish Iraqis, taking part in many of the journalistic and literary endeavors that sprang up in Baghdad from the 1920s to the 1950s. Somekh mentioned such writers as Meir Basri, Shalom Darwish, and Ya'qub Bilbul. At least some of these authors have been studied by Arab scholars and praised for their contributions to Iraqi literature. The situation is more complicated with those writers who came to Israel as teenagers or in their early twenties. Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas, for example, left Baghdad between the ages of 18-20. Both had been part of political (Michael, who was active in the Communist Party) and literary circles (Ballas) in Baghdad. In Israel, they learned Hebrew and published most of their works in that language. Somekh, who came to Israel when he was 17, belongs to this group. Although he did not speak about it, he has published a memoir called Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew which has been translated into English.

But a different group of writers found itself in a sort of "doubled exile" after the immigration to Israel. Somekh spoke about two remarkable individuals who, for whatever reason, wrote almost all of their works in Arabic while living in Israel. They were perhaps the most accomplished Jewish novelists to write in Arabic but their work has made almost no inroads in the Arab world. Yitzhak (Ishaq) Bar-Moshe and Samir Naqqash (1938-2004). Both were born in Baghdad but came to Israel at different ages.

Bar-Moshe left Baghdad when he was 23. He found work as an Arabic-language broadcaster and journalist employed by the Israeli government and did not become active in literary circles until 1972 when he published a first collection of stories, in Arabic, called "Behind the Fence." Over the next decade, he had published ten more short story collections and four enormous autobiographical novels. Most of his stories are "like Kafka's worlds," devoid of local context and often philosophical. A posthumously-published memoir called Two Days in June (2003) described his experience of the 1941 "Farhud" (pogrom) against Baghdad Jews in June 1941.

Samir Naqqash arrived in Israel at the age of 13. Unlike many others of his generation, he mastered literary Arabic and indeed never learned to speak Hebrew properly. He published his first collection of stories, called Al Khata (The Mistake), in 1971. Subsequently he published about a dozen novels, plays, and short stories. The most remarkable feature of Naqqash's writing was his transcription of the differing colloquial dialects spoken respectively by Baghdad's Jews and Muslims. Because these dialects, which were the subject of a study by Somekh's revered teacher Haim Blanc (Communal Dialects in Baghdad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) would have been incomprehensible - in writing - to readers of literary Arabic (indeed, Somekh claims that Baghdadi Jews would not have been able to decipher the Muslim dialect and vice versa), Naqqash added footnotes to each of his many passages of dialog with a "translation" into fus'ha. To accomplish this, Naqqash engaged in the "Sisyphean labor" of adding diacritical marks (of his own contrivance) to precisely render the dialect pronunciations.

Somekh's talk next Wednesday will discuss the Cairo Genizah. More to follow.

Meir Shalev: "Olmert, you're fired"

Meir Shalev's Roman Rusi (1988)

The protest in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square has drawn more than 100,000 demonstrators. Organizers made a deliberate decision not to allow current Knesset members to speak. It looks like they were able to bring together activists from across the political spectrum (see Ynet, Ha'aretz, Ha'aretz English).

Attendees included the novelist Meir Shalev (b. 1948), famous for his depiction of a Jezreel Valley moshav from the time of the pioneers to the 1980s in the novel רומן רוסי [lit. "Russian Novel," but the English title is The Blue Mountain], who called on the prime minister to resign and accused the government of having "wasted the lives of soldiers and civilians" (Ynet).

The size of this demonstration may not force Olmert to step down, but it might embolden Knesset members opposed to him firing Tsipi Livni. Contrary to what I anticipated, the orange camp did not dominate the protest.There are clearly enough people from across Israeli society who want Olmert and co. to take responsibility.

Post-Colonialist Fantasies about the "Arab Jew"

I've had the pleasure of reading some very interesting Ha'aretz articles by Prof. Sasson Somekh, Israel's éminence grise of Arabic literature and a world renowned scholar of that field, in the past weeks. Somekh is one of a number of Jews who moved to Israel from Iraq in the 1950s and made their mark as academics and writers here.

It's always sad to me that anything written about Middle Eastern Jewry in English has to be prefaced by some obligatory background about the fact that there were once vibrant Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The great majority of these Jews fled/emigrated/were expelled after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the rise of Arab nationalist regimes.

To this day, discussions about the circumstances that caused the massive exodus of Jews from their homelands in the Middle East are highly politicized. There are many people who argue that the Jews who fled Syria, Egypt and Iraq, for example, are no less deserving of the sympathy that has been shown to Palestinian refugees. Scholars and pseudo-scholars of the post-colonialist, anti-Zionist persuasion, on the other hand, have adopted Mizrahi (Hebrew for "Eastern" as in "Oriental") Jews as honourary (but generally reluctant) members of the "victims-of-Zionist-Ashkenazi-imperialist-oppression" club. Generally, the highly politicized claim of these academics is that the Jews who immigrated to Israel were "Arab Jews", whose identity and language was Arab. The post-colonialists argue further that these "Arab Jews,", after being conned into coming to Israel, were forced to abandon their heritage and their true identity, along with their alleged sympathies for their "fellow Arabs", the Palestinians. In the writings of these people, some of whom are Israeli scholars and others foreigners, "Mizrahi" Jews are depicted as the good Jews who were somehow perverted by the white/Ashkenazi/colonialist/Zionist establishment.

I have no problem with critical scholarship that challenges dominant social narratives and examines the problematic relationship of Israeli society to everything "Oriental". Many Middle Eastern Jews were indeed victims of discrimination, and there is no denying that immigrants who came to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s were pressured to conform to what was then an Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli identity. Among other things, this meant that people were made to feel ashamed of speaking Arabic, of having particular "Oriental" customs and of wearing certain clothes. Eastern European Jews, by the way, came under the same pressure to conform to "Israeliness" and to speak Hebrew rather than their native Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, Hungarian or Romanian. In any case, to insist, today, as some radical, weirdo NGOs (Ahoti-Sista) and pro-Palestinian scholars (e.g. Joseph Massad, who has probably never been to Israel) do, that Israel is some kind of "internal apartheid" country composed of a dominant Ashkenazi elite and a downtrodden mass of "Arab Jews", is to be completely detached from reality. Today, Israelis of Middle Eastern origin are part of the establishment. Ethnicity and cultural backgrounds (and it's not exactly in the North American sense of the word) are celebrated proudly in public – witness the popularity of weddings in which bride and groom dress in traditional Moroccan Jewish attire or the number of people who still choose to have a Henna ceremony before the wedding. Furthermore, no one would even think of suggesting that the people who carry out these ceremonies are any less Israeli because of them.

So, basically, the only people who still hold on to the myth that Israeli Jewish society is about to errupt in ethnic conflict are those who have an interest in discrediting Israel. Usually, these people tend to be rather out of touch with what is going on in Israel. That is the reason why I was not surprised to read what Sasson Somekh had to say about a recent translation and review of an Israeli short story that appeared in the Egyptian literary magazine al-Hilal. Somekh grew up reading al-Hilal as a teenager in Baghdad, wrote Arab poetry and published masterful studies of Nagib Mahfuz's work. He has no problem calling himself an "Arab Jew" and does so frequently, but he is well aware that hardly anyone in Israel defines him or herself that way. That is why Somekh, the Israeli academic reading an Arabic translation of a Hebrew short story, is also quite critical of the translator's review.

The review and translation in question appeared in the June 2006 edition of al-Hilal and are the work of Muhammad 'Abud who translated the Ha'aretz prize-winning short story "Ana min al-yahud" written by Almog Bahar (although its title is in Arabic, the story itself was originally in Hebrew). Somekh starts out praising 'Abud, as he should. After all, it's not every day that Israeli literature is translated into Arabic in the Arab world and published so prominently. From Somekhs critique of 'Abud's review, however, it soon becomes clear that he takes issue with the claims that the Egyptian translator makes in his critique. 'Abud, who has also never visited Israel, characterizes Almog Bahar's story as a "Protest against Cultural Oppression". According to 'Abud, the hidden message that Bahar is trying to convey can be summed up as follows:"אני יהודי-ערבי ואני מדוכא ומקופח בשל ההגמוניה האשכנזית" [I'm an Arab Jew and I am oppressed by the Ashkenazi hegemony]. As Somekh reveals, however, the story is much more subtle and complex than that. It appears, above all, to be a humorous take on ethnic-linguistic tensions in Israeli society. I'll try to read the story before I comment more fully on it. To me it seems clear that even some of the more open-minded Egyptian intellectuals who take a genuine interest in Israel still suffer from a tendency to politicize their study of Israeli literature. For them, Israeli literature is to be read only as a means of understanding Israeli society, but not on its own artistic merits. Of course, that is a charge that can also be levelled at Middle Eastern studies scholars in Israel, although not at Somekh, whose works of criticism really do make an effort to treat their subject - Modern Arabic Literature - on its own merits, rather than as socio-political manifestos.

Source:
ששון סומך, המספר הישראלי - שטן או בעל ברית July 7, 2006 Ha'aretz