On 14 December 1984, I was sitting in the news department of the Voice of Israel, Arabic section. One of our correspondents had just informed us that Anwar Shā’ul (1904–1984) had passed away in Kiryat Ono near Tel-Aviv. We broadcast this news along with a short biography. Over the internal telephone network, I called the news editor in the Hebrew section; it was important, I thought, to inform Israeli citizens that one of the last Arab-Jewish writers had passed away. “Anwar who?!” was her rather loud response. I briefly explained the situation to her, but she then replied, ze lo me‘anyen et ha-ma’zīnīm shelanū (it doesn’t interest our listeners). I didn’t try to convince her otherwise, but her words stayed with me.
Two years later Murād Mīkhā’īl (Michael) (1906–1986) died, also in total anonymity. As an academic dealing with the historical development of Arabic literature, mainly in modern times, I saw myself faced with a challenge. I knew, of course, that literature was not isolated from other systems ― political, social, religious, national, etc. ― but perhaps owing to my personal background, I was confused. I understood why the role of the Jews in Arabic literature had been marginalized and why Arab culture had low status in Israeli culture; I was also aware of the sad fact that Israeli society had chosen not to enjoy the contribution that Jews from the Arab world could have made to building a pluralistic Israeli culture ― a culture which would not have excluded the Arab as the “Other” and would have included the Arab as an integral part of the Jewish historical-cultural heritage. Nevertheless, I was completely surprised by the sheer indifference felt by Israeli Jews toward the deaths of these last Arab-Jewish writers as well as by the former’s efforts, consciously or unconsciously, to rewrite the past, even if that past was hardly a distant one.
Soon thereafter, I started to follow the cultural and literary activity of Jews from Arab countries, both in Israel and abroad. Although from the very beginning of my academic career I had been a student of Arabic literature, I had paid little, if any, attention to this phenomenon. At this point, however, I became eager to know as much as possible about its historical background. I began to explore the struggle of Jews ever since the pre-Islamic period to be Jewish in their religion and Arab in their culture ― to be “Arabs of the Mosaic faith.” In fact, only gradually did I become aware that although I was a Sabra ― a native-born Israeli Jew ― these writers and poets should have been part of my cultural heritage. But they had been deliberately excluded to such an extent that even the Israeli-born offspring of Jews from the Arab world were unaware of their existence. The Arabic cultural heritage of these writers and poets became for me a focus of research and personal introspection.
My parents were born in Baghdad and immigrated to Israel in 1951 ― I was born two years later. A Sabra in the Israeli-Zionist educational system, I had been taught that Arabness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive. As a child trying to conform to the dominant Ashkenazi-Zionist norm, I felt ashamed of the Arabness of my parents. For them, I was an agent of repression sent by the Israeli-Hebrew establishment, after “excellent” training, into the territory of the enemy ― my own family. And I completed the mission in a way that only children can do with their loving parents: I forbade them to speak Arabic in public or to listen to Arabic music. My sole cultural heritage was the Ashkenazi-Zionist-Jewish one, and the Holocaust was the decisive marker of my cultural identity. It was not only the problem of Arabness that I had to face: my father was a Communist activist at a time when being a Communist in Israel was tantamount to being a terrorist.
What I remember most about my father is that he was a lover of Arabic poetry and that he always quoted verses for my benefit, even though I understood little. When my interest in the role that Jews had played in Arabic culture and literature was awakened, I realized that I remembered nothing of what my father had recited to me ― it had been part of the culture that in Israel had been shunted aside as inferior. This had not only been the case in my elementary and secondary education, but also in my academic education in the field of Arabic literature. In any event, I remembered that my father had insisted on reciting Arabic verses to me even though I had no desire to listen to him. Probably because he was compelled to recite them over and over again and because he sometimes insisted on adding a Hebrew translation ― on account of my being so ignorant ― I managed to retrace one of those verses. I remembered that it had something to do with camels and water, and I still had some sense of the music ― the melody of al-kāmil meter. It is a verse that has been attributed to the blind medieval ascetic Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī (973–1058) ― the poet whose Risālat al-Ghufrān [The Epistle of Forgiveness], according to some views, influenced Dante (1265–1321) while he was composing the Divine Comedy. The verse reads as follows:
When I managed to discover the verse, I suddenly understood what my father had for many years been (rather unsuccessfully) trying to convey to me regarding my dismissive attitude toward my own personal cultural heritage. But I also understood that he had stood no chance with a son whose brain was being washed and controlled by the Israeli-Zionist educational system. In fact, it was only after my father and my mother had passed away that I started to ask myself certain troubling questions: What is the relationship between Jewishness and Arabness? What is the historical background of my father’s love for Arabic poetry and of my mother’s love for Arabic music? Why is something that was completely natural during the 1930s or even the 1940s ― to be an Arab of the Mosaic faith ― now untenable? Why were entire generations in Israel educated to understand Arab culture as an inferior one? How and why did a child acquire so much hatred for the culture of his own parents, and why have my own daughters never understood how their father could wish to listen to Arabic music (given that he is not an “Arab”!)? One day after I had given a talk in Arabic on Israeli television, one of my daughters came home from school and said that her friends had told her that her father was an Arab ― and this was not a compliment. Only at the beginning of the 1990s did I ask myself whether I could refer to the civilized society in which I lived in terms used by Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”1
But it was not a one-sided exclusion. Gradually, I began to understand that there was a kind of unspoken agreement between the two national movements ― Zionism and Arab nationalism ― to perform a total cleansing of Arab-Jewish culture, and that each claimed to have support from an “exclusivist” divine source. The national and political struggle over a small piece of territory has not hindered the two national movements from seeing eye-to-eye in this respect, although I was very much aware of the difference between them: one was inspired by European colonialism, and the other was an anti-colonial venture. The canonical Arab-Muslim and the Jewish-Zionist cultural and national systems have both excluded the hybrid Arab-Jewish identity and promoted the “pure” Jewish-Zionist identity against the “pure” Arab-Muslim one. As a result, Arab-Jewish culture has become a disease that is to be eradicated, and the few people who cannot be cured are to be quarantined and contained for fear of contamination. When Dār al-Sāqī in Beirut published in 2002 my Arabic book Rak‘atān fī al-‘Ishq: Dirāsa fī Shi‘r ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bayyātī [Two Rak‘as in Love: A Study of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bayyātī’s Poetry], it was without any reference to my Jewish or Israeli identity or my academic affiliation. In a letter from 26 November 2001, the publisher’s London office wrote to me: “We unfortunately cannot mention that the author is an Israeli citizen or leave any hint that the book has come from Israel.” The publisher also omitted the book’s dedication, which was to my father, who was born in 1921 in Baghdad, an Iraqi of the Mosaic faith, and who passed away in 1979 in Haifa longing for the banks of the Tigris. The present book bears this very omitted dedication.
We are currently witnessing the demise of Arab-Jewish culture. A tradition that started more than fifteen hundred years ago is vanishing before our very eyes. The main factor in the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Arab symbiosis up to the twentieth century, from the Jewish point of view, was that the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam adopted Arabic as their spoken language. This symbiosis does not exist in our time because Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language spoken on a daily basis by Jews. The image of an hourglass is an apposite one: the grains of sand are quickly running out. Following the death of the aforementioned Anwar Shā’ul and Murād Mīkhā’īl, other Arab-Jewish writers and poets passed away in absolute obscurity, among them Salīm al-Baṣṣūn (1927–1995), Shalom Darwīsh (1913–1997), David Semah (1933–1997), Ya‘qūb Balbūl (1920–2003), and Isḥāq Bār-Moshe (1927–2003). There can be no doubt that the death of the greatest Arab-Jewish writer in modern times, Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004), was one of the major nails in the coffin of the Arabic literature of the Jews. Naqqāsh passed away without possessing the most elementary means for honorable survival. “I don’t exist in this country,” he said some years before his death, “neither as a writer, citizen, or human being. I don’t feel that I belong anywhere, not since my roots were torn from the ground [in Baghdad].” After Naqqāsh’s death, other Arab-Jewish writers and poets passed away, including Mīr Baṣrī (1911–2006), Ibrāhīm Obadyā (1924–2006), Murād ʽAbd Allāh al-ʽAmārī (1923–2012), Maurice Shammās (1930–2013), Salīm Murād Shaʽshūʽa (1926–2013), Maryam al-Mullā (1927–2013), and Shmuel Moreh (1932–2017), who passed away shortly before I sent the manuscript of the present book to the press.2
Furthermore, in the field of literature there is not even one Jewish writer of record who was born in Israel after 1948 and who is still writing in Arabic. A Jew who is now fluent in Arabic must have either been born in an Arab country (and their numbers, of course, are rapidly decreasing) or have acquired the language as part of his training for service in the military or security services (and their numbers, needless to say, are always increasing). The Israeli-Jewish canonical elite does not see the Arabic language and Arab culture as intellectual assets ― there is no better illustration of this point than the structure of the comparative literature departments at Israeli universities, where you can hardly find tenured scholars who have a knowledge of Arabic or who have taken the trouble to study its literature. In short, we all know that the chapter of Arab-Jewish symbiosis has reached its end, and that the hourglass will not be turned over anytime soon, if at all.
From the late 1980s, I have been dedicating a major part of my scholarship in the area of Arab culture to the study of the Arabic literary and cultural activities of the Jews of the Middle East (see the General Bibliography). As I published in this field of research in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German, it was brought to my attention that the phenomenon of Jewish-authored Arabic literature was completely unknown even among educated people and university professors in the West. The present book is a modest attempt to fill the gap and shed some light on this phenomenon. It is as well a complementary volume to the two books I already published about Arab-Jewish modern culture: The Hebrew book ‘Arviyyūt, Yahadūt, Tsiyonūt: Ma’avak Zehūyot ba-Yetsira shel Yehūde ‘Iraq [Arabness, Jewishness, Zionism: A Clash of Identities in the Literature of Iraqi Jews] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 2005), and the more recent theoretical study Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity? Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities (Leiden: Brill, 2015), in that its aim is to provide the English-speaking reader with a glimpse into the literary Arabic writings produced by Jewish authors. The contents and indexes of both books may provide the reader with suggestions that will allow him to expand his knowledge of specific matters as well as to trace the development of and changes in my conceptions since I had started to study Arab-Jewish identity and culture in the middle of the 1980s, based on updates in the relevant research, new theoretical insights, and the discovery of new material and sources.
The small literary anthology appended to the present book includes sixteen stories, and each of them represents a different stage in the development of the art of the modern Arabic short story among the Jews of the Middle East. Fourteen of the stories were written by Iraqi Jews, one by an Egyptian Jew, and another by an Israeli-born writer. This proportion represents in general the decisive majority of Iraqis among Jewish authors of Arabic literary texts. Two of the stories were written by women (Maryam al-Mullā and Esperance Cohen-Moreh), and in this case this is by no means the true proportion between male and female authors in the Arabic literature of the Arabized Jews in modern times: the number of Arab-Jewish female authors is very small, which is a true representation of the limited role women played in Arabic literature in general during the time when literary activity in Arabic was blossoming among the Jews.3 Two of the stories in the anthology were written by the same author, Shalom Darwīsh, who is the only professional author whose work is discussed in this book to have published collections of short stories before and after immigrating to Israel. Going through both of Darwīsh’s stories will help the reader get a sense of the last stage of the development of the art of the modern short story among Arabized Jews and its current demise. Fourteen of the stories in the anthology were originally written in Arabic, and two were written in Hebrew (while their titles are in Arabic!). The latter were translated into Arabic soon after their composition and achieved their fame and current status in the Arab-Jewish literary heritage as Arabic works. I decided to include these stories for their literary importance and for their symbolic and metaphorical value: one of them was published (1992) by an author (Shimon Ballas) who had started his literary career in Arabic in Israel and then made a decisive shift to Hebrew; and the other was published (2006) by a young author (Almog Behar) from an Arab-Jewish family, who was expected to cut any connection he may have had with Arab-Jewish culture but who, unlike hundreds of thousands of his ilk, and in an ironic twist of fate, decided to put all of his literary energy into what seems to be a naive effort to revive his cultural heritage. In terms of the chronological order of the stories presented in the anthology, it is the penultimate story, written by Samīr Naqqāsh, which represents one of the peaks ― perhaps the last one ― in the development of the Arab-Jewish art of the short story; it is the swan song before its total demise. This very specific location is also symbolic of the sad end to the glorious culture of Arabized Jews that we are about to witness.
In fact, the tragedy of the Arabized Jews can be illustrated by the personality of Samīr Naqqāsh, whose experiences are embedded in his literary work. When we think of tragedy in the context of literature, we think first of the Shakespearean “great tragedies,” Hamlet (1600–1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606).4 With these plays in mind, the personal story of Naqqāsh himself and his literary writing — the story discussed in the present book, “Prophecies of a Madman in a Cursed City” (1995), could serve as a metaphor — comprise the four basic elements of tragedy. First, there is a central character, the person Samīr Naqqāsh represented by the narrator-character in this specific story with whom we are able to sympathize and identify. Second, this protagonist suffers and dies in relatively early age, and this death, in our case, coincides with the downfall of Arab-Jewish culture and identity. Third, this death of the protagonist and the downfall of his community are considered by the readers, at least many of them, to be inevitable but at the same time unjustifiable and unacceptable. And fourth — and this can be imagined as an apocalyptic element — the readers’ (Arab-Jewish readers, or better those few who are still alive) close identification with Samīr Naqqāsh, the person, the writer, and the protagonist of this tragedy draws them into thinking about their own death and downfall, physical and metaphorical. And because the protagonist’s death is invariably shattering to other characters, and tragedy always engages with a broader sense of death and destruction, the personal tragedy and the literary one conclude with the shattering of Arab-Jewish culture in its entirety.
My initial plan was to publish the English translations of the short stories together with the original texts in Arabic, but I came to the conclusion that whoever needs the Arabic text of any specific story will be able to access it rather easily, as all the stories are currently available in books or anthologies. I did, however, bring over some of the quoted verses in the book in the original Arabic: after all, during most of the twentieth century poetry was still considered the principal channel of literary creativity among the Arabs and may serve as a true testimony to the existence of the Arabic literature of the Jews before it stopped being produced altogether (one of my future projects will hopefully be a new anthology of Arab-Jewish poetry from the pre-Islamic period until the present). At the end of the present book, I appended the Authors and Books section, which is a selection of the various publications of the authors whose stories appear in the anthology. The General Bibliography section provides updated scholarship on the Arab culture of the Jews and related references.
I would like to thank the authors of the short stories presented in this book, as well as their families and the original publishers of their work, for permitting me to publish their stories once again in the anthology, which commemorates the contributions of these authors to Arabic literature in general and to Arab-Jewish culture in particular. My thanks go out to Aviva Butt, who worked with me to translate most of the stories. I would also like to thank Amrita Dani and Shani Boianjiu, my research assistants while I was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University at the 2009–2010 academic year, for the illuminative discussions we had on some of the stories presented in the anthology and for their important insights. Finally, a special word of thanks and appreciation is due to the editor Michael Helfield for his excellent work on the manuscript and for his significant contribution to the final shaping of this book and two of my previous books. This book is among the fruits of a long-time research project that I have been conducting during the last three decades. The project has been supported by grants and fellowships which I had obtained from the Israel Science Foundation (1992–1995), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1993 and 1998), the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2000 and 2008), the Seminar für Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients and Hochschule für Jüdische Studien ― Heidelberg University (2002 and 2017), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin ― Institute for Advanced Study, Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik ― Freie Universität Berlin (2004–2005), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study ― Harvard University (2009–2010), the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture ― Leipzig University (2015), and the Department of Languages and Literatures ― University of Gothenburg (2017–2018).
Benjamin 1969, p. 256.
For a list of Iraqi-Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists, as well as their relevant dates, see Snir 2015b, pp. 231–234. See also Snir 2005 (Index).
Two other female authors are Iraqi as well: Istīrīna Ibrāhīm (1914–1996) (on her, see Mudhi 1988, pp. 489–490; Shā’ul 1980, pp. 153–154, 188–195; and Snir 2005, pp. 391–392, 558) and Malīḥa Isḥayiq (b. 1925) (on her, see Snir 2005, pp. 392, 558–559; and Abd al-Kāẓim 2017, vol. IV). One should mentioned as well the Lebanese-born journalist Esther Lazari-Moyal (Istīr Azharī-Mūyāl) (1873–1948), wife of the Egyptian-Jewish journalist Shimon Moyal (Shimʽūn Mūyāl) (1866–1915) — in her literary activities, she mainly published translations (on her, see Levy 2007; Levy 2010, pp. 139–174).
This section was inspired by Bennett and Royle 2004, pp. 103–104.