Talk:Arab Jews

Removal of infobox and other unconstructive edits

To editor Free1Soul: Please restore the infobox, in-line 'citation needed' tags and dead link tags that you removed in (these edits). You provided no reason for removing the infobox, a critical and well-sourced component of the article. Your reasons for removing the dead link tagging are also unclear (note for instance the clearly dead Voice of America source that you removed the dead link tag from). You also provided no explanation for removing several 'citation needed' tags in instances where no further citation has been provided. You should also not unilaterally remove disputed neutrality tags from articles when the neutrality is so clearly the source of dispute, and where the only changes made since the application of the tag are your own nonconsensual edits. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:45, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

The infobox did not use reliable sources, and only addressed a small minority of Jews from Arab countries - the small minority, less than 0.1%, still living in Arab countries after the pogroms and expulsions - most now live in Israel, France, the US, and other countries who offered refuge from antisemitism. The infobox was inappropriate - this is a term most Mizrahi Jews find deeply offensive and object to - adding population figures in an infobox is the same as adding such an infobox to Nigger. I provided citations to the citation needed tags. Your addition of dead link tags was disruptive - most of the refs you tagged were journal and book sources, like Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib in The Jewish Quarterly Review which had no url and needs no url. The vast majority of your dead link tags were disruptive, and not on actually dead links. Free1Soul (talk) 08:42, 20 September 2021 (UTC) sock

Journal and book sources should of course, wherever possible, have links, e.g.: to Google books. Iskandar323 (talk) 08:47, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Your analogy is meanwhile terrible. For one, the point of this article is not to define what Arab Jews means from the perspective of one group, but what it has meant as a term over in entire history of use. It is also hard to see how this phrase can possibly be as offensive as you say, as it is in effect, a simple contraction of the term 'Arabised Jews', just as the term 'Arab' is essentially a contraction of the term 'Arabised peoples'. If there is any perceived offense in that, I assume you mean the term 'Arab' is viewed as offensive, which would seem to point more to the troubled mindset of those that take offense than any demonstrable inappropriateness in the basic terminology. Is 'Arabised' controversial as well? Iskandar323 (talk) 08:57, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Finally, if it was only the vast majority of my dead link tags that you viewed as disruptive, why did you remove them all, and not simply remove 'the vast majority'? Likewise, why did you remove all of the 'citation needed' tags indiscriminately? Iskandar323 (talk) 09:28, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Rewrite and clean-up

Hi all, I have performed a massive rewrite of this piece to re-orient this page back towards its purpose as a page about "a term", the origins of the term, its recent political usage and the key criticisms against it, and away from being an article about Jewish community demographics, Mizrahi Jews or post-Zionism, none of which it should be about, and all of which have their own pages. As the section on origins and journal references hopefully make clear, the term 'Arab Jews' has been used as a term in academic literature long before the emergence of any post-Zionist critique or any other intellectual trends. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:51, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

The section on "Arab-Jewish diaspora" is possibly also inappropriate and would be good to discuss. Iskandar323 (talk) 13:08, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

• Reverted. The change downplayed just how contested this is. You changed this to a "term", not "contested political term", something other editors already objected to. You changed from "the vast majority of Jews with origins in Arab-majority countries do not identify as Arabs, and most Jews who lived amongst Arabs did not call themselves "Arab Jews" or view themselves as such" to "do not often self-identify ", which other editors already objected to. Free1Soul (talk) 16:07, 21 September 2021 (UTC) sock

  As my rewrite made clear, it is a term with an academic usage that predates its recent politicization, hence the phrase 'political term' is inappropriate. There was no supporting source for the 'vast majority' statement. 'Majority' was not a word from the source. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:22, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

  Actually, my mistake on the word 'majority', which is mentioned by David Tal (2017), though I would note that the appropriate quotation from Tal uses the phraseology "reject the Arab Jew definer as representing their own identity", while Yehouda and Hannan note "very few Jews of Arab descent, in Israel, would label themselves Arab Jews" so based on the sources available, the use of the phrase 'self-identify' is clearly an entirely representative phrasing that is completely consistent with the sources. What is the difference between call oneself and self-identify? Iskandar323 (talk) 18:18, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

More like radically re-written the article to push an overtly racist agenda. Disappointing, but not surprising. The article has been massively damaged by these pernicious edits. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 05:05, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

To editor Bohemian Baltimore: Which edits are you talking about? Everything I have done has been reverted. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:19, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

To editor Bohemian Baltimore: Irony upon irony, you have inserted the hopelessly POV term 'gentile'. Iskandar323 (talk) 06:24, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

New section: Origins of the term

I've just added the most original and totally self-generated part of my previous re-write that is based on a combination of existing sources within this piece along with a few extra books and journals. This work doesn't interfere with anyone else's existing edits or content, but plugs the massive, gaping hole on this page that is begging for an explanation as to the origins of the term that the page is actually supposed to be all about. Thoughts everyone? Iskandar323 (talk) 16:41, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Menachem Klein states that it was coined in 1975 by Albert Memmi. I think that is wrong, because the term was used by Golda Meir three years earlier. Memmi understood this to refer to numerous Jewish communities in Arab countries which, as was the case with his own group in Tunisia, 'were undeniably ‘natives,’. . . as near as possible to the Muslims in poverty, language, sensibilities, customs, taste in music, odors and cooking.' The only distinction was confessional.

The best way to handle this is to define it, the problem being that, as per sources, Israeli education is dedicated to splitting the terms to make them antithetical exclusively as ethnonyms, whereas there was no problem, certainly in Palestine historically, in being Jewish and Arab. The term was not an ethnonym, but a signifier of cultural affinity, a huge overlap, save for religion, in the respective cultures. This will take time. Nishidani (talk) 17:22, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Golda Meir used "Arab Jews" in a very pejorative sense, this is a fuller quote from the Golda interview: "We in Israel have absorbed about 1,400,000 Arab Jews: from Iraq, from Yemen, from Egypt, from Syria, from North African countries like Morocco. People who when they got here were full of diseases and didn’t know how to do anything.". In 1971 the protest slogan was "Golda, teach us Yiddish" because Golda maybe said (it's contested, some sources say her words were twisted) two years earlier that only Yiddish speakers were real Jews or Israelis. Golda was not the first to use this as a pejorative. This was part of the movement that led to the historic defeat of Labour in 1977. Golda had very troubled relations with Mizrahim in Israel. You can read about how this led to Mapai eventual defeat in this Hebrew article--11Fox11 (talk) 17:44, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Which of course means that stating, as the text tends to, that the idea is associated with post-Zionist thinkers is nonsense. Meir and others who used the term pejoratively did so as Ashkenazis whose contempt for Arabs was an integral part of early Zionism. That is also in sources that will be introduced. The article is heavily weighed towards dismissing this as some verbal invention associated with recent times. One of the untold (on wiki) rifts in early Zionism arose from intense friction between culturally Arab Palestinian Jews and European Ashkenazi immigrants. The former were thoroughly at home within an Arab world.Nishidani (talk) 19:16, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

There are plenty of pre-20th-century uses of the term in English. The earliest I found was 1788.[1] I didn't try other languages. Zero^talk 02:35, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

The analogous term musta'arabi was used by medieval Jewish authors to refer to the cultural and linguistic Arabized North Africa Jews in what would become the modern states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:10, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

That like the material you restored is very useful. But it doesn't belong in the etymology section. Rather it should go under Post-Zionism or thereabouts. You shouldn't worry that the material was excised. I intended to restore it in a place more apposite. The page as it stands and stood was poorly organized, since the term "Arab Jew" occurs long before what several otherwise reputable sources state. As Zero noted, there is a long history of it in English going back centuries. The political controversy (which is driving most edits by those deleting here, edits that seem to wish deny a congruent Arab-Jewish identity which is attested over a millennium, as Zionism insists on ideologically) is relatively recent, and indeed looks somewhat undue. But again, this will take time to reorganize. Don't hurry.Nishidani (talk) 17:34, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Regardless of how it was used historically, today the term is mostly used by post-Zionists and Arab nationalists. The introduction is right on that. The vast majority of Mizrahi Jews reject the term, and in fact in Israel they tend to be on the political right due to centuries of second class status in the Arab world as well as the violent riots and increased oppression in the mid-20th century. You will find very few Mizrahim who identify as Arab Jews today. The intro is 100% correct.--RM (Be my friend) 09:05, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

References

This is a misleading term since Arabs and Jews are two different ethnic groups.

This is false information, Jews in Arab countries do not identify themselves as Arabs, and they lived in separate communities conducting a Jewish way of life and did not embraced Arab culture and customs. Especially in north Africa when most Jews settled after being exiled from Spain and Portugal. Although all Jews are indigenous to Israel, there are sub groups of Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, East Asia Jews, Indians Jews. But there is no Arabic Jews. An Arab Jew is a decent of mixed ethnicities. People who are supporting the use of this term are using it usually to insults Jews that are not Europeans, and by doing that, act in a very racist way (towards both groups!) This should not be published and need to be reported and removed in order tp keep Vikipedia credibility. 49.182.83.224 (talk) 15:00, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Sigh... Iskandar323 (talk) 15:15, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 16 February 2023

Hello, there is an error: epistemologic is badly spelt. Kammback (talk) 15:26, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done small jars tc 15:52, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 16 February 2023 (2)

ATTENTION, >>>>>Duplicated lines!!!!!<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The term "Arab Jews" was used during the First World War by Jews of Middle Eastern origin living in Western countries, to support their case that they were not Turks and should not be treated as enemy aliens.[17][better source needed] Today the term is sometimes used by newspapers[which?] and official bodies in some countries,[where?] to express the belief that Jewish identity is a matter of religion rather than ethnicity or nationality. Many Jews disagree with this, do not use the term and, where it appears to them to be calculated to deny the existence of a distinct Jewish identity in favour of reducing the Jewish diaspora to a religious entity, even consider it offensive.[18][19] However, some Mizrahi activists, particularly those not born in Arab countries or who emigrated from them at a very young age, define themselves as Arab Jews.[citation needed] Notable writers on Arab-Jewish identity include Naeim Giladi, Ella Habiba Shohat, Sami Shalom Chetrit and David Rabeeya.

According to Salim Tamari, the term Arab Jew generally referred to a period of history when some Eastern Jews (Sephardic and Mizrahi) identified with the Arab national movement that emerged in the lead up to the dismantlement of the Ottoman empire, as early as the Ottoman administrative reforms of 1839, owing to shared language and culture with their Muslim and Christian compatriots in Ottoman Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.[4] Kammback (talk) 15:37, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done you didn't indicate what line was repeated, so I had to go searching for it. Please make edit requests in the WP:EDITXY format when possible. small jars tc 16:03, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Supposed Oppression of Arabs in the Middle East

"In recent decades, some Jews have self-identified as Arab Jews, such as Ella Shohat, who uses the term in contrast to the Zionist establishment's categorization of Jews as either Ashkenazim or Mizrahim; the latter, she believes, have been oppressed as the Arabs have."

This paragraph is confusing. It seems to state as a fact that Arab Muslims have been oppressed (even saying to the extent of Mizrahi Jews), though this contradicts the vast majority, if not all, of Middle East history.

Arab Muslims have historically been the oppressors of Jews, Christians, and any other religion they ruled over. As the colonizers of the entirety of the Middle East and large portions of Africa, I fail to understand how this sentence is even remotely accurate. 24.24.163.139 (talk) 06:02, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Add link to source 11

The text to footnote 11 by Little Levy is publicly available by Princeton Press open access:

https://oar.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/pr11v5bd0w/1/HistoricizingArabJews.pdf

I'm adding this only formal improvement but not without stressing that already the approach of this article needs fundamental rethinking and seems to have largely fallen prey to the pervasive propaganda around the Gaza-Israel conflict. Barthelmes (talk) 23:53, 19 November 2024 (UTC)