Iskandar323 (talk | contribs) New section: Origins of the term |
|||
Line 133:
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? [[User:Iskandar323|Iskandar323]] ([[User talk: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. [[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani|talk]]) 17:22, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
|
Revision as of 17:22, 22 September 2021
This article is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.
|
This page has archives. Sections older than 365 days may be automatically archived by ClueBot III when more than 8 sections are present. |
Lead
The current lead kind of got edit warred. I will not change it for now but here is how I would write it. I would also make two separated sections in the body, with more sources, about Arab nationalism and post-Zionism.
- Judaism has deep roots in the Near East. Many classic Jewish texts where originally written in Judeo-Arabic. The Arab world was home to many different Jewish communities including Persian Jews, Berber Jews, Yemenite Jews and others including descends of Sephardim who fled from Spain. While no one doubts the close cultural ties between Arabs and the local Jews. The validity of categorizing the Jews of the Arab world broadly as an Arab subgroup is disputed.
- The term Arab Jew found some usage in the Arab national movement. Recently the term has become part of the language of post-Zionism.Jonney2000 (talk) 20:29, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- I think that is not a good proposal. Debresser (talk) 21:40, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- I agree, you are trying to politicize a neutral term. Sir Joseph (talk) 21:43, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- Ok but you do realize that this article has been scrubbed of post-Zionist thought. Which is strange because like half the sources are from post-Zionist and many of the rest are their opponents and no one will even realize that! Can I at least add something about that?
- I agree, you are trying to politicize a neutral term. Sir Joseph (talk) 21:43, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- I still object to the recent additions which try to tilt the article away from the sources.Jonney2000 (talk) 23:15, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
- Jonney2000 is contributing on this article without having sufficient knowledge about "Arab Jews" : see above the sections "How did first Arab Jews, i.e. Jews of Arabia, define themselves ?", and "Some of theme are the descendants of native habitants of Arab lands, others are descended from Sephardim", were he talks about "Judeo-Arabic people", a term wich doesn't even exist (there is a Judeo-Arabic language, used by Arab Jews, which is the right term). The problem is that you may not found sources in English, but in Arabic only, because Arab Jews wrote in Arabic, and the other Arabs (Muslims for instance) named them in Arabic. Al-Yahou al-arab in Arabic is a very ancient term. Jonney2000 thinks it has been used at the 20th century only, it is just very funny.Jonney200, you should stop.--86.249.205.123 (talk) 18:11, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- I still object to the recent additions which try to tilt the article away from the sources.Jonney2000 (talk) 23:15, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
"who criticizes aspects of Zionism"
@Sir Joseph: Re this. I'm having trouble accessing the source at the moment (GDocs isn't agreeing with my iPad's slow connection, it seems) and was making tweaks based on what was in our article already. If the source doesn't support the text Zionism-critic
, does it support criticizes aspects of Zionism
? Because that text is still in the article. I can see how someone might criticize "aspects" of an ideology and still not want to be described as "a critic" of said ideology itself, which is why I don't want to remove it myself based on how I'm reading your edit summary. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:15, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- Ella Shohat is generally described as a post-Zionist. Sometimes an anti-Zionist she was close to Edward Said. I am working on a section about post-Zionism. She was the first to really use the termJonney2000 (talk) 06:26, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- You are making the article extremely undue. While everyone has a bias, you need to edit in a neutral manner. Sir Joseph (talk) 14:12, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- Jonney2000, how can you say that "Ella Shohat was the first to really use the term" ? Do you think history begins at the 20th century ? You did not answer my question in the section above : "How did fist Arab Jews, Jews of Arabia define themselves ?" . You don't have an answer, and you are not even interested. I gave above a reference to a WP article about a jewish poet of Arabia (VIIth century), Al-Rabi ibn Abu al-Huqayq : "He is cited among the Arabic Jewish poets by Moses ibn Ezra in his Kitab al-Muhadharah ". I gave in the section "What about Jewish Viziers ?" a list of Jews who were commanding to Arabs : do you think these Jews were not considered as Arabs ???? How could they have these high positions ???? And you still repeat that the term and the idea did not exist before the 20th century ? It is crazy ! This is not history, this is propaganda. Stop please.--86.249.205.123 (talk) 18:22, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- @86.249.205.123: It's pretty obvious he was talking about the term "post-Zionism", and I can't imagine anyone used that term before 1900. Aside from your failure to actually read the comment to which you are replying, the talk page etiquette demonstrated in your response is atrocious. You should be more considerate of these points. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:25, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
- The opposite, why would we assume that a distinctive ethnic sub-group would be defined as another one to begin with? You are the one who should provide the sources that Jews were referred as Arabs in the past (by reading the writings of Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi, for instance, we can understand the opposite). Infantom (talk) 10:06, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
- Jonney2000, how can you say that "Ella Shohat was the first to really use the term" ? Do you think history begins at the 20th century ? You did not answer my question in the section above : "How did fist Arab Jews, Jews of Arabia define themselves ?" . You don't have an answer, and you are not even interested. I gave above a reference to a WP article about a jewish poet of Arabia (VIIth century), Al-Rabi ibn Abu al-Huqayq : "He is cited among the Arabic Jewish poets by Moses ibn Ezra in his Kitab al-Muhadharah ". I gave in the section "What about Jewish Viziers ?" a list of Jews who were commanding to Arabs : do you think these Jews were not considered as Arabs ???? How could they have these high positions ???? And you still repeat that the term and the idea did not exist before the 20th century ? It is crazy ! This is not history, this is propaganda. Stop please.--86.249.205.123 (talk) 18:22, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
- You are making the article extremely undue. While everyone has a bias, you need to edit in a neutral manner. Sir Joseph (talk) 14:12, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
WP:OR/SYNTH?
Jews living in Arab lands, being part of a greater distinctive ethnic[1] and national[2] group, are not considered as Arabs.
Not considered by whom? And 'greater distinctive ethnic (group)' is a glaring example of ethnic one-upmanship: 'greater' implies 'greater' than the Arab ethnic group, even if the editor perhaps intended something else. Klein clearly shows that, in Palestine, for one example, traditional Sephardic Jews were considered by their (Arab) compatriots as 'Arab Jews', a term inscribed in their language.Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
- In your first question you ask because you want to know, or because you want a source? If you just want a source, please tag the statement. If you are interested in the answer, it is: by nobody. Nobody considers Jews as Arabs just because they live in predominantly Arab countries.
- You misunderstood the intention of the phrase. The intention is, obviously, that "Jews" is the greater distinctive ethnicity of "Arab Jews" (and of "American Jews", etc.
- The example you bring from Sephardic Jews proves the opposite of what you seem to claim. It proves that Sephardic Jews were considered "Arab Jews" = Jews, not "Jewish Arabs" = Arabs. Debresser (talk) 21:49, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
- The whole lead is trash not least because Judeo-Arabic is a dead language.
- No doubt that a few who used the term for political purposes pre-48. Much like Jews use the term Israeli-Arab now, even if most think of themselves as Palestinian and definitely not as Israeli.Jonney2000 (talk) 23:49, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
References
- ^ John A. Shoup III (17 October 2011). Ethnic Groups of Africa and the Middle East: An Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 133. ISBN 978-1-59884-363-7.
- ^ Alan Dowty (30 January 1998). The Jewish State: A Century Later, Updated With a New Preface. University of California Press. pp. 3–. ISBN 978-0-520-92706-3.
- Unlike the both of you I examined the sources. The statement (a) '(Jews living in Arab lands) being part of a greater distinctive ethnic' is not in the source, hence this is source-falsification and must be removed. (b) 'nation' per Dowty, is in the source, but not as defining 'Jews living in Arab lands'. (c) (Jews) 'are not considered as Arabs' (no source).
- So in the sentence:
Jews living in Arab lands, being part of a greater distinctive ethnic and national group, are not considered as Arabs.'
- We have no source backing the generalization.
- (d) The sentence is, aside from this WP:OR/WP:SYNTH pastiche, stupid, because the present tense is used, cutting out therefore the sense of the lead and the definition of 'Jewish Arabs' as a historical reality. After the mass emigration or aliyah, an extremely exiguous number of Jews remain in Arab countries, and the generalization refers to them not to the antecedent reality when Jewish populations in Arab countries were substantial, the object of this article.
- (e) This moronic statement was reinserted by Debresser in his blind revert, without showing any awareness of the problem but worse still, since I questioned it, and opened a thread here. Debresser refused to add the tag required. Reinstating it, he simply dismissed my removal and said if I want the statement sourced, I should tag it, not he.
- What in the fuck is going on? The sentence does not mean what it purports to mean, per above, and one of two sources failed scrutiny, and the whole sentence has therefore no adequate sourcing, being patched up synthetically. Debresser. English is my first language, and as a non-native speaker, if you wish to contest my plain construal of the obvious meaning, your authority counts for nothing. It implies what I said it implies and is not in the source, which you didn't even examine. Nishidani (talk) 11:03, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- Jonney. True, Judeo-Arabic dialects are dead, but that was not the point of my editing. Arab Jew in Palestine. In stating '::No doubt that a few who used the term for political purposes pre-48'. No they didn't.
Arab–Jew was a living reality in Palestine, a local identity of belonging to people and place beyond residence location. This identity survived the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but not the 1948 war. Until then, Arab Palestinians defined their compatriot Jews as natives [Abna al-Balad] and Arab-born Jews [Yahud Awlad Arab].' Menachem Klein, 'Arab Jew in Palestine,' Israel Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 134-153, p.
- Several sources state that Zionist historiography has militantly rendered any links between Arabs and Jews in an Arab-Jewish identity inconceivable ( Shenhav p.xi), a fact which if true, would throw some light on why an editor here has reverted my work, as incompatible with the standard state ideology (which has no place on Wikipedia).Nishidani (talk) 11:03, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- I said lead is a mess what is your problem?
- I don't have a problem, save that whenever I touch a page regarding Jewish history, the odds are I will be contested or reverted. Several people suddenly show up, and quarrel, or revert my work, which is never done without reading several sources. In particular, I noted this falsehood:
This term is proposed by cultural studies scholar Ella Shohat to refer to populations commonly termed Mizrahim or Sephardim
- That obvious error struck me and I fixed it, and was reverted by someone who apparently had neither read the new source I added to correct the error, and in doing so, restored the falsehood attributing this usage to Ella Shohat. Can you see that, or is Debresser's editing not an issue?Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- Yes post-Zionist make this claim which is not accepted outside of this intellectual school of thought. Note that even among post-Zionist there is widespread dispute as to what constitutes A “Arab Jew” sometime it is made conditionally other less so. It is kind of like later day Canaanism.Jonney2000 (talk) 16:29, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- Well, I'd read, among several other sources, Reuven Snir's ‘We Are Arabs Before We Are Jews’: The Emergence and Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in Modern Times,” EJOS ― Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies VIII.9 (2005), January 2005 pp. 1-47. Have you? Have you never considered the 'Arabian Jews' (Arab converts to Judaism) of the Himyarite Kingdom whose world is discussed in G.W. Bowersock's, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, Oxford University press, 2013? Have you ever read Aziza Khazzoom, The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel, American Sociological Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Aug., 2003), pp. 481-510, which discusses, among much else, French attempts to 'westernize Arab jews' p.497, not in rthe last decades, but in the 1860s? , etc.etc.etc. Had you, you would have perhaps appreciated that the term as defined by the page limits its scope to a recent 'post-Zionist' meme, despite the fact that historically the topic of Arab Jews has in the literature far more historical depth than the page, with Zionist rigour, allows.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- @Nishidani These sound like good sources, but I can't see them. Did you add them? Iskandar323 (talk) 16:22, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
- Some efforts to do so were wiped out by reverts. It was impossible to add that material because at the time, the page was dominated by a numbers majority that was, in my view, utterly indifferent to historical sources, and would revert at sight anything which contradicted what anyone who reads knows to be a recent Zionist meme: Jews cannot be Arabs, and vice versa. Some people who guarded this page adopt that doctrine and stoutly militate against anything that might undermine it. It's to be expected. It's true that now a Mizrachi Israeli majority finds the term opprobrious, but for two reasons: Zionism is in part ideologically committed to an idea of ethnic purity and cannot countenance heterogeneity. Since Arabs, particularly Palestinians, are held in contempt, to be tarred with the brush of being an 'Arab Jew' would amount to exclusion. So one disowns the epithet. Shenhav's family history is a good example: his forefathers were profoundly 'Arab' and he, raised within Zionism, rebelled against what he felt to be an offense to his dignity as an Israeli Jew. In any case, the only way this article can be fixed from its dopey mishmash, is slow long term work on details: nothing like an ambitious overnight rewrite. You in particular will be almost inevitably teased into frustration. You should know that, and learn to edit slowly and with detachment. Nishidani (talk) 21:48, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
- @Nishidani These sound like good sources, but I can't see them. Did you add them? Iskandar323 (talk) 16:22, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
- Well, I'd read, among several other sources, Reuven Snir's ‘We Are Arabs Before We Are Jews’: The Emergence and Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in Modern Times,” EJOS ― Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies VIII.9 (2005), January 2005 pp. 1-47. Have you? Have you never considered the 'Arabian Jews' (Arab converts to Judaism) of the Himyarite Kingdom whose world is discussed in G.W. Bowersock's, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, Oxford University press, 2013? Have you ever read Aziza Khazzoom, The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel, American Sociological Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Aug., 2003), pp. 481-510, which discusses, among much else, French attempts to 'westernize Arab jews' p.497, not in rthe last decades, but in the 1860s? , etc.etc.etc. Had you, you would have perhaps appreciated that the term as defined by the page limits its scope to a recent 'post-Zionist' meme, despite the fact that historically the topic of Arab Jews has in the literature far more historical depth than the page, with Zionist rigour, allows.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- I said lead is a mess what is your problem?
- @Nishidani We are encouraged to paraphrase sources, so the fact that a certain sentence isn't verbatim in the source, only means somebody did a good job. I am afraid all your assertions here are as unfounded an untrue as the statement that only you had a look at the sources to the exclusion of other editors. Debresser (talk) 16:28, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- I asked for a source for that statement. It is sitting there. If a source is available, add it. I've tried to find one for a half an hour, without results. If the sentence therefore cannot be sourced within a week (I'm generous), and contains, as shown an egregious WP:Synth problem, I'll remove it.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
- I agree that the sentence "Jews living in Arab lands, being part of a greater distinctive ethnic[3] and national[4] group, are not considered as Arabs." is not in either source, and even the second source, which at least touches upon the relevant terms, no more than somewhat alludes to it. Although it is true, I have no problem with it going, unless some better source could be found for it. Debresser (talk) 00:08, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
- {1) The sentence is terribly written. My first edit fixed this, changing it to:
- "Jews living in Arab lands, being part of a distinctive ethnic group, as well as a national group, are not considered to be Arabs."
- (2) Although sub-clauses of the sentence may or may not be properly sourced, the meaning of the sentence as a whole is not sourced. Therefore I have removed it on these grounds. If you want to say in Wikipedia's voice that Jewish people living in Arab lands are not considered to be Arabs, find a neutral and reliable source that says that Jewish people living in Arab lands are not considered to be Arabs. At this point, you haven't got that, so the sentence cannot be in the article. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:14, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
"Arab Jews is a controversial term..."
The idea that this is the very first sentence of the lede is off the fucking charts insane, as the term is virtually always used in the Israeli context (in English, Hebrew and Arabic) to denote Jews who, or whose forebears, made aliyah from Arabic countries where they were well integrated and in no way considered "un-Arabic". A textbook example of WP:UNDUE, the only supporting source is an editorial by Alpher about his own interaction with al-Faisal, and the fallout of the latter's flippant and unrealistic comment once it was made public. This is not journalism. Hell, it's not even a secondary source! It's basically a kvetching contest. What the f___?
This erasure can only be construed as an extension of the broader de-Arabization program unfolding in the State of Israel, which is obviously intended to wipe out anything that might bolster the claim of other Arabs to the land. Oy vey. 2607:FEA8:BFA0:47F:8130:2E11:FA39:9235 (talk) 12:46, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
- The entire article is a mess and is in dire need of a re-write. The article for Arab Christians is actually an article about the culture and history of Arab Christians. This article is basically just a cobbled together string of arguments over the terminology. Very little that is actually about Arab-Jewish culture, history, language, religion, etc. The overemphasis on controversy is transparently ideological. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 15:28, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
In Culture
"After arriving in Israel the Jews from Arab lands found that use of Judeo-Arabic was discouraged and its usage fell into disrepair. The population of Jews in Arab countries would decreased dramatically."
I can't edit this article, but the "would" should be eliminated, and "its usage fell into disrepair" would be better expressed as "fell into disuse". Thus:
"After arriving in Israel the Jews from Arab lands found that use of Judeo-Arabic was discouraged; thus it fell into disuse. The population of Jews in Arab countries decreased dramatically." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Michaelhurwicz (talk • contribs)
The first sentence should be about the term Arab Jews itself ("is a term used to describe/ a controversial term)
I'll try to ignore the obvious antisemitism that influenced some of the editors of this article (see talk section "Arab Jews is a controversial term...")
Arab Jews is, as the page states, not the default term used to describe Jews from the Arab world. It is highly controversial (there's an entire section devoted to "criticism") and nearly always ideological. This page should open in a similar style to queer or Yankee.
I know that technically this doesn't matter on this site, but seeing this, as someone with a Baghdadi family, is insulting and ridiculous. A term used by Arab nationalists to refer to their countries' Jews, and not used at all by 99% of those Jews themselves, should not be described as a a neutral term.Eladabudi (talk) 16:58, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
- User:Eladabudi, you are right. 99% of Mizrahi Jews find this term offensive. A very small anti-Zionist minority uses it. I have tried to fix this and add sources showung the Mizrahi overwhelming rejection of this. Free1Soul (talk) 21:40, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you @Free1Soul:. I agree that the vast majority of Sephardic Jes consider this derogatory and would strongly object to being described in this manner. However, the citations you added were badly formatted. One had a URL, author, and quote while the other had just an author and quote. While it is possible to find sources with a quotation and author, it is not normally sufficient to identify the source. At a bare minimum you should fill out the title, main author, and where this was published. In the non-visual editor you can choose cite->templates->cite journal and it will give you a box that you can fill out.--11Fox11 (talk) 05:36, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
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)
- 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)
- Iskandar323 tagging non-dead sources, such as book sources without a URL at all, as dead links is disruptive. Most of your tags were wrong. As pointed out above, 99% of Mizrahi Jews find this term deeply offensive. Jews were the victims of pan-Arab nationalism, the victims of this newly invented nationality that had nothing to do with them. Jews had their own languages and writing systems, languages such as Judeo-Tunisian Arabic and Judeo-Yemeni Arabic were not mutually intelligible with local Arabic (like Yiddish, containing many many non-Arabic loan words) and were written usually with Hebrew/Aramaic script. It was a language Arab neighbors could not read. Use of "standard" Quran Arabic was external to the community. Jews lived in the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa for a couple of millennia before the Arab invasion, dating back to the Roman and biblical periods. Imposing some joint "Arab identity" is offensive to these communities, and in terms of Jewish liturgy this does not resemble their divide at all.--11Fox11 (talk) 10:47, 21 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)
- 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)
- 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
- 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)
- 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)
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)