No room for 'misfits' - Haaretz

Subscribe to Print Edition

Tue., September 25, 2007 ,

Israel Time: 21:49 (EST+7)

web haaretz.com

Back to Homepage

Print Edition

Diplomacy

Defense

Arts & Leisure

Real Estate

Jewish World

National

Advertising

Magazine

Week's End

Business

Opinion

Rosner's Domain

Anglo File

Books

Travel

del.icio.us

Digg It! new

No room for 'misfits'

By Yehouda Shenhav

"Zman yehudi hadash: tarbut yehudit be'idan hiloni, mabat entziklopedi" ("A New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age, An Encyclopedic Look") in five volumes; project manager: Yair Tsaban; chief editor: Yirmiyahu Yovel, Keter, NIS 540

In the first part of my review, published here last week ("An Incomplete Sketch of Secularism," Week's End, September 12), I argued that "A New Jewish Time" fails in its attempt to offer a clear definition of secularism, and that it ignores the fact that most of the Israeli public does not define itself as "ideologically secular." The encyclopedia's notion of secularism is simplistically presented through its (inverse) kinship to religion, and the binary nature of the opposition between "religion" and "secularism" does not allow the latter to encompass other entities within it.

In his introduction to the first volume, chief editor Prof. Yirmiyahu Yovel writes that "This new ideology [of secularization] expressed, among other things, the needs of the emerging bourgeoisie and of the capitalist entrepreneur class." As far as that goes, Yovel is correct; later on, however, he ignores the sociological reality and rounds off its contours: "But to the same extent, at least in principle, it [the ideology of secularization] also represents the misfits of modern society, which bourgeois conservatism regards with suspicion or distaste (including certain ethnic, racial and sexual groups)."

	Advertisement

This sentence discloses the problematic nature of the editor's position, and of the project as a whole. In Israel, the great majority of the elite that calls itself secular is an Ashkenazi-European elite, and it is in possession of a distinctly Eurocentric thesis. "Secularism" is really a synonym for the ideology of the liberal left, and the misfits never constitute a part of it.

In advancing their thesis that the world has become increasingly secular since the 18th century, the encyclopedia's editors ignore the religious-secular earthquake now occurring worldwide. They also overlook the fact that the secularization thesis, in its deterministic form, not only has never been accurate in relation to the real world, but has recently been tossed out to the graveyard of the history of ideas. Secularization in the spirit of the Enlightenment is now perceived more as a romantic, class-based utopia of liberal intellectuals than as a characteristic of sociological reality.

History has shown that secularization disrupts its own function, flirts with theology, and has trouble articulating a coherent agenda that is not based on religion, as the project before us demonstrates. Religion scholars Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have already explained that the secularization thesis must be cast off, not only because of the degree of religiosity present in the world, but also because the illusion regarding the decline in religion's status in several Western European countries (to which the secularization thesis primarily alludes) relies on a biased historiography, which saw the Middle Ages as a hothouse of religious darkness.

A similar conclusion was reached by sociologist and scholar of religion Philip Gorski, who argued that while large parts of European society have become more secular, their secularism did not in fact make them less religious. In some ways, Gorski claimed, modern-day Europe is more religious than medieval Europe, because the ways in which religion situates itself within society have changed.

It might help to remember, for example, that modern nationalism is a distinct product of the Protestant revolution, and that it is suffused with Christian preconceptions; the American Revolution, too, was grounded in the spread of Protestant faith known as the "Great Awakening." The Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries did not only manifest itself as an attack on religious authority; it also brought into being new religious movements, such as Methodism in England and Pietism in Germany.

End of history?

The changed ways in which religion manifests itself in society have also been evident in our own era. U.S. foreign policy since World War II, for example, has been shaped by a theological vision and suffused with symbols from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, which supposedly announces the triumph of secularism in a global world, was also shaped by a religious-messianic vision. It relies on a metaphysical position that expresses a desire for total evangelical logic, which leads history in a straight line from creation to the "end of days." A post-secular perspective on the world, therefore, can capture complex hybridizations of religion and secularism rather than the replacement of one by the other.

One of the fascinating aspects of religion's appearance in contemporary "secular" Europe can be found in the attitude toward immigration and immigrants. In a lecture in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, scholar of religions Jose Casanova discussed the effect that immigration waves from the "Third World" to Europe have had on the intensification of religion in the old continent. At the same time that European church attendance rates are dropping, he said, the continent is also witnessing an intensifying religious discourse, and Christianity is in effect becoming a category that enables the European Union to exist.

True, the acceptance of Catholic Poland to the EU did arouse "secular" protest, but this resistance was not as fierce as the objection to the proposed inclusion of Muslim Turkey in the Union. Islam, as the distinct cultural "other" of European civilization, is perceived as more dangerous to Europe's identity than devout Catholicism.

If Europeanism has conceived of itself as a white secularism, the massive immigration waves from the former colonies and the Muslim world came along and flooded the continent with religious communities that preserve their religious nature even in the public sphere and disrupt the secularization process, if it even still exists. Above all, however, these immigration waves reveal that Europe has never been truly secular, and the war over religious symbols in the public sphere (such as the hijab controversy in France) exposes the fragility of its civic-secular culture.

Here it is important to note the fascinating reversal that exists between Europe and Israel. In Europe, Christian religion serves as a cultural barrier protecting the Europeans from the "invasion" of "Third World" immigrants; Christianity gives Europe back to the "Europeans," and it helps them to formulate their new identity. In Israel, by contrast, it is "secularism" that performs a similar function, playing a central role in the attempt to imagine Israel as "the Europe of the Middle East," which is explicitly contrasted with the Arab world around it, perceived as traditional and fundamentalist, never as secular.

Defying the thesis

This thesis also characterizes the way in which the encyclopedia's editors conceive of Mizrahim in Israel. Despite declarations that the project was born out of a desire to promote unity and prevent polarization, in practice they exclude not only the religious and Haredi public, but Israel's community of Middle Eastern and North African origin. After all, the patterns of religiosity and secularism in Israel are not ethnically neutral, and a large Mizrahi population does not submit to the distinction between "secular" and "religious."

When Farha Mo'alem, my grandmother, came from Baghdad to Israel, she was asked at the Sha'ar Aliya ma'abara (transit camp) whether she was religious or secular. Until her death a year ago, at age 94, my grandmother continued to mock this distinction, which had been transported to Israel from the Christian world. She was a devout Jew, but she did not impose strict limits on conduct. At Sabbath dinner, for example, those gathered around the table could luxuriantly smoke a cigarette after having finished the blessings. It should also be stressed that the majority of Israelis who vote for Shas are not Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews, like the politicians of that party. Not without reason, then, have sociologists in Israel used the term masorti (observant of tradition) to describe Mizrahim; using this category, they wished to bypass the problem posed by the impossibility of sorting Mizrahim into one or the other of the European categories.

This is why some Mizrahi intellectuals (for example, Meir Buzaglo, Haviva Pedaya and Yaacov Yadgar) have redefined masorti Judaism as a nominal and assertive category in its own right. They wished to speak for those whose voices could not be heard on the binary frequency that defines "secularism" as the opposite of "religiosity," a frequency on which many Mizrahim occupy an intermediate position of neither/nor, while the Arabs are all "religious."

This grave conceptual error is expressed, of course, in what the editors and writers of this encyclopedia have produced; they may have failed in their effort to fill a "secular cultural cart," but they did "succeed" in creating a racialized project of ethnic hierarchy. "Zman yehudi hadash" is a white project that corresponds with Europe and North America while casually erasing entire Jewish histories, those lived by the Jews of the Islamic countries.

As I pointed out last week, the encyclopedia's editorial board consists of 14 learned members, among them only one woman (Shulamit Volkov) and one Mizrahi (Michel Abitbol). And what about the contributors? The five volumes contain some 380 entries written by about 240 different authors. Of the 380, 67 were written by women (about 18 percent), three by Arabs (on "Arab topics"), and 15 at most were written by Mizrahim (about 4 percent).

This bias, which is even more severe than the outrageously low representation of these groups among Israeli university faculty members - where the numbers are 20 percent women, 7 percent Mizrahi and about 1.5 percent Arabs - is also evident in the contents of the different entries. It is astonishing to see, for example, how for most of the writers, Mizrahi Jews simply do not fall within their field of vision.

And so Dan Almagor, for example, writes of Hebrew songwriting without including Mizrahi songs; Dan Miron writes of modern Jewish culture, theater and literature without including any Mizrahi creators; Ronald Zweig writes about the restitution of money and property to Jews while completely ignoring those who came from the Arab countries; and the entry devoted to Jewish struggle by way of international organizations likewise makes no mention of the Jews from Arab countries.

Some melting pot

This blunt ethnic exclusion places in a grotesque light a conclusion reached in the encyclopedia's entry for "Melting Pot." The author indeed ponders at length the question of whether the "melting pot" ideology has been successful, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that indeed, it has.

Here is how the entry ends: "The trend of stronger common elements [between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim] finds expression primarily in the crystallization of the Jewish-Israeli national identity, whose champions, and not by coincidence, include Jews of Mizrahi origin. In this sense, at least, it seems that the idea of the melting pot has been greatly successful." If this is the case, could the editors please explain why the encyclopedia project itself has failed the melting-pot test? How can it be that only 4 percent of the contributors to the encyclopedia are Mizrahi?

And there's more: In Volume I, the editors present a list of 24 pioneering thinkers of Zionism, and there is not a single Mizrahi among them. This might seem obvious, since Zionism was always European in nature, but then they go on to list 51 people who contributed to modern Jewish thought. Among them, for example, are Ahad Ha'am, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Rabbi Leo Baeck, Isaiah Berlin and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Only one of the 51 contributors to modern Jewish thought is Mizrahi (Albert Memmi); even Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is absent from the list.

The editors apparently also presupposed that the "secularism" of the kind they are promoting cannot easily be found among Arab-Jews. Otherwise it is hard to understand why, within the context of their own project, they failed to examine the patterns of secular Jewish culture's appearance in the Arab countries. The two main sections of the project (its backbone, if you will), "Modern Jewish Thought" and "Memory, Myth and History," are therefore entirely devoid of any discussion of the Arab countries in the 20th century (when Menahem Ben-Sasson does write about the lives of Jews in the Islamic countries, he restricts himself to the 7th-14th centuries).

The first and solitary entry in the first volume to deal with a Mizrahi Jew appears only on page 280, in the section on "Changes in the Ways of Life"; in it, the author, Michel Abitbol (who contributes about one-third of the entries written by Mizrahi authors), subordinates the Jews of the Arab countries to the anachronistic and simplistic modernization thesis.

Why didn't the encyclopedia include such prominent figures as Eliahu Eliashar, David Sitton or the leaders of the so-called old Sephardi yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Jerusalem? Why is there no mention of Jewish silent film in Egypt? Why does the entry "Jews in Music" fail to mention singers Salima Mourad from Iraq, and Leila Mourad from Egypt, both of whom enjoyed considerable renown in their countries?

And it should be stressed: Unlike the marginality (in their countries of origin) of musicians who came to Israel from Eastern Europe, musicians who arrived from the Arab countries enjoyed canonical status there; with the exception of one singer, all of the musicians who represented Iraq in the first Convention of Arab Music in Cairo in 1932 were Jewish. The official orchestra of the Iraqi broadcast authority was founded by the Kuwaiti brothers, and most of its musicians were Jews. Their emigration to Israel in the 1950s was a profound loss to Iraqi music. But of course, neither the Kuwaiti brothers nor the orchestra of the Iraqi broadcast authority received entries of their own in the encyclopedia, and luckily Reuven Snir happens to mention them in his excellent entry on Jewish-Arab literature and culture.

The various entries in the encyclopedia also ignore feminist thought, and entries about women are few; beyond two short ones ("Women in the Bible" and "Foreign Women in the Bible"), the first volume has almost no discussion of women. Women in the Arab countries or Mizrahi feminism in Israel (such as the work of Henriette Dahan Kalev or the late Vicki Shiran) are doubly excluded, left outside of Jewish history in both the male entries and the feminist entries.

Similarly, the entry regarding multiculturalism ignores feminist and Mizrahi critical scholarship on the subject, replicating instead a whitewashed establishment narrative. The works of Ella Shohat, Yossi Yona, Yossi Dahan, Amal Jamal, Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Ktzia Alon, Dalia Markovich, Galit Saada-Ophir and others, who have written explicitly about multiculturalism and formulated more complex variations of it, are bluntly excluded from the entry.

In other words, not only did this project cease to be relevant on the very day of its publication, but it reflects and enhances the gender-ethnic-national power relations in Israel, and all with the generous support of public foundations and kind philanthropists.

Yehouda Shenhav is a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University, and editor of the journal Theory & Criticism.

Bookmark to del.icio.us


	Jewels of the East
	For years Kfar Saba, Ra'anana and Hod Hasharon have been competing for the lead.


	Dodging the crunch
	The Bachar Commission did a fine job of protecting us from the global credit crunch.




1.	who wants to be included with the misfits?	23:47	\|	Joanna	22/09/07

Today Online


	Shmuel Rosner: Israel is clear loser from Ahmadinejad's visit
	Responses: 548


	Carlo Strenger: Israel on path to becoming a pariah state
	Responses: 183


	Amira Hass: Showing Palestinians that there are other Israelis
	Responses: 66


	Ben-Eliezer: Barghouti is best chance for breakthrough with PA
	Responses: 109

More Headlines
20:45 Bush: UN rights council unfairly criticizes Israel


19:08 Bank Hapoalim to sever ties with Palestinian banks in Gaza


21:22 FM Livni meets Arab leaders in N.Y. in bid to normalize ties


21:31 Hamas urges Saudis not to go to U.S.-led Mideast conference


19:42 Peres: Ahmadinejad at Columbia like talks with Hitler before WWII


14:59 N. Korea accuses U.S. of helping Israel develop nuclear weapons


21:06 Court won't let children visit father in Sderot due to security concerns


16:46 Knesset panel threatens to found separate kashrut authority


18:29 Former chief Ashkenazi rabbi Abraham Shapira hospitalized