“Subject Matter:” Orientalism and Arab Racialization in the Work of Yitzhaq Shami
Photo graphic by Sophie Levy
As Edward Said pointed out in 1978, Orientalist ideology simultaneously grows out of and reproduces the material foundations of imperial conquest – an ideology and a structure of feeling, erected by the West “for” its Eastern Others. Numerous writers have attended to the Orientalist gaze insofar as it has applied itself, historically, not just to Muslim Arabs but to Mizrahim. In the space of this paper, I will close-read the work of the work of the Palestinian Jewish author Yitzhaq Shami (1888-1949) for traces of how Orientalist attitudes played out in Mizrahi experiences during the late-Ottoman and British Mandate periods of Palestine. I argue below that the image of pre-Mandate Levantine “authenticity,” which increasingly stuck to Shami’s reputation through the period of British rule, the events of 1948 and so on, helped to cement a technique of racialization that would be deeply instrumental to the project of Zionist settler-colonialism.
In other words, I want to insist that Shami’s work did not contradict the foundations of British-colonial and Zionist ideology, nor did it straightforwardly confirm them. Both the idea that “distinctions [between Arab and Jew] must have become irrelevant for someone like Shami who could define himself as both as an Arab and a Jew,” (Tamari, 2004) and the idea that “the various selves that had once been integrated easily within [Shami]”— Arab and Jew, traditionalist and iconoclast— “were with time and by others deemed irreconcilable” (Hoffman, 2009) seem to be missing something. Shami was embedded, if not explicitly, in the ideological production of the burgeoning Zionist movement (Cohen, 2015).
Along with Ammiel Alcalay, I take Shami’s construction of Arab-Jewish authenticity to have been an instance of “Orientalism in reverse.” Shami celebrated an “exotic” hybrid of Arab and Jewish identity not in order to shift Zionism’s Orientalist premises or to intervene in the political tensions brewing because of it; nor were his depictions of pre-Mandate Palestinian life “aloof” and disconnected from the politics of his day,as some scholarship has also suggested. Rather, I see Shami’s work as a protocol for racialization, and a significant contribution to Zionist settler-ideology, in its appropriation of Arabism, which I use in a consciously overly-broad way to denote not simply Arab nationalism but aspects of Arabic-speaking and Islam-proximate lifeworlds that pertain to “The Orient.”
According to Patrick Wolfe’s analysis of the place of Mizrahim in Israeli society in 1967, race was of central importance to the Zionist settler-colonial project, yet it functioned precisely by concealing its own work. The idea of religious affiliation became particularly important at that point, as it masked how the Israeli government was expanding a regime of racial violence/dispossession that targeted indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. In this essay, I want to suggest that there was, in fact, an earlier model of Mizrahi incorporation, to which Shami’s work significantly contributed – a similar enmeshment of de-racination and racialization. I contend that, even in Shami’s time, this model of Mizrahi affiliation produced an ideological apparatus for the sustenance of Arab racialization “under erasure.”
More than simply concealing pejorative Orientalist or racist attitudes, I argue that Shami’s de-racination of (Jewish) Arabness was absolutely necessary and materially connected to the success of the coming settler-colonial project. Shami detached the notion of “Arab authenticity” or “Arabism” from its ethnic coordinates in Palestine by placing it in a Zionist literary canon whose idea of community may not have been rooted in religion at the time, but certainly did have a relationship to some idea of“tradition.” Shami and his characters embodied what Wolfe calls “the refractory imprint of the native counter-claim” – i.e. a remainder of indigenous “culture” around which settlers consolidate their birthright, and use to propel themselves forward (Wolfe, 2006). This refractory position allowed him to play a key role in the Arab racialization conducted by Zionist culture.
Shami masked the racializing dimension of settler-culture by staging performances of struggle between tradition and modernity. Nearly everyone in Shami’s stories wrestles with tradition of a certain sort: Abu Al-Shawarib (in Vengeance of the Fathers) and Jum‘ah (in “Jum‘ah the Simpleton”) as much as Mercado (in “Ransom”) or Flor (in “The Barren Wife”). Often, Shami doesn’t decisively side with either tradition or modernity. Situated at the crux of the two, most of Shami’s characters are “disintegrating figures” (Hever, 2006). As Adina Hoffman (2009) puts it, “the ethnicity of his characters seems to matter much less to Shami than do their fraught inner lives. On that score he is an equal-opportunity creator: his characters suffer without regard to race, creed, or color.”
Yet, the trace of a sharper division haunts the text. Although it is presumed that Jews and Arabs co-habit their land peacefully in Shami’s stories, Jewish and Arab characters hardly ever appear together. As we will see, it is now commonplace among Shami’s critics to divide one’s opinions between “the Jewish stories” and “the Arab stories.” Rather than a mere development in recent scholarly interpretation, this division is a deeper reflection of Shami’s larger racializing strategy.
A marketplace in Jerusalem, 1930s. Source
Jewish Arab(ism)
Yitzhaq Shami is curiously positioned in Hebrew literature; he is claimed by the canon yet not often remembered. He constitutes part of what some have called “the Hebrew counter-canon” (Hoffman, 2009). Shami’s family on his mother’s side traced back to Spain, but for about two hundred years lived in Palestine. On his father’s side, Shami’s family hailed from Damascus. It’s common thus for critics to regard Shami as a Levantine, in Jacqueline Kahanoff’s terms. After all, in his writing, Shami does explicitly identify as Jew and Arab simultaneously. Yet, for critics of his work like Tamari, Shami’s dual identity was doomed to melancholia after the Mandate period. As a peer to Ashkenazi authors like Yosef Hayyim Brenner, Shami’s work was clearly invested in Zionism and its orientalist underpinnings, andambivalence toward the Arab and Jewish-Arab figures in his stories could be an outgrowth of this influence. For instance, Nancy Bergasks us to ponder this question:
Is Shami as innocent of Orientalist tendencies as Band, Shaked, and others have suggested? . . . The Arabs are still seen as ‘Other’ and as members of an exotic, almost inscrutable culture. The Jewish stories ring with sociological truth, the Arab stories with anthropological curiosity (Berg, 2001).
The charge of anthropologism here situates Shami in a tradition of Eurocentric ethnography and Orientalist study. Certain readers, with a more Orientalist bent, have actually found great interest in Shami’s writing – Barzilay (1977), in particular, says:
Above all, it is the Arab ethos that is revealed and illuminated [in Vengeance of the Fathers]: a world of religious zeal and fervor, superstition and prejudice. Though united in both language and religion, ancient tribal roots and local loyalties run deep and strong in these multitudes of people. Taken as a whole, they represent a primitive society, exhibitionist in character and exceedingly sensitive to honors and externalities. The male is dominant and the woman totally supressed [sic] and dominated. Physical prowess and bravado are greatly esteemed, holding a high rung on the scale of values. The individual Arab appears passionate and impetuous, short-tempered and easily carried away.
Berg and Barzilay both insist that “Arabism” is important for Shami’s writing; the only difference being that whereas Berg sees “Arabism” as a reflection of Shami’s distorted ideology, Barzilay sees it as a reflection of Shami’s person – his very identity. We’ll see this confusion crop up frequently; It’s unclear to many a reader whether Shami’s “Arabism” has to do with himself, with his “neighbors” (in Hoffman’s words), or with both. What the vast majority of critics don’t question, in any event, is his “authenticity.”
On the other hand, we find a number of critics who completely discount this charge of self-Orientalization in Shami’s oeuvre. Adina Hoffman, for instance, writes that:
While it has been convenient for literary critics to cast Shami as an ethnographic writer—whether to praise him in Orientalist terms for his ability to “penetrate. . .the Arab mind,” or to criticize him in more understandable if politically correct fashion for his “problematic” approach to “Arabs as objects of representation”—neither of these scholarly strategies takes Shami on his own more intriguing and complicated terms.
But what would it mean to take Shami on his own terms? Similarly, Hannan Hever urges us to recognize that Shami portrays Arab life “from the inside,” while also criticizing it from the perspective of “universal values.” Are these terms “universal,” or in fact European? By what is Shami’s alleged criticism motivated – perhaps “modernity?” As we will see, this is indeed a common interpretation: Shami was an ambivalent modern.
On my reading, however, Shami’s work served as an instrument for 1. an orientalist procedure whereby all thought about “Arabism” was further fictionalized, abstracted and absorbed into the discursive system of the West; and 2. an early settler-colonial procedure, in which Shami tethered the portrayal of Arab authenticity to a burgeoning reinvention of Jewish identity, as a “refractory imprint” of a (displaced) native culture. Ironically, however, hardly any of this appears on the surface of the Shami’s work. His stories more often centralize conflicts between traditionalism and modernity, men and women, village and village, etc. than they do conflicts between Jews and Arabs (or Arabism).
A Syrian Jewish family poses for a photograph at a bar mitzvah in Damascus, 1930s. Source
Tragedy Strikes
Another thing Shami’s more attentive readers seem to pick up on is his obsession with time. Shami is often regarded as a tragic writer. His stories are set, more often than not, against the backdrop of idyllic natural settings, unfolding at a pace that seems appropriate to rural life. His protagonists, however, tend to swiftly and nightmarishly undo themselves by their own actions. Critics tend to trace these tragic, “disintegrating” figures to Shami himself, whose letters (quoted here in Tamari, 2004) are full of regret and anxiety:
[This] is the secret of my tragedy - when I look back at my life, I realize that everything was distorted and wrong from the foundation. My very existence was a big mistake beginning with the smallest matters and ending with the biggest. Due to my own faults or due to fate, it does not matter.
The dominant interpretation of this “secret” tragedy is that Shami felt conflicted about Zionist developments in his time and their effect upon Jewish-Arab relations. Hever (2006) quotes these lines from Shami’s correspondence, in which he describes the difficulty of writing his story “Jum’ah the Simpleton:”
At some moments I think that [at] this time of rage and horror between us and our neighbors... perhaps it is not proper to take an interest in them and in their lives. But I have answered my heart [that] art transcends all. No more need be said.
Considering that Shami is writing to his editor and, by proxy, to his primarily Ashkenazic, Zionist readership, it’s not surprising that he speaks about “the life of the Arab” at such a distance – the “our” in “our neighbors” indicating a particularly Jewish affiliation that would presumably make an Arab “us” impossible. While Shami may have been personally concerned with the social antagonism between Jews and Arabs – undeniable certainly by the time of this correspondence (i.e. after the riots of 1929 in Hebron) – his stories continue to avoid convening Jewish and Arab characters.Hever summarizes the trajectory of Shami’s conflicted affiliation and how it influenced his writing.
The piece of Hever’s argument that seems to be missing is Shami’s interest in the tension between traditionalism and modernity writ large. This acknowledgement is precisely what we must read into his conclusion that:
[Shami] creates the subject, but it cannot survive the universalistic imperative for autonomy and therefore falls apart. Navigating between the conflicting normal of local-ethnic writing universalistic-national writing, Shami fashions a collective subject who cannot survive the conflict and therefore ultimately disintegrates into elements that rob him of his agency and autonomy. So far-reaching is his collapse that not even ethnic identity survives. Ethnicity itself plays a transient, insubstantial, and conflicted role in Shami’s stories.
So it is here that categories of ethnicity and race tend to fall out. We find ourselves, again, at Hoffman’s point about Shami’s “equal-opportunity” platform of making all his characters suffer “without regard to race, creed, or color.” Yet, we have to ask what precisely Hever means by the “universalistic imperative for autonomy.” Out of the most prominent, actually-existing social demands for “autonomy” in Shami’s day, Shami was probably interested the most in the one for religious reform and secular modernity. As Tamari notes in his biographical sketch, Shami grew frustrated with his traditional, religious upbringing in Hebron, and ended up leaving for a teacher’s college in the secular spheres of Jerusalem.
For Shami, the clash between tradition and modernity was itself tragic. His stories too embrace tragedy as the genre precisely this “time out of joint” – i.e. a time situated between conservative and modernizing religious trends.
Some critics, as we’ve seen, link Shami’s narrative of “time out of joint” to the political crises in Palestine during the Mandate period (1929 and 1936 being flashpoints), which were making “Jewish” and “Arab” cultural exchange more and more untenable. They view Shami’s idyllic backdrops and unhurried style as a response to these events, a back-projection onto “earlier times free of hostilities between Palestinian Jews and Arabs,” as Issa Boullata put it. Some argue that this historiographic move should be thought of as a thinly-veiled political demand (to turn back the clock, so to speak). Others say this backward glance proves that Shami is “aloof” or melancholically escapist. In the actual content of Shami’s stories, as we know, Jewish and Arab characters don’t tend to interact; and so, at the level of content, Shami’s stories are essentially about religion and community. Yet, the question of this backward glance is interesting because it touches on a stylistic tendency in Shami’s writing to mix up timelines.
A great example of this is in Shami’s early story, “Ransom” (1907), which depicts the fallout from a botched circumcision. The text is rife with symbols of beginning and nascency that also signify decline. Consider, for instance, the opening lines:
It is one of those nights when winter begins to draw its first breaths. The sukkot are still standing on the roofs, abandoned and pathetic.
The symbols here of Jewishness, the sukkot, which traditionally signify vitality and fruition are “abandoned and pathetic” in the cold winter of Jerusalem’s thoroughfares. Likewise, there’s something fresh about the start of winter which, much like a baby, “draws its first breaths.” Yet in this story, a baby’s first breaths also tend to be its last. These reversals of before and after significantly reflect a tale of someone whose traditional goals are clearly “out of joint” – someone who, with the most earnest intentions, wants to contain within himself all the aspects of Jewish identity and practice available to him in Jerusalem, and yet after much effort, fails before he can even begin. A remarkably clumsy young man, Hakhan Mercado Bekhar accidently kills a baby on his first attempt to administer a brit milah – and that, after studying to become not only a mohel but a cantor and a ritual slaughterer too.
Despite Mercado’s intention to fully grasp Jewishness as “his” through traditional expertise, he is inexplicably foiled, not at the last but at the first moment – which is also the last. One reason for this seems to be Mercado’s hubris: “Being a slaughterer and cantor was not enough for him – he had to become a mohel as well. And now he has lost everything, his entire world.” His mistake is to think he can encapsulate the whole range of Jewish identities and lifestyles circulating in Jerusalem at the time. With ethnographic precision, Shami reminds us of the presence of “Jews of all kinds – Bokharan and North African, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Yemenite and Georgian” who admix though they live in segregated parts of the city. Shami marks this diversity as a phenomenon of urban modernism:
[They] mix in the streets, buzzing like bees out of their hive. They walk quickly, glance at each other in passing, mutter a blessing. . . to be swallowed up by workday cares, by livelihood and winter. Only Hakham Mercado Bakhar remains seated on a bench in the synagogue.
Very clearly, the problem here is that Mercado refuses to be modern, because he believes that ritual practice can accommodate, unite and homogenize all kinds of Jewish peoples within itself. Yet his goals aren’t completely absurd. Random filiations flash through the text – e.g. one where, upon arriving at the house of the dead baby’s family, Mercado discovers the father hunched over a text by Maimonides, recalling the heyday of Medieval Jewish literature. Moments like this make Jewish tradition seem possible, even across the lines of (ethnic) difference Shami so painstakingly draws. A “time out of joint,” indeed – Shami doesn’t seem to privilege or condemn, in an absolute sense, either secular modernity or an expanded conception of religious affiliation.
Likewise, in other stories like “Jum’ah the Simpleton,” Shami blends elements of a modern secular awareness (think, for instance, of the protagonist’s heroic veterinary skillset) with possibilities for renewed connections to the past. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate – using Edward Said’s analysis of 20th century innovations in Orientalist technique– how this discourse between tradition and modernity is a mask for practice of racialization taking shape in the early Zionist movement.
Zionist demonstration against the Palestine White Paper. Jerusalem, 1939.
Settler-Orientalism
In his essay “Style, Expertise, Vision” (1979), Edward Said tracks imperialism’s entrance into a more precarious phase during the Arab Revolt of 1917, when figures like T.E. Lawrence lived in colonial territories and involved themselves more directly in the affairs of “natives.” The revolts called for a new micromanagement style whereby Orientalists were encouraged to “press the Orient into service, to turn the Orient from unchanging ‘Oriental’ passivity into militant modern life. . . [yet] never to let the Orient go its own way or get out of hand.”A tall order, indeed.
These events, after all, did contradict well-established assumptions about “Oriental” life as having “no tradition of freedom,” etc. Now the Orientalists had to acknowledge the existence of emancipatory Arab movements, even to “press” them into service, but not to let them “go [their] own way.” This wasn’t anything new. The corpus of Orientalist thinking was always internally contradictory to begin with, as Said points out:
The ‘power of choice’ is mainly for Europe first to acknowledge the Orient as the origin of European science, then to treat it as a superseded origin. Thus, in another context, Balfour could regard the native inhabitants of Palestine as having priority on the land, but nowhere near the subsequent authority to keep it.
In other words, Orientalism’s internal contradictions are crucial. The Orient can be a source of “beginnings” and also a place out of which nothing new arises; a modern hub of scientific knowledge and utter antiquity. It is on account of these contradictions that the Orient becomes something suited for “digestion,” abstraction, and reformulation.The orientalist writers of this period found a way of emptying out the living content of the Orient and asserting themselves as its authors. Differently put, they “flex” their “positional superiority” by putting themselves “in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient. . . without ever losing him the relative upper hand.” As Said’s reference to Balfour suggests, this technique would be essential for Zionist settler-colonial practice.
A Man of Letters
Alcalay (1993) acknowledges a phenomenon in striking parallel to, if not the intentions then certainly the effects of this late-orientalist practice. Alcalay sees Shami in relation to other secular Arab-Jewish writers like Yehuda Burla, whose construction of an ideological apparatus of oriental “authenticity” in his writing serves to marginalize voices within the Arab-Jewish community without ever really homogenizing or disparaging an orientalist strawman figure of the “The Arab.” These writers peform “Arab authenticity” in ways that actually befit the Zionist colonial apparatus, precisely by complicating the vulgar orientalist categories of Jew vs. Arab. Alcalay proposes allusively that “The [Levantine] ‘Jewish’ world depicted becomes. . . subject matter and not the very material of a way of life that is simply practiced from within.” After the British mandate, something fundamentally shifts and Levantinism moves into other domains; in this case, the performance of Arab-Jewish identity gets abstracted into the world of letters, and then (he continues):
From this point on, the gap steadily widens between a more popular generally working-class Arab Jewish or Judeo-Spanish culture, and the secular Hebrew culture of Zionism or one of the many versions of culture inherited by European colonialism. As the working-class Jews of the Levant found themselves more and more marginalized within this framework, with fewer and fewer avenues of expression open to them due to the undermining of rabbinic authority and popular culture, "authentic Orientals" – in a kind of Orientalism in reverse, celebrating the "exotic" – began to depict worlds they had long left behind. At the same time, the very real political conflict between Arabs and Jews, with its tremendous cost in human suffering, increasingly began to affect precisely those Jews most firmly rooted in Arabic culture, something that would ultimately result in the cultural schizophrenia of Levantine Jews in Israel.
Ultimately, then, the abstraction we’ve been discussing has an indirect but significant impact on the structure of social relations in the region. As Alcalay insinuates, it exacerbates the oppression of working-class Levantines – aggravating “real violence,” that is, by concealment or distraction. I would make a slightly different argument, though. Rather than proletarian oppression, I see Shami’s practice of abstracting his own identity as a tool in the arsenal of settler-colonial racialization. This whole process which, through the excessive production of ethnographic meanings, abstracts Shami into the world of letters wherein he figures as a “refractory imprint” of native presence, only thinly veils a settler prerogative to eliminate all who cling to native identity (in a lived way). Thus, Shami’s process of literary racialization makes Arab life less grievable, and his own life less “Arab.”
Bibliography
Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Barzilay, Isaac. “The Arab in Modern Hebrew Literature: Image and Problem (The Ottoman Period, 1880-1918),” Hebrew Studies 18 (1977).
Berg, Nancy. “Review of Hebron Stories by Yitzhaq Shami,” Hebrew Studies 42 (2001).
Boullatta, Issa J. “Yitzhaq Shami’s Hebrew Fiction: Arabs and Jews Before Balfour,” Aljadid 34 (Winter 2001)
Cohen, Hillel. Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929, trans. Haim Watzman (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2015).
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da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence,” Griffith Law Review 18, no. 2 (2009), p. 224.
Tamari, Salim. “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly File 21 (2004): p. 23, 24.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006), p. 398
Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (New York: Verso, 2016).