Mizrahim, the Holocaust, and the Fluid Ownership of Jewish History
A photograph of a Persian Jewish man taken in Paris during the years leading up to WWII.
Growing up and living as Jewish people in the 21st Century, the Holocaust is weaved into the very fabric of the collective historical and cultural consciousnesses of our communities. It has become a synecdoche for Jewish persecution, and regardless of where we live or where our families are from, it is a part of how we are perceived and how we interact with the world around us.
Generational trauma, the perpetually conditional state of whatever privilege we’ve historically been able to attain, as well as diasporic histories of violence, displacement, and ghettoization, inform the very nature of how our cultures change over time. All Jews, regardless of geographical or ethnic origin, have historically known persecution. Jewish tragedy is by no means a monolith; however, in educational spheres, Jewish and otherwise, it is often regarded as such. Consequentially, mainstream understandings of our persecution revolve around the notion that the Holocaust is the core of all Jewish suffering.
Mizrahi Jews are placed in an ambiguous position because of our simultaneous distance from the Holocaust and our proximity to our own histories of antisemitic violence. For many young Mizrahim, a single generational gap separates us from experiences of persecution, forced departure, and displacement, yet despite what understandings we have of antisemitic violence, most (but not all) of us don’t have family directly impacted by the Holocaust. This makes navigating discussions about the Holocaust, as well as our emotional connection to its remembrance, a complicated task.
Given my experiences with Jewish education and secular collegiate culture, I often ask myself— How does my position relative to the Holocaust as a Persian Jew guide my vocal and emotional presence in conversations with other Jewish people? How do the obligations attached to my identity shift when I leave those spaces?
In Jewish spaces
Because the Shoah functions as a sort of masthead for Jewish suffering, it makes the experience of being a non-Ashkenazi Jew all the more complex. While I by no means feel distant from the histories of systemic antisemtism (having been born to parents and an entire community who were expelled from or fled their country), when I am involved in conversations specifically discussing the Holocaust, it is often harder to know the place that my voice and experience warrants.
Most college students who are invested in social justice are familiar with the “take space, make space” mantra. This essentially means when speaking in a group about a topic that is based heavily around personal experience and testimonies, it is important to state your relevant point, or “take space”, and then actively provide room for those who potentially have more relevant lived experiences to speak up: “make space.” This concept has been central to how I position myself in Holocaust conversations, because in these situations I find myself hyper-aware of taking up too much space, which— to be blunt— tends to be a functional reversal of typical racial dynamics in most other settings. In this particular situation—keeping in mind this does not by any means discount the fact that there were Mizrahim directly impacted by the Holocaust— Jews of European descent often have greater experiential merit to speak on the topic of Jewish genocide.
In the spring of 2018, I traveled to Poland, where my experiences visiting the sites of concentration camps, ghettos, and centers of prewar Yiddish culture led me to have a better understanding of this dynamic. While I can say with no hesitation that visiting the grounds of the largest mass murders in history was deeply horrifying and panic-inducing, it is hard to say if my emotional response to what I saw would have differed had I not been Jewish, or had I been Ashkenazi.
In my effort to internalize what I had seen that week, processing the physical experience of having my body in the place where infinite worlds had ended, I also found myself asking myself how it might feel to be one of my peers there whose family members were just narrowly missed by this murderous system; Someone who not only lost their relatives, but came face to face with how easily their specific familial branch could have come to an abrupt and premature end.
I have trouble finding the words to explain this feeling-- but I was almost uncomfortably envious of the fact that my Ashkenazi peers were even able to access the sites of their families’ suffering, while I might never be able to see those of my own ancestors firsthand.
In a way, the Holocaust is an anchor for emotional wrestlings with Jewish pain, and it was made my responsibility to project the abuse my family has known onto the extreme tragedy in front of me. I came to understand that my occasional feelings of disconnect were not born from apathy, but from the fact that the weight my parents and grandparents carry, while significant, is meaningfully different than that which is carried by Jews who were affected more directly by the Holocaust.
Further, a sentiment communicated by leading figures on my trip was the question “what if it were you?” I came to terms with the fact that standing there, at this site of death and abuse , this question was much less theoretical for some of my Ashkenazi friends than it was for me.
In secular spaces
After I left my Jewish high school for a secular university away from home, I found myself in a new and unfamiliar position. Even in my first few days at college, I found that my identities were often sectioned off into two distinct parts by others. At home, I took for granted the fact that I was viewed as a Persian Jew generally without question, but upon entering secular spaces I began to realize that people saw Persian and Jewish as separate identities, even by groups who made a point to stress the importance of intersectionality in their conversations and activism.
One conversation in particular has stuck with me and illuminates this point. After explaining my ancestry to a new friend at school, she replied “I guess that makes sense. I know Jewish people originated in the Middle-East but when I think of a Jewish person, they are always white.” Because of the compartmentalization of my identities by others and their lack of exposure to Jews of Color, there was no nuance or distinction between the persecution of Ashkenazi Jews and my own family’s experiences; in other words, commonly-held assumptions about European Jewish histories were applied across the board. This fact, combined with my earlier point that the Holocaust is often employed as the sole representative of Jewish persecution , meant that I was expected to be an ambassador not only of the facetss of my experience as an Mizrahi / Persian Jew, but of Ashkenazi experiences, as well.
When met with questions about my perspective on Jewish experiences and history related to the Holocaust, I frequently have to make choices about whether it’s better to take the time to explain my complex relationship to it, or to just resort to expressing more easily-digestibleand diplomatic “as a Jew…” opinions. I don’t resent this task, but I often feel unequipped to tackle it, and the more I try to explain the nuances of my Jewish identity, the more self-conscious I am about coming off like I am playing some sort of “identity olympics.”
Because broadly “Jewish” educational programs and organization are rarely able to encompass the full range of experiences under the massive umbrella of Jewishness, as a Persian Jew I am faced with this complex task of acknowledging the specificity of my identity, all the while being expected to relay the opinions and emotional state of an entire demographic to whom Mizrahim often don’t relate-- especially when we feel actively excluded from established narratives of Jewishness.
Nonetheless, I do feel it is a necessary task to assume a position of mutual responsibility. Like members of any religious or cultural minority, we sometimes bear the load of what people assume we have experienced, and counter to that, we experience things that differ from or even contradict characterizations typically assigned to our labels. Still, whether we feel it reciprocated now or not, all Jews have a responsibility to all Jews. That responsibility leads to a plethora of opportunities, inconveniences and dilemmas, but they are ultimately all part of a deeper obligation we have to one another.
Although these nuances of dialogue and representation are ever-present in my navigation of secular spaces, I still believe that our occasional frustrations with identity and difference are cornerstones of how we talk and grow together. I have learned that not being able to relate to every possible story of Jewish trauma does not discount or outweigh my deeply rooted emotional connection and devotion to a sense of Jewish peoplehood, but rather enhances my understanding of what it means to be a diasporic people.
A new feeling of proximity
Something I did not include earlier is that during my trip to Poland, I learned something highly unexpected that triggered even more questions about Jewish identity and tragedy. Everyone on our trip was given a card with the name of a single victim of the Holocaust. We were told that if you had family that perished, your card would hold the name of a family member, and if not, they would include the name of a victim with one similar to your name. I sat there shuffling through my pack list papers and took a glance at what I expected to be someone who shared my Hebrew name, but what I saw instead was a card that read:
Yvonne Aftalion Place of birth: ParisBorn: August 1891Convoy destination: AuschwitzTo the knowledge of my family, there are no other Aftalions in the world who are not our direct relatives, so I quickly realized that this was not a by chance pairing, this woman was my family. I went online and checked all the available databases for Holocasut records. Jean, Colette, Armand, Alfred-- all members of a branch of my father’s family who moved to France from Iran, just prior to WWII, and had been killed in the camps. I didn’t expect for this to change my experience, but of course it did. All of it was suddenly closer, and I was made aware of a proximity I had been numb to before, which led me to completely reevaluate much of what I had been taught about the Holocaust and the recent history of Persian Jews.
Our identities as Jews are fluid; the ways in which we claim ownership over Jewishness move between dissonant feelings of obligation and reservation. We are often expected to be simultaneous representatives of the sum of Jewishness and also of that which makes us unique. This tension can feel exhausting or frustrating-- but we can look at it in a new way, wherein unity and difference in identity enhance one another, rather than subtract from one another. Ultimately, grappling with the beauty and frustration of finding our place is, in every meaningful way, a deeply and universally Jewish act.