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Abbas produced this lengthy and detailed report in Hebrew in 1958. Most notably, it was not written by a member of the Hebrew University’s Department of Sociology , one of whose tasks was dealing with questions of Mizrahi “integration,” nor did it appear in an official governmental publication. It is striking to see how many of Abbas’s insights at the time were later reflected in the findings and conclusions of Israeli sociologists who criticized the government’s policies from the mid-1970s onwards. This report is also probably one of the first times that the term “Second Israel”—often used in the 1970s and 1980s in reference to Mizrahim—appeared in print, either in Hebrew or English. In this regard, the report marks a turning point, a shift toward the discourse on Mizrahi Jews as a social problem within Israel. Furthermore , most of the authors presented in this volume—those who wrote before 1948, in particular—spoke of the Jews of the Middle East in nonconcrete terms. Middle Eastern Jewry was a collectivity that they imagined as a single whole. In contrast, this report discusses Mizrahi Jews from all countries as one whole community in concrete terms. Abbas was not the first to do that, but his report was probably the most comprehensive treatment at the time of what would become the “question of the Mizrahim” in Israel. Considering that Israel had existed only ten years when Abbas wrote the report, and given that he represented a party that was part of the government, the report’s critical tone is quite remarkable. A year after Abbas’s death, and shortly after the violent clashes of 1959 known as the Wadi Salib Events, the Sephardic Council reproduced the report in English as a special publication of the World Sephardi Federation. It is not clear who made the translation, but its awkward, sometimes inconsistent, style makes it clear that it was done in some haste. It is clear that the Sephardi or Mizrahi organizations felt an urgent need to send a message in English—probably to Jewish and Zionist organizations abroad—about the tensions within Israel. In this respect, the publication of the report in English turns it into a different document from the Hebrew original. The English translation is another turning point. It tries to convey, probably for the first time, the Mizrahi perspective on Israel’s internal social problems and ethnic 33 | From Ingathering to Integration: The Communal Problem in Israel Excerpt from Abraham Abbas, From Ingathering to Integration: The Communal Problem in Israel (Jerusalem: Achva, 1959). 226 | av r aha m a b b a s divisions to an English-speaking audience—American and other Western Jewish philanthropist organizations and Jewish supporters of such Zionist organizations as the Jewish Agency. Attempts like this one to speak to world Jewry, as it were, about the social and ethnic divisions within Israel’s Jewish population would intensify during the 1960s and 1970s. The translation is reproduced here almost in its entirety, with the original foreword by the federation. We chose not to interfere with its awkward style except in a few cases. Foreword The author of this survey, the late Abraham Abbas M.K. [member of the Knesset] whose untimely death in 1958 was mourned by wide sections of the community,wasanextraordinaryphenomenoninthepubliclifeofIsrael.Aselfeducated man who came from Syria with the Youth Aliyah, he quickly advanced to a position of leadership in the large community of Syrian and other oriental Jews, most of whom were either totally disorganized, or could evince meagre understanding for the organizational patterns of the Israel community. All recognized in him a single-minded and dedicated public worker and accepted him all the more willingly as one of their accredited leaders because he eschewed the strictly communal approach. The pressing need for the quick up-building of the land was always uppermost in his mind. The value of the present survey and its conclusions is considerably enhanced by the fact, known to all who followed the late Mr. Abbas’s public career, that for a long time he was opposed to any sort of separate organization by Sephardi and oriental Jews. It was his direct contact with the problems of the masses of immigrants who came since the establishment of Israel, both as party leader (member of the Executive of the Ahdut Ha- ‘avoda Party) and as a well-known and reelected Sephardi leader (member of the Executive [Committee] of the World Federation of Sephardi Jews), which...

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