The Jews of Lebanon: Between Coexistence and Conflict (review)

Although a considerable body of scholarly and popular work has been published over the last thirty or forty years on the history and culture of the various Jewish communities of the Arab world in modern times, certain communities have received little or no attention. The history of Lebanese Jewry was a notable example of such a neglected community. Kirsten Schulze, who is a specialist on Lebanon at the London School of Economics and the author of an earlier study on Israel’s Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon (1998), has now provided an important contribution to help begin filling in the gap with a book that sets the history of the Jews of modern Lebanon squarely within the context of that country’s at times delicately balanced, at times turbulent, political history. Indeed, the author is at her best in describing the dynamics of the overall political setting and their consequences for Jewish socioeconomic life. The internal dynamics of Lebanese Jewish social history are not ignored by any means, but are dealt with in considerably less detail.

After a very brief survey of Jewish history in Lebanon from Antiquity to the early twentieth century (pp. 1–11), the book focuses upon the period from the establishment of the French mandate at the end of the First World War to the mid-1990s. This period saw the growth, prosperity, and ultimate decline and dissolution of Lebanese Jewry. Over and over again, Schulze emphasizes that the modern historical experience of the Jews in Lebanon was essentially different from that of their coreligionists in other Middle Eastern Arab countries. The Jews of Lebanon were not the classic ahl al-dhimma, or protégés of the Muslim community, nor were they second-class citizens in an Islamic Arab state, but rather they were one of twenty-three constituent minorities of the Lebanese polity which Schulze describes as “a consociational political system.” The constitutionally recognized division of power amongst the leading confessional communities with the scales tipped in favor of the Western-oriented Maronite Christians provided for several decades the kind of non-ideological, non-militantly nationalist, laissez-faire atmosphere in which the apolitical, commercially-oriented Jews could conduct business and lead their easygoing Mediterranean lifestyle in relative tranquility. Through the judicious use of excerpts from interviews conducted with Lebanese Jews mostly living in Israel, but also with two who had remained in Beirut as late as 1995, Schulze captures some of the flavor of Jewish bourgeois life and its unabashed joie de vivre as it is nostalgically recalled by Lebanese expatriates. In the words of one of her informants, “We were living in the Paris of the Middle East. We had everything. The clothes were fancy—we didn’t have anything but Bally shoes, a designer tie; it was normal” (p. 93).

Being officially apolitical did not mean that the Jews took no interest in Lebanese political life. They simply did not choose to play an actively visible role which, of course, was the norm for Jews everywhere throughout much of Diaspora history. They over whelming majority of Jews supported the Maronite Kata’ib (Phalanges) Party in elections, formed a tacit alliance with it, and looked to its militia to protect them in times of violent unrest on the Muslim Arab street. In keeping with their publicly apolitical profile, few Jews were actually party members. As the smallest of all the minorities in the country and with no militia of its own, the Jews saw in continued Christian political predominance the best insurance that Lebanon would remain an exception within the Arab world and a refuge for non-Muslim minorities. At the very same time, however, they cultivated wherever and whenever possible cordial relations with the other Lebanese confessional communities. Furthermore, the Jews of Beirut “were generally courted” by politicians during elections since “they voted as a block” (p. 87). The occasional exploitation of antisemitism by cynical politicians or unscrupulous non-Jewish rivals...