Diversified Diasporas

Diaspora 6:1 1997 Diversified Diasporas Sarah Abrevaya Stein Stanford University Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Harvey E. Goldberg. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. The many contributors to this volume disagree on who, precisely, are the subjects of theirjoint work. Or rather, they diverge in their understanding ofhow their subjects should be defined, remembered, portrayed. Some ofthe contributors to Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries imagine their subjects regionally (as Middle Eastern, North African, or Balkan); others refer to them as linguistic entities (speakers of Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Spanish, or Judeo-Arabic). Others describe them as transnational or diasporic populations (Sephardi, Hispano-Jewish, or simply Jewish), while still others divide them along the borders ofempires or nation-states (Ottoman, Iraqi, Moroccan, Israeli).1 To confuse matters further, this is a volume composed of stories narrated by different disciplinary methodologies (history, sociology, anthropology, and literary studies among them). The contributions span two centuries, rely on material printed and spoken in numerous languages, and examine Jewish cultures whose differences are stunning. Impressingthese manydifferences upon the readeris aprimary goal—and one ofthe main accomplishments—ofthe volume. This diversity also threatens to be the book's undoing. The complexity of the communities described challenge the book's dependence upon regionality, culture, and modernity for cohesion. While some of the contributing authors view these three concepts as immanent in the study they facilitate, the volume as a whole illustrates the extent to which they (like diasporic, linguistic, or national delineations) are conceptual categories, useful for periodization but neither consistent, rigid, nor even always helpful. This discord reflects some of the vexing questions that contemporary scholars ofSephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries face: is there, in fact, a "field" ofSephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish Studies? Do the institutional borders of this field reinforce or reify historical ones? Can "modernization" serve as a useful or unifying concept 112 Diaspora 6:1 1997 for understanding the experiences of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries when the origins of "modernity" are imagined to be rooted in Europe? If links—spiritual, intellectual, economic—bridged Middle Eastern Jewries and "the Occident" in the modern era, did they inevitably replace these Jewries' ties to their region, neighbors, or one another (or indeed, sprout where no alliances had hitherto existed)? These are among the challenges that the contributors to Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries engage, challenges that provoke them to offer fresh and engaging analyses, and challenges that betray the possibilities and the limits of their joint project. It is striking that the historical leitmotif running through this volume is not so much themes of regionality or cultural similitude as the presence of "European" Jews among the Sephardim. In this volume, this presence finds metonymical form in the Alliance Israélite Universelle (hereafter referred to as the AIU), an organization founded by Jews in France in 1860 with the aim of educating and thereby transforming many of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and Northern Africa. The AIU trained its staff (Jewish men and women recruited from urban centers throughout the Middle East, Ottoman Balkans, and North Africa) in Paris at the Ecole normale Israélite orientale, after which they were hired to provide Jewish students throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa with a "typical" French education, as well as training in Jewish history, religion, and Hebrew. All instruction took place in French. If the AIU reappears often in this work, it is at least in part because the organization itself saw (or wished to see) little difference between Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries; and what differences its agents did encounter, they were trained to attempt to erase, alter, or redeem by initiating a kind of (imagined) FrancoJewish fraternité. As the contributors to this volume testify, the cultural result was by no means uniform, but nonetheless, can serve as a unifying, or perhaps periodizing, dimension of Jewries' confrontation with a self-conscious "modernity." The presence of the AIU is in this sense a convenient crutch, for given the tremendous breadth of the contributions to this volume, it is otherwise difficult to identify concrete points of intersection among their subjects. To put this another way, the AIU...