Oriental Neighbors: Middle East Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine by Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor (review)

The diverse Arabic-speaking Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, called Sephardim, Mizrahim, or Oriental Jews, depending on context, have often been presented as external to the Zionist project, victims of that project, or as its principle internal critics. In Palestine, Oriental Jewish perceptions of European Zionists as foreign and lacking appropriate regional knowledge and themselves as locally embedded allies of Palestinian urbanites and peasants alike have at times provoked nostalgia among scholars. Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, in their book Oriental Neighbors, share some of that nostalgia for figures who continually engaged with, travelled within, and wrote for broader Middle Eastern audiences as they "lived in a Levantine space and belonged to an intellectual community that encouraged a debate on the nature of past and future relations between Arabs and Jews." (4) Oriental Neighbors is not a wistful reflection, but rather an exploration of the difficulty—and ultimately the impossibility—of maintaining a strong commitment to the brotherhood of all native Middle Easterners, Bene ha-Aretz, while promoting the Zionist aims of Jewish immigration and settlement.

Oriental Neighbors focuses on the British Mandate Period, defined both by Sephardi loss of prestige and influence within the Jewish community and by new communal and organizational attempts at self-definition vis-à-vis the newly configured Arab Middle East and the ascendant Zionist movement. While insisting in organizational and literary forums that they were natives who could and should constitute a bridge between Arabs and European Jews, they repeatedly rebuffed suggestions, both by Arabs and by Ashkenazi Jews, that they were outside of or resistant to the Zionist project. They asserted that Zionism could be a force for good, though they insisted that this could only occur if the project were implemented with sensitivity to and out of an affinity with its Eastern setting.

Using Jewish organizational documents and the Hebrew periodical press, and occasionally Arabic sources written by non-Jewish Palestinians, Oriental Neighbors explores modes of engagement between Sephardi/Oriental Jews and Arabs, and between Oriental and European Jews, on two levels: elite and popular. The first three chapters offer a history of circles of Sephardi Jews who created organizational, institutional, and journalistic structures to communicate their affinities to the East both to Ashkenazi audiences and to Arabs. As they articulated their stances in a variety of forums, they reiterated their belief that "they could be both loyal Zionists and mediators between Jews and Arabs." (23) The Jewish Agency's Arab Bureau and the Arab Department of the Histadrut employed Oriental Jews as leaders and mediators to strengthen ties to Arab activists, undertake diplomatic contacts, and encourage Arabic study. Zionist Arabic newspapers like Al-Akhbar, Al-Salam, Ittihad al-'Umal, and Haqiqat al-Amr not only promoted Zionism but sought to mediate between Jews and Arabs and connect the Jews of Palestine to the broader Middle East. Pushing back against scholars who have emphasized the Zionist goals of these papers, they emphasize the writers' engagement with the regional Arab press and claim that the Sephardi writers "used newspapers as much more than a propaganda tool." These papers sat alongside efforts to promote Arabic study, write textbooks, and arrange for teacher visits to the Middle East as expressions of an "Arab-Jewish cultural hybrid identity." (89)

The later chapters shift to the popular level with a cultural history of life in the Jewish-Arab mixed "frontier neighborhoods" or "Oriental Ghettos" in Tel Aviv–Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa. These spaces were characterized by coexistence and cooperation, but also the sort of conflict borne of proximity. As Jews and Arabs played at the same playgrounds, shopped in the same markets, and employed one another, they defied broader trends in the Yishuv toward Jewish–Arab separation. This chapter is a fascinating work of cultural and working-class history, but unfortunately...