Over the past decade, the Arab world has started to show increasing interest in the stories of the Jews who once lived in their lands, as expressed in television series, a few translated memoirs, and a rash of novels. This new awareness of the Middle Eastern Jewish past stands in stark contrast to the second half of the 20th century, during which Arab societies deliberately erased “their” Jews from collective memory. Reviewing two recent novels, by Muslim authors, with Jewish main characters, Samuel Tadros presents a brief history of this new genre and draws some conclusions:
Perhaps the most profound issue at stake is the Arabic-speaking world’s inability to imagine coexistence between Zionism and the rest of the region. Jews may be humanized for the first time in Arabic novels and movies, but it is only one type of Jew: an anti-Zionist Jew or, in the case of Khawla Hamdi’s [novel In My Heart Is a Hebrew Woman], one who converts to Islam. . . . History, of course, was more complex. Some Arabic speakers, even after the Balfour Declaration (in which the British government endorsed the creation of a Jewish national homeland) did not see a necessary conflict between their national aspirations and Zionism. . . . Contemporary Arabic-speakers may be shocked to discover that a leading member of the Egyptian intelligentsia declared in the 1920s, “The victory of the Zionist ideal is also the victory of my ideal.”
Most importantly, the Jews of the Arabic-speaking world who are now being remembered and imagined are not ghosts of a lost past, as they are portrayed by contemporary Arabic-speaking authors. Many of them may be dead, and they certainly are no longer living in Arabic-speaking countries. That part is lost forever. . . . But Jews with roots in that world have not disappeared from the planet. They and their descendants live close by in Israel, where they now represent nearly a majority of the country’s Jewish population. If the Arabic-speaking peoples really want to remember and get to know them, all they need to do is to cross the border and visit them. They may be surprised by what they find.
Read more on Hoover: http://www.hoover.org/research/once-upon-time-jews-lived-here