Imran Abdullah
In 1928, the Jewish historian Salo Baron published his famous article "Ghetto and Emancipation: Are We Revising the Traditional View?", Examining the dangers of writing Jewish history as a weird narration of tears, pains, and blood.
He wrote in the year 1963 another article in which he stated that throughout his life he had been fighting against the concept of tears and blood that dominated Jewish history, and added, "Suffering distorted the overall picture of Jewish historical development."
Barron was the most important Jewish historian of his generation, born in 1895 to a wealthy and cultured traditional Jewish family in the Austrian Empire, and his family spoke German rather than the Yiddish language spoken by the poor Jewish masses of Eastern Europe.
Barron's article challenged the categories of the most important 19th-century Jewish historian, Heinrich Gritz, who viewed Jewish history as a continuum of tragedies and episodes of suffering.
Barron insisted that the idea of persecuting the Jews more than any other ethnic or religious group throughout history was wrong, and concluded his article that "it is time to break the theory of the history of blood, and adopt a view more consistent with historical truth."
A mixed date
In a joint article recently published by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the authors Lior Sternfeld and Manshiet Anzi addressed the dangers of writing Jewish history in a manner of tragedy and the constant suffering in the service of political propaganda and propaganda purposes, and referred to what they considered a project to formulate a "sad" history for Middle Eastern Jews to justify contemporary Israeli policies.
The authors cited Barron's idea of Jewish history, as he considered that it should not be reduced and simplified in a "series of persecutions", but rather a process of continuous communication between Jews and their surroundings, and should be studied in the context of the non-Jewish societies in which they lived.
Barron studied how the distorted perception of the past was misused, misunderstanding the historical context to serve political goals, and he was defending his varied concept of Jewish history that takes into account historical complexities in various social, cultural, religious and economic aspects.
The authors pointed to the fact that the Israeli ministries of culture and education are returning the early Zionist history book in an ideological and politicized way to justify current events historically, citing allegations of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world, which Israel seeks through its promotion to justify its reluctance to accept the peace process in the region and promote Jewish-Arab coexistence in Israel, on The authors quote.
The authors pointed to changing the names of the streets of Silwan neighborhood as part of the process of Judaization in Jerusalem, as the Israeli municipality’s decision was implemented and new street signs bearing the names of Yemeni Jewish rabbis claiming that the occupation lived in the Palestinian neighborhood were installed.
They added that this practice by which the Israeli state tries to wash its hands from decades in which non-Ashkenazi history (Western Jews) was neglected, but, ironically, it did so in a neighborhood inhabited by an overwhelming Palestinian majority that did not set foot in Israeli Jews.
The writers say that Jewish history, including their history, is being portrayed in some countries of the Islamic world as a series of tragedies for political purposes, and this is evident in the Israeli obsession with portraying France as suffering from Muslim immigration and anti-Semitism to urge French Jews to migrate to Israel.
This Israeli narrative ignores the culture and rich history of Jewish societies in North Africa and the Middle East, and insists that they have lived a humiliating life as second-class residents, "awaiting Zionist salvation," and once Israel was established they migrated there according to the Israeli narrative that the authors deem misleading.
According to the authors, this account ignores long centuries of Jewish life in the Islamic world, and denies that Jewish societies in the Middle East are an integral part of their societies, in an attempt to link the history of Jews in the Middle East to their counterparts from Jewish societies in European countries, as they were expelled from Spain and Portugal and the massacres in Russia in the late nineteenth century and Germany in the mid-twentieth century.
The authors concluded their joint article by saying that Middle Eastern Jews lived in an Arab and Islamic context whose eras are currently being erased in parallel with the Israeli effort to eliminate Palestinian history.
And considering that the history of the Jewish communities that lived in the Middle East is being addressed in a simplistic and abbreviated way analyzed by Palestinian thinker Edward Said in his book "Orientalism", denouncing the comparison, for example, between the conditions of Yemeni Jews, Moroccans, Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and others who lived and migrated in different circumstances, there is no unified history And simplified for these disparate societies.
Victim of the victim
Palestinian thinker Edward Saeed sees that the Palestinians were a victim of the victim, and he means that the Jews were victims of the Christian West, and he says in his article "Oslo and Beyond" that "the Jews are truly viewed as victims of a long history of Western Christian anti-Semitic persecution mainly, and it was crowned with the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust Which almost exceed the limits of ratification, but for the Palestinians, their role is the role of victims victims. "
Saeed denounces the Western liberals' distancing themselves from supporting the Palestinian cause despite their opposition to racial discrimination in South Africa and their position on the issue of Bosnia and civil rights in America, due to the mixture of fear and guilt.