Modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought: Writings on identity, politics, and culture, 1893-1958

This volume opens the canon of modern Jewish thought to the vibrant and compelling--yet all too often overlooked--writings of Jews from the Arab East, from the close of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Whether they identified as Sephardim, Mizrahim, anticolonialists, or Zionists, these thinkers engaged the fundamental challenges and transformations of Middle Eastern Jewry in this decisive period. In an illuminating and provocative introduction, Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite present Jewish culture and politics situated within overlapping Arabic, Islamic, and colonial contexts. They invite the reader to reconsider contemporary invocations of Levantine, Mizrahi, and Arab Jewish identities against the backdrop of earlier generations of Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals who critically assessed or contested the implications of Western presence and Western Jewish presence in the Middle East, religion and secularization, and the rise of nationalism, communism, and Zionism, as well as the creation and meaning of the State of Israel.