Who has the right to define Jewish identity? Most will agree—it’s hard to agree.
For converts like me, the truth is that more often than not, it’s easier to conform to the dominant narrative than it is to define Jewish identity for ourselves. When I joined a Sephardic Jewish community as a young convert, the limitations and complexities of a Jewish identity defined by that narrative became apparent—a narrative I would come to know as a toxic, trauma-laden mix of Zionism and Arab nationalism.
Within the Jewish community at large, there exists a palpable tension around the intersection of Jewish and Arab heritage. For many Jews with roots in Arab lands, the scars of Zionism and Arab nationalism run deep, overshadowing the beauty of our blended history.
“Jewish Arabs—that’s what we would have liked to be,” the Tunisian-Jewish essayist Albert Memmi once wrote. “And if we have given up the idea, it is because for centuries the Moslem Arabs have scornfully, cruelly, and systematically prevented us from carrying it out. And now it is far too late for us to become Jewish Arabs again.”
Memmi’s sentiments reflect a feeling of betrayal and resentment I know to be shared by many Jews with roots in the Arab world. There is a sense of longing for what could have been, mingled with the pain of the betrayal of Arab nationalism, which cast all Jews as Zionists and, therefore, traitors. The formation of the State of Israel had its own consequences for Arab Jews. Zionism cast the Arab as the ultimate enemy of the Jew, forcing a quasi-de-Arabization of the Sephardic community. The language, customs, and traditions that for centuries had defined Jewish communities in places like Casablanca and Baghdad were suddenly associated with “the enemy.”
“For Zionism, this Arabness, the product of millennial cohabitation, is merely a diasporic stain to be ‘cleansed’ through assimilation [to Ashkenazim],” the Iraqi-Jewish academic Ella Shohat wrote in her 1999 essay The Invention of the Mizrahim. “This unidimensional categorization, with all Jews being defined as closer to each other than to the cultures of which they have been a part, is tantamount to dismembering a community’s identity.”
As a convert, I often find myself navigating a delicate balance between the desire to reclaim our lost heritage and respecting the traumas of Jewish history. While I have come to understand and, to some extent, internalize those traumas, they weren’t foisted upon me the way they were my fellow Jews.
But being an outsider has its benefits—it allows you to hear what others don’t. Underneath the constant noise of the master narrative is the quiet hum of thousands of individual counter-narratives, silenced by the mainstream.
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Like most converts, I learned to read Hebrew early on in my Jewish journey. I took to it quickly, and language soon became a conduit through which I could connect to Judaism in all its aspects—I studied Judaism’s holiest texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic; I made friends from Tel Aviv and spoke to them in Hebrew; I took classes in Ladino and learned to read and write Solitreo, hoping to connect more with Sephardic history.
My passion for Hebrew and Ladino was well-received by my new community, and I was commended for taking an interest in Sephardic culture beyond borekas and bimuelos. But when I began studying Arabic, the reaction was different. While some reacted neutrally, I also encountered skepticism and thinly veiled prejudice from others.
Early on, one woman in the community expressed surprise and asked if I would be making aliyah and joining the Israeli military, as if the only reason to learn Arabic would be to spy on Palestinians. Later, another community member tried to discourage me and questioned whether Arabic might be an “inherently antisemitic” language (ironically, Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family.) Last year, on a hike in the Upper Galilee, an Ashkenazi man from Brooklyn asked if learning Arabic meant that I “support Arabs.”
A few months into my conversion, these reactions baffled me; Arabic had been the language of countless Jewish communities for hundreds of years. So many of the Sephardic community’s most important contributions to Jewish literature, including Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, were originally written in Arabic. Why was Arab culture suddenly so foreign and incompatible with Judaism? It felt wrong to discount such a significant aspect of our culture, and I felt sure that without embracing the full spectrum of our tradition, I wouldn’t feel authentic in my Jewish identity. Confused, I turned to a community elder who would later become a mentor in my conversion journey—Sami (pseudonym), a Moroccan Jew who came to America by way of France.
“In France, it was always both,” he told me. “Judeo-Arabe, the language and culture.”
For Sami, it seemed that the boundaries between Jewish and Arab identity were more permeable than they were for others. He still spoke the Moroccan-Jewish dialect of Arabic—and sometimes prayed in it too. He wasn’t the only one, either. From him and other mentors, I learned to embody Judaism more earnestly than I did from my conversion classes and assigned readings. I adopted the nusachim practiced by my mentors and began saying the Shema with a Moroccan pronunciation. I also started incorporating a North African tradition of mysticism into Shabbat and other Jewish holidays. At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya in Arabic, Ladino, and the more common Aramaic.
`As I spent more time with Sami and his generation, I realized how much we are losing with time; unlike most of us, they experienced an era when the boundaries of identity were less rigid and more permeable. Many continued to hold onto varying degrees of Judeo-Arab tradition, even if not all of them labeled it as such.
For Sami, there was pride in preserving his Arabic-accented Hebrew prayers. While his children and grandchildren adopted a more Yiddish-influenced pronunciation of Hebrew, he stayed true to the tradition as it was passed down to him and maintained the sounds and pronunciations associated with Arabic.
“With all the languages you learn, Akiva,” he told me, “you can’t let yourself forget your mother tongue.”
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Within the community, there are those who view my journey with suspicion, or even outright hostility, questioning my right as a convert to step outside the confines of our communal norms. For some, my exploration of the Judeo-Arab legacy is perceived as a disruption of the status quo and a betrayal of the Jewish community. This resistance can be disheartening, creating barriers where there should be bridges. Still, I am driven by a profound sense of responsibility to honor and preserve the full richness of Sephardic heritage—a heritage that predates the establishment of the State of Israel and transcends the confines of modern nationalism.
The notion of an “Arab Jew” is disturbing to many who subscribe to these narratives. It upsets the Arab/Jewish binary and contradicts the lachrymose conception of Jewish history in the Middle East. And, as the scholar of Moroccan Jewry Emily Benichou Gottreich notes: “In an immediate sense, it is meant to suggest Jewish solidarity with Palestinians.”
It is this last part that seems to be most troublesome to the largest number of people.
When Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) officially adopted a policy of anti-Zionism in 2019, it did so in part because of the Zionist project’s historic mistreatment of Jews from Arab lands. In response, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) and a coalition of other community organizations published an open letter denouncing JVP and demanding it remove all references to Sephardim and Mizrahim from its literature. While the letter correctly points out that most Sephadim and Mizrahim identify as Zionists, its claim that JVP “tokenizes, appropriates, revises and explicitly lies about Mizrahi and Sephardic history and experiences in order to promote a hostile, anti-Israel agenda,” is silly and ignores the fact that plenty of JVP members are Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa who do indeed identify as anti-Zionists.
Ironically, JIMENA is engaged in its own tokenization and revisionist history—one in which the violent displacement of Jews is used to justify the violent displacement of Palestinians. Although the Zionist narrative tries to equate the historical traumas of Middle Eastern Jews with those of the Palestinians, the truth is that Mizrahim and Sephardim have largely resettled (albeit with great difficulties) in Israel, Europe, and the United States, while Palestinian refugees continue to languish in a state of displacement and statelessness.
But like the Palestinians, Ella Shohat notes, Arab Jews, “by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self-representation.”
Though the narrative of Sephardic/Mizrahi migration to Israel typically emphasizes endemic antisemitic persecution in the region, the reality for many Arab Jews was shaped by a combination of political maneuvering, coercion, and displacement orchestrated by Israeli and Arab governments. The collaboration between Zionists and Arab nationalists served multiple purposes: for Arab governments, it appeased a particular segment of the political elite in providing a convenient means by which to rid the Arab world of perceived internal threats. For Israel, it bolstered population numbers and furthered Israel’s goal of creating a demographic majority.
In Israel itself, European cultural hegemony, state-sponsored assimilation, and limited representation in media and politics have often operated subtly, but their impact on Sephardic/Mizrahi communities has been profound. While Zionism claimed to offer a return to the promised land and the unification of the world’s Jewry, the reality for many Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab lands in the mid-20th century was one of intense discrimination and the systematic erasure of their cultural and linguistic heritage in favor of a new Israeli identity shaped by Ashkenazi norms.
Ultimately, the Zionist vision of creating a homogeneous Jewish state led to the suppression of Judeo-Arab culture and the erasure of its contributions to Jewish history and tradition.
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Reclaiming lost Sephardic heritage is not just about preserving traditions—it is about forging a path that honors the diversity of our heritage in a way the community at large might not. I am far from the first to walk this path. Along with Ella Shohat, I’ve come to know and love the works of other radical Arab-Jewish (or, in some cases Jewish-Arab) intellectuals like Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Yehouda Shenhav, and more recently, figures like Massoud Hayoun and Hadar Cohen.
In the moments of connection and understanding I share with other Sephardim on the same journey, the frustration and challenges I’ve encountered evaporate entirely. I now see that while this path may be fraught with discouragement from those who see Zionism as the true arbiter of Jewish identity, it is also paved with moments of joyful connection that reaffirm the resilience of the Jewish spirit.
One of my most cherished memories is an afternoon spent among like-minded Sephardim and Mizrahim, the scent of bakhoor filling the room. Delving into discussions about the complexities of our identities and immersing ourselves in the beauty of ancestral wisdom, I felt as though I was partaking in a sacred ritual—a journey of rediscovery tracing back centuries. As we exchanged stories and experiences, I felt a profound sense of belonging, as if I had finally rediscovered a part of my Jewish identity that had been buried long before I knew it ever existed.
Like me, these young Jews found meaning in the reclamation of Judeo-Arab rituals and practices that have been marginalized or forgotten over time. In embracing these traditions, I have found a profound sense of connection with my spiritual ancestors—a feeling that I am not merely shaped by history, but an active participant in shaping it. This reclamation is not just some academic exercise or nostalgic longing for the past; it is a deeply spiritual endeavor, a reconnection with the sacred rhythms and cycles that have sustained our people for generations.
In the end, the journey to define one’s own Jewish identity is not really about reclaiming the past. It’s about shaping the future so there will be room for more than what the current narrative allows. The journey is one of both discovery and rediscovery—a process of unearthing layers of identity stratified between the weight of history and politics.
As more Jews embrace a broader definition of what it means to be Jewish, we find our communities at a pivotal juncture—a moment where the limitations of outdated narratives are being challenged, and new possibilities are emerging. In moments when the narrow confines of Zionism and Arab nationalism begin to fade away, we can reclaim our right to define our own Jewish identity—an identity that is as diverse and multifaceted as the communities from which we hail.
For me, this journey of self-discovery is deeply rooted in a profound appreciation for the full spectrum of customs, languages, and traditions that define the Jewish experience. In reclaiming my right to define my own identity, I am not just asserting my autonomy, but also affirming my commitment to a vision of Jewish and Arab communities that transcends the narrow confines of sectarianism. Through conversations with elders, immersion in ritual and language, and engaging with radical intellectuals who challenge conventional narratives, I’ve learned that Jewish identity isn’t static or fixed—it’s fluid, evolving, and deeply personal.
While this vision of a fully integrated Judeo-Arab legacy is not without its challenges, nor is it immune to criticism from those wedded to the certainties of the past, in reshaping the narrative of Jewish identity, one is forced to confront uncomfortable truths and reckon with the complex histories that shaped Jewish identity in the first place. It requires acknowledging the injustices perpetrated in the name of Arab nationalism and Zionism, while also recognizing the nuanced power dynamics that precipitated those injustices.
In my own experience, the journey of self-discovery and self-affirmation is a confronting yet rewarding process that is guided by the wisdom of our ancestors and the dreams of generations yet to come. And it’s a path that I am honored and privileged to continue walking, knowing that with each step forward, I am contributing to the ongoing story of our people.
