When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2019, pp. 65-66

Book Talks

By Dale Sprusansky

Journalist Massoud Hayoun discussed his new book, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History, at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books in Philadelphia, PA on July 24. Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s, moderated the discussion.

A Jew of Moroccan, Tunisian and Egyptian descent, Hayoun explained what it means to identify as both Jew and Arab at a time when white nationalism is on the rise and the State of Israel is promoting a narrow definition of the Jewish identity.

The author began his talk by noting that the Arab identity has long been correlated with backwardness, resulting in some Arabs running away from or minimizing their identity. It’s time for Arabs to reclaim their identify from racist, colonialist and simplistic narratives, he implored. The “colonial problem of not seeing ‘Arabness’ as transnational, border-less, colorless and race-less” needs to be corrected by remembering the diversity of the Arab world, Hayoun said. Arabs, he noted, are “people who don’t maybe always look the same, or maybe don’t always have the same faith, or maybe don’t always have the same dialect of Arabic.”

While Hayoun is proud to identify as Arab, he also expressed a humanistic view of the world in which, he believes, “colorized categories of human existence” ought to be deemphasized. “There’s no such thing as ‘peoples,’” he said. “There are so many people who throughout history moved through different spaces—It’s very possible for me as a North African person to say I’m Phoenician, or that I’m Amazigh (Berber), or that I’m an Arab, or that I’m an Ottoman, or a Circassian, or Greek, or Roman, or any of these things that moved through our lands.”

Hayoun said his decision to intentionally identify as an Arab Jew is more about combating hateful stereotypes and policies than it is about relishing an identify that makes him distinct from other people. His identity, he said, is “something that at its core is a beautiful legacy that deserves to be taken and uplifted for the sake of shutting up the forces that say otherwise.”

He made painfully clear the level of unease he feels as an Arab and Jew in the United States today. The era of Donald Trump “makes it impossible for me to have this very event tonight without worrying that somebody’s going to come through that door with a MAGA hat and shoot us all dead,” he said. “I was very afraid to call myself a Jewish person and an Arab American and come and speak to you guys tonight, because we are living in an unsafe environment.”

As a Jew, Hayoun said he is also appalled by historical accounts that often solely emphasize the history of anti-Jewish discrimination in the Arab world and extol the State of Israel as a safe-haven for Arab Jews. “There were very frequent instances of discrimination, murder and acculturation that happened to us throughout history,” he acknowledged, but “that isn’t the only narrative that exists.” While these hate-filled incidents should by no means be dismissed, he said his book offers a “counterbalance” by showing the ways Arab Jews thrived in the region and noting the “role that the Zionist state played in divorcing us from those societies.”

Hayoun condemned Israel’s attempts to use attacks against Jews in Europe, the Arab world, the U.S. and elsewhere as a reason to encourage Jews to abandon their homelands and move to Israel. “The response to international hatred against Jewish communities has been time and again to ghettoize us on a very narrow parcel of land on the ash heap of another civilization of displaced people,” he said.

He also called out Israel for its cordial relations with leaders who promote hatred against minorities, including Jews. “If Israel were in earnest concerned with preserving the legacy of the Holocaust and ensuring that it never happened to anyone again, their response to various attacks on our faith community internationally would not be to emigrate to Israel, they would be to ensure an environment of white supremacist genocide did not exist,” he said. “We see the very opposite happening, especially with the Israeli administration’s close and fond relationship with [Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro, [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban and [U.S. President Donald] Trump.”

Hayoun said his impetus for writing the book came from long, daily conversations he held with his grandmother—who he called his best friend—in which they frequently discussed identity and “why ‘Arabness’ had become such a difficult concept.”

These talks led him to a thought that provoked the book: “Not calling ourselves Arab divorced us from humanity.” This sentiment perhaps best describes the dual but congruent intent of When We Were Arabs—to defend and celebrate a targeted and complex identity, while calling for a shared, inclusive human identity.

 When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family's Forgotten History is available from Middle East Books & More.