World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [112]
Lebanon is perhaps the most religiously diverse country in the region, with its plethora of Muslim and Christian sects. After World War I, for reasons including the establishment by the French of a confessional power-sharing system in which the country’s Christian Maronites controlled the presidency, Lebanese Christians emerged as something of a market-dominant minority, deeply resented by the country’s majority Muslim population. Largely over this issue, bitter civil war erupted in 1976, causing many wealthy Lebanese to flee the country. The extraordinary market-dominance of the Lebanese minorities in Latin America and West Africa has already been noted; many of these successful expatriate Lebanese have been Christians.
Today, Lebanon is generally viewed as being on the cautious upswing, although military dominance and political interference by Syria remain serious problems. With the 1991 Taif Accord, a new power-sharing system was put in place, in theory giving the country’s Muslim majority political representation more proportionate to their numbers. At the same time, many wealthy Lebanese Christians are returning to the country. Whether the problem of a market-dominant minority reasserts itself in Lebanon’s struggling democracy remains to be seen.
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In sum, with only a few possible exceptions, none of the Arab countries has a market-dominant minority. Few, if any, are democratizing. Rather, throughout the Arab Middle East, economic and political power tends to be concentrated in the hands of a corrupt, repressive, often hereditary ruling elite that deflects popular criticism by fomenting hatred against other, “outsider” targets.
Israel: Ashkenazim as a Market-Dominant Minority?
Israel presents a surprisingly complicated case. This is true even if we bracket off the country’s Arab population for the moment and focus only on Israeli Jews. If the division between Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews is viewed as an ethnic division—I return to this question later—then the former are arguably a market-dominant minority.
In the Middle Ages, explains Bernard Lewis, the terms Ashkenaz and Sepharad (actually two ancient place names from the Hebrew Bible) were used to refer to Germany and Spain, respectively. Over time, Ashkenazim came to refer to Jews of European or Russian origin, most of whom in the past spoke Yiddish, a German dialect. By contrast, the term Sephardim came to denote Jews who came from the Arab-speaking Muslim lands, even though only a small portion of these Jews actually originated in Spain. Ashkenazim founded modern Israel, but by far the largest immigration to the country after independence was from Muslim countries. At least until recently, Sephardim made up roughly 55 percent of the Jewish population in Israel.
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Generally speaking, Sephardic Jews are said to be darker and to “look Arab” whereas Ashkenazi Jews “look European.” Historically, Sephardic Jews from the Muslim countries were linguistically Arab and today often still speak Hebrew with an Arabic accent. Other cultural differences, more pronounced thirty years ago but still evident, include demographic patterns (orthodox Sephardim have higher birth rates), family organization (Sephardim are more patriarchal), religious observance, and so on. Provocatively, Bernard Lewis describes the Ashkenazim/Sephardim division in terms of a contest between “Jews of Christendom” and “Jews of Islam,” “both groups bringing with them certain attitudes, habits, and cultural traditions from their countries and societies of origin. They have now come together in an intense symbiosis.”
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In addition to cultural differences, there remains a substantial and persistent socioeconomic gap between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Ashkenazim have dominated the elite institutions and professions of Israel since the state was founded. By contrast, most Sephardim came from much poorer, barely