World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [113]
7
To be sure, the category “Sephardim” is highly artificial. There is an important distinction, for example, between the Sephardi Tahor (literally “pure” Sephardi) and the more recent Sephardic arrivals from the Arab countries, known as Edot Mizrach. (In fact, during Israel’s founding years, the Sephardi Tahor were a kind of Jerusalem aristocracy, who looked down on the Ashkenazi newcomers from Europe.) Further complicating the picture, many Israelis think of themselves more narrowly as, say, Yemenite Jews or Moroccan Jews rather than Sephardim, and some Sephardic communities have outperformed others. Nevertheless, on the whole, Ashkenazi Jews have many of the attributes of a market-dominant minority.
Ashkenazi Jews continue to be disproportionately represented among professionals, managers, academics, and big business, while Sephardic Jews predominate in low-skilled occupations and in poor “development” towns in outlying areas where there is high unemployment. The number of Ashkenazi Jews with university degrees is almost three times higher than that of Sephardic Jews.
8 In recent years, Israel, originally more socialist in orientation, has aggressively liberalized certain sectors of its economy. Consistent with the proposition that Ashkenazi Jews are a market-dominant minority in Israel, there is a widespread sense among the Sephardim that market reforms are “leaving them behind” while reinforcing the dominance of the Ashkenazim.
Nevertheless, it may be inaccurate today to describe Ashkenazi Jews as an ethnic minority within Israel. As I have repeatedly stressed, ethnic identity turns not on “biology” but on subjective perceptions, which are in turn the product of prevailing ideologies in part constructed by elites and politicians. In Israel, the powerful official ideology is that Jews—whatever their social origins—are one people, and thus one “ethnicity.” When I ask Israelis whether the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews might be seen as an ethnic difference, roughly half of them answer, “Of course it’s an ethnic difference,” while the other half respond with an annoyed “Of course not, that’s ridiculous.”
Israel is a Jewish state—this is just the problem for the country’s Palestinians. As a matter of official policy, every Jew has an automatic right of admission to Israel, the famous Jewish “right of return.” Judaism is the official, established state religion. Every Jewish immigrant, whether from Russia or Iraq, is subjected to strong ideological pressures to learn Hebrew as quickly as possible, to “assimilate” into mainstream Israeli society, and to make a total commitment to the Israeli state. Precisely to integrate Sephardic Jews into Israeli society, the government has instituted various “affirmative action” policies, and rates of intermarriage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are on the increase, suggesting a trend toward the gradual merging of the two groups. By contrast, marriages between Jews and Arabs in Israel carry a strong stigma on both sides and almost never occur.
Israeli Jews as a Market-Dominant Minority
in the Arab-Dominated Middle East
Internal divisions within the Middle Eastern countries, whether viewed as “ethnic” or not, pale by comparison to the defining conflict in the region: the Arab-Israeli conflict. As mentioned above, the Arab-Israeli conflict is in many ways unique and obviously is not reducible