//features//
Fall 2020
Fall 2020
Revisiting Middle Eastern Jewish History: An Interview with Professor Alon Tam
Sophie Levy
Being an Iranian Jewish student at Barnard/Columbia is an interesting experience, to say the least. I am a Middle Eastern person in Jewish studies courses and a Jewish person in Middle East studies courses—and while those spheres certainly are not mutually exclusive, the relative separation in course subject matter between these disciplines can sometimes make it feel like they are academically sequestered from one another.
That changed this past semester, when I took Professor Alon Tam’s course, “The History of Jews in the Islamic World in Modern Times.” Under Professor Tam’s guidance, the class managed to cover Jewish histories from Morocco to Yemen to Iran with unrelenting nuance and deliberation, and touched on large-scale sociopolitical sea-changes as much as music, film, and the minutiae of urban life in Islamic cities. I sat down with Professor Tam over Zoom as the semester drew to a close to discuss the specifics of his courses at Columbia as well as some larger reflections on the past and future of his field of study.
Sophie Levy: Could you talk a little bit about how you were drawn to the subject of Jews in the Islamic World and tell us about your academic background?
Alon Tam: Well, it was a long and circuitous way to this point, not really a straightforward path, which I am very much grateful for. It’s rooted in my family background; my father’s side of the family is originally from Cairo and they came to Israel in 1957 like most Egyptian Jews. I was raised with that cultural heritage growing up, and that was enough to foster an interest in the history of Egyptian Jews in me. I wrote a high school “thesis,” I think you could call it, about the history of the Jewish community in Egypt, so that was kind of my entry point into this subject.
I went on to study the Middle East generally, not even Egypt specifically. I studied the politics, culture, and social history of the modern and medieval Middle East for quite a long time. I came to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for my PhD, and I wrote my dissertation and my first book on the social history of Cairo’s coffeehouses. I’ve always held an interest in the history of Egyptian Jews and Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in general.
When I got to my undergraduate studies, I was taught back then that a good historian does not research anything close to them personally, to keep a distance for the sake of objectivity. Now the thinking in the humanities and in the historical discipline has very much changed; it’s taken a 180. A personal connection to your topic of study, whatever it is, is even celebrated now. So that actually allowed me to go back and delve into the topic [of Egyptian Jews], even getting my own family’s history involved in my research.
SL: How did you end up at Columbia, and what are the two courses you’re teaching here this year?
AT: After doing my PhD at Penn, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, which is an independent center affiliated with Penn. I was there for a couple of years—they had a fellowship focusing on Jews in Islamic contexts. Then I came to Columbia as the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies. It’s a joint fellowship between IIJS [The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies] at Columbia and the Jewish Studies program at Fordham University.
As part of the fellowship, I am continuing my research on the Egyptian Jewish community and teaching two courses. I taught one of them this semester—on the History of Jews in the Islamic Middle East in Modern Times—and next semester I will be teaching a Global Core seminar on Jews and the City in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. While the class I taught this fall sort of covered the general history of Jews in the region, my actual research is about the intersection of Jewish social history and urban history, so my spring seminar is right up my alley—looking at Jewish history in the region from the perspective / in the framework of the city.
SL: We started our class this semester by talking about the idea of the “Islamic World” and how that term can be approached critically as we study these communities. Why do you see this region / grouping as necessary even as you are critical of it?
AT: Islamic civilizations were really umbrella civilizations that included many different cultures and communities that were non-Muslim. In some geographic areas, non-Muslims even constituted the majority of populations under Islamic rule for certain periods of time. Different communities lived together and interacted under these larger structures; they weren’t monolithic societies, and Jews were part of them. Jewish communities that were there in the region before Islam were absorbed into those systems.
I think we need to study these communities in their specific historical context. So yes, the “Islamic world” is an umbrella term, but its history is also very distinct and unique and different from the European historical context experienced by Ashkenazi Jews. One big takeaway from my course is not to collapse all Jewish communities in the Islamic world into one category. Each community needs to be studied on its own historical terms, let alone in the context of the Islamic world as a whole.
SL: One of the things that I appreciated about the class was how the reading list was actually very dynamic and encompassed a range of media. I think it’s unique to take a history class where you analyze photographs, films, and music fairly often on top of the usual articles. Why do you think this multimedia approach to research is important, particularly for the subject of Jews in the Islamic world?
AT: This is something I wanted to do in all my classes deliberately. It comes from my work, first and foremost. For my first big research project, on the social-political history of Cairo’s coffeehouses, I had to use a real plethora of sources. I couldn’t rely just on texts; I used a lot of images, a lot of films, a lot of visual and physical evidence to create a holistic view of the place. So I am really, deeply trained to think in that multimedia way. Approaching different sources from different disciplinary points of view also opens you up to methodologies and theories from other disciplines beyond the historical discipline. I think it’s an enriching way to teach and can really help students build a range of skills.
SL: In the last article I wrote for the Current, I conducted this personal examination of the word “Mizrahi.” I understood that there was an obvious separation between my experience as an Iranian Jew from Los Angeles and the experiences of the Yemeni-Israeli poets that I mentioned, who were from working class backgrounds. But I think your class has helped me understand the importance of being very specific and deliberate about showing the differences between these communities, even as there might be a ribbon of commonality through them. What terminology do you think is best to describe these communities in a collective way? How has your positioning as an Israeli scholar working in the US influenced your views as to what descriptors we should use?
AT: The question of labels is fundamental to any discussion of the history of Jewish communities in the region. It comes down to a conversation about identity that has been pervasively woven through a lot of scholarship on this subject. Where did these communities feel that they belonged? How did they see themselves? These questions in and of themselves have a long history, one that was born from a reality of different nationalisms that pressed people to choose an identity and be very committed to it.
There is also this history of trying to really collapse these communities onto each other and to place them into generalizing categories, which was done especially in Israel in the form of the Mizrahi category. I think it does indeed efface difference, and as a label it should be conceived as very, very specific to Israel and to Israeli realities, experiences, and histories. I am extremely careful not to expand this term beyond Israel and to throw it back and time and impose it on communities that were in other countries before 1948, because that just doesn’t make sense historically. It’s an anachronism.
If we have to use labels, then I am all for narrowing them down rather than expanding them, because that’s how you can help them retain meaning as working tools for understanding historical reality. You want them to be clarifying rather than confusing. So, what to call these communities if not Mizrahi? The very simple answer to that is… to just call them what they individually are! Why do we need to collapse them together other than in Israeli or American diasporic contexts?
SL: However, your course does discuss these communities under the structure of a single course, without collapsing them. If we know there are important differences between these communities, and that it’s clarifying as historians to analyze them separately / for what they are, then what do you see as some of the threads that do unite them in a way that doesn’t collapse them?
AT: There were some historical conditions in the region that were shared between different communities—first of all, the fact that many of those communities (but not all) were for centuries under the same political umbrella of one Islamic empire or another. Whatever the policies of that empire were, they extended to and affected multiple territories—not equally, necessarily, but there certainly is a shared historical experience. We focused on the Ottoman empire, the last of the Islamic empires, which existed until the start of the twentieth century—so that history of shared political experience did not take place that long ago.
Even if you look past the Ottoman empire, there certainly are grand historical processes that happened in Iran or Morocco in tandem with how they happened in the Ottoman context. I'm talking about things like modernization, or westernization, or colonialism. So these are shared experiences, just by the force of history. Also, I think their Jewishness and their relationship to religious practice gives a common ground to their cultures. Lastly, we need to remember that yes, these communities were rooted in different countries and societies and histories—but they did talk to each other, they were in contact. The fact that we’re talking about their existences in specific contexts does not mean that they were isolated. By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were certain kinds of media, like newspapers, in which they learned about different Jewish communities across the world. They travelled, they traded, they sent letters. They were very much aware of each other, and that kind of contact definitely enabled them to influence one another.
SL: That contact—that synthetic cultural landscape, especially of the twentieth century—you can very much still feel the impact of it today in the form of marriages and languages. And the newer histories of Middle Eastern Jewish life in Israel and the US are also changing what that kind of contact and mutual influence looks like.
AT: Absolutely.
SL: Especially as someone who teaches in America, but also more broadly, in what direction do you hope your teaching and your research take the conversation about these communities? What kind of change do you want to see in this discipline?
AT: We’re actually having a moment in Jewish Studies in this country in particular where attention to communities in the Islamic world is burgeoning. It’s been building for the past decade or so. There was always some research about those communities between Israel, the US, and Europe, but it was very marginalized in the realm of Jewish Studies; it was seen as esoteric by the discipline. But that’s changing. There are more endowed chairs that focus on these histories, there are many, many more books and much more research about these communities coming out in English written by American and Israeli scholars. It’s very exciting for me, and scholars of my generation, to be part of this moment.
So what I wish for, first and foremost, is that this moment only continues and is amplified, because there is still so much more work to be done even to just compose a baseline history of these communities before we can even move into conversations with a deeper or broader scope. I hope to encourage more students to embrace an interest in this topic, so they become researchers themselves and join that production of knowledge. This necessitates, as always, an investment of funds, so I also hope that the wave of more endowed chairs and fellowships in this subject increases, too, so this whole academic apparatus can grow stronger. The next step, of course, would be to encourage attention toward these subjects outside of academia, in the context of the general public. There are already some projects and initiatives that are academically based but publicly-facing, and are working to engage younger people today.
//SOPHIE LEVY is a senior in Barnard College and Literary and Arts editor at The Current. She can be reached at srl2178@barnard.edu.
Jewish girls during Bat Mitzva in Alexandria, Egypt. Nebi Daniel Association Public Photo Collection. From http://commons.wikimedia.org/
That changed this past semester, when I took Professor Alon Tam’s course, “The History of Jews in the Islamic World in Modern Times.” Under Professor Tam’s guidance, the class managed to cover Jewish histories from Morocco to Yemen to Iran with unrelenting nuance and deliberation, and touched on large-scale sociopolitical sea-changes as much as music, film, and the minutiae of urban life in Islamic cities. I sat down with Professor Tam over Zoom as the semester drew to a close to discuss the specifics of his courses at Columbia as well as some larger reflections on the past and future of his field of study.
Sophie Levy: Could you talk a little bit about how you were drawn to the subject of Jews in the Islamic World and tell us about your academic background?
Alon Tam: Well, it was a long and circuitous way to this point, not really a straightforward path, which I am very much grateful for. It’s rooted in my family background; my father’s side of the family is originally from Cairo and they came to Israel in 1957 like most Egyptian Jews. I was raised with that cultural heritage growing up, and that was enough to foster an interest in the history of Egyptian Jews in me. I wrote a high school “thesis,” I think you could call it, about the history of the Jewish community in Egypt, so that was kind of my entry point into this subject.
I went on to study the Middle East generally, not even Egypt specifically. I studied the politics, culture, and social history of the modern and medieval Middle East for quite a long time. I came to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for my PhD, and I wrote my dissertation and my first book on the social history of Cairo’s coffeehouses. I’ve always held an interest in the history of Egyptian Jews and Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in general.
When I got to my undergraduate studies, I was taught back then that a good historian does not research anything close to them personally, to keep a distance for the sake of objectivity. Now the thinking in the humanities and in the historical discipline has very much changed; it’s taken a 180. A personal connection to your topic of study, whatever it is, is even celebrated now. So that actually allowed me to go back and delve into the topic [of Egyptian Jews], even getting my own family’s history involved in my research.
SL: How did you end up at Columbia, and what are the two courses you’re teaching here this year?
AT: After doing my PhD at Penn, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, which is an independent center affiliated with Penn. I was there for a couple of years—they had a fellowship focusing on Jews in Islamic contexts. Then I came to Columbia as the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies. It’s a joint fellowship between IIJS [The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies] at Columbia and the Jewish Studies program at Fordham University.
As part of the fellowship, I am continuing my research on the Egyptian Jewish community and teaching two courses. I taught one of them this semester—on the History of Jews in the Islamic Middle East in Modern Times—and next semester I will be teaching a Global Core seminar on Jews and the City in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. While the class I taught this fall sort of covered the general history of Jews in the region, my actual research is about the intersection of Jewish social history and urban history, so my spring seminar is right up my alley—looking at Jewish history in the region from the perspective / in the framework of the city.
SL: We started our class this semester by talking about the idea of the “Islamic World” and how that term can be approached critically as we study these communities. Why do you see this region / grouping as necessary even as you are critical of it?
AT: Islamic civilizations were really umbrella civilizations that included many different cultures and communities that were non-Muslim. In some geographic areas, non-Muslims even constituted the majority of populations under Islamic rule for certain periods of time. Different communities lived together and interacted under these larger structures; they weren’t monolithic societies, and Jews were part of them. Jewish communities that were there in the region before Islam were absorbed into those systems.
I think we need to study these communities in their specific historical context. So yes, the “Islamic world” is an umbrella term, but its history is also very distinct and unique and different from the European historical context experienced by Ashkenazi Jews. One big takeaway from my course is not to collapse all Jewish communities in the Islamic world into one category. Each community needs to be studied on its own historical terms, let alone in the context of the Islamic world as a whole.
SL: One of the things that I appreciated about the class was how the reading list was actually very dynamic and encompassed a range of media. I think it’s unique to take a history class where you analyze photographs, films, and music fairly often on top of the usual articles. Why do you think this multimedia approach to research is important, particularly for the subject of Jews in the Islamic world?
AT: This is something I wanted to do in all my classes deliberately. It comes from my work, first and foremost. For my first big research project, on the social-political history of Cairo’s coffeehouses, I had to use a real plethora of sources. I couldn’t rely just on texts; I used a lot of images, a lot of films, a lot of visual and physical evidence to create a holistic view of the place. So I am really, deeply trained to think in that multimedia way. Approaching different sources from different disciplinary points of view also opens you up to methodologies and theories from other disciplines beyond the historical discipline. I think it’s an enriching way to teach and can really help students build a range of skills.
SL: In the last article I wrote for the Current, I conducted this personal examination of the word “Mizrahi.” I understood that there was an obvious separation between my experience as an Iranian Jew from Los Angeles and the experiences of the Yemeni-Israeli poets that I mentioned, who were from working class backgrounds. But I think your class has helped me understand the importance of being very specific and deliberate about showing the differences between these communities, even as there might be a ribbon of commonality through them. What terminology do you think is best to describe these communities in a collective way? How has your positioning as an Israeli scholar working in the US influenced your views as to what descriptors we should use?
AT: The question of labels is fundamental to any discussion of the history of Jewish communities in the region. It comes down to a conversation about identity that has been pervasively woven through a lot of scholarship on this subject. Where did these communities feel that they belonged? How did they see themselves? These questions in and of themselves have a long history, one that was born from a reality of different nationalisms that pressed people to choose an identity and be very committed to it.
There is also this history of trying to really collapse these communities onto each other and to place them into generalizing categories, which was done especially in Israel in the form of the Mizrahi category. I think it does indeed efface difference, and as a label it should be conceived as very, very specific to Israel and to Israeli realities, experiences, and histories. I am extremely careful not to expand this term beyond Israel and to throw it back and time and impose it on communities that were in other countries before 1948, because that just doesn’t make sense historically. It’s an anachronism.
If we have to use labels, then I am all for narrowing them down rather than expanding them, because that’s how you can help them retain meaning as working tools for understanding historical reality. You want them to be clarifying rather than confusing. So, what to call these communities if not Mizrahi? The very simple answer to that is… to just call them what they individually are! Why do we need to collapse them together other than in Israeli or American diasporic contexts?
SL: However, your course does discuss these communities under the structure of a single course, without collapsing them. If we know there are important differences between these communities, and that it’s clarifying as historians to analyze them separately / for what they are, then what do you see as some of the threads that do unite them in a way that doesn’t collapse them?
AT: There were some historical conditions in the region that were shared between different communities—first of all, the fact that many of those communities (but not all) were for centuries under the same political umbrella of one Islamic empire or another. Whatever the policies of that empire were, they extended to and affected multiple territories—not equally, necessarily, but there certainly is a shared historical experience. We focused on the Ottoman empire, the last of the Islamic empires, which existed until the start of the twentieth century—so that history of shared political experience did not take place that long ago.
Even if you look past the Ottoman empire, there certainly are grand historical processes that happened in Iran or Morocco in tandem with how they happened in the Ottoman context. I'm talking about things like modernization, or westernization, or colonialism. So these are shared experiences, just by the force of history. Also, I think their Jewishness and their relationship to religious practice gives a common ground to their cultures. Lastly, we need to remember that yes, these communities were rooted in different countries and societies and histories—but they did talk to each other, they were in contact. The fact that we’re talking about their existences in specific contexts does not mean that they were isolated. By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were certain kinds of media, like newspapers, in which they learned about different Jewish communities across the world. They travelled, they traded, they sent letters. They were very much aware of each other, and that kind of contact definitely enabled them to influence one another.
SL: That contact—that synthetic cultural landscape, especially of the twentieth century—you can very much still feel the impact of it today in the form of marriages and languages. And the newer histories of Middle Eastern Jewish life in Israel and the US are also changing what that kind of contact and mutual influence looks like.
AT: Absolutely.
SL: Especially as someone who teaches in America, but also more broadly, in what direction do you hope your teaching and your research take the conversation about these communities? What kind of change do you want to see in this discipline?
AT: We’re actually having a moment in Jewish Studies in this country in particular where attention to communities in the Islamic world is burgeoning. It’s been building for the past decade or so. There was always some research about those communities between Israel, the US, and Europe, but it was very marginalized in the realm of Jewish Studies; it was seen as esoteric by the discipline. But that’s changing. There are more endowed chairs that focus on these histories, there are many, many more books and much more research about these communities coming out in English written by American and Israeli scholars. It’s very exciting for me, and scholars of my generation, to be part of this moment.
So what I wish for, first and foremost, is that this moment only continues and is amplified, because there is still so much more work to be done even to just compose a baseline history of these communities before we can even move into conversations with a deeper or broader scope. I hope to encourage more students to embrace an interest in this topic, so they become researchers themselves and join that production of knowledge. This necessitates, as always, an investment of funds, so I also hope that the wave of more endowed chairs and fellowships in this subject increases, too, so this whole academic apparatus can grow stronger. The next step, of course, would be to encourage attention toward these subjects outside of academia, in the context of the general public. There are already some projects and initiatives that are academically based but publicly-facing, and are working to engage younger people today.
//SOPHIE LEVY is a senior in Barnard College and Literary and Arts editor at The Current. She can be reached at srl2178@barnard.edu.
Jewish girls during Bat Mitzva in Alexandria, Egypt. Nebi Daniel Association Public Photo Collection. From http://commons.wikimedia.org/