The Creation of Israeli Arabic

Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel

Y. Mendel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137337375
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book sheds light on the ways in which the on-going Israeli-Arab conflict has shaped Arabic language instruction. Due to its interdisciplinary nature it will be of great interest to academics and researchers in security and middle eastern studies as well as those focused on language and linguistics.

1

Rooting Security in Arabic Soil

When Zionism Met Arabic

Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers.

Yehuda Amichai, poet¹

From the Arabic of ibn Maymūn to that of Unit 8200

The connection between Arabic studies and security considerations in Israel is an open secret widely shared by the majority of Israelis. Nevertheless, there is a lack of academic research on this specific topic, a fact that I find rather telling. An examination of the motivations of pupils for studying Arabic aptly demonstrates the explicit and straightforward nature of this open secret.² For example, research conducted in 1988 was done to assess the attitudes of Jewish-Israeli high school pupils towards Arabic studies. Specifically, the research inquired as to why pupils chose both to study Arabic and also elected to take the final exam on the subject on completion of high school. It found that 65 per cent of those who chose to study Arabic had a ‘desire to serve in the army in a position that demands knowledge of Arabic’.³

Along the same lines, a different survey, conducted in 2006, found that 62.9 per cent of Jewish-Israeli pupils who sat for end-of-high-school exams in Arabic mentioned a desire to serve in Military Intelligence as a primary motivation for studying the language. This poll also examined teacher attitudes and found that 72.8 per cent of the Arabic teachers surveyed believed that a desire to serve in Military Intelligence was a leading factor in their pupils’ decisions to choose Arabic. Strikingly, ‘the wish to serve in Military Intelligence’ was consistently at the top of the list of reasons for studying Arabic in Israel, as indicated by both pupils and teachers, in intermediate and in high schools alike.⁴ These findings correlate with and support additional research that have highlighted the importance of instrumental considerations – including service in Military Intelligence – in motivating Jewish-Israeli pupils to study Arabic in school and the supremacy of such considerations over ones that are more integrative in nature.⁵

Security and Arabic are inseparable from general suspicious and negative attitudes among Jewish-Israelis in relation to Arabs and the Arab world. In 2003, a government-appointed investigation committee found that on the state level, and historically since 1948, ‘the Arab citizens of Israel have lived in a reality in which they have been discriminated against just for being Arabs’.⁶ A survey conducted in 2006 revealed that about half of Israel’s Jewish citizens believe that the state should encourage Arab emigration. The same survey also investigated how people felt when hearing spoken Arabic. Some 50 per cent of respondents said that hearing Arabic makes them fearful, 43 per cent responded that they feel uncomfortable, and 30 per cent said that Arabic aroused feelings of hatred within them.⁷ Another survey investigating the attitudes of 1600 Israeli high school pupils and conducted by the Center for Research on Peace Education (CERPE) at Haifa University found that 75 per cent of the Jewish respondents associated Arabs with being ‘unclean, uneducated and uncivilised’.⁸ These selected examples demonstrate that Jewish-Israeli views of Arabs are, by and large, negative, and that such attitudes have a profound effect on the way Israeli society relates to its Arab citizens and to the Arabic language.

These negative perceptions towards Arabic and its speakers that is pervasive among Jews in Israel, are also in evidence in the diminishing Israeli interest in knowing Arabic and in the low number of speakers of Arabic among Jewish-Israelis. Yossi Klein, for example, writes:

Today it is hard to find Arabic-speakers in Israel who are not Arabs or who were not born in a Muslim country … only 3 per cent of Israeli-born Jews speak Arabic. Last year [2012] only some 2000 Jewish high school pupils took the matriculation exam in the language of 20 per cent of their country’s residents. The teenagers who took that test in Arabic did not see it as a bridge: they saw it as a weapon, and most of them, presumably, were inducted into [the Military Intelligence’s] Unit 8200.⁹

Keeping Klein’s quotation in mind, and in light of research and surveys that have taken place over the past three decades, one could get the impression that animosity between Jews and Arabs, or Jews and Arabic, has always been the case. The truth, however, is quite the opposite, and in order to grasp fully the abyss that has been created between the Jewish people and Arabic, it is important to gain some historical perspective. This section, accordingly, will demonstrate that Jews used to enjoy close ties to Arabic and that Arabic was a lingua franca for the Jewish people of the Middle East, serving as a daily language for communication and trade and as a Jewish language of culture, intellectual debate and also religion.

Indeed, for thousands of years, the Jewish world was centred in various parts of the Middle East. In pre-Islamic times, Jewish communities spoke the language of the ruling empire or regime of that period – primarily Greek, Aramaic or Persian. Hebrew was also prevalent during these periods, however, by and large, it was not the mother tongue or the dominant spoken language among the Jewish communities.¹⁰ This gradually changed following the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and a situation whereby Jewish communities were increasingly ruled by different Arab Islamic regimes. As a result, and similar to the acquisition of Greek, Jews of the region underwent a gradual process of Arabicisation that included their adoption of the Arabic language and its accompanying culture.

The new rulers related to their Jewish subjects in different ways, some better than others. In all cases, though, Jewish and Christian minorities were under special dhimmī status (a special protection pact with a number of restrictions), meaning that they were not privy to the same level of rights granted to the Muslim majority. While sectarian tensions did occur, Jewish communities enjoyed an official status, and using Lewis’s words: ‘A recognised status, albeit one of inferiority to the dominant group, which is established by law, recognised by tradition, and confirmed by popular assent, is not to be despised.’¹¹ This established status overall served as an asset and was advantageous for Jews in Muslim lands.

Despite some of the restrictions placed on Jews, they flourished during this period. Various scholars contend that from the ninth century onwards, ‘the bulk of Jews lived and prospered among Arab Muslims, whether in Spain, North Africa, or the Middle East’.¹² This relatively positive experience was most famously exemplified in Abbasid Baghdad, Fatimid and Ayyubid Cairo, the city of Kairouan in Tunisia and Ummayad Spain (Al-Andalus) where Jews enjoyed a ‘gracious productive and satisfying way of life they were not, perhaps, to find anywhere else until the 19th century’.¹³ This was considered to be a unique period of harmony in relations between Jews and Muslims. Shlomo Dov Goitein, the great scholar of Middle East history at the Hebrew University, characterises this period as the pinnacle of Jewish–Arab relations. According to him, ‘[N]ever has Judaism encountered such a close and fructuous symbiosis as that with the medieval civilisation of Arab Islam.’¹⁴ Lewis had similar feelings and believed that the Jewish–Muslim linguistic and cultural symbiosis surrounding Arabic was ‘not merely a Jewish culture in Arabic, but a Judeo-Arabic, or one might even say a Judeo-Islamic, culture’.¹⁵

This period of stability and prosperity continued throughout the Middle Ages – especially in the Iberian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran and Central Asia, the Maghrib, Yemen and Bilād al-Shām (Palestine, Lebanon and Syria). Jewish communities prospered and enjoyed a relatively better situation – socially and financially – than during the preceding period and in comparison with those of their fellow Jews living in Christian areas. Undoubtedly, Jewish communities enjoyed a reasonably egalitarian and, for the most part, sustainable and productive relationship with their Muslim neighbours.¹⁶

Spain (Al-Andalus) is a particularly poignant example of the flourishing of Jewish life during this period. In Spain in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Jewish life and society thrived, with members of this community enjoying economic well-being and cultural prosperity. This place and period in time was later characterised in Hebrew as ‘Tor ha-Zahav’ or ‘The Golden Age’ of Jewish creation. In this significant era of Jewish thought and religious output, Arabic was the primary vehicle for the transmission of Jewish expression. Some of the most important historical figures of Jewish thought were from this period. They included the Jewish philosopher and physician Abū ʿImrān Mūsā ibn ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Maymūn al-Qurṭubī (also known as Maimonides, or in contemporary Hebrew as Ha-Rambam), the renowned and prolific grammarian and translator Saʿīd ibn Yūsuf al-Fayyūmī (in Hebrew, Rabbi Saʿadia Gaʾon), poets like Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn Yaḥyā ibn Jabīrūl (in Hebrew, Shlomo ben-Gvirol) and scholars such as Abū Ibrāhīm Ismāʿīl ibn Yūsuf ibn Naghrīla (in Hebrew, Shmuʾel ha-Nagid); who were primarily active in Al-Andalus.

In a similar vein, out of the thousands of scholarly works created during this period by Jewish scholars, Arabic was by far the dominant language. Some of the texts were written in Arabic using Arabic script, some were written in Arabic using Hebrew script and some Jewish scholars wrote their studies in Hebrew using Arabic script. This dominance of Arabic not only influenced Jewish thought, but also Arab philosophy. Some of the more influential of these texts include Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn (The Guide for the Perplexed; Hebrew translation, Moreh ha-Nevokhim); Kitāb al-Ḥujja wa-al-dalīl fī naṣr al-dīn al-dhalīl (The Kuzari; Hebrew, Sefer ha-Kuzari); Yanbūʿ al-ḥayāt (The Source of Life; Hebrew, Meḳor ḥayim); and Kitāb al-durar (The Book of Pearls; Hebrew, Sefer peniney ha-musarim ṿe-shivḥey ha-ḳehalim). These texts have had a profound influence on Jewish thought over the centuries and, to this day, remain central to Jewish religious tradition.

Increasingly, Jewish literary output during this period was written and consumed in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written with Hebrew letters, known in Hebrew as ʿAravit-Yehudit). This specific type of Arabic, common in the Jewish community, often included consonant dots from the Arabic alphabet that helped to accommodate phonemes that did not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.¹⁷ Interestingly, during that time, Arabic was a prime example of the Jewish language used by Jewish communities. For example, when analysing religious sources used during the twelfth century, the bulk of Jewish religious writing and literature – almost 90 per cent of the sources – were written Arabic.¹⁸ Furthermore, Arabic translations of the Bible by rabbinic Jews were widespread within Jewish communities. This even extended to Muslim communities, and a significant work from this period was al-Tafsīr: Saʿīd al-Fayyūmī’s translation of the Bible into Arabic (and in Arabic script) in the early tenth century.¹⁹

In addition to having a profound influence on Jewish thought and religion in the Middle East, North Africa and Al-Andalus, Arabic was also the language of Jewish scientific works outside these regions. Interestingly, Jewish scholars often used translations from Arabic in the development of scientific texts. Gad Freudenthal’s analysis of intellectual preferences of Jewish scholars in Europe from the twelfth to the 15th centuries found that the overwhelming majority of Jewish philosophical writers were consistently more interested in Arabic than in Latin when borrowing, translating and using existing scientific knowledge.²⁰ Therefore, Arabic was widespread in secular and religious subjects alike among Jewish thinkers of this period.

The importance of this era for Jews and Arabic stems from the fact that the Jewish Arabic-speaking community that lived under Islamic rule in Spain, North Africa and the Middle East represented the largest, most active and most influential Jewish community in the world at that time. Arabic played a major role in this Jewish renaissance; it was the language of daily life and was the vehicle for Jewish expression of spiritual, literary and religious achievements. Lewis emphasises this point in his comparison of Jewish communities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Documents
• List of Appendices
• Preface: Arabic, Security and Me
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction: Arabic and Security in Israel
• 1 Rooting Security in Arabic Soil: When Zionism Met Arabic
• 2 Whose Language is it, Anyway? Arabic in Jewish-Israeli Schools, 1948–67
• 3 Recruiting Arabic for War: The Influence of the 1967 and 1973 Wars on Arabic Studies in Jewish-Israeli Schools
• 4 Israel’s Army of Arabists: 1976 and Beyond
• 5 Givʿat Ḥavivah and Ulpan ʿAḳiva: Arabic Studies Independent of the Ministry of Education
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index