by Amy Chua
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.”6
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 industrialized countries and typically arrived in Israel with little education, capital, or modern skills. Thus, writing for a prominent Israeli newspaper in 1949, Arye Gelblum lamented of his Sephardic compatriots: “[These immigrants are] only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. . . . These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to the play of savage and primitive instincts. . . . [They display] chronic laziness and hatred for work.” Similarly, David Ben-Gurion saw Sephardic immigrants as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.”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 to economics. The fact remains, however, that Israeli Jews are as a group far more economically advanced and successful than the vastly more numerous, generally impoverished Arabs surrounding them. Despite the infusion of trillions of oil dollars into the Gulf States, Israel has nevertheless outperformed all of her neighbors in the Middle East under any number of economic indicators. Indeed, most Israelis and Arabs would probably agree that Jews are a market-dominant minority in the Middle East, while bitterly disputing the reasons why this is so.
But first, the undisputed facts—and there are not many of these when it comes to the Middle East. There are roughly 5.2 million Jews in the Middle East, almost all of them living in Israel. By contrast, there are over 221 million Arabs in the region. In terms of per capita wealth, Israel is starkly more prosperous than all of the neighboring Arab countries. According to the World Bank, in 2000 Israel’s per capita income was roughly $16,700, compared to $7,230 in Saudi Arabia, $1,710 in Jordan, $940 in Syria, and $370 in Yemen. Per capita income is of course not the only measure of development. In 2000, Israel’s infant mortality rate was roughly 5.5 per 1,000 live births, compared to approximately 43 per 1,000 live births in the rest of the Middle East. Also in 2000, 4 percent of Israel’s population over the age of fifteen was illiterate, compared to 44 percent in Iraq, 45 percent in Egypt, and 54 percent in Yemen. In addition, Israel has a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful military said to have nuclear-weapon capacity, impressive infrastructure rivaling the Western nations, and a high-technology sector competitive with Silicon Valley.9
In stark contrast, large portions of the Arab Middle East are characterized by poverty, squalor, and mass frustration despite the region’s enormous oil wealth. In Saudi Arabia, writes Seymour Hersh, “Saudi princes—there are thousands of them—have kept tabloid newspapers filled with accounts of their drinking binges and partying with prostitutes, while taking billions of dollars from the state budget.” Meanwhile, the male unemployment rate is estimated at 30 percent (women are prohibited from working in all but a few occupations), and 25 percent of the total population is illiterate. Jordan too, writes Stephen Glain, considered a “bright spot” in the Middle East, “has the same problems as the rest of the Arab world: hordes of disenfranchised, unemployed, hopeless young men susceptible to poaching by extremist groups.” In the still poorer Arab countries of North Africa, conditions remain primitive in many regions, comparable to Indonesia or Bangladesh, with no potable water, electricity, or sanitation among vast portions of the population.10
Egypt is an especially tragic case in light of its optimistic, modernizing trajectory in the fifties and sixties. In A Portrait of Egypt, journalist Mary Anne Weaver describes two trips she took to Cairo, one in 1977, the other in 1993. In 1977, Weaver recalls living “on the tony island of Zamalek” with its gracious if slightly shabby Edwardian mansions:
[W]e sat on well-appointed terraces overhanging the Nile, and looked across the water at the slum of Imbaba; we speculated on its lifestyle. Its population density was 105,000 people per 2.2 square miles; an average of 3.7 people lived in every room. On our side of the Nile, the level
of literacy was the highest in the world; in Imbaba, the average income was thirty dollars a month. Here, four languages were normally spoken at dinner parties, served by candlelight; rooms were filled with books. There, hidden away in the alleys, far from our understanding or view, sheep, goats, and children drank from open sewers, and after dark, some neighborhoods yielded to packs of wild dogs. I remember one evening in particular as I watched with friends the flickering lights of a funeral procession passing through Imbaba. The next morning, we read in the newspaper that two children had been eaten alive by rats.
Fifteen years later Weaver found that, despite immense amounts of Western aid, the disparity between rich and poor in Cairo had, if anything, intensified:
I was struck, more than ever before, by the contrast between the poverty that seemed to be everywhere and a world of astonishing wealth. At a downtown car dealership, I listened as two men, wearing sparkling rings, argued and gesticulated, flailing their arms, over the price—$400,000—of a new Mercedes, which had just arrived. Then I watched bands of ten-year-olds lumber by in mule-drawn carts. Their faces were pretty but filthy, and they were dressed in rags; they lived among smoking piles in south Cairo’s City of Garbage, and they survived by collecting rubbish along the streets.
But one of my most vivid impressions on this visit was of decay: of crumbling buildings seen through a patina of dust; of torn-up sidewalks and sewage in the street; of a city that was angry and was living on the edge as its population continued to grow. . . . And the more the city crumbled and the more its population swelled, the more eager it appeared to be to embrace revival of Islam.11
In a region of prodigious inequality and mass poverty, Israel is like a tiny industrialized Western enclave. Indeed, a constant charge hurled by Arabs is that Israel is “an extension of the West.” Compared to the rest of the region, a starkly disproportionate percentage of Israel’s population is highly educated, highly skilled, and highly “Westernized.” Unlike the Arab states, Israel is not considered a “developing” country; in 1996 the IMF reclassified Israel as an “advanced economy.” Moreover, despite the fact that Israel has no oil, while the Gulf States sit on the largest reserves in the world, marketization and economic liberalization in the region has reinforced Israel’s disproportionate prosperity as well as its industrial and technological superiority. In January 2001, Limor Nakar reported in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Bear Stearns has just established its first Israel office and HSBC will open its first branch in Israel early this year. They join Lehman Brothers, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and other investment companies.
These investors are responding to economic changes in Israel that began when the government instituted a reform program based on three pillars: the privatization of state-owned companies, the de-regulation of major industries and the liberalization of markets. With these policies in place, Israel’s economy took off.
. . . Israel, a start-up nation, now is filled with start-up companies and second only to the United States in the number of new companies it pioneers. As a result, more venture capital dollars are invested in Israel than in anywhere outside of the Silicon Valley. . . . In the last two years, Israel also has seen the largest deals ever with U.S. firms.12
In all these respects, despite the ravaging economic effects of prolonged warfare, Israeli Jews can be viewed, at the regional level, as a market-dominant minority within the overwhelmingly Arab-populated Middle East.
Reasons for Israeli Economic Dominance
If you ask Israeli Jews the reasons for their market dominance in the region, they tend to respond consistently. They invariably cite the unique origins of modern Israel, in which, beginning around 1882, thousands of well-educated European Jews came together in their common commitment to a Jewish state. They emphasize Israel’s impressive tradition of the rule of law (Arabs would angrily disagree), including its well-respected independent judiciary and relatively low levels of corruption. They point out that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East (again Arabs would disagree), an attribute that, but for constant warfare and terrorism, is attractive to foreign investors and global markets. Many Israeli Jews acknowledge, and some worry about, the tremendous amount of financial assistance that Israel has received from external sources. Between 1950 and 1985, U.S. government grants to Israel totaled approximately $21 billion, a level of aid far exceeding that provided to most other countries. (The two largest recipients of United States aid today are Israel and Egypt, which receive $3 billion and $2 billion, respectively, per year.) Over the same period, financial contributions from world Jewry totaled roughly $9.4 billion. Meanwhile, between 1950 and 1965, West Germany paid the government of Israel $780 million in Holocaust reparations. In addition, between 1950 and 1985 it paid Israeli citizens $7 billion in personal reparations.13
But most important, Israelis seem to agree, is the country’s “human capital”: its unusually skilled and educated population and their deep commitment to the survival and success of a Jewish homeland. Most developing countries suffer from “brain drain”; this is certainly true of many Arab nations. By stark contrast, Israel has always been a magnet for talented Jews who move to Israel out of ideology rather than out of hopes for a better life. (Tellingly, aliyah, the Hebrew term for the act of moving to Israel, literally means “going up,” while yored, literally “one who goes down,” refers to someone who moves from Israel to any other place in the world.) Most recently, over a million Russian Jews—a quarter of them engineers—have emigrated to Israel since 1990. In part because of this latest influx of engineering skill, Israel has become one of the world leaders in high technology.
If you ask Arabs in the Middle East the reasons for the disproportionate success of Israel as compared to the Arab nations, their responses also tend to be consistent, but, predictably, could not differ more from the Jewish perspective. Typically, their first reaction (not directly responsive to the question) is to emphasize the mistreatment of Palestinians within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Although Palestinians residing in the pre-1967 areas of Israel do have Israeli citizenship and the right to vote—there are a few Palestinian members of the Knesset—Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have few political rights and are treated as a conquered people. More generally, Arabs in Israel are treated as second-class citizens in numerous respects, including frequent infringement of their land rights. At least until the most recent deterioration in Palestinian-Jewish relations, many Israeli Jews disagreed with their government’s policies toward the Palestinians.14
As for Israel’s economic success vis-à-vis the other countries in the region, Arabs usually attribute it to a combination of U.S. aid and Israel’s “racist” “neo-colonialism,” although one often hears half-admiring, half-contemptuous grumblings about Jewish wealth, greed, and moneymaking tendencies. Generally speaking, Arabs see the Israeli Jews not as members of a persecuted minority but as a ruthless, expansionist colonizing force supported by the capitalist countries, especially the United States. Indeed, because the Zionist movement that founded modern Israel was largely European in origin and ideological inspiration, Arabs commonly describe Israel as representing, as a historical matter, “the last wave of European overseas colonization.” A favorite historical parallel among Arabs is between Israeli Jews and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Crusades. The Crusaders, of course, were eventually expelled from Palestine after two centuries of precarious rule.15
Arab Ethnonationalism and
“Driving the Israelis into the Sea”
To describe the Middle East as a site of majority-based ethnonationalism targeting a market-dominant minority might at first seem surprising. The Middle East, after all, is not a nation but a region. Moreover, it is a region that, on the whole, has assiduously resisted democratic politics and majority rule. Nevertheless, closer examination reveals striking parallels between the defining conflict in the Middle East and the central dynamic in, say, a contemporary Indonesia or Zimbabwe.
As already established, Israeli Jews are perceived, by themselves and Arabs alike, as a disproportionately wealthy, market-dominant minority in the Middle East. In addition, Arabs perceive themselves as an exploited “indigenous” majority—the original inhabitants and “true owners” of the Middle East—who are suffering at the hands of an abusive, “outsider” colonizer minority. (On this point, of course, the Jews disagree: For them, as for the Palestinians, the Israeli-Arab conflict is in part a fight for their ancestral homeland.) Tellingly, but not necessarily accurately, in a famous Egyptian best-seller, The Jews, History and Faith, Dr. Kamil Safan, widely respected in Egypt as an “expert on Hebrew and Judaism,” writes that in ancient times pharaohs turned on the Jews because “they tried to take control of the economy of Egypt” and “collaborated with the colonialists—the Hyksos—against the people of the country.”16 Like whites in South Africa or Chinese in Indonesia, Israeli Jews are feared as much as they are hated. Every Arab in the Middle East is conscious that Israel has the backing of the most powerful nation in the world and that between 1948 and 1973 Israel won four wars, humiliating Arab forces that outnumbered them twenty to one.
Further, although the Arab countries generally are not democratizing, the ruling elites in these countries routinely engage in populist demagoguery, deliberately fomenting anti-Israeli sentiment, both to deflect criticism from themselves and to keep their frustrated populations united against a common enemy. At the same time, nonruling demagogues, including many highly influential Islamic clerics, also engage in anti-Israel baiting, whether out of sincere zealotry or for more instrumental reasons. Meanwhile, in Arab newspapers Jews are routinely referred to as “terrorists” and perpetrators of “genocide”: “Cartoons depicting Israelis and other Jews with Nazi-style uniforms and swastikas have now become standard,” writes Lewis. “These complement the Nazi-era hooked noses and blood-dripping jagged teeth.”17 The increasingly influential Al-Jazeera, unusual in the Arab world for its journalistic independence, is simultaneously anti-Israel and “pan-Arabist,” observes Fouad Ajami. “These are reporters with a mission.”18