Israel’s discourse on Middle Eastern Jews inherited the Enlightenment’s program for engineering Ashkenazic Jewry.

Evidence

The oriental Jew was, then, the object of a discourse of degeneration, regeneration, and assimilation, a conceptual field that originated in the European Enlightenment’s critique of Ashkenazic Jewry and program for its alteration through social and cultural engineering. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 727

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on the state’s civilizing mission applied to internal minorities, echoing Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and colonial discourse analysis.
• DEEPTHINKING: A compressed genealogical claim: the same conceptual machinery the Enlightenment turned on one Jewish community was redeployed against another. Dense enough to sit with.