The Mizrahi educational debate replayed the earlier European Jewish emancipation debate wholesale

Evidence

The entire deliberation over the status of the Mizrahim from the 1950s onward reproduced the terms of the Dohm-Michaelis debate over the civil status of European Jews. … The crux of the pedagogical debate was whether the oriental Jews were innately retarded (thus making it useless to try to educate them), or whether the Mizrahim suffered from a “secondary retardation” that originated in their surroundings. … As in the European debate regarding the Jews, both sides to the debate shared the assumption that the Mizrahim had been changed, and could not be integrated as they were. It should be emphasized that the educators mentioned above shared Dohm’s positive and assimilationist attitudes, and stood against those who argued that the attempt to educate Mizrahim was impossible. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of recycled moral-panic discourse; also to the broader scholarship on how colonizer discourse about ‘the Orient’ migrated into intra-Jewish politics.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that even the ‘benevolent, assimilationist’ wing of a debate shares with its opponents the core premise that the subjects cannot be accepted as they are is a genuinely paradigmatic observation about liberal paternalism.