Writing Mizrahi history requires narrating from a colonized subject position within a Jewish state

Evidence

To write Mizrahi history is not merely to write the history of the Mizrahim, nor simply to write them into history, nor to only include them in the master narrative; such would set them in contrast to both Arab and Jew, the two cultural sources from which their experience arises. This approach would mean to remain within the boundaries of colonial discourse, necessarily strengthening the modern notion of “History” and its implications. Rather, to write Mizrahi history means writing Jewish history as critical history. This history must be written from the place where the Jews were defined as such: from the Orient, from that ambivalent place that combines the perspective of the colonizer with that of the colonized. This means liberating the dialectics of East/West and colonizer/colonized from their binary prison. Jewish critical attitudes towards the modern concept of history will thus be recharged with concrete meaning. To write Mizrahi history means to write “against the grain,” in a way that accords with Walter Benjamin’s perception of history as a new and concrete understanding. Such a history would be a counter-history in the way suggested by Amos Funkenstein, since it holds both perspectives, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized. It means taking advantage of the state of ambivalence, and writing history from the standpoint of the oppressed from within a unique and contradictory situation, in which Mizrahim are Jews in a Jewish state, but at the same time in a Jewish society that defines itself via a negation of their culture. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 673

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘writing Mizrahi history’ actually means as a method — critical counter-history from the colonized standpoint, not mere inclusion.
• XREF: Connects to Walter Benjamin’s ‘opposing the grain’ and Amos Funkenstein’s counter-history concept, and to the broader subaltern-studies literature on writing history from below.