Zionist scholarship studied Mizrahi Jews only as objects until absorbing them into its plans.

Evidence

Interestingly, in its initial stages, Zionist historiography was devoted to the Jews of the Arab world; the first series of the historical journal Zion was dedicated to the history of oriental and Palestinian Jewry, a project intended to provide the requisite knowledge for the formation of the new Jewish culture. Similarly, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, founded in 1906, continuously exhibited “authentic” Jewish arts and crafts, albeit displaced into a European frame. In both cases, the oriental Jew was not a subject, but an object of inspiration for the construction of the “new Jew”—the real heir to the ancient Orient. Later, this attitude shifted to a denial of Mizrahi history. The second series of Zion, launched in 1936, was dedicated to Jewish history as the history of European Jewry. This scholarship was succeeded by a later division of labor in Israeli academe: historians contemplated European Jewish history, and anthropologists scrutinized the oriental Jews. The shift between the two series represents the change in the way the orientalist paradigm was employed. Interestingly, the scholarly interest in Jews from the Arab world continued only until they were included in Zionist planning. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 654

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how intellectual interest in a subaltern group evaporates precisely once governance/planning absorbs them, and how the division of labor assigns the powerful to history and the powerless to anthropology.