The Jewish People Are Both Middle Eastern and European

“Given that the Middle East used to be far more ‘Western’ and even ‘European’ than it is now, there is no cultural disconnect between ‘Western’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ Jews. Jews can be both at once.”

Among the many controversies over the existence of Israel, there is a widely held belief that “white Jews,” or Ashkenazi Jews, are inherently alien to the Middle East. Fortunately, there is also no dearth of people who are keen to object. For example, the journalist Joshua Robbin Marks has made a persuasive case that “Ashkenazi Jews Are Middle Eastern.” Arguing that “the ethnogenesis of the Jewish people” happened in Israel, he avers that Ashkenazim are no less directly descended from that original population than their Sephardic and Mizrahi brethren. Marks claims that all Jews, Ashkenazim included, belong to the region.

The conception of Jews as Middle Eastern has a storied past. At times, it is Jews themselves who frame their heritage this way. In 1921, novelist Jakob Wassermann wrote that his life as a Jew and a German was a confluence of “both spheres, the Oriental and the Occidental.” But Wasserman seemed sensitive to what some may consider an indelicately worded implication of this idea. “The Germans,” Wassermann observed, often imputed an “Asiatic sensuality” to Jews which they viewed as polluting German culture.

For other authors, the identification of Jews as Oriental has often entailed mistrust and aversion. For instance, in his 1964 book Suicide of the West, James Burnham recounts an exchange he had with an unnamed liberal who was “an avowed atheist, of Jewish origin.” These identity markers are among Burnham’s reasons for suspecting that the man does not identify himself with the cause of “Western, Christian civilization.” The implication seems to be that the Middle Eastern origins of Jews necessarily means they are non-Western.