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[The European Conservative] Searching for the Lost Mizrahim
Having thrived for millennia amidst Arab societies despite their inferior status, Oriental Jews were swiftly uprooted in a matter of decades by the Arab-Israeli conflict. A once-in-a-lifetime exhibit at Paris’s Institute for the Arab World attempts to synthesize conflicting narratives of trauma and nostalgia.
Every so often, some corner of French academia will launch into a seemingly sterile controversy that nonetheless touches a deep chord amongst parts of the larger society and works as a barometer gauging its political climate. Over the past half-decade, Arab-Jewish relations past and present have been just that scholarly domain of contention. In 2015, the dispute leaped from the ivory tower to the courtroom. Historian Georges Bensoussan, an otherwise uncontroversial intellectual and a distinguished expert of the Holocaust, was sued that year for stoking racial hatred by an assorted group of progressive NGOs. His offense? Bensoussan had sounded the alarm about one form of racism that’s become palpably pervasive in today’s France but did so in a way the NGOs deemed racially insensitive. “In Arab families, everyone knows it but few dare to…
