| Esther Azhari Moyal, born in Beirut in 1873, was a celebrated Jewish journalist, author, literary translator, and feminist who founded an Arabic newspaper for women, translated a dozen novels from French to Arabic, and published an Arabic-language biography of Emile Zola. Yet despite these achievements she died in Jaffa in 1948 alone, impoverished, and utterly forgotten. My dissertation tells the story of Moyal and her contemporaries: the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Arab Jewish intellectuals who wrote of their visions and aspirations in poetry and in prose, in newspapers, cultural journals, and books. Their story unfolds in the mashriq (Arab East) during a moment of intense passion for new forms of knowledge, an era when the collective terms of identity and affiliation were being renegotiated, civil society was being shaped, and new connections between members of different genders, sects, and cultures were being forged.;At the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, in urban centers such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Jaffa, Jewish intellectuals participated in the modern Hebrew and Arabic enlightenment movements (the haskala and the nand&dotbelow;a). They immersed themselves in the ideological and political currents of their time, responding to the competing pulls of Ottomanism, Zionism, and territorial nationalism. Above all, they explored what it meant to be Arab, Jewish, and modern, reimagining themselves and their communities through the regional vocabulary of modernity and enlightenment. But the split between "Arab" and "Jew" was to become violently entrenched, socially institutionalized, and in time, historically reified. With these developments, Moyal and other Arab Jewish writers were cast out not only from the bygone world of the cosmopolitan Middle East, but from historical memory itself.;This dissertation thus represents a lost chapter in the histories of modern Jewish and Arab cultures. First and foremost, it is a reading of the discursive production of modernity by mashriqi Jews through their double engagement in the nand&dotbelow;a and haskala. Second, it investigates the historical development and expression of modern Arab Jewish subjectivity within those two cultural contexts. How, I ask, did Jewish writers of Arabic represent themselves to a general Arabic readership? Conversely, how did Arab Jewish writers of Hebrew address a primarily European Jewish readership? Finally, the dissertation seeks connections between the nand&dotbelow;a and the haskala, a discussion I situate within the broader epistemological context of non-Western enlightenment movements. Ultimately, I argue, Arab Jewish writing represented a transculturation not only of European enlightenment discourse but of the "minor," non-Western discourses of the nand&dotbelow;a and the haskala . As such, it poignantly underscored the struggle for authority that was at the heart of both movements. |
