Berkeley conference distorts Arab-Jewish relations

Bataween
Point of No Return
16 May '10

The good news is that academics in Middle East Studies departments in the West are turning increasingly to the study of relations between Jews and Muslims in the Arab world. The bad news is, as this Front Page report of a recent Berkeley conference shows, that the agenda often serves the propaganda myth of pre-Zionist 'peaceful coexistence', or in this case a 'Jewish-Muslim civilisation'. Why so few Jews still live in the Arab world today is never really addressed. The more radical think of Jews as Arabs of the Jewish religion, others downplay the dhimmi status of Jews under Islam. As Nathan Weinstock once described their unequal relationship: Jews were to Muslims as the horse to its rider - allowed to survive as long as the beast was useful to its master. (With thanks: Michelle, Ami)

A conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 28-29, 2010 (and continued at UC Davis on April 30), “Muslims and Jews Together: Seeing From Without; Seeing From Within,” was billed as a major international symposium for “the inauguration of the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at UC Berkeley and the establishment of a UC-wide and West Coast working group for the study of Muslim-Jewish relations .”

The conference was a collaborative effort between the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at UC Berkeley and the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. Its stated purpose was to use the frameworks of traditional Middle East studies and Jewish studies to develop a new academic field focused on the historical interaction between Muslims and the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them. Most of the participants were historians or anthropologists specializing in North African Jewry, particularly Morocco.



CMES chair Nezar AlSayyad introduced the conference with a discussion about “building bridges” by re-framing the term, “Jews of Islam,” into something that could be equated with Judeo-Christian civilization: something he called “Judeo-Muslim civilization.” CMES vice-chair and conference organizer Emily Gottreich echoed AlSayyed’s comments in her introduction to the first panel, describing the “Jews of Islam” as “an awkward and unfortunate” construction and seconding the notion of “Judeo-Muslim civilization.”

(Read full article)

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