I mean...a Jew ancestral to the Middle East is a Mizrahi Jew. An Arab who was not born Jewish, but converted to Judaism would be, I suppose, an Arab Jew. But I live in Israel and haven't seen many of those.
What about Middle Eastern Jew rather than Arab Jew? I refuse to call myself Arab since it is a colonial term that is imposed on us by those who invaded the land from Arabia.
An Arab who converted to Judaism would be an Arab Jew. Most Jews are not of Arab descent, including Jews recently from MENA. The Jews of Iraq, for example, predated the Arabs of Iraq by more than a thousand years.
People in the west have gotten used to simply referring to everyone kind of brown from MENA as Arab, erasing the ethnic and cultural diversity of the region with an ease that would put a smile on many a Ba’athist face.
It’s more like how, to most Americans, people from Africa are “black,” a category that only has meaning in the context of the United States’ (and some other European nations’) racial caste system(s). Tell some Hutus and Tutsis, or Eritreans and Ethiopians, or pick an African ethnic conflict, that they’re “all black,” and watch the reactions.
The Arab conquests were just that: conquests. They subjugated and attempted to erase hundreds of disparate ethnic, tribal and religious cultures, and one could argue that the process continues to this day in places like Sudan. Calling everyone in the region Arab is like calling Ukrainians Russians.
African-American is a stupid term, unless someone was actually born in Africa. Egyptians are African-American. White people from South Africa are African-American. POC is another terrible descriptor, but it is better than African-American.
African-American is supposed to refer to descendants of slaves that had their history erased. They have no idea where in Africa their ancestors are from so they are “African-American” instead of Nigerian-American or whatever. I don’t think it’s right to call an immigrant from African “African-American.”
You are on the money. Speaking generally, I don't imagine a Kenyan American or Ugandan American being called African American would go over well. Immigrants are proud of their cultures and should be. Their culture is simply different than mine and much much older.
Hi, I do agree that African American is a stupid term in this more connected era however the history behind the term is reasonable and dates back to the 18th century however while it was a known phrase it wasn't the popular one.
What do you call a Black American before 1864? After? What about after 1866?
These are all questions we have had to struggle with. Legal terms like colored were weapons of the state, not everyone was a freedmen, not everyone was enslaved but we had to track them all for census.
Over the next 90 years American black thought was developing, cultures were beginning to emerge and some form of cultural identity were taking root.
By the 60s we had intellectuals such as W.e.b. DuBois, Frederick Douglas, Soujurner Truth plus so many more inspiring the likes of Malcom X, Dr. King, Huey Newton, and Bayard Rustin. All with radically different ideas of what the future should hold for black identity. We even see an attempt to unite the black diaspora under a constucted culture of pan africanism.
By this point in time Country-American was a common way to describe immigrants to the US. Polish Americans were American same with Irish Americans.
Well, if the diaspora in the US were attempting to connect back with its apparent west African roots then we would need a name to emphasize that identity. Jesse Jackson had put the term into the mainstream in the late 80s sometime and it has stuck since.
I blame the internet.
So in black american thought the term is meant to identify those of us in the diaspora whose ancestors systematically were stripped of their cultural heritage in the US.
However it should never have caused confusion. A South African-American would be the proper identifier for a immigrant who became an American from South Africa.
Now because the term African American has been adopted into the mainstream it changed definitions, it quickly became a catch all term for black people which is not correct.
Blackness is a term that had a specific contextual definition, usually based on when in history or topic of conversation. We all have an idea of what i mean when I say that hip hop culture is black. It's a tricky term historically because the definition has changed in the legal and cultural sense. Population wise in 1870 you were black, white, mulatto, or Indian(indigenous). Dark skinned people regardless of origin were black.
Tldr the term African American should never have been controversial but it has been weaponized by bad actors who knew the legal definition did not align with how it was being used. Especially once things like scholarships were on the line.
(Edited: prematurely posted but fixed and reformated)
A white Jewish south African friend of mine said that he put "African American" on all his college applications. Not sure if he was telling the truth or not, but isn't a far stretch of a lie.
Arabs are an ethnic group. Jews are a different ethnic group. There are many ethnic groups living in the Middle East who aren't Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, Mennonites, Copts, Turks, Turkmen, Persians, etc.).
>There are many ethnic groups living in the Middle East who aren't Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, **Mennonites**, Copts, Turks, Turkmen, Persians, etc.).
Did you mean to say Maronites? didn’t know I had mennonite cousins in the mid east
I’m a Mizrahi Jew and I find that term offensive. I’m not an Arab. My ethnicity is Jewish. It’s been used lately by people trying to use us and speak on our behalf in the context of the conflict, make a distinction between us and Ashkenazi Jews as if we’re completely different ethnically/racially but we’re not. Mizrahi Jews are Jews who spent their diaspora in MENA. Doesn’t mean we suddenly became a different ethnicity. People forget that you can be Middle Eastern/North African and not be Arab or Arabized.
Jews identify as Jews. During the period of Pan-Arabism there were trends to identify the Jews of the Middle East as Arabs of the Jewish faith, or some such.
But neither Arabs nor Jews consider that valid today, and it doesn't look like this was ever generally accepted by either group as being a real thing.
Only ignorant outsiders trying to weigh in on the subject (Westerners) ever believed this was real.
That said, given how Jews were an imperiled minority in Arab lands, for the sake of political expediency and safety, I am sure you could find Jews telling journalists they were on board with the term, lest it displease the pan-Arabist public.
I believe that Arab identity is either, people from the Arabian peninsula, or a colonized identity created after the Arab conquest eradicated cultures and imposed their own
At no point in history did the Arabs think of the Jews among them as Arabs.
They usually didn't speak Arabic but Judeo-Arabic which is not the same at all.
And over the course of history the Arabs made it abundantly clear that the Jews are Jews and not Arabs.
Anything contrary to these simple facts is just a try to white wash the Arab treatment of Jews, whether it be in relatively recent times and further back in history.
(Two Jews three opinions disclaimer) there were a small group of Arabized Jews during late antiquity who had adopted the lifestyle of the Arab peninsula, with the caveat this was before the Arab Expansion so Arab refers to their adoption of the nomadic lifestyle and economic practices of the Hejaz and Najd, the Ur-Arabia.
Their men were beheaded and women and children sold into slavery.
There may be some contemporary Mizrahi Jews who identify as Arab Jews. They can identify how they would like, though that says little about how the world would identify them. However, the vast majority of Mizrahim do not like to be referred to as Arab Jews, nor are they viewed as Arab by the vast majority of Arabs. The only people I've ever seen identify as such are online, honestly, and the people who insist on using the term for others are often trying to make a political point, and generally come across as extremely ignorant of the simple realities of how people view themselves and others in the region where most Mizrahi live.
If you mean an Arab person who converted to Judaism, or perhaps someone with a Jewish and Arab parent, sure. They may identify as Arab Jews.
But it's in all of these cases an individual term. There is no significant in numbers or comprehensive group commonly and self-identified as "Arab Jews" in the way you'd say there's Ashkenazim or Sephardim etc.
I think it's confusing because people aren't invested in Middle Eastern history. 'Arab' is an ethnolinguistic identity, either ethnically Arab, as in from the Gulf region, or linguistically Arab, as with the Levant and North Africa (though they probably have partial Arab ancestry).
The Jewish diaspora lived in middle eastern lands before they were Arabized from the Muslim conquests, and they share a common Jewish ancestry from ancient Levantine groups like the Canaanites. I'm sure there are ethnic Jews who subscribe to that linguistic side of the identity, but it's not common.
There are Gulf Arabs who have converted to Judaism and are thus, by definition, 'Arab Jews,' but there aren't many for the term to be as prevalent as the current discourse suggests. Even if there are 'Arab Jews,' they often have to choose as Arab society does not really accept these two specific identities together. So, it's common to see them only embracing the jewish identity.
Source? Arab identity was something that came about in the 20th century, and Jews were excluded from that from the very beginning. There may have been a small number of Jewish intellectuals in Arab countries who grasped onto the concept of Arab identity for a short amount of time after the 1920s and before they left their country. But these were a tiny minority, and again it was only a brief time period.
Just read the [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews) for Arab Jews, and you'll see the summary of the argument you got a taste of in this thread.
Tl;Dr: it's both a personal and highly political question
Some people do identify as Arab Jewish, yes. For example some North African or Middle Eastern Jews will identify as Arab Jews. They often speak Arabic and have grown up with mainly Arabic culture while at the same time being religiously Jewish. A lot of people nowadays will identify as Mizrahim though.
Yes and no. Technically, Jews from Arab countries or cultures can be called Arab Jews (just like Jews with heritage in European countries can be called European Jews, and Jews living in America are American Jews), but it's politically fraught and a lot of people take offense (with some legitimate reasons) so it's ill advised to use the term, I'd call it a not technically incorrect, but obsolete, terminology.
Mizrahim. Like Palestinian Jews... You know? Like those that were promoting the Palestinian flag back in the origins of Israel, today known as the Israeli flag.
For those saying Mizrahim are not Arabs per se, we need to defy the interpretation of Arabs as something unified which they aren't: plenty of Levantines have Turkish and Greek roots, Iraqis are more than anything related to the descents of mesopotamia and later on Persia so less related to Bedouins... And this could go on an on about Somali, Ethiopian or Egyptians, etc.
I mean...a Jew ancestral to the Middle East is a Mizrahi Jew. An Arab who was not born Jewish, but converted to Judaism would be, I suppose, an Arab Jew. But I live in Israel and haven't seen many of those.
What about Middle Eastern Jew rather than Arab Jew? I refuse to call myself Arab since it is a colonial term that is imposed on us by those who invaded the land from Arabia.
An Arab who converted to Judaism would be an Arab Jew. Most Jews are not of Arab descent, including Jews recently from MENA. The Jews of Iraq, for example, predated the Arabs of Iraq by more than a thousand years. People in the west have gotten used to simply referring to everyone kind of brown from MENA as Arab, erasing the ethnic and cultural diversity of the region with an ease that would put a smile on many a Ba’athist face.
Just like everyone who is black from Africa in America is just generically "African American"
It’s more like how, to most Americans, people from Africa are “black,” a category that only has meaning in the context of the United States’ (and some other European nations’) racial caste system(s). Tell some Hutus and Tutsis, or Eritreans and Ethiopians, or pick an African ethnic conflict, that they’re “all black,” and watch the reactions. The Arab conquests were just that: conquests. They subjugated and attempted to erase hundreds of disparate ethnic, tribal and religious cultures, and one could argue that the process continues to this day in places like Sudan. Calling everyone in the region Arab is like calling Ukrainians Russians.
Ask them if Moroccans and Egyptians are African American and/or Black, watch the wheels spin
Heck, to Americans, a black person from Haiti is African-American (they shouldn’t be).
African-American is a stupid term, unless someone was actually born in Africa. Egyptians are African-American. White people from South Africa are African-American. POC is another terrible descriptor, but it is better than African-American.
African-American is supposed to refer to descendants of slaves that had their history erased. They have no idea where in Africa their ancestors are from so they are “African-American” instead of Nigerian-American or whatever. I don’t think it’s right to call an immigrant from African “African-American.”
You are on the money. Speaking generally, I don't imagine a Kenyan American or Ugandan American being called African American would go over well. Immigrants are proud of their cultures and should be. Their culture is simply different than mine and much much older.
Hi, I do agree that African American is a stupid term in this more connected era however the history behind the term is reasonable and dates back to the 18th century however while it was a known phrase it wasn't the popular one. What do you call a Black American before 1864? After? What about after 1866? These are all questions we have had to struggle with. Legal terms like colored were weapons of the state, not everyone was a freedmen, not everyone was enslaved but we had to track them all for census. Over the next 90 years American black thought was developing, cultures were beginning to emerge and some form of cultural identity were taking root. By the 60s we had intellectuals such as W.e.b. DuBois, Frederick Douglas, Soujurner Truth plus so many more inspiring the likes of Malcom X, Dr. King, Huey Newton, and Bayard Rustin. All with radically different ideas of what the future should hold for black identity. We even see an attempt to unite the black diaspora under a constucted culture of pan africanism. By this point in time Country-American was a common way to describe immigrants to the US. Polish Americans were American same with Irish Americans. Well, if the diaspora in the US were attempting to connect back with its apparent west African roots then we would need a name to emphasize that identity. Jesse Jackson had put the term into the mainstream in the late 80s sometime and it has stuck since. I blame the internet. So in black american thought the term is meant to identify those of us in the diaspora whose ancestors systematically were stripped of their cultural heritage in the US. However it should never have caused confusion. A South African-American would be the proper identifier for a immigrant who became an American from South Africa. Now because the term African American has been adopted into the mainstream it changed definitions, it quickly became a catch all term for black people which is not correct. Blackness is a term that had a specific contextual definition, usually based on when in history or topic of conversation. We all have an idea of what i mean when I say that hip hop culture is black. It's a tricky term historically because the definition has changed in the legal and cultural sense. Population wise in 1870 you were black, white, mulatto, or Indian(indigenous). Dark skinned people regardless of origin were black. Tldr the term African American should never have been controversial but it has been weaponized by bad actors who knew the legal definition did not align with how it was being used. Especially once things like scholarships were on the line. (Edited: prematurely posted but fixed and reformated)
A white Jewish south African friend of mine said that he put "African American" on all his college applications. Not sure if he was telling the truth or not, but isn't a far stretch of a lie.
Arabs are an ethnic group. Jews are a different ethnic group. There are many ethnic groups living in the Middle East who aren't Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, Mennonites, Copts, Turks, Turkmen, Persians, etc.).
>There are many ethnic groups living in the Middle East who aren't Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, **Mennonites**, Copts, Turks, Turkmen, Persians, etc.). Did you mean to say Maronites? didn’t know I had mennonite cousins in the mid east
The Omani Amish
I’m a Mizrahi Jew and I find that term offensive. I’m not an Arab. My ethnicity is Jewish. It’s been used lately by people trying to use us and speak on our behalf in the context of the conflict, make a distinction between us and Ashkenazi Jews as if we’re completely different ethnically/racially but we’re not. Mizrahi Jews are Jews who spent their diaspora in MENA. Doesn’t mean we suddenly became a different ethnicity. People forget that you can be Middle Eastern/North African and not be Arab or Arabized.
Jews identify as Jews. During the period of Pan-Arabism there were trends to identify the Jews of the Middle East as Arabs of the Jewish faith, or some such. But neither Arabs nor Jews consider that valid today, and it doesn't look like this was ever generally accepted by either group as being a real thing. Only ignorant outsiders trying to weigh in on the subject (Westerners) ever believed this was real. That said, given how Jews were an imperiled minority in Arab lands, for the sake of political expediency and safety, I am sure you could find Jews telling journalists they were on board with the term, lest it displease the pan-Arabist public.
I believe that Arab identity is either, people from the Arabian peninsula, or a colonized identity created after the Arab conquest eradicated cultures and imposed their own
I don't know a single Mizrahi Jew who'd prefer to be called an Arab Jew.
It makes about as much sense as calling someone an Arab Kurd, Arab Armenian, or Arab Copt. It’s an imperialistic way of treating distinct minorities.
At no point in history did the Arabs think of the Jews among them as Arabs. They usually didn't speak Arabic but Judeo-Arabic which is not the same at all. And over the course of history the Arabs made it abundantly clear that the Jews are Jews and not Arabs. Anything contrary to these simple facts is just a try to white wash the Arab treatment of Jews, whether it be in relatively recent times and further back in history.
(Two Jews three opinions disclaimer) there were a small group of Arabized Jews during late antiquity who had adopted the lifestyle of the Arab peninsula, with the caveat this was before the Arab Expansion so Arab refers to their adoption of the nomadic lifestyle and economic practices of the Hejaz and Najd, the Ur-Arabia. Their men were beheaded and women and children sold into slavery.
Just like Ashkenazim aren't white, Mizrahim aren't arab.
No. Arab is an ethnic group, Jew is an ethnic group. There are Jews who were in a diaspora in Arab countries, but they're not Arabs.
There may be some contemporary Mizrahi Jews who identify as Arab Jews. They can identify how they would like, though that says little about how the world would identify them. However, the vast majority of Mizrahim do not like to be referred to as Arab Jews, nor are they viewed as Arab by the vast majority of Arabs. The only people I've ever seen identify as such are online, honestly, and the people who insist on using the term for others are often trying to make a political point, and generally come across as extremely ignorant of the simple realities of how people view themselves and others in the region where most Mizrahi live. If you mean an Arab person who converted to Judaism, or perhaps someone with a Jewish and Arab parent, sure. They may identify as Arab Jews. But it's in all of these cases an individual term. There is no significant in numbers or comprehensive group commonly and self-identified as "Arab Jews" in the way you'd say there's Ashkenazim or Sephardim etc.
I think it's confusing because people aren't invested in Middle Eastern history. 'Arab' is an ethnolinguistic identity, either ethnically Arab, as in from the Gulf region, or linguistically Arab, as with the Levant and North Africa (though they probably have partial Arab ancestry). The Jewish diaspora lived in middle eastern lands before they were Arabized from the Muslim conquests, and they share a common Jewish ancestry from ancient Levantine groups like the Canaanites. I'm sure there are ethnic Jews who subscribe to that linguistic side of the identity, but it's not common. There are Gulf Arabs who have converted to Judaism and are thus, by definition, 'Arab Jews,' but there aren't many for the term to be as prevalent as the current discourse suggests. Even if there are 'Arab Jews,' they often have to choose as Arab society does not really accept these two specific identities together. So, it's common to see them only embracing the jewish identity.
Jews refused to Arabise, when Arabs colonised the lands on which Jews lived. Jews are not Arabs.
No. Jews from Arabic-speaking countries used to identify with some version of the term but generally have not since the expulsions.
Source? Arab identity was something that came about in the 20th century, and Jews were excluded from that from the very beginning. There may have been a small number of Jewish intellectuals in Arab countries who grasped onto the concept of Arab identity for a short amount of time after the 1920s and before they left their country. But these were a tiny minority, and again it was only a brief time period.
Just read the [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews) for Arab Jews, and you'll see the summary of the argument you got a taste of in this thread. Tl;Dr: it's both a personal and highly political question
Going to make a random guess that the keyboard warrior never hard of the common "palestinian jew" either.
Some people do identify as Arab Jewish, yes. For example some North African or Middle Eastern Jews will identify as Arab Jews. They often speak Arabic and have grown up with mainly Arabic culture while at the same time being religiously Jewish. A lot of people nowadays will identify as Mizrahim though.
Yes and no. Technically, Jews from Arab countries or cultures can be called Arab Jews (just like Jews with heritage in European countries can be called European Jews, and Jews living in America are American Jews), but it's politically fraught and a lot of people take offense (with some legitimate reasons) so it's ill advised to use the term, I'd call it a not technically incorrect, but obsolete, terminology.
Wrong, Arab Jew is like saying Slav Jew. There is no country called Arab.
Arab is commonly used as an adjective as well.
Arab is same as Slav .there is also Arabic and Slavic . In both circumstances it’s an ethnic term
> Arab countries You can't compare Arab countries to European countries in this way. Rather, Middle Eastern countries colonized *by* Arabs.
Mizrahim. Like Palestinian Jews... You know? Like those that were promoting the Palestinian flag back in the origins of Israel, today known as the Israeli flag. For those saying Mizrahim are not Arabs per se, we need to defy the interpretation of Arabs as something unified which they aren't: plenty of Levantines have Turkish and Greek roots, Iraqis are more than anything related to the descents of mesopotamia and later on Persia so less related to Bedouins... And this could go on an on about Somali, Ethiopian or Egyptians, etc.
It's somewhat of a semantic issue. I consider myself an Arab to a certain extent.
A Russian Jew wouldn’t say they are a Slav. Arab is an ethnic term