“Prophecies of a Madman in a Cursed City”: The Birth & Demise of Arab-Jewish Identity and Culture

We are currently witnessing the demise of Arab-Jewish identity and culture, a tradition that started more than 1,500 years ago is vanishing before our very own eyes.
Until the twentieth century, the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam adopted Arabic as their language. It was the main factor for the Muslim-Jewish Arab symbiosis up to the twentieth century, but since the establishment of the State of Israel and because of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the clash between the Israeli-Jewish-Zionist nationalism and Arab-Palestinian nationalism, Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language spoken on a daily basis by Jews and the aforementioned symbiosis does not exist in our time. Israeli-Jewish culture currently does not see the Arabic language and Arab culture as intellectual assets – the chapter of the Muslim-Jewish Arab symbiosis has reached its end, at least for the foreseeable future.
 

Reuven Snir is professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Haifa. He teaches courses on Arabic poetry, Palestinian theatre, Sufism, and Arab–Jewish culture. Prof. Snir has published articles and books in Arabic, Hebrew, and English and has translated poetry between the three languages. Among his last books in English: Baghdad: The City in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2013); Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Arab–Jewish Literature: The Birth & Demise of the Arab–Jewish Short Story (Brill, 2019), Contemporary Arabic Literature: Heritage and Innovation (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); and Palestinian and Arab-Jewish Cultures: Language, Literature and Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).