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“The Virtual Genizah”: Emerging North African Jewish and Muslim Identities Online

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Aomar Boum
Aomar Boum*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California; e-mail: aomarb1@gmail.com
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Extract

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist narrative dominated the histories and historiographies of Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Accordingly, Jews and Arabs were largely kept as distinct binaries divided by the intellectual walls that separated Middle East studies and Jewish studies programs. Local North African and Middle Eastern scholars also silenced or overlooked the Jewish dimension of Middle Eastern societies in the same manner that Israeli scholars ignored the historical connections between Arabs and Jews that existed both before and after 1948. The exclusive, sacred yet ebbing, nationalist paradigm has been plagued with historiographical fissures in recent decades, allowing a new wave of intellectual engagement by a young generation of Jewish and Muslim scholars who began to put the Jew and the Arab back into local and global histories formed through complex social, cultural, economic, and political networks.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 597 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Gottreich, Emily and Schroeter, Daniel, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 These sites include dafina.net, darnna.com, mimouna.net, marocorama.com, communautejuiveagadir.com, cimitierejuifcasablanca.com, and melca.info.

3 Aron Rodrigue is one of the few historians who capitalizes on internet sources, using online accounts and newsletters to track narratives of the Jews of Rhodes and to analyze how their memory lives in translational diasporic spaces. See his keynote lecture “Sephardim, Memory, and the Holocaust,” Symposium on Sephardic Jewry and the Holocaust, University of Washington, Seattle, 2013.

4 Beaulieu, Anne, “Mediating Ethnography: Objectivity and the Making of Ethnographies of the Internet,” Social Epistemology 18 (2004): 139–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, S. M. and Peterson, L.C., “The Anthropology of Online Communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 449–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Varisco, Daniel, “September 11: Participant Webservation of the War on Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104 (2008): 934–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Buchanan, Elizabeth, “Ethics, Qualitative Research, and Ethnography in Virtual Space,” Journal of Information Ethics 2 (2000): 82–87Google Scholar.

7 Abdelhamid Larguèche, “La culture juive de Tunisie entre histoire et mémoire: l'exemple du web des juifs tunisiens,” Conference on Rethinking Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, Tangier, Morocco, 2004.

8 See mygenealogy.ch; rabbidavidoumoshe.com; rabbinessimbnessim.com; zehoutavot.com; rabbidavidbenbarroukh.com; melca.info; moroccan-judaism.org; juifdumaroc.over-blog.com; darnna.com; mimouna.net; marocorama.com; and diarna.org.

9 See juifdumaroc.over-blog.com.

10 Representative sites include beit-hahayim-tanger.com, cimetierejuifmarrakech.com, communautejuiveagadir.com, and cimetierejuifcasablanca.com.

11 See http://www.diarna.org/wordpress/Diarnawp/wordpress/about/.

12 See http://www.judaisme-marocain.org.