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Hamsa. Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies 2 (2015): 1-13
5 As the Jewish community is fearful of being constructed as society’s exteriority, it adopts what I call passive resistance to anti-Semitism, attempting to mimic the dominant group’s behaviour in an attempt to make themselves similar to their surrounding environment. The only way to survive and redress the lack of not belonging is to resort to mimicry of the Muslims. The adaptive behaviour of mimicry is a means for the Jews to be assimilated and conforms to the implicit demand by the reference group that on condition that the Jews renounce their difference, they can join it in the hope of acceptance: “Become like us, abandon your difference, and you may be one with us” 14 . This mimicry is evident in Caspian Rain in which the wealthy, Jewish Arbabs embrace a national Iranian identity by mixing with other upper class Iranians comprising Jews, Muslims and Baha’is. The factor that therefore unites them in an Iranian identity is membership of the upper class. To integrate with the upper class, the Arbabs minimise their observance of Jewish traditions: “they’re modern Jews who believe themselves Iranians first and Jews second” (CR: 137). Nonetheless, their continuing acknowledgement of Jewish identity in the form of the retention of facets of Jewish observance is analogous to the manifestation of Jewish self-loathing which arose from the specific circumstances of German Jews and which resulted from their attempts to assimilate into German society and to distance themselves from their Jewish identity 15 . Similarly, German Jewish self-loathing is not an absolute rejection of Jewish identity and practice but an assimilated form. The Arbabs observe Yom Kippur but not Rosh Hashanah because they celebrate the Christian New Year and Nowruz and swear on the holy Qu’ran instead of the Torah, wearing gold plaques showing the Shah, instead of a Star of David (ibid: 138). Therefore, their religious and cultural practice suggests a confusion of identities in their attempt to be wholly Iranian. Because the Shah protects the Jews, many upper-class Western-educated Muslims embrace the Jews sincerely believing there is no difference between a Jew and a Muslim. In Caspian Rain, Yaas observes cynically that in return for acceptance as Iranians, the Jews diminish their Jewishness taking pride in their acceptance (ibid). However, despite the apparent assimilation, a disjuncture exists between the affluent Jews deluding and persuading themselves of Muslim acceptance, and the perception by most Muslims of the Jews as outsiders. Yaas observes that most Muslims believe Jews are not Iranian because they are imposters and spies of Israel implementing Israel’s order to control Iran, as they have controlled America. Their aim is to become rich by exploiting God-fearing Muslims (ibid: 137). The second reason Muslims believe Jews are not Iranian is that for centuries the Jews were second-class citizens condemned by the mullahs to living in poverty in the mahaleh. Hence, these Muslims perceive the Jews as both threatening and inferior. Therefore, irrespective of Jewish self-definition, the Jews are negatively defined by most Muslims. Some protagonists are fearful that any manifestations of Jewishness will mar belonging particularly as they associate the latter with impurity demonisation and exclusion in the mahaleh. While Gilman constantly refers to the myths of society about the outsider group 16 , the mahaleh Jewish community were actually designated as religiously impure by Shi’a Islam. Jewish self-hatred is demonstrated by the assimilated Jews’ abhorrence of traditional Jews’ continued practices and customs which they perceive as a betrayal of their aim to be considered Iranian. Self-contempt and self-blaming are facets of Jewish self-hatred. Indeed, Gilman maintains that the minority group identifies with the reference group’s definition of their unacceptable otherness, and therefore projects the flawed characteristics onto an extension of themselves 17 . Some of the assimilated Jews apply these unacceptable 14 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred..., p. 2. 15 Ibid., p. 298. Jewish self-hatred is a term that gained particular currency from the early twentieth century to the beginning of Nazism and wider circulation from the philosopher Theodor Lessing’s work
16 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred..., p. 5. 17 Ibid., p. 3. Hamsa. Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies 2 (2015): 1-13
6 characteristics to mahaleh Jews as they feel shame about their own mahaleh roots and according to Gilman the Western German Jews similarly projected their Jewish self-loathing on to the poorer, Eastern Jews 18 . They thereby created the image of a Jew who embodied all the negative qualities that they feared within themselves. According to Tangney and Dearing shame involves negative evaluations of the self-accompanied by a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness 19 . Those who feel shame blame others for negative events and are prone to resentful anger and hostility. In Moonlight Fräulein Claude or Golnaz from a poor Jewish background married to wealthy Teymur, is repelled by Roxanna’s mahaleh relatives because they remind Fräulein Claude of her own humble roots (MO: 115). In Caspian Rain when Bahar invites her husband’s Jewish contacts for a meal they are deterred by “the Jewishness” in her food, manners, accent and choice of words (CR:71). Because of their wish to escape from this past the seemingly assimilated Jews adopt behaviour that is its antithesis. The need to adopt mimicry is ostensibly indicative of the trauma of continuing lack of a coherent self and stable space of belonging. Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that mimicry is a form of death of the self that is undertaken for protection because of fear 20 . They assert that undisciplined mimicry, indicative of domination, is inscribed in the dominated and transgenerationally transmitted by Jews, thereby displaying the old fear 21 . Due to the extensive imitating, the self become destabilised and I question whether it becomes purely other. Indeed, Sartre’s stance is that because of the necessity imposed upon the Jew of subjecting himself/herself to self-examination, the Jewish person finally assumes a phantom personality that haunts him/her and which is not his/her personality but which is himself/herself as others perceive him/her 22 . Yet, these concepts are not substantiated by the Jews in the literary texts who become self and other to varying extents as they become false others because of the split or layered self incorporating both self and other which is an ambivalent self. Rather than Jewish self-hatred, this layered behaviour incorporating Jewish insider autonomy, suggests an ingrained strategy for achieving an Iranian identity to successfully function in Muslim society. Crucially, mimicry here is solely imitative behaviour while retaining an underlying Jewish identity and in my view, therefore, it is disciplined rather than undisciplined mimicry. In Wedding Song and Land of No the protagonists use language as an instrument of mimicry. Judeo-Persian is inseparable from their mahaleh roots and Farideh comments that all the Jews were trying to disassociate themselves from the language in the hope of integrating into the larger community (WS: 140). Uncle Ardi had shed “ghetto” speech and the inflections of the Jewish dialect (NO: 50). Gilman’s argument (1986: 15) is that nonetheless, the reference group perceives the minority as lacking possession of the dominant language because of the latter’s own hidden language which represents the real enunciation of their Jewish otherness 23 . In an episode in Land of No Uncle Ardi’s Jewish business contacts initially assume he is Muslim as he is an almost assimilated Jew (NO: 49). They are obsequious, well-mannered and speak flawless Persian, quoting passages from the Qu’ran. However, when they learn he is Jewish, they revert to the Judeo-Persian dialect and satirically avenge the Jewish need for mimicry of the majority by using the pejorative term, goy to refer to the Muslims and by jokingly asserting that Muhammad was an “illiterate war-mongering bandit” and that he paid a learned Jew to ghost-write the Qu’ran (ibid: 50). They also feel able to openly criticise the
18 Ibid., p. 270. 19 June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Shame and Guilt, New York, London, Guilford Press, 2002, p. 18. 20
trans. John Cumming, London, Verso, 1979 [1944], p. 180. 21 Ibid., p. 182. 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew..., p. 78. 23 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred..., p. 15. Yüklə 194,35 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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