The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times.

• Author: Jankowski, James

This is the companion volume to Professor Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1979). Where the former volume dealt with the history of Arab Jewish communities from the emergence of Islam to the nineteenth century, this one focuses on their development and eventual disappearance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like its predecessor, it combines a concise narrative history with a wide-ranging collection of documents concerning the social, communal, and particularly the political conditions of Arab Jewry in the modern era. An assemblage of photographs taken from both published and unpublished sources provides a rich visual complement to the text.

A chronologically organized narrative comprises the first third of the work. There is now a large body of monographic material dealing with the specific histories of the various Arab Jewish communities, as well as with the social and political trends which affected all or most of them in the modern period. Professor Stillman skillfully synthesizes this historical scholarship, supplementing it with original research in the voluminous memoir literature relevant to the subject as well as in the archives of Western governments, Jewish communal organizations, and the Zionist movement. The result is a solidly based, clearly structured, and generally judicious synthesis of a large body of material.

The interpretation offered is, by and large, a familiar one. The first two chapters of the historical narrative focus primarily on the communal, educational, and social development of Arab Jewry in the nineteenth century (to 1914), emphasizing their gradual Westernization and their concomitant alienation from the less-Westernized Muslim Arab populations among whom they lived. The conclusion in chapter two simultaneously summarizes the growing divergence between Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs wrought by the processes of "modernization" in the nineteenth century, and provides the leitmotif informing subsequent chapters: "The forces of modernization had the effect of widening the gap that already existed in Islamic society between believer and unbeliever".

It is the political consequences of this "polarity" between the Muslim Arab majority and Jewish Arab minorities in the post-World War I era of nationalism which is the main subject of the remaining five chapters of the historical narrative. Now largely ignoring the internal evolution of...