The Descendants of Aleppo Jews in Jerusalem

From the booklet Darkei Eretz, No. 13, Year 2001

The Descendants of Aleppo Jews in Jerusalem

by Walter P. Zenner

One way to get a handle on the changes which have taken place in Jerusalem and Israel between 1960 and 1995 is to study what has occurred in a microcosm. While such a study only reveals one piece of a larger mosaic, when we put all the parts together we can gain new insights into the whole.

In 1961-62, I did a study of Syrian Jews in Jerusalem, concentrating on about ten ^ extended families, as well on a number of communal organizations.’ Most of these families lived in the neighbourhoods surrounding Mahaneh Yehuda, including the Nahala’ot, Romema, and Geula. Most were of Aleppean origin and several were rabbinic families, related to a number of old rabbinic dynasties. Several of these families had been in Jerusalem since the 1890s. Others were families which had originated in the South-Central Turkish hinterland of Aleppo and were of proletarian origin, having immigrated to Aleppo after the First World War and to Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. Jews from this region were often referred to as Halebim (Aleppeans; halebi, singular). A few had arrived after the establishment of the State.

In 1992 and 1993,1 interviewed members of some of these families. I also investigated the condition of a number of Syrian Jewish institutions which I had studied previously or which had been established in more recent years. Here I will compare the findings of my 1962 work with that of my 1993 study and place both into a larger framework. Certain trends, such as the dispersal of origin-group members into the larger Israeli—Jewish society, have continued, while other trends such as movement to certain new neighbourhoods and the strengthening of the Orthodox institutions, are the result of larger changes in Israel.

BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SYRIAN JEWS

Like the Turkish and Bulgarian Sephardim and the old-line Sephardim,2 the Syrian Jews represent one of the smaller origin-groups in Israel. These groups generally entered Israeli society without causing massive social problems. In fact, some were part of the Sephardic community which was part of the ‘Old Yishuv’. They were generally too small to make great waves in the society. They were thus unlike the ‘yekkes’ (German Jews), the Moroccans, Kurds, Iraqis and Yemenis of the 1950s and 1960s, or the Russians of the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike these groups, they were not seen as the source of major social problems. In addition, there were no collections of jokes or sayings in which Syrians were stereotyped. They are useful for seeing how the various divides of Israeli society may deepen or may be bridged, such as the social division between affluent Ashkenazim and impoverished Mizrahim or between religious and secular Jews or between ‘nationalists’ and ‘socialists’. Walter Weiker, for instance, has called Jews from Turkey, ‘the unseen Israelis’.3 By this, he points to their lack of visibility as a distinct group.

Weiker tests the suggestion that small immigrant groups would assimilate fairly rapidly. In his 1988 book, he concluded that the children of Turkish immigrants would be indifferent to their parents’ culture, but in a 1994 article, he found that there was considerable interest in their heritage. Still, the process of assimilation was proceeding. For instance, Weiker’s findings include almost universal intermarriage with Jews of other origins. Thus the grandchildren would be interested in the parents’ heritages (plural).

The integration of small origin-groups into Israeli society tells us much about the processes of assimilation and/or continued separation by country of origin in Israel and its relationship to similar processes elsewhere. Syrian Jewry’s significance is highlighted by the fact that in the New World, a number of Syrian, particularly Aleppean, communities have established and maintained separate parallel institutions, side by side with those of other of Jewish groups, including synagogues, day schools, community centres, and even Zionist youth groups. This is particularly true of the New York metropolitan area and Mexico City.4

Assimilation

In the social scientific conceptualization of processes of ethnic relations, the national entity is considered central and normative. Immigrants and local groups must conform to its demands {through assimilation and/or integration) or face marginalization of one kind or another.5 In recent years, as part of the ‘post-modernist’ reaction, these assumptions have been challenged by an emphasis on diasporas. The inevitability of the absorption of immigrants into a national society is denied by emphasizing their ‘trans-national ties’. The new diasporic discourse ‘decenters’. Thus the authority of the national as the inevitable standard is undermined. In fact, at least one proponent of this viewpoint has written that the whole plethora of concepts relating to acculturation and assimilation is obsolete.6

While ‘diasporic terminology’ was originally derived from the Jewish historical experience, it is no longer limited to it. In addition, while Jewish historians have generally thought of the diaspora as one entity, we can also think of the Jewish people as made up of many different dispersions and international networks. As noted elsewhere, this is certainly true of the Jews from Aleppo who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dispersed to the Americas, Egypt, Western Europe and East Asia, as well as Israel.7

While the diasporic discourse corrects the over-emphasis on national integration of the older theories, the assimilation discourse continues to have its place. It does describe certain experiences quite accurately. This is particularly true with regard to the smaller immigrant groups in Israel.

The Syrian Jewish dispersion, as has been noted, have fairly intensive and extensive trans-national webs of family and business relationships. Despite this, the descendants of Syrian Jews in Israel have been affected by the national culture in Israel and have changed their language and other patterns of life. For instance, a number of quite Orthodox Jews of Aleppean descent in New York City maintain Hebrew as their primary medium of communication.

Those Syrian Jews who went to Palestine/Israel faced a much more consistent policy fostering absorption and assimilation than those who immigrated to other areas, at least through the 1960s and into the 1970s. These policies included such elements as encouraging Hebraization of names and practically forced settlement of certain immigrants on the land. This was particularly the case during the 1950s. In the 1970s and 1980s assimilatory demands were generally lifted and greater voice was given to Middle Eastern cultural expressions. This included the pressure on people to change their names, which was in sharp contrast to the Ben-Gurion era when Hebraization of names was clearly preferred.8

In the period of my original study, I was concerned with the degree to which the Syrian immigrants and their descendants had maintained or lost their particular local identities and merged with the Sephardic and Middle Eastern segment of the Jewish population. I noted the fact that, at that time, there were few specifically Syrian institutions or organizations. It seemed that Aleppean Jews were dispersing as a group, though many displayed both ambivalence towards and pride in their ancestry.9

In my previous work, I had concluded that Syrian Jews were not residentially concentrated, nor were there many institutions which were marked ‘ethnic arenas’ for Syrians; those that were, like the synagogues and even charities supported by Syrian Jews abroad and mediated through Syrian Jews in Israel, served a larger clientele. Like most national white ethnic groups in the United States, Syrian Jewry in Israel had been reduced to a recognition of ancestry and the performance of a few customs, particularly culinary and musical, which were not their exclusive heritage.

In my recent study, I sought to interview members of these families and to return to sites which I had spent much time in previously. I also spoke to and interviewed leaders of the World Centre for the Traditional Heritage of Aleppo Jewry. My goals were the same. I also wanted to set this study into the context of studying other Syrian Jewish communities in other countries. As noted some of the Diaspora Syrian Jews have vigorously maintained their communal structure, although others have not.

JERUSALEM 1962 AND 1993

The changes between Jerusalem in the early 1960s and the early 1990s, needless to say, have been great. In 1962, Israeli Jerusalem was part of a truncated metropolitan area, somewhat isolated from the population and economic centre of the country on the Coastal Plain. It was a city of a little over 150,000 people, mostly Jews. Connections with the Jordanian Jerusalem metropolitan area were few, mediated primarily by the United Nations at the once famous Mandelbaum Gate checkpoint. While Jerusalem was the capital, most governmental buildings in the city were modest. Building tended to be oriented westward, such as the Hadassah Hospital complex in Ein-Karem and the Hebrew University’s Givat-Ram campus. Building along the then international border was not done very often. The haredi presence was still a minority phenomenon, though much more visible than in the rest of the country.

Jerusalem in the 1990s is far different. The city as a whole has a population of over 400,000, although it is larger when combined with that of surrounding suburban communities and villages. The united Jerusalem is still a divided city, as Romann and Weingrod amply illustrate in their volume, Living Together Separately.l0 The divisions include those between Arabs and Jews, as well as between haredim and other Jews.

Large government, residential and commercial buildings now cover many of the hills from north to south and east to west. In 1960, Bethlehem was far from Jerusalem, while now the high-rise apartments of the Jewish development of Gillo tower over the Arab towns of Ephrata.11 The haredim are now a much more important segment of the population throughout the city than they were in the 1960s and they include substantial numbers of Sephardim as well as Ashkenazi Jews. For instance the Rehavia area which was seen in the 1960s as a predominantly secular middle-class neighbourhood with a large number of Hebrew University professors now has large numbers of people wearing haredi dress. As we will note later, the yeshiva population among Middle Eastern Jews has grown.

Gentrification has been another force in Jerusalem. Several old and poor neighbourhoods have been targeted as places where middle class people can find good and attractive housing with the patina of age. Among these is Nahala’ot with its small houses with courtyards and winding lanes. A consequence of such gentrification is that the cost of housing in such neighbourhoods rises. Nahala’ot now also has been renamed Lev Ha-ir (The City’s Heart), following the old Talmudic proverb: ‘change of name is change of destiny’.12

THE ALEPPEAN JEWS OF JERUSALEM CHANGES IN RESIDENCE AND NEIGHBOURHOOD

The Levi family had lived in Nahala’ot and Giv’at Shaul, a western neighbourhood in the 1960s. Nahala’ot in particular is in walking distance of Mahaneh Yehuda, while Giv’at Shaul was farther out. Nahala’ot is an old Middle Eastern style quarter with closely packed one or two storey houses, often with courtyards. Jacques Levi’s house was a two-room house with kitchen and bathroom and a small courtyard on one floor. He did not have a telephone at that time.13

Jacques Levi and his wife, Jamila, were both born in Aleppo and had immigrated to Jerusalem in the 1940s. They had married early. Jacques who was a truckdriver selling vegetables to market shops and later a grocer is now dead. He has seven surviving children. Only one continues to live in Nahala’ot and another has a shop in Mahaneh Yehuda. One of his children whom I did not see this time has, according to her brothers, become ‘religious’ (Orthodox), which the Levis were not. When I asked her brother if he was religious, he indicated that he was not irreligious. One of Jacques’s sons lives in Gillo in a high-rise apartment. Ezra Levi who had also lived in the central and western neighbourhoods now lives in East Talpiot. Nearby lives a daughter and her Ashkenazi husband. One son lives in Gillo, while another lives in Bak’a in an older apartment building. Both Gillo and East Talpiot are neighbourhoods which were built in the past 20 years as high-rise apartment areas in the former Jordanian zone. While one of Jacques Levi’s children lives in Nahala’ot, most of the rest have moved to the southeastern neighbourhoods and live in high-rise apartment buildings there.

Among those who are professionals, many live in other areas, such as the southwestern areas of the city, where there are also many nonreligious Ashkenazim. These had already lived outside the areas surrounding Mahaneh Yehuda in the 1960s and they generally lived together with non-religious and moderately religious Ashkenazim.

In 1962,1 kept in touch with one teenager, Raful, as he left school and got a job as an apprentice.14 At the same time, Sima, his sister had succeeded gaining admission into an academic high school. I inquired about them in 1993.

Raful, who is now known as Rafi, is a taxi driver living in the southeastern suburbs. He had lived in the Negev for a few years, before returning to Jerusalem. He owns his own taxi, but he is employed by a company. His wife, a woman of Kurdish origin, is a civil servant and one of his daughters is a university student. His sister never finished high school. She also married a man of Kurdish origin and they run a business in one of the villages near Jerusalem. If we look at their outward appearances, Raful and Sima have risen in terms of status, despite the disadvantages of not finishing school.

What is true of Raful and his sister also can be applied to the other families I visited; both the families of people who worked in the market and those of rabbis had a higher standard of living than they did in the 1960s. Many were engaged in middle-class occupations. Foreign travel is not uncommon and most households have televisions and telephones. Whereas in 1961, visitors would just drop in, now they must call ahead. There are some exceptions, such as one man who was paralyzed by being injured by a landmine in Gaza. Some of those who have prospered the most have done so abroad. A member of one of the rabbinic families went to work in the United States for a company founded by other Sephardi Israelis and has become an important executive in this company.

In 1961-62, much of my field work was devoted to the observation of family life in the Halebi households I visited. In my much shorter update, I was unable to make equivalent observations. There are some hints, however, that trends noted in the 1960s have continued. It is likely that what is often seen as the traditional ideal, in which wives obeyed husbands and children their parents, was never a perfect reality. In addition, the discontinuities that have marked Syrian Jewry since the beginning of the nineteenth century added to contradictions and conflicts in these relationships. The moredet (rebellious wife) was known for centuries. Such women often ran away from their husbands’ homes to return to their parents, complaining of abuse on the part of husbands and husbands’ parents. Such an action might occasion negotiations, so that the wife returned to her husband, or it might precipitate a divorce. Disobedient children appear in both response and in the accounts of foreigners resident in Aleppo. For example a woman who was an Alliance teacher in Aleppo reported that once a father brought his adolescent son to her so that she would punish him.15

The disruptions of and changes in traditional family relationships in the 1960s included:

• Marriage against parental wishes;

• Wives disobeying husbands;

• Disobedient children and inconsistent parental behaviour;

• Grandmothers acting as baby sitters and living near children, while their daughters work outside.

Most of these changes indicate that the family has become less patriarchal and authoritarian. A woman might go to Tel-Aviv to visit relatives without her husband knowing she was going, or she would consider voting against his political party. I did not have the opportunity to observe households in 1993, but from conversations with the Halebis in their forties, I found that relationships between spouses seemed fairly relaxed. In most cases, wives worked outside the house, sometimes in jobs of higher status than their husbands. Grandmothers continued to babysit for their daughters and daughters-in-law.

Another trend that has appeared is the ‘traditionalizing’ among those who are Orthodox. This is especially marked in Rabbinic families, where the model of the Ashkenazi haredim is especially strong. Several older male members of rabbinic families, who were not themselves rabbis, complained about the ways of their younger relatives. One said that his nieces will not shake his hand.

At the other extreme, one finds members of Halebi families who are unattached and lead an almost bohemian way of life. One individual, about 40 years of age, has traveled extensively and lived abroad. While he has returned to Jerusalem, he is unmarried, although he had a succession of girl friends.

1. The results of that study were reported in my doctoral dissertation, Walter P. Zenner, Syrian Jewish Identification in Israel, Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1966, Order No.66,8536.

2. See Walter Weiker, The Unseen Israelis: The Jews of Turkey in Israel, Lanhaxn, 1988; and idem, ‘Ethnicity Among Turkish Jews in Haifa’, Social Science Research (Israel), Vol.10 (1995), pp. 23-42; see also Guy Haskell, From Sofia to Jaffa, Detroit, 1994.

3. See Weiker, Unseen Israelis and ‘Ethnidty Among Turkish Jews’. Weiker’s definition of ‘Turkish Jews’differs somewhat from my usage of Syrian Jews. He means specifically immigrants from the Republic of Turkey, especially those who immigrated from 1948 to the present. His questions specifically relate Turkish identity to identification with Turkish national culture. This is more explicit in his work than their relationship to the Judeo-Spanish heritage, though he asks about that as well. Since Syrian Jews as I define them include families who left Syria under Ottoman as well as Mandatory and Republican rule, my orientation regarding Syrian Jews is different.

4. See Joseph A.D. Sutton, Aleppo Chronicles, Brooklyn, 1988, pp.62-109; Walter P. Zenner, ‘Syrian Jews in New York City Twenty Years Ago’, in Victor D. Sanua, ed., Fields of Offerings: Studies in Honor of Raphael Ratal, London and Toronto, 1983, pp.173-93; Liz Hamui de Halabe, Los Judios de Alepo en Mexico, Mexico, 1989, passim.

5. S.N. Eiscnstadt, The Absorption of Immigrants, London, 1954, and Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, New York, 1965, are good representatives of the social scientific literature on assimilation.

6. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Spaces of Dispersal’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.9 (1994), pp.339—44; also see James Clifford, ‘Diasporas*, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.9 (1994), pp.302-38.

7. W.P. Zenner, ‘The Transnational Web of Syrian Jewish Relations’, in G. Gmelch and WP. Zenner, eds., Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology, 3rd Edition, Prospect Heights, 1996, pp.459-72.

8. Raphael Cohen-Almagor, ‘Cultural Pluralism and the Israeli Nation-Building Ideology’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.27 (1995), pp. 461-84.

9. Walter P. Zenner, ‘Ambivalence and Self-Image among Oriental Jews in Israel’, Jewish Journal of Sociology, Vol. V (1963), pp.214—23; idem., Syrian Jewish Identification, pp.176-207, 289-327; idem. ‘Sephardic Communal Organizations in Israel’, Middle East Journal,V61.21 (1967), pp.173-86.

10. Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem, Princeton, 1993.

11. Nancie L. Gonzalez, Dollar, Dove, and Eagle: One Hundred Years of Palestinian Migration to Honduras, Ann Arbor, 1992, pp.57-60.

12. Jeff Halper, ‘Modern Jerusalem: Policies, Peoples, Planning’, in K. Avruch and WP. Zenner, eds., Critical Essays in Israeli Society, Religion and Government, Albany, 1997, pp.93—114.

13. For further description of the Levis .and other families, see WP. Zenner, Syrian Jewish Identification, pp.247-88.

14. W.P. Zenner, ‘Raful Leaves School’, The Reconstructionist, Vol.28 (1962), pp.21-4.

15. See WP. Zenner, ‘Jews in Late Ottoman Syria’, in Shlomo Deshen and Walter E Zenner, eds., jews among Muslims, Basingstoke, 1996, pp. 117-181, for a description.