A Tale of Segregation: The Story of Sephardic-Mizrahi Settlements in Colonial Palestine

• In Event: War and Nationalism: Sephardim/Mizrahim in Between

Abstract

When Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa arrived to Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. Amid devastating economic strains, ethnic tensions, and civil unrest on a local and national scale, these immigrants began to identify their experiences and politics as Sephardim-Mizrahim. This presentation tells the extraordinary story of these immigrants and the creation of segregated Sephardic-Mizrahi settlements, which has hitherto not been documented in historical or sociological studies of Israel-Palestine. Drawing on a rich body of private letters, I describe how Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria, Iraq, and Georgia, to name a few, were forced to unsought and profoundly disquieting discoveries about their new “Sephardic-Mizrahi” identities – which shaped Sephardic-Mizrahi interstices and political ideologies in colonial Palestine.

author

• Yehuda Sharim, Rice University