Entangled Loyalties: Arabic-Language Jewish Newspapers on Nazism and Anti-Semitism in Europe, 1933-1948

This paper offers a study on Middle Eastern Jewish journalistic debates on Nazism during the 1930s and 40s. It focuses on the textual discourses and encounters of several Arabic-language Jewish newspapers from Cairo, Baghdad and Beirut. While some of these newspapers ultimately addressed the local Jewish communities, they aimed at a transregional Jewish and non-Jewish readership, and relied heavily on foreign media outlets for their news contents. The Arabic language used in these media provided a vehicle through which various identifications and competing political loyalties, such as local patriotism and Zionism, could be entangled and expressed to different audiences. The self-ascribed ‘Arabness’ of the editors generally reflected their integrationist visions for Jews in the region. In addition, the newspapers were often used as platforms to combat local Nazi sympathies and anti-Jewish sentiments in the Arab press. How did the editors relate the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Europe to the position of Jews in the Arab ‘East’? By using the analytical tools of entangled history or histoire croisée, this paper locates the textual discourses on Nazism and anti-Semitism in their historical, local, transregional and global contexts. It seeks to broaden our understanding of the various, shifting, and often competing ways in which concepts such as ‘Arabness’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Easternism’ and ‘Semitism’ were employed by Jewish intellectuals in the Middle East.