This paper analyzes a 1943 pamphlet entitled “Tribes and Jewish Ethnic Communities in the Pot of the General Union of Hebrew Workers,” written in Mandate Palestine by Yisrael Yesh‘ayahu-Shar‘abi, then the head of the Histadrut’s Oriental Department and later Secretary General of the Labor Party and Speaker of the Knesset. The paper insists on taking Yemeni thought seriously as part of the Labor Zionist intellectual tradition.
Yesh‘ayahu’s pamphlet reflects a uniquely Mizrahi- and Sephardi-centered understanding of Zionist history. His classification of Jews in five ethnic divisions (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Italian/Balkan, Oriental, and Yemeni) serves to promote a policy agenda that includes economic equalization and the facilitation of large-scale Mizrahi and Sephardi immigration; at the same time, this classification supports an ideological agenda that centers Labor Zionism and privileges Yemeni Jews. Yesh‘ayahu’s ideas about race – and his brief assessment of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict – bolster the claim that only better treatment of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews could allow the Zionist community to achieve what Yesh‘ayahu understands as its primary objectives: Jewish national independence and security, a cultural “melting pot,” and a just society rooted in socialist principles.
By unpacking the layers of racial meaning encoded in Yesh‘ayahu’s work, this paper wrestles with questions of intra-Jewish racism, colonialism, and Zionism. It draws upon scholarship on the transnational history of race in order to explore the racialization of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in Israel, demonstrating the value of analyzing the category of “‘eidah” as a parallel to “race” within the Zionist imagination of global Jewry.