Israel between East and West
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Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Raphael Patai, Israel between East and West, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1953/1970, bahai-library.com.
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ISRAEL BETWEEN
EAST AND WEST
A STUDY IN HUMAN RELATIONS

BY RAPHAEL PATAI
Second edition with
Supplementary Notes and a New Postscript
by the Author

"From the East will I bring thy seed
And from the West will I gather thee."
Isaiah 43.5

GREENWOOD PUBLISHING CORPORATION
WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT
Contents

Preface to the Second Edition                               ix
From the Preface to the First Edition                       xi
Illustrations                                              xiv
Introduction                                                3

1. Chronicles of the People
1. Origins 2. The Oriental Environment 3. Dis-
persion and Assimilation 4. The Great Migration
Original edition copyright, 1953, by                          5. Race and Language                                 9
The Jewish Publication Society of America              2. Eastern and Western Culture
Second edition
1. "Fellah"-Peoples? 2. Cultural Foci 3. The
Copyright© 1970 by Dr. Raphael Patai                          Western Pattern 4. Religion 5. Oriental Weltan-
schauung 6. What the East Must Leam 7. East-
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be           ern Social Structure                                21
reproduced, by any process or technique, with~ut the   3. Currents of Immigration
express written consent of the author and publisher.
1. From Halukka to Bilu 2. The Second Aliya
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-98711             3. The Third and Fourth Aliyot 4. Oriental Influ-
ences 5. The Fifth Aliya: Westernization 6. The
SBN: 8371-3719-5                                              Oriental Aliya 7. New Settlement Forms 8. The
Changing Ethnic Composition 9. Capital and
Labor                                               56

Greenwood Publishing Corporation                       4. Demographic Highlights
51 Riverside Avenue, Westport, Conn. 06880                    1. The Growth of Jerusalem 2. Vital Statistics
Greenwood Publishers Ltd.
3. Occupational Structure 4. Residential Segrega-
42 Hanway Street, London, W.l., England                       tion 5. "Mixed" Marriages 6. Juvenile Delin-
quency 7. General Criminality                       79
Printed in the United States of America
234                                                                                                                                            235
bites constitute a backward group even in relation to the Moslem-
Arab fellahin. Their villages are neglected, their architecture poor,
The eventual absorption of these two groups into the Jewish com-
munity can be foreseen.
*
their clothing mostly dilapidated, their agriculture primitive. S~­
7. The Bedouin
cially and culturally their status is low. They are regarded by ~err
neighbors as lazy, and th~re is a tend~ncy a~ong. the Palestinian               The Moslem Arabs of Israel are either bedouin, nomadic herds-
Arabs not to intermarry with them. This relationship of ~e _Pales-           men, or fellahin, settled agriculturists, or townspeople. The life-
tinian Arabs to the Moghrebites is especially noteworthy m VIew of           form of the bedouin is wandering within their traditional tribal
the very similar attitude displayed by many among the Jews of                territory, mostly in the Negev, and leading a precarious existence
Israel towards the present Moghrebite Jewish immigration. (Cf.               on the subsistence level. Notwithstanding their poverty in material
pages 294 ff.)                                                   . .         goods, the bedouin are possessed of a great pride coupled with a
The remaining small minority groups can be dealt with m a               deep contempt for sedentary people, especially for the fellahin. "The
sentence or two. There were in Palestine (i? Haif~ and Acre) s~!?e          Bedu is the king of the world, the Fellah is the ass of the world,"
300 Bahais Persian followers of a sect which split off from Shi 1te         says one of their proverbs. In 1947 the bedouin in Palestine num-
Islam. Abo~t 100 of these returned to Haifa in the summer of 1949.          bered about 50,000; their number today in Israel is estimated at
A few Ahmadiyyas, followers of a heretical Shi'ite sect, co~tinue to        17,000.
live in the village of Al-Kababir on Mt. Carmel and publish a re-              The Israeli bedouin are not real nomads like the great camel-
ligious monthly called Al-Bushra, "The Message.'' In addition to            herding tribes of Saudi-Arabia, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, whose
these, there were in Palestine a num?er. of groups who were. ~e             tribal territory stretches across political boundaries and who roam
descendents of immigrants once constituting separate comrr.1W:ities,        with their rich camel herds over hundreds of miles of desert and
but who in the course of time have almost completely assinill~ted           steppe. The bedouin of the Negev are semi-nomads; their livestock
to the Moslem Arab majority of the country. These are the Egyptians,        consists mostly of sheep and goats; and they are tied to fixed camp-
the Sudanese, the Negroes, the Ghawarna, the Kurds, ~e Syrians,            ing-places for a considerable part of the year, wandering during the
the Lebanese, the Persians, the Afghans and the Gypsies. These             rest of the year within a much smaller tribal territory, nearer to the
minority groups, each in itself of no great consequence,_ accounted        settled and cultivated land. Tribal structure and other traditions of
together for the mosaic-like appearance of the ~on-Je~s~ popula-           the proud full-nomads are declining. Together with tribal disintegra-
tion of Mandatory Palestine. As the overwhelming ma1onty of all            tion goes a trend toward sedentarization, that is, a settling down
these groups lived in Galilee, which today is fart of the S_tate of        permanently within the tribal territory, on a stretch of land capable
Israel those of them who did not abandon therr homes dunng the             of being cultivated and of yielding some crop. This trend makes it
'ti"c~l months of fighting automatically became citizens of Israel.    imperative to divide the land, which previously was held in common
enSpecial mention must be made here of two quasi-      . Jewi~
· h gro~ps,   by the whole tribe, into individual holdings to be owned either by
the Samaritans and the Karaites. The Samaritans have lived, smce           a family or a private person. The division of the land occurs usually
the days of the Second Temple, in Nablus (Sichem). During the last        in the form of "occupation," this means that a family occupies a
fifty years their numbers have slowly dwindled and it began_ to look      piece of land de facto, cultivates it all the year round, and thus
as though they were doomed to extinction. After the establishment         becomes its sole owner also de jure. Usually the sheikhs, the tribal
of the Jewish State, however, they began to infiltrate into Israel, a~d    chieftains, who are the most powerful members of the tribe, succeed
today (spring, 1952) they constitute a community of 60 persons m          in occupying considerable tracts of relatively good land and become
in time feudal lords and big landowners. Other strong members of
Jaffa-Tel Aviv.                                           .     .          the tribe also prevail when it comes to dividing the tribal lands
The Karaites, stemming mainly from Egypt, have arnved m Isra~l
and occupying tracts, so that the weaker and poorer tribesmen
after the establishment of the State. There are now about 2?0 fami-       remain altogether left out and inevitably become tenants. In this
lies in Israel, half of whom live in a workers settlement ~hich they      manner the social classes which are characteristic of the Arab
founded and called Matzliah, after a 10th century Karaite author.         village develop at the very moment when the semi-nomadic tribe
The rest are dispersed in various places throughout the country.          become a settled community.
-- Israel between East and West (Used by permission of the curator)