Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya // Review

Change Within Tradition is a recent addition to the literature surrounding the experiences of Jews living in the Arab world. Unfortunately, like many books in its genre, it appears to be written by a European whose ideological framework reinforces ethnocentric attitudes towards Arab Jewry. This is a particularly painful insight for me as reviewer, as I am a Jew of both Polish and Libyan extraction. Interestingly, both my grandmother and cousins appear in the book.Before offering specific examples of the author's Eurocentrism, it is important to elaborate on an apparent underlying political agenda. Right wing Zionists often claim that it is acceptable to remove Palestinians from their homes because Arab Jews were refugees from their countries of origin. In the minds of some Zionists, this constituted a "population exchange." It is therefore in the interests of this particular faction to portray Arab lands as particularly dangerous and anti - semitic. This is not to say that anti - semitism did not exist in Arab lands. It did. The point is that Zionists emphasize its existence in Arab lands in order to justify the oppression of Palestinians. It is perhaps for this reason that Rachel Simon takes eight pages to describe a few incidents of Jewish women being kidnapped by Muslim men. In contrast, she takes only a one - and - a - half pages to detail Jewish women voluntarily marrying Christian men.A pro - Zionist bias also informs Simon's understanding of what precipitated certain changes in Libyan Jewish society. Early in her book, Simon states that Italian Zionist groups introduced the notion of gender equality. This is a rather outrageous assertion, particularly in view of recent writings by Jewish women about the early Zionist feminist movement. Not one Zionist theorist advocated equal rights for women.(f.1)Ashkenazis, Jews of European origin, created the myth that Arab Jews were "uneducated" and that it was the Zionist enterprise that "civilized" them. Simon perpetuates this myth by referring to women as "illiterate" and "uneducated" again and again throughout her book. She does not, however, examine the possibilities of an oral tradition nor its potential wealth. Much Libyan Jewish history was passed down by women in the form of song and stories.While Simon does mention the practice of hand painting with henna, she does not present it as an art form butrather as a folk practice performed at weddings. She relegates a non - European cultural practice to the margins of her analysis. She does not, for example, offer descriptions of some of the designs. Nor does she consider the loss of this skill among modern Jewish Libyans living in Israel in her discussion on "change within tradition. …