Birth of the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Controversy on the Arab Question (1910-12)
b"On 'the mother' of all ensuing Mizrahi\\u2013Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. The question was simple: should the Hebraist Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine invest in publishing a newspaper in Arabic and, if yes, should it be communitarian Jewish or general in its topics? What began as yet another obscure intra-Zionist deliberation gradually crystallized into what Dr. Behar argues merits the label of the earliest, explicitly Ashkenazi\\u2013Mizrahi ethnic controversy. This is with the smallest risk of the superimposition in hindsight of the terms and signifiers usually associated with Israel\\u2019s post-1971/Black-Panthers era onto the Ottoman period. Lasting between 1909 and 1913, the spirited exchange regarding the Arabic newspaper involved two dozen writers, mainly of the Sephardi\\u2013Mizrahi Haherut newspaper, and about one third of ethnic Ashkenazim writing elsewhere. It was nonetheless October 1911 that encapsulated the peak of the controversy, mainly due to writing by Mizrahi intellectual and activist Dr Shimon Moyal (1866\\u20131915) and Ashkenazi intellectual and activist Dr Avraham Ludvipol (1865\\u2013 1921). Dr. Behar lets let primary texts speak for themselves at greater length than is customary, resulting from his conviction that \\u2013 in this case \\u2013 extensive recourse to source material can convey best to twenty-first-century readers why the exchange is effectively \\u201cthe mother\\u201d of all ensuing Mizrahi\\u2013Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. Please note that the talk was accompanied by slides, offering the full quotes mentioned by the speaker. Your can read these text in Dr. Behar's article linked here: https://www.academia.edu/32479282/_1911_the_birth_of_the_Mizrahi_Ashkenazi_controversy_2017_"