Looking at a number of publications from research institutes and publishing houses in the Arab world from 1948 to 1982, this project hopes to map the circulation of Mizrahi texts in the Arab world. In order to attend to the roles of different actors in the publication process, the project will detail how these works’ physical circulation, material dimensions, and intertextual relationships were integral to these texts’ reception. The project will use digital platforms such as Omeka in order to map, catalog, selectively digitize (in accordance with fair use guidelines), contextualize, and crucially, relate works published in English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic on Mizrahi thought. In the process, it hopes to ask: why and how have Arab intellectuals written about the Mizrahi struggle in Israel? Despite their purported focus on “the enemy,” many of these works translate and endorse the views of Mizrahi social movements; emphasize historic ties of Jewish communities with their co-citizens of other faiths in the Arab world; and elevate non-Zionist Jewish voices on the Palestinian Question. Indeed, all of the works in question argue that the stakes and impact of Mizrahi struggle are relevant, either as a part of or an obstacle to, the Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Rather than seeing Mizrahim and Palestinians as separate populations brought together only through their common position as oppressed, this study hopes to center these actors themselves showing how they engaged–even after their separation by partition and the hardening of borders–with each other and with broader global and regional intellectual currents such as Continental existentialism, Communism, Arab leftism, and Third Worldist thought.

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