Paper short abstract:

The lecture will deal with the encounter between center and periphery, making account of the part of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe in the absorption of Mizrachi Jews immigrating to Palestine and then Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Paper long abstract:

The lecture will deal with Israeli scholars from different disciplines, who dedicated their scholarly work to the Mizrachi immigrants who arrived to Israel from North Africa and Asia at the end of the 1940s and during the 1950s. Some of these scholars - immigrants themselves from Central Europe - became prominent policy makers in their fields; due to the determining moment in which they acted - in the founding period of the State of Israel- they had helped shape the new states' institutional infrastructures in fields such as education and immigrant absorption. The way in which these institutions were shaped and worked in Israel's early days still serves today as one of the most sensitive friction points of the "ethnic rift" in Israel, on the basis of the argument that these institutions served to constitute a structural discrimination concerning the allocation of resources between "Mizrachi" and "Ashkenzi" Jews.

Some of the scholarly work dealing with Mizrachi Jews in Israel's early days - especially those based on theories of "modernization" - had received since the 1970s critical attention. Their authors, on the other hand, had remained rather neglected. My lecture wishes to discuss a few of these scholars and in the context of their Central-European roots; despite the fact that they belonged to different disciplines and that they do not represent one stream of thought, it will still be argued that their Central European background can account for some of the fundamental assumptions underlining their scholarly work.