ariella azoulay potential history unlearning imperialism

1890s–1900s Courtesy of the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Banks McLaurin, Jr.

Keystone View Company Underwood & Underwood, 'Picturesque homes of wealthy Jews along the Tigris in North Bagdad, Iraq, Mesopotamia,' c.

Does all Jewish migration to Israel constitute a spiritual ascent? Are they always finite 'immigrations'? Should we speak more precisely about the 'migration' of Jews to Israel? Yet curiously, we overlook the significance of yeridah and the role it plays in shaping Israel's history and relationship to the Jewish Diaspora. Scholars have diligently chronicled the history of the various waves of aliyah. Similarly, emigrants are unaware of the implications of their absence from their abandoned residences. As a rule, immigrants do not know in advance the extent to which they will shape, and be shaped by, their new society. The Hebrew term for the opposite of aliyah, yeridah, in contrast, is fluid it designates a temporary peregrination, an existential Jewish spiritual descent from Zion into the nebulous realm of the Diaspora. Spiritually, it is an aliyah, a finite ascension to the Holy Land the logical culmination of millennia-long Jewish desire to return to the Land. Politically, it is assumed to be an explicit realization of the Zionist ideal. Jewish migration to Israel is imbued with a sense that the physical act of relocation marks a historic moment for the individual and the collective, as if each Jewish migrant brings the collective closer to redemption. King Faisal I with Baghdadi Jewish notables including Senator Menahem Salih Daniel, and Rabbis Ezra Dangoor and Sasson Kadurie, 1925.

Ariella azoulay potential history unlearning imperialism