Between exile and redemption - by Luis S. Krausz

With the creation of Israel in 1948, Jewish communities that had lived in the Arab world for millennia were systematically persecuted. Coming from countries such as Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Morocco, waves of refugees arrived in the Israeli state, strangers to a national culture that invented itself as modern, secular and Western. Called mizrachim (Orientals, in Hebrew), these immigrants are pressured to abandon their values ​​and worldview to integrate into the social, cultural and economic structures of Israel, embodying the paradoxical condition of exiles in the “land of redemption”. Generally belonging to the educated classes of their societies of origin, they find refuge in literature, triggering a literary current whose works, analyzed by Luis S. Krausz in this book, elaborate from different points of view the theme of Jewish immigration from Arab countries.