Ginger and Salt

Yemeni Jewish Women in an Israeli Town

Lisa Gilad

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367012854
• eBook ISBN: 9780429713590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on women in development and the effects of the development process on women's roles and status. By considering women in the full context of their cultures, the book offers new insights on sociocultural, political, and economic change cross-culturally.

1
Introducing Ginger and Salt

It was a quiet autumn morning in Gadot, Israel; everyone was at work or at school. I was at my typewriter, trying to remember some of the events of the previous evening. Suddenly, through my open windows I heard a woman’s sobs. I ran out to the square to see what the problem was. There was Adina—a Yemeni Jewish woman, forty-nine years old, mother of ten children—sobbing. She was moving from side to side, extending her arms to the sky as if asking God to help her. Since we knew each other well, I asked what troubled her so; she replied that it was too awful to speak about. I insisted that she come to my flat for a cup of coffee, and finally, after an hour of tears, she poured out her heart. The night before her husband had defiled her; instead of waiting until fifteen days after the onset of menses and her immersion in the mihveh (ritual bath) as required by religious law, her husband forcibly had sexual intercourse with her. She could not understand his behavior because he had not done so in thirty years of marriage. More important, and this was the reason for her tears, she feared that the evil eye would destroy her whole family because they did not adhere to the family purity rituals (tahamt hamishpahah).

I asked Adina if she knew that in Yemen, Jewish women had a cure for this type of pollution: her reply was negative. Without hesitation I suggested that she seek the advice of a Yemeni healer who had told me the cure consists of a ginger and salt paste which is spread on the vagina. After reciting several blessings, the defiled woman would then be purified. Adina left immediately to learn the appropriate blessings used during the purification ritual. The next day she rewarded me with a dozen roses, thanking me profusely for having saved her family. She wanted to know how I knew about the ritual; I replied that learning such things was part of my research.

The point of this story is not simply that when working in immigrant societies, the anthropologist often ends up filling in aspects of “lost” culture, but that women with whom I spent a lot of time continue to practice ancient rituals from their Yemeni Jewish heritage, even when they no longer have the knowledge to cope with calamities in the new context of Israeli society. This episode in Adina’s life took place thirty-two years after she immigrated to Israel. If she had still been in Yemen, undoubtedly she would have known the cure. It is also possible that if she had lived in an ethnically segregated Yemeni community in Israel, other women could have informed her of the cure. Gadot, an Israeli immigrant settlement and the setting for this study, was far from homogeneous; Yemenis were dispersed among Jews who had emigrated from seventy other countries. I chose Gadot precisely because of its cultural diversity, allowing a unique opportunity to study Israeli values of “integration” and to see how one particular etdah (ethnic community), the Yemeni Jews, interacted with others from all around the globe.¹ I wanted to understand why being “Yemeni” was still an important identity to people thirty-two years after the group immigrated to Israel and to learn what it meant to their children.

The title of this book was chosen for the symbolic significance of those ingredients used in the purification ritual undergone by Adina: ginger, a spice used daily in Yemen for both flavour and healing, and salt, the mineral evoking the bitterness and troubles of the Jewish people. Ginger and salt, then, bring together two of the socially important identities and cultures of the Yemeni Jews in Israel. While I studied Yemeni Jews of all ages, the people in this book are two generations of women.² One generation is the women who immigrated from Yemen shortly after the creation of the state of Israel; the other is their daughters, who were born in Israel. Ginger and Salt is about starting afresh in an “old-new” country, about radical changes in the self-images and actions of the immigrant generation, and particularly interesting, the “invention” for the younger generation of a period of life as unmarried women.

Both generations of women experience conflicting imperatives placed upon them and created by them in Israeli society. The immigrant generation believes in the traditionally Yemeni Jewish model of women solely committed to managing their households. Yet in Israel mothers find they must work in paid employment in order to provide their children with a good education and to “supplement” their husbands’ low incomes. Outside work, in turn, is often seen to interfere with good mothering because it takes away from the time a mother spends with her children and affects her ability to manage her household efficiently. At the same time, women’s experiences in paid employment are seen to threaten and re-arrange the family authority structure. Nevertheless, work outside the home and involvement in a wide variety of extra-domestic activities has enabled immigrant women to gain more authority in the home, to gain more independence from the family unit, even to engage in politics. In sum, they achieve an understanding that their lives as women in Israel are considerably “liberated” from what they now view as enslaving constraints on Jewish women’s lives in Yemen.

Daughters, by contrast, do not suffer from the problems—for example, illiteracy or confronting a Western medical system—their mothers faced upon arrival to Israel. They find themselves filling a social status previously unknown to Jewish women in Yemen: unmarried adulthood. In Yemen, a girl went from child to bride to become a complete “woman” only upon the birth of her children. In Israel, as in the West in general, childhood is followed by prolonged “adolescence.” The majority of these women spend two years in the army, several years in university, and finally, years in the work force and often travel abroad. Thus they postpone marriage, in many cases, until their late twenties, having passed through at least ten years during which their parents wished for nothing more than the successful marriages of their daughters—even though they are pleased that their daughters achieve university degrees. The conflicting imperatives of unmarried women’s lives revolve around their desire to experience the world around them and meeting the expectations of their “primitive” (a word learned in Israel) and religious parents demanding early marriage. This pocket of time—unmarried adulthood—is without precedence in traditional Yemeni Jewish culture. Nor do they really have a welcome place in the wider Israeli society, once they reach their mid-twenties, because by this age Israeli women—even the secular—are expected to marry, “to be fruitful and multiply.”

What is striking is how the two generations constantly seek to accommodate the conflicting imperatives that invade their lives. Particularly notable is how some of the immigrant generation continue to believe in the practices of the past while accepting the social realities of the present. In fact, at the level of belief unmarried women are faced with making considerable changes in notions of honour and shame. Here there is the contrast between the imperative of pre-marital chastity in Yemeni Jewish society and the practice of pre-marital sex in secular Israeli society. Not surprisingly, such differences and contradictions, especially between the two generations, are often at the root of bitter and inflamed arguments, particularly in those cases where unmarried women continue to live in their parents’ homes. This book, then, looks at the creation of new cultural patterns in the family, and in society, according to the perceptions of the women themselves.

Choosing the Field

There were personal and intellectual reasons why I chose Gadot for a research site, and I should also explain my interest in the Yemeni Jews. Before I began field work in April 1980, I had already lived in Israel intermittently for three years, dividing my time between a kibbutz in Southern Galilee and university studies. I met several women soldiers who were working on the kibbutz as part of their service in the agricultural core of the army. I became close friends with two sisters who are daughters of Yemeni immigrants and who grew up in Gadot. I used to visit them in their parents’ home when they were there on leave and it was through this family that I became interested in mother-daughter relationships among the Yemenis. After some months of visiting, I was invited to spend Passover with their uncle’s family; the Passover service among this large extended family (some forty persons) was very different from that which I knew growing up in an American Jewish home. Though the story of the exodus from Egypt was the same, the rituals and melodies accompanying the story were very different. I felt out of place, and I wanted to know why. How was it that these Yemeni Jews were so different—what was their history, and why was the “old country” still a part of the new?

In the summer of 1978, after my third year of university in Israel, I left with one of the sisters for the United States. She had finished her army service and wanted to travel; I arranged for her to be a guest in my parents’ home in Cleveland, Ohio, for a year. I did not know at the time that her stay with my parents would later help me as a field worker. At that time I had no clear research plans. But one reason why I eventually decided on Gadot was because her family and their friends wanted to reciprocate: my parents had given her a home for a year, they wanted to give me one. I had heard that Yemenis were quick to distrust outsiders, so it seemed obvious that if I wanted to study Yemenis, I should go to Gadot where I would be welcome. This indeed was the case; from the moment I arrived in Gadot I was able to begin field work.³

I was also attracted to Gadot for reasons which were intertwined with my understanding of Israeli society at that time. During my first summer in Israel as a sixteen year-old tourist, I had the opportunity to live for one week with a Kurdistani Jewish family on a moshav (co-operative farm). I never knew that there were Jews from Kurdistan (where was Kurdistan anyway? Certainly not anywhere on my Jewish map). I also never knew that there were Jews in Israel who lived in poverty. The moshav was located in an area which was difficult to farm because of its extremely hot climate and bad soil; nonetheless, the families who lived there made the best of a bad situation.⁴ I stayed with a family of fifteen (a mother, father and thirteen children) who lived in a small dwelling consisting of three and a half rooms. Needless to say, coming from my middle-class background, I was shocked by these cramped quarters. Although I could not speak Hebrew at the time and could not get used to the crowded conditions, this experience did lead me to become interested in Jews who were very different from those I knew growing up in Ohio. I spent the next six years learning all that I could about Middle Eastern and North African Jews.

The books which I had read as an undergraduate, almost all written by sociologists and anthropologists, tended to give me an unbalanced view of Israel. Most researchers had been funded by various development agencies who contracted research largely concerned with why certain new settlements or particular eidot (ethnic communities) faced difficulties in Israeli society. As a result, these studies focused on social problems, whether in moshavim or development towns, in criminal activities, or as expressed by protest groups (such as the Black Panthers).⁵ The relationship of social class and country-of-origin in Israel became readily apparent: immigrants from Europe and America (Ashkenaztm) and their children invariably had more years of education, better paying jobs, more political representatives, and lived in more prestigious areas than did the immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.⁶ Certainly there were studies explaining the relationship between ethnic origin and class status and underdevelopment in Israel, but I felt the balance needed some correcting. It eventually became clear to me that the “normal” side of Israel was not represented in such studies and I do not mean only the Ashkenazi middle class, but also Eastern immigrants who had done well for themselves. Like several others, then, I decided to study a place in Israel which was neither unsuccessful nor of an entirely Middle Eastern Jewish population.⁷

Beginning with my first visit to Gadot in the spring of 1978 I became curious about the town. On the basis of my social science reading, I pictured almost all new towns in Israel as ridden with problems of ethnic strife, political immaturity, unemployment, and so on. But other than a dilapidated, run-down central market, Gadot was clearly thriving and I learned very quickly that it had virtually no unemployment or unoccupied youth, or out-migration. Contrary to many other new towns in Israel, young couples from Gadot remained there, the school system was good, most of the houses were in excellent condition, and it had a vibrant political life. Also, its population was at least 30 percent Ashkenazi. Why was the town different, why had Gadot discovered a successful development path without the utilization of, even more surprisingly, a selective absorption policy like other new towns?⁸ I also felt that to work in a place such as Gadot, I would be able to learn about issues that were not central to the prevailing sociological concerns in Israel. For me, Gadot seemed like an ideal place to do research, and so it proved.

While I learned a great deal about council politics, urban development, and the educational system in Gadot, most of my time I spent with Yemeni Jewish women. I was able to speak with and observe men in the household or the synagogue, but it would have been inappropriate for me as an unmarried woman to try to become close with married men of the immigrant generation, largely because of the concern over the possibility of illicit affairs and religiously-inspired taboos. In fact, it took me about eight months to get up the nerve to greet men at the all-male tables found at celebrations where they debated religious questions, told stories, and drank brandy.

Nor, clearly, could I study people from seventy different ethnic groups in Gadot. For one thing their identity as “Israelis” was not really of interest to them or to me—not in the local context, that is. I was not interested in immigrants from Hungary, Germany or Russia because they were too familiar to me; like most anthropologists I wanted to study “the other.” Nor did I want to study Moroccans or Tunisians because they were already the subjects of extensive social research; I was interested in the large Turkish population, but husbands would not let me get close to their wives who would always be shooed out to the kitchen when I came to visit. I chose the Yemenis because, as I said above, I knew several families who would help me get started with research—“connections” are important in any complex society. More importantly, perhaps, in Israeli society Yemenis represented an Oriental (Mizrahi) ethnic community that maintained a prestigious ethnic profile. I wanted to know why they differed from the other immigrants from the East, or at least why Israelis in general held such a (relatively) high opinion of Yemenis. And, although Yemeni Jews were the subject of previous anthropological studies, no one had worked with Yemenis who did not think of themselve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Photos
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• 1 Introducing Ginger and Salt
• 2 From Yemen to Israel
• 3 Introducing Gadot and Israeli Ethnicities
• 4 The Immigrant Generation
• 5 Being Female in Transition
• 6 The Israeli-born Generation: Unmarried Women
• 7 Proper Conduct and Social Reality: The Immigrant and Israeli-born Generations
• 8 The Immigrant Experience
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index