Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 4

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

immigration and the transmit camps the state set up to house them. This is the most interesting portion of the book, for it sheds light on the
contradictions of the state’s goal of ingathering Jews, and how the state and its elite subsequently treated those immigrants. An early idea could be
gleaned from journalist Amos Elon’s visit to North Africa in 1953. “Elon portrayed the mellah (Jewish quarter) of Casablanca as a place of stench,
degeneracy, disease, and perversity” (p. 150). He worried about the effects that “uncontrolled fertility would have on the Jewish people’s genetic
robustness” (p. 150). As Rozin illustrates, the “old-timers” claimed that the immigrants arrived with venereal diseases and had “a high proportion of
mentally ill persons” (p. 151) as well as having diseases that “could spread from transit camps to kibbutzim” (p.152). Supposedly, the transit camps
were “plagued by prostitution” and the women were “sold for miserable pennies to men who are liable to destroy them” (p. 173).”
The numerous primary sources that this book includes, showing the stereotyping and racism employed by the elite in Israel against the immigrants,
makes this book a major asset and important work for understanding Israeli society. Yet, at every instance where the author might have added
analysis, the monograph falls short. Even though Rozin notes that some of these claims are stereotypes, she does not bother to probe deeper. Who
was Dr. Erich Nassau, director of HaEmek Hospital in Afula, who claimed that the immigrants possessed such potent diseases that they might be
carried airborne to affect the diseases? Who was Amos Elon who claimed that the people of North Africa were “degenerates”? What world view
informed this racist eugenic pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that would have had a better fit in the recently defeated Nazi Germany than in the
newly created State of Israel? When these “old-timers” claimed to be shocked by prostitution, isn’t it important to question how many brothels there
were in the “old timers’” part of Tel Aviv, and what sort of sexual mores the observers had? And why does the author employ the term “old timers”
to refer to many of the Ashkenazi writers who, in fact were recent immigrants to the country, having only ar ɥٕ