Itzhak Benyamini proposes in his essay a unique  theoretical framework for understanding the question of Mizrahiness. He argues that Mizrahiness cannot be located in any positive, essential, sociological or historical contents. Rather, one must look at the way the marker of Mizrahiness operates in the current political discourse. Benyamini maintains that the current turn to Mizrahiness follows Freud’s model of retroactivity; according to that model, a traumatic event is experienced only through its belated symptoms, and therefore it is experienced and even actually first exists only retroactively, as a secondary event, according to the marks it left. Similarly, argues Benyamini, the Mizrahi past is recorded only from the position of the present, which constitutes it belatedly. Therefore, instead of asking about the veracity of the contents presently contained in different Mizrahi positions, whether it is a community-national orientation of the “second Israel” or the anti-national position of the Arab Jew, one ought to trace the belated constitution of the Mizrahi source; to trace it not in order to dismiss it as a mere ideological device, but in order to open up the seething phantasmatic space beyond the quasi-factual monolithic of Mizrahi identity.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.54.2021.163172