Advantageous Asynchrony: Toward a Reevaluation of the Dissolution of Jewish Life in Lebanon, 1943–1967

ABSTRACT: This article reexamines the causes and chronology of the dissolution of Jewish life in Lebanon. Instead of focusing on the Six-Day War as decisive rupture, attention is shifted toward a slower, cumulative process of isolation and retreat by the members of the community which was set into motion during the First Israeli-Arab war. I argue that the community’s relative longevity was less the result of intercommunal harmony than of Lebanon’s consociational system whose protective asynchrony shielded its members from the rapid ideological and nationalist realignment happening in the rest of the Arab Mashriq during that time. Drawing on French diplomatic archives, the correspondence of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and interviews with members of the Lebanese-Jewish diaspora, I illustrate how autonomy fostered a sense of security while at the same time reinforcing reclusiveness in and around the quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil. Consequently, instead of a sudden collapse after 1967, the dissolution of Jewish life in Lebanon emerges here as the endpoint of a much longer process of withdrawal from public life due to the delayed exposure to regional upheaval.