Histories of Jews in the Middle East have received much recent scholarly attention. Some historians have sought to challenge a narrative of continuous Jewish oppression under Islamic rule, while others importantly have looked to “provincialize Zionism” in the histories of Jewish communities in the Arab world beyond Palestine.1
Franck Salameh's new monograph, Lebanon's Jewish Community: Fragments of Lives Arrested, contributes to this growing field of scholarship documenting alternative histories of Jews in the Middle East. His focus is the Jewish community of Lebanon, which comprised an estimated 14,000 individuals at its height.2 Building on much recent scholarship on this population, Salameh succeeds in integrating Lebanon's Jewish story into broader Lebanese history using a wide range of archival sources, family papers, and oral histories.
Salameh puts forward at least three related arguments. First, he seeks to restore the history of Jews to Lebanese memory. The erasure of Jews...
