החיים החברתיים של דבר לא חוקי: חשיש ויהודים בפלשתינה המנדטורית ובמדינת ישראל

This article explores the history of, and public discourse about, Jews and hashish in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel. Jews in interwar Palestine tended to steer clear of the drug, considering its use a form of “backwardness” linked to the realities of living among Arabs in the Middle East. Colonial knowledge about hashish—technical, medical, social, and aesthetic—seemed to corroborate these fears, confirming that hashish was an Oriental substance that animated the supposed pathologies inhering in Arab mentalities: irrationality, insanity, criminality, inordinate (homo-)sexuality, indolence, and manipulability. This knowledge survived the transition to the State of Israel but responded, among other things, to new realities: the expulsion and flight of the Arab population during the Nakba, and the country’s repopulation by Jews from the Muslim world (Mizrahim). Some of these Jews had used hashish in their countries of origin, and brought the habit with them to Israel. Others began to smoke hashish in Israel as a consequence of their socio-ethnic marginalization. Although hashish smoking in Israel in the 1950s and much of the 1960s remained limited to a few thousand members of the Mizrahi underclass, it rekindled Jewish middle-class anxieties about Levantinization-cum-Arabicization. It also assisted in further marginalizing and criminalizing Mizrahim in Israeli society.