Historian Emily Benichou Gottreich has observed that the term 'Arab Jew' is largely an identity of exile and “was originally theorized from within frameworks of, and remains especially prominent in, specific academic fields, namely literary and cultural studies”. Gottreich has also noted that the term "implies a particular politics of knowledge vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and larger Zionist narrative(s)" and post-Zionist discourse. However, she argues that the discourse about Arab Jews remains largely "limited to the semantic-epistemological level, resulting in a flattened identity that is both historically and geographically ambiguous". Prior to the creation of the State of Israel, between 700,000 and 850,000 Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa, but by the end of the 20th century, all of these communities had faced "dislocation and dispersal" and largely vanished, according to Lital Levy, who has noted: "These were indigenous communities (in some cases present in the area for millennia) whose unique, syncretic cultures have since been expunged as a result of emigration." In Israel, these communities were subject to "deracination and resocialization", while in the West, the concept of Jews from the Arab World was, and remains, poorly understood. From a cultural perspective, the disappearance of the Jewish dialects of spoken Arabic, written Judeo-Arabic and the last generation of Jewish writers of literary Arabic "all silently sounded the death knell of a certain world", according to Levy, or what Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis" in his work Jews and Arabs, and which Ammiel Alcalay sought to recapture in her 1993 work After Jews and Arabs. According to Shenhav and Hever, the term Arab Jews was “widely used in the past to depict Jews living in Arab countries, but was extirpated from the political lexicon upon their arrival in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.” The discourse then underwent a demise before its “political reawakening in the 1990s”. Nevertheless, "very few Jews of Arab descent, in Israel, would label themselves 'Arab Jews'" due to it being a "marker of a cultural and political avant-garde." Gottreich has labelled the recent work on the subject by Ella Habiba Shohat as particularly pioneering, while also pointing to the significant contributions made by Gil Hochberg, Gil Anidjar and Sami Shalom Chetrit. Other notable writers on the subject include Naeim Giladi and David Rabeeya. Until the middle of the 20th century, Judeo-Arabic was commonly spoken. After arriving in Israel the Jews