In 1928, the Jewish historian Salo W. Baron published his essay on the dangers of writing Jewish history as a “lachrymose” narrative. In Baron’s article, called “Ghetto and Emancipation” and published in the Menorah Journal, he explored how a distorted perception of the past and poor understanding of historical context can be misused to advance political goals, which are not necessarily inevitable, despite the way willful parties present them. Baron was talking mostly about European Jewish communities, and his words carried different meanings during the interwar period in which it was written. Today, however, in a similar way, we are witnessing a large-scale national project – the writing of a “lachrymose” history of the Jews of the Middle East, so as to justify contemporary Israeli policies, and to make up for a generations-long marginalization of Oriental Jews in Zionist historiography.