The Memory of North African Jews in the Diaspora by Mechtild Gilzmer

The Memory of North African Jews in the Diaspora by Mechtild Gilzmer Abstract In the following contribution, I will approach in three steps the construction of memory by North-African Jews in the Diaspora. I will first trace the history and historiography of Jews in Arab countries and point out their characteristics. This will lead me to look more precisely at the concept of “Sephardic Jews,” its meaning and application as a key-notion in the memory building for Jews from Arab countries in the Diaspora nowadays. As literature and filmmaking hold a crucial role in the perception and transmission of memory,1 I will then present the works of two Jewish women artists, one living in France and the other living in Quebec, both with North African origins. I will try to show how they use the past for identity (de-)construction and compare their approaches. I choose the two examples because they illustrate two extremely opposed positions concerning the role of cultural identity. Standing in the intersection of history and literary studies, my interdisciplinary work considers literary and film as memory archives and subjective representations of the past not as historical sources. In referring to Jews in Arab countries this means in my article more precisely to look at the North-African Jews. That is why my article treats the following aspects: 1. Jews in Arab lands. A Historiographical Overview 2. A Special Case: “Sephardic Jews” 3. Jews from Arab Lands in the Diaspora - Literature as “lieu de mémoire” of Sephardic Identity in France. - The Example of Eliette Abécassis’ Novel “Sépharade” (2009). - Identity Trouble in Québec : Michka Saäl’s Film “L’arbre qui dort rêve à ses raciness” (1992). 4. Conclusion ____________________________ 1. Jews in Arab Lands. A Historiographical Overview In 1975, the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi asked the rhetorical question: “What is an Arab Jew?” He answered himself with a clear rejection of an overly idealistic vision of Jews and Arabs living in close proximity: Ah, what a lovely term! It even made us secretly nostalgic; yes, of course we were Arab Jews, or Jewish Arabs, in our customs, our culture, our music, our cooking … I have said so often enough in writing, but must one remain an Arab 1 | Our Jewish Life: Lacunae & Silence of the Jewish Mediterranean Diaspora ● Discussion Leader, Al Romano Jew if that means having to tremble for one’s life and the future of one’s children? If it means being denied any existence of one’s own? (…) All right, I can see I’ll have to put it more bluntly: the supposedly “idyllic” life led by Jews in Arab countries is all a myth! The truth – since I am being forced to say it – is that we were, first of all, a minority in hostile surroundings and, as such, we had all the fears and anxieties of the overly weak, their constant feeling of precariousness.2 In a footnote to his text, Memmi points out that the term “Jewish Arabs” or “Arab Jews” is wrong, in so far as it supposes the simultaneous existence of the Jews in one country with a mainly homogeneous Arab population. But Jews were in these countries long before the Arab invasion. The term Arab is no more accurate, applied to such a diverse population, including those who call themselves, and believe themselves to be, Arabs. One can distinguish different periods concerning Jewish presence and existence in the part of the world now under Arab and Muslim influence. Before the existence of Islam, Jews already lived in the Mediterranean area and in North Africa. The exact dating of their first presence in North Africa is unclear, but we find traces of Jews living there under Roman domination, as evidenced by Hebrew funeral inscriptions on stones among the ruins of Volubilis, near Meknès, in Morocco. The historiography of Jews in Arab lands was first chronicled by French historians and it reflected Western cultural perceptions and ideology. As an example: in order to find the real roots of the Berber-Arab conflict, French historians stressed the myth of the Berber-Jewish princess Kahena who successfully resisted Arab invaders over a long period. “While it is not at all certain that al-Kahina was actually Jewish, this story plays an important role in shaping the historical experience of the Jews of the Maghreb in modern times,” because it “granted legitimacy to the feeling of alienation felt by many Jews of the colonial period toward the Arab population – an attitude that accorded with the anti-Arab orientation of French colonial policy and historiography.”3 From the Muslim conquest onward, the vast majority of Oriental Jews lived under Islam, which was established at one time or another in almost all Arab countries. As Michel Abitbol shows in his overview of the historiography of Jews in Arab lands, not all European studies written about Jews during French colonisation were inspired by extraneous or non-professional considerations. Among them were French Jewish as well as non-Jewish scholars. In general, it appears that the non-Jewish scholars of the Maghreb were most interested in Moroccan Jewry. The quality of these works is uneven. In 1965, Hayim Zeev Hirschberg published his comprehensive two-volume historical study of North African Jewry. But it was first published in Hebrew and therefore had only a limited audience before it was translated into English.4 2 | Our Jewish Life: Lacunae & Silence of the Jewish Mediterranean Diaspora ● Discussion Leader, Al Romano Since then, an increasing number of scholars from English-speaking countries, Israel, and the Maghreb have been attracted to the historical study of North Africa in general, and Jewry in particular. But as Abitbol resumes in his article, contemporary Israeli scholars and some of their colleagues abroad, both Jews and non-Jews have differed sharply: non-Israeli scholars tend to paint Jewish-Muslim relations in terms of ‘coexistence’ or a ‘symbiosis’, some of them going so far as to attribute all of the anti-Jewish outbursts occurring in the Maghreb over the past hundred years to external factors such as imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism. Israeli scholars, for their part (even those not diametrically opposed to that view), emphasize the fact that during the modern period, the Jews, for a variety of political and cultural reasons, ceased to regard themselves as an integral part of the history of the lands in which they had lived for centuries. Thus, in their view, in not participating in their home countries’ struggle for independence, the Jews distanced themselves from the fate of the North African peoples and, subsequently, willingly departed from the Maghreb along with the colonial powers that had ruled the region since 1830.5 As Abitbol also points out, historians in western countries and in Israel today focus on issues that colonial historiography has played down or ignored, such as the Algerian Jews’ lack of enthusiasm for French citizenship, for example. On the other hand, the Arab historiography of the Jewish history in Arab lands is also quite obviously influenced by historical context, when it was written, and the author’s ideological visions. That is the reason why the rise of Zionism and the emergence of the state of Israel, the modern and contemporary era is by far the most thoroughly discussed topic among Arab historians of Judaism. […] the Jews are depicted as the deus ex machina of a vast global plot, a people who, since the end of the 18th century, have sought to destroy Islamic civilization by any and all means, whether on their own or in collusion with the Christians.6 [BACK] 2. A Special Case: “Sephardic Jews” Abitbol’s article shows very clearly the mechanism which rules the construction of historiography on each side, be it reconstructed by non-Jews, Jews or Muslims. Events are explained through the mirror of self interest and perception frames. This also concerns the way Jewish Diaspora is represented. For Mark Cohen, the “World Jewry can be divided into two parts, “the Jews of Islam” and “the Jews of Christendom,” or to Jews living ‘under the crescent’ and Jews living ‘under the cross.’ As he himself remarks, this distinction overlooks that the Sephardic Jews of Spain are historically related to the Jews of Christendom, since 3 | Our Jewish Life: Lacunae & Silence of the Jewish Mediterranean Diaspora ● Discussion Leader, Al Romano they descend from those expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492. That is why Mark Cohen considers that, “In terms of the crescent-cross scheme, the Sephardim constitute a third entity, bearing similarities to both the Jews under the crescent and the Jews under the cross.”7 Shmuel Trigano opposes the Sephardic world to the Ashkenazi world because of the different context in which the Jews lived.8 For Shmuel Trigano, Jewish civilization has been marked most strongly during the Sephardic period. This influence transformed the Sephardic identity and opened it to the European North. When they where persecuted, some decided to emigrate to the north, to Western Europe (Holland and England, but also to Germany), while others went to the Ottoman Empire. In order to find distinguishing elements that characterize the “Sefarad,” Trigano comes to a contradictory result. If it is true that each exile situation transformed and marked the exiled, we can no longer refer to ‘a Jewish identity’ which is culturally or religiously homogeneous. It is more accurate to refer to each situation and look at the differences instead of stressing a homogeneity that does not exist. Behind the vision of a unit “la civilisation sépharade” stands a concept of cultural identity which creates a sharp contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews.

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