Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature

A Diaspora

Dario Miccoli, Dario Miccoli

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315308579
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Jewish Literary Criticism

In the last few years, the fields of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies have grown significantly, thanks to new publications which take into consideration unexplored aspects of the history, literature and identity of modern Middle Eastern and North African Jews. However, few of these studies abandoned the Diaspora/Israel dichotomy and analysed the Jews who moved to Israel and those that settled elsewhere as part of a new, diverse and interconnected diaspora.

Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature argues that the literary texts produced by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s and afterwards, should be considered as part of a transnational arena, in which forms of Jewish diasporism and postcolonial displacement interweave. Through an original perspective that focuses on novelists, poets, professional and amateur writers – from the Israeli poets Erez Biton and Shva Salhoov to Francophone authors such as Chochana Boukhobza, Ami Bouganim and Serge Moati – the book explains that these Sephardic and Mizrahi authors are part of a global literary diaspora at the crossroads of past Arab legacies, new national identities and persistent feelings of Jewishness. Some of the chapters emphasise how the Sephardic and Mizrahi past and present identities are narrated, how generational and ethno-national issues are taken into account and which linguistic and stylistic strategies the authors adopted. Other chapters focus more explicitly on how the relations between national societies and different Jewish migrant communities are narrated, both in today's Israel and in the diaspora.

The book helps to bridge the gap between Hebrew and postcolonial literature, and opens up new perspectives on Sephardic and Mizrahi literature. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Jewish and Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature

1 The literary work of Jewish Maghrebi authors in postcolonial France

Ewa Tartakowsky
(trans. from French by Clara Leon)

Literature written by authors of Jewish Maghrebi origin has slowly come to take its place within the field of broader French literature.¹ The fruit of over one hundred authors’ contributions, it contains works in all literary genres – fiction, memoir, poetry, theatre – even if novels and prose do make up most of it.² Some of its writers are well known, such as Marcel Bénabou, Colette Fellous and Hubert Haddad. Others’ fame came to them in the context of a second career – in any event, a well-paying career – among them Jacques Attali, Serge and Nine Moati, Jean Daniel, Alexandre Arcady and Gisèle Halimi. Still other authors are not truly considered part of the literary establishment but have published numerous works and attracted some media attention, such as Gil Ben Aych, Monique Zerdoun and Pol-Serge Kakon; there are also authors who published one or two well-received works but did not continue with their literary careers, such as Katia Rubinstein, Paule Darmon, Annie Goldmann and Jean-Luc Allouche. Finally, some authors in this field opted for self-publication, like Georges Cohen, Viviane Scemama-Leselbaum and Edmond Zeitoun.

Disregarding the purely aesthetic dimensions of their work and looking at this literary subfield as a whole, it is possible both to categorise these authors within their subfields and to examine the role that exile played in their trajectories.

Social pre-conditions of the emergence of literature by Jewish Maghrebi authors in France

In order to understand how and why this body of work came to be, one must place these authors in the historical and collective context in which they wrote. The primary element of this context was the departure en masse of Jews from the Maghreb.

The cultural impact of this moment is particularly important for this group; understanding it requires some analysis of the social group in question. Three percent of the colonial Maghreb’s population after the Second World War, approximately 500,000 people, the Jewish community – in the majority urban – had largely assimilated into a French cultural environment. One major reason for this was the collective naturalisation of Algerian Jews, extended by the Crémieux Decree in 1870,³ constituting a symbolic promise of future French acculturation.⁴ The impetus for the transformation of Algeria’s Jews’ legal status came essentially from the Jewish community of metropolitan France, in line with the assimilationist policies of the colonising power, and opened access, for its beneficiaries, to the Republic’s schools and civil service, both channels for social success. The situation was different in the protectorates, where France did not opt for any collective naturalisation of the Jews. This did not keep them from acculturating to French culture, but there it occurred to a lesser degree. The Jewish community in metropolitan France intervened, in fact, to “bring French civilisation” to their co-religionists in order to “reform” them. This work led to the establishment in 1862, only in Morocco at first, of a network of schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) for Jewish girls and boys, providing them essentially with a French education, though it included a few elements of religious instruction as well.⁵ A method of linguistic colonisation, this French education also became a path towards real social mobility for these Jews, who not long ago were considered simply part of the indigenous colonial population. It also sparked a “cult”-like devotion – the word is not too strong – to France “the emancipator.” This cult would later become one of the central themes of literature of the Jewish Maghrebi authors in exile.

This historical detour helps us to understand why, when the countries of the Maghreb gained their independence, a great number of Maghrebi Jews chose France as their new home, rather than Israel or Canada, other potential destinations.⁶ Their departure was due to multiple factors, but one of the most salient was the rise of Arab Muslim nationalism and the identity its activists promoted, one which denied, out of hand, so-called ethnic minorities any future in their midst.⁷ The Jews feared a return to dhimmi status,⁸ especially since their experience of emancipation in the colonial period had further alienated the Jewish and Muslim communities from each other.⁹

Their migration radically changed their situation. North African Jews who went to metropolitan France quickly integrated into that country’s socio-economic structure. It should be mentioned here that despite facing problems common to all immigrants, they had fewer difficulties adapting than did those North African Jews who chose to go to Israel. Beyond language difficulties, Israeli society greeted them with ambivalence, and the social divide between so-called “Oriental” (or, in Hebrew, Mizrahi) and “Western” Jews has not since ceased to widen in that country.

Nonetheless, despite their rapid adaptation to their new place of residence, North African Jews in France remained profoundly marked by their experience of exile. The words of the Algerian-born Albert Bensoussan, recorded at a meeting of Mediterranean Jewish authors, attest to this: “I wrote a book called La Bréhaigne which represents exile. It’s a look at the exile faced by Jews who came to France and who suffer, particularly in their old age, from the difficulties of adapting.”¹⁰

Like nearly all pieds-noirs, North African Jews shared the feeling that France had abandoned its former colonies. They would later explore, albeit implicitly, this point of view in their literature. Given the relative political consensus that colonialism belonged to the past, it became difficult to express this disappointment in France. As if to justify themselves, and to explain the reason that they did not take the side of the nationalists,¹¹ some narratives would reconstruct a posteriori a harmonious cohabitation between Jews and Arabs, even going so far as to celebrate it in scenes of close friendship and solidarity. This literary output contributed to the construction of a new identification, one primarily based in memory.

One final point: all those who took part in this emigration en masse knew from the start that they would not return. Going back, even in the context of an authorised trip, was for many of them nearly impossible, a fact which made their feelings of homesickness all the stronger. Those who did return discovered a changed world, one where often there was nothing left to signal the former presence of Jews there. Decolonisation, and the Maghreb’s independence, thus engendered the nearly total disappearance of its Jewish communities, despite the fact that Jews had lived there for two thousand years.

Their arrival in France was certainly a culminating point of their acculturation, which had already begun in North Africa, and the metropole, a land already known to some of them (for many North African Jews had completed their studies there), had long symbolised their emancipation. But the Jewish community in metropolitan France was essentially made up of Ashkenazis, whose culture and rite was different from that of North African Jews. All of this led to a need for these Jews to reconstruct their identities and find ways to express their experiences in art and literature. This is why the exile of Jews from North Africa served as a spark in the development of their own literary subgenre.

This does not mean that without their experience of exile, these authors would not have written or published works of literature. But the psychological, historical and social weight of this forced departure, one they shared with many thousands of other individuals, would have been difficult for these authors not to express and explore in artistic or literary form.

As such, the enormous and overwhelming presence of certain themes in their work is striking. All of the work of Jewish Maghrebi authors who experienced this geographic and social rupture, who live – or have lived – in metropolitan France, either frequently or occasionally, and to different degrees, are marked by themes of exile, displacement, rupture and confrontation with their own Otherness, all themes which derive from their situation as cross-cultural migrants. That is not to say that their past always has the same definitive or automatic role – not all Jews from North Africa became authors, for instance. Rather, it is clear that exile, as a powerful and inescapable ordeal, over-determined the subjects of predilection for those who did become writers. In that sense, as a nodal point in their life trajectory, exile was experienced as a collective trauma.

But other experiences also contributed to increasing the likelihood that this literary subgenre would develop. There were favourable, facilitating circumstances as well. Two key factors in the French socio-political context of the era were the way in which Jewish consciousness was crystallising in the wake of the Six Day War and the fact that, in the same period, the memory of the Shoah was beginning to penetrate into and gain recognition in the public sphere.

The Six Day War prompted the crystallisation of trends which had begun to emerge before then but not in any formalised way.¹² Raising the spectre of a new genocide, this event consolidated and strengthened Jewish solidarity for Israel. Intellectuals who up until that point had not expressed their Jewishness now began to do so openly. This affirmation of Jewish identity also took root in the political arena. All of this served to create a new effervescence around what it meant to be Jewish.

In this new affirmation of Jewish identity within French society in the 1970s, the memory of the Shoah emerged with new force and in a new key. It had an influence on political discourse. This new paradigm of “all the painful memories”¹³ helped in one way to nourish Jewish immigrants from North Africa’s literary imagination. At the same time, however, the predominance of the Shoah in French Jewish historical memory also served to partially erase the painful exile of Maghrebi Jews, marginalising their history. It was in this context, with a view to compensate for the little interest shown in the period to Sephardic Studies, that literature took upon itself the role as carrier of the memory of the Jewish exile from North Africa.

This literary restructuring of “forgotten” memories was also spurred by the paradigm shift in the way the French nation and its peripheries represented and interpreted themselves following May 1968. As a political rupture, it gave new impetus to affirm non-majority identities and gave rise to memorial demands which, in turn, contributed to the development of these groups’ cultural production. Memory – as a subject for study, as a political and social force and within the media – became a central focus of debate starting in the 1980s, and was seen as a central element of identity for groups claiming recognition. For many Jews, this trend took the form of a cultural quest, seeking one’s roots through literary or scholarly pursuits.

This “memory moment”¹⁴ was further fed and nourished by new epistemological reflections on how one writes about the past,¹⁵ in short, the linguistic turn occurred, with all that it engendered in terms of debate over to what extent academic history could be considered its own kind of fiction, and inversely, on the validity for history of literature. Finally, the question of “what literature can tell us” (savoirs de la littérature) is particularly interesting given that this is also a form of postcolonial literature, a genre that had become popular, leading publishers to be looking for this type of narrative. The literary emergence of Jewish Maghrebi authors in France thus benefitted from this trend.

Social characteristics of Jewish Maghrebi authors in France

To understand these Jewish Maghrebi authors active in France, one must also examine their social dispositions, their life and literary trajectories, and the positions they have taken within the field of literature.

Examining which authors came from which countries sheds light on the specific contribution of eac...