To Drink from the Source: Tobie Nathan’s A Land like You and Jewish-Egyptian Identity

Abstract:

A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s scrupulously researched yet wildly imaginative historical novel of early twentieth-century Cairo offers an extended exploration of what it means to be both Jewish and Egyptian, even as it chronicles the rise of the competing nationalisms that led to the dispersal of Egypt’s Jews. Unlike most Egyptian Jewish novelists and memoirists, Nathan claims Cairo’s Haret al-Yahud, where the city’s poorest, indigenous Jews lived from time immemorial, as his ‘source,’ and indeed the source for all of Egypt’s Jews—the ‘spring one drinks at every day.’ This source arises from the Egyptian land and the ancient spirits that govern it, to which the exiled writer remains inextricably bound, symbolized in the novel through the irresistible love that links the Jewish narrator to his Muslim ‘milk-sister.’ For Nathan’s French-to-English translator, herself an Egyptian Jew, the novel offers a return to her own Arab-Jewish source, which, like Nathan, she seeks to cultivate so that it may nurture others.

Key Words:

• Arab-Jew
• Egyptian Jewish literature
• Tobie Nathan
• Nationalism
• Zar cult

Acknowledgements

Elio Zarmati first led me to Ce pays qui te ressemble, and was an enthusiastic and perspicacious reader of my first draft of A Land Like You. Michele F. Levy and Jimmy Griffin were indispensable readers all along the way. Sunandini Banerjee was my sensitive and brilliant editor and book designer at Seagull Books. Ella Shohat and Alyson Waters are constant sources of inspiration and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ella Shohat (2017) On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (London: Pluto); see also David Shasha (2013) Newsletter Special: ‘Arab Jews,’in Sephardic Heritage Update. Available at: https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Y6mrmIhSKfg/m/0m9SHOUbSjIJ, accessed April 30, 2021.

2 Tobie Nathan (2015) Ce pays qui te ressemble (Paris: Stock); trans. Joyce Zonana (2020) A Land Like You (New York: Seagull), pp. 132 and 321. All further quotations will be from the translation and will be cited parenthetically within the text.

3 Nathan’s French title directly quotes a line from Charles Baudelaire’s well-known poem “L’invitation au voyage,” a line French readers would immediately recognize as evoking passionate love in an idealized setting of “luxe, calm, et volupté”—luxury, calm, and voluptuousness. While my title preserves the meaning, Anglophone readers are likely to miss the multiple associations embedded in Nathan’s reference to Baudelaire. I encourage such readers to turn to Baudelaire’s poem, in any translation, before beginning A Land Like You.

4 The historical works to which I turned include: Joel Beinin (1998) The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (New York: American University in Cairo); Shimon Shamir (ed) (1987) The Jews of Egypt: A Mediterranean Society in Modern Times (Boulder: Westview); Ammiel Alcalay (1993) After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota); and Liliane S. Dammond & Yvette M. Raby (2007) The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews: First-person Accounts from Egypt’s Jewish Community in the Twentieth Century (New York: iUniverse). Memoirs and novels that I avidly read include: André Aciman (1993) Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Farrar Straus); André Aciman (2013) Harvard Square: A Novel (New York: Norton); Gini Alhadeff (1997) The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family (New York: Pantheon); Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (2015) Alexandrian Summer, Y. Greenspan (trans.) (New York: NewVessel); Lucette Lagnado (2007) The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (New York: Harper Collins); Jean Naggar (2008) Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt (New York: Stony Creek); and Colette Rossant (2004) Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes (New York: Washington Square).

5 Joyce Zonana (2008) Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey (New York: Feminist Press).

6 Aimée Israel-Pelletier (2018) On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 4.

7 Ibid, pp. 3–4.

8 For a slightly different view, see Joyce Zonana (2016) ‘Enta Omri, You Are My Life’: Embracing the Arab Self in André Aciman’s Harvard Square, Studies in American Jewish Literature, 36(1), pp. 33–51.

9 Judith Roumani (2019) Review of On the Mediterranean and the Nile by Aimee Israel-Pelletier, in: Sephardic Horizons 9(4). Available at: https://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume9/Issue4/Israel-Pelletier.html, accessed April 30, 2021.

10 While Kahanoff’s important early novel remains out of print, an invaluable collection of Kahanoff’s nonfiction prose is Deborah Starr & Sasson Somekh (eds) (2011) Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

11 See also Joyce Zonana (2016) ‘And she loved brown people’: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s Affirmation of Arab Jewish Identity in Jacob’s Ladder, The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, 13, pp. 53–73.

12 Tobie Nathan (2012) Ethno-roman (Paris: Grasset), p. 111; this author’s translation. All further quotations from this text, which won the Prix Femina in 2012, also are my translations.

13 Nathan, Ethno-roman, p. 272. See also Tobie Nathan (2017) Les Âmes errantes (Paris: L’Iconoclaste), English trans. by Stephen Muecke (2019) Wandering Souls (Medford, MA: Polity), p. 5.

14 For an explication of ethno-psychiatry, see Tobie Nathan (2000) Psychothérapie et politique. Les enjeux théoriques, institutionnels et politiques de l'ethnopsychiatrie [Psychotherapy and politics: Theoretical, institutional and political issues of ethno-psychiatry], Genèses, 1(1), pp. 136–159. Available at: https://www.persee.fr/doc/genes_1155-3219_2000_num_38_1_1615, accessed April 30, 2021.

15 Nathan is a prolific writer. He has published more than a dozen psychoanalytic studies, and some ten novels, including, most recently, a sequel to Ce pays qui te ressemble: Tobie Nathan (2020) La Société des belles personnes [The society of beautiful persons] (Paris: Stock).

16 Massoud Hayoun (2019) When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (New York: New Press), p. 137.

17 Nathan, Ethno-roman, p. 185.

18 Ibid, p. 188.

19 Ibid, p. 191.

20 Ibid, p. 180.

21 Ibid, p. 146.

22 Nathan, Wandering Souls, p. 5

23 Compare Jacques Hassoun’s formulation: “The Jews of Egypt have had … to cope with the contradictions of belonging to two worlds. Caught in this duality, they appeared to exclaim, like ‘Abadallah al-Yahudi, the beggar of Tatwig Street in Alexandria: ‘See my galabia, I am Egyptian! See my jacket, I am European!’” From “The Traditional Jewry of the Hara,” in Shimon Shamir (ed) (1987) The Jews of Egypt: A Mediterranean Society in Modern Times (Boulder: Westview), p. 169.

24 Nathan, Ethno-roman, p. 245.

25 Nathan, Wandering Souls, p. 29.

26 Ibid, pp. 29–30.

27 As Aron Rodrigue explains in his article, “Alliance Israélite Universelle Network,” the AIU, founded in France in 1860, sought the “social regeneration” of Middle Eastern Jews, hoping to integrate them into “modern,” e.g. European, “civilization.” AIU schools were responsible for the spread of the French language among Jews of the Middle East, and consequently occupy a “significant place” in the eventual “Westernization and departure” of the “Jews of Islam.” Available at: https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/alliance-israelite-universelle-network-COM_0001600, accessed April 30, 2021.

28 Ella Shohat (2006) Taboo Memories: Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University University), p. 332.

29 Ella Shohat (2017) On the Arab-Jew, p. 107; see also Ammiel Alcalay (1993) After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

30 Nathan, Ethno-roman, p. 254.

31 See, e.g., Amitav Ghosh (1993) In an Antique Land (New York: Vintage).

32 Motty appears to be modelled both on Nathan’s father and a great uncle. His father, he tells us, in Ethno-roman, had “a quasi-autistic passion for numbers that allowed him to calculate infinite multiplications in his head,” p. 178; his blind great uncle “knew by heart all the useful texts, prayers, and verses in the Torah,” p. 166.

33 Esther, too, incarnates qualities possessed by Nathan’s relatives; his mother, he tells us in Ethno-roman, was “a sort of Egyptian griot” p. 116; his grandmother “had a sort of intuitive familiarity with the invisible,” regularly speaking with “spirits,” p. 170.

34 Hager El Hadidi (2016) Zar: Spirit Possession, Music, and Healing Rituals in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press), p. 4.

35 Ibid, pp. 2, 26.

36 Ibid, p. 4.

37 Hayoun, When We Were Arabs, p. 87.

38 See also Tobie Nathan (2013) Philtre d'amour. Comment le rendre amoureux, comment la rendre amoureuse [Love Potion: How to Make Him or Her Fall in Love] (Paris: Odile Jacob).

39 Nathan, Ethno-roman, p. 318.

40 Again, Nathan seems to be invoking a childhood memory here. His grandmother was said to have consulted an Arab healer after losing two children. And he remembers the kholkhal around her ankle: “I always knew my grandmother had a heavy foot as a result of that alliance.” Ethno-roman, p. 169.

41 Andrew Baker (2010) A synagogue in Cairo, New York Times, March 3. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04iht-edbaker.html, accessed April 30, 2021.

42 See, e.g., Joyce Zonana (2008) Dream Homes, pp. 174–81; and Lucette Lagnado (2007) The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, pp. 137–140.

43 Because in Hebrew the word zar means “stranger” or “foreigner,” El Hadidi speculates that the term zar “may have been borrowed from Old Hebrew.” She notes that “Silversmithing and goldsmithing were mainly in the hands of old Sephardic Jewish communities in many parts of the Middle East … Given the importance of jewelry in relation to zar cults and its association with alien spirits, it is plausible that the word was passed from the jewelers to the participants. If so, then, the term ‘stranger’ would refer not only to the ethnic difference between the smiths and their clients, but also to the otherness of the spirits with respect to their hosts,” Zar, pp. 36–37.

44 Ella Shohat (2021) ‘Sant al-Tasqit’: Seventy Years Since the Departure of Iraqi Jews, Jadaliyya, January 14. Available at: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42239, accessed April 30, 2021.

45 See, e.g., David Shasha (2010) The Voice of Um Kulthum: A Place to Start the Dialogue. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/the-voice-of-um-kulthum-t_b_595161.html, accessed April 30, 2021.

46 “The Jews of Egypt … did not realize that their choice of the French language signaled their inevitable expulsion,” Nathan writes in Ethno-roman, p. 48.

47 Here again, Nathan uses family lore to ground his narrative. In Ethno-roman, he notes that his ancestor the Grand Rabbi Yom Tov was known for his “frank talk, especially with the wealthy,” warning them that if they refused to give generously and “continued to take themselves for fine gentlemen … they would eventually be chased” out of Egypt, p. 143.

48 See Robert Malley (2021) An Anti-Imperialist Father and His American Diplomat Son, Jewish Currents, available at: https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-imperialist-father-and-his-american-diplomat-son/, for a discussion of an Egyptian Jewish (secular) Arab nationalist, accessed April 30, 2021; see also Jérémie Dres (2018) Si je t’oublie Alexandrie [Lest I forget you, Alexandria] (Paris: Steinkis), in which Dres describes the Egyptian nationalist affiliation of his Egyptian Jewish grandfather.

49 Ethno-roman, pp. 47–48.