Jacqueline Kahanoff and the demise of the Levantine

Abstract

More than anything else, Jacqueline Kahanoff is associated with the term Levantinism and, more specifically, with transforming the term – which for many years had a derogatory meaning – into a positive source of identity. However, this reading of Kahanoff – namely, a carrier of the message of Levantinism as a bridge between Orient and Occident – seems to tell us more about Kahanoff’s readers than about Kahanoff herself. An attentive reading of her work reveals a different Kahanoff, a person who, more than being the originator and proponent of a new kind of identity, while moving swiftly across cultures and feeling at home nowhere because her home was everywhere, was actually well entrenched in the West, in Zionism and in Israel.

Keywords:

• Israel
• identity
• Kahanoff
• East–West

Notes

1. Ohana, “Jacqueline Kahanoff”, 9–10.

2. Amir, “From the Dawn of Sun to Dusk”, 7. See also Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs, 27, 119; Calderon, Multiculturalism, 68; Rejwan, Outsider in the Promised Land, 68–9; Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, xii–xiii, xxii–xxvi.

3. Quoted in Sagi Bijaoui, “Introduction”, 27 and 31 respectively.

4. Sagi Bijaoui, “Introduction”, 32.

5. Hochberg, “Permanent Immigration”.

6. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 45.

7. Sagi Bijaoui, “Introduction”, 23. See also Shiff, “Between Minor and Major”, 125, 130–5.

8. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 7–8.

9. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 120–1, 127, 132, 134 and more. Braudel treats the Levant the same way in the second volume of his magnum opus.

10. Carlino, “The Levant”, 2.

11. Levi, Jews of Beirut, 5. See also Editor’s Note, Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 1 (Summer 2011): 6.

12. Sagi Bijaoui, “Introduction”, 7–8. See also Mansel, Levant, 1–2.

13. Mansel, Levant, 2.

14. Ohana, “Jacqueline Kahanoff”, 9–12; Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, xiv, xx–xxi.

15. Quoted in Goebel and Weigel, Escape to Life, 3.

16. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 1.

17. Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs, 270–4.

18. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 60–2.

19. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 20–21. The AIU operated in Egypt only briefly, from the 1980s to the 1910s (ibid., 23). However, the Jews in Egypt sent their children to other secular schools that also had a strong French influence.

20. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 24–33. See also Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 61.

21. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 51–2.

22. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 4.

23. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38.

24. Kahanoff, Jacob’s Ladder, 63.

25. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 8.

26. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 57–61.

27. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 17–18.

28. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 8.

29. Kahanoff, Jacob’s Ladder, 160.

30. Goldstone “The Problem with the ‘Early Modern’ World”, 249. The modern era is not to be confused with Modernism, though: 573–621.

31. Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, 56–8, 298–312, 313; Seth, “Book Review”, 305.

32. Hanson, Why the West has Won, 29.

33. Hanson, Why the West has Won, 3.

34. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 35; Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 100. See also Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, xxiii, xxv.

35. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 57–61.

36. Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 50.

37. Eban, A Sense of Europe, 22–3, 75.

38. Kahanoff, Jacob’s Ladder, 58.

39. Kahanoff, Jacob’s Ladder, 174.

40. The “Literature of Social Mutation” in Between Two Worlds, 109–19 is a good example of Kahanoff’s external point of view and analysis.

41. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 106–7.

42. Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 153.

43. Goldstone, “The Problem with the “Early Modern” World”, 250.

44. Kahanoff, Jacob’s Ladder, 56.

45. Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and Technology, 5, 7.

46. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 81, 104.

47. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 110.

48. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 31.

49. Rosen, “Between Two Ladies”, 239.

50. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 193–4.

51. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 48.

52. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 50.

53. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 101–2.

54. Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 20.

55. Shiff, “Between Minor and Major”, 126.

56. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 195.

57. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 106.

58. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 196.

59. Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 17.

60. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 66. See also Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 19.

61. Khazzoom, Shifting Boundaries and Inequalities in Israel, 127–61.

62. Between Two Worlds, 154.

63. From East the Sun, 52, 64–5; Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 14–15. See also Ben Simon, The Moroccans, 24.

64. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 54–5, 58.

65. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 149.

66. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 68.

67. Twain, The Innocent Abroad, 63.

68. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 68–9.

69. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 69–70.

70. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 110–11.

71. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 74.

72. Benkhabib, “Women’s Skirts are Shorter Now”, 689–90.

73. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 74.

74. Macdonald, “Muslim Women and the Veil”, 9.

75. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 75.

76. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 16; Parsons and Harding, “Post-Colonial Theory and Action Research”, 2. Sagi Bijaoui categorizes Kahanoff’s thinking as post-colonialist: Sagi Bijaoi, “Introduction”, 49.

77. The best-known articulator of colonizer/colonized relations is of course Homi Bhabha, who presented the idea of mimicry and hybridity as conceptual tools to describe those relations. Bhabha, it should be noted, was not speaking simply about mutual colonizer/colonized relations, but more about how the colonized, through the mimicry of the colonizer, explore the hollowness of the colonizer’s world, culture and values. See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 121–31.

78. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 38.

79. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 48, 58.

80. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 49–50.

81. Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 21.

82. Kahanoff, From East the Sun, 50–1. See also ibid., 70–2; Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 40–4.

83. Starr and Somekh, Mongrels or Marvels, 107.

84. Kahanoff, “What About Levantinization?”, 21–2.

85. Caron, “The Ambivalent Legacy”, 515–6; Meyer, “Thoughts on Jewish Modernization”, 31.

86. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 231–42.

87. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 110–11.

88. Kahanoff, Between Two Worlds, 113.

89. Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 1; Mansel, Levant, 3–4; Mansel, “Cities of the Levant”, 220–1. The quotations are from ibid., 224.

90. See Schwara, “Rediscovering the Levant”.

91. The prime rationales for the existence of the UfM are strategic and economic, and are based on nation-states and the relations between them: Reiterer, “From the (French) Mediterranean Union to the (European) Barcelona Process”, 313–36.