Rethinking “Jews” and “Arabs” through Palestine: Transcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT  In this essay I investigate an unexplored transcolonial relation: that tying North African writers to Palestine. Examining three sets of texts from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, I argue that, in different ways, Albert Memmi, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Jacques Hassoun reconsidered the legacies of French colonial divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb—in particular those opposing Jews and Arabs—through the lens of Palestine. Whereas in the 1950s Memmi famously analyzed the colonial hierarchies of his native Tunisia, he later endorsed the opposition between Jews and Arabs, giving credence to these categories and proclaiming the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” To the contrary, the Moroccan Jewish writer El Maleh faulted French minority politics, Zionist discourse, and Israeli colonialism with the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghreb and beyond, disidentifying with Israel and allying with Palestine in an attempt to restore the link between Jews and Arabs. Finally, Khatibi, a Muslim Moroccan, and Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian, sought to deconstruct this opposition through philosophical exchanges on the Abrahamic. These diverse examples invite us to reconsider national and postcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature in light of transnational relations connecting the Maghreb to Palestine.

Keywords:

• Transcolonial
• Palestine
• Maghreb
• Jews
• Arabs
• Assimilation

Notes

Notes

1 The Maghreb and the Mashreq are Arabic terms denoting respectively the western part of northern Africa and an area of the eastern Mediterranean roughly similar to that referred to in English as the Levant or Middle East.

2 Arabness (‘uruba) has been mobilized in a host of ways by Maghrebi and Middle Eastern actors in the pre-, anti-, and postcolonial periods, and has a long tradition that falls outside the purview of this essay. I focus here on European reformulations of this category.

3 As evidenced in texts and films that give shape to a transnational imaginary of emancipation, often in highly localized idioms and forms. See for example Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1958 biopic on a heroine of the Algerian revolution, Jamila Bouhrayd, which deploys the ubiquitous vocabulary of Egyptian melodrama to give voice to a transcolonial cause. One can draw parallels with transnational aesthetic practices in the current context. The Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, for example, recently published a novella, Par le feu (By Fire), which recounts the self-immolation of the Tunisian youth Mohamed Bouazizi, an event that is credited with triggering the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond.

4 It would be interesting to investigate the continued role Palestine plays in liberation discourses across the Middle East, and its frequent invocation during the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Though this is beyond the scope of this essay, I suspect that today Palestine signifies even more unequivocally the limits of decolonization than it did in the immediate aftermath of decolonization, when a postcolonial critique began to take shape.

5 There is a vast body of work on the colonial genealogy of these categories. For the opposition between Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, see Gellner and Micaud, and Lorcin. For the European construction of Semites and the distinction between Jews and Arabs, see Anidjar, Shohat, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Shenhav.

6 Joshua Schreier similarly describes French colonial efforts to assimilate the Jewish minorities of Algeria with a view not just to divide and rule, but also to create a buffer zone between Muslim natives and Europeans that would effectively make the former's accession to citizenship impossible. Though it is important to emphasize that the Algerian case is exceptional in the Maghreb, the unilateral extension of citizenship to Algerian Jews through the Crémieux decree of 1870 exemplifies in a radical way the minority policies implemented in all three colonies of the Maghreb.

7 In these writings Memmi compares Israel, not Palestine, to Third World nationalist movements. His support for the project of assimilating Israeli Arabs rather than advocating for Palestinian self-determination speaks volumes to the drastic shift in his thought from his anti-colonial to his pro-Israeli positions (1985, 183–184).

8 It is important to note that Morocco lends itself particularly well to a celebration of Muslim-Jewish symbiosis and to Jewish anti-Zionism, given the country's historical ties to Al-Andalus and the ‘Alawi tradition of protecting Jewish minorities. See Kenbib for a thorough and balanced history of Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco.

9 All translations of French texts that have not been published in English translation are my own.

10 The philosopher Jacques Rancière uses the term disidentification in his analysis of French citizens’ refusal to identify with the state that killed French subjects on October 17, 1961, when the police murdered scores and possibly hundreds of Algerians (their precise numbers are unknown) who were peacefully demonstrating in Paris.

11 Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic spoken by Moroccan Jews, is traversed with classical Hebrew words and was often transcribed in Hebrew script, illustrating the multiculturalism of Moroccan Jewish communities.

12 Hochberg similarly argues that the novel formulates a dialogic rather than self-oriented form of memory, poised toward a shared, Jewish-Arab future (31).