On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt
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On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt
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Overview
Aimée Israel-Pelletier examines the lives of Middle Eastern Jews living in Islamic societies in this political and cultural history of the Jews of Egypt. By looking at the work of five Egyptian Jewish writers, Israel-Pelletier confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust. She illustrates that the Jews of Egypt were a fluid community connected by deep roots to the Mediterranean and the Nile. They had an unshakable sense of being Egyptian until the country turned toward the Arab East. With Israel-Pelletier's deft handling, Jewish Egyptian writing offers an insider's view in the unique character of Egyptian Jewry and the Jewish presence across the Mediterranean region and North Africa.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253025784 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2018 |
| Series: | Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Aimée Israel-Pelletier is Professor and Head of French at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jacques Hassoun
Return to Egypt
Remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.
Deuteronomy 16:33
You leave Egypt. You leave the family. You can't go back.
You have to move forward ... You play the cards that are dealt you.
Maurice de Picciotto
The most eloquent of Jacques Hassoun's works, Smugglers of Memory (Les Contrebandiers de la mémoire; 1994) argues that most of us feel the need to pass on our heritage to future generations. We are compelled to state who we are and where we come from, the moment we leave our place. Mostly, says Hassoun, it is not we who volunteer but others who want to know. He writes:
In the Arab-Muslim world, we find ourselves daily facing the injunction to tell our story, give our genealogy, identify our clan. For example, when two people who do not know each other meet, and immediately after the customary salutations, the question that is always asked is: "What is your asl?," a word that means attachments (tribal and religious) and, at the same time, affiliations and membership in a specific ethnic class or mind-set.
This injunction to state who we are and where we come from, explains Hassoun, is oftentimes the harbinger of a crisis. We give out this information to defend our heritage and to make sure our ancestors are not forgotten and that we and our children are counted. This impulse to pass on our history is what Hassoun calls transmission. Transmission is a desire. It is also a process. It represents the ontological drive to connect, communicate, and be counted. Already in Deuteronomy, Hassoun reminds us, we read: "Ask your father and he will tell you your story. Ask your ancestors and they will tell you your past." This commandment confirms for Hassoun that the imperative to transmit is written in history (CM, 10). Deuteronomy was composed after the Jewish people returned from the First Exile in Babylonia. This was a critical period. For Jewish leaders at that time, the imperative was to establish the premises upon which Jews were to continue as a people. They had to find ways to tighten the links that had loosened after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah (CM, 11). Several generations born in exile were returning to their ancestral home. The concern was that these Jews born in exile had grown up in an environment that was intellectually, economically, and socially superior to the place into which they were moving. There had to be good reasons for them to want to reclaim that heritage. A good story needed to be told, explains Hassoun: "The idea was to illuminate the present through the telling of a grand story, one that would take on mythical proportions so as to prepare a future for the planting of new roots" (CM, 12). The act of transmitting is an adventure that, when brought to term successfully, enhances our appreciation of the present and our sense of freedom. Passing heritage down from generation to generation, Hassoun argues, involves creatively weaving the past with the present in every new generation. The success of transmission depends in interesting ways upon "sneaking" information through from one generation to another. He writes:
It is precisely because we are different from those who preceded us and different as well from our descendants who will most likely follow a road clearly different from ours, that I find fascinating the adventure that constitutes transmission .. And yet ... it is also precisely in this series of differences that we inscribe what we have to transmit. (CM, 14)
For Hassoun, heritage does not refer to a specific body of experience but to the way this experience is shaped at the moment it is recalled when we think about it, speak about it, and transmit it to others. Transmission is an aesthetic remodeling of the heritage it works to preserve (CM, 17). "The story of us" that heals Rachel Gaon in Jacqueline Kahanoff's novel, Jacob's Ladder, and Elliot Malki's film Starting Over Again, is the story we all owe our descendents. Hassoun explains:
When all is said and done, transmission is a treasure that each one of us constructs from elements supplied by parents and the environment. Reconfigured by chance encounters and by events we have overlooked, these elements become, over the years and in contact with day-to-day life, fundamental components both of the subject and for the subject. (Italics in text; CM, 81)
To this dialectic between ourselves, our heritage, and contemporary society that constitutes transmission, Hassoun introduces the compelling notion that without transmission the individual will not be able to integrate in society. Transmission is essential to the well-being of individuals and groups. It defends individuals against a society that sees them — that will always see them — as outsiders and excludes them from the dominant scene. Hassoun was a militant psychoanalyst whose practice focused on immigrant children and children who were born in France to immigrant parents. His observations led him to an understanding that the most vulnerable children were those who did not know their family history. In Smugglers of Memory, he presents case studies focusing on a Polish child of immigrants, a child from Egypt, displaced children from rural parts of France, victims of the Algerian war of independence, and others to argue that each of these cases demonstrates that it is impossible for children to feel they are an integral part of society unless they can articulate what they know or think they know about their past. This framing of one's heritage may not always be carried out in discursive language, says Hassoun. But it must somehow or other represent a breaking of the silence. The immigrant or outsider must conceive a language to envisage and reconstruct his or her family history. He writes:
We see all the time in clinical practice that such silences are responsible for much of the suffering and disorders experienced by the children of deported Jews, the children or grandchildren of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the descendants of torture during various wars of independence, in short, all those who experienced History in its extreme ferocity. ... Orphans of language, they suffer from the impossibility of mourning conclusively and of constructing a family narrative that helps to launch them into the future. (CM, 24–25)
Without successful transmission and without exposing children to the history of their people, particularly when they are a minority, children will not be able to integrate their past with the present. They will likely experience a sense of alienation. Hassoun embodies the Jewish and Marxist imperative: know your history. Even the most pluralistic of societies, Hassoun believes, will at some point resort to divisiveness and exclusionary practices. This is not because integration was built on faulty lines, he argues, but because ideologies of exclusion are ever present in all social and political bodies. They are ineradicable. Minority populations suffer when they ignore their history and seek comfort in the delusions of not-knowing. All is deemed perfect until a crisis in the social body occurs: "In times of wretched divisions — think of the Dreyfus affair or the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Central Europe — what seemed until then incontrovertible and what seemed to have offered the subject a sense of inviolable wholeness reveals itself to be a monstrous lie" (CM, 33).
For this reason, if for nothing else, children of immigrants and immigrant parents themselves must know their history. Failing to communicate one's history to the next generation puts at risk the well-being of subsequent generations. Hassoun writes that even several generations later, we find individuals who are still unreconciled, still apt to consider themselves born in exile (CM, 37). He adds, to be clear, that these people are not suffering exile from some mythical long lost "promised land"; rather, they believe exile occurred to them personally before they were born (CM, 37–38). How can the perpetuation of exilic melancholy be mitigated? This is the question Hassoun addresses directly in Smugglers of Memory. He identifies the immigrant problem as a problem of adaptation, which is to say it is a problem of reconciling one's past attachments with a new set of cultural directives. To adapt and be able to integrate means that equilibrium has been attained. It does not mean that an individual has left the past behind and has accepted a new state. As for assimilation, always a hot topic when Jewish identity is discussed, Hassoun is adamant that it does not work. Assimilation cannot work, he argues, because people are predisposed to exclude others at the slightest sign of a crisis.
In Smugglers of Memory, Hassoun does more than advocate transmission as a critical practice for successful adaptation. He demonstrates how this can be achieved. He observes that the person who succeeds in adapting in exile has found a device, a ruse. That person has fashioned an identity in the present by reframing the past, by interpreting their heritage in such a way as to have made both the present and the past intelligible and, ultimately, acceptable personally. That device or ruse is constituted uniquely in the form of a language. We are not always conscious of passing on something in our history. These unconscious languages (both verbal and nonverbal) are reservoirs of affect and information about us and our ancestors. When we speak, move, gesture, or write, we signal our belongingness. These figures of belongingness are passed down from generation to generation. Hassoun writes: "Is it not difficult, even impossible, to find the appropriate words to evoke the homeland of one's parents or grandparents, to transmit the essence of their past?" He continues: "The difficulty we face is understandable: the past — like a sudden gust of wind — stuns us while beckoning that we make out what it is. But how can we know what it is when the forms of that past inherently resist transmission?" (italics in text, CM, 54). The device or ruse that allows immigrants and other outsiders to transmit their past and the rich affects that accompany remembrances are what Hassoun calls the languages of contraband, smuggled languages. These languages are embedded in our words, gestures, in the tone of our voice, and even in our silences. They are identifying traits that we smuggle in with us when we cross borders. These may be cherished traits or simply traits that are part of our identity. No matter how special or ordinary, we do not want to lose them or have them taken away from us. These languages are what we sometimes call style. The trick is to pass something we are attached to as something else. In the process of moving across borders, something is likely to be lost or altered. As Hassoun explains in the discussion on transmission, the past does not repeat itself but confronts the present and is changed by it. He argues that the metaphor of the smuggler and smuggled makes clear the modus operandi of immigrants and minorities. They use languages in which are embedded what they desire, what they once desired, and what they have appropriated (stolen) from different sources. For Hassoun, smuggling is a vital concept and practice. It is not just an idea; it is a call to action:
Furthermore, I owe it to the truth to state the following: let us not be afraid to be smugglers because this is the way we will be able to relay our history. Let us face the fact. The idea of a transparent and fixed language is a delusion. We are all Exiles, transmigrants who have burned their ships behind them. Our past will never again be recovered intact. ... We are from this place and from another, from the present and from the past. Unfailingly. (Italics in text; CM, 42–43)
Reclaiming Egypt
Jacques Hassoun spearheaded the movement in France that gave the Jewish diaspora from Egypt a sense of itself as a people with a distinct history. His efforts spurred collective self-reflection, which in turn gave this community of Egyptian Jews an understanding of the social and historical factors that had changed the course of their lives. Twenty or so years after their exile some began to pose the question: Were we strangers in Egypt or did we have ancestral attachments to this land and culture? This is the perennial question Jews in biblical times and modern Egyptian Jews endeavor to answer. Hassoun organized the narrative of that people's presence in Egypt and gave it shape by making explicit the relation between Egyptian Jews and Egyptian-Arab culture more broadly. He argued that Egyptian Jews, regardless of their political status when they lived in their native country, were Egyptians. Throughout his work, he reminds his interlocutors that even Jews who were not born in Egypt are Egyptians. As he explains during an interview, he is Jewish because he is Egyptian and Egyptian because he is Jewish. The rootedness of Jews in Egypt is asserted in the works of many Jewish Egyptian writers. In her poignant and sublime book Egypt, Return (Egypte, Retour: Récit, 2007), the photographer and writer Carole Naggar traces evocatively her protagonist's connectedness to Egypt, where for millennia "the water of the Nile and the blood" of her ancestors ran together and "their skin took on the color of the sand." For two thousand five hundred years, her ancestors were tied to Egypt "by all the fibers of their being." Naggar's protagonist returns to Cairo to visit the graves of her "grand-parents, her great grand-parents, her great-great grand-parents, and their parents" (Naggar, 21). She "invents ruses" and "rituals" that are meant to refresh with her own presence the history of her people. The attachment to Egypt comes at the cost of heartbreak and doubt. Does the protagonist leave all this history behind her and turn away? "Enough already," she says, "enough scratching these roots inflamed by memory" ("Assez! Suffit de gratter ces racines de mémoire"; Naggar, 30). Before leaving, will she replace the plaque on her grandfather Elie's gravestone, ensuring that his name remains visible "or leave Elie's grave without a name?" (Naggar, 33). Has Egypt preserved something of the "fragrance" of its Jews from "before the breakup?" or have "the sands covered them in forgetfulness, the deserts closed in and erased their trace, and the Nile like a mirror serene and impassive will not be bothered to remember" ("Ou bien le sable de l'oublie a tout recouvert. Ou bien le désert s'est refermé sur nos pas, a recouvert nos traces, et l'eau du Nil, a peine troublée, recoule comme un miroir qui ne se souvient pas"; Naggar, 126). This is the bind served to the children of Egyptian exiles by a long, complex, and monumental history.
The dedication in Naggar's book is made in Hassoun's memory. She writes: "This voyage was taken without him. Without him it would not have been taken." Hassoun's contribution to the return to Egypt cannot be overestimated. True, the project to reconnect the Jews of Egypt with their past there was a collaborative endeavor. But Hassoun's efforts gave the project direction, depth, and intellectual coherence. As a protagonist in the May 1968 upheavals in France, Hassoun had experience as a leader. He was learned, professionally accomplished, and gregarious. And he was by all accounts charismatic. He was therefore in an excellent position to lead the Jews of Egypt to reconnect with their past and their culture. When relations between Israel and Egypt improved in the late 1970s, it became possible for Jews to visit Egypt more easily. Hassoun personally led many of them quite literally to the site of memory. Assisted by friends, he organized trips with groups of his compatriots. Some were returning for the first time since they had left; others were the children of exiles, often in their thirties and forties, who could not remember Egypt.
The motivation behind the effort to connect with a complicated Jewish past came from Hassoun's personal circumstances and worldview. It also came from his experiences as a trained psychoanalyst. As I indicated, Hassoun worked with immigrants. In postwar France, many communities experienced dislocation. There were immigrants from other former colonies as well as from Egypt; immigrants from Western and Eastern European countries; displaced individuals and families migrating from French villages and farms to urban centers. Both his theoretical and clinical works focused on the trauma of immigration, particularly as it affected children. Hassoun was drawn to their issues. He believed that psychoanalysis was particularly suited to articulating how individuals coped with new conditions, related to new groups, and navigated through an environment that tended to be unsympathetic to them. Tobie Nathan, a contemporary fellow Egyptian Jew and psychoanalyst himself, explains in his memoir — an intellectual biography he describes as an "ethno-novel" — that in the 1960s many Jews outside the mainstream of French intellectual life took up psychoanalysis as a way to understand themselves and establish themselves in French society. Similarly, Adam Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis is a language that makes it possible to talk about loss, about dislocation, about the cost of losing everything in order to survive. He writes:
Psychoanalysis is first and foremost a psychology of, and for, immigrants (people who can never quite settle); not a Jewish science as Freud feared, but an immigrant science for a world in which, for political and economic reasons, there were to be more and more immigrants. The human subject that Freud will describe in psychoanalysis will be a person with little autonomy, subjected to forces he can for the most part neither control nor understand.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 Aimée Israel-Pelletier.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Jacques Hassoun: Return to Egypt
2. Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's Egypt: A View from the Nile
3. Edmond Jabès: Egypt Recovered
4. Paula Jacques, Resistance and Transmission: Transplanting Egypt on the Soil of France
5. André Aciman and the Mediterranean: The Staging of Egypt as Elsewhere
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index