Literature Thinks: The "Jewish Question" in Postcolonial Francophone Jewish Literature from North Africa

My thesis argues that literature is a privileged medium to reflect on and reimagine the “Jewish question” in colonial and postcolonial North Africa. Early scholarly and popular narratives on colonial North Africa typically highlight the alienation between Jews and Muslims, as well as Jews’ strong identification with European cultures. While these narratives risk essentializing Jews by privileging a collective perspective on their political positioning, they also perpetuate the idea of North African Jews as outsiders in their native countries. By conducting a close, formal analysis
of a corpus of literary texts by North African Jewish writers, my thesis explores the critical and imaginative potential of literary form to challenge and reimagine ideas about North African Jewish identity and Jews’ place in colonial and postcolonial North African societies.

Chapter 1 examines the Jew as a literary figure of ambiguity in Albert Memmi’s novels La statue de sel (1953) and Le Pharaon (1988). In contrast to approaches that see ambiguity as something to be resolved, this chapter argues that it can be a productive way of becoming integral to a community’s cultural and political life, rather than a refusal to take sides. Chapter 2 investigates how, in the literary works of Jacqueline Kahanoff, storytelling and reinterpretation function as political arguments and participate in her project of a redefined Levantinism – a pluralistic political and culture project in the Middle East. The third chapter considers the novel Un sémite (2002) by Denis Guénoun as a creative attempt to heal from colonial violence. It explores how formal strategies such as embodied writing and theatrical practice in Un sémite think through and with the body to enact a recovery of personal and political freedom that includes both North African Jews and Muslims.

While they depict the socio-political alienation of Jewish populations during the colonial period in North Africa, Memmi, Kahanoff, and Guénoun also move away from the figure of the Jew as the “Other”. They challenge exclusive notions of identity – such as “native” and “European”, or“Arab” and “Jew” – and imagine models of integrated societies in North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. Ultimately, the thesis explores how their ideas are expressed through literary strategies.