Abstract: Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas explores how the 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco developed a sense of kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Hispanophone world that was unlike anything experienced elsewhere. The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, as this group is often called by its scholars and its community leaders, also became one of the most mobile and globally dispersed North African groups in the twentieth century, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, and the US, among others.
Drawing on an array of communal sources from across this diaspora, Aviad Moreno explores how narratives of ancestry in Spain, Israel, Morocco, and several Latin American countries interconnected the diaspora, empowering its hubs across the globe throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
By investigating these mechanisms of diaspora formation in a small community that once shared the same space in Morocco, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas challenges national accounts of the broader Jewish diasporas and adds complexity to the annals of multilayered ethnic communities on the move.
Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to compare native-born and immigrant Jewish people from North African roots who reside in greater Paris regarding their multiple identities: ethnic-religious, as Jewish people; national, as French citizens; and transnational, as migrants and ‘citizens of the world’. This study employed the correlative quantitative method using survey questionnaires (N = 145) combined with qualitative semi-structured interviews. The main results indicate that both groups have strong Jewish and religious identities. However, while immigrants had fewer opportunities for upward mobility and were more committed to national integration, the younger second-generation have higher socio-economic status and more choices regarding their identities in contemporary France. In conclusion, even among people of the same North African origin, there are inter-generational differences in several dimensions of identity and identification which stem from being native-born or from their experience as immigrants. Different social and political circumstances offer different integration opportunities and thus, over the years, dynamically construct identities among North African Jewish people as minorities. Nonetheless, the Jewish community in Paris is not passive; it has its own strength, cohesiveness, vitality and resilience which are expressed not only in economic but also in social and religious prosperity of Jewish organizations shared by both the native-born and immigrants, who can be considered a ‘privileged’ minority.
Abstract: Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Abstract: La tesis recoge una propuesta lexicográfica en jaquetía (etnovariedad del judeoespañol) a partir de los lemas que la comunidad judía de Melilla incluye en su habla entre 2014 y 2017. Dicha propuesta se ha elaborado combinando los datos obtenidos en entrevistas y cuestionarios de campo llevados a cabo a los miembros de esta comunidad y sus descendientes y relacionados que residen en la ciudad, en el resto de España o en el extranjero, especialmente en Israel (capítulos II y III). El marco teórico central se apoya en la sociolingüística cognitiva y las amplias posibilidades aplicadas que ofrece la corriente para el estudio de etnovariedades. La tesis igualmente relaciona el habla de las etnias con la percepción y la incidencia de esta en los hablantes y la academia. Se emplean, como novedad, distintas tomas de datos modulares que permiten reforzar la información en las diferentes fases del proceso. Asimismo, el estudio guarda una relación considerable con la antropología y la etnografía relacionándose algunos conceptos y métodos de estas ciencias con la producción lingüística de los hablantes (capítulo I). Tras presentar el papel de la jaquetía en la academia y en la política lingüística española, se contabilizan y analizan los principales rasgos y fenómenos lingüísticos observados, estos se relacionan con otras etnovariedades para comparar la similitud de patrones en cuanto a la evolución y/o vigencia de la jaquetía se refiere a la vez que se aporta una aproximación para contribuir y abordar en el futuro este tipo de estudios sobre hablas minoritarias (capítulos I, III y IV). La originalidad del trabajo reside en el enfoque comunicativo sobre un habla oral que en su estadio de extinción está incluso estandarizando su escritura a través de mensajes privados de WhatsApp y Facebook. Por otro lado, se muestra un uso intracomunitario relacionado con la intimidad de los hablantes no presentado con anterioridad para las etnovariedades, ya que normalmente estas se asocian con el humor en el caso de la jaquetía o la delincuencia si se hace referencia al caló (capítulos I y IV). El estudio trata de resolver la aparente antonimia entre lo que la jaquetía de Melilla es, es decir, energía, producción, uso, variedad cultural o etnovariedad; y lo que los lingüistas y los hablantes, aquí informantes, creen que es como resultado de sus investigaciones y percepciones respectivamente (capítulo IV). Por último, se presentan los fenómenos extralingüísticos relacionados con el habla y la evolución de esta en la comunidad de descendientes judíos melillenses en Israel así como la convergencia de la jaquetía al hebreo y al español y divergencia del elemento árabe (capítulo IV).
Abstract: Immigration et mise en œuvre du processus d’extermination nazi ont forgé le destin commun de nombre de familles juives en France. Leur patrimoine photographique est à l’image de ces événements, fait de ruptures et de traces en pointillées. Ces photos surprennent bien des fois, émeuvent et surtout instruisent. De ce déracinement à la fois géographique et culturel, plusieurs d’entre elles en ont conservé la trace. C’est à partir de l’étude croisée de visuels représentant le costume traditionnel dans l’aire maghrébine, choisie pour exemple et, par corollaire, de l’analyse onomastique de ceux qui en sont revêtus, qu’il est possible de distinguer les différentes facettes du processus de mutation et, ainsi, mieux apprécier les étapes de ce qu’il est convenu de qualifier de marche à la modernité, une modernité où acculturation et sécularisation sont largement imbriquées.
Abstract: Une fresque conçue par Henry Dougier et dirigée par Pierre Milza et Emile Temime. Populations, lieux symboles, récits : les trajectoires de l'immigration en France dressent une véritable cartographie de leur mémoire par rues, quartiers et villes interposés. Des histoires inscrites dans l'espace et dans le temps. La première grande saga de ces Français venus d'ailleurs, dans une France monde. Avec les Juifs tunisiens, la scène bellevilloise, déjà riche d'expériences migratoires, acquiert un nouveau visage. Ainsi va ce quartier, qui ne les a pas attendus pour se faire un nom. Ils y ont néanmoins accompli un tel enracinement que leur présence a marqué cet espace de vie, ne serait-ce que par leur-attachement à ce " petit Jérusalem ". Traumatisme du départ, traumatisme des taudis, angoisse des rénovations. Mais, grâce à la cohésion communautaire, les nouveaux venus s'acclimatent d'abord aux règles de vie bellevilloises, pour mieux s'en affranchir et créer leur quartier " tune ", haut en couleur de nombreux témoins se souviennent... Les rites, autant séfarades que tunisiens, la convivialité, mais aussi la " guerre des Six-Heures ", la transmission rompue, la tradition réinventée. Ainsi, au fil de son intégration, la population reprend à son compte des fragments de la mémoire bellevilloise et les intègre à la matrice tunisienne. Curieux mythe qui ravive l'identité blessée à travers l'ancrage en terre d'exil...
Abstract: This article discusses the historical and geographical contexts of diasporic religious buildings in East London, revealing – contrary both to conventional narratives of immigrant integration, mobility, and succession and to identitarian understandings of belonging – that in such spaces and in the concrete devotional practices enacted in them, markers and boundaries of identity (ritual, spatial, and political) are contested, renegotiated, erased, and rewritten. It draws on a series of case-studies: Fieldgate Street Synagogue in its interrelationship with the East London Mosque; St Antony's Catholic Church in Forest Gate where Hindus and Christians worship together; and the intertwined histories of Methodism and Anglicanism in Bow Road. Exploration of the intersections between ethnicity, religiosity, and class illuminates the ambiguity and instability of identity-formation and expression within East London's diasporic faith spaces.
Abstract: During the course of her fieldwork in Paris, anthropologist Kimberly Arkin heard what she thought was a surprising admission. A French-born, North African Jewish (Sephardi) teenage girl laughingly told Arkin she was a racist. When asked what she meant by that, the girl responded, "It means I hate Arabs."
This girl was not unique. She and other Sephardi youth in Paris insisted, again and again, that they were not French, though born in France, and that they could not imagine their Jewish future in France. Fueled by her candid and compelling informants, Arkin's analysis delves into the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, and identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that Sephardi youth, as both "Arabs" and "Jews," fall between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond religion and culture to categorize their Jewishness as race, distinguishing Sephardi Jews from "Arab" Muslims, regardless of similarities they shared, while linking them to "European" Jews (Ashkenazim), regardless of their differences. But while racializing Jewishness might have made Sephardi Frenchness possible, it produced the opposite result: it re-grounded national community in religion-as-race, thereby making pluri-religious community appear threatening. Rhinestones thus sheds light on the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within marginalized French and European populations.
Abstract: Il s'agit dans cet article d'éclairer les pratiques alimentaires d'une population juive originaire de Tunisie, installée en milieu urbain, dans le quartier de Belleville, à Paris (XXe arrondissement), depuis une quarantaine d'années. A partir d'observations et de matériaux collectés dans les familles, l'auteur retrace la réalité des pratiques alimentaires dans leur rapport à plusieurs pôles culturels. Le pôle tunisien, avec une prédominance de plats « traditionnels » lors des repas festifs, le pôle français avec une récupération de notions clés un temps catégorisées comme propres à la cuisine française (haute cuisine, légèreté, modernité), et désormais appliquées à la cuisine tunisienne, ainsi qu'un maintien de certaines pratiques alimentaires (le petit déjeuner français) ou l'adoption d'autres (le « steak-frites » ou le « poulet rôti »). Le pôle juif qui oppose les générations quant à l'observance des règles de la cacherouth, et un pôle « exotique » qui témoigne de la capacité de cette population à adopter certaines pratiques alimentaires de ses voisins. Ces pratiques illustrent la difficulté de parler d'essentialisme identitaire, au profit d'identités culturelles aux multiples facettes.
Abstract: In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by so-called ‘active’ white Flemish residents in Antwerp, and their perpetual disappointment with the responses of their neighbours of orthodox Jewish and Moroccan backgrounds. Instead of viewing these relationships either as a product of culturalist social cohesion policies, or as a vernacular ethical achievement that escapes culturalist politics, she argues that we should understand them through the figure of the Neighbour. Combining the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, she suggests that the neighbourly relation is a paradox in which the Neighbour as a nearby Other induces both an ethical desire for total openness in the engagement with this Other, as well as the uncanny sense that his/her Otherness haunts and makes impossible such an engagement. When viewed in this way, vernacular intercultural relationships, and the fantasies and frustrations surrounding them, emerge as the site where residents of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in postcolonial Europe engage and struggle with existential and ethical questions of human interconnection and, especially, the effects of the culturalist inflection that these questions have gained.
