What is “Judeo-Christian,” then? It is the name of a post-World War II onto-epistemological bargain that incorporates the Jew into the Christian paradigm at the expense of a shared Judeo-Arab world. Thus, it is not only about “Man and its others,” or maybe never was, since men could not become Man without destroying previous alliances, pacts, and shared worlds, and establishing their domination on and through this dyad. Some, like the Jews, had to be made “other” and then conscripted into Man’s projects, before Man could define himself by relation to still-existing others. Hence, since 1492 — and even earlier, perhaps, if one think about the Crusades — targeting the Judeo-Arab world has been one of Man’s raisons d’être, one that in Palestine becomes not just a Christian but a Judeo-Christian enterprise. The temporal proximity between the invention of the Judeo-Christian (1945) and the creation of the Jewish State (1948) is not a coincidence.
Re-reading your text on 1492, I am struck by how you refrain from engaging the destruction of the Judeo-Arab world, not mentioning, the purging Jews and Muslims from the body politic of Spain and Portugal from that also occurred in 1492. It is not that you are not familiar with this history: you use it as the background for your discussion of Bartolomé de Las Casas and how he “had been trapped by an ‘error’ of natural reason” (“New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1984). In that text, written a decade earlier, you use the term “Euro-Christianity.” I cannot help but think that this omission of the other 1492, and the transformation of the term itself, is itself a manifestation of fabricated Judeo-Christian epistemology and dictated by its use.
The violence against non-Europeans and women worldwide, which was required to end World War II and establish a new world order on the ruins, was partially concealed through the spectacle of redress. While non-whites, like in many colonies in Africa or Roma people in Europe, were punished, European Jews were differentiated from others who were equally deserving, and granted redress. For the Jews, the price and the prize was becoming white, i.e., Judeo-Christian.
In the U.S., given that the majority of American Jews came from Europe, the whitening of the Jews was relatively seamless, and took place alongside the whitening of other American immigrant subcultures that had been despised: the Irish, the Italians, the Poles. As I was born an Arab-Jew in a white Judeo-Christian state, treated as such by others earlier than I could claim it as an identity with any self-awareness, my life experience is of a non-white Jew. To my surprise, since I arrived in the U.S. in 2012, I have been read as a white woman. When I understood that this unintended and undesired “passing” actually has a name — “Judeo-Christian” — it annoyed me in two ways. First, the fictional fusion of Jews with their persecutors and the erasure of Jews’ history of being “others”; second, the homogenization of all Jews into a single category, which is a reiteration of the consistent denial of the existence of the Arab-Jew. “Judeo-Christian” denies whole realities: Jews were part of Arab worlds, Jews were part of Judeo-Arab modalities of being and caring. From the 1492 purge of Jews and Arabs from the Christian body politic in Spain and Portugal, Christian European empires reached out to Judeo-Arab worlds in North Africa, South-East Europe, and West Asia and were troubled by them. An emblematic example of this was the establishment of Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in North Africa. The schools, which provided a “civilizing” European education, sought to uproot Jews from their Judeo-Arab worlds and reeducate them into quasi-European citizens, separating them and setting them against their Arab co-citizens.
Whether in Israel, which I left eight years ago, or in the U.S., where I am a legal resident, I am not ready to trade my life experience as a non-white Jew — a Mizrahi Jew, Sephardic Jew, Arab Jew — for that of a whitened Jew. I refuse to inhabit this position because I do not recognize its legitimacy. In Palestine, it has so often been used to persecute inhabitants, Palestinians but also in different ways Jews, in the name of the modern Jewish nation-state. Here in the US, the recruitment of whitened subjects has assisted in the project of enslavement and the continuing persecution of non-white people.
I have long tried to discuss this with colleagues and friends since emigrating to the U.S., but I sensed that my American friends had no context for what I was trying to say, and the conversation could not go beyond an exoticization of me as an “Arab Jew,” an identity unfamiliar to most of my interlocutors, despite the existing work of scholars such as Ella Shoat or Gil Anidjar. When it comes to official forms where my “race” should be indicated, “Jewish” no longer existed as an option. Every time I have to fill such a form, the census, or when applying for changing my legal status, I find myself pressed to select “white.” In the local context, choosing “white” seems to me to be less of a lie in the eyes of those who check my forms and raise their eyes to look at me to verify my race, than saying that I am Black, Asian, or Native American.
Since I left destroyed Palestine and migrated to the U.S., my engagement with 1948 in Palestine has intertwined with a growing personal and intellectual interest in 1492, in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. I came to understand what bothered me about the category of the “Mizrahi Jew,” used in Israel to describe Jews from Arab countries. When seen from my chosen research unit of a half-millennia, we see how the idea of the “Mizrahi Jew” caught Jews from Arab countries in a manufactured history that started in 1948 and rendered everything before into a kind of museumified “past.” The category of “Mizrahi Jew” normalizes the dissociation of my family from Algeria, and in a broader way from Africa. You may say, as some have already done with a certain historical and scientific authority, that North Africa is not “Africa.” No doubt, relating to North Africa as a separate region makes sense, but not at the risk of erasing it from the African continent, nor from broader Jewish life in Africa and the Mediterranean world That is, North Africa was part of a Euro-African world long before the inventions of Europe and its other, Africa.
As you can likely guess at this point of my letter, I’m troubled by the disappearance of the Jews from Africa, and more so, by the disappearance of this disappearance from our political and worldly imagination, and see in it the effects of the invented Judeo-Christian bargain that is now at the core of white supremacy. The wholesale differentiation of North Africa from Africa and Europe, like the partitioning of so many other areas in the world, facilitated creation of separate histories for each region, as if each were caught in its own temporality. And this partitioning serves imperial ends by making it impossible to see one global regime that needs to be abolished.
When the life of Jews who migrated (mostly against their will) from North Africa to Israel is reduced to “Mizrahi Jew” and the story of Mizrahi Jews’ oppression in Israel, this narrative becomes an internal discourse among Jews in Israel, as if the departure of approximately 600,000 Jews from Africa has had no impact on Africa. The Judeo-Christian bargain has no place for the disappearance of the Jews from Africa to be thinkable. It was only because I have spent all this time undoing the Judeo-Christian reference that I encountered in a text I love, your 1492 text, that I could think about the centuries of Jewish life in Africa as also an African issue.
To recover this story through the labor and love of family recollection ought to underscore how naturalized this disappearance of Jews from Africa, and Africa from Jews, has been. Not all of us, descendants of Arab Jews, are fortunate enough to have a share in these memories, for many of the parents and grandparents held them privately as part of a disappeared world.
Let me say this bluntly now. I have no memories from centuries of Jewish life in Africa. At the same time I am not inclined to let this manufactured absence determine what I remember and what could and ought to be remembered. I continue to unlearn Man’s false memories in the hope that recollections of shared Judeo-Arab and Euro-African life will become available — “life beyond Man,” as you call it. Think about this series of imperial bargains: European citizenship to the Jews in Algeria for the price of differentiating them from their Muslim cocitizens; reparations to Jews at the end of World War II in place of the abolition of European imperialism which had destroyed their worlds and those of many others; citizenship for all Jews in Palestine as a weapon against the return of Arab and Jewish Palestinians to the homeland they had previously shared.
The right to undo political bargains of this kind is a right descendants in imperial regimes ought to claim to reject ongoing expansion, violence, growth and domination. We have the right to replace these with the principle of repair. In undoing these bargains, we can repair our shared worlds.
James Baldwin and Edward Said, without reading each other’s accounts, describe almost verbatim the same experience. As children, they saw themselves as cinematic heroes from popular culture, chasing the “natives,” and only years later they understood that they were actually running after themselves. Reading them, I could not avoid thinking about my father, who never ceased to run with these villains after himself, without ever realizing it. As you now already know, he was born in Algeria but as a French citizen, though always indigenous in the eyes of the French settlers. Unlike his grandparents, who were likely among those who didn’t embrace the bargain (as I gather from the Arabic name they gave to their daughter, Aïcha, a name that I have adopted), my father accepted the bargain. But he also experienced it as constantly under threat, a European citizenship that could be taken away — as indeed happened under the Vichy government, even before he was sent to a concentration camp. Imperial citizenship in itself is a bargain — it is “given” in exchange for loyalty, a bargain that asks the imperial citizen to differentiate themselves from their worldly co-citizens.
Azoulay The Funambulist (1)
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[P]ostcard, School of embroidery, Algiers (1905). / Any of these Arab-looking girls, could have been my ancestor. In 1850, a British traveler who visited the school reported: “there were several little Jewesses squatting most amicably among the Mauresques, conspicuous only by their simpler robe of colored stuff and a conical cap of red velvet, tipped with gold lace.” In the first decades of the 20th century, postcards of them were sent from to France and other European countries. The photographs I have of my grandmother in Algeria, taken a few decades later, show her already as a French-looking woman, a Jewish Arab who has learned the lesson of Frenchness this school was established to impart. Where did my great-great grandmother, who was a native Algerian and could have been one of these girls, disappear to?
