A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean

Front matter

A COLLECTION OF STORIES CURATED BY LEILA SEBBAR

EDITED AND ANNOTATED BY

TRANSLATIONS BY

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Jewish Childhood in Translation, by Lia Brozgal Note on Translation and Transcription

CHAPTER TWO: LEBANON Country Snapshot Rebecca Glasberg The Dead-End Alley

Lucien Elia

The Baker’s Son

Yves Turquier

CHAPTER THREE: EGYPT Country Snapshot Rebecca Glasberg Jo and Rita Rita Rachel Cohen The Blue Muslims Mireille Cohen-Massouda

Jour de féte Tobie Nathan

CHAPTER FOUR: TUNISIA Country Snapshot Rebecca Glasberg Nothing about Childhood Chochana Boukhobza A Triple Coexistence Annie Goldmann Of Wings and Footprints Hubert Haddad

The Broken Bargain

Ida Kummer

Open Letter to my Grandchildren Adrien, Elie, Raphaél, and Anna Nine Moati

The Jewish Boy from Monastir

Guy Sitbon

CHAPTER FIVE: ALGERIA Country Snapshot Rebecca Glasberg 119

Excellent Frenchmen

Jean-Luc Allouche 123

Diar-es-Saada

Joélle Bahloul 129 Djelfa, My Beloved Albert Bensoussan 133

Between Agony and Delight

Patrick Chemla 140 An Algiers Girlhood

Alice Cherki 145 Kaddish for a Lost Childhood

Roger Dadoun 151 Like a Slap in the Face

Line Meller-Said 158

“No, Not Jewish. Israelite”

Daniel Mesguich 165 With All Due Respect...

Aldo Naouri 174

The Hammam, and Afterwards

Benjamin Stora 178 The Courtyard Dany Toubiana 184

CHAPTER SIX: MOROCCO Rebecca Glasberg 193 For Other Tomorrows?

André Azoulay 197

The Ocean in a Carafe

Marcel Bénabou 202

God’s Cradle

Ami Bouganim 207 Flecks of Memory

Anny Dayan Rosenman 212 Mamada

Lucette Heller-Goldenberg 217

Crossing an Invisible Distance

Nicole S. Serfaty 223 In the Medina Daniel Sibony 229

Living between the Lines

Ralph Toledano 235 Further Reading 241 List of Contributors 247

NAY PY YY

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS Middle East and North Africa xlii Turkey 8 Lebanon 38 Egypt 56 Tunisia 80

Algeria 120 Morocco 194

FIGURES

Leila Sebbar with her brother Alain and her sisters, Lysel and Danièle Lizi Behmoaras, Şişli Square, Istanbul, early 1950s 12

Moris Farhi, age three or four in Ankara, 1938 or 1939 17

Roni Margulies, Istanbul, 1960 24

Rosie Pinhas, age three, Taksim Garden, October 1950 30

Rosie Pinhas, Turkish primary school diploma, received 1957 33 Lucien Elia, age seven 42

Yves Turquier, photo taken from the balcony of the family apartment in Beirut 47

Rita Rachel Cohen and brother Jo, Alexandria, summer 1956 60

. Mireille Cohen-Massouda, Alexandria, September 1945 66 11. 12.

Tobie Nathan, age three, Ras El Bar (Egypt), 1951 72 Chochana Boukhobza with her little sister, Sfax, 1963 84 ix

X

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32, 33.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Annie Taïeb-Goldmann, five or six years old, Mateur 89

Hubert Haddad, approximately three years old, La Goulette 94

Ida Kummer, Villa Zirah, Tunis, 1956 101

Nine Moati and family, Verdun Square, Tunis, 1943 107

Guy Sitbon, age fourteen, Monastir 112

Jean-Luc Allouche, class photo, Aumale High School of Constantine, 1960-1961 124

Joëlle Bahloul, class photo, Diar-es-Saada School for Girls, Algiers, 1958 130 Albert Bensoussan, class photo, Gautier High School, Algiers, 1948 134 Patrick Chemla, six years old, and family, Bergere-sous-Montmirail (Champagne) 141

Alice Cherki, three years old, photographer's studio, Algiers 146

Roger Dadoun and family, circa 1943 152

Line Meller-Said, class photo, Lavigerie Preschool, Blida, 1936-1937 159 Daniel Mesguich and mother, central post office, Algiers,1960 166 Aldo Naouri, around ten years old, Orléansville, circa 1948 175 Benjamin Stora with father, age five, place de la Breche, Constantine, 1956 179 .

Dany Toubiana, six years old, Ecole Sévigné, Guelma 185

André Azoulay leading parade, Moulay Al Hassan Square, 1955 198 Marcel Bénabou as a teenager, Meknes 203

Image “Bouquet of Brotherhood? 208

Anny Dayan Rosenman, age nine, Studio Marty, Casablanca 213 Lucette Heller-Goldenberg and family, Mamounia Gardens, Marrakesh, 1946 218

Nicole S. Serfaty with father and brother, boulevard de la Gare, Casablanca, 1956 224

Daniel Sibony’s childhood home on Derb Djama Street, Bahia neighborhood, Marrakesh 230

Ralph Toledano, two years old, Casablanca 236

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This particular task of translation has been nothing if not a group effort. Our gratitude goes, first and foremost, to Leila Sebbar, for her ongoing commitment to telling nuanced, complex stories from parts of the world too often shrouded in stereotype, and for entrusting us with the project of bringing these stories to an even larger readership.

Our appreciation also goes to Patrice Rötig, founder and editor-in-chief of Editions Bleu autour (the publishing house responsible for the original French version of this volume), for his permission to translate this work. We also thank his co-editor, Emmanuelle Boucaud, for her prompt replies to so many administrative queries.

A small team of translators are at the heart of this project, animated by a sense of mission and, as is unfortunately too often the case, for no financial gain of their own. And so we are indebted to Jane Kuntz, Rebekah Vince, and Robert Watson for their linguistic skill, their cultural acumen, and for their good will.

Numerous scholars and experts in the field responded generously to various calls for help. We are grateful to Aomar Boum, Nouri Gana, Ali Igmen, Jean-Claude Lalou, Jessica Marglin, Aron Rodrigue, Brady Ryan, Marc Sounigo, Jessie Stoolman, and Yasemin Yildiz for their help in clarifying so many linguistic, historical, and cultural details.

The publication of this translation would not have been possible without the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, which provided the financial support necessary for the acquisition of the rights to the original manuscript. Many thanks to Todd Presner, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and the Leve Center team—Vivian Holenbeck, Chelsea White, Reina Chung—for making this possible. Moreover, this project was supported, at critical stages, by grants from the Center for European

XI xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and Russian Studies, the Faculty Research Grant Program, and the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (all at UCLA).

The introduction to this collection benefitted immeasurably from feedback received in different venues and from a wide variety of experts. Lia would like to thank the Faculty Working Group at the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies for reading the original proposal and providing insights on how to best frame this collection for an English-reading audience. She would also like to thank Neetu Khanna, Olivia Harrison, and Jessica Marglin of the USC writers’ group, for opening the door to a “Bruin” and rigorously workshopping the introduction’s penultimate version, as well as Sara Kippur and Josh Lambert, who read and commented on various iterations of both the proposal and the introduction. The entire manuscript also benefitted from the expertise of the UC Press’s peer-review team (Jessica Marglin and one anonymous reviewer). All of these readers helped to produce a final product that is as clear and as rigorous as possible. Any lingering errors or political missteps are the editors’ own.

This volume has been enhanced by a set of custom-designed maps, provided by cartographer and graphic designer Bill Nelson. We are indebted to the meticulous work of our copy editor, Lynda Crawford, and of our indexer, David Robertson. A special thanks to Ashley Gallo, Senior Fund Manager in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, for her skill and patience in helping us organize vendors and finances. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation for the professionalism and expertise of the entire team at UC Press Luminos—Eric Schmidt, LeKeisha Hughes, Jessica Moll, Lynda Crawford, and Teresa Iafolla—for their commitment to bringing this project to the world.

Introduction A Jewish Childhood in Translation

Lia Brozgal

But in having to translate everything, they ended up transforming themselves. In other words, the act of translation changed both the object to be translated and the subject doing the translating.

—DANIEL MESGUICH, “NO, NOT JEWISH; ISRAELITE”

His name is Ahmed; he’s my best friend. He is seven years old, just like me. I know that his parents are Muslims, he knows that mine are Jews. On our street in Beirut, everyone knows that. But you think that’s a problem for kids who want to play marbles?

—YVES TURQUIER, “THE BAKER’S SON”

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean is a collection of autobiographical stories and essays curated by Franco-Algerian writer Leila Sebbar. Originally written in French, the stories collected here provide a window onto a bygone world marked by the complex history of Judeo-Muslim cohabitation in the Middle East and North Africa.! By turns nostalgic and bitter, familiar and improbable, explicit and elliptical, the childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish. While each story testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith

1. For reasons having to do with their schooling and life trajectories, two of the authors preferred to write their stories in English. Although Roni Margulies’s parents spoke French with him at home, growing up he spoke Turkish and was schooled in English and American establishments in Istanbul before attending college in England. Similarly, Moris Farhi grew up in a multilingual environment in Ankara and eventually moved to England for university. The original French version of A Jewish Childhood contains translated versions of their stories; here, we have reproduced their original English-language texts.

xiii xiv INTRODUCTION communities into which its author was born, when taken together, the essays articulate ambivalent histories of proximity and distance, solidarity and suspicion, sameness and difference.

The contributors are Jews who came of age in the Muslim Mediterranean—that is, in places where Islam was the majority religion, and at a moment when their everyday routines were inflected, albeit to different degrees, by the politics and policies of French imperialism. The lives of the authors, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1955, were also undeniably impacted by the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Moreover, between 1948 and 1970, many of the lands of the Mediterranean would bear witness to a veritable exodus of their Jews. While departures were broadly motivated by a sense of political uncertainty and ongoing experiences of persecution, they were also prompted by specific events, such as the Second Arab-Israeli War (1956), or the demise of colonial regimes that heralded a turn toward pan-Arabism. (Morocco and Tunisia became independent in 1956; Algeria in 1962.) For many, the lure of the Zionist project was also a factor in the decision to leave. As a result, by the early 1960s, most of the region’s Jews had left their respective homelands for new lives in exile (primarily in Israel and France, but also in England, the United States, and Canada).’ It is telling that, of the thirty-four authors featured in this volume, only one still makes her permanent residence in the country where she was born.’

Prompted by Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers gesture to universal themes such as language, difference, family, memory, and history, while also shedding light on the idiosyncrasies of Jewish experience, both within the Muslim Mediterranean and beyond. For if the authors brought together in A Jewish Childhood have in common a religion, a region, a language, and, ultimately, the experience of exile, their stories reveal significant differences in both content and form. Indeed, from the details and anecdotes selected for inclusion to the mode of self-representation deployed, the authors display an array of attitudes toward their childhood experiences, the impact of geopolitics, and of their sense of identification with the French language, with Judaism, and with their native communities.

Some, like the Algerian-born historian Benjamin Stora, favor a triumphant narrative filled with detailed reportage, facts, and dates. Others approach the

2. Migration patterns over the course of the twentieth century shifted as a function of geopolitics and policy, making the emigration of Mediterranean Jews difficult to systematize. Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Jews living in Arab lands in 1948, approximately two-thirds emigrated to Israel, while the remainder moved to France and the United States. If the North African Jews tended to move to France in greater numbers, early emigrants from Morocco, for example, preferred Israel. The Jewish Virtual Library’s section on Jews in Islamic Countries provides useful statistics on demography and migration, broken down by country. See https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews -in-islamic-countries.

3. Lizi Behmoaras has remained a resident of Istanbul. It is also worth noting that Roni Margulies returned to Turkey after living in England for more than thirty years, and André Azoulay spends a great deal of time in his homeland of Morocco and continues to hold Moroccan citizenship.

INTRODUCTION XV autobiographical genre with impressionistic brush strokes: the Egyptian actress, dramaturge, and writer Rita Rachel Cohen sets forth a fragmented tale that reproduces the instability of memory and the teetering experience of departure. Algerian psychoanalyst Roger Dadoun manages to tell his own story while scrupulously avoiding the use of the pronoun “I” Some writers describe a rupture with their origins: Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech, born in Istanbul, writes of her desire to “become another, to be reborn in French, in France”; others, like Ida Kummer, who now lives between France and the United States, ends her story with a defiant declaration of alliance: “Tunisian I am; Tunisian I remain?

The convener of this collection, Leïla Sebbar, is a novelist and essayist of significant renown in the francophone world. Sebbar was born in 1941, in Algeria, to Mohammed Sebbar (an Algerian Muslim) and Renée Bordas (a French woman from the Dordogne region)—both of whom were teachers in a French school near Tlemcen. The Algeria of her early childhood was multicultural, multi-confessional, and plurilingual. It was also, at the time, a French settler colony, having been conquered in 1830 and then annexed to mainland France as a set of three overseas départements, or administrative regions, in 1848. This meant that Algeria was considered as an extension of French territory and subject to the laws, regulations, and governmental structures of mainland France, all of which were administered, locally, by French bureaucrats.

Citizenship, however, was one key exception in the application of French law in Algeria. Whereas Sebbar’s mother was French by birthright, and thus able to pass her nationality to her children, Sebbar’s father was a French subject, not a French citizen. Like all indigenous Arabo-Muslim Algerians, he was considered an FMA, or Français musulman dAlgérie (French Muslim of Algeria), a novel category of legal belonging that ascribed some of the rights of nationality to the indigenous population, while simultaneously denying them many others.*

Sebbar was educated in French schools in Algeria until the age of seventeen, and she describes both her schooling and her upbringing as secular and very much francophone. Her adolescence coincided with the beginning of the Algerian War for Independence, the experience of which would compel her to acknowledge the plurality of her own identity.” Although she does not speak Arabic, Sebbar would come to view her bicultural and biracial background as foundational to

4. Questions of citizenship and nationality under colonial regimes were complex—notoriously so in French-ruled Algeria, where ethnicity, religion, and even past military service impacted eligibility. For more on this topic, see Patrick Weil, “Le statut des musulmans en Algérie coloniale. Une nationalité française dénaturée,” Histoire de la justice 16, no. 1 (2005): 93-109. For a more general overview of citizenship and North Africa, see Jessica Marglin, “Citizenship and Nationality in the French Colonial Maghrib, in Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa, eds. Roel Meijer, Zahra Babar, and James Sater (London: Routledge, 2021): 45-60.

5. Danielle Marx-Scouras, “The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar,’ Studies in 20th-Century Literature 17, no. 1 (1993): 46-47, https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1311&context=sttcl.

Xvi INTRODUCTION her identity and to her writing practice, noting, “difference, or alterity, makes me write, I preserve it, I seek it out everywhere where it can inspire me to write.”® She attended university in France, married a Frenchman, and made her life in Paris, where she taught high school, and where she still resides today. Yet her complex relationship to Algeria and to Arabic remains the dominant motif in her writing, as demonstrated in recent autobiographical texts.’

Perhaps it was this longing to find inspiration in difference that compelled Sebbar to undertake the project that would become A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean. After all, she stands apart from the company she has gathered together to meditate on Jewish childhood insofar as Sebbar herself is not Jewish. Yet her vision for this project—her reason for taking up what she calls a “collective, creative archeology”—seems to be rooted in memories of shared subjugation and an unexplained sense of common rejection. In her preface, she writes of understanding, as a child, that it was “bad to be an Arab [... ] bad to be Jewish,” at a time when she didn’t even know what the words “Jewish” and “Arab” meant. She goes on to wonder: “Why was it bad? Nobody ever said. Did I believe it? I dont know.’ A Jewish Childhood is Sebbar’s attempt to grapple with these questions, to carve out a literary space for an encounter “that brings together those so often separated by colonial history.”

Ultimately, the experience of cohabitation described herein is idiosyncratic, and the reader looking to put her finger on the “truth” about the experience of cohabitation between Jews and Muslims, to establish once and for all a narrative of tolerance or rejection, will find that this collection raises more questions than it answers. Some authors claim that, as children, they didn’t even know they were Jewish (or different from their Muslim neighbors); others speak of an early, and very clear sense of difference and even rejection (and those who do often use the word anti-Semitism); others, still, reflect an awareness of the complexity of the situation, with its tacit rules and implicit boundaries—both of which were policed instinctively and often unconsciously. Rather than attempt to establish or reinforce a unified story about Jewish childhood in the Mediterranean, the reader would do well to pay attention to how these writers figure their own identities, how they describe or produce impressions of difference or sameness, and how they interpret, post facto, the experiences of their formative years.

This introduction, which is a supplement to the original volume, seeks to provide the reader with some crucial historical and cultural signposts, and to engage

6. Soheila Kian and Leila Sebbar, “Une entrevue avec Leila Sebbar: l'écriture et laltérité? French Review 78, no. 1 (October 2004), 130.

7. See, for example: Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (2003); LArabe comme un chant secret (2007) [Arabic as a Secret Song, translated by Sklyer Artes, afterword by Mildred Mortimer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)]; and, completing what is now known as her autobiographical trilogy, Lettre a mon père (2021). Excerpts of this last title have been translated into English by Marilyn Hacker and are available at https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27706.

INTRODUCTION xvii some of the big questions prompted by this work as a whole, questions that revolve around religion and politics, to be sure, but also around memory, representation, and the slippery genre of autobiography. Given that no such contextual information was deemed essential to the French version, one might argue that its inclusion here is superfluous, or that it risks overdetermining the reader’s experience; after all, the task of the translator is certainly not to explain the original. Moreover, since many of the essays take it upon themselves to provide historical and cultural detail, readers can readily situate individual stories against a broader backdrop, even if they are not well versed in the micro politics of a given region.

But I would suggest that while each essay contains its own world of experience and complexity, and each can be read on its own merits, it is the collection of these worlds—as they work in synergy, contradict, and unsettle one another—that produces complexities and ambiguities to challenge our thinking and received ideas. And so, by drawing attention to and historicizing some of the polemics that hum in the background of this book, and by providing a suggestive road map to interpretation, I aim neither to explain nor to clarify the contents, but rather to make legible the contradictions and ambivalences at the heart of A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean. References to relevant scholarship are provided along the way, should the reader wish to delve more deeply into a given history, terminological debate, or literary quarrel.’

THE MUSLIM MEDITERRANEAN: A PLACE, AN IDEA

The Mediterranean is said to contain a multiplicity of worlds; it is, to borrow a familiar trope, a “mosaic” of cultures. Yet despite the fact that from the Middle Ages until the sixteenth century the majority of world Jewry lived in the Mediterranean basin, the region is not always readily associated with Jews and Judaism.’ Of course, many readers will be aware of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, which led to the dispersion of some two hundred thousand Spanish Jews across North Africa and the Ottoman empire. However, the history of Jewish presence in the region prior to the expulsion is perhaps less well known. Indeed, the countries in question—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey—all lay claim to Jewish communities whose existence predated the common era. In North Africa, Jewish settlements in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia can be traced to the Roman Empire (27 BCE), predating even the Muslim conquest of the region in the seventh century. At the very beginning of the common

8. A list of further reading, including scholarship and creative work available in English translation, is provided at the end of this volume, in an appendix organized by country.

9. See Jane Gerber, “History of the Jews in the Middle East and North African from the Rise of Islam until 1700,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, eds. Reeva Spector Simon et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 3-5. See also Georges Bensoussan, Juifs en pays arabes, le grand déracinement 1850-1975 (Paris: Tallandier, 2012), 41.

XViii INTRODUCTION era, Anatolia (whose borders resembled those of modern-day Turkey) was known as a haven for Byzantine and Hellenistic Jews. In Biblical times, the world’s most ancient Jewish communities were found in Egypt and the Levant.

For centuries, then, Jews constituted a robust minority in the broad swathe of territory identified here as the Muslim Mediterranean. Their dim visibility in the region is thus a complex phenomenon.” Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews of Muslim lands lived as dhimmis, or protected non-Muslim subjects." Dhimma status ensured that Jews were guaranteed some protections, including the freedom to practice their religion, but they were nevertheless subjected to a number of discriminatory regulations (including specific taxation and laws governing their clothing). At the same time, in many places, Jewish communities were granted a significant degree of autonomy and permitted to preserve their own courts. While some Jews experienced poverty and other forms of marginalization, they were never prohibited from practicing the professions of their choice, and Jews became active participants in commerce, spoke multiple languages, including Arabic, and were key figures in the scientific, intellectual, and cultural achievements of the Golden Age of Islam.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the populations of Jews in Muslim lands had decreased sharply and, by the nineteenth century, the center of gravity of the Jewish world had been firmly repositioned in Europe.” Today, in demographic terms, Ashkenazim (the Jewish subgroup that settled in central and eastern Europe in the Middle Ages) make up three-quarters of world Jewry; their stories have tended to dominate those of the Sephardim (Jews from the Iberian peninsula) and Mizrahim (“eastern” Jews—or Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia).

The story of Jewish childhood in a place called the “Muslim Mediterranean” thus requires a backstory about a particular region of the world and the history of Jewish existence therein. The Mediterranean is, to state the obvious, a body of water—technically a sea but so nearly landlocked as to have been baptized “the

10. For more on the long history of Jews and the Mediterranean, see Fred Astren, “Jews, in A Companion to Mediterranean History, eds. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (Chichester/ Malden/Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.): 392-408. See also Mattias B. Lehman and Jessica Marglin, “Jewish History in the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean in Jewish History,’ in Introduction to Jews and the Mediterranean, eds. Lehman and Marglin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020): 1-29.

1u. Dhimmi means “protected person? Dhimma status is an historical feature of Muslim law that offered certain forms of protection to “people of the book” (namely, Jews and Christians) living in Islamic lands. While dhimmis had fewer rights than Muslims, the existence of this category nonetheless provided guarantees of some state protections.

12. See Gerber, 18; Astren, 403; and Norman A. Stillman’s preface to The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979). The displacement of the center of world Jewry from the Mediterranean to Europe is reflective of the general shifts that accompanied the Mediterranean’s decline as a center of the global economy and the rise in standing of Europe as a dominant, imperial world power.

INTRODUCTION xix inner sea” (mediterraneus is Latin for inland), and nicknamed, by different peoples 2213 6 at different points in history, “the middle sea” or “the inland sea.” “Mediterranean” is also the proper name given to the region composed of twenty-one countries that have coastline along that sea, and thus it unifies territories that are linguistically, culturally, and politically diverse. It is a place that has long been a site of exchange, encounter, conflict, and conquest." And of course, “Mediterranean,” as an adjective, has come to be identified in contemporary parlance with a certain kind of lifestyle made possible by a particular climate and geography."

Notwithstanding the relative ease with which one can identify the place on a map, and despite the dominant imagery it conjures, the Mediterranean is complex, and the use of the term—even as a toponym—nearly always seems to point up problematic amalgams or omissions that require further explanation. The Mediterranean exceeds its meaning as a delineated geographical area and resists its reputation in the popular imagination as a place of “Sea, Sex and Sun” (as French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg crooned), or its construction as one big neighborhood where neighbors pass olive oil from one balcony to the next (as the francophone Algerian writer Maissa Bey lamented).'* It has come to be understood as a symbolic space, an idea, a construct, and as a site of scholarly inquiry.

Scholarship, particularly since the publication of Fernand Braudel’s foundational work La Méditerrannée in 1949, has done a great deal of work to establish the Mediterranean as a unitary category of analysis while also unsettling notions of regional cohesiveness.” In the past twenty years, “Mediterranean’—as a new

13. See New World Encyclopedia, “Mediterranean Sea,’ https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org /entry/Mediterranean_Sea.

14. Countries and regions officially considered part of the Mediterranean include Europe (Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia- Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Greece); Asia (Turkey, Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel); Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco). Noncontiguous countries (such as Portugal and Serbia) are often grouped together with “the Mediterranean,’ even though they do not touch the sea; they are understood as sharing in a similar climate, flora and fauna, and cultural affinities.

15. Here, we might think of the “Mediterranean diet,’ fusion music, and even the origins of the resort chain Club Med, conceived as “vacation colonies” situated in Spain and Italy.

16. The bad boy of French chanson Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) sang about the “Med” in his hit single “Sea, Sex, and Sun” (1978). In her preface to the collection “Pourquoi la méditerranée?” (Why the Mediterranean?), written for a collection of transcribed radio interviews with French-language authors from the Mediterranean, Algerian writer Maissa Bey articulates a certain skepticism about the grouping: “One might wonder why writers are brought together in a collection based on the mere fact that they are neighbors and that they could, from one shore to another, one balcony to another, pass each other the salt and the pepper, and above all that they could pass each other the olive oil so dear to the hearts of all Mediterranean people, and which guarantees their health and longevity? In La langue francaise vue de la Méditerranée, eds. Patrice Martin and Christophe Drevet (Léchelle, France: Zellige, 2009), 7. [Our translation. ]

17. Braudel’s magnum opus was the first to conceive of the “inner sea” as a principal actor in history. His work would set the stage for numerous key concepts in the social sciences, including the idea of la longue durée and the importance of geography to the study of history, politics, and

XX INTRODUCTION

“area studies” subject and as a heuristic tool—has become a major trend in the Humanities, no doubt in part because of its natural affinity with interdisciplinarity. This is perhaps most obvious and fruitful in Medieval Studies, where historians and literary scholars trained in national paradigms have found common ground in the Mediterranean as a proto-national, multilingual space. But it has also found purchase in Postcolonial Studies and its subfields, insofar as the deployment of the Mediterranean—understood in its capacity to “displace the nation as the default category of analysis”!*—offers a welcome alternative to worn binaries such as metropole/colony, north/south, center/periphery.°

If the cohesion offered by the Mediterranean concept has both intellectual and disciplinary advantages, the region’s plurality and fragmentation are legendary and cannot be discounted.” After all, the area is home to some of history’s most intractable ethnic conflicts—between Greeks and Turks; Turks and Armenians; Jews and Arabs; and among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. Given the multiple worlds contained within the Mediterranean—the Arab world and divisions thereof (the Mashreq, the Maghreb);”! the Middle East and its contested territories; Europe (the meridional Europe of Spain, Italy, and Greece, but also France, with its dual claims to “northern reason” and “southern passion” )—it stands to reason that while “Mediterranean” functions as an efficient unifier, critical discussion of it necessitates a qualifying term. Hence, in both political discourse and academic work, we economics. See The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (Oakland: University of California Press, 1995).

18. Sharon Kinoshita, “Mediterranean Literature,’ in Horden and Kinoshita, 314.

19. Numerous literary scholars, in particular, have heralded the usefulness of the Mediterranean as an alternative category of analysis. See Claudia Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013); Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature Across the Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); and Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis, eds. yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).