Introduction
1. Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 165, highlights how Memmi combines these oppositions in his identity. The quote is from Lia Nicole Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), xv.
2. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), xvi.
3. Edmond Jouve, ed. Albert Memmi, prophète de la décolonisation (Paris: SEPEG International, 1993).
4. Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 13, 242, 259.
5. Jonathan Judaken, “Introduction: Rethinking Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 123, no. 4 (October 2018): 1133. Memmi coined the term heterophobia as more expansive than racism or anti-Semitism, since historically these have focused on biological differences rather than cultural, social, or other differences. In doing so, he suggests, “Instead of speaking of anti-Semitism, which is manifestly imprecise, one might employ the term Judeophobia, which clearly signifies both fear and hostility toward Jews. The same can be said for Negrophobia and Arabophobia.” He also encourages using ethnophobia for the exclusion of whole groups as preferable to xenophobia, since the latter tends to refer only to foreigners. See Albert Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: 2000; original French ed., 1982), 117–121, quote on 119.
6. In 1984 Guy Dugas undertook something similar with an overview of Memmi’s work and selections from his texts in Albert Memmi: Écrivain de la déchirure (Québec: Éditions Naaman, 1984).
7. For the best biographical overview of Memmi’s life, see Guy Dugas, Albert Memmi: du malheur d’être juif au bonheur sépharade (Paris: Alliance israélite universelle/Nadir/Fondation du judaïsme français, 2001). For an extended reflection on the hara in shaping Memmi’s work, see Philippe Barbé, “Jewish-Muslim Syncretism and Intercommunity Cohabitation in the Writings of Albert Memmi: The Partage of Tunis,” trans. Alan MacVicar in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, ed., Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 107–127. For how it is represented in Memmi’s fiction, see Majid El Houssi, Albert Memmi: l’aveu, le plaidoyer (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2004), 45–56.
8. The Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) is a Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 to fight for Jewish rights around the world. The AIU established French-language schools throughout the Mediterranean. See André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine: 1860–1960 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862–1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). See also the essays by Jonathan G. Katz, Joy A. Land, and Keith Walters in Emily Gottreich and Daniel Schroeter, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
9. Albert Memmi, “Growing Up as a Minority Child,” in this volume.
10. On the impact of these laws and the uneven ways in which they were applied, see Michel Abitbol, Les juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983); Michael M. Laskier, “Between Vichy Antisemitism and German Harassment: The Jews of North Africa during the Early 1940s,” Modern Judaism 11, no. 3 (October 1991): 343–369; Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 55–83; Daniel J. Schroeter, “Between Metropole and French North Africa: Vichy’s Anti-Semitic Legislation and Colonialism’s Racial Hierarchies” and Daniel Lee, “The Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives in Tunisia and the Implementation of Vichy’s Anti-Jewish Legislation,” in The Holocaust and North Africa, ed. Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 19–49, 132–145.
11. Paul Sebag, Histoire de juifs de Tunisie des origins à nos jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), 245.
12. Lee, “The Commissariat Général,” 135.
13. Abitbol, Les juifs d’Afrique, 137.
14. Albert Memmi, The Stationary Nomad, in this volume.
15. Denise Brahimi, “Agar, un essai de devoilement” in Albert Memmi, écrivain et sociologue: Actes du colloque de Paris X-Nanterre 15 et 16 mai 1988, ed. Jean-Yves Guérin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), 49–59; Afifa Marzouki, Agar d’Albert Memmi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007).
16. Albert Camus, “Preface to The Pillar of Salt,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 16.
17. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008; orig. ed. 1952), chap. 1.
18. Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, in this volume. On this theme, see Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensa (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
19. On Sartre’s anticolonialism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. A. Haddour, S. Brewer, and T. McWilliams (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le tiers monde: Rhétorique d’un discours anticolonialiste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Jonathan Judaken, “Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and ‘the New Racism,’” in Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 23–53; Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Verso, 2010).
20. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, by Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1977; orig. ed. 1948); Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, Massachusetts Review 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1964–65): 13–52.
21. Audre Lorde famously denied this is possible in her article “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), 98–101.
22. Sartre, “Orphée noir/Black Orpheus,” xiv, 18.
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Portrait du colonisé précédé de portrait du colonisateur, by Albert Memmi (Paris: Payot, 1973; orig. ed. 1957); Jean-Paul Sartre, introduction to The Colonizer and the Colonized, by Albert Memmi, trans. Howard Greenfeld (New York: Beacon Press, 1991; orig. ed. 1965), xxv.
24. Sartre, introduction, xxiii-xxiv. On Sartre’s critique of Memmi, see Jonathan Judaken, “Race and Existentialism: The Dialectic from Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’ to Memmi’s Racism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 276–278.
25. Important explorations of privilege as a concept can be found in Paula S. Rothenberg, ed., White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York: Worth Publishers, 2012) and Michael Monohan, “The Concept of Privilege: A Critical Appraisal,” South African Journal of Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2014): 73–83.
26. Albert Memmi, “Does the Colonial Exist?” in this volume.
27. As a secularist, Memmi calls for the secularization of Judaism. As Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz helpfully point out, secularization entails several discrete processes, all of which Memmi advocates at different points: “the transformation of religious symbols, practices, and gatherings into cultural, political or social ones; the establishment of legal separation between state and religious authority; the broader differentiation of religion from a set of spheres often understood in the West as strictly ‘secular,’ such as politics, education, and science; and, relatedly, the increasing privatization of religion through its confinement to nonpublic spaces.” His increasing calls for these projects make him an advocate for secularism, or what is termed in France laïcité. On these distinctions, see Ari Joskowicz and Ethan Katz, introduction to Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1–21, quote on 7.
28. Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, in this volume.
29. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1995; orig. ed. 1946), 69.
30. On Sartre’s support for Zionism, see Jonathan Judaken, “On Ambivalent Commitments,” chap. 6 in Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). For the controversy Sartre’s Zionism aroused in the Arab world, see also Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
31. For a useful mapping of the differing types of Zionism, see Gil Troy’s “Introduction: How Zionism’s Six Traditional Schools of Thought Shape Today’s Conversation,” in The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2018), xxvii–lix.
32. Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75.
33. Judith Morganroth Schneider, “Albert Memmi and Alain Finkielkraut: Two Discourses on French Jewish Identity,” Romantic Review 81, no. 1 (January 1990): 130–36; Seth L. Wolitz, “Imagining the Jew in France: From 1945 to the Present,” Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 119–134; Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Critical Reflections: Self-Portraiture and the Representation of Jewish Identity in French,” in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1995), 103–108; Judaken, Sartre and the Jewish Question, 265–68.
34. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 121–131.
35. See Robert Bernasconi, “The Impossible Logic of Assimilation,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 37–49.
36. Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, in this volume.
37. On Arendt’s elucidation of the tradition of the conscious pariah, see Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 275–297.
38. On the École de Paris, see for example Stanley Meisler, Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). For a good compendium showing the vitality of modern Jewish philosophy in France, see Sarah Hammerschlag, Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018).
39. See Doris Bensimon, “Albert Memmi et la Libération du Juif,” in Guérin, Albert Memmi: Écrivain et sociologue, 93.
40. Albert Memmi, “A Total Revolt,” in this volume.
41. Memmi’s basic argument was first sketched in his review of David Caute’s Frantz Fanon and Peter Geismar’s Fanon, titled “Frozen by Death in the Image of Third World Prophet” in the New York Times Book Review (March 14, 1971). On the reception of Fanon after his death, see David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2001), chap. 1.
42. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (1991): 457–70. On Memmi, Fanon, and the Jew, see Bryan Cheyette, “Diaspora and Colonialism: Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and the Cosmopolitan Jew,” in Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 43–77.
43. Albert Memmi, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” trans. Thomas Cassiser and G. Michael Twomey, Massachusetts Review 14, no. 1 (Winter, 1973): 9–39.
44. Albert Memmi, “A Tyrant’s Plea,” in this volume.
45. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
46. Albert Memmi, “The New Slaves,” in this volume.
47. Memmi declares that this defines his position in Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1975), 11. Denis Charbit maintains that Memmi was the first to use the term “Arab-Jew,” but this is not correct since the term goes back to the early twentieth century. See his “Albert Memmi, or the Reconciliation of Identities,” in A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, trans. Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 589. On the construct of the Arab Jew, see Emily Benichou Gottreich, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 433–451 and the paired article Lital Levy, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the ‘Mashriq,’” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 452–469, as well as Lital Levy’s synthesis “The Arab Jew Debates: Media, Culture, Politics, History,” Journal of Levantine Studies 7, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 79–103.
48. Albert Memmi, “The Arab Nation and the Israeli Thorn,” in this volume.
49. This paper was originally delivered to the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 1972 with several Israeli leaders in attendance. The quotes from it are from the excerpt included in this reader.
50. While its critics see post-Zionism as an assault on the Israeli state, the scholars and writers who adopted this mantle are critical of the myths that underpin the Zionist narrative of Israel and Palestine. See Postzionism: A Reader, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
51. Among the important studies of Memmi’s literature not cited elsewhere in this introduction see also Nathalie Saba, Les paradoxes de la judéïté dans l’oeuvre d’Albert Memmi (Paris: Edilivre-Aparis, 2008).
52. His two novels not excerpted here are Le Pharaon (The Pharaoh, 1988), a tale about the final days before Tunisian independence, and Térésa et autres femmes (Teresa and Other Women, 2004), a novel of interconnected short stories.
53. On Memmi and the topoi of “writing back” in anticolonial and postcolonial literature, see Lia Brozgal, “Writing Back to Whom? Novel Strategies of Ambiguity and the ‘Mark of the Plural,’” chap. 2 in Against Autobiography. On the dual approach of Memmi’s fiction as both counternarrative to French literature and demarcating what is novel in Maghrebi literature, see Judith Roumani, Albert Memmi (Philadelphia: Celfan, 1987), 6.
54. Roumani, Albert Memmi, 6.
55. Joëlle Strike, Albert Memmi: Autobiographie et autographie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 21–126.
56. David Mendelson, “Albert Memmi ou l’entrée du ‘Scorpion’ dans le ‘labyrinthe’ du post-moderne” in Lire Albert Memmi: Déracinement, exil, identité, ed. David Ohana, Claude Sitbon, and David Mendelson (Paris: Éditions Factuelles, 2002), 167–184.
57. See Albert Memmi’s Author’s note in The Scorpion, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1971). See also L’Écriture colorée ou je vous aime en rouge: Essai sur une dimension nouvelle de l’écriture (Paris: Éditions Périple, 1986).
58. Isaac Yetiv, “Du Scorpion au Désert: Albert Memmi Revisited,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 7, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 77–87.
59. Commentary on the novel includes Dalia Kandiyoti, “The Possibilities of History: The Desert and North African Jewish Identity,” European Legacy 1, no. 4 (1996): 1452–58; Lia Nicole Brozgal, “Blindness, the Visual, and Ekphrastic Impulses: Albert Memmi Colours in the Lines,” French Studies 64, no. 3 (2010): 317–28; and Afifa and Samir Marzouki, Individu et communautés dans l’œuvre littéraire d’Albert Memmi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), chap. 8.
60. Judith Roumani, “Translator’s Introduction : The Desert as Folktale, Chronicle, and Biography” in The Desert, trans. Judith Roumani (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), xiii-xxxvi.
61. Yetiv, “Du Scorpion au Désert,” 85–6.
62. Brozgal, Against Autobiography, 7. See Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, “Introduction to Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction,” in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003), 1–14.
63. See Catherine Dechamp-Le Roux, ed. Figures de la dépendance autour d’Albert Memmi: Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991).
64. Albert Memmi, “La dépendance à l’art,” in Penser à vif : de la colonisation à la laïcité, 1941–2002, ed. Hervé Sanson (Paris: Non Lieu, 2017), 201.
65. Albert Memmi, Dependence: A Sketch for a Portrait of the Dependent, trans. Philip A. Facey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 76.
66. David Ohana, “Réflexions sur l’essai d’Albert Memmi: Le racisme” in Lire Albert Memmi: Déracinement, exil, identité (Paris: Éditions Factuel, 2002), 29–38; Pierre-André Taguieff, “Réflexions sur la théorie du racisme et la nouvelle question antiraciste,” in Guérin, Albert Memmi: Écrivain et sociologue, 99–138.
67. Albert Memmi, “An Attempt at a Definition,” in this volume.
68. Albert Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22.
69. Memmi, Racism, 195.
70. Albert Memmi, “Racism and Colonization,” in this volume.
71. Albert Memmi, “Treatment,” in this volume.
72. Memmi, “Treatment,” in this volume.
73. Keally McBride discusses a lot of this critical reception in “Albert Memmi in the Era of Decolonization,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 50–66.
74. Daniel Gordon, “Telling the Whole Truth,” Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2018): 29–32.
75. Françoise Vergès, review of Decolonization and the Decolonized, by Albert Memmi, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 3 (2007), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/230170.
76. Catherine Déchamp-Le Roux, “De l’expérience vécue à l’universel,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 17–36.
77. Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, in this volume.
78. See Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
79. Dugas, Albert Memmi: du malheur d’être juif, 13–14.
80. Debra Kelly, “How to Live? One Question and Six or Seven Life Lessons with Albert Memmi,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2011): 67–95, quote on 68.
81. Albert Memmi, “Passport for a Hoped Immortality,” in this volume.
1. Biographical Reflections
1. Kabyle is a Berber dialect spoken by the ethnic group of the same name.
2. Patri was one of many French intellectuals who saw Leon Trotsky’s vision of communism as an alternative path to maintaining a broad international Marxist movement in the face of Stalin’s authoritarian leadership in the Soviet Union.
3. Kibbutz here refers to the small farming collectives in Israel. In Memmi’s youth these were the main sites of Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, predating the founding of the Israeli state.
4. Éditions Gallimard, one of France’s most prestigious publishers, went on to publish most of Memmi’s most important works.
5. These were each among the most prominent, independently minded journals in postwar France.
6. Along with Césaire, Senghor was a poet, politician, and theorist and a cofounder of the Négritude movement, which sought to celebrate black culture and history.
7. André Malraux was a novelist and writer who served as Charles de Gaulle’s minister of information (1945–1946) and as the minister of cultural affairs during de Gaulle’s presidency (1959–1969). De Gaulle was a French general, leader of the French Resistance during World War II, chair of the provisional government of the French Republic from 1944–1946, founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and president until his resignation in 1969.
8. In May 1968, student rebellion in the universities in France led to the largest strikes in French history, ultimately ushering in a new era in French politics and culture.
9. Roughly translated as the new “Constitutional Liberal Party,” this version is also known as the Neo-Destour Party to contrast with the initial version of the party referenced subsequently by Memmi as Old Destour. Members of the Neo-Destour Party emerged as the leaders of Tunisian independence following World War II.
10. Rally of the French People, the party of Charles de Gaulle.
11. Upon arriving in France in the immediate aftermath of the war, Memmi had a significant encounter with the Jewish writer and thinker Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), to whom he would make frequent references, notably in The Liberation of the Jew (1966).
12. Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, the main character of the novel.
13. This crisis was caused by a decision by Nasser, in July 1956, to nationalize the Suez Canal, which until then had been largely dependent upon Franco-British capital, and to freeze the assets of the multinational company that was operating it. What followed was an international crisis that led to war that autumn between Egypt, backed by the USSR, and the combined armies of France, Great Britain, and Israel. It took American intervention to bring the hostilities to an end.
14. This refers to de Gaulle’s November 27, 1967, speech announcing an arms embargo as a result of the Six-Day War in June in which he stated that “the Jews, hitherto dispersed . . . had remained what they had always been, in other words, an elite people, sure of itself and domineering.” This phrase was taken by many as breaking the post-Holocaust taboo on anti-Jewish discourse when it was uttered by the symbol of the French Resistance.
2. The Pillar of Salt
1. The Alliance school refers to the Alliance israélite universelle, a Paris-based Jewish-rights organization that sponsored schools in France and throughout the Mediterranean.
2. A prominent nineteenth-century Romantic poet, novelist, and playwright.
3. The followers of Charles de Gaulle, who led the Resistance, known as Free French Forces.
4. Colonizer and Colonized
1. Literally “black feet,” pied-noir is used as a designation for Europeans born in the French colonies during French rule.
5. Portrait of a Jew
1. Anti-Semite and Jew.
2. AM: I will not belabor this somewhat surprising slip of the pen, [ . . . ] to which we are hardly accustomed in Sartre’s work, where he writes about traits that “penetrate to the marrow.” This would suggest that the Jew corresponds somehow to the description given by the anti-Semite. When we see that Sartre has already added his voice and given of his time to defend Jewish causes, we might conclude that what we have here is a philosopher who has fallen victim to his own system.
3. Mellah is most commonly associated with the Moroccan Jewish experience and refers to the sections of Arab cities, often walled, where Jews lived, making them analogous to European ghettos.
4. Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982) founded the World Jewish Congress.
5. Here Memmi means the myth of host desecration, that Jews’ ritually reenact their murder of Christ by stealing and then desecrating the sacramental bread used in the Christian ritual of communion.
6. Here Memmi refers to the blood-libel myth, that Jews would kidnap Christian children, murder them, and then use their blood for ritual purposes.
7. A 1959 prize-winning novel about the significance of the Holocaust set within a longer history of Jewish persecution within Christian societies.
6. The Liberation of the Jew
1. As depicted in The Pillar of Salt, this was one of the French high schools mostly attended by Europeans.
2. Arnold Toynbee argued that Jewish civilization continued to exist as a relic of an ancient culture.
3. In medieval Spain and Portugal, a Jew who accepted Christianity to avoid persecution but continued to practice Judaism in secret.
4. A nationalist organization with fascist overtones active during the interwar period.
5. A medical condition characterized by semiparalysis.
6. Most likely this refers to his work I and Thou. Memmi worked on French translations of Buber during his initial studies in Paris.
7. Dominated Man
1. AM: I was finishing this introductory text when the news arrived of the assassination of Malcolm X. It will very surely be said that he had preached violence too often not to fall a victim to it himself. But why did he resort to violence? The violence of the oppressed is a mere reflection of the violence of the oppressor. By his death Malcolm X is not signing an admission of error or defeat, but confirming, unhappily, that oppression is an infernal machine, and that from the bond between oppressor and oppressed there is no escape.
2. Memmi wrote the introduction to the French translation of Baldwin’s most famous book, The Fire Next Time (see the third selection in this chapter).
3. Here Memmi refers to his previous critique of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew.
8. The Scorpion
1. Memmi here references various strands of the Jewish rabbinic tradition.
2. A tenth-century Tunisian scholar and, according to legend, a founder of the city of Tunis.
9. Jews and Arabs
1. AM: The term Jewish Arabs or Arab Jews is not a very good one, of course. But I have found it convenient to use. I simply wanted to remind my readers that because we were born in these so-called Arab countries and had been living in those regions long before the arrival of the Arabs, we share their languages, their customs, and their cultures to an extent that is not negligible. So, if we stick to this legitimation! and not to arguments of force and numbers, we then have the same rights—no more, but no less—to the land as the Moslem Arabs. But we might note, in passing, that the term Arab is no more accurate, applied to such diverse populations, including those that call themselves and believe themselves Arabs. [ . . . ]
2. Habib Ben Ali Bourguiba was the leader of independent Tunisia from 1956 to 1987.
3. A renowned Jewish French historian, whose professional and personal life were shattered by the Holocaust and who devoted the last years of his life to fighting anti-Semitism, specifically its Christian roots in the Christian “teaching of contempt.”
4. The Algiers summit refers to a meeting of Arab heads of state in 1973. It concluded with a statement reaffirming the participants’ support for the Palestinian cause and opposition to Zionism.
5. This is a reference to the 1870 Crémieux Decree that made Algerian Jews, but not Moroccan or Tunisian Jews, French citizens.
10. The Desert
1. Memmi alludes to a section of The Scorpion.
13. Literary Reflections
1. French poet, novelist, and literary critic (1889–1961).
2. Jean Duvignaud was a French novelist, sociologist, and anthropologist (1921–2007).
3. Guy Le Clec’h was a French writer (1917–2005).
4. Jean-Louis Bory was a French writer, journalist, and film critic (1919–1979).
5. Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a Martiniquan, francophone postcolonial writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic.
6. The series was published by Éditions du Seuil.
7. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962), killed in the Algerian revolution, was known for novels such as The Poor Man’s Son.
8. Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) was one of the leading Algerian francophone authors, publishing more than thirty novels.
9. The renowned Moroccan author Driss Chraïbi (1920–2007).
10. Kateb Yacine (1929–1989) was an Algerian Berber writer.
11. Here Memmi refers to the colonial administrator Robert Arnaud (1873–1950), whose pseudonym was Robert Randau when he published his novels, and the writer Louis Bertrand (1866–1941).
12. Jean Pélégri (1920–2003), who was born in Algeria and left following the Algerian War, was best known for Les Oliviers de la Justice, which was made into a film.
14. Decolonization and the Decolonized
1. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was a traditionalist who opposed many of the Second Vatican Council reforms and openly supported authoritarian nationalists in France as well as the Spanish and Portuguese governments under Franco and Salazar. Jean-Marie Le Pen was the leader of the extreme-right National Front from 1972 to 2011.
2. Refers to the Buddhist monks who self-immolated to protest the South Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem regime’s treatment of Buddhists.