Jews of the Arab World, why did they leave? Albert Memmi's lessons

Conference delivered during the first session of the colloquium “Jews of the Arab world, why did they leave? » at Paris' Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme (Museum of Art and History of Judaism /mahJ).
Session entitled “An impossible narrative? », chaired by Colette Zytnicki, professor emeritus at the University of Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès.
On the occasion of the symposium “Jews of the Arab world, why did they leave? », I discussed the answers given by the writer Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, to this essential question for him. The Jewish condition in the Maghreb occupied his thoughts since the 1930s, and his diary bears witness to the tension born of his multiple loyalties, between support for Tunisian independence, commitment in favor of Jewish national liberation and adherence to French culture. This was already what "The Pillar of Salt", the first novel which was the matrix of all his work, was about. But Memmi was led to directly address the issue of the departure of Jews from the Arab world when their history was used for propaganda purposes against Israel.
In 1973, Albert Memmi responded directly to Muammar Gaddafi, visiting Paris for the signing of an arms contract, who called on the Jews settled in Israel to "go home", and affirmed that they had always lived in peace. in the Arab world before the birth of Zionism.
Facing with Gaddafi and his false instrumentalization, Memmi insists on the massacres, oppression, fear and bullying experienced by Jews in Arab countries. Although legitimate, his response is not exempt from generalizations, and contributes to the construction of a counter-narrative.
In reaction to the instrumentalization of the myth of the idyllic life of the Jews in the land of Islam to deny Israel's right to exist, a counter-myth thus emerges presenting their history as a long oppression punctuated by massacres and completed by widespread deportation.
A derivative or corollary of this counter-narrative, the story of the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced to leave Arab countries is instrumentalized in reverse to deny the Palestinians' right to a state, on the pretext that these "forgotten refugees" would settle the balance of refugees.
Although he was one of the first to respond to the false manipulation of the history of the Jews of the Arab world, Albert Memmi always refused to sacrifice the rights of the Palestinians in the name of those of his group, and was a supporter of the "Peace Now" movement since its inception.
Without losing sight of their polemical narrative of 1973, I have tried to return to the events, the reasons and the circumstances of the departure of the Jews from Tunisia as they were experienced and analyzed in real time by Memmi, thanks to the study of his diary edited by Guy Dugas (CNRS editions, 2021).
In May 1941, the young Memmi, barricaded in his home with his family, recounts in his diary a night of anguish awaiting a pogrom, terror having seized the Jews of Tunis after seven Jews were murdered. in Gabès, including a ten-year-old girl.
Memmi will insist later on the role played by the "collective memory" of the Jews of the Maghreb in their departure, the political instability accompanying independence having reactivated in them a fear of explosions of anti-Jewish violence based on numerous family stories.
His diary from 1956 offers a dive into the struggles of Memmi and his Jewish interlocutors over the coming independence. Go or stay? The question is on everyone's mind, and the catastrophic situation of the Egyptian Jews is on everyone's mind.
Its reading shows in particular that the departure of the Jews from the Arab world was experienced and thought about by themselves in a collective way, the dramatic fate of the Jews of Egypt giving birth among the Tunisian Jews, despite being spared from the violence, the fear of a similar fate.
Albert Memmi, who had actively supported the independence of Tunisia but whom political events, small phrases as well as great history, persuaded that there was no place for him, embodies like no other the heartbreak of this departure .
The entire conference can be watched on the mahJ's TH-cam channel:
shorturl.at/xG015
Thanks to Claire Marynower, Guy Dugas and Hervé Sanson.

[@oliviermarron]

Trop long. Trop plein.
Il faut procéder autrement en communication. Sinon c'est de la transmission brute.
Surtout quand il y a une telle charge émotionnelle.
C'est dommage car les 4 premières minutes étaient intéressantes.

[@becomepostal]

C’est pourtant contraint en temps, et justement c’est expliqué dès le début. Sinon on peut changer le rythme de lecture.

[@ASLIOL]

Merci pour ce récit, beaucoup de tunisiens ont reproché aux tunisiens de confessions juives leurs rapprochement coopération avec la France coloniale, la création de l état d Israël sur les terres arabes n' a pas arrangé les.choses. ma grand mère m'a toujours raconté beaucoup de bien des juifs à la Goulette, bab El khadhra, la Fayette. Et ce qu ils ont subi de la part de certains tunisiens avides d argent.. Je garde néanmoins l Espoir d un monde où toutes les personnes seront respectées pour ce qu'elles sont . Mais ce monde est encore loin hélas