Dario Miccoli
A SEPHARDI SEA
JEWISH MEMORIES ACROSS THE MODERN MEDITERRANEAN
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780253062932
Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies Series, 222pp.
Reviewed by Judith Roumani1
This excellent book, consisting of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion, was something of an eyeopener for me. I had always thought of Sephardim as being somewhat landlubbers. With storms, pirates, plagues and seasickness, I did not think that they enjoyed their voyages across the Mediterranean. But of course it is a Sephardi Sea, as Miccoli correctly points out, with numerous generations crisscrossing, from Baghdad to Andalusia, from Spain to North Africa and Turkey and the other lands that were part of the Ottoman Empire. The French writer of Algerian origin, Albert Bensoussan, speaks of “notre longue déhanchement d’un port à l’autre de Méditerranée” [our longtime hopping from one Mediterranean port to the other]2 and this same concept underlies Miccoli’s book. Didier Nebot’s novel of the 1492 expulsion from Spain is a historical novel that also portrays a sea journey from Spain to Algeria, as the last surviving (non-converted) member of a persecuted Jewish family finds refuge in the Maghreb. As Miccoli correctly points out, with his photograph of the late Lucette Lagnado and her father on a ferry leaving Egypt, and other photographs, such as those of Algerian Jews leaving Algeria in 1962, these were not happy voyages. The New York writer Andre Aciman describes a Pesach seder in Egypt, on the eve of the family’s departure, where everyone felt depressed and no one was looking forward to leaving. It was the end of an era, a traumatic uprooting, for all the Sephardim on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Egypt. The end of a history of over two millennia, for many.
Dario Miccoli takes us to the next stage, showing how history has given way to memorializing, and the many ways that Sephardim, through cultural organizations, clubs, museums, events, and of course novels, films and memoirs, have managed in their new homes in Israel, North America and Europe to keep the memory alive. The first of his three chapters is devoted to writers. It includes, from Tunisia, Shoshana Boukhoubza, whose central character lives first in France, then makes Aliyah to Jerusalem, then returns to France, leaving her family there. She writes sensitively of the emotional and ideological issues raised, and Miccoli shows us how various characters (a series of boyfriends) encapsulate the character’s dilemmas, in a situation without easy resolutions. Despite the Aliyah, this chapter in Miccoli’s book is entitled “Writing Exile.” The same chapter deals with other Sephardi writers, from Libya and Egypt. When life in the old country was traumatic, or when the rupture from what is remembered as a kind of idyll is painful and unwanted, forgetfulness may intervene to muffle it, and forgetfulness itself is a kind of remembering. Just as, in the Bible, we are enjoined to remember to forget what Amalek did to us, and blot out his name. This chapter concentrates, with two writers from Libya, on the stories of Libyan Jews who were forced out in 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War, and who mostly moved to Rome and Milan. Already fluent in Italian, since Libya had been an Italian colony, the Libyan Jews are generally singled out as a successful immigration. However, they maintain their original North African culture in many ways, and have made their mark on Italian Jewish life. The author conceives of “Sephardi and Mizrahi identity as a polyphonic construct based in a Mediterranean (Jewish) history of ruptures and continuities that only can be reconstructed in a diachronic manner.” Moreover, and I think I share the same view, “these texts highlight the need to look at Jewish and Israeli literature in a comparative manner—paying attention to the existence of a multilingual Sephardi Diaspora of writers and intellectuals—that mirrors the complexity of these Jewish communities and their migrant identity” (both quotes from p. 25).
The second chapter discusses migrant associations, museums, and the internet, other ways of memorializing the past. In the immediate aftermath of the exiles, or exodus, associations were formed in the destination countries to represent the material needs of the Jewish immigrants or refugees, which included in some cases requests for reparations and for classification of the Jews as refugees by the United Nations. Such requests fell on deaf ears, and have mostly been abandoned over the half century or so, and now the goal of such associations is to preserve knowledge of the specific culture of Jews from southern Mediterranean countries among their new generations. Thus the emphasis now is on such aspects as music, history, and food. Museums have managed to preserve meaningful artefacts of the old country, to sponsor lectures or performances, or publications. Internet sites feature old photographs, and Facebook groups manage to keep communities together. Occasionally non-Jewish individuals who went to school with Jews, or otherwise shared their lives, or friendly Muslims who remember with pleasure their interactions with Jews, will participate on the Facebook pages, seeking out old friends from their youth. Nostalgia is the impetus here, and remembering happy times in a land of sunshine, where the problems of today did not yet exist. There were certainly other problems, but the pain and seriousness of them may have faded with time. Another matter, a much more serious one, is the idea of a virtual cemetery, by which Jews of North Africa, in their new homes, can memorialize those who were left behind in the Jewish cemeteries, which now (in a country like Libya) have been destroyed and no longer exist. Only now are such ideas being broached. Miccoli discusses how, to use the French terms, souvenirs (individual memories) become mémoire (collective memory), and lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) become noeux de mémoire (memory clusters).
Chapter 3 addresses “An Unfinished Present: Migrations of Sephardi and Mizrahi Memory.” Where does memory go from here? Miccoli writes that he focusses on the edges of memory, events and memories that may be viewed “as crossing the border between the history of the Jews of the Arab world and that of other groups, be they the Jews of Europe, Palestinians, or today’s Muslim migrants.” In a neat but questionable phrase, he analyses “the Holocaust as an absent past” for Jews of Arab lands, pointing out “the importance gained by the Holocaust as a global category of memory and the quintessential paradigm of trauma.” The Holocaust, though, was not absent from Arab lands and Iran: though attenuated, and of course far less so than among Ashkenazi communities, Middle Eastern Jews did suffer, with hundreds of victims caused by Nazi and Fascist influence in Iraq (the 1941 Farhud), Libya (deportations to Nazi camps in Europe, to camps in Tunisia and Algeria, and the Italian Fascist camp of Giado, and pogroms in 1945 and 1948) and Tunisia (six months of Nazi occupation, with harsh work camps and deaths).3 Turning to the present, Miccoli asserts that “over the last years, the juxtaposition of unnaturally fixed Arab and Jewish identity has become more and more common, standing in sharp contrast to the rather nuanced descriptions that often come out of memorial literature or individual memories” (the quotes in this paragraph so far are from pp. 120-122). Here again, Miccoli skillfully examines novels and films from these communities, such as the novel by Yossi Sucary, Benghazi--Bergen-Belsen (2013).4 Such a statement can only leave us to hope for a less rigid polarity sometime in the future.
This excellent and well-nuanced study of the evolution of memory among Sephardim and Mizrahim of the Mediterranean leads us to question and perhaps challenge the contrasts and differences between North and South, into which we have fallen over the last century , and to hope that some of these rigid categories might at some point become more relaxed. It is not too late for Sephardim, if willing, to contribute to the process, simply by reclaiming their own collective memory.
1 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons.
2 Albert Bensoussan, Frimaldjézar (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1976), p. 185.
3 On Libya and Tunisia, see the essay by Maurice Roumani in a recent issue of Sephardic Horizons.
4 Sephardic Horizons published an extract from this novel in 2014, before the publication of the full English translation. Readers might also like to refer to my own analysis in print, “Yossi Sucary’s Novel Benghazi-Bergen-Belsen, in the Context of North African Jewish Literature of the Holocaust,” in Jacques Roumani et al., eds., Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image ( Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018), pp. 226-243.