Recipient Rebekah Vince, Queen Mary University of London
Date 01 October, 2023
Amount £20,000
Summary In response to Ghaddafi’s call for Jewish return to Arab countries, Franco- Tunisian anticolonial writer Albert Memmi famously stated, ‘We would have liked to be Arab Jews’ (1974). In view of recent attacks at the Jewish El Ghriba festival in Tunisia, there is an urgent need to trace colonial legacies and histories of marginalisation across North Africa and France, revitalising Arab-Jewish heritage for future generations. This project explores troubled memories and forgotten futures, with an examination of the collection of autobiographical essays A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (2023). Through an analysis of the ‘atopical’ Franco-Libyan Jewish writer Aldo Naouri and Franco-Tunisian Jewish historian Sophie Bessis as postcolonial pariah, it offers alternative perspectives on the Arab Jew, in relation to transgenerational Maghribi heritage. Building on the collection A Jewish Childhood, the proposed writing workshops will lead to a co-edited volume of autobiographical texts by French Jewish women of Tunisian descent.