Khatibi and His Jews: Constructions of the Figure of the Jew in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Writings

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Aomar Boum. I am Associate Professor in Anthropology and Near

Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. In my

capacity as the director of the Mellon Program

on Minorities in the Middle East and North Africa at the Center

for Near Eastern Studies, it is my pleasure to welcome you

to our final talk of the quarter by

Professor Brahim El Guabli from Williams College

titled Khatibi and His Jews:

Constructions of the Figure of the Jew

in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Writings.

Mellon Minorities is a two-year pilot project

which aims to implement the first phase

of a larger curricular program

to transform Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA,

building towards designing a new

blueprint for pedagogy about the region.

This is our second and final year of workshops,

lectures, and faculty/ graduate student research group meetings.

We plan to organize an international

conference to explore the historical dynamics of

inter-communal conflict and contacts later in Fall 2021.

One of our key objectives is to further

curricular development at UCLA and beyond.

Our UCLA graduate students from different departments and disciplines

have been involved in the development of

modules and syllabi on the topic.

As an interdisciplinary project our

programmatic initiative approach,

the issue of minorities from the

perspective of the humanities and humanistic social sciences,

by considering histories, ethnographies, biographies,

works of fiction, and documentaries to help us

understand ethnic tensions and relations.

I want to acknowledge faculty and students

from different departments who have been

involved in this project

and huge thanks go to the Center for Near Eastern Studies

staff Johanna and Christian. With that

said, I would like to introduce today's speaker,

Dr. El Guabli.

Dr. El Guabli is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies

and Comparative Literature at Williams

College. Before, he joined Princeton

University where he earned an M.A in

Comparative Literature in 2016 and a PhD in 2018.

El Guabli has unique academic journey

that began with a bilingual teacher's diploma

in Arabic and French in 1999 at [...] college at [...]

Morocco.

Between 1999 and 2009 he served as a tenured

primary school teacher in the High Atlas mountain village while

pursuing a B.A. and a Maîtrise in applied foreign

languages in English and Arabic at Bordeaux III

University in France. Fluent in classical Arabic,

Darija, Berber, French, and English,

Dr. El Guabli taught Arabic, French and Berber

at the K through 12 and the university level.

In addition to teaching different levels

of Arabic language courses at Williams college,

Professor El Guabli has taught a variety of

topics in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern

cultures including Trauma and Memory: Saharan Imaginations,

Jews in Arabic Literature and Films, Transitional Justice Processes,

Translation, Current Events, Marxist

Leninist Movement, Afro-Arab Solidarities and

decolonization movements.

His research also covers areas of language politics,

human rights, transitional justice,

political violence, archive creation, memory studies, and

Amazigh and Berber literature. His articles

appeared in many journals and edited volumes.

He is the co-editor of two-volume

special issue of the Journal of North African Studies

entitled Violence and the Politics of

Aesthetics: a Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders

as well as the forthcoming anthology Lamalif,

a critical anthology of societal debate

in Morocco during the years of lead.

Professor El Guabli's first book manuscript

and review is titled Other-Archives: Jews, Berbers,

and Political Prisoners Rewrite the Post-1956 Moroccan Nation in

which he draws on new material in Arabic,

Berber, French and Moroccan colloquial Arabic

where he makes a novel argument about

the connections between cultural production, history, writing, and

citizenship in post-1999 Morocco. As a comparative literature

scholar, Dr. El Guabli uses prison narratives and other

literary writings to rethink and rewrite the post-colonial

political, cultural, and social dynamics of Morocco.

By focusing on literature, museums, art

and other different forms of

cultural production, Dr. El Guabli invites our Mellon group and

initiative of the MENA region to consider

understanding the place of minorities

in the region through literature. Please

join me in welcoming Dr. El Guabli.

Thank you Aomar for the generous

introduction. Um, thank you uh Christian and Johanna, my

thanks to um the Mellon uh Foundation

and then the Center for Near-Eastern

Studies for this uh invitation. I truly appreciate it.

Abdelkébir Khatibi is probably Morocco's most known

post-colonial theorist–

an essayist, novelist, and thinker whose

works have left a lasting

imprint on Francophone studies outside Morocco.

A native of the coastal city of El Jadida.

Khatibi studied sociology at the Sorbonne

before returning to Morocco in 1964

to join the Institute for Scientific

Research which is the equivalent of the

Center for Advanced Study.

In 1966 he became the Director of the

Institut de sociologie

where alongside anthropologist Paul

Pascon, he undertook the challenging task of decolonizing

and de-orientalizing sociology. However the

Moroccan state's wariness of the outcome

of the events of 1968 in France

pushed it to close the Institute of

Sociology in 1970, thus diminishing the possibility of

empirical sociological research.

As a result, Khatibi distanced himself

from this academic discipline

but he used this theory, he used its

theoretical tools to quote

captivate science visualized in social changes

in dress behavior, acculturation, and

mixing of languages end quote.

This shift to semiology and literary

writing was his wide open gate to

becoming an influential

critical figure in Francophone studies

particularly in the United States

and the UK. Despite the rich scholarship

that his multi-faceted oeuvre

elicited, Khatibi's intellectual trajectory

has yet to be historicized

within the internal dynamics of the

Moroccan years of lead and their impact on cultural production.

This period of state violence and

political repression between Morocco's independence in 1956

and the passing of King Hassan II in

shaped Khatibi's theoretical trajectory.

Reading Khatibi's shift from sociology to theory and literature

within this context reveals as much

about how theory goes uncensored

in upper shift on oppressive context as

it does about Khatibi himself. Khatibi's interest in identity,

languages, and minorities

could not be divorced from the larger

context of the departure of Moroccan Jews

and the sense of loss and void that

generations of Moroccans experienced as a result.

Thus contextualized Khatibi's work can be

read as a precursor to the development

of the full-fledged mnemonic literature,

which inspired by Aomar Boum's

ethnographic work on how Muslims remember Jews,

I have theorized as the sum of a

novelistic and literary output

probably produced by younger generations of Muslims

about departing Moroccan Jews. I argue that

the figure of the Jew in Khatibi's work

responded to various temporally situated needs

and reflected albeit in very subtle ways

the memory of loss was

replacing Jewish Muslim

intimacy in Morocco.

In this new configuration, the foreign

Jew, namely the one

who left the land of origins in Algeria and Egypt,

is an interlocutor whereas the local Jew

is an object of loss and a source of personal guilt.

Moreover similarly to George Simmel and

Edouard Glissant who respectively used the figure of the

Jew to discuss the stranger

and rhizomatic identity. Khatibi grappled

with the Jew as he was engineering

his conceptualizations of bi-langue

pensée-autre, fluid identity, and étranger professionnel.

Whether it is in his book Derrida, en effet

which is his response to the Derrida's

claim in the presence of Khatibi at the

conference convened at Louisiana State University in 1992

that he was the only, that he was the only

Franco uh Magribian attending the

conference or Le Même Livre,

the epistolary book he co-authored

with Jacques Hassoun

in 1985 for Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoureux,

a novel he published in 2003. The figure of the Jew,

both real and imagined, is central to the

process of ideation and concept creation in his oeuvre. This

Jew is then a frientimate.

This this Jew is then a frientimate,

a model for foreign, professional

foreigner and an object of

lament and ignorance. Delineating these

three different figures of the Jew in

Khatibi's literary and theoretical output lays bare the

contrast between Khatibi's highly intellectual

exchanges with European Jews of Arab

descent such as Derrida and Hassoun and his

silence over local Jews still living in Morocco and

opens a fitting space for the

examination of various ways

in which language, class, and identity

intersect in his intellectual project. First, the

Jew as a professional stranger.

The Jew in Khatibi's conceptualization is

a professional stranger.

A professional stranger is one who, instead of being

apprehensive of strangeness, develops a

capability of inhabiting multiple

languages and cultures.

Articulated in his books, Le Même Livre, Figures de l'étranger dans la littérature

française, Féerie d'un mutant, Le scribe et son ombre, the Jew is pivotal to the earliest

conceptualization of professional strangeness.

In a 1984 letter to Jacques Hassoun, he

stressed the fact that quote the Jew is always bilingual end quote,

adding that he knew many Arab Jews who

were named Jacques.

This means that in addition to learning

new languages, this constructed Jew has

the ability to accept other names, other cultures, other processes of

becoming in different contexts.

However it is not until 1987 that Khatibi

fleshed out this concept based on Viktor

Segalen's [...]. Drawing on [...] in

Figures de l'étranger Khatibi

defines the professional stranger as someone

who is always in a state quote of wandering

through the boundaries of countries, territories,

cultures, and dissidences, end quote.

Le Scribe et son ombre, his last book, Khatibi tells his readers quote

it happens that I introduce myself as a

Moroccan as well as a professional

stranger end quote.

To those who wondered what this job was

Khatibi says that he would

respond that a professional stranger is

quote not a job but a mobile position in the world

in which we are able to cross borders

between languages, civilizations, and markets.

The question then is whether Khatibi is

talking about all Jews or just a specific type of Jewish

experience.

In fact Khatibi's construct calls to mind

several of his intellectual friends

who represent a specific and situated Jewish experience.

Both Hassoun and Jacques Derrida feed this

description by straddling complex

identities.

On the one hand since Derrida's family is Sephardic Jews originally from

Toledo living in

Algiers had been granted France

citizenship with the Crémieux Decree of 1870.

Derrida himself grew up with French as

his language of citizenship

and not Arabic or Hebrew. On the other

hand, Hassoun, who was born and raised in

Egypt until he emigrated to France in his late teens

spoke Arabic and wrote proficiently in

both Arabic and Hebrew.

We can easily perceive how these

intellectuals fit Khatibi's definition of

a professional stranger.

They hail from elsewhere, speak French, have rich

and very linguistic heritages including

latent languages that are no longer used

and have a special openness to crossing intellectual

and physical boundaries. Professional

strangeness is not how we were

merely limited to mobility or the ability to live in

different languages and cultures.

In fact, it is also a critical

disposition in the world,

especially these are these sacred texts.

In this sense Khatibi presents

the Jew as someone who is quote endowed with reason

and freedom of the mind, end quote. Considering

Sigmund Freud a professional stranger

whose work revolutionized the reading of

sacred texts, Khatibi affirms that to desacralize

is to quote rationalize in a very

rigorous even intractable manner end quote.

In Le scribe et son ombre, he writes that quote the Muslim is

invited to share the line of thinking end quote

of the Jewish professional stranger.

This Jew that Muslims are called upon to

emulate carries within himself the weight of an

eccentric authority and of a truly

lived ethics. This is Khatibi's quote. To

further explain himself and the

significance of his identification with the

the figure of the Jew as a professional

stranger, Khatibi quotes the prophet Muhammad's famous

Hadith stating that

quote Islam has begun as something strange

and it shall return to being something

strange so give glad

tidings to the strangers end quote. Other than the

very obvious invitation to Muslims to

take this constructed Jew

as a role model for their attitude

vis-a-vis their world.

What specific connection between the

professional stranger and the hadith

that Khatibi wishes to underline is

difficult to grasp

or recognize. Instead of fleshing out the

significance he gives to these

connections between Islam,

professional strangeness, and the figure of the Jew,

Khatibi only stresses Islam's enigmatic celebration

of strangeness. Khatibi calls for Muslims to embrace

the professional strangeness of the Jew

including how the figure of the Jew reminds us

that both religions have had an

ambiguous historical relationship with foreigners.

As space opens up for encounter between

Islam and Judaism,

one way to reflect on this is to

underline that for Khatibi the figure of the Jew

provides the model of an open, generative,

and conflictual reading

of the sacred text that he calls upon

muslims to embrace.

Pushing this even further, Khatibi

asserts that quote we are all Jews in so far as we have

become readers of a book,

a prophetic book end quote. Jewishness is

neither a particularity nor a singularity

since the Jew exists in everyone who

believes in the sacred.

A further hint can be found in a letter

he sent Jacques Hassoun in 1983 quote,

what does it mean to be Jewish today if

not the end of the horizon of the book,

of a certain horizon that is in itself undefined

undefinable. To be Jewish is even is

even in the text beyond the book. That's

why there are as many exact

performative and external readings of

the book itself as there are Jews. The contradiction that

Khatibi was trying to resolve lay in the

way the sacred text

had taken over Muslim lives. Khatibi

affirms in a 1985 letter to Hassoun that quote

the Islamic body was donated, sacrificed

for the text end quote.

Around the same time he was

corresponding with uh with Hassoun,

Khatibi published Maghreb pluriel

in which he revisits this question of the body

sacrificed to god through the

hypostatized text of the triumvirate of the body, the text,

and law. Instead of the text surrendering itself

to the Muslim well as was probably the

case when Muslims praised foreigners to

shatter the accepted norms

of the pre-Islamic Arabia, Khatibi seems

to say that Muslims subjugated

themselves to the book.

Although cryptic, as was Khatibi's habit,

this phrasing helps to unravel

some of the reasoning that undergirds

happiness construction of the figure of

the Jew and its uses to uh to forge his

theoretical path. The Jew as a friendtimate

Le même livre is a collection about 50 of

about 50 letters that Khatibi and Hassoun

exchanged between 1980 and 1985.

The letters which covered many topics

were sent from Paris, [...]

Rabat, Cairo, Malta,

New York, and Tangier. Following the

mobility of the two authors around the globe, in the original

introduction to Le Même livre, Khatibi and Hassoun,

highlight that quote this book is an encounter or

rather the effect of an encounter. One of us who

was born in Alexandria, lives in Paris

and the other who was born on the shore of

the Atlantic in Al-Jadidah,

lives in Morocco end quote. In 2009 Khatibi revisits

this correspondence in these terms. Quote, [...]

and the writer published an

exchange of letters and cosign it,

what is the significance of this public

confidence. Who is it addressed to?

End quote. He goes on to add that this is a quite

atypical correspondence between two

intellectuals, one from an Alexandrine Jewish family

and the other from a Moroccan Muslim

family end quote.

In foregrounding the atypical nature of

this correspondence with Hassoun,

Khatibi alludes to its subversive

potential especially given that the letters were

destined to leave the private sphere and enter

the public domain up in publication.

The pioneering nature of Khatibi and

Hassoun's correspondence

captures the spirit of a growing

interest in Jewish Muslim relations.

By 1980 Identité idéologue an

association of Moroccan Jews living in France

had already published the

proceedings of a groundbreaking

conference that was held in Paris

on December 18 through December 21

1978 under the title Moroccan Jew,

Jewish Community, Cultural Life, Social History

and Evolution. Combining autobiographical

presentations with academic papers,

this conference was according to the

organizers, the first time Moroccan

academics of Muslim and Jewish origins including the ones

who moved to Israel came together for quote, a frank and

direct dialogue to tell each other not only how

they perceive each other

but also the sort of grievances they can

communicate to each other end quote.

Historians Ahmed [...], [...], Haim Zafrani

and [...] as well as political activist Joe Levy and linguist

and political figure Simon Levy

were part of the conference. Taking into

account this context Khatibi

and Hassoun were corresponding with each

other at the moment when Morocco was reconnecting with its

Jewish communities globally. However, the uniqueness of

Le Même livre is its focus on a public and

intellectual friendship that is situated

in a determined historical context. I

propose to call this correspondence an

indulgence in frientimacy,

an uncensored playful journey that takes

Khatibi and Hassoun

into their intellectual and personal

lives to nourish a writing project with deep

intellectual and political implications.

More than merely presenting

conversations between two

theorists who shared French Language as a medium of expression

and the mediterranean as a geopolitical

space, the epistles are an exercise in frientimacy

between Hassoun and Khatibi. Sociologist

Harry Blatterer defines intimacy

as quote a non-instrumental relationship of trust

based on affection, care, and respect.

Blatterer's relational conception of intimacy places

emphasis on positive sentiments, genuine

care for each other's well-being, and the

absence of instrumentality as cornerstones of intimacy. [...]

Jameson has revealed that intimacy is underlain by notions of

equality, the recognition of the intimate whole

personhood, and the elimination of boundaries

between the parties within an intimate relationship. Frientimacy is

therefore a relational subjectivity that is marked by heterogeneity

and involves uncomfortable discussions

of memory, class, guilt, and loss. Frientimacy

complicates our analysis of Khatibi's

uses of the figure of the Jew in his work.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in

productive play that aims to subvert notions of the

inherent and bridgeable difference. Khatibi's

and Hassoun's frientimacy blurs the

boundaries between the private

and the public. It started as an amitié

intellectuelle, intellectual friendship, but surpassed

its original intellectual focus over time.

Although their letters started an

intellectual endeavor to reflect on Jewish Muslim relations,

the Arabs and Jews, the situation in Palestine,

the failure of religion, and their

disillusionment with all divinities,

their intellectual friendship develops

into frienttimacy over time

and gates their correspondence closer to

home toward the end of their exchange.

For instance, Hassoun announces the

birth of his first granddaughter

while Khatibi informs him of his

marriage. Both Khatibi and Hassoun share

with each other their exhilaration and happiness about

things that were

happening in their lives as well as

complain to fatigue

as a result of intense writing and intellectual work.

As time passed, Khatibi and Hassoun shift

from using the formal "Vous" plural you in French

to the less formal "Tu" singular you in

French. Khatibi remarks, I have realized that our

correspondence is becoming more personal. We probably

have not been [...]

speaking freely in a language that's foreign to both

Hebrew and Arabic end quote. This

intimacy overcomes the guardedness

of their early correspondence and instigates a kind of

serious playfulness that does not

however disengage from the world as

shown for instance by the shift of their

conversations in 1982

to focus on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The professional stranger has no more

conceptually, I would argue, into a new

guide– the frientimate,

an intimate partner who shares the concern

of champion and difference. The frientimate

models professional strangeness through play and biological

engagement with the other.

Khatibi and Hassoun's intellectual and

emotional agility finds a playground in the book. Hassoun,

the permanent psychoanalyst and historian,

becomes a storyteller who in telling his

story entangles his own existence with Khatibi's.

Similarly, Khatibi embraces professional

strangeness departs from any cautious attitude

to launch a frontal attack on archaisms

in both religions.

From professional strangeness to

Frientimacy,

it seems that becoming cool conspirators

was crucial for both Khatibi and Hassoun.

Khatibi would later write that their

correspondence was quote

a coup, somewhat of a rebellion,

a cross-sectional self-analysis in the

form of letters,

signs, fragments, end quote. Neither

Khatibi or Hassoun however explained what

their book was a rebellion against.

Nonetheless this allows us to say that a frientimate

is a conspirator who draws on

professional strangeness

to undermine walls of separation between

Judaism and Islam,

religions, and cultures. Frientimacy

also requires deep understanding

of each other's psychology. This

understanding is manifested in the way

they broached sensitive topics

either openly or in convoluted ways.

In a letter dated July 14 1984,

Hassoun asks Khatibi a pivotal question

that had been latent in their

correspondence for a very long time

but which both maneuvered to avoid until then.

This is the question. At this point I

wish to ask you, and you, do you feel touched by the

departure of Moroccan Jews

with whom you have cohabitated. This absence is

part of the Moroccan people, how did it

touch you?

I wish that you will respond to me about this end quote.

Khatibi's response to Hassoun from Tangier

on July 22nd 1984 excitedly writing quote, I don't wish to

wait too long before responding to your question

about my feelings about the departure of

Moroccan Jews end quote.

In a good mood, he underlines how, quote

the movements of departure travel and

exodus, pick his imagination, end quote.

Thus pushing him to answer Hassoun's

letter quicker than normal, end quote. Hassoun

still no silent question about

the immigration of Moroccan Jews

offers Khatibi the opportunity to insert

himself into the history

of Moroccan Jews and further his

internal engagement

in frientimacy. In his response, Khatibi

presents one of the first articulations

of a loss Moroccan society experienced as a result

of the immigration of its Jews.

Now when I remember the Jews of my

childhood, its words such as [...] or [...]

that I remember in my mouth

in a certain way. It's this unsalted and crusty bread

that has always intrigued me. Thanks to a

Jewish friend

and a Communist it was only later that

I was able to know

and truly savor sweets, wines, and the heavily

delicacies of Moroccan Jewish cuisine

which we are currently losing to exile

toward other mouths. It's generally after Mimouna,

I want to recount this because these

little details take me

back in time to my own Jewish niche,

which whether I want it or not

is a tattoo in my pure childhood.

End quote. The mass immigration of

Moroccan Jews has transformed them into an object of

loss for Khatibi. As Israeli historian

Michael Laskier has demonstrated,

Morocco had the largest Jewish community

in the lands of Islam

but the country lost 220 000 of its

citizens to immigration between 1948

and 1964. Simon Levy, the aforementioned

scholar and politician

observed that a notable demographic

change occurred in certain cities as entire

villages were empty of their Jews.

With only a few thousand Jews left in

the country, the Jewish immigration irrevocably

transformed Morocco's religious and

cultural landscape

and the possibility of Jewish Muslim

intimacy [...].

In their absence, Jews have become part

of Khatibi's culinary

and olfactory memory. The Jew covered

here is not the professional stranger

like Hassoun but rather someone

who left and his image has become

enmeshed in memories of food

including [...], [...] [...]

water of life, [...]

a Jewish alcoholic beverage distills from figs

or dates which Moroccans continue to

mythologize even today.

However instead of locating remembering

in the mind, Khatibi's embodied

approach attributes memory to the mouth, the nose,

and the ears. The mouth remembers the

delicious Jewish foods and the nostrils

are filled with the smells of this

displaced cuisine.

The ears remember Moroccan Jews through

the specific dialects of Jewish

of Andalusian descent who were

not able to pronounce the Arabic sound [...] which they instead pronounced as [...].

Remembering Jews in the Khatibian

approach is an operation that requires

the mobilization of all senses

because of its malleability, memory

allows loss to be narrativized

and incorporated into newer forms of knowledge

and situations that were not available

to the rememberer at the time of the experience took place.

If culinary, olfactory, and acoustic

memories evoke loss for Khatibi,

memories of cemeteries and all Jewish

men evoke guilt. Revisiting his childhood, Khatibi

tells Hassoun with much remorse that it was the

children who attacked the Jewish quarter.

Reflecting on his childhood memories, he

confesses that they

quote stole kippas of all Jews so that

we could resell them end quote

Khatibi attributes this behavior to

childhood naughtiness before asserting

that quote I only did it once end quote.

Similarly cemeteries are prominent in

Khatibi's childhood memories

of Moroccan Jews. Khatibi admits to have

installed talismans

but this time he also did the same thing

in Muslim marabouts.

George Simmel has underlined that one

with the privileges of being a stranger,

his openness to sharing things that have

a confessional nature,

and which one would quote carefully

withhold from a closely related

Person end quote. It is specifically this

productive space between

nearness and distance where frientimacy resides

and allows Khatibi to share memories of a

childhood laden with guilt vis-a-vis his Jewish

co-citizens.

Instead of dwelling on guilt however,

Khatibi draws

on these memories to appreciate the

formative childhood he had in Al-Jadidah.

He underlines how the Jewish dimension

is a part of his plural identity,

quote Now I think that my childhood was more,

my childhood was more complex in its

emotional formation.

Biographically, I lived my my youth

in a wet of cultural elements

simultaneously Arab,

Muslim, Berber, French, Jewish

infused with a Portuguese mythology, end quote.

The Jewish communities that Khatibi is

referring to here

without much detail have escaped the

writer of scholarship

Mustafa [...] a social historian of

Al-Jadidah has authored a unique local

history of the Jews of the city.

Of note in [...]'s book is the

fact that Mazagan was home to quote

Muslim, Jewish, and Protestant populations End quote as

early as 1820. [...] also emphasizes

the role of the Portuguese present in Mazagan

in shaping Jewish and Muslim identities

and reveals how similarly to Essaouira,

the Jews of Al-Jadidah occupied and

discharged important commercial, linguistic, and

ambassadorial functions

for Moroccon monarchs. [...] also

attributes the decline of the Jewish

population over Al-Jadidah

to a famine that struck Morocco in 1856

and 1857. This famine is depicted by

Hassan [...] in his debut novel [...]

Hebrew Papers. Although the novel

unfolds in the portal city of Safi, it

reveals how the Jews of coastal cities

were affected by the famine. [...] was such a novelty

that it was awarded the prize of the

Moroccan Writers Union in 1996.

Literary critic [...] highlighted

how [...] tells a story whose people

were not of much concern to Moroccan

literature until then.

The Jew in Khatibi's construction is not

one but multiple.

He is– this absence was

culinary, sensorial, or olfactory, traces

are left to bear witness to his erstwhile

existence among Muslims.

His evocation stares at feelings of

guilt and evokes the flaws of the self

in its connection to the minority other.

Oddly, however, at the time of his writing,

some ten thousand Jews uh Moroccan Jews

still lived in the country.

And yet Khatibi, they had nothing to say

about them. To him they seem to have already left

and have become an object of memory,

lamentation, and indignation.

The question that stems from this is

whether Khatibi refuses to be a guard of

memory, especially given his description of

Muslim guards

of Jewish vestiges. Contrasting still present

empty homes with the departure of Jewish

people, Khatibi

writes to Hassoun in 1984 that the Muslim guard

is quote a witness,

often all, forsaken, a last trace,

a corpse that persists in this myth.

But the tragedy of these witnesses is

pitiful. It's more of a

decomposition than a testimony, a

watchman over

death rather than a vestige that hopes,

end quote.

Perhaps the finality of this Jewish

world in Khatibi's understanding

is what explains this representation of local Jews

as absent in contrast to Hassoun's

reminiscences about Egyptian Muslims which are full

of vivid life. The Jew–

the absent Jew, professional for

strangeness and frientimacy stop at home.

Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoreux takes place in Morocco in the early 20th

century.

It recounts the story of a mysterious and mystic [...] individual named Raïssi,

a master of decorative ornamental

plaster.

Raïssi, travels to and lives in Marrakech, Mazaran,

Alexandria, and Mecca. After his long

perignation, Raïssi, settles down in Mazagan just a few

years before the French protectorate,

thus representing Moroccan society

before the turning point or the [...].

Pèlerinage offers a particularly

important gateway into Khatibi's

imagination of local Jews.

The novel opens a bridge through which

we can examine another facet of Khatibi's construction

of the figure of the Jew in his literary medium.

Only one chapter in the novel takes

place in the Jewish mellah

or jewish quarter in Arabic. When

Raïssi moves to Marrakesh, he decides to

cross the gates of the mellah

but the gates close behind him in the

early evening and he ends up being

trapped in a place where he knows no one.

Raïssi finds himself, quote, the only

Muslim among this population

that he had dropped shoulders with his

entire life without knowing it, end quote.

Trapped in what seems to be a terra incognita,

Raïssa is saved by Shlomo, a Jewish

jeweler who invites him to spend the night with

him and his family in the Jewish

neighborhood.

What emerges from their conversation is

their mutual ignorance

despite sharing the same homeland and

being Moroccophones, end quote.

Morocco might have been a home for

important Jewish communities

but these communities were not, as Khatibi

constructs them,

communities of citizens because of the

lack of contact as the novel depicts them.

This acceptance of spatial separation

and mutual ignorance of these two

communities could be at the root of some of Khatibi's

misconceptions

about local Jews. Khatibi's construction

of the mellah as an impermanent space

is contradicted by empirical research on

spatial, corporeal, and mnemonic

configurations of Moroccan Jewish Muslim relations. In

fact, although a Jewish neighborhood, the mellah

is an integral part of life in the city

as Emily Gottreich and [...]

show. Multi-directional traffic between

the mellah and the larger Muslim

community was embodied for example in

the Jewish Muslim celebration of Mimouna, a one night

celebration of [...] as well as other mundane activities that

Jews and Muslims carried out in each

other's spaces. Partaking in music, dance, and other

celebratory events, Jews and Muslims

engage in the egalitarian activities

that solidify their reciprocal

recognition despite their religious

difference.

Neither the Jew nor the Mellah that

Khatibi imagines in Pèlerinage reflects

the rich experiences

of communal citizenship depicted in

scholarship or other fiction

that takes place there. Compared to the

rich dialogues that Khatibi had with Derrida

and Hassoun, the local Jew is overlooked

in the novel while europeanized Jews of a certain

class and standing emerge as

professional strangers and interlocutors,

the Jews who still carry the marks of

their Moroccan origins for indigeneity

are confined to their quarter. Stripped

of the translingual

and trans-culture capital of

professional strangers

the Jew race emits is constructed in the

image of the Muslim with outside Islam. However, in a

quintessentially Khatibian twist,

Raïssi's ability to penetrate this Jewish

subjects into Shlomo's authority. I offer you my

hospitality until the morning,

says Shlomo. To Raïssi's request of a night

tour or a nighttime tour of the mellah, Shlomo

responds quote, we will go out

provided that you get dressed like me.

Above all don't talk to anyone, be mute,

you never know. Shlomo's request subjects

Raïssi to the challenge of passing

for a Jew for a very short part of the

evening. In the morning

Raïssi wonders if in disguising himself as a Jew

he did not switch religions for one

night.

Despite staging a frientimacy between

Shlomo and Raïssi,

the novel fails to capture the vividness

and complexity of Jewish Muslim

relations. Shlomo is after all a generic name for a Jew.

Situating Raïssi's visit to the mellah at night time

when the streets were were almost empty

minimizes his contact with his Jewish

co-citizens and limits the potential of

what a novel can represent.

Shlomo therefore stands for all the Jews

who become part of an amorphous collective rather than

distinct individuals who each have a story to tell. Moreover

no Jew other than Shlomo speaks in the novel, not even his

wife, three children, or little brother.

Although one of the earliest

manifestations of the literary interest

in Jewish Muslim memory in Morocco, Pèlerinage

depicts the local Jew from an angle

that is both limited and limiting for

representation.

Mnemonic literature which emerged in

Morocco in the 1990s to account for the

laws associated with Moroccan Jews immigration

has complicated the history that Khatibi

is alluding to in Pèlerinage. [...] all depict the lost intimacy between

Jews and Muslims in their

representations of interfaith border crossings, shared

Jewish Muslim health,

households and childhoods and Jewish Muslim

women's transgressive solidarities. In

Hasan [...] [...] and Muhammad [...]

the forgotten Jewish Muslim intimacy acquires an even

stronger political resonance

through the stories of collaboration

between Jews and Muslims

against French colonialism. These texts

are sites where both representation

and the recovery of histories

of Jewish places occur.

Literary texts are not only media and

objects of remembrance, as [...] and [...] have

argued, but also media for quote observing the

production of cultural memory, quote.

In our case mnemonic literature unearths

an overlooked past. Documents and documents and then

silences it and makes a statement about the absence

of Moroccan Jews from post-independence history through

its refiguring of the erstwhile places that both Jews

and Muslims inhabited

before Jewish immigration between 1948

and 1967. I conclude. I have argued that a

multifaceted figure of the Jew

permeates Khatibi's work. Constructed as a

professional stranger, the Jew lives

between languages and cultures

and possesses a fluid identity

that Khatibi invites Muslims to emulate

in celebration of the Sunnah. The

the Jewish professional stranger is

mainly three rise through the particular

experience of North African Francophone Jews

who had long left their societies of

origin. As a frientimate, the Jew is a

co-producer of an extremely rich

theoretical discussion

that is grounded in play and egalitarian

intimacy.

Finally, the local Jew is a striking

blind spot for Khatibi

who seems to have little contact with

and whose knowledge about him is moving,

laden with guilt, and nostalgia.

Particularly in his novel Pèlerinage, the

Jew is confined to the mellah.

Since naming is almost consubstantial to

thinking for Khatibi, we cannot but notice that the local Jew

is almost never named even in his letters to Hassoun. This

failure to name the Jew

in his correspondence with Hassoun is a

failure to particularize

which offers an opportunity for a

generative critical engagement with his

oeuvre. At the moment, the question that

remains is whether the failure to go

beyond theory, the failure to particularize the figure

of the Jew as a sociological sign

should be interpreted as a form of

aphasia or a choice.

One thing is certain, however, Khatibi has

bequeathed us with a rich legacy that requires the

expansion of his work

into the realm of Jewish Studies. Thank you.

Thanks for taking time from your busy

schedule to talk to us and to present to us

really this interesting work

and stay in touch. Thank you for having me

Bye.