Summary
The Levantine (in Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren’s usage, Mediterranean) hybrid identity that Jacqueline Kahanoff articulated for the French-educated Jews of Egypt — a creative synthesis of European and Egyptian culture — which the dominant Ashkenazi Zionism of Israel detested as a curse, and which Egyptian Jewish writers revalorized after 1977, in Chapter 2 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
Details
- Kahanoff “consciously sought a creative Levantine synthesis”: “[E]ven though we sympathized with the Muslim nationalists’ aspirations, we did not believe them capable of solving the real problems of this society, and for this they could not forgive us. As Levantines, we instinctively searched for fruitful compromises, feeling as we did that the end of the colonial occupation solved nothing unless western concepts were at work in this world, transforming its very soul. We knew that Europe, although far away, was inseparably part of us because it had so much to offer. These radically different attitudes toward Europe and towards our conception of the future made the parting of our ways inevitable” (Chapter 2, note 77). The synthesis was hierarchical: Kahanoff “and her schoolmates had no doubt that European culture was more advanced and should be the dominant component in the Levantine synthesis” (note 78) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- Keshet, the Canaanite movement’s journal, was “a highly regarded literary journal, though very few Israelis embraced its cultural politics. Kahanoff’s celebration of Levantinism was abhorrent to the dominant Ashkenazi Zionism that required the mass migration of the Middle Eastern Jews to Israel to populate the country but detested their culture and regarded Levantinism as a curse to be avoided at all costs.” Critics praised her sensitivity and emotional range, “but Levantinism was not an idea that could elicit a serious response from the militantly Eurocentric Israeli cultural establishment”; one critic dismissed her youthful aspirations as “fruitful illusions” (note 81) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- After Anwar al-Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem “created a receptive audience in Israel,” Kahanoff’s essays were collected as Mi-mizrah shemesh (From the east the sun), and “[s]uch critical receptivity, though far from unanimous, was encouraged by the soaring hopes for peaceful normalcy in Israel”; for the generation then remembering Egypt positively, “Jacqueline Kahanoff’s work is a point of departure” (note 82) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- Gormezano-Goren’s Kayitz aleksandroni (An Alexandrian summer) “relishes the hybrid Mediterranean identity of Egyptian Jews” — “Mediterraneanism” — opening: “Yes, precisely Mediterranean. Perhaps it is by virtue of this Mediterraneanism that I sit here and spin this tale. Here, in the Land of Israel, which lies on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Sometimes you wonder if Vilna is really the Jerusalem of Lithuania or if Jerusalem is the Vilna of the Land of Israel” (note 83). Reviewers who noticed the valorization “were distressed by it”; one concluded, “if this is Mediterraneanism, then it is better for us for now to remain on the coast of the Baltic Sea” (note 88). Unlike Kahanoff, Gormezano-Goren “is not sure that Europe should be the dominant element in the Mediterraneanism he advocates” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- At the chapter’s close, Egyptian Jews are said to have “reclaimed their Levantine cosmopolitanism through nostalgic literary reconstructions of Egypt that challenge the canons of Zionist discourse and simultaneously resist the discourse of Egyptian nationalism” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Jacqueline Kahanoff, Mizrahim