Summary
Edmond Jabès, an Egyptian Jewish philosopher and literary critic who resettled in France after the 1956 war, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as, with Paula Jacques, perhaps the best-known Egyptian Jew in France — known there as a French Jew, and one who acknowledged his Egyptian family’s synagogue roots publicly only near the end of his life (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
Details
- Jabès, a philosopher and literary critic, arrived in France after the 1956 war (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
- Jacques Hassoun, interviewed at the book’s close, says Jabès “waited until one or two years before his death before admitting publicly, in an interview that I did with him and Carole Naggar, that he was from a very old Egyptian family—that his grandfather, his father, his great grandfather, were gabais (sextons) of the synagogue of harat al-yahud and that he had continued, until his expulsion from Egypt [in 1957], to go once a year to the synagogue, of which he was still, in principle, the gabai, on the evening of Yom Kipur for Kol Nidre” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
- On Hassoun’s account, Jabès and Jacques are known in France as French Jews, not as Egyptian Jews (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Paula Jacques, Jacques Hassoun