Summary
Eric Rouleau, the Egyptian-born Jewish journalist who covered the Middle East for Le Monde for many years and later served as French ambassador to Tunisia and Turkey, whom Chapter 6 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry presents as an intermediary whose whole journalistic oeuvre was a project of cultural and political translation between his early life as an Egyptian Jew and his adult professional world in France (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2785-2810).
Details
- Rouleau grew up in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, joined the Iskra communist group after World War II, and, when HADETU split in 1948, joined one of its most dogmatic splinters, the Egyptian Communist Organization; he left Egypt for France and a career in journalism in 1950 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2791-2797).
- With Yugoslav President Josip Tito, he helped arrange the proposed meeting between Nahum Goldmann and Gamal Abdel Nasser in April 1970, which Golda Meir thwarted by asking the Israeli cabinet to approve it; after it fell through, Rouleau arranged a meeting between Goldmann and Ahmad Hamrush at his home in Paris (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2785-2797).
- He became especially close to Abdel Nasser: the chapter notes it is more than an ironic accident that the Egyptian ruler most excoriated by Israel and the West often selected an Arabic-speaking Jew as his favored journalistic conduit to the West, and records Rouleau’s judgment — worth recording because he was neither a sycophant nor an uncritical supporter — that Abdel Nasser was not an anti-Semite (Chapter 6, note 50) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2791-2797).
- After Sadat’s 1977 Jerusalem trip, Abu ‘Iyad (Salah Khalaf) asked Rouleau to help him write his political autobiography, the first extensive account of a historic PLO leader’s life and political outlook in a Western language (Chapter 6, note 51). Rouleau noted that Abu ‘Iyad was the first PLO leader who publicly advocated creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2791-2810).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, HADETU, Henri Curiel