The Postcolonial Jewish Question: Jewish and Arab Entanglements in Postwar France

"The Postcolonial Jewish Question" tells the story of the political, philosophical, and epistemic shifts in the category of Jewishness, its relation to the broader structures of Western modernity, and, especially, its affiliation and disaffiliation with other marginalized and oppressed groups. I situate this transformation in the post-World War II Francophone world from the 1950s through the early 2000s and the particular ways that France's colonial history has shaped the relationships between Jews and the nation-state, Jews and Arabs, and anti-Semitism, colonialism, and Islamophobia. The proverbial "Jewish Question," has often been a site for debating issues of religion, race, nationalism, and universalism in France. However, with the end of colonial rule, the "Muslim Question" has been at the center of renewed tension around these issues. I argue that Jewish thought was shaped in distinctive ways by the relationship between these discourses and the ways they evolved in the latter half of the 20th century. The dissertation illuminates the primary historical and theoretical contours that have shaped the postcolonial development of Jewish thought. Chapter 1 focuses on the Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi and considers the broad trajectory of his work. Specifically, I show how the Jew and the colonized went from being almost interchangeable figures of oppression in his early writing to entirely separate and distinct figures in his final portrait. This historical and theoretical trajectory, I suggest, illustrates some of the central problematics of thinking across colonialism and anti-Semitism and how these have evolved in the postcolonial period. In chapter two, I analyze how Jewish writers and thinkers responded to the movements for decolonization in North Africa in the 1950s, especially the Algerian War of Independence, and the ways that it shaped Jewish political life. Decolonization, I suggest, was one of the first moments in the postwar period in France where the relationship between Jews and other oppressed minorities was put into question. Chapter three considers the effects of Zionism, and in particular the 1967 war, on the discourse of the Jew as other. I argue that this constituted a turning point for the viability of this discourse—even if it was not always acknowledged or recognized as such. Chapter three looks at North African Jewish writers and intellectuals in the 1980s in order to illuminate the ongoing legacies of colonial division between Jews and Arabs. It foregrounds the figure of the Arab-Jew as a lens through which to think about these conversations as well as a vector through which to resist the paradigms of division. The final chapter takes up the question of race, racism, and anti-Semitism and illuminates how these went from being almost synonymous with one another in the immediate post-Holocaust period to becoming separate regimes by the late 90s and early 2000s. Understanding this separation, I suggest, is essential for making sense of the so-called "new antisemitism" that appeared in the early 2000s and the ways it marshaled Islamophobic sentiments and panic in the name of protecting Jews.