Book Review: The answer to what comes after Zionism may lie in what came before it

What comes after the supremacism and apartheid of Zionism? Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s substantial new work, The Jewellers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World, looks to dormant histories for visions of justice and repair.

By Guy Mannes-Abbott 

 November 24, 2024 
MONDOWEISS

A found colonial photo album. Note that the caption “Jewish types” has been corrected to “Arab types.”

THE JEWELERS OF THE UMMAH
A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World
by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
656 pp. Verso, $44.95

While Benjamin Netanyahu and his ‘Western’ allies flirt with mortifying visions of what might come after their year-long genocidal campaign in Gaza, any such talk is overridden and encompassed by the real questions. What comes after ethnic cleansing, dispossession and displacement, supremacism and apartheid, topped by the mostly widely and minutely witnessed genocide in human history? That is; what comes after the Zionist state of Israel as presently constituted? How do we think it and bring it into being?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s previous book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) was both a guide and radical challenge to common if not equitably distributed perils as the post-1492 world breaks down along-with its climatic regime. In this equally substantial new work, The Jewellers of the Ummah subtitled A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World, the author, burgeoning jeweller and Brown University academic offers propositional responses to directly and indirectly related questions of after by looking harder at before to recognise, recover, and reconfigure dormant histories and immanent qualities of justice and repair.

Azoulay explains that the scope and locus of these questions and the before has shifted for her: “For years I felt defined by one imperial project, that of the colonisation of Palestine. But suddenly, my feelings were transposed onto another: the French conquest of Algeria in 1830” (p. 421). The turning point and key to this new work and a parallel sense of potentially rooted self was the discovery of the “Jewish Muslim name” given to Azoulay’s father’s mother Aïcha in 1895, one of many anti-colonial acts discovered and championed here. “Through these letters,” Azoulay writes, “I am trying to reconstruct a genealogy of those refusals” (p. 207).

Ultimately, it is this act of naming and self-naming that enables Azoulay to conclude, in her very particular and expansive sense, that: “Jewish liberation or decolonisation requires the recovery of a Jewish Muslim world” in north Africa and beyond (p. 267). A world ignored, erased and vilified through French and Israeli colonisations but embodied in a ‘before’ not of the conventional historians’ past but the eruptive, resistant realms of human entanglements, interdependencies and collectivities carried by objects crafted, treasured, growing, archived, remembered and re-conjured here in the mode of critical fabulation that Azoulay extends for her purpose.

Azoulay has defined the unlearning of Imperialism through potential histories as “the transformation of violence into shared care for our common world” (2019:57), while insisting that it is “not an attempt to tell the violence alone, but rather an onto-epistemic refusal to recognise as irreversible its outcome and the categories, statuses, and forms under which it materialises” (ibid:286). She approaches the Jewish Muslim common world activated here with painstaking care in the form of sixteen letters to her family; mother, father, great grandmothers and her own children, as well as key intellectual figures; Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Silvia Wynter and Ghassan Kanafani.

Supplementing these ancestral connections and significant cultural figures are letters to a Madam Cohen who “used the museum to address us” with photographs she deposited in Paris in the 1980s (pps. 368 & 400). Azoulay adopts her ambiguous images as a radical conduit to the intermingled milieu of the old city labyrinth of interconnected structures and the “derb lihoud [or] Jewish neighbourhood” in Oran, Algeria (p. 367). Oran was the biggest port in the Mediterranean, birthplace of Hélène Cixous and second city to Algiers, birthplace of Jacques Derrida, who owned his “Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy” but wrote of “dwelling” in monolingual French (Salmon, 2020:21 & Derrida, 1998:1). Azoulay leans into her Maghreb further by writing to activists, authors and historians in and of Algeria about craft worlds, decolonising practices and their complex kinship.

The first letter in the book, to her father Roger Lucien Azoulay born in Oran in 1923, establishes the confiding tone that grants this conceptual project its affectivity. Azoulay writes to the person she knew and the one/s she didn’t, now armed with more life, context and understanding than was transmitted to her. This is an “impossible story” (Hartman, 2008:10), which generates “ongoing, unfinished and provisional’ outcomes” (ibid:14). The intimacy of the epistolary form is a cunning response to this impossibility; incorporating plaintive appeals, revisiting lived experience, reflecting over experiential time and with the benefit of archival resource. It allows Azoulay to address this, for example; “I want to understand what I failed to understand about you from ‘your pains’ to ‘your world’” (p. 41), and this; “Why couldn’t Algeria have been a source of bliss, rather than something to repress?” (p. 44)

The thing that was most tangibly repressed was that “our ancestors were Arabs, Amazighs [Berber], and Muslims, as well as Jews,” after dwelling in multilingual Algeria for millennia (p. 52). Azoulay has been “trying to glean those belonging rights we lost, which pre-existed the imperial regime rights written in documents” (p. 67). “Abba, craft was who we were in the Maghreb … and I inherited your sensibility, that of a bricoleur” (p. 62). Since the dawn of Islam, “Jews in the Maghreb had been those who dealt with precious metals… jewels… coins… amulets” (p. 302), “in the cities as well as in the country” (p. 251). Jews, she writes, “were trusted with huge quantities of gold” (p. 303), in a “world they shared with others, notably the Muslim ummah” (p. 15). This liberated world of craft guilds is symbolised in the production of gold threads, which required “one Jew and one Muslim” to sit on each side of the same bench (p. 389).

Roger Azoulay severed himself from all of this in his attempt to pass as a Frenchman literally. He was a radio technician, incarcerated by the lingering Vichy regime in Algeria, drafted in to the French army on liberation, fought in Europe and volunteered for a year in the Israeli Army, where he met his wife and stayed, opening a store selling audio gear and records, making and repairing objects, dying there in 2012. Azoulay writes of the dismissive categorisation of him by European Jews in the new “colony” as a north African Jew or mizrahim, of his hatred for Israel and love for Radio Monte Carlo, which she belatedly discovered had broadcast both in French and Arabic, allowing him to “inhabit the Jewish Muslim world that he never had any intention of leaving” (p. 503).

Algeria was colonised by the French in 1830, when 13 synagogues were destroyed in Algiers alone, they offered their subjects citizenship in 1865 and only 2-300 of 40,000 Jews took it up. In 1870 the Crémieux Decree, sixty six words that Azoulay calls a “document of cultural genocide” (p. 282), imposed citizenship on Algerian Jews and severed them from immersive lifeworlds. However, by the time the French had killed “four millions Algerians” (p. 302) and were forced to leave in 1962, “very few Algerian Jews [had] migrated to Palestine, and in 1962, less then 20 percent of the 150,000 Jews who were forced to leave Algeria opted for Israel” (p. 276). Azoulay concludes that “What disappeared was the world of which those who departed were once a part, and what was established with their departure was a world in which their departure was a non-event” (p. 21).

Azoulay’s letter to her mother Zahava Azoulay née Arie negotiates their explosive differences in life with loving care and exactitude. Zahava’s ancestors were Sephardim exiles from 15th century Spain, via Ottoman Bulgaria to Ottoman Jerusalem, bringing associated privileges of wealth and archived memory. Zahava was born in Palestine, becoming Israeli at 17 before embracing Zionism’s racialised hierarchies and exclusions in toto. Azoulay laments her mother’s refusal to transmit the intimacies of her grandmother’s Ladino tongue to her with touching force as she unearths Bulgarian rebels and Marrano traditions. She pleads with her mother and insists that “we are Palestinian Jews, Ima, not Israelis” (p. 543).

The longest letter addresses “my beloved children” over seventy pages of impassioned pleas to follow her in inhabiting “the world of our ancestors that imperialism wants us to believe is impossible to inhabit, and to make it part of my -our- continuous present” (p. 159). She writes about being “initiated into the imperial world” by French and Israeli identities offered by “a world formed against us” and their ancestors; “deprived of their wisdom, cosmology, spirituality, magic and ways of loving and being” (p. 161). Azoulay is at her strongest when she writes; “we also have the right to be with our ancestors and to be Jews of all sorts,” spurning the racism with which mizrahim is laden for a project that “absolved Europe of paying for the crimes committed against the bodies of our ancestors” (p. 166).

Azoulay’s letters to her paternal great grandmothers start with the least documentation but speculative weaving generates situated lifeworlds in which Julie Boumendil is formally classified as a maid, with family transported to Auschwitz, and a son -claimed by a father otherwise married- who later deserts the French Army to Azoulay’s delight. Marianne Cohen is the one that named her daughter Aïcha against her own parents’ embrace of colonial modernisation, a name shared with someone Azoulay’s father described as a third grandmother in what Azoulay identifies as a “polygamous family formation” (p. 444). Instinctively, Azoulay embraces this as “a form of extended family, a tribe, a non-state formation,” an anti-capitalist talisman that “we can … use to resist, together, our individualisation as citizens of empire” (p. 452).

In her letters to Fanon, Arendt and Wynter, Azoulay insistently reconfigures the “before” of her thrown forwards milieux. She challenges the colonial lens through which each approached the Algerian Jewish actualities that Azoulay has rewoven; asking Fanon why her ancestors would want to “pass” for white Europeans as he assumed “without recognising the violence involved in affiliating them with their colonisers” (p. 428). She refuses Arendt’s assumption about “Oriental Jews” who speak Hebrew but “look Arabic” being “closely linked to the mother country through their French brethren … unlike Muslim natives” (pps. 432 & 428). She rebukes Wynter for incorporating “the Jews’ into the Judeo-Christian tradition” (p. 428), an Imperial confection embodied in Zionism’s “answer” to the “Jewish Question” (p. 466).

One part of Azoulay’s “before” relates to the failure of Imperial actors to care for “Jews who survived the Holocaust” and help “rebuild their destroyed communities” (p. 467), but the other parts are about her being able to write to Marianne thus; “I am an Algerian Jew, and I’m proud to be your great-granddaughter, my dear umm Aïcha” (p. 537). This is the precise opposite of a claim to a state in north Africa! It is a call to make afresh worlds of declared interdependence and to re-distribute common cultural and other resources justly. We can do it; Azoulay shows us one way in which it is not only possible but necessary -not least in our urgent responses to ‘Gaza’.

References

Derrida. Jacques, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998:1

Hartman. Saidiya, Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), June 2008:10

Salmon. Peter, An Event, Perhaps, Verso, London, 2020:21