Almog Behar (Tel Aviv University)

Between Judeo-Arabic, Literary Arabic and Hebrew in Jewish-Arab (Literary) Modernity

Almog Behar laid before us a model of Jewish modernization that is in dialogue with several Jewish histories and the intellectual traditions that have emerged from them. More specifically, he presented a project of Jewish modernity connected to a Sephardic heritage of modernization understood as process that goes back to the 10th century with Saadia Gaon through contemporary Arab culture. He presented this process as conceptualized by Abraham Shalom Yehuda, who reclaimed the historical connection of Judaism and Islamic thought and defended a reconnection that would in turn present a model for a new Hebrew and Jewish culture in Eretz Israel/ Palestine which would see itself as rooted in the East and emerging from a dialogue held in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and literary Arabic with Arab culture and Islamic thought. This model opposed the external and Eurocentric partition of those cultural worlds, a partition that was sanctioned by colonialism, Zionism and Arab nationalisms. Almog Behar spoke about the problem of equating modernization with secularization, nationhood and national languages that render people as monolingual and monocultural. 

Clemence Bouloque (Columbia University) 

In praise of the Orient: Elia Benamozegh's Sephardic Modernities

Clemence Bouloque reconstructed Elijah Benamozegh's religious imagination in which things that seem to be at odds can be in fact reconciled, and coexistence with otherness should not be feared. She spoke about Benamozegh's conception of the Orient as a mental space that establishes continuity and harmony between heaven and earth, religion and science, individuals and society, reflective discourse and action and as an alternative to inertia. Today we hold on to this alternative to inertia and gather strength to continue exploring other attempts at reframing Jewish tradition and thought in order to keep them alive, relevant and helpful.

Gabriel Abensour (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Rabbi Yosef Knafo's Struggle for Democratization of Knowledge in Fin de Siècle Essaouira

Gabriel Abensour focused on non-elite North-African Jewish authors, shedding light on ignored and silenced sources of knowledge and their relevance for a different understanding of Jewish modernization that poses questions about what constitutes Jewish knowledge, who has epistemic legitimacy, who establishes the relevant political questions and who sanctions sources as authoritative.

Angy Cohen (University of Calgary) and Yuval Evri (Brandeis University)

Foreign in a Familiar Land: Language and Belonging in the Work of Jaqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida

In this session, Angy Cohen and Yuval Evri closed the seminar series with a dialogue on language, belonging, and Sephardic subjectivity in the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Derrida. Through these three authors, the session explored different experiences of Sephardic modernization shaped by colonialism, cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, and decolonization across Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, France, and Israel.

The discussion focused on the condition of being “in between” worlds as a specifically Sephardic position of mediation, translation, and ambivalent belonging. Kahanoff, Memmi, and Derrida each wrote from within the contradictions produced by colonial modernity: the adoption of French or English as languages of culture and intellectual life, the loss or weakening of Arabic and other local Jewish languages, and the resulting estrangement from familiar traditions, communities, and memories.

The session invited us to think about Sephardic modernity as a complex process in which colonialism and nationalism disrupted older forms of Jewish belonging. It also raised broader questions about tradition, memory, and the difficulty of reconstructing a sense of home after the familiar has been rendered foreign.