"Tierra Prometida: Jews from Rhodes in the Belgian Congo and Southern Rhodesia, 1910s-1960s"

Between the 1910s and the 1960s, Jews from the island of Rhodes migrated to the Belgian Congo, particularly to the region of Katanga and its capital Elisabethville, and to Southern Rhodesia. The migration was due to economic reasons, and then to the impact of the 1938 Italian anti-Jewish laws. In the mid-1940s, also several Holocaust survivors from Rhodes settled in Congo, where a Jewish community continued to exist and thrive until the early 1960s. Basing on historical and literary sources, as well as on oral testimonies, this article explores the history of this little-known migration and the social and economic activities that the Jews of Rhodes conducted in central Africa. By doing so, it sheds light on the historical and memorial interconnections between colonialism and the Holocaust, Jewishness and whiteness

"Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince, eds., Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures Between North Africa and France, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020"

recensione del volume Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince, eds., Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures Between North Africa and France, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 202

“‘I come from a country that is no more’: Jewish nostalgia in the postcolonial Mediterranean”

Based upon a corpus of literary texts by Jewish authors born, or descendants of families that lived in North Africa and Egypt and that in the 1950s and 1960s migrated to Israel, France or Italy, the essay looks at nostalgia as a foundational trope in the Mediterranean Jewish historical imagination. Nostalgia is analyzed as a literary chronotope, that allows these writers to come to terms with a complex and ambivalent past while, at the same time, reflecting upon its repercussions on the postcolonial present and future. What comes out is an original archive of memories travelling across the Mediterranean, that while shedding light on the ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial times, reflects on the possibilities of coexistence and reconciliation – or, on the other hand, on the cleavages – that still exist between Jews and Arabs, Europe and North Africa, the Diaspora and Israel.En se basant sur un corpus de textes littéraires d’auteurs juifs nés ou de descendants de familles ayant vécu en Afrique du Nord et en Egypte et ayant migré vers Israël, la France ou l’Italie dans les années 1950 et 1960, cet article approche la nostalgie comme un trope fondamental dans l’imagination historique juive méditerranéenne. La nostalgie est analysée comme un chronotope littéraire qui permet à ces écrivains de se confronter à un passé complexe et ambivalent tout en réfléchissant à ses répercussions sur le présent et l’avenir postcoloniaux. Ce qui en ressort est une archive originale de mémoires voyageant à travers la Méditerranée qui, tout en éclairant les ruptures et les continuités entre l’époque coloniale et postcoloniale, réfléchit aux possibilités de coexistence et de réconciliation - ou, au contraire, aux clivages existent encore entre Juifs et Arabes, Europe et Afrique du Nord, la Diaspora et Israël

"Rachel B. Gross, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia As Religious Practice, New York, New York University Press, 2021"

review of the volum

Orienti migranti: tra letteratura e traduzione

scopo di Orienti migranti è provare a te- nere insieme queste realtà e definizioni, soffermandosi – attraverso una serie di casi di studio – su ‘zone di contatto’ a metà tra più lin- gue e paesi, delineando un modello di letteratura locale e globale al contempo (Orsini 2015, 351-2) e che considera il migrante un tropo ricorrente e centrale della contemporaneità. Le tematiche che più si ritrovano nella letteratura della migrazione – e in questo volume – so- no, prevedibilmente, quelle legate all’identità, allo spaesamento e al- la necessità di ricostruire la propria vita in un altro luogo e spesso in un’altra lingua. Per questo motivo, uno dei generi più praticati è la memorialistica: dal memoir, vale a dire un’opera che si concentra su un momento più o meno specifico nella vita dell’autore, all’auto- biografia (sulla quale si veda: Lejeune 1975), fino a romanzi semiau- tobiografici o che comunque riprendono storie accadute alla propria comunità d’origine

A Fragile Cradle: Writing Jewishness, Nationhood, and Modernity in Cairo, 1920-1940

On the basis of literary texts by four Jewish writers (Georges Cattaui, Emile Mosseri, Albert Staraselski, and Lucien Sciuto), this article tries to understand the models of Jewish cultural and political identity circulating in Cairo during the monarchic period, investigating the intellectual atmosphere of interwar Egypt and the numerous ways in which the Cairene Jewish middle and upper classes narrated their lives vis-a-vis their own ethnoreligious community, Egypt, Europe, and Zionism. Literary representations of Jewishness, nationhood, and modernity suggest that living in Egypt as a Jew meant belonging not only to a (semicolonial) national space, to whose imagination these four writers contributed, but also to a wider Mediterranean lieu de savoir (site of knowledge), at the crossroads of past ethnoreligious legacies and novel feelings of cultural and political belonging