Postcard, School of embroidery, Algiers (1905). In my letter to him, I’m still reconstructing all he had to omit to sustain the self-deception of being French, despite being continually betrayed by the dark color of his skin, his French accent in Hebrew which Arab-Jews readily recognized as a North African one, and his Arab accent when speaking French. In Israel, where my father migrated in 1949, he was able to take advantage of the World War II imperial bargain, as his French citizenship - given to Algerian Jews in 1870 - meant he could pass for a European Jew (that is, a white Jew), and assimilate, at the cost of forgetting his Arabness. In the Zionist state where I grew up - Israel - there was no room for my father’s memories of persecution during World War II as an Arab-Jew whose French citizenship was revoked, nor for the vulnerability of Jews in Algeria after the creation of the State of Israel, which was constructed as a Europeanized stronghold against the Arab world. Thus, many of the diverse groups that were targeted by the Nazis, the Fascists, and all other imperial powers were omitted from history and their suffering disavowed, to make room for the exceptional suffering and extermination of Europeans of Jewish origin. I could not conceive of concentration camps in Algeria, since as you write, “Man’s memories” of World War II were mainly European. I know that my failure to hear him the first time he told me is not really mine alone. We never talked about it, though he told me and I heard, he told me and I wrote it down. Years later, when my friend, the anthropologist Susan Slymovics, asked to interview my father - knowing his age and guessing he might have been in a camp - that I truly heard for the first time that my father was in a concentration camp.
It is as if what he was telling me didn’t register in my conscious mind. I had no memory of having heard this, though a few years later, I read it in the booklet that I prepared from the interview. He mentioned, in passing, that he was in a concentration camp in Algeria. In my letter to my father, I try to reconstruct my failure to grasp the meaning of one brief sentence he told me during a longer interview I conducted for his 65th birthday. I struggled with the writing of this letter, maybe because at the same time I began writing to you, I was also writing a letter to my father who passed away seven years ago. Why a letter? Your 1492 text sent me off on a journey, and I feel I owe you a postcard from my travels. The term “Judeo-Christian,” as I hope you will understand, is in itself a distortion of the work of repair. I finally found the courage to do this in a letter addressed to you. A work is required to show how it was manufactured. But simply changing, excising, or explaining away the vexed term is not enough.
Judeo-Christian - where? When? In whose interest? Against whom? In service of what kind of world? Often, I wish the texts of authors I like to be flawless. Unlike other terms, whose origins you carefully question and whose meanings you transform, “Judeo-Christian” stands untroubled in your writing, as if there is a confirmed reality behind it. However, each time I read this text, I’m troubled, by your frequent use of the term “Judeo-Christian,” and this is why I am sending you this note. Your essay “1492: A New World View” (1995) helped me understand that the entire world as manufactured out of the events of 1492 is in a dire need of repair, a project that cannot be confined to calls for reparations. They inspire me and stir the mind of my students.
and reckons with the skewed concept of “Judeo-Christianity.” In this moving account, Ariella Azoulay writes a letter to Sylvia Wynter discussing the Black scholar’s essay “1492.” She passes her reading through the filter of her experience as an Arab-Jew scholar relocated in the U.S.