Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw out similarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries, with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: it embraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before the arrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that go back to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. The author traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile and migration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examines diaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life, and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than mere nostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardic fiction.

Reflections on A New Mexican Crypto-Jewish Song Book offers close examinations of a manuscript written over a 20-year period by Loggie Carrasco, a well-known crypto-Jew from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The manuscript includes a wide range of genres: folklore, memory, ritual practices, genealogy, and most significantly poetry and songs. Although the manuscript remains unpublished, this book utilizes quotations and excepts to enable the reader to have a good understanding of Carrasco’s voice. Focusing on the main genres and themes that shape Carrasco’s manuscripts, the contributors argue that the work is both unique and illustrative of the vitality of crypto-Jewish culture and contemporary understandings of it.

In the last few years, the fields of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies have grown significantly, thanks to new publications which take into consideration unexplored aspects of the history, literature and identity of modern Middle Eastern and North African Jews. However, few of these studies abandoned the Diaspora/Israel dichotomy and analysed the Jews who moved to Israel and those that settled elsewhere as part of a new, diverse and interconnected diaspora. Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature argues that the literary texts produced by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s and afterwards, should be considered as part of a transnational arena, in which forms of Jewish diasporism and postcolonial displacement interweave. Through an original perspective that focuses on novelists, poets, professional and amateur writers – from the Israeli poets Erez Biton and Shva Salhoov to Francophone authors such as Chochana Boukhobza, Ami Bouganim and Serge Moati – the book explains that these Sephardic and Mizrahi authors are part of a global literary diaspora at the crossroads of past Arab legacies, new national identities and persistent feelings of Jewishness. Some of the chapters emphasise how the Sephardic and Mizrahi past and present identities are narrated, how generational and ethno-national issues are taken into account and which linguistic and stylistic strategies the authors adopted. Other chapters focus more explicitly on how the relations between national societies and different Jewish migrant communities are narrated, both in today’s Israel and in the diaspora. The book helps to bridge the gap between Hebrew and postcolonial literature, and opens up new perspectives on Sephardic and Mizrahi literature. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Jewish and Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature

Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities addresses the legal, political, symbolic, and conceptual consequences of the development of a new framework of relations between the Spanish state and the descendants of the Jews expelled from the Iberian kingdoms in 1492 from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its unexpected consequences during World War II. This book aims to understand and explain the unchallenged idea of the Sephardim as a mix of Spaniard and Jew that emerged in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Maite Ojeda-Mata examines the processes that led to this ambivalent conceptualization of Sephardic identity, as both Spanish and Jewish, and its consequences for the Sephardic Jews.

"The novel Mazaltob (1930) by Blanche Bendahan is the forerunner of a modern Sephardi feminist literature in French, which in recent decades has earned growing recognition. Yet this model for a vital current of post-colonial literature has disappeared from our cultural memory. Rendering the novel Mazaltob into English aims to repair that loss"--

For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the 'other.' While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern 'rootless cosmopolitans' (to use Stalin's expression), today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how 'French thought' is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.

With an approach both personal and symbolic, this volume leads us through the imagined worlds, delusions, discoveries, questions, hopes, ambivalences, anxieties, and historical, cultural and psychological dynamics of six German-Jewish writers and intellectuals who arrived in Palestine between the 1920s and 1930s. Hugo Bergmann, Gershom Scholem, Gabriele Tergit, Else Lasker–Schüler, Arnold Zweig, and Paul Mühsam witnessed the gap between dream and reality from their own perspectives, representing it at many levels: intellectual, cultural, historical, psychological, and literary. As these six figures arrived in Palestine, this ancient land long imagined by diaspora generations with life-long nostalgia was new and open to different interpretations, outcomes, and realities. This book explores the difficulties and challenges that these figures had to face as they returned to the land of their fathers, a return shadowed by a historical, symbolic and metaphysical exile. It tells the story of a culture suspended and balanced between many worlds— a story of exile and return that is still unfolding under our eyes today.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to work as a prostitute, she dreams of a better life and an education for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son in the local school and the story unfolds as she narrates her life to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's story should still prove surprising today suggests how much we stand to learn from history, and from the secrets of Sin Street. This volume offers the first English translation of Danon's best-known work. A selection of his letters and an editors' introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.

This book argues that the literary texts produced by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s onwards, should be considered as part of a transnational arena, in which forms of Jewish diasporism and postcolonial displacement interweave. Through an original perspective that focuses on novelists, poets, professional and amateur writers, the book explains that these Sephardic and Mizrahi authors are part of a global literary diaspora at the crossroads of past Arab legacies, new national identities and persistent feelings of Jewishness.