Trace 1: The Jew as the Quintessential Professional Stranger

The Jew in Khatibi's conceptualization is a professional stranger.Footnote ² A professional stranger is one who, instead of being apprehensive of strangeness, develops a capability of inhabiting multiple languages and cultures. In a 1984 letter to the Jewish Franco-Egyptian psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun,Footnote ³ Khatibi stressed the fact that “[l]e Juif, pour moi, est bilingue, toujours” (“the Jew, for me, is always bilingual”; Khatibi and Hassoun 140),Footnote ⁴ adding that he knew many Arab Jews who were named Jacques. This means that in addition to learning new languages, the Jew has the ability to accept other names, other cultures, other processes of becoming. In short, the Jew, for Khatibi, is a palimpsestic being who carries and lives with millennial traces of other languages and cultures. However, it is not until 1987 that Khatibi redefines this Jewish bilingual figure as the professional stranger, or someone who is always in a state of “errance … à travers les frontières entre pays, territoires, cultures, dissidences” (“wandering … through the boundaries of countries, territories, cultures, and dissidences”; Figures 141). Not only did Hassoun signify to Khatibi as such a professional stranger, but so too did Jacques Derrida, another of Khatibi's intellectual interlocutors and personal friends. These two Jewish men both belonged to this exclusive upper-middle-class league. Hassoun, a Franco-Egyptian Jew, and Derrida, a Franco-Algerian Jew, fit this description by straddling complex identities. Both of them became French citizens, albeit in different circumstances. While for Derrida living in colonial Algeria meant the loss of his mother tongues of Arabic and Hebrew to French as a result of his assimilation into French society and citizenship, Hassoun, who grew up in Egypt, spoke both Arabic and Hebrew in addition to French. They fit the definition of the professional stranger because they hailed from elsewhere, spoke French, had rich and varied linguistic heritages, including latent or active mother tongues, and had a special, intellectually elite openness to crossing intellectual and physical boundaries.

Professional strangeness, in Khatibi's mind, also requires a nondogmatic or even openly critical position vis-à-vis accepted morality, particularly sacred texts. Considering Sigmund Freud a professional stranger whose work revolutionized the reading of sacred texts, Khatibi affirms that to desacralize means “rationalizer d'une manière très rigoureuse, parfois untraitable” (“to rationalize in a very rigorous, even intractable, manner”; Penser 38). Khatibi calls for Muslims, whom he invites to become professional strangers, to question their scripture and emulate the Jew who “porte en lui le souci et le poids d'une altérité excentrée et d'une éthique réellement vécue” (“carries within himself the weight of an ex-centered alterity and of a truly lived ethics”; Le scribe 106). Khatibi presents this invitation to Judaize Islamic thinking through professional foreignness as a normal continuation of the inherent foreignness embedded in Islam itself. Khatibi quotes the Prophet Mohamed's famous ḥaḍīth stating, “L'Islam a debuté étranger et redeviendra l’étranger qu'il a commencé par être. Félicité aux étrangers!” (“Islam began as something foreign, and it shall return to being something strange just as it began, so give glad tidings to the foreigners”; Le scribe 106; “Hadith”). Since “nous sommes Juifs dans la mesure où sommes devenus des lecteurs d'un livre, et d'un livre prophétique” (“we are all Jews insofar as we have become readers of a book, a prophetic book”; Khatibi and Hassoun 92), Muslims would only reconnect with their tradition by critically rereading their sacred scripture. The Judaization of Islam reorients the sacrifice of the body to the text by subduing the text to critical thinking (162).

Trace 2: The Jew as Frientimate

A collection of about fifty letters sent back and forth between Khatibi and Hassoun from Paris, El Harhoura, Rabat, Cairo, Malta, New York, and Tangier between 1980 and 1985, Le même livre (“The Same Book” [1985]) was a pioneering “confidence publique” (“public confidence”; Khatibi, Le scribe 103) shared by a Jew and a Muslim. Le même livre records in epistolary form the process whereby a Jew and a Muslim could strike up a “frientimacy” without being oblivious to the occupation in Palestine.

This correspondence captured the zeitgeist of a period when Jewish-Muslim relations were increasingly becoming a public matter. By 1985, when Le même livre was published, Identité et Dialogue, an association of Moroccan Jews living in France, had already published the proceedings of a groundbreaking conference that was held in Paris on 18–21 December 1978 on the theme “La communauté juive marocaine, vie culturelle, histoire sociale et évolution” (“Moroccan Jewish Community: Cultural Life, Social History, and Evolution”) under the aegis of the Council of the Moroccan Jewish Communities. Featuring autobiographical presentations and academic papers, this conference marked the first time Moroccan academics of Muslim and Jewish origins, including the ones who had moved to Israel, came together for “un dialogue franc et direct pour se dire, non seulement comment les uns percevaient les autres, mais encore quels griefs les uns pouvaient faires aux autres” (“a frank and direct dialogue, to tell each other not only how they perceive each other but also the sort of grievances they can communicate to each other”; Ifrah). The participation in the conference of the historians Ahmed Taoufik, Germain Ayache, and Haïm Zafrani, as well as the political activist Joe Levy, and the linguist and political figure Simon Lévy attested to the sense of the critical importance of the issue of Jewish-Muslim intercommunity understanding that was emerging in Morocco via France.

I propose to call the correspondence in Le même livre an exercise of frientimacy—an uncensored public and playful friendship that takes Khatibi and Hassoun into the intellectual and personal realms that nourish a writing project with social, cultural, and political consequences. More than merely presenting conversations between two francophone theorists from the Mediterranean, the epistles are a radical project in public intimacy. The sociologist Harry Blatterer underlines “affection, care and respect” as the main characteristics of intimacy (63), which is also underpinned by a sense of equality and mutual recognition (Jamieson 190). The combination of friendship and intimacy that is frientimacy serves the frientimates as a space for the deployment of their proactive agency and critical consciousness, allowing them to deliberately engage in uncomfortable discussions about guilt, regrets, privilege, and loss.

Jewish-Muslim frientimacy effectively blurs the boundaries between the private and the public spheres. Although Hassoun and Khatibi's correspondence starts as “une amitié intellectuelle” (“an intellectual friendship”; Le scribe 104)—an endeavor to reflect on Jewish-Muslim relations, Arabs and Jews, the situation in Palestine, the failure of religion, and the authors’ disillusionment with all divinities—their letters slowly develop into a frientimacy that encompasses public and private spaces and exposes veins of accepted ideational practice for each religious identity. When Hassoun announces the birth of his first granddaughter (Khatibi and Hassoun 105), and Khatibi muses about the difference in the friendship one has with a man and with a woman, opening up about some intimate ideas that he has about gender (137), the public barriers of exogenous communities are breached. Frientimacy opens an aperture into the two intellectuals’ exhilaration and happiness about events happening in their lives as well as complaints of fatigue as a result of intense writing and intellectual work. Khatibi remarks, “Je me suis aperçu que notre correspondance devient plus personnelle. Peut-être n'avons-nous rien à perdre de ce côté pour parler librement dans une langue étrangère à l'hébreu, à l'arabe” (“I have realized that our correspondence is becoming more personal. We probably have nothing to lose, speaking freely in a language that is foreign to both Hebrew and Arabic”; 123). Jewish-Muslim frientimacy overrides guardedness and instigates new forms of bilateral, intercommunity intellectual engagement, as evidenced by the shift in their conversations in 1982 to focus on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The frientimate champions difference through play and dialogical engagement. The epistolary medium is the playground for Khatibi and Hassoun's intellectual and emotional agility. Hassoun, the prominent psychoanalyst and historian, becomes a storyteller. Meanwhile, Khatibi, acting on his invitation to Muslims to Judaize Islam, launches a frontal attack on archaisms in both religions. Khatibi would later write that his correspondence with Hassoun was “un coup de force, une sorte de révolte, une auto-analyse croisée en forme de lettres, de signes, de fragments” (“a coup, somewhat of a rebellion, a cross-sectional self-analysis in the form of letters, signs, fragments”; Le scribe 104). Frientimates, in this case, are coconspirators in the project to demolish the walls of separation between Judaism and Islam, religions and cultures. Sensitive topics can be broached, as they are when Hassan asks in a letter dated 14 July 1984, “À cet endroit je souhaite te demander: Et toi, te sens-tu atteint par le départ de ces Juifs marocains avec lesquels tu as cohabité? part distraite du peuple marocain comment t'a-t-elle touché? C'est là-dessus que je souhaiterais que tu puisses me répondre un jour” (“At this point, I wish to ask you, And you, do you feel touched by the departure of Moroccan Jews with whom you cohabitated? This absented part of the Moroccan people, how did it touch you? I wish that you will respond to me about this one day”; 102–03). Until “this point,” both Khatibi and Hassoun were silent on the question of emigration of Moroccan Jews, but Hassoun's question caught Khatibi at the right time and in the right mood while he was in Tangier. Khatibi was enthusiastic about the question and presented one of the first articulations of the loss that Moroccan society experienced with the emigration of its Jews:

Jews are an object of loss. It is not just people, but also the cuisine that migrated to other places. The wound of Jewish emigration Khatibi is referring to has irrevocably transformed Morocco's demographic, religious, and cultural landscape and the possibility of Muslim-Jewish intimacy therein. (El Guabli, Moroccan Other-Archives)

Trace 3: Sensory Loss and Guilt

The Jew remembered thanks to the frientimate's question is an object of culinary and olfactory memory. The Jew recovered here is no longer the frientimate, but rather someone who left and whose image has become enmeshed in memories of food, including “pain azym” (matzah) and “mā’ al-ḥayāt” (water of life, eau de vie [Khatibi and Hassoun 107]), a Jewish alcoholic beverage distilled from figs or dates that Moroccans still mythologize today. However, instead of locating the act of remembering in the mind, Khatibi's embodied approach attributes memory to the mouth, the nose, and the ears. The mouth remembers the delicious Jewish foods, and the nostrils are filled with the smells of this displaced cuisine. The ears remember Moroccan Jews through the specific dialect of Jews of Andalusian descent who were not able to pronounce the Arabic sound qāf (ق ), which they instead pronounced as a short alif (أ). Remembering Jews in this Khatibian approach is an operation that requires the mobilization of all senses.

If culinary, olfactory, and acoustic memories evoke loss for Khatibi, memories of cemeteries and old Jewish men evoke guilt. Revisiting his childhood, Khatibi insinuates to Hassoun with much contrition that he was among the children who attacked the Jewish quarter (107). Reflecting on his childhood memories, he confesses that “nous volions des chéchias aux vieux Juifs pour les revendre” (“we stole kippahs of old Jews in order to resell them”). Khatibi attributes this behavior to childhood naughtiness before asserting that “je l'ai fait une fois, une seule” (“I only did it once, once”). Similarly, cemeteries are prominent in Khatibi's childhood memories of Moroccan Jews. Khatibi admits to having stolen “talismans” but, this time, he also did the same thing to “les marabouts musulmans” (“Muslim marabouts”).

Instead of dwelling on guilt, Khatibi draws on these memories to appreciate the formative childhood he had in El Jadida. He underlines how the Jewish dimension is a part of his plural identity: “je pense maintenant que mon enfance était plus complexe dans sa formation affective. Biographiquement, j'ai vécu—très jeune—… tout une trame d’éléments culturels: à la fois arabes, musulmans, berbères, français, juifs, avec—dans ma ville—toute une mythologie portugaise” (“Now, I think that my childhood was more complex in its emotional formation. Biographically, I lived my youth in … a weft of cultural elements, simultaneously Arab, Muslim, Berber, French, Jewish, [infused with] a Portuguese mythology in my city”; 108). The city of El Jadida, where Khatibi spent his childhood, was an ecumenical port city space that saw many “Oceanic” invasions, piracies, and migrations, and the sediments of this history remain mostly underexplored in the burgeoning scholarship on Khatibi's work. An exploration of this history's significance to Khatibi's work would benefit from the meticulous work the local historian Mustapha Jmahri has been publishing about Maghazan—El Jadida's older name—for the last twenty years.Footnote ⁵

The physical Jews have been replaced by an absence, whose culinary, sensorial, and olfactory traces are left to bear witness to an erstwhile shared Jewish-Muslim existence. They are the source of childhood guilt. Jews seem to have become an object of memory, lamentation, and indignation. Oddly, at the time of his writing, some ten thousand Moroccan Jews still lived in the country, and yet Khatibi had nothing to say about them. Khatibi probably refuses to be the keeper of a vanishing memory, especially given his description of Muslim guards in a 1984 letter to Hassoun. The Muslim guard is “[u]n témoin, souvent vieux, délaissé, un restant, une dépouille qui persiste dans ce mythe. Mais le drame de ces témoins est pitoyable, c'est plutôt une décomposition qu'un témoignage, un veilleur de la mort qu'une survivance qui espère” (“[a] witness, often old, forsaken, a last trace, a corpse that persists in this myth. But the tragedy of these witnesses is pitiful; it's more of a decomposition than a testimony; a watchman over death rather than a vestige that hopes”; 93–94). Unlike Hassoun, who has mostly positive reminiscences about Egyptian Muslims, Khatibi's Moroccan Jews belong to a finished world. They are not frientimates; they are only an object of both loss and ignorance.

Trace 4: The Local Jew as an Object of Ignorance

Khatibi's Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoureux (Pilgrimage of an Artist in Love [2003]) takes place in Morocco in the early twentieth century. The novel unfolds in Fez, Alexandria, Mecca, Marrakesh, and Mazagan, following the travels of Raissi, a Muslim master of decorative ornamental plaster, who settles in Mazagan after his long peregrinations. The novel's representation of Moroccan society before the Protectorate (1912–56) offers a particularly important gateway into Khatibi's imagination of local Jews.

Only one chapter in the novel takes place in the mellah—the Jewish quarter—in Marrakesh. When Raissi moves to Marrakesh, he wanders into the mellah only to realize that the gates closed behind him. The “seul musulman parmi cette population que j'avais cotoyée pendant toute ma vie sans la connaitre” (“only Muslim among this population that I had rubbed shoulders with my entire life without knowing it”; 250), Raissi is saved from the anger of the Jewish members of the community whose space he transgressed by Shlomo, a Jewish jeweler, who invites him to spend the night with him and his family. What emerges from their overnight conversation is a mutual incomprehension despite their shared Moroccophony (250). This acceptance of spatial separation and mutual ignorance of these two communities could be at the root of some of Khatibi's misconceptions about local Jews.

Khatibi's construction of the mellah as an imprisoning space is contradicted by empirical research on spatial, corporeal, and mnemonic configurations of Moroccan Jewish-Muslim relations (El Guabli, Moroccan Other-Archives). In fact, although a Jewish neighborhood, the mellah is an integral part of life in the city (Canetti; Benichou Gottreich). Multidirectional traffic between the mellah and the larger Muslim community was embodied, for example, in the Jewish-Muslim celebration of Mimouna, a one-night observance of Pesach, as well as other mundane activities that indicate the intertwinement of Jewish and Muslim lives (Goldberg 75–76). Partaking in music, dance, and other celebratory events, Jews and Muslims engaged in egalitarian activities that solidified their reciprocal recognition despite their religious divide and legal inequality (Hammoudi 99). Neither the Jew nor the mellah that Khatibi depicts in Pèlerinage reflects this rich communal citizenship that is portrayed in scholarship and other Jewish-Muslim-centered fiction.

Although Khatibi engaged in rich dialogues with Derrida in Derrida, en effet (2007) and Hassoun, he overlooks the local—the “real”—Jew in the novel. While Europeanized Jews of a certain class and standing emerge as professional strangers and interlocutors, the Jews who still carry the marks of their Moroccan origins, or indigeneity, are confined to their quarter. Stripped of the translingual and transcultural capital of professional foreigners, the Jew Raissi meets is constructed in the image of a Muslim who happens to be Jewish, falling outside the realm of Islam. However, in a quintessentially Khatibian twist, Raissi's ability to penetrate this Jewish space subjects him to Shlomo's authority. “Je t'offre mon hospitalité jusqu'au matin” (“I offer you my hospitality until the morning”), says Shlomo (250). To Raissi's request of a nighttime tour of the mellah, Shlomo responds, “Nous sortirons, à condition que tu t'habilles comme moi. Surtout, ne parle à personne. Sois muet, on ne sais jamais” (“We will go out provided that you get dressed like me. Above all, don't talk to anyone. Be mute, you never know!”; 251). Shlomo's request subjects Raissi to the challenge of “passing” for a Jew for a very short part of the evening. In the morning, Raissi wonders if, in disguising himself as a Jew, he did not switch religions for one night (256).

Despite attempting to stage a frientimacy between Shlomo and Raissi, the novel fails to capture the vividness and complexity of Jewish-Muslim relations. Shlomo is, after all, a generic name for a Jew. Situating Raissi's visit to the mellah at night, when the streets were “presque désertes” (“almost empty”; 251), minimizes his contact with his Jewish cocitizens and limits the potential of what a novel can represent. Shlomo, therefore, stands for all the Jews who become part of an amorphous collective, rather than distinct individuals who each have a story to tell. Moreover, no Jew other than Shlomo speaks in the novel, not even his wife, three children, or little brother (256).

Although one of the earliest manifestations of literary interest in Jewish-Muslim memory in Morocco, Pèlerinage depicts the local Jew from an angle that is both limited and limiting for representation. Mnemonic literature, a subgenre that focuses on representations of Jews by Muslims (El Guabli, “Breaking Ranks”), has complicated the history that Khatibi is alluding to in Pèlerinage. Because of Pèlerinage's underlying assumption that Jews and Muslims did not know each other, it has failed to attain the same level of sophistication that is achieved in mnemonic literature's unsilencing, unearthing, and documenting of the significance of the absence of Jews from postindependence Morocco.

The emigration of the majority of Moroccan Jews between the 1940s and the end of the 1960s had a transformative impact on both people and topography. Jewish emigration robbed Muslims of dear friends, neighbors, lovers, and colleagues. Neighborhoods and villages that used to have Jewish and Muslim inhabitants became homogeneous overnight, and neither Muslims nor Jews had any chance to mourn their erstwhile shared existence, which came to an end as the result of global processes that were beyond their control. The gallicization of North African Jews began in 1830 when France colonized Algeria. The establishment of the first Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Tetouan in 1862 with the aim of Westernizing Arab/Amazigh Jews through French education (Laskier, Alliance Israelite Universelle) and granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews in application of the Crémieux Decree of 1870 launched the long-term linguistic and cultural separation of North African Jewish communities from their Muslim cocitizens. This cultural rift between gallicized urban Jewish communities and their rural coreligionists as well as their Muslim cocitizens sped up their emigration. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing wars in 1967 and 1973 further accelerated Jewish departures in the context of the repressive Years of Lead, turning Morocco into a predominantly Muslim country. Morocco was irrevocably changed by the departure of its Jews, which amputated a vital part of its socioeconomic and cultural makeup. It is this Morocco that would have been had Moroccan Jews stayed that would later be the object of the subgenre of what I have called mnemonic literature (El Guabli, “Breaking Ranks”), which reimagines Morocco with its Jews to show the many things Moroccans lost in the aftermath of their Jewish cocitizens’ emigration. Khatibi lived in Morocco at the height of this process, which took place most aggressively between 1961and 1968 as a result of the independent Moroccan state's cooperation with different Jewish organizations to encourage Jews to emigrate, and must have witnessed the void it left in metropolitan centers, like Rabat and Casablanca. Although many of the textual traces that are interspersed in his publications are not explicitly about his direct experiences, Khatibi's work contains one of the earliest articulations of Moroccan society's loss of its Jews. Beyond searching for any experiential aspect of loss in Khatibi's intertextual movements, it is important to underline that—maybe as a result of this loss—the Jew has played a fundamental role in Khatibi's theorizations of multiple identity and criticism of the sacred, among other things: conceptualizations whose ramifications are now extended to include an understanding of the place of Jews in conceptions of history and citizenship in Morocco.