Delivered. From her rock of Carthage, Sophie Bessis is sometimes seized with a furious desire, that of scolding the icons of her pantheon. There, at the foot of the bishopric of Saint Augustine (a son of the Maghreb), she thought for a moment to take the Mediterranean as a witness to question Rosa Luxembourg. In the end, she preferred to admonish Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). We won’t regret reading I am writing to you from another shore, a long letter addressed to the German philosopher (naturalized American).
In the course of this letter of demanding tenderness, the Franco-Tunisian historian who, for four decades, questions the North-South relationship, confesses her debt to Arendt only to better describe it. “I have things to reproach you”, she retorts with all the more verve that the unanimity in vogue around Arendt does not do him justice, in his eyes.
Of his “Shore” of Carthage full of light – and she insists on the “ famous summer »Who signs his “Irreducible belonging »- Sophie Bessis is therefore annoyed by the biases of the author of The Culture Crisis, and in particular its Eurocentrism: “You are an incurable European. “ The two women – born forty years apart – share the Jewishness of their birth. Their proximity is also due to the common criticism of the “Tragic deviation of Jewish nationalism” in Zionism. But connivance does not abolish a serious misunderstanding. Sophie Bessis does not console herself that Arendt, the Jewess of the North, is so ignorant of the existence of Eastern Jews.
Get out of denial
There, the author reveals a little of her genealogy. “ I am a “Jewish Arab”. You have never heard of us. “ She thus relates: of the grandmothers who came from Tuscany – where the Sephardi expelled from Andalusia found refuge – and of the indigenous grandfathers of Tunisia, one of whom traded cattle with Tripolitania and the other officiated as a “Jew of court ”with the Ottoman bey in Tunis. Her parents were communists and the young Sophie received an internationalist education rubbed against the emancipatory struggles of the time. His “Internal plural” brandished like a totem pole.
However, she detects in Arendt a concealment of this heritage. “You Europeans wanted to forget it. “ Forget the role of the Andalusians – Maimonides or Ibn Rochd (Averroes) – in the European renaissance. Annex the Mediterranean to its northern shore. And convey prejudices such as those connotations of archaism assigned to the adjectives “Balkan” or “Levantine”. Sophie Bessis calls for an end to denial. It exhorts Europe and the Israel of the Ashkhenazis to rediscover their part of the East just as it invites the Arab-Muslim world to assume its traces of the West and of Jewishness. This will require going beyond nationalisms of all stripes which “Kill diversity” and, beyond, this “Hurt the Other” which stunted the horizon.
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