Interview with Jacques Hassoun
“I am Jewish because I am Egyptian.
I am Egyptian because I am Jewish.”
Jacques Hassoun was born in 1936 and educated at the Lycée de l'Union Juive pour L'Enseignement in Alexandria, where the dominant intellectual orientation was Marxism. As a teenager, he joined the Dror Marxist-Zionist youth organization affiliated with the Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah faction of MAPAM in Israel. In 1952, Dror's leaders in Egypt decided that Marxism and Zionism were incompatible and dissolved the organization. Hassoun then joined HADETU, the largest of the illegal Egyptian communist organizations. In 1954, after being arrested as a communist, he was expelled from Egypt.
Upon resettling in France, Hassoun joined the Egyptian Jewish emigres who formed the Rome Group—a cell of HADETU in exile under the leadership of Henri Curiel. He remained active with Curiel's group until 1968. In 1979, Hassoun, several other Jews who had formerly been active in the French branch of HADETU, and others initiated the Association to Safeguard the Cultural Patrimony of the Jews of Egypt. The association sponsored the publication of two books, which Hassoun edited, Juifs du nil (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981) and Histoire des Juifs du nil (Paris: Minerve, 1990), as well as an elegant collaboratively produced photo essay, Gilbert Cabasso et al. (eds.), Juifs d'Egypte: Images et textes (Paris: Editions du Scribe, 1984). It also published a journal, Nahar Misraïm (The Nile River), from 1981 to 1986.
Paula Jacques and Edmond Jabès, who are discussed briefly in the interview, are perhaps the best-known Egyptian Jews who resettled in France. Jacques was born in Cairo in 1949 and left Egypt with her family in 1957. She is the author of four novels that depict the Egyptian Jewish community in Cairo and France. Jabès, a philosopher and literary critic, also arrived in France after the 1956 war.
Q:How did you feel as a Jew, as a member of a minority community, in Egypt before 1948?
A:I was born a Jew. I was from a completely Jewish family, religiously observant, Arabic speaking (even if my mother spoke French). Being Jewish was part of my identity. It posed no problem. It is certainly true that in…1946, 1947, 1948, we sensed a growing hatred toward Zionism, which was often expressed as a hatred of Jews. However, this hatred in no way detracted from the legitimacy of our existence.
Q:Why were a relatively large number of Egyptian Jews attracted to the left, to Marxist organizations, in the 1940s?
A:Apart from some exceptions who, before the Second World War, were part of the nationalist movement or at least members of the Wafd, Egyptian Jews, after the establishment of the state of Israel, did not have the possibility of becoming Egyptian nationalists, close to the Egyptian people, etcetera.…The only possibility for them was to take part in the communist movement, that is to say, a movement which at that time was not anti-Semitic and [from late 1947 on] favored the creation of the state of Israel. It was also very internationalist—with all of the ideology of that time. In other words, the triumph of communism would liberate the Jews from their situation, etcetera. Communism and Marxism provided a coherent vision, a theoretically coherent possibility of being Jewish and Egyptian at the same time without any major contradiction, at least until the 1950s.
Q:Does that mean that being communist meant the same thing as being Egyptian?
A:From that perspective, it seemed that to be a conscientious Egyptian, nationalistic, in favor of independence, and—to use the political terminology of the era, “a patriotic Egyptian”—was the only solution for the Jews.
Q:Were there social differences between those Jews who became Marxists and those who became Zionists?
A:There was, it seems, a cell of communist Jews in harat-al-yahud (the Jewish quarter of Cairo). But in general, the Jews that became communists were either from the middle class, or even the upper class. Very few poor Jews became communists. Zionists, on the other hand, were never from the upper class. They came from the middle or lower classes.
Q:When you arrived in France, why did you continue to engage actively in politics as an Egyptian?
A:You must remember, I was not expelled from Egypt because I was a Jew but because I was a communist—that is a very different situation. It was before the great expulsion of Jews following the 1956 war. I believed that if a socialist government came to power in Egypt, I would return to the country with full rights. I completely identified with the struggle of the Egyptian people. I considered myself completely Egyptian; I even had an expression for a very long time, which I repeated as recently as ten years ago: “I am Jewish because I am Egyptian. I am Egyptian because I am Jewish.”
Q:France has a very strong secular tradition as well as a very strong tradition of nationalism. Did this combination resolve for you the identity problems that you had confronted being Jewish in Egypt?
A:Resolve? No. I think that [being in France] actually complicated things; it did not resolve them.
Q:How?
A:It complicated things because after 1956–1957, I realized, even if I did not necessarily want to believe it…that I would never return to Egypt. The desire to be Egyptian, Jewish, communist, and French at the same time was really too much. For me it was a very long process. I had to practically reconstruct for myself the category of Egyptian Jews, I had to create associations with others, and I had to finish with this story of the Egyptian Jew in order to finally see all the different aspects of my identity reconciled. For a nonreligious Egyptian Jew like myself, resigning oneself to live permanently in France is extremely difficult. Though I was not religious, I was Jewish. I called myself “Juif d'Egypte” [an Egyptian Jew] even though I knew I would never return to Egypt. This was really a significant collection of contradictions for me. I think that politics, in other words, the ability to remain a communist, and then almost immediately to become a Trotskyist, allowed me to resolve all of this because the internationalist ideology permitted a certain marriage of these contradictions.
Q:Why did Egyptian Jews in France begin to form a collective identity in 1980?
A:I think that there are two reasons. The first is that it seems that the members of a persecuted group need twenty or thirty years before they can reappropriate their story. For example, look at what happened to the Jews in Europe.…It wasn't until 1975–1980 that there was discussion once again about the Holocaust, the extermination camps, etcetera. In addition, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s in France, it was the other order of the day to reconsider questions of identity. Moreover, several of us returned to visit Egypt between 1977 and 1979. Ibram Gabbai, André Cohen, Emile Gabbay, and I decided at that moment that we had to preserve the traces of a history that we feared was going to disappear.
Q:What was the French public reaction at that time toward this project of recuperating Egyptian Jewish identity, the publication of books, etcetera?
A:I was very surprised. There were of course write-ups in the Jewish newspapers. There were also write-ups in French newspapers, a significant amount in Le Monde (where there is rarely coverage of this sort of thing), in Liberation, on France Culture [a radio program]. There was a whole series of very interesting reactions. It seemed that people were curious. In particular, it appeared that French Jews were very curious about who the Egyptian Jews were. No one had ever talked about it before. They did not know that Egyptian Jews existed.
Q:If the Egyptian Jews have a certain repute in France, does that mean that someone like the novelist Paula Jacques is very well known?
A:Paula Jacques became famous late, very late. Paula Jacques published her first book [Lumière de l'oeil] in 1980. But Paula Jacques, despite the quality of her book, which I would say is very high, is not at all liked by the Jews of Egypt. In fact, they dislike her.
Q:Why?
A:The Egyptian Jews think that she tells nonfiction stories even though she writes novels. These stories present Egyptian Jewry as ridiculous, composed of crooks, the impoverished, etcetera. The Egyptian Jews don't want to identify with this depiction. They don't like her. There was also Edmond Jabès. But Edmond Jabès waited until one or two years before his death before admitting publicly, in an interview that I did with him and Carole Naggar, that he was from a very old Egyptian family—that his grandfather, his father, his great grandfather, were gabais (sextons) of the synagogue of harat al-yahud and that he had continued, until his expulsion from Egypt [in 1957], to go once a year to the synagogue, of which he was still, in principle, the gabai, on the evening of Yom Kipur for Kol Nidre.
Q:So the most famous Egyptian Jews in France are not known as Egyptian Jews but as French Jews?
A:As French Jews, exactly. But even Paula Jacques knows very well, I can say very frankly, that she could not have published her book without the work that we did in the journal Nahar Misraïm and in the association. We introduced her to the characters she used in her first novel. I am sure, and I told her this, and I say it publicly, that she would not have existed if we had not done this work. She would have written something else. She would have written it another way. But we cleared the path for her.
Q:How does the French public feel about the setting of Paula Jacques's novels?
A:It amuses them. They find it very funny. They think it is a bizarre diaspora because they know only the diaspora of Eastern Europe or the North African diaspora. They find it extravagant, a little strange, but nothing more.
Q:The fear of Islam is so strong in France now. Has it affected the Jewish community or you personally with your experience of being a resident and citizen of France of Middle Eastern origin?
A:It touches me not as Jew, but personally right now, as a French citizen. The big danger, the thing which would affect me, is that the Islamists threaten to transform an integrated, republican state, into a multi-ethnic state. I am for a republican, centralized, and integrated state.
Q:So you believe that the ideas of the French Revolution are still valid.
A:For me, as a Jew, yes. Perhaps it is different for American Jews. But in Europe and in France, the only way that the Jews can live in peace is to live in an integrated state. Personally, I am against the public manifestation of the Jewish religion. I am against the wearing of the yarmulke [skull cap]. Not at all because I am secular, but because I believe that we shouldn't openly flaunt ourselves as Jews. I am against the fact that, each year during Hanukah, the Hasidim light a menorah on the Champs de Mars, the most important place in Paris, while shouting about the Messiah coming, etcetera.…I think it is dangerous because, if there are different communities, [this type of demonstration] would create, given the latent atmosphere in France and in Europe, a pretext for anti-Semitism.
Palo Alto, California November 2, 1995
Transcribed and translated from French by Mara Kronenfeld