In this section, I examine the various moments in each text that contain biblical references, or at least resonance. I hope to demonstrate the creative and generative
potential of midrash as a way of conceptualizing one facet of what Cohen and Boukhobza do in these texts. In other words, I hope to mobilize midrash metaphorically as a way of describing some of the literary strategies these two writers employ. I argue that these instances of biblical intertextuality function as midrashic variations on biblical themes which serve to simultaneously call into question the original biblical stories and etch out a new kind of Judaic text. In turn, this new kind of text contributes to Cohen’s and
Boukhobza’s expressions of écriture juive féminine, which we will study in greater detail in the next section of this chapter.
While these midrashic elements of the texts aim to subvert some of the
foundational narratives and stories that form the bedrock of Judaism and religious Jewish culture, the variations and adaptations they offer nonetheless retain a sense of Jewishness, in part by their very existence. This is to say, midrash is a very “Jewish” mode of
textuality and storytelling, so the midrashic elements of Géographie des origines and Un été à Jérusalem reinscribe Jewish traditions into the text even as they are subversive. Rather than rejecting altogether the textual-cultural tradition of Jewish religious identity, Cohen and Boukhobza effectively create a new ethos of story by redefining the
interpretive scope of these foundational narratives. The importance of story in the context of this project cannot be overstated. In her contribution to Judaism Since Gender, an edited volume of essays, Rebecca Alpert, one of the first women rabbis in the United States and a professor of American Jewish Studies, emphasizes the importance of stories in shaping collective feminist consciousness:
Midrash succeeds in presenting an alternative to historical research, and to the real “dominant discourse” in Judaism, halakhah. The creation of feminist midrash has been an amazing process of re-creating our people’s history and questioning Jewish “norms.” Jewish life is based much more on a collective memory and perception, on stories of how we came to be […]. These stories have done more to shape a feminist consciousness than a hundred archaeological digs. This is true because these stories rely on imaginative reconstruction. They can be written by anyone […]. Again, accessibility is a crucial component for creating change. (111-112)
Echoing Alpert in her introduction to Lifecycles, Rabbi Debra Orenstein emphasizes the centrality of storytelling in Jewish and feminist approaches to community and identity formation:
Stories are particularly important in both the feminist and Jewish communities. Feminists draw on and honor women’s experience, often using storytelling as a
tactic to ‘hear each other into’ being. Formats range from consciousness-raising groups to the literature of women ‘writing their lives.’ […]. Jewish tradition […] thrives on retelling sacred stories: Interpreting ancient texts anew in each
generation, reciting the story of Passover again and differently at this year’s seder (ordered readings and meal), cycling through the five books of Moses each week and each year. Jews, too, are defined largely by the stories we tell, and, especially, by the book we brought to the world. (xiv-xv)
Rabbis Alpert and Orenstein’s descriptions of the function of storytelling in feminist and Jewish contexts emphasize the roles of transmission (telling – or writing, and listening – or reading) and interpretation (retelling and ritual as enactment of interpretation).
Cohen’s and Boukhobza’s works give a sense that there is a need to tell, and in so doing, to elicit (re)interpretation. There is a provocative quality to these texts that partially comes from the midrashic variations, subversions, and inversals they effect.
One of the most salient examples of the midrashic facet of Géographie des origines appears in the excerpt below. As the narrator reflects on the trajectory of Algeria’s colonial history and its impact on her family’s eventual “exile,”53 she
eventually refers to her country of childhood as “Mosaic Algeria.” Naming it so sparks her memory of a verse from the Bible:
Rien n’est définitif dans ce que nous sommes. On aurait pu réussir une terre multiple. C’est aujourd’hui une terre brûlante. Algérie mosaïque, autrefois lumineuse et plurielle. Et je reviens à cette phrase de la Bible : Je te donnerai la terre que tu auras arpentée. Celle que tu auras sillonnée, celle que tu auras édifiée phrase à phrase, mot à mot, celle que tu auras fabriquée de tes mains. Se libérer des origines pour élaborer sa loi. Tracer un univers, constituer un monde, inventer un espace, disons-le ! Le trou de l’origine s’agrandit à mesure que l’écriture se fait, prend corps. Comment échapper au territoire des origines ? (59)
There are several midrashic elements in this passage. First, there is the fact that the verse seems to enter associatively into the narrator’s consciousness which suggests an
53 This appears in quotations because Cohen’s narrator oscillates repeatedly between on the one hand (ex)claiming that hers is not a story of exile since she feels that Algeria was never really her home, and on the other hand clearly articulating a sense of displacement and uprootedness, which she attempts to redefine and reclaim throughout the text.
interpretive interplay between the ancient text and the contemporary twenty-first century world of the narrator, thus echoing Orenstein’s claim that “[a]ll reading is marked by the interplay between text and context, but midrashic reading is especially so, since it
presupposes that the Bible is relevant to every age. In fact, midrash is created by the interaction between a fixed scripture and the evolving considerations of its readers” (xix). Second, there is the verse itself, whose exact origin is a bit questionable in that it appears to be an amalgam of verses from the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua.54 Translated
roughly into English as “I will give you the land that you will have surveyed,” it
obviously references the promise made to Moses that his exiled people would eventually have a land to call their own home. This line is one of the most foundational narratives to Jewish life through the ages, from the biblical era to the present55, in that the biblical
promise of a homeland is part of what fueled the Zionist movement and the eventual creation of the State of Israel.
The third midrashic element at play in this passage is the sequencing of what follows immediately after the biblical verse. The narrator inserts her own voice and adapts the original ancient line with vocabulary that makes a gradual semantic shift from the original “arpentée” (“walked across” or “surveyed”) to “sillonnée” to “édifiée”56, to
describe first the act of walking and then that of writing through/across the promised
54 Joshua 1:3 is a variation/repetition of God’s promise made to Moses in Deuteronomy 31:3-8; Cohen’s ‘citation’ is thus an approximation and an ambiguous mixture of these.
55 Indeed, it still features in religious Jews’ daily practices when reiterated three times throughout the day as a reminder of this promise.
56 The Larousse dictionary offers the following definitions for the verbs at the root of these three adjectives: “arpenter”: mesurer la superficie d’une terre; parcourir à grands pas.
“sillonner”: parcourir un lieu, le traverser en tous sens.
“édifier”: construire, bâtir; créer, élaborer par étapes un ensemble complexe; porter à la piété, à la vertu, par la parole ou l’exemple; renseigner sur ce qui était dissimulé, dissiper toute illusion.
land. She is thus writing the world she wants to be given and in so doing rewrites the covenant. Rather than being promised an actual land (Canaan), Cohen’s narrator
promises herself a textual, literary landscape that has potential for constant evolution by virtue of the fact that it is textual and a product of creation. The promise seems to be that a territory can become the writer’s home if she does the work of surveying (writing) that territory, thereby coming to know it. At the same time, she cannot escape ‘the territory of origins,’ which only seems to expand the more she writes. The promise of writing is that it generates new homelands and models of belonging, but whether that promise is ever fully fulfilled remains in question.
With these three midrashic elements of this passage in mind, it is fascinating to briefly consider the Book of Joshua, which tells the story of the fulfillment of the earlier promise made to Moses in Deuteronomy. The consummation of that promise comes as a result of the Israelites’ conquest and occupation of the land of Canaan, and thus
essentially legitimizes and validates colonization. Given this biblical context, Cohen’s description of colonial Algeria as “Algérie mosaïque” takes on new meanings. There is first the image of Algeria as a pluralistic, luminous ideal, a multicolored mosaic of cultures, peoples and languages. This pluralistic Algeria “of times gone by”
(“d’autrefois”) might refer to the early phase of French colonial presence in Algeria before the Crémieux Decree when both groups received equal treatment by the colonizer. In that period, the tension and separation were largely absent that would later characterize the relationship between Algerian Jews and Muslims once Jews – and not their Muslim neighbors – were granted French citizenship under the Crémieux Law (passed in 1870 and repealed in 1940, then reinstated by De Gaulle in 1943).57
57 See Chapters 3 and 7 of Benjamin Stora’s Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 1830-1954 for an overview of these shifts. There is also an excellent in-depth tracing of these developments in a doctoral dissertation by
The second potential interpretation that arises from “Algérie mosaïque” is biblical; a “Mosaic Algeria” in this sense could have various implications. First, it could imply that Algeria is recast as the proverbial promised land. Or, that Algeria is the site of the alleged exchanges between Moses and God (i.e., the revelation of the Ten
Commandments, and the covenant of return to the promised land). Lastly, it might imply rather that Algeria is the site of exile and subjugation (i.e., the biblical Egypt) from which Jews had to flee. This resonates with the mass departures of Algerian Jews from Algeria to France in 1962, which is sometimes referred to as an exodus. Analogous to the biblical exodus facilitated by Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, the 1962 exodus of Algerian Jews to France meant a crossing of the Mediterranean. But, as we saw in the previous section of this chapter, unlike the biblical exodus that engendered a return from exile as well as a liberation from enslavement, the Algerian Jewish exodus signified an entry into a strange kind of exile in that for Cohen’s narrator, Algeria was never ‘really’ home. The
ambiguity of the epithet (“(M/m)osaic”) allows room for interpretation, and in this way too contributes to the midrashic style (and agenda) of Cohen’s text.
In any case, what is clear is that the (post)colonial experience of Algerian Jews such as Cohen’s narrator and her family is mixed, and the invocation of the biblical stories of exile, conquest and occupation underpins the equivocal status of that
experience and the metahistorical as well as personal, national, and political narratives that surround it. While the French colonial empire grew out of the Enlightenment rhetoric of the “mission civilisatrice,” it could be (and has been) argued that the eventual founding of the State of Israel in part rested its justification on the stories related in these very biblical stories that Cohen’s narrator invokes. There is thus an analogical interplay here
Sophie Rogers titled Jews, Citizenship, and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870-1943. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/33871/6/Roberts_Sophie_B_201103_PhD_thesis.pdf
between the biblical stories, Israel, and French colonialism, and Cohen’s narrator, like many Jews coming from former colonies, is stuck between these narratives in perpetual ambivalence. Cohen’s narrator is as forsaken by Algerian nationalism as Boukhobza’s narrator is by Israeli and Tunisian nationalisms, thus discrediting the Book of Joshua by demonstrating the impossibility of “belonging” along national lines, which can be interpreted in the Israeli context as the fulfillment of the promise made in Joshua.
The context (or intertext) of Joshua also foregrounds the critiques Boukhobza’s narrator makes in Un été. As discussed earlier in this chapter, it is clear throughout Boukhobza’s novel that the time the narrator spent living in Israel disabused her of her earlier Zionist ideals that brought her there from France in the first place. Indeed, her return to Jerusalem for the summer of the novel’s setting only sharpens her critique and denunciation of Israel’s participation in territorial geopolitical violence and its repetition of colonial self-legitimizing narratives and logic. This critique as it connects to biblical narratives of conquest is perhaps most explicitly expressed in her description of Begin’s televised appearances throughout the summer: “Begin paraissait malade dans ses
passages à la télévision. Son visage, barré de lunettes épaisses, exprimait le doute et la fatigue. Le ton avait perdu de sa morgue et de cette emphase biblique qui lui avait conquis les cœurs. Pourtant, dans les rues, on continue d’acclamer son nom” (“Begin looked ill in his appearances on television. His face, crossed with thick glasses, expressed doubt and fatigue. His tone had lost its arrogance and biblical grandiloquence that had won him peoples’ hearts. Yet, in the streets, people continue to cheer his name”;
emphasis added; my trans., 98). At the same time, this description of Begin conveys the sense that it pains her to be so critical and condemnatory of Israel. On Begin’s face, she can see the toll taken by the choices he has made, thus reinforcing that the Lebanon War,
first presented to Israelis as a biblically justified initiative, has not served anyone well – not even the Prime Minister.
This sense that it pains her to be so harshly critical also stems from what we saw in the previous section, when she expresses compassion as well as disdain for the North African immigrants of her parents’ generation who arrived in Israel via the “trajectory of a circumflex accent.” Lastly, this sense arises in part from the melancholy she expresses for the era of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in the Tunisia of her
grandparents and relatives of that same generation: “Ils viennent d’un pays où durant des siècles, le juif a vécu en paix avec le musulman. […] c’est en Tunisie qu’ils ont vécu leurs plus beaux jours. Israël ne représente que ce sol trop sacré où ils sont venus mourir et qui rabattra sur eux la dalle d’une tombe” (“They come from a country where for centuries, the Jew lived in peace with the Muslim. […] it was in Tunisia that they lived their best days. Israel represents nothing but this too sacred ground where they came to die and that will close a tombstone over them”; my trans.; 192). This melancholy effectively creates a juxtaposition between what Israel could have been (a recreation of pre-1956 Tunisia and a society built upon the values of the kibbutzim), and what it is for the narrator (a reenactment of colonialism, sanctified in part by the biblical stories of Joshua that foretell the “too sacred ground” where the narrator’s relatives have come to die). The narrator’s empathy towards Palestinians in Jerusalem further exemplifies her disdain for Israeli nationalist politics built upon the sustained occupation of the very land reacquired by Jews in the book of Joshua.
The geopolitical reverberations of the book of Joshua as they manifest in the colonial dynamics of Israel/Palestine and the knotty relationships between France, the Maghreb, and Israel are further highlighted through a textual retracing and remapping of
the geographical spaces in the book of Genesis. Both narrators trace and draw these new maps, but in Un été, this occurs in a very literal sense since the novel takes place in Israel. As Israeli biblical scholar Nathan P. Devir points out in his article “Midrashic Bodies: Prostitution as Revolt in Chochana Boukhobza’s Un Été à Jérusalem,” “The trip that the narrator undertakes from Jerusalem to Beersheba is […] significant in that she traverses, almost from end to end, the length of the biblical Kingdom of Judah […]” (“Midrashic” 132). Devir then goes on to explain that according to his analysis of the novel, this geographical mapping foretells the prophecies alluded to in the novel, which echo the prophecies of Jeremiah that because of the broken covenant from Deuteronomy, the inhabitants of Judah would face disaster (“Midrashic” 132). For Devir, this biblical prophecy is echoed by Boukhobza’s novel which warns against the Lebanon War.
If the geographies and geopolitics (re)mapped in Un été à Jérusalem have obvious biblical resonance, this is less the case in Géographie des origines. In the following passages, a memory from a summer spent in the mountains of the French Haute-Savoie region gives way to mixed metaphors and mythologies to draw a new map. As Cohen’s narrator recalls time spent in the mountains, looking for gold, she draws on biblical as well as Spanish colonial legends to eventually make a prophecy of her own:
Le pays rêvé est vierge de toutes les histoires humaines et familiales. La tête penchée sur des trésors invisibles, je redeviens fille de la terre, femme d’un monde sans père, pays ignoble et merveilleux. Eldorado sans foi ni loi. Comment redevenir des enfants de la terre ? Bonheur que d’avoir déserté les chemins de l’enfance ! S’extraire du bourbier des origines. Eldorado de mes pieds qui foulent une terre purifiée des humeurs primales de la naissance. Qui sont-ils, ces
légionnaires aux mains sales, ces têtes brûlées d’un pays sans nom, fils de pute ? Légionnaires de Sidi-bel-Abbès. Qu’ont-ils fui, ces aventuriers poilus et membrés, prêts à en découdre avec Dieu lui-même ? […]. Sur le territoire des questions, je déplie ma carte intérieure. Les filiations nous étouffent, elles s’enroulent sur nos gorges fatiguées. Eldorado, Jérusalem, résurrection, toujours vaincre en nous l’attirance du néant. « Il faut être voyant. » Voilà l’ange Gabriel annonçant un Eldorado de larmes et de gloire : « Je vous salue, Marie pleine de grâce, le Seigneur est avec vous. » […]. Je gambade, la tête à l’envers, sur des chemins
inconnus, sur les pentes verdoyantes et humides de la Grande Chartreuse, à des années-lumière de mes oueds asséchés et de mes terres craquelées. Des paysages magnifiques s’offrent à mes yeux ahuris. Je ne connais rien des territoires que je parcours, je marche, je marche, décidée à inventer un nouveau chemin, à casser les habitudes, à ne plus être conforme au programme des lettres de mon nom. Aucune terre ne nous est promise, aucun métal précieux ne nous attend ! (65-67) The mixed imagery in this passage is striking, and (re)generative even as its tone is ironic and unequivocally condemns colonialism and the myths that support its ideologies and practices. Proving consistent with the characteristic ambivalence of the entire text, here the contrasting, conflicting positions that the narrator articulates vis-à-vis her origins and