The Other Middle East by Franck Salameh

Author:Franck Salameh [Salameh, Franck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

JACQUELINE KAHANOFF (1917–79)

In a 2011 collection of papers and short stories by little-known polyglot Israeli essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff, Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh suggest that Levantine fluidity and hybridity had their champions in the State of Israel. Kahanoff, wrote Starr and Somekh, in the early 1950s had already envisioned a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, a solution culled from the confines of her native Egypt, where Jews, Muslims, Christians, Greeks, Italians, Syrians, Arabs, and others had lived together for centuries, if not in peace and harmony, then at least side by side and in acknowledgment of each other’s distinctive character and multi-ethnic heterogeneity, often partaking of each other’s languages and cultural rituals without even being conscious of their differences. As a child in Egypt, wrote Kahanoff, “I believed that it was only natural for people to understand each other even though they spoke different languages, for them to have different names—Greek, Muslim, Syrian, Jewish, Christian, Arab, Italian, Tunisian, Armenian—and at the same time be similar to each other.”5 Like the Israel of her old age, the Egypt of Kahanoff’s youth was a symbiosis of religions, national origins, languages, and histories that were all uniquely Levantine. It is nationalism, and in the case of once cosmopolitan Egypt, it was the Arab nationalism of the 1950s, that brought an end to Levantine diversity. Under Nasser, “the idea of a liberal, pluralistic Egyptian nationalism which included the non-Moslems and was accepted by them had died,” lamented Kahanoff in 1973.6

From Kahanoff’s perspective, the Middle East will know peace only by recovering the halcyon times of ecumenical Levantine identities, where Arabs, Jews, and others lived together in mutual acceptance, and where hybridity and pluralism were celebrated elements of unity and overriding parameters of selfhood. Likewise, Kahanoff intimated that Israel may never find peace unless Zionism, a conceptual bedmate of Arabism, comes to terms with its own Middle Eastern essence.

Born in Egypt to an Iraqi-Jewish father and a Tunisian-Jewish mother, Jacqueline Kahanoff was raised in the port city of Alexandria, and grew up proud of her hybrid Mediterranean pedigree. Like many Christian and Jewish minorities of her generation, issuing from Ottoman coastal centers like Izmir, Alexandria, or Beirut, Kahanoff was a gifted polyglot intimately acquainted with her city’s maritime conflations, kissed by its fluidity, at home with several of its languages—wielding with native familiarity a number of Arabic vernaculars, speckled with French, Hebrew, Italian, Turkish, and English—and straddling multiple cultures and multiple religious traditions. And so, Kahanoff’s intimation that Israel “become part of the Middle East” was a reflection of her background, the outcome of her upbringing and the human space in which she came of age. Most importantly, her Middle East represented the cosmopolitan ethos of her times, elements of which were already expounded by Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian precursors from the 1920s on. Like her Mediterraneanist elders, the language of Kahanoff’s literary output avoided Arabic and Hebrew—although she did at times write in both—languages that she knew well, but which she deliberately avoided, given

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