A Palimpsest People
On
ne sait ce dont on doit s'étonner le plus : de l'habileté et l'influence
puissantes des faiseurs juifs, de la naïve ignorance de la commission
d'enquête, ou de la bonne grâce avec laquelle le public se laissait prendre à
cette fantasmagorie cousue de fil blanc.[1]
It
is not clear which is the most astonishing thing: the powerful abililty and
influence of the falsifying Jews, the naïve ignorance of the commission of
inquiry, or the good grace with which the public lets itself be led by a white
thead into this phantasmagoria.
This section of the essay deals with three special words to describe the
condition of the men of the nation we have been discussing. These terms—phantasmagoria, palimpsest and anamorphosis—designate ways of mixing
different ingrediants, holding in suspension different elements, hiding
different component parts, and allowing the differences to break forth into the
light and dazzle spectators and participants alike. Our approach is psychohistorical and does not
follow academic protocols of historiography, and draws on insighrs form
psychoanalysis, to be sure, but also cultural anthropology and art history.[2]
The normal modern sense of nationality derives from the idea of the
nation-state and seems to combine the concept of citizenship and ethnicity, as
well as language and religion or at least culture. Contemporary usage also suggests that the
nation is defined by its shared—sometimes consistent or coherent—political and
economic system. Though the use of the word nation in the United States and a few
other so-called western democracies tends towards a sense of shared allegiance
to the state and its written or unwritten constitution and yet also includes
the ideal of pluralism and multi-culturalism,.
This sense of nationality, insofar as all those who swear allegiance to
the flag (banner, enseign, standard) as the iconic centre of historical and
social continuity no matter the individual’s country of origin, mother tongue
or private confessional status, become more than legal citizens of the
state. They have been boiled down in the
melting pot into one people. However, in
other modern states, such as Canada or the United Kingdom, the word still contains
inflections that emphasize a particular language, religion or historical
culture as normative.[3]
But though there may be a superficial resemblance between this kind of
contemporary inclusiveness in the Disaporic Sephardi[4] understanding
of naçio, that national sense
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries originates in a very different
conceptual framework. It must be seen in relation to its early modern
definition conceived within a Baroque mentality and developed under conditions
of forced dispersion and strategies of constant duplicity. That is, in the first instance, the Sephardic
nation can be defined by what it is not.
It is not a people who share a political space and allegiance to a
particular political regime. It is not a
community of faith who share a common religious ideology or loyalty to a common
church or synagogue. It is not a group
of individuals and families who speak the same mother tongue, share the same
cultural habits, or believe in the same political values. Instead, in subsequent instances. they do
share a historical memory of once having been a part of a religious community
with shared language, culture and beliefs.
This collectively rememebred background develops to include a variety of
experiences by which they became separated to a certain extent. It is not only a memory of persecution and suffering, but of created differences constantly renewed and
therefore in a state of flux.[5]
While they share much in this way with other Jews and even with the
non-Jewish societies they come to inhabit, they do not share everything. They are a family, or at least like an extended
family, whose members recognize common ancestors, and who therefore feel
comfortable working with one another at most times and across long distances;
they intermarry and undertake a range of mutual obligations and
responsibilities—care for and education of each others’ children, to protect
the closeness of marital ties, to share feelings of charitable responsibility
sometimes agaionst the grain of national, economic or religious interests, and above
all to trust in many though not all financial and commercial dealings.[6]
If we can extrapolate from
contemporary writing—the kind of thick autobiographical explorations of
intimate feelings that are not possible in earlier texts—we can begin to grasp
this sense of this special; kind of nationality created around a shared
difference in most other matters considered essential to the concept amongst
nationaoity elsewhere. Ruth Knafo Setton,
for example, expresses it this way in “Ten Ways to Recognize a Sephardic
Jew-ess’”:
Our nomadic history has given
us a variety of languages, none of which is ours, but all of which we have
learned to speak—with a bite. You can
recognize us by the rage we carry in us…
[7]
Or take this instance of the same typical attitude deeply ingrained in
the soul of the modern Sephardi writer, this comment from Gini Alhadeff’s 1997
autobiography, The Sun at Midday: Tales
of a Mediterranean Family:
The Sephardi Mediterranean
from which I come is a world of many languages and no borders. My father’s
family speak Ladino among themselves; my mother speaks French. Most of them have a “foreign accent” in every
language they speak, though they speak fluently. Contained in this trace of an accent, in this
shared difference, is the nature of their identity: belonging everywhere, but
not quite…..Our generation, that of my brothers and myself, has achieved a
deeper level of camouflage: we too belong everywhere and nowhere, but this
telltale racial characteristic has been obscured by the chameleon skin of our
new identities….I am the worst of the chameleons: I have swallowed several
ethnic identities whole and no single one lords it over the others. They are all equal and fully developed….There
is an “original me” in every language I speak, though this “original” is
constantly rendered false by the presence of other, just as original,
“originals.” [8]
A little while further into her memoir,
Alhadeff continues:
We lived in Alexandria, Cairo
and Khartoum, then Tokyo, London and New York.
For a time between Alex and Tokyo, we lived at my grandparents’ house in
a place called Buguggiate, near Varese in northern Italy. My elder brother, Giampi, was sickly and had
been sent to Switzerland with a witchlike governess called Mademoiselle
Pourchot who was obsessed with table manners and little else in the realm of
human endeavor. My younger brother,
Gianchi, and I went to an Italian school in the nearby town of Azzate, where
for the first time, in grade school, we studied what was after all meant to be
our mother tongue. (In fact, we had already learned Arabic and French, and
though the first was soon forgotten for lack of practice, the second is what we
spoke at home[9]
In this way, using a contemporary instance, the naçio can be seen as a network of individuals and families tied
together by family histories, interlocking commercial activities, and mutual
aid in social and political obligations.
Virtually every family, then, is located in many places, simultaneously
and/or sequentially, speaks many languages but always, as it were, with a
foreign accent, and believes it can and must trust and be trusted by its fellow
Sephardim, whether or not they have remained Jewish, returned to Judaism, are
waiting to escape from Lands of Idolatry, or operate for strategic, cynical or
pious reasons as Christians. They are
aware that any moment—or at least once their own lifetimes—they may be forced
to escape from persecution, to change their culture, language or religion. Therefore, each family and each individual in
that family also know that at some point in their lives—if not many times—they
will have to think through who and what they are in relation to their
surrounding culture, including their closest friends and most intimate business
associates, as well as other members of their household and extended families
in various parts of the world. Unlike
most people who constitute a nation, they cannot accept their place in the
world—their ethnicity, language, culture, religion—as an unquestioned
certainty.
I want to call such a nation, the Sephardic Nation in Exile of the early
modern period, a palimpsest. In the first instance, a palimpsest literally
is a vellum or parchment sheet or book (scroll or codex) whose original text is
rubbed or scraped off and a new text inscribed on it. No matter how different the second writing is
from the first, the vellum or parchment retains an underlying record of the
original text; and by means of special dyes, lighting or x-rays it is now
possible to bring into readable focus the first writing. In the second instance, a palimpsest is a
form of double or triple inscription, by which a single or multiple texts are
written over one another. Sometimes this
is done as an expedient to save the expense of preparing a second vellum or
parchment. Sometimes it is done as a
cryptographic device to hide a secret message under the dominance of a darker
ink, a more distinct handwriting or some other technique. Sometimes the
palimpsest is created as a stylistic feature to embellish the appearance or the
meaning of the plainly written first text.
In the third instance, however, the palimpsest exists in a more
metaphorical sense, not as an actually doubly- or triply inscribed object, but
as a complex rhetorical or literary conceit, so that all or some of the words,
phrases and sentences may be read in several different ways simultaneously,
alternatively, or sequentially. This may
involve different kinds of word-play (puns or paronomasia), recombination of
letters and anagrammes, bi- or trilingual calques, and a variety of allusions
to historical, mythical or private codes.
[2] Norman Simms, “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and
Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) 52-64.
[3] Canada speaks of two founding nations or peoples interchangeably, though
it now allows or mandates recognition of indigenous “native” peoples as
well. The United Kingdom allows a degree
of internal autonomy to its constituent regional untis because of their
historical identities, along with dialects and folkloric customs. Switzerland allows for cantonal differenfes
with some overlapping of linguistic distinctions and religious
tolerastion. Belgium exists with an
ongoing tension between its Flemish and Francophone populations (and to a
lesser degree its German-speaking minority.
[4] I must ask the reader to keep in mind that the use of Sephardic here is not the common
political sense found in Israel, where it seemsd to designate and include all
of Oriental Jewry—not just those from Spain and Poertugal and their South
American former colonies, but also Arab-speaking communities in the
Arabic-speaking and former Ottoman Empire regions, the Levant, the Balkans, the
Mediterranean Islands and North Africa; in brief, to be Sephardfic is not to
be Ashkenazi and vice versa. The usage
here is more specific and historical;: with the legal disappearance of
Sepharad as a Jewish region in Iberia and the outlawing of Judaism as a
religion, the people who identify as ”men of the nation” live in the fluid, reversible, unsteady
condition we have been attempting to describe.
Many, if not most, live for at least part of their lives or consider
themselves to belong to families that are sometimes more or less in the
condition of Crypto-Jews and Marranos.
[5] They still share languages, cultures, and beliefs, but not as their
primary way of presenting themslevs to one another or outsiders.
[6] One thinks of the large and powerful international conglomerates that
bind together members of the same family that over-ride usually (although not
always) major political and military events.
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