Memory, culture and identity of Moroccan Jews in Israel
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Joseph Chetrit

Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture.

Individual memory, community memory and sociocultural identity

• 1 The present study is a direct extension of that which was published in Chetrit 2008, where I (…)
• 2 On memory and its individual and social constructions see for example Benabou 1995; Halbw (…)

1In the affirmation or formation of one’s identity1, the eminent place taken by the personal and family memory of the individual as well as the cultural and social memory of his community of life or his community of origin is more than obvious. It is a psychosocial and socio-cultural data which forms for the person a node of regulation, integration and management both for his daily movements and impulses and for the strategies he deploys when making options or decisions. major decisions2. Likewise, for any human group, its collective memory, recent and ancient, is a major element in the ideology and mythology which consciously or unconsciously base its axiological values and its life orientations and at the same time determine its options and strategies. of action.

2For the individual, this place of collective memory and its implications for their identity depend on numerous factors which relate as much to age and the methods of training and education followed as to each person’s experience. This is particularly true of individuals from groups that may have been strongly structured, who find themselves, for all kinds of reasons, led to redefine themselves socially or culturally by their belonging or their assimilation to new groups in formation or to other groups already well established. constituted.

One of the authors who best perceived these processes and gave them a poignant literary and human expression, after his departure from Meknes in 1956 for Paris at the age of 17, is undoubtedly Marcel Benabou. In his masterpiece cited in the highlight, it is in fact the obsessive jolts of his Judeo-Moroccan memory which form the framework of his Oulipian novel and which prevent him from feeling at ease in the French identity that he was seeking. to put on. Although he has not even once mentioned the term identity in his work, there is no doubt that Benabou traces through his novel the intermittents and twists and turns of his quest for identity. It ends with a life choice as a young activist intellectual haunted by the Latin Quarter, its philosophical debates and its political commitments. His quest ends with the renunciation of his dream of writing a great encyclopedic work which would (re)valorize his Meknes community and retrace both his family epic and that of Moroccan Judaism as a whole as an integral part of the Sephardic Jewish world3. Instead of writing his encyclopedic work of revalorization, he retraced the memory of his unfulfilled dream, but in doing so, he no less revalorized his community and his family.

All those who have willingly or by force left their places of life for new skies and a new human environment experience, more or less, like our author, the outpourings of this obsessive memory of experiences accumulated in the places of origin. This is because, for each of us, the communities of origin are not only a physical place or an external scene which sheltered us and allowed us to live during part of our lives, but are indeed interior entities whose constructions populate our memory and our being and assail us from time to time with their psychic presence, without any apparent or conscious trigger. Like Marcel Benabou, we all carry our mental community with us to our new places of life; the representations that take place there consciously and unconsciously determine the a posteriori construction of our former family and community life and infuse them with meanings4. Even if the part that this memory of places and experiences plays is not the same for everyone in their new environments, there is no doubt that it continues to accompany, for a certain time at least, their psychic life. and often even its action. But individual memory is inseparable from forgetting, and all psychic life is constructed from one as well as the other, progressive amnesia often even being essential for adaptation to the new environment and the adoption of new forms. of life, not to mention the traumas consciously or unconsciously hidden.

Beyond this or that individual case, what about this community memory and its reconstructions for social groups whose members represent themselves as having lived for dozens of generations in the same places and who, in in the space of a few years, found themselves (re)displaced or uprooted, dispersed and resettled in new socio-political and human environments? For them, it is clear that the individual memory of each of them cannot merge or merge into a large memory reservoir into which these multiple human experiences would flow, even if reunions can be the opportunity for a new implementation. common of this common memory. What comes into play in this case is the re-establishment of cultural structures and values, forms of life and ceremonials identified with the group, whose fresh and less fresh traces still nourish the memory of those who lived as self-evident. When new social conditions allow it, the management of this cultural memory depends as much on a social organization, formal and informal, of reconstituted groups as on a political will of designated, or even self-proclaimed, leaders interested in this reconnection with their past. and that of their ancestors. The problems of action, awareness, mobilization, consolidation, organization and adaptation of memory contents to new living conditions and new possibilities for action then arise, including the implications for the sociocultural identity of those who are concerned and its representations are decisive and sometimes even disturbing. In such situations, it is indeed difficult to separate the injunctions of memory from the challenges of the old community culture: new forms of identification adopted by those who continue to claim to be part of the group attempt to ward off the amnesia of their recent or even distant past. This reappropriation of community memory must then take into consideration both the factors conducive to the adaptive conservation of cultural heritage, which has become essentially intangible due to transplantation, as well as the factors contributing to its resorption and amnesia in the new living spaces. It must therefore invent or at least readapt the methods of maintaining and transmitting this memory and to this end create new institutions, formal and informal, capable of managing this cultural heritage as best it can by drawing on memory anchors, or eye-catching and mobilizing “places of memory”. Promoters must also found associations and organizations or adequate transmission and dissemination networks and organize in particular ceremonials that establish established traditions or generate new ones.

The goal, admitted and unacknowledged, is that through this institutionalization of the cultural memory of the community, an identity of the group is reforged where the experiences of the past and their memory would hold a significant place alongside the other identity ingredients adopted in new environments, whose culture wants to be and behaves as hegemonic, if only by its antiquity and its domination of the territory. As such, this culture in effect provides or even imposes on us