What does this ” At home ” that Jewish grandparents and parents from the Maghreb regularly use to evoke the country they had to leave before coming to live in France or what they refer to in Israel? The nostalgic memory that such an exclamation implies has been transmitted to the generations that followed, sometimes provoking a desire to know more about “their” country of origin, as if they wanted to appropriate it in turn. Joseph Benamour, who had already asked himself whether there were any Jews left in Algeria, tells about the search of several young Frenchmen tempted to discover Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria – or even to move there. Do they represent an important phenomenon? It is difficult to say. In any case, the trajectory is symptomatic. It is that of a paradoxical “return” to countries known through family stories, but also of a return to oneself, to investigate an identity experienced as multiple and fragmented, at once Arab, Jewish and French.
In 1940 Marseilles, on the verge of leaving Europe, the great revolutionary Victor Serge was asked if he was Jewish. “I don’t have that honor,” he replied… Contrary to a large part of the communist and libertarian left which, even when it condemned anti-Semitism, was hardly interested in Jews as such, the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was unusually philo-semitic. Far from the positions of a Proudhon, a Marx, a Blanqui or a Bakunin, the struggle against anti-Semitism was for him “a struggle for the liberation of man, for a new humanism” and should “[constitute] one of the most imperative duties.” Mitchell Abidor evokes this preoccupation of Victor Serge, without neglecting the part of ambiguity that is sometimes revealed in it.
Séan Fergusson, a Scottish professor, goes to a Spanish university to give a course on culture and memory. As the guest of honor, he is given a private tour of its historical library. In a secret room, containing the collection of books banned by the Inquisition, the librarian opens a wooden chest and extracts – an unexpected discovery – a carefully saved curiosity: a Torah scroll. Séan Fergusson then begins his investigation. Philip Schlesinger’s “The Torah of Salamanca” tells a story of the erasure of the past and the incomplete repression of memory. The author has chosen the literary form for this story, rather than reportage; but the most curious readers should know that the Torah of Salamanca does exist, still hidden in a chest of the university library…
