Troubling Memories and Forgotten Futures: A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (2023)
Published:
British Institute for Libyan & Northern African Studies (BILNAS) webinar
Thursday 19 February 2026, 5pm via Zoom
Summary of the event: In dialogue with Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida speaks of himself as ‘Franco-Maghrebian’, as an Algeria-born, French-speaking Jew with precarious French citizenship, revealing a ‘trouble d’identité’. This webinar extends the notion of troubled identity to troubled memories as explored in A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (2023), a collection – or recollection – of Jewish memories stretching across North Africa and the Middle East. Edited by Franco-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar, this anthology of autobiographical essays, originally published in French (2012), includes narrative accounts of pre-exilic Jewish memories spanning Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. These micro-autobiographies trouble colonial ideologies, fixed identities, and competing nationalisms. Drawing from Jewish studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies, the lecture examines the ways in which French-speaking Jews in Muslim-majority countries across the Mediterranean negotiated the ‘triple coexistence’ of Jewishness, Arabness, and Frenchness. It concludes on a tentative and fragile note of hope, gesturing towards a forgotten future of coexistence. You can read the book Open Access here: A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean.
This relates to Dr Rebekah Vince's research project 'Memory as Inheritance: Transgenerational Maghribi Jewish Heritage across the Mediterranean Francosphere' (2023-2025), funded by the British Institute for Libyan & Northern African Studies (BILNAS).