Albert Memmi (1920 - 2020)

Albert Memmi, the great Tunisian-Jewish anti-colonial writer and theorist, has passed away at age 99.

Late last year, a friend and I had the early sketches of a plan to host a conference in honor of Memmi's 100th birthday (at the time, the most common response to this idea was for people to exclaim "he's still alive?"). That was put on brakes after the coronavirus hit, but there's no question Memmi remains worthy of study and (now) memorialization.

Albert Memmi was born in Tunis in 1920. In his early life he was involved in socialist youth movements, and during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia he was interned in a slave labor camp (from which he escaped). After the war, he became one of the leading intellectual lights of the movement to free Tunisia from French colonization. What Fanon was to Algeira, Memmi was to Tunisia, and for many years Memmi's book The Colonizer and the Colonized was read alongside Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as cornerstone texts of decolonial theory. That is much less true today, possibly because Memmi's later work was more conservative, possibly because Memmi was emphatic throughout his career that he viewed Zionism as the decolonization movement of the Jews.

Unfortunately, following independence Memmi found that Tunisia had little place for Jews, and he exiled himself to France where he spent the remainder of his life. He wrote a trilogy of books -- Portrait of a Jew, Liberation of the Jew, and Jews and Arabs -- which have been widely overlooked but which I think are each superb explorations of the Jewish condition that continue to resonate to this day (many excerpts from these books have been featured on this blog). He continued to write prolifically, culminating in a follow-up to The Colonizer and the Colonized titled Decolonization and the Decolonized in 2006. This book was controversial, as Memmi evinced a marked conservative turn, and there are parts of it that made me wince as a reader. But that does not mean it is not worth reading, as is the broader corpus of Memmi's amazing life's works.

While Fanon famously died extremely young, Memmi's career as a writer spanned well over a half-century, witnessing tremendous revolutions in his homeland and in the disciplinary areas he wrote upon. Hence, I've sometimes described Memmi as the version of Fanon who got to watch the decolonization story actually unfold. By itself, that makes him a fascinating character. But Memmi deserved to be read and praised in his own right, not simply as a shadow of Fanon.

May his memory be a blessing.

More Memmi Quotes (on Autonomy as the Specific Liberation of the Jew)

Is it obvious what I'm reading these days?

You may choose, in spite of everything, to remain on the side of the oppressed, whatever the risks; but you cannot prefer to be oppressed. In any case I fail to see the glory in it. To uphold one's oppressed condition is an act of false daring and empty words, if it does not also mean an action to abolish it, the firm decision to do everything in one's power to cease being an oppressed person and to end the oppression.

For me the dignity of the oppressed begins, first, the moment he becomes conscious of his burden; second, when he denies himself all camouflage and all consolation for his misery; third, and above all, when he makes an effective decision to put an end to it. May all the victims of history forgive me. I know only too well how a victim becomes a victim. I understand the subterfuges which enable him to survive. I pity his inner ruin, but I do not admire his grimaces of pain or his scars. I do not find his suffering face the most beautiful in the world nor do I consider the plight of the victim to be very admirable.

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, trans. Judy Hyun (New York: Orion 1966), 271-72.

The first condition of a specific liberation seems to me self-evident: the oppressed person must take his destiny into his own hands. My life must no longer depend on any treaty, often signed with other ends in mind, by anyone with anyone. Not that alliances or the aid of generous friends must be refused, but neither Socialist planning, nor the abstract humanitarianism of the Democrats, nor Christian charity are essential. Better still, no one owes us anything. I became adult, I believe, the day I understood that nothing was owed me. It was high time we became adult; in other words, non-dependent, neither in fear nor in hope. We should not have had to ask ourselves piteously and in vain why the Pope was silent or why the Americans abandoned us, why the Russians didn't budge. And why not the Red Cross! And the A.S.P.C.A.! Liberty is not a gift; bestowed, conceded, protected by someone else, it is denied and vanishes. Our liberation must depend on our own fight for it.

Id. at 274-75.

Still none of this was specifically Jewish. All impossible conditions call for a radical solution, all absolute misfortunes demand an absolute revolt. How were we to discover the specific conditions of each liberation? Here I proposed another criterion: the liberation of an oppressed person must be made as a function of the specific conditions of his oppression. In other words, our starting point had to be the complete description of the Jewish condition, which I have attempted to give in my last book and in this book. The reader may now understand why I have dwelt on this problem; it was not only because I needed to free myself of it, or to exorcize my own ghosts. The liberation of the Jew must be deduced from his particular misfortune.

 The misfortune of the Jew is then a total misfortune; in other words, it does not encompass only one aspect of his life, his political autonomy, his economic function, his culture or his religion. It concerns his whole existence, his relations with himself and with others; it affects the unity of his personality, divided into a private individual and a public person; and his whole dimension as a questionable citizen and an historically impotent man. It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular intonations. The Jew is not oppressed as a member of a class, which distinguishes him from the proletariat, for example. Nor is he oppressed as a member of a biological group, which distinguishes him from Negroes or women. He is affected as a member of a total, social, cultural, political and historical group. In other words, the Jew is oppressed as a member of a people, a minor people, a dispersed people, a people always and everywhere in the minority (which distinguished him from the colonized, also oppressed as a people, but a people in the majority).

Therefore the Jew has to find a total solution, one which answers every aspect of his threatened existence, which guarantees his present but also rehabilitates his past and restores to him possession of his future. In other words, the Jew, oppressed as a people, must find his autonomy and freedom to express his originality as a people. Therefore to overcome absolutely, the revolt of the Jew must include that particular aspect which will necessarily rehabilitate and recognize him as a major and majority people.

In effect, if the Jews do not pull themselves together as a people they will necessarily remain a separated minority, threatened and periodically exterminated. If they do not defend themselves as a people they will remain subject to the benevolence of others, in other words, to the fluctuations of their moods, more often bad than good. They will remain condemned to serve as a too-convenient scapegoat, a target for other people's economic and political difficulties, to live in ambiguity and by subterfuge and in fear--his own and that of others, to which he strangely clings, like a hated ghost.

Only this collective autonomy will give us at last the daring and the taste for liberty which alone are the foundations of dignity....

Humanism yes, but humanism after the liberation and not this fake humanism, a one-way street where I must consider all men as saints in a humanity in which I still have no place.

Id. at 276-79.

Albert Memmi on the Jew-of-the-Left

As part of my summer reading (basically, this summer I committed to do zero work on my dissertation and instead just ... read. Doesn't matter what, just read things. I'd say my success in this endeavor has been middling), I've picked back up the work of Albert Memmi. He's a fascinating figure -- it's no accident he's been a regular feature of my periodic philosophical musings about Jews on this blog -- and much of his observations on Jews and the Jewish experience remain resonant a half century after publication.

One of the things I like about Memmi is that he is an unimpeachable member of the left -- he made his bones, after all, as an advocate for Tunisian decolonization and his most famous work, The Colonizer and the Colonized, is part of the anti-colonial studies canon -- but he is not blind to its faults or its perils. He simultaneously believes the left is the only reasonable path for the Jew and is well aware of the betrayals the left has regularly foisted upon its Jewish comrades. A chapter in his The Liberation of the Jew ("The Jew and the Revolution") remains an outstanding exploration of how Jews relate to the left, and is worth diving into in detail.

First, we should place an important preliminary front and center: Memmi states outright that a reasonable, thinking Jew "can only be of the left". "[A] Jew," he writes, "is conservative only out of blindness or some short-sighted caution." While money or economic success may provide some measure of security in certain cases, "it is in the final analysis an illusory shelter; the Rothschilds themselves supplied their quota to the deportation camps. Whatever kind of insurance he has, the Jew remains a dominated person." And while right-wing politics occasionally gestures towards a sort of facile inclusion of the Jews, "[t]he government of the Right, cultivating the myth of the homogeneity of the nation, of the people or of the race, naturally tends to exclude the Jew, or at least limit his participation" (228-29). This echoed a point he made in his earlier Portrait of a Jew, where he said:

How can a man be a Rightist when he is a Jew?. . . The alliance of Jewry with Right wing movements can never be anything but temporary . . . To preserve the existing order, the Right has to stiffen and emphasize differences while at the same time having no respect for what is different. To preserve itself as a privileged group, it must repulse, restrict and repress other groups. Now it may be that a Jew may desire the survival of a given social order in which, by chance, he is not too unhappy. But in addition, he wants the differences between himself and the non-Jews in that class to be forgotten or at least minimized. The Right, either openly or covertly, drives the Jew back to his Jewishness and can only condemn and burden his Jewishness (218-19).

As Daniel Burston fairly observes, this argument doesn't hold in a case where Jews can themselves form the government and realistically attempt to cultivate their own myth of the homogeneity of the nation -- that is, it doesn't hold in Israel (surely, the nation-state bill is very much an illustration of how Jews, too, can genuinely indulge in this sort of right-wing exclusivity when they'd be the beneficiaries of homogenization). In its way, Israel is what has allowed the emergence of genuine right-wing Jewish politics. This isn't itself an argument against Israel (there's no time to go into that here, but see my post on strength, repentance, and diasporaism for hints on where I'd go), but it does reveal the potential for a sort of complacency in the Jewish world that thinks it is our destiny rather than our work to remain democratic, egalitarian, and a light-unto-nations. They're more committed to the slogan of "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" than they are to the reality of it.

Anyway, I digress. Memmi thinks that Jews -- certainly, at least those in the diaspora and under conditions of domination from non-Jews (a condition not solved simply when some Jews have money) have to be on the left. And on that I agree, and anyone who thinks that the Trumpist Republican Party or Orbanist Hungary or Austria's Freedom Party or any of their compatriots will be reliable friends of the Jews is deluding themselves. All the seeds of nativist resentiment stand ready to blossom against the Jews, now as they ever had, and if you think past attendance at a CUFI rally is going to stand as even a speedbump to embracing it going forward you haven't been paying attention to contemporary politics. The right is not and will never be a friend of the Jewish minority.

But, Memmi continues, this does not and has not meant that the left has reciprocated in protecting us:

It is true that the parties and governments of the Left very quickly gave us reason to doubt their ability to resolve our problem. Relatively speaking, we had certainly furnished the different parties of the Left with the largest contingent of hard-core militants, but this did not put an end to the hesitations and muddling of the European Left with respect to us. The Left did not defend us against the vile racist aggression with the complete strength and decisiveness which we had a right to expect from it. I have already spoken of the enthusiasm with which many of our youth movements followed the Soviet experience.... Did all this prevent an anti-Semitic brochure from appearing in Kiev as late as 1964? Did it prevent Russia from feigning ignorance of the kibbutz, the only true collectivist experience in the world? I will never be able to rid myself of a terrible doubt: would the Red Army have stood immobile at the gates of the Warsaw ghetto if it had not contained Jews alone? (Liberation of the Jew, 229)

And then Memmi writes a passage that rang very familiar: a "portrait" he drew of the prototypical "Jew-of-the-Left" -- or at the very least, of its most devoted foot-soldiers:

A portrait of the Jew-of-the-Left would be easy to paint. Under a dogmatic and assured exterior, he would be emotional, easily disturbed, both Manichean and Rousseauist; determinedly logical, but blind to the obvious, a mixture of desperate intellectual severity and annoyingly naive sentimentalism; stubbornly insisting on seeing as friends people who would watch him being tortured with indifference; believing in the fundamental goodness of man and in the irremediable evil of some men; clearly dividing humanity into two imaginary lot: on the one side the dirty skunks--reactionary, racist, incomprehensible monsters, or those reduced to thoughts of their wallets alone; on the other, their victims--the good and the pure who happily make up the great majority. Though they are at present mystified, one day they will certainly carry out the revolution because they have already done so in their hearts. Then, that which comically betrays, better than all the rest, the Jewish note: a touchy disinterestedness. On no condition can anyone suspect him for a moment of thinking of himself or his people. He fights unconditionally for all humanity; a trait which everyone uses and abuses; perfectly abstract, in reality laughable and touching; in the final analysis always ridiculed and in fact he is a sort of cuckold (231).

Why yes, I am familiar with the type (and again, for the right-wing Jews crowing in the bleachers -- scroll back up, because he thinks you're even more ridiculous).

Memmi proceeds to delineate and critique a particular pathology of the Jew-of-the-Left, who can abstractly agree that Jews are among the people he or she is fighting for but is squirmy and uncomfortable to do so with any specificity. It feels too provincial, too parochial, to back those distinctively their own -- a logic which ends up concluding at the absurd demand that people "fight only against an injustice of which he is not a victim" (234). And then you get the plea that the silence about Jewish issues is a tactical one -- yes, we must fight for Jews, but not in a "provocative" way; yes, we must fight for Jews, but doesn't speaking of antisemitism just "give substance to [its] delirium?"; yes, we must fight for Jews, but we don't want to divert attention from "more decisive battles" (234-35).

He even identifies a particular form of comfort this sort of Jew-of-the-Left can create for him or herself by encrusting themselves in the body of the left so wholeheartedly that antisemitism and the Jewish question really do cease to be a problem for them (this is how you can get the Jews who proclaim that their entire careers have been spent inside the belly of leftist politics and yet they've somehow never once experienced antisemitism -- almost always, they're Jews whose Jewishness starts and ends at that sentence). Here Memmi is alluding back a prior chapter on "encystment", a condition of ghettoization where the ghetto itself provides a soothing, comfortable (but ultimately quite brittle) shield against the dangers and anxieties of the outside world. The left can be its own ghetto, albeit of an inverted sort where instead of being entirely Jewish the Jew instead is asked to be not Jewish at all: To be comfortable in the left,

the Jew-of-the-Left must pay for this protection by his modesty and anonymity, his apparent lack of concern for all that relates to his own people. In the hope of a future victory he must first agree to lose everything. Like the poor man who enters a middle -class family: they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible. As if this obligatory discretion were not already a very nasty symptom of the real meaning of this admission (236).

Here there is at least a bit of a more modern complication, in the form of a racial capitalism which very much values and demands that its "good Jews" speak as "good Jews". But the point still generally holds.

Next, Memmi attacks what has become almost a shibboleth among the contemporary left that I am exceedingly skeptical of (it is a mainstay of the corrupted form of intersectionality): that all oppressions are connected such that every oppressed person is the natural ally of all other oppressed persons. Memmi takes a dimmer but I think more realistic view: "[A]n oppressed person must never expect others to hand him his liberation." He chides Sartre for thinking that the French Democrats would naturally be allies of the Jews or the Algerians in their fight -- why, exactly, would we think that other than romanticism? And this reliance -- never all that reliable -- can also end up being demobilizing and debilitating:

[T]he Democrat's fight for the Jew always had overtones of "in favor of the Jew." At best, he fights for the Jew because he fights for all the oppressed. But it is always graciousness on his part. The Jew must depend on the good will of the Democrats for his security, his safety. The Jew must hope for his salvation indirectly and the Democrat will give it to him indirectly.

Alas, that is not all: the history of our relations with the Left--of our messianic hope of being delivered by the Left--is the history of a great derided hope. Forty years after the Russian revolution anti-Semitism remains a fact in Socialist countries and among the militants of many political parties and unions of the European and American Left. When I pointed out this fact in Portrait of a Jew I was indignantly told I was repeating calumnies perpetrated by the adversaries of democracy. Except for a few tirelessly stubborn or blindly unconditional advocates no one denies this any more today. At most they try to explain that it is not exactly racism, that it is not a deliberate desire to hurt Jews, but a question of certain inevitable social and historical difficulties. Maybe so; in any case, it looks savagely like anti-Semitism to me (238-39, emphasis added).

That last italicized part reads far, far ahead of its time. A few pages later, addressing the Soviet apologists who say their government cannot be accused of "intentional anti-Semitism," Memmi concedes the point but rejoins "what follows is even worse: it has become, in spite of itself, objectively anti-Semitic, as if by some internal fatality" (243). The interceding pages were a critique of Marxism's impotence at answering "the Jewish question"; this same discourse could apply with considerable force towards UK Labour today (right up to and including the potential concession that "intentional anti-Semitism" is lacking so long as it is reciprocally conceded that this absence is utterly besides the point. Such reciprocity, alas, is never forthcoming).

Memmi concludes by suggesting that Jewish liberation, like American Black liberation or any other liberation, must occur in a specifically Jewish way. Generalities about liberation that claim to back them all in one fell swoop won't do the trick (this is where Marxism's over-reliance on class fails). That segues into the next chapter. But what I want to conclude with is that this critique of the Jew-of-the-Left -- bracing as it is -- works only because Memmi is, in his own way, very much a Jew-of-the-Left (as am I). It is not and should not be viewed as a cri de coeur for right-wing politics or even a rejection of Jewish leftism (anymore than, say, intersectionality's critique of left-wing feminism and anti-racism practices should've been viewed as a plea for conservatism).

It is a distinctive feature of Jewishness in its own right that, no matter how many bodies we contribute to the left, any critique we offer of the left is never perceived as coming from the inside -- it always demonstrates that we were at best a Fifth Column. It'd be hard to make that charge of Memmi (at least in his mid-century iteration); though I have no doubt that somebody is hard at work trying to pull it off.

 Albert Memmi, Portrait of a Jew, Elisabeth Abbott, trans. (New York: Viking [1962] 1971)

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, Judy Hyun, trans. (New York: Orion 1966)

Memmi on the "Mistaken" Belief of Jewish Suffering

I'm trying to return to Albert Memmi this summer, and so I've been reading his book Portrait of a Jew.. I've pulled quotes on this blog from Memmi before -- his discussion on the meaning of Zionism (from Jews and Arabs) and why the nation-state is part of Jewish liberation (from The Liberation of the Jew). This passage deals with how other people react to Jews when we try to claim that we are marginalized, that we do suffer.

Earlier in the chapter (pp. 22-23), Memmi discusses an interesting phenomenon where Jews claimed to not have been truly "aware" of themselves as Jewish, of their marginalized Jewish status, until a particularly robust event of anti-Semitism revealed it to them. Einstein encountering German anti-Semites, Herzl facing down the mobs clamoring for Dreyfuss. As Memmi observes, there is something odd about this -- as if any Jew of that era could really be unaware of the broader currents of anti-Semitism -- and furthermore, the celerity with which these persons are able to describe their situation following the triggering event belies the idea that they really lacked any awareness of its contours prior to that date. What's really going on is a sort of self-deception, where Jews try to tell ourselves that we're fine, happy, assimilated people. And because we tell it so insistently to ourselves, it maybe isn't too surprising that non-Jews are also sometimes incredulous when we do finally feel compelled to express it out loud.

In any event, after noting the default incredulity -- he analogizes it to Europeans who can't fathom that natives suffer under colonialism and accuse them of being "too sensitive" or just "out of [their] mind[s]" -- Memmi writes the following:

"Very well,"" I, too, have often been told, "you suffer because you are a Jew. I believe you because you say so. But you are wrong to feel that way."

[*29] After denying that the situation exists, they say it is a "mistake," after refusing to believe in the Jew's anxiety, they declare it is unfounded. In the end they even lose their temper and retort sharply: "You think of yourself too much! Come now! You enjoy pitying yourselves! Have a little pity for others!"

One of the best arguments I have heard accused me of selfish complacency.

"You are not the only victim--if there are any victims at all!" they told me. "Look at the Negroes, at the Spanish Republicans, at all the displaced persons. And what about the gypsies! What social outcasts they are!"

 A fine argument indeed! They are going to chip off your leg (and sometimes your head) but just look at that poor man in the bed next to you, they say. They cut on both his legs and he was so brave. Aren't you ashamed! A little more and they would blame you for not singing while they dismember you!

Far from thinking I am the only one in this situation, I believe, on the contrary, that racial discrimination is more widespread than anything else in the world. I note, with horror, that most individuals, most peoples, are basically inclined to xenophobia. Far from believing I am the sole victim in a world of peace and justice, I think, unfortunately, that the statement should be reversed: the Jewish tragedy is part of a much broader human category--the category of oppression and misfortune.

 But, I repeat, I do not understand how the misfortune of others can be reassuring and comforting. All the misfortune in the world gives me no consolation at all for my own. It does not console me for anything. All the injustice in the world cannot make me accept the injustice I suffer. On the contrary, it feeds my anger, it whips up my fury against the shame and the outrage. Because I am a Jew, am I to console myself with the [*30] thought of anti-Negro racism or racial difficulties in the colonies? What my would-be comforters suggest to me is that since, after all, xenophobia does exist, it is up to me to suffer patiently the insults to the Jews! I understand perfectly. There are, in short, two attitudes: either one accepts all the sufferings or one rejects it all. Well, I reject it in totum as I reject in detail each face of oppression.

Albert Memmi, Portrait of a Jew (Elisabeth Abbott, trans., New Yor: Viking 1971) (1962), pp. 28-30.

Memmi on "What is a Zionist?"

I'm finally sitting down to try and make some progress on my pile of books. Reading Professor Zasloff inspired me, what can I say. And the book that I've actually been making some real progress in is Albert Memmi's Jews and Arabs (Eleanor Levieux, trans., Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara 1975). Memmi, of course, is a Tunisian Jewish writer whose work I've praised before. But the chapter I'm reading now ("What is a Zionist?") makes some particular important and erudite points.

[O]ne cannot propose any effective liberation if the specificity of each condition has not been grasped. That is why I protested so strongly when attempts were made to reduce the colonial problem first, then the Jewish problem, to a matter of class struggle . . . . It is reductions such as those which have made the ideology of the political left in Europe impotent.
[...]
What, then is the meaning of the oppression of the Jew? I have demonstrated [in prior work] that the Jews are not oppressed only in the practice of their religion, or only as a religious group; they are not oppressed only as a cultural group; nor only in the exercise of their political rights, nor only in their economic activities, etc. The Jews are oppressed in every one of their collective dimensions. In other words, they are oppressed as a people.
[...]
[W]hether we like it or not, we are looked upon as a special category of foreigners and we are treated as such. Unlike our universalists, the Jewish masses know this and take it into account. The Jewish masses never have more than a limited amount of confidence in their fellow citizens. That is why they constantly confirm their unity, for they know that when a catastrophe occurs, the only help they can hope for will come from other Jewish communities that have been temporarily spared. People ought to stop stupidly repeating that such solidarity cannot be allowed! That it is a reverse form of racism and other such nonsense. It is a perfectly natural self-defense reaction on the part of an endangered group. Let people stop persecuting the Jews, first, and then we ill see what they can be reproached with.

Thus, the Jews are oppressed as a people. If we accept the idea that liberation should be achieved on the basis of the specificity of each case of oppression, then we are now in a position to take another step forward: oppressed as a people, it is only as a people that the Jews will be genuinely liberated. Today, however, the liberation of peoples still retains a national physiognomy.
[...]
. . . . I have not been more sparing in my criticisms of that young state [of Israel], of its political errors or its theocratic self-satisfaction. . . . All this, however, is merely a matter of criticizing details. The essential and undeniable fact is that from now on, the State of Israel is part of the destiny of every Jew anywhere in the world who continues to acknowledge himself as a Jew. No matter what doubts or even reproofs certain of Israel's actions may arouse, no Jew anywhere in the world can call its existence in question without doing himself grave harm. And the nonJews, especially the liberals, must understand that Israel represents the still-precarious result of the liberation of the Jew, just as decolonization represents the liberation of the Arab or black peoples of Asia and Africa.
[...]
. . . . I did not hide the fact that these new ties, this sentimental solidarity with the new state, were likely to intensify the climate of suspicion in which Jews everywhere have always lived. But we have always been in danger. I do not believe that we can be in greater danger. Let us at least face danger with dignity. Above all, and once again, the perspective of accusation must be reversed. If the Jews had not been so accused, threatened, and periodically prevented from living, they would not have tried to secure a possible refuge. It is really too presumptions of the people who have persecuted us for centuries, who have made us second-class citizens, often despite their own laws, to dare to reproach us with this ambiguity that they have cultivated in us regardless of our protests, our efforts, and the sometimes shameful pledges we gave them. What they call our double allegiance was forced upon us. We would have liked nothing better than not to need it!

What exactly is a Zionist?

A Zionist is anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who, having found that the Jewish situation is a situation of oppression, looks upon the reconstruction of a Jewish state as legitimate: so as to put an end to that oppression and so that Jews, like other peoples, may retrieve their dimensions as free men.

Or again, anyone who considers the liberation of the Jews as a Jew desirable.

Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs 92-97 (Eleanor Levieux, trans., 1975) (emphasis original).

Quote of the Afternoon

The "guest-post" I've been putting together for Feministe is already way too long -- I started writing, and then realized I needed some catharsis. I don't normally shy away from the lengthy blog post, but 14 single-spaced pages and counting is a bit much even for me.

However, if I did have space for such things, this would certainly make it in:

I did not suddenly become nationalistic as soon as it was in my own interest to do so. I continue to think that nationalism is far too frequently an alibi for hatred and domination. I cannot forget that the Jew was always one of the first victims of nationalistic crises. But history has convinced me, at least twice, that a nation is the only adequate response to the misfortune of a people. In the case of the colonized I had already discovered that their liberation would be national before it could be social, because they were dominated as a people. The Jew too was oppressed as a member of a total society which was neither completely real nor completely fictitious! He was considered and treated as a foreigner, or at best as a special kind of citizen.

For the Jew, it is true, the matter was extremely complex. The colonized were generally a people, reduced to impotence, but a compact and obvious mass—a majority. [*288] What then could become of the Jewish people, scattered in a thousand fragments across the globe, not even able to understand each other in a common language? I am sorry to have to point out once again our sociologists’ lack of imagination, one which leads them furthermore into a systematic error in their evaluation of reality. They can only conceive of peoples and nations on the basis of the completed models which they have before their eyes: the great European nations. The result is that no one has the right to conceive of a new type, either in the present or in the future. The same objection had served against the colonized: how dared they claim a national liberation for nonexistent nations? The Jews, it is perfectly true, did not comprise a nation, hardly a people in the usual sense of the word. Efforts, such as those of the Zionists, to demonstrate that a Jewish nation has always existed, apart from the abnormal conditions of its existence, are, I believe, useless. Today the Jew has become an anachronism, irritating to others, unbearable to himself. His dispersion, his crumbling, are part of his oppression. He must cease to be a three-legged sheep: the missing leg must be restored to him, he must be allowed to remake an existence more adapted to the world in which he lives. He must be shaped into a people among peoples, a nation among nations.

In short, the nation is before the Jew and not behind him. Like the colonized, he has to fight for his national liberation and create a nation for himself, since history exacts it. Since the nation is still the most effective historical form, the Jew must adopt this form to rid himself of the oppression and live as a normal people among other peoples. The nation is not a preliminary, it is an ending.

I continue to hope it is a temporary ending.... (287-88, emphasis original)

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew (trans. Judy Hyun) (New York: Orion Press 1966). Memmi, a Tunisian Jew, is a key figure in the field of post-colonial literature and thought.