Questions of Belief: Albert Memmi's Deontology

During a long career spanning half a century, Albert Memmi has produced dozens of literary works, including novels, memoirs, and essays, in which he has repeatedly focused on two interrelated problematics: a question of origins and a question of existence. The question of origins can be summarized as an investigation into the specificity of his own birth, existence, youth, cultures, and family situation as a Sephardic Jew born in Tunisia when it was still in a colonial relation to France. I use cultures in the plural because three cultures co-exist in him, the first of which, if there is a first, is Judaism. I say that this is the first, because it is the oldest of the three and it maintains a several thousand year-old set of beliefs that relate to the apparently unchanging relation between the ‘‘chosen people’’ and the ‘‘book.’’ Memmi will come to question the articulation of Jewish identity, but its foundational aspect is undeniable. The second culture, or pair of cultures, is the indigenous local traditions of Arab and Berber cultures. Memmi often points out, in distinction to what we might perceive as a long-standing enmity between Jews and Arabs, that there is a long history of relatively peaceful co-existence between Jewish and Arab-Berber communities in North Africa, precisely because, with the exception of religion, the two groups share many of the same cultural and ethnographic practices. Certainly in the cities, and among the more economically modest, this sharing was most evident: many specific cultural details seemed less important than the same day-to-day existence, especially under colonization where both groups belonged to the dominated. The third culture was, of course, French culture in particular and Western culture in general, Derrida’s mondialatinisation, for short. That imposed culture,