A group of Franco-Maghreb Muslim culture passionate about Hebrew, and a group of French Jews from the Sephardic diaspora of North Africa are dedicated to learning Arabic in the Dalala association, located in Paris. But his efforts to learn the language that is supposed to be the other’s is, ultimately, a journey to his own roots in the Maghreb.
Wahib is a 30-year-old Algerian who is taking Hebrew courses in Paris. Now, he is able to speak it fluently, like his friend Mourad, a Franco-Moroccan, who says that Hebrew allowed him to capture the semantic richness of Arabic, “because these languages are sisters.”
Classical Arabic and Ancient Hebrew are linguistically related as both languages are derived from an ancient language called “West Semitic”. The result is almost identical syntax, morphology and conjugations, explains Jonas Sibony, a doctor of Semitic linguistics and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Strasbourg.
For almost thirteen centuries, the Jews in North Africa lived, spoke and thought in a language shared with their Muslim surroundings: Arabic.
For Benjamin Stora, historian and author of numerous works on the Judeo-Islamic experience in the Maghreb region, this proximity was broken by a cocktail of “historical explosions”: colonization, decolonization, Arab nationalism, Zionism and the birth of Israel. Started long ago, the exodus of Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, accelerated sharply between 1948 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Today, it is estimated that around 70% of French Jews come from this diaspora, which has flocked to France since the 1950s.
Associate Professor of Arabic Jonas Sibony and Yohann Taïeb, professor at Sciences Po, are both children of this exodus: born in France to Ashkenazi mothers (a name given to Jews settled in Central and Eastern Europe), their parents are Sephardic , respectively from Morocco and Tunisia.
In 2019, the two professors founded the Dalala association. His vocation is to revive the Jewish cultures of North Africa, in particular through Arabic and Hebrew classes. Unlike Arabic, North African Jews only used Hebrew in a religious or academic context, Sibony says, explaining that “it is still a language for them that they identify with.”
With the Dalala association, these two linguistic amateurs make a double bet, never materialized in France. The first thing is to offer a Hebrew course, having a previous knowledge of Arabic. The second is to teach Arabic by promoting training in Hebrew. It is a pedagogical design from which an unprecedented situation arises: the majority of the students of the Hebrew course are from North African Muslim culture, while the public interested in the Arabic course very generally comes from Jewish families originating from North Africa.
“Go to you”
Within this last group is Anne-Marie Adad, 68, who exchanges a few words in Arabic during her interview for France 24. A smile lights up her face as she detects in her accent the dialect consonances of a country where she was born, but that was alien to him a few years ago: Algeria.
In 1870, by the Crémieux decree, colonial France made Anne-Marie’s great-grandparents, like most “native Israelites” in Algeria, French citizens. When his father, Maurice Adad, was a child, this community was already largely francophone. He, however, becomes a teacher of Arabic. Beyond the baseness of the Algerian war that broke out in 1954, he had found a third homeland, “his own”, continues his daughter: literary Arabic.
Anne-Marie’s childhood was shaken by this language that she did not understand. Among the memories she keeps in her apartment in Nice, where her family moved when she was 12 years old, is the dining room table, “always full of books and copies of Arabic that dad corrected.” The day she was able to read this language for the first time, in 2019, during a course at the Dalala Institute, Anne-Marie had the feeling of “putting a score to the music”, which she had never been able to decipher.
Her father was also passionate about Hebrew: “He kept explaining the parallels between the two languages,” says Anne-Marie. Furthermore, when he discovered that Yohann teaches Arabic in its relation to Hebrew, a biblical injunction in this language came to his mind: “eikh leikha”, or “go to yourself”.
Upon meeting Yohann, Ilana saw her cultural paradigm resolved. “I understood that one could feel fully Jewish and at the same time be moved by a feeling of belonging to the Arab culture,” summarizes the young woman, to the point of feeling proud when in Morocco they sometimes believe that she is Arab.
mutual impregnations
“I couldn’t even imagine living my Judaism without understanding Arabic,” adds Ilana. Mourad is driven by a reciprocal dynamic: it is his Muslim faith that pushed him towards Hebrew, even to the point of feeling “even more Moroccan” since he knows the sacred texts of Judaism in their original language. In Morocco, “part of our Islamic spirituality has its origins in Judaic culture,” says Mourad.
There is nothing spooky about this history teacher’s insight, says Benjamin Stora: “Moroccan Muslim populations of yesteryear rubbed shoulders with a large Jewish community, even in rural areas. Everything in this country, its music, its gastronomy, its architecture, reminds Moroccans of this minority. Many of them experience the disappearance of the Jews as a mutilation of their national history.
Khawla is a Moroccan who, like Mourad, began learning Hebrew several years ago. “In crafts, cooking and music during my childhood in Morocco, I realized that many references that I thought were Arab-Muslim were actually Judeo-Arab.”
Judeophobia by default?
But this cultural symbiosis, lived and told by the grandparents, is often ignored by their generation, according to Khawla.
The Jews continue to leave Morocco “because of some of us”, says the indignant young woman. “Who would persist in staying in a hostile environment?” he exclaims.
For her part, Ilana does not consider it “appropriate” to exhibit or evoke her Judaism in Morocco. A traumatic episode ended up consuming his father’s divorce from his native country. In 2005, while passing through Meknes, in the north of Morocco, the driver who was driving the car he was in was stopped by a passer-by who told him: “Aren’t you ashamed to serve these dirty Jews?” “I think that made him feel really bad, he has never been back to Morocco since then,” Ilana says of her father.
Calling oneself a Muslim and despising Jews is a theological aberration, considers Tareq Oubrou: the Koran contains more Jewish prophets than “Arabs”, recalls this French-Moroccan imam based in Bordeaux. However, in countries where this community is disappearing, “sometimes the image of the Jew is now constructed in a purely imaginary way,” explains Oubrou. As if Judeophobia, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become a default thought for some.
This article is a translation of its original in French
A group of Franco-Maghreb Muslim culture passionate about Hebrew, and a group of French Jews from the Sephardic diaspora of North Africa are dedicated to learning Arabic in the Dalala association, located in Paris. But his efforts to learn the language that is supposed to be the other’s is, ultimately, a journey to his own roots in the Maghreb.
Wahib is a 30-year-old Algerian who is taking Hebrew courses in Paris. Now, he is able to speak it fluently, like his friend Mourad, a Franco-Moroccan, who says that Hebrew allowed him to capture the semantic richness of Arabic, “because these languages are sisters.”
Classical Arabic and Ancient Hebrew are linguistically related as both languages are derived from an ancient language called “West Semitic”. The result is almost identical syntax, morphology and conjugations, explains Jonas Sibony, a doctor of Semitic linguistics and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Strasbourg.
For almost thirteen centuries, the Jews in North Africa lived, spoke and thought in a language shared with their Muslim surroundings: Arabic.
For Benjamin Stora, historian and author of numerous works on the Judeo-Islamic experience in the Maghreb region, this proximity was broken by a cocktail of “historical explosions”: colonization, decolonization, Arab nationalism, Zionism and the birth of Israel. Started long ago, the exodus of Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, accelerated sharply between 1948 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Today, it is estimated that around 70% of French Jews come from this diaspora, which has flocked to France since the 1950s.
Associate Professor of Arabic Jonas Sibony and Yohann Taïeb, professor at Sciences Po, are both children of this exodus: born in France to Ashkenazi mothers (a name given to Jews settled in Central and Eastern Europe), their parents are Sephardic , respectively from Morocco and Tunisia.
In 2019, the two professors founded the Dalala association. His vocation is to revive the Jewish cultures of North Africa, in particular through Arabic and Hebrew classes. Unlike Arabic, North African Jews only used Hebrew in a religious or academic context, Sibony says, explaining that “it is still a language for them that they identify with.”
With the Dalala association, these two linguistic amateurs make a double bet, never materialized in France. The first thing is to offer a Hebrew course, having a previous knowledge of Arabic. The second is to teach Arabic by promoting training in Hebrew. It is a pedagogical design from which an unprecedented situation arises: the majority of the students of the Hebrew course are from North African Muslim culture, while the public interested in the Arabic course very generally comes from Jewish families originating from North Africa.
“Go to you”
Within this last group is Anne-Marie Adad, 68, who exchanges a few words in Arabic during her interview for France 24. A smile lights up her face as she detects in her accent the dialect consonances of a country where she was born, but that was alien to him a few years ago: Algeria.
In 1870, by the Crémieux decree, colonial France made Anne-Marie’s great-grandparents, like most “native Israelites” in Algeria, French citizens. When his father, Maurice Adad, was a child, this community was already largely francophone. He, however, becomes a teacher of Arabic. Beyond the baseness of the Algerian war that broke out in 1954, he had found a third homeland, “his own”, continues his daughter: literary Arabic.
Anne-Marie’s childhood was shaken by this language that she did not understand. Among the memories she keeps in her apartment in Nice, where her family moved when she was 12 years old, is the dining room table, “always full of books and copies of Arabic that dad corrected.” The day she was able to read this language for the first time, in 2019, during a course at the Dalala Institute, Anne-Marie had the feeling of “putting a score to the music”, which she had never been able to decipher.
Her father was also passionate about Hebrew: “He kept explaining the parallels between the two languages,” says Anne-Marie. Furthermore, when he discovered that Yohann teaches Arabic in its relation to Hebrew, a biblical injunction in this language came to his mind: “eikh leikha”, or “go to yourself”.
Upon meeting Yohann, Ilana saw her cultural paradigm resolved. “I understood that one could feel fully Jewish and at the same time be moved by a feeling of belonging to the Arab culture,” summarizes the young woman, to the point of feeling proud when in Morocco they sometimes believe that she is Arab.
mutual impregnations
“I couldn’t even imagine living my Judaism without understanding Arabic,” adds Ilana. Mourad is driven by a reciprocal dynamic: it is his Muslim faith that pushed him towards Hebrew, even to the point of feeling “even more Moroccan” since he knows the sacred texts of Judaism in their original language. In Morocco, “part of our Islamic spirituality has its origins in Judaic culture,” says Mourad.
There is nothing spooky about this history teacher’s insight, says Benjamin Stora: “Moroccan Muslim populations of yesteryear rubbed shoulders with a large Jewish community, even in rural areas. Everything in this country, its music, its gastronomy, its architecture, reminds Moroccans of this minority. Many of them experience the disappearance of the Jews as a mutilation of their national history.
Khawla is a Moroccan who, like Mourad, began learning Hebrew several years ago. “In crafts, cooking and music during my childhood in Morocco, I realized that many references that I thought were Arab-Muslim were actually Judeo-Arab.”
Judeophobia by default?
But this cultural symbiosis, lived and told by the grandparents, is often ignored by their generation, according to Khawla.
The Jews continue to leave Morocco “because of some of us”, says the indignant young woman. “Who would persist in staying in a hostile environment?” he exclaims.
For her part, Ilana does not consider it “appropriate” to exhibit or evoke her Judaism in Morocco. A traumatic episode ended up consuming his father’s divorce from his native country. In 2005, while passing through Meknes, in the north of Morocco, the driver who was driving the car he was in was stopped by a passer-by who told him: “Aren’t you ashamed to serve these dirty Jews?” “I think that made him feel really bad, he has never been back to Morocco since then,” Ilana says of her father.
Calling oneself a Muslim and despising Jews is a theological aberration, considers Tareq Oubrou: the Koran contains more Jewish prophets than “Arabs”, recalls this French-Moroccan imam based in Bordeaux. However, in countries where this community is disappearing, “sometimes the image of the Jew is now constructed in a purely imaginary way,” explains Oubrou. As if Judeophobia, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become a default thought for some.
This article is a translation of its original in French
A group of Franco-Maghreb Muslim culture passionate about Hebrew, and a group of French Jews from the Sephardic diaspora of North Africa are dedicated to learning Arabic in the Dalala association, located in Paris. But his efforts to learn the language that is supposed to be the other’s is, ultimately, a journey to his own roots in the Maghreb.
Wahib is a 30-year-old Algerian who is taking Hebrew courses in Paris. Now, he is able to speak it fluently, like his friend Mourad, a Franco-Moroccan, who says that Hebrew allowed him to capture the semantic richness of Arabic, “because these languages are sisters.”
Classical Arabic and Ancient Hebrew are linguistically related as both languages are derived from an ancient language called “West Semitic”. The result is almost identical syntax, morphology and conjugations, explains Jonas Sibony, a doctor of Semitic linguistics and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Strasbourg.
For almost thirteen centuries, the Jews in North Africa lived, spoke and thought in a language shared with their Muslim surroundings: Arabic.
For Benjamin Stora, historian and author of numerous works on the Judeo-Islamic experience in the Maghreb region, this proximity was broken by a cocktail of “historical explosions”: colonization, decolonization, Arab nationalism, Zionism and the birth of Israel. Started long ago, the exodus of Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, accelerated sharply between 1948 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Today, it is estimated that around 70% of French Jews come from this diaspora, which has flocked to France since the 1950s.
Associate Professor of Arabic Jonas Sibony and Yohann Taïeb, professor at Sciences Po, are both children of this exodus: born in France to Ashkenazi mothers (a name given to Jews settled in Central and Eastern Europe), their parents are Sephardic , respectively from Morocco and Tunisia.
In 2019, the two professors founded the Dalala association. His vocation is to revive the Jewish cultures of North Africa, in particular through Arabic and Hebrew classes. Unlike Arabic, North African Jews only used Hebrew in a religious or academic context, Sibony says, explaining that “it is still a language for them that they identify with.”
With the Dalala association, these two linguistic amateurs make a double bet, never materialized in France. The first thing is to offer a Hebrew course, having a previous knowledge of Arabic. The second is to teach Arabic by promoting training in Hebrew. It is a pedagogical design from which an unprecedented situation arises: the majority of the students of the Hebrew course are from North African Muslim culture, while the public interested in the Arabic course very generally comes from Jewish families originating from North Africa.
“Go to you”
Within this last group is Anne-Marie Adad, 68, who exchanges a few words in Arabic during her interview for France 24. A smile lights up her face as she detects in her accent the dialect consonances of a country where she was born, but that was alien to him a few years ago: Algeria.
In 1870, by the Crémieux decree, colonial France made Anne-Marie’s great-grandparents, like most “native Israelites” in Algeria, French citizens. When his father, Maurice Adad, was a child, this community was already largely francophone. He, however, becomes a teacher of Arabic. Beyond the baseness of the Algerian war that broke out in 1954, he had found a third homeland, “his own”, continues his daughter: literary Arabic.
Anne-Marie’s childhood was shaken by this language that she did not understand. Among the memories she keeps in her apartment in Nice, where her family moved when she was 12 years old, is the dining room table, “always full of books and copies of Arabic that dad corrected.” The day she was able to read this language for the first time, in 2019, during a course at the Dalala Institute, Anne-Marie had the feeling of “putting a score to the music”, which she had never been able to decipher.
Her father was also passionate about Hebrew: “He kept explaining the parallels between the two languages,” says Anne-Marie. Furthermore, when he discovered that Yohann teaches Arabic in its relation to Hebrew, a biblical injunction in this language came to his mind: “eikh leikha”, or “go to yourself”.
Upon meeting Yohann, Ilana saw her cultural paradigm resolved. “I understood that one could feel fully Jewish and at the same time be moved by a feeling of belonging to the Arab culture,” summarizes the young woman, to the point of feeling proud when in Morocco they sometimes believe that she is Arab.
mutual impregnations
“I couldn’t even imagine living my Judaism without understanding Arabic,” adds Ilana. Mourad is driven by a reciprocal dynamic: it is his Muslim faith that pushed him towards Hebrew, even to the point of feeling “even more Moroccan” since he knows the sacred texts of Judaism in their original language. In Morocco, “part of our Islamic spirituality has its origins in Judaic culture,” says Mourad.
There is nothing spooky about this history teacher’s insight, says Benjamin Stora: “Moroccan Muslim populations of yesteryear rubbed shoulders with a large Jewish community, even in rural areas. Everything in this country, its music, its gastronomy, its architecture, reminds Moroccans of this minority. Many of them experience the disappearance of the Jews as a mutilation of their national history.
Khawla is a Moroccan who, like Mourad, began learning Hebrew several years ago. “In crafts, cooking and music during my childhood in Morocco, I realized that many references that I thought were Arab-Muslim were actually Judeo-Arab.”
Judeophobia by default?
But this cultural symbiosis, lived and told by the grandparents, is often ignored by their generation, according to Khawla.
The Jews continue to leave Morocco “because of some of us”, says the indignant young woman. “Who would persist in staying in a hostile environment?” he exclaims.
For her part, Ilana does not consider it “appropriate” to exhibit or evoke her Judaism in Morocco. A traumatic episode ended up consuming his father’s divorce from his native country. In 2005, while passing through Meknes, in the north of Morocco, the driver who was driving the car he was in was stopped by a passer-by who told him: “Aren’t you ashamed to serve these dirty Jews?” “I think that made him feel really bad, he has never been back to Morocco since then,” Ilana says of her father.
Calling oneself a Muslim and despising Jews is a theological aberration, considers Tareq Oubrou: the Koran contains more Jewish prophets than “Arabs”, recalls this French-Moroccan imam based in Bordeaux. However, in countries where this community is disappearing, “sometimes the image of the Jew is now constructed in a purely imaginary way,” explains Oubrou. As if Judeophobia, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become a default thought for some.
This article is a translation of its original in French
A group of Franco-Maghreb Muslim culture passionate about Hebrew, and a group of French Jews from the Sephardic diaspora of North Africa are dedicated to learning Arabic in the Dalala association, located in Paris. But his efforts to learn the language that is supposed to be the other’s is, ultimately, a journey to his own roots in the Maghreb.
Wahib is a 30-year-old Algerian who is taking Hebrew courses in Paris. Now, he is able to speak it fluently, like his friend Mourad, a Franco-Moroccan, who says that Hebrew allowed him to capture the semantic richness of Arabic, “because these languages are sisters.”
Classical Arabic and Ancient Hebrew are linguistically related as both languages are derived from an ancient language called “West Semitic”. The result is almost identical syntax, morphology and conjugations, explains Jonas Sibony, a doctor of Semitic linguistics and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Strasbourg.
For almost thirteen centuries, the Jews in North Africa lived, spoke and thought in a language shared with their Muslim surroundings: Arabic.
For Benjamin Stora, historian and author of numerous works on the Judeo-Islamic experience in the Maghreb region, this proximity was broken by a cocktail of “historical explosions”: colonization, decolonization, Arab nationalism, Zionism and the birth of Israel. Started long ago, the exodus of Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, accelerated sharply between 1948 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Today, it is estimated that around 70% of French Jews come from this diaspora, which has flocked to France since the 1950s.
Associate Professor of Arabic Jonas Sibony and Yohann Taïeb, professor at Sciences Po, are both children of this exodus: born in France to Ashkenazi mothers (a name given to Jews settled in Central and Eastern Europe), their parents are Sephardic , respectively from Morocco and Tunisia.
In 2019, the two professors founded the Dalala association. His vocation is to revive the Jewish cultures of North Africa, in particular through Arabic and Hebrew classes. Unlike Arabic, North African Jews only used Hebrew in a religious or academic context, Sibony says, explaining that “it is still a language for them that they identify with.”
With the Dalala association, these two linguistic amateurs make a double bet, never materialized in France. The first thing is to offer a Hebrew course, having a previous knowledge of Arabic. The second is to teach Arabic by promoting training in Hebrew. It is a pedagogical design from which an unprecedented situation arises: the majority of the students of the Hebrew course are from North African Muslim culture, while the public interested in the Arabic course very generally comes from Jewish families originating from North Africa.
“Go to you”
Within this last group is Anne-Marie Adad, 68, who exchanges a few words in Arabic during her interview for France 24. A smile lights up her face as she detects in her accent the dialect consonances of a country where she was born, but that was alien to him a few years ago: Algeria.
In 1870, by the Crémieux decree, colonial France made Anne-Marie’s great-grandparents, like most “native Israelites” in Algeria, French citizens. When his father, Maurice Adad, was a child, this community was already largely francophone. He, however, becomes a teacher of Arabic. Beyond the baseness of the Algerian war that broke out in 1954, he had found a third homeland, “his own”, continues his daughter: literary Arabic.
Anne-Marie’s childhood was shaken by this language that she did not understand. Among the memories she keeps in her apartment in Nice, where her family moved when she was 12 years old, is the dining room table, “always full of books and copies of Arabic that dad corrected.” The day she was able to read this language for the first time, in 2019, during a course at the Dalala Institute, Anne-Marie had the feeling of “putting a score to the music”, which she had never been able to decipher.
Her father was also passionate about Hebrew: “He kept explaining the parallels between the two languages,” says Anne-Marie. Furthermore, when he discovered that Yohann teaches Arabic in its relation to Hebrew, a biblical injunction in this language came to his mind: “eikh leikha”, or “go to yourself”.
Upon meeting Yohann, Ilana saw her cultural paradigm resolved. “I understood that one could feel fully Jewish and at the same time be moved by a feeling of belonging to the Arab culture,” summarizes the young woman, to the point of feeling proud when in Morocco they sometimes believe that she is Arab.
mutual impregnations
“I couldn’t even imagine living my Judaism without understanding Arabic,” adds Ilana. Mourad is driven by a reciprocal dynamic: it is his Muslim faith that pushed him towards Hebrew, even to the point of feeling “even more Moroccan” since he knows the sacred texts of Judaism in their original language. In Morocco, “part of our Islamic spirituality has its origins in Judaic culture,” says Mourad.
There is nothing spooky about this history teacher’s insight, says Benjamin Stora: “Moroccan Muslim populations of yesteryear rubbed shoulders with a large Jewish community, even in rural areas. Everything in this country, its music, its gastronomy, its architecture, reminds Moroccans of this minority. Many of them experience the disappearance of the Jews as a mutilation of their national history.
Khawla is a Moroccan who, like Mourad, began learning Hebrew several years ago. “In crafts, cooking and music during my childhood in Morocco, I realized that many references that I thought were Arab-Muslim were actually Judeo-Arab.”
Judeophobia by default?
But this cultural symbiosis, lived and told by the grandparents, is often ignored by their generation, according to Khawla.
The Jews continue to leave Morocco “because of some of us”, says the indignant young woman. “Who would persist in staying in a hostile environment?” he exclaims.
For her part, Ilana does not consider it “appropriate” to exhibit or evoke her Judaism in Morocco. A traumatic episode ended up consuming his father’s divorce from his native country. In 2005, while passing through Meknes, in the north of Morocco, the driver who was driving the car he was in was stopped by a passer-by who told him: “Aren’t you ashamed to serve these dirty Jews?” “I think that made him feel really bad, he has never been back to Morocco since then,” Ilana says of her father.
Calling oneself a Muslim and despising Jews is a theological aberration, considers Tareq Oubrou: the Koran contains more Jewish prophets than “Arabs”, recalls this French-Moroccan imam based in Bordeaux. However, in countries where this community is disappearing, “sometimes the image of the Jew is now constructed in a purely imaginary way,” explains Oubrou. As if Judeophobia, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become a default thought for some.
This article is a translation of its original in French