Related Papers
International Journal of Middle East Studies
Ghostly Labor: Ethnic Classism in the Levantine Prism of Jacqueline Kahanoff'Sjacob's Ladder
2017 •
amr kamal
In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novelJacob's Ladder(1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan ...
Otherwise Have Missed
1998 •
Joel Beinin
shared their memories, papers, and hearts with me in the course of my research for this book. Without their assistance, this book would have been an entirely different and inferior product. Their names are listed in the Bibliography. Many Egyptian Jews as well as other friends and colleagues saved clippings from the Israeli and Egyptian press for me, allowed me to copy personal papers, or gave me books, magazines, and other materials that were invaluable sources for this book. Among them were
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Who needed department stores in Egypt? From Orosdi-Back to Omar Effendi
2007 •
uri kupferschmidt
... notes. A few personnel fiches of higher level employees in Alexandria have miraculously survived, showing such names as Morgenstern, Harari, and Marinovitz. ... Revue du Musée d'Orsay, Vol.16 (Spring 2003), pp.469. View all notes. The pink-coloured 'Palais Omer Effendi' has ...
Beyond the sea of formlessness : Jacqueline Kahanoff and the levantine generation
2011 •
Daniel Monterescu
If I had another daughter I’d call her Algeria, and you would doff your colonial hats to me and call me “Abu Algeria.” In the morning, when she opened her chocolate eyes I would say: “Now Africa is waking up,” and she would caress the blonde on her sister’s head certain that she had rediscovered gold. The grains on the seashore would be her sandbox and in the footprints of the French who fled from there she would hide the dates that dropped from the trees. “Algeria,” I would clasp the railing of the balcony and call to her: “Algeria, come home, and see how I’m painting the eastern wall with the brush of the Sun.”
Contemporary Levant
Levantine chronotopes: prisms for entangled histories
2020 •
Einar Wigen
"Permanent Immigration": Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon, and the Impetus of Levantinism
Gil Hochberg
Entangled communities: interethnic relationships among urban salesclerks and domestic workers in Egypt, 1927–61
Nancy Reynolds
This paper examines the relationships among salesclerks and other lower-level commercial and domestic employees in inter-war and post-Second World War urban Egypt, especially Cairo. It argues that the Italians, Greeks, local Jews, Armenians, Syrian Christians, Maltese, Coptic Christians and Muslims who often worked side by side on the floors of department stores and private homes participated in multiethnic occupational subgroups, formal unions and leisure cultures that created a series of networks linking lower-middle-class people in workplaces, public and neighbourhood space as well as commerce. These networks spanned ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, and they reveal a complex shared Mediterranean culture, underpinned by a juridical system shaped by European colonialism. Although historians have documented the vertical relations within ethnic groups and the horizontal relationships among the business elite of different communities, horizontal relationships among the lower and lower-middle classes of locally resident foreigners or Egyptians, who made up the bulk of the different communities, evidence both deep entanglement and regular conflict. The history of lived Mediterranean or cosmopolitan experiences thus challenges contemporary uses of both terms. Keywords: cosmopolitan; Egypt; salesclerk; domestic employee
Settler Colonial Studies
Who and What is Native to Israel? On Marcel Janco’s Settler Art and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's "Levantinism"
Susan Slyomovics
Zola and Orientalism
William Gallois
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History
Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud
2006 •
Deborah Starr
Maurice Shammas (Abu Farid) stands out among writers whose literary works represent Jewish life in modern Egypt. His collection of short stories Al-shaykh shabtay wa-hikayat min harat al-yahud [Sheik Shabbtai and Stories from Harat al-Yahud (1979)] and his memoir ‘Azza, hafidat nifirtiti [‘Azza, Nefertiti’s Granddaughter (2003)], written in Arabic, represent not the wealthy cosmopolitans, but rather the poor residents of Cairo’s harat al-yahud. This article explores Shammas’s representations of the city, arguing that for Shammas the city’s textuality is not primarily visual or material, but aural. The spaces of the city are defined by the sounds that fill them: Arabic music and the musicality of Arabic, verbal and non-verbal human expression, and the noise of the structures of the city themselves. This article also traces and unpacks the intertwined tropes of nationalism and urban localism, cosmopolitanism and parochialism, language and identity in Shammas’s writings.
