“I am learning Hebrew”, repeats in this language a small group wearing kippas.
On that day, in 2010, the rabbi probably had reason to frown.
What are two "Arabs" doing in the Dijon synagogue?
"I think we were the most motivated in this Hebrew course," recalls Wahib with a burst of laughter. Ten years later, he has never abandoned this language. This 30-year-old of Algerian origin speaks it now fluent, like his friend, Mourad, Franco-Moroccan, who explains: "Hebrew allowed me to grasp the semantic richness of Arabic, because these languages are sisters".
Linguistic affiliation, historical proximity
Both derived from an ancient language called "West Semitic", Classical Arabic and Ancient Hebrew are indeed linguistically related.
The result is almost identical syntax, morphology and conjugations, explains Jonas Sibony, doctor in Semitic linguistics and head of the Hebrew and Jewish studies department at the University of Strasbourg.
In North Africa, for nearly thirteen centuries, Jews lived, spoke and thought in a language shared with their Muslim environment: Arabic.
For Benjamin Stora, historian and author of numerous works on the Judeo-Islamic experience in the Maghreb, this proximity was broken under a cocktail of "historical explosions": colonization, decolonization, Arab nationalism, Zionism and the birth of Israel.
Begun a long time ago, the exodus of Jews from North Africa, the Sephardim, accelerated sharply between 1948 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
It is estimated today that around 70% of French Jews come from this diaspora, which flocked to France from the 1950s. Jonas Sibony and Yohann Taïeb, 38, an associate professor of Arabic and teacher at Sciences Po, are both sons of this exodus: born in France to Ashkenazi mothers (Jews from Eastern Europe), their fathers are Sephardim, respectively from Morocco and Tunisia.
In 2019, they founded the Dalala association.
Its vocation is to revive the Jewish cultures of North Africa, in particular through Arabic and Hebrew lessons.
Unlike Arabic, Hebrew was only used by the Jews of North Africa in a religious or scholarly context, concedes Jonas Sibony, who explains: "But it remains for them a language to which they identify".
With Dalala, these two linguistic buffs take a double bet, never materialized in France.
The first is to offer a Hebrew course that enhances a prior knowledge of Arabic.
The second is to teach Arabic by encouraging a background in Hebrew.
A pedagogical design, from which arises an unprecedented situation: most of the students in the Hebrew course are of Maghrebi Muslim culture, while the public interested in the Arabic course very generally comes from Jewish families originating from North Africa.
"Go to you"
Among the latter, Anne-Marie, 50, who exchanges a few words in Arabic during her interview for France 24. A smile lights up her face as we detect in her accent the dialectal consonances of a country in which she was born. , but which was foreign to it a few years ago, Algeria.
In 1870, by the Crémieux decree, colonial France made Anne-Marie's grandparents, like most of the "native Israelites" of Algeria, French citizens.
When his father, Maurice Adad, was growing up, this community was already largely French-speaking.
He, however, becomes an Arabic teacher.
Beyond the turpitudes of the Algerian war which broke out in 1954, he had found a third homeland, "his own", continues his daughter: literary Arabic.
Anne-Marie's childhood was rocked by this language which she did not understand. Among the memories she keeps of the apartment in Nice where her family settled when she was 12, the dining room table, "always strewn with books and copies of Arabic that dad corrected". The day she read this language for the first time, in 2019, during a course at the Dalala Institute, this pianist had the feeling of "putting a score to music", which she had previously never been able to decipher. .
His father was also passionate about Hebrew: "he kept explaining to us the parallels between the two languages", says Anne-Marie.
Also, when she discovers that Yohann teaches Arabic in his relationship with Hebrew, a biblical injunction comes back to him in this language: "leikh leikha", or "go towards you".
In this Arabic course, "I finally felt in my place", confides Ilana, 36 years old.
For more than three years, this lawyer devoted to Arabic the little free time left to her by her daily pleadings.
Ilana embarked on this path to heal a frustration: having hardly conversed in Arabic with her father, a Jewish-Moroccan, than with her mother, born into a Tunisian Jewish family.
By meeting Yohann, the young woman saw her cultural paradigm being resolved.
"I understood that one could feel fully Jewish, and be moved at the same time by a feeling of belonging to Arab culture", sums up the young woman.
To the point of feeling a pride invade her when in Morocco, she is taken "for an Arab".
Mutual impregnations
"I could not 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.
Until feeling "even more Moroccan" since he knows the holy texts of Judaism in their original language: in Morocco, "part of our Islamic spirituality has its origins in Judaic culture", believes Mourad.
There is nothing phantasmagorical about the perception of this history teacher, according to Benjamin Stora: "The Moroccan Muslim populations once rubbed shoulders with a large Jewish community, even in the 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."
Thus Khawla, Moroccan, who like Mourad started learning Hebrew several years ago, says: "In crafts, cooking or music that rocked my childhood in Morocco, I realized that many references I thought Arab-Muslims were actually Judeo-Arabs".
Judeophobia by default?
But this cultural symbiosis – lived, told by the grandparents – is often ignored by his generation, according to Khawla.
This engineer, now from Grenoble, remembers the day when, at the age of 18 in Meknes, Morocco, she first met a young Moroccan who told her he was Jewish.
"I was filled with a priori", regrets the young girl, adding "like many of my relatives in Morocco".
One of them had told him a few years ago: "Since the owner of your apartment is Jewish, you don't have to pay him your rent."
Jews continue to leave Morocco "because of some of us", indignant Khawla.
“Who would persist in staying in a hostile environment?” she exclaims.
When he was studying in Tunis, Yohann, he resolved to ignore a "verbal" judeophobia, by means of a simple question: "The Tunisian who would make the most obscene remarks about us, would maintain them it by meeting a Jew?
Ilana does not consider it "appropriate" to display or evoke her Jewishness in Morocco.
But a traumatic episode ended up consuming his father's divorce from his native country.
Passing through Meknes in 2005, he had seen the Moroccan who accompanied him being challenged by a passer-by in these terms: "Aren't you ashamed to serve these dirty Jews?".
"I think it broke him, he has never returned to Morocco since," says Ilana.
To call oneself Muslim and to despise the Jews is a theological aberration, considers Tareq Oubrou: the Koran contains more Jewish prophets than “Arabs”, recalls this Franco-Moroccan imam living in Bordeaux.
However, in countries where this community is disappearing, "the image of the Jew is sometimes now constructed in a purely imaginary way", explains Tareq Oubrou.
As if Judeophobia, fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, had become a default thought for some.
A Sephardic youth in love with the Orient
The personal approach of Jews who are passionate about North African culture testifies to a historical reality, notes Benjamin Stora. "The generation from the Jewish communities who left the southern shore of the Mediterranean know that their grandparents spoke Arabic, belonged to an oriental universe, hushed, long hidden. Fantasized, he recalls their genealogical memory through photos of family, by the musicality of the liturgies of the Sephardic synagogues. This generation which grew up in Europe would like to reclaim this universe", explains the historian, himself born into a Jewish family from Constantine, 430 km east of Alger.
"The first Jewish generation to arrive in France had settled there with a view to becoming French, progress being then, according to them, in the West", explains Tareq Oubrou, author of several publications relating to Jewish questions.
"But to the credo 'progress is ahead of us' of the first arrivals, the following generations oppose a passion for their origins."
This generational schism takes on a paradoxical aspect for Ilana.
Formerly frustrated at not understanding the jokes that her elders exchanged in Arabic during family meals, she sees these same people being surprised by her approach: "but why do you want to learn the language of these people so much?" , we repeat to him.
But is the detachment vis-à-vis this oriental universe the corollary of a peaceful attraction for it?
"I feel French first and foremost", explains Yohann during an interview in Arabic.
"As a result, and unlike my elders, I apprehend the dark hours of the Judeo-Muslim experience in Tunisia without bitterness."
Like him, who was his first Arabic teacher, Esha, 15 years after him, strives to learn the language that was that of his ancestors in an attempt to overcome a fracture.
This Dutch student, now Parisian, is the child of an extinct community.
His father was born into a Jewish family in the Ghayran region in northwestern Libya.
The Jews had to leave it at the end of the 1940s.
By embarking on the study of Arabic, the young man discovers in his paternal family a resentment towards Muslim Arabs, the depth of which he had not previously fathomed.
Her father reads Arabic and speaks it privately with his relatives.
But like most of the Judeo-Maghrebs encountered here, Esha grew up in a family that hides her Arabic speaking like a wound.
"They are afraid that they will be taken for Arabs", he explains.
"What a tragedy the departure of Jews from the Arab world," sighs Tareq Oubrou, the Bordeaux imam.
His own daughter is learning Hebrew.
"What pride, he adds, it is the language in which God spoke to Moses."
Between human communities, we cannot impose love, because love is nourished by tangible objects, philosophizes the theologian.
"Like the Arabic language, like its intimate proximity to Hebrew: let's first resuscitate this shared wealth. Let's try, if only in France."
The imam pauses, before concluding: "Friendship will perhaps win us over later."
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