Christina Leah Sztajnkrycer
The Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

Published in 1930, Blanche Bendahan’s novel, Mazaltob, offers a unique glimpse into the lives of North African Sephardic Jews at a crucial time of French colonial influence. With the creation of French schools by an inimitable Franco-Jewish philanthropic entity, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, teaching North African Jewish children to read, write, speak, think, and dream in French, Bendahan’s novel tells the story of the psychological trauma that occurred when literary education was employed as a tool of imperial domination. Writing before North African independence from France, Bendahan critiques the French civilizing mission as a trauma that is expressed through a type of misappropriated nostalgia that her character, Mazaltob, feels for an idealized France, a place that is not hers, that will never be hers, and that she will never in reality know. Bendahan’s novel serves as evidence that authors began denouncing the violence of colonial subjects long before colonial independence as the canon of post-colonial literature had previously led to believe. Mazaltob is therefore examined as an early chronicle of both the perceived opportunities and the traumatic displacements of colonial education as a gendered experience.

Keywords: North African Jewry, Colonial Education, Alliance Israélite Universelle, Identity, Belonging, Nostalgia, Trauma

Introduction

In Mazaltob (1930), author Blanche Bendahan follows the trajectory of a North African Jewish girl from her childhood through her early adult years. The setting, timing, and identity of the protagonist make this bildungsroman a productive site for reconsidering nationalized histories of colonial education. Mazaltob offers a glimpse into the Sephardic North African Jewish community, little-documented in literature, and thus provides an opportunity to contrast literary and historical accounts of colonial education and serves as a point of reflection on intersections of trauma-theory and post-colonial approaches to literary study. 

Published in Paris with Éditions du Tambourin, at the tail end of les années folles (France’s version of the roaring twenties), Mazaltob appeared as the euphoria of France’s victory in the First World War waned and the worldwide impact of the Depression set in motion the forces leading to the Second World War. The story, however, is set in early twentieth-century Tetuan, Morocco, and harkens to a time and place that might seem—for a cosmopolitan, French readership—exotic, steeped in so-called oriental tradition, untouched by modernity and the vagaries of national unrest or international conflict. While Mazaltob may offer all that, it also explores the modern hardships of identity and belonging in France and colonial North Africa for a young Francophone, Jewish woman. The split between the eponymous character’s aspirations to a modern French existence and the gendered requirements of her community appears at first to be a classic indictment of traditional cultures stifling women, evoking Gayatri Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men” paradigm, but Bendahan’s tale offers a more nuanced perspective. 

Mazaltob stands, in fact, as an important piece of evidence, bolstered by historical accounts from the period, of the psychological trauma that occurred when literary education was employed as a tool of imperial domination. In this essay, I argue that Blanche Bendahan, writing before North African independence from France, critiques the French civilizing mission as a trauma that is expressed through a type of misappropriated nostalgia. Her character, Mazaltob, a French-educated North African Jewish girl, feels this misappropriated nostalgia for an idealized France, a place that is not hers, that will never be hers, and that she will never in reality know. Mazaltob is therefore examined as an early chronicle of both the perceived opportunities and the traumatic displacements of colonial education as a gendered experience.

I first explore the many ways in which Bendahan’s life experiences informed the writing of Mazaltob. I then evoke the literary context in which she wrote and published this first novel, including the unique historical context surrounding Jews in France and the treatment of North African Jews during the French colonial period. This context frames the deployment of education as a French imperial instrument contributing significantly to acculturation and assimilation in the colonies. As I explore the post-colonial thought of Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon in terms of the violent effects of a French education on colonized children, I also introduce the use of trauma theory to address Bendahan’s unique and early contribution to this field. This analysis of Mazaltob speaks to the trauma endured particularly by North African Jewish girls, educated in a French system that gave them hope for a modern, universalized, French future that is inaccessible in their time and place.

Biography of une femme de lettres

Often described, vaguely, as une femme de lettres, Bendahan left scant imprint on historical records. What is known of her formative years is cobbled together from French colonial archives and hints found in Bendahan’s writing.1 While Bendahan is rarely mentioned in literature summaries or scholarship,2 the introduction to the first English translation of Mazaltob, published in 2024 and edited by Frances Malino and Yaëlle Azagury, offers new and important information. Nevertheless, contemporary knowledge of Bendahan’s life story remains skeletal. 

For example, it is impossible to confirm Bendahan’s Jewish identity from the maternal side. She was born Blanche Jeanne Fernandez in Oran, Algeria on 26 November 1893, to an unknown father and to Maria Fernandez, who appears to have died in childbirth since the date of her death is the same as the author’s birth. As noted on her birth certificate, Bendahan’s mother was originally from Malaga, Spain. Sadek Benkada indicates that she likely had been living precariously in tight quarters with other Spanish immigrants to Algeria (“être écrivain” 4). Malino states that Maria Fernandez was Catholic, and she finds no records that Bendahan herself ever converted to Judaism even though the author referred to Mazaltob as a “Jewish novel” on the dedication page (xv). Seven months after her birth, Hayo Alfred Benoliel, assumed to be Bendahan’s biological father, recognized her as his daughter, and the changed patronymic is also noted on the birth certificate. 

Much more is known about the Benoliel family. Their history establishes the author’s connection to Morocco, contributing to her choice to set the novel there. Bendahan’s father, Hayo, was the son of Judas Ben Oliel and Fréha Coriat, both born in Tetuan, Morocco, but married in Oran, Algeria in 1868. Hayo’s parents, like many Moroccan Jews, left Morocco for Algeria, certainly for economic reasons but also likely to benefit from the greater freedom Jews were granted in Algeria under French colonial rule. The Benoliels also might become French citizens, an option made legal in 1865, then mandatory in 1870, when the Crémieux decree made all Algerian Jews French citizens whether they desired it or not. Bendahan’s ancestors were among many Moroccan Jews living in Oran, Algeria, a community said to have had a distinct identity from local Algerian Jews. Referred to as “Tétouanais,” either from Tetuan or from another location in Morocco, they “distinguished themselves by a deep attachment to their Judeo-Spanish culture and Moroccan traditions” and were also responsible for “the transmission of the Judeo-Spanish linguistic, artistic, and culinary heritage” (Benkada, “être écrivain” 2). Bendahan’s portrait of this Jewish community in Mazaltob pays tribute to such a unique identity.

A few years after Benoliel recognized Bendahan as his daughter, they moved to France where he married Marie Hortense Ginoux on the author’s third birthday, 26 November 1896. The family remained in France until a divorce in 1907. During those eleven years, Bendahan received a traditional French education, likely encouraged and perhaps directed by her stepmother; historians have even confused Ginoux with a teacher the author had as a child (Malino xv, 149n7; Benkada, “Blanche”). In either case, Bendahan’s relationship with Ginoux significantly influenced the author’s life, confirmed in the dedication of Mazaltob: “To Mrs. Marie Ginoux, Catholic, who so tenderly guided my childhood, I dedicate this Jewish novel” (7). One year after the divorce, Bendahan’s father was back in Oran, Algeria, remarried to Rica Akrich, with whom he had two children. Fourteen at the time, Bendahan likely returned with him (Malino xv).

The author’s biographical trail picks up with her marriage on 11 June 1919, at 26 years old, in Oran, to Yahya (Gaston) Bendahan, a soldier who served in the First World War. Gaston, like Bendahan’s father, was also born in Tetuan. Details of her married life, like those of her childhood, are unknown, save for her intellectual pursuits: she wrote newspaper articles, poetry, and fiction; gave lectures; and even organized a feminist movement in Oran (Malino xv-xvii). She published two volumes of poetry, La voile sur l’eau (1926) and Poèmes en short (1949); two novels, Mazaltob (1930) and Messieurs, vous êtes impuissants (1961); and a compilation of miscellaneous works, Sous les soleils qui ne brilleront plus (1970). She won three French literary prizes: one for Mazaltob, one for Poèmes en short, and another for Sous les soleils.3 During the Second World War, Bendahan remained in Algeria with her husband, whose name is listed on a Vichy census document of Freemasons in Algeria in 1941 with their address indicated as 14 rue de la Paix, Oran (“Liste” 3). A journal account of this period is included in Sous les soleils (Malino xvi). After Gaston’s death in 1960, and Algerian independence in 1962, Bendahan relocated to the south of France, where she died in Nice in 1975.

Literary and Historical Context

As an author, Blanche Bendahan is niched in the relatively small field of North African Francophone Jewish fiction writers, within which she represents an even smaller, and often sidelined, group of those writing before colonial independence. Guy Dugas explores the exceptional nature of these writers in his critical analysis of their work. He explains that literary scholars have traditionally omitted this group from the canon of North African Francophone literature, with the exception of Albert Memmi, because they would complicate a nationalist anti-colonial and post-colonial agenda centering Arab/Berber and Islamic writers (9-11). Authors like Bendahan began writing and publishing long before colonial independence. They also began learning French as a first or close second language much earlier than their Muslim neighbors. Furthermore, they showed no overt animosity towards or direct rejection of colonial France. For many North African Jews, the French presence was seen as liberating, first from their status as dhimmi, considered inferior to the majority Muslim population, then from the constraints of their traditionalist North African Jewish society. A final reason for excluding authors like Bendahan from the canon of North African Francophone literature is their French education, despite the fact that, as Dugas claims, French education is the reason these authors were able to become writers: 

C’est bien évidemment le système scolaire qui … a joué le rôle le plus important. L’école est le lieu où est apprise la langue dans laquelle, abandonnant hébreu et judéo-arabe, vont désormais s’exprimer les jeunes générations, la langue qui véhiculera leur savoir, et bientôt leur imaginaire. [It is obviously the school system that … played the most important role. The language in which the young generations, abandoning Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, will henceforth express themselves, the language that will guide their knowledge and soon their imagination, is learned at school.] (29)4

Not only did their education determine their future literary careers, it is also a key thematic element of their writing. 

The “how” and “why” of North African Jews receiving a French education has roots predating the 1830 invasion of Algiers and reaching as far back as the French Revolution. In August of 1789, the revolutionary National Assembly published the ground-breaking Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Inspired by the Enlightenment movement and the push for freedom and equality driving revolutionaries to revolt, the Declaration informed essential laws drafted in the future French constitution. Based on the first article, stating that all men are born and remain equal, the National Assembly adopted laws in 1790 and 1791 giving Jews living in France equal rights as French citizens. Historically considered the first form of Jewish “emancipation,” it lent France an aura of the promised land for Jews. With major administrative reorganization under the first Empire, Judaism in France, like Catholicism, Protestantism, and later Islam, became a highly distinct entity, governed by a group of appointed officials and influential men, both religious and secular. Following emancipation and Napoleonic codification of the religion, massive assimilation to French culture and adoption of French ideals occurred over just a few generations, producing in effect a Franco-Jewish population that believed in France as a place where Jews could live freely and prosper. Additionally, with the law of 12 December 1792, making public education available to nearly all (except girls), Franco-Jewish boys began attending French schools. A secular French education paved the way to social mobility and there was little to no hesitation for most families in taking full advantage. By the second half of the nineteenth century, there were many prominent French Jewish men in a myriad of domains like education, law, politics, arts, finance, medicine, and even the military.

When France invaded Algeria in 1830, French Jews were present very early in the colonial process. As ardent believers in the mission civilisatrice française, they were eager to initiate the Algerian Jewish population into their enlightened French existence. Just as Judaism in France had been organized into consistories during the First Empire, one in each major city all answering to the central consistory in Paris, French Jews participated in the creation of consistories in Algerian cities with sizable Jewish populations—each answering to the central consistory in Paris. With a governing body in place that effectively supplanted most local Jewish authority, Algerian Jews could then follow suit and assimilate to French culture and ideals as their co-religionists had done in France. Change did not happen instantaneously, but, following France’s example, education was one of the most important means with which this process took place. With the creation of French schools for all Jewish children in Algeria as early as 1834, assimilation began to take root one generation at a time.

The Civilizing Mission of the Alliance Israélite Universelle

In neighboring Tunisia and Morocco, which became French protectorates much later (in 1881 and 1912, respectively), France did not invade and conquer and French Jews did not impose a governing body on Tunisian and Moroccan Judaism as in Algeria (see Davidson 8-11). The assimilation of the Jewish population to French culture and ideals still took place through education. In the absence of French state schools, it was the Alliance Israélite Universelle that took on the role of establishing institutions. For the eponymous character of Bendahan’s novel, Mazaltob, an Alliance education plays a critical role in the traumatic outcome of the story.

Established in 1860 in Paris by six young Franco-Jewish intellectuals, the Alliance Israélite Universelle5 was determined from its outset to bring the French principles of liberty and equality to all Jews living in oppression wherever they might be, and primarily in countries in which Islam was the dominant religion. The creation of this secular yet religious organization, philanthropic although never claiming to be such, was catalyzed by two contemporary scandals unjustly targeting Jews: the blood libel of Damascus in 1840 and the Edgardo Mortara affair in Italy in 1858. Both causes célèbres were debated throughout Europe, rekindling anti-Jewish sentiment and also encouraging the intervention of highly assimilated, educated, and influential European Jewish notables. 

The six young founders of the AIU were the epitome of educated and assimilated French Jews. If not already influential, they certainly aimed to be so through their AIU efforts. Having experienced assimilation through education, the founders of the AIU believed that a French education would lead oppressed Jews of Muslim-dominant lands to assimilate to enlightened French ideals, thus escaping oppression and elevating themselves (Rodrigue 72). With this mission, they established a vast network of Franco-Jewish schools throughout the Mediterranean in which students were taught a mixture of French language and literature, French and European history and geography, arithmetic, sciences, Jewish history and religious studies, and non-academic subjects like drawing, painting, calligraphy, singing, sewing (for girls), and physical education (Rodrigue 26-27). Alliance schools were able to attract students of all income levels, especially the poorest who were given food and clothing for the duration of their studies. Students often became fervent believers in a French Alliance education. The Alliance also provided the brightest of their students with the opportunity of becoming Alliance teachers. Every so often a student was chosen to train in Paris for three to four years at the École normale israélite orientale (ENIO) for boys, created especially for the purpose of producing future teachers, or at vocational and private schools for girls (Malino, “Prophets” 59). 

The Alliance took very seriously training Jewish girls as mothers of future generations. In a study of an Alliance school for girls in Galata, Istanbul, Esther Benbassa reveals the importance placed on creating “la nouvelle mère orientale juive” [“the new Oriental Jewish mother”] (537). In practice, the Alliance educated Jewish girls not with the hope of improving their condition in life but that of their children, and the children of their children. Aron Rodrigue uses letters and communications between Alliance teachers and the directorate in Paris to prove this point:

The education of girls was also deemed essential by the Alliance because of its potential impact on future generations. It was the woman as mother who transmitted the most important values to the children. If the Alliance wanted to reach future generations, it had above all to educate, to “civilize,” the women of the Jewish population. (81)

Benbassa indicates, however, that the result of this process was not always as anticipated, especially for the less financially fortunate: 

Pourtant, la disparité sociale … posait des problèmes sérieux. Les jeunes filles pauvres, leurs études achevées, retournaient au foyer s’occuper du ménage et retrouvaient la misère et l’ignorance du milieu d’origine. [And yet, social disparities … caused serious problems. The impoverished girls, once their studies complete, returned home to take care of the house, finding themselves again amidst the misery and ignorance from which they came.] (537)

The Alliance thus intentionally made Jewish girls aware of a different, Western lifestyle, with Alliance teachers implicitly, if not explicitly, teaching them to believe it to be better than the local way of life, the one in which the girls were raised and to which they were likely to return once their education was complete. 

Despite the contradiction between promises and actual opportunities, and opposition from local community authorities, many parents sought to send their girls to local Alliance schools. In her 1979 Les fille de Mardochée: histoire familiale d’une emancipation, Annie Goldmann discusses how her grandmother, Ziza, was sent to the recently opened Alliance girls’ school in Tunis in 1882. Local rabbis thought that a European education would lead to less religious adults, and mothers did not want their daughters to leave the protective enclave of the home. Ziza, however, came from a family she describes as “aisée et éveillée,” relatively well-off and culturally aware (Goldmann 25). Ziza spent a few years learning to read, write, and speak French because, at the time the school opened, she was the right age to attend, which was not the case for other siblings, as Goldmann explains (25n1). But Ziza’s French education concluded as quickly as it began: 

Appliquée, pleine de bonne volonté, assez « douée », elle réussit gentiment dans ses « études » et, tout aussi sereinement, reprend sa place à la maison. Élise à l’école redevient Ziza chez elle… [Diligent and willing, rather “talented,” she succeeded as calmly in her “studies” as easily as she fell back into her role at home. Élise at school became Ziza again at home…] (25)

Born into an already financially comfortable family, an Alliance education was not a necessity for Goldmann’s grandmother. For others, however, it was often deemed the sole opportunity for Jewish girls to have a secure future. In her work on women and the Alliance, Malino reveals how some North African Jewish mothers saw an Alliance education as a means to ensure the financial viability of entire families (“Prophets” 59, 66-67). This opportunity depended, however, on the girls being sent to study in Paris and becoming Alliance teachers themselves: “for mothers like Mesdames Benchimol and Benaïm, Paris was an investment in the future. The position of institutrice, they believed, would bring security as well as prestige. It could also rescue a family from poverty” (“Prophets” 59). Three of Madame Benchimol’s daughters succeeded in securing studies in Paris and later becoming directors of Alliance schools in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. 

There is no direct evidence that Bendahan knew of the Benchimol women, but it is likely, Malino explains, that Bendahan knew of another Alliance-educated woman who followed a similar trajectory. Hassiba Coriat, a distant relative on Bendahan’s father’s maternal side, studied at the same Alliance school in Tetuan as Mazaltob, Bendahan’s fictional character, but Coriat’s studies did not stop there. She traveled to Paris and trained to be an Alliance teacher. Returning home, she was assistant to the director of the Alliance’s girls’ school in 1892 (Malino xxiii). Malino draws many parallels between Mazaltob and Hassiba: a native of Tetuan who studied at the local Alliance school, one of nine other children with parents struggling to support them all, and a stunning beauty whose Alliance career ended abruptly following a marriage proposal from a wealthy fellow Tetuan native who had made a fortune in South America (xxiv). While we do not know how Hassiba fared in marriage and in life on another continent, such a match would have been perceived as a positive outcome for an Alliance-educated woman. 

Bendahan did not allow such a fortunate fate for her own Alliance-educated character, instead proffering and then withdrawing it as a result of Mazaltob’s education. In deviating from the historically positive outcome of creating the “new oriental Jewish mother,” ushering her family into modernity by instilling French ideals, Bendahan makes a narrative choice with important implications: to have her character’s French education unfit her for marriage. This choice establishes Bendahan as an early critic of French colonial practices, like those that the Alliance enacted in its quest to emancipate and modernize North African Jews. Furthermore, Bendahan’s fictional choice to tell the darker side of the Alliance’s influence, particularly on North African Jewish girls, aligns her with later scholars whose work is foundational in postcolonial and trauma theory (Miller, “Gender and Poetics” 230).  

Postcolonial Thought, Trauma Theory, and a Colonial Novel

Recent scholarship has begun to revisit the history of North African fiction to include previously excluded writers like Bendahan. Azagury locates Mazaltob within a “new genre,” that of “modernist Sephardi fiction” (132). Judith Roumani, exploring the work of Sephardic authors from the 1920s through the 1980s, further defines these authors as “nomadic writers” who “cross boundaries, bridge cultures,” and “have experienced the collapse of … empires, drastic modernization, the shock of the Holocaust, the horror of wars, decolonization and often virtual expulsion from their millennial homelands” (1). While Bendahan wrote and published Mazaltob prior to the Holocaust, decolonization, and the exodus of Jews from North Africa following the independence of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and Algeria in 1962, she lived through these traumatic events and continued to write throughout. Bendahan’s last published work, Sous les soleils qui ne brilleront plus, likely compiled in France after she left Algeria with 150,000 fellow Jews in 1962, exhibits “nostalgia and deep sense of loss” (Malino xvi). Bendahan’s apparent post-independence grief for a homeland lost may indicate a lifelong sense of displacement and alienation that takes a different narrative form in her 1930 novel of education. 

In writing of Jewish girls’ experience with a French education in a North African colonial setting, Bendahan’s work predates that of Albert Memmi, an author touted as introducing the themes of trauma through French colonial education that have since become standard arguments in postcolonial thought. Memmi, the exception to the rule when it comes to omitting North African Francophone Jewish writers from the canon of North African Francophone Literature, wrote and published his first novel, La Statue de sel, in 1953, just a few years before Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956. Memmi’s semi-autobiographical novel features a young Tunisian Jew tormented by a sense of alienation and identity confusion after studying at an Alliance school and then in a French high school in Tunis. Four years later, Memmi wrote two seminal essays on the colonial condition, “Le portrait du colonisateur” and “Le portrait du colonisé.” In the latter he reveals the paradox in the French colonial enterprise of educating colonized children, theorizing what he had shown in fictional form: 

the memories that are formed for him are surely not those of his people. The history that he is taught is not his own … Everything seems to have taken place somewhere other than in his home … The books inform him of a universe that recalls in no way his own … far from preparing the adolescent to take himself in hand, his school establishes in the core of his being an irrevocable duality. (Memmi, Colonizer 133-134)

Contemporaneously to Memmi, Frantz Fanon was theorizing the violence of colonialism as a psychological violation. From these iconic thinkers emerge the broad contours of postcolonial thinking about the impact of education as an instrument of control. For example, W. John Morgan and Alex Guilherme analyze Fanon’s arguments about the harmful role of colonial education in Peau noire, masques blancs (1959) and Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and “argue that… the implications of Fanon’s thought on education… are considerable” considering that “the violence of colonialism both destroys and undermines the cultural foundations of colonized peoples and makes use of education as a weapon of domination” (37). Furthermore, Morgan and Guilherme discuss Fanon’s belief that the imposition of the colonizer’s language in place of local dialects led to a loss of identity: “losing one’s command of one’s own language … represents a loss of one’s self and belonging” (38). Similarly, Memmi claims that “colonial bilingualism” constitutes a “primary tearing (rift or division)” (135). In Memmi’s opinion, the colonized remain forever strangers in their own land because their mother tongue has been made useless. But the alternative, using the language of the colonizers, leads to insurmountable cultural catastrophe—such as Mazaltob experiences in the dissonance between the life she came to imagine through French literature and the gender role she is expected to fulfill according to North African Jewish tradition. Ultimately, the conflict between the two proves too strong to overcome.

The theoretical work of both Fanon and Memmi has most often been applied to post-colonial authors in the period that followed the appearance of their work, notably from the 1960s on. Bendahan’s work indicates that such ideas permeated North African literary culture during the colonial period. Mazaltob, written by a Franco-Algerian, culturally if not legally Jewish, woman writer, writing in French, the language of the colonizer, during the colonial period, and publishing in France for a primarily French readership, may offer the French an exotic tragedy of miseducation, but it is also a powerful critique of disingenuous French colonial practices. Indeed, Mazaltob, in describing the perils of the French civilizing mission, represents a common theme in North African Francophone Jewish literature prior to independence. In his 1896 autobiographical novel, Rabbin, co-written with Robert Randau, Sadia Lévy alludes to the effects of colonial France on local North African Jewish culture: “Les civilisations fermées éclatent d’elles-mêmes quand la trainée de lumière venue d’immenses cités modernes les effleure” [“Closed civilizations implode on their own when the stream of light coming from immense modern cities skims them”] (67-68). In two different novels, Les Juifs ou la fille d’Éléazar (1921) and Le Sein blanc (1928), Élissa Rhaïs exposes the many dangers the Algerian Jewish community faced when entire families exchanged tradition for modernity. Both stories conclude with tragic deaths. Two decades later, in La famille Bensaïd (1947), Irma Ychou evokes Mr. and Mrs. Bensaïd’s worries that their daughter, Lydia, will never marry because they have allowed her, despite their better judgment, to continue her French education beyond the normal age (13-16 years old) at which North African Jewish girls ceased their studies for marriage.

These literary portraits of French-influenced North African Jewish individuals continue in pioneering psychological theories of colonial trauma. Trauma theorists—Geoffrey Hartman, Kathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman—began exploring literary narrative as a form of abreaction in the 1990s. Joshua Pederson, in “Trauma and Narrative,” indicates that arguments have been made that literary language has a “special ability to communicate – or ‘claim’ – trauma” whereas “non-literary language” cannot (98). Furthermore, “trauma theorists often argue that historical, objective, or archival language fails to capture traumatic experience” (Pederson 98). Historians focusing on experiences of Jewish students in their studies in Alliance schools have relied primarily on archival material. Mazaltob offers a narrative window into the mind of its protagonist; Bendahan’s narrative imagines the trauma endured, maybe not by Bendahan herself, her generation, or by Jewish girls in French Algeria, but by Jewish girls attending Alliance schools in Morocco and Tunisia. Second-wave trauma theorists like Gabriele Schwab contextualize how authors, like Bendahan, knowingly or not, participated in communicating the trauma of others: “An individual or a generation can unwittingly speak the unconscious of a previous individual or a generation in a cryptic speech marked by an unspeakable secret” (Schwab, qtd. in Pederson 105). What historians cannot read in the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle is the trauma Jewish girls experienced when a French secular and literary education was imposed in an unsuitable time and place, which is the moral of Mazaltob.

Reading Mazaltob for the Trauma of Displaced Nostalgia

The novel opens with Mazaltob Macias and her numerous siblings in their parents’ home in the Juderia, the overcrowded and generally impoverished Jewish quarter of Tetuan, Morocco. At the beginning, we learn that she is ten years old, and, based on approximate dates the author provides, was born in the late-nineteenth century to Sephardic North African Jewish parents. The circumstances of her birth distinguish this text from Bendahan’s biography. Born in Algeria in 1893, Bendahan was born French. Mazaltob was born Jewish in the Moroccan kingdom of Islam that had not yet become a French protectorate. 

Mazaltob’s status as a culturally divided mind and body is evident from the opening of the novel. As a descendant of Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition, Mazaltob sings the ancient songs that her ancestors sang in Castillo centuries earlier. Although she might sing in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect her community speaks, she thinks and dreams in French, an ability she acquired through her studies at the local Alliance school. In studying French history and geography, reading French literature, poetry and novels of great French authors, she has developed a deep love and loyalty for France, a place that she knows only in theory. While Mazaltob is a stunning beauty—her pale skin contrasting with her lush dark brown hair and piercing, black, diamond-like eyes—known throughout the Juderia, it is her French education that makes her a curiosity in her community. As she passes the women of the Juderia, perched on their doorsteps, they deem her too European, commenting to each other, “As though she weren’t flamenga enough, that Mazaltob in her way of speaking without moving her hands” (11). 

An oddity in the Juderia, it is at the Alliance school that Mazaltob thrives, to the point that she has come to imagine France as her ideal home, a place to which she aspires and a culture she endorses. She is nevertheless endlessly pulled between tradition and modernity, the sense of duty to her local customs and her aspirations to a French identity. When a matchmaker presents a suitor for her older sister, Preciada, Mazaltob engages in an internal battle between what she has learned in school and what she instinctively knows as a young Jewish girl of Tetuan. While her father expresses outrage that a cobbler would dare ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, being of a lower caste than the Maciases, a merchant family, Mazaltob recalls the novels she has read in which “kings marry shepherdesses and shepherds marry queens” (13). Her reading has shown her that love can transcend class difference, but her cultural identity tells her to not question patriarchal authority: “but isn’t a father’s judgment infallible?” (13). Mazaltob’s incipiently feminist thought signals her link with a universalized, European vision of women’s social role. The disjunction between Mazaltob’s education and her traditional culture, where only men have the right to study and go out into the world and girls stay at home helping their mothers, biding their time until they also marry, generates trauma when Mazaltob, faced with a narrow future path, suffers nostalgia for the French modernity instilled by the Alliance. It is in this sense that her nostalgia fits Svetlana Boym’s model of traumatic nostalgia: “The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland…” (12). Mazaltob’s nostalgia is traumatic in that she is “longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed” (Boym 9). 

To complicate her already fractured identity, divided between her ancestral Sephardic North African Jewish identity and her French-educated mind, Mazaltob expands her knowledge of France in song. One day while visiting the Juderia, the wife of the French consul to Tetuan, Madame Gérard, hears a “delightful voice” (10) singing an old Spanish song of lament. When she learns to whom the voice belongs, she requests permission from Mazaltob’s mother to give her voice lessons in which Mazaltob learns to read music and train her voice as Madame Gérard accompanies her on the piano. In the French lyrics Mazaltob sees a brighter, freer life beyond Tetuan: “Mazaltob sings and the sky seems higher. Vast expanses of green materialize in place of the stifling Juderia … Mazaltob sings [and] escapes far from the bleak bondages of her life” (16). Bendahan uses dialogue between the women of the Juderia gossiping about this “unprecedented … extraordinary event” that the voice lessons constitute to express the community’s perception. “To waste time teaching a young girl to sing, what a strange occurrence…! And operas at that? When their Judeo-Spanish ancestors had brought to Tetouan ballads from Castilla” (11). In their opinion, Mazaltob would be better off learning “to cook adafina, the delicious dish we feast upon on Saturdays,” they say (12). The voice lessons further distance Mazaltob from her local community. Aware of the criticism, conscious of the cultural line she has crossed—“And the neck of the crimson-faced adolescent sinks beneath her shoulders. O, shame on her! She has dared something no one else ever did!” (12)—Mazaltob continues these precious lessons as long as possible.

Furthermore, Mazaltob’s friends reflect her aspiration to a French modern Jewishness, masquerading as universal, that exceeds local and national boundaries. Jean, her childhood friend and future beloved, is the orphaned nephew of the local doctor in Tetuan, Dr. Bralakoff, an emigrant from Russia via France. To the Jewish community of Tetuan, Jean is not said to be Jewish, despite having a Jewish mother and being the nephew of the Jewish doctor. With a French father and having studied in France, Jean is French, a living representation of all that Mazaltob aspires to in her dreams of France. Jean serves as a guide, a reference point, to Mazaltob as she explores France from Tetuan. 

In successive vignettes, Bendahan has Jean appear for Mazaltob at key moments of exploration. In one vignette, Mazaltob is flipping through a French magazine and observes on one page something extraordinary: young women, both married and unmarried, in public, fancily dressed, with sparkling jewelry and beautiful, unhidden hair. She is troubled by the stark difference these images present when juxtaposed with her own existence and that of all the Jewish women of Tetuan. Wondering about her future “Mazaltob sadly strokes her brown tresses. How long will her family allow her to keep them?” (7). On another page, Mazaltob sees various women characters: “Here is the stage of a theater with magical dancers. Here an elegant Amazon rides a galloping horse. And there applauds a singer with swooning eyes” (7). She muses aloud, “But who kneads the daily bread? Who makes the almond cakes…? Who distills the anisette? Who prepares the orange blossom jam? Who makes the palm tree brooms…?” (8). Her curiosity and confusion continue as she ponders how it is possible that “these pretty ladies … seem to exist only to be admired, and …, astonishingly, go out without their husbands” (8). These unfamiliar behaviors intrigue more than they horrify Mazaltob. In the next vignette, Mazaltob stumbles over a math problem she must complete for her studies at the Alliance. Her brothers refuse to help, indicating that “girls don’t need to learn so much arithmetic” (9), but Jean steps in and shows her how to solve the problem. 

Through these vignettes Bendahan establishes Jean and Mazaltob as mirror opposites, at once similar and dissimilar. He is “a dreamer” like Mazaltob (30), and, as an assimilated European who chooses to not ascribe to one religion, preferring a “Great God,” a “poet-God,” a “cosmic God” (99), he is an outsider in Tetuan like Mazaltob who, with her European manners and education, “is nothing like the girls from [Tetuan],” as her peers say (36). Like Mazaltob, Jean will eventually die from the same dissonance that she experiences. Malino, however, equates Jean with Bendahan herself, being part Jewish, linking the choice in this key character’s name to the author’s own middle name, Jeanne, and emphasizing the fact that he never converts (xxv). 

Her Alliance education, her voice lessons with Madame Gérard, her interactions with Jean, and her exposure to French culture through literature and magazines, all contribute to distancing Mazaltob from her ancestral identity and feed into her imagined nostalgia for France, a place for which, never having lived there, she should not feel nostalgic, blurring her understanding of her own identity, confusing, even erasing her sense of belonging. Nevertheless, Mazaltob appears to resolve this tension as her ancestral identity as a Jewish woman of Tetuan takes precedence with age and circumstances. At sixteen, she has left school, stopped voice lessons, and dedicates her time to taking care of her numerous younger siblings and attending to the domestic duties that her mother, due to yet another pregnancy and a weak heart, cannot. Her father’s once prosperous company has failed and the family is in economic hardship. In appearance, Mazaltob has stepped back into the traditional role assigned to her, and to all the Jewish women of Tetuan. Her preoccupations seem purely material, such as “producing perfect preserves in her kitchen or obtaining the right shade of white on the patio’s wall” (16). Bendahan, however, emphasizes this exterior appearance, contrasting it with Mazaltob’s interior awareness: “Mazaltob is just another Jewish girl. But this is in appearance only, for Mazaltob has also had a taste of the dream … The DREAM!” (16). Working tirelessly to keep her family fed and home in order, Mazaltob still dreams of France. 

This traumatic division in her consciousness reasserts itself as both a psychological and cultural problem at the supremely gendered moment of betrothal and marriage. Although Mazaltob’s help in her family home is essential, there is another way by which she can support them even more: marrying a wealthy suitor. While Bendahan likely knew of other options, like the one that Madame Benchimol chose for all four of her daughters, that of becoming an Alliance teacher, (Malino, “Prophets”) she chose, as an author, to emphasize the more common traditional trajectory for North African Jewish women. Penniless, Mazaltob must rely on her looks to attract a match. When a suitor presents himself, lured by the reputation of her beauty, his wealth convinces Mazaltob’s father to willingly agree to the proposal. Surprisingly, Mazaltob does not protest, seeming to forget all the emancipatory ideas acquired during her French education, creating dissonance with prior character development. This dissonance resurfaces when Mazaltob visits Madame Gérard to inform her of her upcoming marriage. The French consul’s wife asks, “But what does your young heart whisper in your ears?” and “Could it be … perhaps … that you do not love your future husband?” (27). She is stunned to learn that Mazaltob feels no emotion, neither about the wedding, nor for her future husband. Her lack of sentiment is even more shocking when compared with what Mazaltob’s earlier reactions when a cobbler courted her sister, when she still knew of “the love … Tristan feels for Isolde and Romeo for Juliet” (16) and believed that places existed in the world where “attractive young men and women get drunk on love in the course of magical full-moon nights … countries [where] love either of the forbidden kind or the other one, is the ultimate purpose of life” (17). 

Mazaltob’s absence of emotion about her pending arranged marriage, despite her awareness of other possibilities, is historically accurate. In another North African Jewish community, in Tunisia, a few years earlier, the 1890s rather than the 1900s, Annie Goldmann’s grandmother, Ziza, had a nearly identical reaction to her arranged marriage. Similar to the fictional Mazaltob, Ziza studied at the local Alliance school until an age at which she became eligible to marry. Switching between her own reflections on her grandmother’s story and direct quotations, Goldmann relates what Ziza responded when her mother asked her if she wanted to marry the man that her father had chosen: “Je veux… Je veux pas… c’est mon père… je veux par mon père” [“I want… I don’t want… it’s my father… I want what my father wants”] (28). Like Ziza, Mazaltob demonstrates an apparent disinterest, representing a traditional understanding that the daughter has no say in who she marries. She responds to Madame Gérard’s questions with deceptive placidity: “– I have neither like nor dislike for him. – So why did you choose him, my dear? – Oh! madame! Our girls seldom choose their husbands. Their families usually do it” (27-28). Mazaltob, like Ziza, cannot culturally refuse the husband that her father chooses. Bendahan nevertheless hints at Mazaltob’s internal panic when Madame Gérard hears “a repressed sob” that “cracks her voice on the last note” as Mazaltob sings with her voice teacher for the last time (28).

Despite all the Alliance’s efforts to emancipate the Jews of North Africa through a modern, western education, introduced directly into homes by forming Jewish girls to become the “new Oriental Jewish mother” (Benbassa 537), many, like Mazaltob in fiction, and others in reality, could not escape the customs of their place and time. However, in Madame Gérard’s searching, “gaz[ing] intensely at Mazaltob who is speaking in a calm voice,” asking “what is hiding behind those magnificent eyes of hers…? Resignation? Indifference? Pain?” (28), Bendahan leaves points of suspension. Reverting to her traditional role, Mazaltob embodies for the European Madame Gérard the impenetrable Oriental. For modern readers, however, this moment encourages a pause to wonder if Mazaltob will be able to abandon permanently all that she learned. Goldmann asks a similar question, imaging how indelible or ephemeral were the effects of an Alliance education for her grandmother at the time: 

L’épisode de l’Alliance est peut-être une simple parenthèse, elle oubliera sans doute vite la grammaire, la cursive. À quoi lui serviraient ses nouvelles connaissances ? son destin est tout tracé : un mariage organisé par les familles, avec un homme qu’elle ne connaît pas… [Her time at the Alliance is perhaps but a simple interlude, she will undoubtedly quickly forget the grammar and cursive. What purpose would her knowledge serve? her fate is already all mapped out: a marriage arranged by the two families, with a man she doesn’t know…] (26).

The testimony Goldmann provides for her grandmother’s nearly analogous experience lends historical veracity to Bendahan’s story. It also validates Bendahan’s skepticism of the intended benevolence of the Alliance in educating Jewish girls, for neither Madame Gérard nor Mazaltob’s betrothed, José Jalfon, see her education as an asset. When Mazaltob is still taking voice lessons, Madame Gérard asks herself whether initiating the young North African Jewish girl to French music was unkind, given the future that awaits her. Bendahan’s narrator confirms this line of thought but absolves Madame Gérard of her guilt. Mazaltob arrived at the Gérard home already influenced by her French education, yet bound to her tragically traditional destiny: 

For her books have already opened up new horizons for Mazaltob beyond the narrow Juderia. And yet, like her sisters, she remains bound by the strict law of Moses. And like all the other Jewish women, she will no doubt submit to her destiny—to increase Israel’s prosperity and fulfill the wishes of the God of Abraham (16).

Likewise, Mazaltob’s betrothed, José Jalfon, is disconcerted by her devotion to France, especially considering that he sees himself as the representation of cosmopolitan modernity. Although originally from Tetuan, José grew up in Argentina where his family relocated when he was six. Far from the circumscribed customs of the old world, José has made a fortune, partied, traveled, and flirted with modern women. Mazaltob, dressed in her traditional Moroccan Jewish clothing and reserved in manner, hardly seems the type to respond, “I would rather go to France” (23), when he asks, “would you like to move to Argentina?” (23). When she states that she feels “grateful” (23) to France, the country without which she “could neither read nor write… would know nothing of history, geography, or literature,”  he counters, “that famous school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle from Paris … has neglected to instruct you in the history, geography, and literature of other nations,” like Spain, he says, “whose language you speak” (23). More than perplexed, he feels challenged: “He thought he could subjugate that young Jewish girl; not only is she more cultivated than he, however, she knows things he does not…!” (24). From José’s perspective, Mazaltob’s education makes her unfit to be an appropriately submissive wife.

José blames the Alliance for making his future wife more knowledgeable than himself, but the details he gives about its history and its intentions reveal the true critic behind this diatribe to be Bendahan herself. Indeed, for several pages, the novel offers a history lesson in the form of a singular footnote, unique in the novel in that it extends beyond explanations of Hebrew or Ladino terminology for French readers, like all other footnotes. The narrator references Manuel L. Ortega’s 1919 historical work, Los Hebreos en Marruecos [Jews in Morocco], supplying a series of Spanish to French translations revealing the influence of the AIU on Moroccan Jews and the inability of Spanish teachers to sway them from their admiration for France. In the Éditions du Tambourin version, the footnote indicates, “nous traduisons ceci” [“we translate the following”] (46). However, in Malino and Azagury’s translation, the footnote says, “I translate the following,” collapsing the distinction between author and narrator, thus attributing to Bendahan the inclusion and translation of Ortega’s text. While José’s objections to French education may be self-interested, the footnote indicates that Bendahan intends a broader critique of the Alliance, France, and the French Jews involved in bringing Franco-Jewish modernity to North African traditional Jewish society. 

Closing one chapter with José’s musing on the cult appeal the Alliance holds for North African Jews, Bendahan plunges directly into their wedding in the next, mimicking in narrative rhythm the hasty timeline of arranged nuptials and emphasizing the contradictions between ancient traditions and Mazaltob’s modern education. Over a dozen pages, Bendahan offers a near ethnographic description of the week-long Sephardic wedding ceremony (26-38), a scene that a French readership would rarely have witnessed firsthand but could imagine through Eugène Delacroix’s painting, Noce juive au Maroc, based on sketches the artist made a century before Mazaltob’s publication. In the next chapter, the week culminates with the married couple spending their first night together. This night is followed by eight nights, known as “huppah” (37), during which the husband must not leave the home nor sleep in the wedding bed where his wife must remain, protected by an elderly lady of standing, Mazaltob’s mother in this case. In the narrator’s voice Bendahan contemplates the reasons for this ancient tradition, first finding that it is in “fear of forever damaging a woman’s body, that fragile instrument of procreation,” then concluding that it is purely an automatism (37-38). In contempt of all tradition, José tries to send Mazaltob’s mother away, giving her a heart attack that results in Mazaltob leaving the wedding bed and José leaving the home. If the outcome was less grave, this scene would be almost comical, revealing both José’s hypocrisy in returning to the old world to marry, expecting to impose a modern agenda and failing, and the absurdity of a tradition that even those who perpetuate it do not understand. 

Positioning this event as a semi-dénouement, Bendahan punctuates the passage that follows with a few curious references to French literature, thus foreshadowing Mazaltob’s tragic future. In so doing, she reaffirms her critique of the Alliance in the assumption that educated girls would willingly and easily assume the role of wife and mother in the traditional North African Jewish home. First Mazaltob returns a borrowed copy of Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1849 Graziella to Dr. Bralakoff. A romanticized memoir of Lamartine’s youthful travels in Italy from 1811 to 1812, the novel recounts the tragic results when Lamartine, rescued from drowning by an Italian fisherman, falls in love with Graziella, the fisherman’s granddaughter. Graziella is melancholic, aware of the vast class and cultural differences and thus the impossibility of their union. When familial obligations call Lamartine back to France, Graziella dies, heartsick, a few months later. When asked what she liked about the story, Mazaltob responds, 

How I love and envy Graziella! She was nearly my age when she died, but how intensely her heart lived during those few years! Furthermore, she was free… Free to roam under the sky and to run, engulfed by the fragrance of orange trees with not a single soul to tell her: “You can’t do that.” (50)

In a darker, more twisted parallel to Lamartine’s novel, José abandons Mazaltob, not for familial duty, but simply because she is unsuitable for the life he desires to live. Unlike Lamartine and Graziella, the status difference between himself and Mazaltob does not irk him, but her incongruent attachment to tradition coupled with her devotion to France does. Deciding to abandon her, he fumes, “Let that chaste and cold beauty remain here and gorge herself on foolish novels!” (52), confirming the dissonance of Mazaltob’s modern Alliance education with the backward place in which she acquired it, the Juderia of Tetuan. With this literary reference to Lamartine and Graziella’s unrequited love, Bendahan points to Mazaltob’s future, but it is not for her love of José that Mazaltob will perish.

Instead, a renewed attachment to her friend Jean, Dr. Bralakoff’s nephew, who represents achieved Frenchness, results in intercultural tragedy wrought by mismanaged education. Dr. Bralakoff’s son, Serge, returns to Tetuan from France to take up his father’s practice, bringing along his wife, Léa, a French Jewish woman. Léa cultivates Mazaltob as a friend whose French education makes her appear more familiar and European. The Alliance memories Mazaltob tried to relinquish by returning Graziella surge forth and she begins to dream of France again. Furthermore, Léa tells Mazaltob that Jean will return. While Léa eventually realizes that the pair are in love, she does not grasp that they are aware that their romance is doomed due to cultural differences. Sympathetic to the conflict that a French education could create for a Jewish girl of Tetuan, Jean had expressed hope, upon hearing of Mazaltob’s marriage, that she might forget everything she learned of the world beyond the walls of the Juderia so that she would not suffer. Seeing Jean reignites Mazaltob’s deep passion for France, of which Jean is an ideal representation. Brazen, Mazaltob removes her head covering and spends time gazing at herself in the mirror, styling her hair in a French chignon, as she saw in the French magazine she had flipped through as a child. The women of the Juderia who once judged her European mannerisms would be appalled but not surprised by a resurgence of this behavior. One evening, as Léa plays the piano and Mazaltob sings, something that she said she would never do for José Jalfon, the husband who abandoned her, Jean faints from the excess of emotion he feels in seeing her beauty and hearing her voice. While Léa runs to the kitchen to concoct a reviving cordial, Mazaltob leans over him, worried that he will not awaken. With her face so close to his, she sees “her childhood companion, the only person who touched her soul when she was a child, the one who, through the books they read together, traveled with her to the marvelous land of fairies and lovers…” (80). Bendahan creates in Mazaltob’s gaze on Jean the epitome of what her fictional character has come to believe is France—books. Bendahan, however, aware of the unfortunate endings of these tales, shrouds Mazaltob and Jean’s blossoming love in doubt.

Mazaltob is still a married Jewish woman; worse, she is a married Jewish woman of Tetuan, Morocco. Faced with what might appear an easy choice to optimists, Mazaltob must choose either to allow the romantic tales she has read become her reality or to be faithful to her ancestral identity and remain a prisoner of the Juderia. Unable to make such an impossible decision, Mazaltob imposes on Jean a separation, after which she then agrees to a second and then a third encounter, followed by months of tormenting indecision. Jean falls ill, desperate to fulfil his love for Mazaltob. Finally, she agrees to run away with him in secret. On the night of their clandestine escape, en route to a boat that will sail them away to France, Mazaltob panics, pushes Jean away as he passionately kisses her, and runs away in the dark. This final rejection, so close to realizing both of their dreams, proves too much for Jean who later dies. Before dying, however, he writes a letter to Mazaltob in which he details the reasons for which their love was at once possible—they speak the same language, love the same books, share the same dreams—and impossible—Mazaltob’s ancestral identity is too heavy, Jeans writes, compared to her desire for Frenchness (124-125). Furthermore, Bendahan brings full circle the impossibility of their relationship in Jean’s letter, which repeats a phrase, “loin, si loin de Tétuan” [“Far, so far from Tetuan”] (240) that Mazaltob had long ago used to envision the love stories she had read: “loin, bien loin de Tétouan” [“Far, so far from Tetuan”] (33).6 

In the conclusion to the novel, Bendahan provides an ironic juxtaposition of Mazaltob and her sister, Preciada, one representing the result of a French education and the other an unwavering observance of tradition. Upon receiving Jean’s letter and learning of his death, Mazaltob’s memories of their love for each other and the one they shared for France, French literature, music, and art transform her nostalgia for France into an actual incurable malady. Irreconcilable and insane, Mazaltob spends the last of her days repeating verses of a poem Jean once wrote, wandering until she no longer can, up to Jean’s grave, weeping and kissing his tombstone. When she is about to pass, her sister cries out: “Dearest sister… Nothing will remain of your passage on this earth for you have not, as I, known the great joys of motherhood…” Mazaltob responds: “Poor Preciada, poor fool who prides herself on spawning eyes that will soon cry, chests that one day will pant under the implacable grip of agony” (128). Bendahan juxtaposes the sisters’ differing perspectives on life to demonstrate the disparity between women who have and women who have not received an Alliance education. Preciada did not attend the Alliance school and was never exposed to any path other than one which entails marriage and children. Mazaltob’s French education prevents her from accepting the path her sister has taken and seemingly the only possible path for a North African Jewish woman. Had she not attended the Alliance school, she would not have learned to read, she would not have read love stories, and she never would have dreamed of living a love story with Jean in France. In receiving a French education, leading to her manufactured nostalgia for France, Mazaltob unknowingly trades potentially blissful ignorance with knowledge, making a return to the narrow future to which she was destined unthinkable. Such is the cost, Bendahan implies, of a French education incongruous with the place and time in which it was taught. 

In Mazaltob, exposure to modernity through a French education ends in tragedy. This is, nevertheless, a narrative choice of one possible outcome. Not all North African Jewish girls were unable to navigate the dissonances Mazaltob could not. As Malino writes of Claire Benchimol, an Alliance-educated native of Tetuan who became the director of several Alliance schools, “French literature may have become a passion for her and the fables of La Fontaine an inspiration… [her] loyalty remained with her family and her identity that of a Tetuannais” (“Prophets” 62). The authentic account Malino provides of girls and women like those of the Benchimol family offers an alternate ending to Bendahan’s fictional representation of a French-educated North African Jewish woman. No matter how deep was Claire Benchimol’s admiration, loyalty, and love for France, she remained forever faithful to her ancestral identity. The tragic ending of Bendahan’s novel—the death of the protagonist—is not, per se, the consequence of a French education for a North African Jewish girl, but is due to what a French education promised and failed to deliver. Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” is salient. As she explains, “optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving” (2). In their Alliance studies North African Jewish girls got a glimpse of a different life, a French life, a life that Berlant would call “the good life” and that the Alliance founders considered the only way forward for Jews. Rarely, however, did these Jewish girls have the chance to experience what they had studied, learned, and read, as once their education was complete, they returned to their traditional lives as North African Jewish women. In this sense, it was not their education that impeded realization of the possibilities it promised, but the place and time in which they lived. Through Mazaltob’s story, Bendahan demonstrates the hopes raised and dashed by  an optimistic vision of life as a modern French girl who is ill-suited for survival as a Jewish woman of Tetuan. Bendahan thus questions the ethics of the Alliance through Mazaltob’s tragic ending.

Conclusion

Nearly three decades after Mazaltob’s publication, Albert Memmi wrote that “Possessing two languages is not only that of two tools, it is the participation in two psychological and cultural kingdoms,” indicating that the role of the colonized writer is impossible to endure given that “he embodies all the ambiguities, all the impossibilities of the colonized, brought to the most extreme degree” (136-137). Memmi implies that the colonized writer cannot exist, and yet, Blanche Bendahan existed, as did her literary peers. 

Bendahan’s novel, Mazaltob, is many things. It is a tribute to her ancestral identity, the Sephardic Jewish community of Tetuan, Morocco. It is an early feminist piece, exploring the sacrifices Jewish women made for the sake of tradition and community. It is also a love story, undoubtedly the love that Mazaltob and Jean felt for each other, but more importantly their shared love for France, French literature, and French music, translating Bendahan's own admiration for the country where she received an education in the pivotal early years of her life. It is, as Azagury writes, an “Orientalist piece by a Jewish woman,” also playing into the new genre of experimental “Sephardic fiction” (136-140). For readers today, Mazaltob offers a unique opportunity to explore the history of Judaism in France and North Africa, the unparalleled role French Jews played in the colonial enterprise through the creation of Alliance schools, and the quotidian life of ancient Jewish communities in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Studying both the biography and bibliography of Bendahan, as a Franco-Algerian Jewish woman and as an author of Francophone fiction and poetry, opens up further exploration of contemporary authors of similar national identities and colonial experiences: Elissa Rhaïs, those of the School of Tunis (Vitalis Danon, Ryvel, et Jacques Véhel), Irma Ychou, and others publishing before colonial independence. While not all the literature these authors produced ends as tragically as Mazaltob, themes of alienation, identity confusion, and dissonance, common symptoms experienced by colonial subjects, run throughout.

Future scholarship in this field can only be enlightened and enriched by the writing of authors like Bendahan, writing before colonial independence and demonstrating a lively critique of French colonial influence while retaining a sensitivity to the uneven distribution of its opportunities. Bendahan’s work strengthens women’s perspectives, both in fiction and in social analysis, as always already present in North African colonial societies. Analyzed here from the intersecting perspectives of postcolonial studies and trauma theory, Bendahan’s multifaceted novel also encourages exploration of even more original themes. Her character’s misappropriated or manufactured nostalgia, for example, earned through her French education, reframes French classics, like Lamartine’s Graziella or Gustave Flaubert’s iconic Madame Bovary by reorienting them within a colonial context. While it is beyond the scope of this analysis, situating Bendahan and her character, Mazaltob, within a chronology of nineteenth-century authors and their often-tragic heroines would further scholarship into philosophical questions debated a century earlier, such as the danger of novels for a feminine readership. If Bendahan were to contribute to this debate in the twentieth century, Mazaltob just might support the argument that novels are in fact dangerous, even deadly.

Notes

1. The facts of Bendahan’s birth have been established by Pierre Benoliel on the website Geneanet.org. This information can also be verified on the author’s birth certificate through the Archives nationales d’outre-mer.
2. See Déjeux; Dugas; Benkada, Oran, not “être écrivain”, since the conference paper was never published; Pressman.
3. The prizes are, respectively, the Prix d’Académie, the Prix de l’académie de l’humour, the Prix de la ville de Nice.
4. In this article I offer my own English translations for sources that have never been translated, including the French when relevant for readers interested in the original wording. For sources for which an English translation exists, such as Mazaltob, translated to English for the first time by Frances Malino and Yaëlle Azagury in 2024, I use the English version unless otherwise indicated.
5. Hereafter referred to as the AIU or the Alliance.
6. The 2024 translation says, “Oh Mazaltob, I fancied you different, very different from that woman of Tetouan” (124), which eliminates the parallelism in the original.

Works Cited

Archives nationales d’outre-mer. www.recherche-anom.culture.gouv.fr/archives/egf.

Benbassa, Esther. “L’Éducation féminine en Orient : L’École de fille de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle à Galata, Istanbul (1879-1912).” Histoire, Économie et Société, vol. 10, no. 4, 1991, 529-59.

Bendahan, Blanche. Mazaltob. Éditions du Tambourin, 1930. 

---. Mazaltob, A Novel. Translated by Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino, Brandeis UP, 2024.

Benkada, Sadek. “Blanche Bendahan.” Oran, La mémoire, edited by Kouider Metaïr, Paris Mediterra, 2004, pp. 137-38.

---. “Blanche Bendahan (1893-1975), être écrivain, femme et juive à Oran dans l’entre-deux-guerres (1919-1939).” Colloque « Les Juifs du Maghreb de l’époque coloniale à nos jours – histoire, mémoire et écritures du passé. » Societé d’Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie, 3-6 Nov. 2008, Sorbonne, Paris.

Benoliel, Pierre. “Blanche, Jeanne Benoliel.” www.geneanet.org.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.

Boym, Svetlana. Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.

Déjeux, Jean. Femmes d’Algérie: Légendes, Traditions, Histoire, Littérature. Boite à documents, 2017.

Dugas, Guy. La littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression françaises, Entre Djéha et Cagayous. L’Harmattan, 1991.

Goldmann, Annie. Les filles de Mardochée. Denoël/Gonthier, 1979.

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