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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Two years ago, without any apparent explanation, a little-known Egyptian scholar translated Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (originally published as Réflexions sur la Question Juive, 1946) into Arabic. Widely acknowledged as an experimental and highly influential theory of anti-Semitism in the 1960s, Sartre's text had already had a profound, yet indirect, influence on an entire class of left-wing Arab intellectuals who used it in order to figure out their relationship with the colonizer; that is, with their Otherness. Though these intellectuals read Anti-Semite and Jew in French, it still remained one of Sartre's very few works that had never been translated into Arabic. How so? Addressing this question, this article offers a genealogy of non-translation that revisits the accumulative process by which Sartre's text acquired the status of a haunted and, hence, untranslatable text. Situated at the juncture where anti-Semitism, Zionism, and revolutionary Arab politics intersect, the text became entangled in the ethical politics of the conflict and, after the 1967 war, became associated with the collapse of the Arab revolutionary project and with Sartre's betrayal of the Arab cause. Thereafter, the work of leftist intellectuals who had drawn on Sartre to reject anti-Semitism was forgotten, and an anti-Semitic sentiment that rejects the original message of Anti-Semite and Jew slowly settled in. Beyond dissecting the process by which a text becomes haunted, this article also states the need for an original theorization of anti-Semitism that is culturally specific to the Arab world rather than derivative of European experience.
I wish to thank Modern Intellectual History coeditor Tracie Matysik for her many insightful comments and critical suggestions toward revision. At my home university, my colleagues Ben Brower, Judy Coffin, and Sabine Hake generously assisted me to articulate a more coherent vision for the problem of haunted texts. I would also like to thank Jonthan Judaken and an additional anonymous reader for demanding a more culturally specific treatment of anti-Semitisim.
1 Jawda ʿAbd al-Sadiq Ibrahim, “Kitab taʾamulat fi-l-masʾala al-Yahudiya li-Jan Bul Sartar,” at http://elyom1.com/archives/141458, accessed 18 April 2017.
2 For the book launching and public event see “Baʿd 70 ʿaman min hajbihi,” al-Bayt Beytak, 7 May 2016, at www.elbeitbeitak.com/69732.html, accessed 18 April 2017. “Bayna Lughatayn,” radio interview with translator Dr. Hatim al-Jawahiri, 16 May 2016, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTURnXA1FQ8, accessed 18 April 2017.
3 For an in-depth treatment of this history see Di-Capua, Yoav, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (Chicago, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For a critique of Anti-Semite and Jew see Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The Jew in Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive: An Exercise in Historical Reading,” in Nochlin, Linda and Garb, Tamar, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 201–18Google Scholar.
5 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, 1948), 49.
6 Ibid., 42, my emphasis.
7 Ibid., 16.
8 Ibid., 80.
9 Julian Bourg, review of Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews, Nov. 2010, at www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31252.
10 Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 142.
11 Kirsteen Anderson, “Sartre and Jewishness: From Identificatory Violence to Ethical Reparation,” in David Gascoigne, ed., Violent Histories: Violence, Culture and Identity in France from Surrealism to the Néo-polar (Oxford, 2007), 61–78.
12 Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 187–92.
13 Sartar, Jan-Bul, Taʾamulat fi-l-Masʾala al-Yahudiya (trans. Hatim al-Jawahiri) (Cairo, 2016), 13–14Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., 13–14.
15 Ibid., 40.
16 Ibid., 37.
17 Ibid., 40–41.
18 Ibid., 40–41.
19 Ibid., 29, 34.
20 Ibid., 46.
21 Ibid., 43–6.
22 Ibid., 15.
23 The following six subsections are derived from Di-Capua, No Exit.
24 See, for instance, a confrontation between the young generation and Taha Husayn on Layla Rustum's television show Najmak al-Mufaddal. There, Husayn is specifically asked about Descartes, which for them means colonial Enlightenment as a whole. The show is available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU-ULahGxKA, accessed 14 March 2018. For more on the generational clash with the udaba see Di-Capua, Yoav, “The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the ‘Fall of the Udabāʾ’,” in Pannewick, Friederike, Khalil, Georges, and Albers, Yvonne (eds.), Commitment and Beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden, 2015), 89–104Google Scholar.
25 Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit, chap. 2; and Moser, Kata, “La réception arabe de Heidegger,” Bulletin heideggérien, 5 (2015), 4–16Google Scholar.
26 Césaire, Aimé, Nègre je suis nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris, 2005), 23Google Scholar.
27 Young, Robert, Colonialism and Neo-colonialism (London, 2006)Google Scholar, Preface, xiv.
28 Simons, Margaret, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 11.
29 Following Fanon, however, Souleymane Bachir Diagne argues that Sartre's introduction narrowed the meaning of the movement and forever tied it to his own work. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Négritude,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negritude/index.html#note-4, accessed 14 March 2018.
30 Arthur, Paige, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 2010), 32Google Scholar.
31 Ahmad ʿAbbas Salih, “Risala ila Sartar,” Al-Katib, March 1967, 25. On Salih's life see obituary in al-Sharq al-Awsat: http://archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?issueno=9896&article=366494#.VT_oVZNQB_A, accessed 28 April 2015.
32 Ibid., 21.
33 Fayiz Sayigh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut, Sept. 1965), 1.
34 “Marks wa Sartar wa al-masʾala al-yahudiya,” al-Baʿth, 2 April 1967, 3.
35 Ibid.
36 A.A., “Sartar wa-l-qadiya al-Filastiniyya,” al-Thawra, 28 Feb. 1967, 3.
37 Ibid.
38 “Marks wa Sartar.”
39 Muʾnis ʿAbd al-Salam, “Qissa ʿan al-shaʿb al-yahudi wa-l-shabaka,” Al-Baʿth, 19 March 1967, 8.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Le Monde, 30 May 1967, 4. Le Monde, 1 June 1967, 3. New Outlook also published the statement: New Outlook, June 1967, 1.
44 See, for instance, Moyn, Samuel, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, MA, 2005)Google Scholar; and Wolf, Joan, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, 2004)Google Scholar.
45 Muhamamd al-Hamamsi, “Taʾamulat fi-l-masʾala al-Yahudiya … Jan-Bul Sartar,” 25 March 2016, at www.albayan.ae/books/from-arab-library/2016-03-25-1.2602650, accessed 18 April 2017. Islam Anwar, “Taʾamulat fi-l-masʾala al-Yahudiya li-Jan-Bul Sartar bi-l-ʿArabiyya,” al-Ray, 18 May 2016, 18, also available online at www.alraimedia.com/ar/article/culture/2016/05/18/680433/nr/egypt. “Sartar, faylasuf al-hurriyya al-muadi li-huquq al-Filastini,” al-Khalij, 23 Feb. 2016, at www.alkhaleej.ae/alkhaleej/page/075402c3-b75f-4739-a472-306a1ad3a469, accessed 18 April 2017. Jawda ʿAbd al-Sadiq Ibrahim, “Kitab Taʾamulat fi-l-masʾala.”
46 Gorman, Anthony, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 133–4Google Scholar.
