Pariah and rebel: Abraham Serfaty and Moroccan Judaism

The character of our era is ambiguity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on shifting social foundations, without losing awareness that everything is sliding there where earlier generations believed they saw solid footing.

— Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1906)

Tradition in ruins

For as long as they have existed, the Jews in diaspora have experienced exclusion from the public space in resignation or in pain, ambivalence or resistance. They were subjects, minors or wards of the State, sometimes intercessors and court Jews. They were witnesses to a truth that was added to their own, with the New Testament, or that was substituted for the Old, with the Koran.

Max Weber attributed their seclusion to “election” and their social position to the rites that set them apart. He constructed a typology of ancient and medieval Judaism out of which wells up the notion of a pariah people and a guest people. He drew his analogy from India when he qualified the Jews as a quasi-caste in a world without castes. This social and worldly condition, routinized by the “voluntary” segregation of the Jews, arouses in him pity but not a discourse of victimization of the kind many interpreters of his work will claim for themselves¹. The thesis of the “functional specialization” of the Jews in the economy and their radical atheism furnished a sociological framework for “explaining” the reversal of hospitality into hostility, according to place and period. It remains today a model for the analysis of immigrant groups and diasporic networks resistant to assimilation but also of the reactions of the “natives” faced with the “foreigners”².

For modernity, it is Bernard Lazare and Hannah Arendt who deepened the notion of the pariah within a European Judaism tossed between emancipation and denial, individual affirmation and the suspicion directed at a group of real or imaginary origin. Arendt demonstrates with great finesse this impossible condition opened up by assimilation. The weight of the past, isolation, the difficulty of having a speech of one’s own are reactivated by the specter of idiom, of name and of origin³. She knows the rupture is possible only if a place and a speech in the world become credible for the Jews in the City. She knows too that the efforts of the parvenus to escape the trace, by allying themselves with the dominant classes or by hoisting themselves up within the space of the economy, are precarious. Indeed, the social pariahs from whom the parvenu distances himself threaten him by their mere presence. Recourse to philanthropy certainly bolsters his “betrayal” but cannot stand in for a desire for political emancipation. The figures of the pariah and the parvenu are therefore complementary: the one aspires to rise, the second dreads the fall. These are class postures and fragile identifications. Both have a distorted image of the world in the absence of a struggle for the recognition of plurality in the political field.

In the wake of T. Herzl and B. Lazare, Arendt observes that the wager of assimilation and the love of homeland were of no help to A. Dreyfus. Arendt thereafter rejects the unconsciousness that runs through the possessive individualism of the parvenu and the resignation of the social pariahs⁴. Only the passage to the political is a means of breaking the unhappy consciousness and of proclaiming “the right to have rights”⁵. The conscious pariah is that being who then attempts to reconcile ethics and politics, detachment and presence in the world, otherness and the common good.

In distinguishing pariah, conscious pariah and parvenu, Arendt forged political categories that allow us to think dialectically the stigmata of a Jewish life torn between invisibility and fraternity, the mystical and the political. She was sensitive to the stateless, to those like herself whose world had vanished. Her anxiety at being sent back to origin and to the originary did not inhibit her in her criticisms of Jews and non-Jews. She was a rebel and her response to those who pointed their finger at her is not without interest in the current debates on the politics of identity and the conflations among Jewishness, Judaism and Zionism: “I had arrived at a certainty that I used to formulate at the time in a sentence I still remember today: ‘When one is attacked as a Jew, it is as a Jew that one must defend oneself.’”⁶

The passage from powerlessness to power by Jews in Israel did not lift the ambiguities surrounding the triangulation among pariah, parvenu and rebel. It transformed the languages but not the invariants. The Jews continue to be referred to “pariah capitalism,” to the impurity of crossbreeding and to the “world conspiracy,” even there where they are absent. This tension is well characterized by Martine Leibovici, a demanding interpreter of Arendt’s work, when she writes that “[c]oming from a rejected people, they are not admitted in full into the world toward which they strive. To orient themselves in such a situation, they no longer have the tradition of their people. What they have first of all is a moral start, a ‘pride,’ a will to veracity, a repugnance for lying and denial. And to sustain, in the world, such a start, they have only one promise of emancipation: the idea of a humanity in which all those who bear a human face would be respected.”⁷

The fecundity of Arendt’s reflection is to have anticipated the polemics over the undesirables, the vanquished of history, the relations between men and women. It is to have insisted on the importance of being counted in the world so as to settle the miscount and the disagreement⁸, the contempt and the exclusion. Her agonistic conception of the public space is in a certain sense more open to a particularized universalism, to plurality and to what today claims to derive from it: multiculturalism and the defense of minority rights. Attentive to the common good without defining it in a substantive manner, she would perhaps have contested the postmodern radicalism of the feminist and post-colonial currents. She would not have subscribed to their nihilism while being sensible of the challenge they throw down to us, to be “the world’s obliged”⁹ by inscribing within it their breath and their voice.

This brief incursion into the figures of the pariah imposed itself as the ridge line on which to stand in order to interpret the destiny of that heretic and believer who has been or is Abraham Serfaty, the collision of history that swept away a two-thousand-year-old Judaism in Morocco¹⁰. In the pages that follow, I will sketch a portrait of Serfaty by emphasizing the political organization he co-founded, Ila Al Amam. I will return to his article¹¹ devoted to the torture that marked him forever. His virtue of reserve must not, however, veil our face before the desolation of the tortured.

Abraham Serfaty: an unsubmissive pariah

The man who leaves the Kenitra central prison on September 13, 1991 has just served close to seventeen years and will not see again the shores of his country until eight years later. Cloistered, banished, deprived of his civil and civic rights, Serfaty remained, against all and everyone, Moroccan and Jewish.

The world into which he is born is bathed in sunlight and in the co-presence of cultural and confessional groups. He is Jewish but receives a French education. His mother tongue is Haketiya. His parents are first cousins and modernists. Daily life is paced by tolerance and a constant affection. France, which has established its protectorate since 1912, restructures the city and sharpens the inequalities. For Serfaty, the Republic is first of all a cry, a desire to see equality triumph, social distances and quasi-racial exclusions dissipate. The Vichy State and the numerus clausus put the Jews back in their place and constitute a betrayal of the republican ideals. His sister Évelyne will be offended by it. Does he feel a sense of guilt for having escaped it?

The era is full of sound and fury. The Spanish Civil War; the Second World War and the discovery by an adolescent of the sacrifice of militants for equality and freedom. In 1944, he joins the Communist Party out of solidarity with those who are the object of injustices. He seeks fraternity and condemns humiliation. He becomes a nationalist and an anticolonialist within a party that receives its directives from Paris and from the Comintern. Little does it matter to him. What counts is less the dogma than the will to change.

He pursues brilliant engineering studies and is destined for a prestigious career. The Résidence exiles him in December 1952 to the Cantal, with his wife and his son. It could not tolerate that a Jew should join the national movement — it, which applies itself to turning them into native “poor whites.” He will find his country again after independence. Moroccan nationality is restored to him, as it is to his sister Évelyne. All the dreams and hopes take shape. Patriotism and nationalism then rhyme with monarchy. Mohammed V opens the game of a pluralist democracy facing the zaouia [religious brotherhood] of the Istiqlàl and the reformist movements. Serfaty is appointed Director of Mines, where he notably directs the drafting of the Miners’ Statute, then Technical Director at the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, whose technical renovation he ensures.

During these years of grace and ferment, he sees and does not see that thousands of Moroccan Jews are taking the road of the exodus. He believed that decolonization would liberate them from despair. Guarantees had been given by the monarch. Numbers of Judeo-Moroccans had been integrated into the State apparatus. A minister was appointed in the first government after independence, Dr. Benzaquen. Dozens, even hundreds of Jews were flocking toward the Communist Party and other political formations. In spite of everything, the nationalist tensions and the aftereffects of the colonial and imperial period got the better of his degree-zero of communism: the equality and freedom of the Enlightenment. He aspired to the universal at the moment when God and toil were the common lot among all his own people.

During these years, his work occupies and impassions him. He carries out research, questions himself about his country and his party. Mohammed V dies following a benign operation in 1961. His son Hassan II succeeds him. He did not yet inspire the baraka [blessing, charisma] and the charisma that haloed his father. He must establish his power against the rival claims of the Istiqlàl and of the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires, without underestimating the army and the notables¹². Disillusion takes hold of the young. Students embrace radical ideas. The Casablanca riots of March 1965 are crushed in blood. Serfaty and his comrades are arrested and tortured, some almost at the peril of their lives, like Simon Lévy. In 1965, the Moroccan revolutionary leader Mehdi Ben Barka is abducted and assassinated in France. His party can no longer trouble the makhzen [the central power apparatus of the Moroccan state].

The Six-Day War in 1967 shatters the mirror of pan-Arabism. Two siege-mentality nationalisms leave no voice to those who think for themselves. Serfaty dismisses both chauvinisms in an article where he proclaims his indignation. In it he takes the side of the Palestinians. Tradition is broken and honor is saved. He affirms himself as pariah and rebel. Which is to say that the image henceforth assigned to him will oscillate ceaselessly between these terms. A fiction has just been born.

In these turbulent years, Serfaty more and more has the feeling that the Communist Party is a sect. He seeks his way. He has heard the call of Frantz Fanon while China was exporting its theory of revolution, a new version of Leninism for proletarian nations. The revolutionary myths were unfolding from Algeria to Mozambique, from Cuba by way of Bolivia. Third-Worldism had its emblematic figures: Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, Hồ Chí Minh and Nelson Mandela. The fascination with Vietnam and Palestine fed also on the strategy of guerrilla warfare theorized by Régis Debray and Che Guevara¹³. The ferment of May 1968 pushes A. Laâbi and A. Serfaty to create an Association for Cultural Research, and Serfaty to join the review Souffles, directed by Laâbi. In the autumn, the strike of the Khouribga miners does not put Serfaty to the test. He supports their struggle from the outset, is dismissed from his functions at the summit of the Office des Phosphates and relegated to the Mines department. He breaks with the Communist Party. The latter had just been legalized under the name Party of Liberation and Socialism. The change of name left the whole scene intact: the Moroccan proletariat had no spokesman.

The riots of March 23, 1965 had demonstrated both the start and the impasse. The Moroccan opposition was incapable of inflecting the orientations of the janissaries, courtiers and compradors, to take up Waterbury’s typology¹⁴. There then emerged a front of Marxist-Leninist students, in 1970, with cadres who had broken with their respective parties: the Communist Party, from which issued Ila Al Amam [“Forward,” from the name of the movement’s journal], with Laâbi and Serfaty, and the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires, from which issued the March 23 Movement, so named in memory of the Casablanca insurrection of March 23, 1965. This movement will itself split into two components: the March 23 Movement and Serve the People. They share Maoism, support for Palestine, workerism, but diverge on tactics and strategy. Ila Al Amam is opposed to the foco, to the revolutionary focal point of which Serve the People is an adept — which plunges into clandestinity and melts into the mass by setting the example. The March 23 Movement opted for a radical workerism and the study of the sacred texts, even as behind every worker hides a peasant. Ila Al Amam advocated the weapon of critique and the primacy of the political while campaigning for the right to self-determination of the Sahrawis. The power will draw no distinction among the quibbles that divide the frontists. In 1972, Laâbi and Serfaty are arrested and then released. The trap seems to be closing. Serfaty chooses clandestinity until his arrest in 1974.

Prison: the wringing of bare life

Serfaty was tortured and placed in isolation. In our interviews, he could not go back over the sadism of the torturers and I did not have the indecency to insist on the obscene. His discourse is austere and restrained. He utters neither complaint nor imprecation. The harshness of carceral existence resists the description of a third party. Only one who has survived can bear witness to the interminable death that torture represents, as Jean Améry and Primo Levi revealed with emotion¹⁵. What seems to us unimaginable and indescribable was set down by A. Serfaty in an article in 1986¹⁶. He cannot reread it. One will understand why.

In it he describes the methods of the savage extortion of confession: blows of the riding crop, suffocation by forced ingestion of water mixed with chemical products over a floor-rag wedged at the back of the mouth, the body suspended — hands and feet bound — as in the techniques of the parrot’s perch or that of “the airplane,” blinding light night and day. The objective is to break you, to wait until you show some sign of weakness. There are also the blows on the soles of the feet or the calves — the falaka —, the electric baton. Serfaty could no longer be supported by his feet, quivering with pain. They kept indelible marks of it and aftereffects that recall the hell of prison.

Serfaty says, nonetheless, that torture is not only this debasement of the body. It seeks rather to hollow out your soul and to prevent you from thinking. Life lives only thanks to an unheard-of effort to recover confidence in the world that has just deprived you of it¹⁷. In his article, he thus explains the necessity and the impossibility of repressing the fact of having been relegated to the rank of a bare life, of which M. Foucault and G. Agamben also speak¹⁸.

“…..when one has undergone it so long and so intensely that it has penetrated your body and your being — and this reason will perhaps be understood by the reader of this text —, and that to speak of it, for one who has undergone it, is like extracting a vomit buried at the bottom of one’s body. I say buried, now, ten years later. As long as it is still raw, and that lasts for years, it is impossible for oneself to look it in the face. On the contrary, one must do everything to forget those filthy hours, to recover a human countenance, after months and months of physical debasement, so that the heart no longer trembles at each sound that recalls that bass voice which whispered in my ear, in the deepest of my torpor: ‘Nuhud’ (get up) and I knew it was for the torture.¹⁹”

Agamben brought out this shame of speaking of it by referring to the double process of being subject and subjected, that is to say what “comes about in the absolute concomitance between a subjectivation and a desubjectivation, between a loss of self and a mastery of self, between a servitude and a sovereignty”²⁰. Torture is a limit-situation, a rape, but also a subjection of the body in the name of the moral power the State claims to possess. It overrides the right of the governed not to be persecuted²¹. The tortured is reduced to his biological existence. His wound is such that for a long time he cannot say “we” without questioning the body, corporeality and that which ruins them. The moving pages where Serfaty describes with courage and lucidity the pretensions of the agents of power to exercise their absolute will to know are to be set alongside the description of the sadism glimpsed by Freud in the Rat Man. The vomit Serfaty evokes refers to the abyss. Améry underscores it by insisting that “torture is the most frightful event a man can keep within the depths of himself”²². To survive this trauma is hardly done “without bearing the mourning”²³ of a death pronounced and suspended.

And yet, Serfaty will yield on nothing. He will go on hunger strike, will refuse to be mired in objectification while knowing the arbitrariness of a power that exercises punishment sovereignly. His martyred existence sharpens his sense of injustice. He knows and feels in the folds and recesses of his body and his mind that one is a man if one is a citizen. The rebel did not bend, even if his status as pariah will pursue him still in the exile imposed by the makhzen.

During those black years of pain and solitude, Serfaty reflects and writes. He turns back upon himself. He has the feeling that an immense injustice has struck the Judeo-Moroccans exiled in Israel. He suffers at the thought that his compatriots were abandoned to their fate by the national movement, the collusion of the makhzen, of the parvenus of the community and of the Moroccan bourgeoisie.²⁴ He does not spare himself. He wonders whether such a devastation could have been stemmed in the age of Jacobin and fundamentalist nationalism. He questions himself about these broken lives, these sad gazes of Jews of the Atlas whose messianism gave way to bitter disillusion, accompanied by the loss of an art of living and of communicating. Why did the project to “save” them turn against them? By what detours did they come to desert the little Jerusalems that were theirs at Debdou or at Sefrou to join the Holy City? Why, then, was their ethos profaned?

One may wonder whether this return to the humiliated memory of his compatriots, notably in Israel, is not the mark and the trace of the wounds inflicted by coloniality, on the one hand, and by the decline of universalist ideals, on the other. I tend to interpret Serfaty’s posture as that of the witness, heretic and believer, of a community whose uprooting was also an irremediable loss for Moroccan society and culture. His marginal and revolutionary position pushes him to adopt a Judaic ethics that rejects violence and oppression. It is also significant that his defense of minority rights — Berber, Palestinian and notably Sahrawi — was already an anticipation of the debates over the struggles for recognition that are at the heart of our postmodernity. Like Charles Taylor, he supports a multiculturalism founded on the hope of dialogue. In his eyes, the re-diasporization of the Judeo-Moroccans is full of promise and not of tragedies, if Israel were to opt for reconciliation and reparation and to put an end to a Zionist discourse that is henceforth emptied of finality²⁵. Serfaty dreams of a new Andalusia where the war of memories would give way to exchanged words and shareable meanings. This horizon of expectation seems today swallowed up by a war of fictions over the justice and the rightness of the rights of one side and the other — Israelis and Palestinians. One must only hope for an appeasement that turns to the advantage of freedom and secularism.

Notes