Jewish-Arab coexistence as a family chronicle: Pierre Hazan

Hybridity versus essentialism: Hazan's family chronicle as an epistemic counter-project

Pierre Hazan, Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi (Éditions Textuel, 2026).

Pierre Hazan's work, published in 2026, is neither a family novel nor a conventional memoir, but rather a project to explore the conditions of possibility for Jewish-Arab coexistence by reading its historical disappearance against the grain. The book develops a specific poetics of hybridity, a style of writing that sees itself as a counterpoint to the essentialist narratives of the Middle East conflict. Hazan employs a set of tools that are both literary and historiographical: family narrative, archival research, interviews with witnesses, and essayistic reflection intertwine. The overarching historical interpretation that the book develops can be summarized in three theses: First, Jewish-Arab coexistence is not a utopian projection, but a historically documented practice that was destroyed by the nationalist logic of the 20th century. Second, both sides—Arab regimes and Zionist politics—bear responsibility for this destruction, and this dual responsibility is the structural taboo of the current conflict. Thirdly, by expelling one million Jews from the Arab world and several hundred thousand Palestinians from the emerging Israel, exclusive nationalisms have produced two irreducibly different but inextricably linked historical injustices, and this connection is the blind spot of both Israeli and Arab memory politics.

Basic content guidelines

The book unfolds in seven chapters, each dedicated to a figure from Hazan's family or to the immediate contemporary context. The starting point is Rabbi Moshe Hazan (1808–1862), the author's great-great-grandfather, a Sephardic Orthodox from Smyrna who grew up in Jerusalem. He traveled through Europe to combat the Haskalah, a Jewish reform movement, and paradoxically, in the process, became a passionate advocate for Arabic language and culture against European materialism. His grandson, Daoud (1869–1946), born in Jerusalem, raised in Tripoli, and eventually settled in Alexandria, co-founded the first Egyptian independence party, fought as a nationalist against British colonial rule, was sentenced to death and later pardoned—and was also a Zionist. Hazan's grandfather, Maurice Adès (1890–1961), considered himself quintessentially British and became an unwitting protagonist in a global political drama when, in 1944, British Prime Minister Lord Moyne was assassinated in his garden by Jewish extremists. Hazan's father, Elie (1915–1993), did everything in his power to delay the forced withdrawal from Egypt after the Suez Crisis of 1956. The fifth chapter is dedicated to Magda Haroun, the last Jew in Egypt, a communist atheist, and the daughter of an unwavering Egyptian nationalist. The final two chapters bring us to the present day: Hazan encounters the Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani and the Israeli lawyer Yaël Vias Gvirsman, both fighting before the International Criminal Court—for opposing sides of the case, with similar tenacity. A final chapter about the Palestinian Ali Abu Awwad and the Israeli May Pundak ends with a cautious but unwavering gesture of hope: that Jewish-Arab coexistence was not only historical, but politically conceivable again, albeit in a form yet to be invented.

Hazan's historical interpretation: Three guiding principles

Before analyzing the structural features of the book, it is necessary to explicitly name Hazan's historiographical argument, because it is not a casual framing device, but rather the supporting framework of the entire narrative.

Nationalisms are not natural, but historically constructed.

Hazan demonstrates, using Daoud as an example, that in the first half of the 20th century it was possible to be both an Egyptian nationalist and a Zionist. What appears to us today as a logical contradiction was, for Daoud, a coherent stance: he considered both movements expressions of the same liberal principle of emancipation, the right to self-determination for oppressed peoples. The animosity between Arab nationalism and Zionism is therefore not the natural outcome of irreconcilable claims, but rather the product of a historical hardening of positions that could have unfolded differently at certain pivotal moments.

The revolution of 1919 was a missed historical opportunity.

Hazan describes the failure of the Egyptian independence revolution as profoundly tragic because it could have enabled an alternative future: an open Egyptian nationalism in which Muslims, Copts, and Jews would have fought for independence together. Had it come to pass, this moment would have set a precedent for the entire Arab world. What emerged instead was a succession of dictatorships and the escalation of exclusionary nationalisms—but, according to Hazan, this was not a historical necessity.

Both sides have pursued a criminal policy of displacement – ​​and they instrumentalize each other as justifications.

Hazan explicitly rejects the Israeli thesis that the exodus of Jews from the Arab world was a "population exchange" that effectively offsets the Nakba. He also rejects the Arab thesis that the Jews left voluntarily or were manipulated by Zionist agents. He argues that there are two historical injustices that are irreducibly different yet inextricably linked – and that these can only be addressed together without smoothing over the asymmetry of the current situation.

These three guiding principles permeate all chapters of the book and structure its relationship to the literary and cultural memory techniques it employs.

Identity as a palimpsest – no purity, only layering

The book's character structure does not follow a psychological developmental logic, but rather a genealogical one: each character embodies a specific historical possibility of identity under pressure. Hazan does not portray homogeneous characters, but rather constitutively divided subjects – with the division itself functioning as historical testimony.

Moshe is an Orthodox Jew who travels through Europe and understands modernity without wanting it; a defender of Arab culture without being Muslim; a conservative who advocates for opening up the ghetto. Daoud is both an Egyptian nationalist and a Zionist, an Eastern Jew and an anti-colonialist, the son of a chief rabbi and a secular revolutionary. Maurice feels British despite being born in Egypt, speaks Arabic, French, and English without an accent, and discovers at the end of his life that he was actually Egyptian. Elie is a Jew without religious practice, an Egyptian without a nationality, an Italian without ever having seen Italy.

This systematic ambiguity is not a biographical curiosity, but, according to Hazan, the historical norm of Levantine Jewry. What he constructs is what Homi Bhabha would call a "Third Space": a culturally unfixable subject that attempts to navigate between the appeals of national movements. The failure of these figures is the effect of nationalist imperatives that declare this flexibility to be a betrayal. Amin Maalouf's motto, which Hazan places at the beginning of the book—"Homogenesis is a costly and cruel chimera"—is, in this light, not a pronouncement about cultural diversity in general, but a specifically historical argument: homogeneity was the goal of nationalisms, and it was the most expensive, because most destructive, goal they could have set for themselves.

Nationalism as a point of friction: Coexistence did not arise through ideology, but in spite of it.

Hazan's core historiographical argument lies here: Jewish-Arab coexistence was not a product of political theory, but rather a lived practice in the everyday life of trading cities like Alexandria. The national movements of the early 20th century did not replace this practice, but destroyed it.

The Daoud case illustrates how this destruction unfolded. In 1907, Daoud could simultaneously be an Egyptian independence fighter and a Zionist because, for him, both projects shared the same liberal logic of emancipation. That this dual identity is now considered absurd is itself a result of escalation—not a pre-political truth. When Islamism, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, reinterpreted Egyptian nationalism along ethno-religious lines, Daoud lost his place in the movement he had co-founded. He was not ousted because of his ideas, but because of his origins—a mechanism that Hazan describes as paradigmatic for the failure of pluralistic national projects in the Arab world.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 provides a counterpoint: When Saad Zaghloul proclaimed independence under the banner of a secular, culturally open nationalism and invited all population groups—Muslim, Coptic, Jewish—to participate, Jewish integration into Egyptian society reached its historical zenith. The first book on this revolution devotes an entire chapter to Jewish participation. Hazan sees this as the antithesis of what followed: Had it been consolidated, this moment would have been an alternative history of the Middle East. Its failure explains what followed without determining it.

The Orient as a suppressed memory – the Mizrahim as a blind spot in both narratives

In the introduction, Hazan develops a precise diagnosis of the discursive field into which his book intervenes: The Juifs d'Orient – ​​the Oriental Jews – constitute the “grand impensé” of the conflict, a collective phantasm that neither the Arab nor the Israeli narrative can afford to acknowledge.

For Arab governments, the Jews who left the Arab world are either voluntary emigrants who answered the Zionist call or victims of their own hypocrisy. A genuine reckoning with the state-sponsored expulsion of roughly one million people would expose the political responsibility of these regimes. For Israel, however, full recognition of the exile of the Jews of the East would present the problem that these Jews would have legitimate claims for compensation—especially if Israel relativizes the Nakba by referring to a “population exchange.” Hazan explicitly dismantles this logic: The fate of the Jews of the East cannot be weighed against Palestinian suffering; both expulsions are historical injustices that must be addressed individually, and the structural connection between them does not lead to a zero sum, but rather to a twofold guilt.

For postcolonial discourse in the West, as Hazan states in one of the book's most honest sentences, the Jews of the East are a "dead angle": they don't fit the mold that understands the Jewish population of Israel as European-Ashkenazi and thus as a colonial implant. In reality, however, almost half of Israel's Jewish population originates from Arab countries and was itself displaced. This silence is part of the construction of a conflict that only appears morally clear-cut if one ignores half the population.

Alexandria as a counter-space

The dominant space of the book is Alexandria, and Hazan's literary approach to it is revealing. Alexandria appears neither exoticized nor nostalgically idealized. It is a space of constitutive overlap: Levantines, Greeks, Armenians, Italians, French, Syrian-Lebanese merchants, Arabic-speaking Jews, Copts, and Muslims inhabit the same streets, attend the same sports club, and speak in varying idioms.

Hazan establishes an implicit spatial opposition between Alexandria/Cairo and Europe on the one hand, and between cosmopolitan Egypt and the nationalist-homogeneous Egypt of the Nasserian era on the other. The space does not change geographically, but politically: the same Zamalek where Maurice drinks whisky with Churchill and in whose garden Lord Moyne is shot is, thirty years later, a place from which the Jews are expelled.

This spatial dramaturgy reaches its culmination in the figure of the apartment: Sami, the Egyptian officer who monitors and ultimately protects Elie, moves into the Hazan family's Alexandria apartment after their departure—and later buys an apartment in the building constructed on the site of Maurice's villa. The space is literally occupied by other subjects; the Jewish-Arab is replaced by the exclusively Arab. The destroyed villa, of which no photograph remains—Hazan's mother burned it—represents this process of material annihilation.

Another counterpoint is Sarajevo, which appears in the "Préambule" and at the beginning of the "Introduction." Hazan travels there to avoid going to Alexandria—and recognizes in the besieged, formerly multicultural city an echo of his own origins. Sarajevo is Alexandria in ruins; both represent what nationalism can destroy in terms of urban hybridity.

Genealogy versus chronology

Hazan deliberately avoids a chronological narrative structure, opting instead for a genealogical one – and this choice is significant. The book does not begin with the present day of the Gaza War, which was its immediate trigger, but with Moshe in 1843. It moves from the past to the present, but with loops, anachronisms, and foreshadowing.

This handling of time has an epistemic function: it shows that the categories that supposedly make the conflict appear natural today—Jew vs. Arab, Zionist vs. anti-colonial—were historically constructed. The characters of the 19th century did not yet recognize these categories as oppositional. This temporal retrieval denaturalizes the present and is the literary expression of Hazan's core historical argument.

At the same time, the book employs what could be called an "anachronistic mirror": Jabotinsky's 1923 text on the "Iron Wall" is read as a prophetic foundational text for the contemporary Israeli right; Moshe Dayan's 1956 funeral oration is quoted as an unanswered question, posed again 67 years later in the same kibbutz. Hazan doesn't leave history behind, but rather shows how it is embedded in the present. This observation also applies reflexively to the structure of the book itself: it wasn't finished by October 7, 2023, and therefore continues into the spring of 2026—an open work in the strictest sense.

Hybridity of the characters as disruption and resource

Structurally significant is the parallel between the characters Daoud and Maurice: both are Jews without Jewish practice, both invest their identity in a national project that denies them belonging – Daoud in Egyptian nationalism, Maurice in the British Empire. Hazan contrasts the two to show that assimilation to an imperial or national power offers no security once nationalism becomes ethnic.

Lord Moyne is particularly revealing as a contrasting figure. In the British House of Lords, Moyne espouses an explicitly racist theory of Judaism's inability to achieve nationhood and rejects Jewish immigration to Palestine for reasons of colonial politics. At the same time, he is Maurice's tenant and is considered by the grandfather to be a representative of the British civilization to which he feels he belongs. The murder in the villa's garden thus becomes the focal point of a threefold identity contradiction: Maurice is Jewish like the assassins, Arab like the judges, British like the victim. Hazan writes: "Dans ce procès, il est partout." This figure of always being on all sides is the literary shorthand for the entire Jewish-Arab liminal space.

Forms of communication: Silence as a conversation partner

A striking structural feature of the book is how often Hazan recounts conversations that never took place, questions he never asked his parents, and secrets that vanished with the dead. This communication structure is historically significant: the generation of Jews from the East often did not pass on the memory of Egypt to their children—partly out of pain, partly out of strategic assimilation, and partly out of a sense that this memory had no place in a Jewish world dominated by the Ashkenazi perspective.

The second relevant form of communication is language as a marker. Moshe writes in Arabic; Daoud Arabicizes his first name; Elie speaks Arabic fluently, but his children no longer do; Hazan himself knows only a few Arabic words from his grandmother's cooking. Arabic disappears from the family within a generation—and with it, a dimension of identity. Hazan addresses this not lamentingly, but analytically: The relationship between languages ​​reveals which cultural ties are abandoned under national pressure.

Finally, there is the communication between Hazan and his conversation partners today. Raji Sourani responds to Hazan's account of the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab world with icy silence: he either doesn't know this story or doesn't want to know it. This honest moment in the book reveals that the conversation the book seeks to initiate cannot yet take place. The book itself is an attempt to begin it nonetheless.

Extinction or fertilization

The central semantic field of the book is that of "effacement"—the word that recurs with compulsive regularity: the effacement of the Palestinians, the effacement of the Jews from the Arab world, the effacement of Jewish-Arab civilization from the collective memory of both sides. Hazan transforms "effacement" into a political term that structures the mutual dehumanization within the conflict and motivates his own writing: to write against forgetting, because a past that existed can also exist again.

In contrast, there is the field of hybridity and "fertilisations croisées"—cross-fertilization. Plant metaphors also appear explicitly in the work of Ali Abu Awwad, who describes himself as an olive tree. This image connects ecological rootedness with cultural persistence: olives survive wars and national borders.

Hazan's use of mirror metaphors is particularly revealing. The best-known example is Mahmoud Darwish's poem "Il est paisible, moi aussi," which he quotes. In it, a Jew and an Arab sit in a café without speaking to each other, and in the end, both leave because each believes the other to be an assassin. The mirror reflects equality—both men are quiet, both order from the waiter, both read the newspaper—but generates fear instead of understanding. The poem encapsulates Hazan's entire diagnosis: mirroring without recognition is the fundamental structure of a conflict that cannot see its own solvability.

The motif of the "d'"—Hazan's father says he is "d'Égypte," from Egypt, not "égyptien," Egyptian—is a tiny grammatical metaphor for a vast cultural ambivalence: belonging without nationality, origin without homeland. Hazan calls this his father's "l'ambiguïté"; but it is also the ambiguity of the entire book.

Violence and blindness – the mechanism of extremism

The detailed reconstruction of Lord Moyne's murder by the Stern Group is among the most historiographically rich sections of the book. Hazan demonstrates how ideology blocks perception: Jewish extremists, whose families were murdered by Nazis, planned an alliance with the Nazi regime against the British. Hazan doesn't counter this logic with outrage, but rather with a question: What psychological and political conditions lead people to believe that the enemy of their enemy is their friend?

Crucial is the structural comparison Hazan draws between the Stern Group and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini: Both see Hitler as an ally for their respective national projects; both share the logic of annihilating the other. “In my view, the Stern Group and Al-Husseini share the same will to eliminate the other.” With this, Hazan makes a gesture of symmetry that he otherwise carefully avoids—but here it is precise: It is not about a moral equation, but about the shared mechanism of ideological blindness that has reproduced itself on both sides of the conflict and extends into the present: into the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, as well as into the supremacist Israeli right.

Hazan retrospectively views Ben-Gurion's decision to persecute the Stern Group and the Irgun, thereby risking a Jewish civil war, as a case of prophylactic statecraft: those who fail to combat extremist violence early on pay an exorbitant price later. The lesson he draws for the present is explicit: the inability to combat or contain Hamas has led Palestinian society to catastrophe; Israel's inability to confront supremacy within its own borders is doing the same.

Culture of remembrance: The archive against amnesia

The book is in several respects a project of remembrance culture. It writes against a double amnesia: against the silence of Arab countries about their Jewish history and against the silence of the Zionist narrative about Oriental Jews.

Hazan works with what he has left: a family tree full of rabbis, a black-and-white photograph, a sentence his mother tossed aside, archival telegrams from London, court records from the Eichmann trial, Egyptian newspapers. With this fragmentary evidence, he literally shows what remains when a civilization is wiped out.

The fate of the photographic archive is particularly revealing: Hazan's mother burned almost all of her Egypt photographs. The few that survived are reproduced in the book. These gaps are significant – the absence of photographs is itself a historical document.

Magda Haroun embodies this culture of remembrance in an extreme form: she preserves Torah scrolls, birth and marriage registers, and manuscripts from the ninth century—against the resistance of the Egyptian authorities, against the recommendation of the American ambassador to send them to Israel, and against the exhaustion of her own age. Her statement, "Over my dead body," is not rhetorical: it says that these documents must remain in Egypt because they are part of Egyptian history, not Israeli. This is an argument about the sovereignty of memory—and at the same time the practical expression of Hazan's historical thesis that Jewish-Arab civilization cannot be separated from the history of a single state without both sides mutilating themselves.

Herein lies the deepest irony in the fate of the Egyptian communist Jews, whom Hazan portrays using the example of Magda's father, Chehata Haroun: The very atheist Marxists who rejected Judaism as a religion are the last guardians of Jewish memory in Egypt. The archive harbors no nationalist sentiments—it survives through the stubbornness of those who refuse to forget.

Coexistence as a memory – and as a political resource

Hazan's concluding interpretive framework is neither utopian nor resigned. Moshe, Daoud, Maurice, and Elie lived Jewish-Arab coexistence not as an abstract principle, but as a daily practice—in multiple languages, in mixed coffeehouses, in anti-colonial movements, and in business relationships. This legacy has been destroyed, but it existed. Hazan insists that a past that existed can exist again—in a form yet to be invented. This is not consolation, but a political argument against the essentialist thesis that the conflict is irresolvable because the enmity between Jews and Arabs is ontological.

Hazan finds his anchor of hope in encounters with figures like Ali Abu Awwad and May Pundak, who refuse to deny each other's pain to justify their own. Ali, who began as a Palestinian guerrilla fighter, visits Auschwitz because he wants to understand what Israeli fear means. May, whose grandfather survived the Holocaust and whose family immigrated to Israel from Morocco, accepts the Palestinian Nakba as a historical fact, not as a political concession. What Hazan holds onto is the pattern: Recognizing the vulnerability of others doesn't diminish one's own vulnerability—it renders the war over the limited resource of compassion unnecessary.

Concluding remarks on the current debate

The value of this book for current identity debates lies not in its utopia, but in its archaeology of the past. Through characters, spaces, documents, and arguments, Hazan demonstrates that Jewish-Arab coexistence is not an abstract hope, but a historical reality. In doing so, he undermines the argument that the conflict was inevitable.

For debates on postcolonial identity, this book offers an important correction: it shows that the category of "Mizrahim" is systematically rendered invisible in both Western and Arab discourse. This prevents a complete understanding of Israeli society and the conflict itself. A postcolonial theory that recognizes only half of Israel's population as a historical subject is not a theory of the conflict, but rather one of its ideologies.

For debates about the culture of remembrance, the book demonstrates that the lack of a specific name for a collective trauma—unlike the Palestinians with the "Nakba," Jews from the Arab world have no common word for their expulsion—has political implications. Without a name, there is no recognition; without recognition, no coming to terms with the past. The scene in which Hazan, along with other Jews from the Orient in Geneva, searches for a word and cannot find one, is a demand for a politically relevant understanding of memory.

Finally, for debates about identity politics, the book poses a radical counter-question: Must belonging be exclusive? The characters in the book have denied this—and have been rejected by all sides for it. Hazan doesn't want this to be their last word. The book is a refusal to accept this rejection and, at the same time, an invitation to renegotiate the conditions under which different memories and affiliations don't have to be pitted against each other, but can coexist—which is not an easy question, but a necessary one.