Pierre Hazan

Pierre Hazan's "Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi" (2026) unfolds a project that is both literary and historiographical, using a sprawling family history as its framework. In seven genealogically organized chapters, the book reconstructs the vanished reality of Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Eastern Mediterranean and contrasts it with the hardened identity logics of the 20th century. Starting with figures such as a 19th-century Sephardic rabbi, an Egyptian nationalist and Zionist, and the last Jewish voices in Egypt, Hazan combines archival material, fragments of memory, and contemporary encounters with Israeli and Palestinian actors. From this, he develops three central theses: that coexistence was historically lived practice, that its destruction stems from competing nationalisms, and that the mutually repressed traumas—the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and the Nakba—are inextricably intertwined. The book thus sees itself as an intervention in the politics of memory of the present and as a plea to rethink hybridity not as an exception, but as a lost historical normality.