The Boujenah Family

Before being a family that one follows in the archives, Boujenah is a name that one reads and interprets. The great onomastic repertoires of the Jews of North Africa list this patronym, with its variants Boudjenah and Boujnah, among names of Arabic composition formed on Abou, "the father of" or "the man of," followed by an attribute [J. Toledano, A History of Families]. The attribute, here, is jenah, the wing. "The man with the wing": the formula is a euphemism, that linguistic discretion which, in order not to speak bluntly of infirmity, veils it in metaphor. The one-armed man becomes the man with the wing just as, in the related register, the lame man becomes the man with the foot and the blind man the man with eyes [J. Toledano, A History of Families].

This manner of naming reveals a conception of the world. In the Judeo-Arab culture of the Maghreb, the nickname is never pure cruelty: it fixes a trait, but it envelops it. Language protects by designating. And when this nickname becomes a hereditary patronym, transmitted from father to son over generations, it performs a moral conversion: the misfortune of an ancestor becomes the coat of arms of his descendants. Where the Greek world might have seen a disgrace, the Jewish tradition reads the trace of a singular history that the name has the mission to perpetuate. To name, in this perspective, is already to remember.

The second hypothesis — that of the ample and flowing garment imposed on the dhimmi — inscribes the name in a more austere history, that of the status of Jews in Muslim lands [J. Toledano, A History of Families]. The dhimmis, "protected" according to Muslim law, enjoyed the safeguard of their lives and their worship at the price of a special tax and distinctive marks of dress designed to make them recognizable. That the name Boujenah perhaps preserves the memory of such a garment is to make the patronym itself a silent witness to the minority condition — of this dignity maintained in subjection, of this fidelity that the Jews of the Maghreb knew how to keep through centuries of inferior status without ever denying what they were. The name thus carries, engraved in relief, the endurance of a people who made perseverance in the Law a way of inhabiting exile.

To understand the world from which the Boujenah lineage comes, one must go to Tunis, into the maze of the Hara, the Jewish quarter of the old city. The Jewish community of Tunis was, from the modern period onward, a dual community. Since the sixteenth century, the Jewish population of Tunis was divided between those originating from Touansa, and the Jews of Livorno who created a minority community called Grana [Morashá]. The Touansa were the indigenous Jews, Arabic-speaking, rooted in the Maghreb since time immemorial; the Grana, whose name comes from El-Gorna, the Arabic form of Livorno, had come from the Tuscan city, bringing with them the Italian language, Livornese culture and the ties of great Mediterranean commerce [Morashá ; Lionel Lévy, La Nation juive portugaise, ref:12].

The distinction was not merely one of origin; it became institutional. The Grana community constituted itself as an autonomous community with its own rabbinical court, its separate butcheries and a cemetery separated by a wall from that of the Touansa [Persée, Revue des études juives]. Two courts, two ritual slaughterhouses, two cemeteries: two ways of being Jewish in the same city. And yet, confined with the indigenous Jews in the narrow quarters of the Hara of Tunis, the Livornese Jews came to bear poorly this promiscuity in the long term [Persée]. The separation of rites did not abolish the proximity of walls: in the cramped conditions of the Hara, Touansa and Grana lived side by side, sharing water, bread and peril.

It is within this fabric that the Boujenah lineage is inscribed, a surname of the Tunisian community whose Judeo-Arabic anchoring links its bearers rather to the Touansa, the Jews of the land [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. This dual structure of the community is not a mere detail of local history; it speaks to a virtue properly Jewish, that which consists in keeping the Law (halakha) alive in its institutions—courts, slaughterhouses, burial grounds—to the point of making it the very skeleton of collective life. Where other peoples would have dissolved, the Jews of Tunis preserved, even within the division of their two "nations," a scrupulous concern for the Law and a sense of organized community. That this organization also engendered rivalries and mistrust, the archive does not hide: the honest history of a community includes its tensions as much as its cohesion.

The world of the Hara, centuries old, fell apart in a single generation. The twentieth century was for Tunisian Jews a time of great departure. Under French protectorate rule and in the years following independence, the community, caught up in the country's political upheavals, gradually set itself in motion. In 1952, the beginning of the struggle against the French occupier, which resulted in access to internal autonomy in August 1954, weakened this minority, anxious about being unable to fully access citizenship under the new Tunisian administration, and uncertain about its future from social, economic, political and institutional perspectives [O. Ben Achour, L'émigration des Juifs de Tunisie de 1943 à 1967].

It was an exodus in waves, sometimes toward Israel, sometimes toward France. The figures for emigration to Israel reveal its uneven rhythm, year after year: 3,725 Tunisian Jews emigrate to Israel [in 1949]. In the following years, this figure shifts to 3,414 (1951), 2,548 (1952), 606 (1953), 2,651 (1954), 6,104 (1955) and 2,362 (1967) [Jeune Afrique]. While one part of the people headed toward Zion, another chose France, whose language and culture were already familiar to many. It was this second path that the Boujenah family took.

In this great movement, one of the deepest motifs of Israel's Memory is replayed: the galout, exile, not as mere geographical misfortune but as spiritual condition and trial of faithfulness. Tunisian Jews did not simply change countries; they repeated, in their own way, the immemorial gesture of a people taking to the road carrying as their only baggage their Law, their books and their Memory. The philosopher has said it of Judaism as a whole: the exile of speech runs through all of Jewish History, from biblical silence to the silences of the century. That the Boujenah lineage, in this uprooting, chose to preserve and transmit the memory of Tunis rather than bury it—here already is the announcement of its own vocation.

The documented history of the lineage comes fully into light with a Tunisian family who took, at the beginning of the 1960s, the path to France. Michel Boujenah was born in Tunis on November 3, 1952; his father, Joseph Boujenah, is a physician [Cinéfil]. The father's profession says much: it connects the family to this long Jewish tradition of care, where medicine is not merely a profession but the concrete exercise of a virtue, that of the rofé, the healer who puts his knowledge at the service of another's life. Since the Middle Ages, Jewish physicians have embodied in the Mediterranean world this alliance of science and charity; that the father of the contemporary lineage was a physician inscribes the family in this filiation of knowledge put at the service of care given to another.

Then came the departure. At the age of eleven, in 1963, Michel Boujenah emigrated with his parents to France, to the Croix d'Arcueil housing development in Bagneux, in the modest suburbs south of Paris [Cinéfil ; Harissa]. The passage from the Hara of Tunis to a Parisian suburb housing development sums up the experience of an entire generation: the Mediterranean sun exchanged for the gray sky of Île-de-France, the Judeo-Arabic language of grandparents for the French of republican schools. Michel Boujenah suffered greatly from this uprooting [Cinéfil]. Exile, here, ceases to be a historical abstraction: it becomes the intimate ordeal of a child torn from his world.

From that world of before, the child kept everything. He grew up in a culturally rich Tunisian Jewish environment, steeped in an oral tradition made of storytellers and Mediterranean palaver [Humorix]. There lies the key to the vocation to come: this heritage of speech, this art of narrative inherited from the family tables of Tunis, would be the very substance of which a son of the lineage would make his work. Jewish tradition has always held oral transmission — the massorah, the chain of memory from mouth to mouth — to be as sacred as the written word [ref:1 ; ref:7]. The Boujenah family, in exile, remained faithful to that part of the heritage: they continued to tell stories.

This is where the history of the lineage meets the stage, and private memory becomes public offering. The young man wants to become an actor. The anecdote of his beginnings carries, in a single scene, all the weight of his subject: after his baccalauréat, he takes the entrance exam for the National School of Strasbourg but is rejected because of his Tunisian Jewish accent, which clings to him [Cinéfil]. What the institution rejects as a defect — the accent, the trace of origin — will become precisely the matter of his art. Refused for his accent, he will make that accent into a work.

In 1980, he creates the show Albert, a one-man-show entirely woven from the narratives of Tunisian Jews [Zakhor Corpus, ID 040a71bf-7502-49f9-9005-1fa71ba95ead]. On the French stage, alone, he brings back to life the figures of the Hara, the voices, the manners, the laughter and tears of an engulfed world. Actor, director, humorist, he marked several generations through his ability to blend laughter and emotion around the condition of Tunisian Jewish immigrants in France [Humorix]. This mixture of laughter and tears is not a commercial formula; it is a distinctly Jewish way of confronting exile, where humor is the politeness of despair and the weapon of those who refuse to sink. He would moreover make it the very title of his book, From Laughter and Tears [Zakhor Corpus, ID f646dfeb-70ca-478c-afc8-83756e40455f].

Here, tradition and archive respond to each other. The Memory transmitted — the palavers of Tunisian tables, the oral tradition of the family — becomes established History: a dated performance, a published book, a public trace inscribed in French culture. It is the very movement described by contemporary Jewish thought: to bring lived remembrance into a form that preserves and transmits it, to transform the witness into a bearer [ref:9 ; ref:1]. By giving voice to Tunisian Jews in exile, Michel Boujenah accomplished, on the stage of the theater, what the Sages accomplished on that of study: he made a work of memory so that the disappeared world does not die entirely. His wide renown — a figure of the French stage and co-star, notably, of the film The Three Brothers — did not dilute this anchorage: it was its voice.

What remains, in the end, of this lineage whose scholarly history preserves only a part, and whose memory overflows in all directions from the archives? There remains a truth that Jewish tradition places at the summit of its values: that of transmission. A people who lost their lands, their houses, their cemeteries — the wall that separated Touansa and Grana no longer exists, the Hara is now only a name [Persée] — survives only through what it manages to tell of itself. The great historian of Jewish memory showed it: it is narrative, far more than learned chronicle, that has kept Israel alive through the dispersions.

In making the engulfed world of Tunis into a public work, the Boujenah lineage exercised a rare form of tsedaka, that justice-charity which, in Judaism, is not limited to monetary alms but extends to the gift of what one holds most precious. To restore to a scattered community the face of its past, to give voice again to the dead and the disappeared, to offer the children of exiles the mirror of what their grandparents were: this is an act of kindness toward an entire collectivity. The memory of the Jews of Tunisia in exile, without the narratives that fixed it, would have vanished with the generation of witnesses [O. Ben Achour, L'émigration des Juifs de Tunisie].

There is a measure of conjecture in generalizing from a single figure to an entire lineage, and honesty demands that we say so: we do not possess, for the Boujenah family, the continuous genealogy that other families left in the rabbinical registers. But what is known bears a clear meaning. A family come from the Hara, a father devoted to the care of bodies, a son devoted to narrative: from the medicine of the body to the medicine of memory, the same virtue transmits itself in different forms — the care for the other, the refusal to let them suffer or disappear. In this, the singular destiny of this lineage joins the immemorial vocation of Israel: to be the people of memory, that people for whom remembering is a commandment [ref:9 ; ref:3].

At the end of this journey, one image stands out — that of the name itself, "the man with the wing". What the Boujenah lineage will have, among all the virtues of Judaism, best expressed is the transmission of Memory: the refusal to let a world die, the conviction that telling is a sacred duty. From a patronym that bore the trace of an ancient mark, the family made the vector of a fidelity; from a suffered exile, it made an offered word.

It first expressed this virtue through the care given to the other, in the figure of the physician father, heir to the long Jewish tradition of the healer [Cinéfil]. It expressed it then, and above all, through the art of storytelling inherited from the storytellers of Tunis and carried onto the French stage, where laughter and tears became guardians of a vanished world [Humorix; Corpus Zakhor]. In doing so, the Boujenah lineage joined the great vocation of Israel, that people whose survival rests entirely in the commandment zakhor, "remember". For Memory among Jews is not nostalgia: it is resistance, it is fidelity, it is the way a scattered people stands upright in the face of oblivion [ref:5 ; ref:8].

Thus a family from the Hara of Tunis, torn from its land and cast into the suburbs of a foreign city, will have restored to an entire community of exiles the most precious of goods: the right to remember who it was. The man with the wing, once marked by the sign of his difference, will have ended by lending his wings to the Memory of a people.