[Seminar]: Dario Miccoli, A Sepharadi Sea

The cycle “Belonging in the Mediterranean/Belonging to the Mediterranean” is organizing a seminar on Wednesday, June 5, 2024, about the book A Sephardi Sea. Jewish Memories across the Modern Mediterranean by author Dario Miccoli. We are delighted to invite you to this event, which will take place at 2, Place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille (meeting room of Maison Neuve). To attend, you should register here.

Wednesday, June 5: 4:00 PM, Mediterranean Program, Iméra: Dario Miccoli, A Sepharadi Sea

(For people with reduced mobility, entrance is through Avenue Jean-Louis Pons accessible via Boulevard Cassini.)

A Sephardi Sea. Jewish Memories across the Modern Mediterranean

Wednesday, June 5: 4:00 PM, Mediterranean Program, Iméra: Dario Miccoli, A Sepharadi Sea

A Sephardi Sea. Jewish Memories across the Modern Mediterranean tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible?

Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel/Palestine, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea explores how practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel/Palestine today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia.

Dario Miccoli is Assistant Professor of modern Hebrew and Jewish studies at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. He is the author of Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s–1950s and the co-author of Homelands and Diasporas: Perspectives on Jewish Culture in the Mediterranean and Beyond (2018). He was the Fernand Braudel Fellow at IREMAM/Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in 2014-2015. His current research project deals with the history of the Jews of Rhodes and he recently published “Tierra prometida: Jews from Rhodes in the Belgian Congo and Southern Rhodesia, 1910s–1960s,” Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry 55(1), 152–175.