A Man in Three Worlds
Zeik, Michael
Commonweal: 188 Hope for this hour A NAN IN THBEE WORLDS Andre Chouraqui Translated by Kenton Kilmer University Press of America, $22.50, $10.75 paper, 234 pp. Michael Zeik THE REALIST is the...
...Consider his relationship with the Arab culture of his childhood...
...Commonweal: 190...
...Gazing backwards, Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt...
...The resulting laughter of the populace defused the situation, and the ringleaders realized that their own noses had been pulled...
...Chouraqui views monolithic, static sovereignty as part of the outworn history of Europe...
...Trained at the Sorbonne, Chouraqui felt, until the Vichy collaboration with the Nazis, that he was truly an adopted son of France...
...Unlike pagans, they were not to be converted by force...
...Baba's faith in the living God and the intercessory powers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were legendary — as was his ingenuity in times of crisis...
...It is exactly the opposite of the partition proposal laid down by the United Nations in 1947 — a proposal on which the writer invokes the judgment of Solomon: if you partition the child, each mother will receive half a corpse...
...George Orwell did not predict it...
...e ho ¦. nistic mass of theology, histos .-'id jioetry which undergirds it...
...What, then, is Chouraqui's audacious, all-encompassing plan for peace in the Middle East...
...It is here that Chouraqui's voice, intense throughout, attains truly prophetic pitch...
...survivor of a Sephar-dic family exiled by the Spanish Inquisition (who loves Christians...
...Not so Chouraqui, who points out that for 1200 years, right up to the Twentieth Century, the Sephardic Jews, unlike their Ashkenazi brothers in Christian Europe, who were forever being expelled from one country to another, lived in comparative security, and developed a flourishing religious and cultural tradition in the Middle East...
...A spark of the creative love of God, who beheld the completed universe and called it (not good, but) very good, kindles this author...
...Our forefathers, the Gauls, were big, brave, strong, and quarrelsome...
...Having suffered under Arab domination once, they see any political compromise with the Arabs as moral compromise as well...
...He is certain, moreover, that Sadat's boi<i venture represents only the first step • i a general peace settlement in the Mddle East...
...Why this conviction that miracles are the vertebrae of reality...
...But if a fusion of Arab oil, wealth, and population with Israeli technology and energy, would bring about a prosperous 22 March 1985: 189 Middle East and, indeed, a more peaceful world, what would result from the definitive, lasting reconciliation between Christian and Jew...
...This book was published in 1984...
...Michael Zeik THE REALIST is the one who sees miracles...
...Having personally suffered at the hands of Arabs, Frenchmen, and Christians in general, he feels himself also blessed by his contact with all of them...
...politics, here, is but the tip of the iceberg...
...But neither could Chouraqui harbor resentful thoughts regarding the French...
...the principles of Common Market and Federation are the global hope for the future...
...It is generally acknowledged that the * 'oriental" or Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Arab lands, are the most hawkish in Israel...
...This is true enough, though as a historian I would add that lenience to Jews varied from Caliph to Caliph...
...and as though the church, faced with the impossible task of converting the nations of the earth to the God of Abraham, had never done anything but persecute them . . . The church must bring back to life its Hebrew roots . . . The Jews must discover the values of the Christian world and the face of Jesus their brother, whose true name is Ieshua ben Iosseph...
...The Druid priests, the Cathedrals of Chartres and Paris, the exploits of Napoleon Bonaparte, all were their inheritance...
...he is truly a man not of one world (Israel), but of three...
...Because, in one lifetime, he has lived through both the Jewish resurrection (from Auschwitz to Holy Land...
...It will not be possible in the space allotted for this review to do justice to what he has to say on this subject...
...Let me simply point out that while he warns Christians against their neurotic repression of the Jewishness of Jesus and his teachings, his apostles, and the early church, he admonishes Jews also, that through twenty centuries they have acted as though Jesus, of whom they often make themselves a distorted picture, had never existed...
...Allow the separate populations to express themselves through autonomous political and cultural entities, he urges, but let them do this within a larger political federation...
...If such things can happen, given the greed, lust, hate, sloth, and general ani-mality of the human race, reasons Chouraqui, then even Isaiah might be right: after all, the lion and the lamb are still evolving...
...So asserts Andre Chouraqui, Israeli writer/statesman/theologian...
...But to read this book as a pois: il treatise alone, would be to ignuK...
...Chouraqui, who served both as advisor to Ben Gurion, and as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek, was laughed at and ridiculed by "realists" after the Six-Day War in 1967, for his famous Lettre a un Ami Arabe, in which he put forth an all-encompassing peace proposal...
...Rather than separating the territories while leaving the nationalities mixed, Chouraqui would unite the territories but separate the nationalities...
...Paul (Romans 11:15), "what will their acceptance mean...
...But it is useless to dwell on the injustices of the past, he insists...
...Why this hope...
...The vitality of Sephardic Jewish culture, so' 'Arab'' in many ways, delighted the author, whose description of his childhood constitutes one long verbal caress...
...Farfetched...
...Unlikely...
...This is a remarkable story of a remarkable man, in a translation that renders both accessible...
...France was motherland...
...That is to say, he wants to "leap-frog" the present impasse between Arab and Jew, by a daring Federation of the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian populations: a United States of the Near East...
...For in a world afflicted by the starvation and poverty of whole continents, and endangered by the nuclear fry/freeze of the entire planet, what might be accomplished by the concerted voice, will, and action of all the "Peoples of the Book...
...and learn to see in the New Testament the flesh of their flesh, a text devised and proclaimed in Hebrew, that has sowed throughout the pagan world, the hope of a salvation announced by the prophets of Israel...
...emigrant from Algeria (who loves Arabs...
...He tells us the story of his maternal grandfather, "Baba...
...from Sultan to Sultan...
...Perhaps the least surprised Jew in Israel, however, he lived to see Anwar Sadat in Jerusalem, addressing an astonished Knesset...
...Once, during the period of the Dreyfus Affair, when there were outbreaks of French-inspired anti-Jewish rioting in Algeria, he quickly assembled all the Jews of his town, and marched them through the streets, chanting: "Down with the Jews, Down with the Jews...
...Algeria was French...
...So, too, he would answer, are the existence of Israel, the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, and the visitation of Anwar Sadat...
...For if their (Israel's) rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world," he writes, quoting St...
...Jews (and Christians) in Muslim lands were recognized as dhimmi (protected), since they were the "People of the Book" — people whose scriptures Mohammed, himself, had confirmed...
...Contrary to both Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell — to mention only two of the more distinguished cosmic-pessimists of our century — Chouraqui thinks the human race is going to make it through its primitive nuclear era...
...Those were the words that young Andre, together with his Arab, Spanish, Jewish, and Negro fellow students, chanted out loud under the supervision of both his nuns in kindergarten and his lay teachers in Algerian public school...
...We have to hang them by the nose...
...member of the Resistance in Vichy France (who loves Frenchmen...
...ardent supporters of the Likud since 1973, and members of the Herut bloc before that...
...and the Christian pente-cost: that outpouring of Spirit in the Second Vatican Council which, among other things, reversed the pervasive two-thousand-year-old tradition of doctrinal anti-Semitism...
...Nothing less than life from the dead...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
