L’émancipation de la femme juive nord-africaine dans les romans d’Élissa Rhaïs et de Blanche Bendahan

Abstract

In the story of French Jewish emancipation, women occupy a very particular place. Thanks to schooling and to the adoption of French mores, they have moved progressively away from the roles traditionally assigned to them. In the novels of both Elissa Rhaiis and Blanche Bendahan, the question of emancipation occupies a critical role. Caught between doubt and hope, these women writers evoke the confrontation with the challenges of modernization and westernization that accompanied colonialism. Their analyses are nonetheless quite different, even paradoxical. Whereas Elissa Rhaiis has the tendency to put the traditional world on a pedestal and contrast it with a Western world blemished by superficiality, the position of Blanch Bendahan is more ambiguous, as she paints a picture of a heroine torn between her Tétouan roots and Western values. Even as she celebrates the movement towards French acculturation that touched the Maghreb at the end of the 19th century, Blanche Bendhahan emphasizes its limits. Beyond a positive assessment of those changes, we see in her novels a kind of warning about the violence done to these women by this confrontation between different cultures and mentalities.