Image of the Jews in the work of Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf’s work reveals charming facets of the Eastern Mediterranean in its natural settings, and its spiritual, intellectual, and multi-cultural dimensions; a Levant that is at once “region,” “dialogue,” and “quest” for diversity; a multiform cosmopolitan polyglot blend of identities, cultural rituals, and histories that are dynamic, shifting, agile, fluid, never smug, never resentful, never static. It is in this context that the work of Amin Maalouf will be explored in this lecture, placing a special premium on the author’s Jewish characters, actors he depicted as Levantine exemplars. Named in turn, Naïm, Clara, Adam, Leo, and Sarah among others, Maalouf’s Jews are ecumenical iconoclasts, cultural conduits who defied the narrow stereotypes of given-names, ancestral creeds, rigid patronymics, uptight national identities, contested memories or places of birth. Through his characters, Maalouf spoke, not without nostalgia, of a fluid “Levantine age” when “venerable women and men of confused origins fused together, lived side by side on their Eastern Mediterranean promontories, blending all their languages and histories and modes of being into one.” In his telling, this image is not idealized reminiscences of lapsed times past; it is a story of overlooked present days, and a foretelling of future times yet to come, both backward-looking and visionary. In a sense, this is the life of Lebanese Jewry that Maalouf wanted to uncover and valorize.