Portrait of a Jew

Albert Memmi

1962

I was born in Tunisia, in Tunis, a few steps from that city’s large ghetto. My father, a harness maker, was somewhat pious, naturally somewhat so, as were all men of his trade and his station in life. My childhood was marked by the rhythms of the weekly Sabbath and the cycle of Jewish holidays. At a fairly early age, after first attending yeshivah…

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Creator Bio

Albert Memmi

1920–2020

Best known for his fictional, autobiographical, and sociological studies of racism and colonialism, Albert Memmi was born in Tunis near the Jewish ghetto of Hara. After completing his secondary studies in Tunis, he studied at the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne, where he met his Catholic wife. During the war, Memmi was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp, from which he managed to escape. Following the war, Memmi taught at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis and published The Colonizer and the Colonized, a reflection on the decolonization of French North Africa, which has become one of the principal texts in postcolonial theory. Ironically, the anticolonialist agenda of the Tunisian independence movement led to Memmi’s expulsion to Paris in 1970.

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