Samia Hathroubi on interfaith bridging between Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe
Samia Hathroubi is an advisory board member of the Democracy & Belonging Forum and a doctoral student at the Max Weber Sociology Institute at the University of Heidelberg in Germany where she studies Jewish-Muslim interactions in Paris and Berlin. Formerly, she was the Director of Interreligious Programs within the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and Director of Development within Coexister in France. The Democracy & Belonging Forum’s Evan Yoshimoto met with Samia to discuss the importance and challenges of interfaith bridging between Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe.
Hi Samia! It’s an honor to meet with you. Firstly, I would like to ask, what does belonging mean to you?
Belonging… wow. This is the hardest question I have ever had to answer and, at the same time, it is the one that came up the earliest in my life as a child and then as a brown teenager of Maghrebi descent in schools and surroundings that were particularly white and upper-middle class.
I have eight siblings. When we were kids, people used to call us the mafia because solidarity was the spine and DNA of how we collaborated as a group. I know I belonged with my family, because it is with them I found joy with people who shared the same struggles. But outside of my home, until the age of 21, it was hard to look at my schoolmates and colleagues and say- these are my people.
I have always been the poor kid around wealthy kids. The brown kid around white ones. The one with illiterate parents when all my mates at Uni had parents working in education, politics, or engineering. Then I was the Muslim one in a country that defines itself first and foremost as secular.
At my age nowadays, I first and foremost belong to the people who share my values and embody them day after day.
Your research focuses on Jewish-Muslim interactions in Paris and Berlin and understanding the relationship between these communities through time. Why is interfaith bridging between Muslim and Jewish communities important? And what led you to this work?
For more than 50 years, Muslims and Jews have been portrayed as natural enemies. I always struggled with this naturalization, which is nothing natural, but constructed through history. The discourse has always been polarizing. Divisions between two main ethno-religious groups as Muslims and Jews in France or Germany, countries I know best, are also instrumentalized by different political parties for their own gain. Interfaith bridging can bring a new process of identification of Arab-Jews and an acknowledgment of Jewish history and life within Arab-French-Muslim people. It is a way of deconstructing essentialist identities.
My family came from Tunis, Tunisia. Every summer as a kid, I would walk by the synagogue of Tunis, which is a huge building with a Magen David located on one of the busiest avenues of the city. This puzzled me, so I asked questions. Meanwhile, I was socialized and attended French school, where Jews and Muslims are absent and present in the national French curriculum and narrative.
Those two processes led me to discover my own past as a Tunisian, a country where more than 150,000 Jews lived until 1960 (less than 1,500 remain nowadays), and allowed me to question my own presence in France- a place of immigration for many post-colonial populations, among them Jews and Muslims.
What are the challenges to bridging between these two communities? What are strategies to overcome these challenges?
Throughout colonial and post-colonial history, Jews and Muslims (categories that have evolved over time) have been constructed in competition and in opposition. As social transformations and political developments in the Middle East (with the unresolved conflict in Palestine) progressed, French Jews and Muslims, but also elsewhere in Europe, adopted transnational solidarities that had repercussions on the daily realities of the cities and neighborhoods where they lived. More so, tragic moments of antisemitic attacks in kosher groceries or Jewish schools perpetrated by men in the name of Islamist ideology have had huge impacts on people's realities. These are a few of the challenges. There are many more of course. I think one of the points to keep in mind is the following—in a secular Christian context, Jews and Muslims were/are constructed as others and we should never forget this triangle relation.
I believe there are many ways of overcoming these challenges as there are a variety of local realities. In France, there is an affinity and communal history between Jews and Muslims because they come from North African countries that can be acknowledged. I wrote an article about how two learning sites in Paris contributed to the complexification of identifications for Jews and Muslims. This is one example among many others.