Maghrebian Feminism Meets the Bride of God

This article examines the political discourse of a highly successful francophone novel, Chochana Boukhobza’s Un été à Jérusalem (A summer in Jerusalem) (1986), as a case study for exploring the underrepresented genre of secular, feminist Jewish Tunisian-Israeli literature written in French. In particular, this study focuses on the ways in which the novel debunks many of the themes, tropes, and archetypes held sacrosanct in the Judaic tradition (specifically, traditional representations of matriarchs and the feminine manifestation of the Divine Presence) and then reenvisions them along the lines of distinctively Maghrebian feminist concerns. Finally, this article demonstrates how Boukhobza’s text dissects the dogma inherent in both of the self-legitimizing discourses of Zionism and Judaic religious piety by way of a particular kind of female epistemology, in which the destructive qualities of both discourses might be explicated through the lens of patriarchal oppression.