Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa

17. Education for Jewish Girls in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Tunis and the Spread of French in Tunisia

17 • Education for Jewish Girls in Late Nineteenth-­and Early Twentieth-­ Century Tunis and the Spread of French in Tunisia Keith Walters Since at least the time of the Phoenicians, Tunisia has been multilingual, and from the time Jews first arrived there, they have contributed to that multilingualism . Enjoined to use Hebrew as a liturgical language, Jewish communities have necessarily been bilingual to varying degrees as they came to speak whatever languages were used in daily life while continuing to use Hebrew in religious contexts. In a very real sense, because Tunisia and North Africa more broadly have always been multilingual, debates—pub­ lic and private, institutional and individual—about specific languages (or varieties of language) are in many ways constitutive of North Africanness: to be North African is to have a particular stake in any of several debates about language and languages going on at any given time. Despite this fact, scholars of the region have very little systematic information about the social histories of the languages of North Africa, in­ clud­ ing those used in or by Jewish communities. In other words, we know little about the mecha­ nisms by which specific languages came to North Africa, the institutions through which knowledge and use of them were spread or encouraged, the perceived social motivations (whether incentives or disincentives) for learning or using them, or the details of how the spread took place or why it took the form it did. The existing documentation of what we might term arguments about specific languages is deliberative in nature. It looks toward the future and asks what a community or nation should do (or allow to be done to it) with respect to the languages it uses rather than to the past to evaluate how and why a specific language spread as it did. Thus, these discussions teach us much more about the symbolic valences a specific language represented at a specific historical moment than about the social history of the languages being used, especially as they came to define one another relationally. 257 258 Keith Walters This chapter focuses on one very small part of the social history of language in Tunisia and more particularly in its Jewish communities. It seeks to explore the role that formal education for Jewish girls in nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century Tunis played in the language shift that took place in the Jewish community there during the period between the two world wars, when community members came to use French rather than Judeo-­ Arabic as the primary language of daily life and as the native language—that is, the first or primary language— they passed on to the next generation. Neither Muslim communities nor Jewish communities elsewhere in Tunisia adopted French as their primary language. What set of circumstances and events might have led to such a language shift in the Jewish community of Tunis? What can an examination of this situation teach us about that community and its role in Tunisian history, about Jewish culture and society in North Africa more broadly, or about language and languages as social signifiers? As Benedict Anderson has noted, “The most important thing about languages is their capacity for generating imagined communities.”1 This chapter seeks to examine the ways that language created Jewish communities, real and imagined, in colonial Tunisia. To achieve these goals, I provide information about the complex nature of the Jewish community in Tunis in the nineteenth century and sketch the history and nature of education for Jewish children, especially girls, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I then examine factors that encouraged the Jews of Tunis to learn to speak French, to speak it well (i.e., “without an accent,” which, of course, means speaking it with the accent associated with educated Parisians), and to use the language, considering specifically the ways French functioned as various kinds of financial, cultural, and symbolic capital. Particular attention is paid to the expectations regarding matrimony for Jewish and Muslim families and their daughters and to assimilation and naturalization. Finally, I conclude by contextualizing the historical role the Jewish community of Tunis likely played in helping create the social context for a particularly robust contemporary language ideology in Tunisia, one that associates the speaking of French with women. I focus on the Jewish community of Tunis for two major reasons. First, Tunis was home to the largest number of Jews in the country and served as the primary destination of Jewish migrants from the countryside and...