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3. The Making of Arab Paris
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Making of Arab Paris The most ancient monument in today’s Paris is not French but Egyptian. The obelisk of the place de la Concorde stands at one end of the “golden road” stretching through the Jardin des Tuileries, past the empty site of the Tuileries palace favored by Napoleon, and the triumphal arch celebrating his victories, to meet the Egyptianizing glass pyramid of the Louvre at its farthest point. Thus the axis of an Egypt part real and part imagined plays a central role in imagining modern Paris and its history. The glass pyramid of the Louvre stands today in an open square. In the early nineteenth century, that square was still a disreputable warren of streets where cheap lodgings crowded upon one another. One of the streets of this quarter took its name from a church disaffected during the Revolution, SaintThomas du Louvre. In this street, opposite the imperial stables at number , was a cheap lodging-house called the Hôtel de Bretagne. In the early years of Napoleon’s rule, the authorities in Paris kept a record of the foreigners arriving in the capital, classified into various ethnonational categories . In the miscellaneous file marked “Russes, Turcs, Africains et colons,” the address of this hotel—, rue Saint-Thomas du Louvre—can be noted again and again as the place of residence given by a certain group of foreign arrivals. Their names included Abdallah and Azaria, Joseph Hamawi, Antoine Gibril, Lutfi Nemr, and Charles Vitallis.1 All of these names were linked in one way or another with the “Egyptian refugees,” but otherwise they were quite heterogeneous. Among them were Muslims, Christians, Franks, and Armenians; interpreters, soldiers, and merchants from Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, and Istanbul. Their immediate ports of departure for the capital, however, were much closer at hand: Marseille, Melun, Lyon, or occasionally Strasbourg. Ironically, then, the Egyptianizing gesture of the pyramid conceals another, forgotten history, a hub of the itinerant and shifting Arab milieu of postrevolutionary Paris. In the register, alongside the names of these guests of the Hôtel de Bretagne, are others who may have belonged to this milieu: Hamed, a merchant from Algiers; Moyse Rabi Isaï of Jerusalem; Boulos Bachera and his daughter, coming from Melun; Ahmed Kachef de Soliman from Egypt; Assa-Ossman ben Mabrouk and his son Mahomet from Tunis; al-Haggi Mohamed Arzara from Morocco. Unfortunately, however, the register is silent about the relationship between these people, and whether their jostling against one another in the official record is no more than a stroke of the bureaucratic pen, or whether this categorization in fact might contain some more intimate proximity, some encounter, exchange, or even sociability. In , when Jean-François Champollion arrived in Paris as a young and avid student of Oriental languages, he wrote to his brother with excitement at his discovery of a milieu he had doubtless never experienced in his provincial hometown of Grenoble. The lodgings of Rufa’il, according to one biographer , “constituted, with the Persian embassy, the principal rallying point of the Egypto-Oriental colony.”2 These spaces were also those of a Muslim cosmopolitanism : in a letter to his brother, Champollion reported with pride that a Muslim acquaintance, Ibn Saoua, “mistook me yesterday for an Arab, and began to give me his salamat—when I replied with the suitable responses he quite overwhelmed me with his expressions of friendship until I thought he would never stop!”3 Champollion studied Arabic with Rufa’il Zakhur, and Coptic with another Egyptian émigré, Youhanna Chiftichi, studies that ultimately proved crucial to his success in solving the riddle of hieroglyphic writing. But these classes were interrupted when he was forced to return to his provincial Grenoble, too soon to offer anything more than these few glimpses. Another young Orientalist, Maximilian Habicht, from the town of Breslau (Wroclaw), who arrived in Paris as an attaché at the Prussian embassy at this time, immersed himself more fully in this milieu. Keen to learn Arabic, he found lodgings with Arabic-speakers and formed a very close friendship with a Tunisian Jewish writer, Mordechai al-Najjar. He later published a selection of the correspondence he had received from his friends among the Arabic-speaking milieu of Paris, including al-Najjar, an Algerian Muslim named Muhammad, Gabriel Taouïl, Mikha’il Sabbagh, Aid-el Bajaly, Rufa’il Zakur, Youhanna Chiftichi, and many others.4 In fact, the dozen or so letters Habicht included as examples in his book belonged to a collection...