“Adieu à ma maison”: Sephardi Adolescent Identities, 1932–36

Thanks to archives confiscated by the Nazis in 1940 and only recently returned to France, historians can glimpse the identities of North African and Middle Eastern Sephardi adolescents on the eve of World War II. This article focuses on the French essays young boys and girls wrote as part of their exam for admission to the Parisian normal schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Though evocative, these essays provide an important evidentiary base that offers answers to the following questions: What did the prospects of a long absence from their homes to a foreign metropole mean to these adolescents? Schooled on the margins of Europe, how did they negotiate between their education and the memories they imagine will be theirs? Did they share a broad Sephardi identity or identify as Orientals? And, how, if at all, did they understand the emancipation of their fellow Jews in the West?