Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This article reappraises Gérard Oury's Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), a comedy about a bigoted Frenchman and an Arab revolutionary disguised as orthodox rabbis, by considering the film's original historical context, its attention to traumatic memories, and its place inside French culture as a cinematic lieu de mémoire. Rabbi Jacob represented a comedic medium through which Oury addressed the serious themes of racism and antisemitism as he envisioned multicultural reconciliation between the French, Arabs, and Jews. Rabbi Jacob was inseparable from the history of Jews in France, their deportation during the Second World War, and the postwar acceptance that being Jewish was compatible with integration into France. At the same time, Rabbi Jacob portrayed Arabs as a series of (post)colonial stereotypes leading one pro-Palestinian supporter to hijack an airplane in protest. Rabbi Jacob records an optimistic moment at the close of the trente glorieuses and continues to serve as a source for narratives on philo-Semitism, tolerance, and anti-racism in France.
Keywords
antisemitism, comedy, film, France, Holocaust memory, stereotypes
Despite the plot of non sequiturs and actor Louis de Funes's hysterics, director Gérard Oury's (1919-2006) Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973) merits our critical attention for its imagining of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the Arab at the historical juncture of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.· Rabbi Jacob navigated reawakened memories of Jewish deportation and repressed memories of (de)colonization as well as their legacies for a multiracial and multicultural France. Oury set Rabbi Jacob in a present full of intentional allusions to the recent past. As the top box-office draw of the year, the film provoked widespread praise and limited criticism-although the latter included a plane hijacking in protest against the film. Rabbi Jacob represented a serious moralpolitical effort to promote a transcendental French reconciliation with both, as well as between, Jews and Arabs. The film has become a veritable cinematic lieu de mémoire tied to a particular definition of French national identity. To quote Dominique de Villepin, Rabbi Jacob is "part of all our [French] memories" because it is "part of the patrimony of French families."2 The comedy has entered the Pantheon of French popular culture as a symbolic text that returns viewers to a less politically correct and more self-congratulatory past. Far...