Third session of the seminar series 'Between Empire and Nation: Jewish thought in historical transition' by Prof. Cedric Cohen-Skalli (University of Haifa), visiting professor at Memory Lab.
Date: 14 OCTOBER 2025 from 15:00 to 17:00
Event location: Aula Gambi, Department of History and Cultures, Piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2
Type: Cluster 1 - Trauma and Memory
Abraham Serfaty (1926–2010) could be labeled the “Jewish-Moroccan Mandela.” He was imprisoned for his political activism, spending almost 20 years in Moroccan jails from the 1970s to the early 1990s. In prison, he wrote a vibrant call to his Sephardic brothers in Israel, trying to influence the Sephardic or Mizrahi revolt against the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment in the 1970s and 1980s. In these writings, he developed a new historical and political understanding of the traumas of colonialism and imperialism in Jewish and Maghrebian history. He also gave a voice and a conceptual frame to the harsh colonial experiences of Jews and Muslims in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.