The Franco-Tunisian Jewish writer and social philosopher Albert Memmi died in the spring of 2020, having lived a full century, at least a half of which he devoted to developing an arc of thought with great relevance to some of the most vexing questions now facing the societies of the Middle East, the region where he was born, although he eventually found his intellectual and literal home in the West. We need him now. Memmi was born in 1920 in the Jewish quarter in Tunis, at the time a French protectorate. The eldest son of a poor Italian Tunisian saddlemaker and an illiterate mother of Bedouin Berber heritage, he spoke Judeo-Arabic at home and studied Hebrew in a traditional religious school. Ambitious and studious, he won a scholarship to the most prestigious French high school in Tunisia, and went on to study philosophy at the University of Algiers. Forced to return to Tunisia after Vichy France expelled Jews from public institutions throughout the mainland and the colonies, Memmi was interned briefly in a labor camp after the Nazi occupation of Tunisia in 1942. After liberation from Nazi rule in May 1943, he decided to continue studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he became deeply engaged in Jewish intellectual life and thought and embarked on a life of letters. Returning to Tunisia in 1949, he worked as a high school teacher teaching philosophy and literature, and three years later he helped to found the Centre de Psychopédagogie de Tunis, where he studied the psychological dimensions of colonial oppression. After Tunisian independence in 1956 he returned to France, teaching in a number of universities and eventually being appointed in 1970 a professor of sociology in the University of Paris. Memmi is remembered today chiefly for his research and his novels about the psychological impact of colonialism, which he produced when he was in his thirties, in the 1950s. He became a hero of the anti-colonial left with his novel The Pillar of Salt, a fictionalized autobiography of his childhood in French-colonized Tunisia that appeared in 1953, and his study The Colonizer and the Colonized, which appeared four years later. Promoted in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, the leading French intellectual journal that was edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote a preface to the book, The Colonizer and the Colonized was a study of the sociological and psychological dimensions of the dependence and the privilege created by a colonial hierarchy. This “lucid and sober” book, wrote Sartre, describes the predicament of its author as “caught between the racist usurpation of the colonizers and the building of a future nation by the colonized, where the author ‘suspects he will have no place.’” (He will have no place because he is a Jew.) The Colonizer and The Colonized made Memmi a giant of anti-colonialism, along with such writers as Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Albert Camus (who also wrote a preface to Memmi’s book), and Aime Cesaire; one of the key figures of what later came to be dubbed the postcolonial school of thought defined by works ranging from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 to Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. But slowly Memmi’s thinking began to change. His later works sought to generalize the insights from his early phase into a broader sociological account of dependence, privilege, and racism. (He published a deep study of racism in 1982.) Memmi came to view racism and colonialism as only one instance of the more general human trait of what he called heterophobia, the fear of difference, which motivates groups to dominate, to condemn, and to exclude other groups. Memmi’s understanding converged with thinkers such as Niebuhr, for example, for whom “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men”; and his emphasis upon the challenge of heterogeneity anticipated an important theme in contemporary social and political philosophy. I believe that Memmi’s work is a vital resource to make sense of contemporary failures of governance, not least in his own region, the Middle East and North Africa. The World Bank report of 1996 noted, for example, “a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years” in almost every country in Africa, adding the melancholy remark that “the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.” The Arab Human Development Reports prepared for the United Nations in 2003 and 2004 highlighted how isolated Arab countries are from the diffusion of the world’s knowledge, mentioning as an example that the number of books translated into Arabic is miniscule. (It noted that whereas Spain translates ten thousand books into Spanish a year, the same number of books have been translated in total into Arabic since the ninth century CE, and that between 1980 and 1985 the number of translations into Arabic per million potential readers was 4.4, less than 0.8 percent of the number for Hungary and less than 0.5 percent of the number for Spain.) Likewise it highlighted the widespread ignorance and the culture ripe for conspiracy theories and irrational resentments that result from this isolation. Study after study since the 1980s has found the Middle East and North Africa to be the most repressive region in the world, with almost all countries ruled by (occasionally elected) authoritarian regimes (the only exception as a liberal democracy is, for all its agonies, Israel), and that the lowest levels of human freedom in the world are in the Middle East and Africa, and that this translates into having the highest levels of serious armed conflict in the world and the highest concentration of fragile or failing states. This is a crisis about which Memmi has a lot to teach. It is therefore a great loss that much of the world remains unaware of his contribution. The left disinherited him because his later works took positions contrary to progressive and postcolonial stances. The discerning and unsentimental eye that he trained on
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