Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 21
identifi cation’. He hated this Jewish school right from the start, and
‘skived off ’ as often as he could. The general chaos and the diffi cul-
ties of everyday life were so great that his parents seem never to have
been informed of his absences. Of the few days he did actually spend
at Émile-Maupas, Derrida kept a memory that he described in his
dialogues with Élisabeth Roudinesco:
It was there, I believe, that I began to recognize – if not to
contract – this ill, this malaise, the ill-being that, throughout
my life, rendered me inapt for ‘communitarian’ experience,
incapable of enjoying any kind of membership in a group. [.. .]
On the one hand, I was deeply wounded by anti-Semitism. And
this wound has never completely healed. At the same time,
paradoxically, I could not tolerate being ‘integrated’ into this
Jewish school, this homogeneous milieu that reproduced and in
a certain way countersigned – in a reactive and vaguely specular
fashion, at once forced (by the outside threat) and compulsive- the terrible violence that had been done to it. This reactive
self-defence was certainly natural and legitimate, even irre-
proachable. But I must have sensed that it was a drive [pulsion],
a gregarious compulsion that responded too symmetrically, that
corresponded in truth to an expulsion.^8
As Jackie was coming up to his thirteenth birthday, he needed
to prepare for the exams he had to take for his bar-mitzvah – or
‘communion’, as it had long been known among Algerian Jews.
But his apprenticeship amounted to very little. Jackie pretended
to study a little basic Hebrew with a rabbi from the rue d’Islay,
without showing the slightest enthusiasm for the task. The rites,
which had fascinated him since his earliest years, now greatly irri-
tated him. All he saw in them was an empty formality imbued with
mercantilism.
I started resisting religion as a young adolescent, not in the
name of atheism, but because I found religion as it was prac-
ticed within my family to be fraught with misunderstanding. It
struck me as thoughtless, just blind repetitions, and there was
one thing in particular I found unacceptable: that was the way
honors were dispersed. The honor of carrying and reading the
Torah was auctioned off in the synagogue, and I found that
terrible.^9Instead of going to the Consistory school, Jackie spent his days
with his cousin Guy Temime who worked in a little watch-maker’s
shop right next to the Casbah and just opposite one of the biggest
brothels in Algiers, Le Sphinx. Half-amused, half-fascinated, the