rituals—I found it thoughtless, just blind repetitions.... The
privilege of holding, carrying and reading the Torah was
auctioned offin the synagogue, and I found that terrible”
(Derrida 118 ).
Derrida’s bar mitzvah was in 1943. He achieved intellec-
tual maturity, though, not through his obedience to Jewish
ritual but by reading German philosophy. In 1943 , he recalled,
“I read Nietzsche for the first time, and though of course I
couldn’t understand him completely, he made a big impres-
sion on me. The diary I kept then was filled with quotations
from Nietzsche and Rousseau, who was my other god at the
time. Nietzsche objected violently to Rousseau, but I loved
them both and wondered, how can I reconcile them both in
me?” ( 118 ).
By this point, Allied troops had already landed in North
Africa (on November 8 , 1942 ). The massive incursion of Amer-
ican and British soldiers led to Jackie Derrida’s first encounters
with foreigners: his “discovery of America,” as he later put it
(Counterpath 27 ). The next year, Jackie returned to his previ-
ous school, once again studying alongside gentile pieds-noirs
in an Algeria liberated from Vichy control. The threat of
Nazism was ebbing; Jackie played soccer until dark with his
teenage friends.
In 1943 Charles de Gaulle, as leader of the free French,
promised emancipation to the Arab population of Algeria.
The pieds-noirs protested de Gaulle’s offer, increasing political
tensions. Before long Algeria was hit by the wave of Arab na-
tionalism that accompanied the end of the Second World War.
In the 1945 Sétif massacre, Algerian Muslims hacked to death
over a hundred Europeans, castrating the men and ripping
open the bellies of the women. The French response was mer-
ciless: they murdered thousands of Muslims. The Arab rebel-
18 From Algeria to the École Normale