Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
CULTURE/FILM
Tunisia, 1942: Humanity Amid Inhumanity
THE WEDDING SONG, Gloria Film
France 3Cinema
Review by Ralph Seliger
The Wedding Song begins with a young girl sweetly singing an Arabic wedding ditty. This is followed abruptly by a photo tableaux of the infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting with Hitler and his SS henchman, Himmler, and reviewing Nazi troops. The Mufti—through his Arabic radio broadcasts from Berlin, his recruitment of Balkan Muslims to the SS, and his work against the British in Iraq—spearheaded Nazi Germany's outreach efforts to Arabs and Muslims.
The Wedding Song is an emotionally charged drama with documentary appeal—both ethnographic and historical. It is also highly sensual, with the need for actors willing to appear naked in some scenes having caused the French director/writer Karin Albou to cast herself in a major role. "I couldn't find an actress who matched what I had written," she says. "The French ones did not speak Arabic; the Arab ones did not want to get naked in the hammam [Turkish bath]. My husband and a friend of mine told me 'why don't you do it?' So I had myself go through the casting process!" She also cast a non-Arab French woman, Olympe Borval, as the main Arab-Muslim character.
Borval had to learn sufficient Arabic for her role. Both Arab and Jewish characters routinely mix French and Arabic, often switching languages from sentence to sentence. The film depicts the intimate living conditions and the wedding customs largely practiced and celebrated in common by North African Jews and Arabs.
The story begins in November 1942 and is set entirely in Tunisia. That month, the tide of World War II dramatically turned against the Axis in North Africa, with the British victory at El Alamein and the landing of U.S. and British forces in Algeria and Morocco. But Field Marshall Erwin Rommel successfully withdrew his Afrika Korps to Tunisia, where the Germans landed heavy reinforcements. Bloody fighting sea-sawed for another half year in Tunisia until the Germans and Italians surrendered there in May 1943.
The Nazi overseer of anti-Jewish measures in Tunisia, SS Colonel Walter Rauff (mentioned in the film), received this assignment as a consolation prize for his previously intended mission as commander of "Einsatzgruppe Egypt," created to murder the Jews of Palestine after the anticipated British defeat there.
The Nazis began their rein of terror over Tunisia's 100,000 Jews much as they had proceeded in European countries they occupied, with the establishment of a Jewish council, a local "Judenrat," forced by Colonel Rauff to select and equip thousands of slave laborers at short notice and to collect heavy "fines" imposed upon the Jews to pay for their alleged "crimes."
Vichy France had already stripped North African Jews of their rights as citizens, just as it had stripped all the Jews of France of such rights. The Vichy regime also prohibited or restricted North African Jews from the practice of most professions and the conduct of most businesses. Only the accident of geography saved them from being transported en masse to the death camps. The blessedly short duration of the Nazi occupation prevented the death toll from malnutrition, disease, and sheer brutality from climbing into the tens of thousands.
Jews in North Africa were caught in a vise between their traditional second-class status as "dhimmi" in Muslim lands—a "protected" but subordinate minority—and the French Republican promise of equality. In 1870, the Jews were offered French citizenship and most accepted, in exchange for giving up the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts. This benefited them but also estranged them from members of the Muslim majority, most of whom were not offered the same deal. It was the classic colonialist gambit of "divide and rule."
The Nazis exploited this contentious fact to propagandize against the Jews. This anti-Semitic effort had some limited success, and it fueled tensions that eventually erupt between the two sixteen-year-old protagonists of The Wedding Song, the Arab Nour and Myriam, her Jewish neighbor and closest friend.
Myriam and her mother, a widowed seamstress, are so impoverished that Tita (the mother, portrayed by director Karin Albou) promises her daughter to a wealthy but much older suitor. Myriam envies Nour's engagement to a handsome young man, but they can only marry if he finds a job, and the only ones hiring are the Nazis and their Vichy-French collaborators. Influenced by the ideology of his new employers, Nour's fiance, Khaled, opposes her friendship with Myriam.
Albou embarked on a personal quest in making this film, delving into her North African-Jewish roots (she is of Algerian descent). Her work parallels that of Robert Satloff, whose Among The Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (Public Affairs, 2006) recounts the little-known story of 500,000 North African Jews living under German, Vichy-French, and Italian occupation and how a number of Arabs heroically sheltered or otherwise aided Jews being persecuted. He did so not simply as a historian, but also with the explicit purpose of reaching out to the Arab world to find common purpose in the interest of peace.
Albou seems similarly motivated by a conciliatory spirit. This is especially evident in a scene of Nour reading the Qur'an with her father and in the film's perhaps overly sweet conclusion.
Sadly, there are few Jews left today in North Africa. Only Morocco has a community that still numbers a few thousand from the 300,000 who lived there until the 1950s. Tunisia now has an even smaller community, which briefly made the headlines in 2002 when an al-Qaida suicide bomber killed nineteen people (mostly tourists) visiting a synagogue on the island of Djerba.
Like Ms. Albou's family, most Tunisian and Algerian Jews immigrated to France. Most Moroccan Jews settled in Israel.
The post-war national liberation struggles in North Africa gave rise to a pan-Arab consciousness that identified with the Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes during Israel's victory in 1948. Arab anger and frustration deepened with their ensuing defeats in 1956 and 1967, leading to mob violence and hostile governmental measures against the Jewish minorities in their midst. The kind of personal reconciliation that Albou depicts is emblematic of her hope but does not yet reflect reality, at least not on a societal level. Still, Arab-Jewish relations as a whole will surely benefit once Palestinians and Israelis learn to live together in a peace that provides security and dignity for both peoples.
Ralph Seliger is editor of Israel Horizons, Meretz USA's quarterly publication, and a blogger at www.MeretzUSA.blogspot.com.
Seliger, Ralph. 2010. Tunisia, 1942: Humanity Amid Inhumanity. Tikkun 25(2):66 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010seliger
