Following Models, Wherever You Find Them

Co. Dublin, 1954. Courtesy National Library of Ireland on The Commons. Image with no restrictions via Wikimedia Commons. Marcel Bénabou tells us about the way his younger self pondered writing a grand epic which, centered upon his family, would also depict the history of the Moroccan Jewish community. He was well aware that this was a massive undertaking, and the first step in getting it going was figuring out how to go about the whole thing. What he needed was models for how to proceed—but which would fit? Proust, shaping his own voluminous work according to a “cathedral structure?” Not appropriate, Bénabou thought, for a region dominated by Muslim and Jewish architecture and culture. Greek epic had been put to good use by Joyce, but that didn’t seem right either. And so, the would-be author goes in search of help from “the Jewish tradition”—finding, though, that said tradition was never one thing, and that much of the way that tradition had taken shape in different parts of Europe…