Jacqueline Kahanoff and the demise of the Levantine

More than anything else, Jacqueline Kahanoff is associated with the term Levantinism and, more specifically, with transforming the term – which for many years had a derogatory meaning – into a positive source of identity. However, this reading of Kahanoff – namely, a carrier of the message of Levantinism as a bridge between Orient and Occident – seems to tell us more about Kahanoff’s readers than about Kahanoff herself. An attentive reading of her work reveals a different Kahanoff, a person who, more than being the originator and proponent of a new kind of identity, while moving swiftly across cultures and feeling at home nowhere because her home was everywhere, was actually well entrenched in the West, in Zionism and in Israel.