Samir Naqqash and His Polyglotic Literaturein the Age of National Partition

Almog Behar and Yuval Evri challenge the familiar image of Samir Naqqash as the “last” Arab-Jewish writer clinging nostalgically to a dying language. They argue that his prose weaves Baghdadi Jewish and other dialects, Judeo-Arabic traditions and modern literary Arabic into a multilingual fabric that resists the linguistic and literary partitions created by colonialism, nationalism and secularization.