ABSTRACT
This article discusses the nature of collective memory represented in descriptions of the Jewish experience of Tlemcen and the ways in which a collective construct is translated into a corresponding spatial one. Often, individual and social memory of a particular place may be reproduced, replaced, supplemented or complemented by commemorative ceremonies at a new site. What have been the ways for the Tlemcen Jews of France to replicate Tlemcen the place? How are images and recollected knowledge of a destroyed past transmitted spatially? This particular community has responded by a physical recreation of the Jewish quarter of Tlemcen that reconstitutes in Paris at least three physical losses: the tomb of the miracle-working Rabbi Ephraim Al-Naqawa located outside the city walls, the synagogues of the Jewish quarter of Tlemcen, and the annual spring pilgrimage that linked the synagogues of the medina to the rabbi’s tomb.
