In search of the Hassoun family of Constantine

Image

Légende

Abraham Hassoun (1876-1972), Abraham et Sarah Hassoun et leur fils André Gilbert, Constantine, 1904

Copyright

© mahJ

In December 2019 the mahJ acquired three large pastel pictures executed from photographs by a certain A. Hassoun in 1904: a couple in western dress in a park with a child in a new pram, and a man and woman in oriental dress. On the back of the first canvas an inscription added several decades later by the artist’s grandson indicates the identities of the people portrayed: a teacher (the artist himself), his wife and their son, a future student of the Ecole polytechnique. With these clues, the museum pieced together the social ascension – thanks to state school education – of this modest Jewish family from Constantine, a journey that took them from their Algerian home city to Paris then Rouen and finally Drancy.

In conjunction with this exhibition in the Department of Prints and Drawings, the spotlight is on Algeria in the adjoining showcases: notably a basket of requisites for ritual bathing (miqveh) and the hammam, synagogue and study room pictures, portraits and traditional costumes, including a traditional headdress of an Algerian Jewish woman (sarmah).