Ethan B. Katz. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 480 pp (original) (raw)

'Ni Oiseau ni Poisson': Algerian Jewish Literature

Literature has always been a refuge and a means of resistance for ethnic minorities. Algerian Jewish Literature has evolved through time as a testimony of existence. It reiterates the echo of the Algerian Jewish experience on the Algerian soil with all its intricacies during the French colonization. Algerian Jewish literature provides an interesting workspace to study the historical tie between two religions, two cultures, two memories that split due to a historical choice. The Cremieux decree was a kind of favoritism to Jews that made them absolutely distant from the people they lived with for centuries. The article examines the assimilation of Jews to the French that worked well since the beginning of colonization. Identification with the French has been ultimate and critical in the eyes of the Muslims. With the coming of independence, exile became more and more central. Though exile is a recurrent phenomenon for Jews, it is nevertheless a step in the making of their identity in French society. By 1962, Jews were complete strangers in their native land, and exile became an obligatory step. The Jews have probably whispered the victory of France, and they dreamt of it while aspiring to remain home. As the time for departure neared, many Jews still assumed a happy end for France, but the events went differently.

Beyond the Saharan Cloak: Uncovering Jewish Identity from Southern Morocco and throughout the Sahara

Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 2016

From the end of the medieval period into the early modern era, regional anti-Semitic violence in Northwest Africa forced Jews to convert and/or flee into other lands. A legacy of imposed invisibility, through illegality of Judaism and fear of expressing a Jewish faith identity, was a consequence of intolerance towards Jews. For their own safety, Jewish persons had to conceal their faith identity. In doing so, what appears to be a lack of Jewish presence may simply be a strategic concealment of one’s interior faith conviction. This paper explores how Western institutional oversight, by organizations and scholars, continually perpetuates the impression of Jewish absence from these spaces. Further, the paper seeks to challenge a visible lack of Jewish presence in West Africa by analyzing the complexity of conversion and investigating seemingly “invisible” identities. Lastly, the paper examines how the efforts of Jewish persons to become undetectable have contributed to the historical elisions of Jewish presence in West Africa.

Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara

Journal of North African Studies, 2012

Algeria occupies a special case within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in the colonial world in which autochthonous Jews were granted citizenship by a colonial power; with the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, some forty years after the French conquest of Algeria began, roughly thirty thousand Jews became citizens of France in one of the only acts of mass naturalization to occur under modern European imperial rule. It is usually but a footnote to histories of Algerian Jewry that the Crémieux Decree did not, in fact, extend to all Algerian Jews. At the time at which this law was passed, France had begun but not yet completed its bloody, fifty-year conquest of the Algerian Sahara, where several thousand Jews lived. Algeria’s Southern Territories (as they would come to be called in 1902) remained under direct military oversight for nearly eighty years of colonial rule, and Jewish residents of this administrative region, like the majority of Algerian Muslims, were categorized by the state as indigènes (indigenous subjects). This paper reconstructs how colonial conquest, law, and policy sought to delineate southern Algerian Jewry from northern Algerian Jewry. It argues that in the aftermath of the French conquest of the M’zab in 1882, the military sought to identify and legally isolate ‘southern Algerian Jewry’ (first from ‘northern Algerian Jewry’, and subsequently, from Algerian Muslims) for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews, per se; rather, in order to avoid jeopardizing a protectorate relationship it had built with the region’s Ibadite leadership in 1853, to protect French strategic interests, and to maintain a fragile status quo. Southern Algerian Jewish difference, neither inherent nor extra-historical, thus emerged as an exogenous creation of colonialism.