Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962

Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962
Author: Sophie B. Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2017-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316991636

Professor Roberts examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. She focuses on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other populations in the colony, including newly naturalised non-French settlers and Algerian Muslims, for control over the scarce resources of the colonial state. The author argues that this resulted in antisemitic violence and hotly contested debates over the nature of French identity and rights of citizenship. Tracing the ambiguities and tensions that Algerian Jews faced, the book shows that antisemitism was not coherent or stable but changed in response to influences within Algeria, and from metropolitan France, Europe and the Middle East. Written for a wide audience, this title contributes to several fields including Jewish history, colonial and empire studies, antisemitism within municipal politics, and citizenship, and adds to current debates on transnationalism and globalization.

Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria

Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria
Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 022612388X

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism. But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria’s south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era. Drawing on materials from thirty archives across six countries, Stein tells the story of colonial imposition on a desert community that had lived and traveled in the Sahara for centuries. She paints an intriguing historical picture—of an ancient community, trans-Saharan commerce, desert labor camps during World War II, anthropologist spies, battles over oil, and the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. Writing colonialism and decolonization into Jewish history and Jews into the French Saharan one, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating exploration not of Jewish exceptionalism but of colonial power and its religious and cultural differentiations, which have indelibly shaped the modern world.

In Quest of Justice

In Quest of Justice
Author: Khaled Fahmy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2023-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520395611

In Quest of Justice provides the first full account of the establishment and workings of a new kind of state in Egypt in the modern period. Drawing on groundbreaking research in the Egyptian archives, this highly original book shows how the state affected those subject to it and their response. Illustrating how shari’a was actually implemented, how criminal justice functioned, and how scientific-medical knowledges and practices were introduced, Khaled Fahmy offers exciting new interpretations that are neither colonial nor nationalist. Moreover he shows how lower-class Egyptians did not see modern practices that fused medical and legal purposes in new ways as contrary to Islam. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Islam and modernity.

A History of Algeria

A History of Algeria
Author: James McDougall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108165745

Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.

The Architecture of Memory

The Architecture of Memory
Author: Joëlle Bahloul
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1996-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521568920

Recalling life in a single house occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, this is a micro-history of a period which came to an end in the early 1960s.

Globalizing Race

Globalizing Race
Author: Dorian Bell
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2018-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810136902

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself. Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism. As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

'To Be French?'

'To Be French?'
Author: Lauren Mazzatesta
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre:
ISBN:

Since the age of antiquity, Algeria was home to a robust Jewish community, rich in its diversity and solidarity among the other Jewish communities in North Africa. Yet, the 1870 Crémieux Decree forced Algeria's Jewish community into a new legal, social, and political model in order to adhere to the decree's larger purpose of elevating the position of French Jews. As a result, Algerian Jews' way of life was forever altered. The French government intervened on nearly every facet of their life. One can consider the impacts upon Algeria's Jewish community through their family relations, education, and citizenship, considering the French government's laws dictated each of these spheres of life to coalesce with their political agenda in rendering Algerian Jews as French citizens. Although Algerians Jews in general welcomed French citizenship, they sacrificed their culture and Mzabi community, also known as the Mozabite Jewish community, at the expense of such legal recognition, which eroded the authenticity and the presence of Algeria's Jewish community over time to the extent that Algeria is no longer home to such a flourishing Jewish community.