Synopses & Reviews
Review
and#8220;Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating and extremely well-researched book. It is imaginative, quite original, broad in scope, and deals with a truly understudied topic: the small community of Jews of the Mand#8217;zab valley in the Algerian Sahara. Stein uses their experience to highlight a number of fascinating episodes in Jewish, French, Algerian, and even American history, and as such it will appeal to a wide audience.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;This wonderfully told story breaks new ground in the history of North Africa. Stein brings the Mzabi Jews of the Sahara into the main currents of colonial-era Algerian history for the first time. She shows clearly how colonial texts produced Mzabi Jews as the archaic vestiges of a and#8216;lost tribe,and#8217; and how this version was recycled into the work of the anthropologists, philanthropists, and administrators who wrote the rules that gave form to Mzabi Jews as political subjects. Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria admirably pulls Mzabi Jews from the footnotes, and like the very best work of historians it gives rise to a critical interrogation of the present.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Steinand#8217;s compelling study takes us into the vexed spaces where nation and empire, family and colony, religion and the state, and knowledge and law converged and collided. By situating and#8216;Saharan Jewsand#8217; at multiple, unsteady historical margins, the book argues that colonial military legislation and policy called into existence this and#8216;Southern Algerianand#8217; indigenous community. Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have long fixated upon the Orientalist East-West divide, but Steinand#8217;s masterful account redirects attention to the genealogies of North and South through a sort of micro-history set in motion that never loses sight of the big story.and#8221; and#160; and#160;
Review
and#8220;The granting of Algerian Jews French citizenship by the Crand#234;mieux Decree of 1870 is a central theme in the history of colonial Algeria, yet forgotten in this standard narrative is how the Jews in the Saharan region of the Mzab valley were excluded from this new status. Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria explores how Mzabi Jews came to be differentiated from other Algerian Jews under the French military regime that governed the Southern Territories by legally designated them as and#8216;indigenousand#8217; along with the Muslim inhabitants of Algeria. Stein begins by telling the intriguing story of an ethnographic study of the Jews of Ghardaand#239;a, the major Jewish community of Mzab, undertaken by the American anthropologist, Lloyd Cabot Briggs, and his assistant, Norina Lami Guand#232;de, on the eve of Algerian independence in 1962. Yet rather than treating the study as an authentic source on an isolated Jewish community to be mined for information, Stein analyzes it as a product and culmination of eighty years of French colonial rule in the Sahara. Stein then traces the encounter of the Mzabi Jews with French colonialism from the time of the conquest of the Sahara to the period of decolonization and mass departure of the community. Drawing from a rich array of archival evidence and primary accounts, Stein poignantly reveals how the Saharan Jews were shaped by events and processes of change in colonial Algeria:and#160;the Dreyfus Affair and settler anti-Semitism, military conscription, public health, education, Vichy in the Sahara, the oil and natural gas boom of the 1950s, the Algerian war of independence, and emigration. In examining the distinctive ways that Jews of Mzab experienced French rule, Steinand#8217;s richly documented and eloquently written book offers exciting new insights not only on the importance of regional differentiation in Algerian history, but into larger questions on the relationship between colonialism, decolonization, and the Jews.and#8221;
Synopsis
The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of the northern coast, the and#147;Tell,and#8221; as it is called, where the majority of the countryand#8217;s Jews resided before independence. The only people to be given European citizenship by an imperial power, northern Algerian Jews were considered subjects of French civilizing initiatives and were consequently dissociated from Algerian nationalist movements. As such, their immigration to France immediately before Algerian independence has often been understood as and#147;repatriation,and#8221; the logical outcome of their and#147;naturaland#8221; cultural intimacy with the French. Historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein provides a remarkably different perspective on Algerian Jewish history in Indigenous Jews by focusing on the Jews of the Mand#8217;zab in southern Algeria, which was ruled by the French military as opposed to the civil state. Far from being treated as if they were culturally akin to the French, these Jews were severely marginalized. Their difference from other Jews and from their non-Jewish neighbors was, as Stein demonstrates, and#147;legislated into reality.and#8221;and#160;
Synopsis
In this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life. For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other--its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable "tide of history," the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria--Muslims in particular--but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship--once focused on the Algerian "province/colony"--have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory.
About the Author
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce and Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and coeditor of A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi and Sephardi Lives:
Table of Contents
Note on Translation and TransliterationsPrologue: The Lost ArchiveIntroduction: Inventing Indigeneityand#160;Chapter 1. Anthropology and the Ghost of the Colonial PastChapter 2. Jews Northern and Southern: The French Annexation of the Mzab and the Boundaries of Colonial LawChapter 3. Governing Typologies: From the Conquest of the Mzab to the Touggourt/Dreyfus AffairChapter 4. Contested Access: Conscription, Public Health, and Education from the Fin de Siandegrave;cle through the Interwar PeriodChapter 5. Saharan Battlegrounds: From the Vichy Regime to a Postwar WorldChapter 6. Oil, the Algerian War of Independence, and Competing Stories of DepartureConclusion: Colonial ShadowsEpilogue: Dark Matterand#160;AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations of Archival and Library CollectionsNotesand#160;and#160;BibliographyIndex