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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
On Rosh Hashanah, 1961, six months before the conclusion of the Evian accords promised independence for Algeria, riots broke out in the city of Oran. Surprisingly to many, the aggressors were overwhelmingly Jews, while those injured or killed were largely Muslims. The events—widely covered in the media but since forgotten—were a product of Oran's particular social chemistry, but were also shaped by far wider set of debates about a chasm that was growing between Jews and Arabs in France, Algeria, and the wider Arab world. This article focuses on responses to these riots, especially how they drew on polemical renderings of a shared Muslim-Jewish history. I make two interrelated arguments based on printed matter of the period, French government archives, and memoirs. First, Algerian Jewish observers and pro-FLN nationalist writers, groups that only rarely agreed on the question of Algerian independence, both recalled that the two groups' shared a largely harmonious history. They vehemently disagreed, however, on what this shared, harmonious history meant in terms of political obligations. The article's second argument is that the Israel-Palestine conflict helped sour relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria, as well as historical renderings of these relations, during the Algerian War of Independence. Specifically, the question of Palestine frequently appeared as a reference when interpreting the riots. Together, the two arguments demonstrate how international issues helped occlude the particular, local stories and belongingness of Algerians, while they defined the future, religio-ethnic contours of the Algerian nation.
1 This account is drawn from both North African and French papers: L'Echo d'Oran, 12 and 13 Sept. 1961; Le Monde, 12 and 13 Sept. 1961; El Moudjahid, 1 Oct. 1961; Le Figaro, 13 Sept. 1961, Information juive, Aug.–Sept. 1961; and the New York Times, 12 Sept. 1961.
2 On the settler population and anti-Semitism, see Michel Abitbol, Juifs d'Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2008), esp. 21–50; Zack, Lizabeth, “French and Algerian Identity Formation in 1890s Algeria,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 115–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Geneviève Dermenjian, La Crise anti-juive oranaise, 1895–1905 (Paris: l'Harmattan, 1986); Samuel Kalman, French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
3 Some blame the OAS for Choukroun's murder. See Henri Chemouilli, Une Diaspora Méconnue: les Juifs d'Algérie (Paris, 1976), 390, cited in Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 55.
4 Estimates vary greatly and are subject to dispute. See Alistaire Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62 (New York: Viking, 1977), 538.
5 Most OAS attacks targeted Muslims, but leftist Jews were also victimized. Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Le Temps de l'OAS (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1995); Olivier Dard, Voyage au Coeur de l'OAS (Paris: Editions Perin, 2005); Jean-Pierre Rioux, “Des clandestins aux activistes (1945–1965),” in Michel Winock, ed., Histoire de l'extrême droite en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 215–42.
6 Struggles between the FLN and rival Mouvement Nationale Algérien (MNA) had killed thousands, while the Paris police massacres of Algerian immigrants were in the near future; up to two hundred Algerian demonstrators were killed on 17 October 1961, and the Charonne metro station killings took place the following February. For more on French police massacres, see Neil McMaster and Jim House, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alain Dewerpe, Charonne 8 Février 1962: Anthropologie historique d'un massacre d’État (Paris: Folio histoire, 2006). On disputed memories of the October massacre, see Cole, Joshua, “Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17 October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory,” French Politics, Culture and Society 21, 3 (2003): 21–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Non-Muslim casualties were on a different order of magnitude, with perhaps 2,800 deaths and another seven thousand injuries. This estimate includes non-Muslim victims of OAS attacks. French military casualties were higher, but French car accidents still claimed more lives (ibid.).
8 Relative privilege notwithstanding, many Algerian Jews were deeply marked by Vichy's legacy. On this, see Jessica Hammerman, In the Heart of the Diaspora: Algerian Jews during the War of Independence, 1954–1962 (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013), 66–106; and Henri Chemouilli, Une Diaspora Méconnue: les Juifs d'Algérie Paris: Imprimerie Moderne de la Presse, 1976), 130. Jacques Derrida has also discussed his deeply disrupting experience of being expelled from school under Vichy in, among other works, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Hélène Cixous has also discussed the contradictions of Jewish “belonging” in Algeria; see Hélène Cixous and Mireille Caille-Gruber, Hélène Cixous: Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (New York: Routlege, 1997).
9 There is a historical debate about this attack. In addition to the number of casualties, the role of French police repression, the extent to which Jews attacked Muslims, and the involvement of Israeli agents are all at issue. I thank Joshua Cole for pointing this out to me. See Gilbert Meynier, “Mise au point factuelle sur les événements de Constantine 12 mai 1956, et jours suivants,” posted on Etudes coloniales: revue en ligne, 17 Mar. 2007, http://etudescoloniales.canalblog.com/archives/2007/03/14/4319574.html (accessed 7 Aug. 2015).
10 For more on anti-Jewish violence, including the story of his own family's struggles in Constantine, see Benjamin Stora, Les Trois exils des Juifs d'Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2006).
11 For example, Habib Bourgiba's demand in July 1961 that France evacuate the Tunisian naval base at Bizerte led to fighting and anti-Semitic violence. Egyptian president Gamal ‘abd al-Nasser's 1961 visit to Morocco also accompanied attacks on Jews. See Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Muslims and Jews from North Africa to France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 207, 221.
12 Katz, Burdens, 177; Archives de l'Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, Appel aux électeurs israélites. Of course, Algerian Jews were aware of violence against Jews in Tunisia, Morocco, and other decolonizing Arab countries. In addition to Katz, above, see Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 44–45, Orit Bashkin, The New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), esp. 100–40, 183–228; Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 60–89.
13 Like Muslims, Jews held wildly divergent perspectives, from the OAS to the FLN. See Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Doris Bensimon, Juifs d'Algérie hier et aujourd'hui: Mémoires et identités (Toulouse: Bibliothèque historique Privat, 1989), 215. On Jews who supported independence, see Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens dans la lutte anticoloniale (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015); Denis Guénoun, A Semite: A Memoir of Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Daniel Timsit, Algérie: récit anachronique (Paris: Bouchène, 1998); Hammerman, Heart of the Diaspora, 149–87; On Jews who moved toward the OAS, see Choi, Sung, “Complex Compatriots: Jews in Post-Vichy French Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 17, 5 (2012): 863–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 55–56. On French Jews' opinions, see Boukara, Philippe, “La Gauche juive en France et la Guerre d'Algérie,” Archives Juives 29, 1 (1996): 72–79Google Scholar. “Manichean” is Ethan Katz's apt phrase (Burdens of Brotherhood, 157).
14 In metropolitan France, Muslims were also understood to be profoundly different from standard subjects; they were seen to possess an irrevocably religious character that required a set of physical practices that put it at odds with republican citizenship. See Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
15 On early colonial efforts to separate Jews from Muslims, see Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010). On creating the indigenousness of Saharan Jews, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jewry and the End of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Other recent treatments of Algerian Jews' encounter with colonialism include Pierre Birnbaum, “French Jews and the ‘Regeneration’ of Algerian Jewry,” in Ezra Mendelssohn, ed., Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 88–103; Valérie Assan, Les Consistoires israélites d'Algérie au XIXe siècle: l'alliance de la civilisation et de la religion (Paris: Armand Colin/Recherches, 2012); Nathan Godley, “Almost Finished Frenchmen”: The Jews of Algeria and the Question of French National Identity, 1830–1902 (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2006). On other mythologies that divided the colonized, see Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 267–92; Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 118–66; Lazreg, Marnia, “The Reproduction of Colonial Ideology: The Case of the Kabyle Berbers,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5 (1983): 380–95Google Scholar; Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 222–38.
16 “Taxonomic state” is Anne Laura Stoler's term, usefully applied by Todd Shepard to French Algeria. See his The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 20; the citation is from Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 206–8. On the fluidity of the term “indigenous” in the early conquest, see Schreier, , “The Creation of the ‘Israélite indigene’: Jewish Merchants in Early Colonial Oran,” Journal of North African Studies 17, 5 (2012): 757–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Algerian Muslims were granted citizenship in 1958 but stripped of it in 1962. Jews maintained their citizenship. “Algerian ‘Muslims’ appeared as a ‘nationality’ or ‘ethnicity’ … Algeria's Jews were discussed not as a group but as French individuals who each ‘had a religion,’ Judaism”; Todd Shepard, “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité: A History of Ethno-Religious Nationalisms and Decolonization,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (Aug. 2013): 445–67, 448.
18 In the nineteenth century, Oran's Jews often distinguished themselves according to whether their origins were in the cities near Oran, notably the towns of Mostaganem, Mascara, Tlemcen, and Nedroma, or towns and oases such as Oujda, Debdou, Figuig, and Tafilalet. See Richard Ayoun, “Problematique des conflits internes de la communauté juive—Simon Kanoui, President du Consistoire Israélite d'Oran,” Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies (1986): 75–82.
19 The Crémieux decree was reinstated in 1943. It should be noted that the French use of the term “indigenous” did not parallel the post-1390 (or 1492) Jewish historiographical distinction between toshavim, or natives, and megorashim, those who had been expelled from Spain or Portugal and their descendants. On the M'zabi (Saharan) Jews, see Stein, Saharan Jewry.
20 For a helpful, brief history of French uses of citizenship to manage the population of Algeria, see Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 19–54.
21 The phrasing is Shepard's (ibid., 15). For the most textured history of the dynamics between Jews and Muslims in Algeria and France over the twentieth century, see Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, esp. 155–241. For a treatment focused on roots of conflict, see Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 35–58. For postcolonial evaluations, see Eldridge, Claire, “Remembering the Other: Postcolonial Perspectives on Relationships between Jews and Muslims in French Algeria,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11 (2012): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 This essay only indirectly intervenes in the robust scholarship on how the Algerian War's legacy has been “remembered” or “forgotten.” More directly, I build on work examining Muslim and Jewish recollections of their relationship and the colonial experience, during the war itself. On the former issue, see Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l'oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992); and Le transfert d'une mémoire—de ‘l'Algérie française au racisme anti-Arabe (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). See also Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1997). In a subsequent, edited volume scholars framed their interventions as an “end” to this “amnesia”: Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, eds., La Guerre d'Algérie 1954–2004: la fin de l'amnésie (Paris: Lafont, 2004). For the latter issue, see Katz, Ethan, “Between Emancipation and Persecution, Algerian Jewish Memory in the Longue Durée (1930–1970),” Journal of North African Studies 17, 5 (2012): 793–820CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Israel-Palestine, among other ongoing historical processes, continues to influence Muslim memories of Jews. For the Moroccan context, see Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
23 Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persecution,” esp. 799.
24 Ibid. These riots, appearing at moment of possible reform, may have been rooted in debates about Muslim inclusion. See Joshua Cole, “Antisémitisme et situation colonial pendant l'entre-deux-guerres en Algérie: les émeutes antijuives de Constantine (août 1934),” Vingtième Siècle, Revue d'Histoire 108 (Oct.–Dec. 2010): 3–23. For more on these riots, see Ageron, Charles-Robert, “Une émeute antijuive à Constantine (août 1934),” Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 13, 1 (1973): 23–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aouate, Yves-Claude, “Constantine 1934: un pogrom ‘classique,’” Nouveaux Cahiers, Alliance israélite universelle 68 (1982): 49–56Google Scholar; Ayoun, Richard, “À propos du pogrom de Constantine (août 1934),” Revue des études juives 154, 1–3 (1985): 181–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert Attal, Les Émeutes de Constantine, 5 août 1934 (Paris: Romillat, 2002).
25 As James McDougall explains, “The formulation of historical knowledge is an active production of meaning in which, at every new historical moment, a conception of the past is continually reconnected to the constantly vanishing present”; History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.
26 Recall that the FLN adopted the revolutionary slogan coined by Sheikh Abdelhamid ibn Badis, who founded the reformist Association des Uléma Musulmans Algériens in 1931: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my country.” It later became the Algerian state's official motto. On Jewish “neutrality,” see Benjamin Stora, “l'impossible neutralité des Juifs d'Algérie,” in Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi, eds., La guerre de l'Algérie, 1954–2004: la fin de l'amnesie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004). This idea is developed further in his Les Trois exils. When confronted with worry that France might treat Algerian Jews as a separate ethnic group (following Guy Mollet's 1960 suggestion to this effect), men like Jacques Lazarus vigorously insisted Jews be treated like other Frenchmen of Algeria. See Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 169–82.
27 Shortly after the Crémieux Decree was passed, Governor General Louis Henri de Gueydon argued that Jewish naturalization, by increasing the “indigenous element” in administration, would lead to the “French element” being overwhelmed. See Ayoun, Richard, “Max Regis, un antijuif au tournant du XXe siècle,” in Revue d'histoire de la Shoah: le monde juif 173 (2001): 137–69Google Scholar. Many blamed the Cremieux Decree for the 1871 Kabyle revolt. See Richard Ayoun, “Le Décret Crémieux et l'insurrection de 1871 en Algérie,” Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 35 (Jan.–Mar. 1988): 11–87. On the Jews' attachment to republicanism in France and French Algeria, see Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: Histoire politique des juifs d'Etat, de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992); “French Jews and the “Regeneration” of Algerian Jewry,” in Ezra Mendelssohn, ed., Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88–103; and “The Empire Abandoned,” in Antisemitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present, Miriam Kochan, trans. (London: Blackwell, 1992), 247ff.
28 Stora, Les Trois exils. Ethan Katz provides the most in-depth account of relations during this period, in Burdens of Brotherhood, 155–42. For another account of the diversity of Jews' opinions, see Allouche-Benayoun and Bensimon, Juifs d'Algérie, 209–22. See also Eldridge, “Remembering the Other.”
29 This was in keeping with older Orientalist renderings as well. Contextualized within scholarship on Jews under Islam, the question of Jews in Algeria has been subject to polemics. On the “myth and counter-myth” of Jewish life under Islam and Christianity since the nineteenth century, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 52–76.
30 Nineteenth-century Algerian rabbis often continued to reflect a wider, Mediterranean context than the legal boundaries imposed by France. See Marglin, Jessica, “Mediterranean Modernity through Jewish Eyes: The Transimperial Life of Abraham Ankawa,” in Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture Society 20, 2 (2014): 34–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Another example of relative privilege: Algerian Jews' public Zionist sympathies were in accord with France's pro-Israel policy. Algerian nationalists, meanwhile, were by definition disloyal.
32 In contrast, Maude Mandel sees the Palestine/Israel issue poisoning Muslim-Jewish relations (in France) mainly after 1967; Muslims and Jews in France, 45, 52–53. As for the FLN, Ethan Katz has written that “the question of Israel played a significant part in increasing hostility toward Jews” by the early 1960s (Burdens of Brotherhood, 206). Allouche-Benayoun and Simon reported, however, that Jewish spokesmen were already nervous that events in the Middle East could sour Muslim-Jewish relations in Algeria; Juifs d'Algérie, 215.
33 Algerian nationalists debated Arabism's centrality to their agenda, especially given the significant population of Berberophones in Algeria. Nevertheless, links with Arabism were strong. As for the atrocities accompanying Israeli independence, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–59; Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel and Grau/Random House, 2013), 99–134.
34 On citizenship discourses in Israel, see Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On how central institutions of the Zionist state were built in relation to Palestinians, see Gerson Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
35 Some Algerian nationalists occasionally admitted to admiring the Zionist nationalist project. Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 181.
36 This is not to say that the shadow of the 1934 riots vanished entirely after World War II. See Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persecution.”
37 Katz relates some fascinating and telling episodes, from Algeria and from France, of the temporary “reversal” of racial fortunes during the Vichy period. Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 111–54.
38 Raymond Benichou, “Les relations judéo-musulmanes en Algérie,” Information juive 32 (Apr. 1952).
39 André Chouraqui, in American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 13 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, American Jewish Committee, 1953), 372. Chouraqui was a historian, lawyer, translator, politician, and poet. For his rather lachrymose conception (I borrow the term from a Jewish historiographic debate that Salo Baron initiated in the 1920s) of precolonial Jewish life, see André Chouraqui, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). Chouraqui settled in Israel in 1958. For Baron's influential essay, see his “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Menorah Journal 14 (June 1928): 515–26.
40 “Rabbi Kapel Reports on Situation of Jews in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia,” American Jewish Archives, Series H7/1, cited in Sung Choi, “Complex Compatriots.” Kapel was a former French army captain, internment camp chaplain, and resistance fighter. He had escaped from German custody in 1944 with Jacques Lazarus, another former resister and then head of the CJAES. Background on Rabbi Kapel is from Susan Zuccotti, The French, the Holocaust, and the Jews (New York, Basic Books, 1993), 72–79, 202.
41 It should be noted, however, that Jews were well, if not disproportionately, represented in the anti-colonialist Algerian Communist Party from the 1930s. Attracting more “Arabs” had been a concern. See Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens, esp. 57–66.
42 “Algerians Deny Discord,” New York Times, 5 Aug. 1957.
43 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XXI, “Memoire sur le Judaïsme algérien, présenté par le Comité juif algérien des études sociales et la Fédération des communautés Israélites d'Algérie, 1 Mar. 1961.”
44 Benichou, “Les relations.”
45 Ibid.
46 Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Reference C3/1418, undated speech, attributed to Benjamin Heler.
47 Franz Fanon argued that the colonized would only gain their humanity when they resorted to violence. See Les damnés de la terre, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: La Decourverte/Poche, 2007 [1961]).
48 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XXI, “Mémoire sur le Judaïsme algérien, présenté par le Comite juif algerien des études sociales et la Fédération des communautés israélites d'Algérie,” 1 Mar. 1961.
49 An example is the coverage of the riot in question, “Oran: les graves incidents de Roch Hachana,” Information juive, Aug.–Sept. 1961.
50 On the overlap between anti-Semitism and anti-Arab sentiment, see Sivan, Emmanuel, “Colonialism and Popular Culture in Algeria,” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979): 21–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On anti-Semitism forming Algerian settler identity, see Zack, Lizabeth, “French and Algerian Identity Formation in 1890s Algeria,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 115–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Jews and French republicanism, see Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République; and Destins juifs: de la Révolution française à Carpentras (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995); Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 64–89.
51 The Direction générale des affaires politiques et d'informations ordered several reports in the early 1962 about the political affiliation of Algerian Jews, all agreeing that the communal leadership, rabbinate, and population tended to vote Socialist. Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (ADN), 21 PO/A 1958–1962 “Note de Renseignements,” Délégation Générale en Algérie, 10 Jan. 1962; Direction générale des affaires politiques et d'informations, report entitled “importance de la communauté israélite dans le département d'Alger,” Jan. 1962. Similar reports came to similar conclusions about the departments of Oran and Constantine.
52 It is possible that anti-Semitic police overstated Jews' participation in the Algerian Communist Party. Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens, 57.
53 Denis Guénoun, A Semite: A Memoir of Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 21.
54 Choi, “Complex Compatriots,” 865.
55 Richard Ayoun and Bernard Cohen, Les Juifs d'Algérie, 2000 ans d'histoire (Paris: JC Lattès, 1982), 185.
56 Raymond Benichou, “Les relations.”
57 The term used in the memoir. See Daniel Timsit, Alger: récit anachronique, 13. Discussed by R. Watson, “Memories (out) of Place: Franco-Judeo-Algerian Autobiographical Writing, 1995–2010,” Journal of North African Studies 17, 1 (Jan. 2012): 1–22. We must keep in mind that “Arab” was used broadly, and French writers did not always distinguish between Arabic and Kabyle speakers.
58 Eldridge, “Remembering the Other.”
59 Jean Cohen, Chronique d'une Algérie révolue: comme l'ombre et le vent (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 49, cited in Eldridge, “Remembering the Other,” 10.
60 For the exceptions, see Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens dans la lutte anticoloniale. Also, Daniel Timsit, Algérie: récit anachronique (Paris: Bouchène, 1998). See also Eldridge, “Remembering the Other”; Choi, “Complex Compatriots”; and Hammerman, Heart of the Diaspora, 149–87.
61 Le Monde, 15 Dec. 1961.
62 It is important to note that these “official pronouncements” did not express the various and often opposed beliefs of FLN members. For internal debates and ideological changes, see Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieur du FLN, 1954–1962 (Paris: Fayerd, 2002). Relating to Jews, see Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 172–76.
63 ADN 21 PO/A 1958–1962, folio “Question israélite,” clipping from Le Monde, 8 Mar. 1961.
64 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, pamphlet entitled “Fédération de France du Front de Libération Nationale,” FLN- Documents à l'adresse du peuple français, les Juifs d'Algérie dans le combat pour l'indépendence nationale (undated brochure), 3.
65 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, Droit et Liberté, “Les Prises de position du FLN et du GPRA,” Jan. 1961. The reference to “fiefdoms” is perhaps a negative reference to Ottoman domination.
66 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, Claude Estier, “Les Journées de décembre,” Droit et Liberté, Jan. 1961.
67 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, La Nation Française, “Le FLN: ‘Israël avec nous!’” 24 Oct. 1956.
68 Ibid.
69 “Fédération de France du Front de Libération Nationale,” 3.
70 Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, “Des étudiants juifs algériens dans le mouvement national algérien à Paris (1948–1962),” in Frédéric Abécassis, Karima Dirèche, and Rita Aouad, eds., La bienvenue et l'adieu: migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe–XXe siècle), vol. 3 (Casablanca: Centre Jacques-Berque, 2012), cited and translated in Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 176.
71 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, Claude Estier, “Les Journées de décembre,” Droit et Liberté, Jan. 1961.
72 Chasse à l'Arabe was the practice of grabbing Muslims in the streets or from cars and beating or killing them.
73 El-Moudjahid, 1 Oct. 1961.
74 Le Figaro, 13 Sept. 1961.
75 “Zionist,” was a broad category, but no variant found much success in bringing Algerian Jews to Israel. Jewish leaders, especially in Algeria, were often “left-wing” Zionists, but still maintained a sincere belief in Muslim-Jewish peace (see Stora, Les trois exils, 66–70). The farthest left-Zionists in France, such as the Cercle Bernard Lazare, held to a discourse of neutrality similar to those in Algeria. More mainstream groups such as the JNF and the Organisation sioniste de France, however, unambiguously supported Algérie française. Boukara, “La Gauche juive en France.”
76 AIU, Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, “Le Chantage du FLN sur les Juifs d'Algérie,” undated clipping, ca. 1959.
77 La Terre Retrouvée, 15 Mar. 1960. The Jewish National Fund was an organization established in 1901 by the World Zionist Organization to buy land in Ottoman Palestine and administer it “for and on behalf of the Jewish People.” This was (and remains) contentious, in that JNF land was (and is) barred to Arabs. See Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins.
78 In David Ben Gurion's 1948 speech declaring the foundation of State of Israel, this narrative is produced as such: “Pioneers … made deserts bloom … built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture … bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants….” For French justifications for colonialism using the notion of “mise en valeur,” see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
79 Much Zionist rhetoric was deeply masculinist, offering to transform effeminate, weak, or “sick” Jews into the haIvri haHadash or “the New Hebrew Man.” See, for example, Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007). As Daniel Boyarin memorably put it, Zionism offered Jews a “return to phallustine.” See Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 222. Interestingly, some French colonialists also offered a version of this. In his celebrated 1842 “Report on the Moral and Political State of the Israelites of Algeria, and the Means of Ameliorating It,” Jacques Altaras promised that Algerian Jews, if “attached to France,” would make good soldiers. See Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les Juifs d'Algérie et la France, 1830–1850 (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1981).
80 Notre Drapeau: Bi-mensuel des sionistes-révisionistes de France, 25 Oct. 1956.
81 Eugène Mannoni, “Juifs et Musulmans, à leur tour, à Oran,” Le Monde, 14 Sept. 1961.
82 Notre Drapeau, 25 Oct. 1956.
83 ADN, 21 PO/A 1958–1962, telegram to Délégation générale du gouvernement en Algérie, 15 Jan. 1962. In the West, the Irgun was widely regarded as a terrorist organization, including by major papers such as the New York Times.
84 ADN, 21 PO/A 1958–1962, telegram to Délégation générale du gouvernement en Algérie, 11 Jan. 1962.
85 For more on “ethno-nationalist” discourses of citizenship and the Israeli case, see Shafir and Peled, Being Israeli.
86 The links between Tunisia and the FLN were strong. The FLN's forces (sometimes larger than Tunisia's) were stationed there for a time, and Tunisia served, early in the conflict, as a springboard for attacks in Algeria. For a time the FLN's military leadership was housed in Tunis. Tunisia helped the FLN outflank France's “invisible barriers of censorship and sovereignty around Algeria” in an international arena of politics and media relations. See Matthew Connolly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
87 London Municipal Archives (LMA), Board of Deputies of British Jews (BDBJ), ACC/3121/C/11/013/004, Al-Amal, 15 Sept. 1961, reproduced in Le Petit Matin, 15 Sept. 1961.
88 Ibid.
89 The paper, while also Tunisian, supported the FLN. LMA, BDBJ, ACC/3121/C/11/013/004, translation of the article appearing in as-Sabah, 13 September 1961, submitted in French by American Joint Distribution Committee to the Board of Deputies of British Jews on 19 September 1961.
90 In 2005, Israeli agents recounted their activities in Algeria during the war in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv. See Choi, “Complex Compatriots.” For Israeli denials that they were supporting the OAS, see Le Monde, 11 Jan. 1962.
91 Choi, “Complex Compatriots”; Todd Shepard, The Invention, 169–82.
92 ADN 21 PO/A 1958–1962, “Note sur les “commandos juifs” d'Oran, 15 Jan. 1962.
93 LMA, ACC/3121/C/11/013/004, translation of article appearing in as-Sabah, 13 Sept. 1961.
94 Benichou, “Les Relations.”
95 Bernard Lewis most famously articulated this position in “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in the Atlantic (1 Sept. 1990): “In part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation—a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors.”
96 “Fédération de France du Front de Libération Nationale,” 3.
97 “Le problème de l’émigration juive de l'est algérien,” undated report, ADN 21 PO/ A 1958–1962.
98 ADN 21 PO/ A 1958–1962, “Le gouvernement de Rabat interdit l’émigration collective des juifs vers Israël,” Le Monde, 13 June, 1956.
99 “Le problème de l’émigration.”
100 ADN 21 PO/A 1958–1962, Délégation Générale en Algérie, Direction de Sûreté Nationale en Algérie, Sous-Direction des Renseignements Généraux, “A/S d'une organisation contre-terroriste d'inspiration sioniste,” 22 Sept. 1961. The most detailed treatment of Israeli involvement in Algeria is in Choi, “Complex Compatriots.”
101 Gozlan was a committed leftist, co-founder, with Sheik Okbi, of the interfaith group Union des croyants monothéistes, and also a Zionist. Stora, Les Trois exils, 66–70.
102 AIU Fonds Jacques Lazarus, Dossier XVI, Jacques Lazarus, “Tels que nous sommes,” Information juive, Feb. 1961.
103 In addition to preventing Palestinians from returning, Israel continued to subject its remaining Arab inhabitants to harassment, violence, expulsion, and obstacles to obtaining citizenship.” See Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Meanwhile, Zionism had an “unprecedented legitimacy” among French Jews. See Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 161. Zionists failed, however, to convince Algerian Jews to settle in Israel.
104 On the fraught terrain of dual Arab-Jewish identity, see Gottreich, Emily Benichou, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, 4 (2008): 433–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levy, Lital, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, 4 (2008): 452–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
105 Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, “The Field of in Between,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, 3 (2014): 581–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the West, we owe the endurance of this telos to Zionist historiography in which the modern period is characterized primarily by the rise of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. See, notably, Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
106 “Potentialities of Modernities” is Orit Bashkin's term. See “The Middle Eastern Shift and Provincializing Zionism,” the first part of the roundtable discussion “Jewish Identities in the Middle East, 1876–1956,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46 (2014): 577–605Google Scholar, “The Middle Eastern Shift,” 577.
