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Between emancipation andpersecution: Algerian Jewishmemory in the longue durée(1930–1970)Ethan Katz aa History Department, University of Cincinnati,Cincinnati, OH, USA

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To cite this article: Ethan Katz (2012): Between emancipation and persecution: AlgerianJewish memory in the longue durée (1930–1970), The Journal of North African Studies,DOI:10.1080/13629387.2012.723430

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Between emancipation and persecution:Algerian Jewish memory in the longue

duree (1930–1970)

Ethan Katz∗

History Department, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

In recent years, scholars of post-colonial France and Algeria have devoted substantial attention tothe question of memory. Typically, studies of memory in the field have centred on competingnarratives and afterlives of the Franco-Algerian War; likewise, this event has dominatedexaminations of specifically Jewish Algerian memory. Seeking a more longitudinal approach,this article focuses on Algerian Jewish commemorations of three events: the 1930 centenaryof the French conquest, the 1934 Jewish–Muslim riots of Constantine, and the 1970 centenaryof the Cremieux Decree. Such an examination reveals two longstanding Algerian Jewish‘models of remembrance’, one of progress, the other of persecution. This article contends thatthe two remembrance models developed during the colonial era and crystallised in the 1930s.The two models, and their complex interplay, did much to shape subsequent communalnarratives. Each model drew upon and reflected a complex set of French republican, colonial,Algerian, and Jewish influences and positionalities among those who claimed to speak forAlgerian Jews. Only by examining such long-term memory developments can we ascertain theparticular way that most of Algerian Jewry, having relocated to France by the mid-1960s,sought to process the Franco-Algerian War and decolonisation. In the process, we canunderstand better the particular forces that shaped the formation of this population’s distinctidentity. More broadly, this examination points towards the need to exhume the deeplycolonial roots of many ‘post-colonial’ memories and identities.

Keywords: Algerian Jews; Jewish memory; 1930 centenary; Exodus narrative; 1934 riots;models of remembrance

On the evening of 7 July 1970 in Paris, the administrative council of the Association des Juifs

Originaires d’Algerie (AJOA) held its quarterly meeting. The final agenda item concerned a

momentous occasion. October 1970 would mark the centennial of the Cremieux Decree, the

act by which most Algerian Jews became French citizens.1 The leaders of the AJOA – the prin-

ciple organisation supporting cultural, social, and religious needs for Algerian Jews in France –

had to decide how to observe the anniversary. As the discussion began, council member Andre

Bakouche noted that the Central Consistory of France and the Alliance Israelite Universelle

∗Email: katzen@ucmail.uc.edu

ISSN 1362-9387 print/ISSN 1743-9345 online# 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2012.723430http://www.tandfonline.com

The Journal of North African Studies

2012, 1–28, iFirst Article

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were planning a communal celebration; he suggested that the AJOA join their event. Yet Jacques

Lazarus, head of the AJOA, opposed this idea. Others seconded Lazarus’ objection. After

lengthy discussion, the council agreed to organise the AJOA’s own, rather subdued gathering:

a Sunday morning ‘informational meeting’, with a number of dignitaries, and two or three

speakers.2

Thus, the leading association of Algerian Jews in France elected to pay lukewarm tribute to

the act that had bestowed French citizenship on its community. The AJOA commemorated the

occasion, but with limited fanfare, apart from the rest of organised French Jewry. The centenary

fell 8 years after the conclusion of the Franco-Algerian War and the mass migration of Algerian

Jews to France. The AJOA leadership comprised individuals who had held key positions in the

Algerian Jewish community during decolonisation. The AJOA’s treatment of the centenary,

therefore, might seem like another manifestation of the painful ruptures, displacements, and

memories of the Algerian War. In fact, however, the AJOA’s commemoration constituted a

new stage in a longer story of collective memory. The occasion expressed an ambivalence

born not of decolonisation but of colonialism itself.

Introduction

This article traces the development of Algerian Jewish collective memory from the height of

colonialism to the post-colonial era. By Algerian Jewish memory, we refer to a set of discernible

narrative strands articulated by figures claiming to retell, expose, or clarify the Algerian Jewish

past. These figures were French-speaking, and held positions of eminence in the Jewish reli-

gious, political, cultural, or scholarly communities of Algeria, metropolitan France, or both.

Their renditions of the Algerian Jewish past appear in numerous sources: Francophone, expli-

citly Jewish newsletters, journals, special publications, reports, speeches, and ceremonies, as

well as internal communal reports, correspondence, and meeting minutes. Thus, for our

purposes, Algerian Jewish memory denotes a particular set of constructed renderings, authored

in French, frequently with both Jewish and wider Francophone audiences in mind.3 Through

their circulation in Algeria and the mainland, such historical accounts greatly influenced

wider understandings of Algerian Jewish memory and identity.

Due to their Francophone tint, these narratives reveal how the peculiarities of the colonial situ-

ation in Algeria helped to shape a unique interplay between republican, imperial, and Jewish

efforts to forge a usable past. They therein also serve to remind us of the choices, glosses, dis-

tortions, and erasures entailed in constructions of collective memory, even those crafted among

groups situated marginally in relation to hegemonic power centres. Indeed, the case of Jews in

French Algeria suggests that such selective, shifting narratives played a key role in the processes

by which these groups at once became subsumed and sought to adapt under the weight of what

James McDougall terms the ‘brutal operation of the power of modernity to reorder the world, to

produce new truths of its own volition’.4

We will focus on three Algerian Jewish commemorations: the 1930 centenary of the French

conquest, the enduring memory of the Constantine riot of August 1934, and the 1970 centennial

of the Cremieux Decree. These acts of remembrance share several characteristics that make

them revealing snapshots of Algerian Jewish memory. First, each commemorated an event

that constituted a major rupture for Jews’ position in Algerian society and for Algeria more

broadly. Second, all three commemorations highlighted the complex nature of Algerian Jews’

position in a colonial triangle between their Muslim fellow natives and the French colonists

and administration.5 Legally, citizens from 1870, Jews never gained full acceptance among

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the ‘European’ settler population. Like their metropolitan coreligionists, they acquired French

education, language, and culture. They also, however, retained ties to traditional North

African Jewish customs and sensibilities that were similar to those of their Muslim neighbours.

Correspondingly, at each commemorative moment, Algerian Jewish actors and organisations

had to forge a coherent narrative in the face of two major contradictions: their experience of

colonialism as bringing both persecution and emancipation and their attachments at once to

older Algerian life rhythms and rituals and to the allure of French ‘civilisation’. Diverse

voices of Algerian Jewish memory thus spoke from different positionalities at different times.

Various figures could articulate their memory as supporters of a distinctive Algerian Jewish

consciousness, as advocates of a metropolitan-based republican Judaism, as fellow Algerian

natives, and simply as Jews. Finally, in connection to the above characteristics, Jews experi-

enced each of the remembered events differently, but not entirely separately, from Algerian

Muslims. Thus, these commemorations allow for useful Jewish–Muslim comparison.

This article will argue that, for Algerian Jewry, the 1930 centenary and the 1934 riots of Con-

stantine crystallised two ‘models of remembrance’ for the twentieth century. Literary scholar

Rigney (2005) has used the concept of models of remembrance to describe situations

whereby memory actors ‘recycl[e] and adap[t] old [memory] forms in new situations’. In this

way, writes Rigney, ‘one act of remembrance can stimulate comparable acts in other situations’.

Furthermore, ‘[t]he language in which memories are articulated is recycled, providing an

intellectual hook’ by which those articulating a narrative may resurrect forgotten ‘relics of

the past’ and ‘[bring them] into working memory’ (Rigney 2005, p. 13).

I contend that what we might term the ‘progress and patriotism’ model of Algerian Jewish

remembrance concretised around the 1930 centenary. This model framed Jewish history in

French Algeria as a story of ever-advancing emancipation, civilisation, and attachment to

France. Jews were passive recipients and active agents. The 1870 Cremieux Decree and Algerian

Jews’ service in World War I marked key hinge points in this narrative. The second model of

remembrance, shaped by the events of August 1934, may be termed as one of ‘violence and

vulnerability’. In this narrative, the murderous destruction of these riots, and the shocking

specter of Muslim hostility and/or French abandonment that they evoked, proved most central.

The two narratives stood in dialectical opposition; they were contrasting but ultimately inse-

parable. This interrelationship corresponded to what Yerushalmi (1996) identifies as a traditional

opposition in Jewish memory, based upon a ‘structural contrast’ of Jewish history embodied in

the ‘dramatic polarity’ of Exodus and exile (pp. 43–44). At the same time, it reflected the

specific vicissitudes of modern Algerian Jewish history, between the inclusionary and exclusion-

ary sides of French colonialism and nationalism. When opponents of the Cremieux Decree

sought to repeal it, leading Jewish personalities defended the community’s attachment to

France; as Algerian Jews served in World War I, community organs expressed a patriotic enthu-

siasm haunted by the anti-Semitic wave of the fin-de-siecle. From the early decades of colonial

Algeria, then, the progress and patriotism and the violence and vulnerability models emerged,

and mutually informed and reinforced one another.

The models were neither one-dimensional nor static. Algerian Jewish acts of remembrance

reflected multiple memory strands that included republican narratives of nation-building and

the ‘civilising mission’, and master narratives of Jewish history, specifically Exodus and

persecution.6 Subsequent moments of Algerian Jewish remembrance, particularly the Franco-

Algerian War, not only drew upon but reshaped both models. Ultimately, as we shall see, the

two models of remembrance merged in a manner that proved crucial to Algerian Jewry’s

capacity to respond to the traumas and displacements of decolonisation.

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This article’s longue duree approach at once builds upon and challenges recent literature on

the memory of French Algeria. Since the early 1990s, a growing scholarship has examined the

memory of colonial Algeria as a source for identity, trauma, nostalgia, silence, and forgetting.

Writers have assessed the importance of these patterns for the post-colonial French state and

society, and for particular groups who migrated from Algeria to France.7 Most of these analyses

have centred on the contested memory of the Franco-Algerian War of 1954–62.8 Likewise, an

emerging scholarship on specifically Algerian Jewish memory has focused largely on the

meaning of the war and decolonisation. Scholars have treated 1962 as the decisive rupture in

Algerian Jewish historical consciousness, and illuminated the subsequent struggle of many in

France to rekindle memories of life in Algeria.9 They have sometimes incorporated significant

attention to the memory of Vichy and the Holocaust.10 The heavy concentration on the memory

of 1954–62 reflects the war’s tremendous violence; its impact on Algeria, France, and many

communities therein; and its cultural and political afterlives in the two societies. For Algerian

Jews, the war’s end meant the migration to France of most of a population of 140,000.

And yet, what has become an often singular focus on the memory of the Algerian War and

decolonisation can lead to distortions. A more longitudinal approach to the construction and

mutation of memory deepens our understanding of how certain groups processed French

Algeria and its aftermath, including the Franco-Algerian conflict. Indeed, by examining three

acts of remembrance from the interwar to the post-colonial era, we can rethink two broad his-

torical questions: first, how did Algerian Jewish identity and collective memory shift throughout

the twentieth century? Second, what longer term narratives have driven contested memories of

French Algeria in the post-colonial period? This article posits that we need to explore questions

of memory and identity for Algerian Jews not simply by way of, but across the caesura of the

Franco-Algerian War and decolonisation.

1930, or the crystallisation of progress and patriotism

The 1930 centenary of the French landing in Algeria was a major event in both metropole and

colony. For Jewish leaders, the occasion became an impetus to assess the first century of colonial

rule in Algeria, broadly and more specifically for Jews. Their centenary narratives echoed long-

developing ideas about the emblematic episodes of the Cremieux Decree and Jewish partici-

pation in World War I. Each event, according to these accounts, highlighted Jews’ loyal and

enthusiastic role in France’s ‘civilising’ progress in Algeria. In an atmosphere of competing tri-

umphalist narratives, such depictions echoed the liberal renderings of French republicans, and

carried certain features distinctive to Jewish experiences and traditions.

In the mainland and Algeria, 1930 witnessed a barrage of celebrations. Throughout the first

half of the year, ceremonies and speeches, military processions, sporting competitions,

museum exhibits, and fireworks displays occurred in honour of the centenary. Observances

included 14,000 press releases about France’s glorious work in Algeria from the state press

agency, 1.2m pamphlets or Cahiers du centenaire for distribution in libraries and schools,

and 18 exhibitions and 59 conferences honouring the occasion (Thomas 2005, pp. 197, 207,

nn66).

The centenary repeatedly depicted the conquest as a starting point towards glorious

French colonial success and construction. State accounts and ceremonies framed the anniversary

as exemplary of a longer patriotic rite of passage for all associated with colonial

Algerian. Within this broader optimism, multiple strands of memory and ideology competed.

Republican colonialists narrated the past century as ushering in an ongoing, ever-delayed

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process of ‘Frenchification’ for Algeria and its subjects. Right-wing forces, however, depicted

French Algeria as simply a triumph of France’s military and the colons. Opposing assimilation,

they portrayed Muslim natives as irredeemably primitive and uncivilised.11

For Jews in Algeria and France, the centenary offered an occasion to articulate their own

narrative, at once republican and Jewish, of progress and patriotism. In the process, they reiter-

ated themes that had become central to the community’s self-understanding, particularly in the

wake of the World War I. As Zytnicki (2011, pp. 71–143) has shown, Algerian Jews had first

engaged the writing of history as part of their struggle for emancipation and integration in the

decades surrounding 1870. The pioneers of this historical oeuvre sought to show the cultural

and moral contributions, rather than decline and decadence, of Algerian Jews and to insist on

their growing assimilation to France. The 1930 centenary arrived at an opportune moment for

this burgeoning historical consciousness. During the 1920s, several leading communal figures

around the chief rabbi of Algiers founded the Societe des conferences juives d’Alger. This

society, which published a bulletin and organised conferences, sought to promote Judaism’s

moral values, with an emphasis on the study of history (Zytnicki 2011, pp. 294–298).

During the same period, Algerian Jewish leaders worked to commemorate their community’s

sacrifice in the Great War. Their efforts included the erection in 1922 of commemorative plaques

for deceased Jewish soldiers inside the Grand Synagogue of Algiers and the construction of a

monument in their honour at the Jewish cemetery in Saint-Eugene (renamed Bologhine follow-

ing Algerian independence).12 Another manifestation of this memory work was the publication

of the Livre d’Or du Judaısme Algerien (1919), an incomplete honour book of the community’s

decorated and deceased war veterans. This 300-page book touts the patriotic devotion of Alger-

ian Jews. Despite the sizable number of Jewish soldiers in the same units as Muslims, the book

hardly mentions the Muslim soldiers, who were, with rare exception, not fellow citizens but

colonial subjects. In their quest for national acceptance, Algerian Jews often accentuated differ-

ences and obscured commonalities between themselves and Muslims.13 For the centenary, the

metropole, rather than Algeria, became the seat of most visible Jewish acts of remembrance.

Yet Algerian Jewry’s previous interwar constructions of memory had charted what became

the occasion’s defining narrative, an ever-growing, active Jewish attachment to the French

fatherland and civilisation.

Three writers for the metropolitan Jewish press prominently articulated the centenary’s sig-

nificance. The first was Hippolyte Prague, longtime editor-in-chief for Archives Israelites, the

more liberal of France’s two leading Jewish newspapers. Prague presented a narrative of

ever-growing emancipation and civilisation in Algeria, centred on the benevolent French state

and the devotion thereto of Algerian Jews (1930a, 1930b). This echoed longstanding rhetoric

from French officials and institutional French Jewry. In two front-page editorials in the Archives

– the first in early January, the second in May on the eve of French President Gaston Doumer-

gue’s official visit to Algeria – Prague developed these themes. He spoke of the significance of

1930 for all of France, and of the extraordinary light of civilisation brought to Algeria’s Jews

after the French ‘swept away’ the regime of the Turks, under whom the present generations’

‘fathers had had to suffer so much’. Now, Algerian Jews had become, through assimilation,

‘worthy of integrating into the liberator France’, and had achieved impressive successes.

Prague framed the Cremieux Decree as simply the fulfillment of an act ‘already prepared by’

the government of the late Second Empire.14 Alluding to the Great War, he spoke of how Alger-

ian Jews gave their lives on the battlefield to pay their ‘debt of gratitude’ to France (Prague

1930a). Prague predicted that among the crowds that greeted the president in Algeria,

the Jews would be ‘numerous’ and ‘their cheers particularly enthusiastic’. He recounted the

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opposition to Cremieux and the anti-Semitic politics of a previous era in Algeria, but contended

that Doumergue would now witness social peace and economic development, nurtured by

France’s ideals of ‘equality among citizens’ (Prague 1930b).

Prague’s narrative accorded with ‘republican Judaism’ and its longstanding emphasis on

Algerian Jewish emancipation and integration, and with the emerging historical consciousness

expressed by many Algerian Jews.15 He seemed to implore his Algerian coreligionists to

show their enthusiasm for the occasion. At the same time, he framed their Frenchification and

that of Algeria as a fait accompli. In June 1930 in L’Univers Israelite, France’s more traditional

Jewish newspaper, William Oualid (1930), a professor at the Sorbonne, offered his own iteration

of Algerian Jewish remembrance. The Algerian-born Oualid retained strong ties to Algeria’s

Jewish community. While his column echoed many of Prague’s themes, he spoke without the

Archives editor’s hints of paternalism, and in a voice that expressed the experience of Algerian

Jews themselves. Like Prague, Oualid drew a dramatic contrast between the condition of Alger-

ian Jews under Islamic and French rule, respectively. In a detailed discussion of dhimmi status,

he acknowledged that this standing had granted Jews protections, but he focused on its restric-

tions and obligations. He exclaimed, ‘Emancipation, security, equality, dignity, there is what the

French occupation has brought’. Oualid referred to France as the ‘initiator of the liberation of the

Jews’. Noting that this process had been gradual, he implied that Jews now served as a model for

advancement under French rule.

After detailing how Algerian Jews ‘prove[d] their attachment to the French fatherland’ during

World War I, Oualid concluded exuberantly: ‘[I]n this year, where Algeria commemorates not a

conquest and a victory, but a pacification, not a domination but a continuing education, not a

brutal and militaristic occupation but a progressive emancipation of all its inhabitants and the

improvement of their economic and material, moral and social condition, the Frenchified

Jews, associated with the naturalised foreigners and with the pacified Muslims, commune in a

single homage and in a single love for their common mother: France (Oualid 1930). Here, in

order to underscore his narrative of progress and patriotism, he employed a striking set of

binaries. Oualid pushed back against all who might depict the past century in Algeria as one

of violence, occupation, or oppression. In the process, he unwittingly revealed an awareness

of the tremendous complexity, destruction, and loss entailed in a history that he sought to

narrate as simply triumphant.

The third Jewish writer who focused substantially on the centenary was researcher H. Boucris,

also of Algerian origin, who composed several articles in the Archives and L’Univers. While he

articulated many themes common to Prague and Oualid’s narratives, he approached Algerian

Jewish history in a more scholarly and critical manner. Boucris made this history the subject

of not only his analysis and documentation, but just as importantly, of his appeals for further

study. Shorter pieces included clarifications and a call for greater research on the history of

the Bacri and Busnach merchant families and the publication, with enthusiastic annotations,

of previously unknown correspondence of Adolphe Cremieux relating to the 1870 decree

(Boucris 1930a, 1930d, 1930e). The latter item’s appearance in July 1930, at the height of the

centenary celebrations, implied that the acquisition of French citizenship constituted the

central turning point in Algerian Jewish history.

Yet in three longer articles published between April 1930 and April 1931, Boucris was more

circumspect about the French impact. The first two pieces offered lengthy reflections on the need

to fill a gaping hole – the absence, in historical writing on Algeria, of a comprehensive history of

Algerian Jewry. Boucris (1930b, 1930c) discussed the important, narrowly focused contributions

of a few previous authors. Yet he highlighted the many untapped surviving records of the Alger-

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ian Jewish community, stating in both articles that ‘it would not require a Graetz’16 to sift

through these ‘fruitful’ files. Tempering slightly the unbridled enthusiasm of others for the cen-

tennial, the author recounted the nostalgia of many Algerian Jews of the nineteenth century for

the period of Muslim rule, though he qualified this by exclaiming, ‘They certainly would not

prefer it to the regime of liberty, justice, and absolute tolerance that France has imported into

Algeria under the folds of its glorious flag’. Still, Boucris detailed the aspects of Jewish life

in pre-colonial times, noting everything from communal autonomy over religious affairs, to

the popularity of mahia, a fig alcohol distilled by Jews and consumed secretly by many

Muslims, subsequently banned by the French.

In his third lengthy article on the centenary, published in spring 1931 in Archives Israelites,

Boucris (1931) accentuated his disagreements with Prague and Oualid. Directly challenging

the latter’s historical account, Boucris focused on what he described as the religious, econ-

omic, and cultural vibrancy of Algerian Jewish life under Islam. He argued that Jews had

fared quite well, particularly when compared with their counterparts who suffered violence

in Europe. Concluding on a very different note from Oualid, he observed the ongoing

impact of the Dreyfus Affair in France and Algeria even 10 years after the Jewish sacrifices

in World War I. Here, he pointed to metropolitan publications like Action Francaise, and to

the election in Oran of several public officials on an anti-Semitic platform. Declaring that

no Muslims took part in such activities, he called them ‘the exclusive work of too many

French or neo-French of Christian origin, jealous, hateful of Israel’ while admitting that

these were a minority in ‘great, noble, and generous France’. Thus, Boucris sounded a note

of partial dissent from the prevailing narrative, depicting Jewish life under Islam in unusually

idyllic terms and expressing doubts about Algerian Jewry’s integration into colonial society.

Yet, he still mimicked many of his contemporaries’ positivistic assumptions speaking, for

instance, of how documents like the Livre d’Or du Judaısme Algerien would contribute ‘the

most beautiful chapters of the future history of Algerian Israelites’ (1930c). Indeed, Bouris’

vision of the unfolding and writing of Algerian Jewish history highlighted substantially the

progress and patriotism narrative.

Since these three authors spoke via the metropolitan Jewish press, they crafted narratives not

necessarily consonant with those of native Algerian Jews, but rather influenced by a variety of

memory strands. Yet, their voices became particularly important, for in 1930 Algerian Jewry

produced little in the way of communal publications and left few traces of any organised com-

memoration of the centenary.17 As Eldridge (2009) has contended regarding another group from

Algeria (the ‘harkis’ in post-colonial France), organisational strength or the lack thereof can

prove decisive in a group’s ability to voice its distinctive narrative. In the absence of its own

associations and forums for public expression, argues Eldridge, a minority group in a transna-

tional context, particularly one in a liminal position, can find its narrative produced in significant

part by larger and more institutionally powerful groups. This framework largely applies to

Algerian Jews at the 1930 centenary, as they relied heavily upon metropolitan Jewish presses

and narratives to tell their story.

Indeed, the historical renderings of Prague, Boucris, and Oualid drew upon those of the French

state and republican Judaism. Conversely, they differed sharply from Muslim narrative

responses to the centennial. As we have seen, Jewish accounts generally painted a stark contrast

between the darkness of life under Islam and the light and progress of French rule. They echoed

statements like that of President Gaston Doumergue in Algiers in May 1930 about how the

French had eliminated the ‘misery, fear, and violence’ that had previously plagued this now-

beautiful port city (Thomas 2005, p. 198).

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Against such optimistic choruses of joy, many Algerian Muslims sounded notes of discord.

The Algerian pharmacist and liberal activist Ferhat Abbas (1930) wrote a long pamphlet for

the centenary dedicated to Algerian Muslims killed in World War I. He attacked the ‘noises

of shindig’ and ‘vain parades’ that ‘commercialised [the] sacrifice’ of all who had died on

both sides in the decades-long conquest of Algeria. Contending that Muslims had little cause

for joy, he noted: ‘The century that [ended] was a century of tears and of blood. And it is par-

ticularly us, indigenes, who have cried, who have bled’. Yet he sought to turn the events towards

possibilities for improvement. He declared that ‘fraternity’, often invoked at centenary events,

was one word worth retaining:

The celebrations of the centenary are only an awkward reminder of an unfortunate past, an exhibitionof the richness of some before the poverty of others. Fraternity, on the contrary, is a program: it is theFuture. But this program has to be elaborated and the future prepared. (Abbas 1930, pp. 29–30)

Like Algerian Jewish leaders, Abbas made the sacrifice of his community in World War I central

to his narrative. Whereas the former, however, regarded this service as an affirmation of loyalty

to benevolent France, Abbas framed it as an enormous investment in the promise of France –

one that still waited in vain for a good return.

Jewish coverage of the centenary rarely hinted at the inequalities and injustices suffered by

Algeria’s Muslims. The contrast is instructive of the influences that shaped Jewish remem-

brance. As we have seen, Jewish writers treated the moment as symbolic of growing advance-

ment, inter-ethnic harmony, and republican equality. In part, this reflected Jewish attachment to

the idea of French nationalism as, in Bell’s (2001) formulation, ‘a political program which has as

its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one,

casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form’(p. 3). Under this logic –

reinforced in many centenary observances – emancipation, assimilation, and reinvention for

those under French rule remained ongoing.18 For multiple generations of Jews, the republican

schoolhouses of France and Algeria, and for males, the experience of military conscription,

had imparted such an understanding of French universalism.19

The Jewish vision of the Algerian past bore as well indelible marks of specifically Jewish

understandings. Longstanding efforts to ‘emancipate’ and ‘regenerate’ the French and Algerian

Jews drew upon the Biblical Israelite Exodus from Egypt and the journey through the wilderness

to the Promised Land.20 As the work of Walzer (1984), Goldberg (1995), and Yerushalmi (1996)

has suggested, the Exodus long constituted the ‘archetypal locus’ or ‘master story’ of Jewish

history and of western ideas of progress.21 In Walzer’s (1984) summation, this created a histori-

cal consciousness that consists of three basic components: ‘first, that wherever you live [i.e. your

current situation], it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place . . . a promised land;

and third that ‘the way to the land is through the wilderness’. There is no way to get from here to

there except by joining together and marching’ (p. 149). For even the most loosely affiliated

Jews, the Exodus story was repeated twice annually around the family table at the Passover

seder with the traditional injunction, ‘In every generation a man is obligated to see himself as

if he left Egypt’.22 For the many traditional Algerian Jews who still apprehended the world

through the prism of faith, such religious teachings retained powerful immediacy.23

Moreover, ample evidence exists that for the metropolitan followers of French republican

Judaism, the French Revolution and its emancipation of Jews long represented the ultimate con-

temporary relevance of the Passover story both for Jewish history and western progress.24

During the 1889 commemorations of the Revolution, numerous rabbis in France and Algeria

gave sermons that framed the Revolution as part of Jewish and broader human redemption,

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often linking it explicitly to the Exodus.25 In the Provencal town of Nımes, for instance, future

French chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn (1890) called the occasion nothing less than ‘the anniversary of

our deliverance, the anniversary of our social emancipation, it is our Exodus from Egypt, it is our

modern Passover!’ (p. 100).

Jewish leaders on both sides of the Mediterranean extended this story to incorporate Algerian

Jews. In 1871, in defending the previous year’s decree, Adolphe Cremieux had described the

Jews as deserving of emancipation from ‘eighteen centuries of degradation and persecution’,

linking this early act of the Third Republic to the Second Republic’s 1848 emancipation of

African slaves (quoted in Zytnicki 2011, p. 90). In his 1889 sermon for the revolutionary cen-

tenary, Isaac Bloch (1890), chief rabbi of Algiers, told his flock that they were ‘latecomers

among the sons of France’ but recipients of the same protections and rights as their metropolitan

counterparts. With striking imagery, he described the conquest:

They understood it well, your fathers of 1830, when they welcomed with ardent sympathy the vic-torious battalions of Sidi-Ferruch, when they fraternized with them under the eyes of their formermasters, facing the anger of the latter, even though [they remained] uncertain of the outcome ofevents; rallying to civilization against barbarity, at the risk of [everything].

This depiction featured several moments reminiscent of the Israelites at the Sea of Reeds: the

Jews uncertain of their future but courageous; the threatening presence of the ‘former

masters’; the importance of water and its crossing as a passage to freedom (in this case, the Med-

iterranean Sea by the French fleet) and the happy fraternising, akin to the joyful singing of the

Israelites after crossing the sea.26 Bloch insisted that ‘[t]he Algerian Israelites were convinced

ahead of time that the new France, formed by the principles of ‘89, carried in the folds of its

flag not hatred and persecution, but love, justice and liberty’ (Pardes 2002, pp. 64–65).

The expositors of this narrative adapted it to ongoing anti-Semitism in Algeria. In his 1889

sermon, Bloch acknowledged with sadness the recurrence of hostility towards Jews, but declared

confidently, ‘prejudices, by the grace of God, are diminishing each day’ (Bloch 1890, p. 70).

Making an explicit link to the Exodus as ongoing, he concluded optimistically with an image

of Israel as not the ‘vagabond’ of longtime anti-Jewish caricatures, but rather ‘a colossal

sower’ of seeds, advancing in time across a ‘field of centuries’, with ‘its forehead haloed by a

reflection from Sinai’, moving towards the perfection of humanity (Bloch 1890, p. 73).

Optimism even endured at the fin-de-siecle, amidst the Dreyfus Affair and intensely, some-

times violently anti-Semitic politics in Algeria. In 1900, the editors of the Israelite algerien,

the Jewish newspaper of Oran – a city particularly plagued by recent anti-Semitism –

marked Passover by contrasting the France they loved to ancient Egypt and its latter-day

incarnations (Israelite algerien 1900).27 After discussing the flight from Egypt and persistent

anti-Semitism through history, the editors stated proudly: ‘We do not fear today being obligated

like our ancestors of other times to abandon the noble and generous country that has become our

Fatherland and that we serve with love and faithfulness’. They concluded by speaking of future

occasions when ‘the children of Israel will cross once more the Sea of Reeds, opened under their

steps by a new miracle’. The author implicitly linked such crossing to Jews’ loyalty and contri-

butions to France. Evoking the fate of the Egyptians, meanwhile, he described the persecutors of

the Jews (and, implicitly, opponents of the republic) as ‘bad citizens’, who would find the ‘dis-

honourable death’ they deserved in the same sea. Such an account framed the struggles to secure

democracy in early Third Republic France and Algeria as an ongoing Exodus, with the Jews as

enthusiasts, opposed by ill-fated anti-Semitic and anti-republican enemy pursuers. Thus, France

had two faces: Canaan and Egypt, one of Exodus, the other of exile. Such duality reflected how,

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already in the late nineteenth century, within the narrative of patriotism and progress, violence

and vulnerability lurked as counterpoints and motivations. From the start, the two models of

Algerian Jewish remembrance were inseparable.

Yet in 1930, optimism was the order of the day. As we have seen, within the French Jewish

paradigm of 1789 as the dawn of a new Exodus, Algerian Jewish ‘Frenchification’ had become

the most recent, ongoing chapter. In the above-cited Jewish narratives from the Algerian centen-

ary, the repeated language of freedom and emancipation underscored this connection. Likewise,

in his 1931 pioneering study of North African Jewish history and demography, Algerian chief

rabbi Maurice Eisenbeth described Algerian Jews on the eve of the French arrival in the follow-

ing terms:

deys and beys inflicted daily [upon the Jews] grave offenses, very often these were tortures, inresponse to acts for which only a slave would receive a beating. It would be the glory of theFrench conquest to pull up [the Jews] from this miserable state. (Eisenbeth 1931, pp. 21–22)28

Recent work by Malino (2008) suggests that, by the early 1930s, through the schools of the Alli-

ance (AIU), countless young Jews across North Africa and the Middle East had internalised

similar teachings about the Revolution and about France (specifically the AIU) as a civilising

force for Jews everywhere.29

Here, we have drawn out the multilayered view of 1789 as French, Jewish, and human liber-

ation moment, for it is crucial to understanding one, the specificity of the Jewish treatments of

the centenary; and two, the place – or absence – of Algerian Muslims therein. Such an absence

covered over widespread, ongoing Jewish–Muslim social interactions, and the numerous ways

that shared elements of North African culture continued to mark the texture of Algerian Jewish

life. Instead, as we have seen, according to the emancipation as Exodus framework, Muslims

were the longtime, oppressive masters from whom Algerian Jews had achieved freedom. To

the extent that Jews narrated the first 100 years of French rule in Algeria as a Jewish Exodus,

the community could celebrate numerous tangible benefits; those who saw the past century as

part of a broader French civilising process could claim that Muslim Algerians proceeded

along the same path.30 But ultimately, it was fundamental to the progress and patriotism

model of remembrance that Algerian Jews were already – and ever – several steps ahead.31

The ‘Emeutes’32 of Constantine as narrative rupture

Four years after Algerian and French Jews expressed loyalty, pride, and hope around the centen-

ary, they found much of their optimism shattered by the violence and destruction of 3 summer

days. The Constantine riots of August 1934 brought to the fore the counter-narrative of violence

and vulnerability. Jewish leaders and writers sought immediately to offer defining accounts and

nascent commemorations of the events. Once more, both French colonial discourses and

longstanding Jewish memorial practices played important roles. Now, however, Algerian

Jews perceived their relationship to both France and their Muslim neighbours as threatened.

Jews in Algeria and the metropole framed the event as a massacre. They demanded justice

from the French state and contrasted the Jewish attachment to France and ‘civilisation’ with

the alleged hostility and barbarity of many Muslims.

From Friday, 3 August to Monday, 6 August 1934, intermittent rioting occurred between Jews

and Muslims in Constantine. The disturbances began Friday night, when Jewish tailor Elie

Khalifa insulted several Muslims whom he saw washing themselves in the mosque across

from his home. Khalifa later admitted that he cursed the Muslims, their nudity, and Islam.

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The Muslims claimed that he also urinated or spat on them and the wall of the mosque. Over the

next several hours, crowds of Muslims gathered outside of Khalifa’s home located at the junction

of the city’s Jewish and Muslim quarters. Many attacked pedestrians and businesses they ident-

ified as Jewish and struggled with police. From the windows of homes, Jews threw objects and

fired shots. By the time order was restored, 6 Jewish-owned shops had been ransacked and 15

people injured, including a Muslim who would die several days later.

The next day, local authorities and communal leaders sought to defuse the situation. Order

appeared to return. On Sunday morning, however, news of the cancellation of a large meeting

planned by popular local Muslim leader Dr Mohamed Salah Bendjelloul, and the brief

rumour of Bendjelloul’s murder by Jews, sparked greater unrest. Jews fired shots in the street

and from their windows. Large crowds of Muslims pillaged businesses in the Jewish commercial

quarter throwing items into the street and lighting shops on fire. At least two Jewish families,

hiding in their homes, were brutally murdered. French authorities responded slowly, largely

standing by for hours before intervening to restore order. The following day, Muslim attacks

on Jews or Jewish property occurred in several neighbouring towns. Ultimately, 25 Jews and

3 Muslims died with dozens more injured.33

The emeutes of Constantine marked a watershed. Among French administrators, Algeria’s

‘European’ population, and many ardent French nationalists, the riots created widespread

anxiety about Algeria’s future. The French colonial regime responded with a lengthy investi-

gation, hundreds of arrests, and a series of repressive measures. As Cole (2010) argues,

beneath the official reports and actions, one can detect the fear of many officials and colonists

that the Muslim attacks on Jews portended a direct assault on colonial France (p. 22).34 For

their part, Jews in Algeria had previously experienced intense hostility and even violence, par-

ticularly in the late nineteenth century. In recent years, they had become more concerned about

increased anti-Semitism from the settler classes and growing tension, often provoked by colo-

nists, with their Muslim neighbours.35 Still, the riots stunned the community. Jews responded

by framing events through the lens of Jews’ and Muslims’ respective relationships to France.

Revealing a sense of betrayal by the French, Jews in Algeria and the metropole insisted on

Algerian Jewry’s French bonafides while questioning those of Muslims.

Whereas major Jewish reactions to the centenary appeared via certain figures and press outlets

of metropolitan Jewry, in responding to the riots, Algerian Jewry itself took the lead. As the

mainland Jewish press gave the riots substantial attention, it often did so by reprising or repri-

nting Algerian communal reports. This role reversal of sorts from 4 years prior reflects a few key

factors. First, France’s Jewish leadership remained quiet about the riots for weeks, following a

longstanding tenet of Franco-Judaism that communal leaders should not publicly speak about

politics.36 A second factor was the newfound presence, since spring 1934, of an umbrella Alger-

ian Jewish association, the Federation des Societes Juives, which also published a communal

bulletin. Perhaps most important were the local dynamics of Constantine. The city had the

largest percentage of Jews of any major Algerian city (12% according to the 1931 census)

and several figures played leading roles in both the Jewish community and municipal politics

(Cole 2010, p. 5). This meant that Jews, collectively and individually as public figures, had

the visibility and stature to speak out forcefully. At the same time, Jews in Constantine found

their liminal position accentuated by the city’s highly ethnicised colonial politics in which

both settler anti-Semitism and growing assertiveness by Muslim political groups figured impor-

tantly. Finally, unlike the centenary, which served as an occasion to construct narrative tributes

to events that were seldom part of living memory for Algerian Jews, the 1934 riots became a

subject of instant retelling and commemoration among hundreds of Jewish witnesses and

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their contemporaries.37 This difference lent the events particular power and immediacy, provok-

ing a flurry of Jewish communal responses. These included at least five formal reports on the

emeutes for various audiences.38

The most influential and widely disseminated report came from Henri Lellouche, a leader in

the Constantine Jewish community and member of the municipal council and departmental

general assembly. Lellouche’s version of events both served as the official account of Constan-

tine’s Jewish community and sought to influence the government’s forthcoming report (Cole

2010). Extensive excerpts of his account soon appeared in several French Jewish newspapers

(Lellouche 1934, Archives Israelite 1934b, Chalom 1934). Lellouche’s report claimed that the

violence against Jews had not been spontaneous but premeditated, directing blame towards

Muslim leaders. Methodically and in cold blood, the report explained, rioters had carried out

their orders. The report framed its most forceful critique of Algeria’s Muslims in terms of

their relationship to France. Lellouche contended that, rather than evincing an age-old tribal

hatred of Jews (as the government report would later claim), the riots reflected Muslims’ strongly

‘anti-national’ sentiments. In the author’s view, any signs of French loyalty by Algerian Muslims

were ‘illusory’. Muslims, he maintained, resented what they perceived as Jewish power. They

took exception to Jews’ greater civic rights. Muslims could not tolerate that this group, ‘formerly

their slaves’, had attained greater status via French citizenship. Likewise, Muslims begrudged

Jews’ ‘profoundly French’ sentiments.

Throughout Jewish-authored accounts, the difference in status between Algerian Jews and

Muslims remained paramount. From the start of their coverage, in Algeria and the metropole,

Jewish writers rarely used the term ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’, but rather ‘indigene’. While the word

translates as ‘native’ and designated the legal category of non-citizen Muslims in Algeria, in

colonial discourses, it carried a pejorative connotation hinting at savagery.39 By contrast,

reports often referred to Jews as ‘israelites’, the title that most French Jews used to insist that

their Jewishness represented a confessional rather than national affiliation. Several reports in

the Jewish press reprinted official government statements. Once more, state narratives helped

to shape Jewish ones.

While the terminology of these accounts was hardly original, its constant reiteration had

implications for shifting models of Algerian Jewish remembrance. Repeatedly terming Jews

as victims and ‘israelites’ and Muslims as aggressors and ‘indigenes’ suggested that, whereas

Jews could become civilised and French, Muslims remained bound to their primitive Maghre-

bian past. Jewish organs in Algeria and France reinforced this dichotomy as they filled their

pages with poignant and horrifying details of murder and destruction by Muslim attackers

against Jewish persons and property. The two leading French Jewish newspapers and the

recently founded Bulletin de la Federation des societes juives d’Algerie featured stories that

repeatedly described the cutting of victims’ throats, the terror of women and children, and the

bloody destruction wrought in a few hours by a fanatical horde of rioters.40 Likewise, Jewish

accounts constantly searched for the riots’ ‘real’ cause, implicating the provocations of

Muslim leaders (Lellouche 1934), Nazi or French right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda (Cherch-

evsky 1934, La Terre Retrouvee 1934), Arab nationalists (cited in Ageron 1973, p. 31), and

French officials’ negligence or even complicity (Lellouche 1934). While these accusations

reflected genuine suspicions, they also suggested that Muslims were manipulated, and that

absent the imposition of law-and-order, they might become violent.

Such representations separated Algerian Muslims, their motivations, and their place in history

from the French nation. Four years earlier, Jewish narratives had ignored colonial atrocities and

discrimination against Muslims; yet they had situated Muslims on the same path of emancipation

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and Frenchification where their Jewish fellow natives marched ahead. Now, in the paradigm of

violence and vulnerability, differences between Algerian Jews and Muslims became central,

linked to divergent modes of French progress and enlightenment on the one hand, and indigen-

ous stagnation and brutality on the other hand. Suddenly, it was no longer clear that Jews and

Muslims shared the same historical path or destiny. In a related vein, ethnic divisions

between ‘Europeans’, ‘israelites’, and ‘indigenes’ – encoded, as Cole (2010) has contended,

in interwar electoral laws and politics – garnered emphasis in Jewish narratives of the riots.

Mirroring Jewish renderings, Muslim accounts focused on differences between the two

group’s relationships to France. Most Muslims who spoke forcefully about the riots did so as

Algerian reformists in Constantine or as members of the nascent Algerian nationalist movement

among North African labourers in the metropole. In the former instance, the rising local political

figure Mohamed Salah Bendjelloul compiled Muslim testimonies into his own report. Bendjel-

loul utilised the resulting document to give voice to Muslim experiences as individuals; chal-

lenge the colonial administration to reform; and paint Jews as a tribal group that had

provoked the violence (Cole 2010, pp. 21–22). Among the nationalists of the metropole,

Messali Hadj’s followers in the Etoile Nord-Africaine (ENA) held numerous meetings and

printed flyers and newsletters. Denouncing French rule and honouring Muslim victims of the

riots as martyrs, the ENA characterised the event as the opening salvo in an anti-colonial

struggle. While nationalist speakers and writers made clear that their primary target was the

French colonial state, they repeatedly demonised Jews by attaching them to France and the

evils of colonialism.41

Reassessing their own relationship to France, Jews revealed newfound uncertainty about the

republic’s commitment to protect them. Jews’ sense of their Frenchness as suddenly tenuous

hardly contradicts the insistent contrast that they drew between Jews as loyal ‘israelites’ and

Muslims as threatening ‘indigenes’. In fact, the former helps to explain the latter. Likewise, in

their critiques of the authorities’ role, many Jews at once highlighted Algerian Jews’ claim to

full membership in the French nation and evinced a sense of betrayal. The October 1934 cover

of the Le Bulletin de la Federation des Societes Juives d’Algerie (1934a) asked, ‘The Tragedy

of Constantine: Whose fault?’ and seemed to answer with an indictment of the French adminis-

tration. In the editorial on the inside page, the editors lamented, ‘twenty-five Frenchmen are dead,

in the shadow of the flag’. The author attacked bitterly the anti-Semitism of many colons, whom

he claimed had ‘wished for such things’. The author pleaded with the administration: ‘Justice! We

denounce those responsible!’ Turning again to World War I, he noted, ‘I hear well that France is a

land of liberty; and we French Jews, we love it passionately...This love is inscribed in letters of

blood on the fronts of war and also in the flesh of our wounded’. Near the end of the article,

the editor spoke with firm insistence: ‘North African Jews, French by heart and by law, we

demand that France, our country, take in hand the organisation of its own security’ (Le Bulletin

de la Federation des societes juives d’Algerie 1934b).

Such reactions made palpable both accusations of complicity against colons, and stunned dis-

appointment at the authorities’ failure of protection. These constituted betrayals not only of the

Jews but of the values of the France that so many of the community had loved and served. A

number of Jews and non-Jews alike perceived quickly that the riots represented an acute

rupture for Jewish identity and memory. One deputy of Constantine, writing to the Governor-

General, even lamented how, ‘In the period after the celebration of the Centenary, we have

allowed to enter here a page which will remain like a black mark [on France’s reputation]’

(Alliance Israelite Universelle 1934e). The report on the riots compiled for the World Jewish

Conference of 1934 quoted one Algerian Jewish leader who declared:

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Ah, if the object of this attack had been the ‘European’ French! How violent the authorities’ reactionwould have been! But at the moment when it was about the Jews, they found a thousand pretexts toremain passive in order to sacrifice the eternal scapegoat. We are French for the Arabs, and poor Jewsfor the French. That is our tragedy (Alliance Israelite Universelle 1934c).42

No longer the undisputed shepherd of Jewish civilisation and acculturation in Algeria, now

France was placed at a distance from Jewish history and Jewish future. For some Jews, the

rupture became one of physical displacement. The emeutes helped trigger the departure of up

to 1000 Jews from Constantine (out of 14,254) for Paris or Tunis (Alliance Israelite Universelle

1934d, Sitbon 1997).

Migration as a response to violence followed longstanding patterns of Jewish history. Like-

wise, in the wake of the riots, a central memory trope of the older Jewish past re-emerged: per-

secution, more specifically the specter of the deadly anti-Semitic attack, often called since the

late nineteenth century the pogrom. Pogrom, a Russian word, originated in the Ashkenazi

context, specifically the Russian empire. By the 1880s, the term signified a spontaneous outburst

of communal violence by the majority against a defenseless (usually Jewish) minority with the

authorities perceived as either negligent or complicit (Klier 1992, Bergman 2003). In the case of

the attacks in Constantine, the term represented something of a misnomer, as a number of Jews

had themselves committed provocations or even violence, and the authorities’ role remained

unclear. Nonetheless, several stories in the metropolitan and Algerian Jewish press called the

riots a pogrom (L’Univers Israelite 1934b, Gozlan 1934). This familiar reference likely reflected

both the longstanding humanitarian efforts of French Jewry on behalf of other Jewish commu-

nities, including those of Russia, and the sizable number of Russian and Eastern European

Jewish immigrants living in France by the mid-1930s.

In addition, traditional religious responses to persecution resurfaced in the wake of Constan-

tine. Special prayers and memorial services on behalf of the Jewish victims and their families

occurred in numerous locales in Algeria and France (Le Bulletin de la Federation des societes

juives d’Algerie (BFSJA), 1934c; L’Univers Israelite 1934e, 1934f). One can find traces of

two other Jewish responses that, ever since the Middle Ages, had emerged specifically in the

wake of communal tragedy. The first was the ‘Memorbuch’, or Memory Book. Such a book, par-

ticularly common among Ashkenazic communities, traditionally featured communal leaders and

histories of persecution with lists of their ‘martyrs’. In 1934, the Jewish press served a similar

function, offering not only detailed, pathos-filled accounts of the violence, but also a list of

‘Our Martyrs’. In this instance, modern journalism had taken up tasks previously performed

by the Memory Book.43

A second traditional religious response was selichot, or penitential prayers in the form of

heartfelt poetry, pouring out the community’s emotions. Written following communal

tragedy, selichot traditionally prayed for deliverance, asked for divine forgiveness or justice,

and in some fashion commemorated the painful events. Typically, such prayers were only

loosely based upon ‘the facts’ of what had occurred, as the poet could be confident that the com-

munity already knew them well.44 In response to the 1934 riots, one Tunisian Jew published a

fictional story in the pages of the L’Univers Israelite entitled ‘selichot rouge’ (Ryvel 1934).

Described as a dream, set in the Tunisian town of La Marsa-Plage, just outside of Tunis, the

story begins in the dead of night as Jews are reciting traditional selichot prayers in what

appears to be the aftermath of Constantine. The author describes ‘familiar voices that move

my most secret sensibility . . . disdainful of the justice of men, voices address themselves to

God, master of all things, proclaiming their sadness, their faith, their hope’. Meanwhile,

sounds are heard of the wind lashing the beach and of dogs howling at the moon. Suddenly, a

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bloodthirsty horde of Muslims arrives, massacring all the Jews present in a fit of vengeance for

the very type of incident that began the troubles at Constantine. Soon after, the writer tries to

explain to one of the murderers the error of his ways. In response, the Muslim succumbs to a

fit of uncontrollable, cruel laughter and leaves the scene. The narrator then wakes from his

dream to the sound of an infant and the inspired cantillation of the prayer leader in the synago-

gue. Even as he uses his story as a cautionary tale to the Jews of North Africa, he also lauds them

for ‘your beautiful faith in God that makes you dare to assemble, at night, at the time when

everyone is sleeping in the indigene section of town, without any arms other than prayer . . .’45

In addition to its title and its reference to selichot prayers, this story exhibits certain traditional

characteristics of the genre: poetic and religious sensibilities, an emotional expressiveness,

haunting undertones, and a loose but clear connection to the recent tragedy. At the same

time, it reflects important contemporary departures from a purely sacred genre of writing. The

work takes a literary rather than conventional penitential form; specifically, the author structures

it as a dream. With several of its features, the story carries, from a traditional religious stand-

point, highly subversive implications: the disconnection between the seemingly unanswered,

heartfelt prayers – directed to an explicitly mentioned masterful God – and the massacre that

follows; the lonely atmosphere of abandonment; and the final lines that foretell greater danger

ahead for North African Jewry. Each of these aspects seemed to secularise a longtime religious

form. Indeed, they all echoed precise changes witnessed since the late nineteenth century in

Jewish written responses to catastrophe, parallel to those of what Roskies (1984) has termed

‘pogrom poems’ in the Ashkenazic setting (especially c. 4).46

Following the riots of Constantine, the violence and vulnerability model of Algerian Jewish

remembrance contested, rather than displaced, the progress and patriotism model. Indeed, just as

the centenary accounts of the history of Algerian Jews were not monolithically overjoyed, in the

period after the 1934 emeutes, certain Jews expressed cautious optimism about the future of their

national belonging and relations with Muslims. A lengthy account of the riot in the Bulletin, for

instance, emphasised: ‘Muslim indigene elected officials and notables have expressed their

strong condemnation of such cruel events. We should not doubt these sentiments. Muslim friend-

ship is still dear to us, still precious’ (Gozlan 1934). In the metropolitan Jewish press,

articles appeared praising certain Muslim leaders’ efforts to mend relations (L’Univers Israelite

1934c, 1934d). Such reports offered a significant counterweight to the ubiquitous negative

representations of Muslim perpetrators. Likewise, they suggested the ongoing presence of

multiple historical narratives and future projections for the place of Jews and Muslims in

French Algeria.

Indeed, in the months and years following August 1934, the two remembrance models played

competing roles in the actions, experiences, and aspirations of Algerian Jewry. A Muslim econ-

omic boycott of Jews persisted until November 1934 even as leaders from both communities

worked to mend relations. The trials of the accused kept the riots in the Jewish press until the

February 1936 conviction of the murderers of the Halimi family (L’Univers Israelite 1936).

The emergence of the Popular Front, led by the Jewish socialist Leon Blum, and supported

by numerous Jewish and Muslim leaders and groups, offered a particularly hopeful moment

for visions of French progress and universalism. Yet the divisive memory of the riots persisted.

In meetings and the press, Jewish and Muslim speakers and writers sought explicitly to move

beyond the specter of Constantine (Corrot 1936, Gozlan 1936). The riot of August 1934

would remain a signal event. Jews and Muslims alike would continue to invoke it for

decades, framing its significance in relation to subsequent events.47 In this manner, the

memory of the emeutes endured, and shaped a broader model of Algerian Jewish remembrance.

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Post-‘exode’ memory and the Cremieux Decree centenary

Between the interwar and post-colonial eras, the progress and patriotism and violence and vul-

nerability models of remembrance would reapply themselves to new historical developments.

The most critical events in this process were World War II and the Franco-Algerian War. In

the first instance, Vichy’s decision in October 1940 to abrogate the Cremieux Decree, stripping

Algerian Jews of French citizenship, devastated the community. Following the November 1942

Allied landing in Algeria, Jewish leaders were shocked that the Allies and the Free French did

not reinstate the Decree for almost a year. These experiences strengthened the paradigm of vio-

lence and vulnerability, and cast it into a new realm, that of legal status. Algerian Jews would

forever recall that they had lost their French citizenship once and thus could never take it for

granted. But the war’s ultimate outcome was widely understood as a victory for freedom over

tyranny. Algerian Jewish resisters played a pivotal role in the success of the Allied landing.

The eventual triumph of the Resistance and the defeat of fascism seemed to return all Algerian

inhabitants to the path of progress and patriotism, restoring many Jews’ optimism about the

republic.48

From 1954 to 1962, the Franco-Algerian War tested Algerian Jewry’s allegiances as never

before. As the secretary-general of the Comite Juif Algerien d’Etudes Sociales (CJAES), the

leading representative body of Algerian Jewry, Jacques Lazarus sought to navigate the commu-

nity’s conflicting loyalties and interests. Lazarus’ own story embodied the multiple, fluid posi-

tionalities of those who came to speak for Algerian Jews and their memory. Born in Switzerland

to an Alsatian Jewish family, Lazarus gained attention as a leader in the Jewish Resistance

during World War II. He earned the nickname ‘the Jackal’, and narrowly escaped near-

certain death in 1944 by leaping from a train en route to Auschwitz. After the war, Lazarus

went to Algeria to open the first schools for the French Jewish vocational association ORT.49

Soon, he became heavily involved in the Algerian Jewish community, helping to revive the

CJAES; founding and editing the Jewish newspaper, Information Juive; and serving as the

North African representative to the World Jewish Congress. After playing a leading role in

the community throughout the Franco-Algerian War, Lazarus came to France with most of

Algerian Jewry and continued to work intensively on its behalf.50

In what became a defining 1956 declaration in the CJAES organ Information Juive, Lazarus

tried to craft a position of neutrality. He wrote that Algerian Jews maintained a ‘profound rec-

ogn[ition] of France, to whom we owe so much’. In the same statement, he recalled the Jews’

2000-year presence in Algeria, and emphasised the cordiality of historical Jewish–Muslim

relations and hopes of future coexistence. Evoking Jews’ suffering due to racism and Judaism’s

tradition of ‘ma[king] justice and equality between men an absolute demand’, the organisation

called its community ‘unshakably attached to these principles’ (Information Juive 1956).

Through this formulation, Lazarus and the CJAES attempted to uphold a narrative of patriotism

and progress whereby not only Jews but all Algerians could still attain liberation under French

tutelage.

But Lazarus’ private correspondence from the period illustrates how this narrative was

becoming increasingly intertwined with that of vulnerability. In one confidential letter of

January 1957, he declared, ‘the future of the Jewish collectivity in North Africa is conditioned,

in large part, on the maintenance of France in Algeria’ (Alliance Israelite Universelle 1957a). A

few months later, he elaborated: ‘[F]or the Jews [of Algeria] . . . [n]ow’, he wrote,

it is a matter of choosing, of choosing between two worlds, between modes of life. Algerian Judaismis too integrated into the Western world, to the detriment even of its own ancestral values, to take

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another path forward than that which it has followed for more than a century. (Alliance Israelite Uni-verselle 1957b, emphasis mine)

Lazarus and others repeatedly resisted pleas from the Front de Liberation National (FLN) to

express Jewish support for independence. In the course of the war, the FLN grew impatient

with the ‘wait-and-see’ attitude of most Jews, eventually committing numerous violent acts

against specifically Jewish targets. By 1961, Algerian Jews had to contend as well with

threats and attacks from the newly formed Organisation de l’Armee Secrete, a paramilitary

organisation dedicated to keeping Algeria French at all costs.51

In these circumstances, Algerian Jews increasingly saw their fates as separate from those of

the independence movement and the physical space of Algeria. Lazarus and other leaders in

Algeria and France employed considerable energy to guarantee that, in the event of French with-

drawal, Algeria’s Jews would have the option of coming to France as citizens in the same way as

any other French ‘European’ from Algeria. These ultimately successful efforts included repeated

references not only to the Cremieux Decree and loyalty to France, but also to the painful pre-

cedent of the loss of citizenship between 1940 and 1943. The decision of most of the community

of 140,000 to migrate to France at the war’s end reflected a momentous turn in Algerian Jews’

historical self-understanding: they chose France, definitive of their evolution, their patriotic

loyalty, and their path forward. In significant part, older memories and recent histories of

violence and vulnerability helped to clinch the decision.52

The end of French Algeria brought floods of Algerian Jews, pied-noirs, and Muslims to

French shores (Jordi and Temime 1996). The new arrivals struggled to find their footing in

post-colonial France. In order to weather the moment’s profoundly disorienting changes, each

group needed to craft a coherent, usable past. Such a narrative had to confront several elements:

the ruptures of the Algerian uprising and independence, and the accompanying physical, ideo-

logical, and emotional displacements.53 Leading Algerian Jews addressed these narrative

necessities by situating the events of 1954–62 within the two previous models of remembrance.

Simultaneously, they reinforced the metamorphoses and growing fusion of these two models that

had occurred during the Franco-Algerian conflict.

The newly formed AJOA quickly took on a key role in fashioning post-colonial Algerian

Jewish memory. Created in December 1962, the AJOA was the successor in mainland France

to the CJAES. By declaring itself apolitical from the outset, the AJOA established continuity

with the CJAES’s wartime posture of neutrality. In its articulated historical memory,

however, the AJOA chose to forget two of its precursor’s major preoccupations during the

Algerian conflict: one, maintaining cordial relations with Algerian Muslims; and two, securing

guarantees about the future French citizenship of Algeria’s Jews.

This selective forgetting reflected how the progress and patriotism and the violence and vul-

nerability models of remembrance merged in the post-colonial period. This merging played a

pivotal role in the process through which Algerian Jewish leaders in France forged a cohesive

past from multiple, contradictory strands in their recent history. Linking the two models of

remembrance accentuated the episodes of violence and vulnerability that had helped to catalyze

Jews’ departure from Algeria, but it also reduced them to a finite chapter. That is, the mass

migration had been painful, leading to a kind of ‘exile’ in France. Yet, Algerian Jews often

called the event an ‘exode’ (‘exodus’) and framed it as the logical fulfillment of the path of lib-

eration under French tutelage.54

Beyond their place within a wider set of displacements from Algeria, these newly arrived Jews

were also the majority in a larger North African Jewish migration. Between 1949 and 1969,

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roughly 250,000 Jews came to France from the Maghreb and Egypt. This wave of migration

swelled France’s overall Jewish population to 535,000 by the late 1960s. For France’s native

Jewish community, still rebuilding from the destruction of World War II, these developments

would prove immensely challenging, prompting an unprecedented mobilisation of resources

to welcome, aid, and acculturate the newcomers. Ultimately, the migration would rejuvenate

and transform French Jewish life. To a longstanding Ashkenazic, highly integrated population,

these Jews from the Maghreb brought changes and distinctive outlooks in religious and cultural

customs, socio-economics, family life, and public expressions of Jewish identity (Zytnicki 2005,

pp. 85–88).

In this context, while the AJOA worked with the established French Jewish community for the

‘fusion’ of its constituents ‘within metropolitan Jewry’,55 it also sought to maintain the distinct

‘personality’ and traditions of the Jewish ‘rapatries’ (Information Juive 1963). During the next

20 years, the AJOA defended the interests of Algerian Jewry, attending to matters as diverse as

housing, schools, and attempts to reclaim assets or protect holy sites in Algeria. We may observe

the group’s significant influence by noting that, as of December 1964, its newspaper, Information

Juive, recreated in the metropole, had a circulation of 15,000.56 In 1968, observers noted the

widespread respect of Algerian Jews for the AJOA leadership, and estimated its active member-

ship as 10,000 strong.57

In order to understand the AJOA’s response to the 1970 centennial of the Cremieux Decree,

we must analyze briefly its almost total silence, at least publicly, regarding the more recent

Algerian Jewish past. A close examination of the meeting minutes of both the AJOA general

assembly and administrative council from 1963 to 1976 reveals only a handful of rather

oblique references to the events of the Algerian conflict, and not a word about the large

numbers of Algerian Muslims now residing in France.58 Likewise, in December 1964, at an

all-day gathering focused on the needs of Algerian Jews living in the Parisian suburbs, speakers

made no mention of the potential challenges or benefits of the often sizable nearby Algerian

Muslim populations.59 In part, such silences undoubtedly reflected other, more pressing preoc-

cupations of economic, cultural, and social integration. Increasing Jewish–Muslim tensions in

North Africa, often over the Israeli-Arab conflict, also surely played a role.

Yet given the AJOA’s history and its larger efforts to maintain distinctive Algerian traditions,

the absence remains notable. In an increasingly racialised environment where Jews hoped to be

understood as fully ‘European’ rather than ‘Arab’, these silences suggest a desire to avoid associ-

ation with a group that, due to the colonial past, was often considered ‘non-white’ and less than

fully French. Paying little attention to the presence of Muslims enabled Algerian Jews to forget

the trauma of suddenly fleeing a society in which one’s families and culture had resided for gen-

erations.60

Moreover, within a longitudinal perspective on Algerian Jewish memory, this silence reflects

the quest for a deeper sort of narrative continuity. Such post-colonial forgetting hearkened back

to an earlier Algerian Jewish narrative absence: the unbridled celebration in 1930 of master

stories of French progress and Jewish Exodus, at the expense of concern for the colonial oppres-

sion of native Algerian Muslims. This earlier problematic intertwining of French and Jewish

emancipation narratives prefigured a parallel outlook three decades later that helped to fuel

Algerian Jews’ striking ambivalence regarding their Muslim fellow emigrants to France.

The AJOA’s response to the centenary of the Cremieux Decree underscored the way that com-

bining the two models of remembrance enabled the community to weave attachments to Algeria,

France, and Jewishness, along with a profound sense of loss and displacement, into something

like a linear narrative. As noted at the outset, after much discussion, the association’s leadership

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decided in July 1970 that, instead of a public celebration of the decree’s anniversary, the group

would opt for ‘a sober display of limited scope’. On 25 October 1970, the AJOA held a large

‘informational meeting’, with a few speakers and special guests, to mark the occasion.61

This subdued observance contrasted the monumental importance that both Algerian and

metropolitan French Jewry had traditionally assigned to the Decree. Longtime Algerian commu-

nal activist Emile Touati served as a chief advocate of such restraint. Indeed, Touati’s voice

became crucial to the entire AJOA treatment of the centenary. For, as a primer for the centenary

observance, in their September 1970 issue, the editors of Information Juive republished, in unal-

tered form, a lengthy essay about the Decree’s history that Touati (1961) had penned 9 years

earlier, under rather different circumstances.

When first published in February 1961, Touati’s article had attempted to respond to two con-

cerns: one, the perceived danger that Jews might lose their French citizenship at the advent of

Algerian independence; and two, accusations by Algerian nationalists that the Decree had

unfairly privileged Algeria’s Jews and divided them from Muslims. In his article, Touati

treats the official act of emancipation as merely the formalised result of a longstanding

process of legal ‘Frenchification’ for Algerian Jewry. He reminds his readers of several

aspects of Muslims’ historic relationship to the Decree and French citizenship: the 1871 declara-

tion of support for the Decree by leading Muslim notables of Constantine, the fact that Muslims

were eligible to apply individually to become French though most preferred not give up their

status under their religious law (as the Decree forced all Jews to do), and the opposition

expressed by many Muslims to Vichy’s revocation of the Decree during World War II. In

this way, he tried to show that the Decree had neither privileged Jews nor angered Muslims.

Jews and Muslims, according to Touati, had followed divergent paths reflective of their respect-

ive wishes. Yet through legal reforms of 1919, 1947, and 1958, Muslims did gradually gain full

French citizenship. Most importantly, argued Touati, the Decree was now merely symbolic and

no longer legally relevant. Because their parents attained citizenship under the Decree, Algerian

Jews of subsequent generations had French citizenship automatically, not via an act of emanci-

pation. Given that they had become completely integrated, Jews could not be distinguished from

other French citizens of Algeria.

This outlook explains Touati’s ultimately successful effort to minimise the public attention

granted by Algerian Jews to the Cremieux Decree’s 100th anniversary. Their citizenship was

so assured, their past process of emancipation and integration so distant, he implied, that the

community should treat it with no fanfare. Touati appeared to fear that to do otherwise would

stigmatise Algerian Jews as different, from the native Jews of mainland France, and from the

far more numerous pieds-noirs. Yet in mentioning plans to republish his article, AJOA leader

Jacques Lazarus described the essay as ‘having lost nothing of its current relevance’.62 In a

remarkably ahistorical fashion, these words suggested that little had changed since February

1961. Indeed, the use of this article, Lazarus’ statement of support, and the larger restraint of

the observance all implied that, rather than seeking to forget parts of their history, Algerian

Jews simply remained the models of republican integration that they had claimed to be until

the very last moments of French Algeria.

Further reinforcing this outlook was Lazarus’ correspondence with Alfred Ghighi, a former

Algerian Jewish communal leader and member of the General Council of Oran (Alliance Israe-

lite Universelle 1970b). In a letter that he wrote the previous year to his friend Andre Chouraqui

and then sent to Lazarus in the months preceding the centenary, the elderly Ghighi spoke of his

desire to pass along to future generations a previously unknown chapter of history, his pivotal

role in the reinstatement of the Cremieux Decree in 1943. According to Ghighi’s account, he

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lobbied General Charles De Gaulle and found him receptive but concerned over Muslim reac-

tion. Ghighi then received assurances from his Muslim colleagues on the General Council of

Oran, who declared that all Frenchmen were equal and the Decree’s revocation had deeply

offended them. At Ghighi’s urging, the Muslim officials issued a public statement of support,

bringing a policy shift within days from De Gaulle. This letter, through its portrayals of De

Gaulle as eager to restore Jewish citizenship, of Muslims as seeing their fate aligned with that

of Jews, and of Jews as taking an active role in their own liberation, resituated the events of

1943. No longer a wounding reminder of vulnerability, the moment became transformed into

a vivid chapter in the progress and patriotism narrative.

Touati and Ghighi’s narratives, and their juxtaposition to the centenary observances,

suggested a particular post-colonial relationship between the progress and patriotism and vio-

lence and vulnerability narratives. The second had to be subordinate to the first. By absorbing

‘exile’ within ‘exodus’, Algerian Jewish memory could emphasise episodes of harmony with

Muslims on their own path to integration and minimise the terrible violence and divisions of

the Franco-Algerian War. At the same time, Algerian Jews connected to two emerging dimen-

sions of French Jewish identity after 1967 – visible attachments to Israel and Holocaust com-

memoration – that reinforced wider Jewish narratives of violence and vulnerability.

Emphasising these components linked up Algerian Jews’ experiences of fear and suffering

with those of European Jewry, thus forging closer ties with the metropolitan Jewish community,

and further burying the contradictions of the colonial past.63 Thus, the AJOA drew upon various

long- and short-term memory strands to craft a framework that could paper over the massive rup-

tures and displacements of the Algerian conflict and its aftermath.

Here again, Muslim responses offer an instructive comparison. Like the AJOA, the leading

post-colonial organisation for Muslims from Algeria, the Amicale des Algeriens en France

(ADAF), attempted to ignore the transformative nature of independence, but through a rather

different narrative. Like its sponsor, the Algerian government, the ADAF repeatedly linked

itself to an ongoing Algerian revolution. In so doing, the organisation minimised the importance

of 1962 as a sharp historical break, instead looking ever forward to an unspecified future moment

when the revolution would be complete (L’Algerien en Europe 1967a, 1967c). Also deeply influ-

enced by the 1967 War, the ADAF sought to rally Algerians in France around Palestinian liber-

ation. The organisation framed the cause as the latest battle in a continuing freedom struggle that

had begun with the Algerian uprising (L’Algerien en Europe 1967b).

Conclusion

This essay has sought to trace long-term modes and developments in Algerian Jewish collective

memory. Two interrelated models of remembrance – one emphasising progress and patriotism

under French tutelage, the other focused on recurrent violence and vulnerability in the colonial

context – crystallised around two events: the 1930 centenary of the French conquest and the

August 1934 Constantine riots, respectively. Each model drew upon narrative tropes of

French universalism and colonialism, and on master narratives and memorial practices from

Jewish tradition. During World War II and the Franco-Algerian War, each model of remem-

brance became at once reinforced and re-appropriated. A final emblematic commemorative

moment, the 1970 centenary of the Cremieux Decree, illustrates how certain Algerian Jewish

leaders had, in the course of decolonisation, come to combine the two previously opposed (if

inherently inseparable) models into a kind of dialectical symbiosis. The process of passing

from Algeria to France became, all at once, a leap forward in the long process of Exodus and

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emancipation, and the decisive escape from an increasingly violent and vulnerable Jewish exist-

ence. At each crucial commemorative moment, Algerian Jewish memory at once mirrored and

diverged from that of Algerian Muslims. This article has illustrated that such a longitudinal and

comparative perspective on Algerian Jewish memory is vital in order to account fully for the way

that Jews remembered the Franco-Algerian War. Simply put, this event’s memory can only be

understood in longer and wider memorial contexts, not in isolation.

This re-conception of the Algerian Jewish historical imagination has at least two broader

implications. First, we have seen how articulations of Algerian Jewish memory both

emerged from, and made choices among, multiple positionalities and influences. Scholars

have commented upon the unique identity of Algerian Jews in post-colonial France, separate

from that of other ‘rapatries’, North African Jews, or native French Jews. Yet, they have neg-

lected the crucial role of a particular collective narrative, and its harmonious merging of

certain memory strands, and erasure of others, in constituting this identity. Second, since

the so-called ‘imperial turn’ in French historiography, scholars have increasingly treated

decolonisation as the lynchpin of the recent French past. The case of Algerian Jews,

however, exposes the limitations of this approach. We see that our efforts to find the roots

of post-colonial memories, discourses, and identities in France cannot fixate narrowly

on the era of decolonisation. Instead, we must dig deeper into the long-term experience of

colonialism itself.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many readers whose feedback strengthened this article considerably. Joshua Cole, JonathanGribetz, Jessica Hammerman, and Lisa Moses Leff took time to read early drafts and offered insightful andinvaluable critiques and suggestions. Subsequently, the probing comments and questions of Susan Slyomo-vics and Sarah Stein forced me to rethink and address several important issues. It should go without sayingthat all faults or errors remain mine alone.

Notes

1. The law did not give citizenship to the several thousand Jews living in the Mzab region of the Algerian Sahara,

whose conquest the French still had not completed in 1870.

2. Archives du Consistoire Israelite Centrale de France (1970a), hereafter ACICF.

3. Therefore, we mean in no way to suggest that all Algerian Jews remembered their past in the same manner or

that these sources can tell us how each Algerian Jew understood his/her history.

4. Here, McDougall (2006) refers specifically to French Algeria, but as his broad language suggests, the description

could apply to numerous colonial contexts (p. 72).

5. I draw this formulation in part from Younsi (2003).

6. In a similar vein, Watson (2012) shows the multiple Algerian, French, and Jewish influences that have shaped as

well subsequent individual articulations of Algerian Jewish memory.

7. With respect to the memory of the Algerian War in particular, the work of Stora (1992, 1999) has been especially

influential. For two important more recent directions, see Shepard (2006) and Rothberg (2009).

8. See, for instance, the fine introduction to Lorcin (2006), which despite the volume’s much broader title and

subject matter, focuses primarily on the memory of the Franco-Algerian War and decolonisation. McDougall’s

(2006) recent work on the construction of Algerian historical narrative over the longue duree is an important

exception. Rothberg (2009), meanwhile, also expands narrative boundaries by focusing on the relationship

between Holocaust memory and the memory of colonialism and decolonisation.

9. See, in particular, Bahloul (1996), Friedman (1988), Slyomovics (2000), Stora (2006), Watson (2012), and

Wood (1999). Despite their numerous insights, these works do not challenge the pattern outlined above.

10. See, especially, Friedman (1988), Rothberg (2009), Stora (2006), and Wood (1999).

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11. Scholarship on the centenary remains remarkably thin. For an excellent discussion of the competing strands of

memory, see Graebner (2007, c. 4). For an emphasis on the second, anti-assimilationist treatment of the centen-

ary, consult Lambelet (2005).

12. For photographs and a recounting of this history, as well as the recent restoration of these memory markers, see

Le Monument aux morts [online]. Available from: http://www.monumentsauxmorts.fr/.

13. For a good discussion of this phenomenon in the early decades of colonisation, see Schreier (2010).

14. There was truth to this assertion. On the complex long-term processes that led to the Cremieux Decree, see

Schreier (2010) and Shurkin (2010).

15. Pierre Birnbaum has written at length about the notion of ‘republican Judaism’, now a term used commonly by

scholars to denote what became, by the late nineteenth century, a widespread French Jewish devotion to the

republic and its ideals of liberty, equality, and public secularism. See especially Birnbaum (1996). A fuller

discussion of this ideology and its significance to Jewish treatments of the centenary are given later.

16. Here, Boucris clearly referred to the legendary nineteenth-century German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz,

widely regarded as the ‘father of Jewish history’.

17. To some degree, the lack of surviving evidence of specifically Algerian Jewish engagement with the centenary

merits further investigation. I base my contention here on the absence of discussions of specifically Jewish com-

memorative events in several places: the organs of the metropolitan French Jewish press and official French pub-

lications on the centenary, such as Le Livre d’Or du Centenaire de l’Algerie Francaise (1930), Centenaire de

l’Algerie (1930), and Mercier (1931). At the same time, in correspondence, Susan Slyomovics has shared with

me that her own research has uncovered smaller cases of Jewish attention to the centenary, specifically in

western Algeria, in contexts such as small local, Jewish-owned publications, and Jewish scouting movements.

18. Numerous ceremonies for the centenary seemed designed to further the work of the Frenchification of Algeria.

See Le Livre d’Or du Centenaire de l’Algerie Francaise (1930).

19. On the decisive impact of both education and military service for forging French identity, the classic work is

Weber (1977). For the impact of education and military service on Algerian Jewish identity specifically, see

Allouche-Benayoun and Bensimon (1998, pp. 110–111; c. 13).

20. On the ideology and work of ‘regeneration’, see especially Berkovitz (1989). On efforts to bring the work of

regeneration to Algerian Jewry, see Schreier (2010).

21. The first term is Yerushalmi’s, the second Goldberg’s. Walzer’s argument seeks to extend the Exodus’ paradig-

matic status beyond Jewish history.

22. At least one contemporary communal leader, discussing the Biblical origins of the principles of the French

Revolution, explicitly linked the meaning of ‘Liberty’ for French and Algerian Jews to the annual rituals of

the Passover Seder, see Kaoua (1926–1927). For evidence of Passover’s enduring importance in this period

for even the less religious, see Malino (2008, pp. 136–137).

23. On the centrality of religion for the worldview of much of Algerian Jewry, see Allouche-Benayoun and Bensi-

mon (1998, c. 6).

24. For good examples on this point aside from those below, see Berkovitz (1989, pp. 60–61, 72, 188–90). I have

drawn on Berkowitz in connecting the Revolution as Exodus to the Haggadah’s traditional command to see the

Passover story as contemporary and personal (Berkovitz 1989, p. 280, nn82).

25. Many of these were collected and published in Mosse (1890).

26. Here, my literary reading draws in part from that of Pardes (2002).

27. Regarding the wave of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Algeria, and Oran in particular, see Dermenjian

(1986).

28. As with certain other citations offered above, my reading here accords with Garrett’s (2002) contention that,

even without explicit reference to the Exodus, ‘slavery necessarily generates some very specific reactions

among Jewish readers because of its inevitable associations’ with Moses’ heroism and the passage from

Egypt to freedom, and with subsequent histories of Jewish persecution (p. 226).

29. While Malino (2008) does not discuss AIU schoolchildren from Algeria specifically, the AIU curriculum shared

educational themes and even textbooks across its international networks and schools. Because Algerian Jews

could attend French public schools after 1870, the AIU’s presence in Algeria was admittedly limited. Nonethe-

less, beginning in 1900, the organisation created schools in Algeria to provide supplementary instruction to that

of public education. Its schools’ role in Algerian Jewish education increased during the interwar years.

30. For the longer term Jewish view of the civilising mission in Algeria and its significance for Jewish rhetorical and

narrative distance from Muslims, see Leff (2006, 2007) and Schreier (2010).

31. In my observations regarding Muslim absences, I am in part inspired by certain analogous contentions about the

exclusion of black Americans from the reconciliationist narrative of the American Civil War in Blight (2001).

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32. I have used quotation marks here to acknowledge the ambiguity of the term ‘emeutes’, and even its English

equivalent, ‘riots’. At one level, these terms are the most neutral way to describe an episode of collective vio-

lence that included some (if not equivalent) aggressive actions and provocations from multiple parties. At the

same time, the term also was used by French administrators and much of the French press, and reflected colo-

nialist assumptions about ‘rowdy’ native rioters. As discussed further on, other terms that framed this event, such

as a ‘pogrom’ or ‘massacre’ (on the part of many Jewish accounts); or the start of an anti-colonial ‘insurrection’

(according to the nascent Algerian nationalists), entailed their own distortions and blindspots. Thus, I have stuck

to emeutes or riots as the most neutral words possible. Yet as we can see, these terms are problematic, and under-

score the challenges for historians of writing even-handedly about inter-ethnic violence in colonial contexts.

33. For the most balanced published account of the riot itself, see Ageron (1973). For a more recent and persuasive

analysis of the riots’ meaning (which has influenced my own analysis in several ways), see Cole (2010). Attal

(2002) is at once memoir, history, and sourcebook of the riots. His parents were both murdered.

34. For direct examples, see Attal (2002, c. VII).

35. On the climate of growing anti-Semitism and tension in the years preceding the riots, see Cole’s essay in this

volume.

36. Hyman (1979) makes this argument broadly, and with specific regard to the riots, for the latter see pp. 206, 218,

nn36, and nn98.

37. This distinction corresponds in many respects to that between Pierre Nora’s conception of the lieux de memoire

as actively constructed monuments to the past and the milieux de memoire, or living social networks of memory,

described by Maurice Halbwachs.

38. Four came from Algerian Jews, see Lellouche (1934) and Alliance Israelite Universelle (1934a, 1934b, 1934f).

The fifth came from the French Zionist leader Joseph Fisher (Alliance Israelite Universelle 1934c).

39. On the complexity of the term ‘indigene’, see Blevis (2001).

40. See, for example, Archives Israelites (1934a), L’Univers Israelite (1934a), and Gozlan (1934).

41. Archives de la Prefecture de Police (1934).

42. Most of this report is also reproduced as a text at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (1934), entitled in the

type-set ‘Note sur les massacres de Constantine’, and mislabelled as a ministerial report in hand-written pen

scrawled across the top.

43. Broadly speaking, Memory Books remained a major way that many Jewish communities continued to honour

their dead. On the emergence and characteristics of the Memory Book as a genre, consult Yerushalmi (1996,

p. 46).

44. On the origins and development of selichot, see Yerushalmi (1996, pp. 45–46). Without using this term, Roskies

(1984) traces in great detail the evolution of the genre in Ashkenaz across many centuries.

45. The work’s title may be read as having a double meaning signifying both the genre of the writing and the prayer

service interrupted by the massacre.

46. Roskies’ illuminating, in-depth study focuses exclusively on the Ashknenazic world. To my knowledge, there is

no systematic examination of this evolution that has been undertaken for Sephardic or Mizrahi Jewry.

47. For a Muslim nationalist treatment during the Algerian War, see La Voix du Peuple Algerien (1956). For the

Jewish case in the post-1967 period, see, for example, La Presse Nouvelle (1969) and on the 50th anniversary,

Sitbon (1997), ‘Aout 1934’, and Attal (2002, p. 209).

48. On the impact of the World War II for Algerian Jews, see, among others Stora (2006, pp. 75–126).

49. ORT is the widely used acronym for the organisation, based upon its original name, the Organisation Recon-

struction Travail, later changed to the Organisation internationale de Recherche et de formation Technique.

50. For a good overview of Lazarus’ contributions to the Algerian Jewish community, see Hammerman (2010).

51. For much more on Jews’ negotiations of political positions during the war, see, among others, Ayoun (1996) and

Cohen (1996).

52. On the decision of Algerian Jews to depart for France en masse, see Stora (2006, part 3), Shepard (2006, c. 6),

and Sussman (2003).

53. Here, I am in part inspired by the somewhat parallel ideas of Geyer (1997) regarding the need to account for

contradictory paths and breaks in twentieth-century German history.

54. For a striking literary example of such a framing, see the commentary of Watson on an excerpt from Cohen’s

(2000) autobiographical novel.

55. ACICF (1964b).

56. See ACICF (1963a, 1963b, 1963c) and Abitbol (1998, p. 315). The first quotation and statistic come from

ACICF (1964c). The second quotation is from Information Juive (1963).

57. Central Zionist Archives (1967, 1968).

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58. ACICF (1963–1976).

59. ACICF (1964b). At this time, an estimated 350–500 Algerian Jewish families lived in the area of Saint-Denis

(ACICF 1964a), a neighbourhood where Algerian Muslims had longstanding roots and numbered as many as

10,000 in the late 1950s (Archives de la Prefecture de Police 1961).

60. Such concerns correspond to those expressed by many Algerian Jews interviewed by ethnographer Friedman

(1988) during the two decades following their arrival in France. Indeed, many resisted vehemently any

attempt to confuse them with ‘Arabs’ from Algeria. Yet simultaneously, they had great difficulty processing

how the war could have turned their world from a place where ‘we were all alike’, into one where everything

was ‘rotten’ (Friedman 1988, p. 98).

61. ACICF (1969, 1970a, 1970b), Alliance Israelite Universelle (1970a).

62. ACICF (1970a).

63. On the importance of these factors within wider French Jewish consciousness of this era, see Wolf (2004).

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