Ethan B. Katz. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France.

Abstract

Ethan B. Katz’s excellent, meticulously researched monograph The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France traces the political, social, and cultural relationships between Jews and Muslims in France—as a trans-Mediterranean space—from World War I through the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is an intricate analysis of the way the ebb and flow of these relationships shaped the contradictions and lost and attained potential of ethnic harmony and national allegiance. Katz eschews the binary analyses of Muslim versus Jew, racist versus nonracist, colonial versus anticolonial, dear to some scholars, to demonstrate that at any given moment in the chronological trajectory, equating the political, cultural, and social complexity of Jewish-Muslim relations to such binaries is not just reductionist, it is analytically unsophisticated. The book is divided into seven chapters, arranged more or less chronologically, each dealing with a defining moment in the Muslim-Jewish relationship. Katz’s innovation is to examine the lived interactions of ordinary Jews and Muslims, which, he argues, have been lost in the currents of contemporary events. The overarching disruptions that have shaped the lives of these ordinary players and reset their relationships were largely the result of four wars: the two world wars, the Algerian War of Independence, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. As Katz points out, French history has inscribed Jews into the republic and Muslims into the empire, but by examining the intricate associations of Jews with (and in) the colonies, Katz suggests that imperial projects were as important in shaping the identities of French Jews as was the republic (8). By examining separate urban spaces, namely Paris, Marseille, and Strasbourg, he shows that the local politics and demographic and geographic differences have created disparities in the Jewish-Muslim relations of each city.