Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and: The French Intifada: The long war between France and its Arabs by Andrew Hussey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and: The French Intifada: The long war between France and its Arabs by Andrew Hussey Dzavid Dzanic Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria By Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. The French Intifada: The long war between France and its Arabs By Andrew Hussey. New York: Faber & Faber, 2014. Debates on immigration and national identity continue to permeate the public sphere in France. Countless essays, novels, historical monographs, documentaries and television shows have been devoted to these topics in recent years. The legacy of French imperialism often frames these debates and many commentators have pointed to possible links between the colonial past and the recent history of troubles in France’s poor suburban areas, or banlieues. Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria and Andrew Hussey’s The French Intifada: The long war between France and its Arabs throw new light on the long and complicated process that attended the creation and recreation of identities during the colonial and postcolonial periods in Algeria and France. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Stein examines the ways in which the colonial government in Algeria imposed an “Indigenous” identity on Mzabi Jews in southern Algeria by relying on rigid legal categories. Stein also shows that these legal categories continue to reverberate among this small community, despite its exodus from the Mzab in 1962. Using a comparative approach in The French Intifada, Hussey seeks to uncover what he sees as the colonial roots of widespread anger and anti-French views among the descendants of families who moved to France from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco both before and after decolonization. Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is an exceptional study in which Stein convincingly argues that the marginal social status of Mzabi Jews did not represent a perennial historical fact because their marginality was in fact constructed during eighty years of French colonization. By examining the history of Mzabi Jewry in its regional context and paying close attention to its entangled relationship with the more numerous Muslim Ibadi community, Stein rightly puts into question the widespread reliance on the east-west, or Occidental-Oriental, binary. She shows that members of this small community primarily experienced a north-south duality because they were treated as an Indigenous population with the same rights as their Muslim neighbors, while northern Jewry underwent a different trajectory, especially after it obtained the French citizenship due to the 1870 Crémieux decree. In the first chapter, Stein offers a fascinating examination of Lloyd Cabot Briggs’s 1964 book on the Mzabi Jewish community, No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish town, which Briggs wrote after personally witnessing the 1962 exodus. Due to his close relationship with the colonial authorities, Stein argues, Briggs failed to see that the “innate” traditional qualities he believed marked the community in fact represented the final stage of a long colonial process. Turning to the roots of that marginality in the second chapter, Stein shows that the decision to legally classify Mzabi Jews as an Indigenous population owed much to the colonial administration’s attempts to preserve the fragile status quo in the south, where French officers projected onto the Muslim population fears about possible unrest in the event of an extension of the Crémieux decree to the south after 1870. The third and fourth chapters detail the ways in which French officers and Mzabi Jews tested the elasticity of this unique legal categorization. For instance, French officers tried to rigidify the legal restrictions that circumscribed Mzabi Jews’ ability to travel, trade and mix with the surrounding Muslim and Jewish communities. According to French officers, this remained the only approach that could prevent the straining of relations between the colonial state and the Muslim Ibadi leadership. For their part, Mzabi Jews challenged their legal status by demanding to be conscripted into the army, by attempting to obtain better access to public health and by seeking access to French schools for their children. In the fifth chapter, Stein demonstrates that the imposition of limiting legal categories also meant...