Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, by Sarah Abrevaya

Abstract

Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2014. xv, 261 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $27.50 US (paper). In the early 1960s, a team of anthropologists introduced the Western world to the hidden Jews of the Algerian Sahara. They described primitive tribes, untouched by modernization. Tribesmen had traditional occupations, like metallurgy, and they lived in deplorable conditions. Women engaged in unusual childbirth rituals. These tribes were said to trace directly back to Moses. For years following their emigration in 1961, prior to Algerian independence in 1962, even well-meaning conversations about this group focused on their ill-preparedness for the modern world. Jewish experience in the M'zab was neither as rigid nor as pristine as it seemed. Under the years of French colonial rule, a legal barrier kept Jews out of the polity; Saharan Jewish communities were in fact adaptable and eager to modernize. Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a book about how these people were constricted, policed, and monitored. In fact, Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues that the very concept of their indigeneity was a French innovation. Jews were targets of the French colonial strategy to divide and rule--to segregate natives to manage the territory. Administrators elevated the status of Northern Algerian Jews, judging them to be closer than others to European lifestyles. Stein's book tells a lesser-known story about the Jews of the southern Algerian territories. Governed by a military administration, these people were not only restrained from the benefits of citizenship, they were also restricted from travel, medical care, and modern education. In 1882, the French annexed the Saharan territory as a protectorate, not an integrated departement as in the north. (Jews from Northern Algeria were naturalized in 1871.) Over the next eighty years of French governance, the administration denied Southern Jews the privilege of citizenship. The administration left behind a paper trail of justifications for this discrepancy between north and south. This archival material forms the basis of Stein's research. Saharan Jews were exempt from taxes, state registries, and military service, and they could neither vote nor attend public schools. They were governed by so-called which permitted them to engage in polygamous marriages, and allowed uncomplicated divorce proceedings. Colonial administrators reasoned that Southern Jews would live according to the Torah instead of French civil law. Although some bureaucrats suggested that Mosaic Law preserved cultural freedoms, Stein argues that it euphemized a negative legal identity (p. …