Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara

Abstract

Algeria occupies a special place within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in the colonial world in which autochthonous Jews were granted citizenship by a colonial power; with the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, some 40 years after the French conquest of Algeria began, roughly 30,000 Jews became citizens of France in one of the only acts of mass naturalisation to occur under modern European imperial rule. It is usually but a footnote to histories of Algerian Jewry that the Crémieux Decree did not, in fact, extend to all Algerian Jews. At the time at which this law was passed, France had begun but not yet completed its bloody, 50-year conquest of the Algerian Sahara, where several thousand Jews lived. Algeria's Southern Territories (as they would come to be called in 1902) remained under direct military oversight for nearly 80 years of colonial rule, and Jewish residents of this administrative region, like the majority of Algerian Muslims, were categorised by the state as indigènes (indigenous subjects). This paper reconstructs how colonial conquest, law, and policy sought to delineate southern Algerian Jewry from northern Algerian Jewry. It argues that in the aftermath of the French conquest of the M'zab in 1882, the military sought to identify and legally isolate ‘southern Algerian Jewry’ (first from ‘northern Algerian Jewry’ and, subsequently, from Algerian Muslims) for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews, per se; rather, France sought to avoid jeopardising a protectorate relationship it had built with the region's Ibadite leadership in 1853, to protect French strategic interests, and to maintain a fragile status quo. Southern Algerian Jewish difference, neither inherent nor extra-historical, thus emerged as an exogenous creation of colonialism.

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