In colonial Algeria, the Jews of Mzab formed a “ native » distinct not only from the local Muslim community, but from the Jewish population of the North. American historian Sarah Stein reflects on the construction of statutory inequalities and citizenship in the French Empire.
Specialist in Sephardic history at the University of California at Los Angeles, Sarah Stein questions the existence of an unprecedented legal and administrative particularism in colonial Algeria, namely the submission of Saharan Israelite communities to the regime of the ‘native. Indeed, until 1961, nationals of Jewish faith from the vast area forming, from 1902, the enormous entity of “ Southern Territories » remain excluded from the naturalization process inaugurated by the Crémieux decree of 1870. Like their Muslim neighbors, they are subject to the rigidities of a “ mosaic personal status » which drastically limits their political and civil rights.
To analyze the genesis and, above all, the longevity of this little-known statutory exception, the author looks at the case of the largest of the Israelite communities “ indigenous »: that of the Jews of Mzab, an oasis archipelago located six hundred kilometers south of Algiers. By tracing the evolution of this community from the occupation of Mzab in 1882 until the exodus of 1962, Sarah Stein shows how the French authorities endeavored to create a “ Jewish native » which they considered not only distinct from the Jewish population of the North, but also alien to the local Muslim community.
The construction of the indigeneity »
An observation marks the starting point of the author’s reasoning: “ Native Jews are made and not found “. This means that the “ indigeneity » is constructed in the classifications of a colonial state keen to establish its control over indigenous populations. The American historian shows that maintaining a “ mosaic civil status », throughout the colonial period, testifies to the concern not to jeopardize the alliance with the notables of the Ibadi Muslim community of Mzab.
But the “ indigeneity » is also produced through the constitution of ethnographic knowledge. Sarah Stein shows in the first chapter how surveys and scholarly publications – the most important being the monograph by Briggs and Guède published in 1964 – contribute to shaping the image of a “ forgotten Jewish tribe », with heterogeneous origins and obscurantist traditions. In this vision, both miserabilist and mystifying, the Jews of Mzab are “ outsiders »: arriving in the region at the end of the Middle Ages, they owe their local roots only to the kindness of their Ibadi hosts.
This discourse on the foreignness and archaism of a population considered as “ unworthy » to be naturalized serves as legitimization for a policy aimed at social and economic isolation. The military administration of the Mzab strives to limit commercial exchanges between Jews and Muslims, just as it scrupulously ensures the preservation of spatial segregation between Israeli and Ibadi neighborhoods.
At the same time, measures are being taken which contribute to widening the gap with co-religionists in the North. Introduced in Algeria in 1845, the consistorial system did not find application in the Mzab. Community affairs are managed there by a Jewish municipal council (djemaa), created in the wake of the occupation in 1882 and chaired by a “ leader of the Jewish nation “. Finally, in legal matters, disputes relating to inheritance, marriage and family law are handled before a rabbinical court according to the rules of a “ mosaic law » which the author describes as “ an inventive marriage between early modern Ottoman jurisprudence and French colonial legislation “.
Despite the emphasis she places – rightly – on the disintegrative effects of this policy, Sarah Stein does not fall into the trap of a unilateral story in which the “ colonized » resign themselves to suffering the yoke of their “ colonizers “. By focusing on the negotiations and contestations through which the Jews of Mzab come to terms with a system often undermined by its own contradictions, the author tries on the contrary to keep the different perspectives in balance. Thus she insists on the manipulations of identity made possible by the indecisive nature of the borders separating the South of the Sahara from northern Algeria where “ the native » Jew is entitled to claim citizenship. Likewise, she highlights the frequency of petitions and grievances addressed to the French authorities.
Integration and exclusion
Even more revealing is the determination with which the Jewish community seeks to appropriate the three main institutions for the supervision of indigenous populations in a colonial context: the army, the hospital and the school. Many Mozabite Jews enlisted in the army, when this right was granted to them – with reluctance – at the end of the First World War, but also to attend French medical institutions. In particular, the Ghardaïa military hospital, founded in 1884, was in great demand to the point that, in the 1920s, the director of medical services for the Southern Territories decided to prohibit access to “ indigenous “.
Things are more complex when it comes to education. The author tells us that in Mzab, as in the rest of the Algerian Sahara, the Universal Israelite Alliance does not maintain schools. Within the Mzab community, traditional religious teaching centered around the institution of midrash in Ghardaia. However, while cultivating “ the traditional sciences of the Synagogue “, according to the expression of André Chouraqui who visited the region in 1939, Jewish families did not hesitate to send their children to the White Fathers’ schools, which were rarely attended by the Muslim population.
It is a paradoxical consequence of this “ indigenization » that it proved – to a certain extent – protective during the dramatic events of the Second World War. While, in the North, anti-Semitic laws and decrees adopted between 1940 and 1942 deprived the Jewish population of their most basic civil rights and many Jews were locked up in internment camps in the Sahara, the Mzab community escaped more or less to the persecutions of the Vichy regime.
Certainly, the local authorities take care to prevent any contact between internees and “ indigenous » Jews. But, overall, Sarah Stein notes a relative disinterest, which she relates to the very marginal position occupied by the community within French Algeria. It is rather the reaffirmation of the indigenous regime by the Fourth Republic in 1947 which, according to the author, marks a real turning point insofar as it amplifies the movement of emigration of Jews from Mzab towards Palestine/Israel.
The exodus constitutes the theme on which the book ends. The last chapter and the conclusion explain in detail the impact of the native regime on the modalities of emigration. Begun in the 1940s, at the instigation of international Jewish philanthropy now committed to the cause of the Mozabite Jews, the departures were initially directed mainly towards Israel and not towards France. The metropolis only truly became a departure destination in 1961, when, in the context of the departmentalization of the Southern Territories, the naturalization of Saharan Jews was finally decided. The last Jews from Mzab flew to France during the summer of 1962.
The arrival of this population “ freshly naturalized » then poses the delicate problem of converting his native civil status into French civil status. In particular, the non-existence of a civil status complicates the administrative transformation of the “ native » in « citizen “. To remedy these problems, the French authorities in Mzab were responsible, in December 1961, for establishing a civil register retrospectively listing the members of the community. In this late and incomplete initiative, however, Sarah Stein detects more than a simple measure of authentication. For her, the investigation articulates nothing less than an attempt to erase the traces of the unequal policy carried out since the beginning of the colonial period, “ neutralize a typological and legal distinction which seemed impossible, even shameful, at the time of decolonization. »
The question of sources
What to conclude from this book ? Sarah Stein’s account of the “ indigenization ” of this Saharan Jewish community is pleasant to read, solidly documented and fits into current historiographical debates, for example that around “ legal pluralism » (legal pluralism) in a colonial context. Taken as a whole, the study reminds us of both the indispensability and the fertility of the monographic approach when it comes to analyzing, as a historian, systems of domination and constraint. By emphasizing the genesis of the categories and typologies of indigenousness, by demonstrating the importance of the exception for the homogenization of the whole, by remaining sensitive to the trajectories of individuals, the author launches into This “ set of scales » dear to micro-historians, which allows us to approach state institutions from a praxeological point of view.
The bet seems to have paid off. We only regret that the synthetic style of the work sometimes prohibits the in-depth examination of certain social problems mentioned. Thus it would have been desirable, in our opinion, to study in more detail the question of the rabbinical court and this “ mosaic law » the nature of which the reader does not really understand.
Furthermore, we cannot help but deplore the fact that once again, the native only appears through the traces left by the “ colonizer “. By this we mean that Sarah Stein relies solely on French archival and literary sources. The absence of documents from members of the Jewish community in Mzab (epistolary correspondence, notarial deeds, literary writings, etc.) is all the more unfortunate since the existence of endogenous sources does not seem to be in doubt.
These reservations made, the book makes a valuable contribution to shedding light on the past of this Algerian South, which still remains a terra incognita for the historiography of the Maghreb.