“Brothers from South of the Mediterranean”: Decolonizing the Jewish “Family” during the Algerian War

Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France

“…This categorical uncertainty points to the importance of an emerging conversation among French colonial historians, one that is really just beginning and insists on rethinking French colonial history outside the “identity” categories (French, Muslim, Jewish, indigenous, native) that seem so self-evident from a contemporary perspective (Davidson 2015; 2012; Katz 2015; Mandel 2014; Schley 2015; Shepard 2008; 2013; Schreier 2010; Stein 2014). The attention these colonial historians bring to the contingency and slipperiness of these categorical positions is a reminder of the constant and always contested sociological work required to make difference into sameness and sameness into difference.…”

“…For a similar observation about Algerian Jewish conceptions of Frenchness in an entirely different set of circumstances, seeDavidson 2015.990 K I M B E R L Y A . A R K I N 990terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.…”

“…In the decades following the Second World War, as the French North African Empire crumbled, France became the preferred destination for almost all Algerian Jews and many Moroccan and Tunisian Jews. By the mid-1960s, such migration had more than doubled the postwar French Jewish population (Bensimon and Della Pergola 1984) and laid the groundwork for decades of disputes over communal leadership positions, prayer spaces, forms of religiosity, and politics (e.g., Arkin 2014; Davidson 2015; Poirier 1998; Podselver 1986). By the early 2000s, a study funded by the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU), the major Jewish philanthropic organization in France, estimated the total Jewish population in France at 500,000–575,000 people.…”

“… 12 For a similar observation about Algerian Jewish conceptions of Frenchness in an entirely different set of circumstances, see Davidson 2015.…”