Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226123745, 9780226123608
• eBook ISBN: 9780226123882
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism.  But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria's south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era.
           
Drawing on materials from thirty archives across six countries, Stein tells the story of colonial imposition on a desert community that had lived and traveled in the Sahara for centuries. She paints an intriguing historical picture—of an ancient community, trans-Saharan commerce, desert labor camps during World War II, anthropologist spies, battles over oil, and the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. Writing colonialism and decolonization into Jewish history and Jews into the French Saharan one, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating exploration not of Jewish exceptionalism but of colonial power and its religious and cultural differentiations, which have indelibly shaped the modern world. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Prologue: The Lost Archive
• Introduction: Inventing Indigeneity
• 1. Anthropology and the Ghost of the Colonial Past
• 2. Jews Northern and Southern: The French Annexation of the Mzab and the Boundaries of Colonial Law
• 3. Governing Typologies: From the Conquest of the Mzab to the Touggourt/Dreyfus Affair
• 4. Contested Access: Conscription, Public Health, and Education from the Fin de Siècle through the Interwar Period
• 5. Saharan Battlegrounds: From the Vichy Regime to a Postwar World
• 6. Oil, the Algerian War of Independence, and Competing Stories of Departure
• Conclusion: Colonial Shadows
• Epilogue: Dark Matter
• Abbreviations of Archival and Library Collections
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index