Between emancipation and persecution: Algerian Jewish memory in the longue durée (1930–1970)

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of post-colonial France and Algeria have devoted substantial attention to the question of memory. Typically, studies of memory in the field have centred on competing narratives and afterlives of the Franco-Algerian War; likewise, this event has dominated examinations of specifically Jewish Algerian memory. Seeking a more longitudinal approach, this article focuses on Algerian Jewish commemorations of three events: the 1930 centenary of the French conquest, the 1934 Jewish–Muslim riots of Constantine, and the 1970 centenary of the Crémieux Decree. Such an examination reveals two longstanding Algerian Jewish ‘models of remembrance’, one of progress, the other of persecution. This article contends that the two remembrance models developed during the colonial era and crystallised in the 1930s. The two models, and their complex interplay, did much to shape subsequent communal narratives. Each model drew upon and reflected a complex set of French republican,...