Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria

Conclusion

177 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Conclusion In late eighteenth-century France, a Portuguese-Jewish merchant from Bordeaux named Samuel Peixotto chose to divorce his wife, Sara Mendes Dacosta. Rather than regulate the affair with a rabbi, he sued for divorce in the Paris royal courts, claiming that he had the right to divorce on the grounds that he was Jewish. Peixotto’s odd move—attempting to get a French court to uphold Jewish law and grant him a divorce—triggered an explosion of legal discussion on the question of the status of Jews in France. The discussion centered on what exactly described their status, whether they enjoyed all rights generally accorded to inhabitants of the kingdom (régnicoles), were foreigners (étrangers) or French (français), and what code was to govern their marital practices. Evelyn Oliel-Grausz has noted that the Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence civile, criminelle canonique et bénéficiel de Guyot, perhaps the most important French legal journal of the eighteenth century, had manifested a dramatic new interest in this subject during the 1770s. While the Répertoire of 1778 featured only six pages on divorce, the editions of 1784 and 1786 featured more than 60 pages on the subject.1 The Collection de décisions nouvelles, another journal, went from featuring one-half page on divorce in 1778 to 21 pages in the edition of 1787. Almost all of the new text stemmed from the odd case of Peixotto and the wider question of what the code governing Jews’ personal status implied for their legal status in France. The case soon grew into a cause célèbre and attracted a significant amount of popular attention. Arabs of the Jewish Faith has emphasized that colonial ideology and policy in Algeria developed in response to local circumstances, actors, and institutions . Yet in interesting ways, Peixiotto’s case foreshadows the 1870 trial of Sasportès, the Algerian Jew brought to court by the French authorities for practicing polygamy. In both trials, the question of which authority governed 178 A R A BS OF T HE JE W ISH FA I T H family structure and marriage law served as the locus of a wider debate over the criteria for French nationality. While the Revolution supposedly resolved ambiguities over Jewish status, Napoleon used French Jewish “abuses” as a pretext for reevaluating their citizenship. His approach was to convene representatives of the Jews of France and inquire about their laws and customs, emphasizing those dealing with the family and marriage. For the purposes of French law, the Grand Sanhedrin officially resolved the supposed contradictions between Judaism and the civil code. As we saw earlier, colonial laws used this precedent to locate both the “foreignness” of Jews and their avenue to citizenship in their family practices. Members of the consistory and civil administration in colonial Algeria worked within this Napoleonic precedent. At the same time, the Algerian consistory system was an effort to export a modified vision of Abbé Henri Grégoire’s ideal of Jewish “regeneration.” Grégoire’s influential essay in favor of Jewish emancipation rested on his faith that the corruption of Jews was due to past persecution, and emancipation would lead to their regeneration as happy and productive citizens. Yet like Napoleon, Grégoire located Jewish vices in the domestic sphere. Certainly, Grégoire criticized Jews’ economic behaviors, but he also speculated on their immoral family life, marriage customs, and sexual proclivities.2 He insisted that the health and morality of the republic depended upon women assuming their proper role in society, avoiding public roles, and helping to preserve monogamous, Christian family life. Foreshadowing colonial critiques of Islamic society, he suggested that non-Christian cultures mistreat their women and regard them as property. It was no coincidence that Grégoire explained the regenerative power of citizenship in an essay about Jews. Enlightenment and Revolutionary debates used the corrupted Jew as a sort of “anti-citizen,” a vehicle for emphasizing the power and meaning of emancipation and citizenship.3 Seemingly influenced by the moralistic formulations of Grégoire and other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, consistorial officers in Algeria focused on morality, interior spaces, and family customs of local Jews as crucial loci in which the civilizing project could be worked out. Civil officials and consistorial members thus sought to close private synagogues, certify the morality of teachers, measure and judge the air quality in schools, encourage Jews...