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86 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 3 Synagogues, Surveillance, and Civilization In March 1848, Emmanuel Nahon of Oran’s consistory requested financing from the director of civil affairs to support the construction of a “large and unique” synagogue that could unite the entirety of Oran’s Jews. Nahon framed his request as an urgent response to the social unrest that had recently gripped Oran. The owners of the city’s private synagogues, he explained, were “convinced that the articles of the ordinance of November 9, 1845 . . . cannot be applied to them due to recent events.”1 Currently, “a spirit of revolt has surged amongst them” and the consistory was doing its best to suppress it. At the same time, explained Nahon, these efforts could not be effective until a large communal building was built that would justify closing all the other synagogues of Oran. The director to whom Nahon addressed his request readily agreed, and, in turn, made a formal request of the governor general of Algeria to build a large synagogue that could “replace the private synagogues whose existence and use for private profit are entirely contrary to the spirit and letter of the ordinance of November 9, 1845.”2 Though the community would only receive the funds to construct the synagogue years later, this incident marked the beginning of a long struggle over control of Jewish social and religious life in the Province of Oran. The private synagogue, which was a central feature of Algerian-Jewish life during the period under discussion, garnered the particular interest of French reformers in Algeria. These synagogues provided centers of community, schools, charitable foundations, and rabbinical councils that frustrated centralizing efforts. Meanwhile, members of the same Algerian elite who owned these synagogues entered into the consistory. These men could then help determine which local practices and institutions would be supported or suppressed. In some cases, this involved protecting their SY NAGOGUES, SURV EILL A NCE, A ND CI V ILIZAT ION 87 synagogues or those of their allies. In other cases, the Moroccan ethnic loyalty of consistorial members took precedence over the colonial administration ’s goals. Therefore, efforts to submit these (and other) AlgerianJewish religious spaces to surveillance had the unintended consequence of strengthening, rather than weakening, local elites. Once again, the civilizing ideology proved malleable as both local and French actors justified their actions as efforts to advance progress, emancipation, or civilization. The social and religious landscape of colonial Oran ended up making a significant mark on the goals and activities of the consistory; as the consistory struggled to penetrate and monitor Algerian-Jewish domestic and religious space, local Algerian Jews in turn penetrated and helped shape the direction of these civilizing institutions. Nahon’s request to the director of civil affairs also marked an early episode in a wider campaign to monitor other Algerian-Jewish interiors, not only synagogues, but homes and schools as well. Strikingly, this campaign was interlaced with a discourse of health and hygiene. As others have noted, French discussions of disease and hygiene developed in interesting ways during the decades following the initial conquest. In the metropole, health professionals focused increasingly on private dwellings and morality after the 1832 cholera epidemic.3 In Algeria during the same period, the military medical corps helped construct the taxonomy of races upon which the logic of colonial domination rested.4 It follows that the conquest of contagions and disease reinforced the ideology of civilization throughout the colonial period.5 Of course, medicine in early colonial Algeria was first and foremost a military effort designed to limit the devastating toll disease took on occupying troops—not help the local populace. Muslims’ experience of French medical genius has been described as “an insignificant fringe of a crushing military action.”6 Yet Algerian Jews, as privileged colonial subjects in midnineteenth century Algeria, found that in important ways, their bodies, homes, schools, and synagogues mattered. A special concern for hygiene echoed through discussions of Jewish schools in Algeria; administrators often justified interventions in religious schools with the imperative to safeguard children’s health. This recalls Michel Foucault’s observation that it was the body and private life of the bourgeois, rather than that of the proletariat, that first became the locus of discourses of sexuality during the articulation of modern power/knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 While most Algerian Jews were far from bourgeois, they were part of a relatively privileged urban society over which French law claimed increasing jurisdiction. The effort to civilize...

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