Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria by Sarah Abrevaya Stein (review)

In the early 1960s, a team of anthropologists introduced the Western world to the hidden Jews of the Algerian Sahara. They described “primitive” tribes, untouched by modernization. Tribesmen had traditional occupations, like metallurgy, and they lived in “deplorable” conditions. Women engaged in unusual childbirth rituals. These “tribes” were said to trace directly back to Moses. For years following their emigration in 1961, prior to Algerian independence in 1962, even well-meaning conversations about this group focused on their ill-preparedness for the modern world.

Jewish experience in the M’zab was neither as rigid nor as pristine as it seemed. Under the years of French colonial rule, a legal barrier kept Jews out of the polity; Saharan Jewish communities were in fact adaptable and eager to modernize. Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a book about how these people were constricted, policed, and monitored. In fact, Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues that the very concept of their “indigeneity” was a French innovation.

Jews were targets of the French colonial strategy to divide and rule — to segregate “natives” to manage the territory. Administrators elevated the status of Northern Algerian Jews, judging them to be “closer” than others to European lifestyles. Stein’s book tells a lesser-known story about the Jews of the southern Algerian territories. Governed by a military administration, these people were not only restrained from the benefits of citizenship, they were also restricted from travel, medical care, and modern education.

In 1882, the French annexed the Saharan territory as a protectorate, not an integrated département as in the north. (Jews from Northern Algeria were naturalized in 1871.) Over the next eighty years of French governance, the administration denied Southern Jews the privilege of citizenship. The administration left behind a paper trail of justifications for this discrepancy between north and south. This archival material forms the basis of Stein’s research.

Saharan Jews were exempt from taxes, state registries, and military service, and they could neither vote nor attend public schools. They were governed by so-called “Mosaic Law” which permitted them to engage in polygamous marriages, and allowed uncomplicated divorce proceedings. Colonial administrators reasoned that Southern Jews would live according to the Torah instead of French civil law. Although some bureaucrats suggested that Mosaic Law preserved cultural freedoms, Stein argues that it euphemized a “negative legal identity” (p. 72). Saharan Jews remained “uncivilized” in a land where the civilizing mission dominated.

The fine points of the group’s segregation from their northern counterparts were difficult to maintain, creating dissonance for law enforcement. The French military administration is the clear antagonist in this book. In charge of the Saharan territories, they policed the legal status of its inhabitants, keeping Jewish Saharans from top-notch medical care and out of French educational facilities — perhaps the single factor that led to Northern Jews’ success.

This book does more than just tell a history of a relatively microscopic community (2,700 souls at a maximum). It makes a profound argument about our Westernized perceptions of indigenous subcultures. The misreading of the innate exoticism of this group, following the Orientalist paradigm, has been reiterated by multiple sources. For instance, the notion that Jewish citizenship would rankle the Muslim locals became “irrefutable by dint of repetition” from the 1870s on (p. 44). Like their northern counterparts, many southern Jews desired to be closer to France. Some begged authorities for the chance to serve in the French regiment of World War I.

Stein holds the mid twentieth-century anthropological team Briggs and Guède accountable for the enduring idea that Jewish Saharans were culturally or biologically distinctive. Her first chapter offers an overdue corrective to their 1962 ethnography, No More For Ever. This critique builds toward Stein’s overall argument that legal strictures isolated Saharan Jews, not innate cultural or racial differences. In later chapters, Stein proves that the border between North and...