Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis by Richard C. Parks (review)

In 1976, I interviewed urban sociologist Paul Sebag in his Tunis apartment. The apartment was absolutely crammed with books, papers, posters, and pamphlets, the home of a lifelong intellectual and leftist activist. Sebag was a Tunisian Jew. He had lived an exciting life, but was clearly a holdover from another era. The following year, when his university contract was not renewed, he took a position in Rouen, and died in Paris in 2011. In this fascinating book, Richard C. Parks, an academic specialist in the history of science and medicine at Michigan State University, seeks to understand the complexities of Tunisian Jewish indentity formation and experience during the French colonial era.

At the beginning of each chapter, Parks quotes from Albert Memmi, also a Tunisian Jew, known for his poetic insights into the colonial era. Memmi sets the stage by stating that the colonizer can never be good or evil, only evil or uneasy. The French were uneasy about their uncertain status in Tunisia and in particular about their small numbers in comparison with the Italian immigrant and indigenous Muslim communities. Parks explains how French colonial policies attempted to resolve their uneasiness.

In the early twentieth century, French and French-trained officials, using new scientific and medical theories, attempted to develop those communities they thought likely to accept their civilizing mission and become assimilated French citizens. They would tear down decrepit buildings, cleanse unhealthy streets, install water systems, and establish Western style schools and hospitals.

In the racial hierarchy of the colonial era, whites, mainly French, were at the top, with blacks, or in this case, Muslims at the bottom. Indigenous Jews, who were far from homogenous, were in an intermediate category, but were good candidates, French officials believed, for scientific regeneration. Some communities had lived in the region for many centuries; others had arrived following the expulsion of Jews from Spain, still others from Livorno, a thriving port city in Tuscany. The Jewish communities with European roots welcomed the secular education and emancipation offered under the French protectorate. Both Jewish communities eventually accepted to varying degrees new notions of progress and modernity, acculturation and assimilation. The typical pattern, Parks shows, was that wealthier Jewish families moved out of their traditional quarters as soon as they could while poorer indigenous, often Muslim or Christian families took their places.

French colonial authorities considered the Arab quarter unassimilable and not eligible for modernization. It was treated separately and not developed along modern lines. Hence, for example, trash cans were placed in newer sections of the city, but not in the medina or old city. The French colonial authorities purposely created Jewish and Muslim enclaves that were almost entirely separate. Tunisian Jews could eventually receive French citizenship; Muslims could not.

By 1913, thousands of Jewish boys and a lesser number of Jewish girls attended the newly established Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. The curriculum was secular and entirely in French. The Zionist movement competed by offering physical regeneration and a Jewish homeland, not assimilation in France or in French colonies. As Parks (and Memmi) explain, it was a complex and nuanced process of identity formation. The French sought to strengthen their position by dividing and ruling and by gaining supporters, but also to spread their civilizing mission for the betterment of themselves and French civilization. Educated Jewish elites from the colonies also actively contributed to the development and spread of new scientific educational, medical, and scientific theories and sought to advance their own communities.

Jewish women were to be, through scientific and medical advances, progenitors and regenerators of the new Jews. Women were able to retain their preeminent role as midwives and medical workers and availed themselves of modern obstetrics, prenatal care, hospital births, and infant nutrition. Falling infant mortality rates convincingly proved the efficacy of...