The Changing Legal Classification of Middle Eastern Jews in the 20th Century

FAIN: FA-55750-11

Sarah Abrevaya Stein
UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)

This historical study explores Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish encounters with evolving legal systems whose shaping accompanied the dismantling, persistence, and transformation of empires across the globe over the course of the twentieth century. Misfits works at the intersection of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean History, European History, Legal History, Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies, and Jewish Studies, all of which stand to be enriched by an exploration of Jewish cases. This is so because Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jews served as litmus tests in instances when colonial, national, and international laws collided, rendering them crucial case studies of a larger, global story. Once Jewish subjects, experiences, and encounters are taken into account, I argue, we may tell a more diverse story of the dissolution and reconstitution of empire and the formation of post-colonial identities and modern legal systems in the twentieth century.

Associated Products

Sarah Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Book)
Title: Sarah Jews and the Fate of French Algeria
Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Abstract: The Jews of southern Algeria under French colonial rule were different than the Jews of Algeria’s north: they were not French. This book presents their history and through it, a history of legal difference born of colonial imperatives under eighty years of French rule (1882-1962). In 1870, France granted citizenship to the Jews of Algeria’s north, effectively rendering them European at the stroke of a pen. The Jews of the Algeria’s south were handed a different legal fate. After the conquest of the Algerian Sahara, the state categorized its Jews as it categorized the majority of Algerian Muslims—as indigènes [indigenous subjects], whose political rights were radically curtailed. The case of southern Algerian Jewry provides evidence of another variation of colonial rule produced as the French authorities sought—sometimes methodically, sometimes with frantic desperation—to achieve mastery over their diverse subject populations in North Africa. Indigenous Jews considers why French law and military policy treated the Jews of the Algerian Sahara differently than it did the Jews of Algeria’s north and, in time, than Algerian Muslims, and explores how this “difference” was mistaken as innate by generations of social scientists. It investigates how members of the southern Jewish community experienced and negotiated with the legal categories imposed upon them. Finally, it argues that the so-called “indigeneity” of southern Algerian Jewry, which was essentially colonial and juridical in formulation, continued to haunt France, southern Algerian Jewish émigrés, and scholarship on modern Jewry long after Algeria became a sovereign nation and France entered the post-colonial world.
Year: 2014
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

“Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara,” (Article)
Title: “Dividing south from north: French colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara,”
Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Abstract: Algeria occupies a special case within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in the colonial world in which autochthonous Jews were granted citizenship by a colonial power; with the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, some forty years after the French conquest of Algeria began, roughly thirty thousand Jews became citizens of France in one of the only acts of mass naturalization to occur under modern European imperial rule. It is usually but a footnote to histories of Algerian Jewry that the Crémieux Decree did not, in fact, extend to all Algerian Jews. At the time at which this law was passed, France had begun but not yet completed its bloody, fifty-year conquest of the Algerian Sahara, where several thousand Jews lived. Algeria’s Southern Territories (as they would come to be called in 1902) remained under direct military oversight for nearly eighty years of colonial rule, and Jewish residents of this administrative region, like the majority of Algerian Muslims, were categorized by the state as indigènes (indigenous subjects). This paper reconstructs how colonial conquest, law, and policy sought to delineate southern Algerian Jewry from northern Algerian Jewry. It argues that in the aftermath of the French conquest of the M’zab in 1882, the military sought to identify and legally isolate ‘southern Algerian Jewry’ (first from ‘northern Algerian Jewry’, and subsequently, from Algerian Muslims) for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews, per se; rather, in order to avoid jeopardizing a protectorate relationship it had built with the region’s Ibadite leadership in 1853, to protect French strategic interests, and to maintain a fragile status quo. Southern Algerian Jewish difference, neither inherent nor extra-historical, thus emerged as an exogenous creation of colonialism.
Year: 2012
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of North African Studies

“Dreyfus in the Sahara: Jews, trans-Saharan commerce, and southern Algeria under French colonial rule,” (Article)
Title: “Dreyfus in the Sahara: Jews, trans-Saharan commerce, and southern Algeria under French colonial rule,”
Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Abstract: As it explores the outbreak and political contours of a Dreyfus/Touggourt Affair in Algeria’s Frenc-controlled Southern Territories, this paper considers how French colonial politics in Algeria (and, particularly, in relation to France’s Algerian Jewish subjects) took unique and unexpected shape south of the Mediterranean. This was true both in the realm of colonial law and typology, and also in the uneven exercise of anti-Semitism—which, could guide French military policy (in the years of the Dreyfus Affair) even if, in general, Jews were of minor concern to military and civilian leaders in Algeria’s Southern Territories.
Year: 2014
Format: Other
Periodical Title: French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, eds., Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Book)
Title: Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century
Author: Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Abstract: We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern history teaches otherwise. Reimagining citizenship as a legal spectrum along which individuals can travel, Extraterritorial Dreams explores the history of Ottoman Jews who sought, acquired, were denied or stripped of citizenship in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as the Ottoman Empire retracted and new states were born—in order to ask larger questions about the nature of citizenship itself. Sarah Abrevaya Stein traces the experiences of Mediterranean Jewish women, men, and families who lived through a tumultuous series of wars, border changes, genocides, and mass migrations, all in the shadow of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendance of the modern passport regime. Moving across vast stretches of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, she tells the intimate stories of people struggling to find a legal place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. From a poor youth who reached France as a stowaway only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a spy to a wealthy Baghdadi-born man in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife, Stein tells stories that illuminate the intertwined nature of minority histories and global politics through the turbulence of the modern era.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://https://www.worldcat.org/title/extraterritorial-dreams-european-citizenship-sephardi-jews-and-the-ottoman-twentieth-century/oclc/928239102&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: Worldcat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226368221
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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