Recent work on the deadly 1934 anti-Jewish riots in Constantine, Algeria has tended to downplay tensions over the Palestine conflict in stirring violence in the interwar period. Instead, the most serious work has highlighted the specifically French contest; in other words, how the dynamics created within the local colonial hierarchy, as well as an electoral politics shaped by the rise of the far right—had far more to do with rising tensions between Algerian Muslims and Jews than events elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet other scholarship on Algeria during this period, notably that focusing on the Arabic press, has found that local interest in Palestine was a way journalists of the interwar Arabic-language press articulated their critique of colonialism and sympathy for a still-nascent nationalism in the shadow of censors. This cast a shadow on their Jewish neighbors, who were sometimes associated with the Zionist project. While the chief spokesperson of the emergent Islamic reformist movement (a movement that would influence Algerian nationalism), Abdelhamid Ben Badis, was deeply critical of the Zionist project in Palestine, his publication was also known to print articles that emphasized the value of coexistence and Jews’ deep roots in North Africa. Yet, he did not see the Jews as blameless in the 1934 violence against the Constantine community. This paper uses examples from reformist responses to the 1934 violence in Ben Badis’ journal al-Shihab to talk about how the dynamics of colonialism were affecting Algerian Muslim understandings of Jews in the 1930s. Journalists sometimes described Algerian Jews as profoundly rooted in Algeria, part and parcel of the “glorious” and “ancient” Maghrebi civilization. Other pieces saw Jews more as a subset of settler society; a group who benefited from the colonial dynamic and thus victimized Algerian Muslims. It was this latter portrayal that took center stage in the weeks following the rioting. However, this tendencywas mitigated by another current in reformist thinking: Muslims were profoundly loyal subjects of France deserving of better representation in government. Ultimately, Muslim reformist responses to the Constantine anti-Jewish riots serve as window into the tension between colonial factors (both local and wider, Middle Eastern) that endowed Muslims with a unique subjecthood, and the articulation of a North African identity that was supposedly older, tolerant, and multi-religious, a vision that was paradoxically not antithetical to French Republican notions of citizenship.