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Malleable Memories, Re-imagined Identities: Conceptions of Algeria among Jews and Muslims in France after Decolonization
Abstract
This paper analyzes the enduring impact of Algeria, as place and memory, for Jews, Muslims, and their interactions in post-colonial France, from 1962 to the mid-1970s. It shows the overriding importance of the experience of the Algerian War in shaping each community’s regard toward Algeria, and toward one another. Focusing on the meetings, publications, and correspondence of the large Association des Juifs Originaires d’Algérie (AJOA), I argue that Algerian Jews combined commemoration and willful forgetfulness in their approach to Algeria. During the war, the community had sought to emphasize both its longstanding ties to Algeria, and its ultimate commitment to France and republican ideals. Now, as emigrants to France, these Jews drew attention to memory objects that marked the closeness of their relationship to France, that evoked episodes of anti-Jewish violence in Algeria, or that represented their ongoing physical connection to the land of Algeria. Simultaneously, in their effort to emphasize their Frenchness and put behind them the brutal circumstances of their departure, they chose to forget. Rather than evoking their longstanding relationship to the Muslims and Islamic culture that remained close at hand in many of their new neighborhoods, they treated Muslims and Islam with stunning silence. Meanwhile, I examine a particular Algerian Muslim community, that of the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville, and a key Muslim organization, the Amicale des Algériens en Europe (AMAE), to chart the multiple Muslim approaches to Algeria. In agitating for greater Muslim rights in France, the AMAE regularly drew strong parallels between the Algerian national liberation movement and the Palestinian cause. It also frequently cited connections, real or imagined, between the most adamant forces of “Algérie française” during the war, and the State of Israel. Yet the Muslims of Belleville lived side-by-side with a large community of Tunisian Jews. Their daily coexistence, while marked by occasional outbreaks of violence, proved relatively harmonious. Indeed, the presence of these North African Jews helped to foster an unmistakable sense of shared Maghrebian identity in this immigrant quarter of Paris, evoking earlier experiences of overlapping culture in Algeria. Ultimately, Jews and Muslims in post-colonial France treated Algeria and its recent war for independence with selective memory. They chose to retain certain elements of their Algerian past, while projecting present circumstances onto others. In the process, they sought to redefine their relationship not only to Algeria and its past but to the present and future French state and nation.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Algeria
Europe
Sub Area
None