Abstract: The Polemics of Muslim-Jewish History in the Wake of Vichy This paper demonstrates how the Algerian nationalist movement, and ultimately the war of independence, accompanied a profound change in the ways Algerian Jews and Muslims remembered their historical relationship. Coming in the wake of World War II and Vichy France, the rise of Algerian nationalism forced an end to earlier narratives that emphasized “progress” of the Jewish community from the “yoke of Islam” under the French. Even though the war brought about a number of well-publicized instances of violence between Jews and Muslims, the new tendency that emerged (among both Jews and Algerian nationalists, most of whom were Muslim) was to emphasize the history of Muslim-Jewish harmony in Algeria. Even though Jewish writers overwhelmingly favored the maintenance of French Algeria (albeit with reforms to grant equality to Muslims), and the FLN obviously were fighting for independence, both used this putative history of harmony as a polemic to advance their respective causes. For the nationalists, this was intended to underline the equal place of Jews, as native sons of the country, in a future independent Algeria. Many noted, for example, instances when Muslims tried to help Jews during the Vichy years. For Jews, this history of good relations—also manifest under Vichy—paradoxically emphasized their French citizenship and republican allegiances. This is because it served as a counter-narrative to anti-Semitic accusations that full Jewish citizenship had often been the root of Muslim humiliation, jealousy, and unrest. This was all the more important after the French citizenship of Algerian Jews had been revoked under Vichy. These politically-laden historical narratives reveal how contesting political agendas sought legitimacy, at this fraught juncture in French and Algerian history, by advancing surprisingly similar visions of a shared Muslim-Jewish past. This paper will also point out how these polemical uses of history also suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict was already straining relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria. Even as the FLN publicly espoused a historical narrative whereby Jews were native “sons of the country,” they connected Algerian Jews to events in Palestine. By late 1961, when it was clear to the FLN and their fellow travelers that most Jews wished to avoid commitment, Zionism was already a means to explain “Jewish” lack of patriotism.