Algerian Jewish History

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3943-race-place-trace
This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The book emphasises Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistance. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as entwined now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.

A case study of Bedeau Camp for the internment of Algerian Jewish soldiers: During World War II, the violence of French military culture in Algeria was intensified by Vichy-era fascism expanded to the overseas North African colonies against those racially classed by the colonial bureaucracy as indigènes, or “natives,” a term perennially applied to the Muslim and temporarily, between 1940 and 1943, to the Jew.

In 1856, French sculptor Charles Cordier (1827-1905) was sent on an ethnographic mission to Algeria to produce racial typologies. One sculpture, the “Jewish Woman of Algiers” (Juive d’Alger) reflects and joins the works of Eugène Délacroix, Théodore Chassériau and other artists and photographers documenting Jewish women. If North African Jewish males famously served as the tarjumān or translator and dragoman for travelers, missionaries, military officers, artists and adventurers alighting in Algeria, the Jewish woman in turn was another gendered mediator and object of fascination, representation and substitution, or so it was believed, for the exotic interior feminine world of the native in the absence of Muslim women.
Open access: http://www.hesperis-tamuda.com/

Studies on the traditional pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew among North African Jews have tended to concentrate on the Moroccan and Tunisian traditions. This paper focuses on the Algerian traditions. This field of research has hardly received attention since the publications of Father Bargès and Marcel Cohen issued in 1848 and 1912, respectively. The Algerian pronunciation is not homogeneous: Algerian Jewry consisted of several communities that differed in culture and language as well as Biblical Hebrew pronunciation. The North Algerian traditions, that is, those of the districts of Oran, Algiers and Constantine, are the ones investigated in this study. Evidence is based upon the author’s own experience and upon ethnomusicological and private recordings that reflect the pronunciations used in the 1950s and 1960s. Specific features, influence of the French language and, to a lesser extent, deviations from more ancient stages and further evolutions are discussed.

This paper presents an edition, translation and linguistic analysis of a Judaeo-Arabic letter from the Prize Papers Collection. The letter introduces previously unexplored Algerian Judaeo-Arabic documents from the Prize Papers Collection, which constitute a unique chance to study the history, language and culture of Jewish trading across the Mediterranean and North Africa during the late 18th century.