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Lycee Reda Houhou (Former Lycee d'Aumale) at New Constantine, Algeria

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Introduction 

The Jewish community of Constantine, Algeria, once one of the largest and oldest in North Africa, has since dwindled to a handful of individuals. The city is divided in two by the Rhumel River and Gorge, which run north-south. Spatially, Constantine was divided into three main neighborhoods: Jewish, Arab, and European. [1] The Arab quarter (village Arabe) was situated in the southwest of the city, characterized by closely built homes and winding, narrow streets. Home to an estimated 12,000 Jews in 1934, the Jewish quarter, established in the eighteenth century, was located northwest of the city. The European population resided at a higher elevation in newly built, French-style homes to the northeast of the Pont d’El Kantara. [2] In this district, schools such as École Normale de Filles, École Normale de Garçons, and École Michelet were constructed to educate the French settler youth and a small minority of indigènes. [3] Historically, the Algerian Jewish population served as intermediaries between the European and Arab populations, with the spatial division of Constantine reflecting and reinforcing this social hierarchy. [4] On the outskirts and within the Jewish quarter were major mosques and markets, the courthouse (Palais de Justice), the Casbah (old city), and the French Lycée d’Aumale (now Lycée de Reda Houhou). Constantine’s Jewish quarter thus functioned as a zone of intercommunal interaction – a densely layered social and structural intermediary where colonial administration, religious life, commerce, and education brought together members of all three communities in uneven but recurring contact. 

History of Lycée d'Aumale

In 1875, Constantine’s Grand Lycée replaced the Arab-French College, which had previously stood on the Sidi M’Cid plateau, a poorly serviced area located north of the city, across the Rhumel Gorge. [5] [6] The Grand Lycée was constructed at the intersection of Rue de France and Rue Thiers, where the Jewish and European quarters converged in Constantine’s northern district. Still standing today, the Grand Lycée is a five-story French colonial educational complex built in a nineteenth-century institutional style, with thick walls, tiled roofs, and stone accents. Its U-shaped layout was formed by several interconnected pavilions – including dormitories – arranged around a large central courtyard that contains a recreational area. 

The building’s windows vary according to function: tall, shuttered rectangular openings on the lower floors admit light and air to classrooms; arched windows brighten communal spaces such as the refectories (dining rooms); and small dormer windows are tucked under the roof. Traditional French architecture was adapted to suit the North African climate with high ceilings, shaded façades, thick walls, and tiled floors to moderate heat. A formal gated entrance with ornate pillars and iron fencing opens onto the street, reinforcing the school’s prestige. Geographically, the east wing overlooks one of Constantine’s deep ravines, while other façades face the city. Rue Thiers, on which the school is situated, was anchored at its western end by the Synagogue de la place Negrier and at its eastern end by the Pont d’El Kantara bridge, which linked Constantine’s center to the European quarter. 

A well-funded and organized French educational institution, the school enrolled 384 students in its first year. By the mid-1950s, the Grand Lycée appeared to have enrolled a majority of European students. [7] By comparison, the Arab-French College had served 206 students, 43% of whom were European. Mid-twentieth-century planning data shows stark disparities in access: about one in three European children attended secondary schools in Algeria, compared to only one in 125 Muslim children. [8] This structural imbalance produced overwhelmingly European enrollments in elite institutions like Lycée d’Aumale. For Constantine’s Jewish population, which historically occupied an intermediary position between European settlers and Muslim Algerians, admission to such a school could serve as both a marker and a mechanism of social mobility, making these statistics essential for understanding patterns of assimilation and political alignment in the colonial era. 

Renamed in 1942 for Henri Eugène Philippe Louis d'Orléans, the Duke of Aumale (Governor General of Algeria in  1847-48,) the Lycée d’Aumale was regarded as a leading institution for French secondary education. [9] French historian and author Benjamin Stora, a Jewish student there in the 1950s, recalled “...we were made to feel that Lycée d’Aumale was the best school – in Eastern Algeria, in Algeria. Everyone knew the names of the great teachers who had been there before.” [10] Stora also spoke of tensions between students, stating that it was the pieds-noirs (people of French and other European-descent born in Algeria) who most often perpetrated antisemitism. Stora recalled being taunted with “dirty Jew” in the schoolyard, and moments when teachers overlooked or brushed aside such hostility. [11] At times, Jewish students felt doubly exposed: legally French citizens under the Crémieux Decree, yet never accepted as fully European by their settler peers. [12] Muslim and Jewish students, by contrast, tended to bond more closely than with European students. [13]

According to the Lycée d’Aumale’s 1929 Honors List, students studied an extensive range of subjects, including multiple languages (English, German, Arabic, Latin, Greek), physics, chemistry, mathematics, history, philosophy, and geography. Students also had the chance to pursue various sports and musical instruments. Abdelkader Barakrok, who graduated from the Lycée in the early 1930s, was the first Algerian Muslim to become Secretary of State in a government of the French Republic. Alphonse Juin, a prominent French army general, also studied at the Lycée in Constantine. He is the only general of World War II to have received the title of Marshal of France. Fernand Braudel, a French historian notable for recognizing socioeconomic factors as essential to development, taught at Lycée d’Aumale between 1923-1924. Jean-François Lyotard, who popularized the philosophical term “postmodernism,” also taught in Constantine between 1950-1952. With its long-standing prestige, architectural prominence, and rigorous curriculum, Lycée d’Aumale served as a central institution in Constantine’s colonial educational landscape. 

Education, Social Mobility, and Jewish Assimilation

The enrollment patterns at Lycée d’Aumale, with their stark disparities between Europeans, Muslims, and Jews, mirrored the broader social hierarchies of colonial Constantine. They also illustrate the role education played in shaping political identity and cultural affiliation.

Initially, many Algerian Jews resisted assimilation into French colonial culture out of concern that French emancipation represented a “...direct assault on Jewish religious identity and traditional society.” [14] Between 1865-70, only thirteen percent of Algerian Jews petitioned for French citizenship. [15] After the 1870 Crémieux Decree unilaterally granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews while excluding the Muslim majority, the French state’s secular education policies  began to transform Algerian Jewish communal life. French schooling became not only compulsory, but was also widely perceived as a pathway to social mobility. 

Institutions like the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) sought to reconcile Jewish religious continuity with integration into French civic life. In Constantine, Judeo-Arabic remained a literary language but was gradually replaced in everyday use by French. 

While the Alliance’s leaders maintained that “Jews must remain Jews,” their educational mission sought to prepare students for success in French society without forsaking their religious identity. Assimilation and religious fidelity were framed as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive ideals. [16]

Most Jewish children in Constantine began their schooling at the Alliance, but not all advanced to more elite institutions such as Lycée d’Aumale. In 1931, Jews comprised 22% of the city’s primary school students but only 2.6% of students in co-educational high schools. While Jewish students outnumbered their Muslim counterparts at Lycée d’Aumale, they remained a minority among an otherwise overwhelmingly European student body. As Benjamin Stora later recalled, attendance at institutions like Lycée d’Aumale marked a social threshold: for many Jewish students emerging from tight-knit religious communities and schools, these French institutions were their first sustained encounter with French settler peers from the city’s wealthier, European neighborhoods. [17]

For those who attended, Lycée d’Aumale functioned as a critical stepping stone toward integration into the French colonial elite. Stora emphasized that Jews in Constantine who became financially successful were most often those who worked in administrative roles as engineers, doctors, accountants, and tax collectors –  professions that required a rigorous French secondary education. Évariste Lévi-Provençal hailed from a Jewish family with deep  North African roots and studied at Lycée d’Aumale in the early twentieth-century. He went on to direct  the Institute of Islamic Studies in Algiers, producing research that reshaped the study of Muslim Spain. Lycée d’Aumale shaped pathways of mobility, reflecting how Jewish students balanced French integration with religious identity. 

Jewish Education under Vichy

The rise of antisemitism in France during the late 1930s, intensified by political anxieties over Jewish refugees and associations between Jews and the political left, set the stage for systemic exclusion under the Vichy government. Within weeks of the German invasion of France in May-June 1940, Vichy implemented measures excluding Jews from public life. [18] On October 4, 1940, the Vichy government adopted the first statut de Juifs, tightening racial definitions of Jewish identity and excluding Jews from nearly all public roles. 

By October 7, 1940, the seventy-year old Crémieux Decree was revoked, stripping Algerian Jews of their French citizenship. Jewish enrollment in schools, including Lycée d’Aumale, was strictly limited by a numerus clausus. By the end of the 1942 academic year, the numerus clausus had been reduced from fourteen percent to seven percent. [19] Jewish children were expelled from primary and high schools across Algeria, effectively barring them from institutions that had long served as gateways to social mobility and French integration. [20]

At Lycée d’Aumale, this policy abruptly excluded generations of Jewish students from the rigorous academic and social opportunities that had historically marked their entry into the French colonial elite. In response, Grand Rabbi Maurice Eisenbeth, Consistory Secretary General Elie Gozlan, and Professor Robert Brunschvig organized a network of private schools to educate the expelled Jewish children. By 1942, approximately 20,000 Jewish students across Algeria were enrolled in seventy-five such schools, ensuring continuity of education despite the Vichy regime’s restrictions. [21]

Postwar Exodus

After World War II, Algerian Jews occupied an increasingly precarious position within a reconfigured colonial order. Though they had lost their French citizenship under the Vichy regime in 1940, the Crémieux Decree was reinstated in 1943 after the Allied liberation of  Algeria, restoring their legal status as French citizens. [22] Jewish students who had enrolled in Rabbi Eisenbeth’s network of private education during World War II were now able to return to their schools. The restoration also reimposed a two-tiered citizenship system – Jews as French citizens, and Algerian Muslims as “indigenous” subjects without full civil rights – tightening the juridical link between Algerian Jews to the privileges of colonial rule. Though Jewish families continued to live, work, and study in Constantine between 1943-1962, many began to emigrate to France and Israel as sociopolitical tensions rose. As the Algerian War of Independence escalated after 1954, the Jewish minority was caught between an ascendant Muslim nationalism and the violence of a collapsing colonial state. For Jews employed in the public administrative sector, remaining in Algeria carried the risk of being perceived as agents of the colonialist French regime, a stigma that contributed to their gradual departure as the Algerian nationalist movement gained strength. 

The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the principal nationalist movement fighting for Algerian independence, initially courted Jews as fellow Algerians and invited them to join the struggle for liberation. [23] Yet other FLN currents cast Jews as complicit in French domination–an inference strengthened by Jewish communal leaders’ public affirmations of loyalty to France. [24] In Constantine, attacks increasingly targeted Jewish neighborhoods; while many initially blamed French security failures, they ultimately felt besieged from multiple directions. Despite longstanding social, cultural, and commercial ties with Algerian Muslims, many Jews concluded that an independent Algeria offered limited prospects for communal security. [25]

By 1962, when Algeria gained independence, approximately seventy-five percent of Algeria’s roughly 130,000 Jews had departed. Most sought refuge in metropolitan France, a country they had long fought to be recognized as their true homeland. In 1962, as institutions were nationalized, decolonized, and renamed, the Lycée d’Aumale became the Lycée Reda Houhou, honoring the dedicated Algerian writer and activist. [26] There are no records indicating that Jews returned as students to the Lycée d’Aumale after 1962. Given the mass departure of Algerian Jews and the transformation of the school under Algerian rule, it is unlikely that substantial re-enrollment of Jewish students occurred. By the mid-1990s, several accounts estimated that not more than fifty Jews remained in  Algeria. The Lycée Reda Houhou continues to function as a secondary school today, though it has been repainted white, and its lush central courtyard has been paved over. [27]

New Constantine, Algeria