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Airport, Site of 1962 Airlift in Ghardaia, Algeria

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History of Jews in Ghardaia: It is likely that Jews arrived in Mzab (a vast region of some 3,089 square miles in the northern Sahara desert, located in the Ghardaia province of Algeria, approximately 311 miles south of Algiers) in the early Islamic centuries, as local legends of origin begin with the 6th century BCE diaspora, when a group of Jews from Jerusalem settled in Cyrenaica, in modern-day eastern Libya.² In 118 CE, the Roman emperor Trajan persecuted and expelled the Jews from Cyrenaica, driving the survivors to a settlement in Tamentit (in the district of Touat), on the western edge of the northwestern quarter of the Sahara.³ Here the Jewish community flourished for generations, until it was driven out by in the 15th century by settlers arriving from Morocco.⁴ The Jewish community reestablished itself in Ghardaia in the Mzab Valley and remained until the mid-twentieth century.⁵ The earliest known Jewish families in Ghardaia engaged in metalwork, jewelry making, and carpentry.⁶ Jews were required to wear distinctive garments and were prohibited from riding donkeys outside the Jewish neighborhood.⁷ They were not restricted from building synagogues and were allowed to carry out all their religious and social ceremonies without restraint.⁸ The Jewish quarter of Ghardaia thus became a town within a town, a community whose members maintained a separate existence, but interacted with the semi-nomadic Berbers and Arabs in the region for trade.⁹ Owing to the nature of the community, the Jews of Ghardaia gradually developed a unique local culture, and by all accounts, the Jewish population of Ghardaia never exceeded 2,500.¹⁰

French Occupation of Algeria and the Jews: When the French conquest of Algeria began in 1830, many Algerian Jews emigrated to Palestine.¹¹ Forty years later, the Crémieux Decree of 1870 granted the Jews of Algeria French citizenship with all the rights and obligations attached to it; in a single stroke this decree erased their previous humiliating status as dhimmis (protected Jews and Christians), elevated them to the status of European colonist, and completely distunguished them from their Muslim neighbors who remained simple "subjects."¹² Long-standing Muslim-Jewish tensions were counterbalanced by considerations of material interest and economic ties, yet the collective memory of Ghardaian Jews attests to a long history of subjugation, violence, and daily harassment by Muslims.¹³ More acute tensions developed with the arrival of the French, as the Jewish community was suspected of having welcomed foreign intervention.¹⁴ Between 1830 and 1882, the French authorities registered a number of violent acts, murders, and incidents of property damage perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter.¹⁵  Although the French conquered the Mzab region in 1852, they did not impose French criminal law there until 1882, and the Crémieux Decree of 1870 did not extend to parts of the Saharan territories, including Ghardaia.¹⁶ Instead, the French chose to recognize the local jurisdiction of the customary legal regime, allowing the Jews of Mzab substantial liberty in civil and public matters, with little or no administrative or judicial oversight.¹⁷ The Jews of Mzab had an ambiguous “Mosaic” or “Israélite” civil status, which allowed them to retain their customary Jewish laws, until 1961 when the Jews of Mzab were granted French citizenship and “common law civil status,” shortly before Algeria gained independence in 1962.¹⁸  

Jews and the Algerian War: Civil war in Algeria began in 1954 when Algerian nationalists, led by the Algerian Nationalist Party, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) revolted against the French colonialists.¹⁹ For the first 2-3 years, the Jews remained neutral; some Jews supported the FLN, wanting reforms, while others supported a French Algeria and worked with the pied noirs.²⁰ The Algerian Jews faced a difficult situation: when they wanted to remain neutral, the FLN called them traitors, and supporters of Algérie Française did not hide their anti-Semitism.²¹ During the Algerian War, the FLN harassed and attacked the Jewish community throughout Algeria.²² Ultimately, the vast majority of the Jews of Algeria were forced to emigrate to France or to Israel in order to escape the anti-Semtitic attacks, and in the summer of 1962, the last remaining Jews of Ghardaia left via plane as the Algerian war was drawing to a close. 

Algerian Jews in France today: Today, France has around half a million Jews, the largest Jewish population in Europe, and around five million Muslims.²³ Algerians and North African Arabs constitute France’s largest immigrant population, and Algeria has for years demanded an official apology from France for colonization, but it has not come.²⁴ Towards the end of July, 2014, the suburb of Sarcelles, (known as “little Jerusalem” because it is home to 15,000 Jews, a kosher grocery and a Jewish-owned pharmacy) was torched.²⁵ In the space of just one week, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France's Jewish organizations, eight synagogues were attacked.²⁶ A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats".²⁷ That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one banner.²⁸ A synagogue on Rue de la Roquette near the Bastille in central Paris came under attack while its congregation cowered inside, while demonstrators were heard chanting, “Death to Jews.”²⁹ Across the city, the Sephardic congregation at Rabbi Malka’s Berith Chalom synagogue on Rue Saint-Lazare — mostly Jews who fled Algiers in the 1960s — has escaped the violence, but not the tension. The flare of anti-Semitic attacks is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organizations have observed a noticeable sharp increase in anti-Semitic incidents every time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares.³⁰ Many factors contributing to anti-Semitism in France, however, have changed in the past decade. Analysts say ideological extremists use recurring offensives in Gaza to pit members of Europe’s largest Muslim community against those of the world’s third largest Jewish community.³¹  France's Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community says annual totals of anti-Semitic acts in the 2000s are seven times higher than they were in the 1990s, while French Jews are leaving for Israel in greater numbers, for reasons they say include anti-Semitism and the electoral success of the hard-right Front National.³² The Jewish Agency for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on the previous year. Between January and May this year, 2,254 left, against 580 in the same period last year.³³ Anti-Semitism in France, in some ways, has become a catch-all for many angry people: "radical Muslims, alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left."³⁴ The conflation between Israelis and Jews is dangerous, and the normalization of anti-Semitism, the ways in which it is made to seem somehow acceptable, such as through popular figure and controversial comedian Dieudonné ("He has legitimised it. He's made acceptable what was unacceptable") can lead to history repeating itself over again, as the Jews, like other minorities, find that prejudice follows them no matter where they go.³⁵ 

Suggested Further Reading:

• Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
• The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times by  Reeva S. Simon, Michael M. Laskier, and Sara Reguer
• Arabs of the Jewish faith: the civilizing mission in colonial Algeria by Joshua Schreier
• A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora; translated by Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith
• "No More Forever: A Saharan Jewish Town." by Lloyd C. Briggs and Norma Guède, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 55, 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964) 

Ghardaia, Algeria

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