Algerian Epistolary Treaty: The Jews Are Still There, In Every Bracelet

At the Academy, Azoulay will turn to her own family history in Algeria to reconstruct the process through which, in less than a century, an offspring of an indigenous Algerian Jew could no longer say, “I’m Algerian.” She interrogates the structures of colonial dispossession, charts processes of estrangement, and asks what kind of repair—increasingly called “decolonization”—is possible. The extension of French citizenship to the Jews in Algeria, a few decades after the French conquest of Algeria, marked the destruction of their world. Singled out from the rest of the indigenous population, Jewish Algerians were forced to become French citizens. To prove their worthiness for citizenship, they had to discard their customs, modes of living, and objects to which they were attached. Within a generation, they stripped themselves of many things that could identify them as other than French. “What does it mean not to have any artifacts from the place where one’s ancestors lived for centuries?” asks Azoulay. “What happened to their material and spiritual world, and the rights, knowledge, and beliefs inscribed in it? Could it really be vanished?” Beyond the physical and emotional world-loss of the Arab-Jews of North Africa, these questions lead her to explore the role of both the colonizing powers in North Africa and the colonial (Israel) and post-colonial (France) nation-states. How did destruction of the Arab-Jewish world in North Africa affect the consolidation of nation-states? Were the Jews in France—who played a leading role in this process of conversion—and in Algeria persuaded or forced to cooperate with this project of conversion? How did the secular promise of citizenship come to imply the loss of a world?