Between emancipation and persecution : Algerian Jewish memory in the longue duree (1930-1970)

In recent years, scholars of post-colonial France and Algeria have devoted substantial attention to the question of memory. Typically, studies of memory in the field have centred on competing narratives and afterlives of the Franco-Algerian War; likewise, this event has dominated examinations of specifically Jewish Algerian memory. Seeking a more longitudinal approach, this article focuses on Algerian Jewish commemorations of three events: the 1930 centenary of the French conquest, the 1934 Jewish - Muslim riots of Constantine, and the 1970 centenary of the Cremieux Decree. Such an examination reveals two longstanding Algerian Jewish `models of remembrance', one of progress, the other of persecution. This article contends that the two remembrance models developed during the colonial era and crystallised in the 1930s. The two models, and their complex interplay, did much to shape subsequent communal narratives. Each model drew upon and reflected a complex set of French republican, colonial, Algerian, and Jewish influences and positionalities among those who claimed to speak for Algerian Jews. Only by examining such long-term memory developments can we ascertain the particular way that most of Algerian Jewry, having relocated to France by the mid - 1960s, sought to process the Franco-Algerian War and decolonisation. In the process, we can understand better the particular forces that shaped the formation of this population's distinct identity. More broadly, this examination points towards the need to exhume the deeply colonial roots of many `post-colonial' memories and identities.