History of The Jews in Algeria - History

History

There is evidence of a Jewish presence in Algeria since at least the late Roman period. Early descriptions of the Rustamid capital, Tahert, note that Jews were found there, as they would be in any other major Muslim city. Centuries later, the Geniza Letters (found in Cairo) mention many Algerian Jewish families.

However, in the seventh century, the Jewish population was significantly augmented by Spanish Jewish immigrants fleeing from the persecutions of the Visigothic king Sisebut and his successors. The Spanish immigrants escaped to the Maghreb and settled in cities in the Byzantine Empire. Later settlers, forced from Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, followed the Reconquista. Together with the Moriscos, they thronged to the ports of North Africa, forming large communities in places such as Oran and Algiers. Some Jews in Oran preserved their Ladino language—a uniquely conservative dialect of Spanish—until the 19th century. Jewish merchants did very well financially in late Ottoman Algiers; the French attack on Algeria was provoked by the Dey's demands that the French government pay its large outstanding wheat debts to two Jewish merchants. In the 17th century, "Granas" (Jews from Livorno, Italy) started settling in Algeria. They were highly involved in commercial trading and exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, reinforcing the Jewish community.

After their conquest in 1830, the French government rapidly restructured the Ottoman millet system. At the time, the French government distinguished French citizens (who had national voting rights and were subject to French laws and conscription) from Jewish and Muslim "indigenous" people, who each kept their own laws and courts. By 1841, the Jewish courts (beth din) had been abolished, and all cases involving Jews were instead heard by French courts. In 1845, the communal structure was thoroughly reorganized, and French Jews were appointed as chief rabbis for each region, with the duty "to inculcate unconditional obedience to the laws, loyalty to France, and the obligation to defend it". In 1865, liberal conditions were laid down so that Jewish and Muslim "indigenous" people could become French citizens if they requested it. Few did so, however, since French citizenship required renouncing certain traditional mores, and thus was perceived as a kind of apostasy.

The French government granted the Jews French citizenship in 1870 under the décrets Crémieux. For this reason, they are sometimes incorrectly categorized as pieds-noirs. This decision was due largely to pressures from prominent members of the French Jewish community, which considered the North African Jews to be "backward" and wanted to forcefully bring them into modernity. Within a generation, most Algerian Jews had come to speak French rather than Arabic or Ladino, and embraced many aspects of French culture. After World War II, and the subsequent struggle for independence, the great majority of Algeria's 140,000 Jews left the country for France together with the pied-noirs.