In the last week of my two-year stay in Paris, I was fortunate to attend a wedding and a museum exhibition. The former was a thoroughly secular but nonetheless Jewish affair. A friend and fellow conservative word-stringer in her 30s, freshly moved from America, was marrying into the Franco-Tunisian family of a doctor she’d met through an app, her parents in town from the Midwest for the occasion. In a palatial townhall in the city’s southwest, a telegenic deputy mayor had flawlessly—and humorously—officiated the marriage in the sweltering mid-July heat. Back at the family home, I resolved to query my friend’s new father-in-law about his family’s experience of Judaism, colonialism, and Frenchness on both sides of the Mediterranean, which was partly what I’d come to Paris to study in the first place. A grandfather of three who danced like a man half his age, Saul cut an imposing figure. Amidst the exuberant “Mazel tovs!” and the champagne toasts raised to the newlyweds, I asked him what it was like to live in—and flee from—the Arab world. “I have no issues with Arabs,” I will never forget him saying, “but they drove me out of my country.”
Saul’s lament echoes the generational trauma of countless Jews forced to flee the tide of antisemitism that swept the Middle-East and North Africa through the 1950s and 60s. Once deep-rooted and prosperous Jewish communities in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan were almost extinguished overnight, with a husk of their former selves remaining in Morocco, Turkey, and Yemen. Categorized by scholars as something between forced migration and ethnic cleansing, this mass exodus took an estimated 700,000 Jews to Israel between its independence in 1949 and its 1967 victory in the Six-Day War. Known as the Mizrahim (Hebrew for ‘Oriental’), these immigrants often had no other place to go. Besides Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew was generally all they spoke.
By contrast, French-speaking Jews from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia had elsewhere to opt for exile. An estimated 235,000 of them chose France in the 1948-67 window, about half of whom have since undertaken aliyah (relocation to Israel). Scholars call this three-step journey ‘triangular migration.’ French Judaism has been shaped by the approximately 50,000 who remain, making it very much a North African affair. Indeed, whilst France welcomed large numbers of Ashkenazis, driven out of Eastern Europe in the interwar years, today only 20% of its Jews hail from that region, vastly outnumbered by the Maghrebi contingent. Nowadays, the two communities combine to supply Europe’s highest number of olim (immigrants to Israel), nearly 3000 in 2021 alone.
But Sauveur’s boutade captured something else. Uprooted from Arab society 50 years ago and now a besieged minority in an increasingly ‘Islamized’ society, French-speaking Jews are even more at odds with Islam than Jews generally tend to be. About 1.6 million Muslims followed in their footsteps from the Maghreb to France through the postwar decades—out of economically-induced choice—making France home to Europe’s largest communities of both faiths. The two groups’ official institutions may put up a façade of goodwill, but their coexistence is straining by the day. Brought to a fever pitch by the murder of three infants at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 by a radicalized Salafist, the ongoing saga of Islamist attacks on Jews—the latest as recent as the week before last—feeds into an alarmist narrative that portrays France as on the point of inter-ethnic civil war.
This heightened animus is about far more than the Israel-Palestine conflict. The larger context of colonialism which frames these divisions was addressed in the exhibition I visited the week of the wedding. Commissioned by the esteemed Franco-Algerian historian Benjamin Stora and held at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the expo aimed high, seeking to alleviate the brewing hostility between the country’s Arabs and Jews by exploring the history of their rapport. As it made amply clear, France unwittingly imported a conflict that predated the colonies, and which threatens now to blow up in its face.
As I roamed the halls of the MNHI in search of solutions, Sauveur’s observation kept reverberating in my head. Naturally, the exhibition contained a tinge of anti-colonialist wokery, depicting Arab-Jewish relations as degraded by multiple factors, all ultimately rooted in colonization. It suggested that, before France began to annex the Maghreb in the 1830s, Jews and Muslims lived an idyllic, peaceable coexistence, the two communities hermetically shut off to one another but nonetheless sharing a language and common culture. As France sought to homogenize its vast empire socially and economically throughout the 19th century, however, the region’s Jews were granted a preferential place in the colonial pecking order, turning Muslims into second-class citizens by contrast. This was famously the case with Adolphe Crémieux’s namesake decree which grandfathered the 35,000 Jews of Algeria into French citizenship in 1870, with Morocco and Tunisia following closely after. While the decree satisfied that community’s desire to assimilate into French society, it prompted an antisemitic reaction among not only local Arabs but also the white settler community, as epitomized by the MP and publicist Édouard Drumont, the infamous author of La France Juive (1886). What the exhibition came close to omitting is that the offer had been made to Algeria’s 3 million Muslims also, to no avail: they chose to hold onto Islamic law at the risk of never becoming full-fledged citizens. In scholarly terms, rather than undergoing colonization as sisters in oppression, Arabs and Jews struck a different balance between affirming their ethnic particularism and enjoying the rights afforded by French modernity.
In World War I’s wake, the diasporas of both communities swelled with new economic migrants. Relations between them—both in France and back home—also became subsumed within a larger conflict brewing half a world away, in Palestine, and have remained inextricably linked to it since. Just as Arab revolts against Zionist settlers erupted over the post-Ottoman British mandate, a similarly infamous pogrom occured in 1934 in Constantine, Algeria, killing 30 French Jews and injuring 100. What both France and Britain were discovering at the time was that their colonizing mission—the “white man’s burden,” in Kipling’s terms—involved something harder than they’d expected, namely, governing relations between two peoples who professed similar faiths but were historically at odds. The nagging colonial rancor amongst Maghrebi Muslims—the sense that Jews had enabled the subordination of Arab society by playing hatchet man to France—was temporarily eased under the Vichy regime (1940-1944), which somewhat rebalanced the ledger by passing a battery of antisemitic decrees in 1940, far more than demanded by the Nazi occupiers. Marshall Pétain even pandered to French-speaking Muslims as he turned Jews into deportable pariahs, to the point where Parisian Jews were often caught forging fake Muslim identities to escape prosecution. The exhibition highlighted one particularly praiseworthy episode. The Great Mosque, which has come under fire in recent years for hosting radical hate preachers, had hidden and protected Jewish families even as it feigned to collaborate with Vichy.
Thereafter, however, relations turned sour. During what the French nostalgically call the Trente Glorieuses—the three decades of sustained, broad-based prosperity following World War II—record numbers of Jews and Arabs were attracted to the hexagon (France), though again, for different reasons. Jews were already seen in the Arab imagination as part of the white, settler community (pieds-noirs) which, forcefully expelled from Algeria at the close of that country’s war of independence in 1962, had trickled towards France. Their comparatively better economic fortunes in France testified, in many a Muslim’s mind, to the privileged rank Jews held in the wider French society. If colonization had created a gulf between the two communities, therefore, decolonization was about to deepen it further. Most Jews immigrated to stay, however, whereas Muslims hoped to work and save enough to afford a better retirement back home; though most ultimately remained and ended up bringing their families to France. The late 1960s were a turning point, not only because the Six-Day War radicalized most Arabs in support of Palestine, and against the state to which French Jews were accused of pledging allegiance, but also in terms of numbers. Jews had, until then, been the larger of the two groups but would soon be submerged by a wave of Arab migration, bringing that population’s total number of residents in France to over 6 million in 2021, whereas Jewish migration had shrunk their community to a paltry 500,000 by the same year.
Regardless of the wokeish, France-bashing prism through which the museum sought to convey an exceedingly complex history, there has never been a better time for such an exhibition. French Jews and Arabs stand in defiance of one another. While the more politically active among the former pay homage to France’s secular ethos of inter-faith concord, a growing share of the grassroots is losing patience with republicanism. Although Jewish groups often call their members to reject essentialist rationales portraying all Muslims as potential terrorists or hate preachers, their task has been made harder by the increase in Islamist terror attacks. Ilhan Halimi, Sarah Halimi, and Mireille Knoll are just three among the tens of Jewish victims of radicalized Islamist terrorists. And it’s not just terror attacks. Shocking proportions of Muslims—15% in 2022—confess to harboring deep-seated antisemitic prejudices, according to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and FONDAPOL, a think-tank. Sensing a deep malaise, many are leaving for Israel, and, often, those who stay behind are either seduced into a form of Jewish identitarianism that rejects French laïcité, or embrace right-wing views, or both, as was proved at the last election by Éric Zemmour’s stunning results among Jews in both France and Israel. It is in this hopeless context that the exhibition’s purpose comes into full view. If it explicitly derided colonization, it is perhaps because that’s the common enemy which may unite two apparently unreconcilable communities.
The exhibition “Juifs et musulmans de la France coloniale à nos jours” was on display from April 5th-July 17, 2022 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée (Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration), Paris.
