Algerian Nationalism Zionism and French PDF

Int. J. Middle East Stud.
45 (2013), 445–467
doi:10.1017/S0020743813000421
Todd Shepard
A L G E R I A N N AT I O N A L I S M , Z I O N I S M , A N D F R E N C H
L A Ï C I T É : A H I S T O R Y O F E T H N O R E L I G I O U S
N AT I O N A L I S M S A N D D E C O L O N I Z AT I O N
Abstract
The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion
and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence
in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that took shape in the interwar period and
blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French
government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did
so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments
that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to
French laı̈cité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly
“European.” Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria
and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments in the
making of contemporary France.
In recent years, there has been much talk of “laı̈cité,” that variant of secularism so
particular to modern France, and claims about Muslims have played a central role.
Although a number of scholars explore how recent international developments and
longer colonial histories frame these debates,1 the ways that mid-20th-century Middle
Eastern and North African actors and contexts have shaped French laı̈cité up to the
present day have been largely ignored. When invoked, they are reduced either to diplo-
matic maneuvering—whether France’s “Arab strategy” or links between France and
Israel/Palestine—or burdensome memories, notably around traumatic violence during
the Algerian Revolution (1954–62).2 In the era of decolonization, this article shows,
challenges that echoed across the Mediterranean transformed French certainties as well
as altered laws and institutions. The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims”
and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped
French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a
complex and shifting debate that began in the interwar period and blossomed be-
tween 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French
Todd Shepard is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Co-director of the Program for
the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.; e-mail:
tshep75@jhu.edu
© Cambridge University Press 2013 0020-7438/13 $15.00

446 Todd Shepard
government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism,

and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called eth-
noreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship,
have always been anathema to French laı̈cité. Most scholars on France continue to
presume that its history is national or wholly “European” and its religious references
Catholic. Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from
Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean
developments as well as of Muslim and Jewish questions in the making of contemporary
France.
Among its many effects, Algeria’s war of independence catalyzed and altered French
understandings of the relationship between religion and the republic. After 1918, long-
standing French “republican” hostility to political claims made in the name of religion
focused increasingly on those that conjoined references to “ethnicity” and religion,
notably in Zionist arguments. After World War II, however, such claims came to seem
less threatening. Faced with the Algerian Revolution, the French Republic proved quite
willing to rely on origin-based and religious identities to promote policies meant to keep
Algeria French. When France finally accepted Algerian independence, not only did this
recent history of grappling in novel ways with ethnic and religious identities disappear
but French laws and presumptions defined Algerian “Muslims” as members of an ethnic
group and thus alien to French identity. The same laws and understandings referred to
Algerian Jews as French people whose religion was a private matter, compatible with
French citizenship. This is not another history of “identity,” for the French decisions
I study had little effect on how people identified at the time: multiple contexts, much
evidence, and many scholars help explain why in 1962 both the vast majority of Algerians
were unconcerned, or even overjoyed, to “lose” their French nationality and Algeria’s
Jews chose French rather than either Israeli or Algerian nationality.3 Instead, this article
shows how encounters with what recent scholars name “ethnoreligious nationalisms”
redefined how late 20th-century French nationalism and the French state dealt with
religion.4
With the defeat of French Algeria, the certainty that Islam had “ethnoreligious”
implications—while Christianity and Judaism did not—shaped French laws and “re-
publican” presumptions. As Naomi Davidson remarks about 20th-century French dis-
cussions of Islam more generally, this “French” understanding of Islam always refer-
enced Algerians.5 The category of “ethnoreligious” nationalisms and identities is key
to this history because of the complicated ways it functioned in the mid-20th-century
confrontation between three nationalisms—French, Algerian, Israeli—over their con-
tradictory claims to encompass inhabitants of Algeria (most, for the first two; Jewish,
for the third). The category has been widely deployed in recent analyses of “people of
Muslim culture” (and, to a lesser extent, “Judeo-Muslim relations”) in contemporary
France. I am not interested in relying on the “ethnoreligious” as an “analytic” category;
instead, I historicize it as a “native” category, looking at how it emerged as an analytic
category in earlier mid-20th-century French scholarly and political discussions about
“Jews” and, equally important, at its absence from contemporaneous French discussions
about Algerian nationalism.6
At least until 1962, French commentators did not use the term “ethnoreligious” to talk
about Algerian nationalists, even as it appeared regularly in discussions about Zionism.
Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laı̈cité 447
Indeed, French commentators ignored or denigrated the very idea of a specifically

Algerian nationalism, from its early 20th-century stirrings to Algeria’s independence.
French intelligence assessments, popular commentators, and scholars dismissed its pro-
ponents’ claims (to speak for the “Algerian” people of Algeria, which excluded the
“European colonists”) and ridiculed its premises (that this people, formed by a unique
encounter of Berbers and Arabs that Islam made possible, formed a distinct nation).
When discussing them at all, French critics framed so-called Algerian nationalists as
dupes of international conspiracies. Debates about Zionism, as an international move-
ment but most particularly its claims on (Jewish) French citizens, did engage some French
intellectuals before 1940. Most were critics, who spoke of Zionism’s “ethnoreligious”
premises, which they contrasted with French republicanism’s “universal” principles.
After World War II, and especially after Israeli independence in 1948, Jewish and non-
Jewish French commentators, even those who were critical, presumed that Zionism
needed to be taken seriously.7
Between the end of the World War II and Algeria’s independence, the dual challenge
posed by these distinct nationalisms—both of which privileged “ethnoreligious” terms
over the territorial and legal definitions of national belonging that French republicanism
embraced—contoured the ways the French republic dealt with religious and “ethnic”
identities. The affirmations of scholars and politicians that a “French model” of the
nation-state—dating from the 1789 revolution and coalescing in the 19th century—
involves the consistent republican rejection of “origins” or “faith” to explain membership
in the nation have obfuscated what actually happened in this recent period.8 In the mid-
20th century, debates and decisions about national belonging—most notably, who from
Algeria was French and why?—saw French republican arguments and laws, supposedly
anchored only in legal and territorial facts, unsettled by assertions from Algerian nation-
alists, on the one hand, and Zionists, on the other, that privileged so-called ethnoreligious
criteria.
This shifting history crystallized in late 1961 and 1962, when officials of the French
Republic once again took up two religious labels—“Muslims” and “Jews”—to advance
or counter policy initiatives related to how their government should treat people from
Algeria, all of whom were (in French and international law, if often for “Muslims”
not in practice) French citizens. These decisions were related to the imminent victory
of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which from its first declaration had
rejected French pretensions that all Algerians were French. The FLN’s 1 November
1954 Proclamation demanded “an official declaration abrogating the edicts, decrees
and laws that present Algeria as a ‘French land,’ which is a denial of the History,
the geography, the language, the religion, and the mores of the Algerian people.”9
Yet despite the fact that the FLN’s triumph forced their hand, French officials sought
to avoid any legal acknowledgement that this was the case. There was no “official
declaration”; instead there were multiple intersecting decisions that, in the end, had
the effect of excluding most Algerians from the French nation. Exclusion rather than
recognition is the argument I develop in The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian
War and the Remaking of France, yet that book’s focus on how “ethnicized racialization”
anchored French legal decisions occludes almost any discussion of religious questions
(“Islam,” e.g., is not in the index).10 At the dawn of Algerian independence, however,
religion was crucial to explaining French choices, notably because official explanations
448 Todd Shepard
at this precise moment denied that religion had any effect on national identity while
insisting that origins did. To be from Algeria and defined by religious belonging posed
no problem for remaining French; to be part of one distinct ethnic group posed serious
problems. In these discussions, however, Algerian “Muslims” appeared as a “nationality”
or “ethnicity,” members of a group that was not French because “Muslim” by origin and
yet whose relationship to Islam went unspoken; Algeria’s Jews were discussed not as a
group but as French individuals who each “had a religion,” Judaism.11
Questions of inclusions and exclusion went beyond certainties to determine shifts
in French laws, which worked to end the right of all “Muslims” and to guarantee that
of all “Jews” from Algeria to hold onto French nationality. A 21 July 1962 Executive
Decree (which had the force of law) stripped all French citizens with “Koranic law civil
status” of their (French) birthright nationality. This included the hundreds of thousands
who had worked to keep Algeria French, such as members or veterans of the French
Armed Forces; actual and former office holders; French civil servants; and the thousands,
so-called harkis and others, who had fled Algeria to metropolitan France after Alge-
ria’s independence. For Algeria’s Jews, the French government’s legal and bureaucratic
strategy was the opposite. A law of 28 July 1961 had transformed French citizens with
“Mosaic civil law status” into French citizens with French Civil Law Status. French
functionaries described this small group of people, the Jews of the Mzab region, as
among the “least assimilated” groups in Algeria: they had no patronymics, an indication
of how little contact, historically, they had had with the French colonial state compared
to other Algerians: they were polygamous; they used repudiation for divorce. Yet not
only did this group of Algerian individuals “naturalize” into common law status, they
were able to do so with none of the restrictions that had always accompanied such
shifts. Most notable was their right to choose their own given names and patronymics, a
possibility that had been pointedly denied to Jews entering into French nationality since
the Napoleonic Concordat (for example, “naturalizing” Jews had always been prevented
from choosing patronymics that referenced places or the Bible).12 In 1963, when some
Mzabite Jews who had emigrated to Israel sought to “repatriate” to France, the state
waived the usual requirements for documentary proof of their identity or their French
nationality, and welcomed them as citizens.13 The actions favoring the small numbers
of Mzabites were emblematic of decisions ultimately taken vis-à-vis the some 120,000
Jews from Algeria, as French officials affirmed that all were French. Efforts by some
Zionists and Algerian nationalists to insist that these people were part of other nations—
Israel or Algeria—precipitated these choices. Scholars have explored at length how
French influences shaped both Zionism and Algerian nationalism.14 Since the mid-20th
century, however, Israeli and Algerian arguments and actions have shaped French laws
and ideologies, too.
L A Ï C I T É A N D T H E C R I S I S O F C AT H O L I C I S M
French republicanism, much scholarship tells us, rejected the idea that people should
participate in political life as members of groups, rather than as individuals. Republi-
cans are those who embrace the forms of democratic politics and related understandings
of how to organize society that the French Revolution catalyzed and that then took
institutional and ideological form over two centuries of struggle to make and keep French
government republican. It was the rejection of old-regime “corporations” and “estates”
that initially powered the critique of subnational organizations. Yet within France and
without, republican polemicists increasingly focused on how religious- and origins-based
arguments were irrational, anti-universalist, premodern, and backwards ideologies that
impeded people from becoming rational modern individuals. Religious groups, espe-
cially the Catholic Church, often appeared as an extreme case of the “corporate” danger
to republicanism, because they explicitly privileged faith and established authority as
the basis for reaching key decisions, rather than rational, informed, and evidence-based
debate between individuals. This understanding among republicans crystallized around
the fin-de-siècle Dreyfus Affair, when the fabricated accusation of treason leveled at
a Jewish member of the French Army’s General Staff resulted in a vicious and wide-
ranging confrontation between “the forces of order” (the Catholic Church, the army,
and those who celebrated their place in French society) and the “forces of progress”
(those who embraced France’s revolutionary tradition). The victory of the latter had
many effects, but the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State was the most
important and most widely invoked.15
The explanatory value of this foundational conflict between “state” and “church”
is substantial. Particularly important, although often ignored in current discussions, is
that the mechanisms and rules that today make France laı̈c result from a long history
of negotiated truces—which Jean Baubérot ties together as a “pact” between the two
antagonists—rather than from any simple principle of separation.16 Up to the present day,
French laws, including those adopted to advance the most militant versions of laı̈cité, give
a role to (Catholic) Christianity that some might find surprising. The major Catholic holy
days—not just Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas but also Pentecost and Ascension—
are national holidays. Almost all schoolchildren have Wednesday afternoons off, because
of a law to ensure that they have time to attend Catechism classes.17 Although Vatican
II (1962–65) tempered the Catholic stricture against eating meat on Friday, all French
public school cafeterias still serve fish on Fridays. In certain regions of France, the state
has made further adjustments to accommodate local needs, sensibilities, and histories.
Today, the most well known are in the eastern departments of Alsace and the Moselle.
Because they were under German control between 1871 and 1918, the law of 1905,
which excluded religious groups from the operation of public institutions, does not
apply there. Public schools in these departments continue to have mandatory classes in
religion, taught by members of the clergy.
These accommodations stand out precisely because they are not subtle: they are
not efforts to camouflage longstanding religious practices in secular garb—to replace
the word “Christmas” with “holiday” to qualify late-December “trimmed” trees, gift-
giving ceremonies, pageants and parties, for example—but battles won by proponents of
maintaining the presence of certain religious forms in public life. They won these battles
in the course of losing the larger war against republicans who opposed allowing religious
forms, personnel, and arguments to play a substantial role in public life. The lack of
constancy reminds us that, like real wars à la Clausewitz, this was a political struggle,
with partial retreats and compromises as important to winning as tactical victories could
be to losing.
450 Todd Shepard
F R E N C H A L G E R I A A N D L A Ï C I T É
Laws and institutions—marriage, hospitals, schools—were crucial grounds on which the

struggle over laı̈cité took place. Besides Alsace-Lorraine, this struggle was particularly
important in another part of France: Algeria. In the decades following the 1830 French
invasion of Algiers, which saw the violent conquest and pacification of most of what we
now know as Algeria, the new rulers organized several legal systems to govern the people
who came under their control: their own, often called “common law,” and the already
mentioned “Koranic” law and “Mosaic” law systems. These two systems had existed
under Ottoman rule; their maintenance was specified in the 5 July 1830 Agreement of
Capitulation that French authorities signed with the defeated leader of Algiers, Husayn
Dey, in recognition of their conquest. After initial attempts to sweep the two legal
systems away, intense local resistance led French authorities to adhere to the agreement,
though they worked actively to reduce the purview of what would eventually be called
“local law.” By the 1850s, the Koranic and Mosaic legal systems only had authority
over so-called civil status law—marriage, paternity (filiation), divorce, inheritance. In
addition, Koranic law courts and jurists only had the authority to judge such cases in
the first instance; all appeals, although judged under Koranic law, were to be brought
before French courts. Mosaic law courts and jurists had been swept aside, their authority
appropriated by French courts. These courts were enjoined to respect Koranic and
Mosaic laws and procedures. The French government of Algeria, and more particularly
the practice of French jurists, simplified and stultified both legal systems, ignoring the
multiple schools and contested interpretations that characterized them; Quranic law,
in particular, was cut off from the transnational debates it had always depended on to
develop. This left them largely as rigid rule books, written by French authors, rather
than vital discursive traditions.18
In 1870, the Crémieux Decree forced all Algerians with Mosaic civil status to abandon
it; they became French of “common law civil status,” to use a category that appears in
post-1945 texts. Already, an 1865 law had affirmed that the people of Algeria were French
nationals. This law had also offered a pathway for (adult male) French nationals with
Koranic or Mosaic civil status to be “naturalized” as citizens rather than only as nationals,
by abandoning the civil status to which they were born and entering into “common law”
civil status. Publicists presented the Crémieux Decree as another sign that “the republic”
and its universal values had been reborn out of the ashes of the Second Empire (1852–
70). Yet it resulted directly from the frustration of deeply republican politicians (most,
like Adolphe Crémieux, were also active in Jewish organizations in the metropole) that
almost no Algerians with Mosaic civil status had chosen to be naturalized. It removed the
possibility of individual choice as it eliminated Mosaic civil law within the territory that,
in 1848, had become the three French Algerian departments. After 1870, most Algerian-
born Jews were citizens, as were settlers of European origin born to French parents or,
after the 1889 French nationality law, born on French territory, which included Algeria.
The caveat was that between 1876 and 1961, the Jews of the Mzab—an area declared
French after 1870 and thus not automatically affected by the Crémieux Decree—had
Mosaic civil law status; like “Muslims,” they had French nationality and gained legal
citizenship only in 1946.19
In the colonial rule of Algeria, as this brief summary suggests, the law had a privileged
place in ongoing French efforts to transform the people of Algeria. Again and again,
French officials in Algeria affirmed that regular contact with French law and jurists
would inevitably lead local people to recognize the superiority of a system that, they
had no doubt, was fairer, more rational, and, in short, superior. They would abandon
their identity as part of “backwards” or “feudal” groups, defined by origin or religion,
and seek to become French “individuals.” In parallel, the slow consolidation of the
Third Republic—which emerged during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), took hold
in the late 1870s, and lasted until the German conquest of France in 1940—saw repeated
affirmations that France had to reject laws and rules that defined French people on the
basis of origins or religion. Such standards anchored larger arguments by republicans
that the institutions they sought to build were inspired by universal principles. This,
republican writers noted, was in sharp distinction to antirepublican French reactionaries
as well as rival foreign states, notably the U.K. and Germany, which explicitly relied on
religion, race, and origins in their laws and in the propaganda celebrating their “nations”
and forms of government. This contest with other European nationalisms is central to
most accounts of how French “republican” and “laı̈c” nationalism developed, notably
that offered by Hannah Arendt. Yet, although ignored by Arendt and most subsequent
scholars, some of the clearest institutional evidence for republican pretensions involved
Algeria: both the Crémieux Decree and the 1889 Law on Nationality actively embraced
people who, in Algeria, lived on French soil and were raised in contact with French
institutions as French citizens, despite their religious attachments, in the first instance,
or foreign (European) origins, in the second.20
Neither law, of course, made French citizens of the vast majority of Algerians—
those called “Arabs, “Berbers,” “Muslims,” or indigènes—despite the fact that they
had French nationality and lived on the territory of the French Republic. Indeed, the
paucity of rules and institutional reforms toward this end gives the measure of how
little belief in and/or desire for such an outcome existed among men of influence.
Much historical work carefully demonstrates how racism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism,
and fear of Islam—along with greed and the power of monied interests—constantly
reaffirmed this exclusion, and traces its devastating effects on most Algerians’ lives,
health, livelihood, educational possibilities, and hopes. Yet, over the course of the Third
Republic, French officials and politicians explained that this unequal status, too, was
consonant with republican principles.21
To be a citizen was to stand in the same relationship to the law as all other citizens.
The French nationals in question, however, had “Koranic civil law status,” and this
difference in legal status was the most widely used public explanation for why this
group of adult males could not exercise citizenship. Since they did not stand as private
individuals before the republic’s law in “civil law” matters, they could not participate in
its elaboration. It was not because they were Arabs or Berbers and it was not because their
religion was Islam: it supposedly was because of their legal status, which happened to
be anchored in religious texts and teachings. To further demonstrate that the system was
consonant with republicanism, officials noted that it was individual descent, rather than
religion, race, or group membership, that explained why these male French nationals
were not citizens. The most famous example of how this worked was a 1930s French
452 Todd Shepard
court rejection of a suit by Berbers who had converted to Catholicism and sought entry
into “common law status” because they were not Muslims: it was the legal status of
their parents that defined their civil law status, the ruling announced, not their religion.
To leave Koranic civil law status required a successful application to the republic (as
governed by the laws of 1865 and 1919), not a renunciation of Islam.22
One constant in these claims was the argument that French “respect” for the choice of
indigènes to remain under the empire of “local law status” explained why “Koranic civil
law status” still existed. “Qualified” Algerians could leave this status and, thus, enter
citizenship. This announced attachment to individual desires, of course, had been ignored
repeatedly in Algeria—most dramatically, at the level of legal status, in the Crémieux
Decree, not to mention during the violent conquest of Algeria—and for that matter, in
all of the extensive legal assimilation practices republicans pursued in the metropole.
Yet republican leaders and French officials paid little attention to the incoherence or lack
of constancy in their own claims. They preferred to focus their critique on the “feudal”
and “backwards” traditions and beliefs of Algeria’s Muslims, forms of group thinking
and pressure which they described as the primary impediments to individuals making
the choice to abandon “Koranic civil law status.” Proposals to bring more Algerian
men into the ranks of full citizens, by allowing them to hold onto “at least aspects
of Koranic civil status,” were met with intense opposition. Any such liberalization,
“European” voices from Algeria insisted, “would fossilize Algerians in their Muslim
law, their communitarian institutions, their ‘querelles de minarets.’” These critiques, as
French historian Gilbert Meynier describes, “were expressed in terms of a commitment
to ‘assimilation’ and in defense of ‘laı̈cité.’”23
E T H N O R E L I G I O U S N AT I O N A L I S M S A N D T H E F R E N C H R E P U B L I C :
T H E A L G E R I A N N AT I O N
The emergence of Algerian nationalism directly targeted these confused French explana-
tions for why French nationality did not coincide with the exercise of citizenship for most
Algerians, especially the odd pretense that, as far as the republic was concerned, “Mus-
lim” was a legal status. Almost all critics of French rule in Algeria berated the hypocrisy
of official claims; they targeted French efforts around citizenship to distance Algerians
from Islam as well as to subsume the practice of Islam to state control. For many of
Algeria’s Muslim religious leaders and Muslims more generally, to abandon “Muslim”
status in order to become a full citizen was to become an apostate; there were numerous
cases of denied religious burials and other indications that most leaders of the religious
community and many other Algerian Muslims did not recognize the claims of fidelity to
Islam made by “assimilated” Muslims.24 Raberh Achi, in his analysis of one important
nationalist movement, the Association des oulémas (Jamaat al-Ulama), and its calls for
the French government to enact the separation of Muslim religious organizations from
state control (i.e., laı̈cité), describes how the association “highlighted the contradiction
between this Republic so quick to affirm laı̈cité as its dogma in the metropole yet ready
to render it meaningless in Algeria whenever control of the indigenous population was
at stake.” Concerns about the place of Islam motivated many Arabs and Berbers to
challenge French rule; growing numbers invoked the Algerian nation to explain their
goals.25
The definitions of the Algerian nation that crystallized in early nationalist debates
were at the intersection of religious/Islamic affiliation and ethnicity. This has led recent
scholars to assert that Algerian nationalism was “ethnoreligious” in character from the
beginning. With this claim, they critique an existing historiography (deeply influenced, it
must be noted, by French republican certainties) arguing that “ethnic” and religious ref-
erences emerged only in the 1930s and corrupted earlier forms of Algerian nationalism.
James McDougall shows that early nationalist texts and statements articulated a unique
Algerian personality, an alloy of Islam and the particular ethnic heritage of Algeria’s
Arab and Berber peoples forged through history.26 Such claims took on increasing
precision during World War I and the early 1920s, he argues, in polemical disputes
about the place of Algeria’s Kabyle and other Berber populations vis-à-vis its “Arabs.”
They became foundational to other strands of nationalist politics in the 1930s, especially
after the reformist intellectual and politician Ferhat Abbas catalyzed debates about the
existence of an “Algerian nation” with his infamous 1936 claim that “I have interrogated
history; I have interrogated the living and the dead; I have visited cemeteries. No one
spoke to me of the Algerian nation.”27
Disputes among Algerian nationalists, anticolonialists, and reformers over the exis-
tence, history, and definition of the “Algerian nation” were often intense and always
multivocal. Yet French commentators, almost without exception, simply ignored or
dismissed them all. Before 1914, there were infrequent but regular warnings in the
French Algerian press about Pan-Islamism and “Muslim nationalism.” In the years after
the Great War, French critics transformed these into far more frequent attacks on “Arab
nationalism.” This was the primary charge against the period’s most prominent Algerian
political figure, the Emir Khaled. Some French Algerian newspapers even sought to link
his “Arab nationalism” with “Bolshevism.”28 During the 1920s, claims of a specifically
Algerian identity began to coalesce in the arguments of small numbers of Algerian
“Muslim” elites. Yet French analysts continued to argue that extra-Algerian links, not
Algerian nationalism, motivated actions that they deemed anti-French and/or dangerous.
Several republican certainties help explain French commentators’ inability to respond
to pressing evidence that Algerian nationalism existed. One had to do with the terms
Algerian nationalists (and protonationalists) used. As Meynier writes, in reference to
even relatively informed French responses, “the fact that Algerian nationalism was
articulated through frames foreign to the French conception of the nation” and the lack
“of concepts that corresponded to French concepts” together “led observers to deny
that it was nationalism.”29 Notably, republican rejection of origin- and religious-based
nationalisms—which had developed historically against French, British, and German
opponents—was joined with almost total ignorance of or disdain for specifically Islamic
models and political thinking. More broadly, over the course of the interwar period,
as Martin Thomas puts it, “French governments, Algiers officials and the settler lobby
still maintained that Algeria was a French construction built on virgin soil from the
administrative chaos of the Ottoman era . . . ”30 Even the French political organization
that had expressed the most sympathy with at least one branch of Algerian nationalism in
the interwar years, the French Communist Party (PCF), forthrightly avoided the claims
of Messali Hadj—who came to lead the first nationalist proindependence movement, the
Etoile nord-africaine, founded in 1926—or any other Algerian about what defined the
Algerian nation. This was clearly visible in PCF leader Maurice Thorez’s 1937 argument
454 Todd Shepard
that Algerians were merely a “nation-in-formation,” which like the French nation would
fuse diverse ethnic groups into a whole defined by a unique secular vision and, once
formed, would leave religion to the side.31
E T H N O R E L I G I O U S N AT I O N A L I S M S A N D T H E F R E N C H R E P U B L I C :
ZIONISM
Such silence was not inevitable. During these same years, a set of terms and categories
emerged in France that, in retrospect, seems ready-made to both speak of and criticize
Algerian nationalism. As noted, between 1789 and 1914, French republicans grew
increasingly univocal in their opposition to any political and public recognition of
identities anchored in either religious belief or origins (“racial” or “ethnic”). Yet it
was not until the interwar period that French anxieties about the potential intersection
of “origins” and “religion” were clearly articulated. This happened in the context of
discussions about Zionism among a small number of French historians and critics,
who elaborated the concept nationalisme ethnico-réligieux (ethnoreligious nationalism)
to speak of Jews. Interwar discussions in France about Zionism and about Jews and
Palestine more broadly repeatedly referred to an “ethnoreligious” community or nation,
notably, in numerous studies of ancient Hebrew and Roman Palestine. As the Jesuit
theologian Joseph Sirven wrote in the first volume of Palestinian Judaism in the Time
of Jesus Christ (1934), “it was this ethno-religious nationalism . . . that allowed Judaism
always to continue to exist as a nation.”32
As French critics noted, Zionist arguments for an “ethnoreligious” Jewish identity
differed markedly from central tenets of French republicans, which most French Jew-
ish leaders passionately embraced. What scholars term “Franco-Judaism” shared the
certainty that religious attachments and belief were acceptable, so long as they were
confined to the private sphere and excluded from politics. Zionist political leaders in
Palestine, however, as they worked to create an independent Jewish homeland, took
up ethnoreligious definitions. Alain Dieckhoff details how, in their effort “to determine
membership in the Jewish people,” the founders of the State of Israel “adopted de jure
the religious criterion alone.” Even though these men and women, he argues, “wanted to
found a largely secular identity . . . there was always agreement on an ethnic definition
of the Jewish people which coincided closely with the religious definition.”33 Such
arguments, scholars such as Annette Wieviorka and Esther Benbassa note, found little
purchase in France, as “Franco-Judaism remained the primary frame of reference for
French Jews throughout the interwar period.” Yet texts from this period that invoke
Jewish “ethnoreligious nationalism” support the more nuanced claims of more recent
scholars of French Jewry, such as Nadia Malinovich. She notes that, despite the ongo-
ing hegemony of “Franco-Judaism,” there were many self-identified Jews and Jewish
groups in France who, alongside Zionists, sought to articulate definitions of Jewish
identity that had public, even political, implications, rather than accept that they must
remain wholly “private.” (The role of immigrants, notably those who primarily spoke
languages other than French, was especially important.) The term “ethnoreligious,”
even when used in critiques of Zionism, made clear that a discussion not restricted to
republican prescriptions was taking place.34
In the post-1945 period there was an increasing willingness to affirm forms of Jewish
specificity that could not be collapsed into religion, which crystallized with Israeli
independence.35 In addition, over the course of the 1950s, French discussions about
Zionism increasingly expanded beyond a “Jewish” public, however defined. In a context
where Paris developed a close and supportive relationship with Tel Aviv—including such
markers as the joint attack on Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis and the commerce in
nuclear and other types of advanced weaponry—and where French intellectuals engaged
with analyses both of the place of religion in public life and the role and causes of anti-
Semitism in Europe, many discussions about Zionism appeared in forums such as Le
Monde, Temps modernes, and Esprit.36 French scholars continued to deploy the concept
of ethnoreligious nationalism; in the late 1960s, the well-known Group for Religious
Sociology, founded by Gabriel Le Bras, categorized all of its work on Judaism under
the rubric “An Ethno-Religion.”37
D E N Y I N G A L G E R I A N N AT I O N A L I S M , 1 9 4 5 – 6 2
After World War II, French commentators and officials continued to studiously avoid
serious engagement with Algerian nationalism, denying its complexity and even its
existence. This was despite the fact that French discussions about Zionism as an “eth-
noreligious nationalism” grew increasingly substantial between World War I and the late
1950s. When confronted with nationalist demonstrations at the end of World War II—
most spectacularly those for Algerian independence on 8 May 1945 in the Constantinois
region, which included a number of deadly attacks followed by a murderous official
crackdown—metropolitan political parties and politicians relied on settler and official
sources in Algeria that, bizarrely enough, led them to interpret nationalist demonstra-
tions on “Victory in Europe Day” as a pro-Nazi plot. (Already in February 1945, a
Communist Party leader described “the pseudo-nationalists of [Messali Hadj’s] PPA”
as “troublemakers and dupes of the Hitlerian services.”) In debates during the Constitu-
tional Assemblies of 1946 and in parliament, politicians loudly and disdainfully rejected
the efforts of nationalist politicians from Algeria to advance claims for autonomy and
independence. Between 1947 and 1954, according to historian Jean-Charles Jauffret,
the French intelligence services in Algeria (the Deuxième bureau), like their colleagues
in the metropole (Service de liaisons nord-africaines), “never used the term ‘nation,’
or for that matter the word ‘nationalism’” in reference to the groups that they spied
on in Algeria or that were concerned with Algeria in the metropole. In discussions in
the French press during the weeks after the 1 November 1954 launch of the FLN’s
Algeria-wide military campaign for independence, as Zahir Inhaddadden shows, “there
is not a single reference to Algerian nationalism, except for one timid reference to the
nationalist leadership in the newspaper Combat.”38
Over the next several years, as FLN actions expanded, even the most reticent French
commentators found it necessary to discuss “Algerian nationalism.” Most did so to
discredit it, with a focus on ethnic and religious references and arguments that Algeria’s
“so-called nationalists” were driven by an unexamined and deadly mix of “religious
fanaticism” and “racism.” In 1954, the historian Hubert J. Deschamps identified the
message of the most well-known nationalist leader, Messali Hadj, as an amalgam of
“religious and xenophobic fanaticism and proletarian emancipation”; in 1955, the new
456 Todd Shepard
governor-general of Algeria argued that “a theocratic and racist state” was the goal of the
FLN; in 1957, ex-General Alphonse Juin qualified nationalist action as resulting from
an “unhealthy surge of racism and religious fanaticism”; and the pamphleteer Maurice
Candas rejected attempts “to speak of Algerian nationalism, when it is nothing more than
pan-Arabism, which is to say fanaticism spiced up with racism.” Besides the repetitive
and self-serving nature of the twinned claim, what is particularly noteworthy is how it
intersected with key innovations in government policy.39
T H E R E P U B L I C A N “ I N T E G R AT I O N I S T ” E M B R A C E O F E T H N I C I T Y
AND RELIGION
After 1945, and most dramatically during the first years of the Fifth Republic, French
governments embraced policies in metropolitan as well as Algerian France that were
explicitly linked to religious and ethnic claims and identities. Their immediate goal, of
course, was to keep Algeria French. The most innovative approach that officials relied
on (one that did not directly employ physical violence) was termed “integration.” Like
earlier models for governing the colony, integrationism sought to make Algerians more
like French people; what distinguished it, at least in theory, from earlier models (termed
“assimilationism,” “associationism,” or “coexistence”) was its claim that a key factor
that had kept most Algerians from becoming more French was the discrimination they
had suffered from their fellow French nationals. This broke with previous certainties that
the main impediment was the reluctance of the vast majority of Algerians to abandon
their attachment to what made them “different” (by making the “choice” to abandon
Koranic civil law status, for example).40
What integrationism authorized most clearly were state policies to address the effects
of French racism on most Algerians.41 This meant recognizing that in order to achieve
real equality, despite longstanding claims to the contrary, it was not enough for gov-
ernments to establish formal legal equality while pursuing economic growth and justice
and, in return, for individuals to abandon any public invocation of nonnational group
(e.g., religious or ethnic) membership. Legal equality was something that all Algerians
supposedly had—and over the course of the war, French policies made this legal equality
more complete—and French politicians, notably on the left, still insisted that economic
growth and the extension of social welfare policies to Algerians (along with the elim-
ination of armed rebellion) would solve the Algerian crisis. But integrationism set the
stage for policies giving exceptional and temporary forms of targeted state assistance
to those Algerians who had suffered the effects of racist discrimination resulting from
previous French policies. This meant giving explicit state recognition of identities based
in “origins,” rather than simply targeting such identities as problems.42
A 1956 decree created a new legal category, citoyens Français musulmans d’Algérie
(Muslim French citizens from Algeria), or FMA. The acronym FMA had existed for
a decade, yet this legal category was novel because it extended state recognition to a
group explicitly defined by origins: all French citizens (and legally all Algerians were
French citizens) who could trace their ancestry back to someone who a) was living in
what became Algeria at the time of the French conquest; and b) had been governed
under Koranic law as an FMA, regardless of their own religious faith (or current civil
status). State recognition of FMA status allowed the French Republic to offer support
or open possibilities to FMAs. This odd intersection of religious nomenclature and an

identity defined by origin, as we have seen, had long roots in the French rule of Algeria,
but it took on new importance during the Algerian war. In 1959, for example, during a
debate in the Senate over a proposal to establish a quota system for FMA officers in the
French Armed Forces, the senator presenting the law noted that
some colleagues thought that the expression “Muslim Frenchmen” might carry a religious sig-
nification that could exclude some who were of another religion or who had no religion . . .
But we have held onto it because existing texts that relate to Algeria already use the expres-
sion “Muslim Frenchmen” without any implication that the term implies any form of religious
distinction.43
Over the course of the Algerian war, documents and officials spoke endlessly of “Mus-
lims” and the French republic pursued quota policies for “Muslims” in state hiring and
the recruitment of university students. Yet these “Muslims” were supposedly defined by
origin, not religion. “Muslim” equaled what most Algerian nationalists termed “Algeri-
ans”; the term stood in for what some French commentators referred to as “Arabs” and
“Berbers.” This was its meaning, for example, in the debates internal to the Algerian
Communist Party right before the war began in 1954, as militants grappled, according
to Emmanuel Sivan, with how the party had become divided “into two racially-based
camps,” Europeans and Muslims.44
Officials and politicians began to embrace “ethnic” definitions specific to Algeria
to rethink the contours of the French nation, a process they claimed would bring all
Algerians more fully inside. They used ethnic categories for policies announced as
targeting the effects of racism and in analyses that identified how origin-based politics
functioned. French republicanism, we are told, rejects all political references to group
“origins” as necessarily racist, because they depend on the lie that “races” and “ethnic
groups” are more revelatory categories than that of the individual. Yet French decisions
made in the name of “integrationism” remind us how such claims can obscure the
multiple and paradoxical realities of republican theory and practices: republicanism,
whether in the centuries following Machiavelli or in recent decades, always had been
both imagined in terms of guiding principles and defined in terms of changing contexts.
After World War II and the defeat of fascism and Nazism, the new importance of
antiracism was a key international context. In France, the post-Vichy hegemony of
republicanism was also crucial. The ways that antirepublican arguments were excluded
from the realm of the possible (because of their link to Nazi occupation and French
collaboration) help explain the new willingness to think with “origins” in the post-1945
context. These contexts also render understandable the novel shape of French discussions
about religion and laı̈cité in these years.
In their “integrationist” campaign to defeat Algerian nationalism, French officials
joined their reliance on reforms linked to ethnicity and antiracism (which predominated)
with others that concerned Islam-as-religion. Beyond the immediate pressures to crush
the FLN, there were larger contexts at play. In 1950s France, religion increasingly
appeared to be domesticated, a development that reflected a wider decline in “West-
ern” anxieties around religious identities in the years following World War II. With
an approach similar to contemporary scholars who elaborated what recent critics term
the “secularization thesis,” many laı̈c commentators presumed that the modern French
458 Todd Shepard
nation had found ways to master religious irrationality, to render it private and so
unthreatening.45 As historian Antoine Prost argues, these were years in which “Catholi-
cism no longer posed a danger to the unity of the nation; a real consensus had emerged
around republican principles and our [French] society was wracked more by conflicts
of interest and class-based antagonisms than by these ideological debates.” Even in the
one area where religion continued to provoke substantial disagreement—“the school
question”—the role of Catholicism was now the source of “tensions” rather than “a
war.” All participants in a 1959 forum in the left-Catholic journal Esprit on “Laı̈cité
and Scholarly Peace” agreed on the decreasing public importance of the topic. As the
Gaullist government was defending its project to extend public financing to private
(overwhelmingly Catholic) schools, Henri Chateix, a retired teacher and a defender of
public schools who rejected any role for the church in their operations, noted that “public
opinion, again confronted with a conflict of which it has grown tired, seems to have lost
some of its reflexes.”46
This had effects on Islam, too. The so-called loss of reflexes, I suggest, helps explain
why integrationist French officials proved surprisingly open to reforming policy, in
the metropole and Algeria, to make it more amenable to Islam. In early 1955, for
example, the Mendès-France government proposed to establish an Institut d’Études
Franco-Islamiques in Paris. Bureaucratic discussions of the still-born project all ex-
pressed certainty that there was a form of Islam—“modernist”—that would find a home
in the French Republic and, as it did so, would restore Islam to a truer path, make
it a modern religion.47 This Orientalist certainty—that there was a “true” Islam that
could best be interpreted by French- or Western-trained theologians and guided by
metropolitan governments—had a long history.48 Yet during the Algerian war, it shaped
government policies in unrecognized ways. The most notable was a French reform that
extended civil marriage to “Muslims” in Algeria. Spokesmen presented this both as one
part of the larger effort that began in 1957 (and became widely publicized with the
1958 advent of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic) to expand women’s rights and as
one among many reforms of “Koranic civil law” that aimed to make Algerian Islam
“modern” and “French.”49
The Ordinance of 4 February 1959 codified a decision, taken in June 1958, to allow
marriages between French citizens whose personal status was governed by Koranic civil
law to take place at the town hall, like other French citizens, and mandated that a civil
marriage—a (necessarily) nonreligious ceremony administered by a state official—take
place. This broke with Algerian practices. It was one of several reforms that altered
Koranic civil law rules on divorce/repudiation and the role of male legal guardians of
adult women. As requested, French administrators and jurists based in Algeria sent
reports to Paris about the changes. Many evoked widespread support for these reforms,
anchored, on the one hand, in what was described as the indifferent or vaguely accepting
reaction of “Muslim” public opinion, especially among the young, and, on the other
hand, in extended analyses of why the reforms were wholly consonant with Islam, if
properly understood. “Let us return to the source,” wrote the lead prosecutor attached
to the appeals court of Oran, “which is to say the Koran, and examine if the rules we are
changing are, according to theologians, guardians of Islam, and true believers, rooted in
Divine Law . . . ” After arguing that neither the Quran nor the sunna mentioned these
questions, he reiterated his strong support for the reforms.50
Another exchange between French officials brings these claims into a different light.
In September 1959, a French deputy elected from the Sahara submitted his report on
the “reactions of the populations of the Sahara to the application of the Ordinance of 4
February 1959” to the minister of the interior. His report outlined the insistent complaints
of local, religious, and tribal leaders concerning the new rules. Like many other French
officials, he recounted how he sought to use the Quran and his (self-proclaimed) knowl-
edge of “the ch’ria” to counter the critiques that local people expressed. His interlocutors
claimed that their “religion,” its texts, and its laws mandated male legal guardianship
of unmarried women and rejected the idea that faithful Muslim women could appear
before a state official (marriages in this region were performed in the absence of the
woman). He explained to these men, so he wrote, that the basis of these claims was
not Islam, but rather local patriarchal traditions. His approach was typical of most such
reports. What makes this document noteworthy are the written annotations of a Ministry
of Interior civil servant to the deputy’s arguments.51 Rather than religious exegesis, the
Paris-based functionary emphatically affirmed that the ordinance should be read as laı̈c:
an effort “to undermine paternal authority,” “to emancipate women,” and “to affirm the
French rule of the separation of Church and State,” as he wrote in the margins.52 This
approach—explicitly critical of Algerian realities, and religious arguments for them,
and affirming the superiority of republican models—was also embraced by the woman
who was in charge of guiding the reforms, Mlle. Nafissa Sid-Cara, named in 1958 to
the Michel Debré government as Secretary of State for Muslim Social Reforms. Yet
despite her success in advancing a series of reforms that aimed to emancipate women—
a hard-fought battle involving her repeated threats to resign—the laws and rules adopted
were all, publicly but also juridically, framed as consonant with Islam, that is, with a
modern Islam, accurately understood, and against local traditions that, because of their
“fossilization,” had become non-Islamic.53
A L G E R I A ’ S “ F R E N C H ” J E W S : T H E D E F E AT O F Z I O N I S M , T H E
D I S A P P E A R A N C E O F I N T E G R AT I O N I S M
The ways that the same officials discussed Algeria’s Jews sharpen the contours and
meanings of this development. There are signs that the republic’s relationship with
Judaism, as with other religions, had become more flexible during the war. In the fall of
1958, for example, Algiers instructed prefectures across Algeria that Jewish civil servants
who requested days off to celebrate the High Holy days should be accommodated, a clear
break with previous laı̈c practices.54 Yet the integrationist reliance on taking “origins”
into account in pursuit of “republican” policy was more visible, notably in official
plans for how to deal with Algeria’s Jews in light of imminent independence. Claims
that Algeria’s Jews had an “ethnic” specificity, which paralleled that of “Kabyles,”
“Chaouis,” and “Arabs,” anchored internal debates and projects in 1960 and 1961. Yet
the developments that actually led to independence saw these references expunged from
official considerations, to be replaced by religious descriptions.55
In the spring of 1961, the leaders of Jewish organizations in Algeria were shocked to
learn that the president of the republic Charles de Gaulle had evoked, in private conver-
sations, “the rights of the Arab, Chaouia, Mozabite, Jewish, and French communities.”56
The listing of group names reflected what critics termed a “‘communities’ policy,” which
460 Todd Shepard
sought to set the stage for an Algerian state that, when independent, would recognize
group rights (notably for the “Europeans,” or pieds noirs, here termed “French”). Jewish
leaders fixated on how the statement distinguished between the “Jews” and the “French”
in Algeria. To counter what they saw as its disastrous implications, Jewish leaders on
both sides of the Mediterranean immediately and publicly affirmed that Jews in Algeria
had no political identity as Jews. Their arguments avoided all references to either religion
or ethnicity; they turned to French history to assert that they were merely French citizens.
Like all “French people,” argued one of the preeminent French Jewish organizations,
the Alliance Israélite Universelle, they should be considered as “individuals,” and not
as “belonging to an ‘ethnic community.’” Jewish leaders now called on the state to
clarify whether membership in the French nation was to be decided on the basis of
“subnational” group identities. In Algeria as in France, what made each individual
“Jew” French, community leaders pointed out, was being born of parents with French
citizenship and/or on French soil.57
The FLN’s 1956 Congress of the Soummam insisted that “Jewish Algerians” were
fully part of the Algerian nation. Jewish leaders and their allies successfully sought to
ensure the government adopted a position that wholly rejected this claim about a group of
“Algerians,” even if the republic accepted the origin-based claims of Algerian nationalists
regarding “Muslims.” They had great success in their efforts to keep any reference to any
form of Jewish identity out of documents and deliberations. After repeated interventions
by powerful allies, “Israelites” disappeared from French proposals, except in occasional
affirmations that they were part of the group to be included in the “European minority.”58
What is remarkable about this effort to present a “European character” to French
nationality—which included Jews—while affirming its “republican” genealogy was the
formative role of Zionism. In the last months of the government’s brutal fight to crush
Algerian nationalism, officials of the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs engaged
in a tug-of-war with Israel over Algerian Jews. Their eventual success helped buttress
the claim that Algerian Jews were first and foremost French citizens, for whom religion
was a private affair, not the basis of community identity.
This history of thinking about the contradictions between French republicanism and
Zionism informed official French analyses and the claims of Algerian Jews at the
end of the Algerian war. In these final years of French Algeria, the future of Jews
qua Jews became a topic of official concern. The proximate cause was the growing
number of Jewish departures from Algeria. (Unsurprisingly, bureaucrats spoke of an
“exodus.”) As early as 1960, police and army intelligence noticed that a good number of
Jews were leaving with no intention of returning.59 Concerted official attention to such
activity began in early 1961, and bureaucrats made considerable effort to see that the
“approximately” 128,380 Algerian Jews that one list claimed were living in Algeria at
the beginning of 1961 remained there.60
Officials blamed what was happening among this group of French citizens on for-
eign intervention; this, of course, was similar to earlier French claims about Alge-
rian nationalists as pawns of international conspiracies. Yet in this instance, French
sources stated clearly that there was one culprit, Zionism, and they linked it to one
state, Israel. French functionaries had verifiable intelligence that the Israeli paragov-
ernmental organization, the Jewish Agency, was inciting French Jews in Algeria to
leave for Israel, to “make aliya” in Zionist parlance. In January 1961, the highest
civilian official in Algeria, Delegate General Jean Morin, alerted the Ministry of the
Interior to requests for entry permits by “ten delegates of the Jewish Agency,” who
wanted, they stated, “to calm the apprehensions of the Israelite population of Alge-
ria.” Morin argued that they had a different agenda, noting that the “most important
activity of the Jewish Agency always has been to encourage emigration to Israel.” He
asked whether the French government “would facilitate such an enterprise” and stressed
“above all” that emigration to a foreign country was being urged on “a population that
was the first autochthonous population to acquire French nationality.”61 In mid-March,
Morin reported that Jewish Agency representatives had shifted from “facilitating the
emigration of Israelites who wanted to leave” to “exhortations to leave for Israel.”62
Morin again touched on the issue of Algerian Jews’ unique history of successful as-
similation. Jewish Agency speakers claimed, Morin reported, that “Algerian indepen-
dence is inevitable in the short term” and that Israel “merited their trust more than
France.”63
The contest between Zionism and the French Republic over Algeria’s Jews, as Morin
made clear, was the heart of the matter. French officials aimed to win it. Israel’s first
prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, stated in 1958 that the French should trust no Algerian
Arabs “no matter how assimilated.” Officials repeatedly invoked Ben-Gurion’s remark.
His assertion of inassimilable difference—and necessary enmity—was indicative of the
ethnoreligious crux of the Zionist project advanced by the Jewish Agency. In 1960, it
was the subject of a polite but firm disagreement between Ben-Gurion and de Gaulle,
when the former offered his advice to the latter: like the Jews in his country, Israel’s
prime minister argued, the French in Algeria needed “to build the country themselves,”
through the exclusion of Arab Muslim labor: “instead of 500,000 soldiers, you must send
500,000 workers . . . to make the Sahara French just like Israel made the Negev [Jewish;
sic].” It was an ethnoreligious definition of national identity that French republican
ideologues found anathema. De Gaulle, after thanking Ben-Gurion, remarked that if
France did as he suggested, “it would provoke the same fury among Arabs as Israel had
[provoked].”64
Official efforts to prevent Jewish departures at first seemed futile. Yet by the end
of 1961 and, more markedly, the beginning of 1962, in what proved the last months
of French Algeria, military and civilian officials noted a decline in Jewish departures.
More important, when Algeria’s Jews did leave Algeria en masse, almost all (over 90%)
“repatriated” to France, despite Zionist efforts. Since Israel’s 1948 founding this remains
the only example of the flight of a substantial group of Jews in which most did not go
to what Zionists proclaimed was the homeland of all Jews. Algerian Jews’ choice of
France “was interpreted by some in Israel as showing the limits of Zionist ideology.” In
August 1962, a mock trial in Tel Aviv condemned Algeria’s Jews for the betrayal of the
Jewish homeland.65
The intensity of French officials’ efforts to counter Zionist claims was clearly linked
to the political and diplomatic successes of Algerian nationalism. Yet even the ways they
parried Zionism reflected their unwillingness to take seriously the claims of Algerian
nationalism: in the process of denying that “Muslims” were French—despite legal
realities and the intensity of political arguments and actions to the contrary during
the war—they could reaffirm republican orthodoxy as regards non-“Muslim” French
citizens, notably Algerian Jews. Assimilation worked, but not for “Muslims.” This
462 Todd Shepard
allowed the integrationist experiments—like Algeria’s “Muslims” tout court—to be

excised from French history.
CONCLUSION
In assessing current debates over the public visibility of Islam in light of the French past,
scholars have privileged either a domestic history of struggle over the place of religion
in public life or an imperial history of Orientalism and racism. Both approaches rely on
overarching narratives that crystallized in the 19th century. To emphasize continuities,
they depend on teleologies, which begin either with the declaration of the first French
Republic in 1792, followed by the re-emergence of republican rule in France after
1870, or with the renewed French pursuit of overseas empire, which began (under royal
control) with the 1830 invasion of Algiers and mushroomed under republican leadership
by the century’s end. More recent histories, notably of the 1950s and 1960s, suggest a
different frame: in this mid-20th-century historical narrative, choices and actors from
outside Europe determined French decisions.66
Ethnicity and religion were both claims of belonging and bases for public action
that republicans had long rejected. Yet in the post-1945 era, French officials showed
new willingness to make use of both. They faced the challenge of the Algerian Revo-
lution in a domestic context where the republic seemed newly hegemonic, untroubled
by antirepublican internal threats—notably from Catholicism—and in an international
context in which political as well as social-scientific discussions, after the defeat of
fascism and Nazism, gave new authority to antiracist arguments.67 Over the course of
the Algerian Revolution, French authorities proposed innovative legal and policy shifts
to bring Islam more fully into a “republican” frame while admitting that “ethnic” or
“origin-based” groups existed in Algeria. The former trend aimed to “normalize” Islam
and did so in part through increasing references to “Koranic law” and “Muslims” in the
public sphere. The latter extended “exceptional” measures of recognition that aimed to
redress the effects of racist discrimination that these groups had suffered at the hands of
other French citizens and the republic. This approach promised to tame the danger of
origin-based politics and set the stage for a renewed republicanism. With French defeat,
all of these efforts were abandoned.
The FLN’s triumph forced France to accept that its claims on “Muslims” were unten-
able. Zionism, however, had lost what numerous Israeli and French observers saw as a
contest over the national belonging of Algeria’s Jews. The failure of Zionist efforts to
convince Algeria’s Jews to come to Israel legitimated what bureaucratic explanations
at the war’s end had suggested: that one of the potentially disruptive “sub-national
groupings” was origin-based (a “nationality”) and proved politically threatening, and
that the other was only religious and thus not possessed of a politically meaningful
identity. In 1962, policies toward Algeria’s Jews at once reaffirmed republicanism’s post-
1945 confidence vis-à-vis religion—which included Christianity and Judaism, but not
Islam—and erased the French Republic’s brief forays into grappling with “ethnicity.”68
This frame—that Jews have religion whereas Muslims are part of a “nationality”—
I suggest, makes visible a newly intense French concern with “ethnic” difference as a
potential threat to republican values. The name the French gave to the “ethnic group” that
then posed the most concern (because alien to France, despite their French nationality)
was “Muslims.”
N OT E S
Author’s note: This article first took shape thanks to a last-minute invitation to speak at the “Secularism
and Its Discontents Conference,” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced
Judaic Studies. I thank Ethan Katz and Jonathan Gribetz for the invitation and their insightful and careful
comments as well as the conversation that it sparked. Subsequent discussions at the “1962/2012: The World
after Algerian Independence” conference at Johns Hopkins University; the Centre des études maghrebines en
Algérie, in Oran; and Georgetown University at Doha, Qatar, all helped me greatly. My thanks to the American
Institute for Maghreb Studies for its support. Particular thanks to Robert Parks, Karim Ouaras, Edward Kolla,
Saı̈d Gahia, and Joan Scott for their suggestions. I also thank Sarah A. Stein for the trip to Ghardaı̈a and its
archives, and the conversations it energized. Finally, the guidance of Beth Baron, Sara Pursley, and the four
anonymous reviewers was precious and much appreciated.
1 Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); John Bowen,
Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
2 Michael R. Shurkin, “Decolonization and the Renewal of French Judaism: Reflections on the Contem-
porary French Jewish Scene,” Jewish Social Studies, no. 6 (2000): 156–76; Vincent Labouret, “Politique
méditerranéenne de la France,” Politique étrangère 36 (1971): 489–99; La Fracture coloniale, la société
française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, ed. Nicolas Bancel et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2005); Vincent
Geisser and Aziz Zemouri, Marianne et Allah, les politiques français face à la “question musulmane”
(Paris: La Découverte 2007); Sadek Sellam, La France et ses musulmans, un siècle de politique musulmane
1895–2005 (Paris: Fayard, 2006).
3 On the choice of Algeria’s Jews for France, see esp. Sarah B. Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing
Identities: The Migration of Algerian Jewry to France, 1954–1967” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002).
4 Recent scholarship often cites the works of two French sociologists, Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Domi-
nique Schnapper. These works are particularly focused on Muslims and, in Schnapper’s case, Jews in con-
temporary France. See Hervieu-Léger, La religion pour mémoire (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 228–37; and Schnapper,
“Le sens de l’ethnico-religieux,” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 81 (1993): 149–63. The qualifier
“ethnoreligious” has been in use since at least the early 20th century; the first use I have found in print is
Alexander M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City (New York: Bureau of Jewish Education, 1918),
1.
5 Davidson show how 20th-century French dealings with Islam in metropolitan France were always
framed in reference to Algeria and relied on “corporeal” or “racialized” logics to define Muslims as “only
Muslims”; however, she largely ignores the role of law and and does not explore how Algerian nationalism and
independence or French policy toward Islam shaped wider French institutions, principles, or understandings,
such as laı̈cité or citizenship. See Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century
France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012).
6 On the distinction between “native” and analytic categories, see, for example, Frederick Cooper and
Rogers Brubaker, “Beyond Identity,” in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005).
7 This was particularly true, as Idith Zertal shows, when non-French Jews, notably refugees, were the
people linked to Zionism. See From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 2. See also Michel Abitbol, “La France et le
sionisme: aspects historiques, culturels et idéologiques,” in France and the Middle East: Past, Present, Future,
ed. Abitbol (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004), 155–66.
8 Hannah Arendt laid out the template for this 19th-century history in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which
describes how French republicans during the 19th century defined their “territorial” nationalism in opposition
to French “reactionaries” (Catholic and antirepublican) by linking their opponents to a “German model”
(based in ethnicity, an opposition that Rogers Brubaker influentially detailed) or a “British model” (which
Linda Colley has linked to Protestantism) of the nation. See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in
France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging
464 Todd Shepard
the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: World Books, 1951).
9 See John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 2005), 159.

10 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, rev. 2nd
ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008).

11 See, for example, Ministère d’Etat chargé des Affaires Algériennes, “Définition de la minorité” (24 March
1961), 1, in Archives du Ministère des affaires étrangères, La Corneuve, France, séries Affaires algériennes
(hereafter MAE): 99.
12 Charles Kleinknecht, Adminstrateur des Services Civils, Ancien Sous-Préfet de Ghardaia, “Lettre à M.
Cotte” (Barr, 17 May 1965), 1–2, in Centre des archives contemporaines, Fontainebleau, France (hereafter
CAC): 950236/9 [C/3614]. On polygamy, see Jean Moriaz, “Situation des Israélites de M’Zab” (Lyon 29
March 1963), 1, in CAC: 19950236/9 [C/3614]; Senateur Abel-Durand, “Rapport . . . rélatif à la constitution
de l’état civil des Français des départements algériens . . . qui ont conservé leur statut personnel israélite, et à
leur accession au statut civil de droit commun; Annexe au proces-verbal de la séance du 19 juillet 1961,” in
CAC: 19950236/9 [C/3614]; CAC: 19950236/9 [C/3614]; Journal officiel de la République française (1961):
1564; on the usual restrictions placed on Jewish immigration, cf. Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing
Identities,” 178–80.
13 See Archives du Ministère de la Justice, Paris, France: FA S54 113 for letters of inquiry and circular.
14 On the role of French republicanism on the development of Zionism, see, for example, Jacques Kornberg,
Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993); Walter B.
Laqueur, A History of Zionism from the French Revolution to the Establishment of Israel (New York: MJF
Books, 1972); and Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History (New York: Random
House, 1998).
15 On post-1789 anticorporatism, cf. William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of
Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); on anticorporatist
arguments vis-à-vis religious and ethnic identity claims, cf. Scott, The Politics of the Veil; on the 1905 law,
see, for example, ibid.; and Bowen, Why the French.
16 On how some Catholic movements participated in republican policymaking in the late 19th century, see
Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993); on the “pact,” see Jean Baubérot, Vers un nouveau pacte laique? (Paris:
Le Seuil, 1990); for how this argument has been taken up in response to current anti-Muslim hysteria, see
Dominique Borne et al., eds., Europe et islam, islams d’Europe (Versailles: CRDP, 2003).
17 NB: The half day off used to be Thursday.
18 Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985); Louis-Augustin Barrière, Le statut personnel des musulmans d’Algérie de 1834 à
1962 (Dijon, France: Universitaires de Dijon, 1993).
19 Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris:
Grasset, 2002).
20 See the accounts of French nationalism in Arendt, The Origins; and Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader,
“Introduction,” in Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, ed. Chapman
and Frader (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 1–22. On how to analyze lawmaking and legal thought in
the Algerian situation, see Laure Blévis, “Les avatars de la citoyenneté en Algérie coloniale ou les paradoxes
d’une categorization,” Droit et Société 48 (2001): 557–80.
21 See esp. Christelow, Muslim Law Courts; and Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la
France (1871–1919), 2 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1968).

22 See Isabelle Merle, “Les ambiguités du statut colonial en droit colonial. Respect des coutumes indigènes
ou construction d’une exclusion républicaine,” in Autochtonies. Vues de France et du Québec, ed. N. Gagné,
T. Martin, and M. Salaün (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval), 143–50; Laure Blévis, “La citoyennété
française au miroir de la colonisation: Étude des demandes de naturalization des ‘sujets français’ en Algérie
coloniale,” Genèses 53 (December 2003): 25–47; and Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization.
23 Gilbert Meynier, Algérie révélée. La guerre de 1914–1918 et le premier quart du XXe siècle (Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 1981), 559; the reference is to querelles de clocher (bell-tower disputes), which disdainfully
evokes Catholic “theological” debates such as over how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. See also
Michel Le Gall, “Anticlericalism and Positivism: A Note on French Orientalism,” in Franco-Arab Encounters:
Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon, ed. L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1997), 109–28.
24 See James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 89; and Gilbert Meynier, “L’Algérie, La nation et l’islam: le FLN, 1954–1962,”
in Religions et colonisation: Afrique-Asie-Océanie-Amériques XVIe-XXe siècle, ed. Dominique Borne and
Benoı̂t Falaize (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2009), 241–55, 243.
25 Connections with movements in the larger Islamic, Mediterranean, and Arab worlds were also key
factors. Cf. Raberh Achi, “L’islam authentique appartient à Dieu, ‘l’islam algérien’ à César. La mobilisation
de l’association des oulémas d’Algérie pour la séparation du culte musulman et de l’État (1931–1956),”
Genèses 69 (December 2007): 49–69, 52–54.
26 McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism.
27 Allan Christelow describes the earlier historiographic consensus in “Ritual, Culture and Politics of Islamic
Reformism in Algeria,” Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1987): 255–73. Meynier’s Algérie révélée was the first to
challenge accounts that defined religious and ethnic criteria as outside impositions on, rather than constitutive
of, Algerian nationalism.
28 Meynier, Algérie révélée, 3, 33–39, 167, 702–708, 730–34.
29 Ibid., 257.
30 Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005), 260.

31 Meynier, Algérie révélée, 113.
32 Joseph Bonsirven, Le Judaisme palestinien au temps de Jésus-Christ, sa théologie. v. I, La théologie
dogmatique (Paris: Beauchesne et ses fils, 1934), 71.

33 Alain Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel, trans.
Jonathan Derrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 130–31.

34 Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 159. See also Annette Wieviorka, “Les juifs en France au
lendemain de la guerre: état des lieux,” Archives juives 28, no. 1 (1995): 7–22; and Nadia Malinovich, French
and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early-Twentieth Century France (Oxford: Littman Library
of Jewish Civilization, 2008).
35 Ethan B. Katz, “Jews and Muslims in the Shadow of Marianne: Conflicting Identites and Republican
Culture in France (1914–1975)” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2009); Renée Poznanski,
Jews in France during World War II, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,
2001), 472–73; Martine Cohen, “Les juifs de France. Modernité et identité,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire
66 (2000): 91–106.
36 Benjamin Pinkus, From Ambivalence to Tacit Alliance: Israel, France, and French Jewry 1947–1957
(Sede Boqer, Israel: Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2005); Guy Ziv, “Shimon Peres and the French–Israeli
Alliance, 1954–9,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (2010): 406–29, esp. 413–15. Within France, see esp.
debates in the journal Esprit between writers such as André Neher and Wadi.
37 “Le groupe de sociologie des religions. Quinze ans de vie et de travail (1954–1969),” Archives de
sociologie des religions 28 (1969): 3–92, 23, 39–42.

38 Joanny Berlioz, “L’Afrique du Nord, foyer d’activité pro-hitlérienne et anti-française,” Les Cahiers du
Communisme 4 (1945): 47–53; Alain Ruscio, “Les communistes et les massacres du Constantinois (Mai–Juin
1945),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 94 (2007): 217–29; Zahir Ihaddaden, “La désinformation pendant
la guerre d’Algérie,” in Militaires et guerilla en guerre d’Algérie, ed. Jean-Charles Jauffret et al. (Brussels:
Complexe, 2001), 363–82, 371.
39 Hubert J. Deschamps, Peuples et nations d’outre-mer (Afrique, Islam, Asie du sud) (Paris: Dalloz,
1954), 111; Alphonse Juin, Le Maghreb en feu (Paris: Plon, 1957), 40; Maurice Candas, Plaidoyer pour
l’Algérie (Paris: Éd. des Quatre Fils Aymon, 1957), 98. Even the small number of radical non-Algerian French
intellectuals—notably Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Francis Jeanson—who offered their support
to the FLN avoided definitions of the Algerian nation that Algerian nationalists developed; most relied on
what Frantz Fanon defined as the dialectic of colonizer/colonized to explain its existence. See Shepard, The
Invention of Decolonization, chap. 2.
40 For details on “assimilationist” and “associationist” models—their claims and the distinction between
claims and practice—see Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–
1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). On integrationism, see James LeSueur, Uncivil War:
466 Todd Shepard
Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of
Nebraska Press, 2005); and Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence
and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 9.
41 On integrationism, see Todd Shepard, “Thinking between Metropole and Colony: The French Republic,
‘Exceptional Promotion,’ and the ‘Integration’ of Algerians, 1955–1962,” in The French Colonial Mind, vol. 1,
Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska
Press, 2011), 298–323.
42 See Todd Shepard, “Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO: A Transnational History of Anti-Racism and
Empire, 1932–1962,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 273–97.

43 My italics. “Presentation and debate in Senate concerning Loi n. 59-480 du 28 décembre 1959 . . .
assurant, par des mesures exceptionnelles, la promotion des Français musulmans,” Journal Officiel du Sénat
(26 November 1959): 1205.
44 Emmanuel Sivan, Communisme et nationalisme en Algérie 1920–1962 (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1976),
206; see also Todd Shepard, “Decolonization and the Republic,” in The French Republic, ed. Edward Berenson,
Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 252–61.
45 The most well-known sign was the secularization thesis itself, which turned a conflict into a certainty:
religion did not need to be fought, as it would wither away. That story, of course, has been discredited by
much scholarship as well as recent developments. See esp. Schnapper, “Le sens de l’ethnico-religieux.”
46 Antoine Prost, Education, societe et politique. Une histoire de l’enseignement en France de 1945 à nos
jours (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992), 48; “Laı̈cité et paix scolaire: points de vue,” Esprit (new series) 10 (1959):
309–59, 318; on laı̈cité, see esp. Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laı̈cité en France, 4th ed. (Paris: PUF-Que
sais-je?, 2007); on post-1945 developments, see esp. René Rémond, L’anticlericalisme en France (Paris:
Fayard, 1976), chap. 8; Colin Robert, “Secularisation and the (Re)formulation of French Catholic Identity,”
in Catholicism, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Kay Chadwick (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2000), 260–79; and Gerard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, eds., Histoire religieuse de la
France contemporaine, 1930–1988 (Paris: Privat, 1988), 220–35; on the importance of these developments for
post-1945 France, see Henri Mendras, La seconde révolution française, 1965–1984, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard,
1994).
47 Ministère de l’Intérieur, “Projet d’organisation d’un Institut d’Etudes Franco–Islamiques à Paris,” 1–3,
in CAC 19950395/74; see also Archives de l’Institut Pierre Mendès France, Fonds PMF, II/3/A.
48 For an overview of this “Islamophile” form of Orientalist essentializing, see Dietrich Jung, Orientalists,
Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield:
Equinox Publishing, 2011).
49 See esp. Ryme Seferdjeli, “French ‘Reforms’ and Muslim Women’s Emancipation during the Algerian
War,” Journal of North African Studies 9, no. 4 (2004): 19–61.

50 Mr. le Procureur Général, “Objet: Date d’application de l’ord. du 4 fevrier 1959” (13 June 1959), 2, in
CAC 19950236 art. 8. On the marriage reforms, see Seferdjeli, “French ‘Reforms’”; Davidson, Only Muslim,
151–58; and Neil Macmaster, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the “Emancipation” of Muslim Women,
1954–1962 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 286–91. All ignore the non-laı̈c premises of the
actual legislation.
51 Pigeot, Deputé de la Saoura, “Reaction des populations musulmanes du département de la Saoura à
l’application de l’ordonnance du 4 février 1959” (24 September 1959), 1–5, in CAC 19950236 art. 8.
52 Ibid.
53 For Sid-Cara’s decision to abandon her “laı̈c” approach, see Paris, 19 August 1959, CAC 19950236 art.
8.
54 Letter from the Association Consistoriale Israélite d’Alger to President, Conseil d’administration de les
association consistoriale Israélite du Ghardaı̈a (20 August 1958), Archives Nationales d’Algerie, Wilaya de
Ghardaı̈a, “Culte Israelite.”
55 On the Jews of the Mzab, see Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 242–47; and Sarah A. Stein,
Indigenous Jews: French Colonialism and Decolonization in the Algerian Sahara (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, forthcoming). Most scholars who have discussed French policies vis-à-vis Muslim and Jews
historically and in the present avoid discussing the Algerian war; in fact, most skip the period 1945–62 entirely.
An exception is Katz, “Jews and Muslims in the Shadow of Marianne.”
56 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 170.
57 Alliance Israélite Universelle, “Note concernant les modalités de conservation de la nationalité francaise
et l’acquisition de la nationalite Algérienne dans l’Algérie future” (Paris, 17 April 1961), 5, in MAE: 99.
58 Ministre d’Etat chargé des Affaires Algériennes, “Garanties de la Minorité européenne en Algérie” (31
March 1961), 2, in MAE: 96. The new position did admit that “Muslims who expressed the desire” could
be included “for political reasons.” See Ministre d’Etat chargé des Affaires Algériennes, “Définition de la
Minorité” (24 March 1961 with revision 18 April), 1, in MAE: 96.
59 See Secrétaire d’Etat aux affaires Algériennes, “La Communauté israélite d’Algérie” (19 October 1962),
1, in MAE: 121 bis.

60 For reports on Jewish departures, see CAC: 19920172/08. For early 1961, see “Liste approximative des
Juifs en Algérie par localité au début de 1961,” in CAC: 19920172/08. For Algerian Jews’ choice of France
versus Israel and other countries, see Secrétaire d’Etat aux affaires Algériennes, “La Communaute Israélite
d’Algérie” (19 October 1962), p. 2, in MAE: 121 bis.
61 C. Viellescazes, Dir. du Cabinet, Délégation générale en Algérie, “A l’attention personnelle de M. Aubert”
(24 January 1961), 1, in CAC: 19920172/08.

62 Jean Morin, “Objet: Activité des mission israéliennes en Algérie “ (Algiers, 24 March 1961), 1, in MAE:
121 bis; see also Délégation générale en Algérie, Affaires politiques, “Télégramme n. 2784” (22 March 1961),
1, in MAE: 121 bis.
63 Ibid., 1 and 2.
64 “Entretien du Général de Gaulle avec M. Ben Gourion le 17 juin 1960 à l’Elysée,” 1–10, in Fondation
national des sciences politiques, Fond Debré: 2 DE 60 #1a.

65 See Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” 162–68; and René Gallisot, Les Accords d’Évian:
en conjoncture et en longue durée (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 114.

66 Recent studies that explore the colonial history of modern French governance of Islam include James
McDougall, “The Secular State’s Islamic Empire: Muslim Spaces and Subjects of Jurisdiction in Paris and
Algiers, 1905–1957,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 553–80; Scott, The Politics of
the Veil; Vincent Geisser and Aziz Zemouri, Marianne et Allah: Les politiques français face à la “question
musulmane” (Paris: La Découverte, 2007); and Marcel Maussen, Constructing Mosques: The Governance of
Islam in France and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, 2009).
See also Baubérot, Vers un nouveau pacte laı̈c?; and Borne et al., Europe et islam.
67 Todd Shepard, “‘History is Past Politics’? Archives, ‘Tainted Evidence,’ and the Return of the State,”
The American Historical Review 115 (2010): 474–83.

68 See Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, introduction and conclusion.

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government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism,

Indeed, French commentators ignored or denigrated the very idea of a specifically

Laws and institutions—marriage, hospitals, schools—were crucial grounds on which the

or open possibilities to FMAs. This odd intersection of religious nomenclature and an

allowed the integrationist experiments—like Algeria’s “Muslims” tout court—to be

University Press, 2005), 159.

ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008).

France (1871–1919), 2 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1968).

Manchester University Press, 2005), 260.

dogmatique (Paris: Beauchesne et ses fils, 1934), 71.

Jonathan Derrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 130–31.

sociologie des religions 28 (1969): 3–92, 23, 39–42.

Empire, 1932–1962,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 273–97.

War,” Journal of North African Studies 9, no. 4 (2004): 19–61.

1, in MAE: 121 bis.

(24 January 1961), 1, in CAC: 19920172/08.

national des sciences politiques, Fond Debré: 2 DE 60 #1a.

en conjoncture et en longue durée (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 114.

The American Historical Review 115 (2010): 474–83.

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