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The Merchants of Oran

Indiana University, September 2018

When French colonial authorities chose Jacob Lasry, a Sephardic cattle and grain

exporter in Oran, to lead the city’s recently organized Consistoire Israélite in 1854, it

could be construed as a paradox. France’s ostensible purpose in establishing the

consistories in Algeria was to “organize” the culturally and religiously diverse collection

of Jews Oran and “attach” them to France. Yet Lasry himself was from Tetuan in

Morocco, probably knew Arabic and Spanish better than French, had married in

Gibraltar, was a British subject, and likely first traveled to France only after the French

began the occupation of Algeria in 1830. He was a business partner of Britain’s vice

consul in Oran, and spent much of 1831 vexing French officials by mobilizing British

support for his claims against them, specifically regarding business losses he blamed on

the actions of a French general. Ultimately, the government’s choice of Lasry to

spearhead the French Empire’s newly conceived mission to encourage the Jews of

Algeria’s “assimilation” to France, and pave the way for their eventual “emancipation” as

French citizens seems odd.1

This episode, however, only appears as a “paradox” from a French historiographic

vantage point, which is, of course, a natural place from which to be interrogating

imperialism’s political and ideological lack of coherence.2 Furthermore, this lack of

1 Joshua Schreier, The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2017) and “From Mediterranean Merchant to French Civilizer: Jacob

Lasry and the Economy of Conquest in Early Colonial Algeria,” International Journal of Middle

East Studies 44 (2012), 631-649. 2 Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1890-1914 (Lincoln,

NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) (originally published in 1960); Martin Deming Lewis,

Professor Joshua Schreier

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coherence has become even more evident thanks to recent scholarship representing a self-

described “imperial turn” in French Jewish history, which has produced much-needed

revisions of the story of North African Jews’ encounter with colonialism, which had

generally been told as a triumphalist story. At the same time, however, this work

necessarily frames its inquiries within the colonial and post-colonial republic and by

extension takes an interest in established Jewish historiographical tropes; notably

emancipation, assimilation, and anti-Semitism.3 This work has also looked at the

"One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The 'Assimilation' Theory in French Colonial Policy,"

Comparative Studies in Society and History 4:2 (January 1962): 129-153; Alice Conklin, A

Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion,

Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2006); Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the

Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Joshua Schreier, Arabs

of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2010).

3 Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Geneviève Dermenjian, Juifs d’Algérie: histoire des ruptures

(Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015). See notably the avant-propos by

Philippe Portier, the préface by Franklin Rauskey, the introduction by Joêlle Allouche-Benayoun

and Geneviève-Benayoun, as well as chapters such as Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, “Les Juifs

d’Algérie, du Dhimmi au citoyen français;” Denis Charbit, L’historiographie du décret Crémieux,

Le retour du refoulé;” Valérie Assan, “Les rabbins de France et d’Algérie face à la “mission

civilisatrice;”and Philippe Danan, “Les Juifs de Constantine au début de la présence française;”

Ethan B. Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persecution, Algerian Jewish Memory in the Longue

Durée (1830-1970), Journal of North African Studies 17:5 (December, 2012), 793-820, and The

Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2015); Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: Jewish

Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006),

and “The Impact of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin on French Colonial Policy in Algeria,” CCAR

Journal (Winter, 2007): 35-60; Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a

Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish

Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,

2010); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 2014); Joshua Cole, “Antisémitisme et situation colonial pendant

l’entre-deux guerres en Algérie,” Vingtième siècle, 4:108 (October-December, 2010), pp. 3-23;

Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), and especially Benjamin Stora, Les trois

exils: Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2004). Some recent dissertations intertwining French,

Algerian, and Jewish history include Rachel Eva Schley, The Tyranny of Tolerance: France,

Religion, and the Conquest of Algeria (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,

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experience of later generations of North African Jews and Muslims in France which,

given Jews and Muslims’ different experiences there, compounded with their often

contrasting perspectives on the ever-deteriorating situation in Palestine/Israel, has often

described their relationship as a “history of conflict,” as one volume recently put it.4 In

other words, when it comes to scholarship on North African Jews, the empire, its

ideologies, and its teleologies have been hard to escape.

Yet the “paradox” of the choice of Lasry to lead the consistory does melt away a

bit if we take in the view from Lasry’s Oran In this case one might be less concerned with

why a group of French officials would “choose” a Moroccan-born protected subject of

Great Britain for a post devoted to turning Arabophone Algerian Jews into Frenchmen, or

whether it complicates or reinforces the traditional French historiographic arc assigned to

Algerian Jews, which begins in an undifferentiated, stylized past as an isolated and

oppressed “dhimmi” under the yoke of an Islam far past its supposed “golden age,” and

moves inexorably forward, weathering several anti-Semitic storms to eventually find its

berth in full French citizenship and passionate patriotic attachment.5 As an alternative, it

Los Angeles, CA, 2015); Rebecca Wall, “The Jews of the Desert: Colonialism, Zionism, and the

Jews of the Algerian M’zab, 1882-1962” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014). 4 The tone regarding French attitudes toward Jews in North Africa generally shifted in the 1990s.

See Benjamin Stora and Geneviève Dermenjian, “Les Juifs dans le regard des militaires et des

Juifs de France à l’époque de la conquète,” Révue Historique, 284:2 (1990): 333-339; Aron

Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance

Israélite Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). On how

metropolitan models shaped colonial policies toward Jews in Algeria, see Pierre Birnbaum,

“French Jews and the ‘Regeneration’ of Algerian Jewry,” in Jews and the State: Dangerous

Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, Ezra Mendelssohn, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press, 2003): 88-103; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, and Leff, “The Impact of the

Napoleonic Sanhedrin;” Joshua Schreier, “Napoléon’s Long Shadow: Morality, Civilization, and

Jews in France and Algeria, 1808-1870,” French Historical Studies 30:1 (Winter, 2007), 77-103. 5 Literature illustrating the contradictions of Algerian Jewish emancipation is more robust for the

end of the colonial period than the beginning. Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens

dans la lutte anticoloniale (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015); Joshua

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may look back on why Jewish merchants had been attracted to Oran in the decades

leading up to the French landing at Sidi Ferruch, how changing power dynamics in the

western Mediterranean had dramatically improved pre-colonial Oran’s prospects as a port

city, or how merchants who were deeply embedded in a western Mediterranean network

of commerce that included Italian, Moroccan, and British ports adapted to the changed

commercial conditions in the wake of the French conquest. By extension, the view from

Oran might relieve Jewish merchants from their confining historiographic role as the

putatively “indigenous” aids to French colonialism, and recast some of them, not

necessarily as self-conscious or enthusiastic partners in the ascendant Regency of

Algiers’ own recent project of westward expansion, but at least as its accomplices.

Finally, given the charged and overdetermined set of meanings evoked by the

contemporary social categories of Muslim and Jew, the view from Oran could shed light

on what sorts of categories were operative in those days, in other words, before the

emergence of the modern “problem” of Muslim-Jewish relations, at least configured as

those between two putatively self-explanatory or pre-existing groups. In a word, the

historian may obtain a better sense of the dynamics and texture of western Algeria, and a

picture of an “alternative” or potential trajectory in modern North African history.

Schreier, “A Jewish Riot Against Muslims: The Polemics of History in Late Colonial Algeria,” in

Comparative Studies in Society and History 58:3 (July, 2016): 746-773; Sung Choi, “Complex

Compatriots: Jews in post-Vichy French Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 17:5

(December, 2012): 863-880; Sarah Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria; Clare

Eldridge, “Remembering the Other: Postcolonial Perspectives on Relationships Between Jews

and Muslims in French Algeria,” in Modern Jewish Studies (2012): 1-19. For earlier periods, see

Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith, and “The creation of the ‘Israélite indigene’ Jewish

Merchants in early colonial Oran,” in Journal of North African Studies 17:5 (November, 2012),

757-772; Ethan Katz, in an upcoming special issue of French Historical Studies, posits that

Elizabeth Thompson’s notion of “colonial citizens” could be fruitfully applied to Jews in Algeria.

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This all being said, prioritizing the view from pre- and early colonial Oran does

not diminish the relevance of these Oran merchants’ stories to scholars of French Jewish

and/or imperial history. The view from Oran suggests that pre-existing Jewish

commercial class, long considered passive recipients of France’s civilizing and, more

concretely, naturalizing mission in colonial Algeria, had already been influential in Oran

at the time of the conquest, and continued to possess a great deal of agency to shape local

institutions, trade, and civic projects, and to become formidable partners and rivals with

French authorities once they arrived. As such, it helps us see at least one angle on how

the empire had a role in changing the very meanings of “Muslim” and “Jewish,”6 two

very old social markers that have, in the modern period, become seemingly self-evident

and trans-historical analytic categories.

In other words, looking at Jews in a city like Oran at the very dawn of French

colonialism allows us to step outside of the perspective of the French assimilating

campaign directed toward Jews that led up to and included the 1870 Crémieux decree,

which is important in that that this campaign remains under-critiqued in the

historiography (not to mention the popular imagination). As a reminder, this decree

naturalized—or “emancipated”—almost all the Jews living in Algeria as full French

citizens, with several notable limitations. Certainly, recent scholarship has registered the

6This call for a “North African” turn is inspired in part by work on the durability of the

Mediterranean region. See Naor Ben-Yehoyada, “Mediterranean Modernity?” in A Companion to

Mediterranean History, Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, eds., (London: Wiley and Sons,

2014), 107-121. For a Mediterranean perspective on North African Jews, see Jessica Marglin,

“Mediterranean Modernity Through Jewish Eyes: The Trans-imperial Life of Abraham Ankawa,

1810-1890,” Jewish Social Studies 20:2 (Winter, 2014) 34-68. These works revisit some of

Fernand Braudel’s arguments. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à

l’époch de Philippe II (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1949); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas

Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: Studies in Mediterranean History (Oxford and Malden, MA:

Blackwell, 2000).

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limits of this early Third Republic-era “emancipatory” act by noting that the decree did

not “emancipate” the vast majority of France’s new subjects. But I would posit that the

scholarship has been less insistent on how the act helped to create modern categories of

Muslims and Jews.7 After all, by crowning the Third Republic with the laurels of the

emancipator of Jews from their Islamic ancien regime, the government of 1870 echoed

the First Republic’s granting of civic equality to the Jews of France in 1791, so Crémieux

was instrumental in helping forge the conceptual link between Jewish emancipation and

the Republic, an ideology that was rooted in the Enlightenment-derived, Revolution-era

conviction that the Republic could forge a moral citizenry from even the most immoral of

men—given what some philosophes imagined to be the causal relationship between

intolerant despotism and the moral corruption of the oppressed.8 But by isolating one

component of the population of Algeria and casting them in the starring role of “The

Oppressed” in a particularly French Enlightenment-structured drama of emancipation, the

Crémieux decree also drew upon and helped crystalize an older tradition whereby Islam

functioned to help define fanaticism and despotism against (supposedly universal, but

historically understood as French or European) Enlightenment and liberty. It ultimately

played a role privileging Islam as the character-defining religious foil against which the

autonomous subject so crucial to French republican citizenship was to be defined. 9

7James R. Lehning, To Be A Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early Third Republic (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2001), 130. 8 Pierre Birnbaum has explored the deep and complicated relationship of Jews to the French

Republic, Une mythe politique: “la République juive” (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Destins juifs: de la

Révolution française à Carpentras (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1995); Les fous de la République:

histoire politique des juifs d’état, de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Comparable

dynamics were at work in Jews’ relationship to the state during the First Empire. See his l’Aigle

et la Synagogue: Napoléon, les Juifs, et l’État (Paris: Fayard, 2007). 9 Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Enlightenment thinkers used Islam to veil

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As I argue in my recent book, Merchants of Oran, Jewish merchants were

powerful agents in late Ottoman Oran, serving a vital part in the Algiers Regency’s

expansion to the west at the close of the eighteenth century. This, I argue, is important in

that it adds some much-needed texture to the far-better examined historical sketch of

Jews as vectors of European expansion in the Modern Middle East and North Africa.

The book also suggests that Oran’s Jews have been cramped by their historiographic

function as passive and long-suffering victims of Islam until France’s Armée d’Afrique

landed on the shores of Algeria, paving the way for France’s emancipatory project.

Rather, Oran’s Jews maintained significant influence and power to shape the society that

emerged in the fog of blood and smoke that France unleashed on North Africa during the

decades of the early colonial era. By emphasizing their agency, but also the splits

between them (which I talk less about in the pages below), I hope to bring a world of

western Mediterranean commercial culture into view, a world previously eclipsed by a

French teleology and spectrum of social categories. In so doing, it hopefully makes it

easier to see the innovation represented by France’s new caste, les Israelites indigènes, a

social category supposedly encompassing a diverse set of individuals with a variety of

interests, backgrounds, and allegiances, presented both locally and in later historiography

as a seemingly natural social category distinct from their Muslim neighbors, endowed

with its own historical trajectory (once again, borrowed from a French Jewish teleology).

It fleshes out some of the history of Jews in western Algeria as actors who participated in

their criticism of the church. See Rebecca Joubin, “Islam and Arabs Through the Eyes of the

'Encyclopedie:' the 'Other' as a Case of French Cultural Self-Criticism, in International Journal of

Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 197-217. In the following century, Islam came to be seen as

something preventing Muslims from being full republican subjects. See Naomi Davidson, Only

Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

2013.

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commercial networks, hierarchies, rivalries, and political structures well beyond France,

and describes how they adapted to and maintained influence after the dawn of modern

French imperialism in Algeria. It presents an alternative problematic to the far more

common inquiry into how and where Muslims and Jews failed to get along in the French

or North African contexts, suggesting instead that the imperial Republic and its

cacophonous colonial projects and ideologies be seen as an important actor in the

creation of new and conflicting social identities, some of which bear old names, such as

“Jew” and “Muslim.” But paving the way for this alternative casting requires us to look a

bit more carefully at an earlier period when the invasive ideology of “emancipation” had

yet to take root in Africa, and perhaps ask less about how Jews assimilated to France than

about how France assimilated to North African Jews.

The Merchants of Oran

While the nineteenth century witnessed Oran’s emergence as one of French

Algeria’s three major cities, it had been an isolated and decrepit presidio under the rule of

Spain for much of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Spanish general and commander

Don Joseph Vallejo advised his king to abandon the recently acquired city in 1734,

predicting that “This city will forever be, regardless of what is said, a deadweight for our

kingdom.”10 It was then destroyed in a 1790 earthquake, occupied by the Ottomans

shortly after, and remained small. In the 1860s, a French historian described Oran as

10 Don Joseph Vallejo, “Memoire sur l’état et la valeur des places de Oran et de Mers-el-Kebir,”

translated and annotated by Jean Cazenave, in Revue Africaine 66 (1925), 353.

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“nothing but a heap of ruins,” upon which “France would place the cradle of the proud

and valiant Oran of today.”11 But this does not do justice to the stirrings of life that Oran,

newly conquered by Algiers, exhibited by the early 1800s.

Algiers, we recall, was a growing, dynamic power in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century. Oran fell in the wake of a series of battles between Spain and the

regency of Algiers. In 1775, Captain O’Reilly, the Irish commander in the service of

King Charles III of Spain, failed in his bid to take Algiers despite the 300 ships and army

of 22,000 men at his disposal.12 This was followed up by two more failures under the

leadership of Don Angelo Barcelo to take Algiers in 1783 and 1784. Meanwhile, the beys

in Mascara made efforts to take Oran from the Spanish, including a siege that began in

1775 that was reinforced in 1777. The Ottomans finally forced the Spanish into a treaty in

1786, though it was not fully completed for another five years. Not only did Spain agree

to abandon Oran, it was also to provide a number of gifts and pay for an annual tribute

for the privilege to trade there.13 Algiers seizure of Oran represents one chapter the

growth and consolidation of the Algerian state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries.14

But somewhat against the grain of standard roles assigned Jews in the

historiography of the modern Middle Eastern or North Africa, Mediterranean Jewish

11 C. I. Derrien, Les français à Oran depuis 1830 jusq’à nos jours (Aix-en-Provence: Imprimerie

J. Niciot, 1886), 25. 12 Eugène Pellissier de Reynaud, Annales Algériennes vol. 1 (Paris: Anselin et Gaultier

Laguionie, 1836), 16; Colley, Captives, 68 13H. D. de Grammont, Histoire d’Alger sous la domination Turque (1550-1830) (Paris: Ernest

Leroux, 1887), 344. 14 For an excellent overview of how the Algerian state was growing and consolidating in this

period, see James MacDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2017), esp. 9-48.

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merchants played a role in Algiers’ re-settlement, and re-vitalization of Oran. In the

interest of expanding and exploiting a centuries-old port that had grown stagnant and

isolated under Spanish rule, the Algerian dey Muhammad al-Kabir moved the capital of

the western beylik of Algiers from Mascara to Oran, opened Oran to the interior, and in

so doing, (paradoxically) opened the Iberian peninsula to grain and cattle shipped from

Oran. He also repopulated the port by inviting Muslim and Jewish denizens of Tlemcen,

Mascara, Milianah, and Médea to settle in the town. In the years following 1792, Jews

also came to Oran from the cities of Mostaganem and Nedroma as well as the Moroccan

towns of Fez and Oujda in the northeastern Moroccan rif. The late medieval commercial

links that had made Oran an important port for the medieval capital of Tlemcen were

renewed, and Oran saw ships arrive from various Iberian, Italian, and North African

ports.15 Commercial ties were also re-established between Oran and the interior. One of

the early French colonial mentions of Oran’s muqaddem (chief of the Jewish nation, what

might be called sheikh al yahud elsewhere) involved his ability to effectively negotiate

commerce between tribesmen who brought goods into town and the Jewish shop owners

who purchased them.16

If France and its empire has cast itself central to the modern story of Oran and the

uplifting of its proportionately quite significant Jewish population (in 1832, the French

estimated that Jews constituted more than half of Oran’s admittedly small population17),

Jewish merchants who settled in the newly open port of Oran at the beginning of the

nineteenth central probably saw Gibraltar and Morocco as possessing more economic and

15 Schreier, Merchants of Oran, 47-70. 16 SHAT, 1 H 11, dos. 2. Muhammad al-Qadi to General Boyer, undated, probably February

1832. See also Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith, 31 17 Schreier, “The creation of the israélite indigene,” 757.

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cultural gravity than French ports such as Marseille. In the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century, the makhzen (or government) in Morocco had been pushing against

increasing Spanish influence by encouraging its own maritime trade with Britain through

Gibraltar.18 Only fourteen kilometers across the eponymous straits from Morocco, and

barely 200 kilometers to the west of Oran, this British garrison shone particularly brightly

in the revival of Oran. Gibraltar’s location at the mouth of the Mediterranean and in close

proximity to rival powers’ naval ports rendered it strategically vital to Britain’s growing

Mediterranean empire, a fact that would lead it to be declared a crown colony in 1830.19

Indeed, it was there, we learn from registries currently held by officers of today’s

Gibraltarian Jewish community, that Jacob Lasry married his first wife, Rica (Rivka)

Bergel (1809-1847), a Gibraltar native and daughter of a wealthy local ship building

family, in 1823.20 Soon after the wedding, he and his then-small family sailed eastward

over the Alboran Sea, the westernmost section of the Mediterranean, to pursue expanding

business opportunities, notably the exportation of cattle hides, in newly Muslim Oran.

Other Moroccan-born Jewish merchants followed a similar path through Britain’s Iberian

18 Brown, Crossing the Straight. On efforts among Algerian merchants to foster commerce with

Britain, see Joëlle Redouane, "British Trade with Algeria in the Nineteenth Century: An Ally

Against France?" in The Maghreb Review, 13:3I4 (1988): 175-182. See also Amira Bennison,

Jihad and Its Interpretation in Pre-colonial Morocco: State-Society Relations During the French

Conquest of Algeria (London: Routledge, 2002): 421-74.

19 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York: Anchor

Books, 2002), 23-37. Information on Lasry’s birth comes from French état civil records; IREL

(Instruments de Recherche En Ligne, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Etat Civil), URL:

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/caomec2/resultats.php?tri=typeacte%2C+annee&te

rritoire=ALGERIE&commune=ORAN&nom=Lasry&prenom=&typeacte=&annee=&debut=&fi

n=&vue=&rpp=20. 20 Official Registrar of the Jewish Community of Gibraltar (RJCG), housed in the office of Mr.

Mesod Belilo, Gibraltar. Thanks to Joshua Marrache for explaining the background of the Bergel

family.

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colony, into the western beylik of the Regency of Algiers.21 In 1828, the British vice

consul in Oran wrote in his journal that Jacob Lasry sought help protecting one of his

shipments of hides to Gibraltar, which the dey of Algiers, for some reason, threatened to

block.22 The Gibraltar Government Archives hold the record of Lasry’s application for a

passport from two years before the French occupation of Oran, where he ambiguously

listed his nationality not as British or Moroccan, but as “inhabitant of Oran” in 1829.23

Standing in contrast to the French Jewish historiographical binary between a shapeless

precolonial immobility and post-conquest emancipation and assimilation, many Jews in

western Algeria were wealthy, mobile or recently settled, and aware of and taking

advantage of ever-changing economic currents.

Consular records also hold key evidence of Jewish commercial prominence in

Oran. These records kept track of ships coming in and going out of the port, and

organized commerce along several “national” categories, with commerce juif counting

alongside that labeled Sardinian, British, or French.24 The slice of trade categorized as

“Jewish” was frequently the largest in Oran. For example, in the first trimester of 1823,

56,000 francs worth of goods were brought into Oran. This included 50,000 francs worth

of sugar, coffee, and cotton fabrics, brought from Gibraltar on the English ship Benpardo,

and 6,000 francs worth of cotton brought on the Algiers-based ship Massouda,

presumably originating in a European workshop. According to the French consul, the

21 The Jewish population of Gibraltar was 900 in the late eighteenth century and would rise to

1,533 by the 1870s. See Mesod Benady, “The Settlement of Jews in Gibraltar, 1704-1783,” in

Transactions and Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 26 (1979), 87-110. 22 TNA F.O. 3/31, Diary of British vice consulate in Oran, 19 October, 1828. 23 Gibraltar Government Archives (hereafter GGA), “Traveling Passports, 1819-1830.” 24 Ministre des Affires Etrangers, Archives Diplomatiques, La Cournveuve. (Hereafter MAE)

dossier 231 CCC/2.

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entirety of the merchandise brought in during these months of 1823 was attributed to the

account of commerce juif of Oran.25 During the same season of 1825, Oran’s Jewish

merchants were responsible for even more commerce.26 The same sources show Jewish

commerce responsible for a great deal of the exports out of Oran, too, largely consisting

of grain and cattle shopped to British Gibraltar. Merchants invested their earnings from

trade in local real estate, and early colonial property records reveal Jews as many of the

most important landlords in the growing city.27 Of course, given the former presidio’s

ban on Jews, the very presence of Jews in Oran in the late pre-colonial period is a story of

Algiers’ expansion, Jewish and Muslim dynamism, and interconnected commercial

interests.28

Jews were not only active in reviving Oran via commerce in the years before the

French army unleashed chaos on western Algeria, they invested their earnings from trade

in local real estate, buying buildings and land in and around the city of Oran. By the time

the colonial authorities attempted to regularize property records in the 1840s through the

newly established Conseil de Direction de la Province d’Oran, it was clear that Jews

were some of the more important landlords in the growing city. At the first meeting of the

council, on November 13, 1847, the members heard 16 requests for the certification or

approval (homologation) of deeds of property. The names listed included David Amar,

25 MAE, dossier 231 CCC/2, tableau de navires de commerce entrées dans le port d’Oran pendant

le premier trimestre de 1823, 31 March, 1823. 26 Ibid. 27 Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (Hereafter ANOM), fol. 7K 1, Conseil de Direction de la

Province d’Oran, Registre des Procès-verbeaux des Séances. 28 Isaac Bloch, “Les Israelites d'Oran, de 1792 à 1815” in Revue des Etudes Juives 13:1 (1886),

85-104; also see Saddek Benkada, “A Moment in Sephardi History: The Reestablishment of the

Jewish Community of Oran, 1792-1831,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited

by Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, 2011), 168-176.

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Joseph Gabisson, Messaoud ben Zaguen, Abraham Kanoui (whose son would, in under

two decades, marry Jacob Lasry’s daughter), Ephraim (no surname given), Nessim ben

Haim, and Jacob Ben Allah.29 Six of the 16 names were obviously Jewish; one, Ben

Haim, was registered in partnership with a man we could presume to be Muslim (Ali

Kodja). The two professional titles négociant (merchant) and proprietaire (owner,

landlord) are regularly coupled in early French colonial records of Jewish births, deaths,

and marriages.

Gardens, which helped supply the city with fresh food, were also a prominent

feature of early nineteenth-century Oran’s real estate, and the Jewish merchants became

prominent investors in it—though it is possible this began only after the French occupied

the city in 1831. In an 1843 listing of the gardens of Oran, for example, Jacob Lasry

possessed four separate jardins extérieurs and one jardin intérieur within the central

ravine framing the Ras al-Aïn stream, which supplied the city with fresh water. The only

other person listed as possessing more than one garden in this area was Abraham

Senanes, another Moroccan Jew who had settled in Oran, who possessed two (the

military administration is also listed as having two). Another prominent Jewish family,

Durand, is also on the list of garden owners in this area. Beyond Ras-al-Aïn, Lasry is

listed as having two other gardens elsewhere in Oran, while the Durands had four others.

Although the size of these gardens is not noted in the records, there were only 26 garden

owners listed, possessing a total of 48 properties. This means that Jews owned at least

one fourth of these properties, with Lasry heading the list, possessing more than any other

single person. These property records, compiled less than a decade and a half after the

29 Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (Hereafter ANOM), fol. 7K 1, Conseil de Direction de la

Province d’Oran, Registre des Procès-verbeaux des Séances.

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French occupation of Oran, could be read as a paper trail of a pre-colonial merchant class

making the transition into a sort of colonial notability.

While parenthetical to the point being made here, this is a useful place to recall

my earlier point about how French colonial rule would dramatically influence how the

meanings of older terms such as “Muslim” and “Jew” changed in the modern period. The

descendants of these North African Jewish merchants, thanks to their considerable means

and the French policies and ideologies that presented them with opportunities denied to

the vast majority of Algeria’s inhabitants , would unproblematically be referred to as

“Europeans” in the French press a bit more than a century later.30

In any case, the French records detailing these real estate holdings, dating from

the 1840s, picked up the echoes of pre-conquest Jewish commercial might in Oran. But in

addition to these French records, rabbinical decisions also contain resonances of real

estate investment, notably in the form of disputes that transactions necessarily

engendered. They also suggest how merchants continued to conduct business, perhaps

even profiting from disruptions engendered from the conquest. Among the judgments of

an Oran rabbi by the name of Faruz Karcenti, recorded in a Hebrew volume published

several decades later in Livorno, entitled Gushpanka deMalka figures our man Jacob

Lasry, apparently attempting to purchase real estate on the cheap.31 In a decision dated to

5594 (1833-34), Lasry purchased (or attempted to purchase) eight shops and a yard from

Messaoud Teboul for a price (2,500 gruesos) lower than originally agreed. Apparently,

Lasry had convinced Teboul that his land was bound to be taken and destroyed by the

30 Schreier, “A Jewish Riot Against Muslims.” 31 Faruz Karcenti, Gushpanka deMalka, section Hilchot Makirah (Livorno: Shlomo Belforte and

Company, 1861), 55.

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French (lehavir veleharos velinkhol al yadei ha-alfransis) in order to make a public plaza

(palazza), and thus justified a lower price. At this price, however, Teboul complained that

it was “a sale to which I never would have agreed” (lo ‘altah ‘al ra’iti hamakirah).

Presumably, Lasry was aware that the value of the land would not actually decline, and

withheld this information intentionally. Rabbi Karcienty compared what Lasry did to

deception and warned him (or any others who might engage in similar practices) that to

cheat or deceive people when negotiating prices was forbidden (asur lirmot et b’nei adam

b’mekakh u’mimkar o lignov et da’atam). While the ultimate fallout is unclear, the rabbi

clearly ruled against Lasry in the affair.32 French military archives reveal a number of

additional disputes concerning property sales, the sale of export permits, requisitioning

wealth from surrendered cities, and usurious loans made to local allies, all suggesting

how well-placed Jewish merchants in Oran, having benefited from opportunities created

by the Algiers’ occupation of it in 1792, continued to do business as the conquest

dramatically changed the circumstances.

The Jewish commercial class shaped Oran’s elite well into the early colonial

period. In 1845, for example, it was Emmanuel Menahem Nahon, a Moroccan-born

member of Oran’s Jewish elite and an interpreter for the French military, helped to

organize the collection for funding a sewer system serving the Jewish quarter.33 Jacob

Lasry, who played a prominent role in the Jewish consistory, donated land for a Jewish

cemetery while serving on the chamber of commerce. Men in his circle eventually joined

the French colonial haute bourgeoisie. In the middle years of the 1850s, an article in

32 Ibid. 33 Derrien, Oran 192-193.

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L’illustration covered a high-society ball that was hosted by the wealthy Kanoui family.34

Entitled une soirée juive à Oran, the author described how “among the descendants of

Abraham and Jacob, a certain number of families remind us, thanks of their grand

fortune, the luxuries of the rich merchants that once inhabited the Italian littoral.”

Remarking how the hosts were “indigenous” Algerians, the article went on to describe

the mansion’s “half Arab and half European” design, including European decorated

rooms surrounding an “Arab interior courtyard.” If we are to believe the report, the city’s

Muslim, Jewish, and French elite were all in attendance at this “fairy-like” ball. Together,

these stories point out some of the pitfalls of scholarship centering Jews’ assimilation to

French rule, and illuminate instead how precolonial currents actually helped shape French

colonial society in the decades following 1830.

Social Identities and the Pitfalls of Citizenship

Of course Oran’s commercial dynamism challenges several received ideas about

precolonial Maghrebi Jewish social identities. Notably, it is clear that their mobility,

agency, and influence underlines the ideological nature of their new, French appellation

“indigenous” in the years following 1830. Rather than isolated or fixed features of North

Africa’s unchanging social landscape, passed from conqueror to conqueror as French

chroniclers often told the story, the very presence of Jews in Oran in the late pre-colonial

period was quite recent changes: the result of craftspeople, rabbis, small-scale

shopkeepers, and wealthy merchants in the western Mediterranean region following the

opportunities that came in the wake of the Muslim conquest of a small but growing port

34 L’illustration, Journal universel (1855), 204.

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city. Less a story of Jewish humiliation as a dhimmi, Oran tells one of North African

Jewish agency and participation in a Muslim state’s expansion, its ending of Catholic

bans against Jewish settlement on its lands, and interconnected commercial interests.35

As such, the history of Jews as vital players in Algiers’ pre-colonial expansion

and Oran’s resurgence also raises serious questions---ones about what has been missing

from scholarship that presents French citizenship as the goal and culmination of North

African Jewish history. Even in recent work, this (unproblematized) process has a been

seen as threatened primarily by Muslim and European anti-Semitism. But the problems of

Jewish emancipation in Algeria was not only in its unequal allocations of rights based on

post-Enlightenment mythologies about Jews and Muslims, which is dramatic and

important. Nor is “emancipation’s” faults limited to its work staging Islam as the ultimate

foil against which Republican enlightenment was defined- in other words, that which one

is to be emancipated from. But even for Jews, “emancipation” also exposed its Algerian

beneficiaries to new and specifically republican forms of marginalization. After the

Crémieux decree (and the death of Jacob Lasry, which happened within the same year or

so), Algeria experienced several waves of intensely violent anti-Semitism. During the

Dreyfus affair near the turn of the twentieth century, settler anti-Jewish violence far

exceeded that which was witnessed in the metropole. Jews were often blamed for voting

as a block, against the interests of an imagined real citizenry of European settlers.36 In

35 Isaac Bloch, “Les Israelites d'Oran, de 1792 à 1815” in Revue des Etudes Juives 13:1 (1886),

85-104; also see Saddek Benkada, “A Moment in Sephardi History: The Reestablishment of the

Jewish Community of Oran, 1792-1831,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited

by Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, 2011), 168-176. 36 Dermenjian, “Les Juifs d’Algérie entre deux hostilités (1830-1943),” in Allouche-Benayoun

and Dermenjian, eds., Les Juifs d’Algérie, 105-134; La Crise anti-juive oranaise, 1895-1905

(Paris: l’Harmattan,1986);

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fact, non-French European colons used anti-Semitism to bolster their own status as

French in late nineteenth-century Algerian society.37 It is not coincidental that anti-

Semitic violence spiked specifically around that most republican of institutions, elections.

Anti-Semitism would remain a defining aspect of colon society, particularly in Oran,

through the war years, and even influence the way the Front de Libération Nationale

(FLN) later spoke about Jews’ rightful allegiances.38 Importantly, a consistent complaint

of late nineteenth-century colonial anti-Jewish activists was that Jews voted as a block—

in other words, not as autonomous, rationally-thinking, individual citizens (the real or

imagined subject upon which modern democratic orders are supposedly reliant), but in

blind obedience to their leaders, underlining how anti-Semitism in Algeria was often

articulated in republican terms. Indeed, a similar casting of Muslims as non-autonomous

subjects—in their case because they are supposedly the nearly powerless servants to the

strictures of a faith in ways Jews and Christians are not, has structured many past

representations of them as somehow not fully abstracted citizens.39 Finally, it is hard to

forget that French citizenship proved to be a fragile institution in the twentieth century,

both by the de-nationalization of Jews during the Vichy period, and of course the de-

nationalization of millions of Muslim Frenchmen during decolonization.40 In other words,

37 Lizabeth Zack, ‘‘French and Algerian Identity Formation in 1890s Algeria,” in French

Colonial History 2 (2002): 115–43 38 Michel Abitbol, Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2008), esp. 21I-50;

Samuel Kalman, “Le Combat par tous les moyens: Colonial Violence and the Extreme Right in

1930s Oran, in French Historical Studies 34:1 (2011), 125-153; and French Colonial Fascism:

The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919-1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Henri

Chemouilli, Une Diaspora Méconnue: les Juifs d’Algérie Paris, 1976); Katz, “Between

Emancipation and Persecution;” Jessica Hammerman, In the Heart of the Diaspora: Algerian

Jews During the War of Independence, 1954-1962 (Ph.D. diss. City University of New York,

2013), 66-106; Schreier, “A Jewish Riot,” Sung Choi, “Complex Compatriots.”

39 Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim 40 Shepard, Invention of Decolonization.

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contemporary scholarship on the experience of Algerian Jews that remains fixed within

the French imperial perspective, endlessly employing citizenship as an index of

emancipation and progress, not only misses the immense violence that was wrapped up in

French projects of “emancipation,” but it loses sight of earlier forms of Jewish power and

agency.

Conclusion: “Jewish” as Another “Imperial Identity”

These glimpses into a dynamic and occasionally prosperous Jewish life before

and immediately following the onset of French colonialism bears on the potential North

African modernities that French colonialism—justified in part by the exclusionary notion

of emancipation—cut short. I also hope it helps provide a point of reference illustrating

the slipperiness of some common analytical categories which were in the process of

tremendous transformations during the 1820s and 1830s. Appreciating the extent of

colonialism’s effects on modern subjectivities underlines a point that also holds true

outside of colonial contexts: terms such as “Jew,” “Muslim” and “European” are used to

denote both local and analytic (scholarly) categories. In other words, it is important to

understand that the terms scholars use now as analytic terms (notably in “Jewish”

Studies) are the same used by and for a vast array of historical actors in vastly different

periods and places. The only constants in the equation, ultimately, are not the groups

themselves, but the labels used to define groups.

This truth is all the more important to remember given the popular and scholarly

interest in the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in France, Europe more generally, and

the Middle East. “Jew,” like other social identifiers, does not describe a trans-historical

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constant, a single group that moves through time. The subjectivities of members of any

group categorized as “Jewish” at any given time and place is defined by local powers and

processes. They do not necessarily have a single, easily deciphered “relationship” with

institutions, states, or other social groupings, if only because they are simultaneously

produced by those other forces and entities. If the imperial turn in Jewish scholarship has

offered Jewish historians a broader field of inquiry to pursue their craft, we must keep in

mind not only that the term "Jewish" applies to a varied set of social groupings, but also

that state actors and economic transformation were never impartial observers or

background sets to dramas of local identities—they dramatically remade subjectivities

(including Jewish and Muslim ones). This points to the ideological artifice built into

narratives that attempt to trace histories of Muslim (or Christian) “relationships with” or

“treatment of” Jews over time.

This was as true at the dusk of the colonial era as it was at its dawn. While not the

focus of this paper, it is vital to keep in mind how processes involved in the

decolonization of Algeria also dramatically changed Jewish subjectivities in the years

leading up to and following Algerian independence in 1962. Depending on the political

perspective, historians generally describe Jewish-Muslim violence and the mass exodus

of Jews from Algeria during this as either a continuation or disjuncture from earlier

patterns of “Jewish-Muslim “relations” in Algeria. In this way, historians have actually

echoed a good deal of popular discourse of the 1950s and early 1960s, when polemicists

drew differing political conclusions from the supposed long history of “friendly”

Muslim-Jewish relations in Algeria. But in addition to missing how the colonial policies

discussed above had dramatically changed these subjectivities (thus rendering

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comparisons of how “Jews” and “Muslims” got along in different historical epochs a

question of comparing apples and oranges), these treatments often de-emphasize how the

strategies of decolonization itself also recast Jewish and Muslim subjectivies. After all,

the FLN’s “method” of decolonization required not only outside pressure from the United

States and other countries (the “diplomatic revolution” in the words of Matthew

Connolly41), but, as Jeffrey James Byrne has shown, the establishment of a “shadow

state” under the noses of the French “binding the Muslim population to its subversive

authority.”42 Thus the struggle involved not only military force (a domain where the FLN

was definitively beaten by the French), but the FLN’s successful campaign (often

violent) to establish their hegemony over justice, taxation, medicine, civil ceremonies and

public culture. These ceremonies and guidelines were often informed or defined by the

FLN’s reading of Islam—not surprising given that religion had organized France’s

colonial hierarchy in Algeria, and most notably who was at the bottom of it. In other

words, the FLN’s strategy of securing legitimacy among the people they saw themselves

as representing required securing the position of arbiter of an Islamic culture whose

boundaries and meaning France had helped shape. While ultimately far more of the

FLN’s violence was directed at Muslims than at Jews, it did leave The Jews on the

precarious margins of Algeria’s national identity, ultimately pushing them down the

road—one paved by violent colonial innovations such as “emancipation” via the

Crémieux decree—toward their departure for France. This, once again, dramatically

reformulated Jewish and Muslim subjectivities in France and Algeria going forward.

41 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins

of the post-Cold War Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 42 Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World

Order (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 16.

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As for The Merchants of Oran, it illuminates an often overlooked story of North

African Jewish place, agency, and empowerment. It evokes a dynamic early nineteenth-

century North African Muslim state, where Jews were major players, albeit not always

treasured ones, in the story of its expansion. As such, it also presents a critique of

citizenship and “emancipation” as institutions that were both deliberately deployed and

became indirect causes of conquest, exclusion, and violence. Colonial republicanism was

built on racial and religious stereotypes and Orientalist binaries, so citizenship served

violent, exclusivist ends.43 The effect was the creation of profoundly new subjectivities in

the French Mediterranean world, albeit clothed in old language: “Jewish” went from a

broad religious identifier describing a wide range of people at the dawn of colonization,

to describing a subcategory of precariously entitled (if only relatively) but frequently

despised “Europeans” by the eve of decolonization in the 1950s. “Muslim,’ meanwhile,

went from describing people with a vast array of cultures, practices, and statuses to a

crude, dehumanized abstraction denoting a threat; a subject whose inherently religious

identity was ontologically at odds with French republican citizenship, if not modernity

itself.44

43 Todd Shephard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of

France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith. 44 Davidson, Only Muslim. On “emancipation” as a discourse of exclusion, see Schreier, Arabs of

the Jewish Faith.