To be an Algerian Jew is to revolt
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay examines the disruption of Jewish Muslim life across North Africa and the Middle East by two colonial projects: French rule in the Maghreb and the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
In her latest work, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay pens open letters to her ancestors — her father, mother, and great-grandmothers, and to her elected kin — Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Houria Bouteldja, and others. In these letters, she reintroduces Muslim Jews to the violence of colonization and traces anticolonial pathways to rebuild the rich world of the jewelers of the ummah.
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In 1962 when I was born under the supremacy of the white Christian world, Jewish belonging and tradition could continue within the catastrophic project of the Zionist colony in Palestine, or among disconnected and blank individual citizens naturalized in other imperial countries. Claims to Jewish belonging within the Muslim world are still seen as an interference in the work of global imperial technologies tasked with accelerating their disappearance: most of North Africa was already emptied of its Jews, and the European imperial powers mandated the Zionists establish a nation-state for the “Jewish people” in Palestine.
That Jews had been part of the ummah since its very beginning, part of what shaped it and defined Muslims’ commitment to protect other groups, had to be forgotten by Jews and Muslims so that the Judeo-Christian tradition could emerge as reality rather than invention and be reflected in the global geographical imagination. Despite the dramatic change, this is never called a “crusade,” but it sought to make Jews foreign to Africa, transfer them elsewhere to serve Western interests, and make them Zionists by fiat.
Objections to this crusade incurred a high risk, for it was (and is) in the interests of those in power to keep the Jews away from the liberatory idea that Muslims and Arabs were never their enemies. To ensure that this idea would stay suppressed, the involvement of non-Jewish European Zionists in devising plans to colonize Palestine with Jews from Europe and to empty Europe of its Jews, including through collaboration with Nazi actors during the war, had to be diminished and construed as a Jewish liberation project.
In this way, the Zionists were tasked by Euro-American powers with conscripting Jews from across the globe as settlers. Jews were trained in the European school of racialized nationalism to become operators of imperialist, colonial, and capitalist technologies—though some were disguised at the time as socialists. Despite the fact that the tiny Zionist movement was unappealing to most Jews worldwide, at the end of WWII the Euro-American new world order included the accelerated colonization of Palestine as yet another “solution” for the Jews. The French colonization of Algeria facilitated the forced inclusion of those Jews from the Jewish Muslim world in re-birthing the Jewish people in Palestine as European colonizers.
The settler-colonial grammar that deracinated Jews from Muslim countries had to adopt was given to me as my “mother tongue.” For years, it forced me to say that though my ancestors were Algerians, I was not. For how could one belong to a world made nonexistent?
To be an Algerian Jew is to revolt. In 1962, with the forced departure of Jews from Algeria, the existence of a Jewish Muslim world turned into history, the stable past that can never re-emerge. To be an Algerian Jew is to resist this idea of history, to rebel against the settler identity that was assigned to me in the Zionist colony where I was born, and to open a door into the precolonial worlds where such identities can be possible again.
To be an Algerian Jew is to reclaim an ancestral world, to free ourselves from the “progress” imperialism forced upon us and from the new identities imperial nation-states imposed in every domain of our life. However, the refusal extends further. To be an Algerian Jew is to repair. It is to refuse to inhabit the “Jewish” identity invented by the secular imperial state, an identity bereft of the rich heritage of nonimperial world building of which it had been a part. To be an Algerian Jew is to inhabit Jewish Muslim conviviality. It is also a commitment to imagining that conviviality’s repair and renewal on a global scale.
To be an Algerian Jew is to acknowledge that I have been inhibited for more than fifty years from saying the obvious: that I’m not a child of empire but the descendent of a world that empire aims to destroy.
The force of this question. “Who am I?”—entangled with “who are we?”—surprised me when it presented itself to me more than a decade ago. It felt as if the weight of an entire world were at stake in the answer. The question imposed itself just after the death of my father, which coincided with my departure from the Zionist colony in Palestine and with my arrival into a Christian world, one where I felt more Jewish than ever.
I felt more Jewish than ever, I came to realize, because I had parted from the “Israeli” identity assigned to me at birth, and once I shed my national (Israeli) identity, I felt myself at once a “Jew” and robbed of being a Jew, a Muslim Jew, whose ancestors had once been part of the ummah. The national identity, I saw, had destroyed and subsumed diverse kinds of Jewish life.
Moreover, in the Euro-American world in which I now live, Jews are understood to have come from Europe, and their history is understood as a European one. I am often marked as a European Jew or Ashkenazi Jew, regardless of the fact that my ancestors are Arab Jews, Berber Jews, Muslim Jews. Simple statements like “I am an Arab Jew” or “I am a Muslim Jew” require long explanations because the concept of a Muslim Jew disturbs the fiction of Jewishness as a primarily European identity. The fiction of Jewishness also obscures the fact that asking diverse Jews to become simply “Jewish” was part of the European “solution” to the “Jewish problem” Europe had created on the continent and in its colonies.
Refusing this fiction is an unpopular thing to do, I have found. I looked for others who were refusing this fiction, so that we might refuse together. Reading the work of Katya Gibel Azoulay, Samira Negrouche, or Hosni Kitouni triggered letters from me about our shared investment in the realities of diverse Jews, those Jews whose experiences and worlds are eclipsed by the fictive construction of a cohesive Jewish people. This fictive border had also separated Muslims and Blacks from Jews.
Don’t dare to tell us
we cannot talk like this!
No, don’t dare!
You silenced our ancestors
until you pressed them to leave
a world in which
we could not be born.
Don’t dare to tell us
“it was their choice,”
as if
they had wanted to ruin the world
their ancestors shared
with Muslims.
Don’t dare to tell us
that their wish was
to see beloved Palestine
ruined.
We will not let you bury us
alive
in your museums,
where our ancestors’ worlds,
which should have been ours,
are piled up in your acclimatized halls
dedicated to extinct species:
Afghan Jews,
Algerian Jews,
Egyptian Jews,
Iranian Jews,
Iraqi Jews,
Tunisian Jews,
Yemeni Jews.
— An edited excerpt from The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.
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