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This introductory chapter discusses the roots of the conflict between Muslim and Jews in France. It reviews the cultural and historical connections linking these two populations. It describes the vastly different levels of Muslim and Jewish communal development in the metropole that created sharply divergent processes of integration. By the early twenty-first century, Jews proved more economically mobile, better educated, and professionally better placed than the general population and certainly than French Muslims. However, the organized community was often criticized for failing to defend Jewish interests successfully, particularly with regard to foreign policy around Israel. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter focuses on the student uprisings in France in 1968, which brought the story of Muslim–Jewish polarization to France's national conversation as student radicals began to link the occupation of Palestinian territories evermore fully to leftist politics at home. While many Jewish and Muslim leftists worked together in these endeavors, highly visible moments of discord, such as a riot in the Parisian immigrant neighborhood of Belleville in June 1968 and ongoing conflictual encounters between Muslim and Jewish university students, continued to fuel perceptions of polarization. Indeed, paradoxically, even those who emphasized the cultural connections and shared histories binding Muslims and Jews contributed to this process, since in seeking to counter more polarizing rhetoric, they unwittingly legitimized the boundaries of political discourse as it was taking shape: to deny Muslim–Jewish polarization was to acknowledge the problem, thereby reinforcing the very categories they were seeking to dismantle.

This chapter discusses how migration and settlement in Marseille in the 1950s and early 1960s illustrates the impact of colonial legacies in shaping the contours of Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole. While Paris remained the main pole of attraction for both, Marseille's close proximity to North Africa, its Mediterranean climate, and its expanding economy meant that the city attracted thousands of repatriates and immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Shared cultural frameworks and the common experiences of migration and displacement meant that Muslim and Jewish newcomers often had much in common, creating the basis for convivial exchange in the mixed immigrant neighborhoods where many initially settled. Such commonalities did not, however, ensure similar processes of incorporation into French urban life. Differing relationships to the French state and levels of communal development meant that incoming Jews often not only had more resources available to them than Muslims arriving in the same period but also benefited from a local administration sympathetic to their concerns.

This concluding chapter summarizes key arguments woven throughout the text. These are that in order to understand fully the way Muslim–Jewish political conversations have evolved in France, we must begin in North Africa in the decade and a half after World War II as France first tried to hold on to and then extricate itself from the region; disagreements over Middle Eastern war and the Israeli–Palestinian struggle cannot in and of themselves explain the evolution of Muslim–Jewish political conversations in France over the last fifty years; and that binary constructions of Muslim–Jewish interaction have worked to erase the more complex social terrain in which Muslims and Jews have interacted in late twentieth-century France.

This chapter builds on the link between French colonial policies and Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole by tracing how decolonization throughout North Africa changed the way a diverse set of social actors, including French colonial administrators, international Jewish spokesmen, and a wide range of indigenous nationalist groups conceptualized Jewish belonging throughout the region. It argues that the process led to the emergence of the “North African Jew,” a category to which no individual ascribed but that worked rhetorically to unite the diverse Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish populations into a collective often understood to be in conflict with “North Africans,” “Muslims,” or “Arabs.”

This chapter traces the rise and fall of a Muslim–Jewish alliance to fight racism in 1980s France. It argues that the widespread excitement over the joint anti-racist campaign in the mid-1980s overlooked ongoing tensions between “particularistic” and “pluricultural” approaches to ethno-religious participation in the French state. Divisions over the Palestinian–Israeli conflict both prior to and during the 1991 Gulf War made these tensions evident as, once again, debates over the Middle East became a means of making sense of politics at home. Although calls for joint anti-racist campaigns never disappeared, by the end of the 1980s, those who articulated such appeals had backed away from a “pluricultural” model. While Muslims and Jews should work together, they argued, their perspectives and goals were necessarily divergent.

This chapter investigates the influence of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors on Muslim–Jewish relations in France. This conflict, which ended with Israel's occupation of significant Arab lands including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, had little impact on daily interactions more fundamentally shaped by the colonial North African past and the French present than the Middle East. Nevertheless, the unprecedented mobilization of Jewish organizational life around Israel and efforts to create parallel affinities in the Muslim North African population around Palestine continued to shape political discourse in binary terms. The result was that while conflict between France's large Muslim and Jewish populations was rare, the story of two polarized ethno-religious political units hardened as new political actors, particularly university students, began to use French campuses as spaces in which to engage in discussions of foreign policy.

Shimon Benizri is an Arab Jew – a conjunction that to Westerners may seem a contradiction in terms but for him is a unity of enduring value. Raised in the Middle Atlas Mountains and fluent in Berber he, along with his wife, lived comfortably enmeshed in a Muslim world through most of their lives. Moroccan Jews accounted for a quarter of all Jews in the Middle East in 1948 and Shimon’s life and ideas trace the ways in which his ancient Jewish community interacted with the Muslims and shared with them many rituals, saints, and everyday experiences. Following the eventual move of Shimon and his family to the city and ultimately to Israel the entire history of the Jews in North Africa becomes condensed in one life, and with it a sense of what both Muslim and Jew feel they have lost as the community that was once so vital to this Arab society has, physically if not psychologically, all but departed.

Starting with disputes over interfaith adultery, conversion, and marriage, this chapter expands to a broader discussion of Muslim-Jewish relations in late medieval Iberia, exploring issues such as theoretical restrictions in Jewish and Muslim law and the reality of sexual interaction between these communities, tracing the development of the relationship between the two communities in Christian Spain through the lens of love. Before 1400, Muslim and Jewish communities appear to have been comparatively free to compete in love, mediated by Christian fiscal rather than spiritual interests, the outcome generally dependent on the relative economic and political power of the two communities. For a number of reasons, that balance of power initially favored Jewish access to Muslim women rather than vice versa. But by ca. 1450, the tables had turned dramatically, with Christian authorities strongly supporting Muslims over Jews. The changed possibilities for Muslim-Jewish love, conversion, and marriage were not primarily a product of a shift in the relative power of Muslims and Jews; they reflected changes in the role these two religious communities (and the theological categories they represented) played in the Christian theological imagination, and the increasing importance of these theological considerations in the Christian mediation of Jewish-Muslim relations.

Military and colonial officials maintained a kaleidoscopic view of southern Algerian Jews in the decades after France’s conquest of the Sahara. As they shaped law and policy, these officials borrowed freely from centuries-old tropes about Jews that were European in inspiration. They recycled military, colonial, and ethnographic writing about northern Algerian Jewry that had been penned decades earlier, in the aftermath of the French conquest of the Tell. They read events in the Mzab through global politics, including the unfolding Dreyfus affair and the wave of anti-Semitism that was sweeping France and Algeria. Finally, they pieced together an impressionistic sense of facts on the ground, occasionally eliding issues about which they had little knowledge, such as the workings of Jewish law or the nuances of Muslim-Jewish relations in the region. When it came to the shaping of colonial policy in French North Africa, improvisational borrowing of this kind was not uncommon. In this instance, however, the dynamic had a specific catalyst. Having resisted applying to southern Algerian Jews the mission civilisatrice [civilizing mission] that defined colonial policy toward Jews in Algeria’s north, French officials drew upon a hodge-podge of cultural and economic typologies to provide conceptual validation for their policies.

This chapter explores various ways that imperial enclaves could project power over their borders. Examples include the increasing power of European consuls in Tangier to adjudicate conflicts between Jews and Muslims throughout Morocco; the processes by which officials in Gibraltar and Melilla asserted control over regional trade networks by protecting smugglers; and the role of French Oran in serving as a landing point for Spanish and Moroccan refugees and dissidents. Taken together, these examples illustrate the formation of a constellation of power in the trans-Gibraltar borderland that curtailed the ability of the Spanish and Moroccan governments to administer their own laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the crisis of 1898, which set in motion a cooperative effort by Spain, Britain, and France to clearly delineate imperial spheres of influence, producing the Entente Cordiale of 1904.

Hussein ou Muhammad Qadir is a Berber. Living in the Middle Atlas Mountains just south of the city of Sefrou he has succeeded as an agriculturalist and animal dealer to a very high degree. In the process, he demonstrates the working of the Moroccan marketplace as a venue of relationship and cultural enactment no less than economic maneuvering. Through the description of his career one comes to understand how tribal organization remains highly flexible, how relationships are forged in an intensely personalistic environment, and how family life and contacts with Jewish merchants plays a crucial role in his personal success and his psychological comfort. Ever sardonic about the political he is the exemplar of that merchant the poets call the beloved of God, and in his humor and his warmth the joys of his Berber identity come sharply and articulately to the fore.

This chapter includes a selection of reviews of books which span the fields of history and social sciences. The first book reviewed presents the essays and other writings of Ben Zion Dinur, one of the most influential educators and historians in Israel. Another book explores the history of the Jewish community in Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan. The next book reviewed contains a collection of thirty essays on the development, major intellectual currents, and achievements of Israeli anthropology. Other topics included in the books reviewed include Bundist counterculture in Poland during the interwar years; life of Marie Syrkin, a polemical journalist, poet, socialist Zionist, and self-styled feminist; immigrant Jewish behavior in the U.S.; Jewish demography, settlement patterns, social structure, economic activities, religious and cultural life, communal organization, and politics; and the history of the Jewish cultural renaissance in the Soviet Union. The last two books reviewed are about the life of Abba Kovner, a Jewish poet and leader of a partisan organization in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania and the evolving nature of Muslim-Jewish relations in Qajar Iran.

This chapter looks at how debating news of distant events shaped the development of Algerian nationalism. Distance gave Algerians a means to reconsider their own problems on a different scale, to zoom out and reconsider their relationships with each other. It considers two case studies. First, Algerians observed keenly the Italian takeover of neighbouring Libya from 1911 to 1919, and used it to experiment with new forms of political mobilization. However, the interpretation of events in Libya remained volatile. This uncertain interpretation remained a problem during a second moment of mobilization around events in the British mandate of Palestine from 1929 to 1939. Palestine seemed to offer a mirror back to communal relations between Muslims, Jews, and Europeans in Algeria, leading to a number of conflicting interpretations.

French civil status records reveal that in all likelihood, Jacob Lasry was married simultaneously to two women. This returns a paradox discussed in the introduction, notably that Jacob Lasry, France’s chosen agent of “civilization” in Oran, apparently maintained practices that French colonial law singled out as “indigenous.” Civilizing mission notwithstanding, France could not afford to alienate this class of local Jewish merchants. It follows that colonial Oran was deeply shaped by them. With the introduction of new ideas, institutions and laws, however, all classes of Jews were increasingly understood to be “indigenous.” This process led, after several decades, to a naturalization decree based entirely on religion. “Jew” evolved into a subset of “French citizen,” while “Muslim” increasingly described the “colonial subject.” France had initiated the process of Jewish reification, minoritization, and isolation from their Muslim neighbors.