Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
*not to be cited or quoted without written permission of the author*
Looking back to the Future: The Motivations behind
Association Formation in the Wake of the 1962
Exodus from Algeria within the Pied-noir and Algerian
Jewish Diasporic Communities in France
Introduction
My thesis as a whole deals with group memories of the Algerian War of Independence as
expressed through social, political, cultural and commemorative associations created by
those affected by the war who currently reside in France. This includes the European
settlers, or pieds-noirs, who came to Algeria from across Europe, primarily in the 1830’s
and 1840’s, acquired French citizenship over the course of the colonial period and who
left Algeria en masse at the conclusion of the war. It also includes the Jews of Algeria who,
as a result of the Crémieux Decree of 24 October 1870, were legally classed as French
citizens and who also overwhelmingly chose to leave in 1962. These two groups of
repatriates1 are the subject of this paper today.
The Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 until 1962. It pitted the
independence-seeking guerrilla force, the Front de libération nationale, FLN, against a
French government and army determined, in the wake of the Second World War and the
battle of Dien Bien Phu, to avoid another humiliating military defeat at all costs and
under pressure from a settler population of just over 1 million to maintain the French
flag in Algeria. This, in addition to the fact that Algeria was not merely a piece of the
empire, but an integral part of the French nation, comprising its three most southern
départements in 1954, meant that whilst the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco gained
independence relatively peacefully, Algeria was a different matter altogether. The war
brought about the controversial return to power of General de Gaulle and the creation of
the Fifth Republic; it gave the world the now infamous Battle of Algiers and the
paratroopers of General Massu; it brought the right wing, clandestine Organisation armée
secrète, OAS, which sought to resist Algerian Independence through violent means, into
existence; and brought bloodshed and terror to the streets of Paris.
Although the French government used the term rapatrié to describe all those who left Algeria at the
conclusion of the war, it is something of a misnomer given that virtually none of the groups in question
had ever lived in mainland France prior to 1962.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
Eventually a peace deal was struck: The Evian Accords, signed on 18 March 1962
confirmed the cease fire, promised a referendum on the subject of self-determination and
thus marked the official end of the hostilities. The accords stipulated that all people and
possessions were to be respected; a clause intended primarily to reassure the French
citizens of Algeria, as well as those Algerians who had been engaged on the French side
during the war. However, events on the rue d’Isly in Algiers on 26 March 1962, when the
French army fired into a crowd of pied-noir demonstrators, killing 61 and wounding
many more; the increasing frequency and ferocity of OAS and FLN attacks; and finally
the widespread kidnappings and killings during this transitory phase, precipitated the
mass exodus of the pieds-noirs and Jews of Algeria who were now convinced that the
Evian guarantees would not be respected once independence was obtained. In total,
more than 90% of the 1,075 000 Français d’Algérie left their homeland. This figure
includes 110,000 Algerian Jews out of an estimated overall population of 120,000. The
overwhelming majority headed for France.2
One result of this mass arrival was a proliferation of associations among the newly
created pied-noir and Algerian Jewish diasporas. As the saying goes: ‘Quand deux piedsnoirs se recontrent et commencer à évoquer leurs souvenirs, ils créent trios associations’.3
Estimates range from a conservative 100-300, to former Cercle algérianiste president
Maurice Calmein’s undoubtedly optimistic 800 such associations, with most academics
congregating around the mid-point figure of 400 advanced by Jean-Jacques Jordi.4
Approximately 10-15% of the pied-noir population are believed to formally belong to an
association.5 Examining what these groups brought with them mentally from their
former homeland can help illuminate the motivations behind their associational activity,
suggesting what it was they were seeking to preserve, perpetuate and transmit. Adopting
a comparative approach, this paper will argue that the experience of exile for the piednoir and Algerian Jewish communities and the translation of that experience into
associations is a history of two groups moving in opposite directions and, in many
senses, undergoing an identity exchange.6 For the pieds-noirs, exile in 1962 became the
defining feature of their collective identity, fixing their gaze firmly on what had been lost.
The insularity and nostalgia of which they are frequently accused stems largely from this
narrow basis of self-definition. In contrast, for the Jews of Algeria, the decision to leave
Algeria, to affirm their francité, or ‘Frenchness’, and tie their identity, as well as their
destiny, to France, represented a moment of liberation: for the first time, they were being
Fremeaux, “Le reflux des Français d’Afrique du Nord”, 13-15; Allouche-Benayoun, “Une histoire
d’intégration”, 72.
3 ‘When two pieds-noirs meet and begin evoking their memories, they create three associations’. Jordi,
“Archéologie et structure du réseau de sociabilité”, 177.
4 Roche, “Pieds-noirs”, 153; Calmein, Les Associations pieds-noirs, 15; Jordi, De l’exode à l’exil, 179.
5 Averell Manes, The Pieds-noirs 1960-2000, 52.
6 Jordi, Marseille, 127.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
exiled not on the basis of their ‘Jewishness’, but as a result of their ‘Frenchness’. They
therefore came to France with a more pluralistic self-perception which, when combined
with their religious tradition of organised sociability and the historical imperatives
towards inclusion, heightened by the experience of French Jewry under Vichy, created a
more open and multifaceted identity than displayed by the pied-noir community.
Parameters of the pied-noir mentality
Turning first to a consideration of the pieds-noirs, it is the case that as their identity
contracted following their departure from Algeria, the parameters of their communal
self-perception came sharply into focus. There is a very clear set of images and ideas
around which the community orbits which recur throughout the sources. Perhaps the
most striking of these is their visceral attachment to their former homeland. As Paul
Robert, creator of the Robert dictionaries, puts it: ‘Cette terre d’Algérie est gravée dans
mon coeur’.7 Pieds-noirs retain extremely vivid, sensual memories of the climatic and
geographical specificity of Algeria:
J’ai oublié noms et visages…Mais je peux revoir le brun mêlé de blanc et de gris du ventre de
la fauvette et sa culotte noire, le duvet de l’amande cueillie fraîche, ressentir l’odeur de poivre
et d’alcool du cyprès…8
Landscape, light, colour and smell are the building blocks of their territorial common
patrimony. The standard evocation is of an untroubled idyll, perpetually bathed in
sunlight, the memories of which are intensified by the knowledge that this is a paradise
lost. The editor and author Louis Gardel epitomises this almost universal sentiment
when he says: ‘Comme les autres pieds-noirs, j’ai perdu l’Algérie. Mais elle ne m’a pas
quitté. Elle ne me quittera jamais. Elle est en moi jusqu’à ma mort. Je suis fait d’elle’. 9
Into this idyllic setting is placed a peerless group of European settlers who enjoy
excellent relations with all around them. The stereotypical pied-noir is described as
‘volubile, exubérant, chaleureux, direct, hospitalier, travailleur, fonceur, gagneur, fier,
attaché aux valeurs familliales, un peu frimeu, un peu fataliste…’10 This pied-noir feels
himself to be deeply French and is also intensely patriotic, as attested to by their
disproportionately high participation in both the First and Second World Wars. These
descriptions are less about novelty and nuance, and more about reiterating, reinforcing
‘This land of Algeria is engraved on my heart’. Robert, “L’aigle des mots”, 173.
‘I have forgotten names and faces… But I can still see the brown mixed with the white and grey of the
belly of the warbler and its black tail, still see the blanket of freshly gathered almonds, still smell the scent
of pepper and of the alcohol from the cypresses…’ Lenoir, Mon Algérie tendre et violent, 12.
9 ‘Like the other pieds-noirs, I have lost Algeria. But she has not left me. She will never leave me. She is in
me until my death. I am made of her’. Louis Gardel, quoted in Ayoun and Stora, Mon Algérie, 252.
10 ‘…voluble, exuberant, warm, direct, hospitable, hard-working, a whiz-kid, a winner, proud, attached to
family values, a bit of a poser, a bit of a fatalist…’ Roche, “Pieds-noirs”, 160.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
and thus validating an already known and accepted canon of images; that is to say, about
asserting a collectively acknowledged singularity, both of territory and character.
Theirs is, however, une solidarité d’exclus (a solidarity of the excluded), because what
unites them above all else is that the country and way of life they remember so fondly is
lost to them forever. This is reflected in the defensive tone of many associations.
According to the Centre d’études pied-noir, for example:
Nous avons une identité culturelle bien plus large, bien plus riche, qu’il serait malhonnête
d’occulter…Hélas, ce patrimoine a été bien amputee en 1962, mais le devoir de mémoire
demeure. C’est pourquoi nous nous attachons à defendre cette mémoire. 11
What seems ultimately to be at stake in pied-noir recollections is legitimacy. Their
principal desire is to establish an accepted place for their past within the national history
of France, which is, after all, their mother country. Indeed, the agenda of the majority of
pied-noir associational propaganda is to correct what they regard as metropolitan
misperceptions and misrepresentations of them and their history. For example, Maurice
Calmein, founder of the pied-noir organisation the Cercle algérianiste, describes himself as
motivated by the desire to ‘contribuer ainsi à rendre justice à une communauté et à une
page d’histoire trop souvent méconnues, incomprises et décriées. 12 However, considering
that the pieds-noirs are the living embodiment of a now globally discredited form of rule
and live in a society that many feel has yet to face up to its imperial past, let alone to
decolonisation and its legacies13, this is no easy task. It is further complicated by the
persistence in the metropolitan French mentality of the stereotype of the pied-noir as a
privileged, racist, rich, lazy and exploitative colonialist who prospered at the expense of
the indigenous inhabitants of Algeria.
The pieds-noirs, often in response to such depictions, advance a very different collective
history that revolves around particular canonical elements or what they refer to as their
‘truths’. There are three examples in particular that recur frequently. Firstly, the lack of
racism and inequality in pre-1954 Algeria is stressed. The idea of everyone living as one
big, happy family is most strongly expressed by Josette Sutra in her memoir Algérie, mon
amour (1979) in which she writes:
‘We have a cultural identity much larger, much richer, that it would be dishonest to conceal …Alas, this
patrimony was amputated in 1962, but the duty of memory remains. It is why we apply ourselves to
defending this memory’. Revel-Mouroz, “Le Centre d’études pied-noir”, 195-196.
12 ‘…in this way to contribute to rendering justice to a community and to a page of history too often
unrecognised, misunderstood and disparaged’. Calmein, Dis, c’était comment, 9-10.
13 See in particular Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire, La fracture coloniale; Blanchard and Bancel, “Les pièges
de la mémoire coloniale”, 68-74.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
Nous vivions sans doute, un moment unique de l’Histoire, un moment où les trois religions
monothéistes: chrétienne, juive et musulmane, se respectant, s’admirant, se soutenant
réciproquement dans la recherche de la vérité et de la foi, vivaient en parfaite harmonie. 14
The other standard refutation of racism is a reference to the ‘bon Arabe’ (good Arab) that
every family knew (generally in the context of being served by them), the implication
being that this one, ‘nôtre Arabe’ (our Arab), is the exception that proves the rule of the
‘sale race’ (dirty race). As Anne Loesch explains in her memoir La valise ou le cerceuil
(1963): ‘Chacun de nous a “son”, a “ses” bons Arabes, et ce sont ses amis, même s’il
admet depuis toujours dans l’absolu que la race arabe est une “sale race”’.15
Secondly, and connected to the denial of racism, is a strong sense of entitlement. Piedsnoirs dwell at length on their roots which most date from the 1830s or 1840s, the
decades when their ancestors first arrived in the new colony. The right of the pied-noir
community to be in Algeria stems from the efforts made and the suffering endured by
these early pioneers when creating the original European settlements from nothing.
Maurice Calmein boasts: ‘Il s’agissait pas d’occuper un pays mais plutôt de le fabriquer de
toutes pièces’. 16 Although the term mission civilisatrice is almost never used, the argument
that Algeria would have been nothing without the efforts of the French is ever-present.
Once again, the stress is on a common self-perception and a shared historical experience
unique to that particular group
Finally, the pieds-noirs argue not only did they have every right to be in colonial Algeria,
they in no way deserved to lose that right. The bare bones of this thesis are that their
ejection from paradise was an inexplicable misfortune; an event for which they are in no
way culpable and as a result of which they have been left as a permanently scarred
community of betrayed victims. ‘Nous nous sentons intimement le droit de nous
considerer comme des victimes, des incompris’.17
This defence of the pieds-noirs and their history, expressed as a tightly bound set of selfaffirming beliefs, is in many ways part of the natural process of group identity formation,
since in order for a community to exist and to have a collective memory, it is necessary
that the concepts around which they congregate are recognised by, and recognised as
pertaining to, all members. Memories that deviate too much from convention are unlikely
‘We were living, without a doubt, a unique moment of history, a moment where the three monotheist
religions: Christian, Jewish and Muslim, respecting each other, admiring each other, supporting each other
reciprocally in the search for truth and for faith, lived in harmony’. Sutra, Algérie mon amour, 84.
15 ‘Each of us has ‘his’, has ‘their’ ‘good Arabs’, and these are their friends, even if they always admit in the
absolute, that the Arab race is a ‘dirty race’. Loesch, La valise, 16.
16 ‘It was not a question of occupying a country but rather of creating it in its entirety’. Calmein, Dis, c’était
comment, 14.
17 ‘We feel deeply that we have the right to consider ourselves as the victims, the misunderstood’. Loesch,
La valise, 20
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
to be meaningful to large audiences, nor to be spread successfully. Groups therefore
labour to create stable, widely-shared social memories that are resistant to unsanctioned
interpretations, from both within and without the community.18
That this identity is built almost exclusively around the concept of loss is a product of the
fact that the category “pied-noir” emerged at precisely the moment that French Algeria
ceased to exist.19 During the colonial era the dominant position of the settlers meant they
did not have to grapple with their identity; they could simply take it for granted. Algerian
independence destroyed this sense of security, jettisoning the pieds-noirs not only into an
alien country, but into an alien social position. The immediate consequence of this
trauma was to create a fixation on what was no longer. By fixing their gaze on the past,
the pieds-noirs were able to comfort themselves by returning to a time of confidence and
certainty, the lineaments of which became more vivid and perfect in direct proportion to
the distress and uncertainty of the present. Such emotions were exacerbated by the fact
that when the pieds-noirs arrived in France they generally did not have family or friends
on which to rely, no pre-existing kinship networks to help ease their transition into this
new world. Furthermore, they did not receive quite the warm welcome they were
expecting from their metropolitan cousins. Thus, feeling ‘étrangers parmi les leurs’
(strangers among their own), and finding no wider community open to including them
(indeed, many considered the metropolitan French to be actively closing ranks against
them), the pieds-noirs naturally turned in on themselves. This is the source of the
excessive and exclusive solidarity that Jordi observes, the phenomenon of:
La recherché du médecin rapatrié, du boulanger rapatrié…avec lesquels on pourra parler de
‘là-bas’ et evoquer un passé regretté, qui ne saurait revivre certes, mais qui n’appellerait pas en
retour des condemnations ou opprobres. 20
The nebulous identity of the Jews of Algeria
In contrast, the former Jews of Algeria have a much more nebulous identity. Individually
they often display similar attitudes to the pieds-noirs and indeed some belong to piednoir organisations. The Algerian Jewish singer Enrico Macias, for example, has a
particularly entwined identity. Although he locates many of his experiences within the
specificity of his confessional affiliation – ‘Bien que ma famille n’habite pas dans le
Brundage, “No Deed But Memory”, 9.
Joëlle Hureau cites 1955 as the year in which the term “pied-noir” came into existence, while other
historians date it more generally to the period of the conflict, in particular the years during which the
exodus of the European population began in earnest. Hureau, “Les pieds-noirs existent-ils?”, 329; Jordi,
“1962 l’arrivée”, 114; Cohen, Chronique d’une Algérie revolue’ , 46.
20 ‘The search for the repatriate doctor, for the repatriate baker…with whom one could speak of ‘back
there’ and evoke a regretted past, which admittedly one knows will not come back to life, but which in
return will not bring about condemnation or disgrace’. Jordi, “Archéologie et structure du réseau de
sociabilité”, 182
18
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
quartier juif, nous y passons beaucoup de temps’ 21 -, he appears equally comfortable
adopting the more generic role of pied-noir spokesperson: ‘Aucun peuple dans l’histoire
des nations n’a su assumer son exode avec autant de dignité, d’abnégation, d’esrpit
d’entreprise que le mien’.22 There is no clear line separating his ‘Jewishness’ from his
identity as a pied noir, he moves between the two seamlessly, apparently without conflict.
However, as a collectivity, the Algerian Jewish experience of and reaction to exile has
been markedly different to that of the pieds-noirs. This difference stems primarily from
their historical and cultural particularity, both within a colonial and confessional context,
which gave them a distinct and unique patrimonial identity and memory.
In colonial Algeria, the Jews were an extremely liminal group with multiple, interlocking
and overlapping identities as the author Jean-Louis Chiss explains:
Nous, Juifs d’Algérie, on savait vite, tôt, qu’on était juifs mais aussi vite, aussi vite et tôt qu’on
était français, ou plutôt français d’Algérie, pieds-noirs. Et aussitôt dès que je dis pieds-noirs,
je ne peux pas oublier juif pour dire que je suis encore plus lié à l’Algérie que les autres ‘piedsnoirs’, les catholiques comme on disait. Je suis plus arabe qu’eux mais pas moins français. Au
lieu de chercher ma specificité dans une identité precise, j’aperçois la multiplicité de mes
enracinements, de mes liens qui composent un écheveau confus. 23
More than one historian has described them as ‘frontaliers’, that is ‘people living at the
frontiers of several societies; their uniqueness stemm[ing] from the multiple borders they
straddled and the many ways that they fell in-between established categories’.24
Co-existing, and frequently conflicting, with this practical liminality, however, was the
fact that technically, legally, the Jews of Algeria had only one identity: they were French
citizens and had been since the Crémieux Decree of 1870. However, this was by no
means an identity in which they felt secure. ‘To be French and not a single French
person on the genealogical tree, admittedly it is a fine miracle,” writes Hélène Cixous,
“but it clings to the tree like a leaf menaced by the wind’.25 Yet despite, or possibly
because of, this fragility, francité appears to be a status that they actively sought. For Jean
Cohen: ‘L’histoire des Juifs d’Algérie fut une longue série d’assimilations successives.
Toutes furent subies. Une seule fut acceptée, voulue, exigée, et ce fut l’assimilation
‘Although my family do not live in the Jewish quarter, we spend much of our time there’. Macias, Mon
Algérie, 118.
22 ‘No other people in history has dealt with its exile with so much dignity, self-sacrifice or
entrepreneurship, as mine has’. Macias, Non, je n’ai pas oublié, 181.
23 ‘We, Jews of Algeria, we knew quickly, early, that we were Jews but also quickly, as quickly and as early
that we were French, or rather French of Algeria, pieds-noirs. And straight away, as soon as I say piedsnoirs, I cannot forget Jews, that is to say that I am even more bound to Algeria than the other ‘pieds-noirs’,
Catholics as we used to say. I am more Arab than them but no less French. Instead of searching for my
specificity in a precise identity, I see the multiplicity of my roots, of my ties, which form a confused web’.
Allouche, Les Juifs d’Algérie, 306-307.
24 Sussman, “Changing Lands”, 368. Sussman’s terminology is based on Jean-Robert Henry’s introduction
to Hargreaves and Heffernan’s French and Algerian Identities, in which he describes the history of FrancoAlgerian relations as consisting of various symbolic border zones or frontiers, around which notions of Self
and Other are formed. Henry, ‘Introduction’, 12-13.
25 Cixous, “My Algeriance”, 260.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
français’. 26 Various reasons are advanced to explain this sentiment, however, irrespective
of motives, in 1962, when events forced them to make a choice about whether to remain
in the newly independent Algeria or not, more than 90% placed their French citizenship
above their historical, cultural, familial and emotional ties to Algeria.27 This represented
the only large scale migration of Jews not to choose Israel since the establishment of the
state in 1948.28 Thus while exile, for the pied-noir community, was something imposed
upon them by what they regarded as forces beyond their control (the indifferent French
public, the perfidious de Gaulle etc), for the Jews of Algeria the decision to leave was
more a choice for something, for France and francité; an affirmation of identity and
allegiance, rather than the negation of that identity. Consequently, their departure was
more easily framed as a potential new beginning, as opposed to a definitive and
calamitous end.
The Jews of Algeria were also arguably better equipped to deal with the psychological
trauma of exile given their historical familiarity with the phenomenon. As one Algerian
Jew put it: ‘Le deracinement n’est pas une découverte, une souffrance nouvelle pour le
peuple juif qui le subit depuis six mille ans’. 29 Consequently, while 1962 left the pied-noir
community feeling abandoned and isolated, many Jews felt that in leaving Algeria they
had joined their ancestors in a larger Jewish experience of exile and thus had entered into
a broader community which left them in a position to establish links beyond their
immediate circle and make a contribution to European Judaism.
The other confessional characteristic that the Jews of Algeria brought with them which
helped them integrate into wider communities in France was their tradition of organised
sociability. In contrast to the conviviality of Algeria that the pieds-noirs so sorely miss
which was a spontaneous, informal and unstructured phenomenon; the Jewish
community in Algeria had a far more codified, formalised tradition of interaction that
was intimately bound up with the practice of their faith. Although the basis of these
contacts was religious and familial, their actual reach was far broader. Sarah Sussman
goes so far as to claim that even if they were not religious, the majority of Jews in
colonial Algeria lived in a “Jewish social and cultural milieu”. This milieu was quite
different from that of the metropolitan Jewish community. The uniqueness of the
Algerian Jews revolved around the combination of traditional Maghrebi religious
customs; their sense of their Sephardic, as opposed to Ashkenazi, Jewish identity; and
‘The history of the Jews of Algeria was a long series of successive assimilations. All were suffered. Only
one was accepted, wished for, demanded, and that was French assimilation’. Cohen, Chronique d’une Algérie
révolue, 10.
27 Allouche-Benayoun, “Une histoire d’intégration”, 72.
28 Sussman, “Changing Lands”, 162.
29‘ Uprooting is not a discovery, not a new suffering for the Jewish people who have suffered it for six
thousand years’. Pierre Bensimon quoted in Michel-Chich, Deracinés, 126.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
their strong, voluntary kinship networks. Temperamentally, Algerian Judaism was ‘à la
fois plus simple, différentialiste, plus démonstrative, plus exubérante, en un mot, plus
méditerranéenne’,30 than the secular and intellectual attitude of Jews in the Hexagon. It
was also a more public form of religious identification. However, in spite of these
differences, it remains the case that, unlike the pieds-noirs, the Jews of Algeria left their
homeland and arrived in a country where there were approximately 250,000 people who
shared and valued not only their religion, but also the notion of community as a key
aspect of that faith.31
Furthermore, the Jews of Algeria arrived at a time when their metropolitan co-religionists
were fundamentally re-thinking the precise form they wanted that community to take.
The failure of Jewish organisations to combat the anti-immigrant rhetoric and
discriminatory policies towards Eastern European immigrant Jews of the 1930’s had left
a bad taste in the mouth, particularly since such attacks proved to be a prelude to the
attitude adopted by the Vichy regime. Moreover, the Second World War in general, and
Vichy in particular, produced a backlash within the French Jewish community against the
concepts of assimilation and universalism. Consequently, the post-war era witnessed the
emergence of a desire to re-create a civil Jewish presence outside of government
institutions and for that presence to embrace a more pluralistic and inclusive notion of
Judaism. The waves of Jewish migrants and immigrants during the 1950’s and 1960’s,
from Eastern Europe, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, provided the perfect opportunity to
put this new, all-embracing concept of community into practice. In 1962 therefore, the
fortuitous convergence was that the stronger, more public, Sephardic communal
identification of the Jews of Algeria came to be implanted in France at the same time as
acceptance of many different ways of being Jewish was growing and an increasingly
flexible and pluralistic institutional framework designed to accommodate such diversity
was being developed. This enabled the Jews of Algeria to integrate into French Jewish
society without sacrificing the unique aspects of their identity.
Conclusion
Decolonisation further complicated the already plural identity of the Jews of Algeria,
inserting them simultaneously into several new communities: French society, French
Jewish society, as well as the repatriate population. This was possible because in the
metropole, the Republican ideal of undifferentiated, individual citizenship was adhered to
more ostensibly than in Algeria where the effective functioning of the colony
necessitated an ethnically and religiously based hierarchy. Consequently, whereas in
‘…at once simpler, more distinctive, more demonstrative, more exuberant, in a word, more
Mediterranean…’ Tapia, “Religion et politique”, 214.
31 Sussman, “Changing Lands”, 252. The figure is for 1954.
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Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
colonial Algeria, definitions of identity were thrust upon them from outside, in France,
the Jews of Algeria had greater freedom to create their own definitions, enabling them to
disperse into pre-existing communities, adding a distinctive element to each.32 Their
experience evolved in direct contrast to that of the pied-noir community who in many
ways underwent a ‘judiasation’33 of their identity, being collectively subjected to exile and
exclusion, which them feeling ‘strangers among their own’. A process that produced an
insular, defensive, closed identity, consisting of very strong, clear tenets, widely shared
and constantly re-iterated within the group. This case study, which charts the
oppositional reactions of these two groups, demonstrates, I feel, the potential value of
exploring post-colonial diasporas within a comparative framework as well as on their
merits as distinct communities.
Claire Eldridge
University of St Andrews
cle@st-andrews.ac.uk
This is reflected in the fact that literature on the exodus from Algeria considers the pieds-noirs qua piedsnoirs, whereas the Jews of Algeria are generally studied as an element of broader groupings.
33 This term comes from Jean-Jacques Jordi who has advanced a similar ‘double movement hypothesis in
the context of an identity exchange - the ‘judaisation’ of the pied-noir and the ‘piednoirisation’ of the
Algerian Jewish community – which lasted until the 1970’s, at which point the two groups swapped back.
Jordi, Marseille, 127. However, as I have argued here, the exchange Jordi describes was merely one element
of a more complex process of collective identity formation in which the double movement can more
accurately be described as the contraction of the pied-noir identity down to a central core and the
simultaneous expansion and diffusion of the communal identity of the Jews of Algeria. The manifestations
and effects of this phenomenon can still be observed today.
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Claire Eldridge, University of St Andrews
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
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