Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso Books, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (AAA): There were two interrelated things which drove me to write this book: first, the clear understanding I had in 2012, in the wake of my father’s death, that two colonial projects deracinated me from the world of my ancestors, the Jewish Muslim world, and the Maghreb in particular, of which I knew very little; second, the realizations I subsequently came to that, firstly, it was not a coincidence that I was ignorant of this world for so long, and, secondly, though I was immersed in researching different places that were destroyed by imperial enterprises, studying the world of my ancestors did not seem relevant, despite the fact that it was destroyed with the same types of violence I had been examining. This is due to the fact that the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world was made a non-event in historical narratives, as its completion, conducted by the Zionist state, involved making this shared world unimaginable—both as a fact of history and as possibility for the present. Despite this manufactured amnesia, spearheaded by the Zionist state and sponsored by the West, individual descendants of this world still remember bits and pieces of its existence. Given this, it felt insufficient to trouble the accepted narratives about Jews in the Maghreb by recovering my memory alone; rather such a project required weaving together those disparate threads borne by the many descendants of this world. 

One day, I started to address, in the form of open letters, some authors who were either part of this world or knew about it, or whose accounts of the Maghreb could have been different if the existence of this world had not been denied even when it was still there. (One paradigmatic expression of such denial is the Crémieux Decree which forced Algerian Jews to become French, thus invisibilizing their existence as constituents of a shared Jewish Muslim convivial world.) Thus, quite accidently, instead of writing academic articles, I discovered the epistolary space as a research tool to access and inhabit the debris of this destroyed world, and unexpected things began to unfold. At moments, it was quite magical, as the presumed presence of my addressees in this epistolary space exemplified and thereby troubled the role that the invented category of “the past” plays in disrupting what could still be transmitted, exchanged, and renewed across generations. Documents, photographs, postcards, books, and objects, which I have collected for more than a decade, came alive in this space, disobeying of the imperial markers of time and space and some academic protocols which function as tools of empire, keeping me apart from my ancestors. It was as if the protocols of academic research determined that the world of my ancestors should be buried, camouflaged by the horrifying “solution” provided to the Jews: a state of their own in Palestine, which, prior to its colonization by European powers as part of the Sykes Picot agreement, was inhabited by various communities native to the un-bordered Middle East. Among my addressees are family members— my father, mother, and great grandmothers—and known authors such as Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and Ghassan Kanafani.

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AAA: The book’s title reveals one of its main topics—the world as it used to be when artisans were its builders. To examine this topic, the book explores their professions, ethics, intergenerational memories, know-how, knowledge of the elements, and the forms of resistance they posed against those who had the power to command violence against their world and its inhabitants. In the book I try to understand the nature of the artisans’ infrastructures of knowledge, the norms, laws, friendships, and solidarities that they created and transmitted over centuries. It is because of this knowledge and the infrastructures it spawned that the craftspersons’ guilds were one of the first things the colonial powers in Algeria targeted and destroyed. 

In the book, I also dwell on the fact that since the beginning of Islam Jews were the jewelers of this world, those who are charged with occupations that involve metal and fire. The aim of the book is not to trace their talent and reclaim their objects as “Jewish,” but rather to offer a potential history of this shared world, of its pre-colonial and pre-national political, social, and spiritual order which was organized around a series of worldly professions; in so doing, I trace the profound belonging of those I call Muslim Jews to this shared world from which they/we were uprooted. The book tracks down their mass deracination in the wake of WWII and the concomitant invention of the Judeo-Christian tradition as part of the imposition of a post-war New World Order. It examines the role Muslim Jews were forced to play in “solving” the West’s “Jewish problem” through the sacrifice of Palestine and the creation of a Muslim world free of Jews. Thus, while the arguments and examinations in this book are culled from different types of literature, I also want to emphasize how the book draws just as much from objects and pieces of jewelry. In lieu of people’s memory, which often fades out after two or three generations, I draw from a wide range of objects to explore their solid resistance to imperial classification.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AAA: Had I not first written Potential History, I would not have been able to write this book. Drawing on the theoretical premises of that book, I was able to avoid falling into the trap of writing another history of the Jews as a group apart in a bygone world. And yet, this book is different from Potential History: first, in its format—epistolary, where my voice is woven with that of others, which makes it more polyphonic, including through dreams, prophecies, and storytelling; second, in its study of objects as the product of communities—the community of artisans but also of those who used such objects and enabled them to play a central role in their shared lives and forms of sovereignty; third, in the way that it traces identities as forms of belonging, thus exploding colonial classifications that were based in an either-or logic; and fourth, in the way it undoes the European invention of the Jews and accounts for diverse Jewish communities that were colonized by different European and Euro-Zionists colonial projects. The book thereby strives to de-exceptionalize the Holocaust and to reinscribe those accounts of diverse Jewish communities within histories of colonialism and anticolonial liberation. Thus, a free Palestine is understood as part of an anti-Zionist Jewish liberation project and the reclamation our Jewish Muslim or Muslim Jewish forms of belonging to a shared world of languages, liturgies, rituals, practices, beliefs, etc. This anticolonial project is equally oriented against the Judeo-Christian imperial enterprise.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AAA: Given how widespread is the normalization of the invented Judeo-Christian tradition has become and the book’s commitment and labor to reveal the interests involved in it and reject it, the book is not a niche project but is relevant to anyone who is interested in anti-colonial movements, imaginaries, projects, and obviously in a free Palestine, which is today central to all of these. It is a complementary volume to Potential History. When the genocide in Palestine started, I was already working on the last edits and proofreading of the text. While it was not a book about Palestine—though Palestine is central to it—nor about the genocide, it became clear that it sketches, in long durée, many threads that are useful for understanding how this genocide against Palestinians became possible to begin with. What was striking is that I did not have to rewrite the book in light of the ongoing genocide but only to emphasize, in a few places, what this genocide made clear—that Israel was a genocidal regime already in 1948. My hope is that the book will inspire others to expand the anticolonial and anti-imperial struggle through the recovery of a precolonial world of craft making, wherein the skills, knowledge, and know-how involved in sustaining a shared world were so entangled with a commitment to justice and different forms of solidarity that it could never have been presumed possible that AI apps would serve as their replacement. I want the book’s readers to be taken by the belief that there are many pre-colonial formations that are not obsolete but waiting to be reclaimed and used against those formations we are socialized to see as inescapable; those precolonial traditions and forms are our only hope if we wish to disrupt this world where AI seems liberatory.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AAA: I am working on the third part of my cinematic trilogy Unlearning Imperialism, which experiments with the idea that objects are sites of rights and when plundered, they can be reclaimed in different ways by the communities who were dispossessed of them. The first part, titled Un-Documented, engages with plundered objects in museums and presents them as the (missing) documents of those people which imperial countries with colonial backgrounds proclaim “un-documented”. The second part, titled The world like a jewel in the hand, focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa and challenges museums’ power to reinforce its extinction by displaying objects plundered from it as artifacts of a bygone world. And the third part, Thousand and One Jewel, focuses on jewelry from the Maghreb through the stories that the guardians of such jewels have to tell us about the colonization of North Africa, how people resisted this colonization, and the precolonial forms of worldly sovereignty they established.

Excerpt from the book (from Letter 4 to Franz Fanon. “With all my being, I refuse to accept this amputation”)

Dear Frantz,

I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a psychoanalyst, but I can say with confidence that my father suffered from colonial trauma and a colonial disorder. He felt foreign to his environment, totally alienated. And even though this kind of disorder must have been very common among Algerian Jews, there was nowhere he could go to take advantage of what you describe as the “the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment.” No therapeutic or psychiatric initiative in Algeria offered Algerian Jews a way to recognize or articulate their colonial disorder. They suffered from their colonial subjection as indigenous Algerians, their transformation into French citizens in 1870, the revocation of their French citizenship under Vichy, the anti-Jewish laws in the Maghreb, and the restoration of French citizenship after World War II—the latter, granted as if France had not confiscated Jewish property, deported young Jews to concentration camps in the Maghreb, and, in France, sent 75,000 Jews to their death (among them 3,000 Algerians living in France). The infamous Crémieux Decree granting newly colonized Algerian Jews French citizenship was not the end of their colonization but its continuation in a different form.

Without recourse to the medical techniques of which you wrote so eloquently, and with his alienation impacting all areas of his life, my father attempted to leave the toxic colonial environment of Algeria three times in less than a decade—in 1943, 1946, and 1949. The first time was when he was held in the Bedeau internment and forced labor camp; he suspected that volunteering for the French forces and going to war would be better than staying in Algeria. Given the unresolved status of the Jews after the official end of the Vichy government in Algeria, he did not know exactly what volunteering for this army as a Jew would mean, but he went anyway. The second time he tried to leave was upon his return from service in World War II. I assume that, like many other colonized people who fought for France, including you, he quickly realized that the promise of freedom and victory over fascism was a broken one, since the racial regime under which he lived had not been defeated with the fall of the Axis powers. He then decided to move to France, but after barely a year in Paris, he returned home to Oran.

Reading “The ‘North African Syndrome’ ” (1952), which you wrote based on your observations of North Africans’ experiences in France in the same years when my father left for France, helped me figure out what may have provoked his quick return to Algeria. You quote a certain Léon Mugniery, who in 1952 submitted a doctoral thesis in medicine to the university in Lyon. In his thesis, Mugniery denounces the French government’s “too hasty” mistake of granting French citizenship and equal rights to Algerians working in France “based on sentimental and political reasons, rather than on the fact of the social and intellectual evolution of a race having a civilization that is at times refined but still primitive in its social, family and sanitary behavior.” Even as you critique Mugniery’s imperial stance, you do not ask yourself, “Who were these Algerians that Mugniery speaks of?” You assume they are Arabs, and that all Arabs are Muslims. However, the majority of Algerians with French citizenship who lived in France following World War II were not Muslims. The ruling of March 7, 1944, ascribed French citizenship only to “deserving” Algerians: “those having received decorations, civil servants, etc.” Algerian Jews had been legally considered citizens since 1870, and they migrated in small numbers to France in the first half of the twentieth century.

For racists like Mugniery, Algerians were Algerians, irrespective of their faith or citizenship status. The common racist idioms you quote—“Why don’t they stay where they belong?”—are indicative of a world where Mugniery could be licensed to heal people. And the trouble, as you say it, lies here: “They have been told they were French. They learned it in school. In the street. In the barracks … Now they are told in no uncertain terms that they are in ‘our’ country. That if they don’t like it, all they have to do is go back to their Casbah.” This is probably the drama my father also went through during his one-year stay in Paris. This is the core of the Algerian Jew’s disorder—and that of Algerians in general—their (self-)ascribed Frenchness exceeded the status assigned to them, so much so that their performance of Frenchness was often experienced by French settlers of Algeria as an insult, and by the French in France as an invasion.

In a biography she wrote about you, Alice Cherki, who, as you know, studied psychiatry in Algeria before she worked with you, shared her memory of how a French psychiatrist-in-training responded when he read the names of the students displayed at the entrance of the medicine school in Algiers: “Benmiloud, Benghezal, Benaïssa, Chibane, Aït Challal, Boudjellal … we are being invaded by Arabs. To say nothing of the Jews who consider themselves at home everywhere and anywhere they please.” Since the very beginning of Algeria’s colonization, the French were obsessed with planning to expel Algeria’s Jews. This, in a way, turned the Jews of Algeria into captives of the settlers’ goodwill, for despite all the settler-colonial violence, the French settlers offered Algeria’s Jews protection from the even more vicious early plans of other Frenchmen (for example, plans to deport them or to water “the tree of freedom with the blood of the Jews”). As one of the Jewish protagonists in Olivia Elkaim’s semi-autobiographical novel says, “We are so happy to be French that, from now on, we have become their guests. We are no longer at home. And they’re going to do whatever it takes to kick us out.” It is not a coincidence that with Algeria’s independence, France’s early plans came to fruition and the Jews were forced to depart from Algeria. (The French had to leave too; alas for them that they could not enjoy the realization of their dream, an Algeria free of Jews.)

It didn’t occur to me to ask my father about his experience in France during that year in 1946. What might it have meant for him to be so unwelcome, knowing that deportation could be as real a possibility for him as it was for his paternal uncle and aunt, who had been deported by the French to Auschwitz? What I regret most is not being able to awaken the anticolonial interlocutor within him, who, in my decolonial imagination, should have existed along with his anarchic spirit. If someone like you could have helped him understand his distress, he might have acquired this consciousness, especially as his father, who died in 1943 and could not be there for him when he came back to Algeria, had been an anarcho-communist.

Instead, my father had to be torn by the contradictions of colonialism, assimilation, and conversion, numb to the inherited pain of exile ingrained in those who were forced to leave their country and become converted Frenchmen. My father dissociated himself from the memory of the forced conversion to Frenchness, even though he still retained some remnants of its harm, transmitted from his parents and his parents’ parents. He was not given an anticolonial education that could have helped him account for his experience. And, similar to other North African men you describe in your essay, he had a hostile attitude toward his painful past: “It is as though it is an effort for him to go back to where he no longer is. The past for him is a burning past. What he hopes is that he will never suffer again, never again be face to face with that past … He does not understand that anyone should wish to impose on him, even by way of memory, the pain that is already gone.” All his life my father suffered from chronic headaches; the condition lasted until he died. It was exactly as you describe: “The patient is not immediately relieved, but he does not go back to the same doctor, nor to the same dispensary.” No one could help him. After he tried physicians, he switched to pharmacologists, and he even consulted pharmaceutical companies and research centers. In one response he received from a research center in Montreal, I could see how desperate he had been to receive a supply of a hard-to-obtain drug.

The third time my father tried to leave Algeria was in 1949. A Zionist advertisement in the newspaper called upon Jews to volunteer for one year of military service to defend “the Jews” in Palestine, whom the ads depicted as under an “existential threat.” With all the disinformation about the establishment of the state of Israel, I don’t think my father could grasp the deceptive nature of this advertisement, which concealed the colonial reality in Palestine. Nor could he conceive of how the Zionists were akin to the French colonizers, waging war to conquer Palestine and to destroy centuries-old conviviality between Arabs and Jews. The advertisement was deliberately written to make Jews like him, who had fought against the Nazis, see the war in Palestine as a sequel to World War II, the next place where Jews were under genocidal attack. My father had a return ticket, but toward the end of his year in Palestine, he met the woman who became my mother and decided to stay. If he hadn’t met my mother, he probably would have continued as planned to Canada; as he told me once, “I would not return to Oran at any price.” He did not even mention France as an option. In your 1956 resignation letter from your position as a Chief of Staff at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, you wrote: “I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.” It is not clear to me how much you understood that this Arab that you were talking about was not necessarily Muslim but could be Jewish too.