Abstract
This article studies the impact of the Vichy government’s antisemitic laws on the lives of Jews from Algeria: From 1870 to 1940 they were classed as French citizens, after which their status was demoted to that of “natives”; then, in 1943, their French citizenship was restored. Since 1936, the year of the Constantine Pogrom, stigmatization and persecution by the two other main populations which lived in Algeria—Europeans and Arabs—had significantly increased. Following the reinstatement of their French citizenship in 1943, the young Jewish men participated as soldiers in the Liberation of France in 1944–1945.
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Notes
"Public education, primary or secondary, remains accessible at the rate of 14% of the enrollments of each school. A law of 19 October 1942 reduced the numerous clauses to 7%. The historian Michel Ansky in his book Les Juifs d’Algérie [du décret Crémieux a la liberation] notes that this law is applied in Algeria even before its promulgation.” Benjamin Stora, http://ldh-toulon.net/les-juifs-de-l-Algerie-coloniale.html, 18 October 2007.
Many a respondent insisted that it was thanks to Jews like the Aboulker family in Algiers and the Carcassonne family in Oran that the Americans were able to land in Algeria and pave the way for the arrival of the leader of Free France, General Charles de Gaulle.
In this narrative, the respondent tells about the life of her young uncle, who left Constantine in 1944 to “liberate the mother country” and was killed in action soon after the Provence landing.
See Philippe Portier in Allouche-Benayoun and Dermenjian (2015).
Let us bear in mind that, at the time, most of the Jews from France were Ashkenazim, and people were more familiar with names such as Goldenberg and Jacubowicz than with names beginning with the French transcription of the Arabic letter “bin,” such as Benguigui or Bensoussan.
Until the publication of Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (1978), Zarie had trusted the death certificate delivered to her by the French administration, which indicated that her husband had been killed in Majdanek.
This is an excerpt from Nous Chanterons Encore, a self-published autobiographical novel (Darmon 2006).
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Allouche-Benayoun, J. Intermittently French: Jews from Algeria during World War II. Cont Jewry 37, 219–230 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-017-9230-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-017-9230-9