Kinship, Community, Manhood: The Jewish Subculture That Made the November 8 Uprising in Algiers

• In Event: Rethinking Jewish “Subcultures”: Algerian, Parisian, Viennese, and Beyond

Abstract

On November 8, 1942, in coordination with the Allied landing in North Africa, a motley crew of several hundred Jewish shopkeepers, students, and civil servants teamed with arch-conservative French military brass and businessmen to stage an uprising. More than 80% of the participants were Jewish; yet the insurgency was avowedly apolitical and its immediate result was the installation of an authoritarian (if pro-American) regime that declined to dissolve Vichy’s antisemitic racial laws in Algeria. Consequently, historians have debated if the Algiers insurgency was a “Jewish” resistance movement or not.
This paper argues that this movement is best understood as the product of what David Sorkin called a Jewish minority subculture of the wider European sector in colonial Algeria. Most of the Jewish insurgents, nearly all men, were fluent in French, took French names, and saw themselves as acculturating to France and shedding the Arab or Berber identities of their forebears. Nonetheless, they experienced frequent settler anti-Semitism and did not typically reject their Jewishness. To paraphrase Sorkin, Algerian Jewry’s minority culture consisted of elements that appropriated European culture but that became distinctively Jewish and functioned as a self-contained system of ideas and symbols. These ideas and symbols informed the emergence of a press, organizational life, and social structure led and peopled mostly by Jews and at once linked to and largely independent of, the traditional religious community. For most Algerian Jews, other Algerian Jewish individuals, groups, and institutions formed their primary community.

Drawing upon associational records, newspapers, memoirs, and testimonies, this paper contends that in the November 8 insurrection, this Jewish subculture’s most notable characteristics were many participants’ overlapping kinship networks, concentrated in certain neighborhoods; involvement in Jewish organizations; and re- assertion of Algerian Jewish masculinity. While these Jews forged a subculture of the European sector, they simultaneously carried and often sought to shed the vestiges of their erstwhile life within the native, majority-Muslim sector. They thus constituted a subculture that reflected at once broader patterns of modern Jewish history and the distinctive character of French colonial Algeria.

Author

• Ethan Katz, University of California, Berkeley