North African Orthodoxies and the French State

• In Event: Jewish Orthodoxies: Social Science Perspectives

Abstract

My brief address speaks to the following questions that are embedded in to the overall session: how do Jewish Orthodoxy and State Authority intersect politically in France? How can Orthodoxy and Authority work together in a context in which the state does not recognize kinship or religion? How is Orthodoxy different across space and religious traditions?

I draw from ethnographic and historical research on a peri-urban Parisian neighbourhood called Sarcelles that was purposefully regenerated in the mid 1950s to house highly diverse ethno-religious populations. Among these are significant North African minority groups (both Jewish and Muslim) from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Their Orthodox number has began to increase in the 1980s. Orthodoxy is self-ascribed in-group; young people are often more specific using terms like les Louba' and les Breslev'. However l'orthodoxie is seldom used by the state or local authorities that prefer a more generic christian lexicon: personnes de confession juive (people of the Jewish faith).
My intervention seeks to problematize issues of state-community authority and North African Jewish difference within the observance and enactment of contemporary Orthodoxy in Sarcelles. I seek to add complexity to the category of contemporary French Orthodoxy by revealing its close relationship to and increasing abstraction from Maghribi (North African) kinship solidarity and an intergenerational feeling of social alienation from French national cultural and secular norms. Within the context of the broader discussion therefore what I insist upon is the local specificity of Orthodoxies and the ways that these are historically and spatially bounded. Such an observation does not however overlook the theoretical power of religious praxis and its importance to new and politicized forms of community-formation which include interesting parallels between French Jewish and Muslim groups of North African descent in their dealings with sacred space and the secular state.

Author

• Samuel Sami Everett, Cambridge University