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The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of the northern coast, the Tell, as it is called, where the majority of the country s Jews resided before independence. The only people to be given European citizenship by an imperial power, northern Algerian Jews were considered subjects of French civilizing initiatives and were consequently dissociated from Algerian nationalist movements. As such, their immigration to France immediately before Algerian independence has often been understood as repatriation, the logical outcome of their natural cultural intimacy with the French. Historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein provides a remarkably different perspective on Algerian Jewish history in "Indigenous Jews" by focusing on the Jews of the M zab in southern Algeria, which was ruled by the French military as opposed to the civil state. Far from being treated as if they were culturally akin to the French, these Jews were severely marginalized. Their difference from other Jews and from their non-Jewish neighbors was, as Stein demonstrates, legislated into reality. "
About the author
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce" and "Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires," and coeditor of "A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The "Ladino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi "and "Sephardi Lives: a documentary history, 1700-1950."
