A Jewish Riot against Muslims: The Polemics of History in Late Colonial Algeria

On Rosh Hashanah, 1961, six months before the conclusion of the Evian accords promised independence for Algeria, riots broke out in the city of Oran. Surprisingly to many, the aggressors were overwhelmingly Jews, while those injured or killed were largely Muslims. The events—widely covered in the media but since forgotten—were a product of Oran's particular social chemistry, but were also shaped by far wider set of debates about a chasm that was growing between Jews and Arabs in France, Algeria, and the wider Arab world. This article focuses on responses to these riots, especially how they drew on polemical renderings of a shared Muslim-Jewish history. I make two interrelated arguments based on printed matter of the period, French government archives, and memoirs. First, Algerian Jewish observers and pro-FLN nationalist writers, groups that only rarely agreed on the question of Algerian independence, both recalled that the two groups' shared a largely harmonious history. They vehemently disagreed, however, on what this shared, harmonious history meant in terms of political obligations. The article's second argument is that the Israel-Palestine conflict helped sour relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria, as well as historical renderings of these relations, during the Algerian War of Independence. Specifically, the question of Palestine frequently appeared as a reference when interpreting the riots. Together, the two arguments demonstrate how international issues helped occlude the particular, local stories and belongingness of Algerians, while they defined the future, religio-ethnic contours of the Algerian nation.