AHR Roundtable Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Buried Troves: Decolonization and the Multi-Sited Archives of Algerian Jewish History SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN IN DECEMBER 1961, AMIDST THE bloody de´nouement of the Algerian War of Inde- pendence (1954–1962), Algeria’s governor-general directed the assistant district commissioner of Ghardaı¨a, Jean Moriaz, to create, retroactively, a civil register for the Jews of the Mzab, a valley of five fortified oasis cities in the north of the Algerian Sahara, six hundred kilometers south of Algiers.1 The register would document the births and deaths of all living Jews born in the Mzab and note whether they remained there, had moved elsewhere in Algeria, or had emigrated. This paperwork was nec- essary in order for the French Assembly to enact Law 61-805 of June 1961, which naturalized the Jews of Algeria’s Southern Territories as French citizens with “com- I would like to thank, for their insightful comments on drafts of this essay, the anonymous reviewers for the AHR, as well as Jordanna Bailkin, Orit Bashkin, Joel Beinin, James Gelvin, Lisa Leff, Susan Slyomovics, and Richard Stein. For their engagement and assistance with the larger project associated with this study, thanks also to Aomar Boum, Benjamin Brower, Joshua Schreier, Daniel Schroeter, Todd Shepard, and Susan Slyomovics. Indispensable financial support for my research came from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and from the Maurice Amado Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles; I am also grateful to Robert Parks and Karim Ouaras, Director and Associate Director of Centre d’etudes maghre´bines en Alge´rie (CEMA), for helping to orchestrate two research visits to Algeria, in 2009 and 2012. 1 Initially it was Charles Kleinknecht, the district commissioner in Ghardaı¨a from 1955 to 1962, who thought to charge Moriaz with this task. Archives nationales d’Alge´rie, Wilaya de Ghardaı¨a [hereafter ANdA, WdG], 80, “1960, 1961, 1962,” Charles Kleinknecht to Administrateur charge´ des fonctions de sous pre´fet de l’arrondissement Ghardaı¨a, August 10, 1961; and 361, “Juifs israe´lites,” [Charles Kleinknecht] to M. le Pre´fet du De´partement des Oasis, October 18, 1961. On the history of Saharan Jewry generally, see Michel Abitbol, “Juifs maghre´bins et commerce transsaharien du VIIIe au XV e sie`cles,” in Le sol, la parole et l’e´crit: Me´langes en hommage a` Raymond Mauny, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), 2: 561–578; Abitbol, ed., Communaute´s juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb (Jerusalem, 1982), es- pecially Gabriel Camps, “Reflexions sur l’origine des Juifs des regions Nord-Sahariennes,” 57–67, Regine Goutalier, “La ‘nation Juive’ de Gharda¨ia,” 115–135, and Nehemia Levtzion, “The Jews of Sijilmasa and the Saharan Trade,” 253–264; Aomar Boum, “Saharan Jewry: History, Memory and Imag- ined Identity,” Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 3 (2011): 325–341; Boum, “Southern Moroccan Jewry between the Colonial Manufacture of Knowledge and the Postcolonial Historiographical Silence,” in Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, eds., Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 2011), 73–92; Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford, Calif., 2013); Re´gine Goutalier, “La ‘nation juive’ de Ghardaı¨a,” in Abitbol, Communaute´s juives des marges sahariennes de Maghreb, 115–136; Jacob Oliel, De Je´rusalem a` Tombouctou: L’odysse´e saharienne du rabbin Mardoche´e, 1826–1886 (Paris, 1998); Oliel, Les Juifs de Colomb-Be´char et des villages de la Saoura, 1903–1962 (Orle´ans, 2003); Oliel, Les juifs au Sahara: Une pre´sence mille´naire (Succursale Coˆte-St-Luc [Que´bec], 2007). For the larger history of which this article is a part, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago, 2014). 900 Black Holes, Dark Matter, and Buried Troves 901 Algiers Bougie Bone Blida Tizi-Ouzou Constantine Mostaganem L T E L Médéa Oran Kaar el Boukhari Batna Tiaret Mascara Bou-Saada T E N X L L Tlemcen A U Djelfa S . Biskra T E M T L A S P Aflou L A Zaatcha G H T H I Géryville A Metlili Ouled-Djellal A N A R Ain- Laghouat El Oued A H TUNISIA S Madi Ain-Sefra Guerrera Touggourt TUNISIATUNISIA MOROCCOMOROCCO Ghardaïa Figuig (MZAB) Ouargla Columb-Béchar Hassi Messaouad El Golea Timimoun (GOURARA) Adrar (TOHAT) LIBYALIBYA ALGERIA In Salah (TIDIKELT) SAHARA Tarnanghasset MAURITANIAMAURITANIA MALI MALIMALI NIGERNIGER 0 100 200 300 mi 0100 200 300 400 500 km FIGURE 1: Algeria. Map by Bill Nelson. mon” civil status; it also enabled, in June 1962, the extant community of southern Algerian Jews to join roughly 140,000 northern Algerian Jews, 1,000,000 pieds-noirs (Algerians of European descent), and 100,000 harkis (Muslim Algerians who had fought with France during the Algerian War of Independence) in fleeing a soon- to-be sovereign Algeria for France. The Cre´mieux decree of 1870 had granted Jews in the northern departments of Algeria French citizenship forty years after the colonization of Algeria began.2 But in the military-ruled Southern Territories—an administrative entity that existed from 1902 to 1957—Jews, like Muslims throughout Algeria, were categorized as indige`nes (indigenous subjects) and were subject to “personal status” laws, also called “local status” or “local civil status” laws, with their political rights radically cur- tailed.3 These laws recognized the legitimacy of Quranic, Berber, Mozabite, or Mo- 2 For an exploration of the French “civilizing mission” as it unfolded relative to the demographic majority of Algerian Jewry in the decades between the conquest of Algeria’s north and the passage of the Cre´mieux decree, see Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Piscataway, N.J., 2010). 3 On laws pertaining to Muslim personal status in colonial Algeria, see Louis-Augustin Barrie`re, Le statut personnel des musulmans d’Alge´rie de 1834 a` 1962 (Dijon, 1993); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006). On the fraught history AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2015 902 Sarah Abrevaya Stein saic (israe´lite) laws and institutions in matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, pa- ternity, and inheritance, and assigned a qadi or, in Algeria’s Southern Territories, a rabbi the authority to oversee related legal matters, including the maintenance of communal ledgers. With the application of Mosaic personal status laws in Algeria’s Southern Ter- ritories, its several thousand “indigenous” Jews became, over eighty years of French colonial rule, the only Jews in Algeria, France, or North Africa to live in sustained fashion under military rule (rather than civilian rule or protectorate status) while they were simultaneously beholden to rabbinical law.4 Additionally, this was the only colonial Jewish community whose members were systematically constrained in their access to a culture of legal pluralism—including extraterritorial relationships—avail- able to Jews elsewhere.5 Though colonial law segmented southern Algerian Jewry off from northern Algerian Jewry, the Jews of the Mzab were not alone in the dif- ference that colonial jurisprudence ascribed to them. On the contrary, the case of and shifting authority of the Muslim court over roughly the same period, see Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, N.J., 1985). On the French conquest of the Sahara, see Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York, 2009). On the typological casting of Algeria’s residents by French law and social science, see, in addition to Brower’s work, Kamel Kateb, Europe´ens, “indige`nes” et juifs en Alge´rie (1830–1962): Repre´sentations et re´alite´s des populations (Paris, 2001); Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London, 1995); James McDougall, “Myth and Counter-Myth: ‘The Berber’ as National Signifier in Algerian Historiographies,” Radical History Review 86, no. 1 (2003): 66–88. 4 Primary sources pertaining to the delineation of the status of the Jewish indige`ne in Algeria’s Southern Territories include Service historique de la l’Arme´e de Terre, Vincennes [hereafter SHAT], 1H1026, “Sahara, occupation et organisation du Mzab et cre´ation du Cercle de Ghardaı¨a, 1882–1883,” GGA Tirman, Service des Affaires indige`nes, “Instructions du gouvernement ge´ne´ral de l’Alge´rie pour l’organisation du Cercle de Ghardaı¨a,” November 1, 1882. On the legal status of the Mzab as decreed by the 1853 negotiations, see the various legal analyses in Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en- Provence [hereafter ANOM], 81F/1295. 5 Jews in the Mzab, unlike Jews elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, had no opportunity to earn the protection of foreign powers, to acquire standing as foreign nationals or extraterritorial subjects, or to serve the colonial administration, as did Jews elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, even if they did have access to both Muslim and colonial courts for civil matters. On the notion of legal pluralism in the colonial context, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002); John L. Comaroff, “Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword,” Law and Social Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2001): 305–314, here 306; Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Medi- terraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900