1 Professor Joshua Schreier The Merchants of Oran Indiana University, September 2018 When French colonial authorities chose Jacob Lasry, a Sephardic cattle and grain exporter in Oran, to lead the city’s recently organized Consistoire Israélite in 1854, it could be construed as a paradox. France’s ostensible purpose in establishing the consistories in Algeria was to “organize” the culturally and religiously diverse collection of Jews Oran and “attach” them to France. Yet Lasry himself was from Tetuan in Morocco, probably knew Arabic and Spanish better than French, had married in Gibraltar, was a British subject, and likely first traveled to France only after the French began the occupation of Algeria in 1830. He was a business partner of Britain’s vice consul in Oran, and spent much of 1831 vexing French officials by mobilizing British support for his claims against them, specifically regarding business losses he blamed on the actions of a French general. Ultimately, the government’s choice of Lasry to spearhead the French Empire’s newly conceived mission to encourage the Jews of Algeria’s “assimilation” to France, and pave the way for their eventual “emancipation” as French citizens seems odd.1 This episode, however, only appears as a “paradox” from a French historiographic vantage point, which is, of course, a natural place from which to be interrogating imperialism’s political and ideological lack of coherence.2 Furthermore, this lack of 1 Joshua Schreier, The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) and “From Mediterranean Merchant to French Civilizer: Jacob Lasry and the Economy of Conquest in Early Colonial Algeria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012), 631-649. 2 Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1890-1914 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) (originally published in 1960); Martin Deming Lewis, 1 2 coherence has become even more evident thanks to recent scholarship representing a self- described “imperial turn” in French Jewish history, which has produced much-needed revisions of the story of North African Jews’ encounter with colonialism, which had generally been told as a triumphalist story. At the same time, however, this work necessarily frames its inquiries within the colonial and post-colonial republic and by extension takes an interest in established Jewish historiographical tropes; notably emancipation, assimilation, and anti-Semitism.3 This work has also looked at the "One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The 'Assimilation' Theory in French Colonial Policy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 4:2 (January 1962): 129-153; Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 3 Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Geneviève Dermenjian, Juifs d’Algérie: histoire des ruptures (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015). See notably the avant-propos by Philippe Portier, the préface by Franklin Rauskey, the introduction by Joêlle Allouche-Benayoun and Geneviève-Benayoun, as well as chapters such as Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, “Les Juifs d’Algérie, du Dhimmi au citoyen français;” Denis Charbit, L’historiographie du décret Crémieux, Le retour du refoulé;” Valérie Assan, “Les rabbins de France et d’Algérie face à la “mission civilisatrice;”and Philippe Danan, “Les Juifs de Constantine au début de la présence française;” Ethan B. Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persecution, Algerian Jewish Memory in the Longue Durée (1830-1970), Journal of North African Studies 17:5 (December, 2012), 793-820, and The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), and “The Impact of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin on French Colonial Policy in Algeria,” CCAR Journal (Winter, 2007): 35-60; Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Joshua Cole, “Antisémitisme et situation colonial pendant l’entre-deux guerres en Algérie,” Vingtième siècle, 4:108 (October-December, 2010), pp. 3-23; Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), and especially Benjamin Stora, Les trois exils: Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2004). Some recent dissertations intertwining French, Algerian, and Jewish history include Rachel Eva Schley, The Tyranny of Tolerance: France, Religion, and the Conquest of Algeria (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 2 3 experience of later generations of North African Jews and Muslims in France which, given Jews and Muslims’ different experiences there, compounded with their often contrasting perspectives on the ever-deteriorating situation in Palestine/Israel, has often described their relationship as a “history of conflict,” as one volume recently put it.4 In other words, when it comes to scholarship on North African Jews, the empire, its ideologies, and its teleologies have been hard to escape. Yet the “paradox” of the choice of Lasry to lead the consistory does melt away a bit if we take in the view from Lasry’s Oran In this case one might be less concerned with why a group of French officials would “choose” a Moroccan-born protected subject of Great Britain for a post devoted to turning Arabophone Algerian Jews into Frenchmen, or whether it complicates or reinforces the traditional French historiographic arc assigned to Algerian Jews, which begins in an undifferentiated, stylized past as an isolated and oppressed “dhimmi” under the yoke of an Islam far past its supposed “golden age,” and moves inexorably forward, weathering several anti-Semitic storms to eventually find its berth in full French citizenship and passionate patriotic attachment.5 As an alternative, it Los Angeles, CA, 2015); Rebecca Wall, “The Jews of the Desert: Colonialism, Zionism, and the Jews of the Algerian M’zab, 1882-1962” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014). 4 The tone regarding French attitudes toward Jews in North Africa generally shifted in the 1990s. See Benjamin Stora and Geneviève Dermenjian, “Les Juifs dans le regard des militaires et des Juifs de France à l’époque de la conquète,” Révue Historique, 284:2 (1990): 333-339; Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). On how metropolitan models shaped colonial policies toward Jews in Algeria, see Pierre Birnbaum, “French Jews and the ‘Regeneration’ of Algerian Jewry,” in Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, Ezra Mendelssohn, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): 88-103; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, and Leff, “The Impact of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin;” Joshua Schreier, “Napoléon’s Long Shadow: Morality, Civilization, and Jews in France and Algeria, 1808-1870,” French Historical Studies 30:1 (Winter, 2007), 77-103. 5 Literature illustrating the contradictions of Algerian Jewish emancipation is more robust for the end of the colonial period than the beginning. Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, Les juifs algériens dans la lutte anticoloniale (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015); Joshua 3 4 may look back on why Jewish merchants had been attracted to Oran in the decades leading up to the French landing at Sidi Ferruch, how changing power dynamics in the western Mediterranean had dramatically improved pre-colonial Oran’s prospects as a port city, or how merchants who were deeply embedded in a western Mediterranean network of commerce that included Italian, Moroccan, and British ports adapted to the changed commercial conditions in the wake of the French conquest. By extension, the view from Oran might relieve Jewish merchants from their confining historiographic role as the putatively “indigenous” aids to French colonialism, and recast some of them, not necessarily as self-conscious or enthusiastic partners in the ascendant Regency of Algiers’ own recent project of westward expansion, but at least as its accomplices. Finally, given the charged and overdetermined set of meanings evoked by the contemporary social categories of Muslim and Jew, the view from Oran could shed light on what sorts of categories were operative in those days, in other words, before the emergence of the modern “problem” of Muslim-Jewish relations, at least configured as those between two putatively self-explanatory or pre-existing groups. In a word, the historian may obtain a better sense