Author ORCID Identifier
Degree Year
2024
Document Type
Thesis - Oberlin Community Only
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History
Advisor(s)
Leonard Smith
Annemarie Sammartino
Committee Member(s)
Rishad Choudhury
Ellen Wurtzel
Keywords
Antisemitism, Colonialism, French Empire, Algeria
Abstract
My research project covers the rise of antisemitic ideology, targeted toward indigenous Algerian Jews, among settlers of French Algeria between 1870 and 1900. In 1870, Algerian Jews were made French citizens after a long assimilation effort, sparking backlash among French settlers who wished to keep their political rights exclusive. In the late 1890s, the Dreyfus Affair, a legal scandal and eruption of antisemitism in metropolitan France, reverberated in Algeria into what scholars call an "anti-Jewish crisis" that saw the worst antisemitic violence in the Francophone world at the time. My research seeks to answer the questions: why did antisemitism find such success in French Algeria? How did the conditions of settler-colonial society impact French-Algerian antisemitic ideology? I argue that antisemitism developed so strongly in Algeria because Jews, as indigenous targets of a metropole-led assimilation effort, made perfect scapegoats for colonial anxieties over settlers' relationships both to the metropole and to the indigenous. Furthermore, settler antisemitic ideology was able to quickly set roots not only thanks to simultaneous antisemitism in the metropole but also, paradoxically, thanks to the preexisting philo-Semitic colonial discourse that isolated Algerian Jews as intermediaries of colonial inequality.
Repository Citation
Bernstein, Ella, "Jewish Question, Imperial Question: Antisemitism and Colonial Anxiety in French Algeria, 1870-1900" (2024). Honors Papers. 908.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/908
