The Jews of the Maghreb (North Africa)
As Western colonial powers imposed more direct rule in North Africa and Jews embraced Westernization, their relationships with their Muslim neighbors changed.
Complicated by European Colonialism
The Jewish situation was especially complicated and fissured in the Maghreb (North Africa), where Italy, Britain, Spain, and above all France imposed significant levels of direct rule, not least through massive violence. Already early in the nineteenth century, France had not only conquered Algeria but had made it part of France, and it extended direct imperial rule over Tunisia (in 1881) and Morocco (in 1912), where the region’s largest Jewish population lived. Britain took direct administrative control over Egypt’s centers, and Italy dominated Libya with its deeply rooted Jewish population in Tripoli, Benghazi, and smaller settlements.
The implications of such direct rule for Jews were dramatic. Many of the Jewish communities scattered across the vast expanses of Arab and Berber North Africa had entered the nineteenth century with especially close cultural affinities to their Muslim neighbors, though at the same time, their place in society was generally thickly and sometimes violently circumscribed by especially stringent versions of the traditional Muslim custom governing the differentiation of tolerated religious minorities. As of 1880, this was still true for most Jews, particularly in more isolated inland cities like Marrakesh.
Elite Ties with Western Business Interests
Already before the modern era, small but non-negligible Jewish communal elites, particularly in North African port cities, had cultivated special ties with Italian and West European business interests, won special protections, and begun to adopt Western cultural forms.
Between 1880 and 1918, direct European rule turned such exceptional identification into much more of a norm. Though European conceits about “Oriental” backwardness, decadence, and ineducability cast a shadow over Jews too, generally imperial administrators came to see Jews as corrigible while conveniently judging the much larger indigenous Muslim populations as much less so.
European Legal Status and Protection
A growing number of Jews, and not only those who had great wealth, gained access to European legal protection. More directly and dramatically, the Jews of Algeria actually received French citizenship en masse in 1870, though what that would mean concretely was hashed out in subsequent decades.
In short, for Jews in North Africa, Westernization could mean something far more politically concrete than elsewhere in the region. North African Jews increasingly tied their fates to identification with the culture of the European metropole, although in Morocco and Libya some more provincial communities remained rooted in older lifeways or grew even more conservatively tied to their local traditions as competing European powers divided the region piecemeal.