Between 2003 and 2005, French-born North African Jewish (Sephardi) youth in Paris repeatedly told anthropologist Kimberly Arkin that they were not French and could not to imagine a Jewish future in France. Why? This questions fuels Rhinestones’ analysis of the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that, as both “Arabs” and “Jews,” Sephardi youth fell between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond ... More

Between 2003 and 2005, French-born North African Jewish (Sephardi) youth in Paris repeatedly told anthropologist Kimberly Arkin that they were not French and could not to imagine a Jewish future in France. Why? This questions fuels Rhinestones’ analysis of the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that, as both “Arabs” and “Jews,” Sephardi youth fell between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond religion and culture to categorize their Jewishness as race, distinguishing Sephardi Jews from “Arab” Muslims, regardless of similarities they shared, while linking them to “European” Jews (Ashkenazim), regardless of their differences. But while racializing Jewishness might have made Sephardi Frenchness possible, it produced the opposite result: it re-grounded national community in religion-as-race, thereby making pluri-religious community appear threatening. Rhinestones thus sheds light on the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within marginalized French and European populations.