This book recounts the French conquest of Algeria by exploring the world of Oran’s influential Jewish merchants. Jacob Lasry, along with Mordecai Amar, Judah Sebbah and others, established themselves in this Mediterranean port after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792. They were part of a settlement hailing originally from Algerian and Moroccan cities and towns, Saharan Oases, and British Gibraltar. In newly Muslim Oran, they found opportunities to ply their trades, deal in goods brought in on caravans from the African interior, or export grain, cattle, or hides. On the eve of ... More

This book recounts the French conquest of Algeria by exploring the world of Oran’s influential Jewish merchants. Jacob Lasry, along with Mordecai Amar, Judah Sebbah and others, established themselves in this Mediterranean port after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792. They were part of a settlement hailing originally from Algerian and Moroccan cities and towns, Saharan Oases, and British Gibraltar. In newly Muslim Oran, they found opportunities to ply their trades, deal in goods brought in on caravans from the African interior, or export grain, cattle, or hides. On the eve of France’s long, chaotic, and brutal invasion of Algeria, Oran’s Jewish mercantile elite was well established, having made deals and formed partnerships with European consuls, Muslim traders, and local governors. Colonial officials and reformers boasted of bringing “emancipation” to those they called the “indigenous Jews,” but they actually depended on its mercantile elite to fund civic improvements and military campaigns, fill civic posts, and even disseminate “civilization.” As the French colonial order solidified, the merchants of Oran maintained their commercial, political, and social clout, demonstrating that the French conquest of Algeria did not instantly undo Oran’s pre-colonial order. Yet, by the 1840s, French policies began collapsing Oran’s diverse Jewish inhabitants into a single social category, legally separating Jews from their Muslim neighbors, and ranking them above Muslims in a new colonial hierarchy. France’s exclusionary process of “emancipation,” rather than older antipathies, planted the seeds of the twentieth century’s ruptures and violence.