The Jewish Diaspora

Flight from persecution

Algerian Jews to France

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1962Algeria (Algiers, Tlemcen, Constantine) → Provence & the Comtat Venaissin

Why it happened

At Algeria's July 1962 independence, its Jews—French citizens since the 1870 Crémieux Decree1—were identified with the departing pied-noir settlers2 and fled amid wartime violence and the collapse of their position.3

The migration

The 1870 Crémieux Decree had made Algeria's 'indigenous Israelites' French citizens, binding them to the settler order.1 During the 1954–1962 war their position eroded: in December 1960 the Great Synagogue of Algiers was desecrated,3 and the June 1961 murder of the Constantine musician Cheikh Raymond (Raymond Leyris) helped precipitate that community's flight.4 After the March 1962 Évian Accords2 and July independence, roughly 130,000 of Algeria's approximately 140,000 Jews left for France and about 10,000 emigrated to Israel;5 some 80% of all Algerian Jews settled in France.3 They departed as citizens rather than refugees, alongside the pied-noir exodus,2 in a near-total departure that left fewer than a thousand Jews in Algeria by 1969.3 Their influx reshaped French Jewry, which in the twenty-first century is majority and North African.5

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomal (genome-wide SNP arrays)Genome-wide analysis of five North African Jewish groups including Algerian Jews found 'distinctive North African Jewish population clusters with proximity to other Jewish populations,'6 with these populations 'part of a larger and Jewish group'6 yet 'orthogonal' to contemporary non-Jewish North African populations.6 These affinities do not describe the causes or individual composition of the 1962 migration.

Sources

  1. BRoberts SB. 2017. Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962. Cambridge University Press
  2. BShepard T. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Cornell University Press
  3. BJewish Virtual Library. 2024. Algeria Virtual Jewish History Tour. Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise), drawing on Encyclopaedia Judaica link
  4. BGlasser J. 2016. The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. University of Chicago Press
  5. BKatz EB. 2015. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Harvard University Press
  6. ACampbell CL, Palamara PF, Dubrovsky M, et al.. 2012. North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 13865–13870. doi:10.1073/pnas.1204840109