French colonial rule replaced religious with national categories dividing Algerian Jews and Muslims

Evidence

Andre Chouraqui explains that already with the Act of Capitulation of July 5, 1830 which established French rule, a fundamental change had occurred within the Algerian population. The act “implied the abolition of the traditional relationships between Moslems and Jews. Nevertheless, a distinction was maintained between the two based not on religion, but on the concept of nationality” (Chouraqui, Between East and West, 143). Chouraqui does not elaborate on the new juridico-political division here established between nationality and citizenship, but he does describe how religion continued to define the legal situation of the Jews-until 1870, that is. “The rabbinical courts,” he writes, “were entrusted with the administration of justice” (144). By 1834, those rabbinical courts were deemed “unsatisfactory” by the French, and with the Cremieux decree, “the Jews indigenous to the departments of Algeria are declared citizens of France. In consequence their civil status and their personal status will be regulated according to French law” (Decree of October 24, 1870, quoted in Chouraqui, 150). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 789

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the historical shift from religion-based to nationality-based legal distinction between Algerian Jews and Muslims, and the Crémieux Decree’s citizenship grant.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the immodesty/colonial civilizing-mission theme and to how imperial powers re-engineer communal legal status.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”