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🪵 The Threshold

The Crémieux Decrees granted Jews citizenship while denying it to Muslims

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@horne_savage_1977, loc. 171

3 min read

The Crémieux Decrees granted Jews citizenship while denying it to Muslims

Evidence

Comprising approximately one-fifth of the non-Muslim population, they — rather like the unhappy Asians of East Africa — tended to find themselves in the tragic position of being caught between two fires: between the European and the Muslim world. Many could trace back their antecedents to the expulsions from sixteenth-century Spain; some even claimed them to pre-date the invaders who had surged out of the Arabian peninsula during the eleventh century. Thus they could argue that only relatively were they later arrivals than the Muslims. However, by 1830 the Algerian Jews had become an under-privileged community, fallen into backward squalor, and the advent of the French gave them an opportunity to improve their status. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870, conferring automatic French citizenship, attracted more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria; while at the same time they provoked a sense of unfair prejudice among Muslims. However, it was not the Muslims but the Catholic Maltese, Spanish and Italian pieds noirs who, at the turn of the century, launched a minor pogrom against the Jews, smashing up their shops in protest against the competition of this new class of petits commerçants. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 171 (#expands, via linked claim)

There were two further inconsistencies. To begin with, in having imposed upon them by the French the Arab judicial system, the Berber Kabyles had been made to accept a social structure that had been alien to them in the first place. Secondly, in 1870 the Crémieux Decrees had made the exception of conferring automatic French citizenship upon the whole Jewish community of Algeria. Here, for Muslims, was a constantly open wound: why should the Jewish minority be open to political privileges denied to the indigenous majority? — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 100 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Racist colonial hierarchy led some Jews to humiliate Algerians to gain standing.; The CrĂ©mieux Decrees of 1870 conferred French citizenship on Algerian Jews — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 171; French laws granted Jews citizenship while imposing alien judicial structures on Kabyles — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 100 (+3 more)

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