The small Jewish population of southern Algeria did not share a collective experience of French rule in Algeria with their northern co-religionists, Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues in Saharan Jews. Unlike Jews in the three coastal départments of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine, whom the Crémieux decree of 1870 naturalized as French citizens, colonial law and practice considered Jews in the colony’s south as an exceptional indigenous community until 1961, the penultimate year of French rule. Focused on the town of Ghardaïa in the Mzab region of central Algeria, Saharan Jews depicts the colonial production of a novel legal identity, the indigenous Jew. Stein analyzes how this legal status shaped the ways that Jews of southern Algeria experienced colonial rule and global historical processes, mainly anti-Semitism, the political economy of oil, and decolonization.

Chapter 1 begins at the end of the book’s chronological arc, with a critical excavation of the scholarship of the American anthropologist and spy Lloyd Cabot Briggs, who carried out fieldwork in Ghardaïa with his assistant Norina Lami Guède in the final years of the colonial period. In No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish Town (1964), Briggs and Guède described the Jewish Mzab as “a world isolated politically and genetically” (36), putting forth an anthropometric analysis of the local Jewish population and sensationalized depictions of its cultural and social backwardness. Stein suggests that French policy toward Ghardaïa’s Jews in the 1960s reflects the influence of their anthropological work. However, the evidence that supports this assertion of French indebtedness to the work of Briggs and Guède can be read in the opposite direction. Perhaps the impression of their research that Stein sees in French policy is really a mark of Briggs’ dependence on French academics and colonial officials, such as Jean Moriaz, for access and information.

The next two chapters examine the production and maintenance of the thorny legal category of the non-naturalized Algerian Jew in the 19^th century. “Indigenous Jews are made, not found”, Stein argues (18). The Jews of southern Algeria were not subject to the civilizing mission that Jews in the three coastal departments of the colony experienced. Forms of imperial authority over Jewish communities that were obsolete in the north by the 1870s, including the appointment of a single community leader and the application of statut personnel mosaïque to the Jewish population, were employed in the southern territories until the end of the colonial period. Stein describes how the French authorities sought to distinguish southern Algerian Jews from their Ibadite Muslim neighbors in practice, describing the latter as the “hosts” of the Jews of the Mzab. “They were indigenous, but nonetheless immigrants”, she carefully concludes (61). The analysis in Chapter 3 of the lack of sustained anti-Semitism in the Mzab at the height of the Dreyfus affair (i.e., the 1890s), indicates that southern Algerian Jews, legally separated from other Jews under French rule in the Mediterranean, had a unique experience of trans-national historical processes. This experience was not only limited to the mid-20^th century but was throughout the French colonial period.

In Chapter 4, Stein focuses on how Ghardaïa’s Jews challenged the French state for access to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the 20^th century. The author documents the disproportionately high rate of Jewish patronage (compared to their Muslim neighbors) of the paltry public health care services and education available in the Mzab. Examined alongside the state’s slow extension of conscription to southern Algerian Jews, Stein demonstrates the useful fungibility of the category indigène. State officials cited the legal status of the Jews of the Mzab to limit their access to services at the local military hospital, even as the state was also hesitant to draft southern Algerian Jews into military service on account of their perceived foreignness and exceptional social position.

Due to their exceptional legal status and their poverty relative to the Jews of northern Algeria, the Jews of the Mzab had a unique experience of Vichy-era anti-Semitism and post-World War II political reform. “Most histories of North African Jewries demarcate the Vichy era as a discrete, disturbing chapter in the lives of individuals and their communities”, Stein argues in Chapter 4, “Southern Algerian Jewish history requires its own timeline and conceptual narrative” (115). The “earthquake” of Vichy rule, as the northern Algerian Jew Jacques Derrida described it, was not as catastrophic in the south. Instead, the electoral law of 1947 that bifurcated elected representatives to the assembly into European and native colleges was at least equally traumatic, as the law perpetuated the condescending bifurcation of northern and southern Jewish communities.

Naturalization and decolonization came in quick succession to the Jews of the Mzab in the early 1960s. In Chapter 6, Stein classifies the fossil fuels boom in the Algerian Sahara as the material explanation for the erasure of the legal distinction between northern and southern Jews in a July 1961 law (126). This argument, a welcome foray on the author’s part into the economic life of the region, counters Todd Shepard’s conclusion in The Invention of Decolonization that the symbolic necessity of delineating who was “European” and who was not at the outset of decolonization drove the tardy naturalization of Saharan Jews. In either case, French officials hurriedly produced a register of the new French citizens; however, this document was left behind during decolonization and became representative of a broader fight between French and Algerian archives over control of the past, as the French state tried in vain to retrieve the register in the years following decolonization. The exceptional legal categorization of Saharan Jews in the colonial period bedeviled attempts in the post-colonial period to integrate the population into the new legal categories of modern French citizenry.

Saharan Jews demonstrates the value of taking a global approach to the study of a local subject. A wealth of archival material from multiple continents and languages has enabled Stein to show that, while the indigenous legal status of the Jews of the Mzab significantly limited their ability to interact with the broader world, they contributed to and experienced global history nonetheless. Read alongside Joshua Schreier’s Arabs of the Jewish Faith, which considers the history of the Jews of northern Algeria naturalized in 1871 and subjected to the civilizing mission, Stein’s work adds welcome complexity and new historical actors to the history of French Algeria and Jewish North Africa. Saharan Jews also offers fascinating glimpses, particularly with its impressive array of photographs from the early 20^th century, of the economic and cultural history of central Algeria, which warrants further investigation. Even as it is tightly focused on the ramifications of colonial law for a marginal minority in central Algeria, Saharan Jews is nevertheless critical reading for scholars of decolonization, Jewish history, and the politics of identity under colonial rule.