https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7268-2651
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ABSTRACT
Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Notes
1 Catherine Roth, ‘Cités neuves pour rescapés de l’histoire’, Patrimoine en Val de France, no. 10, 2012, 20–3.
2 See Karima Dirèche-Slimani, ‘Histoire de l’émigration kabyle en France au XXe siècle: réalités culturelles et réappropriations identitaires’, doctoral thesis, University of Provence Aix-Marseille I, 1992, 10; Françoise Soulignac, La Banlieue parisienne: cent cinquante ans de transformations (Paris: Documentation française 1993); and Hervé Vieillard-Baron, ‘De l’exil aux logiques d’enracinement: l’exemple de Sarcelles’, in Gilles Ferréol and Michel Autès (eds), Intégration et exclusion dans la société française contemporaine (Lille: Presses universitaire du Septentrion 1992), 105–28.
3 For these figures see Erik H. Cohen and Maurice Ifergan, Heureux comme juifs en France? Étude sociologique (Jerusalem: Éditions Elkana/Akadem 2007), 225; Rahsaan Maxwell, Ethnic Minority Migrants in Britain and France: Integration Trade-Offs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), 168; and, for more recent corroboration of these numbers, see also Nonna Mayer and Vincent Tiberj, who give similar statistical data on population percentages in their ‘Jews and Muslims in Sarcelles: face to face or side by side?’, in Samuel Sami Everett and Ben Gidley (eds), Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 13: Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (Leiden: Brill 2022), 183–208.
4 See Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2014); Brice Teinturier and Etienne Mercier, 'perceptions et attentes de la population juive: le rapport à l’autre et aux minorités’, Ipsos, 31 January 2016, available at www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/complement-perceptions-et-attentes-de-la-population-juive-le-rapport-lautre-et-aux-minorites (viewed 9 September 2023).
5 Michel Wieviorka, La Tentation antisémite: haine des juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont 2005), 387–406 (387).
6 Dorian Bell, Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2018).
7 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2008), 6.
8 See in particular the work of Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2006); and Todd Shepard, ‘Algerian nationalism, Zionism, and French laïcité: a history of ethnoreligious nationalisms and decolonization’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2013, 445–67.
9 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (London: Routledge 2014), 111, which draws significantly on British sociologist Michael Banton’s pioneering article ‘Race as a social category’, Race, vol. 8, no. 1, 1966, 1–16.
10 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 2.
11 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1998), 3.
12 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 10.
13 Maxime Rodinson, ‘Israël, fait colonial?’, Les Temps modernes, vol. 22, no. 253 bis, 1967, 17–88.
14 Derek J. Penslar, ‘Is Zionism a colonial movement?’, in Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff and Maud S. Mandel, Colonialism and the Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2017), 275–300.
15 James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press 1972), 34.
16 Ibid., 31.
17 Ibid., 34.
18 David Nadjari, ‘L’Émancipation à “marche force”: les juifs d’Algérie et le décret Crémieux’, Labyrinthe, no. 28, 2007, 77–89.
19 On this point, see, in particular, Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2010).
20 See, for example, Benjamin Stora, ‘Question identitaire et occultation des minorités au Maghreb’, paper presented at the ‘Colloque international Méditerranée Sud, le retour du cosmopolitisme?’, National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco (BNRM), Rabat, 8–10 June 2011.
21 Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2008).
22 Ernest Renan, Histoire générale des langues sémitiques (Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1878), 18.
23 Albert Memmi, La Statue de sel (Paris: Corrêa 1953).
24 Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: portrait (Paris: Seuil 2000), 103. All translations from the French are, unless otherwise stated, by the author.
25 Frantz Fanon, Sociologie d’une révolution (L’an V de la Révolution algérienne) [1959] (Paris: François Maspero 1972), 144.
26 Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Ethnicisation de la France (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Lignes 2011); Fabrice Dhume-Sonzogni, Communautarisme: enquête sur une chimère du nationalisme français (Paris: Dempolis 2016).
27 Pierre Tevanian, La Mécanique raciste (Paris: Éditions Dilecta 2008); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Ahmed Boubeker, Le Grand Repli (Paris: La Découverte 2015).
28 Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (New York: Fordham University Press 2017); Todd Shepard, Sex, France and Arab Men 1962–1979 (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2017).
29 Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France; Ethan B. Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2015).
30 Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood, 19.
31 Ibid., 12.
32 Anya Topolski, ‘The dangerous discourse of the “Judaeo-Christian” myth: masking the race–religion constellation in Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 54, nos 1–2, 2020, 71–90.
33 Nikki R. Keddie, ‘The new religious politics: where, when, and why do “fundamentalisms” appear?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 40, no. 4, 1998, 696–723; Olivier Roy, L’Islam mondialisé (Paris: Seuil 2002); Yaacov Loupo, Métamorphose ultra-orthodoxe chez les juifs du Maroc: comment des séfarades sont devenus ashkénazes (Paris: L’Harmattan 2006).
34 Samir Amghar, ‘Le Salafisme en Europe: la mouvance polymorphe d’une radicalisation’, Politique étrangère, no. 1, 2006, 65–78; Mayanthi L. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2014).
35 Laurence Podselver, Retour au judaïsme? Les loubavitch en France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010).
36 Marc Weitzmann, Hate: The Rising Tide of Antisemitism in France (and What It Means for Us) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019); Gunther Jikeli, ‘Is religion coming back as a source for antisemitic views?’, Religions, vol. 11, no. 5, 2020, 255. For a corrective, see Illana Weizman, Des Blancs comme les autres? Les Juifs, angle mort de l’antiracisme (Paris: Stock 2022).
37 Grégoire Morin and Catherine Roth, ‘Textes et images du grand ensemble de Sarcelles 1954–1976’, Les Publications du Patrimoine en Val de France, no. 10, 2007, iv.
38 Dominique Lefrançois, ‘Guide des sources pour l’étude des grands ensembles Garges-lès-Gonesse, Sarcelles, Villiers-le-Bel 1950–1980’, Les Publications du Patrimoine en Val de France, no. 3, 2005, 9.
39 Roth, ‘Cités neuves pour rescapés de l’histoire’, 22.
40 Morin and Roth, ‘Textes et images du grand ensemble de Sarcelles 1954–1976’, v.
41 Hervé Vieillard-Baron, ‘Sarcelles: l’enracinement des diasporas sépharade et chaldéenne’, Espace géographique, vol. 23, no. 2, 1994, 138–52 (16).
42 Rahsaan Maxwell, Ethnic Minority Migrants in Britain and France: Integration Trade-Offs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), 169.
43 Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2011), 10.
44 Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, ‘Unité et dispersion des choix identitaires des juifs originaires du Maghreb en France contemporaine’, in Frédéric Abécassis, Karima Dirèche and Rita Aouad (eds), La Bienvenue et l’Adieu: migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb, XVe–XXe siècle. Volume 2: Ruptures et recompositions (Casablanca: éditions la croisée des chemins 2012), 165–79 (170–1).
45 This is what Ella Shohat argues vis-à-vis the usage of the term more broadly in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006), 213.
46 Annie Benveniste, Figures politiques de l’identité juive à Sarcelles (Paris: L’Harmattan 2002), 9.
47 See Samuel Sami Everett, ‘From Les Petites Jérusalems to Jerusalem: North African postcolonial racialization and orthodoxy’, AJS Review, vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, 113–30.
48 Vieillard-Baron, ‘Sarcelles’, 139.
49 Benveniste, Figures politiques de l’identité juive à sarcelles, 71.
50 Laurence Podselver, ‘De la périphérie au centre: Sarcelles ville juive’, in Chantal Bordes-Benayoun (ed.), Les Juifs et la Ville (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2000), 81.
51 Ibid., 50.
52 Ibid., 40.
53 Anick Vollebergh, ‘The other neighbour paradox: fantasies and frustrations of "living together” in Antwerp', Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, 129–49.
54 Everett, ‘From Les Petites Jérusalems to Jerusalem’.
55 Maxwell, Ethnic Minority Migrants in Britain and France, 2012.
56 Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims’, Social Text, nos 19/20, 1988, 1–35.
57 Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002).
58 Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (London: Routledge 2009).
59 Shmuel Trigano (ed.), La Civilisation du judaïsme: de l'exil à la diaspora (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat 2012).
60 Shmuel Trigano, La Nouvelle Idéologie dominante: le post-modernisme (Paris: Hermann 2012).
61 Günther Jikeli, European Muslim Antisemitism: Why Young Urban Males Say They Don’t Like Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2015).
62 Paul A. Silverstein, Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic (London: Pluto Press 2018), 64.
63 SPCJ, ‘2013: Rapport sur l’antisémitisme en France’, 2014, available at www.antisemitisme.fr/dl/2013-FR.pdf (viewed 2 November 2023).
64 CNCDH, La Lutte contre le racisme, l'antisémitisme et la xénophobie: année 2016 (Paris: La Documentation française 2017) available at www.cncdh.fr/sites/default/files/2021-04/Rapport%20racisme%202016.pdf (viewed 2 November 2023).
65 See, for example, ‘Emeutes à Sarcelles: “C’est tout simplement de l’antisémitisme”, s’indigne Valls’, Le Parisien (online), 21 July 2014, available at www.leparisien.fr/val-d-oise-95/sarcelles-95200/emeutes-a-sarcelles-raffarin-et-ciotti-appellent-au-rassemblement-republicain-21-07-2014-4016771.php (viewed 2 November 2023).
66 On Bensoussan’s statement, see Samuel Sami Everett, ‘La Haine: intercommunal hate in Paris’, AJS Perspectives, Spring 2020, available at www.associationforjewishstudies.org/publications-research/ajs-perspectives/the-hate-issue/la-haine-intercommunal-hate-in-paris (viewed 2 November 2023).
67 See Kimberly A. Arkin, ‘Defining France and defending Israel: romantic nationalism and the paradoxes of French Jewish belonging’, in Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich (eds), The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities (Leiden: Brill 2016), 323–49.
68 Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, ‘Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”: on Trojan Horses and the problematization of Muslims’, Critical Research on Religion, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, 200–20.
69 See Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Antisémitisme et Islamophobie: une histoire croisée (Paris: Amsterdam éditions 2021). It should be noted that the vernacularized ‘new antisemitism’ narrative has as its corollary a Jewish youth anti-Arab (Muslim) racism as demonstrated in Kimberly A. Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2014).
70 Arié Alimi, ‘Combattre le racisme d’etat’ (blog), 17 August 2016, available on the Mediapart website at https://blogs.mediapart.fr/arie-alimi/blog/170816/combattre-le-racisme-detat (viewed 4 November 2022.
71 Fieldwork interviews with Arié Alimi, October 2015, September 2019 and May 2022.
72 Zia-Ebrahimi, Antisémitisme et Islamophobie.
73 James Renton and Ben Gidley, ‘Introduction: the shared story of Europe’s ideas of the Muslim and the Jew—a diachronic framework’, in James Renton and Ben Gidley (eds), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story? (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017), 1–21.
74 Wieviorka, La Tentation antisémite, 404.
75 Ibid., 405.
76 Ibid.
77 See Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France.
78 See Dominique Schnapper, Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Freddy Raphaël, La Condition juive en France: la tentation de l’entre-soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 2009).
79 Joseph Chétrit, ‘Les Pratiques poético-musicales juives au Maroc et leurs rapports avec les traditions andalouso-marocaines’, Confluences Méditerranée, no. 46, 2003, 171–9.
80 Jennifer Bidet and Lauren Wagner, ‘Vacances au bled et appartenances diasporiques des descendants d’immigrés algériens et marocains en France’, Tracés, no. 23, 2012, 113–30.
81 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 6.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Samuel Sami Everett
Samuel Sami Everett is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and the Iméra Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University. He is an anthropologist and the co-editor (with Rebekah Vince) of Jewish-Muslim Interaction: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2020) and (with Ben Gidley) the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 13: Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (Brill 2022). Email: [email protected]. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7268-2651