Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 77

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa
By: Emily Benichou Gottreich
Daniel J. Schroeter, editors
Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa. Indiana University Press, 2011. 373 pp. $29.00. ISBN: 978-0253222251.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Seth J. Frantzman, PhD
The Hebrew University
Israel
In 1948, there were 250,000 Jews in Morocco. Today there are less than 4,000. Across North Africa most ancient and important Jewish
communities vanished in the years 1940 to 1970 (p. 313). The upheavals and disappearance of Jewish communities in North Africa had a variety of
causes, coming against the backdrop the Second World War, the creation of the State of Israel, and the end of the colonial regimes. In this important
volume, the authors seek to shed light on that lost world from a variety of angles.
The origins of this volume lie in a 2004 conference of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. The editors note that “the earliest attempt to
write a comprehensive history of the Jews of the Maghrib dates to colonial Algeria in the nineteenth century” (p. 6). Yet, in Jewish studies “their
culture had been assigned little value beyond the exotic by the dominant Ashkenazi ethos” (p. 9).
This book seeks to examine how Jews were part of the larger Muslim mosaic of North Africa. “There are practically no Muslims living in the
Maghrib [North Africa] today who interact with Jews…the very notion of Jews as indigenous is an alien concept. Jews have become almost
invisible” (p.12). However as late as 50 years ago this was not the case, and this volume attempts to provide a corrective, based on Muslim sources
and Muslim scholarship on this important minority group.
Farid Benramdane, the dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Abdulhamid in Mostaganem, contributes an essay on the origin of place
names in Western Algeria. He compiled a list of 20,060 names in the region (p. 35). He found, for instance, that 84 places had the name Musa or
Moses. He shows how place name associated with Jews, Muslims and Christians came to influence the landscape and combine with local preIslamic terms. This essay is interesting but it doesn’t seem to illustrate necessarily