reclaims the lost sense of what Berdugo calls in his epilogue, “Mere life.”<sup>25</sup> This is where the donkey serves heuristically to change Roslan’s fate. The southern sun that counteracts the cold north, is described as “unpleasant sun”<sup>26</sup> whose solar radiation exposes Roslan and his donkey to a new set of ecological challenges. But to Roslan’s amazement, the drying neglected yard, the soil, and its natural yield welcome both Roslan and donkey:

> Donkey tapped lightly with his horseshoes, and to Roslan it seemed like a respectful march, as if donkey is thankful for his food before meal—a jocular food blessing. And when he reached the pile, he [donkey, R”T] lowered his head and started to gather weeds, in a nonselective manner, and yet it looked as if he is pulling them in preciseness with his thick rough tongue, chewing them gently with his stony teeth, glidingly swallowing them, and gathering more of them in his mouth. Donkey was probably hungry in a non-animalistic passion, and Roslan stood next to him and wondered, amazed by the simplicity of health, by the necessity of food and its justification, and astounded by his proper choice of weed and how he gathered what’s necessary, and the more donkey consumed the grains the deeper was the feeling in Roslan’s round lower-belly: the art of animal and life.<sup>27</sup>

This “simplicity of health” brought by donkey is epiphanic to Roslan. The above passage, it seems, recalls the two conflictual Greek concepts, zoē and bios: the cyclic “bare life” of animals, men, and gods (zoē) and what Giorgio Agamben perceives as, “the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (bios).<sup>28</sup> Donkey reintroduces Roslan with the very idea of “bare life”; yet the donkey’s hunger

<footnote n="25"><sup>25</sup> Ibid., 263.</footnote>

<footnote n="26"><sup>26</sup> Ibid., 214.</footnote>

<footnote n="27"><sup>27</sup> Ibid., 43.</footnote>

<footnote n="28"><sup>28</sup> For Agamben, the event of modernity is allowed by the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis. See Giorgio Agamben, *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare life*, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. See also, Elizabeth D. Gruber, “Nature on the Verge: Confronting ‘Bare Life’ in *Arden of Faversham and King Lear’,” *Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment* 22, no. 1 (2015): 98-114, 99. Zoē and bios have received much scholarly attention by Hannah Arendt; however, the philosophical discourse of these two terms is beyond the scope of this paper.</footnote>
should be conceived in “non-animalistic” biopolitical terms of “health,”
“necessity,” and “justification.” Roslan’s backyard functions as simulacra of the
Israeli periphery whose brutish physicality of pain, duress and immobility permits
the condition in which “a human lapses into presumptively ‘lower’ state”<fnref n="29" /> that
enables what otherwise is denied. Noticeably, the neglected backyard and the
parents’ apartment represent human spaces that are “forced to be penetrated.”<fnref n="30" />
The permeable metaphor that Berdugo applies to the Israeli periphery situates life
and death in an eerie juxtaposition. It is precisely here where the human-donkey
correspondence comes into play, while the donkey becomes an “agent of
revelation” and offers Roslan a haunting sensation of the familiar and the strange.<fnref n="31" />
The depiction of donkey’s eating and Roslan’s lower belly that apparently digests
the animal’s food, clarifies the natural (and continuous) bonding between the two;
it anchors the most familiar passion in a blunt state of anomie. But there is more.
Berdugo offers here an alternative agenda that denies any residues of the Israeli
chronicle (protected by its *bios*). When he opens his “transition” to the past,
Berdugo adds a subversive comment that one might easily dismiss:

> It was one day. 1994. A day that is not an allegory, but a singular day, in
> and of itself. A day at the beginning of November. No one has been
> murdered yet in this November of 1994, who can even think about a
> *future grandiose death*, or falling in love, or cherry bloom in Israel, or
> about a permanent enslavement to loneliness.<fnref n="32" />

The “future grandiose death” evokes the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. But by juxtaposing this (political) grandiose murder with love, cherry bloom, and permanent loneliness, Berdugo unveils his literary intention to narrate an alternative set of priorities that rethinks and reorganizes the political order and agenda.

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Elizabeth D. Gruber, “Nature on the Verge,” 100.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Even the prostitution-like southern diction evokes this type of permeability see Berdugo, *Donkey*, 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Jeanne Addison Roberts, *The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender* (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 75.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Ibid., 45. My emphasis.</footnote>
Donkey as Agent

In *Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment* (2006), Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin discuss animals in terms of agency. They note that:

[A]gency has been a problematic issue for both postcolonial and environmental studies since, in the anthropocentric version of this problem, ‘others’ may speak but their speech is often pre-positioned so as not to be heard by those in power [...]. Animals, similarly, are rarely seen independent actors, a sometimes strategic human failing that reminds us that “what is at stake [in recognizing animal agency] is our own ability to think beyond ourselves.”<fnref n="33" />

In the novel, the donkey moves beyond a metonymy to an actual “participant that dynamically engages and exerts an impact on the human drama.”<fnref n="34" /> The donkey, as both animal and symbol, exposes “the competing claims” of human and non-human species for life.<fnref n="35" /> I will return to the “competing” component in the novel, but even before that, since the donkey arouses and stimulates Roslan,<fnref n="36" /> one might read it as a clear affirmation of the very idea of Eros. The novel develops towards an alternative form of life that perceives vulnerability, suffering, and animality as resources for some enacted reality. Precisely because “donkeys are commonplaces,”<fnref n="37" /> Roslan, the anti-hero, can claim for existence on the small piece of land that he shares with the animal.

This claim for existence or sense of life, where freedom is put into place, occurs when Roslan gathers weeds for his donkey for the first time. In this simple act of gathering food, “the life or death of the weeds are insignificant to him,” since all

<footnote n="33">³³ Erica Fudge, *Animal* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 22. See also, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, *Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment* (London: Routledge, 2015), 208.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Fudge, *Animal*, 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Anand, “Words on Water,” 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ In the novella, “My Young Brother Yehuda,” Berdugo also describes an intimacy between the protagonist and his dog. Sami Berdugo, *Orphans* (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Jill Bough, *Donkey* (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 7.</footnote>
that matters is keeping the donkey fed and active. The vivid descriptions mimic
the promise of life that feeding itself conceals, as Roslan

takes advantage of what nature delivers in such easiness, gift by gift. And
what type of simple doing it is to take from whatever exists, whatever is
given, for free, with grace [...] and all this pleases Roslan, wraps his heart
tightly, and even his arms get a blissful essence, turn happy, hungry, while
gathering more and more.<fnref n="38" />

The description is not only passionate and energetic, but it accentuates Roslan's liveliness in a manner that is rare in the novel. What Berdugo depicts here is a food web in which Roslan is allowed to fully participate and to feel valuable as a subject. This sense of approval—of being an active participant in the event of life—is further accentuated in the following depiction:

> No, it's this hour, in the neglected backyard, that actually locates Roslan erect amid his own life, life literally, with its right purpose, and when he saw donkey standing not far from the fresh animal droppings, he took a warmed and wide breath to his lungs, as if by inhaling he affirms the force of life.<fnref n="39" />

In its emotional and libidinal energy, the donkey's force of life might be compared
to Roslan's lover Steve, who indeed, “demands the immediate vanishing of the
animal, and maybe even more than this, if only possible.” Roslan’s lover rejects the
donkey and uses threats and brutal language to express his disapproval: “I’m
telling you, if you don’t do something with this donkey, I don’t know what I...”<fnref n="40" />
The blunt threat of the lover reaffirms and validates the irreplaceable merit of the
donkey, juxtaposed here with the human lover. The fact that this threat comes
from Roslan’s lover, locates the donkey at the emotional-libidinal matrix of the
characters, assuring his presence not only as an essential companionship but also
as a desired living entity. Steve’s reaction also brings to mind Agamben’s question,

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid., 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ibid., 36.</footnote>
"why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. What is the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of an exclusion?"<fnref n="41" />
Translating these questions into the Israeli reality that Berdugo portrays, it seems that donkey carries the peculiar privilege of being the excluded one who mobilizes Roslan's (excluded) subjectivity. The sense of life and the type of emancipation that donkey offers, cannot be offered by any other human agency.

## Part II

### Naked, Limp, and Perverse: The Abject as Interruption

The subchapter titled "Abjection," appears early in the novel. It opens immediately after a graphic description of the sexual encounter between Roslan and Steve:

> Even when he held in his mouth the ejaculation, and hastened to the shower to spit it there in the deeply and severely cracked sink, even then Roslan kept doing nothing, remained naked and limp on the futon sofa bed, and mostly rediscovered, and quickly, that he is detached, that looming time's particles do not deserve their existence, to be followed, that for him, they are all fallen, uprooted<fnref n="42" />

This proximity of the limp body, post sexual activity, to a deep sense of displacement is meaningful: just before spitting out the sperm, still impure, sinful gay man, Roslan experiences his utmost displacement. Could sexual activity be more antinormative, provocative, and political? It is here that Roslan considers the very idea of agency, or more precisely the lack of it: "what could have happened, if he-himself did nothing? It is Steve Silberman who was active..."<fnref n="43" /> While holding the symbolic abject in his mouth, Roslan is decoding the sexual act into

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Agamben, *Homo Sacer*, 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Berdugo, *Donkey*, 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Ibid.</footnote>
active/passive, pursuer/pursued categories which accentuates the tension between the sexual functionality of his own body (whose masculinity is questioned by Roslan throughout the book) and its political significance, and by that also its relation to and placement at the “body politic.”

In *Powers of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection* (1982), Julia Kristeva argues for a theory of subject formation in which a disavowed “founding repudiation” of the maternal body is the basis of the social self. According to Kristeva, to come into being, the social self must abject, or cast away, “those material elements that remind it of the original union with that body.”<fnref n="44" /> Kristeva’s long list of such materials includes tears, blood, sperm, urine, and more—all of which accentuates behaviors that “do not belong to the ‘clean and proper’ social body: incest, crime, etc.”<fnref n="45" /> To become a social being, the “I” must expel elements that cannot be entirely expelled, and thus remain a threat.<fnref n="46" /> Abjection then resides in “that liminal state that hovers on the threshold of the body and body politic.”<fnref n="47" /> Judith Butler, who posits a similar dynamic of rejection, argues that “this exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.”<fnref n="48" />

The novel presents different forms of abjection, while breaking the binary distinction between abject/subject. The major distinction that the novel aims to collapse is the one between Roslan and Donkey: in this sense, the latter is the all-too-obvious abject. But the indistinctiveness between Roslan and his donkey is expressed by the fact that they both represent different forms (animal and human) of an abject. It is through the so-called forbidden sexual pleasures, illness, and bodily discharge that Berdugo releases the idea of an abject that resides within Roslan: Roslan is the abject who denies his immigrant parents or his foreign lover, and at the same time as a gay immigrant who is part of a minor community he is

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Délice Williams, “Spectacular Subjects: Abjection, Agency, and Embodiment in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” *Interventions* 20, no. 4 (2018); 586-603, 587.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Julia Kristeva, *Powers of Horror*, Ann McClintock, *Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest* (London-New York: Routledge, 1995).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ McClintock, *Imperial Leather*, 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Judith Butler, *Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex* (London-New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.</footnote>
socially, politically, and culturally denied by the normative hegemonic “center.” His exclusion is evidential, and he shares a crucial existential meaning with his donkey.<fnref n="49" /> Nevertheless, Roslan is aware of the abjection that he carries as a mark of Cain and reconciles with it: “Hence Roslan was an abject, and did not refuse to accept the abjection, folded his legs on the futon mattress, tried to hide by threading in between them his almost dead penis that mimics woman’s genitals that he never wanted because he felt angrily...”.<fnref n="50" /> The effeminacy that Roslan attributes to his genitals positions him as another form of abject, the feminine one. But the reader should note here the type of negation employed by Berdugo to stress the process of Roslan’s reconciliation (with this effeminacy): “*did not refuse to accept*” (my emphasis). This is the undoing of what Kristeva describes as the inability to fully expel: the denied subject, the abject, who is fully aware of his position, reconciles with it, settles, and accepts his threshold position. The doubled negation of “did not refuse” (instead of simply “accepted”) accentuates Roslan’s conflict between his desire to refuse and his involuntary consent. Although the language suggests Roslan’s choice, the reader knows that Roslan is denied choices. Kristeva calls attention to the function of effeminacy in the economy of indistinctiveness between the subject and what is external to the subject. “What we designate as ‘feminine,’” she writes, “will be seen as an ‘other’ without a name, which subjective experience confronts when it does not stop at the appearance of its identity.”<fnref n="51" /> The subject experiences coming face to face with what Kristeva calls “an unnamable otherness.” This “unnamable” marks the

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Donkey’s health deteriorates throughout the book, but as soon as Roslan gets the animal, he notices the donkey’s skin ailment: his walk is dragged out the road and his eyes are fixed at donkey, focusing now on his gray-brownish fur, whose lateral part, behind the back leg is shaved-like, or maybe even violently cut, and probably will not regrow. The narrator returns periodically to this bald patch. Roslan himself has *pityriasis rosea*, a temporary rash of raised red scaly patches. This condition requires a series of doctor’s appointments and Roslan knows that nothing has changed. The rash neither increased nor disappeared, and if so, so what is it [...] maybe these are signals from the thickness of the body, the inwardness of his limbs, a dormant disease that bursts out Berdugo, *Donkey*, 7 and 77. The condition of the body, however, is one of the novel’s greatest ironies: in its natural state the organic body cannot be trusted to remain intact and is vulnerable to illness and infection. Rina Aryeh, “The Fragmented Body as An Index of Abjection,” in *Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture*, eds. Rina Arya and Nicolas Chare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 146-163, 149.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Kristeva, *Powers of Horror*, 58-59.</footnote>
economy of non-distinctiveness when the subject cannot differentiate inside from outside or pleasure from pain. “The subject,” writes Kristeva, “will always be marked by the uncertainty of his borders and of his affective valency as well; these are all the more determining as the paternal function was weak or even nonexistent, opening the door to perversion or psychosis.”<fnref n="52" /> Abjection, Kristeva stresses, “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”<fnref n="53" /> This type of abjection that Kristeva describes, of the liminal space where the subject experiences a crisis of meaning, is where transformation—that is, life itself—is possible; the difference between internal and external becomes unclear, and in the process, conditional identity is stripped away to reveal a queer object.<fnref n="54" /> This is the possibility that Berdugo wants his reader to consider. It is established early in the book, perhaps in donkey’s very first hours at Roslan’s yard, where Berdugo introduces the possibility of perversion (or bestiality) as the donkey arouses Roslan, awakes his sexual desire, while Roslan, “watches his tiny blade, the one that evokes the forbidden stimulus, measurably forbidden, even if during these moments he doesn’t care about what is not-allowed [...] since donkey enters the wild yard, each time Roslan sees it, his independent freedom is unified and becomes also justified.”<fnref n="55" /> The pleasure that momentarily overcomes the pain is in and of itself justified; it is also this pleasure that makes Roslan feel less passive, and he turns from an object to subject whose freedom is justified/valued. This great sense of freedom is conditioned by the presence of the donkey.

Masculinity, Interrupted

A major task that *Donkey* is engaged in is the blurring and queering of normative masculinity of the type that represents normative heterosexuality, establishment, and Israeli systems of power that constitute the Israeli political-militant mentality. By “queering” I wish to emphasize the fluidity of Roslan’s identity: Berdugo wishes, first and foremost, to queer-and-question heteronormative sexuality and

<footnote n="52">⁵² Ibid., 63.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Ibid., 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Robert Phillips, “Abjection,” *TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly* 1, no. 1-2 (2014): 19-21.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 16.</footnote>
examine its politicality. As mentioned, Roslan constantly explores and questions
his (and not only his) masculinity. While working towards the human/donkey
indistinction, Berdugo attends to masculinity whose significance to the Zionist
enterprise has received much scholarly attention.<fnref n="56" /> This blurring-cum-
undermining is achieved through the collapsing of gender binary, often depicted
in the novel as a stumbling block or impediment, in the national psyche. A
poignant expression of this collapse-turn-indistinctiveness recurs when donkey's
gender is in question, a query that puzzles Roslan: "Is Donkey a boy or a girl?
Actually, not like that; one should ask, male-donkey or female-donkey, as merely
anatomic typology of animals, as they were born, and not according to their sexual
orientation or according to the behavior they acquire throughout their lives."<fnref n="57" />
Berdugo asks to reverse the "gender trouble" and retrieve its origin: sex that marks
the most basic preconditioned category, before (gender) roles are inscribed
according to the conventional social order. Essentially, masculinity is portrayed as
an environmental condition or indicator; at times, it is an ecosocial matter.<fnref n="58" /> In a
supermarket, where Roslan expects to encounter women, he wonders, "And why
women do not come to the place? Where were the mothers lost?"<fnref n="59" /> In the
immediate literary sense, he might be referring to his own mother, but the
question reveals a poignant political concern of imbalance between a necessary lost
force (the mother) and a national contagious "infection" (masculinity). This
absence of the (m)others (or the female figure in general), creates a void that allows
Berdugo to feminize his male characters through their sexuality, habits, or lifestyle,
and complicate the abjection by teasing it. For Berdugo the boundaries of Jewish
abject—the hesitant one, whose sexual identity is blurred—are intimately
connected to properly embodied masculinity, the one that should take hold

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Tallie Ben-Daniel, “Zionism’s Frontier Legacies: Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco,” *American Studies* 54, no. 4 (2016): 49-71.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 169.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Ibid., 94 and 114. In the novel, Israeli masculinity is an affliction, a condition that infects other metonymies of the Israeli space and society. The palm trees in Kiryat Yam, for instance, are infected by this spiky masculinity that is coarse and rough, an image that suggests the way man affects, conquers, and masters nature; or the male shoppers at the local supermarket, whose bodies are content, fed up, calmed, walking in a crawling that is fertilizing and security-like, of the IDF. Once again, an image that evokes a repulsive heroism associated directly with its most prominent agency: the IDF.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Ibid., 113.</footnote>
instead of the normative one, that he defines as the “average male.” Throughout
the novel, Berdugo provides different representations of how “men negotiate and
perform their masculinity and compete for hegemony, focusing on what might be
called failed or abject masculinity in particular.”<fnref n="60" /> Berdugo’s references to
masculinity are scattered throughout the novel, but embedded in a way that
demands his reader’s attention. At one point in *Donkey*, for instance, Berdugo
poses in parentheses that “interrupt” the flow of Roslan’s reflections (on his
boyfriend’s anatomy), some focal/basic questions: “(and who is the average male?
Where is he exactly? Well, let us see him already, so we can point at him.)”<fnref n="61" /> First,
Berdugo questions the existence of a category such as “average male” and second,
he “points at him” almost as an act of shaming. But does he refer to the average
man as a statistic or rather as a mediocre man, neither too good nor too bad? The
questions, however, bring the two options to mind. The form of masculinity that
the novel portrays might best be described in Kristeva’s terms as “neither subject,
nor object.”<fnref n="62" /> Roslan is unable to perform masculinity in a way that is socially
accepted, and thus his subjectivity, that remains “open” or “in the making” is
called into question. Who are then the male prototypes in the novel? Roslan’s
major male-representative, perhaps his only role-model, is his father Arthur,
whom he describes as a “home-male” who “carries forever the certification of his
birth, keeps it in his memory so that is never forgotten.”<fnref n="63" /> Note the proximity
between the animalized collocation “home male” and the phrase “domesticated
animals” (in Hebrew: ‘hayat bayit,’ home animal). Here, too, Berdugo, aspires to
release animality from masculinity which leaves the latter as a set of almost savage,
tribal codes, vulgar, and essentially of eastern origin and brutish nature.<fnref n="64" />

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Ellen Rees, “Abject Masculinity in Niels Fredrik Dahl’s *Herre*,” *Scandinavian Studies* 93, no. 2 (2021): 266-286, 267.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 212. The line evokes Yona Wallach’s well-known poem, “Presleep Poem,” in which she writes: “If there is another sex br/ing it here so that we’ll get to know it...” see Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen, *Loosen the Fetters of The Tongue, Woman: The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach* (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003), 66. For the poem in Hebrew, See Yona Wallach, *Selected poems 1963-1985* (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992), 65.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Kristeva, *Powers of Horror*, 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ This vulgarity is also emphasized in Berdugo’s description of the male circle of prayers at the synagogue. Here, Berdugo relies on Hebrew and Arabic as he mimics the specific jargon and its vulgar vocality. Ibid., 247-248.</footnote>
Masculinity is described as a tribal event in this family, and is associated with and validated by physical potency and strength: “The strength of the house in Azerbaijan as well as its support, were also compared to a male, and he, Arthur, obviously belongs to that group of men, because *kol ehad*, and not *ahat*, began to be there, in Kavkaz, a home-male already in early stages of his youth, and even before that, as he was born.”<fnref n="65" /> Berdugo’s diction here, and particularly his choice of “kol ehad” (everyone) versus “lo ahat” (literally: “not even one,” in its feminine form) is highly important, sophisticated, and manipulative since the phrase “lo ahat” could mean both “not once” and “not even one female.” Both phrases/meanings fit the context of the sentence, while leaving the initial intention of the writer rather blurred. Clearly, Berdugo is interested in this duality that complicates and subverts cultural tradition in general and Roslan’s (eastern) Azerbaijanian lineage, in particular. Roslan, however, admits that he “doesn’t really belong anymore to the legacy of the young republic of Azerbaijan.”<fnref n="66" /> Berdugo “kills” the two major father-figures in the novel (Roslan and Steve’s father), and although Roslan’s (abject) mother,<fnref n="67" /> Olga, is also “killed” (going up in flames with her husband), the killing of the father is a literary “act” that Berdugo uses (not for the first time).<fnref n="68" /> We are all familiar with the Freudian thesis of the murder of the father in *Moses and Monotheism: “In connection with Judaic religion the archaic father and master of the primeval horde is killed by the conspiring sons who, later seized with a sense of guilt for an act that was upon the*

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Ibid., 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Ibid. The etymological origin of the name Ruslan is an old Caucasian form of the Turkic word arslan that means lion. Roslan (or Ruslan), then, could refer to lion (*Arye* in Hebrew), which suggests the lion with its masculine aspirations as the totem of the family. This masculine aspiration—that again, relies on animals—is firmly counteracted by the donkey, who challenges the traditional and heteronormative masculine psyche. The lion here, Roslan, not only exiles himself from the legacy of predators, but he also lives and takes care of a donkey. The tribal legacy of the Isekov family and its totem is contaminated by the donkey, the abject-Totem.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ According to Kristeva, the maternal body is neither an object nor non-object for the baby, but rather abject. As the process of subjectivity develops through the infant’s separation from the mother during the course of weaning, the infant undergoes a stage of abjection in which it ‘abjects,’ or finds abject, its mother’s body See Jayne Wark, “Queering Abjection: A Lesbian, Feminist, and Canadian Perspective,” in *Abject Visions*, eds. Arya and Chare, 50-76, 55.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ This topic has been discussed with Berdugo in different interviews. For a further reading see Sami Berdugo, *Land Upon an Ongoing Tale* (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2014) [Hebrew]; Sami Berdugo, *Because Guy* (Tel Aviv Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2017) [Hebrew].</footnote>
whole inspired by ambivalent feelings, end up restoring paternal authority, no
longer as an arbitrary power but as a right.”<fnref n="69" /> By breaking this primal taboo (by
killing not only Roslan’s father, but also the father of his lover Steve), Berdugo
interrupts the all-too-secured line of fathers, breaks their continuity and restores
the chance for a new type of authority.

Hebrew, Interrupted

In *The Human Condition* (1958), Hannah Arendt asserts that words and action
“are the political events that ‘mark’ the linearity of a human life such that its *bios*
can become that subject matter of a ‘story’ written by those who have witnessed
the effects of the actions and words.”<fnref n="70" /> It is this linearity that *Donkey* breaks to
the point that language here becomes an autonomous biopolitical indicator; it is
the event that shapes identities, redefines and recreates political categories. In the
linguistic context, the novel’s political ambition is to accentuate the failure of the
standard Hebrew to render the complexities that the peripheral reality offers.
Chapter 2, for instance, opens with a striking insight that captures the mental-
cum-linguistic poverty of the southern periphery:

"You're here." Like that [...] Steve asserts with his superficial voice, and
poor dimples are exposed in his cheeks. And suffice it to say that he is
exactly like that: insignificant; his personality is like that too. Here, in two
words Steve sums up what is apparently so untrue to the back weedy yard,
neither 'you' nor 'here.' "We are here" says Roslan and remains standing.<fnref n="71" />

Berdugo breaks down Steve's casual expression to juxtapose exclusion with inclusion; the poignant contrast between the second-person singular pronoun (you) and the first-person plural pronoun one (we), teases not only the conflictual Israeli politics, but mainly the distinction between Roslan and the donkey, one that the former wishes to clear away. This, we should note, is narrated early in the

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Kristeva, *Powers of Horror*, 56.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt,” 146.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 23.</footnote>
novel, when Berdugo establishes Roslan and Donkey’s form of ‘We.’ In another
chapter, Berdugo conveys his linguistic perspective while describing a futile,
“wasted” dialogue between Roslan and a policewoman (the “authority”)
regarding the donkey. “It is clear to the eye and heart that here, in these seconds, a
mere linguistic event took place, a language-instance that doesn’t constitute a
certain new reality, that doesn’t involve any enthusiasm or concern for a change.”<fnref n="72" />
But what is the exact biopolitical meaning of the “mere linguistic event”? The
“mere” suggests linguistic immobility with no single promise or even a chance for
a political change. When Roslan encounters the authority, Berdugo describes him
as “paralyzed,” enveloped in a disappointment, “in the killing of a chance.”<fnref n="73" /> This
is the linguistic stagnation in which time (Roslan’s here-and-now, the present)
freezes and any movement is denied. By “movement,” I mean a chance for life, the
“additional capacity” in Agamben’s words, “that must be understood as
problematic”<fnref n="74" /> by the authority. Conversely, following a casual friendly remark in
Arabic, Roslan admits that the person who had just greeted him “approves of me,
laughs with me, understands me, he’s something of me [...] and there’s no need to
translate the words, their kindness appears in their prolonged pronunciation, their
liberty is stamped in the air.” The metalinguistic-cum-metaphysical
understanding is at play here and it goes beyond words—as between Roslan and
donkey. Unlike his conservative lover Steve, who preaches for a homogeneous
(standard) Hebrew that functions as superego to block assimilation,
Roslan/Berdugo maintains that the Arabic which is “non-Hebraic and non-
Jewish, is proper [...] overflowed with preciseness the mutual fondness, and
solidarity, even if for a few seconds.”<fnref n="75" /> Berdugo connects the “abject” Arabic
(which threatens the “pure” Jewish identity) to human freedom: the neighbor-
language that blurs the borderlines between the Israeli subject and standard
Hebrew, between the closed territory and the open-border, is the language that
signifies a deep sense of solidarity and a chance that Roslan cannot obtain
anywhere else. The subchapter titled “Speech” is striking in its clarity: words are
described here as a creative tool that a person possesses—creative even if they

<footnote n="72">72 Ibid., 158.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Agamben, *Homo Sacer*, II.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 115.</footnote>
(words) hold “the strongest destructive force that the same man possesses.”<fnref n="76" /> Language, then, may both create worlds and destroy them. It is in this chapter that Berdugo voices Roslan’s wish to avoid this linguistic excessiveness and “extends the boundaries of silencing.”<fnref n="77" /> The distinction between silence (noun) and silencing (gerund) is dramatic: between the banal act of speech—excessive yet free speech—and its (political) denial, raises a comfort zone of possibility where Roslan wishes to dwell.

## Conclusion: Canon, Interrupted

In *Donkey*, Berdugo considers and constructs a type of subjectivity that the Israeli body politic severely excludes. Berdugo creates a bio-“interval”: a space of humans who are neither fully human (or whose humanity is overlooked) nor fully animal (or alternatively a bit of both) that enables despair, Thanatos, and “slim likelihood” to coexist along with Eros, hope, and even delight. From an eco/biopolitical perspective, the novel reveals how the peripheral neglect, as a subversive narrative that rewrites the Israeli southern periphery through different forms of violence, poverty, and political apathy, takes on a different significance: rather than accepting the actual tragedy of the historical Roslan, Berdugo releases life. At the end of the book, following the chilling and graphic depiction of the parents who perish in fire, Roslan is described as one who actively “took himself off the main paved road and turned into a narrow one.”<fnref n="78" /> The type of subjectivity that Berdugo wants us to consider is one that *actively* resists death as the fate that one’s state and society designate. The genesis of this life, out of the allegedly inevitable death, is enabled through the collapsing of the relentless hierarchy between Roslan and his donkey and also through the constant teasing of the idea of death in its different forms. For that reason, Roslan is excited by the fire that he sets in the “Mizraḥi summerizing areas”<fnref n="79" /> outside his parents’ building. His excitement incited by death is a form of conquering death.

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Ibid., 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Ibid., 90.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Ibid., 261.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Ibid., 140.</footnote>
In Emile Habiby’s highly acclaimed book, *The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist* (1974), the title character is a Palestinian who escaped to Lebanon in 1948 and finds his way back to (now) Israel, as an informer. Saeed credits a donkey with his rebirth.<fnref n="80" /> Habiby describes the donkey as “the substitute, the scapegoat, the supplement” that is also metonymic to Saeed who is “the substitute, the scapegoat, and the supplement” of the Israeli establishment.<fnref n="81" /> In this book, Habiby presents the human-donkey as a possible threat to the Israeli political establishment. In a subversive act of authorship, Habiby writes his fourteenth chapter as a footnote in which he graphically recounts the grisly fate of stray donkeys following the war of 1948.<fnref n="82" /> Yet, his powerful allegoric statement that “Many are the nations saved from a butcher’s knife by an animal!”<fnref n="83" /> resonates with Berdugo’s novel that first problematizes and eventually rejects the preeminence of man above beast, while emphasizing the shared fate of man and animal throughout Israeli existence.

Berdugo abandons the national “accepted” narrative, for the story of a single marginal man, “the scapegoat,” whose life is reclaimed thanks to donkey, and by that he both creates an intertextual relation to Habiby’s footnote (that in itself marks a textual marginality) and concretizes his allegory. Here Berdugo challenges the traditional position of the Observer of the People of Israel—a position that has traditionally been taken by established writers, out of their public authority and historical responsibility, to define Jewish life—through observing the overlooked and unattended, neglected areas of Israel and their lost potential. Precisely from his well-established and highly acclaimed status as a writer, Berdugo shifts hierarchies and ridicules the political agenda and its “accepted” categories. Berdugo then pointedly teases the literary canon and abandons the traditional stance of the narrator. At the peak of this exchange between fiction and reality, Berdugo settles the open account with his literary milieu:

> On what the hell are you writing, the writers?

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Habiby, *The Secret Life of Saeed*, 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Soker-Schwager, *Spare Thoughts*, 282.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² When asked where their asses had gone, the Hebron officials laughed and replied that Tel Aviv butchers had used them all to make sausages. Habiby, *The Secret Life of Saeed*, 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Ibid.</footnote>
Why are you buried in all that?

Wake up! Wake up to the land, to the inherent pain of the local settlers, to the invention of the buildings and roads, to the breaking of the ugly Hebrew, to the not-good children, to the youngsters who just matured, wake up to the ostentatiousness of all the people of Israel and the people of the territories that are subject to it, go out to the eastern splendor that westerns its foundation, to the beauty that Roslan knows for the first time in his life, before these moments will pass from him.<fnref n="84" />

The lines have the tone of a manifesto that clarifies Berdugo's rage at his fellow writers who cannot see what is at stake: the bad children, the ugly speech, and unattended beauty that reveals itself momentarily as an authentic source of "bare life" that is perpetually denied and thus is about to disappear. Berdugo's complaint here is both authoritative and vulnerable, a silent (as a written text might be) scream that is unleashed before it's too late. Reading the donkey as an analytical category allows the debunking of social situations reified as natural; in a way, Berdugo writes this book to resist what has become natural. Berdugo adds an epilogue in the form of a letter to the late Roslan Isekov who gave the protagonist of the novel his name. Berdugo's writing is stormy and emotional, as he insists that Roslan has not died but in fact lives "much" on narrow wooden logs of scaffolding, in construction areas, where "he walks in heights." Here, Berdugo foregrounds the issue of visibility as a trope that recurs in the book. "I see you not disappearing, you've never disappeared," he writes, while addressing the sad fact that the Israeli society ignores Roslan as much as it overlooks the donkey. The final sentence with the dramatic apostrophe: "See him—he is alive, his blood be in *your* own eyes" [my emphasis] is not only a twist of the phrase "damo be-rosho" (his blood be in his own head, that is, he bears the responsibility), but it is a direct accusation against the Israeli establishment of not seeing the real, flesh-and-blood Roslan in both his life and death.

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Berdugo, *Donkey*, 242-243.</footnote>
**Riki Traum** is professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey; and a lecturer of English, American, and Jewish literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her research and publications focus on prose and poetry of the 1960s in Israel and the United States and on the avant-garde female voices of the era. Dr. Traum is also a translator of poetry from English into Hebrew. She is the editor of a volume of the poetry of Rina Shani (1937-1983), a powerful poetic voice of the 1960s in Israel, and she is also the author of its introductory essay. Her work has appeared in books and literary journals both in Israel and the United States. Currently, she is working on an anthology of translations of American women's poetry of the 1960s and 1970s into Hebrew. She teaches creative writing and explores relations between poetry and the visual arts, and painting in particular.

**Keywords:** Biopolitics, Sami Berdugo, Donkey, Abjection, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

**How to quote this article:**

Riki Traum, “Man, Interrupted: Abjection, Animality and Agency in *Donkey* by Sami Berdugo,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 23*, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13910](https://10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13910)
# Antisemitism and the Image of Jews and Muslims in Nineteenth Century French Colonial Algerian Writings*

by Sharon Vance

## Abstract

*This paper focuses on descriptions of Jews and Muslims in writings by officials and journalists in nineteenth century colonial Algeria and their recycling by antisemites at the end of that century. These writers assumed that Muslim Arabs shared their beliefs and would acquiesce to French rule and serve its military imperial expansion.*

Francophone descriptions of Jews and Muslims in colonial Algeria began in the decades immediately after the French conquest, creating images recycled throughout the rest of the century. One element of these descriptions, which is the focus of this paper, incorporated longstanding European antisemitic stereotypes that were accompanied by assumptions of Muslim animosity against Jews. These assumptions became a repeated theme that is probably unique to this version of antisemitism, which developed in the colonial context. The nineteenth century antisemitic wave reached its height at the end of that century. When discussing its ideological leadership in colonial Algeria, studies have tended to focus on Édouard Drumont and Max Régis,<fnref n="1" /> two major leaders of the antisemitic movement in colonial Algeria. However, their ideas were not original but were repetitions of

<footnote>* This research was supported by a grant from the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ Michel Abitbol, *Mi-Kremyeh le-Peţen: antishemiyut be-Alg'iryah ha-ḳolonyalit, 1870-1940* (Yerushalayim: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-toldot Yisra'el: ha-Merkaz ha-benle'umi le-ḥeker ha-anṭishemiyut 'a. sh. Vidal Sason, 1993), 44; Genevieve Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive oranaise (1895-1905) L'antisémitisme dans l'Algérie coloniale* (Paris: Éditions L'Harmattan, 1986), 140; Sophie B. Roberts, *Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870-1962* (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).</footnote>
images from earlier stereotypes. In this paper I will focus on how these images and
stereotypes were propagated and applied to the colonial situation from the
beginning. The role that the mobilization of Muslims played in this disdain for
Jews necessitates a consideration of the images of both Muslims, particularly Arab
Muslims, and Jews in these writing. They were generated by French military
officers, clerics, journalists, and politicians from the early days of the conquest and
were repeated by later antisemites in Algeria up to the end of nineteenth century.<fnref n="2" />
The earliest examples were communications, some of which were later published,
that were concerned with the stability, progress and expansion of the conquest and
gave an appraisal of supposed Muslim support for it. When these rosy predictions
of Muslim acceptance, acquiescence and even support for the on-going conquest
were proven to be false by the ongoing resistance, Algerian Jews were blamed. The
portrayal of Jews and these accusations against them were later attached to the
popular antisemitic movement developing in colonial Algeria and France at the
end of the nineteenth century, especially as they were articulated by Édouard
Drumont, the most well-known and consequential exemplar of nineteenth
century French antisemitic discourse. His writings and political activism
encompassed both France and colonial Algeria, where he ran for and won a seat in
the French Chamber of Deputies in 1898, representing Algiers. While I will be
discussing him at the end of this paper, given that his *La France juive* (1886)
spawned a number of similar works devoted specifically to colonial Algeria, I will
first show how such ideas were developed by these officials prior to his
publication. The fact that none of these accusations and stereotypes are original
should not be surprising given that antisemitic discourse is characterized by

<footnote n="2">² Édouard Drumont *La France juive*, 43 ed. (Paris: C. Marpon & E. Flammaron, 1886); G. Meynié, *L’Algérie Juive* (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Parisienne, 1887). Regarding antisemitism in the Algeria, Benjamin Stora had this to say, “L’antisémitisme n’est pas le soule doctrine fondée sur la haine de l’autre, mas ses formes particulières d’ancienneté, de récurrence, d’intensité, en fond un phénomène paradigmatique qui renvoie par son idéologie, ses mots d’ordre, ses pratiques, ses objectifs affirmés ou induits aux différents types de racisme. C’est pourquoi étudier l’antisémitisme en Algérie pendant la période coloniale française reste un sujet d’étude important,” in Geneviève Dermenjian, “Préface,” in *Antijudaïsme et Antisémitisme en Algérie coloniale 1830-1962* (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2018), 5. For a discussion of whether there is a meaningful difference between antisemitism and “anti-Judaism” see Dermenjian, Ibid., 9; Marianne Moyaert, “Understanding the Difference Between Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism,” *Antisemitism Studies* 6, no. 2 (2022): 373-393; 375, [muse.jhu.edu/article/868124](muse.jhu.edu/article/868124).</footnote>
repetition and recycling, with slight variations, of such long-standing myths,
allegations, and conspiracy theories.<fnref n="3" /> What is unique about the colonial Algerian
context is that when it comes to antisemitism, the texts discussed here summon
Arabs and Muslims as participants in attacks against Jews, as will be seen below.
In focusing on these French portrayals of Jews placed in the mouths of Muslims, I
am not implying there is a uniquely French origin to anti-Jewish attitudes among
Muslims or that such attitudes do not exist. It is important to not overlook the
research on the history of anti-Judaism and its contemporary manifestation in the
Muslim World and among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe. There is a
growing body of research on this unfortunately violent phenomenon and I will
only mention a few of the researchers on late 20th and 21st century antisemitism
and extremism including Jikeli Günther, Meir Litvak and Robert Wistrich,<fnref n="4" /> along
with studies on antisemitism in France by Georges Bensoussan, Pierre Birnbaum,
Shmuel Trigano and Michel Wieviorka.<fnref n="5" /> In addition, studies by Camilla Adang,

<footnote n="3">³ Richard S. Levy, *Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution* (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005); Leon Poliakov, *The History of Anti-Semitism* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); David Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition* (New York: W. W. Norton 2013), 464; Peter Shäfer, *Judeophobia Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7; Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, *Antisémythes: L'image et la représentation des juifs* (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2005); Michel Winock, *Nationalism, anti-semitism, and fascism in France* (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998), 98.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Günther Jikeli, “L’antisémitisme en milieux et pays musulmans: débats et travaux autour d’un processus complexe,” *Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine* 62, no. 2-3 (2015): 89-114; Meir Litvak, “Islamic Radical Movements and Antisemitism: Between Old and New,” in *Confronting Antisemitism in Modern Media, the Legal and Political Worlds*, eds. Armin Lange, Kerstin Mayerhofer, Dina Porat, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (New York: De Gruyter, 2021), 133-148; Robert Wistrich, *A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad* (New York: Random House, 2010). Regarding contemporary antisemitic violence in Europe see for example the European Commission’s Fundamental Rights Agency’s European Union-wide data on antisemitic hate crimes and incidents [http://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2022/antisemitism-overview-2011-2021](http://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2022/antisemitism-overview-2011-2021); Commission on Security and Cooperation’s report on escalating antisemitic violence in Europe [https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/events/alarming-rise-antisemitism-and-its-threat-democracy](https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/events/alarming-rise-antisemitism-and-its-threat-democracy). Both accessed June 5, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Georges Bensoussan, *Les Territoires perdus de la République: Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire*, 3ᵉ édition augmentée (Paris: Pluriel, 2015) documents governmental loss of control of the public schools in the face of antisemitism, racism and sexism; Pierre Birnbaum, “Jour de Colère,” *Revue d’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine* 62, no. 2-3 (2015): 245-259; Shmuel Trigano, “Antisémitisme: Une analyse en forme de déni,” *Times of Israel*, December 18, 2014.</footnote>
Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Sarah Strouma and Uri Rubin have provided detailed analyses of Muslim anti-Jewish polemics in the medieval period. <fnref n="6" /> The comprehensive *Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World*, edited by Norman Stillman, has entries on the history and status of Jewish communities in that region, along with a detailed overview on the history of anti-Judaism, antisemitism and anti-Zionism. <fnref n="7" /> When discussing the extended history of antisemitism it is important to recognize that negative attitudes towards Jews in both the Muslim World and in European Christian regions waxed and waned over time under various historic circumstances. Old stereotypes were recycled and given new justifications and updated to suit the predominant concerns of a given time and place. Some periods were more conducive to their propagation and acceptance than others. Moreover, some individuals and groups were more receptive to them than others. A further complicating factor is that some individuals could hold negative attitudes towards “the Jews,” while having Jewish friends and associates. As such, case studies of amical relations between Jews and Muslims, a whole other subject of inquiry, do not preclude the existence of overall animosity towards “the Jews” or provide sufficient data regarding their status in society as a whole. A study of anti-Jewish and antisemitic rhetoric, its dissemination, and an examination of whether this defamation led to actual violence are essential for understanding the extent, and significance of antisemitism in any society and time period.

In the early years of the conquest, military commanders played the dominant role
in shaping colonial society and in creating the earliest images of the indigenous

<footnote>Accessed June 5, 2023, https://frblogs.timesofisrael.com/antisemitisme-une-analyse-en-forme-de-
deni/. Trigano critiqued Michel Wieviorka for rebuking the French Jews, accusing them of
particularism and for being responsible for the violence directed against them; Michel Wieviorka,
*The Lure of Antisemitism: Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France* (Leiden: Brill, 2007), studied the
fear of antisemitism in present day France, including in French schools, emanating, in part, from
young French Muslims, and asked whether French Jews are to blame for being targeted (xxiv).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Camila Adang, ed., *Muslim writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible from Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm* (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, *The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam* (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999); Sarah Stroumsa, “From Muslim Heresy to Jewish-Muslim Polemics: Ibn Rawandi’s Kitab al-Damigh,” *Journal of American Oriental Society* 107, no. 4 (1987): 767-772; Uri Rubin, *Between Bible and Qur’an: The Children of Israel and the Islamic Self-Image* (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Jonathan Fine, Norman Stillman, İlker Aytürk, and Steven Uran, “Anti-Judaism/ Antisemitism/ Anti-Zionism,” in *Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World*, vol. I, ed. Norman Stillman (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010), 221-240.</footnote>
population, both Jewish and Muslim, under its rule.<fnref n="8" /> As the conquest was
consolidated, many soldiers and officers transitioned into the bureaucrats of the
Bureaux arabes or became “scholars” upon retirement.<fnref n="9" /> Both often published
their memoires.<fnref n="10" /> The correspondence of others, such as Marshal and Governor-
General of Algeria Thomas Robert Bugeaud and Captain and later General
Melchior Joseph Eugène Daumas were published posthumously.<fnref n="11" /> Rather than
provide a comprehensive overview of all works by French military officers in
colonial Algeria, I will concentrate on a few whose writings are available today in
digital form. Given that these are still in circulation it is possible to conduct a
follow up investigation to see whether they are continuing to influence attitudes
today. Of the two, Daumas is a lesser-known figure, yet his descriptions contain
themes and images often reproduced by later colonial Algerian officials.
Captain Daumas (1803-1871) arrived in Algeria in 1835 and later helped organize the
Bureaux arabes. He eventually achieved the rank of general and wrote other works
on Algeria in addition to his correspondence, such as his *Les Chevaux du Sahara*
(1851), a book devoted to Arab equestrian skills that also contained a great deal of
translations of Arabic folklore, including derisive appraisals of Jews.<fnref n="12" /> His

<footnote n="8">⁸ Patricia Lorcin, “The Soldier Scholars of Colonial Algeria: Arabs, Kabyles and Islam: Military Images of France in Algeria,” in *Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon*, eds L.C. Brown and M.S. Gordon (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1996), 128-150; Joshua Schreier, *Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria* (New Brunswick [etc.]: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Schreier discusses nineteenth century colonial attitudes towards Algerian Jews, framing it in the context of the conquest and colonial discourse and France’s self-appointed civilizing mission without considering its antisemitism.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ F. Gourgeot, *Situation politique de l’Algérie* (Paris: Challamel 1881), 164, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5788592b?rk=21459;2; Lorcin, "The Soldier Scholars of Colonial Algeria."</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ François-Charles du Barail, *Mes souvenirs* (Paris: Plon, 1897), digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from the University of Toronto, accessed June 5, 2023 http://archive.org/details/messouvenirsoiduba; Jacques Louis César Alexandre Randon, *Mémoires du maréchal Randon* (Paris: Typographie Lahure, 1875).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Thomas Robert Bugeaud and Henry-Amédée Lelorgne Ideville, *Le Maréchal Bugeaud, d'après sa correspondance intime et des documents inédits, 1784-1849*, ed. H. d'Ideville (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1885), accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6479022g?rk=21459;2; Eugène Daumas and Georges Yver, *Correspondance du capitaine Daumas, consul à Mascara (1837-1839)* (Alger: Place du Gouvernement); Impr. de A. Jourdan, 1912).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Daumas and Yver, *Correspondance*; Daumas, *La Grande Kabylie* (Paris: L. Hachette, 1847); *Le Sahara algérien études géographiques et historiques sur la région au sud des établissements français*</footnote>
correspondence described animosities and divisions between different Muslim
communities (e.g., Arabs and Imazighen), but stated that, despite these internal
conflicts, they all held Jews in disdain and would never accept them as equals.<fnref n="13" />
This is a theme, along with that of Jewish deceit and exploitation of others, that
would return over and over again throughout colonial Algerian writing.<fnref n="14" /> At the
end of the nineteenth century these themes were embedded in antisemites’ refuted
claim that granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews caused the Muslim revolt
of 1871.<fnref n="15" /> Despite its questionable use in this discourse, the notion of Muslim
aversion nevertheless does rest on the fact that in the Islamic World, including in
pre-colonial Algeria, Jews were defined as *dhimma*, “protected” subjects with
unequal status.<fnref n="16" /> These writings equated that status as debased, enslaved and
subhuman.<fnref n="17" /> Daumas’ correspondence is full of accounts of Algerian Jews being
robbed, or pretending to have been robbed, and occasionally killed.<fnref n="18" /> He and the
other military officials saw themselves embarking on a civilizing mission, or at least
rendering justice, including their treatment of the native Jewish population, which
they considered to be more humane, despite their disparaging depictions of them
and the fact that the debate over Jewish citizenship and equality also was not at all
clear cut in nineteenth century Europe.<fnref n="19" />

<footnote>*en Algérie* (Paris: Langlois et Leclercq, 1845); *Les Chevaux du Sahara et les mœurs du désert* (Paris, Lévy, 1858), accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k8838666.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 322, 605.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Geneviève Dermenjian, “Les Juifs d’Algérie entre deux hostilités (1830-1943),” in *Les Juifs d’Algérie Une Histoire de Ruptures*, eds. Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Geneviève Dermenjian (Aix-en-Provence: Presse Universitaires de Provence, 2015), 105-133; Abitbol, *Mi-Kremyeh le-Peţen*, 86-87.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Richard Ayoun, “Le décret Crémieux et l’insurrection de 1871 en Algérie,” *Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine* 35, no. 1 (1988): 61-87, doi: 10.3406/rhmc.1988.1439.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Fred Astren, “Dhimma,” in *Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World*.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 605; du Barail, *Mes souvenirs*, 403.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 85, 86, 142, 145, 150, 250, 262, 265, 268, 304 and 306, ff.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ For a measured appraisal of the change in Jewish status brought by the colonial regime see M. Abitbol, “Le rencontre des Juifs de France avec le judaïsme d’Afrique du Nord,” in *Les Relations intercommunautaires juives en méditerranée occidentale XIIIe – XXe siècles Actes du colloque internationale de l’institut d’histoire des pays d’outre-mer*, ed. Jean Louis Miège (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984), 229-242; for a positive assessment of the effect of the conquest on Algerian Jews, see Pierre Hebey, *Alger 1898 La grande vague antijuive* (Paris: NiL éditions, 1996), 15-16. Regarding the status of Jews in Europe see Paul Mandes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, *The Jew in the Modern World A Documentary History*, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).</footnote>
An additional theme that runs through these texts is the supposed deceitful nature
of Jews and their lack of trustworthiness.<fnref n="20" /> Regardless of whether this was in fact
a true reflection of Muslims' attitudes towards Jews, it is a classic theme of
European antisemitic discourse.<fnref n="21" /> Yet despite this supposed Jewish deceit, in this
early stage of the conquest the French army needed to rely on Jewish translators
and merchants for communication and supplies, along with their services as
intermediaries.<fnref n="22" /> Daumas himself harbored suspicions of his own translator that
proved to be unfounded.<fnref n="23" /> Another leitmotif of French colonial antisemitism in
general is the supposed cowardliness and lack of martial skills of the Jews.<fnref n="24" /> This is
contradicted in Daumas' correspondence. In his account of why the Guard
nationale was renamed in colonial Algeria, he affirmed that both Algerian Jews
and Muslim served in it.<fnref n="25" /> Yet his *Les Chevaux du Sahara* Daumas quotes Arab
expressions that compared their brave warriors with supposed Jewish cowards
who abandon their women. According to these sayings Jews were not men but
beings similar to horses that could be mounted.<fnref n="26" /> Along with this reported Arab
scorn of Jews, most of Daumas' texts were focused on the Arabs, who, along with
the Kabyle and other Algerian Muslims, put up prolonged resistance to the French
conquest. His appraisal of them mixed fear with admiration and an assurance that
with the proper management “the Arabs” could be aligned as auxiliary military
units (e. g. zaouias, spahis, and later tirailleurs) to advance France's colonial
interests. In *Les Chevaux*, Daumas' colonial discourse combined paternalism and
utilitarianism. He praised “the Arabs” for their equestrian knowledge and warrior
spirit, but he did not see them as equal. They enjoy destroying their enemies and
their equestrienne skills need to be attached to the French national interest, to
make Algeria a part of France and mobilize them in the colonial project.<fnref n="27" /> Daumas'

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 86; *Les Chevaux du Sahara*, 242, n. 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism*, 183.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Daumas, *Correspondance*, 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Ibid., 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Daumas *Les Chevaux du Sahara*, 320-21; du Barail, *Mes souvenirs*, 403.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 193, n. 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Daumas, *Les Chevaux du Sahara*, 321.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Ibid., 201, 235; Lahouari Addi, “Colonial Mythologies: Algeria in the French Imagination,” in *Franco-Arab Encounters*, eds. L. Carl Brown and Matthew Gordon (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1996), 93-105; Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria: The Archives of the Arab Bureau,” *History and Anthropology* 12, no. 4 (2001): 343-379, 370.</footnote>
own derision of Jews is expressed in his gathering, translating, and quoting Arabic sayings with these themes, helping to consolidate often repeated maxims of what would later become colonial Algerian antisemitic discourse. This, along with the idea that the Jew was uniquely responsible for Muslim revolts against colonial rule and for their impoverishment and misery,<fnref n="28" /> despite the fact that it was caused by the conquest itself,<fnref n="29" /> would be an important element of this discourse.

Another French military commander wanting to harness the Arab warrior spirit to French imperial interests was General Count François Charles du Barail (1820-1902). He fought with the spahis in Oran in 1840 against Emir Abd al-Qadir, who resisted the French conquest of Algeria. He also participated in the Battle of Isly (1844) between the French army and Morocco, and later in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), retiring in 1887. <fnref n="30" /> His memoires were published in 1894 and republished in over a dozen editions. By the time of the first publication, the Crémieux Decree (1870), which was a series of decrees establishing republican rule in colonial Algeria that politically empowered the European civilian colonial population and severely weakened the role of the military, had been in effect for over two decades. The Army, through the Bureaux arabes, saw itself as the “protector” of the native Muslim population from European civilian land grabbing, even as it continued to be responsible for putting down ongoing revolts of that population. After 1870 it was politically weaker than the civilian administration.<fnref n="31" /> In addition, with the establishment of civilian rule over all of Algeria, land was more easily privatized and expropriated from the Muslim population, which still remained under military rule and lacked citizenship. The Crémieux Decree also extended French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Despite these changed circumstances, much of du Barail's statements regarding Jews and Arabs repeated the previous theme: Arabs justifiably hate Jews, considering them worse

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 601.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Charles-Robert Ageron, *Modern Algeria A History from 1830 to the Present*, trans. and ed. Michael Brett (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991), 53-56.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Narcisse Faucon and Corneille Trumelet, *Le Livre d'or de l'Algérie, histoire politique, militaire, administrative, événements et faits principaux, biographie des hommes ayant marqué dans l'armée, les sciences, les lettres, etc.*, de 1830 à 1889, vol. 1 (Paris: Challamel, 1889), 37, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k103575v.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ John Ruedy, *Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 74.</footnote>
than dogs. To this he added the charge that Jews did not take up arms defending France while Arabs did and were not rewarded.<fnref n="32" /> He also claimed that Jews caused the 1871 Muslim revolt against colonial rule.<fnref n="33" /> Du Barail proposed to quell Muslim discontent by taking supposed Arab feelings and prejudices against Jews into consideration and respecting them.<fnref n="34" /> However, he cautioned against simply accepting Arab Muslim culture in general. Instead, he proposed that the sons of elite, wealthy Arab noble families be educated in French military schools and be allowed to become officers so they could learn French values and ways of doing things, thereby facilitating their motivation to suppress rebellions in Algeria and guard its borders.<fnref n="35" /> In this vision, Arabs were mobilized into defending colonial rule and putting down revolts of their own people in an alliance with France. It also displaced the supposed cause of these revolts from the conquest onto Algerian Jews. The basis for such an alliance was a reported shared contempt for Jews, who were seen as “the lowest stratum of society.”<fnref n="36" /> The glue of this alliance was a distain for Jews and was predicated on a fundamental inequality between the two parties, French and Muslims.

The next source I will consider, by an anonymous French officer, was published
two years before the fall of the July Monarchy (1848). It challenges the colonial
government's policy regarding religious freedom for all and preventing the
Catholic Church from proselytizing indigenous Muslims. While there was much
support for the Church among the military, many of the *colons* (French colonists)
were decidedly irreligious. <fnref n="37" /> Daumas himself applauded the arrival of the bishop
in Algiers.<fnref n="38" /> This work went considerably further calling for the conversion of

<footnote n="32">³² du Barail, *Mes souvenirs*, 403.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Ibid., 403-404.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Ibid., 404. For an analysis of Muslim attitudes towards Jews in the wake of the Crémieux degrees see Benjamin Stora, “Prologue – The Crémieux Degree” in *A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day*, eds. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ du Barail, *Mes souvenirs*, 388, 393 and 399-402.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ruedy, *Modern Algeria*, 103.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Charles-André Julien, *Histoire de l'Algérie Contemporaine La Conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827-1871)* (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 159; Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Daumas, *Correspondance*, 493.</footnote>
Muslims as a means of consolidating the conquest.<fnref n="39" /> The official policy of the colonial regime, enshrined in the Convention of Capitulation of 1830, was freedom of religion for all of the established religions, including Islam.<fnref n="40" /> However, in practice, particularly when it came to Muslim property rights, this was often violated. <fnref n="41" /> Still the government’s policy in the 1840s was to avoid allowing Catholic missionaries to proselytize Muslims. This officer acknowledged this but considered it a grave mistake because he thought that as long as the indigenous Muslims were attached to their religion, they would be an implacable enemy of France. “It is Muslim fanaticism that gives them the force to resist us.” <fnref n="42" /> To counter this he favored evangelizing them, which he assumed would facilitate their work for the colonization, especially in the field of agriculture.<fnref n="43" /> Their “warrior spirit” could be used to advance France’s civilizing mission in Africa and in the process attach a rich empire to France.<fnref n="44" /> The Arab “character,” being “simple and ignorant” and always “speaking in God’s name,” would not allow them to easily separate from their marabouts. The way to achieve conversion would be through a few *mauvais* neophytes whose children would become real Christians.<fnref n="45" /> He recommended educating the children of these new converts, along with translating the Gospel into Arabic, as a means of affecting this conversion.<fnref n="46" /> This text only makes one mention of Jews, along with non-French Europeans, in a discussion of their “petit industries” and “finesse,” which the author claimed had resulted in rising prices since the Conquest and made it impossible for city dwelling Muslims in contact with the French, to compete. As a result, they were reduced to misery.<fnref n="47" /> This theme was later expanded and repeated incessantly in French Algerian

<footnote n="39">³⁹ *De la conversion des musulmans au christianisme, considérée comme moyen d’affermir la puissance française en Algérie par un officier de l’armée d’Afrique* (Paris: J. Lecoffre 1846), accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5788849c; Julien, *Histoire de l’Algérie*, 160.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ruedy, *Modern Algeria*, 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Charles-Robert Ageron, *Les Algériens Musulman et la France (1871-1919)*, vol. I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 294 ff.; Julien, *Histoire de l’Algérie*, 91 and 240. See also Judith Surkis, who argues that France was interested in assimilating Algerian land, but not its people, *Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² *De la conversion des musulmans*, VI.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Ibid., 35.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Ibid., 37-38.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Ibid., 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Ibid., 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Ibid., 10.</footnote>
antisemitic writings, but by the end of the nineteenth century it focused
exclusively on Jews as exploiters of the indigenous Muslim population.
The Bureaux arabes, in addition to being staffed with military personnel, also
employed French interpreters, among them François Gourgeot, who later wrote a
number of books on Algeria, including *Situation politique de l'Algérie* (1881), and,
under the influence of Édouard Drumont's popular bestseller *La France juive*
(1886), *La Domination juive en Algérie* (1894). Inspired by Drumont's solution to
France's Jewish problem, he proposed the expulsion of Jews and confiscation of
their belongings.<fnref n="48" /> Prior to the publication of Drumont's antisemitic diatribe,
Gourgeot focused most of his attention on the native Muslims. He saw them as a
menace, but not simply those in Algeria. For him the entire Muslim world was a
threat. All of Europe looked to France to deal with it and the battle would be
fought in the Sahara, where effective repressive measures would be needed.<fnref n="49" />
Moreover, what was needed was a reorganization of the decadent Bureaux arabes
and an extensive system of surveillance of the Muslim population and its religious
institutions.<fnref n="50" /> For Gourgeot the most significant difference within indigenous
society was between the Muslims in the North who could be included in the
French army and those in the South who needed to be excluded, along with
anyone who was a member of a Muslim religious order. As we saw in the
anonymous work from 1846, the idea that Islam was a threat to colonial rule was
not new. However, unlike that text, Gourgeot maintained that the Islamic
traditions and laws needed to be understood and respected, including those of
collective punishment.<fnref n="51" /> Such a policy would allow France to promote
colonization in safety while insuring the prosperity of the native Muslims.

Regarding the Jews, Gourgeot saw their naturalization as a disaster that led to their
domination and caused Muslim insurrections, which he saw as an expression of
their protest over Jews being mixed in with “our political affairs.” According to
Gourgeot “the indigenous” recognize that they will be dominated as a result of the

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ F. Gourgeot, *La domination juive en Algérie* (Alger: Pierre Fontana et Co., 1894), 164, 168 cited in Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive*, 142, n. 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹F. Gourgeot, *Situation politique de l'Algérie* (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1881), 1, accessed June 5, 2023, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5788592b.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Gourgeot, *Situation politique*, 171-172.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Gourgeot, *Situation politique*, 137, 177 and 185.</footnote>
conquest, but they reject being dominated by an inferior people such as the Jews.<fnref n="52" /> Gourgeot further developed this theme of contempt that he ascribed to the “indigenous” in his *La Domination juive* (1894), describing the patron client relation between Jews and Muslims in traditional North African society as one of master to slave.<fnref n="53" /> To this he added the disdain of the French against Jews, not because of “their religion,” but because of their supposed worship of the golden calf in the Bible and supposedly engaging in a cult of conspiracy to oppress Catholics.<fnref n="54" /> Such images were part of the repertoire of nineteenth century French antisemitism, first developed by the utopian socialists and by Catholic antisemitic newspapers such as *L'Univers* and *La Croix*, and later by Drumont, showing a continuity of accusations in both colonial Algeria and France, despite religious and political differences. These images reprised similar themes of classic Christian antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as worshipers of gold, as usurers and traitors, along with the notion that the very name “Jew” was synonymous with these evil traits.<fnref n="55" /> Alongside the military, the Catholic Church was a major institution in colonial Algeria. Until the 1860s, its efforts at evangelizing Muslims were resisted by the authorities, even though it had benefited from the confiscation of mosques that were turned into churches. The colonial government permitted the Church to provide medical services and other works of charity to the Muslim population,

<footnote n="52">⁵² Ibid., 87 and 97.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Gourgeot, *La domination juive en Algérie*, 52-53.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Ibid., 21: "Ils mettent sur la paille des milliers de familles, ils les détestent, enfin, parce qu'ils sont Juifs et que ce nom seul comporte en soi tous les attributs impurs qui caractérisent leur maudite race!"</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Drumont *La France juive*, 4, 34 and 67; Alphonse Toussenel, *Les Juifs, rois de l'époque: histoire de la féodalité financière*, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion 1886), xx. Toussenel's work was first published in 1847. See also F. Picard, "Les Juifs," *La Croix*, February, 1882, 723-726 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k503606z/f3/item; Denis Durocher, "Variétés Le juif contemporain," *L'Univers*, October 14, 1884, n. p. [5, col. 6-6, col. 1] https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k704986b/f3.item; Louis Veuillot, "Les Juifs," *L'Univers*, November 12, 1869, n. p. [1, col. 1], https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k698197n/f1.item; Pierre Sorlin, "*La Croix* et les Juifs : (1880-1899), contribution à l'histoire de l'antisémitisme contemporain* (Paris: B. Grasset, 1967); Auguste Chirac, *Les Rois de la République: Histoire des juiveries. Synthèse historique & monographies*, 3 vols (Paris: P. Arnould, 1883-1889); Marc Angenot, "«Un juif trahira» : La préfiguration de l'Affaire Dreyfus (1886-1894)," *Romantisme* 87 (1995): 87-114; Sharon Vance, "Antisemitism and Socialist Strategy 1880-1917: France and colonial Algeria," *Patterns of Prejudice* 51, no. 3-4 (2017): 292-317; See "juif," in *Dictionnaire de l'Académie*, 9th ed., http://atilf.atilf.fr/academie9.htm. Links accessed June 5, 2023.</footnote>
relieving it from having to invest resources in their welfare. This continued under
successive French republican governments despite the policies of anticlericalism
(*laïcité*), which were never implemented overseas, where these same governments
saw the Catholic orders advancing the French language and French colonial
interest.<fnref n="56" /> *Laïcité* was not for export.

One important Church official in the early years of the conquest was Antoine-
Adolphe Dupuch (1809-1856), who served as the first bishop of Algiers authorized
by the government in 1838. In addition to his duties to the Church and its
congregation, he also intervened on behalf of French soldiers and civilians held in
captivity by the Emir Abd al-Qadir.<fnref n="57" /> After the Emir was defeated in 1846 and
imprisoned, in violation of the terms of his surrender, Dupuch wrote an appeal on
his behalf. This was part of a campaign to persuade the French government to
honor its commitment by engaging the French public, including religious
Catholics, to get him released. One way of doing this was to show the Emir's high
regard for Christianity, particularly in comparison to Judaism, which, according
to Dupuch, the Emir dismissed as a rude and terrible religion. In this appeal Abd
al-Qadir praised Christianity as sweeter, as granting of indulgence and enjoying
the bounty of God.<fnref n="58" /> The text reminds French readers of Abd al-Qadir's humane
treatment of French prisoners under his authority, in contrast to the brutality of
French forces under General Bugeaud's command. Dupuch alluded to this while
giving an obfuscated appraisal of the "humanity" of General Bugeaud. He stated
that the Emir reacted to the attacks against the indigenous civilian population with
red faced silence.<fnref n="59" /> The appeal on the Emir's behalf ends with his solemn oath to
be a loyal helper to France and not engage in any activity contrary to French or
Christian interests.<fnref n="60" /> It included a promise to serve the French and Christians from
his new home of exile. Once again Arab Muslims function in this discourse as
auxiliaries and helpers to French overseas ambitions, and in the process of

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Pierre Vermeren, *La France en terre d'islam: Empire colonial et religions, XIXe-XXe siècles* (Paris: Belin, 2016), 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Faucon and Trumelet, *Le Livre d'or de l'Algérie*, 240-241.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Antoine-Adolphe Dupuch, *Abd-el-Kader au château d'Amboise: Dédié à M. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte* (Bordeaux: Impr. de H. Faye, 1848), 33, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5740408g.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Ibid., 60-61.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Ibid., 6, Abd-el-Kader, Letter to Dupuch, n.d., translated by M. l'abbé J. Roth, à Bordeaux.</footnote>
consummating this relationship, Judaism and Jews are invoked disparagingly by
contrast, as if the love of one necessitated the hatred of the other. The Emir was
eventually released after a number of his family members died in French captivity
and made his home in Syria.

Attempts at proselytizing Muslims, along with contempt for Judaism, continued
in the writings of a number of Church officials in colonial Algeria, including: the
second Archbishop of Algiers, Louis-Antoine Pavy, who served two decades in
that role starting in 1846; an anonymous former priest from Laghouat; and an 1875
address of the Archbishop of Algiers, Charles Lavigerie, at a religious service for
the army.<fnref n="61" /> In addition to encouraging the conversion of Muslims, all of these
Church officials denounced the official French colonial tolerance of Islam, which
they felt was a major insurrectionary agent. They also had universal disdain for
Judaism and were convinced that Muslims shared this, including an indictment of
Jewish supposed attempted deicide.<fnref n="62" /> Added to this charge was the accusation that
Algerian Jews were destabilizing the French conquest.

Louis-Antoine Pavy was the second Archbishop of Algiers, serving two decades in
that role starting in 1846.<fnref n="63" /> One of his published works that treated the subject of
Jews, Arabs and Muslims was his *Histoire critique du culte de la sainte Vierge en
Afrique, depuis le commencement du christianisme jusqu'à nos jours*, published
in 1858. According to Pavy, there was an active cult of the Virgin Mary in North
Africa, but the Arab “invasion” led to its destruction and that of Christian
buildings, along with many martyrs and weak apostates.<fnref n="64" /> His treatment of
Muslims is mostly negative, stating that they engage in absurd polemics in the

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Gérard Grimaud, *Les catholiques d’Algérie et leur église: histoire et tragédie : 1830-1954* (Paris: Harmattan, 2012), 366; Louis Antoine Augustin Pavy, *Histoire critique du culte de la Sainte Vierge en Afrique depuis le commencement du christianisme jusqu’à nos jours* (Alger: Bastide, 1858), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5806799b; Les Arabes et L’Occupation Restreinte en Algérie par un Ancien Curé de Laghouat (Paris: Challamel Libraire-Éditeur, 1866), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5788849c?rk=21459; [Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie], *L’Armée et la mission de la France en Afrique: discours prononcé dans la cathédrale d’Alger le 25 avril 1875 pour l’inauguration du service religieux dans l’Armée d’Afrique* (Alger: Librairie A. Jourdan, Éditeur (Ancienne Maison Bastide), 1875), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k103769n. Links accessed June 5, 2023,</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Pavy, *Histoire critique du culte*, 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Grimaud, *Les catholiques d’Algérie*, 366.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Pavy, *Histoire critique du culte*, 49; Addi, “Colonial Mythologies,” 103.</footnote>
defense of their religion, are intolerant, fanatic and persecute Christians. However, they are also curious about Christian processions,<fnref n="65" /> prompting the idea that open affirmation of the religious truth of Catholicism is better than dissimilitude. The work ends with a celebratory summary of the building of churches, cathedrals, seminaries, and hymns devoted to Saint Mary. No such ambivalence exists regarding the Archbishop’s appraisal of Jews they are the enemies of Christ and according to the Quran, they tried to crucify him, but God substituted him with Judas.<fnref n="66" /> During times of draught when the Jews pray for rain, they make matters worse with their noisy confused litanies.<fnref n="67" />

A more severe rebuke of Jews attributed to Arabs and Muslims was published in 1866 by an anonymous former priest from Laghouat, to which was amended a letter from Abbé Sauve on the Quran, and a collection of various anti-Jewish folklore attributed to Arab and Spanish sources.<fnref n="68" /> The main text provides a historical overview of the condition of the Jews of Algeria starting with their situation prior to the French conquest and stating that in the beginning they were happy with the arrival of the French because the Muslims attacked them violently. However, by the time of this publication they were lording it over the Muslims because the French treated them as equals, using them as intermediaries. France was doing this despite the Jews’ attempt to kill Christ, according to the Muslims, and their defeat by Muhammad.<fnref n="69" /> Now Muslims had contempt for the French and were preparing a holy war due to their pact with the Jews.<fnref n="70" /> They tolerated minor abuses of the administration, but they would not accept an affront to their religion.<fnref n="71" /> Despite this seeming concern for supposed Muslim feelings, particularly as expressed in deicidal accusations, this former priest stated that the Quran was the most implacable enemy in Algeria and its teaching should be proscribed.<fnref n="72" /> In addition, he was against the policy of a limited occupation. Instead, he advocated

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Ibid., 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Ibid., 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Ibid., 79.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ *Les Arabes et L'Occupation Restreinte.*</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Ibid., 38-39.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Ibid., 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Ibid., 63.</footnote>
the closing of Quranic schools and opening of Christian schools in their place.<fnref n="73" /> When the government officials attempted to support the Muslim cult by repairing mosques, but refrained from entering Catholic houses of worship, the Muslims concluded that the French are godless. In order to counter this the Catholic Church and the activity of its priests should be vigorously supported, not suppressed in colonial Algeria.<fnref n="74" /> As was the case with the nameless military officer, we see the advocacy of evangelizing Muslims promoted anonymously. Alongside this is the consistent claim that France's reliance on Jews and supposed granting equality to them was provoking the anger of the Muslims. It should be noted that in 1866 at the time of this publication, while French Jews were full citizens of France, Algerian Jews were not. The assumption was that Muslim anti-Jewish hatred and contempt along with indignation over their supposed elevation was arousing Muslim anger, and not the colonization itself, nor the violent actions of the army, nor the attitude of its representatives and of Church officials.

The final clerical statement I will consider is a public pronouncement by the Archbishop of Algiers Charles Lavigerie in 1875 on the occasion of the inauguration of religious service for the army. His statement emphasized the merging of French patriotism and the Catholic Church. According to Lavigerie, France's conquest of Algeria was a crusade, Christianity would provide just rule for the indigenous, and the Church should proselytize among the Kabyles, who were supposedly former Christians and closer to the French than they were to the Arabs. This was part of the French colonial rhetoric that helped justify the conquest.<fnref n="75" />

Regarding the Jews, the Archbishop claimed that they promoted Abd al-Qader's revolt with their gold.<fnref n="76" /> Lavigerie had prior encounters with Jews growing up in France. In his youth he forcibly led young Jews to the baptismal fount.<fnref n="77" /> The

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Ibid., 51.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Ibid., 41-45.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ [Lavigerie], *L'armée et la mission*, 25 and 28-29. See Karima Dirèche, "Les écoles catholiques dans la Kabylie du XIXe siècle," *Cahiers de la Méditerranée* 75 (2008): 1-13; on the Kabyle myth see Patricia M. E. Lorcin, *Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria* (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995).</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Ibid., 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Claude Thiébaut, “Les Manifestations Pour Le Centenaire De La Naissance Du Cardinal Lavigerie (Rome, Alger, Tunis Et Paris, 1925),” *Revue Historique* 291, no. 2 (1994): 361-399. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40955760.</footnote>
evangelizing he promoted in Algeria vis a vis the Kabyle Muslims had its source in
this aggressive proselytizing of French Jews. Lavigerie gave a more expansive
treatment of Jews in his history of the Church of Saint Anne in Jerusalem. He
admitted that the early Church consisted of Jews, but this does not mean that he
held them in high esteem. He quoted a devotional hymn describing Saint Anne as
a rose among thorns, that is to say the Jews, in case the reader missed the
metaphor.<fnref n="78" /> He claimed that during the reign of Caliph Hakim it was the Jews
who instigated the bloody attacks against Christians.<fnref n="79" /> He admitted that Salah al-
Din, according to Arab historians, turned the Church of Saint Anne into a
madrassah,<fnref n="80" /> but also stated that these historians provided precious records on the
Church and Saint Anne's tomb.<fnref n="81" /> Later its abandonment to Islam over the
centuries left it devastated, but the interior was not hurt because the Muslims were
afraid to enter and pillage it.<fnref n="82" /> Finally, it was snatched from the “infidels” by a
Frenchman in 1861.<fnref n="83" /> While Muslim conduct varied over time, in this account the
supposed animosity and hatred of the Jews was constant, including their hatred of
Christian holy places, despite their knowledge of them.<fnref n="84" /> Their thorny, debased
state and their hatred is contrasted against the Mother of God from whom would
be born the Lamb of God, who will erase sin from the world, and the place of her
birth should be restored to the Catholic Church for its glory and the glory of
France.<fnref n="85" /> When looking at both works it is apparent that Lavigerie’s attitudes
towards Algerian Jews are intertwined with his attitudes towards Jews and Judaism
in general.

In both the published works of the highest-ranking military officers and the
officials of the Catholic Church in Algeria there is a consistent theme of uniform
contempt and disdain for Jews and Judaism, often placed in the mouth of Muslims
and Arabs, who are assumed to have even greater, violent, disgust as expressed in

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, *Sainte Anne de Jérusalem et sainte Anne d'Auray, lettre à Mgr l'évêque de Vannes par l'archevêque d'Alger [Mgr Lavigerie]* (Saint-Cloud: Belin, 1879), 14, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5777408g.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Ibid., 47.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Ibid., 60-61.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Ibid., 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² Ibid., 76-78.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Ibid., 75-76.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Ibid., 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Ibid., 9-10, 18, 25, 72-73 and 75.</footnote>
their folklore that portray Jews as sub-human. In these texts Muslims and
Christians share this antipathy, universalizing it, and creating the conditions for
mobilizing a united front of colons and indigenous against the Jews, a theme that
would be taken up by the “anti-juive” crisis at the end of the nineteenth century.<fnref n="86" />
The Church and the officer corps were not the only institutions disseminating
these ideas. Journalists and politicians also propagated them. Pierre Pascal Duprat
(1815-1885) was both. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and edited the
journal *Revue Indépendante* and a number of other republican journals. He also
served as a professor at the Lausanne Academy, later to become the University of
Lausanne.<fnref n="87" /> His *Essai Historique sur les Races anciennes et modernes de
L'Afrique septentrionale* (1845) is a relatively early work whose ‘racial’
characterizations would be repeated later in the century. It describes both Jews and
Arabs, with more attention on the latter. It contains the same themes we have seen
so far in more detail. According to Duprat, Jews are a wandering people who never
mingled with others and were vagabonds;<fnref n="88" /> they were always dominated, but kept
to themselves.<fnref n="89" /> The Jews of North Africa do not look like Berbers or Arabs but
are the same type as those of Europe with the same expression of calculation,
defiance and ruse, due to persecution.<fnref n="90" /> They have a desire for vengeance, with
savage rude instincts, following the bloody tracks of the lions of the French army
like jackals; they suffer from sick flesh and live in wetlands. <fnref n="91" /> Thanks to the
security and improvements in hygiene provided by the conquest, and the
fecundity of their women, their population is growing, but they will not be able
to dominate because they are a small portion of the total. Despite their
resemblance to European Jews, African Jews are more corrupt due to Arab
domination since antiquity. They are known to dissimulate due to persecution.
Jews could be useful for France, but it is dangerous to associate with them. They

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Dermejian, *La Crise anti-juive*, 205; Abitbol, *Mi-Kremyeh le-Peten*, 45.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Lorcin, *Imperial Identities*, 300; Pascal Duprat (1815-1885), accessed June 5, 2023, http://data.bnf.fr/14428722/pascal_duprat/.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Pascal Duprat, *Essai Historique sur les Races anciennes et modernes de L'Afrique septentrionale* (Paris: Jules Labitte, Libraire-Éditeur, 1845), 215 and 232-233, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1058849.</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Ibid., 253-254.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Ibid., 259.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Ibid., 261-262.</footnote>
need to be kept in check, so they don't ruin the majesty of French power. They
engage in shameful speculation, industrial abuse; behind private and public
scandal is always the figure of the Jew. France's character suffers as a result of this
alliance with Jews that corrupt its mores and life. The Turks and Arabs hold Jews
in contempt. France will lose its authority should it associate with a people of such
unworthy character who are not capable of marching with it.<fnref n="92" />

Duprat's treatment of Arabs is seemingly more laudatory. Unlike Jews who have always been dominated, Arabs had the highest civilization, thanks to the genius of Muhammad and his leadership.<fnref n="93" /> Prior to this they lacked discipline, but he gave them religion, laws, and power, allowing them to conquer the world.<fnref n="94" /> France needs to study the history and literature of the Arabs, because they were the former conquerors and the French, as the latest imperial power, are in need of their knowledge.<fnref n="95" /> Arab geographers are the guides and masters of North Africa.<fnref n="96" /> But Arabs cannot be treated as one treats European nations, they are a people of the desert, restless and on the move. France should not have made a pact with Abd al-Qadir, because prior to this the Arabs were divided and isolated, but in 1845, they are united and can rally around a religious fanatic marabout and rebel. They still have great power and France needs to be careful in dealing with them.<fnref n="97" /> France instead should align with the Berbers rather than neglect and irritate them, as they are more ancient on this soil than the other peoples and they exercised more than once the greatest influence over the destiny of this territory. They are the race of the mountain whose “hymen” has never been “penetrated” and have a temperament of stone.<fnref n="98" />

Duprat subscribed to a racialized conception of humanity that was determined by
geography and climate, which he assumed influences the character of these
“races.”<fnref n="99" /> His description of Algeria consisted of a hierarchy of races, based on
their supposed character, how useful they were to French interests, how they

<footnote n="92">⁹² Ibid., 383-385.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Ibid., v and 197.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Ibid., 198.</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ Ibid., viii.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Ibid., 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Ibid., 264, 289, 291 and 294.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Ibid., 255 and 297; Surkis, *Sex, Law and Sovereignty*, 84.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Ibid., 262.</footnote>
responded to the conquest, and how amendable they were to accepting it. He drew
on long standing stereotypes from a variety of sources, including classical Greek
and Roman authors, along with translations of Arabic poetry. According to
Duprat the French are the Greeks of modernity. <fnref n="100" /> It is beyond the scope of this
paper to trace the sources of these accumulated stereotypes. However, many of his
ideas echo those of the military and clerical sources presented so far. In turn, his
more detailed characterization, along with geographic and racial determinism, his
distrust and admiration of Arabs and Arab civilization, and his complete disdain
for Jews, all became an important source for ideas that were to follow, including
those later developed by Gustave Le Bon.

Le Bon was one of the founders of social psychology and the author of the
immensely successful book *The Crowd*. He also published works on Arabs and
Jews, including a multivolume work entitled *La Civilisation des Arabes* (1884),
and an article published in 1888 in *Revue Scientifique* under the discipline of
ethnography entitled “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,”<fnref n="101" /> and
discussed Jews in his *Les Premières Civilisations* (1889). <fnref n="102" /> In addition to
reproducing the same racialized descriptions of Duprat, he also discussed French
colonial rule in Algeria. While his work on Arab civilization is full of praise for
Muslim architectural achievements, their establishing of a vast empire and their
martial skills, he has nothing but contempt for Jews, placing them at the bottom
of a hierarchy of civilizations.<fnref n="103" /> Although he sees Jews and Arabs as “Semites” in
his ethnography of the Jews, in his *Civilisation des Arabes*, he states that it seems

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 54-55 and 262.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Gustave Le Bon, *La civilisation des Arabes* (Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1884). At least one translation into Arabic was published recently: ‘Ādil Zu’aytar and Gustave Le Bon, *Haḍārat al-’Arab*, 2010, n. p. . A republication has also appeared in Algeria: Gustave Le Bon, *La civilisation des Arabes* (Alger: Casbah éditions, 2009); Le Bon, “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,” *Revue Scientifique* 25, no. 13 (1888): 386-93, accessed June 5, 2023, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2151111/f389.item.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Gustave Le Bon, *Les premières civilisations* (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1889).</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Le Bon, “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,” 387, “... ce petit peuple juif, intolérant, égoïste, vaniteux et féroce, mais ils se greffèrent sur l’idée de monothéisme local vers laquelle a toujours plus ou moins penché l’esprit exclusif et simpliste des Sémites demi-barbares, tel que les Juifs et les Arabes.”</footnote>
insulting to associate the two peoples together and in a footnote claims that Arabs consider Jews less than human.<fnref n="104" />

When comparing Le Bon's treatment of Arabs and Jews often the same traits praised in the former are disparaged in the latter. One example is the trait of nomadism. In his ethnographic article he states that the origins of the Jews were an obscure tribe of ignorant nomads without culture whose beliefs have no scientific value. <fnref n="105" /> Yet in his account of Arabs, their origins, and their environment, he describes the fierce and noble allure of the Arab nomads of the desert, which strikes all travelers. And while they are semi-savage and do not have the artifice of civilization, they are intelligent, and their life of freedom and independence in the desert has charm, and, according to Le Bon, is preferable to that of working in a stultifying factory for twelve hours a day.<fnref n="106" /> The desert itself takes on different qualities depending on whether it is associated with Jews or Arabs. In his essay on “the Jews” he states that Semitic spirit suffers from its monotonous, vague, and grandiose horizons, apparently losing its charm as a result of this association.<fnref n="107" /> As noted above, both Jews and Arabs are Semites according the Le Bon, and share a number of common traits and origins, such as nomadism and desert dwelling, charming among Arabs, but the source of ignorance and aridity among the Jews who, unlike them, contributed nothing positive to civilization.<fnref n="108" />

In all of these sources, Jews and Muslims are seen as fanatic, their religions as primitive. Yet Jews and Judaism are singled out for particular defamation. For Catholics they are treasonous and deicidal. For Le Bon the God of Israel is jealous, intolerant, and demanding of massacres, sacrifices, and holocausts, and the Old Testament, showing the real history of the Jews, is full of stories of adultery, incest, prostitution, and summary executions.<fnref n="109" /> His appraisal is anything but original.

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Le Bon, *Civilisation Arabe*, 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Le Bon, “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,” 386 and 389.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Le Bon, *Civilisation Arabe*, 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Le Bon, “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,” 389. “Il ne précise rien, il n’enferme rien dans les formes nettes, arrêtées et multiples, si facilement créées par l’imagination aryenne. Aujourd’hui encore, malgré son islamisme apparent, le Bédouin du désert n’a qu’une religion bien vague et qui ne le préoccupe guère.”</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 386.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 387-388.</footnote>
The French Communard Gustave Tridon claimed Jews committed cannibalism.<fnref n="110" />
The Jews form part of the inferior races lacking in civilization, even constituting
an obstacle it. Their malevolence goes back to Antiquity, as does their mercantile,
vengeful, avaricious character. They were opposed to Greeks and Romans, Aryans
who are conveyors of Western Civilization. Arabs, on the other hand, are noble
Semites who built a great civilization under the genius of Muhammad, whose
occupation as a merchant is downplayed or not mentioned at all. In contrast Jews
are associated with exploitative merchants but are sometimes useful and necessary
as middlemen. For Le Bon the traits shared by both “Semites” are positive when
applied to Arabs, as long as they stay in their place as auxiliary helpers overseas,
and negatively when applied to Jews, who also live in Europe but are neither
European nor real French and can never assimilate into French society. Le Bon also
excluded certain Muslims from his positive appraisal, particularly the Kabyle, who
seemed to be amendable to evangelizing. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Le
Bon, who demanded the complete separation of Occidentals from Orientals, had
such contempt for the Kabyle.<fnref n="111" /> This could also account for his hatred of Jews,
who existed in both the East and the West, despite their “semitic race” and Asiatic
origins.<fnref n="112" /> Yet the claim that Jews constituted an inferior, non-Western race was
not unique to him, or even nineteenth century writers associated with the political
right. Socialists also made such claims.<fnref n="113" />

Le Bon also wrote a series of articles against the French Third Republic's colonial
policy and in particular against its educational and assimilationist policies towards
the Arabs. This was not due to an anti-imperialist stance per se, however. He
praised the British for refraining from trying to change the mores and culture of
the natives in India and stated that those who received a British education were
demanding independence and that the same would occur in Algeria if the French
government adopted such a policy.<fnref n="114" /> For Le Bon the goal was not Algerian
independence, but maintaining French control while keeping apart from the

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Gustave Tridon, *Du molochisme juif: études critiques et philosophiques* (Bruxelles: E. Maheu, 1884), 127-128, accessed June 5, 2023, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62073w.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ Gustave Le Bon, “L’Algérie et les idées régnantes en France en matière de colonisation,” *Revue Scientifique (Revue Rose)* 24, no. 15 (1887): 449-457; 454, n. 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Le Bon, “Rôle des Juifs dans l’histoire de la civilisation,” 387 and 392.</footnote>

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ Vance, “Antisemitism and Socialist Strategy.”</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Le Bon, ‘L’Algérie, 449, 451-452</footnote>
indigenous population, following the British model of leaving the “natives alone” so they would be content with their lot. Finally, he invoked the precedent of Rome’s collapse, saying it was caused by extending citizenship to the “barbarians.”<sup>115</sup> Le Bon’s ideas combined racial determinism, collective psychology, and the valorization of the irrational with an anti-modernist, aristocratic anti-republican admiration of the Arabs as the embodiment of traditions and virtues lost among the French due to the mercantile capitalist spirit embodied by the Jews.<sup>116</sup>

This association of Jews with capitalism is part of a larger nineteenth century antisemitic literature that often recycled the earlier myths (e.g., “Jewish usury”), and combined them with a reactionary, anti-modernist, anti-democratic political ideology. The idea that Jewish merchants and Jewish capitalists were uniquely powerful and could ruin national economies was accepted on both the French Left and the Right.<sup>117</sup> Algerian Jews were accused of impoverishing the native Muslim population. This claim was at first accepted by the French socialist and later Dreyfusard Jean Jaurès.<sup>118</sup> As we have seen, it also was voiced by an anonymous French military officer in 1846. What Le Bon admired in the Arabs was their global conquests, something equally admired by the French military officials discussed above, and their monumental architecture. It is curious that he was completely against “intermixing with conquered people” and downplayed it his discussion of Arab and Islamic civilization despite the fact that this intermixing was pervasive in the Arab conquest and expansion of Islam. Despite his apparent praise for Arab civilization Le Bon subscribed to the theory that the Orientals, which included the Arabs, were fundamentally different, and that they should not intermingle with the West.<sup>119</sup>

<footnote n="115"><sup>115</sup> Ibid., 449, 454-457.</footnote>

<footnote n="116"><sup>116</sup> Pierre Birnbaum, *La France aux Français: histoire des haines nationalistes* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 268-271; Zeev Sternhell, *La droite révolutionnaire (1885-1914). Les origines françaises du fascisme* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), 17, 148-149.</footnote>

<footnote n="117"><sup>117</sup> Birnbaum, *La France aux Français*, Sternhell, *Ibid*; Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, ed., *Antisémythes: l'image des Juifs entre culture et politique, 1848-1939* (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2005); Vance, “Antisemitism and Socialist Strategy.”</footnote>

<footnote n="118"><sup>118</sup> Ibid., 295.</footnote>

<footnote n="119"><sup>119</sup> Le Bon, “L’Algérie,” 456-457.</footnote>
From all of these works a number of repetitive themes become apparent. Arabs
and Muslims detest Jews and see them as sub-human. The clergy added that
Muslims prefer Christianity to Judaism and that Muslims revere Jesus and believe
Jews tried to kill him, but God saved him. These themes were articulated by
military and religious officials, as well as by politicians such as Duprat, before
Drumont published his influential *La France juive* (1886). They were repeated
afterwards. For the military and intellectuals such as Duprat, and Le Bon, as well
as the more well-known leaders of the antisemitic movement such as Édouard
Drumont and Georges Meynié, one of Drumont’s disciples in Algeria and author
of the derivatively titled *L’Algérie Juive* (1887), their supposed character made
them unworthy of association with the French. For all of these writers, both
religious and secular, the Arabs are brave, fierce, and important role models due to
their world conquest and martial skills. For the colonial agents in Algeria, once
conquered, the Arabs would be loyal to France and willing to die for it in its hour
of need.<fnref n="120" /> For Drumont, the Arabs did their duty as soldiers in the Franco-
Prussian war, scaring the Prussians, like tigers rushing into the front and “black
devils,” with their savage cries.<fnref n="121" /> These heroic Arabs, after fighting the French for
so long defended them in their hour of need.<fnref n="122" /> While Arabs fought for France,
Jews, according to Drumont, applauded their defeat with the most indecent
cynicism.<fnref n="123" /> Indigenous Jews are incapable of being soldiers; in case of an Arab
insurrection they would not be able to march with the real French and they would
provide a bad example. Drumont had been the instigator of the Dreyfus Affair,
which tore France apart after Captain Dreyfus was falsely accused of spying for
Germany.<fnref n="124" /> Their presence in French ranks would endanger the fidelity of the
Muslim auxiliaries.<fnref n="125" /> Drumont repeated the antisemitic claims that Jews are also

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰ Drumont, *La France juive*, vol. 2, 11; Meynié, *L’Algérie Juive*, 54 and 159.</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ Drumont, *La France juive*, vol. 2, 12, “Ces ‘diables noirs,’ comme les appelaient les Prussiens, qui bondissaient sous la mitraille, avaient émerveillé l’ennemi à Wissembourg et à Woerth. Albert Duruy, qui, pour aller de suite au feu, s’était engagé parmi ces tirailleurs algériens, m’a raconté maintes fois l’effet presque fantastique qu’ils produisaient avec leurs cris sauvages, leur joie en entendant parler la poudre, leur façon de se ruer en avant comme des tigres. Pour ce camarade, qu’ils nommaient ‘le fils du vizir,’ ces farouches avaient à la fois du respect et de l’affection.”</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³ Ibid., 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ Eric Cahm, *The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics* (London: Longman, 1966), 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ Drumont, *La France juive*, vol. 2, 25.</footnote>
responsible for the impoverishment and exploitation of the Arabs after their lands
were expropriated.<fnref n="126" /> All these themes were taken up and expanded upon by G.
Meynié, in his *L'Algérie juive*, including stereotypes about “fanatic Arabs,” the
‘pitiful’ state of the Jews before the French conquest, and their engagement in
shameful commerce under the protection of France.<fnref n="127" /> Once again Arabs are
praised for their martial skills, which could be mobilized for France if it did not
continue to protect the supposedly exploitative Jews at their expense. He also
accused “the Jews” of exploiting European colonists.<fnref n="128" />

All of these writers shifted responsibility for Muslim discontent from the effects
of the colonial regime onto the Jews, using reported Arabs and Muslim statements
of contempt and dehumanization. According to accounts published after 1870
Muslims revolted because of the Crémieux Decree; Arabs were supposedly upset
over Jewish involvement in French metropole and colonial politics. For the
military and intellectuals such as Duprat, and Le Bon, and publicists such as
Drumont and Meynié, Arabs will eventually accept colonial occupation and even
their inferior status under it, but not the equality of the Jews as French citizens.
According to them, Jews are universally despised. Sources published before and
after 1870 make the same claims. Jews were saved by France from a humiliating
existence under Muslim rule. They are not trustworthy and not worthy of French
citizenship. Their nature is to be avaricious, vengeful, and greedy exploiters of
both colons and Muslims; Jews are the enemy of both by nature.

Given the intense antipathy of this antisemitic rhetoric it should not be surprising
to learn that it led to real violence against Jews, which exploded throughout
colonial Algeria during the Dreyfus Affair. However, there were incidents prior to
this, including in the 1880s, seemingly provoked by objections to Algerian Jewish
soldiers attending dances for military recruits, and after elections when the losing
political party blamed “the Jews” for their defeat.<fnref n="129" /> In 1897 and 1898 antisemites
in Algeria, calling themselves antijuifs, organized politically, establishing

<footnote n="126">¹²⁶ Ibid. 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="127">¹²⁷ Meynié, *L'Algérie Juive*, 3-4 and 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="128">¹²⁸ Ibid., 35 and 139.</footnote>

<footnote n="129">¹²⁹ Zosa Szajkowski, "Socialists and Radicals in the Development of Antisemitism in Algeria (1884-1900)," *Jewish Social Studies* 10, no. 3 (1948): 257-280; Fernand Grégoire, *La juiverie algérienne* (Alger: impr. Torrent, 1888); Meynié, *L'Algérie juive* (Paris: A. Savine, 1887).</footnote>
newspapers and printing election paraphernalia that vilified and dehumanized
Jews.<fnref n="130" /> Many won their elections in Oran, Algiers, and other cities in colonial
Algeria, taking over municipalities and excluding Jews from public sector
employment, from vital municipal services such as schools and hospitals and even
from the public space, threatening to expel them from Algeria.<fnref n="131" /> In those two
years there were violent riots throughout Algeria. These were not put down until
the French government, motivated by the antijuifs' threatens of succession,
arrested the leadership, and imposed martial law, leading to the weakening of their
movement. Yet antisemitism lived on among colonial administrators and the
general population and resurfaced during the Vichy regime.<fnref n="132" />

Attempts at mobilizing Muslims and Arabs in the violence at the end of the
nineteenth century overall failed. Although individuals from these communities
took part in the riots, their leadership warned against collaborating with the
colonists, given the ongoing structural inequality and violence of the colonial
regime. <fnref n="133" /> The twentieth century would see more violence, including violence
directed against Algerian Jews and would eventually lead to their mass exodus in
1962 when Algeria achieved its independence. <fnref n="134" /> The antisemitic rhetoric

<footnote n="130">130 Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive*, 126-130, 132 and 143-144; Dermenjian, “La Caricature comme élément du discours antisémite européen en Algérie (1830-1939),” in *Antisémythes*, ed. Matard-Bonucci, 395-410; Sharon Vance, “Antisemitism in Colonial Algeria and France in the 19th & early 20th centuries,” (Paper Presented at the International Workshop and Conference Jewish Historical Writing: 140 years to Heinrich Graetz’s “History of the Jewish People,” 9-11 March 2015, Western Galilee College, Akko, Israel); Vance, “Antisemitism and Socialist Strategy,” discusses the history of antisemitic rhetoric in both France and colonial Algeria, and the connections between them, along with its expression in violence in colonial Algeria, particularly among those who self-identified as socialists. For an example of a particularly violent cartoon see E. Herzig, *Supplément Illustré de L’Antijuif Algérien*, April 3, 1898, 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">131 Abitbol, *Mi-Kremyeh le-Petén*, 45; Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive*, 142.</footnote>

<footnote n="132">132 Abitbol, *Mi-Kremyeh le-Petén*; Pierre Birnbaum, *The Antisemitic Moment* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 [1998]); Dermenjian, *La crise anti-juive*, Michael M. Laskier, *North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria* (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Henri Msellati, *Les juifs d'Algérie sous le régime de Vichy: 10 juillet 1940-3 novembre 1943* (Paris: Harmatta, 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="133">133 Ageron, “Une révolution manquée: la crise anti-juive,” in *Les Algériens musulmans*, vol. I (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 583-606; Ruedy, *Modern Algeria*.</footnote>

<footnote n="134">134 Richard Ayoun and Bernard Cohen, *Les Juifs d'Algérie 2000 ans d'histoire* (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1982)</footnote>
incessantly repeated throughout the nineteenth century helped pave the way for
this violence.

Accompanying this rhetoric were seeming complements paid to Arabs and to a
lesser extent to Muslims in general. However, the compliments by these
antisemitic writers, including Le Bon, were backhanded and reinforced colonial
discourse and power relations. Yet even this was not extended to Jews, who were
threatened with expulsion.

It has been claimed that antisemitism among some Arabs today is the same as the
old European antisemitism.<fnref n="135" /> To what extent these generals, bishops, politicians,
journalists and publicists and their attitudes towards Jews influenced and still
influence the ongoing spread of antisemitic discourse in France and in the Arab
and Muslim world in later decades needs to be studied, and the focus needs to be
on an analysis of the content, its means of transmission and distribution, and its
possible impact on violence and antisemitic hate crimes.<fnref n="136" /> When considering
antisemitism among Muslims it is important to remember that these nineteenth
century works are not the only sources for the animosity, and that there are also
Islamic texts disparaging Jews, yet if such stereotypes and this rhetoric sound
familiar, these nineteenth century texts from colonial Algeria are some of their
sources.

**Sharon Vance** is an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University in the History and Geography Department where she teaches courses in Middle Eastern and North African History, Jewish History, the Holocaust, World history and US history. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 from the Department of

<footnote n="135">135 Saïd Ben Saïd, “L’antisémitisme des Arabes aujourd’hui est le même que le vieil antisémitisme européen,” *Le Monde*, November 6, 2017. Accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/11/06/said-ben-said-l-antisemitisme-des-arabes-aujourd-hui-est-le-meme-que-le-vieil-antisemitisme-europeen_5210836_3232.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="136">136 An example of such research is Monika Hübscher and Sabine Von Mering, “A Snapshot of Antisemitism on Social Media in 2021,” in *Antisemitism on social media*, eds. Monika Hübscher and Sabine Von Mering (London: Routledge, 2022), 1-16; Navras J. Aafreedi, “Antisemitic Rhetoric in Urdu on YouTube: An Analysis,” in *Antisemitism on social media*, 114-128; Service de Protection de la Communauté Juif, “2017 Rapport sur l’antisémitisme en France,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.antisemitisme.fr/dl/2017-FR.</footnote>
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Some of her publications include: *The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint* (Leiden: Brill, 2011); “Conversione, apostasia e martirio: Il caso di Sol Hatchuel,” *Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana della Storiche* 6, no.2 (2007), 75-100, (trans. Giovanni Campolo); “Sol Hatchuel, ‘heroine of the 19th Century.’” Gender, the Jewish Question, and Colonial Discourse,” in *Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa*, eds. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011); “Hatchuel, Sol (Lalla Solika),” in *Encyclopedia Of Jews In The Islamic World* (Leiden: Brill, 2010); “Judeo-Arabic,” *Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish History, Religion, and Culture*, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and “Antisemitism and Socialist Strategy 1880-1917: France and colonial Algeria,” *Patterns of Prejudice* 51, no. 3-4 (2017): 292-317.

**Keywords:** Antisemitism, Colonial Algeria, Jews, Muslims, Nineteenth Century

**How to quote this article:**

Sharon Vance, “Antisemitism and the Image of Jews and Muslims in Nineteenth Century French Colonial Algerian Writings,” in *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13912](https://doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13912)
Hillel Kieval, *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), pp. 312.

by Robert Weinberg

The accusation that Jews engage in the murder of gentile children for a variety of
ritual purposes stretches back a millennium and has been at times part of the
antisemitic arsenal over the centuries. Originating in England in the twelfth
century, the accusation, commonly referred to as the blood libel, emerged as an
allegation that Jews killed Christians to mock the Passion of Christ and desecrate
the Host. It also claimed that Jewish men consumed non-Jewish blood in order to
replenish the blood they lost during menstruation. But it was the unfounded
belief that Jews needed gentile blood in order to bake matzo that became the
mainstay of the blood libel and characterized most ritual murder accusations from
the fourteenth century to the twentieth century.

The blood libel spread from England to the continent, finding a home in German-
speaking Europe by the fifteenth century. The blood libel could have deadly
consequences for Jews: Jews suspected of ritual murder were arrested, tortured,
and sometimes executed. It provided the rationale for burning at the stake fifteen
Jewish men in the city of Trent for the murder of a two-year-old boy named Simon
in 1475. From Protestant and Catholic Central Europe, the accusation then spread
further eastward, taking root in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, by
the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire where it found a receptive audience
among Orthodox Christians.

Despite its spread to Central and Eastern Europe, lands where most European Jews
lived, the accusation was not a constant feature of Jewish life. The Vatican actually
challenged blood libel allegations in papal bulls. Moreover, by the mid-sixteenth
century authorities in Western and Central Europe<fnref n="1" /> rejected efforts to prosecute
Jews on the basis of the accusation. By the end of the eighteenth-century officials

<footnote n="1">¹ One exception was the Damascus Affair in 1840 when Christians in Damascus accused a group of Jews of murdering a monk and his Muslim servant for the purpose of using their blood for the baking of matzo. The French consul supported the interrogation and torture of the accused, who were imprisoned, tortured, and then released by the Ottoman rulers of Syria.</footnote>
Robert Weinberg

in Poland and Hungary stopped putting Jews on trial for ritual murder. But the blood libel enjoyed a reascence in the quarter century before the outbreak of World War I. It was very much alive at the turn of the twentieth century: dozens of ritual murder accusations left their traces in newspapers, parliamentary proceedings, and trials in Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and tsarist Russia. Many Jews found themselves under suspicion for crimes they did not commit, became the focus of public debates and government concern, and in some cases attracted the attention of Jews and governments outside Europe and became *causes célèbres*. Violence against Jewish communities erupted in the aftermath of accusations, especially in small towns and villages. Historians are unsure whether the number of accusations actually increased toward the end of the nineteenth century or simply represented the reporting of newspapers and periodicals that proliferated during the second half of the 1800s and became the mainstay of public life. It contributed to the emergence of a politically informed and engaged citizenry throughout Europe.<fnref n="2" />

In *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle*, Hillel Kieval focuses on four ritual murder trials that occurred in Imperial Germany (Xanten in the early 1890s and Konitz in the early 1900s and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Tiszaeszlár in the early 1880s and Polná at the end of the 1890s). The book reads like a police procedural on television by offering in-depth and nuanced accounts of how the ritual murder accusations played out in each case study and exploring the different dynamics that characterized the modern blood libel and its earlier incarnations. *Blood Inscriptions* explores the social, cultural, and political undercurrents of each trial and reveals the inner workings of judicial systems. It also uncovers the forces that rent the social fabric at the end of the nineteenth century.

Kieval uses the four case studies to illuminate how and why educated Europeans beholden to Enlightenment thought and rationality, and modern science, medicine, and jurisprudence would embrace a canard rooted in medieval religious prejudice and superstition. He writes:

<footnote n="2">² As Magda Teter writes, “Anti-Jewish libels did not cease at the end of the eighteenth century.” Magda Teter, “On the Continuities and Discontinuities of Anti-Jewish Libels,” *Antisemitism Studies* 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 383.</footnote>
What, for example, are the means by which *disreputable* knowledge can
become reputable, recapturing the imagination of social elites? How is it
possible that state officials at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, whose ethos was built on a commitment to bureaucratic
rationality and scientific method, should commit huge amounts of time,
energy, and prestige to such criminal investigations and prosecutions?
What would have made the accusation of Jewish ritual murder *meaningful*
to self-consciously “modern” individuals? (p. 6).

He challenges the argument that the blood libel in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe was nothing more than a continuation of pre-Enlightenment religious prejudices and popular superstition. For Kieval, the blood libel was in fact a consequence of modernity and found sustenance in modern science, medicine, and forensic criminology. Antisemitism in general and the ritual murder myth are not, according to Kieval, static phenomena but are historically contingent. They may stem from a long intellectual and political lineage, but their manifestations, motivations, and justifications may change over time. *Blood Inscriptions* offers a roadmap to understanding the social, cultural, intellectual, and political underpinnings of conspiracy theories in our contemporary discourse.

One would expect that secularization and Enlightenment thought, along with the
decline of superstition and rise of modern science, urbanization, and
industrialization, would have led to the disappearance of blood libel canard. But
the ritual murder accusation retained its hold on both educated and uneducated
Christians, and did not disappear from the historical stage. Kieval notes that

the argument for the cultural backwardness—the atavism—of the
modern ritual murder trials either presumes a regrettable continuity
between the medieval accusation and its modern variant—underscoring
the incompleteness of Enlightenment education—or suggests that it was
precisely the irrational element in the blood libel that its modern
protagonists found to be so appealing (p. 20).
According to Kieval, accusations lodged against Jews for murdering Christian youths in order to consume their blood are not explained by the persistence of irrationalism and superstition. Rather, historians need to uncover reasons why educated professionals, government servitors, politicians, and journalists embraced a preposterous conspiratorial theory in quintessentially modern terms. After all, many defense attorneys, criminologists, medical examiners, and government ministers subscribed to ritual murder accusations. By1900 reliance on torture to extract confessions had been replaced by the rules of evidence demanded by modern jurisprudence.<fnref n="3" /> Rather than turn to religion on which to base their arguments, proponents and detractors relied upon late nineteenth-century science and medicine, two quintessentially modern fields of knowledge.

Kieval wrestles with the question of why the modern ritual murder trial emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and ended on the eve of World War I, a period limited to thirty-five years. Ritual murder accusations clearly had not gone away: they just hibernated until they were awoken in 1870s with the weaponization of antisemitism as a political movement. In the words of Kieval, ritual murder discourse at the end of nineteenth century “tied the imagery of the modern ritual murder accusation to the programmatic concerns of political antisemitism” (p. 107).

Kieval points to several factors that account for the emergence of the blood libel in modern Europe. One was the recent granting of Jews civil and political rights in Imperial Germany and the Habsburg Empire, the two states in which the four case studies took place. Opponents of the changes brought about by modernity turned to the political arena to promote their agenda, which aimed to limit if not undo the enfranchisement of Jews, which was seen as a by-product of democratization. Unlike England and France, German-speaking Europe was less welcoming to liberalism and therefore Jewish emancipation, and easily became a testing ground for conservative and nationalist activists who felt threatened by rapid socio-economic and political changes.

World War I marked the end of trials accusing Jews of ritual murder, and Kieval posits that perhaps the trauma of the war and the revolutions and civil wars that

<footnote n="3">³ As Kieval writes, “These were people who were convinced that they occupied a radically different historical situation than that which had existed two or three centuries earlier” (p. 226).</footnote>
followed in its wake overshadowed the ritual murder accusation. As he notes, even the Nazis did not put Jews on trial for ritual murder. Or maybe the emergence of nation-states and constitutional rule that emerged in the debris of the failed Russian, Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires militated against state-directed persecution of Jews, notwithstanding the fragile foundations of the new political order and the continued intensity of antisemitism. Kieval offers a compelling explanation when he argues that the “structure of plausibility” (p. 6) and discursive universe that fostered the willingness to countenance the blood libel collapsed under its own weight. The language and institutions that justified the accusations were “always inherently unstable and at risk of coming apart” (p. 223).

It bears keeping in mind that belief in the accusation was not monolithic and the governments' cases fell apart: none of the defendants brought to trial in the cases studied by Kieval were found guilty of murder. At times government prosecutors undermined their cases by raising doubts about the veracity of the charges. At other times medical professionals and criminologists challenged the conclusions drawn by proponents of the blood libel. In addition, politicians and civil servants were prone to reject the premises of the ritual murder myth.

Unlike Kieval, I hesitate to dismiss religious prejudice as one underlying cause of the modern ritual murder accusation. To be sure, prosecutors, lawyers, and medical professional who supported the ritual murder allegation sought to base their cases on what they believed to be demonstrably rational, scientific evidence, thereby distancing themselves from arguments rooted in religious prejudice. They also tended to refrain from injecting Judaism into the proceedings and did not embrace the emerging racialist thinking that set Jews biologically distinct from Christians. But many educated Europeans who embraced the reality of Jewish ritual murder “pointed precisely to religion, religious, texts, and religious fanaticism as the sources of a most dangerous expression of Jewish difference” (p. 224).

Kieval is indeed correct that blood libel trials at the end of the nineteenth century were prompted, not by religious prejudice and animosity, but by the social and political dislocation caused by modernization. But anti-Judaism lurked beneath the social fabric and explained why, when a Christian youth turned up dead, all eyes turned toward Jews as the culprits. There would be no ritual murder
accusation without the existence of Judaism whose texts were twisted and
misinterpreted to lend credence to the claim that Jews needed the blood of gentiles
for Jewish rituals and practices.

The 1913 trial of Mendel Beilis, a Kyivan Jew accused of murdering a gentile youth, speaks to the persistence of the religious foundations of the blood libel. The prosecutor called witnesses who insisted, based on erroneous and uninformed readings of Judaic texts such as the Talmud, that Jews were religiously obliged by Judaism to use the blood of gentile youths. Even though the jury did not find Beilis guilty of murder, it did agree with the prosecution that the murder had the hallmarks of a ritual murder.<fnref n="4" /> It is also important to acknowledge that the transition from pre-modern to modern forms of knowledge was incomplete. As one proponent of the blood libel asserted in connection to the trial of Mendel Beilis, Beilis’s legal team did not permit itself to believe that there “could be ritual murders in the century of airplanes and trams.”<fnref n="5" /> Finally, it merits mentioning that Beilis was the last Jew to stand trial for ritual murder in Europe.

Kieval is not the first historian to write about these trials, but *Blood Inscriptions* is a superb contribution to the growing literature on the blood libel in Europe in the modern era. The book is a tour de force of historical research and reasoning that leaves no stone unturned and merits a wide audience. It will join classic accounts by Helmut Walser Smith, Magda Teter, and others as a testament to exemplary historical research and analysis on the subject.<fnref n="6" /> Kieval’s analysis sheds light on the inner workings of the conspiratorial mindset and demonstrates how people may not believe in cabals but nonetheless find them politically expedient.

<footnote n="4">⁴ See Robert Weinberg, *Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Robert Weinberg, “Connecting the Dots: Jewish Mysticism, Ritual Murder, and the Trial of Mendel Beilis,” in *Word and Image in Russian History. Essays in Honor of Gary Marker*, eds. Daniel Kaiser, Valerie Kivelson, and Maria di Salvo (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2015), 240.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Helmut Walser Smith, *The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town* (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003); Magda Teter, *Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Eugene Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg, eds., *Ritual Murder in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017); Eugene Avrutin, *The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town* (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Edward Berenson, *The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town* (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019).</footnote>
This is, of course, small consolation in today's world in which conspiratorial thinking suffuses all forms of media.

Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College

**How to quote this article:**

Robert Weinberg, discussion of *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle*, by Hillel Kieval, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13920](https://10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13920)
Hillel Kieval, *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), pp. 312.

by *Michal Frankl*

This book is full of gruesome details: knife cuts on the neck, dismembered bodies and blood, a lot—or too little—of it. But this provoking content is not for nothing: Hillel Kieval's touches upon one of the most basic and, at the same time, most difficult questions in the history of modern antisemitism. How was this possible, asked contemporaries and later commentators, journalists or scholars, that an outdated, “medieval,” religious and irrational accusation took hold in the period considered by many as modern, enlightened and scientific. The author read many reports of brutal murders, tragic deaths and narratives drowned in blood which disrupted cohabitation, in those places where the criminal cases occurred and beyond, and examined how there emerged the “knowledge” of a specifically Jewish crime. The book is an outcome of Kieval’s decades’ long interest in the accusation of ritual murder, one in which he took inspiration from his research on Czech-Jewish history in the long nineteenth century. While facing nationalism and integrating into a changing society, Czech Jews were also confronted with rumors, trials and violence that referred to alleged Jewish crimes and the removal of blood from bodies in Kolín, Polná and many other places.<fnref n="1" />

<footnote n="1">¹ Hillel J. Kieval, “Death and the Nation: Ritual Murder as Political Discourse in the Czech Lands,” in *Allemands, Juifs Et Tcheques a Prague - Deutsche, Juden Und Tschechen in Prag, 1890-1924*, eds. Maurice Godé, Jacques Le Rider, and Francoise Mayer (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 1996), 83-99; Hillel J. Kieval, “Antisémitisme Ou Savoir Social? Sur La Genese Du Proces Moderne Pour Meurtre Rituel,” *Annales* 49, no. 5 (1994): 1091-1105; Hillel J. Kieval, “Representation and Knowledge in Medieval and Modern Accounts of Jewish Ritual Murder,” *Jewish Social Studies* 1, no. 1 (1994): 52-72; Hillel J. Kieval, “Middleman Minorities and Blood: Is There a Natural Economy of the Ritual Murder Accusation in Europe?” in *Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe*, eds. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (Seattle-London: University of Washington Press, 1997), 208-233; Hillel J. Kieval, “The Importance of Place: Comparative Aspects of the Ritual Murder Trial in Modern Central Europe,” in *Comparing Jewish Societies*, ed. Todd M. Endelman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 135-165; Hillel J. Kieval, “The Rules of the Game: Forensic Medicine and the Language of Science in the Structuring of Modern Ritual Murder Trials,” *Jewish History* 26, no. 3-4 (2013): 287-307.</footnote>
Michal Frankl

To establish what made such modern accusations distinct, Kieval focuses on four out of the six ritual murder trials that took place between the late 1870s and the First World War (for a quick overview, see table on p. 15). All had in common the disappearance and/or murder of a Christian child, girl or young man, an investigation which confronted local knowledge and social ties with modern criminology, and eventually exposed them in court trial(s). In the case of Tiszaeszlár from 1882-83, a group of Jews from a Hungarian village was accused of killing a fourteen years old Christian girl. In the context of rising Hungarian antisemitism, this case, which the local investigator steered towards a Jewish religious crime, was eventually decided in a court trial which acquitted the defendants.<fnref n="2" /> A small town in Germany, Xanten, in 1891 became a stage for a similarly polarized investigation following a murder of a five years old Christian boy. It took a year for the investigation and the jury to acquit the local Jewish butcher.<fnref n="3" /> After Anežka Hrůzová, 19 years old, was found dead close to the town Polná in Bohemia in 1899, and in the context of a broader antisemitic mobilization, a poor and mostly unemployed local Jew was put on trial for allegedly being an accomplice to her killing, in which the blood was drained from the body of the deceased. In 1899 and again in 1900, following an appeal and in what proved to be an exception, Leopold Hilsner was sentenced for a crime that rested on the imagination of a Jewish ritual murder.<fnref n="4" /> Finally, the brutal murder

<footnote n="2">² Among previously published studies on this subject, especially Andrew Handler, *Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar* (New York: Boulder, 1980).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Julius H. Schöps, “Ritualmordbeschuldigung und Blutaberglaube. Die Affäre Buschhoff im niederrheinischen Xanten,” in *Köln und das rheinische Judentum*, eds. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz et al. (Köln: J. P. Bachem, 1984), 286-300; Jürgen Lange, “Der Xantener Ritualmordprozeß von 1892 und die Staatsanwaltschaft,” in *Rheinische Justiz. Geschichte und Gegenwart*, eds. Dieter Laum, Adolf Klein, and Dieter Strauch (Köln: Verlag Dr. Otto Schmidt, 1994), 565-623; Bernd Kölling, “Blutige Illusionen. Ritualmorddiskurse und Antisemitismus im niederrheinischen Xanten am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in *Agrarische Verfassung und politische Struktur. Studein zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte Preußens*, eds. Wolfgang Neugebauer and Ralf Pröve (Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1998), 349-382; Willi Faehrmann, “Die Buschhoff Affäre in Xanten,” in *Das Bild Des Juden in Der Volks- Und Jugendliteratur Vom 18. Jahrhundert Bis 1945*, ed. Heinrich Pleticha (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1985), 127-139.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Bohumil Černý, *Vražda v Polné* (Praha: Vydavatelství časopisů MNO, 1968); Jiří Kovtun, *Tajuplná vražda. Případ Leopolda Hilsnera* (Praha: Sefer, 1994).</footnote>
and dismembering of the body of a Christian young man in Konitz in Germany
in 1900 triggered multiple accusations and investigations.<fnref n="5" />

While these cases have attracted not only popular, but also scholarly attention
before, a comparative study was still missing. In this respect, the research on
modern accusations lagged behind that on the blood libels of the medieval and
early modern periods<fnref n="6" /> and Kieval's work can be read as a strong companion to
recent study of Magda Teter.<fnref n="7" /> Without any doubt, this book will become an
authoritative study on ritual murders as discourse and trials in the late 19th and
early 20th century. The approach of this author—inspired by the sociology of
knowledge, in his exploration of the mutual influence and confrontation of
scientific languages with local societies and economies—rewrites the history of the
formation and effects of these accusations. Kieval demonstrates to be a careful and
attentive reader paying attention to detail and location, terminology and tone.
Exactly because he unearths the details of scenes and narratives, the book has a
differentiated pace and is somewhat selective, no doubt to avoid repetitions
stemming from the similarity of many details of these “bloody” cases, but also to
advance Kieval’s particular interpretation. For instance, Leopold Hilsner’s
confession after his first trial, a central moment in all other histories of the Polná
case, is not discussed here at all, which shows how, for Kieval, Hilsner remained
an outlier in the modern discourses on ritual murder.

Even though the motive of an alleged Jewish blood ritual might have been
persistent, the series of trials examined in the book is distinct, according to Kieval.
The accusations follow a gap of two or three centuries which separate them from
the medieval and early modern trials, the demise of which coincided with the
arrival of modern criminal justice and banning of torture as a legitimate
investigative practice. Kieval focuses on the few accusations, out of the dozens or

<footnote n="5">⁵ Christoph Nonn, “Zwischenfall in Konitz. Antisemitismus und Nationalismus im preussischen Osten um 1900,” *Historische Zeitschrift* 266, no. 1 (1998): 387-418; Helmut Walser Smith, *The Butcher’s Tale. Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town* (New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ R. Po-chia Hsia, *Trent 1475. Stories of a Ritual Murder* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Magda Teter, *Blood libel. On the trail of an antisemitic myth* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); see also discussions by Diego Quaglioni and Kenneth Stow, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 19 (June 2021), https://doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/12547 and https://doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/12762.</footnote>
hundreds that were circulating in the press and beyond, because they developed
into court trials. The indictment and legal arguments in these cases could no
longer "be articulated [...] in pre-Reformation language and symbols" (p. 136). Re-
emerging in the late 19th century, the image of the ritual murder was stripped of
its deep religious meanings. Now, "sacrifice has been transmuted into slaughter,
the altar into the cutting block" (p. 160).

Kieval challenges the simple binary opposition between the accusations of ritual
murder as a primitive, old and prejudicial phenomenon on the one hand, and the
progress and modernity which also underpinned the ideas of Jewish integration in
societies on the other hand. In reevaluating his own assumptions at the start of his
work, he came to the conclusion "that obsessive attention to the apparent
irrationality of the blood libel simply does not work well as an analytical lens" (p.
18). Kieval confronts the usual liberal responses which viewed the blood libel as a
matter of the past—an expression of medieval superstition and irrationality. Such
reactions, says the author, were—and sometimes continue to be—based on a
serious misunderstanding of the nature of such cases.

These trials, he argues, “constituted a *new phenomenon* in the long history of the
blood libel” by following modern criminal codes and rules and by the application
of “modern forensic science and criminology” (p. 4, emphasis in original). In re-
reading and re-contextualizing these cases of ritual murder accusation, Kieval
specifically pays attention to the new epistemology of medical science and
criminology in supporting or refuting the mostly inherited knowledge about Jews
and their alleged deeds. Reflecting on impulses from the sociology of knowledge
allows him to ask what made these accusations work by making this knowledge
“meaningful” to modern, educated social actors. It was experts and practitioners
of science who now “defined the boundaries—linguistic and conceptual—of
plausible argument” (p. 136). Out of the large corpuses of text that these
investigations, trials and the press coverage left behind, the medical reports and
autopsies are the material which especially attracted Kieval’s attention, providing
the language and scientific legitimacy to the old accusation. In the post-
Enlightenment context, only this knowledge and authority could move the State
to act, investigate and put on trial.

Kieval’s approach differs from that of Daniel Vyleta who, tracing “Jewish” crimes
in contemporary criminology and press, focused on the process of discursive
making of the cunning and modern Jewish criminal and on the notion of
suggestive power of a master criminal.<fnref n="8" /> In contrast, the analysis of Kieval revolves
around the production of knowledge accumulated through the investigation and
the public discussion of these crimes. This requires the readers to familiarize
themselves with medical expert knowledge. For instance, in the Tiszaeszlár case,
where the proceedings depended on the identification of the body of a drowned
girl, Kieval guides the reader through complex medical terminology such as the
production of “adipocere” (corpse wax) or “endochondral ossification” (p. 78).
The volume of blood in the body and its alleged absence on the crime scene played
a central role in the report of local physicians in Polná which, according to Kieval,
“constitutes one of the seminal documents in the turn-of-the-century struggle to
establish proper scientific procedures in forensic medicine” (p. 156). These
opinions written in the language of modern science and building on observations
made possible by the state-of-the-art technology both supported, but also tamed
the epistemological making and sustaining of the accusations of ritual murder.
Eventually, Kieval argues, sometime before the First World War their instability
became apparent, and these epistemologies collapsed, no longer resulting in court
trials. Even though the accusations of ritual murder continued (and still continue)
to be present in antisemitic discourses, their real impact remained limited.

For Kieval, the history of modern antisemitism as ideology and practice offers little
clue to explain the relative success of ritual murder accusations of the period under
examination. In contrast, the book “attempts to disengage the modern ritual
murder trial [...] from antisemitism as an explanatory construct” (p. 27).
Antisemitic propaganda and violence was an important aspect of all four cases,
Kieval recognizes; however, he seems reluctant to derive their emergence and
impact from the national political movements which developed and spread
antisemitic discourses. Leaning on the research of Robert Nemes about
Hungarian provinces,<fnref n="9" /> he can claim that “it wasn’t antisemitism that produced the
Tiszaeszlár affair but, rather, Tiszaeszlár that helped to galvanize modern
antisemitism” (p. 107). Instead, Kieval locates the history of ritual murder cases in

<footnote n="8">⁸ Daniel M. Vyleta, *Crime, Jews and News. Vienna 1895-1914* (New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Robert Nemes, “Hungary’s Antisemitic Provinces: Violence and Ritual Murder in the 1880s,” *Slavic Review* 66, no. 1 (2007): 20-44.</footnote>
the context of what he calls “cultural geography of place” (p. 27), a close reading
of the social and cultural settings in Tiszaeszlár, Xanten, Polná and Konitz. He
shows multi-layered relationships between Jews and Christians and Jewish
integration into local societies which cannot be easily subsumed to any history of
antisemitism. As he stresses, “Jewish residents [...] were rooted in their
communities, had a strong sense of place, and felt entitled to the protection of the
state” (p. 59). On the other hand, with Jews and Christians living in proximity and
interaction, it was the accusation of ritual murder which disrupted the daily
cohabitation, triggered social exclusion and migration from these communities.
Rather than antisemitism, it was this locally constructed knowledge of Jewish
criminality which made up the recipe in the accusations of ritual murder. Kieval
acknowledges the impact of local views and prejudice on the building up of
medical knowledge. In the case of Xanten, for instance, “the closer the medical
practitioners themselves were physically to the social and cultural universe of the
town [...], the more susceptible their analyses were to the cultural assumptions
that supported accusations of Jewish ritual murder” (p. 137). In Polná, he similarly
recognizes the mutual influence of the “[s]ymbolic language, received tradition,
rumor, and forensic medicine” (p. 154). Starting with Tiszaeszlár, the local was
essential for the construction of knowledge about Jewish criminality and “blood
libel.” For instance, Kieval shows how the “transportable images” (p. 124) of the
butcher and ritual slaughterer, easily identifiable locally in the villages and small
towns like the four examined in the book, played a central role in the construction
of the storylines of several accusations.

Still, while persuasive and highly inspiring, the book could have been taken further
to refine the argument with regard to the relationship to modern antisemitism,
beyond the negative boundaries which Kieval draws. As a result, the history of
antisemitism remains more a scenery to his interpretation. It appears to me that
this is based on a narrow understanding of themes and methods in antisemitism
research, as if it only explored continuities and ruptures of anti-Jewish ideas and
practices. Arguably, the interest in the history of antisemitism in the 19th and early
20th century lessened after the 1990s, when it expanded geographically, especially
with respect to Eastern Europe, and thematically. Yet, in striking similarity to the
development of Holocaust Studies, it opened new approaches, be it through the
lenses of gender, language, or—most significantly in this context—local history.
Kieval’s new perspective on ritual murder trials fits well with this vision of the history of antisemitism as a broad category.

While antisemitism in the narrow sense of the word alone does not offer an ultimate explanation, the success of the cases that were examined in this volume would have been unthinkable without the mobilization and the legitimization it provided. In particular, one wonders how the discussions of the crime, its sites and actors, relate to the contemporaneous modernization of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and structurally fits the widespread ideas about a coordinated action of Jews against non-Jews. Similarly to the accusations of ritual murder, the narratives of Jewish conspiracy on global or local scales constructed knowledge that seemed meaningful to its authors and recipients—it’s irrationality notwithstanding. In a parallel to Kieval’s interpretation, antisemitism—while not (always) scientific—offered a new language which claimed to disengage from traditional anti-Judaism with its baggage of prejudice and hatred. In the very own words of antisemites, their arguments against Jews were supposed to be rooted in the analysis of economy and society, and thus in fact and science. That’s why at least some economists and sociologists experimented with antisemitic arguments. Thomas Masaryk himself, before becoming a staunch opponent of the Polná blood libel, flirted with antisemitism as a language that described the ills of the modern society scientifically. Like the epistemologies of the modern ritual trial, their entanglements with antisemitism were temporary and perhaps transitional.

Hence, the logics and languages underpinning the investigations and trials examined by Kieval might be more significant to the study of modern antisemitism than the author himself acknowledges. In conclusion, rather than reading the book in separation from research on modern antisemitism, it can be studied as an enrichment and as an inspiration for future research in this field.

Michal Frankl, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences

**How to quote this article:**

Michal Frankl, discussion of *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle*, by Hillel Kieval, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 23*, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13927
David J. Kertzer, *Un Papa in guerra. La storia segreta di Mussolini, Hitler e Pio XII* (Milano: Garzanti, 2022), pp. 720.

by Liliana Picciotto

Kertzer’s volume offers what the title honestly proclaims: *A Pope at War. The secret history of Mussolini, Hitler and Pius XII*. This is the chronicle, rich in documentation, of papal politics, from the years of the election to the papal throne of Pius XII in March 1939 to the end of the Second World War. The events discussed by Kertzer are those on stage and also those in the background, on the basis of a long research that has involved not only the Vatican archives, but also the archives of the Foreign Ministries of various States involved in the Second World War: Italy, Germany, France, United States and Great Britain.

In addition to describing the various official diplomatic positions, the book
abundantly describes secret meetings, important and less important talks, rumors,
opinions and moods circulating in the corridors of power, in this way revealing
intrigues, antipathies and double-crossing between various characters, even
including the private chats between Mussolini and his beloved Claretta Petacci.
This over-abundance of documents on the one hand reveals interesting internal
mechanisms of the international diplomacy of the time, on the other risks
confusing the reader and making him lose the thread of some themes, especially
since everything is narrated in a rigidly chronological order and not according to
the different topics.

Despite these difficulties, I will try here to point out some passages of this
important, even though not definitive, book. We must first of all keep in mind
that very little time has passed between the opening, brought forward by a few
years at Pope Francis’s behest, of the four Vatican archives that can now be
investigated and their closure due to the pandemic. The underlying thesis, already
known but amply verified here, is that Pope Pacelli, finding himself at the time of
his election, in March 1939, on the eve of the most frightening conflict of the
modern age, unleashed by a state ready to do anything to win and expand his own
ideology, did nothing to counter it even in the face of the blatant atrocities it
perpetrated, and on which Pacelli always had precise information.
The best way, according to Pope Pius XII as soon as he ascended the papal throne, to coexist with Nazi Germany, in the hope that it would eventually repent, was to flatter Hitler, to try not to irritate him and to seek his favor to obtain that Catholic schools and seminaries were not closed in Germany, that no books were published that attacked the Church, that the cut of public funds in favor of the Church in Austria was reviewed. He was also concerned that, after the German annexation of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, forty million Catholics now lived in the Reich and, consequently, he did not want to do anything that would jeopardize their situation. Another thought worried him: the fear that denouncing the Nazis would alienate, within the territories of the Reich, loyal citizens who were both Catholics and Nazis, thereby risking causing a schism.

Hitler had sensed the change of perspective towards Nazi Germany taking place in the Vatican. In previous years, being Pope Achille Ratti-Pius XI, he had received from him clear disapproval of the Nazi ideology in its form of “new pagan religion” and even ostracism towards its racist policy, with various initiatives, even striking ones, which I will not be repeating here. Now Hitler was willing to open a dialogue with the new Pope even outside the official diplomatic channels, using as an intermediary the pro-Nazi German prince Philip of Hesse, husband of the unfortunate (she was later arrested and deported) Princess Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel. The secret meetings between Philip of Hesse, very close to Hitler, and the Pope are one of the new pieces of data discussed in Kertzer’s book.

A first meeting took place on 19 May 1939 and started off a relaxing phase in relations between Nazism and the Vatican. Another took place on August 26, 1939, in Castel Gandolfo, in which the prince of Hesse reported to the Pope that Hitler wished to confirm his most fervent desire to restore peace with the Church. He believed that there were two major issues that needed to be resolved if an agreement were to be reached: the “racial question,” and what the Führer regarded as clerical interference in Germany’s internal politics. Hitler thought that the first of these obstacles, the “racial question,” could possibly be “evaded,” Kertzer says, by continuing the new Pope’s policy of not speaking out on the matter. What was therefore necessary to conclude an agreement on was the role of the German Catholic clergy.
Despite the fact that meetings between the Prince of Hesse and the Pope lasted until March 1941, nothing came of the religious peace between the Vatican and the Reich, given the war in progress and Hitler's lack of aspiration to submit to any request, but these talks are the premonitory sign of the Pope's stubborn attitude of non-pronouncement on any subsequent question presented to his consideration.

In fact, the Pope remained silent for many years, out of convenience and out of fear, following the idea that it was better never to pronounce himself and in the conviction that Europe would be subjugated by Nazism everywhere in the near future. The silence covered many events: the murder of the Jews of Europe, the persecution of the clergy in Poland after the attack of September 1941, the harassment of the Catholic Church in Germany, the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, the roundup of the Jews of Rome, the treacherous invasion of territories, the unchallenged use of absolute violence. All missed opportunities to affirm the moral strength of the Church, letting instead diplomatic considerations linked to the Vatican's state of neutrality prevail. Conversely, let us not forget that the moral influence of the Church was, at the material time and throughout the world, incomparably superior to today's and the Pope's words were listened to with devotion and respect everywhere. The Pope's silence, supported if not often induced by his advisers, the Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione, the two Deputy Secretaries of State Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Battista Montini, perplexed not only the diplomats of the nations hostile to Nazi Germany and stationed in the Vatican, such as Francis d'Arcy Osborne representative of Great Britain; Myron Taylor personal representative of US President Roosevelt and his successor, Harold Tittmann; François Charles Roux and then Vladimir d'Ormesson, until even France was overwhelmed by German armies; but even German military themselves.

In two years, Nazi Germany captured much of Western Europe and pushed back British forces in North Africa, while Japan, the third Axis partner together with Italy, captured a large territory in Asia and Oceania. The Pope, like everyone by now, was convinced that the future of the world was Nazified. As we know, Mussolini had thrown himself on the side of the conquerors and had not hesitated to throw Italy into a war for which the country was not prepared. Interesting and new in the book is the close examination of Mussolini's attitude towards the Pope
and the influence he systematically tried to exert over him by making him accept
his alliance with Hitler and trying to induce him to make pro-German statements.
The Church and Mussolini needed each other to establish popular consensus in
Italy and the Pope tried not to displease a person he basically trusted. Mussolini
guaranteed him the respect due to the national religion and this was no small thing
for a Pope attacked from various sides. Furthermore, Kertzer reminds us, we are
talking about an Italian Pope (as was the tradition) and a predominantly Italian
clergy, educated in the fascist mentality, convinced that the best protection for the
Church was precisely its close bond with Mussolini and the fascist government.
On the occasion of Italy's entry into the war with the attack on France,
*L'Osservatore Romano*, urged to be cautious by Monsignor Montini himself,
made no pronouncement, but the Catholic press went wild in favor of Mussolini's
declaration of war shouted by the Duce himself from his balcony in Piazza Venezia
on 10 June 1940. *L'Avvenire d'Italia*, the country's main Catholic newspaper,
carried the headline "Winning!" and others followed. It emerges from Kertzer's
study that the Pope's main concern was to save the institutional structure of the
Catholic Church and, for this, he considered that Mussolini was a good guarantor.
The result was that the clergy supported the Axis war by urging good Catholics to
side with Hitler despite their embarrassment towards the Nazi regime. It was a
kind of vicious circle: the clergy supported fascism which, in turn, held on to the
alliance with Hitler and, consequently, the clergy themselves never publicly
criticized Nazism. Pius XII's interest in maintaining friendly relations with
Mussolini was also motivated by his assessment that he was a useful intercessor for
the Vatican with the Führer.

The surprise German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 aroused a certain
enthusiasm in the Catholic press which fueled the idea of the Axis cause as a
Christian crusade against Bolshevism. However, also in this case, the Pope
personally did not allow himself to be persuaded to make a declaration
condemning communism, although he was under pressure in this sense especially
from the fascist government. In this, it must be admitted, he maintained a
behavior consistent with his principles of non-intervention, being continually
solicited by the parties involved to condemn something or approve something
else. His moral pronouncements, throughout the war period, would concern only
the opposition to the Allied bombings on Italian cities—which intensified in the
second half of October 1942, with the aim of weakening fascist Italy and inducing
the population to rebel against the regime.

On September 1942, shortly before returning to the United States, Taylor visited the Pope and handed his Secretary of State a long memorandum which contained reports of the incessant massacre of Polish Jews, outlining a picture of appalling violence. The Pope, according to the recently unearthed documents found by the author, read it immediately. In the meantime, precisely in that month, news of horrendous massacres and of the policy of extermination of the Jewish population reached the Vatican from various parts. The Holy See took nineteen days to respond to the American memorandum, through Cardinal Maglione: the declaration, unsigned, acknowledged that stories of "serious measures taken against non-Arians had also reached the Holy See from other sources, but that so far it was not possible to verify their accuracy" (p. 289). From a *memorandum* from Monsignor Dell'Acqua of the Vatican Secretariat of State dated the previous 2 October, Kertzer deduces that the Pope accepted the advice not to give confirmation to the Allies of the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe, risking that the Vatican would be called into question. "In fact," said Dell'Acqua, "better not to use the word 'Jews' at all" (p. 290).

Two months later, information about the ongoing massacres spread with even more certainty, especially from the Polish government in exile in London: "December 10: The Polish government addresses a new circular to all governments concerning the massacre of Jews by the Germans. In Poland, one million Jews out of three have already been exterminated" (p. 302). It was just one of several memorandums that reached Western chancelleries and reflected the fact that 1942 was precisely the year in which the extermination policy flared up most violently from eastern to western Europe. On 18 December, Osborne, the English appointee, had a conversation on this subject with Tardini and the Polish representative did the same, and asked the Pope to "firmly and clearly condemn these and other German crimes the extent of which is unprecedented in history" (p. 303).

Everyone knew that the Pope would, with Christmas just around the corner, make a public speech and that is why pressures multiplied precisely in that December of 1942. As Kertzer points out, on the twenty-fourth page of the Pope's text there were words that the defenders of Pius XII would later quote in an attempt to
present the speech as a blatant denunciation of the massacre of the Jews of Europe. Even if the Pope never mentioned either Nazis or Jews, in that well-hidden passage, he did pity “the hundreds of thousands of people who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only for reasons of nationality or race, are destined to die or to a progressive physical deterioration” (p. 306). The diplomats of the nations involved were disappointed and did not fail to send their impressions to their respective governments. As usual, the speech had been of an exaggerated length and enveloped in an unstoppable flow of oratory.

But the ambiguity of the Pope's position, expressed in his speeches, as Kertzer well underlines, had one characteristic: it set amid rivers of rhetoric pearls that both parties to the conflict could have defined as proofs of support for their cause.

To give just one following example of a speech after that of Christmas 1942, his address on the radio on 2 June 1943, on the occasion of his name day, was so unclear that Osborne, emphasizing the passage in which the Pope expressed closeness to the persecuted due to their ancestry and for the Polish people, described his address as “the most forthright speech he has given since the outbreak of war” (p. 327). Galeazzo Ciano, however, as a consummate diplomat, preparing the report to Mussolini, underlined how Pius XII, combining the theme of concern for the peoples of the occupied nations, with regret for the cruelty of the air war, had come almost to equally distribute burdens and responsibility to the two belligerent groups and thus underline the universality and impartiality of the action of the Holy See (pp. 327-328).

Pius XII used the same method in the aftermath of the terrible roundup of the Jews of Rome, which took place on 16 October 1943, a few hundred meters away from his headquarters. After a mellifluous and completely useless dialogue that took place between the German ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weiszäcker and the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, the same afternoon as the raid, the German diplomat was very fearful of a public declaration of condemnation from the Pope.

And instead, against the same German expectations, the only official reaction of the Holy See was a bland editorial that appeared in *L'Osservatore Romano* of 25-26 October 1943, entitled “The charity of the Holy Father,” with extremely vague references to the deportation of Roman Jews, the majority having being already murdered two days earlier in Auschwitz: “The Holy Father continues to hear,
more than ever, the insistent and pitiful echo of the disasters that the current conflict, with its prolongation, continues to accumulate. The August Pontiff, as is well known, after having worked in vain to avert the outbreak of war, trying to dissuade the rulers of the peoples from resorting to the force of arms, so tremendous today, did not desist for a single moment from implementing all the means in His power to alleviate the sufferings that in any way are the consequence of the immense conflagration. With the increase of so many evils, the universally paternal charity of the Supreme Pontiff has become, one might say, almost more industrious, which does not stop in front of any border neither of nationality, nor of religion, nor of race. This multifaceted and incessant action of Pius XII in recent times has also intensified, due to the increased suffering of so many unhappy people. May this beneficial activity, especially for the prayers of the faithful throughout the world, who with unanimous consent and burning fervor do not cease from raising it to Heaven, achieve even greater results in the future, and hasten the day when on earth it will return to shine the iris of peace; and men, having laid down their arms, extinguished all discord and rancor and found themselves brothers, will finally collaborate loyally for the common well-being.”<fnref n="1" />

The German ambassador Weiszäcker himself, on 28 October 1943, was able to write to his boss, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, the following reassuring words, already known to the general public because they were presented at the Nuremberg trial with the text of the article in *L'Osservatore Romano* attached: “Despite having been implored to do so by several fronts, the Pope has refrained from making any overt comment on the deportation of Jews from Rome. Although he certainly expects to be criticized for this for a long time by our enemies, and that Protestant circles in Anglo-Saxon countries exploit this for propaganda purposes, even on this matter he has done everything possible not to undermine relations with the German government and the German authorities in Rome.”<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="1">¹ From Weizsäcker to Berlin, October 28, 1943, with attached text of the article “L’atteggiamento caritatevole del Santo Padre,” *L’Osservatore Romano*, October 25-26, 1943, in *Nuremberg, Doc. NG-5027*; the same text is in *Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts*, PAAA, Inland II g.193, *Juden in Italien* 1943-1944.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Ibid.</footnote>
Liliana Picciotto

As amply underlined by many other historians, the Pope had done nothing to stop the murderous intentions of the Germans in Rome on 16 October 1943 and, not even in Kertzer's research, nothing new seems to emerge in this regard: the arrested were, according to the report from Kappler to Wolff, one thousand two hundred fifty-nine, the prisoners released in the following hours, from 1.30 pm on 16 October until the morning of the 18th were, according to accredited calculations, two hundred forty-two. The merit of the releases, I add, should not be attributed so much to the intervention of the Vatican as for the Nazi policy which at that time did not provide for the deportation of Jewish spouses living in mixed marriage, nor that of children of mixed marriage, as well as the safeguarding of those Jews belonging to a neutral state or one not invaded by Nazi Germany. In reality, the Vatican sent the German authorities a list of baptized Jews, but, I venture to say that it was not that which led the Nazis to release them. It was only the victims' ability to prove their status (and some actually didn't succeed, like Clara Sereno).<fnref n="3" /> Furthermore, according to new documents found by Kertzer, the lists of non-Aryan Catholics (i.e. baptized Jews) bear the dates 19, 21 and 23 October, the latter the same day as the arrival of the one thousand twenty deportees (not one thousand seven) to Auschwitz: too late for any intervention. However, the fact that the Vatican worked in some way to specifically protect only baptized people and that it made some attempts in the days following the deportation to get them released does not speak in favor of the morality of the Church at the time. With regard to "non-Arian Catholics," I would like to highlight a small internal contradiction in some Vatican documents, already known because they were published in the series *Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale* with which Kertzer also deals. In a note dated 26 October 1943, Father Tacchi Venturi sent Cardinal Maglione a question from Rosy Gattico on the disappearance of her husband, Count Vittorio Cantoni Della Rovere, and of his mother, Irma Finzi, after being taken from their villa in Arona the previous 15 September<fnref n="4" /> (the count and his mother, as mentioned

<footnote n="3">³ Liliana Picciotto, *Salvarsi. Gli Ebrei sfuggiti alla Shoah 1943-1945* (Torino: Einaudi, 2017), 257-261.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ From Padre Tacchi Venturi to Cardinal Maglione, Rome, October 26, 1943, in *Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde guerre mondiale*, vol. 9, “Le Saint Siège et les victimes de la guerre,” Janvier-Décembre 1943 (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1975), 527.</footnote>
in my *Il libro della memoria*,<fnref n="5" /> were in fact victims of the massacre of Jews which took place around 15 September 1943 on Lake Maggiore). Following this request, which concerned two people who had long since become Catholics, Maglione took a step with the German embassy in the Vatican on 29 October, in so doing, though, he reported the data in an amazingly wrong way: “it is recommended to the benevolent interest of the most excellent German Embassy at the Holy See so that they may be released free, Count Victor Cantoni and his mother, who from Rome where they lived, were deported by German troops to an unknown location.”<fnref n="6" /> The error of the circumstance and place of the arrest of the Cantonis would not be so serious in itself, if it did not highlight a certain tiredness and inattention in pleading cases already considered lost by Vatican officials themselves.

In the book, strangely, the question of the shelter found in many religious houses by Roman Jews terrified for themselves and their families is not addressed. First of all, I must recall that the reception by Catholic religious houses was, yes, wide and generous (the number so far proposed by the historian Renzo De Felice is four thousand cases that I myself, together with the historian Sister Grazia Loparco, are trying to verify)<fnref n="7" /> but this acceptance was generally granted upon request, through acquaintances or recommendations. There are no known cases of spontaneous offers of opening and help. It should also be remembered that Rome, after 8 September 1943, was hit by a flood of refugees from the South, the homeless, the destitute, young people who refused to enlist, leaders of anti-fascist parties, officers of the dissolved army. In this context, the reception of a few thousand Jews was not specific, but included in this work. The aid to the Jews, as amply demonstrated in my book *Salvarsi*,<fnref n="8" /> took place in a broader context of aid activities to the civilian population left homeless, the disadvantaged and those wanted by the fascist and Nazi authorities. The surviving lists of people rescued by parishes and religious houses show that the guests were almost never only Jews in danger, but included

<footnote n="5">⁵ Liliana Picciotto, *Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia 1943-1945. Ricerca della Fondazione CDEC* (Milano: Mursia, 2002).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ From Segretario di Stato to Ambasciata tedesca, Vaticano, October 29, 1943, in *Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde guerre mondiale*, vol. 9, “Le Saint Siège et les victimes de la guerre, Janvier-Décembre 1943 (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1975), 532.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Renzo De Felice, *Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo* (Torino: Einaudi, 1972), 610-614.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Picciotto, *Salvarsi*.</footnote>
also many other refugees. The lists of the guests of the Pontifical Roman Major Seminary in Lateran, of the boys hosted at the Pius XI Salesian College, of the refugees in the house of the Augustinian Oblates of *Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori* in Via Garibaldi, of the wanted men accommodated in monasteries, even cloistered ones, by the apostolic visitor Father Giovanni da San Giovanni in Persiceto, of those hosted at the *Istituto Dermopatico dell'Immacolata*, directed by Father Emanuele Stablum, show an indistinct generosity and respect for the principle of the right to asylum, practiced towards all wanted and persecuted people.

One of the paragraphs of the book is devoted, very appropriately, to the supposition that Hitler was planning to kidnap the Pope, an issue often cited by Pius XII's defenders to explain his prudence, but which was non-existent, the fruit of Allied propaganda. The war not fought, but carried out through news circulated on purpose—that was already in common use during the Second World War. The “fake news” that Hitler wanted to kidnap the Pope was accompanied by reports that the Germans were mistreating the clergy in Rome. This was not true and had the opposite result to the desired one: it led the Pope to much prefer the German occupiers who maintained cordial and respectful relations with him, to the Allies who bombed the civilian population from the skies of the cities, including the Romans. In fact, the Pope, in this regard, expressed several times his opposition and underlined how it was not really the Germans who bombed the city, but the British and Americans.

Finally, I point out that the author, in a vigorous epilogue, reminds us that, after the war, the official interpretation of the events of the recent past was distorted by a series of actors, among which the main one was the Catholic Church itself, who hastened to the first possible opportunity, on 2 June 1945, to speak of its relations with National Socialism, defending the Concordat of the Church with Hitler's Germany as the lesser of possible evils. It highlighted the suffering experienced by Catholics and the Church during the conflict and portrayed Catholics in Germany as victims of the Nazis. It didn't even make the vaguest hint to the extermination of the Jews of Europe. He made no mention of Italy's part in the Axis cause, much less insinuated any Italian responsibility for the catastrophes that had befallen Europe. In his Christmas speech of 1945, with the war now over thanks to the intervention of the Allies, he finally spoke of totalitarian states as bloodthirsty and
tyrannical, of the Italian people portrayed as victims, of the German clergy who
opposed the Nazi regime, something which, by the way, was denied in 2020 by the
German bishops who admitted that they had done little or nothing against the
extermination of the Jews.

The Pope was not the only one who wanted to cancel his moral responsibilities
linked to his silence. Everything was rewritten and folded to the convenience of
the moment which was, in fact, to turn the page and make all forget the evil
distributed with both hands. Thus the vulgate was that the fault of the anti-Jewish
persecutions fell exclusively on the Germans, Italy having only adapted to the Nazi
requests; most of the population had helped Jews in danger, there hadn't been a
whole band of Italians who had thrived in the practice of informing (about Jews,
murdered in Auschwitz, but also about anti-fascists and partisans, tortured and
put to death); Mussolini had not been a popular hero acclaimed and respected in
all of his decisions; the papacy had not tried to agree with the worst dictatorships
in order to keep its institutions alive; the fascist anti-Jewish laws enacted starting
in September 1938 had been mild and very little applied; the Concordat, signed by
the Church with the fascist regime in 1929, was not an implicit approval of the
Church towards fascism; the subsequent Concordat signed with the Nazi regime,
least of all; Italians redeemed themselves from the approval of fascism through the
Resistance, to which all the people had given a hand. Even the Jews of Italy adapted
to these false beliefs: they represented a psychological blanket that was supposed
to protect them from the shock suffered and help them save something from their
surrounding world. You can't survive thinking that everyone hates you to such an
extent that they will hunt you down like an animal, hand you over to the assassins,
will not organize any rescue network as was instead done for the allied military,
prisoners of war, that were helped to escape, helped themselves to survive, and
then were brought to safety in Switzerland or in the South of Italy. Jews in Italy,
as in the rest of Europe, were left alone to face the worst, but this fact was too
difficult to swallow for people who wanted to gradually heal their wounds and
start a new life. After the war, Jewish delegations even went to the Pope to thank
him for his "interventions on their behalf." As Kertzer says: "not only has the Pope
helped to reconstruct the history of the collaboration of the Italian Church with
the Mussolini regime and that of his support for the war, he has also contributed
Liliana Picciotto

to rewriting the history of Italy and Germany. Far from sharing responsibility for
the conflict, Italians were now portrayed as victims" (p. 524).

An indisputable fact emerges powerfully from this book: the vaunted “heroism”
of Pius XII lies in his having managed, for as long as World War II lasted, never to
pronounce himself in favor or against any side in the conflict, despite the
enormous pressure to which he was subjected. And despite the mass murder of the
Jewish population of Europe and the persecutions and injustices against the
Catholic clergy and their institutions in Germany, Poland and the occupied or
annexed territories taking place before his eyes. Kertzer presents us with a Pope
who, in times of war, protected, yes, the institutional interests of the Church, but
sacrificing his moral leadership.

Liliana Picciotto, CDEC. Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan

**How to quote this article:**

Liliana Picciotto, discussion of *Un Papa in guerra. La storia segreta di Mussolini, Hitler e Pio XII*, by David J. Kertzer, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI:10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13938
Laurent Joly, *La falsification de l'histoire. Éric Zemmour, l'extrême droite, Vichy et les Juifs* (Paris: Grasset, 2022), pp. 136.

by Valeria Galimi

Published in the weeks leading up to last May's French presidential election campaign, Laurent Joly's volume focuses on the most prominent figure in the cultural landscape of the French (extreme) right, Éric Zemmour. The son of Algerian Jews, Zemmour is a columnist for the conservative daily *Le Figaro*, a publicist and the star of a highly successful TV show. He was already known for his sexist views in his book *Le premier sexe* (2006) and for the volumes *Le suicide français*, published in 2014, and *Destins français*—A reinterpretation of the history of France—in 2018.

A paperback edition of the book *La falsification de l'histoire* was published in January 2023 with a new preface by the author that takes into account his election results as candidate, about seven percent below what was expected given Zemmour's media ubiquity in the campaign. Beyond the election results, what deserves attention here is the re-construction and revising of the public discourse on the past that the journalist of the daily *Le Figaro* has been carrying out for some time now, in order to promote his racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigration agenda, as well as the circulation and distribution of these buzzwords in French public opinion.

Laurent Joly, a specialist on Vichy's anti-Jewish policies and the French right,<fnref n="1" /> analyzes Zemmour's choice to use distorted interpretations of the past, in particular regarding the memory of Vichy, the figure of Pétain, and State antisemitism. He convincingly argues, that “never, in a hundred and fifty years, in our Republic, on the eve of significant elections, has the far right seemed so strong, made so much noise. Rarely in a period of peace has the national political system appeared so fragile” (p. 9). It should also be noted that in 2022, five years after the elections that first pitted Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen against each other, the latter's victory seemed possible for the first time.

<footnote n="1">¹ One may recall, among others, the volume *L'Etat contre les Juifs* (Paris: Grasset 2018), and the recent *La rafle du Vel d'Hiv* (Paris: Grasset, 2022)</footnote>
Joly investigates the transformations of the French far right, and its xenophobic and sovereignist identity content to which Zemmour contributed. He takes a long-term look starting from the history of right-wing cultures between the late 19th and 20th centuries; if Gérard Noirel has already pointed out the similarities with another late 19th century polemicist, Édouard Drumont, it is in the wake of the culture of Action Française and the “integral nationalism” advocated by its founder Charles Maurras that Zemmour fits in. Appropriately, the author points out that “curiously enough, this filiation with Maurrasian thought and strategy has often been ignored, belittled or misunderstood” (p. 13). The other aspect to be noted, typical of Zemmour’s public discourse, is his abundant use of history, in continuity with the Maurrassian tradition; consider, for example, the success of *Enquête sur la monarchie* published in 1924, in which the founder of Action française interprets the history of France as destined toward an inexorable decline due to post-revolutionary “democratic and republican disorder.” Indeed, the journalist of *Le Figaro* presents himself as a historical truth-seeker counteracting an instrumental and propagandistic reading of the past. While the themes he touches on in his speeches are varied—he has, for example, returned to the Dreyfus affair, advancing doubts about Dreyfus’ innocence—Zemmour mostly focuses on Marshal Pétain’s policy against Jews. In particular, he calls into question, and considers criminal, the choice—initiated with President Chirac’s speech on July 16, 1995—to recognize the role of the French state in the Shoah. “Revisiting the history of the *années noires* is an indispensable element of the cultural revolution he intends to impose in order to have his program accepted,” Joly notes (p. 37); the aim is to rewrite the history of Vichy primarily to reunite French right-wingers.

In the first chapter, the author quickly traces Zemmour’s political and cultural references as the basis of his populism-tinged “ethnic nationalism,” and then moves on in the second chapter to examine how Zemmour went to the source of the rupture between the Gaullists and the extreme right-wingers, namely the memory of collaboration and the Resistance, in other words, the Pétain-De Gaulle *querelle*. For several decades, the Gaullist-inspired conservative right had kept its distance from the French extreme right, embodied first by Jean-Marie Le Pen and then by his daughter Marina.

Zemmour defends Pétain’s actions with arguments used by the Marshal himself during his trial in 1945, namely that of having used the choice of the armistice as “a
shield (*bouclier*) to protect the French people.” This interpretation was later re-
proposed by Robert Aron’s well-known volume *Histoire de Vichy*, published in
1954, which corroborated the thesis that Pétain avoided the “Polonization” of the
country with his choice of State collaboration. Aron proposed that the myth of
the *bouclier*, represented by Pétain and the *épée*, on the other hand, was
represented by De Gaulle: “both were equally necessary to France.”<fnref n="2" /> Zemmour,
then, in his articles and television broadcasts, takes up Aron’s thesis extensively,
and indeed speaks of an intimate connivance between De Gaulle and Pétain.

The other argument taken up by Aron concerns the supposed choice to have
sacrificed foreign Jews in order to protect French Jews, a thesis refuted by later
historiography beginning with the volume by Michael Marrus and Robert
Paxton, published in 1981.<fnref n="3" /> Joly also recalls an academic “forerunner,” François-
Georges Dreyfus, who in 1990 published a *History de Vichy* edited by Perrin,
which reiterated the *bouclier* thesis represented by Pétain. Dreyfus, like Zemmour,
took cover behind his Jewish origins in order to claim objectivity against Pétain
and Vichy.

Calling into question the Vichy regime's responsibility regarding discrimination
against foreigners and Jews who were considered "undesirables" ultimately leads
to the normalization of the measures of exception and, therefore, to making the
current policy proposals against immigration acceptable. To this end, Zemmour
proposes a fierce critique of what he calls the Paxtonian *doxa*: that is, the
recognition that the choice of the Vichy regimes to collaborate with Nazism was
made in order to build an anti-democratic and illiberal "National Revolution."
Such a view, now shared by historiography and public opinion finds its origins
with the book of American historian Robert Paxton, published in France in 1972.<fnref n="4" />
In particular, according to Zemmour, "Paxton's mistake is the general mistake
today, which is to think that there is a connection between the anti-Semitic laws
of October 1940 [...] and the final solution and the extermination of the Jews.
Now this is false" (p. 93). However, the connections between the measures taken
by Vichy and the deportation of French and foreign Jews have been established by
scholars for more than three decades, as has the fact that about three quarters of

<footnote n="2">² Robert Aron, *Histoire de Vichy* (Paris: Fayard, 1954), 55.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, *Vichy et les Juifs* (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Robert Paxton, *Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order* 1940-44 (New York: A. Knopf, 1972).</footnote>
Valeria Galimi

them escaped arrest thanks to the partial help of the French population. Despite
this, Zemmour proceeds systematically with falsifications, omissions and
manipulations of sources.

The last point to emphasize is that, in France, falsifying history to refute the
responsibility of Vichy in the Holocaust is a crime of negationism, punishable by
the Gayssot law passed in 1990. Among the many criminal proceedings against
Zemmour for racist and anti-Islamic expressions since February 2021, the 17th
Chambre Correctionnelle in Paris acquitted the journalist in the first instance,
while in 2023 the journalist will face eight court proceedings for racist
pronouncements in previous years.

In conclusion, Joly's little book is a useful study of the tradition of French right-wing culture to which Zemmour belongs; for his success—beyond the election result—we must blame a media system that puts historians and polemicists on the same level, where knowledge and expertise is not recognized, but rather despised. "Zemmour's triumph", Joly tells us, "resides in a profound relativism, in the air of the times, which authorizes one to say everything, to contest everything, to make everything the same" (p. 126). On the other hand, he adds that there is a certain intellectual laziness that goes too far in the opposite direction towards simplification, as in the case of President Macron's latest speech, in which only the French seem to be responsible for the Holocaust, without Nazis being in the picture. To counter this danger of simplistic reductions of a very complex issue there remains—only and above all—the accuracy of historical research and its appropriate communication.

Valeria Galimi, University of Florence

**How to quote this article:**

Valeria Galimi, review of *La falsification de l'histoire. Éric Zemmour, l'extrême droite, Vichy et les Juifs*, by Laurent Joly, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 23, no. 1 (2023)*, DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13945](https://doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13945)