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The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World
A deeply personal exploration into family, empire, art and identity, from the author of the groundbreaking Potential HistoryAlgeria’s Arab Jews were renowned for their metal-working and jewellery-making skills, and these jewellers of the ummah—the Arabic community—are, for Azoulay, the symbol of a world that can still be reclaimed and repaired.In a series of letters written to her father, her great-grandmother, and her children—and to the thinkers and artists she claims as intellectual kin, such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Azoulaytraces the history of Arab Jewish life in Algeria, and how it was disrupted by French colonialism. She begins by asking how her family became assimilated into the identities of “Israeli,” “Jewish,” or “French.”As she does, she finds a whole lost world open up to her – the world of her family, the Arab Jews of Algeria. She traces how Arab Jews were severed from other Arabs, and how Arab Jews were severed from their Arabness by the Israeli vision of a Jewish diaspora, and sets out to repair those breaks and revive their world.But it is in the return to the carefully crafted jewels, whose beautifully crafted objects act as messages to the future, reminds us of the conviviality of a world that existed long before colonial disruption, and whose memory challenges the imperial ways of thinking we have all inherited.
656 pages, Paperback
Published September 24, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 13, 2024
Brilliant. Until recently I was unaware of the diversity that once existed in Judaism. Thanks to Judith Butler, Ilan Pappe, Geoffrey Levin, and now Ariella Aïsha Azoulay amongst others; the depth and richness of this history is coming back to life.
June 25, 2025
There are many versions of the statement that ‘history is written by the winners’, including the notion that ‘until the prey have their historians, the story will always be told by the hunters’, or some version of that proverb-like statement. More so, at a time when those hunters are working hard to solidify their truth-claims as The Truth – we are surrounded by right wing attempts to shut down critical voices – it’s worth remembering that history – both the past and the study of the past – has always been contested, disputed, revised, and changing. Part of the issue – the one most of us agree on – is that as historians our evidence is always partial, it is both incomplete and from a specific point of view. It gets even more complex because that evidence takes on different meaning in different contexts, or as we ask different questions of it. So, one of the things we have to do is test the veracity of that evidence, work its partialities, and build bridges over the gaps: at best our ‘truths’ and our narratives are plausible, and we know that whatever it is we write will sometime, possibly quite soon, be wrong. For many years now, historians have tended to shift from the definite to the indefinite article – we write ‘a’ history of [insert subject here], not ‘the’ history, or at least some of us have.
And yet even with all the methodological sophistication we are building up to sustain rigour and ensure flexibility in our work, there are still histories that are beyond us – these are what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls Potential History , histories we cannot tell given the methods and approaches we have. In part that inability to tell is because of evidence gaps, because past actors and voices have been and are silenced, because received and acceptable forms of presentation cannot be sustained by the material and evidence at hand, and because received and dominant ideological forms deny the plausibility of the narrative we can construct. In this superb exploration of the lives and histories of North African Jews, Azoulay sets out to confront that problem of potentiality, and grapple with that meaning of plausibility.
The first and most notable aspect of this attempt is the form the book takes. It is constructed as a series of 16 letters to friends, family, academic, political, and scholarly influences. Some of these are unpicking and unpack family narratives; others are more scholarly disputes and debates over specific points – always civil, always generous; some are conjectural – at least in respect of the individual to whom they are addressed; others more specifically empirically grounded. At the heart of it all is an attempt to make sense of experience in that she takes a personal or family issue and explores it as a public problem; in her case an issue of not quite fitting. She was born in Israel to a ‘Mizrahi’ father and ‘Shephardic’ mother, othered by the dominant ‘Ashkenzi’ ideologies and narratives making up a Euro-Zionist image of Jewishness – she was a Jew of Arab descent in a world where Arabs are presented as the enemy, meaning that their Jewishness had to be remade to deny their Arab-ness. It is this remaking that she explores.
She does that by asking two questions. The first is to consider what we know about the lives of Algerian Jews before and during the era of French colonisation. The second is to frame that exploration with what we know about the long-run of imperialist ideologies over the last two hundred years, where European imperialist outlooks – including those in its satellite states in North American and Australasia – have been about maintaining a particular form of European ideological and political power. She paints of picture not of Jewish bliss in Ottoman Algeria, but of a complex multi-cultural world of shared community marked by craft distinction and social interaction very different from the dominant, contemporary, monolith of a single way of being Jewish – these were, she show, Arab Jews, Berber Jews, Amazigh Jews, and more, interacting, living alongside, and sharing cultural, social and religious lives with other faiths in a predominantly Muslim world. Crucially, in this Muslim world Jews were jewellers, because faith provisions prohibit Muslims from that craft.
In the first strand she explores how French colonialism brought two things – modern ways of organising the world to extract wealth from its colonial holding, and modernity as a binary mode of thinking. Dispossessing Algeria of its wealth included its valuable metals and jewels, but also of the knowledge to work them so production could be controlled by colonisers. Imperial control meant constructing the ‘controlled’ to justify dominance, and the North African experience shows that initial attempts to control the ‘natives’ as Arab failed, so they came to be controlled as Muslim, which meant the Jews needed to be isolated from their Muslim world. Imperialism therefore transformed Arab, Amazigh, and Berber Jews with their distinctive ontologies and epistemologies, languages and ways of being into ‘The Jews’ modelled on French ways of being Jewish. Azoulay puts this in the context of what she calls onto-epistemological violence, where she sees continuing craft labour – Jewish jewellers – as anti-colonial practice.
The second strand then explores how this separation of Algeria’s Jews from their Arab, Berber, Amazigh, or other ways separated them from the Algerian nation so that at the point of independence they no longer fitted, and many left with the French, denied an Algerian identity or nationality. The picture she paints, running alongside this, is a creation through the late 19th and early 20th centuries of a specific Euro-Zionist way of being Jewish as part of the creation of the nation for whom Israel-as-a-State was to be invented.
These are entirely plausible readings of the history of North African Jews, based in archival scraps (often the only thing we have) and traces of people and events peeking through gaps and around corners of pieces of evidence. More so, Azoulay draws extensively on visual culture – some of her other work (and where I first encountered her) is in the politics of photography. Here she reads postcards to address urban redesign in the colonial era, or to highlight the cultural construction of craft work or clothing styles and ‘old’, as archaic and anti-modern. She also draws on family stories and experience, often filling the gaps with reasonable supposition based on more general understanding, making justifiable assumptions, for instance, about an elderly relative’s experience in Nazi-occupied Paris after most of the younger members of her family had been kidnapped to Auschwitz.
She also explores and unravels key elements of the language and analyses of imperialism, writing a long generally positive letter to Frantz Fanon while showing how he sustained a key aspect of imperialism’s binary mode of thinking in his denial and ignoring of Algeria’s Jews in the anti-colonial struggle, or challenging Sylvia Wynter’s language of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ outlooks as both denying anti-Semitism and the existence of a Jewish-Muslim world. Other scholarly correspondents include Hannah Arendt, historians, anthropologists, and novelists, critiquing, building on, extending, and enriching through considered engagement.
The epistolary form allows empirical exploration to be woven into musings, possibilities, conjectures, and storytelling. It also allows the same pieces of evidence or story to appear in different places, making different points, responding to different questions, reaching different judgements – all seen from different angles to expose the richness and complexity of the Jewish Muslim world Azoulay seeks out.
The book is a companion volume to Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism and whereas that book showed how imperialist outlooks shaped what we understand the past and history to be as well as limiting what it can be, this shows the potential of what history might be, showing also how questioning the impact and role of ideologies of imperialism can take historical analysis to new places, disrupting ‘the hunters’ Truths’ to give voice to the silenced. Much as I welcome the specific argument Azoulay makes, the methodological and historiographical significance of this matters even more – it shows us a way (note the indefinite article) of addressing the onto-epistemological violence of imperialism and colonialism.
And yet even with all the methodological sophistication we are building up to sustain rigour and ensure flexibility in our work, there are still histories that are beyond us – these are what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls Potential History , histories we cannot tell given the methods and approaches we have. In part that inability to tell is because of evidence gaps, because past actors and voices have been and are silenced, because received and acceptable forms of presentation cannot be sustained by the material and evidence at hand, and because received and dominant ideological forms deny the plausibility of the narrative we can construct. In this superb exploration of the lives and histories of North African Jews, Azoulay sets out to confront that problem of potentiality, and grapple with that meaning of plausibility.
The first and most notable aspect of this attempt is the form the book takes. It is constructed as a series of 16 letters to friends, family, academic, political, and scholarly influences. Some of these are unpicking and unpack family narratives; others are more scholarly disputes and debates over specific points – always civil, always generous; some are conjectural – at least in respect of the individual to whom they are addressed; others more specifically empirically grounded. At the heart of it all is an attempt to make sense of experience in that she takes a personal or family issue and explores it as a public problem; in her case an issue of not quite fitting. She was born in Israel to a ‘Mizrahi’ father and ‘Shephardic’ mother, othered by the dominant ‘Ashkenzi’ ideologies and narratives making up a Euro-Zionist image of Jewishness – she was a Jew of Arab descent in a world where Arabs are presented as the enemy, meaning that their Jewishness had to be remade to deny their Arab-ness. It is this remaking that she explores.
She does that by asking two questions. The first is to consider what we know about the lives of Algerian Jews before and during the era of French colonisation. The second is to frame that exploration with what we know about the long-run of imperialist ideologies over the last two hundred years, where European imperialist outlooks – including those in its satellite states in North American and Australasia – have been about maintaining a particular form of European ideological and political power. She paints of picture not of Jewish bliss in Ottoman Algeria, but of a complex multi-cultural world of shared community marked by craft distinction and social interaction very different from the dominant, contemporary, monolith of a single way of being Jewish – these were, she show, Arab Jews, Berber Jews, Amazigh Jews, and more, interacting, living alongside, and sharing cultural, social and religious lives with other faiths in a predominantly Muslim world. Crucially, in this Muslim world Jews were jewellers, because faith provisions prohibit Muslims from that craft.
In the first strand she explores how French colonialism brought two things – modern ways of organising the world to extract wealth from its colonial holding, and modernity as a binary mode of thinking. Dispossessing Algeria of its wealth included its valuable metals and jewels, but also of the knowledge to work them so production could be controlled by colonisers. Imperial control meant constructing the ‘controlled’ to justify dominance, and the North African experience shows that initial attempts to control the ‘natives’ as Arab failed, so they came to be controlled as Muslim, which meant the Jews needed to be isolated from their Muslim world. Imperialism therefore transformed Arab, Amazigh, and Berber Jews with their distinctive ontologies and epistemologies, languages and ways of being into ‘The Jews’ modelled on French ways of being Jewish. Azoulay puts this in the context of what she calls onto-epistemological violence, where she sees continuing craft labour – Jewish jewellers – as anti-colonial practice.
The second strand then explores how this separation of Algeria’s Jews from their Arab, Berber, Amazigh, or other ways separated them from the Algerian nation so that at the point of independence they no longer fitted, and many left with the French, denied an Algerian identity or nationality. The picture she paints, running alongside this, is a creation through the late 19th and early 20th centuries of a specific Euro-Zionist way of being Jewish as part of the creation of the nation for whom Israel-as-a-State was to be invented.
These are entirely plausible readings of the history of North African Jews, based in archival scraps (often the only thing we have) and traces of people and events peeking through gaps and around corners of pieces of evidence. More so, Azoulay draws extensively on visual culture – some of her other work (and where I first encountered her) is in the politics of photography. Here she reads postcards to address urban redesign in the colonial era, or to highlight the cultural construction of craft work or clothing styles and ‘old’, as archaic and anti-modern. She also draws on family stories and experience, often filling the gaps with reasonable supposition based on more general understanding, making justifiable assumptions, for instance, about an elderly relative’s experience in Nazi-occupied Paris after most of the younger members of her family had been kidnapped to Auschwitz.
She also explores and unravels key elements of the language and analyses of imperialism, writing a long generally positive letter to Frantz Fanon while showing how he sustained a key aspect of imperialism’s binary mode of thinking in his denial and ignoring of Algeria’s Jews in the anti-colonial struggle, or challenging Sylvia Wynter’s language of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ outlooks as both denying anti-Semitism and the existence of a Jewish-Muslim world. Other scholarly correspondents include Hannah Arendt, historians, anthropologists, and novelists, critiquing, building on, extending, and enriching through considered engagement.
The epistolary form allows empirical exploration to be woven into musings, possibilities, conjectures, and storytelling. It also allows the same pieces of evidence or story to appear in different places, making different points, responding to different questions, reaching different judgements – all seen from different angles to expose the richness and complexity of the Jewish Muslim world Azoulay seeks out.
The book is a companion volume to Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism and whereas that book showed how imperialist outlooks shaped what we understand the past and history to be as well as limiting what it can be, this shows the potential of what history might be, showing also how questioning the impact and role of ideologies of imperialism can take historical analysis to new places, disrupting ‘the hunters’ Truths’ to give voice to the silenced. Much as I welcome the specific argument Azoulay makes, the methodological and historiographical significance of this matters even more – it shows us a way (note the indefinite article) of addressing the onto-epistemological violence of imperialism and colonialism.
May 15, 2025
I find this a very important and needed book, but at times a highly tedious read. The author's goal of excavating, exploring, and refounding a shared history, culture, and civilization between Algerian Jews and Algerian Muslims, I am very supportive of. I think she is largely succesful in this exercise in decolonialization. But the format of open letters lends itself to being highly repetitive at times, with her arguments and thesis presented non-linearly. Maybe some might enjoy this format, but for me it became a bit of slog. The book could have been about 20% shorter without losing much in terms of content.
I also think the author overselled her argument and bent the stick a little too far at times. Some of her letters to departed family members read like the author projecting her own views too heavily onto others, creating ahistorical anachronism as well as romanticizing the past. Critically though in her attempt to recover this pre-colonial Algerian Jewish identity she gave very limited engagement to very thorny subjects and counter-arguments such as; how the overwhelming majority of Algerian Jews supported the side of French colonialism in the Independence War and how the FLN failed to extend solidarity to Algerian Jews and craft a nation identity that was inclusive of them. Yes France takes the ultimate blame for those, and yes those topic areas feature heavily in dominant narratives that this book is trying to fight against. But in order to properly resist the dominant narrative you really need to wrestle with the topics a lot more effectively than this book did. One theme I noticed was a misunderstanding or underestimating of assimilation as a multi-agent process. Assimilation always appears as something that is done to a person - whether they are an Algerian Jew or American Jew - but they have no agency, its never something that the person can sign up, even partially. This is a simplistic and one sided view on how assimilation operates and occurs.
Still, for the subject of creating a anti-zionist and de-colonial Algerian Jewish identity, this book is a worthy contribution. It's not the definitive book on the subject, though it was never really meant to be, but it does proactively add to the conversation despite its shortcomings.
I also think the author overselled her argument and bent the stick a little too far at times. Some of her letters to departed family members read like the author projecting her own views too heavily onto others, creating ahistorical anachronism as well as romanticizing the past. Critically though in her attempt to recover this pre-colonial Algerian Jewish identity she gave very limited engagement to very thorny subjects and counter-arguments such as; how the overwhelming majority of Algerian Jews supported the side of French colonialism in the Independence War and how the FLN failed to extend solidarity to Algerian Jews and craft a nation identity that was inclusive of them. Yes France takes the ultimate blame for those, and yes those topic areas feature heavily in dominant narratives that this book is trying to fight against. But in order to properly resist the dominant narrative you really need to wrestle with the topics a lot more effectively than this book did. One theme I noticed was a misunderstanding or underestimating of assimilation as a multi-agent process. Assimilation always appears as something that is done to a person - whether they are an Algerian Jew or American Jew - but they have no agency, its never something that the person can sign up, even partially. This is a simplistic and one sided view on how assimilation operates and occurs.
Still, for the subject of creating a anti-zionist and de-colonial Algerian Jewish identity, this book is a worthy contribution. It's not the definitive book on the subject, though it was never really meant to be, but it does proactively add to the conversation despite its shortcomings.
September 26, 2024
Historical revisionism parading as real
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews