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Jews originating in Islamic lands, together with their descendants, constitute the majority of contemporary French Jewry. Mass migration to France from North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century doubled the post-Holocaust French Jewish population, making it the largest in Europe and the third-largest in the world after Israel and the United States. This migration, which brought profound changes to the lives of the immigrants and transformed the face of French Jewry, was part of the drastic decline…

On October 24, 1870, the Jews of Algeria, “native” subjects of France since the colonial conquest in 1830, were collectively made full French citizens by a decree of the republican Government of National Defense that succeeded Napoleon III’s Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. Algerian Jewry was the first of many Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East to undergo this profound change and the only indigenous group to be incorporated en bloc. The grant of citizenship was the last step in the emancipation of Algerian Jewry under French colonial r…

Viscount Charles Eugène de Foucauld de Ponbriand (1858–1916) was a French army officer who became an explorer, scholar, monk, and missionary, achieving renown for his studies of Morocco and Tuareg culture. He was born in Strasbourg, France, on September 15, 1858, into an old French aristocratic family. Studies at a Jesuit school in Paris prepared him for the entrance examination of the Saint-Cyr military academy, where he was admitted in 1876. One of his classmates was Philippe Pétain, later to gain notoriety as commander of a French army at Verdun in World War I and a…

1. Traditional anti-Judaism in the Islamic WorldA historical survey of Islamic attitudes toward and treatment of Jews must take into account the facts that Islam is (1) a religion with a corpus of doctrines, beliefs, and practices that have evolved over fourteen hundred years and have been subject to widely varying manifestations and interpretations; (2) a body politic, united at first, but becoming more divided over time; and (3) a civilization that despite local and regional differences has neverthe…