Relevant Articles

ANU Museum of the Jewish People tells the story of Dihya al-Kahina, the Berber queen who led resistance to the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century and whom legend remembers as Jewish.

Author Didier Nebot discusses his book on Rabbi Ephraim Alnaqua, the fifteenth century rabbi and physician of Tlemcen, and his discovery of rare rabbinic manuscripts at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Paul Benhamou recalls leaving his mother and his hometown of Tlemcen in September 1961, in the middle of the Algerian War, for a year of study in the United States that became a lifetime away.

Singer Enrico Macias, born in Constantine and forced to flee Algeria in 1961, became the voice of North African Jewish nostalgia.

Poet Erez Biton, born in Algeria to Moroccan Jewish parents and blinded as a child, became the founding voice of Sephardic poetry in Israel.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy talks with David Samuels about his family’s roots in Algeria, his parents’ silence about their Jewish past, and what it means to be a nomad.

Writer Albert Bensoussan recalls his family’s life as French citizens in colonial Algeria, the Crémieux Decree that made them citizens, and his father’s loss of citizenship under Vichy.

Anthropologist and artist Miléna Kartowski-Aïach recounts the return of her great-grandfather’s tefillin bag, looted during the Holocaust, and her family’s journey from colonial Algeria to France to Israel.

Justice for Jews from Arab Countries traces the decline of Algeria’s Jewish community from 140,000 in 1948 to none today, estimating its lost property at $36.8 billion in today’s dollars.