This years marks 150 years of the Crémieux Decree, the law that granted French citizenship to the majority of the Jewish population in French Algeria.
The decree, signed by the Government of National Defense on 24 October 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, was named after French-Jewish lawyer and Minister of Justice Adolphe Crémieux, who had founded the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
Forty years earlier, when the French troops of King Charles X landed in the bay of Sidi-Ferruch, located about thirty kilometers west of Algiers, in June 1830, there were 25,000 Jews in Algeria. The community, composed of both Berbers and Sephardim, was organised as a “nation” under a “king”, with a mokadem, responsible for taxes, and rabbinical courts in charge of justice. They are essentially small artisans, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, shopkeepers, hawkers and a few bourgeois enriched by trade.
It had been three centuries since the Turkish regency, an autonomous state of the Ottoman Empire, has been established in northern Algeria and imposed the status of dhimmis (“protected subjects”) on the Jews, as on Christians, “among Peoples of the Book”.
They were not allowed to wear green, the color reserved for Muslims, but only black; not allowed to own weapons or to move around with a lantern at night, nor to ride on a horse, but only on a mule or a donkey, and never with a saddle.
“No wonder that most of the Jews of Algeria would throw themselves into the arms of France”, writes Nathalie Funès in L’OBS, the decree would kickstart the process of integration of one of France’s most successful minorities.
