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The Field of In Between

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Sarah Abrevaya Stein*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.; e-mail: sstein@history.ucla.edu
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Extract

In the spring of 1902, Miryam bint Lalu Partush appealed to military representatives in Ghardaïa, in the Mzab Valley (a valley of five fortified oasis cities in the northern Algerian Sahara, six hundred kilometers south of Algiers), for the paperwork that would allow her to undertake a six-month pilgrimage to Jerusalem with her husband, the wealthy merchant Musa (Moshe) bin Ibrahim Partush. Miryam Partush was unusual in possessing the means for such a rare, costly voyage; but notwithstanding her class, Partush's legal status was typical of most Muslims and southern Algerian Jews in Algeria. She was not a citizen, nor did she hold official papers of any kind. When Miryam Partush appealed to the military authorities in Ghardaïa, then, she was appealing for many things: for the right to leave her native valley and travel to the port of Algiers; for the papers that would allow her to cross colonial boundaries; and for the documentation that would register her liminal legal identity. Authorizing her travel, Algeria's governor-general named Partush a “non-naturalized Jew from the Mzab.” Thus did Partush embark on her six-month journey with a negative legal identity: this Jewish woman was definable, in the eyes of the law, only by what she did not possess.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 581 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 ANOM 22H/16, Letter from General Servière to the governor-general of Algeria (GGA) (Réviol), 26 March 1902 and GGA (Réviol) to Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 28 March 1902.

2 An important exception is Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

3 Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Clancy-Smith, Julia, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

5 Cohen, Julia Phillips, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, Mary Dewhurst, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Slymovics, Susan, How to Accept German Reparations (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boum, Aomar, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Maureen, Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bashkin, Orit, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Jessica Marglin, “In the Courts of the Nations: Jews, Muslims, and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century Morocco” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012); Campos, Michelle, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Jacobson, Abigail, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Gottreich, Emily and Schroeter, Daniel, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Schreier, Joshua, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, N.J.: University of Rutgers Press, 2010)Google Scholar. Ongoing projects by Paris Papamichos Chronakis, Bedross Der Matossian, Jonathan Gribetz, and Lital Levy also fit squarely within this oeuvre.

6 These works include two documentary histories and two encyclopedic works: Cohen, Julia Phillips and Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, eds., Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700–1950 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Behar, Moshe and Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor, eds., Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Meddeb, Abdelwahab and Stora, Benjamin, eds., A History of Jewish–Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stillman, Norman, Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip I., Ayalon, Yaron, and Levy, Avigdor, eds., Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishing, 2010)Google Scholar.