Jackie Derrida, later known as Jacques, was born on July 15 ,
1930 , in El Biar, Algeria, near Algiers. Both his parents came
from old Algerian Jewish families. His mother was Georgette
Safar, whose family had lived in Algeria for at least three gen-
erations. In 1923 she married Aimé Derrida, a young traveling
salesman. Their first son, René, was born in 1925. Paul Derrida
followed in 1929 and died a little less than three months later.
Then came Jackie in 1930. Jackie’s younger sister, Janine, was
born in 1934. A third brother, Norbert, was born in 1938 and
died, like Paul, several months later. Derrida later said that the
fact he was a middle child explained everything about him. He
often quarreled with his elder brother, but never with his
adored younger sister.
The Derridas’ house was in the rue Saint-Augustin in El
Biar, a fact that later attracted the attention of their son, the
most famous North African thinker (along with Albert Camus)
since Augustine. In 1934 the Derrida family moved to a larger
house in El Biar that they called, with affectionate mockery,
“the villa.”
The ordinary, hardworking Derrida family lived in a
mysterious and dangerous country, a place that would prove
central to the identity of France because of its rebellion against
colonial rule in the 1950 s and 1960 s. (Algeria was never, strictly
speaking, a French colony, but rather a department of France—
a fact that would be of crucial importance to the struggle over
its future.) Algeria, for thousands of years fought over and
conquered in turn by the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Van-
dals, the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs, and the Turks, had been
invaded by France in 1830. The move was part of France’s effort
to establish firmer control over trade in the western Mediter-
ranean. More important, it represented the attempt of Charles
X, the Bourbon king, to distract attention from his failing rule.
From Algeria to the École Normale 13