Gaulle 12 ). The pieds-noirs, though vastly outnumbered by
the Arab population, had the upper hand economically and
socially.
Jews like Aimé Derrida and Georgette Safar belonged to
a group set apart from both the Arabs and the pieds-noirs. The
Jews had been natives of Algeria since Phoenician times, in the
first millennium before the common era. This original group
of Jews, brought to North Africa as traders allied to the
Phoenician-Carthaginian empire, was augmented later on
by Jewish refugees fleeing Roman repression and those ex-
pelled from Spain in 1492. When the French arrived in 1830 , the
Jewish community of Algeria numbered some 25 , 000 and
was quite destitute. Many of the desperate Jews embraced the
French as trading partners, seeing in them a long-needed route
to prosperity.
The condition of the Jews of Algeria before the French
conquest was indeed dire. William Shaler, the American con-
sul general in Algiers, reported in 1825 that the Jews “are in
Algiers a most oppressed people; they are not permitted to re-
sist any personal violence of whatever nature, from a Mussul-
man; they are compelled to wear clothing of a black or dark
colour; they cannot ride on horseback, or wear arms of any
sort, not even a cane... they are pelted in the streets even by
children, and in short, the whole course of their existence here,
is a state of the most abject oppression and contumely”
(Dhimmi 300 – 301 ).
During the hundred and thirty years in which Algeria
was a colony of France, the French improved the lives of the
Jews, whom they relied on in business dealings. But France
also subjected them to its control; in this case as in all others,
the French government held sway over religious institutions
(Jews 16 ). In 1845 , the government of Louis-Philippe estab-
From Algeria to the École Normale 15