hear French mobs in Algiers celebrating the Nazi victory. In
August 1934 , Arabs murdered twenty-five Jews in Constantine,
in eastern Algeria. In 1936 , a Jewish soldier was killed in Algiers
for tearing down an anti-Semitic poster (Atlas 94 ).
Not a single German soldier set foot in Algeria during
World War II. Even in the absence of the Nazis, though, the
Vichy regime’s persecution of the Jews was extreme. Jews were
stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the professions
and from schools. In Algeria as in France proper, Vichy im-
posed a strict numerus clausus:only two percent of doctors
and lawyers could be Jewish, and all Jewish teachers were dis-
missed (except for teachers in Jewish schools;Jews 126 ). In
1942 , on the first day of the school year, the twelve-year-old
Derrida was made to leave his school, the Lycée de Ben Ak-
noun, without being told why: an event he often recalled in
later life as a kind of primal scene, the submission to an au-
thority that had no need to explain itself. Until the spring of
1943 young Jackie attended the Lycée Emile-Maupas, com-
prised of expelled Jewish students and teachers. The exclu-
sively Jewish environment made Jackie uncomfortable. He had
spent his childhood largely with gentile schoolmates. Sud-
denly, he was thrown together with a people he was not ac-
customed to thinking of as his own. His own bar mitzvah was
approaching, but he resisted the rituals of Judaism, dragging
himself unwillingly through rote memorization of the prayers
he would need to recite before the bimah.
In a November 2002 interview with Kristine McKenna of
theLA Weekly,Derrida remembered that he went regularly to
synagogue as a child in Algiers, and that “there were aspects of
Judaism I loved—the music for instance.” But by the time of his
teenage years young Jackie Derrida was, as he later remarked,
“shocked by the meaningless way my family observed religious
From Algeria to the École Normale 17