12 Jackie 1930–1962
out in Algeria after 1897. The following year, Édouard Drumont,
the notorious author of Jewish France, was elected as député for
Algiers.^6
One of the consequences of the Crémieux Decree was an increase
in the level of assimilation of Jews into French life. Of course,
Jewish religious traditions were maintained, but in a purely private
space. Jewish forenames were Gallicized or, as in the Derrida
family, relegated to a discreet second place. People referred to the
‘temple’ rather than the ‘synagogue’, to ‘communion’ rather than
‘bar-mitzvah’. Derrida himself, much more attentive to historical
questions than is often thought, was keenly aware of this change:
I was part of an extraordinary transformation of French
Judaism in Algeria: my great grandparents were still very close
to the Arabs in language and customs. At the end of the nine-
teenth century, in the years following the Crémieux decree of
1870, the next generation became more bourgeois: though my
[maternal] grandmother had to be married almost clandestinely
in the back courtyard of a town hall in Algiers because of the
pogroms (this was right in the middle of the Dreyfus Aff air),
she was already raising her daughters like bourgeois Parisian
girls (16th Arrondissement good manners, piano lessons, and
so on). Then came my parents’ generation: few intellectuals,
mostly shopkeepers, some of modest means and some not,
some who were already exploiting a colonial situation by
becoming the exclusive representatives of major metropolitan
brands.^7Derrida’s father, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles, was called Aimé;
he was born in Algiers on 26 September 1896. When he was twelve,
he was apprenticed to the wine and spirits company Tachet; he was
to work there all his life, as had his own father, Abraham Derrida,
and as Albert Camus’s father had done – he too was employed in a
wine-shipping business in Algiers harbour. Between the wars, wine
was the main source of revenue for Algeria, and its vineyards were
the fourth biggest in the world.
On 31 October 1923, Aimé married Georgette Sultana Esther
Safar, born on 23 July 1901, the daughter of Moïse Safar (1870–
1943) and Fortunée Temime (1880–1961). Their fi rst child, René
Abraham, was born in 1925. A second son, Paul Moïse, died when
he was three months old, on 4 September 1929, less than a year
before the birth of Jacques Derrida. This would make of him,
he later wrote in ‘Circumfession’, ‘a precious but so vulnerable
intruder, one mortal too many, Élie loved [aimé] in the place of
another’.^8
Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the