lished a central rabbinate in Algiers, and two others in Oran
and Constantine. The chief rabbi in each of the three towns
was imported from France, to insure French influence over the
Jewish denizens of its colony.
The Crémieux decree of 1870 made the “indigenous
Jews” of Algeria French citizens. Now literate and introduced
into the modern world, the Jews were, technically at least,
Frenchmen. Their improved status led to persecution. The
pogrom of May 1897 began with the sacking of the synagogue
in Mostaganem, near Oran. Rioters demanded the repeal of
the Crémieux decree and charged the Jews, in classic anti-
Semitic fashion, with being capitalist parasites who exploited
the population. In fact, the majority of Algerian Jews were still
living in poverty in 1897.
The dangerous situation of Jews in North Africa contin-
ued into the twentieth century. Albert Memmi, a Jewish au-
thor born in Tunis, wrote in 1974 that his grandfather, living
under Muslim rule, was regularly beaten in the street by Arab
boys in a ritual known as the chtáká.^1 After Algeria won its in-
dependence from France in 1962 , Jews were deprived of all
legal rights by the Algerian Supreme Court and were forced
out of their professions. The Jewish population of Algeria,
which stood at 140 , 000 in 1948 , sank to a mere 500 by 1974
(Atlas 94 ). Eventually, there was not one Jew left in Algeria. It
is no surprise that Derrida’s parents were among the Algerian
Jews who fled the new regime in the early 1960 s.
Anti-Semitism in Algeria had a long history and was par-
ticularly intense in the 1930 s, the first decade of Derrida’s life.
From the time of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany, the
threat of pogroms loomed, supported as well by a tradition of
anti-Semitism in France. Derrida was three years old in 1933 ,
the year of Hitler’s seizure of power; he and his family could
16 From Algeria to the École Normale