History of Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Middle East and North Africa

From the 7th to the 19th century, the majority of the world's Jews lived in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, under Muslim rule. This course will revisit the long history of this coexistence and the Jewish condition in Muslim lands, in its various aspects-legal, religious, social, economic, political, cultural-and its ambivalences. Jews were not considered equals and faced forms of discrimination that varied according to time and place. We will then examine how colonization marked a break in the history of these societies, from Algeria, which experienced the most extensive colonial intervention, granting Jews French nationality, to Yemen and Morocco, where Jews remained the "protected" (?immi) of the Muslim authority. The departure of Jews from the Arab and Muslim world will be discussed in the context of decolonization, combined with other factors, foremost among them Zionism. The final part of the course will focus on the birth of Zionism, Jewish immigration to Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel, and the conflicts that seem to have become the matrix of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle East since 1948.

This course aims to deconstruct the contemporary understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations as necessarily antagonistic by reintroducing historical depth. The historical perspective will be combined with anthropological notions and methods to better reconstruct the richness and complexity of these relationships.