Jews lived in Algeria for some two thousand years, in Algiers, Oran, Constantine and Tlemcen and in the oases of the Sahara. Refugees from the Spanish massacres of 1391 shaped its rabbinic life, and the Crémieux Decree of 1870 made most Algerian Jews French citizens, a status Vichy took away in 1940. About 140,000 Jews lived in Algeria after the Second World War; almost all of them left for France in 1961–1962. See also Moroccan Jews, Tunisian Jews and North African Sephardim.
Origins
Jewish epitaphs from the first centuries CE show Jews living in the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis, in what is now western and central Algeria; when the first Jews arrived is not known. In the 7th century, Jews fleeing Visigothic persecution in Spain joined the communities of the Maghreb. The great legal scholar Isaac Alfasi was born in 1013 at Qal’at Bani Hammad, in today’s Algeria, before he moved to Fez and later to Lucena in Spain.
The Sephardi connection
Algeria received Spanish Jews a century before the expulsion. After the massacres of 1391 in Spain and the Balearic Islands, many refugees crossed to the ports and towns of Algeria. Among them were two leading rabbis: Isaac ben Sheshet, the Rivash (1326–1408), born in Valencia, who became rabbi of Algiers, and Simeon ben Zemah Duran, the Rashbatz (1361–1444), from Barcelona or Majorca, who succeeded him. In 1394 the two drafted statutes for the Jewish community of Algiers, and Duran’s responsa, the Tashbetz, with 802 rulings, became one of the major works of North African rabbinic law.
In Tlemcen, tradition credits Rabbi Ephraim Alnaqua (1359–1442), another refugee from Spain, with founding the community after he cured the daughter of the Zayyanid ruler; his tomb in the old cemetery became a place of pilgrimage. After 1492 more Sephardi exiles arrived, and later Livornese merchants (Grana) and, in the 19th century, Jews from Tetouan, who brought their Judeo-Spanish to Oran.
Modern era and departure
- Ottoman Algiers. Jewish merchants played a large part in trade with Europe. A debt owed by France to two Jewish merchant houses of Algiers for wheat bought in 1795–96 led to the quarrel in which the dey struck the French consul with his fly whisk in April 1827, the pretext for the French invasion of 1830.
- 1870. The Crémieux Decree, signed on October 24, 1870, made about 35,000 Algerian Jews French citizens. The Jews of the M’zab, in the south, were excluded and did not receive citizenship until 1961.
- 1897–1934. French settler antisemitism brought riots in Oran in 1897 and in Algiers in 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus affair. In August 1934 a pogrom in Constantine killed 25 Jews.
- 1940–1943. On October 7, 1940, the Vichy government revoked the Crémieux Decree, stripping about 110,000 Jews of French citizenship, and Jewish children were expelled from public schools. On the night of November 7–8, 1942, a resistance group led by José Aboulker, most of its members Jewish, seized key points in Algiers to help the Allied landings. Citizenship was restored only in October 1943. Read more: Sephardim in the Holocaust.
- 1954–1962. During the war of independence, Jews were targeted in attacks; in June 1961 the musician Cheikh Raymond Leyris was shot dead in the market of Constantine. About 140,000 Jews lived in Algeria in 1954. In 1961–1962 about 130,000 left for France and about 10,000 for Israel.
Religious life
Algerian Jews prayed in a North African Sephardi rite, shaped by the rabbis of 1391; Duran’s commentaries on liturgical poems were printed in the Algiers prayer book. After 1845 the French organized the community into consistories in Algiers, Oran and Constantine, on the model of French Judaism. The Great Synagogue of Algiers, inaugurated in 1865, was converted into the Ben Farès Mosque in 1962.
Language, music and food
Algerian Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic, and in Oran some families kept Judeo-Spanish into the 19th century; after 1870 French became the language of school and, within two generations, of the home. Jewish musicians were central to the Arab-Andalusian tradition: Cheikh Raymond was a master of the malouf of Constantine, and his son-in-law Enrico Macias began in his orchestra. Algerian Jewish cooking includes couscous, the Shabbat stew t’fina and makroud (date-filled semolina pastries). See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
Only a few dozen Jews are believed to live in Algeria today, with no public communal life. Most Algerian Jews and their descendants live in France, where, with other North African Jews, they became a large part of French Jewry, and in Israel.
Notable people
- Cheikh Raymond Leyris 1912–1961 · Batna Oud player and singer, master of the Andalusian malouf of Constantine; killed there in 1961.
- José Aboulker 1920–2009 · Algiers Resistance leader in the Algiers uprising of November 1942; later a professor of neurosurgery.
- Jacques Derrida 1930–2004 · El Biar Philosopher; expelled from his lycée in 1942 under Vichy’s quotas; author of Of Grammatology.
- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji b. 1933 · Constantine Physicist; Nobel Prize in Physics, 1997, for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light.
- Enrico Macias b. 1938 · Constantine Singer, born Gaston Ghrenassia; left Algeria in 1961 and became a star in France.
Sources and further reading
- Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (Rutgers University Press, 2010).
- Benjamin Stora, Les trois exils: Juifs d’Algérie (Stock, 2006).
- “History of the Jews in Algeria”, Wikipedia.
- “Crémieux Decree” and “1934 Constantine pogrom”, Wikipedia.
- “Simeon ben Zemah Duran” and “Isaac ben Sheshet”, Wikipedia.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
