![]() Entwined RelationsMirza Asmer Beg THE BURDENS OF BROTHERHOOD: JEWS AND MUSLIMS FROM NORTH AFRICA TO FRANCE By Ethan B. Katz Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2015, pp. 480, Rs. 2290.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 5 May 2016 This study is a broad history of Muslims
and Jews in France from World
War I to the present times. With half
a million Jews and 4 to 6 million Muslims,
France is home to the largest Jewish and
Muslim populations in Western Europe. It
tries to look at how the lives of Jews and
Muslims had been entwined on both sides
of the French Mediterranean. Historically
what we call Jewish-Muslim relations in
France were neither inescapably ethno-religious
nor necessarily oppositional, rather
they interacted on a wide range of terms. As
we move to the second half of the 20th century,
we discern that relations between Muslims
and Jews became defined increasingly
by potentially differing ethno-religious categories.
However, in the context, both groups
continued to interact in an assortment of
ways that far escape the narrow framing of
their relationships as interactions between
Jews and Muslims.
To start with, Jews in France generally
had certain advantages over Muslims. Firstly,
the majority of Jews who migrated to France
in the 20th century were French citizens,
educated and knew French; on the other
hand, few Muslim immigrants from North
Africa shared these characteristics. These differences
played a major function in Jewish
capability to move into middle class professions
and better neighbourhoods quite easily.
Secondly, a well-established Jewish community
gathered together enormous resources
to welcome its North African co-religionists;
no such structure was available for
Muslims.
However, both Jews and Muslims tried
hard to show their loyalty to France. But the
former did it as a statement of affirmation,
and the latter as a plea for equal rights.
This book also maintains that Jews and
Muslims in France did not perceive one another
in an elemental manner, rather their
relations were always ‘triangular’, with France
as the third party. The author argues that
hitherto, the descriptions of their relations
have usually assigned Jews and Muslims to
misleadingly dichotomous positions that
made nearly imperceptible the greater fluidities
of daily interface and survival. Historians have often emphasized solid divisions
which have classically masked important
competing threads in the history of Jews and
Muslims and their relations as they opened
up in the war.
In this study the author has made assessments
between the different cities where
these two communities often lived, and he
tries to bring out how urban settings, geography,
local politics and population sizes
have defined Jewish-Muslim relations in
modern France. He emphasizes the concept
... Table of Contents >> |