Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria by Joshua Cole

Reviewed by: Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria by Joshua Cole Stephen A. Toth Cole, Joshua –Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 317. On August 3 and 5, 1934, in the city of Constantine in French Algeria, riots left 28 people dead, a figure which included 25 Jews, making this the bloodiest episode of anti-Semitic violence on French territory in peacetime. Officials blamed the riots on the ostensible religious fanaticism of the Muslim population, while also suggesting that Jews had somehow provoked the anger of Muslims. This explanation obscured more than it revealed, and in Joshua Cole's fascinating new book, he uncovers how the uprising was deliberately inflamed by a shadowy group of right-wing French nationalists whose "lethal provocations" were covered up by officials desperate to downplay any hint of a broader conspiracy that could also point to their own complicity in the affair. Utilizing provocation as a heuristic is its own provocative act, and it is a testament to the author's considerable skill that he has assembled a wealth of archival evidence that connects "as many as twenty of the twenty-five" (p. 5) Jewish deaths not to Muslim mobs, but to the machinations of anti-Semitic agitators who wished to exacerbate tensions between the two groups and forestall "the possibility that both Muslims and Jews might be included in the French polity on equal terms" (p. 4). The book is divided into four sections: the first two examine Muslim-Jewish relations, before narrowing to the local political context in the third, and concluding [End Page 191] with an exhaustive examination of the riots. Prior to invasion in 1830, Algeria was enmeshed in the Mediterranean world, both commercially and demographically. Its population was heterogeneous, comprised of Muslims affiliated with various religious schools, Sephardic Jews who traced their heritage back to Spain, Berber Jews whose presence predated the arrival of Islam in North Africa, Arab peoples of Turkish descent, and a diverse array of Europeans (pp. 14–16). Relations between Muslims and Jews in this period were generally amicable. Indeed, as the French laid siege to Constantine in 1837, Muslims and Jews fought alongside one another, manning the city walls in their efforts to repulse the invaders. Under French rule, Arabs and Jews were subject to the Indigénat, a set of laws which instantiated their inferior legal status. While Jews in France were granted citizenship in 1791, those in Algeria were provided no such opportunity. This remained the case until October 1870 when, in a moment of crisis, Adolphe Crémieux, first Minister of Justice, who was both Jewish and a popular Republican figure, extended citizenship to native-born Jews via the Crémieux decree. Under the constraints of the Indigénat, however, Arabs remained outside the fold, unless they abandoned their personal status as Muslims by renouncing Muslim law in exchange for naturalization, a practice that was exceedingly rare. The Crémieux decree enraged portions of the settler community, who viewed it as a dictate that threatened social and political order. Émile Morinaud, who was elected to the office of mayor of Constantine in 1898 on a decidedly anti-Semitic plank, endeavored to remove Jewish children from public schools and exclude Jews from social welfare programs. As the anti-Semitic backlash that accompanied the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s began to ebb, however, Morinaud shifted course, forming a political alliance with Jewish leaders to expand his power base. As Cole notes, "The fact that local Jewish leaders found such an alliance expedient indicates how vulnerable they felt against anti-Semitic agitation" (p. 41). The second half of the book demonstrates that what took place in Constantine was partly a product of its demography and the French colonial milieu rather than a reflection of immutable antipathies between Muslims and Jews. Unlike in Algiers or Oran, where settler populations were more robust, settlers comprised only 34% of Constantine's population, with Arabs constituting more than 50% (p. 75). As over half of the city's population was excluded from citizenship, Jews represented a quarter of the voting populace—although...

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