A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [95]
AT THE TIME when Mendes-France decided to cut loose the French protectorate of Tunisia, Roger Journo, like his father before him, was a successful cloth merchant in southern Tunisia. The Journos were Jews in a country where Muslims and Jews did not mix socially but worked together and seldom had conflicts. The Tunisian nationalist leader, Habib Bourguiba, valued the hundred thousand Jews in the protectorate and tried to keep Jewish leaders informed on negotiations with France for Tunisian independence. Bourguiba told Tunisian Jews personally that the independent Tunisian state would guarantee the equality and citizenship of Jewish Tunisians. Some Jews believed him and even worked for the independence movement. But Journo feared that if things turned out badly after independence, it might be difficult to get out. In 1951 he gave up his good life in the sunny Mediterranean port town of Sousse, where one in five people were Jewish, and moved his wife, two daughters, and two sons to one of the smudged little damp and badly heated apartments on the bad end of the Finkelsztajns’ Rue des Rosiers building. Only on rare days would they get sunlight through their three small garret windows on the top floor. They bought a small storefront across the street from the apartment and sold Jewish food. But with the exception of three or four other North African families, none of the Jews on Rue des Rosiers had ever before seen such Jewish food—olives, hummus, tahini, couscous, and halvah. Not a gefilte fish or a herring in sight, and not a word of Yiddish. The neighbors on Rue des Rosiers found these too to be very strange Jews.
More of them were coming. French North Africa had a population of a half-million Jews. Morocco alone had some 285,000, mostly impoverished or struggling peddlers and craftsmen. After Israeli statehood in 1948, a wave of poorer Jews emigrated to the new Jewish state from both Tunisia and Algeria. In Oujda, Morocco, a mob attacked the Jewish quarter during the 1948 Middle East war, killing more than a dozen people and wounding many more. More than a third of Morocco's Jewish population, mostly the poorest, emigrated to Israel. These emigrants sent reports back to Tunisia and Morocco of a hard and sometimes dangerous life, and few Jews were interested in following this first wave. After independence the new Moroccan government kept its promise to treat Jews fairly and even appointed Jews to ranking government posts. But the new country had virtually no economy, and with Moroccans sending back troubling reports from Israel, the remaining Jews began an orderly three-decade-long retreat to France.
Algerian Jews never called themselves Algerian. Algerians were Arabs. These Jews, though they had been in Algeria since the Spanish expulsion, considered themselves French, which was legally correct since 1870, when the decret Cremieux had granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Adolphe Cremieux was a passionate nineteenth-century advocate of French revolutionary idealism who had championed the abolition of slavery. He successfully argued that extending citizenship to Jews in Algeria was the overdue fulfillment of the rights granted other French Jews by the French Revolution. They were simply thought of as French Jews. In fact, Algeria was thought of as part of France. Mendes-France, after getting France out of its bitter colonial war in Vietnam and dropping Tunisia and Morocco, balked at Algeria. “Algeria,” he said, “is France and not a foreign country.” There was enough anger about his “giving away” Tunisia and Morocco that he never could have discussed doing the same with Algeria; it would have been seen, as he himself said, as an attack