The memory of ordinary, everyday intercultural or interreligious relationships, in brief 

Joëlle Bahloul’s book The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962, is the work of an anthropologist whose family lived in Dar Refayil, a shared Jewish-Muslim house built on two levels: Muslim families lived in apartments upstairs, Jewish families downstairs, and the common household was formed around a common courtyard, a housing arrangement that not uncommonly united Muslims and Jews in Algeria – and in other North African and Middle Eastern countries. 

Other published sources give little sense of the relationships between ordinary Jews and Muslims in Sétif, and that is what the Memory Bank is designed to highlight and explore further. We are also looking for recollections from other Algerian towns about the ways in which ordinary cross-confessional friendships were valued and helpful, in areas of social and economic life that go beyond the religious area.

The context in which the memory made a difference at the time 

In Dar Refayil, social solidarities amongst Jewish and Muslim neighbours both natural and inevitable. In public life, such solidarities came under pressure from discriminatory regimes and hate campaigns which targeted both Jews and Muslims, albeit separately

What has happened since, which makes the memory valuable 

The Sétif saw some of the most brutal atrocities of the French rule in Algeria. Jews were targets of an antisemitic French movement from the 1890s, and conditions for other citizens worsened over time. The Sétif massacre in May 1945 – part of a series of massacres of Muslim civilians in the area – marked the beginning of the Algerian War and also the beginning of the decline of the city’s Jewish community. By 1962, when Algeria gained independence, more than three hundred Jewish families still remained in Sétif  The new government did not extend citizenship to Algeria’s Jews, and life for the city’s Jews continued to be insecure. The descendants of Sétif’s last Jews mostly moved to France. 

How might the memory be used in bringing people together in practice now? 

Bahloul recalls a common household model which encompassed and fostered diversity: the house, set around a courtyard, creating common social spaces and interests, has parallels in collective living arrangements in countries around the globe.  Bahloul’s book shows how the memories of the former Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Dar Refayil overlapped, but also differed as a reflection of the different experiences that their apartments’ locations, upstairs and downstairs, gave them. Living abroad in separate communities, they are exposed to separate and often very politically-charged narratives about the past. The example of the common life lived in Dar Refayil contrasts with narratives which assume conflict across the communities was natural, or inevitable, or that people of different religions would naturally seek to live apart from each other. 

Additional context/Some additional reading

Joëlle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962, 1996.