Between selective memory and oblivion: toward a new interreligious history of the Cremieux Decree

This last session of the senior seminar, which also opens the seminar series 'Religion and Memory', curated by Guido Bartolucci and Cristiana Facchini, aims to sketch a first intellectual history of the 1870 Crémieux decree granting French citizenship to all Algerian Jews in the newly conquered and colonized Algeria – in sharp contrast to the lot of the Muslim indigènes. Taking the intellectual and biographical path of Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880) as a red thread, it intends to offer a new overview of the intellectual evolution leading from the 1791 decree of emancipation of French Jews to the imperial expansion of France in the nineteenth century and its complex redefinition of the status and role of Jews. Shedding light on the forgotten intellectual history behind the emancipation of the Algerian and more broadly Oriental Jews will lead to a renewed understanding of the complex articulation of liberalism, the traumas of imperialism and modern Jewish thought.