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The Jewelers of the Ummah:A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World
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A deeply personal exploration of family, empire, art and identity - from the author of Potential History
Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay examines the disruption of Jewish Muslim life in Algeria and broadly in the Maghreb and the Middle East by two colonial projects: French rule and the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which provoked the departure of Jews from these areas.
Jewelry making was a profession that marked the Algerian Jews’ place in the world they shared in the ummah, the borderless community of Muslims. The objects they crafted continue to unsettle the clear-cut separation of Jews from Muslims and of Jews from Algeria. In this jewelry, and in the history of those who made, wore, and sold it, Azoulay finds a path to reviving the lost wisdom of her ancestors.
Emptying Africa of its Jews is a tragedy which Azoulay refuses to accept. In these letters, she reintroduces Muslim Jews to the violence of colonization and traces anticolonial pathways to rebuild the rich world of the jewelers of the ummah.
Reviews
A tour de force of formal, conceptual, and historiographical innovation, not to mention ethical creativity. In keeping with Azoulay’s signature commitment to transformable and transformative pasts—potential histories, in her terms—this powerful book refuses the partitioning of composite Arab and Jewish identities and shared forms of life in colonized Algeria. Azoulay reopens the foreclosed past by means of a dazzling epistolatory experiment. In letters to ancestors and elected kin (Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, her own parents, among others), she exercises a right to address, become coeval, and build a world anew with strangers and familiars, those who have gone and who remain. This work is a manifesto of repair in times of unconscionable violence.
Azoulay has thought deeply about the many specificities of Algerian Jews - people she calls Jewish Muslims-and draws lessons from their destroyed worlds. The Jewelers of the Ummah - which sparkles and glows like the heavy and handmade jewelry which Azoulay crafts to help her think differently - teaches readers how existing recitals of the past obscure luminous and complicated realities. It opens precious possibilities to think about Palestine as well as what anticolonial futures-freedom from every river to every sea-could look like.
Colonialism severed the Jewish Muslim world, conscripting the Arab and Berber Jews of North Africa into the European settler project, initiating a violent historical erasure perpetuated under Algeria's nationalist conceits. Ariella Azoulay's quest to recover and restore this world has produced her latest masterpiece-a sublime, richly illuminating meditation on how and why decolonization requires repairing pre-and anti-colonial Muslim and Jewish entanglements. She communes with ancestors through letters, archives, and art as anti-imperialist refusal. This book is also a work of art, carefully crafted like the jewelry fabricated by her ancestors, forged in fire and strung together by revolutionary love and a profound responsibility to rebuild the ummah and remake the world.
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If we are to repair our political imagination for a world where we can live together again, it will require not just an account of epistemic partitions and the amnesia that they cast. Azoulay's letters to her tribe of ancestors and intellectuals are so very deeply felt and profound in their grief and poetry that they forge a shared inheritance of the kind we so urgently need. A must-read across disciplines!
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In this simultaneously moving and disturbing book, Azoulay delves into the internalized and transmitted experience of exile, exemplifying this struggle herself. Like her ancestors, she refuses to surrender, seeking to re-anchor the Jews of the Ummah, unraveling colonial violence both past and present.