In the 18th century, other Jews, the Granas of Livorno, were few in number, but played a role as commercial intermediaries between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Algerian Jews increasingly identified with metropolitan France, and despite a period of forced return to second-class indigenous status during World War II,[4] they opted en masse to be repatriated to France on the eve of Algerian Independence—when even the formerly excluded Mozabite Jews were granted French citizenship—with a minority choosing Israel.

The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by Titus in 70 CE, and thereafter by the Kitos War in 117, reinforced Jewish settlement in North Africa and the Mediterranean.

Early descriptions of the Rustamid capital, Tahert, note that Jews were found there, as they would be in any other major Muslim city of North Africa.

Later many Sephardic Jews were forced to take refuge in Algeria from the persecutions in Spain of Catalonia, Valencia and Balearic Islands in 1391 and the Spanish Inquisition in 1492.

Jews were also present in the cities of the interior such as Tlemcen and Constantine and as far spread as Touggourt and M'zab in the south, with the permission of the Muslim authorities.

The fear of Spanish invasions in the 18th century caused Jews in Algeria to face potential expulsion and confiscation of property, similar to what had occurred in Spain.

By 1841, the Jewish batei din "religious courts" were placed under French jurisdiction, linked to the Israelite Central Consistory of France.

[13] Such oversight was an example of the French Jews' attempt to "civilize" Jewish Algerians, as they believed their European traditions were superior to Sephardic practices.

[12] In 1865, the Senatus-Consulte liberalized rules of citizenship, to allow Jewish and Muslim "indigenous" peoples in Algeria to become French citizens if they requested it.

Although some took on more typically European occupations, "the majority of Jews were poor artisans and shopkeepers catering to a Muslim clientele.

In Algiers when Émile Zola was brought to trial for his defense in an 1898 open letter, J'Accuse…!, of Alfred Dreyfus, sympathy for whom was widespread in the Arabic press,[19] over 158 Jewish owned shops were looted and burned and two Jews were killed, while the army stood by and refused to intervene (see 1898 Algerian riots).

[20] Hannah Arendt was to comment later that,'that pogroms against Jews in Algeria were carried out not, as it was claimed, by “‘backward Arabs’” but by “thoroughly sophisticated officers of the French colonial administration” and by the mayor of Algiers, Max Régis.

[citation needed] By the mid-thirties, François de La Rocque's extremist Croix-de-Feu and, later, the French Social Party movements in Algeria proved active in trying to turn Muslims against Algerian Jews by publishing tracts in Arabic, and were responsible for inciting the 1934 Constantine Pogrom, in which 25 Jews were killed and some 200 stores were pillaged.

[25][26] Under Vichy rule in Algeria, even Karaites and Jews who had converted to another religion were subject to anti-semitic laws, known collectively as Statut des Juifs.

[25] Under Admiral Darlan and General Giraud, two French officials who administered the French military in North Africa, the antisemitic legislation was applied more severely in Algeria than France itself, under the pretext that it enabled greater equality between Muslims and Jews and considered racial laws a condition sine qua non of the armistice.

[25] This was unique in French North Africa, and as such the laws covering the status of Jews were governed much more harshly in Algeria than in Morocco or Tunisia.

On November 8, 1942, the Algerian resistance to the Vichy government took part in the takeover of Algiers in preparation for the Allied liberation of North Africa, known as "Operation Torch.

This can partially be explained by the fact that Giraud himself, along with the Governor-General Marcel Peyrouton, in promulgating the cancellation of Vichy statutes on March 14, 1943, after the allies landed in North Africa, retained exceptionally the decree abolishing citizenship rights for Algerian Jews, claiming that they did not wish to incite violence between the Jewish and Muslim communities in Algiers.

[27] It was not until the arrival of Charles De Gaulle in October 1943 that Jewish Algerians finally regained their French citizenship with the reinstatement of the Crémieux Decree.

[29] The FLN published declarations guaranteeing a place in Algeria for Jews as an integral constituent of the Algerian people,[30] hoping to attract their support.

Some Algerian Jews had joined the Organisation armée secrète, which aimed to disrupt the process of independence with bombings and assassination attempts, targets including Charles de Gaulle and Jean-Paul Sartre.

[1] According to the Jewish Encyclopedia,[43] A contemporary [1906] Jewess of Algiers wears on her head a "takrita" (handkerchief), is dressed in a "bedenor" (gown with a bodice trimmed with lace) and a striped vest with long sleeves coming to the waist.

At an earlier stage the Algerian Jewess wore a tall cone-shaped hat resembling those used in England in the fifteenth century.The largest study to date on the Jews of North Africa has been led by Gerard Lucotte et al. in 2003.

Sephardi population studied is as follows: 58 Jews from Algeria, 190 from Morocco, 64 from Tunisia, 49 from the island of Djerba, 9 and 11 from Libya and Egypt, respectively, which makes 381 people.

Two major subgroups were identified by principal component, neighbor joining tree, and identity-by-descent analysis—Moroccan/Algerian and Djerban/Libyan—that varied in their degree of European admixture.

Thus, this study is compatible with the history of North African Jews—founding during Classical Antiquity with proselytism of local populations, followed by genetic isolation with the rise of Christianity and then Islam, and admixture following the emigration of Sephardic Jews during the Inquisition.