The Jewelers of the Ummah

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.