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.
