Benjamin Stora

The Stora surname belongs to the vast repertoire of North African Jewish names whose formation often refers to a place. In his reference inventory, Joseph Toledano recalls that many Sephardic and Judeo-Maghrebi names derive from a toponym — the name of the city, village or region of origin becoming the transmitted identity passed down from generation to generation [Toledano, 1999]. The case of Toledano himself, "originating from Toledo," illustrates this mechanism: the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 carried, in their name, the memory of the lost city [Geneanet].

For Stora, the most plausible lead is that of the port of Stora, a cove and town on the coast of Constantinos, near present-day Skikda. It is not uncommon in the region for a family to have taken the name of the place where they had disembarked, resided or traded before moving inland. This toponymic hypothesis remains the most solid, without documented genealogy being able to settle it definitively [Toledano, 2003]. What can be established with certainty, on the other hand, is the Constantine anchoring of the family: Benjamin Stora was born into a Jewish family of Constantine and he would devote precisely to this birthplace one of his most personal books.

He revisited this birthplace with particular intensity in [Les clés retrouvées. Une enfance juive à Constantine, Corpus Zakhor id:1f185879-6c14-45b6-8741-5444466639b6], published in 2015 by Stock editions. The title refers to a material object of exceptional symbolic power: after his mother's death in 2000, Benjamin Stora discovers at the bottom of his bedside table drawer the keys to their Constantine apartment, left in June 1962. His mother had taken these keys upon their departure, never throwing them away, keeping them as a silent relic of a world she had never ceased to carry within her [benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr]. This maternal gesture — preserving the keys to a door whose threshold one will never cross again — condenses in itself the Stora lineage's relationship to belonging and to memory.

In this name linked to a port is already readable a virtue that the Jewish tradition has continually tested: the relationship to the stranger and to exile. The North African Jew is almost always the heir to a displacement — from ancient Judea, from medieval Spain, from Mediterranean shores. To bear the name of a shore is to make the migratory halt an assumed identity, and to transform the precariousness of the traveler into enduring memory. The Stora lineage, in this, participates in a collective experience of Israel: that of a people who learned to make the journey itself a heritage.

Constantine — the ancient Cirta, Numidian capital — was one of the oldest and deepest centers of Algerian Judaism. Perched on its rock, surrounded by dizzying gorges, the city sheltered a community whose presence is attested since Antiquity and which, in the nineteenth century, numbered among the most important in Algeria. The civil registry records of the colonial period paint a portrait of a predominantly urban and artisanal population: Jews there were very numerous as tailors of clothes, or worked in jewelry and goldsmith workshops; women were seamstresses [History of Jews in Constantine, Wikipedia]. The same source notes that there were only three Jewish farmers in Constantine, a sign of a city community rooted in urban trades.

It is in this universe of narrow streets, numerous synagogues and neighborhood solidarities that the Stora family belongs. Constantine Judaism was not merely a religion: it was a way of inhabiting the city, a dense fabric of confraternities, talmudic schools, charitable works and mutual aid. Craftsmanship — tailors, jewelers, goldsmiths — expressed there a discreet but essential virtue: the dignity of transmitted work, the trade learned from father and entrusted to son, a humble and daily form of Jewish continuity. In a community without great fortunes, this workshop economy sustained families and nourished, through tsedaka, the most destitute.

The [Illustrated History of the Jews of Algeria, Corpus Zakhor id:11488d17-bb66-48ac-b3f7-3326d039b5ce], realized by Benjamin Stora with cartoonist Nicolas Le Scanff and published by La Découverte in October 2021, precisely stages this long duration — from the first settlements in ancient North Africa to the exodus following the independence of 1962. The narrative is conducted by a fictional character, the young David, from a family of Sephardic Jews who sets out to seek the great history to understand his personal situation [journals.openedition.org]. This narrative device is not innocent: by making individual quest the guiding thread of a collective fresco, Stora underscores that the history of Algerian Jews is not an abstract academic object, but a reality incarnate in concrete families — like his own, like the families of Constantine.

The city was also a place of religious knowledge. The rabbis of Constantine, guardians of halakha, settled questions of daily life, ensured respect for the calendar, dietary laws and rites of passage. This authority of the Law, exercised within a tight communal framework, constitutes the spiritual background that the Stora lineage implicitly inherits: a Judaism of fidelity, where the Law is not abstraction but shared rule of life. And it is to this living, plural Constantine — Jewish, Arab, Berber, French — to its smells and its lights, that Benjamin Stora devotes the most striking pages of [The Keys Found Again. A Jewish Childhood in Constantine, Corpus Zakhor id:1f185879-6c14-45b6-8741-5444466639b6], enumerating the names of streets, the faces of Muslim neighbors, celebrations shared at the border of two cultures.

A specific fact distinguishes the family of Benjamin Stora in the History of the emancipation of Jews in Algeria. Encyclopædia Universalis reports that the historian was born on December 2, 1950 in Constantine, in a Jewish family naturalized as early as 1867, before the Crémieux Decree [Universalis]. This early naturalization — three years before the great collective decree of 1870 — is not insignificant: it bears witness to a movement of individuals who, as early as the Second Empire, were seeking French citizenship through individual proceedings.

This detail sheds light on a reality that Benjamin Stora himself studied at length. Before 1870, a few hundred Algerian Jews requested naturalization each year: in 1865, for instance, 244 Algerian Jews applied for individual naturalization. The Crémieux Decree of October 24, 1870 would change everything: Adolphe Crémieux, minister of justice, submitted nine decrees to the Council of Government that established the civil regime and above all collectively naturalized Algerian Jews [Judaicalgeria]. This collective naturalization would be immediately and vigorously criticized, notably by military leaders [Judaicalgeria], and would become the focal point of virulent colonial antisemitism. The decision conferred citizenship, but at a price: it deprived those concerned of their personal status by subjecting them to French common law, that is, to the abandonment of rabbinical jurisdiction in matters of civil status [Crémieux Decree, Wikipedia].

Benjamin Stora would make this tension the heart of his work on Algerian Jewish identity, showing how the decree made the Jews of Algeria shift "from the Orient to the Republic" [Stora, 1997; Stora, 2016]. In [The Three Exiles. Jews of Algeria, Zakhor Corpus id:82203747-f06f-44b9-9597-21c6c3472875], he synthesizes this moment of rupture as the first of the three successive wrenching events that structure the collective trajectory of the community: the 1870 naturalization indeed marks the beginning of a progressive distancing from Arab-Berber culture, which succeeding generations would experience as a fracture of identity as much as as a civic advancement. That the Stora family chose citizenship as early as 1867, through individual initiative, says something about a value: involvement in the civic sphere, the will to belong fully to the political community — a civic virtue which, in the descendants, would take the form of an intellectual commitment in service of the common good.

Conquered citizenship did not protect Jews of Algeria from violence. The Crémieux Decree became the pretext for a long antisemitic campaign, of which the Oran crisis at the end of the 19th century offers the most studied example. Historian Geneviève Dermenjian analyzed this outbreak of hatred in the years 1895-1905, showing how antisemitism became rooted in colonial society, mixing political resentment, economic competition and the importation of metropolitan passions from the Dreyfus Affair [Dermenjian, 1986].

Constantine, for its part, witnessed one of the most tragic episodes in the history of Jews of Algeria: the riots of August 1934, during which dozens of Jews were killed. This violence, which occurred in the city where Benjamin Stora would be born sixteen years later, left a lasting mark on the memory of the Constantinian community and recalled the fragility of an emancipation forever contested. The very preservation enterprise carried out by associations such as Morial — devoted to Memory of the Jews of Algeria — finds its reason for being here: to collect the traces of a world exposed, and to transmit the remembrance of the victims [Morial, 2024].

The [Illustrated History of the Jews of Algeria, Corpus Zakhor id:11488d17-bb66-48ac-b3f7-3326d039b5ce] addresses this painful sequence with the means peculiar to comic art: the power of the image — the brilliance of colors according to the publishers of La Découverte, the clarity of Nicolas Le Scanff's line — makes visible and legible a violence that academic prose alone risked abstracting [editionsladecouverte.fr]. In choosing the graphic medium to reach a broad audience, Stora and Le Scanff transform the memory of the 1934 pogrom from a footnote reserved for specialists into a reality that readers of all ages can appropriate for themselves.

It is in this experience of persecution that there is forged, in reverse, a major virtue of the lineage as it will be expressed in its most famous representative: the refusal of forgetting, the duty of memory as a form of justice. In the face of hatred, the response will not be vengeance but history — that is, the patient establishment of the truth of the facts. The Jewish tradition has always held zakhor, the injunction to remember, as a commandment. By making memory their profession, the Stora family inscribes its destiny in this long fidelity of Israel to remembrance.

The decisive turning point in family history is the exile of 1962. Benjamin Stora witnesses violence during the Algerian war of independence, and his parents go into exile in France in June 1962, which leads to family social decline [benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr]. This departure, shared by nearly all Jews of Algeria, marks the end of a presence two thousand years old.

[The Keys Found. A Jewish Childhood in Constantine, Zakhor Corpus id:1f185879-6c14-45b6-8741-5444466639b6] gives this rupture its most intimate dimension. On the morning of June 16, 1962, Benjamin Stora recounts, his mother meticulously washes their small apartment before leaving, but she does not pour water on the threshold — as she traditionally did when a loved one departed but was expected to return [crif.org]. This ritual detail, laden with terrible significance, says everything: there will be no return. The historian's mother knows, that morning, that she is leaving forever. And yet she takes the keys with her. This double gesture — not pouring the water of return, but keeping the keys to the door — sums up the wrenching ambivalence of exile: accepting the irreversible while refusing to erase what was.

War is a background noise that amplifies in the narrative: as early as August 1955, soldiers had installed a machine gun in young Stora's bedroom to fire on Algerian fighters [babelio.com]. The child witnesses violence on both sides. This experience, both personal and collective, nourishes the theoretical reflection in [The Three Exiles. Jews of Algeria, Zakhor Corpus id:82203747-f06f-44b9-9597-21c6c3472875], where Stora shows that the community experienced three successive uprootings: the estrangement from Arab-Berber culture by the naturalization of 1870, the exclusion under the Vichy regime which abrogated the Crémieux decree, then the final departure of 1962 [Stora, 2006]. Exile to France was accompanied by social decline: the family which, in Constantine, held its place in the community fabric, had to start everything over in the metropolis.

Here, transmitted memory and archive answer one another. The family testimony of exile — the house left behind, the tombs abandoned, the city left behind — finds its confirmation in migration sources and ANOM archives that Benjamin Stora himself inventoried for the study of Algerian Jewry [Stora, 1998]. The virtue that emerges then is that of humility before ordeal and courage in reconstruction: not allowing oneself to be erased by loss, but making the experience of uprooting a source of knowledge offered to all.

If Benjamin Stora's work is first and foremost academic, it has never renounced seeking other modes of expression for a history that overflows the boundaries of the academy. This tension between scholarly rigor and the urgency of the witness runs particularly through two works that echo each other across time: [The Keys Found Again. A Jewish Childhood in Constantine, Corpus Zakhor id:1f185879-6c14-45b6-8741-5444466639b6] (2015) and [Illustrated History of the Jews of Algeria, Corpus Zakhor id:11488d17-bb66-48ac-b3f7-3326d039b5ce] (2021).

In the former, Stora undertakes a return to childhood made both possible and necessary by his mother's death in 2000. The discovery of the keys at the bottom of the drawer triggers a work of memory of a different nature from that of the professional historian: no longer the consultation of archives but the surfacing of sensory images, voices, smells, bodies. The book mingles personal narrative and historical document, family anecdote and the context of war, in a writing that refuses hierarchy between the small and the large, between the intimate and the political [benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr]. The journal Esprit, which devotes an article to it in May 2015, sees in this account a testimony to the disappearance of a "multi-confessional Algeria" [benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr]. The child of Constantine is also, in these pages, the transmitter of a world where Jews, Arabs and Europeans cohabited in the physical proximity of working-class neighborhoods, sometimes sharing the same apartment courtyards and the same markets.

The [Illustrated History of the Jews of Algeria, Corpus Zakhor id:11488d17-bb66-48ac-b3f7-3326d039b5ce] answers a complementary ambition: to reach readers who do not frequent historical essays, and to make tangible a span of twenty-three centuries of Jewish presence in Algeria. By entrusting the drawing to Nicolas Le Scanff, whose clear line and bright colors structure the narrative, Stora accepts the constraint of popularization not as an impoverishment but as another form of rigor. The work of a lifetime — according to the editors of La Découverte — thus condenses into images that struggle against amnesia and attempts at rewriting [editionsladecouverte.fr]. Thirty years after The Gangrene and Forgetting (La Découverte, 1991), the same struggle against forgetting finds a new vehicle, proof that fidelity to Memory is not fixed in a single format.

This question of form — how to transmit a history whose actors have almost all disappeared — is itself an answer to a question the Jewish tradition has always posed: how to pass memory from one generation to the next when direct witnesses are no longer there? The Passover Haggadah answers it through ritualized narrative; historiography answers it through source criticism; graphic narrative answers it through image and graphic storytelling. Benjamin Stora, in successively exploring these registers, illustrates that zakhor knows not one path alone.

From the exiled child is born the historian. Formed in France during the 1960s and 1970s, marked by a militant culture that he would transcend, Benjamin Stora established himself as the great specialist of contemporary Algeria. Universalis emphasizes that despite solid Marxist training, he broke with the materialist anticolonialist history of the 1970s and 1980s and introduced unprecedented sources and issues, particularly the use of archives and the history of Memory [Universalis]. He founded and has directed the Maghreb-Europe Institute at Paris 13 since 1991, teaches the history of contemporary Maghreb, and even stays in Hanoi as part of the French School of the Far East to pursue his work on the imaginary of the Algerian and Vietnamese wars [benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr].

His work is considerable and diverse: history of the war of independence, history of immigration, and a series of books devoted specifically to the Jews of Algeria. [Les Trois Exils. Juifs d'Algérie, Corpus Zakhor id:82203747-f06f-44b9-9597-21c6c3472875] constitutes in this body of work a theoretical pivot: there he formalizes the concept of three successive ruptures that prevented the community from finding stable ground in France, each exile adding to territorial loss a loss of identity. The essay places the trajectory of the Jews of Algeria within the long duration of colonial and postcolonial history, without yielding either to tearful commemoration or to memorial polemic. This same concern for balance would guide Benjamin Stora when President Emmanuel Macron entrusted him, in July 2020, with drafting a report on memorial questions concerning colonization and the Algerian war [elysee.fr]. The report, submitted in January 2021, sets out recommendations for moving forward on a path of appeasement and recognition of all Memories [elysee.fr]. The Élysée announces that the head of state intends to take "symbolic acts" to attempt to reconcile the two countries, without, however, presenting formal apologies.

Before the deputies, Stora summarizes his approach with a formula that expresses the spirit of all his work: "Sixty years later, History is still a disordered field" [lcp.fr]. He expresses the wish that the two countries advance together on the path toward appeased memory, working toward a "reconciliation of French and Algerian peoples" [lcp.fr]. In this, the Stora lineage expresses, raised to its highest form, a cardinal virtue of Judaism: the pursuit of justice through truth, and care for the other — for reconciling wounded Memories is to work toward peace between peoples. The contribution to thought and knowledge, the refusal of forgetting, the willingness to understand yesterday's adversary rather than condemn him: all of this falls under an ethic that the tradition names tikkun, the repair of the world.

The Stora lineage, born from the name of a Constantinois shore, encapsulates in itself the great stages of the history of the Jews of North Africa: ancient and craft-based anchoring in a world city, the ambiguous emancipation of French citizenship, the ordeal of colonial antisemitism, then the exile of 1962 and rebirth in the French diaspora. At each stage, a virtue manifested itself — the dignity of transmitted work, involvement in the city, communal solidarity, the courage of reconstruction.

But it is also in the passage of forms that this lineage wrote its most singular chapter. From keys kept in the back of a drawer to the graphic novel that carries the story to thousands of new readers, the same gesture repeats itself: not to let fall what was, to find it the vehicle that will make it live for those who did not know it. The mother who washes the apartment before leaving and keeps the keys accomplishes an act of memory. The historian who makes it the title of his book amplifies it. The cartoonist who represents twenty-three centuries of Jewish presence in Algeria transmits it still.

If one must name, above all, what this lineage will have best expressed, it is without question fidelity to memory placed at the service of justice. By making the history of its own vanished community an object of rigorous science, and by working to reconcile the wounded memories of two nations, the Stora family embodied the injunction of zakhor — remember — not as a retreat into pain, but as an act of truth and reparation. It is there that the singular destiny of a Constantinois family joins the collective memory of Israel: this people which, across the centuries and continents, held that remembering with accuracy was already a way of rendering justice, and that transmitting the past was a way of hoping for the future.