Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict.

• Author: Dikici, Erdem
• Position: Book review

Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict

By Maud S. Mandel

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, 272 pages, 24.95 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9780691125817.

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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been, to a certain extent, shaping not just the relations between Israel and Muslim-majority countries but also the nature of the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the diaspora. In fact, many people tend to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the only noteworthy factor that forms Jewish-Muslim relations in the diaspora--thanks to the Western media that have been relentlessly selling this narrative of conflict. In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict, Maud S. Mandel, however, challenges this false conception and narrative through arguing that both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and all the other conflicts in the Middle East have been shadowing local parameters and factors that might have been playing a substantial role in the formation and maintaining of Jewish-Muslim interactions and relations in the world. She focuses on the history of the Jewish-Muslim conflict in France, and vigorously demonstrates that there are local/national issues and dynamics, including colonial legacies, post-colonial minority policies, anti-racism alliances, and so forth, that shaped the Jewish-Muslim relations in France from the early 1940s until 2000s, in addition to the conflicts in Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian issue per se. Muslims and Jews in France is a well-studied, nuanced and compelling book, which will soon become one of the seminal works in the studies of Jewish-Muslim relations in France.

Proceeding from the central claim of the book that in order to understand Jewish-Muslim relations in France one must consider both the Arab-Israel conflict and local-national contexts in post-colonial France, Mandel contends that an exclusive focus on the former is misleading. For instance, she argues, one of the local factors that shaped Jewish-Muslim relations in France is their asymmetrical integration patterns. According to Mandel, during the 1950s and 1960s Jews were more advantaged than Muslims in respect to accessing resources and means, including immediate assistance in arrival, housing, education, and so on, because of two main reasons: the presence of an established Jewish community and continuing legacy of colonial inequalities. Although both Jewish and Muslim people faced bitter discrimination...