Following her unique work on the role of Jews in ostrich farming and the global feather trade (Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010]), Sarah Abrevaya Stein continues to break new methodological, thematic, and historiographical ground. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Stein traverses (un)familiar historical terrains through a focus on an isolated Jewish shtetl on the margins of the Algerian Sahara. She provides a fresh and different perspective from the early historical and colonial ethnological accounts of this community by John Hunwick, Lloyd Briggs, and others. Stein's historical reassessment of the Jews of Ghardaïa is based on research in thirty municipal, national, and missionary archival treasures in Algiers, Ghardaïa, Rome, Nantes, Washington, D.C., New York, Jerusalem, Paris, Strasbourg, Aix-en-Provence, and London. She highlights the significance of this story, which has been exoticized by some and viewed as irrelevant by others, through a focus on the colonial and postcolonial legal categories imposed on these tribal Saharan Jewish dwellers by colonial, military, civilian, and intellectual communities. In this study of the Jews of Ghardaïa in the Mzab Valley, she contends that the story of Mzabi Jewry is important for how it knits together Jewish relationships to French (de)colonization in North Africa, French rule in Algeria, peripheral histories, and colonial legal systems.

Stein opens her historical narrative by presenting, deconstructing, and reconstructing the celebrated and oft-critiqued ethnographic study of the Jews of Ghardaïa that the American anthropologist, Lloyd Cabot Briggs, and his assistant, Norina Lami Guède, carried out in 1962. Published in 1964, “No More For Ever: a Saharan Jewish Town” (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology 55.1 [1964]: 75–88) is generally believed to provide the ultimate factual narrative about the Jews of Algeria's pre-Saharan communities. Stein has a different view. She notes that the fact that Briggs dedicated his work to Jean Moriaz, a civilian agent of the French colonial administration, is at its core an “homage to French colonialism in the Algerian Sahara” (p. 38). After highlighting the political connections between Briggs and French colonial military and civilian officers, Stein calls for broader networks of analysis that link these Saharan Jewish communities to northern Algerian Jews, the French metropole, and Israel.

Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is an open invitation from the author to rethink the colonial archive's (un)conscious assumptions, and reexamine it against other local and global sources. Stein does not argue that the foundational material of No More For Ever is untrue or that it should be shelved and never consulted again. Instead, she notes that colonial, bureaucratic, and legal motives are central to the story. Therefore, scholars need to engage in a “background check” of their compilers as part of rewriting the historical narrative. By making the decision to consult and use other archival data from other parts of the world, Stein invites historians of North African Jewries to blaze a new path of historical investigation that reinserts Jewish lives and communities into larger colonial and local environments. By writing a story about a marginal community in the periphery of North African geography, history, and historiography, Stein preaches the erasure of boundaries between fields, archives, and regions, and provides a new interpretation to an old subject.

The reframing of the historical analysis and understanding of this community begins with a well-grounded historical analysis of the French military rule in Algeria's southern territories as well as a contextualization of French policies toward the Jewish communities of the north, including the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, which granted French citizenship to Jews in northern departments. After a discussion of the application of the Mosaic personal status laws in Algeria's southern territories, Stein analyzes legal categories that the Jews of Mzab experienced at different stages of French colonial rule in Algeria and postemigration in France. She contends that their early labeling and bracketing off as un-French indigenous Mzabi Jews, as opposed to their naturalized northern coreligionists, was a strategic decision to maintain the fragile legal political and social situation among the diverse ethnic and religious communities of the Mzab. Southern military officers were prevented from naturalizing local Mzabi Jews in order to avoid igniting Ibadite discontent. Stein then unpacks and traces the legal domains and complexities that Mzabi Jews experienced during the Vichy period, into the decades after World War II, and after the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Stein succeeds in providing a clear description of the legal confusion that shaped French colonial Algeria. However, the book could have benefited from a detailed account of the social and political interactions involving Jews, Muslims, and colonial administrators in the Mzab Valley, and how they negotiated this colonial legal bureaucracy. Despite this shortcoming, the book is a great addition to the widening literature not only of North African Jewries, but also scholarship on Algeria itself.

Stein finishes the book by describing her personal trip to Algiers and the Mzab Valley in 2009 and 2012. She visited the crumbling and empty synagogues and houses of this Jewish community. In her personal ethnographic commentary on the absence of local Jews from this region, she laments the fact that Middle Eastern politics are creating a new memory about the Jews of Ghardaïa and Algeria in general. It is a memory that could be based on erasure of Jewish heritage of Mzabi Jews from national Algerian history and history and misrepresentation that conflates Algerian Jews with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

On the whole, Stein's book should be celebrated as a new and important contribution to the field of Jewish, Middle Eastern, and North African Studies. The author shows her persistence to write against mainstream historical themes and subjects. She insists that the margin has the capacity to tell a complex story that sheds light on the center in relation to larger networks. Like the ostrich feather story, the narrative of Mzabi Jewish dwellers is used by the author to highlight global connections of a historical narrative whose plot starts in the Mzab Valley and takes the reader to Algiers, France, Israel, and back to Ghardaïa. This way of writing and conceptualizing the story allows Stein to avoid abstract jargon that could limit her readership to academic environments. The book is not only a compelling read for students of Middle Eastern, Jewish, and North African Studies but also for a growing general public of readers interested in questions of North African Jewish and Muslim memory and history.