The Jewelers of the Ummah

A tour de force of formal, conceptual, and historiographical innovation, not to mention ethical creativity. In keeping with Azoulay's signature commitment to transformable and transformative pasts-potential histories, in her terms-this powerful book refuses the partitioning of composite Arab and Jewish identities and shared forms of life in colonized Algeria. Azoulay reopens the foreclosed past by means of a dazzling epistolatory experiment. In letters to ancestors and elected kin (Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, her own parents, among others), she exercises a right to address, become coeval, and build a world anew with strangers and familiars, those who have gone and who remain. This work is a manifesto of repair in times of unconscionable violence. -- Leela Gandhi, author of Affective Communities
Azoulay has thought deeply about the many specificities of Algerian Jews - people she calls Jewish Muslims-and draws lessons from their destroyed worlds. The Jewelers of the Ummah - which sparkles and glows like the heavy and handmade jewelry which Azoulay crafts to help her think differently - teaches readers how existing recitals of the past obscure luminous and complicated realities. It opens precious possibilities to think about Palestine as well as what anticolonial futures-freedom from every river to every sea-could look like. -- Todd Shepard, author of The Invention of Decolonization
Colonialism severed the Jewish Muslim world, conscripting the Arab and Berber Jews of North Africa into the European settler project, initiating a violent historical erasure perpetuated under Algeria's nationalist conceits. Ariella Azoulay's quest to recover and restore this world has produced her latest masterpiece-a sublime, richly illuminating meditation on how and why decolonization requires repairing pre-and anti-colonial Muslim and Jewish entanglements. She communes with ancestors through letters, archives, and art as anti-imperialist refusal. This book is also a work of art, carefully crafted like the jewelry fabricated by her ancestors, forged in fire and strung together by revolutionary love and a profound responsibility to rebuild the ummah and remake the world. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
If we are to repair our political imagination for a world where we can live together again, it will require not just an account of epistemic partitions and the amnesia that they cast. Azoulay's letters to her tribe of ancestors and intellectuals are so very deeply felt and profound in their grief and poetry that they forge a shared inheritance of the kind we so urgently need. A must-read across disciplines! -- Vazira Zamindar, associate professor of History, Brown University
In this simultaneously moving and disturbing book, Azoulay delves into the internalized and transmitted experience of exile, exemplifying this struggle herself. Like her ancestors, she refuses to surrender, seeking to re-anchor the Jews of the Ummah, unraveling colonial violence both past and present. -- Samira Negrouche, poet