Rabbi Joshua Schreier The Merchants of Oran sku-55600655

The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire is a hardcover by Rabbi Joshua Schreier, listed under African History Books as sku-55600655. It follows Oran's Jewish mercantile elite through the transition to French colonial rule, focusing on Jacob Lasry and other merchants who both responded to and influenced colonialism in Algeria.

Lasry's cohort established itself in Oran in the decades after the Regency of Algiers dislodged the Spanish in 1792. During a period of relative tolerance and prosperity, Jewish merchants traded in imports and exports and contributed to Oran's commercial vitality before the French invasion. They retained commercial, political and social influence under French occupation.

By the 1840s, French policies were treating Oran's diverse Jewish inhabitants as a single social category, legally separating them from their Muslim neighbors and creating a racial hierarchy. Schreier argues that France's exclusionary policy of "emancipation," more than older antipathies, laid the groundwork for twentieth-century ruptures between Muslims and Jews.

The book is in the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C series.