Dwelling in Narrative: Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Domestic Communities of Joëlle Bahloul and Karin Albou

Joëlle Bahloul’s ethnographic study Architectures of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962 (1996) and Karin Albou’s film Le Chant des mariées (2008) draw attention to female sociability inside domestic communities in North Africa during French colonisation. Recounting tales of Jewish and Muslim women living under the same roof, these narratives depict the home as a predominately female space where interreligious differences can be and are overcome. While Bahloul and Albou present the home as providing social cohesion and emotional support for women, they also show its susceptibility to an instability that threatens this structure. Spatial proximity and housework forge these interreligious bonds that, in turn, help the community overcome the threat of rupture of relations by external forces such as Nazi violence. Regardless, the movement of history still prevails in altering the roles of women and their relation to one another and creating different forms of displacement that change the entire shape of the community. Together, the two works contribute to a larger interdisciplinary corpus that communicates an idea of what life was like in the home in the middle of the twentieth century for Jews and Muslims dwelling in the Maghreb under French colonial rule.