From Les Petites Jérusalems to Jerusalem: North African Postcolonial Racialization and Orthodoxy

In this paper I engage with identification to North Africa within the return to religion (teshuvah and Aliyah) for the Banlieusard (Parisian suburb-dweller) turned Breslover, Shmuel Benisrah. Through a close analysis of Shmuel Benisrah's trajectory—from Garges, greater Paris, to Jerusalem and from Arab Jew to Breslover—I seek to add complexity to the category of contemporary French Breslov Orthodoxy by revealing its close relationship to and increasing abstraction from postcolonial Maghribi (North African) identification and an intergenerational feeling of social alienation from French national cultural and secular norms. My observations show the power of religious praxis and its importance to new and politicized forms of Breslover community formation in Jerusalem. These community formations include perceived tensions between French Jewish and Muslim groups of North African descent in France and their manifestation in Jerusalem.