Emerging Identities in Colonial Tunisia: "Alliancist" and Zionist Representations in Tunis prior to World War I

By 1900 the Jewish community of Tunisia witnessed the emergence of new competing identities: “assimilationist” of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, termed “Alliancist,” and Zionist. Strikingly, two members of the same family in Tunis, Raymond Valensi, President of the AIU Regional Committee, and Alfred Valensi, President of the Zionist Federation, led the struggle for their separate causes. In his discussion of identity in the modern world, Homi Bhabha asks, "How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities…where, despite shared histories of …discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities…may be profoundly antagonistic…?" It is in this context that the claims of the Alliance and Zionism will be examined prior to World War I, based on the Archives of the AIU and on such secondary sources as the indispensable work of Paul Sebag. The tensions between the Alliancists and Zionists continued until the outbreak of World War II, as the French-speaking Jews of Tunisia sought to define their individual and collective identities.

Stagnation and Change in Islamic History

There appear to be two seemingly contradictory images of economic change in the Islamic World and mixed evidence on whether Islamic societies have been open or conservative against modern ideas, technological advancements, and legal developments. Whereas a conservative attitude has been dominant in some societies and time periods, Muslims were at the forefront of scientific, technological, and legal developments in others. Rather than rely on ad hoc assumptions about the attitudes and characteristics of societies or the inherent qualities of new developments, this paper explains attitudes towards change by studying the political economy of the relationship between the rulers and the legal community. I extend recent theories of endogenous institutional change to develop a framework based on how rulers and legal community reacted to new developments immediately and how their strategic interaction unleashed an endogenous process toward change in the long run. Using this framework, I identify conditions under which new ideas, technologies, and legal developments have resulted in immediate change in Islamic societies. I also examine the process of change in the long run, whether and how immediate outcomes could be sustained over time as strategic interaction continued repeatedly.