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Paper short abstract:

This paper retraces the constitution of an Algerian-Jewish collection of ‘objects of affection’, exploring the agency of these exile-materialities in producing Magrehebian Jewish heritages; it aims to rethink: How does the curatorship of these objects' biographies evolve into new forms of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Seeking to fill the gaps in its collections with Jewish-Argelian heritage, in 2011, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (MahJ), Paris, disseminated a calling for the participation of Jewish families exiled in France to donate ‘sensitive testimonies’ (Héricher 2012) of their life trajectories. This curatorship was envisioned to counteract the process of institutional forgetfulness that Judeo-Algerian heritage faced after the mass departure of the Jewish population from Algeria in 1962 (Stora 2006). The constitution of this fund of administrative and family archives and heirlooms, curated in the exhibition “Juifs d’Algérie” (2012), came to complement MahJ’s permanent collection exhibited in the gallery entitled “The Jews in the Levant and the Maghreb.”

Drawing on my ongoing research on the trajectories of Algerian Jewish ‘exile materialities’ reassembled in the MahJ’s collections in articulation with ethnobiographies of their donors, this paper proposes a reflection on the knowledge recuperation and actualisation entailed in the process of musealisation of Algerian-Jewish heritage. In particular, it seeks to establish correspondences between the representations of a lost vernacular world exhibited in MahJ’s galleries and the subjective and affective dimensions interwoven in the materiality of these dons. How can museums act as proxies to re-animate Judeo-Arab ‘desert heritages’ for second-generation descendants of Algerian exiled Jews? In what ways does the constitution of a collection of ‘displaced things’ (Dudley 2021) enable the mapping and transmission of Arab-Berber-Jewish traditional knowledge?