La prostitution féminine juive dans l'Algérie coloniale : Entre fantasmes et réalités (1830-1962)

Résumé 0

Jewish Female Prostitution in Colonial AlgeriaAs soon as it had conquered Algiers in 1830, the French administration organized a coercive system that aimed at controlling, regulating, concentrating, imprisoning and capitalizing on prostitution in North Africa. From the military campaign brothels to the red-light districts, the agents of colonial rule (police, doctors and brothel keepers) transformed and marginalized the world of prostitution – especially in the old spaces of the medina and in the extended urban areas. Both in terms of contemporary representations of Jewish women and prostitutes and in the reality of their lives, the issue of prostitution acutely raises questions concerning all the components of colonial society (“indigenous” as well as European, which is especially important for the Jews in Algeria), in particular regarding inter-community sexuality. Between conformity and deviance, between the legal and the forbidden, Jewish prostitutes became a median and a hybrid group confronted with both masculine and colonial domination, as the case of Germaine Aziz illustrates it.