The book The Jewish Maghreb – North African Experiences in Greater Paris since 1981 by Samuel Sami Everett, Senior fellow 2023-2025, was published by Berghahn Books in April 2026.
Presentation
Homogenization, monochromatic rendering, and the process of schematic imposition is readily apparent in modern mainstream Jewish French politics. The Jewish Maghreb explores complex self and communal understandings of Maghrebi Jewish populations and their descendants in France through ethnography across generations.
This study examines how colonial history, migration, and geopolitics shape ongoing Maghrebi belonging. From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, the book reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.
About the author Samuel Sami Everett
Samuel Sami Everett is Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Associate Professor at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton.
He was an Iméra fellow from September 2021 to June 2022, and subsequently a Senior Fellow from 2023 to 2025. The themes of the book are reflected in the project undertaken during his successive residencies, in which Samuel Sami Everett conducted a dialogical investigation into North African and diasporic spaces of creativity and long-term Jewish-Arab exchanges.
