Constantine's Old Quarter

Some communities are remembered for what they built. Constantine is remembered for how it sounded. Perched on its gorge above the Rhumel, the old Algerian city held a Jewish community for centuries, and what it sent out into the world was a voice - a way of singing, a way of speaking Arabic that was its own, a musical tradition that a Jewish master would carry to the edge of the twentieth century and then have torn out of him in a market square. To talk about Constantine is to talk about an accent that outlived a city.

A Jewish presence in Roman North Africa is well attested, with synagogue remains and inscriptions along the coast. For Cirta, as Constantine was then called, the deep dating is softer than the local pride sometimes suggests - the regional Roman-era community is real, but a securely dated ancient community in the city itself is asserted more than it is proven. The firm ground begins later. From roughly the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, Constantine was one of the great Jewish centres of the Maghreb, with a Jewish quarter built in the seventeenth century, its own learned class, and a Judeo-Arabic so distinctive that scholars simply call it Constantinian.

The malouf and the master

Constantine is the capital of malouf, the Andalusian classical music of eastern Algeria, and Jews stood at the centre of it. The supreme example is Raymond Leyris - Cheikh Raymond - a virtuoso of the oud and one of the great masters of the tradition, who led a mixed Jewish and Muslim ensemble and was revered across both communities. A young guitarist in his orchestra, Gaston Ghrenassia, married Raymond's daughter and would later become famous in France as Enrico Macias. The music was not a Jewish enclave within the city. It was a place where Jewish and Muslim Constantine made something together, and meant it.

That shared world is exactly what makes the city's modern history so bitter to tell. The French took Constantine in 1837, after a failed first attempt the year before, ending the beylik. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 then made Algeria's Jews French citizens in a stroke - a gift that bound them to France and, by excluding their Muslim neighbours, helped poison the ground between them. The fault line ran straight through the music's home town.

The square and the exodus

The end came with a single shot. In June 1961, during the Algerian war, Cheikh Raymond was assassinated in a Constantine market, shot in the back of the neck while shopping with his daughter. No one claimed it. For the city's Jews, the killing of the man who embodied their shared culture with their Muslim neighbours was the signal that the shared world was over. Within weeks, families began to leave; within a year, after independence in 1962, the community of fifteen to twenty thousand had almost entirely gone, overwhelmingly to France rather than to Israel, for Constantine's Jews were as French as the decree had made them.

So the gorge holds its bridges and its empty Jewish quarter, and the city's Judaism lives now in French memory and in recordings. But this is not only a story of loss, and it would be a thin reading to make it one. Constantine produced a tradition strong enough to survive its own displacement: the malouf is still played, the dialect is still archived, and the descendants of that ensemble still fill concert halls. A community can lose its streets and keep its voice. Constantine did exactly that.