The Racial Politics of the Alliance Israélite Universelle

Abstract: Despite the extensive literature on the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), scholars have yet to apply race as an explicit analytic in examining its work across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Iran. I argue that the AIU racialized the Beta Israel as subjects in need of aid through overtly physiognomic descriptions, notions of time, and ethnographic descriptions of cultural practices that rest on underlying racial logics. Further, I argue that the AIU was driven by racial notions, anxieties, and aspirations around whiteness. These racial politics come to the fore through a case study of the ethnographic expeditions that the AIU sponsored to the Beta Israel in Ethiopia. The Alliance first sent Joseph Halévy in 1867–1868, and forty years later, dispatched a second expedition led by Rabbi Haim Nahum in 1909. While accounts of the AIU tend towards a paradigm of Orientalism, thinking with race accounts for the role that racial theory played in the development of Alliance policy, emphasizes multidirectional constructions of Blackness and whiteness, reveals analytic connections linking groups within a global racial hierarchy, and highlights continuities with debates around white gatekeeping in the Jewish community that are still unfolding today. Applying race as an explicit analytic thus not only reframes the work of the Alliance, but enables us to rethink Jewish history and historiography more globally.