Many could trace back their antecedents to the expulsions from sixteenth-century Spain; some even claimed them to pre-date the invaders who had surged out of the Arabian peninsula during the eleventh century. Thus they could argue that only relatively were they later arrivals than the Muslims. However, by 1830 the Algerian Jews had become an under-privileged community, fallen into backward squalor, and the advent of the French gave them an opportunity to improve their status. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870, conferring automatic French citizenship, attracted more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria; while at the same time they provoked a sense of unfair prejudice among Muslims. However, it was not the Muslims but the Catholic Maltese, Spanish and Italian pieds noirs who, at the turn of the century, launched a minor pogrom against the Jews, smashing up their shops in protest against the competition of this new class of petits commerçants. (Analysing the various degrees of disdain in Algeria, a pied noir journalist, Albert-Paul Lentin, observed how "the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises the Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in turn despising the Arab."

XREF: Complements the colonial stratification seen in other settler societies and aligns with broader patterns of ethnic hierarchy in French Algeria.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 171