As an additional instalment of the final tragedy, on the evacuation boats was also almost the whole of the Algerian Jewish community. To many who had sympathised, actively or passively, with the F.L.N. throughout the war, their expulsion at the hands of the Muslims came as a cruel shock. “Why are you making us leave, because after all we are your friends?” the Ankaoua family asked their Muslim neighbours. “Then we locked the door, taking the key with us. We thought we might be able to return. We still had hope … until we reached the airport at Maison-Blanche. Then we knew it was the end.” Over a hundred thousand Algerian Jews, many of them impoverished, backward and disease-ridden, poured into metropolitan France.

XREF: Connects to the decolonization and pied-noir exodus narratives, resonant with broader Mediterranean Jewish displacement after 1948. DEFINE: Establishes the scale of the Algerian Jewish exodus, a distinct community expelled alongside the wider European repatriation.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1618