Norman A . Stillman Introduction prim and proper bourgeois French of the nineteenth century were shocked by their earliest contacts with North African Jewry . The noisy exuberance of the Maghrebi Jews represented to their eyes a total lack of manners . They celebrated their holidays with a lack of decorum , according to antisemitic observers , descended to the point of 1 debauchery . Acculturated French Jews were also disgusted and embarrassed that their North African coreligionists quarreled among themselves in public without any shame or even the least constraint . In a on the condition of Algerian Jewry in 1840 by a Jewish doctor and interpreter serving in the French African Army addressed to Lieutenant-Colonel Marx Cerfberr , a leading Jewish communal figure France , they report : The reproaches that they address to one another in their discussions of importance are incessant , acerbic , loud , shameless , for these distressing scenes take place coram populo : there , reproaches an...
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