I am a historian of citizenship, language, and the public sphere in the modern Mediterranean.

My first book, Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship, offers a major reinterpretation of state membership and legal status as menace, lived reality, and promise in France’s most important modern colony. Using legal documents, police reports, petitions, leaflets, and newspapers in French, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic, I show how Algeria became a crucial site for drawing and negotiating the boundaries of participation and rights. It was here that the French idea of citizenship emerged in its culturally codified and highly ideologized form. At the same time, colonial Algeria witnessed some of the most powerful struggles to retain, revive and accommodate difference within the Republic, with Algerian Muslims and Jews drawing on Maghribi languages, religious life, and history as crucial dimensions of belonging. Tracing intellectual and political connections throughout the Maghrib, the Mashriq, and across the French empire, this book weaves Algeria into a global history of citizenship in the colonial age.

My current research investigates the transformation of Jewish-Muslim relations in the rapidly changing public sphere of the late-Ottoman and colonial age. At the core of this project is what I call the coming of Judeo-Arabic political writing, a development that reshaped the nature, contours, and readership of Jewish political thought and its position in the Arab world. By exploring vernacular textual production in and between Algeria, Iraq, and Palestine, I aim to rethink the modes and frames of cross-communal relations, to reconstruct perceptions of shared pasts and visions of common futures formulated in the age of colonial domination, anti-colonialism, and nationalism.

I studied history at the FU Berlin and obtained my PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018. I was lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bremen and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan before returning to the FU in 2023 as part of the Alfred Landecker Lecturer Program. I would be keen to hear from graduate students working on jurisdictional politics, Jewish-Muslim relations, and Jewish intellectual history in the modern Middle East and North Africa.

Monograph:

Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

‘“We Shall Become French”: Reconsidering Algerian Jews' Citizenship, c. 1860–1900,’ French History 35,2 (2021), 243-265, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa073.

‘Alsace in Algeria and the Notion of “Failure” in Settler Political Culture, c. 1870-1960, The Historical Journal, advance online access: September 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000316.

Further publications:

Review of: Daniela Hettstedt, Die Internationale Stadt Tanger: Infrastrukturen des geteilten Kolonialismus, 1840-1956, Berlin: De Gruyter 2022, 15 February 2023 in: H Soz Kult (in German): https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-116808

‘South, North and the Mediterranean,’ in The Hinder Sea. Edited by Roni Cohen-Binyamini (Ashdod: Ashdod Museum of Art, 2015): 67-77. (Hebrew).

‘Von Ostpreußen nach Palästina. Die Erinnerungen des Gideon Cohen: Emigration, Bruch und Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit,’ in Jüdische Geschichte im preußischen Osten (Berlin: Stiftung Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung, 2013): 101-7.

Hebrew-German translation: Die Geschichte des Anderen kennen lernen: Israel und Palästina im 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Sami Adwan et al. (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 2015).

Essays, podcasts, and interviews:

‘A Question of Sensitivity: The ethical issues posed by the Sophie Hingst case.’European Journalism Observatory, September 4, 2019: https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/a-question-of-sensitivity-the-ethical-issues-posed-by-the-sophie-hingst-case

‘On Leaving the Archive,’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Issue 1 (2017), http://www.oarplatform.com/on-leaving-the-archive/.

‘A Global History’ Alaxon Magazine, July 2013 (in Hebrew): https://alaxon.co.il/article/היסטוריה-גלובלית-מה-שרואים-מכאן/

‘Where Has the Mediterranean Gone?’ Alaxon Magazine, May 2013 (in Hebrew): https://alaxon.co.il/article/לאן-נעלם-הים-התיכון/

Podcast Episode: ‘A Language of One’s Own’, Frankely Judaic Podcast, 15 April 2023:

https://frankelyjudaicpodcast.buzzsprout.com/2098910/12666700-avner-ofrath-a-language-of-one-s-own-writing-politically-in-judeo-arabic-c-1860-1914

Podcast Episode: ‘Wer Gehört Dazu?‘, Kleio – Historiker:innen der Universität Bremen im Gespräch, 15 October 2022: https://www.uni-bremen.de/institut-fuer-geschichtswissenschaft/podcast/alle-folgen/folge-8

Interview in taz, die tageszeitung:

„Orte mit symbolischer Bedeutung“, 10 March 2022:

https://taz.de/!5836597/

Interviews in Deutschlandfunk Kultur:
„Das Pogrom von Bagdad – der Farhud im Juni 1941“, 2 June 2021: https://share.deutschlandradio.de/dlf-audiothek-audio-teilen.html?audio_id=930285&fbclid

„80 Jahre Farhud: Das vergessene Pogrom von Bagdad“, 11 June 2021: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/80-jahre-farhud-das-vergessene-pogrom-von-bagdad-100.html