Mozabite people

The Mozabite people or Banu Mzab (بني مزاب) are a Berber ethnic group inhabiting the M'zab natural region in the northern Sahara in Algeria, numbering about 150,000 to 300,000 people. They speak primarily the Mozabite language, one of the Zenati languages in the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. Mozabites are primarily Ibadi Muslims, but there was a small population of Jews as well.

Mozabites mainly live in five oases; namely, Ghardaïa, Beni Isguen, El Atteuf, Melika and Bounoura, as well as two other isolated oases farther north: Berriane and El_Guerrara. Ghardaïa is the capital of the confederation, followed in importance by Beni Isguen, the chief commercial centre.

History
In 767, a refugee Persian Ibadi leader founded the Rustamid kingdom, leading to most of the Berber population adopting Ibadi Islam. After being defeated at Tiaret by the Fatimids in 911, they were banished to Ouargla in the Sahara and founded an independent state in the M'zab in 1012. In 1012, further persecutions made them flee to their present location, where they long remained invulnerable.

In the 1500s, they recognized nominal Ottoman authority. After the capture of Laghouat by the French in 1852, the Mozabites concluded a convention in 1853 and accepted to pay an annual contribution of 1,800 francs in return for their independence. In November 1882, the M'zab country was definitely annexed to French Algeria.

Since the establishment of French control, Beni Isguen has become the depot for the sale of goods from Europe. The Mozabite engineers built a system of irrigation works that made the oases much more fertile than before.

Language
Mozabites speak the Mozabite language, a branch of the Zenati group of Berber languages. Many also speak Algerian Arabic as a second language. The Mozabite language is spoken by around 150,000 people.

Mozabite Jews in French Algeria
It is not canonically agreed when Jews first came to Southern Algeria, but one theory suggests they were sent there by the Ibadite leadership in the 14th century from Tunisia, as part of a merchant trade route. They continued as a merchant community, with subsequent waves of immigration during times of anti-Semitism across the Sahara, Europe, and the Middle East. In 1881, one year before the French annexed the Mzab, there were estimated 3,000 Mozabite Jews out of the 30,000 Algerian Jews. By 1921, the latter number would grow to 74,000, a result of a spike in anti-Semitism in the later 1800s and early 1900s, but the Mozabite Jewish community would remain small, with most Jewish migrants settling in the north. In 1882, when the French military annexed the Mzab, it began an administrative rule that was separate from the northern departments. Unlike their northern Jewish counterparts, many of the Mozabite Berber Jews in Southern Algeria were classified by the French under the “indigenous code”. Given the diversity of the Mzab Jewish population, the French administration incorporated some “culturally Saharan” but ethnically non-indigenous Jews to the north and gave them citizenship under the Crémieux Decree of 1870. That perceived distinction by the French between Berber and non-Berber Jews of the Mzab was not a reflection of “technical precision” but rather “a manufactured form of legal difference”. While the French sought to assimilate the Northern Jewry as French citizens, they recognised religious rule of the Mozabite Jewish population and kept them separate under indigenous law, which meant severely limiting its political and social power. With anti-Semitism on the rise in the late 1800s, the French colonial powers sought to decrease Jewish commerce in the south and prevent further Jewish collaboration with Muslim communities. They continued to distance the Mozabite Jews from other Algerian Jewish affairs by keeping Mozabite, or “Mosaic” laws for civil matters, and French indigenous laws for public and criminal matters. It was not until 1961, with the French National Assembly Law 61-805, that the Mozabite Jews were granted “common law civil status” and French citizenship.

Genetics
Mozabite people are characterized by a very high level of North African haplogroups E1b1b1b (M81) (86%) and U6 (28%).