The antisemitic laws of Vichy in Algeria from 1940 onward struck the Jews of Algeria hard.
As part of its antisemitic policy, the Vichy regime repealed the Crémieux Decree by the law of October 7, 1940. This brutal measure stripped about 110,000 Algerian Jews of their French nationality and citizenship, placing them in a situation of great vulnerability. The Jews were subjected to the Statute of the Jews, excluded from the liberal professions and public office, and subjected to a numerus clausus in education. Members of the Encaoua lineage are among those excluded from schools and professions. The Crémieux Decree was not officially restored until October 21, 1943, by the French Committee of National Liberation, after the Allied landing in North Africa in November 1942.
Between October 1940 and October 1943, the Jews of Algeria lived through a period of systematic dispossession and humiliation. Children were excluded from public schools (numerus clausus limits of 14% and then 7%), the liberal professions were closed, and businesses were 'aryanized'. For the Encaoua, whose French citizenship had been firmly anchored for 70 years, this regression was experienced as a profound trauma. The Jewish community of Oran, where many Encaoua lived, was particularly affected by the discriminatory measures and the climate of antisemitism stirred up by Vichy propaganda.
The independence of Algeria in July 1962 provoked the mass exodus of about 130,000 Jews, most to metropolitan France, some to Israel. For the Encaoua, this meant the end of a presence of nearly five centuries in Algeria — since the settlement of Éphraïm Al-Naqua in Tlemcen in 1391. The departure took place in urgency and heartbreak: families left homes inhabited for generations, synagogues built by their ancestors, cemeteries where their dead lay. The Jewish community of Tlemcen, which still numbered several hundred members, dispersed within a few weeks, mainly toward Paris, Marseille, and Montpellier.
Arrival in metropolitan France marked for the Encaoua the beginning of a new era. The repatriates had to rebuild their lives in a country they considered their own (thanks to the Crémieux Decree), but which often welcomed them with indifference or hostility. Faced with this ordeal, the Encaoua showed the same resilience as their ancestors after 1391 and 1492: they reconstituted community networks, founded cultural associations, and kept alive the memory of the places they had left. Associations such as MORIAL (Memory and Traditions of the Jews of Algeria), of which Didier Nebot is honorary president, play an essential role in the preservation of this heritage.