The conquest of Algeria beginning in 1830 and the Crémieux Decree of 1870 radically transformed the situation of the Jewish communities.
The Crémieux Decree, adopted on October 24, 1870, by the Government of National Defense (in which Adolphe Crémieux was Minister of Justice), automatically granted French citizenship to the 'native Israelites' of Algeria. About 35,000 Algerian Jews thus moved from the status of natives to French common law, while the Muslim populations remained subject to the indigénat code. This decree radically transformed the situation of the Jewish communities of Algeria, opening to them access to French education, the liberal professions, and political life. For the Encaoua, it created an unprecedented tension between the ancestral rabbinic tradition and French republican modernity.
Rav Yaakov Encaoua, Chief Rabbi of Oran in the second half of the 19th century, embodied this tension with particular acuity. In 1878 he published a collection of responsa entitled Yagel Yaakov, one of the last great collections produced by the Algerian rabbinic tradition before the rupture of the Second World War. In his halakhic rulings, he had to navigate between the demands of French law and the principles of rabbinic law, inventing a hybrid jurisprudence that bears witness to the complexity of the Jewish condition in colonial Algeria.
The Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), founded in Paris in 1860, opened schools throughout the Maghreb, including in the towns where the Encaoua exercised their rabbinate. These schools taught French, the sciences, and modern Hebrew, profoundly transforming the Jewish communities of North Africa. The Encaoua's relationship with the AIU was mixed: in Salé, Raphaël Encaoua ultimately adopted a benevolent attitude toward the Alliance, since it enabled the simultaneous learning of Hebrew and French, notably by young girls previously excluded from instruction. In Oran and Tlemcen, the Encaoua rabbis accompanied this transition with pragmatism, seeing in French education a tool of emancipation compatible with fidelity to the Torah.