For two days in early June 1968, rioting erupted between Jews and Muslims living in Belleville, a diverse immigrant neighborhood in Paris. The riots began with a disputed card game between a Jew and a Muslim, an illustration of the generally peaceful daily co-existence of the two groups in the neighborhood. Indeed, the large, mostly Tunisian Jewish and the sizable, mostly Algerian Muslim populations of Belleville had long lived in inter-ethnic harmony. Hallal and kosher restaurants and butcheries existed side-by-side, and Jews and Muslims often felt a shared sense of Maghrebian culture, sometimes exchanging pastries around each others' holidays or life cycle events, as they had in North Africa. In these daily interactions, one can detect two forces, at once competing and complementary. The first is the tradition of secular French republican nationalism that privileged public unity and confined ethnic or religious identities to the private sphere. The second is Jewish and Muslim traditions from North Africa, wherein harmonious coexistence depended on related and often shared ethnic and religious traditions that did not start and stop at the door of one's home or place of worship.

The riots, soon linked by commentators and community members to their coincidence with the first anniversary of Israel's victory in the Six Day War, illustrated the at once explosive and harmonious potential of such a mixture. On the one hand, violence between neighbors, whose real roots lie, in significant part, in social and economic discontent, quickly gave way to a battle framed both by participants and by the media as inter-ethnic and inter-religious. Such a framework violated the terms of the secular republican pact through the simultaneous self-identification and stigmatization of individuals and groups based not on relationship to the French state, but rather on those to transnational or religious communities. On the other hand, attempts by leaders to quell the riot took two forms: a verbal insistence on the shared responsibilities of Jews and Muslims as neighbors and fellow residents of France; and a public demonstration by a pair of important Jewish and Muslim figures of inter-personal warmth and calm, as models for their communities.

The latter gesture, captured in this photograph of Belleville Rabbi Emmanuel Chouchena, originally from Algeria, and Tunisian ambassador Mohamed Masmoudi, played a key role in restoring Belleville and its inter-ethnic relations to normal. The leaders' action at once insisted on the need to uphold publicly secular French identity, and reflected a more complex reality in which minority ethnic and religious groups were becoming increasingly visible in their culture and politics. Indeed, this moment, a signal one in post-colonial France, revealed the very tensions -- between the insistently unified and secular nature of French nationalism, and assertive ethnic and religious group identities -- that continue to plague the Fifth Republic today.