I have spent my entire life trying to explain to people why I speak French, why I grew up speaking French with my father and grandparents, why at least half of my phone calls involve some shouting in French. “Are you French?” they’ll ask. “Sort of” is usually the best I can do.

My confusing family history and the reason I speak French begins in the 1860s, when Adolphe Crémieux, a Frenchman who would go on to become minister of justice, founded a Jewish organization called the Alliance Israélite Universelle and started what it called a “civilizing mission” aimed at teaching Middle Eastern Jews how to speak French and inducting them into French culture. The Alliance opened schools in Turkey and across the Maghreb, and by 1900 had almost 30,000 Jews in its tutelage.

The mission’s aftershock was that foreign Jews felt French even though some might never even step foot in Europe. For French-speaking Jews around the world, the Alliance promised something as powerful and as compelling as the American dream.

I am the direct result of this mission. My grandfather was born to a French-speaking family in Constantinople, before moving to the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, where Alliance-educated Jews felt at home because French was the lingua franca. He met my grandmother — a Syrian-Egyptian Jew who, despite being deaf, also grew up speaking French in Alexandria. My grandmother lived in France for only a few years as a child in order to learn lip reading and was given a large medal by the French government for her success. My father, who grew up in Alexandria, spoke French at home and on the street, and until he was a teenager always assumed that he was not, in fact, Egyptian, but French.