The Holocaust and North Africa by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

THE HOLOCAUST AND NORTH AFRICA Edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019 (vi + 251 pages, notes, bibliography index) $30 (paper) Reviewed by Chris Silver With the fall of France to Germany in the summer of 1940, at a moment in which “the years of persecution” and “the years of extermination” marking the Holocaust blurred together, half a million Jews across the Maghrib found themselves living under fascist European regimes. By the autumn of 1940, those in French-controlled Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were subject to anti-Jewish race laws, much as their co-religionists in Italian-controlled Libya had been since 1938. Meanwhile, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Maghribi Jews dwelling in the French capital were suddenly trapped behind German lines. The fortunate ones escaped into the unoccupied zone of the French State, better known as Vichy. Those remaining in the German occupied zone were subject to exclusion, arrest, and confinement to detention centers and internment camps. Later, deportations to the east began. In North Africa, Vichy France and fascist Italy enacted measures familiar to scholars of the Holocaust. Between 1940 and 1942, Jewish life in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya was dramatically altered by the implementation of racial quotas, ghettoization, deportation to labor and Chris Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture at McGill University. 151 internment camps, spoliation (Aryanization), and in rarer cases, transport to Europe. While the Allied landing in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 brought some immediate relief to the Jewish population there through the vanquishing of Vichy rule (but not its leadership nor all of its decrees), it also led to the direct Nazi occupation of neighboring Tunisia. Under German rule, Tunisian Jews endured forced labor, among other injustices, until their liberation in May 1943. North Africa has largely been understood by scholars as marginal, if not irrelevant, to a Eurocentric history of the Holocaust. Indeed, even the scant discussion of “the years of persecution” in the Maghrib has remained the domain of the afterthought and aside. But the 2018 publication of Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s edited volume The Holocaust and North Africa changes all of that. Through their pathbreaking work––a comprehensive and collaborative effort undertaken with leading international scholars of the Holocaust and North Africa, many of whom relish exposing the centrality of the margins––Boum and Stein have transformed those asides into a series of thought-provoking and fieldchanging conversations. That there has been limited scholarship on the Holocaust and North Africa despite the rich archival material (including in Arabic and JudeoArabic), the growing availability of memoirs engaging with the period, and the recent efflorescence of literature and film on the topic emanating from both the Maghrib and Maghribis, is surprising. Yet as Boum and Stein make clear, theirs was not a totally blank slate, even if it was a fragmentary one. More than three decades ago, Michel Abitbol’s foundational Les Juifs D’afrique Du Nord Sous Vichy (1983, later published in English translation as The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War) established historiographical precedent for further research. Recently, others have begun to pick up where Abitbol left off, integrating the Holocaust into larger projects about North Africa and French Empire, as with Ethan Katz’s Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (2015). Still, the exceptions prove the general rule. Whether understood as distraction from a European Jewish tragedy or because of the dauntingly complicated entanglement of colonialism with fascism, many have been reticent to treat seriously the impact of French, Italian, and German anti-Jewish policies in North Africa during World War II. 152 The Holocaust And North Africa For North Africanists, the reluctance in dealing with the war years may ring familiar. As Susan Gilson Miller (a commentator in the volume) wrote in The Journal for North African Studies in 2014, historians of Morocco have avoided World War II (including the Holocaust) despite its singular importance to the growth of anti-colonial nationalism and the ways in which it shaped decolonization. The same has been true for Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Given this lacuna, Miller called on scholars to fill in a gaping “historical parenthesis.” Boum and Stein have answered that call, creating the intellectual infrastructure not just to plug a gap but also to ask new questions that are as relevant to Holocaust studies as to Arab studies. Boum and Stein’s volume is organized into four interlocking parts, with the final section dedicated to commentary on the previous three. As the authors state in their introduction, the book reflects the multiple histories of the Holocaust and North Africa. That multiplicity mirrors the fact that the diverse Francophone, Arabophone, and Berberophone Jewish communities of the Maghrib experienced a variety of legal regimes and status under colonialism even before it was overlaid with fascism. The majority of Algerian Jews, for example, were citizens of France by dint of the Crémieux Decree of 1870. Such was not the case for most Moroccan and Tunisian Jews, who were simultaneously French subjects and subjects of their respective sovereigns. Nonetheless, Boum, Stein, and their contributors underline the connections despite the variations. In the midst of war, as Daniel Schroeter illustrates in his chapter, the racial logic of Vichy anti-Jewish policy in Algeria would be imbricated with legislation targeting Muslims there. Similarly, the October 1940 abrogation of the Crémieux Decree, which rendered Algerian Jews stateless at a moment when papers of state meant everything, reverberated across Morocco and Tunisia and especially in metropolitan France. For a great many from the Maghrib, as the volume is right to emphasize, colonialism, fascism, and the Holocaust were hardly separate affairs. In Part I, “Where Fascism and Colonialism Meet,” Daniel Schroeter, Jens Hoppe, and Ruth Ginio excavate the long geographical and temporal reach of Vichy anti-Jewish race laws in the Maghrib and beyond. In fact, as Ginio demonstrates, those policies were even brought to bear on French West Africa, a place where few Jews actually resided. Schroeter, for his part, outlines how anti-Jewish legislation had entangled sources, on the one hand, 153 and multiple targets, on the other. The promulgation of anti-Jewish statutes in Algeria and rescindment of French citizenship for Algerian Jews, for instance, found precedent in seven decades of virulent settler colonial antisemitism, drew inspiration from the Nuremberg Laws, and also represented an attempt to undercut Muslim demands for rights. Finally, Hoppe details how the injustices suffered by Libyan Jews, which in some cases included deportation to Bergen-Belsen, were the subject of litigation in West Germany for three decades after the war, extending well into the 1970s. Part II and Part III cover the varied lived experiences of North African Jews and Muslims. In Part II, “Experiences of Occupation, Internment, and Race Laws,” Susan Slyomovics, Aomar Boum, and Mohammed Hatimi give voice, respectively, to Algerian Jewish soldiers and rural Moroccan Jews and Muslims. Slyomovics masterfully articulates the tremendous power of colonialism to construct and deconstruct categories by following of a set of Algerian Jews citizens who had earlier answered the call to arms on behalf of France, but were instead transported to the internment camp of Bedeau, stripped of their French citizenship, and relegated to a state of legal indigeneity below that of Muslims. By contrast, Boum and Hatimi delineate the enduring quality of the Jewish-Muslim relationship in the pre-Sahara, which proved nearly impervious to that colonial power. But if rural Morocco and even Bedeau were exponentially less lethal for Jews than in Europe, their study should not be precluded. As Daniel Lee observes in his chapter, new antisemitic policies applied in Tunisia were soon proposed for metropolitan France. The multiple histories of the Holocaust and North Africa were also multidirectional. Part III, “Narrative and Political Reverberations,” reveals that the tendency to downplay the North African Jewish encounter with the Holocaust had already emerged during the war. Perhaps, as Boum suggests, it was because much of fascism was so familiar. After decades of French colonial rule, the presence of labor camps in the Moroccan Sahara were hardly novel to the region’s Jewish and Muslim residents. In addition, Lia Brozgal identifies a politics of restraint that afflicted a set of Tunisian Jewish chroniclers of life under German occupation who frequently compared their suffering to that of their European coreligionists. Those accidental historians faced “an irresolvable dilemma”: to “write a history that competes with a more catastrophic one, or be written out of history” (184). Given how critical 154 The Holocaust And North Africa the Vichy period was to “the political galvanization of Moroccan Jewry,” as Alma Heckman argues, and to their eventual postwar marginalization, the time for writing a history of the Holocaust and North Africa––which complements the European narrative––has finally come (192). The Holocaust and North Africa is a singular achievement. It is also one of consequence. For survivors, reparations may be at stake. For scholars of the Holocaust, North Africa must now be seriously taken into account. For modern Jewish historians, the experiences of North African Sephardim can finally be integrated into the study of the Shoah. For scholars of the Middle East and North Africa, the case has been made for writing layered histories of colonialism, fascism, and World War II while situating the Jewish-Muslim encounter within that triad. As for moving forward, Boum and Stein have provided a persuasive model, one born of their monumental initiative. 155