Africans and the Holocaust

Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples

Edward Kissi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War.

An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust.

This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

1 Jews in East and West Africa before the Holocaust

Many Africanists may be aware of the legend of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and its connection to the history of “Ethiopian Jews” in East Africa. In its simplified version, this is a contested story of an “Ethiopian queen” or “princess” who is said to have visited King Solomon of Israel and ended up having a child with the Jewish monarch. Later in his adulthood, the child, Menelik, steals the Ark of the Covenant and other relics of Judaism and flees with them, together with a retinue of loyalists from Jerusalem, to Ethiopia. Hence, the presence of Jews in Ethiopia.¹ Besides this story of Ethiopia’s indigenous Jewish population, the documented history of Jews in Africa, from antiquity to the outbreak of World War II, is primarily the story of Jews and Jewish life in North Africa and South Africa. However, there are isolated but nonetheless notable studies of Jewish life and influence in Africa south of the Sahara desert and north of the Limpopo river. This chapter examines the historical evidence for the presence of Jews in this subregion of Africa, particularly the western and eastern parts of it before the Holocaust. It traces, from a comparative perspective, the origins of Jewish settlements in West and East Africa, the activities Jews engaged in, the status they maintained, the types of interactions they had with the indigenous groups they lived with, and how these groups viewed and treated their Jewish neighbors. Examination of these histories and interactions is necessary to assess the dynamics of African–Jewish relations before the Second World War and how they affected African perspectives on the Holocaust in the two regions.

Evidence of the Jewish presence and influence in West Africa has been established in some notable social science studies. Richard Hull’s Jews and Judaism in African History is one of the most comprehensive of such studies of Jewish life in West Africa. Hull settles on heritage, religion, tradition, and legend for answers to the perennial question of “[w]ho precisely is a Jew and what constitutes Jewishness” and even Judaism. He considers “Jews” as people and groups whose lineage or ancestry connected them directly to the “Hebrews and the Israelites” of the Old Testament and who practice Judaism as a religion. In this mode of establishing Jewish identity, people in Ethiopia, in East Africa whose lineage may not have originated in Biblical Israel but whose legends linked them to it and who practice a very ancient form of Judaism are Jews. And so are those who are Jewish, by descent or lineage, but do not practice any form of Judaism because they chose to be secular or converted to other religious faiths, voluntarily or by coercion, at some point in their lives.² William F.S. Miles has asked a similar question about how to define a Jew in his book Jews of Nigeria: An Afro-Judaic Odyssey. He offers what he calls the “longstanding traditional answer” that “a Jew is one born of a Jewish mother or one who has converted [to Judaism] through the Orthodox Jewish rabbinate.”³ Beside Hull’s historical work and Miles’s from a political science perspective, Labelle Prussin’s study, from the prism of art history, is notable in its confident assertion that there is a “Judaic heritage in West Africa,” although that historical fact is rarely acknowledged by Africanists.⁴ Although this chapter focuses on the presence of Jews, as Hull and Miles have defined them, in West and East Africa, it cannot overlook the documented history of Jews in North and South Africa, the regions of Africa where their story has often been told. A summary of that history is intended here as a backdrop to the main focus of this chapter.

North Africa

Greek, Roman, Arab, and European written records and other historical sources affirm that Jews and Judaism have been an integral part of the history of North Africa for “more than three thousand years.”⁵ In fact, Judaism was the first monotheistic religion to take root on the African continent before Christianity and Islam. Jews have lived in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria under various accommodating and hostile indigenous and foreign governments since 332 BCE. These include Greek and Roman rulers of North Africa (ca. 332–146 BCE), various Arab and Muslim dynasties (ca. 640–1550), Ottoman Turkish rule (1550–1830), and French and British colonial regimes prior to the outbreak of World War II (1830–1939). Under the Greek ruler Ptolemy I (305–283 BCE), “a huge influx of Jews into Egypt” made that North African colony of the Greeks one of the major centers of Jewish settlement in the ancient world.⁶ By the time the Romans annexed Egypt in 30 BCE, about one million Jews lived in Egypt, and about 100,000 of them resided in the city of Alexandria. This city that Alexander and his Greek army built in North Africa accommodated “the largest Jewish community in the ancient world between the third century BCE and the close of the first century CE.”⁷ It was under the Romans that the fortunes of Jews in foreign-controlled Egypt changed. Roman preference for polytheism and obedience to the state marked the monotheistic religion of Judaism and the Jews who practiced it as a threat to the Roman empire. This ideological position exposed Alexandria’s Jews to “one of the earliest anti-Jewish pogroms in history.”⁸ After the introduction of Christianity into Egypt from Jerusalem in about 41 CE (the beginning of the reign of Emperor Claudius), and the rejection of this new faith by many of Egypt’s Jews, Roman persecution of Jews in this part of North Africa found its unyielding allies among Christians. To retain their own distinctive faith and survive this Roman and Christian onslaught, Jews in Egypt built strong, but isolated communities. In the west of Egypt and along the coasts of North Africa, Jews prospered economically in their communities as minters of gold coins from gold possibly obtained from “the Upper Senegal River Valley of West Africa.”⁹ It was their economic success, and self-preservationist consciousness that also exposed the Jews of North Africa to various stereotypes as “cunning, avaricious, secretive, exclusivist, and rejecters of Christianity.”¹⁰

Under Roman rule, the lives of Jews in Egypt worsened. They became even more precarious after the failed Jewish war of liberation against the Romans from 66 to 70 CE which led to the Roman destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the imposition of a special tax, and other strict Roman regulations on all Jews in the Roman empire. The persecution of Jews by the Romans and their Christian allies in Egypt also marked the beginning of the global dispersion of Jews and the global spread of Judaism.¹¹ Increased Roman persecution of Jews under Emperor Trajan (98–117 CE) forced many Jews to flee from the west of Egypt (Cyrenaica) into what is today Morocco in North Africa and Mauritania in West Africa. It was after this period of Jewish settlement among the Berbers of North Africa that conversion of some Berber populations to Judaism must have occurred, if it actually happened at all.¹² Arguably, writing the history of North African Jewry in antiquity (Greek and Roman periods), in the absence of reliable historical sources, is, as H.Z. Hirschberg has aptly put it, a task “similar to the restoration of a mosaic from which many stones are missing.”¹³

The second most significant challenge to Jews and Judaism in Africa north of the Sahara desert came during the Muslim Arab penetration into this region in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. The conquest of North Africa by Arab armies begun with the invasion of Egypt, in 639 CE. Within five centuries, Islam had become the dominant religion in North Africa. Between the Arab conquest of the region and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Arab–Jewish relations took many twists and turns. Initially, the Arabs depended on Jews and Coptic Christians to administer Egypt. But as the Arab population grew in the course of the eighth century, reliance on Jews and Christians as administrators became unnecessary.¹⁴

Events outside of Africa also influenced the emigration of large numbers of Jews into Islamic North Africa. Pogroms in Seville and Andalusia in Christian Spain in 1391, sparked by virulent anti-Semitism, took the lives of close to 50,000 Jews. To survive state-sanctioned and religiously inspired anti-Jewish sentiments in Spain, many Jews converted to Christianity. In the late fifteenth century, Spain had a large population of conversos, or converted Jews, and Jews of mixed Judeo-Christian heritage. In 1492 and 1496, when Christian Spain and Portugal ordered all Jews within their domains to convert to Catholicism or leave the kingdoms, large numbers of converted and practicing Jews fled these parts of Europe for the relative comfort of now Arab-controlled North Africa, particularly in Morocco. As is typical of immigrant and diasporic communities, migrating Jews brought with them necessary skills as traders, goldsmiths, and carriers of other culture.¹⁵

Jews who came to Africa, aside from those who were born on the continent to their migrant parents, came from Judaism’s two contending traditions: Sephardi and Ashkenazi. Sephardi Jews trace their lineage to Spain and North Africa, particularly Egypt and Morocco. They follow the traditions of Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula, many of whom were expelled from the peninsula in the 1492 royal decree. Sephardi Jews spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic dialect. Ashkenazi Jews, on the other hand, trace their ancestry to Germany, Hungary, Poland, Belarus, and other East European areas such as Lithuania and the former Baltic States. They spoke Yiddish and German, sometimes Italian and Greek, and also Russian.¹⁶

Jews who arrived in Morocco, in their thousands, from Spain, were mainly Sephardi Jews. In the course of time, they “played important roles in the political and economic life” of the sultanate of Morocco. Some of them managed the finances of the Moroccan city of Fez, the royal mint, and made Fez the center of the production of Hebrew man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Jews in East and West Africa before the Holocaust
• 2 Africans and Nazism
• 3 Africans and World War II
• 4 Africans and the Holocaust
• 5 African and British proposals on Jewish refugees
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index