The Holocaust and North Africa

Aomar Boum, Sarah Abrevaya Stein

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781503607057
  9781503605435
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781503607064
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other.

The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim–Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored—and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Part I Where Fascism and Colonialism Meet

1

Between Metropole and French North Africa Vichy’s Anti-Semitic Legislation and Colonialism’s Racial Hierarchies

Daniel J. Schroeter

ON MARCH 14, 1943, the French high commissioner in North Africa, General Henri Giraud, abrogated the Crémieux Decree, the 1870 law that had granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Since Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa beginning on November 8, 1942, and the rapid takeover of Morocco and Algeria, Jewish leaders in Algeria were demanding the restitution of their rights, which had been stripped from them by the Vichy government. However, the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime were not to be quickly rescinded: The Americans had struck a deal with the French to cease the hostilities and to induce them to join the Allied side. Consequently, much of the administration that had previously served the Vichy government remained intact in the North African colonies. Admiral François Darlan, who had commanded the French forces for the Vichy government, continued his command in cooperation with the Allies until his assassination on Christmas eve, and a few days later, in the last days of 1942, General Giraud assumed his position.¹

Giraud’s decree on March 14 came amid public pressure to rescind the anti-Semitic legislation that had been implemented across French North Africa by the Vichy government. Jewish organizations and government officials and leaders in Britain and the United States, including President Roosevelt, had campaigned for the repeal of the racial laws. But Giraud and many of the French authorities in Algeria who had previously served the Vichy administration, including Marcel Peyrouton, who was appointed governor-general in January and who had been a prominent figure in the Vichy regime, were opposed to lifting the discriminatory laws, claiming that it might inflame Muslim opinion against the government and that this would be dangerous during wartime. Allied forces were then engaged in fierce battles to recover Tunisia, which was occupied by German and Italian forces from the time of Operation Torch in November 1942, and many American officials supported the position advocated by French officials.² But on March 14, 1943, General Giraud succumbed to pressures and reluctantly repealed Vichy’s racial laws, yet at the same time he abrogated the Crémieux Decree. Girard justified the latter action in a speech in which he declared that “the suppression of these laws or decrees reestablished the French tradition of human liberty and the return to equality for all before the law. . . . With the desire to eliminate all racial discrimination, the Crémieux Decree, which in 1870 established a difference between Muslims and Jews, is abrogated.”³

Jewish leaders and organizations and some American and British journalists expressed outrage at this discriminatory measure, which deprived Jews of their citizenship, claiming that it was intended to appease the Muslim population. The American Jewish Committee enlisted Hannah Arendt in its campaign, publishing and disseminating her article “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated.” In an incisive analysis of the history of anti-Semitism in Algeria, Arendt indicts the colonial administration, “that is even more anti-Jewish than anti-native,” for its repeal of the decree that would effectively place Jews in a worse position than the Muslims. In Arendt’s interpretive framework, imperialism and anti-Semitism were closely linked. It was, according to Arendt, the “French colonials” who implemented the measure, because they were no longer controlled by metropolitan France. Arendt proposes that Giraud “acted as an agent of those French colonials who always wanted to bring under their ‘dictatorship’ the only part of the Algerian population that so far had escaped their arbitrary and selfish rule” (namely, the Jews). Arendt continues, “The French colonials, in other words, took advantage of France’s defeat and of their freedom from the control of the mother country in order to introduce into Algeria a measure which they would never have been able to obtain through legal channels.”⁴ Arendt distinguishes between the metropolitan efforts through governors appointed in Paris to assimilate and naturalize Algerian Muslims, and the French colonials who were intent on maintaining the natives in an inferior status to better exploit their cheap labor. In Arendt’s view, metropolitan France had a mitigating effect on Algeria, but with France under Nazi occupation, there was nothing to prevent the violation of the rule of law.

Curiously, Arendt does not devote attention in her article to the anti-Semitic Statut des Juifs (Statute for the Jews) of October 3, 1940 (revised in 1941), and does not even mention its repeal in March 1943 on the very same day that the Crémieux Decree was abrogated. Even more surprisingly, Arendt makes no reference to the fact that the Crémieux Decree of 1870 was first abrogated in October 1940 a few days after the Statut des Juifs was enacted. Jews had therefore already been stripped of their citizenship rights by the Vichy government, and the decree’s second repeal by Giraud was therefore considered particularly egregious. The technical reason that Giraud deemed it necessary to re-abrogate the Crémieux Decree was that the decree would have been reinstated, because all the laws and statutes since the installation of the Vichy government had been declared null and void. Giraud’s declaration that the measure was needed to eliminate racial discrimination was a pretext to do just the opposite. As I argue, the overriding concern was that the restoration of Jewish political rights would spur Muslim demands for political rights, which would challenge French colonial rule and the racial hierarchy on which it was based.

Ironically, the annulment of the Crémieux Decree in 1940 was the first explicitly anti-Jewish measure implemented by the Vichy government in French North Africa.⁵ In retrospect, it is unknown whether Hannah Arendt willfully omitted this essential fact—that this was the second abrogation of the Crémieux Decree—and amid the turbulence of the war, it is unclear how much of the details of Vichy rule in Algeria were known. The abrogation of the Crémieux Decree in 1940, however, did come at the behest of the metropolitan authorities and was not a separate measure by the colonial administrators of Algeria, who were still considered an integral part of France under the Vichy government.

If Arendt was unaware of the previous abrogation of the Crémieux Decree in 1940, as implied in her article, she was certainly aware of the repeal of the racial legislation of the Vichy government, which was broadcast internationally, as the editors of the American Jewish Committee’s journal remarked in the preface to Arendt’s article. Arendt’s omission of the repeal of the anti-Semitic legislation does raise a fundamental question about how to interpret the relationship of the French empire to the Holocaust. After all, it was the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree, the focus of Arendt’s article, that most clearly revealed the close connection between imperialism and anti-Semitism, and it was the Statut des Juifs, based on the Nuremberg racial laws, that explicitly showed the relationship of National Socialism to colonial North Africa. Arendt’s focus on the Crémieux Decree and its abrogation rather than the anti-Jewish statute draws our attention to the history of colonial anti-Semitism in Algeria, which, as noted in her article, was part and parcel of an ideology of exploitation of the Muslim population.

Yet can we disentangle the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree, for which many French settlers advocated, from the radical anti-Semitic legislation of the Nazis, implemented by the Vichy government with few modifications in France and the colonies? If we accept the argument that the Holocaust was rooted in European imperialism, as Arendt later argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), can we then infer that National Socialism, expressed through the anti-Semitic legislation, was also integral to the history of colonialism? By leaving out of her analysis the connection between the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree and the Nazi-influenced Statut des Juifs, Arendt seems to suggest otherwise.⁶

The Holocaust and or in North Africa?

The anti-Semitic legislation of the Vichy government in the colonies revealed that “the long reach” of the Holocaust extended to Europe’s southern Mediterranean shores,⁷ even if the consequences were much less lethal than in Europe. The Jews of North Africa were spared the horrors of the European extermination camps and thus have been largely excluded from histories of the Holocaust that focus on the destruction of European Jewry.

Although the Maghreb remains very much on the margins of the larger field of Holocaust studies, since the 1970s scholars have produced a body of literature on the effects of the Vichy regime and Germany on the Jews in North Africa during World War II. The impetus for these studies, largely produced in Israel, is to integrate North African Jews into the World War II and Holocaust narrative and to include the testimonies of Jews from Arab lands.⁸ Since the foundation of the State of Israel, the Holocaust has been a fundamental part of Israel’s national identity. But the Holocaust narrative has been all about the destruction of European Jewry, and the Mizrahim (as Jews from Asia and Africa are called) in Israel have not been seen as part of that story.

After the mass immigration from Middle Eastern and North African countries to Israel in the 1950s, it became all the more imperative for the European Zionist leadership to educate the population as a whole on the Holocaust as being central to Israeli national identity, including those populations whose origins were from countries distant from the European death camps. Holocaust education as a way to unify the nation was a prime objective of Israel’s official Holocaust institution, Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority). The Eichmann trial (1961–1962) also had a crucial didactic purpose: to unify the country through survivor testimonies, which then shaped Israel’s collective memory of the Holocaust. Mizrahim were to identify with the Holocaust narrative, not as their story but as part of the more general experience of the Jewish people. However, this only served to reinforce the sense of exclusion and discrimination that they felt in Israel.

The mobilization of ethnic politics, especially since the defeat of the Labor Party in 1977, caused a shift in discourse regarding Mizrahim and the Holocaust. Rather than rejecting the Holocaust as a story of Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and especially some North African Jews sought to inscribe themselves in the Holocaust narrative from which they had been excluded, and scholarship followed suit. Studies on the impact of the Vichy regime and Germany on the Jews in North Africa have thus been shaped by political questions pertaining to the exclusion or inclusion of Mizrahim in the larger history of the Holocaust.⁹

The inclusion of the Jews of the Maghreb as victims of the Holocaust had legal implications in the twenty-first century, when Germany agreed to recognize North African Jews as Holocaust survivors, thus entitling them to receive compensation.¹⁰ Reparations to Holocaust victims in Vichy-controlled North Africa were the latest and probably the last cause of the Claims Conference for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the organization founded in 1951 that negotiated with the German government for reparations. Germany had already accepted the principle of compensation for Jews who suffered under European collaborationist regimes. Not surprisingly, compensation was all the more complicated when it involved colonies of collaborationist regimes, which was the case for French North Africa. In 2011 Germany agreed to reparations that included one-time payments to victims in Morocco, on the principle that they were subject to regulations restricting freedom of movement.¹¹

Although the initiative to recognize North African and especially Moroccan Jews came from political leaders in Israel and was driven by ethnic identity politics, lawyers for the Holocaust Survivors Rights Authority at the Finance Ministry of the State of Israel, gatekeepers to the funds, have sparred with lawyers representing Moroccan and Algerian Jews¹² about the degree to which Jews suffered as a result of direct or indirect actions of Nazi Germany through the anti-Jewish laws and measures. The extent of the impact of Vichy rule in North Africa is also disputed by historians who have been consulted by lawyers on both sides to offer their expert opinions. What is at stake in these (mis)representations of the history of the Holocaust are the lives of thousands of mainly elderly North African Jews, most of whom are poor and some of whom are in dire straits, who stand to receive regular stipends that could help ameliorate their condition.¹³ Scholarship and historical interpretation is thus mired in the contested terrain of identity politics and national narratives and the agenda to redress the discrimination against North African Jews in Israel.

Although the degree to which Jews in French North Africa suffered during Vichy rule or during the six-month German and Italian occupation of Tunisia in 1943 is a subject of debate, historians would all agree on the impossibility of disentangling the prior history of colonialism from Vichy’s anti-Semitic policy. However, the German reparations are predicated on the idea of a unique debt that Germany owes to the Jews; colonialism and colonial violence, of which Muslims were also the victims, is not a criterion. Investigating the entanglement of colonialism with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Where Fascism and Colonialism Meet
• Part II. Experiences of Occupation, Internment, and Race Laws
• Part III. Narrative and Political Reverberations
• Part IV. Commentary
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index