Introduction for The Holocaust and North Africa

Introduction

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

“WHAT WOULD I HAVE DONE if I had been a German Jew on his way, with all his family, to the gas chambers, or, worse, condemned to become a slave member of these unimaginable Sonderkommandos, expected to throw his own co-religionists in the flames of ovens, before being thrown there in his turn?” This question motivated Algerian writer Anouar Benmalek to craft Fils de Shéol (Son of Shéol), a new work of fiction that reflects the burgeoning interest in the Holocaust among francophone Algerian novelists.¹Fils de Shéol intertwines the stories of three generations of a single family tarred by multiple genocides: a German teenager, Karl, on his way to the Nazi gas chambers of Poland; his father, Manfred, a Kapo; his mother Elisa, an Algerian Jewish woman marked by French colonialism; and his grandfather, Ludwig, who served the German army in colonial southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), where he witnessed the genocide of the Herero. As Benmalek argues in a series of interviews prompted by the book, Fils de Shéol is also motivated by the sense that it is time for Africa to reclaim its own histories of genocide, beginning with the case of the Herero.² So it is that Benmalek, a Moroccan-born Algerian Muslim author, co-founder of the Algerian Committee Against Torture, has written a work that fictively integrates the history of the Holocaust, North Africa, colonial acts of genocide in Africa, Muslims, Jews, and their complexly intertwined—and sometimes conflictual—forms of collective memory.

It is striking that Fils de Shéol, a gripping and haunting novel, triangulates North African history with the Holocaust by way of Namibia and a German teenager. The historical connections between the Holocaust and colonial violence have been amply explored, to be sure, enumerated by theoreticians of colonialism since the 1940s (including W. E. B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre).³ Yet a shorter, more direct vector links the Maghreb and the Holocaust more than even these writers recognized. The Holocaust, after all, has a North African dimension of its own, albeit one that has been hitherto unexplored. It is the aim of this pioneering volume to flesh out our understanding of the ways the Holocaust unfolded in North Africa, a region considered marginal, if not to World War II (which was fought in part on North African soil), then to the racial and genocidal policies of the Nazis and their allies.

In this introduction we begin by offering a short historical survey of the Holocaust’s manifestations in German-, French-, and Italian-occupied North Africa. In addition, though with considerably more brevity, we describe the circumstances that faced Jews from North Africa who found themselves in Europe over the course of World War II. A second, somewhat more meditative section returns us to the probing questions raised by Benmalek’s Fils de Shéol: Why has North Africa been written out of Holocaust history and memory, and, conversely, why has the Holocaust been excised from so many narratives about North Africa? Finally, a last section introduces the reader to the essays that follow. Here, we suggest—as do the essayists themselves—that alongside a penetrating silence about the Holocaust and North Africa there exists a rich body of texts, voices, and archives that await our attention.

Jews, Muslims, and the Holocaust in North Africa: A Historical Overview

On the eve of World War II, the Maghreb was home to one of the largest and socially vibrant Jewish populations in the Islamic world. Most of these Jews were indigenous to the region, with a history that dated to the pre-Islamic period. Others immigrated to North Africa during the Spanish Inquisition or after their exile from Iberia, settling in northern urban centers such as Tétouan and Oran. By the modern period, Jews constituted an overall minority in North Africa, with Muslims (Arab and Amazigh, or “Berber”) the dominant population. Still, in certain cities and towns, Jews made up a significant percentage (and/or highly visible portion) of the whole, with many playing influential roles as artisans and merchants.

The total population of North African Jewry hovered at half a million before the outbreak of the second global conflict of the twentieth century. In 1941 a census by the French wartime government based in Vichy put the number of Algerian Jews at nearly 110,000 and counted an additional small population of foreign Jews. Neighboring Tunisia claimed 80,000 Jews and Morocco 240,000. Forty thousand Jews lived in Libya during its protracted Italian colonization, concentrated primarily in Tripoli and Benghazi. All told, Jews in interwar North Africa lived under different legal regimes, spoke a variety of languages, hewed to different minhagim (religious rituals), and could claim diverse ancestries. They were less a single, discrete population than an internally diverse one.

Most of the Jews in interwar Algeria were citizens of France, according to the 1870 Crémieux Decree.⁴ In Morocco and Tunisia the Jews (like their Muslim neighbors) were colonial subjects rather than citizens, but their legal and social rights were generally protected and a significant number of Tunisian Jews became French citizens in 1926, according to the Morinaud Law.⁵ Although it is difficult to generalize, one could argue that Jews were perceived as “native” by most Muslims, but many Jews nonetheless lived in separate neighborhoods (known in Morocco as a mellah and in Tunisia as a hara) and followed a traditional way of life influenced by rabbinic authority.⁶ At the same time, North African Jews’ exposure to French, Spanish, and Italian culture (especially to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Franco-Jewish philanthropy and educational organization) since at least the nineteenth century prompted waves of modernization and embourgoisement, leading Jews to become vehicles of social and cultural change not only for their communities but for the Maghreb as a whole.

These populations experienced different legal and political regimes before the war and thus experienced World War II in different ways as colonial rule was complexly overlaid with fascism. As in Europe, in North Africa the Holocaust was not a single affair, nor did it hew to a single chronology.

When Germany occupied France in May 1940, the terms of the armistice divided the country in two. Germany assumed control over northern occupied France; the southern third of France and its North African colonies (their colonial bureaucracy still largely intact) was led from the city of Vichy, under the oversight of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Vichy policy would differ across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, much as Nazi policy differed across Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. Daniel Schroeter’s and Ruth Ginio’s contributions to this volume (Chapters 1 and 3, respectively) help parse the complexity of Vichy law (as does Jens Hoppe’s contribution [Chapter 2], which looks at the nuances of Italian fascist law in colonial Libya). We therefore summarize this history only tersely here.

The Vichy regime adopted its first anti-Jewish statute in October 1940, determining that Jews in mainland France and Algeria were to be defined by race—that is, based on the religion of their grandparents. These Jews found themselves barred from public office, including governmental work, the military, and classroom instruction in all but Jewish schools. The same month, the Vichy regime overturned the Crémieux Decree, which had granted French citizenship to most Algerian Jews in 1870. With this ruling, Algerian Jews became stateless overnight. In neighboring Morocco and Tunisia (as discussed by Susan Gilson Miller and Daniel Lee in Chapters 12 and 6, respectively), where most Jews were, legally speaking, colonial subjects rather than citizens, Vichy law defined Jews differently, as part of a religious community and not a racial group. The distinction allowed the Jewish communities in question to maintain a degree of autonomy throughout the war, even during the short occupation of Tunisia by German authorities (November 1942–May 1943).

Although Morocco and Algeria never fell under direct German control, Vichy authorities were all too willing to remain impassive when anti-Semitic settlers attacked Jews (and sometimes native Muslims) and targeted their property and businesses for spoliation after the introduction of the anti-Jewish laws. North African Jews who fell under the rule of Vichy, like the Jews of France, were barred from most sectors of the economy, with quotas (numeri clausi) limiting the number of Jews who could operate as teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, students in public schools and universities, and so on. The existential repercussions of this restriction were particularly heady for Algerian Jews, because they (in counterdistinction to Algerian Muslims) had long served the French bureaucracy and its political and legal institutions.⁷ Jewish property was subsequently Aryanized by Vichy decree (the process was stalled in Tunisia because of the intervention of the bey), and Jews in Moroccan cities were forced to move from outlying neighborhoods into the mellah. The extent to which Moroccan Jews did (and did not) feel the sting of these measures is a question at the heart of the essays included here by Susan Gilson Miller, Alma Heckman, and Aomar Boum and Mohammed Hatimi (Chapters 12, 5, respectively).

Beginning in 1940, the Vichy authorities established ribbons of penal, labor, and internment camps across the Maghreb and Sahara and repurposed existing camps to serve as wartime sites of internment.⁸ In Italian-ruled Libya, as Jens Hoppe shows us in Chapter 2, these patterns were echoed but not duplicated. Meanwhile, hundreds of Jews of North African origin living in Paris and its environs were sent to the Drancy internment camp and, from there, to concentration and death camps in Eastern Europe.⁹

In the Maghreb and Sahara the inmate population included North African Jews (including some who held foreign passports), Allied prisoners of war, and an international population of men who participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the International Brigade. These camps, and the day-to-day experiences and subsequent literary constructions of their internees, are the subject of several essays in the present volume, including those by Aomar Boum, Lia Brozgal, and Susan Slyomovics (Chapters 7, 8, and 4, respectively). Together, the contributors explore virtually unexplored dimensions of the Holocaust, bringing the North African story of World War II ever more closely aligned and integrated with the European one.

In their co-authored essay, Hatimi and Boum revisit the effect of Vichy policies on the Jews of southern rural Morocco—and their implications for Jewish-Muslim relations in the region (Chapter 5). Although French authorities refrained from enforcing anti-Jewish laws and regulations in Morocco’s south, war and drought had a deleterious (if indirect) effect on the businesses of local Jewish peddlers and merchants. At the same time, the economic crisis spawned by the war influenced legal and social customary relations between communities. For example, Muslim litigants (at times encouraged by French military officers) refused to repay loans to Jewish creditors or repossessed land sold to Jewish merchants before the war. Despite this turbulence, relations between the communities were in general positive, notwithstanding the fact that many local Jews were forced by economic circumstance to emigrate from their rural homes to the cities of Marrakesh, Essaouira, Casablanca, Taroudannt, and Agadir (even before so many left for destinations abroad).

FIGURE 1: Jewish men in Tunis on their way to forced labor. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J20382; photo: Lüken, December 1942. Reprinted with permission.

FIGURE 2: An unidentified worker walks by the railroad tracks at the Im Fout labor camp in Morocco, 1941–1942. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, D.C., Photograph 50720, courtesy of Sami Dorra. Reprinted with permission.

Thus the Holocaust was experienced by Jews in North Africa through the implementation of French and Italian racial laws, the expropriation of property and economic disenfranchisement, and internment and forced labor. Some Maghrebi Jews were deported to death camps from North Africa; North African Jews living in France were deported from Western Europe. These events unfolded against a backdrop of war and what might be understood as a double occupation, by which French and Italian colonialism overlaid and interacted complexly with fascism.

Perhaps there is something in this history that dictates why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has fallen between stools; is it, after all, because it sits comfortably on more than one? This, after all, is at once a European and a North African story—a story of the encounter between imperialism and fascism, colony and continent. In this, it finds singular peer with the island of Rhodes, the only colony other than Tunisia from which Jews were deported by the Nazis during World War II.

These ruminations return us to the foundational questions raised by Benmalek, with whom this Introduction began. What is at stake in studying the Holocaust and North Africa? Why has silence swirled around this topic, and when have voices filled the void? To address these questions, we move from the realm of history to the interactive realms of scholarship, literature, and memory.

Pushing the Boundaries of the Holocaust

Scholars’ understanding of the geographic reach of the Holocaust has been expanding ever since scholarship on the topic first took shape. Germany, as a site of organized perpetration, was the spatial pivot of the earliest generation of Holocaust scholars. But the field has not been so limited for a long time. Today, scholars scrutinize the Holocaust through a dizzying variety of places and spaces, reimagining its geography (and chronology) with reference to overlooked diaries of Jews from Alsace to Warsaw, pilloried furniture of Paris, frozen bank accounts in Switzerland, the dismantled cemetery of Thessaloniki, the intricacies of Nazi policies in Ukraine, and German historical memory.¹⁰ This geographically prismatic approach is mirrored in scholarship (and, as we have seen in Benmalek’s case, fiction) that stretches the timeline of the Holocaust to encompass genocides before and after it and that interpolates the Holocaust through the history of decolonization and today’s refugee crises (among other phenomena).¹¹ Literature on the subject seems continually to seek an ever wider array of voices and perspectives on the Holocaust and its victims and perpetrators. Given this spectrum of activity, the field of Holocaust studies has become dense and also fractured, and the question for a current generation of Holocaust scholars is not so much whether the study of the Holocaust has “limits” (in the formulation of Saul Friedländer’s 1999 classic edited volume) but whether Holocaust historiography and Holocaust memory have (or should have) an “ethics” of its own.¹²

Yet it is a striking quality of the diverse field of Holocaust studies that, even as our information becomes ever more detailed—accommodating even the most fine-grained digital mappings of Nazi concentration camps¹³—entire geographic realms of Holocaust history remain opaque.¹⁴ Our aim with this volume is to shed light on one such murky zone, North Africa, as part of an ongoing (and still incomplete) effort to flesh out the details and push the boundaries of Holocaust history.¹⁵

The opacity of this history is not accidental—or, better put, it has many causes. European-centered Holocaust studies have played a role in marginalizing the North African story, and the politicization of the Holocaust in Israel and the states of North Africa has rendered the topic historical taboo. In these contexts many scholars have been repulsed from exploring the impact of Nazi and Vichy-era anti-Jewish laws in North Africa during World War II (whether consciously or unconsciously)—or from unraveling the complex legacy of the war on the decades and diasporas that followed in its wake.

The essays in this volume consider a range of reasons for these omissions. Here, we highlight two. First, some scholars prefer to see the Holocaust as a continental affair. This argument tends to be formulated not so much de jure as de facto. We can see the rational at work in the finite European-bound geographic reach of many otherwise sophisticated historical surveys or documentary collections, even if few scholars would make the point with affirmative conviction. In her research on the myriad German women who participated in Nazi genocidal warfare, Wendy Lower writes that the Holocaust “was unfolding in different forms and at different stages across Europe; it was neither a foregone conclusion nor the comprehensive event that we perceive it as today.”¹⁶ This is a sober conclusion, but one that forestalls the current approach, imposing as it does implicit limits on the geographic reach of the Holocaust, even as multiply configured. The Shoah, the implication stands, was demarcated by the waters and political boundaries that bound Europe together: Whatever its complexities, geography defines it.

This position finds echoes in contemporary Israel, where the Holocaust has long been claimed as a European Jewish trauma and, at the same time, a generalizably Israeli one.¹⁷ The results are contradictory. On the one hand, Israeli Jewish youth of North African and Middle Eastern heritage (along with Muslim citizens of the state) are expected to be swept up, along with all other Israelis, in the public witnessing and commemoration of European Holocaust history, a component even of kindergarten education in Israel.¹⁸ On the other hand, Middle Eastern and North African Jewish histories—including the Holocaust chapter of the North African Jewish story—are terribly underrepresented in curricula and textbooks, constituting, in the visual vocabulary of the Mizrahi artist and activist Meir Gal, only “9 out of 400” pages of the typical Israeli textbook.¹⁹

Taking the view from the Maghreb, we become attuned to a second and converse point. For some scholars of North Africa the Holocaust chapter is a distraction from a larger history and point. The spotlight is shifted away from the long history of colonial violence against Muslims and toward a history of Jewish persecution. Other scholars of North Africa and the Arab world raise questions about the scholarly attention afforded the Nazi death machine. They argue that there are too many publications about the Holocaust and therefore no need for further inquiry. Whether for these reasons or others, we can find, among surveys and documentary histories on North Africa, an uncanny, inverse parallel to the previous trend: the topical elision of World War II.

There are exceptions to these trends. Michel Abitbol authored a pioneering work in 1983, and a variety of publications in French, Hebrew, German, and English followed.²⁰ This oeuvre includes encyclopedic work produced by Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center and a number of memory books generated by communities of North African descent in Israel.²¹ In Washington, D.C., the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is gathering archival material on Vichy France and its policies in North Africa and is nurturing scholarship on the period. More recently, a 2016 special issue of Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah is a collaboration between Paris’s Mémorial de la Shoah: Musée et Centre de Documentation and Jerusalem’s Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East. This special issue, titled “The Jews of the Middle East Confront Nazism and the Shoah (1930–1945),” translates for readers of French recent trends in Hebrew scholarship on the topic.^>22 Edited by Haim Saadoun (also a contributor to the present volume) and Georges Bensoussan, the contributors to the journal issue argue that the Holocaust had a powerful and hitherto underestimated reach into North Africa and the eastern Arab world, where (Bensoussan argues in a forceful editorial) Muslim indifference to Jewish suffering laid the foundation for Jews’ subsequent embrace of Zionism and emigration.²³ Although this position finds echo in contributions to the current volume, our editorial emphasis is on filling in neglected historical details rather than advancing a position as self-consciously opinionated as Bensoussan’s.

In nonacademic circles in Israel too, scholars are beginning to attend to Mizrahi and Maghrebi Jewish history after a long period of silence and sometimes deliberate marginalization.²⁴ As early as the late 1960s, the Israeli government became alarmed that Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel perceived the Holocaust as a European Jewish story.²⁵ Over time, this realization led to the development of educational and political programs that sought to transform the Holocaust into a unifying Jewish and Israeli narrative, one accepted by Mizrahi and Sephardi Israelis as well as by Ashkenazi Israelis. This shift required activism and governmental incentive; Mizrahi activists pushed for education on and public awareness of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish history and culture, including the periods of French, Spanish, Italian, and German colonialism and the Holocaust.²⁶ The partial success of these efforts is reflected in a recent Israeli Ministry of Education mandate to teach Mizrahi history in public schools.²⁷

Writers of fiction have also helped to bring Holocaust-era North Africa to light. Yossi Sucary, an Israeli author of Libyan background, has joined the tide of those critical of the Ashkenazi hegemonic discourse that continues to prevail in Israel.²⁸ Sucary’s 2016 novel From Benghazi to Bergen-Belsen, inspired by the author’s mother’s history, presents the story of Silvana, a young woman whose family lived a comfortable life in Benghazi until they were deported by Nazi officers to the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. In Bergen-Belsen they experienced the hardships of internment, weathering snow and bitter cold as well as the degradation endemic to Nazi camps.^>29From Benghazi to Bergen-Belsen has become an integral part of the educational curriculum in Israel. Still, Sucary remains a critic of what he understands to be Israel’s historical erasure of a portion of its citizenry. Sucary has dwelled on this erasure with stark cynicism.

I wanted to believe that the Nazis’ bullets, which struck the heads of my mother’s 12- and 13-year-old cousins with frightening precision, accidently missed the history books of the State of Israel. . . . I wanted to believe that when Nachum Goldman, the President of the World Zionist Organization, rejected my aunt Saloma, who asked to receive reparations after her young son was shot at point-blank range by the Germans, he did so because he truly believed his own words: “You have never seen a German in your life, you have an Oriental Imagination.”³⁰

Haunted by a history unwritten and ignored, Sucary nonetheless acknowledges the slow but steady transformation in Israeli attitudes and policies toward North African cultures, histories, and memories. “And now, without a shred of cynicism, I want to believe that despite not having even an ounce of bitterness over these historical distortions, I am very happy that things have changed over the past few years, that justice has been served. That is enough for me.”³¹

Moving from Israel to the Maghreb, we find that North African writers are also beginning to fill a deep void of silence, sometimes despite a degree of personal risk. After all, the embrace of research on Jewish and Holocaust history in the Maghrebi and Middle Eastern contexts is associated with a degree of public stigma. Anouar Benmalek has even incurred death threats for his validation of the Holocaust.³²

In Germany the historians of the Claims Conference and the process of German Wiedergutmachung (granting of reparations) have uncovered North African Jewish histories of the Holocaust that were buried in the archives. Propelled by the need to indemnify and constantly rethink categories of reparations set in the 1950s, these scholars—including Jens Hoppe, who is represented in this volume—have been indefatigable in documenting the unfolding of the Shoah in North Africa and in paving the way for survivors of certain Algerian war camps to receive reparations.³³

Despite these considerable strides in attending to the history of the Holocaust and North Africa, from the perspective of scholarship, justice has not been served. The existing landmark work on the history of the Holocaust in North Africa demands to be expanded, updated. This becomes all the more true as even more original documentation about the Holocaust in North Africa is collected, cataloged, and made available to researchers. Today, original, largely unexplored documentation pertaining to the Holocaust in North Africa abounds in archives (and private hands) in North Africa, France, Israel, the United States, and beyond. What’s more, there is a wealth of published (or otherwise available) memoiristic and lieu de mémoire literature, some of which is explored in this volume. Rich sources surround us, and it is time for scholars of North Africa, Europe, and the Holocaust to attend to the stories they tell.

The Holocaust and North Africa: About this Book

This book offers a series of North African histories of the Holocaust—the emphasis being on the Holocaust and North Africa, because we cannot offer a complete account of the Holocaust in North Africa and because our focus encompasses not only the years of trauma but also the impact of the Holocaust on North African Jews and Muslims in the postwar period and its ongoing reverberations through memoir, memory, literature, and politics.

The essays that constitute this book seek not only to flesh out our skeletal understanding of the history of the Holocaust in North Africa but also to hone in on the sometimes dramatic and sometimes subtle manifestations of this history, country by country and region by region. Significantly, our gaze is not just on coastal cities, which tend to receive the most scholarly attention; we also look at rural sites and communities, including the Moroccan bled (the pre-Saharan region of rural Morocco) and the Sahara, where the Vichy regime built so many wartime labor and concentration camps. Libya and French West Africa, other neglected zones of the Holocaust, also receive attention here, allowing us to broaden and deepen the overall historical landscape. Finally, the essays in this volume meditate on the question of how central the Maghrebi story is to the holistic Holocaust narrative. This approach generates novel observations on North Africa and World War II based on new historical and ethnographic sources.

The contributors to Part I, Daniel Schroeter, Jens Hoppe, and Ruth Ginio, explore the intersecting and overlapping political contexts that provided the political bedrock for World War II in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and French West Africa, considering the nuanced unfolding of policy “where colonialism and fascism meet.” The contributors in Part II, Susan Slyomovics, Aomar Boum and Mohammed Hatimi, and Daniel Lee, shed light on individuated stories of occupation, internment, and race laws in Vichy North Africa. In Part III contributors Aomar Boum, Lia Brozgal, and Alma Heckman explore the ways in which the Holocaust and war reverberated across North Africa, producing novel narratives and influencing the course of politicized Jews.

MAP 1: French-occupied North Africa and French West Africa, c. 1942

MAP 2: Penal, labor, and internment camps in French-occupied North Africa and French West Africa.

MAP 3: Penal, labor, and internment Camps in German-occupied Tunisia and Italian-occupied Libya

To contextualize these new readings in the larger geographies of the Holocaust, we include unique comments by scholars of the Holocaust, North Africa, France, and Holocaust memory: Omer Bartov, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Susan Gilson Miller, Haim Saadoun, Michael Rothberg, and Todd Presner. They address the importance of the present volume to the various fields with which it is engaged. These comments appear in Part IV, which is organized to mirror the focus of the preceding parts of the book.

Readers will find circularity in all the book’s parts, as the story of the Holocaust and North Africa compels one to look both backward and forward in time, reconsidering the legacy of colonialism, for example, or questioning anew the roots of anti- and postcolonialism.

All told, this volume fills a layered void. It unveils forgotten histories, showcases hitherto neglected archival stories, and interpolates them—from both within and outside the traditional framework of Holocaust studies. Crucially, the essays gathered here weave together a conversation carried out, though all too often nondialogically, in the American, Israeli, European, and North African academy. Together, our diverse and brilliant pool of contributors disrupt the regional, epistemological, and conversational borders that have divided scholars in North Arica, Israel, Europe, and the United States until now.

Notes

1. Mohamed Berkani, “Anouar Benmalek: “La Shoah a un peu commencé en Afrique avec les Hereros,” Géopolis (August 28, 2015), http://geopolis.francetvinfo.fr/anouar-benmalek-la-shoah-a-un-peu-comme… (accessed November 2, 2016); English translation by authors. It is possible that the work of Boualem Sansal initiated the trend with his widely acclaimed Le village de l’Allemand.

2. See also “Littérature—Anouar Benmalek: ‘En Afrique, il y a un déficit de mémoire,” Jeune Afrique (August 24, 2015), www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/255284/culture/litterature-anouar-benmalek-en-… (accessed March 20, 2018); and “From the Shoah to the Herero Genocide: A Singular Journey for an Arab Writer Anouar Benmalek, May 2016,” blog post (June 2, 2016), anouarbenmalek.blogspot.com/2016/06/from-shoah-to-herero-genocide-singular_2.html (accessed November 2, 2016).

3. For an exploration of this intellectual genealogy, see, for example, Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind; Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; and Slyomovics, German Reparations, esp. ch. 7. Exploration of the historical links between colonial violence and the Holocaust have been plentiful; see, for example, Baranowski, Nazi Empire; Hull, Absolute Destruction; Kossler, Namibia and Germany; Moses, “Holocaust and Colonialism,” 68–80; Moses and Stone, Colonialism and Genocide; Olusoga and Erichsen, Kaiser’s Holocaust; Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence; Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust”; and Zimmerer and Zeller, Genocide.

4. Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith; Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood. For an exception to the trend, see Stein, Saharan Jews.

5. Marglin, Across Legal Lines; Lewis, Divided Rule.

6. Crespil, Mogador.

7. Laskier, North African Jewry; Ansky, Juifs d’Algérie.

8. Oliel, Camps de Vichy.

9. Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews.

10. This is an intentionally and inevitably partial list, as would be any single attempt to account for the diversity of Holocaust histories and scholarship. Work referenced herein includes Garbarini, Numbered Days; Dreyfus, Impossible réparation; Vincent, Hitler’s Silent Partners; Lower, Nazi Empire Building; Fleming, Greece; Confino, World Without Jews; and Lipschitz, Franco.

11. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.

12. We contrast here two dialogic edited volumes, the first canonical and the second a newly published “bookend” to the first: Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation; and Fogu et al., Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture.

13. See, especially, Knowles and Jaskot, “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps.”

14. Despite the increasing number of publications on the Holocaust and the Arab world, the impact of World War II on Middle Eastern societies requires more scholarly attention. For studies on the Holocaust and the Arab world, see Herf, Nazi Propaganda; Nicosia, Nazi Germany; Wien, “Coming to Terms”; Nordbruch, “Cultural Fusion”; Gershoni and Jankowski, Confronting Fascism; and Gershoni, Arab Responses. On recent public debates on the Holocaust in the Arab world, see Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial; and Achkar, Arabs and the Holocaust.

15. This volume finds dialogue with a number of events focused on the history of the Holocaust in southeastern Europe and North Africa, regions little covered by the Holocaust canon thus far. These include the 1999 “Sephardic and Oriental Holocaust Workshop” sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); lectures by Aron Rodrigue on Sephardim and the Holocaust delivered at the 2004 Ina Levine Annual Lecture at the USHMM and at the 2005 Samuel and Althea Stroum lectures for the University of Washington; the April 2003 conference “Sephardic Jewry and the Holocaust: the Future of the Field,” held at the University of Washington and co-sponsored by the USHMM; the June 2009 conference “North Africa and Its Jews in the Second World War,” convened by the USHMM; the June 2015 workshop “Historical Comprehension and Moral Judgment of World War II and the Holocaust: The View from North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya,” sponsored by the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and the UCLA event from which the current volume is derived, “On the Margins of the Holocaust: Jews, Muslims, and Colonialism in North Africa During the Second World War,” organized by the USHMM, the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the 1939 Society at UCLA.

16. Lower, Hitler’s Furies, 78.

17. Ofer, “History.”

18. Lidar Gravé-Lazi, “New Holocaust Education Program in Israel to Start in Kindergarten,” Jerusalem Post (April 24, 2014).

19. The phrase is the title of a photograph by Meir Gal, in which the artist holds, in a hand outstretched before him, 9 pages of a 400-page textbook to illustrate just how little coverage is devoted to Mizrahi history in mainstream Israeli pedagogy. See meirgal.com/exhibitions/nine-out-of-four-hundred-the-west-and-the-rest-1997/5060044 (accessed March 20, 2018).

20. French literature includes Abitbol, Juifs d’Afrique du Nord; Levisse-Touzé, Afrique du Nord; Laskier, Yehudei ha-Maghreb; and Laloum and Allouche, Juifs d’Algérie. For a finergrained historiographic review of the literature pertaining to World War II in Morocco, see Miller, “Filling a Historical Parenthesis.” Miller’s article introduces a special issue of The Journal of North African Studies that includes relevant articles: Baida, “American Landing”; Boum, “Partners Against Anti-Semitism”; Kenbib, “Moroccan Jews”; and Maghraoui, “Goumiers.” In addition, recent English-language literature includes Heckman, “Radical Nationalists”; Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, esp. ch. 3; Katz, “Paris Mosque”; Slyomovics, German Reparations, esp. ch. 6; and Stein, Saharan Jews, esp. ch. 5.

21. Yad Vashem has included coverage of North Africa in their Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, a multivolume work that focuses on specific communities: to wit, Abramski-Beligh’s Libya, Tunisia. Representing the genre of memory book is Yaacov Haggiag-Liluf’s Toldot Yehude Luv: me-reshit hityashvut ha-Yehudim be-Luv ṿe-'ad 'aliyatam u-ḳeliṭatam ba-arets (Tel-Or, Israel: ha-Irgun ha-'olami shel Yehudim yots'e Luv, ha-Makhon le-limudim ule-meḥḳar Yahadut Luv, 2000).

22. The special issue is “Les juifs d’Orient face au nazisme et à la Shoah (1930–1945),” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 205 (October 2016). Select American and French scholars are represented in the volume as well.

23. Bensoussan, “Juifs d’Orient.” Bensoussan’s work stands in opposition to Robert Satloff’s popular work, imagined as a quest for an “Arab” Righteous of the Nation. Satloff, Among the Righteous.

24. Oppenheimer, “Holocaust.”

25. Yablonka, Harhek meha-mesila. Also see Schwartz, “Tragedy Shrouded in Silence”; and Kozlovsky-Golan, “Site of Amnesia.”

26. On the history of Mizrahi activism more generally, see Roby, Mizrahi Era.

27. Yarden Skop, “Mizrahi Jewish Heritage to Be Taught as Required Matriculation Subject in Israeli Schools,” Ha’aretz (August 9, 2016).

28. Rein, “Historiographie israélienne.”

29. Sucary, Benghazi to Bergen-Belsen.

30. Yossi Sucary, “We Can No Longer Deny the Holocaust of Libya’s Jews,” 972 Magazine (April 16, 2016), 972mag.com/we-can-no-longer-deny-the-holocaust-of-libyas-jews/105596/ (accessed November 5, 2016).

31. Sucary, “We Can No Longer Deny.”

32. Faraz Rivli, “Fils du Sheol: Anouar Benmalek on Memory, Violence, and Fiction,” The Highlander (October 18, 2016), www.highlandernews.org/25662/25662/ (accessed November 2, 2016).

33. For example, Slyomovics, “French Restitution”; and Slyomovics, German Reparations, esp. ch. 6.