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December 2006

Author Interview

Robert Satloff’s new book is sure to rankle Arabs who insist that the Holocaust never happened. In Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands, Satloff chronicles the persecution of North Africa’s Jewish community during the Axis occupation and the Arab reaction to it. From the Sahara desert to cosmopolitan Casablanca, he discovers much Arab cruelty and indifference to the Jewish plight, but also tells stories of Arabs who’ve risked their lives to save Jews. In an interview with Moment’s assistant editor Nonna Gorilovskaya, Satloff, the executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, discusses what Holocaust’s Arab history means for the Arab-Jewish relationship today.

A Moment with Robert Satloff
Author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands

What was the extent of the persecution of those Jews living in the Arabs lands?
The Axis came into control of North Africa with the fall of France in May and June of 1940, when the French government collapsed and was replaced by the Vichy regime. Algeria was a French colony and Tunisia and Morocco were under the French protectorate. Then there was Libya, which was an Italian colony.
Vichy implemented the Statute of the Jews—le statut des juifs—which began the official persecution of Jews in these territories. This was an official policy—it was called antisémitisme d’état, state anti-Semitism—to separate Jews from economy, education, livelihood, residence and all manner of social activity. In fact, it was applied even more stringently in the Arab lands than in France itself. So, for example, in Algeria, they set all sorts of quotas for Jews, and the quotas were more stringent in Algeria than they were in France. The end result was enormous expulsion of Jewish students from all state schools and universities, quotas on doctors, lawyers, professors, any profession. Any Jew who was in the public service was fired. Jews were forced in many places to leave their residence and to take up residence in the mellah, which was the Jewish quarter of old cities.
The Vichy actually deported a couple of thousand Jews from Europe to Arab lands to work as slave laborers. So you have these poor souls that were caught up in the dragnet by the Vichy authorities in France, people who had been fleeing the rise of Nazism in Central Europe. Even if you were a Jewish soldier in the French army or the Foreign Legion and you had fought valiantly for France against the Germans in the spring of 1940, there was a reasonable chance of you one day being sent to a labor camp in the Sahara desert. Nobody told the French to do this. It is not as though the Germans ever went to the French and said, “Please deport Jews to the Sahara.”

How many labor camps were in North Africa?
Over a hundred have been recognized by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany as sites of Jewish forced labor, and the [post-war] German government agreed to take responsibility for them though some of them were Vichy and Italian. The Italians created some of the worst labor camps in North Africa. In one such camp, Giado, 562 people—a quarter of the inmates—died, more than in all other [North African] camps combined.

What was really remarkable was that, despite the fact that the Germans never held more than about half of Tunisian territory, despite the fact that the Allies were bombing Tunisia every day, the Germans still found the time and the wherewithal to send the SS and implement a pervasive program of anti-Jewish persecution. It wasn’t just the application of laws against the Jews, it was also the roundup of all Jewish men for forced labor, it was identifying Jews by making them wear the yellow star, it was taking Jews hostage, executions, deportations to death camps back in Europe. It was the precursor elements of the Final Solution. That shows you how motivated the Germans were to implement their eventual plans for the Final Solution in Arab lands.

How many Jews died as a result of Axis policies in North Africa?
It is extremely difficult to estimate, but the [best] estimate is that between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews in Arab lands died as a result of Axis control.

How much leeway did local ruling elites in North Africa have in executing anti-Jewish policies?
Most historians tend to believe that the rulers of Morocco and Tunisia had their hands tied and had to go along with all this. The sultan of Morocco [Sultan Muhammad V] and the bey [chief] of Tunis [Moncef Bey] each made public acts of sympathy towards Jews. They offered important moral support and in some cases, private acts of assistance to individual Jews. There’s very little evidence that they took political stands of any major consequence to prevent the imposition of Vichy laws. They did manage to find some loopholes that benefited their local Jewish communities. For example, there’s a loophole in the Moroccan version of the statut des juifs that permitted a certain number of Jewish veterans of the Moroccan army not to have the Vichy laws imposed against them.

There’s a debate. On one hand, one can say that the yardstick for heroism is that these leaders should have fallen on their swords to prevent the imposition of these laws. Sometimes that’s too much to ask and the offering of important moral support is significant in and of itself. One could say that they did what they could within the circumstances.

There were important members of some of the royal courts who were truly collaborators. The head of the royal court in Morocco [Grand Vizier Mohamed El Mokri] was a collaborator. There were also senior court officials who were active in trying to help Jews. One of them was Tunisian Prime Minister Mohammed Chenik, who took great risks to assist Jews. Chenik was a businessman originally and head of the Tunisian Chamber of Commerce. Tunis was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world at the time, with a huge Jewish community. Jews were the plurality of lawyers, doctors, even businessmen. His best friends were Jews; he was philo-Semitic. Chenik went out of his way to warn Jewish leaders when he found out that the SS was about to arrest the head of the Jewish community, for example. There are stories I heard that he provided exemptions to Jews so they wouldn’t have to perform forced labor. He really took action.

How did ordinary Arabs respond?
The fundamental lesson of the experience of the Holocaust in the Arab lands is that Arabs acted, in many ways, like Europeans. The vast majority were indifferent to the fate of the Jews. They might have been indifferent in a belligerent way—not unhappy to see Jews suffer—or they were just indifferent. They went on about their lives trying to survive during a period of war. A small but significant percentage were active collaborators. These were guards at these different labor sites, people who manned the cattle cars in which the Jews were sent down to the desert labor camps, people who went door-to-door as translators with the SS, picking out the houses of Jews. Then you had a very small, but in my view, a very significant number of people who risked their property and in some cases, their lives, to help Jews. I think that essential breakdown—mass indifference, significant number of collaborators, small but highly important number of rescuers—is very much the European story and connects the experience in Arab lands to the wider Holocaust experience.

Among the stories of Arabs saving Jews during the Holocaust, is there one that stands out?
My favorite is the story of Khaled Abdelwahhab, this Tunisian fellow in the small town of Mahdia who was a wonderful bon vivant, the son of one of the most famous writers in Tunisian history and a leader in his town. He made a habit of being one of the interlocutors with whomever occupied his town. So, if it was the Brits, it was the Brits; if it was the Germans, it was the Germans. He would meet with these people to make sure to look out for the best interests of his town. In the course of a dinner one evening, he learned that a German officer had his sights on a young Jewish woman and was going to rape her. So, late that night Khaled went to the place that this woman and her family had been living—the Germans had confiscated their home to use as barracks for German soldiers. They were living in an olive press factory with several other families. Khaled banged on the door and said, “You have to come with me.” Everybody who had been living in that olive factory was taken to a farm that he owned about 30 kilometers outside of this town. He went back-and-forth and protected them there for the rest of the German occupation. To me, the idea that this Tunisian notable would perform such a noble deed is really remarkable.

Did the Allied forces come to the rescue of the Jews of North Africa?
What I think should be remembered is that the first Jews to be liberated by the Allies were Jews in Arab lands. The first camps to be liberated were in Morocco and Algeria. But even in the early days, while the war was still raging, it was quite clear that saving Jews was not a top priority for the Allied army. In one episode, the members of the predominantly Jewish underground in Algiers, which did so much to enable Allied troops and Allied forces to take Algiers with a minimum of fire, were arrested under the eyes of the Allies.

How have Arabs reacted to your work?
In doing the research, I think one of the most interesting phenomena is how for some of the Arabs with whom I spoke, it was not the most welcome piece of news to learn that their father or grandfather saved Jews. Now, this was not uniform. Some people were proud of it. Others would have preferred that I not knock at their door.

How do you hope these stories will affect the relationship between Arabs and Jews?
You know, these days, in the Arab lands, the term “Nazi” is most often used as an adjective to describe a Jew. This is crazy! I am hoping—maybe it is a big hope—that among Jews, among Arabs and between Jews and Arabs, that this [the reach of the Holocaust into Arab lands] becomes a legitimate topic for people to talk about maturely and that it not be used as a weapon.