Jews in Arab Countries: The Great Uprooting 0253038588, 9780253038586

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: The Gradual Erosion of Tradition, 1850–1914
1. “Barbaric Lands”
2. Colonized
3. From the Enlightenment to the Alliance
4. Jewish “Subjects”
Part Two: The Disintegration of a World, 1914–1975
Section One: The Echo of the Great War, 1914–1939
5. “A New Jewish Man”?
6. Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?
7. The 1930s: Years of Tension
8. A Turn for the Worse
Section Two: Shock and Collapse, 1939–1975
9. In the Wake of War, 1939–1945
10. The Turning Point, 1945–1949
11. Captive Communities: From 1948 to the 1960s
12. Flight
13. The Final Act
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

J E WS in A R A B C OU N T R I E S

S T U DI E S I N A N T I S E M I T I S M Alvin H. Rosenfeld

J E WS in A R A B C OU N T R I E S The Great Uprooting

Georges Bensoussan Translated by Andrew Halper

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Originally published in French as Juifs en pays arabes, Le grand déracinement 1850–1975 © 2012 by Éditions Tallandier All rights reserved. Published by special arrangement with Editions Tallandier, France in conjunction with their duly appointed agents L’ Autre agence and 2 Seas Literary Agency. English translation © 2019 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bensoussan, Georges, author. | Halper, Andrew, translator. Title: Jews in Arab countries : the great uprooting / Georges Bensoussan ; translated by Andrew Halper. Other titles: Juifs en pays Arabes. English Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2019] | Series: Studies in antisemitism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055037 (print) | LCCN 2018055855 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253038586 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253038579 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Arab countries—History—19th century. | Jews—Arab countries—History—20th century. | Jews—Persecutions—Arab countries. | Islam—Relations—Judaism. | Judaism—Relations—Islam. | Arab countries—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS135.A68 (ebook) | LCC DS135.A68 B4613 2019 (print) | DDC 305.892/401749270904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055037 1 2 3 4 5  24 23 22 21 20 19

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xi 1

Part One: The Gradual Erosion of Tradition, 1850–1914 1 “Barbaric Lands”

11

2 Colonized

84

3 From the Enlightenment to the Alliance

129

4 Jewish “Subjects”

157

Part Two: The Disintegration of a World, 1914–1975 Section One: The Echo of the Great War, 1914–1939 5 “A New Jewish Man”?

195

6 Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?

228

7 The 1930s: Years of Tension

255

8 A Turn for the Worse

296

Section Two: Shock and Collapse, 1939–1975 9 In the Wake of War, 1939–1945

309

10 The Turning Point, 1945–1949

349

11 Captive Communities: From 1948 to the 1960s

387

12 Flight

435

13 The Final Act

467

Appendix Bibliography Index

475 479 489

Preface Despite dissimilarities, divergences, and particularities, the Arab-Muslim

world constitutes a single civilizational unit. And, taking into account its major geographic regions as well as the distinct evolution of each Jewish community, historically this was equally true of the diverse groups of Jews within that Arab world. To understand this history—and a fortiori the history of the disappearance of these communities in less than a generation—this book will conduct a series of exploratory dives in order to survey and map out, as a marine archeologist might do, first the broad contours and then the details of this submerged world. The book will focus on five countries, extending from Morocco to Iraq. Morocco, because it was never subjected to Ottoman rule and remained independent until 1912, and from early on was home to the Arab world’s largest Jewish community. Libya, because in 1911 its small Jewish community passed from Ottoman rule to Italian colonial control. Egypt, because it presents an atypical situation, namely as a destination for Jewish immigration throughout the nineteenth century. A second particularity is that there was not a single Egyptian Jewish community but rather several, which co-existed, and of which the majority, unlike the rest of the Arab world’s Jews, had only a slight connection to Arab culture. Iraq, because it was the oldest Middle Eastern Jewish community and the second most populous after Morocco’s, and also because it was the most Arabized of them all. And finally Yemen, one of the most subjugated Jewish communities, in the heart of a remote and archaic country. Beginning in 1880, its Jews were to emigrate to Palestine (Eretz Israel),1 to build the modern Jewish national home alongside Zionists from Eastern Europe. The end of the Jewish world in Arab lands cannot be read solely in the light of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Rather, one must go back to the middle of the nineteenth century in order to identify the first signs of collapse, to the moment when Western modernity, even if only tentatively, was reaching the shores of the Arab Middle East’s Jewries. The mid-nineteenth century is also where it is necessary to start in order to understand why Jewish modernization, born in the wake of the Haskala and colonization,2 would come to separate these Jews from their environment while, at the same time, the rise of Arab nationalism would push Arabs and Jews toward divorce. Arab archives are for the most part closed, although a small amount of original material has occasionally been published in academic works or documentary

vii

viii | Preface collections, translated into Western languages. This book therefore has drawn on the immense holdings of the Alliance israélite universelle,3 which cover nearly all the Arab world from 1862 to 1939. French diplomatic archives have also been consulted, as these are often essential for the Maghreb (and the Near East after 1945). Finally, we have consulted the Zionist archives in Jerusalem, for the birth of Zionist movements in the Arab world and for the post-1945 period. On examination, Jewish worlds within Arab lands often seem stripped of the inner mental framework that structured their existence. Not that there is a complete dearth of monographs or other works on such Jewries, nor a lack of scholars or libraries dedicated to their study. Rather, the issue is the internalized consciousness of a history that places a people within a successive chain of generations, the collective consciousness that, alone, can stave off the anxiety of existence in this world by shoring up the fragility of people and things by imbuing them with meaning. The past of Moroccan, Iraqi, or Yemenite Jews has yet to become their history, has yet to constitute that fabric of civilization of which their descendants today are custodians. Middle Eastern Jewish cultures were crushed by the narratives of a colonizing Europe, and even more by the narrative of an Ashkenazi Judaism that was itself enshrouded in the immense shadow of genocide. Thus triply alienated, those Oriental Jewish cultures were reduced to the status of folklore (captioned, for example, as “Typical view of the Jewish Quarter,” “Traditional Bride’s Dress in Morocco,” or “Yemenite Jewish liturgical items”). These cultures have been museumified, stereo-typified, and submerged, but have not yet emerged as history. The eviction of 1945 to 1965 is thus only the preamble to a still-illegitimate history. The account offered in this book is for the defeated, history’s orphans, that they may reclaim their past and the recounting of that past from their former masters.4

Notes 1. Translator’s note: Generally we will use “Eretz Israel” to designate Palestine from a Jewish viewpoint, and “Palestine” from an Arab perspective. “Palestine” is also used in a neutral descriptive sense to denote a territory demarcated on a geographical or administrative (first Ottoman, then British) basis. The nomenclature describing the broader region (or parts of it) reflects the inconsistency that continues to characterize modern usages. Thus, we variously use “Near East,” “Middle-East,” “the Maghreb,” “the Arab world,” “the Muslim world”; the meaning should be clear in context. Mirroring French usage, we also use the expression “Oriental Jews,” since this term reflects socio-cultural and intellectual perspectives prevalent during the period under examination in this book. Despite the controversies around the use of “Oriental” in the past few decades, this expression made sense to those who used it during the relevant time period.

Preface | ix 2. The Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) was a movement among European Jews in the 18th–19th centuries that advocated enlightenment values, greater Jewish integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history. 3. The Alliance, or AIU, is a Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 by the French statesman Adolphe Crémieux to safeguard the human rights of Jews around the world, by promoting the ideals of Jewish self-defence and self-sufficiency through education and professional development. Early on it became particularly active in promoting education through the medium of the French language for Jews throughout the Muslim world. 4. “The worst is that others—who are complete strangers to us—will write for us and in our name! And amongst these strangers we count so few friends.” Isaac Leib Peretz in 1915, cited in Samuel D. Kassow, Qui écrira notre histoire? (Paris, Grasset, 2011), 306.

Acknowledgments Throughout the years spent researching and writing this book, people at

several institutions have been extremely helpful to me, and I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to them. First and foremost are Raoul Bellaïche, Guila Cooper, Jean-Claude Kuperminc, and Rose Levine of the Alliance israélite universelle. I am very grateful for their exceptional competence and dedication. Warm thanks also go to Simone Schliechter, of Jerusalem’s Central Zionist Archives, for her expert guidance through the maze of the CZA’s immense holdings. Many thanks to Peggy Frankston, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for sharing with me a number of her archival discoveries in the French diplomatic archives at Nantes. Thanks, as well, to Claire Mouradian for her friendly dedication in introducing me to many dossiers from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I am equally appreciative of Katy Hazan’s friendship and support in helping me with the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants archives. I am grateful to Haim Saadon, of the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, and to the late Robert Attal (z l), who hosted me in 2004. I would also like to record my very warm thanks to my English translator, Andrew Halper. On a personal level—and they will know why—I would like to express my thanks to Carina Chiesa, Stéphanie Dassa, Laura Fontana, Dalit Lahav, Véronique Lippmann, and Corinne Weiler. Thanks as well to Michelle and Albert Roche for hosting me at their house in Bordeaux, where I always found hospitality and friendship. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Annette, for being by my side through thick and thin.

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J E WS in A R A B C OU N T R I E S

Introduction It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it. —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, volume 5, The Prisoner

A

strange silence surrounds the history of the Jews of the Middle East, and even more the history of their disappearance. And yet they are part of that “Jewish civilization” about which Fernand Braudel, at the end of the war, wrote “the one thing of which we can be certain is that the destiny of Israel, its strength, its misfortunes are all the consequence of its remaining irreducible, refusing to be diluted, that is of being a civilization faithful to itself.”1 This silence belies a malaise, starting with the inherent unease within the broader Jewish world itself, a Euro-centric world that came to consider Middle Eastern Jewry as of negligible importance, as much with respect to religious thought as to the rise of Zionism. Thus the Maghreb, for example, often overlooked in cultural histories of the Jewish people, was nevertheless present in all fields of creativity in the course of the past few centuries.2 When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, communal mutual assistance focused on persecuted Russian and Romanian Jews, the voices of Persian, Yemenite, or Moroccan Jews were rarely heard. Established as a discipline in the nineteenth century, Jewish history has most often told the story of Europe’s Jews. Reading through the great histories of the Jewish people by Graetz, Dubnow, or later Baron, one finds that Oriental Jews feature as “forgotten Jews,” to whom only a few modest pages are devoted, buried within a huge tome. Rather like a poor relation invited to a family reunion. To this long silence must now be added the silence surrounding the end of an entire civilization. In one generation, from 1945 to 1970, the Arab-Muslim world (and in particular, the Arab world) lost some 80 percent of its Jews through emigration. The main Middle Eastern Jewish communities are now to be found in two countries, which are Muslim but not Arab: Iran and Turkey. For Arab nationalists, the responsibility for this disappearance rests with European colonizers, Zionist campaigners, international Jewish organizations, and indeed with Israeli agents, who are said to have urged these communities to leave. This issue—which is clearly quite complex—cannot be resolved merely by advancing

2  |  Jews in Arab Countries partisan points of view of whatever stripe. Instead, it is necessary to raise issues and questions that do not lend themselves to obvious answers. The challenge is to understand how this world, subjected to aggression from without, also collapsed from within, and how its own memory was constructed. It is also necessary to examine, in terms freed of both idyllic fantasies and nightmarish images, how Oriental Jews—these colonized subjects—perceived themselves. In the Western imagination, for a long time—from the end of the seventh century up to Lepanto in 1571, and even beyond—Islam was perceived as a threat. This did not prevent contacts, nor indeed diplomatic missions or sustained relations. More threatening than Islam per se was the Ottoman threat up to the seventeenth century, which European collective memory would not forget for many centuries. The same was true for Arab collective memory, which also recalls past domination. If this old danger had been overcome by the nineteenth century, the European imagination nevertheless retained traces of it at the time of Europe’s major colonial expansion. The Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) inherited this mindset. It is first and foremost by way of the AIU’s archives, but also through its administrative reports and private correspondence, that we can approach the situation as it was perceived and experienced. That history is, nevertheless, hostage to ideological views that became set in stone as a result of the Jewish/Israeli-Arab conflict. At the time of the birth of Islam, in the seventh century, the majority of the Jewish world lived in the Near East. Between 850 and 1250, Jewish culture in these Islamic territories experienced unparalleled growth. Conditions for Jews began to deteriorate at the end of the thirteenth century, a slow change of fortune that European travelers up to the nineteenth century would witness. This is also why, when Europeans penetrated the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, reaching the southern shores of the Mediterranean and rapidly colonizing a large part of the Arab world, the Jews were the first to rally to them. For the same reason, some Jews were among the first in the Islamic world to embrace the values of the Enlightenment. The condition of Jews in the Arab world has become a mirror reflecting political passions. For some, it was an age of persecution, and for other others, a Golden Age: the gulf between these extreme readings is itself a symptom of an ideological pitfall. To a great extent the myth of a Golden Age was invented by nineteenth-century European Jewish intellectuals. Frustrated by the slow progress of Jewish emancipation in the West, they imagined a Judeo-Arab Golden Age featuring a mythologized elsewhere. This myth was subsequently echoed by Arab discourse throughout the twentieth century, insisting that the Judeo-Arab honeymoon was destroyed by Zionism. This mythology is used today by the Arab side in its struggle against the State of Israel, resulting in the conversion of history

Introduction | 3 into a simple propaganda tool. After 1948, this myth of “great benevolence” and tolerance won respectability. The counter-myth, equally widespread and simplistic, emphasizes the “absolute horror” of the Jewish condition in the Islamic world. It, too, serves as a weapon in the ongoing conflict. The belief either that Islam is fundamentally intolerant and the Arab world inherently anti-Jewish, or that the harmony of yesteryear was undone by Zionism, is based on a double myth. In the case of Egyptian Jews, for example, above and beyond the Israeli-Arab conflict and Nasser’s hostility toward a Jewish state, economic and social forces also pushed the Jews to leave—as was the case with all foreigners, for that matter. It should however be noted that a large number of the Jews of Egypt were not foreigners, and that the property of most non-Jewish foreigners was not plundered. In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, Albert Memmi wrote that “the famously idyllic life of the Jews in Arab lands is a myth! The truth—because I am obliged to repeat it—is that we were first and foremost a minority in a hostile envi­ ronment. At no time—and I really mean at no time—did Jews live in Arab lands other than as lesser persons.”3 It is necessary to counterpose this angry image against another view, also of a Maghreb intellectual but a Muslim one: Abdallah Laroui, the author of an important work on the origins of Moroccan nationalism. In the 1970s, Laroui argued that the Europeanization of the Jews (through the AIU) allowed them to avoid becoming subject to Moroccan national law, thus encouraging them to adopt an attitude of “arrogance and rebellion” with regard to Muslim authority.4 It seems that other factors also played a role in the creation of this mythology, beginning with the tendency of some Israelis, anxious not to burn bridges, to think in idyllic terms about the Judeo-Arab past—for example in mythologizing Oriental Jews (as it happens, Yemeni Jews) who thus in the minds of Ashkenazim became “good savages,” “authentic Jews” speaking “real” Hebrew. Oriental Jews themselves also were quick to erase from their memory the climate of muted oppression in which they had grown up. Yet, in an effort to counter the myth of a Golden Age, many intellectuals have contributed to the creation of a lachrymose history composed entirely of suffering. One must, therefore, navigate around clichés and stereotypes. Not that one has to reject out of hand those analyses, for many have some truth to them. But we must not err by confounding causes and origins, or assuming that the origin of something is sufficient to explain what follows. Beginnings and origins do not determine destiny—at the very most, they outline a cultural territory composed of ordinary, insignificant, and anodyne everyday events: minor facts that say far more than learned discourses can. Nor should historians genuflect before the altar of the archives, which constitute the primary resources of history yet are of questionable worth because

4  |  Jews in Arab Countries observed (and reported) facts are determined “by the act of observing, [and because] it is theory which has determined what may be observed.”5 If the goal of historical knowledge “is to tame our incredulity,”6 such knowledge also serves the function of uncovering masked mechanisms of domination—the subjacent aspects of the discourses that speak to us, the layers that constitute us and that have shaped our gaze, and the imaginary representations that form us and in return fashion reality—so that we can take due account of this cultural loam from which events emerge. In so doing, it is essential to take archival documents not as “reality” but rather as descriptions of reality. It is true that the factual reality of the archives may hardly be questionable, but it is a reality expressed in the language of archives, through both reports and policy documentation, recounting facts while at the same time being a representation of those facts. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, a number of accounts in Hebrew were written highlighting the anti-Jewish hostility of Christianity and the benevolence of the Muslim world. The error was to transform this myth into a historical postulate, as found in the majority of significant Jewish historians prior to the Second World War, starting with Heinrich Graetz, panegyrist of the inter-confessional benevolence of the Muslim world. “The situation of the Jews, so painful in Palestine and in the various European states, was very satisfactory in the Arabian peninsula. There, they were not constrained to live like their coreligionists in Europe had to, in perpetual fear of drawing upon themselves the anger of the clergy or the punishment of the sovereign. There, they were not the subjects of exclusion from all forms of activities and dignities.”7 It seems that European Jewish elites were in fact employing the myth of Spanish Muslim tolerance in their struggle for emancipation in Europe, addressing those ruling over them and enjoining them to “do as well as” the Muslims. This myth was exposed with the beginning of research on Oriental Jews, carried out in particular on the basis of archives available in the West. The historian Cecil Roth, a pioneer in this field, noted in 1946 “the idea that in the Arab world, Jews lived in perfect peace and tranquility, up until the moment that Zionist campaigners upset reciprocal relations of great stability, is a perversion of the truth.”8 On December 15, 1911, from Mosul (in Mesopotamian Kurdish territory under Ottoman administration), the director of the AIU’s boys school (the major French philanthropic institution had been founded 50 years previously) addressed the organization’s Comité Central in Paris: “Humiliated and scorned, Mossul Israelites have come to think of themselves as inferior beings; they have come to lose all sense of initiative and, although intelligent . . . they are today the poorest and most backward class of the population.”9 Three years earlier, at the

Introduction | 5 other end of the Arab world, the Chief Rabbi of Meknes, in Morocco, explained in Arabic (at the time, the mother tongue of the vast majority of Jews in the ArabMuslim world) the extent to which his people had been stunted by oppression: “We have become awkward and clumsy in expressing ourselves—the length and harshness of our captivity has suffocated our spirits. For this reason, we ask you to be our interpreter and intermediary.”10 This picture can only be understood by accepting that it is the culmination of the long practice of dhimma, the protected status accorded Jewish and Christian infidels that was developed during Islam’s first century. This long experience of submission fashioned a form of alienation difficult to render clearly discernable to those very people who internalized it. It became necessary to learn to survive within the tight confines of a domination that was neither the Hell some claimed, nor the Paradise that others said it was. It was an ordinary world in which codified violence kept everyone in his place, at the risk, otherwise, of bloodshed. But the very survival of the dhimmis—because it constituted a form of ransom— harmed its subjects. Comparisons between Islam and Christianity have little heuristic value. Such comparisons are, above all, ideological in nature, because over a lengthy period of time their parameters are heterogeneous and difficult to disentangle. It is not the case that one can simply hold up one history against another in order to compare them, rather it is a question of examining their points of dissimilarity. The historian should not judge, nor be indignant or angry, nor feel pity, but rather should aim to uncover the past’s buried reality, thus illuminating what remains of the past in this opaque present that continues to obstruct perception of current issues. What is required is an understanding through contemporaneous eyes, taking care to avoid moralizing about “tolerance” when tolerance was not even a recognized value. In the 1960s, ignorance about the cultural substratum of Arab-Muslim societies led many intellectuals to make analyses that were quickly belied by the facts, and that failed to weigh the impact of dhimma, or the persistence of its rootedness in mind-sets well beyond its formal abolition in the midnineteenth century. To think that relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Arab world would have harmonized indicates an underestimation of the power of resentment. We know the outcome: large-scale departures, starting with the Jewish minorities, and continuing with Christians, who began to leave the region following the Lebanese and Syrian conflicts of 1840–1860, the genocide of Armenians in 1915, and the massacre of Iraqi Assyrians in 1933. The anti-Jewish passages of the Koran are frequently raised; these are real, but also cited in a way that is partial and biased, and they have been exploited in the current context of the Israeli-Arab conflict—a conflict that also leads a large

6  |  Jews in Arab Countries part of the Arab world today to unblushingly espouse the ranting of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First translated into Arabic in 1925, the Protocols has been repeatedly cited by leaders such as the Chief Mufti, Nasser, Saudi King Faisal, and Colonel Gaddafi. Few Arab voices have dared to speak against this calumny. Similarly, the Eurocentric view of Oriental Jews has not only taken up the clichés of nineteenth-century bourgeois thinking and applied them to a different world, but also presented a distorted picture. In the view of the masters of the West, it came to be considered that Moroccan Jewry constituted a closed, tribal society within which the individual played hardly any role. In fact, the evidence is abundant today that the individual had a much more important position in that society than was previously believed. What is more, expressions of genuine concern were free of either paternalism or condescension, even with regard to these Hebrew “savages.” The Ashkenazi view of Yemeni Jews, for example, was altogether mythologized. Shortly before the First World War, the American rabbi Judah Magnes, an advocate of cultural Zionism and later the first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, spoke of Yemeni Jews as a “lost tribe and the oldest community of the Diaspora which, by its simple faith and its authentic Judaism, teaches us about Jewish life during the earliest years of the Exile.”11 A few decades later, WIZO (the Women’s International Zionist Organization) wrote of the Yemenis that they were “the purest of the communities.” This field of history is in fact an ideological canvas on which fantasies, illusions, and memorializing reconstructions are projected. “In all of the Muslim countries,” noted Pierre Loti in 1890, “Jews resemble each other.”12 Beyond that author’s assumption, historians have corroborated this judgment. It was with good reason that Fernand Braudel spoke of a “Jewish civilization,” of which “obstinacy and desperate refusal are the strong features of their destiny.”13 This civilizational unity allows one to envisage taking a global view of Arab-Jewish societies, even if the nuances that distinguish them from each other should also be highlighted. In family and religious matters, in the functioning of communities as well as in education, in the relationships with non-Jews as well as the reception encountered by the Zionist movement—in all of these respects, the similarities are overwhelming. The same can also be said with regard to the views of Arab societies toward “their” Jews: despite some important nuances, the views are close, and indeed, equally uniform. Mentalities constitute the cultural loam or potting soil most widely shared among Jewish communities in the Arab lands. They highlight slowly changing thought-systems: “People use machines they invent, while retaining pre-existing mentalities. . . . Mentalities are the things which change the most slowly: the his­ tory of mentalities is the history of slowness throughout history.”14 There exists in fact an Arab-Muslim unity above and beyond regional differences. First of all, there is Islam, which is a majority religious fact, a shared

Introduction | 7 world-view and unifying cement, a psychological universe marked by a common economy of slavery and servitude. The cultural unity of the Jewish world in Arab lands throws into relief a system of beliefs, social practices, and religious behavior, involving the elaboration of something Lucien Febvre calls a “mental tool-kit.” Culture, far from being some mechanical “reflection” of the economy or social structure, actually has full autonomy. In turn, the cultural engenders the social. This is not a question of causative “stacking,” nor is it reductive (i.e., economic, social, cultural, etc.), but rather it displays intertwined levels of reality, with the cultural intimately linked to the social. That is why one can move from a social history of culture to a cultural history of the social, as the most objectively “economic” of practices are inseparable from cultural structures. The history of the mental toolkit that we use is actually the history of the systems of thought that operate inside us without our awareness. Moroccan sociologist Mohammed Ennaji has studied the political vocabulary of the Arab world in order to try to uncover its psychological framework. In so doing, he uncovered the lasting legacy left by slavery, which marked all authority relations and imposed the concept of servitude onto most modes of expression about power, from the faithful in prayer before God to the hierarchical relations of daily life.15 The history of Oriental Jews also shows to what extent cultural autonomy runs parallel to political autonomy. Not everything can be reduced to discourse: social classes and conflicts are not merely the effects of language, and thus because social practices of the Jewish world were unified across the span of Arab lands, it is those practices that must be investigated in order to understand how that world disappeared in less than a century. The point is to try to understand how we believe what we believe. And the world must be understood in the terms in which we have made it: “It is the very presence of the past in the present which renders it knowable.”16 Thus, it is less the past as such that interests us than the process of time, which makes and unmakes new realities, fashioning them amid a continuous clash. Working from fragments, debris, and bare traces, the challenge is to reconstruct the beliefs, collective practices, and collective unconscious of a sunken world in order to try to understand the shipwreck.

Notes 1. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’epoque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1985), vol. 2, 155. 2. Haïm Zafrani, cited in Jacques Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb modern (1500–1900). Un monde en movement (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000), 189.

8  |  Jews in Arab Countries 3. Albert Memmi, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 50. 4. Abdallah Laroui, Les Origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830–1912 (Paris: Maspero, 1977). 5. Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, and Garcia Patrick, Les Courants historiques en France: XIX–XX siècle (Paris: Folio Histoire, 2007), 255. 6. Saul Friedlander, Les Années d’extermination: L’Allemagne nazie et les Juifs (1939–1945), vol.2 (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 29. 7. Cited in Mark R. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix. Les Juifs au Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 38. 8. Cited in ibid., 54. 9. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 19. 10. AIU, Morocco, IV.C. 11, Tangiers, March 10, 1908. 11. Cited in Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of Yemen 1900–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 29. 12. Charles de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc. 1883–1884 (Paris: Challamel Éditeurs, 1888), 68. 13. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen, 136. 14. Jacques Le Goff, “Les mentalities, une histoire ambiguë” in Faire de l’histoire, vol. 3, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 82. 15. Mohammed Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Marmelouk. Esclavage, pouvoir et religion dans le monde arabe (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2007), 17. 16. Roger Chartier, Les Écoles historiques en France, cited in Guy Bourgé and Hervé Martin, Les Écoles historiques (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 587.

Part One The Gradual Erosion of Tradition, 1850–1914

1 “Barbaric Lands” I have scrupulously abstained from ridiculing, pitying or hating human actions. I have only wished to understand them. —Spinoza, Tractatus I. IV.

B

etween 1860 and 1890, explorer-emissaries were frequently dispatched to the southern shores of the Mediterranean both by geographical societies and the armed forces to whose strategic objectives such societies were linked. Many were also sent by educational and philanthropic organizations, such as the Jewish National Board as well as the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU), the major Jewish philanthropic institution founded in France in 1860. Some of these men, such as Charles de Foucauld, sent to Morocco in 1863, had as their mission the organization of topographical surveys for essentially military ends. Others, following the example of AIU agents, were tasked with examining the state of the Jewish population and its needs as well as its rights, which were largely overlooked in the prevailing context of general misery. Some were sent to examine the prospects of opening AIU schools. It was in fact with that purpose that Joseph Halévy, one of the greatest Hebrew scholars of his time and professor at the Ecole Normale Israélite Universelle (ENIO, the AIU teacher training institute), was sent to Yemen in 1869–1870, and then to Morocco in 1876. He reported in detail on the condition of indigenous Jews; his command of Hebrew, a language widely known across Jewish communities around the world, was the passport giving him access to them. From Marrakesh in 1876, Halévy reported on the alarming state of Middle Eastern Jewry. At the end of his visit, more than three hundred Jews saw him off on the outskirts of town, “despite the danger,” he wrote, “of being seen to so eagerly associate with a foreigner.” They had to fear, upon their return to town, being held accountable for their behavior, risking “perhaps being beaten, thrown in jail and despoiled of their property because of me; such were the dark thoughts that tore at my very heart and made me rail against their fate. We parted from each other in the shadow of the deepest emotions which the human heart has ever had to bear.”1 “Barbaric lands”—this harsh judgment ran through reports of all sorts by diplomats, missionaries and scholars, such as, for example, that of June 26,

12  |  Jews in Arab Countries 1871, by Auguste Beaumier, French consul at Mogador (in Essaouira, Morocco). Beaumier noted that among local Jews, one encounters “certain persons of an elite nature, whom it is truly painful to see debased by the indescribable barbarity of this country.”2 Ten years later, at the other end of the Arab world, the French vice-consul at Hodeida, in Yemen, described violence perpetrated against the Jews of “that still barbaric country.”3 In 1883, the young Charles de Foucauld traveled the length and breadth of Morocco, producing a hydrographical and topographical report of outstanding quality. Independent Morocco at that time comprised two zones, the bled es siba, which barely recognized the sultan’s authority and was thus a zone of dissidence, and the bled es makhzen, which fell directly under his authority, under the shelter of which the condition of the Jews appeared less subject to injustices. De Foucauld wrote that every Jew of the bled es siba belongs body and soul to his master, his sid. . . . Once he has rendered homage, he and his posterity are linked forever to he whom he has chosen. The sid defends his Jew against others just like anyone will protect his property. He makes use of him just as he manages his property, depending on its specific nature. Is the Muslim wise? Is he thrifty? Then he spares his Jew. But should the master be excessive and lavish, he will eat him up as one dissipates an inheritance, demanding of him inordinate sums, which the Jew will say he does not have; the sid will then take the Jew’s wife as a hostage, holding her until the Jew pays. . . . Nothing in the world can protect an Israelite against his master; he is at his mercy.4

At the turn of the twentieth century, the reports emanating from the ArabMuslim world about the Jews’ situation were alarming. This was in fact true not just for the Arab world, but also Iran where in 1903, for example, a report published in the AIU Bulletin highlighted the morale decay of Jewish communities, and how suffering was not just physically degrading but psychologically as well, negatively impacting Jews’ self-esteem: “Mistreated, chased like wild beasts, and systematically subjected to exceptionally harsh conditions, they have ended up resigned to their sad fate and they now find their situation entirely natural; they have become accustomed to lowering their heads while the storm rages. Thus, any pride or dignity has disappeared, and ignorance has done the rest.”5 “One becomes as accustomed to misfortune as to an illness,” concluded the president of the AIU, addressing its general assembly, noting that it is possible to become so miserable that one no longer feels the weight of one’s condition.6 Other evidence from a variety of sources attests to the overall decay of the Jewish condition in the Muslim world in the modern era. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European travelers passing through Morocco described the same humiliating rituals. Right up to the 1920s they cited stone throwing (always unpunished) by Arab children at Jewish passers-by. In both

“Barbaric Lands” | 13 Iran and Yemen, one reads the same analyses about Jews, who were convinced that they carry the natural burden of a people in the galut, or forced exile, a term that continually resurfaces. For many, this provided an explanation for both religious fervor as well as heavy alcoholism, both offering a refuge from servitude. At the same time, the AIU was developing its school network in the Mediterranean basin and beyond, as illustrated by the mission with which it charged one of its most capable representatives, Yomtov Sémach, sent to Yemen to examine the prospects of establishing a school there. Cut off from the rest of the Jewish world by the sea as well as Arabia—a country forbidden to the Infidel—Yemen had for decades been a source of concern for most Western Jewish authorities. Starting in 1908, a trickle of emigration toward the Holy Land slowly drained Yemen of a part of its Jewish community. In February 1910, Sémach arrived in Sana’a. Like many before him, he described the distress that seized him at the sight of the subjection crushing the Jews. “Everyone tells me: ‘We know nothing, we are savages, yet we want to be men—we have written, prayed, cried so much but our voices were not heard. At last God has taken pity on us.’ . . . They lack selfconfidence and under Arab oppression they crawl, prostrate, through the dust. They are despised, and are indeed despicable.” Yet, on several occasions during his journey, Sémach observed the “liveliness of spirit” these people “have maintained despite ten centuries of ignorance and abjection.”7 With a series of brushstrokes, he depicted the degraded self-image of “the Yemeni Jew [who] knows nothing of civilized life or modern progress [and] has no self-respect or dignity; insulted, he affects not to understand; stoned by an Arab child, he simply runs away.”8 Humiliation and internalized oppression were nothing other than the effects of exile, with exile itself eperienced as the result of moral decadence. For some external observers, this somber self-image was what led to Jews accepting their degraded state. Legion are the pictures from the time showing an Oriental Jew with head lowered and face marked by fear shot through with servility, to cite an expression of the time. In a word, a condition that repelled many witnesses, who to describe what they saw, sometimes turned to the most common of antisemitic clichés. This image of submission, however, was not unique to the Jews of Yemen. In 1903 the director of the AIU boys’ school of Casablanca wrote that the Jews of his town “were of a servile nature, and Europeans, while perhaps not provoking fear, nevertheless inspired in them something or other which caused the Jews to blindly carry out their wishes.”9 Sémach, for his part, described a Yemeni Jew who seems to have internalized the “idea that he was the natural inferior of the Arabs.” Traveling alongside a group, he remarked that the Yahudi “gets along very well with the Arabs, who are teasing him . . . he knows he’s not their equal, and he acquiesces to all their orders.” Sémach asked the Jew why, smiling and taking care not to anger his masters, he put up with this. Referring to the condition of spiritual exile, the Jew

14  |  Jews in Arab Countries answered: “What can I tell you, Rabbi [here, used as an honorific title meaning ‘learned man’]: Do you not realize that we are in the Galut? I do what they wish, and they leave me in peace.”10 In 1790, the English traveller William Lemprière undertook a long journey in the Moorish Empire, which he recounted in A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogadore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant, and thence over Mount Atlas to Morocco, published in London in 1791. He described the condition of the Jews of Marrakesh: “Everywhere, they are treated like creatures of a lower class than our own. In no part of the world are they as oppressed as in Barbary. . . . Despite all the services rendered by the Jews to the Moors, they treat them with greater harshness than they would treat their animals.” He concluded that in subjugating Jews so, they are turned not just into slaves, but into beings inclined toward vice. It is the violence against them, Lemprière explained, “that causes nearly all of them to be without principles or probity.”11 Converted to Islam and disguised as an Arab, René Caillié traveled around parts of West Africa between 1824 and 1828. “Throughout the regions of El Drah and Tafilet, Jews inhabit the same villages as the Muslims. They are miserable, go around nearly undressed and are ceaselessly insulted by the Moors: those fanatics go so far as to strike them disgracefully, and throw stones at them as if they were dogs.”12 What emerges from these accounts is the sense that humiliation had become so all-encompassing, so omnipresent, that words failed to express it. And when the words no longer sufficed, the awareness of the reality receded too. Fear, that destructive cloud haunting diminished lives, was everywhere: fear of raising one’s head, speaking at full voice, making music in public, the fear above all to claim one’s due. “Mistreated by the natives, they don’t dare seek justice in court,” reported a leading expert on Maghreb Jewry in 1906 on his observations of the Jews of Western Libya.13 In 1909, at Amara in Mesopotamia, a number of consuls attended the opening ceremony of an AIU school, where they meet “these poor Jews who are so despised,” noteed the AIU director, “thus raising the prestige of the Jews amongst the general population and raising the Jews’ human dignity in their own eyes as well.”14 The former director of the Mosul AIU school wrote in 1926 “I look at them, and honestly, their appearance fills me with sorrow. They have not changed, and yet everything around them has evolved. They always have a seedy and sordid air about them.”15 Such was the reality, stripped bare. The misery of nearly all Jews—and their alienation—exhibits conditions that can neither be denied nor accepted. To be a Jew “is to suffer the objective fate of a group of humans,” notes Albert Memmi.16 One can rebel against it or ignore it, but the oppressive look continues to define its victim by what he no longer wishes to be. The fear that comes from being the subject who is required to walk with head lowered, rarely hated but most often

“Barbaric Lands” | 15 scorned, is a form of dehumanization. The silence around the long history of the dhimma proves not its “insignificant importance” rather, in reality, the contrary. It casts a light over oppression so powerful that it becomes internalized and, at the end of the day, experienced as a condition of inevitability. “The radical evil of alienation is simply neglect,” writes French philosopher Robert Misrahi.17 For Western travelers, the East they find in the last third of the nineteenth century appears as a nightmare of fatalism and resignation. “I didn’t expect to find such a backward city at the very gates of Europe,” the director of the AIU in Tetouan wrote in 1901.18 In 1905, the AIU director at Marrakesh described “sluggish” and “listless” children, whose mental alertness is enshrouded within a “fog of indifference and fatalism,” their spirits “atrophied by shameful and depraved habits, a legacy passed down by a line of alcoholics.” Only material needs, he added, can “awake them from their torpor.”19 These routine descriptions are indissociable from the moralizing discourse of an elite more concerned with the challenges of imparting basic elements of civilization than with merely educating people for whom they are responsible. But what emerged first and foremost from the reports is the fatalism and resignation in the face of misery and disease. Western observers found themselves appalled by this apathy.20 It is indeed this resignation that was evoked in 1904 by the director of the boys school of Casablanca: “The great majority of them work very hard, earn very little, and think that is entirely natural. They are happy, these poor devils, when—their hard day’s work finally over—they can at last sit and smoke their tiny pipes of kif.”21 In Morocco, in the wake of Moses Montefiore’s 1864 visit and the opening of the first AIU schools (in Tetouan, in 1862), delegation after delegation of Western Jews painted their descriptions of the mellah, or Jewish quarter, in the same brushstrokes, until this became an obligatory if repetitively monotone element in every such report. In 1876, Joseph Halévy visited Marrakesh’s mellah: I hastened to enter, not so much in order to avoid the curiosity of on-lookers than to escape the saddening scene which revealed itself to me during the short ride, a sight which seized my heart and brought tears to my eyes. . . . On the one side, men of alluring aspect, enveloped in magnificent, richly trimmed burnooses, their heads wrapped in coquettishly folded turbans, feet shod in beautiful yellow slippers . . . ; on the other side, an apprehensive and ragged crowd, coiffed only by blue kerchiefs splattered with black, casually fixed around the neck, holding their plain slippers in their hands, walking barefoot despite the sharp stones of the roadway surface.22

Similar reports emanated from Algeria, where Jews were only allowed to go out at night with a candle; the French consul at Algiers noted in 1805: “The

16  |  Jews in Arab Countries oppression and abasement which they experience are beyond anything one could imagine.”23 The promises of the Sultan to Moses Montefiore in 1864 remained unfulfilled. In fact, the situation only worsened: the more that Europe’s expansion came ever more sharply into focus, the more the power of the Makhzen (the sultan’s administration) tightened against a Jewish minority suspected of yearning for the Europeans. The Moroccan administration explains that all of its subjects could receive caning, Jews as well as Muslims. But Halévy counters that “the Muslim stripped of his rights, or condemned to caning, is a malefactor who has been convicted of murder or at the very least of aggravated robbery, whereas the Israelite has no need to have committed any crime to find himself outlawed. He is a criminal by his birth and because of his religious views, and it is already a great act of generosity to allow him to live and to move about amongst genuine believers.”24 Injustice was the only rule. From Yemen, Kurdistan, and Morocco, archival reports relate unending violence on the part of warlords. All lives were fragile, but none were as precarious as those of the religious minorities. The recurrence of such descriptions and their pathetic tone might lead one to suspect exaggeration. However, everywhere in the Muslim world where the law of the Sublime Porte had practically never penetrated—or if at all, then hardly very deeply—the condition of the Jews appears archaic when considered alongside the timid Ottoman evolution toward the Enlightenment during the second half of the nineteenth century, following the Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and 1856. It is this despair that explains why Persia and Morocco are bracketed together, at the turn of the twentieth century, for their social exclusion: Persia as a land of forced Jewish conversion to Islam since the fourteenth century, and Morocco as a land where the Jew remained a dhimmi even after 1912 (when Morocco became a French protectorate), notwithstanding that the inferior status of dhimmi or “protected person” had been abolished in 1856 in the Ottoman Empire. It was thus with a certain perspicacity that from 1895, the AIU linked these geographical zones together, noting that in both cases “the government has a hard time protecting them (the Jews) against the mass fanaticism of a still-barbaric population which sees in every non-Muslim an enemy.”25 Finally, within the Arab world itself, it is Morocco that seems to present the most apt comparison when recall­ ing the social exclusion of Christian Europe: in both places we find similar mea­ sures of isolation and segregation, measures of degradation, latent violence, and the same condition of vulnerability. From Yemen, too, desperate missives arrived on a regular basis concerning the condition of local Jewries. The repetition and diversity of sources endows these accounts with believability. In 1875, Yemeni Jewish communal leaders

“Barbaric Lands” | 17 wrote to the AIU in Paris: “From time immemorial, the inhabitants of Yemen make us drink of the cup of suffering and bitterness, and every day they torment us, allowing us not a moment of respite. We suffer without let up, and God sees neither our misery nor our pains.”26 Jewish community leaders in Sana’a reported in 1873: For the past eighty-six years they’ve [the local Muslim authorities in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen] forced Jews to clean out all the city’s latrine pits, and we even had to pay the salaries of those who carry this out. A dozen years ago, they even required the principal community leaders to do this; they led us by work-details, one after the other. . . . In the streets they chase us with curses, calling us donkeys and dogs and so on. There isn’t a single child amongst them who doesn’t allow himself to show the most crass insolence towards the most respectable of the Jews, who are obliged to put up with this in silence.27

It was the deterioration of the situation for Yemeni Jews in the nineteenth century that in part explains the surge in messianic fervor that shook these communities in the second half of the century. Between 1860 and the 1890s, three movements rocked the Jewish community, of which the first two, between 1861 and 1875, correspond to the period of instability that preceded the return of the Turks in 1872. Many rabbis in the communities scattered across Yemen stayed on the sidelines, not condemning developments. In this way, they intended not to cut themselves off from the faithful who were drawn to calls to repentance that would usher in the Messiah. A majority of the Jewish masses lent an accommodating ear to false messiahs. The influence of Shiite Islam played a role, to be sure, but without doubt it was misery and a strong sentiment of punishment that paved the way to the acceptance of a messianic message. Yet, the Yemeni exodus—fed by social misery—started well before this uprising. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Yemeni Jews had already set off for Palestine, to which they had started moving in 1881. In Aden, Somekh, the AIU’s Egypt director, witnessed the arrival of these exhausted émigrés who hoped for a boat to Egypt. “They are, perhaps, more to be pitied than even the Jews of Persia,” he noted. From Cairo in 1905 he described the misery of these emigrants who “defy any description. . . . They literally own nothing: their only clothing is a tunic of black cloth and a lamentably dirty tallit, or prayer shawl, from which they never part; for food, they have only unpalatable bread of millet, cooked in ashes.”28 In 1910, Yomtov Sémach witnessed the gradual resumption of Arab sovereignty over the country. “The Turks proved to be good for the Jews; the Arabs, on the other hand, pushed as they are by their fanaticism, spared them no affront.”29 Struggling with the Arab uprising that broke out in 1905, the Turks granted autonomy to Yemen in 1913, before finally withdrawing entirely in 1918 following their defeat in the First World War. Imam Yahia retained power until his

18  |  Jews in Arab Countries death in 1948, reestablishing both order and Sharia, which for the Jewish community meant a regulated (albeit diminished) status. The Iman was praised by the Jews, who called him Melekh Hassid (“righteous king”). But as vengeance on a community suspected of having welcomed the Turks, he required that Jews pay taxes relating to the forty years under Turkish rule. Even as late as 1946, Americans passing through Yemen related that ancient vexatious measures were still in effect, such as the obligatory wearing of dark-colored clothing, and the cleaning of latrines in Sana’a. Judaism in the Maghreb dates back to ancient times, probably from the fall of the First Temple. The crushing of the Bar-Kochba Revolt in 131 CE set off a resurgence of emigration around the Mediterranean. By the end of the seventh century, with the coming of the Arabs, Jewish communities were already solidly rooted. Islamization resulted in the submission of the “peoples of the Book” (ahl el kittah), and the establishment of dhimma status. The attitude of Islam vis-à-vis the Jews drew on that of the vanquished Byzantine Empire. Yet, for the Jews during Islam’s early years, the new religion was a liberation compared to their oppression at the hands of the Byzantine Greeks. Christians, by contrast, now underwent domination, subjected to constraints similar to those previously imposed on the Jews. A second novelty for the Jews was that their religion was now protected by Islam, even if such protection became a permanently insecure state, since the conqueror could breach the contract at any moment. Still, if dhimma status is taken at face value, persecution of the Jews violates the pact between Islam and the religions of the Book, Judaism and Christianity. Nevertheless, dhimma constituted liberation: Islam guaranteed to dhimmi Jews the security of their property and persons, and the freedom to practice their religion as well as to exercise a number of occupations. They were also assured of the autonomy of their communities, and even their jurisdiction over matters of civil law. For these reasons, the period closing with the Almohad onslaught (around 1130) would for a long time be considered the most brilliant and happiest of epochs. The Pact of Omar, which codified dhimma status, was not applied everywhere in the same manner, and during the first centuries it was far from strictly followed. For the Jews, then, the time of tranquility, in particular in the Sunni world, was Islam’s early period. The Almoravid conquest, by Berbers from Western Sahara between 1060 and 1080, did not destroy this peace and prosperity. However, the Almoravid fall in the Maghreb, at the hands of the Almohads, put an end to this “Golden Age.” Christians and Jews were now required to choose between apostasy, death, or exile. Thus, the last Christian groups of the Maghreb disappeared, while numerous Jews converted to Islam (only for many of them to revert to Judaism after

“Barbaric Lands” | 19 1230). The consequences were impactful: the Islamization of modes of thought, the isolation of Jews cut off from other Jewish communities, and the reduction to the status of dhimmi in a world now unified under Sunni rule. During the Middle Ages, the majority of the Jewish people lived in Muslim lands. It was in fact only at the turn of the sixteenth century that the Jewish world’s center of gravity swung from the realm of Islam to Christendom. Up until the sixteenth century, the Arabization of the great Jewish communities of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and the Near East was a reality. Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared the same language—Arabic—as well as common cultural references, thus creating bridges between these communities of a sort that one found only rarely in Europe. It was in this context that Bernard Lewis talked of an Islamization of Judaism and the development of a Judeo-Islamic tradition, observing: “In Judaism as well as Islam, there exist neither sacraments, nor altars, nor ordinations nor sacerdotal intercession between man and God.”30 Then at its apogee, Arab-Muslim influence on the Jewish world was considerable, especially in the fields of language (Hebrew), Jewish theology, poetry, literature, arts, and the law. The “Jewish-Muslim symbiosis” was not mere propaganda—it was a reality, even if it needs to be stated in nuanced terms. In the twelfth century, Maimonides held that one must reject the Christian credo but that one could, on the contrary, feign conversion to Islam. Mohammed as “God’s prophet” was one thing, but Jesus as the “son of God” was quite unacceptable. The Jewish/Muslim rapprochement around dietary laws was evident; there was agreement around the idea that certain foods could be forbidden by divine interdiction. According to Bernard Lewis, this symbiosis during the first centuries has no equivalent in the history of the Western world. Many works of Arab historians, including Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), dwell at length on the history of the children of Israel. Jews, then, were no strangers in the Arab-Muslim world, which included, moreover, a number of other minorities. Although excluded from the army, they were present everywhere else, including in the bureaucracy. Hostility toward the Jews was a basic element in Christian theology, but not in the Arab-Muslim world. The Talmud was burned in Christian lands but not in Muslim territory. Christianity built its identity on rejection of the old religion, while Islam constructed its own on the Arab tribes of the Peninsula. Yet, the word “symbiosis” is perhaps too strong, for above all, the Muslim authors displayed a polite indifference toward the Jewish world. Nevertheless, from the twelfth century this very real disposition did not prevent a policy of humiliation that was sustained right up to the definitive departure of the Jews. The first shift in the condition of Jews in the Muslim Orient occurred in North Africa with the twelfth-century Almohad thrust, and in the East with the

20  |  Jews in Arab Countries Mameluk breakthrough. It is in this context that, in 1172, Maimonides composed his Epistle to Yemen (Iggeret Teiman), which paints a bleak picture of Islam (“No nation has caused more harm to Israel; no nation has so demeaned and debased us”) but which contains, according to Bernard Lewis, a measure of truth.31 What may have seemed exaggerated at the end of the twelfth century was to become the norm. Although there are different degrees of dhimma, there is a consensus that in the modern era (that is, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries), the Jews experienced the worst of the dhimma. The humiliation was most evident in the Maghreb. With the Almohad surge, the situation deteriorated and was punctuated by massacres, as at Fez in 1276. The Jews’ obligation to walk barefoot when passing a mosque is said to date from this period. This was a time of material and spiritual misery, when both rabbis (often of mediocre training) and the scrolls of the Law became scarce. The Fez mellah was modeled on the Spanish juderias or Jewries and was the first closed Jewish quarter in ArabMuslim lands. It was established in proximity to the royal palace in order to protect its inhabitants from popular fury. Later, other mellahs would be created, but with the sole purpose of bullying the Jews. The seventh-century change of dynasty in Morocco—with Sa’di yielding to Alawite in 1666—did nothing to reverse an already deeply deteriorated situation. The Jews were made subject to crushing fiscal pressures, applied solely to them. They had no right to testify in the courts, and the attacks and murders to which they were subjected were rarely punished. Warmth remained a hallmark of elite inter-relations only, and was less often seen among ordinary Moroccans. Finally, where the writ of central power ran less effectively (such as immediately on leaving the bled es makhzen, or “subject territory,” and entering the bled es siba, or “dissident territory”), the more vulnerable became the situation of the Jews, as indeed was true for all those who were weaker. In the Maghreb, moreover, following the Almohad advance, Jews were the only remaining dhimmis. This was a contrast to the Middle East, where, due to its greater diversity (Jews, Christians, Shi’a, Druze, Alawite, and other minorities), tolerance was somewhat better upheld—other than in Persia, where Twelver Shi’ism considered Jews to be impure creatures. According to the majority of travelers’ accounts, the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the latter half of the nineteenth century was the very worst for the Jews in Muslim lands. This is also one of the reasons why Oriental Jewish communities at the start of the twentieth century were not large. At the eve of the Second World War, Oriental Jewry constituted only one million out of a worldwide Jewish population of 16 to 17 million. In 1914, out of a population of 4 million, the Fertile Crescent counted hardly 125,000 Jews, of whom 54,000 lived in Baghdad. In Egypt in the same year, there were 53,000 Jews out of 11 million inhabitants.

“Barbaric Lands” | 21 Christian travelers in the nineteenth century were struck by the harshness, all the more because the Enlightenment and concomitant emancipation in contemporary Europe had eased the condition of the Jews. In 1909, the British viceconsul in Mosul reported an event in a public park that he witnessed, when a Muslim child, barely eight years of age, “picked up a large stone, then another, and with utter casualness threw them in the direction of two middle-aged Jews of respectable appearance. . . . The Jews halted and ducked the shots, which were well-aimed, but raised not the slightest protest.”32 This seething desire to humiliate found expression in sporadic outbursts of mob violence, with massacres such as those in Tetouan (Morocco) in 1790, Baghdad in 1828, Safed (Palestine) in 1834, Meched (Persia) in 1839, and others elsewhere. However, the degraded condition of the Jews in the nineteenth century should be placed in the wider context of tyrannical regimes to which all were subject, regimes in which, when it came to justice, arbitrariness seems to have been the only rule. The reports that emerged from Mesopotamia and Yemen could just as well have come from Libya or Morocco. Contact between Jews and Arabs long predated Islam, in particular in Arabia and Yemen. For Norman Stillman, the monotheism of Jews and Christians—who were very numerous in the Arabia of the seventh century—played a part in Mohammed’s preaching. From 622 with the start of the Hejira and the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina, the arrival of Islam pushed the Jews to depart almost everywhere. Relations were violent between Mohammed and the three Jewish tribes of Medina; two of the three tribes were forced to emigrate, and the third, the Banu Qurayza, was besieged until, at the end, its men were massacred. Mohammed’s hostility was nevertheless maintained, as illustrated by the Khaybar oasis episode, where the unarmed Jewish delegation was assassinated by the Muslims. Besieged in 628, the Khaybar Jews submitted by paying tribute, the jizya, a word probably signifying “compensation” and that constituted a percentage of goods and food provisions. In 630 this tax received divine sanction, when it was declared to be the wish of Allah, and in 632 became a capitation tax. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Mesopotamia became the center of the Jewish world. Already from the fourth century, ancient Babylonia had become the greatest hub of that world, as the home of both Sura and Pumbedita, the two Talmudic academies or yeshivot where the Babylonian Talmud was compiled. The directors of the two yeshivot took the titles of Geonim, the plural of Gaon. They became the highest authorities of the Jewish world of the time, major points of reference concerning Halakhah, or Jewish law. It was in fact through them that Jewish communities across the world corresponded by means of sheelot (Hebrew for “questions”) posed, to which respondents gave teshuvot or “answers”—even if some communities, such as the Karaites of the second half

22  |  Jews in Arab Countries of the eighth century, would not acknowledge the authority of the Geonim and indeed rejected the authority of the Talmud itself, recognizing only the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible or Old Testament. Following the Bible, the Talmud, and the Kabbalah, other great Jewish texts were produced in Asia, North Africa, and Spain. The great Jewish schools of Europe (Gershon, Rashi of Troyes) proclaimed themselves to be “tributaries of Eastern and Mediterranean Judaism.”33 The great shift toward Europe took place at the start of the sixteenth century, concomitant with the displacement of the center of economic gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Morocco, more open thanks to its Atlantic seaboard, contained the largest and the greatest Jewish community of the ArabMuslim Orient. The halt of the Turkish drive at Tlemcen, at the end of the sixteenth century, preserved Morocco’s independence.34 The Jews were often restricted to exercising professions forbidden to Muslims, such as jewelry making. The portrait of their condition in Morocco, where they were the only dhimmis, is somber. Over time, the harassment and bullying came to form a system of persecution, a specific style of oppression that the Jews termed sin’ut, Hebrew for “hatred.” Ordinary Jews were condemned to disdain and deep poverty. They endured everyday persecution: distinctive garb, and were prohibited from writing in Arabic script, riding a horse, or bearing arms. They faced denial of justice and the impossibility of defending themselves physically. The oppression became even more grave during the eighteenth century: there was financial pressure to be sure, but also increasing violence, marked by massacres in Meknes (1728) and Ifran (1775), and then the bloody reign of Moulay Yazid (1790–1792). Emblematic of this oppressive atmosphere, a rumor circulated that non-Muslims have taken to addressing Muslims with the words “al sammu alayka” (may poison be with you) instead of “al salam alayka” (may peace be with you). From the perspective of Islam, the Jews formed a people. In Morocco, for example, it was long considered that treaties concluded with a Christian country applied only to Christians. Therefore, a French Jew is first and foremost a Jew in the eyes of the royal authority, and thus a dhimmi because he belongs to the Jewish people and not to the French people. For a Muslim, wherever he may be and throughout many centuries, the dhimmi represented “the archetype of the inferior and the oppressed” explains Bernard Lewis, who cites this Muslim oath: “If my words are not true, may I become a Jew.”35 When one wished to discredit an individual or a group, one attributed “Jewish origins” to them, just as one attributed subversive doctrines to “Jewish plotting.” Overt violence was not meted out against the dhimmi simply due to his status; this was only inflicted if he attempted to liberate himself from it. Should he breach the pact “which ties him to Islam,” he placed himself outside its protection

“Barbaric Lands” | 23 and could thus be subject to any and all attacks. In Muslim folklore, the Jew not only appears as the agent of subversion par excellence, but also as the archetypal prototype of the humiliated and oppressed.36 In Islam, a body of ancient texts relating to the Biblical prophets is entitled Isra’illyat, or “Jewish fables,” a word that gradually took on a pejorative sense until it came to be synonymous with “superstition.” Muslim theologians saw the “holiness of Jerusalem” as a “Judaizing error.”37 It was only with the Crusades, at the end of the eleventh century, and above all with the rise of modern Zionism, that Islam came to rediscover the political “sacredness” of the city, something that for centuries Muslim theology considered as only a Jewish belief. Even so, Mecca remained the sole direction of prayer, and the only pilgrimage destination for believers. For the Koran, “eternal and uncreated, and coexisting with God for all eternity,” it made no sense to talk of Jewish or Christian influences, since the world is selforiginating. Jewish and Christian Scriptures, considered as authentic revelations, have nevertheless been “neglected and corrupted,” and “distorted by their unworthy custodians.”38 This is why the orphans of Jews and Christians (and this was still the case in Yemen until the twentieth century) had to be Islamized—because their parents had shown themselves unworthy by raising their children outside of the true faith. The world thus divides into two parts, the Dar al Islam, which lives in peace under the true faith, and the Dar al Harb, or “House of War,” literally, inhabited by infidels, with whom the only possible relationship (one, however, that does not preclude pauses) is that of a war that will finish with the triumph of Islam. This combat, or jihad (literally “fight on behalf of God’s cause”) is incor­ rectly translated as “Holy War.” In reality, jihad refers to anything that can bring the world back to the true faith, which could be Muslims themselves through spiritual combat or those who are still (for the time being) dwelling in the “House of the Infidels.” Peace is thus impossible. Therefore, any accord (which Muslims are capable of entering into, just as the Prophet did in His time) can be no more than an armistice between two battles. Like Judaism, Islam is first and foremost an orthopraxy. Beyond its precepts, accords, and decrees, behavior takes precedence over text. Some consider the Pact of Oman an apocryphal document that is hard to date. Yet, apocryphal or not, these texts reflect a policy of domination imposed on the Peoples of the Book, drawing a strict delineation between dominant and dominated. This does not, however, mean rigid segregation. The Charter is attributed to Caliph Omar I (r. 634–644), or somewhat later by some scholars. It originated in the form of a letter from Christians in Syria and Egypt, providing the foundation of a pact of protection offering peace on condition of accepting a relationship of servility.

24  |  Jews in Arab Countries When you defeated us, we asked you for security for ourselves, our descendants, our goods and the members of our community, and we promised: • whether in our cities or in their environs, not to construct any convent, or church, or upper stories or monastic cell, and not to reconstruct any such thing which has been destroyed or which previously existed • to keep our doors open for the comfort of passers-by and travelers, and to offer shelter and nourishment to Muslim visitors for three days • not to give shelter to any spy in our churches or our houses, and not to hide any goods left with us on deposit by Muslims • not to teach the Koran to our children • not to make any ostentatious display of our religion, not to encourage anyone to convert to it • not to prevent anyone in our community to convert to Islam should he so wish • to respect Muslims, to rise in their presence when we encounter them and to offer them our places to sit if they wish to be seated • not to resemble Muslims through our appearance, whether through our hats, turbans, shoes or hair styles • not to take on, or give within our community, Muslim names or nicknames • not to mount upon a saddle, not to carry a sword, and not to make use of or to carry any weapon • not to carve inscriptions in Arabic on our seals • to shave the front portion of our heads • to honor our guests for as long as they reside with us • to bind our waists with a belt • not to show our crosses in public (upon churches or in processions) • not to keep our latrines in proximity of Muslims or of their marketplaces • not to strike a gong, in order to call to prayer, in the presence of Muslims, not to take out our palm branches and our icons during festivals, not to raise our voices during burials of our dead, and not to light fires in the streets or marketplaces of Muslims • not to bury our dead in your districts • not to take into slavery any of those who fall into the hands of Muslims • not to look within their houses • not to build our houses higher than theirs • not to strike any Muslim. We take upon ourselves and upon our community these obligations, in virtue of which we benefit from security. And if we do not respect these commitments which we and our fellows have assumed to you, you will have no obligation to protect us and you will be entitled to act towards us as you would have towards rebels and dissidents within Islamic society.39

“Barbaric Lands” | 25 Although some scholars doubt that this text dates from as early as the seventh century, we can identity in it three key elements that lie at the foundation of the daily practice of Islam: the superiority of the Muslim religion, the respect owed by the Jew to the Muslim, and the separation of Jews and Muslims. A dhimmi may not inherit from a Muslim, but the inverse is possible. In Shi’a Islam, if a dhimmi has several heirs of whom one is a Muslim, it is the Muslim alone who receives the entirety of the inheritance. The new Muslim state adopted the measures imposed on the Jews by Byzantium but softened them. Jews were forbidden to marry a Muslim woman, their testimony is not receivable before a Muslim tribunal, and certain arduous and unpalatable occupations are reserved to them; in some countries (for example, Yemen up to 1949) this included cleaning latrines. And while it is impossible to generalize, it seems evident that the dhimmi’s lot worsened in the modern era, while everywhere their financial subjection became overwhelming. Subjugation of vanquished people was the outcome of conflict. The vanquished should then be tolerated in their own land, as was the case with Jews and Christians facing the Arab advance. Yet the Arabs did not invent the taxes imposed on the dhimmis; rather, they inherited them. For the origin of dhimma one must look to the Byzantine Church—it was the church that early on elaborated a legal system characterized by persecution and humiliation, beginning with the Theodosian Code of 438 and extending to the Justinian Code of 534. Islam adopted this system on the basis of the conviction that might makes right, and weakness proves that one is wrong. Strength is the divine proof of truth and furnishes ample legitimacy for the resulting legal regime. Islam took the tools elaborated by Eastern Christianity to persecute Judaism and turned them against Christians themselves. Many of the Muslim laws were similar to Byzantine legislation, but Islam added the jizya or individual tax, a form of ransom imposed in exchange for the right to live. In addition to this personal tax, Islam imposed on dhimmis a form of communal real property tax, the kharraj. Over the following decades, Islam created a number of humiliating measures, such as distinctive clothing distinguishable from afar by its color, shoes, and caps, as well as types of acceptable mounts, saddles, behavior in the streets, forms of address appropriate to use when speaking with Muslims, and so on. “On condition that they obeyed the law, the dhimmis were able to practice their religion, carry out their activities and live as they wished,” writes Bernard Lewis.40 Violence was only meted out when the dhimmis sought to free themselves from these ancient rules. In a society as hierarchically structured as the traditional Muslim one, these differences in status did not arouse the sort of indignation that they would come to provoke in sensibilities shaped by the Enlightenment. Rather, they were accepted as natural, just as one accepts one’s

26  |  Jews in Arab Countries place in the cosmogony of the world. The Pact of Omar did not exclude; it subjected. If the Jew contravened its rules, he disturbed an order and a vision of the world that was taken to be eternal—a world founded on inferiority and a restricted life, yet one that is lived under protection and thus secure, within the “just order” that God wishes. Relations between Muslims and dhimmis reflected the relationship between Islam and the rest of the world. When Islam was the target of aggression (during the Crusades, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries), or in the grip of fears that it was in retreat, it stiffened and thus weighed more heavily on nonMuslims, as was the case in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Each time the Muslim world felt itself in danger, the lot of dhimmis worsened, and discriminatory measures that had more or less fallen into disuse made a reappearance. The dhimmi should know his place and stay in it. What the Jews think makes no difference; the only thing that matters is what they do and how they conduct themselves in public. Any departure from the subjugation imposed on them contravened the order of the world. At the heart of this system of power was dependence. Every Jew had to place himself under the protection of a Muslim leader. Arbitrariness seemed to be the usual rule, and this included the payment of the jizya, which was the occasion for a public ceremony during which the dhimmi is struck on the head. The acknowledgment, worn around his neck or on his chest, was simultaneously a guarantee of safety and a mark of disgrace. The heavy tax burden resting on Jews encouraged them to convert, but such conversions put the treasury in difficulty and only increased the tax on those who still had to pay it. For example, the communal property tax, or kharraj, resulted in an exodus of dhimmis to the cities, and this is one of the reasons why city taxes on Jews and Christians were so high in the Arab-Muslim world. Both Jewish and Christian dhimmis benefited from the economic opening that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, for example, in 1912, none of Istanbul’s forty private banks was Muslim-owned. However, this economic success also encouraged resentment and anger. Less numerous than the Christians, and above all less well protected than them by Europe, the Jews were easy prey. All the more so when the anti-Judaism of Middle Eastern Christians was added. In the course of history, the Jews seem to have gone from harmony one day to tragedy the next. Between 900 and 1200, while Muslim civilization was flourishing beyond its political and territorial divisions, the Jewish world experienced a period of splendor during which Halakha, or Jewish jurisprudence, took shape. It was during this period that Maimonides (author, in 1180, of the Mishnah Torah and in 1190 of the Guide for the Perplexed) attempted the first codification. The Jewish center of Mesopotamia experienced a decline from the tenth century. The

“Barbaric Lands” | 27 baton then passed to Spain, Egypt, and in particular to Ifriqiya (modern day Tunisia) where an intense Jewish cultural life consolidated in the tenth and eleventh centuries around Kairouan, the greatest Jewish intellectual center outside Iraq. However, the principal religious centers remained Tiberias, and Babylon, in Mesopotamia. It is only very late, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that the first measures for the abolition of dhimma were taken. In 1855 the jizya was ended in the Ottoman Empire and replaced, for those refusing conscription, with the payment of a tax. With the Constitution of 1876, the Ottoman Empire became the first Muslim power to grant full political rights to Jews, who could then elect deputies to Parliament (as in the elections of 1908, 1912 and 1914). Elsewhere, by contrast, the condition of Jews markedly deteriorated, especially in Morocco, Persia, and Yemen; all lands outside Ottoman influence. In 1842, responding to the French consul at Tangier who called on him to improve the condition of the Jews, the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd el-Rahman, explained: The Jews of our fortunate country have received guarantees of which they will benefit provided they adhere to the conditions imposed by our religious law on persons enjoying our protection. If the Jews respect these conditions, our law prohibits the spilling of their blood, and orders the respect of their property rights, but should they violate as much as a single of those conditions, our blessed law allows their blood to be spilled and their goods to be taken. Our glorious religion does not only assign them outward marks of abasement and humiliation; in addition, the mere raising of his voice against a Muslim constitutes a violation by a Jew of the conditions of his protection. If in your country they are your equals in all respects and are assimilated to you, then that is all very well in your country, but they are not so in our country.41

In April 1884, in the course of his Moroccan travels, Charles de Foucauld noted that in the region of Essaouira, in Mogador, Jews and animals are each counted as half of a human being. He explained a little later that when a tribe agrees to submit to the sultan’s authority, he authorizes the tribe “to collect fees for what occurs on their territory, and these fees will be one franc per each Jew and each beast of burden.” Decades later, a 1951 World Jewish Congress report on Morocco cited requirements such as “no reading aloud from religious books or prayers, enshrouding the dead in silence, and only using mules and asses rather than ordinary or blueblood horses.” 42 In Morocco during the same period, Almohad tyranny was marked by forced conversions (although these were generally rare in Islamic territory), exile, and death. At the end of the fifteenth century, the arrival of Jews expelled from Christian Spain provides a stimulus to the communities in Egypt and Morocco. There,

28  |  Jews in Arab Countries Iberian Jews, , anxious not to intermix with indigenous Jews, would form a veritable aristocracy. They came to constitute quasi-patrician “old families,” which asserted the right to exercise hereditary leadership over the communities. Of the 150,000 to 200,000 Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, some 20,000 ended up in Morocco. Known by the name megorashim (the exiles), they speak Judeo-Spanish (called, in Morocco, haquitia), and settle principally in the north of the country—Tangiers, Larache, and Tetouan. Socially stratified and culturally diverse, Moroccan Jewry for many years would contain two distinct communities, a cleavage marked by Sephardic domination, that is, by Spanish exiles. The two groups were so foreign to each other that they formed two distinct mellahs, still separated in 1910 by a main street, although eventually the AIU schools would end up bridging the two communities. At the end of the nineteenth century, a quarter of Moroccan Jews spoke Berber (there exists, for example, a Passover Haggadah—the account of the flight from Egypt—in the Tamazight language), while 10 percent were Spanish speakers, in the north of the country. The remaining two-thirds were Arabic speakers, as was the case elsewhere in the Maghreb. Jewish presence in Morocco, no doubt anterior to Christianity, was reinforced by the fall of the Second Temple, in 70 CE, as well as by Visigoth persecution in Spain during the seventh century. By a very far margin the weakest and most downtrodden of subjects, the Jews crystalized the resentment felt by others, in the context of a daily existence marked by recurring violence. It was in order to escape from this arbitrariness that Jews, becoming more and more numerous, would seek to bring themselves under the consular protection of a Western power. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European penetration into Morocco accelerated the emergence of national sentiment. It also spurred resentment and violence toward the Jews, considered infidels suspected of looking forward favorably to the arrival of the Europeans. The result: repeated pogroms, such as Casablanca in 1907, Sefrou in Meknes in 1911, and Fez in 1912, although in theory, following the dahir (sultan’s decree) of February 5, 1864, Jews were supposed to enjoy better protection from the violence visited on them with impunity. In Libya the small Jewish community, impoverished and Arabic-speaking as well as massively urbanized (75 percent)—like the community in Morocco— became Ottoman subjects in 1835. Libyan Jews benefited, at least in theory, from the reforms of 1839 and 1856. Yet, here as elsewhere, this dawn of emancipation provoked rejection by the Arab population, who viewed it as blasphemy, as with anything that leads the dhimmis to stray from the “straight path,” to use the traditional Koranic expression.43

“Barbaric Lands” | 29 In 1861, the fragile Jewish community in Tripoli (4,500 people, constituting 30 percent of the city’s population) established a committee of the AIU, as a preparatory step to the opening of a school. Led by a few large merchants, this handful of Jews dreamt of the sort of modernization that was rejected by more traditionalist elements of local Jewry and also by the bulk of the Muslim population, who were uneasy with the abandonment of the age-old system of tutelage. This is why, in 1911, opposition to the Italian occupation was almost exclusively Arab, while for the majority of Libyan Jews, especially those of Livorno origin— the elite of the community—the arrival of the Italians resounded like a liberation, albeit one they dared not celebrate openly, just as they dared not offend the Turks, whom they long viewed as protectors.44 This community would remain archaic for many years, characterized by a high birthrate and a low level of education; only fourteen Libyan Jews practiced a liberal profession in 1940. The degree of poverty was staggering. As in Morocco, the poorest elements of the community emigrated, while the better-off, who wanted still to believe in their Libyan identity, grew disillusioned, especially after the 1945 pogroms. However, for all of them, their Jewishness remained strong and assured, even if there was much disquiet in the face of threats and violence. Assimilation was nonexistent, and “mixed marriages” extremely rare. Thriving, especially prior to the ninth century, Mesopotamian Jewries went into decline following the defeat inflicted by the Mongols, and only came to flourish again in the nineteenth century, in particular in Baghdad. By 1890, the city counted some 50,000 Jews out of a population of 145,000, with the number of synagogues having risen from three to thirty over one century. Baghdad’s Jews had come to play a critical role in commercial relations with India (then a British possession); this trade was amplified by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which stimulated the local economy by offering the more entrepreneurially minded the possibility of both enrichment and emancipation. The economic importance of this development is evident regarding Basra, where it was estimated in 1914 that Jews controlled 95 percent of commercial life, and still controlled 65 percent in 1946. Moreover, pushed out by Shi’ite persecution, many Persian Jews, and to a lesser extent Jews from Kurdistan and Syria, added their numbers to the Iraqi Jewish community. The Egyptian Jewish community remained atypical right up to its definitive departure. In contrast to the Jews of Iraq, Egyptian Jews took a long time to declare themselves Egyptian or to acknowledge their own Arab character. But starting in the 1930s the Egyptian community had to respond to the challenges of Arab nationalism and Islamic radicalization, both taking place against a background of violence linked to the question of Palestine. In many cases having

30  |  Jews in Arab Countries arrived only recently to the country, a large number of Egypt’s Jews had a low awareness of issues of identity and remained oblivious to the coming earthquake. It was also the case that Egypt was quite unrepresentative of the ArabMuslim world. Not only did it contain many minorities, but it also presented an image of greater openness toward Western modernity, such that it was difficult to fully perceive its Arab characteristics. Moreover, even its level of Judeophobia had nothing in common with other, more violent, Arab societies. Egypt’s Jewish community was highly fragmented and had no real power; rather, it presented a tableau of individual success coupled with collective powerlessness. This community had, moreover, very little interest either in its own history or in participating in political life. Culturally and religiously, any specifically Jewish life in Egypt appeared quite shallow; most of its rabbis came from abroad, and there were many conversions to Christianity. In a community that frequently seemed in danger of disappearance, Zionism was primarily viewed as a cultural movement or one of re-Judaization. The Cairo community, more important than the Alexandrine community after 1940, consisted of more than forty thousand people, of which some thirty thousand were Ladino-speaking Sephardic and Arabic-speaking Oriental Jews. Six thousand were Arabic-speaking Karaites and five thousand were Yiddishspeaking Ashkenazi, the latter living on the margins of the official community while holding it in some contempt. Sephardim dominated through a handful of great families ruling the community on a nearly hereditary basis. The Arabic Jews (or mizrahim, Hebrew for “Oriental”) constituted the proletariat of a Jewish community that, as a Zionist emissary stated in 1925, presented the spectacle of mutual contempt. In 1922, the independence of the country led many Jews to realize that they should acquire Egyptian nationality: only 25 percent of Jews were citizens in 1922, and of the prominent members of the community, more than half were Italian, French, or British subjects. Egyptianization progressed, from 33 percent in 1927, to 65 percent in 1937, and to 78 percent in 1947. Yet, in the 1940s, although citizenship had become indispensable for participation in economic life, the government discretely closed access to nationality. Although the proportion of Jews of foreign nationality declined during the 1930s, it nevertheless remained quite elevated among prominent members of the community. In 1517, the Ottoman conquest represented liberation for the Jewish Near Eastern minority, which was a mere 0.2 percent of the population of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century. Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512) welcomed many Sephardic refugees from Spain. Under his reign, as under those of his successors, the condition of Jews in the Arab provinces of the empire was rather enviable.

“Barbaric Lands” | 31 Dhimmi status remained in force, but was relaxed under the Turks (except for measures subjecting Jews to the jizya) and this status continued to protect the Jews from accusations against them, by Christian communities, of ritual murder. If the sixteenth century was by no means a “golden age,” at least it seems to have been a happy interlude in the very long twilight that the Jews in the Arab world would undergo from the twelfth century, thanks to the softening, in the Ottoman Empire, of Sunni severity toward minorities. Up to the seventeenth century, Turkey’s Jewish community appears to have been the richest of the Middle East, and the first to establish Hebrew language printing presses (Istanbul in 1494, Edirne in 1554). Subsequently, however, the condition of the Jews deteriorated. Contacts with Europe began to shrink. The Jews started to lose those particular abilities that made them so indispensable in the eyes of the Turks, in particular, their knowledge of European languages began to whither, due to the halt in European immigration. Jewish physicians, hitherto so numerous, would more and more often be replaced by Greek doctors. A number of pious legends have come to mythologize the concept of “Turkish tolerance.” Certainly, in this respect, the Turks compare very favorably with the intolerance of the Arabs; yet, both the Muslim Sunni populace and the ulemas (mullahs, or scholars of Koranic law) were aggravated by the liberties taken by dhimmis, and insisted that non-Muslims be reminded of the limits set on their freedoms. From the seventeenth century onward, the condition of Ottoman Jews more and more often reflected the disdain in which they were held, as was underscored by European travelers who seemed all the more shocked because in Europe, at that same time, the Jews’ condition was improving. Toward 1900, a large proportion of the Turkish population had come to share the same prejudices regarding the Jews as held by the Arab populations. A large number of Turks were, for example, convinced that through their “occult power,” the Jews had engineered the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908. Yet, for the first time, the Empire accords 4 parliamentary seats to the Jews in 1908 (against 147 Turkish, 60 Arab, 27 Albanian, 26 Greek, 14 Armenian, and 10 Slav deputies). In fact, in allowing Jews the possibility of entrance to state schools, the Ottoman Empire fostered the birth of a Jewish intellectual elite not specifically Jewish in character. Indeed, viewed from a longer historical perspective, Turkish domination remains synonymous with Jewish liberation from arbitrariness. From Yemen, Mesopotamia, and Tripolitania (Libya), hundreds of archival reports describe the relief expressed by Jewish communities whenever Turkish law was substituted for Arab rule. Such was, for example, the case in Libya in 1835, where, in addition, from 1856 the Turks instituted the Tanzimat reforms in favor of the dhimmis. This was also true between 1872 and 1912 in Yemen, which became, under Turkish control, a vilayet (administrative division or province) of an empire

32  |  Jews in Arab Countries whose citizens were intended to benefit from these reforms. Turkish rule, pushing ajar the door to once-isolated Yemen, also allowed Europeans to come in. Thus, during some four decades, Yemeni Jews benefitted from a relative opening that made it possible for them to renew connections with other Jewries. The subsequent departure of the Turks was, however, marked by the violent return of dhimma, a regression that only encouraged the Jewish exodus toward Eretz Israel. Indeed, by 1948, with the gaining of independence by the Jewish state, half of Yemen’s Jews already lived in Israel. In 1892, Turkey’s Jews celebrated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish exiles. In 1908, they participated in the Young Turk revolution. But, like other nationalisms in the same period, Turkish nationalism turned inward. This was only further exacerbated after the 1918 defeat, when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled. When the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) granted specific rights to minorities (including the Jewish minority), Ankara viewed this as interference in its internal affairs. Three years later, anxious to avoid irritating the central government, Turkey’s Jewish community renounced recourse to the rights conferred by the Treaty. In 1839 and 1856, the Empire undertook two great waves of reforms, known as the Tanzimat. These reforms granted the Jews the status of a millet (religious community), in substitution for dhimma status. Each millet enjoyed the exercise of its religious laws, the selection of its judges, and the management of its own social and educational systems, within the framework of a pragmatic state structure that was the most liberal of its day. For the first time, the status of non-Muslims was formally improved. The initiative did not come from Europe. Rather, it came from the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mustafa Rachid Pasha, who was influenced by the values of the French Revolution: rule of law, economic freedom, and laws founded on the principles of justice (even if this reform was aimed at winning the sympathy of European powers in the conflict between the sultan and the Viceroy of Egypt). It was Mustafa Rachid who urged Sultan Abdulmecid I (r. 1839–1861) to promulgate the Katt i Sharif de Gülhane (“Noble Words”), an initial series of reforms that transformed the condition of non-Muslims by drawing on the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), by promoting the rule of law and formal legal equality of all citizens, including non-Muslims.45 However, it was necessary to wait several decades for these reforms to be applied in Turkey itself. Meanwhile, in the Arab provinces of the Empire, these decrees remained a “dead letter” until 1914. By a new decree issued February 18, 1856, and entitled the Katt i Humayun (Imperial Words), Sultan Abdulmecid I enunciated the specific rights of nonMuslims (including the right to construct new houses of worship). The decree also terminated the jizya, the individual tax that was the principal symbol of

“Barbaric Lands” | 33 subjugation, replacing it with a new tax payable in substitution for military service. This tax, the bedel i askari, was to remain in place until 1909, following the revolution. The 1856 reforms allowed non-Muslims to serve in the public administration, including (at least theoretically) the diplomatic corps. This second wave of reforms was directly correlated to the Crimean War of 1854–1855, which saw European powers allied with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. These reforms, the fruit of collaboration between British, French, and Austrian ambassadors, were comprised in the treaty ending the war, the Treaty of Paris, dated March 30, 1856. The “Imperial Words” decree of 1856 further developed and deepened the earlier decree of 1839, and constituted the Ottoman Empire’s “carte d’entrée,” as it were, into Europe. It also marked the reciprocal recognition by Europe of the Ottoman Empire’s territorial integrity. In addition, the decree proscribed the pejorative expressions habitually used with regard to dhimmis, and in particular the word ra’aya, which literally was used to designate grazing livestock. The changes introduced into the lives of Jews and other dhimmis by the decrees of 1856 were indissociable from the transformation that the Tanzimat reforms produced in the Empire. However, for a long time, the change remained largely a paper one, for the further Jewish communities were situated from the central power, the less these decrees had the actual force of law. In the most distant regions of the Empire, such as Yemen, Arab opinion showed itself violently hostile to any improvement in the lot of the Jews, which was perceived as a lowering of Arabs’ status. As a result, the Turkish governor or vali refused to apply Istanbul’s measures in order not to “offend” the Arab majority. This oppression was also felt in the army, where often, both before and after the First World War, Jewish soldiers were despised and reduced to performing subaltern duties. The Muslim forces of opposition to liberalization remained powerful. Opposition to the reforms was coterminous with and inseparable from opposition to Jewish emancipation. In Tunisia, for example, the liberalization decrees of 1857 were abrogated in 1864 following public and clerical pressure. In Algeria, where Jews had become French citizens in 1870, two forms of opposition were conjoined: that of the Arabs, and even more violently, that of European colonizers. Poverty was the backdrop to this world. This was even the case for the less unfortunate. But for the others, it was essentially misery, and could include begging, malnourishment, morbidity, and filth. Certainly, this condition was shared with the Arabs, but was all the more aggravated for the Jews by the blind violence targeted against them. In the Jewish Maghreb of 1850 to 1914, artisans, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and small-business owners made up almost half of the economically active urban population. This was a poor and austere world, although relatively egalitarian, a

34  |  Jews in Arab Countries world of hard work in workshops and stores. Marginally above them was a small “middle class,” culturally light-years away from the mass of indigent poor workers and vagabonds. The social climate bred violence. In Morocco, for example, “credit”— transformed into usury at exorbitant rates, from 30 percent to 300 percent per annum—resulted in pledging of harvests and mortgaging of farms. All it would take to throw the entire economic structure into disarray was for a single crop to fail, with the result that the peasants could no longer buy from Jewish artisans and peddlers. In fact, Morocco would experience a large number of drought cycles in the last third of the nineteenth century: 1867–1869, 1878–1884, 1891–1893, and 1896–1897. Such poverty, approaching utter misery, was usually experienced fatalistically. Revolt made no sense. “I was struck, from my arrival, by the deep misery which rules their lives,” noted Dr. Allard, French physician and consular official in Morocco, writing of the Jews of Safi.46 Out of a population of 7,000 Tripoli Jews, there are not as many as “one hundred well-off families,” reported one Monsieur Cazès of the AIU in Tunis: “At present they are encased within the blackest misery, and their communal institutions reflect this. Aside from a handful of taxpayers, whose numbers decrease daily, the largest proportion of them are indigent and need help.”47 To be sure Cazès was biased, since he was trying to open a school, but his testimony is corroborated by the accounts of hundreds of travelers and merchants. This image of extreme urgency is reinforced by the reports of the AIU’s headmasters. In 1904, the Casablanca AIU school director described a town assailed by malaria, and overwhelmed by the arrival of refugees fleeing war and tribal uprisings. Also in 1904, the Rabat AIU school director wrote, “After receiving your subsidies, I personally crisscrossed the mellah from one end to another in order to gain an understanding of the state and number of the ill. . . . In the course of the general visit which I carried out, I saw people in agony, dragging themselves to my feet to hold them tightly, only letting go once I had promised to give them something to ease their hunger.”48 The children educated by the AIU—making up just a tiny proportion of Jewish youth—provided striking testimony of this extreme poverty. In Larache, Morocco, a schoolmaster in 1882 described pupils in his classroom crushed by exhaustion from the work they face the minute classes end for the day, just in order to earn the 40 centimes needed to buy bread and butter: “(Yet) half-dead by hunger and numb with cold, they attended class regularly.”49 Insalubriousness was a recurrent corollary of this misery: “As for filth, our miserable students did the best they could,” reports the Marrakesh school director in 1905. “Initially I tried to be quite strict about this, but faced with reality, I

“Barbaric Lands” | 35 had to yield. It was simply impossible for me to force a child to come to school in shoes when his father earns hardly enough for bread, or to wear a somewhat less filthy shirt when he doesn’t have another one to change into.”50 Most of the students who abandoned their studies during the school year sank into impoverished misery. The situation was equally catastrophic in the countryside. To this backdrop of impoverishment must be added epidemics, especially cholera. Poverty was the cause of high rates of child mortality, further aggravated by superstition. A number of eye conditions, trachoma in particular, explain the large proportion of blind people. Tuberculosis was another illness of the Morocco mellah. To all of this one must add social plagues, such as ubiquitous prostitution and begging. In 1884, a report estimated that the some 40 percent of the Iraqi Jewish community was indigent. Contempt, poverty, and prostitution: AIU officials, rushing to the bedside of Oriental Jewries as if to the sickbed of a loved one, are fueled by a collective mission of “regeneration.” In Tripoli in 1899, a survey revealed nearly 9,000 indigents out of a Jewish population of 10,000. The parents of the most impoverished among them could not scrape together even a penny toward their children’s school meals. “For a pittance, they can eat at home, two or three of them sharing a piece of barley bread and some peppers.”51 In 1909 Nahum Schlousch, visiting North African Jewish communities, describes the misery of Tripoli’s hara, or Jewish quarter, where hardly 10 percent of inhabitants “live decently.”52 In 1901, at least 40 percent of the community in Egypt was impoverished, according to agricultural engineer Albert Najar, and that figure is probably an under-estimate, considering that at the end of the 1940s, the American Jewish Year Book would estimate that 70 percent of Egyptian Jews could be considered poor.53 That is nothing when compared to the 95 percent poverty rate of Yemeni Jews.54 This mass poverty was contained, after a fashion, by the AIU’s excellent emergency relief network, but remained the reality right up to the disappearance of the Jewish communities in the period from 1945 to 1960. In Tripoli in the early 1930s, out of 3,400 men of working age, only 600 were in a position to pay taxes, with some 2,000 underemployed or out of work.55 At Safi (Morocco) in 1930, the poverty and state of filth remained similar to the situation prevailing in 1900, with water frequently unavailable in the morning. The AIU director wrote: “When I reflect on it, I am rather inclined to understanding. For what can a mother do when she has six young children, and has neither water nor fresh linen for them, and when the tyrannical sewing machine calls her to work?” Often going about barefoot, risking tetanus, the children “are generally hard-working, and indeed, how could they not be industrious? A large family lives off of hard work.” The father is usually a peddler, “working the souks in the dust, under the burning sun amid a ragged crowd which covets his few

36  |  Jews in Arab Countries possessions. The mother and the sisters are bent from morning to night over their sewing machines, where they lose their sight and their health. . . . Everyone who can, works.” Yet, in 1936 in Casablanca, 25 percent of working-age Jews were unemployed or beggars.56 In 1938, the Casablanca AIU school director described how “streams of the sightless and the crippled file along the streets, emitting plaintive cries. This is the essence of this place. It is part of the scenery, these . . . miserable people, the very sight of whom provokes pangs of remorse for those who are less unfortunate. . . . Blind and miserable, this is utter desolation.”57 Such conditions provoked the mobilization of charitable and philanthropic organizations that could provide emergency relief such as, for example, l’Aide scolaire (School Aid), which offered help to “indigent pupils of Casablanca’s Jewish schools” and which in January 1927 launched its umpteenth appeal for generosity. This misery fostered the proliferation of a type of people to which allusions were delicately made in police reports. “A certain Jewish rabble . . . has developed since our arrival in Casablanca, as in the other cities of Morocco, in the margins of traditional communities toward which they display a fiercely independent stance as well as a total lack of respect,” noted an official.58 Here, this “policeman-sociologist” was alluding to a process of emancipation vis-à-vis traditional Moroccan Cherifian custodianship, and that is indeed how the police authorities would have interpreted his words “lack of respect towards Muslims.” The changes provoked by the impact of European civilization and colonization, as well as the process of emancipation and even the modest rise in living standards, would have pushed some to leave, and starting in the 1930s yet other factors would also come to preoccupy them. In 1953, Albert Memmi, a young Tunisian Jewish intellectual, tried to explain the mass poverty eating away at Jewish communities: “As punishment for our traditions and our very existence, we writhe in agony from bodily misery, undernourishment, syphilis, tuberculosis and mental illnesses. A fifth of the inhabitants of our ghettos are confirmed carriers of tuberculosis! We live in a state of historic catastrophe.”59 At the turn of the twentieth century, from Morocco to Libya, consular reports and travel accounts confirmed that hunger was ravaging the countryside, which was paradoxically less well protected because it lacked an adequate relief network, and was thus powerless to stave off extreme poverty and chronic undernourishment; this could, in turn, overwhelm the educational support from Western institutions. “How can we require these poor unfortunates to apply themselves with sustained attention and concentration?” asks a schoolmistress of the Tripoli AIU in 1903.60 “How many students at our school pass their entire day without even a cup of tea and a bit of barley bread?” queries the headmaster

“Barbaric Lands” | 37 of the Mogador AIU school in 1916. “What will this be worth to them—having to show so much courage and undergo such privations in order to acquire some learning?”61 Hunger remained the daily reality in certain mellahs, alongside deplorable sanitary conditions, as attested by reports published both before and after the Second World War by the OSE (Oeuvre de secours à l’enfance, or Children’s Aid Society, a French Jewish charity). These reports described the scourge of the “Three Ts”—tenia (or ringworm), trachoma, and tuberculosis—to which one can intermittently add a fourth “T,” typhus. Up until 1940, the AIU was the only large-scale organization present in these countries. During the war, it was joined by American organizations, in the front row of which was JOINT, the American Joint Distribution Committee established in 1914 and one of the most effective in bringing aid to Moroccan Jewry. More or less everywhere, drought was the principal cause of famine. Religious processions—Jewish as well as Muslim—routinely implored heaven for relief, against a background of misery and violence in a countryside that became even more dangerous. In Morocco, the 1877 drought caused the price of grain to jump by 300 percent. Malnutrition brought epidemics. Taxes were imposed in vain. Violence of all sorts bloodied the countryside and even the towns, despite the repression of the Makhzen, or governmental authority. Of the twelve thou­ sand people crammed into Mogador’s mellah, some three thousand subsisted in a state of utter beggary, and every day four or five of them died of hunger. This recurrent famine in North Africa was widely recognized. In 1868, in Algeria, Monsignor Lavigérie, Archbishop of Algiers, spoke of the calamity “that is decimating the indigenous population. . . . Two years of drought and the locust invasion have exhausted all resources.”62 The devastation strikes both Jews and Muslims without distinction. In 1906, in Azemmour (Morocco), AIU school headmaster Abraham Ribbi described “chaos throughout Morocco and in particular the inland cities; by land and by sea, we see a ceaseless stream of beggars, Jew and Muslim, filling ever more densely the streets and markets,” a flow of refugees propelled by “the insecurity reigning in the countryside.”63 In 1913, at Mosul in Iraq, the AIU director reported that the price of bread had gone from 10 to 70 centimes per kilo, while hoarders stockpiled wheat in order to push up prices.64 In 1905, the drought devastating Morocco was aggravated by the state of quasi-anarchy prevailing in the country. “The mellah offers up an altogether lamentable sight,” writes the Marrakesh AIU director in August 1905. “Everywhere, processions of the miserable; everywhere, cadaverous faces of feverish and haggard people, half-naked, dragging their emaciated legs through the dust under the pitiless sun.”65

38  |  Jews in Arab Countries Jewish minorities were not simply “communities”: more fundamentally, they should be viewed first and foremost as societies riven by conflict. To be sure, they were structured and underpinned by strong elements of communal solidarity, but they were also beset with social divisions and contempt—all the more so in that social welfare could draw forth condescension. There was not, therefore, a single Oriental Jewish memory, but rather multiple memories, often fragmented around class divisions. The most affluent of Moroccan Jews retained an almost idyllic recollection of the Judeo-Arabic past, maintaining the illusion of interethnic brotherhood that made it extremely hard for them to grasp the abruptness of the collapse. Within the protective orbit of the Cherifian palace, JewishMuslim solidarity was undeniable, and well after independence, relations remained very close between the Jewish and Muslim high bourgeoisie, while conversely, the gap was considerable between this wealthy minority and the working classes. In Libya too, according to historian Renzo De Felice, from very early on the drama for Jews was the wide gulf separating an educated, Europeanized elite from the poor and fatalistic indigenous Jewish masses.66 The Oriental Jewish population was overwhelmingly urban. Morocco’s Jewish social elite inhabited the coast; from there, they maintained contacts and commercial relations with Europeans, especially the British. This small section of the community, most often from the world of the megorashim or exiles from Spain, looked down on the indigenous Jewish community, established for the most part in the interior and made up of “fugitives from the Souss region” in southern Morocco, drawn to the coast by the hope of easy money in cities enjoying ever-increasing prosperity.67 Community leaders—close to the Moroccan authorities—tended to selectively entertain complaints from those over whom they had charge, sometimes, for a small sum, brushing aside appeals brought by the most impoverished. Writing of Morocco, Joseph Halévy explained that from within the mellah, “a rather powerful oligarchy arose which the highest authority conspicuously favored, and this oligarchy—whether through fear or through gratitude—always connived with the administration in order to stifle the voices and pleas of the people.” Yet, externally these Jews were subject to the same vexing measures imposed on the rank and file of the community. Exposed to “the antipathy of the populace, positioned between the fear of the Arabs and the thinly-disguised hatred of their coreligionists, the Guebirim (notables) of the mellah strike me as more to be pitied than envied. Their lives are split between prudence and remorse, so much so that they have little occasion to enjoy their wealth.”68 Such oligarchies are to be found in most Jewish communities, for example, that of Egypt, where René Cattaoui, president of the Cairo community, “behaves as an absolute ruler who imposes rather than proposes what he wants,” writes Abdallah Somekh in 1908. “He is too rich (I am speaking of the Cairene

“Barbaric Lands” | 39 wealthy) and too prideful to suffer any opposition or limits to his power, however slight such limits may be.”69 He noted that Cairo’s Jews, conscious of the educational progress of Copts and Muslims, understand the danger posed by Cattaoui’s policy of inaction and his fierce attachment to his absolute power: “They’ve taken their courage into both hands . . . and to this aim have established an organization called Israel Reawakens, in order to fight against the illwill of the elite, the leaders whose egotistical indifference have left thousands in Cairo’s immense ghetto to rot in ignorance and poverty.” It was during these same years that the birth of Zionism cast a light on the emergence of new social strata, better educated and yearning to free themselves from the tutelage of the traditional baronies. Eastern Europe had already gone through this confrontation, when organizations such as Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) in the 1880s and the first World Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, were making their appearance. Ruled over by a few oligarchical families—of only relative power, in the dhimma context—these communities faced severe social problems: begging, low educational levels, high divorce rates (with many couples separating because they were not able to support themselves financially), alcoholism, gambling, and so on. Some exploited the impoverishment of their fellow Jews. Profiting from the overpopulation of the Jewish quarter and the resulting inflation in rents, certain notables opposed any extension of the mellah. In the first ranks of speculators stood Muslims, who were the immense majority of mellah landlords. Yet, some Jewish landowners also joined in, exploiting the poverty of the majority through rents as well as community taxes, in particular on kosher meat, taxes from which some landowners were in fact exempt. AIU officials were often quite severe regarding the lack of solicitude shown by the rich toward the poor. Yet, it is also true that numerous philanthropic projects were energetically undertaken by some families. Nevertheless, there were recurrent complaints about notables who were judged to be egotistical. From Larache, in 1904, the headmistress of a girls’ school wrote of “the hateful thinking of the parents . . . in the beginning, rich parents would write to me, imploring me not to seat their girls next to students living in the fondak (housing for the poor). Such ghastly prejudice. Since then, I have been waging incessant war against that kind of caste thinking.”70 From Egypt, Somekh lamented that one should have no illusions: class barriers are hardly surmountable, even if everyone is part of the same minority. As he explained in 1909, the community’s schools are attended solely by the children of “Jewish indigènes,” often Arab-speaking: “The Ashkenazi and foreign Jews of every provenance regard them with horror, and do everything they can not to send their own children there.”71

40  |  Jews in Arab Countries Academic mixing remained rare in Egypt. It was even more rare in Morocco, in particular at the AIU schools. What mixing there was created no sense of “camaraderie,” as the headmistress of a Tangiers girls’ school deplored in 1916: “During the school year, without doubt, yes,” she writes. “But ties are very weak. They speak with each other at school, but outside of school, don’t know each other. Over four years, I saw no examples of any natural sympathy or any true friendship between two children of different social classes.”72 In all of the Arab-Muslim societies in which they lived, the Jews made up a tiny minority—between 0.5 percent and 3 percent. In the Egypt of 1945, they did not exceed 0.5 percent of the total population. In Iraq, at time of their demographic apogee, during the 1947 census—not a reliably accurate one—they constituted no more than 3 percent of the population (130,000 out of 4.8 million). With some notorious exceptions, one can hardly count on the unreliable censuses prior to the Second World War, neither regarding population nor migratory flows. In Yemen, for example, nothing better than an estimate is available for a Jewish population dispersed across more than twelve hundred localities. In 1910, Yomtov Sémach reckoned there were some 16,000 Jews. In the next year, Shmuel Yavne’eli (sent on mission to Yemen by the Zionist executive) put forward the figure of 30,000. Toward 1930, estimates varied between 30,000 and 40,000 people. In 1949, at the time of the large-scale departure, the number was said to have hit 51,000, although without any certitude, since no census had been conducted. The overwhelming majority of these populations were situated at the very bottom of the social ladder. Maghreb Arabs called them “dogs without a flag.” They were generally very poor: in Baghdad, at the end of the nineteenth century, 70 percent of the Jewish population was classed as “genuinely poor,” 25 percent constituted a small “middle class” and a mere 5 percent could have been characterized as “comfortable” or indeed “wealthy.” The pattern of their demographic increase was not exactly the same as that of the surrounding majority. Declines in both birthrates and infant mortality occured earlier, but the overall demographic characteristics remained those of poor countries: a weak net increase marked by a high birthrate and a high mortality rate, a fragile life expectancy and an elevated infant mortality rate (up to 25 percent). In the second half of the twentieth century, with the help of reduced mortality rates (above all in Egypt and Iraq), growth would accelerate, and Jewish populations appeared to increase everywhere. It was then that emigration really took off. Over the long term, however, population development remained modest, constrained by the classic “demographic accidents” (with a single drought coupled with an epidemic, the gains of several years would be wiped out). Conversions to Islam also played a role in the demographic undermining of some Jewish communities, especially in Morocco.

“Barbaric Lands” | 41 Emigration, even if remaining only a trickle for a long time, could attenuate and even cancel out the fragile gain recorded in any given year. Finally, the omnipresence of violence, striking the Jews more than other population groups (with a disproportionate number of violent deaths), added to their demographic fragility. In Morocco, the Jewish community was traditionally threatened by slow if not non-existent growth. The threat under a modern regime came from assimilation.73 In the Maghreb, from 1860 to the First World War, demographic growth was above all attributable to Algeria. At the time of the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, all together the four countries of the Maghreb comprised some 130,000 Jews (more than 50 percent of which were in Morocco), a figure that, due to plague, was perhaps lower than that of fifty years previously, according to Jacques Taïeb.74 By 1880, with 0.5 percent annual growth, this figure had risen to 170,000. From 1870, mortality began to fall everywhere (other than in Yemen), thanks to improved hygiene, more frequent recourse to modern medicine (which implies a decline in superstition), and a better diet. First and foremost, however, mortality decline was due to the simplest of hygienic measures, such as those relating to water. Even if epidemics—primarily cholera—remained recurrent, there was more knowledge about how to prevent this from becoming lethal. Isolation of the sick, mosquito-control measures, disinfection of toilets with limewater, handwashing, as well as the provision of cleaner water were all essential elements in the attainment of a longer life expectancy.75 The rural Jewish population remained marginal. If the imposition of land tax (kharraj) played an indisputable role in this, lack of security was even more important. Cities offer better protection for a community living within the embrace of royal power. In Morocco, out of a Jewish population estimated in 1880 at 120,000, hardly 20,000 were scattered around some one hundred non-urban localities. The only exception to this was Yemen, where in 1947 some 80 percent of the Jewish population was still living in villages or small towns. Jewries in Arab lands were thus overwhelming urban: in 1900, 70 percent in Morocco, 75 percent in Libya, 80 percent in Algeria, 85 percent in Tunisia. The same was true for Egypt and for Iraq, where in 1917 Baghdad’s total population of 202,000 included 80,000 Jews. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Middle Eastern Jewish urbanization rate was some 83 percent, virtually the inverse of an overwhelmingly rural Muslim population. The evolution in birthrates closely followed developments in education, hygiene, and Westernization/modernization. In the Egypt of the first half of the twentieth century, a better nourished and educated population, one enjoying better medical care, experienced a falling birthrate—as in Algeria following the Crémieux decree. Marriage age goes up everywhere, even if in Maghreb Jewries, up to around 1950, the average family still had three or four children, if not more. In

42  |  Jews in Arab Countries Morocco in 1951, 22 percent of women over fourteen had given birth to more than four children, although the proportion was much lower in Casablanca.76 From 1880 to the decades during which Arab countries achieved independence, slow growth turns into a demographic explosion for reasons very similar to those that drove European growth prior to 1914. The Maghreb remained the core of Jewish demography in Arab lands. On the eves of their respective attainments of independence, censuses showed 300,000 Jews in Morocco, 160,000 in Algeria, 120,000 in Tunisia, and 40,000 in Libya. By 1947 these four countries already contained over 500,000 Jews, more than half the Jewish population in Middle Eastern Muslim lands (if one also includes Iran and Turkey) and more than two-thirds if one just counts the Arab world. Morocco alone contained more than half the Jews of the Maghreb, and one in four Jews of the whole Arab-Muslim world. This trend was already visible in 1914, when Morocco and Algeria together had more Jews than the entirety of the Near East. This explains the focus by Jewish organizations worldwide on these Jewries, following the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities. After 1945, in the space of a single generation nearly all the Jews in the Arab world would emigrate. It took only forty years for Moroccan Jewry to fall from 300,000 people to just a few thousand. Algeria’s Jews, numbering 150,000 in 1948, fell to some 3,500 in 1966. In Tunisia, numbers dropped from 100,000 in 1948, down to 23,000 in 1966, and then to 3,500 by 1998. Libya’s Jews disappeared entirely following the military coup of 1969. The Egyptian community evaporated in two waves: first in 1948 and then again in 1956, falling from 80,000 to 8,500 in 1966, and then down to a mere 100 in 1998. The Iraqi community disappeared during a single year (1950–1951), going from 130,000 in 1948 to fewer than 5,000 in 1952—with virtually none at all left today. Yemen’s Jews effectively vanished during two years (1948 to 1950), passing from 60,000 souls in 1948 to 2,500 in 1966. In these three countries—Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen—the numbers went from 270,000 in 1947 to fewer than 1,000 in 1972. Today, there remains only one community in Arab lands—that of Morocco, but as an isolated outlier, with fewer than 3,000 by 2008. Jews made up the majority of inhabitants in several of the Arab world’s cities. Elsewhere, in each of the large cities, the Jews constituted an important minority. Only making up 3 percent of Morocco’s population at the turn of the twentieth century (and with two-thirds of them living along the coast), Jews represented 20 percent of the overall population of the port cities, and as much as 40 percent in Tangiers, Tetouan, and Casablanca. At the same time, 80 percent of Morocco’s Muslim population was rural. Among other factors, this urbanization process was driven by the Jews’ more advanced economic development. Islam condemned usury, but its attitude visà-vis commerce and city life remained an open one. Thus, Jewish emigration

“Barbaric Lands” | 43 toward towns was facilitated, occurring within an Arab-Muslim world that was more mobile than the long-sedentary Western world. Another element in the process of Jewish urbanization was the deterioration of Jewish-Arab relations in the nineteenth century. In the countryside, Ottoman law, which protected Jews, was more honored in the breach than in observance, particularly insofar as it concerned the numerous Jewish peddlers often killed— with impunity—for nefarious reasons. If Moroccan roads around 1880 were dangerous for all travelers, they were even more so for Jews, whose lives had little value in the eyes of Muslim justice. Finally, living in large population agglomerations made it easier for Jews to avoid being targeted with ritual murder rumors, which multiplied between 1870 and 1920 under the influence of local Christians as well as European Christian missions. Everywhere, urban Jewish population growth went hand in hand with a net decline in infant mortality, a pattern that continued up to the time of independence. Thus, Cairo’s Jewish population grew five-fold (from 8,800 to 42,000) between 1897 and 1947, while Alexandria’s doubled from 10,000 to 21,000. The situation was similar in the more developed towns of Morocco: in Casablanca, the Jewish population went from 7,000 in 1912 to 75,000 in 1951 (out of a total population of one million). The same trend was recorded in Libya, where censuses conducted by Ottoman (1911) and Italian (1931) administrations show some 73 percent of Libyan Jews living in Tripoli or Benghazi. Equally for Iraq, in 1919 two-thirds of the Jews were in Baghdad and Basra, going up to 73 percent by 1947. The sole exception was Yemen, where only 15 percent of the Jews lived in the capital, Sana’a. In 1438, the sultan established Morocco’s first separate Jewish quarter, in Fez, after an explosion of anti-Jewish violence. The Jews were expelled from their original quarter, and resettled in a location called Al-Mellah, or “salt-mine,” close to the seat of administrative power, the Dar Al-Makhzen. The name seems to have taken, and it replaced the name Harat al-Yahoud or “Jewish quarter.” In theory the mellah (as it was called in Morocco; in Tunis and Tripoli, the word hara—literally “the quarter”—was used) was originally designed to protect the Jews, but they experienced this separation rather as a sign of ostracism. The “quarter” was not a hermetically sealed ghetto. Initially established in the imperial cities (Meknes, Marrakesh, and Fez), it reflects a desire to isolate non-Muslims in a city where a descendant of the Prophet resided, but also of a wish to protect the dhimmis. Over the decades, the mellahs suffocated under the press of overcrowding. Year after year, entreaties wended their way up to the sultan, but they were practically never heard. With the population rising, the Jews received neither authorization to enlarge the mellah nor permission to leave it. “We know well what kinds

44  |  Jews in Arab Countries of obstacles and difficulties the city governors constantly place in the way of the Jews when it comes to the development of trade, and their ability to move outside of the mellah,” states the Bulletin of the AIU in 1888. In Fez, Jewish merchants were prohibited from setting up in the Muslim town; there were precisely six exceptions, and these were due to consular protection available to the individuals concerned. Central governmental authorities were repeatedly made aware of the situation. In 1892, for example, the AIU reported the interminable approaches made to the sultan in order to try to enlarge the Mogador mellah—in vain, owing to “the hostility or indifference of officials.” The central government was, to say the least, rather ambivalent vis-à-vis the Jewish minority—protected and tolerated, but maintained in an unquestioned state of submission. Many Europeans viewed the palace as playing a double game. Although attentive to complaints about the Jews’ situation when Western powers were listening (and worried about the prospect that they may intervene), the sultan’s administrators stayed true to their master when they refused to extend the Jewish quarter to a less confined location. In 1907, the French legation to Tangiers explained to the AIU Central Committee that the sultan fears that his “opinion” does not make him incline favorably toward the Jews. Up to Moroccan independence in 1956, Jewish organizations continued to try to steer around the obstacles placed in the way of their emancipation, sometimes by taking advantage of unfortunate circumstances. What explains the Makhzen’s inaction; the pressures of speculators, seeking to benefit from the situation by increasing the rents? Certainly, but there was more. The inaction was also due to the wish to keep the Jewish population under its tutelage. In October 1905, freshly posted to Fez by the AIU, Joseph Moyal described his first impressions of the Jewish quarter: “Life imprisonment in the narrow and revolting prison which is how we view the mellah?” He is discouraged by the “road scattered with carcasses, stinking up the air.”77 Five years later, at Fez again, Joseph Elmaleh was horrified by “the crowd of men and women in rags, swarming along the narrow and filthy streets.”78 Was this particular to Morocco? One is at first tempted to think so, given the abundant documentation, and in light of the widespread injustice and arbitrariness, especially compared to the provinces under Ottoman jurisdiction. Yet, the illusion quickly dissipates on reading descriptions of Tripoli’s hara, or the Jewish quarters of Cairo or Shiraz. The reality was the same—with only a few differences—and was even darker in Yemen and Persia. In 1903, the AIU school’s director at Isfahan described the Shiraz Jewish quarter as a “veritable ghetto, dark and confined.”79 For several decades, a visit to the Jewish quarter was a highlight of the tours of certain moneyed European tourists, providing a spectacle where filth was viewed

“Barbaric Lands” | 45 simultaneously as “picturesque” and “revolting,” and customs as both “strange” and “charming.” In 1926, in Morocco, Jacques Bigart of the AIU rejected these views: “I have visited plenty of slums in Paris, and the poor Jewish quarters in London, Algiers and Tunis: those are almost beautiful compared with certain streets of Marrakesh’s mellah. I have gone into dozens of houses, and the spectacle which so often throws itself up to my eyes defies any description in terms of sadness and pained observations.”80 In his anger, Bigart had no room for the sorts of de rigueur travel accounts (usually describing visits to Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter or Morocco’s mellahs) that are found from Chateaubriand in the early nineteenth century, all the way up to the Tharaud brothers, who described the spectacle they saw in 1929: When one has long wandered in this Muslim town—quite dusty and rundown but spacious and airy—and filled with this charming humanity who smells of the mountains and the villages, how distasteful then to come upon the mellah! It is one of the most atrocious places on Earth. Twenty thousand Jews piled up in a space infinitely too confined for their swarming life. Dirty black caftans, filthy skullcaps, greasy hair . . . heads ravaged by all varieties of lice which disgust the passerby and delight the medical specialists, rheumy eyes, suppurating and half-opened, which seem to have emerged from a cave and are startled by daylight.81

Yet, there was even worse than the mellah, and that is the “mellah of the mellah,” the b’hira, “reserved for the real indigents,” as Casablanca’s AIU school director explained in 1904. This place provoked both “disgust and deep pity,” a place where “families are crammed into hovels,” “at doorways, the piles of bodily waste emit asphyxiating odors” from “latrines that are but open holes in the middle of some street, or at any possible or imaginable place; and practically no water.”82 From Morocco to Iraq, the observation was the same: the authorities had abandoned the Jewish quarter. The Kirkuk AIU school director wrote from Mesopotamia in 1912: “A canal runs through the whole length of the Israelite quarter, containing stinking water giving off a suffocating smell.”83 The municipality has simply lost interest; the road-sweeping service busy in the city’s other quarters is absent here. Often, this involved deliberate policies, especially in Shi’ite Persia where—as in the case of Christians and Zoroastrians—the Jews represent a source of impurity. Similarly in Yemen, Yomtov Sémach noted in 1910 in Sana’a that unlike the Arab or Turkish quarters, the Jewish quarter was plunged into darkness at nightfall. There was neither street-lighting nor road maintenance. The inhabitants had to remove their own latrine waste and had sole responsibility for sewage disposal as well as carting away animal carcasses.84 It is as if the degradation and disgrace of a subject minority were inscribed on the very face of the city’s vilest places.

46  |  Jews in Arab Countries From the Maghreb to the Middle East, houses were shielded from the street, but gave onto a courtyard shared by several families. Each door opened to a room and the family inhabiting it. There was generally no other opening, and windows were rare, as were furnishings. The walls contained many niches, holding kitchen utensils. There were few beds or mattresses—people slept (in a single room, with a propinquity that was the subject of frequent criticism) on mattress covers stuffed with horsehair for the poor, and wool for the rich. In the Maghreb, the nuclear family was embedded within a larger social structure, living under one roof. The adult sons lived with their wives and children alongside their father and married brothers. These familial structures, together with over-population, engendered promiscuity, as is often underscored in medi­ cal reports and other communications from the AIU in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The young wife would leave her own family to join her husband’s household, and a lack of privacy was the rule for young couples. The adaptation—difficult, sometimes violent—was almost always the cause of great unhappiness. The only area where the Jewish woman exercised some enhanced autonomy was that of conjugal sexuality, by contrast to Muslim women, who were completely subjected in this area too. The notion of “menstrual impurity” is less rigorous in Islam than in Judaism; Jewish women in consequence had more latitude in managing enforced abstinence. Heaps of rubbish in the open air, piles of filth at the entrance to the mellah and more generally in front of doors, no more than the occasional collection of garbage, which was sometimes simply dumped under school windows—such was the spectacle that Maghreb Jewish quarters presented around 1910. Houses were devoid of toilets, and the public conveniences rarely used: “The Jews relieve themselves in the streets.”85 Such was the frequent observation, especially with the spread after the First World War of increased concern about hygiene and preventive sanitation. And yet, this was at a time when, with Western medicine taking root in the Arab-Muslim world, it was Jewish communities—with their higher education level—who should have been most conscious of the notion of hygiene. The situation is even worse in summer, when they emit unbearable “noxious odors,” recounted Jacob Valadji, in Baghdad in 1889. The children stay indoors, at school and Talmud Torah, without physical exercise, and spend the rest of the time confined in the mellah’s hovels.86 There they remained, “in this hot, suffocating, nauseating atmosphere. Pressed together, teeming, exhausted, overcrowded, sticky with sweat and dirt, covered with flies.”87 The parents were not great enthusiasts for hygienic measures, and in fact often denigrated the schools’ efforts in this regard. To understand this, it is necessary to bear in mind the conflict between traditional healing methods and Western medicine, and more broadly the resistance to new ideas, modern schools, and

“Barbaric Lands” | 47 the modernity of the Enlightenment. In many Moroccan Jewish communities, the modern school—la escuela—was called eshkullah, which in Hebrew means “entirely fire.”88 Similarly retrograde was the “matron” role played by mature women in communities, regarded as childbirth experts. Sémach, writing in 1930 from Morocco, underscored the importance for midwives to be able to operate in the mellah; they “shall remove these ignorant and dirty birthing matrons from the beds of women in labor—these matrons who have brought so much misfortune to families in the mellah—so that babies will be raised in accordance with modern childcare standards.”89 Most of the teaching staff sent out to the region by the AIU ended up concluding that education is more important than instruction. How could cleanliness and hygiene be taught to a populace that seems so little aware of the need of sanitation and prevention, concepts that were patiently impressed on European schoolchildren during the nineteenth century? At the school in Baghdad, for example, it was reported in 1898 that children in the canteen did not know how to use a spoon, and discarded it as soon as the teacher was gone. As for cafés, they were “nauseatingly dirty.” Everyone drank from the same cup. Children and adults alike had “disgusting habits,” wiping their mouths with their fingers. “Even in the synagogue, everyone spits under the carpet, and some even spit directly onto it, right in front of everyone.”90 An elevated morbidity rate formed a common backdrop to the lives of both Jews and Arabs. For the former, any epidemic assumed the contours of a catastrophe, due to the intense crowding. At Mogador in 1873, French consul Auguste Beaumier attended medical consultations given in the mellah by a French doctor. He observed the “sad cortege of scrofulous patients,” a sight that was “hardly unusual.”91 Ten years later, Charles de Foucauld paints a disastrous picture of the hygiene of Moroccan Jews: “The Jew walks but little, and strolls not at all.” They “consume enormous amounts of alcohol . . . above all on Saturday, when they absorb a prodigious quantity.”92 This tableau is confirmed by other sources. Mortality rates for this physically and psychologically diminished populace were high. Even after the turning point of the age of five, many pursued a restricted existence: ill, partially sighted or blind, struck by polio, TB, smallpox, or syphilis. The same observations were made during cholera epidemics, when the urban overcrowding multiplied the effects of illness. Collective facilities were nonexistent or not maintained. In 1919 at Rabat, Robert Conquy confirmed that the water pipe network had not been cleaned out for ten years. Family configuration also played a role in the spread of the epidemics. As a result of its closely defined concept of familial solidarity, the structure of the Muslim family aggravated the impact of contagion. Rather than isolate the ill when sickness strikes, both healthy and sick remained in proximity with each other.

48  |  Jews in Arab Countries They stay where they are even when they have the means to leave, as occurred during the cholera epidemics in Baghdad at the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast, Jewish and Christian families—at least the more comfortable among them—would leave town. These differing mentalities resulted from a long history of epidemics, starting with the plagues that for centuries ravaged the Mediterra­ nean. A third of Cairo’s population died during the fourteenth century’s Black Death; toward 1450 there were no more than around 150,000 inhabitants, against some 250,000 in 1340. Between 1739 and 1741, the plague cut down 20 percent of Izmir’s population and, in short, that explains the stagnating demography. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Maghreb was decimated by plague epidemics. Between 1785 and 1830, the demographic regression was obvious. It was not until 1820—a full century after the last such epidemic in Western Europe—that the Maghreb witnessed its last large-scale plague. The plague was, however, reported again in Baghdad in 1892 and Egypt in 1901, and also reappeared in Libya in 1910. Superstition played a major role in traditional medicine, in particular in the more remote regions. Fear of infant mortality explains the precautions taken with regard to newborns, with the aim of preserving them from “the snares of the devil.”93 Barbaric measures were the other face of the traditional fatalism before illnesses sent by God. Only prayer could help. At the end of the century, cholera and typhus ravaged populations through successive epidemics, while tuberculosis remained endemic. In 1888, Baghdad was shaken by cholera, which in fact struck all around the Mediterranean basin. From Tangiers came this cable: “The horrors in this country are indescribable. To cholera we must add famine and insurrection. The roads are infested with criminals.”94 From Cairo, on the September 15, 1902, came this report: “The epidemic . . . has assumed horrifying proportions. The daily toll of victims numbers in the thousands. All of Egypt is contaminated.”95 As endemic maladies, smallpox, syphilis, and above all tuberculosis continued to eat away at populations rendered even more vulnerable by promiscuity. In certain communities, TB infection rates exceeded 50 percent. Underlying conditions also played a part: in Yemen, Haim Habschush noted that the Jews of Djawf “don’t live long, due to the burning heat of the sun and the fumes emanating from the arid earth.”96 Smallpox struck hard. In Marrakesh in 1902, the disease cut down 300 children in less than three months, and it was only the vaccine sent from France by the AIU that limited the number of victims. Infant mortality continued to ravage the mellahs up to the Second World War, taking “the extremely filthy children, poorly cared-for, under-nourished and sickly, making a long life unlikely.”97 Syphilis, “the disease of poverty and ignorance,” raged. What could be done about it? Nothing, or practically nothing. One could not just change the ancestral way of life of an entire people, for whom customs virtually have legal status.98

“Barbaric Lands” | 49 In precolonial Maghreb, “eroded by illness” in the words of Lucette Valensi, the struggle against disease—for a long time of only negligible effect—did not improve until the colonizers arrived. It was they who opened a few dispensaries (which were rapidly overwhelmed), introduced measured doses of modern medication (sulfonamides, serums, vaccines, quinine, etc.), and worked through modern European philanthropic doctors, who were in some cases virtually secular saints.99 Generally, whenever community leaders reached agreement to open a dispensary, they would need foreign assistance. AIU directors turned to Paris, once they abandoned any illusions they may have had about local capabilities. Alcoholism, prostitution, and illiteracy were recurrent problems. Alcoholism was a daily reality for Oriental Jews, especially in Morocco and Yemen. In 1903, in Fez, Jacob Valadji evoked “the ‘pantagruelian agapes’, those gargantuan feasts during which the famous mahia, a native eau-de-vie, flowed in abundance, and everyone in attendance, young and old, had to toss down shot after shot.”100 In Islamic lands, where drinking alcohol was forbidden to Muslims, Jews often had a monopoly of production. In the Morocco of 1910, Jews distilled their own anisette, most often for local consumption. Supplying alcohol to Muslims was forbidden and severely punished, which, however, prevented neither sales nor a certain amount of consumption by Muslims (alongside their widespread drug use). Something noted by all contemporary travelers: poverty brought both alcoholism and oppression, and the consumption of alcohol by Jews was highest wherever their condition was worst—at least this is the case for the majority of the poor ones.101 In 1912, at Meknes, the AIU director described “the intellectual debility of the children, the principal cause of which is fetal alcohol damage.” 102 From Yemen in 1945, the envoys of the Jewish Agency described Jewish children whose “physical health and intellectual development are greatly threatened by the consumption of khat . . . the leaves of which are chewed and then swallowed. . . . Jewish and Arab children develop this practice from a very young age. . . . Khat causes increasing lethargy in its users, as well as a lowered resistance to infectious illnesses.”103 Everywhere, colonization was marked by a soaring increase in prostitution. In Yemen with the arrival of the Turks in 1872, as in Morocco with the arrival of the French in 1911 to 1912, “one bitterly deplores how the mellah has more and more become a district of debauchery and easy pleasure for crowds of foreigners and military men. . . . Prostitution and alcoholism . . . increase with each passing day.”104 With the arrival of colonial troops, the numbers of drinking establishments and occasions for encounters multiplied. From Fez in 1913: “It’s the parents themselves whom one sees selling their girls, and the husbands who close their eyes to the misbehavior of their wives,” complains Joseph Elmaleh.105

50  |  Jews in Arab Countries The third bane was illiteracy. Secular education was unknown until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of schools was to teach liturgy, prayers, and sacred texts. Women were generally excluded, apart from in certain communities (e.g., Spanish Morocco) or for certain privileged girls, such as the daughters of scholars and rabbis. Elementary education was provided in “little schools” (sla, in Morocco) organized by schoolmasters who themselves were hardly (if at all) educated. Poorly paid by the parents (and often in kind rather than in cash), and making frequent recourse to corporal punishment, the teachers were not well respected. A tiny minority of well-off Jews could afford private tutoring. In the atmosphere of stench, filth, and noise, children only just managed to learn to read and—more rarely—to write. The emphasis was mainly on learning by heart, and corporal punishment; only those who managed to get through what one AIU director called “hell” would go on to the yeshiva. Education consisted of rote-learning and cramming, and students often dropped out of the heder or the Talmud Torah before the age of thirteen, able to read the Hebrew text but in most cases without understanding a word of what they read. The rod was not spared, especially on “interrogation day,” which the children call “black day.” Physical punishment was encouraged by the parents, as children were “by nature” possessed by evil. In 1913, at Suleiman in Mesopotamian Kurdistan, the aged rabbi teaching reading to sixty students seated on mats showed his baton to the AIU professor: “‘This stick is from Paradise—it’s the stick which teaches the Torah,’ he said. At that, all the assistants, and myself, burst into laughter at the artless remark of this rabbi.”106 Most of the teachers were poorly trained and poorly paid, often in the form of a variable salary collected from the parents every Friday. There were no schoolbooks, and due to a lack of Hebrew printing (as in Yemen, too), books were hand-copied, each one used by eight pupils at a time. As for the classroom itself, in Yemen in 1910 it was said to present “an indescribable brouhaha, a deafening cacophony.”107 Many children did not even attend the heder, but instead hung about on the streets, or work to contribute to their families by “earning their father’s daily bread.”108 Many other children switched schools—especially to AIU schools—as soon as their parents managed to get them enrolled. Nevertheless, true illiteracy remained rare, except in remote regions such as Kurdistan. When compared to traditional education, which was excoriated by so many reports, the AIU schools, foreign schools, and schools of Christian congregations represented a genuine new beginning. Yet, schools functioned as a breeding ground for propagation of infections, such as, for example, in the religious school at Kefil, in Mesopotamia. A market town of some three thousand souls located along the Euphrates, in 1912 it was “an airless place of disgusting dirtiness, the children all squawking together,

“Barbaric Lands” | 51 squatting on their mats or wallowing about on the earthen floor. An unbearable odor seizes you by the throat upon entering. Fifty children together in this furnace of a hovel, at 45 degrees centigrade in the shade.”109 The hostility of progressive elements toward the education furnished by the heder or the Talmud Torah was the mirror image of the rabbis’ rejection of proposals to establish modern schools. The rabbis were rarely perceived by the AIU as allies; nearly everywhere, the rabbinate was united in its denunciation of the “de-Judaization” of children. The French model imported by the AIU in the form of the Ecole normale israélite oriental (ENIO; Middle Eastern Jewish teachers’ training college) provoked rabbinical opposition with similarities to the conflict played out in France between 1870 and 1914 around the issue of “two school systems” (i.e., state and private/Catholic). Finally, the “ignorance” of the rabbis was condemned in a host of reports. David Arié, director of Tripoli’s AIU school, did not hesitate to write of the city’s Chief Rabbi that the latter was a “nullity,” like the “backward” and self-regarding notables of the Jewish community.110 An instructor in Basra, writing in 1909, said “there is no-one more despised in the Middle East than this rabbi.”111 Others elaborated on rabbis’ “vulgarity” and “filthiness,” underscoring the low regard in which they were viewed. Another report, from the AIU school director at Hille, Iraq, in 1909, noted that instruction in Hebrew is deplorable and that “this won’t change as long as the language is taught by rabbis as ignorant as they are backward.”112 Even by the 1930s, the descriptions barely varied. In January 1943, a report on Jewish youth in Aleppo sent from Syria to the Jewish Agency (an organization hardly favorable to rabbinic power) emphasized the wide gap between such young people and those aspiring to modernization. The report notes that many youths have “never had the slightest interest in Hebraic culture.”113 Even if the bias of many such reports is obvious, the consensus is nevertheless striking. The gulf between the enlightened elements (who in the colonial context are considered “advanced” or “évolués,” i.e., “evolved ones”) and the archaism of the traditional world was still very much evident. This was to remain a yawning gap even at the very threshold of the Second World War, and indeed was still significant at the moment of the final dispersion of these Jewish communities. Thus, even as late as May 1951, the Casablanca Jewish community committee scorned the hedarim as a “plague upon Moroccan Jewish childhood,” which constituted “centers of infection and ignorance,” and announced the opening of a modern Talmud Torah, “far from inept recitation punctuated by strokes of the cane.”114 In the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern Jewish communities faced an environment of violence. Nearly everywhere, justice was dishonest and corrupt. State power held little sway outside a few urban centers, and the countryside was beset

52  |  Jews in Arab Countries with danger. Both arbitrariness and physical violence were quotidian affairs, especially when involving minorities, poorly protected by the criminal justice system because the voices of non-Muslims were simply not heard. Abundant testimonies underscore the archaism of the Arab world. In his 1803 account of his journey to Morocco, Ali Bey al-Abassi (who was in reality an Arabic-speaking Spaniard, probably working on behalf of the Spanish Court) described the Jews as crushed by “Muslim despotism,” with their “humble posture, bodies fully inclined forward.” He noted the restraint he imposed on his soldiers and servants, who were always ready to strike the Jews. The same Ali Bey evoked a “horrible inequality of rights . . . such that a very young Muslim may insult and strike a Jew . . . with the latter having no right to raise a complaint.” Again, Ali Bey described Muslim children amusing themselves by “striking Jewish children, who cannot respond with so much as the slightest act of self-defense.”115 In 1833 in Palestine, the British vice-consul in Jerusalem reported that a Jew in the Holy City is “not considered to be worth any more than a dog.” In the West, international Jewish organizations were created to serve as the shadow executive of this dispersed people, by modeling themselves on the two great colonial empires of the time: in London the Board of Deputies and in Paris the Alliance israélite universelle, to cite only the principal organizations. These organizations advised Jewish communities to keep a low profile, as evidenced by the appeal issued in 1876 to Moroccan Jews and co-signed by Adolphe Crémieux and Isidore Loeb, secretary of the AIU, “urging them to neither do or say anything of a nature which might provoke the anger of their compatriots, or which could cause the Sultan to view them as very arrogant.”116 Especially in Morocco in the decades preceding French occupation, a broad array of witnesses (including non-Jewish journalists and diplomats) noted that Jewish communities were subject to violence that was all the more unpredictable and capricious for being perpetrated by people not subject to the effective jurisdiction of the central government. Direct accounts abound. The Arabic-speaking English journalist Bridget Meakin (1866–1906), who worked for a period at the Times of Morocco, described beatings as more easily inflicted on the Jews; when incarcerated, they were “chained from the head to the feet such that they could not stretch out straight,” and abandoned without food or care until relatives could amass $200 in ransom money.117 The Anglo-Jewish Association evoked the near complete absence of punishment (other than a fine) for the murder of a Jew by a Muslim.118 All observers reported a situation of great poverty, as well as often-gratuitous violence and a desire to inflict humiliation. If an intervention was to be made on behalf of a poor, imprisoned Jew, there was simply no question of trying to raise the issue of the “injustice” of which he was the victim. Such injustice could not be corrected with justice, but only by begging for a “favor,” requesting a further

“Barbaric Lands” | 53 arbitrary distortion of the justice system in order to repair—to some extent—the original act of injustice. The climate of violence cast light onto the ubiquitous denial of justice. Western consuls intervened repeatedly, such as Auguste Beaumier at Mogador, who was to leave a strong impression among the region’s Jews. Persecution allows us to understand emigration, at least partially so. Charles de Foucauld noted there were few Jews in Morocco’s northern mountainous Rif region, “Previously, there were many here, but bad treatment caused them to leave during this [i.e., the nineteenth] century, some to Fez, others to Tlemcen and Debdou.”119 The most widespread form of injustice was legalized theft, carried out by a soldier or administrative official. In 1909, in Sulaymaniyah (in Iraqi Kurdistan), a headmaster of the AIU school illustrated the situation prevailing before the Young Turks revolution of 1908: “A person in the Agha’s retinue comes to a Jewish shop to make a purchase, and pays—depending on how he feels—a half or a quarter of the price, or simply pays nothing at all.”120 Among people of the same income, some are taxed while others are not. Charles de Foucauld describes areas of Morocco where the condition of the Jews resembles serfdom: The region where I saw the Israelites treated the worst and the most miserably is the Wad el Abid valley, from Ouarzazate to Tabia. There, I found Jewesses held captive by their seigneurs for three months because their husbands could not pay certain sums. In that region, tradition fixes at 30 francs the amount of the fine payable by a Muslim who kills a Jew. This sum is owed to the sid (lord or master) of the deceased, and there is no other penalty or fine. In this region, the Israelites do not engage in any business: as soon as they come into possession of anything, it is taken from them.121

Unfairness includes fiscal injustice, like in Fez in 1912 where taxes paid by everyone only go to the benefit of the Arab part of town. Injustice also involved theft and unpaid work extorted by the authorities themselves from Jews deprived of any legal remedy, in a kingdom where recourse to the sultan was in any event only theoretical. Craftsmen were forced to violate the Shabbat day of rest, as in Fez in March 1909, where the pasha ordered the Jewish goldsmiths to make him a piece of jewelry on a Saturday: “Although the jewelry-makers asserted the impossibility of working on a Saturday without gravely failing in their religious duties, and pointed out in vain that the Sultan of Morocco and the public authorities have never obliged the Israelites to violate the peace of the Sabbath, nevertheless some had to do so, while others were imprisoned.”122 There is a fine line between officials and thugs when every functionary feels himself to be endowed with extended powers and—this is key—considers himself to have no public accountability whatsoever. The Makhzen’s officials, “whose

54  |  Jews in Arab Countries hatred and cruelty towards the Jews is well-known,” explained an AIU director in 1908, only worsen the lot of imprisoned Jews, and they never intercede in their favor.123 As many Western envoys noted, it was not just the Arab population that outdid itself in this respect, but also the governmental and administrative apparatus. Also unjust was imprisonment by a cruel justice system that incarcerated people without any specific legal basis, and then left the prisoners to rot. It was the lack of a proper trial in a Tangiers case that so scandalized a former Moroccan Jew who had taken British citizenship, and who brought the matter to the AIU’s attention in December 1901: “In what other country can one see such injustices? To convict someone for murder without any proper trial! Even in Russia, where our unfortunate brothers are subject to such cruelties from their Orthodox compatriots, at least the judges apply the law—whether it be good or bad law— and always after trial and judgment.” In Morocco, he continues, a man who goes to jail becomes a burden on his family, because he receives no food behind bars. “It was such injustices . . . which made me and my family determined to leave our own country for free England.”124 Imprisonment without trial or judicial safeguards was common. However, such a matter took on quite a different importance when the victim was an AIU member; at least his testimony produced an echo. Sent out to Yemen in October 1903 for the purpose of opening a school, Abdallah Solekh was imprisoned for eight days in the port of Hodeida. After being deported, on his return to Aden he recounted his “burial” at the hands of “appallingly sordid and vulgar police.”125 Fear was the keyword of this system. Everyone understood the virtues of silence: don’t say too much, in fact, don’t say anything at all, lest you risk imprisonment and beatings—hence, the fear of lodging a complaint against manifest abuses of power. It was to oppose these abuses that a number of organizations were created in Europe. In 1840, the Damascus Affair played a vital role in the birth of Jewish associations in the West, dedicated to fight against such iniquities. In June 1865, in Paris, Adolphe Crémieux learned through the post that the vice-governor of Baghdad, Ahmed Pasha, had had several Jews imprisoned for five years, without evidence or trial, accusing them of having corrupted his predecessor. Ahmed was eventually repudiated, but in the meantime, families were reduced to poverty, lives were destroyed, and property put under seal.126 In an attempt to extort money from them following their arrest, nearly sixty Jewish notables (including rabbis) were thrown into jail in 1889 for having participated in a contentious burial. A pogrom nearly erupted, with a rumor circulating that Jews could be attacked without any risk of consequences.127 Injustices also affected the ordinary rules of daily life. At Tetouan, in 1808, the sultan ordered the mellah to be moved after he took the view that Jewish

“Barbaric Lands” | 55 houses were too close to a newly constructed mosque. Moulay Sulayman granted the victims another residential zone free of charge, ordering them to construct new houses there.128 The religious calendar was suspended when, in 1884 at Demnat in Morocco, the ruler ordered the mellah to work on a Jewish holiday in order to fulfil an order.129 In regions far from central power, arbitrary rule was even more violent, and was sometimes accompanied by sadism on the part of local potentates. Nahum Schlousch explained, in 1909, that in the territory of the Ait Atta tribe of Morocco, Jews were forced to organize fights among themselves in order to entertain the Muslims. The score: twelve deaths.130 Caning recurs like a litany in all the accounts. Inflicted for even insignificant reasons, it could cause the victim’s death or result in injuries that left him crippled following months of suffering. In 1911, in Marrakesh, Raphael Danon of the AIU informed Paris of the fate of the Azoulay brothers—one imprisoned, and the other beaten for having protested against his brother’s incarceration.131 In March 1888 in Amesmiz, Morocco, the governor encouraged his soldiers to beat a Jew: “Hit hard and without fear, for if he dies, we will pay His Majesty the blood money.”132 In Marrakesh in 1892, two young Jews argued but then reconciled without raising the matter before the court of the local caïd. Furious at the denial of his jurisdiction, the caïd had them summoned to appear; they were each punished with four hundred strokes of the cane.133 Central governmental power was the sole guarantor of minorities’ security. However, up to the First World War at least, central power was weak throughout the Arab world, and in fact central power was in total decline in Morocco up to 1912, and nearly nonexistent in Yemen until the arrival of the Turks in 1872. Central authority only functioned in a modest radius around the capital. The Jews were the first to pay the price, in particular in Morocco where they constituted the only minority of importance. Their condition worsened whenever central power weakened, and when it did, some local rulers inflicted beatings, while others piled on insults and harassments, and constrained Jews to go about barefoot. The more violent the local ruler, the more the populace felt authorized to humiliate the Jews, as a reflection of their own submission. In Morocco, 1894 was a turning point: from this point no sultan managed to assert his authority, whether against the tribes or against the Europeans. For everyone, the weakening of central power was synonymous with precariousness. Anarchy allowed the colonizer to establish a foothold. In Yemen, the Turks took over in 1872 thanks to the tribal unrest that had prevailed for more than fifty years. For the Jews, this was a period coterminous with suffering and repression imposed by petty local potentates. Some Jews left Yemen after 1872

56  |  Jews in Arab Countries once this became possible with the opening brought by Turkish rule, including the elimination of dhimmi status. Such a situation made the arrival to power in 1910 of an honest ruler like Nazim Pasha, governor of Baghdad, seem as if a near-miracle had taken place. Nazim ruled equitably; this was so unprecedented in the region that the memory of it was to last a long time. To grasp the doubly concussive impact of colonization and modernization, it is necessary to understand how much the Jewish condition was marked by feelings of precariousness. Numerous witnesses attest to the fact that Jewish life in Arab lands, far from being idyllic, often constituted suffering or even a calvary, comprised of injustices, theft, rape, abduction, insults, and daily beatings. Above all, humiliation of “the Jew” made him the laughing stock and whipping boy of “the Arab,” in particular among the lower social classes, who used the Jew as an outlet for their frustration. Yet, the regularity of the reports masked a muted silence that grew heavier as the Makhzen’s authority weakened and the Europeans advanced further into the country. Was this therefore a question of a nationalist reaction? Far from it. The conviction that the Jew is only partially a man coursed through the century, starting well before the colonizing inroads. Humiliation was an old policy, and a reality that Europe and a part of Ashkenazi Judaism did not manage to grasp. In June 1965, in an article in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes enigmatically entitled “Les Juifs vont en enfer” (The Jews Are Going to Hell), a young Moroccan Muslim, Said Ghallab, described the customary submission of the Jew in Morocco “who discovers that any fine morning he is someone who can simply be killed without knowing why, and for this reason it becomes relevant to see how the Jew reacts vis-à-vis this state of affairs.”134 To understand the background to this servitude, it is necessary to go back to the Morocco of the late nineteenth century, when Joseph Halévy was sent on his mission by the AIU. Arriving in late July 1876, Halévy stayed in the country for several weeks. At the outset he grasped the legal status of Moroccan Jews, a status profitable to all Muslims, from workers right up to the sultan. The debasement of the Jew was an element in the psychological economy of the Berber and Arab worlds, whether poor or well off. Each, in his own way, considered the inferiority of the Jew to be natural, and thought that it was always necessary to act in a manner that reminded the Jew of this, so that he would not forget where he came from, nor what he was: someone who submits. If he accepted it, he would be tolerated. If he strayed from this status, he would be punished. When Halévy evoked “cruel punishments without the slightest pretext,” he understood in reality that this injustice was rationalized, that it was in fact a political and psychological system in which violence, apparently gratuitous (like the constant humiliation), was imposed in order to remind the Jews that their masters can do with them

“Barbaric Lands” | 57 what they will.135 There was no question whatsoever of the Jew undertaking any initiative on his own; this was not only to maintain exceptional financial pressure on him, but even more importantly so that he would always feel the hand pushing down on him, subjecting him, constraining him. This was the source of the blows raining down on him under whatever pretext, because beyond any specific issue provoking the violence, the important thing was to remind the Jew that he must lower his head and speak softly. This “naturalized” inferiority was made manifest in daily life by the insults that made all Jewish symbols the signs of misfortune and death. Observers of Moroccan Jewish life in the late nineteenth century were unanimous in describing a Muslim populace always ready to unleash violence against the Jews on the flimsiest pretext. In 1864, for example, a young Safi Jew was arrested by a soldier, who tied a rope around his neck and paraded him around. “While walking him, the soldier and the Moors struck him such that blood flowed from him everywhere.”136 A number of prohibitions illustrated the Jews’ vulnerable condition. They were considered “as vile and impure beings,” wrote Abdallah Somekh in 1903 with regard to Yemeni Jews. They were forbidden to ride, and if they did, “the first Muslim who comes along is authorized to pull him off his mount and punish him with the cruelty customarily used towards the Jews of Yemen, who were all the more despised and mistreated because they had always bent their necks towards their executioners.”137 Weaklings were systematically fleeced. In 1876, Joseph Halévy witnessed the ruse by which his servant was victimized. Those who try to avoid becoming snared, he explained, were “beaten severely and often deprived of their goods.”138 Those carrying out the fleecing were sometimes guards of the Jewish quarter, or officials who “agree amongst themselves to despoil our fellow Jews of funds which they’ve managed to put together by the sweat of their brows.”139 Simple commercial transactions, Halévy reported in 1876, could provide grounds for the denial of justice to specific subcategories of people bent over with fear. For example, a Muslim customer could return a few hours after making a purchase, and accuse the Jewish merchant of having cheated on weights or measures. The arbitrariness fostered by the absence of restraint when Jews were involved created a heavy atmosphere of violence and threat, of fear and submission. One became accustomed to the denial of the most basic rights, in a universe where “justice” was a word stripped of meaning. The testimony of the lowliest Muslim was validly receivable in law against a Jew, who could be convicted on it, but a Jew’s word against a Muslim’s was worth nothing. This gave rise to a long series of abuses in commercial transactions entered into with Jewish craftsmen and tradesmen, and resulted in many murders of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. If insecurity was the norm

58  |  Jews in Arab Countries for everyone, it was worse for those whose lives were hardly worth anything in the eyes of local justice. Aggression against them carried no great risk. The AIU’s archives in Morocco for the period 1870 to 1910140 overflow with news items of crimes motivated by gain where Jews were murdered, generally in order to steal from them. It was thus necessary to live under the protection of a “guardian.” As Foucauld explained, if custom offered at least some protection for everyone from his fellow citizens, “nothing, nowhere, protects the foreigner; everything is permitted against him. You can steal, pillage or kill—no-one will take up his defense. If he resists, everyone will fall upon him.” Although present in Morocco for centuries, the Jew was nevertheless considered to be a foreigner, and his life there would have been completely impossible without recourse to the ancient form of protection call debiha, “an act by which one places oneself under the permanent protection of a person or a tribe.”141 Chaos is more selective than may be thought; the deterioration in their situation did not touch all Moroccans in equal measure. As a review of financially motivated crime stories in the newspapers shows, subjected Jews saw their condition worsen as the Moroccan state’s control unraveled, while Europeans, on the other hand, pushed for their advantage even before coming ashore as colonizers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the degrading condition of Moroccan Jews was the subject of numerous reports in Europe and the United States, resulting in the transmission to the sultan of complaints. This is well established from various diplomatic representations (in particular from Spain), providing direct evidence of abuse of power and denial of justice. It is for this reason that Max Nordau repeatedly cites Morocco among those countries where the condition of the Jews is particularly degrading. Nordau, who served as Theodor Herzl’s right-hand man during the first World Zionist Congress, held in Basel at the end of August 1897, raised the worldwide Jewish situation at the opening of each Congress. Those in Russia, Romania, Morocco, Yemen, and Persia were among the worst cases. Although not uniform, the dhimma system evolved during nearly twelve centuries, from a sacred and unquestionable starting point. In the nineteenth century, in a situation of ubiquitous impoverishment, the Jews stand out as even more crushed than everyone else, thanks to the position of inferiority imposed on them. Their poverty is aggravated by social opprobrium and disdain, as well as by their confinement to designated districts. At the top of the social scale, however, a well-off minority is shielded from dhimma by their ties overseas and with the European trading houses that, since the sixteenth century, employed polyglot Christian and Jewish agents. But the immense majority suffers from poverty; thus, in Tripoli in 1900, 70 percent of the Jews are accordingly exempt

“Barbaric Lands” | 59 from payment of community taxes established to enjoy dispensation from military service. The mercantile Jewish elite, busily developing contacts with Europeans, displayed little solidarity with the surrounding army of paupers. In Mogador, in 1866, French consul Auguste Beaumier writes of “a dozen Jewish families inhabiting the Casbah who are comfortably well off, even relatively rich and powerful, but for the most part indifferent—if not entirely deaf—to the need for any improvement in the condition of their fellow Jews of the mellah, whom they dominate as masters.”142 In the second half of the nineteenth century, economic injustice, compounded by remoteness, strikes widely, and—as usual—hits a subjected community with particular force. Even in those areas where the state still exercises some authority, peace and order are not a given. In 1883, Charles de Foucauld reported constant insecurity in Morocco. Jews were particularly exposed to it because they are especially vulnerable to false testimony against them. In this psychological and juridical context, economic accusations become difficult to rebut. Jewish businessmen were frequently accused of concealing goods from customs officials. Of course, sometimes this is well founded, but often it is not, with the goal being to “appropriate the merchandise.”143 After payment of royalties or even the sale of the merchandise, an accusation of fraud is enough to achieve incarceration, beatings, and the imposition of a fine. Locked up without legal recourse, the Jewish merchant paid the penalty, sometimes needing to borrow from friends and family to get out of jail. Incidents occurred where Jewish creditors asking for payments due to them were attacked violently, especially when their debtors were powerful. It could occur that after several days or even weeks of work, an artisan would seek payment, but would instead be thrown behind bars and soundly beaten. In both Morocco and Iraq, many Jewish merchants had to form alliances with an Arab partner in order to obtain import permits, which would otherwise be denied them as Jews. Jewish businessmen thought to possess assets were subjected, under various pretexts, to a multiplicity of fines, and to a doubling or even a tripling of customs duties. As Joseph Halévy reported from Morocco in 1876: “In summary, through various means, the Jewish merchant is surrounded on all sides by traps, and whatever his natural perspicacity and intelligence, it doesn’t take long before he is brought to ruin by the insatiable cupidity of officials.”144 The shakedowns in Morocco could sometimes operate at large scale when, for example, a pasha, short of funds, decides to impose a specific tax on Jews, or to dramatically increase the jizya. Paradoxically, this happened to the Jews of Yemen under Ottoman rule, although the dhimma was abolished in 1856: thus, in tribal areas far from Sana’a, Jews had to pay a double jizya, once to the capital and

60  |  Jews in Arab Countries again to tribal chiefs, in order to buy security. The Turks, meanwhile, required the same sum as had previously been paid, but from a community diminished in size as a result of emigration. Repeated year after year, these depredations fueled emigration, and they explain, at least in part, the first wave of migration to Eretz Israel in the late 1870s. Unjust, too, were the brutal expulsions, as in March 1891 when the local Mogador potentate expelled 200 Jewish families who had lived in the area for seventy years. AIU school director Elmaleh noted: “It is an out and out expulsion, just as practiced in Russia, and something which hitherto was absolutely unknown in Morocco. . . . How to liquidate all of this [i.e., their assets] within one week? The misfortune of these people is indescribable.”145 Another shakedown was perpetrated in 1911 at Asni, in Morocco, when the local ruler obliged the community to supply the wood needed for the construction of his properties, amounting to 5,000 francs—an “unattainable sum for such a poor community.” During several days, flanked by the ruler’s soldiers—whose costs, moreover, they had to bear—the Jews were forced to neglect their own work in order to cut the requisite amount of wood and deliver it to the ruler. Wherever their work was judged insufficient, their livestock was seized and the Jews, shut within the mellah, were prevented from fleeing to Marrakesh.146 Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco developed into a form of protectionsubmission, with the patron-client rapport characterized by the Jewish subjects’ internalized inferiority. In 1946, senior French official Etienne Coidan, in a report on Zionism in Morocco, analyzed “the Jewish situation”: “In the Siba [sic] region, the condition of the Jews is worse. They only manage to subsist by placing their families and their possessions under the authority of a ‘siyed’, a lord and master whom they have paid for protection through the dbiha—an animal sacrifice— and many gifts or services.”147 Regarding the Jews of Rif, American ethnographer David Hart noted in 1955 that “the crucial point of the Jew’s comportment, the guarantee of their security, involves humility; conversely, for any powerful man, to own ‘his Jew’ is a sign of prestige.”148 The Jew was thus situated midway between a man and a piece of furniture. That is why killing him was, paradoxically, a crime resulting in graver consequences than other homicides, not vis-àvis the victim’s family, who would be monetarily compensated, but vis-à-vis his master, because of the insult inflicted on him by thwarting his role of protector. Whether times were peaceful or not, subjection was the backdrop to this universe. If the master was magnanimous, “his” Jew will pass his days peacefully. If the master was cruel, he would be at his mercy. His peace of mind depended on the complete acceptance of his state of submission. This is why any sign of emancipation was perceived as a revolt, and an upright posture appeared as an affirmation of virility, or indeed of humanity, all of which were slaps in the face of his master. Hence the prohibition on carrying arms, or riding a mount other than

“Barbaric Lands” | 61 in side-saddle. In addition, there was the frequently repeated imposition of the requirement to walk barefoot, a shoe being the sign of a higher social standing. The violence to which Moroccan Jews were subject explains why, following the appearance of European powers, Jewish communities sought protection by a panicked rush in the direction of Europe. It also accounts for the Jews’ generally favorable welcome to the colonizers. Personal relations were the warp on which was woven the weft of political relations, constituting feudal patronage, submission, and protection. Such ties were first and foremost of an interpersonal nature. Whenever central power grew stronger, these ties withered, and “the Jew”—deprived of his feudal protection—all the more strongly experienced a sense of humiliation. This is also why memories of Moroccan Jews so often appear to be at odds with each other, some evoking a kind of Eden, and others a land of violence and hate. Both of these facets are true, and are in fact complementary rather than contradictory. A strong central state encourages integration, but at the same time leaves the way open to a humiliation all the more burning in that those who were abased sought to raise their heads. Beyond everyone’s agreement “not to love the Jews,” everyone also had “his own Jews,” whom he protected against the violence of outsiders. Even as late as 1937, Leon Ninio (author of an April 1937 AIU report, Les Juifs de la Montagne) reported from Teddili, Morocco, home to a modest Jewish community of 250, “the Muslims don’t love the Jews, but their local loyalties are so strong that they protect them against other Moroccans from outside Teddili. They attend Jewish weddings, and the Jews attend Arab weddings.”149 They are undoubtedly dhimmis, but dhimmis linked to the Muslims of their locality and against all those who are not of the locality—thus integrated and ostracized at the same time, within relationships wholly dominated by the patron/client model. Protection was the counterpart of submission, which could at any time become servitude, but this individual protection was also the sole (more or less effective) firewall against a violent society. This vassalage explains why the lord was addressed directly; this included the Sultan of Morocco, the highest of lords, in order to inform him about the situation of overcrowded mellahs about which, it seems, he really did not want to do anything. In societies based on servitude, one speaks to one’s master—or to the sultan—in a low voice, just as the dhimmi spoke before the Muslim. “Silence is the rule. . . . No-one must raise his voice before the Prophet.” There was no possibility of contradiction in the context of power that by definition was absolute.150 The “benevolence of the sultan towards his Jewish subjects” is an obligatory feature of every history of the modern Maghreb. It is not a groundless assertion, but formulated in that manner it is superficial and obscures the rapport of power. Oppression hid behind the “benevolence” of the magnanimous sultan,

62  |  Jews in Arab Countries who intervened—as is well established—to protect his Jewish subjects. This royal attention, according to the analysis of an AIU correspondent in 1891, provoked resentment and “a feeling of hatred and jealousy” among the Arabs.151 Among mid-level power-holders, such as town governors who were often criticized for the injustices they perpetrated, the overriding reaction was anger. The sultan’s efforts to win hearts and minds reflected the fears of the kingdom in a context of the growing threat posed by Europe’s designs on Morocco, based on a pretext of intervention to relieve the Jews’ distress. Everyone knew that they had to deal with local officials who were generally hostile toward the Jews, as indeed they were toward any other subjects who inspired no fear among such officials. It was thus necessary to negotiate with the caïds, or local chiefs, who often reigned unchecked as virtual potentates. As far as the sultan’s edicts were concerned, the reality was weak and inconsistent enforcement, for these edicts were often ignored by local officials, and thus often had to be requested and reiterated. Yet, Jews found that any relaxation of their status only resulted in further obstacles being placed in their way. Morocco’s Jews were like barometers of political power. To attack them was, clearly, to insult the sultan. However, there were two faces to the policies regulating this most important of the Arab world’s Jewish communities. They were protected by confinement to the mellah, but their misery there only underscored the hollowness of the authority of the sultan, who as his power weakened, ordered more and more mellahs to be established (in Rabat, Marrakesh, Saleh, Tetouan, and Demnat in the nineteenth century). In fact, the sultan sought to affirm his power by crushing the Jews, although during the course of the two preceding centuries, when the power of the Makhzen was firmer, there was no question of shutting up the Jews in the mellahs. The sultan’s benevolence toward his Jewish subjects did not involve solicitude for subjects possessing legal status, but rather protection of inferior beings from violence. To underscore the successful pacification undertaken by a Moroccan sultan, at the end of the seventh century a chronicler reported: “Even a woman or a dhimmi can go to Wadi Nul from Oujda in complete safety.” Instead of an empowering regard for the Jews, they received enfeebling and humiliating benevolence.152 It was well understood that the ramparts of the sultan’s protection could be removed at any time, and moreover that this protection was altogether illusory during interregnums. At such time, inter-clan struggles were exacerbated, and this made Jews convenient targets of vengeance from one side or the other. In such circumstances, many Fez Jews moved to Rabat, only to flee Rabat for refuge in Meknes or elsewhere. Because the life of the Jew belonged to his master or protector, its price could be high—not intrinsically, for his life was worth nothing—but because it had

“Barbaric Lands” | 63 bearing on the image of his master and protector: his sid. From Yemen, Habschush reported that if a slave, a woman, a child, or a Jew committed a crime, the matter did not fall within the purview of ordinary criminal law, because such persons were owned subjects.153 “Their blood will be preserved under our dominion,” explained Iman Yahia with regard to Yemen’s Jews, when he defeated the Turks.154 “Whenever there are troubles, the mellah might be pillaged,” noted Frenchman Edmond Doutté in 1914 with regard to Demnat.155 Every conflictual situation placed Jews in a delicate position. In the chaos prevailing in Morocco between 1894 (with the death of Sultan Hassan I) and the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, anti-Jewish violence mushroomed, with pogroms in Oujda and Casablanca in 1908, and Fez in 1912. Jewish helplessness could be thoroughgoing. In 1911, in Debdou in Morocco, Jews paid Arab mercenaries to protect them. Yet, their protectors, fed and paid, warmed themselves by burning Jews’ doors and beds, and carried off anything of value, thus robbing those they were meant to protect.156 In this situation of semi-anarchy, helplessness often leads to absolute tyranny, as in Ouezzan in 1908, where Jewish notables were thrown into prison and despoiled of their possessions, the synagogue sacked, Torah scrolls burned, and land titles had to be turned in to city officials.157 In Morocco and Yemen in particular, the mounting violence led to emigration, although even departure required authorization. On several occasions, Jews found themselves taken hostage during local conflicts, such as inter-tribal clashes. This was true as well for ethnic revolts between Kabyles and Arabs, such as in 1867 when the anti-Arab revolt of the Rif Kabyles descended into an anti-Jewish riot in Tetouan, provoking the exodus of many Jewish communities toward the large cities. In Yemen, in 1905, Jews were caught up in the conflict between Sunni and Shi’a.158 Popular antigovernment uprisings, initially without explicit anti-Jewish slogans, almost always ended with Jews as targets, because there was no fear of reprisals from Jews. In Morocco during the period from 1894 to 1897, tribal revolts against the Makhzen led to attacks against the mellahs, in particular at Demat, where the Jewish quarter was invaded. Girls and women were abducted, and had to be ransomed.159 Each change of sovereign in Morocco heralded a critical period, much feared by the Jews, as, for example, in 1894, on the death of Moulay Hassan and the accession to the throne by Moulay Abd el-Aziz. In the context of tribal wars, towns in the interior, such as Demnat and Ait-Mellal, were pillaged, Jews massacred, women raped and then sold, children kidnapped and sold at the markets. Armed contingents outside the towns lived off the countryside, stealing, wounding, and killing, for the most part with impunity. This did not necessarily

64  |  Jews in Arab Countries imply hatred, just routine aggression against the hapless. Nevertheless, the communities were seized with panic as soon as trouble broke out. Finally, vanquished troops avenged their defeat by attacking the Jews, even where the Jews had played no part in the fighting. When French troops in Morocco prepared to occupy Oujda in 1911, the Arabs were “avenging themselves on our brothers in Debdou,” cabled the director of the Oujda consistoire, or Jewish community, to the AIU Central Committee. Their houses were “filled with Arabs who force the Jews to feed them . . . [who] pillage and ravage . . . and abuse our daughters and wives.”160 The indigenous populations took revenge on the colonizer by attacking those who were the most vulnerable and moreover often suspected of sympathizing with the colonizer. In late August 1897, the Comité Central of the AIU received a letter from the heads of the Fez consistoire, setting out the abuses committed against the Jews: reinstatement of humiliating laws, extortion of payments, and above all, caning, which was inflicted on the mere command of a leader. All Moroccans—Jews and Muslims—were vulnerable to this punishment, but for the Jews it was systematic. This was not a question of a few lashes of the whip or baton, but rather a punishment that could reach five hundred, seven hundred or even a thousand blows on the back, the legs, the feet, or the soles of the feet of the poor unfortunate victim, to the point where he died or was mutilated for life. The Jews’ most obsessive fear was first and foremost the return of caning, which, the Fez AIU school director wrote, killed “with the cruelty characterizing the implacable enemies of our race.”161 This was a return of the practice: in 1864 a firman, or royal command, of the Moroccan sultan had abolished caning of the Jews, but fifty years later the firman was a dead letter. The firman had been issued by the sultan as a goodwill gesture to the West, which—through the voice of Sir Moses Montefiore—had called for it. Caning could be inflicted on mere suspicion of theft, without need for any investigation. Such was the case in 1923 of the fifteen-year-old David Ben Braham Bitton, of Marrakesh, who received 400 strokes of the lash to force him to admit to the crime. The boy was left to die. “When they tried to remove his trousers, his skin—stuck to the cloth—detached from his body.”162 Often, people were condemned for a mere trifle, such as avoiding a formal hearing by trying to come to a negotiated settlement, or for a delay in the delivery of goods that had been ordered, for not having paid tax of one franc, or—like the man condemned to receive eight hundred strikes of the cane—for having insufficient funds.163 In addition, the victim of the bastonnade (caning) was often robbed, as his possessions were left unattended while he received the punishment. In Mazagan, in August 1899, a Jewish peddler was condemned to 700 strikes of the cane. Afterward he could not move for a month. His property was stolen during the punishment.164

“Barbaric Lands” | 65 In 1897, from Fez, AIU school director Conquy reported the case of two Jews condemned by the local caïd to more than a thousand blows, a number so high that it had to be administered by eight soldiers. One of the Jews, as he died, was transported on a donkey to his home by other Jews: “His breeches were bloodied, and he could hardly move his limbs. . . . Finally, his hips were black as jet, and were a terrible sight to see. It was a spectacle which struck my heart with pain.”165 Such accounts, impressive by their number, give witness to a community tyrannized by violence and denial of justice always hanging over its head. Additionally there was fear of prison, which was hell for everyone but even worse for the Jewish prisoner, who could expect to be mistreated—sometimes violently—by his Muslim fellow detainees, and pressurized by the jailers. There was fear of the police as well, who displayed “deplorable behavior” against Jewish girls and women of “good conduct.”166 Any excuse would do to extort money, such as when a policeman, without proof, accused a Jew of having sold eau-de-vie to a Muslim. His denials made no difference, and he was imprisoned, but if he agreed to pay bakshish, he would be released with no consequences.167 The same venality characterized prison guards. In Morocco, prisoners received water but no food from the prison administration. The arrival of a Jew was occasion for “a party by his jailers,” reported Monsieur Danon, AIU school director at Larache, in 1909.168 In 1911 he reported that in Marrakesh, without having been ordered to do so, the pasha had Jewish inmates chained, a measure with one objective: to extort money from inmates’ families in order to have the chains removed.169 Corruption undermined and corrupted the administration. Examples are legion in which allegations were never pursued as soon as a judge— with the aid of payment—became convinced to drop the charges. From one end of the Arab world to the other, prison was like “hell,” and “notoriously viewed as death’s ante-chamber.”170 To varying degrees, everyone lived in fear of it. Some, such as Valadji in Baghdad, were well informed, but others, such as Somekh in Yemen in 1903, spoke from personal experience. In Morocco, jail was described as an abyss. On occasion, Jewish community officials or AIU schoolmasters were able to visit an inmate, who may have been caned. Thus, in 1904 the Rabat AIU director wrote that he spent “some moments with one of them [i.e., a Jewish prisoner], I saw that he was dying in his airless and lightless solitary dungeon. If you read some of the descriptions of Moroccan jails, you will get a rather exact idea of what is happening under a sultan who rules in name only.”171 In 1910, Danon, the Marrakesh AIU director, visited two young Jewish porters in Larache, incarcerated for theft: They were dressed in rags which barely covered their scrawny bodies. In this cell, dripping with water and smelling of mold, they crouched on the ground, stiff with cold, their pitiful faces revealing that they had already not eaten for several days. . . . In response to my call, they showed me their feet, bound with

66  |  Jews in Arab Countries iron rings attached to large chains. . . . Hardly had I entered the room when I was suffocated by a horrible odor. Around me, thirty-some prisoners lay on the ground, which had never seen a broom and where rubbish of all sorts was intermingled with the mud. Next to each one of them was a tin bowl, which the guards filled with muddy water—the sole nourishment provided by the prison.”172

A year later, Danon reported on the visit paid by Messod Azoulay to his brother Moise, jailed in Marrakesh: “He saw his brother, standing up against a wall. The Arab executioners had bound him in a horrifying manner: his feet chained, and around his neck an iron collar. Chains and collar were firmly attached to a spike fixed into the wall. He struggled in torment.”173 The purpose of the extreme violence in the prisons was to demonstrate, through terror, the earthly power cast in the image of “the unwatchable God the all-powerful,” whether in fact this was the face of the caliph, the sultan, or just the caïd or local chieftain. The same was true regarding the systematic use of torture, which stripped people of everything, leaving them naked and in absolute isolation in the face of the power crushing them. As late as 1951, a report to the World Jewish Congress read: “Up to the present, both Muslim and Jewish detainees and convicts were put together in common rooms. From this propinquity, immoral and unnatural acts, against nature, occurred every day, especially to young Jews. The complaints of their families, when they dared raise the issue, have until now not led to any result.” 174 In 1908 the French consul at Mosul had few illusions about the local magistrates.175 It seemed that everything could be bought, if needed, in order to move a case along. In that year, the Mosul vali (governor) decided to close the AIU school because it lacked Istanbul’s firman, or authorization. When the Consul sought to intervene, the vali noted “we won’t do anything for nothing.” What was needed here, explained the school director, is the fortitude to live with arbitrariness and in anarchy.”176 Protest seems to have been constrained by censorship of the mail, in particular of “any telegram dealing with the Jewish question,” explained the Baghdad AIU school director in 1889. Moreover, a number of AIU directors were Ottoman subjects, and any appeal abroad could be imputed against them as a crime of treason. As for the judges, continued the director, they “are not free in this country. They will do anything rather than displease the vali.”177 Before the local courts, the word of a non-Muslim was disregarded, and above all in economic matters, the dice were loaded. As a 1913 report from Morocco related: “Rarely does a claim by a poor Jew against an Arab come before the competent authorities. The same moghzanis [police officers] who are paid off by the accused Arab conspire to prevent the Jew from even getting before the

“Barbaric Lands” | 67 hakim [judge, and by extension, a French official]. . . . They make him wait for hours.” He was sent off in the evening and required to appear again the next day “until the exhausted Jew abandons his complaint.”178 There were recurrent complaints of judicial corruption. What was the use of raising a claim in law? In 1867, Bernard Levy, one of the first AIU directors in Tangiers, reported the murder of six Jews in Safi, “horrible crimes of which only our brothers are the victims,” he writes. If this is arguably excessive, it is not a judgment without foundation. In fact, the Pasha of Safi would be paid off by the killers in order to close the file.179 This reality extended well beyond Morocco or Yemen. In 1888 Jacob Valadji described Mesopotamian justice in terms of corruption and violence. “This proverb—‘No justice without bakshish’—is very well known, and much practiced, in the Orient. But nowhere in Turkey is as corrupt or blind as Baghdad.” Of two complainants, he explained, he who pays the most and the fastest will win before the judge. The other one can be instantly put behind bars, and it will be pointless to protest. A zaptié [gendarme] comes along one fine day and seizes you by the collar: you just have to go with him. No matter what steps your relatives undertake before the courts, and no matter how much they affirm the prisoner’s innocence, they will everywhere meet nothing but deaf ears. No money? Then no justice in the Orient. But as soon as you show a few shiny pieces of gold in your palm, well then the prisoner is, of course, completely innocent, the zaptié has seriously breached his duty in seizing an innocent man in the middle of the bazaar, and everyone is wrong except the accused. And of course the other party is the guilty one!180

Justice was merciless toward those too poor to pay off the Pasha, and a fortiori, toward poor Jews, explained the Marrakesh AIU school director in 1902. “Any lawsuit submitted to the Pasha for his judgment will only be decided on the basis of payment of ‘recompense’.” Justice should “sustain its proprietor,” all the more so in that the office of governor was purchased at such a dear price by its incumbent. It must, therefore, generate returns, as Moise Levy comments: “Pity on the poor unfortunate devil . . . incapable of laying anything before the feet of his master.”181 For his part, the new Marrakesh school director wrote in 1905: “Justice exists in name only; everything is corrupt, and all good consciences can be bought.”182 In Morocco, justice seesaws between money and floggings. People pay to avoid caning and prison. If you cannot pay money, then you end up paying personally. Often—in the more serious cases—both forms of payment are required. What, then, should be expected of a justice system without professional judges, without judicial independence, without a legal code (other than the Koran), and in the thrall of power? In 1883, in Morocco, Charles de Foucauld described justice

68  |  Jews in Arab Countries as dispensed “at the cost of blood, once it is limited to paying for the murder of an unfortunate victim. And one need not pay at all if one is powerful . . . for who would dare to claim against him? This sort of murder occurs frequently.”183 As indeed do legal murders, resulting from canings, such as the case of the poor Jew of Mogador, caned to death in 1864 on the order of the caliph, before whom he had come seeking justice after a theft.184 Such impunity only encouraged violence, which constituted the framework of social relations. Precariousness was the common lot of all subjects of the realm. Murders (with theft as the sole motive) occured often, in broad daylight and in front of many witnesses. These crimes’ authors were known but frequently went unpunished, which “only encourages disorder on the part of the other Arabs.”185 Generally, it was then under pressure of a European (or sometimes American) consulate that the Pasha had an investigation opened. On their own, the Jews would have no recourse, and even all the more so if one of them was accused of having blasphemed against the Prophet, or insulted the Koran and the sultan. Facing a justice system described by all observers as partisan and corrupt, violence and fear pushed the Jews to retreat, and “to bend their necks and withdraw into their shells,” in the words of the Sefrou AIU school director.186 With the word of a Jew being disregarded by Koranic justice, it became necessary to convince Muslim witnesses to overcome their fear of speaking. However, this rarely sufficed, since one had to be able to request justice while remaining in a position of subordination. It was by no means forbidden for a Jew to so request, but this very step took him outside the humble position in which the dhimma enclosed him, and thus led to insults and blows. The Jew was thus a “juridical non-entity” as Sémach put it in his travel account from Yemen. 187 The legal standing of the Moroccan Jew wass not improved from what it had been, explained Jacques Lazarus to the World Jewish Congress in February 1951: “Makhzen justice is only justice in name. The most elementary principles of law are ignored.”188 Was the Jew in Yemen more heavily punished than the Muslim? This is what was asserted by a number of witnesses, who cited the absence of support rendering the Jew more vulnerable. Both before and after the establishment of the protectorate in Morocco in 1912, the most insistent request of the Jewish community was for the ability to be exempt from the Muslim justice system. Indeed, the courts seemed incapable of stemming anti-Jewish aggression. “It is well understood that for our Muslims, the Jews count for nothing,” writes an AIU teacher from Libya in 1897.189 Despite the Ottoman constitution of 1908, and the Young Turks’ proclamation of equality before the law, when appearing before Arab tribunals, “there are judges who’d let a Muslim killer off because his victim is Jewish,” noted Meir Levy from Tripoli in 1909.190 This explains the very slight

“Barbaric Lands” | 69 value placed on a Jewish life, as noted by contemporary observers. Previously, “Muslims could kill a Jew like they could kill a chicken, and no-one objected,” reported the Kirkuk AIU school director in 1912.191 But accessories to injustice could also be found among the subjugated themselves. In Morocco, for example, it happened that “the Sheik of the Jews,” who was responsible for the police and courts of the mellah, would refer plaintiffs to the court of the local caïd, unless they paid the “Sheik” off in cash or sugared bread.192 For his part, the caïd would remember to see that the “Sheik” was taken care of, when an occasion to do so arose. This is why in November 1951, the Moroccan Jewish community informed the French Résident Général of its wish to see justice improve, including the nomination of Jewish jury members in the criminal courts across the Cherifian Empire, something at the time only done in Casablanca.193 A muted fear of violence hovered over the community; everyone lived in the shadow of a permanent sense of insecurity. In August 1912, a rumor spread in Marrakesh that the Jews were going to be kicked out of their quartier and relegated to some vacant tracts of land, because the mellah had become “too big and too beautiful” for them: “They are too comfortable there; such comforts are only allowed for Muslims.”194 Such fear, just below the surface, coexisted with a fragile but real MuslimJewish conviviality: this was the quotidian framework of their lives. Fear animated the accounts of Jews in Iraq, Morocco, Libya, and Yemen. Naim Kattan noted that this violence was inexplicable, as was the muted or explicit violence against Jews who participated in the Arab festivals, when aggressiveness was given free rein. “Generally, during any Islamic celebration, groups of Arabs run through the streets of the old quarter of town; they try sometimes to brutalize isolated Jews, or even dash towards the hara,” reported a Tripoli AIU teacher in 1933. The police would come out with reinforcements on such occasions, to “prevent the Arabs, who are armed with metal-tipped or nailed clubs and cudgels, from reaching our fellow Jews. . . . A latent animosity smolders.” “The most painful thing,” the teacher continued, “is the state of insecurity haunting each and every Jew.”195 This daily reality, where closeness and otherness mingled indistinctly, was more significant than the outbreaks of deadly violence, which in fact remained rare. “My brother, who is in service to a Shi’ite,” reported Sassoon Heskel, a Baghdad AIU schoolteacher, in 1895, “sometimes tells me tales which make me shudder in horror. The Muslim employees who work for his master never stop teasing, mistreating and insulting him—in a word, they make him sick of life. ‘You, you Jews,’ one of them said to him one day, ‘we wouldn’t think twice about ripping your guts out, slicing you from ear to ear, and soaking the ground with your blood.’”196

70  |  Jews in Arab Countries It is often now asserted that this fear was exaggerated. However, archival reports, and memoirs freed of ornament or embellishment, put paid to such rosetinted interpretations. The temptation is great to relegate the violence to the distant past, and to imagine that past as if it somehow belonged to a vanished world to which nothing today links us. And yet the fear passed to the younger generations, as Albert Memmi explains in The Salt Statue.197 All these Jewish populations suffered from this endemic violence, where anyone wielding the slightest bit of power was tempted to abuse it. At Mosul in August 1908, an AIU teacher evoked the “absolute insecurity” of a “country which is savage and hostile to civilization,” noting that “it is never advisable to leave one’s home after six o’clock in the evening.”198 The sense of insecurity even determined the cost of real estate. The placing of a guard, the construction of a protective wall, or the installation of a gate are enough to push up prices, explained the director of the Tripoli AIU school in 1899.199 “[This is] a land where lies and violence dominate, from the top to the bottom of society,” stateed Moise Nahon in Tangier in 1898, with regard to Morocco.200 “Five-sixths of this country is closed to Christians,” notes Charles de Foucauld in 1883. “No-one can move about in safety . . . and Europeans can only travel in disguise.”201 Xenophobic outbursts of violence were directed in the first instance against European Christians, designated derogatorily as “roumis.” In 1899, at Fez, Jacob Elbaz, a Jewish merchant from Oran, was insulted and struck by an Arab in the marketplace of the medina. “Unclean Christian, how dare you speak back to a sharif, a noble Arab?” A mob of the “faithful” rushed on the unfortunate merchant, who was beaten roundly while the crowd shouted: “Death to the roumi, burn him with petrol!”202 In Fez the following year, a Jew mistaken for a Christian was the victim of a banal altercation that got out of hand. Dressed as a European and astride a horse, the man was chased by a wild mob, which killed him, smashing his skull and tearing apart his body, covering it with straw and burning it.203 In these countries, where carrying a bladed weapon was a sign of enfranchisement, Jews had no right to bear arms, not even a simple knife. Between May 1880 and January 1881, 128 murders were recorded in Morocco; 12 percent—14 people—of the victims were Jews, a percentage five times greater than the proportion of Jews in the population (2.5 percent).204 When a town was sacked, the entire population suffered; the Arab quarters, too, would be vandalized and pillaged, but according to nearly all witnesses, the fury directed against the Jews was the most intense, because they presented no risk of resistance, nor of revenge. Impunity was the unspoken rule, which explains why aggression was always more often targeted against the Jews. “The Muslim merchants, too, are robbed and seized for ransom. But the most pitiable victims are definitely the Jews,” recounts Christian Houel, a French witness, during troubles in Casablanca in

“Barbaric Lands” | 71 1907. “The men have their throats cut, the girls are raped, the boys taken off into slavery. . . . In the unarmed mellah, everything is taken—money and girls.”205 Jews were thus not merely victims of the ambient insecurity, among many other victims. Besides the impunity described above, Jews were also targeted in the sermons of certain preachers. Many anti-Jewish incidents would take place during Ramadan, the “period of over-excitement,” as Western consuls reported.206 Between 1817 and 1831 in Baghdad, the governor, Daoud Pasha, and his religious counselor Mulla Muhammad, pushed many Jews (among them, members of the Sassoon family) to flee to Iran, India, and even Australia. This climate of diffused violence was reported even during periods said to be quite tranquil. In Iraq, for example, during the British Mandate (1918–1932), a Jew recalled “every day was filled with insults against the Jews. To call a Muslim a ‘son of a Jew’ was a greater insult than calling him a ‘son of a whore’. Beating up Jews was a common occurrence.”207 The more the European advance progressed, the tougher grew the Arab nationalist reaction. Anti-Jewishness became stronger, Jews being viewed less as “agents of foreigners” than as vulnerable targets at which resentment could be aimed. Thus, in Morocco, for example, where incidents between Jews and Arabs were already quite frequent, things degenerated even further in the precolonial context. As noted, in 1907 “the Arabs are so stirred up that all it takes is for a Jew to brush up slightly against them for the anger they feel towards the Europeans to gush forth.”208 The same fragile climate prevailed in Mesopotamia. In October 1889, in Baghdad, Jacob Valadji reported on the anti-Jewish riot that, on a “flimsy pretext,” had shaken the city fifteen days previously. “Since September fifteenth there has been no more safety for the Jews of Baghdad. Hitherto, they were despised by Baghdad’s Muslims, and now . . . they have fallen to a state of absolute nothingness. They have lost much of their freedom. Now, no Jew can walk with his head up high, or peacefully conduct business. Although the Jews have all returned now, the souks are still deserted.” Jews were afraid to open their shops: “Especially over the past few days, the Jews are tracked, followed everywhere like wild beasts. With the Muslims seeing that the Jews at present fear even to be seen in the streets and that the mere glance of a Muslim terrifies them, there is no ruse or wickedness which they won’t concoct to exploit the Jews.”209 In 1900, in Baghdad, Somekh, who just a few years earlier thought that the Jewish community exaggerated the threats, described a “regime of violence and terror.”210 Thirty years later, Naim Kattan would depict Baghdad in the same tone: “We lived side by side with the Muslims. It behooved us, therefore, to avoid their attacks and to draw forth their benevolence, provided they left us in peace.”211 His mother worried about his visible “Jewish background”; she covered his hair, which was “too light” and dressed him in a way that would “hide his Jewish

72  |  Jews in Arab Countries origins.”212 The child walked across the Arab quarter, “advancing into enemy territory,” full of fear.213 Having arrived safely at school, the shame and fear clung to him, because he and his fellow Jewish schoolmates knew that in the world surrounding them, to be a man meant to not let oneself be insulted without reply. Yet every day they suffered insults, feigning having heard and seen nothing. The colonial administration, in particular in the French Maghreb, would later try not to displease the Muslim majority, nor to offend the antisemitism of the European colonists. This explains the relative silence over Arab antisemitism, indeed its discrete encouragement in certain cases. In reality, whether abolished (as in Morocco) or not, dhimma status continued to envenom relations between Jews and Muslims. Moreover, in circumstances where pillaging the Jewish quarter (or more rarely, the European quarters) led neither to reprisals nor even convictions, dhimma status also multiplied denials of justice. Jewish taxpayers had to pay heavier taxes than their Muslim neighbors. In Yemen, in 1910, business licenses were six times more expensive for Jews than for Arabs. In 1924, Iman Yahia required the Jews to “purchase” properties they had occupied since ancient times. He refused to recognize property titles, and required new payments, under the pretext that they were “religious assets” belonging to the state.214 Injustice also struck Jewish artisans, obliged to work “voluntarily” for the caïd, or to supply him with merchandise without charge, as frequently occurred in Morocco. Such practices were apparently the exception and not the rule, but they encouraged the repeated recourse to such abuses. The most terrifying fear remained that of the sacking of the Jewish quarter. In early August 1907, Makhzen troops, intermingled with the populace, made the Jews pay for the arrival of the French by pillaging Casablanca’s mellah. For three days the mellah was ransacked, torn asunder down to its doors and windows; even the AIU school furniture was stolen. Synagogues were desecrated, rimonim (silver Torah ornaments) stolen, and books burned. The indigent and the poor—that is, the great majority—were victims of the sacking. That is why, originating as they do from the mellah or the hara, Jewish working classes generally have a painful memory of Jewish-Arab coexistence. It was these working classes—and not the tiny Jewish bourgeois class whose houses were dispersed in other quartiers, intermingled with those of Arabs and Europeans—who were most usually the target of violence perpetrated by the surrounding populations. The dimensions of impoverishment in the Jewish community are underscored, for example, by the fact that in 1900, 70 percent of Tripoli’s Jewish population was exempt from community taxation. Abduction for purposes of ransom was a frequent practice in the slavery environment of precolonial Morocco. For the Jews, this was often accompanied

“Barbaric Lands” | 73 by forced conversion, or sale as an actual slave. The possibility of vengeance was essentially nil, as were the chances of getting justice. This was what made the Jewish communities so vulnerable: “Islamism reigns,” reported Joseph Halévy in 1876, “and its inherent fanaticism can play itself out against a Jewish population from which annually it extracts numerous victims.” He mentions the kidnapping of children and young girls above all, the parents being powerlessness to get them back. “If they persist, they are made to disappear, and no-one talks about them any further.”215 At the end of the nineteenth century, with the Arab world beginning to sense that it was on the eve of being invaded and colonized, the situation of the Jews deteriorated. Resentment focused on this minority suspected of favoring the Europeans or even being their accomplices. Thus, in Morocco during the years 1870–1900, the litany of murders is impressive. In 1888, the AIU addressed the French Minister of Foreign Affairs with a summary of the tortures and beatings leading to death, and the thousands of other examples of violence that had gone unpunished: “The officials and the populace treat them as people against whom everything is permitted.” From 1864 to 1880, some 307 Jews were murdered in different localities around Morocco, a very high figure when compared to the number of Jews in the general population: “A proverb has it that one can kill up to seven Jews without punishment.”216 Between 1862 and 1912 a litany of sadistic acts filled hundreds of pages in the AIU reports relating to Morocco. The view of their Arab neighbors presented in Jewish-Moroccan accounts was staggering. These reports, such as one from Fez in 1898, described “cruelty” and “evil,” and “veritable pleasure taken in making an unfortunate Jew suffer.”217 A number of external chroniclers used the same terms; for example, Joseph Halévy, in Marrakesh in 1876, speaks of “Arab cruelty.”218 The quotidian harassment suffered by these scapegoats, powerless people serving as whipping posts for the frustrations of others, made for a daily condition paved with insults that incessantly reminded them of their subjected state. It was a life that can be lived, but only as long as they kept their eyes lowered. The phenomenon of forced conversions seems to have been more a feature of Shi’ite lands (Yemen and Persia) than elsewhere, even if it did not involve huge numbers of people. Jews were generally permitted to practice their faith, apart from certain specific circumstances: in the ninth century during the conversion of a portion of North African Jewry; in Persia in the nineteenth century with forcible conversions in Meched; or in the twentieth century, with the affair of Yemeni Jewish orphans. At the time of the most violent persecution, converted Jews held secretly to their faith by developing Marrano-like practices, which could still be found after 1945. In 1905, the Pact of Omar was renewed again. Among other things, one read in it that the Jews “do not have the right to straddle the saddle when riding, but rather only to mount like women” that “they shall not raise their voices when

74  |  Jews in Arab Countries reading or blow loudly into their shofars” (the ritual ram’s horn). Finally, that it was “their duty to recognize the superiority of the Muslim and to respect him.” 219 In Yemen, in 1909, after Imam Yahia’s victory over the Turks, Jews in the liberated territories were called on to convert. Yemen was becoming an even more inhospitable land than the rest of the Arab world, with forced conversions in the country occurring much more frequently than in Shi’ite Persia. “At the rate things are going, there’s a fear that soon there will be no more Jews in Yemen,” wrote Somekh in September 1909.220 In 1922, Imam Yahia reintroduces the ancient custom of “Jewish orphans,” for those whose father had died and who were below 13 years of age; these children were commanded to convert to Islam. Tradition teaches that every child coming into the world is born in the Muslim religion; it is, in fact, only the parents who have misdirected them. At their death, therefore, the child should return to the religion “of its birth.” The putting into practice of this decree, attested since the seventh century but only in rare cases, hit the Jewish community like an earthquake. Between 1872 and 1905 the Ottoman reconquest had led this rule—by then barely applied—to be virtually forgotten. But in the 1920s, influenced by Shi’ite dignitaries, the Imam brought it back into force. At Hodeida in 1923, forty-three Jewish orphans were called on to convert. Some were beaten, even tortured. In remote regions, the decree had scarcely been applied; whenever he could, the Imam reacted with all the violence of Shi’ite strictness. Aided by foreign Jewish communities, Yemenite Jews tried to ransom the orphans, but the sums demanded of them were colossal. Recalcitrants were locked up in dungeons and beaten. When they gave in, the conversion took place in public, and everyone was required to attend. For the Jews, it was a spectacle of mourning. Forced conversion was practiced through the 1930s, particularly in backward regions such as Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan: “Young Jewish girls are not allowed to remain Jewish. They are forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslims,” reported the Mosul AIU director in 1934.221 The practice continued in Yemen even after the Second World War.222 These forced conversions should be evaluated in light of the fate of other minority communities. The comparison is devastatingly negative for Lebanese Christians in particular, in light of the events of 1841, 1846, and 1860. However, in the case of Lebanon, the landing of French forces and the holding of an international conference in Istanbul on June 9, 1861 permitted the granting of administrative and financial autonomy to Lebanese Christians. The Jews were not persecuted in similar proportions to the Christians, because from the Muslim point of view, this derisory minority posed no geopolitical issue. That of course was not the case with Christians, in particular Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, whose massacre in 1894–1896 provoked an international mobilization, including the 1903 Congress of Brussels. Nor was it the case with the

“Barbaric Lands” | 75 Assyro-Chaldeans, a less well-known Christian minority, 250,000 of whom were massacred by Muslim forces during the First World War, all within the boundaries of modern Iraq. Such violence was reiterated following the independence of Iraq in 1932, with the elimination by the Iraqi Army (supported by Bedouins and Kurds) of the Christian village of Simel, near Mosul, in 1933. Between 350 and 700 were killed, and 50,000 Christians fled. On August 29, 1933, the assistant director of the Baghdad AIU school reported that twenty Jews had been killed in these massacres. Among the Jewish minority, everyone understood that tomorrow, the fate of the Assyro-Chaldeans could be their fate too. In Yemen and above all in Persia, just as previously in Europe, the imposed conversions nurtured an underground Judaism, forcibly watered down, and that subsisted sometimes more than a century after the conversion of the ancestors. The adherence to Islam could sometimes be rather superficial, it being sufficient to pronounce the ritual formula of shaada, or “witnessing” (“There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet”), and showing some external signs, such as Friday prayer, “all the while remaining secretly faithful to Judaism within the four walls of their houses.”223 What many call “Muslim fanaticism” crystallized above all around the Shi’ite world, in particular on the occasion of the traditional Sbaya pilgrimages. Naim Kattan recalled having seen, as a child, men armed with daggers and swords marching in an atmosphere of violence and blood, while he hid in a state of “defensive numbness,” not daring to make the slightest movement even of his eyelashes, which would reveal his presence “to this multitude of demons.”224 Muslim fanaticism would soon be challenged by the Western Enlightenment; the 1908 Young Turks revolution was viewed as a precursor of that challenge. This revolution, explained an AIU official in Baghdad in 1909, would force Muslims to renounce the project of spreading Islam across the face of the earth. “Once they [Muslims] attain their freedom, they will be obliged to put a brake on their hatred” of infidels, those “unclean beings, detested by Allah, who, they say, ought to disappear from the world.” But the same official considered that Muslim resentment risked worsening as the values of the Enlightenment continued to make headway. The more injustice was muzzled, the more the Jews escaped from their role of whipping-post for Arabs who themselves were powerless and crushed by iniquity. Yet, the adoption of a constitution in the Ottoman world, including in its Arab possessions, “in protecting the Jews against arbitrariness and Muslim malevolence, has exasperated the Muslims.”225 These brief remarks, made well before the appearance of the Zionist movement in the Arab world, casts light on one of the motor forces of anti-Jewish violence in that world. The missives sent to the West called for the respect of basic rights, and for an end to the humiliation, slapping, spitting, and insults. “With each passing day

76  |  Jews in Arab Countries we are more badly mistreated, despised and trampled underfoot,” reported a schoolmaster from Baghdad in 1895, specifying that because of religious Muslims—both Sunni and Shi’a—“we have no hope of living in peace and being considered men.”226 This only further lowered Jews’ own self-image, as well as their image in the eyes of their neighbors.227 Their impotence undermined their self-respect and destroyed even further the figure of the Jew in the Arab imagination of the time. This reality cannot be masked by adorning—as some commentators have done—Jewish renunciation of violence in terms of virtuous ideals, in effect interpreting as a moral choice that which is first and foremost the result of oppression. The sacking of the vulnerable Jewish quarter was, in the words of Mohamed Kenbib, “une tradition séculaire de la société musulmane nord-africaine” (a centuries-old tradition of North African Muslim society).228 In April 1912, the Fez Jewish quarter was sacked, while the rioters were “looking for all French inhabitants of Fez, in order to kill them.”229 A few weeks previously, French troops had collected all weapons. The mellah was thus disarmed; there were five rifles, and 400 refugees. Joseph Elmaleh and his family took refuge in the zoological gardens adjacent to the sultan’s palace. Many others joined them, hoping to gain safety. In the evening, the sultan opened the gates of his zoo to the refugees. They passed the night in the rain, hungry and frozen with fear. When calm was restored, Elmaleh reached the French Embassy where, with the help of other diplomatic missions and the royal authority, he organized aid. He evoked the “atrocious wounds” of the injured, many of whom would die. Two French doctors who were put at the disposition of the Jewish community visited the refugees, still sheltering in the palace zoo, “without clothing, sleeping on the bare ground or sheltering in lions’ cages, trembling with fever, stricken with dysentery. . . . How can a new life be built on such ruins?” On April 12, 1912, Elmaleh visited the disaster-stricken mellah with several French officials. He took Eugène Regnault, a French government representative, to see the ruins, and said that Regnault “reports an impression of unforgettable horror.” Violence still smoldered. In order to move about outside the European quarter, Elmaleh “dressed as an Arab.”230 Linked to the arrival of the French, this pogrom was the acme of violence in Morocco, in which the mellah served as the lightning rod for public anger. Elmaleh continues: “We were the innocent sacrificial victims of the anti-French movement which broke out in Fez. . . . We were the most cruelly attacked because with every explosion of popular anger in Morocco, vengeance is wreaked upon the mellahs, and it is there that the thirst for hatred is quenched.”231 In fact, Jewish existence is less an object of hate than a convenient way to let off steam in times of violence. That is one of the key functions of Jewish dhimma, especially in

“Barbaric Lands” | 77 Morocco and Yemen, where it was never tempered by any constitutional arrangements, as it was in the Ottoman Empire. Soldiers assigned to protect the mellah were sometimes “the first to rush upon Jewish houses.”232 At best, they attended as spectators, sometimes helping the rioters to transport their booty. With regard to the pogrom that bloodied the Tunis hara, Albert Memmi describes the infantry who, before setting off for the massacre, fall on the Jewish quarters, assured of impunity: “following tradition, they may steal, rape and kill.”233 The pillage also enriches profiteers and stolen goods dealers of all types (including Jews), who display little concern for the provenance of goods stolen during the sacking of the mellah. Their backs to the wall, the Jewish minority has no ally—neither the sultan nor the colonial power, which for its part is preoccupied with its own interests, despite solemn declarations and a level of assistance that can sometimes prove to be generous on the ground. After the pillaging, immense problems required attention. On May 2, 1912, Elmaleh depicts the devastated city of Fez: rain-soaked refugees, “an uninterrupted flood of men, women and children in rags, bewailing the sight of such ruin . . . faces ravaged by emotions, suffering and privation” when they return to the mellah, which looks like a “district ravaged by the worst cataclysm.”234 Countless stories describe the misery, which was to become one of the main drivers behind the engagement of Western Jews on behalf of the plight of the Eastern Jewries of the Arab-Muslim world.

Notes 1. Bulletin de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (henceforth BAIU), Jan.–June 1877, 56. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Cited in André Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine (1860–1940) (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1965), 114. 5. BAIU, 1903, 140. 6. BAIU, 1904, 140. 7. Yomtov Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yemen,” AIU, 76–77 (report subsequently published in the BAIU). BAIU, 1911. 8. AIU, Egypt I.G. 9. AIU, Morocco, I.E. 1–19. 10. Ibid., 61. 11. Cited in Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Le status des Juifs en terre d’islam. Essor et disparition de la dhimmitude,” in Le Monde séfarade, ed. S. Trigano, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006) 48. 12. René Caillié, Voyage à Tombouctou, vol. 2 (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), 355. 13. Nahum Schlousch, in BAIU, 1906, 108. 14. BAIU, 1909, 90.

78  |  Jews in Arab Countries 15. Paix et Droit, March 1927, 9. 16. In Albert Memmi, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 40. 17. Cited in Bat Ye’or, Le Dhimmi. Profil de l’opprimé en Orient et en Afrique du Nord depuis la conquête arabe (Paris: Anthropos, 1980), 123. 18. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. 19. AIU, France, XV. F. 25. 20. Jean-Claude Berchet, Le Voyage en Orient. Anthologie des voyageurs français dans le Levant au XIX siècle (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, Bouqins), 830. 21. AIU, France XIV. F. 25. 22. BAIU, Jan.-June 1877, 51. 23. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 51; and B. Stora, Les Trois Exiles. Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2006), 40. 24. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 52. 25. BAIU, 1895, 9, speech on the occasion of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Alliance. 26. BAIU, Jan.–June 1876, 8. 27. BAIU, July–Dec. 1873, 74. 28. AIU, Egypt, X.E. 182. 29. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” BAIU, 1911, 111. 30. Bernard Lewis, Islam (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 522. 31. Cited in ibid., 545. 32. Cited in ibid., 603. 33. Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite, 7. 34. Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb moderne, 36. 35. Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 488. 36. Ibid., 547. 37. Ibid., 515. 38. Ibid., 513, 514. 39. Cited in Shmuel Trigano (ed.), Le Monde sépharade, vol.1 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 46–47. 40. Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 492. 41. Cited in Michel Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde. Juifs et Arabes du VII siècle à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 1999), 233. 42. CZA, C10/306. 43. Cited in Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb moderne, 53. 44. AIU, Libya, II.E. 45. Albert Hourani, Histoire des peuples arabes (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 362. 46. AIU, France, IX. E., 9 August 1879. 47. BAIU, 1889, 111. 48. BAIU, October 1904, 58. 49. AIU, France, XIV. F.25, 6 January 1882. 50. AIU, France, XIV. F.25, 27 September 1905. 51. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6. 52. Nahum Schlousch (Slouschz), Travels in North Africa (Philadelphia:, 1927), 7. 53. Cf. Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989. 54. Cf. Nathan Weinstock, Une si longue présence. Comment le monde arabe a perdu ses Juifs, 1947–1967 (Paris: Plon, 2008). For Iraq, other sources indicate an indigence proportion of 65% around 1917.

“Barbaric Lands” | 79 55. Cf. Renzo De Felice, Jews in Arab Land. Libya 1835–1970 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 56. AIU, France, XIV. F.25. 57. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 58. CADN, Morocco, Protectorate, D. I., dossier 24 (“Jewish Questions”). 59. Albert Memmi, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 84. 60. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6. 61. AIU, France, XV, F. 26. 62. L’Illustration, cited in Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 58. 63. AIU, Morocco, V.B. January 1906. 64. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 2., Raphaël Danon, 28 March 1913. 65. BAIU, 1905, 74. 66. De Felice, Jews in Arab Land. 67. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. 68. BAIU, 1877, 55. 69. AIU, Egypt, XIV. 182. 70. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 24 December 1904. 71. AIU, Egypt, XIV, 182, 6 September 1909. 72. AIU, France, XV, F. 26. 73. See AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, Meknes, Edery, 20 December 1931. 74. Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb moderne, 87. 75. Cf. Jean-Pierre Goubert, Une histoire de l’hygiène (Paris: Hachette, 2008). 76. Cf. D. Bensimon-Donath, Évolution du judaïsme marocain sous le protectorat francais, 1912–1956 (Paris: Mouton and Co., 1968), 81. 77. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25. 78. BAIU, 1910, 175. 79. BAIU, 1903, 120. 80. Paix et Droit, May 1926, 8. 81. Jérôme Tharaud and Jean Tharaud, Marrakech ou les seigneurs de l’Atlas (Paris: Plon 1929), 115. 82. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25. 83. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 7., 10 October 1912. 84. Cf. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen.” 85. AIU, Morocco, I. B. January 1935. 86. The slas of Morocco. 87. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. 88. In Haïm Zafrani, Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983), 18. 89. AIU, France, VI. F. 12. Y. Sémach, Rabat, report of 20 October 1930. 90. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1–9, 7 July 1898. 91. BAIU, 1873, 143. 92. de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 397. 93. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 145. 94. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 1–8. 95. Somekh, Cairo, in AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182.

80  |  Jews in Arab Countries 96. In Haïm Habshush, Yémen, trans. from the Arabic by Samia Naïm Sanbar (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 130. 97. AIU, Morocco, II. B., Meknes, 20 December 1931. 98. AIU, Morocco, III., Mogador, June 1913. 99. AIU, Morocco, III. 100. AIU, France, XII. F. Morocco. 101. CZA, C10/474. 102. CAZ, 1943, S6/4578. 103. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25. 104. AIU, Morocco, XIV, F. 25. 105. AIU, Morocco, XIV, F. 25. 106. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3., Kirkuk, Nehama, 15 October 1913. 107. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 97. 108. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9., Mosul, Silberstein, December 1911. 109. BAIU, 1912, 87. 110. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6c. 111. AIU, France, X. F. 17–19. 112. AIU, France, X. F. 17–19. 113. CZA, S 32/799 114. CZA, C10/306 and CZA, S20/575. II. 115. Ali Bey al-Abassi, Voyage au Maroc en 1803 (Paris: éditions Coda, 2008 [1814]), 30–31. 116. Cited in Mohammed Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948. Contribution à l’histoire des relations intercommunautaires en terre d’islam” (PhD Diss, Mohammed V University, 1994), 206. 117. Cited in Paul B. Fenton and David G. Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb. La condition juive sous l’Islam. 1148–1912 (Paris: PUPS, 2010), 360. 118. Ibid., 346. 119. In de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 401. 120. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1. 121. In de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 400. 122. AIU, Morocco, V. B. 123. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 124. AIU, Morocco, III. C.10. 125. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182. 126. Cf. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1. 127. Cf. AIU, Iraq, I. 3. 128. BAIU, 1888, 52. 129. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. 11. 130. Schlousch, Travels. 131. AIU, Morocco, III. C.10. 132. Ibid., 31. 133. BAIU, 1892, 55. 134. Said Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” Les Temps modernes, 229 (1965), 2253. 135. BAIU, 1877, 54. 136. AIU, Morocco, IV. C.11., letter of 5 July 1864. 137. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182.

“Barbaric Lands” | 81 138. BAIU, 1877, 50. 139. BAIU, 1873, 89. 140. One example among many. The list is published in BAIU, 1892, 24–25. 141. De Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 130. 142. AIU, Morocco, V. B. (dossier 9) 143. Joseph Halévy, Morocco, 1876, in BAIU, 1877, 68. 144. BAIU, 1877, 54. 145. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10. 146. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, 3 December 1911. 147. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 148. Cited in Shlomo Deshen and Walter Zenner (eds.), Jews Among Muslims: Communities in the Pre-Colonial Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 90. 149. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 1–8. 150. Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Marmelouk, 172, 202. 151. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, note dated 29 July 1891. 152. In Shlomo Deshen, Les Gens du mellah. La vie juive au Maroc à l’époque pré coloniale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 46. 153. Habshush, Yémen, 129. 154. Cited in Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 84. 155. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc,” 235. 156. Cf. AIU, Morocco, V. B. 157. Cf. BAIU, 1908, 78. 158. BAIU, 1905, 92. 159. Cf. BAIU, 1896, 60. 160. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10. 161. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 18. 162. Paix et Droit, September 1923, 12. 163. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, letter dated 31 October 1892, from Mogador. 164. Cf. AIU, Morocco, IV, C. 11. 165. Ibid., 27 July 1897. 166. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Casablanca, Elmaleh, 12 December 1909. 167. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, July 1913. 168. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, 25 November 1909. 169. Ibid., 16 November 1911. 170. Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Marmelouk, 21. 171. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Rabat, 26 December 1901. 172. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10. 173. Ibid., 12 November 1911. 174. In CZA, C10/610. 175. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3. 176. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3. 177. Ibid., 14 October 1889. 178. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5. July 1913. 179. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. 11. 180. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2. 181. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25.

82  |  Jews in Arab Countries 182. Ibid., Falcon, Marrakesh, 27 September 1905. 183. De Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 129. 184. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10., 19 July 1864. 185. AIU, Morocoo, III. C. 10. 186. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. 11. 187. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 120. 188. CZA, C10/306. 189. AIU, Libya, I. C. 1. 190. Ibid. 191. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 7, 10 October 1912, Kirkuk. 192. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 1. 193. In CZA, C10/610. 194. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10. 195. AIU, Libya, I. C. 1. 196. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3., 4 July 1895. 197. Albert Memmi, La Statue de Sel (Paris: Gallimard), 1972. 198. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3. 199. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6, letter from D. Arié, 31 March 1899. 200. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25. 201. De Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, xv. 202. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 18, Bensabat, Fez. 5 March 1899. 203. BAIU, 1900, 91. 204. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc,” 228. 205. Cited in ibid., 342. 206. Cf. AIU, France, IX, E., 20 September 1881. 207. CZA, S20/539/2. 208. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc,” 342. 209. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1. 210. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2. 211. Naim Kattan, Adieu Babylone. Mémoires d’un Juif d’Irak (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 61. 212. Ibid., 71. 213. Ibid., 102. 214. Cf. Paix et Droit, March 1924, 10. 215. BAIU, 1877, 59. 216. BAIU, 1888, 33. 217. BAIU, 1898, 72. 218. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 59. 219. In Norman Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 2003), 225. 220. AIU, Egypt, XIV, 182. 221. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9, 26 June 1934. 222. Cf. CZA, S75/3973). 223. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 361. 224. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 67. 225. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 3, A. Franco. Baghdad, 28 May 1909. 226. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3., 4 July 1895.

“Barbaric Lands” | 83 227. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10. 228. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc,” 533. 229. BAIU, 1911, 58, report of 22 April 1912. 230. Ibid., 59–62. 231. BAIU, 1912, 58, report of Joseph Elmaleh, 22 April 1912. 232. BAIU, 1910, 185. 233. Memmi, La Statue de Sel, 273. 234. BAIU, 1912, 64.

2 Colonized The image of the Jew imprinted on the Arab-Muslim consciousness at the end

of the nineteenth century was, first and foremost, a figure of contempt. In the Arab-Muslim world of the time, Jews—even from a theological perspective— were people of little interest. They were only tolerated to the extent that they conformed to the prescriptions of dhimma status. Their presence was not the source of a genuine Judeophobic passion, as in the Christian world. Even if Jewish stereotypes were negative, they did not provoke an obsessive reaction in Arab or Muslim consciousness. Open hostility came, rather, from Christians, even more so in the case of Christian converts to Islam. Muslim anti-Jewish theological polemic drew its inspiration from pre-Islamic Christian sources, introduced into the Muslim milieu by conversions en masse of Christians.1 This was an ancient state of abjection. Germain Mouette (1652–1691) was captured in 1670 by Moroccan corsairs and remained under detention for eleven years. He wrote of the Jews that “they rarely traveled alone about the countryside, because most often their throats were cut by Arabs and Berbers.”2 The discreet scorn visited on subjected Jews was expressed through deeds and words aimed at highlighting their condition. From the top to the bottom of the social hierarchy, society was regulated by the image of servitude inherited from slavery. “In the countryside,” reports Foucauld, the Jew “can travel by donkey or mule, but if he comes across a member of the clergy or a chapel, he dismounts or makes a detour. At toll points or town gates he is subject to a tax, like a beast of burden. In town, he has to go barefoot.”3 In Yemen in 1910, Sémach used practically the same images: “For them, the Yahudi is a serf over whom they have all the rights; he is also a member of the family, albeit a very poor relative with whom one doesn’t have to stand on ceremony, but to whom one owes help and protection; a curious situation, psychologically very particular. . . . The Jew is the animal you can strike for any reason: for any little nothing, to calm your nerves, to quench your anger.”4 This scorn is articulated by a cultural code that structures society in its entirety and establishes a watershed between those who merit consideration and all others. Impurity surrounds cadavers, excrement, and infidels. In Yemen the code takes the form of an ensemble of requirements to which Jews must submit: collecting excrement and animal cadavers in the Muslim quarters, collecting the corpses of non-Muslims.

Colonized | 85 The fragility of the Jewish condition is inseparable from the “psychological economy” of the Arab-Muslim world. On the basis of the word abd (“slave” in Arabic), Moroccan sociologist Mohammed Ennaji explains how authority—shaped by slavery—is synonymous with servitude, for the word abd also means “to crush, to smooth out, to eliminate all friction.” Liberty only means something for those with power, that is, the Arab masters. Discourse about liberation and the equality of believers is therefore, according to Ennaji, nothing but pure mythology.5 Islam aims to be a religion of equality, as exemplified by the traditional formulation that on condition that they obey the law, dhimmis can practice their religion, engage in their ordinary activities and live as they wish.6 However, Islam is even more fundamentally a religion of submission; the applicability to dhimmis of this concept is exemplified by the statement attributed to Caliph Omar II: “Give them a status consonant with the sordidness and humiliation which God has inflicted upon them.”7 The freed slave remained in a situation very close to servitude. Emancipation (saiba in Arabic) came progressively to take on the sense of a contestation of the masters’ power. In other words, liberty is a privilege, while servitude is the rule. Once emancipated, the freed slave, like a dhimmi, remained half a man, of impious provenance in the eyes of his master: neither a citizen nor an equal, only a subject. Servitude, centrally positioned in this mental geography, feminizes the victim because woman is the very image of submission. This relationship, modeled on slavery, could only subsist by the visible administration of violence—for example, caning. This extended to the exposure of the bodies or decapitated heads of torture victims. The master/slave relationship is the core around which relations between the king and his subjects were articulated. This relationship was also a reflection of the believer’s submission before Allah. The Jews’ diminished place was at the very heart of this mental structure. The Arab child learned quickly that he can insult or even strike the Jew, and in any case was free to display his disdain, without fear of punishment. In 1965, Saïd Ghallab described relations with Jews: “We impoverished kids grew up imbibing this hateful milk, and it was in that tense atmosphere that we came to learn what a Jew was.” In 1725 the English scholar John Windus, back from an official mission to Morocco, published Journey to Mequinez. He wrote that “[the Jews] live under great subjugation, risking death if they damn the most miserable Moor or raise their hand against him, such that boys kick them at their pleasure, against which they have no other remedy but to flee.”8 “There were three things we loved,” continued Ghallab, speaking of Morocco in the 1930s, “Playing football, stealing and harassing the Jews in the mellah.”9 “Placid contempt,” are the words of civil administrator Etienne Coidan, concerning Jewish youth who were more and more emancipated and who “could barely

86  |  Jews in Arab Countries tolerate the disdain which (Muslim youth) instinctively displayed to them, even when they manifested apparent friendship or simple amiability.”10 The contempt of “the Arab” for “the Jew” set the tone for the behavior of the colonizers, becoming a standardized formula to be employed regarding Jews. “The centuries-old yoke of the Arabs which weighed so heavily on the Jews,” writes Morocco-based military chaplain Rabbi Farb to France’s Chief Rabbi of the Consistoire central (the officially recognized organization of French Jews), “had a compressing effect on them. Their humble and fearful stance, rather than attracting sympathy . . . instead had the effect of drawing on them insults from the Arabs and those low-ranking French functionaries who, in order to flatter Arab arrogance, think it appropriate to publicly display disdain for the Jews.” In 1870, James Bernard Ginsburg, an English protestant missionary (and Russian Jew by origin) described the Jews of Mogador, where he would later be dispatched as a missionary from 1875 to 1886: “Such a system of oppression, persistent and crushing, has—as one could well expect—quite evidently left its mark on the Jewish character: they have become servile and cunning.”11 The more the Jewish subjects bent their necks, the more they showed their unworthiness. The more they behaved self-effacingly, the more they lowered themselves in the eyes of others. The more they were dominated, the more they bolstered their masters’ conviction of having a God-given right to dominate. “The more they were persecuted,” wrote Abdallah Sémach regarding Yemeni Jews in 1910, “and the more they lowered their heads before the disdainful Arabs, the more rebellious they became in the Jewish quarter. It was retaliation.”12 The heavier and more insidious the oppression, the less the Jews—at last legally emancipated—were able to become citizens in the full sense of the word. Once it was established that “no Jew has any authority whatsoever in the eyes of the Arabs,” it became simply impossible to produce any community leaders respected by the Arabs.13 For the Jew is not a man in the virile sense of the word; that is, he is incapable of protecting the honor of his women. Accounts are legion in Kurdistan and Morocco of the kidnapping of Jewish women and girls, many of whom are raped. Jewish men, who do not join in on conflicts among Muslims and are moreover forbidden to carry arms, are assimilated to the status of women. It could happen that a caïd, or local chief, forbade Jewish women to veil themselves; for a man in that society, to see his spouse exposed to the gaze of everyone constituted absolute shame. It was not so much a “dispossession” of his ownership of the woman’s body—that object of male desire—as the Jew’s dispossession of self through the very public display of his impotence and cowardice. The honor code forbade a Muslim woman to receive Muslim men in her home, but she was permitted to receive Jewish men, because they were kif el mra (“like women”). In the Maghreb, where peddling was so important, Jewish

Colonized | 87 merchants practiced this function without too many obstacles. No one fears “the Jew, this frightened one,” recounted Said Ghallab, who was once thumped by his father after he refused to fetch water from an unlit patio: “Well, you’re a Jew.” It was an insult, “but it also meant something else. It meant: you are frightened like a Jew. That’s right. The Jew, by nature, is a creature of fear.” Ghallab elaborated: frightened, timorous, the Jew absorbs blows without giving them back in return; “If they don’t protest, thought the children, it’s because they feel guilty.”14 This inferiority, absorbed by the dominated, opens the door to violence. “It will take some time,” wrote the Baghdad AIU school director in 1910,” before the fanatical Arab will be able to think of the Jew as a human being, with his rights and self-respect.”15 And yet this being, feared by no one, was nevertheless sometimes presented as a quasi-diabolical figure. The Koran was solicited in support. In this respect, Bernard Lewis offers several examples of a theological dispute in which the sacred text is cited for a proposition as well as its contrary. Regarding the need for mistrust of the Jews, Lewis mentions the sura V.51, frequently cited: “O, believers, take not Jews or Christians as friends [or as allies: the Arabic word is awliya]; they are friends of each other. He amongst you who would take them as friends is one of them.” The Koran and tradition use the word dhull (or dhilla)—humiliation, degradation—to describe “the state of rejection by Allah of those who do not recognize Mohammed.” Contempt led to an image of the Jew who is immoral by nature—suspect, debauched, and a cheat. He became suspect when, in the nineteenth century, Near Eastern Christians import the accusation of ritual murder—previously unknown there—into the Arab-Muslim world. The accusation was sometimes leveled by Muslims, but its origin is generally to be found among Greek or Italian communities, or Christian Arabs. Facing Western aggression, Morocco believed it could not count on the loyalty of its Jewish subjects who, as inveterate fraudsters, busied themselves attempting to evade taxes.16 In the past, anger first crystalized against Court Jews and then struck the entire community. All Court Jews who served Arab princes had, it was said, succumbed to violent deaths, such as the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naguela, considered “haughty” and scornful, lynched in 1066 at Grenada by a mob that then massacred the entire Jewish community. Regarding these events, and making reference to the Pact of Omar, the grandson of the sultan of Grenada wrote: “The people and the nobles were disgusted by the ruses of the Jews, as well as the obvious changes which they had introduced into the order of things, and the positions which they occupied despite their pact.”17 On occasion, anti-Jewish uprisings would take on the coloration of an antitax revolt. When taxes were considered too heavy and the fiscal burden unfair, anger poured onto the poorly protected mellah, as in Fez in December 1907.

88  |  Jews in Arab Countries Taking an anti-usury turn, violence was directed at the Jews who practiced moneylending at exorbitant rates, even if the “attack on the mellah” was only an outlet, since the mass of Jews was as poor—if not poorer—as their attackers. Ever present during popular revolts, millenarianism crystallized as antiJewish resentment. In 1862, in the course of the Gharb revolt in Morocco, a simple shepherd, Jilali Roghi, claimed to be the Mahdi charged by God with “filling the world with justice just as it is presently filled with iniquity,” and promised the insurgents that he will deliver up to them the gold of the cities. In the popular imagination, “gold” and “Jews” were synonymous, and thus it is to the mellah they should turn.18 Fueled by powerlessness, this rancor called forth violence against convenient victims, whose very weakness, it was said, was the sure sign of their cowardice. Brutal price rises? Pillage the Jewish quarter. From Yemen in 1910: “Certain functionaries attack the Jews. Their houses are entered, and everything inside is taken, and in order to force the Jews to give up anything they have managed to hide, they are tortured until they promise to bring quantities of wheat, or coins.”19 Western Jewries showed scant interest in the Jews of the Arab world. At best little known, they were often the objects of a colonialist conviction of the necessity to bring them into the light. In the great histories of the Jews published in Europe during the nineteenth century, which assisted in the development of a Jewish national awareness, the presence of Near Eastern Jews was only marginally mentioned if at all. Isaak Markus Jost’s 1828 History of the Israelites contained not a single word on the Jews of Africa and the Middle East; the same was true for Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews (1853–1874).20 In unison, European Jewish newspapers kept their eyes fixed on their Jews, which also numerically constituted the heart of world Jewry. In France prior to the founding in 1860 of the AIU, articles on Oriental Jews were rare. The first article about Jews of the Levant was published at the beginning of 1840, before the Damascus Affair. In 1842, in the wake of the conquest of Algeria, a Rapport sur l’état moral et politique des Israélites de l’Algérie, et des moyens de l’améliorer (“Report on the moral and political condition of Algerian Jews, and the means to improve it”) was published in France by Jacques Isaac Altaras (1786–1873), president of the Israelite Consistoire of Marseilles.21 Only the AIU Bulletin reported at length on the situation of the Jews of Morocco and Persia. In 1840 the repercussions of the Damascus Affair were to thrust Oriental Jewries into the limelight. European Jewish intellectuals began to interest themselves in Eastern Jewries, but did so from within the worldview of colonialist stereotypes. From the subtlest among them to the most ideological, an entire generation of intellectuals reasoned in terms of nature or essentialism, that it is the essence of these people to be indolent, lustful, or thieving.22

Colonized | 89 Most of these descriptions highlighted, in moralizing terms, a state of naturalized decay that had become intrinsic. Oriental Jews were negatively portrayed in caricatured versions of whatever things Western Jews held in esteem. Thus, if a Near Eastern rabbi wrote religious works, he was said to be in the grip of some kind of mania, but if his European counterpart did the same, this is taken as a sign of spiritual elevation. Their European co-religionists attempted to distance themselves spiritually from Oriental Jews, while at the same time defining them territorially by reference to the “passivity” and the “incredible placidity” of Africans: “Without doubt this is related to the climate,” assured an 1895 report from Tripoli. “They need someone from outside to guide them and push them into working in charitable enterprises.”23 The point was to encourage Jews who had become “completely Arabized and permeated with all the worst aspects of the populace amongst which they live,” noted an Ashkenazi envoy of the Zionist movement from Alexandria in 1928.24 The incomprehension concerning the Oriental world was very old. Herzl seemed to understand nothing about the lives of Jewish populations in the Arab world. In his Journal he envisaged sending to Tripolitania the “over-flow of Jewish immigration” (to Palestine), so that they could live there “under the liberal laws and institutions of Italy.”25 How could one be the same as these Jews, whom one calls “brothers” but who were so mired in “obscurantism”? In the end, embarrassment—sometimes repulsion, as well—won out, simultaneously together with a muted feeling of solidarity. This explains the ambivalence of European Jewish discourse, and the ambivalence as well of a Zionist movement that urged emigration but which welcomed poorly, as evidenced in 1923 by the unsuccessful aliyah of several dozen Moroccan Jews. They had been refused entry at Jaffa by the British and sent back to Morocco without the executive of the Jewish Agency intervening, even though it had done so on several occasions when European Jews had been barred from entering Palestine. Emancipated Judaism of the Near East should therefore liquidate its “Arab elements,” just as the entirety of the Arab world should break with what Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, leader of “Revisionist” Zionism, in 1925 called “the Orient,” a concept sufficiently vague to serve as a foil to the idea of “Western values.”26 Regardless of who was the colonizer, the view of the “colonial Jew” (French, Italian, etc.) regarding the “colonized Jew” was similar: the archaic brother whom one despises but must help. However, since both Rome and Paris considered that the point was to not offend the Arab populations, one passed in silence over the specific oppression strangling the Jewish minority. Thus, the embarrassment of French, Algerian, and Italian Jews, divided between their loyalty as national subjects, and their solidarity toward these sorely tested brothers.

90  |  Jews in Arab Countries The reports sent to Paris by AIU teachers said less about the Orient than about the images held of it, which Edward Said later was to call “Orientalism.” Such reports recounted not so much the reality as the perspective from which men (or women) reading this “Orient” had been taught to read it. In Fez, in 1903, Jacob Valadji deplored the stubbornness of Jewish parents (just as fanatical, he noted, as the Muslims), who refuse to send their children to school. He castigated the Jews of Fez who were, he wrote, “motivated by an unquenchable fanaticism as well as indifference and disdain for anything new or strange.” They were “vain: the Jews of Fez feel that they are endowed with extraordinary intelligence and abilities. On what basis do they say this? I have never understood.”27 The remedy prescribed to counter such obscurantism was harsh: “The generation of the desert must die out,” stated Moise Nahon in 1901 at Casablanca, a view shared by the majority of the French consular corps, which supported the efforts of the AIU.28 Addressing Adolphe Crémieux, French consul Pellissier de Reynaud, posted in Baghdad in 1867, praised the AIU, which “struggles patiently, without offending anyone, against the fanaticism and narrow-mindedness of the indigenous Israelites.”29 These “narrow views” produce lumbering children, “bodies heavy, short and squat,” whose “intelligence is completely asleep.”30 From Iraq in 1885: “In these Oriental countries, abstractions are not understood—one simply looks, touches, feels.”31 In 1903, in Fez, Oriental populations were said to be animated by “an intractable fanaticism, indifference and disdain for anything new or foreign.”32 How should we understand this avalanche of negative judgments, viewing an entire population as “savages”? By exaggerating to the point of caricature, AIU correspondents shone a light on the obstacles and problems that made their lives so difficult, and that doubtless hindered their work. This stigmatization brings to mind the view of French enlightened elements toward rural folk in the early nineteenth century, or the mid-nineteenth century attitudes of the educated classes toward the working class. Again, they are rhetorically compared to animals, with the same brutish descriptions highlighting the presence of social problems. The Eurocentric regard of AIU teachers was evident. While it is true that the viewer’s perspective is as important as that which is viewed, this does not mean that the act of viewing is merely an intellectual construct. To deplore the brutalization of people through poverty and work is not the same as “essentializing” them by claiming to have discovered their true essence.33 Limited horizons, indifference, and lack of concern for others—these are not inherent essences, but only contingent facts. It remains crucial to be able to discern the reality of oppression, famine, insalubrity, and illiteracy—things that only literacy, access to books, and increased prosperity will change. Many AIU teachers grasped this

Colonized | 91 quickly enough to get past their initial “essentialism” and understand the potential of the grubby children in their care, whose initial state of stunned lethargy was misread as stupidity. It is not religious faith that was denounced by the quasi-unanimous chorus of theistic educators trained in fin de siècle French intellectual Kantism. Rather, it was magic, credulity, and the defeat of reason. As reported from Baghdad in 1888, the institutions that implemented Hebrew language teaching implanted into students’ minds “a host of superstitions, rather than healthy and pure morals free of prejudice.”34 In 1873, Auguste Beaumier, French Consul at Mogador, deplored the credulity of local Jews and the “plague of rabbis from Jerusalem” concluding that it was “impossible to accurately describe the stultification of Jews in the mellah,” people who were more intellectually feckless than faithful.35 The tone of some of these reports was at the outer limits of disparagement, and sometimes simply insulting; such reports were often written by people who were all the more disparaging for having themselves come from a world very much like the one they described. In Paris, the AIU Central Committee generally disapproved of such summary judgments, for fear that they would pit the Near Eastern communities against the AIU. Poverty perpetuated in the poor a feeling of humiliation. In 1910, Yomtov Sémach wrote of the Jews he encounters in Yemen that they “look at you with fear and haggardness; when you speak with them, they respond ‘I don’t know; we are waiting for the end of the djalouth (Galut). . . . We have to suffer because it is God’s will. . . . The Jews are so used to their fate that they cannot imagine a better situation.” One never hears them singing or laughing, he tells us.36 These Jews find their own distress natural: “Are we not born to suffer?” Their self-image, imposed by submission, leads them to ascribe no importance to themselves. Resignation is all the more marked because the imprint of servitude is so strong. From one end to the other of the Middle East, it was said that “our lot is in the hands of the Creator.” Revolt? That would betoken spiritual confusion. In 1889, in a cholera-stricken Baghdad, Valadji recalled the calm of those Jewish families that, “at every moment replied to me: God is great and everything is in his hands; if it is written that we will die, nothing will save us, but God will have pity on us. They raised their eyes to heaven and that said it all.”37 The timid, symbolic liberation that followed Montefiore’s visit to the Cherifian kingdom in 1864, but above all the commercial penetration by the Europeans, led many Jews along the coast to experience an impression of freedom, causing them to abandon their habitual reserve. Many became impudent and even aggressive toward “the Arabs,” as noted in consular reports registering surprise at the attitude of people who traditionally were subjugated.38 An appeal for “moderation” quickly becomes a set piece in reports on the Jews of Morocco. Until the 1950s, one continues to read here and there, including in reports of the

92  |  Jews in Arab Countries French police, how Muslims no longer tolerate the “disdainful attitude” of the Jews, said to have been adopted since the British-American disembarkation in North Africa.39 Notables—who were rarely victims of injustice—were sometimes reproached for showing themselves insensitive to the lot of the common Jew. In 1903, in Cairo, Somekh accused Egyptian Jewish community leaders of reacting too weakly in the face of another affair of ritual murder, this time in Port Said. He lambasted the “servile dependence”—the expression is not too strong—of notables, evoking their “cowardly abandon,” while simultaneously highlighting the positive role played by the AIU.40 There is an element of truth in this charge: having so often been abandoned by their own community’s notables, many then turned for protection to foreign powers or major institutions, first and foremost the AIU.41 Another recurrent accusation was the supposed hostility of “the rich” and of “the notables” toward schools, fearing the spread of learning and the concomitant emancipation of the poorer classes. This was, for example, the view of the French consul at Mogador, who evoked in 1891 these “Israelite merchants, whose interests are with the English and who, fearing the loss of their own privileged positions, are hostile towards the spread of education.”42 This was also the view in 1908 of an AIU teacher in Egypt, who considered that the notables of the community, who were “very wealthy and educated, have no wish whatsoever to raise the moral level of their co-religionists.”43 The view taken of the children of Near Eastern Jewish communities captures the fear that such a different world engendered. This was not merely the “colonialist gaze” or the supposed “Orientalism” of AIU instructors that required critical examination, but also the cultural shock provoked by the meeting of these two worlds. Two sentiments were simultaneously at play: a banal feeling of foreignness and a missionary conviction that deprived and oppressed children needed to be emancipated from poverty. The decrepit condition of these communities, the impoverishment of both Jewish and Arab children—these did not simply reflect a colonialist gaze. Statistical, economic, and demographic studies converged to describe an overwhelming situation that daily confronted schoolmasters, so recently graduated from teacher training in Paris and brimming with the latest knowledge, which convinced them of the validity of their mission in the Near East. “These were not students standing before me, but little monsters, filthy, disgusting and in rags, insubordinate and insolent,” wrote the Tetouan AIU school director in 1901.44 This tableau of filth and poverty recalled the images of “dangerous laboring classes” so widespread in Western Europe at the time. From filth it is but a short step to moral depravation. In the judgment of one female teacher at Tripoli in 1905, lies were part of their very being; she described girls “so

Colonized | 93 accustomed to lying that they lie without even being aware that they are doing so, and with astonishing naiveté, to the point that even when caught out in flagrante delicto, they deny it.”45 The very idea of “innocent childhood” raised a smile, as it was thought that by their nature, children incline toward evil. One report from Fez in 1916, complained that pedagogical training in France had burdened teachers with “soft teaching methods,” producing instructors with smiles, sweet words and soft gestures.”46 The accusation of morale depravity runs throughout the modern era, and was an issue that inspired Abbé Grégoire’s Mémoire, the report written on the eve of the French Revolution. The issue also influenced the “Lumières” of the Enlightenment, when considering how to “reconcile the Jews and the human race”: how to reintegrate those whom anti-Jewish imagination had excluded for centuries? But a moralizing analysis became an immoral judgment when both dominated and dominant were viewed as having equivalent responsibility and power. “Stealing and lying—these are the two leading characteristics of this bastardized populace, running from the top to the bottom of the social scale. The rich steal, the poor steal, the rabbi steals, the beggar steals, everyone steals,” claimed the Baghdad school director in 1887.47 Increasingly, the external judgments distinguished between different NearEast national Jewries, and indeed between different communities within a given country. In 1929, a schoolmaster adjudged Maghreb Jews as “careless, disinterested and devious” when compared with their co-religionists of the Middle East.48 Another schoolmaster considered Moroccan Jews more vain than the average and filled with a “sense of superiority,” sometimes on the part of the Jews of one town toward those of another. These summary judgments, often made in sadness, smack of the personal resentment and the loneliness of semi-educated teachers, brutally thrust into socially archaic settings. Nevertheless, most chroniclers recount zeal in carrying out work, and reports highlighting laziness or apathy are extremely rare. The Baghdadi Jew? “Extraordinarily hard-working,” in the judgment of Valadji in 1888. “To be fair to him, he earns his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. He is quite sober and eats practically nothing.”49 An enthusiasm for work that is overshadowed by the superficiality of rich women (“salon puppets who speak French, English and Spanish, and play piano and guitar . . . chatty poseurs, elegant and worldly but quite ignorant of their own history or their duties as Jewish women”50) and by the crudeness of their husbands: “For pleasure and enjoyment, they only know the flesh and the stomach. They eat . . . eat and drink in Gargantuan proportions,” wrote A. Ribbi regarding the Jews of Meknes, in 1901.51 “One could even say that those of Fez live only for the table and chair,” notes Valadji in 1903. “Eating and drinking, having as many women and children as possible, this is the ideal for every good Jew of Fez.”52

94  |  Jews in Arab Countries The AIU directors, whether in Paris or in the field, tried to understand the alienation of communities that were victims “of every kind of oppression,” living “amidst barbaric local populations,” in the words of Narcisse Leven, SecretaryGeneral, during the General Assembly held on November 29, 1866.53 French Jews, themselves in the course of assimilation, drew a frightening portrait of “co-religionists” whom they found unbearable, leaving the suggestion that their own process of integration was called into question by the backwardness of these “brothers.” Yet, the great majority of correspondents sought only to report on the poverty and “abasement.” “Everything imaginable is done to make them the most miserable and degraded of beings,” noted the Marrakesh AIU director in 1900.54 A report from Tripoli in 1890 asked: “Is it this age-old persecution which has imprinted on their faces such seriousness, such singular sadness?”55 The severity of AIU directors’ attitudes to this Near Eastern world may be explained by its very proximity, provoking a sort of self-alienation. This, in turn, suggests why this “inner regard” was so ambivalent. In France, Adolphe Crémieux organized action in favor of the naturalization of Algerian Jews. In 1845 Joseph Cohen, who would become president of the Algerian Consistoire (the official Jewish community organization) in 1846, explained that this impoverished Jewish community will be able to play a positive role in future for “Morocco’s 500,000 Jews, who moan in their enslavement . . . and thus, in making them French, will exercise a powerful influence over several thousands of other Israelites; and is not that a mission which any man with a heart should be happy to attempt to undertake, even if he should be crushed by the importance of this mission?”56 In 1866 Salomon Munk, one of the century’s great Jewish exegetical scholars, defended this vision, considering it a milestone on the road to the Crémieux Decree, which conferred French citizenship on Algeria’s Jews: “Only Africa’s Jews can be reached by European civilization, from which the Arabs will forever be separated by an insuperable barrier.”57 The exploration of Oriental Jewish communities prior to 1914 bumps up against the presence—declared or not—of the pervasive fear that embittered their lives. In Morocco from 1880 to 1910 this fear was overt, when tribal conflicts and opposition to the Makhzen intensified while the Europeans, at the same time, continued to push their advantage bit by bit. Jews lived in fear of the violent mobs that would suddenly erupt onto the Jewish quarter, in devastating explosions described by many witnesses. “In the blink of an eye, the shops closed and everyone ran to the synagogues to read psalms,” recounts Jacob Valadji in 1903 at Fez. In the schools, rabbis and pupils went pale and, invoking the spiritual intercession of the much venerated eighteenth-century Amram ben Diwan, murmured “‘Oh, Rabbi Amram! Rabbi

Colonized | 95 Amram! Oh, take pity on us poor Jews!’ . . . The entire population of the mellah streamed into the streets. Crying and weeping, the women wrung their hands and raised their faces to heaven, and ran about aimlessly. The din was appalling. . . . Everyone expected death at any moment.”58 This fear called into question the relations between Jews and Arabs, a sometimes warm coexistence but one that was always fragile and at the mercy of the slightest incident should the Jews forget their sense of “humility.” They were fearful of the Muslim populace, which they viewed, in Fez in 1896, as “aggressive and war-like . . . [seeking] the slightest pretext in order to give free rein to the implacable hatred which they always nourished with regard to the Jews.”59 The same assertions were made regarding Libya, Iraq, and Yemen. All reports note a conviviality that was granted and conceded, but which was at the mercy of the slightest adverse gust, resulting in a destabilizing precariousness: “I learned to interpret the smiles and the whispers, to read the eyes and to reconstitute their reasoning from a mere phrase or a word which I might catch,” notes the narrator of Albert Memmi’s The Salt Statue.60 “Fear and disdain,” recounts the narrator: “We have known them ever since the dawning of our awareness.”61 Memmi recounts these everyday minor incidents between Jews and Arabs, which rapidly degenerated on the Arab side into boundless violence, as if they were trying to make the Jews restitute something they had misappropriated.62 “A mutual walling-off,” Memmi concludes.63 But it was the Jews and the Jews alone who, due to fear, were obliged to avoid religious sites. Thus, the “intimate geography” of the Jews kept them confined to an imaginary mellah, a form of internal exile vis-à-vis forbidden territory. The fear became so deeply ingrained over time that it could be said that they did not simply fear, rather, they incarnated fear. In 1910, Baghdad AIU school director Nissim Albala, on a visit to Yemen, was astonished to see that the most powerful Jew in Sana’a, an educated and “powerfully built man, trembled as he traversed the Muslim quarter, and when he came to the house of the Ottoman governor, gave the impression not of a religious chief, but rather of a shameful beggar.” Albala offered the man a lift in his motorcar, but this was refused: Here, he explained, it would offend the Muslims were he to ride rather than go on foot. He then muttered that he was, moreover, afraid of being stoned.64 Jews were “rendered more cowardly by their persecution,” noted Valadji in Baghdad in 1889.65 Moreover, community leaders—ever ready to sacrifice on the altar of public order those elements considered as politically dangerous—were considered spineless toward the authorities.66 In 1912, a Zionist organization in Cairo proposed to hold a conference on the following subject: “Should We Blush To Be Jews?”67 As if echoing this sentiment, Josué Cohen, AIU director at Mazagan, in Morocco, was indignant in 1918 at the idea that one could be ashamed of

96  |  Jews in Arab Countries one’s Jewishness, suggesting that an un-avowed embarrassment lies beneath the surface, undermining all denials to the contrary. Thoroughly absorbed by their strategy of social ascent, mesmerized by the success of their children, these communities engaged in a de-Judaization that, in the view of the Tangiers AIU director in 1905, rendered them less able to defend themselves. Because concern for collective well-being was almost entirely absent in the communities, they swore by individual success, refusing to acknowledge any danger; the result would be a rude awakening of people who were “too egotistical and indifferent to struggle in favor of a common cause,” concluded Issac Pisa, one of the most gifted writers of the AIU. Attempts to organize collective self-defense? “They will laugh in your face sooner than discuss this. . . . If you say that the danger is visible and near, you will be called a false prophet. . . . Everyone looks after his own interest, without worrying about others, and the supreme watchword seems to be ‘Each for himself, and God for all.’”68 Buffeted by denial and excuses, honest Jews became entangled in the snares of an impossible identity. In 1935, rejecting lofty proclamations that resounded like the opposite of denial, Moise Mamane, a schoolteacher in Fez, analyzed this alienation: “If, in our heart of hearts, we are proud to belong to our race, nevertheless, who amongst us could dare say: I have never dissimulated, and I have always and everywhere shown myself as Jewish? Who amongst us has not felt this poison course through his veins when, amongst company unaware of one’s Jewishness, malicious things were said about one’s co-religionists?”69 This secret fear and internalized submission fed not so much the discourse of shame as its incorporation, in the literal sense of the word. Yet, far from presenting an unchangeable essence, the psychic condition of the colonized Oriental Jew underwent much evolution before 1914. Immersion into the Enlightenment (thanks to education), as well as the proximity of European colonizers, combined to reinforce the capacity of resistance; this is something on which all witnesses agreed when it comes to Morocco in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Fez, in 1909, Amram Elmaleh saluted the new mood: “This is simply too significant not to be remarked upon. It indicates a new mentality, hastily shaped by events, involving a vague idea of their right to freedom, and the first hint of resistance to Muslim oppression.”70 At Mogador in the same year, Loubaton noted that “the Israelites are more aware of their dignity and their rights.”71 Yet, oppression continued to feed lies and venality. “Treated like beasts, misfortune has turned them into fierce and savage creatures,” noted Charles de Foucauld in 1883.72 There is no point looking for the truth of an historic situation in the supposed immorality of the victim, or of that of his persecutor; rather, what perverted both dominated and dominator should be sought in the dynamic of

Colonized | 97 domination. After having made Africa savage, observed Aimé Césaire, colonization then rendered Europe savage too. There is no such thing as an innocent dominated one, for the crushing of the weak ruins the notion of innocence for everyone. Binary and moralistic thinking is inoperable when, at every moment, individuals adopt poses and strategies of survival unrelated to the question of “radical evil.” Evil becomes a central subject of reflection on condition that it be understood not as an essence, but rather as a relation. Is the Jew venal, corrupt, and biased? “But in a country where authority softens only upon hearing the sweet tinkling of precious metals, could the Jew neglect this weapon, which guarantees his peace?” the Mogador AIU director asked in 1917. “And in a country where he was enslaved, could he hold his head high?”73 Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who described how the oppressor shapes the immorality of the oppressed, Jacques Bigart explained in 1901 the necessity of a “moral regeneration” of the Jews, borrowing from the songsheet of Zionism. This is a theme that recurs all through the twentieth century, in particular when concerning the integration of Yemeni Jews in the Yishuv, whom Somekh saw flocking to Cairo in 1905 and whose physiological misery and moral dejection he described.74 Five years later, still in Yemen, Yomtov Sémach was struck by the handsomeness and intelligence of these people, and by “the light of knowledge” shining in their eyes: “In chatting with them, I no longer notice their burlesque appearance, or their piteous state; instead, I contemplate their intelligence and I find them truly beautiful. What they lack is order, method, manners, and self-confidence. Under Arab oppression they sink down, they crawl in the dust, and they are despised.”75 Without attempting to make an amalgam of situations that are so dissimilar, it is hard not to think of first-person observations, from the Warsaw Ghetto, of the effects that the worst possible oppression can have on moral conduct.76 The Jewish world spoke, wrote, and thought in Arabic. In Yemen, for example, an ancient symbiosis existed: Shalom Chabazi and Abbo Choloem, the Hebraic poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who were venerated as much by the Arabs as the Jews, wrote alternatively in Hebrew and Arabic. The same proximity existed in names. While Ashkenazi women traditionally bore biblical names, the Jewish women of the Orient (especially in Yemen and in the Karaite community in Cairo) had Arabic names. The same was the case for men, whose given names were often Arabic, while in Christian Europe, up to the nineteenth century very few Jews bore Christian given names. Both daily language and social practice reveal a cultural proximity that was unknown to European Jews before emancipation. This kinship was even stronger in religious terms. The Koran honors biblical figures as prophets. For Jews as for Muslims, the Holy Land is the place of

98  |  Jews in Arab Countries the resurrection of the dead. A number of pilgrimages link the two religions. In the Maghreb, thirty-one saints’ tombs are venerated by both religions, and it occurred that Muslims—asserting their conviction in the “effectiveness” of Jewish prayers—asked Jews to intercede for them. There was proximity, also, in rituals of birth, marriage, and death. Marriage ceremonies could be interconfessional. In the distant past, Arabic was utilized as a liturgical language, and sometimes, cultivated Muslims attended Jewish services; on such occasions, maxims from the Pirkei Abbot (a Talmudic collection of rabbinic judgments and aphorisms focusing on religious practice and Jewish ethics) were translated into Arabic for them. The closeness of Jewish and Muslim mysticism has also often been underscored. At the end of the fifteenth century, Spanish Jews introduced to the Muslim world the mystical interpretations of the Law, derived from the Kabbalah in particular, and a concept of redemption found in Sabbatai Zvi’s hereticism. Sharing this proximity with Islam, these Jews were immersed in Muslim messianism, especially of the Shi’ite variants. The Mahdist movements also have an echo in messianic Jewish doctrines, which in turn influenced Muslim messianism, especially in Yemen. Yemenite Jewish messianists of the tenth century, inspired by Shukr Kuhayl, joined Muslims in their expectation of the prophesized arrival of a “great Muslim king” who, heading a powerful army, will march from Mecca in order to liberate Sana’a. His words found attentive listeners among the Muslims. In 1861, the preaching of Kuhayl was not specifically addressed to Jews but instead to “the poor” and in general to “those who had suffered offense.” To the Jews he presented himself as the Messiah. Kuhayl was more prudent with the Muslims, to whom he claimed to be “an envoy of the Messiah,” and preached repentance in order to hasten redemption, collecting money along the way, a portion of which he distributed to the poorest. His discourse changed with his audience: the Messiah would be Muslim when he spoke to Muslims, and Jewish when he spoke to Jews. Among certain Muslims, he was thought to represent a sly attempt by the Jews to restore the Kingdom of Israel and to destroy, at the same time, the Kaaba in Mecca. Joseph Halévy described this atmosphere of mistrust; during his journey in 1869–1870, he was taken for the Messiah and briefly arrested. In the Arab-Muslim lands, religious dialogue was a reality that was hardly to be found in Christian Europe. Judaism held Islam at a distance, but considered it worthy of debate. Religious coexistence seemed possible; this was, however, more difficult in Europe, where every exchange risked ending with the burning of the Talmud, as in Paris in 1240. An Arab mark is etched strongly on Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed (written in Arabic) was long read by Muslims. Arabic influence is also noteworthy in Saadia Gaon, the first great rabbinic figure to write in Arabic: he even used the word Sharia to speak of the Torah, and

Colonized | 99 Koran to designate the Tanakh or Jewish bible. Similarly, he used Arabic terms when describing Jewish liturgy, in particular the word imam to refer to the cantor (hazan in Hebrew), who led services.77 Islamic liturgical literature, the hadith, and Muslim legends all borrowed from the Talmud, the Midrash, and Jewish folklore. This close kinship appears in the work of Bahya ibn Paquda, The Duties of the Heart (1075). Written in Arabic, the book “attests, for the first time, to Judaism’s complete assimilation of ‘Muslim ascetic theology.’”78 Nevertheless, deep theological divergences separate Jews and Muslims in the fields of both mysticism and human freedom. The Muslim world believes man’s fate is predetermined and predestined. Judaism considers man to have freedom of choice regarding his own destiny; if he is responsible for his own actions and must choose at each moment, it is his actions and not divine mercy that will decide his destiny. The Bible reminds man that God offers everyone the choice between life and death: “Choose life,” the Torah teaches. In daily life—in music, literature, cooking, and handcrafts—there was virtually a complete fusion. There was a similar fusion in the love for nature, as shown by Yemeni Jewish literature, which sings of the beauty of the mountains. One finds few equivalents to this in European Jewish literature prior to the Haskalah. This proximity explains how in the mid-twentieth century, in Iraq and elsewhere, a part of the lettered elite was Jewish. In 1945, the Iraqi Jewish community included several writers who were considered as part of the Arab literary revival. More broadly, this was an intellectual elite that identified with Arab culture, indeed with Iraqi nationalism. Despite the warning events of the 1930s, this remained the case up to the Farhud of June 1941. Certain Jewish doctors were respected and consulted by Muslims, while they were suspect in Christian countries; in Europe, popular imagination linked Jews to the Devil (even if recourse was also sometimes made there to the services of Jewish physicians). When, in Christendom, the “choice” was between conversion and death, it is the latter that was most often “chosen.” In Islamic lands, this type of situation was more rare, and most often resulted in conversion. “Jews living in the Islamic world were far less disgusted by the symbols of the dominant religion to the extent that the Ashkenazim are . . . by Christianity,” writes the historian Mark Cohen. “One does not find, in the writings of Jews in Islamic lands, the sort of invectives and hatred which characterizes the treatment of Christianity by the Ashkenazim. This includes even the private letters found in the Cairo Genizah, the repository for the Torah and Talmud, manuscripts, correspondence, tefilin and mezuot, and other ritual objects which could not be thrown away. Contrary to what one might have supposed, one finds no disdainful remarks in the Cairo Genizah regarding the Muslims as a group.”79

100  |  Jews in Arab Countries The development of an economic, social, and cultural gulf between Jews and Muslims antedated the arrival of European colonialists—with the exception of Yemen and the interior of Morocco. In Libya, the gap was made even larger by the Italian occupation: those with command of a European language were able to seize this historic opportunity, thus provoking Arab jealousy. The Italians, arriving in 1911, viewed the Jews as constituting a micro-elite on which they could rely, but only reluctantly, because they were conscious of power relationships: the Jews are more open to the modern world, but it is necessary to count instead on the Arabs, who constituted the overwhelming majority. Noting the cultural gulf, the Italians (like other colonizers) set out to exploit it in order to take their first steps in the country. It was not so much European modernization that, from the middle of the nineteenth century, drew a line between the two communities, but rather the way that modernity was regarded. Many (but far from all) Jews experienced political and cultural modernization as beneficial. For the immense majority of Muslims, however, modernization was an evil force carried into their country by a longhostile invading adversary of the Islamic world. Modernization widened the gap, which became a veritable gulf between optimistic minorities won over to the Enlightenment, and gloomy majorities tormented by the sense of decline and the anguish of being dispossessed of their due. In the greater part of the Arab Near East—other than in Egypt and some remote regions—the Jewish/Arab status quo was shaken for three reasons. Already present in the local economy, the Jews grew bolder when they realized they had the support of large Jewish organizations. The attitude of a minority that began to stand up for its rights only exacerbated the discontent of Arab societies that were accustomed to Jewish submission. And from Morocco to Iraq, the modernization of economic relations penalized local intermediaries whose role now appeared less necessary. Progressively relegated to the margins, the Jews were more and more perceived as strangers in the Arab universe, even though their entire culture was Arabophone. From the end of the nineteenth century, the emergence of Arab-Muslim nationalism was accompanied by the importation of basic elements of European antisemitism. Reacting against the colonialist incursion as well as their own failure to achieve technological and intellectual modernization, Arab-Muslim nationalism reared up into an anti-Occidentalism tinged with antisemitism. Considered—and justly so—as favorable to European intervention, the Jews were perceived as potential traitors, without however a consideration of what it was that pushed them to greet the Europeans as liberators. For Libya (an Ottoman province up to 1911) alone, one notes with regret the sacking of the synagogue at Misurata (1864), the burning of Zlitin’s synagogue at the instigation of the local chieftain (1867), and the murder of a notable, Saul Raccah (1870). Still further violence occurred in 1876, when the mob became

Colonized | 101 persuaded that the new sultan, Abdulhamid II, was going to require the Jews to respect Muslim law. The Jews received no reparations in any of these cases, despite the changes to Ottoman law. It was against the background of this fragile situation that the first reverberations of conflict in Palestine and the advance of Zionism in the Arab world were heard, beginning in the 1920s. This was to block the pathway of Jewish involvement in a nationalism whose very nature, as with the prior heritage of servitude, was such as to push the Jews aside. Palestine did not bring about a situation overwrought with violence; it revealed it. Palestine only darkened an already somber picture. Moreover, it is not so much the Palestinian issue that the Arab world refused to accept: it was, rather, the Jews’ emancipation. “The Israelites had a tendency to forget their former humility,” explained Etienne Coidan, a senior French official in January 1946 in Morocco.80 It was most often in the name of the faith that Jews and Judaism were persecuted. Everyone understood the Koran in his own way, and did so as he pleased, citing such and such a surah favorable to the Jews, or another one that is unfavorable to them. To be sure, the sacred text does appear unfavorable to the Jews in several places, but the struggle against Judaism long remained of secondary importance in Islam. Periods of subjected coexistence were punctuated by sharp phases of persecution. An example of such a sharp phase occured in 850 when the Abbasid Caliph Mutawakkil attacked the public practice of Judaism (involving chanting and recitations in the streets) as well as the public practice of Christianity, forbidding processions of the cross on Palm Sunday. Mutawakkil was following in the footsteps of Caliph Omar II (717–720), who with regard to the dhimmis, enjoined his provincial governors to “Give them a position consistent with the lowness and humiliation which has been imposed upon them by God.”81 This atmosphere of subjection inspired Maimonides to write his Epistle to Yemen, composed in the wake of the Almohad persecution in the Maghreb, from which he had fled. The series of forced conversions that assailed Yemenite Jewry at the same time was “news which made us blanche . . . which resounds in the ears of whomever shall receive it; this news makes our hearts burn and these great persecutions throw us into a state of consternation. Our persecution stretches from one end of the world to the other, from the East to the West.”82 To such persecutions organized by the authorities must be added the violence of messianic movements, often of an anti-Jewish coloration. The promise of a better world and of the arrival of the Savior (the Mahdi) was accompanied by the pressing necessity of either converting the Jews or making them disappear. Inseparable, initially, from social uprisings and then anticolonial ones, messianism expressed itself through threats of extermination, as during the rebel movement led by Ahmed el-Hiba in Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth

102  |  Jews in Arab Countries century, which was finally crushed by the French troops of Colonel Mangin. Today, apocalyptic messianism in Islam is invariably linked to the extermination of the Jews.83 In 1883, Charles de Foucauld (who, as will be recalled, disguised himself as a Jew) arrived in the territory of the Beni Hassen, who were Berbers “of Tamazirt race and language” and “very devout.” He was made to undertake wide detours through the fields due to their fear of soiling “venerated places through the presence of a Jew.”84 In 1910 in Yemen, Yomtov Sémach had hardly approached the door of a mosque and cast a glance within when he was made to move away, writing, “a Jew would not get out of this enclosure alive.”85 Such episodes speak volumes about the stigmatization of the Jew in Islamic lands, as a vector of impurity and indeed the soiling of holy places were he to draw near, especially in the Shi’ite world. Well into the twentieth century in the Arab-Muslim world, Jews remained associated with dirtiness, nauseating odors, and impurity that prohibited them from approaching Muslim cemeteries. This same impurity prevented Persian Jews from seeking justice in the courts, because it meant one cannot “accept truthfulness from their testimony.”86 Because he soils everything he approaches, a Jew could not rent a house, which ipso facto became unfit subsequently to be inhabited by a Muslim. In February 1910, in Yemen, Sémach described Muslim shopkeepers who sell foodstuffs, “good to eat but which the Jew would render impure by contact with them.”87 Equally, the Jew rendered impure the chair on which he sits. Thus, Sémach reports from Sana’a, in March 1910, that “for his part, Rushdi Pasha, in speaking of Arab fanaticism, told me ‘Friday, after your departure, a colonel came to see me; he moved toward the seat which you are presently occupying when an Arab chief in attendance leaped to his feet and cried ‘By the name of Allah, do not sit there—it is an impure place!’ For a Jew had sat there.”88 One finds recent recurrences of this. In Ben-Gurion, the Liar, published in Cairo in 1963, Muhammad Hussein Shaban wrote: “The land of Palestine will completely vomit up everything in her, with the exception of the sons of Palestine, and no-one will remain except for Arabs, such that they will be able to reconstruct the glory of their homeland and clean it of traces of the Jews.”89 The impurity of non-Muslims is at the center of Shi’ism, which became the state religion of Persia in the mid-seventh century, during the Safavid Dynasty. What is impure? “Everything which is not Muslim,” explained the AIU Bulletin in 1898, “everything touched by a non-Muslim.”90 Moreover, this was so whether he is Jew or not, as shown by an incident occurring in Mosul in 1937, in a Shi’ite café where a European ordered something to drink. As soon as the customer had left, the owner smashed the glass, which had just been dirtied by the “impure lips” of the Christian.91

Colonized | 103 The notion of impurity, based here on the concept of nadjasset embedded within Shi’ite religious law since the seventh century, considers that all non-Muslims are impure, even attributing an impure essence to their corporal secretions, which obligates “true believers” to avoid contact with objects touched by them. Thus formed the basis of endless regulations, characterized by a collective quasi-phobia toward touch, and leading to segregation. Also central to the institution of dhimma were the recurrent accusations of blasphemy against Islam. When added to the charge of apostasy (applicable to converts to “the true faith” who later retract), such an accusation could merit death, as illustrated by the affair of Sol Hatchuel, in Morocco. In 1834 this teenage Jewish girl was executed for having embraced and then repudiated Islam. In fact this was likely a false charge, and she was accused of apostasy because she had refused the unwanted advances of her Muslim master, who would certainly have known that a conviction for apostasy would result in her death. In the Maghreb Jewish world, Sol Hatchuel would become a celebrated heroine in Judeo-Arabic songs, prayers, and elegies. In Tunisia in 1857 the affair of Batto Sfez—a Jewish coachman executed after being accused of blasphemy against Islam—erupted. Along with the recurrent violence in Morocco, this episode was instrumental in the establishment three years later of the Alliance israélite universelle. In May 1895 at Suleymani, in Mesopotamian Kurdistan, after an altercation pitting Jews and Muslims against each other, the Muslims, in order to prevail in court, accused their adversaries of having blasphemed the Muslim religion: “That is a calumny of which our coreligionists are often victims in this country. Should a Muslim wish to take revenge upon a Jew, or to prevent the Jew from lodging a complaint when mistreated? Or evade an obligation towards a Jew? He just arms himself with this calumny.”92 On two occasions in 1909 the leaders of the Basra Jewish community in Mesopotamia addressed the Chief Rabbi of Turkey, Haim Nahoum. Their first letter was dated June 11, 1909: When a Muslim wants either to unburden himself from a too troublesome Jewish creditor, or to cause him harm for one reason or another, he accuses him of blasphemy. There will be no lack of witnesses to confirm what he says: all those barefoot buggers or louche lay-abouts sniffing after a scam that will earn them a few sous, those above all who blame their situation on claims made against them by Jewish merchants, bankers or landlords, all these will dishonestly swear to what they’ve seen and heard. . . . In future, when we serve in the army, will we be able to enter the barracks if we are in constant fear of being imprisoned indefinitely? Where is the Jewish junior officer who would dare punish a Muslim soldier in these circumstances? Where is the Jewish soldier who would refuse to carry out an onerous work detail which is the responsibility of a Muslim fellow-soldier, if the latter threatens to accuse him of blasphemy?93

104  |  Jews in Arab Countries As the 1840 Damascus Affair showed, the accusation of ritual murder emanated above all from the Christian world. In February 1840, at Damascus, the disappearance of Father Thomas, superior of the Capuchins, together with his manservant, was by rumor (and by the French consul) imputed to the town’s Jews. Arrested and tortured to death in some cases, the suspects were exonerated months later. The Damascus Affair opened the way to other accusations of this sort. In 1844, for example, Cairo Muslims accused Jews of having killed a Christian child for his blood. In 1847, Maronites of the village of Dayr-al-Kamar, in Lebanon, raised the same accusation. In Egypt these insults emerged almost exclusively from Christians, including Arab Christians, as at Damanhur in 1873, where a Christian Arab policeman urged the father of a little boy whose genitals were bitten off by a dog to accuse the rabbi, who is also a kosher butcher.94 In March of 1881, in Alexandria, the body of a Greek child who had gone missing some days earlier was found in the sea. His community considered this to be a ritual crime committed by Jews. Violence erupted immediately. A rapidly established international commission, including fourteen doctors, carried out a first autopsy. A second commission was set up, including twenty-three doctors. Both commissions concluded that the child died accidentally by drowning, with no trace of violence, wounding, or poisoning. Some 152 witnesses were heard. The second commission issued 196 statements of fact, again concluding that “the young Evangeli was victim of an accident and even had there been a crime, nothing shows that the Baruk family would be guilty.” However, as it held Greek nationality, the Baruk family remained in prison while the Egyptian government released the other Jewish accused persons, who held Egyptian citizenship. The affair aroused some agitation in Europe, with the AIU describing a “resurgence of fanaticism right in the middle of the nineteenth century.”95 Egypt’s strong Greek community seems to have been well versed in such matters, being at the origin of six such accusations between 1870 and 1892. Other ritual murder cases also shook the Christian community of Port Said, in 1901 and 1903. But the crimes imputed to the Jews went beyond ritual murder. “The Jew,” this mythic figure, is first off responsible himself for any violence committed against him. He is paying the price of his “arrogance,” of his excessive self-assurance, and of his “dishonesty.” In 1880 in Morocco, the power of the central government weakened, and murders of Jewish lenders multiplied; Prime Minister Mohamed Djami explained to European consuls in Tangiers that the Jews are solely responsible for the violence they have unleashed. Insolently, “they dare look upon that which, for everyone, should remain veiled [i.e., women]. . . . They defy the power of the law, making light of it and forgetting their subject condition.”96 Yomtov Sémach, on an inspection tour in Morocco in 1934, noted that “the Jews, in the eyes of these people, are the cause of all troubles and all

Colonized | 105 the sufferings of peoples as well as the current crisis with which both the most powerful nations and those nations just recently acceding to independent status are wrestling.”97 The Jews of the Orient had long memories. Sémach was not unaware that, against accusations of being “all-powerful,” Jewish communities were often able to offer nothing but feeble defenses. In 1919, in the Moroccan newspaper Le Courrier du Maroc, the heads of the Marrakesh Jewish community protested “against this imputation which portrays us as wanting to rule and command everything. We live our lives and have never intrigued in order to involve ourselves in any manner whatsoever in France’s public affairs in the Protectorate. We have never proclaimed any pretention to hold ourselves as superior to anyone.”98 If the self-defense measures undertaken by Marrakesh Jews in 1919 seem somewhat naïve, our view of their anxiety is affected by the subsequent tragedy of the 1940s. In 1919, the Jewish communities of the Near East were still far from being able to even anticipate the full power of antisemitic hatred. Belief in the virtues of education and the spirit of the Enlightenment was much stronger than is the case today. There is a great risk of projecting our contemporary perspectives, formed by the Shoah, onto an historical reality that was quite different to that of Eastern Europe between 1918 and 1921. Jewish emancipation was taken badly by the Jewish world’s neighbors. If the Jew—who was kif el mra (“like a woman”), as was said in the Maghreb—takes it on himself to show his masculine traits, he upsets the code of honor as well as the traditional order that regulates relations between masters and servants. Even more, he pulls the entire edifice down when—like a slave at the bottommost rung of servitude—he tries to recuperate his humanity. This is why the employment of Muslim female domestics by Jewish families constantly agitated the Moroccan authorities under the Protectorate. Moroccan police reports from the 1930s and 1940s repeatedly discussed this issue. In May 1935 the Grand Vizier recommended “limiting, city by city, the number of female Muslim domestics employed by the Jews.”99 Yet, this fear of influence over Muslim women actually expressed the fear of a world in which the recently subjected ones would act as masters over the very people who are supposed to be the Jews’ eternal masters. Women’s freedom was the anguishing symbol of this upheaval; female liberation, encouraged by the Protectorate and the opening created by the Enlightenment, seems closely linked, socially and psychologically, to the Arab reaction against Jewish emancipation. Economic resentment grew sharper with the European penetration. Ahead of Arabs on the educational front, and often fluent in a European language, Oriental Jews readily found employment in colonial administrations. This was the case in the French Maghreb, and in both Egypt and Iraq; they fell under

106  |  Jews in Arab Countries British control from 1917, which was then confirmed in 1920 by the League of Nations mandate after the organization came into existence. The educated elite of the Iraqi Jewish community, in particular AIU-educated youth, easily found employment in “remunerative positions,” as reported in correspondence in 1934. Many Jews, notes this report, experienced a “rapid career rise, while the Arab found himself neglected and relegated to a secondary status. A silent hatred arose between these two elements of the population.”100 The Sultan of Morocco affirmed his concern about the new importance of “the Israelite element” of his kingdom: “During the course of an audience last October, he did not hide his apprehension about the Israelites more and more monopolizing all the important positions, unless the education of Muslims were to spread rapidly.”101 Spread by the Western powers, Christian antisemitism in the Arab world for a long time concerned only that marginal segment of the populace in economic competition with the more “evolved” elements of society. Lagging behind the Christians in this regard, Muslims at first did not perceive the Jews as rivals. This view was to change radically with the economic take-off and the opening of countries to free competition. When the Ottoman Empire emancipated the Jews, it lost prestige among a considerable portion of the Arab world. This showed inter-Arab solidarity to be stronger than Muslim solidarity, and it also revealed the awakening of a nationalism that reinforced links between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. At the same time, the Jews (other than in Iraq) showed little interest in joining the dawning literary renaissance and awakening Arab nationalism. It was the Near Eastern Christians who were the first, from the end of the nineteenth century, to compose or translate the classics of European antisemitic literature into Arabic. Georges Corneilhan’s Jews and Opportunists: Judaism in Egypt and Syria (published in French in 1889) was translated into Arabic by the Beirut Christian Arab journalist Najib al-Hajj. In 1905, the Christian Arab Najib Azoury published (in French) The Awakening of the Arab Nation or the Universal Jewish Threat. It was quickly translated into Arabic. Modernization—whether consented or forced—came to affect the Arab view toward Jews. Always despised, gradually the Jew became the rival, a fortiori when the Palestinian conflict became envenomed. The major themes developed by European antisemitism between 1880 and 1910 were imported into the Arab-Muslim Middle East. The Arab world castigated Europe, but at the same time borrowed its diabolic image of the Jew. Yet, the very high level of illiteracy characterizing the Muslim world at the time makes for a relativizing of the importance of the anti-Jewish literature channeled by Near Eastern Christians. In parallel, during the first half of the twentieth century, Muslim reformism forges a new image of the Jew. Muhammad Abdou and Rachid Rida set out to

Colonized | 107 “de-Jewify” Muslim tradition in order to attempt to “purify” the exegetical traditions of the Koran and the hadith. Muslim tradition, they believed, had been perverted by Jewish converts to Islam. From the 1930s, against a background of European colonialism and the emergence of the “Zionist question,” the figure of the Jew becomes an obsessional image in Arab-Muslim consciousness, purely composed of rivalry and hostility. The Islamization of Christian accusations is particularly perceptible in the Near East. Certain Christian converts to Islam played the role of anti-Jewish propagandists, by importing themes inspired by Christian sources into the arguments. This was also true of recent immigrants, often Greeks, who were in direct economic competition with the Jews and proved to be among the most ready to spread accusations of ritudal murder. The final vectors of Christian anti-Judaism in the Arab-Muslim world were the populations of European origin, in particular in French North Africa and Spanish Morocco. In most of the Arab-Muslim world, Jews lived alongside Christian commu­ nities. In 1881, in Ottoman Mesopotamia, there were 800,000 Muslims, 18,000 Christians and nearly 35,000 Jews. If the future states of Syria and Lebanon were included—that is, the vilayet of Beirut—then 2.5 million Muslims lived alongside 547,000 Christians and 55,000 Jews.102 The de-Christianization of the Near Eastern world was a very old reality. At the beginning of the seventh century, Byzantine North Africa counted 470 bishops, and it is said that the Maghreb contained 1.5 million Christians and nearly 20,000 Jews. Islamization was accompanied by the disappearance of Christian minorities and recurrent anti-Jewish violence; meanwhile Islam confronted its first setbacks in Europe with the Christian reconquest of Palermo (1072) followed by Toledo (1085). The final mention of Christianity in the Maghreb date back to 1049 in Libya, 1091 in Tunisia, 1150 in Algeria, and 1300 in Morocco. In 1237 the last bishops leave Morocco. The Maghreb of the fourteenth century, apart from Ceuta and Tangiers, no longer contained any native Christians, other than slaves. The beginning of the Muslim decline in Europe in the eleventh century, followed by the invasions of the Crusaders and the Mongols, aggravated resentment, resulting in anti-Christian excesses and anti-Jewish violence. Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), one of the most important Islamic thinkers, preached in favor of the reduction of Christianity and Judaism in the Islamic world, and opposed the construction and even the basic maintenance of churches and synagogues. Engaged in the resistance of Islam to the Mongols on the one hand, and to the last of the Crusaders on the other, he was at one and the same time a “religious sage” and a combatant physically engaged in armed struggle. At present in the Sunni world Ibn Taymiyya is held in high esteem, and even venerated in Islamist circles.103

108  |  Jews in Arab Countries Without doubt, profanations of Jewish places of prayer and cemeteries occurred, but it often remained difficult to determine how often. The violence was masked by the relative symbiosis, already discussed, of popular religion—shared saints, pilgrimages, invocations, and prayers. The profanation of Jewish ritual was more frequent in Shi’ite areas than Sunni regions, where respect for a related monotheism seems to have prevailed. In 1911, Muslims from Mosul carrying their ill children attempted to embrace the Torah scrolls that had just been taken out of their ark. AIU director Silberstein evoked a “secret but real admiration” for the Jewish people by the Muslims of Mosul. Despite the power of prejudice, he reports that relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims are “excellent in all respects.”104 This view, while it is no doubt soothing, nevertheless reflected the respect generally manifested everywhere for sacred matters. But nor does it efface the manifestations of Muslim disdain of the Jews, who were enjoined by the Muslim world to practice their religion virtually in silence. Profanation of the religious calendar and violation of the Sabbath and high holidays have already been discussed. Disrespect was also frequently shown to funeral cortèges, which were deliberately interrupted by Muslim children passing under the coffin, thus requiring the procession to start again. Streams of insults would gush forth, sometimes blows as well; prior to the arrival of Europeans the tension was such that funeral processions avoided town centers and Muslim quarters. Processions had to keep their distance from mosques and get underway either early in the morning or late in the evening. In a word, burials were carried out discretely. Up to 1945 and indeed beyond, the police archives teemed with such reports. As well, Jewish cemeteries were frequently considered to be dumping grounds.105 In Fez, in 1913, the community was obliged to protect the cemetery by building an enclosing wall.106 In Casablanca the Jewish cemetery, more than a century old, was turned “by neighboring Arabs into a public latrine, where the majority of time the tombs were soiled with droppings from the animals pasturing there, and it is not unusual to find rotting animal carcasses left overnight which we have to transport elsewhere.”107 Complaints made to public authori­ ties were usually in vain. In 1906, Nahum Schlousch reported the case of a cemetery in Tripolitania that the Arabs put under cultivation, to the great distress of the Jews “who now, with tears in their eyes, wander aimlessly about this field scattered with the desecrated remains of their ancestors and rabbis.” This violence against burial places was recurrent, continuing in Tunisia, for example, after the war.108 Even more frequent was the desecration of Torah scrolls, liturgical objects, and places of prayer. Many documents report the theft of vases and objects in gold or silver. Torah scrolls were soiled, torn or burned, and some even taken to serve

Colonized | 109 as saddles. In such cases the Jews would have to repurchase, scrap by scrap, the Torah scrolls in possession of Muslims, in order to preserve these remnants in the genizah (the storage sanctuary for religious objects).109 One such example occurred in 1897, in Libya: after having pillaged a small synagogue in a remote community, “some Arabs stole the scrolls of the Law. How astonished were the Jews, the next day, to see an Arab mounted on a donkey whose saddle had been made out of Torah parchment. They protested, but in vain.”110 Desecration included urination on synagogue walls and dumping of feces inside. In Shi’ite areas, many Jews converted in order to flee the daily pressures on them. “In becoming Muslims, they escape a thousand harassments, vexations and exactions constantly inflicted upon them,” reported a correspondent from Hamadan, in Persia, in 1900.111 Conversion to the faith of Westerners could appear as a safe-conduct pass of the same sort as European or American consular protection. However, compared with conversions to Islam, cases of Jews embracing the Christian faith generally remained rare. Ceaselessly, the Jews—eyes cast downward—were made to feel the weight of their subjection and submission. “The oppressed and degraded status which the Jews are made to endure is beyond imagining,” wrote the French First Consul at Algiers in 1809.112 “They wear no shoes on their feet,” reported Heloise Hartouch, a schoolteacher in Algeria, in 1840. “Those who can afford it are permitted to wear slippers as shoes, but these slippers must be much shorter than the foot in order that the heel is in complete contact with the ground at all times.”113 If daily life for these “protected” dhimmis varied over time, or from one region to another, their existence—stuck fast between tolerance and uncertainty—was similar from one end to the other of an Arab-Muslim world whose “psychological economy” denied Jews the status of fellow and equal. If astride a mount, a Jew coming on a Muslim had to dismount and ask the Muslim permission to continue on his way—in theory, in any event. Custom might allow such constraints to be bypassed, yet the smallest provocation could cause them to be reasserted at any moment. Even if such practices could fall into disuse here and there, they persisted in collective memory. Everyone grew up with the idea that this melancholy figure, the Jew, was destined to receive blows without ever returning them. Writing from Yemen in 1910, Yomtov Sémach described the daily humiliations. He asked an Arab chieftain why the Jews are required to set themselves apart by these “curls that hang miserably along their cheeks . . . why it is that they must go about barefoot.” Why could they not dress in European clothes, or, if they tried to do so, why would they be surrounded by a crowd of children “who give them such grief that they give up”? Back in Yemen after some years in Egypt, he reported that to win themselves some peace, “many Jews stitch long locks of hair under their kippot, or skull-caps, on both sides of the ears.”114 The same was

110  |  Jews in Arab Countries true in Morocco prior to 1912 where, as in both law and custom the Jew was only tolerated, and injustice often prevailed over conviviality. That situation explained the existence of an impressive list of interdictions, respected or ignored, brought back into effect and then forgotten once again. However, the threat remained present, because a right to real equality remained almost impossible to imagine. This inferiority, gelled into a habitus of behavior, had become so normal that no one any longer remarked on its presence. Wiping one’s dirty hand on a Jew’s lapel, ordering a Jew whom one encounters to gather up the fodder that has fallen off one’s mule: if the Jew contravened these customs, he was held to be showing “insolence.” Some Muslims considered that “the Jews are drunk and have become insolent,” in the words of an Arab song from the 1830s regarding the taking of Algiers by the French.115 Humiliation was neither the rule nor the exception; it was a permanent risk from which nothing could shield the Jew. In 1907 in Marrakesh, a report mentioned “all sorts of humiliations and exactions by indigenous Arabs,” in particular “receiving a punch on the head from every passing Arab, a tradition— according to the Arabs—passed down from father to son.”116 It frequently happens, noted another correspondent in 1912, that Jews crossing Arab quarters “are subject to a thousand humiliations, such as taking their kippa and throwing it onto the ground or filling it with urine and giving it back to them. Then, they spit in their faces, throw stones at them or force them to carry out humiliating movements.”117 Children played a special role in these daily insults: “With regard to persecuting the Jews, harassing them in their homes, no one reproaches us for that. Rather, we get approval,” recounted the Moroccan Saïd Ghallab in 1965.118 The pleasure was shared by the adults: “The majority of Arabs,” wrote Bensabat in Fez in 1898, “and sometimes the pashas as well, get pleasure out of making ‘an infidel’ suffer. That is the word which they use to indicate a Jew.”119 Saïd Ghallab continued: “Sometimes, armed with sticks which we have climbed up to pull off trees . . . we beat a Jew until he cries—how can I describe it? —and until we have become satisfied that we’ve rained enough horrible blows down upon him to make him black and blue.”120 There was, evidently, also a long tradition of having the Jews perform filthy tasks, “those which we would have felt revolted to perform,” such as sewing and repairing mattresses “on which our younger brothers and sisters pissed and shat, which had large brown stains of the menstrual blood of our mothers, who didn’t make use of sanitary towels. Such was the job of the Jew: the dust of alfalfa and the smell of pee.”121 “At the end of the day, the central message,” notes Jacques Taieb, “can be summarized as consisting of the absolute necessity to humiliate the Jews without however treating them unjustly.”122 This dovetails with the words of the second

Colonized | 111 Caliph, Omar, cited by the Arab chronicler Ibn Taymiyya: “Exchange no letters with the dhimmis and call them not by their name; you should humiliate them but do not harm them.”123 These discriminatory measures were a daily reality with far more purchase than is suggested by a theoretical literature claiming the existence of a wide gap between text and application. It was solely on the basis of this condition that the Jew lived among others, and that he was admitted— indeed, often appreciated and liked. “Servile status arises from this aloneness,” explains Moroccan sociologist Mohammed Ennaji, “from the fact of having been vanquished, dominated and in the hands of one’s master, not to be able to look him in the eyes but instead needing to raise one’s eyes in order to see him.” And he adds, regarding the subject of submission: “He must be lowered and humbled.”124 De visu, clothing marks the boundary between conquered and conqueror. The origin of the distinctive vestimentary sign goes back to Caliph Mutawakkil (847–861), who chose the color yellow at first for the “protected ones” (dhimmis) and later for Jews alone, red being designated for Samaritans and blue for Christians. Colors, as distinctive signs, could vary somewhat. In the Middle Ages Jews could wear blue or yellow clothing as well as a yellow round badge, a piece of cloth called the chikla. In the nineteenth century, in Morocco, Jews had to be dressed in black, “a rule rigorously observed even in the most distant parts of the countryside,” noted Charles de Foucauld in 1883.125 In Fez, in 1910, Jews had to be covered “in this color of abjection, a sort of round badge imposed by the Muslims.” In Marrakesh in August 1912, when El Hiba controlled the city, he obliged the Jews to dress in black and to blacken their slippers.126 The mixture of fear and custom was such that despite the lifting of the interdiction, for a long time Jews dared not wear any color but black. In Morocco, the wearing of shoes was the source of friction up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Sometimes lifted, the interdiction would then be reintroduced, then suspended, and once again enforced, a to-ing and fro-ing that only aggravated the feeling of injustice and arbitrariness. In the report of the Anglo-Jewish Association, addressed in February 1888 to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, one reads that “the Muslims often amuse themselves by throwing hot coals, glass shards or bits of old tin in the path of Jews, and delight in seeing them twisting in pain.”127 If the Jew is required to dismount before a Muslim, the affair most often goes no further than insults or blows. However, it could also take a tragic turn, as happened in Fez one summer morning in 1900. An exchange of insults occurred between a young Jew in his thirties, who was going to work on horseback, and an Arab “who could not tolerate seeing the young man mounted,” recounts a Jewish merchant. The Jew responded to the insult. Attacked by the Arab crowd, the Jew was beaten to death, and his body burned.128

112  |  Jews in Arab Countries Taken together, these apparently isolated signs make sense. The interdiction on wearing shoes or riding a mount in the presence of Arab Muslims both follow the same logic: to forbid to Jews a symbolic dignity that would remove their humiliation. In 1946 in Yemen, a Jewish child was incarcerated because he had gotten into an American Army jeep. It was not the contact with a foreigner that was being punished, it was the fact that he had raised himself above his station.129 Neither a Muslim nor indeed a Christian may serve a Jew. In the fifth century, the Theodosian Code (book 9, chapter XVI) stipulated that “no Jew shall have a Christian slave.”130 The Arab-Muslim world extended this interdiction to all personnel, even those who were not slaves. The measure was unequally applied, relaxed for a time, and then reinforced. From Yemen in 1910, Sémach reported that the Arab servant whom he had hired quit because “despite the good wages he received, he was ashamed to serve a Jew, even one from Europe. The Turkish language teacher also resigns, apparently for the same reason.”131 Dishonor was also the predominant issue when it came to female domestic workers. In 1937 the Glaoui, or pasha, of Marrakesh prevented young Muslim women from working in Jewish houses, an insult reinforced by the Vichy regime that gave comfort to Moroccan nationalists, for whom serving in a Jewish household was the nadir of “Arab humiliation.”132 This oppression aroused a torrent of complaints, which increased in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The expansion of trade and the rise in the educational level emancipated awareness and encouraged critical reasoning. People began to dream of their rights, to speak of justice, and to stand up to iniquity and brutality. In 1875, the AIU director in Tangiers, Monsieur Benoliel, was a Moroccan Jew educated as a teacher in France at the AIU. When he returned home to take up his post, one of his first reports back to the AIU recorded his cry of distress at learning of the punishment inflicted on his father, an artisan who had not immediately obeyed an injunction of the pasha. He spoke of “the fanaticism, combined with the despotism and the tyranny of the Arabs who daily abused their power and the powerlessness of our unfortunate brothers. The Muslims commit whatever their unjust hatred and savage anger inspire them to do.”133 The climate began to change a quarter century later, a consequence of Morocco’s slow opening and above all of the creation of the powerful AIU network in the Mediterranean basin. More than anywhere, it was in the coastal areas that the Jews found emancipation, supported by the presence of European legations employing many Jews as interpreters and intermediaries. It was this mentality that the AIU sought to engender in its pupils, as noted by Nissim Falcon, Marrakesh school director, in 1909. Falcon described Jewish children who refused to remove their shoes in order to enter the Arab quarter,

Colonized | 113 preferring, if the weather worsens, not to leave the mellah rather than to accept such measures.134 The study of the democratic ideals of 1789 was not without impact on minds that were growing ever more open to the European world. A contradiction quickly emerged between the European presence (bringing in its wake both oppression and liberation) and a society immobilized in its code of honor. Just as compulsory and secular schooling was to solidify the republican regime in the France of 1880 to 1914, and thus realize the mission of the French revolution, so the forces emerging from 1789 would dissolve the structure of a Jewish world stuck fast in the web of servitude. Finally, from the 1920s, Zionism in its turn came to constitute an emancipatory factor just as powerful as the AIU was in its time. In 1923, in a Libya that only recently had become Italian, following antisemitic statements made “by a handful of excited fascists,” young Jews in Tripoli established the Tripoli Jewish Youth. Its purpose was to, “embrace all educated and enlightened young persons who seek to raise the intellectual and moral level of its members,” reported the AIU school director.135 The resplendent legend of “Andalucía of the Three Faiths” was to be followed by a dark picture of life in a Muslim world reductively portrayed as a “land of suffering.” Today, it is the black legend that often prevails, substituting other—equally contestable—simplifications for the bright colors of the Golden Age. Reality is more complex, comprising distance and closeness, sometimes brotherly relations and at the same time leaden contempt. This reality is very hard to grasp: a world where symbiosis was the norm and yet where the communities remained distinct, “mixed” marriages were impossible, and conviviality was restricted to matters of courtesy, festivals, and major ceremonial events. It should be noted that a Muslim could have a meal at a Jew’s house, but not the inverse, due to the kosher dietary laws. Tastes in common, the same cuisine, a virtually identical language, the same music: in this sense, Near Eastern Judaism was incomparably deeper and better immersed in its surrounding cultural environment than European Judaism ever was. Among the well-off classes, affinity developed into complicity. In the nineteenth century, Moroccan Jewish merchants operating for the Makhzen, or central power, were considered as quasi-equals. “Class solidarity,” explains Jacques Taieb, convinced that there was “a strong feeling of cultural proximity between the two communities, a vast space of individual conviviality, resulting in an ambiguous tableau of Judeo-Arab relations made up of nuances and codes.”136 Second-class citizens? Certainly, but cultural cousins just the same. This proximity is a reflection of ancient communities, as in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, or the interior of Morocco. “The milieu in which our children live is

114  |  Jews in Arab Countries essentially Arab,” noted the AIU director at Safi, in Morocco, in 1929.137 Many Jews were prominent in Arab culture, including in popular song, as illustrated by the Iraqi singer Salima Murad (1905–1974). Of her repertoire of more than five hundred songs, some four-fifths were composed by two Jewish musicians, the brothers Salah and Daoud al-Kaiti. Murad, who dominated Iraqi popular song in the ’30s and ’40s, remained in Iraq after 1948, as did other Jewish artists and intellectuals, and converted to Islam in 1953 in order to marry a Muslim singer. Arab-Jewish sociability was principally based on the reciprocal needs of both communities. “They help each other out, and often suffer from the same deprivation,” noted Sémach in the Morocco of the 1920s.138 This sociability was the foundation of the existence of cordial relations,” as was reported in 1911 from Mogador, in Morocco: “With each community playing a specific economic role, there can exist no rivalry between them, and thus no antagonism.”139 In Autumn 1934, despite the pogrom perpetrated the preceding August at Constantine, in Algeria, Sémach underscored the tradition of cordial relations maintained in the past by Jews and Muslims in Morocco, whose “shops are side by side, and who, while they work, tease each other, like clowns, to the great amusement of passersby.”140 A rather happy co-existence, then . . . In 1913, at Suleymani, the Kirkuk AIU director noted “the Jews here live in perfect peace with their Muslim compatriots.”141 The same comment, about “the excellent relations” between Jews and Muslims, echoed from Mosul in 1927: “Hatred of the Jews is unknown,” notes Sasson, Baghdad director (and former director of the Mosul AIU school between 1907 and 1917).142 “I have spoken with Jews inhabiting small villages where Muslims are the immense majority,” reported AIU Secretary General Jacques Bigart during a visit to Morocco in 1926. “Everyone gets along well, people help each other out, and many poor Jews are aided by their Muslim neighbors.”143 The same thing was noted in 1931 at Debdou, that “desert oasis” where, in school, “the children of both religions sit side by side and get along extremely well.”144 Tasked in 1937 by the AIU with drafting a report on “mountain Jews” (that is, communities scattered across the mountains), Leon Ninio, writing about Denmat, described the “good relations with the natives. The Arabs attend their marriages, or come on Saturdays to eat skhina.”145 About Oulad-Mansour, Agadir, and Bou-Eciba he noted: “Friendly relations with the natives.” At Sidi-Rahal, he reported “Good relations.” In Tassemsit, population 125: “Cordial relations with the natives, who are true friends. Each visits the other on the occasion of marriages. Beyond that, much frequentation.”146 Both business relations as well as numerous other associations between Jewish and Arab merchants were mentioned. On alcohol: the Jews, who were

Colonized | 115 authorized distillers, would clandestinely sell a portion of their production to Muslims, who generally consumed it discretely right on the spot. Clandestine sales could lead to trouble for both parties, when Muslims used this as a pretext to “persecute the Jews,” as Nahum Schlousch noted from Libya in 1909.147 But this is unstable terrain. An area that appears peaceful one day could, ten years later, become a hotbed of violence, and amicable relations could be brutally cut off during outbreaks of insurrection. Here the neighbor killed, while there, he opened his door and protected the Jews. No general conclusion can be drawn, except to note the highly changeable and fragile nature of Jewish-Arab relations. At heart, however, this is a question that revolves around psychological outlooks, which are not freely determined by individuals, for above and beyond individual predilections, everyone was influenced by collective issues. Thus, at Demnat, the local Jews, according to de Foucauld in 1883, “have no mellah, . . . and reside pellmell with the Muslims, who treat them with exceptional kindness. Demnat and Sefrou are the two places in Morocco where the Jews are the happiest.”148 But these were tiny islets of peace in an ocean of instability. Decade after decade, the interpretations, such as those found in the reports from the French Residence Générale, are frankly irreconcilable: “cordial relations” and “friendly,” but conversely “hateful” and marked by violence.149 Nevertheless, relations between Jews and Muslims, from the Middle Ages up to the modern era, were not marked by the exclusion that characterized Christian Europe, but instead by marginality and abasement within social hierarchies. Paradoxically, demonstrations of solidarity and indeed friendship appear as somber touches in the portrait of this society. Peace, present here and there, appeared like a fleck of land in a vast sea. Respect, as well, seems to have remained an exceptional phenomenon, as was succor to neighboring Jews, for such neighborly aid had to be extended discretely in order not to arouse the ire of one’s Muslim co-religionists. In 1888 in Morocco, six Arab witnesses to the murder of a Jew deposed declarations and then retracted, refusing to give evidence in a court of law as they feared “the vengeance of the authorities.”150 Yet, year after year the Moroccan authorities reiterated their good faith in order to quash rumors about denial of rights of Jews. In 1908, the Sultan of Morocco indicated word should be conveyed to the French authorities that he wished to see “articles concerning his attitude towards the Israelites” published in reports of both the AIU and the AngloJewish Association.151 Doors helpfully sprung open during times of riot, and neighbors, ordinary passers-by, and foreigners came to the rescue by trying to halt the pillaging and fend off the violence. Numerous documents establish the absence of a universal culture of hatred, despite the deterioration in relations and in attitudes, which were in any event ordinarily oppressive toward the Jewish minority.

116  |  Jews in Arab Countries Thus, people sometimes came to the assistance of Jewish victims of violence, as in the case, in 1903, of the Arabs of Ouled-Hriss in Morocco, who took in robbed travelers, fed them, and dressed and lodged them. Within these communities, as in the AIU correspondence, the Ouled-Hriss incident continued to be remembered. In Marrakesh in 1911, while the market was being pillaged, some Jews took refuge “with Muslim friends while waiting for the authorities to reenter the city.”152 The same active solidarity was shown by Christians, as in Egypt in 1913 when, during the course of riots in Port Said, Greeks saved some fleeing Jews while the British Consul took things in hand. Among the Shi’ites, after the Kirmanshah pogrom of 1909, Muslims opened the doors of their houses to Jews, and fed the victims. “Some Muslims sent bread into the Jewish quarter. They also loaned blankets and mattresses to our co-religionists.”153 It sometimes happened that justice prevailed, but this seemed so unusual that it was considered a landmark event. Right up to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jew was still not a juridical equal in the Arab world, and thus Jewish communities always registered their astonishment whenever a judgment favorable to them was obtained. Yet, these few trees cannot hide the forest of iniquities of which the archives are replete, corroborated by testimonies (e.g., René Caillé and Charles de Foucauld, in the case of Morocco) that all underscored the degraded Jewish condition. Justice in fits and starts? That is what was suggested in 1911 by the brief mandate of the vali (governor) of Baghdad, Nazim Pasha. Nazim wished to reestablish the Jews in their rights during the “Cohen cemetery affair”—which brought about his recall from his position, after a few months, for having attacked powerful interests. Jews demonstrated in the street to express their support for this governor, who had allowed the weakest to travel unarmed. “Unheard of,” reported the Baghdad AIU director in March 1911. “A Jew traveled alone from Suleymania to Baghdad without being molested.” The Jews had Nazim Pasha to thank for this new-found security. Under his rule, they “felt in effect to be the equal of Muslims; they walk with their heads held high, and they have full awareness of their dignity as men and citizens.”154 Under the reign of Moulay Ismail (1672–1727), the Morocco government assumed the form it was to maintain up to the French intervention in 1912. The royal household—staffed by black slaves—would also bear this imprint.155 “Slavery had become a Muslim reality,” explains Malek Chebel. “It encountered neither opposition nor reprobation anywhere [in the Muslim world].” If the extent and duration of the practice of slavery varied, with available figures lacking reliability, nevertheless, all observers confirm the gravity of the phenomenon. It is further attested by the existence of Arab slavery codes, whereby Muslim theologians provided slave-traders with the theological and juridical support they needed to justify their activities.156 Language itself was marked with the concept,

Colonized | 117 as testified by the richness of vocabulary linked to servitude. In his 1886 Dictionnaire français-arabe, Edouard Gasselin listed more than 30 synonyms for the word “slave,” as if “Islamic lands had not only acclimatized to the practice of slavery, but . . . in addition, the concept had become integrated into the imagination.”157 If every believer is the equal of any other believer, everyone agreed in recognizing the opposition that, in reality, separated white believers (Arabs, Turks, Persians) and black ones. In popular language “black” was synonymous with “slave” (abd), while “white” was rarely associated with servitude. “The difficulty experienced by Islam simply in defining the status of a person is due to its essential inability to contemplate the notion of a human subject, independent of his religious affiliation.”158 Why undertake an excursus to examine slavery? First, because it would be erroneous to think that the Jews were the sole victims of violence that is often described as a sort of generalized barbarousness. Second, a Judeo-centric his­ tory incurs the risk of distorted perspective. The Jewish condition must be apprehended in the light of a many-faceted oppression, and the accounts relating to the Jews should be placed into the context of a world of servitude. Women, children, and slaves, too, have much in common with the Jews, for they all share subjugation to the same tyranny. Egyptian religious authorities, and above all Cairo’s al-Azhar Islamic University, established the Muslim doctrine on slavery. Treaties abolishing slavery remained dead letters right up to the beginning of the twentieth century, and even beyond in certain cases. In 1933, slavery was an everyday reality in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As late as 1958, out of 5 million inhabitants, 500,000 were slaves. The Anglo-Persian Accord of 1851, which banned the slave trade in Persia, had no real effect before the beginning of the twentieth century. Texts cited by Arab historians describe these horrors. The issue of the relationship between Islam and slavery is probably poorly formulated. The Koran, as is the case with Islamic law—and indeed in certain respects the Torah and Halakha or Jewish law—can be interpreted as justifying whatever one wishes. Did Islam legitimize the enslavement of non-Muslims? One can find support in the Koran and the hadiths for such arguments. It nevertheless remains the case that the word islam, which means submission, opened the way to numerous interpretations even if the submission in question was submission of His subjects before God. From spiritual acceptance of submission to its earthly acceptance requires, in the eyes of some, but a single step. Malek Chebel considers that Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence) “sets in stone de facto equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs.” In fact, a kind of double-speak seemed to have been the rule: Egypt, a slavery crossroads, abolished the slave trade in 1877 but the decree of abolition was for decades more honored in the breach than in the observance. At the same time, the Koranic verses

118  |  Jews in Arab Countries recommending liberation of slaves were contradicted by the edicts (fatwas) of theologians, who justified the traffic in human beings.159 An examination of cultural history runs the risk of falling into “Orientalism,” to borrow the expression of Edward Said, who sees it first as the colonialist lens through which the West viewed the Orient in the nineteenth century.160 According to Said, in the binomial “Orient/Occident,” the West writes while the East is described.161 Moreover, to study, to expound on or to research is to affirm one’s superiority, as Lord Cromer innocently confessed in 1908: “We (Westerners) consider in all good conscience that we are worth more than the subjected race.”162 It is the act of enclosing the subject in an essence, an inescapable nature, an eternal state of being talented or inept, strong or weak. Thus understood, Orientalism closely associates scholarly erudition and European expansion. Scientific societies are at the forefront of the search for knowledge: the Société asiatique (1822), the Royal Asiatic Society (1823), the American Oriental Society (1842), Christian organizations, from the oldest— founded at the end of the seventh century—to the Church Missionary Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804). The establishment of the Alliance israélite universelle in 1860 was in part a reflection of this trend. Nevertheless, the differences are more important than the similarities when it comes to the mission and approach of the AIU, in particular because it attempted to break with the habitual view of the Jews as “sickly victims.” If Orientalism deprecates the Orient and encloses it within an essentialist vision (which Saïd calls “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”), the AIU, for its part aimed at emancipation from a gaze that undervalued and underestimated.163 If Orientalism presupposes a master/slave relationship, the AIU distanced itself from that, even if the approach of its schoolmasters drew from the well of Orientalist clichés. Orientalism says more about the West than the world it purports to observe. Thus Flaubert, in his correspondence, conflated the Orient with the feminine and the Occident with the masculine, the one passive and conquered, and the other active and conquering.164 At the beginning the AIU reflected this mental framework but in fine, its goal was to depart from the paths of servitude that “Judaized” the Jews and “Orientalized” the Orient. Authority relationships remain marked by the relations of servility that characterize power. If slavery per se has disappeared (or virtually disappeared), many consider that in part of the Arab-Muslim world, slavery persists in the form of domestic service. In modern-day Morocco, some children are sold by their families. Malek Chebel evokes “an ocean of submission, and of everyday servitude and a denial of the most elementary human rights . . . something which acts as a brake on the unfolding of a modern notion of an individual’s rights.”165

Colonized | 119 The view with regard to Jews is inseparable from a mental universe where the individual is enmeshed in the web of entangled relationships: of the family to the lineage, the lineage to the clan, and the clan to the tribe. The group alone is what matters, not “society” or the individual. What counts is the balance of power, not some universally applicable law or natural law above clans or tribes. Traditional culture is at the antipodes of what can be called the revolution of the subject, and such a culture inevitably collided head to head with the Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In societies regimented by honor, force is ranked “at the first level of political instrumentality,” and citizenship is “reduced to a relation of submission.”166 The binary concepts of honor/shame structure a mental environment in which war and physical courage are among the highest of the virtues, along with resistance to humiliation. Conversely, avoidance of combat induces a shame worse than death. This is why it can appear so difficult to negotiate, as if negotiation were the acceptance of defeat, with the very idea of compromise experienced as an attack on one’s honor. In denouncing “Orientalism,” Edward Said encloses the imagined Orient within reductive categories, in particular by assimilating the “Orient” to the Arab Orient alone. Inspired by an imperatively anticolonialist perspective, he excludes any critical thinking about what constitutes the cultural soil in which these worlds grow. In the name of the rejection of essentialism, he stigmatizes cultural history, which is nevertheless the only approach capable of explaining the genesis of mentalities, social structures, and discourses. Cultural history is thus reduced to a form of intellectual colonialism. But should Israeli historians studying the Masada complex, or messianism in the wake of Sabbatianism, also be viewed as reductivist thinkers and partisans of a “racist” history? This is in fact how Said proceeds with regard to the Jewish world, its culture and its history. By making Zionism into an “essentially colonial and European movement,” he passes in silence over the long cultural history of the Jewish world, ignoring—like any self-respecting colonialist—both the past of what he is examining, and the living links that constitute its mental landscape. Here, Said fails to take into account the omnipresent ties uniting scattered Jewish communities who thought (as a dispersed people, to be sure, but nevertheless as a people) of a land that they had physically deserted but that remained present and current in the imagination of traditionalist Diaspora Jews. This was the reality for the immense majority of Jews in the nineteenth century. Said is also silent about the one million Jews of Arab lands, three quarters of whom emigrated to the State of Israel between 1945 and 1970. Thus, Said recreates the same Orientalist discourse that elsewhere he dismantles. After Said laments over a topos that deprived the Orient of its identity, he then denies the cultural history of Zionism, which was at the origin of the

120  |  Jews in Arab Countries State of Israel, and obscures the history of a people whose imagination was long inhabited by a land it no longer inhabited. Said thus reduces Israel to a colonial (and thus, foreign) fact. He also obscures the exclusion of Arab Jews from their countries as well as their massive emigration to Israel. In these ways, Said reveals the ideological dimensions of his discourse. Edward Said considers that with the contemporary expression “the Arabs,” one now permits oneself to do what was once—and is no longer—permitted, with the use of expressions like “the Blacks” and “the Jews.” This, he maintains, is because one expatiates on “Arab mentality” yet one would no longer dare speak about “the mentality of Negroes.”167 But historically, “the Jew” or “the Black” was not associated with the figure of the oppressor but rather with that of the oppressed. This is quite the opposite of a conquering Arab world that imposed its law (including dhimma), reduced the status of minorities and practiced—as did others—the Black slave trade. To be concerned solely with how the West models the Orient through its gaze is to avoid any questioning about the cultural foundations of oppression. Can it be the case that examining German culture across a long historical period in order to understand Nazism is somehow less “racist” than interrogating the cultural foundations of Arab societies that have practiced oppression? It should be feasible to envisage abandoning a binary model that produces reasoning in terms of either/or, because the world’s complexity enjoins us to think in conjunctions, that is, in terms of and/and. Europe approached the fantasized Orient in a paradoxical manner: it subjected, dominated, and colonized the Orient, but at the same time, through the European cultural heritage—which also became the Orient’s—Europe provided the Orient with weapons for its own liberation. Conversely, conquest that was supposed to deliver emancipation was initially and solely oppression. Yet, this very oppression carried within itself a heritage of liberty that was to bring about the implosion of the prison of domination, and deliver the weapons of the spirit of the Enlightenment to those who were dominated. In this respect, there is a major difference between Orientalism as Said understands it, and the position of the AIU. In locking “the Orient” into an “essence,” Orientalism considers that the Orient is not capable of change. The AIU, on the contrary, took on as its only goal the release of Oriental Jews from the straitjacket of their misery. Orientalism functions in reality as a variant of nineteenth century Western-centrism and racial Darwinism. If the AIU articulates a Western Jewish voice determined to relieve the alienation of Oriental Jews, it can do so precisely because it does not imprison them within some sort of facile “essence of humanity.” If the fate of Jews improved during the reign of Mehemet Ali, as the Englishman Edward Lane reported after his stay in Egypt between 1833 and 1835, they

Colonized | 121 nevertheless “hardly dared utter anything when the worst sort of Arab or Turk beats them unjustly or assails them with curses.”168 Such examples remind us that despite proclamations of fraternity, the Jew remained a barely tolerated subject. This narrowly limited tolerance was ancient and varied from one area—and era—to another. And yet a common thread ran through these disparate times and places. Research into medieval Islam shows that already by the eleventh century, a Jew who had reached an important position was not able to maintain such a position for very long. As the first victim of popular anger, it was toward him, his family, and his community that the rioting mob turned when the time came. Here, respect amounted to interiorized submission. In 1910, Amram Elmaleh, at Fez, linked moral abasement and oppression: “In order to establish bit by bit normal relations between the Jews and their Muslim fellow citizens, free of disdain and hatred, it is not necessary to work on the latter so much as on our own co-religionists. This requires a long-term effort, including educational work in the schools which will form generations who are more conscious of their own dignity, and who have a greater moral standing, as they are slowly weaned off that instinct of servility and bending of the spine before the Muslim which is the inherited result of centuries of oppression.”169 From the start, Muslims were hostile to the first signs of Jewish emancipation along the Moroccan littoral. On March 29, 1841, the sultan sent a message to the governor of Larache-Tangiers: “We have learned that the Jews have begun to buy the best horses and ride them with saddles. Immediately upon receipt of the present announcement, all those Jews who have horses are to sell them. They are to mount only donkeys. For the Prophet said: ‘Debase them as God has debased them’, and Sidi Khlil, for his part, said: ‘Forbid to them all horses, saddles and rapid mounts.’”170 In the vocabulary concerning the Jews, the expression “exceeding the boundaries” became a veritable refrain. In 1884, an edict of the sultan reminded the Jews “to not pass the limits which have been assigned to them, and to strictly observe their obligations.”171 In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Yemen, several testimonies evoked the threat hanging over Jewish houses and synagogues judged “too beautiful.” At the end of the eighteenth century, in his Travels in Arabia, the Danish traveler Carsten Niebuhr described the demolition of synagogues for these reasons.172 At night, the Jewish quarter had to remain unlit. Because they were required to live discretely, the Jews were forbidden to make music in the streets. If they were able to own houses, these had to appear poor in order not to offend the Muslims, because God—it was said, invoking the Koran (II:58 and III:108)—had commanded the Jews to be poor. For the neighbors, this first step toward emancipation was experienced as an attack on their own independence. On November 1, 1880 (the year of the

122  |  Jews in Arab Countries Madrid Conference), the Makhzen set about cracking the whip concerning Jews who “spoke in an insolent manner, something which had never previously been seen.”173 In 1883, when the Jews took the initiative themselves to begin judging penal cases, the Ulemas (community of scholarly Muslims) resisted, citing texts relating to dhimma status. The Makhzen was concerned to reassert a control that could not be relinquished, because Europe was at its gates, and because in neighboring Algeria, since 1870, the Jews had been citizens on an equal footing with the French. This reaction, first of astonishment and then of anger, in the face of the insubordination of people meant to be dominated, was not unique to the Maghreb. In 1889 at Kirkuk, as Jacob Valadji reported, even the cadi, or traditional leader, incited his fellow Muslims to revolt, reminding them constantly that in their relations with Muslims, the Jews had lately become very free and easy, and indeed audacious.174 This change of attitude took effect in several regions of the Arab-Muslim world at the end of the nineteenth century. Both consular archives and AIU records are replete with complaints by the Muslim populace. The most educated fringe of the Jewish world, conscious of its worth and its new rights, simply had no intention to submit. Education had opened the way to insubordination. The Arab world thus had good reason to note a change in attitude. In Morocco, the Jewish community seemed to no longer tolerate the traditional justice applicable to it: “Why have you educated us?” asks a father in 1934. “Why do you educate our children? The more we raise ourselves up, the more we feel that we are infe­ rior beings, and the more we suffer psychologically.” Sémach concluded: “Fathers accept all sorts of insults which their sons don’t want to acknowledge.”175 From the first demonstrations organized in April 1933 by Moroccan Jews in solidarity with German Jews, a French police report notes that “‘the Moroccans’ [the Muslim majority], outraged, consider that the Jews ‘had become arrogant, unbearable.’”176 “Many find that Moroccan Jews have evolved too quickly,” explained Sémach in November 1934. “They’d like to see them return to the mellah in order to serve as the first scapegoats for popular vengeance.” As noted in a report from May 1933 concerning the submission of the Jews to Muslims in Morocco, “The issue is mezreg, or sovereign rights. That’s the mentality of populations which base their societies’ organization on the principle of power. The more powerful pursues the weaker, or, if this is in his interest, tolerates his presence.” The abandonment by the Jews of the mellah of their distinctive clothing is thus considered by Muslims as a breach of contract. The report goes on to explain that the protests of the Jews in favor of independence, which the French presence in Morocco permits, only reawakens the wounds of defeat” in Muslim hearts.177 A police note dated January 31, 1945, from Meknes in Morocco, asserted that it was not so much the national aspiration of the Jews to have a state in Palestine

Colonized | 123 that irritated their Muslim co-citizens, but rather the “change which had taken place for the past roughly two years in the general behavior of the Israelites visà-vis the Muslims.” They were accused of “wanting to be identical to the Europeans” in the country.178 The most blatant aspects of this submission faded away over time, but the underlying mentality did not disappear. The Moroccan Department of Indigenous Affairs in May 1933 explained: For the natives it was a question of mezreg, the right to sovereignty—the dhimma of Islamic jurists. This reflected the mentality of populations who have based the organization of their societies on the principles of force. He with the most power drives out the weakest, or—if it is in his interest— tolerates the presence of the weakest. . . . These relations of protector to protected are regulated amongst all primitives by very simple but precise laws. . . . The abandonment by mellah Jews of their distinctive clothing is thus considered by the Muslims as a breach of contract. “Let these Jews go to their own country, if they have one,” say the Muslims. “Otherwise, let these foreigners accept the laws of the land in which they live.” 179

The Department goes on to explain that the Jews’ manifestations of independence—allowed by the French presence—revive, in the hearts of Muslims, the “wound of the vanquished.”180 Under Vichy, with the flimsy republican umbrella no longer effective, the Makhzen regained its anti-Jewish vigor. In January 1941, Grand Vizier Mohamed el-Mokri warns that the Jews should not “forget their demmi [sic] status and in no case—under penalty of exposing themselves to dangers, which they well understand—should they depart from their traditional ways and the limits within which their lives have always been lived.”181 Similarly, he reiterated the interdiction forbidding Muslim women working in Jewish households. The Allied victory of 1945 modified the appearance of relations, but psychologically the Muslim attachment to the dhimma system remained intact, as did the intent to keep the Jews in a position of inferiority.182 Tolerance depended on the submission of the dhimmi. If the dhimmi resisted, tolerance fizzled out. Protection, too, was conditional on the dhimmi respecting the “pact” of submission. Equality was inconceivable. In October 1909, following the Young Turks Revolution, which proclaimed the civic equality of all inhabitants of the Empire, the Jewish community of Basra, in Iraq, addressed the Haham Bashi, or Chief Rabbi of Turkey: “Your Eminence will have no difficulty in imagining it. One would almost say that these people had waited until we were their equals in the eyes of the law to show us, through every manifestation of their hatred, the impossibility of such a monstrous thing as our equality with them; one could almost say that they now sense their own inferiority. . . . What they want at all costs is to prevent our moral recovery.”183

124  |  Jews in Arab Countries

Notes 1. Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 529. 2. See Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 36. 3. de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 395. 4. In Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 64. 5. Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Mamelouk, 77. 6. Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 492. 7. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 336. 8. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2249. See also Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 37. 9. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2247. 10. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., QJ, dossier 18. 11. See Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 309 and AIU, Morocco, I-J., 1, 11 September 1917. 12. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 88. 13. AIU, Iraq, I.C.2. Baghdad AIU school director, 27 February 1910. 14. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2248. 15. AIU, Iraq, I.C.2, Baghdad AIU school director, 27 February 1910. 16. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 215, 217. 17. Cited in Mark R. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix. Les Juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 340, author’s emphasis. 18. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et musulmans,” 119. 19. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 83. 20. Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 11 volumes (Leipzig: Leiner, 1853–1870). 21. This was probably published in Marseilles, likely by the Consistoire itself in the form of a pamphlet. 22. Shmuel Trigano (ed.), Le Monde sépharade, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 683. 23. AIU, Libya II. E. 3, letter from D. Arié, 18 December 1895. 24. CZA, KH 4B/451. 10 December 1928, letter from Hans Kohn. 25. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 25. 26. Cf. Denis Charbit, Sionisms (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), 378. 27. AIU, France, XIV. F.25, report dated 1 September 1903. 28. AIU, France, XIV, F.25, Casablanca, 22 October 1901. 29. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1, 4 December 1867. 30. AIU, France, XI. F. 20, report from Jerusalem, 26 August 1901. 31. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1, 20 November 1885. 32. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25, report dated 1 September, 1903. 33. In Bensoussan, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme, 1860–1940, 297. 34. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 2, letter from Valadji, 28 December 1888. 35. AIU, France, IX. E., letter from Mogador to the AIU in Paris, 22 February 1873. 36. In Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 123, 134. 37. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 1–9, 1 October 1889. 38. AIU, France, IX. E. 39. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 222/Zionism. 40. AIU, Egypt, X.E. 182, Somekh, Cairo, letter of 10 April 1903.

Colonized | 125 41. AIU, Egypt, I. G. 42. AIU, France, IX., E., 10 January 1891. 43. AIU, Egypt, VI. E. 87. 44. AIU, France, XV, F. 26. 45. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6, Tripoli, March 1905. 46. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Fez, annual report, 2 October 1916. 47. AIU, France, XII, F.21–22. 48. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Safi, Morocco, September 1929. 49. AIU, Iraq, I. C., 209, Baghdad, 16 October 1888. 50. AIU, Morocco, V. B. Tangiers, March 1905, Isaac Pisa. 51. Ibid., on Meknes, A. Ribbi, July 1901. 52. AIU, France, XIV, F.25, Fez, 1 September 1903. 53. BAIU. July–December 1866. 54. BAIU, 1900, 97. 55. BAIU, 1890, 77. 56. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 158. 57. “Les Arabes, les Juifs et la civilization” in Archives israélites de France, 1866, cited in ibid., 219. 58. AIU, France, XIV. F.25, Fez, J. Valadji, 1 September 1903. 59. AIU, Morocco, II. C., letter of 24 September 1896. 60. Memmi, La Statue de Sel, 108. 61. Ibid., 111. 62. Ibid., 286–287. 63. Ibid., 288. 64. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2–9, letter from Baghdad, 27 February 1910. 65. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 3., letters of 18 November and 8 October 1889. 66. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Oujda, 1 July 1940. 67. CZA, Z3-752. Cairo, Zionist Society of Hasamsony. 68. AIU, Morocco, V. B., March 1905. 69. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 3., Fez, 8 October 1935. 70. AIU, Morocco, XIV, F. 25, Fez, annual report, 1909–1910. 71. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, 20 January 1910. 72. In de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 400. 73. AIU, France, XV, F. 26. 74. AIU, Egypt, X. E., Cairo, 18 August 1905. 75. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Sémach, Sana’aa. 23 February 1910. 76. Cf. Chaim Aaron Kaplan, Chronique d’une agonie: journal du ghetto de Varsovie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2009), 354. 77. Cited in Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 248. 78. In Salomon D. Goiten, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957), 187. 79. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 360. 80. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Dossier 18. 81. Cited in Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 366. 82. Moïse Maimonides, Épître au Yémen (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 53. 83. Jean-Pierre Filiu, L’Apocalypse dans l’islam (Paris: Fayard, 2008). 84. de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 11.

126  |  Jews in Arab Countries 85. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 92. 86. BAIU, 1892, 54. 87. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 68. 88. AIU, Egypt, I.G. 89. Cited in Bat Ye’or, Le Dhimmi, 91, author’s emphasis. 90. BAIU, 1898, 64. 91. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9, 9 April and 18 June 1937. 92. AIU, Iraq, I.C. 3, Raphaël Danon, Baghdad, 6 June 1895. 93. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 5. 94. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 427. 95. BAIU, 1881, 65–69. 96. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. 11, 6 October 1880. 97. AIU, Morocco, I. B., 15 November 1934. 98. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Casablanca, 10 August 1919. 99. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, Question juives, dossier 22, May 1935. 100. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2, Baghdad, 14 December 1934. 101. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, Questions juives, dossier 22, 4 December 1944. 102. Cited in Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’islam arabe et turc (Paris: Payot, 2005), 165. 103. Emmanuel Sivan, Mythes politiques arabes (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 191, 197. 104. AIU, I. C. 9, Mosul, 15 December 1911. 105. As in Libya, at Zaouïa, reported in 1906 in the BAIU, 108. 106. AIU, Morocco, XIV. F. 25. 107. AIU, Morocco, I. B, 26 December 1900, letter from Ézagury to the President of the AIU in Paris. 108. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 210. 109. Cf. AIU, Morocco, I. B., 17 February 1936, letter from Leon Ninio reporting on the events of 1894. 110. AIU, Libya, I. C. 1. 111. BAIU, July–December 1900, 84. As well, cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 218. 112. In Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 32. 113. In Archives israélites de France, 1, 1840, cited in ibid., 9.29. 114. AIU, Egypt, I. G., March 1910 115. In Pierre Genty de Bussy, De l’Établissement des Français dans la régence d’Alger (Paris: Didot, 1839, cited in Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 33. 116. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Mogador, 8 October 1907. 117. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, Benoudiz, 30 March 1912. 118. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2250. 119. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 18, 11 September 1898. 120. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2250. 121. Ibid., 2249. 122. Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb moderne, 38. 123. Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 278. 124. Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Mamelouk, 92, 107. 125. de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 23. 126. AIU, Morocco, XIV, F. 25, report of 1909–1910, Elmaleh.

Colonized | 127 127. In Fenton and Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb, 344. 128. CZA, ZI-308/1, testimony of Aharon Sultan, businessman in Fez, in his letter of June 29, 1900. 129. Cf. Parfitt, The Road to Redemption. 130. Cited in Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 99. 131. AIU, Egypt, I. G., 9 May 1910. 132. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 515. 133. AIU, Morocco, IV. C., 11, Tangiers, 24 December 1875. 134. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25, annual report 1908-1909. 135. AIU, Libya, I. G. 1-2, Tripoli, 17 June 1923. 136. Jacques Taïeb, Être Juif au Maghreb à la veille de la colonisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 121. 137. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25. 138. Paix et Droit, June 1928, 5. 139. AIU, France, XV. F. 25. 140. AIU, Morocco, I. B., Casablanca, Sémach, 15 November 1934. 141. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 7, 15 October 1913. 142. Paix et Droit, November 1927, 11. 143. Paix et Droit, May 1926, 10. 144. AIU, France, VI. F. 12, report of 10 June 1931. 145. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 8, report of Leon Ninio, April 1937. 146. Ibid. 147. Schlousch, Travels in North Africa, 37. 148. de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 77. 149. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I. Questions juives, reports of 4 and 23 March 1932. 150. BAIU, 1888, 31. 151. AIU, Morocco, III. B., Rabat, Conquy to Bigart, 28 April 1908. 152. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10 June 1911. 153. BAIU, 1908, p.98. 154. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 7, 22 March 1911. 155. Cf. Albert Hourani, Histoire des peoples arabes (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 327. 156. Malek Chebel, L’Esclavage en terre d’islam (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 27. 157. Ibid., 34. 158. Ibid., 52. 159. Chebel, L’Esclavage en terre d’islam, 167. 160. Cf. Edward Said, L’Orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Occident (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 161. Ibid., 339. 162. In an essay published in 1908 in the Edinburgh Review, cited in ibid., 41. 163. Said, L’Orientalisme, 15. 164. Cf. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, vol.1, 1973, letters of December 1849-July 1850 sent from his Egyptian travels with Maxime du Camp, 536–651. 165. Chebel, L’Esclavage en terre d’islam, 288–299. 166. Ibid., p.41. 167. Said, L’Orientalisme, op. cit., p.294.

128  |  Jews in Arab Countries 168. Cited in Lewis, Juifs en terre d’Islam, 487. 169. BAIU, 1910, July–Dec. 170. In Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 61. 171. BAIU, July–Dec. 1884, 31. 172. Cf. Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 99. See also Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 92. 173. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 231. 174. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3, Baghdad, 23 December 1889. 175. AIU, Morocco, IV, C. 11, Rabat, 17 July 1934. 176. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I. Questions juives, dossier 24, 14 April 1933. 177. CADN, protectorate of Morocco, Questions juives, May 15, 1933. 178. AIU, Morocco, I. B. Casablanca, 15 November 1934. See also CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, Questions juives. 179. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I. Questions juives, 15 May 1933. 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid., dossier 24, 4 January 1941. 182. Ibid., Rabat, 4 November 1946, letter to the political secretariat of the Résidence Générale. 183. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 5, letter from Basra, 22 October 1909.

3 From the Enlightenment to the Alliance

The central role played by the French consul in the Damascus Affair only

amplified the tragedy’s convulsive impact on European Jewish communities. On February 5, 1840, Father Thomas, the Capuchin superior in Damascus, disappeared, together with his servant Ibrahim Amarah. A Sardinian subject, Thomas was a protégé français, that is, a person enjoying France’s protection and legal tutelage. He was thus under the jurisdiction of the French consul, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, who—bolstered by the support of local Christians—initially accused the city’s Jews of having abducted Thomas in order to commit a “ritual crime.” If such an accusation was routine in Christian lands, it was new to Muslim lands. The resulting wave of arrests demoralized the Damascus Jewish commu­ nity. In Paris the president of the council (i.e., prime minister) Adolphe Thiers supports his consul. In Europe, Jewish notables began to mobilize. Meanwhile, a first Jewish suspect—a barber named Salomon Hallaq—is arrested. Beaten and tortured, he “confesses” to put an end to his suffering and gives up the names of a dozen or so of the city’s Jewish notables, including Jacob Antébi, the Chief Rabbi. They are arrested and tortured. One of them succumbs and dies, a second converts to Islam, and five others accuse each other of every imaginable crime. Only Rabbis Antébi and Salonieli refuse to confess. At the instigation of the French consul, another young Jew is arrested and whipped to death. Ratti-Menton then has all Jewish butchers and gravediggers arrested. Finally, he has sixty Jewish children arrested in order to force the community to “confess,” threatening to execute the children one after another in front of their mothers. This arouses the attention of the French press, which had been unaware of these exactions. Damascus was not the only Middle Eastern city where this charge was leveled by Christians. Other occasions are recorded: Aleppo in 1810, Beirut in 1824, Antioch in 1826, and Homs in 1829. In all these cases, the accusations were brought by Greek Catholics in order to discredit Jews in the eyes of Muslims. In early June 1840, Thiers congratulated Ratti-Menton for “standing up to the Jewish campaign of political mobilization.” On July 13, convinced that the pitiable state of Oriental Jews would improve through reinforcement of the European

130  |  Jews in Arab Countries presence, Adolphe Crémieux, Moses Montefiore, and the Orientalist scholar Salomon Munk left Paris for Egypt. They were received by Mehemet Ali Pasha, who was supported by France. On September 8, faced with an absence of proof and a denial of justice, Mehemet Ali had the prisoners freed; Sultan Abdulmecid I, who also received Crémieux and Montefiore, ordered the publication of a firman acquitting the victims: An old prejudice exists against the Jews. Ignorant people believe that the Israélites practice human sacrifice in order to use blood in their matzot. As victims of this belief, the Jews of Damascus and Rhodes, who are subjects of our empire, have been persecuted by other believers. . . . In addition to that, all the Jews’ religious books have been submitted to the examination of competent men with a perfect knowledge of the Hebrew language. Such examination has determined that the Israélites do not use blood—not just human blood but even the blood of animals. We conclude that the violence directed against the Jews is based on absolute calumny.1

On top of the Damascus Affair came the Mortara Affair in 1858, named after the young Italian Jew from Bologna who, hardly six years old, was baptized in secret by his family’s Christian maidservant. As he was now a Christian, the child was taken from his parents by gendarmes in June 1858, and sent to Rome under papal protection, as Bologna belonged to the Papal States. This occured despite the protestations aroused in Europe by this affair, including by Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna and Napoleon III in Paris. In 1859, Montefiore himself went to Rome and was received by the Pope, but to no effect. Baptism is an indissoluble sacrament: the Mortara child was placed in a convent. In 1870, upon attaining the age of eighteen, he was free to return to his family, but refused to do so. He later became a priest, and eventually a professor of theology. For many Jewish communities, the Mortara Affair was a shock. No manner of intervention was enough to make the Church bend. Many concluded that only the Jews’ own forces could be relied on and set out to create organizations capable of making themselves heard. These two affairs would push European Jews to establish political institutions; in the wake of these events, the Board of Deputies of British Jews was founded in London in 1859, and the AIU in Paris the following year. Other groups, too, arose: the Anglo-Jewish Association in London in 1870, the Israelitische Allianz in Vienna in 1873, the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden in Berlin in 1901 and the American Jewish Committee in the USA in 1906. The birth of these associations occurred in a context larger than the Jewish one, as other international institutions were established at the same time. Thus in 1860, the same year the AIU was established, the Red Cross was founded in Geneva by Henri Dunant, and Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx ramped up appeals to found a Workers’ International.

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 131 The establishment of Britain’s Board of Deputies was concomitant with that of the AIU. In 1855, the Jews of Yemen had informed British Jews of the new wave of violence to which they were subjected; the Jewish Chronicle reported on these events. At the time, Moroccan Jewry was also a priority for humanitarian aid. In 1858 Salomon de Rothschild traveled to Tetouan and tasked Dr. Henri Hauser with relieving misery in the mellah. In the 1860s, the AIU ended this “philanthropy of handouts” in favor of more political aid that considered impoverished Jews of the mellahs less as paupers to be supported than emerging citizens, shackled by poverty. In June 1861, Syrian native Moses Picciotto (1806–1879), head of the Sephardic community in London and member of the Board of Deputies, sent a proposal to Narcisse Leven, Secretary of the AIU, to open a school in Tetouan. This was the first occasion when European Jews intervened in favor of their Moroccan co-religionists. Moroccan Jewry started to mobilize Jewish institutions. In Tangiers in 1863, two Jews suspected of killing a Spaniard were executed under pressure from the Spanish consul. In September of the same year the terrified communities called on the AIU and the Board of Deputies. American Jewry also intervened; in fact, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites had already provided financial assistance to Moroccan Jewish refugees in Gibraltar in 1862, during the “Tetouan War.” But it was London Sephardic Jewry who, from 1845, played a pioneering role in creating the Moroccan Relief Fund to aid the mellahs, hit by recurrent famine. Montefiore, head of the Board of Deputies from 1835 to 1874, was a leader in this fight. Later, he was elected to the House of Commons and was knighted by Queen Victoria. Retiring on his fortune before the age of forty, he participated in all the struggles affecting Jews. Conservative—indeed quite orthodox—in religious matters from 1827, he feared that Jews were distancing themselves from religious practices, which fueled his distrust of secular education. It was on reading the Picciotto report in 1860 that Montefiore decided, despite his age of seventy-nine, to travel to the Cherifian kingdom; with the assistance of the British government, he set off and was received in Marrakesh by Sultan Mohammed IV (1859–1873). Morocco was not disposed to adopt the Ottoman reforms of 1856, which abolished dhimma status. On January 26, 1864, after reporting on the condition of Moroccan Jews to the Board of Deputies, Montefiore declared his determination to convince the sultan to put an end to humiliating measures, above all the requirement that the Jews go about barefoot. This proved to be a complete waste of time and effort. Received by the sultan on February 1, he requested the abolition of dhimma status. Five days later, the sultan issued a dahir or edict, which made the Jews the equals of Muslims.2 However,

132  |  Jews in Arab Countries confirming the disdain with which one should treat them, he addressed this not to the Jews themselves but to the British consul. Moreover, this promised equality of treatment included no modification of legal status. In effect, the sovereign granted this concession because he hoped to obtain loans on the European financial markets. But the resistance of Muslim society even to the idea of Jewish equality should not be underestimated. Montefiore knew that local authorities had no intention of giving in so easily. The Makhzen’s official historian, Nasiri al-Slawi, explained that the dahir was perceived by Muslims as a European intrusion, an incursion by the Christian enemy, and a catastrophe. He reported that the Jews, emboldened by this dahir, “attacked oppression and injustice, for they wanted to administer their own internal affairs in particular manners, above all in those port cities which enacted formal engagements. However . . . the Sultan understood that it had been his dahir which had provoked this delusion on the part of the Jews.”3 Within the narrow framework of the dhimma system, any claim of equality was the equivalent of insubordination, challenging the hospitality hitherto offered by the faithful. Arab sources view the Jews as arrogant, greedy, and cynical. For Arab chroniclers, Montefiore’s 1864 Morocco visit was proof of a worldwide “Jewish conspiracy,” just as was the French intervention in Tunisia after the execution of the Jewish coachman Batto Sfez in 1857. In Western chancelleries, Montefiore’s visit was viewed as a clumsy step that “risks over-exciting Muslim fanaticism and provoking acts of violence,” as the French consul at Mogador stated in February 1864.4 In reality, other interests were at play; Paris feared a British encroachment into Morocco by taking advantage of Montefiore’s mission. Beyond imperialist competition, the Moroccan Jewish community saw Europe as a lifeline, but by doing so, as Bernard Lewis notes, the Jews were mortgaging their future in the country.5 The opening of schools in the Middle East—starting with Egypt, the site of advanced Western penetration since the expedition of 1798—constituted the first marker laid down by what would become the AIU. The first such establishment was founded in Cairo in 1840, followed by two others in Alexandria, at the initiative of Adolphe Crémieux in the wake of the Damascus Affair and thanks to financial assistance from the Rothschild family. Until that time, European Jews had above all focused on opening religious schools in the Holy Land, such that there were no fewer than twenty-seven yeshivot in Jerusalem by 1850. In liberal Europe of the nineteenth century, a single generation that issued from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution undertook to achieve the accession of Jews to political life. The Frenchman Adolphe Crémieux, born in 1796, and the Englishman (and Anglican convert) Benjamin Disraeli, born in 1804, were the emblematic figures of a movement to turn Jews into citizens.

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 133 A lawyer by training, Crémieux started his political career as a deputy of the National Assembly in 1842, and by 1848 had become Minister of Justice of the Second Republic. He withdrew from politics during the Second Empire; he was not one of the founders of the AIU in 1860, for these all belonged to a younger generation, but he accepted its presidency three years later. The fall of the Empire brought him back into politics. He became Minister of Justice in the Government of National Defense in September 1870, and in 1871 was elected deputy from Algeria. The transition to “institutional” philanthropy changed the very sense of the word. It was no longer a question of paternalistic charity, comforting the existing social dispensation in the name of maintenance of order, but on the contrary a result of the Enlightenment spirit that “aspires toward progress and not solely charity, with the mission of preventing rather than healing, of providing work rather than distributing alms.”6 This philanthropy was political, as it aimed to turn impoverished people into citizens with equal rights, and subjects of reason who can rebel against dogmatic verities. “Charity” does not contest the order of the world, but “benevolence,” on the contrary, aspires to a quite different order. The work of the AIU, like that of Jewish philanthropy in general, fell into that second category. It was only late into the twentieth century that philanthropy came to be perceived as a tool of repression and a means of social control, through the regulation of morals and the maintenance of order. Jewish philanthropy, inspired by the early nineteenth-century SaintSimonian movement and an optimistic idea of progress, sought to prevent rather than just remedy. It was political because, in the name of natural law, Jewish organizations of the nineteenth century disregarded (at least theoretically) the sovereignty of states and only recognized the human race. These organizations grasped the efficacy of collective mobilization against tyranny, and the importance of pressure groups and circles of influences such as Freemasonry, literary salons, and academies, and the cultivation of relationship networks. Bringing itself into step with enlightened Europe, the European Jewish world carried Middle Eastern Jewry in its wake. The AIU was the first Jewish organization of an international character, founded on the basis of Jewish solidarity, that is—and not without contradiction— on the conviction that the Jews are a people and not just dispersed followers of the same faith. By postulating that Jews are political subjects sharing common interests, the AIU laid the foundations (without realizing it) of a Zionism that nationalized religious identity and secularized religious faith in order to speak of a people and a culture. By taking as their watchword the Talmudic adage “Kol Israel haverim” (which can be more or less faithfully translated as “all Jews are in solidarity with each other”) the AIU broke with the strict confessionalism of consistories, and in particular with the French conception of Jewishness.

134  |  Jews in Arab Countries This meant promoting the Enlightenment at the heart of Judaism, on the model of German Wissenschaft, with perhaps the subjacent desire to deOrientalize Judaism, like the German Haskalah (the early nineteenth-century German-Jewish enlightenment) had attempted to do. This explains the vocabulary borrowed from the French Revolution, as when the AIU explained that the Jews (sous-entendu the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin) must be “regenerated.” Fueled by their precocious emancipation as French Jews and powered by the ideal of the “Grande Nation” bringing liberty to the entire world, several French Jewish personalities were convinced that they could speak on behalf of Jews world-wide, and that French Jewry should work for the regeneration of Oriental Jewries—while at the same time enlarging France’s scope of influence around the Mediterranean. The AIU sprouted in the same intellectual loam as Zionism, at the turn of the 1860s during a period when pro-Enlightenment Europe was in combat with anti-Enlightenment Europe. But the AIU had a quite different end-goal, namely to avoid enclosing Jewish identity within a national framework. Thus, the “return” of the Jews cannot be a geographic one but only political, through their accession to citizenship and attainment of human rights in whatever country they inhabited. Rather than leaving in order to regather, the Jews should set down firm roots on a basis of equality. This outlook explains the antiZionism of the AIU, up to the Second World War at least. Key to understanding this is to grasp the paradox of an institution that, in re-Judaizing and opening up toward the Enlightenment, adopted a secular and national approach. The AIU project was thus linked to progress toward democracy in both Western Europe and the United States, and of more transparent institutional behavior—unlike the Consistoire central des israélites de France (Central Council of French Jews). The AIU’s founding meeting took place in Paris on May 17, 1860, when seventeen people met at the home of Charles Netter. The resulting Manifeste des fondateurs (Founders’ Manifesto) had a huge impact.7 With 142 members by July 1860, it engaged in its first action, in favor of Syrian Maronites. In May 1861 it had 850 members, of whom 92 percent were French and Italians. By 1870 it had 13,370 members, and by 1895 more than 30,000. There were three goals. First, emancipation, the achievement of moral progress through education in French, and action against poverty and illness. Second, support for Jews persecuted because they were Jews. Third, alerting European powers to violence committed against Jews. AIU school directors were required to complete monthly reports. Eventually, the information transmitted to Paris headquarters would constitute a large documentary record about Oriental Jewish communities between 1862 and 1939. Several European Jewish associations quickly developed the practice of working together, in particular the AIU and the British Board of Deputies.8 In

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 135 1861, Joseph Halévy, for the AIU, and James Picciotto, for the Board of Deputies, met Jewish leaders from Tetouan and together established a plan of school establishment that would break with the rigid teaching by local rabbis. A portion of the operating costs had to come from the local community itself. The first boys’ school opened on December 23, 1862, enrolling some 160 students and turning away 140, who were put on the waiting list. On December 30, the school was placed under the official protection of France and Great Britain. It was a challenge to recruit for the initial staffing at a time when the AIU had not yet begun to train its own teachers. From Tetouan, then Tangiers and Mogador, genuine missionaries were recruited, whose role went well beyond that of schoolteacher. In step with the political mission of the AIU, they also conducted themselves as harbingers of justice, such that between 1860 and 1900, the school directors were viewed as invested with the informal status of “political protectors of the Jewish community.” A consideration of the Oriental Jewish world’s first steps toward modernity (in the Western sense of the invention of the subject) leads to the demolition of the idée reçue of European Jewry bringing light to a benighted, fog-enshrouded Maghreb. This cliché is of a piece with the Orientalization of the Orient, the Sephardization of the Sephardim, and the casting of a pitying eye on the “archaism” of this world. In effect, the first steps toward political modernity in the Near East are not unconnected to the 1798–1801 French Expedition to Egypt, and in particular the measures abolishing the jizya and according equality of rights. These were instituted by Napoleon on September 7, 1798, and applied to all inhabitants of the country (including the miniscule Jewish community of perhaps seven thousand). The reign of Mehemet Ali, from 1805, was evidence that historical forces had been set in motion. Civil courts were created before which a Jew could testify against a Muslim. This fact—unique in the Muslim world—bore the mark of the French Revolution. It is one of the reasons why Egypt became an attractive land for many Jews from the Maghreb and Europe, throughout the nineteenth century. The viceroy’s policy of opening allowed the establishment of modern schools, the creation of Hebrew printing houses and the flourishing of publications in JudeoSpanish, Hebrew, and at the end of the nineteenth century, Yiddish. The ideas of the French Revolution, which conquered Europe at the same time as Republican armies, can be readily summarized: equality among men, and equal citizenship regardless of religious affiliation. This ideal of civic equality made even more unbearable the massive inequality that had hitherto been accepted. The more inequality retreated under the impact of new ideas and practices, the more what remained of it came to appear scandalous. As well, one must take into account the Balkan Jewish Haskalah, or enlightenment. This produced many AIU teachers, who spread their own “Jewish

136  |  Jews in Arab Countries modernity” across the Middle Eastern network of schools, such as Joseph Halévy (1827–1917) in Andrinopole (Edirne). Similarly, in Izmir, more than twenty periodicals were published in Judeo-Spanish between 1840 and 1923. We must also underscore the importance of Hebrew as a lingua franca between intellectuals scattered across both the Middle East and the West, well before the arrival of Ben Yehuda in Eretz Israel in 1881. In the Maghreb, the elements of the Haskalah were in place by the end of the nineteenth century. Maghreb Jewry, so criticized by AIU schoolmasters, nevertheless appeared less dogmatic than Ashkenazi orthodoxy; despite some reticence and resistance, it did not declare open war on Western civilization or modernization. Unlike Ashkenazi Jewry, the Maghreb variant resisted assimilation or at least delayed it, just as it resisted Orthodox fundamentalism. This explains the less powerful grip of Zionism: here, it was possible to embrace modernity without abandoning either faith or a large proportion of tradition. On the contrary, when the dividing line was sharper, Zionism prevailed more easily as a secularized form of Jewish identity. This is why, unlike European Ashkenazi maskilim (scholars of the Jewish enlightenment), the maskilim of the Judeo-Arab world presented an image of modernity within the faith, because a universe that had no experience of secularization offered no alternative identity. This is also why a great proportion of the Near Eastern rabbinical world accepted the new intellectuals, who had no intention of mounting a frontal challenge to the rabbis. It is, furthermore, the reason why the majority of Egyptian and Maghreb rabbis supported the early Zionist movement. Contrary to the cliché spread by Europeans, Oriental Jewry was neither highly narrow-minded nor stupidly archaic. For Oriental Jews, the West was synonymous with liberation from dhimma status, and political and humanitarian protection (as well as good nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, etc.). For Jews and Christians of the ArabMuslim world, Europe offered a major positive change, while for Muslims, Europe first and foremost represented the risk of dispossession; and for Ashkenazim, Europe was wrapped up in the long history of oppression. The aspiration to equality and justice was, to a large extent, what fed the political struggle of European and Oriental Jews up to and indeed beyond the First World War. In any hierarchical society, co-existence is only possible when inferiority is internalized. When this hierarchy comes to be perceived as foreign to oneself, it becomes more and more difficult to live with inferiority. Thus, the modernity of the Enlightenment undermineed a formerly stabilizing consensus. These new ideas contributed to the deterioration of relations between Jews and Arabs, starting in the nineteenth century and intensifying during the first half of the twentieth century. Under the impact of the opening of trade, crosscultural encounters, and efforts to spread education, Jews stopped putting up with the tradition of submission. For their part, Muslims no longer recognized

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 137 their neighbors of yesteryear, familiar and accepted to be sure, but also inferior. In Morocco the Jews became a political and international “problem”; some 25 percent of diplomatic documents in Moroccan archives from 1870 to 1880 deal with the protection of the country’s Jews based on complaints submitted by Europeans to the Cherifian authorities. The Revolution of July 1908 was another modernizing factor. Non-Muslims, in particular Jews and Christians, reacted favorably. For the Jews, the Empire’s new regime was a lifesaver in the face of governmental arbitrariness, as the Baghdad AIU director stated in 1909: “The non-Muslims are exultant when hearing the news of the newly promulgated Constitution, while the Muslims grant it a frosty and hostile reception,” for it “strikes very rough blows at their fanaticism.”9 But the Constitution would give birth to hope more widely than just among religious minorities. “The entire Empire explodes with universal joy,” noted an American missionary in Beirut. “The press speaks freely. Public meetings are held; cities and towns—large and small—are decorated, and one sees Muslims embracing Christians and Jews.”10 Yet, this gust of free air did not blow for long, for power was quickly confiscated by a group of officers and senior functionaries belonging to a secret society founded in 1889 by a core of soldiers and Istanbul medical students—the Committee of Union and Progress, also called the “Young Turks.” A process of Turkification of the Empire began in April 1909. Arab nationalism was muffled, as all the more so was the nascent Jewish nationalist movement—Zionism. From August 1909, non-Muslims were required to perform military service. Many young Jews, aware of the weight of popular anti-Judaism, were reluctant to serve as whipping posts in the barracks, and prefered to pay the exemption tax. Nevertheless, equality was now enshrined in the law. There was even a Jewish parliamentary deputy, Sassoon Heskel, a former AIU student, who served as Minister of Finance in five successive governments in Baghdad during the British mandate. But such equality was far from being real or accepted, even if the Ottoman government looked to the Jewish minority to serve as a vector of economic progress. The slow liberation of the Jews was manipulated with prudence by the European colonizer, which found itself caught between the wish to emancipate a community loyal to it, and the desire to not give it too much importance, nor to give umbrage to the Muslims. Such would be the French attitude in Morocco up to 1956. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish emancipation was still highly limited; out of 5 million Jews worldwide, hardly 400,000 enjoyed political and civil rights, and 90 percent of the world’s Jews suffered under regimes of exception. The movement toward emancipation was initiated by France in 1791; the country’s

138  |  Jews in Arab Countries precocity in Jewish freedom explained the immense prestige France enjoyed among all Jewish communities. The success of the AIU starting in the 1860s and 1870s was inseparable from the enviable position enjoyed by the birthplace of the Revolution. Emancipation and legal equality opened the way to the fluid notion of modernity. This comprised, first, freedom of thought and critical reason over dogmatic faith; second, the emergence of the subject out of the group—thus, chosen affiliation versus subjected affiliation, or membership determined by ancestors, race, and blood; third, the ability to change one’s situation in order to hasten emancipation without needing to wait for divine will to do this; and fourth, the invention of a Jewish public space, beyond faith—the space of political expression. Thus, Jewish modernity considered the Jewish world to be a nation, without however reducing Jewishness to a religion. These elements converge to underscore the importance of individual struggle, that is, taking one’s own destiny in hand while waiting neither for the forward movement of the group, nor for divine intervention, and by prioritizing education. From this emerged the view that Hebrew, the quintessential Jewish language par definition, is the very heart of this nation and is all the more crucial in that this atypical nation was deprived of a territory. Thus, words, the modernization of the language, and its secularized instruction, and its mutation from a vernacular and liturgical tongue into a mother-tongue (and thus one also spoken by women) would take the place of a physical country, and serve as a substitute for the landscapes and atmospheres that make up a world of belonging. The retreat of communal autonomy struck Jewish notables, already dispossessed of some of their rights and roles. The advance of secularization offended a rabbinical power more and more confined to disputes relating to personal status (inheritance, marriage, divorce, etc.). In promoting secular knowledge and science, modernity reduceed both the scope of Talmudic knowledge and the prestige of the old elites. The erosion of traditional frameworks challenged established power at the very heart of communities. The emancipatory West came to see Oriental Jewry as backward, a population that needed to be saved from widely documented oppression, and that was unhesitatingly described as stultified and brutalized: “Modern times entered the Arab East through its non-Muslim minorities.”11 European Judaism would thus shake up the Judaism of the Arab-Muslim Near East. Western Jewry considered the Near Eastern Jewish minority as an agent of modernizing ferment, a widespread concept in the mid-nineteenth century. “The destiny of the Israelites is to open up the Orient to Western civilization,” affirmed the AIU Secretary General in 1866.12 This view was internalized by the Jewish elites of the Arab world, deeply convinced that the Jews were agents of modernity “at the decisive

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 139 moment when civilization finds us immediately available to serve as the best agents of its popularization.”13 It is a modernization that relied, as in Eastern Europe, on the maskilim. Such was the case in Morocco, where the writer David Elkaim (d. 1940), maskil, Zionist, and native of Mogador, was excited by the Balfour Declaration. Another personality of importance, also from Mogador, was Itzhak Ben Yaich Halevi (1850–1894), for a time the spokesman for Moroccan Jewry vis-à-vis European Jewry. In 1903, in Libya, Mordehai Ha Cohen (1845–1929), spokesman of Libyan Jews to the country’s authorities, organized the first demonstration against the tax imposed on the Jews in lieu of military service. These men, along with others, incarnated the first steps toward modernity. The interest in education is clear. Although the AIU encountered early difficulties in Morocco, the situation quickly turned around. Before long, AIU school waiting lists lengthened, and the schools started to turn away prospective students. Every September became the occasion of dramas, exacerbating feelings of injustice when pupils were turned away. The success of the AIU was not the result of a sudden passion for learning, but rather reflected a “professionalism” of education. As in France at the same time, even the most recalcitrant when it came to encouraging children’s education realized that educated children found work more quickly than the uneducated. This explains the craze for studies and earning a diploma. The endpurpose of schools changed: from places where sacred knowledge is imparted, they became the transmission belt of secular learning, the doorway into occupations, and the entry point into the modern world. A culture of employment took off, also opening the way toward education of girls, whom it was intended to turn into good seamstresses, capable homemakers, and so on. From the beginning of the nineteenth century this was true of both Istanbul and the Egypt of Mehemet Ali, and also for Lebanon’s Maronites who, like the Jews, cultivated relations with Western consular agents, opened schools, and at the same time nurtured the emigration of their elites. As in Eastern Europe the Haskalah only affected an educated minority, while the bulk of the community remained scrupulously within traditional practice. Toward 1870, the backwardness of Jewries of Yemen, Mesopotamia, and Morocco would be frankly evoked in terms that were often disparaging. The new Jewish schools were transmitters of modernity—not the only transmitters, evidently, but they constituted an essential vector in shaking up the old order. The opening to knowledge, occupations, and another language—a European one—as well as new practices, led the Jews of the Orient to feel that their state of servitude was more and more incongruous. Their subjected status was out of phase with the emancipation they studied on their school benches, a

140  |  Jews in Arab Countries heritage of the Enlightenment that, even if watered down, was part and parcel of France’s national history, which itself had become part of a universal heritage and included such epic tales as July 14, the night of August 4, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the battle of Valmy, and Bonaparte leading the troops at the Bridge of Arcole or at the pyramids of Egypt. The legend of the Great Nation pointing the way to liberty for suffering peoples can provoke a smile today, but in the past it elicited a motivating drive few myths had been so capable of producing. This status of subjected people underscores the contrast between on the one hand, the teaching of reason and freedom of thought, of respect of persons and habeas corpus, with on the other hand the reality of silent repression and violence, and of a sovereign contempt for women, Jews, and children—the crushing, in a word, of everything that does not have sufficient power to revolt. From being a tolerated but submitted subject, the new Jewish man, trained in Western schools, discovered the revolutionary potential of Zionism as a form of self-decolonization. This “new” man simply could no longer accept as a given the ancient subjection of the dhimmi. The crack became a gap, and then a yawning gulf. The beginnings of modernization were expressed by the first stage of political mobilization. The oppressed subject made a claim, hoped, and then fought. The first signs of secularization provided the occasion for rare violations of the Shabbat rules of repose: the frequentation of cafes, making music, and even the act of writing by merchants who used the day of rest, when their shops were closed, to deal with their books of accounts. Modernization produced other effects: it deepened the gap between rich and poor and between modernizers and traditionalists, and even divided the modernizers, with some favoring integration and others leaning toward Zionism. Nevertheless, one should not overestimate the effects of modernity on Oriental Jews. For the immense majority of them, backwardness and poverty remained the rule, and for many it was not until the 1930s that the first impacts of this modernization became discernable. Yet, nowhere did modernity start with colonization. Rather, elements of modernity were present well before then, as in Morocco, due to the existence of a Judeo-Moroccan diaspora in Europe and the Americas (especially in South America), which exercised an emancipatory effect on the community of origin. The roots of secularization were planted by international Jewish organizations and the Haskala, as evidenced by the creation of the first Zionist lodges in Moroccan port cities just after the inaugural Zionist congress in Basel, in 1897. Moroccan Jewry was already in full upheaval when the French troops disembarked in 1912. Given these mutations, the institution of dhimma appeared more and more anachronistic. In the Arab-Muslim world, modernity—by taking on a European form— tended to reject its own native origins. In Europe, modernity stayed within the

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 141 framework of the dominant power; in the world of Islam, by contrast, modernity broke with that world in order to don the garb (or at least the tattered rags) of its hereditary enemy, Christianity. Several contemporary observers perceived early on that modernity, accordingly, unsettled traditional communities and destabilized their expectations for the future, and those observers became convinced that the futures of the younger generation would diverge from the arcs of their parents’ lives. Emancipation did not upend only Jewish communities of the interior, or the traditional elites. It predominantly frightened the Muslim majority itself, as reported by the AIU director in Baghdad in 1909, who, citing the effects of the Young Turks Revolution, mentioned “Arab agitators” who arouse Iraqi mobs, convincing them that “the Koran is in danger and that it is the Jews who are the cause of the changes in the country, that the Jews are in charge of the government and that the laws are enacted under their inspiration.” This led to violence against the Jews; the authorities responded with apathy, not daring to confront the crowds, even if “a troop of thirty gendarmes was in the end able to restore order faced with a Muslim populace which did not understand the meaning of the word liberty” and which only saw in this new state of affairs “the sharp challenge which liberty was mounting against their privileges and their fanaticism.”14 The idea of civil equality, which inspired the Turkish nationalists of the Committee for Union and Progress, repelled the Arab world, with the exception of the narrow Westernized elite who applauded the restoration in vigor of the 1876 Constitution. “The idea of a legal and political equality between Muslims and non-Muslims . . . appears particularly unacceptable to the Arabs,” observed Justin Alvarez, French consul at Tripoli.15 The efforts of modern education, reinforced by the European penetration, would come to shape several generations of Jewish pupils, even if not the majority of them. There were, nevertheless, sufficient staff numbers to bring about a “training effect” on a great many. The mastery of a European language (generally French, English, or Italian) was a marker of modernity and emancipation, but this then led to accusations that Western schools were encouraging acculturation. To whatever extent it occurred, modernization created distance from the world of the past. What occurred between 1750 and 1914 in Eastern Europe with the Haskala now recurred in the Middle East, but even more rapidly due to the impact of European Judaism. Would emancipation and acculturation lead to deJudaization, as suggested in 1901 by the AIU director in Algeria, where the Jewish community was shaken by the Dreyfus Affair? Emancipation, he argued, had now shown its limitations; it results in a de-Judaization, which will leave Jews defenseless in future. The AIU was quickly perceived as a sort of court of final appeal to which one turned when all other doors had closed and the sovereign appeared

142  |  Jews in Arab Countries unapproachable. This French institution was soon receiving hundreds, indeed thousands, of calls for help that had no connection with educational issues, but rather involved issues of arbitrary political and social mistreatment, gratuitous violence and rape, and extortion. In a word, everyday tyranny enacted against minorities about whom the majority was accustomed to thinking not just that anything might be done against them, but that anything was permitted. One must however keep perspective—something that partisans of a dark version of Oriental Jewish history have not always done—for nothing here could compare to the horror of the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated from the Baltic to the Black Sea between 1903 and 1921. Before the violence in Romania and the Ukrainian pogroms of 1903, the principal preoccupation of the AIU remained Morocco, where the institution intervened on a priority basis through school directors, sometimes directly with provincial governors. After the 1912 disembarkation of French troops the AIU directly addressed the Résidence Générale to seek assent for the Jews henceforth only to be tried before the French courts. Lyautey steadfastly refused. On the ground, the AIU worked with foreign consuls; in the 1860s and 1870s this collaboration was often excellent, for example with Auguste Beaumier (French consul at Mogador), Ramon Lon (Spanish consul at Tetouan), and Aymé d’Aquin (French representative at Tangiers). On occasion, realizing that the Cherifian government’s commitments were virtually worthless, the AIU approached the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs directly, as when promises made to Montefiore in 1864 were never honored, and again in 1874 when the new sultan’s engagement was similarly made in vain. This was what drove the need to call for the support of foreign powers, on the basis of principles akin to a “right of intervention,” superior to the sovereignty of a state. Many examples illustrate the importance to the AIU, from its very establishment, of the Moroccan dossier. Present on the ground, it compiled an endless list of innumerable acts of violence. Due to its strong European relationships, when the AIU took up the political defense of Jewish communities, fear of European reaction sometimes acted to limit mistreatment. In its 1910 Annual Report, Amram Elmaleh, writing from Fez, described the reopening of schools the previous year, following two years’ interruption due to the pogrom of April 1907. The climate, he explained, had changed, and Fez Jewry lived more freely: “Jews go about wearing shoes and mounted on their mules, peaceably respected by passers-by, in the awful Arab quarter where previously they would go barefoot, humble and huddled against walls, heads lowered while receiving insults and blows.”16 The representative of the AIU was seen as the protector of the Jews. As Jacob Valadji explained in 1890, the AIU was “the hearth from which light radiates to the furthest reaches of Kurdistan.” These communities, he added, were sunk in

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 143 the “fog of ignorance,” and they had “respect . . . a truly touching veneration” for the AIU. But it was an institution whose role was changing. The educator became the protector, then the promoter of emancipation, especially when abolition of the capitulation systems (Tunisia 1897, Morocco, 1912) brought thousands of “protected” Jews back to the status of locals. “Just as the Israelite of the past was humble, servile and accustomed to bending his spine before the Muslim, so the young people of today are conscious of, and jealously attached to, their dignity as people and citizens.”17 On July 30, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte and thirty thousand soldiers disembarked in Egypt. The mission would last three years. Contact with an Arab world, in which Islam was not just a faith but also the very framework of social and legal life, was brutal. For many observers, the expedition represented a turning point in East-West relations, by opening the way toward domination and “Orientalism,” and also engendering the creation of a huge field of scholarship, with the development of Egyptology leading later to the decipherment of hieroglyphics. From the Arab perspective, however, the French expedition created a mental shock. By a solemn proclamation on April 19, 1799, Bonaparte invited the Jews of Asia and Africa (he was silent about those of Europe, although they were more numerous) to reestablish, under his sovereignty, their ancient homeland in Jerusalem. If this was obviously pure political propaganda, for the Jews it nevertheless represented the first time a European power (indeed, the greatest one at the time) had undertaken political action on behalf of the Jews of the Orient. Suddenly, they developed the feeling that they existed. The previous year, Bonaparte had already abolished the jizya for both the Jews and the large Coptic minority, provoking Muslim indignation. (General Menou, who succeeded Kléber after the latter’s assassination in June 1800, was more prudent; he reestablished the jizya in the same year.) The Egyptian expedition was the genesis of modern Orientalism, but at the same time it was the fruit of a long tradition. Sixty years after the expedition, the men and women of the AIU became the inheritors of this tradition, and as such, participated in the age-old confrontation between Islam and Christianity. The technological and scientific domination of Christianity ushered in its supremacy. An entire literature emerged from Bonaparte’s expedition in which the Orient was transformed, under the influence of fantasies and projections, into an Edenic realm of “early man” embodying the origins of Christianity. From the twelfth century, European powers had concluded treaties with the Levant states governing trade and the protection of European subjects (Genoa

144  |  Jews in Arab Countries 1149, Pisa 1154, and Venice 1220), guaranteeing their lives and goods when in Islamic lands by placing them under European jurisdiction (up until the 1535 treaty between François I and the Sublime Porte). For such subjects, dhimma status was thus annulled. This system of “capitulation” was to govern the status of foreigners in these lands right up to colonization. This highly prized protected status fiscally exempted subjects from the relation of servitude that was specifically attached to non-Muslims. However, for Muslims this engendered a strong feeling of internal interference. In 1880, the Madrid Conference, organized to deal with Morocco, was in part an expression of the irritation of the Cherifian government in the face of the multiplying requirements for consular protection. Moroccan unhappiness was also stoked by the threat of military action, as when in July 1883 an Italian fleet passed before Tangiers in order to demand of the sultan that he remove the governor of Rabat, who was accused of requiring Jews to salt the decapitated heads of rebels on Shabbat. For the Jewish minority, treaties between the Europeans and Arab or Ottoman powers furnished occasions to free themselves from dhimmi status. In Morocco, treaties concluded with the United Kingdom in 1751 and 1760 contemplated the granting of particular rights to Moroccan subjects serving as commercial agents for Britain, on an equal basis with treatment of British subjects residing in the Cherifian kingdom. Although the treaty text specifies “Musulmans and Jews,” everyone understood that it was particularly intended to apply to Jews, who thus were for the first time accorded considerable rights. For many Jews in Morocco, this passport spelled liberation. Europe intervened in the Arab-Muslim world through press campaigns denouncing violence in the region.18 However, its presence primarily took the form of commercial domination, particularly in Morocco. Morocco’s doors were opened to the British by the 1856 trade treaty between London and the Cherifian kingdom. British consuls were posted in the port cities, and British subjects were permitted to purchase land; moreover, they enjoyed exemption from taxation other than for customs matters, and were not subject to local law. Overwhelmed by European competition, Moroccan artisanal manufactures became dependent on world markets. Between 1860 and 1914, many Europeans arrived, multiplying the number of consular exemptions, protections, and protected persons; from barely a few hundred Europeans in 1830, Morocco counted twelve thousand by 1912. For London the essential thing was to maintain Morocco as a weak but independent state, preventing the establishment of Spanish or French tutelage. This is why, in the 1870s and 1880s, Britain refused to extend the regime of “consular protections,” which weakened Cherifian independence. Following Great Britain, Germany and Spain would also try to establish footholds in Morocco, by way of educational networks. The foreign thrust provoked

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 145 an attempt by Morocco at modernization, which seemed to be the sole way to counter Western penetration. The same was true for Egypt and also in Tunisia, where a first round of reforms was launched in 1857 prior to the adoption—for the first time in the Muslim world—of a constitution, in 1861. The Ottoman Empire would not promulgate its own constitution until 1876. Yet, modernization was most often a synonym for new economic subjection, as in Egypt, which became heavily indebted in the 1860s and by 1876 found itself unable to repay its debts. This was also the case in Morocco, which, invaded by Spain in 1860, was forced to pay Madrid a financial indemnity that strained its budget. This only further facilitated European penetration and ended with the country being placed under guardianship from 1880. The doors thus opened to more abuse. Certain consular protégés in Morocco profited from their status by cheating the locals through selling them factitious protection, leading to their despoilment. The mechanism was simple. Every “administered native” in Morocco understood that he was subject to arbitrariness that, the very next day, could dispossess him of his property. To abate the risk of seeing a lifetime’s effort ruined in an instant, the Arab peasant, if he was well off, purchased peace of mind by having his property registered in the name of a European. The property thus became inalienable, but the European received half of the income associated with it. In a position of power, some Europeans took over the totality of the income, and sometimes the totality of title to the property itself. Such interference and abuse was to create powerful resentment. In the Morocco of the 1880s, there were 563 European protégés, of which 103 were Jews, constituting less than one in a thousand out of a Moroccan Jewish community of some 120,000.19 On the coast, at least, the Jewish minority sought the protection of foreign consuls against denials of justice. But the consuls’ priority was intervention in order that their own businessmen, bankers, and other entrepreneurs could work without disturbance. They were only secondarily concerned with protecting an industrious minority who, with knowledge of the environment and European languages, servd as intermediaries. Interest in conversion was also a factor motivating certain Christians. In 1838 a British consulate opened in Jerusalem, to aid Jews whose miserable condition has been described above. However, this solicitude was inseparable from the Anglican Church’s messianic convictions, which underlay the establishment of schools that the Jewish community—conscious of the proselytizing objectives— strove to avoid. In addition to diplomatic personnel and religious missions, certain European doctors were actuated by purely humanitarian motives. Such was true for Doctor Thévenin, of Mogador in Morocco, who served at the same time as French consul Auguste Beaumier in the 1860 and 1870s. Thévenin, notes an AIU report

146  |  Jews in Arab Countries from 1873, “is a philanthropist in every sense of the word. Everyone considers that he dedicates himself entirely to aiding the many unfortunate persons in the mellah.”20 Consular activity responded to requests for intervention by businessmen hoping to be able to act with less hindrance, but also by worried individuals. Some Muslims, particularly the richest ones, also attempted to avoid injustice by benefiting from protégé status. As an AIU schoolmaster in Tetouan explained in 1893, “Several extremely wealthy Arabs find themselves sentenced to life imprisonment and end up dying, shackled and in utter misery, simply because a gracious God has granted them a great fortune. In order to get its hands on that fortune, the government rids itself of these Muslim millionaires by means of a life sentence.”21 When facing Muslim justice (which was the sole authority exercising jurisdiction in penal matters), lack of protection meant a Jew was exposed to extremely heavy risks. Accordingly, because consular protection was often effective, one of the primary goals of Jewish humanitarian organizations was to request it for those communities whom it considered to be exposed to injustice. In 1877, Stefano Scovasso, Italian consul to Tangiers, reported the expressions of friendship addressed to him by the Jews of Fez and Meknes, who “appreciate and are grateful for what I do for them.”22 Moreover, as Joseph Halévy concluded in 1876 regarding Morocco, “If the Jews of the coastal towns are treated better, the credit for this is entirely that of the representatives of European powers.”23 “The fear of finding that a Jew is in fact a protégé has prevented more than one murder, and this safeguarded Jews from Moorish violence,” as the AIU Central Committee reminded the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1888.24 As the Marrakesh AIU school director noted in 1902, “In this country, the mere mention of a European name, or of a protégé of some great power, is enough to cause the locals to show respect.”25 Even when minimal, consular protection constituted a liberation. But for the former masters of the country, this in itself was an affront and a source of humiliation. Where the AIU saw liberty regained, the Muslims saw arrogance, and this gulf did not stop widening. One side’s liberation was felt as the abasement of the other side, and the end of dhimmi status for the Jews (or indeed others) represented, for Arabs, the commencement of humiliation. Consular protection, insofar as it only affected a tiny minority, did not resolve the fundamental problem. It barely even maintained the illusion that diplomatic action is a response to the ambient climate, without taking account of how this system perpetuates dhimmi status, since exceptional consular protection of the few reinforced the habitual domination over the many. It was, moreover, weak protection, as it did nothing other than arouse a “sentiment of humiliation.” Are they really protégés? Perhaps, but not ones who are able to trumpet this urbi

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 147 et orbi, to all the world, as did the Jewish merchant of the Mazagan market in Morocco, who “blesses the ambassadors” for having prevented the change of the market day from Monday to Saturday, which would have wiped out the Jewish merchants. (The Pasha of Mazagan subsequently ordered his arrest and the imposition of 800 strokes of the cane, after which he was thrown from the top of a staircase, leaving him crippled, before being incarcerated.26) Consular protection, as the consuls underscored, did not release the Jews from the codes imposing discretion. In Tangiers, in 1873, the French Legation observed that it was necessary to maintain “the prudence hitherto displayed vis-à-vis the Moors,” who for their part intended “to make felt more than ever the force of their domination, from which it seems some wish to so quickly release themselves.” Several foreign powers refuse to grant Jews the status of protégés, particularly Bismarck’s Germany, “in order not to attract the enmity of the Muslims,” as Bismarck wrote in 1878.27 Apart from that, one would have to consider antisemitic motivations (“The German Government is too anti-Semitic to put Russo-Romanian Jews under its patronage,” reported Somekh of the AIU from Cairo on August 29, 1911.28) It could also happen that the consul himself was behind the persecution, as in the Damascus Affair of 1840, and the Safi (Morocco) incident of 1863. Consular protection exasperated all Muslims everywhere and resulted in pressure being directly applied to the Europeans to dissuade them from employing Jews. To this end, Morocco promulgated a series of interdictions, in 1836, 1844, 1851, and 1854. Partially liberated by the European presence, Jews were viewed as the principal beneficiaries of modernity, crystalizing—in the Muslim world as elsewhere—resentment against the modern world. The disgruntlement of “Muslim opinion” without doubt ran even deeper: it was less over European interference than the very emancipation of the Jews. This was the primordial scandal, the one that upset the order of the world itself. Western interventionist policies, which often took advantage of the suffering of the persecuted Jewish minority, were perceived as a transformation of sovereignty. These policies, moreover, placed local powers in difficulty. The Madrid Conference on Morocco, held in 1880, was intended to redesign the system of protections, which, it was said, had wounded local honor, all the more so in that certain protégés used and abused their freedoms in order to facilitate capital flight and to lower their taxable income. As a French diplomat posted to Morocco noted in 1894, “The protection leaves only the indigènes to the Sultan. This institutes a State within the State, indeed several States within the Moroccan State, and leads it straight to its doom.”29 Eleven European countries participated in Madrid, alongside the United States and Morocco. The final protocol reinforced consular protections. As the

148  |  Jews in Arab Countries only non-Muslim minority of any importance, the Jews refused the individual laissez-passer pathway, instead seeking to obtain legal equality, recognition of their ability to testify in court, the abolition of caning and punitive detention, and the abrogation of humiliating measures. They received nothing more than empty words, as had Montefiore fifteen years previously. It was during this conference that the national signifier of “Moroccan” appeared for the first time; previously, the sole distinction was one of religious confession. Article 15 of the Convention provided for renunciation of “Moroccan nationality” in the case of definitive exile; the Convention also provided that returnees can reassume “Moroccan” nationality, regardless of the additional nationality that has been acquired. The result was to bind Moroccan Jews to a state of injustice while affecting to liberate them from it through the possibility of renunciation of “their nationality.” London thus undermined the position of Moroccan Jews in order to avoid weakening the sultan and putting the wind in the sails of French imperialism. The Conference turned out to be nothing but a temporary respite, and violence resumed from 1884 onward. In Fez, twenty years after the sultan’s dahir, the authorities once again required Jews to walk barefoot in the Arab quarters. In the Maghreb, as indeed throughout the Arab world, the decisive irruption was less the 1798 French Expedition into Egypt than the landing of Charles X’s troops on the Algerian coast in July 1830. The first breakthrough of importance since the end of the Crusades, the seizing of the southern shore of the Mediterranean produced the economic decline of indigenous societies and the destruction of local crafts industries. “We have rendered Muslim society much more miserable, disordered, ignorant and barbaric than it was before making our acquaintance,” writes Tocqueville in 1847 in his Report on Algeria.30 What was brutally the case for Algeria was more insidiously so for Morocco as well. In 1844, the limits of Moroccan independence were drawn by the French at the Battle of Isly, on the Algerian-Moroccan border, and with the bombardment of Mogador, in reprisal for Moroccan support for Algerian rebel chief Abd el-Kader. European penetration continued amid trade treaties and ever more aggressive attacks, such as the 1860 Spanish intervention concluded by the signature of a treaty in 1861. This granted Spain the same advantages as those enjoyed by the British, without however permitting Spain to annex Northern Morocco due to London’s refusal to countenance a Spanish presence on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. Commercial treaties ruined Moroccan textile trading. Through proselytism by Christian clerics attempting to convert Muslims and Jews, patriotic sentiment (which above all meant attachment to Islam) was humiliated. Jews often greeted the Europeans as liberators. Testimony of French military personnel was unanimous on this point. The country’s Jews “loudly demonstrated their pleasure; a

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 149 large number ran like wild men through the streets” during the capture of Algiers on July 5, 1830. When Blida (in December 1830) and Mascara (in December 1835) were temporarily evacuated by French troops, the Jews followed them, fearing reprisals as a result of their collaboration.31 France nibbled away at Morocco, while attempting to appease Britain and Spain, and then Germany too. With the 1904 Anglo-French accord (the Entente Cordiale), London recognizes Paris’ “right to preserve order in Morocco.” In October that year, Spain joins the accord. Following violence in Casablanca against Europeans in July 1907, the disembarkation of the first French troops in Casablanca, and their occupation of the city for two days, inflicted humiliation that degenerated into an anti-European revolt, fed by that convenient outlet of impotence—anti-Jewish resentment. The result was the anti-Jewish riots of 1907– 1908 in Casablanca, Marrakesh, Fez, and Oujda. French interference weakened the power of the Makhzen, leading to repeated rebellions in 1911 and 1912, which provided fresh pretexts for French troops to intervene, to protect Europeans. The uprisings in Fez and Meknes in early 1911 against Sultan Moulay Hafid led to French intervention in May 1911, in Meknes in June and in Rabat in July, while the Spanish intervened in Larache. On March 30, 1912, Sultan Abd el-Hafiz signed the Treaty of Fez, establishing the French Protectorate over Morocco (and resulting in a pogrom at Fez a few days later.)32 A Spanish protectorate was also recognized in the North. In November 1917, France and Spain divided respective areas of influence, and in 1923 Tangiers becomes an international zone. In parallel, in October 1911 Italy extended its grip over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, setting off a short war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911–1912. Rome gained three territories—Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan—which by 1934 were brought together under the ancient name of Libya. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman decline was perceived as the decline of Islam and of a Muslim world that many believed was in the sights of its old enemies from the northern shore of the Mediterranean. This decline was checked neither by the granting of a constitution in 1876, nor by the convening of a parliament. This democratic progress, moreover, was soon suspended by the new Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), and as the West accentuated its advance, a siege mentality came to predominate. Political frustration and resentment underscored the Islamic aspect of Arab rejection, something already perceptible in Algeria with the uprising of Bou Zeyyane, who claimed to be the Mahdi. That revolt’s millenarian aspirations would soon be renewed by the surrender of Abd el-Kader, who also claimed that on three occasions the Prophet had commanded him, as Mahdi, to expel the invader.33 Mutual antagonism set in among the different population elements. In Morocco, because the country had always been independent, resentment was all

150  |  Jews in Arab Countries the stronger; in 1912 the collapse of Moroccan independence struck a violent blow against the Arab world. The same rejection occurred in Libya, where the Arab revolt, supported by the Turks, begins in 1914, prior to Italy’s entry into the First World War. Islam was thus very early on a factor in the demands for independence that arose in the Arab world. This was evident at the first Libyan National Congress, held at Gharian in November 1920, which called for “the establishment of a government approved by the masses, founded on sharia and under the authority of a Muslim chosen by the nation.”34 If the welcome with which a portion of Maghreb Jewry greeted the colonizers was often enthusiastic, the immense mass of the Jewish population was impoverished and remained passive, as if resigned to pass from one tutelage to another. Moreover, the rabbinical world was often hostile to the arrival of Europeans, fearing—with reason—that it would lose its own power. In the Arab-Muslim world, colonization provoked the reactivation of a feeling of decline as well as the supposedly purified Islam of the ancients—Salafism. A composite ideology emerged, comingling humiliation and resentment, and would come to feed into the rise of Arab nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. With the Protectorate agreement only freshly signed (on March 30, 1912), Moroccan troops within the French Army, humiliated at being under the command of Christians, mutinied at Fez on April 17. The revolt spread, reinforced by the local population. Contained by the military, the rioters rushed the new town and the defenseless mellah, to “make the Jews pay” for their joy at the arrival of the French. “Lets hang the Christians on a hook!” and “Roast the Jews on the spit!” were two lines from a song of the era; with regard to Muslims, the song’s refrain was “Jasmine from Paradise!”35 Arab resentment combined with the desire for independence constantly found expression through making Jews into scapegoats responsible for Arab impotence, and viewing Jewish emancipation as the very symbol of Arab decline. As late as August 1942, a chief inspector of the French protectorate of Tunisia could still write that “each time the Muslims want to demonstrate some protest concerning France, it is against the Jews that they exhibit their animosity.”36 In Tunisia, the Batto Sfez affair of 1857 had provoked one of the first European interventions. A French fleet dropped anchor at Tunis’ port of La Goulette in late August 1857, pushing the Tunisian authorities to grant a constitution and to agree to guarantee all Tunisians civil liberties, equality before the law, and equality in matters of taxation, regardless of their religion. The rural revolt of 1864 led to the withdrawal of that constitution, although Tunisia’s Jews remained exempt from their ancient status of exception. It would be wrong, however, to believe that the traditional Jewish world was ready to accept the teachings of the European Enlightenment. Jewish elementary

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 151 schools were of a low level, and knew nothing of Europe, its languages, or its pedagogical methods. On the other hand, Tunisian Jewish elites knew at the end of the nineteenth century that only a European power could make its voice heard and that without such intervention, the Tunisian authorities would proffer promises that would always remain a dead letter. This was also why the AIU welcomed the arrival of the colonizer, while local community heads remained more reserved. It seems that Near Eastern Jewish elites quickly looked to Europe, and in particular to France, “the country of the rights of man and the great revolution, and the second homeland of good men everywhere,” in the words of a Tangiers Jewish newspaper in 1903. 37 Whatever nuances should be applied to this overall view, the non-Muslim minorities greeted the colonizers (including the Turks in Yemen) as liberators. Oppression is the primary explanatory factor of this favorable welcome by Jewish communities for the European troops entering Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere. On November 22, 1914, the Ottoman Empire having just joined the war alongside the Central Powers, the British occupied the port of Basra in the south of Mesopotamia. “I won’t surprise you at all in telling you that the Israelites of Basra greeted the arrival of the English with great joy,” reported the AIU school director in May 1915.38 In March 1917, the British entry into Baghdad brought about the same manifestations of joy. This was also true in Mosul, Kirkuk, and Erbil in 1918. For Iraqi Jews, a happy period had begun, which would see them militate from 1919 alongside Christians for the maintenance of British law and the protection of minorities. The agreement signed with London in October 1922 guaranteed freedom of religion and belief, education and language, liberal provisions that were then inscribed into the 1924 constitution. Jews were henceforth represented in parliament, with five deputies for Jews and four for Christians. In the period from 1920 to 1925, a Jew served as Minister of Finance, and King Faisal, who ascended to the throne in August 1921, was one of the rare signatories of an accord between Jewish nationalists and Arab nationalists, signed in 1919 with Chaim Weizmann. Under the Mandate, from 1918 to 1925, and during the period of transition to independence between 1925 and 1931, the situation of the Jews of Iraq made it possible to believe in a permanent improvement. “The Jews,” reported Haim Kattan, “constitute the spinal column and the structure of the Iraqi state. It is a role which they fulfill involuntarily, unwillingly.”39 Often, they were former students at the AIU schools, where they had learned fluent French as a second language, and English too, or at least some rudiments of these languages. What was true for Iraq was equally true for the entire Arab world. “If I hadn’t found Jews in Morocco,” said French colonial administrator Hubert Lyautey, “I would have had them brought there.”40

152  |  Jews in Arab Countries In Egypt, equality of rights for Jews was only accorded by the Khedive (viceroy) Tawfiq after the arrival of the British in 1882., Some Jews openly desired the arrival of the Europeans, as was the case in 1907 with the Casablanca AIU school director, who considered that “the Israelites can only benefit from occupation, for the Arabs will lose their arrogance towards both the Israelites and the Europeans.”41 From 1908, French troops acted as a buffer. In Casablanca, Lieutenant-Colonel Mangin granted to the Jews “all those rights enjoyed by the other inhabitants of the country, both Muslims and Christians,” thus permitting them to live outside the mellah.42 He also instituted the cleaning of the mellah, having it swept and sprayed with water twice a day, “like the other quarters of the town.”43 French colonization of the Maghreb allowed a number of vexatious mea­ sures to be discarded, such as the custom of Jews having to yield the right of way to Muslims, being obliged to go to the end of the queue when drawing water from public fountains, being required to bury bodies of torture victims and to carry Muslims on their shoulders in the event of disembarkation in shallow water, being forbidden to wear red colored clothing, and so on. In Aden in 1913, the Jews “are the butt of the insults and disdain of a hostile and fanatical local population,” although “their security is absolute thanks to the wisdom and vigilance of the British authorities.”44 Yet, Somekh added, “the timidity of the Jews is such that they do not dare to complain, however assured they may be of obtaining justice.”45 A 1913 report from Marrakesh notes: “the Israelites of today are treated almost as equals to Arabs and Christians.”46 This was confirmed throughout the country, and only more so over the following decades. The same was true for Libyan Jews under the Italians, and Iraqi Jews under the British. In Fez, in May 1911, the arrival of French troops put an end to the siege of the town by insurgent Berber tribes.47 A report from Mogador in 1917 relates that the “traditional, famished Jews, sweating and unclean . . . imperceptibly give way to an active, entrepreneurial younger generation.”48 The positive side of colonization generally concerned improvements in hygiene, preventive medicine, and a reduction in mortality rates. In 1927, in Fez, an AIU report emphasized the work achieved by French doctors and municipal health services, as well as campaigns for prevention of tuberculosis, undertaken largely in vain considering the unhealthy housing, and trachoma, which was also difficult to eliminate for the same reason. Even if one puts aside moralizing judgments about the “treason” of the Jews— which judgments, by essentializing Jews as henchmen imbued with the “spirit of treason,” are frankly antisemitic—it remains nevertheless to be explained why, nearly everywhere, this minority welcomed the invader. The origin of this attitude should be sought in the history of oppression. In April 1912, the sultan offered not a word of compassion for Jews massacred at Fez,

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 153 although he sympathized over French deaths. At the end of the day, European interventions on behalf of the Jews antagonized the Muslims. Already in 1842, Sultan Moulay had expressed his mistrust of this community, suspected of being favorable toward the Europeans threatening the north of Morocco. Writing to the governor of Tetouan, he stated: “The Jews—may Allah confound them! —are even more favorable towards the French—may Allah destroy them! —than they are impatient to welcome the Antichrist.”49 Other testimonies reported on the joy of Jewish populations. In Debdou, in Eastern Morocco, the sole official who came to salute the French troops was the religious chief of the Jewish community, Rabbi David Cohen Scali.50 This attitude would later come to feed mistrust and resentment of the Jews. In Iraq, a Zionist report of 1938 recalled that the Jews were reproached for having greeted British troops in 1917.51 Such accusations later encouraged a climate of vengeance when the colonizer withdrew.52 Because their arrival brought security, the colonizers were wreathed with an aura of appreciation. This was particularly clear in Libya with regard to Rome (despite the hardening of 1936 to 1938), to the point that in 1945 the Jewish community wished for the return of the Italians. A particularly warm appreciation was reserved for certain administrators, such as the directors of public health already mentioned with regard to Morocco in 1913, or certain military officers who were the subject of laudatory reports by AIU directors for their efforts toward modernization of the mellah. The pro-French sentiment of Jewish elites of the Maghreb was well established, including among Zionist circles, where the dream of a nation state in Palestine was long associated with gratitude toward France. From the 1920s through to the 1950s, and despite outrages, the Jewish press in Morocco featured repeated proclamations and displays of gratefulness. Such sentiments responded so strongly to the context of everyday oppression that often, Maghreb or Iraqi Jews sought to take on the nationality of the colonizer in order to gain a foothold in the West, thereby escaping injustice as well as the image of decline that seemed to have attached itself to the Arab world. In May 1919, the Baghdad community collectively sought British citizenship, soliciting the AIU Comité Centralto back its request. The same desire had already been expressed in November 1918 to the British Civil Governor of Baghdad, with a view toward obtaining autonomy or, failing that, British citizenship.53 Modernity, which had already progressed in the Jewish milieu well before the arrival of the colonizers, bit by bit made the old world unravel. The work of the AIU, the waning of community autonomy and of the prerogatives of rabbinical tribunals, the decline of the elevated mortality rates: these all make it possible to speak of the slow march of the elite toward the West. The evolution of Algerian Jewry under French colonial law in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s raised

154  |  Jews in Arab Countries questions relevant to more than just the Algerian situation. With rabbinical tribunals abolished in 1841, Jews became justiciable before French tribunals. The foundations for the famous October 1870 Décret Crémieux, (the decree granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews), were laid down long in advance by the dismantling of communitarian institutions and the estrangement from Islamic law. In 1845, Algerian Jewry was granted a consistorial administration, modeled on the French Consistory put in place by Bonaparte. At the time, the Algerian French population—anxious to bolster itself through a demographic alliance of increased numbers—favored the collective naturalization of the Jews. In 1865, Napolean III, on a visit to Algeria, replied to a speech of Chief Rabbi Mahir Charleville by stating: “I hope that soon, the Algerian Israelites will be French citizens.”54 This was more than a pious wish. In March 1870, before the defeat of the Second French Empire to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, Minister of Justice Émile Ollivier presented a proposal to the Conseil d’État (State Council) for the naturalization of all “indigenous Israelites in Algerian territory,” although it should be noted that Ollivier’s proposal also envisaged the possibility of refusing naturalization.55 Despite these developments, the process of acculturation puts Jews in an uncomfortable position. They are in but not of the region, simultaneously indigenous and Europeanized, both subject to European law and perceived as European allies, and thus as traitors. They are on the path of emancipation but still dominated, with the feeling of oppression growing all the more powerful as the weight starts to lighten. Meanwhile, Muslims feel they live in an unraveling world, one in which the distance between master and subject seems to shrink further every day. The colonizing power decides that it should lean toward the Arabs, who are the stronger side. As a result, friendship with the Jews becomes an embarrassment; the colonizers try to convince them to be more discrete, and to understand that full equality of status is not possible. In Morocco and Tunisia there will be no question of repeating the 1870 Crémieux decree, which many think was an error. This is why many Jews do not mythologize the liberation brought by the colonizer. It is real, to be sure, but also ambivalent: it must be assessed alongside the accusations of violence committed by the French against civilians, and the subjection of women to prostitution in military field brothels, such as in Fez in 1911. These things are difficult to verify, since Jewish sources provide no confirmation. However, what is soundly attested is the antisemitism that erodes the Expeditionary Corps, in particular in an army that had just emerged from the Dreyfus Affair. Certain officers were known for their antisemitic views, which they did not conceal. In their garrisons, far from protecting the Jews, they permit injustices and violence against them.

From the Enlightenment to the Alliance | 155 If the progress was real, there was still no autonomous Jewish political life. Between 1919 and 1947, not a single Moroccan Jew was a member of the Protectorate Council. It was only in 1947 that six Jewish delegates made their appearance in a body whose role, moreover, was purely consultative. AIU publications reflect the perspective of a French and Jewish institution working for the promotion of the “Great Nation” around the Mediterranean basin, one that “pursues no egotistical goals in Morocco . . . but rather works for progress and humanity.”56 Other Jewish sources are somewhat more nuanced, but Bernard Lewis is no doubt right to argue that the few benefits that Jews in Arab lands enjoyed prior to independence were solely the result of the deeds of Europeans. The objective alliance between Jewish communities and the Europeans would come to exacerbate the split between Jews and Arabs, but did not create it. And ultimately, the Arabization of most of the Jewish communities would do nothing to prevent their eviction.

Notes 1. Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 215. 2. The Jews’ “Bill of Rights”, according to historian Haim Zeev Hirschberg, in The Jews in North Africa, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1981). 3. Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 171. 4. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 160. 5. In Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 609. 6. Nora Seni, Les Inventeurs de la philanthropie juive (Paris: La Martinière 2005), 9. 7. Cited in Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite, 38. 8. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, letter of the Anglo-Jewish Association to Conquey, Fez school, 5 March 1895. 9. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 4. 10. Cited in Hourani, Histoire des peuples arabes, 374. 11. Courbage and Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs, 139. 12. BAIU, 1866, session of 29 November 1866, Paris. 13. Cf. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 3, in Le Moghrabi, Jewish periodical founded in 1903. 14. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 4, letter of 28 May 1909. 15. In Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 48. 16. AIU Morocco, XIV. F. 25. See also CZA, C10/330, letter of 22 September 1949. 17. BAIU, 1913, 112. 18. Cf. BAIU, 1899, 62, Séverine’s article concerning Persian Jews. 19. Cited in the report of Étienne Coidan on “Sionisme au Maroc” (Zionism in Morocco), January 1946, p. 26, CADN. 20. BAIU, July–Dec. 1873, 143. 21. AIU, Morocco, V. B., 6 March 1893.

156  |  Jews in Arab Countries 22. BAIU, July–Dec. 1877, 33. 23. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 69. 24. BAIU, 1888, p.34. 25. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25. 26. BAIU, July–Dec. 1873, 19. 27. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 202. 28. AIU, Egypt, XIV, 182. 29. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 321. 30. In Gilles Manceron, Marianne et les colonies (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), 94. 31. See Gabriel Esquer, La Prise d’Alger (Paris: Champion, 1923), 378, and Jeannine VerdèsLeroux, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 220. 32. See Otzar ha Mihtavim (Collection of Letters) (Jerusalem: Bne Issakhar Institute, 1998), tome 1, p. 88, referenced in Littman and Fenton, L’Exil au Maghreb, 59–60. 33. Cf. Filiu, L’Apocalypse dans l’islam, 98. 34. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 52. 35. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 381. 36. CADN Tunisia, Protectorate, Bernard file, Calleya report, 13 August 1942. 37. Cf. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 3., and Le Moghrabi, 1903. 38. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9, 20 August 1915. 39. Kattan, Adieu Bablone, 75. 40. CZA. C10/459/ These are the comments of a member of the World Jewish Congress in an internal report of August 1945. 41. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 3, report of 24 August 1907. 42. AIU, France, XIV, F. 25. 43. Ibid. 44. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, 30 September, 1913. 45. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, 10 September 1913. 46. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5. 47. Cf. BAIU, 24 May 1911, 52. 48. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. 49. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 65. 50. Cf. Schlousch, Les Juifs de Debdou, 49. 51. Cf. CZA, S25/3528, 16 October 1938. 52. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, report of July 1913. 53. Cf. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 4. 54. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations. From the Origins to the Present Day, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 288. 55. Charles Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present, (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1991), 39. 56. Paix et Droit, June 1927, 9.

4 Jewish “Subjects” One of the primary goals of international Jewish organizations, to borrow

from their own lexicon, was to “hold tyranny in check.” Before long, they had begun to act like a substitute Jewish government, operating as if the Jews were united by a shared destiny under the name of “a people” here, “a nation” there, and most often, “communities.” The objective, as Yomtov Sémach recalled in 1910 with regard to Yemen, was for the Jews to be viewed a little better, “for the Arabs to start to understand that the Israelites will no longer be left to their sad fate, and . . . to become accustomed to considering the Jews as people who are entitled to live in good houses, dress as they wish, and come and go freely.”1

In a wider context, beyond the specific situation of the Jews, the Orient—a repository of social plagues that clearly conceived sanitation practices had already started to push back in Europe—needed to be “regenerated,” “rehabilitated,” and “changed.” Westernization would be its salvation, eliminating the ignorance and oppression that abased people. The expansion of the AIU, and the concepts that undergird it, were linked to the flowering of “geographical societies” in France after 1870, together with an increase in numbers of instructors, geographers, missionaries, and soldiers. The Westernization of Near Eastern Jewish communities occured within the context of “a greater France,” itself a direct outcome of the all-conquering French Revolution. Thus, humanitarian organizations had a double mission: coming to the aid of the most isolated Jews, and increasing the knowledge of their worlds. In 1867, the AIU sent a mission to the Gondar region of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in search of Falasha Jews. It assigned Saul Somekh, director at Cairo, with responsibility of making inquiries about the Falasha and Abyssinia.2 Another mission, led by Joseph Halévy, was dispatched to Marrakesh in 1876, and yet another—more important still—in 1910 to Yemen, with Yomtov Sémach at its head. From the 1860s, the institution was active on fronts that today would be called humanitarian, in both the Near East as well as Europe, following the first wave of pogroms in the tsarist empire in 1881–1882, in particular in Brody, at the distant border with Austro-Hungary, a place through which thousands of Jews fled from Russia. The AIU established a center there, a “crushing task” led principally by Charles Netter, with the aim of relieving misery and anguish.3

158  |  Jews in Arab Countries Early on, education was promoted to the status of a universal arm in the struggle against barbarism. Consular authorities were the first to become convinced of this, and they began to support educational efforts while also hoping to gain some advantage from the establishment of schools. At first reticent, Jewish communities soon showed themselves more and more eager for schools. If the numbers of Jewish pupils were still low in the 1860s, twenty years later the enrollment waiting lists had grown very long. “We’ve lowered our heads for a long time,” reported a society for the rescue of Egyptian Jews in 1908 in a missive addressed to the AIU. “But enough is enough. . . . We beg of you, our palms joined together and our lips in prayer, to help us in this most difficult work.”4 Although they had long remained reticent, soon Jewish fathers were first in line to ask for help for their children. In the past they may have seen the schools as “a weapon capable of endangering the very basis of faith,” as a Fez AIU director stated in 1899. But now things have changed, and “they have started to appreciate the value of rational education” since “it is only education which can lift their intellectual and moral state.”5 The community elites, on the contrary, would hesitate for much longer to invest in education. From Paris, the AIU sent an emissary to study the situation on the ground and to make contact with community leaders and political authorities. When needed, diplomacy loaned further support to the initiative. Once authorization was obtained, financing had to be put in place. Reports are legion on the difficulties of school establishment. To the material difficulties must be added the more or less openly declared hostility of the authorities, especially in Yemen. In 1910, the local governor warned Sémach: “I will protect the Jews’ rights but I beg of you, don’t rush things: I will do everything I can to improve the situation of your brothers, but let us proceed slowly and prudently, taking care not to increase the animosity of the Arabs and create new political difficulties.”6 In May 1910, Sémach acquired a plot of land, but the difficulties multiplied with the Turkish authorities. A foreigner could not buy land (which was “sacred”) and a fortiori doing so in order to build a school for Jews was out of the question. The vali explained that in addition, he feared the interference of a foreign power.7 The AIU school network essentially was established between 1884 and 1910, a quarter-century marking the zenith of a system that stabilized in the inter-war period despite policies of nationalization in countries such as Turkey and Iraq. The network expanded rapidly: Fez in 1884, Marrakesh in 1899, and Meknes in 1910. In Libya, the Tripoli AIU school opened in 1889. In neighboring Egypt, Cairo opened its school in 1896, Alexandria in 1897, and Tantoura in 1905. In Iraq, after Baghdad’s opening in 1865, the AIU network had covered nearly the entire

Jewish “Subjects” | 159 country before the First World War: Basra by 1903 (although not for girls until 1913), Mosul by 1906, Hilla by 1907, Amara by 1910, and Kirkuk by 1913. Set up around the world, AIU committees provided financial, political, and moral support. To become a member in 1880 required annual dues of six francs (one day’s salary of a qualified Parisian worker). The AIU base broadened: 80 percent of its members were French in 1861, but by 1885 no more than 40 percent of members were French, although the AIU’s Comité Central remained completely French. From three schools in 1865 (with 680 pupils in 2 schools in Morocco and one school in Mesopotamia), the network expanded to 14 schools in 1871 (with 2,365 children) and to 43 by 1880 (with a total of 5,910 children). The AIU saw its biggest expansion between 1891 and 1913: from 55 schools in 1891 with 12,400 pupils, it reached 183 by 1913, teaching some 43,700 children. The number of schools diminished after the First World War, falling to 127 in 1939, although the school population increased to 48,000 in the same year. Between the wars, the AIU had to deal with national policies in the Balkans, notably Bulgaria, Greece, and Attaturk’s Turkey, with national languages now legally required as languages of instruction. The AIU withdrew progressively from these countries, even while reinforcing its presence in Persia (Iran from 1925). Following the Second World War, recovery proved to be transient. In 1948, the AIU network only continued to develop in Morocco, with 135 schools and 51,000 pupils. Across the region, independence and departures weakened the network but—thanks to the durability of Morocco’s Jewish community— without completely destroying it. However, elsewhere in the Middle and Near East, by 1946 the AIU counted only 50 schools (of which 17 in Iran and 10 in Iraq), and by 1960 this had dwindled to 32 (of which 15 in Iran, 4 in Lebanon, 1 in Syria, and 12 in Israel), and no longer any in Iraq or Egypt. By 1960, Morocco remained the sole bastion of importance, with 77 schools and 29,000 pupils; this represented nearly all the children of a Jewish community whose departures had caused its numbers to dwindle in the space of only a few years. The AIU remained the cornerstone of the Jewish school system, but the Moroccan government was nationalizing the old French institution in stages. During the course of one century, the AIU had educated some 600,000 children. Morocco certainly had the densest AIU network, but in 1911 the Maghreb in its entirety constituted merely a quarter of the total headcount—11,000 out of 42,000. The heart of the system was elsewhere—in the Levant. After 1945 American Jewry, stripped of any illusions in the aftermath of the Shoah, became interested in the Jews of Muslim countries. In 1946, the Friends of the Alliance was established, followed in 1947 by the American Friends of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. That same year this latter organization educated

160  |  Jews in Arab Countries some 14,000 Moroccan Jewish children. Sixteen thousand others benefited only from education at the heder, or traditional school. The high point—the years from 1880 to 1914—corresponded to the scientificpositivist and imperialist “golden age.” The First World War, the revolutions, the “brutalization” of society, and the molting of anti-Judaism into biological antisemitism, would soon win out over the beliefs populating the intellectual pantheon of AIU teachers. Successive AIU presidents are illustrative of this golden age of the French “régime républicain.” These Israelite notables belonged to the enlightened bourgeoisie; they were the children of the Enlightenment, adherents of moderate social conservatism. The opening of a school depended first on local determination. Strong attachment, however, would not take root until schools proved their ability to boost social mobility. In France, the attraction of education never really won over the “deep countryside” until the son of so-and-so, having attended school, attained an enviable rise in social status thanks to it. Everywhere, AIU school openings were considered a form of aid by fellow Jews in Europe, not so much linked to the expectation of education as to the hope of liberation and less straightened circumstances. In 1913, Josué Cohen visited the community of Bakuba, 60 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. Local notables explained their hope to see an AIU school open there: “One of them told me that ‘Our children shouldn’t remain ignorant like us—they shouldn’t just be vendors of cloth or spices.’”8 Some observers described the thirst for knowledge, the “acquisition of learning for learning’s sake,” the “respect for everything involving knowledge, the instinctive penchant for work of the mind, and this innate and atavistic love of the Torah and of knowledge in all its forms.” Such images are the polar opposites of the appalled evocations of “stupidity,” “ignorance,” “filth,” or the “stultification” of indigenous Jews.9 The Western gaze had made the Orient into a myth and reduced Oriental Jews to a mass lacking knowledge or insight. In reaction to this characterization by others, the Jews of the Orient set about incarnating the caricature of oppression imposed on them. A desire for education was manifest throughout the twentieth century, and sometimes well before. In 1911, “deepest Morocco” (Debdou, Demnat, Taza, Oujda) requested AIU schools, but the applications were adjourned due to lack of sufficient numbers of school staff. In 1912, fifty-eight Jewish families of the little locality of Martimprey, Eastern Morocco, sent a second request to the AIU: “A small number of us are seeking a new way forward in a barbaric country,” evidently alluding to the settlement of Algerian Jews in the region.10 But the requests exceeded the AIU’s capacity. It is difficult “to describe the supplications of parents, the tears of little girls turned away and the joy of those who are admitted,” noted the director of the Fez girls’ school in 1930.11

Jewish “Subjects” | 161 The emphasis was on education rather than mere instruction, as Yomtov Sémach insisted at Baghdad in 1903: “We are more than simple schoolteachers; our mission is much grander: we are the pioneers of civilization and we should strike powerful blows to smite ignorance and superstition. We try to reach the parents through the children . . . in order to take Oriental Judaism out of the materially and morally miserable state in which it languishes.”12 What is needed is to promote “an effort of physical, moral and social rehabilitation aimed at spreading basic precepts of hygiene,”13 combating psychological misery, which is the apathy of young people who “feel nothing, whom nothing stirs, who lack any spark of initiative, whether for themselves or the community.”14 It is a question of “morally lifting up” degraded people among whom moral sensibilities have atrophied, who struggle to distinguish between good and evil. “Lies, bad faith and egotism are widely shared flaws amongst our co-religionists,” assures Joseph Danon, director of the AIU schools in Baghdad, in 1896. “I am at war with them; I preach the very opposite virtues to our children.”15 This educational work had to be complemented by classes for adults, generally men aged between fifteen and thirty-five years old, for whom a first evening school was opened in Marrakesh in 1904. Two years later, some sixty students were learning French, arithmetic, geography, and Jewish history, as well as basic hygiene. These night classes would continue until after the Second World War, and would also encompass students of Talmudic schools, who would later become “spiritual leaders” in their villages. Schools helped push back poverty and bigotry, both of which were combatted with equal vigor. For decades, the fight against obscurantism was a major theme, as the many reports of teachers and directors attest. If Balkan Sephardic Jews had long ago freed themselves, explained a director of the AIU in Safi, Morocco, in 1928, it was because they “had torn away the blindfold of religious fanaticism that blinded them.” But the Jews of Morocco still had “a long road to travel before reaching the same level as their brothers from the shores of the Bosphorus.” The only thing that could shorten this path was education.16 This was a struggle involving all indigenous Jews, first and foremost the poorest, such as Marrakesh children, half naked in simple shirts, “insubordinate school kids, used to pounding the pavement all day long, begging and roaming around.” But, “thanks to the midday hot soup and the promise of some clothing, we were able to provide for them and look after them.”17 This misery is recurrent. From Fez in 1938, director Djivré noted the large numbers of applications for the enrolment of children in school, which held out the promise of education, to be sure, but also of clothing, care and a hot meal at lunch.18 “Only school can change the Arab habits of the country’s Israelites, and save them from their age-old poverty,” noted the Tetouan AIU school director in 1902.19 By

162  |  Jews in Arab Countries “Arab habits,” the writer meant the plight of women, the violence within families, including between couples, and the corporal punishment inflicted on children. To pull Jewish youth away from its “moral degradation,” according to Valadji in Baghdad in 1890, meant “the transformation of these impolite, rude, dirty, undisciplined creatures, who in no way resemble schoolchildren.”20 They had to be turned away from thoughts that were “as dirty and disgusting as their bodies.”21 In Libya, the challenge was to rehabilitate girls in whose hearts thievery and lies had lodged since “their earliest childhood,” and in whom “the feeling of personal dignity” had been extinguished.22 Because they constitute the meeting ground of several different communities, noted Joseph Halévy in Morocco in 1876, the AIU schools could contribute to the rapprochement between different ethnic groups. Inspired by the example of Mogador, he reports that some of the Christians settled in Morocco send their children to the AIU schools because their teaching is of better quality than that of Christian schools, which are free.23 This pacific vision, widespread among partisans of reason and progress, was also shared by local authorities, and it even occurred that Muslim notables wished to send their own children there. In 1909 at Amara, in Iraq, they joined their voices to those of the Jewish community to request the opening of an AIU school, which was achieved in February 1910.24 Schools also permitted the different Jewries to frequent each other. This was the case in Egypt, where “Arab Jews, Spanish Jews and German Jews” intermingled. Somekh noted in 1900 that even the Ashkenazim enrolled their children, “a considerable result when one thinks of the hatred dividing the two communities.”25 This faith in a better future was the foundation of the AIU’s humanist optimism, as expressed (in the same period in which Hugo published Les Misérables) in its first call upon “all Israelites,” launched in June 1860. The organization positioned itself as the sword of universal justice, as a shadow Jewish government for a people of the shadows, as Leon Pinsker would put it in 1882. “If, somewhere at the ends of the earth a Jew is struck in some land with which we [i.e., France] have little dealings,” Adolphe Crémieux thundered during the AIU’s 1873 General Assembly, “the AIU will learn of it, and everywhere it will rise up and invoke the protection of justice or the authorities of that land.”26 In so doing, the AIU claimed the double heritage of the revolutionaries of 1789 and the Jewish prophets. It was a marriage that symbolized the “Israelitism” à la française, one that was both Jewish and French, in a way thoroughly French because of the inspiration of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and at the same time thoroughly Jewish because of the prophetic heritage.27 The work of the AIU was inseparable from the context of the 1860s, reflecting as it did both the ambient Orientalist perspective, and the creation of a secular mission dedicated to the values of Girondin France, in the tradition of the “Great Nation” bringing freedom to the world.28

Jewish “Subjects” | 163 Seeking to “reform” their Oriental Jewish brothers, the AIU founders presented—and perceived—themselves as secular missionaries: “I believe, in fact, that my duty extends beyond the school, and includes in part the role of a selfless and secular missionary,” noted Élise Saguès, director of the Casablanca girls’ school, in 1911.29 The AIU thus appeared as a moral government, almost as a spokesperson for dispersed Jewry. Like Zionism, which has a parallel history, the AIU had an international and indeed global aim: to remedy Jewish suffering. During the 1860s, the AIU aimed to come to the aid of oppressed Jewish people nearly everywhere. On March 1, 1865, the Comité Central launched an appeal to Jews throughout the world: The moment has come to establish a memorable effort by working together on a most urgent basis for the primary form of emancipation, that of the mind. . . . We have to work on behalf of future generations. Schools from one end of the world to the other! This is the cry of our era. Grown men pay no attention to new learning, and the aged fear it, while the fanatic simply rejects it. But the child is sacred ground, always ready to receive beneficial seeds! The child will be the salvation of these disinherited ones. We must organize Israelite schools for Africa and the Orient. . . . There must be schools for boys and schools for girls.30

The school appeared at the same time as other novelties, most of which opened the way to modernity by creating, like the AIU at Fez, new concepts of civil status: “To have the civil authorities register births, marriages, divorces and deaths is an entirely new thing in Morocco, and not just for the Jews.”31 However, AIU establishments reached only a small segment within Jewish communities, and ran into the hostility of some traditionalists. At the same time, other segments of the communities criticized the schools for dedicating too much time to Jewish and Hebraic matters. In Morocco, before the Second World War, the AIU educated 15,000 students, out of a total of around 200,000 Jews. In Egypt between the wars, nearly all the children of the Cairo community (8,500 aged between 6 and 15) received education, although less than 20 percent did so in Jewish schools, including AIU schools. Some 40 percent were educated in secular French and Italian schools.32 The effects of education without follow-up risk dissipating. A number of students stopped reading once they left school. “They very quickly forget what they had put in so much effort to learn. They neither speak nor read European languages, and after a time fall back into the deplorable condition from which they had been extracted with so much difficulty.”33 And even when they preserved intact the legacy of their AIU education, they were few in number: In Baghdad in

164  |  Jews in Arab Countries 1885, they made up a mere 200 students out of 40,000 souls. Of this tiny handful, a quarter at least would leave for India, England, or France. And what impact would the others make? “There aren’t enough of them, and generally speaking, they are insufficiently united.”34 Moreover, one could not hope to change the mentality, much less the entire person. In 1901, the Tetouan school director seemed to have lost any illusions about his former pupils, now grown up: “The fact is, one cannot wholly transform, in such a short period of time, a populace which has been enclosed for centuries within the narrow walls of the ghetto, in contact solely with barbaric, fanatic and cruel masters; so many years of poverty, persecution and humiliation leave profound marks in spirits as well as mores.”35 Sometimes, there is outright despair, the undertaking is considered hopeless, and pessimism wins out. By way of illustration: even twenty-two years after the establishment of a school, it proved simply impossible to create an alumni association.36 The guidelines and programs of the AIU contained within them the concept of redemption and the fostering of a “new man.” The AIU is “an educator of Jewishness,” as the director of the Mogador girls’ school wrote in 1904; it straightens a nature that has been warped. If modern education preceded the actual arrival of the AIU, the organization nevertheless provided a motive force for Westernization, around a discourse patterned on that of the founders of education under the French Republic. This positivist discourse, laced with scientism, also drew inspiration from the SaintSimonianism animating social thought in the nineteenth century. To these wellsprings must be added the approach of Jewish rationalism, based on the old enlightenment of Maimonides but also directly inspired by the German Haskalah and the early nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. AIU instructors were thus children of both the French Revolution and scientism who had broken with the master, departing from the pathway inspired by tradition. For at least a small number, they were more shaped by Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and Montaigne than by the Bible, let alone the Talmud. But as theists, they accommodated a belief in the Great Watchmaker, and declined to associate with atheism. In any event, any manifestation of atheism would have caused the communities too shut their doors. This explains the condemnation of those teachers who made a public display of their detachment from Jewish practice.37 Similarly, superstition and mysticism were also rejected. The AIU archives are full of accounts of religious processions, of both Jewish and Muslim saints’ cults, “manifestations . . . which are nothing but shabby attempts by the human spirit to attain knowledge of the greater powers,” in the view of Albert Navon, writing from Tripoli in 1891, regarding Muslim confreries or associations.38

Jewish “Subjects” | 165 Weaning oneself away from the practice of usury, becoming conscious of “the monstrosities one commits,” moderating one’s conduct, and mastering one’s instincts and desires: the ideals advanced by instructors were in fact close to those of the growing Scout movement, explained Issac Dahan, of the Meknes AIU, in 1929.39 Dahan envisaged “the scout as clean in body, word, thought and act.”40 In the course of a century, from 1860 to 1960, 20 percent of AIU teachers received an honorable distinction from the French Government (decorations for services to education, etc.). Whether viewed as “teacher” or “soldier of France,” the instructor acted as a shtadlan, a traditional intercessor on behalf of the Jewish community, but in this case, a secularized shtadlan, a sort of consul adapted to the dhimma situation. The devotion of some instructors was well known; they were simultaneously teachers, caregivers, and counselors, present on all fronts and in particular with regard to interactions with Muslim and colonial authorities. For many years the majority of AIU teachers came from the European or Turkish Sephardic world, and the encounter with Arab Jewry came as a surprise for them. AIU directives recommended avoiding causing offense or injury, and encouraged attendance at synagogue on Shabbat, wearing talith (mens’ ritual prayer shawl), mixing with the locals without any prejudice or disdain, and accepting invitations for lunch or dinner “without assuming it will be unhygienic.”41 Teachers were also advised to keep their distance from notables and the wealthy, who were cut off from the common folk; the descriptions of such people could be quite lurid. AIU personnel of non-Jewish French origin, full of assumptions based on Orientalist and antisemitic prejudices, had to struggle to accept what their eyes saw. “These teachers simply never suspected the depth of the masses’ poverty,” Somekh reported from Morocco in 1923. “The Jews of legend and of our acquaintance, beneath a more or less brilliant exterior, were for them people who were very fortunate, who amassed gold and silver and monopolized the best products of the market; but what a surprise it was when they came to see a quite different and poignant reality! Children shivering in the winter cold, owning no shirts and often arriving at school without breakfast, and having to await the school canteen’s soup in order finally to satisfy their hunger. This, and not some degeneracy, was why these children were so emaciated and diseased.”42 Management of the first AIU schools was often put in the hands of Alsatian Jews—teachers or young rabbis. In 1864 the AIU established special (and remunerated) training for the best students, and in 1867 the AIU training school— the École Normale Israélite Orientale or ENIO (Middle Eastern Jewish Normal School) was opened, initially populated by four students from AIU schools in the Orient: two from Tangiers, one from Tetouan, and the fourth, Nissim Behar, born in Constantinople but in reality from Jerusalem (and who would later play

166  |  Jews in Arab Countries a key role, alongside Ben Yehuda, in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue). Training lasted four years, modeled on the Napoleanic lycée. Uniforms were compulsory. In 1880 ENIO was declared as being “of public utility.” The number of annual admissions grew, with twenty-five students in 1914. (Even as late as 1951 a Casablanca Hebrew teacher training college accorded an important proportion of instruction time to Arabic and Hebrew studies, in order to educate future teachers for Jewish communities in the Arab world. It shows that even at that date, some still thought that Jewish life in the Arab world was sustainable.) Two separate institutions trained teachers up to the advanced teacher’s qualification—boys at the school in Auteuil, near Paris, and girls at the Bischoffsheim Institute in Alsace. Most of the applicants came from the Ottoman Empire. Apart from the journey to France—which was at students’ cost—ENIO covered tuition and lodging expenses. Recruited aged fifteen or sixteen years old from AIU schools in the Middle East, ENIO student teachers were admitted following a competitive entry examination. Fifteen percent of the curriculum was dedicated to Jewish subjects (reduced to 10 percent in 1935). “Training in worship” was obligatory and solemn services featured chanting in Hebrew. Children—not exclusively Jewish—were admitted to AIU schools between the ages of five and thirteen. Regulations were similar from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and for the most part the curriculum was identical for all, wherever they happen to live: French, arithmetic, European geography, Biblical history, and Hebrew, which took up the second greatest number of instruction hours after French. The only exception to this uniformity involved language teaching, with Spanish privileged in Tetouan, English in Cairo, and so on. Education lasted in theory for six years, but many children only attended school for between two and four years. Girls had in addition to take training in “work appropriate to their sex, such as sewing, weaving, embroidery, etc.” School fees were payable, but indigent parents (up to 50 percent of the total number) were exempt. The application of this rule appeared merciless—if in default of payment by the third day of the month, the child was expelled—but in practice, numerous arrangements were made. Classes began in the morning and continued each day until 5 p.m., except for Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The “long vacation” lasted for the month of August, and schools also closed during all Jewish festivals. In 1903 the AIU published a manual entitled Instructions générales pour les professeurs, hand-delivered to all teachers graduating from ENIO, stipulating that more than mere instruction was required: the ethos of the Enlightenment would be combined with remaining a “good Jew,” and morals and citizenship should be taught.43 Beatings and bullying were forbidden. As in nearly all schools at the time, gender mixing was not on the agenda despite some experimental efforts.44

Jewish “Subjects” | 167 The AIU kept control over its personnel by means of a torrent of reports where everyone fell under the watchful eye of the hierarchy. The private life of teachers, in particular concerning religious practice, was the subject of close surveillance, for the school should be a model of ethical conduct. Gambling, cards, casinos, and even stock market speculation, were all condemned. Easy winnings were deemed immoral, and material ambitions were dangerous. Teaching staff, often dispatched to countries that were shut off, isolated, and socially closed, seemed to tread water in towns frequently perceived as zones of banishment. Their ambitions withered. Resentment won out, all the more because AIU instructors could sometimes sense the disdain in which wealthy parents held poorly paid schoolteachers.45 A third of teachers resigned within the first ten years of service. They were paid—and viewed—poorly and controlled with an iron fist, which fueled the temptation to rebellion by teachers who would rather be fired than resign. And in fact, according to a report from Egypt in 1908, nothing was easier for them than to get dismissed. Once fired, they would rapidly find a better paying job as an office worker or commercial employee. As the teachers in Morocco collectively wrote in 1931, “Elegant titles such as ‘apostles’ or ‘missionaries’ of the AIU’s work, which the Comité Central deigns to bestow upon teachers in order to justify the derisory salaries they are granted, are no longer compatible with the requirements of modern life. Landlords of rented accommodation, tailors, and other suppliers of goods and services are not impressed by these kinds of titles. The ‘apostolate’ was unconvincing in 1931, and AIU teachers should under no circumstances disclose the precise salaries they earn, lest they risk appearing laughable.”46 On top of their mediocre financial situation, teachers also suffered a loss of prestige. From the pioneers they had been in the 1880s, they had become just one symbol of learning among others. As the education provided by the AIU became something increasingly less rare, the effect was to undermine the AIU image, and this decline continuously embittered the teaching profession. Exhaustion, resentment, and overall wear and tear constituted the daily existence of most teachers. Many halted their careers and disappeared from AIU records. The primary cause of discouragement was the posts to which the teacher arrived, far from family, amid a populace a thousand leagues from one’s own mentality. One teacher described how, hardly had he set foot in Morocco than he was flooded with pessimism and “profound discouragement, which his first contact with the Fez population only reinforced.” Motived by the idea of his “mission,” he expected to be met with open arms by a populace avid to become educated. “Bitter illusion! Apart from a small core—former students and some Jews who had traveled abroad—the masses were enclosed within a fortress of ancient prejudices, jealously defended by the rabbis, and professed complete indifference regarding us. . . . Indeed, a mute hostility.”47 This kind of portrait gave rise to

168  |  Jews in Arab Countries bitter self-portrayals, sometimes with a tint of self-mockery, and always marked by continually rehashed sadness. The image (from Charles Péguy) of Black Hussars or heroically idealistic schoolmasters needs to be revised, to the extent that on a day-to-day basis for many teachers it was boredom that predominates. They faced the gloominess of a life calculated down to the last penny, where teachers “cast an envious eye on our own students who benefit from the sweat of our brows to create their own revenue,” notes a Mogador school director in 1917.48 In a word, the “dignified” and hidden poverty of those who were the very incarnation of learning, who should “maintain their status” without descending to the ranks of average people, in the image of French schoolteachers who are neither working class nor farmers or middle class, and who live within the illusion of personal autonomy and the myth of a exercising a calling.49 European Jewish discourse on the necessity of providing education was an exact corollary of the discourse of Western elites in the second half of the nineteenth century. Education could serve to destroy those “baleful prejudices” held by children and their families that hampered progress. “Building schools for these unfortunates,” assured Somekh in 1903 regarding Yemen, “will redress the absence in the mellah of a heritage of La Fontaine’s Fables” (long a mainstay of French children’s moral instruction).50 A desire for education, and a concern with social ascent, were among the strongest driving forces for investment into schools. Girls’ education was the poor relation of the promotion of education in the Judeo-Muslim world. Only Egypt presented an encouraging picture. Prior to 1914, girls in Egypt sometimes pursued education beyond the primary level, but it was extremely rare for young girls to be literate. “If men are oppressed in Yemen,” wrote Sémach in 1910, “women are doubly so; they have virtually no independent legal status.”51 Girls had to be freed from early marriages (at eleven or twelve), which impeded education when the girl was pulled out of school from one day to the other, explained Louria in Baghdad in 1886. What is the point of education, he asked, if this question is not resolved? Ignorant girls became backward women, with the result that the benefits of education were lost for everyone. Numerous teachers argued that nothing was gained by educating boys if girls are left to vegetate in hidebound tradition. All children had to be educated. As early as 1876, Joseph Halévy, speaking of Morocco, asked “Isn’t neglecting girls’ education tantamount to knowingly losing the benefits of educating boys?”52 Once they are better educated, these women will be able to aid “their brothers” to fight against “the barbarity, ignorance and fanaticism which are the plague of Morocco,” as the French consul at Larache explained in 1874.53 It

Jewish “Subjects” | 169 is thought that, wielding authority over a large part of family life, women—if educated—could bring about a softening of manners, promote hygiene and push back superstition.54 The emphasis placed on moral education suffused the entire issue of female education; what was necessary was to contain the desire to merely cleave closely to the narrow pathway that would create good future wives. But in breaking apart the world of tradition, schools ran the risk of fostering uncontrolled liberty. It was thus considered that the educational system must closely supervise children, especially adolescent girls placed into apprenticeship in seamstress schools.55 An educated young girl will become a more respected mother, a genuine spouse within the couple. One may have mocked “educated women” but it was just a question of having girls acquire “some knowledge of arithmetic and practical science” as “an intelligent and educated woman would be better placed than an ignorant one to prevail upon her husband, to keep him in check, and to have herself respected and obeyed by her children.”56 This points toward the significant number of abandoned wives and the recurrence of domestic violence. Liberation for women would come about through education and the autonomy assured by acquisition of a manual trade.57 Schooling for girls would bear fruit, assured many reports, as if to better demonstrate the validity of an initiative so often contested. Correlated to the economic expansion and rise in social status of numerous Jews in Iraq and Egypt, expansion of female schooling was equally rapid. In the 1930s only a few adolescent Baghdad Jewish girls were studying at the Lycée Shamash, the Jewish high school. By the end of that decade, a few had moved up to higher education. In 1941, in Iraq, the first Jewish woman passed the Bar. In Morocco, even before 1912, the feminization of the teaching corps was testimony to a similar—albeit slower—evolution, since only one-third of instructors in the local AIU school network were female. Yet, on the eve of the Second World War, this portrait had to be nuanced. During nearly 80 years, the educational efforts of the AIU—like those of other organizations working for the emancipation of girls—often ran into conservative mentalities. This was a resistance that was all the more powerful in that it could not be admitted out loud: it always maneuvered indirectly, creating ambushes, obstacles and booby traps. Female emancipation—because it heralded the collapse of an entire world—was also synonymous with anguish. In the 1930s, many still deplored the weak level of female schooling as well as the numbers of educated girls who had to give up studies in order to marry young; if early marriages had in fact become less frequent, they had still not disappeared by the middle of the twentieth century. One can still glean testimonies of forced abandonment of their studies by gifted young girls pulled out of school from one day to the next and married off a few weeks later.

170  |  Jews in Arab Countries Upbringing comes before education: this required, first of all, learning cleanliness through the teaching of hygiene, a key factor in the struggle against what had previously been called “pauperism,” that is, a grab-bag of illiteracy, disease, infant mortality, alcoholism, prostitution, begging, and so on. The archives overflow with reports on the general state of filthiness. Thanks to the end of colonialist Euro-centrism, it is common nowadays to make fun of the horror of educators when they came face to face with the dirtiness of the time. The mocking regard of “free-thinkers,” as one used to say, does not change the raw reality of a social plague, one that brought vermin and epidemics. In 1901, at Casablanca, a school director ordered a domestic “even at school, to wash every morning those pupils considered unclean by the master in his morning inspection: arms, neck, face, hair, everything went mercilessly under the sponge and the soap. I also found it useful, once a month, to have the hair of our poor pupils shaved off.”58 From Azemmour, in Morocco in 1915, it was reported that students judged unwashed were sometimes expelled, giving rise to conflicts with parents accused, in so many words, of being unclean themselves.59 This campaign for cleanliness was above all aimed at stemming the tide of epidemics (in particular, tuberculosis), from which the Arab population was better protected by the more salubrious environment in the medina. This explains the necessity for the school to teach some preventative measures: aerating buildings, forbidding spitting, and so on. “The certificate of studies, however important it may be, should not be our only goal,” wrote Robert Béhar in 1937, from Rabat.60 Learning a trade was the third objective set by the AIU for the end of the primary cycle (the cursus primaire, achieved normally by age thirteen). The slight academic “toolkit” acquired then permitted the brightest and most fortunate to find a job in trade or in an office, in particular when, under colonization, the number of administrative positions swelled. But these job prospects quickly closed. Education at cursus primaire level was primarily aimed at poor children, who would not go on to secondary studies and thus would not make it to the peak of the system, the baccalauréat (normally age nineteen; this is comparable to the German gymnasium, not to the American baccalaureate degree or B.A.). It was thus necessary to round off the primary cycle so that the children did not forget what they had just learned, and thus to prevent unemployment and its corollary, beggary. By 1876 Joseph Halévy had congratulated the AIU for establishing a teaching program in Morocco enabling “children of the poor to learn a trade”—although only for boys.61 From the 1880s, similar requests were raised regarding girls (as in the seamstress training workshop in Tetouan). But in order to do this, it was nec­ essary to reburnish the image of manual work, and put an end to the disrepute traditionally attached to it. This started with less taxing occupations, and then

Jewish “Subjects” | 171 woodworking and metalworking for the boys. In 1880s Iraq, professional education did not exist; artisans simply hired young people and taught them the craft or trade. Vocational training was thus able to put a brake on emigration abroad by the more gifted young people or, as in Morocco, was able to stem the exodus toward coastal communities, such as Casablanca. The challenge remained to teach trades to girls, especially in the hinterland and more remote corners of the country, places that existed “on the margins of the civilizing work taking place in Morocco.” Thus, when a teacher in Demnat set out to teach her pupils needlework and knitwear fabrication, she also had to organize the delivery of a supply of knitting needles and wool previously inac­ cessible there.62 Training of girls is carried out in apprenticeship workshops, essentially sewing and embroidery. But in all cases, it was necessary to fight against the reluctance of parents who dreamt of an office job for their children, the worst outcome being—after agriculture—manual work. Apprenticeship constituted a long struggle. The illusion had to be broken that held that primary school would enable an escape from the damnation of manual labor. The situation following the First World War, in particular the economic difficulties of 1919–1924, explains the ebbing of commercial employment and the rise of joblessness, while manual trades were less severely affected. What was needed was to bring Jews back to artisan work, and to break the prejudice characterizing Jews as parasites unsuited to the exercise of a manual trade. By the 1930s there was no longer a fear of saying in front of the parents that their children were destined to be workers, as when in July 1937, during the awarding of prizes at the Ben-Ahmed School in Morocco, the school director declared to the students: “When you dream about your future situations, don’t imagine yourselves shut up in an office, a fountain pen in your hand. Have, instead, the image of a worker. Your future will be with the blacksmith’s hammer, the cabinet-maker’s plane and saw, or the laborer’s pickaxe and shovel.”63 However, there was much resistance, as in Mosul in 1931, where Christian and Muslim employers feared “that their trades would become denigrated once they were practiced by Israelites.”64 Another obstacle was the frequent refusal of Muslims to teach certain trades to Jews, reflecting their opposition to any competition in, for example, metalworking trades, according to a 1911 AIU report; this was especially the case with arms manufacturing, exclusively reserved for Arabs. But the restrictions went considerably further. In 1910 at Fez, the AIU director considered the future prospects of a brilliant student. Emigrate? He may have neither the wish nor the courage to do so. Take a job in commerce? But commerce is essentially in Muslim hands. Take up a “Jewish” occupation in the mellah—jewelry, embroidery, tailoring, engraving? The “overcrowding” within these trades is such, and the competition is so tough, that these trades “no

172  |  Jews in Arab Countries longer feed their men.” There remain the Muslim trades (blacksmithing, saddlemaking, weaving), well-paying but closed to the Jews. “No Jewish apprentices in these workshops.”65 This is why, despite some successes such as vocational schools in Morocco, the record was so poor on the eve of the Second World War. In 1920, fewer than 1000 boys and girls (500 of whom were in Morocco) received this form of instruction developed by the AIU. Working together with ORT, the international Jewish vocational training organization, the AIU redoubled its efforts after 1945. The “healthy” occupation par excellence remained work on the land, long ago abandoned by Jews. On this issue, the AIU was aligned with Saint-Simonianism, the dominant political and economic philosophy. The AIU had two agriculture schools: Mikweh, set up in 1870 in Eretz Israel, and Djedeidah, established in Tunisia in 1895. For security reasons, no such facility was opened in Morocco, where for the same reasons the number of Jewish farmers remained low. Finally, Morocco’s Zionists between the wars also played a modest role in the attempts at reconversion back to agriculture via vocational training in preparation for emigration to the Holy Land. The extremely limited job prospects and the competition posed from civil servants from France tended to reduce the value of diplomas, which had previously been effective door-openers. However, these efforts, in the largest Jewish community in the Arab world, remained marginal. Homegrown prejudices remained powerful. Moreover, parents balked at sending their children to study in Tunisia or Palestine. In a letter from 1899, David Arié, of the Tripoli AIU, recounted how some parents disdainfully rejected an advantage that, elsewhere, parents sought and indeed were willing to pay rather dearly for: “‘Working the land—that’s work for Negroes,’ I was told by these impoverished and benighted parents. The more I tried to persuade them, the more they seemed convinced that I wanted to harm them.”66 The clearest success was the reduction in illiteracy. In Egypt, the number of Jewish children in education increased from 3,000 in 1884 to 15,000 in 1938. In Alexandria and Cairo, which together contain 90 percent of Egypt’s Jews, the illiteracy rate plummeted from 65 percent of girls and 37 percent of boys in 1907, to 24 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys in 1947. These are the lowest illiteracy rates of any Jewries of the Middle East. By comparison, in 1947, the overall national rate of illiteracy in Egypt was 69 percent for girls and 44 percent for boys.67 By 1947, illiteracy had become almost non-existent among male Jewish youth in Baghdad. It remained higher for girls, a fortiori for older women and in general among the aging segments of the population. The rate would shrink throughout Iraq during the first half of the twentieth century other than among the Jews of Kurdistan.

Jewish “Subjects” | 173 Children taught their own parents. From day to day, parents often unraveled what the schoolmaster had woven, but through education, assured an 1883 report from Baghdad, “bit by bit the bad influence of parents would fade, and then change would be significant and progress rapid.”68 A report from Tangiers in 1895 stated that education made it possible to reach parents and “modify their ways of life.”69 Or to put it more positively: impressed by the schoolmaster’s lessons, the children would desire to “communicate to their parents the things which had struck them,” by repeating the stories they had read or which had been recounted by the teacher.70 In a word, the students themselves became educators. Although perhaps somewhat simplistic, this perspective was not really erroneous. Yet, many teachers hardly had any confidence in this beneficial side-effect of education, for the moment pupils left the school, they were “irremediably lost. Family life, composed of theft and lies, gripped them by the throat, and the next day, the same child would lie to you about any little thing, enough to make your eyes pop out of your head in stupefaction. The moral effect of school is nil, or close to it,” concluded the Baghdad AIU school director in 1887.71 These cries of anguish, without being the norm, nevertheless surfaced on a regular basis, as a kind of pressure release in the face of a daily reality that was light years away from initial ideals. But if the ideals of the Enlightenment remained vivid for many—torn as they were between a “Jewish education” and a “universalistic education” and wavering over which to transmit—the universal generally won out. It alone could facilitate the integration of Jewish populations, because the goal was not to extract this community from its country of residence. And moreover, what is the meaning of “Jewish thought,” asks Somekh in Cairo in 1910. Some Talmudic aphorisms, or anecdotes from the pious life of some rabbi, does that constitute a “Jewish book?”72 This question was all the more pertinent in that AIU schools accepted children from all confessions. In 1906, in Tangiers for example, the boys’ school counted 40 Catholic pupils out of 300, and the girls’ school had 40 Catholics out of 320.73 In 1909 in Hillé, in Mesopotamia, the Jewish notables, seeking harmonious relations with an often hostile Shi’ite community, reported that 16 percent of the students were Muslims, as some parents “prefer to pay our relatively higher school fees rather than send their children to the Rushdi School, where no tuition is charged.”74 In Mosul in 1911, the AIU school counted eight Muslims and six Christians: “Several Muslim sheikhs,” explained the director, “hastened to send their children there.”75 The Comité Central of the AIU opted for inter-community harmony, which the school could promote. In reality, this welcome, which was after all only marginal, did not really change inter-community relations. Amin al-Husseini, the future Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was himself for a time a student at the Jerusalem AIU school. The objective of the AIU remained the integration of Jewish children in their respective countries, by means of raising their academic level. A system of school

174  |  Jews in Arab Countries libraries was created, with Paris approving the content. In all AIU schools, the students studied the rudiments of two or three languages for four or five years, although attaining only an elementary level. In the Maghreb, teaching European languages was the function of the colonizer. The acquisition of a foreign language remained the achievement of a minority. It was often the guarantor of social promotion, offering the possibility of one day joining the “middle class,” the “entry ticket to the modern world.”76 European tongues were languages of distinction, the languages of “culture,” for example as was for many years the case with Italian in Egypt (especially in Alexandria) before French came to prevail among foreign minorities. This explains the desire of many Oriental Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century to learn a European language. This was an easy thing for Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire, who spoke Spanish, or in Tunisia and Algeria for the Grana (Livorno Jews) who spoke Italian, and for Iraqi Jewish merchants in India who knew English, not to mention that consular personnel, for the most part dhimmis, counted many Jewish dragomans (interpreters with command of Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and other tongues) among their number. In fact, from 1770, in the Maghreb, the consular representatives of European nations were often local Jews. Keen to penetrate these territories, European powers embraced the cause of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects in the nineteenth century. This was already an established pattern for France (which had protected Oriental Latin Christians since the sixteenth century) as well as for Russia, which in 1774 obtained the same prerogative on behalf of Orthodox Ottomans. In the Maghreb the essential was to be able to speak French, a language that marked one out as “modern” in the social scale: as the Fez AIU director noted in 1890, “The parents of our students hardly worry about whether their sons are strong in mathematics; they have but a single ambition: this is to see them learn to speak fluent French.”77 In addition, “French culture” would lift up the new generations who were downtrodden “by several centuries of oppression and moral brutalization,” and would allow an escape from the suffocating “face to face” between Muslim justice and the Jewish minority. Moreover, with the French now masters of the Maghreb, acquisition of “French culture” would allow the Jews to influence their own destiny. In any event, the AIU had nothing but contempt for “regional languages”— Ladino and Yiddish in Europe, and Judeo-Arabic here—“corrupted mélanges of several languages” and veritable “obstacles to teaching.”78 In fact, in the nineteenth century, these Jewish communities were massively Arabized. It is only slowly, from the middle of that century, that Spanish, Italian, and above all French would penetrate these places. Local languages then started to decline, without provoking much anxiety (whereas by contrast the

Jewish “Subjects” | 175 retreat of Ladino and Yiddish in Europe aroused emotions in both intellectuals and community leaders). Mobility and modernity, virtually synonymous concepts, implied a change of language. With France appearing as a virtual emblem of “high culture,” the price did not seem too high. Yet, even on the eve of the Second World War, these communities had still not become massively Francophone, Hispanophone, or Anglophone. In 1939, only a minority of the Moroccan Jewish community were Francophone. In the cities and towns of the plains, Arabic speakers dominated, and Berber speakers dominated in the mountains. A large proportion of Moroccan Jews had mastered Arabic and Tamazight. In 1936, according to a study derived from a population census, out of 120,000 Jews in Morocco, only 40,000—one third—could write, read, or speak French.79 The prevailing view was that French was the “language of prestige” and “the language of educated foreigners.80 Very few people foresaw the domination of English. In Cairo, however, by 1900 Somekh already noted “in the near future, it [English] will become the only official language of the country besides Arabic” and observed that it had already supplanted French in state primary schools. Two years later the same would be true for secondary schools. Because knowledge of English was required for public service employment, the Egyptians turned toward English, but not the Jews, “who do not seem to grasp the importance of this development.” Somekh described as “unaware” those Jewish parents who place their children in congregational schools where Arabic is poorly taught and who thus cut themselves off from the future of a country that will be Arabophone and Anglophone. Should therefore the AIU move to English? Most certainly, he opined: There will come the day when the Comité Central will “be led by necessity to adhere to governmental policies and give English the preponderant place in its schools which today is taken by French.”81 The future belongs to English, Somekh added in 1902. “As the dream of every Egyptian is to become a civil servant,” English will become the language of “business,” with French confined to “social relations.”82 Imperial France’s rational self-interest seems to have lain in supporting the AIU. Every colonial administrator rapidly understood that the Jewish organization was promoting the influence of “La Grande Nation,” without asking for much in return. Lyautey, France’s Résident Général in Morocco since 1912, was one of the senior officers who understood the benefit to be had from an organization that promoted Francophilie, or love of France, in the colonial world. In July 1915, he proposed to the AIU to take responsibility for the financing of its school buildings. The Quai d’Orsay (France’s Foreign Ministry, named after its location in Paris), knew that in organized Jewish communities, the AIU was the vector by which France is admired and adorned with all virtues. The First World War

176  |  Jews in Arab Countries provided the occasion for a surge of patriotism on the part of children who had never even stood under Gallic skies. From the Mazagan school, in Morocco, in 1916: “Our children are moved by a deep sentiment of gratitude for France, their adopted country.”83 These good feelings translated concretely into sewing carried out for soldiers at the Front (such as gloves, socks, balaclavas), accompa­ nied by letters speaking of the “love for France,” which the children had learned. From Mogador in 1916, the young epistolary correspondents assured the soldiers that the students are “with France, certain that victory will be ours thanks to the spirit of France and the symbol of Justice and Law which she incarnates.”84 This is the dominant image of France as the capital of the Enlightenment, and daughter of the Revolution and emancipation, which “deserves not only the gratitude of all the world’s Israelites, but also for leading the cause of progress and civilization.”85 The refrain of these reports was “the indebtedness towards France,” as Sémach confirmed again in a report he delivered to the Quai d’Orsay in 1925, evoking these “recent times when, relegated to the mellah, [the Jews] had to wear long robes and black hats, and yield the way to any Muslim.”86 If the AIU conceived of itself as having a universal mission, in reality it was acting more and more like a Francophone and Francophile institution. Love of France became entangled with adherence to the Enlightenment. Moreover, French officials on tour in the Mediterranean and the Near East did not fail to fan the flame of this love for the “second homeland,” by paying visits to AIU schools. Cultural radiance was by no means an empty word. By means of patient groundwork, the AIU equipped itself to advance all things French in the Near East. In a Baghdad bookstore in the 1930s, the young Naïm Kattan discovered “a shelf where the whole series of Cahiers de la Quinzaine was piled up. My teacher told me that the AIU subscribed to the Cahiers for all the schools, in order that Péguy would survive.”87 (The Cahiers was a bimonthly journal, founded in 1900 and directed by pro-Dreyfus intellectual Charles Péguy.) The AIU’s teachers were not solely obeying instructions of the Comité Central. Their love of France reflected the view of the “country of the Rights of Man” held by all those who participated in the nineteenth century struggles for independence, among whom the Jews of the Arab world were in the front lines. “Our teachers,” Narcisse Leven wrote to Lyautey in 1913, “are suffused with our thinking, and with French mentality.”88 In the interviews carried out for her book on the French of Algeria, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux reported the testimony of many French-by-adoption, of Spanish, Italian, Maltese, and Jewish origin: “We loved France. From the moment something was [felt to be] beautiful, it was French. . . . France represented not only the improvement of conditions of life but intelligence, education, culture, and civilization.”89

Jewish “Subjects” | 177 Like the French authorities in France, those in Morocco were also clear very early on about the debt they owed the AIU, and well before 1912, French consuls in the Cherifian Empire tried to convince Paris to support the organization. However, Paris hesitated between opening its own network of schools (the Alliance Française) and supporting those of the AIU. With the development of its own schools stalled, the government assisted the AIU, a decision confirmed in 1912 when the French military understood to what extent the cultural offensive preceded (and paved the way for) the colonial conquest.90 “Your interests are the same as ours,” Lyautey assured the AIU Marrakesh director in 1913. Such convergence of views was reinforced by the visits of senior French officers to AIU schools in Morocco. Over the years, the French political class came to recognize the AIU’s role as “contributing today, by its own efforts, to maintaining in our favor a certain key role which we do not always show ourselves to be sufficiently concerned to defend.”91 This contribution to the French undertaking explains why, between July 1940 and November 1942, the Vichy régime did not attempt to block the work of the AIU in Morocco; deprived of instructions from Paris, the AIU continued to educate 14,000 pupils. The Judaism advanced by the AIU was one that bathed in the glow of the Enlightenment. A Mosaic version of rational faith, it posited itself as unburdened by “fanaticism” and “superstition.” It was regenerated in that it was articulated around the Revolution of 1789; it was Westernized. This explains its progressive move away from ritual, irrespective of what its adulators said. Obviously, the work of the AIU and its Francophone activism transformed Oriental Jews inasmuch as they had become Francophone. But in fact, this was a mythical view. In 1945, only a minority of Oriental Jews was Francophone, and sometimes, in a given community, this concerned only the tiny number of people educated by the AIU. The desire to Gallicize Near Eastern Jewry was one of the foremost grievances raised against the AIU, suspected moreover of pulling Jewry away from religious tradition. This leitmotif of the period from the 1850s to the 1950s dovetails with the prejudices against schools and teaching that “would distance people from the faith,” and reflects the struggle that at the same time, opposed “the two Frances,” that is, the traditional, Catholic France, and the secular France of the 1789 Revolution. The Comité Central of the AIU aimed to reassure Jews by emphasizing, in its 1903 Manuel or guidebook, the necessity of teaching about God and universal morals, and responding to the challenge posed by Jules Ferry (French statesman, and promoter of secularism and colonial expansion) to teachers at the beginning of the 1880s: “We will regret our efforts if the result is to suffocate the faith of Jews. . . . You have to teach, but you must also teach morals,

178  |  Jews in Arab Countries by cultivating and upholding religious feelings, the attachment to Judaism, its doctrines and its practices of worship.”92 During many decades, AIU personnel repeatedly insisted that teaching did not promote a world without God, but rather reflected a “pure faith” in rational creation by a Great Watchmaker, who charged His people to lead humankind on the pathway of reason and morality. To purify worship from a “coarse religiosity” would lead to a faith relieved of the burden of superstition and “puerile prejudice.” Yet, the adversaries of the AIU accused it of de-Judaizing Jewish youth. However, in both North Africa and the Near East, if modern education did pull people away from religious practice, it did not lead to assimilation, much less conversion. (By contrast in the West, there were many conversions, in particular for the generation of Jewish French notables from the 1820s to the 1870s.) The fear of a decline in faith led rabbinical circles to seek the introduction by the AIU of religious curriculum. This was, for example, the case in Tangiers in 1899, when the rabbi requested three daily and consecutive hours of religious instruction.93 Working in areas that were a priori hostile, the AIU had its teachers apply the principal commandments (daily prayers, obligatory fasting, respect of the laws of kashrut). For many parents, the institution represented the possibility of reconciling modernity as the guarantor of social ascent, the power of new ideas that opened access to the world, and respect for tradition. The teaching of Hebrew was aimed at breaking their mistrust. From Tripoli in 1896: “Such instruction can only contribute to winning over the population in favor of the schools.”94 In the view of the director of a Tripoli AIU school in 1894, above all no pretext should be given to the orthodox to attack the school, which “in class as at work, respects the tradition of covering the head,” because “the greatest plots are hatched in the name of religion.”95 In reality, many teachers held the rabbis, and in some cases religion itself, in very low esteem, and thus spoke with a forked tongue on this issue. Beyond teaching a theism that makes God’s gift of the Torah a prefiguration of the rule of reason, the Jewish character of AIU teaching concerned the introduction of Jewish history and instruction in Hebrew. Jewish history, however, was the AIU curriculum’s “poor relation,” an approximate rehash of the Bible, a kind of universal moralistic preaching that did not draw on specifically Jewish traditions or thinkers. Judaism seemed to have dissolved into a universal and humanist message emptied of any specific history or specific religious instruction. Moreover, the heder virtually ceased to exist around 1860. Many children were unable to recognize Hebrew letters and knew nothing about Jewish history. This is why, during a long period, there was not a single yeshiva in Egypt. In the 1930s, one had to count on Zionists alone (who were still not great in number) to promote knowledge of Hebrew.

Jewish “Subjects” | 179 Yet, during the 1930s, Zionism was gaining ground. In 1931, Daniel Lerner, Meknes AIU school director, explained that it was not sufficient to teach the heroism of Bayard or Jeanne d’Arc, but was also necessary to talk about Bar Kochba’s revolt against the Emperor Hadrian. Just as one must teach the battle of Betar (135 CE) alongside the battle of Bouvines (1214 CE).96 The AIU was accused of placing inadequate emphasis on Hebrew. But in both Yemen and Iraq this criticism lacked real significance, given the structuring of traditional teaching and the widespread knowledge of Hebrew. In Baghdad toward 1850, in the community’s five schools, nineteen hours per week were dedicated to Hebrew, thirteen to Arabic and only five to manual work and design. But textbooks in Hebrew were almost inexistent, and until 1906 the language was taught by reading the Bible. In Egypt, knowledge of Hebrew began to deteriorate around 1850. At that date, a large number of Egyptian Jews still spoke it (as well as Arabic); a century later, only a minority could do so. Only the Zionist movements continued to use Hebrew as a vernacular tongue. This relative decline occured just at the time when the ramparts of the faith were tottering. Yet, this is before a secularized Jewish identity—that is, a Hebraic identity—had taken shape, with Hebrew language being the backbone of the Jewish nation, as the first Zionists intended. This essential link to nascent Zionism explains why the AIU hesitated to invest further in Hebrew instruction, as if, by so doing, the AIU would also be lending support to the idea—preposterous, in its view—of “the Jewish nation.” Because the AIU feared reinforcing Zionism, it resisted recruiting Hebrew professors from the Yishuv (Palestine), even though they enjoyed a reputation for being among the most qualified for that role. Nevertheless, Hebrew teaching was one of the AIU’s key missions; it could only abandon this at the cost of turning its back on itself. But on promoting this language, it opened the way to the development of a more and more secularized identity, built on language. With the decline in religious practice, the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and the emergence of the identity of the subject, an entire world of tradition foundered, and Zionism started to prosper on its ruins. In 1913 in Cairo, Somekh lucidly diagnosed the contradiction: “Zionism, which is enjoying a noisy success, forgets that . . . we have prepared the groundwork for its success by bringing Hebrew instruction, and in the place of age-old routines, we have brought methods and processes of modern pedagogy.”97 After 1945, the AIU would opt for a radically different policy, for example popularizing instruction in modern Hebrew as spoken in Tel Aviv. This was now the language of a nation, and in the post–Second World War context it was also a language of immigration—in the Orient as well. This is why the French Government, despite its links with the AIU, refused to subsidize Hebrew instruction,

180  |  Jews in Arab Countries which it judged too close to the Zionist movement. The Jewish Agency picked up the baton; it had already been doing so since 1943. In Morocco in the early 1950s, home to the last large Jewish community in Arab lands, a Hebraic Normal School, or teacher training institution, was founded in order to provide a fiveyear course (increased to seven in 1956) of training in Hebrew language and Judaism. Its promoters claimed not to favor Zionism, in order not to irritate Morocco (a member of the Arab League) or, before 1956, the French. In reality, Zionism was omnipresent. Hebrew education soon opened the way to Zionism in both Europe and the Near East, where the Jewish world—more homogenous than in Europe—was based on a still largely intact identity. Pleading by certain teachers and directors in favor of Hebrew hardly disguised their faith in the idea of a Jewish nation. Their view was that Hebrew—the language that “allowed Judaism to subsist during 2000 years of dispersion,” giving rise to “a long chain of thinkers and poets who linked Hebraic antiquity, via the Middle Ages, to the renaissance of contemporary Judaism”—was the nation itself. And “if the Hebrew tongue is thus one of the principal causes of our existence as Jews, is it not our duty to seek to know it better?”98 But for the Comité Central, at least in the 1930s, emancipation, despite disillusionment, remained the sole solution. That is why all pleading in favor of Hebrew had firstly to display a total disinterest in Zionism.99 Massive poverty was one of the principal obstacles to literacy. From Morocco to Iraq, the overwhelming majority of the school population constituted poor children financially assisted by the community. In 1920, 56 percent of Iraqi Jewish children taught by the AIU were educated for free; by 1930 the figure was 64 percent. The fee-paying AIU schools were not the only contenders. The wealthiest members of the community turned away from AIU establishments in order to send their children to French, Italian, or English schools. The AIU took on the allure of the school for the “middle classes” and in part the school of the poor, too; assuring a balance between these two populations proved to be a delicate matter. In Tetouan in 1910, the girls’ school contained 455 students, divided into 10 classes, thus 45 students per class. Some 261, thus more than half, were admitted with fees waived. In Tripoli in 1909, to keep these students, the AIU proposed to offer them lunch, which was often the only real meal of the day for the many who arrived with empty stomachs; in consequence, lunch was soon dubbed “the meal of the poor.”100 Did AIU bylaws stipulate welcoming all children in need? Did AIU schools not risk being viewed as “the poor schools,” and would parents thus not be encouraged to find it “entirely natural to pay much less at our school than they would be obliged to pay at any other school in town?” In fact, charitable assistance

Jewish “Subjects” | 181 in the Jewish environment was considerable. Thus, in Damascus in 1919, several associations delivered aid: help to travelers (Hakhnassat Orehim), which permits them to stay for free, poor relief (Otzer Dallim) and assistance in the form of free meals to women to prevent them from having to prostitute themselves.101 How to attract the children of the very poorest? The Jewish community hardly financed the AIU schools, providing, for example, only 10 percent of the annual budget for Baghdad’s schools. The schools had to find resources elsewhere in order to meet tuition requirements, which were in any event quite inadequate to sustain a balanced budget. The result was that the AIU itself pays. The chronic lack of financial resources manifests itself in the dilapidated state of premises, which in general are poorly adapted for teaching, lacking adequate ventilation or lighting sources. Schools often lack recreation grounds and have few, if any, trees. Doing homework at home was almost impossible: overcrowding, noise, and poor lighting were the norm, and the girls were preoccupied with household chores. In 1904, the director of the Tripoli girls’ school reported that at night, many students “begged to be allowed to remain at school because, they said, not only did they have neither a table nor light at home, but their mothers were opposed to them doing their homework.”102 In Cairo in 1909, Somekh was saddened to see a crowd of poor children wandering in the streets.103 In 1913 at Larache, in Morocco, the director decried parents who only send their children “to school in order to get them out of their hair,” keeping them away from school when needed at home. On Friday morning the classrooms were empty, as the pupils accompanied their fathers to market. What could be had from such a disjointed education, other than patchy knowledge? Parental apathy was regularly denounced. However, if in the initial years following school establishment the students tended week by week to desert the classroom, this was no longer the case by the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet, poverty decimated classroom numbers at the first sign of any upswing in difficulties. Thus, in Mogador in 1867, hunger and cold keep children from school, “either due to lack of sufficient clothes, or to the need to send them out begging in the streets. The misery is shared by even the youngest of girls,” reports French consul Auguste Beaumier.104 On the other hand, if numbers are higher in winter, as was noted in Iraq in 1913, this is because, come summer, “thirty or so of our boys . . . go off for the season into town or into the villages as domestic servants in order to earn a few sous.”105 In Fez in 1903, Jacob Valadji deplored the absence of parents who “say nothing, and don’t even try to make their child attend school; on the contrary they tell me that the child doesn’t want to attend, and that I should not bother him.”106 This testimony was corroborated by other sources, especially from Morocco, where

182  |  Jews in Arab Countries parents were accused of letting these things occur “without daring to antagonize [their children].”107 In reality, education was not yet something to which they had morally committed. Such behavior was therefore not likened to “weakness” on the part of parents, who were able to show toughness in other respects; it was simply the reflection of a weakly anchored commitment to education. School was in effect not viewed as a sanctuary of learning, with an agreedupon symbolic code fashioned by the teachers. Rather, as Valadji recalled from Fez in 1903, education was considered as “useless,” and schools as “profane and impious places.” Useless, because the children “will never have need for a European language.”108 Impious places, because schools were perceived as “a powerful machine ready to undermine the bases of faith,” reported Conquy in Morocco in 1917, recalling Rabat fifteen years earlier.109 Tripoli’s rabbis hope to see the AIU school closed, but their objection to teaching European languages (“out of fear that this would harm the religious feelings of our compatriots who are so orthodox”) was substantially anterior to the arrival of the AIU.110 Considered as vectors of de-Judaization and atheism, for certain rabbis these schools were breeding grounds of immorality, as one rabbi in Baghdad explained in 1913. He was particularly upset with the education of girls, which would produce “heralds of vice” who ruin their husbands with sumptuary expenses, and who, “casting aside all modesty will go about shamelessly with bare heads. Woe betide eyes that have seen such things! Misfortune upon the generation in which this has arisen! This evil that afflicts us is caused by the AIU schools. . . . But this is still not enough for these people. They needed to create schools for young Jewish girls in order to catch innocent and pure souls in their nets. . . . This is how they bring about the destruction of the world.”111 To these internal obstacles we must add the restraints applied by foreign consulates, unhappy to see French influence spreading; thus, the reservations expressed by German and Spanish consuls in Morocco prior to 1912, as well as those of some Jews working for Britain and Italy. These threats were serious. More than once an AIU school closed its doors after a few years, not to reopen until five or ten years later. The first few years were full of risk, and schools faced multiple threats. The proportion of those educated by the AIU remained a minority among those of school age: in 1949 to 1950 in Baghdad, 4,026 students attended AIU schools, 6,400 went to other Jewish community schools, and 2,300 attended private schools. Of the 18,000 Jewish students, girls made up just one third.112 There were sometimes very large variations from one country to another, as well as within the same country. In Morocco in 1902, out of 1,000 Jews, twentyfive received education in Mogador, while Tetouan, Casablanca, and Larache counted, respectively, forty, fifty, and one hundred. Attendance at school was generally brief: rare were those who completed a full curriculum of four or five

Jewish “Subjects” | 183 years. In Mogador in 1893, out of 112 students who dropped out in the course of the school year, sixty-two (i.e., 55 percent) had attended for less than one year.113 In 1899, out of nineteen who quit during the school year, seven had attended for less than one year. In 1910, out of 119 who quit during the year, seventy-six (or 64 percent) had attended for less than a year.114 Despite all these difficulties, the education record overall was a positive one for all countries except Yemen. Illiteracy was for the most part eradicated by the end of the Second World War. Religious schools were in decline everywhere, which confirms the impact of secularization. In 1950, Israeli immigration bureau statistics recorded that among the youngest immigrants (those aged from fifteen to twenty-nine at the time of their arrival), only 5 percent of those from Egypt were illiterate (of which 4 percent of males and under 7 percent of females). For Iraqis of that age group, the figure was 30 percent, of which 17 percent of males and 44 percent of females. For young Yemenis, 25 percent of males and 82 percent of females were illiterate.115 AIU schools faced competition from religious schools, such as Midrash or Talmud Torah. The struggle, following the mounting of an offensive by hostile rabbis, could sometimes conclude with the closure of the AIU school. Although schools charged tuition, nearly half of the students went free of charge. Competition was thus very sharp with free schools, which included foreign institutions (such as the Moroccan Spanish schools in the early twentieth century), and community schools frequented by the poorest students. In addition, alongside structured school systems, Zionist movements established schools where secular instruction was delivered in Hebrew, although these were much rarer than in Eastern Europe. In Egypt, many Jewish children went to Christian schools, often by social choice. In contrast, in Iraq, Morocco, and Aden, the motivation was above all to avoid the old-fashioned Talmud Torah. In Morocco, children were steered toward mission schools because of a lack of places in Jewish schools, but at the risk of exposure to proselytism by priests. In fact, Christian schools, both secular and missionary, were the first to open up to Jewish pupils, in particular in Egypt where this widespread phenomenon preoccupied Jewish school directors. The Alexandrine community only opened a Jewish lycée in 1925, following another ritual murder accusation by a teacher in a Christian missionary school. The attraction felt by wealthy classes for denominational-based education extended beyond the Egyptian case; the demand for this was considerable and existed well before the establishment of the first AIU schools. Despite concerns, Christian proselytizing was held in check as in the Near East Jewish identity was not solely religious, ethnic, or based on family memory; instead, it was all three at the same time. To embrace another faith, therefore, did not signify “changing

184  |  Jews in Arab Countries religion,” but rather the erasure of one’s identity and one’s inner life. This is why conversion was so rare; even when faith dissolved, Jewishness remained intact. Jewish communities that turned toward Christian schools (often due to lack of choice) thus absorbed modern education while leaving the Christian message at the door. There were rare exceptions, such as the affair of the twenty-two Jewish schoolboys who, in 1914 as pupils of Christian schools in Cairo and Alexandria, converted secretly to Christianity. Following the enormous scandal set off by this affair, most returned to Judaism. Finally, strategies of social ascent were also in full play. The evidence suggests that, for the wealthier classes, sending one’s child to a Christian school (despite the violation of Shabbat that implies) is part of a strategy of social ascent sometimes tinged with a hint of snobbishness. This phenomenon was evident above all in Egypt where, in 1939, nearly 50 percent of Jewish students were enrolled in non-Jewish schools. As in Europe, both integration and ascent involved social de-Judaization. This explains the interest in Christian schools, and the decided reticence with regard to AIU schools, considered as symbols of an inward-turning community and social stagnation. Children from wealthier families also attended foreign institutions, such as French schools in Morocco, Italian schools in Libya, and English schools in Egypt Such enrolment was socially advantageous. It was noted in Casablanca in 1912 that “neither the Sabbath issue nor the question of religious instruction constitute insurmountable obstacles any longer.”116 This was also the case in Libya where, before Italian intervention, wealthy Jewish families preferred Italian schools to those of the AIU or the community. This tendency only increased after 1911, when Italy opened free secular schools. Egypt was a matter of concern for international Jewish organizations. In April 1913, a Zionist society described, to a Berlin-based Jewish organization, a community undergoing de-Judaization. A majority of its educated children enrolled in non-Jewish schools, in particular the children of the local Jewish elite, who attended Christian schools.117 Foreign educational competition was only heightened by colonial rivalries. The AIU was viewed as the vector of French expansion, and therefore met with German, British, and Spanish rejection as well as Italian resistance in Libya from 1895, when the Italian consul at Tripoli was reported to have “little concern about hundreds of children stagnating in ignorance as long as the French language was not promoted on an equal footing with Italian.”118 There was also competition within the Jewish community. In 1911, an Ashkenazi school was opened in Cairo, subsidized by the Berlin Hilfsverein, with classes taught in both German and Hebrew. Echoing Franco-German rivalry, which was sharpened by the 1905 “First Moroccan Crisis,” Somekh was convinced that the Reich was secretly

Jewish “Subjects” | 185 seeking to undermine the influence of the AIU in Egypt.119 Yet, despite increasing difficulties after 1920 the AIU maintained a dominant position up to 1945, other than in Egypt. Within Jewish communities the AIU faced multiple opposition. First, that of the rabbis, ready to see AIU schools as hotbeds of impiety that would sap their power. “Faithful people,” as stated in an 1899 report from Baghdad, viewed the early AIU schools as “diabolical places expressly set up to destroy religion.”120 In turn, AIU teachers—like other “enlightened” thinkers of the time—viewed the Talmud Torah centers as breeding grounds of reaction if not outright “stupidity.” The AIU did not conceal its disdain for rabbis considered to be deficient and poor teachers. The objective was to conceive an educational system that relegated religious belief to the private domain. However, many rabbis feared seeing school principals becoming spiritual leaders of the community, and opposed them— sometimes violently, more often silently. From Mosul in 1911, Silberstein decried those “fanatical rabbis” who rejoiced in “the difficulties that the governor has been causing us.”121 Like Zionism itself, this unacknowledged struggle for secularism expressed the emergence of a secularized Jewishness. In 1885 in Tangiers, AIU director Moïse Fresco incured the anger of the rabbis because he explained to his students that rain does not come from God but, rather, the condensation of water vapor in the clouds, adding that Moses had been able to cross the Red Sea because the water level “was very low.” If so, exclaimed a community leader, this would mean that God does not exist! Fresco replied that the school is not a rabbinical institution. In 1887 he dissociated the Talmud Torah from the school, setting off the anger of the traditionalists, who issued a herem, or banning order, against the school. The school had to close for several months, and Fresco himself had to withdraw. A new director reopened the school at the end of 1887. (At the same time, a secular struggle was being waged in France to leave God out of the curriculum. French secular educational circles viewed AIU schools as confessional or religious in nature, hence their opposition.) Other traditional notables opposed the schools, which they saw as vectors of education synonymous with emancipation. Such was the discourse of local leaders, but also the agreed line of elites who feared loss of their supremacy, particularly in Egypt, where the small number of wealthy families ruling the communities on a quasi-hereditary basis opposed the AIU. In Cairo, the principal Jewish leader, René Cattaoui, favored the community school, whose mediocre standards were well known. Finally, to this traditional hostility based on domination of the community, we may add the jealous reactions on the part of Muslims to the powerful AIU network, who feared that it might in future become an obstacle to the nationalist struggle.

186  |  Jews in Arab Countries Nascent Zionism, too, came rapidly into conflict with the AIU. From 1898, Theodore Herzl made clear his reticence, if not hostility. In his eyes, the AIU was not a Jewish institution and should take a back seat. This was also the posi­ tion of Ahad Haam as well as Nahum Sokolov, one of the principal leaders of the Zionist Organization in its early years. To Herzl, AIU teachers were acculturating Jewish youth, and in Gallicizing them, was also de-Judaizing them. This reproach would be maintained until the Second World War. In Morocco, the Zionist magazine L’Avenir illustré (The Illustrated Future) attacked the key AIU figure in the country: “Have you never any policy, Monsieur Sémach, than to flirt with the Résidence, or with Leon Blum, after you have flirted with Pierre Laval, and to de-Judaize yourself and your people?”122 The secondary position given to the Hebrew language was one of the main complaints of the Zionists. At the beginning of “land Zionism” in Palestine, the Bne Moshe, an organization founded in Russia by Ahad Haam in the early 1890s, deplored the importance accorded to French instruction in the AIU schools; in Bne Moshe’s view this compromised any national project, which by definition should be Hebrew-speaking. Finally, we should add the risk for the AIU of losing control of its schools, principally in the Maghreb, which France completely controlled from 1912, but also in Syria and Lebanon, where France was present from 1919. From the 1930s, the independence of Arab states, starting with Iraq, raised the issue of the absorption, pure and simple, of the schools into the national school network. In France, the Ministry of Public Education leaned in favor of taking control of AIU schools, or at least neutralizing them in favor of French schools. In Morocco, three agreements were concluded between the Résidence Générale and the AIU, in 1915, 1924, and 1928. The 1924 accord provided for an annual grant to the AIU schools, in exchange for an obligation to give priority to French citizens, and to submit to pedagogical and hygienic inspections by Paris. A modification in February 1928 extended subsidies so that they covered 80 percent of running costs, with the AIU preserving its autonomy over Hebrew instruction, religious education, premises, and foreign personnel. After 1961, Paris committed to support the education of an additional 2000 students every year. This is the sole case of such growth at a time when, throughout the Arab-Muslim world, student numbers were collapsing. But when schools wanted to move beyond uplifting discourse about “vocations,” doubts started to set in, undermining confidence. With the schools enjoying such little take-up, teachers found themselves questioning the usefulness of their work and its impact. AIU schools trained a tiny local elite who, in the absence of local career outlets, would leave to settle elsewhere. From Baghdad in 1899 came this assessment: for the community, the investment into the AIU school is a pure loss. As for those who do not leave, they are reabsorbed “by the

Jewish “Subjects” | 187 prevailing prejudices and superstitions, [losing] bit by bit the knowledge they had acquired at school.”123 Moreover, the curriculum was patchy, and in any event, rare were the students who finished the entire secondary program. As Valadji wrote from Fez in 1903, what they study was “acquired too quickly and is poorly digested,” in an environment that was “deleterious, immoral and provides negative examples.”124 Finally, without material improvement, “comportment” lessons have no impact. What is the point of instruction in hygiene given the extent of overcrowding in the mellah? An immense, yawning gap opened between the clichéd discourse of the ENIO—an institution that sprung straight out of the pedagogical ethos of the Third Republic—and the poverty that was the one truly inescapable reality in Libya, Morocco, and Yemen. The school would not accomplish its mission until these environmental facts were resolved. As Leon Pinto wrote regarding Casablanca in 1936, “the moral recovery must be matched by immediate material recovery.” The immense poverty and misery, to whose reduction the AIU was dedicated, formed a seamless whole. To Pinto, it was clear that it would be necessary to attack it simultaneously, on all fronts, including the excessive birthrate of “brutishly prolific parents.”125

Notes 1. AIU, Egypt. I. E., letter from Sana’a, 11 March 1910. The Alliance archives remain the most thorough source of information on the situation of Jewish communities in the lands of Islam between 1862 and 1939. 2. In AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, 16 August 1907. 3. Paix et Droit, November 1934, 4. 4. AIU, Egypt, XIV. 182. 5. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, letter of 10 October 1899. 6. AIU, Egypt I. G., Sémach, March 1910. 7. AIU, Egypt, I. G., 4 May 1910. 8. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2, letter from Baghdad, 21 August 1913. 9. Tadjouri, Casablanca school director, in Paix et Droit, January 1929, 4. 10. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5. 11. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 9 October 1930. 12. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, 1902–1903 annual report, Baghdad, 11 October 1903. 13. AIU, Morocco, III. Correspondence of Loubaton, Mogador, 1910. 14. AIU, Libya, I. G. 1–2, letter of David Arié, 12 March 1899. 15. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, 1895–1896 annual report. 16. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Sarfati, 1927–1928 annual report. 17. BAIU, 1901, 79. 18. BAIU, 1901, 79, and Paix et Droit, November 1938, 12. 19. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, 12 October 1902. 20. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3, 24 February 1890.

188  |  Jews in Arab Countries 21. AIU, France, XIV.F. 25, Larache, Bensimhon, 25 December 1903. 22. AIU, Libya, III. E. Tripoli, 20 January 1908. 23. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 47. 24. Cf. BAIU, 1909, 88. 25. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, letter of 23 February 1900. 26. BAIU, Jan.–June 1873, General Assembly of 22 May 1873. 27. Cf. AIU, Morocco, LIX. E. 943. 28. Saint-Marc Girardin, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 March 1862, cited in Said, L’Orientalisme, 24. 29. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 22 October 1911. 30. Cited in Chouraqui, L’Alliance, 155. 31. BAIU, 1912, 79–80. 32. Cf. Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (London: I.B. Innis and Co., 1989). 33. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Baghdad, end of 1883, annual report. 34. BAIU, July–Dec. 1886, 57, Louria, Baghdad school director. 35. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Tetouan, 1901. 36. Cf. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22. It appears that Jacob Valadji was the author of this report. 37. AU, Iran, I. F. 1, Tehran, 30 August 1908. 38. AIU, Libya, I. C. 1, 20 October 1891. 39. AIU, Morocco, V. B., Abraham Ribbi, July 1901, (report on Meknes). 40. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, Meknes, 11 January 1929. 41. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Taourirt school, Morocco, 21 July 1927. 42. Ibid., 7 August 1923. 43. Cited in Aron Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation. Les enseignants de l’Alliance israélite universelle et les Juifs d’Orient, 1860–1939 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989), 75. 44. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Tetouan, 10 July 1931. 45. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Somekh report, Cairo, 24 June 1906. 46. AIU, Morocco, V.B., Tangiers, 21 October 1924. 47. AIU, Morocco, XIV. F. 25, Fez, 31 October 1905. 48. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. 49. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Cairo, 1 July 1900. 50. AIU, Egypt, X. E. Cairo, 16 October 1904. 51. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen,” 102. 52. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 65. 53. AIU, France, IX. E. 20 March 1874. 54. AIU, Iraq, I. C., director of the Baghdad girls’ school, 9 March 1910. 55. Cf. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Tetouan, 19 September 1905. 56. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Elise Saguès, Casablanca, 22 October 1911. 57. AIU, Morocco, XIV. F. 25, July 1913, annual report. 58. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 22 October 1901, annual report. 59. AIU, Morocco, I. E. 1–19. 60. AIU, Morocco, III. 6, 24 March 1937. 61. BAIU, Jan.–June 1877, 58. 62. Paix et Droit, October 1936, 10.

Jewish “Subjects” | 189 63. AIU, Morocco, I. E. 1–19, Mizrahi, 3 July 1937. 64. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Mosul, D. Sasson, 10 December 1913. 65. AIU, Morocco, XV. F. 25, 1909–1910 annual report, Elmaleh. 66. Cf. Paix et Droit, June 1936, 12. 67. Cf. Haïm J. Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East, 1860–1972 (Tel Aviv: Israel Universities Press, 1973, 111 68. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, annual report, Baghdad, 1883. 69. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, 30 September 1903. 70. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Larache, 25 December 1903. 71. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Iraq, 1887. 72. AIU, Egypt, XI. E. 182, 20 May 1910. 73. Cf. Michael Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862–1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 74. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Hillé, 13 September 1909. 75. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9, 15 December 1911. 76. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 18. 77. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Fez, Nahon, 12 November 1890. 78. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Nahon, Casablanca, 18 October 1898. 79. Paix et Droit, June 1939, 9. 80. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 30 September 1924. 81. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Cairo, 15 July 1900. 82. Ibid., Cairo, 24 October 1902. 83. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Josué Cohen, 23 September 1916. 84. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Tangiers, September 1916. 85. AIU, France, XV. F. 26. Rabat. 5 November 1919. 863. September 1925, cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 472. 87. Naïm Kattan, Adieu, Babylone. Mémoires d’un Juif d’Irak (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 352n186. 88. AIU, Morocco, I. J. 1–2, 6 January 1913. 89. Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Les Français d’Algerie de 1830 à aujourd’hui. Une page d’histoire déchirée (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 324–325. 90. In Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 151. 91. Cited in Paix et Droit, June 1934, 10, député Maurice Pernot, in the Journal des Débats. 92. Cited in Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite, 158. 93. AIU, Morocco, V. B., Tangiers, 19 July 1899. 94. AIU, Libya, I. G. 2–1, Tripoli, 4 October 1896, Esther Arié. 95. AIU, Libya, II. E. 3–6b, Tripoli, 5 June 1894, D. Arié. 96. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, Meknes, 1931. 97. AIU, Egypt, XII. E. 182, Cairo, 15 May 1913. 98. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Mazagan, Josué Cohen, 15 September 1918. 99. The letter is cited in Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 239. 100. AIU, Libya, III. E., Mlle Lévy, 1909. 101. AIU, France, XV. F. 26., cf. Joseph Joel Rivlin, handwritten report August–September 1919, in CZA, S2/657. 102. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6–21, Mlle Avigdor, 11 January 1904. 103. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Somekh, Cairo, 26 June 1903.

190  |  Jews in Arab Countries 104. AIU, France, IX. E. Mogador, 24 December 1867. 105. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Mosul, D. Sasson, 10 December 1913 (the Mosul school was opened in 1907). 106. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Fez, 1 September 1903, annual report. Italicized in the original text. 107. AIU, Morocco, I. E. 1–19, Azemmour, Haroche, 5 January 1916. 108. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, 1 September 1903. 109. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, 20 September 1917. 110. AIU, Libya, II. E. 3–6, Tripoli, D. Arié, 9 December 1894. 111. Shimon Agassi, Imre Shimon, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 243. 112. Cf. Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East. 113. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, annual report 1893–1894, Benchimol. 114. Ibid., Benchimol report, 16 October 1910. 115. Cf. Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East, 106. 116. AIU, France, SIV. F. 25, Casablanca, 25 October 1912. 117. CZA, Z3/115, Palestine Bureau of the Zionist Action Committee, 7 April 1913. 118. AIU, Libya, II. E. 3–6b, D. Arié, 28 October 1895. 119. AIU, Egypt, XIV, 182, Somekh, 5 February 1911. 120. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, annual report 1898–1899, 7 September 1899. 121. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 9, Mosul, 15 December 1911. 122. L’Avenir illustré, 30 July 1936, cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 554. 123. AIU, France, XII. F. 21–22, Baghdad, annual report 1898–1899. 124. L’Avenir Illustré (Morocco), 21 May 1931. 125. AIU, Morocco, I. B. Casablanca, Léon Pinto, 10 March 1936.

Part Two The Disintegration of a World, 1914–1975

Section One The Echo of the Great War, 1914–1939

5 “A New Jewish Man”? In several parts of the Judeo-Arab world, the power of the rabbis waned at the start of the twentieth century. In a context of gradual secularization, they feared losing the material advantages linked to their status. The poor quality of religious teaching was the first sign of decline. Baghdad’s Zilkha Yeshiva, founded in 1840 and counting sixty students in 1848, had only twenty by 1879. The religious conservatism of the rabbinical corps contributed to this disaffection and to the climate of intellectual closure. In Eastern Europe too, traditional instruction declined under the impact of modernization. At the same time, one tendency within the religious world—encouraged by scholarly work carried out by some rabbis that gave substance to the idea of a Jewish nation—sympathized with the nascent Zionist movement. Without a racial underpinning, unconcerned by ethnic intermingling and conversions, an entire cultural nation was taking shape in the nineteenth century by means of knowledge, both secular and religious. This involved a conception of “nation” that was situated at the very antipodes of the constructions—then flourishing in Europe—of ethnic identities (i.e., “racial” identities, in the parlance of the times). It was from this tendency that Proto-Zionism was to emerge, marked by European nationalist movements—in particular the Italian Risorgimento. The rabbinical world did not always mount head-on opposition to the Enlightenment or Zionism. In Yemen, the messianism that characterized the Jewish community flowed easily into the Zionist idea, as if Zionism were a tool in the hands of God: even if against their own will, the “atheists” were somehow participating in the work of divine redemption. Here, one observes a direct passage between the most archaic of traditions and Zionism, without the intermediary of the Haskala. Many contemporary observers, nevertheless, considered that religious education required urgent reform—not reform of the yeshivot, which were losing students—but rather of the Talmud Torah schools, which furnished primary religious education leading to the Bar Mitzvah. From one end of the Arab world to the other, Jewish religious education was said to be genuinely “stultifying,” and described in Baghdad in 1912 as “a harmful education which neglected the most elementary principles of hygiene and the most basic rules of pedagogy, which incrusts [young minds] with tenacious prejudices and crude superstitions.”1 Jewish identity in the Arab-Muslim world knew nothing of the emancipation that led to the separation of religious from political issues; indeed, in the

196  |  Jews in Arab Countries era of early Zionist activism, one can observe young “enlightened” intellectuals and rabbis working side by side, while in Europe, maskilim and Ashkenazi rabbis frequently clashed. Female education leads to progress on the path of critical reason. “Women are lifting themselves up from their enslaved state,” wrote the Baghdad AIU director in 1913.2 The decline and then the disappearance of the veil are emblematic of the progress toward the emancipation of Oriental Jewish women. A parallel change occured with the decline of early marriages. In the 1930s, Sémach was pleased to see “big girls” (aged from 10 to 12) still attending school: “Four years ago, children of their age were already married; but these ones want to learn.”3 In the first half of the twentieth century, women began to work outside the home in greater numbers: 9 percent in Egypt, according to the 1937 census, which was higher than in Iraq (4 percent) or Yemen (1 percent), although in those countries the rate was increasing. In the 1940s, 14 percent of Egyptian Jewish women supported their families. From the 1930s, salaried work constituted a sort of quiet revolution for Oriental Jewish women; previously it had been common to work up until marriage and then immediately to cease.4 The rise of the subject (i.e., an individual with a consciousness of being one) also occured through education of the body, which Zionist thinkers of the first decades of the twentieth century called the “regeneration” of the Jew. As senior French official Étienne Coidan wrote in 1946, one must promote “the physical development of the race . . . in order to restore to the Jewish people their full dignity and confidence in the future.”5 Such concerns, far from being the sole preserve of the Zionist movement, suffused all educational currents in the Jewish world at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was part of the promotion of “the new man,” regenerated by physical effort outside the fetid urban miasma. These are familiar themes of the “muscular Judaism” extolled by Max Nordau toward 1900, a key feature of which was a psychic liberation that would show everyone that “the Jew” (as constructed in both the Western and Arab-Muslim imaginations) has reappropriated for himself the use of physical power. This reconquest of the body was an element in the recovery of dignity, a regeneration, to use a word current at the time; thanks to education, a young adult would “no longer [bend] his spine at the slightest threat of a Muslim or a Christian; he will know how to make the Christian respect him.”6 In 1913, Baghdad senior AIU official N. Albala wrote: “The contrast is striking between old and new Baghdadis. The Israelite was previously humble, servile, habituated to bend his spine before the Muslim; now, the young Jew is conscious, jealous of his dignity as a man and as a citizen.”7 This dignity, which was part of the process of emancipation (in the absence of an impossible change in legal status), was remarked on throughout the Arab-Muslim world’s cities where, dressed

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  197 à l’européenne, young Jews sat discussing politics in the cafés. Thus, at Tétouan in 1910: “the [alumni] of our schools know how to inspire respect and fear in Muslims,” whereas those who emerged from the traditional curriculum of the midrashim “almost always have a humble attitude, readily allowing themselves to be put upon by the arrogance of the Arab, who despises them.”8 One understands why, when opening themselves up to politics, Jewish youth regarded the Left as offering—in parallel with the Zionist movement—hope of emancipation. In Iraq and Egypt in the 1930s, many young Jews joined the communist movement, even if only a minority became politically engaged. In Egypt it is Ashkenazi Jews who formed the base of a socialist movement. Jews played an important role in the extreme Left in the inter-war period and dominated the socialist and communist movements up to the 1950s. For a long time, Egyptian communism remained a predominantly Jewish matter and attempts to Arabize and proletarianize it fizzled out. In Egypt as in Iraq, communism recruited mainly in the upper and intellectual strata. As for Zionism, it found its militants in the middle class if not in fact in the working classes. In the Maghreb, those educated Jewish youth who got involved in French political life in the 1930s always did so on the Left, in particular with the May 1936 victory of the Front populaire. Whether communists or close to the communist movement, these intellectuals expressed solidarity with Muslims and opposition to any separate claims, a fortiori to Zionism. Thus, in November 1936, a group of Moroccan Communist Jewish intellectuals warn that “in the face of provocateurs and manoeuvres aimed at separating Moroccan Jews from their Muslim brothers, we—Moroccan Jewish intellectuals—affirm one more time, with ever more strength, our determined will to remain indissociably united with them for the good of all the Moroccan people, without distinction of race or religion. Long live the Moroccan proletarian movement!”9 Yet, from the beginning of the twentieth century, Zionism’s achievements on the ground in Palestine would make an impact among Jewries throughout the Arab world. The first result was to create a sentiment of pride in those who had barely been interested in the movement, and thus were correspondingly less inclined to contemplate one day quitting their homelands. Practical Zionism of this sort modified the Jewish self-image. This was the case with the Cercles sionistes, or Zionist Circles, founded from Morocco to Iraq and Egypt, “where the goal is the revival of a national feeling amongst the student youth of Cairo.”10 Even when observed from afar, the Zionist movement appears as part of a reconquest of self-esteem and of “dignity,” to employ once again an expression of the time. Even at an early stage, the AIU functioned as a supra-national institution, as a sort of political intercessor toward which dominated people turned. Neither

198  |  Jews in Arab Countries the AIU nor the Anglo-Jewish Association was the first organization to operate on the ground. In the course of the violence in 1860 in Lebanon, international aid had been put into place. Money collected in America and Europe had been dispensed to the victims of that civil war. This was in fact one of the first examples of organized international charity. The Jewish organizations did not invent anything on this score, but rather adopted a model created in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, as illustrated by the Red Cross, whose establishment occurred nearly contemporaneously with that of the AIU. The AIU was not merely appreciated for the education it provided, but even more for having worked for restoration of the Jewish self-image. Thus in 1953 Albert Memmi, erstwhile AIU student, would reflect during a return visit to Tunisia: “The role of my old teachers then appeared clearly to me. Not only did the Alliance impede nothing, it in fact permitted much. I am today certain that it was thanks to it that, in large measure, the Jews of North Africa are able to understand their own situation.”11 The AIU was also credited with having produced “generations more conscious of their dignity, and of a greater moral bearing, slowly weaned away from an instinct of servility and bending of the spine before Muslims, the hereditary result of centuries of oppression.”12 One cannot, however, assume a complete unanimity of views on this issue, because the correspondence consists of exchanges of a protocol nature, marked by relationships of authority between distant schoolmasters (without means and often of humble origin), and French Jews who were often rich, cultivated, philanthropic, and convinced of their natural superiority. What seems completely sincere, however, is the gratitude expressed at times of distress, as in Marrakesh when, in 1876, Joseph Halévy spoke of those unfortunates who took such risks in coming to bid him farewell. The same emotion prevailed in Yemen in 1910, when Sémach was hailed as a hero, indeed as the Messiah. “I saw a crowd of raggedy and miserable Jews come towards us; they expressed their joy with grand gestures and guttural cries, some trying to embrace my feet, others my hands; rabbis, notables, all were there, all dressed the same; I dismounted from my horse and sat with them under a cluster of trees near a small canal. I contemplated their joy; for my part, I was very saddened to see them appear so dreadful, their heads shaved and two curls of hair hanging miserably alongside their cheeks!”13 A few months later, he explains to the Comité Central how he described to Yemeni Jews what the AIU does, “in a language accessible to these simple minds. It was quite something to regard the expression of these poor souls when they heard that in other countries and other provinces of the Empire, Jews attend public schools, and are respected and honored.”14 In collective memory, Zionism is a European development, to which the Jews of the Orient were latecomers, only participating marginally. This, however, is

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  199 to forget that in Arab countries the movement was contemporaneous with its European branch, and that Hovevei Zion Circles (also called Hibbat Zion, Love of Zion) were founded in Morocco well before the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897. Besides Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, who was so important in the nineteenth century, other less well-known Sephardic figures opened the pathway to the modern nation and to Hebrew as a mother tongue: one thinks for example of Rabbi Shaoul Ha Cohen of Tunis (1772–1848), Rabbi Menahem Farhi, publisher of a Hebrew grammar in Ladino, Joseph Halévy, AIU emissary to Yemen and Morocco (1869 and 1876), Barouh Mitrani, and finally of Nissim Behar, close companion of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, whom Behar helped in his early days in Jerusalem in the 1880s.15 What, then, is meant by Zionism? The search for a safe haven? The demand for equal rights? The aspiration for a homeland? A strengthening of Jewish identity (and if so, which one)? In reality, the national idea has been at the heart of Zionism since its origins, in the Arab world as elsewhere, even if, for many years, activities were limited to collective reading of journals from Europe and the United States. From 1901 to 1904 Yomtov Sémach, AIU director in Baghdad, led a Zionistleaning group in the city that collectively read Ha Tzfira (the first Hebrew language newspaper, founded in Warsaw in 1862). Herzl—whom Sémach knew personally—was spoken of. This was not yet a Zionist association, which was only to form in the Spring of 1914 after contact in 1913 with the Zionist executive in Berlin by some young Baghdadi Jews, following in the footsteps of others in Basra. During the First World War, there was little Zionist activity in Mesopotamia. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, and its first anniversary, seems not even to have come to the group’s attention. Yet it was indeed of an earthly Jewish homeland that the Arab world’s first Zionists dreamed. “The Jews do not expect Zionism to bring about the restoration of Judaism as a religion, because religious ideas are not very important to them; rather, it is a political restoration—a homeland, however small it might be—of which they can avail themselves when their rights are disregarded,” writes Somekh in 1904.16 The second major motivation was flight from oppression. The sometimes naive tone of the first Zionists of the Arab world was due to the oppression that infantilized and reduced them. This nascent Zionism had both a religious and a cultural content. For those distancing themselves from the faith, it provided a new identity and a rootedness in the land of long memory, structured by the Biblical text. In Morocco, as Étienne Coidan noted in 1946, there was no organized political Zionism prior to 1912, but there was a spiritual Zionism, “a form of religious Zionism . . . such as the kind which could be found at the same time within Jewish communities of Europe or America. Based on the profound attachment which ties every Israelite to Judea, that holy place and land of his ancestors, [this

200  |  Jews in Arab Countries Zionism] presented above all a sentimental aspect, expressed by the Moroccan Jew in a few simple concepts.”17 The Egyptian Zionist movement requires a separate treatment, as it is emblematic of the difficult birth of Jewish nationalism in the Arab world. In the 1930s, at a time when Egypt’s Jewish population was estimated at 80,000, Egyptian Zionism might have counted no more than 500 adherents. Following a rapid, albeit uneven, takeoff before the First World War, the movement vegetated during the 1920s and remained silent after the events of 1929 in Palestine. (After the San Remo conference of 1920, the two Egyptian Zionist federations together had 3,000 activists; by 1939 this had fallen to 600.) At the origin of this weakness was the enviable situation of many Egyptian Jews, for whom the “Jewish question” was unknown. Palestine was only considered a haven for unfortunates. According to the 1961 Israeli census, between 1920 and 1940 barely 2,000 Egyptian Jews moved there, followed by 2,000 others between 1940 and 1947. Moreover, it should be noted that some of those people were from Morocco or Yemen or were Ashkenazi who had interrupted their journey to the Holy Land. Egyptian Zionists continually assessed the weakness of the movement, often harshly. Their rash and hasty judgments reveal a contented community, one of the few not to have been strangulated by “Jewish dereliction” and the “Jewish sense of misfortune.” The Libyan situation was altogether different and was more similar to the rest of the Arab world. In 1916, after two abortive attempts in 1913 and 1914, the first Zionist organization (Zion) was born. Zion principally worked to promote the teaching of Hebrew. It was followed in 1919, at Benghazi, by the creation of the Herzl Circle. Zion counted 30 members at its start, and had amassed some 300 by 1919. Its aim was to revive local Judaism and not to dream of a mythic Jewish state (even if one fantasized of that), and to live a renewed Judaism outside the narrow tutelage of the rabbis. At the end of the 1920s, and indeed as elsewhere in the Near East, this was a Zionism that defined itself as “apolitical.” It contributed to creating a link of a different nature from a shared faith, rather than presenting the embryo of a national state of mind. The Hebrew language, and an appreciation for literature, sports, and hiking demonstrate to what extent modernity as a spiritual state was a foundational element of the birth of Zionism in Arab lands, as in Europe. But here, in the Arab world, identity was singular, faith was inseparable from politics, and secularism was an unknown concept. In Morocco, the first two Zionist organizations were born—unrelated to each other—in 1900, at Mogador and Tetouan. In Mogador, the initiative came from a businessman open to Europe, where he had long lived: this was Moshe Logassy, who with others founded a Zionist society, Shaarei Zion (the Gates of Zion), which sent two delegates to the 5th Zionist Congress in 1901. However, this representation remained marginal, and all the less taken into

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  201 consideration by European Judaism because Shaarei Zion’s concept of Zionism as a manifestation of the hand of God was foreign to the thinking of the Russian founders of Zionism. In both the Maghreb and the Jewish Mashreq (that part of the Arab world to the East of Egypt), it was modernist elements—often graduates of Western schools, merchants dealing with Europe, the Near East and India, or members of the liberal professions, medicine in particular—who were the groundbreakers in terms of Zionist activism. For a long time, the Arab East remained relatively spared by the conflict between the secular and the religious, which tore apart Jewish communities in Europe. The only thing that counted in the eyes of the Arab world was the Jewish national idea and the attainment of independence, the form of which mattered little since the definition of “Jew” remained largely uni-dimensional. In Russia or Berlin, up until the Second World War, little attention was yet paid to Near Eastern Zionists, so few in number and still the poor relations of the Zionist movement. A few Ashkenazi Jews played a determinative role in the birth of Near Eastern Zionist societies. This generally involved émigrés who had fled poverty, the numerus clausus, and persecutions in the 1880–1914 period. Tetouan’s Zionist association (Shivat Zion) had thus been founded in 1900 by two Russians, a doctor named Barliavsky, and a rabbi named Leon Halfon. The tone used toward the Ashkenazi world borders sometimes on servility, as shown by the letter of March 1903 from Meir Bar Sheshet and Jacob Murciano of the association Ahavat Zion of Safi, in Morocco, to Theodor Herzl: “Although our town is very distant from the lofty ideals of the Zionist movement, and although the spiritual level of its inhabitants is extremely low, nevertheless, thanks to the precious journals Ha Melitz and Ha Yehudi, the Zionist idea makes the hearts of many amongst us beat intensely. . . . Like blind men walking alongside a wall, we do not yet have a correct idea, or a clear understanding, of what Zionism is.”18 This humility, so widespread among the Moroccan communities, is first the mark of a culture based on submission to Muslim rule. However, the connections to the Ashkenazi world are tight. The Fez Zionist organization attempts to read the movement’s press despite the obstacle posed by the German language; in July 1908, David Wolffsohn, of the Zionist Organization, informs his Moroccan correspondents that they can henceforth read Ha Olam, the movement’s organ, in Hebrew in an edition published at Vilna. After 1912 the increasing disappointment of Moroccan Jews vis-à-vis France (which opposes any modification in their status) stoked the movement. The Ashkenazim benefited from this situation, as in the case of the Russian Leon Halfon, named Chief Rabbi of Tetouan in 1920. Elsewhere, it was often envoys sent from Eretz Israel who gave form to a nascent Zionism, particularly Hebrew teachers, who made up the core of the national renaissance.

202  |  Jews in Arab Countries This was a “Zionism of the heart,” as is said in Morocco. In the local context, it was first and foremost a belonging based on an identity, and not a movement based on uprooting from one’s homeland of birth. Thus, in 1914, out of 45,000 Jews in the Yishuv, only 2,000 were from the Maghreb. The weakness of the Zionist movement in the Arab world is explained by the fear of communities to see their place in their homelands called into question through accusations of treason. Raphael Danon testified to this when he wrote from Baghdad in 1898: “The idea of us settling in Palestine is unachievable and absurd! Supposing—and this is an impossibility—that His Majesty the Sultan consents to relinquish Palestine in favor of the Jews; The Christian states would never permit the Jews to take over and become the masters of places consecrated by Christian legends. This idea can have but one result, which would be to position us—we Ottomans—as seditious and unfaithful subjects of our sovereign.”19 Warnings followed upon warnings, often by AIU directors, alarmed to see their “efforts at integration ruined”: “We will soon be able to take the measure of the damage done by the Zionist idea, and will be stupefied by the disastrous consequences which result.” Against Zionist propagandists who went from town to town, it was necessary “to hold back our people on the slope of Jewish nationalism, keeping it within the norms of national Judaism. Otherwise, tomorrow it will be too late.”20 The growth of Zionism in the region remained modest. Toward 1900, the few Zionist groups suffered from insufficient means. They did not know German, which remained the language of the Congress, its internal correspondence, and propaganda. In 1900, Dr. Valensin, settled in Montpellier but a native of Algeria (he represented North Africa at Basel in 1897), asked the Vienna Zionist action committee to send materials in French. He requested the aid of the central organization, without which he feared being nothing other than “a show-delegate playing an illusory role. . . . P.S. It’s no use sending anything in German: alas, I only understand French.”21 Arab tolerance for the early Zionists was the exception; the general rule was mistrust, which set in very quickly, and hostility, which expressed itself sometimes very unambiguously, creating fear and the necessity of working underground, especially in Iraq and Syria, where Arab opposition was sharpest. In Iraq after the First World War, there was a brief parenthesis of tolerance. A Zionist society was even legally established, but its authorization was soon withdrawn. In February 1928, the visit to Baghdad by the Briton Alfred Mond was the occasion of serious street violence. The troubles in Palestine the following year gave rise to the banning of all Zionist activity in Iraq. Jewish newspapers were forbidden entry to the country, and Jewish teachers from the Yishuv (in particular, professors of Hebrew) were sent back there.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  203 Egypt, where a Zionist federation was established in 1917, was more tolerant. But in the 1930s, Jewish leaders were forbidden from raising funds for Palestine. The Zionist movement remained legal until 1947, before going underground. Even in Morocco, in principle less repressive, the Jews knew that they had to fear “Muslim reprisals, prosecutions by the police, and sanctions of the pashas or caïds.” On this generalized fear, French reports after 1945 were eloquent. Many relate the concerns of Jews about their security.22 The First World War was preceded by some brief attempts at dialogue from 1912 to 1914 between Zionists and Egyptian nationalists. The Zionists of Egypt reported regularly on the Arab press to the Zionist executive in Berlin. In March 1912, they cited an article from Al-Ahram stating that “the Syrians in particular and especially the Arabs hardly hate the Jews, and are ready to collaborate with them for the cultural renaissance of Palestine and for the recovery of Syria.”23 But this type of declaration was extremely rare. Equally atypical are the words—so often repeated—of Emir Faisal to Felix Frankfurther in March 1919: “We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves. . . . We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complement one another.” In London two months earlier, Faisal had met Haīm Weizmann, head of the Zionist movement. Together, the two men signed an accord that referred to the “racial affinity and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.” Faisal, who did not speak English, was advised by T. E. Lawrence, whom Henry Laurens suggests had manipulated him.24 This was a superficially calm spell. Arab nationalism was seeking allies at all points of the compass, all the more so after 1908–1909, in the wake of the Young Turks Revolution As for the Zionists, they took the measure of this opening and considered, as Egyptian Zionist S. Hasamsony explained in October 1913, that now was “the best moment to act as we enjoy today a favorable position which at any price we must not let escape our grasp.”25 In January 1914, Jacob Caleff, an Egyptian Zionist activist, informed the Zionist Central Committee in Berlin that several Arab nationalists had approached him, among whom was Rashid Rida (1865–1935), owner of the magazine Al-Manar, as well as the president of the Ottoman Party for Administrative Decentralization, a cryptic appellation used with the Turkish censors to denote the Arab national movement. The two men, he explained, wished to make contact with the World Zionist Organization.26 The approach was not followed up and Arab rejection grew rapidly. After 1929 it turned from a local conflict into a global one, in particular during the first Islamic Congress, held in Jerusalem in 1931. Committees in support of Palestinian Arabs, in which Palestinian emissaries played a key role, were organized from Morocco to Iraq. The Zionist movement in Arab countries was thus condemned

204  |  Jews in Arab Countries to acting with extreme caution if not in fact to moving underground. Arab rejection of Zionism was visceral, like a matter of faith that permits of no discussion. Zionist circles were conscious of the power of this rejection, and of the fact that starting even before 1914 (and with only a few exceptions), the Arabic press was overwhelmingly hostile to them. In 1921, in a memorandum sent by the Palestinian Arab executive to Winston Churchill (then British colonial minister) and to the League of Nations, in a context of exacerbating antisemitism in Europe, the executive posed a tendentious question: “Will the Arabs bear the burden which Europe is incapable of carrying, or will the Jew, in coming to Palestine, change his stripes and lose all the character traits which have made him hitherto detested by all nations? . . . Does Europe believe that the Arab can live and work alongside such a neighbor? Wouldn’t Britain do better in finding another homeland for them in one of the vast regions inhabited by its immense empire?”27 The antisemitic aspect was present right from the beginning of the Arab rebuff. In 1897, Rashid Rida warned “Muslims and the Arabs” that if they did not eliminate this danger, they would fall “into a state of abjection worse than that of the Jews.”28 Right from the beginning the rejection of Zionism tended toward Islamization even though, paradoxically, it was Christian Arabs who had initiated this fight. Zionist movements near Palestine tried to contain this growing hostility. They appropriated the litany of arguments in favor of the “good understanding between Jews and Arabs,” and the “benefits” the Arabs will gain from the development of the country by the Jews, who are loyal subjects of the Ottoman Empire and who, moreover, were only “returning to their ancient homeland.” In April 1913, Robert Ghazi, one of the most prominent Egyptian Zionists, wrote in Al Misr, the Egyptian review: “Returning to our ancient homeland will benefit the Arabs as much as us. They know well that we bring new sources of happiness for the future and that we will raise the country up out of its ruinous state, because the experience of the past 30 years is the best proof of what the country stands to gain from our collaboration.”29 Up until 1918, a large proportion of Near Eastern Jews lived under Ottoman rule. It was thus easy for them to remain informed of events in Palestine, even if for the majority of communities, “Eretz Yisrael” only existed in terms of the “Holy Land” and the Halukkah, the organized raising and distribution of charitable funds there. The Young Turks Revolution of 1908 led to hope within the Zionist milieu of an alliance: for some, this meant an alliance with the new power, and for others, with Arab nationalism against the Turks. The necessity of mistrust and cunning, and corruption designed to get around Ottoman obstacles blocking entry into the Holy Land, meant that

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  205 realism won out: Turkish imperial logic simply precluded the creation of another “Balkans Question,” this time in the South-West flank of the Empire, and this explains the prudence of Zionists working on the ground. The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in November 1914, on the side of the Central Powers. For the Allies, the old dream of Ottoman dismemberment looked like becoming real, particularly with the division of the Empire’s Arab provinces. In May 1916, the final version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Great Britain and France divided Palestine into four sectors. On February 9, 1918, a few months after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, Paris pledged its support to London. In March 1920, however, Emir Faisal’s proclamation of “the independence of Syria” would thwart the plans of the French, whose army entered Damascus on July 25, 1920. Expelled, Faisal moves to Baghdad where, under the protection of the British (who had promised him a “great Arab kingdom”), he is proclaimed sovereign in August 1921. His brother Abdallah, also with the support of London, receives a parcel of Palestine arbitrarily sliced off from the country: the “Emirate” of Transjordan. The rest of Palestine is placed under British mandate, under the authority of the League of Nations with the goal—among others—of establishing, at least on a part of Mandate territory, a “Jewish national homeland.” In the same vein, in 1922 Hebrew is recognized—along with Arabic and English—as one of the three official languages of the country. The Supreme Allied Council had permitted the Zionist movement to express itself during the Conference of Versailles. Nahum Sokolov, one of the Executive’s leaders, declared on February 27, 1919: “We demand our historic right over Palestine, the land of Israel, in the country where we created a civilization which has had such a great influence on humanity.”30 The Balfour Declaration was to have a considerable impact on all Jewish communities in the Middle East. It was celebrated in the streets by parades and demonstrations that, however, betrayed a certain increase in disquiet. It was rapidly understood that the Arab neighbors must be dealt with carefully, and that Jews should not too evidently display their sympathies. Very few people could actually envisage a Jewish state. Yet that was the meaning of the Declaration, the symbolic charge of which was extremely powerful: it meant the Jews’ right to self-determination on a portion of the ancestral homeland. The entry into Jerusalem of General Allenby’s troops in December 1917 set off a fresh burst of enthusiasm. In Morocco, some Jewish families in Fez, Marrakesh, Casablanca, and Sefrou decide to embark for Palestine. Pride, enthusiasm: the same words resound from Morocco to Yemen. In their wake, hundreds of families migrate to Palestine. Among Jews, the fervor triggered by the Balfour Declaration goes well beyond Zionism in the strict sense of the word, as

206  |  Jews in Arab Countries if something repressed, internalized, and contained for so long had at last been expressed, as if the day had at last come when one could breathe more freely and lift up one’s eyes. The Declaration gave an impetus to activism. In January 1918, the first issue of the Zionist Review, the official publication of the Zionist Federation, appeared in Egypt. Every year, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration was celebrated, and in Cairo and elsewhere a “Week of Deliverance” took place, to cries of “Long Live the Jewish Nation!” A succession of diplomatic events—the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1920 Treaty of San Remo, the 1922 decision of the League of Nations to grant the mandate over Palestine to the United Kingdom—all drove Zionist activity. In the Arab world, the awakening was accelerated by social and cultural upheavals resulting from the First World War. In 1920s Egypt, some Zionists—for the first time—were elected to community councils in Cairo and Alexandria. The voice of the Jews had begun to find its own place amid this organized chaos. Above and beyond their attachment to the imaginary homeland, references to which populate their world, Zionism for many Oriental Jews represented a refuge that must be achieved for their suffering fellow Jews. This was the position in Tangiers of Yomtov Sémach, of the Morocco AIU, who in 1919 eulogized the concept of “Zionism for others”: “Not all Jews want to return to Jerusalem, but all rejoice in the knowledge that men will no longer suffer for their beliefs. English, Italian and French Jews are happy citizens and proud of their rights and duties. . . . Those in France in particular are attached to their homeland with every fiber of their grateful hearts and sentient minds. They love France for herself, and for all that she has done to break the chains of their fathers.”31 In Iraq, the expression of Zionism was muted. There was a considerable distance between attachment to the principle of self-determination, and a move toward emigration. In fact, the immense majority of Jews had no intention of uprooting themselves to go to a distant and rather mythic homeland, one moreover which seemed forever to be coming into being. In Iraq and Egypt, the only two large Arab countries with a wealthy Jewish elite counting significant numbers of notables (and, to a lesser extent in Morocco too), fundraising remained the principal form of support. The entire Arab Middle East—even if at a modest scale—witnessed this growth in Jewish nationalism, incarnated above all by the Zionist movement. This was also the case in Libya at the beginning of the 1920s. For the Tripoli AIU director, it was the spirit of modernity that shook traditional society, just as, in parallel, Arab societies were also moved by new aspirations.32 As has been observed, Ashkenazi Jews can be found at the origin of some Zionist movements. This was already the case in the 1890s. Consular protégés and holders of foreign passports were more sheltered from repression, which

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  207 facilitated things somewhat for them. The most prominent of these émigrés was Nathan Halpern, a Polish Jew who arrived in Morocco at the beginning of the 1920s after having spent time in France. He set out to spark a “national” spirit within the Jewish community. A pragmatic thinker, he urged Jewish youth to abandon the professions of their fathers, in order to take up “professions of the future”—industrial and agricultural occupations—which the Jewish national homeland would need. The dispatching of Zionist emissaries by the Yishuv in the 1920s reinforced these meager movements, in particular with the mission of encouraging emigration from Egypt and Yemen, an effort in fact already underway before 1914. Between the wars, the construction of the Yishuv gave rise to a stream of edifying commentaries in the Arab world’s Jewish press, in first place Egypt, a country whose proximity with Palestine encouraged both curiosity and pride. In 1925, for example, exultant at the inauguration in Jerusalem of the Hebrew University, the Jewish press encouraged the purchase of products from the Yishuv. Such patriotism by proxy characterized most Oriental Jewish communities up to the Second World War. In October 1943, on his return to Egypt from a trip to Eretz Israel, Cairo Zionist Albert Salama wrote to a correspondent at the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem: “Since our return . . . I and my comrades . . . are truly filled with great enthusiasm.”33 This was a sort of Zionism that took on the image of modernity, combining it with a slow secularization of Jewish existence. In the richest communities, those of Iraq and Egypt, the movement’s forward motion remained modest. In Morocco, on the other hand, Zionism seemed to progress most rapidly between the wars, in particular among the less wealthy or culturally advanced segments of the population. Even if attachment to passive Jewish nationalism could be taken for granted in the near-totality of Jewish communities, the same did not apply to political Zionism, which many prominent figures opposed. The AIU, whose anti-Zionism was well known, seemed to be on the defensive. In 1927, in Morocco, Yomtov Sémach reported that “youth, who only have a superficial political culture, accept with enthusiasm the credo [i.e., of Zionism].”34 Lyautey’s successor to the Résidence Générale, Théodore Steeg, would adopt the same attitude: he tolerated the Zionist Federation, but temporarily banned the Zionist newspaper, Ha Olam. In April 1934, Jacques Bigart, Secretary General of the AIU, asked: “After having struggled for so many years for emancipation, can we now support a movement which undermines the achievements of all our efforts? . . . The process of emancipation, in my opinion, involves the complete adaptation of the Jews to their new homelands. Zionism, with its dishonest approach, condemns this process [to failure].”35 Many former AIU pupils became increasingly more critical vis-à-vis the institution that educated them. Other factors came into play. On the one hand, there was their disappointment with a France from which they

208  |  Jews in Arab Countries expected liberation from Muslim law (with or without the Crémieux Decree); this did not happen. Equally, Jews were tired of Arab oppression, perceived as even more unbearable as it began to ease up. To this resentment we can add endemic poverty, that became harder and harder to bear as emancipation started to undermine traditional fatalism. This “spontaneous Zionism” was thus more a matter of self-affirmation than a concrete wish for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. This is why it still did not precipitate a massive emigration to the Holy Land. Both the French protectorate and the AIU feared incidents between Jews and Muslims. Equally, both also feared departures, which would deprive Morocco of a portion of its elite who—thanks to the Jewish minority’s higher literacy rate, and in light of Muslim backwardness—played a key role. After a period of weak Zionist development in the 1920s, linked to Jewish emancipation that was, despite everything, encouraged by the protectorate, by the start of the 1930s it became clear: Zionism was advancing, powered by massive unemployment and the spread of extreme poverty. After 1940, the disappointment caused by the French defeat, and even more so by Vichy’s collaborationist policies and enthusiastic embrace of antisemitic measures, would reinforce the Zionist movement. For a long time, the primary form of Zionist engagement remains fund-raising via the famous tin-plate boxes, painted blue and white (“To help with the redemption of the Galilee” notes a 1938 Moroccan police report).36 Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (Jewish National Fund) brochures call for charitable donations in support of “Palestinian regeneration.”37 These campaigns are tightly monitored. Zionist grassroots action is prioritised toward young “Jewish militants full of faith and courage” and dedicated to the reconstruction of “the ancient Jewish homeland of Jerusalem.”38 Propaganda is conveyed through periodicals (The Regained Land, Palestinian News), films (The Promised Land, shown in Safi and Fez in 1938, A Dream Becomes Reality, shown in Fez in the same year), and photographs.39 Public commitment to a Jewish national homeland is part of the grassroots work. This is often marked by an anti-British overtone (with London accused of having “betrayed” its Balfour Declaration commitment), although a more measured tone is adopted in the 1930s due to the new dangers of Arab nationalism and Nazi propaganda. The daily press, which represents only a small proportion of Jewish news publications, is the key vector for Zionist propaganda. In Egypt, the proximity of the Yishuv and the massive expulsion of 1915 create a potential readership that provides the basis for the founding of several Hebrew publications, including Ha Hadashot Ha Haronot (Breaking News, in 1915) and Be’nekar (On Foreign Soil, in 1917).

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  209 Out of thirty-nine Jewish periodicals published in Morocco between 1891 and 1964, only five could be qualified as Zionist, a label that was always camouflaged in terms such as “Jewish national reformists.” The monthly L’Avenir Illustré (The Illustrated Future), established in 1926, was the first to espouse a concept of Zionism embracing all Jewry. Concerning the conflict that starts to take shape in Palestine, from early on the Zionism emerging from the Arab world called for an opening to dialogue with the Arab parties. But pessimism would win out. The calls for a dialogue continued but seem devoid of illusions, as if previous subjugation rendered it impossible to envisage a relationship based on equality. “The Arab question is always there,” noted Abraham Elmaleh in 1935, after his return from a journey to Palestine. “It is a question which has not been resolved, and in fact appears unresolvable.”40 At the eve of the Second World War, this was a judgment that seems to have been widely shared. It is in fact as “Orientals” that the Oriental Jews viewed a relationship that to them seemed destined to remain burdened by the dhimma status of the past. Zionism’s progress also clashes with the resistance of the AIU, which, in Morocco for example, denounces the activism of emissaries who have come “in order to awaken the sentiment in the country of Jewish unity, such that every Israelite will think of himself as a citizen not of the country where he lives, but of the Jewish State.”41 In 1924, Yomtov Sémach charges that Zionist emissary Nathan Halpern, rather than “re-Judaizing” Jewish youth through history, Jewish literature, and Hebrew, is instead applying to France the situations and events of Central and Eastern Europe, by suggesting France “is infested by the anti-Semitic virus and that it is a land of pogroms.”42 Such recriminations expose the latent conflict opposing community authorities and traditional rabbinical and financial elites with the new, educated stratum of the population. The word “Zionism” must therefore be understood here in a broad sense, comprising a new definition of Jewish identity, reflecting the aspiration toward modernity and the promise of social improvement. Here as elsewhere, the international conjuncture is beneficial to the Zionist movement. “When we look carefully at the facts, we ought to raise a statue to Hitler in the main square of Tel Aviv itself,” writes a female educator from Fez in 1934, after a visit to Palestine. “Thanks to him, the population has doubled in little time. . . . Hitler has done more than Hertzel [sic] for Zionism. . . . The Führer has shown that the logic of Zionism is a life-force.”43 This is why the hardening of the international situation from 1936 onward makes the anti-Zionist position of the AIU more difficult to maintain; this is even more true after 1939, with Zionism starting to gain an audience among the most educated sectors, while Arab nationalism undergoes radicalization by making Palestine a core element of Arab mobilization.

210  |  Jews in Arab Countries Early on, Zionism in Arab lands has to face a somewhat condescending attitude on the part of the World Zionist Organization. The Arab Jewish world is numerically marginal (with 6 percent of the world Jewish population in 1939) and must put up with the colonialist gaze with which Europe—including the Ashkenazim—viewed it, particularly in Egypt, where a part of the “Jewish community” originated in Ashkenazi Europe. In September 1933, a Zionist leader from Aleppo questions the Jewish Agency: “We hope the Agency will attribute a portion of immigration certificates to the olim [immigrants] of Aleppo. It is astounding that the Agency has already received 1000 certificates, and to learn through the newspaper Doar Ha Yom that all of these certificates are reserved for olim from Eastern Europe, Yemen and Salonica, and that for the olim of Aleppo, nothing has been provided. Lord! Are those immigrants of better stock than those of Aleppo?”44 It was only after the destruction of Europe’s Jews that Ashkenazi Zionism viewed Oriental Jews from a new perspective. “Our role vis-à-vis this Jewry can be defined in a single sentence,” explained Elyahu Dobkin, the Jewish Agency’s immigration department director in July 1943: “It is the Zionist conquest of these diasporas in order to dismantle them and transfer them to Israel. . . . We do not know how many Jews will remain in Europe after this wave of extermination, nor with how many of them we will be able to remain in contact . . . and at the end of the day, we all know that our concern is to strengthen ourselves by increasing the number of Jews in Eretz Israel.”45 However, as a witness reported from Tunisia, these Oriental Jews, on whom the Zionist executive would be counting, felt “like a lost flock which does not interest the shepherd in the slightest.”46 They received few emigration certificates and remained weakly represented in Zionist organizations. Yet, despite the small number of visas, it is estimated that between 1919 and 1939, some eighty thousand Jews from Arab countries arrived in Eretz Israel. They were generally poorly viewed (with the exception of Yemeni and Kurdish Jews), and soon marginalized. This was a paradoxical situation for a Near Eastern Zionist movement condemned to silence and hardly recognized by the Zionist organizations, but whose fate would be henceforth linked to that of Jewish Palestine—and, moreover, not only its own fate, but the fate of all Oriental Jewries. If Zionism constituted a rupture with a Jewish condition experienced as impossible to bear, it did not break with Europe’s colonialist gaze vis-à-vis a culture adjudged “Levantine,” and that subsequently underwent folklorization. Oriental Zionists unanimously experienced the impression of being pushed aside. In 1925 the movement in Iraq (which remembered that the Zionist Organization hardly helped it organize before 1914) explicitly expresses to the Zionist executive its feeling of counting for little.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  211 We wish to inform you by the present . . . that we have waited until this day for your invitation to involve Iraqi Jews (who number around 150,000) in the Jewish Agency, as you have invited the other communities, who are by the way less numerous than our own, and for whom the Zionist question is politically less important than it is for Iraqi Jews. But we have waited in vain. We would like, however, to ask you the following questions: (A) Do you not intend to invite the Jews of our country to participate in the Jewish Agency, which will be constituted during the fourteenth Congress? (B) Is your attitude towards the Sephardim different than your attitude vis-à-vis the Ashkenazim?47

In April 1912, S. Hasamsony, one of the leaders of the fragile Zionist movement of Egypt, wrote to Arthur Ruppin, director of the Zionist Organization’s Palestine Office: “And yet, despite the imperative necessity of an intervention on your part, our country is entirely neglected, and its small number of [Zionist] activists are completely abandoned to Fate.”48 In 1916 Jack Mosseri, tipped to take the lead of the Zionist organization in Egypt, wrote to officials of the Jewish National Fund, in the Hague: “I would like you to try to reserve important and interesting work for the Jews of Egypt, by granting them extended powers.”49 The regard of European Jews, when added to the alienation experienced by Jews in the Arab world, only aggravated the feeling of denigration that undermined so many intellectuals in the Near East. The central element, in the national homeland, was disdain toward the Mizrahim, leading to self-denial and hatred of one’s own identity. Yet, Yemeni Jews seem to have constituted an exception. It is well known that the Zionist Organization was delighted to see them come to Eretz Israel. In 1912, American Zionism’s fifteenth annual convention, held in Cleveland, congratulated itself on the arrival of “our Yemenite brothers,” destined “due to their abilities and their savoir-faire to become an important part of the Jewish working population in Palestine.”50 The lived reality, however, did not reflect this irenic vision. In October 1913, witnessing the troops of emigrants making their way to Palestine, Somekh reported: “Our Yemeni co-religionists must surmount the most dreadful adversities. In their country, they are the target of persecution, and exposed to the horrors of war. In Palestine they are viewed as helots, serfs or inferior beings by RussoRomanian settlers, from whom they differ entirely and who exploit them mercilessly. It is naïve to think that their shared religion will prevail over antipathies of race and language. The divisions and hatreds of which the Jews in Palestine present a disgusting display—especially in Jerusalem—prove this every day.”51 In the 1930s the situation of Yemeni Jews, much worsened during the 1920s, would no longer hold much interest for the Zionist executive. Instead, urgent attention is directed toward Europe. Out of some 30,000 legal entries to Palestine in 1933, only 130 are from Yemen. It is also true that in 1930, it had become more

212  |  Jews in Arab Countries difficult to enter Palestine, the Mandate authorities requiring of each immigrant: (a) funds in the amount of 500 pounds sterling (250 for skilled tradesmen); or (b) that an immigrant be invited by a resident of Palestine who would act as guarantor; or (c) that he already possesses real property or a firm promise of employment. Minors and orphans could enter on condition that host organizations made a payment of 2100 pounds sterling for each such immigrant. In Egypt as well, Jews deplore the “lesser status” of Sephardim in the Zionist Organization. In 1926, Jack Mosseri calls for Oriental Jews to be better supported, “in order to make of them men useful to the nation, and not the parasites or pariahs which they are presently considered to be.”52 He reproaches the Jewish Agency for giving little room to Sephardim in the Yishuv’s institutions, since with their knowledge of the Arab world they would be able to improve JewishArab relations in Palestine. Resentment continues to increase among those who note that “a Sephardi will never have a chance to be employed with the Jewish Agency in Palestine.”53 Yet, it remains the case that this Oriental Zionism is condemned to remain discrete in order not to offend Arab-Muslim populations. Well before the emergence of Zionism, the Hebrew language was at the heart of Jewish education. In Damascus prior to the First World War, many young Jews spoke it fluently. All sixty-nine candidates presenting their candidacy for admission to one of the three teacher training schools could read and write in the language. All of them hailed from the Mediterranean basin, from Tangiers to Aleppo.54 Hebrew: a dead language? The Zionist movement asserted that it had always been a vehicular language, or lingua franca, used between different Jewish communities. In 1906, Yossef Haïm Brenner, one of the first modern Hebrew writers, attacked opponents of Hebrew, who were also opposed to the still marginal Zionist movement: They say it is fetishistic! That this dead language is completely useless! . . . But what ought we to do if we possess a literature which is three thousand years old, written in this dead language which, however, is still alive? And what should we do if, in eliminating this dead language from our lives, we simultaneously destroy, with our own hands, all that our minds have gained and created during centuries? . . . We are a thousand leagues from the Amoraim of Babylon [renowned scholars of the Oral Torah], or the sages of the Mishnah in Eretz Israel, and even further from Ba’er Heitev [a commentary on the codification of Jewish law]. But we write in Hebrew because we could not do otherwise, because the divine spark that is in us can only express itself through that flame, and because that spark can only set off a fire through contact with that language and no other. . . . “A dead language?” Hebrew is still alive, forgotten and yet unforgettable: during two thousand years of exile, not a year has passed without at least one work being written in Hebrew.55

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  213 The language war that shook the Yishuv before the First World War echoed within the Zionist societies of the Near East, which all backed the pro-Hebrew camp. At the same time, Zionism made Hebrew the key vector for the cultural winning of Jews’ minds. “For the Zionists,” explained a French report from Morocco, “this language is one of the keystones of their movement, Judaism only being able in their view of achieving a full personality and a true nationality in the eyes of the world if Hebrew becomes the everyday language of all Jews.”56 The movement’s development in the wake of the Balfour Declaration provided a powerful impetus for teaching the language. The AIU itself had to take account of this, requiring its staff to “openly favor these new desires for Hebraic studies.”57 This is yet one more contradiction lying at the heart of the AIU, opposing political Zionism while undertaking the spread of Hebrew literacy, which remained Zionism’s most sure vehicle. In order to advance across difficult if not hostile ground, the organized Zionist movement also used other cultural means: knowledge of Jewish literature, the opening of libraries, and the organization of conferences and evening courses. Hebrew schools themselves were often the primary vectors of the Zionist movement. The ideal scenario, as viewed from Cairo in 1913, was to open a modern secondary school dispensing “a Jewish education and sound instruction in the Hebrew language.”58 Thus, the creation of Zionist associations was always articulated around a school establishment plan or the setting up of a Hebrew course. Unlike the European Enlightenment, where modernization led to deJudaization, modernization in the Near East did not bring about a weakening of Jewish identity. The religious substratum remained at the heart of the inner being of these Jews, however remote they may have been from faith. Zionism appeared as the extension of Judaism, and the first meetings of the movement were often held in synagogues. In turn, the Zionists attempted to capitalize on Jews’ religious faith. Understood in this light, Near Eastern Zionism was initially an identity movement. In 1913 in Egypt, Somekh evoked “the awakening of religiousness set off by the Zionist movement.”59 In 1927, in Beirut, Abraham Elmaleh, emissary of the Zionist movement, noted both cultural and religious excitement in the wake of his visit. The impact was profound: it was no longer just a question of Zionism, but of re-Judaization.60 Above all, it is among the more traditional Jewries that Zionism was viewed as the natural extension of Jewishness, and indeed, as in Yemen, of the Jewish faith itself. Sent to Yemen by the Zionist leadership in 1911–1912 with the aim of convincing his audiences to emigrate to Palestine, Shmuel Yavne’eli garnished his orations with the tinselly trappings of Messianism: “I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; neither a messiah nor the harbinger of the Messiah. However, I am a herald with a message for you. . . . With joy, I announce the

214  |  Jews in Arab Countries redemption of our land. Every part of the territory worked by Hebrew hands is redeemed.”61 This Zionism incarnated a proto-national and secularized Jewish identity, a cultural Zionism synonymous with local emancipation. As noted in 1945 by an official of the French protectorate of Morocco, with regard to the Jews of Meknes: “The creation of a state is for them only a symbol. What they want is that Palestine should become their fixed, common reference point, as they view themselves at present, always and everywhere, as a wandering people. . . . It is, thus, a rather special conception of the national idea, or rather of a quite particular sort of nationalism.”62 This “static” Zionism, above all aimed at the “moral regeneration” of Jewish communities, reinforced national identity and liberated it from tutelage.63 The Algerian Zionist movement took off early, but it only led to a derisorily small level of emigration. On the contrary, the Zionist movement in Yemen—where it was strictly forbidden—set off a massive emigration. In 1946, senior French official Étienne Coidan observed: “Rare are those who take Zionism to its ultimate consequences, that is, emigration to Palestine without any thought of return.”64 This was also the perspective of the Egyptian Arabic-language Zionist newspaper, El Shams (The Sun); its owner and editorin-chief, Saad Malki, was an active member of the Wafd (the principal governing party), and a proponent of a Jewish and Arab bi-national homeland in Palestine. El Shams was supported by the Jewish Egyptian working and middle classes; the very same population segments that made up the breeding ground for the Zionist movement. The newspaper aligned itself with the desire of a large number of Egyptian Jews to “Egyptianize” themselves. This explains its support of both Zionism and the Egyptianization of Jewish youth, reassuring its readers that to speak Arabic at home “is not shameful.”65 After the enthusiasm of the period from 1917 to 1922, the purchase of land in Palestine slowed down, and sales agreements actually resulting in transactions were few in number. “The idea of going to live in Israel, which had been nurtured in a completely theoretical manner, in reality never even entered their minds,” acidly observed a Moroccan Zionist in 1950 with regard to the commercial petite bourgeoisie involved in the movement. “What do they mean, mechanically repeating ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ and invoking ‘geulah’ (Hebrew for ‘liberation,’ ‘redemption,’ or ‘deliverance’) three times a day in their prayers, yet meanwhile the City of David reaches out to them, and opens its gates widely to them?”66 An Alexandrine periodical from November 1942 affirmed that Zionism involved “national redemption [destined to] foster feelings of Jewish dignity and love of one’s ancestral homeland, as well as the sense of duty as Jews.”67 This was to be a Zionism of education, infused with the myth of the “new man.” From this flowed the proliferation of Zionist youth organizations across the Arab Middle East. Egyptian organizations were particularly prominent. The Maccabi sports

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  215 movement was affiliated with both the Egyptian sports federation and the Egyptian Scouting federation. Alongside Maccabi was also the He Haluts Ha Tzair, founded in 1933 in Cairo, the Ha Ivri Ha Tzair, founded in 1932 in Egypt, the Bne Akiva, founded in 1929 in Mandatory Palestine, and the Betar Zionist Revisionist youth movement, emerging from Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s sphere of influence. A similar flourishing development was seen in Libya, with the Tzofim, Maccabi, Ben Yehouda and Ha Haloutz Ben Yehouda, groups that were inclined to Scouting and agriculture (and more discretely, paramilitary training). Recruitment was principally among the poorer youth of Tripoli and Benghazi. “Clean living,” a “new man,” and “redeemed”—these new motifs united Zionist youth organizations with the European Scouting movement. In an October 1947 report addressed to the Jewish Agency, a Cairo correspondent makes reference to the “healthy youth of Palestine.”68 As underscored in a Zionist brochure from November 1942, “We consider our comrades as like healthy fruits which must be kept from contact with rotten fruits threatening them with corruption. Forward for progress, forward for a healthy life.”69 As with all emigration, the first reason for departure remained the hope of a better life. In 1922, in Fez, 80 families—comprising 600 people—prepared to leave for Palestine; they “belong in general to the less favored classes, owning little or no property and not enjoying a comfortable situation.”70 As Étienne Coidan recalled, “From 1919, the motivation for departure was no longer just religious faith, but also the hope of a better material life,”71 one liberated from the silent oppression characterizing the condition of minorities in Arab lands.72 The worldwide rise of antisemitism in the second half of the 1930s contributed to the exacerbation of “the Zionist feeling among the mass of Moroccan Jews, up till then passive if not ambivalent,” as a French official posted at Meknes was later to note. “No other territory,” he added, “interests them, however vast and rich it may be.”73 The rise in power of the Zionist movement after 1918 exposed social fissures within Jewish communities, such as the opposition of notables to new elites reinforced by knowledge, and the competition between thinkers from the rabbinical world and secular intellectuals. The crossfire resulting from these conflicts fed the growth of the Zionist project in the Oriental Jewish world, as the social divisions accompanying Zionism’s birth in Europe had also done. Beginning in the 1900s, the gap widened between students of modern schools and the other children, between those who left the mellah or the hara and those who remained, those who abandoned daily religious practice and those who remained faithful to it. The first Oriental Zionist circles were founded to oppose

216  |  Jews in Arab Countries poverty and nepotism, such as, in Morocco, Agudat Haim in Mogador and Shivat Zion in Tetouan. Zionism grew in opposition to the muted brutality of the cultural domination and ease of the well-off, those born with silver spoons in their mouths who dismissed anyone of lesser status as merely one of “the people.” For the impoverished segments of the community, Zionism could often appear as a means of taking social revenge. Was it a middle-class movement, of the educated and socially ascendant? To be sure, but that was only part of the picture. The movement also drew in—and not without fostering some misunderstandings—the poorer elements of communities, by encouraging the idea of their emigration (with the ulterior motive of ridding communities of the social “burden” presented by such elements).74 And yet, Zionism was only marginally a movement of the poor. In reality, it was initially actuated by an educated, Westernized petite bourgeoisie whose wealth essentially comprised knowledge acquired on schoolroom benches. These people were often, derisorily, called “liberated” or “enlightened.” The attitude of Moroccan Jewish notables in 1948, as summarized by one Moroccan historian, was that “many amongst them no doubt did not mind that the poor were leaving. This exodus appeared to present the triple advantage of reducing pressures on charitable works, limiting the risk of incidents with ‘lower class Arabs’ and providing the State of Israel with workers and soldiers at a cheap price.”75 Outside of the communities, the colonizer often applied a lucid judgment about the social basis of the Zionist movement. In January 1946 the Coidan Report, from Morocco, noted that the “advanced” youth turned toward Zionism by abandoning communism, because their “religious sentiments” were still “very much alive.”76 Middle Eastern Zionism was often consonant with traditional Judaism. And while relations between community authorities and leaders of the movement might sometimes be conflictual, they were rarely implacably so. Even though it was secularized, this Zionism remained rooted in tradition. Up to the Second World War, community leadership was more often non-Zionist or un-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, even if the leadership assigned itself the role of watchman for Zionists’ “dangerous deviations,” and first and foremost sought to prevent violence. By contrast, in 1919, Yahia Zagury, Inspecteur Générale of Moroccan Jewish Institutions (and appointed by Résident Général Lyautey), affirmed that Zionism “is a great danger for Moroccan Jews.”77 The anti-Zionism evinced by the AIU cohered with his views, and earned him increased support from the French authorities. Elsewhere, leadership of the communities was sometimes in the hands of averred anti-Zionists, in particular (as in Egypt) when coexistence with the Arab population became unstable.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  217 The wealthier classes were aggravated by the ostentatious Jewishness of the Zionist activists. There was the same aggravation (indeed, anger) on the part of Iraq’s Arabized Jewish elites, who perceived the movement as a call for Jews to be uprooted. Between the wars, Jewish elites feared that Zionism would render their integration unstable. As elsewhere in the Middle East, they were resistant to a political movement synonymous with their own downgrading. As a Zionist official in Alexandria noted in 1947, “Unfortunately, the occasional black sheep is to be found amongst our wealthy.”78 In 1948, a French official in Morocco mentions those “persons generally well-off and comfortable who fear the repercussions and retaliatory measures which could result from the departure of massive numbers of Jews.”79 This hostility on the part of the notables would not let up in the following years, when more and more massive departures continued in the run-up to independence. In Vienna during the summer of 1895, at work on his project of a Jewish state, Herzl met Chief Rabbi Moritz Gudemann, who referred him to Narcisse Leven, president of the Jewish Colonization Association, to which body Baron Edmond de Rothschild would entrust his Palestinian settlement projects in 1899. Leven would be named to the leadership of the AIU three years later. This was the first contact between the man who would soon become the “father of Zionism” and a leader of the AIU, who initially considered Herzl a somewhat unstable utopian. The 1896 publication in German of Herzl’s The Jewish State, and its rapid translation into French, together with the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, mobilized the AIU leadership. “The healthy section of the population,” wrote Secrétaire Général Jacques Bigart, “will in the end understand that in the long run, they will be compromised by the things the Zionists say and write.”80 Bigart was all the firmer because he was aware that some of his own staff were secretly favorable to political Zionism. In the public realm, the AIU had no intention of laying out Jewish divisions of opinion for all the world to see. But in private, AIU leaders took aim at the Zionist movement, distancing themselves over the course of decades from the political realities that animated Jewries. The discrete struggle between these two lines would continue right up to the First World War. Even before 1900, numerous Zionists attempted to occupy the Comité Central by seeking election to it. As a result, in 1911 the AIU returned to the principle of cooptation, to protect itself from inopportune staffing of the Comité Central. Thus, within the Comité itself, Zionist sympathizers were rare, with the exception of the French Chief Rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, who maintained a conciliatory position. By contrast, the majority of eminent figures (first and foremost presidents) were determined opponents: Narcisse Leven (1898–1915) and Sylvain Levi (1920–1935), the Reinach brothers, Dr. Arnold Netter, and others. The Balfour

218  |  Jews in Arab Countries Declaration and Zionism’s first political successes after 1918—indeed, its international recognition—changed nothing up until 1939. Right up to the very eve of war, the AIU continued to insist that Zionism was a false solution “which can lead all of Judaism into danger.”81 In 1904, AIU President Narcisse Leven exclaimed: “Zion is not that corner of land where our ancestors lived. . . . Zion is Judaism spread amongst the nations, across the globe, achieving its destiny across space and through suffering.” Zionism is also suspected of establishing “a Jewish nationalism which would be more fanatical than the others, since history . . . shows us that the first use which peoples newly liberated from their yokes make of their freedom is to persecute the foreign elements existing amongst them.”82 For the Comité Central of the AIU, Zionism amounted to a retreat from the world. It is a “narrow and aggressive nationalism,” noted a report about Morocco in 1945, concerned about Zionism’s advance in the Islamic world under the impact of persecution.83 Zionism’s Jewish critics maintained that education alone would enable hatred to be pushed back. In 1901, in a homage rendered to Eugène Manuel, one of the founders of the AIU, Narcisse Leven argued that Zionism “teaches its adherents . . . to resign themselves to isolation, and to be pulled along by the dream of the establishment of some sort of Jewish state, whose location has hardly been determined, where they would live peaceably, although what is actually needed . . . is to allow them to participate in the progress of civilization together with the peoples amongst whom they live.”84 Moreover, as the Safed AIU school director asserted in 1898, it is vain and utopian—it is, indeed, “an absurdity”—to seek to convert Hebrew into a vernacular language, for “this 2000 year-old instrument . . . is outdated for purposes of assimilation or for gaining an understanding of modern civilization.”85 Warnings against the “dangers of Zionism” were simultaneously raised in different quarters, with the caution expressed by the AIU and the majority of community notables including some in rabbinic circles, generally expressed in moderate tones. In 1922, the Jewish Iraqi Senator Menahem S. Daniel explained that Zionism is endangering the situation of the Jews of his country, many of whom are in business or intellectual professions, and that Arab rejection of Jewish nationalism leaves his co-religionists exposed. With Muslims already displaying bitterness toward the “financial success” of certain Jews, is it prudent, he asked, to feed this resentment? Should not the Jews be more discreet, unlike the overly visible Baghdadi Zionists? As Jacques Bigart explained as early as 1919, Palestine was already inhabited. “Do people think that the Arabs will renounce their prerogatives?” Bigart also indicated that eventually (and despite the Balfour Declaration), London would drop the Zionists due to the hostility of the Arab world to the Jewish National Home project.86

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  219 Menahem Daniel considered that Zionism undermines “good JudeoMuslim relations: the Muslims, after centuries of mutual understanding, had hardly imagined that the Jews could have so little esteem for them.” If the Jews followed in the footsteps of the Zionists, they would transform “themselves into a completely foreign element in this country. . . . You will understand that, on a practical political basis, Mesopotamian Jews will be forced to separate from you if they are to continue to take into account their own vital interests.”87 From the end of 1898, Danon, of the AIU in Baghdad, warned against the consequences of Zionist activism. He noted that the Jews could no longer establish themselves in Palestine. One could fear that the interdiction on Jews acquiring land could be extended by the Ottomans to other provinces, in particular Mesopotamia. Of the Zionist movement then taking shape he wrote: “I fear that it is going to meet new misfortunes.”88 This is not a new fear; it was already present before the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Even then, there was fear of the accusation of double loyalty. The anxiety was that Jewish nationalism would “denationalize” the Jews in their respective native lands, as Moise Nahon, Tangiers AIU school director, wrote in 1894. His report was acclaimed by the Comité Central (which noted in the margin, “Excellent,” and “These are the thoughts of a true man”). Nahon challenged: “Have we forgotten the attacks to which the patriotism of the Jews is continually exposed? Is this how we will try to counter the accusation of ‘outsiders’ with which one continues to charge the Jews in so many countries?”89 The First World War, the Balfour Declaration, and the British Mandate in Palestine all create a situation in which, as Menahem Daniel explains from Baghdad in 1922, “the Jews will not be able to carry on without providing proof of an unshakeable loyalty to this country. . . . Any failure by the Jews in this respect will compromise their future.”90 In 1948, after the creation of the State of Israel, worry became pervasive. An officer of the French protectorate in Morocco did not mince his words: Once the sovereignty of the State of Israel has been recognized by the principal great powers, the nationality of this State will ipso facto take on a quite particular importance. The well-known ties of solidarity that already unite Jews of all conditions everywhere in the world will as a result be reinforced through the control of their own police force or active diplomatic representation. The prescriptions of their religion, which will in practical if not official terms become a State religion, will come to weigh on consciences which hitherto were solely animated by the much more liberal sentiments of their racial community.91

The two declarations of 1917—Cambon in June, and Balfour in November— would rattle proponents of Jewish anti-Zionism. It was in order to win over Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court judge and one of the great personalities of American

220  |  Jews in Arab Countries Jewry, that AIU Comité Central member Sylvain Levi was sent to the United States in the fall of 1918. This time, he stressed the anti-Bolshevik argument, citing “Russian elements, just barely emerged from the ghetto and the chaos of revolution, and unsuited for agricultural colonization, excited by political fever and likely to spread Bolshevik thinking in an environment still taking shape.”92 But Brandeis would hear none of it, and called on the AIU to take a back seat in favor of Zionism in Palestine and more broadly across the Middle East. Prior to 1914, AIU opposition to Zionism was neither virulent nor publicly expressed. However, the apparent victory of political Zionism after 1917 led AIU leaders to conclude that they had underestimated the peril represented by Zionism. For the movement, in refuge in Copenhagen, the war provided the occasion for it to grasp the reins. With a view toward winning the support of American Jews, both the Entente and the Central Powers determined that they should support a movement that antisemitic rumor—quite wrongly—credited with immense power. Convinced that London would seek to control a large part of the Near East, the French attempted in 1916–1917 to win over the Zionists, to the great displeasure of the AIU, which would greet the Balfour Declaration with dismay. The hostility becomes overt, beginning with the diatribe pronounced by Sylvain Levi at the Versailles Peace Conference on February 27, 1919: “As you know, one cannot improvise in establishing a nation, and a certain number of aspirations concerning faith, literature and ideas are not enough to create a national entity.”93 The AIU’s anti-Zionist commitment was now public, even if leaders intended to continue exercising restraint in their public expressions. In reality, throughout the inter-war period, the hostility was patent. In 1926, Jacques Bigart, who in his private correspondence spoke of Zionism as a form of “gangrene,” explained to a senior French Foreign Ministry official how erroneous it would be for Paris to follow London in its support for “this adventure, which may last some time but at the end of the day will not be able to succeed.”94 The Zionist movement, for its part, rages against certain key figures of the AIU, in the front ranks of whom was Sylvain Levi, reproached for his statement at the Versailles Peace Conference, where he had argued: “As you will know, one cannot improvise in creating a nation, and having a certain number of aspirations about faith, literature and thought is not enough to make a national entity.”95 The Zionist reaction was unambiguous: “On that day, Monsieur, writing in the Zionist Revue in Cairo, you attempted, essentially—with that engaging tone for which we recognize you—to assassinate the Jewish nation.”96 It was also pointed out that the French antisemitic paper, La Libre Parole (Free Speech) had at that time called Levi “an honest Jew.” The second half of the 1930s was a continuous tragedy for the Jewish world. The anti-Zionism of the AIU was, in consequence, overturned. The older

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  221 generation passed away in the space of just a few years: Salomon Reinach in 1932, Bigart and Edmond de Rothschild in 1934, Sylvain Levi in 1935, and Arnold Netter in 1936. In March 1939, in correspondence with Albert Ben Meir (a Tunisian educator sympathetic toward Zionism), Sylvain Halff, the new Secrétaire Général of the AIU, evidenced a certain degree of disarray. Alongside a rather nuanced condemnation of Zionism, for the first time, doubt is expressed regarding assimilation, which “in its nineteenth century formulation no longer applies to the current situation.”97 Within Jewish communities, a violent struggle raged between Zionists— gaining in influence—and declared anti-Zionists, particularly numerous among the notables, who discouraged Zionist fund-raising (which directly competes with the communities’ own social services work), obstructed the cultural activities of Zionist clubs, and argued against aliyah (emigration to Eretz Israel). Beginning in the 1920s, tensions mounted to the point of suspicions that denunciation to the authorities was taking place. In 1923, in Damascus, a Zionist political club was closed by the authorities, raising suspicions that the AIU was behind this.98 Tensions boiled over with the hardening of the conflict in Palestine. This became overt in 1937 with the publication of the Peel Commission’s partition plan, which envisaged a division of the country. What also underlay these tensions was not so much the rights or wrongs of Zionist claims, but rather the fear of deterioration of the condition of the Jews in Arab lands. This was not, however, the case with Jewish communists, whose condemnation of Zionism was unequivocal. Communities were profoundly divided by this question, which sometimes resulted in actual physical violence. Most of the time, however, confrontations remain muted. In the ever more tense climate between Jews and Arabs in a number of places, some Jewish intellectuals formed an anti-Zionist committee after 1945. In 1946 a Jewish Anti-Zionist League was even created in Baghdad, which affirmed in its founding document (with eight signatories) that Zionism was a “pressing danger for Jewish and Arab masses in their national struggle. Because we are both Jews and Arabs at the same time, we are doubly hostile towards Zionism. . . . And because the question of Palestine is an issue for the entire Arab world, we place ourselves alongside the Arabs of Palestine.”99 This was the analysis of all the Communist parties of the era. Yet, the conflict would diminish in intensity, both because of the need to safeguard the Jewish presence, and because the disaster striking Europe’s Jews radically changed the situation. Another element was manipulation on the Arab side, with the establishment of anti-Zionist leagues. Both Arab antisemitism (exacerbated by the situation in Palestine) and the virulence of (frequently pro-Zionist) Jewish reactions placed Jewish communists in a delicate situation

222  |  Jews in Arab Countries vis-à-vis their communities, and even more so in the view of Zionist activists, to whom the communists henceforth began to appear somewhat suspect. Both Zionism and the AIU laid claim to the same references to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Yet, their respective heritages differed. Whereas the AIU drew its inspiration from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and from the universalistic aspect of the French Revolution, the Zionists, for their part, principally drew on “the right of peoples to selfdetermination” as their inspiration from the Revolution. While the roots of the AIU lay in reason, the belief in progress and the defense of human rights, historical Zionism was fundamentally pessimistic regarding the future of European Jews. The AIU saw the Jews progressing from a nation to a religion, by relegating religious faith to the private sphere, but Zionism envisaged Jews moving from a religion to a nation or a people, secularizing them in order to make them political actors. The result was an intellectual crisscrossing, where neither side won out, instead mutually reinforcing each other by means of contrasting forms of identity. The partial but involuntary complicity between these two movements shows why so many former AIU students, despite the views of their teachers, figured among the early adherents of the Zionist movement. And not just former students: there were also many teachers won to Zionism, even more after 1918 and especially after 1933 in the context of the Nazis’ accession to power in Germany. Such was the case, for example, with Albert Ben Meir, a primary school teacher in Sousse, Tunisia. In a December 1938 letter addressed to the Président of the Comité Central one month after Kristallnacht, Ben Meir bluntly affirmed his Zionism. This letter, hardly conceivable just ten years earlier, can be explained less on the basis of the change in leadership of the AIU than by the dramatic situation facing European Jews: “The spirit of the new Jew has come into my thinking since I arrived in Sousse. This is the spirit of a Jew who wants to separate himself from the defects of the Galut [the Diaspora] and instead turn his eyes towards that country where the character of the Jew is busy being formed. . . . Here, everyone is interested in Zionism. . . . Palestine seems to them to be the only refuge in these troubled times. To be sure, they are not unaware that Palestine is not, properly speaking, a place of refuge.”100 When colonial authorities restrained Zionist activities, this was not out of ideological conviction nor was it necessarily antisemitic; more simply, this reflected the fear of incidents among Arab populations hostile to Jewish nationalism. French attitudes were particularly firm in Morocco, where France showed itself obsessed by a concern not to offend the sultan, whose subjects the Jews remained, and to whom an autonomous Zionist movement would constitute an affront. This gave rise to virulent opposition to Zionism on the part of the first Résident, General Lyautey, an attitude that would not be disavowed by any of his successors.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  223 After Lyautey’s departure in 1925, his successor, Théodore Steeg, adopted the same attitude. Although Steeg authorized the publication, in 1926, of the proZionist L’Avenir illustré, the basic guidelines remained unchanged. From 1934, several Jewish charitable organizations were refused permission to fund-raise; similarly, the accreditation of Zionist organizations—including the FrancePalestine Friendship Association, led in 1939 by Senator Justin Godart—was challenged. The Résidence Générale regulated fund-raising and the holding of conferences, in order to ensure that public meetings were held within the mellah and were not subject to any publicity, nor involved any processions “in public roadways nor gatherings at the entrances of publicly used spaces.”101 Emigration to the Holy Land was another subject of worry for Lyautey. His fear of the impoverishment of Morocco gives rise to tax obstacles discouraging the departure of families, and requiring they make significant deposits. The violence in Palestine in August 1929 only increases official disquiet. The same is true for Libya, where the Italian administration monitors the reaction of the Arab population. If, before Mussolini’s October 1922 “March on Rome,” fascism displayed some sympathy for Zionism, no sooner had fascism come to power then it began to abstain from visible cordiality in order “not to offend the Arabs.” Between the wars, Arab rejection affected all Jewish communities. It quickly came to threaten viewing every Jew as being not only a potential Zionist, but also as an underground Zionist and traitor to “the Arab nation.” This pressure intensified with the Palestinian pogroms of August 1929, and even more still with the uprising of 1936. At that point, the situation of Jews in Arab lands would become truly dangerous. In 1931, the Beirut AIU director warned all Jewish immigrants that they must show clean hands with regard to “Zionism”: “You know of the links between the Arabs of Syria and Palestine. . . . A clumsy gesture could combine with a slanderous accusation, and perhaps also tomorrow combine with a competitor’s jealousy. That could be enough to set off dangerous attacks for which the entire Israelite populace of Syria will pay the price.”102 Palestinian rejection intensifies even further after the Palestinian revolt of April 1936. It is in this context that the mobilization of Arab nationalism intersected with Nazism. German’s antisemitic policies aroused the approval— sometimes embarrassed and veiled, but more often open and noisy—of Arab nationalists in both the Maghreb and the Mashreq in Iraq and Syria. In Palestine itself, the general uprising and British policies caused immigration to drop: 30,000 Jewish immigrants entered in 1936, but fewer than 40,000 during the next three years combined. This deterioration led several Zionist groups, harboring the hope of being accepted by their adversaries, to attempt to explain their movement to Arabs. Yet, for many Arab intellectuals, Zionism was a kind of Western outpost, one arising

224  |  Jews in Arab Countries at the same time that the colonial grip was weakening. In the inter-war period, several encounters (all initiated by Jews) would take place between Arab intellectuals and Jews from Eretz Israel—in vain. Arab rejection conflated Jews and Zionists, marginalizing Jewish populations that had always been Arab speakers. It transformed the Jewish minority from a religious community into a national one. At the same time, and not without contradiction, they wanted to view the Jews solely as followers of a faith, but by imputing to the Jews grievances that were by nature not religious but rather political. Moroccan nationalists, in their French-language newspaper L’Action du peuple (Action of the People), called on “the Jews” (not just the Zionists) to remain neutral on the subject of Palestine.103 This thinly veiled blackmail was aimed at dhimmis to whom it was recommended not to forget their ancient condition. In 1935, a document in Arabic (from Arabia according to the police and carried by pilgrims returning from Mecca) circulated throughout the country: “Muslims should in general realize that every Jew, regardless of which country he is in, is contributing through his money or any other means to Judaize Palestine and establish the Jewish nation there.”104 The tone hardened to the point of descending into actual Judeophobia. A compromise seemed impossible to envisage. In July 1938 in London, representatives of the Zionist executive, mandated by Haïm Weizmann, met the Egyptian prime minister, Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha. In their final report, the negotiators noted that the Arab chiefs had refused to enter into negotiations before the Jewish party first commited to remain a minority in Palestine and to halt immigration there.105 This was a position shared by most currents of Arab nationalism of the day. The tone was becoming more violent. In Iraq, for example, in June 1933 in Al-Hedaye, an Arab journalist warned his Jewish fellow citizens: “We would hope that the Jews . . . renounce this stupid fantasy that is leading them towards the deepest abyss.” However, the Jews of Iraq obstinately persist in “this course of conduct . . . in the grip of outlandish dreams.”106

Notes 1. AIU, France, XII. F., Iraq, Baghdad, 10 September 1912. 2. AIU, France, XII. F. 21, Baghdad, 26 October 1913, Albala. 3. AIU, France, VI. F. 12, Rabat, 16 December 1932, Sémach. 4. After 1945, the World Jewish Congress mobilizes on behalf of Moroccan Jewish women: CZA, C10/610. 5. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 6. AIU, Libya, III. E. 6c-21, Tripoli, 16 February 1899, Jacques Hoefler. 7. AIU, France, XII. F. 21, Baghdad, 26 October 1913. 8. AIU, France, XV, F. 26, Tetouan, 27 October 1910, A. Moyal. 9. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 558.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  225 10. See CZA, Z3/752, Cairo, July 1912, regarding the foundation of a Zionist student movement baptized the Herzl Circle. 11. Les Cahiers de l’AIU, June–July 1953, 10. 12. AIU, Morocco, XIV, F. 25, Fez, annual report, 1909–1910, Elmaleh. 13. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Sana’a, 23 February 1910, Sémach. 14. Ibid., 9 May 1910, Sémach. 15. Cf. on this point, Shmuel Trigano, “L’invention sépharade du sionisme moderne” (The Sephardic Invention of Modern Zionism), in Trigano, Le Monde sépharade, vol.2, 861–878. 16. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Cairo, 22 July 1904. 17. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 18. CZA, Z1/343. 19. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Baghdad, 15 December 1898, Raphaël Danon. 20. AIU, Turkey, I. G. 1, Constantinople, 16 November 1910. 21. CZA, Z1, 313/1, Constantine, August 1900, author’s emphasis. 22. CADN, French Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22. Cf. CADN, Oujda, 13 June 1947, clandestine emigration file, DST. 23. CZA, Z3/752, March 1912. 24. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 158. 25. CZA, Z3/753, Cairo, 1 October 1913. 26. Ibid., Cairo, 10 January 1914. 27. Cited in H. Laurens, La Question de Palestine, vol 1, L’Invention de la Terre sainte, 1799–1922, Paris, Fayard, 1999, p. 303–304. 28. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 485. 29. CZA, Z3/752, April 1913, Cairo. 30. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 258. 31. AIU, Morocco, 1. G. 1, Tangiers, 4 April 1919. 32. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 5, Tripoli, 17 June 1923. 33. CZA, S25/3589, Cairo, 1 October 1943 and CZA, S5/11588, Tripoli, 20 July 1947. 34. AIU, XLII. E. 717, letter of 21 March 1927. 35. AIU, L. E. 784, letter to Pinhas, 5 April 1934. 36. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 37. Ibid., letter of KKL France to Samuel Ben Mayor in Salé, Morocco, 1 July 1927. 38. Ibid., Rabat, 24 October 1926. 39. Cf. Coidan report, 1946, in CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 40. AIU, Morocco, III. 6, Mogador, 2 December 1935. 41. AIU, Morocco, I.G.I, Tangiers, 2 May 1924. 42. Ibid. 43. AIU, Morocco, I. G. 1, Fez, Myriam Mamane, 10 December 1934. 44. M. Nahmad, writing in the name of the Aleppo committee of the World Federation of Sephardic Jews, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 330. 45. Cited in Haïm Saadoun, “Zionism in Muslim countries,” in Shmuel Trigano (ed.), Le Monde sépharade, vol. 2, 901. 46. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 91, and CZA, Z4/3262. 47. CZA, Z4/2470, Baghdad, 22 April 1925. 48. CZA, Z3/1448, Cairo, 12 April 1912.

226  |  Jews in Arab Countries 49. CZA, Z3/753, Cairo, 5 June 1916. 50. CZA, Z3/754, Cleveland, 5 June 1912. 51. AIU, XII. E. 182, Cairo, Somekh, 5 October 1913. 52. Israel, 7 May 1926, cited in Michael Laskier, The Jews of Egypt (1920–1970): In the midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 40. 53. CZA, S25/2027, Sasia Ehrlich, “Campagne en Égypte,” 1935. 54. Cf. André Kaspi, Histoire de l’AIU de 1860 à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 268. 55. Cited in Georges Bensoussan, Histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme, 332. 56. CZA, Z3/752, April, 1945. 57. AIU, Morocco, V. B., Tangiers, Sémach, November 1928. 58. CZA, Z3/115, Cairo, 7 April 1913. 59. AIU, Egypt, XII. E., Cairo, May 1913. 60. Beirut, 26 December 1927, in Stillman, Jews in Arab Lands in Modern Times, 325–327. 61. Cited in Bat Zion Eraki-Klorman, The Jews of Yemen in the Nineteenth Century: A Portrait of a Messianic Community (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 183. 62. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Meknes, 31 January 1945. 63. In this regard, the Zionism of Oriental Jews was close to that of the Western Jewish communities. For a discussion of the philosophical implications of the conditions of pariah, parvenu, and alienation, see Elhanan Yakira, Post sionisme, Post Shoah (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 322–323 and 333. 64. CADN, French Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., January 1946. 65. Cf. Ovadia Yerushalmi, La Presse juive en Egypte. 1879–1957 (Paris: Éditions Nahar Misraïm, 2007). 66. CZA, C10/349. 67. CZA, S25/4718, He Haloutz Hatzair, n.1, Alexandria, 1 November 1942. 68. CZA, S6/1982, Cairo, 7 October 1947. 69. CZA, S25/4718, He Haloutz Hatzair, 1 November 1942. 70. In Le Progrès de Fez, 26 November 1922. 71. In his report already cited, of January 1946. 72. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, Dossier 18, Coidan, January 1946. 73. Ibid., 31 January 1945. 74. AIU, Morocco, I.G.I, Casablanca, 8 September 1919. 75. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 692. 76. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Dossier 18, Casablanca, January 1946. 77. AIU, Morocco, I. G. 1, Zagury, 6 September 1919, letter to the Résidence Générale. 78. CZA, S32/492, Alexandria, 25 December 1947. 79. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Dossier 18, Rabat, 29 August 1948. 80. Cited in Catherine Nicault, “In the face of Zionism (1897–1940),” in André Kaspi, (ed.) Histoire de l’Alliance israélite universelle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 196. 81. Letter from Sylvain Levi to Lucien Wolf, 12 August 1918, cited in Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle, 221. 82. BAIU, 1904, 41. See also A. Brasseur, “Alliance school at Isfahan, 12 August 1917,” cited in Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation, 192.

“A New Jewish Man”?  |  227 83. Cf. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Coidan report. 84. BAIU, 1901, 23. 85. M. Franco, from Safed, July 1898, Cited in Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation, 184. 86. Letter of 30 July 1919 addressed to the AIU alumni association, Sousse, Tunisia, cited in Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation, 189. 87. In Stillman, Jews in Arab Lands in Modern Times, 333 and CZA, Z4/2101. 88. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Baghdad, 15 December 1898. 89. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. II, Tangiers, 16 March 1894. 90. In Stillman, Jews in Arab Lands in Modern Times, 332. 91. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Dossier 18, undated, probably early 1948. 92. In Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation, 190. 93. In A. Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle, 225. 94. See ibid., 212. 95. In André Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 225. 96. Ibid. 97. AIU, Tunisia, ID IG, 6, 29 March 1939. 98. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, 2 February 1923. 99. CZA, S25/5289, 1946. 100. AIU, Tunisia, ID IG, 6, Sousse, 7 December 1938. 101. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, report of Etienne Coidan, January 1946. 102. AIU, Lebanon, I. C. 1, Beirut, 22 April 1931. 103. Cited in Michael Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862–1962 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983). 104. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Dossier 18, Taza. 23 May 1935, General Lauzanne to the Director of Indigenous Affairs. 105. CZA, S25/3518, meeting of 30 July 1938 between Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha, S. Brodetsky and B. Locker. 106. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 3.

6 Between Europeans and Arabs

Finding a Space?

Whether they desired or regretted it, at the time of colonization the Jews

occupied an uncomfortable intermediary position. At the Congress of Colonial Studies in Florence in 1931, Elia Artom, former Chief Rabbi of Tripoli, was proud to declare: “In the best sense of the expression, the Jews of Tripolitania can fulfill the role of intermediaries and importers not only of merchandise but also of ideas, as they did in Europe during the Middle Ages.”1 They were compelled to be intermediaries, but—as shown in the case of Libya—they were also the first victims of the Arab population’s resistance to the European invader: thus, two thousand Libyan Jews were evacuated from rural regions due to endemic violence following Italy’s 1911 invasion. Examples abound of Jews caught in the crossfire between the colonizer’s advance and Arab resistance. As the Tetouan AIU director noted in 1923, “In such cases, it [the Jewish community] shuts itself up at home, double-locking the doors.”2 Colonization, in effect, did not mean the same thing to all indigenous people: it spelled domination for some, but an opening onto modernity for others. This was, however, to be a modernization that distanced Jews from their native soil, while at the same time bringing the Arabs together into pan-Arab or pan-Islamic movements. This is why, nearly everywhere, the arrival of the Europeans corresponded with a spike in anti-Jewish violence. These outbursts were simultaneously the expression of resentment against the weak, and vengeance against supposed traitors thought to have welcomed the colonizers. Ernest Feydeau, who went to Algeria in 1860, published his observations in 1862 under the title Alger, étude (Algiers: A Study). He described the Jews as “superior in intelligence, and of an unparalleled subtlety” who, upon the arrival of the French, “understood that [they] were bringing them freedom.”3 The colonizer, however, did not hide his contempt for indigenous Jews. He shared in European antisemitism, which was a genuine cultural norm of the times. This contempt also separated the Jewish communities of the two shores of the Mediterranean. Thus, in 1846, the rabbi (and physician) Joseph Sebag, of Toulouse, was removed by the public authorities from the position of Chief Rabbi of Algiers, to be replaced instead by the primary school teacher, Michel Weill, because of Sebag’s “birth in Morocco.”4

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  229 Vitriolic portraits teach us little about these “degenerates,” which the gaze of the colonizer offered up to the European homeland, and one was rarely struck by the subtlety of analyses of these “depraved” people. But such subltety was evident in the views of senior French official Étienne Coidan, author of the study previously mentioned on the Zionist movement in the Cherifian Kingdom. From within a mass of “backward” people (“arriérés”), Coidan detected the emergence of “assimilated ones” (“les assimilés”), for whom “common sense and ability substitute for moral principles, and money substitutes for noble titles. These flaws, which do not necessarily counterbalance the laudable Jewish qualities of solidarity and charity, are even more pronounced among these évolués [evolved, i.e., civilized ones], as they are in a rush to move along quickly and, as speedily as possible, obtain a privileged status which would place them on equal footing with the Europeans.”5 These complaints, avowed or otherwise, fed a European antisemitism gripped by the fear of seeing these évolués narrow the gap separating Jews from Europeans. In 1945, administrative reports mention the persistence of antisemitism, which they impute to “the arrogance of Israelite youth.”6 In 1951, the Secretary-General of Jewish communities of Morocco reported to the World Jewish Congress that the French administration persists in seeing the Jews as a “negligible quantity from whom one expects nothing, and towards whom one has no responsibilities.”7 For most other observers, analysis was limited to a moral judgment. It was rare to demonstrate a relationship between alienation and moral flaws, as Charles de Foucauld did in describing the effects of fear on the behavior of individuals. If all Jews are contemptible, those who have avoided the sultan’s authority, in the bled es siba (zones of Morocco outside the effective reach of state power), at least have the excuse of being “oppressed beyond measure. . . . These are the most unfortunate of men.” Even while insisting on their ugliness (“The Jews are very ugly in Morocco”), de Foucauld first and foremost highlighted their poverty. Albeit reluctantly, he added social factors to the moral tableau he depicts, thus nuancing his judgments. He described young girls who are worn out too soon, and men “sometimes still very much in their early youth” who are “old men before having reached maturity . . . deformed, one-eyed, crippled.”8 Over time, the colonizer without doubt played an emancipatory role. On a more immediate basis, however, Jewish communities had to deal with officers and noncommissioned officers impregnated with antisemitic prejudice, a fortiori in a French army that, at the start of the century, had hardly emerged from the Dreyfus Affair. Yet, given the number of records evoking rather positive interactions between Jews and European troops, one should not overgeneralize from reports of negative incidents.

230  |  Jews in Arab Countries There remained, nevertheless, a deeply rooted anti-Jewish tradition within the French army in Africa. In May 1842, General Bugeaud, one of the conquerors of Algeria, reported to Marshal-General Soult, the Président du Conseil (i.e., Prime Minister): “In the interests of our future and security in Africa, [it will be necessary] to expel [the Jews] entirely. [The] 15,000 or 16,000 Jews existing in Algeria are all traffickers and take up the greater share of business.”9 In Morocco, right from the start of French occupation of the territory, in 1912, certain French officers display contempt for the Jews, refusing to take their complaints (against “abuses inflicted by the ranks”) into consideration. In Marrakesh in 1919, a French captain forbade Jews access to the public gardens.10 At Safi in 1913, a police commissioner who humiliated Jews was defended by the French Consul: “Why are they making all these demands? Who were they previously, these Israelites? A Muslim tells me that since the French occupation, the Israelites have become arrogant and unbearable.”11 But the AIU Comité Central reacts, writing to the Résident Général in Morocco: “It is difficult to accept that, because of a simple road traffic contravention, peaceful inhabitants of a country under French protection could be arbitrarily incarcerated, detained for several days and made to perform forced textile labor.”12 This kind of grievance would recur up to independence. As they progressively attained emancipation, the Jews were considered to be insufferable by the Muslim population, most colonial officials and a fortiori the European populace with whom they competed. North African Jews performing their military service frequently encountered prejudice.13 The colonizers needed the Jewish communities. At the same time, they feared Jewish emancipation, as it antagonized Muslims and put the Jews in direct competition with Europeans living in the region. This gave rise to ambivalence, where emancipation alternated with harassment, and modernization mixed with restrictions, on the model of Lyautey’s policies in Morocco. The Résident Général needed the Jewish community but refused to allow it to integrate. Like the Muslim notables, he considered that the Jews ought to “keep to their place”—as a religious community and nothing more. Let them quench their thirst for education strictly within the exclusive bounds of the AIU, without being allowed to enroll in a European lycée, nor to benefit from scholarships generally available to European students. For these reasons, the protectorate refused to provide financial assistance to Moroccan Jewish communities. Equally, it took no interest in the Jewish quarters, even though it took action to help homeless Europeans and Muslims. For the same reason, the protectorate did not change the status of Jews, who remained the sultan’s subjects as reaffirmed by the Madrid Conference of 1880. Jews thus remain incarcerated within the prison of their ethnicity. As a result, no Jew sat on the Governing Council, a body with consultative status.

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  231 On everything affecting the condition of Jews, the views of the French Résident Général in Morocco accorded with those of the sultan, despite any stories to the contrary. Later, when Vichy extended the two Jewish regulations (October 1940 and June 1941) to Morocco, the sultan did not object, nor did he oppose any other anti-Jewish measure of the French state. And yet he did manage to find the words, in 1929, to resist the Résident when he called on the sultan to distance himself from Moroccan nationalists who had sided with the Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestinian Muslims. The colonial authorities understood very well the strength of Judeo-Arab enmity. They also knew that beyond the quotidian ties between the two communities, relations were often tense, torn between the ancient submission of Jews and the Arab desire to dominate. In Morocco, Paris had decided, without ever making this explicit, that there would be no repetition of the “error” of the Crémieux Decree granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Even when expectation turned to disappointment, many “evolved” Moroccan Jews continued to bear an unrequited love for France. It was this frustration that later led them to turn in large numbers toward the State of Israel in 1948. Emancipation of Morocco’s Jews represented an attack at the very heart of Arab and Muslim sovereignty, a shattering of the political equilibrium of a realm whose system of power was founded on dhimma and even more on servitude. French colonizers understood that emancipating the Jews, here as elsewhere in Arab lands, would do violence to the very order of the world. Lyautey, a friend of Charles de Foucauld, never manifested an anti-Jewish attitude, but he inflexibly upheld his refusal to make Frenchmen of these Jews. By contrast, the situation in Tangiers seems to have been less blocked. Compared to Morocco, Tunisia’s Jewish community enjoyed a degree of liberty that contrasted with the weight of a Moroccan protectorate that repressed dhimmis but increased fiscal pressures, and that suppressed the freedoms of the mellah in order to enclose the Jews in a subaltern position in the name of Cherifian sovereignty. The 1912 Treaty of Fez made no mention of the rights of Jews, who remained subject to the sultan’s law. Local administration—hardly changed—remained in the hands of the caïds and the pashas, under the watchful eye of French civilian administrators. The justice system, on the other hand, was remodeled so that French and other Europeans were not subject to the jurisdiction of local tribunals: an exceptional jurisdiction was created for them, as well as for those Moroccans who acquired European property and lifestyles. The prerogatives of rabbinical tribunals were reduced to apply only to matters of personal status. For civil law, and above all criminal matters, Jews were obliged to be subject to the Makhzen’s tribunals. In the absence of a secular civil code, law means Sharia law. This resulted in arbitrary and unfair justice, and a stream of unjust situations

232  |  Jews in Arab Countries that fueled the desire to emigrate. Yet, in order not to offend the sultan or affront Arab sensibilities, Jews were encased within this unjust status ad aeternum. But the protectorate’s silence on these questions kept hope alive and fed the illusion of a second Crémieux Decree. French discourse, ambivalent, hovered between universalist, generous colonial language, and a daily segregation that kept “the indigenous masses” in an inferior status. In Libya, Governor Badoglio was also determined not to upset Arab opinion by treating Jews as equals. Libyan Jews cannot, he explained, be treated like Italian Jews. They are Libyan natives. Although Badoglio himself was by no means antisemitic, he was aware that in the Arab world, “the Jew” had for a long time been an inferior being, and the mere idea that he would be treated as an equal was unacceptable to most Arabs. This is why Italian citizenship was dispensed drop by drop; this restrictive attitude led Libyan Jews to disappointment about a country of which it expected so much. The colonizer thus did not seek to extend the autonomy of Jewish communities; rather, sometimes—as in Morocco—to reduce it. Well before the situation in Morocco started to deteriorate in the 1930s, the downward trajectory had begun. People sought to flee the condition of being subjects of the sultan by reaching Algeria, where with the Crémieux Decree in force, they could take steps to “Gallicize” themselves. Some Jewish women attempted to deliver their babies in Algeria in order that the children could benefit from the jus soli applicable there. Here as elsewhere, misery and oppression produced exile. Under the protectorate, Morocco’s Jews achieved a major judicial reform— the dahir of May 22, 1918, which brought their personal status (civil status, and divorce and inheritance rights) under the sole authority of rabbinical law and courts. This attempt, which for once was successful, reinforced their hopes visà-vis the French colonizer; this was even true of the ranks of the Zionist movement, more preoccupied with emancipation than departure for the Holy Land. In Libya, the great majority of local Jews, without venerating Italy, nevertheless unhesitatingly preferred Italian to Arab sovereignty. In Iraq, the Jewish minority benefitted from the arrival of the British to avoid subjection to local authority. On several occasions the Baghdad Jewish community requested British nationality and warned against the establishment of an autonomous Arab government. This fear of a return to arbitrariness explains why the Turkish defeats of the beginning of the century did not set off explosions of joy among the Jews. In expectation of emancipation, the communities sought to draw closer to the colonizer. Yet, learning a European language also deepened the gap between Jews and Arabs. In Benghazi in Libya, in 1931, 76 percent of Jewish men spoke Italian, but only 35 percent of Arab men did so. The gulf was even more evident with women: 2 percent of Arab women against 41 percent of Jewish women spoke

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  233 the colonizer’s language. In Tripoli the gap was narrower: 29 percent of Arab men and 3 percent of Arab women spoke Italian, while 44 percent of Jewish men and 30 percent of Jewish women speak it.14 Similar proportions prevailed across all Arab countries. If the Muslims declined the “colonial contract” for obvious reasons, the Jews approved it because they had something to gain from it. Without really choosing, they simply adjusted to an imposed reality. By their adaptive capacity and thirst for emancipation, they distanced themselves from the Muslims. However, this Westernization was undermined by a latent anxiety generated by their dhimma status, as well as by the fear that with a huge mass of indigènes left behind, the Jews would one day have to pay the price of their emancipation. Aspiration to modernity collided with ethnic, cultural and social barriers. Europeans, Jews, and Muslims co-existed but did not mix. Europeans and indigènes seldom interacted. Jewish and Muslim cultural proximity was strong, but the barriers erected by the European colonizer were high. Inter-marriage was exceedingly rare, and Jewish social circles were just as closed as the others. The point is to neither underestimate the social and ethnic distance, nor above all to infringe it: Jewish social ascension annoyed the colonizers, upset at seeing a reduction of a gulf they found so reassuring. In addition, in the Maghreb as in Egypt or Iraq, the colonial administration was often populated by xenophobic officials. It was not necessarily France’s elite that “headed out for the colonies”; rather it was in many cases quite the opposite, and in fact often “the plebs,” as Isaac Pisa, Tangiers AIU teacher, reported in 1905. He noted that since the Entente Cordiale of April 1904, French immigration to Morocco had increased. The lower classes arrived, having transited through Spain or Algeria “in search here of the Eldorado which had been dangled before them in the French press. And what comes here to us, as you may guess, is not the elite, the fine flower of commerce and industry, but instead the upstart parvenus in search of adventure, fortune or speculation, all those who—finding nothing to do in their own country—come here looking for something; all that scum, in a word, which has boiled up and spilled over from France and Algeria.”15 Once in country, the aspiring colonizer grew rapidly disappointed. The early hopes and illusions of a quick fortune were ssoon followed by disenchantment, and then resentment that turned into bitterness. Pisa highlighted the role of frustration in politics when the fantasies collapse of a country where gold and precious stones are simply lying on the ground. . . . In every field of human activity, there is the Jew, already established for centuries in the country, very familiar with it and its inhabitants, and having quickly learned the methods of modern speculation, better equipped than anyone else since he speaks French, English, Spanish and Arabic, and served by his great business intelligence and prowess, to the chagrin of his

234  |  Jews in Arab Countries enemies. . . . This baffles our Frenchman, who, remembering some articles which he half-digested and which he may have chanced upon in Drumont’s and Rochefort’s [notoriously antisemitic] newspapers, he declares that there are too many Jews in the country. He discovers that the Jew is of another race than his own and is a pariah, and in consequence that the Jew has no business in this French country, whose business he has grabbed ahold of by a thousandand-one feats of dishonest cunning as is his custom, and that he monopolizes everything in the most monstrous manner. You will thus understand why all of us here predict an anti-Semitic crisis, which will erupt once the number of Frenchmen has increased to the point that they are officially “in their own land.”16

Shared—in part—by Muslim indigènes, this anti-Judaism becomes a common passion in Algeria well before the First World War. French antisemitism and Arab antisemitism become mutually reinforcing, and move forward in step, in a climate of reciprocal encouragement based on a widely spread pejorative vision of the Jew. Popular rejection expresses itself in the radical opposition to the extension of the Crémieux Decree to Tunisia and Morocco. Everyday relations between Jews and Europeans were ambivalent. The Europeans were happy to welcome the AIU, and the reception on the part of the authorities was almost always courteous; yet, contempt won out as soon as one was no longer interacting on an official basis. Of the three French Maghreb countries, it was in Algeria that the hostility was most obvious. In 1900, before the parliamentary commission of enquiry established after the violent incidents linked to the Dreyfus Affair, the President of the Algiers Consistoire (Jewish Community) declared: “For Jews, access to theatres, public promenades and public festivities is either completely forbidden or is made very painful. Marksmanship clubs, fencing, gymnastics, music and singing are systematically closed to them. . . . Nearly all the large cafés, brasseries and restaurants refuse to admit them. . . . All the anti-Jewish rags—and new ones are hatching every day—spew forth an unbroken stream of the most unworthy calumnies about our mothers, wives, daughters and sisters.” What did French antisemites want from the Maghreb Jews? That they “keep to their place.” In Algeria—and this was an exceptional thing in the colonial world—anti-Judaism was often a trait of governing officials themselves, such as Max Regis, Jules Molle, and Emile Morinaud. Le Petit Oranais, a newspaper edited by Molle, reproduced in the form of headlines these words of Luther: “We must send sulfur, pitch and if possible the fires of hell to synagogues and Jewish schools, destroy Jews’ houses, take all their property and chase them out into the countryside like rabid dogs.”17 This antisemitism worsened in French North Africa during the 1930s, especially during the rise of the Front Populaire. In Morocco, beginning in 1935, attempts were made to prevent Jews from living in European quartiers. In August

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  235 1936, French people protested, by leaflet, “against the admission of Israelites to the Meknes public swimming pool.”18 Elementary and secondary school students, even more violent, vied with each other to ostracize the Jews. In the words of Saïd Ghallab, describing French lycée students: “Their racism was obvious with regard to Arabs and Jews. They carved swastikas on their desks. To these boys in the last years of high school, Hitler was a genius.”19 From the time the protectorate was set up in Morocco, the Muslim population became aware of the antisemitism of the occupation troops. The Meknes AIU director reported in 1912: “As soon as they have the slightest altercation with a Jew, they [the Muslims] threaten to bring the matter to . . . the Pasha . . . knowing that the Pasha will lean on their side.”20 Whether muted or overt, the anti-Jewish violence of Arab society was not created by the colonizers. They only exacerbated it, as did the troops under French command to an even greater extent. The colonizers manipulated the disdain the Arabs have of the Jews, and fanned the flames. In 1897 and 1898 in Algeria, Arab attacks against Jews were often stirred up by the occupiers. Moreover, in those areas where French presence was weak (as in Tlemcen), such incidents were few in number. One could sometimes see police officers (in uniform) soliciting Muslims in their “Moorish cafés” to go “break the Jews.” In 1934, the French Gouverneur Général of Algeria drew the attention of the Constantine Préfet (Prefect, the senior level of local administrative official in the French system) to the presence in Arab markets and shops of posters stating “O Muslims, France loves you and the Jews hate you.”21 These posters were produced by European antisemitic circles, whose Judeophobia worsened in 1936 with the arrival in power of the Front Populaire as well as the outbreak, one month later, of the Spanish Civil War. The posters tirelessly underscore the Jewishness of Léon Blum and other “Jewish ministers,” from Jean Zay to Georges Mandel before him. With the French government just taking office, a letter was sent to Morocco, to “many indigenous Muslims in order to remedy the inadequacies of the Socialist-Communist government which is harming our future.” This missive was followed by a tract entitled “To our Muslim Brothers,” which intones: France, your great friend, has now fallen into the hands of the Jews. The shame appalls us. We are seized by fury. Never would we have thought that, by means of foul manipulations, the damned race of Judas could rule over us for even a single day. In disposing thusly of our fate, the vanquishing Jew knows no bounds. He holds us, you Muslims and we French, more tightly than ever in his odious yoke. In Palestine, the Jews murder the Arabs after having despoiled them of their land under the protection of the English. . . . The Jew must once again become the crawling Yid . . . as your fathers and many of you [used to know him]. . . . We must all together—by force if needed—put these Jews back into their mellah and prevent them from interfering with political parties of any stripe.22

236  |  Jews in Arab Countries The Spanish Civil War provided antisemitic circles with the opportunity to conflate Jews and Bolsheviks, by stigmatizing the supposed involvement of the Jews in favor of the Republican side. Up to the Second World War, the Right and the colonialist extreme-right divided the two communities by using pro-Arab demagogy. Both elements of the right wing were seized by a sudden concern for the Arab peoples, united with the French on an “emotional basis against the common enemy—the Jew.”23 To this antisemitism, characterizing France’s Maghreb colonies of European settlement, must be added the violence, pillaging, and rape committed by indigenous troops, such as in Demnat in 1913. Such cases were however less a question of antisemitism than of the abandonment of a community without protection and at the mercy of the soldiery, which often consisted of Senegalese units.24 When the ranks of the indigenous troops were of Arab or Berber origin, their behavior was even more violent, motivated by overt anti-Jewish hatred. French troops were well aware of this. As an “occasional informer” of the Résidence Générale noted from Rabat, in 1933, “It was as well that the authorities did not make use of Moroccan tirailleurs or marksmen to re-establish order, confining them instead to their quarters, as these troops would not have failed to help the Muslims punish the Jews.”25 Thus, on June 8, 1948, following the Djerada pogrom (in Morocco), the Résident Général required the chiefs of all regions in the country to assemble their troops and keep them in readiness to intervene, and above all “to have them in the main composed of non-Moroccan troops.”26 The war and propaganda directed toward Arab countries by Vichy and the Axis would combine to give free rein to such behavior. In the 1930s, several associations and parties mobilized in North Africa against antisemitism, which was harsher there than in metropolitan France. These included the Ligue international contre l’antisémitism (LICA; International League Against Anti-Semitism), Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH; Human Rights League), the Libre Pensée (Free Speech), the Anciens Combattants Républicains (Association of Republican Veterans), and the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO; French Section of the Workers’ International). Attempts within certain Christian circles or—on the Left—by some secular schoolteachers (as occurred in metropolitan France itself) to contain antisemitism, seem to have had little impact. As well, an ephemeral Moroccan Union of Jews and Muslims was founded—although without effect—following the spike of antisemitism of July 1936. As we have seen, a Westernized Jewish elite slowly emerged in Morocco, in part spurred by the efforts of the AIU. The hearts and minds of this small fringe of educated people drew near to a France from which they would await a sign that never came. As Sémach noted in 1930, “The more our Moroccan Jews evolve,

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  237 educate themselves and grow closer to Europeans through their education, training and way of life, the more they suffer from comprising a socially inferior caste in this country, remote from Europeans.”27 Regardless of such sentiments, even those Moroccan Jews who hold other nationalities remain subjects of the sultan, unless of course they leave the country In June 1928, the Univers Israélite (Jewish Universe) reported that “Moroccan Jews are systematically excluded from French naturalization on the pretext that they are of Moroccan nationality. But they have never been Moroccan in the legal sense of the word.”28 At a time when so many other Near Eastern Jewries are achieving emancipation, the submission to the Makhzen’s justice during the French protectorate was painfully felt. On these issues, Lyautey had made his decisions at the time the protectorate was established, simultaneously rejecting both Zionism and French naturalization. His rejection was all the more determined in that Sultan Mohammed V (1927–1961) was hostile to any such measures. The unhappiness of Moroccan Jews in the face of the denial of civic equality only sharpened as the years went by, but in vain. Only Moroccan Jews who had served in the First World War would be granted naturalization, yet due to the opposition of the Muslim government, Paris remained deaf to all such demands. “Our political rulers are afraid of the outcries which Jewish emancipation could provoke.”29 Paris wanted no trouble from the Muslim masses of Morocco, traditionally hostile to the Jews, any more than it wanted trouble from the French populace of the protectorate. Sémach seemed resigned: he acknowledged that the road forward was definitively blocked. On January 31, 1931, he reported to Jacques Bigart, Secretary General of the AIU, that the Résidence has stated “I am meeting with opposition, even in my own staff.”30 This ever-disappointed hope was one of the factors behind the rise in power of the Zionist movement in Morocco, something recognized by the French administration.31 On the one hand, there was the language of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man, the vocabulary of “la France généreuse,” a generous France, while on the other hand the gate shut as soon as the fraternal words were uttered. “Rancor,” “mistrust,” “dashed hopes” all resound as a litany in the French administration’s reports at the end of the Second World War, as well as from the reports of Jewish institutions. The war, too, played a part. For a century, Europe had appeared as the symbol of modernization and protection. However, this myth was shattered by war and genocide. As for protection, this was now something that just might, possibly, be sought in the Middle East. This resulted in a wave of self-reassertion, a “return to source” among many Maghreb Jews, now convinced that the Europe of the Enlightenment had sacrificed them to its own policy of balance in a Cherifian Morocco where fewer than 20 percent of Jews had mastered French.

238  |  Jews in Arab Countries Signed in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne consecrated the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire. For four centuries, it had remained a key structure for the Arab world. Its collapse shook the Arab self-image, a blow further intensified for Muslim Arabs by the ending of the Caliphate in 1924. Thus, for the Arab and Muslim Orient, as for Europe, the years from 1918 to 1923 were critical. But they were equally so for the Jewries of both Europe and the Middle East, and indeed also for political Zionism, with the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, unleashing a wave of hope among Jews everywhere. For its part, Great Britain, avid to better establish its presence in the Near East, recognized the Arab nation (and thus, eventual Arab independence), at the same time as it recognized the idea of a Jewish nation. However, the period immediately after the First World War saw the beginnings of resistance against European colonizers. In the mountains of the Moroccan Rif, Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi held out against the French until 1926. In Libya, it took Italy more than twenty years to completely dominate the country. In Egypt, the nationalist movement opposing the British hold on the country gave birth in 1919 to the Wafd Party, led by Saad Zagloul (1857–1927), pushing the British to publish the Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence in 1922. Some colonized Arab territories became areas of European settlement, especially the Maghreb: in 1930, Europeans constituted some 1.5 million out of a total population of 17 million in all three countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria) combined. In Libya, Egypt, and Iraq, the European elements were present although massively urban and far less numerous than in the Maghreb, and thus all the more fragile and eventually eradicable. The first Arab demands were heard during the 1920s, starting with Egypt. By 1937—as a result of Wafd pressures—the Arabs achieved the end of Britain’s military presence (except in the Canal Zone), and the end of extraterritorial capitulation treaties. The country then joined the League of Nations as a sovereign state. In Iraq, independence was attained in 1932, but (as in Egypt) foreign policy remained in British hands, acting behind the scenes. In Morocco, the inter-war period saw the younger indigenous bourgeoisie start organizing in order to obtain autonomy and indeed independence, although that word remained taboo. The expectations of Jewish communities were, however, different. The Muslims expected the Jews to rally behind the Muslims’ national struggle, something they expressed in terms of loyalty. For some time, at least regarding Egypt, this national struggle was not closed, as it would be in later decades. Thus, at the first Arab music congress, held in Cairo in 1932, Jewish musicians were invited: Salih Ezra al-Kuwayti, the Iraqi Hugi Rahmin Pataw, the Egyptian David Hosni and others. Yet, scarred by their long subjection, the Jews looked forward to assurances of one day becoming independent. Such irreconcilable desires underscore the

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  239 presence of an existing confrontation that was now exacerbated by the conflict in Palestine. The Bludan Conference, held in September 1937 in Syria, called on the British to withdraw the partition plan for Palestine, which Lord Peel had proposed just weeks earlier, and thus choose between Britain’s faithfulness to the Balfour Declaration and its interests in the Arab world. Throughout the colonial period, receptivity to the Arabic language remained rare among Europeans, while at the same time many Arabs and Jews learned European languages. Across the Arab world—with the partial exception of Egypt— Jewish communities spoke Arabic, and in Morocco some Jews spoke Tamazirt as well. Written Hebrew was known, but most Jews did not have command of the spoken language. The inverse was the case for Arabic; all Jews spoke it but most had but a poor knowledge of the written language. Only well-educated Jews were literate in Arabic, and the AIU was not concerned to remedy this situation. Very few school directors introduced instruction in Arabic into the curriculum. The majority of Jewish communities (with the obvious exception of Iraq) thus remained outside the Nahda, the flourishing Arab intellectual world of the first half of the twentieth century. This only deepened a gulf that was later to contribute to the final exodus. Egypt presented an atypical situation. A large proportion of the Jewish community did not speak Arabic in daily life. Egyptian Arabic was spoken by the poorest and indigenous Jews, as well as the Karaites. Social elites used Italian as their lingua franca, soon to be supplanted by French. The rare Arabic language Jewish newspapers either struggled or closed. It was only at the end of the 1930s, faced with the development of the Arab national movement, that Egyptian Jews tried to attain a better grasp of Arabic. It was a sign of the times that in 1943, the Jewish Community Council translated its annual report into Arabic. The forward march toward independence would accelerate the Arabization process. In several spheres of Jewish life, during the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s, learning Arabic was advocated. However, this process of Arabization was not necessary in preindependence Iraq, where the Jewish community was totally immersed in Arabic, with a perfect mastery of Arabic literature and writing. Jewish schoolchildren were not, in the image of Naim Kattan, proudest of their knowledge of French and English, but rather “of their agile handling of Arabic; the first prize laureate in the end of year examinations set by the Ministry of Education for children in all schools was invariably a Jew.”32 On his 1930 Iraq inspection tour, Sémach noted that the academic language was Arabic, and that the time devoted to French had become limited in favor of good instruction of English and Hebrew. However, this symbiosis was illusory. If between 1920 and 1932 Jews lived happily, this was less due to economic growth than to the British presence. As

240  |  Jews in Arab Countries was the case with the powerful bond linking German Jews to their Vaterland, the romance between Iraqi Jews and their country—and language—was a one-way love affair. Yet, in Mesopotamia during the first decades of the twentieth century, the literary blossoming of Jewish writers in Arabic was impressive. In the Arab world, Iraq is the sole case where Jewish elites attempted to integrate into the dominant culture as they had done in the West. Less and less centered around works of a religious nature, Jewish literary production secularized after 1918, and it became increasingly harder to distinguish it from the work of Arab writers. At the turn of the twentieth century, and a bit later in Egypt, Jewish communities became anxious to have their members learn written Arabic. This was first and foremost a matter of pragmatism: literacy in Arabic was useful “in relations with the natives.”33 In 1912, Somekh, the Cairo AIU school director, defended the idea of better teaching of Arabic in AIU schools “in Syria, through Iraq, in Egypt and even in the Barbary States, notably in Morocco and Tunisia.”34 It would, he argues, be an error to concentrate educational efforts on Hebrew and French; this would amount to sidetracking Jewish children down a pathway with no future, while also depriving schools of new pupils. The willingness to teach Arabic would for a long time remain a pious wish. The repetition of recommendations to that effect demonstrates that the majority of Jews were in fact not literate in Arabic, and indeed apart from the small fringe of Westernized elites, were not literate in any language. Yet, in the 1930s, many authorities were convinced that such instruction would reduce tensions, and that, in the words of a girls’ school director in 1937, “instruction in Arabic would be an element of harmony between Jewish and Arab populations. . . . Israelite children will come to see their Arab compatriots as brothers,” she added, bringing about a desirable rapprochement in Meknes, where “Jews and Arabs live side by side but on bad terms.”35 But this wish often collided with the repeated refusal of Arabic teachers to work within Jewish schools, or even to teach Jewish students. In a word, efforts at Arabization, like attempts at assimilation generally, did not succeed.36 Beyond instruction in the language, Jewish youth could hardly see a place for itself in a nation increasingly defined in ethnic terms as Arab and in religious terms as Muslim. The first four decades of the twentieth century were marked by attempts at rapprochement, but it was the Jews who were almost always the initiators. In Tangiers in 1907, Abraham Ribbi, the AIU school director, created the Wifak Association to promote Judeo-Muslim dialogue. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution, which proclaimed equality of rights between Muslims and non-Muslims, brought hope to the Empire’s Jewish communities. But the law was ahead of attitudes. The view of “Muslims towards Christians and Jews is that of a master

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  241 vis-à-vis his slaves,” noted the British Vice-Consul at Mosul in 1909. “He treats them with a certain seigneurial tolerance as long as they keep their place. However, any sign of pretence to equality is promptly punished.”37 This was the context in which some Jews, from among the most Arabized, joined the Arab nationalist movement. This also included certain Egyptian Karaites, such as the lawyer Morad Faradji, a partisan of Jewish Arabization. Other Jewish intellectuals and political figures supported both Egyptian nationalism (in its Wafd version) and Zionism, without seeing that this involved a contradiction (unless of course they considered Palestine to be an “Arab cause”—which they did not). Among those Jews close to Wafd nationalism was Leon Castro. A friend and advisor of the prominent politician Saad Zagloul, in 1922 Castro founded the Wafd’s French language newspaper, La Liberté. Other Egyptian Jews engaged with the Left, such as Joseph Rosenthal, an Ashkenazi who played a pioneering role in Egyptian socialism; and following him, Henri Curiel and Raymond Aghion, key players in early Egyptian communism. Yet, Jewish intellectuals involved in the Arab nationalist struggle remained exceptional cases: in Cairo, Yaqub ben Raphael Sanua (alias Abbou Naddara, 1839–1912), who forged the slogan “Egypt for Egyptians”; in Beirut, Raphael Hakim; in Jaffa, Joseph Moyal (of Moroccan origin); in Damascus, Haim Lanyad. Sanua, and with him the small number of Jewish intellectuals who joined the Misr Al Fatat (Young Egypt) movement in 1879, were not representative. After 1918, with Arab nationalism in full bloom, the absence of Jews became all the more visible. They kept apart from the movement because they had been marginalized from a struggle whose ethnic dimension excluded them out of its disinterest in dhimmis. Moreover, the 1927 census revealed that only a third of the 64,000 Jews in Egypt were actually citizens of the country; 20 percent had a foreign nationality and 45 percent had none at all. That said, Egypt’s Jewish elite, by contrast, kept close ties with the monarchy. Thus, Joseph Cattaoui was a parliamentarian, and Minister of Finance in 1924 and of Communications in 1925. As for Moroccan Jews, they hardly engaged in the nationalist struggle. They were not alone in fearing the return of Arab sovereignty would be synonymous with a return of subjugation. If a few intellectuals joined the Istiqlal nationalists in the 1950s (such as Joseph Ohana and Jacques Dahan in Casablanca), the majority in the communities remained neutral. In the Morocco of the 1930s, the LICA worked for the rapprochement of the two communities, a policy, explained Etienne Coidan in 1946, “which met neither the desires of the mass of Muslims, profoundly hostile to Jews, nor the longings of the Jewish communities who, almost to a man, had eyes only for France.”38 Some could believe in this brotherly rapprochement, because of the partial but real cultural coexistence during the Middle Ages, when a majority of Jewish clerics read and wrote in Arabic using the Hebrew-Aramaic alphabet (the

242  |  Jews in Arab Countries documents lodged in the Cairo Genizah were principally written in this script, understood from Baghdad to Fez).39 Moreover, the Torah was taught to Jewish children in Arabic from one end of the Arab world to the other. Iraq presents a different profile. There, the cultural symbiosis was real. A third of novels published in Arabic were by Jewish authors. As Naïm Kattan recalled his Baghdad adolescence in the early 1940s: “a majority of Jews drank with an unquenchable thirst from the well-spring of this new culture.” Arabic was not a borrowed language: “Were we not the best Arabic grammarians? . . . There was neither affectation nor calculation in the love we bore for this language, which we spoke from birth, which was ours just as much as it belonged to the Bedouins of the desert.” With regard to the only literary weekly in Baghdad (of which most of the founders were Jews), Kattan writes: “There was nothing Jewish about the enterprise. They were writers; they were Iraqis.”40 He delighted in hearing his Arabic professor speak of this “limitless and ceaseless discovery of our cultural past. Yes, that past was ours.”41 In 1939, in Syria, an Al-Insha journalist was astonished by the success of the AIU pupils in the examinations for the graduating certificate, and even more by their high level: “Isn’t it surprising that the Jewish students have an Arabic superior to that of their companions in State schools, whom they really shame?”42 And yet, when Naim Kattan reproached a Jewish friend for having abandoned the study of Arabic, he received this response: “They don’t want us Jews involved in their literature.”43 The Jewish-Arab symbiosis was not limited to language. It is clear that in the Maghreb in particular, there was a convergence of religious practices, which testifies to the proximity of mental universes. This was true across the Near East where, in Mosul in 1938, AIU school director Silberstein described the Shabbat services in the town’s oldest synagogue. He discovered aligned facing the synagogue, 20-some Muslim women, veiled, holding towards the Torah scroll, in a movement of ecstasy, rachitic babies, pale and nearly bloodless in their dirty and colored headbands. Muslim women in this place! . . . An old Jew, face shining with pride and joy, explained to me that this scene occurred every Saturday, that the blessed moment when the Scrolls emerged, saluted by chanting, was awaited impatiently by many ill Muslims. “They know very well,” continued my interlocutor, “that healing can be rapid and thoroughgoing, and that the Sefer of Moses [i.e., the Torah] contains the completely pure, real and forthright truth.”44

However, Silberstein was aware that the same crowd, credulous and naive, could erupt into a pogrom tomorrow and attack these same scrolls. Yet, at no moment should the existence of syncretism allow us to forget the psychological and physical distances between communities. Even if foreign travelers to remote regions of Morocco or Libya had trouble distinguishing Jewish and

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  243 Arab children, nevertheless Arabs, Berbers and Jews could recognize and differentiate each other. Cultural proximity did not prevent North African Arabs and Berbers from scornfully regarding Jews with condescension. Between learned persons in both religions, it seems the disdain was shared. Paradoxically, this distance sometimes made dialogue possible. Unlike with Christianity, Islam actually recognized the religious concepts that it had in common with Judaism, and it did not regard itself as a “new Israel.” Contrary to the Christians, who intended to take the place of the Jews as verus Israel” (the true Israel), Muslims considered simply that the Jews had departed from the “straight and narrow.” In this context, it would be appropriate to speak of “remote proximity.” Iraqi Jewry, which believed in integration, would come to pay a steep price for this illusion. This split would be all the more painful in that the Jewish community of this country had presented a model of successful Arabization. “Each and every Iraqi Jew speaks and thinks in Arabic,” wrote the AIU co-director in Baghdad in 1933. “We shouldn’t incriminate them for being Zionists just because they don’t constitute an indivisible block in union with the Arab nation. We must understand that this hatred against the Jews comes solely from the ignorance of the masses (98 percent of whom are illiterate), stirred up by a few anti-Semitic demagogues. This tension will only end the day when the advanced classes of Arabs understand their Jewish compatriots better, and want to collaborate with them for the prosperity of the country.”45 There were no “Jewish Arabs” but rather only Jews in Arab territory; they had not been accepted into the bosom of the Arab nation, a nation whose ethnic views automatically excluded them. This was all the more so when this nationalism took on an Islamic dimension. Regardless of the nature of prevailing European guardianship, the daily destiny of Jews remained hostage to outbreaks of violence by their neighbors, as well as to veiled threats. In colonies of European settlement, such as Algeria, the threat posed by colonizers was added to that of the Arab mobs, with the menace of the latter arousing the resentment of the colonizers. “In the streets and cafés, one talks of provoking an anti-Semitic explosion,” reported the director of the Casablanca AIU in July 1919. “Words such as yid or dirty Jew are frequently used by coachmen and certain nasty Arabs.”46 In Tripoli in 1895, it appeared impossible for Jewish children to attend an Arab school, “given that the Muslim populace here is very fanatical, and that the presence of an Israelite in a Muslim school would cause trouble in the town.”47 In 1910, Yomtov Sémach described the Sana’a lycée, which is attended by just fifty students although it is large enough for three hundred: “A number of Jews got themselves enrolled; but the young Arabs greeted them with a hail of stones, and our poor little co-religionists dared not return.”48 Injustice was discernable in the smallest matters of everyday life. At the first sign of a clash, “the mob starts roaring,” the newspaper Maroc (Morocco)

244  |  Jews in Arab Countries reports in May 1933 regarding an incident that occurred in Rabat. “The mob heads toward the mellah, and starts pillaging. It is important to not exaggerate, but it must nevertheless be noted that a thousand stevedores are ready, at the first signal given by the lieutenants of Shakib Arsalan, to kill Jews and sack the mellah.”49 This climate is common to the entirety of the Arab world. In June 1936, the Beirut AIU director denounced this permanent atmosphere of insecurity: “On the slightest pretext, the Arabs create unrest and sow terror to such an extent that the police station established right in the quartier to prevent such disorder is often incapable of coming to grips with the situation.” The Jews who for work purposes needed to travel to towns in the Syrian hinterland “hardly spend even a single night there.”50 With the exception of Iraq, education in Jewish communities—except for the poorest classes—was prematurely de-Arabized (and in Turkey even more deTurkified). Partisans of Arabic teaching blame the AIU, which they accuse of having enlarged the gap by inventing “the modern Jew.”51 Above and beyond the polemical issues, this issue of language highlights the latent divorce that for decades had been pulling the two communities further and further apart. At a time when the Muslim majority turned toward independence, the majority of the Jews looked toward the West. Only the immediate perspective of independence would push many Jewish community leaders to support the teaching of Arabic, particularly in Morocco. Westernization pushed back Judeo-Arabic in favor of the colonizers’ languages. Except in Iraq, Arabic had come to be viewed as the symbol of “a bygone past,”52 but colonization merely accelerated the divorce process; it did not initiate it. The AIU found itself in the dock over the growing estrangement between communities. In 1902, in Cairo, Somekh qualifies as “strange” the spectacle of young people “who speak and write a foreign language with ease and exactitude, and who have only a superficial knowledge—hardly usable—of their own language!”53 In Morocco, many wonder whether they should learn Arabic at a time when they already envisage emigrating. Given that they are sidelined because of being Jews, to teach young Jews in Arabic would only aggravate their sense of resentment.54 Some are prepared to integrate into the nation taking shape, but the majority of Jewish communities—still frightened by the violence emanating from the Arab street—have a fearful presentiment of a return to subjection. Libyan Jews seem powerless before an evolving situation that will determine their destiny. Faced with Islamized nationalism synonymous with a return to dhimmi status, they see Zionism—more than any idea of a Jewish State—as offering the political impetus that will restore their dignity. Emerging Arab nationalism

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  245 leaves Oriental Jews with little choice; more fundamentally than blaming these Jews for their estrangement from the Arab world, Arab nationalism considers them, from the 1930s, as traitors. The communist parties constituted the sole structure within which Jews and Muslims could cohabit. In Iraq, the communist party attracted the minorities that Arab nationalism tends to exclude: Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians. It was above all within communist parties that some Muslim voices rejected anti-Judaism, highlighting the role of the colonial power in the troubles that arose between Jews and Muslims with the objective, in the opinion of those Muslim voices, of wrecking the nationalist movement. The Palestinian Communist Party was an exception: dominated by Arabs, in 1930 it termed the Jewish minority of Palestine as “an imperialist agent of oppression of the national movement of Arab liberation.”55 In effect, the ranks of Arab nationalism were virtually deserted by a Jewish minority often perceived as an auxiliary of European imperialism. With a population 40 million strong in 1914, the Arab world grew to 60 million by 1939. This rapid rise was due first to a decline in mortality occurring at the same time that childbirth rates remained high, thanks to an economic and cultural revolution. There may have been a second reason, one sometimes advanced during the decolonization struggles, such as during the Algerian war. To Pierre Mendés France, who deplored the sudden demographic expansion of Algeria’s Muslim populace, Jean Amrouche replied: “The galloping birth-rate is the effect of a reflex on the part of the social organism which is mortally threatened by colonization and which has no other means to fight to ensure its survival than to fall back on strength of numbers.”56 The demographic expansion of the 1920s to the 1940s set off a massive rural exodus that accelerated the growth of urban populations. Cairo grew from 800,000 inhabitants in 1917 to 1,300,000 in 1937. In 1900, some 15 percent of Egyptians inhabited towns of more than 20,000. By 1937 this had risen to 25 percent. One finds the same growth in North Africa, Palestine, and Syria. The Arab intellectual elites at the start of the century, particularly those of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, were conscious of their lag vis-à-vis Europe. This gap was the fruit of the slow pace of school enrollment. In 1940 in Morocco, 20,000 Jewish children and 26,000 Muslim children attended school, but the Jewish community made up less than 5 percent of the population. In 1945, almost all Moroccan Jewish children appear to have received education, while 90 percent of Muslim children were not enrolled (although there were some statistical discrepancies). Such a gap was also found in the other Arab countries. In Egypt, 82 percent of Jewish children over the age of five were literate in 1947, against only 44 percent of Muslim children.57

246  |  Jews in Arab Countries The literacy promoted by the AIU deepened Arab resentment. “We had neither notebooks nor textbooks,” recalls Saïd Ghallab, evoking the late 1930s in Morocco. “But the Jews of our age did. That annoyed us. We used to wait for them at their school gates, at the Israelite school. To our feints and attacks they replied in French, which drove us mad. We’d be barefoot and in rags, but they were dressed European-style. We would grab their book-bags and anything they had in their hands.”58 The more the economic and social situation of the Jews improved, the more their political and security situation deteriorated, as if their emancipation appeared unbearable to the Arab populace. The AIU did not only educate: it induced a new self-image and created new expectations, strengthening the idea of global Jewish solidarity. It educated Westernized white-collar workers whose cultural advance, when compared with their Arab compatriots, created a widening gap. Such people were from the start in a position of superiority vis-à-vis the illiterate masses. Arab resentment was only exacerbated by the striking disjuncture between the numerical weakness of the Jews and their importance in economic, social, and cultural domains. The contrast was striking indeed between those who had been subjugated at the start of the nineteenth century, and emancipated people who, already well before the First World War, spoke with a different voice. Education fostered ambitions within young emancipated Jews, who looked to the European Enlightenment. Yet, in a colonial context, the pathways forward were limited, with a broad gap between the hopes created by the acquisition of diplomas, and the possible outcomes held out to those who earned them. The subaltern positions offered, for example, by the Résidence Générale in Morocco only fed Jewish youth’s frustrations and intensified their desire to emigrate. Contemporary observers are unanimous in reporting how the Arab population took umbrage at Jewish emancipation, which also constituted Westernization: “Even in the mellahs of the mountains and the Sahara regions, mothers whom it was sometimes difficult to distinguish from Berber or Arab women [started to call] their girls Marcelle, Alice, Colette, Denise, Josiane or Yvonne, and even Clotilde!”59 The French police report that the Muslim populace, “by tradition is opposed to any concession to the Jews,” not to mention the “hard core and those on the street,” ready to take up slogans from German radio: “Ingleterra el Youdiha” (Jewified England), “Youdi Mericaniin” (American Yids).60 Clichés about Jews and money-focused occupations blended with fantasies about “Jewish money,” and this secretive minority that “enriches itself” at the expense of the majority. In fact, the enrichment of a tiny Jewish commercial elite was undeniable, and this success, taken in isolation against a background of general poverty, did not fail to arouse jealousy and indeed violence. In 1940, after

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  247 Pétain comes to power, the Grand Vizier of the Sultan, El-Mokri, explained to Paul Baudouin, Vichy Minister of Foreign Affairs: “Before the Protectorate the Jews took twenty years to make a big fortune; they enjoyed it for ten years. Then a little revolution intervened which made them lose their fortune. The Jews started again and became rich again for thirty years, ending finally in the confiscation of their excessive assets. Now that the Protectorate exists, we fear that this thirtyyear rhythm has been interrupted. The Protectorate has now lasted twenty-eight years. Thus, following this ancient rule—a rule which strikes me as very wise— we have but two years to confiscate the fortune of the Israelites.”61 “Jewish prosperity,” often the stuff of fantasy, had fed Arab resentment since at least the eighteenth century, when certain Jews became the vectors of European development in the Maghreb. “Without them, we would see neither talent nor industry. The country would have difficulty even subsisting without their help. They are the only ones who work with any intelligence,” wrote British doctor William Lempriere, called to serve in the court of Sultan Sidi Mohammed in the 1790s.62 The economic success of a few, the emergence of a middle class, the educational gap—all these factors contributed to these tensions. On top of these elements one can add the establishment of Jewish associations throughout the Arab Middle East (other than Yemen), the adoption of European names and other speech uses, the mastery of a European language, and so on. Muslim anger flared red-hot at the first sign of any Jewish desire for autonomy. Any manifestation of emancipation or sign of wealth negatively upset Muslims’ perception of their Jewish neighbors. Jealousy was also political in nature, as one saw in 1913 in the Egyptian press, following the nomination by the Sublime Porte of two Jewish ministers. As has been discussed above, many Muslims became irritated by what they called “Jewish arrogance.” The people who once lowered their heads, pressed themselves against the walls as they passed by and went about barefoot in the Arab quarters, now seemed to have forgotten their previous “discretion.” These complaints went back prior to the protectorate (1912) and demonstrated that when the Jewish condition in any way evaded submission, this was ipso facto labeled “arrogance.” To the present date, in the view of Arab elites and even many Arab historians, the Jews benefitted from the European advance by becoming “insolent,” causing deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations. By departing from their customary submission, the Jews behaved as provocateurs. In short order this view acquired the status of orthodoxy throughout the Arab world. Thus, in Morocco, the Muslim press highlighted the “arrogance” of the Jews, said to have intensified in 1936 with the victory in France of the Front Populaire. The arrival of American soldiers in Morocco from November 1942 was said to

248  |  Jews in Arab Countries have set off a resurgence of “the arrogance by which certain amongst them had distinguished themselves during the period of the Front.”63 In 1946, Étienne Coidan called on the Jewish Scout movement to, in so many words, display a certain measure of reserve.64 This was echoed in Yemen where, following the December 1947 pogroms, the newspaper Sout El-Yemen noted: “Those who approve of the riots maintain that the Jews became proud.”65 This was the classic stance of the dominant in the face of new insubordination by the dominated, and where dignity is transformed into arrogance. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the discourse of business owners regarding the condition of workers often took the same channels. The conflict in the Holy Land without doubt played a major role, but perhaps less essential for Muslims than the attitude of Jews, as noted in Le Courrier Colonial in 1929, which was considered flippant by Moroccan Muslims, who experienced it as “an attitude which wounds the dignity of Moroccans.”66 Writing in 1946 about the 1930s, Étienne Coidan notes that “the terms mezreg and dhimma came often into their conversations, and they recalled with complacency the Jewish humility of the past, from times when Jewish communities wore black and paid dzizya taxes to their Muslim lords. They forcefully upbraided us for the emancipation of Moroccan Jewry.”67 Jews, in any event, were not the only ones to face popular violence in the Arab world. This was the lot of all the minorities, whose position deteriorated as a result of modernization. The more the Arabs seemed to lose control of their own destiny, the more the condition of the minorities degraded. Starting in 1929, the cause of Palestine crystalized this resentment, the source and amplitude of which are by no means to be found confined within the borders of the Holy Land. As modernization advanced, the Christian and Jewish minorities become the targets of social violence. The years 1860–1914 were not just a time of anti-Jewish persecutions but are also punctuated by massacres of Christians, some 5,000 of whom were killed in Damascus in 1860. Antisemitism was also fueled by colonial frustration. Ferhat Abbas, one of the leaders of Algerian nationalism (he would later lead the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in the 1950s) noted of Algerian Jews prior to the 1954 uprising: “If, based on a decree, they had created a situation worthy of their qualities and of their powerful capacity to work, then no one would have dreamed of reproaching them or envying them. But for them to use this situation in order to prevent or slow down our own evolution, well, this is intolerable.”68 Despite Abbas’ assertion, there is no doubt that the Crémieux Decree encouraged a sort of bitterness among many Muslims engaged on the pathway of emancipation via education, who could not understand the inferior position in which they found themselves when compared with Jews who were no less indigènes than were Muslims. In 1938, four years after the Constantine pogrom,

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  249 an Algerian Muslim explained that the discontent had been provoked by “the traditional arrogance of the nouveau-riche Jew, by the airs of superiority that he put on since becoming a French citizen,” which was a “privileged position.” The Crémieux Decree had “aroused the jealousy of Muslims whose amour-propre or self-respect was wounded, a sentiment which could only worsen since they had previously been the masters, habituated during centuries to primacy over their subjugated Jewish neighbors.”69 Several sources confirm the trauma characterizing Judeo-Muslim relations, in particular due to the possibility of a Jew bearing arms, something that centuries of dhimmi status and social convention had conditioned Muslims to reject. A deterioration in relations thus accompanied Jewish pretensions to acting as equals. The decadence of the Arab world began well before colonization. Nabih Amin Fais, one of the greatest Lebanese historians, considered that it had nothing to do with nineteenth-century colonization, nor with the crusades of the twelfth century, but rather was a reflection of a “drying up of the creativity of Arab society” in the cultural domain, the restraints placed on freedom of thought from the ninth and tenth centuries, the persecution both of Greek inspired schools of philosophy and the impact of Shia Islam in particular.70 Thus, the crusaders of the twelfth century would encounter a society already “in the grip of a process of decomposition.”71 Yet, most Arab historians have difficulty escaping from a soothing vision of the past, or in changing their collective wisdom and breaking with the idea of seeking, in an exaggerated past, solace from the present. They struggle to stop incorrectly attributing the decadence to causes that obscure the role played by a slave economy, political tyranny, religious dogmatism, and the absence of freedom of thought. As one Lebanese historian argued in 1978, “Baghdad did not fall as a cultural capital in 1258 [the year it was taken by the Mongols] but in 1150 when the Caliph Al-Mustanjid gave the order to burn all scientific books. The Arab civilization in Spain did not perish in 1492 [with the fall of Grenada to Christian Spain] but rather at the end of the 12th century, when the Caliph AlMansur burned the works of Averroes.”72 In the Middle Ages, the ulemas were the intellectuals of the Arab-Muslim world. Bought off by those in power, these “men, charged with teaching the people, hastened instead to lead them astray in preaching to them submission and docility towards the powerful, as well as fatalism and passivity.”73 This servility “was not merely the result of external constraints, but was also interiorized in both faith and opinions.”74 As the opposite of essentialization, cultural history takes account of the course taken by ideas. The culture of submission that transformed existence into fate came to take root prematurely in an Arab-Muslim

250  |  Jews in Arab Countries world where the concepts of de-legitimation of power and the right to insurrection remained foreign to the dominant currents of thought. Thus, Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), founder of the most orthodox current in religious law, advocated obedience even if the chief had committed a sin against God: “You should nevertheless obey him and not rebel. Do not support fitna, whether in actions or words.”75 For several contemporary Arab historians, the Arab political tradition is at the source of modern-day political tyranny. Some in fact go all the way back to the Umayyad Period (661–750) to find the roots of a system featuring “systematic oppression of the individual, drastic restrictions of freedom of thought and the imposition of intellectual and judicial terror with regard to any deviance.”76 As the Algerian historian A. Lakhdar writes, “Throughout Arab history, power has been and remains above the law.”77 To this day slavery, which is one of the foundations of this culture, remains a major taboo in Arab historiography, yet the violence prevailing in those Arab society is organically linked to it. The Arabic-speaking Israeli historian Emmanuel Sivan has described the interest of revisionist Arab historians in studying slavery not to understand its actual recurrences, but instead the imprint it has left on the power structure. The past of slavery and servitude forms part of the unimagined or unconscious of many contemporaries, and indeed the division between “free man/slave” in the lands of Islam constitutes one of the three essential binary distinctions, along with “Muslim/non Muslim,” and “man/woman.” In fact, these three oppositions participate in one and the same mental universe, and yet two among them have up to the present been neglected. The fate of Jews and Christians in the lands of Islam is, however, inseparable from the defeat of the Enlightenment and of democracy, of which the writing of history is a key element.78 A number of Arab historians, such as Buali Yassin of Syria, consider that secular thinking has never been able to blossom in Islamic soil. In the 1960s, those who had attacked Islamic dogma as a mental shackle were insulted, hounded out of universities, threatened with death, and forced into exile. Among them were the Syrians Sadik Jamal al-Azm (author in 1969 of Critique of Religious Thought) and Nadim al-Bitar, forced to go into exile in Canada after receiving a death sentence pronounced by the learned doctors of the law. As for the great Arab thinkers, Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Averroes, and Ibn Khaldun, none of them had a successor to perpetuate his thinking, none was the founder of a school of thought, and no element of their thinking penetrated into the minds of ordinary people. Any pretension to equality for those who had been subjected in the past— Jews and women at first instance—was experienced as, and felt like, “arrogance,” and by extension the liberty of others was perceived as a “lack of respect.” The supposed arrogance of the Jews, highlighted a thousand times in the reports and testimonies of the times, is nothing other than their move away from the norms

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  251 of servitude that had always been assigned to them. To be excluded was their natural state. The emancipation of Jews and women broke the traditional vision of the world, one which came from Islam, and that sculpted the family on a model of gender (masculine) and age-based despotism. “The thirty thousand Armenian Christians who inhabit the town are terrified and will be massacred if the Turks gain the upper hand. The Muslims are angered by the equality which Ibrahim Pasha has established between them and the Christians,”79 wrote Lamartine in 1833, as he visited Damascus during his Oriental journey. From their entry into Tetouan at the beginning of the 1860s, the Spanish instituted equality between the three religions of the Book. “It meant the collapse of the Islamic world,” correctly observed Moroccan historian Mohamed Kenbib.80 In 1900, when Moroccan Sultan Moulay Abd el-Aziz attempted a fiscal reform of the country, he put a fairer tax system in place. But it was immediately rejected by the notables and Muslim clerical orthodoxy, offended by the idea that a Muslim could be treated like a Jew. Moses Montefiore’s visit to the sultan in 1864 had shown how much the claim of equality antagonized the Muslim world, which considered that the promulgation of the February 1864 Cherifian dahir had made the Jews “arrogant.” At the beginning of the 1870s, when the Turks reoccupied Yemen, the Arab notables applied pressure to prevent any reform of the Jewish condition in conformity with the decrees of 1839 and 1856 (the Tanzimat). On the contrary, the notables demanded the full reestablishment of Jewish subjection, threatening a bloodbath otherwise. The Turks refused to yield. In 1910, Sémach considered that should it come about, the liberty of Jewish subjects would upset Muslim order in Yemen: “They [the Arabs] do not wish to give up their prerogatives from one day to the next, because they will then be face to face with educated Jews. It’s a matter of time, of much patience.”81 The end of Jewish servility appeared as a major trauma in the psychological economy of the Arab-Muslim world. “Without [Jewish] servitude, authority would lose its footing. It is based on this connection, the abandonment of which would spell the end of this authority.”82 The progressive emancipation of the Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, in parallel with colonial penetration, spurred the proliferation of antisemitic pamphlets in the Arab world; unsurprisingly, then, the first translation into Arabic of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared in Cairo in 1927 and at once met with success with the elites of the massively illiterate country. In June 1936, the Résidence Générale reported that the Muslims “are starting to find that Moroccan Israelites are freeing themselves a little too quickly from customs which, prior to the French arrival in Morocco, guaranteed Muslims would remain superior to Jews.”83 One thus understands better why Muslim opinion would approve—if not actually rejoice, more or less discretely—the antisemitic

252  |  Jews in Arab Countries legislation put in place by the Vichy regime, the essence of such legislation being to put the Jew back into the position from which he should never have moved. In 1943, when Moroccan Jews regained their rights, bitterness flowed freely. For the Muslim populace, the end of Jewish inferiority would always constitute a shock, as Étienne Coidan analyzed the situation in 1946: “Not yet being willing to admit that one man is worth the same as another, they [Muslims] consider it a humiliation to see the Jews move away from their state of fearful reserve, and are of the view that in acting that way, the Jews clearly abuse the generous hospitality accorded to them by the Sultans of Morocco since their exile of 1492.”84 Both the oppression of the Jews—barely acknowledged by Arab intellectuals— and the erosion of this oppression under the impact of the Enlightenment and then of Zionism, constituted a series of narcissistic wounds that for the most part remain unanalyzed, like ancient manuscripts that may be indecipherable to us, but that speak in a voice that remains meaningful to Jews and Arabs. This blindness to the humiliation imposed on others is indissociable from the position of victim in which, today, the Arab-Muslim world has enclosed itself. In 1982, former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella declared: “Israel is a veritable cancer transplanted onto the Arab world. . . . What we want . . . is to be. But we can only be if the other does not.”85 The emancipation of the Jews, linked to the idea of equality, has been experienced in this Arab-Muslim world as a reversal of the natural order, and as an infamy, an abuse and the result of a plot: the plot of Western colonialism and imperialism, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and finally of world Zionism. Such are the origins of a psychic trauma that only longterm historical analysis can elucidate.

Notes 1. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 56. 2. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, Morocco, 28 August 1923. 3. Cited in Verdès-Leroux, Les Français d’Algérie, 80. 4. Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 158. 5. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., 1946. 6. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, official report, April 1945. 7. CZA, C10/610, 1951. 8. De Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, 395 and 397. 9. Cited by Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Colonialisme francais et colonialisms juif en Algérie (1830–1845),” in Michel Abitbol (ed.), Judaisme d’Afrique du Nord aux XIX–XX siècles (Jerusalem: Institut Ben Zvi, 1980), 37–48. 10. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Casablanca, 10 August 1919. 11. AIU, Morocco, IV, C. 11, Safi, 8 June 1913.

Between Europeans and Arabs: Finding a Space?  |  253 12. AIU, I-J, 1–2, Morocco. 13. Memmi, La Statue de sel, 62. 14. Cf. De Felice, Jews in Arab Land. 15. AIU, Morocco, V. B., Tangiers, March 1905. 16. Ibid. 17. Cited in Emmanuel Debono, “Antisémites européens et musulmans en Algérie après le pogrom de Constantine (1934–1939),” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, 187, July–Dec. 2007, 311. 18. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 29. 19. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2253. 20. AIU, France, XIV. F. 25, Meknes, Moyal, November 1912. 21. Cited in Debono, “Antisémites européens et musulmans en Algérie,” 14. 22. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, undated (probably July 1936). 23. May 1938. Cited in Debono, “Antisémites européens et musulmans en Algérie,” 309. 24. AIU, Morocco, I. J. 1–2, 7 February 1913. 25. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24 26. Ibid., dossier 26, author’s emphasis. 27. Le Courrier du Maroc, 27 February 1930. 28. L’Univers israélite, 22 June 1928, cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 517. 29. AIU, France, XV. F. 26, 7 August 1923. 30. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 17. 31. Cf. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Secretan report, 23 November 1947. 32. In Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 78. 33. AIU, Egypt, XIV. 182, Cairo, Somekh, 31 July 1908. 34. AIU, Egypt, XII. E. 182, Cairo, Somekh, 1 November 1912. 35. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5, Fortunée Chayo, 11 April 1937. 36. CZA, S32/951, 25 October 1949. 37. Cited in Weinstock, Une si longue presence, 209. 38. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 39. Cf. Taïeb, Sociétés juives du Maghreb moderne, 153. 40. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 132. 41. Ibid., 200. 42. AIU, Syria, XI. E. 94, Al-Insha, 25 June 1939. 43. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 248. 44. Paix et Droit, March 1938, 9. 45. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2, Baghdad, 29 August 1933. 46. AIU, Morocco, III. C. 10, Casablanca, Bensimhon, 13 July 1919, letter to Jacques Bigart. 47. AIU, Libya, II. E., Tripoli, D. Arié, 19 June 1895. 48. In Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen.” 91. 49. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 533. 50. AIU, Lebanon, I. C. 1, Beirut, 18 June 1936. 51. Cited in Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 254. 52. Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain, 124. 53. AIU, Egypt, X. E. 182, Cairo, 24 October 1902. 54. AIU, Morocco, IV. C. 11, Tetouan, 8 August 1938.

254  |  Jews in Arab Countries 55. Cited in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée. Le IIIè Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine (Paris: Verdier, 2009), 23. 56. Témoignage chrétien, 8 November 1957, cited in Verdès-Leroux, Les Français d’Algérie, 52. 57. On female literacy in Fez, see Doris Bensimon-Donath, L’Évolution de la femme israélite à Fes, (Aix-en-Provence: La Pensée universitaire, 1962), 141. 58. Ghallab, “Les Juifs vont en enfer,” 2251. 59. See David Corcos, Studies in the History of the Jews of Morocco (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1976), 165; and CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, dossier 24. 60. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Casablanca, Information note (police), 21 August 1945. 61. Cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 113. 62. Cited in CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, Coidan report, January 1946. 63. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 646. 64. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 65. CZA, S6/4578. 66. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 516. 67. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, dossier 18, January 1946. 68. Cited in Verdès-Leroux, Les Français d’Algérie, 219. 69. See Rabah Zenati, La Question juive, Algiers, 1938, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 363. 70. Cf. “La Civilisation arabe au XIIè siècle,” Al-Abhath 17, Beirut, 1964, cited by Sivan, Mythes politiques arabes, 59. 71. Sivan, Mythes politiques arabes, 59. 72. Cited in ibid., 175. 73. Ibid. 74. Cited in ibid., 160. 75. Ibid., 189. 76. Ibid., 155. 77. Ibid., 157. 78. Ibid., 264–265. 79. Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835), in J.-C. Berchet, Le Voyage en Orien (anthology), note on April 1833, 805. 80. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 98. 81. Sémach, “Une mission de l’Alliance au Yémen.” 101. 82. Ennaji, Le Sujet et le Marmelouk, 176. 83. CADN, Maroc, D. I., Questions Juives. 84. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 85. Cited in Pierre-André Taguieff, Prêcheurs de haine (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2004), 343.

7 The 1930s

Years of Tension

Culture was one of the most powerful motors driving the awakening of Arab

nationalism; this was also the case for various concurrent European nationalisms as well as Jewish nationalism. Above all, from Egypt to Iraq, the Arab world— before and after the First World War—experienced the beginning of a cultural revolution. This was inextricably linked to the educational revolution, in particular the beginnings of female education, usually in missionary schools. Around the turn of the twentieth century, an entire generation in the Arab world learned to read, mainly in French. In certain families in Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut, French and English were spoken fluently, but not Arabic (in fact, the first important novel in Arabic was not published until 1914). Yet, with the establishment of printing presses and the birth of an Arab language press, education in Arabic progressed. Newspapers and magazines played a key role in the reawakening of the literary language and the crystallization of national feelings. Starting in the 1860s and 1870s, several Middle Eastern intellectual reviews appeared. They initiated debates and conveyed major currents of Western thought. Two of them were published by Lebanese Christians in Cairo: Al-Muktataf, by Yakub Sarouf (1852–1927) and Faisq Nimr (1855–1951), and Al-Hilal, by Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914). In 1875 Al-Ahram was founded in Cairo by Lebanese immigrants. It was above all by way of books that Europe and America penetrated this world, through European languages, debates over ideas, and intellectual confrontation. The awareness of a united Arab destiny, or at least of the relative cultural unity of the Arab world, was also a factor in the birth of national sentiment. Political solidarity was expressed by elites early on, as for example in response to the Balfour Declaration, and by the support of Palestinian Arabs for the 1925 Moroccan Rif revolt. The intellectual, scientific, and national awakening of Arab-Muslim societies achieved lift-off on the shoulders of the new educated class. The confrontation with the West, although unavoidable, was nevertheless mitigated for Christian Arabs, but conversely was more violent for Muslims, challenged over the issue of the inadaptability of Islam to the modern world. In the view of the highly influential Persian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), Islam hindered neither

256  |  Jews in Arab Countries rationality, nor progress, nor social solidarity; on the contrary, he considered that Islam favors them. His modernist views on Islam were taken up a little later by an Egyptian Sunni, Muhammad Abdou (1849–1905), whose work would come to affect the Muslim world even more. Following this generation of “modernist Muslims,” the national idea took shape between 1890 and 1914. Initially, Arab nationalism was a response to Turkish domination, which was then eroding, but also to the 1908 Young Turks Revolution. It was in addition a response to the European occupation of a large part of the Arab world including Morocco itself, a country that had never been colonized by the Ottomans. Arab nationalism rapidly distances itself from Jewish communities. In Egypt, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the AIU’s Somekh explains that nationalism, “growing ever livelier and more redoubtable with each passing day,” requires not that a candidate for public employment be of Ottoman nationality, as previously (an easy matter, involving a simple declaration), but also that he be able to prove his Egyptian citizenship. Documentation to that effect could only be obtained on condition of having been educated in both Arabic and English, which was the case for very few Jews.1 The wish to exclude Jews was even more evident in Syria, where no Jewish representative was invited to participate in the National Congress, held in Damascus on June 20, 1919; this was because Syrian nationalism was in the first place religious—rarely Christian, but massively Muslim, and preponderantly exclusionary of Jews: “We would have really wanted to be Arab-Jews,” noted Albert Memmi in 1973. “If we turned away from that, it was because the Muslim Arabs systematically blocked us, during centuries, with disdain and cruelty.”2 Finally, two other factors contributed to the exclusion of Jews: on the one hand, European education, and on the other, the secularization of social life in the manner of the Enlightenment (emancipation, freedom, and nation), which made Jews’ domination by Arab-Muslim power more absurd with each passing day. Both before and after 1914, and in parallel with Arab cultural awakening, Arab nationalism would briefly attempt to integrate minorities into its national struggle. On July 18, 1921, before the leaders of the Jewish communities, King Faisal, the first sovereign of modern Iraq, declared: “In the terminology of patriotism, the words Jew, Muslim and Christian have no meaning, for there is simply a country called Iraq and we are all Iraqis.”3 At the apogee of the independence movement, Arab nationalism sometimes called on Jewish communities. Whether sincerely or by calculation, many Arab nationalists briefly believed that the Jews, with whom they had always lived—and who had in some cases been there long before the Arabs—would join in their struggle. But by the end of the war, these moderates were to be overtaken by the radicals. In Libya, for example, after the November 1945 pogroms, the British authorities, in charge of the territory since the defeat of the Italians, concluded

The 1930s | 257 that nationalist leaders were fanning the flames and doing nothing to calm the situation. “Some well-known Arab personalities have condemned these shameful riots. But as a general rule, we note that the Arab community in the broad sense has no feeling of responsibility for what has just been committed. Nor has that community been in a rush to bring help to the victims.”4 The attempt to envisage a secularized nationalism rapidly stoped short, for the Arab world contained but a tiny minority of secular people, and Islam remained the motor of social, intellectual, and public life, even if ulema-based education regressed and knowledge of a European language was becoming more and more important. Moreover, the colonial powers inspired the creation of new laws and tribunals, requiring training of new judges and lawyers. The example of Egyptian nationalism was emblematic of the failure of the Enlightenment in the Arab world. Originally inspired by Islam, this nationalism de facto dismissed Jews and Copts. But under the strong influence of the West, more marked in Egypt than elsewhere, nationalism would localize, that is to say it would “Egyptianize,” giving back a role to Copts and indigenous Jews. Moreover, the first to have worked for this end were Jews, in particular Yacoub Sanoua (1839–1912), known under his nom de plume of Abu Naddara. In 1907, Egyptian nationalism split into two distinct streams. Hizb al-Watani had a pan-Islamist strategy that transcended Egypt’s borders. The second—Hizb al-Umma—embraced a more territorial concept over and above religious adherence. The Wafd leader, Saad Zagloul, supported this second concept, which was meant to bring all Egyptians together. His nationalism attracted some Jews (among other minorities as well), as well as some personalities, such as Felix Banzaken, Victor Sonsino, David Hazan, Leon Castro, etc., but without doubt did not attract the masses in the Jewish community. Most of Egyptian Jewry, in fact, did not mobilize politically. There was indeed an attempt at secular nationalism in Egypt, directly inspired by the Europe of the Enlightenment and that reflected an intellectual elite embracing the concept of national identity founded on territory, culture, and history. This highlights a debate specific to Egypt and that divided its elites: did the country belong to Islam and to the Arab world, or did it draw its cultural roots from the times of the Pharaohs, and its present identity in the Euro-Mediterranean space? This debate was re-launched in 1922 with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. One should not exaggerate, however: this debate only concerned Egypt’s Westernized intellectual and artistic elite. The abolition of the Caliphate by the Turkish Republic in 1924 re-launched the debate about the nature of political authority. Without going as far as Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Arab urban, educated, and cultivated elite reflected more and more on the idea of temporal government power separate

258  |  Jews in Arab Countries from religion. Yet the urban masses as well as the more numerous rural populace remained enclosed within traditional beliefs, despite the retreat of Sharia law (other than in Arabia) and the loss of ulema influence within the state apparatus. On the eve of the Second World War, secularism had fizzled out; one even observed re-Islamization movements, as in Egypt with the foundation in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, who aimed at a return to the “Islam of the Koran,” making Egypt an Islamic state founded on a reformed Sharia. This discourse connected principally with the middle classes, torn between ambition, acculturation, and resentment. It is in this very milieu that nationalism would develop. The rise of Arab nationalism and the extension of the Palestinian conflict in the course of the 1930s were concomitant with the grave economic crisis impacting a world already severely shaken by the effects of modernization. New products and new channels of exchange threw entire professions into obsolescence. As Moise Simha, teacher at Fez, asked in 1937: “Imagine what these Hassani [i.e., indigenous] shoemakers or tailors will do when no-one wants their rough and crude products, and Japanese merchandise can be found at 6 francs for a pair of shoes and 4 francs for trousers.”5 In Morocco, an agricultural crisis in 1935–1938 added to the economic crisis originating in the United States. “Charitable institutions are overwhelmed,” stated a female teacher in Casablanca at the end of 1937.6 The social crisis was replete with political danger. From Casablanca in 1937, reports mounted up of the “anguish of households with limited means.” On top of everything else, there were “troubles and rebellions against established authority despite the support given to the impoverished and the fellahin, [and] despite the social assistance from which the indigènes benefit, a wave of malaise sweeps over Morocco and very nearly degenerates into a general revolt.”7 The impact was only intensified by the civil war raging next door in Spain. In addition to these difficulties, the region underwent an enormous demographic growth spurt. Egypt, for example, was a virtual social boiling pot: the country grew from 10 million inhabitants in 1898 to 16 million in 1937. This growth sparked a powerful rural exodus and a rise in urban unemployment, both capable of setting off an explosion that, in a country under foreign guardianship, inevitably took on nationalist colors. The educated middle classes were well-placed to assume leadership of the national uprising. In Libya, in the 1930s and 1940s, a young elite, educated but unemployed, would find its place in the nationalist camp. This elite focused its opposition on the Italians, and its resentment was aimed at Jews, subsumed within “the Zionists” due to the situation in Palestine. Resentment was exacerbated among merchants and artisans facing “Jewish competition.” Libyan exiles,

The 1930s | 259 now back in the country with the British Army, were accompanied by Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians, partisans of a sometimes violent nationalism. It is in fact within this new Arab elite that the aspiration to independence was strongest. Such was the situation in Egypt between the wars, where many young graduates awaited jobs, although their diplomas were supposed to be able to break social shackles. Their elevated unemployment rate made the situation explosive, but the positions to which they aspired were often held by foreigners. The struggle for jobs was thus a key element in this conflict. After 1945, in the competition to win public employment, Muslim graduates pushed the Jews to leave. Although Egypt was occupied by the British in 1882, it remained a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914. With Istanbul’s November 1914 entry into the war against the Allies, Egypt—henceforth separated from the Ottoman Empire— became a British protectorate. Nationalist demands were articulated by the Wafd party, which, following sustained pressure, obtained the end of the protectorate in 1922. Sultan Fuad became king of Egypt in that year, but the United Kingdom maintained control in several areas: communications (notably the Suez Canal), defense, minorities (both Egyptian and non-Muslim), and finally the Sudan. This cut-rate independence spurred Egyptian discontent, in particular within educated sectors of the populace, whose nationalist engagement became more radical. In the Maghreb, too, education was the vector of national momentum, but in 1930 the University of Algiers counted only 97 Muslim students—fewer than 5 percent of the total. Even by 1960 there were only 1,317, some 18 percent of the total number.8 Arab nationalism received diverse responses from the European colonizer. Other than in Palestine, London skillfully negotiated the process of independence. On the other hand, French suzerainty sustained relations of greater tension. In Morocco in 1944, for example, the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN) takes the view that the treaty of 1912 is still in force and that “the word ‘independence’ should disappear from hearts and mouths.”9 The disquiet of Jewish communities was palpable everywhere. The Egyptian nation state coming into view at the very start of the twentieth century pushed Jews outside its membership, with the exception of Karaites, the majority of whom had always held Egyptian nationality. The fears of the Jewish minority grew sharper in the 1920s and sharper still in the 1930s. In Iraq, from independence in 1932, the Jewish community would feel the weight of the silent hostility of authorities won over to the concept of a state of nationalist (indeed, Islamic) spirit, which deprived Jews of the political posts they had occupied. Quotas were imposed regarding the entry of Jews into universities and the teaching of Hebrew (other than the Bible); Jewish history was banned in Jewish schools.

260  |  Jews in Arab Countries In Morocco, too, fear reigned during the long process of the country’s accession to independence. Moroccan Jews settled in Israel did not cease to harbor fears for those of their fellow Jews who remained in their homeland. On January 6, 1955, the French Ambassador to Tel Aviv wrote to the President of the Council, Pierre Mendès France: “The Israelis who came here from our Protectorates or from our département of Algeria periodically hold meetings in order to seek means to come to the aid of Jewish settlements which are threatened by Arab nationalism.”10 From Morocco, in February 1955, Colonel de Furst reported on the climate of fear that seized Jews after the hanging in Egypt of two Jews accused of spying for Israel, an act that he explains was “unjustified” and that could only increase “Jews’ defiance towards the Arab countries.” He concludeed by stating: “Moroccan Jews particularly fear that France will grant internal autonomy to Morocco, which would simply deliver them over into the hands of Cherifian justice.”11 For some time at least, Jewish minorities were able to hope for a secular evolution that rejected ethnic conceptions of the nation. This was the case in Egypt, which did not call into question the abolition of the dhimmi status under the Ottoman reform of 1856, and in 1915 even confirmed the abolition. Moreover, the constitution of 1923 would change nothing about the personal status of citizens, the main point rather being the preservation of the power of clerics of whatever confession (Muslim, Christian, or Jew). For many Jews in the Arab world, this constitution represented progress, and was a reason for hope. Its first article, in fact, made reference neither to the Muslim umma (the collective community of Muslim believers) nor to the “Arab nation,” although Islam is defined as the “State religion” in article 149. However, Article 12 provided for liberty of conscience and—this is revolutionary—the possibility of a person renouncing Islam. Article 13 guaranteed the freedom of religious practice. Articles 23 to 28 asserted the will of the people, and not the will of God (through the intermediary of Sharia). Jews and Copts were given the assurance of representation in parliament (which in fact remained the case for Jews until the 1950s). The Jews, as well as the Greek and Armenian minorities, were considered as children of the Egyptian nation. At the same time, however—and herein lies the seed of future downgrading of their status—they were not perceived as true Egyptians. For there were in fact two nationalisms in the country, that of the 1923 constitution—that is, the nationalism of Saad Zagloul, who goes as far as considering with sympathy the possibility of creating a Jewish state—and the other nationalism, masked by this Enlightenment-inspired text. This other was the nationalism of the pan-Arabs and Islamists, and also of Nazified elements within Egypt, from the start hostile to the Jews and even more so to Zionism, which would become a crucial theme in their political rhetoric.

The 1930s | 261 In Iraq, the constitution enacted two years after the 1922 Anglo-Iraqi treaty ensured the equality of all before the law. In reality, as soon as independence was attained in 1932, practice diverged very widely from the legal text. After the Ottoman reforms of 1839 and 1856, the notion of equality before the law alarmed Muslims—although not so much those with power (whom the former dhimmis do not threaten at all) as the Muslim lower classes, who had been in effect lifted up by the existence of dhimmis even further below them. The end of the dhimma status meant that Muslim intellectuals and working classes were now joined by those who had just recently been their inferiors—the Jews. The emergence of Zionism increased resentment and misunderstanding. In April 1939, the atmosphere became so tense that the leaders of Egyptian Jewry convinced the Zionists to halt their public activities. The same situation prevailed in Morocco, where, in 1939, the rejection of Zionism led to a number of violent incidents, deepening the disquiet of defenseless communities at the very time when European Jewry faced immense danger. The return of Arab sovereignty was feared in all these communities, something that was expressed openly from the very start of colonization. The same fears wracked the Jews of Iraq once the British took over, in 1917–1918. United in a policy symbolized by the Sykes-Picot Agreements of 1916, Britain and France let it be known that they intended eventually to return power to Iraqis. Knowing full well that they would never be able to obstruct the accession to independence, the Jews asked for British citizenship, citing the absence of administrative experience on the part of the Arabs, as well as their “irresponsibility” and their “fanaticism and intolerance.” In 1919, Iraqi Jewish notables explain to the occupation authorities that “centuries of lethargy” have rendered the Arabs incapable of self-governance.12 In a 1936 report, the Beirut Jewish community stated its position on the negotiations underway between France and its possessions in the Near East: “What is of particular concern to us is that the future regime preserve our rights and ensure our security.”13 With Syrian independence inevitable, the Jewish community hoped for direct engagement by France in the protection of minorities. All the more, continued the report’s authors, in that the position of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries was deteriorating, with ever more “persecutions” and “attacks on their lives, liberty and possessions.” In Syria and Lebanon, “prejudice and animosity . . . far from ceasing, instead grow day by day.”14 Eyewitness accounts from Beirut in 1936 substantiated this report, addressed to the League of Nations. On June 19, 1936, Eli Penso, a local AIU director, reported to Paris on the disarray of Jews, whom the “victory of the nationalists has plunged into deep distress.” In Syria there was exultation: “The Muslims . . . are delirious. No more Mandate, no more French; complete, entire and absolute

262  |  Jews in Arab Countries independence. We will be our own masters, they exult. No more mentors, no more intruders. Islam is triumphant. . . . As long as the French flag fluttered above us, we felt in complete security. The French Army protected us. Any abuses were quickly stopped by the High-Commissioner, who saw to it that injustices were remedied. . . . We are very near to Palestine, which arouses great disquiet in us.”15 Expressed from one end of the Arab world to the other, these fears drew on Jews’ collective memory of oppression, in which familiarity was interwoven with disdain and where proximity was intermingled with contempt. In August 1942, one Monsieur Calleya, a French official serving as Chief Inspector for Tunisia under the authority of the regional commander of Tunis, was asked to report on “relations between Jews and Muslims with regard to France.” He wrote a long report in which he evoked the memory of violence and humiliation, live burial, drowning in wells, kidnapping of women and children, attacks, abuses perpetrated against young boys, mysterious disappearances, ambushes, whippings and a host of other insults, not to mention murders in broad daylight that go unpunished as in the case of that unfortunate Jew and family man Braitou Sfez, whose head was cut off by fanatics and used as a football. The Jews remember these atrocities and will still recall them after several more generations.” He also evoked the ceremony of Tisha Be Av (the ninth day of the month of Av), which recalls the destruction of the two Temples and other misfortunes of Jewish history: “A sincere friendship between Jews and Muslims does not exist and will not be possible for several generations to come.”16 On the question of whether dhimma status constituted “protection,” the dhimmis themselves replied that it was “contempt.” If the mellah is said to have been a “shelter,” collective memory called it, rather, a “squalid prison.” The idea of a return of Arab sovereignty seemed to these people like a nightmare. This was the unanimous reaction of Jewish communities between the wars, as various independence movements took form. Such fears were not solely fed by memories of oppression. It was the very nature of the sort of Arab nationalism that arose between the wars that caused disquiet. This was a nationalism in which the ethnic (Arab) dimension and the religious (Muslim) dimension played increasing roles, despite the fact that many Christians gave the movement a religious imprimatur and some non-Arabs participated in the fight for independence. To this must be added, above all after 1929, the anti-Zionism that led to no longer distinguishing between Jew and Zionist, all Jews becoming ipso facto Zionist militants. During the 1930s, a final factor also came into play: the Arab receptivity to Nazism expressed as sympathy of “the Arabs of the street” for the Axis during the war. The process of ethnic and religious homogenization of the Arab world would not just bring about the departure of the Jews, but also more generally would spur the exodus of nonArabs and non-Muslims.

The 1930s | 263 By references to “Arabism,” non-Arabs were excluded from a country’s future right from the start. In Tunisia, the first article of the 1959 constitution states that “Tunisia is a free State whose religion is Islam, and whose national language is Arabic.” In Algeria, Sheik Ben Badis, the herald of the national struggle, composed a battle song affirming: “The Algerian people are Muslim, they are of Arab descent.”17 In March 1963, just eight months after independence, Algeria adopted a Nationality Code. Article 34 reserved Algerian nationality to “any person who has at least two forebears in the paternal line who were born in Algeria with the status of Muslims.” Without even the slightest debate the Jews of Algeria, present there well before the arrival of Islam, were simply excluded from the land of their birth.18 Hardly had independence been granted in 1932 when Iraq perpetrated an ethnic massacre in August 1933 at Simel, an Assyrian Christian village not far from Mosul. Nearly all the men—around 400—were murdered. For the country’s minorities, the warning was chilling. Jews saw it as an ill portent, all the more in that Iraqi opinion, anti-British, had made of Palestine a “sacred cause.” Shlomo Hillel, a Baghdadi Jew, recalls his father watching through his window as the Iraqi Army, “victorious” over the Assyrians, paraded past: “In contemplating this spectacle from behind the shutters, my father too appeared terrified. ‘If they can treat the Christians in this way without the world reacting’ he said, ‘what can we hope for? We cannot live here any longer.’”19 The Iraqi case was emblematic of the closed nature of Arab nationalism. Yet, in the immediate postwar period, the first Iraqi king reiterated assurances to the Jews. His first Minister of Finance, Sir Sassoon Heskel, was Jewish. But beginning in 1921, voices were raised within the nationalist movement, calling for the blocking of the way for non-Muslims. At first muted, this opposition would intensify with independence. In Egypt between the wars, radicalization of nationalism was marked by the dream of pan-Arab (indeed, pan-Islamic) unity, and a rejection of Western values. The founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 occurred in this context. Even more, in 1933, there was the founding by Ahmad Hussein of the Young Egypt Association (Misr Al Fatat), which became a political party in 1938 and would go on to develop religious fanaticism as well as violent xenophobia and anti-Judaism. In 1940, Young Egypt published its “Ten Commandments,” urging that no response be made to people not speaking Arabic, that no purchases be made from shops lacking signage in Arabic, that no clothing be worn resembling clothing worn outside of Egypt, and so on. The atmosphere of war preparations, Nazi propaganda, British control, and the Palestine question—all against a background of social frustration and poverty—ended by exploding into xenophobic and antisemitic hyper-nationalism. Radicalization in the 1930s put an end to the few attempts at JudeoMuslim rapprochement, such as the Tunisian Comité de l’union judéo-musulmane

264  |  Jews in Arab Countries (Committee of the Jewish-Muslim Union), established after the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated in 1917 and 1918. Initiated by members of the intelligentsia of both communities, the Committee struggled to exist. Its press organ, La Tunisie nouvelle (New Tunisia), was born in October 1920 and folded in March 1921 after just thirteen issues. Islamist radicalization of Arab nationalism was evident in the beginning of the 1940s, when Morocco’s Istiqlal Party required members to swear an oath on the Koran. Such radicalization was further evident during the Palestinian uprising of 1936–1939, when civil society was crushed by nationalistimposed intimidation and censorship; in August 1938 all men were obliged to wear the keffieh (scarf) and the agal (cord to keep the keffieh in place). At the same time, an attempt was made to impose the veil on all women, including Christians. One finds the same stirrings in the Maghreb, where several Jewish leaders were convinced that the Constantine pogrom of August 5, 1934, was the mark of a brutal eruption of Arab nationalism. From 1933, in both Syria and Lebanon, Nazi Germany started to identify people susceptible of being favorable to the Hitler regime. The Reich’s representatives established many contacts with Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals and men of politics. This was a perpetuation of the traditional relations prevailing between the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Germany prior to 1918, but it was also more than that. These ties were based on the image that Germany held out to Arab peoples, that of a modern and disciplined society, equipped with an effective ideological direction. For many people, Nazism constituted a benchmark due to its political organization, style, and thinking. Berlin conducted an intense propaganda campaign throughout the Arab world. Millions of tracts and leaflets were distributed, idyllically describing the situation in Germany, embellished with speeches of Hitler and other leaders of the Reich. This material was aimed at locals, to be sure, but also at consuls, foreign missions and colonial administrators. In the 1930s the Near East and Maghreb were marked by a pro-German atmosphere. On its own initiative, Al-Niddah (a Lebanese anti-French newspaper whose editor’s family were long-standing pro-Germans) published a partial translation of Mein Kampf. A comprehensive corpus of propaganda was developed by Arab nationalist circles, specifically taking the form of a justification of Nazism and its leader; thus, works published in 1934 such as Hitler, by the Egyptian Ahmad al-Sadati, and Hitler’s Struggle, by the Lebanese Umar Abu Nasr.20 Yet, there was no unanimity. In June 1933, for example, Monsignor Arida, the Maronite Patriarch, addressed a letter to his faithful in which he qualified Nazism as a menace to religious and humanist values, and cited the violence perpetrated against the Jews. In consequence of this, he wrote, sympathy for the Jews ought to resound as an echo of the spirit of the Gospels.

The 1930s | 265 The majority reaction, however, was hostile, including on the part of Maronites. Arab opinion was massively pro-German, as shown by several prominent local nationalist figures. One example was Shakib Arslan, the Lebanese Druze, long a supporter of the Ottoman Empire and who, after his expulsion from the region in 1919, continued to play a role from Europe. As the head of a SyrianPalestinian delegation to the League of Nations, he spoke not only in favor of Palestinian independence but also of a German-Arab strategic alliance. Another significant figure was Antun Saadeh, who in November 1932 secretly founded the Syrian National Party. Saadeh was fascinated by General Ludendorff and Kaiser Wilhelm II as well as by German history in general— including Nazism, which demonstrated, according to Saadeh that it is possible to bounce back after a catastrophe. Michel Aflak was another leading personality of this emerging nationalism. Resident from 1932 in Damascus, where he taught history, this Syrian became actively involved in politics beginning in 1941, in support of Rashid Ali’s revolt in Iraq. His group, the core of the future Baath Party, drew the attention of the Damascene urban youth. One of his earliest close collaborators, Sami al-Jundi, would later recall on several occasions how much the Arab nationalist milieu was fascinated—militarily as well as ideologically—by Germany: “Nazism was the force which would exact their [the Arabs’] revenge. Defeated persons quite naturally admire those who are victorious.”21 This evolution also manifested itself through the blooming of Arab youth movements such as Syria’s Iron Shirts, “neither fascist nor Nazi but instead a force for reform,” as asserted in a headline of a September 1936 editorial in the daily Damascus newspaper Al-Shab. By the end of 1936, some 15,000 young Syrians had joined the organization. Their leader, Munir Ajhlani, expressed his fascination for the Nazi regime and its Führer’s unbendable will to rule. Fakri Baroudi, leader of the Damascus-based National Block, underscored how German young men were advised to marry honest women and to avoid “sick Jewish women.”22 In Lebanon in 1936, Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalangists, a youth organization influenced by Primo de Rivera’s Spanish Phalange. The intellectual and political currents sympathetic to Nazism were based on a key theme of Arab political thinking of the 1920s and 1930s: the rebirth of the nation. Germany was exalted as a model country to which one feels close because, like Germany, Arab nationalists considered themselves as victims of the 1919 peace terms. The 1933 assumption of power by the Nazis aroused a wave of enthusiasm that was noted by the German consulate in Beirut and embassy in Baghdad, both of which received large numbers of admiring letters. One of the key thinkers of Arab nationalism, Antun Saadeh, spoke of his closeness to the racial conception of the nation. According to him, the conflict with the Jews was connected to the construction of the Syrian nation. Jewish nationalism was thus an immediate menace to the very existence of the Syrian

266  |  Jews in Arab Countries nation. Like the Nazis, Saadeh held that Judaism and Bolshevism are two forms of the same action directed against the national concept, with the Jews being the vector par excellence of antinational thinking. In March 1939, in the first edition of Suria al-Jadida (New Syria), Saadeh explained that Syrian national renewal is shackled by the “mental illnesses of the past,” vectored in particular by the Jews. In a speech grounded in a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiratorial worldview, he cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.23 Hitler was already Germany’s savior; only he would be able to protect the world from this danger. There were daily references to Nazism in the Arab press of the mid-1930s. Major newspapers expatiated endlessly about this ideology, of which some specific aspects (the concept of “people,” the role of the “Führer”) were considered as providing the foundations for a reflection about Arab societies. For Jewish communities, the most alarming element of disquiet was the Islamization of Arab nationalism. Colonial domination was linked to the role given to Islam, for the European presence reactivated the old conflict between the two shores of the Mediterranean. Consequently, Islam became the strongest identity marker signifying the rejection of that domination. In March 1938, Moroccan nationalist leader Makki al-Nasiri declared at Tetouan: “We hate France, enemy of Islam and of all religion because it is governed by atheists and Jews, Léon Blum in particular.”24 Invoking Islam as a condition of membership in the nation and demanding an oath of loyalty sworn on the Koran, Moroccan nationalism practiced a de facto exclusion of non-Muslims. Other than among communists and Freemasons, the opportunities for inter-community encounters became rare. The strong Jewish presence in Arab communist parties was not surprising. In Egypt in the 1930s, political Islam arose, of which the most influential group (after the Wafd) was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. By 1939 the organization had some 500 sections and half a million activists and sympathizers. Its strength came from the simplicity of its message. The Brothers occupied the deserted ground of social services, making up for the state’s monumental deficiencies. The Brothers became a substitute welfare state for the entirety of society. Egypt’s independence was not an end in itself for the Brotherhood, but only a way-station on the road toward the restoration of the Islamic umma. To be sure, Hassan al-Banna affirmed the equality of all, but by demanding the reintroduction of full Islamic law, he undermined the initial message of mutual consent. The soil in which the Muslim Brotherhood grew was first and foremost social. The movement’s roots can be traced to the destruction of the traditional rural world, inseparable from the land pressure linked to the enormous demographic growth that swelled urban slums, with joblessness coexisting alongside islets of prosperity. Poverty, combined with frustration, led to the search for easy answers within an Islam conceived as a return to a mythical golden age, an

The 1930s | 267 “authentic culture,” purified of “contamination” by the Christian West—and by Jews, of course. The Palestinian conflict was mixed into this classic stew of a culture of resentment, with all these elements crystalizing into the perfect symbol of the struggle against Western Imperialism. Palestine—presenting the emancipation of a Jewish minority so recently crushed—gave form to Arab frustration. In this context of muted violence, Arab nationalism Islamicized and ethnicized. Palestine became the theatre of an Islamicizing national movement well before the revolt of spring 1936. In January 1935, at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the Mufti al-Husseini pronounced a fatwa declaring Palestine to be a “possession granted” to the Muslims. Whoever sells any parcel of its soil to Jews would betray this “sacred Islamic country.”25 In the context of the rise of the power of Axis forces—and despite several attempts at secularization and the early successes of the Wafd in Egypt—Arab nationalism seems to have become more and more linked to Islam, and indeed to anti-Judaism. The German authorities did not fail to exploit this situation, making abundant references to the “affinities” between “Islamic values” and those of National Socialism. Late in the war, in 1944, a report from a British agent in the Egyptian police’s Political Department warned against the Muslim Brotherhood: “This is the call of the racism and dictatorship which they want to impose in the Orient, without even waiting until Nazism has been eliminated from Europe. . . . They are the microbes which will spawn the future anti-democratic plague in the Arab East.”26 The 1936 Palestinian revolt was initially understood as a pan-Arab fight for independence. The same year, a Committee for the Defense of Palestine was founded in Damascus. Following the Peel Report and an appeal by the Arab High Committee, in September 1937 the Committee for the Defense of Palestine organized a pan-Arab conference in Bludan, Syria. Four hundred eighty delegates attended from several countries, confirming the depth of Pan-Arabism’s roots and the importance of the Palestine issue, as well as the rejection of any compromise with Zionism, which was the object of a consensus that overwhelmed even the anti-Nazism of certain Arab intellectuals. Far from discouraging Arab anti-Zionism, antisemitic persecution in Germany reinforced it: if a powerful nation like Germany views the Jews as a menace, the same would surely be the case for the Arabs, this weak and fragmented nation. Rejection thus glides from the Zionist threat to the threat from the Jews within, that is, the indigenous Middle Eastern Jewish communities. Despite the May 1939 Beirut antifascist conference, the authoritarian tendencies of Arab nationalism would win out, preferring to see only the supposed affinities of Nazism and Arab nationalism. A campaign for the boycotting of “Jewish products” is launched in parts of the Arab world during the 1930s. The head of the Committee for the Defense of

268  |  Jews in Arab Countries Palestine writes to the Jewish Agency on 8 October 1938: “If you have any concern for your nation, detested throughout the entire universe, then you must at least save the lives of Jews in Palestine or other Arab countries—and take care that the disasters you are facing in the West will not be imported here.”27 In August 1937, the Syrian nationalist Adil Arslan, brother of Shakib Arslan, drew Jewish emigration to the attention of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Oriental Department: “If you allow those precious hostages to leave, the rancor maintained by that race will make itself manifest. . . . I do not need to tell you that our common interests oblige us to adopt strict policies on both sides, [that is, that] Germans and Arabs should collaborate in order to try to defeat this project of a Jewish state in Palestine.”28 In order not to offend the British, and following the advice of its Foreign Ministry, the German Government withheld an important delivery of arms to the Palestinian rebels until the second half of 1938. The Reich sold arms to Iran and Afghanistan, but less to Saudi Arabia. It only sold to Iraq if the UK was not able to furnish a given type of equipment to Baghdad. At the same time, however, Reich financial assistance to the Mufti of Jerusalem, via Beirut, was substantial. This in fact increased, particularly from May 1939, when Hitler became convinced that he was moving toward war with Britain. In the Spring of 1937, the Montreux Convention abolished Egypt’s ancient capitulations. As for consular courts (jurisdictions specially reserved for foreigners), these would be closed in 1949. This process of economic, judicial, and political re-appropriation would be repeated at different moments across the entirety of the Arab world; this was the pathway toward independence. Already with the British-Egyptian Treaty of August 1936, the protection of minorities and foreigners residing in Egypt had come under the control of the government; Article 1 put in place a transitional regime of twelve years, during which mixed tribunals would be maintained before becoming integrated into the Egyptian judicial structure. The process of “Egyptianization” had in fact started with the declaration of independence of February 28, 1922. Egypt required a visa for entry into its territory, and from 1927 imposed professional examinations for foreign doctors and lawyers. In the same year, the government promulgated its first law on nationality, for which everyone had to apply, and the country increasingly stipulated the requirement of holding Egyptian nationality in order to carry out various activities. For a long time, foreigners—who were prominent in liberal professions as well as business—did not seem worried about these new restrictions. Nor did most Jews—who were natives of the country—apply for citizenship, in particular because the procedures were onerous (costing five pounds, a considerable sum for poor people). When, finally, they made the application, the administration

The 1930s | 269 issued a drip feed of nationality certificates to these people, who had always been Egyptian. Sidelined because they were neither Arab nor Muslim, Jews fell victim in 1927 to a process of racial ethnicization: only 5,000 received citizenship, although 40,000 (out of 80,000 in the country) could have claimed. Thus, 40,000 Jews—stateless—were decreed “foreigners” in their own country. In parallel to this process of identity-based nationalization, Jewish communities would be slowly pushed to the margins of economic life, a classic mechanism found wherever Judeophobia manifested itself. In the most developed Arab countries, pressure was applied to educated Jews to make them leave. Resentment was fully at play here, as in Germany in the 1920s, where student associations often comprised fanatical antisemites.29 In Iraq, Jewish civil servants were pushed toward the exit right from independence in 1932. In October 1934, Baghdad AIU director Robert Méfano noted “the increasingly systematic dismissal of Jewish administrators,” and mentioned transfers of funds to Palestine by certain Jewish businessmen.30 He also evoked the numerus clausus of 10 percent, instituted for the secondary and tertiary schools of the capital, despite the fact that in Baghdad, Jews made up 25 percent of the population. In 1935, the Ministry of Education discretely required that fewer Jews be admitted to secondary and tertiary teaching. From 1932, Jewish newspapers from Europe and Palestine were forbidden to be brought into Iraq. The communities thus became more and more cut off from the reality of the outside Jewish world. This sidelining remained furtive and unavowed, even during the 1948 war over Palestine. Thus, no profession was explicitly forbidden to Jews. To more effectively engineer the dismissal of their Jewish employees, Iraqi ministries initially fired both Jews and Muslims at the same time, but then reinstated the Muslims in their jobs after a few weeks. By 1942, only a few Jews remained in the ministries—just those who could not be replaced. Teachers who had migrated from the Yishuv were quickly sent back to Palestine (the last one in 1931), a destination moreover forbidden to all Iraqi Jews from 1932. The pressure intensified with the arrival in 1936 of Mufti Al-Husseini and his entourage. Life became more difficult, sometimes untenable. Harassment and veiled threats multiplied, pushing more people to leave. Naïm Kattan experienced this marginalization in Baghdad and recalled that after 1932 Jews could no longer hope to enter the military or diplomatic corps. Kattan’s uncle was refused admission to the medical faculty, which admitted only two Jews that year. The polytechnic institute and the pharmacy faculty closed their doors in turn. Finally, ostracism took the form of daily humiliation for a community deprived of allies and in the crosshairs of its adversaries’ bad faith. Kattan recounts how even the right to sit down on a bench became a challenge for Jewish students.31 In October 1942, a report prepared for the Jewish Agency noted that community leaders were

270  |  Jews in Arab Countries from time to time called on to “willingly” sign anti-Zionist declarations.32 By the beginning of the 1940s, the net was tightening around the Jews of Iraq. In Egypt, the proportion of Jewish entrepreneurs falls year by year: in 1943 they made up 15.4 percent of company directors, but only 12.7 percent by 1948.33 From 1943, the law requires the use of Arabic in commercial transactions; however, although this language is fluently spoken by most Jews, it is less commonly read and even more rarely written. In a climate of generalized anxiety, people start learning Arabic, especially in Jewish families. When in 1947 the law Egyptianizes the economy, it indirectly throws out many Jewish employees in the commercial sector, which in 1937 represents 60 percent of Jewish jobs. The law stipulates that Arabs shall constitute at least 75 percent of employees and 90 percent of workers, and shall hold 51 percent of capital. According to the president of the Cairo Jewish community, this legislation imperils the jobs of some 50,000 Jews. The Palestine conflict increases fears within all Jewish communities of the Arab Orient. In Morocco, the French police noted on July 9, 1936: “The Jews are very alarmed by the threats created by events in Palestine. It is said that a great number of them are obtaining arms.”34 Similar disquiet struck Syrian Jews. As the AIU director at Aleppo wrote in June 1936, “Without French protection, the future of minorities in Syria appears somber. . . . In the profound hatred which the Arabs, to a man, have for Zionism, Israelites and Zionists are conflated, and the first thing which free and strong Arabs will fight against is Zionism, which stands in the way of Pan-Arabism.”35 “The Jews are afraid of their own shadows,” noted an anonymous 1938 report to the Jewish Agency from Iraq. “Out of fear, Jewish shopkeepers and artisans have closed. No Jew is seen in town after sunset, and in fact many of them dare not go out during the day either.”36 As we have seen, old ties united Germany with Arab nationalism and the Ottoman world. In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Constantinople. Before 1914 the International Muslim Office published a monthly review (Bulletin de la société pour le progrès de l’Islam) of which its three Maghreb subcommittees were financed by the German Consulate in Zurich. In its pan-Germanic and militarist colors, Germany had long been an object of fascination for Arab nationalism, as acknowledged by the Syrian Sami alJundi: “We were racists. We were fascinated by Nazism, reading its works and those containing the sources of its thinking, in particular Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra), Fichte (Addresses to the German Nation), H. S. Chamberlain (The Foundations of the nineteenth Century). We were the first to wish to translate Mein Kampf. Whoever lived in Damascus during that period will remember the general infatuation for Nazism, which seemed to be the only force capable of

The 1930s | 271 serving the Arab cause. The weak always admire the strong.”37 Al-Jundi recollects that in Damascus an Arab club was financed by Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth. Such was the context in which Arabic translations of Mein Kampf appeared (expunged, however, of their anti-Arab passages). “Nazi ideology,” Bernard Lewis writes, “was then very broadly spread around the Arab nationalist camp.”38 Paramilitary groups, established in the 1930s, were directly inspired by the Nazi Party’s youth movement. Thus in Egypt, there were the Green Shirts organization of the Young Egypt movement, Al Kata’b of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iron Shirts of the Syrian National Block; in Iraq, the Al-Futuwa, and so on. Common to all these groups was the same exaltation of violence, and the same cult of power, virility, and war as a vector of identity. Among many, as well, there was violent Judeophobia. Thus, as noted in 1939 by Ahmad Hussein, founder in 1933 of Young Egypt and of the Green Shirts, in his organization’s newspaper, Jaridat Misr al-Fatat: “The Jews are the key to this moral desolation which has taken hold of the Arab and Muslim world. They are the secret behind the cultural misery and repugnant art of today. They are the secret behind the current moral and religious collapse, to such point that today, it appears sound to us to confirm that one must ‘look for the Jew behind all depravations.’”39 It is in this context, too, that the Arabic translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared, with the first appearing in 1927 in Cairo. In the 1930s this nationalism weighed heavily in favor of Palestine. Even more from 1933, when the Nazis, now in power, threw themselves into active propaganda aimed at the Arab-Muslim world, above all in Egypt and Iraq and featuring militant Judeophobia. In 1936, Ahmad Hussein took part in the Nuremberg Party Rally. In May 1938, students at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo demonstrated against the Jewish quarter. In July 1939, bombs were discovered in three Cairo synagogues. A process of Nazification operated in several regions of the Arab world, including in Palestine where, during the Summer of 1934, swastikas appear on walls. On March 1, 1936, in correspondence with Berlin the German Consul in Jaffa, Timotheus Wurst, states his assurance that Palestinian Muslims are “profoundly impressed by Fascist—and above all Nazi—theories and conceptions. Nazism, with its hostility toward the Jews, has made friendly Palestinian Arab heartstrings resonate . . . and Adolf Hitler is without any dispute the most important man of the twentieth century. The popularity of our Führer is so great that there is practically no Arab, not even the simplest fellah, who does not know the name Hitler.”40 But it is in Iraq that the process of Nazification of Arab nationalism was the most advanced, and also in Iraq where the threat was most crudely expressed. In November 1934, the Moslem Youth Magazine blames Jews, who it says are “responsible” for all the disasters striking all countries of which they have been citizens.

272  |  Jews in Arab Countries “The enemies of the Muslims and the Christians; [Jews], look at the situation of the Assyrians! What happened to them is currently being prepared for you by the sword of the Arabs and the Muslims.”41 The life of Iraqi Jews in the 1930s is overlain with worry. Children are beaten in schoolyards under the impassive gaze of their teachers. Swastikas are stuck onto their backs, their clothing and their book bags, or plastered on Jewish houses and shops. In parliament, in December 1934, at the time when the two Jewish representatives from Baghdad were being elected, the names of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering were written on several ballots. While Mein Kampf was being broadly distributed in Arabic, importation of anti-Nazi books, and of Jewish books and newspapers, was prohibited. Already by 1935 it had become obligatory to join Al-Futuwa, the paramilitary youth organization, based on the model of Hitler Youth, while in Baghdad the Muthanna Club opened, bringing together politicians and pan-Arab intellectuals of Nazi sympathies. In 1937, the Director-General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, Fadil Jamali, was warmly welcomed in Germany and invited to send a delegation to the 1938 Party congress in Nuremberg. Directives of the ministry called for inculcation of the youth into “an Arab national spirit,” inspired by Nazi Germany.42 A report from late 1944 assures that Fadil Jamali had been one of the people who have worked to create youth detachments in secondary schools modeled on the Hitler Youth. After the defeat of Rashid Ali in 1941, Jamali will attempt to have his Nazi sympathies forgotten. In 1945 he becomes Iraqi Foreign Minister. After the Farhud (the Baghdad pogrom of June 1–2, 1941), a commission of inquiry was set up by the new pro-British government. In its report, dated July 8, 1941, the commission directly blames “the Al-Futuwa and the Youth Falange, groups impregnated with Nazism by the Palestinians and the Syrians. When they took control of the Baghdad railway station, the first thing they did was to show their hostility to Jews, arresting them under all manner of pretexts, slanders and forged accusations, dragging them to police stations and sometimes killing them before depositing them there. With no punitive measures carried out regarding their members, who were for the most part out of control, their conduct just worsened.”43 Arab nationalist elites were usually coordinated with an “Arab street” of popular sentiment, whose sympathies for the Axis were well known since the beginning of the 1930s. The charismatic leader of the Reich aroused mass enthusiasm, especially during the projection of newsreels at cinemas. In October 1934, the Governor-General of Algeria reported that “the appearance on screen of Hitler in newsreels was greeted with loud applause by the indigenès.”44 As acknowledged by Doctor Slimane Ben Slimane, one of the inter-war leaders of the Tunisian nationalist movement, “We were all pro-Nazis and we wished for the victory of the Axis. We were wrong, but that is how it was.”45 Except, Slimane remarks, for Habib Bourguiba, who did not believe in Axis victory.

The 1930s | 273 The threat was even more serious in Palestine. According to German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, the threat in Palestine assumed “an exterminatory form.”46 In August 1936, Al-Hadi, the leader of the Istiqlal Party, was asked about the future of the Jews in the Jewish national homeland (i.e., Palestine): “This is not a question which can be decided here,” he responded to a journalist.47 He added that if 60 million Germans could not accommodate 600,000 Jews, why would anyone suggest that the Arabs accommodate the 400,000 Jews of Palestine, a country infinitely smaller? Ahead of any anticolonialist preoccupations, it was firstly antisemitism that established Hitler’s popularity in the Arab world. This reality was demonstrated in the Iraq of 1938, where several nationalist movements called for Jews to be expelled from the country. In 1939, Sami Shawkat, the Director-General of the Ministry of Education (and founder of the paramilitary youth group Al-Futuwa), recommends the extermination of the Iraqi Jewish community in his book These Are Our Objectives. This, he explains, is the primary condition of national renaissance.48 With the Balfour Declaration, many contemporaries were able to perceive the outline of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. The riots of 1920– 1921 confirmed these fears, even if the unrest was followed by apparent calm. Disquiet took hold in Jewish communities close to Palestine: Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Taking account of all political colorations, Arab nationalism reacted with a scandalized “No!” to the Balfour Declaration, which it viewed as the prototype of a colonialist move involving arrogation of the power to dispose as one wishes of someone else’s land. In the wake of the Ottoman defeat of 1918, both within the working class as well as among political and intellectual elites, this nationalism would make Palestine a key question incapable of reduction to mere political calculations. Palestine crystallizes the expectations of a Pan-Arabism caught between impotent post-1918 dreams and the end of the Caliphate in 1924. In this struggle the expectation of an elusive Arab Nation, fractured into dif­ ferent states, seeks and finds the unity that elsewhere had made no progress. ­Palestine refracts frustrations and resentments; defeats are explained by recourse to conspiracy theory. This explains the fears of Jewish communities, who feel powerless in the face of reductive amalgams and conflations. Thus, Syrian Jewry is troubled by the echo of the Palestinian conflict. Through the local press, the community reassures the nationalist movements of its complete loyalty, even specifying on August 27, 1929, (right after the pogroms in Palestine) that a distinction should be made between “Arab Jews” and Zionists. In February 1928, some 40,000 people demonstrate in Baghdad against the visit of Sir Alfred Mond. This was the world’s first mass antiZionist demonstration outside of Palestine. Shops are pillaged and burned down.

274  |  Jews in Arab Countries Above all it was following the summer 1929 violence that the question became central for public opinion, which was already won over to the nationalist cause. In January 1933, the victory of the Nazis in Germany resounded across the Arab world as both an anticolonial and anti-Jewish moment of good fortune in the fight against Zionism. The rabid antisemitism of the Nazis would progressively win ground. With no concern about distinguishing between Zionists and Jews, the latter stand accused of wanting to construct an empire all the way to the Euphrates, and to break Arab nationalism by destroying, along the way, Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque. On August 30, 1929, ten thousand demonstrators cross Baghdad shouting “Death”—not to the “Zionists”—but “to the Jews.” Egypt seems to lag behind, with the exception of militant groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the students of Al-Azhar, whose propaganda is based on the traditional image of the Jew within Islam, the eternal enemy who tricks the “true believer.” On August 30, 1929, on the margins of the demonstration at Baghdad, a gathering is organized by Sunnis and Shi’ites at the city’s Haidar Khana mosque. Funds are raised for Palestine, with the insistence that Jews make the first donations. The Zionist movement’s representative, Aharon Sassoon, who is also the director of a Jewish school, is required to leave the capital within six days. In December 1931, a world Islamic conference is held in Jerusalem under the leadership of Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini. “If the Jews continue their activities in Palestine,” the Iraqi delegate states, “we will be obliged to treat them in the manner with which they are familiar.”49 The conference marks a turning point in the deterioration of relations. Violence increases after the event, in particular in Morocco where in March 1932 the protectorate administration reports incidents between Jews and Muslims, the latter reproaching the former for “their aggressive and provocative attitude,” and complaining about “exaggerated benevolence” with regard to the Jews. As a French official states: “It is not without interest to note that these incidents and comments occured right after the Jerusalem conference, the anti-Semitic tendencies of which were made violently clear during conference sessions.”50 Finally, one may note that the Palestine question was connected to the deep economic recession of the 1930s. This is what explains the multiplication of incidents, as at Casablanca in 1932, at Rabat and Casablanca again in 1933, at Rabat and Meknes in 1937, and at Meknes again in 1939. In 1932 at Sfax, Tunisia, Jews and Muslims violently clash following a rapprochement between nationalists of the Tunisian Destour (Constitutional Liberal Party) and the Palestinian Higher Arab Committee. Indigenous Jews are perceived as a national minority, but Arab nationalism does not accommodate this notion. In Yemen, persecution intensifies following the 1929 Jerusalem events, taking the form of holding hostage

The 1930s | 275 Jewish orphans forcibly converted to Islam. With the gates of Palestine closed to them, refugees pile up in Aden. The situation becomes even more perilous in Syria and Iraq. “Panic has reigned in our neighborhood for the last five days,” notes Damascus AIU director Silberstein on August 31, 1929. “All work has halted, and the Jewish populace lives in anxiety.” Processions form spontaneously and attempt to march on the Jewish quarter, but are dissuaded by the police, who “rush to the scene.”51 Evoking “the traces of an anxiety which has not disappeared,” the Jewish Agency’s special envoy to Baghdad, Gershon Agronsky, analyzed the situation in May 1930: “The 100,000 Jews of Iraq are prey to real or imaginary fears.” Agronsky added that anti-Zionism only poorly conceals an antisemitism aimed at removing the Jews from coveted economic and social positions.52 This “explosive climate” (as it was termed by Robert Méfano, Baghdad AIU director in 1934) would continue to deteriorate up to the Farhud pogrom of June 1941. The Arab press poured oil on the fire in spreading false news from Palestine, evoking massacres of Arab civilians. Zionist organizations went underground. The Zionist movement was banned in Iraq in 1930. In Egypt, Syria and Morocco, as in Baghdad, Jewish community leaders publicly and unanimously reiterated their differences with Zionism. In Morocco, the community’s solidarity with the Yishuv found expression through fundraising for victims of the 1929 pogroms. The fundraising movement, which raised considerable amounts of money, won over the country’s Jews, who followed “with great attention the events in Palestine,” although Moroccan public authorities required great discretion.53 Concerns were so high that the municipality of Rabat, on September 1, 1929, refused permission to the Jewish community to put on a play entitled Daniel in the Lions’ Den, considering that the performance “could, in fact, at this moment be considered as a provocation by certain elements amongst Muslims.”54 The Palestinians were the first to bring their cause to the attention of the Arab world. In February 1931, the Arab Executive of Palestine publicly presented its Declaration to the Noble Arab Nation, inviting “all Arabs, whatever country they inhabit . . . to treat the Jews of that country like the Jews treat the Arabs of Palestine, by boycott and oppression.”55 From that date onward, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem no longer spoke of “Zionists,” but instead of “Jews.” Arab proPalestinian propaganda therefore took a quite early turn to anti-Judaism, going as far as to embrace Western antisemitic concepts. Palestinian émigrés, and also Syrians and Lebanese, participated in spreading this propaganda. During the 1930s, several British reports mentioned the intensity in Yemen of Arab propaganda against “the Zionists” and the Jews. As the AIU’s Silberstein wrote in September 1929, “All the newspapers, by agreement, have reported that thousands of Arabs had their throats cut in Jerusalem, that bombs were thrown

276  |  Jews in Arab Countries at the Mosque of Omar, and that women’s and children’s throats were slit without mercy!”56 In Yemen, posters circulated displaying the alleged destruction of the two great mosques of Jerusalem, with a Zionist flag planted on the Dome of the Rock.57 In parallel, large numbers of Arab teachers, ejected from Palestine by the British and from Syria and Lebanon by the French, arrived in Iraq, carrying with them an already firmly anchored anti-Judaism. Incidents were to become particularly concentrated in Baghdad in the 1930s, not only because Iraq was independent from 1932 (joining the League of Nations in that year) and because it hosted many activists and militants, but also because it was in Iraq that Nazi propaganda was deployed with the greatest force. For the Jewish community, the climate deteriorated even more with the arrival in 1940 of the Mufti of Jerusalem. In July 1941, the commission of inquiry into the Farhud (the largest pogrom perpetrated in Arab lands) attributes responsibility for the anti-Jewish hatred to Palestinian and Syrian exiles: “The influence of these men (Palestinian and Syrian teachers) in schools was even more significant than that of their chief, the Mufti, to the extent that they poisoned the minds of their students and made them the instruments of their propaganda. Every time they noticed that the government was taking measures against Nazism, they entered into action, arousing their students who then attended demonstrations and published harmful manifestos.”58 On December 20, 1944, the Jewish Agency qualified as “obsessive” the Arab attachment to the Palestinian cause.59 This was a hasty judgment that ignored the emotional and political depth that this conflict would quickly come to hold for Arab (more than Muslim) consciences. As, for that matter, for Jewish consciences even if, in the Arab world, most of the time ties with Palestine were not internally incorporated in the same way as ties that were developed over the years by many Jews between the Diaspora and the Yishuv, and later between the Diaspora and the State of Israel. On the Arab side, such ties were sometimes fostered by contact, such as on the occasion of pilgrimages to Mecca, but also during studies abroad by Maghreb students in Palestine, Syria, or Egypt, as well as Palestinian students in Paris or London. Thus, a young Moroccan nationalist recounted that his solidarity with Palestine was also due to the fact that he was “linked to a group of Palestinian students in Paris and [accordingly] very well informed about the Palestinian question.”60 In Morocco, for example, the educated population read the press “with interest and . . . with passion,” according to a November 1929 report by a civil servant in the civil administration of Rabat.61 It was that segment of the Arab population that often led campaigns in favor of Arab Palestine. In Spanish and French Morocco, the fear was that the fragile peace between communities would break apart, while mobilization in favor of Arab Palestine gained in scope, sharpened by propaganda (generally involving leaflets) that evoked “unimaginable atrocities.”

The 1930s | 277 In December 1929, in Damascus, Silberstein noted that “nationalist newspapers continue to concern themselves actively with Palestinian affairs. Every day, entire columns are dedicated . . . to the slightest incidents occurring in the neighboring country.” The Jewish community, against which “attacks are very frequent,” felt less and less secure. In fact, Damascus was the center of production of pamphlets and leaflets, which are distributed across the entire Arab world.62 After the August 1929 Jerusalem incidents, Islamist circles in Egypt, claiming the profanation of a Muslim holy site, threatened the Jewish community, which accordingly requested the state’s protection. From 1936, the Egyptian public, which previously seemed little engaged by the conflict, now appeared more receptive to the propaganda distributed by the Palestinian Information Bureau, increasingly featuring antisemitic content, such as the pamphlet in which Great Britain was accused of having “delivered up Palestine to the Jews.” The pamphlet condensed a good deal of the Arab argument from the 1930s: “These Jews, provided with money by Jewish financiers from all around the world, profiting from the ingenuousness of penniless Palestinian peasants who lived on their land without knowing its value, who sold and still sell their land to them, which the Jews then have other Jews cultivate, and who create cities which, like Tel Aviv, become states within the State, with everything Jewish, including the police.” Who is responsible for this situation? The British, certainly, but not only them. Also the “big and rich countries,” which won’t take in the Jews chased out of Germany, and instead “rid themselves of them by directing them to the poorest country in the world.”63 In May 1936, the Muslim Brotherhood calls for a boycott of “Jewish products.” In 1938, for the first time, the slogans “Death to the Jews!” and “Jews, out of Egypt, out of Palestine!” are heard. A world parliamentary congress for the defense of Palestine is held in Cairo in October 1938, at which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf are distributed in Arabic. In July 1939, Young Egypt publishes blacklists of Jewish businesses to boycott. One month previously, bombs had been thrown at synagogues, and private residences had been attacked in Al-Mansurah and Assiut. Troubled, Egyptian Jews multiply their declarations against Zionism. In vain. Many non-Jewish Egyptians are aware of the dangers posed by these developments, and from 1936 warn against the risks of anti-Jewish riots while declaring in advance that “Zionism” would be responsible for any violence that occurs. In a word, the Jews of the Arab world feel that they have been taken hostage. This is particularly so in Iraq, which assumes the direction of the struggle for Palestine, combining the desire for independence with resentment against a modernity that is simultaneously desired and feared.64 In April 1936, the Palestinian uprising brutally aggravated the situation. Jews were beaten in the streets of Damascus, and violence became a near daily occurrence in Iraq where, in September 1936 alone, four Jews were killed for political

278  |  Jews in Arab Countries reasons. A bomb was thrown at a Baghdad synagogue on Yom Kippur (September 27, 1936), and others bombs were thrown at Jewish clubs. For Iraqi Jews, insecurity became a daily preoccupation. In October 1936, as a form of protest, Jewish merchants closed their shops for two days. A report to the Jewish Agency at the end of the 1930s noted “aggression against Jews, who are insulted and beaten in the street; education in Hebrew and in Jewish traditions is criminalized.”65 Reactions were more moderate in Egypt (except in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood), but from 1937, the line between anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment began to disappear. Arab nationalist rhetoric was now engaged on the side of Palestinians, frankly spilling over into antisemitism despite isolated voices attempting to stave off that development. In Damascus, the climate grew so overheated that everyday quarrels, even between children, could degenerate violently, as on July 10, 1936, when the Jewish quarter was invaded by rioters. “The blow which has struck Arabs of Palestine is keenly felt by all Arabs, without distinction,” wrote the Damascus daily paper Al Ayam on June 1, 1936. “Heroic Palestine refuses to let itself be Judaized. Fight Zionism, the microbe of the human race,” proclaimed the National Front Youth in Syria, for whom what was at stake was the possible appropriation of the country to the benefit of the Jews. Every November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration raised tensions. In Beirut in 1938, a day of strikes paralyzed the city’s business district, but not the eastern part, inhabited by Christians.66 The relative self-effacement of Christians in a struggle that is moving toward Islamization set off inter-Arab tensions. In April 1937, in Beirut, the director of the AIU reported that pamphlets had been distributed, suggesting keeping Christians off to the side, as they are “the only obstacle to the independence of the Arab Orient. They secretly boycott Muslims and fraternize with the Jews. And they speak overtly about patriotism. In every Muslim country where there are Christians, from Iraq to Algeria, from Cilicia in southern Anatolia to Egypt, the Christians are nothing other than agents of the colonizing powers.”67 In 1938–1939, even in Egypt, radicalization starts to win hearts and minds. In 1939 a bomb is discovered in Cairo’s main synagogue, together with a message threatening death for any Egyptian Jews who help “their brothers” in Palestine. In mosques in Egypt as well as throughout the Arab world, commentaries on Palestine are sometimes virulent, even if certain religious authorities call for moderation, with the majority of ruling elites fearing that violence would sweep them away in its wake. In Iraq, from 1933, Jews are called “parasitical elements.” Accused of plotting “in their synagogues, their establishments, their clubs and their schools,” pushing “to combat them [Iraqi Arabs] in secret,” provoking “the return of the horrors of history” without reflecting on what befell the Assyrians. If the Jews intend to

The 1930s | 279 boycott Nazi Germany that is their affair, not the business of Iraq “which in the current circumstances” should maintain “good and friendly relations with Germany” as well as “our friendship with its government.” Indeed, it is even said that every Iraqi should buy large quantities of German products.68 In October 1938, Baghdad resounded with calls for the dismissal of Jewish governmental officials and the exclusion of the Jews from all national institutions. In 1940, economic contacts between the Yishuv and Iraq were virtually prohibited. All letters from Tel Aviv were opened by the police. The provenance of products had to be camouflaged. Palestinian Jews no longer had any hope of obtaining visas for Iraq.69 Although in the 1940s Palestine had the best medical center in the Near East (in particular the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem), Iraqi Jews had no right to go there for treatment. Christian and Muslim Iraqis, by contrast, were welcome to go. The main demand of Arab nationalism was to close down Jewish immigration to Palestine. That said, with the exception of Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt, the Arab world was not the master of its own borders. In Yemen, the reasons for the tightening of emigration included financial considerations: the Jews were the subjects of the country crushed the most by tax. “He [Imam Yahia] does not want to lose his most taxed subjects,” noted an official of the British Colonial Office.70 Pressure on the communities took the form of calls (barely followed) for boycott. In July 1933, the Préfet of Oran evoked the antisemitism of the indigenès, mentioning the “latent anti-Jewish rage” prevailing in his region. He recalled that, during the great commercial fair held every year at Tlemcen, “young natives” criticized the Muslim clients approaching Jewish merchants’ stands: “Damned are they who buy from Jews!”71 In 1920, the young Amin al-Husseini, exiled in Syria, was sentenced in absentia by the colonial authorities in Palestine, for political reasons, to ten years in prison. A few months later, British Governor Herbert Samuel pardoned him and permitted him to return to his home. He even approved of his candidacy to the position of Mufti of Jerusalem. In the election of April 12, 1921, when Husseini only came in fourth place, Samuel invalidated the vote and named Hadj Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti, on May 8, 1921. The British would come to regret this rapid promotion. Speaking before the Shaw Commission, which was examining the pogroms, Hadj Amin maintained that the violence was the result of a Jewish plot, as “proven” by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “The House of Commons is nothing but a council of the Elders of Zion, from which we can expect no fairness!”72 Before the Peel Commission, established following the uprising of April 1936, Amin al-Husseini declared on August 8: “Give us independence and we will manage to deal with the Jews ourselves!”73 This barely disguised threat of a

280  |  Jews in Arab Countries general massacre was confirmed in 1937 by Fawzi Kawkiji, one of the best combatants of the Arab cause on the ground. In refuge in his home territory of Kirkuk, in Iraq, he told an Arab journalist of the plan conceived to destroy the Jewish population of Palestine, a plan that he explained he had not been able to put into operation because he had to leave the country precipitously.74 At the end of 1936, the Mufti contacted Fritz Grobba, German ambassador to Iraq: “Germany will draw upon itself the eternal gratitude of all Arabs if she comes to their assistance at this current time of difficulty and helps them attain victory.”75 In summer 1937, the Mufti informed the German Consul General in Jerusalem that he hopes for a declaration from the Reich that expresses clear hostility to the establishment of a Jewish state. In November he sent his right-hand man (and founder of the Arab Club of Damascus), Saïd Abd al-Imam, to Berlin. Sought by the British in Palestine, the Mufti went into exile in Iraq and then in Lebanon, which he left in October 1939 after war breaks out, reappearing in Baghdad as a popular hero. He remained in the country until the defeat of Rashid Ali in late May 1941, and then took refuge in Germany until the capitulation of May 1945.76 In the face of these calls to war, calming voices were extremely rare. A few were heard in Egypt, in particular from the Wafd Party, which preached religious tolerance and rejects racism. Such was also the position—iconoclastic, in this context—of the President of the Egyptian Senate, Mahmoud Bey Khalil, who in December 1938 argued that the Yishuv is both a model as well as an opportunity for the Near East, which could benefit from its technology. To those who deplore “Jewish influence,” Mahmoud Bey replied: “What do the Arabs want? They should thank the Jews for coming to Palestine.”77 In Iraq, despite the deterioration of the 1930s, governments would seek to protect the rights of the Jewish minority and to put a brake on runaway antisemitism. However, despite official proclamations, Jewish communities were stricken by fear, all the more because at the very same moment the Yishuv, the World Jewish Congress, and the Zionist Organization were fixated solely on the situation of European Jews. From 1929, pushed by Arab opinion, a number of Jewish communities supported the “Arab victims” of Palestine. The Baghdad AIU director reports in December 1934 that “Jews, in order to show their attachment to the country and its cause, have widely contributed through open subscription for the benefit of families of Arabs killed by the Zionists.”78 Faced with harassment by militant groups in Iraq and above all in Egypt, the presidents of the communities in Cairo and Alexandria multiplied their demonstrations of allegiance, recalling that their “sole wish is to live in peace with the Muslim part of the country’s population.”79 However, the Arab populace found the attitude of these anti-Zionist Jews to be “hypocritical.” In April 1936, the new Baghdad AIU director reported “All is suspect on the part of our co-religionists. The slightest gesture on their

The 1930s | 281 part draws accusations of Zionism and anti-patriotism. And yet, God knows how far the Jews of Baghdad are from any Zionist thinking.”80 In October 1936, in order not to reinforce panic, murders of Jews were presented by the Jews themselves as “isolated cases.”81 This violence closely followed the calendar of Palestinian events. “We are too near to Palestine, and that is what arouses our disquiet,” reports the Beirut AIU director in June 1936. France should commit to protect the minorities in an independent Lebanon in order to “prevent the misfortunes which one day may fall upon us.”82 Persecution of Jewish communities also turned on internal political calculations. To compensate for the weakness of the Hashemite regime, Iraqi Jews were like bones thrown to assuage ambient discontent: hit hard at the Jews to avoid the regime itself being swept away by public anger. But among the successive rulers in Baghdad, some were also true antisemitic militants, such as, for example, Minister of Defense Sadiq al-Bassam, who envisaged throwing thousands of Jews into a concentration camp close to Baquba. Social competition also played a role in this violence, when young graduates were expelled in order to give jobs to young, newly graduated Arabs. In October 1942, a report addressed to the Jewish Agency explained that the Palestine issue provided the occasion to eliminate Jews from the public service, education, and economic life, an eviction justified “in solidarity with Arab brothers in Palestine threatened by the Jews.” The report adds: “The question of Palestine, which certainly does not mean much for the overwhelming majority of the population of Iraq, has nevertheless become a central issue in Iraqi politics.”83 This passion in favor of Palestine touched more broadly on the issue of the Arab world’s independence, as explained in 1937 by the Zionist Congress representative to Morocco. The struggle over Palestine refracted and distorted the conflicts between dominated and dominating, rich and poor. In speaking of Palestine, Arab crowds also articulated their own aspirations, and their attempts to free themselves from the yoke oppressing them. While they fought for that, Moroccan nationalists also affirmed their wish, first and foremost, to see their country freed of the French. As was noted in a French report dated June 3, 1948, in the middle of the Arab-Israeli war over Palestine: “The Palestinian affair . . . offers them [nationalist parties] the ideal terrain to put themselves forward in the service of a cause which is properly Islamic, as the true leaders of the Muslim people of Morocco.”84 The Palestinian cause was quickly instrumentalized by Arab governments, because it responded to an expectation relating to the national imagination. Many people quickly became aware of the fact that “to work for the ‘Arab cause’ earns you a much better diploma than any other, one which guarantees you an excellent salary in the Iraqi civil service,” as was noted in Baghdad in 1937.85 AntiZionism and its counterpart, the defense of Arab Palestine, will become the only

282  |  Jews in Arab Countries area of freedom of expression in an oppressive context, the sole critique authorized in a political economy founded on servitude. A reaction to colonialism? Not merely that, as shown by Iraq and Yemen—lands of radical anti-Zionism without colonizers. In reality, for Arab societies that are suffocating, Palestine represents a door—ajar—leading to freedom. Yet, propaganda of Arab origin (brochures, pamphlets, and stickers) was of lesser volume than that of the colonizer, especially the French in Maghreb countries, where the majority of the Muslim population was illiterate. During the Front Populaire administration (1936–1938), French police seized a mountain of antisemitic documents, in all likelihood of metropolitan French origin. Usually of obscure provenance, these documents were aimed at creating the belief that they were of Arab origin, going so far as sometimes being directly written in Arabic. Their rhetoric classically belongs to the French Far Right, which was very active in North Africa, and became even more active when a French Jew, Léon Blum, took office as Prime Minister. An example was this pamphlet, written in Arabic and seized in November 1936 in Tangiers: “We must massacre the Jews, dismember them; you must no longer have relations with them. You must no longer agree to your co-religionists working for Jews, if you have purely Muslim feelings. As God said: ‘All those close to the Jews are the enemies of religion.’”86 Other tracts of French origin attempted to arouse Moroccan elites against the Jews. They copy, point by point, elements of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, evoking the “gigantic plot hatched by the Jews with the aim of acquiring domination over the world by means of Bolshevism.”87 The rest of this long screed summarized the argument of the French (and Catholic, with mention of the “reign of the Anti-Christ”) extreme Right, which was violently antisemitic and anticommunist. It concluded with this appeal: “Frenchmen, pull yourselves together if there is still time, and become national again. Long Live France!” Other texts too, adapted from the Protocols (or from European conspiratorial fabrications that preceded and inspired the Protocols), were spread through the Maghreb by the French extreme Right. All these texts insist on the “secret program” of the Jews, of which, evidently, the Front Populaire is the living proof. This sort of language shows the kind of climate that prevailed. Fear played a capital role; it would catalyze into hatred when the time came. This grassroots movement reflects the Christian roots of Oriental Judeophobia, drawing first on Rome and then Byzantium in the propagation of anti-Jewish concepts haunting the Christian imagination. The Theodosian Code, compiled between 429 and 438, brought together texts from the late fourth-century first emperors of Christian Rome. Over the centuries, a series of laws were passed forbidding Jews to bear arms or exercise authority over a Christian. Jews were associated with the notion of “perpetual servitude,” as defined by Pope Innocent III

The 1930s | 283 in 1205. In his Sermon for the Epiphany, Saint Augustine made Jewish dereliction the witness of Christ’s truth; the Jews were condemned never to regain the land of their fathers: “If this people remains expelled from its country and dispersed throughout the world, this is to force it to bear witness to the very faith of which it is the enemy.”88 This is why the re-establishment or gathering together of the Jews in the Eretz Israel was unthinkable. It is this unthinkable thing that is at the source of a sometimes obsessive Western anti-Zionism (and as such, disproportional in light of the actual dimensions of the Judeo-Arab national conflict in Palestine). The polemic against the Jews is thus crucial for defining the identity of the Christian, who needs the Jew like a tree needs the earth that bears it. For a long time, however, the relationship of Muslims to Jews did not include this existential aspect, which constrains any political compromise. During many centuries, the antiJewish argumentation in Islam remained of peripheral importance, until eventually Islam began to harvest the Christian Judeophobic heritage. The first Arabic edition of the Protocols was published in Cairo in 1925. It was translated by a Lebanese Maronite priest under the title The Conspiracy of Judaism against the Nations. Although in the Orient the ideological concepts from Europe long remained limited to Christian Arabs, Palestinian nationalist propaganda turned the Protocols into a classic of anti-Jewish literature in the Arab world. Similarly in Turkey, when the Protocols were translated in 1934, antiJewish violence bloodied the cities of Thrace a few weeks later, in June and July. The Fascist regime in Italy, the Nazi regime in Germany, and the extreme Right in France, in particular the Parti Populaire Français (PPF) of Jacques Doriot, played a major role between the wars in the countries of the Arab world. The new Italian regime had hardly taken power in October 1922 when incidents broke out in Libya between fascist militants and native Jews. The spark was often an injurious word that degenerated into fisticuffs. From 1923, many Jews considered that “fascism has become synonymous with anti-Judaism.” However, until the racial laws of 1938, the Italian government showed no particular hostility toward the Jewish minority. Despite the quarrel of 1935–1936 regarding Shabbat, the Italian occupiers were most often perceived by the native Jews as liberators. In January 1934, the new governor, Italo Balbo, who was hostile to all forms of antisemitism, arrived. Balbo was already crowned with an excellent reputation thanks to his good relationship with the Jews of his native city, Ferrara, as well as with the president of Italy’s Jewish community. In October 1937, he publicly expressed his revulsion for the antisemitism that characterized a portion of the Fascist movement. Addressing 2,000 Blackshirts gathered in a stadium in Tripoli, he raised the “Jewish question,” unleashing hostile shouts of “Death to the Jews! Jews out of Italy!” Balbo raises his arm and, in an angry voice, calls

284  |  Jews in Arab Countries for silence in order to say that he understands how hard the Libyan Jews work, and how much discipline and loyalty toward the regime they show. He adds that the obligation to open their shops on Saturdays is strictly and only related to the needs of tourism and indeed in their own interest: “The hostile exclamations of this assembly caused me grave offence because I make no distinction between a Catholic Italian and a Jewish Italian. We are all Italians and I would like to add that, from my childhood up to today’s date, I have had three real friends. Do you wish to know who they are? Well, then: all three are Jews.” The audience was frozen into silence.89 In 1938, the promulgation of racial laws by Rome was like a cold bath for both Italian and Libyan Jews (despite the fact that a number of Jews were members of the Fascist Party and notwithstanding a 1935 report from Cairo addressed to the Jewish Agency noting that Jews of Italian origin “are fascists by taste or by necessity”).90 The measures were all the harder to take in that the community lived in a globally hostile Arab society. In January 1939, Balbo attempted to convince Mussolini of the impossibility of strictly applying the anti-Jewish measures, as the Jews are indispensable to the local economy. They “are already a dead people,” he argues, “so there is no reason to cruelly oppress them, in particular since the Arabs, traditional enemies of the Jews, are even now showing signs of compassion concerning them.” According to Renzo De Felice, who reports this conversation, Mussolini seemed to acquiesce.91 This in no way changed the persecution on the ground. When Balbo died in an accident at the end of June 1940, Libya’s Jews lose a powerful protector. At the end of 1941, the Italian Minister of Colonies expelled 1,600 French Jews and 870 British Jews from Libya; many of them were to be interned in Italy without suffering further harm, but some would be deported to Bergen-Belsen, via Fossoli, in May 1944. According to several contemporaries, it would also appear that the Italian population resident in North Africa showed little receptivity to this anti-Jewish propaganda. Nevertheless, in 1938, Rome—following the line of Berlin—intensified its antisemite propaganda in the Maghreb, especially in Morocco. The Jewish communities were stunned by this change in attitude, and shaken as well by the restrained but evident joy of the Muslim populace. In 1938, thousands of children were expelled from Italian schools. In June 1940, Italy’s entry into the war against France caused the situation to deteriorate somewhat more. Persecution intensifies, and Jewish associations, including sports associations such as Maccabi, were prohibited. Ties between Germany and the Arab world were of long date. It appears that the German Government meddled in the Maghreb both before and after the First World War in discretely supporting, for example, Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi’s revolt in the 1920s. Yet, Hitler was a disciple of Bismarck: only Eastern Europe interested him, not overseas, and this produced indecisive and hesitant foreign

The 1930s | 285 policy. On the ground, Germany relied on a network of thousands of German expatriates, established over one or two generations, sometimes part of Nazified organizations operating within local groups. As well, the presence of German agents was noted in most Arab countries, including Yemen. In non-Arab Muslim countries such as Iran, from 1936—under German pressure—Jews were excluded from government administrative positions.92 In 1937, in Egypt, out of 1,178 Germans whose presence was registered, 214 were members of the Nazi Party, a success that may have been linked to the fact that it was Rudolf Hess’s brother who founded the Nazi Party section in Cairo, in 1926. In Palestine, the process was even more pronounced. While on average some 5 percent of Germans abroad were Party members, in Palestine the rate reached 17 percent. Many Germans recall that in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, during the uprising, a Nazi insignia or a swastika flag constituted a safe-conduct pass accepted by the Arab population.93 In 1933, Berlin set up an Arabic language press service and in 1935, opened a radio bureau in Cairo. Several Egyptian movements made contact with the Bureau, including Young Egypt and also the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna’s condemnation of racism. The Jewish press in Egypt reported on several occasions in the 1930s on the actions of Nazi emissaries, such as the diffusion of antisemitic literature and instructions given to the most anti-British and anti-Jewish movements in Egypt. In February 1943, a report of the Jewish Agency specified that the intimidation methods of the Muslim Brothers, toughened by street violence, “make one think that the Nazi instructors are not entirely disconnected from events.”94 Massive volumes of propaganda were transmitted by way of antisemitic tracts and pamphlets. German emissaries disguised themselves as businessmen, “who do not just do business but also spread Nazi propaganda.”95 British services were well informed of the activities of these agents in Aden, Iraq, and Egypt. In the event of a war in Europe, London feared the defection of Arab leaders.96 Named German Ambassador to Iraq in 1932, Fritz Grobba was the key Nazi propagandist in the Arab world. An Arabic speaker, he aided the arrival to power of the most Nazified elements of Arab nationalism, in particular Rashid Ali, instigator of two coups d’état, in 1938 and 1941. Grobba remained in Baghdad until September 1939, when the declaration of war leads to the rupture of diplomatic relations between Berlin and Baghdad. During his time in Baghdad, Grobba took charge of publishing the Arabic language edition of Mein Kampf, released in spring of 1934 in chapters appearing in several newspapers in Baghdad and Beirut. However, German propaganda, aimed at the illiterate public, was initially transmitted by radio. People generally listened collectively, since radios remained costly and rare; in 1937 in Palestine, for example, hardly ten thousand people were subject to the radio license fee.

286  |  Jews in Arab Countries Still seeking to assuage London, the Reich holds back until 1938, when it first broadcasts in Arabic. On April 25, 1939, Germany launches a shortwave transmitter (the most powerful in the world) in Zeesen, south of Berlin, and in September under the aegis of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, creates a “Radio Department” that by 1940 would count fourteen units operating in several languages. Some transmissions are received as far as Iran. By the end of the 1930s, these propaganda efforts are bolstered by the growth in the number of radio receivers, the price of which falls. In French Morocco, for example, just with regard to radio receivers declared to Customs (and thus subject to the license fee), the numbers for Muslims went from 1,525 radio receivers declared in May 1936 to 6,333 in October 1939 (a four-fold increase in a little more than three years), while between October 1937 and October 1939, the total number of receivers in French Morocco went from 33,200 to approximately 40,000.97 Hitler hoped to keep the UK out of the coming conflict for as long as possible, and especially out of the “discussion” that Germany intended to have with France. After Munich (in September 1938) and the toughening of the British position, German restraint receded. Berlin was now plucking the strings of anticolonialism, saluting “with pleasure the inevitable storms which will strike the Orient, and the inevitable triumph of pan-Arabism on the ruins of colonialism.”98 In the Near East, particularly in Syria, which was under French mandate, Hitler Youth established contacts with nationalists around the theme of antisemitism. Some of the phraseology of Arab nationalists there seems to have been copied from German racism. This is equally true in the Maghreb, with the words of Moroccan nationalist militant Muhammad al-Wazzani evoking a “Moroccan race, pure and free” in contrast to the “French ethnic group, mixed with odious Jewish blood.”99 However, with regard to the Arab world, German racism runs into contradictions, in the first place with the need to expunge from Mein Kampf any passages insulting to Arabs. A first—shortened—version, published in 1937 features an edition in bookshops shortened to barely 200 pages. Offensive passages such as ones describing “this decadent people made up of cripples” were removed. The complete edition (960 pages) was prepared by Shakib Arslan, a confidant of Amin al-Husseini, and appeared in November 1938. But again on this occasion, the word “antisemitism” offended Arab sensitivities. On several occasions, specialized staff in Berlin had to reassure nationalists that this term applied only to Jews. “The racial theory of National Socialism considers the Arabs to be a superior race,” the Nazi Party wrote on October 23, 1942, to Rashid Ali, Iraqi former leader in exile. “The oppression suffered by the Arabs of Palestine is followed with great interest by Germany, and Germany promises to uphold Arab demands on this issue.”100 In reality, the Reich impeded (if not prevents entirely) any relations between German women and Turkish or Arab men.

The 1930s | 287 Berlin got entangled in other embarrassing contradictions, in particular with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. An upset Egyptian press wonders if Arabs, too, were targeted. The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs feared an impact on the Olympic Games, which were to open in Berlin in summer 1936, and reassured Cairo by specifying that the laws were only aimed at Jews; an Egyptian boycott of Germany was averted. In June 1939, the Ministry of Propaganda advised editors-in-chief not to use the word “anti-Semitism,” but instead to speak of “defense against the Jews” or “hostility towards Jews.” In June 1939, after Berlin had established relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia the preceding January, German diplomacy drew more overtly closer to the Arab world, insisting (through the Abwehr, German military intelligence) on the necessity to forge ties with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Through the intermediary of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, funds were sent to Palestine. However, Germany’s interests did not entirely correspond with those of Arab nationalism. This is shown by the economic accord (called the Haavara) signed on August 25, 1933, between the Jewish Agency and Berlin: more than 20,000 German Jews reach Palestine, constituting 37 percent of the German Jews who immigrated there. Between 1933 and 1940, 178,000 European Jews reached Palestine. Of this total, 52,600 came from Germany. During the summer of 1937, at the time of the debates aroused by the Peel Commission, Konstantin von Neurath, the Reich’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, questioned the 1933 agreement: “The creation of a Jewish State or of a form of state ruled by the Jews under British Mandate is not in the interests of the Germans, since such a Palestinian State would not absorb world Jewry but would create an additional base for Judaism under international law, like the Vatican State for Catholicism or Moscow for the Comintern. It is thus in Germany’s interest to see the reinforcement of Arabism as a counter-weight to the growing power of Judaism.”101 Between 1933 and the renunciation of the Haavara agreement in 1941, the Reich at no point slowed the emigration of Jews—quite the contrary. In Germany, Zionist organizations continued their work, despite Berlin’s rejection of the 1937 Peel Partition Plan and the radical anti-Zionism of Nazi ideologues (with Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg in the lead). In fact, for Nazi ideology, the “Jewish conspiracy” provides two reasons for demonization of the Jews: Bolshevism and Zionism, as Alfred Rosenberg argued, playing on the concomitance of the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik seizure of power. As early as 1921, Rosenberg publishes Der Staatsfeindliche Zionismus [Zionism, Enemy of the State], which was later republished in 1938. In it, Rosenberg insisted on “a fundamental ideological hostility and incompatibility between Nazism and Zionism.” The only pragmatic note to Zionist hostility toward Germany was that Zionism might tomorrow be able to help Germany “purge itself of its Jews.” But the idea of a Jewish state is nonsensical, Hitler argues in Mein Kampf: “We consider from

288  |  Jews in Arab Countries the start that the notion of the establishment of a Jewish State is nothing less than a farce.”102 In his Secret Book, the second—unpublished—volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler writes: “Zionism attempts to convince that the Jewish national conscience will finally be satisfied by the establishment of a Jewish State. By doing so, the Jew, one more time, dupes the stupid goyim. The Jews have no intention whatsoever to build a Jewish State in Palestine in order to settle there; they simply want to establish a central organization for their charlatanic enterprise of universal internationalism. . . . This would be a place of asylum for all those unmasked rogues, and a training school for future hucksters.”103 In a word, a Jewish state would be the site of the “international Jewish plot.” In 1939, Berlin published a propaganda work entitled Engländer, Juden, Araber in Palästina (English, Jews and Arabs in Palestine), in four editions of 10,000 copies. The author, Giselher Wirsing, defined the objective of Zionism as “the establishment of a Vatican of World Jewry . . . the solid platform on which world Jewish politics would repose in the following years.”104 To be sure, faced with the problems of Jewish emigration, Berlin considered in 1937 that it would be better to gather the Jews together in Palestine than to disperse them, which would mean spreading out Germany’s opponents. But it should be a Palestine without a Jewish state, since such a state, as a member of the League of Nations, would tomorrow become a base for the “Jewish anti-German plot.” Facing this sort of impasse, Nazi officials in 1937–1939 convinced themselves that the “Jewish question” would soon not be limited to the borders of Europe, and that it was in fact global. Finally, a number of German diplomatic voices raised opposition to the Haavara accord, reminding Berlin that the agreement exasperated the Arabs. But until the end of 1937, in order to carefully handle London, Berlin would not seek an accord with the Arabs. One year later, the change in the situation would become perceptible; it was only then that Berlin would use the Palestine issue against the British. On the ground in the Arab world, Germany’s agents kept the antisemitic propaganda going by spreading rumors, pamphlets, and tracts, to the point where eventually, many observers ended up by seeing a “German hand” behind all antisemitic incidents—incorrectly, for anti-Jewish violence there did not just begin in 1933. That said, it remained the case that German antisemitic intrigues were a reality in the Near East. In Egypt in 1933, Wolfgang Diewerge, one of the activists most in view from the Ortsgruppe or regional German units operating in the country, underscored the necessity of exporting the Palestinian conflict to the rest of the Arab world, and of “transplanting Palestinian antagonism into Egypt.”105 In April 1939, the emissary of the Jewish Agency explained: “For nearly a year, Egypt has been the site of organized anti-Semitic propaganda activities,

The 1930s | 289 whose promoters are Nazi envoys and fascists acting through the mouths and pens of extremist Muslim groups. At first glance it would seem that this activity is directed solely against Zionism, but in reality it has involved anti-Jewish intrigues for which an anti-Zionist form is particularly appropriate for Egypt.”106 The Nazi press was interested in the three Maghreb countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), which in the eyes of Berlin constituted a formidable reserve of troops for the French Army. This explains the efforts made to sow division and fan antisemitism by presenting France as “a toy in the hands of the Jews.” Controlled by a specialized organ of the Nazi Party, the Ausland-organisation (AO), German émigrés played their role in the diffusion of this propaganda, in particular in the propagation of the (expurgated) French version of Mein Kampf, with the books bearing an ad banner declaring Hitler “The strongest man in the world.” Yet, Hitler did not harbor dreams of supporting the struggle for independence of the peoples of the Maghreb; his concern was only to manipulate them. Thus, André François-Poncet, French Ambassador to Berlin, did not for a moment believe in the “German danger,” but he was aware of the reality of Germany’s propaganda conveyed via a paid press.107 German-style antisemitism was not foreign to the Arab world. In both places, rejectionist policies were rooted in national concepts that were based on blood and soil. In October 1938, a report from Baghdad, written for the Jewish Agency, confirmed the links between Iraqi leading circles and the Nazi regime. The report mentioned the September 1938 visit by an Iraqi youth delegation to the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, on the invitation of Hitler Youth head Baldur von Schirach. The visitors made up a thirty-strong delegation from the ministries of Culture and Education, which was received by Hitler in person before spending two weeks holidaying in Germany as guests of the Hitler Youth. The report’s author also mentioned the wish of the Nazis to control several Iraqi and Arab newspapers by financing them. Such Germanophile sympathies extended beyond Iraq, even if it was probably in that country and Syria that Berlin made its strongest gains. According to a 1943 report from the same source, Germany financed Arab associations that possessed “funds too important to have been furnished by their members.”108 The result of these sympathies and exchanges was the construction of networks of connivance and complicity. Many German agents were posted to the Arab world (including ordinary businessmen who used this as a way to shore up their finances). In addition, Muslim student associations were set up in the Reich, as well as Muslim religious communities, such as the Islamische Gemeinde, oriented toward students from the Near East, the Union of Arab Students in Berlin, or the Moroccan Action Committee, and so on. As we have noted, the extreme Right and certain French fascist movements, like the PPF (the leading French collaborationist party), were particularly

290  |  Jews in Arab Countries active in the Maghreb. What mattered, as Emmanuel Debono observed, was the participation of many Muslims at meetings where antisemitism flowed freely. In Algeria, police testimony confirmed the desire of extreme Right activists to exploit Arab resentment, giving birth to a new alliance between a portion of the indigènes and the French ultra Right, something called “colonial fascism,” which the Front Populaire had revealed in June 1936, and which it denounced. On January 14, 1937 Raoul Auband, Under-Secretary of State for the Interior, regarding the antisemitism of French colonists in Algeria, evoked in the French Parliament the “chancre of our civilization in this country.”109 The antisemitic phantasm, by definition hostile to reality, operated powerfully. “The Jew” was viewed in Algeria as, among other things, a “monopolizer of land.” In reality, land registry records show that in the 1930s the Jews possessed 0.97 percent of land in the département of Algiers, 1.18 percent in the Oran département, and 0.87 percent in the Constantine département.110 Some indigènes joined the ultra movement (sometimes after having converted to Christianity, although such cases were rare). The PPF of Doriot was thus the only French party to enjoy a solid indigenous base in Algeria—20 percent—as well as three thousand activists. In 1938, in Algeria, one of its slogans was “Islam is with us!” The arrival to power of the Front Populaire unleashed the extreme Right, some elements of which called for actual civil war. The Jewishness of Léon Blum revived a latent antisemitism. In areas with large European communities, these radical movements threw fuel on the fire of the already deteriorated relationship between Jews and Muslims. In August 1936, in Rabat, the police seized a pamphlet addressed by French residents to the colonial authorities: To our Muslim brothers. Never would we have supposed that, by odious means, the damned race of Judas would one day rule over us. . . . The conquering Jew knows no measure. He has us—you Muslims and we French—more than ever under his odious yoke. In Palestine the Jews kill Arabs after having despoiled them of their lands, under the protection of the English. In Germany Hitler, outraged by their impudence and their abuse, had to kick them out. . . . You should react, without delay and violently in letting it be known, with the assistance of His Majesty if need be, that you will not tolerate the Jews laying down the law in your home. Use force where necessary. You will use force where necessary because Paris Jews, like those from Morocco, will not resist a threat from the Muslim people.111

In October 1936, following inquiries, the police conclude that this document was issued by the proto-Fascist Croix-de-Feu or the Cercle d’études nationalistes.112 In 1946, in a report on “Sionisme au Maroc” (Zionism in Morocco), Etienne Coidan explained that anti-Jewish actions could not be imputed to Germany alone, rather, these had been initiated by the nationalist, ultranationalist and

The 1930s | 291 fascist political groupings of the French mainland, such as Solidarité Française (French Solidarity), Mouvement Franciste (Francist Movement), sections of the PPF created in the French Zone after May 1934, the Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire), the Parti Social Français, the Union Latine d’Action Française (Latin Union of French Action), three Paris associations called the Alliance Raciste Universelle, and so on. Antisemitism in French Algeria was old, and violent. Right after the First World War, the mayor of Oran, Abbé Lambert, established a Muslim Section of the Fascist organization, Amitiés Latines. The National Assembly representative from Constantine, Emile Morinaud, published extracts from the Middle Eastern Arab press on the Palestine question, and circulated (or fabricated?) readers’ letters inviting Algerian Muslims to fight alongside their Palestinian brothers, “groaning beneath the Zionist yoke.”113 In 1938, the mayor of Sidi Bel Abbès, Paul Bellat, had 400 Jewish voters removed from the electoral lists of his city, on the pretext that their ascendants were not living on Algerian soil in 1870 but rather were alleged to have come from Morocco. The government reacts at once in promulgating an addition to the Crémieux Decree in January 1939. On this issue the newspaper of the Federation of Muslim Elected Officials, L’Entente, wrote (under the name of its editor Ferhat Abbas) on February 2, 1939: “The Jews are French and will remain so. And that is only fair. But it would be intolerable if certain neo-French were to wish to rule us, and to do so against us, free to exploit us and to enrich themselves, until further notice. When it comes to racism in Algeria, against Algerians, that’s enough!”114 In September 1939, Emile Morinaud refused to pay homage to the first citizen of Constantine to be wounded in the war, which had just begun, because he was a Jew. In Sidi Bel Abbès, the pro-PPF mayor removed Jewish citizens from the electoral rolls, and the town prided itself on being named in Algeria as “little Berlin.” In Oran, the city of Abbé Lambert, a speaker for Amitiés Latines stated in 1939: “We must destroy the Jews, not by throwing them into the sea, for they would poison the fish, but in burning them, for the good of France.”115 In March 1939, a tract circulating in the département of Algiers evidences the Nazification of antisemitism, calling for “the complete and definitive sterilization of both sexes” of the Jews.116 This hatred serves as a form of ideological bond, joining together the antithetical elements of indigenous nationalism and the ultra-colonial milieu. It serves as a release of the resentment felt in the indigenous world, which sees it as a bridge to membership in the values of Nazi Germany. This does not however erase contradictions, such as the issue of emigration to Palestine, desired by the extreme Right but resisted by Arab nationalism. Antisemitic agitation before the Second World War was punctuated by campaigns using posters provided—according to the police—by the Parti

292  |  Jews in Arab Countries Social Français, on the model of one distributed at Meknes in May 1938, which stated: 1. This is a Jewish house—the house of a profiteer. 2. The Jews belong to a race foreign to us. Within our nation they form a vast consortium of exploiters and thieves. 3. The Jews own more than half of our nation’s wealth. Their fortune must be confiscated . . . 4. Buying from Jews means the ruination of French business. 5. Wars and revolutions are the harvest of the Jews.117

In these extreme Right movements, the Palestine question will early on become a sacred cause of antisemitic passion. In Morocco, as in other Arab territories, these groups instrumentalize the issue in order to damage relations between communities. Well before the Second World War, the link to Palestine would be constantly affirmed by European antisemites. During the war, in 1943, German propaganda would connect Jews’ elation at the Allied landings with the “struggle of Muslims in Palestine.”

Notes 1. AIU, XII. E. 182, 1912. 2. Memmi, Juifs et Arabes, 51. 3. In Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 260. 4. In De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 201. 5. AIU, Morocco, I. B. 1–8, Fez, 23 March 1937. 6. AIU, Morocco, I. B., Casablanca, 10 December 1937. 7. AIU, Morocco, I. B., Casablanca, 1 December 1937. 8. Cited in Verdès-Leroux, Les Français d’Algérie, 75. 9. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 643. 10. At the time, Algeria was, legally, still a département of France, and not a colony or protectorate. 11. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, “Zionism.” 12. In Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq. 3000 years of History and Culture (Chicago: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 211. 13. AIU, Lebanon, I. C. 1, Beirut, 18 June 1936. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 19 June 1936. 16. CADN, Tunisia, Category Bernard (1881–1949), Tunis, 13 August 1942. 17. ‘Abd al-Hamīd, Textes de Abdelhamid Ben Badis, selected and trans. by Ahmida ˙ Éditions En Nahdha, 2000). Mimouni (Algiers: 18. Cf. Catherine Simon, Algérie, les années pieds-rouges (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 93. 19. Shlomo Hillel, Le Souffle du Levant. Mon aventure clandestine pour sauver les Juifs d’Iraq, 1945–1951 (Paris: Didier-Hatier, 1989), 139.

The 1930s | 293 20. See Götz Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon. The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1939–1945. London, Routledge, 2009. 21. Ibid, 119. 22. 1 July 1937, the daily Al-Musawwar, cited in Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon, 50. 23. Suria Al Jadida, 11 March 1939, in Götz Nordbruch, 75–76. 24. In Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 53. 25. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 24. 26. CZA, S25/3544, Cairo, February 1944. 27. Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon, 62. 28. Ibid., 63, letter to Prüffer. 29. Cf. Ulrich Herbert, Werner Best (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). 30. AIU, I. C. 2, Baghdad, 3 October 1934. 31. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 203. 32. CZA, S25/11323, October 1942. 33. See Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 49. 34. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 575. 35. AIU, Syria, I. C. 3, Aleppo, 9 June 1936. 36. CZA, S25/3528, 1938. 37. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 106. 38. Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 625. 39. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, p.107. 40. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 61. 41. Moslem Youth Magazine, No. 22, 16 November 1934. 42. CZA, S25/3528, Baghdad, 16 October 1938, Jewish Agency secret report. 43. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 405–417. 44. Letter of October 17, 1934, cited in Emmanuel Debono, “Antisemites euopéens et musulmans après le pogrom de Constantine (1934–1939),” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, No. 187, July–December 2007, 305–328. 45. In Juliette Bessis, La Méditerranée fasciste, (Paris: Karthala, 1981), 105. 46. Ibid., 62. 47. Ibid., 31. 48. In Arabic, Hadhihi ah-Dafouna, cited in Sylvia Keddourie, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 97–99. 49. In Weinstock, Une si longue presence, 214. 50. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Rabat, 4 March 1932. 51. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, 31 August 1929. 52. CZA, S25/3528, May 1930. 53. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 17. 54. Ibid. 55. Cited in Weinstock, Une si longue presence,170. 56. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, 9 September 1929. 57. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 15 June 1935, cited in Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 140. 58. Report of the Iraqi Commission of Inquiry into the Farhud (1941), issued on 8 July 1941, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 403–417. A report from Baghdad

294  |  Jews in Arab Countries delivered to the Jewish Agency in October 1942 sets out nearly the same analysis (cf. CZA, S25/11323, October 1942). 59. CZA, S25/3528. 60. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 497. See Mohamed Hassan Ouassani, Mémoires de vie et de combat (Beirut, 1982), cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 501. 61. CADN, Maroc, DI, QJ, Dossier 17, Rabat. 62. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22. 63. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24. 64. Cf. CZA, S25/3528, Baghdad, 14 May 1938 and Baghdad, 22 September 1937. 65. CZA, S20/539/2, undated. 66. CZA, S25/3528, Beirut, 3 November 1938. 67. AIU, Lebanon, I. C. 1, Beirut, 28 April 1937. 68. Cf. AIU, Iraq, I. C. 2. 69. CZA, S25/7381, Tel Aviv, 24 March 1940. 70. Cited in Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 137. 71. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Oran, 23 July 1933. 72. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 22. 73. Ibid., 31. 74. CZA, S25/3528, Baghdad, 13 October 1937. 75. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 60–61. 76. Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis. The Berlin Years. London, Valentina Mitchell, 2015. 77. CZA, S25/3518 (press dossier). 78. AIU, I. C. 2, Baghdad, 14 December 1954. 79. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Tantah, 20 May 1938. 80. AIU, I. C. 3, Baghdad, 23 April 1936. 81. AIU, I. C. 2, Baghdad, 18 October 1936. 82. AIU, Egypt, I. G., Beirut, 19 June 1936. 83. CZA, S25/11323, Baghdad, October 1942. 84. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 85. CZA, S25/3528, Baghdad, 13 October 1937. 86. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Tangiers, 20 November 1936. 87. Ibid., Rabat 14 October 1936. 88. Cited in Cohen, Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix, 74. 89. Cited in R. De Felice, op. cit., p.170. 90. CZA, S25/2027, 1935. 91. In De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 173. 92. Cf. Paix et Droit, February–March 1947, 10. 93. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 59. 94. CZA, S25/3544, Jerusalem, 17 February 1943. 95. CZA, S6/4665, 12 February 1939 (probably in Yemen). 96. CZA, S25/3528, Headquarters of British forces in Iraq, 11 April 1938. 97. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 561. 98. Cited in Charles-Robert Ageron, “Les populations du Maghreb face à la propaganda allemande,” Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, no. 114 (1979): 3.

The 1930s | 295 99. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 352. 100. In Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 150. 101. Cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 65. 102. Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 24 and 27. 103. Ibid., 27 104. Cited in Jeffrey Herf, L’Ennemi juif (Paris: Calmann-Lévy/Mémorial de la Shoah, 2011). 105. Cited in Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 138. 106. CZA, S5/490, April 1939. 107. Cited in Charles-Robert Ageron, “Contribution à l’étude de la propagande allemande au Maghreb pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale,” Revue d’histoire maghrébine, January 197): 21. 108. CZA, S25/3544, Jerusalem, 5 May 1943. 109. In Benjamin Stora, Les Trois Exils: Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2006), 77. 110. Ibid., 85 111. CADN, Morocco, D. I., QI, Tangiers, 1 July 1936. Rabat, August 1936. 112. Ibid. 113. Cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 45. 114. Cited in Stora, Les Trois Exils, 80. 115. Pascal Blanchard, “La vocation fasciste de l’Algérie coloniale dans les années 1930”, in De L’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvement des deux cotés du miroir colonial (1940–1962) (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), 183. 116. Cited in Pascal Blanchard, 184. “La vocation fasciste de l’Algérie coloniale dans les années 1930”, in De l’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en movement des deux côtés du miroir colonial (1940–1962), Paris, La Découverte, 2003, pp. 177–194 117. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Meknes, 18 May 1936.

8 A Turn for the Worse Tensions between Jews and Arabs mounted during the 1930s. Even countries

considered calm, such as Egypt, now witnessed physical aggression, sabotage and attacks on property. The change in the atmosphere in Egypt was striking. In March 1935, a team of Egyptian Jewish athletes participated in the Maccabee Games in Palestine; on their return to Egypt they were met and congratulated by Prince Abdel Moneim, the uncle of King Farouk. In the same year, Joseph Cattaoui, the senior member of the Jewish community, participated in the Egyptian delegation to London to negotiate the country’s independence. The year before, at the funeral of the Jewish banker Joseph Mosseri, the prime minister and his entire government were present. The principal factor behind the change is the Palestine conflict, which enters a sharp phase in 1936 and is ramped up by the Mufti of Jerusalem’s calls for Muslim and Arab solidarity. In Iraq, the death of King Faisal in 1933 is the spark for the imposition of discriminatory measures, which the Jewish community’s protest strike cannot stave off. Travel to Palestine becomes almost impossible for Jews—they are required to deposit the enormous sum of 5000 dinars, the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars. Their passports bear the proviso “Not valid for Palestine.” Overt violence sometimes breaks out against community notables, as well as students in the streets and in public schools. Aggressors are only lightly punished. A Baghdadi Jew recounts his teenage years during the 1930s: “Arab hooligans, knowing that Jews went to synagogue barefoot on Yom Kippur, spread broken glass in the streets. Many Jews arrived at synagogue with bloody feet.”1 The situation also appears to have been difficult in Morocco. In 1935 an AIU official evoked the violence of the “dregs of the population” and the presence of German agents: “But what is clear is that the old Arab hostility against the Jew, even if it appears to be dozing, is not extinguished.”2 Sémach reported in June 1933 that an antisemitic campaign had just been launched by the newspaper Le Soleil du Maroc, and observed that “in the time of Marshal Lyautey, when a journalist undertook an anti-Semitic campaign, he would immediately receive an order to leave the country.”3 Before the Palestinian uprising of April 1936, repression was already evident in Iraq and Yemen. Tensions also ran high with Christian Arabs, as reported by the Damascus AIU director in 1929.4 Everywhere, the deterioration of the

A Turn for the Worse  |  297 economic situation, starting in 1930 and aggravated by four years of drought lasting until 1933, altered inter-community relations. New anti-Jewish measures were promulgated. Impoverished Muslim peasants found themselves more and more indebted, sometimes to Jewish creditors. All this occured against a backdrop of a world crisis, which in the 1930s, deepened poverty and insecurity. In Iraq, the arrival on the throne of King Ghazi, son of Faisal, in September 1933, marked a turning point. The new sovereign lent a complacent ear to the antisemitic rhetoric now permeating the state administration, in particular among activists receptive to Fritz Grobba’s Nazi propaganda and sympathetic toward the actions of Palestinian and Syrian militants exiled in Iraq. Although the Jewish community still sent five representatives to parliament (increasing to seven after 1946), the deterioration in the situation was manifest. Yet, successive Iraqi governments cited, with reason, article 6 of the constitution of March 21, 1925, which stipulated that all Iraqis are equal before the law, and article 18, that all employment is open to all Iraqis, whatever their origin, language, or religion. In effect, Iraq never adopted the slightest anti-Jewish legislation. At independence in 1932, the Minister of Finance, Sassoon Heskall, was Jewish, as were the Directors-General of Posts and Railways. This was true, but not for long. The Zionist movement was the authorities’ priority target. The first veritable Iraqi Zionist organization was founded in February 1921. After a euphoric interval following the Balfour Declaration, Zionist activity grew sluggishly, such that by 1925 it counted a mere 300 activists out of a community of some 100,000, a derisory number reflecting, among other factors, the radical hostility of the authorities. The first retaliatory measures taken in Arab countries consisted of preventing the departure of Jews for the Holy Land. In Yemen in the 1920s, Imam Yahia created “all sorts of difficulties in order to paralyze their economic existence.”5 In 1933 Abraham Levi, delegate of the rescue committee for Jewish refugees in Aden, estimated that: “Eighty percent of the population [of Jews in Yemen] needs immediate help,” accusing Zionist authorities in 1935 of ignoring this “silent tragedy,” which was “no less terrible than the tragedy of Jewish communities in other countries.”6 The Jewish Agency delivered few certificates in Iraq, giving priority to Europe instead, while the Iraqi government makes life impossible for families wishing to emigrate. Some, waiting more than six years for visas, had already sold their goods. The plethora of restrictions and retaliatory measures intensified from 1945.7 Within Jewish communities, Zionist activity was also restrained by fear or conviction. It is true that after 1929, above all, many wished to distance themselves from Zionism: “As certain newspapers distinguish insufficiently between Arab Jews and Zionists,” declares the Damascus Jewish Youth Association at the end of August 1929, “we find it opportune, in our capacity as Arab citizens

298  |  Jews in Arab Countries from time immemorial, to bring to the attention of both our fellow citizens and Syrians . . . that the Israelites of Syria have no connection to the Zionist question.”8 In 1936, the Chief Rabbi of Baghdad, Sassoon Kaddourie, flanked by other notables, expressed his disapproval of Zionism. School director Ezra Haddad, a well-known Jewish intellectual, wrote in the Arabic newspaper Al-Akhbar: “The Arab Jew, when he reflects upon his position regarding Zionism, does so in all conscience, bringing to bear his own free will and considerations of justice on the basis of established facts. And when he speaks of Arab land, he speaks of his own homeland, his country since time immemorial, which embraces him with its generosity and richness, which constitutes an oasis in the desert of injustice and oppression which has been Jews’ lot in a great number of the countries which have benefitted from their culture and civilization.” Earlier, in the newspaper Al-Bilad, Ezra Haddad had published an article entitled “We were Arabs before we became Jews.”9 It is not always easy to determine how much such appeals expressed genuine convictions (since many Iraqi and Egyptian Jews were convinced anti-Zionists), but these appeals would be repeated until the beginning of 1951. In spring 1946, for example, while the UN was considering the Palestine issue in order to find a solution to the conflict, the review El-Fagr El-Jedid (The New Dawn) reproduced the appeal addressed by “the free Jews of Iraq” to their co-religionists, exhorting them to boycott the British-American commission of inquiry mandated by the UN. The appeal reaffirmed the Arab character of Iraqi Jews, “a full part of the Iraqi people. . . . We call upon the people to boycott this commission, and we consider that the solution to the Palestinian question depends on the struggle, and the joining of efforts, of all Arabs.”10 Whether or not they were sympathetic to Zionism, community leaders were obliged to publicly express disagreement with it, as in August 1938 when thirtythree dignitaries of the Baghdad community sent a telegram to the British Colonial Office and the League of Nations to express their opposition to Zionism. In Egypt in November 1938, on the occasion of the Balfour Declaration anniversary (a date henceforth dreaded by all Jews of the Arab world), Cairo Jewish community president Joseph Cattaoui, in an exchange with Chaim Weizmann, supported a Judeo-Arab entente in Palestine. Unlike the Iraqi Government, Cairo ordered the seizure of antisemitic literature while in parallel, numerous Egyptian political figures affirmed that one should not confuse Zionists with the Jews of Egypt, who are good citizens. The Egyptian authorities cracked down not just on antisemitic literature, but on anti-Nazi Jewish material as well. In 1936, Maurice Fargeon, who three years earlier had published Hitler, Modern Tyrant, was convicted by the Egyptian courts of insulting a foreign head of state. The official enthusiasm of Egyptian Jews for their homeland continued in the run-up to the establishment of the State of Israel. In August 1947, Chief Rabbi

A Turn for the Worse  |  299 Haïm Nahum sent a letter to the UN to affirm the engagement of the Egyptian Jewish community on the side of its sole homeland, Egypt. In December 1947, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, “invites” the Chief Rabbi to support the fight of Arab Palestine, both morally and materially, which would, he said, “eliminate all doubts about the position of Egyptian Jews.”11 In January 1948, Cattaoui, president of the Cairo community, and Goar, president of the Alexandria community, called on Egyptian Jews to show solidarity with Arab Palestine. On May 16, 1948, on the second day of the Arab-Israeli war, Al-Ahram published the letter of the Cattaoui brothers (René and Joseph), addressed to the Chief Rabbi, in which they affirm that their “religion is Judaism, their country is Egypt and their nationality is Egyptian.”12 In the wake of this, certain Jewish newspapers, such as Al-Kalim on 28 May 28, 1948, spoke of the “so-called State of Israel.”13 In 1939, in Morocco as well, Jewish notables adopted the most discrete position possible with regard to the Palestine conflict. They made contributions “for Palestine” (in December 1947, just after the UN vote for partition), publishing their names and amounts of gifts in the press without any mention of their religious affiliation. Yet, everyone recognizes Jews based on their family names. These proclamations of goodwill extended as far as public self-humiliation, arousing the discrete disdain of Arab officials. At the end of August 1929, a delegation of Jewish notables calls on Muslim leaders in order “to assure them of the sympathies of the Damascus Jewish population for the bereavement which had just struck Palestinian Arabs.”14 These antiZionist proclamations were often qualified as “hypocritical” by the Arab press, as observed in 1932 by the Baghdad AIU director.15 Zionist activity in Baghdad went completely underground between the wars, hiding behind literary or sporting associations. Fund-raising and propaganda stopped, although sympathies for Zionism may well have increased under the brunt of hardened repression.16 At the same time, the 1930s saw the eruption of antisemitic demonstrations, this time emanating from the street as well as from indigenous authorities. In several Moroccan towns, for example, the pashas enacted hostile measures. One heard “unkind words in mosques and medinas with regard to the Jews. As a result, the anti-Semitic sentiments of the Muslim populace are exploited, notably by the nationalists,” as the French administration reported from Morocco in 1937.17 “Both young and old, whether of nationalist, Francophile or Francophobic tendencies, speak discretely and secretly about Jews,” as reported by the regional Sûreté (the criminal investigative bureau) in Safi. All agreed that the ills from which the world (and in particular Morocco) suffered should be attributed to the Jews.18 These police reports were evidently marked by the antisemitism of the colonial administration, but the deterioration of Judeo-Muslim relations could

300  |  Jews in Arab Countries not be doubted. Evidence of this could be seen in a cascade of daily incidents, often of a minor nature, which shined a light on a climate where harassment was the norm (“All the Jews who went past were chased, hooted by street kids, and manhandled”) and the slightest quarrel could degenerate into a riot.19 In Libya, the inter-war period was also the stage of a series of venial incidents, most often initiated by Muslims on the occasion of religious festivals, that rapidly spiraled out of control. The boycott of Jewish businessmen and artisans was also testament to the deterioration in relations. In Marrakesh in 1938, female Jewish dressmakers were deprived of work by Muslim merchants.20 “Many people criticize the overly rapid evolution of the Jews and come to think of them as useless parasites. . . . And we see Muslim merchants reduce or intentionally cut off their business relations with the Jews,” noted Etienne Coidan. “Artisans declined to recruit Jewish women and certain indigènes refused even to use the services of Jewish barbers operating in the medina.”21 In response to the colonizers’ antisemitism, Muslims showed little solidarity with the Jews; they were at best indifferent. When, in 1936, Jews created the Moroccan Union of Jews and Muslims for the purpose of combatting the Croixde-Feu, they elicited almost no involvement on the Muslim side. At Meknes in May 1938, confronted with the Parti Social Français offensive, the Jews were “very disappointed with the attitude adopted regarding them by Moroccan Muslims, whom they had hoped would be disposed to an entente with them thanks to the activities of Bernard Lecache, president of the LICA.”22 Alarmed, the Résidence Générale noted in May 1939 that “recent incidents have just demonstrated that the traditional antagonism between Muslims and Jews has a tendency to sharpen.” The Résidence recommended that Jews display a measure of discretion in the “anti-Hitler campaigns,” and added that it would be better to avoid recourse to “indigenous troops” in operations to maintain order.23 The disquiet taking hold of Jewish communities was heightened by the antisemitism sweeping Europe. This disquiet was aggravated by recurrent rumors (sometimes well-founded) that an antisemitic campaign or persecutions would soon be set off here or there. After 1930, Jewish traveling merchants in Libya could no longer go into Muslim quarters. By the end of the decade even Egypt was gripped by fear. In July 1939, La Tribune Juive (the Jewish Tribune) reported that “in the space of two weeks, four bombs have been placed in front of synagogues and Jewish houses. . . . In this time, four newspapers . . . as well as a movement called the Parti de la Jeunesse (Youth Party) have openly led a violent campaign of anti-Jewish propaganda on Egyptian territory.”24 In Morocco, the French police reported a climate of anxiety. Several Jewish notables “were thinking seriously of moving to the land of Zion out of fear of a pogrom.”25

A Turn for the Worse  |  301 The Constantine pogrom, perpetrated by indigènes and encouraged by the quasi-inertia of the military, marked the acme of violence. The town of Constantine was a stronghold of colonial antisemitism; its mayor, Emile Morinaud, was a member of Croix-de-Feu and publisher of anti-Jewish newspapers (Le Tam Tam de Constantine, and L’Éclair). This antisemitism found a sure audience with Muslim notables. Between August 3 and 5, 1934, twenty-five Jews were killed in atrocious circumstances. At the origin of events, against the background of an agricultural crisis, a minor indiscretion was committed on August 3 by a Jewish tailor, probably drunk, in front of the Green Mosque. The riot started that night and took a dramatic turn on Sunday two days later, when 300 Muslims who had been harangued by ringleaders over the course of two days rushed to the Jewish quarter. The army and the police, weapons at the ready, stayed in barracks. The riot spread to cover the entire Constantine area by the next day. Was this premeditated murder? “One has noted in fact several chalk-marks on the display windows of Jewish shops, which proves [the existence of] a plan which had been conceived at length and methodically executed. The mosque incident would therefore have been but a pretext.”26 After this drama, fear did not loosen its grip on Jewish communities of Algeria, or in fact throughout North Africa. Some Jewish organizations intervened in an attempt to stave off the deterioration, or even to try to preserve Jewish-Muslim dialogue. In Fez in 1936, as we have seen, LICA pushed for the creation of a Moroccan Union of Jews and Muslims, which was in reality exclusively Jewish. Across the Arab world in the years 1936–1939, Jewish communities called for fraternization with the Muslims. But to these repeated requests for camaraderie, the Arab-Muslim camp turned an increasingly deaf ear. The increasing solitude of the Jews was coupled with defiance toward the police, which a portion of the Casablanca mellah populace accused of partiality. In Paris in mid-March 1933, the Comité Central of the AIU received a missive from Morocco: “On this evening of celebration [Purim], I think of the Jews of Germany. I think of them not because they belong to my race, but because they are people. . . . Yes, the Inquisition is being reborn. The pogrom recommences. . . . During the twentieth century, in the very heart of Europe, civilized men conduct themselves as barbarians.”27 The anonymous author’s emotions were in unison with the emotions seizing Oriental Jewries upon the announcement of the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler. From the first months of 1933, Jewish communities mobilized, and while this was in a disorganized manner, none of the communities remained apathetic. They sought to publicly express their solidarity by means of posters, pamphlets, articles, by fund-raising

302  |  Jews in Arab Countries for the initial refugees, and by refusing to buy German products. In Meknes in March 1934, the AIU director, Prosper Cohen, reported on the diabolical aura surrounding the name of Hitler, “the champion of the collective crime. Anything which may have a connection to Hitlerian Germany, to bad luck, to any object or person who might be able to inflict moral or material prejudice, these all take the name of Hitler, the “talisman” of the twentieth century. There is no-one, including children, who does not know this name and its sad reputation.”28 Others hastily organized “movements,” such as the International League Against German Anti-Semitism, founded in Cairo on March 24, 1933; it would subsequently merge with LICA, becoming the latter’s Egyptian branch. The International League called for the boycotting of German products in Egypt, and this had some success regarding German films. But with Berlin threatening to stop buying Egyptian cotton, the boycott fell flat a few months later. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 set off a new wave of indignation, but the fervor of 1933 died down, not through lack of conviction but because of fear. Protestations continued in the form of tracts, posters, pamphlets, and newspapers (often ephemeral). Jewish communities were conscious of their weakness: if German Jewry, a bulwark of the Jewish world of the times, was pushed down like that, if such was the lot of the Jews “in one of the most civilized countries,” as rehashed by a refrain of the times, then liberties which had been attained in the Arab world would also be called into question. There were fewer and fewer spectacular actions; boycotts carried on, but on an individual scale. Rejection of the Hitler regime was also expressed through supporting the opposition in Germany and giving assistance to refugees. Aid organizations were set up. From 1933 onward, authorized fund-raising was organized, sometimes under the aegis of the AIU. This was the case in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, where however authorizations by the protectorate were doled out parsimoniously. Community leaders pleaded with the authorities in favor of recognition of the right to asylum, but such interventions only worsened the rapport with colonial authorities. In Morocco, the Résidence Générale turned down most requests for asylum. Prior to 1933, German-speaking immigrants made up only 2.5 percent of the total of arrivals in Eretz Israel. By 1933 they were 17 percent, and 52 percent by 1938. But the April 1936 uprising pushed the authorities, first to put the brakes on, and then to forbid Jewish immigration (under the 3rd White Paper on Palestine, in May 1939). Oriental Jewish communities turned against London, even though since the Balfour Declaration, Great Britain had been considered as a friendly nation. The welcome held out to Jewish refugees from Europe led to social tensions across the Arab world. There was fear (including among the Jews) of an increase in joblessness. In June 1933, for example, the arrival of two German Jewish

A Turn for the Worse  |  303 doctors in Damascus resulted in “great emotions.”29 According to a press release, the association of doctors and pharmacists would meet “in the next few days to protest against any hospitality accorded German refugees: they have no place in Syria.”30 The mobilization of the Oriental Jewish communities antagonized most authorities. First, it upset their traditional attitudes, as discussed above; it reflected a political awakening highlighting the existence of a quasi-national “Jewish solidarity” and showing the extent to which a strictly religious conception of Jewishness was obsolete. Thus, as an indirect result, the Nazi assumption of power in Germany upset the structure of Jewish-Arab relations in the Middle East, all the more so when this involved Zionism, the expression of which was forbidden in Iraq and Syria and tightly monitored everywhere else. Restricted in the 1930s to confidential activities and private meetings, the Zionist movement avoided all publicity, and was absent from the press. In Casablanca, the Résidence Générale stipulated that meetings had to take place inside the mellah. Fear of Arab reaction was at the core of this attitude. In Morocco, for example, when the Jewish community wanted to create youth movements and sports associations, this was refused by the authorities due to their fear of Muslim sentiment: there would be no Jewish Scouting organization, because there was no Muslim Scouting organization. After repeated rejections of requests for approval, the Moroccan Jewish Scouts were finally attached to the French associations. In 1944 the head of the Marrakesh region, Colonel d’Hauteville, recommended a “monitored and oriented” evolution in order not to offend indigenous authorities.31 To avoid “upsetting the Arab street,” on the eve of their return to Baghdad, British forces camped at the gates of the city did not budge during the Farhud, the pogrom of June 1–2, 1941. Because they knew that the “Arab street” was hostile to their presence, the British let events run their course, allowing popular anger to erupt. It was, similarly, to avoid offending this same “Arab street” that in September 1939 the French authorities rejected the enrolment applications of 8,000 young Jews in Morocco. The same attitude explains why in 1948 the Résident Général of Morocco (and this was also true of French authorities in Algeria and Tunisia) recommended that Paris not recognize the young State of Israel, as this would render France’s position in North Africa delicate.32 It was less the nature of Jewish engagement that was problematic than Jews’ very existence as political actors. The affair of the boycott of German products was revelatory of an “Arab street” not so much favorable to the Reich as hostile to any Jewish pretention to political expression. Berlin protested against the boycott to all countries involved. In Lebanon, German diplomats even tried to convince the Chief Rabbi that the community was in error, since Chancellor Hitler, as the German consul wrote, had promised that his government “would take effective

304  |  Jews in Arab Countries measures to protect the property and lives of German citizens of the Jewish race. . . . Notwithstanding these facts, a veritable propaganda of calumnies was unleashed against the German national movement as soon as Herr Hitler had come to power.” As for the campaign initiated by the Jews of Lebanon to boycott German products, “a measure which you will permit me to qualify as poorly thought out,” continued the consul, “this will only serve to worsen the situation of the Jews in Germany.” This approach, he said, was all the more absurd because “a good deal of German commerce and industry is in the hands of the Jews.” The Chief Rabbi replied to the Consul that he looked forward to revocation of the anti-Jewish measures in Germany, with the Jews treated as fellow citizens, so that he might “reassure his flock [and] calm their minds.”33 Such pressures aroused in the Jews their ancient fear of any political action, judged a priori to be dangerous. Moroccan Jews were advised to “steer clear of anything which may concern politics, including public affairs,” and keep away from their “thinking, milieu or homes any connection, idea or conversation concerning anything connected to politics.”34 Hence the frictions within Jewish communities as soon as the Palestine question arose, even if hearts and minds aligned on the side of a Jewish national home. At the beginning of 1936, Bernard Lecache, founder of the LICA, toured Morocco in order to (illegally) establish branches of his organization. He did so with the support of the Ligue des droits de l’Homme and the SFIO. He was closely monitored by the French police, who termed him a “communist” (and, moreover, “without known address”). In March of that year, the Quai d’Orsay reiterated its refusal to authorize the establishment of a Moroccan LICA branch.35 The Front Populaire would lift the interdiction. The organization was not really mixed—it was and would remain overwhelmingly Jewish: in October 1936 the Meknes branch contained only one Muslim out of 47 members. One of LICA’s essential tasks was to oppose the propaganda of the extreme Right, which sets up the Muslim majority against the Jews, and to inform the press about incidents by means of reports and communiqués, enabling Jewish communities to defend themselves through, among others, the distribution of its publication, Le Droit de vivre (The Right to Live). The rise in anti-Jewish violence, combined with the influence of Zionism, led to the beginnings of community self-defense. In Tangiers in May 1936, a group was created that aimed to stop the campaigns organized by the extreme Right. However, genuine Jewish self-defense would only be organized after the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad, in June 1941, and in general only with the support of emissaries sent by Eretz Israel. This was the case in Iraq, from 1941–1942, with the arrival of agents of the Yishuv. Some arrived clandestinely, operating under the cover of a construction company. Others arrived as employees of the British

A Turn for the Worse  |  305 administration, but in reality were members of kibbutzim, and often Haganah fighters. The Haganah’s agents were sent to train youth; with these volunteers, they founded, in 1942, the Shahab al Inqadh (The Youth of Health) association. Other groups follow, including the Edat Hofshim (The Community of Free Jews), who call on the “100,000 Jews of Baghdad” to join in self-defense and purchase weapons. But their work rapidly went beyond self-defense, to become the preparation for emigration. The Jewish homeland’s emissaries were witnesses—often aghast ones—of the poor preparation of the communities in terms of facing violence. On questions of security, the communities still tended to rely on the authorities. Autonomous and active Jewish self-defense was still a tentative and not easily accepted idea. What then remained was a propensity to minimize the dangers while at the same time reacting hyper-sensitively to them. Only powerlessness can explain these contradictory reactions, simultaneously watering down the peril and yielding to panic, and both downplaying conflict and feeding the most somber of forebodings. It was this self-inflicted blindness that wanted to believe in the absence of deep conflict in Palestine, out of fear that by recognizing it, Jews would undermine their own situation in the Diaspora. This same process of denial demonstrated lucidity about German antisemitism, while refusing to see the danger at home in the Arab world. In Egypt, for example, groups articulating a violent antisemitic discourse, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt, were— incorrectly—considered by the Jewish press to be marginal movements who were “superbly ignored” by the Egyptian people. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, Oriental Jewish communities were marked by a quite accurate grasp of distant horrors in Europe, but a muted sense of the fragility of their own future in Arab lands. What emerged from this obscure present and future was a feeling of solitude.36 “Everyone is setting sail,” hammered Bernard Lecache. “Today us, and you tomorrow.”37 The argument would be endlessly rehashed until the day when the Jews, looking around themselves, suddenly realized that they were alone on the boat.

Notes 1. Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 169. 2. AIU, Morocco, IV. C.11, Tangiers, 4 July 1935. 3. Ibid. 4. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, Silberstein, 4 December 1929. 5. Paix et Droit, March 1924. 6. In Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 132.

306  |  Jews in Arab Countries 7. Cf. CZA, S6/3785 (II), Union of Iraqi Youth of Iraq, 2 December 1938, and CZA, S25/1292, 28 February 1947. 8. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, Silberstein, 31 August 1929. 9. These texts are cited in Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq, 219. 10. CZA, S25/8003. 11. CZA, J112-1893. 12. Cited in Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 213–214. 13. Ibid, 213–214. 14. AIU, Syria, I. G. 2, Damascus, 31 August 1929. 15. CZA, S25/3528, Baghdad, 3 September and 16 October 1938. 16. Baghdad, 18 December 1929, in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 342. 17. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Meknes, 28 June 1937. 18. Ibid., Safi, 9 July 1938. 19. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Casablanca, 14 April 1933. 20. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Marrakesh, 1 December 1938. 21. Ibid., dossier 18. 22. Ibid., dossier 24, Meknes, 24 May 1938, correspondence addressed to the Résident Général. 23. Ibid., Rabat, 11 May 1939. 24. La Tribune juive, 26 July 1939, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 393. 25. Ibid., dossier 24. 26. Paix et Droit, September 1934, 4. 27. AIU, Morocco, II. C. 3, 19 March 1933. 28. AIU, Morocco, II. B. 5. 29. In L’Orient, 13 June 1933. 30. L’Orient (newspaper), Beirut, June 16, 1933. 31. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24 Marrakesh, 28 December 1944. 32. Ibid., dossier 26, Oran, 15 June 1948. 33. AIU, Egypt, I. G., April 1933. 34. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, September 1938. 35. Ibid., dossier 29, 5 March 1936. 36. AIU, Morocco, III. C.18, Fez, 10 March 1935. 37. Ibid.

Section Two Shock and Collapse, 1939–1975

9 In the Wake of War, 1939–1945 From the late 1930s to the end of the war in 1945, German propaganda, espe-

cially via the medium of radio, played a considerable role in the Arab world. But it did not operate on a blank slate: it had been preceded by the transmissions of Italian propaganda platform Radio Bari. On April 25, 1939, the Reich begins transmitting from a powerful new transmitter in the small town of Zeesen, south of Berlin (later, centers will be opened in Munich, Saarbrücken, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart). From early 1940, two daily programs are broadcast in Arabic, then three from the following summer. In one year, from September 1939 to September 1940, Berlin produces 89,500 foreign language broadcasts—including more than thirty thousand hours of programs in which the Near East is the priority. Some 80 personnel work on these programs in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and programs were also transmitted to India. German activity in the Turkish and Arab worlds in fact goes back to before World War I, when Wilhelmine Germany was tardily attempting to construct a colonial empire. After 1918, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germans involved in this foreign policy initiative found themselves out of work. They came back into service with the Third Reich and acted as advisors in these efforts in the 1930s. In 1938, an Arab Maghreb defense committee and a North African political refugee committee were created in Berlin. These German dens of intrigue, which were explicitly anti-French, operated under the guise of organizations working for the defense of Arab independence and “fundamental freedoms.” Tetouan and Tangiers, in Spanish Morocco, were hubs of the propaganda activities aimed at North Africa. “The Jew gnaws away at you like vermin gnawing at a lamb,” asserted a tract put out by these offices. “France protects the Jew, who is her agent and henchman. Germany fences off and hunts down the Jews and confiscates their property. If you were not France’s slaves, you would do the same.”1 Overseen by the Sicherheitsdienst Ausland, the SS security overseas service, German propaganda also used transmitters broadcasting from outside the Reich toward the Maghreb, in both Arabic and Kabyle (for example, Radio Rome and Radio Bari, created by the Italian Government in 1934, broadcasting daily news bulletins in Arabic, from April 1935). The start of the war in 1939 increased the volume of the propaganda—even more when, from October 24, 1941, Radio Athens, not far from the Arab Middle East, started producing two daily broadcasts in Arabic.

310  |  Jews in Arab Countries Berlin broadcasted in Arabic seven days per week. Programs such as “The Voice of Free Arabism” attracted a large listenership, according to Allied intelligence services. In August 1941, an American report estimated the number of shortwave receivers in the Middle East at 90,000, of which 55,000 were in Egypt, 24,000 in Palestine, 6,000 in Syria, and 4,000 in Iraq. By January 1942 there were some 60,000 in Egypt, 40,000 in Palestine, 20,000 in Syria, and 10,000 in Iraq. Further west, in the Maghreb, at that time there would have been around 70,000 shortwave receivers in Algeria and 46,000 in Morocco, most of them belonging to Europeans. These figures appear low, but it should be borne in mind that radio listening was usually collective. In a tense political situation, at least 50 people— sometimes 100—might listen to a single receiver.2 This propaganda, moreover, was meant to reach a mainly illiterate populace.3 From 1941, German radio also had as its objective the indoctrination of the Afrika Korps, stationed in Libya, in particular with the goal of encouraging antisemitism. This was tightly linked to German plans regarding the Near East, at a time when the Reich still harbored great hopes for victory. On January 11, 1941, Hitler published his “Directive No. 32,” which envisaged that after the attack on the USSR, Germany would (with the participation of the Italians) direct its forces toward the Suez Canal, counting on the support of Arab nationalists. The Führer designated as “Sonderstab F” (Special Staff F) the Wehrmacht army corps that would operate in the “Arab zone.” On April 6, 1941, General Rommel disembarked in North Africa. A month later, the German Government published a paper On the Arab Question, while the Reich furnished Rashid Ali’s Iraq with arms, and 100,000 marks to the Mufti of Jerusalem, exiled in Baghdad.4 Germany attempted to weaken the British position through the weapon of antisemitism. The pro-British Iraqi authorities put in place at the time denounced the role played by such propaganda in the Farhud, in June 1941. The July 8, 1941 report from the Iraqi inquiry concluded that German radio “created a favorable climate for Rashid Ali and his supporters, permitting them to put his diabolical plans into operation.”5 Propaganda follows the development of military operations in North Africa; thus, when the Afrika Korps finds itself 100 km from Alexandria at the end of June 1942, Ribbentrop decides to intensify propaganda. He has 100,000 postcards printed showing “the frontiers of the new Zionist realm,” featuring Roosevelt, Churchill, and Weizmann standing in front of a map on which the borders of this usurper state were drawn, encompassing Trans-Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and a part of Saudi Arabia. In August 1942, 300,000 pamphlets entitled “The New Jewish Kingdom” were distributed in Syria, stating: “17 million Jews from the entire world could be accommodated in this new realm. . . . Subsequently, they will expel the inhabitants of the country, using the Jewish methods we know about!”6

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  311 The Propaganda Abteilung (Propaganda Division) redoubles its initiatives following the November 1942 Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria: “North Africans know very well that the Jews are the source of their misfortunes,” just as they know that the American landing signifies more power for “the Jews” and for “their influence and misdeeds.”7 In its six daily bulletins in Arabic and Berber, German radio calls for pogroms and for the “redistribution of Jewish wealth to Muslims” after the sacking of the mellahs.8 In February 1943, Berlin sets out its propaganda topics: “Jews sent to perform forced labor. Jewish wealth distributed to the Muslim poor who have suffered bombing.”9 Tracts in the tens of thousands are dropped into the Maghreb, exploiting the Palestine issue and showing the Mufti of Jerusalem speaking with Arab soldiers in German uniform; between January 3 and February 13, 1943, some twenty-two different pamphlets are dropped over the Maghreb, totaling 350,000 copies. Discovering the power of anti-Zionism and well informed about the Jewish obsession of many Arabs, the Germans claim “the Anglo-Americans, who are paid off by the Jews, want to turn Morocco and Algeria into a second Palestine.”10 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, speaking on German radio on November 14, 1942, declares: “The Jews’ interest in the colonization of Arab lands and the creation there of a Jewish State has been a major contributor to inciting the AngloAmerican occupation of Arab territories twenty-five years after the Balfour Declaration. Arabs, be assured that the American Army is a sword in the hands of the Jews, and that they have come in order to enslave you.”11 Alexander C. Kirk arrived in Cairo in 1941 after having served for two years as chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Berlin. In March 1944 he delivered a report to the State Department on his activities during his three years in Egypt, deciphering German propaganda produced for the Near East. In nearly three thousand pages, he reported on the importance of the “Jewish question” in Axis propaganda from 1941 to 1942. He described the antisemitism distilled ad nauseum in the Reich’s propaganda, constituting nothing less than a call for massacres in response to the loss by the Arabs “of their lands and their wealth due to Jewish rapacity in Palestine,” with the result that “the Arabs, who have disposed of their liberty to the British, will soon be deported and condemned to famine.”12 Five million people, it is said in the Reich’s propaganda, will be brought to Palestine. The Jews have promised to raise an army of 20,000 men, “officially to lend support to the British, but in reality to expel the Arabs if the Germans advance.”13 Life in Palestine is a “bloodbath.” The Arab people live there in an atmosphere of “shame and misery.”14 The Jews are described on November 18, 1942 as “the enemies of the Arabs— of all the Arabs and of Islam.”15 They are vectors of irreligion, atheism, and Zionism, which is the final avatar of “the Jewish hatred for Islam.”16

312  |  Jews in Arab Countries Following the Anglo-American landings of November 8, Werner von Schmieden (one of the Reich officials in charge of propaganda) explained that antisemitism should be a means of leveraging public anger: “We must encourage the indigenous population to commit anti-Jewish actions.”17 The theme of the United States being “the property of the Jews” is a cornerstone of this propaganda. On April 27, 1942, Roosevelt is said to be at “the head of Zionism.” On May 27, 1942, he is the “Chief Rabbi Roosevelt.”18 The imputation is that if the United States wins the war, this will in reality be the victory of the Jews and thus the destruction of the Arabs. As the Americans would then be obliged to ensure the protection of the Jews, this would be a means of provoking “the confrontation which we desire between Americans and natives. . . . Fomenting demonstrations, confrontations and pogroms against the Jews. Inciting the pillaging of Jewish shops, refusing to pay interest or to repay loans. Re-establishment of the mellah (ghetto) and the obligation on Jews to wear Jewish clothing, etc.”19 With the consummation of the French defeat in June 1940, German propaganda was now aimed at soldiers of Maghrebin origin interned as POWs and those still in their home countries. After the armistice was signed, a German delegation arrived in Morocco, “a treasure of infinite possibilities,” noted the head of the delegation, expressing the wish that the Führer would invest more into North Africa. During the “Phony War” (September 1939–May 1940), as well as during the short campaign following it, Berlin sought to lead astray Muslim soldiers from the Maghreb, inciting them to desert. It did this through its radio programs (in Moroccan or Tunisia dialects of Arabic, or in Moroccan Berber or Kabyle dialect, all produced by Maghrebin intellectuals.) From the beginning of 1940, five daily transmissions were sent in Arabic. They were generally listened to collectively, at the café. The anti-Jewish theme, blended with anti-Zionism, was omnipresent, as was the theme of the “Jewish war” whose goal was to “expel the Arabs from Palestine in order for Jews to be able to settle in their place,” as broadcast on January 29, 1940.20 Palestine quickly becomes a hobbyhorse of Nazi propaganda. “American soldiers are your enemies: behind each one hides a Jew who will remain when the soldier withdraws. Moroccans! Show yourselves to be worthy of your Palestinian brothers!” as the German Consulate in Tangiers exhorts at the end of December 1942.21 Pamphlets in the millions exploit the Palestinian conflict with a view to demoralizing France’s Muslim soldiers. “The Jew-British force our Palestinian brothers to fear and submit to Jewish dictatorship.”22 After the armistice with France, Germany installs a shortwave transmitter near Allouis, in France, with a longer range than the Zeesen facility. It broadcasts in French,

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  313 Maghreb Arabic, and Kabyle. Impressed by the French defeat and in admiration of German power, many inhabitants are convinced that their own country’s independence is near. The Reich multiplies its pamphlets and newspapers in Arabic, aimed at the 60,000 Muslim prisoners of war from the Maghreb.23 It even displays a degree of subtlety in certain POW camps where, every Friday, commandants allow the colors of Islam to be hoisted alongside those of the Reich. In December 1940, the Germans create a propaganda bureau in Paris aimed at Muslim countries, with a special section for each French North African country. From January 1943, the North African Muslim Committee publishes a monthly bulletin (twice-monthly from May 1943) in French, Er-Rachid (The Messenger), which defends a fanatical Nazi line, and calls for struggle against those it qualifies as “Jew-ified.”24 This crude propaganda found a favorable echo in the pro-German Arab populace from Morocco all the way to Iraq. German radio maintained its audience until the end of the war; Nazi influence was such that in July 1944 a Tunisian Francophile could still write: “cut open the heart of an Arab and you will find a little Hitler inside.”25 On May 31, 1933 the Mufti made contact with the German consul at Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, in order to assure him that the Muslims “saluted the new German regime.”26 “The sole man present in Germany”—this was the headline, under Hitler’s portrait, in an Iraqi newspaper. Shop windows displayed his photo. This was the case in Jenin (in Palestine) in 1938 as well as in Baghdad in May 1941. Well before the war, Arab opinion in Palestine showed marked enthusiasm for the Reich. In March 1937, the German consul at Jerusalem, Walter Doehle, reported on “the admiration our Führer inspires.” He explained: “If a crowd appeared threatening, all that was needed was to explain that one was German, and this served as a safe-conduct. And if one revealed one’s identity by shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’, the attitude of the Arabs became completely enthusiastic, with the German receiving ovations and the Arabs frenetically returning his Hitler salute.”27 The same enthusiasm was noted in Kurdistan, where the portrait of Hitler featured in many cafes and restaurants, because he “had the same enemies as they did,” affirms a German lieutenant: “the British and the Jews.”28 In Algeria before the war, the French Gouvernement Général reported on “the symptomatic desire expressed by many Algerian pupils and students to learn German.”29 It was also in Algeria, in 1933, that in order to stimulate the sale of its products to the Muslim populace, a manufacturer had swastikas printed on its cigarette papers30 Swastikas were painted on walls, and each time the image of Hitler appeared in newsreels in the cinema, the indigènes erupted into thunderous applause. Songs with explicit titles, such as “Hitler the Magnanimous,” or “Hitler the Redeemer,” were popular in the Maghreb.

314  |  Jews in Arab Countries As King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia stated in February 1939, “All Arabs, and Muslims from different parts of the world, hold Germany in high esteem, something which is only increased by the struggle which that country wages against the Jews, who are the sworn enemies of the Arabs.”31 A German captain, WolfDietrich von Xylander, on his return from North Africa in March 1939, noted “In any conversation with the Arabs, they exhibit the joy which anti-Semitism brings them.”32 The theme of anti-Zionism combined with that of antisemitism, and antiZionism would take a central position in Nazi discourse after 1938. In September of that year, during the annual Party celebration in Nuremberg, Hitler finished his speech with these words, which heralded the Sudetenland crisis: “There will not be a second Palestine in the heart of Europe.”33 Witnesses are in accord on this point: from Morocco to Iraq, “Arab opinion” seemed to be favorable to the Axis. Habib Bourguiba, the prominent Tunisian nationalist militant, wrote on August 8, 1942, to Dr. Habib Thameur: “After the armistice I received the visits of a number of compatriots from all circles: students, businessmen, lawyers. In speaking with them, I gained the conviction that all or nearly all believe firmly in the victory of the Axis.”34 Activism remained marginal, but the mass of the public was sympathetic to the Reich (and to a lesser degree, Fascist Italy). In Casablanca, the Résident Général noted, “Moroccans employ disobliging words [with regard to France] both in public places and when traveling by public conveyance.”35 From Tunisia in May 1941, Admiral Esteva wired Vichy, just after the Gabès riots, that the street is in favor of Germany, wishing for its victory and that the presence of German soldiers in Gabès “even without intervention by them, made the rioters feel that they would go unpunished.”36 The prestige Germany enjoyed after 1933–1934 intensifies. Germany presented the image of a once-defeated nation, animated by active antisemitism, capable of lifting itself up from its trauma: everything about the Reich fed the feeling that it was a model. And everything encouraged the working classes and the Muslims of the Arab world to view Hitler as a vigilante who rights wrongs. A member of the German Foreign Ministry reported on 6 November 1942 that “the fight against Zionism, and thus against Judaism, is an undertaking approved by all Arabs and which some support [i.e., actively], depending on their character. Jewry is seen as the permanent and hereditary enemy.”37 The Arabs used a number of pseudonyms to speak about Hitler in public. The most popular one was Hadj Nimr, “the Tiger.” In Arab Palestine, people sometimes greeted each other in the street with “Heil Hitler!” “The extraordinarily pro-German disposition of the Arabs,” reported Walter Schellenberg, “is essentially explicable by the hope that Hitler will arrive in order to chase the Jews away . . . all the Arabs ardently hope for the German invasion, and ceaselessly

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  315 ask when the Germans will finally arrive; and they are very unhappy not to have any arms.”38 Schellenberg was in charge from July 1941 of Bureau VI (foreign intelligence service of the Sicherheits Dienst), within the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Main Security Bureau). German propaganda considers “Arab opinion” to be anti-Jewish. This analysis is corroborated by both French sources and English sources from the Palestine Yishuv. In Rabat in late 1940, the protectorate authorities are of the view that the German victory liberated the anti-Jewish sentiments among Muslim soldiers, to such an extent that the Grand Vizier recommends stationing them away from large cities, adding that “to leave thousands of Muslim soldiers in towns where there are Jewish agglomerations is a danger.”39 In January 1943, British informant Miles Lampson advised the Foreign Office that 90 percent of Egyptians, including those in government, consider that the Jews would bear principal respons­ ibility for rationing and inflation, and further that the Jews act as agents of the British with the sole aim of depriving Egyptians of necessities in order to furnish them to British troops.40 The anti-Jewish climate was even more intense in Iraq, as underscored in a report of the Jewish Agency. In fact, this was already true in the 1930s, when Iraq had closed its borders to Jewish refugees from Germany. Between 1933 and 1935 Iraq only admitted five refugee Jewish doctors. In the same years the Iraqi Government closed three Jewish dailies, Al-Misbah, Yeshurun, and Al-Hasid. In Iraq, again according to the Jewish Agency, the populace did not hide its hatred for the Jews after the return of the British in June 1941. When the Germans reached El-Alamein in June 1942, to the west of Alexandria, “many people were joyous and in no way hid their sympathy for Germany; they even openly menaced the Jews with total liquidation. ‘This time,’ they said, ‘we will finish what we started in 1941.’”41 German agents in Iran were expelled after the entry of British and Soviet troops. One such German agent, Erwin Ettel, back in Berlin working for the Reich government as a Near East expert, noted in 1942 that “the Arab question is inextricably linked to the Jewish question. The Jews are the mortal enemies of the Arabs, just as they are the mortal enemies of the Germans; anyone in Germany who is responsible for Arab policy should be a sworn and absolute enemy of the Jews.”42 This analysis was corroborated by the American army, which discovered the depth of anti-Jewish passion in the Maghreb. After 1945, German generals Felmy and Warlimont declared in their Nuremberg deposition that “the sole point around which the Arabs rallied politically was their hatred of the Jews.”43 In summer 1941, Nazi Germany seemed invincible. By contrast, Jewish communities were anxious if not in fact terrorized, as in Egypt with Rommel’s victory at the end of June 1942. Everywhere there was creeping fear of the indigènes. An

316  |  Jews in Arab Countries uprising by them, according to a July 1, 1942 report by the Jewish Agency, would lead to a “massacre of the Jews.”44 In Cairo, the government decreed a state of emergency and imposed martial law. Many Jews had already left Alexandria to take refuge in the capital, and many Zionist and anti-fascist activists left for Palestine. The war now created a feeling of common fate between Oriental and European Jews. The attitude of the Arab populations would come to leave a durable imprint in the minds of Jewish communities. Despite some discordant notes, the first German detachments sent to Tunisia following the Allied landings were greeted with enthusiasm, and the convoys of British prisoners were jeered. A press favorable to Germany deliberately created a stream of false news reports in order to throw fuel on the fire. The press depicted the “slavery” of the Muslim population, and the iniquity of “the Jews.” Er-Rachid reproduces a call by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in favor of Lebanese independence: “Why has North Africa not been liberated from the cruel oppression of the British, Americans, Gaullists and the Jews?”45 In the Near East, collaboration is more evident, particularly in Iraq with the first government of Rashid Ali, formed on March 31, 1940. In office up to January 1941, he then returned to power in April 1941, bringing overtly pro-Nazi and antisemitic ministers into the government. The worst violence against the Jews broke out at the end of May 1941, when Rashid Ali fled the advancing British, leaving no succession. The first German-Arab force was secretly established in Greece under the name of Deutsche-Arabische Lehrabteilung (DAL or German-Arab Instructional Department), a pompous name for a mediocre reality. Hardly 800 Arabs (of which two-thirds were Maghrebin) enrolled, against 5,200 Germans. In metropolitan France, other Maghrebins worked within the Milice (the collaborationist paramilitary force established to fight against the French Resistance). Some 200 worked within the North African Brigade, set up by Mohamed el-Maadi. Military collaboration with the Axis was thus largely symbolic, even if a certain number of Arab chiefs found exile in Berlin during the war, among them the Iraqi Al-Kawuqji, who played an important role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising. With Himmler ordering the creation in May 1944 of a Waffen-SS division recruited from among “Muslims of the East,” the Mufti of Jerusalem insisted that Islam and Nazism shared an ideological affinity: National Socialism was thus “a German ideology of nationalist character, and Islam was an Arab ideology of nationalist character,” naturally underscoring their “common enemies,” in first place the Jews.46 Palestine was one of the deep causes of the Arab refusal to serve the Allies, especially the British, who were held responsible for the establishment of a Jewish national home. Although from 1939 to 1945 nearly 9,000 Palestinian Arabs

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  317 volunteered to join the British Army, the Jews—whose population was merely half the size of the Arab population—mobilized at a rate fifteen times superior to that of the Arabs. Palestine galvanized Arab passions more than Abyssinia and Libya did, even though those situations were punctuated by atrocities. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini (1895–1974) remains the most recognized (and ritually cited) figure of the engagement of the Arab world in favor of the Axis. In summer 1940, he gloated over France’s defeat and sent his congratulations to the Führer. In September, his private secretary, Osman Kemal Haddad, met Fritz Grobba and several senior German officials in Berlin. He proposed to the Reich to launch an anti-British revolt from Syria in Palestine and Trans-Jordan by using French military equipment that had just been seized. In summer 1941, he reiterated his offer of military collaboration. With no clear response from Berlin, he returned to the charge, proposing the following communiqué: “Germany and Italy recognize that the Arab countries have the right to resolve the question of the Jewish elements who live in Palestine and in the other Arab countries based on the national and ethnic [völkisch] interests of the Arabs, and on the model of what is being done in Germany and Italy to resolve the Jewish question.”47 With the defeat of Rashid Ali in Baghdad, Al-Husseini flees to Teheran on June 2, 1941. He subsequently reaches Istanbul and then, in October, Rome. At the beginning of November, he obtains from the Italian government the promise to eliminate the Jewish national home in Palestine. Finally, on November 6, he reaches Berlin and is lodged sumptuously in a villa. Alongside Fritz Grobba, Al-Husseini is received on November 28 by Hitler. The Führer explains to him that an Axis victory would signify the extension to Oriental Jews of the “final solution” (Hitler includes Iran in this perspective), as well as the destruction of the Jewish national home in Palestine, which is nothing other than “a national center for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.” After his victory against the USSR, Hitler explains, the Wehrmacht would push toward the Caucasus in order to put the “Final Solution” into operation in the Near East; this was a solution that could only be an “international” one, failing which it would not be effective. Together with his team the Mufti moves to Berlin, where the regime pays him between 75,000 and 90,000 marks per month.48 What did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem represent in the Arab world during the war years? A personality of secondary importance? A marionette in the hands of the Axis? Or a recognized leader? The tendency today is to minimize his significance and reduce his representative quality, to relegate him to second fiddle—a just barely audible personality, as suggests Lebanese historian Gilbert Achcar.49 However, these analyses are invalidated both by archival reports and eyewitnesses. In 1942, Alexander C. Kirk called Al-Husseini “a leader of the Arab

318  |  Jews in Arab Countries world.”50 This was also the view of the Zionist executive, who considered on several occasions the value of liquidating him. In the ranks of the Zionist movement, several voices opposed that plan by highlighting the high price that Oriental Jewish communities would pay in reprisals, considering the popularity of the Mufti in Arab opinion. In Berlin, Al-Husseini remained in direct contact with the German Government through the intercession of diplomat Erwin Ettel (1895–1971), a dedicated Nazi. Aimed at Europe, Al-Husseini’s propaganda relied almost exclusively on antisemitism, insisting in his radio transmissions on a single demand: “the elimi­ nation of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. . . . The aspirations of the Jews are limitless,” he declared in March 1942. “Jews make use of Palestine as a base for their diabolical intentions concerning the other Arab countries. . . . As a matter of fact, the Jews would like to stretch their reign to encompass all of the Near East.”51 In Berlin, on December 23, 1942, he inaugurated the Islamic Institute, explaining that hatred of the Jew is rooted in Islam itself, and goes well beyond the question of Palestine. Here, his vision borrows directly from Nazi millenarianism: “The Koran says that the Jews are the cauldron of war, bringing corruption to the earth, and that God does not love corrupters. . . . [The Jews] set peoples against each other, and the catastrophes and tragedies which occur today are all due to them.”52 A great number of his repetitive declarations instilled hatred. After the AngloAmerican landings in Morocco and Algeria, he declared on the radio on November 19, 1942: “The North Africans know perfectly well what misfortune the Jews brought them . . . how they soaked up their wealth and corrupted them in all respects.” Al-Husseini met Adolf Eichmann on several occasions. In July 1942, his colleagues visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin.53 In 1942, Aktion Reinhardt had been underway for several months, and the destruction of European Jewish communities had begun. To what extent was the Grand Mufti aware of this reality? His closeness with Heinrich Himmler, confirmed by Dieter Wisliceny, allows a better understanding of the meaning of the speech he gave in Berlin on November 2, 1943, on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Two sentences, at least, indicate awareness on his part of the genocide in progress. Speaking of the “bonds of friendship” that link him “to the Germans,” he specified on two occasions “But the Germans know how to rid themselves of the Jews,” and a few seconds later “But above all, they have definitively resolved the Jewish problem.”54 As far as the future in the Arab world, he affirmed that the goal was “to chase all the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. This is the only remedy, and it is what the Prophet did thirteen centuries ago.” In his memoirs, Amin al-Husseini reports that in summer 1943, Himmler confided in him that they had “already exterminated nearly three million of them.”55

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  319 At the end of 1942, Wisliceny, Eichmann’s adjutant, negotiated with JOINT about the possibility of bringing Jewish children to Palestine from Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, in exchange for German civilians held prisoner. Al-Husseini, informed about this, protests to Himmler and succeeds in having the proposal abandoned. In May 1943 London made a proposal to Bulgaria to bring 5,000 Jewish children to Palestine. In this case, too, the Mufti intervened, writing on May 6, 1943 to the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that these Jewish children should be sent to Poland, “where they will be firmly under control; as far as the Arab people are concerned this would be a good and appreciated act.”56 On May 7, 1945, Al-Husseini sought refuge in Switzerland. Handed over to the French authorities, he was jailed in Paris and then placed under house arrest. He fled in May 1946 and reached Cairo, where he was received by King Farouk on June 19, 1946. In 1951 he presided over the International Muslim Conference. He later would participate in the Bandung Conference in 1955. In July 1974, AlHusseini died in Beirut. After his death, the Beirut correspondent for Le Monde, Edouard Saab, reported that during an interview in 1968, the Grand Mufti had told him of having intervened with Eichmann in 1944, in order to block the rescue of 1,500 Hungarian Jews by preventing them from entering Palestine.57 Hitler responded clumsily to this demonstration of Arab empathy. For him, the future of Germany lay to the east of Europe, not the south. In addition, he did not wish to come into conflict there with France, Italy, and Spain. This explains why despite his declarations of sympathy for the “Arab cause,” he never followed through. Berlin would endlessly drag its feet in terms of a public commitment. In July 1943, after the Battle of Kursk—a serious defeat for Germany—the Reich abandoned any idea of support for “these North African tribes,” as Hitler calls them. German policy regarding the Arab East never envisaged support, much less an alliance. To be sure, military aid was promised to the nationalists of the Near East. But the sole concrete realization would take place in spring 1941, with the rescue operation for the Iraqi nationalist government of Rashid Ali. As far as the overall aid delivered to the Arab world, it was directed only toward Palestine, and was organized by Franz von Papen, posted as German Ambassador to Tunisia in April 1939. From 1941, with the Mufti of Jerusalem’s private secretary Osman Kemal Haddad, von Papen established an arms flow to Palestine. In mid-April 1941, the Abwehr delivered 15,000 rifles, 200 light machine guns and 300 submachine guns.58 This was not the promised alliance, even if Ribbentrop wrote to Al-Husseini on April 28, 1942: “Germany is ready to give its support to the oppressed Arab

320  |  Jews in Arab Countries countries for the achievement of their national goals . . . [and] its agreement for the destruction of the ‘Jewish National Home’ in Palestine.”59 Yet, Berlin prudently held back. German support for the Grand Mufti was more about the Arab request than the Reich’s desire. On several occasions, Hitler refused to give Al-Husseini an official declaration of support for Arab nationalism, including during their audience of November 28, 1941. The Reich waited until November 2, 1944, to finally publish a formal declaration recognizing “the independence of the Arab countries,” and to encourage their unity—formulations that were vague to perfection. The disappointment was commensurate with the hopes of the years from 1933 to 1941. On February 17, 1945, Hitler declared to Martin Bormann: “We had great policies to establish with regard to Islam, but this failed, like so may other things we failed at out of loyalty to the alliance with Italy. . . . Alone, we would have been able to free the Muslim countries dominated by France. . . . All of Islam trembled at the announcement of our victories. The Egyptians, the Iraqis and all of the Near East were ready to rise up.”60 In the face of the Arab world’s Germanophilia, the Allies toned down all questions relating to antisemitism and Zionism. In Cairo, Alexander C. Kirk noted that German propaganda hammered away every day the message that the Reich’s victory would lead to Arab independence, but that a defeat of the Reich would result in the Jews controlling the entirety of the Near East. After Kirk, the Americans considered that the “Zionist question” was highly embarrassing in that it nurtured Arab anti-Americanism. On a short-term basis, therefore, the decision was taken not to mention the fate of the Jews of Europe, in order not “to upset” Arab populations, all the more in that German propaganda continuously reiterated false information about “the extermination of Muslims” and the establishment of a “vast Jewish army,” as broadcast for example on October 21, 1941.61 In the view of American counter-propaganda services, the price of an alliance with the Arabs was to forget about the Jews. Anti-Zionism echoed loudly among Arab peoples. However, American diplomacy also understood that antiJewish resentment was distinct from the Palestinian problem. It was thus necessary to distance the United States from the Jews on the question of Palestine, the hobbyhorse of German propaganda, which insisted that the Allies’ war aim was to create a Jewish state. On November 14, 1942, the Allied Bureau of Information asked the Voice of America to deal with the question “with the greatest of tact and care,” to not “mention Zionist aspirations” or evoke a “Jewish army,” but rather to try to win over Arab Christians and Muslims to the cause of the United Nations, a cause to which the Jews for their part had already rallied.62 Jews were direct witnesses of the sympathy of the “Arab street” for the Axis. This experience would come to mark them and weigh very heavily on them after the war. Jews were also clear about the catastrophe of European Jewry, even if they

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  321 did not know the details of that tragic reality. And they showed solidarity as well, as shown by the Meguilat Hitler (the Scroll of Hitler), a text written in 1942 in Casablanca by a Hebrew professor, P. Hassine, composed on the model of the Meguilat Esther, or “the Scrolls of Esther,” concerning the tale of Esther, which is at the core of the Purim celebration. MEGUILAT HITLER It was in the days of Hitler, that painter, that corporal who ruled over all of Germany and its seventeen provinces. In that time this barbarian had acceded to the throne in Berlin, the capital. This is a matter of “the spirit of vindictiveness of his ancestors Haman and Amalek, may his name, and their names, be damned. The spirit of vindication was engraved on his heart.” The Germans drank to their fullness, and their hearts rejoiced, and the rejoicing spread amongst the Nazis throughout Germany. Italy also organized a feast for the Nazis at the palace of King Emmanuel. On the second day, when Hitler felt his heart celebrating, he said to Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Budd, Lei, Hess and Himmler, the seven chamberlains of Hitler the Ruler: “What shall we do with this Jewish nation, which has destroyed and exterminated our ancestors, does not practice our religion and hates us?” . . . They put the men and the boys to the sword, and starved the older ones and the very young; they tortured the pregnant women and trampled on the infants. They oppressed them with exhausting labors, chased them from their homes, stole their wealth and imprisoned them. The Jews prepared to flee the fury of their enemies, abandoning all their goods. They had fallen into the hands of their enemies, but Hitler’s rage was not assuaged.63

On the persecution that spread out across all of Europe, the Meguilat Hitler continues in these terms: Wherever the Nazis went, city or country, the fate of the Jews was bitter: tears, hunger and mourning, sackcloth and ashes were their lot. Fathers were taken from their children and led away to be massacred; pregnant women and their babies were killed; they showed not the slightest compassion, and even old people were not spared. They subjected all the town’s inhabitants to cold and hunger. They destroyed the Jews’ houses. They led them far from the customs of their fathers and enclosed them in ghettos. And, as if what Hitler did was not enough, the Italians, Japanese, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians acted like Hitler and spilled out their fury against the Jews. From all sides for the Jews it was distress, suffering, blows, punishment, humiliation, affronts, torture and death of all kinds. No respite was allowed. The Leader ordered hanging and killing of anyone who rebelled against him, and he placed this decree in his annals.

It was in Tunisia and Egypt that the Jewish communities experienced the worst anguish. After retaking Tobruk, Rommel paused to await reinforcements. The Egyptian Jewish community plunged into despair, particularly in Alexandria, which was abandoned by the British war fleet on July 11, 1942. On June 25,

322  |  Jews in Arab Countries panic seized the Jews, who rushed to the banks to remove their savings.64 Those able to do so hurried to the Palestine border: 15,000 Egyptian Jews (out of 80,000) crossed it in the summer of 1942. Not everyone could leave, as noted in a report of July 1, 1942, addressed to the Jewish Agency. Those of “superior classes” found an exit, sometimes in the direction of Aswan and Luxor in Upper Egypt. But the middle classes and above all the working classes were blocked. In the summer of 1942, in a Jerusalem invaded by Egyptian Jews, a victorious offensive by Rommel was expected. Some nights, the façades of Jews’ houses were marked with chalk. A police enquiry concluded that these were the acts of Arab residents who were marking their ownership claims on properties in the event that Rommel prevailed.65 In Egypt, the community was overwhelmed by panic. Throughout the country, reports a German informant, large numbers of Jews were selling their property.66 Fear only started to subside on September 5, 1942, after Rommel’s offensive was blocked, and definitively from October 23, 1942, when, after the third battle of El-Alamein, Rommel started to beat a retreat, reaching Tunis in February 1943. Beginning in 1920, the Jewish national homeland established a self-defense force. A partially clandestine militia, the Haganah counted 17,000 men and 4,000 women by April 1937. Dissident groups operated alongside the Haganah, such as Irgun, established in 1931. To this must be added the supernumerary Jewish police, created by the British in May 1936, numbering 1,300 men in June 1936, and 22,000 by July 1939. With his superiors’ green light, in May 1938 Philo-Zionist British officer Orde Wingate created special units in the Jewish forces, operating above all at night—the “Special Night Squads.” These were dissolved in 1939, their units forming the core of what in May 1941 became the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite battalion, counting 460 members by the end of 1941. In sum, the Jewish military forces existed, but at the very most it was a self-defense force, incapable of holding off a regular army, much less the Afrika Korps. It was only in September 1944 that London agrees—and not without hesitation—to create the Jewish Brigade Group within the British Army. Formed in Egypt, the Brigade would have its own national flag and participate in European combat, in particular in Italy in spring 1945. From 1939, anticipating the European drama, the Jewish Agency called on the Jews of Arab countries to help. Like other Jewish organizations, the Jewish Agency gathered information about the ongoing disaster.67 From November 1942, the Agency became certain that it was in the presence of a systematic massacre, and this awareness would change its view both of the future and of the Jewry of the Muslim Orient.

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  323 On an immediate basis, the Agency wanted to make known the tragedy striking Europe’s Jews; not, however, without ambiguity, for to insist on the radicalness of the massacre both strengthened and weakened the cause of the Jewish national home. What good is a state if tomorrow there are no more Jews in Europe? But the Agency also intended to prevent what was brewing for the Near Eastern communities, especially after the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad. The most serious pogrom ever perpetrated in the Arab world, the Farhud was set off by one of the members of the government of Rashid Ali when that government was in flight; with the support of the police and the army and flanked by a mob, 180 were killed, and more than 600 wounded. In July 1941, the Jewish Agency produced several detailed reports on the events.68 It set as its mission the reinforcement of the legitimacy of Zionism in the eyes of the Allies. The Agency did not look to the postwar period in a spirit of cynicism, but rather as a reflection of its powerlessness to act on the present. The presence in the British Army of soldiers from the Yishuv, as later was the case with the formation of the Jewish Brigade in autumn 1944, provided the occasion to explain the meaning of Zionism and the Jewish national homeland. It was also an opportunity to teach some rudiments of Hebrew to populations marveling at the existence of a Jewish military force. Between 1942 and 1946, the vision articulated by these soldiers made a considerable impact on Oriental Jewish communities as well as on Jews who have escaped from Europe. The image of these soldiers reinforced Zionism and established its legitimacy, following a disaster of such enormous scale. The Zionist leadership thus began to look closely at Jews of the Arab world, and to recruit from among them. At least at a certain moment, part of Near Eastern Jewry faced mortal danger. On October 25, 1941, Hitler declared before Himmler and Heydrich: “The attempt to establish a Jewish State will fail.”69 One month later, before Amin al-Husseini, in Berlin, he reiterated his promise to destroy the embryonic Jewish state, a threat he would repeat on several occasions. In Berlin the Arabia Section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or Security Service), which groups together Syria, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, was allotted to Herbert Hagen, who had directed the Jewish Section of the SD since late 1937. Despite the policy of emigration and the Haavara accord, Berlin—not without contradiction—haad no intention of encouraging the birth of a Jewish state, even though it was aware that Jewish departures would reinforce the Zionist movement. As in other domains, it was the ideological perspective that had the stronger hand. Any concern about an Arab alliance played no role. In January–February 1941, the Wehrmacht launched a ground operation in North Africa in order to come to the aid of the Italians. In Southern Europe, Yugoslavia and Greece capitulated in April 1941, and Crete was occupied

324  |  Jews in Arab Countries on June 1. Churchill thus envisaged the loss of Egypt, Palestine, Malta, and Cyprus. The Yishuv was at risk of dying. What saved it, in extremis, from German strangulation was the beginning of the conflict between the USSR and the Reich, on June 22, 1942. When Rommel drew near to the heart of Egypt in summer 1942, many expected a massacre. On the Arab side, informants noted that people were feeling more confident. With the prospect of a German victory, 8,000 Arab soldiers deserted from the British army with their weapons; among them were 7,000 Palestinians, who went underground. On October 19, German radio addressed Chaim Weizmann in these terms: “Just you watch, dirty Jew. Palestine will remain a pure Arab country, like it has always been!”70 During the German advance, the Axis seemed to be readying people for a massacre of the Jews. The propaganda of the airwaves grew increasingly excited with the Afrika Korps’ successes. On June 16, 1942, the Grand Mufti declared on the radio that there would be no compromise over Palestine, because the Jews had no rights to that land. On July 7, with the Wehrmacht camped less than 100 km from Alexandria, Arabic language German radio (the VFA, or Voice of Free Arabs) stated: “Kill the Jews before they kill you! . . . Kill the Jews who have appropriated your wealth and who plot against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you still waiting for? The Jews have planned to rape your wives, kill your children and destroy you. According to Islam, to defend your life is a duty that can only be fulfilled by destroying the Jews. . . . Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their shops, annihilate these henchmen of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies in the annihilation of the Jews before they destroy you.”71 Among the tracts issued at the same time in French North Africa, one—of which 300,000 copies were distributed—was entitled “The Borders of the New Zionist Kingdom,” showing a Star of David flag planted in Jerusalem, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Alexandria, and Cairo.72 An Allied report from August 15, 1942, confirms that a large-scale massacre was planned for Palestine: “The radicals, who are the majority, see General Rommel’s approach as the ideal occasion to kill the Jews and take their property. Throughout Palestine they are already talking of dividing the spoils.”73 In parallel, the Reich had an SD unit prepare for the destruction of the Jews of Egypt and Palestine. On July 13, 1942, two weeks after Rommel’s victory at Tobruk, a commando squad named after its chief, Walther Rauff, was organized. This small team of twenty-four men reached Athens on July 29, where it awaited transfer orders to Africa. Seven officers and seventeen deputy commanders and soldiers of the SS were assembled under Rauff’s command. Their mission: to organize the mass murder of Jewish communities at the rear of the Afrika Korps. In this respect, Rauff was a man of experience: he had developed the first gas trucks,

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  325 which, in Chelmno in December 1941, carried out the gassing of some of the Jews of the Łódź ghetto and environs. At first, this commando group contained only cadres who would guide the killing. German services seemed to know that when the time came, they would be able to rely on an army of collaborators. For German historians Mallmann and Cüppers, Berlin counted on Arab participation: “An incalculable number of Arabs, sometimes already organized, voluntarily offered their support to the Germans.”74 Anguish returned when the threat of Rommel disappeared. The Jewish Agency then turned to concentrating some of its efforts on the Jews of Yemen and Iraq, who were systematically prevented from leaving their countries. “The day of liberation for the Jews of Europe will be the day of great peril for Jews of Arab countries,” noted, in 1943, Elyahu Dobkin, in charge of immigration at the Jewish Agency. “A horrifying fate awaits them, even worse than the fate which European Jews are currently experiencing. That is why our first responsibility is to save those communities.”75 It was in this context that, at the beginning of 1943, the Jewish Agency sent a secret mission to Yemen; the mission’s leader, Yosef Bendavid (a Yemeni Jew himself), reported on a catastrophic situation in which emigration took a desperate turn. “Condemned to despair, many flee by night. If through bad luck they are captured, they are imprisoned and subject to new and even worse torture. Twenty-three thousand refugees have already fled through Aden and reached Palestine via Port Saïd. It is urgently essential to unblock funds—we must work tirelessly and spare no effort to that end—in order to come to the aid of our Yemeni brothers.”76 Other Middle Eastern Jews seek to reach Palestine, coming from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, under French mandate. Among them are many children, sent by their parents as a form of security, more and more in fear for their future in independent Arab countries. On April 1, 1941, in Baghdad, a military coup d’état overthrows the pro-British government of Taha al-Hashimi and forces the Hashemite regent to flee. A proGerman government takes power, supported by the army, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the German services associated with Fritz Grobba. Directed by Rashid Ali, the government includes some antisemitic fanatics, such as Yunis al-Sabawi, who not long before had contributed to the translation into Arabic of Mein Kampf. The months of April and May 1941 thus marked the high point of Nazi propaganda in Baghdad. The violent coup occurred at a moment when German armies had seized the Balkans and landed in Libya, catching the British in a pincer movement. On May 3, Hitler gave the green light for supplying arms to Rashid Ali. The Jews were viewed by the Arab population as a “fifth column.” Harassment, intimidation,

326  |  Jews in Arab Countries and threats were incessant. Thugs pillaged in the streets, arresting and beating Jews. In mid-May, Basra’s Jewish quarter was sacked. The Jewish middle class is stripped of everything by the state in the name of “aiding the war effort.” Incidents multiplied during the spring, but the worst of the violence was yet to come; it arrived in fact at a moment when the Jews of Baghdad believed they had seen the end of their ordeal. On May 29, British troops had advanced as far as the suburbs of the capital, and Rashid Ali and his allies—including the Mufti of Jerusalem—fled, but not before they distributed weapons to members of the Al-Futuwa youth. Still in Baghdad, the Economics Minister, Yunis al-Sabawi, proclaimed himself military governor of the city. On the morning of May 30, he called on Rabbi Sassoon Kaddouri, president of the Jewish community, to order the community to stay at home for three days, during which time they were not to use the telephone. At the same time, he called on Iraqis to “cleanse the city of the enemy within.” Clearly, al-Sabawi was preparing a pogrom. At the last minute, he was arrested by domestic security authorities and expelled from the country. On June 1, the city awaited the British and the regent, making his return to Baghdad. For the Jews, this would be the hour of their deliverance. By coincidence, it was also the day of the festival of Shavuot, commemorating the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai. The Jews of Baghdad filled the streets in their best clothes, at last able to breathe freely and indeed to show their jubilation. The Arab populace interpreted this as a desire to celebrate the victory of the detested British. This set off violence at the hands of demobilized soldiers, quickly joined by civilians. The Farhud (an Arabic word connoting the bloody collapse of public order) of Sunday June 1 and Monday June 2 were days of horror.77 The nightmare ended on Monday at 5 p.m., when a curfew was imposed an hour after the police fired on the rioters and Kurdish troops enter town. Present in the suburbs, the British could have intervened, but they remained in place for thirty-six hours, weapons at the ready but fearful, as has been seen, of giving the impression of being “agents of the Jews” and of appearing to escort the regent back to the capital. The first murders were perpetrated by soldiers, policemen, and members of fascist youth organizations such as Al-Futuwa. Pillaging followed, generally devoid of any evident ideological motivation. Naïm Kattan in Adieu Babylone recalls: They advanced armed with pickaxes, knives and sometimes rifles. They surged forth in waves, surrounding the town, invading it. . . . They only chased after the Jews. As they advanced, their ranks swelled, filled with children, women and teenagers, who hooted as they would at a big wedding or large festivals. Now they reach the goal. . . . They break down the doors, and the big push began. They destroyed whatever they couldn’t take away. Then a second wave made its entry into the wrecked houses. No more booty. They separated the

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  327 men; those who put up the slightest resistance had their throats cut on the spot. The women were subjected to the will of the males. The agitation continued, reaching new neighborhoods. Where there was neither jewelry nor money, they contented themselves with clothing and furniture.78

In a letter from Baghdad to his family two months after the event, an escapee recounted the massacre: “What would have become of us had a gang of these savages come and pounded on our door. What am I saying? It wasn’t a question of knocking on doors, those days, but of breaking them down! Nor did we suspect that the police, too, were involved.”79 Mordechai Ben Porat, aged eighteen at the time, lived in North Baghdad, at Adhamiya. He remembers having heard, dozens of times, “Idhbakh Al Yahud” (Kill the Jews) and “Mal El Yahud, Halal” (It is permitted to pillage the Jews). Baghdadi Jew Naïm Kattan, recounts his own experieces: “They advanced, armed with pickaxes, knives and some with rifles. Wave after wave swept in . . . occupying. . . . They only went after the Jews. As they advanced, their ranks swelled, full of kids, women and adolescents who ululated as if attending a wedding or big holiday. And then they reached their goal . . . they broke down the gates and everyone fled. . . . Anyone raising even the slightest resistance was butchered on the spot. And the women were forced to submit to the men.”80 Officially, 170 people were killed (although some sources talk of 600 deaths), of which 9 were in the countryside, and nearly 2,000 others were injured. Some 240 children were orphaned, and nearly 1,600 houses and businesses were destroyed and pillaged, with more than 12,300 people left without shelter—15 percent of the Jewish population of Baghdad were directly affected by the pogrom. American JOINT released $60,000 in assistance. Va’ad Leumi (the Jewish governing body in Mandatory Palestine) sent help, and in particular the following year sent emissaries in order to set up self-defense and organize emigration of volunteers to Palestine. The Iraqi government promised to pay an indemnity to every victim of the pogrom. After two months of hesitation, the allocated amount remained derisory (20,000 dinars, versus 80,000 dinars for every British victim of the violence). In May 1942, a report to JOINT explained that the government had had to take into account anti-Jewish public opinion.81 On June 2, the new government created a commission of inquiry that delivered its report on July 8. Several explanatory factors were advanced: the roles of German agents, radio propaganda from Berlin, and the Grand Mufti’s propaganda, and the behavior of fascist youth organizations such as Al-Futuwa and Katayib al-Shabab (Youth Brigades), “impregnated with Nazism disseminated by the Palestinians and Syrians.” The commission particularly underscored the responsibility of the police, who had refused to fire on the rioters, or merely fired in the air once the crowd had already dispersed: “In addition, certain policemen and members of the Commissariat participated in pillaging, sacking and murders.” Some of the police even fired on their own chief when he gave the order

328  |  Jews in Arab Countries to fire on the rioters.82 In November 1941, Nuri Pasha, prime minister, declared to the Iraqi newspaper El-Saghar that the Farhud violence had been the result of Zionist activity in Iraq.83 The commission of inquiry incriminated the DirectorGeneral of the police, the Prefect of Baghdad, several police commissioners, as well as the commandant and several officers of the military police. For Iraqi Jews—living in a nation and a culture that were profoundly their own—the trauma was immense, and the resultant fear abiding. The dream of total assimilation had started to unravel from independence, with the massacre of Assyro-Chaldean Christians, following by several military campaigns against the Kurds in 1935. After the Farhud, the Jews blamed the British for having remained passive. They felt they had been sacrificed to the cold political interests of London. This pain was aggravated by the refusal of India and Palestine (two territories under the control of the UK) to offer shelter to Iraqi Jews. It was the end of an historic alliance: the British, who had depended on the Jews in order to find their footing in Iraq between 1914 and 1919, came to consider them an irritant as far as Britain’s relations with the Arab world were concerned. In 1941 and 1942, the dominant feeling was fear: the recurring fear of new pogroms. “Most of the Jews no longer leave home at night. Jewish women, who in the past wore Western clothing, now dress like Iraqi women. Most Jewish men, who used to wear Western hats, now wear Iraqi hats.”84 A female refugee from Baghdad wrote on August 6, 1941: “I feel so imprisoned; my nerves are on fire and I just don’t want to see anyone or write to anyone. . . . Is it possible that the Arabs, who used to be such champions of generosity, have now come to burn alive old people and children, rape young girls, and plunge their knives into the bellies of women in childbirth? It’s horrible, awful!”85 Many tried fleeing to Palestine but were often caught en route, imprisoned, and sent back to Iraq. In February 1942, an informant of the Jewish Agency posted in Baghdad describes the “belt of iron encircling the Jews, such that they have no way out. The State’s laws are against us, and the populace threatens us. Our brothers live as if in a giant prison camp, without knowing what tomorrow will bring. For this reason they are ready to pay whatever price is required of them to obtain papers.”86 More and more, the Jews of Iraq become convinced that there is no future for them in their homeland. As the author of one report noted, Iraqi nationalism, deprived of “its hopes in the German messiah,” trains its violence on “the Jew”; moreover, the question of Palestine, which will undergo a resurgence after the war, is a supplementary reason for hatred.87 In 1946, a report from Baghdad evokes the fear of many Jews that riots could again break out due to “an extremist nationalist movement modeled on Nazi Germany.” Jews conclude that “it is no longer possible to live peacefully in Iraq as Jews, as they had hitherto done for many centuries, and they are starting to seek a new refuge.”88

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  329 For its part, the Jewish national homeland attempts to put into place the self-defense of Baghdad’s Jews, sending several emissaries who set up a modest organization comprising, in October 1942, seven trios of armed men between eighteen and twenty-four years of age. These self-defense activists are not all necessarily Zionists. Many are graduates, and well-integrated into Iraqi Jewish and Arab society; they belong to the middle class. For Mossad LeAliyah Bet (the external intelligence service) and the Haganah, self-defense is a provisional solution pending emigration. For others, however, it is a goal in itself, one that will enable them to remain in Iraq. In Jerusalem it was understood that these communities are in danger. In Baghdad in 1945 it was thought that if a pogrom were to break out, the police would join in. The goal of self-defense was thus not to ensure the defense of 100,000 people, but rather to buffer the initial blows while waiting for help and an international reaction. The Jewish national home of Palestine thus financed almost on its own an organization that trains discretely outside Baghdad, establishes two other branches (in Basra and Kirkuk), and counts 8 instructors and 120 members by the end of 1946, most of whom are Zionist militants. After a few months of respite, Iraqi Jews were pushed aside from administrative as well as economic life: “The latest governmental measures appear to be the beginning of the road which leads to the elimination of Jews from economic life,” notes a Mossad LeAliyah Bet report of January 6, 1944. “After the war, there is no longer any doubt that the Jews will not recover their former position in the economy.”89 Illegal Iraqi immigration to Palestine intensified after the Farhud, even though the Jewish community hardly seemed receptive to Zionism at that point. In February 1942, a secret report was addressed to the Jewish Agency from Baghdad: “Parents make their daughters go to Israel because during the last pogroms, Jewish girls were raped and cruelly killed. Seventy girls were kidnapped.” The report adds: “The candidates are from the poorer class, with few from the middle class.”90 Yet, the government blocks all Jewish emigration, which leads to a multiplication of attempts to clandestinely cross the border, in particular toward Iran. The journey to Palestine is interminable—1,500 km—and bus and train routes are controlled by the police and the army; thus, there are barriers everywhere. During the war, Mossad LeAliyah Bet nevertheless managed to bring nearly 2,000 Jews from Iraq. Before the actual opening of hostilities of the Second World War, the French political class was cognizant of the strength of antisemitism in the Maghreb. In particular, the Left was conscious of the force of fascist currents within the Maghreb French community as well as fascistic tendencies within the French language press, which enjoyed a readership of nearly 70 percent of the Algerian French readership together with sweme Muslims.91

330  |  Jews in Arab Countries France’s defeat is imputed “to the Jews,” those “do-nothings” who enrich themselves while others get themselves killed. “A simple fight is capable of setting off anti-Semitic riots,” according to a report from Oujda, Eastern Morocco, in June 1940: “They hate the Jews. If they sell, they’re stealing. If they close their shops, others starve. If a group of them go for a stroll on Shabbat, their ‘noisy joy’ is felt by everyone to be ‘arrogance’ [on display] despite the painful times they are living through, to the point that they are told to stop with this Saturday promenade.”92 The extreme Right exacerbates this anti-Jewish climate, which reaches its apogee at the beginning of July 1940. This violent, mass antisemitism is accompanied by a wave of denunciations, as shown by police and diplomatic archives. The Jews who had fled Germany in the 1930s were often the first targets; 8,000 of them reached Morocco, hoping for a visa to the United States or some other country in the New World. The Vichy regime parked them in camps set up in southern Morocco and Algeria. From the start of the war, the protectorate imprisoned them there, and internment spread to purpose-built camps, such as Azemmour, Bouarfa, and Agdiz. They would remain confined there until the Allied landings of November 1942. What emerges clearly from a 1943 French report is that elements of the French administration were riddled with antisemitism.93 Vichy persecution was effective, because it relied on dedicated agents. After the Anglo-American landing of November 8, 1942, Jews of Meknes recounted that when they came to request laissez-passers, the reply was “You don’t need them; go dress like a Jew and get back to the mellah!” The French administration did not hesitate to deprive the Jewish population (and them alone) of food supplies, even after the Allied landings: “Moroccan Jews are to be granted the smallest quantities of foodstuffs or foods under quota. . . . In addition, Moroccan Jews shall not make claims upon the authorities. They are not admitted to call upon any authority, and the doors are slammed in their face, if they are not in fact actually insulted.”94 The report furnished precise figures: Europeans had individual ration books, while Jews had one per family. Examples of rations provided: fresh milk—¼ liter for a European/nothing for a “Moroccan Jew”; pasta 250 g/nothing; semolina 250 g/nothing; coffee 350 g per month/50 g for an “Israelite” family. The report continues: Out of the 20 different products enumerated in the preceding chapter, no less than 14 of them are withdrawn from Moroccan Jews, and of those 14, some 13 of them concern their children. . . . The Europeans are allowed to register with the grocer of their own choice for rations supplies. This is not the case for Moroccan Jews, who sometimes find themselves several km from their home and always in the Arab part of town. . . . As incredible as this may seem, one tries by all means possible to deprive infant Moroccan Jews of the food which is indispensable for them: fresh or condensed milk.95

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  331 The report also specifies that a Jewish infant can only be inscribed on the rations booklet once he or she is six months old. A European baby obtains an individual booklet from his first day of life. Anti-Jewish violence—whether muted or openly declared—is a constant feature of French administration. In certain Muslim environments, notably in the countryside, people rejoice at this misfortune. Numerous incidents followed the Allied landings. In Casablanca on November 11, a witness saw a Jew severely beaten by an Arab gang: “Four French police officers arrived and, lifting the fallen man, set about striking him violently—and without any explanation. They only stopped when the man, bloodied and unconscious, lay on the ground without moving. The scene was so disgusting that all around me on the café terrace, men cried out in indignation and women wept.”96 After other anti-Jewish violent incidents in Séfrou, in July 1944, René Cassin, AIU president, member of the Provisional Consultative Council (and one of the first to join General de Gaulle in London), wrote to the Commissioner of Foreign Affairs to express his conviction that the colonial administration was rotten with antisemitism, evoking “the passivity, indeed the complicity, of officers throughout these incidents.”97 The army and police both appear to have been as infected with antisemitism. Mounting numbers of reports were filed—without any result whatsoever—about police officers who allowed their antisemitic passions to run unchecked. In the small Moroccan town of Beni-Mellal, following the American landings, exactions were inflicted by the new pasha and both civil and military authorities. Among French officials who were incriminated was a captain “notorious for his antisemitism.”98 The report comments: “In this charming and attractive town, racism as devious, inhuman and violent as anything in a Nazi city in Germany is flourishing.”99 In Séfrou, following the serious incidents pitting goumiers (Moroccan soldiers in the French Army) against the Jewish population on July 30, 1944, the French commandant warns representatives of the Jewish community: “I want you to remain what you are; let the Jews keep their traditions, but I do not want to see you advance. You will keep what you possess, but it is not my role to help you advance.”100 This refusal of emancipation is like a veritable refrain. It was known that the Muslims felt this way, but now it was also confirmed with regard to the French administration. French Maghreb, representing half of the Jewish communities in Arab lands, was subject to Vichy regulations. In Morocco, the two Statuts des Juifs (Statutes regarding the Jews) of October 1940 and June 1941, were applied through Cherifian dahirs (royal commandments) of October 31, 1940 and August 5, 1941.101 The confinement of the Jews to the mellah was, in the eyes of Muslims—who had long demanded it—a key measure. The Jews were evicted from European

332  |  Jews in Arab Countries neighborhoods on a month’s notice. Jewish doctors and lawyers were excluded, or kept on only temporarily. In Casablanca, thirteen out of twenty Jewish doctors were removed, and six were kept on only temporarily, for periods from six months to two years. In Marrakesh, only one out of three Jewish doctors was kept on permanently. Twenty-six out of thirty Jewish lawyers in Casablanca were excluded. Jewish boys were kicked out of the Éclaireurs de France (French Scout movement) in November 1940. Teachers and students of public schools, as well as magistrates, were excluded. This massive exclusion was accompanied everywhere by a climate of denunciation. The colonizer’s anti-Jewish policies were autonomous, except in Libya and Tunisia, where the German presence (lasting six months in Tunisia) radicalized antisemitism. In Libya in 1941, anti-Jewish measures worsened as Italy became bogged down against the British. In spring 1942, economic measures were tightened. In the beginning of July 1942, men between eighteen and forty-five years of age were required to register for work. In August, a camp was set up at SidiAzzaz, 150 km east of Tripoli. At the beginning of October, racial laws in effect in the Italian peninsula were extended to Libya, although not for long: Tripoli fell to General Montgomery’s British forces on January 23, 1943. In the interval, 3,000 Libyan Jewish pupils were thrown out of schools. Such measures also massively affected the Jewish children of French Maghreb, who were impacted by Vichy laws. In Morocco, the protectorate imposed even tougher anti-Jewish measures than those promulgated in Algeria, by setting the numerus clausus for Jewish pupils at 10 percent rather than 14 percent. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree was abrogated on October 7, 1940. The new status of Algerian Jews was defined by the law of February 18, 1942. To the two Statutes of the Jews (October 1940 and June 1941) was added a law specific to North Africa: on July 2, 1942 an edict was promulgated stipulating that a Jew can no longer operate a bar. The presidents of the three consistories of Algeria, as well as the three Chief Rabbis of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine, wrote to Marshal Pétain to express their “sad astonishment . . . at this unmerited measure which strikes us,” by raising “a solemn protest. Up to present we have been French citizens, and we remain completely French in our hearts.”102 Thus “end[ed] a 70 year-long scandal,” as French fascist Charles Maurras puts it.103 This is applauded by the majority of French Maghreb communities, and seems to find approval in the Muslim countryside. The Résident Général in Morocco declares that he is favorable to the extension of this measure to the few Moroccan Jews who had benefited from the Crémieux Decree. Pétainism was a powerful force in French North Africa. In Algeria, the French Légion des Combattants (Veterans Association, established under the Vichy regime), devoted to Marshal Pétain, counted some 150,000 members (out of a European population of less than one million inhabitants). Obviously, the Légion excluded Jews from its ranks. As an innovator in

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  333 antisemitism, the Algerian colony removed Jewish children from school (nearly 20,000 students were excluded from public schools), something Vichy had not even dared do in the southern zone in mainland France (instead, the numerus clausus was fixed at 14 percent, the Jews constituting 14 percent of the European population of Algeria in 1941). Four hundred and sixty-five Jewish teachers in Algeria were required to resign from their jobs. Another nearly 2,500 state officials were in the same position. In October 1941, at the start of the university year, only 110 Jewish candidates were admitted out of 652 applicants. In Morocco, antisemitic legislation removed Jewish civil servants, and established a numerus clausus of 2 percent for secondary students and 3 percent for university students. In 1941, Jews were forbidden by regulation to reside in the European areas of municipalities (where Jews, who often owned their own residences, made up around 20 percent of the inhabitants). In Morocco, although the French law of July 22, 1941, on Aryanization was not applied in the protectorate, the second Jewish Statute, of June 1941, was transposed into the Cherifian dahir of August 5 of the same year. It forbade Jews from practicing a number of occupations, obliged Jewish public school teachers to resign, and kicked Jewish high school students out of French schools in Morocco. Jewish access to employment in banking and journalism was restricted, and Jews were obliged to make declarations regarding their property. Quotas of food allocated to Jews could not exceed 50 percent of what was allocated to Muslims. Foreign Jews were interned in a dozen work camps. The status of Moroccan Jews was less severe than that of foreign Jews. The sultan refused, in fact, to apply certain dispositions, in particular economic measures. He put a brake on the application of such measures not (as is often asserted) out of philo-Semitism or out of a concern for justice but rather out of a desire to demarcate his autonomy vis-à-vis France, as a means of affirming that he intended to remain the master of his own realm despite the existence of the protectorate, and to show that the Jews were his subjects. The war marked the “golden age,” as it were, of French antisemitism in North Africa, because the collapse of the French mainland unchained antiJewish expression in the Maghreb. This was bolstered by the Vichy collaborationist government’s abrogation on August 27, 1940, of the Marchandeau Law (which interdicted ethnic or religious hate speech). The Allied landings did not put an end to this climate. The Jewish Questions Service continued to work in Algiers until March 1943, and General Giraud, put in power by the Americans following the assassination of Admiral Darlan on December 24, 1942, for the second time cancelled the Crémieux Decree out of a concern of “anti-racism.” It was, he explained on March 15, 1943, a matter of “eliminating all racial discrimination” between Jews and Muslims, the Decree having introduced in 1870 “a difference between indigenous Muslims and Israelites.”104

334  |  Jews in Arab Countries Internment remained the violent reality of these war years. In 1941, Vichy decided to construct the Trans-Saharan Railway, a project in which detainees from thirty camps across Morocco and Algeria would participate. This involved ten hours of work per day in the Saharan climate, and for Jewish workers, four times as much work as was required of free Arab workers. Malnourished, given little water (just one liter per day at Berguent), covered in lice and fleas, nearly everywhere they suffered a rate of mortality bordering fifty percent. To these conditions can be added “ordinary” sadism, torture, beatings, starvation, standing upright in the sun whilst chained all day with the head uncovered, the “tomb torture” (enclosure for eight to twenty-four days without moving in a ditch measuring 1.6m by 0.8m), which led to the deaths of a number of victims, among whom were many Spanish Republicans. In the Libyan camps of Cyrenaica (the eastern coastal region of the country), governed by the Italians, during ten months more than 500 Jewish prisoners died of typhus, typhoid fever, and above all, hunger.105 Starting in May 1940, the pasha of Salé applied a long-demanded measure: the interdiction for Jews to employ Muslim domestics. At Meknes, in August, Muslim merchants of the city’s main market required the expulsion of their Jewish colleagues. Collaborationists in Paris discovered a sudden friendship for Arabs, now that it was useful for crushing the Jews. In 1943 in Paris, Le Cahier Jaune (The Yellow Notebook) of André Chaumet, an antisemitic publication from metropolitan France, issued a volume entitled Jews and Americans: Kings of North Africa. In it one reads: “Israel is at the center of all these maneuvers. Our Muslim brothers are watching our ‘tricolore’ [the French flag] disappear. It is necessary that the tricolore be raised alongside the green flag of Islam, against disgusting Judaic exploitation.”106 The government fanned the flames of working-class Muslim anti-Judaism by “systematically stirring up the Muslims against their Jewish compatriots.”107 Vengeance was exacted, moreover, for Jewish support of the Allies: in Algiers, out of 377 conspirators preparing for the Allied disembarkation of November 8, 1942, 315 of them were Jews. Vengeance was also taken in Benghazi, Libya, against Jews who too quickly displayed their joy at the arrival of British troops, especially after the second occupation (December 24, 1941–January 27, 1942). Only the help of American Jewry (interrupted for one year, between Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the landings of November 1942) softens the difficulties of these times, especially in Morocco, thanks to the contacts established by Moroccan Jews who had emigrated years before to the United States. Certain New York communities were even led by Moroccan rabbis.

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  335 In such a context, the sultan can easily appear magnanimous, with the darkness of Vichy contributing to surrounding him with a bright halo. For the majority of Maghrebin Jews, shaken by those four years—which included the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree—French naturalization was an illusion of ever-decreasing attractiveness; instead (and in this respect they followed the leaders of Moroccan Jewry), Maghreb Jews increasingly aspired to achieving recognition of religious or national minority status. After the French defeat, prison sentences were imposed for invalid reasons; repressive and restrictive measures were welcomed “with great satisfaction by the Muslim populace, whose hostility towards the Jews is strong. . . . The Jews, very concerned, remain extremely reserved.”108 In the French Maghreb, anti-Jewish violence was entirely rooted in local antisemitic traditions. Yet there were some who rejected racism, such as the Frenchman of Algeria who, in June 1941, wrote to Xavier Vallat: “Germany can be racist; deprived of a colonial empire, its population is composed of a homogenous race. But in Algeria, if there is not perfect racial harmony, this jewel of the French Empire is destined to fail.”109 And yet, Moroccan Jews threw themselves into the French cause, even when struggling for their own emancipation. Although they had no obligation to perform military service, a large number enrolled when war was declared. This reflected a certain idealization of France that would be seriously undermined by the policies of the protectorate in the years from 1940 to 1943.110 The great majority of Arabs showed hardly any reaction to persecutory measures taken against the Jews, although there were a few incidents in which indigènes were implicated. The most notorious ones occurred at Gabès, Tunisia, in May 1941, which we discuss later. Contemporary observers concur in recognizing that most of the indigènes reacted with indifference, and that displays of support were rare. There were even, here and there, displays of joy (above all in the countryside) but these were not of a grand scale. Some took advantage of the situation in order to crush the Jewish minority. With the complicity of the French authorities, certain Arabs profited from the distress of the Jews by appropriating their property, as occurred at Beni-Mellal. But it also happened that indigènes protested, as in early 1942 in Algeria, where Sheikh Taieb el-Okbi, president of the Algerian League of Muslims and Jews, issued a fatwa forbidding anti-Jewish violence. As well, some Arab intellectuals disassociated themselves from the persecution implemented by the colonizer. This was the thrust of the letter of November 29, 1942 (after the Anglo-American landing) sent by the lawyer Ali Boumendjel to Jewish leaders in Algiers: “I can assure you that the Muslims, speaking generally, have understood that it would be inappropriate to rejoice in the special measures of which the Jews of Algeria are the victims. They could not, in all good reason, align themselves with those attempting to

336  |  Jews in Arab Countries carry out racial policies when they themselves are attacked in the name of racism on a daily basis. Our adversaries did not suspect that in putting down the Jews, they would only succeed in bringing them closer together to the Muslims.”111 How did the Arab populace react to the antisemitic persecution in Germany? Those who were best informed (and there were very few such persons) hovered between occasional compassion and—more frequently—satisfaction at “seeing Jews put in their place.” In certain cases, there was even joy at witnessing the degradation of people who had forgotten humility and had become “arrogant and insolent.”112 This antisemitism was fueled by jealous passions. The Montagne Report, of October 1939, noted that Moroccan Muslims appeared “very jealous of any advantages which seemed to be accorded to Moroccan Jews, as a group or even individually.”113 This resentment was further sharpened by assistance given to Maghreb Jews by JOINT. In addition, many Arabs feared that similar sorts of measures would be inflicted on them one day, or that a British victory—such as had occurred in Libya—could lead to “domination” by the Jews. This was a classic case of imitational reversal, in which the Jews—who, come what may, could never be viewed as equals—turned into “masters” in Muslims’ fantasy imaginations. If the war exacerbated rejection of any improvement in the lot of the Jews, it was not in fact the cause of this. When it feared that the flourishing of the Jewish community would arouse an “enraged Arab reaction,” the colonial administration, as reported in May 1945, “monitored the Muslims, and every time anything new was proposed in favor of the Jews, it met with an argument grounded in indigène policy.”114 In May 1945, under the signature of Robert Schumann, the Résidence Générale compiled a list of antisemitic incidents occurring since 1941: thefts, sacking of synagogues, charges levied on mellahs, ransoms extorted, stonings of Jewish funerals, all sorts of violence, rapes, murders.115 The Résidence had long been aware of this climate of veiled and sometimes overt violence. In Meknes, for example, at the end of September 1944 it was necessary to accompany, by military convoy, some 1,000 Jews from the new town to the mellah in order to put them out of harm’s way, and to provide for the presence of European police as well as tight surveillance over the mellah gates.116 Starting in September 1939, a rumor circulated, spread, according to the Montagne Report, by “Moroccan bourgeois and intellectuals,” that “This war has been started—and solely for their benefit—to save the Jews from the firm hand of Hitler.”117 Among indigenous army ranks, the Report continued, anti-Jewish feelings are such that a Jewish non-commissioned officer cannot be put in charge of a unit made up of Muslims, as “this would set off new conflicts. In a word, it would harm the cohesion of native troops—who at present are Muslims—if they were to be mixed together with Jews.”118

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  337 That one of the favorite pastimes of Arab youngsters was the harassment of Jews is testimony to the climate of aggression. At Fez in 1940, at the end of Ramadan, “a hundred or so indigenous youngsters coursed up the main street of the ghetto, shouting ‘We’re here for Moulay Idriss [great-grandson of the Prophet, and founder of Morocco’s first Arab dynasty]—we’ve signed up to take vengeance on the Jews.’”119 The pasha had the crowd dispersed. In 1940 it seemed that the resentment at the idea of the formerly dominated Jews achieving emancipation could at last freely gush forth. “The majority of young Arabs have been raised with anti-Jewish prejudices which are not found in older generations, who were raised during the Ottoman times,” noted an October 1942 report from Iraq for the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.120 The antisemitism of the early 1930s, which above all concerned small ideological groups, has now, at the instigation of Palestinian and Syrian immigrants, won over the entirety of Iraqi society. After the Farhud, the “Arab street” promised to the Jews that there would be a “huge party” alongside which the 1941 Shavuot events would seem like nothing. In a number of Arab countries, the expulsion of the Jews seems to have been planned in the event of an Axis victory. In May 1941 at Gabès, in Tunisia, tensions exploded into a riot. Already by the preceding August, four Tunisian towns had been the theater of anti-Jewish violence, with shops and houses sacked. This time, however, events are worse: from May 19 to 22, hundreds of demonstrators assaulted the Jewish quarter, killing eight and wounding twenty. After the pogrom, anti-Jewish feelings remained high, as noted later by the chief French civil administrator, evoking “the violent anti-Jewish feelings of the Gabès Muslim population, which remain latent even after the 1941 riot.”121 This was the case in Iraq after the Farhud, and also true for Morocco; in several Moroccan cities, the arrival of American troops leads to violence in which Jews are “savagely beaten on the heads and bodies by Moroccan units of goumiers, whipped up by Arabs in the crowd selecting victims by shouting ‘Oua, Oua’ (him, him).”122 In 1945, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) would attempt to identify reasons for the surge of violence occurring at the time of the landings in Morocco: “The reason for this is clear. During the years 1940–1942, Vichy made the Protectorate into Germany’s granary, and an inexhaustible mine of rare metals. Any disorder would have been prejudicial to Germany’s interests.”123 The American disembarkation eliminated this, and thus the years 1943–1945 were punctuated by incidents—some extremely grave—such as the quasi-pogrom at Sefrou on July 30, 1944. On that morning, after a conflict between a Jew and an Arab soldier, Jews are beaten at random throughout the town, right in the streets, or even in their gardens. Others are arrested and taken to jail, beaten along the way by goumiers on patrol. “Once at the jail, they were beaten again, sometimes even by other native prisoners [according to] testimonies received that day, on the tenth

338  |  Jews in Arab Countries of August 1944.”124 Accounts gathered from non-Jews attest to the “pogrom-like savagery of certain events.”125 Leaders of the Jewish community were subjected to degrading treatment; one of them was beaten with a stick across the mouth while he was leading religious services.126 “Two hundred and sixteen Jews were crowded into prison, together with forty Muslim prisoners who were already there, into a space measuring 3.3 meters by 7.5 meters . . . and space for a WC, with a single hole in the wall for light and air, over which everyone fought feverishly.”127 Commanded by the French, the forces of public order confined the Jewish populace to the mellah for three days, without food and under the guard of the Arab soldiers who had been at the origin of the pogrom. The inquiry report concluded that the massacre was premeditated, that it had been “a riot . . . set off in several places at once, which leads one to presume—without being able to be affirmative on this point in the absence of concrete proof—that these were concerted and premeditated acts.”128 From one end of the Arab world to the other, the Reich’s defeat gave rise to the same joy of the Jews, and bitterness of the Arabs vis-à-vis their ancient subjects, now so quickly forgetful of their past “humility.” German forces occupied Tunisia between November 1942 and May 1943. The Nazi objective was to deport Jewish leaders to Germany, such as the lawyer Felix Samama, former president of the Tunis Jewish community, arrested on November 26, 1942. Several notables were incarcerated. Some of them would be deported to the Reich, executed in prison, or interned in concentration camps. Although often hated by the French colonizers, as in Algeria and Morocco, the Tunisian Jewish community—at the time, numbering 85,000—benefitted from the presence in the Résidence Générale of Admiral Esteva, who refused to apply the Vichy antisemitic regulations. The German brigade, led by Walther Rauff, was sent to Tunisia; in January 1943, one hundred new recruits were added to it. In Tunis, Rauff took charge of persecution. As in Eastern Europe, he orders Jews to form a council and requires 2,000 people fit for work, threatening to arrest 10,000 in case of refusal. On December 9, 1942, instead of the required 2,000, only 128 reply to the call. Furious, Rauff rushes to the Great Synagogue, where he has the faithful arrested and transported to a camp 65 km from Tunis. Admiral Esteva and the Italian consul oppose these measures, and it was probably their intervention that saved the Jews arrested on that day. From April 12, 1943, all Jewish civilians were required to perform forced labor. At the beginning of May they were assigned to thirty camps. Largescale plundering occurs. In December 1942 a tax of 20 million francs had been imposed on the Tunisian Jewish community; it was raised to 50 million in April, in order to “repair damage.” The preceding year, on February 13, 1942, the Jewish

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  339 community of Djerba Island had been required to pay a “tax” of 10 million francs. This sum proved impossible to raise, so the penalty was converted into 50 kg of gold; the community managed to raise 43 kg, which was given to the Germans. Only the Allied offensive of May 1943 saved the Jewish community; meanwhile, the Rauff brigade was evacuated to Naples. The Allied victory did not assuage anxieties. Rather, it seemed that the Jewish presence in Arab lands henceforth posed problems. Both American Jewry and, to a lesser extent the WJC, mobilized with ever greater intensity in favor of North African Jewry; both also criticized the persistence of anti-Jewish legislation four months after the Allied landings. The Sultan of Morocco enjoyed an immaculate reputation for fairness. In the memory of the Jewish community, he is praised for resisting Vichy’s measures, defending his Jewish subjects and blocking the imposition of the yellow star (although the Germans, not present in Morocco, never introduced the star there—no more than they did in the French Southern Zone controlled by Vichy). The measure was not applied in the Maghreb, except, it seems, in Sfax, in Tunisia. This quasi-legend has become richer and richer over the decades. Thus, Moroccan historian Mohamed Kenbib insists on the sultan’s “great solicitude” for his Jewish subjects; despite all available archives on the subject, he is convinced of “the predisposition of the entire Moroccan populace in favor of the Americans” and of the “unpopularity of the anti-Jewish measures amongst the Muslim population.” Kenbib highlights that at the time of the professional de-listings of Jewish doctors and lawyers in 1942, the sultan received Jewish delegations on several occasions in order to express his rejection on personal grounds of the Vichy measures.129 In November 1944, on the occasion of the Throne Day celebration, Moroccan protocol chief Si Mammeri reminds the Jewish delegation that “His Majesty the Sultan was the only person who opposed the application of the Vichy antiSemitic laws in Morocco, and thanks to his high solicitude, he was able to avoid the worst.”130 In 1945 a Jewish delegation, on taking leave of His Majesty, was told by him: Nothing has changed regarding Our conduct towards Our Israelite subjects. Just as Our ancestors have always displayed the greatest solicitude towards them. We too are preoccupied constantly with their situation. This you were able to note during the bad period We have gone through, during which We dedicated our efforts to brake, limit and moderate as much as possible those measures taken concerning you. We gave orders to Our representatives to see to it that no harm came to Our Israelite subjects. And We say to you: if anyone [of you] is harmed, may he immediately write to Us and We will see to it that justice will be done to him.131

340  |  Jews in Arab Countries This appeal is primarily addressed to American Jewry, and beyond it, to the White House, whose support the sultan has the greatest need of in order to secure independence for his country. In the spring of 1942, the sultan in fact did grant an audience to the leaders of the Jewish community in order to tell them of his disapproval of the Vichy measures promulgated eighteen months earlier. Yet, the sultan prevented none of the Vichy anti-Jewish measures. If he disapproved of them personally, he never said so in public, and placed his signature on all decrees, not delaying any of them—quite the contrary, as Etienne Coidan confirmed in his report on Zionism in Morocco (1946). According to Coidan, the sultan distinguished himself by his zeal in the matter of Vichy “racial measures.” “It is thus that, inspired by the dahir of 19 August 1941 which ordered certain Moroccan Israelite subjects to evacuate the European quarters in cities, a letter from the Vizier (the Sultan’s Prime Minister) dated 20 October 1941 orders Pashas of the towns to end the cohabitation of Jews and Muslims in the medinas, to relegate the former to the mellahs, and to interdict the employment of Muslim servants by Jews.”132 The sultan in fact took advantage of the Vichy regime to remind Jews of their condition and to forbid Muslim women to serve within Jewish families. Muslim women who work as domestics in a Jewish house, according to a Makzhen circular of January 4, 1941, “damage the respect due to Muslim women, and lower their dignity.” Such a situation is “of a nature which will incite the Jews to disdain Muslims and to forget their own condition of dhimmis.”133 In this respect, the sultan is in rhythm with “the opinion of the Muslim people in the towns.”134 After the November 1942 landings, he becomes privately enraged against the “aspirations” of Jews, whom he wants to see reminded of their condition as subjects. His “benevolence” collides with the limits of a dhimmi status that cannot be circumvented. In a system where there are no rights but only favors, the tenants of the legend of the “Sultan as benefactor” have a hard time grasping that the sultan’s solicitude for the notables is part and parcel of the process of servitude. As the Sultan, according to Coidan, was adept at double-speak, he was not unhappy “as a good Muslim” to see “the Jews put in their place” from 1940 to 1942, and “he was even complacent about the adoption of certain racial measures, playing a role as moderator. It was that benevolent attitude which explained the recognition the sovereign receives today from Jewish circles.” In 1945 the Jewish communities in the Near East faced a disaster of a quite different nature than the one striking European Jews. The cumulative ordeals mounted up: relegation in the French Maghreb, fear petrifying Jewish communities in Egypt and Palestine, German occupation in Libya and Tunisia (until 1943),

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  341 and ongoing active sympathy for the Reich on the part of a large proportion of Arab nationalism. In 1944, the clandestine Iraqi Zionist movement asks: What hadn’t the Jews of Baghdad done, in order to convince the Arabs to trust them? . . . They even renounced the use of their Hebrew language. . . . But did all this benefit them in any way during those days of massacre? Were they able to purchase their lives at the price of their dignity? Did they gain security after so many sacrifices? Not at all. They never derived even the slightest advantage from all of that, because their condition of servitude meant they were not ever spared being pillaged, despised, or exterminated. . . . All efforts on the part of the Jews to mix with others and act like them just led to their massacre. Things in Iraq were exactly like in Yemen. Our destiny is identical in all these Oriental countries.135

In November 1944, three Jewish delegates from Morocco participated in the WJC, meeting in the USA in Atlantic City. With two Jews from Tangiers but resident in New York, they established an American Committee for Moroccan Jews, as if the Jews were no longer just a religious community but rather a quasinational minority. The year of reckoning was 1944. Vichy anti-Jewish legislation, long considered to have been a German requirement, was now revealed to be of French origin. These were times of deep reflection about identity, social position, and the future. A portion of Jewish communities rejected the idea of a separate destiny and refused the leadership of the Zionist movement. In November 1944, several Algerian Jewish notables argued against sending delegates to Atlantic City; this would, they say, presuppose the “concept of a Jewish race or people.”136 Both the Arab populations and the French colonizer seem to have been unhappy about the enthusiasm of the North African Jews that began with the Allied landings of November 8, 1942, (in January 1943, the community of Casablanca instituted a Hitler Purim, to celebrate the fall of an enemy of the Jewish people, in the image of Haman). In the days that followed, in particular in Morocco, antiJewish exactions multiplied at the hands of the police, French soldiers (especially of indigenous origin), and Muslim populations. On several occasions, mellahs were closed off, including in Rabat, Meknès, and Fez. But Jewish joy at the liberation also made the Arabs tense to the point of disaster, as on the occasion of the Farhud in Baghdad. In Libya, Tripolitan Jews were exultant at the arrival of the British 8th Army: “This is the happiest Shabbat of our lives,” declared Jews to a Tripoli Times journalist.137 The Arab side did not share this happiness, as an American Quaker on mission to Casablanca

342  |  Jews in Arab Countries observed: “It seems the Jews celebrated the American arrival with excessive indiscretion. . . . The Arabs could not accept that, and attacked them.”138 In Rabat, the Jewish quarter was encircled by the police on November 12. Jews were rounded up, with some sentenced to forced labor. Arab troops terrorized the inhabitants, making them serve food, and beating them with truncheons. It was in fact after the landings that numerous Moroccan public establishments displayed signs warning “Jews Forbidden.”139 Terror reigned in the mellah; a report from Rabat asks “if it was really the Americans—or instead the Germans?—who had landed in Morocco.”140 The “liberation” was bitterest in the French Maghreb. The Vichy anti-Jewish laws remained in effect for nearly one more year, as if there had not been an Allied landing at all. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree was abrogated for a second time, before being restored on October 20, 1943, nearly one year after the disembarkation. Like colonial antisemitism of the time, the Gouverneur Général of Algeria, Marcel Peyrouton, hid behind Arab antisemitism to explain the refusal to reinstate the Decree, declaring to Jewish notables on January 28, 1943 that: “The abrogation today of the racial laws would clash with Muslim discontent.”141 On March 14, 1943, General Giraud announced the abolition of racially discriminatory laws, which he claimed—with complete disregard for historical fact—had been “imposed on France by the Nazis.” Yet, unlike Algeria, where the Crémieux Decree was abrogated twice before finally being reinstated, in Tunisia, racial laws were annulled on liberation. To this tense climate we must add the attitude of the American command, which recommended to its troops “not to interfere in internal affairs,” despite the anger of some American Jewish soldiers, who wanted to help the mellah. This neutrality on the part of the Allies was felt to be hard to bear. Such was the case in Baghdad in June 1941, when the British remained in their barracks during the Farhud. It was also the case in Libya in 1945, during the anti-Jewish riots. General Paton denied the existence of discrimination to which Jews are subject in North Africa, although he was a direct witness of it. The Jews “are doing quite well,” he considered; it was with reason that Secretary of State Henry Morgenthau highlighted the antisemitism of certain senior figures within the State Department.142 In order to inform himself of the situation, Morgenthau personally visits Algiers, where he learned that Jewish American soldiers, outraged by the misery of the mellah, had been advised “to calm yourselves” to avoid “angering the Muslims.” In 1943–1944, in both Morocco and Tunisia, the French army turned a deaf ear to requests by indigenous Jews to enlist. The army registered the requests but counseled candidates to go home and wait. The French administration feared “displeasing the Muslims, accustomed to considering the Jews as a race unworthy of bearing arms.”143

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  343 In Iraq the discourse was even more brutal. The Arabs judged the Jews to be cowardly, dirty, and destitute; it seems to them unimaginable that someday Jews could command Arabs, for the former are “a people without any sense of gratitude, a nation comprising agents of evil, crime and vice,” affirmed the newspaper Al-Arab in March 1945.144 By 1945, the educated and urban element of Moroccan Jewish youth was disillusioned with France, even feeling “resentment that a return to the previous state of affairs had not been entirely excluded.”145 Étienne Coidan explained that France, her international actions the subject of unfavorable comment, was left out when toasts were offered for the regaining of liberty. Coidan also compared this attitude to the wounded love of “an educated youth,” wavering “between hate and love.”146 Vichy measures had, in fact, worsened colonialist iniquity, with Jewish children refused milk rations because “these must be reserved in priority for Europeans.”147 Bitterness hit all Jews of French North Africa, a fortiori the 117,000 of Algeria who had been brutally deprived of their nationality. In the twilight of his life Jacques Derrida, who as a Jewish Algerian child was denied access to public school by the 1940 laws, would write: “This is an experience which leaves nothing intact—an atmosphere that, going forward, you would forever after continue to breathe.”148 This “wounded love” spurred the Moroccan Jewish community to demonstrate greater independence. The June 1948 pogroms of Oujda and Djerada embittered Jews toward a power incapable of protecting them. Jewish youth blamed traditional leaders for their submission, and elites for their integrationist strategy.149 In 1945, a portion of the youth looked to Zionism, while another portion moved to France, convinced that it is solely their colonial position that is the cause of discrimination. During the same period, Western Judaism made its influence felt throughout North Africa, including Libya, with the JOINT, American Jewish Committee, and Europe’s OSE (Organisation de Secours aux Enfants—Children’s Aid Society). The genocide incites the American Jewish Committee to consider Jews of Arab lands as “the forgotten million.” As a report of the AIU notes, “America’s prestige is great amongst Moroccan Jews, because they have seen American Jews in the US Army, proud of their Judaism, freely and openly celebrating religious services and festivals with the frankness of men who feel truly free. The Zionist idea . . . also meets with more and more sympathy.”150 Others engage with the communist movement, such as Léon Sultan, a lawyer and secretary general of the Moroccan Communist Party, founded in 1943. Yet others look toward a Judeo-Arab entente, which Moroccan nationalists also endorse for tactical reasons, namely that Jewish support would facilitate their

344  |  Jews in Arab Countries rapprochement with the United States. However, contacts created in 1943 and 1944 did not develop further. Moroccan Jewry was evolving. Many now lived outside the mellah, such as in Casablanca (32,000 of the city’s 58,000 Jews). In 1939, the Montagne Report pointed up the imbalance between the Jews’ civilizational level, and the backwardness of their status: “The Jews can never hope to be judged by other Jews. Yet, those amongst them who are civilized—indeed, more so than many Europeans—aspire to be ruled by a different regime.”151 Youth in particular were no longer minded to accept their ancient state of submission.152 Everywhere, Jewish communities were animated by a desire to recover their dignity, and the wish to “re-establish the Jewish people in all its pride,” as Étienne Coidan noted in 1946 regarding Morocco, a judgment that could without hesitation be extended to other Jewries. Autonomy is the recurring demand in the WJC 1951 report on Morocco. But also dignity, abrogation of distinctions linked to religion, and a demand for equality (yes, Moroccan Jews would accept to be tried in the Makzhen’s courts, but why could they not also serve as judges?). And finally, opposition to conversions of Jewish minors, which in reality were almost all forced.153 This concern with a “moral” reawakening by Jewries from one end to the other of the Arab world also explains the success of Zionism, “the sole valid expression of contemporary Judaism,” writes Coidan in 1946, who states that Zionism was the “only policy able to give them back their unity, their dignity and their right to respect by other peoples, and thereby to greatly contribute to the disappearance of antisemitism.”154

Notes

1. Cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 55. 2. Cf. Ageron, “Contribution à l’étude de la propagande allemande,” 21. 3. Cf. for these figures and the preceding ones, Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 9–10. 4. Ibid., 59. 5. In Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 416. 6. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 146. 7. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 633. 8. Ibid. 9. In Herf, Nazi Propaganda. 10. Herf, L’Ennemi juif. 11. Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 148. 12. Ibid., 99. 13. Ibid., 99. 14. Ibid., 102.

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  345 15. Herf, Hitler, Propagande et le monde arabe (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2012,) 99 (French translation of Herf, Nazi Propaganda). 16. Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 99. 17. Cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 231. 18. Cited in Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 106. 19. Speech of Werner von Schmieden, November 29, 1942, cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 232. 20. Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 48. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. In Ageron, “Contribution à l’étude de la propaganda allemande,” 18. 23. Numerous examples are cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 119. 24. Ageron, “Les populations du Maghreb,” 34. 25. Ibid., 35. 26. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 55. 27. Ibid., 58. 28. Ibid., 53. 29. In Ageron, “Les populations du Maghreb,” 3. 30. Cf. Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 55. 31. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 52. 32. Ibid., 54. 33. In Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 31. 34. In Ageron, “Les populations du Maghreb,” 24. 35. In Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 601. 36. 23 May 1941, cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 180. 37. Cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 171. 38. Ibid., 173. 39. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 11 November 1940. 40. Cf. Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 94. 41. CZA, S25/5289, 1946 report on “The Jews of Iraq.” 42. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 174. 43. Ibid., 118. 44. CZA, S25/10372. 45. In Ageron, “Contribution à l’étude de la propaganda allemande,” 30. 46. German report of May 19, 1943, cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 248. 47. Cited in Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 625. Author’s emphasis. 48. Cf. on this subject the comment of Nathan Weinstock in Terre promise, trop promise. Genèse du conflit israélo-palestinien (1882–1948) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011), 288–291. 49. Cf. Gilbert Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah. La guerre israélo-arabe des récits (Arles: Actes Sud), 2009. 50. In Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 98. 51. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 127. 52. Cited in Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 153. See also Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 227. 53. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 168.

346  |  Jews in Arab Countries 54. Cited in Richard L. Rubenstein, (ed.), Jihad et genocide nucléaire (Les Provinciales, 2010), 124. 55. In Weinstock, Terre promise, trop promise, 290. 56. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 131, 133. 57. In Weinstock, Terre promise, trop promise, 290; see also Le Monde of 6 July 1974. 58. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 90. 59. In Ageron, “Les populations du Maghreb,” 8. 60. Ibid., 11. 61. Cf. Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 73. 62. Ibid., 149. See also Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 231. 63. Translated from Hebrew by Claire Darmon. The document can be consulted at the Yad Ben Zvi Archives in Jerusalem. 64. CZA, S25/10372. 65. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 182. 66. Ibid., 149. 67. On this subject there is a substantial bibliography, especially in Hebrew and to a lesser degree in English and French. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); Georges Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable. Israël, le Sionisme et la destruction des Juifs d’Europe, 1933–2007 Seuil, 2008, and Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no.182, Devant l’abîme: Le Yishouv et l’État d’Israël face à la Shoah, 1933–1961, January–June 2005. 68. CZA, S25/3529. 69. In Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée, 100. 70. In Herf, Nazi Propaganda, 143. 71. Ibid., 126. 72. Ibid., 132. 73. Ibid., 139. 74. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et Croix gammée,163. 75. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 389. 76. Cited in Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 143. 77. See Weinstock, Terre promise, trop promise, 216. 78. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 35–36. 79. CZA, S25/3529, Baghdad, 6 August 1941. 80. Naïm Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 35. 81. CZA, S25/3529, Haifa, 26 May 1942. 82. From a July 8, 1941 official Iraqi inquiry report presented to the British authorities, in Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 405–417. 83. CZA, S25/4731. 84. CZA, S6/3785 (II), Baghdad, 18 February 1942, letter to Yehuda Bachar, Jewish Agency at Jerusalem. 85. CZA, S25/3529. 86. CZA, S6/3785 (II), Baghdad, 27 February 1942, letter to Yehoshua Bachar, Jewish Agency, Aliyah Department. 87. CZA, S25/11323. 88. CZA, S25/5289. 89. Cited in Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab country. Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (London: Routledge, 2004), 27.

In the Wake of War, 1939–1945  |  347 90. CZA, S6/3785 (II) Baghdad, 18 February 1942. 91. Cf. Pascal Blanchard, “La vocation fasciste de l’Algérie coloniale dans les années 1930,” in De l’Indochine à Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvement des deux côtés du miroir colonial (1940–1962), ed. Nicolas Bancel, Daniel Denis and Youssef Fates, Paris: La Découverte, 2003), 177–194. 92. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Oujda, 1 July 1940. 93. CDJC, LXXXV-24. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. CDJC, LXXXII-12. 97. CDJC, LXXXV-40. 98. CDJC, LXXXII-12. 99. Ibid. 100. CDJC, LXXXV-34. 101. There are numerous works on this issue, such as those of Haim Saadon (Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem). 102. Cited in Stora, Les Trois Exils, 198. 103. L’Action française, 9 October 1940. 104. An article by General Giraud in the daily newspaper, Oran républicain, on March 15, 1943. Cited in Michel Abitbol, Les Juifs d’afrique du nord sous Vichy, 211. 105. Cf. CZA, S6/4582, Tripoli, 13 August 1943. 106. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 634. 107. CDJC, LXXXII-12. 108. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Marrakesh, 20 September 1940, concerning 13 Jewish businessmen incarcerated for “illicit price-rises.” 109. See CDJC, LXXXII-12, and CCCLXXI-5. 110. CDJC, LXXXII-12. 111. In Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 218. 112. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 531. 113. CDJC, LXXXV-II. 114. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 10 May 1945. 115. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Casablanca, 30 May 1945. 116. Cf. ibid., Meknes, 24 September 1944. 117. CDJC, LXXXV-II, 17 October 1939. 118. Ibid. 119. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Fez, 20 October 1941. 120. CZA, S25/11323. 121. CADN, Protectorate of Tunisia, Résidence Générale, Gabes, 25 May 1948. 122. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Casablanca, November 1942. 123. CZA, C10/459, 8 August 1945. 124. CDJC, LXXXV-32. 125. Ibid., LXXXV-33.

348  |  Jews in Arab Countries 126. Ibid. 127. CDJC, LXXXV-33. 128. Ibid. 129. In Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 624, 628 130. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Coidan report, January 1946. 131. Ibid. As an annex to the Coidan report. The article appeared in the weekly La Voix juive, Tunis, 18 May 1945. 132. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, January 1946. 133. Cited in Weinstock, Une si longue presence,142. 134. Frédéric Abécassis and Jean-Françoi Faü, “Les Juifs dans le monde musulman à l’Age des nations (1840–1945),” in Les Juifs dans l’Histoire, ed. Antoine Germa, Benjamin Lellouch, and Evelyne Patlagean (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2011), 545–570. 135. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 457–459. 136. Cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord, 227. 137. Tripoli Times, 31 January 1943, in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 443. 138. CDJC, LXXXV-13. 139. CDJC, LXXXII-12. 140. Ibid. 141. Cited in Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, 208. 142. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 635. 143. Cited Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain, 108. 144. In Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 31. 145. From a report by senior French official Etienne Coidan, entitled Zionism in Morocco, and submitted to the authorities in January 1946. In CADN, Morocco, D.I., Q.J., dossier 18, January 1946. 146. Ibid. 147. Sefrou, Morocco, December 1944, CDJC, LXXXV-44. 148. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabon, La Contre-Allée (Paris: Éditions La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1999), 87. 149. CZA, 10/349, 1951, Abbou. 150. CDJC, LXXXV-6. 151. CDJC, LXXXV-11. 152. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, report of 4 December 1944. 153. Cf. CZA, C10/610, World Jewish Congress, September 1951. 154. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, 1946.

10 The Turning Point, 1945–1949 The history of Jewish-Arab relations in Arab lands has become encumbered

with analytical frameworks that distort assessments, yielding a dark version of this history for some and a golden, mythologized version for others. Moreover, the Arab-Israeli conflict has deformed the past in encouraging over-interpretation of historical archives. As a result, some only see this past as a long conflict and the teleological prefiguration of today’s violence, while others—fewer in number— see an idyllic symbiosis. This deformation arose well before 1948. In October 1942, a report from Baghdad to the Jewish Agency already noted that Arab textbooks emphasized periods of tension with the Jews. Many were written by Palestinian authors, who used them to mount anti-Jewish attacks.1 After 1945, many Jews, concerned for the future of their communities, hawked a sugar-coated version of the past, while pleading for reconciliation. In 1947 an Egyptian Zionist activist addressed his country’s prime minister to express his rejection of the divide between Jews and Arabs that the British wanted to see: “And we, Jewish and Arab natives, we are stupid enough to swallow all of that without protesting.”2 In July 1949, regarding an inquiry in the Marrakesh region, the Cahiers de l’AIU (Notes of the AIU) formerly called Paix et Droit (Peace and Law) urged that the suffering of Muslim compatriots also be considered.3 The Arab side quickly appropriated this account (which was to a certain extent mythic) in order to explain that the departure of the Jews was due to “Zionism,” and the deterioration of inter-community relations due to the actions of “Mossad agents.” This version of events would redouble in intensity with the Six-Day War (1967), by making “Zionism” the ultimate cause of the divorce and leading several Arab governments to implore their former Jewish residents to come back to their motherland.4 Iraq, in particular, distinguished itself in this respect, as shown by an article in the Baghdad Observer in March 1970: “Does Israel claim that Israeli Jews have a better fate? . . . Israel was created on a racist foundation: certain Jews there are even treated as second-class citizens. The complaints formulated by Israel about the claimed persecution of Jews in some countries serve only to mask the barbaric crimes committed against the populace of the occupied Arab territories.”5 The strong demographic growth in the Arab world, starting in the inter-war period, is directly linked to the steep fall in mortality, first and foremost infant

350  |  Jews in Arab Countries mortality. The second pertinent reality is the rapid urban take off: Cairo’s population passes from 1.3 million in 1937 to 3.3 million in 1960, and Baghdad’s population increases from 0.5 million in 1937 to 1.5 million in 1960. The same holds true for Casablanca, rising from 250,000 inhabitants in 1945 to 1 million in 1960. Following the destruction of European Jewry, and in fact beginning even in 1944, senior leaders of the WJC and other organizations were conscious of the shift then taking place. In 1945, a report from the OSE asserts that the Jews of the Maghreb constitute a demographic reservoir for Jewry. But this does not take into account the hygienic and social situation, which in most places is disastrous. This reality is all the more grave for the Arab world in general, where unemployment is endemic (in 1960, two thirds of Cairo adults have no steady or regular work), and where the army of indigents and the poor constitute a majority of the population. Even within Jewish communities, an immense gap separates the narrow fringe of “educated and civilized” people (as described in 1945 by an OSE doctor in Morocco) from the rest of the population. A “civilized” man who has emerged from the mellah “thinks only of widening the gulf separating him from his origins. . . . These two worlds are evolving in two different directions.”6 Hence, the endless descriptions of the misery of the Moroccan mellah, and the poverty of the poor artisans, such as those at Taroudant who, in 1950, work only during the two market days: “Well, we just do without meat or dessert, and cook without oil.” Reports evoke “the impoverished class [which is] unfortunately very numerous. It includes the blind, the old, the sick, etc.—some 40 percent including their children. This class, which can do nothing, seriously suffers.”7 The same poverty is encountered in Tunisia and Libya where in 1949, an OSE report on Cyrenaica (whose 200,000 inhabitants include 5,000 Jews) describes a 60 percent rate of indigence.8 Malnourishment destroys the children, “beautiful at birth [but who] very often wither away, and die through lack of food,” according to a 1946 OSE report from Casablanca. “Is this not an anomaly in a country which was only remotely touched by the war?”9 The continuous emigration of Yemeni Jews is no doubt fed by religious and political considerations, but poverty plays the principal role. This was the finding in February 1944 by Israel Jacob Kliger (1889–1944), professor of medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on mission to Yemen, who explained the resurgence of Jewish emigration as the effect of epidemics and famine. The hygienic situation was catastrophic across the Arab world. In the slums of Baghdad in 1956, one child out of three failed to reach its first birthday. In the towns, overcrowding, eye infections, ringworm, and tuberculosis were ubiquitous. In 1945, Yemen had no more than five doctors, most of whom were drafted to work in the court of Imam Yahya. Eye conditions affected all Yemenis: in 1938,

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  351 90 percent of Muslims and 80 percent of Jews in the country had trachoma. In 1945, Jewish combined infant and juvenile mortality hit 60 percent, and the Arab situation was even worse. The gap was considerable in most of the Arab world; when in Libya there were 447 deaths per 1,000 Arab children aged between 1 and 5, there were 28 among the Jews and 12 among Europeans. The proportion of blind persons was enormous; this included 10 percent of children. The mellah was a permanent source of infection. Public sewerage systems were very rare. As the director of the Rabat girls’ school reported in 1947, with regard to mange, “We treat the child in school, but she goes back home in the evening to a contaminated environment, sleeps in the same bed with a brother or sister struck by the illness, and when the scabs reappear after 15 days of treatment, we have to start all over again.”10 From the Moroccan mellah to the Tunisian hara, tuberculosis was omnipresent. The rate among children in the Casablanca mellah in 1946 was 73 percent, according to OSE doctor Valentine Cremer. The mellah was a “permanent focal spot” of the illness, according to the Cahiers de l’AIU in 1947, where entire families crowded into rooms without windows. If only one person was contaminated, the contagion raged among everyone.11 Similar observations were made in Tunisia concerning tuberculosis, as well as learning disabilities. The recurrence—even if falling—of early marriages (including, in 1950, a girl aged eight and a half) and alcoholism must also be underscored.12 The sordid character of the Moroccan mellah has been described a thousand times. By 1945, according to the OSE, it seems that nothing had changed: neither the reality nor the words used to describe the filth, the overcrowding and “the physiological and moral misery . . . defying all description.” Out of Morocco’s 250,000 Jews in 1945, some 150,000 inhabited the mellahs. Vantentine Cremer of the OSE reported on a single bed shared by the entire family: “On this bed, they gave birth, and on this bed they died. No water, and only three hydrants for the tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Casablanca mellah. No drains, and latrines without water and often open-air. Houses without fresh air or light, with low ceilings and a nauseating atmosphere. Narrow twisting lanes where the sun, even in “sunny” Africa, never reaches.”13 In 1953, in the Cahiers de l’AIU, Georges Dumézil published a brief account of a visit to a Moroccan mellah a few months earlier: “I was truly knocked back, experiencing physiological exhaustion in the presence of the most inhumane material conditions of existence imaginable. . . . Everywhere I saw a repetition of the circumstances and scenes which had been described with disturbing cruelty by the Tharaud brothers [Jean and Jerome Tharaud, French novelists with a particular interest in Jewry] thirty years previously: leprous houses, streams that were really ditches surrounded by feces.”14 And along the laneways, “little

352  |  Jews in Arab Countries ragamuffins—unsmiling, no toys—drag themselves through the mud, infected by trachoma and vermin. . . . Yes, hopeless.” Forty years earlier, Lyautey, on leaving the Marrakesh mellah, said: “All this should be razed to the ground.”15 Assistance was common in all Jewish societies across the Arab world, first and foremost medical assistance against the endemic tuberculosis, for which “the poor are treated for free, or are taken into the community’s care,” according to the OSE in Libya, in 1949.16 Professional apprenticeships for the acquisition of a trade were also part of community aid, as in Egypt where, in 1945, the Salomon Cicurel Apprenticeship Program opened, designed for school-age students in care (like the ORT in Morocco, where it opened its first school in Casablanca in 1946).17 The point was to provide a profession for young Jews “picked up off the streets,” in the words of the AIU in 1947. “Most of them are illiterate: they can read a page with difficulty and at best can write their name.”18 Aid involved a wide array of forms of supervision and training, in order to prevent poverty, delinquency and prostitution. In the immediate postwar period, a large number of Jewish children in North Africa (with the exception of Algeria) did not attend school. In 1945, in Fez, 1,800 children attended school but 1,400 did not. In Marrakesh, the ratio was 2000:1200.19 On top of everything else, at the end of the war, rabbinic schools were disgustingly dirty, according to a 1946 OSE report on Morocco: “little synagogues without air or light . . . where the children are literally crammed together. Scabies, purulent eye infections, ringworm, spots of all sorts, tuberculosis,” in a mellah where “mountains of rubbish” piled up, and “waste-pipes, often draining directly onto the ground, gave off an unbearable stench.”20 In 1947, concerning the Mogador rabbinic school where sixty to eighty children are crammed into a single room without hygiene, the AIU director “asks by what miracle no epidemic breaks out in houses which do not conform with even the most elementary sanitation rules.”21 Each year in October, the crowding in AIU schoolyards is such that employment of security personnel is necessary. The situation is the same year after year, with thousands of Moroccan Jewish children left behind, pleading for education, “like someone calling out for bread, to survive.”22 In 1948, a schoolmaster opens a new AIU school at Rissani, a small, isolated Moroccan community. As the students were registering at school, a group of some twenty children fixed their eyes on him: “I drew near to them and this is what I heard in Arabic: ‘I hope he won’t turn me away; I would like to greet him.’”23 Everywhere, Jewish-Arab relations are tense. In Libya, Italy’s abrupt retreat plunges the country into a deep economic depression contributing to deteriorating relations. Despite aggression such as stone-throwing as well as fanatical

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  353 anti-Jewish sermons pronounced by the cadi at Tripoli’s Great Mosque, Jewish leaders try to downplay the seriousness of the situation. Three weeks before Tripoli pogrom of November 1945 (discussed in more detail later), the president of the community declared to the Americans that no serious problem existed that could tarnish relations between Jews and Arabs.24 On August 8, 1945, the French ambassador to the United States, informed of incidents taking place in Morocco, explicitly states “an anti-Jewish sentiment . . . is present amongst the country’s Muslim populace. . . . All these troubles are to be explained by the anti-Jewish feeling which, as you know, exists among the population of the Moslem faith.”25 Official documents, including reports of the French police and the 1946 memoires of Étienne Coidan, confirm this. “Gangs of Arabs were taken to suitable locations from which they fanned out into the mellah and into other streets inhabited by Jews; during three days a veritable Jew-hunt took place.”26 The climate was equally degraded elsewhere in the Middle East. In July 1945, the Damascus Jewish community sought to send 106 children to Palestine.27 From 1943–1944 the situation in Egypt deteriorated against non-Muslims in general. The Muslim Brotherhood called on its Jewish compatriots to dissociate themselves, in their actions, from Zionism, while at the same time calling on the populace to boycott the Jews. The approach of the Balfour Declaration anniversary, on November 2, 1945, raises tensions. The British ambassador notes that the atmosphere is one of real “animosity regarding the Jews.”28 On the date, riots erupt in Cairo and Alexandria. The mobs attack Jews and by extension, foreigners: six dead, hundreds injured and numerous cases of pillaging. There is no doubt that the conflict in Palestine radicalized emotions, as an October 1944 French protectorate report from Rabat highlighted. The report noted President Roosevelt’s declaration in favor of the creation of “a free Jewish state in Palestine,” and observes that “the Muslim peoples of the Near East will not accept the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, considered to be Arab land.”29 In Iraq, by 1946, anything bearing a Jewish symbol had become suspect, and the authorities began prohibiting the importation of books and newspapers in Hebrew, and merchandise from the Jewish sector in Palestine. On November 4, 1945, with the Egyptian riots beginning to calm down, the mob attacked the Jewish quarters in Tripoli and other Libyan towns. Arms were first distributed to rioters, whose movements seem to have been coordinated (before the riots, doors were marked in chalk, bearing Arabic inscriptions: “Jew,” “Italian,” “Arab”). For four days, from Sunday November 4 to Wednesday November 7, the riot raged, while the police simply stood by. The British army remained camped at the gates of the city; yet troops only needed two hours to restore calm once the order was finally given. “The curfew put an end to the violence. It could have been imposed the previous Sunday. In fact, the riot could

354  |  Jews in Arab Countries have been stopped in five minutes,” reported Joseph Zweben, a US Air Force sergeant who was present at the scene. “A single shot, just to show the Arabs that the British were determined to protect the Jews, would have been sufficient to avoid the bloodbath. I repeat: the British could have easily stopped the riots within five minutes.”30 In his report, the president of the Tripoli Jewish community explained that the troubles broke out simultaneously in different sections of the town; moreover, he reported that at the police station he could find no officer in charge; and that on the second day the rioters were joined by thousands of peasants from surrounding areas, without any of the rare troops present on the streets that night making use of their arms. It was only on the third day that the British commandment arrested some rioters, while the Tripoli hara was only protected by the Jewish self-defense force. Elsewhere, the massacres continued. The state of the corpses, “which had been atrociously mutilated,” underscored the rage with which Jewish cadavers were set on. The Anglo-American Commission noted that the victims had generally been killed with clubs or iron bars to the head, and then, when they fell to the ground, their throats were cut: “On certain bodies, marks of unimaginable cruelty were noted.”31 One hundred and thirty Jews and five Arabs were killed. The majority of the Jewish victims lived in isolated localities, where they were more vulnerable. Rapes were frequent in small towns or villages with no self-defense units, such as Zanzur and Kussabat in particular, where girls and women were raped in front of their families before being obliged, like the men, to convert to Islam; there were in fact numerous cases of forced conversions. Children were the easiest targets: in Amrouss, out of 38 Jews who were murdered, 25 percent were below 10 years old. In Zanzur, 15 out of the 34 murdered were younger than 10.32 Material damage plunged already poor communities deeper into poverty. For all observers without exception—Jews and non-Jews—there was no doubt about the premeditated nature of the Libyan pogroms. The police remained passive during nearly all anti-Jewish riots from 1945 to 1949, serving as de facto accomplices. The Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry specified that, on the afternoon of November 4, 1945, the president of the Tripoli Jewish community rushed to the police station when the initial attacks began. He demanded rapid intervention, but in vain. The Cairo police showed the same passivity a few days earlier when only a few hundred meters separated the police from the building under attack. The police chief’s sole response was to clarify later that the synagogue (300 meters away) was not within his intervention perimeter. As reported in 1945 by the British administration, although it was the absence of governmental willpower that allowed the massacres to take place, there was little sentiment of guilt within the Arab community. By contrast, the Iraqi example during 1945–1948 showed how, even in a country where antisemitism is strong,

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  355 state determination could prevent such murderous outbursts, through the declaration of martial law on May 15, 1948 (even if in the case of Iraq, this was actuated by the fear of the populace gaining the upper hand). Jewish self-defense was active in several cities—in the Tripoli hara, in Cairo, and above all in Baghdad after the Farhud. It seems that that the Haganah had sent operatives throughout the region, as in Cairo in early November 1945, when the Haret El Yahoud (Jewish quarter) went on a war footing. Barricades sealed the entrances, guarded by men awaiting a pogrom, armed with batons, clubs, and a few handguns.33 By contrast, where there was an absence of Zionist emissaries, communities were often left without any organized defense. This was seen in Morocco in 1948, when numerous anti-Jewish riots erupted in the wake of the war in Palestine. The result was the classic scenario: frightened Jews, trapped in their quartiers under protection of the forces of order. If the Palestinian conflict had evidently radicalized thinking, this was nevertheless not the main cause for passing from word to deed. The official inquiry report speaks of “dormant antagonism” between Jews and Arabs, and the turmoil of Arab nationalism set off through the contagious impact of events in Egypt. The majority of contemporary observers concur, moreover, in ascribing a sparking role to the nationalist Arab press (which, however, mainly affected the minority of Arabs who were literate). On the Arab side, from Morocco to Iraq the official account of the violence was the same: it had nothing to do with the “real” Arab world, but rather was only the act of a handful of thugs. Moreover, as the Libyan newspaper Tarabulus El-Gharb claimed on November 8, 1945, the first victims of this violence were actually the Arabs, because Arab honor had been besmirched. The article condemned the massacre without ever mentioning the word “Jew.” The British report explained that Arab notables condemn the pogrom, but “there is no feeling of responsibility amongst the Arab community as a whole, just as, for that matter, the Arab community was not seen to offer any aid to the victims.”34 There was clearly a contagious effect. After the November 2–3, 1945 riots in Egypt, troubles broke out in Tripoli and Baghdad. On November 5, Iraqi nationalists called for pressure to be exerted on the Jewish community to dissociate itself from “Zionism.” Conciliatory declarations and the rejection of Zionism did not, however, quench the smoldering violence. In 1946 in Egypt, a “Struggle Group Against the Jews” multiplied denunciations and pamphlets: “Egyptians, you have seen how the Jews feared you on November 2nd, you have seen how the Jews hid on that date, you have seen the limit of their power on that glorious day. . . . Thus, this is the path: revolution against the Jews, aggression against the Jews and against all who seek to defend the Jews. . . . O Egyptians, history has set for you one single attitude regarding the Jews. . . . May each day be the 2nd of November for you.”35

356  |  Jews in Arab Countries As often occurred when a genuine threat emerged, Jewish communities tended to minimize the danger, not due to any lack of clear-sightedness (on the contrary, they were always able to clearly perceive coming trouble), but because they were often paralyzed by fear. In Alexandria, for example, in November 1945, the anti-Jewish aspect of the violence was obvious: 5 of the 6 people who were murdered were Jewish. Yet, the community preferred to ignore this: “Attacks by those scum against our synagogues, our persons and our property were only the result of a treacherous campaign, knowingly orchestrated and led by criminal trouble-makers offending against their homeland and their fellow citizens.”36 This was tantamount to echoing the discourse of Arab leaders, for whom “the real Egypt” had nothing to do with the violence. What was really at play, above and beyond the violence, was a divorce between the Jewish world and its centuries-old environment: this was the beginning of the end of a thousand year-old identity. In Libya, the pogrom of November 1945 marked the rupture between the Jews and their country. In September 1950, an AIU director wrote: “A storm has destroyed all feelings of security within the Jews and has deprived them of all illusions. Today it is terror, poverty, illness and suffering which reign, without even the glimmer of a bright spot in this somber future. Will they leave? And if so, how? And to where?”37 Anxieties ease somewhat after February 1949, when the Jews of Libya receive assurances that they will be able to leave for Israel, as London had recognized the Jewish State. But this is too late—it is no longer a question of maintaining their relations with their Arab fellow citizens, nor of concerning themselves about the future of their country as it stood on the threshold of independence, but only a matter of escaping a repeat of the massacres. Even if the riots did not become as ferocious as in Libya, in Egypt too the feeling of security was wearing thin. In November 1945 in Paris, the AIU Central Committee stressed the precariousness of the “Jewish populations within certain Arab countries, where the slightest pretext can set off anti-Jewish aggression.”38 In June 1948, the administration in Morocco seemed to have had no illusions as far as the pogrom of Djerada was concerned: “One should not deceive oneself. As long as the Arab mentality remains as it is, we can only hope to limit—but not prevent—pogroms.”39 In 1938, the problem of the reception given to European Jewish refugees had pushed JOINT to discover Moroccan Jews. A few years later, awareness of a demographic upheaval within Jewries led to greater attention being paid to Oriental Jews. By February 1946, when a world conference of Jewish organizations was held in London it was there, for the first time, that the fate of Jews in Islamic lands was raised. European genocide had changed Western Jews’ views. In 1939, in Jerusalem, the Zionist Organization had solicited the help of Jewries of the Arab world. Yet it was only from the second half of 1943 that the Zionist

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  357 movement and the WJC started to look differently at Jews of Arab countries, with the entire Zionist project now at risk of coming to naught for lack of a living nation in search of a state. In any event, a state for what purpose, if the nation for which it had been designed was now dead? Thus, on June 18, 1945 the Jewish Agency requested the British High Commission in Palestine to issue visas for Jews from Muslim countries. Yet, the pejorative view of Near Eastern Jews had not simply vanished magically. These Oriental Jews whom it was now intended to bring in would occupy the same role as had been allotted previously to Yemeni Jews. The Zionist Executive had, moreover, arranged two types of lodging. For those from Europe, there were camps along the coastal plain, where they would not stay longer than three months; for those from Arab countries, transit camps (often in the Negev desert) were set up for a longer period—one or two years. The aim was to settle this population in a desert intended to constitute an important part of the territory of the future state. The attention brought to bear on the Jews of the Arab world remained intense until early 1945. Then, with the Zionist executive mobilized to deal with European survivors, the number of Zionist emissaries in the Arab world fell to an extremely low level. The focus on Oriental Jews remained diminished until 1948. Then, the plentiful children of the Arab world’s Jewish communities would come to be viewed as a guarantee of the continuity of the Jewish people. French Zionism was interested in Moroccan Jews. At the end of 1948, Marc Jarblum, “representative to Paris of the interests of the State of Israel” (as described by the Résidence Générale) was “above all preoccupied with the examination of the possibility of organizing the mass transfer of elements of Morocco’s Jewish community to the Land of Israel in the coming years. . . . Mr Jarblum considered that at least 100,000 Moroccan Jews, chosen from amongst the young and vigorous elements, should be transplanted to Palestine during the course of the coming three years.”40 In 1951, a report addressed to the WJC makes explicit the State of Israel’s vital need of the Jews from the Arab world.41 With aliyah from Europe starting to fall off, among other reasons due to the Cold War and the Iron Curtain cutting the continent in two, Israel seeks to revivify immigration from the Arab world. At the same time that Jewish organizations are starting to look at the Jews of the Arab world, the AIU changes its approach to Zionism. The turnabout is impressive, dictated by the war and genocide, but also by the antisemitism of the French state, which shattered the assimilation strategy. The times now favored discrete sympathy for Zionism. Hebrew instruction, which had always been provided by the AIU, was now implemented in a more intensive manner, and contacts with Zionist organizations such as the Jewish Agency were increased.

358  |  Jews in Arab Countries The 5th Conference of the WJC is held at the end of November 1944 in Atlantic City. The Moroccan delegation is much bigger in number than previously, a sign of the new recognition of Maghreb Jewry’s importance. “The mellah of the Maghreb constitutes the last biological reserve in the world of the Diaspora,” as one prominent French Jewish intellectual argued in April 1955.42 From 1945, international Jewish organizations grew concerned about Libyan Jewry, which seemed the most threatened and whose fate, it is thought, would serve as a warning for the other communities in the Arab world, at a time when Arab independence was drawing near. After Libya, the Moroccan Jewish community, which was the most numerous, was the object of the greatest concern. The crystallization of threats weighing on Jewish communities caused several Western Jewish leaders to conclude that the AIU, on its own, will no longer be able to protect these Jewries. The first European conference of JOINT was held in Paris in 1948. Moroccan Jews were a priority issue. American aid allowed the AIU to educate more children: 28,000 in 1952, and 32,000 in 1960. This financial manna also allowed for the opening in Casablanca of a Hebrew language teachers’ training school in the early 1950s. Starting at the end of the war, the OSE and the AIU cooperated. In the Maghreb, the OSE opened community clinics and hospitals, often with up to 80 percent financing by JOINT. In Morocco, the ORT educated nearly 3,000 children in 1962. In all, nearly one-third of Morocco’s 170,000 Jews depended on JOINT, a virtual welfare state when compared with the incompetence of the Moroccan state: this included health care, free meals, clothing distribution, efforts against endemic trachoma and tuberculosis, and loans to craftsmen. Notwithstanding this important emergency aid, however, the Jewish community of Morocco continued to shrink year by year. JOINT’s multifaceted assistance displayed the strength of American Jewry, itself a reflection of the power of the United States in the postwar world. American Judaism operated in the post-1945 Arab world through organizing relief operations via intermediaries such as the American Jewish Committee. American Orthodox Judaism was also present in 1945, in order to guide Moroccan religious education through the creation of new networks, which would undermine the influence of the AIU. The American Lubavitcher movement, at the time exclusively Ashkenazi, taught the children of the poorest. It provided absolutely no non-religious education. This religious thrust emanating from the USA, together with the success of Zionism, created a more important place for Hebrew in all Jewish schools. What remained of European Jewry affirmed its solidarity with the Jewish world in Islamic lands. This is shown by the action of OSE in North Africa. In 1957 one of its doctors, Valentine Cremer, enumerated the work carried out since

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  359 1946 against “the three Ts” (tuberculosis, trachoma, and tinia, or ringworm). In Tunisia this grew from “twenty consultations per day in 1947, to a thousand per day in 1957.” The rate of hospital deliveries rose from 5 percent in 1947 to 70 percent in 1957. The retreat of infant mortality was also dramatic. Seven health centers were opened in Morocco by the OSE.43 In addition, the WJC intervened in favor of endangered communities. In 1947 at the UN, the WJC calls on the UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, to block the entry of Yemen as a member state until such time as it treated all its citizens equally. The WJC also called on the French protectorate in Morocco to improve the legal condition of indigenous Jews.44 Similarly in December 1947, it protested on behalf of Egyptian Jews against the reduction by the Egyptian government of half of the community to the status of foreigners, despite the fact that most of those Jews were born in Egypt.45 In December 1948, the WJC protested against the campaigns carried out in Egypt and Iraq, describing them as “a deliberate program of extermination of a defenseless group.”46 These interventions show how conscious people were of danger. In December 1948, the International League for Saving Jews from Arab Countries was founded. The Jewish Agency intervened more discretely. Jewish institutions all knew that the Arab world needed Westerners in order to develop the newly discovered oil fields. This led to pressures on Western governments and Arab regimes to respect signed accords and put an end to discrimination, and to denounce the presence in Arab countries of former Nazis. To what extent was the Arab world aware in 1945 of the genocide? And what “Arab world” is meant? The evidence indicates that the level of information among cultivated elites was excellent. In Egypt, in January 1945, the daily newspaper AlAhram gave detailed accounts of the mass deaths of European Jews, using Arabic terms for “German atrocities,” “gas chambers,” “extermination,” “crematoria,” “Jewish martyrs” and “Jewish catastrophe” (n’abat al yahud). In March 1945, AlAhram estimated that a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated.47 The diversity prevailing in 1945 soon gives way to a monochord discourse. Above all, the lumping together of the genocide with the fate of the Palestinians begins to be observed. In August 1945, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam, employs the same word to evoke the lot of the Jews and that of Palestinians who face becoming refugees, using in both cases the word “persecutions,” which amounts to a minimization of the amplitude of the drama that European Jews underwent. He avoids terms such as “massacre,” “killings,” and “genocide,” instead underscoring Nazi aggression against all civilians in Europe, thus masking (as also did a part of the Western press) the centrality of antisemitism and genocide. One can consider this article, which appeared on November 13, 1945, in the Moroccan newspaper Al-Morchid, as

360  |  Jews in Arab Countries already characteristic of what would become a classic rewriting of history: “To be sure, the Jews have been persecuted in the Axis countries, but why were they? They were martyred because of their immense capital. Did Hitler give the Jews the coup de grâce? Far from it! While a few Jews were dying in Poland and elsewhere, other Jews were doing business and increasing their fortunes. The Jews helped the Allies with much hesitation, while the Arabs did so without setting any conditions, going as far as to forget the Balfour Declaration.”48 The issue of the role of the Mufti offers a good illustration of this evolution toward a partial—and soon a total—denial. The Arab press issues no criticisms of the Mufti. The photo of the meeting between the Mufti and Hitler, on November 28, 1941, is widely distributed; it was published on many occasions in the press, the first being in an Egyptian newspaper in spring 1946, which triggered a number of reactions across the Near East. On March 19, 1946, in Lebanon, Camille Muruwa wrote in Al-Hayat: “Some newspapers have criticized the publication of this photo, claiming it is a forgery. We would like to put an end to such rumors and confirm that the photo is real. The Mufti in fact did meet Hitler, and he also met with other German leaders. Other photos exist, which is not surprising since the Mufti spent nearly four years in Germany! But in what way is the Mufti’s meetings with Hitler and others a problem?”49 Immediate postwar contemporaries were unanimous in describing a change of attitude among Jewish communities. Without doubt, both mass school attendance (in Morocco, for example, it is total by 1960) and an atmosphere of liberation were factors. As an AIU director noted in November 1946, “All of these reasons have made it such that the Jewish populace of Casablanca, abandoning its ingrained posture of humility, today demands what yesterday it only sought.”50 This “moral awakening,” as it was called at the time, explains the reduced tolerance in the face of injustice. In the 1950s, the process of Westernization step-bystep distanced the last Jewish communities of Morocco and Tunisia from their Arab environments. From the 1930s, a portion of Jewish young people had been attracted to communism. After the war, a number of them became members of communist parties, and were even frequently in party leadership positions. This was the case in Iraq, for example, where the Iraqi Communist Party was founded in 1934 by two Jews, Yehuda Avaham Zaddik and Sasson Shlomo Dallal (both of whom would be executed in 1949). Communist parties recruited from within the rising Jewish and Arab middle classes, in particular among the Jews, a veritable breeding ground of youth with an above-average level of education. In 1945 communism also benefitted

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  361 from the aura the Soviet Union enjoyed as the conqueror of Nazism. Some communist parties in the Arab world were also the only defenders of the Jews as such and were alone in opposing the war against the State of Israel and in organizing the defense of Jewish quarters, as in Baghdad in the 1947–1949 period. The repression striking the communist parties was ferocious, and was both earlier and even more violent than that striking the Zionist organizations. By the beginning of 1949 the Iraqi communist party was broken. Zionism was thenceforth the sole pretender to traditional community leadership. This same militant Jewish youth, sympathizers with the communist movement, also instigated a strong Jewish anti-Zionism after the war, from Cairo to Baghdad. The creation of the State of Israel and the war of 1948–1949 put Jewish communist militants in an uncomfortable situation. Shlomo Hillel, an Iraqi Jew and Yishuv intelligence agent working for Mossad LeAliyah Bet in Iraq in 1947, recalls that these men were “persecuted both as Jews and as Communists.” “And from whom do they request help?” asks one of his correspondents. “From their Arab friends, or from local Communists? No! They find their Jewish brothers, who hide them and see to their needs.”51 In November 1942, the Yishuv becomes aware of the radical reality of the genocide, and David Ben Gurion sees the collapse of his dream of welcoming two million European Jews after the war. The destruction of six million Jews risks destroying the basis of Zionism, he declares on June 24, 1944. The massacre of the Jews of Europe, he adds on September 28 of that year, will without doubt be a setback for the Zionists: “There has never yet been an anti-Zionist weapon of such power. Everyone asks himself, deep in his heart: Where are we going to find Jews in order to populate Palestine? We are confronted by a decisive moment, where Palestine is either won by the Jews or is denied them.”52 In 1940 he had set the threshold of viability of the future state at two million people. After the Biltmore meeting in New York, in May 1942, he spoke only of one million. It was from this awareness that, along with many other people, he understood that it was necessary to turn urgently toward the Jews of Muslim countries. Along the way, the arrival in Arab countries of Jewish soldiers in the Allied armies had set off a wave of enthusiasm among the Jewish population. Formed within the British army in 1944, the Jewish Brigade had a considerable impact on Jewries of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. In Benghazi and Tripoli in particular, “young people now speak fluent Hebrew and are awaiting the opportunity to leave for Eretz Israel,” noted a Jewish officer of the British army, stationed in Libya in July 1947.53 Although the Zionist movement had declined in the 1930s, recent events gave it renewed strength and vigor. Young soldiers of the Jewish Brigade were not only icons; they got involved in the life of the communities,

362  |  Jews in Arab Countries contributing for example to the creation of a network of Hebrew schools, and sometimes participating in clandestine emigration organized by Yishuv agents (Mossad LeAliyah Bet). This was the case in Iraq, where Jewish soldiers in the British Army assisted emigration after the Farhud. Zionism in the immediate postwar period seems, therefore, to have scored an intellectual victory, winning hearts and minds of the communities, and it was viewed as the sole solution to the “Jewish question” even if there was not always unanimity about that question. One must, on that point, also take into account sincere Jewish anti-Zionism in both Morocco and Tunisia, for example, where in the former some Jews joined Istiqlal, and in the latter some joined the Neo-Destour. But above all, it was a question of a sort of Zionism of acknowledgment, moved by the wish to be considered as an equal. This sort of Zionism was not necessarily synonymous with departure. In 1945, Jewish communities were not massively won over to active Zionism, and even less so their bourgeoisie, always more distanced from Jewish nationalism. It was Zionism as a way of being that had penetrated the strata of Jewish society—and youth in particular—reflecting how the war had revealed the fragility of the assimilationist ideal. As a diffused aspiration toward autonomy, Zionism had entered consciences, even if in 1945 the majority of Jews did not wish to break with traditional life. In the view of the British military administration in Libya, the new assuredness of the Jews, encouraged by the presence of the Jewish Brigade, had irritated the Arab populace and “provoked” the pogroms of November 1945. British hostility was directly linked to the conflict in Palestine and to the interests of Britain in the Arab world.54 Zionism, which was taking on the allure of an “intellectual and moral reawakening,” had as its object the creation of a “new Jewish man” (or woman), young and vigorous, face turned to the rising sun, in an imagery of the purest Soviet style. In 1945, the Yishuv had become an object of curiosity for a large part of Diaspora youth. During the war, Jewish communities let it be known—when they were able to express themselves—that they were in favor of a national Jewish solution in Palestine for refugees and survivors, who would certainly flock there at the end of conflict. There could be “no better solution than a national home for the Jews in the land of their ancestors, where a half-million had already settled,” as the Lebanese Jewish community explained in 1944 to the American ambassador to Beirut. “Dispersing them would only lead to the creation of new problems in the future.”55 As Étienne Coidan noted in early 1946 with regard to Jewish leaders in Morocco, “they considered that after the huge test which Jewry had undergone, no ‘brother’ in the Galut [diaspora] should any longer fail to be involved in the growing national movement; on that point, they considered that neutrality on the part of a North African Jewish block constituting nearly 450,000 souls would be like a veritable abnegation of Israel.”56

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  363 In Morocco, the “laws of exception” (i.e., antisemitic laws) gave Zionism a form of legitimacy. “Many of the ‘evolved’ elements have since that time harbored a grievance towards us, a sentiment which has not yet settled down,” notes the French administration in April 1945. Turning away from a failing France, they sought other pathways toward the realization of their hopes. This explains the explosion of joy with which the mellahs greeted the announcement of Allied landings in North Africa.57 In October 1944, the Zionist Federation of Egypt reports on the “immense Jewish tragedy,” adding that Jewish youth are “impressed by the development of nationalism in the countries of the Middle East.”58 In the shadow of genocide, the movement hammers home the idea that there can no longer be any Jewish life outside of Eretz Israel. Clandestine immigration to Palestine continued during the war, in particular from the Middle East and also Iran, where the Jewish Agency had opened an office in 1942. Emigration also flowed from Syria, where in 1945 there were three distinct Zionist movements. Iraq, too, was a source of emigration; the Zionists (operating clandestinely) attempted to win over the “Jewish street” in the face of community leaders who, although committed anti-Zionists, remained tolerant. The leaders had long considered Zionism a sort of fad (but not the most dangerous of “fads”; in their view, it was above all communism that must be fought). In any event, they could not separate Zionism from their own love of Zion. That is why underground emissaries from Eretz Israel to Iraq were never denounced or endangered, any more than were Jewish soldiers from Palestine who trained local youth in self-defense. In the turmoil of the war’s end, the Zionists tried to take control of cultural organizations, such as alumni associations. The movement thus seemed to engulf the communities, as if it alone gave voice to the struggle for emancipation. This engendered endless quarrels, often around personality issues, a phenomenon exacerbated by the increasing sidelining of traditional leadership and its replacement by new personalities. Nevertheless, the rise of Zionism, although quite real during the war and immediately afterward, was in some measure deceptive. In Morocco, Zionism was first a cultural (and quasi-national) redefinition of the Jewish fact and was not necessarily synonymous with an emigration always perceived as uprooting. The number of emigration candidates was derisory, and even if it were possible to emigrate to Palestine (which was still under the 1939 White Paper regulation) in massive numbers, “these new possibilities would have only a weak attraction for Moroccan Israelites who, in their great majority, were attached to their country, wishing for an improvement in their status within a local framework and having no taste for an adventure in which they feared being more certain to find misery than riches.”59 In Egypt, Zionist officials noted that at the age of eighteen or nineteen, rather than migrating to the Jewish national home, young militants opted for study overseas.

364  |  Jews in Arab Countries The illusion was even worse in Iraq, where, despite the ambient insecurity, the Zionist movement remained limited in scale. Toward 1945, out of 400 Jewish professors in Baghdad, hardly 30 would have been sympathizers of the movement.60 In addition, the economic situation, which had improved, further cooled whatever desires there were to leave. At the same time, culturally, the Zionist movement took ever-greater hold of the life of Jewish communities in Arab lands. It was supported, more or less discretely, first by the Yishuv and then the State of Israel. Jewish communities all felt their future to be compromised. The State of Israel would certainly take charge of those departing after 1948, but by itself the State was not able to uproot ancient communities. Rather, more powerful motivating elements came into play, which surpassed the actions of a foreign power (i.e., the State of Israel) or the repeated calls for emigration by Zionist movements. Wherever possible, Israeli agents sought to direct toward the State of Israel a flow of people that these agents could not simply call into existence ex nihilo. In Iraq it was neither Zionism nor Mossad LeAliyah Bet agents that made the Jews leave, but fear and persecution. To these two key factors we must add, in Morocco, the role of poverty (in 1945, the country was struck by drought and famine), and the physical decrepitude and moral decline of the mellah that seizes all travelers: “The day I saw the mellah, actually saw it with my very own eyes, it was impossible for me to sit at a table and take a meal. . . . I felt a shudder of pity and shame.”61 From another point of view, fear can cause certitudes to change. Although for decades the community in Egypt was hardly susceptible to Zionist arguments, the idea of emigration (especially to Europe) started to win out with the Israeli-Arab fighting of 1948–1949. Thus, a report from October 1949 cited the repression and persecution (internment, seizure of property, the apathy of the police during anti-Jewish attacks) in order to explain the willingness to leave for any destination.62 In Morocco, emissaries of the Jewish Agency directed legal emigration from 1948 to 1955, involving some 37,000 departures, initially from rural zones and isolated communities that would be defenseless in the event of trouble. In October 1951, the Moroccan Aliyah Commission director, Itzhak Raphael, “insists again on the urgency to liquidate the villages in the South, and the importance of teaching Hebrew.”63 After the Arab defeat, Jews’ fear of reprisals played a role in the organization of emigration, first among the poorer classes. For the protectorate authorities, it was concern for a better life that explained emigration, “the possibilities of education of children at the State’s cost, and the concern to avoid a narrow life without prospects, as well as the awakening of a true national sentiment—all these factors together explain the numbers of volunteers.”64

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  365 In the Near East, Zionist activity went underground. The movement’s offices were closed, its leaders either under arrest or in flight. Martial law was in effect in Palestine from 1948. Repression partially dismantled the Zionist movement in Iraq in summer 1949, and dozens of militants were imprisoned and tortured. Frightened Jewish community leaders suggested that this was all a “Zionist affair,” not a “Jewish affair.”65 In Syria, the Baath Party (the word means “resurrection”) attracted nationalists who often came from educated classes. Its principal theoretician was the Syrian Christian Michel Aflak (1910–1989), who defended the idea of an Arab nation founded on ethnic principals, postulating an ethnically pure state in which the Jews, who are not Arabs, would have no place. Nasserism in 1954, like the Baathism that took power in Baghdad in 1963 (and in Damascus in 1967) would make the Palestinian cause the very crystallization of Arab nationalism. Between 1945 and 1948, Arab opinion was powerfully mobilized by the Palestine issue, which awakened an anti-Judaism just under the surface. According to a September 1944 French report, in Morocco: the people in the streets and the indomitable évolués pick up the facile theme of the Judaization of democracies. We hear once more the words “Ingliterra el Ihoudia” and “Ihud Americanye.” . . . The nationalists have formed underground committees “for their brothers of Palestine,” which collect donations. . . . As well, they write poems about Palestine and give lectures in the madrassas on the history of this country under Muslim rule. Finally, the Arabic press has featured a number of articles on Zionism during the past six months, [developing the idea that] if Europe has persecuted the Jews, it should not be the Arabs who bear the consequences, and further that Palestine is an Arab country which will be defended by the Muslims to their last breath.66

In Cairo in November 1945, on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, students distributed leaflets: “Today is Palestine Day; November 2nd is the anniversary of the greatest imperialist crime committed against the Arabs and humanity. . . . The hidden designs of colonialist Zionism which have as their plan, well beyond Palestine, the domination of all Arab countries, have now become transparent. They want to appropriate our lands from the Euphrates to the Nile in order to bring Solomon’s kingdom back to life.”67 The Maghreb—also mobilized—championed Palestine, by frequently dipping, via the press, into anti-Judaism. In May 1948, a tract in Arabic circulated in the Gabès region: “Important notice to Arabs. O generous Muslims! You are aware of the hatred unleashed by the Zionists against the Arabs in the Holy Land. They fight the Arabs with the money they have gained from those same Arabs outside or inside Palestine, and with their lies and malice.”68

366  |  Jews in Arab Countries A French report on Morocco from early June 1948 noted: “Not a day goes by without in one place or another altercations or individual violence breaking out, generally at the initiative of Muslims and which reflects a growing nervousness. If this were only a matter of superficial public reflexes provoked by news of hostilities, then the harm would perhaps not be great, although the merest mention of a Jewish-Arab conflict is enough to arouse within the Muslim masses—especially in the towns—memories and instincts which had only recently quieted down.”69 This mobilization for Palestine affects immigrant Maghrebin communities in Europe, for example as mentioned in January 1948 by the French police intelligence service regarding Arab students in Paris.70 How did the colonizer maneuver between an Arab majority, which it feared, and a Jewish minority on which it had relied at the beginning of its presence and which it had helped to protect, as shown by the efforts of the French authorities in favor of the AIU schools? (In January 1946, the Coidan report on Zionism in Morocco noted, “three-quarters of the operational costs of the Alliance in Morocco were covered by the Protectorate’s budget.”71) And how did it do this while taking care that the emancipation of its “protected” Jews did not anger the Muslims, and at the same time seeking to prevent “the Israelites from attempting to evolve too rapidly?”72 In 1945, Paris opts for the status quo, sacrificing the Jewish community on the altar of civic peace. The critical thing, in the administration’s view, is to not have “problems with the Arabs.” In February 1949, during the trial of the murderers of the June 1948 Djerada pogrom, the defense lawyer calls for across-theboard acquittals in the name of “prudent justice.”73 Although the French administration is regularly informed about abuses of power committed by the Muslim authorities against the Jews, the fear of Arab opinion swings the balance against the Jews. Paris is worried about the Arab response to any sign of Zionism, a fear that was already exhibited by Vichy and the CFLN (the French Committee for National Liberation, formed in 1943, which came under the leadership of General de Gaulle). This is the background to the surveillance of Zionists’ activities, and the banning of the Zionist press. It also led to the reiterated interdiction of Zionist conferences, as well as books from the Yishuv (including textbooks for schools).74 The Résidence Générale insisted that any Jewish emigration to Israel be as discrete as possible, and it prohibited any “sign-posting, headed stationary, posters, press announcements” as well as Zionist youth movements and their collections and fund-raising.75 By the beginning of the 1950s, reports increasingly testify to Paris’ fear of the reactions of Muslim leaders, always ready to denounce collusion between “Zionism and colonialism.” (At that time the Fourth Republic maintained close cooperation with the State of Israel. In addition, the head of the government was a French Jew, Pierre Mendès France.) Yet, colonial authorities

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  367 dreaded a Judeo-Arab entente, “a tendency which fortunately is superficial. Moreover, unless there are repeated errors on the part of public authorities, this tendency seems to have no great future, for on the one hand it is contrary to the latent anti-Semitism of the Muslim masses, and on the other hand it would awaken the Israelites’ primitive wariness.”76 The British colonizer more obviously ranges itself alongside Arab nationalism, abandoning Jewish communities to their fate. At the end of 1947, following prior Anglo-Iraqi treaties, London and Baghdad sign a new cooperation agreement. Yemeni Jews, too, are the victims of British determination not to offend Arab nationalism. “The British do not wish to help the Jews leave Yemen,” notes a March 1949 report addressed to the Jewish Agency, “but if they feel that the Jews are ready to do so no matter what, the British will turn the Jews away from British territory (Aden) and towards Israel. [They want to] avoid offending the Arabs.”77 British partiality was even more obvious in Libya. In June 1948, after the antiJewish riots that bloodied Tripoli and Benghazi, the Jewish Agency received this report from Italy: “The British military administration in Tripolitania is overtly favorable to the Arabs. It closes its eyes as the Arabs seek to arm themselves, and undertakes no searches for arms caches except amongst the Italians and in the Jewish quarter.”78 Already by 1945, the British authorities were reproached for their nonchalance and bad faith attitude during the Tripolitania pogroms. To be sure, the British did not engineer the riots, but they allowed them to carry on for three days, according to Italian historian Renzo De Felice. After having at first described “inter-confessional confrontations,” the British concluded, “in reality, this was a concerted plan for simultaneous attacks against the Jews. An attack should not be mistaken for a quarrel,” as initially presented in the press.79 The specific pogrom nature of the violent incidents was established by the commission of inquiry. The accused included 289 Arabs and 6 Jews: 204 Arabs and 4 Jews were convicted.80 Yet, London tended to mask the true character of the violence as well as sidestep revelation of the aggressors’ identities. The concern was to avoid antagonizing the Arab populace. Contemporaries differed on the causes of the deterioration in Jewish-Arab relations. The “Muslims cite, as the deep source of these troubles, the noxious effects of Communist propaganda,” noted the general commanding the Meknes region in Morocco in September 1944. This propaganda would provoke “the increasing hubris of the Jews towards Muslims. The Israelites on the other hand see the influence of Moroccan nationalists who, disappointed with the speed of events in Europe [i.e., the German defeat], push their Islamic co-religionists to engage in assaults against the Jews.”81 According to the Arabic-language Moroccan press, the Jews bear the main responsibility for the violence. “The lamb has provoked the wolf,” a French report concludes.82

368  |  Jews in Arab Countries In 1945, a question (one that would have seemed unimaginable just a generation earlier) haunted all the Jewish communities in the Arab world: Should we leave? In Egypt and Iraq, where the Jewish minorities played a definite role in the birth of communist parties, the authorities were close to thinking that the Jews may be a “fifth column,” according to a report addressed to the Jewish Agency.83 In November 1948, the civil administrator of the Rabat region considered that “the Jewish minority problem in Morocco is already evident. It will be so even more powerfully when the State of Israel has been recognized. A Moroccan Israelite personality, known for his moderation . . . recently said to a person of the region that the issue of the Jewish element in North Africa was in the forefront of world Zionism’s preoccupations. It is acceptable to consider that, given the current state of the Israelite populace of this country, it will no longer be resolvable solely by mass emigration.”84 The Zionist movement’s role was indisputable (an issue that will be further examined), but if the Jews of Morocco had not wished to leave, no propaganda—however effective—would have succeeded in uprooting them. Zionist circles expected, and obviously wished for, mass emigration. “Our most absolute duty today is to foresee future events if we do not want to be surprised by them,” warns an internal Zionist document at the end of 1950.85 “The Jewish population feels that the situation has worsened,” the report continues. “Many people have become convinced that suddenly, there is no longer any place for Jews in this country, that the sooner they leave, the better it will be for them.”86 Due to disquieting signs, the idea thus took root among Arabized Jewish populations that they had no future in Arab countries. The Jewish community of Libya proved to be astonishingly passive during discussions, from 1945 to 1951, on independence. This was less indifference than the fruit of an age-old sidelining of these internally colonized subjects, inwardly convinced that they would never exercise control over their own lives. Without doubt the lack of leaders played a role, as many Jewish leaders had already emigrated. But essentially, Libyan Jews had withdrawn from the future of the country, because they no longer saw a place for themselves in it. In 1950 what preoccupied them was no longer how to live in a suddenly sovereign Libya, but when and how to leave. Many Jews in fact had seen this coming as early as in the 1930s. In 1930, Abraham Elmaleh, a Moroccan Jew living in the Yishuv, analyzed the outlook for Moroccan Jews attracted to the West who were step-by-step divorcing themselves from the Arab world: There is an absolute irreducibility between their conception of life and the Islamic conception. If between the Jews and the Muslim populace there have arisen apparent similarities due to living side by side and through the imprint of a common language, at the very first contact with another civilization

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  369 the Jew discovers himself and immediately separates from an environment where his distinctive character was only dormant. In the new Morocco . . . to assimilate the Jews to the mass of the indigenous population . . . would be to submit them to a compressive weight from which they will always seek to escape.87

Everywhere, in Morocco or in Libya, the feeling emerged of an impossible future, and an affective withdrawal took shape, especially after the violent pogroms of 1945–1948. “None of the survivors of Djerada talk about returning there,” noted the AIU in July 1948. “What would become of them? . . . What would become of this young boy of nine who cries ceaselessly while clenching his temples, because they have killed his mother, father, aunt, brothers and sisters?”88 In the view of many observers, colonization aggravated the divide between Jews and Arabs, pushing the former to leave. But this explanation reduces to a recent and external phenomenon a situation anchored in the deep history of Arab and Muslim society. The de-Moroccanization of the local Jewish community began before colonization and before the emergence of Zionism. One could say as much regarding all Jewish communities in the Arab world. And yet, even up to the present, the Arab world holds colonialism (allied to “Zionism”) as solely responsible for the exodus of the Jews. On the Arab side, the Jewish withdrawal was experienced as a form of “ingratitude” toward those who long ago welcomed them. Such an analysis does not question what, within the very structure of Arab-Muslim society, might explain this rupture. For the Jews, emigration was liberation, but for all of them it also brought the rending pain of an unhealable wound of exile. Rarely expelled but always excluded, these Arab Jews would hold in their hearts the skies, colors, sounds, smells, and language of a lost homeland. For none of them would departure be solely “liberation”; it would also be—at least during the first years—the beginning of a new exile, greyer and gloomier. All these Jews of the Arab Orient had been shaped by the world of their birth, starting with those of Iraq; then they were robbed and expelled in a quasi-legal manner. After the storms of 1947–1948, Iraqi Jewish notables had hoped to resume their normal lives. But this was to be an illusion. On October 23, 1949, the Baghdad Jewish community protested against anti-Jewish measures. As analyzed in 1950 by the British Embassy’s commercial attaché, “Most of them belong to families which have been settled in Iraq for generations. They consider themselves to be loyal Iraqi citizens and have no desire to leave their houses and businesses for a life full of uncertainty in Israel. They are conscious of the fact that in Iraq they lived in better conditions and in nearly complete security. However, recent events make them wonder if they will be able to keep living in Iraq.”89

370  |  Jews in Arab Countries Another drama, similar but less violent, took shape around the Arabized Jews of Egypt, in the small towns and cities where they were the victims of a hushed process of exclusion. The rending conflict was the same for a large number of their brothers in Morocco, divided as they were in the early 1950s between loyalty to their country, and attachment to Israel, “the cauldron of their faith.” As well, there is their attachment to France—the principle source of their secular culture—for Moroccan Jewish intellectuals, like those across the entire Arab world, are all the more drawn to the West in that Arab nationalism has made no place for them. The rising tension amplified Zionist voices Increasing clandestine emigration toward Palestine began to swell after 1945. The trauma of genocidal Europe, together with the sympathy of the “Arab street” for the Third Reich, both played a role. Fund-raising for the Yishuv continued discretely, albeit closely monitored and even forbidden. Everywhere, Arab authorities undertook surveillance of Zionist movement underground activities. “Muslim Moroccan intellectual youth follows these schemes of the Jews very closely,” the French police note in December 1944.90 Colonial authorities do not mask their fear of seeing the anger of “the Muslims” (or of “the Arabs”) spill out into overt violence or indeed an anti-French uprising. Arab hostility was exacerbated by the partition plan voted by the UN General Assembly at the end of November 1947. In Egypt, even if one still tried officially to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, the climate was one where anonymous letters denounced the “Zionist” activities of such-and-such a fellow citizen. The Egyptian Zionist movement knew that it was being watched: “Activities have had to be limited following a tighter and tighter control on the part of local authorities,” reported a message sent at the end of December 1947 to the Jewish Agency.91 The situation would calm down somewhat after 1949, but the assumption of power by the military in 1952 brought about a fresh deterioration, disorganizing the underground Zionist movement.92 In the independent Libya of 1952, literature about Israel and Zionism was forbidden to Jews: “It is dangerous for Jews here to receive books, brochures or material of any kind on Zionism or Israel.”93 In Morocco in the same year, the sultan’s counselors informed the French authorities of the existence in Casablanca of “transit camps sheltering emigrants about to leave for Israel, without even trying to hide it.”94 Following the vote on Palestine, secrecy becomes the rule for all Zionist movements. “Correspondence is very often censured. Please respond briefly,” writes an Egyptian activist in January 1948.95 It becomes necessary to learn the elementary rules of underground work, including the use of codes, as prescribed by the Jewish Agency in November 1948, explicitly taking its inspiration from the

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  371 French Resistance.96 Political activities are masked by a cultural alibi. Finally, it becomes necessary to run the blockades set up to prevent emigration. In the early 1950s, the Zionist movement in independent Arab states was disorganized. Israeli historian Esther Meir-Glizenstein maintained that the Israeli government wrongly claimed anti-Jewish persecution, while what was really involved was anti-Zionism. She argued that the Zionist Organization sought to create the belief that the Jews had been attacked as Jews, and that the State of Israel thus manipulated Iraqi Jews into joining Israel. In reality, the State of Israel did not have the capacity to welcome large numbers of Iraqi Jews in 1951. As for Zionists, if they acquired a powerful position within Jewish communities, this was because in the prevailing climate of fear (which had not been created by them), the Zionists offered more reassurance. In reality, one also must take into account the Arab wish to substitute Muslim elites in place of Jewish elites, as well as the desire to favor young middleclass Muslims, educated and in search of employment. Anti-Zionist combat thus presented a golden opportunity to get Jews to leave, and to misappropriate their wealth as they went. As well, fear of violence played an important role in getting Jewish communities (such as that of Iraq, which had up to the war shown hardly any sympathy for Zionism) to now envisage emigration. In January 1946, for example, the Iraqi Jewish community council assured the British Foreign Secretary that if they were to proceed immediately to a vote, “they would find that 100 percent of Iraqi Jews were anxious to finally emigrate to Palestine, and that none wished to remain in Iraq.”97 This fear was exacerbated by the war of 1948–1949, which was conducive to fostering rumors about indigenous Jews acting as accomplices of the “Zionists” of Palestine. More or less discretely, Jewish communities rejoiced in the victories of the young State of Israel. From May 1945 to May 1948, some 30,000 Jews from the Arab world arrived clandestinely in Jewish Palestine. From Oujda, Morocco, on August 26, 1948, the administration reported that “small groups of young Israelites have been seen all over the place, and do not hesitate to acknowledge that they are heading towards Palestine.” The authorities suspected the presence, behind this flow, of an orga­ nization that recruits and sets these migrants on their way, diversifying their means of transport in order to evade controls.98 In December 1948, the French police at Oujda reported that “the great masses of Moroccan Jews no longer accepted being subject to a Muslim makhzen. In their hearts—and they did not hide this— they had repudiated Moroccan nationality; their ‘homeland’ was Israel.”99 The Résidence Générale attempted to stem the flow in spring 1948, especially after the start of overt war. But everywhere, clandestine emigration was organized, often supported first by the Yishuv and then the State of Israel acting through the Jewish Agency in particular. In Iraq, the desire to emigrate swelled

372  |  Jews in Arab Countries after the Farhud. As a British diplomatic report from March 1949 noted, “Many young people from the “white collar” middle class and aged 30 or less are interested in the idea of emigrating to Eretz Israel, with the conviction that they would have better prospects than in Iraq.”100 There was no dearth of obstacles. Colonial France continued to try to put a brake on this emigration. London’s position was even tougher. In addition to these obstructions, there was all manner of swindling at the borders, with dubious “ferrymen,” slippery intermediaries, and crooks that prospered on the distress of others, in particular at the borders of Iraq and Yemen. Emigration of young people was particularly difficult to organize, all the more so when families were reticent to let their children depart. The role of the Jewish Agency was crucial: it assumed costs of travel, organized the preparation of future emigrants, and centralized (prior to May 1948) the issuance of immigration certificates. As well, the Agency had to deal with all sorts of false rumors. The role and mission of the Jewish Agency were not, however, secret; the Jewish press and the Israeli press spoke openly about it in the 1940s and 1950s. From 1945 to 1949, the most important flow of emigrants came from Yemen. Impoverished migrants were stuck for months if not one or two years. For example, out of 3,700 Jews who mdke it to Aden between April 1943 and January 1944, only a hundred received an entry certificate for Palestine. The thousands of refugees crammed into camps under British control were overwhelmed with enthusiasm at the news of the establishment of the State of Israel. After the assassination of Imam Yahia in February 1948, the new Imam, Zaydi Imam Ahmad, decided to allow the Jews to leave the country, in part in order to relieve them of their possessions, and in part out of the hope of drowning the young Israeli economy under a flood of immigrants. After having walked hundreds of kilometers, some of the exhausted refugees flowing into Aden suffered from malaria, and most had eye infections. A third of the migrants died of exhaustion or illness before arriving in the British colony. With its population swollen from 45,000 to 80,000 between 1939 and 1947, Aden was submerged under thousands of street-sleeping vagabonds. Because immigration rules set the age limit at thirty-five, many had to abandon their elderly parents. In December 1947, Zionist officials stressed the urgency of the situation, describing a besieged community, fearful of attack and no longer wanting anything except to leave for Israel.101 The American JOINT, the Jewish Agency, and both the Yemeni Jewish community in Israel and the Jewish community of Aden, bore the weight of relief efforts in a situation turning catastrophic in 1948 and 1949, when the talk was of famine. Ultimately, between September 1949 and September 1950, some 44,000 Yemeni Jews (out of an estimated total of 50,000) would reach Israel via Aden during the course of the operation “On Wings of Eagles” (the name taken from

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  373 Exodus 19:4) also known as “Operation Magic Carpet.” There were 430 Aden–Tel Aviv flights. Three thousand Aden Jews joined the Yemenis. Some four thousand Jews remained in Yemen, of which 1,300 would reach the Jewish state before 1954. Some Yemeni Jewish craftsmen were kept back by tribal chiefs, to force them to divulge the techniques of their trades. The exodus would finally end only in 1955, thus bringing to a close an emigration that had begun in 1882. In 1959, one could still count some 600 Jews in Yemen, but only 200 by 1968. The proclamation of the establishment of the State of Israel and the 1948– 1949 war placed Jews of Arab countries in a difficult position. But well before May 14, 1948, the pressures had been continuously rising. As we have seen, community leaders on several occasions had to pledge their allegiance and proclaim their rejection of Zionism and solidarity with the Arab Nation. Nevertheless, the Western Jewish press published a number of testimonies of visa issuance denials, describing how 40,000 Egyptian Jews, born in the country yet declared stateless, had overnight become expellable. The press also showed how posters—with citations from the Koran in support—called for boycotting the Jews, how pamphlets distributed in the streets on the eve of November 2nd called for violence against the Jews, and finally, how Cairo, in November 1947, secretly envisaged the registration of the Jews.102 For “Arab opinion,” the UN partition plan came as a shock. From Morocco to Iraq, opinion was paralyzed by what it considered to be a denial of justice and an act of imperialist robbery; a colonial machination carried out just at the moment colonialism everywhere was in retreat. “The development of the Palestinian situation has inflicted a sharp wound to Muslims’ pride, and they might be tempted to take their revenge on local Jews,” noted a French administrator at Oujda, Morocco, in December 1948.103 In 1947, for purposes of his mission (he had been tasked by Mossad LeAliyah Bet to deal with clandestine immigration), Iraqi Jew Shlomo Hillel finds himself in Beirut. He describes the shock to local opinion created by the news issuing from New York: “Once back to my hotel, I opened a book to help me sleep, and promptly drifted off, remaining asleep until the morning, when I was awakened by a tumult outside. Through the window I spotted a group of some dozens of young people, marching right in the middle of the street, angrily shaking their fists and shouting loudly. The only word I could distinguish amidst their inarticulate cries was ‘Palestine, Palestine.’”104 Hillel rushed to a newspaper kiosk. “All the front pages were bordered in black.” Beirut is “in shock,” he writes on the morning of November 30, 1947. “This city, ordinarily peaceful, elegant and sophisticated, seems seized by frenzy. . . . The mobs crowded around the kiosks, and, here and there, someone read the news in a loud voice. . . . In the cafés and restaurants, the radios blared at full blast, churning out prayers and military marches. . . . Shortly after, together with thousands of others, I heard speeches inciting revolt, pouring out of the

374  |  Jews in Arab Countries loudspeakers. . . . Each time they cried Falastin biladna w’al yahud klabna (Palestine is our country, and the Jews are our dogs), thousands of voices shouted in response.”105 In Alexandria, a Zionist movement leader reports on December 20, 1947: “You cannot imagine the joy with which we in Alexandria have greeted the UN decision on the partition of Palestine. Unfortunately, we have had to stifle our joy and enthusiasm. . . . Following this great decision, a campaign has been undertaken here by the Arabs . . . and [there is] the eventuality of repressive measures against Zionists and Jews in the Arab countries. We are very concerned here, and it is above all our ignorance about the actual situation which most worries us.”106 Their disquiet firstly comes from the threats reiterated in the press and by certain leaders, as if Jews were to be held responsible for the events in Palestine. On November 24, 1947, five days after the UN vote, these were the words of the Egyptian representative to the UN: “The Arab governments will do everything in their power to protect their Jewish citizens, but we all know that an angry crowd is much stronger than all the forces that the police can muster. Involuntarily you may be in the process of igniting a conflagration of anti-Semitism in the Middle East which will be much more difficult to extinguish than the one which consumed Germany.”107 On the ground, and in a less euphemistic manner, the press goes berserk against Jews en masse, accusing them of being “Zionists,” a “fifth column,” “capitalists,” “exploiters,” “traffickers in arms and women,” and so on. Nevertheless, the government protects the community: demonstrations marking November 2 had already been banned twice (in 1946 and 1947). The government also firmly denied rumors in December 1947 accusing Jews of having poisoned public fountains. The American Embassy in Egypt reports that a portion of the Egyptian press itself hesitated. Pro-governmental organs appear moderate, and even show a rare open-mindedness. By contrast, newspapers of the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt nationalists push for war against their Jewish fellow citizens, demanding a boycott if indeed not the seizure of Jews’ property, as well as their arrest. Such threats are common currency in other countries of the Arab world. In Morocco, large businesses in Casablanca withdraw their money from the Commercial Bank of Morocco, reputed to be “Jewish.” In Egypt, tensions degenerate into riots, often manipulated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The anti-Jewish dimension quickly spills over to also strike Copts and foreigners. On February 16, 1948, threats are followed by a secret resolution of the Arab League stating “Zionist terrorism is susceptible of setting off a holocaust of the Jewish community.”108 The tension mounts further. Prominent people are arrested in the street, and are required to prove that they are Muslims.109

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  375 In May 1948, the onset of the war stretches things to the limit. This time, the violence is overt, as in Oujda on June 7, 1948, when five Jews are killed by the mob during a riot inspired by Maghrebin nationalism. There are more and more riots. In Damascus and Aleppo, Jewish quarters are attacked, and community leaders take flight to Beirut. In the Lebanese capital, Jewish students are expelled from the American University. Palestine’s borders with Syria and Lebanon are closed. The most serious riots occur in Aden. The small Jewish community, which benefitted from the British presence since 1839, had grown in size from 2,000 in the 1870s to nearly 5,000. On December 2, 1947 a pogrom began in the town, and there was also an announcement of a general strike in protest against the UN vote. However, on that day, with the Jewish quarter under police guard, the situation stayed fairly calm and the pogrom remained contained despite some sporadic violence. In contrast, the next morning, pillaging began. The boys’ school went up in flames. With the complicity of the police, thugs burned Jewish houses, and those seeking to flee the flames were attacked by the forces of order or by the crowd, and beaten to death. The rioters raged unrestrained. Some police officers participated in the pillaging; others shot Jews to death in their houses. It was only then that the British decided to send in their own marine units. According to the British report, seventy-six Jews (or possibly eighty-two or eighty-four) were murdered, and another six bodies were later found. There were seventy-eight wounded. On the Arab side, there were thirty-six deaths. Four synagogues and two of the city’s Jewish schools were torched, without counting private houses and cars. Financially ruined, the community was without means of subsistence.110 Some 3,500 refugees survived, deprived of all resources, waiting for visas to Palestine. Yet, even with the situation of the communities deteriorating everywhere, never before had Jewish determination seemed so strong. The advance of anticolonialism, educational progress, and the impact of the success of the Yishuv and Zionism were certainly important factors. The birth of Israel, and its military victory (considered by everyone as unex­ pected, indeed “miraculous,” and that reinforced latent messianic certitudes) shaped the thinking of Moroccan Jews impatient to shake off their yoke. In December 1948 General Leblanc from Meknes notes: “The repeated victories won by Israeli troops . . . are well known to, and the subject of comment by, the most widely varying elements of the mellah, even the very poorest. To continue to be subject to the pasha’s tribunals is a situation adjudged as deeply intolerable; thus, the fixation on ‘leaving’ gains ever more ground.”111 On the moral hold of the new State of Israel, note the testimony of Élie Maissi, a former student in the 1920s of ENIOand later an AIU teacher. In 1955 he travels

376  |  Jews in Arab Countries to Morocco, where he used to teach, and where he meets with younger generations of Jewish students: “In the heads of these teenagers, profound ties link them to the hills of my native Judea, and to the lofty songs of our kibbutzim.”112 As the civil controller of the Rabat region observes in November 1948: “Although they are officially on an equal footing with the Muslims, they realize that they are nothing of the sort. . . . They complain that, while the Muslim has a name, they for their part are only ‘that other, the Jew,’ hadal el youd laghor, and they simply no longer wish to put up with that state of affairs.”113 The moral shock is the same within other Jewries. In Iraq they speak of “the spark of redemption” and everywhere one notes rediscovered selfconfidence, a self-image turned upside down. At the end of July 1949, a secret Egyptian Zionist youth movement report explains that the news out of Israel (Radio Kol Israel is mentioned) and the successes of the Haganah have brought about a lessening of the suffering generated by the ambient tension and fear. The report adds that a “direct effect of the persecution was to win over many hearts to Zionism.”114 A part of the Arab press pushes for the isolation of Jewish communities, sometimes echoing the wildest accusations borrowed from the anti-Jewish demonization of Christian imagination, such as poisoning wells. In June 1948, after the Oujda and Djerada pogroms, the Résident Général of Morocco explains to Paris that Arabs of all stripes, and Arab nationalist groups in particular, feign conformity to the Makhzen’s directives in order to more effectively apply pressure to the Jews while throwing fuel on the fire.115 There are innumerable French reports about the situation, above all in May–June 1948, citing stone-throwing, beatings, and graffiti (accompanied with images of skulls) reading “Death to the Jews” and “Obadia [President of the Jewish community] will be hanged first, and the others will follow.”116 The attempted assassination on June 11, 1948 of the pasha of Oujda, after he was reproached by a young Arab nationalist for his protective stance toward the Jews, is first known of through a rumor that the murderer was a “Jew disguised as an Arab.”117 Tensions are higher still in Eastern Morocco, which is a zone of passage to Algeria. Without exception, the aggressors are always Arabs, notes the French administration, which asserts that the Oujda and Djerada killings of June 7, 1948 are “the distant consequence” of events in Palestine against a background of “racial hatred which, for centuries, has always opposed Jews and Arabs.”118 Both groups were absorbed by the Palestinian situation: “Amongst both the Jews and the Muslims, the events of the Palestine war were meticulously followed and the subject of impassioned commentary,” noted the Oujda Civil Controller.119 For the Moroccan Arab press, responsibility for the riots is placed on the “recrudescence of Zionist activity,” in the wake of “the triumphal entrance of Arab armies into the Holy Land.”120 The sole point of agreement between the

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  377 three parties (Arabs, Jews and French) is the role played by the Palestinian situation. In Libya, June 1948 sees bloody riots in Benghazi and Tripoli. Taking refuge in Italy, Jewish community leaders describe the tardy intervention of the forces of order, and of an Arab police force that trained its fire solely on the Jews, indeed on the wounded, who died in the colonial hospital after having been deliberately abandoned by Arab nurses (which is why Jewish nurses were excluded from the surgical department). The first incidents break out on June 12, 1948, but are countered by effective self-defense, and the violence is then redirected against isolated Jews. On June 14, thirteen Jews and three Arabs are killed, and more than three hundred Jewish families are pillaged and left destitute. The next day, the mufti and the rabbi visit the hara together in order to calm things down, but tension remains, as well as the fear of a reprise of violence fed by the frightening accounts of depredations against Jews: “Old people, children, have literally been chopped into bits, their bodies nothing more than a mash of flesh and bone, according to those who saw the events,” reports the AIU in July 1948.121 More testimonies emerge in autumn 1948, such as the one relating to the martyrdom of a young Jew, “his head crushed and his body battered,” with the Arab crowd continuing to attack.122 At the same time there were echoes of the Moroccan pogroms: “Old people and young children were wounded with clubs, slashed with sickles, and stabbed from all sides. . . . A baby of eight months was thrown, in his cradle, into the fire; it took the courage of a Spanish woman to save him from the flames at the risk of her own life. A pregnant woman was killed through kicks in the stomach. Monsieur Boulama was killed by nationalists whose chief, once arrested, confessed to having committed the crime by more than 14 slashes of his knife. Every passing Arab also stabbed the dead man, as if performing a ritual.”123 The June 7, 1948, violence at Oujda and Djerada, in Morocco, struck all contemporaries. Reports of the police and the gendarmerie on the subject were numerous and recurring, permitting a light to be cast onto some issues on which unanimity was reached. The massacre began with the “arrest” of a Jew in Algerian territory that morning, by a crowd of Arabs, who took him—bound—to Oujda, where he was roughed up. In Oujda, the absence of a mellah made the defense of Jewish families more difficult, as they lived among the Muslims. The riot produced eight deaths (seven Moroccan Jews and one Frenchman) and fifty seriously injured.124 Was this spontaneous or premeditated? Everyone agreed that on the Arab side, the violence kept mounting in intensity, through “inscriptions on the walls and all sorts of manifestations of anti-Semitism,” as noted in a police report; “Finally on 7 June the pogrom erupted. It is evident that this attack was carefully prepared—we have evidence of that.” The absence of Arab students at school that

378  |  Jews in Arab Countries Monday morning, the presence of many peasants in town with their scythes, the identification of Arab houses by means of markings on the walls, “quantities of gasoline prepared for starting fires,” and so on, are all factors cited as evidence of planning.125 Another police document spoke, on the contrary, of the “sudden character” of the Djerada incidents, “where the pogrom, erupting suddenly, continued for some twenty minutes against defenseless people whose modest condition, respectful demeanor and friendly disposition did not lend themselves to any presentiment of such an eruption of hatred and violence.”126 In Djerada, out of a community of at most 150 Jews, there were 39 deaths and 44 wounded. The thesis of premeditation or manipulation rationalizes an event whose suddenness and savagery brought anguish. This view responds to the need for an unseen conductor, imparting a semblance of order to chaos. In reality, it is clear that a pogrom will only occur where the conditions for it are ripe. On June 2, the newspaper of Istiqlal, the leading Moroccan party, published an account of the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in Palestine and two days later, noted the commemoration of the Prophet’s ascension. For the nationalist party, the mellahs are no longer the Jewish quarters, but “Zionist haras.”127 According to the Résidence Générale, in a report from June 12, 1948, the cause emanates from communism and the trade unions, since “Moroccan Communism obeys directions coming from outside.”128 Here, one can already detect echoes of the start of the Cold War. A further theory involves an accusation against the French antisemitic milieu, in particular regional chief Jean Brunel, known for his anti-Jewish positions; Brunel was thought to have tried to set off a pogrom like that of Constantine in 1934, in order to better discredit nationalists and trade unionists of the CGT (Confedération Générale du Travail, or General Confederation of Labor, a French trade union confederation closely associated, until the 1990s, with the French Communist Party). In other words, Brunel and the Résidence Générale did not just aim to break Moroccan trade unionism, but also sought to redirect anger toward the Jews. This is why Brunel would not have wanted to pass along the warnings sounded by Jewish community leaders. It was also suggested that this was why he was not reachable on June 7, 1948.129 For the French Communist Party, the Résidence Générale was the sole instigator of violence designed to displace discontent toward a scapegoated minority. The “fat settlers,” in the view of Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité, bear the main responsibility, “seeking by all means to sow discord and hatred between Arabs and Jews, in accordance with the maxim “Divide and conquer.”130 The subproletariat and poverty also play a crucial role in all the pogroms, in particular in the mining town of Djerada. On the other hand, where true middle classes are present, as at Oujda, violence was in part contained. “The ‘Oujdia’

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  379 Muslim bourgeoisie, which more or less aligned with the forces of order, played a moderating role of a sort totally lacking in Djerada, where only the proletarian element existed.”131 The rioters did not emerge from the center of town, but rather from the new suburban areas where people from the countryside had settled: “It is within this mixed and hard-working population that the attraction of pillaging found its best recruits.” The French reporter adds: “To this mob from humble settlements we must add the Rifian harvesters and other seasonal workers.”132 The combined role of plebs and mob—what Marx called the “lumpenproletariat”133—is also found in other riots of that period, as in Aden where, at the end of 1947, a crowd of young people awaited nightfall to launch attacks and robberies of residences.134 Everywhere as well, the attitude of Arab forces of order is described as ambivalent at best, and at worst, they are said to collaborate with the rioters. In Aden, Arab policemen participate in the pillaging. In Morocco, a report on the June 1948 pogrom highlights the complicity of indigenous forces of order with the pogrom participants. An additional French report of June 1948 provided further analysis of the situation: “To line some Muslims up against other Muslims who are attacking Frenchmen: history demonstrates that this is feasible. But to make them act against those other Muslims when they are attacking Jews, this is quite evidently asking too much of them. We are too aware of the disdain in which they hold the Israelite race to ask them to show absolute rectitude in such circumstances.”135 The majority of the Arab populace approve of the pogrom, according to another report from the same source. “An indicator was noted: many Jewish houses and shops were marked with blue paint.”136 Often organized by the Zionists, Jewish self-defense started to play a role in the 1940s, especially in Iraq following the Farhud. In Libya after the 1945 violence, a part of Jewish youth trains in self-defense under the guise of “preparing for aliyah” or emigration to Israel. These preparations showed their usefulness during the 1948 pogroms, when they blocked the attacks of Moroccan volunteers on their way to Palestine. In the spring of 1948, most Jewish communities of the Arab world lived in fear. In that year, with the Egyptian army’s defeat, open violence breaks out, leading to mass arrests starting on May 15, as well as campaigns of defamation and boycotting of Jews, who were called on to contribute funds for Palestine. More than a thousand Jews are arrested in Cairo, and several hundred in other towns over the following days, and then another thousand more, including women. The arrests are carried out in the street or at homes during searches, in the course of which any documents can seem suspect merely for being written in Hebrew, including prayer books. A number of attacks, most of which were

380  |  Jews in Arab Countries fomented by the Muslim Brotherhood, shake the Cairo Jewish quarter during that summer and cause more than fifty deaths, including twenty on June 20 alone when a bomb explodes in the Karaite quarter. The apogee of fear was reached in the second half of July, marked by the burning and sacking of large commercial premises belonging to Jewish families, and lynching in the street of Jews accused of being “Zionist agents” and of “having provided information” to Israeli aviation. Meanwhile, the community multiplies its signs of loyalty; it donates 250,000 dollars for Egyptian troops, but in vain. On September 22, several bombs explode in the Cairo Jewish quarter, leaving twenty-nine dead and seventy wounded; on 12 November another bomb exploded in a “Jewish enterprise.” Some (in the upper classes) convert to Christianity and some (within the working classes) to Islam. The police seem powerless. Between 1948 and 1950, twenty-five thousand people (out of eighty thousand Jews) leave Egypt. Fourteen thousand to Israel. On May 15, Iraqi forces—the sole invading Arab army not sharing a border with the State of Israel—join in on the aggression. Underground in Iraq for some twenty years, the Zionist movement is declared “criminal” in mid-July, along with communism and anarchism. The lack of definition for the word “Zionism” makes all Iraqi Jews potential members of the “fifth column.” From May they are forbidden to travel, unless they deposit 2,000 dinars (several years’ average salary) and are in possession of authorization of the Ministry of Defense. Three hundred businessmen are imprisoned for “Zionism.” Arrests follow, settling accounts that might be ten or even twenty years old. Hundreds of people are deprived of their jobs in public administration, leaving families without resources. There is no longer even a single Jewish medical student in Baghdad; although in reality, educational segregation had started long before, in 1933. According to a 1945 American report, although the Jews represented 25 percent of the Baghdad population, they only made up 1 percent of students educated in government schools; by 1947 they were completely gone from such schools. The entire burden of educating Jewish children thus rested on the community, without the benefit of public funds. In parallel, the Ministry of Education censured Jewish schools, forbidding them to teach either Hebrew or Jewish history as well as the reading of the Bible in Hebrew. All teachers from Palestine were dismissed. In addition, all Jewish teachers of history, geography, ethics, and Arabic were dismissed and replaced by Muslim teachers. The community council ended up closing the schools rather than accepting this final measure. The Shafiq Adès affair illustrates the extreme extent injustice could reach: arrested in August 1948, this wealthy businessman was sentenced to death a few days later, and publicly hanged in September, across the street from his own house in Basra. The execution was a shock for the Jewish community. If this powerful man, surrounded by Arab friends and allies, could not save his own head, what could the life of an “ordinary Jew” be worth?

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  381 The period from May to September 1948 marked, in both Iraq and Egypt, the summit of violence. Everything that could possibly be considered a Jewish symbol was hidden or destroyed. The May 15 proclamation of martial law in Iraq was supposed to protect the Jewish community from violence, but the inverse occurred: the community was hemmed in and thus all the more easily persecuted by the authorities. Anything could serve as a pretext for an arrest, including possession of a book in Hebrew or a letter from Palestine. Convictions rained down on the community. In March 1949, seven Jews are hanged after being sentenced to death for “affiliation with the Zionist movement.” Jewish organizations protested in vain. Deprived of the means of existence, Iraqi Jewry seemed beyond saving. Unemployment and the number of beggars soared, and charitable agencies were overwhelmed. Poverty swelled and came to play a crucial role in the 1951 departures. After the trauma of the Farhud, the Iraqi Jewish community seems to have been the best prepared for the unleashing of violence. The news about the genocide perpetrated against European Jews had, moreover, struck a community convinced that it was possible to exterminate an entire people. The outbreak of violence took on another aspect: “We, the Jews of Iraq, used to criticize Hungarian Jews for not having taken necessary precautions, and then we discovered that we were in no less danger than the Jews of Europe,” recounted one Iraqi Jew, drawing an explicit parallel between the Shoah and the Farhud. “We live amongst even more dangerous peoples, who gave a sufficient demonstration of their savagery in June 1941. . . . We Iraqi Jews are like the Hungarian Jews, failing to take account of the dangers surrounding us.”137 The same climate of fear is described by Morocco’s French police: “The news of the Djerada massacre reached Marnia,” states a June 1948 report to the Governor-General of Algeria, “spreading consternation amongst a literally panicked Jewish populace. . . . They [the Jews of Marnia] do not hide their worry that this massacre is but the prelude to other riots.”138 The riot revealed ancient hatreds, but also shone a light on solidarities. At Oujda, Jews chased by the mob were protected by Muslims offering them shelter in their homes; some were defended, as by an “Algerian, a retired policeman who, brandishing his revolver, forbade anyone to lay a hand on the Jewish houses in his district.”139 In Morocco, as was seen in Oujda in 1948, gestures of protection came from the educated classes. This was also the case in Aleppo: during the riots of late November 1947, the city’s mayor personally visited the residence of the president of the Jewish community, sat on the front steps of his house, and tried to calm the hostile crowd, which surrounded him until he pulled out a revolver to hold them at bay.140 In the course of discussions about Libyan independence, Arab negotiators remained hostile to the idea of according a place to minorities. In order to

382  |  Jews in Arab Countries integrate Libyan Jews, often of Italian nationality but Libyans for centuries, Giacomo Marchino proposed that any foreigner living in the country for ten or more years should be granted citizenship without any additional formalities. The Arab side rejected this. On the issue of the freedom of emigration following independence, a point that particularly worried the community, the Arab refusal was equally clear, and was grounded in the fear of seeing capital, investors and talent depart. Nevertheless, this position was in plain contradiction to articles 13 and 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by Libya. On July 4, 1948, a few days after the Benghazi and Tripoli pogroms, a Jewish community official commences a memorandum with these words: “Let it be clear from the start that THERE IS NO FUTURE for the Jews in Libya.” He adds: “The immense majority of us wish to go to Palestine, and no-where else.”141 Often accused of being parti pris in favor of the Arabs, everywhere the British seem to weigh in against the interests of Jewish communities in Libya, Iraq, Egypt, and Aden. The Americans show themselves to be equally unconcerned about the fate of Iraqi Jews, with the State Department assuring in December 1949 that “despite certain difficulties experienced by the Iraqi Jewish community, nothing would allow one to conclude today, on the basis of established facts, that there is any persecution of the Jewish faith in Iraq.”142 In contrast, Paris had a more courageous position, one that it maintained up to the end of the Jewish communities in the 1970s. A note of the WJC in December 1949 reports that the French Ambassador to Baghdad is “of the opinion that the French Government ought to act and that, for its part, the latter is seriously examining the possibility of bringing the whole matter before the UN.”143 To these Anglo-American failures we should add Arab diplomatic pressures on Western countries to persuade them not to recognize the State of Israel. “There is no doubt that the nationalists and, generally, all well off and educated Muslims will remain in suspense until such time as our government takes a definitive decision about the delicate Palestinian problem,” as explained an “informational note” of the French administration of Morocco on June 9, 1948. “Our most pessimistic informants even affirm that “French Muslims will explode if Paris were to recognize the Palestinian [sic] state.”144

Notes 1. CZA, S25/11323, Baghdad, October 1942. 2. CZA, S5/9033, May 1947. 3. Cahiers de l’AIU, July 1949, 6. 4. Cf. the article by Ali el-Saman, Egyptian press correspondent in France, in the special issue of Les Temps Modernes, n. 253, July 1967, dedicated to the Arab-Israeli conflict in June 1967.

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  383 5. CADN, series B, dossier 13, French Embassy in Baghdad. 6. Doctor Mittelman, unclassified Archives of the OSE.. 7. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, February 1950. 8. Archives of the OSE, report of Doctor H. Fajerman, Jan.–Feb. 1949. 9. Ibid., January 1946, emphasis in original. 10. Cahiers de l’AIU, April–May 1947, 9. 11. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 12. See Cahiers de l’AIU, February–March 1950, 8 and Cahiers de l’AIU, June 1949, 6. 13. Cahiers de l’AIU, June 1949. 14. Cahiers de l’AIU, June–July 1953, 5. 15. Ibid. 16. Archives of the OSE, report of Dr Fajerman, February 1949. 17. Cf. CZA, S25/5218, Report of the community council for 1945. 18. Cahiers de l’AIU, October–November 1947, 10. 19. Cf. Cahiers de l’AIU, December 1946–January 1947. 20. Archives of the OSE, “Report submitted to M. Weil,” 1946. 21. Cahiers de l’AIU, June–July 1947, 5. 22. Cahiers de l’AIU, February–March 1947, 12. 23. Cahiers de l’AIU, February 1949, 4. 24. CZA, S25/5219. 25. CZA, C10/459. 26. Ibid. 27. CZA, S6/3380, 13 July 1945. 28. CZA S6/3380. 29. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 19 October 1944. 30. CZA, S25/5217, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 144. 31. CZA, S25/5219. 32. Ibid., report of Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. 33. Cf. CZA, S25/5218, press review of 9 November 1945. 34. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 145. 35. CZA, S25/9032, document of October 1946, origin unknown. 36. CZA, S25/5218. 37. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 209. 38. Cahiers de l’AIU, November 1945, n.2, 9. 39. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, 19 June 1948. 40. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Rabat, 24 December 1948. 41. CZA, S20/561, April 1951. 42. Cahiers de l’AIU, April–May 1955, 8. 43. Archives of the OSE, Dr V. Cremer, “The OSE Union in North Africa.” 44. CZA, C10/306, February 1951. 45. CZA, S6/4581, 15 December 1947. 46. CZA, S20/539/1. 47. Cf. Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 25.

384  |  Jews in Arab Countries 48. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Rabat, 30 November 1945, review of the Moroccan press in the French Zone. 49. In Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon, 140. 50. Cahiers de l’AIU, December 1946–January 1947, 4. 51. In Hillel, Le Souffle du Levant, 136. 52. Cited in Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 47. 53. CZA, S5/11588, 25 July 1947. 54. Cf. De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 187. 55. CZA, S25/5288. 56. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, January 1946. 57. Ibid., April 1945. 58. CZA, S5/793, Cairo, 25 October 1944. 59. CADN, Morocco, D.I., QJ, dossier 26, April 1945. 60. Cf. Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country. 61. CZA, S20/561, April 1951, “Moroccan Jews on the way to Israel. From the mellah to the kibbutz.” 62. CZA, S5/11584, November 1948; cf. CZA, S32/951. 63. CZA, Z6/611, October 1951. 64. The General Commandant of the Marrakesh region, 24 January 1955, in CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22. 65. In Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 138–139. 66. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Coidan report, January 1946. 67. CZA, S25/5218. 68. CADN, Tunisia, Bernard classification. 69. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, Rabat, 3 June 1948. 70. Ibid., dossier 22, 10 January 1948. 71. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 72. CADN, Morocco, Department of the Interior, Mogador, 30 June 1943. 73. CADN, Morocco, civil cabinet, February 1949. 74. CADN, Morocco, dossier 18, April 1947. 75. Ibid., dossier 22, Record of meeting of 26 November 1952. 76. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, January 1946, Coidan report. 77. CZA, S20/548. 78. CZA, S5/11588, Florence, 4 July 1948. 79. CZA, S25/5219. 80. Ibid. Cf. Il Corriere di Tripoli, 2 December 1945 where the communiqué of General Paget was published. 81. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Meknes, 30 September 1944. 82. Ibid., July 1948. 83. CZA, S25/5218, Cairo, 31 October 1945. 84. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, 9 November 1948. 85. CZA, C10’471, 21 November 1950. 86. CZA, S25/561, 21 November 1950 (the same document can sometimes be found in two separate CZA archival collections). 87. L’Avenir Illustré, 30 March 1930, cited in Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain, 105.

The Turning Point, 1945–1949  |  385 88. In Cahiers de l’AIU, June–July 1948, 11. 89. Cited in Trigano, La Fin du judaïsme en terre d’islam, 113. 90. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, Casablanca, 8 December 1944. 91. CZA, S32/492, Alexandria, Charles Zukerman, 25 December 1947. 92. Cf. CZA, J112/1893, press extracts, 1952. 93. CZA, S5/11588, Jerusalem, Emile Nahum, 27 December 1952. 94. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, 22 August 1952. 95. CZA, S32/951, Alexandria, 16 January 1948, Albert Gueta. 96. CZA, S5/11584, November 1948. 97. Cited in Joseph B. Schechtman, On Wings of Eagles. The Plight, Exodus and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry (New York>: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), 96. 98. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, Oujda, 26 August 1948. 99. Ibid., Oujda, 16 December 1948, letter addressed to the Jewish Agency Immigration Department, Jerusalem. 100. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 158. 101. CZA, S6/4665, Aden, 23 December 1947. 102. All these examples dating from 1946 and 1947 are drawn from CZA, J112-1893. 103. CADN, Oujda, 16 December 1948, dossier DI, report to the Résidence Générale. 104. In Hillel, Le Souffle du Levant, 87 105. ibid., 87. 106. CZA, S20/561, Alexandria, 20 December 1947. 107. CZA, S20/561. 108. Cited in Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 22. 109. CZA, S25/9034, Cairo, 6 February 1948. 110. CZA, S6/4667, Aden, 16 December 1947. 111. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Meknes, 16 December 1948. 112. Cahiers de l’AIU, November–December 1955, 1. 113. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 9 November 1948. 114. CZA, S6/6023, Cairo, 30 July 1948, letter addressed to London, signed by the movements Ha Poel Ha Mizrahi and Bnai Akiva. 115. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26 Rabat, 12 June 1948. 116. CZA, C10/330, undated, probably June 1948. 117. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, 14 June 1948. 118. Ibid., 10 June 1948. 119. Ibid., 19 June 1948. 120. Ibid., (the journal Al-Alam, undated). 121. Cahiers de l’AIU, July 1948, 12. 122. Ibid., October 1948, 12. 123. CZA, C10/330. 124. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26. 125. Ibid., underlined in the original. 126. Ibid. 127. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 685.

386  |  Jews in Arab Countries 128. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, El-Alam, 9 June 1948. 129. Cf. Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 679. 130. In CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26. 131. Ibid., Oujda, 19 June 1948. 132. Ibid. 133. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 1848), cited in Weinstock, Une si longue presence, 70. 134. Cf. CZA, S25/5293, Aden, 13 December 1947. 135. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Oujda, 19 June 1948. 136. Ibid. 137. Cited in Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 34. 138. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, 9 June 1948. 139. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26. 140. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1 (American Jewish Committee, Syria). 141. CZA, S32/1069, 4 July 1948. 142. CZA, S20/554, Washington, 19 December 1949. 143. CZA, S20/554, Washington, 19 December 1949 and CZA, C10/506, Paris, 7 December 1949, note addressed to the World Jewish Congress in New York. 144. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26.

11 Captive Communities

From 1948 to the 1960s

From 1945 to 1955 the overall Jewish population of the Arab world fell by half.

It diminished by 75 percent in Syria, and 90 percent in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. The significant Jewries of the Maghreb remained, representing half of the Jews of the Arab world. Assertive Arab nationalism had to deal with feelings of frustration on the part of its colonized peoples, resentment toward the Allies, and widespread destitution. All of these elements were exploited by nationalist groups, in particular Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is estimated to have attracted nearly a million members and sympathizers by 1945. It was in this soil that Arab anti-Zionism took root. The issue of Palestine would come to crystalize Arab resentment and become the receptacle of accumulated tensions and frustrations. This formed an interconnected system of symbiotic elements: the Jewish condition can be thought of as the counterpart of the demeaned condition of the Arabs. In July 1945, a rumor circulated that a plan had been made in the Syrian Parliament to murder the Jews of the Middle East if the Palestine question was decided in their favor; this provoked panic among the Jewish communities of Syria and Lebanon and spread to encompass the communities of Iraq and Egypt as well. On two occasions, in 1945 and 1948, the tension became extreme, engendering wild speculations. Starting in 1943, the Zionist movement made manifest its worries concerning the future of Jews in Arab countries as a result of the Palestine conflict. David Ben-Gurion and other members of the leadership underscored that Arab Jews would become the prime Jewish victims of Zionism. The Zionist movement thus had to assume responsibility for the Jewries that its own action put in danger. Was it the case that interest was only aroused when European Jewries were being massacred? Were Jewries of the Arab world considered as merely passive objects of history? In other words, were Oriental Jews instrumentalized by an Ashkenazi Jewry that was indifferent to their history? It would be convenient to retrospectively impute motivations, but doing so does not entitle one to claim insight into ulterior motives (which of course would apply to any political analysis). In any event, the context of the 1943–1945 period must be kept in mind.

388  |  Jews in Arab Countries In 1943, Elyahu Dobkin, a director of the Jewish Agency, tried to convince the Mapai, the main party of the national Jewish homeland, to support the idea of mass immigration of Jews from Arab countries. In 1945, the tone grew more insistent. Alongside demographic preoccupations, the shadow of the Shoah no doubt encouraged a catastrophic vision of the future in the minds of all Jews, including those of the Orient. After the birth of the State of Israel, the Israeli government would remain permanently haunted by the memory of the Shoah. Without doubt there was an element of political utilization of this anguish, and indeed this constituted a profound feature of the immediate postwar period. But it would be too narrow to only think in terms of political instrumentalization, when the period was so trauma-laden. That fear was shared by Oriental Jews themselves; they were encased in an atmosphere of anxiety, which explains the multitude of departures at the first sign of danger. Also at play was the fact that social and psychological emancipation had rendered their continuing subjugation even more unbearable. In effect, the fear of genocide continued to reverberate like an echo; having occured once, from then onward, extermination would always be within the realm of possibilities. It was in that context that the previously cited rumors circulated, such as in Damascus in summer 1945, or the warnings such as those expressed to the British Ambassador in January 1949 by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Saïd, explaining that the Jewish community would remain threatened with deportation as long as the Palestinians could not return to their homes. On the streets, anti-Jewish riots everywhere produced a multiplier effect. News of the Cairo riots on November 2, 1945, had hardly circulated before on November 5, Baghdadi nationalists called for demonstrations. Between May and September 1948, using the pretext of martial law, numerous Jews were brought before Iraqi military tribunals. Searches of Jews’ homes multiplied, hunting for “Zionist symbols,” which caused Jews to hide their talith (prayer shawls) embroidered with the Magen David (Star of David). In July 1948, the concept of “Zionism” made its appearance in the Iraqi Penal Code. Two witnesses were enough to bring a charge before a military court, whose verdict was without appeal. A year later, a second wave of arrests dismantled the Zionist youth movement in Baghdad. Activists were tortured; among other things, dozens of people were burned with clothes irons. Between March and December 1949, 1,500 Iraqi Jews managed to cross the border with Iran. In Egypt, beginning on the night of May 15, 1948, hundreds of Zionists, communists, and Muslim Brothers were arrested. For the government, this was the occasion to get rid of the communists and the Islamists, in official eyes the only serious dangers. But 554 Jews were also interned in this first wave.

Captive Communities | 389 Twenty thousand Egyptian Jews emigrated to the State of Israel or Europe in 1948. But on May 25 that year, with war raging, Jews were forbidden to leave Egypt. On May 30, the government ordered the seizure of property of anyone whose activities could endanger the state, without specifying that this meant Jews. In fact, only Jews were targeted (although property would soon be returned to owners in 1949–1950). In August, the Stock Exchange was restricted to Egyptian nationals; this excluded the many Jews who were stateless or held foreign nationality. In September, Egyptian nationality became a requirement in order to practice medicine. To those restrictions can be added attacks, aggression, arson, pillaging, and more than a thousand cases of incarceration. The situation calmed down after 1949, and even more after the Wafd Party returned to power in early 1950. Nevertheless, the feeling of insecurity persisted, although this sentiment was almost non-existent for the better off, who had no intention of emigrating. However, insecurity was keenly felt by the poorest, who were threatened by unemployment, “Egyptianization” of employment, and economic precariousness, which fueled dreams of emigration. In 1950–1951 the Wafd abrogated a number of anti-Jewish decrees. The “revolution” of 1952, at least when it begins, did not affect the Jewish community, with General Neguib showing his sympathy for the Jewish community, even visiting the Great Synagogue of Cairo on the first day of Rosh Ha-Shona in 1953. “At this time, Cairo’s Jewish schools, which burned during the riots of 1948, were rebuilt, and the naturalization of hundreds of stateless Jews was accelerated.”1 The years from 1948 to 1952 were painful everywhere. In Libya, economic strangulation plunged 60 percent of the families ruined by the riots into dependency.2 Meanwhile, Great Britain, the guardianship authority up to Libyan independence in 1951, forbade departure either to the Yishuv or to Italy. Only the aid given by JOINT saved people. The riots of November 1945 revealed the power vacuum, with authorities doing nothing for twenty-four hours or more. Fear that the explosion would repeat itself was sustained by the apathy of local officials as well as the British. The same was true for Morocco following the pogroms of June 1948. “Moroccan Jews, we can say without exaggeration, live in a kind of terror, and are convinced that they must at all costs avoid furnishing the Arabs with the slightest pretext able to lead to new and grave incidents. . . . Anyone who has spent 24 hours in Morocco [will know that] Moroccan Jewry is currently going through a scandalous situation, incompatible with human rights,” writes the WJC’s North African representative on June 18, 1948.3 At the start of 1949, a report addressed to the Jewish Agency described a community in Aden living in expectation of a pogrom exploding.4 In the face of such pressure, community leaders seemed to lose their bearing. In Libya, the

390  |  Jews in Arab Countries majority of the community—traumatized by the “beastly violence” of rioters who, unpunished, had almost all been released—wanted the Italians to return. The community was, moreover, demoralized to see that it was those Jews who defended themselves who were condemned. Anxiety continued to gnaw away at Jewish communities. “Experience has taught us that it is not comfortable to live in a country ruled by Arabs unless we have been granted legal protection of our property and our lives,” the Tripoli community president declared to the WJC in August 1949.5 In 1951 the WJC noted that in the preceding eighteen months, 25,000 Jews (out of 33,000) had left the country.6 In Baghdad, there was a complete fear of testifying. In March 1946, a government official, Fadhil el-Djemai, proposed to members of an international commission of inquiry that they visit Iraqi Jews, in order to put an end to rumors about mistreatment. Anonymously, several Iraqi Jews addressed the commission (in English), via the Palestine Post, to inform the commission of “the terrible consequences that a Jew recounting persecutions (together with his family) would have to endure in Iraq.”7 Morocco seemed to avoid this contagion, with waves of emigration not taking the form of an abrupt exodus, as seen in Iraq, Yemen, or Libya. Nevertheless, between 1948 and 1960, the size of the community dropped from 300,000 to 160,000. It fell dramatically further to 42,000 in 1968, and to around 3,000 by 2007. But here too, migratory surges were linked to waves of fear: there were 30,000 departures between 1948 and 1953, 37,000 from 1954 to 1955 at the threshold of independence, and another 47,000 between 1956 and 1960. More and more isolated, the AIU stoutly defended its mission. In June 1951, a note from the French protectorate administration asserts “Moroccan Israelites have no illusions about the fate that awaits them in the event the French abandoned their position in this country.”8 In November, the Tunisia correspondent of the World Jewish Council reported on the fear that had arisen in the smaller Jewish communities, such as Medenine (population 700), where “the majority of the Jews want to emigrate. Relations with the Arabs are quite tense.”9 Reports from the Zionist movement all highlighted the untimely flow of immigrants into Israel, just at the time survivors were arriving from Europe. This was the reason for the attempt to convince Oriental Jews to postpone their departures. Yet, “the watchword for all Jews now is ‘Leave’; go anywhere, but leave. To end this haunting nightmare has become the sole goal of all Jews here,” writes the AIU correspondent in Libya in autumn 1948, after the pogroms of June 12–13, 1948. But “the local authorities forbid them to leave.”10 In 1948, some Libyan Jews send an open letter to the UN Security Council, ending with these words: “We send out this cry to all free peoples: Free us! Free us! Free us!”11 The letter is

Captive Communities | 391 published in extenso in the magazine Israel on November 18, 1948: “We live under the specter of pogroms. Our minds are entirely preoccupied by the fear of dangers that could strike us at any moment, at the hands of [people] thirsty for blood and pillaging. . . . We have knocked at all possible doors in order to avoid this hell on earth, but we have come up against an administration that refuses to let us emigrate. . . . Our sole fault is to be Jews. Now we address an appeal to the highest international authority, to help us and put our lives and property in security.”12 Libya’s independence is proclaimed on December 24, 1951, without the Jewish minority’s rights having been negotiated. Yet, Libyan Jewry was already but a shadow of what it had been: of the 36,000 Jews in Libya in 1945, barely 3,000 remained by 1951. The massive aliyah from across the Mediterranean basin to Israel led notably to a shrinking of the teaching of French throughout the region.13 The collapse was even more grave in Iraq where, after autumn 1949, what remained of the underground Zionist movement was terrorized, as was the community itself, leaderless after the resignation of Chief Rabbi Kaddouri in December 1940. By force of circumstances, Zionist activists became the new leaders. It was then that the State of Israel thoroughly mobilized in order to save Iraqi Jews, blocked in the country since the UN decision on Palestine. Arrests continued to mount, especially in Basra, near the Iranian border, where many Jews were accused of attempting to flee.14 The Iraqi press regularly reported on convictions. In 1950, the Iraqi Government began revealing the names of emigration candidates. During the long period preceding departure, emigrants were subjected to multiple pressures and violence.15 Leaving Yemen seems to have become even more difficult under the Imam Yahia government, until his successor, Ahmad, finally relented. “They say that rabbis and eminent persons of the Jewish community are in jail, in chains. More than 4000 Jews have left Aden since the December (1947) pogrom and it is understood that the 3124 who remain have called on the JOINT to continue the “air bridge” until they all reach Israel.”16 The situation was also blocked in Syria, where some families attempted to cross the border to neighboring Lebanon. With the exception of Libya, the Maghreb was not initially involved in emigration toward the Jewish state; here, by contrast, the flow was linked to the French withdrawal. But between 1948 and 1953, 46,000 Jews from French North Africa reached the State of Israel. Among them were 29,000 from Morocco, representing 10 percent of Moroccan Jewry, but barely 1,000 from Algeria, out of a community of more than 100,000. From the Maghreb, emigration was a matter of choice, but with fear still operating in the background, just as it did in the case of all Jewish communities of the Arab world. One should not, moreover, forget the role of the messianic momentum generated by the news of the “renaissance” of the Jewish state. A report from the latter half of 1948 evokes “the enthusiasm for

392  |  Jews in Arab Countries emigration to Palestine which has taken hold of Moroccan Jews since the start of the summer. . . . We are in the presence of a sort of collective psychosis of Jewish youth in this country.”17 This emigration was not insignificant: in the first eleven months of 1951, 13,000 Jews left Morocco, motivated as much by spiritual preoccupations as by a concern to flee misery.18 However, beginning in 1950, alarmist reports were issued concerning the failure of Moroccan Jews to integrate in Israel. Isaac Abbou of the WJC wrote: If to this one adds the statements of certain ‘returnees’ on the alleged disrespect to which North African Jews are subject in Israel, of the little regard for them and the multiple difficulties they encounter in earning a living, one will understand that the enthusiasm of the initial days, without completely disappearing, now shows a steep drop. It is undeniable that a chill wind of discouragement is cooling the idea of emigration to Israel in our minds. . . . Our altogether too short memories have caused us to forget the pogroms in Oujda, Djerada and Sefrou. . . . Who knows what our tomorrows will be, in the event of a new war between Israel and the Arab countries.19

This steep drop corresponds as well to a stabilization of the situation in Morocco following the violent episodes of 1948–1949.20 In 1949–1950, in the space of sixteen months, 49,637 Yemeni Jews arrive at Lod. It was difficult for the Jewish Agency to obtain exit permits from Yemen. The Imam needed to be convinced, but so too did local chiefs, who profited from Jewish misery, as the passage of Jews across their territories represented supplementary tax revenues. During the summer of 1949, the Imam allowed Jews to leave Yemen. Large-scale evacuation started in September 1949, with a green light from the British air authorities, and lasted for a year. Departures streamed out of Aden as well, including Jews of Yemeni origin who were born in Aden transit camps. Afterward, only a handful of Jews were left in the principality, which remained under British sovereignty until 1967: the last 150 reached the State of Israel in July 1967, following the Six-Day War. In a departure that was largely one of choice, dictated by Zionist and/or religious convictions, 31,000 Iranian Jews moved to Israel between 1948 and 1953. Between 1949 and 1952, 30,000 Egyptian Jews, representing 40 percent of the community, left their country, and by 1958, 57,000 out of the community of 66,000 had departed. Twenty thousand headed to Israel via Marseille or Genoa. In addition to the highly motivated, in general they comprised the less well off, whose passage was paid by the Jewish Agency and JOINT. Departure from Libya resembled a stampede. Between 1949 and December 1951 (independence was effective on January 1, 1952), 31,343 people (90 percent of the community) embarked on Israeli ships to travel to the Jewish state. Behind this massive departure lay the Zionist motivation of some, as well as the

Captive Communities | 393 omnipresent religiousness, but also the fear of repeated violence from the “Arab street.” Three days after London’s recognition of the State of Israel, on February 2, 1949, the British military administration allowed free emigration, and the situation thus changed radically. Haim Abravanel, AIU school director and in charge of Libyan emigration on behalf of the World Zionist Organization, reported the feverishness of the first days of February 1949: “An indescribable excitement reigned everywhere and especially in the Jewish quarter, the hara. The authorities were swamped by a determined crowd animated by a single desire: to leave Libya.”21 The World Zionist Organization had anticipated 7,000 emigrants per year; in fact 30,000 presented themselves as candidates for immediate departure. The Israeli authorities were overwhelmed, as they would be two years later by the arrival of Iraqi Jews. Libyan Jews raced to leave, out of fear that the borders would be abruptly closed after independence. The moment it was learned, in late November, that the UN would recognize Libya’s independence on January 1, 1952, fear turned to panic. This no longer only concerned the poor; the rich and better off also showed interest in Zionism.22 In 1951, more than 31,300 (out of 36,000 Libyan Jews in 1945) emigrated to Israel, either directly or via Italy. The balance for the most part went to Italy. It was Iraq that produced the largest and most tragic exodus: in less than two years, the near-totality (123,000 out of 130,000) of the country’s ancient community left for Israel. And yet, the Zionist movement had always experienced difficulty in taking root in Iraq. On March 2, 1950, the Iraqi government abruptly changed its policy: Jews were thereafter free to leave the country within a time limit of one year, provided they renounced their nationality. For Iraq this involved a population exchange: Iraqi Jews for Palestinian exiles. Concerning Palestinian refugees, Israeli minister Sheetrit declared in August 1948: “Let us at least say that this confiscation is an exchange for the property which the Jews lost in the Arab world when they emigrated to Palestine.”23 However, the Arab League violently rejected this presentation of affairs, arguing (with reason) that Iraq had welcomed fewer than 10,000 Palestinian refugees. So, why did the Iraqi government suddenly favor emigration to the hated State of Israel? In order to seize Jewish property? To rid itself of communists, many of whom were Jews? In order to make available employment in business and public administration to the increasingly larger numbers of educated Muslims? To drown the young State of Israel in a wave of mass immigration? The Iraqi law of March 2, 1950, deprived the Jews of their nationality, and rendered them stateless even before their departure. The Zionist movement smelled a trap; in any event, the State of Israel was not ready to accept this wave. In addition, many Zionist activists did not want to leave. However, with Iraqi Jews shaken by the departure of friends and relatives, and overcome with the

394  |  Jews in Arab Countries fear of isolation, a dynamic of exodus set in which in its turn fed fears and thus further drove departures. At the end of April 1950, 47,000 people were registered for emigration. On April 8, a bomb had exploded in El Dar El Bayda, a café frequented by Jews, further increasing the numbers of people leaving; between January 15 and March 10, 1951, 50,000 register for departure. Each incident (such as the bomb that exploded on January 14, 1951, at Baghdad’s Massuda Shemtov Synagogue) makes the climate deteriorate further. Zionist activists are arrested and tortured, some to the death. A number are hanged. To the present day, a polemic rages around the issue of the cause of these attacks. The Arab camp, as well as certain Iraqi Jews, accuse the Mossad; yet at the same moment, Israel was slowing down the aliyah of Baghdadi Jews, and only yielded before the risk of a humanitarian disaster. The Jewish state was only prepared to receive 300 immigrants per day in the context of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, mounted to bring the Jews of “Babylon” to Eretz Israel, but was soon required to receive 1,400 per day, in conditions of extreme penury. Moreover, up to February 1951 Iraq refused to allow direct flights from Baghdad to Tel Aviv. Then, one hundred and eight thousand people arrived in Israel via this air bridge, and sixteen thousand by other means; by 1952 no more than 6,000 Jews remained in Iraq. The quotas imposed by the Jewish Agency slowed these operations and created a dramatic situation for tens of thousands of people who had sold their possessions and were now unemployed. With such a large number of candidates awaiting emigration, Israeli agents operating clandestinely soon starting losing credibility, until the Israeli government finally lifted all restrictions. The exodus began in May 1950 and lasted sixteen months. In the three-year period from 1948 to 1951, some 125,000 Jews reached Israel. Each adult had the right to take 50 dinars (the equivalent of $140), plus 20 for each child. On March 10, 1951, Prime Minister Nuri Saïd ordered that the possessions of 60,000 denaturalized Jews be placed under seal, and subsequently extended the measure to cover those who had left the country before 1948. At the same time, the value of Jewish property collapsed after the fatwa of Sheikh Muhammad al-Kharisi, forbidding the purchase of real estate from a Jew. The evolution of tensions and the rhythm of departures reflected the course of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. This is clearly illustrated by the case of Egypt: out of the 80,000 people making up the community in 1945, some 20,000 left immediately after the 1948 war, and another 50,000 were expelled after the 1956 war. The nationalization of business in 1961–1962, followed by the 1967 Six-Day War, ended things for the remaining Jews. The Tunisian emigration of 110,000 people was more staggered. In 1948– 1950, nearly 9,000 reached Israel. Hardly 7,000 arrived in 1951–1953, and then

Captive Communities | 395 more than 12,000 in 1956–1957, when independence was attained.24 By the end of 1957, 70,000 Jews still remained in Tunisia. From Algeria, where the community was estimated at 130,000 in 1954, 7,000 Jews reached the State of Israel between 1948 and 1960, most of these arriving before 1951. At independence in 1962, the immense majority reached France, 25,000 remained in Algeria and a minority went to the Jewish state. The Six-Day War set off a second wave of emigration by Algerian Jews to Israel, this time from France. Everywhere, emigration was organized by the Jewish Agency. As well, the JOINT played an essential role in the distribution of subsidies and assistance. The largest wave came from Morocco: Jewish organizations guided them to Algeria or a Moroccan port, from which they traveled to Marseilles and then on to Haifa. In Yemen, emigration—which now, after the lifting of the ban, could leave directly from Sana’a—was organized by Israel. Journeys from Libya were organized by the Jewish Agency, which from 1949 chartered ships departing from Tripoli. In Egypt, departures were organized by the recently established spy agency Mossad, as well as clandestine Zionist youth movements. There were long waits even after the independence of Israel was achieved in May 1948. Previously, the country had been subject to quotas imposed by the British administration, which explains the small numbers of legal entries as well as the piling up of refugees, in particular at Aden. Emigration to Israel was also impeded by the lack of means of transport, and the interdiction of direct links. Convinced that the Iraqi government wanted to rid itself of its Jews, Ben-Gurion asked Jewish organizations to prioritize the refugees’ care until the State of Israel could welcome them.25 The blockage appeared dramatic in Libya where, after December 1949, no boatloads of emigrants take to sea for four months.26 This led to frequent explosions of anger among candidates for emigration from Libya, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and so on, confined for months in transit camps after having liquidated their property. Emigration had to be accelerated in order to avoid violent reaction on the part of the Arab populations. In Morocco, numerous incidents relating to departures were reported, in particular in the east of the country, where “the clandestine passage of an important number of young Zionists . . . attempting to reach Palestine via Algeria” was taking place.27 Emigration involved the aggregation of refugees and generated sometimescatastrophic situations. Moroccan emigrants piled up in Marseilles while awaiting boats for Haifa. “Thus, people of all ages arrived,” wrote the Prefect of France’s Bouches-du-Rhône region in December 1948, “from newborns a few days old to worn-out old people at the end of their tether, pregnant women in their

396  |  Jews in Arab Countries last trimester, final-stage tuberculosis cases, etc.”28 At the same time, in Iran, Jewish refugees waited in Tehran, for lack of better alternatives joining together in the Jewish Cemetery at Beheshtiyeh (“Paradise”). Whole families camped out between the graves “for months and months without receiving any care. People eat wild plants. And before our eyes, every day four or five children die. . . . We dig a grave, cry in silence and return to the tents, awaiting aliyah.”29 The situation was the most tragic in Yemen. Crammed in the camps at British-controlled Aden, the refugees refuse to return to Yemen, and inundated the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem with letters written in archaic Hebrew, bearing witness to profound distress. “We are in a fog. Misfortunes of every kind, illnesses and threats assail us since the day of our departure from the camp,” according to a letter from Aden dated April 18, 1947, addressed to Tel Aviv. “The fate of our refugee brothers worsens by the day. Many have fled from the camp due to famine, lack of sanitation and many other reasons.”30 The end of the war would reduce even further the number of certificates granted to Yemeni Jews. To the material distress we must add the cultural clash with the Ashkenazim, by whom Middle Eastern Jews felt scorned. At the beginning of 1947, Dr. Olga Feinberg, an American Jew who had been stationed for years in India, was named by the Jewish Agency as director of the main refugee camp: “There, I saw misery which I did not think was possible. I couldn’t believe that human beings could live like that.”31 At the end of September 1949, the American writer Joan Comay visited the principal camp, and saw refugees struck by batons of the guards, who were themselves Jews: “It was difficult to realize that this was done by Jews to Jews.”32 By late 1947, reception centers regrouped 3,800 refugees, of which 1,900 were sent back to Yemen at the end of the year when sanitary situations turned disastrous; 80 percent of the refugees had ophthalmic infections. In July 1949, in the main camp of Hashed, there was only one doctor, who together with two Indian medical auxiliaries from Aden, saw between 100 and 150 people per hour. Some 300 deaths were registered in September to October 1949, sometimes 7 or 8 deaths per day, often of people in a state of total exhaustion, within one or two days of their arrival. This disastrous situation continued until 1950.33 This first great wave of emigrants constituted the poor. To a lesser degree, they were followed by a small part of the tiny middle class, mainly young emigrants “belonging to honorable families, evidently moved by sincere idealism, sometimes timid and rather frightened by the experience.”34 At the end of 1948, in the Meknès region of Morocco, a report comments on the departure “of people of modest means: artisans, tailors, shoemakers, small shopkeepers, laborers and the unemployed. Only a few isolated cases of well-off merchants were recorded.”35

Captive Communities | 397 Such was the profile of most Moroccan emigrants in the 1945–1950 period. If emigration had been unrestricted, “the mellah would have emptied by at least half.”36 In fact, according to numerous studies, the majority of Moroccan émigrés came from the mellahs, and included a large proportion of children “suffering from conjunctivitis, tuberculosis and even syphilis.”37 Those leaving from Egypt in the 1948–1952 period (comprising 20,000 persons, or 25 percent of the community) displayed the same profile: poor people whose departure delighted the well-off classes. After the storm of 1948–1949, the middle and upper classes generally remained in Egypt. Detained Jews were freed and regained their property. In contrast to Iraq and Syria, no anti-Jewish legislation was adopted, and “Zionism” did not appear in the list of crimes and misdemeanors set out in the criminal code. Jewish life in Egypt seemed to have returned to normal. Aliyah from Libya was also a matter of “the poor, unable to pay for their own transfer to Israel or for the expenses associated with the transit camp in Tripoli.”38 For economic reasons, the most well off remained, alongside those few people convinced that they had a place within the independent Arab nation. In February 1951, the American Jewish Committee estimated that 80 percent of the 4,000 Libyan Jews wishing to remain belonged to well-off classes. The other 20 percent were usually old and lonely people who feared that they would not be able to start a new life. Others, despite only having a shaky confidence in independence, wanted to convince themselves that everything would work out in the end. They told themselves that the interests of the Arab population would be convergent with their own, and thus that it was best to wait while the storm passed. The minority remaining in Libya after the exodus of 1949–1951 would not see their situation improve until after 1962. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1969, and the establishment of the military dictatorship, nearly all the rest flee. Those who remain—a hundred or so—are mainly old people without families. In Iraq, at the end of 1951, only 10,000 Jews remain out of the 1945 community numbering between135,000 and 150,000, and these “are people of a certain age who dispose of a considerable fortune. Given the fact that relinquishing Iraqi nationality will deprive them automatically of their property and in light of the news reaching them from Israel [i.e., about the difficulties of adaptation], they cannot take the decision to emigrate.”39 The emigration of the majority of Middle Eastern Jews to the new state causes a number of contemporaries to conclude that a “population exchange” with Palestinian refugees is taking place, a formulation that is immediately rejected by the Arab League. In June 1949, the Résidence Générale informs France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Jewish emigration, “which we cannot oppose” should nevertheless be limited, in order “to avoid possible reactions of popular Muslim anger.”40

398  |  Jews in Arab Countries In fact, all Arab populations react with hostility toward Jewish emigration to Israel. However, it appears that duplicity, speaking with a forked tongue, and contradictory injunctions were operating: the rule of the day was to oppose Jews’ departures but at the same time do everything possible in order to exclude them, as shown in the case of Libya. In the course of negotiations with the UN concerning Libyan independence, the Jews were quickly forgotten in order to avoid “an additional problem” with the Arabs. According to historian Renzo De Felice, the private archives of Italian negotiator Marchino reveal an underlying wish of the Arab side (including the king) to exclude the Jews from Libyan political life. However, King Idris, like all the others, was obliged to accept UN resolutions concerning minority rights. In 1950 he received the Jewish community leaders and reassured them. In reality, the sovereign’s position was ambivalent. Thus, in 1949 during a secret meeting in Tripoli, he explicitly declared to the representative of the Jewish Agency that Libyan Jews would always enjoy his personal protection, but that he saw no future for them in the country. No leader would risk the slightest anti-Jewish declaration. To the contrary, each let known his desire to see the Jews (especially the richest ones) remain. It was even proposed that “a Jew” be a member of the future National Assembly. In reality, when the independence preparatory committee was set up in 1950, it contained no representative of minorities. In Cairo as well, attempts were made to impede emigration, although the authorities closed their eyes as long as the economy did not suffer. As in Libya, public condemnation masked double-speak. The Jewish exodus freed up a large number of relatively well-remunerated positions. Some wonder whether Arab leaders, unable to throw the “pseudo-state” of Israel into the sea, might have concluded that, facing a wave of emigration impossible to stem, it might be preferable to drown the young state in a flood of migrants whom it would not be able to integrate under acceptable conditions. Arab public opinion, as analyzed in police reports, was overtly hostile to Jewish emigration, which it linked directly to Palestine. In Morocco, the administration kept meticulous track of Muslim opinion. The government’s archives showed the rise in 1948–1949 of a “hidden hatred” against the Jews, who “openly boast about the power of the Israeli army and its invincibility.”41 Incidents sometimes erupted during the departure of Jews. If Arab opinion long conflated Jews and Zionists, the political authorities continued to attempt to distinguish between them. In December 1947, for example, the Istiqlal Party called for vigilance “concerning those who have an interest in setting Moroccan Arabs and Moroccan Jews against each other. . . . Our goal is solely the struggle against Zionism, setting aside any resentment towards our Jewish compatriots.”42 However, such distinctions quickly crumbled. Beginning in 1948, Istiqlal’s rival, the Democratic Independence Party, links Jews and

Captive Communities | 399 Zionists: “You, noble Moroccan, [be aware that] by giving a single dirham to a Zionist, you destroy an Arab house and you finance a traitorous Zionist State. . . . Thus, do not buy your medicine from a Zionist pharmacy, do not be treated by a Zionist, do not have a Zionist tailor make your clothes, do not have your hair cut by a Zionist hairdresser . . . do not take a Zionist bus, do not hire a Zionist and remember that every Jew is a partisan of Zion.”43 As in Egypt, this amalgam rapidly becomes a refrain of public opinion and in the Arab governmental circles.44 Jewish communities find themselves held hostage. Sometimes this is explicit, as when Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary-General of the Arab League, declares in January 1946 at the American University of Cairo that “the Zionists are a curse for the Jews themselves and most certainly for us, the Arabs. Here, we call upon the Jews of the world to repent and to remember that they have brothers in the Orient who would hate to see an increase in the sum total of their misery.”45 In June 1946, at a meeting in Cairo, the leaders of the nationalist parties of the four Maghreb countries submitted to the Anglo-American commission of inquiry on Palestine a declaration that explicitly threatened reprisals against Jewish communities: “[Zionist propaganda] has rendered delicate the position of the Jewish minorities amidst the Arab populations of North Africa. One should not be surprised if those populations in the long run end up convinced that the Jews constitute a ‘foreign’ body within the nation, an inassimilable and unreliable element which should be rendered incapable of causing harm.”46 Just after the 1947 UN vote on Palestine, the newspaper Saout el-Yeman (The Voice of Yemen) complained about Jews “who have become arrogant and have started to walk haughtily, and to despise Arabs and, more broadly, Muslims.”47 This echoed a confidential British report of February 1946, from Cairo, which noted, “The Arabs are afraid of the Jews, whom they see not as Semites but as Europeans by blood, a foreign and dynamic body within the Arab world. This European community will develop and swallow up the Arab world through its vitality, its abilities, its financial resources and its new life-style.”48 These few short lines succinctly expressed a certain fear of modernity. Here, a key issue of post-1948 Arab historiography was taking shape: the Jews were held to have brought about their own fate by betraying their homelands and turning their back on the Arab cause. The Zionists made their own bed of Jewish misfortune in Arab lands, destroying the concord that previously reigned. Bloody attacks in Baghdad and Cairo, pogroms in Aden, Tripoli, and Oujda and elsewhere, were all the deeds of “Zionist agents of Mossad” whose goal, according to this view, was to spread terror in order to drive departures for Israel. Nevertheless, the harassment of Jewish communities in the immediate postwar years cannot be explained solely by the Palestinian conflict. Since the 1930s, Arab

400  |  Jews in Arab Countries nationalism had evolved toward an ethno-religious concept of the nation that excluded non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Despite the Wafd, Egyptian nationalism became closed, putting Copts in the position of dhimmis. Around 1950, the hopes for an Enlightenment in the Arab world, coupled to the cultural renaissance of al-Nahda, had stopped short. In addition, between August 1939 and the end of 1944, prices rose by 300 percent in Egypt. Obviously, salaries did not show the same progression. In postwar Egypt, the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood was thus rooted in the soil of poverty, along with anger in the face of injustice, and middle-class frustration. The Brotherhood was banned at the end of 1948. Yet, even underground and despite the assassination of its founder Hassan al-Banna in February 1952 and the execution of his successor Said Qutb (and his Syrian counterpart Mustafa al-Sibai), the movement remained a major political actor in Egypt and Syria, less so in other countries. Beyond the Muslim Brotherhood, the deep tendency within the Arab world was toward Islamization, as the confrontation with the West intensified. Secularism only characterized a narrow fringe of intellectuals. In Tunisia under President Bourguiba, the 1958 constitution made Islam the state religion. Two years earlier, article 3 of the new Egyptian constitution of 1956 made Islam the state religion, thus derogating from the principal of equality of all before the law, since this excluded Jews, Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Copts. Nevertheless, especially after the 1955 Bandung Conference, Egypt assumed the role of a model for progressive states. The climate of muted hostility of a religious coloration also existed in Iran, where it undermined the Jewish community. In October 1946, the Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle evoked the “disfavor” and the “muted and perfidious persecution” that in Isfahan are “continually aimed at the Jews by the Muslims.” The Cahiers continued: “In principal, the Government of Iran acknowledges the equality of all Persian subjects, without distinction of race or religion, but in practice things are otherwise; our students who finish their studies and leave school are generally refused by governmental departments. . . . Thus, unless they are able to find a suitable marriage, then despite their education and superior aptitudes vis-à-vis other nationalities, our students are obliged to take up the occupations of their parents, as peddlers, shopkeepers, etc.”49 Twenty years later, many AIU schools would vanish due to lack of students, as a large part of the community had emigrated. Nazism impacted a portion of the Arab world’s political and intellectual elites, which were more or less condemned to silence by the Reich’s defeat. In Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat, president from 1970 to 1981, recalled that he and Nasser, as well as other young officers, read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Regarding relations

Captive Communities | 401 between the army and the Third Reich, he wrote: “We acted in perfect harmony with them.”50 Colonel Nasser lent an openly antisemitic coloration to his hostility toward the State of Israel, evoking in 1955 the concept of “world Jewry.” At the end of 1956, after the Israeli army’s victory in the Sinai, David Ben-Gurion put on display captured Egyptian vehicles with swastikas on them, noting as well that some captured officers had an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. “Every Egyptian is proud to resemble Goebbels,” noted Sami Daoud in April 1956; Daoud was editor-in-chief of the weekly Al-Tahrir, the official organ of the Free Officers, the nationalist military movement.51 This atmosphere was not limited to Egypt; it was found as well in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, even though by then the Jewish communities existed as mere remnants. In March 1961, at Casablanca during the screening of Erwin Leiser’s film Mein Kampf, the audience applauded when one of their leaders declared, “We must exterminate the Jews.”52 Nazi texts were translated and published in Arabic alongside local pamphlets strewn with quotes from Mein Kampf (such as The Jews in the Koran, sold in Libya before 1967). Since the end of the war, the English-language press noted the suspected presence of former Nazi leaders, such as Martin Bormann, in Arab countries, in particular in Egypt, as well as the integration of “German officers into the Egyptian Army.”53 In the autumn of 1956, the Suez Crisis provides the French and British press with the occasion to loudly proclaim an open secret: the presence of former Nazis in Egypt. Sixty former Waffen-SS contributed to the training of the Egyptian army, and two hundred exiled German scientists participated in the Egyptian ballistic missile program. Among them was Friedrich Buble, former SS officer, who had been assigned at length to Minsk, where he instituted a reign of terror; now using the name Aman, he was recruited in 1952 by the Egyptian Minister of the Interior. His colleague Seipel, a former Gestapo officer, was also recruited by Cairo, as was Leopold Gleim, the former SD chief in Warsaw, who specialized in hunting down Jews and who changed his name in Egypt to Colonel Naam al-Nasnar. Erich Altern (who renamed himself Ali Bella in Egypt), the former regional chief of the SD for Galicia in charge of “Jewish affairs,” became an instructor in Palestinian camps. Standartenführer Baurnann, one of the men in charge of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in spring 1943, also became an instructor for the Palestine Liberation Front. Alois Brunner, in charge of the deportation of Jews from Austria and Greece as well as Jewish refugees in Nice, and of the management of the camp at Drancy in 1943–1944, took refuge in Cairo in the 1950s under the name Alois Schaldienst. He later reached Syria, where he was called Georg Fisher and later Ali Mehemet. Protected by Damascus, he served as an advisor to the government, became involved in the purchase of military materiel, and above all trained the prison administration in torture techniques.

402  |  Jews in Arab Countries The former SS officer in charge of the Gestapo’s Warsaw bureau became Colonel Ben Salem. Former Düsseldorf Gestapo chief Joachim Dauemling supervised Egyptian prisons. Heribert Heim, Haupsturmführer SS and doctor at Mauthausen, became Chief Physician of the Egyptian Police. Gruppenführer SS Alois Moser, who carried out the genocide in the USSR, became an instructor in the Egyptian paramilitary youth movements. Nazi doctor Heinrich Willerman was given responsibility for the Egyptian Army’s training bases. SS Lieutenant General Wilhelm Farmbacher and SS General Oskar Münzel became military counselors of the armored corps. In December 1956 a report by the Israeli Embassy in Paris denounced the presence of hundreds of former Nazis working for the Egyptian Government. Johann von Leers is often cited; a former high official for Reich propaganda, he converted to Islam and thereafter was called Omar Amin von Leers. In charge of radio propaganda (a key post in a largely illiterate country), this close colleague of Nasser had both the Protocols and an expurgated version of Mein Kampf distributed. As the Damascus newspaper Al-Manar wrote in 1956 (and as cited in Le Monde on August 17, 1956), “It should not be forgotten that, unlike in Europe, Hitler held a place of honor in the Arab world. His name aroused love and enthusiasm in Arab hearts. The Arab world would rejoice if it were to produce a Hitler capable of shaking the world. Journalists are mistaken in thinking that it offends us to compare Nasser to Hitler. The very opposite is the case: that name arouses faith and pride. Long live Hitler, the Nazi who shattered the heart of our enemies! Long live the Hitler of the Arab world!”54 In Yemen, from 1946 the authorities refused to allow entry to a medical mission aimed at helping Jewish refugees. In January 1948, one of the Egyptian Zionist movement leaders informed the Jewish Agency that “anti-Semitism is growing amongst the Egyptian authorities, who are prepared to implement harsh measures towards the Jews.”55 In Morocco in 1947, the Jewish community grows concerned and alerts the Résidence Générale: “We are observing this whole process of a call to antiSemitism developing . . . Zionism in Morocco thus seems to be nothing other than a pretext for inciting a campaign of incitement and hatred towards Moroccan Jewry.”56 Within the space of a few years, across nearly the entire Arab world, every Jew has become an avowed or silent Zionist. In Egypt, after the defeat of 1956, the minister of religious affairs, Sheikh Hassan el-Bakoury, has a proclamation read out in the mosques affirming that in the near future, the Jews will all have to leave the country, and that in the meantime, Egyptians should no longer collaborate with them.57 The repression against any actual or assumed Zionist activities took on a barbaric form in Iraq, with the multiplication of nocturnal police raids, arrests,

Captive Communities | 403 and torture to death.58 Entire swathes of the movement were dismantled, with activists killed or interned in camps.59 The communities were called on to publicly disavow Zionism and to make contributions for Arab armies. Jewish declarations of contrition in the condemnation of Zionism mount up, as, for example, in Aden in 1947.60 However, this approach divides Jewish communities. In Egypt in 1945, community president René Cattaoui is in favor of such declarations, but he does not manage to rally the Sephardi community or the Chief Rabbi to this position. In October 1947, he affirms that Judaism is only a religion and that Zionism is the product of imperialism. Following the UN vote, several Egyptian newspapers affirm that the only way to “prove” one’s anti-Zionism is to participate financially in the Arab National Fund, which in fact occurs.61 The same process of intimidation takes place in Libya, where in June 1948 the Tripoli Jewish community joins the (Arab) United Front for the Independence of Libya. Many Jews join Arab political parties and contribute money to them. The community even organizes a reception in honor of the Arab Liberation Committee, celebrating the “age-old friendship and shared goals of the Arabs and the Jews in Libya.” In Egypt, similar pressures were exerted during a second wave of persecutions in 1956 and 1957. Jewish leaders were called on to condemn Israel. The Chief Rabbi refused to do so, despite threats by the government, which told him it feared “not being able to contain popular sentiment.” “Is the Jewish quarter targeted?” he asked. “We know the addresses of each of you,” came the reply.62 He relented, and signed. He intended to resign but then changed his mind, although not without addressing a long letter to the authorities, detailing the measures taken against the Jews. The letter went unanswered. Ten years later, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, the Chief Rabbi of Iraq was subjected to similar pressures, according to the French Ambassador. On June 25, 1967, Rabbi Sassoon Kaddouri was obliged to receive representatives of the Iraq News Agency, “to whom he was made to issue declarations of extreme loyalty.”63 Kaddouri condemned “the traitorous Zionist aggression and the use of napalm against Arab countries in the recent war. In my capacity as chief of the Iraqi Jewish community, I sincerely proclaim that I and the members of my community are first and foremost Arabs, and that we abhor this spilling of Arab blood.”64 In September 1969, Chief Rabbi Kaddouri announces the wish of the Iraqi Government to organize a conference during which Jews of the Arab countries will condemn Israel and Zionism.65 In this interview he calls on the Jews of the world to expose “the diabolical methods of Zionism, which is an imperialist movement worse than Nazism. . . . Zionism has nothing to do with God and accordingly with the Jewish religion. Zionism has exploited the religion of Moses and has done harm to the true faithful of Moses. Before the creation of the Jewish

404  |  Jews in Arab Countries State, the Jews of Iraq lived in the best conditions. They were army officers, ministers, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, etc. But it is Israel which now deprives them of this.” The Rabbi concludes: “We should not be distracted [from the struggle] against Zionism and Israel which, since its creation, is the source of all the troubles of the Near Eastern Jews.”66 In June 1947, the Moroccan newspaper Jeune Maghrébin (Maghreb Youth) states that the Jews “have only profited from this nationality and our protection. . . . The majority of Moroccan Jews do not deserve their nationality; we should exclude them.”67 In May 1948, the organ of the Istiqlal Party, Er Rai el-Amm, assures its readers that “from the religious point of view, the Jews are the most intractable enemies of true believers.” They are a people “known for their falseness, their profound evil, their ambition and their egotism.”68 In Algeria in 1948, it is claimed that the Jews, these ingrates (a term that resounds in nearly all the Arab press), are also traitors who abuse “Arab hospitality” in order to buy arms for their brothers in Palestine, hiding them in Jewish cemeteries.69 In early May 1948, the Iraqi press characterizes the “Jews and communists” as constituting a “fifth column”; they “should be deprived of all positions of power, expelled from schools and put under strict surveillance. Both the government and the military authorities should undertake a large-scale purge.”70 Already before 1948, in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood stated, “the creation of a Zionist State in Palestine would transform the Jewish communities in Arab countries into a ‘Zionist fifth column.’”71 Harsh repression followed. In November 1951, the Damascus Military Tribunal sentenced fourteen Jews to death for “treason and espionage” on behalf of Israel; six others were sentenced to hard labor for life, and three more to terms of hard labor. In Egypt, too, the obsession with espionage, coupled with the repression of the Zionist movement and the communist movement (with communism far from being the principal specter haunting the government) led to a proliferation of arrests, torture and convictions. Of course, espionage for the benefit of Israel was also a reality. After the ousting of Muhammad Naguid in 1954, the Egyptian situation further deteriorated. In July 1954, the police arrested dozens of Jews accused of having failed to uphold their promise not to learn Hebrew; they were later released. In 1953, a “Section of Jewish Affairs” was created by former Nazis whose mission was to track “Jews who had infiltrated” the economic, administrative, and scientific life of the country. Communities that were victims of violence in 1945 were gripped by the anxiety of repeated attacks, in particular in Libya where, after the November 1945 pogroms,

Captive Communities | 405 they were called on to join the “Arab national cause” and to affirm the traditional “Judeo-Arab fraternity.” Fear was mixed with hatred, recalls Regina Waldman, who—aged nine years in 1957—remembers her math teacher asking: “If you have ten Jews and you kill five of them, how many are still alive?” She would later write: “That was my first taste of hatred.”72 Sometimes, the threat was overt, as mentioned in December 1947 by the Aden Jewish committee: “In the face of Arab threats promising us the worst . . . we can no longer feel safe with Arab forces stationed alongside us, and we ask you to maintain British troops in their quarters at the Crater in order to ensure law and order.”73 Any sign of Jewishness set off a cascade of troubles.74 In 1956, the Arab League reminds Jews that it is forbidden to use a Star of David or any Hebrew writing in logos or advertisements. The threat is not limited to harassment; it often promises recommencement of the “German massacre.” In Egypt in October 1946, a Struggle Group Against the Jews distributes several tracts in Arabic, which include statements such as: “O Jews, you want to declare a merciless war and we are ready for this; this will be a day of celebration for us in which we will repeat for you the German massacre, but we will completely vanquish you. This will be the day in which the country will drive you out after giving you peace following fear, and feeding you after famine.”75 This threatening atmosphere explains the aura surrounding the memory of Hitler, and the nostalgia for German victories. From 1945 to the 1960s, the Arab press and radio spread interminable rumors of ritual crimes and poisoning of water, bread, and even candy. Pressure groups urge governments to toughen their anti-Jewish policies. As one of the tracts distributed in Egypt asks: Did you know? That most commercial companies are in the hands of the Jews? . . . That Egypt’s economic life is in the hands of the Jews? . . . That the lack of decency in our country is because of the Jews? That moral degradation is due to the Jews? That all troubles and misfortunes in the country are due to the Jews?76

Verbal violence is accompanied by physical aggression and desecration of places of worship. In November 1946 in Aleppo, Syria, students destroy the Talmud Torah’s French books, before going on to burn Jewish prayer books in a public square.77 In Algeria in June 1948, the police report nationalists as saying: “The Moroccans are real men—look what they’ve done at Oujda and Djerada.”78 The Israeli victory of 1948–1949 rendered the situation of Middle Eastern Jews untenable. Imaginations all the more easily ran riot given that in less than two decades, Arab societies were emptied of their Jews; many among the younger

406  |  Jews in Arab Countries generations no longer even knew any actual Jews. Anti-Judaism ended up becoming self-sustaining, more and more often disconnected from any real association with the Jewish state. All conflicts from then on were susceptible to displays of an anti-Jewish tone. Anti-Judaism became a universal and timeless passion, with the pharaohs themselves the “first to become aware of the Jewish danger for Egyptian society and the security of the state, 3500 years ago,” according to a Cairo newspaper in April 1947.79 In the same period, getting Jews convicted in Iraq was easy. Arrests were the simplest way of extorting money from them: to be set free, or simply to avoid being picked up, one had to pay. To that must be added physical violence and isolated murders (sometimes solely for monetary gain), and also specifically antiJewish violence, stripped of any anti-colonialist varnish. On June 19, 1948 the Oujda civil controller rejected any alleged anti-French character of the massacre. If there were two Frenchmen among the victims, this was, he made clear, something that had happened “by error,” adding: “All I require to establish the proof of this non-xenophobia is the significant number of Muslims who, of their own accord, attended the funerals of Messieurs Amoros and Godin, and presented their condolences to the two families.”80 They did not, however, attend the funerals of the Jewish victims. Even in reputedly calm Lebanon, bombs were set outside the Beirut AIU schools in January 1951. At Sidi Kassem in Morocco, in August 1954 six Jewish merchants from Meknes were tortured and murdered in their capacity as Jews. Even in countries where the communities were on the verge of disappearance, such as Libya in 1963, well-off Jewish figures were threatened or murdered, such as Halfalla Nahum, in Tripoli. For the handful of others remaining in Libya after the 1951 exodus, the situation deteriorated even further before the 1967 Six-Day War. Openly displayed hatred fueled this violence. Although banned in Europe, here antisemitism was highlighted. In September 1958, Egyptian President Nasser recommended the reading of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to those who wished “to understand the dark machinations of the Jews.”81 In May 1964 he confided to a West German neo-Nazi magazine that the genocide of the Jews was a fable, and that he regretted the defeat of the Nazis.82 Similarly, in 1984 the newspaper Imam, published by the Iranian Embassy to the UK, wrote: “The results of the policies of Israel and Western countries in particular the US . . . show that the program of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is followed word for word by Western governments.”83 In 1949, according to the Jewish Agency, the Arab press itself admitted that measures hostile to the Jews “are not only, and probably not principally, a by-product of the war with Israel.”84 In the June 19, 1948, report previously

Captive Communities | 407 mentioned, the civil controller of Oujda affirmed that it was necessary to “recognize the hatred of Jews which traditionally inspires the Muslim, in order to be persuaded that even with precautionary measures being taken at the first sign of trouble, the worst would occur.”85 The Djerada gendarmerie brigade’s report added: “One should not fool oneself. As long as the Arab mentality is what it is, we can only hope to limit, but not prevent, a pogrom.”86 Similar echoes are heard in a report from Oran, in Algeria, dated June 16, 1948: When one studies the relations between Israelites and Arabs in North Africa, it must not be forgotten that the germ of anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the thinking of all Muslims. Decades can go by without this germ, buried deeply in the depths of the subconscious, coming to the surface. Those are times of friendly relations of all sorts between Arabs and Jews: sincere relations, without any doubt, but superficial ones, if analyzed not on an individual level but on a mass level. But let the contingencies which preside over relations between Jews and Arabs change, and the “ancestral virus” immediately appears in the Muslim consciousness.87

Somewhat earlier in the same report, the author evoked the “anti-Semitic virus awakened within the Muslim masses.” Some called it a “virus,” others an “ancestral habit” or indeed even a “custom.” It would be hazardous to extend these repeated assertions to the ensemble of the Arab world, but the Maghreb contained 50 percent of the Jews of that Arab world, and Morocco and Iraq held the largest—and among the most ancient—communities. For Saïd Ghallab, anti-Zionism was only a fig leaf: “My childhood friends have remained anti-Jewish. They veil their virulent anti-Semitism by maintaining that the State of Israel is the creation of Western imperialism. My Communist comrades have also fallen into this trap. Not a single issue of the Communist press denounces the anti-Semitism of Moroccans or their government. For them, the entire Moroccan people, from the proletarians to the capitalists, are free from anti-Semitism. . . . Well, one need only open one’s eyes to see that swastika adorn the walls, or open one’s ears to grasp how deeply the hatred of the Jew is rooted in their hearts.”88 Between 1945 and 1950 the fear of a reprise of the riots was palpable everywhere. In Aden in December 1947, the Jewish Rescue Committee alerted the Board of Deputies of British Jews: “A furious and intoxicated crowd could overwhelm the Jews in a few minutes, before the British troops could come to our aid.”89 The same climate reigned in Libya after the violence of June 1948: “This is an unbearable, bitter existence,” wrote an anonymous correspondent to the AIU in Paris, in summer 1948. “We are on the alert, ready to be attacked by surprise at any moment, without any hope of being saved or pulled from the grasp of the killers in time. This is true terror!”90 The director of the Tripoli AIU school remarks in

408  |  Jews in Arab Countries autumn 1948: “Their conversation is solely focused on one idée fixe: when will the Arabs attack us?”91 The community notes, in an internal report, that after June 1948, out of fear, “several young Jewish girls embraced the Muslim faith, while others prepared to do so in order to make themselves safe. . . . At Kussabat, nearly the entire community which survived the 1945 massacre then converted to Islam, and is ever since lost to us as Jews.”92 In Iraq in 1945, the British authorities and government feared a new Farhud. Martial law, proclaimed on May 15, 1948 supposedly to protect the Jews, only terrorized them more. Many of them left their homes in order not to be caught by surprise.93 The Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine was a direct witness to this climate of fear. In Damascus in 1947, the Commission heard three Jewish delegates from Syria, who were allotted twenty minutes to speak. Their spokesman only used forty-five seconds: “He rapidly read out a written deposition, about a single line in length, in which he indicated that Syrian Jews were happy, had not been the victims of any racial discrimination and lived in excellent conditions under the current Syrian government. They denied having any points in common with Zionism. MacDonald told me that these three Jews appeared terrified. Hutcheson, astonished by the brevity of their deposition, asked, ‘You have nothing else to add?’, to which the Jewish spokesman shook his head negatively.” The three delegates precipitously returned to their seats at the back of the hall “amidst mocking murmurs of Muslims whose attitude was expressed as clearly as if they had said .they understood what awaited them.’”94 The American Jewish Committee, citing the words of Iraqi Jews recounting unlawful entries by police searching for “Jewish symbols,” stated: “To our children’s questions, we can only respond with tears.”95 Martial law only amplified the precariousness: the word of two persons was now enough to inculpate a third one. In October 1949, in a report entitled “Anti-Semitic Policies of the Iraqi Government,” the French Ambassador considered that this atmosphere was fomented in order to “create, amongst the Jews, a climate of insecurity through attacking their personal liberties and in threatening their interests.”96 Fear engenders impoverishment, due to the long delays before departure. In Tripoli, Jews crowded together in the hara even more densely than before, because they felt safer “amongst their co-religionists,” with the high rents functioning “like life insurance premiums.”97 This atmosphere—which solidifies and tightens following independence—is further aggravated by the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This climate of apprehension is observed even in countries that are reputed to be the safest. “Jewish insecurity is complete,” writes the Moroccan Saïd Ghallab in 1965. “You could be thrown into prison from one moment to another; you

Captive Communities | 409 could be killed or burned to death. It was right during Ramadan: a Muslim was in love with a Jewess. It seems the girl’s father opposed the relationship of the two young people and shunned the entire family of the young man; the latter burned alive the father of the girl before the savage eyes of a half-famished mob!”98 This was something everyone had long known: insecurity was part and parcel of the Jewish condition in Arab lands. Neither the Palestine conflict nor emigration caused it; rather, they only exacerbated it. As we have seen, fear was fueled by the specter of pogroms following the violence in Aden, Tripoli, Cairo, Damacus, Baghdad, and Oujda. This fear angered the emissaries of the Jewish national home, on mission to Iraq in 1942: “Even magnificent young people showed themselves to be frightened cowards. . . . There is nothing good to say about the Jews here. . . . What can we do? Exile . . . and such an exile!”99 In early 1949, Iraqi Jews feared meeting a representative of the United States, and asked on several occasions that their names not be mentioned and that no notes be taken.100 In October 1949, according to a report by the French Ambassador to Baghdad, the police chief offered to have detainees examined by two Jewish doctors: “Needless to say, no volunteers presented themselves.”101 An emissary from the American Jewish Committee reports from Baghdad, in 1949, that “a ring of the telephone or the front door bell makes breathing stop, arousing a fear reminiscent of the worst moments at the hands of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.”102 At the beginning of the 1950s, the prospects of independence for Morocco and Tunisia even further accentuated these fears. This accelerated departures, as noted by a French administrator in the Oujda region in February 1955; beyond the obvious social problems such as poverty, hundreds of families were destabilized by fear. This atmosphere was even heavier outside the Maghreb, in the Near East where, right to the end, the fear of violence and injustice continued. The last Jews of Iraq and Syria would all state this during the 1960s and 1970s. In August 1969, the French Ambassador to Baghdad evoked “the climate of insecurity [that] persists within the community, such that its members fear any intervention by ambassadors on their behalf.”103 In 1973, the Syrian Ambassador to France, in a letter to Le Monde, cites the affirmations of the “Religious Council” of the Jews of his country, which forbid “any person from shaking confidence [in Hafez elAssad]” and “sowing disunity” within the country: “In our country, we live in an atmosphere of cordiality and mutual confidence with all our fellow citizens, of whatever faith they may be, as well as with our governing authorities, with President Assad at their head. We permit no one to attempt to shake this confidence and sow discord in our country.”104 And yet, Jews were excluded from the social, economic, and cultural life of the newly independent Arab states. The first step on the path of exclusion was

410  |  Jews in Arab Countries “the impression of a limitation on their freedom, the feeling that they are hostages,” reported the Rabat regional civil controller in November 1948. “All these elements have created, in the Israelite milieu, a psychosis reflected in the desire to leave at all costs and as quickly as possible.”105 In Iraq, a law promulgated on May 15, 1948, transformed the military service obligations of Jews into forced labor. The WJC explained, in a report in 1949, that “They are obliged, in the middle of the Iraqi summer, to build huts out of mud and then to demolish them immediately after. Alternatively, they may work in the desert. In winter, they are given neither warm clothes nor blankets.”106 Travel within the country was risky: any Jew could be arrested, interrogated, and held until payment of an “unofficial tax.” Large numbers of them were stripped of their nationality, as in Egypt in 1957 after the Suez campaign, where this was practiced against those suspected of “Zionist tendencies or sympathies.”107 The strangulation produced its most rapid effects in the commercial and professional domain. In Egypt from 1949, any sale of land or of a building belonging to a Jew required advance police approval. Granting of work permits, and import or export licenses, was extremely restricted. The law regarding free education pushed Jewish schools into bankruptcy, as they could not survive without charging tuition. Any pretext sufficed to summarily requisition school property and transfer it to a fast-growing Muslim population.108 These sorts of measures were aimed at financially ruining the Jews rather than expelling them, with the goal of pushing to despair those who want nothing more than permission to depart. In 1948, the Iraqi community was overwhelmed with punishing levels of direct and indirect levies. For the city of Baghdad alone, the number of Jews in need that the community struggled to keep afloat was estimated at seventeen thousand; with the community crushed by taxes, it could no longer come to their aid. Taxes and imposed social levies abounded, linked to corruption, the existence of “black lists,” restrictions fettering the sale of land and buildings, exclusions from participation in any contract concerning the public sector, limitations on import and export, withdrawals of licenses from many “Jewish banks,” and the exclusion of Jewish civil servants. Poverty soared.109 The Bludan Conference of 1947 “had decided that all the Arab states should do their utmost to break the economic and financial position of the Jews within their borders. The Iraqi Government was the first to implement this decision.”110 Every time a Jew was accused, even without proof or verdict, his property was sequestered, his bank accounts blocked, his merchandise consigned to customs, and his commercial premises placed under seal. Once freed, he had to pay a fine to recover his goods. The same strangulation operated in Syria, but even more deviously: from December 1947, no Jew could work. In Libya, the rare Jews who remained in the country after 1951 could no longer apply for any position in the police or the army.

Captive Communities | 411 They could acquire no property, and had no right to a certificate of nationality or a passport. At the first signs of emancipation, Muslim reaction made it clear that they considered the Jews to have abandoned their restraint. This unleashed the discrete and unavowed pleasure of humiliating Jews. In June 1948, the French administration in Morocco underscored that “at bottom, all these massacres and this pillaging pleased nearly all the Muslims, even if some firmly opposed it.”111 In 1964, following Vatican II, the entirety of the Arab world rebels against the reduction in Christian anti-Judaism. In December 1964, Jacques Dumarçay, the French Ambassador to Baghdad, reports on the anger of the Iraqi Government toward the Vatican, which puts Iraqi Christians—torn between Rome and their government—in a difficult position: “The Iraqi Government has judged it appropriate to engage in the argument, on the one hand by signaling expressly to the Holy See its disapproval ‘in the name of all the Arabs of Iraq’, and on the other, in constraining to silence those Iraqi Christians who do not share the government’s point of view.”112 One month previously, Dumarçay had observed how much the ArabMuslim perspective in fact bolstered Zionism: “Muslim protestations have multiplied since then: in the passionate and excessive manner which could have easily been predicted, these protestations tend unanimously to mix up in a single reprobation ‘the killers of Christ and the killers of Palestinian Arabs.’ This was a conflation which, moreover, was more polemical than probative: not only, as we know, the Koranic text teaches that Christ miraculously escaped death on the cross (Koran, IV, 156), but the acknowledgement of such solidarity between the Hebrews of biblical times and the Israelis of today could not but support the very Zionist thesis which the Arabs were seeking to refute.”113 When archaic submission is reimposed on urbanized and emancipated communities, the cleavage leads to divorce. It is not pauperization that drives departure, but rather—among the middle classes—the rejection of custodianship. Youth in particular seemed less disposed to put up with these affronts. Moreover, the process of Westernization, coupled with the existence of Israel, led to envisaging emigration more readily than in the past. It is not so much overt persecution that made people leave, but an accumulation of humiliations against the Yahud who, silently in his heart of hearts, underwent a mutation in which Zionism played a premier role. When he who has always been subjugated now intends to speak as an equal to those who oppress him, that is a revolution. The communities often appeared divided, split in the face of adversity by rivalries between clans and families. Divided as well over which responses they should adopt to persecution and the challenge posed by Zionism. In Egypt in 1949, the traditional community was accused of pusillanimity, and of parsimony in the

412  |  Jews in Arab Countries levels of aid it provides to the victims of repression. The same occured in Morocco, where the community leaders were judged “timorous and hostile to any new idea, in thrall to the government whose potential wrath it fears, often apparently without reason.”114 No community leaders—neither notables nor chief rabbis— would escape such reproaches. Clarity of political thought, moreover, seemed to decrease as people rose socially and increasingly viewed the world through the narrow perspective of honors, fortune, the esteem of others, and flattery. From 1948 to 1950, after closing its borders, the Iraqi Government carries out nearly 600 arrests in the Jewish community, often under flimsy pretexts. Near Kut, in a swampy region, Jewish prisoners were “tortured, [and] die slow deaths, cut off from the world” according to the American Jewish Committee, reporting in early 1949.115 At the beginning of 1950, the Committee submited a report to the UN on “Anti-Jewish Persecutions in Iraq.” In it one read that “the authorities stir up Muslim prisoners against the Jewish detainees,” extort money from the families, and chain the Jews together until ransom is paid, and that “those whose families can not pay any more were sent to forced labor camps.”116 In early October 1949, according to a report by the French Ambassador in Baghdad, the police launched “a massive wave of arrests, in the best style of the Gestapo, bursting into people’s houses at two in the morning, blowing open doors with machine guns and threatening to take the entire family if the suspect—sometimes only designated by his given name—does not present himself. This brutal abduction is carried out before his family. It is said, although obviously this cannot be proven, that the offices of the ‘Criminal Investigation Center’ sometimes echoe with the cries of people who are being tortured in various ways. It is also reported that policemen sometimes abuse their female prisoners.”117 Torture is “part of the judicial inquiry,” explained Omar Nidmi, the Iraqi Minister of the Interior, and in particular was inflicted on Zionist activists.118 A number of people died from the torture. “Elbows and wrists tightly bound in chains, these people are taken off and whipped all over their bodies. Hands and feet are immersed in boiling water. Burning hot clothes-irons are applied to their bodies,” noted a report sent to the UN in early 1950.119 On October 26, 1949, the New York Herald Tribune reporteed the testimony of an Iraqi Jew who had fled to Israel eleven days earlier. A witness to the arrest of dozens of people, he recounts having heard the shouts of those tortured by fire in the adjacent room.120 In Egypt, arrests began again in 1952, after the seizure of power by the military, which had been defeated by Israel in 1949. In October 1955, more than 500 Jews, “well known for their Zionist sympathies” were arrested, sent to camps and tortured: “This is the norm.”121 In The Black Record: Nasser’s Persecution of Egyptian Jewry, published by the American Jewish Committee in 1957, the Committee

Captive Communities | 413 explained how plainclothes police carried out arrests with neither explanation nor physical brutality, at homes, and in the streets. But as soon as the detention center was entered, such restraint was swept aside, replaced by the absence of hygiene, overcrowding, hunger (in fact, a complete deprivation of any food for the first few days), thirst, confinement cells, constant beating, and threats (“You are all going to die”).122 Personal effects were confiscated. This atmosphere, well attested in Egypt, was apparently even more ferocious in Syria and Iraq, right up to the final days of their Jewish communities, as described in a telex from the French Embassy at Baghdad on April 6, 1971, regarding forty Jews thrown into prison: “Some of them will shortly be transferred to a military prison in order to be tried. They could be subject to capital punishment, and such a sentence would be immediately carried out.”123 On rare occasions, expulsion was ordered. After being subjected to an unbearable existence, departure was experienced as deliverance. Expulsions, particularly from Egypt and Iraq, were masked as voluntary. Departures were always accompanied by violence. Forced departures from Egypt in late November 1956 were planned by the Department of Jewish Affairs (directed by a former Nazi), a branch of the Ministry of the Interior that assembled a dossier on every individual Jew and on every “Jewish enterprise.”124 Even where departure was forced, people had to sign declarations that they were leaving voluntarily.125 These refugees were restricted to taking one suitcase with personal effects, and twenty Egyptian pounds. They had to sign an attestation that they were “offering” their property to the government. They were searched prior to embarkation, and sometimes beaten in front of their children in order to extort money or jewelry from them. This was but “the first wave of 4000 expulsions [from Egypt], with each person given seven days to leave, followed by 17,000 others who were given one month.”126 Here as elsewhere, everything was handled without creation of written records and without ever pronouncing the word “expulsion,” in an attempt to avoid giving the Israeli enemy a basis for arguing that a Nakba, or disaster, had been inflicted not just on the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes, but on Middle-Eastern Jews as well. Meeting in London in May 1957, the executive committee of the WJC noted with regret that “the White House maintained silence” and that the UN Secretary-General “neither drew the attention of the General Assembly to the problem nor even, to our knowledge, made any intervention—even as a formality—with the Egyptian Government.”127 Yet, even before the establishment of the State of Israel, everyone knew that if the State were proclaimed, the Jews of the Orient would be at risk. In September 1948 the Jewish Agency “called upon the United Nations to take urgent measures to put an end to acts of oppression and murder perpetrated

414  |  Jews in Arab Countries in Arab states, and to safeguard the life, honor, and rights of Jews.128 The State of Israel began to act as protector of threatened communities and prepared to save them. Taken up again by the Arab League in 1946, the boycott call went beyond the products of the Yishuv and extended to “Jewish companies” operating in Syria, Lebanon, and in Egypt that are connected to the Palestinian Mandate’s economy.129 Ultra-nationalist or Islamist groups seeking a “boycott of the Jews” sometimes transmitted these calls: in Egypt in 1946 the Struggle Group Against the Jews exhorted “Don’t deal with Jewish merchants or buy from Jews. . . . If you are a lawyer, don’t represent a Jew, if you are a doctor don’t treat a Jew, because Jews don’t share humanity’s feelings of brotherhood, duty or gratitude.” This group proposed to publish a list of “Muslims and Christians who serve the Jews.”130 In Gabès, Tunisia, in May 1948, posters on the walls of a market “forbid buying from Jews,” which a French administrator noted was “harassment which only reinforced the terrified mentality of the Israelites.”131 The boycott impoverished and discouraged all the communities. In Libya, from March 1957, contact with Israel was punishable by eight years’ imprisonment and a heavy fine. Since the majority of Libyan Jews had immigrated to Israel in 1951, this measure condemns those who remained to being cut off from their relatives. In 1960 foreigners (which included most Jews, since most held foreign passports) were forbidden to buy real estate. In 1961, the property of those residing in Israel was confiscated, together with that of all their relatives. The primary objective of the boycott was to take all jobs held by Jews. This is a crucial aspect of nationalistic exclusion. It reflected the expectations of the new educated strata of society, who found foreigners and Jews in their way as they sought employment and social ascent. In Egypt, holding local nationality would henceforth be necessary for employment, yet a large proportion of the Jewish community only held European nationality. “Egyptianization” was now the pronounceable version of “segregation”: 75 percent of an enterprise’s employees had to be Egyptian nationals, and Jews were systematically refused a “nationality card.”132 In Iraq, from September 1948, Jewish doctors found that their professional licenses were not being renewed. In the 1950s and 1960s, chronic unemployment undercut what remained of the communities: “75 percent of the members of communities would find themselves without any resources, having liquidated and spent everything they had, with nothing further to sell to ensure their subsistence,” as the French Ambassador to Baghdad noted in July 1969.133 Finally, still under the same pretext of nationality, Jews were excluded from administrative employment: from October 1949, Baghdad revoked the positions of all Jewish employees in public administration.134

Captive Communities | 415 More broadly, Jews were eliminated from economic and social life. Using the excuse of the Palestine question, Jewish competition, strong in international trade, was pushed aside.135 After the Suez crisis of 1956, the Egyptian Government nationalized foreign banks, enterprises, and insurance companies, reserving jobs for Muslims only. Non-citizens could no longer represent foreign companies. Beginning in 1947, 40 percent of enterprise directors had to hold Egyptian nationality. In Libya, from January 1951, 60 percent of a company’s shares had to be held by “Libyan Arabs,” thus pushing Jewish entrepreneurs to renounce the foreign citizenship that had been their ultimate element of protection. In Syria, a third of Jewish stores were abandoned by their proprietors between 1948 and 1954.136 Collective property was also seized, without need for any legal segregation measures. The German precedent served as a reference: there was no question of Arab authorities exposing themselves to reproach for establishing antisemitic and segregationist policies. In reality, of course, arbitrariness prevails, with confiscation of Jewish community property taking place under the pretext of military security or public interest. In Egypt, the martial law of May 11, 1948, allowed expropriation of private enterprises, a spoliation that led to the exodus of between 20,000 and 27,000 people. In Egypt, collective Jewish properties—such as community hospitals in Cairo and Alexandria—were attributed to the Egyptian Army. Jewish patients in those two cities were transferred to general hospitals, and Jewish surgeons who operated there were no longer admitted (hospitals of other communities were, however, not touched). Finally, the Egyptian Medical Association recommended to the public to cease contact with Jewish doctors or surgeons.137 In Libya, the community’s property and autonomy were both targeted: the rabbinical tribunal was abolished in 1953, the community court was dissolved, and a Muslim administrator assumed governorship of the community’s property from the end of 1958. In 1958, Rabat ordered all Moroccan charitable foundations (Jewish as well as Muslim) to renew their registration with the Ministry of the Interior. Jewish directors justifiably perceived this as the prelude to “Moroccanization” of some of their institutions. Every new authorization is subject to two conditions: only Moroccan citizens could be members of boards of directors, and financing could only come from government subventions and personal contributions. By prohibiting any foreign involvement and any external grants (when most Jewish organizations were directed by people who have non-Moroccan citizenship and receive subsidies from American and French Jewry), the authorities sought to destroy these organizations. Jewish property in Iraq and Syria was seized. In September 1968, the Chief Rabbi of Iraq described the seizure of property “bequeathed by benefactors to educational establishments, on the pretext that this property was not officially

416  |  Jews in Arab Countries registered on the record as waqf ” (i.e., pertaining to religious foundations).138 In 1970, “despite the protests of the Chief Rabbi of Iraq, the scrolls of the Torah and the Tablets of the Law were taken from the synagogue, to be given to the Baghdad Museum’s antiquities department.”139 This accumulation of interdictions was aimed at suffocating all Jewish activity, without explicitly saying so. The decline of fiscal revenues, as well as the rise in unemployment—both a consequence of the boycott—constituted probative evidence of a generalized impoverishment. In June 1948 the Moroccan Résidence Générale cabled: “This campaign extends further each day; many cinemas, pharmacies and enterprises such as the bus company of Fez, whose owners are Jewish but whose clientele is almost entirely Muslim, have lost all activity. Since the US recognized the State of Israel, the Moroccans are abstaining from buying certain imported American products. Throughout the country, many workers and employees belonging to the Jewish working class are fired without cause.”140 The same situation prevails in Damascus, where five thousand Jews still lived in early 1949, and in Libya after 1948, where Jews could “no longer work where they live nor travel any distance, out of fear of the Arabs.”141 In Iraq, unemployment devastates “thousands of people who depended on the salary earned by a member of the family [and who] are now deprived of resources.”142 Many Jews lived only off their savings and community subsidies, and even more depended on international aid (in particular, from JOINT). As in Syria, they also survive by progressively (and illegally, if done without state supervision) liquidating their real estate. Such sales are everywhere controlled by the state, which, as in Iraq, ensures “that the money realized by such transactions will not be transferred to Israel.”143 The result was a depreciation of real-estate values. Demotivated owners carried out a minimum of repairs, which aggravated the under-employment of construction industry workers. Even in Morocco in the 1970s, Jews were not truly free to sell their property. Registered by the Ministry of the Interior, such property could only be sold with the ministry’s authorization. The amount realized from the transaction had to be deposited into a bank or reinvested into another property in Morocco. In Syria, Iraq, and Libya, the strangulation strategy continued right up to the total extinction of Jewish communities. The principal beneficiaries of this situation were the Arab middle and upper classes. For them this was the opportunity to quickly and easily get rich. The state got its piece of the pie through fines, ransoms, and spoliation (i.e., through “nationalization”). The state put pressure on incarcerated people, who could only be freed through the payment of a “heavy bail, threatening them with the prospect of three years in prison. If the accused was absent, he could be convicted in absentia and his property sold—at absurd prices—to those in power.”144 Intimidated by the unleashing of violence, the majority of Jews rushed to sell their property at derisory prices without any certainty of being able to recover

Captive Communities | 417 the funds.145 They want to leave, and in order to do so, were ready to sell their possessions cheaply, as a French administrator in the Rabat region reported in November 1948.146 Confiscation, which constituted large-scale extortion, angered Jewish communities. In early 1950, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram estimated that the spoliation of the well-off segments of the Jewish community brought Egypt an amount greater than “all the measures taken by the Government to penalize the Jews of this country.” The newspaper continued by noting that in Iraq, the trials launched by Baghdad against Jewish notables brought the Iraqi treasury many millions, and that the arrest in the capital of “eight other eminent Jews” for “high treason” would provide the occasion to despoil them of their property.147 The operation was entirely sanctioned by law. With 64,000 Jews (half of the community) awaiting emigration to Israel, Baghdad surprised them by placing a block on the goods of those who had applied for emigration through renunciation of their nationality. The move was all the more effective since the law of 1950, which permited Jews to emigrate up to March 9, 1951 on condition that they renounce their Iraqi nationality, makes no mention of property issues. Thus, overnight they were stripped of their possessions. Those who were able to leave earlier and who did a deal concerning their property (which often involved the less well off) might come out financially even, but those who waited until the last minute (often the wealthier ones) were the main victims of this legal squeeze play. There is considerable discrepancy between the estimates of the amount of wealth that was extorted in 1951 from the Jews of Iraq. Some estimates suggested around 200 million pounds sterling (in 1951 values). However, in May 1951, according to the Cahiers, the Iraqi Treasury in fact put its hands on 500 million pounds sterling (in 1951 values) worth of Jewish wealth, if all the spoliations, nationalizations, fines, seizures, ransom, and so on are taken into account.148 In 2006–2007, Israeli sources calculated that the losses of Iraqi Jews amounted to between 100 and 300 billion dollars, in 2007 values.149Whatever the actual value of expropriated Jewish property, it was worth a very considerable amount of money. In Egypt, the war of 1948–1949 resulted in a wave of dispossessions that struck dozens of enterprises. Apartments were confiscated, with their inhabitants given only a few hours to pack their bags and take shelter in a hotel, without compensation.150 In order to (partially) avoid dispossession, one had to have Egyptian nationality. But great efforts were made to make it almost impossible for a Jew to acquire that nationality; laws were changed, and more and more obstacles were put in the way. The law of 1947 was modified in 1951, then in 1953, and finally again in November 1956. In 1951, the Egyptian Government annulled certain instances of dispossession, and returned their possessions to their owners. In Iraq, on the contrary, no

418  |  Jews in Arab Countries measure of this sort was taken. In 1956, after the Sinai campaign, a second wave of dispossessions struck Egyptian Jews. Dozens of companies had their property confiscated and their bank accounts seized. Refugees were only allowed to leave the country with 5 Egyptian pounds. Those who obtained a delay of a few weeks sought to sell their possessions, but to whom, and at what price? Businessmen and, more broadly, the middle classes, were ruined, with the miserable perspective of trying to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Some were able to get jewelry or cash out, but the bulk of the vast Egyptian Jewish middle class was dispossessed.151 In 1961, the Libyan Government used the existence of Israel as a pretext for despoiling what remained of the Jewish community. Law Number 6, of March 1961, provided for the sequestration of all property belonging (even indirectly) to any persons residing in Israel or connected to that country. Iraq was the scene of a genuine racket in the period of 1948 to 1951. In July 1948, around forty Jewish businessmen were arrested for having dealings with the Soviet Union, although this was entirely legal (an Iraq-Soviet trade agreement had been signed a few years earlier); their Muslim counterparts conducting similar dealings were not disturbed. The Jews were finally released after each had paid 10,000 pounds for his freedom. The WJC reported, in 1949, “Before sentence was pronounced, the courts martial inquired as to the financial position of the accused, in order to impose appropriate fines on them. . . . When the government’s intentions were understood by the non-Jewish populace, they sought to assist the authorities in finding new charges against the Jews. Under martial law, two witnesses were enough to establish someone’s guilt. It was thus very easy for two people to go see a Jew in order to demand money from him. If the demand was refused, they only needed to go to the nearest police station and accuse the Jew of being Zionist or communist, or of having defamed the government. If the Jew in question could not manage to settle the matter with the authorities ‘on a friendly basis,’ that is, by paying money, he could be incarcerated immediately.”152 Before May 15, 1948, the British postal administration in Palestine, which had held back the post sent to Iraq by Jews in the Yishuv, remitted it to the authorities in Baghdad. Once read and studied, these letters served to bring thousands of Jews before the military courts, under accusations of having entertained relations with Jews in Palestine. Anyone named in the letters was charged and risked between three and ten years of hard labor, and a fine of one thousand to ten thousand pounds. Those who could not pay had their goods confiscated and sold at low prices. Some—few in number—got out of the situation by paying large amounts to policemen and to the magistrates of the military courts; called in by the police, they negotiated their freedom.153 Once released, they were still not safe from a second charge, and could find themselves stuck in an interminable cycle of blackmail and ransom. Prison and torture “quickly overwhelmed their obstinacy,” noted a report of the WJC in

Captive Communities | 419 1949. “Innocence is only provisionally proven, because if the person is suspected of still having any money, he will not fail to have it extorted from him. If by chance anyone resists the torture inflicted in the police station, he will be sent to the central prison.”154 Emigration remained the only solution. However, a passport was still needed. This furnished a further pretext for extortion of funds, as a passport was so difficult to obtain, and the departure by Jews from the national territory was so closely monitored, especially in Iraq and Syria. “They allow them to leave, on condition that they do so entirely naked,” wrote Albert Memmi about Tunisia, in 1962, in the review L’Arche. “Despite orders, they try to take along a mattress, covers and some clothes; generally they are obliged to leave all this behind with Customs at the port. Embarking on the ship, they are reduced to their bodies and the clothing on their back. . . . It’s best to look this in the face: whether by force or softly, the Arab countries—even the most moderate ones—are liquidating their Jews.”155 This description can be extended to almost all of the Jews in the Arab world. Memmi considered that the newly independent Tunisia insidiously pushed the Jews to leave by making Islam the state religion. “From the religious point of view, what were we becoming? Nothing.”156 Departure offers the spectacle of a generalized destitution. With one Dinar in the Pocket was the title of a 1961 edition of the monthly L’Arche regarding Tunisian Jews. The Jews were not the only ones targeted for exclusion from Arab countries. All foreigners were targeted, in particular in Egypt, which had 250,000 resident foreigners in 1937 but only 143,000 by 1960. Out of 100,000 foreigners living in Libya before the war, only 50,000 remained by 1960. Behind these figures lies a double difference of great importance: non-Jews were not despoiled of their property, and Jews were not foreigners, even when they carried foreign passports. In at least one case—that of Iraq—the state was surprised by the consequences of its policy of harassment. It expected some 10,000 to leave (and Israel expected 40,000 Iraqi Jews to arrive), but this was to ignore the fear of a community that had been traumatized by the Farhud and the exactions of the years following it. The law of March 10, 1951, adopted by parliament meeting in a “secret session” under the direction of Nuri Saïd’s government, officialized dispossession, which had until then been practiced with a degree of obscurity. Property of those departing was put under the control of a governmental bureau (under “Law Number 5”), and those who had already left were dispossessed immediately (“Law Number 12”). From March 1963, those who did not return on the expiry of their passports had their property confiscated. In September 1963, the Jewish community was dissolved. In April 1950, Syrian law authorized the seizure of goods of any Jew leaving the country for any destination. In Libya, all emigrating Jews had to renounce

420  |  Jews in Arab Countries ownership of their property. Dispossession was also practiced at a large scale by less visible states, such as the Persian Gulf Emirates, which seized the property of Jews wishing to immigrate to Israel. At the end of 1956, Egyptian Jews’ property (both real estate and other property) was sequestered, and it was forbidden to take moveable goods abroad. By means of threats, officials required the Jews to give up a portion of their property for a fistful of dollars before the goods were sequestered. Those who refused were imprisoned and beaten. At the airport and maritime customs, officials swindled departing Jews. Jewelry and other valuable objects in suitcases—even wristwatches—were stolen. The richest were identified and their personal effects taken. Even more difficult scenes accompanied the departure of Iraqi Jews in 1951. Jews were not just robbed: they were beaten and spat on. Suddenly, the amount authorized on departure from the national territory went from 50 dinars down to 5 dinars. Mossad agent Itamar Levin, who witnessed these scenes at the airport, reported: “The height of cruelty was reached on the day police officers started whipping emigrants. The sobs of the whipped adults mixed with the cries and tears of their hungry and thirsty children.”157 From 1947 to 1948, the Arab League discretely recommended blocking Jewish students’ access to university, and Arab foreign legations in Beirut received similar instructions from their governments.158 In May 1948, Jewish students are excluded from Iraqi secondary schools and in January 1949, it became nearly impossible for Jewish students in Iraq to enroll in university. It was also impossible for them to go abroad to follow a university program. In Egypt too, control over Jewish schools was tightened. In 1949, out of forty hours of classes per week, twenty-eight were prescribed by the government.159 In Iraqi Jewish schools, from 1949 only Muslim teachers were authorized to teach history, geography, ethics and Arabic.160 Restrictions were placed on the recruitment of foreign teachers in Jewish schools. The AIU was the first target of this offensive (after an initial attempt at Arabization in the 1930s, notably in Iraq). In 1948, the AIU, which still ran 10 schools with nearly 6,000 students in Iraq, was required to close its doors. The same was true for Egypt after 1956.161 In Libya, an AIU school that opened in 1889 was closed without explanation in April 1960. UNESCO protested, but in vain. The Italian Consulate helped the Jewish community to open another school and to pay Hebrew language teachers’ salaries. Moroccan policies were more nuanced, even if in the end the AIU was still targeted. Western Jewish organizations protested from 1956 against the stranglehold aiming at the Arabization of instruction, which pushed a number of non-Jewish AIU teachers to leave for France, where their employment conditions would be better.162 In 1956 the AIU still had 80 schools in Morocco

Captive Communities | 421 and educated 33,000 children. The teaching of Arabic was constrained by the unpreparedness of most of the teachers, even though 70 percent of them were locally born Moroccan Jews. Between 1956 and 1962, Mogador-born Haïm Zafrani, who had trained at the ENIO, was in charge of the program of Arabization in his capacity as National Educational Inspector for Arab studies in Jewish schools. Zafrani successfully educated many Arabic teachers. From October 1957, to the great satisfaction of the Moroccan authorities, six hours of Arabic instruction per week were provided right from the first year of elementary school. During that same period of 1956 to 1962, many at the AIU considered this policy to have led to an impasse. They explained that the Arab world did not want them, no more than it wanted any specifically Jewish contribution; moreover, the Arab world no longer desired the presence of foreign organizations at all. Many people at the AIU considered that Rabat was quietly constraining Jewish education. Although initially it remained possible to bring in books from Israel, from 1956 this became impossible; henceforth, any books in Hebrew had to be printed in Morocco.163 Given the unfavorable policy environment, the AIU responded with prudence to these difficulties. With the start of the school year in 1960, the AIU network in Morocco still had seventy-seven schools and some 28,700 pupils. In March 1961, going back on its preindependence promises, the government required the AIU to turn over many of its schools: in consequence, at that point, the French institution was down to sixty-four schools, and educated only 20,000 students. The 1928 accord between the AIU and the French protectorate was abrogated, and the AIU was progressively dismantled as an independent academic organization. Zafrani left Morocco in 1962. For twenty years, his successor, Elias Harrus, who remained at the head of the AIU in Morocco until 1982, would have to confront a continuous, exhausting offensive, under attack from the Istiqlal Party as well as the communists. From 1962 there were accusations of “Zionism,” and demonstrations aimed at ending governmental aid, which was decried as being just as “scandalous” as the emigration to Israel by Moroccan Jews. In July 1962, Rabat absorbed AIU teachers of Moroccan nationality into the ranks of the Ministry of National Education (although a majority of instructors, holding the view that they would be less well paid, resisted integration into the system). Yet, slowly but surely, the institution of the AIU itself was legally absorbed. As well, in 1962, the government rebaptized the AIU as Itcha-Maroc, and along the way contested the “excessive place” granted to Hebrew (with the exception of two members of the School Commission, Mehdi Ben Barka and Minister of Education Muhammed al-Farsi, who called for Hebrew to enjoy the same respect as Arabic). Nevertheless, the net effect was that the Jews of the kingdom—without ever being chased out of their homeland—were insidiously pushed to leave it.

422  |  Jews in Arab Countries In the years following the Six-Day War, the last Jews of Iraq and Syria were systematically excluded from higher education. Students were condemned “to wander in the streets or stay at home, deprived of all national education and prevented from going abroad to study, and without any possibility of working,” wrote the Chief Rabbi of Baghdad in September 1968.164 The progressive erasure of their presence extended even to the destruction of any trace of the Jews. This is seen from 1969 in Libya, where the elimination of the Jewish past reflected political will. In October, two months after the military coup d’état, a daily paper, Ar-Raid, called for the destruction of Jewish cemeteries: “We have to immediately eliminate the Jewish cemeteries and throw the mortal remains of their dead, who besmirch our country even when they are dead, into the depths of the sea; this is the absolute duty of the municipal councils in Tripoli, Benghazi and Misurata. Wherever these dirty cadavers remain, we have to replace them by constructing buildings, public parks and roads. Only in this manner will the hatred of the Arab people of Libya towards the Jews be able to be appeased.”165 Twenty-one cemeteries, including four in Tripoli, were eliminated in this manner; as well, 78 synagogues were transformed into mosques and 64 others were destroyed and Benghazi’s central synagogue was turned into a Coptic church. The cemeteries were dug up without the families being given the possibility of moving their loved ones’ remains elsewhere, a choice that was always offered to Christians. On the eve of independences in the Maghreb, the tendency was to reassure Jewish communities about their future, thus in an indirect manner reflecting a return to the ancient notion of “tolerated community.” In November 1944, on the occasion of the Throne Day festival, the Sultan of Morocco was unusually warm to the Jewish delegation that came to present their respects to him. He invited them to draw near and, rising to greet them, “expressed his happiness at receiving them [stating] ‘Just like the Muslims, you are my subjects, and in the same way, I will protect you and love you. . . . This Festival is also yours.’”166 This benevolence reflected the Sultan’s concern to win the backing of the US, which he knew was supportive of Morocco’s independence. He realized, as well, that American Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee and JOINT in particular, were very attentive to the situation of Moroccan Jewry. When he became king, Mohammed V followed the long tradition of the Makhzen in protecting the Jewish community, which he knew was threatened by most of the political forces in the country. But from 1956 the new king (who joined the Arab league in 1958) forbade Jewish emigration to Israel, and two years later suspended postal communications with the Jewish state. In Tunisia, Bourguiba offered greater assurances. Two years before independence, the Tunisian national movement decided to make Yom Kippur a public

Captive Communities | 423 holiday. But this measure was only applied for a single year and was as transitory as the nomination of Jewish minsters in the first Moroccan and Tunisian governments. There would be no future for Leon Benzaken (a minister in the first post-colonial Moroccan government) or André Baruch (a Tunisian minister). This does not alter the fact that Bourguiba was one of the rare Arab leaders to go against the current of popular opinion. In December 1956 he opposed Egyptian leaders who openly persecuted the Jewish community, while at the same time making clear that he was only coming to the defense of Tunisian Jews living in Egypt. In 1945, at least officially, the executive of the AIU did not seem to doubt the future of the Moroccan Jewish community. By the beginning of the 1950s, the AIU was even extending its network by opening schools in remote regions. “With the Taounza school, the Alliance is reliving its glorious early years. Roads are almost non-existent. A single track leads there. . . . The schoolmaster is literally isolated: there is no post office and the only telephone is at the civil administration office, six kilometers from the mellah. A single bus comes, once per week: even so, it stops sometimes eight kilometers from the mellah. The schoolmaster rides a donkey or mule to get to work.”167 Additional schools were also opened in Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknes, in response to a demand for girls’ schooling. In 1950, in Meknes, the AIU educates 1,325 girls and 1,075 boys, a clear reflection of social progress. But in effect, Morocco presented the atypical case of a Jewish community that, although appearing to still exist, was actually dissolving in the space of a generation. The illusion was principally maintained by Jewish elites, while the working classes, for their part, were “voting with their feet” and leaving the country in large numbers, whether officially or clandestinely, but in any event emptying the largest Jewish reservoir in the Arab world. At the same time, an uplifting discourse around the “Judeo-Arab symbiosis” was taking form. But beyond such lyrical fervor, the status of Moroccan Jews had hardly evolved. On August 13, 1955, Istiqlal’s Secretary General, Ahmed Balafredj, reiterated the party’s promise: “In an independent Morocco, the Jews will not be the victims of any discrimination.”168 The following December 5, the Party Congress reaffirmed the equality of all: Jews “should form part of Moroccan society.” Certain Jewish circles (first and foremost the communists under Leon Sultan, who had revived the party in 1943) and certain intellectuals argued in favor of a rapprochement between the two populations and attempted to uproot their fears, warning against “the separatist illusion” of the Zionist movement. In November 1955 in France, Mohammed V received a delegation of Moroccan Jews, and there were even a few Jews in Istiqlal. On the proclamation of independence on March 2, 1956, Jewish community leader David Berdugo wrote that the former regime had attempted “to inculcate

424  |  Jews in Arab Countries within us the false reality that we were different from our Muslim compatriots, our brothers in race and in blood. . . . We Jews should affirm unequivocally our Moroccan nationality.”169 The naming in 1956 of Leon Benzaken as Minister of Posts reinforced optimism. In fact, the WJC had applied pressure for this appointment in order to maintain good relations with the state and to keep the doors of the kingdom open. In 1956, Jewish emigration experienced a second spike: there were 60,000 departures in a single year, representing more than 20 percent of the community’s 1945 population. But the WJC’s calculation was shown to have been wrong: from summer 1956, Rabat forbade emigration to Israel. Behind the proclamations of brotherhood, the situation of working-class Jews deteriorated. A whole world separates the enlightened, urban bourgeoisie of the large city mellahs from the communities in the rural interior. Muslim emissaries traveled throughout the countryside, proselytizing against “buying from the Jews” in order to prevent financing Israel, which would equip itself with arms to fight Nasser’s Egypt. Isolated, those communities requested the protection of the caïds, or local chieftains, who protested that they were powerless to help. Following gestures of rapprochement that were never followed up, disdain— if not out and out hostility—reemerged, at the same time as ever greater pressures were applied to the educational system, with the intention of Arabizing it. What was true for Morocco was also the case in Tunisia, where the Jewish community evaporated without violent shocks, other than the riots of June 1967. Already by that date there remained no more than 23,000 Jews out of a community that had numbered more than 100,000 at the end of the Second World War. The illusion of symbiosis was disparaged. Geographer Pierre Flamand wrote in 1957: “In the south of Morocco, Jews cohabited with non-Jews . . . [but] such relations never encouraged a single community, that is, a willingness to live together.”170 The social gulf remained huge: in 1958, 95 percent of Moroccan Jewish children were in education, against merely 10 percent of Muslim children. On January 3, 1961, on the occasion of Nasser’s visit to Morocco to attend a conference of the Arab League, there were twenty anti-Jewish incidents in ten days. In June that year, the Fundamental Law defined Morocco as “an Arab and Muslim kingdom.” Despite the government’s assertions claiming not to recognize the Jewish/ Muslim distinction, and the appointment of some Jewish persons (as, in 1965, the Defense Minister’s Chief of Staff), the “lyrical illusion” was over. Here and there, some Jews were assaulted, at Mazagan the AIU school was burned down, and the ORT Director General was expelled without any concern for formalities. In 1962, former minister Leon Benzaken protested against the words of prominent revolutionary leader Allal al-Fassi to the effect that the Jews cannot be considered as Moroccans like their fellow citizens, but rather only as residents who

Captive Communities | 425 enjoy Moroccan protection; this signified that in reality, dhimma status has been resuscitated. As sociologist Doris Bensimon-Donath observed in 1968, “Despite certain reforms and efforts at modernization, the Jew remains a dhimmi.”171 At the beginning of the 1960s, several young Jewish girls were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. Many articles in the Moroccan press, such as the Istiqlal’s newspapers, evoked the “Zionist Hydra,” and by adopting antisemitic language, concerned themselves less and less with the Jew/Zionist distinction. As Saïd Ghallab noted, “Every day the Jew feels, at the deepest level inside, that he is undesirable.”172 He asked ORT students, “Can you picture yourselves, once your studies are finished, setting up as an architect in Morocco?” Their response: “The future is blocked for us here. Even the lowliest jobs are denied us here. None of us Jews feels he is at home here. There is no future, no social advancement for us.”173 What Pierre Flamand wrote about Berber Morocco can—with a few nuances—be more or less verified with regard to the entirety of the Arab world, and especially in Egypt. In 1957 he noted, concerning relations between Jews and Berbers in Morocco, that “the legal superiority of the Muslim rarely makes itself manifest through brutal acts or haughtiness. . . . But orders of precedence are always and everywhere respected. And such emotional hierarchies appear impregnable. They are predetermined and independent of the facts: Jew or Muslim, everyone knows the other ‘by intuition’ . . . and maintains disdain for him— passionate on the part of the Jew, and cool on the part of the Muslim. Such is the very essence of the spirit of segregation.”174 In 1955, community leaders in the Settat region reported: “The old roots of Muslim anti-Semitism are nowhere near gone. In Morocco we can hope for respect only from a French presence, whatever form it may take.” A civil administrator stated: “If France were to pull out, Moroccan Jews would try by any means they could to leave the country for Israel, France or elsewhere.”175 Unlike the case with Iraqi or Egyptian Jewries, it was not the Israeli-Arab conflict that rattled Moroccan Jewry, but rather the disappearance of the French presence, in particular after the “Declaration of Carthage” by Pierre Mendès France in July 1954. In 1955, twenty-five thousand Jews left Morocco for Israel, followed by another 36,000 in the first six months of 1956. This was a mass exodus, taking place against a backdrop of fear. In mid-May 1956, the French High-Commissioner to Morocco described the “flight” of Jews, “worried about their property and lives, who wished to leave Morocco quickly. The bad treatment currently inflicted on them (forced contributions, kidnappings, murders) could only incite them to depart.”176 Kidnappings of young girls and forced conversions worsened the climate. At the same time, in January 1961 during the visit of President Nasser to Casablanca, Jewish children were imprisoned by the police chief, a notorious antisemite, who was convinced that seeing Jewish schoolchildren on the sidewalks could displease the Egyptian Rais.177

426  |  Jews in Arab Countries In January 1961, the sinking of the Pisces, with the loss of the lives of more than forty Moroccan Jews, was prominently reported in the international media. It showed the Moroccan authorities not only that they could not prevent departures (which they already knew) but that international opinion could be affected by disasters of this sort. In order to avoid such mobilization of world public opinion and the tarnishing of Morocco’s image, Mohammed V was ready to revisit his policy. However, his sudden death, at the end of February 1961, deprived him of the chance to do so. His son, Hassan II, ascended the throne on March 3, 1961. Clearly understanding the determination to emigrate, Hassan II organized it to his profit, negotiating the departure of Jews at an initial tariff of $100 per person. The accord reached on November 25, 1961, allowed only two destinations: France and Canada. This was Operation Yakhin (from the name of one of the two pillars of King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem), financed above all by the United Jewish Appeal. The Operation ended in 1964 with the departure of 100,000 Jews. Morocco and Syria were the sole Arab countries that “sold” their Jews one by one. In Morocco, the king sought to manage domestic public hostility by limiting numbers to 120 per day, and by handling these departures in the greatest discretion. For each emigrant, Rabat demanded $250 (and a security of $500,000). The first Israeli emissaries had proposed $15 per person. In the end, for the first 26,000 immigrants, the United Jewish Appeal paid $100 each; the fee went up to $200 per head for immigrants above 26,000. Beyond 50,000, the fee was $250 per head. In total, more than $19 million was paid.178 Every three months, a representative of the king visited the Paris office of the HIAS (the US-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), in order to collect the money in cash. That said, Moroccan Jews were not the only Jews to be “purchased” one by one. In that period, world Jewry “redeemed” everyone in distress, including Romanian Jews for whom money was paid directly into the Swiss accounts of President Ceaușescu. In March 1948, the WJC, produced a third memorandum on Jews in Arab countries, denouncing forced contributions to “the Arab cause,” despoilment, and confiscations. Jewish organizations convened an international conference in New York on January 22, 1957. Mobilization continued through the 1960s, and was reinforced in January 1969 after several Jews accused of espionage for Israel were hanged in Baghdad. The vise continued to tighten around what remains of the Jewish communities. At Geneva in February 1969, the WJC convinced the French authorities to negotiate with Baghdad for the release of the last Iraqi Jews.179 The WJC continued its efforts throughout the period from 1968 to 1974 in order to save the country’s last Jews. In April 1971, the WJC denounced the trial being prepared against

Captive Communities | 427 Iraqi Jews, and set up an International Committee, based in Paris, to fight for the release of Middle Eastern Jews. Although the West had previously done little to mobilize for the defense of the last Oriental Jews and to protect them from silent ethnic cleansing, Western pressures mounted during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1948 London had refused to react in the face of the violation of Jews’ rights to live freely in their countries. In October 1949, the French Ambassador to Baghdad mentioned the attacks of which the Jews were victims, adding that the British remained impassive. “The denials and clarifications by the police were taken at face value and repeated to all and sundry.”180 Economic blackmail also played a role in the silence of the West, particularly when it came to Iraq, which had become a great oil power and the focus of substantial investment. In the same time period, France, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries declared themselves ready to accept Iraqi Jewish refugees.181 A number of Swiss parliamentarians participated in the establishment of the International Committee for the Release of Middle Eastern Jews. As reported in a Geneva newspaper, “Real atrocities are currently being committed in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, where the names of some prisons now resonate as ominously as those of German concentration camps of sinister memory, and today, in those three Arab countries, the creation of veritable ‘ghettos where death is not even deliverance’ has become synonymous with ‘final solution.’” In 1969, 19 Iraqi Jews were executed in public. The American press also rallied. On December 12, 1971, the New York Times published a first report on the Jews of Iraq, followed by a second one in February 1973. Several embassies intervened. The Baghdad hangings at the end of January 1969 aroused a widespread outcry. “Deprived of everything, expropriated, incarcerated without cause, humiliated, famished, how would the Iraqi Jews have been in a position to engage in the espionage activities of which they are accused?” asked Paris-based Le Figaro newspaper on February 1, 1969, denouncing the “wave of hysteria breaking out at present across Iraq.” In 1969, France’s Foreign Ministry gave its embassy the green light to grant visas to Iraqi Jews who request them, and asked the Iraqi government about the possibility “of these Israelites to be authorized to leave Iraq.”182 In February 1970, the French Ambassador met the Iraqi Health Minister and asked him about the situation of the Jewish community, the economic strangulation it was undergoing, and the interdictions on studying or of leaving the country.183 In April 1971, his successor reported that the Jews of Iraq whom he had just met have “assured me they feel that, to a great extent, they owe the ‘tranquility’ and ‘moral protection’ they enjoy to France’s Arab policies and the weight of French public opinion.”184 However, the situation remained unstable. Hardly did an upturn

428  |  Jews in Arab Countries occur when, a few months later, there were new grounds for worry. However, in order not to offend the Arab world, French diplomacy had to keep an “equal balance” between the situation of Arab Jews and “the situation of Palestinians in the occupied territories.”185 From 1948 to 1949, Israeli diplomats accused Arab countries of plunging Jewish communities into “a climate of terror.” Israel accuses Cairo, Damascus, and above all Baghdad of interning hundreds of their Jewish residents in concentration camps. It would, Israel stated, be more sensible to resettle the Arab refugees in the empty areas of the Arab world, which at the time was under-populated, and to liberate the Jewish detainees. Terrified Jewish communities feared that Israeli intervention would lead to retribution against them. For the same reason, they also feared the consequences of intervention by the United States. “They were conscious of the fate of minorities which were encouraged to make claims, and then abandoned to the wrath of their oppressors.”186 Israeli emissaries remained present in a number of Arab countries, but in a low-key manner. In 1956, by contrast, Israel protested publicly to the UN against the violence inflicted on Egyptian Jews.187 On several occasions, Jerusalem excoriated the “partiality” of the UN. In August 1968, Israel spoke of “double standards,” accusing the organization of “displaying indifference to the fate of Iraqi Jews, threatened with extermination,” while at the same time showing concern for the fate of the Arabs in the territories occupied by Israel, “who are not threatened by any danger.” Israel complained that the UN wanted to send a commission of inquiry to the occupied Palestinian territories but refused any “inquiry into the situation of Jews in the Arab countries . . . Arab leaders know that henceforth they risk nothing in oppressing the Jews, as the UN is perfectly indifferent to their fate.”188 On several occasions, the Knesset put the question of the last Jewish communities in Arab lands on its agenda. In summer 1969, the Knesset decided to plant a forest in honor of the Baghdad torture victims of January 1969, and in April 1971 called for the intervention “of all countries in the world,” in order to ease the suffering of the victims.189 In concert with Western embassies to Israel, it provided lists of Iraqi and Syrian Jews who were incarcerated, reported missing, or prevented from leaving.190 There was also material aid, as demonstrated by the escape network leading to the Iranian border, where an Israeli medical team took charge of the émigrés before sending them onward to Tehran, from where the Israeli Embassy could deal with them. By 1975, other than a few isolated cases (Morocco in particular, where 22,000 Jews remained, and Djerba Island in Tunisia), the Arab world had lost nearly all of its Jews. In 1974, after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Libyan head of state called on Libyan Jews settled in Israel to “return to their country.” The King of Morocco

Captive Communities | 429 did the same in 1975. Uniquely in the Arab world, he even allowed Moroccan Jews who had immigrated to Israel to visit their homeland with their Israeli passports. In November 1976, Morocco’s UN representative reiterated the call for Moroccan Jews to return: Today we see signs of disenchantment amongst the Jewish population of Israel, victims of a policy of uprooting. Statistics of emigration away from Israel speak for themselves. I would like to take this opportunity to recall the offer made by His Majesty Hassan II concerning the right of return of all Moroccans of the Jewish faith who emigrated to Israel following a systematic propaganda campaign. Full instructions have been given to our diplomatic representatives to facilitate their return. And I note with pleasure that a certain number of them have already responded with genuine enthusiasm to the call to return issued by His Majesty.191

Notes 1. CZA, C10/2440, May 1956. 2. The Jewish Chronicle, 19 March 1948. 3. CZA, C10/330, Paris, 18 June 1948. 4. CZA, S20/548. 5. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Tripoli 3 August 1949. 6. CZA, C10/535, 1951. 7. CZA, S25/6412, Tel Aviv, 6 March 1946. 8. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 21 June 1951. 9. CZA, C10/608, Tunisia, November 1951. 10. Cahiers de l’AIU, October 1948, 9. 11. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 226. 12. Ibid., 226–227. 13. Cf. Cahier spécial de l’AIU, May 1950–mid 1953, 39. 14. CZA, S20/539/1, 1949. 15. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1. 16. The Manchester Guardian, 7 March 1949, cited in N. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 519. 17. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, “Note regarding departure for Palestine”, October 1948. 18. CZA, Z6/611, December 1951. 19. CZA, C10/349, 1950. 20. CZA, C10/475, report by Jacques Lazarus. 21. Haim Abravanel, cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 229. 22. Ibid., 231. 23. Cited in Ilan Pappe, Le Nettoyage ethnique de la Palestine (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine) (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 276. Pappe gives no source.

430  |  Jews in Arab Countries 24. Cited in Haim Saadoun in La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam (Paris: Denoël, 2009), 367, note 2. 25. Cited in La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam, 118. 26. CZA, S32/122, Tripoli, 4 April 1950. 27. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26. 28. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 16, Marseilles, 20 December 1948. The report is also addressed to French authorities in Tunisia and the Governor-General of Algeria. 29. Yonah Cohen cited in La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam, 395, note 2. 30. Signed Yehiel Shlomo Kassar, in CZA, S6/4664/2 31. Cited in Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 161. 32. Cited in ibid., 198. 33. Cf. CZA, S6/5072, letter from Unger, 12 September 1949. 34. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Rabat, Francis Lacoste, 9 September 1948. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., Rabat, 29 August 1948. 37. CZA, S20/561. 38. Report of the World Jewish Congress, in CZA, C10/330, New York, 10 May 1949. 39. CZA, C10/535, Paris, 5 October 1951, letter to World Jewish Congress in London. 40. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Rabat, 3 June 1949. 41. Ibid., dossier 22, Casablanca, 11 September 1948. 42. Cited in Kenbib, “Juifs et Musulmans,” 671. 43. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 446. 44. Cited in Stillmann, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 151. 45. Cited in Gilbert Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah. La guerre israélo-arabe des récits (Paris: Sindbad, 2009), 84. 46. Cited in Abitbol, Le Passé d’une discorde, 444–445. 47. Saout el-Yeman, 18 December 1947. 48. CZA, S25/8004, Cairo, 1 February 1946. 49. Cahiers de l’Alliance, October 1946, 16. 50. Cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et croix gammée, 176. 51. Cahiers de l’Alliance, December 1956, 20. 52. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 278. 53. CZA, S6/7241. 54. Cited in American Jewish Congress, The Black Record, Nasser’s Persecution of Egyptian Jewry, New York, 1957, in CZA, Z5/5644. 55. CZA, S32/951, Cairo, 21 January 1948. 56. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 30 June 1947. 57. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644, Israeli Consulate, New York, 30 November 1956. 58. CZA, S20/539/1, October 1949. 59. Cf. for example, for Egypt, CZA, S6/6003. 60. CZA, S6/4668, Aden, 17 December 1947. 61. Ibid., 29 November 1947. Also cf. CZA, J112/1893. 62. CZA, S6/6023, March 1957. 63. CADN, French Embassy to Baghdad, dossier 13, Series B, 5 July 1967, report of P. Gorce.

Captive Communities | 431 64. CZA, C10/1134, report of American Jewish Committee, New York, March 1969. 65. Bulletin of Agence France Presse, 16 September 1969. 66. Ibid. 67. In CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, 20 June 1947. 68. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22. 69. Ibid., dossier 26, report from Oran, Algeria, 15 June 1948. 70. CZA, S20/539/1, summary of the Iraqi press, week of 2–8 May 1948. 71. Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah, 259. 72. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 273. 73. CZA, S6/4667, Aden, letter to the Jewish Agency, 18 December 1947. 74. CZA, S20/540. 75. CZA, S25/9032. 76. Ibid. 77. Cf. CZA, S25/4557. 78. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Oran, 15 June 1948. 79. Al-Sawadi, in CZA, S25/9033. 80. Ibid. 81. Interview of September 28, 1958 with Indian Journalist R.K. Karandjia, in Gamal Abdul Nasser, Speeches and Press Interviews 1958, Information Department, United Arab republic, Cairo, 402. Cited in Gilbert Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah (Arles: Editions Sindbad, 2009), 319. 82. Reported in Deutsche National Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung, Munich, May 1, 1964. Cited in Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 621. 83. Cited in Lewis, Juifs en terre d’islam, 621. Cf. Mallmann and Cüppers, Croissant fertile et croix gammée, 269. 84. CZA, S20/539/2. 85. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., Oran, 16 June 1948. 88. In Ghallab, Les Juifs vont en enfer, 2252. 89. CZA, S6/4578, Aden, 22 December 1947. 90. Cahiers de l’Alliance, June–July 1948, 13. 91. Ibid., October 1948, 9. 92. CZA, S32/1069, July 1948. 93. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1, report of the American Jewish Committee on the situation of Iraqi Jews, May 1948 to January 1949. 94. Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain: A Personal Account of Anglo-American Diplomacy in Palestine and the Middle East, cited in Stillmann, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 466. 95. CZA, S20/539/1, report of the American Jewish Committee, early 1949. 96. CZA, C10/316, Baghdad, 28 October 1949, French Ambassador to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 97. Ibid. 98. In Ghallab, Les Juifs vont en enfer, 2252. 99. Cited in Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country, 77–78. 100. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1.

432  |  Jews in Arab Countries 101. CZA, C10/316, Baghdad, 28 October 1949. 102. CZA, S20/539/1. 103. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, French Embassy at Baghdad, Pierre Gorce, 6 August 1969. 104. Le Monde, 9 February 1973. 105. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Rabat, 9 November 1948. 106. CZA, S20/540. 107. CZA, S6/6023, confidential report from the Jewish community, 2 July 1957. 108. Cf. CZA, S20/553, report of the AJDC, 14 February 1950. 109. CZA, S20/539/1, January 1949. 110. CZA, S20/540, 1949. 111. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 26, Oujda, June 1948. 112. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, 26 December 1964. 113. Ibid., letter of 24 November 1964. 114. CZA, C10/610, report of Grumbach (for the World Jewish Congress) in Morocco, 1946. 115. CZA, S20/539/1, January 1949. 116. CZA, S20/539/1, 10 October 1949. 117. CZA, C10/316, 28 October 1949. 118. CZA, S20/539/1, report of World Jewish Congress to the UN, early 1950. 119. Ibid. 120. Cf. CZA, Z6/148. 121. Cf. CZA, J112/1646, press review, October–November 1955. 122. Cf. the document in CZA, Z5/5644. 123. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, French Embassy in Iraq. 124. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644. 125. Cf. CZA, Z5/5645, 22 January 1957. 126. CZA, Z5/5644. 127. CZA, C10/3151. 128. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Casablanca, 21 September 1948. 129. Cf. CZA, S25/9031, report to the Jewish Agency from Cairo, 2 January 1946. 130. CZA, S25/9032. 131. CADN, Tunisia, Protectorate, Classification Bernard, Résidence Générale, Gabes, 25 May 1948. 132. CZA, S6/6003. 133. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, French Embassy at Baghdad, 31 July 1969. 134. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1, report of World Jewish Congress on Iraq, late 1949. 135. Cf. CZA, S25/3544, Cairo, 30 December 1945. 136. CZA, C10/1810, 12 January 1954. 137. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644, The Black Record. 138. In CZA, C10/2958, Sasson Khedouri, 14 September 1968. 139. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, French Embassy, 23 April 1970. 140. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18, Rabat, Résidence Générale, 3 June 1948. 141. CZA, S32/1069, July 1948. 142. CZA, S20/540.

Captive Communities | 433 143. 1949, in CZA, S20/540. 144. CZA, S20/540, 1949. 145. Cf. CZA, S6/4665, Joint, N.I. Miondel, 11 July 1947. 146. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 24, Rabat, 9 November 1948. See also CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, Ambassador Pierre Gorce, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, 19 February 1969. 147. CZA, S20/539/1. 148. Cahiers de l’Alliance (April–May 1951, 3), 149. Cf. Trigano, La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam, 41. 150. CZA, S32/951, Paris, 27 June 1949. 151. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644, The Black Record, 24–25. 152. CZA, S20/540. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid. 155. L’Arche, February 1962, “Such an everyday tragedy”, cited in Memmi, Juifs et Arabes, 94. 156. L’Arche, February 1961, cited in Colette Zytnicki, cited in Les Cahiers du judaisme, 32-1, 1999, 83. 157. Cited in Trigano, La Fin du judaisme, 123. 158. CZA, S25/9028, 27 September 1947. 159. According to the Alexandria Zionist movement, in CZA, S6/6003. 160. Cf. CZA, S20/540, World Jewish Congress, 1949. 161. Cf. CZA, S6/6023, Geneva, 2 April 1957. 162. Cf. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 332. 163. Cf. ibid.,326. 164. CZA, C10/2958. 165. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 285. 166. In CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 18. 167. Cahiers de l’Alliance, January 1951, 14. 168. In Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 321. 169. Le Jeune Maghrébin, 15 April 1956, 117. 170. In Cahiers de l’Alliance, December 1957, 5. 171. Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain, 119. 172. Ghallab, Les Juifs vont en enfer, 2252. 173. Ibid., 2254. 174. In Cahiers de l’Alliance, “What is the future of Jewish communities in Southern Morocco?”, December 1957, 6. 175. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Settat, 3 June 1955. 176. Ibid., 19 May 1956. 177. Cf. Saïd Ghallab, Les Juifs vont en enfer, 2252. 178. According to Ygal Bin Nun in Trigano, La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam, 353. 179. Cf. CZA, C10/2703, Paris, 5 August 1969. 180. CZA, C10/316, Baghdad, 28 October 1949, letter addressed to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. 181. CZA, C10/1158, Geneva, 18 February 1969. 182. CZA, C10, Paris, 30 April 1968 and Paris, 4 March 1969. See also CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Oslo, 2 March 1970.

434  |  Jews in Arab Countries

183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191.

CZA, C10, 14 February 1970. CZA, C10, 8 April 1971. CZA, C10, Baghdad, 11 January 1973. CZA, C10/316, Baghdad, 28 October 1949. CZA, Z5/5644, New York, 30 November 1956, intervention of Israeli delegate to the UN. Dispatch of AFP, 20 August 1968, in CADN, Series B, dossier 13. CZA, C10/3032, 5 November 1972. Cf. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Tel Aviv, 5 January 1972. Cited in Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 344.

12 Flight By the 1950s, the Jews of Morocco constituted the last great Jewish community

in Arab lands. The reforms of December 1947 allowed them to serve on the Governing Council, the only representative organ in which they could sit, but they were excluded from all of the country’s executive structures. As French colonial administrator Hubert Lyautey noted on repeated occasions, the Muslim populace remained concerned to retain symbolic superiority and effective domination over the Jews. There were, for example, no Jewish magistrates. As early as 1913 Lyautey had explained, in a letter addressed to the AIU, that the French authority’s concessions in favor of the Jews could not fail to displease “a very intelligent Muslim populace, jealously opposed to equal treatment of all Moroccan citizens.”1 In 1951 the sultan did not solicit the views of any members of the Jewish community when a new legislative code was being prepared.2 In the same year the WJC’s North African delegate noted that in Morocco, the Jews had to “remain second-level subjects with reduced rights, and enjoying no guarantee regarding such rights.”3 Inequality was the rule before French tribunals, since a Muslim could require the presence of three of his co-religionists in the jury, while a Jew could not do the same. In Egypt, the sidelining, more subtle, took the form of statelessness: with half of the community not holding Egyptian nationality, there were ample grounds for pushing them to depart after having deprived them of work. There was no formal discrimination as such, for the legislation applied equally to all foreigners; thus Cairo could not be accused of any violation of human rights, much less racism. From 1947, a series of laws pushed foreigners (with Jews in first place, although never explicitly mentioned) to leave the country. In 1963 Algeria would take measures of the same nature, in order to push aside foreigners and Jews. Algerian nationality was from then on reserved to those whose parents and paternal grandparents had Muslim personal status. As a consequence, the rare Jews who chose to remain in Algeria would not be able to acquire Algerian nationality. After the end of the First World War, Arab nationalism had more and more difficulty accepting communitarian autonomy. But it was above all after the Second World War that Jewish communities in the Arab world would lose their internal

436  |  Jews in Arab Countries freedom. In Iraq, in 1949, employees of Jewish institutions (whether scholarly, cultural, or religious) were exiled, placed under house arrest or even imprisoned. Frightened, many resigned without being replaced. The situation was less brutal in Egypt, but there too, upon independence, the Jews lost a measure of their community autonomy. This process, aimed at events in civil life linked to personal status (birth, marriage, inheritance, guardianship), was structured by a series of laws in 1926, 1929, and 1950 defining Egyptian nationality and citizenship; in 1955 religion-based jurisdictions were ended, as were confessional tribunals the following year. Foreign protection of religious minorities was abolished. Schools, hospitals, and social organizations of a confessional nature would thereafter be governed by a unified legal code. The communitarian freedom of which Egypt was a model between 1880 and 1950 was no more. In July 1958, the Tunis Jewish Community Council was dissolved. Its property was transferred to a provisional management committee, pending elections to the administrative council of the future Tunis Religious Association. Within a few years, 70,000 Jews would leave Tunisia, with 40,000 going to Israel and 30,000 to France. In Morocco in the 1950s, despite the continuation of communities’ internal autonomy, the Jews remained subject to the justice of the Makhzen without having the benefit of judges or assessors of their own faith. From independence, in March 1956, the sultan attacked, in priority, the strongest symbol of this autonomy—the schools. Nationalists for a long time had accused the AIU of consorting with the colonialists and of serving “the Zionist cause.” On top of the pressures from the Istiqlal Party and the Royal Palace now came additional pressures, from the Left, accusing the AIU of having created a wide gap between Jews and Muslims. Many nationalists might accept the Jews, but on condition that they become de-Judaized. This left them only one possible choice: departure. In many Arab countries, under the pressure of the conflict in Palestine, even the past started undergoing de-Judaization. In Egypt, the work of Benzion Tarragan on the Jews of Alexandria, written in Hebrew in the 1930s and translated into French in 1936, was withdrawn from sale in 1945 and then banned in 1948.4 In a report submitted to the UN in 1951, the WJC stated that “every Jewish community, in each and every Arab state, henceforth lives in fear and without any assurances about its security or its liberties in future. Moreover, certain Arab states hinder Jewish emigration, in particular towards Israel.”5 In November 1947, Mohamed Hussein Heykal Pasha, head of the Egyptian delegation to the UN, issued a warning: “The lives of a million Jews in Islamic countries would be compromised by partition [of Palestine]. If Arab blood is spilled in Palestine, then Jewish blood, necessarily, will be spilled elsewhere in the world in spite of sincere efforts of governments to prevent such reprisals.”6 In August 1948, the Jerusalem Post evokes “900,000 Jewish hostages” under “Arab law in the Middle East, not benefitting from any status or other protection.”7

Flight | 437 The theme is trotted out again and again from 1945 onward. The Jews had become the hostages of the conflict in Palestine, and they paid the price in all Arab countries, except those still under colonial rule. The pressure did not let up during the 1950s. The 1953 Kibya affair involved a bloody reprisal by the Israeli Army against the Jordanian village of Kibya, following the murder of a woman and her two young children in Israel. The Israeli action resulted in seventy deaths and set off a wave of anger and threats against the Jewish communities of the Arab world.8 Were these Jews hostages? This is a word that must often be understood in the most direct and unambiguous sense, as in Egypt where, in November 1956, the British consul at Port-Saïd reported that a member of each Jewish family was held hostage and incommunicado.9 In December 1956, after an order for the expulsion of 21,000 Jews (out of 50,000) within a timeframe of seven to thirty days, Cairo holds 1,900 imprisoned as hostages. The governments of Syria and Iraq employ the same methods. It is, they say, a question of not reinforcing the Israeli enemy. “No Jew will have authority to leave the country as long as the Palestine problem has not been solved,” reports the French Ambassador to Baghdad in March 1969.10 This was followed, a few months later, by restrictions on the issuing of passports and visas, and interdictions (always masked) on leaving the country. Without any need to promulgate specific legislation, every government agency (“all powerful and hostile to them [i.e., the Jews],” remarked the ambassador) knew how to proceed.11 The government sought to avoid “the emigration of senior scientific employees,” from an aging community that hardly contained any such people in any event. Following worldwide reactions to the Baghdad hangings in January 1969, the Iraqi government seemed convinced, as the French Embassy reported in February 1970, that it should deal strongly with the Jews.12 A similar process encouraged the Syrian government to have Albert Elia, the Secretary General of the Lebanese Jewish community, picked up in Beirut in September 1971 so it could move him to Damascus.13 In the period from 1948 to 1970, the last Jewish communities, close at hand, became the object of vengeance. This posed little risk, apart from appeals to “international opinion.” By making employers dismiss people, jobs were eliminated; only nationals could be recruited. In Egypt, some Jews were chased out of their residences because, under martial law, they were not allowed to live near government offices or military zones.14 In Iraq, under cover of martial law (decreed in May 1948), thousands of Jewish houses were the object of brutal searches: “Smashed walls, broken furniture, torn curtains, money stolen . . . in most cases, the victims of searches are taken to the police station where, under threat of being locked up, they are forced to pay large sums.”15

438  |  Jews in Arab Countries The fate of wealthy families was even more painful, especially if they had connections with Palestine, such as a member of their family living there, or ownership of property. As “Zionists,” they were taken by the hundreds before martial law councils, which imposed fines and terms of imprisonment following beatings and torture sessions. Between 1948 and 1951, nighttime searches were frequent, with “furniture destroyed for the pleasure of destroying it, money and jewelry confiscated,” arrests and “more refined forms of torture” in order to force people to pay. Sometimes persecutory measures were more focused. In Yemen, in March 1946, the Imam Yahia forbade the entry into the country of Jewish doctors who came to aid refugees awaiting permission to emigrate.16 In Iraq, in the autumn of 1948, it was suggested to put untrained young Jews into the frontlines against Israel.17 In 1950, pressure was applied on companies operating in the country to dismiss their Jewish employees, and on trading companies and banks to replace Jewish employees with Muslims. In Iraq, social services (including clinics, hospitals, and sanitariums) were pressurized to abandon their Jewish patients. Jewish schools were deprived of qualified teachers, who were assigned in priority to state schools; non-diploma holders were forbidden to work as teachers.18 In 1958, just at the time that enormous reserves of petroleum are discovered, the Libyan Government forces the seventeen foreign oil companies to employ only Libyan nationals and solely Muslims. Foreigners and Jews are excluded, although young Jews, better educated and qualified than young Arabs, might have aspired to such qualified positions. The persecution persists over two decades—through the 1950s and the 1960s—and includes the sequestration of Jewish property. In Iraq, the 1948 émigrés had one month to return before the state definitively seized their property. Baghdad planned to make the Jewish community cover the costs of the war that Iraq started against Israel, as well as the costs of aid for the “50,000 Arab refugees in Iraq” (which, however, never materialized in anything like such large numbers). In 1956, Egypt expropriated the property of the better-off Jews. In 1957, an Egyptian Jewish notable recounted how, detained in Cairo’s Bassia Prison, he was hung by the wrists and beaten by secret service agents for three days running in order to get him to admit where he had hidden his fortune.19 Zionist activists were arrested and several died under torture, although in fact throughout the Arab world all prisoners—Jews and non-Jews alike—are tortured.20 In thinly disguised terms, Arab leaders confirmed that the Jews must leave. This discourse was never made explicit, because leaders overtly promoted the values of non-discrimination on religious grounds and the equality of all before the law. In 1951, at the threshold of Libyan independence, the future prime minister,

Flight | 439 Mahmud al-Muntasir, reaffirmed that the Jews would be protected, while also stating “there can be no future for them in Libya.”21 In the same year, the Résidence Générale in Morocco noted the barely dissimulated wish of many Muslims to get the Jews to leave. This climate of anxiety compromised any future. Other than in Egypt, this pressure almost never ended with an out-and-out expulsion; rather, one only encouraged departure. It sufficed to gently carry out economic strangulation: to not renew the business license of a merchant or artisan, to block an import license, to hinder hiring, to require a level of Arabic not required even of Muslim applicants, and so on. It was, as Albert Memmi wrote, “a disingenuous and sometimes overt atmosphere of segregation.”22 Arab political leaders expressed themselves more freely in private. In January 1954, according to an informant of the WJC, “the Syrian head of state as well as Ibrahim Husseini, the former chief of police, more than once expressed the wish to see all the Jews leave the country on condition that they not return.”23 In 1954 the Western press reported “the Egyptians are organizing to throw the Jews out of the country.”24 In 1955, before the Suez affair, a “Department of Jewish Affairs” was created, with the goal of gradually eliminating the Jews from economic life.25 This was especially the case after Nasser took power in 1954, with more and more intimidation, arrests, blackmailing, and extortion of money. Yet, for the moment, there was still no formal measure of expulsion per se. At the end of 1956, the Jewish Agency and JOINT still evoked the “pressures by the Egyptian authorities to force Egypt’s Jews to leave their country.”26 Jewish emigration from Morocco to Israel got under way right at the end of the Second World War. In rural areas, from one day to the next Muslims saw their Jewish neighbors disappear. The same process was at work in Tunisia, where a small portion of Jewish youth decided to join the national homeland; as elsewhere in North Africa, it was generally the youngest and poorest who were most anxious to leave. In Libya, Dr. Fajerman, of the OSE reported that the Jewish community was seized with a state of intoxication as soon as they heard the rumor that “all the Jews were going to be immediately transported to Israel.” There were “demonstrations as enthusiastic as they were unjustified on the part of the excited crowd who followed us during our visits to Jewish institutions in the ghetto.”27 Although biased, such testimony highlights the state of mind of people who have been traumatized by the 1945 pogroms. At the start of 1949, the Jewish director of an important British bank in Baghdad advised an informant: “I, and every Iraqi Jew I know, are ready to leave our positions, our homes and our property, advantages and privileges, just to be able to leave the country and be free. Every penny I earn, other than what I spend on food and contributions to Jewish charitable institutions, goes to ‘voluntary’ contributions to Arab charitable works, and to taxes and charges imposed by the

440  |  Jews in Arab Countries government, in particular to bribes to the police and armed forces in order to obtain a minimum of security.”28 Throughout the 1950s, the latent climate fueling departures would not let up. According to the Renseignements Généraux (the French security services) in Morocco in late 1955, Jewish communities feared the impending independence of the country, specifically “the fate that can await them in an independent Morocco.” The report underscored the particular fear of young Jews of being enrolled into the Moroccan Army, where they could be required to fight alongside Nasser’s Egyptian troops against “their brothers residing currently in Israel.”29 This fear encouraged Zionism, as the geographer Pierre Flamand notes in 1957. The “complete gathering together” in Israel is, according to him, “a goal which corresponds to the wishes of the greatest number, all the more powerfully in that the circumstances do not encourage optimism.”30 Anxious communities feared being unable to leave without delay.31 In 1951, the Libyan community pushed for the right of emigration to be enshrined in the constitution.32 This latent anxiety was fed by a government that opened and closed the door arbitrarily: “No governmental measure officially forbids the issuance [of passports] but when it comes to actual execution (is this a watchword, or ill will?), the brakes are applied to the maximum regarding any issuance, with all sorts of excuses invented,” according to a late 1951 report by the Zionist Federation of Morocco. In the small localities, applicants were simply turned away, explained the head of the Ouezzane Jewish community.33 After independence the situation grew even worse: Muslims obtained passports, the Jews only sometimes did so, and then only after many months. Fear discouraged many from even applying. On the government side, the explanation was that it would not be possible to let military service-aged men leave. But the hostility toward the idea of the Jews departing was also associated with the worry, given the importance of the Jewish elites, that this emigration would compromise the future of the country. Nationalists, for their part, explicitly refused to reinforce the State of Israel. As Moroccan nationalist leader Allal Al-Fassi declared: “This would be to offer hundreds of rich and healthy Zionists to Israel in order to inhabit an Arab land and make war against our Arab brothers: our indulgence has its limits!”34 In September 1959, the breaking off of postal relations with Israel leaves tens of thousands of people without news of their family members settled in the Jewish state; until that time, some 30,000 letters went back and forth in each direction every month. Iraqi and Syrian Jews were forbidden to leave, even “the ill, the children and students.”35 Some patients died due to the inability to be treated outside the country. Since the 1940s, illegal emigration to Israel had never halted. It was particularly noted from Syria and Iraq via Iran or the mountains of Kurdistan, with the

Flight | 441 help of Arab and Kurdish guides. Neither the police nor the army was able to halt the flow, which was handled by the Zionist movement as well as Mossad agents. Between 1956 and the end of 1961, clandestine emigration also flowed from Morocco. This was quite open, and in fact a third of the Jewish community had already disappeared by the time of independence. In 1955, a massive exodus— closely linked to decolonization—emptied the largest Jewish community in the Arab world. Just six months after Moroccan independence, Jews were forbidden to go to “Palestine” and those who were there were summoned to return. At that time, emigration occurred in a totally clandestine context. This did not prevent 18,000 Jews from leaving the kingdom for Israel between 1957 and the end of 1960. The existence of this emigration was suddenly revealed by the sinking of the Pisces, between Tangiers and Gibraltar on January 10, 1961, causing the death of all 44 immigrants aboard as well as 2 crew. At the end of 1961 the new sovereign, Hassan II, legalized departures by Operation Yakhin, which continued up to the end of 1964. From 1950 to 1975, one of the Jewish world’s principal struggles would be to obtain freedom of departure from Arab countries. Yet officially, the Jews were free to leave, something that the Iraqi authorities cited regularly. Based on these publicly reiterated assurances, half of the Iraqi Jewish community registered in 1969 for emigration, but the government turned a deaf ear, blowing hot and cold, and then cold again. Exit from the region’s non-Arab countries, Turkey and Iran, remained open.36 Several Western countries, including France, worked discretely to protect the last Oriental Jews. Quietly, the French Embassy in Baghdad met the community’s leaders, but without offering any illusions.37 Some Jewish émigrés went to Europe. This was true of some 40 percent of Egyptian departures in 1957. It was also the case for half of the émigrés from Tunisia, who above all headed for France. Two factors favored emigration to France: the use of the French language, and the full employment then prevailing in metropolitan France. The other half migrated to Israel. As for Moroccan Jewish emigrants, some 80 percent went to Israel. In Algeria the proportion was the inverse: departures for Israel amounted to 20 percent. The apogee of Jewish emigration from the Arab world to Israel was between 1947 and 1960. In 1949, the first full year of independence of the Jewish state, the majority of the 239,000 arrivals came from the Muslim world. In 1950, the quotas for Oriental Jews—which under the British Mandate had envenomed intra-Jewish relations—were lifted. In four years, from 1948 to 1951, 560,000 out of 688,000 arrivals were from Muslim countries. In 1949, the Zionist Federation of Morocco had warned that Israel could not accept all candidates: the old, the sick, the criminal and the “adventurers” were

442  |  Jews in Arab Countries not wanted, because they represented an excessive burden on the young state, which had to make choices.38 This was also the view of the French authorities in Morocco, who considered that the country risked “finding itself encumbered with unnecessary or unproductive people . . . or an underworld comprising incapable people from Morocco.”39 Far from being a new issue, the question of migrant selection had already been raised when the British issued immigration certificates. In Aden in 1930, for example, the Jewish Agency had prioritized those below 35 and the healthy. In 1949, the State of Israel let it be known, through a number of channels, how “disappointed” it was by the “human quality” of migrants from Morocco.40 As Dr. Fajerman, on assignment in North Africa for the OSE, wrote: “Israel should only receive healthy people . . . who would not be a burden for the country, but instead an aid.” Fajerman recommended a complete medical examination (which on a priority basis meant checking for syphilis, trachoma, and tuberculosis). He intended this to apply to all communities in Arab lands.41 The health reports on the Moroccan Jewish population, for example, were staggering. Medical selection had in the first place the goal of impeding the migration of tuberculosis cases; these were eliminated from the list on the spot. If the carrier was a child, the entire family was prevented from leaving. In October 1951, in Morocco, the aliyah committee ruled that “no ill Jew, or one carrying a communicable disease, may immigrate to Israel.”42 Other parameters were taken into consideration as well, in first place occupational, with the priority being given to young and qualified workers. Israeli norms became stricter and stricter. In February 1953 the Moroccan French Administration reports that the Jews of Berguent “present hardly any interest for the Israeli authorities,” with the exception of single men or women who, from the age of eighteen and above were “accepted without restriction.” Married men were accepted on condition of having a manual trade (other than tailors or shoemakers).43 In 1952, the French chief medical officer of the Agadir region raged against Zionist officials who “want to ensure that emigrants are in excellent condition and free of tuberculosis or syphilis, and who want to leave the refuse to us, washing their hands of it.”44 The Jewish Agency and the State of Israel tried on several occasions to control the flow, dealing with several different priorities and urgent situations. Who should be taken in first? Isolated inhabitants of the camps in Aden, or those in Cyprus? The “displaced persons” stuck in Germany? Would it not contravene “Zionist ideals” to selectively choose immigrants, if the “misfortunes of people are actually the mute result of politics?”45 After May 1948, the State of Israel had to choose between priority flows: Romania? Yemen? “DP” camps in Europe? Iraq? The question of selective immigration would fuel debate for a long time,

Flight | 443 especially when, in the course of the 1950s, the Jews of Morocco suspected that the Zionist agencies, citing health reasons, did not want them. From September 1948, the mass arrival of Yemeni Jews to Israel provoked a sort of stupefaction: witnesses were struck by their state of health and their clothing, worn out through poverty and their long wanderings. “Numerous, dirty, with many injuries, haggard faces and completely silent,” recounts Tudor Parfitt. “Even the crying of the children was difficult to make out. It was difficult for the Israelis to understand their ‘passivity.’”46 The cultural shock was also huge for these Jews, who arrived into a state modeled by Europe and the Ashkenazi world. “It is known that some of those who went to settle in Palestine went back home to Iraq,” noted the Jewish Agency in 1949, “while many of those who remained felt much closer to the Palestinian Arabs than to their Western co-religionists.”47 Generally pious, Maghreb Jews encountered an Ashkenazi Jewry that was less religious and more remote from the Jewish messianic dream, and was moreover often inclined to share the racist prejudices of Europe. Thus, in 1961 at the opening of Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt described the scene: “Above, the judges, the elite of Germany Jewry. Below them, the prosecutors, Galician but still European. All organized by police who are far from reassuring, who speak only Hebrew and are of the Arab type, and sometimes particularly brutal in appearance. They obey any order given to them. And at the doors, the Oriental public, as if one were in Istanbul or some other semi-Asiatic country.”48 The question of “Sephardic identity” is not a new one. The World Conference of Sephardic Organizations (using “Sephardic” in the strict sense of the word: Jews of Spanish origin) was held in Paris in November 1951. It brought together fifty-two communities or organizations from twenty-eight countries.49 The awareness of belonging to a specific Jewry—one containing both Mizrahi (Oriental) and Sephardic (Judeo-Spanish) dimensions—appears clearly. An AIU delegate recalled that during a meeting of the organization’s Central Committee, the issue of the “forgotten million” was raised. This was the expression by which Jews of North Africa and the Middle East were beginning to be described.50 In 1951, Moroccan Jews living in Israel attempted to explain the cultural shock that could be experienced by a young immigrant taken under the wing of the Jewish Agency.51 Part of the shock concerned different religious practices, and the extent of illiteracy, with a significant portion of Moroccan Jewish youth remaining uneducated (in 1948 out of 55,000 Jewish children of school age, barely 24,000 attended school). Even by 1960, 43 percent of the Jews of the Cherifian kingdom could neither read nor write; this rate fell to 18 percent for those between 10 and 14 years of age, but was greater than 45 percent for those above 30, and reached 59 percent for those in their forties.52

444  |  Jews in Arab Countries The notion of a massively literate population was thus an illusion, at least for Morocco. But it was precisely this group of immigrants who would experience the heaviest failure in the new state. Moroccan Jews who—from the perspective of the French protectorate authorities—were acculturated within the Arab world, were marginalized by Jews of European origin, who called them Maroco sakin (Moroccans with knives), an allusion to their elevated rate of criminality. Describing young Jewish authors of Moroccan origin in Israel, Haïm Zafrani evoked the “young poets whose message . . . conveys the murdered soul, the blunted or humiliated culture and the hard conditions of existence of a ‘second’ diaspora.”53 Oriental Jews accumulated disappointment and discouragement in their dealings with a state that was still European in its structures, values, and way of functioning. In addition, some Israeli officials were able to imagine the disappointment that would be felt by Iraqi Jews when they arrived in a state marked by Soviet influences.54 At the beginning of the 1950s, around 10 percent of Moroccan Jews who had already emigrated abandoned the State of Israel and returned to their native land. This trend in fact started in 1949, in the Marseilles transit camps, which housed both European and North African emigrants. Beyond cultural, academic, and social problems, the disdainful attitude of a portion of Ashkenazi Jews also must be taken into account. Iraqi Jews, with their high socio-cultural level, also came up against this.55 In August 1960, the Israeli Minister of Education reminded the Knesset that 62 percent of Jewish births in the country were within “Oriental” families, but only 12 percent of children from that community entered upper secondary school; the proportion was 50 percent for children of European Jews.56 Jews from the Oriental world felt that the state did not consult them. In addition to this perception of discrimination (some even spoke of segregation), there were rumors—or actual scandals—which placed Oriental Jewry in an inferior light. This was shown in what was called the “Yemeni baby affair”; it was said that some of these children had been kidnapped upon arrival, in order to be given to childless Ashkenazi families.57 As noted in January 1947 by an official of the Libyan religious Zionist movement, “The Ashkenazi hold key positions, and they give no assistance whatsoever to the Sephardi. Such an attitude is able to discourage our youth. Perhaps you think that the olim [immigrants] from Libya don’t need to be looked after, and that they are less interesting than those from Europe? That would be a grave error. We have the same needs as the DPs [displaced persons] from Europe. The same rights, as well, as all other Jews. . . . We demand equal treatment.”58 In August 1949, the French administration in Morocco, relaying the comments of Jewish emigrants, noted: “The Jews of Central Europe occupy all the important positions in the new State.”59 But there will be no question, stated René

Flight | 445 Cassin, addressing the Congress of Sephardi Jewry in 1951, of accepting even the slightest segregation: “No racism, neither against the Jews nor within Jewry! We have suffered too much from racism to allow even the tiniest drop of this poison to infect our relations with any of our brothers.”60 Moroccan immigration, often religious, has to lower its expectations rapidly. From October 1949, a number of recently arrived Moroccan families already wanted to leave. The French Renseignements Généraux or security services in Morocco noted: “Given their nationality of origin, the hardest work is assigned to them. They are particularly resentful of their co-religionists’ attitude towards them.”61 In August of the same year, in Marseilles, a French official related the tensions between North African immigrants and Polish and Romanian immigrants, and the disdain of the latter for “African Jews who are dirty, unhealthy and illiterate.” The tension did not dissipate upon arrival in Israel: “This is not the paradise which was expected.”62 The transit camp in Israel constituted another frequently mentioned trial. In 1951, in a text entitled “From the Mellah to the Kibbutz,” Moroccan Jews settled in Israel reported on the “DDT treatment” and the “collective discipline” of the Athlit quarantine camp, where resentment arose against “the government of Ben-Gurion, who transported them 5000 kilometers only to let them vegetate in barracks where women in coveralls mingled with card-players.” Exasperated, one head of family “speaks of nothing other than revolts and coups, excited by agents of the Religious Bloc, who have pledged the downfall of the Ben-Gurion government.” The tone mounts, as people are further exasperated by the disdain of Ashkenazim, the cost of living and so on. To that can be added difficult jobs: “Clearing the fields of stones, paving the roads with stones, drilling in the desert for water! No sooner do Moroccans who back home worked with scales and scissors grimace, then immediately the whole country, in one voice, accuses them of laziness. . . . Such unhappy scapegoats, accused of all the sins of Israel, quickly think themselves persecuted.”63 By the end of 1949, the problems of integration are sufficiently serious for the JOINT and the Jewish Agency to establish the Malben Association, set up to aid newcomers experiencing major social problems. However, these sorts of difficulties did not affect all Jewish immigrants from the Arab Middle East. On the contrary, Zionist officials were delighted by the arrival of Iraqi Jews, highlighting their high level of education and, often, mastery of several languages.64 It is also important to underscore that during the 1950s, Israel had to integrate twice as many immigrants as its own 1948 population. Neither the UN nor any other international organization helped (although in December 1949 the UN created United Nations Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA to assist Palestinian refugees—a structure that exists to this day). Israeli leaders emphasized

446  |  Jews in Arab Countries the assistance that its population spontaneously provided (in addition to governmental assistance). For example, in November 1950, thousands of volunteers offered to house children of arriving Libyan Jews living in the maabarot (transit camps of prefabricated structures or tents) for the winter months.65 The pejorative view toward them provoked profound unease among Moroccan Jews. Many fought against this image, such as community leader Prosper Cohen who, in late 1949, spoke of “habitual slanders” expressed by officials and reported “by a semi-official newspaper” that maintained that 80 percent of this population carries tuberculosis or syphilis. Why, Cohen demanded, did not the author of such rumors inquire about the assignment “of these tuberculosis and syphilis carriers to infected neighborhoods . . . where their diseases find breeding grounds just as favorable as the slums of Casablanca?”66 Nonetheless, integration problems, which the French authorities of Morocco followed attentively, could not be denied. In July 1949, for example, Albert Vauthier, French chargé d’affaires in Tel Aviv, wrote to the Quai d’Orsay that “the absorption of new immigrants presents serious problems for the Israeli Government,” which decided to slow the rate of immigration or at least to organize it better.67 Yet, even the leaders of Moroccan Jewry did not have a good image of those immigrants. In 1950, one of them, Isaac Abbou, confirms “It is an incontestable fact that a great majority of the people emigrating from Morocco to Israel were the refuse of the mellahs, whose only occupations consisted of dubious activities.” Yet, the very same official affirmed that the Ashkenazi/Oriental antagonism is a nasty stereotype: “It is even grotesque to hear from some of these ‘returnees’ that the State of Israel is nothing other than a Polack State, claiming in addition that all sorts of favors and advantages are only accorded to Central European Jews.”68 This climate accounts for the resentment of many Moroccan Jews toward the State of Israel. Their aliyah in fact declines at the beginning of the 1950s. Was this the impact of returnees (10 percent of emigrants ended up leaving Israel), who were above all those with lower professional training? In January 1956, a French report described immigrants “of greatly reduced physical and intellectual capacities,” of little utility to Israeli society, which could obtain “no benefit from these ‘people of modest means’ who were the involuntary cause of supplementary expenditures on the part of the country.”69 The report even states that military training of these recruits required twice as much time as for other recruits. The Arab governments were aware of these difficulties, and exploited them through propaganda inciting Jews from Arab countries to return home. One example, among hundreds, was the appeal launched by Radio Damascus in February 1955: How Israel treats Oriental Jews! Brother Arabs, the Zionists have developed the habit of transferring Jewish emigrants, and particularly those from North Africa, to remote colonization areas situated near the border zones. During

Flight | 447 the course of last week, several of them left these areas in order to besiege the Jewish Agency in Haifa and demand to be returned to their countries. One of them declared: ‘We did not emigrate out of fear of the Arabs, but rather were seduced by the clever propaganda of the Jewish Agency, which promised us a better life; our Arab cousins wept as they bid us farewell.’70

In October 1951, the French consul in Haifa cabled Paris that he was “assailed every day by Moroccan Jewish emigrants wanting to go home; the Moroccans are the ones who adapt with the most difficulty to this country, where existence is presently very tough.”71 He calls on the French authorities to exercise greater control over departures to Israel. The history of Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel is marked with returns. For example, most of the Bilu pioneers who arrived from Russia between 1882 and 1884 did not remain. A portion of the first aliyah (1882–1900), and even more of the second (1904–1914), left the country. Between 1908 and 1918, some of the Yemeni Jews chose to return to their home country, fleeing discrimination imposed by Ashkenazi society. “During roughly the past 18 months, we have witnessed an inverse exodus,” noted the Marseilles police in November 1953.72 Between 1949 and 1953, the French administration recorded 20,019 emigrants to Israel and 2,466 returns (12 percent), a rate that undergoes major reduction starting in 1954. There is even a return to Israel of emigrants who had already immigrated there once before.73 A document from the Sao Paulo (Brazil) Jewish community indicates that for the years 1948–1949, aggregating people from all origins, there were 341,857 arrivals in Israel and 15,008 departures of ex-immigrants, that is hardly 5 percent.74 Israel’s leadership wonders about the reasons for such returns. On the Arab side, it is suggested that the Jewish Agency had manipulated the emigrants, dazzling them with images of castles in the Holy Land. This was also advanced by a number of angry Moroccan Jews.75 Others, on the contrary, were highly critical of Jews who “imagined that the country was filled with palaces and cabarets,” as one wrote from Jerusalem in 1949, “and did not understand that their lot would be hard work and a frugal life,” complaining about those unwilling to do agricultural work, preferring “to be unemployed in town rather than to go to the villages.”76 Returnees to Morocco often presented serious social problems. The State of Israel tried to contain the damage caused by this counterpropaganda. But the protectorate authorities also attempted to stem the flow of returnees, considering that they would be “very poorly received” by Zionist circles as well as the “Muslim milieu,” who would, in the view of the military administrator of the Meknes region in July 1949, be quick to accuse these émigrés of “having borne arms against the Arabs.”77 The tension is such that the Jewish Agency decides to have emigration candidates from Morocco and Tunisia sign an engagement that they will only count

448  |  Jews in Arab Countries on themselves, and that they will repay any debts contracted in Israel in the event they wish to return to their native lands.78 As well, the Jewish Agency requires those who wish to return to Israel sign a document obliging the now former aliyah immigrant to accept agricultural work and not request the advantages of new immigrants (besides social security), and to reimburse the Jewish Agency for his or her travel costs.79 The calls for exclusion, repeated in part of the Arab world, lead—sometimes only eventually—to threats of extermination. In Iraq, the years 1945–1947 see a return to the violence of the 1933–1941 period. In Egypt, Libya, and Syria, demonstrations multiply in which the crowds scream “Yahudi, Sayunni, Bannate El Kelb!” (Jews, Zionists, Sons of Bitches!); every Jew is a “Zionist,” and thus a criminal, under the penal code of most of these countries. By the 1960s and 1970s, Arab propaganda comes to use the inverse argument, calling on Oriental Jews to rise up against “criminal Zionism.” Such propaganda is modeled on the communiqué of the Association of Iraqi Jews, published in Baghdad on April 10, 1970, which through the voices of its members who have “returned from the hell of Israel” calls on its Arab co-religionists who have emigrated to Israel “to revolt against Israeli leaders, lackeys of imperialism, and to institute in Palestine a democratic state where understanding between the different communities would reign.” The communiqué further exhorts “Arab Jews not to let themselves be expelled from their countries of origin and also exhorts world Zionism to stop its charlatanism . . . as well as its interference in the affairs of Jews.”80 The planned policy of banning is not expulsion, but exclusion in stages, enshrined in the law and in contradiction with prior legislation. In Iraq, the 1925 constitution guaranteed the rights of the Jewish minority, as did the Declaration of Minorities of July 13, 1932, prior to the admission of Iraq to the League of Nations. The law of March 4, 1950, depriving Iraqi Jews of their nationality should they leave the country, violated these provisions. In 1949, Prime Minister Nuri Saïd states that it is necessary to take steps for “the destruction of the State of Israel before it can become solidly established, and moreover, in order to exterminate the Iraqi Jewish community.”81 By 1949, the Jewish community of Syria, which counted some 30,000 people at the end of the war, was reduced to 9,500, in the two bastions of Damascus and Aleppo. Two years earlier, riots reduced eighteen synagogues to ashes, and 15,000 people emigrated. From 1948, Jews could neither sell their property nor leave the country. In 1953, bank accounts are blocked. Palestinian refugees are rehoused in Damascus and Aleppo in apartments confiscated from Jewish families. To be sure, no Jew-specific legislation was adopted; governments ducked the trap of expulsion, having in mind the Nazi precedent and its impact on world public opinion.

Flight | 449 In Syria, hindrances and obstacles multiply, people are exhausted and discouraged, daily life is embittered. As noted, a Jew can neither buy real estate nor obtain an import license. Students can neither enroll in university nor leave the country to study overseas. Identity cards feature the word “Jew” in large letters. The property of Jewish organizations is requisitioned for the benefit of Arab refugees. Jewish children are not admitted to Damascus schools. Had they been admitted they would not have been able to attend, for they are forbidden to leave the Jewish quarter. By 1954, only 6,000 Jews remain in Syria, of whom 4,000 are in Damascus. Collective property and symbols are no more respected than individual property: one of the roads to the Damascus airport is constructed atop the site of the Jewish community’s ancestral cemetery. In 1964, a decree forbids Jews to be more than 4 km from their homes. Clandestine emigration continues to Lebanon and Turkey, and from there, often, onward to the State of Israel. After the Second World War, the Iraqi Jewish community is more and more perceived as a national minority. Judeo-Muslim relations, rarely good, nevertheless remain acceptable, at least for notables. On the other hand, the young generation of Arabs, shaped by nationalism, rejects tolerance and feeds an anti-Jewish atmosphere that will push the community to leave. As recalled by Naïm Kattan, “They made life impossible for us, while at the same time slamming the exit door in our face.”82 The future is blocked by fear: “Now, catastrophe loomed on a calm horizon. It lay before us; the future contained the worst misfortunes. We could read the portents everywhere.”83 In March 1949, the government orders community leaders to establish a list of their co-religionists who had left the country since 1933, as well as the names of their relatives and a detailed description of their property, and to stipulate whether their departure was legal or not.84 A number of notables were arrested, even including, in August 1949, the seventy-five-year-old Chief Rabbi, accused of complicity in illegal emigration to Israel. Incarcerated for a month, mistreated, and starved, he died on September 2.85 At the end of December 1949, the US State Department establishes an initial balance sheet of the persecution: Jews totaled 38 percent of convictions, although they made up only 3 percent of the population.86 In March 1950, the decision of Iraqi leaders to let the Jews leave was the result of an error of judgment. They had assumed that only the Zionists (around 2,000 people, including members of the clandestine Haganah) and the poor would leave. These assumptions were quickly swept aside: 47,000 applicants were registered by early May, and 70,000 by September. They were required to sign the following declaration: “I freely and voluntarily declare that I have decided to leave Iraq for good, and that I am conscious that this will have the effect of depriving me of my Iraqi citizenship, and prevent me from returning.”87 Once launched, this groundswell propels itself: fear feeds fear.

450  |  Jews in Arab Countries This climate brings on a sudden fall in property prices, and significant capital flight imperiling the economy. In order to avoid large-scale withdrawals, banks close for a week—which increases anxieties and precipitates additional withdrawals as soon as they reopen. Fear takes hold of all segments of the community, including the well off who intend to stay. The large numbers of departures weakens the economy. As a result, the Arab populace, already unhappy, becomes even more aggressive, which increases the fear and causes the numbers on departure lists to increase. The government grows impatient and threatens Jews with expulsion if the problem is not resolved before March 9, 1951. Difficulties only worsen with the attack in January 1951 against the Massouda Shemtov Synagogue (five deaths and fourteen injured); none of those responsible is arrested. Between mid-January and mid-March, 30,000 more apply to leave. Tens of thousands of people awaiting permission to leave have sold their property and lost their jobs; many are now without any resources, miserably entrapped in concentration centers. At the airport, the emigrants are beaten in front of their children, and despoiled of their last jewelry and personal effects. On March 10, with 104,000 Jews on the application list, Baghdad freezes their assets. In one night, 70,000 people find themselves ruined and legally robbed of their possessions, while in the streets, thugs and hired henchmen (and sometimes even policemen) participate in the scramble for “Jewish property.” Operation Ali Baba, from 1948 to February 1952, brought 113,500 people to the State of Israel. In all, by 1955 some 126,000 Jews left Iraq, including 20,000 who left illegally. By the middle of the 1950s, 6,000 Jews remained in the country. They were henceforth forbidden to leave, but this restriction was lifted in 1958. However, the respite lasted hardly five years. In 1963 the harassment recommences for the 3,000 who remain. Jews do not have the right to sell their property unless they have authorization from the Minister of the Interior; from March 1964 they are also forbidden to remove capital. In September 1963, their community status, which had been recognized since 1931, was abrogated. A special identity card, colored yellow, is issued to them. The last noted Iraqi Jewish writers in the Arabic language, Anwar Shaul and Meir Basri, are required to leave the country. After June 1967, violence worsens: the last Jewish property is sequestered, bank accounts are blocked, payments and transfers become impossible to carry out; shops are closed and business licenses cancelled. Telephone lines are cut. The Jews are placed under house arrest, forbidden to leave town. In 1968, the remaining 2,500 Jews of Iraq are prevented from leaving, while arrests for “espionage” facilitate the dismantlement of the community. In 1954, Damascus imitates the Iraqi government in decreeing that all Jews are free to leave Syria on condition that they leave their property behind. The

Flight | 451 community, mainly located in Damascus, Aleppo, and Kamishli, is only just getting by in the 1950s, and depends on international Jewish charity. Amid the Syrian and Iraqi chaos, Lebanon looks like a happy exception. Of all the Arab countries, it is the only one whose Jewish population grows after 1945 (from 5,200 in 1948 to 9,000 in 1951, of whom 2,000 are refugees from Syria and Iraq). In 1951, the Prime Minister (a Sunni Muslim) as well as the heads of Lebanon’s other religious communities participate in the first night Passover seder. Lebanon was also the only country bordering Israel that did not establish discriminatory measures against Jews, and the only one where the police were ordered to protect Jewish houses. At Sidon, where Palestinian refugees were settled in Jewish houses from which their occupants had been expelled, the police rapidly recovered these properties and returned them to their owners. The Lebanese exodus would come principally after 1967. In Iraq, the law regarding the ban on transactions involving Jewish property (real estate, moveable and personal property, financial assets, etc.) was ratified by both parliamentary chambers and published in the Official Gazette and effective on March 10, 1951; by then, the economic life of Jews was virtually non-existent. On March 22, a new law was enacted confiscating the property of those who did not return to Iraq within two months. In Egypt, reprisal measures taken in 1956 impoverish a community already reduced to a “state of indigence,” as noted in a WJC report of January 1957.88 A law enacted on July 20, 1961, confiscates, for the state’s benefit, 800 Jewish-owned enterprises, including banks and industrial concerns. Everywhere, the expropriation process becomes more radical following the 1967 Six-Day War. In Iraq, a law promulgated on June 28, 1967, deprives Jews of all revenue, in other words, of any employment. In Syria, in July 1967, a ban is imposed on any transactions involving Jewish property. Debts held by Jews (loans, rent, savings interest) are suspended, and the law authorizes non-Jewish debtors to not honor them. All sums paid to Jews are seized. In July 1969, the French Embassy estimates that 75 percent of Jews are without resources, and 90 percent are unemployed. The school system is strangulated. In Damascus, Muslim principals are appointed to Jewish schools, in which Muslim teachers are given priority for employment and exams are systematically conducted on Saturday. In Morocco’s schools, from 1959 to 1963, numbers fall from 30,000 pupils to 13,500. Secret emigration continues throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1948 and 1953, above all passing through Lebanon, 4,000 out of the 10,000 Jews of Syria reach Israel clandestinely. A stream of Iraqi Jews passes via Iran prior to the March 1950 legislation, and again after May 1951; they are often taken hostage by smugglers of people and contraband, who sometimes rob and abandon the fugitives,

452  |  Jews in Arab Countries and sometimes murder them—in March 1974, four young Jewish women were raped and murdered at the Syrian-Lebanese border by Syrian people-smugglers, who then mutilated the bodies. After Jews have been absent for three months, their property is seized by the police, who often have an interest in the matter. Emigration from Morocco did not generally present the same tragic profile. Often difficult, clandestine, and perilous, Moroccan emigration nevertheless did not set off the kind of anguish and terror that characterized departure from Syria and Iraq. Three phases can be identified. From 1948 to Moroccan independence in 1956, the Cadima Agency, an organ of the State of Israel created by the Jewish Agency, operated practically in broad daylight, even if in a relatively discrete manner. Between March 1956 and November 1961, secret emigration operated through the intermediary of what the Israelis called the Misgueret, or “the Framework.” Lastly, from 1961 to 1964, the official Operation Yakhin, the outcome of an accord between Rabat and Jewish organizations, allowed legal departure. Up to March 1956, Cadima facilitated the departures of 110,000 people to the State of Israel, and then, another 30,000 clandestinely between 1956 and 1961 with the assistance of Mossad. Operation Yakhin, from 1961 to 1964, enabled 97,000 additional Jews to leave. In 1965, some 55,000 Jews still lived in Morocco; by 2003 there were no more than 5,000.89 It is estimated that between 1948 and 1967, 238,000 Moroccan Jews, the great majority of the community, reached the State of Israel. Among the principal reasons for their departure figured the underdevelopment (if not outright archaism) of Moroccan society, the end of dhimma status in the minds of the Jews, and the fear of Arab resentment following achievement of independence. In addition to economic and social reasons, one can cite the overpopulated mellahs and the swelling of cities no longer able to absorb the rural exodus. This gives rise to the necessity to expatriate, as many Moroccans already had to South America at the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, the birth of Israel presents an almost providential outlet for many, who leave behind their disappointments and resentment. The end of these communities was not determined on a priority basis by economic considerations—far from it. Cultural uprooting has more profound causes: this was exclusion that in certain cases closely resembles a policy of ethnic cleansing. In August 1963, the Algerian parliament adopts a new nationality law. Rejecting the jus soli (under which citizenship is inter alia acquired through birth within the national territory), as well as the jus sanguini (acquisition of citizenship through blood, i.e., through parental filiation), Algeria creates instead what has been called a sort of jus religiosis.90 One month later, the Algerian constitution is approved by 98 percent of votes cast. In it one reads that “Algeria obtains

Flight | 453 its essential spiritual force from Islam.” What about the Christians and above all the Jews present in this land long before the arrival of Islam? One of the parliamentarians, named Sassi, offers the reassurance that “Every Algerian, before he is Algerian, is Arab and Muslim. . . . he is a member of one of the human races, which is the Arab race.”91 At the time of the vote on the nationality law, the deputy from Tlemcen, a Catholic priest from Montagnac named Abbé Berenguer (who is also a militant in the Front de Liberation Nationale), raises a discordant voice. He says he does not understand why jus soli has been rejected: “That there is no discrimination, I agree! . . . but since there is none, why the hesitation to say that these people, rooted in Algeria for generations, are nationals by origin? Why?! If we take that path, I don’t know where it will lead.”92 In 1954, a senior protectorate official speaks of “the fear of new pogroms. . . . It is thus natural, in these conditions, that Israelites wish to leave Morocco to come to Israel, where nearly every family already has someone who has immigrated there in the course of the past years.”93 The report’s author also stresses the Israeli need for major immigration. On the ground in Morocco, by contrast, community leaders deplore the draining away of youth, which leaves just aged people in charge of an impoverishing community. Emigration undergoes a renewed surge from 1954 onward. “For the Israelite population, Israel currently represents a hope for better housing and food than Morocco.”94 Even though encouraged by economic distress, these emigrants rarely head toward France: only 3,000 Moroccan Jews move to metropolitan France between 1945 and 1955; this Jewish immigration, like Muslim immigration, is forced to remain clandestine.95 In 1955, the French government wishes to cooperate with Israel in order to channel future emigration. In effect, Paris fears that the mass departure of Jews could destabilize independent Morocco. France also wishes for medical examinations to be carried out before the sale of property.96 Between January 1955 and April 1956, 40,000 Moroccan Jews departed, representing one-sixth of the community as at 1949. Following the enthronement of King Hassan II of Morocco and after reaching an agreement with Rabat, in March 1961 the American organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) takes charge of emigration, directing the Jewish Agency and Mossad agents. Departures start at the end of November 1961. Rabat requires the departure of entire families, refusing to take on old people or social assistance cases. Every evening, the airports are open for Jewish emigration. By the end of 1964, nearly 97,000 Jews had left their country in these circumstances. This channel seems to have remained opened until 1966. Egypt remains the very rare example of deliberate—although unavowed— expulsion. The situation was all the more paradoxical in that Egyptian Jewry was without doubt one of the happiest Jewries in the contemporary era. The violence

454  |  Jews in Arab Countries of 1945 to 1949 had been followed by a calm period between 1950 and 1954, before a new deterioration of the situation when Nasser replaced General Naguib, and an Israeli plot (the Lavon Affair) was uncovered. In July 1954, several attacks were committed against public buildings in Cairo and Alexandria, one of which was a library supported by the American Embassy. Organized by the Israeli secret services (which relied on some local Jews), the attacks were aimed at undermining a possible rapprochement between Egypt and the United States. Jews were once again forbidden to leave the country, until the Sinai campaign in autumn 1956 delivered the coup de grâce. Antisemitic propaganda, mounted together with Nazis who had sought refuge in Egypt, developed on a large scale. The Protocols were widely disseminated. At the beginning of November 1956, Jews received the order to leave the country along with a simple pack, 30 Egyptian pounds per person and no more than 140 pounds-worth of personal jewelry. From November 22, 1956 to March 6, 1957, 14,000 people were expelled, followed by another 7,000 up to September 1957; others, too, followed them. At the beginning of the 1960s, 36,000 people had left Egypt for Europe, either to settle there or in transit toward the State of Israel (accounting for nearly 50 percent of them), Brazil (the number two destination), or North America. Of the 40,000 who remained in Egypt in September 1956, only 3,000 were left by June 4, 1967. Property belonging to 500 families and companies owned by Jews had been sequestered, and their bank accounts were frozen; 800 other companies belonging to Jews featured on a “black list.” At every level, Jewish employees were replaced by Muslims. Jewish lawyers were prevented from practicing. One after the other, community institutions were dismantled, starting with requisitioning of the hospitals, where patients “[including] those who had just been operated on were thrown into the streets without warning.”97 French and English schools were confiscated, just like all Jewish schools, and became the property of the state. The property of expellees was seized. Cash outflows were forbidden. People who had reached “an age where it would be difficult if not in fact impossible for them to restart their lives elsewhere (and where, exactly?), starting from zero,” were condemned by this large-scale spoliation to an impoverished exile.98 At the end of October 1956, 2,000 Jews are imprisoned, and 300 of them remained incarcerated in January 1957. The first targets of expulsion were stateless Jews (15,000 out of the total community of 40,000), who had to pay their own air tickets. None of them could take more than 20 Egyptian pounds, and each had to sign a document promising never to return to Egypt, even as a tourist, and confirming that he would make no property claims against the Egyptian authorities. Jews of Egyptian nationality were stripped of their citizenship on grounds of “Zionism,” since under the law a “Zionist” could not be Egyptian.

Flight | 455 Terror takes hold of the remnant of the community. With nightfall, everyone fears police raids, arrests, beatings, theft, and financial blackmail. Many are taken away from their homes during roundups, in cafés, or in the street. Some are expelled with nothing but the clothes on their backs at the time of their arrest. Several thousand are thrown in prison or interned in camps. Expulsion orders (which the authorities, not without contradiction, wish to dissimulate) soon start arriving in proper form. Ready to leave at whatever price, the Jews have to renounce ownership of their property and pay for their journey, usually by boat. They try to accelerate requisite administrative procedures out of fear of being incarcerated should they go beyond the deadlines. For reasons that remained obscure, some received the order to present themselves at nighttime at the police station, where they are told to sign a declaration under the terms of which they state they are leaving the country “voluntarily,” without the intention to return and in abandoning their property.99 Their identity papers are “torn up in front of them.” Chief Rabbi Haïm Nahum resigns in protest against the violence and measures of harassment that extend to the imposition on the Jews of a special identity card, colored yellow. In February 1957, in the Cahiers de l’Alliance, Maurice Moch reports on the forced departure of Jewish fellahin (peasant farmers) expelled from the Nile delta, which had been their home for centuries. “A crime,” he writes. “Nothing other than religion distinguishes these men and these women from their neighbors, and they speak no language other than Arabic. Watching them climb aboard in their long robes, how could I not have the impression that Egypt was expelling Egyptian peasants, its own children?”100 Such was also the lot of the ancient Karaite community of Cairo, obliged to leave its homeland to settle in Israel, near Tel Aviv, where they would join the last Karaite community in the Arab world, from Hitt, in Iraq, which had been expelled from its homeland a few years earlier. Thus, the doors abruptly slammed shut on a life, roots, and ancestors, on the geography of the skies above them and the mental landscape shaped by their mother tongue. This suffering and pain was also the lot of many Jews from Morocco, Iraq, and elsewhere. Most of the expellees were welcomed to Israel. Of the 135,000 Jews living in Iraq in 1948, 125,000 arrived in Israel between 1949 and the beginning of 1952. They had to deal with an emergency situation (as did Jews from Morocco and Egypt who arrived in 1956). They were housed in maa’barot (transit camps) in tents or prefab buildings, with some able to shelter with relatives. The violence of uprooting was such that expressions of resentment were still rare. These Jews were swept up in the work of reconstruction. In December 1951, when the issue arose of the absence of “revenge” against the murderers of the Shoah, Ben-Gurion explained to his party’s central committee: “But we couldn’t do anything, and had we been able to do so, I would have

456  |  Jews in Arab Countries started with Iraq.”101 Resentment would sooner or later have to be faced, but it was barely expressed when the most pressing task was to meet urgent needs and simply survive. Between 1949 and the 1970s, repression alternates with respite. For a time, this contrasting rhythm revivifies the belief in a future for Jews in the Arab world—at least until the next blow, all the more keenly resented because it is unexpected. In Iraq, the small number of remaining Jews live almost decently under the monarchy (1952–1958) and under the Kassem dictatorship (1958–1963). In 1963 the arrival to power of General Arif sounds the end of the grace period. Once again, the Jews are forbidden to depart. Pitfalls reappear, as well as despoilment. The majority of promises made by the Iraqi regime to the Jewish minority, all designed to appease Western powers, are not kept. The promise made in March 1970 to lift restrictions is not honored, as noted by Pierre Cerles, France’s ambassador to Iraq: “The lesson drawn from the past has led the interested parties to greet the news with a skepticism that has shown itself to be justified, since, two months later, the governmental decision remains a dead letter. All those who applied for reintegration to their former employment have been flatly refused, and the telephone lines serving Jewish houses have not been put back into service.”102 “All these things have brought the Jewish population so much misery and fostered such pessimism that they have lost all hope for the future in Iraq, and see no lifeline except Israel,” notes the WJC in 1949 regarding Iraqi Jews. “That day can only come as a result of the intervention of the UN and above all the Great Powers. The Jews pray to God that they will be saved.”103 In 1968 the Baghdad Jewish community makes March 18 a “day of fasting, penitence and lamentation, and special prayers . . . recited in the largest synagogue of Baghdad by hundreds of Jews, imploring God to help them.”104 But it is above all outside the country that native Iraqi Jews sound the alarm, following the example of Daniel Cohen who, at the beginning of the 1970s, establishes the Organization of Iraqi Immigrants, denouncing the murders, thefts, and the climate of terror in which the last 2,500 Jews of the ancient Babylonian community live.105 Jewish organizations mobilize in great numbers. Most often it is a question of discrete activism in order to support emigration or material survival. The tone becomes noisier during international crises, such as in 1956–1957, when the Jews of Egypt were expelled, or on the occasion of the January 1969 hanging in Baghdad of “Jewish spies.” On January 22, 1957, some thirty Jewish organizations, meeting in New York, express their “solidarity with the Jews of Egypt” and accuse the Egyptian authorities of: 1. Despoiling the Jews of all their property 2. Arresting them arbitrarily 3. Interning them in the most inhumane conditions

Flight | 457 4. Expelling them 5. Robbing them . . . 6. Taking hostage a member of each family leaving the country, in order to get it to stay quiet overseas 7. Sequestering Jewish property estimated to be worth $450 million 8. Impoverishing them by preventing them from earning a living 9. Dismissing them from all public employment 10. Preventing them from exercising professions.106

In Syria and Iraq, the WJC is discretely present and multiplies the alarms, taking care of detainees and making contact with governments, the Red Cross, and the UN in order to inform them of reprisal measures taken against the last Jews of Iraq. These are said to be “dying slowly” as noted in 1969 in a Congress report, which was supported by the evidence of a Christian Iraqi woman who had just emigrated.107 “The Jews have no right to a private telephone and they don’t have the right to meet each other. They may not leave their home district, and must present themselves every day to the police. Jewish doctors are forbidden to practice, and the shopkeepers are obliged to shut their shops. . . . Our brothers and sisters in Iraq live in mortal anxiety, just hoping a miracle will occur. . . . A veritable regime of terror is being set up.” Often breaking off and sobbing, she begged us to do everything we could to save that community.108

It was in this context of violence that in 1975, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries was founded at Tel Aviv. Non-Jewish international organizations mobilized too, such as, in 1956, France’s Ligue des droits de l’homme, concerning Egyptian Jews, or the Red Cross, which intervened on several occasions on behalf of Jewish civil internees in Egypt.109 Following the example of the Ecumenical Council of Churches, Christian organizations intervened in favor of Egyptian Jews in 1967: “It would be better for them, it seems, to leave the country, and that is the advice which was given to them.”110 The State of Israel for its part throws itself fully, if discretely, into this fight. This is clear concerning the Iraqi community, whose emigration is undertaken by the Jewish state. It occurs sometimes that Israeli diplomats take a public position. However, generally, things are much more quietly handled. In 1956, Israel mobilizes in favor of Egyptian Jews. At the UN, Jerusalem accuses Cairo of racial discrimination, and Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Golda Meir sets out details of the persecution. In Israel itself, Jewish Egyptians organize, and have prayers said in the country’s synagogues in November 1956. Israel gets involved in arguing for Jewish emigration from Southern Morocco, where 60,000 Jews are dispersed across 120 localities, “scattered amidst five or six million Muslims.”111 In 1951, a report from the Zionist leadership estimates that

458  |  Jews in Arab Countries “the solution to all these problems lies in a massive aliyah of North African Jews to Israel, an aliyah which will be able to put a final end to the worries and preoccupations of the Jews living in Islamic countries.”112 At the beginning of 1955, with Moroccan independence imminent, Israel sends its agents to put in place structures to operate clandestine emigration as well as teach self-defense. No sooner did fighting begin in the Six-Day War, on June 5, 1967, then more than 400 Jews (out of a community of 8,000 people) are arrested in Egypt. At first, they were interned in cells, and then taken out to camps at the edge of the desert, such as Abu Za-abal. Soldiers greeted them on their arrest: “You, Jews, sons of dogs, what’s your name?” They are robbed of everything, forced to eat with their hands, both young and old subject to the same rules, forced to run, pursued by shouting soldiers striking them with whips. Marc Khedr recalled: “I thought I was having a nightmare. You hear voices shouting ‘Death to Israel! Long live Gamal Abdel Nasser! Palestine is Arab—death to the Jews and the Zionists!’”113 Some of these detainees were only freed in July 1970, others a bit earlier thanks to Western pressure. All resigned themselves to exile. Although Egypt was Israel’s principal military adversary, the most serious violence broke out in Libya and Tunisia. In Libya, starting on June 2, Muslim religious leaders called for holy war on sermons broadcast by radio. From the start of combat on June 5, violence broke out in Libyan cities. On June 18, in La Stampa, Italian journalist Giorgio Fattori reports on violence that he witnessed: “Dozens of young men ran through the streets of the town chalking large symbols on certain houses. Shops started to burn. . . . Three Jews were stabbed to death in front of horrified foreigners.”114 The police only react during the afternoon, although for hours Tripoli has been in the grip of chaos and terror. With some hesitation, the forces of order end up evacuating Jews from the old town. “Some are led out of town to Gurji, 4km away, where they are sheltered; some hide at friends’ homes, taken in by some Arab families.”115 On June 9, after the demonstrations have stopped, scattered Jews are still being murdered, such as the young girl disguised as an Arab woman who, once recognized, is killed on the spot. “They were hunting after us even after we had barricaded ourselves in our houses. Every 20 minutes, systematically, someone would phone us and threaten to kill us,” recounted the first emigrants on the Tripoli–Rome flight on June 13, 1967.116 At least fifteen Jews were killed, and thirty others wounded. Villainous acts were committed by the forces of order, in particular the cold-blooded murder on June 7 of two Jewish families by an officer who had set out to “shelter them” in an isolated spot. Without witnesses, they were clubbed to death. On June 20, Italian Ambassador Cesare Pasquinelli reported that the Jews were “chased by the populace the minute they came out of their homes. . . . It is incredible that we have to still see this after the infamy of Nazism.”117 Now, the last Jews of Libya sought to

Flight | 459 leave the country, at whatever price, which the government accepts on the double condition that the government takes all their property, and prevents any possible return. The modest Italian Jewish community obtains two- to three-month visas for them. During the summer, 2,820 Libyan Jews make it to Italy. By the end of October, a thousand of them had reached the State of Israel. In a few weeks, four thousand Jews—essentially expelled—had abandoned Libya, their property seized, their bank accounts confiscated. By 1968 no more than 200 remained in the country. In Tunis, violent scenes broke out on June 5. The Great Synagogue is burned down and 40 Torah scrolls are burned after having been profaned by the mob and covered with urine. However, here, the authorities intervene quickly to bring an end to the riot, even if the orders are only half-heartedly obeyed on the ground. On that day, according to numerous witnesses, the police concerned themselves with traffic while the mob was busy burning down the Grand Synagogue and setting alight cars belonging to Jews. By 2 p.m., the city seemed to be on fire. It was only around 4 p.m. that the troops, who were stationed in the center of town, finally intervened. Some reparations were made, and those responsible were arrested, but no one was ever compensated. As occurred after the Bizerte affair in 1961, the frightened Jewish community departed. Out of the 23,000 Tunisian Jews still present on June 5, 1967, 2,500 left during the month following the riots.118 Between 1967 and 1970, 18,000 Tunisian Jews left their native land, and two-thirds of them settled in France. The community, which counted 70,000 souls in 1948, had no more than 8,000 in 1968. The final émigrés headed above all for Israel. Even before Algerian independence, the deterioration of relations with the Jewish community was noted. On December 12, 1960, the Great Synagogue of Algiers was sacked. Swastikas and “Death to the Jews” were seen daubed on the walls of the Casbah. In September 1961, the Oran Jewish cemetery was profaned, while violent incidents pitted Jews and Muslims against each other. It was difficult for a Jew to identify with the national slogan, inherited from the ulema movement: “Algeria is my country, Arabic my language, Islam my religion.” In 1967, in an Algeria already nearly drained of its Jews, the Six-Day War was the occasion for an abundant flourishing of swastikas. Teachers from France, in the country to support socialist Algeria whether pursuant to development assistance programs or otherwise, were alarmed during those days in June 1967 to see students wearing Nazi insignia and covering blackboards with swastikas, alongside a torrent of antisemitism pouring out of the radio. In the summer of 1962 the Jewish population of Algeria was down to 25,000; a mere 1,000 were still there nine years later. Even Morocco—reputed to be the most peaceful—experienced disturbances in June 1967. The climate of fear, once aroused, encouraged departures. This fear

460  |  Jews in Arab Countries was aggravated by mysterious murders, apparently linked to the Six-Day War; at Meknes, a boy and two Jewish girls were murdered in cold blood in June 1967. Jewish organizations were made to cease their activities. HIAS, too, was required to close its doors in June 1967. After the explosion of violence in the summer of 1967, constant persecution began that rendered life impossible but at the same time blocked departure. For the Arab world, 1948 had been an historical aberration coupled with injustice, which “Arab pride” would rapidly avenge. Yet, nineteen years later, the Six-Day War constituted a second catastrophe that fully exposed the misery of an Arab world “humiliated” by “the Jews.” The last Jews of the Arab world would thus bear the brunt of vengeance. With Israel militarily beyond reach, it was these last Jewish communities that were attacked. “You celebrate the victories but we pay the price of these wars,” an Iraqi Jew later declared to Iraqi-born Israeli diplomat and politician Shlomo Hillel.119 In Syria, the government appropriated the property of deceased Jews, in order to sell it for the benefit of the state. Damascus real estate belonging to Jews comes under the control of a “Palestinian-Syrian Committee,” which controls it and deposits its rental income into its account, although officially, these funds were to be distributed to Palestinian refugees. What was left of the community was strangled by application of the law, which stipulated that Jews (even those holding a foreign passport) could not leave the country, and could only travel up to 3 km from their homes. Identity cards given to Jews bore the word Mussawi (Jew) in red. They were subject to a curfew from 10 p.m., and excluded from public service, institutions, and banks. Government employees and soldiers were forbidden to purchase from Jewish shops. Finally, Jews were only permitted to obtain six years of elementary education. School enrollment numbers collapsed, forcing the remaining schools to consolidate. In addition, Jews could not own radios or telephones, and were forbidden from maintaining postal contacts with the rest of the world. Heirs of deceased persons had to pay in order to use their relatives’ property, and if they could not, the property was distributed to Palestinian Arabs.120 As for foreigners who wanted to visit the Jewish quarter, they could only do so if accompanied by an official guide. Apart from Iraq, when it came to violence against Jews, there were few equivalents to Syria. Where it felt the need to do so, the Syrian government eliminated support for the Syrian Jewish community even from beyond the country’s borders. This was seen in the case of the September 1971 kidnapping in Beirut, by the Syrian secret services, of Albert Elia, who had been supportive of Syria’s Jews. He was never seen again. Lebanon, which in 1967 had only 6,000 Jews, was also gripped by fear. After June, departures intensify. In one year alone, the country loses half of its

Flight | 461 remaining community, which mainly went to France. In 1978 fewer than 500 Jews were left. This figure would fall further due to the civil war, kidnappings, and murders, of which there were thirty in 1979–1980 alone. The Six-Day War thus constitutes the beginning of the final act. Anti-­ Jewish passion certainly was not suddenly born out of the 1967 conflict, but this lightening-fast war and devastating Arab defeat conferred an apocalyptic coloration that rejection of the Jews in the Arab world had not previously displayed. On September 22, 1967, the World Islamic Council, meeting in Amman, declared with regard to Jews in the Arab lands: “They do not have sufficient appreciation for the good treatment and protection which they have enjoyed for centuries.” The Congress further added that Jews who come into contact with the Zionist movement or the State of Israel no longer deserve the protection Islam promises to non-Muslims living in the Islamic world. Such Jews should be warned that “in the future, Muslim governments will treat them as aggressive combatants. In parallel, all Muslims—individually and collectively—will boycott them and treat them as mortal enemies.”121 In Algeria at the time of the Six-Day War, films were banned if they were associated with the names of directors, producers, or actors featuring on the list of “Zionist enemies.” The word “Zionist” rapidly became an insult. If this word was attached to any foreigner in Algeria, he understood that he needed to leave the country quickly. In Iraq, after the Six-Day War, the military government takes revenge on the Jews. The state seizes all Jewish property. The last remaining Jewish employees are fired. Ninety well-off Jewish businessmen are arrested without charges; they later will be released, but in a drip-feed fashion, some not until three years following the June 1967 fighting, after they have been forced to help Palestinian refugees and to participate in other Arab causes. In July 1968, Iraqi Jews (other than the Chief Rabbi and the community office) have their phones cut off. In October a fresh wave of arrests (for espionage) terrorizes the community, seven members of which die under torture. The others are tried for espionage in January 1969. The government announces it has uncovered a “plot.” In the dock the accused are seen to be unconnected with each other, in the time-honored manner of show-trials. Kurdish rebels are co-charged although Jews are in the majority. On January 27, the condemned men are executed in prison as soon as the sentence is announced behind closed doors. Their bodies are then transported to a large Baghdad public square and exhibited to the public (as well as on television). A million Iraqis come to see the nine hanged Jews, each bearing a placard around the neck setting out—in addition to name, profession, and birthplace—the single word “JEW.” Two other Jews are hanged the same day in Basra. Even internment is a form of torture. Many Iraqi Jews are imprisoned in the Nuqrat-al-Salman camp, situated in the desert near the borders with Saudi

462  |  Jews in Arab Countries Arabia and Kuwait. Every one of them is tortured. Each must confess to spying on behalf of Israel. In April 1969, nine Jews die of torture.122 This torture is systematic. Throughout the Arab world of the times, it is a veritable tool of the justice system. In 1973, Haïm Kattan, exiled in Canada, evokes beatings and scenes of humiliation, “to the point where the victim is ground up physically and mentally and begs for the liberation of death. What a sad end, in light of such a glorious past! For a community whose feet are so deeply anchored in the soil of Iraq. . . . A community of 150,000 souls reduced today to 400.”123 On several occasions during the years 1967–1973, the French Embassy confirms the reality of these practices.124 Western governments put pressure on Arab regimes to persuade them to allow the departure of those Jews who want to leave. This is in particular the case with Iraq in the 1960s, with the French Embassy in Baghdad describing in July 1969 a situation that (with some forty arrests in the capital and the sequestration of property) is evolving “from bad to worse,” with Iraqi newspapers “continuing to write that the Arabs are not against Judaism but are merely anti-Zionists, and that Jews residing in Arab countries enjoy rights which are equal to those of their other compatriots.”125 The daily existence of these final representatives of ancient communities is made up of fear, in particular that of being summoned to the police, bearing one’s special yellow identity card. A witness—an Iraqi Jew aged sixteen—recounts that: “A good week is when no-one’s been arrested.”126 Most arrests occur at night: “If the doorbell rings at night, the occupants of the house are frightened to death.”127 The community lives “turned in on itself, each of its members . . . carefully avoiding giving grounds for the slightest reproach on the part of the authorities,” writes the French Ambassador to Baghdad in 1969.128 Finally, no one can leave the country any longer, not even if he gives up his property. The French Ambassador explains on July 31, 1969: “On the basis of the information I have, out of approximately 1500 emigration applications made by members of the community, none have been granted.”129 As well, the last Jews of Iraq are forbidden to express themselves. The Chief Rabbi himself “has had to agree to make declarations favorable to the government, the last of which was published on 18 February [1969],” notes the French Ambassador.130 For the majority of Jewish communities, the 1970s will be their final years in Arab lands. Marked by violence, this period gives rise to a mountain of reports amassing in Jerusalem, Western chancelleries, or offices of Jewish organizations, such as the WJC, JOINT, the American Jewish Committee, and others. It is only following the Madrid Conference of October 1991, after the First Gulf War, that Damascus announced in April 1992 its intention to let the last Jews of Syria leave the country. This was achieved in 1994 with the arrival in Israel of the last Chief Rabbi of Damascus.

Flight | 463 The last Jews of Lebanon leave their country in the course of the civil war (1975–1990). For those who, despite everything, intended to remain, the rise to power of Hezbollah (based in the old Beirut Jewish quarter) definitively sounds the community’s death knell. By 2000 there remained barely 60 Jews in the country. After the September 1, 1969 military coup d’état by Colonel Abu Schneb and Captain Gaddafi, an absolute dictatorship takes over in Libya, against a background of state antisemitism. The “five points” of the new regime’s program, declared in mid-October 1969, call for the expulsion of foreigners and Jews (the latter of whom amount to hardly 200 people). At the end of October, the newspaper Ar-Raid calls for the confiscation of the property of the Jews, “who fought against us and have been our enemies since time immemorial . . . in order to make restitution to the people.”131 Deprived of their civil rights, the last Jews are endlessly summoned by the police, who insult and beat them. Their bank accounts are frozen. Some are incarcerated and remain so for several years without any charges brought against them. In October 2003 the last Libyan Jew leaves his native soil. Elsewhere, the exodus continues in less tragic conditions. The number of children receiving education plummets. In Tunisia, the ORT school closes its gates in 1974. The long decline of local Jewry is marked by emotion, but also sometimes by fear, as at Djerba where several Jews are murdered in 1985 and where the Ghriba Synagogue is the target of an attack in 2002. In May 2003 at Casablanca, a Jewish cultural center and other sites were targeted in attacks attributed to Islamists.

Notes 1. AIU, Morocco, I.J. 1–2, 29 July 1913. 2. CZA, C10/610, Casablanca, 25 June 1951. 3. Ibid. 4. Cf. CZA, S5/11584, “Regards sur l’histoire des Juifs d’Égypte,” by Jacques Maleh, 17 January 1954. 5. CZA, C10/535, 1951. 6. Cf. New York Times, 25 November 1947. 7. Cf. CZA, J112/1893. 8. CZA, C10/1810, note by World Jewish Congress, 12 January 1954. 9. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644, “The Black Record,” 8. 10. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, 28 March 1969, Pierre Gorce. 11. Ibid., 8 July 1969. 12. Ibid., Baghdad, 14 February 1970. 13. Cf. CZA, World Jewish Congress, Paris, 27 January 1972. 14. Cf. CZA, Z5/5644, The Black Record, 24. 15. Report of the American Jewish Committee, 1949, in CZA, S20/540. 16. CZA, S6/4668, Aden, 2 April 1946.

464  |  Jews in Arab Countries 17. Cf. CZA, S20/539/2, report of the World Jewish Congress. 18. Ibid. 19. In CZA, Z5/5644, The Black Record, 16. 20. Cf. Catherin Simon, Algerie - Les Années pieds-rouges. Des rêves de l’indépendance au désenchantement (1962–1969) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2009), 130. 21. Cited in Trigano, La Fin du judaisme en terres d’islam, 128. 22. In Memmi, Juifs et Arabes, 54. 23. CZA, C10/1810, 12 January 1954. 24. Cf. CZA, J112-1893, press review, September 1954. 25. Cf. CZA, J112-1646, 1955. 26. CZA, A6/6023, Geneva, 20 December 1956. 27. Report of Dr H. Fajerman, January–February 1949, Second Mission to North Africa, Archives of OSE (non classified). 28. CZA, S20/5391, American Jewish Committee, early 1949. 29. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Casablanca, 29 November 1955. 30. In Cahiers de l’Alliance, December 1957, 9. 31. CZA, S6/5072, Tel Aviv, 9 February 1948. 32. Cf. CZA, C10/535. 33. CZA, Z6/611, December 1951. 34. Al-Alam, 29 August 1956, cited in Trigano, La Fin du judaisme, 320. 35. American Jewish Committee 1949 Report, CZA, S20/540, 1949. 36. Cf. Cahiers de l’Alliance, October 1966, 18. 37. Cf. Kaplan (representative of World Jewish Congress in Paris) Report. CZA C10/2703, 1 August 1969. 38. CZA, S20/561, Casablanca, 2 January 1949, P. Calamaro, letter to the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem. 39. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, 1948. 40. Ibid., Oujda, Sûreté nationale (National Police), 19 January 1949. 41. OSE Archives, report of Doctor H. Fajerman, February 1949. 42. CZA Z6/611, October 1951. 43. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Oujda, 25 February 1953. 44. Ibid., Agadir, 4 November 1952. 45. Michel Foucault in June 1981, Geneva, on the occasion of the establishment of the International Anti-Piracy Committee, in Michel Foucault Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, vol.4, 1980–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 707. 46. Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 217. 47. CZA, S20/539/1. 48. In Harrah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969 (Paris: Payot, 1995), 587. 49. In 1930, the first congress of “Sephardim” was held in Belgrade. The second was held in London in 1935 and the third in Amsterdam in 1938. 50. In Cahiers de l’Alliance, November–December 1951, 3. 51. CZA, S20/561, April 1951. 52. Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain, 30. 53. In Henry Méchoulan (ed.), Les Juifs d’Espagne. Histoire d’une diaspora, 1492–1992 (Paris: Liana Levi, 1992), 540.

Flight | 465 54. Cf. CZA, S6/6531, 1951. 55. Cf. the Israeli review Peamim and the novels of Sami Michael, in particular one published in 1974, Égaux et plus égaux (Equal and More Equal). 56. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 316. 57. Cf. T Parfitt, The Road to Redemption, 238. 58. CZA, S32/123, Tripoli, 21 January 1947. 59. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 2 August 1949. 60. Cahiers de l’Alliance, December 1951, 4. 61. CZA, S20/613. 62. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, 24 October 1949, for the first text, and 5 August 1949 for the second. 63. CZA, S20/561, April 1951. 64. Cf. CZA, S6/531, note intended for 23rd Zionist Congress. 65. CZA, S5/11588, 23 November 1950. 66. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Tel Aviv, November 1949. 67. Ibid., Tel Aviv, 4 July 1949. 68. CZA, C10/349. 69. Ibid., Casablanca, 13 January 1956. 70. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D.1, Questions juives, February 1955. 71. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Haifa, October 1951. 72. Ibid., 17 November 1953. 73. Cf. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22. 74. CZA, S5/11588, Cronica Israelita, 30 November 1949. 75. Cf. Claude Lanzmann, Le Lièvre de Patagonie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2009). 76. CZA, S20/561, 22 August 1949. 77. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Oujda, July 1949. 78. Cf. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, Rabat, 7 December 1953. 79. Cf. ibid, dossier 18, for the model of such document. 80. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, French Embassy in Baghdad. 81. Report of World Jewish Congress, February 1949, in CZA, S20/539/1. 82. Kattan, Adieu Babylone, 256. 83. Ibid., 264. 84. Cf. CZA, S20/539/1, World Jewish Congress, 10 October 1949, document provided to Secretariat General of the UN. 85. Cf. report of American Jewish Committee, S20/539/1. 86. CZA, S20/554, 19 December 1949. 87. Cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 161. 88. CZA, C10/3173, January 1957. 89. Cf. Yousef Courbages and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Payot, 2005), 126. 90. Simon, Algérie, les années pieds-rouges, op. cit.,94. 91. Cited in ibid., 95. 92. Ibid., 94. 93. CADN, Morocco, D.I. Questions juives, dossier 22, November 1954. 94. CADN, Protectorate of Morocco, D. I., Questions juives, dossier 22, November 1954.

466  |  Jews in Arab Countries 95. Ibid., report to the Minster of Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs, 12 May 1955. 96. Ibid., letter from the Quai d’Orsay to the Résidence Générale, 29 June 1955. 97. Cahiers de l’Alliance, February 1957, 15. 98. Internal report of the Jewish community, 30 June 1957, in CZA S6/6023. 99. Cahiers de l’Alliance, December 1956, 17. 100. Cahiers de l’Alliance, February 1957, 15. 101. Cited in G. Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable. Le sionisme, Israël et la destruction des Juifs d’Europe (1933–2007) (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 81. 102. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, 23 April 1970. 103. CZA, S20/540. 104. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, French Embassy to Baghdad, 21 March 1968. 105. Cf. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, 1970. 106. In Cahiers de l’Alliance, February 1957, 16. 107. Cf. CZA, C10/2703, Paris, A. Kaplan, 16 May 1969. 108. Ibid., Paris, 8 August 1969. 109. CZA, Z5/5644, New York, 21 December 1956. 110. D. Wallace Bell, representative to Greece of the Ecumenical Council of Churches, Athens, 25 November 1967, in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 555. 111. CZA, Z6/611, report of Moroccan Zionist Federation, December 1951. 112. CZA, C10/349, late 1951 (internal report signed by I. Abbou). 113. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 289. 114. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 276. 115. 14 June 1967, cited in Trigano, La Fin du judaisme, 146. 116. In Il Corriere della Sera, cited in ibid. 117. Letter to his brother, cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 278. 118. Note from Henri Elfen to the Geneva Jewish community 16 August 1968, cited in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 551. 119. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 302. 120. In ibid., 303. 121. Ibid., 293. 122. Cf. CZA, S5/11616, Jewish Times, Johannesburg, 26 April 1968. 123. Cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 300. 124. Cf. for example, CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, 31 July 1969. 125. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad. 126. Edwin Shuker, letter to Martin Gilbert, February 2009, cited in Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 302. 127. The report of an Iraqi Christian refugee in Paris sent in June 1969 to the World Jewish Congress, in CZA, C10/2703, August 1969. 128. CADN, Series B, dossier 13, Baghdad, Pierre Gorce, 19 February 1969. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., 19 February 1969. 131. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 285.

13 The Final Act For the majority of Jewish communities, the 1970s were the last decade of

life in Arab lands. This endgame led to a mountain of documentation piling up in Jerusalem as well as in Western chancelleries and the offices of major Jewish organizations. Month after month came reports of disappearances and murders, with Arab authorities generally asserting that these cases involved Jews “illegally attempting to flee” from their countries. This point was repeatedly made by the Iraqi authorities, for example. This in turn provided the pretext for seizure of property. Between 1967 and 1970, nearly 2,300 Jews arrived through illegal channels from Syria into Israel. In 1973, Damascus made its last Jews pay the price for the Israeli victory in the Golan (during the Yom Kippur War), by forbidding them to work and reducing them to survival through handouts. This occurred at a time when they were already cut off from the world—forbidden access to telephones or radios since 1967—and trapped within a society soaked in Jew-hatred. Such were the circumstances driving the flight to Lebanon or Turkey. It was only in 1992, following the First Gulf War and the October 1991 Madrid Conference, that Syria announced it would allow the country’s last Jews leave. This was finally achieved in 1994, with the arrival of the Chief Rabbi of Damascus arrived in Israel. Most of Lebanon’s last Jews, who for years were the best-protected Jews of the Arab world, left the country during its long civil war between 1975 and 1990. For those Jews determined to stay no matter what, the rise to power of Hezbollah conclusively spelled the end. By 2000, barely 60 Jews remained in Lebanon. In Libya, following the September 1969 military coup d’état, an absolute tyranny took root against a background of state-sponsored antisemitism. The new regime called for the expulsion of foreigners and the tiny number of remaining Jews, barely numbering 200. The next month, the newspaper Ar Raid called for confiscation of Jewish property in order that the goods of the Jews, “our enemies since time immemorial,” can be “restored to the people.1 Most of Tripoli’s synagogues are destroyed or transformed into mosques. Denied their civil rights, the last Jews are summoned to the police station, where they are insulted and beaten. Their bank accounts are blocked. Some are locked up, remaining behind bars for several years without any charges brought against them. In October 2003, the last Libyan Jew leaves his native soil. Even so, Reuters still reports in 2011 that the revolution against the regime is characterized by

468  |  Jews in Arab Countries strident antisemitic outpourings, with graffiti insisting on the supposed Jewish descent of Gaddafi.2 This exodus continues elsewhere as well, but under less tragic conditions. In Tunisia during the Six-Day War, “shops owned by Jews were marked with a Jewish star,” according to the scholar responsible for carrying out an inventory of Tunisia’s Jewish heritage, Sonia Fellous of France’s National Center for Scientific Research. The ORT school closes in 1974. The decline of local Jewries is marked by fear, as in Djerba, where several Jews are murdered in 1985, and where the Ghriba Synagogue is the target of an attack in 2002. By 2017 there are no more than 1,500 Jews in the country, mainly based in Djerba (which contains some two-thirds of the community) and Tunis (barely 200 Jews), where every Saturday, twenty or so of the faithful gather together in an annex of the Great Synagogue. Since the January 2011 revolution, antisemitic hate-speech and slogans have flourished, although condemned by the Tunisian government. Antisemitic discourse seems to have become liberated, in particular among Islamists, whose influence is growing. This downturn in the social and political climate only accelerates the departure of the remaining Jews. In 2016, gravestones are broken apart in Djerba’s Jewish cemetery, however not by anti-Jewish haters, but by Jews who want to take the remains of loved ones with them to Israel.3 Born in Iraq, from where she fled in 1970, Israeli journalist Linda MenuhinAbdulaziz recounted on French radio RFI on December 1, 2014: “After the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, they began to persecute Iraqi Jews. They cut our telephones and forbade us to attend university. We couldn’t find work, and the media preached violence against us. We didn’t even have the right to leave Iraq: we were prisoners. I understood that there was no more hope for me there, and decided to flee together with my brother, against the will of my father.”4 He disappeared mysteriously in Baghdad two years later, and she never saw him again. The United States and several European powers, including France, discretely intervened in favor of the departure of the last Jews of the Near East. By the end of 2011, no more than thirty-five Jews remained in Iraq, of whom a mere eight were in Baghdad. In Egypt by the end of 2015 there were twenty, all quite aged, and in Yemen there were fewer than one hundred. Over the preceding few years, Israeli special services had managed to clandestinely take out nearly 200, who had been caught between the Yemeni Army and rebel forces. Two Jews were murdered, in 2008 and 2012, for refusing to convert to Islam. After 1979, the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran leads to the gradual withering of the Iranian Jewish community. Iran’s Jews were particularly shaken by the trial in 1999 of thirteen Jews from Shiraz, accused of spying for Israel and sentenced to death. After an intense international campaign,

The Final Act  |  469 their sentences were commuted and in 2003 they were freed. In 2006, Tehran organized an international negationist conference, but the following year, official Iranian TV presented a drama series describing the lot of European Jews in the Second World War, and highlighting how Iranian diplomats had aided Jews. In the Maghreb, King Mohamed VI of Morocco seeks to protect the last Jews of his country. Morocco stands alone in the Arab world in its official stance toward Jews. The kingdom’s new constitution, promulgated on July 1, 2011, even makes mention of the “Hebraic element” of Moroccan identity. Casablanca, in Morocco, contains the Arab world’s sole Jewish museum (established as a private initiative). In February 2013, the King attended the reopening ceremony for Slat Al Fassiyine, the seventh-century synagogue in Fes. For Algeria’s Jewish community, the final years of the decolonization conflict (which lasted from 1954 to 1962) were marked by rising fear. Anxieties were reinforced by the December 1960 burning of Algier’s Great Synagogue, and the June 1961 murder of Jewish musician Sheik Raymond Leyris, symbol of a shared Arab-Jewish culture. Following independence in July 1962, a minority of Jews decided to remain. However, under the Algerian Nationality Law of 1963, none were granted Algerian nationality. The bulk of the last Jews of Algeria would leave the country during the “Black Decade” of the 1990s. Some fifty of them remain to this day, principally in Algiers. And yet the media, won over to antisemitism, still spreads the rumor that thousands of Jews live, hidden, in the country. The conflict opposing Israel and its Arab neighbors has exacerbated traditional cultural antisemitism. In 1950 Sayyid Qutb, the successor of Hassan el-Banna to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, published a short work that remains, up to the present, the Islamists’ antisemitic handbook: Our Struggle Against The Jews.5 “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism,” he wrote, “there is a Jew; behind the doctrine of bestial sexuality, there is a Jew; behind the destruction of the family and its sacred relationships in society . . . there is a Jew. . . . They liberate their sensual desires from all restraint and thus destroy the moral foundation on which the pureness of faith reposes, by rolling it in the filth which they have spread in the world.”6 He concludes: “Thus, the struggle between Islam and the Jews continues and shall carry on, because the Jews will only be satisfied when they have destroyed the Muslim religion. Even after being dominated by Islam, they have continued to fight against our religion by means of plots and treasonous acts mounted by their agents. Today, the fight has become even more serious, intense and open ever since the Jews, from all corners of the Earth, announced that they would establish the State of Israel.”7 If this level of invective was not sufficient, the Saudi

470  |  Jews in Arab Countries editor added: “There are three of them, in order they are Marx, Freud and Durkheim. One may add that behind the literature of decadence and ruin stands yet another Jew: Jean-Paul Sartre.”8 Antisemitism incarnated the Arab world’s social and political failures, its humiliations, and its wounded self-respect. “The Jew” became, in the classic manner, the repository of social identity malaise born of the confrontation with Western modernity. But while in the Arab world antisemitism took on the allure of a collective passion, it was the object of massive denial in the West—especially in France—and above all in the communities of Arab origin living in the West. The quarrels over the naming of Judaism’s holy places, or about the links between the Jewish people and Jerusalem, all reflect this strategy of denial. Arab-Muslim discourse has concealed the original name of the Temple Mount behind that of “Noble Sanctuary” (Haram esh-Sharif), with the intention of effacing any Jewish legitimacy regarding the Land of Israel. In the same vein is the declaration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, who on October 25, 2015, on Israeli television explained that the Al-Aqsa Mosque was constructed on a site that existed “3,000 years ago, and 30,000 years ago . . . and in fact ever since the creation of the world.” Thus, there was never a Jewish temple on the site. This erasure of the Jewish presence in the Holy Land is part of the larger effort to obscure the Jewish elements of the Arab world.9 This is a history that for a long time was written by the privileged of the Oriental Jewish world. It was also written by Ashkenazi Jewry, which, in the nineteenth century, created the myth of the Golden Age, and it was written by an Arab discourse that attributed to the State of Israel the sole responsibility for the departure of Oriental Jews. What looks like ethnic cleansing (even if without literal expulsion, other than in the case of Egypt) was hidden from sight. Nevertheless, in their hundreds of thousands, the Jews were well and truly pushed out of the Arab world. They did not push themselves out. Arab identity mutated from a cultural concept to an ethnic marker, which led to the uprooting of the Jews, depriving them of their Arab identity and, in the end, of their mother tongue. But because this “ethnic cleansing” does not correspond to the Western consensus concerning the history of decolonization, it remains invisible. In its presence one maintains an uncomfortable silence, as if someone has said something in bad taste. Denial can offer a defense against the world’s violence, and this is also true about the denial of Arab antisemitism. When it aligns with the Far Right or with those who look back with fondness to Nazism, antisemitism in the West is decried. But when it emanates from an Arab world eaten up by this collective madness, the voice of antisemitism becomes harder to distinguish.

The Final Act  |  471

The Importation of Arab Antisemitism to Europe In March 2012, Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman of Algerian origin, murdered seven people in cold blood in Toulouse and Montauban. Among them, in the courtyard of a Jewish school, he slaughtered a teacher and three children under the age of ten years. In July 2016, one of his brothers, Abdelghani, told a French journalist: “When the coroner’s staff brought his body back to the house, they [the neighbors] ululated, saying Mohamed had brought France to its knees, and that he had done well, even if it was regrettable that he hadn’t killed more Jewish children. For them, it was revenge for colonization.”10 “Do you want to become a star in the Arabic language Algerian press,” the Algerian playwright Karim Akouche asked in September 2016. “It’s easy. Preach hatred of the Jews. . . . I am a survivor of Algerian schools, where I was taught to detest the Jews. Hitler was a hero; teachers praised him.”11 Also in 2016, German sociologist Günther Jikeli, author of a study on antisemitism among Muslim populations in Europe, noted: “In Paris I have interviewed young Muslims who did not hesitate to proclaim themselves to be anti-Semites. Some went so far as to declare to me that they wanted to kill Jews. This anti-Semitism is omnipresent and is part and parcel of what is called Islamism.”12 In January 2017, a French sociological study reported “anti-Semitic prejudice is very widespread amongst the Muslim population, much more than in the overall French population.”13 Not long before that, a French sociologist of Algerian origin declared in a televised documentary, with regard to French Arab families: “This anti-Semitism is already present within the domestic space, and in a virtually natural manner is incorporated into language as one of the insults parents address to their children when they wish to reprimand them. They just call them ‘Jews’. Fine, all Arab families know about this! It’s monumental hypocrisy to not see that this anti-Semitism is in the first place domestic . . . legitimated, almost naturalized . . . in what is called the ghetto. It’s actually hard to avoid it; it’s like the air that one breathes.”14 The State of Israel was slow to come to grips with the issue of Jews from the Arab world. In 1951, Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Finance Ministry amassed property deeds and documentary proof of dispossession. Eventually these dossiers were transferred to the Ministry of Justice, which in 1969 created a division specifically responsible for the rights of Jews from Arab countries. In parallel, Middle Eastern Jews established several organizations with the intention of making their voices heard, including World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and Jews Indigenous to the Middle-East and North Africa. Yet, the Jewish state was slow in taking responsibility for the cultural patrimony of vanished Jewries. In June 2014, the Knesset required the Ministry of

472  |  Jews in Arab Countries Education to increase the number of hours dedicated to the history and culture of Jews from Arab lands and Iran, and since then, this subject forms part of the required Israeli higher secondary school examinations. In the same year, the Israeli government established November 30 as the day of commemoration of the exodus of Jews from the Arab world. This date was chosen because it was in the wake of the historic UN vote of November 29, 1947, that the Jews of Arab countries suffered the overt persecution that led most of them to depart, engendering the loss of a major part—if not the entirety—of their property. On November 30, 2014, for the first time, the State of Israel officially paid homage to the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands. Linda MenuhinAbdulaziz, of Iraqi origin, noted: “This is something which was obscured in official Israeli history. We hear so often about the Shoah, the Holocaust, but not enough of the tragedy of Jews from Arab lands.”15 Other than in Morocco, Jewish patrimony in the Arab world has been poorly preserved. In 2015, Algeria relaunched its program of expropriation of Jewish cemeteries with the goal of grouping mortal remains on a few sites.16 In parallel, the UN consistently refuses to grant “refugee” status to the Jews of Arab countries (although between 1946 and 2014 the UN adopted 197 resolutions on the issue of Palestinian refugees).17 Whether transmitted by Islamism or by other pathways, Arab antisemitic propaganda has become more and more virulent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. “Throughout history,” Egyptian Sheik Youssef Al Qaradawi declared in 2009, “Allah has brought forth people to punish Jews for their corruption. The last punishment was administered by Hitler. . . . If Allah permits it, the next time it will be by the hand of the Muslims.”18 Yet, this antisemitism now extends beyond the ranks of the Islamists. On March 6, 2016, the Iraqi daily Al Zaman (in an article entitled “Iraq Needs Hitler”), asserted that Jews in Northern Iraq were fomenting a secret plan to take control of Mosul. “We Iraqis are turning around one single axis: the Jews, who are constantly manipulating their pawns amongst Iraqi politicians and members of parliament.” In a series of five articles from May 5 to June 2, 2016, the main Egyptian daily, Al Ahram, accused the Jews of “secretly plotting [to] dominate the world,” in accordance with “the instructions of the Talmud.” The paper asked: “Why do all the wars in the world take place in the Middle East? . . . Why are the Arabs the poorest, and the least secure or advanced amongst the peoples in the world? Seeking to answer some of these questions, I discovered research revealing a Jewish plan to dominate the world.”19 Articles on May 5 and 19 argued that: “A Jew is above all a Jew, regardless of his nationality. The Jews invented communism

The Final Act  |  473 and atheism in order to destroy religion. The goal of the Jewish plot is indeed to dominate the world. This will be possible after having taken economic control of the countries of the world and drowned them in debts.”20 In 2004, Israeli historian Robert Wistrich denounced “the reams of hate literature constantly appearing in mainstream Arab newspapers and magazines, and the anti-Semitic propaganda pervading Middle East TV channels which has reached staggering proportions.”21 He noted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion served in 2002 as the basis of an Egyptian TV series of 40 episodes, called Horseman Without a Horse, which presented Zionism as a Jewish plot aiming, since the start of the twentieth century, at world domination. In 2003 the same book was the basis of a Syrian-Lebanese series called Al Shattat (the Diaspora), which presented ritual murder as a common “Jewish practice.” Wistrich argued that the hatred and fanaticism underlying this ubiquitous hard-core antisemitism surpassed historical precedents, such as the Christian Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair and the Russian czarist judeophobia. The sole worthy comparison would be the Nazis, whose antisemitism also comported “eliminationism,” resulting in the genocidal characteristics of the Shoah. Now, he asserted, with the Arab and Muslim world still unreconciled to the existence of the State of Israel, “The war against the supposed domination of the world by political Zionism becomes the cornerstone of an apocalyptic Arab and Muslim scenario that threatens to make mutual annihilation a self-fulfilling prophecy.”22

Notes 1. Cited in De Felice, Jews in Arab Land, 285. 2. Reuters, October 3, 2011. 3. Times of Israel, June 27, 2016. 4. Broadcast of Radio France Internationale, December 1, 2014. 5. Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist’s View of the Jews (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987). This book contains the English translation of Our Struggle With the Jews, whose original Arabic title was Ma’rakatuna Ma’a al-Yahud, edited by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study on Antisemitism (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Pergamon Press, 1986. In 1970 the Saudi government reprints this book, adding a large number of footnotes based on the The Protocols. 6. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations, citing Our Struggle with the Jews, 78 and 83. 7. Ibid., 83. 8. Ibid., 83. In Egypt, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was turned into a dramatic series in 41 episodes in 2002 and was licensed to 17 stations across the Arab-Muslim world. In 2003 another series of 29 episodes, also drawn from the Protocols, was produced by Syria and its Lebanese Shi’ite ally, Hezbollah. 9. See Pierre-André Taguieff, “Fanatiques antijuifs sur la voie du djihad. Dans le sillage de Haj Amin el-Husseini et de Johann von Lers,” in Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, no. 205,

474  |  Jews in Arab Countries October 2016, pp. 475–510. See also Ilan Ben Zion, “Le Mufti de Jérusalem: le Mont du Temple n’a jamais abrité de Temple juif,” 27 October 2015, http://fr.timesofisraël.com/le-mufti-de​ -Jérusalem-le-mont-du-temple-na-jamais-abrité-de-temple-juif/. 10. See http://www.laicite-republique.org/abdelghani-merah-les-racines-du-mal-i​ -kersimon-islamophobie-org-29-juil-16.html. 11. Karim Akouche, in Causeur, September 29, 2016. See https://www.causeur.fr/identite. 12. Gunther Jikeli, interview, Le Devoir, Montréal, October 31, 2016. 13. Conducted at the request of the Jewish Foundation of France by the Paris Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the IPSOS Institute and entitled “Le rapport à l’autre et aux minorités” (Relations with others and with minorities.) 14. Smaïn Laacher in the film by Georges Benayoun, Profs en territoires perdus de la République, October 2015, TV channel FR3. See also the book that inspired this documentary, Emmanuel Brenner, Les Territoires perdus de la République (Paris:Mille et une nuits/Fayard, 2002), 46–47. 15. Radio France International, 1 December 2004. 16. JSS News, 20 January 2017. 17. Cf. Haaretz, 30 November 2014. 18. Al-Jazeera TV, Qatar, January 28–30, 2009. See https://www.memri.org/tv/sheik​ -yousuf-al-qaradhawi-allah-imposed-hitler-upon-jews-punish-them-allah-willing-next-time​ -will/transcript. 19. See Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, Cairo, May 5, 2016 and May 19, 2016. 20. Ibid. 21. Robert Wistrich, Muslim Anti-semitism: A Clear and Present Danger (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2002). 22. In Shalom Magazine, The European Jewish Magazine, Autumn 2009.

Appendix

The Ottoman Empire until 1914

The Jewish communities of the Arab-Muslim world in 1914

The Network of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1914 in the Arab-Muslim world

Bibliography

Archival Sources Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) Egypt I.G. (Egypt and Lebanon) Egypt X.E. Egypt XI.E. Egypt XII.E. Egypt XIV. France VI.F. France IX.E. France X.F. France XII.F. (on Iraq and Morocco) France XIV.F. (on Morocco) France XV.F (on Morocco) France VIII.D. Iraq I.C. 1 à 9 Lebanon I.C. Libya 1 C.1. Libya II.E. Libya III.E. Libya I.G. Morocco I.B. Morocco II.B. Morocco I.E. Morocco I.J. Morocco I.G. Morocco II.C. Morocco III.C. 1 à 10 Morocco IV.C. 11 Morocco V.B. Morocco VI.B. Syria I.G.

Bulletin of the Alliance israélite universelle: 1864–1913 The Bulletin was not published between 1914 and 1920. It reappeared in January 1921 as a monthly under the title Paix et Droit. Publication was again suspended in 1940. In 1944, it resumed publication as Cahiers de l’Alliance israélite universelle.

479

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Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes (French Diplomatic Archival Center, Nantes, France) (CADN) Morocco. Internal Directorate. “Jewish Questions” series. Dossier 13. Series B. French Embassy in Baghdad. Dossier 17. Zionism. Propaganda. Fund-raising. Dossier 18. Zionism 1936–1955 Dossier 22. Zionism Dossier 24. Internal Security Dossier 26. Internal Security (Oujda pogroms, June 1948)

Tunisia Bernard Fund (1881–1949)

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Selected Works Abecassis, Frédéric and Faü, Jean-François. “Les Juifs dans le monde musulman à l’Age des nations (1840–1945).” In Les Juifs dans l’Histoire, edited by Antoine Germa, Benjamin Lellouch, and Evelyne Patlagean, 545–570. Paris: Champ Vallon, 2011. Abecassis, Frédéric and Faü, Jean-François. “Le monde musulman: effacement des communautés juives et nouvelles diasporas depuis 1945.” In Les Juifs dans l’Histoire, edited by Antoine Germa, Benjamin Lellouch, and Evelyne Patlagean, 815–840. Paris: Champ Vallon, 2011). Abitbol, Michel. Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy. Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2008. Abitbol, Michel. Juifs et Arabes au XX° siècle. Paris: Collection Tempus Perrin, 2006. Abitbol, Michel. Le Passé d’une discorde. Juifs et Arabes du VII° siècle à nos jours. Paris: Perrin, 1999. Abitbol Michel, ed. Relations judéo musulmanes au Maroc. Perceptions et réalités. Paris: Stavit-CRJM, 1997. Achcar, Gilbert. Les Arabes et la Shoah. La guerre israélo-arabe des récits. Paris: SindbadActes Sud, 2009. Ageron, Charles-Robert. “Contribution à l’étude de la propagande allemande au Maghreb pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.” Revue d’histoire maghrébine 7–8 (1977): 6–32. Ageron, Charles-Robert. “Les populations du Maghreb face à la propagande allemande.” Revue d’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale no.114 (1979): 1–39. Al Abbassi Ali Bey. Voyage au Maroc en 1803. Paris: Éditions Coda, 2008 (1814). Anidjar Gil. The Jew. The Arab. A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Attal, Robert. Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord. Jerusalem: Bibliographie, 1973. Baron, Salo W. Histoire d’Israël, vol. 2. Paris: Collection Quadrige PUF, 1986. Benbassa, Esther and Aron Rodrigue. Histoire des Juifs sépharades. Paris: Collection PointsSeuil, 2002. Benech, José. Essai d’explication d’un mellah. Paris: Éditions Larose, 1940. Bensimon, Agnès. Hassan II et les Juifs. Histoire d’une émigration secrete. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Bensimon-Donath, Doris. Evolution du judaïsme marocain sous le Protectorat français, 1912– 1956. Paris: Mouton and Co, 1968. Bensoussan, Georges. Histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme, 1860–1940. Paris: Fayard, 2002.

Bibliography | 485 Berchet, Jean-Claude. Le Voyage en Orient. Anthologie des voyageurs français dans le Levant au XIX° siècle. Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins, 1985. Blanchard, Pascal. “La vocation fasciste de l’Algérie coloniale dans les années 1930.” In De L’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvement des deux côtés du miroir colonial (1940–1962), 177–194. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Braude, Benjamin and Bernard Lewis, eds. Christians and Jews in Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plurial Society. New York: Holmes and Mayer, 1982. Braudel, Philippe. La Méditerranée et le monde mediterranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, vol. 2. Paris: Armand Colin, 1985 (1949). Cabanel, Patrick, ed. Une France en Méditerranée, Paris: Créaphis, 2006. Caillié, René. Voyage à Tombouctou, vol. 2. Paris: La Découverte, 1996 (1830). Chebel, Malek. L’Esclavage en terre d’islam. Paris: Fayard, 2007. Chouraqui, André. Histoire des Juifs en Afrique du Nord. Paris: Hachette Littérature, 1987. Chouraqui, André. L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine. Paris: PUF, 1965. Cohen, Haïm J. The Jews of the Middle East, 1860–1972. Jerusalem: Israel University Press,1973. Cohen, Mark R. Sous le Croissant et sous la Croix. Les Juifs au Moyen Age. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Cohen-Tannoudji, Denis. Les Enfants d’Yshmaël. Itinéraires séfarades maghrébins du Moyen Age à nos jours. Paris: Hermann, 2010. Courbage, Youssef and Philippe Fargues. Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’islam arabe et turc. Paris: Payot, 2005. Danan, Ariel. “ L’éducation physique dans les écoles de l’AIU.” Les Cahiers du judaïsme, no. 21 (2007): 14–23. Danan, Ariel. “Face à l’inconnu. Présentation de lettres d’instituteurs de l’Alliance.” Les Cahiers du judaïsme, no. 28 (2010): 80–113. De Felice, Renzo. Jews in Arab Land. Libya, 1835–1970. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Debono, Emmanuel. “Antisémites européens et musulmans après le pogrom de Constantine (1934–1939).” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 187 (July–December 2007): 305–328. Delacroix, Christian, François Dosse, and Garcia Patrick. Les Courants historiques en France XIX°–XX° siècle. Paris: Folio Histoire, 2007. Deshen, Shlomo and Walter P. Zenner. Jews among Muslims: Communities in the PreColonial Middle East. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Deshen, Shlomo. Les Gens du mellah. La vie juive au Maroc à l’époque pré coloniale. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991. Doutté, Edmond. En tribu, Paris: Librairie Paul Geuthner, 1914. Ennaji, Mohammed. Le Sujet et le Mamelouk. Esclavage, pouvoir et religion dans le monde arabe. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2007. Eraqi-Klorman, Bat Zion. The Jews of Yemen in the Nineteenth Century: A Portrait of a Messianic Community. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Fargeon, Maurice. Les Juifs en Egypte depuis les origines jusqu’à ce jour. Cairo, 1938. Fenton, Paul B. and David G. Littman. L’Exil au Maghreb. La Condition juive sous l’Islam, 1148–1912. Paris: PUPS, 2010. Filiu, Jean-Pierre. L’Apocalypse dans l’islam. Paris: Fayard, 2008. Flamand, Pierre. Un mellah en pays berbère: Demnate, Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1952. Friedlander, Saul. Les Années d’extermination. Paris: Seuil, 2009.

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Index

Abassi, Ali Bey al-, 52, 80 Abbas, Ferhat, 248, 291 Abbou, Isaac, 392, 446 Abd al Imam, Saïd, 280 Abd el-Aziz, sultan du Maroc, 63, 251 Abd el-Hafiz, 149 Abd El-Kader Abderrezak, 148, 149 Abd el-Rahman, Moulay, sultan du Maroc, 27, 359, 399 Abdou, Muhammad, 106, 256 Abdulhamid II, 101, 149 Abdulmecid I, 32, 130 Abravanel, Haïm, 393 Abu Nasr, Oumar, 264 Achcar, Gilbert, 317 Adès, Shafiq, 380 Aflak, Michel, 265, 365 Aghion, Raymond, 241 Agronsky, Gershon, 275 Ahmad, Imam, 372 Ahmad, Pasha, 391 Ahmed, Pasha, 54 Ahmed Bey, 51 Ajhlani, Mounir, 265 Albala, 95, 196, 224 Al-Din Al-Afghani, Jamal, 255 Al-Farabi, 250 Al-Fassi, Muhammed, 424, 440 Al-Hadi, 273 Alkalai, Yehuda, 199 Al-Kawuqji, 316 Al-Kharisi, Muhammad, 394 Al Kuwayti, Salih Ezra, 238 Allard, Dr, 34 Allenby, General, 205 Al-Mustanjid, 249 Altern, Erich, 401 Amarah, Ibrahim, 129 Amoros, 406

Amrouche, Jean, 245 Antébi, Jacob, 129 Aquin, Aymé d’, 142 Arendt, Hannah, 443, 464 Arida, Mgr, 264 Arié, David, 51, 172 Arif, General, 456 Arslan, Adil, 268 Arslan, Shakib, 265, 268, 286 Artom, Elia, 228 Assad, Hafez el-, 409 Auband, Raoul, 290 Averroès, 249, 250 Azm, Jamal al-, 250 Azoulay, Messod, 66 Azoury, Najib, 106 Azzam, Abdul Rahman, 359, 399 Badoglio, Governor, 232 Bakoury, Sheikh Hassan el-, 402 Balafredj, Ahmed, 423 Balbo, Italo, 283, 284 Banna, Hassan al-, 258, 266, 285, 299, 400, 448, 469 Banu Qurayza, 21 Bar Kochba, 18, 179 Baron, Salo, 1 Baroudi, Fakri, 265 Baruch, André, 423 Bashi, 123 Basri, Méir, 450 Bassam, Sadiq al-, 281 Baudouin, Paul, 247 Baurnann, 401 Bayard, 179 Bayezid II, sultan, 30 Beaumier, Auguste, 12, 47, 53, 59, 91, 142, 145, 181 Behar, Nissim, 165, 199

489

490 | Index Béhar, Robert, 170 Bellat, Paul, 291 Ben Badis, Sheikh, 263 Ben Barka, Mehdi, 421 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 252 Bendavid, Yosef, 325 Ben-Gurion, David, 361, 387, 395, 401, 445, 455 Ben Meir, Albert, 221, 222 Benoliel, 112 Ben Porat, Mordehai, 327 Bensabat, 110 Ben Salem, 402 Bensimon, Doris, 425 Ben Yaich Halevi, Itzhak, 139 Ben Yehouda, Éliézer, 136, 166, 199, 215 Benzaken, Leon, 423, 424 Berdugo, David, 423 Bey Khalil, Mahmoud, 280 Bigart, Jacques, 45, 97, 114, 127, 207, 217, 218, 220, 221, 237, 253 Bismarck, Otto von, 147, 284 Bitar, Nadim al-, 250 Bitton, David Ben Braham, 64 Blum, Léon, 186, 235, 266, 282, 290 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 140, 143, 154 Boulama, M., 377 Boumendjel, Ali, 335 Bourguiba, Habib, 272, 314, 400, 422, 423 Bou Zeyyane, 149 Brandeis, Louis, 219–220 Braudel, Fernand, 1, 6 Brenner, Yossef Haïm, 212 Brunel, Jean, 378 Brunner, Aloïs, 401 Buble, Friedrich, 401 Budd, 321 Bugeaud, General, 230 Caillié, René, 14 Calamaro, P., 464 Caleff, 203 Calleya, 156, 262 Cassin, René, 331, 444–445 Castro, Leon, 241, 257 Cattaoui, Joseph Aslan, 241, 296, 298, 299 Cattaoui, René, 38–39, 185, 403

Cazès, 34 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 426 Cerles, Pierre, 456 Césaire, Aimé, 97 Chabazi, Chalom, 97 Chamberlain, H. S., 270 Charles X, 148 Charleville, Mahir, Rabbi, 154 Chateaubriand, François René de, 45 Chebel, Malek, 116–118 Choloem, Abbo, 97 Churchill, Winston, 204, 310, 324 Cohen, Daniel, 456 Cohen, Joseph, 94 Cohen, Josué, 95, 160 Cohen, Mark, 99 Cohen, Mordehai, 139 Cohen, Prosper, 302, 446 Cohen Scali, David, 153 Coidan, Étienne, 60, 85, 101, 155, 196, 199, 214, 216, 225-227, 229, 241, 248, 252, 254, 290, 300, 340, 343, 344, 348, 353, 362, 366, 384 Comay, Joan, 396 Conquy, Robert, 47, 65, 182 Corneilhan, Georges, 106 Cremer, Valentine, doctor, 351, 358 Crémieux, Adolphe, 52, 54, 90, 94, 130, 132–133, 162 Crémieux, decree, 41, 94, 154, 208, 231, 232, 234, 249, 291, 332, 333, 335, 342 Cromer, Lord, 118 Cüppers, Martin, 273, 325 Curiel, Henri, 241 Dahan, Isaac, 165 Dahan, Jacques, 241 Dallal, Sasson Shlomo, 360 Daniel, Ezra Menahem, 218, 219 Danon, J., 161 Danon, Raphaël, 55, 65–66, 202, 219 Daoud, Pasha, 71 Daoud, Sami, 401 Darlan, Admiral, 333 Dauemling, Joachim, 402 Debono, Emmanuel, 290

Index | 491 De Felice, Renzo, 38, 284, 367, 398 Derrida, Jacques, 343 Diderot, Denis, 164 Diewerge, 288 Disraeli, Benjamin, 132 Djivré, 161 Dobkin, Elyahu, 210, 325, 388 Doehle, Walter, 313 Doriot, Jacques, 283, 290 Doutté, Edmond, 63 Dreyfus, Affair, 141, 154, 229, 234, 473 Drumont, Édouard, 234 Dumarçay, Jacques, 411 Dumézil, Georges, 351 Dunant, Henri, 130 Eichmann, Adolf, 318, 319 Elbaz, Jacob, 70 El-Hiba, Ahmed, 101 Elia, Albert, 437, 460 Elkaim, David, 139 Elmaleh, Abraham, 213, 368 Elmaleh, Joseph, 44, 49, 60, 76–77 El-Mokri, Mohamed, 123, 247 Ennaji, Mohammed, 7, 85, 111 Esteva, Admiral, 314, 338 Ettel, Erwin, 315, 318 Evangeli, 104 Fajerman, Henri, 439, 442 Falcon, 112 Faradj, Morad, 241 Fargeon, Maurice, 298 Farhi, Menahem, 199 Farouk, King, 296, 319 Fassi, Allal al-, 424, 440 Fattori, Giorgio, 458 Febvre, Lucien, 7 Feinberg, Olga, 396 Ferry, Jules, 177 Feydeau, Ernest, 228 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 270 Flamand, Pierre, 424, 425, 440 Flaubert, Gustave, 118 Foucauld, Charles de, 11, 12, 27, 47, 53, 59, 67, 70, 84, 96, 102, 111, 115, 116, 229, 231

François-Poncet, André, 289 Fresco, Moïse, 185 Gaon, Saadia, 98 Gasselin, Édouard, 117 Gaulle, Charles de, 331, 366 Gemayel, Pierre, 265 Ghallab, Saïd, 56, 85, 87, 110, 235, 246, 407, 408, 425 Ghazi, King, fils de Fayçal, 297 Ghazi, Robert, 204 Ginsburg, James Bernard, 86 Giraud, général, 333, 342 Gleim, Léopold, 401 Godart, Justin, 223 Goering, Hermann, 272, 321 Graetz, Heinrich, 1, 4, 88 Grégoire, Abbé, 93 Grobba, Fritz, 280, 285, 297, 317, 325 Gudemann, Moritz, 217 Haam, Ahad, 186 Habschush, Haïm, 48, 63 Ha Cohen, Mordehai, 139 Ha Cohen, Shaoul, 199 Haddad, Osman Kemal, 317, 319 Hagen, Herbert, 323 Hakim, Raphael, 241 Halevi, Itzhak, 139 Halévy, Joseph, 11, 15, 16, 38, 56, 57, 59, 73, 98, 135, 136, 146, 157, 162, 168, 170, 198, 199 Halff, Sylvain, 221 Halfon, Léon, 201 Hallaq, Salomon, 129 Halpern, Nathan, 207, 209 Harrus, Élias, 421 Hart, David, 60 Hartouch, Heloise, 109 Hasamsony, 203, 211 Hashimi, Taha al-, 325 Hassan Ier, Moulay, 63 Hassan II, 426, 429, 441, 453 Hatchuel, Sol, 103 Hauser, Henri, 131 Hazan, David, 257 Heim, Heribert, 402

492 | Index Herzl, Theodor, 89, 186, 199–201, 217 Heskel, Sassoon, 69, 137, 263 Hess, Rudolf, 285 Heydrich, Reinhard, 323 Heykal Pasha, Mohamed Hussein, 436 Hiba, Ahmed el-, 101–102 Hillel, Shlomo, 263, 361, 373, 460 Himmler, Heinrich, 316, 318, 319, 321, 323 Hitler, Adolf, 209, 235, 264, 266, 268, 271, 272, 284, 286-290, 298, 301-304, 310, 313, 314, 317, 319-321, 323, 325, 336, 341, 360, 402, 405, 471, 472 Hosni, David, 238 Houel, Christian, 70 Hugo, Victor, 162 Hussein, Ahmad, 263, 271, 470 Husseini, Amin al-, 173, 267, 269, 274, 279, 286, 317–320 Ibn Hanbal, 250 Ibn Khaldun, 19, 250 Ibn Naguela, Joseph, 87 Ibn Paquda, Bahya, 99 Ibn Taymiyya, 107, 111 Innocent III, 282–283 Ismaïl, sultan du Maroc, 116 Jabotinsky, Vladimir Zeev, 89, 215 Jamali, Fadil, 272 Jarblum, Marc, 357 Jeanne d’Arc, 179 Jundi, Sami al-, 265, 270, 271 Kaddouri, Sassoon, 326, 391, 403 Kahn, Zadoc, 217 Kaiti, Daoud al-, 114 Kassem, General, 456 Kattan, Naïm, 69, 71, 75, 151, 176, 239, 242, 269, 326, 327, 449 Kawkiji, Fawzi, 280 Kenbib, Mohamed, 76, 339 Khattabi, Abd el-Krim al-, 238, 284 Khedr, Marc, 458 Kirk, Alexander C., 311, 317–318, 320 Kliger, I.J., 350 Kuhayl, Shukr, 98

La Fontaine, Jean de, 168 Lakhdar, A., 250 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 251 Lambert, Abbé, 291 Lampson, Miles, 315 Lane, Edward, 120 Laroui, Abdallah, 3 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 130 Laurens, Henry, 203 Laval, Pierre, 186 Lavigérie, Mgr, 37 Lavon, Affair, 454 Lawrence, T. E., 203 Lazarus, Jacques, 68 Lecache, Bernard, 300, 304, 305 Leers, Johann von, dit Omar Amin, 402 Leiser, Erwin, 401 Lemprière, William, 14, 247 Lerner, Daniel, 179 Leven, Narcisse, 94, 131, 176, 217, 218 Levi, Abraham, 297 Levi, Sylvain, 217, 220–221 Levin, Itamar, 420 Levy, Bernard, 67 Levy, Meir, 68 Levy, Moise, 67 Lewis, Bernard, 19, 20, 22, 25, 87, 271 Lie, Trygve, 359 Loeb, Isidore, 52 Logassy, Moshe, 200 Lon, Ramon, 142 Loti, Pierre, 6 Loubaton, 96 Louria, 168 Ludendorff, General, 265 Luther, Martin, 234 Lyautey, General, 142, 151, 175-177, 216, 222, 223, 231, 237, 296, 352, 435 MacDonald, 408 Mahdi, révolte du, 88, 98, 149 Mahmoud Pasha, Mohamed, 224 Maimonide, Moïse, 19, 20, 26, 98, 101 Maissi, Élie, 375 Malki, Saad Jacob, 214 Mallmann, Klaus-Michael, 273, 325

Index | 493 Mamane, Moise, 96 Mammeri, Mouloud, 339 Mangin, Colonel, 102, 152 Manuel, Eugène, 218 Marchino, Giacomo, 382, 398 Marx, Karl, 130, 379, 470 Maurras, Charles, 332 Meakin, Bridget, 52 Méfano, Robert, 269, 275 Méhémet Ali, 120, 130, 135, 139, 401 Meir, Golda, 457 Meir-Glizenstein, Esther, 371 Memmi, Albert, 3, 14, 36, 70, 95, 198, 256, 419, 439 Mendès France, Pierre, 245, 260, 366 Misrahi, Robert, 15 Mitrani, Barouh, 199 Moch, Maurice, 455 Mohammed, prince, 899 Mohammed, Sidi, 247 Mohammed IV, 131 Mohammed V, 237, 422, 423, 426 Moïse, 66 Molle, Jules, 234 Mond, Sir Alfred, 202, 273 Moneim, Abdel, 296 Montagne, Report, 336, 344 Montaigne, Michel de, 164 Montefiore, Moses, 15, 16, 64, 91, 130–132, 142, 148 Montgomery, General, 332 Morgenthau, Henry, 342 Morinaud, Emile, 234, 291, 301 Mortara, Affair, 130 Moser, Alois, 402 Mosseri, Jack, 211, 212 Mosseri, Joseph, 296 Mouette, Germain, 84 Moyal, Joseph, 44, 241 Munk, Salomon, 94, 130 Münzel, Oskar, 402 Murad, Salima, 114 Muruwa, Camille, 360 Mussolini, Benito, 284 Mustafa Kemal, dit Kemal Atatürk, 257

Mutawakkil, Caliph, 101, 111 Naddara, Abou, 241 Nahon, Moïse, 70, 90, 219 Nahoum, Haim, 103 Nahum, Halfalla, 406 Najar, Albert, 35 Najib al-Hajj, 106 Napoleon III, 130 Nasiri, Makki al-, 266 Nasnar, Naam al-, 401 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 458 Navon, 164 Nazim, Pasha, 56, 116 Neguib, General, 389 Netter, Arnold, 217, 221 Netter, Charles, 134, 157 Neurath, Konstantin von, 287 Nidmi, Omar, 412 Niebuhr, Carsten, 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 270 Ninio, Léon, 61, 114 Nordau, Max, 58, 196 Obadia, 376 Ohana, Joseph, 241 Ollivier, Émile, 154 Omar, Pact of, 18, 73, 87 Omar I, 23 Omar II, 85, 101 Papen, Franz von, 319 Parfitt, Tudor, 443 Pasquinelli, Cesare, 458 Peel, plan, 287 Peel Lord, 239 Péguy, Charles, 168, 176 Pellissier de Reynaud, Edmond, 90 Perlman, Éliézer, see Ben Yehouda, Éliézer Pétain, Marshal, 247, 332 Peyrouton, Marcel, 342 Picciotto, James, 135 Picciotto, Moses H., 131 Pinsker, Léon, 162 Pinto, Léon, 187 Pisa, Isaac, 96, 144, 233

494 | Index Qutb, Sayyid, 469 Raccah, Saul, 100 Rachid, Mustafa, Pasha, 32, 106 Rahmin Pataw, Hugi, 238 Raphaël, Itzhak, 364 Ratti-Menton, consul, 129 Rauff, Walther, 324, 338–339 Régis, Max, 234 Regnault, Eugène, 76 Reinach, Salomon, 221 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 310, 319, 321 Ribbi, Abraham, 37, 93, 240 Rida, Rachid, 106–107, 203, 204 Roghi, Jilali, 88 Rommel, General, 310, 321, 322, 324, 325 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 310, 312 Rosenberg, Alfred, 287 Rosenthal, Joseph, 241 Rothschild, Betty de, 131 Rothschild, Edmond de, 217, 221 Rothschild, famille, 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 97, 164 Ruppin, Arthur, 211 Saab, Édouard, 319 Saadeh, Antun, 265–266 Sabawi, Yunis al-, 325, 326 Sadati, Ahmad al-, 264 Saguès, Élise, 163 Saïd, Edward, 90, 118, 119–120 Saïd, Nuri, 388, 394, 419, 448 Salah, frères, 114 Salama, Albert, 207 Saleh Mohsine, Rochdi, 62 Samama, Felix, 338 Samuel, Herbert, 279 Sanoua, Yacoub, see Sanua, Jacob Sanua, Jacob, 257 Sasson, David, 114 Schaldienst, Alois, 401 Schellenberg, Walter, 314–315 Schirach, Baldur von, 271, 289 Schmieden von, 312 Schneb, Abu, 463 Schumann, Robert, 336

Scovasso, Stefano, 146 Sebag, Joseph, 228 Seipel, 401 Sémach, M., 186 Sémach, Yomtov, 13, 17, 40, 45, 47, 68, 84, 91, 97, 102, , 104–105, 109, 112, 114, 122, 157, 158, 161, 168, 176, 196, 198, 199, 206, 207, 209, 236–237, 239, 243, 251, 296 Sfez, Batto, 103, 132, 150, 262 Shaul, Anwar, 450 Shaw, Walter, 279 Shawkat, Sami, 273 Sibai, Mustafa al-, 400 Sidi Khlil, 121 Silberstein, 108, 185, 242, 275, 277 Simha, Moïse, 258 Sivan, Emmanuel, 250 Slawi, Nasiri al-, 132 Slimane, Ben, 272 Sokolov, Nahum, 186, 205 Somekh, Abdallah, 38–39, 57, 65, 71, 74, 92, 97, 147, 152 Somekh, Saul, 17, 157, 162, 165, 168, 173, 175, 179, 181, 184–185, 199, 211, 213, 240, 256 Sonsino, Victor, 257 Soult, General, 230 Spinoza, Baruch, 11 Steeg, Théodore, 207, 223 Stillman, Norman, 21 Sultan, Léon, 343, 423 Sykes-Picot, accords, 205, 261 Taïeb, Jacques, 7, 41, 110, 113 Tarragan, Benzion, 436 Tawfiq, khedive, 152 Thameur, Habib, 314 Tharaud, brothers, 45, 351 Thévenin, Dr, 145 Thiers, Adolphe, 129 Thomas, père, 104, 129 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 148 Troyes, Rashi de, 22 Valadji, Jacob, 46, 49, 65, 71, 90, 91, 93-95, 122, 142, 162, 181, 182, 187

Index | 495 Valensi, Lucette, 49 Valensin, Doctor, 202 Vallat, Xavier, 335 Vauthier, Albert, 446 Verdès-leroux, Jeannine, 176 Voltaire, 164 Waldman, Regina, 405 Warlimont, 315 Wazzani, Muhammad al-, 286 Weill, Michel, 228 Weizmann, Haïm, 203 Willerman, Heinrich, 402 Windus, John, 885 Wingate, Orde, 322 Wirsing, Giselher, 288 Wisliceny, Dieter, 318–319 Wolff, Heinrich, 313

Wolffsohn, David, 201 Wurst, Timotheus, 271 Xylander, von, 314 Yahia-Hamid Ed-Din Imam, 17, 63, 72, 74, 216, 279, 297, 372, 391, 438 Yavne’eli, Shmuel, 40, 213 Yazid, Moulay, 22 Zaddik, Yehuda Avraham, 360 Zafrani, Haïm, 421, 444 Zagloul, Saad, 238, 241, 257, 260 Zagury, Yahiya, 216 Zay, Jean, 235 Zaydi Imam Ahmad, see Ahmad, Imam Zvi, Sabbatai, 98 Zweben, Joseph, 354

GEORGES BENSOUSSAN is a historian, and for many years served as Editorial Director of the Shoah Memorial in Paris. He is author of a number of notable works on modern Jewish history, including Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme, 1860–1940 (An intellectual and political history of Zionism, 1860–1940) and Les Juifs du monde arabe. La question interdite (The Jews of the Arab world: the forbidden question). ANDREW HALPER is a London-based translator and magistrate. Educated in Canada and France, he worked for many years as a lawyer, and served in the Canadian diplomatic corps.