Noam (Norman) A. Stillman
North Africa Jewry During World War II: Subjugation, Heroism and a Near Encounter with the Holocaust
Summary
North Africa (the Maghreb) during the Second World War had the largest Jewish population in the Islamic world. Although there were no death factories in North Africa, no railway lines leading to Europe, and no mass murders, there were, in fact, more than one hundred labor and prison camps under the anti-Semitic Vichy regime. The entire region became an actual theater of war, and for a little over six months between November 1942 and May 1943, Tunisia came under direct Nazi control. The resistance underground that greatly facilitated the Allied landing and takeover in Algeria during Operation Torch on the night of November 7–8, 1942, was overwhelmingly comprised of Jews. Their war-time experience had a major impact upon Maghrebi Jewry who emerged with a renewed sense of themselves (un retour sur soi).
Noam (Norman) A. Stillman
Noam (Norman) A. Stillman is Schusterman/Josey Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma and an internationally recognized authority on the history and culture of the Islamic world and on Sephardi and Oriental Jewry. His books include The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book and The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, among others. He is executive editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. He is chair of the Academic Council of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and sits on numerous boards of academic organizations, think tanks, and journals. He came to Israel permanently in 2016 and teaches each spring semester at the Hebrew University.
This question from Stuart Saidel. The answer is a few did, but most could not. It was very difficult to make the crossing, the authorities did not, simply did not permitted.
There were. The king did not probably incite them. That I think is a, has to be proven. And it certainly doesn’t seem that given his feelings towards the Jews, paternalistic, but nonetheless, that he was the cause of them.
Canada has, after Israel and France, the largest North African Jewish, not just Moroccan, also Tunisian Jewish community. There are about 30,000 in Montreal and another five to 10,000 in Toronto. Most of them came not directly from North Africa, but went to France and Vince to Canada. They have a strong cultural organisation. I twice was a speaker there. In fact, my first French public lecture in North America was at sponsored by the North African Jewish community there. Oh, and by the way, the head of the writer’s union in Canada was actually an Iraqi Jew who came from Baghdad, but had been educated in the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools, and then went to a French university and wrote all his novels in French and including wonderful novels about Jewish life in Iraq.