Genocidal antisemitism is a striking characteristic of today’s Islamism, whether expressed by Hamas, Iran, or any number of imams in the West. Simply disliking, hurting, expelling or fighting Jews is not sufficient; they must be exterminated. Some of this language is couched as anti-Zionist or anti-Israel, but the death threat clearly applies to all Jews. Globally, Islamist voices today drown out other Muslim voices, convincing both Muslims and non-Muslims alike that this hatred is an immutable principle of Islam. Among the Righteous, however, provides evidence to undermine this perception.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, American historian Robert Satloff noted that no Arabs were included among those who had rescued Jews during World War II. He decided to see if he could locate a single North African Arab who had helped a single Jew during that time. This highly readable book describes how his research took him to four North African countries: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, which during World War II were under first the French Vichy government, then under Nazi Germany; and Libya which was under Italian control.
The Vichy government, with no prompting from the Germans, undertook various punitive measures against the Jews. It established some 60 labor camps in Morocco and Algeria, where Europeans, both Jews and other “undesirables,” were deported, forced to work in appalling conditions and frequently tortured. While the Europeans made the laws and established the camps, many Arabs served as guards or in other positions. Among these were sadists who clearly enjoyed making the prisoners suffer.
In Tunisia, local Arab mobs attacked Jews, rioting and pillaging them. The worst event occurred in the coastal city of Gabès in May 1941, where three days of violence left eight Jews dead and twenty injured. The Mussolini regime in Libya was somewhat less harsh, but Jews there were persecuted nevertheless.
Satloff reports that a common reaction among Arabs towards Jews suffering under the new anti-Jewish rules was indifference. Perhaps they didn’t care, perhaps they couldn’t afford to show that they did care or were preoccupied with their own survival, or perhaps they preferred to profit financially from despoiling or exploiting Jews. He sums up the results of his research with the general conclusion: “By virtually all accounts, the mass of Arabs neither participated in nor actively supported the anti-Jewish campaign that European Fascists brought to North Africa. The preoccupation of most Arabs was survival…”
At the outset, Satloff hoped to identify one “righteous” Arab who had saved one Jew. Instead, he identified a number of Arab Muslims who, at considerable risk to themselves, helped Jews to escape or survive. Some performed simple acts of kindness; a Tunisian Jew differentiated between hostility toward Jews in the capital with kindness shown in the countryside. In mosques in Algiers, imams told local Muslims not to exploit Jewish suffering under the Vichy regime – and they did not. A number of prominent individuals also tried to protect Jews, including King Mohammed V of Morocco, Moncef Bey of Tunis, and officials at the Grand Mosque in Paris.
Uncovering all these stories was not easy: families now areoften reluctant to admit that their relative aided Jews. Nor were the few remaining North African Jews willing to talk: centuries of dhimmi status has taught them not to complain. In spite of these difficulties, Satloff was able to make a broad assessment of conditions in North Africa during World War II that included both positive and negative data about Muslim interactions with Jews. Looking at his results, one could conclude that the record of Muslims in North Africa is comparable to that of Christians in Europe. Certainly, it is not worse.
That conclusion is of particular relevance today. The stories from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya occurred at the same time that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem were in close contact with the Nazis, eagerlyconcurring in their genocidal hatred of Jews. Today, few Muslims are willing or able to challenge this genocidal antisemitism. Yet in practice the Muslims of North Africa, some 80 years ago, followed a very different path.