Search Results

Chapter 2 focuses on the Second World War and its effects on Moroccan Jewish and Muslim political life. With France’s fall to Nazi Germany in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy regime applied anti-Semitic legislation in Morocco. While unevenly enforced, such legislation called for severe restrictions on employment, education, and housing for Moroccan Jews. This chapter examines Vichy rule in Morocco and the related spikes in anti-Semitism and fascism. It also describes the efflorescence of political possibilities for Moroccan Jews and Muslims that followed the success of Operation Torch. Yet, the previous fluidity of political choices hardened into mutually exclusive possibilities. Moroccan Jews asked themselves whether it was best to stay in Morocco or to leave. Simultaneously, the chapter charts the transformation of the Moroccan Communist Party into a nationalist organization that included a critical number of politicized Jews.

Despite his misgivings, Laroque contributed to the elaboration of the policies of the ministry of labour during the early months of the Vichy Regime. During this time, he helped draft the legislation which introduced the comités d’organisation, and was implicated in aborted attempts to implement corporatist policies and reform the social insurance system. Dismissed from the civil service because of his Jewish origins, he moved to Lyon, were he bacme involved in the activities of the Resistance. By the spring of 1943, he found himself assigned to the headquarters of the Free French movement in London, and he soon became involved in preparing the administrative personnel which would be entrusted with the direction of public services in the liberated areas of France. It was only in the autumn of 1944 that he returned to civilian life, and it was during this time that he was appointed director general of social insurance by the minister of labour.

At the start of the Occupation, both French and German agencies accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the so‐called Jewish Question (Judenfrage) and adopted anti‐Semitic policies of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Perceiving Jews as a security threat, the military administration evicted Jews from a security zone along the Channel coast and played a major role in the ‘Aryanization’ of the French economy, but the MBF condemned ‘Aryanization’ on legal grounds and did not believe that Jews stood behind all resistance activity. The Vichy regime defamed and discriminated against Jews on its own accord, created the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to despoil Jews, and ordered French police to incarcerate specific categories of Jews, but Pierre Laval objected to the arrest of assimilated French Jews because the roundups undermined support for his government. The SS and German embassy in Paris both championed the entire defamation, discrimination, despoliation, and deportation process, but they lacked the manpower and a legal mandate to act on their own before the summer of 1942. As the fortunes of war turned against the Reich, Hitler championed increasingly ruthless anti‐Semitic measures that culminated in the Final Solution.

The Vichy regime (1940-1944) imposed racist restrictions upon Jews and Muslims in Algeria. This legislation was extended to the Algerian Sahara, but southern Algerian Jews were not sent to labor camps as were Jews in northern Algeria and, when they violated “Aryanization” decrees, they faced relatively light punishment. Some Jews from northern Algeria even attempted to relocate to Algeria’s south during the war. After the Second World War, Jews in southern Algeria experienced the kind of existential horror that northern Algerian Jews experienced during the Vichy years. The Fourth Republic re-extended citizenship to Algerian Jews in 1943, emphasizing that southern Jews remained beholden to civil status laws. France also initiated a series of administrative and electoral reforms imagined by French legislators to democratize the rule of law in Algeria, reconstituting the departments of northern Algeria and the Sahara as an administrative whole. In the Mzab, these developments sparked reactions across the political spectrum; as elsewhere, politics were radicalizing, presaging the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962). Evincing no evident support for Mzabi exceptionalism, Algerian nationalism, or communism, southern Jews occupying an uneasy place in this evolving political landscape. Jewish emigration escalated, while the Mzabi Jewish community captivated various global Jewish philanthropies.