Abstract
This paper will examine Moroccan Jewish and Muslim anti-fascist activism during the interwar period. Interwar Morocco was home to a thriving anti-fascist political scene with intimate connections to France and Spain. Politically active Moroccan Jews and Muslims were found in the ranks of many different anti-fascist organizations, above all the International League Against Antisemitism, or the LICA after its French acronym (Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme). The LICA itself was originally founded in Paris in 1928 by the French Jew and journalist Bernard Lecache as the League Against Pogroms before changing its name. While most of the LICA’s activities were in France, it had chapters across French North Africa as well as in Egypt. Morocco was home to several thriving LICA chapters, with activity in nearly every major urban center, and counted Moroccan Jews and Muslims as well as Europeans among its leadership and membership. At the core of LICA’s mission stood a dedication to French republicanism and its promises of universalist humanism. French and Spanish Fascist organizations, too, had chapters in French North Africa, including Morocco. These organizations included Action Française and the Croix de Feu, and spewed antisemitic propaganda.
Morocco had been divided into two protectorates in 1912, a French one composing most of Morocco’s heartlands and Atlantic coast as well as its main imperial cities, and a Spanish one on the Mediterranean coast in the north. Tangier was an international zone. Jews and Muslims across these zones were alarmed by the growth of fascism in Europe and in North Africa. Propaganda linking Jews to a fictitious international Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory spread in French and Spanish Morocco alike. Indeed, the ongoing Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) provided an opportunity for Nazi propaganda to enter Morocco, as Nazi Germany supported Franco’s forces against the Republican government. At the same time, conflict in British mandatory Palestine reverberated in Morocco, with anti-Zionist agitation slipping into antisemitism. And in 1934, violence broke out against the Jews of Constantine, Algeria, prompting Bernard Lecache to engage in a public speaking tour of French North African LICA chapters. Through organizations like the LICA as well as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French-Jewish educational organization based in Paris with schools throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Moroccan Jews and Muslims responded to rising fascism and antisemitism out of a sense of shared political values.
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