This paper is trying to answer the theoretical and philosophical question that the panel raises by a concrete historical case. The panel examines a possibility of constructing a multidirectional memory and multidimensional historicism of the colonial atrocities in North Africa, on the one hand, and the genocide of the Jews and non Jews by the Nazis on the European soil. To achieve this task, I have chosen three iconic historical protagonists (Maurice Papon, Germaine Tillion, and Yacef Saadi) whose life itineraries and destinies have been crossed trough time and through the symbolism of the physical space: Europe and North Africa during and in the aftermath of WWII. Maurice Papon was a Vichy regime official whose career shifted from his appointment as secretary of the prefecture of the Gironde in 1942, through his terms as a prefect in Morocco and Algeria, to the end of the Algerian War in 1962 when he was a prefect in Paris. Germaine Tillion, the iconic figure of French Resistance worked as an ethnologists at the Musée de l’Homme and in 1934 was sent to Algeria on a scientific mission to work on the Berber speaking population in the Aurès. Once there, her mission was interrupted in May 1940 and she returned to the occupied France. She joined the Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Ravensbrück. Saadi Yacef, the iconic symbol of the Algerian War and the “Battle of Algiers”. He was the FLN's military chief of the Zone Autonome d'Alger (Autonomous Zone of Algiers), during the siege of the Casbah. Through a description and analysis of the life experience of the three protagonists and the historical discourse and events that surrounded them, the paper tries to offer a practical answer to the following theoretical the question: Could it be methodologically and epistemologically possible to juxtapose and/or bridge the human experience(s) of the victims and survivors of the Nazi camps and the victims and survivors of the Algerian War and of the French colonial atrocities in North Africa? By raising and trying to answer these questions, the paper tries to upset the limits and also the lines of flight [lignes de fuite] between the “center” and the “periphery”, the “periphery” and the “center”, the colonial setting and the hexagon, History and Memory?

When reading the Moroccan nationalist daily newspaper al-‘Alam, which was published between 1946 and 1952, the historian is struck by the almost complete absence of memories of the Second World War in general, and the Holocaust in specific. Instead, the vast majority of articles dealt with anti-colonial liberation struggles from Indochina to Palestine, the contemporary political and economic malaise of war-torn Europe, and the emergence of the United States as the new superpower regulating global affairs. Rather than looking to the past, the newspaper looked towards the future. In this paper, I argue that the narrative offered in the pages of al-‘Alam displayed a desire to shift attention away from the past, characterized by colonial domination as well as the horrors of war, towards a brighter future dominated by the decolonized peoples of Africa and Asia outside the constraints of European control. By doing so, the Moroccan nationalists created a memory of the Second World War that decoupled from one another various intrinsically interwoven aspects of the War in general, and the Holocaust in particular, and caused a temporal and emotional distance from this period of horrific violence. Influenced by the progress-oriented teleological ideology of nationalism and the hopeful atmosphere prevalent across the post-War Third World, al-‘Alam mirrored the forward-looking attitude of Morocco’s anti-colonial activists. Within this worldview, the horrors of the Second World War remained but a note on the margins of global affairs, symbolic of decaying Europe’s decadence. Although also motivated by a desire to delegitimize the claims of the Jewish people to a homeland in Palestine, the Moroccan nationalist press’s attitude towards the Holocaust sought to break with the Eurocentric historical past and replace it with a post-European age.

Abstract: The Polemics of Muslim-Jewish History in the Wake of Vichy This paper demonstrates how the Algerian nationalist movement, and ultimately the war of independence, accompanied a profound change in the ways Algerian Jews and Muslims remembered their historical relationship. Coming in the wake of World War II and Vichy France, the rise of Algerian nationalism forced an end to earlier narratives that emphasized “progress” of the Jewish community from the “yoke of Islam” under the French. Even though the war brought about a number of well-publicized instances of violence between Jews and Muslims, the new tendency that emerged (among both Jews and Algerian nationalists, most of whom were Muslim) was to emphasize the history of Muslim-Jewish harmony in Algeria. Even though Jewish writers overwhelmingly favored the maintenance of French Algeria (albeit with reforms to grant equality to Muslims), and the FLN obviously were fighting for independence, both used this putative history of harmony as a polemic to advance their respective causes. For the nationalists, this was intended to underline the equal place of Jews, as native sons of the country, in a future independent Algeria. Many noted, for example, instances when Muslims tried to help Jews during the Vichy years. For Jews, this history of good relations—also manifest under Vichy—paradoxically emphasized their French citizenship and republican allegiances. This is because it served as a counter-narrative to anti-Semitic accusations that full Jewish citizenship had often been the root of Muslim humiliation, jealousy, and unrest. This was all the more important after the French citizenship of Algerian Jews had been revoked under Vichy. These politically-laden historical narratives reveal how contesting political agendas sought legitimacy, at this fraught juncture in French and Algerian history, by advancing surprisingly similar visions of a shared Muslim-Jewish past. This paper will also point out how these polemical uses of history also suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict was already straining relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria. Even as the FLN publicly espoused a historical narrative whereby Jews were native “sons of the country,” they connected Algerian Jews to events in Palestine. By late 1961, when it was clear to the FLN and their fellow travelers that most Jews wished to avoid commitment, Zionism was already a means to explain “Jewish” lack of patriotism.

The Moroccan Jews have benefited from some protections, during the Vichy regime, which held power in North Africa from July 1940 to November 1942, and the Nazi holocaust, compared to many other Arab countries. However, many scholars are revisiting the myth of the monarchy as savior of the Jews. Interviews with Moroccan Jews from different ideological spectrums have shown that the relationship between the Moroccan Monarchy and its Jewish subjects is more complicated than the obviously branding narrative of the King savior. Moroccan Jews, on the “demand” side, cannot be depicted as either with or against the Moroccan monarchy, since some of them, like Andre Azoulay and Serge Berdugo, dance to monarchical tunes, while others like Abraham Serfaty or Simon Levy, are more comfortable clapping into the dissident melody. The Moroccan monarchy, during that Nazi period of Morocco, while careful about branding itself as the savior of its Jewish “subjects,” was extremely frightened about relinquishing mobilizing ground to its islamist/nationalist competitors, and was constantly polling out its center of gravities about whether it was coming out as too “Jewbvious.” Were there any Jewish members in the Moroccan resistance and why did their struggle disappear from the public discourse? Were there any professions that were off-limit to Moroccan Jews in that period? If it is true that Morocco’s current Alaoui dynasty had welcomed the dismissed Andalusian Jews in Morocco and King Mohammed V protected his Jewish “subjects” from the Vichy Nazi reach, it is equally true that it was King Mohamed V who signed the anti-Semitic Vichy laws through his 1940 and 1941 royal decrees. Were there any pogroms in Morocco (Oujda 1948)? How is this period of Moroccan history imagined/reimagined by Moroccans today? What are the Jewish narratives of opposite sides on the Moroccan exception when it comes to the Holocaust arguing? The Moroccan Sultan, as Historian Georges Bensoussan argues, had met the leaders of the Jewish community only once and in private in the spring of 1942 to tell them that he personally disapproved of the Vichy measures. However, for the Historian Haim Zafrani, a 1941 telegram entitled “dissidence,” reporting how Sultan Mohamed V had invited the members of the Jewish community to celebrate his crowning, was discovered, in 1985 in the archive of foreign affairs in Morocco.