This paper examines the relationship between anti-Semitic policies in Vichy administered Morocco (1940-1942), post-war Moroccan Jewish political affiliations and the establishment of the Moroccan Communist Party (PCM) in 1943. Scholars have traditionally noted that Maghrebi Jews became disillusioned with assimilation according to the colonial Gallic ideal marketed to Jews as a direct result of discriminatory Ghettoization policies experienced during the two years of Vichy rule in Morocco. Less explored are Morocco’s Vichy forced labor camps as a nexus of political and social interaction between European and Moroccan Jews that fostered a sense of “supra-national” Jewish belonging, contemporaneous with intensifying Jewish anti-colonial Moroccan nationalist sentiment. It was in this context that Leon Sultan, an Algerian Jewish lawyer working in Casablanca, came to found the PCM in 1943. This paper traces Jewish political attitudes and affiliations, particularly within the Communist party, in Morocco during the Second World War as well as the consequences of these developments for post-war anti-colonial agitation and migration. While Communist activity was legally banned in Vichy Morocco, ideological and political ferment continued underground, informed by interactions with European Jews as well as political dissidents from France and Spain. Based on an examination of contemporary newspapers, political ephemera and oral histories this paper argues that although brief, Vichy rule in Morocco dramatically accelerated pre-existing political and social schisms among Moroccan Jews as well as between Moroccan Jews and Muslims. At the same time, this period proved crucial to the development of the PCM as a force for Moroccan independence and Jewish participation therein. This paper first describes Moroccan Jewish political life in the late 1930s, including a discussion of the state of Zionism, “Allianciste” (Alliance Israelite Universelle) political tendencies and Jews in the Left. From here, it addresses France’s loss to Germany in the fall of 1940, the extension of Vichy rule in North Africa and the effects of these events on Moroccan Jews. This section treats anti-Semitic legislation, forced labor camps primarily founded to incarcerate political prisoners as well as the slow liberation of these camps after the war’s conclusion with the aid of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) as well as the Quaker American organization, the American Friends Service Committee. The paper concludes with the state of the post-war Moroccan nationalist movement, the foundation of the PCM and an analysis of the effects of the war on Jewish social and political life.

Many historians have dealt with Egypt’s foreign policy following the “Revolution” of 1952, usually portraying Gamal Abd al-Nasser as a champion of anti-imperialism. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, the ruling Revolutionary Command Council did not become an unequivocal supporter of pan-Arabism following its ascendance to power. In reality, Nasser and his colleagues remained extremely skeptical of North African nationalism and did little to support the local anti-colonial movements in their struggle against France. My paper addresses this issue with regard to the Moroccan struggle for independence, which occurred in equal parts at home and abroad. Following the founding of the Arab League in 1945, the activists of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party opened an official bureau in Cairo, from which they organized a publicity campaign in order to influence French public opinion. Through newsletters, press conferences, and personal encounters, they tried to convince leading Arab diplomats and politicians, as well as Middle Eastern public opinion in general, of their demands. I argue that the Istiqlal’s propaganda campaign forced the reluctant Arab League to take up the case of Morocco and submit it to the United Nations during the 1940s. However, after Gamal Abd al-Nasser came to power in 1952, Egypt surprisingly withdrew its support for the Moroccan nationalist movement. Having chosen the struggle against Israel as his sole priority, the new Egyptian leader remained reluctant to offend France over a minor issue such as its North African possessions. Shocked by this lack of support by the man widely seen as the redeemer of Arabism, the leadership of the Istiqlal decided to abandon its activities in Cairo and instead opened a new propaganda bureau directly in New York. In conclusion, this project studies the internationalization of the Moroccan struggle for independence, analyzing how the Egyptian government and the Arab League first supported, then actively undermined the Istiqlal’s attempts to create global diplomatic pressure on France to relinquish its Protectorate. Moreover, it incorporates the Moroccan nationalist movement into contemporary academic debates on transnational political activism and thereby challenges the locally restricted focus of the historiography on this topic.

During the French “protectorate,” in Morocco which lasted from 1912 to 1956, France built hospitals, midwifery clinics, puerperia and infant care centers, dispensaries and psychiatric institutions in Morocco. Under the umbrella of the colonial enterprise, several metropolitan and international medical organizations (e.g. Louis Pasteur Institutes, Red Cross, etc.), as well as Jewish medical international organizations (e.g. the medical branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and the International Jewish medical organization OSE) engaged in a "medical race" to cure local populations according to the legal colonial division, that is "Muslims," "Jews," and "Europeans." A few youth groups and movements with different political and religious orientations (e.g. Mouvement du Scoutisme Marocain, Shabiba al-Istiqlaliyyah, Département Éducatif de la Jeunesse Juive (DEJJ), Charles Neter) emerged concomitantly in Moroccan society under the influence of Moroccan nationalism and Zionism. Although the political agenda, religious background, and world vision of these youth movements were different, they all put the cult of the body at the center of their interests as a means to achieve their ideological and political goals. In this paper I examine how, in the context of colonial modernity, the body was chosen to be the “field of experience” in which modern ideas and ideologies (such as “Westernization”, Moroccan nationalism, Zionism) were adopted, negotiated, adapted, contested, etc. How the (medical) care of the body became a political act to identify or misidentify with one’s social and/or political group. How medicine (e.g. “social hygiene” and vaccination campaigns organized by the French Public health service) became a colonial tool of disciplining and civilizing the body of the nascent Moroccan political subject. To what extent bodily medical practices and hygienic culture (re)fashioned both the physical body of the political subject and his/her self, that is, his/her political and social consciousness. How, by taking care (medically) of one’s body, the individual could (re)represent his/her self socially, politically, and ideologically. How Moroccans (Muslims and Jews alike) very gradually adopted the modern discourse and practices of biomedicine and hygiene, and interlaced them with traditional counterparts to physically (re)shape their bodies, (re)conceptualize them and (re)imagine their relationship to central power. Special attention will be been given to the role of youth movements (Mouvement du Scoutisme Marocain, Shabiba al-Istiqlaliyyah, Charles Neter, Département Éducatif de la Jeunesse Juive (DEJJ), and medical campaigns.

Morocco's colonial soldiers, or goumiers, though long virtually ignored in post-independence historiography have begun to receive attention in recent scholarship and gained a higher profile following the release of the Oscar-nominated 2006 film Les Indigènes, which traced the plight of four North African soldiers fighting for the French in World War II. These units (tabors) had originally been formed to help the French “pacify” Morocco itself, played a strategic role in maintaining colonial power throughout the protectorate period, and eventually were transformed into the Royal Armed Forces after independence. Despite not fitting neatly (or at all) into dominant nationalist narratives of Morocco’s anti-colonial struggle, these troops played a pivotal role in Morocco’s colonial and postcolonial history. This paper turns to the still virtually unexamined history of what happened after the war in the late 1940s, as these soldiers were variously deployed in occupied Germany, decommissioned and returned to Morocco, or, as occurred for significant numbers, reconscripted and deployed to fight for the French against the Việt Minh’s anti-colonial struggle in Indochina. Using French military archives and soldier memoirs, I argue this increased military mobilization and global deployment of rural Moroccan men during and after the war in the 1940s had profound economic, social, and eventually political ramifications back in Morocco itself. This paper traces how these effects extended from micro-social dynamics at the family/tribal level (income flows, housing, and movement) to macro-political struggles, in which these soldiers were used as critical leverage, between the Moroccan sultan/king and the French Resident General.

Mohammed Ben Youssef, later King Mohammed V, is venerated by many Moroccan Jews for his role in protecting his Jewish subjects and in mitigating the impact of the anti-Jewish laws during the Vichy period. The sultan’s protection of the Jews during Vichy has also in recent years been officially promoted as a symbol of the tolerance and pluralism of Moroccan society and its rulers. The posthumous glorification of Mohammed V, especially the benevolent role he supposedly played during Vichy, has shaped much of the thinking about Morocco during the war years. The debate has often centered on what actions, if any, the sultan took on behalf of the Jews, either publically or secretly, without analyzing the significance of the sultan’s actions during this period in Moroccan history. Based on an examination of the French protectorate and Moroccan archives located at the USHMM, I propose a different interpretation that distances itself from the debate of Mohammed V’s philo-Semitic benevolence, and instead analyzes the position of the sultan in the larger context of late colonialism and emerging nationalism in Morocco. In the nationalist narrative of the independence movement in Morocco, the Vichy period is practically ignored, especially since the sultan had to a large extent severed the ties that he had begun to develop with the incipient nationalist movement with the arrest and exile of a number of its leaders in 1937 and his subsequent obsequiousness to the French Residency during this period. I argue instead that Mohammed Ben Youssef’s actions, real or imagined, towards the Jews during Vichy, already discussed by French Protectorate authorities and Jewish leaders after the allied landing, reveal how the sultan was positioning himself as a national leader by asserting his credentials as protector of all Moroccan subjects, including the Jews, while at the same time, demonstrate that he was reliant on the Residency for remaining as symbolic ruler of the country. In light of the positioning of some of the Moroccan nationalists, some of whom had found refuge in the northern Spanish zone, the sultan was both outmaneuvering the anti-Semitic nationalist opposition, and Spain's racist claim as protectors of the Jews. Jews were therefore of exceptional value for the monarchy's legitimation and continuity, and ultimately, in the king's ability to both coopt the nationalist parties, and to reduce their influence in the years after independence.