In recent years, stories have surfaced of the Jewish communities who lived in Arab and Muslim countries during the Holocaust, stories that have unequivocally demonstrated that the Nazis and their despicable accomplices in each and every locale were not interested in intra-Jewish divisions between religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardi.
The period of the Holocaust in North African and Mediterranean countries has been pushed out from memory for reasons that are more or less understandable. Afterall, you cannot compare between the fate of the Jews of Galicia who were almost entirely wiped out, and the fate of the Jews of Libya who were "only" for the most sent to concentration camps. But both were the victims of a similar Jewish fate, which differed from place to place in an almost arbitrary way. If they only could, the Nazis would have sent the Jews of North Africa and the Mediterranean to Auschwitz too – something that they planned to do but couldn't following the defeat of their allies in those countries.
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On Nov. 8, 1942, Allied forces of British and American troops landed in Algeria and Morocco and completed the campaign in this area which was under the rule of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. For Algerian Jews, the Allied victory signals the end of a dark period after two years in which they were fully subjected to the Nuremberg Laws. In Morocco, the Allied occupation ushered in a relief mission, led by lawyer Hélène Cazès-Benatar, under which thousands of European Jews would be rescued.
In Tunisia, the Germans held on to control for another six months until they were expelled by the Allies. In this time, they made sure to abuse the Jews as much as possible: they were forced to wear a yellow star, they were fired from public positions and 5,000 of them were sent to forced labor camps. The "Shabbat of gold" of February 1943 is infamous, when German officers came to Djerba's synagogue and gave the head of the community Rabbi Moshe Kalphon HaCohen three hours to collect 50 kilograms of gold from the community, otherwise he would be put to death along with other Jews. And that is just one story.
Libya, too, yearned for the arrival of the Allied forced, which finally came in late December 1942. Libya had been occupied by the Italians and their German allies and had imposed race laws on the Jews, set up the Giado concentration camp, and even deported many of them to camps in Europe.
The Arab response to these acts of anti-Semitism can be divided into several types.
In some areas, the population among whom the Jews had lived for hundreds of years remained apathetic to the Jews – also because of their own distress. In other places, we find righteous among the nations who helped save Jews and protected them with their bodies, while elsewhere, the Holocaust provided fertile ground for hatred of Jews that had been bubbling under the surface for some time.
The Farhud in Iraq is an example of this: during the Jewish festival of Shavuot in June 1941, Arab rioters went on the rampage, looting, robbing, raping and murdering Jews in Baghdad. The pogrom had a clear ideological link to the Nazi party, which had struck a chord with Arab nationalists such as the Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini who hoped that the return to Zion could be stemmed through Jews being deported to the camps in Europe.
These stories are not mere antidotes to artificially demonstrate that "there was a Holocaust for us too, the Mizrahi Jews". The Holocaust of the Jewish people is as its name says – the story of us all.
