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Empty Empire: Anti-Semitism in Vichy Morocco and Political Responses

Mon, December 16, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Hilton Bayfront San Diego, Aqua Salon AB

Abstract

By the time the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government came to power in France and its colonial domains in 1940, Moroccan Jews had already undergone a multi-generational program of French acculturation. Under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French-Jewish philanthropic educational initiative with the goal of “regeneration” of Jews in Muslim lands, generations of Jews from Morocco to Iran and everywhere in between had been taught in French, prompted to identify with France, and inspired to idealize the humanism of the French Revolution and its capacious concept of citizenship. Morocco was the home of the very first Alliance school in the northern city of Tetuan in 1862, while the treaty establishing French and Spanish Protectorates over the country would not be signed until 1912. While Moroccan Jews had not been granted French citizenship as had been the case of most Algerian Jews by dint of the 1870 Crémieux decree, they had strong ideological and cultural ties to France. With the installation of the Vichy regime, the connection between the violence and racism of colonialism intersected with the violence and racism of the Holocaust. Jews, once a relatively privileged category within the French colonial apparatus, were stripped of their citizenship in Algeria, and in Morocco, subject to a litany of anti-Semitic legislation modeled on Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg laws. In this paper, I argue that the emptiness or French empire and its universalist, emancipationist promises were laid bare, undercutting Moroccan Jewish affiliations with France and encouraging a new political landscape of identities. This political landscape included Communism and Zionism in addition to the pre-existing colonial “Alliancism.” The experience of the Vichy period severely compromised Alliancism, which, I argue, sowed the seeds of Moroccan Jewish participation in the anti-colonial struggle of the post-WWII period and ultimate waves of mass migration.

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