Les juifs d'Afrique du nord face à l'Allemagne nazie

Zero star for this book, but I was forced to give one star to publish my review.

The Holocaust in Europe: The Persecution of the Jews in Vichy North Africa during Nazi occupation of France – That should have been the title of the book.

It seems that the editors adopted a geographic and continental approach to Shoah history, while the Holocaust was a political state-sponsored as correctly described by Peter Longerich, and Leni Yahil (mentioned in the book), Yehuda Bauer, academic advisor at Yad Vashem (the Israeli memorial and institute for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust), Gerhard Weinberg, Leon Poliakov, Martin Gilbert, Andre Kaspi, and other scholars who follow a proper historical methodology of "showing the past as it was then."

As per Dan Michman's article “Is the fate of the Jews of North Africa during World War II part of the Shoah?” It seem that 1) the editors decided not to contextualize the Shoah in the proper contemporaneous political historical realities of the era, rather adopting the geographic approach of "the European continent," and 2) to justify their geographic continental decision, they used a "confirmation bias approach, the tendency to process information by looking for information or interpreting, information that is consistent with one's existing beliefs. Information that conflicts with their decisions [or] that would prove their view is false is therefore ignored or given little consideration. https://www.britannica.com/science/confirmation-bias "

It is undeniable, unquestionable and irrefutable, that during the political process of the Shoah:

The persecution, deportations, and murder of the Jews in Vichy North Africa (France's territories of Vichy Tunisia, Vichy Morocco and Vichy Algeria), ruled by the pro-Nazi collaborationist French Vichy and Italian regimes and Nazi Germany (Vichy Tunisia and Italian Libya), were an integral part of the Shoah in France and Italy respectively, and thus part of the Shoah in Europe.

NORTH AFRICA ceased to exist as a political entity. “...with French occupation of Algeria in 1830 –an event which marked the beginning of profound French influence…- and the subsequent establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco in 1881 and 1912 respectively, North Africa could no longer be regarded as an historical and POLITICAL unit.” (André Chouraqui, A History of the Jews of North Africa, p. 141). There was no Holocaust in Scandinavia (all capital letters by Shaked)

“FRANCE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN” - Renee Poznanski, expert the Shoah in France. « Un document ... dévoile cet autre crime contre l'humanité, subi par les Juifs de l'autre côté de la Méditerranée. » L'ÉVÈNEMENT MAGAZINE.

"FRANCE, INCLUDING NORTH AFRICA," as stated in p. 648 of Peter Longerich's Himmler - A Life, "originally published: 2007; Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (February 7, 2013):" "On 10 December, in the course of a long interview, he explained the situatin in the south fo France to his Führer, and why as radical a policy as possible was required to deal with it. It wsas minuted that Himmler had been informed that

'there are currently at least 1.5 million deadly enemies of the Axis liviing and moving arund freeely in the previously unoccupied part of France, namely 600,000-700,000 Jews, … inconsiderable threat…'

Hitler was impressed with this account of the situation. He instructed Himmler, as the latter carefully noted, to 'get rid of' the 600,000 to 700,000 Jews in France, including North Africa."

Michman does not mention this newest book, while he mentions two other books by Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesantdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Juden verfolgung, München-Zürich: Piper, 1998, and The Unwritten Order. Hitler's Role in the Final Solution, London: Tempus, 2002. Interestingly, he also does not mention the newest English version of Longerich's first, published in 2010 under the titleThe Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, where Longerich writes: … In order to set these historical connections into a context … I turned to the concept of Judenpolitik. … ‘Jewish policy' … the Nazis' long-term intentions and goals in respect of the Jews … the utopian dream of a racially homogeneous national community {Volksgemeinschaft} via the systematic exclusion, segregation, and elimination of the Jews. …

…What this means … for a study of the Holocaust is that Judenpolitik carved out its own political territory …
…the overall political context changed with time, and during the war… the ‘Final Solution' as a complex process…” (Longerich 2010: 1-5)

France was a transcontinental "empire nation" correctly called Frankreich in German, consisting of metropolitan France (the part of France in continental Europe) and overseas France (the part of France outside the continent), including Vichy Tunisia, Vichy Morocco and Vichy Algeria. That's why following the June 1940 Franco-German armistice, 700,000 Jews came in the German sphere of influence - about 300,000 in metropolitan France and 400,000 in Vichy North Africa.

That's why Leni Yahil's The Holocaust - The Fate of the Jews of Europe (Hebrew version)/European Jewry (English version), in the segment "The Jewish Policy in the Occupied Countries of Northern and Western Europe" pp 171-174, narrates the persecution of the Jews in Vichy Tunisia/Algeria/Morocco and Italian Libya in her paragraph about “France” and “Italy” respectively ("notice her 'Europe' and ‘European' is part of the title" and the segment! to quote Michman's remark about Hilberg's book, The Destruction of the Jews of Europe later published as The Destruction of European Jews). Michman doesn't mention 1) Leni's pages 171-174, when he quotes from Leni's GERMAN version of the book, and 2) the English version like he does in the following instance: "Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, New York: Schocken, 1983, p. 222; version française: Vichy et les juifs, Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1981, p. 208."

WANNSEE CONFERENCE AND 'FINAL SOLUTION.' "In January 1942 a conference was held in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, in order to coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, the codename for the plan to murder all Jews within reach." - Yad Vashem's website.

SHOAH IN "EUROPE, INCLUDING THE NORTH AFRICAN COLONIES"
The Shoah in Europe was indeed a political "state-sponsored" process, that was not limited to the geographic borders of continental Europe, but included "VICHY North Africa" and Italian Libya (Europe's French and Italian possessions/territories) as stated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm). The Shoah took place in imperial Europe, a “Europe, including the North African colonies" as "Europe" is correctly defined by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). And that's the “proper" and "contemporaneous context” with "precision of language" for Holocaust history that historians at EHRI, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm) and Yad Vashem (its academic advisor, world well known Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer) are demanding. After all, Hitler himself defined Europe as "the European nations and their overseas territories, while he emphasized: “Europe of today was nothing but a geographical term.” - Martin Bormann's Minutes of a Meeting at Hitler's Headquarters, July 16, 1941: … the Führer emphasized that we had to understand that the Europe of today was nothing but a geographical term

“In history, background and context matter.” It is imperative to “perceive past events and issues as they might have been experienced by the people of the time, with historical empathy rather than present-mindedness.” - History's habits of mind, The National Council for History Education - NCHE. How a Holocaust scholar approaches the evolution of political events, assembles historical evidence, and contextualizes them by using a precise terminology, are very important decisions within historiography, because they determine the quality and the accuracy of the historical account.

"SHOAH, THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST, was the ideological and systematic "state-sponsored" "persecution and murder of Jews," in the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, and resulting in the murder of six million Jews and the destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities in continental Europe, as per Avner Shalev, Chair of Yad Vashem -YV), Yehuda Bauer, its academic advisor, the USHMM, Peter Longerich (title of his 2010 book The Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews) and the historical realities of the Shoah.

Raoul Hilberg, reputed Holocaust scholar, was well aware of the pressure to conform to an approved Holocaust narrative, stated, "You can create an illusion that is totally misleading by leaving things out, even though everything you say is true."

Edith Shaked, Advisory Board Member, H-Holocaust, an international academic consortium/H-Net's Network for scholars of the Holocaust

L'histoire des Juifs d'Afrique du nord face à l'Allemagne nazie est un sujet très peu étudié.
Dan Michman et Haim Saadou nous proposent un ouvrage très complet sur cette question .
Le livre comporte quatorze chapitres plus intéressants les uns que les autres.

Il y a un débat sur la question de savoir si les nazis voulaient appliquer la Solution finale aux Juifs d'Afrique du nord. Il s'avère que leur désir d'extermination devait s'appliquer à tout le peuple juif. La preuve nous en est donnée par la vitesse avec laquelle, dès la conquête d'un territoire, les autorités nazies organisaient soit le massacre localement (comme la Shoah par balles en URSS), soit la déportation vers les camps d'extermination comme cela fut fait en, France, Belgique, Hollande entre autres.
Donc, il y a tout à penser qu'en cas de victoire en italo allemande en Afrique du nord, la population juive aurait été exterminée...

Il ne faut pas croire pour autant que la vie fut facile pour les Juifs d'Afrique du nord. Ils furent discriminés, proscrits, chassés de leurs emplois et pour certains internés par les autorités françaises représentant le gouvernement de Vichy.

Les auteurs consacrent un chapitre passionnant et bouleversant sur l'antisémitisme de la part des colons français et de celle des Musulmans, avec un rappel des pogroms auxquels ceux-ci se sont livrés sur la population juive d'Afrique du nord, notamment celui de Constantine en août 1934.

Au cours de leurs recherches, Dan Michman et Haim Saadou ont trouvé plusieurs documents écrits sous forme de mémoires, récits ou poèmes concernant la communauté juive de la ville de Mogador (qui se nomme aujourd'hui Essaouira) en Algérie.

Il y a également un chapitre sur la place de la communauté juive d'Afrique du nord dans la littérature.

Emouvante et passionnante lecture.