The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa

Why this Chapter exists

The Holocaust era beyond Europe.

The Holocaust was centered in Europe: Germany, occupied Poland, the killing centers of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and the deportations from Western and Central Europe. The great majority of its victims were murdered there, and the machinery of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi plan to murder all of Europe’s Jews, operated there. A parallel set of events took place across the Middle East and North Africa, often shortened to MENA. There, Jewish communities lived under regimes aligned with, occupied by, or influenced by the Axis, the wartime alliance of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan. They faced legal persecution, forced labor, deportation, and, in several documented cases, mass murder.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and research center, together with the established scholarly literature, treat the Holocaust in North Africa as part of the broader Holocaust era. The events in the region were of three kinds, by who carried them out: Nazi-executed, Axis-allied, and Nazi-influenced.

A note on classification

The scholarly categories the Chapter uses.

Each event falls into at least one of three categories:

• Nazi-executed. Events in which the German state and the SS apparatus directly carried out the persecution. The German occupation of Tunisia (November 1942 – May 1943) is the clearest case. The operational planning for an extermination operation in Mandatory Palestine (the territory Britain governed under a League of Nations mandate) is a Nazi plan that never reached execution.
• Axis-allied. Events carried out by Axis-allied regimes against the Jewish communities of their territories. Vichy France’s antisemitic legislation in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (1940–1943) is the largest case. Fascist Italy’s labor-camp system in Libya, most prominently Giado, is the other major case.
• Nazi-influenced. Events in which local actors carried out anti-Jewish violence in a context shaped by Axis-aligned propaganda, Axis-supported political movements, or temporary Axis ascendancy in the region, without direct Nazi execution. The Farhud (the pogrom in Baghdad on June 1–2, 1941) is the central case. The Farhud was carried out by Iraqi actors, in a context shaped by the pro-Axis Rashid Ali coup (described below) and by Axis propaganda. It was not carried out by German forces.

Map · the reach of the Holocaust

One region, three kinds of event.

⤢ Enlarge

Distinguishing the framework

European antisemitism meets the older dhimma context.

The events this Chapter documents are the moment when twentieth-century European antisemitism (Nazi, Vichy, and Italian Fascist) entered the MENA region. Jewish communities there had lived for more than a thousand years under the dhimma, the protected but subordinate legal status that Islamic law gave Jews and Christians. Historians of the subject, among them Bernard Lewis, Mark Cohen, Norman Stillman, Gilbert Achcar, Jeffrey Herf, and Esther Webman, treat the two as distinct phenomena, though they weigh the connections between them differently.

The classical dhimma framework was not the same in kind as the Nazi project. The dhimma, articulated in the Pact of Umar tradition (eighth–ninth century) and elaborated across the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ottoman, and other periods, was a hierarchical legal status applied to the “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians together. It was discriminatory, and at times it was enforced with violence. Examples include the Granada massacre of 1066, which fell on the Jews alone, and the Almohad persecutions of twelfth-century Iberia and the Maghreb. Mark R. Cohen, in Under Crescent and Cross, concludes that relations between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages, though not utopian, were less confrontational and violent than relations between Christians and Jews in the West. The dhimma bound every protected non-Muslim alike, and in return for a yearly tax, the jizya, it promised to protect their lives, property, and worship. Jews in the region lived within this framework for many centuries as dhimmis. They were discriminated against, but for most of those centuries they were not the target of the anti-Jewish ideology that developed in Christian Europe.

The pressures that ended most of the region’s Jewish communities in the twentieth century were modern. They included the European-derived antisemitism this Chapter documents, taken up and adapted by regional actors. They also included pogroms, laws that stripped citizenship and seized property, and expulsions, alongside Arab nationalism, the conflict over Palestine, and the end of colonial rule. The distinction between dhimmi subordination and a targeted anti-Jewish ideology is set out in full at the Misconceptions reference.

Radio Zeesen · 1939–1945

The Nazi state’s Arabic-language broadcast operation.

Nazi Germany operated an Arabic-language radio service from a transmitter at Zeesen, south of Berlin, from April 1939 through the end of the war in May 1945. The service broadcast antisemitic and anti-British propaganda across the Middle East and North Africa, including programming directed at Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the French Levant, and French North Africa. Daily broadcasting included political commentary, news manipulation, religious programming designed to align Islamic theological themes with Nazi political objectives, and recurring antisemitic content.

The principal scholarly study of the operation is Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), based on archival research in the German Federal Archives and the records of the Office of Strategic Services. Herf documents the content of the broadcasts in detail, including the specific antisemitic themes, the conspiratorial framing of Jewish presence in Palestine, selective readings of passages from the Quran, and the call for action against Jewish communities. The broadcasts form part of the context of several events described below.

Programming details. The Arabic service operated multiple daily transmissions in standard Arabic. The principal Arabic-language voice of the broadcasts was Yunis Bahri, an Iraqi journalist who had emigrated to Berlin. Programming included religious content delivered by religious figures who had aligned themselves with the Nazi regime, including elements developed in coordination with the Mufti of Jerusalem after his arrival in Berlin in 1941.

The Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin · 1941–1945

Documented collaboration.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (the highest Muslim religious authority in British-ruled Palestine), fled Palestine in October 1937. It was the time of the Arab Revolt, the 1936–1939 Arab uprising against British rule, and the British had cracked down after the assassination of a district commissioner. He reached Baghdad in October 1939 and was at the forefront of anti-British activity there, backing the pro-Axis coup of April 1941 described below. After the coup collapsed he made his way to Italy, and he arrived in Berlin in November 1941. He remained in Germany for the duration of the war, in formal collaboration with the Nazi regime. The collaboration is documented in the German archival record and in the scholarly literature.

The Mufti’s wartime activities included:

• A meeting with Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. The minutes of the meeting, drafted by Paul Otto Schmidt of the German Foreign Office, survive in the archival record and have been widely reproduced in the scholarly literature. Husseini asked for a public German declaration supporting Arab independence, and Hitler declined to give one. According to the German record, Hitler said that once German forces reached the region, Germany’s goal there would be “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power” (in the translation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum).
• Arabic-language propaganda broadcasting. Husseini delivered numerous Arabic-language radio addresses over Radio Zeesen and other Nazi-controlled broadcast services. The texts of several major addresses are preserved in the archival record.
• Recruitment for the Waffen-SS. Husseini participated in the recruitment of Bosnian Muslim units for the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, most prominently the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division Handschar, formed in 1943.
• Correspondence opposing the rescue of Jewish refugees. The archival record includes Husseini’s correspondence with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and others, in which Husseini intervened against negotiated arrangements that would have allowed Jewish refugees, including children, to leave Axis-occupied territory for Mandatory Palestine. He urged that the children be sent to Poland instead, where the Germans were murdering Jews in killing centers. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum finds that his wish for their deaths there “appears to have been explicit,” and that the letters had no effect, because German officials had already blocked the rescue plans.

Scholars differ over how much influence the Mufti had on Nazi decisions, but they agree that his collaboration with the Nazi regime is extensively documented. Historians reject the claim, sometimes repeated in public debate, that he gave Hitler the idea of murdering Europe’s Jews. As the Yad Vashem historian Dan Michman has documented, the mass murder had been under way since the summer of 1941, months before the two men met. The principal scholarly references are Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine (Enigma, 2010), and Jeffrey Herf’s documentation in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.

Arab and Muslim wartime conduct across the region ranged from collaboration to indifference to the rescue documented below.

The Farhud · June 1–2, 1941

A Nazi-influenced pogrom in Baghdad.

On June 1–2, 1941, during Shavuot, the Jewish festival that marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai, a pogrom (an organized mob attack) struck the Jewish community of Baghdad. Known by the Iraqi-Arabic word Farhud (“violent dispossession”), it killed between 150 and 180 Jews and injured about 600, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. By the count of an official Iraqi commission, at least 128 Jews were killed and at least 210 injured. Rioters looted some 1,500 Jewish stores and homes and raped an undetermined number of women. Most of the dead were buried in a mass grave in the old Jewish cemetery of Baghdad. Community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families, 15 percent of the Jewish community of Baghdad, suffered directly from the pogrom. It was the deadliest anti-Jewish violence in the modern history of the Iraqi Jewish community, which had lived in Babylonia and Iraq continuously for more than 2,500 years.

In April 1941, the pro-Axis politician Rashid Ali al-Gaylani led a coup against the British-aligned Iraqi government. The coup regime sought German military support. Britain intervened militarily in May 1941, and the Rashid Ali regime collapsed. Rashid Ali and his collaborators fled to Iran and then to Berlin, where he, too, collaborated with the Nazi regime. The Farhud took place in the brief interval between the collapse of the Rashid Ali regime and the full restoration of British and pro-British Iraqi authority. On June 1 the pro-British regent returned to Baghdad, and many Jews, believing the danger had passed, went out to celebrate the holiday. The attacks began that day. British forces had surrounded the city but did not enter it during the two days of violence.

Iraqi soldiers and policemen who had backed the Rashid Ali coup led the violence, with members of the Futuwwa, a pre-military youth movement modeled on the Hitler Youth. Residents of the city joined as the violence spread. The influence of Axis propaganda is what places the Farhud in the Nazi-influenced category. Radio Zeesen broadcasts had reached Iraq since 1939. An Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by the Futuwwa’s leader, Yunis al-Sab’awi, had run in a Baghdad newspaper in 1933–1934. The Rashid Ali coup had aligned itself openly with the Axis, and anti-Jewish rhetoric shaped the political atmosphere in Baghdad in May 1941. No German military or SS unit was present in Baghdad during the violence.

Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum both document the Farhud in their Holocaust-era materials. The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Israel maintains an extensive memorial and documentation program. The Farhud changed Jewish life in Iraq. Within eleven years almost the entire community had left or been forced out, most of it in the airlift of 1950–1952 known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. To leave, Jews had to give up their Iraqi citizenship, and in 1951 the government froze the property of those who had. How much weight the Farhud carries against later causes, including the events of 1948, is debated.

The principal scholarly references are Hayyim Cohen’s “The Anti-Jewish Farhud in Baghdad, 1941” (Middle Eastern Studies, 1966) and Orit Bashkin’s New Babylonians (Stanford University Press, 2012). Others include Edwin Black’s The Farhud (Dialog Press, 2010) and the Yad Vashem and Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center collections.

Vichy France’s antisemitic legislation in North Africa · 1940–1943

An Axis-allied policy regime over more than 400,000 Jews.

The Vichy regime, the French government that collaborated with Nazi Germany after the June 1940 armistice, extended its antisemitic legislation to the three French North African territories. Algeria was then legally part of France, organized as French departments. Morocco and Tunisia were French protectorates. Yad Vashem puts the Jewish population of the three territories at about 415,000. The Vichy legislation subjected them to legal persecution comparable in form to the persecution of Jews in metropolitan France, with regional variations. Yad Vashem’s historians note that Germany did not press Vichy to apply these laws in North Africa. Vichy applied them on its own initiative.

The major legislative instruments:

• The Statut des Juifs (Statute on Jews) of October 3, 1940. The Vichy government’s first sweeping antisemitic law, defining who was “Jewish” by descent and excluding Jews from public service, teaching, the military officer corps, journalism, theater and film direction, and other listed professions. Extended to Algeria in October 1940, to Morocco by decree of October 31, and to Tunisia on November 30.
• The abrogation of the Crémieux Decree (October 7, 1940). The Crémieux Decree of 1870 had granted full French citizenship to approximately 35,000 Algerian Jews. Vichy abrogated the decree, stripping Algeria’s Jews of the French citizenship they had held for seventy years and reducing them to the legal status of native indigenous subjects (indigènes). The decree was restored by the Free French in October 1943, after the Allied liberation of North Africa.
• The Statut des Juifs of June 2, 1941. A broader antisemitic law extending the legal definitions, expanding the occupational exclusions, requiring registration of Jewish persons and Jewish property, and authorizing administrative internment.
• The Aryanization measures (July 22, 1941). “Aryanization” meant the forced transfer of Jewish property to non-Jews. These measures set out the legal basis for the confiscation of Jewish-owned property and businesses across French territories, including the colonies.
• Quotas on Jewish education. Limits on the percentage of Jewish students at French schools in the territories.
• Labor and internment camps. Vichy maintained a network of labor and internment camps across Algeria, Morocco, and southern Tunisia. Camps such as Djelfa, Djenien Bou Rezg, and Hadjerat M’Guil held mainly political prisoners, Spanish Republican refugees, and former foreign volunteers of the French Foreign Legion, many of them Jews. Yad Vashem estimates that about 2,000 Algerian Jews were held in camps, including Bedeau and Djelfa. Forced laborers were also sent to work on a planned trans-Saharan railway.

Jews were prominent in the local resistance that helped the Allies land. On the night of November 7–8, 1942, an underground force of 377 fighters, 315 of them Jews, seized key points in Algiers ahead of the landing, according to Yad Vashem. The Allied invasion of November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch, the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria) did not sweep Vichy’s order away at a stroke: its administrators stayed in office and its statutes lingered. The restoration of Jewish civil status was uneven and contested: the Crémieux Decree restoration in Algeria did not come until October 1943, more than ten months after the Allied liberation. It came only after a protracted political battle within the post-Vichy French administration of the territory.

The principal scholarly reference is Michel Abitbol’s The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War (Wayne State University Press, 1989). Daniel J. Schroeter’s work on Moroccan Jewry and the records of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos extend the scholarly treatment.

The German occupation of Tunisia · November 1942 – May 1943

Six months of direct Nazi rule over a North African Jewish community.

The German occupation of Tunisia is the clearest single case of a Nazi-executed event in North Africa. Tunisia was the only one of France’s three North African territories that German forces occupied. The German army arrived with an SS unit assigned to carry out anti-Jewish policy, while the Vichy French administration remained in place. Following the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria on November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch), German forces were flown and shipped into Tunisia from Italy and Sicily to block the further Allied advance. The German occupation lasted from November 9, 1942, until the surrender of Axis forces in North Africa on May 13, 1943, approximately six months.

During the occupation, the German command, with SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Walther Rauff present as the senior SS officer in the region, established a forced-labor regime over the Tunisian Jewish community. A census in 1941 had counted that community at about 89,700 people. The measures included:

• Mass requisitions of Jewish-owned property and businesses under the formal authority of the German military administration.
• A forced-labor program targeting Jewish men aged 18 to 50, with approximately 5,000 men sent to labor camps across Tunisia. The camps included Bizerte, Mateur, the camps along the Mediterranean coast, and inland sites in the south of the country. Conditions in the camps were severe. Many of the men were murdered by the Germans or died of diseases caught in the camps. Others were killed in the almost daily Allied bombing of Tunis and Bizerte in the winter and spring of 1943, when the Germans forced Jewish workers to stay at their jobs clearing rubble. Of the men sent to forced labor, at least 46 are known to have died, by the record of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and no full count of the dead has been established. Across North Africa as a whole, Satloff writes, nearly 10,000 Jews “suffered in labor camps, work gangs, and prisons, or under house arrest.”
• Collective fines imposed on the Jewish communities of Tunis, Sfax, and other cities.
• The hostage system by which a designated Jewish communal leadership was required to deliver labor quotas and financial contributions to the German administration on threat of escalation.
• Deportation. Some Jews were deported from Tunisia to camps in Europe. Yad Vashem’s historians write that the SS units in Tunisia “came prepared to implement the Final Solution.” The Axis collapse in North Africa in May 1943 came before they could carry it out.

The principal scholarly references are Robert Satloff’s Among the Righteous (PublicAffairs, 2006), Daniel Schroeter’s various articles on North African Jewish history, and the Yad Vashem and USHMM collections.

The Giado camp · Libya · 1942–1943

An Axis-allied forced-labor and concentration site.

Italy held Libya as a colony from 1911. The Italian Fascist regime had enacted its own racial laws in 1938 and applied them in Libya. In February 1942, Mussolini ordered the Jews of Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal region, removed from the war zone, ostensibly to keep them from aiding the British. The regime sent them to labor and concentration camps in the interior. The largest was at Giado (Jadu in Arabic), a former military post in the Tripolitanian interior about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Tripoli.

Most of the roughly 2,600 Jews deported under the order were sent to Giado. The front line had moved back and forth across Cyrenaica in 1941–1942. The deportees were primarily from Benghazi and the smaller Cyrenaican Jewish communities. Conditions at Giado included severe overcrowding, inadequate food and water, exposure to extreme desert conditions, and a typhus epidemic that swept the camp in early 1943.

Approximately 562 inmates died at Giado (Robert Satloff’s count, while Yad Vashem gives about 500) from typhus, starvation, and exposure between mid-1942 and the liberation of the camp by British forces in early 1943. About one in five of the people held at Giado died there in less than a year.

Smaller camps and detention sites operated in Libya and in the broader Italian-controlled territories during the same period. The Sidi Azaz site held additional Libyan Jewish deportees. Libyan Jews holding British nationality, some 300, were deported to internment in Italy and in 1944 to Bergen-Belsen. Those holding French nationality, roughly 1,600, were sent to Tunisia.

The principal scholarly reference is Maurice Roumani’s The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Sussex Academic Press, 2008). Others include Renzo De Felice’s Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 (University of Texas Press, 1985) and the documentation of the Or Shalom Center for Libyan Jewish Heritage.

Nazi operational planning for Mandatory Palestine · 1942

The plan that did not reach execution.

In the summer and autumn of 1942, the German military advance through North Africa under Erwin Rommel raised the possibility, from the Axis side, of a German entry into Mandatory Palestine via Egypt. Anticipating this contingency, the SS formed a mobile unit to follow the army there. Mandatory Palestine’s Jewish community numbered about half a million people in 1942.

The principal documentation of this operational planning is preserved in the German Federal Archives and is the subject of Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers’s monograph Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (Enigma Books, 2010). The Mallmann and Cüppers study reconstructs the planned deployment of an Einsatzkommando Egypt unit (an SS detachment of the kind that made up the killing squads) under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff. The unit was staged in Athens in July 1942, with Rauff flying to North Africa for liaison, under orders to follow Rommel’s army into Egypt and onward into Palestine. The orders authorized the unit “to undertake executive measures against the civilian population” on its own responsibility. Their key passages were copied word for word from the April 1941 order that sent the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, into the Soviet Union. Neither order named Jews. The command to murder them was given orally, as the squad commander Otto Ohlendorf testified at Nuremberg, and the squads carried it out. Rauff had helped develop the gas vans used to murder victims in Belarus and at the Chełmno killing center.

The plan did not reach implementation. The First Battle of El Alamein, in Egypt, in July 1942, halted Rommel’s eastward advance, and the Second (October 23 – November 11, 1942) drove his army into retreat. The Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch) created a two-front Axis collapse in North Africa that ended with the surrender of Axis forces at Tunis in May 1943. The German advance into Egypt and Palestine did not occur. Rauff was withdrawn to Tunisia, where he became the senior SS officer of the German occupation of Tunis documented above.

The documentary record establishes the unit, its commander, its destination, and its orders. Because the plan never left the planning stage, what the unit would have done can be judged only from its orders and from the record of the squads it was modeled on.

The Righteous in MENA

The documented record of rescue and resistance.

The wartime record in the Middle East and North Africa includes documented cases of Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and Berber (Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa) rescuers who hid, protected, and aided Jewish neighbors at personal risk. In the same towns, under the same occupation, some people collaborated and most did neither.

The documented cases include:

• Si Ali Sakkat (Tunisia): A Tunisian Muslim who sheltered approximately sixty Tunisian Jewish workers who had escaped from a German labor camp during the occupation, hiding them on his estate near Zaghouan until the German withdrawal. His case, like Khaled Abdul-Wahab’s, has been nominated for Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations honor for non-Jewish rescuers, but it has not been recognized.
• Khaled Abdul-Wahab (Tunisia): A Tunisian businessman who hid Jewish families on his farm at Mahdia during the German occupation. The case is documented in Robert Satloff’s Among the Righteous and has been nominated to Yad Vashem.
• Mohammed Helmy (Egypt / Berlin): Recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 2013, the first Arab to receive the recognition. An Egyptian physician working in Berlin throughout the war, who hid the Jewish teenager Anna Boros from 1942 until the end of the war and aided additional Jewish individuals.
• Basra (Iraq): In May 1941, before the Farhud, Arab notables sent night watchmen to guard Jewish property, and many sheltered Jews in their homes.
• The Sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V. Mohammed V is widely remembered as a protector of Morocco’s Jews during the Vichy period, and the record is mixed. He signed the decrees, called dahirs, that applied Vichy’s Jewish statutes in the protectorate, and those decrees allowed some flexibility in how the laws were applied. A Yad Vashem study notes that popular memory has long credited him with shielding his Jewish subjects. It finds that his warm reception of Moroccan Jewish delegations in the spring of 1942 was his one fully positive documented gesture. Historians note that the strongly protective portrait of him took shape largely after the war. Tradition attributes to him the statement “there are no Jews in Morocco, only Moroccan subjects.” Morocco’s Jewish community lived through the war under Vichy’s anti-Jewish statutes, and survived it.
• The Mosque of Paris, under Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Some accounts credit Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, with providing false papers to North African Jews during the German occupation of France, and in some versions to Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe as well. The evidence is fragmentary, and the scope of any such effort remains under research.

The principal scholarly reference for this material is Robert Satloff’s Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (PublicAffairs, 2006), which combines original archival and interview research with the documentation maintained by Yad Vashem.

Object Spotlight

A hooded figure, reading, in a city built afterward.

Look at the figure before you know what it marks. A man cast in bronze sits low to the ground, wrapped head to foot in a hooded cloak, bent forward over an open scroll in his lap. The metal has weathered to a soft green. Around him is an ordinary modern square: paving, a few plants, apartment towers rising behind. He is reading, alone, in the middle of a city going about its day.

The sculptor titled it Prayer. It stands in Ramat Gan, a city next to Tel Aviv in Israel. It was put up by Jews who had come from Iraq, from Baghdad, where on the first two days of June 1941 mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in a wave of killing called the Farhud. The people who raised this memorial, or their parents, had lived through that, then lost their citizenship and property, left Iraq, and built new lives here. The statue is their marker for the dead they carried with them. It also remembers Jews executed in Iraq in the 1960s.

Look closely at the choice the artist made. The sculpture does not show the violence, a victim, or a weapon. It shows a man reading, a figure of prayer and study, the practices at the center of Jewish religious life.

The aftermath

What the wartime experience produced.

Between 1945 and 1972 about 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa, as told in the MENA Departure Chapter. Pogroms struck Tripoli and Cairo in 1945 and Aden and Aleppo in 1947. After the 1948 war, governments took Jews’ citizenship or made them give it up to leave, froze their property, as in Iraq in 1950–51, or expelled them, as in Egypt in 1956. Arab nationalism and the end of colonial rule added to the pressure. The wartime experience documented in this Chapter is one of the longer roots of that uprooting.

Archives and collections

Where the record is kept.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The USHMM’s Holocaust Encyclopedia includes entries for the Farhud, North Africa during the Holocaust, the Tunisian camp system, and related material. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (vol. 3) treats the labor camps of Vichy North Africa systematically.
• Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem maintains educational materials on “The Holocaust in North Africa” and has recognized Muslim rescuers among the Righteous Among the Nations, including the Egyptian physician Mohammed Helmy, the first Arab so honored. The documentation includes the Farhud as part of the broader Holocaust-era record.
• Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, Or Yehuda, Israel. The center for the documentation of Iraqi Jewish history, including extensive Farhud documentation.
• Or Shalom Center for Libyan Jewish Heritage. The center for the documentation of Libyan Jewish history, including extensive Giado-camp documentation.
• The Aladdin Project (Paris). A French educational nonprofit founded under the patronage of UNESCO and the Council of Europe, dedicated to Holocaust education in the Arab and Muslim world. Maintains extensive Arabic-language educational material on the Holocaust era.
• JIMENA · Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. American educational nonprofit documenting the long pre-departure history of the Jewish communities of the region, including the wartime experience.
• Sephardi Voices. A digital archive of filmed oral testimony from Jews of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran, preserving firsthand accounts of community life and of the wartime and postwar years that ended it. Organized by country, with materials for teachers.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Each question is anchored in a fact this Chapter documents. Answer from the evidence on the page.

• Categories. This Chapter sorts the region’s events into Nazi-executed, Axis-allied, and Nazi-influenced. Using the Farhud, the Tunisian occupation, and the Giado camp, what does each category capture that the others do not? What is gained or lost by grouping all three under “the Holocaust in North Africa”? (C3 D2.His.1, how events were shaped by their time, place, and wider context.)
• Causation. The Farhud had several contributing causes operating at once: a pro-Axis coup, years of Nazi radio propaganda in Arabic, local political tension, and the absence of protective authority during the violence. How would you weigh these against one another, and can a single cause be called decisive? (C3 D2.His.14, analyzing multiple and complex causes and effects.)
• Perspective. Compare how this history might be told from the perspective of an Iraqi Jewish survivor, a Tunisian Muslim rescuer, and a wartime Allied official. How does each vantage point shape what counts as the central event? (C3 D2.His.4, the factors that shaped people’s perspectives in different eras.)
• Evidence. The plan for an extermination operation in Mandatory Palestine is documented but was never carried out. How should historians treat a planned-but-unrealized event, and what kinds of sources would you want before stating what “would have” happened? (C3 D2.His.10, detecting the limitations of historical sources and evidence.)
• Memory. The Ramat Gan memorial in Israel remembers the Farhud through a reading figure rather than a depiction of the attack. What does a community communicate by how it chooses to memorialize loss, and how does that choice affect how later generations learn the history? (C3 D2.His.3, how the significance of people and events is judged differently over time.)

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Examines the expansion of Nazi and Axis persecution beyond Europe into North Africa and the Middle East.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • compare the experience of Jews across North Africa and the Middle East
  • analyze wartime propaganda, including the radio broadcasts
  • evaluate maps and planning documents as evidence
  • distinguish direct occupation, Axis-allied rule, and Nazi influence.
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, Middle East studies, global history, and comparative history.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Broadens Holocaust instruction through documented study of Vichy rule, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq, wartime propaganda, and regional Jewish communities.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students compare sources from multiple countries, governments, and historical perspectives.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1, D2.His.14. Students investigate regional comparison, causation, historical perspective, and interpretation.

Teaching resources. For ready-to-use materials and educator training, see Yad Vashem’s Education & E-Learning portal. Several of the institutions listed above (USHMM, the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, JIMENA) maintain their own classroom materials on the regional record.