Africans And The Holocaust

This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War. An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust. This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

African Holocaust, which was first published in 1962, tells the extraordinary story of how and why a group of 22 Catholic converts to Christianity in the historical kingdom of Buganda (now part of Uganda) were executed between 31 January 1885 and 27 January 1887. These “Uganda Martyrs” were killed on orders of Mwanga II, the Kabaka (King) of Buganda, at a time of a three-way religious struggle for political influence at the Buganda royal court. The episode also occurred against the backdrop of the “Scramble for Africa”—the invasion, occupation, division, colonization and annexation of African territory by European powers. A fascinating read.

Between metropole and French North Africa : Vichy's anti-Semitic legislation and colonialism's racial hierarchies / Daniel J. Schroeter -- The persecution of the Jews in Libya between 1938 and 1945 : an Italian affair? / Jens Hoppe -- The implementation of anti-Jewish laws in French West Africa : a reflection of Vichy anti-Semitic obsession / Ruth Ginio -- "Other places of confinement" : Bedeau internment camp for Algerian Jewish soldiers / Susan Slyomovics -- Blessing of the bled : rural Moroccan Jewry during World War II / Aomar Boum and Mohammed Hatimi -- À la recherche de Vichy : the Commissariat général aux questions juives and the implementation of the Statut des juifs in Tunisia / Daniel Lee -- Eyewitness Djelfa : daily life in a Saharan Vichy labor camp / Aomar Boum -- The ethics and aesthetics of restraint : Judeo-Tunisian narratives of occupation / Lia Brozgal -- Fissures and fusions : Moroccan Jewish communists and World War II / Alma Heckman -- Re-centering the Holocaust (again) / Omer Bartov -- Paradigms and differences / Susan Rubin Suleiman -- Sephardim and Holocaust historiography / Susan Gilson Miller -- Stages in Jewish historiography and collective memory / Haim Saadoun -- A memory that is not one / Michael Rothberg -- Holocaust and North Africa / Todd Presner

Drawing on interviews with the black survivors of Nazi concentration camps and archival research in North America, Europe, and Africa, this book documents and analyzes the meaning of Nazism's racial policies towards people of African descent, specifically those born in Germany, England, France, the United States, and Africa, and the impact of that legacy on contemporary race relations in Germany, and more generally, in Europe. The book also specifically addresses the concerns of those surviving Afro-Germans who were victims of Nazism, but have not generally been included in or benefited from the compensation agreements that have been developed in recent years.

Originally published by A & B Books, Brooklyn, New York.

The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.

Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran. Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps. Nevertheless, they fought for the Allies and assisted the Americans and the British in the invasion of North Africa. These men and women were community leaders and average people who, despite their dire economic circumstances, worked with the refugees attempting to escape the Nazis via North Africa, Turkey, or Iran and connected with international aid agencies during and after the war. By 1945, no Jewish community had been left untouched, and many were financially decimated, a situation that would have serious repercussions on the future of Jews in the region. Covering the entire Middle East and North Africa region, this book on World War II is a key resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Jewish history, World War II, and Middle East history.