Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (review)

Robert Satloff is an authority on Arab and Islamic politics and the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has written this fascinating and important study of the Arab response to the Holocaust in the hope that if Arabs learn about stories of fellow Arabs who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, current Arab antisemitism and Holocaust denial might subside. Over the course of four years, the author conducted extensive research and numerous interviews, and his travels took him to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and parts of Europe to discover Arab counterparts to Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. He points out that, to date, Yad Vashem has never recognized an Arab as Righteous Among the Nations, though Muslims from Bosnia, Albania, and Turkey have been so honored.

Satloff's timeline begins in 1940 with the fall of France and ends in 1943 with the liberation of Tunisia. Five hundred thousand Jews found themselves under Axis occupation in North Africa during those years. Morocco and Algeria were under the Vichy collaborationist government's control, while Libya was controlled by fascist Italy. Tunisia was under Vichy until the fall of 1942, when Germany invaded and dispatched to the region the Nazi fanatic SS Colonel Walter Rauff—formerly the administrator of the mobile gas vans at Chelmno, the first death camp. During the years covered, thousands of Jews were interned in 104 labor and punishment camps, and at least four thousand Jews died after having been deprived of their citizenship, property, and livelihood. Twelve hundred Jews from these occupied lands were sent to death camps in Europe.

Though Satloff says that he set out to discover Arab rescuers of Jews, he also provides a detailed and fair account of Arab collaboration with the fascist occupiers. Arabs served as camp guards and informers; some plundered Jewish property; a few tortured or murdered Jews. In some instances, Arab bureaucrats and civil servants facilitated Nazi policy. Pogroms broke out in Iraq and Palestine.

Many Arab citizens, like their counterparts in Europe, appeared indifferent to the Jews' fate. Had the Germans not been defeated in North Africa, the Holocaust would have extended to other Arab lands. Still, this would have taken place on German—not Arab—initiative. Although Jews had been treated as second-class citizens (dhimmi) in many Arab countries, outbreaks of violence against them were relatively rare. Satloff might have mentioned that European antisemitic ideas reached the Arab world in the mid-nineteenth century, and that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated into Arabic as early as the 1920s. He notes that some Arabs played a supporting role in the Holocaust; Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and instigator of European Muslims' participation in the murder of Jews, was the most notorious.

At the same time, Arabs helped Jews by hiding them, speaking out against persecution, and hindering the implementation of Vichy and Nazi plans. Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco, for instance, protected the Jews and warned his people not to harm them. Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided certificates of Moslem identity to Jews. In his book, Satloff reproduces a facsimile of a German memo showing that the Nazis were aware of the imam's actions and warned him to desist. Likewise, some leading Arabs in Algeria opposed the Vichy race laws against the Jews, fearing that the Arabs would be next in line to suffer legalized persecution and denial of rights. Outside the city of Tunis, sixty Jewish prisoners fled a labor camp and appealed for help to a former mayor, Si Ali Sakkat—who hid them until they were liberated. In Algiers, Muslim preachers forbade their congregations to confiscate Jewish property. Arabs from all walks of life helped Jews during the fascist occupation.

The actions of the prominent Tunisian citizen Khaled Abdelwahhab resembled those of Oskar Schindler: while...