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

The goal motivating historian Robert Satloff, Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, in writing this highly readable and important book was a noble, if optimistic one. He was disturbed by the fact that “alone among peoples in the world, Arabs effectively claimed—and won—exemption from the global campaign to remember the Holocaust.” The reason is the widespread perception in Arab countries that whereas the perpetrators were Europeans, the Arabs were those who paid the price with the establishment of the state of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians. Moreover, many Arabs see the Holocaust as the main, if not only, reason why the world community has supported, or continues to support, Israel’s existence. Consequently, the most prevalent Arab response has been to deny the Holocaust, as a means to demolish the legitimacy of Zionism, while a minority have justified Hitler’s actions against the Jews. Corollary approaches have blamed the Zionists for collaborating with the Nazis in killing the Jews, or continuously accuse Israel of being a Nazi state in ideology and action.

In writing this book, Satloff sought to alter Arab perceptions of the Holocaust by framing it as “an Arab story—preferably a hopeful, constructive, and positive story.” He therefore chose to analyze the conduct of Arabs in North Africa, the only part of the Arab world under direct Nazi rule, during the Holocaust. In the book’s first part, Satloff surveys the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule. Only about one percent of Jews in North Africa—between 4,000 and 5,000—perished under Axis control in Arab lands, compared with more than half the Jews of Europe. But had U.S. and British troops not pushed Axis forces from the African continent by May 1943, the Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and perhaps even Egypt and Palestine almost certainly would have perished like European Jewry.

The second part, where the book’s major contribution lies, analyzes the conduct of Arabs toward the persecution of the Jews. Arabs’ actions were not too different from those of Europeans. With war waging around them, most were indifferent. A percentage collaborated, including Arab officials in royal courts, Arab guards in labor camps, Arabs who volunteered to fight for Germany’s cause, and those who went house to house pointing out where Jews lived. Even if 90 percent of Arabs were benignly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, Satloff states, that still left about 2 million “as participants in, supporters of, or active sympathizers with the systematic targeting of Jews.” His conclusion is unequivocal: without the help of local Arabs, the extent of Jewish suffering in Arab lands would have been much less.

However, there were also those Arabs “righteous among the nations,” who risked their lives in order to save Jews, and Satloff brings their stories in a most captivating way. Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews’ valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations, and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. Muhammad V, the sultan of Morocco, and even more so Moncef Bey, the ruler of Tunisia, provided moral support and, at times, practical help to their Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, Muslim preachers forbade believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In Paris, the Imam of the Great Mosque Si Kaddour Benghabrit saved hundreds of Jews in the Mosque’s cellars and provided many with Muslim birth certificates, thereby saving them from deportation to Auschwitz.

However, if the stories of Arab righteous people are moving and encouraging, Satloff ’s description of contemporary Arab reactions to his finding is depressing. Most of his Arab interlocutors were indifferent to these stories, and even family members of then Tunisian Prime Minister, Muhammad Chenik, who saved Jewish lives while risking his own life, to cite one example, “wanted nothing to do...