Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish Responses ed. by Francis R. Nicosia, Boğaç A. Ergene (review)

This collection of seven chapters (plus a helpful introduction) makes one point very clear: there was no singular, monolithic response to Nazism and the Holocaust by Arab and Turkish leaders and intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. These neither embraced unreservedly the various antisemitic policies and attitudes promoted by Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain, nor acquiesced in a game of European nations vying for advantage in the Middle East. Instead, Middle Eastern intellectuals and leaders actively and independently read and interpreted events unfolding in Europe in order to determine their potential impact on their own yearnings for national self-determination. Positioning themselves among the spheres of interest of England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany at the waning of the Ottoman Empire, those leaders looked to their own political gain. This resulted in temporary, partial, and shifting alliances. Initially, there was a general sympathy for Germany after its defeat in the First World War, when Germans were perceived as fellow victims. But identification with Germany ceded to more critical assessments as Nazi Germany proved an unreliable ally. Despite Nazi propaganda against common enemies, Germany provided only little practical assistance to indigenous movements for Arab independence. Nazi Germany pursued its own dreams of a colonial presence in the Middle East, something that the country had lost in 1918 and that receded again when the fortunes of war turned in 1942 and 1943.

Rich in detail, each chapter provides a snapshot of the political situation and intellectual debates in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey, and Morocco. For people unfamiliar with this part of the world, these chapters are full of surprises. For readers familiar with previous scholarship that emphasized the “ideological synthesis” of Arab nationalism, Nazism, Jew-hatred, and Islamic fundamentalism, this volume serves as a vital antidote to simplified understanding.¹

How various forms of European colonialism and Arab nationalism played out through intersecting layers of antisemitism, philo-Sephardism, and multiple positions toward Nazism is illuminated, for example, in Daniel Schroeter’s excellent contribution on the Spanish and French protectorates in Morocco. Despite the Jews’ painful history in Spain, Moroccan Jews in the 1930s embraced the Spanish nation (even under Franco), while Spanish non-Jewish nationalists embraced their “Jewish brethren of the ‘Spanish race’” (p. 184). Nazi Germany—though siding with Franco’s Spain in principle—supported Arab nationalists, especially as war against France drew near. Some Moroccan nationalists “rejected the Nazi influence . . . as racist,” while others rejected any Muslim-Jewish amity as the struggle for Palestine intensified (p. 188).

Israel Gershoni and Esther Webman attest to a similar complexity among the Egyptian intelligentsia. While Gershoni’s chapter builds upon his previous research on anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi discourse among Egyptian mainstream intellectuals (Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Abas Mahmud al’Aqqad), Webman arrives at a more tempered assessment by comparing the daily Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram with the Palestinian newspaper Filastin. By following those papers’ coverage of Germany from Hitler’s chancellorship in 1933 to Kristallnacht in 1938, Webman documents a well-informed public debate about events in Europe (particularly also about Mussolini’s Italy), with al-Ahram pursuing a less emotionally charged reportage and Filastine interpreting events through “the prism of [their] possible adverse implications for Palestine” (p. 120). While Egyptian intellectuals rejected the racist theories of the Nazis as brutal and inhumane, Egyptian and Palestinian newspapers exhibited degrees of animosity toward Jews.

Götz Nordbruch paints a multifaceted picture of intellectuals in Lebanon and Syria. Under the French mandate, these intellectuals commented on European developments with an eye toward national independence. Even though many regarded Nazi Germany as a “potential role model . . . for a humiliated Arab nation” (p. 129), Lebanese and Syrian writers debated with equal fervor other political models such as “Italian Fascism, Kemalism in Turkey, communism...