Early Holocaust-era persecution of Tunisian Jewry

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines the impact of Vichy rule and the subsequent German occupation on Tunisian Jewry between 1940 and 1943, and argues that their experience should be understood as part of the broader history of the Holocaust. Drawing on Tunisian and French archival sources, oral testimonies, and Judeo-Arabic songs and poems composed during and after the war, it reconstructs the sequence of anti-Jewish measures implemented in Tunisia: legal and social separation, escalating propaganda, mobilization of local administrations and segments of the Arab Muslim population, the establishment of labour camps, and instrumental cooperation with Jewish communal leadership. The article shows how these policies reproduced the early phases of the Nazi process of destruction known from several European contexts, even though industrialized extermination was not realized because of the German military retreat. It further argues that these experiences profoundly destabilized Jewish–Muslim relations and contributed to a crisis of trust that became one of the factors driving the post-war migration of Tunisian Jews to France and to the nascent State of Israel.