Anti-Jewish Legislation in North Africa

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• The French-German Armistice, signed on June 22, 1940, established a zone of German occupation in northern and western France and placed southern France under the rule of a new collaborationist government based in Vichy

• few Algerian Berber or Arab Muslims had been granted citizenship by the state: most of Algeria’s Muslims were therefore French nationals,

• On October 3, 1940, the first anti-Jewish law (Le Statut des Juifs) was introduced in France.

• In 1941, the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (The General Commission for Jewish Affairs, or CGQJ) was established under the leadership of Xavier Vallat. The Vichy regime tasked this commission with supervising the implementation of anti-Jewish policies in France,

• A quota known as numerus clausus was imposed upon Jewish doctors, architects, lawyers, and notaries, limiting the number of Jews in each profession to two percent of the whole

• Vichy authorities embarked upon the “Aryanization of Jewish property” under the Office of Economic Aryanization.

• July 1941, new legislation authorized the confiscation of Jewish property. Jewish businesses in Algeria were allocated to non-Jewish “trustees

• March 31, 1942, the Vichy authorities created a communal governing body known as Union Générale des Israélites d’Algérie.

• Jews in the protectorates were considered Moroccan and Tunisian subjects of the sultan and bey,

• Statut des Juifs of 1940 allowed Jews in Morocco and Tunisia to retain their status as a religious group and did not consider them, legally speaking, as members of an inferior race

• With the 1941 Statut des Juifs, a racial definition was applied to Moroccan and Tunisian Jewries, restricting their legal status further.

• Morocco, the application of Vichy racial laws was overseen by Resident-General Noguès, with the approval of Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef (Mohammed V)

• Anti-Jewish legislation also demanded the movement of Moroccan Jews out of European neighborhoods (the ville nouvelle)—neighborhoods to which Jews had moved in great numbers since the late nineteenth century—and into poor Jewish neighborhoods known as mellahs.

• In the Moroccan hinterlands and rural margins, tribal lords were rarely instructed to enforce Vichy law

• Thus Vichy laws bore the sharifian [sultanic] seal, even though the sultan frequently intervened to show his support to the Jewish community and its leadership.

• This was because the majority of Jewish students in the protectorates attended Alliance Israélite Universelle schools, and thus fell outside of the restrictions’ reach.

• Here, the local leadership, including Resident General Admiral Jean-Pierre Estéva, Ahmed Pasha, and Moncef Bey, intentionally stalled anti-Jewish legislation. This was done despite the limited influence of the Bey, whose authority was restricted by the protectorate.

• The Allied invasion of November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch) and the subsequent German and Italian invasion of Tunisia marked a turning point in the war in North Africa, and had myriad effects upon local Jews

• Nazi policies now compelled Jews to wear the yellow star, View This Term in the Glossary dictated the confiscation of Jewish-owned property, drafted Jewish men into forced labor, and deported Jewish women and men to labor and internment camps in North Africa.

• The Italian authorities opposed the application of racial laws to Tunisian Jews who held Italian citizenship.