Africa at Noon
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some American Jewish organizations turned their attention to French colonial North Africa as “one of the great reservoirs of Jewish life” that remained on the globe. Indeed, the nearly half million Jews who lived under French rule in Algeria, Tunisia, and especially Morocco in 1945 outnumbered the remaining Jewish population of France itself – or that of any individual Western European country. Over time, therefore, groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee began to shift some resources away from providing emergency assistance to Holocaust survivors in Europe and toward efforts to support Jews in French North Africa. In the case of Morocco, this produced intensive programs of humanitarian aid to address urban Jewry’s “crushing poverty” and high rates of childhood disease and malnutrition; as Moroccan independence loomed, it also came to involve a political defense of continued French colonial control of North Africa in name of protecting Jews. This talk considers what these multifaceted efforts looked like and highlights the active and ambivalent ways in which Morocco’s diverse Jewish community ultimately received them.
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
This event is co-sponsored by Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Middle East Studies Program.