BETWEEN LIBERATION(S) AND OCCUPATION(S): RECONSIDERING THE EMERGENCE OF MAGHREBI JEWISH COMMUNISM, 1942–1945

Abstract

From the fall of France in 1940 to the Anglo-American liberation of North Africa from Vichy rule (in Morocco and Algeria) and German occupation (in Tunisia), from November 1942 to May 1943, the Second World War profoundly transformed North African youth. For young French-educated Jews living in urban colonial spaces, disillusionment with Vichy France's betrayal of democracy and equality led them to a search for new political models, including Communism.Through the memoirs of three North African Jews that came to politics through local Communist parties, Abraham Serfaty, Daniel Timsit and Gilbert Naccache, Communism in its wartime form (allied with Western democracies) provided an ideal mediating force. For a generation that wanted to fight against the anti-Jewish measures of the Vichy and Nazi regimes, as well as to abolish colonial distinctions between indigenous Jews and Muslims and Europeans, Communism proposed radical equality in a supra-national framework. As the authors/activists look back on the failures of decolonization, they attempt to make sense of their political commitments by gesturing to a utopian moment when Jews could be grounded in local struggles while looking to the US, the Soviet Union, and Popular Front France as models for equality.