The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War /

The Jews of North Africa escaped the horrors of Hitler's Final Solution but their treatment at the hands of the Vichy regime was inspired by "the same principles, the same language, and the same methods" applied to Jews in Europe. Abitbol (Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem) traces the fate of Maghrebi Jews through three phases: he describes their situation in colonial North Africa on the eve of WW II; he details Vichy racial policies and the local Jewish response to them; and he analyzes the political and diplomatic difficulties entailed in repealing Vichy policies after the liberation of North Africa. The monograph suffers from a lack of demographic information. How many Jews lived in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in the first half of the 1940s? The author provides neither raw numbers nor ratios, a glaring omission in a work that devotes so much attention to the proportional limits imposed on Jewish access to education and the professions. Despite a translation plagued by solecisms, the book explores well the controversy surrounding the status of Algerian Jews as citizens of France. Suitable for comprehensive Middle Eastern collections. -L. M. Lewis, Eastern Kentucky University