North African Jewish-Muslim Relations and the threat of European Anti-Semitism, 1934-1940

Dr. Aomar Boum is associate professor in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His anthropological research has a historical bent concerned with the social and cultural representation of and political discourse about religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. He is interested in the place of religious minorities such as Jews, Bahá’is, Shi‘a, and Christians in post-independence Middle Eastern and North African nation states. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (2013). He is also the co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Morocco (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and The Holocaust and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2018). He is currently finishing a book project on: Morocco and the Holocaust, 1940–2018: The Story of King Mohammed V Saving Jews during World War II and a graphic novel on the story of a German Jewish refugee in North Africa during WWII.

Abstract: In the late 1920s, Bernard Lecache founded the International League Against Anti-Semitism (LICA) in Paris to raise public awareness in France and other European countries about the rising hatred of Jews and to mobilize Jews and non-Jews to take action against racial and ethnic discrimination. The anti-Semitic discourse of European settlers in the colonial French Algerian press and other North African circles, which culminated in the riots of Constantine in August 1934, led the European leadership of the LICA to establish branches in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Based on the correspondence between the headquarters of LICA in Paris and its North African chapters between 1936 and 1940, this talk discusses the activities of LICA in North Africa prior to the establishment of Vichy and the partnerships between North African Jewish and Muslim communities to combat racism and anti-Semitism.