The Gabès pogrom

In May 1941 in Gabès (Arabic: Qabis), an oasis port on the Gulf of Gabès (the Lesser Syrtis) in southern Tunisia, an Arab mob attacked the Jewish quarter. According to most sources seven Jews were killed (Robert Satloff gives eight), among them women and a ten-year-old girl, and some twenty people were wounded. According to some accounts a policeman was killed as well. Houses and shops were looted. It was the bloodiest outbreak of violence against Jews in North Africa during the Second World War.

Popular chronologies place the pogrom on 23 May, say that it lasted three days, and state that it was triggered by news of the defeat of the Arab rising in Iraq. The sources allow these details to be made more precise. According to Italian reports cited by the historian Haim Saadoun, the disturbances began on the evening of 19 May, and the attack on the Jews took place on 20 May. Satloff writes of three days of rioting, other authors of a single, bloodiest evening. The date of 23 May, on the other hand, corresponds to the secret cable in which the French resident general in Tunis reported to the government in Vichy on what had happened. Nor had Iraq’s defeat yet come about. The British had broken the siege of Habbaniya at the beginning of May and had taken Fallujah on 19 May itself, but Rashid Ali’s government fell only in the last days of the month. What was reaching Tunisia, therefore, was news of the war in Iraq and calls to fight the British, not news of its end.

Tunisia under Vichy

Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881. Formally it was ruled by a bey of the Husainid dynasty – in 1941 Ahmad II – but real power lay with the French resident general. After France’s defeat in June 1940 the protectorate submitted to the government in Vichy, and in July 1940 Admiral Jean-Pierre Esteva, an officer trusted by Philippe Pétain, became resident general. Under the armistice with Italy a strip along the border with Italian Libya, including the fortifications of the Mareth Line not far from Gabès, was demilitarised, and Axis armistice commissions saw to it that the terms were observed.

According to the 1936 census, close to 60,000 Jews who were subjects of the bey lived in the country, along with some 20,000 Jews holding French or Italian citizenship. Before the war the community in Gabès numbered about 3,200 people and lived in two old parts of the town, Djara and Menzel. It was a traditional, devout community with close ties to the nearby island of Djerba. Relations with its Muslim neighbours were regarded as good, although on the edge of the desert there were occasional Bedouin raids.

Vichy France did not wait for German demands. The first Statute on Jews, adopted on 3 October 1940, extended to the protectorates under its Article 9. On 30 November 1940 the bey signed a decree introducing it in Tunisia: Jews were removed from the public service, the press, radio, theatre and cinema, and quotas were imposed in the liberal professions. Jews who for generations had seen France as their protector and their path to advancement were pushed back into the role of inferior subjects.

Tension after the fall of France

France’s defeat undermined its authority in North Africa. In reports from 1940–1941 French officials noted again and again that the Muslim population had ceased to believe in the strength of the protecting power, and that its resentment readily turned against the Jews, a minority associated with the French, the British and the Americans. Added to this were shortages of food and goods, for which Jewish merchants were blamed, and the return home of demobilised Tunisian soldiers of the French army. According to Satloff, in August 1940 there were attacks and looting in the towns of Le Kef, Ebba Ksour, Moktar and Siliana, sparked by a rumour that Jews had abducted a Muslim girl. In November 1940 riots broke out in Degache, and at the beginning of 1941 in Gafsa. The Vichy authorities responded cautiously. Satloff cites an instruction from the Foreign Minister, Paul Baudouin, in August 1940, telling the resident general to warn Jewish leaders not to agitate against the Marshal and quietly to show favour to the Arabs, for instance by releasing from prison those convicted of looting.

In the spring of 1941 the war in the Middle East was added to all this. The Axis powers had for years been broadcasting in Arabic, first Italian radio from Bari, then German stations. When in April the military seized power in Baghdad, and at the beginning of May the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani went to war with the British, propaganda presented Iraq as the start of an Arab uprising against the colonial empires. The call to holy war proclaimed in Baghdad by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, linked the struggle against Britain with hostility towards the Jews. Historians agree that this atmosphere inflamed feelings in Tunisia, but the sources do not prove a direct connection between events in Iraq and the disturbances in Gabès: Satloff writes only that the attack may have been connected with the news from Iraq.

The attack on Djara

The course of events is known from Italian and French reports and from survivors’ testimonies collected after the war by Yad Vashem. According to the Italian reports, on the evening of 19 May an Arab accosted some Jewish girls and four young Jews beat him. The next day a group of Arabs took revenge. Satloff describes the start as an attack by about thirty men on the synagogue. According to a study by Irit Abramski of Yad Vashem, based on six eyewitness accounts, several dozen men armed with clubs, knives and revolvers burst into Djara at dusk on 20 May. They killed every Jew they met in the street, broke down the gates of houses, and looted homes and shops.

There would have been more victims had the attack begun earlier. The shops were already closed and the synagogue almost empty, because the worshippers had dispersed between the afternoon and evening prayers. Among the dead, according to their families’ accounts, were the beadle of the Djara synagogue, two mothers with their sons, and the shopkeeper and tailor Azzar Benattia with his ten-year-old daughter. According to a neighbour, the attackers surprised one of the women in her kitchen, scalded her with boiling water, tortured her and stoned her to death. Survivors recalled years later that among the attackers were neighbours, customers and business partners, people with whom they had celebrated together only the evening before. Other Muslim residents of Djara and Menzel warned Jews, hid them and raised the alarm, which according to Abramski prevented the pogrom from spreading to the rest of the town. One survivor remembered an Arab on a bicycle who drove an attacker away from his mother.

The police arrived several hours later. Satloff points out that the local Arab policemen proved at best helpless and at worst complicit. The first officers sent to the scene, unarmed according to the accounts, were themselves attacked, and one of them was killed. The attackers withdrew only late at night. Only then, as Satloff writes, did the Vichy authorities for the first time respond to anti-Jewish riots firmly and with force.

The cable of 23 May and the punishments

On 23 May 1941 Admiral Esteva sent a secret cable to Vichy explaining the causes of the disturbances. He wrote that German prestige had long been growing and that the Muslims felt increasingly strong in relation to the Jews, who “retain their confidence in Great Britain and America”. In Gabès the presence of German officers had, even without any intervention on their part, confirmed the Arabs in the belief that they would be protected in the event of disorder. The resident general also complained that Tunisians, even the bey’s entourage, regarded Hitler as master of the whole world and France as a power that ruled in the protectorate only by the Führer’s grace.

This time the French punished the perpetrators, but chiefly to defend their own authority and to prevent the riots from turning into anti-French unrest. Esteva had some of the attackers arrested. According to Satloff, five of them were later executed in the kasbah in Tunis; other sources speak of five death sentences. Some of the accused were acquitted. The Jewish community was forbidden to hold public funerals, and although the Tunisian government agreed as early as 1941 to pay compensation to some of the victims, it reached a settlement with them only in 1948, usually for half the sums claimed. The Jews of Gabès felt that France had reacted too late and had been too concerned with Arab feeling. Many Arabs, for their part, resented being punished by the French for violence against people whom the French themselves were stripping of their rights.

Meanwhile Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation grew harsher. On 2 June 1941 the government adopted a second, stricter Statute on Jews, which was also extended to Tunisia. In June Jewish youth organisations were dissolved and a census of Jews and their property was ordered, and a law of 22 July 1941 opened the way to confiscating their businesses and real estate.

Place in the history of the war

The events in Gabès foreshadowed the violence that struck Jews in the Arab world in the weeks that followed. On 1 and 2 June 1941, in the power vacuum after the fall of Rashid Ali’s government, a mob in Baghdad carried out the pogrom known as the Farhud, in which, according to various estimates, anywhere from nearly two hundred to several hundred Jews were killed. As in Antwerp a few weeks earlier, the perpetrators were not Germans but local people, acting in a climate created by Axis propaganda and by collaborating authorities.

The worst for Tunisia’s Jews came a year and a half later. After the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, Tunisia was occupied by the Germans and Italians, and the country became the battlefield of the Tunisian campaign. An SS unit under Walter Rauff forced the community in Tunis to provide forced labourers; more than 5,000 men were sent to labour camps, in which several dozen died – more than two hundred, according to some estimates. The communities in the south, especially in Gabès and on Djerba, had to pay the occupiers a levy in gold amounting to tens of kilograms. Mass deportations were avoided because the Germans lacked ships and aircraft, and in May 1943 the fighting in Tunisia came to an end. The new bey, Muhammad VII al-Munsif, who had reigned since June 1942, and some Muslim notables then spoke out openly in defence of the Jews, and some hid them in their homes. The memory of May 1941 nevertheless remained alive in the Gabès community. After the war, especially after 1948, most of its members left for Israel and France.