anti-semitism

German and Italian fascist armies in the Second World War treated the Jews quite differently. Jews who fell into the hands of the German army ended up in concentration camps; none of those taken by the Italians suffered the same fate. Yet the protectors of the Jews were no philo-Semites, nor were they (often) great respecters of human life. Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage atrocities against Ethiopians and Arabs in the years before the war. Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Fascism and Nazism.

Orientalizing the Jew shows how French travelers depicted Jews in the Orient and then brought these ideas home to orientalize Jews living in their homeland during the 19th century. Julie Kalman draws on narratives, personal and diplomatic correspondence, novels, and plays to show how the Jews of the East featured prominently in the minds of the French and how they challenged ideas of the familiar and the exotic. Portraits of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, romanticized Jewish artists, and the wealthy Sephardi families of Algiers come to life.

Professor Roberts examines the relationship between antisemitism and the practices of citizenship in a colonial context. She focuses on the experience of Algerian Jews and their evolving identity as citizens as they competed with the other populations in the colony, including newly naturalised non-French settlers and Algerian Muslims, for control over the scarce resources of the colonial state. The author argues that this resulted in antisemitic violence and hotly contested debates over the nature of French identity and rights of citizenship.

Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country's Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious affiliations. This timely book offers a fresh perspective on the debate by showing that French equality has not always demanded an erasure of differences.

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism. But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria's south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era.

French Holocaust survivor, Rachel Jedinak tells the story of how she and her sister escaped the notorious Velodrome d’Hiver round-up in the summer of 1942, evaded subsequent arrests, and ultimately survived the Holocaust in hiding. All the while, the girls were, as Jedinak stresses, “only children.” Jedinak additionally describes her post-war struggles to create memorials for the thousands of murdered Parisian children at their former schools. 

Under the guarantee of the League of Nations, Jews in most of Upper Silesia— an area encompassing nearly 1.5 million residents and around 10,000 Jews in 1933—were subject to special minority protections that barred Nazi discrimination on the basis of religion.  League-enforced limits on antisemitism in this eastern corner of the Reich amounted to an accident of history, born of a Polish-German treaty after World War I. While these protections remain largely unknown to German historians today, they were far from obscure in their time and place.

Statesmen and scholars were inspired by a period after World War I (when the victors devised Minority Treaties for the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe) at the time that the Cold War ended between 1989-1991. This book is the first study of that period--between 1878 and 1938--when the Great Powers established a system of external supervision to reduce the threats in Europe's most volatile regions of Irredentism, persecution, and uncontrolled waves of westward migration.

Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official records and walked off the pages of history. As a result, we have for decades severely underestimated the number of French Jews murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc unearths this tragic record and rewrites World War II history.