The Vichy dahirs in Morocco and the legend of Muhammad V

The legislation. 3 October 1940—the first Statut des Juifs in France and Algeria; 31 October 1940—the dahir applying it in the French protectorate of Morocco. 2 June 1941—the second Statut, extending the racial definition to Moroccan and Tunisian Jews; 5 August 1941—the second Moroccan dahir. In July 1941, the Aryanisation laws and the Office of Economic Aryanisation. 8 November 1942—Operation Torch, the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria; in 1943, a staged abrogation.

The content in Morocco: a census of Jewish persons and Jewish property; a numerus clausus of two per cent in the liberal professions—doctors, lawyers, architects, notaries; an education quota, initially fourteen per cent, tending toward total exclusion from public schools; exclusion from office, teaching and the press; the expulsion of Jews from the European quarters back into the mellahs. Implementation was partial and uneven: Michael Laskier writes that the degree of application is hard to assess, but that the laws were at least partly applied—while rural authorities largely ignored them.

Now the legend, which needs taking apart piece by piece, because in Morocco and in Moroccan-Israeli relations it is today a matter of state memory.

"Muhammad V refused to sign the anti-Jewish laws" is false. A dahir is by definition a sultanic decree; the dahirs of 31 October 1940 and 5 August 1941 bear his seal. He signed them; even the studies sympathetic to him concede it.

"He refused to impose the yellow star and said he would wear one himself"—no such requirement was ever made. The yellow badge was not imposed in French North Africa, not in Morocco, not in Algeria, not in the French zone of Tunisia; it was imposed only in German-occupied Tunisia (November 1942—May 1943), and Morocco was never occupied by Germany. A refusal cannot be documented because there was nothing to refuse; it appears to be a transplant of the (itself apocryphal) legend of Christian X of Denmark. "There are no Jews, only Moroccan subjects"—a sentence quoted everywhere and never footnoted: it appears in no contemporary document.

What is documented is this. A French diplomatic telegram of 24 May 1941, preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris: at the Throne Day reception the sultan for the first time invited representatives of the Jewish communities and said: "I absolutely do not approve of the new anti-Semitic laws and I refuse to associate myself with a measure I disagree with." That is both the floor and the ceiling of the evidence: it neither proves concrete action in favour of the Jews nor hints at a threat to his life or his position.

The spread of scholarly opinion should be set out rather than resolved for the reader: Robert Assaraf—he signed out of inexperience and youth, believing no irremediable damage would follow; Mohammed Kenbib—the position was "particularly delicate," and the contradiction is acknowledged but not resolved; Cohen—he opposed the laws but had little capacity to prevent them, and the effective brake on implementation was not the sultan but Resident-General Charles Noguès; Aouad-Badoual—the combination of "the Sultan's hesitation, the compromises, derogations and exceptions" plus American intervention spared Moroccan Jews the European fate. Daniel Schroeter has written separately on how this memory was manufactured in Morocco after 1999.

And two facts that close the account. Yad Vashem has never recognised Muhammad V as Righteous Among the Nations; the approach by the royal counsellor André Azoulay to President Shimon Peres in 2007, after Robert Satloff's book, went nowhere: the criterion requires that the rescuer risked his own life, and the record does not establish it. And "there were no camps in Morocco" is false: Vichy operated forced-labour camps on the Mediterranean–Niger railway in eastern Morocco: Bou Arfa, Berguent (Aïn Beni Mathar), Missour and others. The inmates were overwhelmingly European refugees, Spanish Republicans and foreign Jews rather than Moroccan Jews; conditions were lethal. The celebratory literature omits them entirely.