Sephardim in the Holocaust

In 1993, Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue observed, “As for the fate of the Sephardim [mostly Balkan and North African Jews of medieval Iberian descent] … they remain to this day on the margins of the history of the Holocaust.” Holocaust historiography has advanced since then to recognize and commemorate the estimated 160,000 European (Balkan) Sephardic victims of the Nazis. Though this number pales in comparison with the millions of Ashkenazi victims, it is approximately 80 percent of the 200,000 Sephardic Jews residing in Europe in 1933 (these figures do not include Italy, France, and other countries where it was difficult to distinguish between Ashkenazim and Sephardim during this period). For example, 90 percent of the 56,000 Jews in Greece perished, with almost total devastation of the communities in Rhodes, Corfu, Crete, and Salonika. With these losses, Sephardic culture lost its major European centers along with their Judeo-Spanish or Ladino heritage.

In North Africa, Sephardim suffered at the hands of the Italian Fascists (Libya) and French Vichy regimes (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco). German occupation afflicted Tunisian Jewry by means of internment, forced labor, starvation, and disease; in addition, Jewish slave-laborers were forced to dig trenches for the Germans under Allied bombing. Algeria’s anti-Semitic laws depriving Jews of their civil status, livelihood, and assets were even harsher than in Vichy France. In Libya, all foreign Jews were deported and Libyan Jews were interned in concentration camps in the desert, where over five hundred died.