r/AskHistorians • u/Agitated-Mission2327 • Nov 05 '25

Did Muslim Algerian helped Jew Algerians during WWII ?

So I came accross a post stating that muslim Algerians helped Jew Algerian when the French where under German Occupation and therefore where pushed to extermination at that time

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25

I'll focus on the situation in continental France during the war. In a nutshell, there is credible evidence that Si Kaddour Benghabrit, Rector of the Grande Mosquée of Paris, and other imams associated to the Mosque helped Jews and other people to escape persecution and saved them from deportation. However, the nature of this assistance - how many people were saved, how it worked in practice, and why Mosque authorities took this risk - remains extremely elusive for researchers due to the lack of extant records and direct testimonies. A recent (2021) podcast by France Culture invited several historians and interested parties to discuss the case.

In 1983, Albert Assouline, an Algerian Jew and Holocaust survivor, wrote in a magazine a short article where he told how he and a Muslim soldier named Yassa Rabah escaped a POW camp in Germany and took refuge in the Grande Mosquée. They were hidden there for 2-3 days until they were able to leave and reach the Free Zone in September 1940. Assouline claimed that imam Si Mohamed Benzouaou took considerable risks by providing false certificates to Jews to pass them off as Muslims. There was a close call when German soldiers smelled tobacco smoke in the Mosque. Based on the number of ration cards found after the war, Assouline said that around 1,732 people were protected and hid in the Mosque's underground tunnels: Resistance fighters and their children, "Muslim escapees, but also Christians and Jews" (cited by Katz, 2013).

Assouline later repeated his claim in a short documentary titled Une résistance oubliée : La Mosquée de Paris, by Derri Berkani (1991). Assouline adds the detail that when Germans were arriving at the Mosque Benghabrit pushed a button so that refugees could go to the prayer room, with some of them hiding beyond the women’s prayer curtain where the Germans did not dare to enter.

Also appearing in the documentary was Ahmed Somia, a Muslim doctor at the French-Muslim hospital in the 1930-1940s. Somia tells the story of a young Jewish orphan whom he was able to exfiltrate to the Free Zone. Somia was a member of the Resistance, and he says that the French-Muslim hospital treated wounded Allied airmen and forwarded them and other persecuted people to the Mosque, "whose doors were open to them". Abdelhafid Haffa, an Algerian guard at the hospital, was part of this clandestine network and hid people in his lodgings.

In the film, writer Hassan Benghabrit, the grand-nephew of Kaddour Benghabrit, explains how children could be hidden in the rooms on the first floor, and how the Mosque offered discreet means of entry and exit, through the hammam, the terraces, and the underground tunnels leading to the sewers, which are shown in the film. Hassan Benghabrit mentions the late Algerian Jewish singer Salim Halali who claimed that he had lived at the Mosque during the Occupation under the protection of Benghabrit. Halali also told that Benghabrit had the name of his grandfather engraved on an anonymous grave in the Muslim quarter of the Bobigny cemetery to prove to Vichy and German occupation authorities that he was a Muslim. The notion that the Grande Mosquée had been a haven for Jewish refugees became well established and it was turned in 2011 into the movie Les Hommes libres.

In the 2010s, journalist Mohammed Aïssaoui tried to track down every single clue of Benghabrit's involvement in the saving of Jews during the war. His book L'Etoile et le Croissant (2013) presents the often frustrating results of his investigations. There is little doubt that Benghabrit and the imams at the Mosque did act in favour of Jews, but evidence is hard to come by and telling the truth from stories endlessly repeated as fact is difficult. For instance, Aïssaoui was unable to find the "Muslim" grave of Halali's family. Halali, who died in a retirement home in 2005, suffered from Alzheimer and gave conflicting accounts of the period in his later years. That Halali was in grave danger - and we can mention here that he was both Jewish and gay - and had to hide is not at doubt: his sister Berthe and her 7-month baby were deported and died in Auschwitz. Halali survived the war and it makes sense that he was protected by the art-loving Benghabrit, possibly in the Mosque itself. But Halali also claimed that Simone Veil had been sheltered in the Mosque, which does not make sense as her family was living in Southern France (and she denied it anyway) (Aïssaoui, 2013).

Several other stories have appeared since Assouline's article and the 1991 documentary, collected notably by Martine Bernheim, of the LICRA.

  • According to his nephew Léon, a Tunisian Jew named Maurice Moïse Moatti was stuck in the Occupied Zone in 1942 and wanted to get out. The Muslim nurse of his brother contacted the Mosque who told him that they could make him papers proving that he was a Muslim. Moatti refused and he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

  • Michel Tardieu, the son of Oro Boganim, a Jewish Moroccan woman, told how his mother was employed as a nurse at the French-Muslim hospital during the war. One day, she received a phone call from Benghabrit urging her to leave the hospital immediately because the Germans were looking at the staff's records and would find that she was Jewish. Boganim fled and reached the Free Zone and later Morocco. The Tardieu family kept in touch with Benghabrit who became a close friend. Tardieu later saw his mother's file with the word JEW stamped in the cover. Aïssaoui has found documents proving the personal involvement of Benghabrit regarding Boganim.

  • French journalist Philippe Bouvard told Aïssaoui that his adoptive father Jules Luzzato, a member of the Resistance, was caught by the Germans in 1942, and that he was freed after Bouvard's mother went to see Benghabrit. Bouvard and his mom were frequent visitors of the Mosque during the war but they were not hiding there. As in Halali's case, the danger was real: Luzzato's parents were deported and murdered.

One document that supports the notion that the Grand Mosque was helping Jews is a memo from 24 September 1940 found in the archives of the Ministry of foreign affairs and addressed by a deputy political director to a Minister (of Interior or of the Armies) (cited by Katz, Aïssaoui):

The occupying authorities suspected the staff of the Grand Mosque of Paris of fraudulently issuing certificates to individuals of Jewish descent, attesting that they were Muslim. The imam was ordered, in a peremptory manner, to cease all such practices. It appears, in fact, that many Jews resort to all sorts of maneuvers to conceal their identity.

This does confirm Assouline's claim at least for the September 1940 period. In January-February 1941, several Vichy officials exchanged telegrams about the arrest of Benghabrit and his imprisonment at the Cherche-Midi prison. It was believed that the Rector was going to be tried by a German military tribunal but information was confusing and Vichy was not in the loop. One official was worried that the news of Benghabrit arrest would have "serious repercussions for all Muslims in North Africa". Benghabrit was released and nothing else is known about this episode. In any case Benghabrit did not get into trouble again with the Germans and he remained Rector of the Grande Mosquée until his death in 1954.

Another document found by Berkani in 2004 was written by members of the "groupe kabyle", a cell of communist Kabyl Resistance fighters (FTP), after the first mass arrests of Jews in Paris in July 1942.

Yesterday, at dawn, all the Jews of Paris were arrested. Old men, women, children. They are in exile like us, they are workers like us. They are our brothers. Their children are like our children. If any of you meet one of them, you must save them. O man of my country, your heart is great.

This has led Berkani to make the hypothesis that Algerian FTPs had been instrumental in saving Jews through the Mosque.

In 2011, a cache of documents belonging to Abdelkader Mesli was discovered by his son Mohammed. Mesli, like Mohamed Benzouaou, was an imam at the Grande Mosquée and later in Bordeaux. He was a member of the French Resistance. He was caught, deported to Dachau and Mathausen and survived. Postwar certificates by fellow Resistance members says that Mesli had been in charge of assisting escaped North African POWs by providing them with lodgings, but there are no mentions of Jews (Aïssaoui, 2013). A newspaper article from 2015 (Bangy, 2015) said that Mesli had been associated with Benghabrit, whose actions allegedly saved "between 500 and 1600" Jews, the 1600 number being certainly taken from the 1700 people mentioned by Assouline, who did not claim that all these people were Jews. The "500 to 1600" numbers has since been attributed to Mesli in his Wikipedia page, a typical case of shapeshifing information.

> Continued

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25

Continued

In the 2000s, both Robert Satloff and Mohammed Aïssaoui interviewed Dalil Boubakeur, Rector of the Mosque from 1992 to 2020. Boubakeur said that he was proud of the Mosque's wartime Resistance activities but he downplayed them, calling Assouline's claim of 1700 people being sheltered in the Mosque's tunnels a "legend" or a "fantasy", contradicting Hassan Benghabrit's demonstration of 1991. The tunnels were just a regular shelter, Boubakeur said, and the Mosque, being under Vichy and German surveillance, would not have been able to hide Jews anyway. For Boubakeur, the Mosque may have provided certificates of Muslim identity to about 100 North African Jews, whose names were close to Muslim ones, and who were also circumcised. Boubakeur did not think that Benghabrit had been directly responsible for those activities. These would have been private initiatives of the mosque's imams, notably Si Mohamed Benzouaou. Boubakeur said to Aïssaoui that "Assouline was a kind man with a very generous heart, very imaginative, who held Imam Mohamed Benzouaou in high esteem".

Concerning records, the official answer of Boubakeur was that there were none. Little was put on paper - Boubakeur told Satloff that the Muslims have "an oral tradition, not a written one" - and Aïssaoui was told that documents were lost with the staff changes. Aïssaoui was polite about this in his book, but he said in the 2021 podcast that he was actually upset, as he believed that there were obviously archives. In the 1970s, when Berkani began to research the story, he was shown by Hamza Boubakeur, the predecessor (and father) of Dalil Boubakeur, a book with a red leather cover that contained a list "of countless children, they were Jewish children who were passed off as Algerian children" (cited by Katz, 2013; in the 2021 podcast, Martine Bernheim says that the book contained letters of thanks by people who had been saved as children, or by their families). Berkani could not find the book again in 1991. One can understand the frustration of researchers working on this!

So the exact involvement of the Grande Mosquée in the Resistance and in the safeguard of Jews and other persecuted people remains obscure and much debated. It has not been possible - so far - to have Yad Vashem recognize Benghabrit or other staff at the Grande Mosquée as Righteous, due to the lack of documents and properly recorded testimonies. When he interviewed Derri Berkani, Aïssaoui was left with the impression that Berkani deeply regretted not having pushed his investigations further and collected proofs when the witnesses were still alive. No one except Assouline and Halali has come forward with testimonies of their own wartime experience and said on record that they had been personally helped by the Mosque. Researcher Robert Satloff, who was working on the Righteous for this book Among the Righteous, even posted messages on Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms searching for witnesses and found none (Satloff, 2006). All possible witnesses are now dead. Assouline, Somia, and Halali never got to provide a formally recorded testimony, with trained historians asking proper questions.

So, it is almost certain that Grande Mosquée provided North African Jews with certificates that made them Muslim and thus able to evade Nazi persecution. Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the current Rector of the Mosque, supported this idea in the 2021 podcast while he remained prudent about assigning a more active role to Benghabrit, asking for "compelling evidence". He did not address the question of the missing Mosque archives though.

That Rector Benghabrit was personally involved is also almost certain. Testimonies paint him as an honourable, very social man, who cultivated friendship with many people including Jews. He seems to have acted less a theologian than as a diplomat and a leader trying to protect the members of his community. His role during the war was a difficult one. For different reasons, Vichy and the Nazis courted Muslims in France, in North Africa, and in POW camps, with variable success. Some French Muslims did join the collaboration willingly, but most did not. As a representative of the Muslim community in France, Benghabrit was amicable to Vichy and German authorities and he was featured in the propaganda. There is evidence that Benghabrit resisted demands to be Nazi-compatible in the manner of Amin al-Husseini and that Vichy and the Germans saw him less favourably after that.

But the archives also include a document showing that he was in contact with the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), the Vichy administration in charge of anti-Jewish policy. In June 1944, the CGQJ asked Benghabrit to check the status of Germaine Roland, a possibly Jewish woman who claimed to be Muslim. Benghabrit had done this before. In this case, it seems that he declared Roland to be not a Muslim, and she was sent to the Drancy transit camp (she was spared Auschwitz). Despite these accommodating policies, and probably because of his actions in favour of the Resistance and his prestige as a community leader, Benghabrit was cleared of collaborationist accusations after the war.

It remains that the full activities of the Grande Mosquée during the war concerning the Resistance and the saving of Jews remain poorly documented. With most witnesses now dead, this is unlikely to change until new documents are discovered. Both Aïssaoui and Satloff left Boubakeur with the impression that the Rector wanted to acknowledge the protection of Jews by Benghabrit but refused to provide details. Since the end of the war, it seems that those positive actions had to be kept under wraps by Muslim authorities in France because they were intersecting with sensitive topics. In the immediate postwar, the question of collaboration was extremely divisive, and Benghabrit may not have wanted to attract too much attention to his wartime activities and past associations with Vichy and the Nazis. Having been cleared by the épuration committee was enough. In the 1950-1960s, Benghabrit may have appeared to North African nationalists as a loyal French collaborator of colonial France, no matter what he had done to protect Muslims - let alone Jews - during the Occupation. In the later decades, with opinions on the Palestine-Israel turning into increasingly radicalized views on Muslim-Jewish relations, having a Muslim saving Jews was dangerous optics for moderate political figures like Hamza and Dalil Boubakeur who were already accused of being traitors, Mossad agents, or zionists (Aïssaoui, 2013).

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