French restitution, German compensation: Algerian Jews and Vichy's financial legacy

ISSN： 1362-9387

Source： Journal of North African Studies, Vol.17, Iss.5, 2012-12, pp. : 881-901

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Abstract

Post-World War II German reparative measures had originally been created for the benefit of European Jews. The April 2004 official German compensation programme for Jews who were interned in World War II included reparations to Algerians Jews of North Africa who were involved in a history of German indemnification superimposed upon a prior history of French restitution. Post-war German reparations since 1952 continue to be rooted in ongoing vibrant debates about coming to terms with Germany's Nazi past. In contrast, France's attitudes and policies towards the Vichy past in France and Algeria foreclosed its financial responsibility to Algerian Jews (or for that matter Algerian Muslims) for what Frantz Fanon would call a `just reparation' for the crimes of colonialism. Consequently, the case of Algerian Jewry and what happened to the community from the beginning of World War II through Algeria's 1962 independence, and into the era of their settlement en masse in France (where they received reparations as Pieds-Noirs</i>, or `repatriated' European colonial settlers), draws on Holocaust studies, post-colonial studies, Algerian Jewish diasporic history and the dynamic unfolding of French-Algerian decolonisation.