Nazism in Syria and Lebanon

Nazism in Syria and Lebanon
Author: Götz Nordbruch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2009-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134105592

The increasingly vibrant political culture emerging in Lebanon and Syria in the 1930s and early 1940s is key to the understanding of local approaches towards the Nazi German regime. For many contemporary observers in Beirut and Damascus, Nazism not only posed a risk to Europe, but threatened to take root in Arab societies as well. In the first publication to reconstruct Lebanese and Syrian encounters with Nazism in the context of an evolving local political culture and to base its analysis on a comprehensive review of Arab, French and German sources, Götz Nordbruch examines the reactions to the rise of Nazism in the countries under French mandate, spanning from fascination and endorsement to the creation of antifascist networks. Against a background of public discourses, local politics and the shifting regional and international settings, this book interprets public assessments of and contact with the Nazi regime as part of an intellectual quest for orientation in the years between the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and national independence.

Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism

Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism
Author: Israel Gershoni
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 029275745X

The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war. While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.

Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Middle East

Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Middle East
Author: Francis R. Nicosia
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785337858

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region’s political, cultural, and religious complexities.

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World
Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300155832

This groundbreaking history connects Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda during World War II to anti-Semitism in the Middle East in the decades since. Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectual, political, and cultural context in which German and European radical anti-Semitism was found to resonate with similar views rooted in a selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin, including Haj el-Husseini and Rashid el-Kilani, collaborated with the Nazis in constructing their Middle East propaganda campaign. By integrating the political and military history of the war in the Middle East with the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the propagandistic diffusion of Nazi ideology, Herf offers the most thorough examination to date of this important chapter in the history of World War II. Importantly, he also shows how the anti-Semitism promoted by the Nazi propaganda effort contributed to the anti-Semitism exhibited by adherents of radical forms of Islam in the Middle East today.

Nazi Germany and the Arab World

Nazi Germany and the Arab World
Author: Francis R. Nicosia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 110706712X

This book investigates the intent and policy of Nazi Germany in the Arab world from 1933 to 1944. It analyzes Germany's support for continued European domination of the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East and Germany's rejection of truly sovereign Arab states in those regions.

Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective

Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective
Author: Kasper Braskén
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-09-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429603215

This book initiates a critical discussion on the varieties of global anti-fascism and explores the cultural, political and practical articulations of anti-fascism around the world. This volume brings together a group of leading scholars on the history of anti-fascism to provide a comprehensive analysis of anti-fascism from a transnational and global perspective and to reveal the abundance and complexity of anti-fascist ideas, movements and practices. Through a number of interlinked case studies, they examine how different forms of global anti-fascisms were embedded in various national and local contexts during the interwar period and investigate the interrelations between local articulations and the global movement. Contributions also explore the actions and impact of African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern anti-fascist voices that have often been ignored or rendered peripheral in international histories of anti-fascism. Aimed at a postgraduate student audience, this book will be useful for modules on the extreme right, political history, political thought, political ideologies, political parties, social movements, political regimes, global politics, world history and sociology. Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Passion of Max Von Oppenheim

The Passion of Max Von Oppenheim
Author: Lionel Gossman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1909254207

Born into a prominent German Jewish banking family, Baron Max von Oppenheim (1860-1946) was a keen amateur archaeologist and ethnologist. His discovery and excavation of Tell Halaf in Syria marked an important contribution to knowledge of the ancient Middle East, while his massive study of the Bedouins is still consulted by scholars today. He was also an ardent German patriot, eager to support his country's pursuit of its "place in the sun." Excluded by his part-Jewish ancestry from the regular diplomatic service, Oppenheim earned a reputation as "the Kaiser's spy" because of his intriguing against the British in Cairo, as well as his plan, at the start of the First World War, to incite Muslims under British, French and Russian rule to a jihad against the colonial powers. After 1933, despite being half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, Oppenheim was not persecuted by the Nazis. In fact, he placed his knowledge of the Middle East and his connections with Muslim leaders at the service of the regime. Ranging widely over many fields - from war studies to archaeology and banking history - 'The Passion of Max von Oppenheim' tells the gripping and at times unsettling story of one part-Jewish man's passion for his country in the face of persistent and, in his later years, genocidal anti-Semitism.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa
Author: Reeva Spector Simon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2019-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000227944

Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran. Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps. Nevertheless, they fought for the Allies and assisted the Americans and the British in the invasion of North Africa. These men and women were community leaders and average people who, despite their dire economic circumstances, worked with the refugees attempting to escape the Nazis via North Africa, Turkey, or Iran and connected with international aid agencies during and after the war. By 1945, no Jewish community had been left untouched, and many were financially decimated, a situation that would have serious repercussions on the future of Jews in the region. Covering the entire Middle East and North Africa region, this book on World War II is a key resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Jewish history, World War II, and Middle East history.

Confronting Fascism in Egypt

Confronting Fascism in Egypt
Author: Israel Gershoni
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 080477255X

Confronting Fascism in Egypt offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italy's and Germany's expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system. The authors place Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfolded—in Egypt's large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journals—emphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and "Islamo-Fascism."