Holocaust Remembrance and Commemoration among the Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora and Islamic Countries (2024–1948)

The Holocaust’s Eurocentric historiography has long overshadowed the tragic fate of Jewish communities in Islamic countries and the Sephardic diaspora. However, the Nazis regarded all Jews, wherever they were, as targets for annihilation. During the war, European Jewry’s Holocaust spilled beyond Europe to French and Italian North Africa and the Middle and Near East. Moreover, Sephardic communities within Europe were affected indiscriminately, particularly in the Balkans and Northern Europe. Although Holocaust remembrance and commemoration among Jews of the Sephardic diaspora and Islamic lands took shape consistently and gradually, both in Israel and around the world, it did so belatedly, beginning only in the 1980s. Among the factors shaping the context in which this history began to be addressed were the dominance of the European ethos and the “Ashkenazi experience” of the Holocaust, the delayed scholarly attention to the Holocaust in these regions, the historiographical and academic debates, and these communities’ legal struggles to have the Holocaust’s applicability to North Africa and the Middle East recognized. Other influential developments included the establishment of museums documenting and commemorating the Holocaust in Islamic lands and the Sephardic diaspora, Together, these factors determined the pace and delay in addressing this significant topic.