The Paris Mosque sheltered Jews from the Holocaust, complicating eternal-enmity narratives.

Evidence

A second example of this universalising tendency within French antiracism is the memory of the sheltering by the Paris Mosque of North African Jews from the Holocaust, for it was not only the Jews and Christians of the MNCR who saved the lives of Jews in France. In recent years the previously little-known role of the Mosque in saving Jews—which some have preferred to overlook because it fits uneasily into narratives of eternal Muslim–Jewish enmity—has been investigated by authors including Robert Satloff and Ethan Katz, and depicted in a feature film by the Franco-Moroccan filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi. Revolving around the relationship between an Algerian Muslim who joins the French Resistance and the Algerian Jewish singer Salim Halali, Les hommes libres breaks multiple taboos about the marginalised role of immigrants in the Resistance, homosexuality among North Africans and, crucially, Jewish–Muslim relations. As Ferroukhi’s film correctly portrays, Halali’s life was saved by passing as a Muslim, thanks to false papers supplied by the Mosque’s Rector, Si Kadour Benghrabit (providing an alibi relying on similarities between the most intimate of Jewish and Muslim rituals, to circumvent the Germans and Vichy police’s practice of inspecting men’s penises to check for circumcision). — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1393

Categorization

• SEED: The detail that Vichy police inspected men’s penises for circumcision, and that mosque authorities exploited ritual similarities between Judaism and Islam to defeat this, is a striking historical mechanism — an essay on how shared ritual practice became a survival technology under occupation.
• XREF: Ties to the book’s overall thesis of shared rather than parallel histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to the earlier discussion of universalist French antiracism (MNCR).