Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa by Susan Gilson Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa by Susan Gilson Miller Joshua Cole Susan Gilson Miller. Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 248 pp. Nelly Benatar, a Moroccan Jewish woman born in 1898, was a lawyer, a member of the French Resistance, and a pioneering figure in the effort to mobilize support for refugees during the Second World War. Susan Gilson Miller's book uses Benatar's story to illuminate the importance of Morocco for Europeans fleeing Nazi terror, the importance of the French Resistance in North Africa, as well as the opportunities for action that this human crisis presented to Moroccan Jews such as Benatar. The drama of the story is never far from the surface—one of the historians who blurbed the book states that it "reads like a thriller." Years of Glory begins with Nelly Benatar's early life. Spanish-speaking Jews in Tangiers occupied a singular social status, distinct both from Moroccan Muslims and from the Berber and Arabic-speaking Jews of the south. When the family moved to Casablanca in 1916, Nelly was able to continue her studies, and she passed the baccalauréat the next year. The story of Nelly Benatar's origins captures the evolution of middle-class Jews in a rapidly changing Morocco, serving as a welcome antidote to histories of Jews in Muslim societies that often do not recognize the diversity of these populations. Benatar's trajectory reveals [End Page 235] the opportunities that this world encouraged—she enrolled in a correspondence program provided by the Faculty of Law in Bordeaux and became Morocco's first female lawyer in 1933. Miller also insists on the limits that Benatar faced: as a Jewish woman in the protectorate, she could not exercise the full rights of French citizenship, and Jews in Morocco remained apart from the Muslim majority. Miller suggests that these exclusions contributed to a growing enthusiasm for Zionism among young Moroccan Jews in the 1920s, though she also emphasizes that Moroccan Jews did not prioritize immigration to Palestine and focused instead on remedying the status of Jews in Morocco. It was exposure to Zionist meetings in Casablanca that gave Nelly Benatar her first experience of political work in 1936, while also establishing the connections to Jewish community organizations that were essential to her refugee work in the years that followed. Miller treats each year between 1939–1945 one chapter at a time. This choice puts the unexpected turns of the war at the center. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Benatar joined a campaign to encourage Moroccan Jewish men to join the French army. This was legally complicated: Moroccan Jews were not citizens, but neither were they foreigners, ruling out service in the Foreign Legion. The effort ultimately failed—after briefly entertaining the idea of a Jewish fighting unit within the French army, the colonial administration decided that the risk of destabilizing relations between Muslims and Jews in Morocco was too great. The failure of the recruitment drive nevertheless convinced Benatar that Moroccan Jews should act on behalf of European migrants who came to Morocco seeking safety from Hitler's war. She trained as a nurse and used her connections to Jewish charitable organizations to raise funds. The political complexities of this work were clearly overwhelming. French officials were frequently influenced by antisemitic assumptions about "undesirable" populations and were quick to set up internment camps to detain refugees. Jewish elites in Moroccan cities found it difficult to accept large numbers of Ashkenazic Jews, whose presence upset the social balance of Moroccan cities. Benatar fought against those who treated refugees as pariahs and found ways to provide housing and food to desperate families. Miller's portrayal of Nelly's participation in the Resistance is constrained by the scant documentation that Benatar herself preserved. It is clear that Benatar was part of a network that tied together private citizens and colonial officials, who quietly worked to undermine the regime and provide political cover and support for clandestine work. These networks in turn became a lever in her...