Tensions between Jews and Muslims are a recurrent headline, but Muslims rescuing Jews during the Holocaust raise curiosity and intrigue. Ronen Steinke's book invites the audience to delve into the complex relationship between Muslims and Jews in Europe and the heroic acts of a Muslim doctor who took on the role of rescuer. This book details in a marvelous way the many complexities that surround Nazi racial laws towards minorities.
The subject of Arabs and the Holocaust may seem like a dichotomy because most people associate the Holocaust with Europe and it was a European crime. However, what is more, unknown is that it expanded beyond the formal European borders and implicated many non-Jews, who are integral to the story of the Holocaust. Ronen Steinke's book adds to the growing scholarship and relationship between Muslims and the Holocaust. Much of this new scholarship looks at stories, policies, racial laws, North Africa, and the positive stories between Jews and Muslims. The story of Anna Boros, a 17 year old Jewish girl and Dr. Helmy is one of the remarkable stories about an Arab who was connected to the Holocaust in several ways. Yet there are many unknown stories that discuss Muslim rescuers who were from diverse backgrounds, for example an Iranian diplomat (Abdol Hossein Sardari), a Tunisian aristocrat (Khaled Abdul Wahab), a British female spy (Inayat Noor Khan), and rescuers from countries like Albania (70% Muslim) that saved all of its Jews. Other stories about Jews and Muslims rely on the history of North Africa under the control of Vichy and the Nazis; one can read much of this in The Holocaust and North Africa edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevya Stein (2019). These are important, complex, and rich stories that intertwine the history of World War II, colonialism, and the horror of the Holocaust. Steinke brings together many of these elements in his marvelous story of Anna and Dr. Helmy.
Steinke's book is about a Muslim-Jewish connection that details the remarkable story of Mohammed Helmy, the Egyptian doctor who risked his life to save Jewish Berliners from the Nazis. The book focuses on a Jewish girl named Anna, whose journey is recounted like a thriller. Through this story, we learn that Anna escaped being murdered several times, and one of the last options was for her to be disguised as a receptionist to Dr. Helmy. “All that was missing was a receptionist. It couldn't be a Jewish one this time, of course, as Jews were no longer allowed to treat ‘Aryan’ patients. But a Muslim one would pass muster all right. And that was how the Jewish Anna morphed overnight into Muslim Nadia, the doctor's niece” (62). Through important and intriguing relationships that Dr. Helmy maintained with Nazi doctors, with the crucial Nazi play for support by Arabs, Dr. Helmy managed to keep himself safe with the Nazis and take control of his private medical practice. Finally, he had the disguised Anna marry an Egyptian Muslim man which she rejected, then he managed to hide her, and ultimately the war ended and she was finally able to live as a free Jew.
Important facts offered in the book are essential in comprehending the antisemitic imprints within the Arab and Muslim community felt even today. Hitler needed allies and was desperate to convince Muslims that the Allies were planning to kill them, since most Muslims lived under colonial forces. “According to an SS pamphlet aimed at the Muslim population of Bosnia in particular, the Allies had an interest in ‘killing as many Muslims as possible’. And the Nazi propaganda didn't stop there: it went on to remind Muslims that 232 million of their number lived ‘under English, American, French, and Russian foreign rule’. Needless to say, it didn't mention that the Germans harboured the same colonial ambitions. On the contrary: it claimed that only Germany had true respect for Islam. ‘If Germany is defeated, the last hope for you Muslims ever to become free also fades’” (67). On the other hand, this book is crucial in discussions about antisemitism and Islamophobia because it lays out the way in which Berliners, and especially Nazis, perceived Arabs as Orientals. Steinke describes how “Most Nazis still had in mind the passage from Mein Kampf in which all Arabs were characterized as inferior, and their anti-colonial campaign against the French and British as a ‘coalition of cripples’” (27).
The book does a marvelous job of further identifying that Muslims were indeed part of an intellectual and religious tradition in Berlin that reveals the deep influence of Arab and Islamic intellectuals within German and Jewish culture. As Steinke writes, “Spinoza . . . came from a Dutch Jewish community—descendants of those Jews who had seen their happiest days under the rule of Islam in Spain, until they were driven out of the country. Spanish Moorish Muslims had willingly shared their intellectual heritage and advanced philosophical and scientific culture with their Jewish brothers” (24). Steinke offers many fresh ways to look at how Muslims attempted to cover internal Antisemitism and simultaneously maintain dignity about the message of rescue in their faith and culture. The story demonstrates that Muslims were indeed part of the propaganda machine of the Nazis: some avoided it, some believed it, and some risked their lives to rescue Jews. The research in this book at times can be a bit sketchy when it comes to Dr. Helmy's own beliefs and practices, as we see moments throughout that are speculative considering that the research and documentation of these stories are rare. Dr. Helmy seems to assimilate in a way that seems impossible during the Nazi era, but the speculation relies on the early 1930s, especially 1934, when we read: “Perhaps Helmy even tried to go with the political flow in the early days, at least for a short time. A testimonial of 1934 indicates that his bosses at the hospital found him less objectionable than the numerous upstarts from the SA and SS. They saw in him a flexible opportunist. ‘Although a foreigner, Dr. Helmy's conduct demonstrated a consistently pro-German attitude,’ they wrote. Indeed, ‘as far as he could, he engaged sympathetically with all national endeavors’” (32). There is a lot more research to do on the story of Dr. Helmy in the Berlin archives, and about the role of Muslims during 1933–1945 in Berlin. Ronen Steinke compels the reader to do more research on a complex and rich topic.
