The Streets of Paris

The Grand Mosque of Paris: Place du Puits-de-l’Ermite

LOCATION: 2, Place du Puits-de-L’Ermite, Grand Mosque of Paris

HOURS: Sat–Thurs, 9–12; 2–6

MÉTRO: Censier-Daubenton

The Grand Mosque of Paris was built between 1922 and 1926 to symbolize the eternal friendship between France and Islam. It was also meant to express gratitude to the half-million Muslims of the French Empire’s North African colonies who had fought against the Germans in World War I. A hundred thousand Muslims died for France; without their sacrifice, it is said, the victory of Verdun would not have happened. The Mosque was particularly meant to honor the fallen Muslim tirailleurs (sharpshooters) from Algeria.

After the war many Algerians relocated to France, working in factories and on construction jobs mostly, sending money home to their families. Known as Kabyles—Berbers from Kabylia, the treacherous Atlas Mountains and impoverished villages of Algeria that Albert Camus wrote about (see here)—the Kabyles became the dominant Muslim population in Paris. Many lived in slum housing in Belleville in northeastern Paris, forming bonds with their other immigrant neighbors and coworkers: Chinese and Vietnamese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Jews from North Africa, Russia, eastern Europe.

When the Nazis invaded in 1940 and began rounding up Jews for deportation, many Kabyles joined the French Resistance. (It is also true that like Christians, many Arabs in North Africa and Paris collaborated with the anti-Semitic Vichy and German authorities.)

The successes of the Kabyle Resistance were intimately connected with the clandestine antifascist operations in daily progress in the cellars of the Grand Mosque where the Kabyles worshipped. Thanks to the heroism of the Mosque’s rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit (1868–1954), the Kabyles were free to bring their Jewish friends and coworkers to the Mosque for safe haven.

The first prayer offered at the Paris Mosque in 1926, in the presence of the president of France, was given by this rector who was also the Mosque’s founder. Benghabrit, born in Algeria, a cultured diplomat in Paris and North Africa who wrote books, enjoyed Parisian salon culture, and loved music became the most important Muslim in Paris and the most influential Arab in Europe. He has now become a figure of historical interest and some acclaim because of his actions during the Holocaust.

When the Nazis and the Vichy government began arresting and deporting the Jews of Paris, Benghabrit committed himself and his congregation to making the Grand Mosque a sanctuary for endangered Jews. He devised a threefold rescue operation: first, he offered European and Algerian Jews shelter in the same apartments inhabited by Muslim families; second, he gave them fake identity certificates, to prove they were Muslims, not Jews; finally, he initiated the use of the cellars and tunnels beneath the Mosque as escape routes. The Jews-in-hiding crawled and dug their way through the sewers and tunnels (souterrains) under the Mosque to the banks of the Seine where empty wine barges and boats operated by Kabyles were waiting to smuggle them out of Occupied Paris. Benghabrit was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo a number of times as rumors of the Mosque’s resistance inevitably got out. A higher German command, however, ordered him released each time: The Germans could not risk Algerian riots in North Africa or Paris if the Reich was to hold North Africa against the allies. It was important that the Muslims on both fronts stayed submissive.

Salim Halali, a Berber Jew from Algeria, popular singer of North African songs and friend of Benghabrit, sought and found safety in the Mosque. The rector not only made him a Certificate of Conversion to show—falsely—that Salim’s grandfather had converted to Islam; he also had an unmarked tombstone in the Muslim cemetery in Bobigny inscribed with the family name of Halali’s grandfather. After the Nazis checked it out, they left Halali alone. He lived out the war in the Mosque, passing as a Muslim when the Nazis, responding to rumors of a Mosque underground, barged in regularly on a search-and-deport mission. (Benghabrit had a warning bell hidden in the floor under his desk that alerted everyone of another Nazi raid in progress.) After the Liberation, Halali went on to become the most popular “oriental” singer in Europe. He and Benghabrit remained good friends.

Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who with a Muslim friend escaped from a POW camp in Germany, surfaced in Paris without identity papers. The Mosque welcomed him and his friend. While hiding out in the basement, Assouline saw many other Jews in hiding: the children lived in the upstairs apartments with Muslim families, the adults in the basement. Because North African Jews and Muslims looked alike, had similar surnames, were circumcised, and spoke Arabic, the Jews, with their fake Muslim identity certificates, were able to pass as Muslim when the Gestapo came searching for evidence of a Jewish sanctuary movement. After the war, Assouline gave testimony that he witnessed 1,600 Jews passing through the basements and sub-basements of the Mosque and descending into the dark labyrinthine tunnels, eventually making it out onto the boats waiting at the Halles aux Vins on the Seine to carry them to safety in the Maghreb and Spain. In addition to Jewish refugees, the Kabyle boatmen also carried messages between the French Resistance in Paris and the Free French Army in Algeria.

Some sources dispute Assouline’s estimate, claiming that at most five hundred Jews were given a home and then safe passage by Benghabrit and the Mosque. One Israeli scholar dismisses the story as exaggerated from start to finish. There is not much data available to provide the actual numbers of Jews rescued by the Mosque. But what there is—old newspapers, scholarly research,1 and personal testimonies from Jews who after the war told of hiding for its duration in the Mosque’s basements—supports the details of this hidden history.

Benghabrit was given the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur after the war. But Eva Wiesel has noted in The New York Times that getting Yad Vashem in Israel to grant the honorific of “Righteous Among Nations” to a Muslim, even the Oskar Schindler–like Benghabrit, is and will remain very difficult. This heroic unsung leader of the Paris Mosque Resistance died in 1954 in the early stages of the war of Algerian independence. He is buried in the Mosque, facing in the direction of Mecca, as are all Muslims.

For the Traveler

The domes of the Grand Mosque of Paris and the golden mosaics of the minaret dominate the skyline of this eastern edge of the Latin Quarter. The voice of the muezzin from the top of the minaret calling Muslims to prayer five times a day adds a backup of ancient chant to the sacred site.

Once inside the Mosque, you enter the courtyard, a calm bright space of grassy green plantings, turquoise pools of water, lovely tiled walls of white and black and shades of blue. “The desert culture of Islam,” in the words of Garry Wills, “sees heaven as a garden perpetually rinsed with purifying waters.” Palm trees and cypress rise along the aisles of intricately carved arches and columns bordering the cascading fountains, flowering bushes. The white ceiling is high.

Walking here, even on gray winter days, you notice the light from above brightening the tiled walls, the sounds of soft voices and flowing water infusing a sense of reverence. Approaching this place from the plain nondescript street outside, you’d never dream such a hushed and beautiful sanctuary existed so close by.

Beyond the courtyard is a large dimly lit prayer room for men and women, the floor and walls covered with magnificent carpets. Other rooms for prayer and study open onto more dim corridors. The downstairs of the mosque where women perform their ablutions are interesting to explore. If you take a guided tour, you can ask about the religious significance of the ritual baths. (Each of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—have in different periods of their history required special cleansing rites for women.)

The Mosque has multiple functions. Besides being a place of prayer it has in the past provided apartments to the people who work there, a health and social services clinic, archives, small gardens, a library of ancient manuscripts, steam baths, pools, a restaurant, café, and gift shop.

What many foreign visitors and Parisians have never heard of is the hidden history of the Paris Mosque: It played an important role in the French Resistance in World War II, until recently, a well-kept secret. The story of the Paris Mosque’s role during the Holocaust has gone strangely neglected. Just as Arab countries, especially Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, deny the very fact of the Holocaust, so Western historians have failed to pay attention to the contribution of the Mosque to the rescue of Jews during the Nazi Occupation. Arab Holocaust deniers, however, deny their own history when they ignore this story of courage.

Walking along the corridors, in and out of prayer rooms and a large library, it’s easy to imagine this place as a sanctuary of secrets—intricate, rich, a labyrinth of life, death, and rescue.

* * *

It is inarguable that the Occupation years were a time of interreligious brotherhood between many North African Muslims and many of the hunted Jews of Paris. Without the Mosque, the number of Jewish deaths would undoubtedly have been higher. In July 1942 when the Nazis and the French police arrested thirteen thousand Jews in the Vel d’Hiv roundup, eight thousand of the arrested Jews came from the immigrant neighborhood of Belleville in northeastern Paris. Without the help of the Kabyle spy networks and the availability of the Mosque as a hiding place, there would have been many more Belleville Jews lost in that roundup.

Wise people saw then and acknowledge now the spiritual bond that has always united the two cultures. “Whoever saves one life,” says the Talmud, “it is as if they have saved the whole world.” “Whoever saves one life saves the entire world,” says the Koran. And, as Eric Hazan observes, in today’s Belleville and Ménilmontant there is still a multicultural peace: Orthodox Jewish men, mothers in African robes, Chinese and Muslim families shop together in the markets along boulevard de Belleville. Old retired workers bask in the sun on the plaza of the Ménilmontant métro or inside the Kabyle café du Soleil; they speak in Arabic or Kabyle inside the Islamic bookshops on rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud. After the war, Albert Camus used to take his visiting Algerian friends to his favorite couscous places in the North African neighborhoods of Belleville, enclaves “full of tolerance and humanity.”2

Several recent French movies (Les Hommes Libres, A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris, Together), books, and journalism3 have weighed in on the secret history of the Paris Mosque, realizing that the erasure of this story creates a tragic loss of opportunity for spiritual healing in an era of Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, the media focused on the Algerian origin of the terrorists though they were born, raised, and educated in France. “Here in France,” said an Algerian man living in Paris, “anti-Algerian racism is everywhere. Because of a group of feebleminded extremists, we have all been stigmatized.”3

The media also warned travelers not to wander beyond the tourist hubs into the “dangerous” Muslim “ghetto“neighborhoods of northern and northeastern Paris. But regular visitors to Paris walk easily in the multicultural streets—Romainville, ending at Square Belleville where the kids of Orthodox Jews and Muslims play on a Sunday afternoon; Couronnes, running uphill to the crowded rose gardens of Parc Belleville; young boys in rue Raponeau playing soccer in early spring evenings. On market days along the boulevard, shoppers bargain with the merchants, whom they know by name, artists descend from squats to pick up bargains, greet their neighbors. Ordinary street scenes. Nothing scary here.

Nearby

MOSQUE GARDEN AND TEAROOM Open daily, 9–midnight. Around the block from the Mosque entrance, on the corner of rue Daubenton and 39, rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, opposite the Jardin des Plantes. A pretty terrace café planted with jasmine, olive bushes, and fig trees where singing birds nest and play. Surrounded by mosaics of dark blue and turquoise tiles on tables and fountain, the ambience here—on a weekday—is a lovely calm. (Very crowded on Saturdays.)

JARDIN DES PLANTES Gardens, summer, 8–8; winter, 8–5:30. www.mnhn.fr. Spectacular garden walks starting at the main entrance on Quai Saint-Bernard (or from the direction of the Gare d’Austerlitz métro). Flowering cherry trees in April, beds of roses, peonies, iris, a laurel orchard, a hidden Alpine garden of two thousand species of flowers and plants, and a menagerie (open summer, Mon–Sat, 9–6; Sun, 9–6:30; winter, 9–5:30) where Delacroix and Cézanne studied and sketched botanical and animal anatomies. For readers of the novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the Mineralogy Gallery is an evocative experience; palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin worked on his studies—once thought heretical—in the Palaeontology Gallery. Inside the rue Cuvier entrance, the first Cedar of Lebanon planted in France in 1734 stands magisterially at the foot of the butte.

INSTITUT DU MONDE ARABE 1, rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard. Daily except Mon, 10–6, entrance through the south-side façade. A building by Jean Nouvel, overlooking the Seine from the Left Bank. From the ninth-floor terrace the views are among the best in Paris; the Middle Eastern food served here is excellent. The gift shop on the main floor carries exquisite pottery and fabrics.