Moroccan Jewish first-places: contraction, fabrication, dissipation

Abstract

The idea of first places is inevitably linked with diasporas. At the heart of this idea and since the very start, there has always been the Jewish case. The diaspora of the Jews of Morocco, in the periphery, was presented by some authors, as a good case with which to relativize the theoretical pertinence and conceptual inspiration of the Jewish model. Focusing on Jewish history, heritage, and travelling in Morocco, I will continue to question the paradigm of social studies based on the bi-polar center-diaspora model. I will testify to the emergence and fabrication of new Jewish ‘first-places’, a process attending the aging and departure of the last Jews of Morocco and with the support of the Kingdom, while following current, and disruptive trends of contraction, commutation and dissipation of ‘first-places’ in different Jewish practices and narratives. The individualization of religious practice in post-secular societies allows and includes – and often merges – secular, ethnic and political approaches of what once was purely designated as religious identity. Heritage Moroccan landscape (and landscaping) allows different approaches and thus probably why one can think of it as an emerging ‘first-place’ for some.

Keywords:

• Morocco
• heritage
• Jews
• Islam
• diaspora

Notes

1. This article was funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the scope of the Project UID/ANT/04038/2013 of CRIA – Centre of Research in Anthropology Part of the fieldwork was sponsored by the project FCT PTDC/IVC-ANT/4033/2012, Religious Memories and Heritage Practices in the Mediterranean Confessional Coexistence and Heritage Assertion MERAP-MED. I thank the Centre Jaques Berque in Rabat for having welcomed me between September 2015 and January 2016.

2. The word makhzen literally means warehouse. In Morocco it refers to the state apparatus. The term is still used today and very often pejoratively when referring to older and more traditional – when not simply dubious – aspects of its use.

3. Dhimmis are non-Muslim subjects. Under Muslim law, dhimmi communities were usually subject to their own special laws and often allowed to hold their own courts. In Morocco, Jews remained dhimmi de facto until 1912 and de juri until the independence of Morocco in 1956. But the ambiguity of dhimmi status, whose legitimating Sharia law sources are the Constitution of Medina and the Pact of Omar, is reproduced nowadays in the current discussion in Morocco among both Jews and Muslims as to the effective protection afforded to Jews at various periods of history (see, for instance, the special edition of Zamane magazine: ‘Mohammed V a-t-il (vraiment) sauvé les juifs Marocains?’ [‘Has Mohammed V (really) saved Moroccan Jews?’]). The debate is echoed in another about mellah-s – Jewish quarters, often walled, to which the Jewish population was confined in some cities. Was this to protect or segregate Jews? Whatever the case may be, as second-class subjects in Morocco, Jews were subsequently better able to move back and forth across different legal lines between Jewish and Muslim institutions, at least until the colonial French legal reform. Starting in the early nineteenth century, and under the foreign diplomats pressure, the Makhzan professed their commitment to treating all subjects equally before the law. If Jews continued to be considered dhimmi until well after colonisation, Moroccans engaged in a hybrid process of adaptation and ‘vernacularization’ of law, regarding what it meant to treat non-Muslims with justice (see Marglin 2016 for this last point).

4. Andalusia assumes the role of yet another early first commutative first-place with increasing relevance in Jewish and Muslim cartography.

5. This argument was used by the French colonial system in its ethnic segregation policies.

6. In June 1948, a riot broke out against the Jews in Oujda, a city close to the border with Algeria, which was at the time the main transit hub for Zionist emigration out of Morocco. The mob riots in the neighbouring mining town of Jerada were even more violent, killing more than thirty Jews.

7. A promise that France seemed to hold out to them when it promoted its Jewish subjects to the detriment of Muslims under the segregation policies of a colonial administration of indirect rule.

8. Some Imazighen militants in Morocco have set up Israeli-Amazigh associations based on their common heritage; others clearly make an appeal on their shared condition of victims of pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism. Israel favours these alliances by supporting their study trips and excursions e départ des juifs du Maroc danand giving visibility to Amazigh culture in Israel: for instance, by giving streets in several Israeli villages Imazighen names and demanding respect for the oppression Amazigh people have to suffer in North African countries.

9. Throughout the twentieth century, most Moroccan Jews emigrated to France and Canada. Israel came only in third place followed by the USA in fourth, although these numbers must be confirmed since they are politically sensitive and data are divergent.

10. See Trevisan Semi (2012) and Boum (2013) for different Moroccan narratives about the departure of Jews in the 1960s and 1970s.

11. In 1992 most of the Jewish schools were closed down and only those in Casablanca have remained active. According to Simon Cohen the majority (80%) of the students of Alliance Israelite Universelle School in Casablanca are nowadays Arab Muslims.

12. The blurred limits of tourism and heritage (or tourism as sacred journey) have been explored since the constitution of the sub-field of Anthropology of Tourism (Turner 1973; MacCannell 1976; Cohen 1979; Graburn 1989) More recently, connections between tourism and pilgrimage became a challenging topic, especially in the course of the ‘sacralization’ process of heritage sites induced by the global regime of heritagization (see, among others, Di Giovine and Garcia-Fuentes 2016). Once again, Jews pilgrimages or Jewish roots tourism in several places were inspiring case studies for these reflections (see, for instance Coles and Dallen, Eds 2004, Leite 2005 and 2007 approach to the making of Jewish Portugal through roots tourism). Levy (1995, 1997, 2004b) and Kosansky (2002) approached Moroccan Jewish Pilgrimages in the same vein.

13. Later and retrospectively, Issachar Ben-Ami (1998) refers to 126 religious saints that Jews and Muslims shared.

14. See, for instance among many others Voyage to Morocco or Sahara Soul Travel https://www.travel-tomorocco.com/morocco-jewish-heritage-tour.php or https://www.voyagetomorocco.com/ [last accessed 3 June 2017] which offers themed journeys for different niches: Morocco Imperial cities, Morocco Golf Tour, Morocco Desert Tour…. Some other trips are organised by Jewish communities or rabbis, coming mainly from the USA or Canada. These last ones are often escorted by Moroccan policemen. Most of these ‘Jewish tours’ includes visits to other touristic places and intersect with Imperial cities circuits, and almost all of them include a stop at the Tour Hassan, the king’s mausoleum in Rabat. A different and significant form of tourism includes aid missions like those promoted by the American Joint Distribution Committee Office, at Casablanca.

15. He himself is a Jew who returned to Morocco after the Aliya.

16. Kabbalah (as Sufism, and the two together) is very well incorporated in general New Age tendencies and performances whose religious cartography is punctuated by a myriad of first-places. Religious landscape in Morocco is a very attractive one for their practices.

17. See Trevisan Semi, Miccoli, and Parfitt 2013 for this and other Jewish museums in Morocco.

18. The Council of the Jewish Communities of Morocco and the Judeo-Moroccan Cultural Heritage Foundation undertook the restoration of synagogues and cemeteries. The following synagogues have been restored: Slat Al Fassiyine in Fez, Barukh Toledano in Meknes, Moshe Nahon in Tangier, Ishaq Ben-Walid in Tetouan, Oufrane synagogue in Anti-Atlas, Ighil n'ogho in the region of Taroudant-Ouarzazate, that of Khmiss Arazan near Taroudant and the great synagogue of Errachidia. In 2015 El Mellah Neighbourhood Urban Upgrading Project was launched in Marrakesh, and several historical sites were revamped. The project will cost around $20 million as part of larger $32 million rehabilitation of Marrakech’s old city. In December 2016 the king gave back the name ‘mellah’ to the old jewish quarter of Marrakesh (Hay Essalam) and told local officials to begin restoring street names to their original Jewish ones. The same month he attended the inauguration of the Ettedgui Synagogue and the adjacent El Mellah Museum in Casablanca, following their rehabilitation. This was at the same time when the Moroccan government had to deal with condemnations by Moroccan anti-normalisation activists of the raising of an Israeli flag to mark Israeli participation at the UN Global Summit on Climate Change that took place in Marrakesh at the beginning of the same month.

19. This was at the reopening ceremony of the seventeenth century Slat Al Fassiyine (Prayer of the Fesians) synagogue in Fes. The head of the Islamist government at that time, Abdelilah Benkirane, was also present.

20. In his book ‘Houses of Life, Rehabilitation of Jewish Cemeteries in Morocco’, Serge Berdugo, former Tourism Minister and Secretary General of the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco, reports the rehabilitation of 167 mausoleums and cemeteries all over Morocco, especially in the Meknes-Tafilalet and Marrakech-Tensift-Haouz regions. This was a project initiated in 2010 by the Chief Rabbinate of Morocco and the Ministry of Interior.

21. And this is as visible in the heritagization processes I describe here as it is in the proliferation of academic production on the theme and even more so in cyberspace, where archives in all forms and sizes are shared and knowledge of diverse registers articulated, but whose analysis falls out of the specific scope of this paper.

22. 2400, according to the Annual Assessment of the Jewish People Policy Institute 2015–2016.

23. According to Jacques Taieb (1992), in 1914, 9 000 Jews lived in Essaouira, representing more than 50% of the local population. The American Jewish Book (1925–1926) refers 200 000 Jews in French Morocco, 18 000 in Spanish Morocco and 12 000 in Tangier. Later statistics mention this same total – 240,000 – in 1952 (Laskier 1983). As a result of emigration to Israel and other countries, the number decreased to 160 000 by 1960 (Laskier 1983), but nevertheless, Moroccan Jewish community remained the largest in the Maghreb. Baïda (2011) confirms there were still 160 000 Jews in Morocco in 1960, but that toward the end of 1967 there were only 40 000.

24. However, this may not be entirely true if we also take into account other Jews who still live in North African countries such as Tunisia.

25. Seen at the last constitutional review and included in the chapter dealing with national unity.

26. As with Tariqa Tijaniyya, for instance, by organising more direct flights from Dakar for pilgrims to their first-place – Fez – and the tomb of its founder, Sidi Ahmed Tijani.

27. See https://www.slateafrique.com/188957/maroc-mohammed-vi-finance-cimetiere-juif-cap-vert. [Accessed 31 March 2017].

28. Even after the revision of Morocco’s constitution in 2011, the king remains the Commander of the Faithful – amir al-mu‘minin – although it has lost its sacred characteristics, it maintains that of unassailability.

29. Neta Elkayam interviewed at Café Gibraltar; published July 10, 2013; https://972mag.com/searching-for-song-and-identity-from-the-maghreb-to-the-negev/75456/ [Accessed 12 December 2016].

30. Citation found at https://www.jta.org/2011/12/03/jewish-holidays/hanukkah/simon-levy-moroccan-jewish-leader-dies-at-77 [Accessed 12 December 2016].

31. Founder of the Jewish Museum of Morocco of Casablanca and responsible for most of the rehabilitation projects of Jewish heritage in Morocco: synagogue of Ben Walid de Tétouan, those of Ben Danan and Slat Elfassiyin in Fez, and rural ones like Oufrane in the Anti-Atlas and Ighil N-Ogho, among others.

32. It is especially the Association des Amis du Musée du Judaïsme Marocain (2013) that follows the impulse and ideas of his founder; other ones, like Mimouna – founded in 2007 at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI) – are engaged with Jewish heritage in Morocco so as to ‘encourage harmony between Jews and Muslims’ (https://www.associationmimouna.org/about [Accessed 12 December 2016].

33. Among them, Sion Assidon – a Moroccan Jew leftist and anti-Zionist activist, former political prisoner who actually see the film an effective vehicle for the message of normalising with Israel: ‘The people we see are never once questioned about the essential issue, which is that they are colonisers occupying the land of another people that were earlier expelled’. Others claimed against an alleged alliance between Imazighen movements and Israel.

34. See https://fr.le360.ma/culture/jewish-film-festival-le-mot-juif-fait-polemique-69385 [Accessed 4 May 2017].

35. For a comprehensive approach on this, see Carvalheira 2015.

36. https://diarna.org/exhibits/dfina-jewish-morocco/ [Accessed 6 June 2017].