Joseph Chetrit, Jane S. Gerber, and Drora Arussy, editors
JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN MOROCCO: THEIR INTERSECTING WORLDS
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-7936-2492-5
Reviewed by Nadia Malinovich1
In the second half of the twentieth century, disagreements over the merits of the Zionist project, the Arab-Israel conflict, and the legacy of European colonialism led to divergent understandings of the Jewish past in the Arab-Muslim world. While some have described a traditional Jewish-Muslim harmony disrupted by the political and social upheavals of the mid-twentieth century, others have painted a bleaker picture, highlighting anti-Jewish discrimination within the dhimmi system. Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds, an edited collection of essays that grew out of the 2019 conference, “Uncommon Commonalities: Jews and Muslims in Morocco,” is an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship seeking to move beyond these binaries. The volume draws together the research of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists so as to “discern the distinctive interplay of cultures that defined Moroccan Jewish history” (p. 1). By providing readers with a rich tapestry of the many ways in which Jews and Muslims in Morocco interacted, intersected, and mutually influenced one another, the volume steers clear of any kind of holistic understanding of that relationship. The editors’ decision to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically is well-taken, as it enables us to identify continuities as well as divergences between the pre-modern, colonial, and post-colonial eras.
Section 1, Political and Social Interactions, begins with Jane Gerber’s essay on the arrival of Sephardic refugees in Morocco in the wake of 1492. Her narrative emphasizes the diversity in terms of social class and cultural background of these new arrivals, as well as the importance of regional variety in how Jews were treated within the kingdom. While the historical record provides a more sober reality of the Sephardic arrival than that painted by some modern apologists, Gerber concludes, there is no question that Morocco provided these refugees, who gradually embedded themselves in their new home and reshaped the collective life of the Jewish community, with a welcome opportunity for settlement.
Daniel Schroeter’s contribution examines the particular nature of the relationship between Moroccan Jews and their sovereign. The fact that Morocco remained a monarchy through the colonial era and post-colonial era, Schroeter argues, has favored a “retrospective reframing of memory” (p. 41) of Moroccan kings as benevolent protectors of the Jewish population that papers over the actual complexity of the evolving web of relationships between Moroccan Jews, French Jews, the Alawid kings, and, after 1912, the French protectorate authorities. Contemporary nostalgia for the “sultan-protector,” Schroeter concludes, must also be understood as a function of disillusionment with France during the war years, and the subsequent enshrining of Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef’s defense of the Jewish population in popular memory.
Joseph Chetrit focuses on the attitudes and actions of the future King Mohammed V towards his Jewish subjects during World War II. The glorified image of the Sultan as a savior who stood up to the Protectorate is largely based on a telegram allegedly sent to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1941, which is now known to be a Nazi forgery. Echoing other recent scholarship on this subject, Chetrit argues that setting this hagiographic view of Mohammed V aside does not preclude recognizing the real measures that the King took to shield Moroccan Jews from persecution. Importantly, however, these measures must be understood within the larger context of the King’s growing resistance to French colonialism. In defending his Jewish subjects, Mohammed V was asserting himself as the rightful ruler and decision maker for all Moroccans, including the Jews, to whom he owed protection according to the dictates of Muslim law and tradition.
In following chapter, Aomar Boum provides a window into the fabric of Saharan Jewish and Muslim cultural and commercial relations prior to the fateful incursion of French colonialism. Tracing the networks and settlements of this understudied population, Boum demonstrates their centrality to intra-regional mobility. Jonathan Katz’s subsequent contribution traces the attitudes of French physicians towards their Arab, Berber, and Jewish clients. These physicians borrowed from a wide variety of tropes circulating in the metropole ascribing mental and physical pathologies to Jews. Ultimately, however, these prejudices and stereotypes did not preclude Moroccan Jews from turning to French physicians for care, which they did at much higher rates than their Arab and Berber compatriots.
José Alberto Rodrigues de Silva Tavim opens Section 2, Cultural Commonalities, by tracing the emergence of Jewish and Muslim hagiography around the seven Ouled Ben Zmirou brothers, descendants of an Iberian family who served as leaders of the Safi Jewish community beginning in the 1530s. In the subsequent chapter, Noam Sienna rejects the dominant view positing Jewish demonology as imitative of Muslim practice, which he characterizes as a product of “the lachrymose perception of Jews as victims of the crude and barbarous nature of Muslim society” (p. 166) that emerged during the colonial era. In fact, as Sienna demonstrates, Jewish demonology is deeply rooted in the core discursive and textual traditions of both Judaism and Islam.
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz brings the reader back to the present as she explores the ways in which Moroccan popular music has been deployed to foster Muslim-Jewish unity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Music had served as a bridge between communities in the politically tense post-independence era; the emigration of most of the Jewish performers silenced the Moroccan Jewish soundscape. A new interest in Jewish music emerged as part of a larger societal validation of diversity in wake of the 2011 constitution, which explicitly acknowledges Morocco’s multi-ethnic past and present.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with both Muslims still living in the region and Jews who immigrated to Israel a half century earlier, Sarah Frances Levin argues that ahwash, a collective and ceremonial Berber dance practiced by both Muslim and Jews in the Atlas mountain region was a shared cultural tradition that “provided an accepted, formal structure within which to play out differences” (p. 217). Ahwash has enjoyed somewhat of a revival in post-2011 Morocco as a symbol of ethnically plural nationalism. For older Jews and Muslims, this dance functions as a nostalgic point of entry into a time when the two communities lived side by side in Atlas region.
Section 3, Religious Traditions and Halakhic Developments, begins with Edwin Seroussi’s discussion of liturgical practices. Scholars have largely ignored Moroccan Jewish liturgy, he argues, because it was not characterized by the same kind of “interdenominational sonic permeability” (p. 245) as other musical forms. Moroccan Jews’ liturgical tradition attests to their links to the wider Sephardic diaspora and, to a lesser degree during the colonial era, to French Jewry. In Israel, where rabbis from Syria and Iraq exercised the dominant influence on the state-sponsored Sephardic rabbinical establishment, some Jews of Moroccan origin have continued to use specific editions of prayer books to perpetuate their unique liturgical history.
André Elbaz focuses on the image of Morocco conveyed by the eminent eighteenth century Meknes poet R. David Ben Hassin, whose piyyutim remain popular today. Hassin’s writings demonstrate a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of his native land while simultaneously conveying a negative view of Muslim political leadership and the poverty and subjugated position of the Jewish population. Elbaz ends this otherwise enlightening chapter with the rather dubious claim that the “distressing historical memories” (p. 275) engraved in the Moroccan Jews' collective consciousness played a decisive role in the community’s mass migration from the country in the mid-twentieth century. In his discussion of the Hakhim Morocco, David Moshe Bitton similarly emphasizes the “dual ethos” that is reflected in the writings of these rabbis who describe a symbiotic relationship with their Muslim neighbors while simultaneously describing experiences of mistreatment and humiliation. Over the course of the Protectorate period, the Hakhim came to assimilate the French and European concept of citizenship into their teachings and legal rulings and developed a balanced approach that identified both perceived advantages and dangers of the transition to the modern era.
Michal Ben Ya’akov focuses on the link between place and faith in the nineteenth century migrations of Moroccan Jews to Eretz Israel. Social and religious mores emphasizing love of the Holy Land created possibilities for geographic mobility that were otherwise rare amongst Maghrebi Jews. This was particularly true for widows, whose marginal status made them more likely to immigrate than their male counterparts. In the subsequent chapter, Moche Amar tracks the evolution of rabbinic rulings on women’s inheritance from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. His focus is on legally complicated cases where a wife died soon after her marriage. Rabbis often sought to mitigate the standard legal doctrine whereby the husband would inherit the entirety of his wife’s estate to take into account the interests of bereaved parents who had given their now deceased daughters substantial dowries. The degree of creativity and multiple stages of interpretation of inheritance laws over the centuries, Amar concludes, was unique to the Moroccan Jewish community.
Melech Westreich’s contribution is an intellectual biography of the Moroccan born Rabbi Refael ben Dva’’sh, who served as Chief Rabbi of Cairo in the early twentieth century. Westreich examines three sets of Dva’’sh’s religious rulings: sucking the blood during circumcision, the law of the rebellious wife, and regulation of betrothal and marriage. He demonstrates that Dva’’sh’s pragmatic approach and sensitivity to societal needs was a product of his strong connection to a Moroccan legal tradition characterized by “coping mechanisms in times of crisis” (p. 358).
Achmed Choauri’s lead essay for Section 4, Memoirs in Word and Image, returns us to the contemporary era with an oral history of Jews and Muslims who co-habited in Meknes’ “New Mellah” in the aftermath of independence. These narratives paint an overall picture of harmonious intra-group relations despite divisive political developments stemming from decolonization and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Contemporary Muslim residents of the New Mellah, Choauri indicates, maintain “rich memories of tolerance” (p. 395) of the relatively brief post-independence era when the two communities lived side-by-side in this previously Jewish space.
The following contribution is Joseph Chetrit’s richly detailed essay describing his memories of growing up in interwar Taroudant. He begins with the family’s traumatic departure to Israel in the early 1960s and the sense of dislocation that they felt in their new home of Dimona. He then contrasts that landscape to the Mellah of Taroudant with descriptions of the topography, religious life, and cultural traditions of the traditional Jewish world in which he grew up. That world, Chetrit, notes was characterized by economic collaboration and formal social relationships between Jews and Muslims that oftentimes created “both friendships and even intimacy” (p. 415) among the two populations.
Maurica Arama’s final essay takes us back to the early-nineteenth century, when the painter Eugène Delacroix accompanied the French mission to Tangier. He was introduced to the Jewish community by the consulate’s translator, a Moroccan Jew who had been working with the French for over twenty years. This entrée, together with the barrier posed by Islamic prohibitions against the representation of the human figure and the unwillingness of Muslims to let him into their homes, led Delacroix to focus his artistic efforts on the Jews of Tangiers. His paintings include a variety of subjects, from Jewish suffering under dhimmi law, to portraiture and scenes of daily life and festive occasions. He also painted several biblical scenes inspired by local Jewish color. Importantly, Arama notes, these paintings, completed after Delacroix’s return to France, convey a romanticized version of Jewish in Tangiers rather than a direct representation of what he observed on the ground. The volume concludes with a lengthy photo essay depicting mid-twentieth century Moroccan Jewish life, divided into sections including Family and Religious Life, Education, Social Life, Professional and Economic Life, and Aliyah. The breadth of knowledge conveyed in this interdisciplinary volume will prove of lasting interest to scholars of both Moroccan and Jewish history as well those interested in cross-cultural connections and intra-group relations more broadly.
1 Nadia Malinovich is a member of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions Laïcités (GSRL) at the CNRS Research University. Her current research is focused on Jewish immigration from the Muslim world to France, the United States, and Canada after 1945.