Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds (Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies) 1793624925, 9781793624925

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Jews and Muslims in Morocco

Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies Series Editors: Jane Gerber and Judith Roumani Being Sephardic has meant various things to various individuals at different times and in different places. In its narrowest definition “Sephardic” has defined Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and more specifically from al-Andalus or Muslim Spain. With the expulsion of Iberian Jewry in the fifteenth century and their dispersion throughout the Mediterranean world a broader definition of Sephardic Jewry has evolved. Today Sephardic Jewry denotes a global diaspora in which indigenous Jewries from many lands have retained distinctive cultures while sharing many customs and memories or associations with medieval Iberia. The role of the scholar is to try to capture these differences. Sephardi-Mizrahi studies lack the geographical concentration, of course, of regional or national studies. Even the supposed linguistic unity of a national culture is missing, though some languages do present themselves as candidates. Thus there can be endless debates about what fits into Sephardi-Mizrahi studies and what doesn’t. What may not have fitted in the past may actually fit today. As a transnational field, influenced by a number of other cultures, Sephardi-Mizrahi studies fit in well with the current emphasis on multicultural, diaspora, and post-colonial studies. We welcome prospective proposals and abstracts for monographs, edited collections, and occasional translations of important texts.

Titles in the series Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds, edited by Joseph Chetrit, Jane S. Gerber, and Drora Arussy Jews in Southern Tuscany during the Holocaust: Ambiguous Refuge, by Judith Roumani

Jews and Muslims in Morocco Their Intersecting Worlds

Edited by Joseph Chetrit, Jane S. Gerber, and Drora Arussy

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chetrit, Joseph, editor, author. | Gerber, Jane S., editor, author. | Arussy, Drora, editor. Title: Jews and Muslims in Morocco : their intersecting worlds / edited by Joseph Chetrit, Jane S. Gerber, and Drora Arussy. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021017893 (print) | LCCN 2021017894 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793624925 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793624932 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews, Moroccan. | Jews–Morocco–History. | Muslims–Morocco– History. | Morocco–Ethnic relations. | Morocco–Social life and customs. Classification: LCC DS135.M8 J49 2021 (print) | LCC DS135.M8 (ebook) | DDC 305.8924064–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017893 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017894 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Map xiii Introduction

1

SECTION 1: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

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1 Refuge in Morocco after 1492 Jane S. Gerber

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2 Jews and the Moroccan Monarchy in the Age of Imperialism Daniel J. Schroeter

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3 Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef and the Jews of Morocco during the Second World War: New Discoveries Joseph Chetrit 4 Centering the Margin: Family Networks, Occupational Mobility, and Saharan Jews Aomar Boum

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5 Jewish Bodies, Muslim Bodies, and French Medicine in Morocco 119 Jonathan G. Katz SECTION 2: CULTURAL COMMONALITIES 6 Sebaa Ouled Ben Zmirou in Jewish and Muslim Contexts: Return to the Dead and Encounters after Death José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim v

141 143

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Contents

7 Invisible Neighbors: Demonology between Jews and Muslims in Morocco 163 Noam Sienna 8 A Common Language: Popular Music in Morocco Vanessa Paloma Elbaz 9 The Aḥwash: Jewish and Muslim Articulations of a Shared Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Tradition in Morocco and its Diaspora Sarah Frances Levin

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SECTION 3: RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AND HALAKHIC DEVELOPMENTS 243 10 Liturgy: An Overlooked Space in the Moroccan Jewish Musical Map Edwin Seroussi

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11 The Image of Morocco in the Poetry of R. David Ben Ḥassin (1727–1792) 269 André E. Elbaz ​ 12 Muslims and Christians in the Writings of Twentieth-Century Ḥakhamim of Morocco David Moshe Biton

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13 Traveling between Place and Faith: Moroccan Jews Migrating to the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century Michal Ben Ya’akov

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14 Takkanot of the Moroccan Rabbis Concerning the Inheritances of Wives and Daughters in the Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries 339 Moche Amar 15 Rabbi Refael ben Dva”sh: Precursor of Moroccan Legal Activity 357 Melech (Elimelech) Westreich SECTION 4: MEMOIRS IN WORD AND IMAGE

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16 Memories of Jewish-Muslim Co-existence in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes and Jewish Heritage Conservation in Post-Colonial Morocco 381 Ahmed Chouari

Contents

17 Growing Up in the Mellaḥ of Taroudant: Spaces, Time, Acquaintances, and Rupture. A Memoir with Two Poems Joseph Chetrit

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399

18 Delacroix and the Jews of Morocco Maurice Arama

419

Photo Essay: Jewish Life in Morocco in the Twentieth Century

439

Index 465 About the Contributors

491

List of Figures

Map of Morocco

xiii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 13.1 Figure 13.2 Figure 13.3 Figure 13.4 Figure 13.5 Figure 16.1 Figure 16.2 Figure 16.3 Figure 16.4 Figure 16.4 Figure 16.5 Figure 16.6 Figure 16.7 Figure 18.1 Figure 18.2

Mohammed V’s and Hassan II’s Declarations 192 Jewish-Moroccan Musical Interactions 202 Travel routes from Morocco to the Holy Land in the late nineteenth century 316 Ṣfat and its surroundings, a section of a pictorial map 320 The Holy Land, Moshe Ganbash, Istanbul (see website) Maghrebin and Sephardic Rabbis at the entrance to the tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal haNes, Tiberias (see website) Prayers at the tomb of R. Isaac ben Sheshet (see website) Demographic characteristics of the interview respondents  387 The grave of the six assassinated Jews (see website) Cohen Street (see website) Ruins of a Jewish House in the Mellaḥ (see website) Ruins of a Jewish House in the Mellah, 2017 (see website) El Krief Synagogue, 2017 (see website) Hebrew Talmud Torah School, 2017 (see website) Grave of Rabbi Joseph Boussidan, 2017 (see website) Jewish Musician from Mogador, Delacroix  424 Jewish Wedding in Morocco, Anonymous: Following Eugene Delacroix (for color image see website) 425 ix

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Figure 18.3 Figure 18.4 Figure 18.5 Figure 18.6 Figure 18.7 Figure 18.8 Figure 18.9 Figure 18.10 Figure 18.11 Figure PE.1 Figure PE.2 Figure PE.3 Figure PE.4 Figure PE.5 Figure PE.6 Figure PE.7 Figure PE.8 Figure PE.9 Figure PE.10 Figure PE.11 Figure PE.12 Figure PE.13 Figure PE.14 Figure PE.15 Figure PE.16 Figure PE.17 Figure PE.18 Figure PE.19

List of Figures

Musicians, Studies in Jewish Wedding, Delacroix (for color image see website)  Courtyard, Studies in Jewish Wedding, Delacroix (for color image see website)  Esther and Mordecai, Delacroix (for color image see website) The Demonstrators of Tangier, Delacroix (for color image see website)  Jewish Musicians from Mogador, Delacroix  Courtyard in Morocco, Delacroix  Jewish Wedding in Morocco, Delacroix  Saada Benchimol and Her Daughter, Delacroix (for color image see website)  Jamila Bouzaglo, Delacroix  Jewish wedding, Fez  A circumcision ceremony, Southern Morocco  Party at the home of Jacob Bendahan  Group of Telwat women dancing the Aḥwash  Jewish women dancing the Aḥwash  Cushion dance, Khenifra  Jewish women, Aït Bu-Ulli  Candle lighting at the Hillula of Rabbi ‘Amram ben Diwan  Jewish musicians playing at a Hillula, Casablanca  A Talmud Torah School, Marrakech  A Talmud Torah School, Erfoud  The Alliance Israélite Universelle School—Class of Girls, Fez  His Majesty King Mohammed V receiving Jewish leaders and rabbis, Meknes  His Majesty King Hassan II receiving the Jewish community, Rabat  His Majesty King Hassan II receiving the Jewish Council of Communities, Rabat  Visit of the Pasha to the mechouar at Bab el Makina, Fez  Official visit of the German politician Graf von Tattenback, Fez  Party at the Royal Palace in honor of the German politician Graf von Tattenbach, Fez  The governor of Rabat visiting the synagogue at Yom Kippur service, Rabat 

426 427 429 431 432 432 433 434 435 440 441 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 452 453 453 454 455

List of Figures

Figure PE.20 Figure PE.21 Figure PE.22 Figure PE.23 Figure PE.24 Figure PE.25 Figure PE.26 Figure PE.27 Figure PE.28 Figure PE.29

Meeting of Muslim and Jewish notables, Tangier  Jewish coppersmith in the Mellaḥ, Fez  Maker of buckets and sandals, Fez  A Torah scribe, Marrakech  Jews at the cattle market, Skoura  Jew and Muslim in front of a fruit and vegetable store, Casablanca Jewish women at Arenas transit camp, Marseille  Moroccan Jews disembarking at the Port of Haifa  Construction of buildings in Israel for new immigrants from Morocco, Ashdod  Arrival of immigrants from Morocco, Ashdod 

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455 456 457 458 458 459 460 461 462 463

LIST OF AUDIO-VISUAL MATERIAL – ON WEBSITE Chapter 10: ‘Arvit until Barekhu, E. Seroussi Chapter 10: ‘Arvit from Barekhu, E. Seroussi Chapter 17: Kehilla poem in original Hebrew, J. Chetrit Chapter 17: Taroudant poem in original Hebrew, J. Chetrit The Ahwasḥ dances of Jews in Southern Morocco, Copyright Serge Berdugo, Casablanca

Map

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Arussy et al_9781793624925.indb 13

02-07-2021 07:54:32

Introduction

This book emerged from an international conference sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation Institute of Jewish Experience that convened at the Center for Jewish History in New York in June 2019.1 The conference, entitled “Uncommon Commonalities: Jews and Muslims in Morocco” brought together scholars from Canada, Great Britain, Israel, Morocco, Portugal, and the United States to examine the interaction of Jews and Muslims in Morocco through an exploration of their shared history and some of their popular cultural practices. The creative interaction of Moroccan Jewry with the Arab and Berber cultures was noted in the Jews’ use of Morocco’s multiple languages and dialects, characteristic poetry and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and popular texts and proverbs. This shared culture, in all its complexity and hybridity, is best explored through many disciplines and multiple perspectives. The present volume represents the research of scholars who, from their respective disciplines as historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists, sought to discern the distinctive interplay of cultures that defines Moroccan Jewish history. The fruits of their research are offered in the shadow of the knowledge that Jewish life in Morocco is in its closing chapter. Numbering over 250,000 people on the eve of Moroccan independence in 1956, the Jews in Morocco today constitute a tiny remnant totaling approximately 2,500 souls. Thus, it seemed fitting to conclude our discussion of the intersection of Jews and Muslims in Morocco through the prism of shared memories from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual from Morocco (Chetrit), a Moroccan Muslim scholar of the Jews of Morocco (Chouari), an analysis of a visual memoir painted by the great nineteenth-century artist, Eugène Delacroix (analyzed by art historian Maurice Arama), and a photo essay of the vanished world of Jewish life in Morocco (Paul Dahan). Today, most of Morocco’s Jews live in Israel, with smaller active communities residing in France, Canada, and 1

2

Introduction

the United States. Their Moroccan heritage, while still informing their lives in myriad ways, has been both preserved and transformed. The beginnings of Jewish life in Morocco are shrouded in legend. Archeological and literary evidence, buttressed by popular traditions, reveals that Jewish communities dotted the shores of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula centuries before the arrival of the Muslim invading forces in the seventh and eighth centuries. Jewish legends situate the origins of Morocco’s Jews in the migrations that occurred during the period of the dispersion of the tribes of the ancient Israelite population in the eighth century BCE with Ifrane in the anti-Atlas region identified as the oldest Jewish settlement in Morocco. Jews uprooted during the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem and the revolts against Rome reached the shores of the Maghreb in antiquity. The Jewish community in Morocco is thus linked from its earliest foundations to both the Land of Israel and ancient Israelite history, and simultaneously to the ancient foundations of Moroccan society. Moroccan Arabic and Berber traditions also connect the original Jews in the Saharan region to the Berber tribes that form the core of the Moroccan population until today. Literary evidence associating the Jews of Morocco with Berber origins as well as oral traditions of conversions of Berbers to Judaism date from the Graeco-Roman period. These multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the region. The conquest of North Africa by the Muslim forces in the eighth century was a drawn-out process in which the indigenous Berber tribes mounted fierce resistance. This resistance is personified in the so-called Jewish female figure of a warrior/priestess, Kahina, who according to some scholars reportedly led a protracted struggle of resistance against the Arabs but was ultimately unsuccessful. Jewish life in medieval Morocco emerges from the obscurity of the early era of Islamic power in the western Mediterranean in the ninth and tenth centuries. Correspondence between Jewish scholars in Fez and the epicenter of Jewish leadership in Iraq (the gaonim of Babylonia), preserved in the Cairo Geniza, attests to the presence of Jewish scholarship in Morocco and to its ongoing links with the wider world of Islamicate Jewry. Jews of the Maghreb who sought guidance from the main centers of Jewish life in the Eastern Caliphate were largely Arabic-speaking and enjoyed connections with mainstream Jewry, whether in Egypt, Palestine, or Iraq. They also moved back and forth between Spain and Morocco when circumstances required flight or refuge (Gerber). The cities of Fez in Morocco and Kairouan in Tunisia formed part of a chain of commercial and intellectual centers, bound by familial ties that transcended political and religious boundaries, that traversed Western

Introduction

3

Europe, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean. As intrepid Jewish merchants followed the land and sea routes all the way to the Indian Ocean, they shared their goods as well as a common rabbinic civilization in the Arabic language. In the case of Morocco, Jewish languages included Hebrew, Arabic, and several Berber dialects. This linguistic and civilizational hybridity of Jewish/ Hebraic and Arabic/Berber encouraged the development of a dynamic culture that looked both outward and inward. (Chetrit) Nevertheless, geography was an obstacle to the creation of a single civilization in the territory that would later be known as Morocco. Desert and mountainous terrain set the Maghreb apart, also separating the small Jewish settlements in the North and coastal regions from those of the interior and South. Spain and its Jewish civilization was another thread in this tapestry of Moroccan Jewish culture. (Seroussi, Gerber, Westreich) Jews in the world of Islam, as elsewhere in the ancient world and medieval Europe, enjoyed a wide degree of autonomy to live their internal lives according to their own regulations. At the same time, they were subjected to a legal status whose theoretical basis had been hammered out over several generations and was to be more or less uniform throughout the Muslim world until the modern age. The actual implementation of the various details that defined and restricted Jewish life varied widely depending upon time, place, and local conditions. Whether a Jew lived in Morocco or Algeria, Egypt or the Levant, his status was defined by traditional texts and Islamic legal traditions. Jews were defined as dhimmis (lit. “protected people”) and were subject to social strictures and economic and political limitations that would delineate their position of subordination in the world of Islam. At the same time, it recognized their right to live in the world of Islam under autonomous self-rule. The relationship of (Jewish) inferior to (Muslim) superior would be maintained on condition that the Jews adhered to several humiliating restrictions that would acknowledge and visibly affirm the dominant faith of Islam and its adherents. As dhimmis they were also subjected to a specific head tax (jizya) and other levies, depending upon time and place. While the dhimmi status might often impose severe limitations on the Jews in periods of political instability, it also assured the Jews that they had a defined niche in the world of Islam. This status, precarious as it sometimes proved to be, preserved a continuous Jewish presence in Morocco with a few important interruptions. The dhimmi status of the Jews would be a source of European Jewish and non-Jewish intervention in Morocco in modern times (Schroeter) and a symbol of the prerogatives of the Moroccan monarchy during World War II (Chetrit). In those areas under the hegemony of Berber tribes, special bonds of fealty and protection were forged between the Jews and individual Berber tribal sheikhs (Boum). This complex web of allegiances and alliances between the Jews

4

Introduction

and their Muslim neighbors changed drastically with the introduction of the French colonial presence in the twentieth century. With the introduction of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Morocco in the 1860s and the spread of its “secular” school network to Jewish boys and girls Moroccan Jewry began to experience rapid cultural, economic, and political changes. The Alliance also provided a lobby in the court of Western public opinion to represent the plight of a beleaguered Jewish community in Morocco. Ultimately, the French colonial presence altered the traditional relationships of the peoples of the region and redefined the scope of Jewish autonomy, circumscribing the applicability of Jewish law to the domain of personal status (Westreich). The establishment of the French colonial rule in 1912 injected far-reaching French cultural influence in all spheres of life, including modern medicine (Katz). At the same time, it introduced heightened tensions in the region, all the while contributing a new francophone cultural identity to the already multi-layered Jewish identity. Spanish colonial rule in the North expanded the already strong sphere of European cultural influences. Spatial separation of the Jews from the Muslims into segregated residential areas known as Mellahs began in Fez in the fifteenth century, followed by the establishment of separate Jewish quarters in Marrakech in the sixteenth century, Meknes in the seventeenth century, and elsewhere in succeeding centuries. Jewish residential segregation, while it imposed economic restrictions, did not impede continuing relationships between Muslims and Jews in towns and villages throughout Morocco. In trying to comprehend the cultural interaction of Jewish and Muslim cultures in Morocco and its impact on Jewish forms of life, social practices, and textual corpora, one should mention a series of cataclysmic events that occurred in twelfth- and thirteenth-century North Africa and Spain. From circa 1145 until 1269, Jews of North Africa, from Morocco to Libya, as well as the Jews of Andalusia, were compelled to live as Muslims by the sultans or Khalifs of the Almohad Dynasty (al-muwaḥidun). This fiercely fundamentalist Islamic dynasty swept through North Africa and Spain imposing the religion of Islam upon the Jews and Christians, leaving a trail of martyrdom and forced converts in its wake. In the first decades of Almohad rule, the Jewish conversion to Islam was essentially declarative, based on the recitation of the short Muslim profession of faith (the Shahada). Conversion to Islam was apparently initially nominal and Jews were permitted to practice their Judaism secretly at home; every public manifestation of Judaism was strictly forbidden. However, all formal Jewish communities ceased to exist, synagogues were then destroyed or, at best, closed down. At the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, under the rule of the Khalifs Yaˤqūb al-Manṣūr (r. 1184–1199) and his son Muhammad al-Nāṣir (r. 1199–1213), the forced conversion of Jews increased in fury. The Jews were

Introduction

5

required to attend the mosques regularly, to listen to Friday sermons, and to teach their children Islam. The study of Hebrew and any Jewish teaching were rigorously forbidden; Hebrew manuscripts were burnt, and the remaining synagogues were demolished. Special clothing was imposed on Jews to distinguish and ridicule them. Finally, Jewish children were taken from their parents and placed in old Muslim families to give them a solid Islamic education. As a result, Hebrew and Judaism disappeared from Morocco. Documentation of these events for the first “soft” period, can be found in the Epistle (Iggeret ha-Shemad) that Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), a fugitive from Andalusia in Fez, addressed to the Jews of Fez in 1167 or 1168 in which he encouraged them to continue their crypto-Judaism alongside their overt Islam. A famous dirge with its variants by R. Abraham ibn ˤEzra (1093–1167) and a second, lesser-known poem, testify to the total destruction of the Jewish communities of Andalusia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania. The writings of the philosopher and physician Rabbi Yossef ben Yehuda ibn ˤAqnīn (c.1150–c.1220) recall the cruel social and economic measures adopted against the converts. After the Marinid dynasty definitively defeated the Almohads in 1269 and extended its rule over almost all of North Africa, its tolerant sultans authorized Jews to return to Judaism openly and to rebuild their communities. However, they recommended that they do so inconspicuously lest the Muslim population riot against these acts of “apostasy” from Islam. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Moroccan Jewry worked assiduously to restore their Jewish communal life and to rebuild their traditional Jewish identity, purged of the remnants of their previous Islamic life and its emblematic figures. They renewed their Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic creativity, recalling the ancient figure of the prophet Moses, hypostatized and mythologized, in order to overshadow the figure of the prophet Muhammad, and introduced new para-liturgical rituals with Moses at their center. The Almohad persecutions, however, in light of their length, their fury, and their thoroughgoing character, played a formative role in shaping the interaction of the Muslim and Jewish cultures in Morocco. During the aggressive stage of Almohad rule, there was no interaction between the two populations, but rather a fusion of the two groups’ cultures following the coercive immersion of Jews into the Muslim culture. It was only after Jews recovered their own traditional imagination, practices, and values that interaction renewed between the society and culture of the two distinct populations. However, the remnants of the previous fusion continued to shape and reshape numerous common cultural spaces, popular beliefs, and textual corpora shared by Moroccan Muslims and Jews since the Middle Ages. These processes produced a common language, common formulaic thesauri, common women’s oral poetry, common music with its textual supports, and common magical

6

Introduction

beliefs that endured until the dispersal of the Moroccan Jewish communities in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The popular custom of the veneration of saints, a practice that emerged in the later Middle Ages (da Silva Tavim), was sometimes shared by Muslims and Jews, constituting another common space. The advent of the articulate, self-confident and worldlier refugees from Spain after 1492 added another layer in the cultural complexity of the Jews of Morocco, especially in its northern ports and northern interior cities. The integration of approximately 20,000–30,000 émigrés from Spain was a troubled process (Gerber). The Spanish Jews (megorashim) clung to their ancestral Iberian customs, including their Hispanic roots, particularly in Northern Moroccan cities such as Tangier and Tetouan, preserving their rich repertoire of song and food and variants of their language (Haketía). Musical and literary traditions transported by the Sephardim also gradually permeated the culture of the indigenous Jewish community. Some of their elite merchants retained commercial and familial ties with relatives and business associates, many of whom were now forcibly converted and remained on the Iberian Peninsula. Others were descended from among the elite courtier families of Andalusia and resumed their traditional roles as intercessors, diplomats, and suppliers to Moroccan dynasties and foreign European powers. This new immigrant population was concentrated in northern Morocco and the imperial city of Fez. As elsewhere in the Sephardic diaspora after 1492, clashes with the indigenous Jews (toshavim or “residents”) were commonplace. Adjustment was aggravated by the general lawlessness and conditions of drought, plague and famine that afflicted Morocco (Gerber). With one foot in a Sephardic world that was traumatized by a century of expulsion, the other foot rooted in the folk beliefs and mores of Morocco, Morocco’s Jews were particularly receptive to the currents of mysticism and messianism sweeping through the Jewish world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the establishment of the Alawid dynasty in the southern, Tafilelt region of Morocco, the center of political power began to oscillate between Fez and Marrakech, with a brief period in the reign of Sultan Mulai Ismael (1672–1727) when Alawid power emanated from Meknes. The Mellah of Meknes was established in 1679 (Chouari). Much of the countryside and its widely dispersed Jewish communities, outside these “royal” cities remained under the control of the various tribal sheikhs. Jews served as craftsmen, traders in local commerce, and artisans and were a conspicuous presence in the ports—especially the newly established port of Essaouira (Mogador) on the Atlantic (founded in 1764). By the time that Europe began to infringe upon Morocco, more than 200 communities dotted the Moroccan countryside.

Introduction

7

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS The Jews’ shared language with the spoken Arabic of the Muslims, known as “Darija,” notwithstanding its distinct Hebrew component and its morphological and phonetic features, permitted the two populations to enjoy daily interaction and communication in social events and economic encounters (Chetrit, Taroudant). The same phenomenon of linguistic sharing and quotidian interaction prevailed in Berber environments of southern Morocco where rural Jews and Muslims lived together on the same streets and even in the same houses (Levin). They conducted their conversations and commercial transactions in Tamazight, although Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic as their mother tongue. As for the common formulaic thesauri, a study of the thousands of proverbs and maxims used in daily life by Jewish speakers, especially by the women, showed that more than 90 percent of their expressions originate in the Muslim experiences; some of these even include sayings referring to Muslim customs such as the consumption of camel meat forbidden to Jews. The oral poetry of Jewish women was essentially based on the large corpus of ˤRubiyat, a genre of short oral, romantic, and lyric poems that refer to Bedouin feelings and behavior. They were introduced in Morocco during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as their Arabic name testifies, by bedouin tribes, the Banu Hilal who originated in Arabia and Egypt, and occupied large parts of Morocco at the Almohad rulers’ instigation. The poetic language of these short texts, the generalized performance of the uvular consonant /q/ as [g], and the sporadic reference to Banu Hilal heroic figures, all testify that these oral poems were not Jewish in origin. Jewish women sang them generation after generation as lullabies and in festive family ceremonies, such as at the birth of a baby boy or at wedding ceremonies. That was the case as well for the large repertoire of Berber songs that rural Jews performed in internal family and communal ceremonies or in common with Muslim singers and dancers in Aḥwash dance sessions (Levin). In the area of shared musical traditions, a vast repertoire of classical Arabic music composed in Cordoba and other parts of Andalusia spread to North Africa during the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and after. The ancient repertoire consisted of twenty-four mega-symphonies (named nawbāt, sing. nawba) of four rhythmical modes and moves (named mayāzin, sing. mayzān or colloquial mizān in Morocco) that each includes dozens of chains (ṭurūq, sing. ṭarīq) of coordinated melodies (ṣanāˀiˤ, sing. ṣanˤa). In Morocco, only eleven nawbāt from the ancient twenty-four survived at the end of eighteenth century. They form the local corpus of the Andalusi tradition, named al-ˀAla (Seroussi). The Moroccan musical repertoire also includes the different local popular musical traditions of the various Muslim communities. Professional Jewish musicians adopted these repertoires with their vast

8

Introduction

Arabic poetic corpora that contained thousands of melodies, while Moroccan Hebrew poets essentially borrowed separate melodies for composing Hebrew liturgical poems (Piyyutim) on their rhythmical schemas (Elbaz). Later on, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some connoisseurs tried to construct chains of Hebrew Piyyutim (ṭurūq) on the model of the rhythmical chains of the Andalusi modes, in imitation of the ancient Arabic chains of al-ˀAla. Fragments of the classical Andalusi repertoire as well as popular melodies were used by ḥazzanim, that is, the officiating priests of the synagogues, for chanting various liturgical texts in place of their simple recitation (Seroussi). In the sixteenth century Muslim religious leaders transformed a large part of the romantic, secular medieval Andalusi poetry into religious praises to the prophet Muhammad and the Divine Allah. They introduced them as Andalusi musical chains in the liturgy of the mosques, chanted by the worshippers in unison without the participation of musical instruments. These liturgical events are called al-samāˤi. A similar tradition was initiated in Safed under the leadership of the Hebrew poet and kabbalist Israel Najara (1555–1628). He composed hundreds of liturgical Hebrew poems on the schemas of Arab and Ottoman melodies and would sing sequences of them with the worshippers of his synagogue at para-liturgical, mystical events. These poeticmusical sessions took place in the early hours of the Sabbath morning, before the prayer of Shaḥarit, without musical instruments. The tradition rapidly spread to Jewish communities of the Mediterranean Basin following the propagation of the Lurianic Kabbala of Safed and the introduction of the tenets of the mysticism of Safed through the circulation of the classical texts of the movement and the preaching of its emissaries and fervent followers. In Morocco, such para-liturgical, musical sessions based on the melodic chains of the ancient Andalusi music and its moods named ṭubūˤ, sing. ṭabˤ, began at the end of the seventeenth century. Their Hebrew poetic and musical chains also celebrate religious and mystical figures and issues, but the sessions begin with poetic supplications addressed to the Divine to forgive the sins of Israel and to hasten the Redemption. Such poetic supplications are called baqqashot, sing. baqqasha in Hebrew (Seroussi). The meaning of the name expanded to cover the entire poetic and musical session. Until the end of the nineteenth century, almost every ḥazzan who was a connoisseur of Andalusi music and its rigorous rules prepared an anthology of Piyyutim of his own for use in his synagogue. After its publication in Marrakech in 1921 the anthology Shir Yedidot, prepared by the great connoisseur of Andalusi music David Iflah, the gifted Hebrew poet David Elkaim, and the famous ḥazzan Haim Afryat of Essaouira/Mogador, with the collaboration of R. Haim Attar of Marrakech, rapidly became a reference work for the amateurs of baqqashot. It replaced the numerous communal traditions and institutionalized a unique manner of performing the baqqashot.

Introduction

9

Jews also borrowed and performed parts of the other vast Muslim poetic repertoire, the Malḥun, consisting of thousands of qaṣāˀid, sing. qaṣīda (Seroussi). These are popular poetic and musical pieces, written in a spoken but very rich language. This genre is essentially dedicated to romantic issues and the ideal beauty of the beloved woman, but it also includes religious and mystical pieces, and philosophic, social, and political poems. The Malhun includes pieces dedicated to Jews and Jewish issues composed by Muslim authors in a sub-genre named Israˀiliyat, generally mocking Jews and their forms of life. Professional Jews were aware of this valuable, popular literary creation, copied hundreds of Arabic qaṣāˀid in Hebrew characters in their manuscripts, and performed some of them in familial events. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Jewish poets composed their own Judeo-Arabic qaṣāˀid in the metrical schemas of Muslim pieces and dedicated them to patriarchs’ and saints’ narratives, to socio-cultural issues of Jewish concerns, and, in the twentieth century, to romantic themes as well (Paloma Elbaz). The shared popular beliefs of Muslims and Jews cover all of the domains of magic with its plethora of demons (jnūn, sing. jinn) and their hidden forces, its array of rituals and bizarre ceremonies, its recipes and amulets, and its healers with their traditional, written knowledge. This common space developed long before the period of the forced fusion of Jews in the Muslim society under the rule of the Almohad dynasty. In fact, magic beliefs dated from antiquity and spread among peoples and communities all over the world, including ancient Israel. In Morocco, after the restoration of autonomous Jewish life under the Marinid dynasty (at the end of the thirteenth century) until contemporary times, Muslim patients would consult Jewish healers and Jewish patients, in turn, did not hesitate to consult Muslim professionals and apply their instructions (Sienna). Concerning these exchanges, it is worth noting that Jewish healers often received their training and knowledge from renowned Muslim healers. Many manuscripts belonging to Jewish healers transposed entire Arabic treatises of magic with their original classical Arabic, a language not commonly used by Jews, into Hebrew characters. The custom of veneration of saints was introduced long after the Almohad forced conversion. It probably began among Moroccan Jews in the sixteenth century after the popularization of the ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of Rabbi Shimˤon Bar Yohay in Meron near Safed in the Galilee. The echoes of this ritual arrived in Morocco thanks to the intense visits of rabbinical emissaries from Eretz Israel (Palestine) who circulated in Morocco for the purpose of raising funds to sustain their educational and social institutions in the Land of Israel. In Fez, pilgrimages to tombs of local saints and rabbinical figures buried in the communal cemetery were organized by eminent rabbis in times of political distress and severe droughts beginning in the

10

Introduction

sixteenth century. Sessions of communal prayers near their tombs were gradually transformed, in Fez as elsewhere, into invocations to deceased rabbinical figures for their intervention on behalf of the sick, the handicapped, and women unable to conceive children. In the eighteenth century a further development occurred: personal prayers were directly addressed to the power of the saint, commissioning him to intercede between God and the supplicant in cases of illness. As a result of this personal link between the patients and the venerated figure, the number of saints increased tenfold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sanctifications first revolved around biblical and Talmudic figures, then Palestinian visiting rabbis who died while in Morocco, and then in honor of local rabbinical figures (da Silva Tavim) or Jewish martyrs, like the young Solika Hatchwell from Tangier, who was decapitated in 1834 in Fez for her refusal to be converted to Islam. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, disputes arose between Jews and Muslims regarding the identification of a particular tomb and pilgrimage; was it honoring a saint who was Jewish or Muslim? Such quarrels concerned the saint of Al-Qsar Al-Kbir, Rabbi Yehuda Jabali, in the north of Morocco, and the saint Sidi ˤIsha u-Sliman of Tamˤruft in the Anti-Atlas mountain range. In our day, many Moroccan Muslims visit tombs of Jewish saints when the Jews are absent from the cemeteries and shrines (da Silva Tavim). Many cultural spaces and practices held in common by Jews and Muslims in Morocco originated during the era of the Almohad persecutions. However, for a majority of Moroccan Jews, both men and women, who are unaware of these origins, the sets of shared beliefs, practices, and values are a natural part of their communal culture. Moroccan Jews have integrated them into their Jewish traditions, assimilated them and made them an inseparable part of their myths and ethos. As is the case with cultural borrowings in other traditions, the social and individual meaning of these ancient borrowings did not remain static. Their full integration necessarily went through their re-somatization, which give them new meanings, new functions, and new values in accordance with Jewish traditions and beliefs. In this manner, the popular culture of the Moroccan Jews is not only hybridized but, in reality constitutes a syncretic entity, which, coupled with rabbinical culture, establishes its fundamentally dual character. One cannot speak of a simple case of cultural borrowing. The complex interweaving of cultures characterizing Moroccan Jewish life is not exclusive to Morocco. In fact, from the high Middle Ages and the establishment of the hegemonic rabbinical culture in Jewish communities all over the world, two distinct but very integrated cultural systems lived side by side in traditional, natural Jewish communities. The one, the rabbinic learned culture, exercised its hegemony on the second, the

Introduction

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syncretic popular, oral culture. The rabbinic culture defines, regularizes, and supervises the normative quotidian forms of life in every domain of human activity according to the vast corpus of the Halakha and its continued interpretation (Amar; Westreich). It also establishes and cultivates the founding religious beliefs and ideological cornerstones that distinguish Judaism as a monotheistic system, hypostatizes the close relations between the Divine and the people of Israel, and maintains the memory of Eretz Israel and the hope of Redemption (Ben-Ya’akov, Elbaz). It nourishes and interprets indefinitely the historical narratives and the founding myths that distinguished Judaism and Jewish history from their beginnings. As spiritual guides and often acting as communal leaders as well, the rabbis were considered to be the repositories of Jewish wisdom and its promotion. The rabbinical class formed a hierarchical intellectual elite, whose members were chosen through the recognition of their erudition. In the past, they were generally nominated to high office in the community after they were recognized by their peers. Under French colonial rule in more recent times, they were recruited through a Talmudic examination (Biton). They were recognized by the communities not only as authorized guides and arbiters in religious and interpretative issues but as spokesmen in general affairs, even on political questions (Elbaz; Biton). They possessed a solid knowledge of the central Hebrew and Aramaic texts of rabbinic culture, could easily read and write in Hebrew in its rabbinic and biblical varieties, and often wrote texts in Aramaic in addition to the communal language, which constituted their mother tongue. In terms of Judaic literacy, the rabbinical class, with its internal hierarchy, did not exceed 5 percent to 10 percent of the male members of the community. In their daily life, Jewish men and women held two parallel but integrated sets of beliefs and practices. On the one hand, they lived their oral knowledge of Judaism with its normative forms of life defined by the traditional halakhic precepts. On the other hand, they nourished magic beliefs and practices (Sienna) that were normally forbidden by the halakhah, but in complete harmony with their oral Judaism. Those beliefs and practices were so anchored in communal daily life that the rabbinical leadership did not consider it useful to oppose them. This popular oral culture of the great majority of Moroccan Jews was, until the advance of European education and rational beliefs, genuinely syncretic. Until the acquisition of French language and writing skills, this syncretic Jewish culture was expressed primarily in Judeo-Arabic or in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish named Ḥaketía, and secondarily in (Judeo-)Berber. This dynamic interplay of several cultures has distinguished Moroccan Jewry until today. The Editors

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NOTES 1. Acknowledgment: This volume was envisioned at the American Sephardi Federation Institute of Jewish Experience conference, Uncommon Commonalities: Jews and Muslims of Morocco. The conference was held in conjunction with Association Mimouna of Morocco. It came to fruition thanks to the editorial support of The Institute for Sephardic Studies of the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

Section 1

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

Chapter 1

Refuge in Morocco after 1492 Jane S. Gerber

INTRODUCTION On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, surrendered to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, ending almost 800 years of Muslim rule in Spain. As the bells of the city pealed, a decree of expulsion of the Jews was being debated among the triumphant monarchs and their advisors. On March 31, a decree of expulsion ordered all the Jews of Spain and the Spanish dominions to depart within the next four months. The expulsion of the Jews was to be irrevocable and total. Jews who chose to remain or to return after July 31 could retain or retrieve their possessions but would be required to profess Christianity. Perhaps 90,000 of the approximately 200,000 Spanish Jewish exiles found shelter in Portugal in 1492, only to confront another expulsion and forced conversion in Portugal in 1496/1497. In 1498 the expulsion of the Jews from the small, northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre completed the elimination of the profession or practice of Judaism on the Iberian Peninsula. Any Jews found in the Spanish dominions would henceforth face death or compulsory conversion. The only apparent exceptions to this ban were professing Jews who entered Spain or Portugal temporarily in diplomatic capacities representing foreign powers such as the Dutch Republic or the kingdom of Fez. The Iberian expulsion uprooted one of the most dynamic communities in Jewish history and marked the culmination of a series of expulsions that dissolved organized Jewish life in most of Western Europe: England had expelled its Jews in 1290; the Jews of royal France were expelled definitively in 1394; local expulsions from cities and towns in Germany and Italy punctuated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries while the close of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century witnessed further expulsions from Provence and the 15

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kingdom of Naples (1541). The expulsion from Spain triggered a century of widespread Jewish wandering and homelessness resulting in the wholesale resettlement of Jews in the Muslim world. Aside from Portugal, the main destination of the exiles of 1492 was the Ottoman Empire. But approximately 10–15 percent of the 200,000 exiles made their way to North Africa, particularly to Morocco. Their numbers were augmented by crypto-Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who continued to reach Morocco in the decades that followed. The precise number of Jews who sought refuge in Morocco is unknown. Already in the chronicles of survivors who either personally experienced the expulsion or heard eyewitness accounts from the mouths of survivors, the narrative of rescue in Muslim lands was circulating and Muslim potentates were lauded for redeeming the Jews. The reigning Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512) was singled out for special praise. But Morocco, to a lesser degree, and its ruler Muhammed esh-Sheikh (1472–1505) of the kingdom of Fez, have shared in the encomia surrounding the refuge and resettlement of the Iberian refugees.1 This tendency was embellished and expanded in 1892, at the time of the commemoration of 400 years of the admission of the Jews to the Ottoman Empire. At that time the subject of the asylum of the Sephardim in Muslim lands formed part of a broader Ottoman Jewish narrative then being shaped that described the redemptive quality of the Ottoman state and the ability of the Jews to co-exist and thrive as a minority in the world of Islam. Jews were described as faithful and useful subjects, their rulers depicted as benign, and Islam proclaimed as eminently tolerant. Patriotism was the new order of the day, both in Europe and in the empire of the sultans. By the 1992 quincentennial of the expulsion, Morocco had joined the ranks of the Ottoman Empire as a welcoming and sheltering asylum in Jewish historiography. This trend has continued, for various reasons, until the present.2 Refuge in Morocco was neither automatic nor simple: it was fraught with physical travails and human obstacles that defy simple description and facile generalization. Its complex story is the focus of this chapter. We will consider the following questions: Why Morocco? How were the Sephardic Jews received by the local Muslim populations? How were they received by the indigenous Jews? What do the various sources reveal about Muslim relations with the Jews in the critical decades following the expulsion? How was the status of the Jew as dhimmi implemented within the Moroccan context? The time frame of this analysis spans the years from 1492 until the mid-sixteenth century, a tumultuous half-century in Moroccan history from the late Wattasid dynasty (1465–1554) to the consolidation of power of the Saadian Sharifs in 1554. This era was marked by great political instability in Morocco, internecine warfare and piracy in the Mediterranean, and the menacing expansion and ultimate containment of the Iberian powers and the Ottomans in the Maghreb.

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SOURCES FOR RECONSTRUCTING JEWISH REFUGE IN MOROCCO Several types of sources are available that facilitate constructing a partial history of Jewish settlement in Morocco after 1492. The sources vary in provenance, genre, and language and offer both complementary and contradictory information. Their apparent contradictions include the numbers of Jews involved and the treatment meted out to them. European and Jewish sources all depict unstable and fluctuating local conditions. At the same time, they reflect the different points of view and aims of their authors. European informants’ attitudes range from curiosity and indifference toward Jews, to active anti-Jewish hostility, frequently revealing more about their own personal prejudices than about the actual situation of the Jews. The European sources include historical chronicles, eyewitness accounts of bystanders, diplomatic correspondence, and observations penned by prelates, merchants, and Christian captives incarcerated in North Africa.3 Their information ranges from casual remarks of visitors who encountered Jews in the course of commercial or diplomatic exchanges to more acute observations of Europeans who resided temporarily among the Jews in the Mellaḥ. The European travelers or diplomats were likely to encounter a small, elite cadre of Sephardic Jews who served as translators and diplomatic intercessors for local Muslim potentates. European informants who were held hostage by Muslim pirates in the Mellaḥ or resided in Morocco’s coastal towns such as Tangier, Essouaira, or Azemmour4 also tended to be acquainted with Jews from those same circles of Sephardic commercial elites who were not necessarily representative of either the broader Jewish population dispersed in the villages in the countryside or the Jewish majority who worked as craftsmen and artisans in the towns. Jewish sources on the expulsion and resettlement in Morocco are, in contrast to the European sources, more varied in genre. They offer sparing but vivid information on the overwhelming challenges that the refugees confronted on entry into Morocco and some details on the evolution of Jewish life in the following decades. The Jewish chronicles in Hebrew (Capsali, ha-Kohen, Ibn Verga, Zacuto), Spanish, and Portuguese (Usque) emerged in the aftermath of the expulsion marking an unprecedented outpouring of historical consciousness on the part of the generation of the exiles and their offspring.5 The most important chroniclers, Eliyahu Capsali,6 Solomon Ibn Verga,7 Yoseph ha-Cohen,8Abraham Zacuto,9 and Samuel Usque,10 either personally experienced the expulsion or were children of exiles. They touch upon issues of refuge in Muslim lands, a few entries relating specifically to Morocco. Their poignant details on the personal tribulations endured in North Africa capture the generally precarious and chaotic conditions that prevailed

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in the Mediterranean world and the diversity of local Muslim attitudes toward the refugees. The Jewish chronicles are not without their problems as well. They provide important fragmentary data as the authors wrestled with understanding the “meaning” of the events that had engulfed them or their parents. Questions of theodicy were never far removed from the narrative. Thus, for instance, Solomon Ibn Verga’s template of the “righteous king,” (melech ḥasid) is less concerned with the motives of the Portuguese political incumbent in Lisbon or the Wattasid ruler in Fez than with the role of the gentile king as an instrument of divine providence in the fate of the Jews. Ibn Verga’s tremendously popular Shevet Yehudah has colored subsequent interpretations of the resettlement of the Jews in Muslim lands.11 According to Jose Faur, Ibn Verga “approached the subject (of the Iberian persecutions) more as would a modern novelist or journalist than as a chronicler of historical events. The historical episodes he depicted served as a frame for imaginary scenes, crisscrossed by dialogues, in which friends and foes of the Jews freely exchanged ideas.”12 Recently, Jeremy Cohen proposed that Ibn Verga’s narratives were intended primarily as pedagogical tools by the author rather than as historical data. As such, they often blurred the lines between the imagined and the documented to reinforce lessons about Jewish behavior, survival, and endurance for his readers. The nexus between divine providence and non-Jewish patronage was uppermost in Ibn Verga’s mind. For Yosef ha-Kohen, questions of theological import on the messianic “meaning” of the expulsion loomed large in his recounting of events in his Emeq ha-Bachah (Vale of Tears). Hebrew chronicles were also penned by indigenous Moroccan Jews (Toshavim) or their heirs and collectively compiled over the course of several generations. Their authors either had returned from temporary residence in Spain with the refugees of 1492, lived among the refugees in the kingdom of Fez, or were descended from them. The Dibrei ha-Yamim shel Fès, Yahas Fès, and the historical fragments in Judeo-Arabic collected by Avner haSarfati incorporate important data culled from each other over the centuries.13 The interests of these “native sons” focused on preserving local Moroccan Jewish history while legitimizing the practices of the indigenous Moroccan Jewish diaspora. Collections of communal ordinances from Fez and other Moroccan Jewish communities form an important source of information on relations of Muslims and Jews.14 Their attempts to regulate Jewish behavior suggest some of the problematic situations that arose between Muslims and Jews that required solemn collective action. The earliest ordinances from Fez dated from 1494 and were promulgated in Judeo-Spanish; many of the subsequent decrees are rich in local Judeo-Arabic terms, especially those enumerating the details of sumptuary legislation. The interweaving of mores, challenges

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of local anti-Jewish movements, and progressive deterioration of Jewish security—important aspects of Muslim-Jewish relations—underlie many of the ordinances that the Jewish leadership promulgated. Their contexts are sometimes explicit, such as in cases of the repeated need for tax assessments, the necessity of selling synagogue artifacts, and the protections necessary to assure the education of children during their apprenticeships brought on by increasing family poverty. The ordinances also contain myriad details of plagues, forced conversions to Islam, and temporary local expulsions of Jews by Muslims. At the same time, they also testify to amicable relations between Muslims and Jews, such as shared dwelling arrangements around common courtyards, fruitful and trusting business partnerships, and other examples of Muslim-Jewish cooperative exchanges and normal interactions. A rare treatise of a communal dispute surrounding customs of sheḥitah (kosher meat slaughtering) in Fez exposes the passions aroused by a clash of customs (minhag) between the Jewish newcomers (Megorashim) and their indigenous coreligionists (Toshavim) and illuminates the willingness of the Jews of Fez to have recourse to the Muslim authorities to resolve their internal differences. The prolonged controversy over minhag that split the Mellaḥ between 1526 and 1532 involved overt and covert political maneuvering that transcended religious boundaries.15 These varied documents paint a rich and contradictory picture of collaboration and discrimination that defy simplistic judgment on the quality of Muslim relations with the Jews. Missing from this array of sources are documents that might provide the Muslim perspectives on the Jews. Arabic chroniclers are generally silent on the subject of the Jews in their midst. Their chief value in our context lies in the corroboration they provide of the anarchic local conditions that form the context of Jewish refuge in Morocco. Muslims as well as Jews were prey to local expulsions, plagues, and droughts, and repeated forced levies that accompanied the Saadian and Ottoman military advances and the collapse of the Wattasid dynasty. Considered collectively in the light of their different motivations, the European, Jewish, and Muslim sources reveal a complex tableau of contradictions and ambiguities that prevailed in Jewish refuge in Morocco in 1492. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS OF REFUGE IN MOROCCO Morocco as a magnet for Jewish settlement has many precedents in Jewish history. Jews moved back and forth along and between the inhabited northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean in ancient as well as medieval times. Morocco provided shelter during episodes of persecution in Spain; Spain, in turn, offered refuge when political and politico-religious events in Morocco

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proved ominous. When economic opportunity beckoned, Jews would instinctively gravitate from a province of uncertainty to a place of economic or political stability. As a result of this pattern of periodic migration between the two land masses, ties of commerce and kinship bound the two Jewries to one another and to other Jewries in one greater Western Mediterranean civilization in medieval times.16 Perceptions of Spain or Morocco as a land of opportunities for Jewish scholarship also played a role in the frequent comings and goings of individual Jews. Beginning in the late seventh century, Iberian Jews sought refuge in Morocco from the persecutions imposed in a succession of persecutory laws promulgated by the Toledan Church councils and the kings in Visigothic Spain. This anti-Jewish legislation culminated in the kidnapping and forced conversion of all Jewish children and the compulsory conversion of Jewish adults to Christianity. Flight from Spain to Moroccan refuge probably ensued. Both Arabic and Christian chroniclers obliquely allude to Iberian Jewish refugees returning to Spain upon the heels of the Arab conquests in 711. The Muslim conquest of Spain introduced a new dynamic in the Western Mediterranean world. For several centuries it also introduced a new Mediterranean unity in which Jews experienced greater mobility. With the establishment of the Umayyad Emirate and subsequent Caliphate of Cordoba (754–1030), Jews from North Africa and further East were attracted to the cultural élan and economic quickening of the new Caliphate flourishing in Andalusia. Jewish institutions of learning also began to attract Jewish talents to Cordoba, Granada, Lucena, and other Spanish cities. Migration from North Africa to Spain can be detected in the names and biographies of talented immigrants such as legal scholar Isaac al-Fasi and inventive Hebrew poet Dunash ben Labrat. Medieval migration between the two regions was multi-directional: when conditions eventually worsened in Spain under the Almoravids (1090–1147) and Almohads (1147–1269), Jewish flight included migration to Morocco. The most famous refugee from Spain to Morocco during the Almohad persecutions is Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). In his case, the choice of Morocco as a refuge has continued to puzzle scholars since Judaism was proscribed in both countries and Morocco constituted the seat of the Almohad dynasty. Twelfth-century Morocco probably represented the closest accessible geographic spot where the Maimon family could find immediate refuge en route to the East. Maimonides’s temporary sojourn in Morocco is still commemorated in Morocco today, recalling the phenomenon of Jewish asylum as well as its ambiguity. Jewish population movements between Spain and North Africa occurred with some regularity. In 1391 when a wave of persecution swept through Spain and Majorca, enduring for almost one year and resulting in thousands of martyrdoms, forced conversion of Jews to Christianity, and flight, Jews

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in Spain had recourse to North Africa with Algeria, not Morocco, providing asylum for many Jewish victims. Conversely, when local persecutions erupted in Fez in 1438 and 1465, Jews fled northward to the kingdom of Granada and elsewhere in Andalusia. One significant result of these fifteenthcentury migrations was the formation in Spain of a group of Moroccan Jewish scholars who were trained in Iberian as well as Moroccan scholarship. They (or their offspring) would later return in 1492 where they served as a bridge between the groups of indigenous (Toshavim) and Sephardic (Megorashim) Jews who found themselves thrown together. This cadre of Jewish leadership enabled indigenous Jewish customs and mores to prevail amidst the challenge posed by the arrival of numerous proud Sephardic refugees. Thus, for example, the family of the Ibn Danans provided a cultural bridge and local leadership despite the large numbers, cultural self-confidence, and proud loyalty of the Sephardic newcomers to their Iberian Sephardic heritage. Many of the refugees of 1492 may have regarded Morocco as a lawless backwater and way station to more favorable shelters in Italy or further East, or as a temporary asylum en route to the desired goal of the Land of Israel. The most important migrant scholars who passed through Morocco in 1492 were Abraham Saba (who moved on to Istanbul), David ibn Zimra, the RADBAZ (who settled in Egypt), Jacob Berab, who functioned as rabbi and teacher in Fez immediately after the expulsion and eventually played a distinguished communal role in the land of Israel), and Yehuda Hayyat (who migrated from Morocco to Mantua where he pursued his scholarship). The promise of Morocco as a site of the nascent Hebrew printing industry was cut short when the Inquisition declared an embargo on the exportation of paper to Morocco, forcing many scholars to seek printers for their works elsewhere. In the years following the embargo the Moroccan refugee scholars looked to Italy and the Ottoman Empire for the publication of their work. Many others left soon after 1492 finding local conditions so difficult that some, out of desperation, returned to Spain and finally converted. This alternative is mentioned by several chroniclers and bitterly lamented by an anonymous chronicler in 1495.17 THE DEPARTURE FROM IBERIA AND RECEPTION IN NORTH AFRICA Beginning in June of 1492 the routes leading to the Spanish ports on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were clogged with refugees. Exit roads to Portugal were particularly crowded as tens of thousands of Jewish émigrés from northern and eastern Spain succeeded in crossing into Portugal, some undoubtedly hoping to wait out the crisis in close proximity to the Spanish

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border and to soon return to their former homes. According to Abraham Zacuto approximately 120,000 Spanish Jews made their way to Portugal, paying hefty entrance and transit fees for a temporary permit to stay. Not long after, however, they again confronted expulsion. In 1497 the Jews of Portugal, the majority of whom had only recently arrived from Spain, endured a bitter fate of forced conversion in the guise of an expulsion.18 The Spanish Jews frantically sought passage to any accessible destination in order to meet the summer deadline for departure. Captains from Genoa and Venice descended upon the Spanish ports to exploit the Jews’ frantic search for passage. Almeria and Malaga on the Mediterranean coast served as points of departure for Jews who passed through the kingdom of Granada, while the Jews of Andalusia made their way to Cadiz and Gibraltar. Some Jews set off for Italy, hoping to move eastward from there to Ottoman lands, including Palestine. Many émigrés viewed the cataclysmic events as the birth pangs of the messianic era: others as punishment for their sins. Estimates vary widely on the total number of Jews who left Spain, the number who died en route, and how many returned in despair and converted. It is also unclear how many conversos joined the convoys of Jews as they departed. Total estimates range wildly from a low 40–60,00019 to the inflated symbolic 600,000. According to Abravanel and Zacuto, approximately 200,000 Jews departed in 1492. Between 10 and 15 percent of them ended up in Morocco. It is unknown how many survived the hazards of the voyage. One contemporary, the Andalusian Rabbi Abraham Boqrat Halevy estimates that one-quarter of the refugees in his personal convoy to North Africa numbering 12,000 souls perished in the crossing.20 Descriptions of the departure from Spain are relatively sparing in detail but nonetheless extraordinary. The Jews of Segovia assembled three days before the deadline around the graves of their forefathers and lifted many of the tombstones to bear them into exile. In Vittoria the Jews entrusted their neighbors with perpetual care of the cemetery and composed proper legal documents to this effect. In Placencia, a major Jewish community in the kingdom of Castile, we are informed of the following tragic sequence of events: Some Jews, when the time for selling their goods ended, went about day and night in desperation. Many returned from the road and wherever they were and received the faith of Christ. Many others, in order not to be deprived of their homeland where they were born, and not to sell their property for a low price were baptized: some with sincerity and others to accommodate themselves to the time and to protect themselves with the mask of the Christian religion. Others returned from the roads, seeking baptism if their homes would be restored to them, returning the purchase money, and to many this was granted.21

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Local Jewish leaders played an active role in the logistical negotiations and arrangements. Departures were organized by family, group, and town with rural Jews joining the urban clans. The rich often paid the exit fees and the cynical Spanish authorities required prepayment of future taxes to the monarchs and the municipalities of the lost income on future taxes as people pooled their resources to buy passage to the unknown. Local leaders who assumed the communal helm would frequently reappear in positions of leadership in their new areas of settlement, the old elite resurfacing soon after arrival in the Ottoman Empire and Morocco.22 Elite Sephardic families such as the Berdugos and Toledanos of Meknes, and the Sereros, Ibn Zurs, and Ibn Atars of Fez dominated Jewish communal life for hundreds of years after arrival in Morocco holding spiritual, political, and economic sway with sons inheriting positions of leadership from their fathers.23 The Jews were prohibited from taking any valuables of gold or silver with them and were subjected to violent body searches and confiscations at the border crossings of both countries. Those fortunate few who were not pillaged en route and managed to retain some assets, used their valuables to bribe local chieftains in Morocco for permission to pass through their territories in order to reach the Moroccan interior, subsequently paying the governor of Arzila, or the king of Fez for the right of entry.24 The coastal cities in North Africa sometimes served as hunting grounds for slave traders. Thus, chroniclers describe harrowing examples of the multiple dangers that the refugees encountered. In one such account as many as 1,500 Jews from one convoy were killed or captured upon landing in Tlemcen: Jewish messengers were hastily dispatched to Fez to beg for local Jewish assistance to pay their ransoms. In another instance, or perhaps a different version of the same incident, a court Jew in the kingdom of Tlemcen personally ransomed a large number of refugees. The chroniclers agree in their portrayal of a reception fraught with protracted and multiple dangers. According to an anonymous Spanish account dated 1495: Many of the exiled Spaniards went to Muslim countries, to Fez, to Tlemcen, and the Berber provinces under the King of Tunis. Most of the Muslims did not allow them into their cities, and many of them died in the fields from hunger, thirst, and lack of everything. The lions and the bears, which are numerous in this country, killed them while they lay starving outside of the cities. . . . A part of those who went to North Africa found no rest and no place that would receive them (ital.. JG) and returned to Spain and became converts.25

Even the unsympathetic prelate and chronicler Andrés Bernáldez was moved in his description of the circumstances of departure. Bernáldez, a zealous proselytizer of Jews and Muslims and the one personally responsible

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for 100 conversions of Jews, was awed at the resoluteness of the Jews at their leave-taking. He notes their mournful departure, admiringly depicting their exodus from Spain as follows: And they went along the roads and over the fields through which they passed, in much travail . . . some falling, other standing up, some dying, others being born, others falling sick, that there was not a Christian but felt sorrow for them, and always where they went they (the Christians) invited them to be baptized, and some in their misery would convert. But very few: and the rabbis continually gave them strength and made the women and girls sing and play tambourines and timbrels, to raise the people’s spirits.26

The despair of the victims was tempered by an indomitable faith in the imminence of redemption that resonates in one episode in the Shevet Yehuda of Ibn Verga: I heard from various elders who left Spain that a certain ship was struck by an epidemic. The captain thereupon threw the people onto land, in a place where there was no human settlement, and there most died of starvation. A few managed to find the strength to walk until they found a settlement. One Jew, along with his wife and two sons, decided to walk, and as the wife was unaccustomed to the exertion, she fainted and died. The man then carried his two sons, until he and the sons also fainted from hunger. When he awoke from his faint, he saw that his two sons were dead. In his despair he got up on his feet and cried: “Lord of the universe! Although you are doing much to make me abandon my religion, know for certain that, despite the heavenly hosts, a Jew I am, and a Jew I shall remain, and nothing that you have brought, or will yet bring upon me will help you!” He gathered some earth and some grass, covered the boys, and went to seek an inhabited place.27

The Jews attempted to sell their belongings within the short time allotted to wind up their affairs and frequently begged their neighbors in vain to purchase their property. Disposal of the extensive communal riches, accumulated over centuries of prosperous and continuous domicile, was especially painful: synagogues were converted into churches or monasteries and cemeteries were abandoned and uprooted, their stones reconditioned for other purposes. A house was reportedly exchanged for a donkey, a vineyard for a cloth or a piece of linen. Lists of confiscated property were meticulously transcribed so that the royal authorities and the municipalities could collect their share of the looted property. These inventories included large tracts of land as well as such small personal items as a silver-threaded ribbon. Officers were appointed at the ports to make sure that the Jews did not depart with any valuables of gold

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and silver. The fate of some of the properties is enumerated in the lawsuits of Jews who returned to Spain as Christians and attempted to retrieve their property as promised by the authorities. Some scholars among the survivors of the ordeal specifically mention the loss of valuable manuscripts and books in introductions to works they produced elsewhere; few were able to take the contents of personal libraries. North Africa was close, but the reception of the Jews was by no means uniformly welcoming. The statements by historians of the warm reception of the Jewish refugees in Muslim lands are the subject of some exaggeration shaped more by modern-day politics than by sixteenth-century realities. Recent historical studies question the historicity of the reports of the Ottoman sultan’s delight at receiving the multitalented Jews, deeming them potential allies in his protracted war against Spain. The same distortion of the reception of the Jews appears to have been true for Morocco as well. According to Ibn Verga, who heard from survivors, the local inhabitants of Fez refused to allow the Jews entry to the city, leaving many to die in the fields outside the city walls.28 This initial rejection of the immigrants, reiterated by various sources, raises the obvious question: What factors influenced the eventual, reluctant admission of the Jews? Approximately 30,000 Jews made their way to Morocco, some following the route which their ancestors from Seville, Majorca, and Catalonia had chosen during the year-long pogrom of 1391. Jews from Catalonia, Aragon, and Andalusia who boarded ships for Tunis, Tlemcen, and other North African Muslim kingdoms reportedly suffered great losses at sea as venal captains attacked and robbed the refugees, leaving them adrift or throwing them overboard after stealing all their belongings and ravaging the women. The Portuguese chronicler Garcia de Resende, best known for his chronicle of King João II, describes this dolorous sequence of events: And of these unfortunate Jews, many died in Portugal of the plague which they brought with them and others died on deserted roads and lands without any assistance. And those who passed to Fez suffered a great persecution, being robbed and dishonored by the Moors who forcibly slept with the women, and with the daughters and sons, killing many of them, and never have the minds of men seen so much persecution inflicted upon any people as with these sad Jews who came from Castile, and after being destroyed, dishonored, and lost, some of them returned to Castile to become Christians.29

No sooner had the survivors of the ill-fated voyages landed than they encountered the avaricious calculations of local tribal rulers who determined whether they would be admitted in a given locality or even allowed to pass through their territory to reach a Jewish community in the interior of the

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country. A number of factors may have influenced some local leaders to admit the Jewish refugees. Many accounts of the crossing and entry into North Africa mention the need to pay multiple bribes to local authorities and to roving bands of lawless tribal gatekeepers and pirates. In one instance, according to Bernáldez: They were to set sail on twenty-five ships and vessels. . . . It was with Captain Peron Cabron that they took the way to Oran, where the pirate Fragoso with his armada were in port. Seeing this, they sent a rabbi from among themselves to serve as the chief leader of the Jews, whom they called Rabbi Levi. When he arrived at Fragoso’s boat he explained the cause for this delegation, and he promised to pay 10,000 ducats on condition that Fragoso do no harm to them, and that he allow them to disembark. The pirate assured them of this, and the rabbi returned to the fleet and to Captain Cabron.30

Obstacles to resettlement abounded everywhere on the North African coast. Many trials awaited the Jews who struggled to reach the territory of the kingdom of Fez where they might count upon the assistance of other Jews. Bernaldez elaborates that: [T]he multitude of Jews that boarded in Gibraltar, went to disembark in Arzila. From there, they were taken in guarded groups to Fez, by certain captained Moorish units, upon payment of sums of money, by command of the King of Fez. En route, they were robbed in diverse manners, and they took their young girls and women, and the valuables of the estate, and they assaulted the women in plain vision of their parents and husbands. . . . As a result, those who also were in Fez were maltreated and were desperate. When this was found out by those who were there, some did not even want to disembark and stayed camped out there in Arzila. . . . There, having reached an agreement, they divided into two groups. One went its way to the kingdom of Fez; the other demanded of the Count of Borba, who was the captain-General in Arzila, for the love of Jesus Christ in whom they believed that he have them baptized and have them returned to Spain. They received them and dealt charitably with them. The clerics baptized them. . . . Afterwards, we, the priests and the clerics, found out by which routes they returned, having taken leave in Arzila throughout the entire year of 1493, when they began to return to Castile, until the year 1496— there was no cessation of people passing from over there to here in Castile in order to become Christians. Here in this place Los Palacios arrived one hundred souls whom I baptized.31

Among the calculations of the local authorities in North Africa, some may have considered Jews to be potentially useful allies in their struggles against

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the Spanish occupiers since they knew the languages of Europe, seemed to be skilled in the arts of diplomacy, and were reportedly also adept in making weapons. They also would likely share a common animosity toward the Spanish and Portuguese who had wrested control along the coast. The Portuguese captured Ceuta in 1415, Arzila in 1471, Safi and Azemmour in 1481 and 1486, respectively. The construction of the Santa Cruz de Aguer fortress on the Atlantic coast (Agadir) and the fortress of Mazagan in 1514 testify to this Portuguese and Spanish colonial expansion. These outposts posed further threats to Jewish settlement. But enterprising Sephardic Jews managed to carve out a commercial and diplomatic role for themselves with the occupying Spanish and Portuguese providing translation and commercial services that the Iberian occupiers needed. The Sephardic Jews already on the scene proved to be critical interlocutors on behalf of the refugees. It is noteworthy that the policies of the Spanish and Portuguese were less dogmatic and more pragmatic in their colonies than on the Iberian Peninsula when it came to tolerating and exploiting the services of Sephardic Jews. Sephardim, resident in some of the ports, such as the Ben Zamiros, provided critical assistance to their needy coreligionists as intercessors, mediators, guides to reach inland havens, and as a source of funds to pay further fees and bribes. The Jewish communities in the interior sent emissaries to rescue their co-religionists but were quickly overwhelmed by the enormity of the burden of ransoming so many needy Jews. Some local Muslims objected to the admission of the Jews from Spain on the grounds of safety, fearful that they would be endangered by the spread of contagion accompanying the refugees. Others were dismayed by the thousands of extra mouths to feed in a time of drought and rising prices of grain. Chronicler Capsali enumerates some of these difficulties: Those communities that lived near the sea boarded boats from Biscay, Catalonia and Castile, some large and some small, for when the news of the decree was announced, these boats came from as far away as Genoa and Venice. Some set sail for the Muslim lands such as Oran, Alcasar and Bougie, which are far from the coast of Cartagena. Thousands and tens of thousands of people came to the port of Oran. The inhabitants of the country, on seeing the great number of ships, complained and said: Lo, they are making the country narrow for us; and they are coming as enemies, to destroy us and take us as slaves and bondswomen. . . . Assemble yourselves and let us go to the fortified cities and fight for ourselves and our children. And so they did: they shot at the ships with cannon . . . and destroyed part of the Jews. But in the end, when they heard of the expulsion, the king received them kindly, for an intercessor stood up for them at the palace in the name of R. Abraham.32

Another chronicler, Yehuda Hayyat, elaborates on his tribulations:

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And all the Jews left, about 200,000 on foot. And our enemies were happy at our misfortunes. Thus, we came to the kingdom of Tlemcen, (on the eastern Moroccan border with Algeria) about 12,000 souls. From the people here at that time about 3,000 died in great distress. The remainder went about naked in the streets and the marketplaces. The Jews roamed outside, clinging to trash heaps. Famine grabbed them in that year. And many could not take it any longer and returned to the kingdom of Castile and converted their honor. Likewise, this occurred to those who came to the kingdom of Portugal and the kingdom of Fez and was the same wherever one went.33

Yehuda Ḥayyat (1450–1510) sailed from Lisbon in 1493 on a harrowing journey that lasted four months. After being captured and imprisoned in Malaga where his wife died from hunger, he endured unremitting pressure to convert to Christianity. Ḥayyat finally reached an unnamed Muslim town in North Africa where he was threatened by a Morisco with his life and again pressured to convert, this time to Islam. When he ultimately reached the kingdom of Fez, his trauma was so extreme that he left for Italy where he settled to live out his tragic life and composed his commentary Minḥat Yehudah. Approximately 20,000 Jews ultimately reached the city of Fez where they were quarantined in huts in the fields outside the city walls and remained through the winter in a makeshift encampment. Fire engulfed their huts, and many were reduced to living with no shelter, selling their children for bread and expiring in the open fields. The Jews within the walled city would supply them with food. They were a pitiful lot, barred from entry into the city lest they raise the price of wheat and spread contagious diseases, such as cholera. Mortality from starvation and disease pursued them. Some local Jews, as was also reportedly the case in Rome, were reluctant to admit the refugees into their towns lest they raise the specter of anti-Semitism.34 WHO WERE THE REFUGEES TO MOROCCO? The Jewish exiles who reached Morocco, like those who went to the Ottoman Empire, represented a broad cross section of Iberian Jewry. They were polyglot: those from Granada spoke Arabic, while some spoke Castilian and Catalan. Their names attest to their provenance from all parts of Spain, Portugal, and Majorca. Their identification with Hispanic culture, particularly with the Spanish language, persisted for a long time. Hispanic culture remained interwoven in the food, speech, proverbs, prayers, and music of the Sephardim long after they discarded Spanish as their daily language. It endured and was eventually amalgamated into new forms of expression in subtle ways. Until the 1550s the Jewish communal ordinances of Fez

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were translated from Hebrew to Castilian. Spanish, with local variations and accretions, remained the daily language of the Jews who lived on the coast. The former oligarchy of leading merchant families of Andalusia and Castile was soon jockeying for power in Jewish communal affairs, quickly reappearing as signatories to communal decrees. The Ben Zamiros, Rosales, Sereros, Rotis, and other Sephardic families regained communal power and attained the ear of the Muslim authorities. The choice of Fez, a historic center of Muslim scholarship and industry, geographically well-endowed for commerce and industry, was a logical choice for Sephardic settlement. The newcomers included doctors, craftsmen, printers, glass blowers, arms makers, artisans, and gold- and silversmiths. Some Sephardim were also vintners, bringing this skill from Spain to Morocco where they enjoyed a monopoly in viticulture in some regions. Scholars from among the refugees almost immediately assumed intellectual authority and merchants quickly resumed their active commercial leadership roles. Jacob Berab states that he served as a teacher and rabbi in Fez to a community of 20,000 Jews. The returning “native sons” such as the Ibn Danan family formed part of the intellectual and commercial elite of Fez. While participating in the Sephardi-oriented power structure of the community, they maintained their allegiance to the Toshavim and were designated “the scholars of the Toshavim” in an ordinance of 1555.35 Settlement in Morocco entailed a downsizing of the Jewish economy. Not only had the expulsion stripped the Jews and their communities of their accumulated wealth. They entered a world with a more limited urban economy than they had enjoyed in Spain, one also plagued by anarchic political conditions. Travel in the countryside was frequently treacherous for Jews (as well as Muslims). European visitors invariably remarked on the fact that the Sephardic Jews constituted a skilled artisanry, specializing in gold- and silver-smithery and the manufacture of luxury textiles. Jewish documentation confirms this assessment in Fez, Tefza, Tednest, and elsewhere.36 Most Jews appear to have been petty craftsmen and artisans. They also found ready employment in some branches of the economy that were held in particularly low repute by the Muslims, such as weaving and tanning.37 The generally unstable conditions of the sixteenth century made life especially difficult. Jewish litigants turned to the rabbis to assign liability when pledges were lost as a result of pillage. Assigning damages in partnerships proved uncertain when assets were consigned to thieves and tax collectors. Business contracts included special provisions to meet specific disabilities that were imposed upon the Jews qua Jews. Thus, an apprentice might request and obtain the special shoes Jews were required to wear outside the Mellaḥ as a clause in his work contract.38 Wearing distinguishing clothing in the countryside was particularly dangerous.

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European diplomatic sources repeatedly mention encounters with individual Sephardim who constituted an elite group of merchants or diplomats. Some of the Sephardic merchants who settled in Morocco continued to engage in trade with their newly converted relatives who remained on the Iberian Peninsula, possibly also guiding them in the preservation of a proscribed Judaism that was becoming ever more tenuous with the passage of time and the vigilance of the Inquisition. Some Sephardim, particularly in Marrakech or in the Atlantic coastal cities exploited Moroccan raw materials such as sugar cane to open new trade links with European markets (especially in England and Portugal). For many refugees, however, the adjustment to Morocco was simply too difficult and the obstacles too overwhelming. As we have seen, the sheer accumulation of tragedies and violence, led many to despair of settling down in Morocco. Unable to start their lives anew, they returned to Spain and converted to Christianity. Archival research by Haim Beinart has traced the footprints of thousands of such tragic victims from North African and Italian shores.39 Others, particularly the more scholarly among them, left Morocco in order to find printers and patrons for their scholarship or a livelihood as teachers. Nevertheless, many scholars remained, and learning resumed. Jacob Berav reports that in Fez, where he served as a rabbi and teacher immediately after the expulsion and served 5,000 households as a teacher before his departure in 1493 schools, students and well-endowed synagogues formed almost immediately.40 Emigration to Morocco from the Iberian Peninsula did not cease with the influx of 1492. The possibility of returning lawfully to Judaism in Muslim lands was a powerful magnet for Jews who remained in the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, a steady stream of conversos continued to arrive from the Iberian Peninsula after 1492 much to the consternation of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Local Muslim authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to the phenomenon. Myths of an Iberian Peninsula devoid of Jews notwithstanding, foreign Jews were permitted to enter Spain as merchants and diplomats. Some served as treaty negotiators for the king of Fez. They also provided a conduit for the dissemination of continuing knowledge about Judaism among the conversos. The diplomatic services of these Sephardic émigrés were highly appreciated by the kings of Fez since diplomatic discussions and business negotiations conducted by a Muslim in a Christian country were regarded by the Muslim religious authorities as highly problematic and unseemly.41 By 1500 there were approximately thirty places in Morocco and Western Algeria where the Sephardic exiles were settled. Sephardic residents could be found in urban concentrations such as Tetouan, Badis, Ksar el-Kebir, Sale, Rabat, and Tlemcen, and smaller rural settlements in the interior. The majority were in Fez. Morocco continued to provide shelter to endangered North African and other Jewries after the initial influx of the Sephardim.

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When Jews in Oran faced massacre at the hands of the Spaniards in 1509, they fled to Morocco. Similarly in the case of the Jews sold into slavery in Spanish-occupied Bougie and Tripoli in 1510. In 1535 the Jews of Tunis fled to Morocco during the threatened invasion of Charles V. Ousted from the kingdom of Tlemcen in 1541 and threatened with destruction in 1542, the Jews in the kingdom of Tlemcen found refuge in Fez. In each instance Morocco provided a refuge, sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent. FROM OUTCASTE IN SPAIN TO DHIMMI IN MOROCCO: THE TEXTURE OF MUSLIM-JEWISH RELATIONS The Jews constituted the sole non-Muslim group in Morocco. A Christian presence had disappeared in medieval times. As non-Muslims the Jews were subjected to the special legal, social, and economic status of dhimmi status that Islamic custom and law assigned to non-Muslims (infidels). This status was not exclusive to Morocco but was shared, with local variations, with Jews in other Muslim countries. The rights and disabilities of the dhimmi had been spelled out in the earliest generations of Islam but were often more theoretical than actively applied. The status of dhimmi contained both positive and negative features. The balance between the implementation of negative disabilities and the application of positive protections depended upon country and regime over the course of the centuries. Dhimmi status did not constitute tolerance of the Jews as the concept of “tolerance” is generally understood by modern political scientists and applied in modern democracies, but rather, toleration of the Jews on a low level. Significantly, the dhimmi status enabled the Jews to find a niche in the world of Islam.42 Its chief positive feature was the wide latitude it afforded the Jews to live according to their own religious laws and the wide degree of internal autonomy it provided. Protection of the Jews in the House of Islam, as expounded by the Qur’an and the Ḥadith, never accorded the Jews a position of equality. Rather, dhimmis were subject to various clothing restrictions that distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors and were intended to humiliate them and to occupational restrictions which stressed their inferiority to Muslims. According to Marmol, “the Jews aren’t permitted to wear shoes, except for the few who have entrée to the King and his officers. The rest wear sandals of straw.”43 Their synagogues were required to be modest, their rites and rituals inconspicuous and inoffensive to Muslims, and their general demeanor respectful of the superior status of the Muslim and his religion. Humiliation or inferiority of the Jew combined with deference. It was understood by the Jews that the various restrictions they endured, sometimes numerous or onerous and at

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other times quite limited, were the price they paid for “protection” and the right of residence in the world of Islam. A discriminatory head tax, the jizya, derived from Quranic injunction while Jews were often subjected to various fines and levies by various Muslim authorities that were extra-legal and from which they had little recourse of appeal. Muslim power was so fragmented in Morocco that Jews in one place might enjoy freedoms totally absent elsewhere. Thus, for instance, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Jews of Tednest in the southwest region of the Atlas Mountains, did not pay the annual tribute of the jizya. Leo Africanus notes, however, that “there are in this city about a hundred families of Jews, who pay no annual tribute at all, but only bestow each of them some gratuities upon this or that nobleman.” Arbitrary fines and levies would prove particularly debilitating during the prolonged periods of warfare in North Africa and local anarchy during the sixteenth and following centuries. Held captive in Fez, the Spanish observer Luis Carvajal Marmol noted the heavy financial burden that the Jews bore: “a Jew pays as much as ten of the richest Muslims.” Jews in Morocco were restricted to certain branches of the economy according to the dhimmi status and the strictures of the Maliki school of law. The settlement of the Sephardim in several key Moroccan ports, coupled with their network of relatives in various Mediterranean ports, facilitated the active participation of Sephardim in the international commerce of the time. Their commercial connections extended from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ottoman Empire. Visitors noted that Jewish skilled craftsmen specialized in a few areas that Muslims esteemed yet avoided as a result of their own religious inhibitions, such as skilled work in the manufacturing of jewelry from precious metals. Dhimmi status provided an essential protection despite its limitations. On the positive side, the Jews were free to practice Judaism, to enjoy autonomous self-rule, and to select their own leaders and live by their own laws. They could travel freely, in theory, although this freedom was often curtailed by the widespread incidents of banditry in the Moroccan countryside. The realities of life in Morocco determined both the restrictions and the protections hammered out by the classical Muslim legal authorities. Thus, although the Jews were free to own property, the inviolability of a dhimmi’s property was often only observed in the breach; few Muslim officials were capable of punishing the violators of Jewish property. Contemporary visitors to Morocco, such as Marmol, noted the contempt in which the Jews were held in the following words: Cette nation estant fort maltraitée en Afrique. On leur crache au nez dans les rues, on les frappe. On ne leur permet de porter des souliers.44 Wearing distinctive footgear was a serious disability that threatened Jewish security when peddling wares in the countryside. Similarly, the requirement

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of donning special headgear, a special, distinctive black turban, or a cap with a red cloth attached (according to both Africanus and Marmol) exposed the Jews to both ridicule and personal danger. During his travels in North Africa Leo Africanus concluded that “Jews are despised everywhere.”45 Although not spatially segregated in most places, the largest Jewish community in Morocco, the Jews of Fez, lived separately in a ghetto. Elsewhere Jews were often the sole inhabitants of certain settlements or districts of towns. Thus, in Badis on the Mediterranean, Africanus noted a large street “inhabited with Jews, wherein dwell sundry vintners that sell excellent wine.”46 Yet, in Tlemcen in northwest Algeria, noted Africanus, Jews lived among (Muslim) students as well as lawyers and notaries. Four hundred Jews were noted in the coastal town of Azemmour at the time of the Portuguese conquests, living among 5,000 households (presumably Muslims). Thus, dhimmi status provided a framework for Jewish co-existence with Muslims, albeit on an inferior level. The implementation of restrictive measures simultaneously protected and humiliated the Jews, a status at best, ambiguous. CONCLUSION In retrospect, Morocco proved to be a fruitful sanctuary for the refugees of 1492. Although their reception by the Muslims was half-hearted and their refuge more precarious than popular narratives suggest, the exiles of Spain ultimately planted roots in the soil of the Maghreb and succeeded in shaping a new diaspora with a distinctive footprint of its own. The historical records present a much more sober reality than the image of Muslim rulers embracing the newcomers that has been disseminated by some modern apologists. Nevertheless, despite the local obstacles that were thrown in their path, the Sephardim seized the openings available for settlement and spread out in the country. Existing Jewish communities lent a helping hand, as did a few Muslim potentates and local Iberian governors of occupied ports. Given a broad measure of internal autonomy within the limitations of the dhimmi relationship, the exiles of 1492 had the freedom to transform their culture into new patterns of creativity. Their Sephardic traditions continued to animate their scholarship and way of life. As the old divisions of Spain disappeared, a subtle and steady amalgam of the local cultures and Sephardic traditions gradually coalesced. Spanish influence remained strongest in the north of the country and was weakest in the south, where almost no Iberian influence penetrated. In the middle of Morocco, in Fez, Meknes, and Sefrou the presence of Arabic-speaking Jews from the Muslim enclaves of Andalusia, such as Malaga and Granada, probably eased the cultural adjustment of the newcomers and helped form a bridge between Andalusia and indigenous traditions.

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The exiles of 1492 gradually adapted and transformed some of the indigenous customs of the Jews and Muslims that had developed over the centuries on the fertile soil of the Maghreb to produce new amalgams in the areas of poetry, philosophy, mystical thought, Jewish law, and popular culture. As new blends of Jewish tradition emerged, a new chapter in the history of the Jews of Morocco commenced. No longer homeless outcasts from Spain, the refugees of 1492 reshaped their collective life in a land that reluctantly gave them shelter.

NOTES 1. On the concept of the “royal alliance” see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Servants of the Kings and not Servants of Servants”: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews, Tenenbaum Family Lecture Series in Judaic Studies delivered at Emory University, February 8, 2005 (Atlanta: The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, n.d.) and his discussion of the royal alliance imagery in Ibn Verga in, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shevet Yehudah (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976); see also, Jeremy Cohen, A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian Encounter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2017). 2. On the shaping of Ottoman Jewish historiography in the nineteenth century and the image of an Ottoman-Jewish “convivencia” see Julia Philips Cohen, Becoming Ottoman; Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); on the broader Ottoman experience, especially the fashioning of the image of Salonica as “Mother of Israel”, see Devin E. Naar, “Fashioning the ‘Mother of Israel”: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica”, Jewish History 28 (2014): 337–72. 3. Leo Africanus, Description de l’Afrique, tr. A. Epaulard (Paris: Librairie de l’Amérique et d’Orient, 1956); Nicolas Clenardus, Correspondence, tr. Alphonse Roersch, 3 vols (Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1941); Luis del Carvajal Marmol, L’Afrique, tr. d’Ablancourt, 2 vols (Paris: n.p., 1661) II, 168–70. The allusions to Jews are interspersed in the diplomatic correspondence contained in the multi-volume archival collection edited by Henri de Castries, et al, Les Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, Archives et bibliothèques d’Angleterre, de la France, d’Espagne, de Portugal, des Bas Pays, 27 vols (Paris: Ernst Leroux, 1918–1939). 4. Luis del Carvajal Marmol was held captive in Fez. Although he presents some independent observations, he is heavily dependent upon Leo Africanus. 5. On the nature of Jewish historical writing in the aftermath of the expulsion, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor (Seattle: University of Washington, 1982), 53–75. Five of the eight historians Yerushalmi highlights (Ibn Verga, Zacuto, Usque, Joseph ha-Kohen, and Gedaliah ibn Yahya were exiles or descendants of exiles from Spain and Portugal and one, Elijah Capsali of Crete, was particularly affected by the testimony of refugees he encountered. For extracts in English, see David T. Raphael, ed., The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles (North Hollywood, CA: Carmi House Press, 1992).

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6. Elijah Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zuta, ed. Aryeh Shmuelevitz et al. (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1983). 7. Solomon Ibn Verga, Sefer Shevet Yehudah, ed. Azriel Shohat (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1947). 8. Joseph ha-Kohen, Sefer ‘Emeq ha-Bakha. The Vale of Tears, ed. and tr. Karin Almbladh (Uppsalla: Academia Upsaliensis, 1981). Ha-Kohen was a child of exiles from Spain. 9. Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto, Sefer Yuḥasin ha-Shalem (Jerusalem: Hotsa’at Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2004). Zacuto was an exile of 1492. See also Abraham Adrotiel whose chronicle is a self-conscious addendum to Abraham ibn Daud’s medieval chronicle and includes Adrotiel’s account of the expulsion and arrival in Fez. See Seder ha-Hakhamim ve-Korot ha-ˤIttim (Oxford: Oxford University, 1888), 101–13. 10. Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, ed. and tr. Martin A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1, 1965). Samuel Usque was a Portuguese Marrano. 11. For an extended discussion of the “melech ḥasid” and the imagery of the “royal alliance” with the Jews, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the ‘Shevet Yehudah’, Annual Supplements I (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976). 12. Jose Faur, “Imagination and Religious Pluralism: Maimonides, Ibn Verga, and Vico,” in New Vico Studies 10:36-51 cited by Jeremy Cohen, A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian Encounter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2017), 43, 57–59. 13. Louis Brunot and Elie Malka, Recueil de textes Judéo-Arabes de Fes, XXXIII (Rabat: Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines, 1939); Raphael Moshe Elbaz, Kisseh ha-Melakhim, Sassoon Library, Letchworth, England, #1007; Saadia Ibn Danan, Dibre ha-Yamin shel Fas, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Anonymous Collection; Avner ha-Sarfati, Yahas Fas (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, #H84A). 14. Jacob ibn Sur, Mishpat u-Sedakah be-Ya’akov, 2 vols (Alexandria: Chaim Mizrahi, 1894). On the communal decrees see Abraham Ankawa, Sefer Kerem hemer: takkanot shel hakhme Kastiliya ve-Tulitula. 1870 (Reprint Jerusalem: ha-Sifriya haSefaradit, 2000), 2 vols. II. See also Shalom Bar Asher, Sefer Ha-Taqanot (The Book of Communal Ordinances) (Jerusalem: Akademon, The Hebrew University, 1990). 15. On the sheḥitah controversy of the 1520s, see Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), 113–20 and Chaim Gaguin, Etz Chaim, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary Enelow Memorial Collection (EMC), #474. 16. The Mediterranean mobility and regional civilization of the Jews in the medieval world is an overarching theme of S.D. Goitein in his magisterial multi-volume work A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967–1993). 17. An Anonymous Account of the Expulsion “Anonymous II”, cited by David Raphael in The Expulsion Chronicles, 131. On emigration of Sephardic scholars from Morocco see the many biographical details in the entries in Joseph Ben- Naim’s Malkhe Rabbanan. Jerusalem (1931).

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18. Abraham Zacuto, Sefer Yuḥasin ha-Shalem (The Book of Genealogies), ed. H. Filipowski (London, 1857), quoted by D. Raphael, The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles,168. An Inquisition was not immediately established in Portugal to oversee the behavior of the forced converts and the New Christians were able to go “underground” and persist as Jews as best they could. Some made their way to Fez where they eventually returned to Judaism and were tried in absentia in Portugal. See Haim Beinart, “Fez as a Center of Return to Judaism in the Sixteenth Century”, Sefunot VIII (1963/1964): 319–34. 19. Henry Kamen, “The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492”, Past and Present 119 (1988): 30–55. 20. Haim Hillel Ben Sasson, “A Dirge on the Expulsion from Spain”, Tarbiz 31 (1961/2): 63. 21. Alonso Fernandez de Placencia, Historia de Placencia (Madrid: n.p., 1627) II, ch.14 as quoted by Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, 2nd edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 22. Jane S. Gerber, Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History (Liverpool: Littman Library and Liverpool University, 2020), ch. 5. 23. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, 83–112; see also Joseph Ben Naim, Malkhe Rabbanan (Jerusalem: Defus ha-Ma’arav, 1931), a biographical compendium or dictionary of Moroccan scholars, on the generations of leaders. 24. For a detailed description of the disposal of personal property and concealment of valuables, see Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Oxford: Littman Library, 2002). For attitudes of the emigres see Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Generation of Spanish Exiles and Its Fate” (Hebrew), Zion XXVI (1960–1961), 23–64. 25. David Raphael, Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, “An Anonymous Account of the Expulsion”, 130 and Alexander Marx, “The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Two New Accounts”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, II (1911–1912): 257–58. 26. Andrés Bernáldez, Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, eds. M. Gomez Moreno and J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1962), 258. 27. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehuda (Heb.), ed. Azriel Shochat and Yitzhak Baer (Jerusalem, 1947), 122. See Jeremy Cohen’s extensive discussion of the chronicle in A Historian in Exile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 28. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, “The Fifty-Third Conversion”. 29. Garciade Resende, Chronica dos Valorosos E Insignes Feitos del Rey Dom Ioam II de Gloriosa Memoria, cited by Raphael, op. cit., 146. 30. D. Raphael, The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, 76 from Bernaldes, History of the Catholic Kings Don Fernando and Dona Isabel. 31. Ibid., 77 32. Capsali, Seder Eliyahu, ch. 70. 33. Yehudah Hayyat, Minḥat Yehudah (The Offering of Judah), cited by D. Raphael, The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, 112–15. 34. A similar response is reported in Rome where the local Italian Jews reportedly resisted the admission of the Jews in 1492 for much the same reasons. Reports

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of Jewish assistance to the refugees, however, outnumber evidence of resistance to rescue and resettlement. 35. Abraham Ankawa, Kerem Hemer (2 vols, Leghorn, 1871) II, #22, 4a. They maintained their own synagogue in the Mellaḥ in Fez where “the ritual of Fez” was the mode of prayer. 36. On the economic life of the Jews in Fez, see Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, ch. V. 37. Leo Africanus, 234; Marmol, II, 171. 38. Marmol, l’Afrique, II, 170. 39. Beinart estimates that as many as one half of the departing Jews may have been involved in the process of return and conversion. 40. Kisseh ha-Melachim, 22; Yahas Fas, 11b; Toledano, Ner ha-Maˤarav, 55. 41. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Professing Jews in Post-Expulsion Spain and Portugal”, in Salo Mittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, 2 vols (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1974) II, 1023–58. 42. A growing literature on the status of the Jews under Islam has been shaped by modern polemics and the Middle East conflict. For a theoretical discussion of dhimmi status see, al-Mawardi, Les Statuts gouvernmentaux, traduit par Edmond Fagnan (Algiers: Braham, 1915), 52, 299ff. On specific disabilities, see the classic studies of Edmond Fagnan, “Le Signe distinctif des Juifs au Maghreb,” Revue des Etudes Juives, XXVIII (1894): 294–98; A.S. Tritton, The Caliphs and their non-Muslim Subjects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930) and more recent analyses of Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University, 1986); Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979); see also the exchange between Mark Cohen and Norman Stillman, “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History”, Jerusalem Quarterly 18 (1956): 125–37. 43. Marmol, l’Afrique, II, 170. 44. Ibid. 45. Leo Afrikanus. 46. Leo Afrikanus.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Africanus, Leo. Description de l’Afrique. Tr. A. Epaulard. Paris: Librairie de l’Amérique et d’Orient, 1956. Ankawa, Abraham. Sefer Kerem hemer: takkanot shel hakhme Kastiliya ve-Tulitula. 1870. (Ordinances of Castile and Toledo) Reprint Jerusalem: ha-Sifriya ha-Sefaradit, 2000. 2 vols. Beinart, Haim. The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Oxford: Littman Library, 2002. Brunot, Louis and Elie Malka. Recueil de Textes Judéo-Arabes de Fès. V. 33. Rabat: Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines, 1939. Capsali, Eliyahu. Seder Eliyahu Zuta, ed. Aryeh Shmuelevitz et al. Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1983.

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Cour, Auguste. La Dynastie Marocaine des Beni Wattas: 1420-1554. Constantine: Braham, 1920. Clenardus, Nicholas. Correspondence. Tr. Alfonse Roersch. 3 vols. Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1941. De Castries, Henri (ed.). Une Description du Maroc sous le règne de Mouley Ahmed el-Mansoor 1596. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1901. ———. Les Sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc. Archives et Bibliothèques d’Angleterre, des Bas Pays, de l’Espagne. De la France, du Portugal. 27 vols. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1918–. Gaguin, Chaim. Etz Chaim. New York: Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Enelow Memorial Collection, #474. Gerber, Jane S. Jewish Society in Fez 1450-1700. Studies in Communal and Economic Life. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980. ha-Kohen, Joseph. Sefer ‘Emeq ha-Bakha. The Vale of Tears. Ed. and tr. Karin Almbladh. Uppsalla: Academia Upsaliensis, 1981. ha-Sarfati, Avner. Yahas Fès. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, #H84A. Hirschberg, Haim Z. Toldot ha-Yehudim be-Afrika ha-Tsefonit (History of the Jews in North Africa). 2 vols. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1965. A History of the Jews in North Africa, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1974–1981. Ibn Danan, Saˤadya. Dibre ha-Yamin shel Fès, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Anonymous Collection. Ibn Sur, Jacob. Mishpat u-Sedakah be-Yaˤakov, 2 vols. Alexandria: Chaim Mizrahi, 1894. Ibn Verga, Solomon. Sefer Shevet Yehudah (The Staff of Judah). Eds. A. Shohat and Y. Baer. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1946–1947. Lebel, Roland. “Le Maroc dans les relations des voyageurs anglais aux XVI, XVII et XVIII siècles”. Hespéris IX (1929): 269–94. Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University, 1986. Marmol, Luis del Carvajal. L’Afrique. Tr. D’Ablancourt. Paris, 1661. Raphael, David T., ed. The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles. No. Hollywood, CA: Carmi House Press, 1992. Zacuto, Abraham. Sefer Yuhasin ha-Shalem. Jerusalem: Hotsa’at Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2004. Zafrani, Haim. Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco. New York: Sephardic House, 2005.

Chapter 2

Jews and the Moroccan Monarchy in the Age of Imperialism Daniel J. Schroeter

In 1918, one of the chief rabbis of Fez, Vidal Hasarfaty, adapted the traditional prayer, “he who gives salvation to kings” (ha-noten teshu‘ah la-melakhim) to be recited in all the synagogues of Fez on the Sabbath, “to exalt and magnify, and lift up higher, the government of France, may its mighty glory be exalted.” In his missive to all the congregations, he explains that the prayer, traditionally for a king, is for the government of France, a republic, and that now the Jewish people are under its protection.1 The expression of allegiance to the king implied in the prayer ha-noten teshu‘ah, spread throughout the Jewish world with the dispersion of Sephardi Jewry. Entrusting the protection of the Jewish community to kings, as implied in the prayer, was a survival strategy, a recognition of the precariousness of living in exile. The blessing for the king voiced the hope for the stability of government and that God would guide the ruler to treat the Jews with kindness, but it also expressed a messianic yearning for redemption.2 Jews in Morocco, as elsewhere in the Jewish world, formed a kind of “royal alliance,” by entrusting their welfare to the ruler. Allegiance to the king was based on a pragmatic understanding that the safety and preservation of the Jewish community relied on the stability and continuity that could best be provided by the highest governing power in the land. These direct vertical alliances with the ruler often came at the expense of horizontal ties with the local authorities or population.3 The royal alliance also depended on establishing reciprocal interests with the sovereign. In Morocco, sultans understood that the Jews were useful to them as sources of revenue, and that because of their vulnerability as a subservient religious minority who could not aspire to political rule, they were loyal to and dependent on the monarchy. In the premodern Islamic world the notion of the highest governing authority responsible for ensuring the protection of the Jews was institutionally 39

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constituted by the legal concept of the dhimma (“protection contract”), whereby it was the duty of the ruler to uphold the law (shariˤa) thereby fulfilling his obligation of protecting the non-Muslim dhimmīs (“protected persons”). As “People of the Book” they were allowed to practice their religion in exchange for paying an annual capitation tribute tax (jizya) and accepting conditions of humility that symbolized their inferiority that were defined in the “Pact of Umar.” This was, in essence, the dhimma contract. In the Middle East dhimmīs referred mainly to Christians and Jews, but in the lands to the west of Egypt, the Maghreb, the disappearance of indigenous Christians in the Middle Ages meant that Jews were synonymous with dhimmīs.4 In Morocco especially, under the reign of the Alawid sultans, the royal alliance was buttressed by the dhimma system. The sultan of the dynasty that has ruled Morocco since the latter half of the seventeenth century is a sharif, a reputed descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. The Alawid ruler also claims the honorific title of commander of the faithful (amīr al-mu’minīn). The title was originally bestowed on the second caliph and successor to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, to whom the “Pact of Umar” is attributed. The ability of the sultan to ensure the protection of the Jews, his weaker dhimmī subjects, was not only a religious obligation but a powerful signal of the strength of the government.5 It might therefore seem surprising that nowhere in the formulaic prayer for the ruler ordered by Rabbi Hasarfaty is the sultan of Morocco, Moulay Youssef, mentioned despite the fact that even under colonial rule the Jews remained his subjects. The prayer, however, was not a rejection of the sultan, but a symbolic recognition that the sultan was no longer the highest authority in the country. Sultan Youssef had become a figurehead monarch for legitimizing the protectorate of Morocco established by the French in 1912 and had no real political power. Leaders of the Jewish community who saw themselves acting on behalf of the well-being of the Jewish community thus turned to the French as their protectors. Already in 1909 on the eve of the establishment of the protectorate when Morocco was beset by political turmoil and foreign military intervention had already begun, Vidal Hasarfaty wrote to the Minister Plenipotentiary, Eugène Regnault, France’s chief diplomatic representative in Tangier, requesting the formal protection of the French government. Sarfaty justified his request by intimating that it would enable him to best perform his role as intercessor, looking after the welfare of the Jewish community.6 Rabbi Hasarfaty had previously enjoyed very close relations with the makhzan (as the Moroccan central government was called), that included members of the royal family and the grand vizier, and he kept within his possession a dahir (lit. ẓahīr, an imperial edict) investing him with the functions of rabbinical judge (dayyan) and commanding that he be recognized as such by all the high officials in Morocco. He was thus able to exercise great influence both in

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the mellaḥ (lit. millāḥ, the term for the Moroccan Jewish quarter) of Fez and beyond.7 In the justification to become a protégé of France, Hasarfaty implied that the highest governing authority of the land, the sultan, was no longer effective in protecting the Jewish community and that the real power to reckon with was France. The French conquest and occupation of Morocco began only three years later. Hasarfaty was prescient, pragmatically considering the best options for himself personally and for the Jewish community where he lived. What he could not have anticipated when he called on the congregations of the community of Fez to bless the French Republic in 1918, was that the monarchy was not only going to survive colonial rule, but to reemerge as the most important governing power of Morocco with the departure of France in 1956. The survival of the Alawid dynasty, with the monarchy remaining in the twenty-first century the principal government power of Morocco, has shaped both the historical narrative and popular perception of the colonial period. The fact that the monarchy itself and the institutions surrounding it were transformed by the French—and that this colonial legacy of the monarchy is what survived—is overshadowed by the nationalist narrative of continuity, of the uninterrupted reign of the Alawids since the seventeenth century.8 The longevity of the Moroccan monarchy is also important for many Moroccan Jews, not only those living in Morocco but also in the much larger diaspora. Their retrospective reframing of memory assumes continuity with the premodern past that also, as in the nationalist narrative, ignores the fact that the post-independence kings were heirs to the colonial past, and that the particular ties of Moroccan Jews were transformed as a result. Also overlooked is the degree to which the vertical ties between Jewish leaders and the monarchy were replaced by the French protectorate authorities. The ties of the Jewish community to the monarchy during the colonial period, even when the sultan no longer had any political power, loomed large in the retrospective construction of the imagined past. In this mythical image of the relationship of the monarchy and the Jews, Morocco is perceived as a place of refuge under the auspices of the benevolent and protective kings, and this was uninterrupted by the colonial period. Although in historical Jewish sources themselves one finds ambivalence toward the monarchy, and incidents of persecution by the sultans are also a part of the historical memory, in the popular imagination the sultan was perceived as good to the Jews. When bad things happened, it was the result of evil ministers and governors, not the ruler himself.9 IMPERIALISM AND THE ROYAL ALLIANCE The one exception in the collective historical memory of the benevolent monarch was Mawlay al-Yazid (r. 1790–1792), when massacres and pillaging

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in the Jewish communities of Tetuan, Fez, Meknes, Rabat, and Marrakesh took place. He is remembered by Muslims and Jews alike as a tyrant, “the malicious one,” an aberration in the history of the Alawid dynasty.10 His successor, Mawlay Sulayman (r. 1792–1822), who after many years was able to secure much of Morocco, was remembered for his piety. According to tradition, he redressed the injustice of his predecessor by returning property that had been seized from the Jews and tore down a mosque that had been built in the middle of the Jewish quarter of Fez.11 The royal alliance was restored, and Jews served the sultan as key intermediaries in trade and diplomacy. At the same time, during Sulayman’s reign (1792–1822), which coincided with a period in which the Islamic world faced external threats from an ascendant Europe, the sultan pursued a harsh policy toward the Jews, implementing a strict application of the dhimma. In 1807, by imperial edict, the sultan ordered the construction of Jewish quarters in the coastal ports of Tetuan, Salé, Rabat, and Essaouira where Jews were forced to live.12 The ties of Jews to foreign interests in Morocco in the age of imperialism that threatened the independence of the Muslim world became the source of growing tensions between Muslims and Jews in Morocco. It was, ironically, in this period that the royal alliance was strengthened, as the monarchy became more reliant on the Jews than ever before.13 Simultaneously, antipathy toward the Jews was growing among Muslim elites and the ‘ulama. This seeming contradiction is reflected in the rhetoric during the reign of Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman (r.1822–1859). During this period, the threat to Morocco’s sovereignty grew with the aggressive expansion of Europe. France invaded neighboring Algeria in 1830, the beginning of a colonial occupation that was to last until 1962. Morocco soon became embroiled in France’s war of conquest in Algeria and fell victim to attack by France in 1844. Most devastating was Spain’s war against Morocco and two-year occupation of Tetuan (1860– 1862) during the reign of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahman (r. 1859–1873). Islam itself felt threatened by the ties of Jewish elites to the foreign powers, which seemed like a breach in the dhimma.14 Jews were vital intermediaries with Europe, and already the question of their status was becoming a diplomatic issue for Europeans and a matter of concern for the monarchy. In 1842, Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman reminded the French representative in Tangier that the Jews in the provinces of Morocco had to live under the stipulations of the dhimma contract that obligated the ruler to protect their persons and property, and he warned that if one of the conditions of the dhimma were to be broken, the law would no longer protect them.15 In a dahir in 1846, Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman ordered the governor of Tangier to prevent Jews from traveling abroad from the ports of Tangier and Larache, which he claimed the Jews were doing under the pretense of

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going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then not returning. “Islam” warns the sultan, “is harmed in two ways . . . by the loss of revenue from the jizya,” and because the Jews “are becoming reconnoiterers, directing the enemy to the weak spots of the Muslims.”16 Unusual in this dahir is the invective rhetoric toward the Jews: “may God curse them,” and “may God destroy them.” Normally the term “Jews” (al-Yahūd) is not found in dahirs, rather, they are referred to as dhimmīs. Connoted in this text, therefore, is the dhimma contract was broken. The question of the Jews’ non-payment of the jizya, which was the guarantor of the royal alliance, periodically comes up in this period. A few years later, a dahir was again directed to the governor of Tangier and another to the governor of Tetuan, ‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Ash‘ash, admonishing them on the laxity of collecting jizya and ordering that arrears in the payment of jizya be collected in accordance with the law and by legal means. After the formulaic opening, the text turns to the heart of the matter: “It is the Jews, may God curse them, of all the People of the Book, to whom God said: ‘fight those who do not believe in God nor the Last Day . . . until they give the jizya willingly while they have been humbled.” [Qur’an 9: 29]17 The insistence on collecting jizya, and the general disdain for Jews as a collective group as expressed in these dahirs, however, did not prevent the strengthening of the royal alliance in this period. The consolidation of interdependent ties between the monarchy and Jewish merchants had become all the more important to increase the revenues of the state and to retain control of trade as Morocco, along with many other countries, faced European economic imperialism. Morocco, like other countries across Asia and Africa, was forced by the European powers to sign commercial treaties unfavorable to their interests. These treaties also contained clauses that accorded foreign trading firms the right to issue patents of protection, and along with this, extraterritorial rights, to the native population. The “capitulations,” as it was known in the Ottoman Empire, or system of “protection” as it was called in Morocco, meant that native Moroccan “protégés” of foreign powers might be exempt from local laws and taxes and come under the jurisdiction of the protecting power. This was a constant source of dispute between Morocco and the foreign powers in the nineteenth century.18 A disproportionate number of the protégés were Jews, and over the course of the nineteenth century their number increased exponentially. On a symbolic level, this was significant since Jews were already protégés (the literal meaning of dhimmīs) of the Islamic ruler. Once they became European protégés with extraterritorial rights, the strength of the ruler, measured in terms of his ability to protect his dhimmī subjects, was being tested. Already positioned as intermediaries with Europe, Moroccan Jews navigated between the advantageous and privileged ties with the sultan, and the new opportunities that their connections to foreigners facilitated. For the European powers

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and European merchants, Jews were also vehicles to penetrate and dominate Morocco politically and economically. To counterbalance this challenge, the sultan strengthened ties with his dhimmī subjects. As a strategy to counter the growing European ties to Jews, Sultan ‘Abd al-Rahman increasingly issued personal dahirs with the sharifian seal, granting favors and privileges to individual Jews, their families, and descendants, especially to royal merchants who were an invaluable source of revenues for the makhzan. Referred to as tujjār al-sulṭān (merchants of the sultan)—a neologism applied retroactively since the term itself does not appear in nineteenth-century Arabic documents—these royal merchants received privileges on the payments of custom duties and loans from the makhzan which enabled them to simultaneous trade for their own account and for the makhzan. This bound the royal merchants to the sultan in a system of credit and debt. Like other dependents of the sultan, they traveled to the palace to present the obligatory gifts (hadāya). As merchants indebted to the sultan, restrictions were placed on travel abroad for trade, and often members of the family were not allowed to travel as a kind of insurance that the merchants would return to Morocco.19 This interdependency between the ruler and the Jews, based on the utility of the Jews, was not new to this period, and was common among Jews all over the premodern world. What had changed was the scale and stake of these relationships as the sultan sought to consolidate his control of the Jews who were increasingly turning to foreign powers for protection. By the mid-nineteenth century, another factor challenged the ability of the monarchy to maintain its hold on the Jewish community. European Jewish leaders, exercising their newfound rights as citizens, began to intervene on behalf of their coreligionists in foreign countries, and Morocco became an important field of operation. British Jews were the first to be at the forefront of these efforts, since Great Britain maintained the greatest political and economic leverage in Morocco.20 France’s efforts, however, were soon to surpass those of any other foreign power with the foundation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860 and the establishment of its first schools in Morocco in the 1860s.21 The advocacy of European Jews and their organizations on behalf of their coreligionists was conducted through the help of the European powers, and through local Jewish actors who were protégés of foreign nations. Cases of abuse against Jews by the authorities were reported, and through the conduit of the embassies and consulates in Morocco, were transmitted to the sultan.22 The foreign powers in Morocco often worked in concert with European Jewish organizations, not because of any particular sympathy for the plight of Moroccan Jews as representatives of European governments claimed, but as a means to further pursue political and economic interests in Morocco. The convergence of interests between European imperialism and transnational

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Jewish efforts to improve the lot of coreligionists in foreign countries, thrust the Jewish question as arguably the most contentious conflict between Morocco and the foreign powers in the nineteenth century.23 The incident that first brought into sharp relief how much the Jewish question had become the subject of vital concern for both the Europeans and the sultan was the visit of the leader of the British Jewish community, Sir Moses Montefiore to the sultan, Sidi Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahman (Muhammad IV) in 1863–1864. Montefiore was at the head of an ongoing international campaign that sought to defend Jews from persecution in foreign lands. His active involvement and interest in the welfare of co-religionists in the Muslim world led him to Morocco. Following an incident involving the execution of a Jewish boy in the Atlantic coastal town of Safi, Montefiore embarked on his mission and was able to obtain a dahir from Muhammad IV. The decree ordered Muslim governing authorities to treat the Jews with justice in accordance with the shariˤa. It specified that their persons and property should be protected from hostile acts, and it prohibited corvée labor. The sultan wished to placate Montefiore and the foreign powers by issuing the dahir, but at the same time to affirm that the existing legal system, based on upholding the dhimma, was the best way to ensure justice.24 The dahir was a somewhat more diplomatic version of what ‘Abd al-Rahman had already decreed in 1842, by declaring that “all people are equal in justice,” deploying the liberal language of equality familiar to Europeans.25 The dahir did little to curtail foreign advocacy for the Jews, and it may have provoked further abuses by some government officials who were already hostile toward Jews because of their growing foreign ties. For the Jewish communities in Morocco, news of the “Montefiore Dahir” and the visit of this powerful European Jewish protector, was sensational. Reports soon circulated that Jews as a result were arrogantly flouting the Muslim authorities, a recurring accusation that continued for the rest of the century. And so, the sultan sent additional dahirs to nullify the objections of the governors.26 The Moroccan monarchy realized that the Jewish question had become a key means by which the foreign powers encroached on Moroccan sovereignty. Both Moroccan Jews and the makhzan had come to understand, as Jessica Marglin analyzes, the power of international appeals to pressure Morocco.27 Confronted with the growing interference of European powers in the affairs of the Moroccan State, the Montefiore Dahir not only sought to placate the foreign powers, but it was also a means to expand monarchal power, in the words of the dahir, into “all of our provinces” (ayālatina). The Montefiore Dahir, more powerfully than ever before, articulated a policy on the Jewish question, based on religious precepts, that might be described as “national.” The dahir was renewed by his successor Mawlay Hassan I (r. 1873–1894),

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and was constantly invoked by Jewish organizations, especially the AIU and the British Board of Deputies and Anglo-Jewish Association whenever allegations were made about maltreatment by the governing authorities. Although not explicitly stated in the 1864 dahir, the foreign representatives constantly referred to the abolition of the “bastinado” in the Montefiore Dahir, and the renewal of the ban on bastinado by Hassan I. In 1910, the president of the AIU pleaded with the Minister Plenipotentiary, Eugène Regnault, France’s chief diplomatic representative in Tangier, to intercede with the sultan to have him promulgate a new dahir that would put a definitive end to the bastinado.28 During the period of the protectorate, the Montefiore Dahir and its renewal by Hassan I was still being invoked by the Jewish community and the AIU as the guarantee that the Jews were the protected subjects of the sultan.29 This served the French authorities well, as a deflection from France being responsible for extending the Jews rights: it was the sultan and makhzan officials who were responsible for the welfare of Moroccan Jews. However, in the nineteenth century, the key issue that vexed the sultan was the problem posed by consular protection, which he believed was causing Jews to circumvent his sovereign right as Islamic ruler. This was considered by the makhzan, and by many in the ‘ulama, to be the most important, if not principal threat to Moroccan sovereignty.30 Countering this challenge, the sultans Muhammad IV and Hassan I continued the policy to consolidate the royal alliance with the Jews, and to incentivize Jews not to sidestep the sultan’s authority. Avenues to petition the sultan grew in this period as part of larger efforts at state building and reforms, necessary to better protect Morocco from foreign interference. This may account for the sultan creating, in the 1860s, a central court of appeals, the Ministry of Complaints (Wizārat al-shikāyāt), to consolidate control of petitions in the face of the destabilizing efforts of the foreign powers.31 International Jewish organizations, backed by foreign powers, put pressure on the sultan to intervene when involving allegations of maltreatment of Jews. Although reluctant to admit it, this did cause the sultan to pay greater heed to their petitions. Furthermore, the subordinate status of Jews as dhimmīs under the special protection of the sultans made their appeals even more efficacious than Muslims because of the religio-legal obligation of the ruler to ensure their protection in accordance with the dhimma.32 Even if the Jews’ access to the sultan grew, this did not prevent arbitrary actions of local governing authorities nor the periodic anti-Jewish violence of the Muslim population. Yet it must also be stated that anti-Jewish violence by either the authorities or population, highlighted in the nineteenth century by a few notorious cases, was sporadic. The quotidian relations between Muslims and Jews were generally harmonious, shaped by interdependency and the existential necessities of daily life. Furthermore, Jews were in many

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cases no more vulnerable than the Muslim population in periods of instability and violence. What had changed, however, was that both the foreign consulates with their many Jewish protégés, and European Jewish organizations, especially the Alliance Israélite Universelle with its expanding networks of schools, were monitoring and reporting every claim of maltreatment by local Muslim authorities, every violent crime committed by Muslims against Jews, and every murder of itinerant Jewish traders by bandits. The foreign press in Morocco, which began in Tangier in the late nineteenth century, published reports of these incidents, and complaints were submitted to the sultan through the foreign consular representatives. An increasing number of Jews, including in the interior of the country, turned simultaneously to the Jewish organizations and to the sultan requesting intervention on their behalf. The persecution of the Jews of Morocco had become internationalized, and a justification for more vigorous intervention by the foreign powers in Morocco.33 In response to the growing encroachments of foreign powers, Mawlay Hassan I undertook vigorous reforms and embarked on major military campaigns (called ḥaraka, colloq. ḥarka) to rein in dissident regions. These campaigns were the first military and political intervention in the Sous and southwestern Morocco for sixty years. Hassan I was regarded as the last of the sultans—in contrast to his successors—able to strengthen the central power of the makhzan by neutralizing dissident regions.34 He became the model of the Moroccan monarchy during the colonial period for nationalists seeking independence and has remained among the most venerated rulers in the Alawid dynasty. Widening the royal alliance with Jews was an essential political strategy of Hassan I at a time when the foreign powers were competing with the makhzan by granting an increasing number of patents of protection. Because of the extensive network of Jewish traders, including Jewish protégés of foreign powers in the interior of the country, Jewish organizations and foreign consulates were able to extend their reach into regions where central power was weak. Jews far from the center appealed to foreign Jewish organizations, especially the AIU or foreign powers, through these networks to put pressure on the sultan to intercede on their behalf. For the sultan and central makhzan, maintaining direct control of dhimmī subjects by tying the interests of the Jews to the monarchy was a means to expand the power of the monarchy over regions where the central control of the state was at best tenuous.35 An example of this can be seen in correspondence between Muhammad b. Husayn U Hashim of Iligh and Hassan I in 1889–1890. Muhammad b. Husayn U Hashim was the leader of the Abu Dami‘a dynasty in the Sous region of southwestern Morocco, and had recently been installed as governor (qā‘id, Fr. caïd ) after Hassan I had restored central makhzan control over the region. Muhammad reported to the sultan on the arrest and harsh punishment

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of someone guilty of murdering a Jew, since the protection of dhimmīs “is entrusted to His Majesty, exalted by God.”36 In another letter Muhammad b. Husayn U Hashim reported to Hassan I that a Jew, Isaac Souissa, took refuge under the sharifian protection of the military encampment even though he had guaranteed his security and that no harm was done neither to his person nor property nor to his children. Meanwhile, Souissa fled to Essaouira, and by way of the Christian consuls and Jewish merchants demanded that his children be allowed to join him. The governor implored the sultan not to allow this to happen, and to allow Souissa to “reap the fruits of his perfidy,” though several months later, he allowed the children to leave, claiming that he wanted to put an end to the complaints and false accusations of the Jewish community.37 The governor’s reactions reflected his anger about a growing number of Jewish merchants who had been leaving Iligh for the newly established makhzan stronghold of Tiznit, where they would stay for a long time and eventually settle with their families. This resulted in siphoning off trade from Iligh.38 Souissa appealed to the AIU to intervene, via the French minister in Morocco, in order to put pressure on the sultan to intercede in his favor and to allow his wife and children to join him. The story was also reported in detail in the European Hebrew press of the arbitrary nature of the governor who held the wives and children as hostages.39 What is apparent from these vignettes is that Hassan I was asserting his authority over some of the far-flung regions of Morocco through his prerogative of protecting his Jewish subjects. Arguably no other sultan in the history of the dynasty was as preoccupied as Mawlay Hassan with Jewish affairs. The sultan needed to adroitly navigate between his political dealings with foreign powers and controlling powerful chiefs even in the peripheries while maintaining his hold over the Jewish population upon whom he depended for conducting trade and generating revenue. This became all the more imperative because of the desperate need of the state to pay for the modernizing reforms required to strengthen Morocco and protect the country from foreign aggression. Mawlay Hassan needed to demonstrate, to both Jewish leaders and to foreign powers, that he was solicitous of the needs of his Jewish subjects, able to guarantee their protection. Navigating through all these pressures, he gave assurances of protection and justice to the Jews when they protested arbitrary treatment by governors, but at the same time needed to strike a balance and coopt the governors. He would relax payment of the annual jizya tax, but then collect years of arrears. At the end of his reign, for example, the sultan demanded that the Jews pay arrears in jizya which had not been collected in places for eighteen years. The community of Essaouira was ordered to pay half of the arrears of jizya, and the second half was to be doubled in amount and paid in nine years, a consequence according to the AIU school director of indemnities demanded by Spain over an incident in Melilla. In Marrakesh,

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when payment of the jizya was renewed, the practice of delivering a blow to the head when the individual paid the tax was implemented, a traditional ceremony designed to demonstrate the humility of the dhimmī. In the past, Jewish communities often paid the jizya in one lump sum, and the custom of individual payment accompanied by a blow to the head was only sporadically practiced.40 Mawlay Hassan repeatedly insisted that Jews must pursue justice through the Moroccan government authorities whom he ordered to treat the Jews with justice. At the time of the international Madrid Conference of 1880, convened to control the abuse of the system of protection, the sultan sent a letter to his foreign Minister, Muhammad Bargash, to be communicated to the foreign representatives, rebutting the claim of some Moroccan Jews that they could not obtain justice nor have their claims heard by the sultan except through the intercession of European Jews and the diplomatic corps in Tangier. “It is our sharifian opinion,” wrote Mawlay Hassan , “that they [the Jews] obtain justice without the intervention of the Powers nor their representatives, because they are our subjects and our dhimmīs (ahl dhimmatinā) entitled by us to the same justice; harming them is prohibited in our religion.”41 Hassan I attempted, without much success, to require that Jews first bring their claims to Bargash before he would accept the intercession of foreigners advocating for them.42 The most famous and protracted case in this period that demonstrated the clash of foreign and Moroccan interests over the Jewish question involved Demnat, the biggest town and largest Jewish community of the High Atlas. For over two decades, from the time of Montefiore’s visit to Morocco, members of the Jewish community of Demnat were petitioning the sultan with grievances against the governor, al-Jilali, and over disputes with the Muslim population. It became a kind of cause célèbre, taken up by the AIU, foreign consulates, and reported in the Tangier and international press as an example of the oppression of Jews in Morocco. A faction of Jews petitioned for foreign intervention, at the same time appealing to the sultan. Eventually, Mawlay Hassan issued two dahirs ordering the governor, al-Jilali to stop oppressing the Jews, and prohibited a long list of arbitrary practices, such as corvée labor, forcing Jews to work on the sabbath, and subjecting Jews to various other exactions that the Jews had long complained about.43 While foreign pressures and the negative press on the maltreatment of the Jews of Demnat impelled the central authorities to act, the story of Demnat, and ultimately the dahirs issued by Mawlay Hassan, were a display of strength—that the sultan was the power who could protect the Jews. It was also an assertion of the symbolic sovereignty over the local authorities, who recognized the sultan as arbiter in the High Atlas.44 Mawlay Hassan’s display of kindness toward his Jewish subjects was a policy both to deflect foreign criticism and to demonstrate the power of the

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state. The question of extending the overcrowded mellaḥs, where conditions had worsened because of urbanization and the continued restrictions on where Jews were allowed to reside, became another cause taken up by foreign Jewish organizations in conjunction with local communities. From Essaouira, the seaport with a sizable foreign population, a delegation went to Marrakesh and petitioned the sultan to expand the overcrowded mellaḥ. The sultan faced a conundrum. On the one hand, he wanted to demonstrate that his benevolence toward the poor Jews was not in doubt, but on the other hand, should he agree to have new housing built beyond the walls of the mellaḥ, then he would have no reason to deny having new housing built for foreigners who were also demanding the expansion of the wealthy casbah quarter, and the sultan wanted to prevent further expansion of Europeans. The sultan agreed to help, and sent orders to the local administration, probably instructing them to instead increase the floors of houses within the existing mellaḥ, while appearing to have authorized the extension of the mellaḥ. And nothing came of it. All of this, including the instructions to the administrators, remained rather vague and probably deliberately so. The result, however, was the benevolence of the sultan toward the Jews was never doubted. The blame was instead cast on the local administrators who had little interest in carrying out the orders.45 A group of reformers in the mellaḥ blamed the impasse not on the sultan, but on wealthy Jewish landlords who, they claimed, stood to lose money from the exorbitant prices, since the houses they would build, makhzan properties, were cheap and this would lower the price of rents. Jews in the mellaḥ were even beginning to rebel against some of their leaders, accusing them of charging exorbitant rents as property owners in the mellaḥ.46 The Jews of Marrakesh were more successful in extending the boundaries of the mellaḥ, not only because of close ties they had with the palace in the capital city where Mawlay Hassan spent much of his time, but also, it seems, because of the revenue that could be derived from leasing property owned by the sultan.47 The increasing number of personal dahirs that Mawlay Hassan conferred on influential Jews, some of whom were also protégés of foreign powers, was part of the strategy to demonstrate his solicitude, while at the same time consolidate his hold on the Jewish community. Such was the case in the dahirs issued to Haim Corcos and his son, Ichoua (Yeshu‛a), leaders of the Jewish community of Marrakesh.48 These documents were often kept and coveted by Jewish families, passed down through the generations into the colonial period as symbols of prestige and elite status and of the particular affection that Mawlay Hassan had for his Jewish subjects. Mawlay Hassan I left an enduring impression on both Muslims and Jews and his reign was represented as the apogee of the precolonial Alawid dynasty. In the collective memory of the Jewish community, Hassan I, the

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grandfather of Mohammed V, was a much venerated monarch, remembered for his benevolence and goodness.49 The story of how Hassan I would open the gates to his gardens of his palace in Marrakesh for the Jews to roam and partake of the fruits and flowers during Passover, was poignantly described during the most frightening times in 1941.50 When Hassan I died in 1894, Moroccan Jews were panic stricken. In the capital city of Fez, the Jews in the mellaḥ were in despair. “One could not have seen this poignant spectacle that took place in the mellaḥ without being moved to tears,” reported Joseph Conquy, director of the AIU boys’ school. “Everywhere one heard shrieks, weeping and lamentations. In anticipation at any given moment for the Arabs to break into our quarter, everybody has entrusted their soul to the mercy of God; poor pregnant women, howling with heart-wrenching tears, their terror causing them to abort.”51 The uncertainty and instability that accompanied interregnums was historically a cause of alarm for Jewish communities, and remained deeply ingrained in the historical memory. The sack of the mellaḥ of Fez, as feared, did not occur following the death of Hassan I, but rather, in the transition to French rule in 1912. The reciprocal relationship between the monarchy and the Jews continued, and in certain respects the influence of Jews in the royal court grew, even as Morocco plunged into political turmoil under Abd al-Aziz (r. 1894–1908), and Abd al-Hafiz.52 The latter overthrew his brother in 1908, and remained sultan until 1912 when he abdicated shortly after the start of the protectorate.53 On March 30, 1912, Regnault negotiated with Sultan ‘Abd al-Hafiz the Treaty of Fez, that established the protectorate. French officers were to take control of the Moroccan army command. One month later, Moroccan soldiers mutinied against their French commanders in Fez, killing a number of them, and then began to search for and kill Europeans. Some sixty-six Europeans were killed. Perhaps as many as 600 Moroccan Muslims were also murdered by the mobs. But what received the most coverage and attention was the pillaging of the mellaḥ by the soldiers and pillagers, the so-called tritel [pillaging]. The violence and plundering of the mellaḥ lasted two days, from April 17 to 19. A reported fifty-one Jews were killed, and dozens were wounded. Property loss was staggering, and a number of houses lay in ruins. It was often referred to as a “pogrom” by foreign observers at the time—a term originally applied to outbreaks of mob violence against Jews in the Russian Empire and signifying that the government had either sanctioned it or did nothing to stop it. In any event, the French had clearly not yet secured its hold on Morocco, and the Jews of the mellaḥ, numbering some 12,000, fled the violence with their homes destroyed, and several thousand escaped to the confines of the royal palace, adjacent to the mellaḥ.54 Powerless to stop the carnage, ‘Abd al-Hafiz had opened the gates to the palace to give refuge to the Jews, who came in the thousands. This event

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came nearly 500 years after the first mellaḥ was established in Fez, which according to tradition, followed a massacre of Jews. Perhaps the sultan’s benevolent action came out of deep sympathy—weeping as he watched the Jews being attacked according to one tradition, shedding crocodile tears according to another—but the symbolism of Jews taking refuge in the palace under the gaze of a protective sultan, recalling the very reason that the mellaḥ was first built in the fifteenth century, could not have been lost to either the sultan or the Jews. It was perhaps the very last, if not forlorn act of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hafiz asserting his royal authority, fulfilling his duty as Islamic ruler and protector of his dhimmī subjects. The sultan decreed, on April 20 on the measures of reparation to be adopted for the victims and property.55 A few months later in August 1912, ‘Abd al-Hafiz abdicated to be replaced by Moulay Youssef, a more compliant and obsequious monarch, disempowered by the French to serve as a figurehead for the protectorate regime.56 COLONIAL MONARCHY, COLONIAL DHIMMĪS For Hubert Lyautey, the first resident-general and the true architect of the protectorate system, the preservation of the Alawid dynasty was a cornerstone of French policy in Morocco. It legitimized the idea of France’s occupation of the country, based on the theory that Morocco was a sovereign country that needed the tutelage of “France protectrice,” the protecting power that would restore stability and help modernize the country. By maintaining the sultan, “keystone of the protectorate” as Daniel Rivet puts it, and creating the verisimilitude of the makhzan under the guise of indirect rule, the French protectorate sought to discreetly govern the country and gain acceptance by the population. It would also help legitimize French supremacy over Morocco, including the Spanish protectorate in the northern zone and, once agreement was reached in 1923, the international zone of Tangier. Now all of Morocco was considered to be one sovereign country under the reigning Alawid monarch. It helped to legitimize the campaign of “pacification,” subduing regions not yet under military control, coopting Muslim chiefs, and building an army with Moroccan soldiers whose interests could become tied to those of the colonial state.57 The monarchy and makhzan were thus transformed and used in the construction of the colonial state based on the separation of the indigenous population—which included the Jews—from the European settlers. Separate laws and ordinances for Moroccans were drafted and implemented by the French administration, and the Spanish in the northern protectorate, under the guise that these were laws and regulations established by the monarchy and the makhzan. Sharifian dahirs (sg. ẓahīr sharīf) were drafted by French officials

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and rubber stamped by the sultan, and vizierial decrees (sg. qarār wazīrī) were similarly composed by French official and signed by the office of the grand vizier. The legislation was promulgated and published in the Bulletin Officiel of the protectorate administration in its original French form, an Arabic version subsequently appearing in the official communiqué, al-Jarida al-Rasmiya.58 This veneer of the sultan as sovereign in fact stripped the monarchy of any political or legislative power. The sultan as supreme arbiter of the law, though kept in theory, had in reality been replaced by the resident-general and high officials of the colonial state. The main power exercised by the monarchy was in the mutual recognition by both the sultan and the “residency” (the government of the resident-general) of their interdependency: the French needed the Islamic symbolism of the monarchy to legitimate the protectorate and the sultan needed the French for the continued existence of the dynasty. There was another reason on both a symbolic and practical level why the French created the colonial monarchy: the Jewish question. The status of indigenous Jews in the Maghreb had troubled French colonial policy makers ever since the Crémieux Decree in 1870 granted Jews in Algeria French citizenship en bloc. Within just a few years, many colonialist thinkers had considered it to be a serious mistake, for it met with the vociferous opposition of the European settler community, the pieds noirs, the privileged sector of the population in colonial society. A further logic also took root and remained in French colonialist thinking about why granting Algerian Jews citizenship was a serious miscalculation: by privileging the Jews above Muslims, it stirred up resentment of the Muslim population and was a major cause for their antipathy toward and rebellion against French rule.59 Moroccan Jewish leaders pressed the French to grant the Jews political rights as French citizens, but to no avail. The French authorities were determined that the Jews would remain indigenous subjects of the sultan. The legal justification for their continued status is based on how the French came to define Moroccan nationality. The basis of Moroccan nationality in colonial jurisprudence, still relevant today, is directly related to an article in the 1880 Madrid Convention to which both the European powers and the Moroccan government were signatories. The article was an attempt to resolve the problem of Jews who obtained foreign nationality abroad, especially in Algeria, and returned to Morocco as foreign nationals, thereby no longer under the jurisdiction of Moroccan law. Moroccan Jews with foreign nationality was a particular challenge for Moroccan sovereignty because it blurred distinctions between dhimmīs and Europeans. This was also deemed to be a problem for the European powers as well, particularly the French who already had concluded that the Crémieux Decree had been a mistake. These considerations were behind the inclusion of an article in the Madrid Convention that sought

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to limit the proliferation of Moroccans returning with foreign nationality that stipulated that “every Moroccan subject naturalized abroad who shall return to Morocco must after a period of residence equal in time to that which was legally necessary to obtain naturalization, choose between his complete submission to the laws of the Empire and the obligation to leave Morocco, unless it be proven that the foreign naturalization was obtained with the consent of the Moroccan government.”60 From this clause, French jurists established the principle of “perpetual allegiance” to the sultan that cannot be alienated after residence abroad. The principle of perpetual allegiance served as a justification for thwarting all efforts by Moroccan Jewish leaders and their supporters abroad to obtain political rights as French citizens.61 This principle also obviated the necessity of eliminating the concept of the dhimmī, even if in practice the payment of jizya and the legal disabilities defined by the Pact of Umar were abandoned.62 In maintaining the sharifian dynasty as the symbol of sovereignty, dhimmī status for indigenous Moroccan Jews was an essential part of the colonial monarchy and by implication, helped to define Moroccan nationality. The sultan and the makhzan rubber stamped numerous dahirs and vizierial decrees prepared by the French administration to reform the Jewish community and regulate the day-to-day operation of the Jewish communities.63 But there were no illusions that these decrees and regulations were all at the initiative of the French administration. The vertical ties previously enjoyed between the Jews and the sultan had now been replaced by the French civilian and military leaders of the protectorate. When Moulay Youssef died in 1927, there was hardly an echo in the Jewish community, though perhaps there was some fleeting concern, based on the collective memory of the Jewish community, that interregnums could create havoc for the Jews. The quick selection of Mohammed Ben Youssef and his coronation alleviated any fears that the community had. It was of course expected by the French authorities that Jewish leaders would pay their respects to the deceased sultan and the inauguration of Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef. Jewish notables in Fez came to present their condolences at the Palace in Fez El Jadid (New Fez), together with a procession of Muslim notables and ulama. Leaders and representatives of the Jewish communities were present at the elaborate coronation ceremonies in Rabat.64 For the Jewish leaders and subjects of the sultan, celebrating the inauguration of the reign of Mohammed Ben Youssef in 1927 was a recognition that the colonial monarchy was an extension of French power in Morocco. In the collective imagination of Moroccan Jewry, however, the ascension of Mohammed V was greeted with an outpouring of joy. Mohammed V’s particular love for the Jews is explained by his having Jews as playmates from among the children of servants and artisans in the palace, or having a Jewish

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wet nurse, the wife of a tailor in the Palace.65 The place occupied by Jewish artisans, servants, and physicians of the sultan is deeply engrained in the historical memory of Moroccan Jews for it reflects the vertical alliance with the highest authority in the land. In precolonial times, hundreds of Jewish artisans, especially tailors and jewelers, worked for the royal court serving as an important source of resources for the Jews.66 In colonial times, it remained an important symbol of the Jews’ empowerment, and there was prestige value attached to serving the sultan, the symbolic capital of a time-honored tradition. But in the colonial monarchy, the system of royal patronage was but a shadow of the past—gone were the Jews who served the sultan as his principal merchants, diplomats, and sometimes even political advisors in the royal court. What remained was the palimpsest of the court life of the palace, now with relatively few Jewish artisans. For the French, maintaining the historic image of the protective sultan concerned about the welfare of his Jewish subjects was part of a larger strategy of promoting the symbolism of the sultan as sharifian ruler of Morocco. The French made loyalty of the Jews to the sovereign ruler of Morocco an inseparable part of the Jews’ support of France and the French colonial project. But most Moroccan Jewish leaders protested their indigenous status, accepting strategically the support for the colonial monarchy as a necessity to demonstrate their loyalty to France. Still, they bitterly complained that Jews came under the jurisdiction of the makhzan courts, which they claimed were administered by unqualified urban pashas and rural caïds. The French expanded the scope of the makhzan courts, having reduced the competence of the shariˤa courts, at least in theory, to personal status. The jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts was also restricted in theory to personal status. Moreover, the extraterritorial rights enjoyed by many Jews as protégés of France and most other foreign countries were lost, as France abolished the capitulations, with the exception of the United States (and Britain until 1937) which was able to negotiate with France the retention of its protégés. Thus, a much greater number of Jews were now primarily under the jurisdiction of makhzan courts, and they had less flexibility than in precolonial times for crossing juridical boundaries, which were now more rigidly delimited by the French. Jews felt greatly disadvantaged in the makhzan courts run exclusively by Muslims, and they complained that their testimony was either not allowed or not given the same weight as Muslim plaintiffs.67 The French authorities, in fact, had little interest in reforming the makhzan judicial system. Leveling the playing field between Jews and Muslims was out of the question, for displaying their preference of Muslims over Jews was structurally part of the colonial system. The French authorities were dismissive of Jewish complaints claiming that the surveillance of their own

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legal authorities over the makhzan courts guaranteed the impartiality of the judges.68 The French policy of keeping Jews subordinate to Muslim authority was becoming all the more imperative because of a growing discontent among makhzan officials and Muslim elites of the disproportionate social advancement of Jews. A much higher proportion of Jews, thanks to the AIU schools, were getting a modern education and acquiring tools that enabled them to work in the modern sector of the colonial economy. Accompanying these changes, Jews began to move into the Muslim quarters, and in disproportionately larger numbers than Muslims, into the nouvelles villes where the European settlers resided. This movement out of the mellaḥs, and a growing number of affluent Jews employing Muslim women as domestic servants, upset the social hierarchy, and led to unsuccessful initiatives between 1934 and 1937 by some Muslim authorities to prohibit such practices, although without much success. Their efforts were supported by some of the highest officials in the makhzan administration, including the grand vizier, Mohammed El Mokri, and the powerful governor of Marrakesh, Thami El Glaoui [Glāwī]. Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef may also have been concerned that the cohabitation of Muslims and Jews in the same neighborhoods and the employment of Muslim women by Jews could cause friction. The French authorities reported that the sultan heard many complaints about Jews employing young Muslim women as domestic servants and that he was concerned about the issue. Whether these were actually concerns of the sultan or were based on reports of El Mokri, who wanted to garner support from the French to step in and agree to a dahir and vizierial regulations to prohibit the practice, is not clear.69 The French were also concerned about the too rapid social advancement of the Jews because it would upset the social hierarchy, not only with regard to Muslims but also European settlers. At the same time, they recognized that Jews played an important role in the economy, both in the traditional and modern sector, which contributed to governing Morocco and its economic prosperity, and consequently, the stability of French colonial rule. The symbolism of the protective sultan, solicitous of the well-being of his Jewish subjects, provided an important counterpoint to this complicated balancing act that the French played between certain Muslim authorities determined to restore the old order, and the Jews, striving for emancipation through obtaining French political rights that would place them on a higher plane than the Muslims. The French therefore symbolically replicated the common trope that the sultan was benevolent to the Jews. For this reason, the “Montefiore Dahir” of Sultan Muhammad IV remained one of the very few precolonial dahirs of any sort cited in the protectorate, for it established the principle that the sultan was the upholder of justice for his Jewish subjects.70

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Individual dahirs were in theory renewable by the colonial monarchy, again symbolically retaining the connection between the sultan and the Jews as his subjects. Even the most powerful leaders of Moroccan Jewry, such as Ichoua Corcos who dominated the Jewish community of Marrakesh for decades, would renew with Moulay Youssef the dahirs bestowed on them by previous sultans.71 The renewal of dahirs was officially done by French protectorate officials, often through the French counselor of makhzan affairs. Even during the Vichy period in 1942, the authorities approved the renewal of dahirs ensuring protection for Mardochée Corcos, the son of Ichoua, and David Mimran, his brother-in-law, despite some reservations regarding the latter for having been listed as a member of a secret society that had been banned that year.72 In 1922, the Jewish community of Demnat turned to Moulay Youssef—by way of the French authorities—to renew the two dahirs of Hassan I dated 1885, which as discussed, had ordered a cessation of maltreatment by the local governor.73 Rather than consulting with the sultan, the French authorities solicited the opinion of Hajj Thami El Glaoui, the governor of Marrakesh who was instrumental for French control of southern Morocco. The Glaoui dynasty of the High Atlas, from their stronghold in Telouet (Telwat) had, since the end of Mawlay Hassan’s reign, been an instrument of indirect control by the makhzan, and by the eve of the establishment of the protectorate, had become more powerful than the sultan himself in Marrakesh and throughout southern Morocco. The Glaouis, especially the two brothers, Si Madani El Glaoui and Hajj Thami El Glaoui, amassed power and control of the High Atlas and southern regions of Morocco during the reigns of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and ‘Abd al-Hafiz. Demnat was one of the bastions from where the Glaouis dominated the south of Morocco since the first decade of the twentieth century. Madani El Glaoui served as a minister of war and grand vizier under ‘Abd al-Hafiz, having helped the sultan gain the throne in his conflict with his brother, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Thami El Glaoui became the powerful pasha of Marrakesh, though he had been removed from power shortly before the French arrived. The French reinstated Thami El Glaoui as governor of Marrakesh, a position he held for forty years. Madani El Glaoui, with the help of a contingent of French troops, helped to firmly establish the continuation of Glaoui control of the south. The French, who were not in military control of southern Morocco until the 1930s, found in the Glaoui dynasty a very useful ally. The Glaouis, especially Thami (Madani died in 1918), loyally served the French and were able to continue to build their extensive base of power, landowners, and wealth, ruthlessly taxing the population and exploiting their labor and property.74 For the Jews in the dozens of mellaḥs in southern Morocco, the Glaoui dynasty had become the effective rulers, remembered by some as protectors,

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by others as tyrants who “owned” the mellaḥs where they lived. This ambivalence was a reflection of the interdependency of the Glaouis and the Jews. The network of Jewish traders from the mellaḥs in southern Morocco, “satellites” of Marrakesh, was an essential part of the Glaouis’s control of the south.75 Ichoua Corcos, powerful leader of the Jewish community of Marrakesh and in some ways the counterpart of the pasha in the mellaḥ of Marrakesh, served as the banker and agent for the trade of the Glaoui dynasty.76 For the Jews of Marrakesh Glaoui was in effect fulfilling the role of the sultan as intercessor between Muslims and Jews, prohibiting the bastinado and other arbitrary actions, and not allowing the imprisonment of Jews except after authorization from Corcos, “whose authority is the equivalent of that of a pasha.”77 With French dependency on the Glaouis for their indirect control of southern Morocco, it is therefore not surprising that when the Jews of Demnat petitioned the sultan to renew the dahirs, the French authorities asked the opinion of the pasha of Marrakesh. It is also not surprising that Glaoui was adamantly opposed to granting the Jews’ request. He pointed out to the French commander of the Marrakesh region, General Daugan, that normally dahirs needed to be renewed with each successor, but that neither ‘Abd al-‘Aziz nor ‘Abd al-Hafiz had done so. Glaoui further claimed that the Jews of Demnat had a bad reputation for their intrigues. He advised the French against it, with the claim that their only motivation was exemption from paying the tartīb, the universal tax on persons and property, “even though they own half of the land of Demnat.” General Daugan deliberated on how to respond to the request for the renewal of the dahirs, the main criteria being what effect it would have on improving the administration where the Jews lived. “Sooner or later,” Daugan wrote, “our matters of concern should, in my opinion, be connected to the more general question of the political, social and administrative evolution of the indigenous populations, as much for Jews as Muslims, who still live beyond the boundaries of the zone that we control.” The general concluded that he saw no utility at present to renew the dahirs which would have no other effect but to antagonize the Glaouis, but concluded that one should take note of the demarche that the Jews of Demnat took with the central makhzan so that the question can be taken up at an opportune time.78 Of course what Glaoui did not tell the French is that he probably would have been in a position to block the renewal of the Jews’ dahirs under ‘Abd al-‘Aziz or ‘Abd al-Hafid, and that he himself was concerned about losing revenue from the tartīb, having gained in precolonial times the right to collect taxes and being a large landowner, including in Demnat. In other cases when it suited them, the French would dutifully renew dahirs to Jews, officially translate the originals and attach a receipt stamp on the renewed dahir. Such was the case for dahirs of protection issued on behalf of the Jews of Ntifa of Foum Jemaâ, one of the more protracted, and

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like Demnat, international conflicts of the late nineteenth century.79 Hassan I promulgated dahirs in 1887 and 1892 for the Jews of Ntifa, and they were renewed by Sultan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in 1896. These dahirs were renewed in 1943 because of another protracted dispute involving the Jews and the local authorities, not only the makhzan officials, but also the French officer in charge of the region. It was also part of the campaign to purge the vestiges of the colonial Vichy regime.80 But it was also more than that. The French authorities continued to deploy the symbolic power of the sultan as protector of the Jews as a reminder that Jews were indigenous Moroccans. The historic image of sultans, solicitous of the needs of the poor Jews of the mellaḥ, was mobilized in Meknes in 1923. A large crowd of reportedly some 2–3,000 poor Jews from the mellaḥ appealed to Moulay Youssef during the sultan’s visit to Meknes offering three oxen for propitiatory sacrifice according to custom in a plea to extend the mellaḥ in order to relieve their misery.81 When the sultan would take up residence at the palace of Meknes in precolonial times, the Jews would greet him and take advantage of his stay and ask for favors.82 Although negotiations with the Meknes municipality and the Meknes Jewish leadership were already underway to rebuild and extend the mellaḥ, Jewish leaders were well aware of the symbolic nature of such appeals to the colonial monarchy, and would therefore at times play the monarchy card dealt by the French to increase aid to the community. The French, on the other hand, would use the symbolic monarchy as a way to deflect Jewish demands for special considerations and privileges, which they attempted to avoid at all costs in order to not antagonize the Muslim population. TOWARD A NEW ROYAL ALLIANCE Old myths die hard. The Jews’ nostalgia for the sultan-protector, as far from historical reality that it was, may well have resonated against the dismal landscape of the 1930s: economic depression, growing incidents of violence and altercations between Muslims and Jews, disillusionment with the French rulers, and segregation from the frequently hostile European settlers who had now surpassed the total Jewish population in the country.83 The Jews also could not have ignored the growing prestige of the sultan. The incipient nationalist movement initiated a new holiday in 1933, Throne Day (Fr. fête du trône, Ar. ‘īd al-ˤarsh), to mark the ascension of Mohammed Ben Youssef in order to promote the sultan as a symbol of national unity in opposition to French rule. Not to be outdone, the residency appropriated Throne Day and made it into an official national holiday under their control. The battle between the nationalists and the protectorate authorities over the symbolic

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monarchy served to enhance the stature of Mohammed Ben Youssef.84 The celebration of the sultan during Throne Day brought Jews and Muslims together in a day off from work for the joyous occasion of the new national holiday. Everywhere the picture of the saintly figure of Mohammed Ben Youssef in his splendid white jellaba was prominently displayed in the kiosks and newsstands in cities throughout Morocco. A letter from an Alliance teacher in Fez writes on the celebration by the Jews of the mellaḥ of the first official national Throne Day in 1934 as a day of respite and fun.85 For Throne Day in 1935, a teacher from the AIU school of Mogador (Essaouira) writes at length of the celebrations, “it’s a sacred day for the Muslims as it is for the Jews.”86 The final part of the story is the Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef himself later remembered and venerated for protecting the Jews during the Holocaust. Much has been written about the transformation of the sultan in the 1930s into a nationalist leader. In the nationalist narrative, this process began with the Berber Dahir with the establishment of a connection between the nationalists and the monarchy, especially with the meeting in 1934 between the sultan and Allal El Fassi, the latter to become the nationalist leader of the independence movement.87 Gradually the sultan took the lead in the nationalist opposition to colonial rule after the war. However, in the 1930s, the sultan was in no position to take bold steps, for he still had no real political power. Nevertheless, it is clear that as his political sophistication developed, he saw the potential of using the conflict between the residency and the nationalists over the symbolism of the monarchy as leverage. Discretely, but methodically, he strategized on how to transform the symbolic capital of his position into political capital. The attitude of Mohammed Ben Youssef toward Jews in the 1930s, and how it evolved in this period, is a subject of sheer speculation. Plausibly, the sultan came to understand, as he acquired greater political acumen, that being the protector of all Moroccan Jews, the weaker of his subjects, was empowering. As part of his coming of age as sultan—endowed with the awesome power of being the commander of the faithful, the sharifian ruler of a dynasty that predated the French republic—he began to take seriously his role as Islamic ruler and this included fulfilling his role as protector of his Jewish subjects. Perhaps Mohammed Ben Youssef did have a particularly unusual affection for the Jews, based on his experience with them growing up in the palace and the maintenance of relations with a number of Jews during his reign. Personal feelings of affection, however, would not contradict the sultan’s conviction of the need to maintain the hierarchical boundaries that had defined the place of Jews in Moroccan society. For these boundaries gave legitimacy to Mohammad Ben Youssef’s right to rule.

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The 1930s, thus set the stage for the sultan’s actions during World War II and the formulation of a Jewish policy that continued after the war. The defeat of France, the establishment of the collaborationist government of Vichy, and the implementation of the anti-Semitic Statute for the Jews in North Africa, including Morocco, weakened the foundations of the protectorate system that depended on the monarchy and the sultan, ruler of both Muslims and Jews. Mohammed Ben Youssef was able to use the symbolic capital of the monarchy fostered by the residency and appropriated by the nationalists, to challenge colonial rule through his defense of the Jews during Vichy.88

NOTES 1. Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris (henceforth, AIU), Maroc XII E 210 (Harvard Digital Collections, Morocco: Collection 039), Vidal Sarfaty (in Hebrew); forwarded to the AIU president by Israel Benaroya, with letter dated Fez, 16 April 1918. 2. On the origins of the prayer and its meaning, see Barry Schwartz, “Ha-noten Teshuˤah: The Origin of Traditional Jewish Prayer for the Government,” Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986): 113–20. 3. On the concept of the “royal alliance,” see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews,” in The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, eds. David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 245–76; Lois C. Dubin, “Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish Political Theory,” Jewish History 28 (2014): 51–81. 4. Literature on the history and concept of dhimma is vast. For a succinct discussion, see Fred Astren, “Dhimma,” in Encylopedia of Jews in the Islamic World [henceforth EJIW], executive editor Norman A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2010). For a general discussion of dhimmī law in Islam, see Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 52–74. 5. On the sharifian ideology of the Moroccan state and its development during the period of the Alawids, see Abdelahad Sebti, Ville et figures du charisme (Casablanca: Les Editions Toubkal, 2003); Amira K. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretation in PreColonial Morocco: State-Society Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 22–41. Article 41 in the Moroccan constitution of 2011 still refers to the king by the title, amīr al-mu’minīn. Bulletin Officiel, nº 5964 bis (30 July 2011): 1909. On the Alawid monarchy and the Jews, see Daniel J. Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 7–13. 6. AIU, Maroc: I C 1-2 (Morocco: Collection 014), Fez, 30 August 1909, Vidal Hasafarty. The letter was sent via the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

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7. AIU, Maroc: XIX E 303-313 (Morocco: Collection 080), 9 septembre 1903, Valadji. 8. For a recent work that shifts focus on colonial transformations of the makhzan and monarchy, see Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 9. See, e.g., a chronological history based on Jewish sources: Georges Vajda, Un recueil de textes historiques judéo-marocains (Paris: Larose, 1951); see also Yosef Ben Naim, Malkhe Rabanan (Jerusalem: Bi-defus ha-Ma‘arav, 1930); Louis Brunot and Elie Malka, Textes judéo-arabes de Fès (Rabat: Typo-Litho Ecole du Livre, 1939). For a chronological narrative, drawing from Jewish sources, that focuses on the relations of Jews to the monarchy, see Haim Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. II: From the Ottoman Conquests to the Present Time (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 188–326. The veneration of the Alawid dynasty is exemplified in the self-published work dedicated to Mohammed VI of an Israeli Moroccan rabbinic scholar: Shlomo Miyara, Malkhe hesed: seqira ‘al tequfot shilton ha-Islam be-Maroqo, shushelet ha-melakhim ha-‘Alawit me-reshit ha-mamlakhah ha-sharifit le-dorot ‘olam (Elad, 2019) [in Hebrew, Arabic and French]. 10. See Vajda, Recueil, 79–94; Hirschberg, History, vol 2, 293–301. Despite the atrocities that he committed against the population, especially targeting the Jewish communities and the court Jews who had served in the previous reign of Muhammad III, the sultan continued to employ Jews to conduct trade with Europe. See Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, 26–29. 11. AIU, Maroc: I.B.2 (Morocco: Collection 001), Casablanca, 15 novembre 1934, Y. D. Semach. On the intercession of Mawlay Sulayman and rebuilding after the destruction of Mawlay al-Yazid, see Vajda, Recueil, 95–96; Hirschberg, History, vol. 2, 301–302. 12. Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, 87–93; Mohamed El Mansour, Morocco in the Reign of Mawlay Sulayman (Wisbech: MENAS Press, 1988), 14–16. 13. Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–60. 14. For an analysis of this era, see A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7–27; Michel Abitbol, Histoire du Maroc (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 289–322; Bennison, Jihad. On the impact of imperialism, and the growing ties of Jews with Europeans had on Muslim-Jewish relations in this period, see Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948 (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1994), 57–121. 15. Germain Ayache, “La minorité juive dans le Maroc précolonial,” HespérisTamuda 25 (1987): 148–49. 16. Bibliothèque Hassaniya (BH), 23 Jumada I 1262 (29 November 1857). The document is discussed in Daniel J. Schroeter, “Royal Power and the Economy in Precolonial Morocco: Jews and the Legitimation of Foreign Trade,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, eds. Rahma Bourqia and

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Susan Gilson Miller (Cambridge, MA: Distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1999), 86–87. 17. BH, 9 Safar 1266 (25 December 1849), Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman to ‘Abd alQadir ‘Ash‘ash. 18. On the impact of the protégé system on Muslim-Jewish relations, see Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans, 193–252. Consular protection was condemned by the makhzan, based on the assumption that it allowed Jews to escape Moroccan jurisdiction, or condoned by foreigners for the same reason—it allowed Jews to escape the inequities of the Moroccan justice system. These assumptions, concealed a more complex reality of how Jews navigated through different legal systems, often switching between Muslim, Jewish, and consular courts. See the important corrective study of Jessica M. Marglin, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 19. Particularly well documented is the Corcos family in the principal seaport of Essaouira who maintained close ties to the sultan as royal merchants. See translations of documents and analysis of Michel Abitbol, Les commerçants du roi: tujjār al-sulṭān, une élite économique judéo-marocaine au XIXe siècle (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998). On Jewish royal merchants in Morocco, see Schroeter, Merchants, 21–60; Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, 79–87. 20. Khalid Ben-Srhir, Britain and Morocco during the Embassy of John Drummond Hay, 1845-1886 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2005), 151–66. 21. Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862-1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 22. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 123–43. 23. See Abigail Green, “The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?” Past & Present, no. 199 (May, 2008): 175–205; Abigail Green, “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840-c.1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 2 (2008): 535–58. 24. As discussed by the contemporary and best-known Moroccan historian of the nineteenth century: Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri, Kitab al-istiqsa’ li-akhbar duwal alMaghrib al-Aqsa (Casablanca: Dar al-Kitab, 1956), vol. 9, 113–15. Part of this text is translated by Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 371–73. 25. Marglin, Crossing Legal Boundaries, 131. 26. Montefiore’s mission to Morocco has received much attention from historians. See especially Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans 143–73; Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 300–19. For the perspective of the Makhzan on the Montefiore Dahir and its repercussions, see Ben-Srhir, Britain and Morocco, 160–66. Numerous documents on the Montefiore Dahir and its repercussions are found in al-Watha’iq:majmuˤat watha’iqiyya dawriyya tasdiruha Mudiriyyat al-Watha’iq al-Malikiyya, vol. 4 (Rabat: al-Matba‘at al-Malakiya, 1977). Maroc. Direction des

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Archives Royales; Eliezer Bashan, Moshe Montefiore ve-Yehude Maroko: ʻal pi teʻudot hadashot min ha-shanim, 1845-1885 (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2008). 27. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 131–32. 28. AIU, Maroc: IV C 11 (Morocco Collection 017), Paris, 11 March 1910, N. Leven to Regnault. See also 11 March 1910, Tangier, A. Ribbi. The Montefiore Dahir and its renewal by Hasan I is invoked in a plea from the chief rabbis of Fez to the French Consul regarding the bastinado and Jews being forced by the chamberlain to work in the palace. AIU, Maroc E 248-254 (Morocco: Collection 045), Fez, 15 octobre 1909. 29. Lettre à M. le Résident Général de France au Maroc au sujet de l’application du supplice de la bastonnade,” signed by the President of the AIU, Sylvain Lévi, in Paix et Droit (Octobre 1923): 11–12. 30. On the ˤUlama and the question of consular protection, see Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830-1912 (Paris: François Maspero, 1977), 314–19. Consular protection of Muslims was also considered to be a major problem, but it came up much less as an issue in disputes with foreign powers. Listings of protégés by city are found in an exhaustive work by a historian and government official who worked in the Direction des Archives Royales (al-Mudiriyat al-Watha’iq al-Malakiya) in Rabat. Mustafa Busha‘ra’, al-Istitan wa-l-himaya bi-l-Maghrib, 1280-1311, 1863-1894, 4 vols (Rabat: al-Matba‘at alMalakiya, 1984–1989). 31. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 41–47. 32. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 122. 33. Details are found in Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans, 253–308. 34. Jacques Berque, L’intérieur du Maghreb, xve-xixe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 472–505; Mohamed Tozy, Monarchie et Islam politique au Maroc (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1999), 53–56; on the harkas, see Daniel Nordman, “Les expéditions de Moulay Hassan,” Hespéris-Tamuda, 19 (1980–1981): 123–52. 35. For a discussion of this process in the Sous region of southwest Morocco, see ‘Abd Allah Laghma’id, Yahud Mintaqat Sus, 1860-1960: dirasa fi Ta’rikh alMaghrib al-ijtima‘i (Rabat: Manshurat Dar Abi Raqraq, 2016), 161–72. 36. Letter from Muhammad b. Husayn U Hashim to Hasan I, 28 December 1888, and response, 20 January 1889, in Mohammed Ennaji and Paul Pascon, Le Makhzen et le Sous al-Aqsa, La correspondance politique de la maison d’Iligh (1821–1894) (Paris: Éditions du CNRS/Casablanca / Les Éditions Toubkal, 1988), 161–64. 37. Ennaji and Pascon, Le Makhzen, 169–70. 38. Laghma’id, Yahud Mintaqat Sus, 173. 39. AIU, Maroc: III.C.10, Mogador, J. de. A. Elmaleh; Hamagid (23 September 1889); and a lengthy account by Yishaq Ben Ya‘ish Halewi in Haṣfirah, no. 18 (1891): 573, 577. For a detailed and nuanced analysis of the Souissa incident, see Laghma’id, Yahud Mintaqat Sus,169–72. 40. AIU, Maroc: XXXII E 543-562 (Morocco: Collection 070), 4 April 1894, J. Benchimol. On payment of jizya in Marrakesh during the period of Hasan I, see Emily Gottreich, The Mellaḥ of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red

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City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 50–53. For a more general consideration of jizya in nineteenth century Morocco, see Susan Gilson Miller, “Dhimma Reconsidered: Jews, Taxes, and Royal Authority in Nineteenth-Century Tangier,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan, 103–26. 41. The dahir is dated 22 Jumada I 1297 (2 May 1880), al-Watha’iq 7 (1989), 372–73. It was translated and reproduced in The Jewish Chronicle of London. See Laskier, Alliance, 52, 76 n.65. 42. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 138. 43. The Demnat controversy has been the subject of numerous studies. See Ahmed Toufiq, “Les Juifs dans la société marocaine au 19e siècle: l’exemple des Juifs de Demnate,” in Juifs du Maroc: identité et dialogue (Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage, 1980), 152–66. On the Jews and their dispute with the authorities in the larger context of trade and the relations of the makhzan to the region, see Ahmed Toufiq (Ahmad al-Tawfiq), Al-Mujtamaʻ al- Maghribi fi al-qarn al-tasiʻ ʻashar : Inultan, 1850-1912, 2 vols. (Rabat: Kuliyat al-Adab wa-l-‘Ulum al-Insaniya, 1978). On the internationalization of the Demnat controversies, see Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 132–34, 138–43; Ben-Srhir, Britain and Morocco, 193–200; Mohammed, Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859-1948 (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1994), 163, 196–200. 44. On the political dynamic of dahirs in regions of weak centralized state control, see Mohamed Tozy, “De quelques lieux de la compétition politique au Tazeroualt,” Bulletin Économique et Social du Maroc, nos. 159-160-161 (1987): 165–68. 45. AIU, Maroc: XXXV E 602-620 (Morocco Collection 075), Mogador, 15 December 1890, D. Haym; Mogador, 6 December 1891, D. Haym. 46. See articles by Yiṣḥaq Ben Ya‘īsh Halewī in Haṣfirah, no. 86 (1891): 350; no. 279 (1891): 1129; no. 280 (1891): 1133. Daniel Schroeter, “The Politics of Reform in Morocco: The Writings of Yiṣḥaq Ben Ya‘īsh Halewī in Haṣfirah,” in Misgav Yerushalayim Studies in Jewish Literature, ed. Ephraim Hazan (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1987), 73–84. On Halewi and the larger context of his participation in the Hebrew Haskalah movement in Morocco, see Joseph Chetrit, “Moda‘ut hadashah la-anomaliyut ve-la-lashon—niṣanehah shel tenu‘at haskalah be-Maroko be-sof hame’ah ha-19,” Miqqedem Umiyyam 2 (1986): 129–68. 47. Gottreich, Mellaḥ, 45–49. 48. AIU, Maroc: I.B.5 (Morocco: Collection 001), Fez, June 1933, Moïse Simha. 49. Miyara, Malkhe hesed, 83–86. 50. “Situation présente et passée des Juifs du Maroc” (October 1941), Yad Ben Zvi Library (Jerusalem), Raphael Benazeraf Collection, file 17. 51. AIU, Maroc: XIV E 226-237 (Morocco: Collection 042), Fez, July 22, 1894, Conquy. 52. An alliance teacher from Rabat writes of the benevolence of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, his spirit of liberalism and tolerance, and his not collecting jizya for a number of years. His report includes several dahirs where the Sultan enjoins governors to protect the Jews. AIU, Maroc: III B 14-22 (Morocco: Collection 004), Rabat, 25 April 1908, Conquy. The influence of Jews grew during the reign of Abd al-Hafiz; Ichoua Corcos,

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helped in the sultan’s rise to power, in collaboration with Madani El Glaoui. See Gottreich, Mellaḥ, 126–31. 53. On the turmoil of this period and the transition from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to ‘Abd al-Hafiz, see Edmund Burke III, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860-1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 99–152. 54. For a detailed account and assemblage of documentation on the tritel, see Paul B. Fenton, Le Pogrom de Fès ou Le tritel, 17-19 avril 1912 (Jerusalem: Institut Ben Zvi and Centre de Recherche Français à Jérusalem, 2012). The author sees the event as a culmination of centuries of horrors but provides little context for understanding the circumstances of the events, nor the longer-term context of MuslimJewish relations. This lachrymose perspective on the history of Muslim-Jewish relations is also evidenced in a book of primary sources that concludes with the tritel. See Paul B. Fenton and David G. Littman, Exile in the Maghreb: Jews under Islam. Sources and Documents, 997-1912 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). 55. Fenton, Pogrom de Fès, 51–68; “Rapport presenté par M. Elmaleh directeur des écoles de l’Alliance Israëlite à Fez à la Commission des secours et d’hygiène du mellaḥ de cette ville” AIU, Maroc E 248-254 (Morocco: Collection 045), Fez, 7 May 1912; Fez, 14 May 1912, A. Elmaleh. The published report, Commission de Secours et d’Hygiène du Mellaḥ de Fez (Tanger, 1913), is found in AIU: I.B. 1-8 (Morocco: Collection 002). 56. Mouley Youssef was the common spelling of his name, which I use rather than the transliterated “Mawlāy Yūsuf.” 57. For the most comprehensive study on Lyautey and the protectorate see Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protetorat français au Maroc, 1912-1925, 3 vols (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996) (on the sultan, see vol. 2, 130-40); on the construction of the colonial state, see Wyrtzen, Making Morocco; on the military specifically, see Moshe Gershovich, French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and its Consequences (London: Frank Cass, 2000). 58. The entire record of laws, including dahirs and all ministerial decrees since 1912 are published in the official Moroccan government website: http:​/​/www​​.sgg.​​gov​ .m​​a​/Leg​​islat​​ion​/B​​ullet​​insOf​​fic​ie​​ls​.as​​px. 59. For a discussion of the Crémieux Decree, its repercussions and influence on French Jewish policy in the Maghrib throughout the colonial period, see Daniel J. Schroeter, “Between Metropole and French North Africa: Vichy’s Anti-Semitic Legislation and Colonialism’s Racial Hierarchies,” in The Holocaust and North Africa, eds. Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 19–49. On the impact of Algeria on French Jewish policy in Morocco, see Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation and its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies, 13, 1 (2006): 174–206. 60. Cited in Leland L. Bowie, “An Aspect of Muslim-Jewish Relations in Late Nineteenth-Century Morocco: A European Diplomatic View,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976): 5.

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61. The issue of blocking the wish of Moroccan Jews to acquire French nationality based on the Madrid Convention is much discussed and criticized by the Moroccan Jewish leadership. See, e.g., “Notes sur les Israélites marocains de Casablanca,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington D. C. (henceforth USHMM), RG 43.154-40, August 1936 [copies of original documents from Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes]. On the principle of “perpetual allegiance,” see André Chouraqui, La condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain (Paris: Presses du Livre Français, 1950), 60–62; Yerri Urban, L’Indigène dans le droit colonial français, 1865-1955 (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de jurisprudence, 2010), 295. 62. Marglin, Crossing Legal Lines, 177–78. 63. A comprehensive compilation of dahirs and ministerial decrees was published in a book by ‘Abd al-Hayy Bannis, Al-Yahud al-Magharibah fi al-manzumah alqanuniyah, 1913-2007 (Rabat: Dar al-Aman, 2010). 64. For accounts of the death of Moulay Youssef and succession of Mohammed Ben Youssef, see Joseph Luccioni, “L’avènement de Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef au trône du Maroc,” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 12 (1972): 123–30; “L’avènement de Sidi Mohammed,” L’Afrique française: bulletin mensuel du Comité de l’Afrique Française et du Comité du Maroc, no. 12 (décembre 1927): 497–99; L’Echo d’Alger, 18 novembre 1927, 19 novembre 1927, 20 novembre 1927, 23 novembre 1927; al-Sa‘ada, 21 novembre 1927; Annales Coloniales, 19 novembre 1927, 21 novembre 1927, 22 novembre 1927. 65. Jacques Dahan, “La Voix des Communautés s’associe au Jubilée,” La Voix des Communautés, no. 25 (novembre 1952): 2; Robert Assaraf, Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc: l’époque de Vichy (Paris: Plon, 1997), 66–69; Miyara, Malkhe Hesed, 129–34. 66. AIU, Maroc E 248-254 (Morocco: Collection 045), Fez, 8 August 1910, A. Elmaleh. See the account of a dynasty of Jewish tailors serving each successive sultan in the 19th and 20th centuries. Albert Sasson, Les Couturiers du Sultan: Itinéraire d’une famille juive marocaine. Récit (Rabat: Marsam, 2007). 67. On the transformation of the legal institutions and its impact on the Jews, see Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 171–96; on reforms of the Jewish community in general, see Schroeter and Chetrit, “Emancipation;” on the advocacy of Jewish leaders and the AIU to transform the Jews’ legal status through French naturalization, see Laskier, Alliance, 163–71. 68. Marglin, Crossing Legal Boundaries, 194–95. 69. Numerous documents on the question of “cohabitation” of Muslim and Jews and the “affair” of Muslim domestic servants are found in USHMM, RG-43.154 (1MA/250-12). The interest of the sultan in blocking the practice is suggested by the French authorities: Marrakesh, 28 May 1936; Marrakesh, 22 March 1937, referring also to a note on Marrakesh during the sultan’s stay there. 70. Paul Decroux, “Le souverain du Maroc, législateur,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 3 (1967): 33. The Montefiore Dahir is even mentioned in the closely monitored press during the Vichy period. “Un épisode du vieux Maroc,” Vigie Marocaine, 29 septembre 1940.

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71. AIU, Maroc: I.B.5 (Morocco: Collection 001), Fez, June 1933, Moïse Simha. 72. USHMM, RG 43.154-45a, Rabat, 3 March 1942 and 5 March 1942, General Henry Martin. Still at the end of the Protectorate period, dahirs were being renewed. See, e.g., dahir of protection, prohibiting injustice and ordering the authorities to take notice of the command, dated 31 August 1951. Raphael Benazeraf Collection, file 2. 3.89. 73. Copies of the two dahirs are found in USHMM, RG 43.154-1MA/106b. 74. For the expansion of the Glaouis and their power in the High Atlas and Demnat, see Tawfiq, Inultan, vol. 1, 170–82; Ali Amahan, Mutations sociales dans le Haut Atlas: Les Ghoujdama (Paris: Editions de la Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, 2017), 14–18, 113–21. For the Glaouis in the context of political struggle before the protectorate, see Burke, Prelude, 42–43, 102–103, 107–10, 153–55. 75. On the relationship between Marrakesh and the Jews of the mellaḥs in the Marrakesh region and south, see Gottreich, Mellaḥ, 108–25. The economic ties between the Glaouis and Ichoua Corcos, linked to the network of trade in southern Morocco is evidenced by a register of accounts and correspondence: Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Centre de la Culture Judéo-Marocaine (Brussels), Correspondence Corcos-Glaoui. 76. On the Glawis, Corcos, ‘Abd al-Hafiz and the Jewish community of Marrakesh, see Gottreich, Mellaḥ, 125–31; Jonathan G. Katz, “‘Les Temps Héroïques’: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Marrakesh on the Eve of the French Protectorate,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, eds. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 288–93. 77. AIU, Maroc E 398-416 (Morocco: Collection 050), Marrakesh, 2 December 1908, N. Falcon. 78. USHMM, RG 43.154-1MA/106b, Marrakesh, 26 April 1923, Thami El Glaoui to General Daugan; Marrakesh, 4 May 1923, Daugan to Counselor of the Sharifian Government. 79. Marglin, Across Legal Lines, 134–38; Ben-Srhir, Britain and Morocco, 193–96. 80. USHMM, RG 43.154-42, 1943. Numerous documents, including correspondence, copies of the translated dahirs, translated petitions from the Jews of Ntifa, and legal statements. 81. “Les problèmes des mellaḥs,” Noar (January–February 1947): 10; L’Avenir Illustré, 16 décembre 1927, Maroc V B 24b (Morocco: Collection 008), “Rapport sur le mellaḥ créé par M. A. Mas à Meknes,” 2 June 1926; Joseph Toledano, Va-yehi be-ʻet ha-mellaḥ: toldot ha-Yehudim be-Maroko me-reshit hityashvutam ṿe-ʻad yamenu (Jerusalem: Ramtol, 1984), 150–51. 82. AIU, Maroc: XXXII E 543-562 (Morocco: Collection 070), Meknes, 5 February 1902, Valadji. 83. The 1936 census of the French zone of Morocco counted 6,296,136 inhabitants, comprised of 5,898,222 Muslims, 161,312 Jews and 236,602 Europeans. Bernard Augustin, “Le recensement de 1936 dans l’Afrique du Nord,” Annales de Géographie 46, 259 (1937): 84–88. On the growing tensions and increased incidents of violence, see Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans, 507 ff.

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84. For an analysis of Throne Day, see Hassan Rachik, Symboliser la nation: essai sur l’usage des identités collectives au Maroc (Casablanca: Éditions le Fennec, 2003), 110–12. 85. AIU, Maroc: I.B.5 (Morocco: Collection 001), Fez, 26 décembre 1934, Sarah Béhar. The response to her letter from the AIU was very critical for being too short, and not a serious effort. 12 February 1935. The festivities in Salé were described by another teacher from Fez, apparently visiting Salé on Throne Day, but there is nothing specifically about Jews celebrating. Fez, 7 avril 1935, Anna Mamane. 86. AIU, Maroc: III B 14-22 (Morocco: Collection 004), Mogador, 5 décembre 1935, H. Azancot. 87. John P. Halstead, Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912-1944 (Cambridge, MA: Distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1969); for this period more generally, see Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1995), 120–53. 88. Daniel J. Schroeter, “Vichy in Morocco: The Residency, Mohammed V and His Indigenous Jewish Subjects,” in Colonialism and the Jews, eds. Ethan Katz, Lisa Leff, Maud Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 215–50.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abitbol, Michel. Les commerçants du roi: tujjār al-sulṭān, une élite économique judéo-marocaine au XIXe sičcle. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998. ———. Histoire du Maroc. Paris: Perrin, 2009. Amahan, Ali. Mutations sociales dans le Haut Atlas: Les Ghoujdama. Paris: Editions de la Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, 2017. Assaraf, Robert. Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc: l’époque de Vichy. Paris: Plon, 1997. Astren, Fred. “Dhimma,” in Encylopedia of Jews in the Islamic World [henceforth EJIW], executive editor Norman A. Stillman. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Augustin, Bernard. “Le recensement de 1936 dans l’Afrique du Nord,” Annales de Géographie 46, 259 (1937). Ayache, Germain. “La minorité juive dans le Maroc précolonial,” Hespéris-Tamuda 25 (1987). Bannis, ‘Abd al-Hayy. Al-Yahud al-Magharibah fi al-manzumah al-qanuniyah, 19132007. Rabat: Dar al-Aman, 2010. Bashan, Eliezer. Moshe Montefiore ve-Yehude Maroko: ʻal pi teʻudot ḥadashot min ha-shanim, 1845-1885. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2008. Ben Naim, Yosef. Malkhe Rabanan. Jerusalem: Bi-defus ha-Ma‘arav, 1930. Ben-Srhir, Khalid. Britain and Morocco during the Embassy of John Drummond Hay, 1845-1886. London: Routledge-Curzon, 2005. Bennison, Amira K. Jihad and its Interpretation in Pre-Colonial Morocco: StateSociety Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002.

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Bowie, Leland L. “An Aspect of Muslim-Jewish Relations in Late NineteenthCentury Morocco: A European Diplomatic View,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976). Berque, Jacques. L’intérieur du Maghreb, xve-xixe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Brunot, Louis and Elie Malka. Textes judéo-arabes de Fès. Rabat: Typo-Litho Ecole du Livre, 1939. Burke III, Edmund. Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Chetrit, Joseph. “Moda‘ut ḥadashah la-anomaliyut ve-la-lashon—nisanehah shel tenu‘at haskalah be-Maroko be-sof ha-me’ah ha-19,” Miqqedem Umiyyam 2 (1986): 129–68. Chouraqui, André. La condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain. Paris: Presses du Livre Français, 1950. Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Dahan, Jacques. “La Voix des Communautés s’associe au Jubilée,” La Voix des Communautés, no. 25 (novembre 1952). Decroux, Paul. “Le souverain du Maroc, législateur,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 3 (1967). Dubin, Lois C. “Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish Political Theory,” Jewish History 28 (2014). El Mansour, Mohamed. Morocco in the Reign of Mawlay Sulayman. Wisbech: MENAS Press, 1988. Ennaji, Mohammed and Paul Pascon. Le Makhzen et le Sous al-Aqsa, La correspondance politique de la maison d’Iligh (1821–1894). Paris: Éditions du CNRS/ Casablanca: Les Éditions Toubkal, 1988. Fenton, Paul B. Le Pogrom de Fès ou Le tritel, 17-19 avril 1912. Jérusalem: Institut Ben Zvi and Centre de Recherche Français à Jérusalem, 2012. ——— and David G. Littman. Exile in the Maghreb: Jews under Islam. Sources and Documents, 997-1912. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. Gershovich, Moshe. French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and its Consequences. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Gottreich, Emily. The Mellaḥ of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Green, Abigail. “The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?” Past & Present, no. 199 (May, 2008). ———. “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840-c.1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 2 (2008). ———. Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Halstead, John P. Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912-1944. Cambridge, MA: Distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1969.

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Hirschberg, Haim Z. (J. W.). A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. II: From the Ottoman Conquests to the Present Time. Leiden: Brill, 1981. Katz, Jonathan G. “‘Les Temps Héroïques’: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Marrakesh on the Eve of the French Protectorate,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, 2011. Kenbib, Mohammed. Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948. Rabat: Université Mohammed V, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1994. Laghma’id, ‘Abd Allah. Yahud Mintaqat Sus, 1860-1960: dirasa fi Ta’rikh alMaghrib al-ijtima‘i. Rabat: Manshurat Dar Abi Raqraq, 2016. Laroui, Abdallah. Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830-1912. Paris: François Maspero, 1977. Laskier, Michael M. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862-1962. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Luccioni, Joseph. “L’avènement de Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef au trône du Maroc,” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 12 (1972). Marglin, Jessica M. Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Miller, Susan Gilson. A History of Modern Morocco. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1995. ———. “Dhimma Reconsidered: Jews, Taxes, and Royal Authority in NineteenthCentury Tangier,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power, and Politics in Morocco, edited by Rahma Bourquia and Susan Gilson Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 103–26. Miyara, Shlomo. Malkhe hesed: seqira ‘al tequfot shilton ha-Islam be-Maroqo, shushelet ha-melakhim ha-‘Alawit me-reshit ha-mamlakhah ha-sharifit le-dorot ‘olam. Elad, 2019 [in Hebrew, Arabic and French]. al-Nasiri, Ahmad b. Khalid. Kitab al-istiqsa’ li-akhbar duwal al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, vol. 9. Casablanca: Dar al-Kitab, 1956. Nordman, Daniel. “Les expéditions de Moulay Hassan,” Hespéris-Tamuda, 19 (1980–1981). Rachik, Hassan. Symboliser la nation: essai sur l’usage des identités collectives au Maroc. Casablanca: Éditions le Fennec, 2003. Rivet, Daniel. Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 1912-1925, 3 vols. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Sasson, Albert. Les Couturiers du Sultan: Itinéraire d’une famille juive marocaine. Récit. Rabat: Marsam, 2007. Schroeter, Daniel. Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. “The Politics of Reform in Morocco: The Writings of Yiṣḥaq Ben Ya‘īsh Halewī in Haṣfirah,” in Misgav Yerushalayim Studies in Jewish Literature, edited by Ephraim Hazan, 73–84. Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1987. ———. “Royal Power and the Economy in Precolonial Morocco: Jews and the Legitimation of Foreign Trade,” in In the Shadow of the Sultan: Culture, Power,

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and Politics in Morocco, edited by Rahma Bourqia and Susan Gilson Miller. Cambridge, MA: Distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. “Vichy in Morocco: The Residency, Mohammed V and His Indigenous Jewish Subjects,” in Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan Katz, Lisa Leff, Maud Mandel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. ———. “Between Metropole and French North Africa: Vichy’s Anti-Semitic Legislation and Colonialism’s Racial Hierarchies,” in The Holocaust and North Africa, edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. ——— and Joseph Chetrit. “Emancipation and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies, 13, 1, 2006. Schwartz, Barry. “Ha-noten Teshuˤah: The Origin of Traditional Jewish Prayer for the Government,” Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986). Sebti, Abdelahad. Ville et figures du charisme. Casablanca: Les Editions Toubkal, 2003. Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979. Toledano, Joseph. Va-yehi be-ʻet ha-mellaḥ: toldot ha-Yehudim be-Maroko me-reshit hityashvutam ṿe-ʻad yamenu. Jerusalem: Ramtol, 1984. Toufiq, Ahmed (Ahmad al-Tawfiq). Al-Mujtamaʻ al- Maghribi fi al-qarn al-tasiʻ ʻashar : Inultan, 1850-1912, 2 vols. Rabat: Kuliyat al-Adab wa-l-‘Ulum al-Insaniya, 1978. ———. “Les Juifs dans la société marocaine au 19e siècle: l’exemple des Juifs de Demnate,” in Juifs du Maroc: identité et dialogue. Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage, 1980. Tozy, Mohamed. “De quelques lieux de la compétition politique au Tazeroualt,” Bulletin Économique et Social du Maroc, nos. 159-160-161 (1987). -------. Monarchie et Islam politique au Maroc. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1999. Urban, Yerri. L’Indigène dans le droit colonial français, 1865-1955. Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de jurisprudence, 2010. Vajda, Georges. Un recueil de textes historiques judéo-marocains. Paris: Larose, 1951. Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews,” in The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, edited by David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014.

Chapter 3

Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef and the Jews of Morocco during the Second World War New Discoveries Joseph Chetrit

INTRODUCTION: RE-EXAMINATION OF SULTAN SIDI MOHAMMED BEN YOUSSEF’S ACTION AND PROTECTION OF MOROCCAN JEWS Myths that Surrounded the Sultan’s Character and Treatment of Moroccan Jews under the Vichy Regime The positions expressed by the Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef (future King Mohammed V, after the independence of Morocco in 1956) with respect to the anti-Semitic Vichy laws applied to Moroccan Jews between 1940 and 19421 and his refusal to authorize these laws until he was forced to, do not cease to inflame the imaginations of Jewish Moroccan expatriates2 for the past thirty-five years, Muslim Moroccan elites too. This glorification of Sultan ben Youssef’s acts in favor of the Jewish community has also been eagerly adopted by the Moroccan establishment3 after Haim Zafrani’s presentation to the Moroccan Royal Academy of a press telegram sent from Morocco to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1941, describing the sultan’s alleged “dissidence” against the protectorate’s anti-Jewish policy.4 As we shall see below, this document was a fabricated telegram that served the Nazi propaganda apparatus that sought to undermine the foundations of French control of Morocco, and cannot be relied on. Present-day social networks also contribute to the perpetuation of Sidi Mohammed’s character as a bold fighter against the Nazi regime and as the Moroccan Jews’ savior.5 In the eyes of his Jewish devotees he should undoubtedly be granted 73

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the honor of being considered one of the Righteous Among the Nations.6 To their great chagrin, Yad Vashem, the institution that grants this honor to those who risked their lives to save Jews, did not consider him worthy of the title. An attempt to compensate for this was carried out in Israel in September 1986 via the naming of an Ashkelon roundabout in the sultan’s honor.7 The memorial stone was unveiled with great enthusiasm and before a massive crowd but radical right-wing lawbreakers, members of the “Kach” party, were quick to remove it during the night following its placement. This glorification of the political and humane actions carried out by Sidi Mohammed was not limited to the lionization of his person and character. It also led to his association with an intense opposition to the Germans and their followers at the Residence-General in Morocco, who planned to force Moroccan Jews to wear yellow stars of David on their clothes.8 Some of his extollers even claimed that he asked to be provided with twenty stars of David for himself and for his family if this directive was eventually enforced.9 On the other hand, and in contradistinction to these lionizations of Sultan Sidi Mohammed’s character with respect to his treatment of the Jews, stands the interview with historian Georges Bensoussan that enjoyed widespread distribution on social networks. During the interview, which was conducted on December 17, 2012, Bensoussan challenged the myth formed around the sultan’s actions and, inter alia, argued that ‟by and large, Sultan Mohammed did not protect the Jews and even promulgated the Jews’ status by way of a Sherifian Dahir.”10 The Sultan’s Actions in Light of Extensive Archival Repositories This chapter does not seek to destroy this heroic character and mythologizing trends concerning the actions of Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef. As social and mental constructs, myths live their lives and develop according to rules and autonomous processes among those who espouse a bona fide belief in their veracity. The chapter seeks to examine Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef’s positions and actions with respect to Moroccan Jews in the Second World War, and to show that the sultan offered a real contribution toward saving Moroccan Jewish property and preventing the ‟Aryanization” that the French High Commissioner of Jewish Affairs sought to implement in Morocco. These acts by the sultan and the political processes they accompanied from October 1940 until the Allies’ landing on the Moroccan coast on November 8, 1942 became clear to me from many documents that scholars of the World War II period have thus far not examined or have not sufficiently analyzed. These documents illuminate the meetings

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Jewish delegations held with the sultan from October 1940 onward, as well as the positions he coordinated, and the decisions he made alongside the Resident-General, General Charles Nogues (1876–1971). These documents are located in French and American archives that have become accessible to scholars only in the past two decades. The main archives we employed in this chapter are: A. The Protectorate Archives at Nantes (Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes), hereafter referred to as CADN. B. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Archives currently situated at La Courneuve (Centre des Archives Diplomatiques La Courneuve), hereafter: CADLN. C. The Maurice Vanikoff Collection at the National Archives of France (Archives Nationales de France, Private Collection Maurice Vanikoff), hereafter: coll. Vanikoff. D. The U.S. State Department Archives whose photographic collection is situated at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, hereafter: USHMM, NARA). Concerning the Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef and the Makhzan, these archives include reports, dispatches, and memoranda that cannot be found in French archives, and especially with respect to the sultan’s positions toward Moroccan Jews and the meetings he held with them between 1940 and 1942. Almost all of the documents mentioned in the chapter can be found in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. However, I examined many of the Nantes and La Courneuve documents in their original venues.11 This chapter proceeds from the central basic premise that the sultan’s policy toward the Jews was handled via a novel and carefully considered use of the Dhimmah conditions that had always governed the lives and status of Moroccan Jews under Islamic rule. These conditions ostensibly disappeared under the principles of French governance as determined by the first French Resident-General, General Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), but reappeared in full force and ambivalence in the formulation of the sultan’s positions toward Moroccan Jews. Moreover, the Dhimmah rules arising from Shariˤa Law were adopted and handled by General Nogues and the sultan as a key governance strategy in their efforts to halt the influence exerted by members of the German and Italian delegations which supervised in Morocco the application of the Armistice conditions signed by France and Germany and sought to worsen the persecution of Moroccan Jews. Given these foundational premises, we will discuss the following issues:

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A. The new uses of the Dhimmah by Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef; B. The appeals made by Moroccan Jews in attempting to gain the sultan’s support and protection, as well as the meetings that took place with him and the one meeting that did not; C. The decisive aid rendered by the sultan in toning down the decrees promulgated in the Second Dahir of August 5, 1941 with respect to the status of the Jews and in preventing the expropriation of Jewish property. RENEWING THE DHIMMAH AS A GOVERNANCE STRATEGY Until the rise of the Vichy government, the leaders of the French government in Morocco who served as Resident-Generals claimed that Morocco’s Jews were emancipated and that their situation had greatly improved with the establishment of the French protectorate in Morocco.12 While Moroccan Jews remained subjects of the sultan, their position was equal to that of the Muslims. This gave rise to a de facto revocation of the Dhimmah status which had heretofore defined the position of the Jews (and Christians) in Morocco, subjecting them to the Sultan’s protection. The poll tax, or Jaziyah, that the Jews formerly paid the sultan, was also revoked. However, the changes the Protectorate’s leaders implemented in Moroccan Jews’ legal status significantly harmed the cultural and legal autonomy Moroccan Jews enjoyed in pre-Protectorate Morocco and placed the Jews under the close supervision of Protectorate institutions. Apart from matters of personal status and inheritance, the rabbinical courts established in 1918 were forbidden from litigating any civil or commercial affair that formerly fell under the Dayanim’s jurisdiction. Individuals seeking to litigate such matters were now referred to the Makhzan courts where they were adjudicated according to Shariˤa laws. Moreover, and insofar as Makhzan personnel were concerned, the Dhimmah principle never stopped existing. It was this principle that guided them in their treatment of the Jews, but they never dared to declare this openly until the passing of Vichy laws. This notwithstanding, Jews were still referred to as Dhimmi in Muslim documents.13 The principle of Dhimmah repeatedly and publicly determined the fate of Moroccan Jews once the Vichy race laws were passed and applied to Moroccan Jews with the encouragement of General Nogues. However, and despite its newer uses, the Dhimmah regime did not lose its inherent ambivalence. On the one hand, it protected the Jews and their property in return for their payment of the Jizya and additional taxes, and—on the other hand—it established their inferiority to Muslims and even coerced them to acknowledge this, behave accordingly, and accept this position’s accompanying

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daily humiliations.14 Thus, on various occasions, the Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef reminded the Jews of their Dhimmah duties and warned them to never fail to obey them. However, on other fateful occasions, the sultan stressed his commitments as a Muslim ruler to maintain the traditions of his forefathers who protected the Jews, and were loved by the Jews in return. The first time the sultan used an official document to establish the Dhimmah’s principles, as well as its duties and constraints on the Jews, was in a Dahir published on January 4, 1941, which forbad the Jews from employing Muslim women in their households. The following was written in the Dahir issued by the Grand Vizier in the name of the sultan: Various sources have provided us Sherifs with notices indicating that many Muslim women are employed as maids in Jewish households. As you all know, this state of affairs violates the dignity of Muslim women and humiliates them. Moreover, it tarnishes their reputation, something which is condemned by our religion and which might lead Jews to hold Muslims in contempt and to forget their position as Dhimmi even though they are in any case forbidden from distancing themselves from their traditional lives lest they be exposed to the dangers they fear and to the limitations whose framework has always delimited their lives.15

In 1935, the Grand Vizier received an anonymous letter of protest from Muslim religious officials from Salé, near Rabat, which raised serious accusations against Jewish homeowners who had allegedly raped Muslim women they employed as servants. These young women then became pregnant, and were forced to discard their newborn children as if they were trash.16 The anonymous letter made the Grand Vizier quite distraught and he consequently asked the Residency to immediately stop the employment of old and young Muslim women in Jewish households. An investigation conducted by the Residency revealed that these accusations were unfounded, that no Moroccan district had reported a similar case, and that the information conveyed in the anonymous letter was false and was written by nationalist circles to defame the Jews and support the nationalists’ religious zeal.17 Moreover, the chief of Municipal Services in Marrakech noted that his predecessor had received a similar appeal from the Pasha of Marrakech in 1930, many years before the anonymous letter was sent to the Grand Vizier.18 The sultan first made his supportive declarations toward the Jews in the meeting which he held with a Jewish delegation that appealed to him for help in the fall of 1940, on the occasion of the passing of the first Jewish status law on October 31, 1940. He repeated them in the summer of 1941 with respect to the risks placed before their property and capital as a result of the passing of the second Jewish status Dahir and its appendices on August 5, 1941. Another

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instance of royal support occurred in the spring or summer of 1942 when a Jewish delegation requested that the sultan undermine the Aryanization plan of the Jewish property that the High Commissioner of Jewish Affairs advanced. The sultan then made his favorable statements on the Jews public on November 18, 1944 during a Throne Festival reception in Rabat, and in April 1945 in Mogador/Essaouira, where he carried out an official visit and received a delegation from the Jewish community.19

THE JEWISH APPEALS AND THEIR MEETINGS WITH THE SULTAN The First Meeting with the Sultan The scholars who have thus far addressed the meetings Jewish delegations had with the Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef for help were mostly concerned with the meetings held in May and June 1942. Later studies based on an examination of the French Protectorate Archives rightfully advanced the Jews’ appeals to the summer of 1941—after the promulgation of the Dahir dated August 5, 1941—and described their objectives and results.20 These, however, did not provide the full picture of the sequence of appeals and attempted meetings that only ended successfully in late September 1941—about a month and a half before the final deadline for the submission of capital declarations. It was this audience that finally convinced the sultan to support the Jews in attempting to change the nature of the capital declarations, and to assure them that their property would remain unharmed, as was indeed the case. But the first meeting a Jewish delegation had with the sultan occurred as earlier as October 1940. A long memorandum dated November 5, 1940, which was sent to the State Department in Washington D.C. provides this earlier date for the first meeting. The meeting was concerned with the declining position of the Jews and the delegation appealed to the sultan to prevent the further deterioration of their position. This meeting was held a short while before the promulgation of the first Dahir on the status of Jews dated October 31, 1940. It determined the close cooperation that existed between the sultan and General Nogues with respect to the anti-Jewish Laws, especially the first Jewish status law of October 31, 1940 and the second Jewish status law of August 5, 1941. The latter law immeasurably worsened the first law’s terms and removed the Jews from liberal professions (while setting a 2% numerus clausus), prestigious positions of public influence, and the business sector and commerce, excluding retail and small-scale handicrafts. This first meeting also indicated the two leaders’ pattern of behavior with respect to the community leaders’ appeals.

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A detailed description of this first meeting appears in the memorandum written by Michael El Khazen21 of the American Consulate in Casablanca, concerning the characteristics and feelings of the various Moroccan populations—the Berbers, the Arabs, the Jews, and the French—months after General Nogues declared his allegiance to Marshal Pétain and the Vichy government in June 1940. By making this decision, Nogues reluctantly accepted the harsh conditions the Germans imposed on France in the armistice agreement the parties signed on June 20, 1940. Among other things, this agreement considered French Morocco (alongside the other French colonies) a part of Free France and in fact subordinated Morocco’s economy and natural resources via the agricultural and industrial supplies it provided to the Vichy government, which, in turn, surrendered part of it to Germany. El-Khazen’s memorandum also provides an extensive discussion of Jewish affairs as well as of the fears that had begun to spread among Moroccan Jews. Among other things, he relates that Jews make up a mere 2 percent of the native population, but engage in about 50 percent of commercial activities and own about 80 percent of the nation’s wealth alongside the French. They also serve as the Muslim population’s bankers, including the sultan. About a week after the Residency held its discussion on its treatment of the Jews according to the Vichy anti-Jewish law of October 2, 1940, a Jewish delegation arrived to present the sultan with a customary gift, as well as present their argument to him while expressing their personal loyalty to him. After hearing the delegation, the sultan asked his secretary, Sidi Mohammed Mammeri, to accompany the delegation to General Nogues’s office and to let the latter know on behalf of the sultan “that the Jews were the faithful servants of his glorious father and ancestors and, therefore, to let them alone.” The sultan’s words could indicate that Moroccan-born Jews should be treated like Muslim subjects and that the sultan was not interested in non-Moroccan-born Jews. After describing this meeting, El-Khazen added that It is believed that the Jews waited on his Majesty at the secret instigation of General Nogues, as it is evident that the Resident General desired by this move to shelter himself by the Majesty’s authority, and thus to throw dust in the eyes of the Italo-German Commission of Control, and more especially to enhance the position of His Majesty the Sultan, who is now represented as being the sole responsible authority in the French Zone.22

This pattern of consultation between General Nogues and the sultan was carried out regularly, as the Jews’ appeals to the sultan show. As noted in the El-Khazen memorandum, both rulers needed each other. Nogues used the sultan’s authority as a shield against the pressures of the GermanItalian commission23 sent to Morocco to supervise the armistice conditions,

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and especially the prohibition on developing the French army that was deployed in Morocco. Committee members also closely monitored the supply of fresh fruit, cereals, and minerals. Nogues also regarded the sultan as a shield against the Vichy government and its extreme right-wing loyalists in Morocco that demanded an extremely meticulous implementation of the anti-Jewish laws. Moreover, Nogues was indebted to the sultan since the latter advised the Vichy government to keep Nogues as Resident-General despite the latter’s initial hesitancy about pledging his allegiance to Marshal Pétain. This protective stance of Nogues would recur after the Allied landing in Morocco on November 8, 1942 with the beginning of a policy of purging Vichy collaborators. After General Giraud and General de Gaulle agreed on June 3, 1943 to joint control from their Algiers headquarters, they decided to remove Nogues. The sultan, in turn, depended on Nogues to secure his position as the overall ruler of French Morocco, as well as to expand the authority of the Makhzan government and the appointment of the sultan’s representatives. This special relationship between the sultan and General Nogues is described extensively in a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State sent by the U.S. Consul General in Casablanca on May 7, 1942. Among other things, the Consul describes a conversation he held with a person close to the sultan. This person told the Consul that the sultan had been in high spirits for quite some time since he felt that he was no longer the Resident-General’s protégé and that it was now Nogues who enjoyed the sultan’s protection. The sultan advised the Vichy government to extend Nogues’s appointment on at least two occasions in order to prevent rioting among Moroccan Muslims. As a result, the sultan was able to obtain whatever he desired from Nogues, including an increase in his Civil List funding and an expansion of his authority with respect to the appointment of Makhzan Pashas, Caids, and Qadis.24 The Meeting That Did Not Take Place The preparation for the second Dahir of August 5, 1941 on the Jews’ status and the regulations for its implementation, as well as the organization of the associated Jewish property census gave rise to many coordination and consultation meetings between the two rulers. Among other things, these meetings resulted from repeated appeals by the Jews for the sultan’s support, that finally convinced the latter to take action and protect their property and capital. Apart from these very documented meetings, there were references to an additional meeting between the Jews and the sultan that never took place but was rather fabricated by German propaganda agents in order to defame both

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the sultan and General Nogues. This propaganda maneuver was accomplished via a telegram sent to the Vichy government from Morocco. A meticulous examination of the relevant archival records reveals that the telegram did not evoke any reaction at the time. However, it did provoke much public interest 45 years later when it had been mistakenly construed as describing an event that had allegedly occurred. The telegram was supposedly sent by the French news agency Agence Française d’Information (A.F.I.),25 was sent to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs26 and was dated May 24, 1941. It was sent by the agency’s reporter René Touraine, and included a dramatic story entitled “Dissidence . . . a change in the sultan of Morocco’s position toward the French authorities.” Touraine also reported word of support allegedly uttered by the sultan with respect to the Jews at the most recent Fête du Trône and within earshot of the French representatives as well as in the presence of a Jewish delegation. In the following, Touraine describes the circumstances of the sultan’s statement: This was the first time the sultan invited the representatives of the Jewish community and had them prominently seated at the best places and directly adjacent to the official French representatives. The Sultan also took care to personally introduce the Jewish figures that were present. When the French representatives expressed their bewilderment with the presence of Jews at this gathering, the Sultan declared audibly that “I wholeheartedly disagree with the new antiSemitic laws and I refuse to join a resolution I do not agree with. I would like to have you know that, as was the case in the past, the Jews remain under my protection and I will not have any distinctions made between my subjects.”

In closing the story, Touraine noted that “this sensational statement was actively discussed throughout the French and native population.”27 There are many inconsistencies which suggest that this story did not take place but rather was fabricated to serve the Nazi propaganda apparatus (which operated the French news agency as part of its international propaganda network). What are these inconsistencies, then? First, the statement was allegedly made during the Fête du Trône festival, which is celebrated on November 18, while the reported alleged incident describes the Festival of Mawlid (marking the birth of the Prophet Muhammad), which was celebrated in May in 1941. Second, a short video filmed during that year’s Mawlid Festival by the French Ministry of Information (and which is currently available on YouTube) clearly shows the sultan on his way to the mosque in his royal carriage, accompanied by his massive entourage. Toward the end of the video, the narrator notes that “The sultan rode on horseback to his palace, where Morocco’s district leaders and dignitaries assembled to express their

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feelings of respect and loyalty to the Sultan and France.”28 Nota Bene—this report stresses the feelings of loyalty to the sultan and to France and the reception’s festivity that were certainly not marred by any extraordinary declaration by the sultan. Third, the document folder containing the telegram contains no other document which relates either closely or distantly to the telegram’s content. Fourth, among the hundreds of Protectorate documents at Nantes that are available for examination and which discuss the Residency’s policy toward Moroccan Jews in 1941 there is no evidence that supports the content of the telegram. If such statements were actually made by the sultan, they would certainly have exerted a great impact among Residency leaders and officials, as did in fact happen at a later point in time, and would have evoked a political scandal. Indeed, statements made by the sultan with respect to the Jews months and years later attracted a great deal of attention among Residency leaders and were mentioned in their respective document collections from various sources. It is therefore very perplexing why they remained silent with respect to the bold statements allegedly made by the sultan during the spring of 1941. Furthermore, the sultan signed anti-Jewish Dahirs in October 1940 and was decisive about issuing the January 1941 decree prohibiting the employment of Muslim women in Jewish households. Moreover, the sultan was not asked to sign any additional anti-Jewish Dahirs before the second half of July that year since the new Vichy decrees on the status of Jews were only promulgated in June 2, 1941 and were updated in Morocco by way of various Dahirs on August 5, 1941. On the other hand, there is no evidence suggesting such dramatic statements by the sultan in the reports of American diplomats, who were aware of any event, however insignificant, in Morocco’s dual government. These inconsistencies support the argument that the reported event did not occur. According to documents which can be examined in the La Courneuve folder under discussion, it stands to reason that this message was sent, such as earlier anonymous documents that were received by the Vichy government, by fascist and radical elements among the French settlers in Morocco. These sought to defame General Nogues in the eyes of the Vichy authorities on account of his allegedly lenient policy toward members of the Makhzan led by the sultan, Muslims, and Jews. They sought to lead to his removal from his position so that he could be replaced by a member of the extreme right who would be able to keep Morocco’s Muslim and Jewish population on a short leash.29 The headline, ‟Dissidence,” given to the story by the telegram’s sender is also telling. It refers to an important event that reverberated widely in Morocco and among Vichy circles, and which was still a cause for concern among Vichy supporters in Morocco in May 1941. This event was the arrest of three de Gaulle supporters who landed secretly in Agadir on September 21,

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1940. Their arrest led to the exposure of Gaullist sleeper cells in Morocco, and especially in Casablanca among Czechoslovakian immigrants, and to the placing of their members on trial in military courts for treason and subversion, where they were sentenced to long periods of imprisonment.30 By using this headline, the sender of this story creates a connection between this serious event and the sultan’s allegedly criminal behavior in expressing his sympathy and concern for Jews in clear opposition to Vichy policy. The report’s tone further suggests that what made the incident more severe is that the Residency officials who heard the sultan’s subversive statements, did not take any punitive measures against the sultan—suggesting that ResidentGeneral Nogues was cooperating with the sultan and acting against the Vichy government’s declared policy. As we saw in the opening of this chapter, this false document has currently been transformed into decisive proof of the boldness, sublimity, and dedication in Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef’s actions for saving Morocco’s Jews from the anti-Semitic decrees imposed on them by the Vichy government and implemented by the Protectorate. This error of interpretation that arose from the absence of a meticulous archival examination of the document, thus created the myth surrounding the sultan and his position toward the Jews.31 The Attempts at Securing Meetings between Moroccan Jews and the Sultan during the Summer of 1941 The Jews of Morocco, who were already inured to the Race Laws of October 31, 1940, were alarmed by the second decree on the status of the Jews that was published in France on June 2, 1941, forcing the Jews to submit a declaration of the full extent of their assets. They knew that the Residency intended to apply it to Morocco’s Jews. They also knew that the original Vichy decree led to the expropriation of French Jews’ property and expected that the implementation of this decree in Morocco would harm them, too. They also expected the capital declarations to lead, at the very least, to heavy taxation of their capital and property by the French authorities subjected to the Vichy government, heavily pressured by Nazi Germany. Thus, the heads of the large Jewish communities in Morocco did not wait until the promulgation of the Residency’s new and dangerous Dahir. They sent General Nogues a heartfelt letter in which they implored him not to promulgate the new law, which could utterly ruin Jewish businesses in Morocco and bring down the Moroccan economy, given the significant involvement of Jews in the commercial sector. Their letter also reminded the Resident-General of the Expulsion of Jews from Spain, when Jewish Spanish exiles found refuge in Morocco even as another group of

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exiles found refuge in France. They also stressed the traditional distance Moroccan Jews maintained from all matters of government and politics and their loyalty to France and to the Sultan. They also expressed the intense anxiety of Morocco’s Jews as a result of the new Vichy law, and implored him to prevent their impending catastrophe.32 The Contrôleur Civil Général of Casablanca had passed the community leaders’ letter to Nogues, who responded to it more than a month after its receipt, on July 26, 1941. His response expresses his pleasure with the writers’ loyalty toward their protector nation, and noted that the ResidenceGeneral distinguishes between Jews with French citizenship and Jews who ‟have been part of Morocco’s populations for centuries” insofar as the new law was concerned. He added that ‟the Jewish community’s request was passed to the Makhzan, who cooperated with the Residence-General in formulating the Second Law on the Status of the Jews.”33 In late June, word was out that the Residence-General was preparing a Dahir that would apply the French decree to Morocco’s Jews. The Residence-General deliberated this with the head of the Makhzan, the sultan’s Grand Vizier Al-Hajji Mohammed El Mokri, in order to prepare the text for the sultan’s signature. According to information given by the American Consul General in Casablanca,34 El Mokri, both of his own initiative and on behalf of the sultan, opposed the passage of the new law and raised two arguments to this end: (1) The March 31, 1912 Protectorate Agreement imbues the sultan with full jurisdiction with respect to Moroccan religious affairs, and (2) Moroccan Jews were the sultan’s subjects, and their status was determined according to the Shariˤa and Dhimmah laws which had existed since the reign of the Caliph ‛Umar ibn al-Khattab, and any decision pertaining to the fate of Morocco’s Jews is an unacceptable intervention in religious affairs. Moreover, the sultan had already ordered a meeting of the ˤUlamа̄ˀ [Oulema] Council, a group of religious scholars with great influence on Moroccan political life, and expressed his negative position concerning the planned Dahir. Seven of the eight council members agreed with him. A meeting between the ResidentGeneral and the sultan was then scheduled for July 11 to discuss the Dahir, but the Resident-General was in Casablanca for the day. The sultan took advantage of this opportunity in order to meet with local Muslim leaders, including the powerful Pasha of Marrakech, Al-Hajji Thami El Glawi (1879-1956), regarding the Dahir. These leaders also agreed with the sultan. It was then proposed that the Residence-General would issue its own decree that would only apply the French decree to the French Jews who had settled in Morocco, while the sultan would issue a Dahir like that issued by the Bey of Tunis,35 one that would coerce Moroccan Jews to report their assets, but resolved that this plan would not be advanced

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for the time being. Moreover, and during meetings held in the course of July 1941 with Jewish delegations in Fès and Meknes, the sultan promised he would do his utmost to help, a statement which was understood as his intention to not pass the Law.36 A senior Residence-General official attests to the ‟heated talks” between the Residence-General and Makhzan leaders in an August 12, 1941 letter addressed to the director of the Bureau of Political Affairs with respect to the employment of Muslim women in Jewish households, to explain the failure to advance his handling of the matter. The official wrote that: I find support for my conduct, unless otherwise instructed by the ResidentGeneral, in the concern which was constantly expressed by the Makhzan in the course of the recent discussions on the status of the Jews, which were often heated, and its opposition to Muslims being subordinated, in some form or other, to the Jews or dependent on them. This principled position gave rise to difficulties with respect to the section in the Status of Jews Law which concerns commercial and industrial occupations.37

Was this new Dahir coordinated between General Nogues and the sultan regarding both the content and the appendices of the Dahir, as well as with respect to the expectation that the Jews would object, as they did to the Dahir dated October 31, 1940? The first matter is clearly attested to by the Residence-General official’s testimony concerning the “heated talks” about the new Dahir which took place between the Residence-General and the Makhzan. As for the Jews’ appeals, Consul-General implied in his letter of July 17 that as a matter of fact, it was Nogues who initiated this appeal, when he mentioned in his response the discussions with the head of the Makhzan. By so doing, Nogues also indicated that the Jews should appeal to the sultan to protect their property and capital, and that he [Nogues] was not interested in a strict implementation of the Dahir as instructed by the Vichy government. Russell wrote that: It would appear that, prompted by various considerations, especially that the economic elimination of the Jews from the business of this country would in the near future very seriously affect and curtail French economic interests and standing (which included Jewish assets), the Resident General confidentially suggested to M. Allouche, Inspector of the Counselor of the Shereefian Government, the finding and reporting of the position and sentiment of the Jews, or, in other words, the concerting of some appropriate action with the Jewish communities.38

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THE ROLE OF SULTAN SIDI MOHAMMED BEN YOUSSEF IN MODERATING THE DECREES OF THE SECOND LAW ON THE STATUS OF JEWS The Sacrifices of Bulls and the Final Intervention of the Sultan for Attenuating the Harsh Regulations The Dahir concerning the new status of the Jews escalated the decrees provided in the first Dahir on the status of the Jews from October 31, 1940, sharpened the definition of Jews and expanded the proscription prohibiting them from engaging in any occupation other than small-scale trade and traditional handicrafts. Its promulgation on August 5, 1941 removed any hopes the Jews entrusted to the sultan. For them, the latter could not withstand the pressure applied on the Makhzan by Nogues, with whom he maintained friendly relations, and this led him to sign the new Dahir. But, he would later argue that the formulation of the law he approved and signed is not identical to the French-language version as published in the new law. Despite their disappointment, the Jews did not despair, and decided to initiate new meetings with the sultan in order to apprise him of the gravity of the situation and of what might happen to their livelihoods and to the Moroccan economy in general if the law was implemented as written. To this end, the Jews revived the ˤĀr tradition that was practiced in Morocco in earlier centuries—primarily in the Berber periphery that was not usually governed by the Makhzan—and conducted ‟ritual protective sacrifices.” They slaughtered bulls near government sites and religiously significant Muslim sites to mark their subordination to the ruler and to appeal to his protection. The first to engage in such a sacrifice were the Jews of Rabat, most likely as early as August 1941. According to a memorandum written by the U.S. vice-consul in Casablanca, Philip Bagby, and based on reliable testimonies, the Jews of Rabat were assisted by a Jewish tailor who worked at the sultan’s palace and who probed whether the sultan would agree to receive the sacrifices.39 He did in fact agree. In order to officially petition for the meeting, the Rabat Jews sacrificed two bulls near the sultan’s palace and simultaneously submitted a request for a meeting, which the sultan accepted. During the meeting at the sultan’s palace, these Jews described their desperate position and implored him to maintain the protection his predecessors as rulers of Morocco had granted the Jewish population. They also claimed that all the foreign Jews who settled in Morocco, apart from the French Jews, were protected by foreign powers who sheltered them from the Vichy government and its Residence-General followers’ anti-Semitic laws. However, the Jews of Morocco, who were the sultan’s subjects, could not rely on anything except the mercy of the sultan and his sense of justice.

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They provided the sultan with a detailed description of the severe measures of the law which were intended to destroy their livelihoods. The sultan was impressed by their arguments and asked them to provide him with a detailed memorandum on what they told him, and the Rabat Jews obliged. The Jewish witness who related these events to the U.S. vice-consul also told him that the French police interrogated the delegation’s leaders about the meeting and its proceedings, but did not take any punitive measures against them. Another Jewish witness informed the vice-consul about the Jews of Fès, who appealed to the sultan through a Jewish court jeweler who worked at the sultan’s palace. The sultan did not reject them, but told them he must discuss the matter with the Resident-General. In order to have grounds for a meeting with Nogues, he asked the Jews of Fès to offer a sacrifice for his protection near his palace while he was in his Fès palace. The sultan’s arrival in Fès was delayed again and again, and the Jewish community began to grow desperate. They sent a delegation to Casablanca, where the sultan was staying at the time, and tried to convince the leaders of the Casablanca Jewish community to join them in a sacrifice ceremony in Casablanca. But the Casablanca Jews were afraid to carry out the ceremony. The Fès Jews returned to their homes and appealed for the assistance of the sultan’s mother, who lived in Fès, with respect to the sacrifice ceremony. They reached her via a Jewish confidante who maintained close friendly relations with her and asked for her advice. The sacrifice ceremony was photographed, and pictures later reached the sultan himself. The Jewish witness added that the Muslims did not hate the Jews and that Muslims provided advance notice to the Jews about closing their shops in anticipation of the riots that took place in the city [Fès].40 The sacrifice ceremonies that took place in Fès were also recorded in the French newspaper La Vigie Marocaine, published in Casablanca. A story published on September 2, 1941, related that the leaders of the Fès Jewish community held a ‟picturesque” ceremony called a ‟Zuagga,” [Zwāga] including a sacrifice made in order to appeal for the protection of a ruler or dignitary, early the previous morning at four different sites in the city. They slaughtered one bull near the gate of the sultan’s palace—in order to appeal for the protection of the sultan’s mother and that of the Sherifian family. Agreeing to the sacrifice and the distribution of the bull’s meat to the poor meant an acceptance of the appeal for protection. They sacrificed another bull near the mausoleum adjacent to the sultan’s father’s grave. In the ‟Medinah,” the old Muslim quarter, they slaughtered two additional bulls near the Moulay Idriss Grand Mosque41 to appeal to the protection of the holy ruler’s descendants, who also agreed to the sacrifice. They also waited near the sultan’s palace to deliver a petition to the sultan (who was not in the city, as noted), but the sultan’s Khalifa asked them to return to their homes.42

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A further testimony was presented in a memorandum written by the viceconsul based on the words of a diplomat at the U.S. Consulate-General in Casablanca who was well versed in the lifestyle of Moroccan Muslims. This diplomat stated that an additional sacrifice was held in Fès after the sultan returned to the city. The sultan agreed to the sacrifice and ordered that the meat be distributed to the poor to mark his acceptance of the appeal for protection. This ceremony took place near the Moulay Abdallah mausoleum which contained the graves of the sultan’s father and other sultans. He added that the sultan apparently received the Resident-General’s word about not implementing the decrees of the August 5, 1941 Dahir on the status of the Jews.43 In another memorandum dealing with the same issue and dated December 13, 1941, the U.S. Consul-General in Casablanca noted that: His Excellency the Sultan received the Jewish delegation in Fès that awaited his arrival after holding sacrifice ceremonies in his honor in Fès and in other locations and without any French officials present; that His Excellency told the delegation that the Dahir which was published was not the one he saw, signed, sealed, and approved for publication, and that he would not allow even the equivalent of a small silver coin to be removed from the Jews’ assets. Knowledgeable circles have made it known that the Sultan had made this statement known to the Resident-General in advance.44

The sacrifice and the meeting probably took place at the end of September 1941, and after the promulgation of the Grand Vizier’s regulations of September 19 for the implementation of the August 5,1941 Dahir. These regulations detailed the harsh terms for the implementation of this Dahir without altering its destructive objective and without keeping the sultan’s promises. In order to openly display their increasing anxieties and to convince the sultan to act more decisively toward the French government, the Jews of Fès once again slaughtered and sacrificed bulls near the entrances of the sultan’s palaces as a mark of submission and a request for the sultan’s protection driven by a sense of clear and present danger. The sultan held another meeting with a delegation of Jews from Rabat. As conveyed by the Consul-General’s aforementioned memorandum, the sultan told the delegation that the promulgated text of the regulations was not the one he agreed to and that he would act to moderate the regulations. The sultan kept his promise and reached an understanding with General Nogues with respect to the moderation of the economic decrees imposed on Morocco’s Jews. This course of events surrounding the implementation of the law is also confirmed by a memorandum sent to the U.S. Secretary of State in Washington D.C. by the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier on November 10, 1941.45 Elsewhere in the memorandum, Chargé

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d’Affaires Childs added that there are various reports on what the sultan told the Fès Jewish delegation during his meeting with them. Some noted that the sultan led the Fès delegation to understand that the French-language formulation of the Dahir, the one that was promulgated, was not the same as the one he approved and signed. Others related that the sultan apparently understood that the Dahir would only apply to the French Jews residing in Morocco and not to the Moroccan Jews who were the sultan’s subjects. In any case, the Jews left the meeting secure in the knowledge that the sultan would do everything in his power in order to soften the Dahir’s regulations and to thwart its implementation. Childs proceeded to note the following: It does indeed seem apparent that the Sultan has taken action with respect to the Moroccan Jews’ concerns. As it turns out, members of the Casablanca Jewish Community’s Executive Committee were summoned to meet the Casablanca Civil Inspector [Contrôleur Civil] General on October 21, 1941, where the latter notified them that contrary to the language of the law which required them to submit a full inventory of all their assets of whatever kind [. . .] the French Residence-General had resolved to exempt Moroccan Jews from declaring their jewelry, their personal residences and their bank account. However, they were legally required to submit lists of their real estate assets as well as inventories of merchandise and the particulars of any stocks they owned. The Civil Inspector General added that the Residence General was aware of the fact that the Jews were smuggling their capital, and that its punitive measures would not only harm the Jewish smugglers, but also the Jewish community as a whole.46

However, the U.S. Consul-General in Casablanca reported again the same affairs to the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier in a letter dated December 13, 1941. Among other things, he related that the Casablanca Contrôleur Civil General summoned the leaders of the local Jewish community to his office on October 21, 1941, and let them know that “His Excellency the Sultan has delightfully and willfully exempted the Jews from including their private property, jewelry, and bank account in their capital declarations, and that an investigation was opened with respect to the flight of Jewish capital.” Nota Bene—it was not the French Residence-General that exempted the Jews as was previously reported, but the sultan himself.47 This matter of the sultan’s opposition to a sweeping implementation of the sections of the August 5, 1941 Dahir and the regulations for its implementation that were later promulgated with respect to the Moroccan Jews’ property and capital was repeatedly raised in various reports sent to the U.S. Secretary of State by the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier. In a letter dated September 23, 1942, that is, about a year following the promulgation of the Dahir’s regulations implementation, and after returning from a visit to Rabat,

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Chargé d’Affaires Childs wrote that he heard again from a senior official at General Nogues’s office that the law’s application to Moroccan Jews shall be as minimal as possible given the sultan’s opposition to the persecution of his Jewish subjects.48 In an earlier letter, dated February 24, 1942, Childs claimed that Residence-General officials were not eager to implement the anti-Jewish laws that the Axis powers had imposed on them since their implementation would harm the Moroccan economy.49 The actions of the Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef in moderating the harsh terms regarding the Jews’ capital declarations were not restricted to American diplomatic reports. They also appear in correspondence between senior Residence-General officials and French Contrôleurs Civils after the Dahir’s promulgation and until the declaration submission deadline, that is, November 8, 1941, and even subsequently. However, Residence-General leaders did not delay in implementing the census of Jews and Jewish assets. The binding Dahir about the census was promulgated alongside the main law. On August 16, 1941, the ResidenceGeneral secretariat sent a request to the head of the Direction des Affaires Politiques where the latter was asked to pass instructions to the heads of controlled regions of French Morocco. These officials were asked to inform the Jews about the capital and asset declarations they would be required to submit within three months. They were also required to examine the manner of organizing the tasks execution and to establish a committee of ResidenceGeneral department heads for the purpose of determining the content and form of said declarations.50 A press release was then dispatched in order to inform the Jews about the duty to submit the declarations within three months. The press release also contained detailed instructions about the asset section of the report: the nature of the stocks and the types of securities; the real estate assets, including city buildings and rural structures; a short listing of the merchandise in a business based on lists or on the latest inventory report. The press release made it clear that all assets must be included in the declaration with no exceptions.51 On August 21, 1941, the head of the Direction des Affaires Politiques informed the heads of the controlled regions of French Morocco that he was about to send them packets of forms for Moroccan and non-Moroccan Jews. He asked them to have the Jews under their control come to their offices and collect the forms, fill them in meticulously and clearly and return them to the respective head of region. After collecting the declarations by November 5, 1941, the heads of regions were required to return them to their sender in a single batch.52 In an additional circular dated September 9, 1941, the head of the Direction des Affaires Politiques explains that the forms’ delivery was delayed since the French government, that is to say, the Vichy government, provided the ResidenceGeneral with a different set of forms should be the ones distributed. He added

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that the new French language form was valid for both Moroccan Jewish and non-Moroccan Jewish subjects, while the Arabic language tools were simpler and were intended for rural communities who were poor and did not speak French. ‟Once the census is completed, he told them, all declarations are to be collected and placed in your offices, but for the time being [emphasis in the original—JC] send me the number of declarations according to the following classification: private citizens (non-merchants), merchants (with no partners), companies. A separate classification should be made for Moroccan Jews and for Jews who are not Moroccan subjects. In addition, I ask you to send me—if necessary—a list of Jews who did not submit their declarations.”53 After this detailed letter, influenced by the Vichy government, changes in the instructions’ language can be observed. In a telegram Resident-General Nogues sent to the Casablanca Contrôleur Civil and to conrôleurs civils in other districts on October 4, 1941, he informed his recipients of the changes made to the requirements pertaining to Moroccan Jews submitting declarations ‟in order to make it easier for them to complete their asset declarations,” while retaining the former instructions for Jews who were not Moroccan subjects. The changes were as follows: apart from identifying details and marital status, Jews with total assets valued at less than 50,000 Francs are not required to declare in detail their property and capital; in addition, they are not required to declare furniture, clothing, and jewelry. Jews with assets valued at more than 50,000 francs will be required to complete a simpler property declaration that would include real estate—type of property, condition, and total value; other assets: commercial businesses: type of asset, condition, and total value of merchandise; capital assets: bank accounts, loans, partnerships.54 Moreover, and in order to appease the Moroccan Jews with regard to the declarations, a November 1, 1941 telegram from the head of the Direction des Affaires Politiques to the heads of the controlled regions required the latter to ‟urgently inform the [Jewish] communities of the easing [‘atténuation’] of Jewish asset declarations as communicated by the Resident-General’s telegram of October 4, 1941.”55 The Director sent this telegram to the heads of regions after talking to them on the phone.56 What happened between September 9, 1941, when the stricter, Vichyinspired letter was sent, and the notice of mitigation sent on October 4, 1941? This is nothing but a result of the sultan’s commitment to keeping the promise he made to the Jews of Fès in the meeting he granted them in late September 1941, as well as a result of the understandings he reached with General Nogues on this matter—as noted above. According to a knowledgeable Residence-General officer,57 the sultan’s intervention in the declaration’s content and its softening occurred after September 22, 1941, when a sacrificial offering of two bulls was made in his honor near the Makhzan building in Rabat.

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The Aversion to the Aryanization of Moroccan Jewish Property As was the case in France, the Moroccan Jews’ capital declarations were to allow Vichy government officials and their Moroccan collaborators to facilitate locating Jewish magnates and property owners so that they could eventually confiscate their property after ousting them from their positions. The issue of Moroccan Jewish wealth was of great interest to the Vichy authorities, and Resident-General Nogues was asked to report the value of Jewish capital held in bank accounts to Vichy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Darlan, in November 1941 after the Jews had completed their property declarations. Nogues’s November 1941 response noted that the forms’ data was still being processed, and that he would deliver the information concerning the capital in Jewish accounts once inspections were complete and once comparisons had been made between the amounts declared and the amounts actually present in the banks.58 Elsewhere in the same letter, Nogues responded to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ offer to also apply a regulation blocking Jews’ bank accounts in Morocco, as implemented in France. Nogues argued that the implementation of such a regulation would inflict great harm on Morocco’s economy and to its rationed supplies since most of the trade activities were concentrated in Jewish hands. He also noted that such a resolution would create panic in a very sensitive population and lead to the flight of Jewish capital. Such a measure would also harm the campaign Nogues initiated for the return of Jewish capital from Tangier to Morocco; Nogues did in fact manage to return some of this capital to Morocco through threats and severe penalties. He did not therefore recommend the application of the blocking regulation to Moroccan Jews.59 Moreover, the High Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Xavier Vallat (1891–1972), had visited North Africa as early as mid-August 1941 in order to have a closer look at how the anti-Jewish Vichy laws were being applied to the Jews of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. While visiting Morocco, he met representatives of the Fès Jewish community and cynically stated that the new Vichy laws did not arise from a desire to persecute the Jews but rather from a desire to introduce order to the Jewish economy.60 Before leaving Morocco on August 20, 1941, Vallat issued a press release about his meeting with the sultan, and noted that he was pleased that the sultan and the Resident-General agreed on the Jewish problem in Morocco. As for the application of the economic decrees on the Jews of Morocco, Vallat added that “the Sultan confirmed the meaning of the Dahirs that were promulgated after receiving his signature. That is to say, that he would keep on implementing them insofar as they offer benefits rather than harms.”61 Vallat offered no further explanation of this statement, but the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires who

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reported this to the State Department noted that Vallet’s statements indicate that the sultan signed the anti-Jewish Dahirs because he was pressured to do so, and that Vallat was concerned that the sultan still opposed the Dahir.62 Once he returned to Paris, Vallat acted urgently to have representatives of the Commissariat Général of Jewish Affairs, which he led at the Vichy Ministry of the Interior, appointed in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, in order to supervise the meticulous implementation of the anti-Jewish laws and report the measures taken by the leaders of the French colonial governments. He also intended to have his representatives promote the program seeking to expropriate Jewish property from its legal Jewish owners and have it transferred to temporary administrators (‟Administrateurs Provisoires”) who could sell it without receiving the permission of its owners. There was no problem appointing such a representative in Algeria since the Vichy government controlled it as directly as it controlled the other districts of Southern France’s unoccupied zone. Indeed, the expropriation program was fully implemented in Algeria, and dozens of temporary administrators were appointed to control Jewish buildings and companies. In Tunisia, the French Resident-General, Admiral of the Fleet Jean-Pierre Esteva (1880–1951), adamantly refused to admit Vallat’s representative and claimed that he was capable of handling the implementation of Vichy laws on his own. In Morocco, General Nogues initially refused to admit Vallat’s representative, but the Vichy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Darlan, eventually forced Nogues to admit that the representative’s pay and expenses were funded by Vallat’s office. He also assigned the representative to an office in a remote corner of the Protectorate building in order to distance him from the business of governance at the Residence-General and required that any of the representative’s correspondence with the main office in Paris be conducted through him [Nogues].63 Despite working in such adverse conditions, representative Jacques de Lernonville managed to send regular reports to Vallat about events at the Residence-General, and did whatever he could to promote the program seeking to ‟Aryanize” Moroccan Jewish property. As was the case in the other French districts, representative de Lernonville also received all the laws, regulations, and resolutions pertaining to the expropriation of Jewish property from Vallat’s office. In addition, he also received the candidacies of French citizens from Algeria and France who sought appointments as temporary administrators of such property, but asked them to be patient until their employment in Morocco could be finalized.64 Eventually, and shortly before his final return to Paris in early July 1942 as requested by Vallat’s successor, the notoriously anti-Semitic Darquier de Pellepoix (1897–1980), de Lernonville had to write to the last candidate and inform him that there was

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no plan to appoint temporary administrators of Jewish property in Morocco.65 And indeed, no Moroccan Jewish property, apart from some Jewish-owned real estate and customs agencies, was ever expropriated by the Residence.66 What, then, prevented the advancement of the planned Aryanization of Jewish property in Morocco? This was another plan which was undermined by the cooperation between Resident-General Nogues and the sultan—not only in order to protect Jewish property, but first and foremost to prevent the collapse of the Moroccan economy given the fact that the Jewish controlled about 60 percent of wholesale and retail trade in Morocco. Whenever the Vichy government or Vallat pressed him, Nogues repeatedly argued that the elimination of Jewish property would critically harm the Moroccan economy and that the sultan adamantly refused to harm any Jewish property. On April 20, 1942, the Secretary-General of the Protectorate contacted Residency-General department and section heads and sought their opinions on the application of the new anti-Jewish laws passed by the Vichy government since June 2, 1941 with respect to France’s Jewish economy, and including the laws permitting the transfer of Jewish property to temporary administrators to Morocco.67 Almost all department heads demanded a professional and detailed analysis of the capital declarations submitted by Morocco’s Jews before any decision pertaining to the passing of new laws was made. In a long and well-reasoned letter, the head of the Direction des Affaires Politiques argued that it was not appropriate for the time being to discuss any new Dahirs which might have disastrous consequences for the Jewish economy in particular and the Moroccan economy in general. Such a situation was inevitable given the economic roles of Moroccan Jews which supplemented of those of Moroccan Muslims and given that Morocco was in fact taking part in satisfying France’s own.68 In his July 11, 1942 response69, the French Advisor to the Sherifian Government who maintained close relations with the sultan and the Grand Vizier used the same arguments and further noted that foreign influences would not be late in coming in the case of a population at the risk of losing its resources. Finally, the Advisor predicted that the Makhzan would oppose the implementation of these decisions due to the traditional protection the sovereign rulers had afforded to ‟the people of the book” according to the spirit and words of the Quran. The sultan was consistent in keeping the promise he made to the Jews in September and October 1941, not allowing even a penny to be taken from their property. This is another case where the documentation indicating the sultan’s behavior can be found in the U.S. State Department Archives.70 In May and June 1942, Jewish delegations visited the sultan again, but for the purpose of expressing their gratitude for his successful efforts in their favor.71

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CONCLUSION: THE SULTAN’S RATIONALIZED AND EMPATHETIC POLICY TOWARD MOROCCO’S JEWS Many Jewish delegations had met the sultan between October 1940 and June 1942. They appealed for his help, shared their troubles with him, asked his intervention, convinced him to act, and then thanked him for what he had done for the Jews. The members of these delegations must never have even considered the fact that General Nogues also played a part in the sultan’s success. As revealed by the reports of U.S. diplomats, it was Nogues who in fact initiated the Jews’ appeals to the sultan with regard to the Dahirs and who pushed the Jews to request a meeting with the sultan to appeal for his help. After meeting him and pleading for his intervention in their favor, the sultan’s appeals served Nogues as a worthy political and religious shield against the pressures of the Vichy government, of the German delegation that supervised events in Morocco, and of the extreme right and the French semi-military organizations which pledged their loyalty to Marshal Pétain. It is very doubtful that the sultan would have been able to help Morocco’s Jews without Nogues’s close cooperation and even without his connivance. It seems likely that Nogues did not adopt this strategy on solely political and economic grounds—in order to prevent the collapse of Morocco’s economy which was already suffering from a constant lack of raw materials and such basic goods as sugar, tea, and fabrics—but also on pragmatic grounds. Unlike many senior figures in his government and in the French armed forces, anti-Semitism had not affected Nogues’s level-headed considerations. Many senior officials at the ResidenceGeneral attested to the many exceptions and delays approved by Nogues in the implementation of the anti-Jewish laws. These testimonies were written before and after Nogues left his position in June 1943. The Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef’s actual actions in favor of Jews were not in fact as negligible as claimed by those who did not examine the hundreds of U.S. and French documents presented in this chapter. The sultan managed not only to ensure that family-owned jewelry, cash, and residences would not be included in the capital declarations, but also managed to soften the blow for most Moroccan Jews, who were not wealthy, and also who were not required to provide a detailed declaration of their assets if the assets’ total value was less than 50,000 francs. He also insisted that the property and businesses of Moroccan Jews owning capital and banking holdings would not be expropriated and would not be transferred to temporary administrators, as was the case in France and Algeria. Moroccan Jews who experienced the Vichy-inspired anti-Semitic terrors implemented by Residence-General officials in the various communities72 and who feared for their property and

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for their lives were well aware of the considerable extent of the sultan’s contribution to their welfare, which is why they were so grateful to him for his actions in their favor. Moreover, and beyond his tangible contribution toward protecting their capital and their property, Morocco’s Jews found Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef willing to offer them an empathetic ear at a time of immense psychological distress. Indeed, the sultan was perceived as the Moroccan Jews’ ultimate protector, especially compared to the French establishment’s betrayal of Jewish trust under the Vichy government. This perception was not merely fueled by the confidential negotiations he engaged in with General Nogues, but also by his public statements in the Jews’ favor, which became increasingly more frequent during and after the Fête du Trône festivities of November 18, 1944. From 1944, onward, the sultan publicly supported the nationalist circles who demanded reforms as Morocco’s release from protectorate control drew closer. According to various testimonies delivered to Residence-General offices, the sultan attempted to establish a sense of rapport between the Jews and these nationalist circles. However, the Residence-General leaders’ fears of such rapport remained unfounded for various reasons. The most important of these being the nationalist circles’ unambiguous pro-Arab sympathies. They condemned the policies of the Jewish pre-state government in what was then mandatory Palestine and the British mandatory authorities that aided its establishment. Instead, young Jews were increasingly becoming tempted by visions of Jewish independence as presented by the Zionist public diplomacy apparatus, even at the cost of a bitter military struggle. Therefore, given his close cooperation with General Nogues, the sultan saw no need to ‟rebel” against the Residence-General’s anti-Jewish policy and defiantly stated this to be the case in a public ceremony as suggested in the fake telegram sent to the Vichy government in May 1941. The sultan was also never asked to sign a Dahir that would force Moroccan Jews to wear a yellow star of David on their clothing, so there was no need to oppose it. Such an idea was never even raised by the Residence-General. This might have been a real threat had the German armies invaded Morocco as they invaded Tunisia after the Allies’ landings in the Casablanca region on November 8, 1942. Fortunately, the Allies were early to land in Morocco and Algeria. The sultan therefore never asked that such shameful patches be prepared for him and his family. Rather than such non-existent identification with the troubles of his Jewish subjects, the sultan’s empathy toward the Jews’ suffering arose from his deep-seated religious faith, and placed a heavy load of gratitude, adulation, and love toward him in Moroccan Jewish hearts.

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NOTES 1. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1202/2015). 2. Consider, for example, the song entitled Saluni [=ask me], by the Israeli singer Mwizo (stage name of Moshe ‘Atiyah, 1937-2020) released as early as 1972, in which he provides nostalgic portrayals of Moroccan cities and their Jewish communities as well as adulatory portrayals of Moroccan royalty. In portraying king Mohammed V, his Judeo-Arabic lyrics may be translated as: “Pray, O Moroccan Jews, for the soul of Mohammed the Fifth / Who saved the Jews from their troubles in times of distress and persecutions.” 3. On November 19, 2019 Moroccan television channel 2M broadcasted an interview with Mr. Abdul Ḥaq al-Marini, the Kingdom of Morocco’s official historiographer and spokesperson for the Moroccan royal court, concerning the acts king Mohammed V carried out in favor of Moroccan Jews. Mr. al-Marini’s remarks described the significant aid the king rendered to Moroccan Jews and claimed that the king opposed the law presented to him and requiring Moroccan Jews to wear a yellow star of David. The interview (in Arabic with French subtitles) may be accessed at https​:/​/ww​​w​.fac​​ebook​​.com/​​watch​/​?v​=1​​03601​​580​00​​68080​. 4. Professor Haim Zafrani, based in Paris, presented this document to members of the Moroccan Royal Academy in Rabat in December 1985. See Sophie Wagenhofer, “Contested Narratives: Contemporary Debates on Mohammed V and the Moroccan Jews under the Vichy Regime,” in Quest – Issues in Contemporary Jewish History: Journal of Fondazione CDEC, no. 4 (November 2012): 4 – available at http:​/​/www​​ .ques​​t​-cde​​cjour​​nal​.i​​t​/foc​​us​.ph​​​p​?id=​​318. Prof. Zafrani also presented this document several times in his books. See below for further discussion. 5. See, for example, the following forum thread, entitled “Mohammed V et les juifs,” published on the Dafina​.n​et website: https://dafina​.net​/forums​/read​.php​ ?48​,95361​,95478 (in French). Also see the article published on the Times of Israel website on December 24, 2015, when Mohammed V was awarded a posthumous Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.-Rabbi Abraham Heschel Award by the Kivunim NGO and on behalf of the International Institute for World Jewish Studies. The award was presented to the king’s granddaughter, Princess Lalla Ḥasna. This article may be accessed at http:​/​/www​​.time​​sofis​​rael.​​com​/l​​ate​-m​​orocc​​an​-ki​​ng​-ho​​ nored​​-for-​​prote​​cting​​-his​-​​count​​rys​-j​​ews. Further see the op-ed article published by the financier Richard Hurowitz in the Los Angeles Times, which is concerned with King Mohammed V’s actions in favor of Moroccan Jews, and which may be accessed at https​:/​/ww​​w​.lat​​imes.​​com​/o​​pinio​​n​/op-​​ed​/la​​-oe​-h​​urowi​​tz​-mo​​rocca​​ n​-kin​​g​-moh​​ammed​​-v​-​20​​17042​​5​-sto​​ry​.ht​​ml. About the Place Mohammed V in Ashkelon see Aomar Boum and Daniel Schroeter, “Why Did Morocco Just Demolish a Holocaust Memorial”, opinion published in Haaretz, English version, dated 22.09.2019: https​:/​/ww​​w​.haa​​retz.​​com​/m​​iddle​​-east​​-news​/​.pre​​mium-​​why​-d​​id​ -mo​​rocco​​-just​​-demo​​lish-​​a​-hol​​ocaus​​t​​-mem​​orial​​-1​.78​​71393​. Also see Wagenhofer, “Contested Narratives”, 4–8. 6. For a later initiative, see Wagenhofer, “Contested Narratives”, 4.

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7. cf. Robert Assaraf, Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc à l’époque de Vichy (Paris : Plon, 1997), « Préface », 16. 8. See Assaraf, Mohammed V, 161. 9. Mr. Serge Berdugo, the longtime general secretary of Morocco’s Jewish communities often tells this story while relating the acts King Mohammed V carried out in favor of Morocco’s Jews. The story is related via Mr. Sege Berdugo’s father Joseph in Assaraf, Mohammed V, 161. 10. The interview has been reproduced many times since its first publication in https​:/​/ww​​w​.ccl​​j​.be/​​actu/​​polit​​ique-​​socie​​te​/ge​​orges​​-bens​​oussa​​n​-sul​​tan​-m​​aroc-​​jamai ​​​ s​ -pro​​ tege-​​ juifs​ . This interview was conducted after Georges Bensoussan first developed the contemptuous remarks concerning the Sultan’s motivations in his book, Juifs en pays arabes: le grand déracinement, 1850-1975 (Paris: Tallandier, 2012), 622. 11. At this point, I would like to express my heartful gratitude to my colleagues and friends Prof. Daniel Schroeter from the University of Minnesota and Prof. Omar Boum from UCLA for their significant assistance in locating files relevant to the present research program at the Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives in Washington. I am also very grateful to the charming and efficient librarians who made it easier for me to work at those Archives and at the Archives in Nantes and La Courneuve. 12. cf. Joseph Chetrit and Daniel Schroeter, “Ha-Reformot ba-Mosadot hayehudiyim be-Maroko be-Reshit ha-Shilton ha-Kolonyali: Ha-Shikulim, ha-Kivunim ve-ha-Nimukm,” Miqqedem uMiyyam VI (1995): 71–103; Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation and its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, n.s. 13, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 170–206. 13. Cf. Daniel Schroeter, “From Dhimmis to Colonized Subjects: Moroccan Jews and the Sharifian and French Colonial State,” in Jews and the State. Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 104–123; Daniel J. Schroeter, “Vichy in Morocco: The Residence, Mohammed V and his Indigenous Jewish Subjects,” in Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017), 215–250; Schroeter and Chetrit, “Emancipation and its Discontents”. Also see Mohammed Kenbib, “Moroccan Jews and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942,” The Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 4 (2014): 540–553, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2014.950523. 14. For the Dhimmah and the status of Dhimmis see, inter alia: Milka Levy-Rubin “Shurūt ˤUmar and its Alternatives: The Legal Debate on the Status of the Dhimmīs,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 30 (2005): 171–206; Maribel Fierro and John Tolan (eds.), The Legal Status of Ḏimmīs in the Islamic West (Madrid, 2011). In BREPOLS, 2013, Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies (RELMIN1), ; HAL. 15. See CADN, FRMAE_1MA2505_0066, circular Nº 372 sent to cities and ports governors by the Grand Vizir Mohamed El Mokri on the 6 Hijja 1359 [hijra date] (4.1.1941).

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16. Anonymous letter to S.E. le Grand Vizir, CADN, FRMAE_1MA25012_IMG 0017. See its presentation by the Counselor to the Sherifian Government, ibid. IMG 0016. 17. See other letters and notes about the same issue: CADN, FRMAE_1MA25012_ IMG 0018, 0019-0020, 0021, 0022, 0023, 0024, 0030-0031. Also see ibid., IMG 0053-0054, which is a non-dated document from the Residency’s Direction des Affaires Politiques that explicitly indicates that the information about what the Jews were accused of was fake news). 18. See his letter dated May 28, 1936, ibid., IMG 0029. 19. CADN, FRMAE_1MA300324-1_0161 for the royal audience during the Fête du Trône, and FRMAE_1MA2502_0028-29; FRMAE_1MA2502_IMG 0074 for the audience at Mogador/Essaouira, where he had friendly words to impart to his Jewish hosts, and where he reminded them what he did in the Jews’ favor during their troubled times. 20. See, for example, Assaraf, Mohammed V, 161, without a precise date. Haim Zafrani’s Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996), 404–405, indicates June 26, 1942 as the date for an audience the Sultan granted to a Jewish delegation from Fes, but precedes this with the text of an earlier declaration the Sultan made to Jewish delegates without mentioning any date. In fact, this undated declaration was made, as we shall see, during the audience granted on September 22, 1941. The text cited by Haim Zafrani was taken from coll. Vanikoff. See USHMM, RG-43.122M.0002.00000998-9. 21. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-US Legation Mor_Box 35, IMG_0139-0152. 22. Ibid., IMG_0145, p. 7 of the memorandum. 23. On these pressures see the memorandum of March 31, 1941 written by the American Consul General in Casablanca concerning the application to the Jews of the Dahir of October 31, 1940, USHMM, NARA RG 84 Morocco Diplomatic files, Casa General 1941 Box 49, DSCO1645-DSCO1656. Also see C. M. C. “French North Africa since June 1940: Main Political Developments”, Bulletin of International News, 19, no. 25 (December 12, 1942): 1125–1131. Stable URL: https://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/25643350.̣ 24. H. Earle Russell to the Secretary of State, USHMM, NARA RG 59_ Box_5761_2 IMG_0291-0295. 25. This agency was active in France between 1940-1944 as a child-agency of the Third Reich’s official German propaganda agency. See the following website – http:​/​/dat​​a​.bnf​​.fr​/1​​13997​​49​/ag​​ence_​​franc​​aise_​​d​_inf​​ormat​​​ion​_d​​e​_pre​​sse/ – for more information and for a selection of data on this held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 26. See the original document at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques La Courneuve (CADLN) in Folder no. 18, Box 6, File 1 in the ‘Vichy – the War’ Collection. The folder is entitled ‘Jews, General, July 10 – 15 in January 1940’ (hereafter referred to as CADLN Folder 18). The document in question is marked as p. 96 in the folder. Also see the document’s text in Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie, 403–404.

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27. See this document in Zafrani, Juifs d’Andalousie, 402–403. In actual fact, it was the late David Cohen that first uncovered this document at CADLN and transmitted it to Prof. Zafrani. Cf. David Cohen, “Ofen yisumah shel ha-teḥikah ha-anti-yehudit be-maroko bi-tekufat memshelet Vichy ˤal-pi mismakhim ḥadashim mi-misrad ha-ḥuz ha-zorfati,” Proceedings of the Ninth World Conference of Jewish Studies, Vol. II (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1985), 125–128 [in Hebrew]. 28. This film can be watched at https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Ecd​​​ oY9Sm​​bNc. 29. See CADLN, Vichy-Maroc Guerre 1939-1945, dossier 18. Such denunciations can also be found on pp. 61–63, 64–66, 68–69, as can other documents sent by French supporters of the extreme right in Morocco and denouncing supporters of General de Gaulle which the former group referred to as ‘enemies of the people.’ See ibid., dossier 22, pp. 73–75 (dated April 14, 1941) and p. 76 (dated July 11, 1941). 30. See numerous other documents concerned with this issue (réseau Pécheral) in CADLN, Vichy-Maroc Guerre 1939-1945, dossier 22, Box 7, File 2 – entitled ‘Dissidence, questions de personnes.’ 31. The document is taken for granted by other scholars such as Assaraf, Mohammed V, 132–133; Joesph Tolédano, Epreuves et libération. Les Juifs du Maroc pendant la seconde guerre mondiale (Jerusalem: Editions Elkana, 2014), 134–136; Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 110–111. 32. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_box_52_IMG 0737-0739; 07410747, and RG 84-Casablanca_Box 49_IMG 0569-0571. 33. Nogues’ response cannot be found in US archives, but is present in coll. Vanikoff - see USHMM, RG-43.122M.0002.00000477. 34. See letter of July 17, 1941 sent by H. Earle Russell, American Consul General in Casablanca to J. Rives Childs, Esquire, American Chargé d’Affaires ad Interim, Tangier – USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_box_49_IMG 0566-0568. 35. See letter sent on July 18, 1941 by H. Earle Russell in Casablanca to J. Rives Childs in Tangier, ibid., Box 49_IMG 0572. 36. Information concerning these events is provided in the Russell-Childs letter cited in note 33, supra. The Chargé d’Affaires Childs summarized the contents of the Consul-General’s letter in his report to the Secretary of State dated July 25, 1941 (see USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_Box 52_IMG 0764-0765). In another long report to Washington dated August 23, 1941, Chargé d’Affaires Childs reported that the Grand Vizier met a Jewish notable for dinner a few days before the promulgation of the second Dahir about the status of the Jews (of August 5, 1941) and told the notable that he was making every effort to oppose the Vichy desire to apply the new law on the status of Jews to Moroccan Jews – see ibid., IMG 0794-0785, which includes the meeting between El Mokri and the Jewish notable at IMG 0788 (on p. 4 of Child’s report). 37. Letter dated August 12, 1941 – CADN, FRMAE 1MA25012_IMG 0113-0114. 38. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_box 49_IMG 0566 (note 33, supra). 39. The Vice-Consul’s memorandum was prepared on October 17, 1941, and sent to the US Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier three days later. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-US Legation Mor_Box 44_IMG 0225-0230.

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40. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_box 49_IMG 0566-0569 (note 33, supra). 41. This refers to Moulay Idriss II, who is traditionally considered to be the founder of Fès at its present location in 808 or 809 CE. cf. Abdelahad Sebti, “Hagiographie et enjeux urbains au Maroc. Une biographie d’Idrîs II,” Publications de l’Ecole Française de Rome 213 (année 1995): 77–88. The author also discusses the issue of sacrifices. 42. See the English translation of the newspaper article that was sent by the US Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier to the Secretary of State in USHMM, NARA, RG-84 US Legation_Box 44_IMG 0155-0156. The diplomat also attached some comments on traditional sacrifice ceremonies in Morocco to the translation. 43. See the Vice-Consul’s October 17, 1941 memorandum in USHMM, NARA, RG 84-Casablanca_Box 49_IMG 0611-0615. 44. See the Vice-Consul’s memorandum, ibid., IMG 0619-0626, pp. 7–8 of the document (IMG 0625-0626), and in RG 59_Box 5766_IMG 0444-0451, pp. 7-8 of the document (IMG 0450-0451). 45. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-US Legation Mor_Box 44_IMG 0160-0161, pp. 1–2 of the document. 46. See ibid., IMG 0161-0162, pp. 2–3. 47. See USHMM, NARA, NARA-RG 59_Box_5766_IMG 0451-0454. The citation appears in ibid., IMG 0448 on p. 5 of the document. 48. See USHMM, NARA, RG 84-US Legation Mor_Box 54_IMG 0454. Chargé d’Affaires Childs’ report about what he was told by a Residency-General source did not prevent him from attaching and discussing a secret circular sent by the Protectorate secretary to the chairpersons of the economic organizations, and in which he asks the chairpersons to report any Jewish-owned member companies and businesses and asking for their opinion about how the economic laws promulgated in the August and September 1941 Dahirs should be applied to them. 49. See ibid., IMG 0448-0449. 50. See CADN FRMAE, IMA2505_0081. 51. See ibid., IMG 0082-0083. 52. See ibid., IMG 0084. 53. See ibid., IMG 0086-0087. 54. See the telegram in CADN FRMAE 1MA9001338_0053, as well as its draft with handwritten corrections by Nogues in ibid., 1MA2505_0085. 55. See the telegram in CADN FRMAE 1MA2505_0104. 56. On November 5, 1941, Jacques de Lernonville dispatched a report from Rabat to Vichy in which he describes the application of Vichy laws in Morocco up to that point in time. This report does not mention the last-minute change made in Moroccan Jews’ favor regarding the property declaration required by the Dahir of August 5, 1941. 57. This would be Etienne Coidan, who was a senior official at the Directorate of Political Affairs of the Colonial Moroccan government and who wrote a comprehensive and meticulously sourced work about the development of Zionism in Morocco from the formation of the Protectorate to 1946, as well as about the tribulations experienced by Moroccan Jews during this period. This work was also accompanied by 12 appendices. See the work and its appendices in CADN, FRMAE, 1MA/250/19_IMG 0020-0512. September 22, 1941 mention is in IMG 0096.

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58. See CADLC, Vichy Maroc, Guerre 1939-1945, dossier 18, p. 186. 59. The Germans were the first to apply a regulation for the blockage of Jewish accounts in occupied areas of France. They were followed by the High Commissioner of Jewish Affairs Xavier Vallat, who acted vigorously to implement a similar regulation in French law and to expand it such that it could be applied to Jews in unoccupied France too. 60. See the report sent to the US Secretary of State by Chargé d’Affaires Childs on August 23, 1941 and entitled ‘Civil Status of the Jews in French Morocco,’ p. 5 of the document, USHMM NARA RG 84_US Legation Mor_Box 44, IMG 0134; also see ibid., Box 52_IMG 0789; ibid. RG 59_Box 5765_IMG 0299. Also see RG 84-Casablanca_Box_52_IMG 0785-0794. 61. See the translation of Vallat’s press release in RG 84_US Legation Mor_Box 44_IMG 154; RG 59_Box 5765_IMG 0312. Also see Assaraf, Mohammed V, 153. 62. See the same sources cited in note 59, supra. 63. For this issue, see numerous documents in CADLC, Vichy – Maroc Guerre 1939-1945, file 18. 64. See the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc files, Dossier D 652, in USHMM RG-81.001M.0001. 65. See his letter dated June 29, 1942 in USHMM RG-81.001M.0001.00000859. 66. See Lt. Colonel Arthur E. Sutherland, Jr.’s memorandum to the Chief of Staff of the Fifth Army entitled “Present Status of Legal Changes” and dated April 21, 1943 in USHMM NARA-RG 338_5th Army_Box 2_IMG 0120: “The French law specifying that Jewish property had to be placed under the supervision of Aryan temporary administrators was never applied to Morocco” (p. 3 of the document). 67. See the Secretary-General’s letter in CADN FRMAE 1MA2505_0132-0135. 68. See ibid., IMG 0156-0161. 69. See the Advisor’s letter in CADN FRMAE 1MA25049_0071-0072. 70. See the letter Consul-General J. Rives Childs sent to the US Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier on September 10, 1942 in USHMM NARA 84-US Legation Mor_Box 54_IMG 0450. 71. See note 19, supra. 72. For the kind of terror that prevailed in Jewish communities during the Second World War, see Joseph Chetrit, “Les juifs de Mogador (Essaouira) pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: la terreur de Vichy et sa gestion Communautaire,” in Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord face à l’Allemagne nazie, edited by Dan Mechman and Haim Saadoun (Paris : Perrin, 2018), 149–175 ; Joseph Chetrit, The Resident-General, the Sultan, and Moroccan Jews During the Second World War: Exclusion, Persecutions and Dhimmah (in Hebrew). Monograph in advanced preparation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assaraf, Robert. Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc à l’époque de Vichy. Paris : Plon, 1997. Bensoussan, Georges. Juifs en pays arabes : le grand déracinement, 1870-1975. Paris : Tallandier, 2012.

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Chetrit, Joseph, “Les juifs de Mogador (Essaouira) pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale : la terreur de Vichy et sa gestion communautaire,” in Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord face à l’Allemagne nazie, edited by Dan Mechman and Haim Saadoun. Paris : Perrin, 2018, 149–175. Chetrit, Joseph, The Resident General, the Sultan, and the Moroccan Jews During the Second World War: Exclusion, Persecutions, and the Dhimmah (in Hebrew). Monograph in advanced preparation. Chetrit, Joseph and Daniel Schroeter, “ Ha-Reformot ba-Mosadot ha-yehudiyim be-Maroko be-Reshit ha-Shilton ha-Kolonyali: Ha-Shikulim, ha-Kivunim ve-haNimukim.” Miqqedem uMiyyam VI, 1995: 71–103. C. M. C. “French North Africa since June 1940: Main Political Developments”. Bulletin of International News, 19, no. 25 (December 12, 1942): 1125–1131. Stable URL: https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/25643350. Cohen, David, “Ofen yisumah shel ha-teḥikah ha-anti-yehudit be-maroko bi-tekufat mimshelet Vichy ˤal-pi mismakhim ḥadashim mi-misrad ha-ḥuz ha-zorfati,” Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Vol. II. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1986, 125–128 (Hebrew). Fierro, Maribel and John Tolan, eds., The Legal Status of Ḏimmīs in the Islamic West. March 2011, Madrid, Spain. In BREPOLS, 2013, Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies (RELMIN1), http: ​ / ​ / www​​ . brep​​ o ls ​ . n​​ e t ​ / Pa​​ g es ​ / B​​ r owse​​ B ySer​​i es ​ . a​​ s px ​ ? T​​ r eeSe​​​ r ies=​​ R ELMI​​ N . HAL. Kenbib, Mohammed, “Moroccan Jews and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942,” The Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 4 (2014): 540–553. DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2014.950523. Levy-Rubin, Milka, “Shurūt ʿUmar and its Alternatives: The Legal Debate on the Status of the Dhimmīs,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 30 (2005): 171–206. Satloff, Robert. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Schroeter, Daniel J., “From Dhimmis to Colonized Subjects: Moroccan Jews and the Sharifian and French Colonial State,” in Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 104–123. Schroeter, Daniel J., “Vichy in Morocco: The Residence, Mohammed V, and his Indigenous Jewish Subjects,” in Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017, 215–250. Schroeter, Daniel J. and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation and its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, n.s. 13, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 170–206. Sebti, Abdelahad, “Hagiographie et enjeux urbains au Maroc. Une biographie d’Idrîs II.” Publications de l’Ecole Française de Rome 213 (année 1995): 77–88. Tolédano, Joseph. Epreuves et Libération. Les juifs du Maroc pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. Jerusalem : Editions Elkana, 2014.

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Wagenhofer, Sophie, “Contested Narratives: Contemporary Debates on Mohammed V and the Moroccan Jews under the Vichy Regime,” in Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History – Journal of Fondazione CDEC, no. 4 (November 2012), http:​/​/www​​.ques​​t​-cde​​cjour​​nal​.i​​t​/foc​​us​.ph​​​p​?id=​​318. Zafrani, Haim. Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb. Paris : Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996.

Chapter 4

Centering the Margin Family Networks, Occupational Mobility, and Saharan Jews Aomar Boum

In 2004, while pursuing my ethnographic research on Jewish communities in southern Moroccan villages and towns, I was fortunate to interview members of the last Jewish families of this pre-Saharan region: the Sarrafs.1 Messaoud and Mardochée were the last head patriarchs of this Saharan Jewish community that traces its origins to different locations in the Sahara, including Touat, Iligh, Guelmim, Akka, and now Agadir. Dressed in the traditional Sahrawi blue robe, Mardochée Sarraf sat on the steps leading to his humble home in the southern city of Guelmim where the family practiced trade for decades. He was one of the last Jews of Akka who opted to live between the coastal city of Agadir, and Akka and Guelmim instead of relocating permanently to Israel as the majority of the community did in 1961. After he offered me a small cup of mint tea, and responding to my ethnographic inquiry about his native origin, Mardochée and I talked for hours about the history of the Jews of Oued Noun and the Anti-Atlas. Descendants of these Saharan Jewish families believed that they are direct descendants of the Daggatouns!2 They justified this historical claim by referencing the work of Mardochée Aby Serour on the Daggatouns. Some recommended that I should consult this historical text which apparently explains their Saharan Jewish identity. Others reminded me how Mardochée and his brother lived in Timbuktu and that members of the Jewish communities of Akka were buried in northern Mali. Before the decline of the trans-Saharan trade and the occupation of Timbuktu in 1894, caravan roads linked sub-Saharan African towns to Mogador [Essaouira] via Tindouf. While the last major caravan was recorded in 1911, a few camel caravans continued to trade with the Saharan interior until 1945.3 These trading networks put Jews at the center of these marginal 105

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Saharan communities.4 While many historians have focused their attention on the Jewish communities of the coastal towns and the interior, such as Essaouira and Marrakesh, little attention has been paid to these marginal Saharan Jewish communities.5 In this chapter, I revisit what I call pre-Saharan Jewish networks by arguing that writing the history of the trans-Saharan commercial networks requires a centering of these Saharan Jewish communities in our historical analysis of this intra-regional mobility. I argue that by tracing their shifting networks and settlements we should be able to have a better understanding of tribal and communal Jewish and Muslim cultural and commercial relations in the pre-Saharan region.6 THE DAGGATOUNS AND JEWISH MOBILITY IN THE SAHARA In 1865, Léon Philippe, a French meteorologist with geological interests in North Africa, convinced the AIU to use Mardochée Aby Serour to expand its knowledge about the Saharan interior in general and its Jewish communities in particular.7 Born in the southern Moroccan oasis of Akka around 1830,8 Aby Serour exemplifies what I call the constant mobility of Saharan Jews driven by economic opportunities. Although Aby Serour did not have a scientific background in data collection and interpretation, Philippe maintained that the Alliance could benefit from using a native Jew to gather information on the Jewish communities of the Sahara. Philippe told Isidore Loeb, secretary of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, that Aby Serour had insider knowledge not only of the Sahara but also of its dialects, including Fulani and Bambara. These skills would allow the AIU to gather statistics about the Jews of central Africa. In 1880, Isidore Loeb translated Aby Serour’s account on the Daggatoun into French in what is known today as Les Daggatoun: Tribu d’origine juive demeurant dans le désert du Sahara.9 Loeb cautioned readers that Aby Serour was not trained in scientific methods, stating that while his account included some exaggerations and historical inaccuracies, it nonetheless could be treated as authoritative. The meaning of “Daggatoun” has long been subject to debate. According to Aby Serour, the name is derived from the Tuareg designation for Jews who changed their beliefs. In the foreword to his translation of Aby Serour’s report, Loeb stated that “Daggatoun” was a word that stood for “trader” or “merchant” in Arabic. The Daggatoun lived mostly among the Tuareg of the Adgag region. They were scattered between the Adgag and Hoggar. As protégés of the Tuaregs, the Daggatoun were at their mercy and had to pay for protection. Aby Serour was the first person to mention the Daggatoun, a tribe of Saharan nomads, believed to be of Jewish origin, who moved constantly

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around the desert interior. Aby Serour traces their origin to the Jewish community of Tamentit and argues that their ancestors had fled the Tamentit region after Muhammad al-Maghili incited the local Muslims to expel them from Touat in 1492.10 Aby Serour’s name has historically been linked to the Daggatoun; in publications of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) they are described as “people whom [Aby Serour] discovered.” Aby Serour described the Daggatoun as white-skinned. Like most tribal desert groups, however, they lived in tents and were assimilated to the Tuareg culture and language even though they spoke Arabic. Their Jewish background and inferior status made them subject to social ridicule and inhibited intermarriage with Arab and Tuareg families. The distance from the Jewish religious centers in Tafilalet, Tabelbelt, El Hammeda, and Tamentit caused the Daggatoun to forget their Jewish identity over time and to adopt Muslim religious and cultural practices. Their Jewish background remained a source of negative perceptions by the Tuaregs and Arabs throughout the Saharan interior, especially as the anti-Jewish ideas of al-Maghili gained ground among religious scholars throughout Bilad al-Sudan in the late sixteenth century.11 According to Moroccan Jewish oral tradition, a long chain of Jewish neighborhoods (mellaḥs) located in the Anti-Atlas Mountains was home to the most ancient Jewish settlement in Morocco.12 As the legend goes, the Jewish presence in southeastern Morocco could be traced back to the destruction of the First Temple and the arrival of Jewish refugees via Egypt and North Africa to settle in Wadi Ifrane (Oufrane) in about 361 BCE. Jewish families later moved to other neighboring communities after obtaining permission from local inhabitants and as trade networks expanded.13 Despite these widely circulated popular traditions, the historical record of Jewish presence in the Anti-Atlas is largely traceable to the sixteenth century.14 Less documented than urban Moroccan Jewries, we learn from both rabbinical literature and Muslim and European travelers that the Jews of the south (which includes the Anti-Atlas, Sous, Tafilalt, and Draa) settled in Berber and Arab hamlets and formed a large network of chains of mellaḥs around which rural agricultural economies revolved.15 These rural Saharan Jewries were involved directly in local and trans-Saharan trade and indirectly in agriculture.16 INTRA-REGIONAL MOBILITY AND JEWISH COMMUNITIES’ SURVIVAL Throughout their history in southern Morocco, Jewish communities maintained a social presence among Muslim communities through a process of

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intra-regional mobility.17 This process of historical mobility between the regions of Draa, Sous, Ziz, Tafilalt, and Dades allowed Jewish families in different hamlets to relocate in times of risk. Accordingly, mobility became an adaptive strategy to manage political, economic, and environmental risk in an arid region usually affected by drought, epidemics, and tribal wars. This mobility created social resilience across the region among Jewish communities forcing them to support displaced Jews and cohabit by sharing limited space and resources.18 This mobility was reinforced through family connectivity, occupational mobility, peddling, and rabbinical networks. This system of intra-regional mobility was based on two key factors. First, marriage relationships historically helped establish long-distance family alliances and connections between Jews of different regions throughout southeastern Morocco. Women and family life were subject to Halakhic law. Jewish girls were promised in marriage to other families within the village or in other neighboring villages at an early age. Women were central to the larger Jewish networks because they established communal connectivity. As marriage outside the small network grew, the connectivity of families outside the villages where they resided expanded. Family archives and manuscripts show how Jews from Akka were able to marry women from within the mellaḥs of Akka such as Tagadirt and Taourirt. Some men married women from the mellaḥs of Tahala, Oufrane, Guelmim, and Taroudant. These relations created by marriage allowed families from different villages to rely on each other in times of hardship. The second significant variable was the growth of rabbinical families in the region. Some families of learned rabbis were able to expand their social and family networks outside certain areas as their children gained prominence and were able to relocate to other villages either to teach local children and lead daily prayers or to serve as rabbinical judges (dayyan). The Abuhasera family, for instance, was a family of rabbis that stretched back several generations and served different communities in Tafilalet, Ksar-es-Souk, and Erfoud.19 Given the connections between the Jews of Sijilmassa and Tamdoult, a few in Sous were students of Jacob Abuhasera (1808–1880) and influenced kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah.20 Finally, as the social and familial networks expanded, the economic opportunities for rural Jews and peddlers grew over time. This allowed many Jewish families to settle in new Arab and Berber villages either as one or two families, or as a group of families. The greater the economic opportunities were the larger the community became. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the population within mellaḥs throughout the southeastern region increased, as reported by many European travelers.21 Jewish peddlers and artisans strengthened these social connections benefiting from the welcome of the local Muslim population, which was in dire need of workers in these occupations.

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However, during times of political change and turmoil, Jews were the first to be targeted since they were mostly under the protection of tribal chieftains. For example, in the aftermath of the death of Sultan Mawlay al-Yazid in 1792, the Jews of Oufrane were affected by the revolt of Bou Ihlas against the Ait Ba ‘Amran. About fifty Jews, including the community’s leader, rabbi Judah ben Naphtali Afriat, were burned alive during this uprising. This political incident pushed many Jews out of Oufrane to settle in neighboring villages in Sous, such as Taroudant, Iligh, Tahala, and Akka. Members of the Afriat family and other Jewish families found refuge in the thriving port of Essaouira (Mogador).22 In 1827, there were about 500 Jewish families in Oufrane. The majority of them were poor. As the political situation in Oufrane worsened, its Jewish peddlers, merchants, and artisans began to relocate to the neighboring settlement of Iligh in the Tazerwalt area. The political reemergence of Iligh took place in the eighteenth century under the leadership of the Bou Dami‘a family, which controlled most of the commercial networks of the southeast.23 Despite the fact that many poor Jews stayed in Oufrane, the ones who moved to Iligh were able to expand their regional trade and trans-Saharan dealings under the protection of Bou Dami‘a. This case of Oufrane and its political instability in the seventeenth century highlights the importance of geographic mobility as adaptive risk management for Jewish communities in the pre-Saharan region, especially in the absence of centralized and stable local government. However, despite the risk of political instability, their much-needed occupational diversity empowered Saharan Jewry in its relationships with the local Muslim populations. It is important to consider the role that Jews played not only as peddlers, artisans, and merchants, but also as supporters of the local farming activity in a region that relied on subsistence agriculture. As peddlers, Jews facilitated commercial networks among the different villages in southeastern Morocco, while the local Muslim population played an insignificant role in commercial networks. For Jewish settlements to exist and thrive in security, tribal communities and chieftains secured the safety of Jews to move from one village to another throughout the chain of mellaḥs of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. Therefore, Jewish predominance in trade was partly reflected in movements around weekly markets.24 As itinerant traders (‘attara), Jews periodically loaded their goods on mules and made long rounds to the tribal settlements and weekly markets located throughout southern Morocco. PRACTICAL SELF-SEGREGATION: JEWISH QUARTERS IN THE ANTI-ATLAS Unlike the ghettos of Europe where Jews were segregated from the rest of the local population, Jewish neighborhoods throughout the Saharan communities

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developed in the socio-economic context of Arab and Berber villages. Therefore, despite many legal opinions that called for the separation of Muslim communities from Jews, Jewish families either lived in separate yet unwalled neighborhoods within the village or shared houses with Muslim families. The variety of these Jewish residential patterns shows the absence of a general form of Jewish settlement in southern Morocco. For instance, in the community of Akka, the Jews first settled in the villages Irhalan and Rahala before they moved to separate quarters within the ksar (village) of Taourirt and later Tagadirt. It was believed that Jews initially settled in Irahalan after the destruction of Tamdoult. The largest Jewish settlement was located in Tagadirt. Some narratives claim that Jews moved from Taourirt to Tagadirt after their neighborhood became too small for their expanding households. This example shows that Jews moved around different villages for political and practical reasons. In all cases, they were granted permission by Muslim leaders to settle and contribute to economic security of their settlements.25 Jews lived in houses and neighborhoods that were similar to Muslim housing. Built of adobe and stone, the houses were usually two storied with a courtyard. Extended families lived in a single compound where each nuclear family occupied a single room. Sometimes, extended families occupied two or three adjoining houses, as was the case of the Sarraf family in Tagadirt, Akka. Three generations lived in one house. Roofs were a central part of the house. They were usually used for social gatherings and sleeping during the hot summertime. Each house had a guest room where foreigners were received, usually located at the entrance of the house or on the second floor accessible through the stairs near the entrance door. Housework, such as cooking and fetching water, was distributed among women, including little girls in the household. It was rare to find Jewish families in Akka and other southern communities that kept sheep and cows inside their houses in the mellaḥ. A male member of the family could decide to move out and resettle in another village for economic reason. For example, instead of going back and forth between Tintazart and neighboring Tata, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and jewelers from the Aby Serour family resettled with their families in the mellah of Tintazart. In the region of Sous, Akka was part of a major chain of mellaḥs that ended in Guelmim on the fringe of the Saharan desert. In addition to local and regional commerce and petty peddling, the Jews of the south worked as blacksmiths, saddlers, jewelers, cobblers, and tailors. They also played a key though indirect role in local farming through partnerships with Muslims in raising cattle and growing barley and vegetables or hiring khammas to work land that Jews owned. In this case many mellạḥs throughout the south were never separated from the general village because both communities depended on each other for economic survival.26

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Yet, throughout the major period of Jewish settlement in southern Morocco, Jews had their own separate and self-segregated neighborhoods, which revolved around the synagogue. The religious separation was needed spatially to maintain a Jewish community where the individual and the family were under strict religious authority. This configuration ensured restricted movement of women and the socialization of children in accordance with Jewish beliefs and customs. The local rabbi, who generally served as ra’is al-yahud (nagid/head of the Jews), managed the religious and daily affairs within these Jewish enclaves and their external relations with the Muslim community and its leaders. For communities of less than ten families, the closest rabbi of a large neighboring community paid brief, intermittent visits to settle their religious and political matters. For instance, the rabbi of Allougoum would visit the community of Lamhamid and its neighboring villages, and the rabbi of Tintazart would take care of the religious affairs of the community of Tissint. At the same time, Jewish families also relied on the legal protection of Muslim friends. FAMILIES AND LIFECYCLES INSIDE JEWISH NEIGHBORHOODS Inside the mellaḥ, Muslims did not intervene in Jewish family institutions and life-cycle observances. Jewish law guided the social and family life inside the Jewish quarter. Parents arranged the marriages, and it was preferred to marry eligible women from the community. In Akka, for instance, apart from a few cases where men married from the community of Tahala and Taroudant, almost all of the marriages took place between the families of Aby Serour, Sarraf, and Dabda. This allowed these families to strengthen their positions by keeping their resources within the mellaḥ of Tagadirt during the nineteenth century, becoming leading economic traders between Timbuktu and the coastal city of Essaouira. As the largest extended family in the area, the Sarraf family strengthened its relations with the Muslim leadership in Akka and the representatives of the sultan in Essaouira. The inability to bear children, the death of a wife, or perceived need for a male heir pushed many men either to remarry or to take a second wife. Jews from Akka had children with two or sometimes three wives. In the case of the husband’s death, the widow was expected to raise the children until her oldest son reached an age to take responsibility for the whole family. Some women did not have children or close relatives, and the community helped them by collecting money in the synagogue. In Akka, the families preferred to marry close cousins, something that Jewish law permitted. Women were required to obey their husbands and male relatives and not to question their decisions.

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If they failed they could be subject to corporal punishment. Since a woman could not fight back, she would seek safety in her relatives’ household until the matter was resolved. The rabbi usually mediated between the families and intervened to make peace. According to Jewish custom, married women covered their heads and sometimes left their houses and quarters only when they married. Throughout the mellaḥs of the south, young men usually married between the age of fifteen and seventeen. Girls were sometimes married at nine, but the more accepted custom was between thirteen and fourteen. After marriage, the most important expectation within the extended family was pregnancy. If a woman failed to bear children, the husband could divorce her after ten years and take another wife. When a woman delivered a baby, she was thought to enter a period of uncleanness, and was forbidden from engaging in sexual relations, cooking, or serving food in the household. Boys would be circumcised and given a name after eight days unless the baby was sick. As for girls, they were named during a family celebration after the fourth day of birth. The children were usually the responsibility of the mother and women of the household. After a male child reached the age of four, he started leaving the threshold of his home and began joining the synagogue to study with the religious teacher, usually the local rabbi. Not every child became a learned man but by the time they reached Bar Mitzvah, they were already familiar with Jewish tradition. Some of them, like Rabbi Mardochée Aby Serour, succeeded first in the local school before attending the yeshivoth of Marrakesh and Jerusalem.27 Boys were considered men after Bar Mitzva and were introduced to trade and craftsmanship. Little girls learned their family tasks by mingling with married women and helping in small tasks such as sweeping the floor and babysitting their siblings. This socialization at the level of the house and synagogue of both girls and boys kept families and the whole community intact and gave it a sense of place and religious belonging. This is why the role of the rabbi and men of learning was also central to the survival of many Jewish communities in different villages throughout the Anti-Atlas and other parts of southeastern Morocco. In general rabbis were sons of previous rabbis. If a family possessed a line of rabbis that went for generations, it gained a sense of holiness not only in the community but also outside the mellah. Local leaders managed to maintain the communal cohesiveness within the mellaḥ. The fact that many communities were composed of related family members limited communal conflict inside the mellaḥs. In ordinary circumstances, when Jewish outsiders resettled in a new community, they set up their own synagogue. This took place in northern and central towns after the influx of the Jews of Spain.28 This issue rarely affected southern Jewish communities because local families were not only related by blood, but they

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also answered to familiar men of learning. However, this does not mean that there were no feelings of jealousy and internal problems; indeed there was intermittent fighting between families and individuals about divorce, inheritance, payment of debt, choice of rabbis, and even the extent of relations with Muslim community. CONCLUSION In the early second decade of the twentieth century, French colonial economic policies started to have an impact on the southern region. Some southern Jewish merchants jumped at the opportunity and became increasingly involved in modern economic activities, building ties with partners in urban centers especially Agadir and Marrakesh. These changes began to affect the organization of communal and family life in southern Morocco as more Jewish families settled in Agadir. Following, the introduction of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in some villages, the mellaḥs of the Anti-Atlas and pre-Saharan oases slowly emptied as their inhabitants migrated to the coast cities of Agadir, Taroudant, Casablanca, and Essaouira in search of new opportunities. The authority of local leaders and rabbis weakened over the years. The introduction of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools into Jewish communities such as Akka, Iligh, Tinghir, and Guelmim led to social and family changes as girls began to attend schools. The Alliance Israélite Universelle’s teachers started asking parents to send their daughters to school instead of finding them husbands at an early age. Some families were intrigued by the opportunities of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and what it could mean for their children, especially as local economies suffered and families were forced to move to Essaouira and Agadir into the already crowded mellaḥs.29 The Alliance Israélite Universelle allowed boys and girls to take advantage of occupational and professional training that would help them later improve their economic background. The Alliance Israélite Universelle education also exposed women and men to European lifestyles and therefore challenged existing gender relations and religious codes. Rabbis were the first opponents of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in many hamlets of southern Morocco. Despite the fact that some women, especially daughters of rabbis, studied the Bible and learnt to write and read, few women questioned the gender segregation inside the mellaḥ. The Alliance Israélite Universelle pushed some men in these villages to rebel against the belief that women’s place was at home and that their role in Jewish society was mainly as mothers and wives as the religious scripture underlined.

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The decline of the rabbis’ role in this society initiated a new definition of community in the Saharan hamlets. The weak economy of the south affected by local drought and global economic crisis during and after World War II pushed many Jews out of the mellah of many villages to seek social and economic support in the coastal cities of Essaouira, Agadir, Casablanca, and others. Peddling was drastically affected by the dwindling economic activities in the region especially as the trans-Saharan routes had already lost their importance because of the dominance of maritime trade along the ports of the Atlantic coasts by the late nineteenth century. Jews were no longer needed as intermediaries between communities in the southern interior given these changing economic structures. Therefore, the risk of staying in villages in the Anti-Atlas was high enough to move to the coastal cities of Morocco and later to Israel where they were promised social and economic security and the long awaited return to Eretz-Israel.30

NOTES 1. Aomar Boum, Muslims remember Jews in southwestern Morocco: social memories, dialogic narratives and the collective imagination of Jewishness. Thesis (Ph.D.) (University of Arizona, Tucson, 2006). 2. This testimony demonstrates that the written and oral tales of Mardochée Aby Serour about the Daggatouns have taken the form of a living myth. For instance, in his work on Mardochée Aby Serour, Michel Abitbol shows that the Daggatouns were not ancient Jews but a vassal tribe among the Touareg. See, Michel Abitbol, “On Jews and Judaism in Black Africa–Rabbi Mordekhai Abi Serour’s Notes on His Travels.” Peˤamim 67 (1996): 5–24 [in Hebrew]. 3. Pierre Flamand, Diaspora en terre d’islam: les communautés israélites du sud marocain (Rabat: Dar al Aman, 2016), 44–45. 4. Michel Abitbol, ed., Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb (Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982). 5. Michel Abitbol, “Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien au MoyenÂge,” in Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982), 229–251; Mardochée Aby Serour, “Premier établissement des Israélites à Timbouctou,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 19: 345–370 (1870); John Hunwick, Jews of a Saharan oasis: Elimination of the Tamantit Community (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2006); Nehemia Levtzion, “The Jews of Sijilmasa and the Saharan trade,” in Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, ed. Michel Abitbol, 253–264 (Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982). 6. Gabriel Camps, “Réflexions sur l’origine des Juifs des Régions NordSahariennes,” in Communautés Juives des marges Sahariennes du Maghreb, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982), 57–67; Jean-Louis Miège, “Les Juifs et le commerce transsaharien au dix-neuvième siècle,” in Communautés Juives

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des marges Sahariennes du Maghreb, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jérusalem: Institut BenZvi, 1982), 391–401. 7. Boum, Muslims remember Jews in southwestern Morocco. 8. Jacob Oliel, Les Juifs au Sahara: une présence millénaire (Canada: Editions Elysée, 2007); idem, Les Juifs au Sahara: le Touat au Moyen Age (Paris: CNRS, 1994); idem, De Jérusalem à Tombouctou, l’odyssée saharienne du rabbin Mardochée (Paris: Editions Olbia, 1998). 9. Mardochée Aby Serour, Les Daggatoun: Tribu d’origine juive demeurant dans le désert du Sahara (Paris: Bulletin A.I.U., 1880); Aomar Boum, “Daggatoun,” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman Stillman et al. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010); idem, “Saharan Jewry: History, Memory and Imagined Identity,” The Journal of North African Studies 16, 3 (2011): 325–341; Henry Samuel Morais, The Daggatouns: A Tribe of Jewish origin in the Desert of Sahara (Philadelphia: Edward Stern & Co, 1882). 10. Hunwick, Jews of a Saharan oasis. 11. Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 12. Daniel Schroeter, “On the Identity of Indigenous North African Jews,” in North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, ed. Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 13. Vincent Monteil, “Les Juifs d’Ifran (Anti-Atlas Marocain),” Hespéris 35: 151–162, (1948). Djinn Jacques-Meunié, Le Maroc saharien des Origines à 1670, 2 vols (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1982). 14. Moshe Hallamish, The Kabbala in North Africa from the Sixteen Century: A Historical and Cultural Survey (Tel Aviv: Ha-Qibbus ha-Me’uhad [Hebrew], 2001). 15. Flamand, Diaspora en terre d’Islam. 16. Harvey Goldberg, “The Mellahs of Southern Morocco: Report of a Survey,” Maghreb Review 8 (3–4): 61–69 (1983). 17. This “intraregional mobility” is explored further in Boum, Memories of Absence. 18. This kind of strategic mobility can be seen “empowering, a resource, a tool for social [solidarity] and agency and an important dimension of social capital,” as argued by Mirjana Morokvasic, “‘Settled in Mobility’: Engendering post-wall migration in Europe,” Feminist Review 77: 7 (2004). 19. Moshe Bar-Asher and Daniel Schroeter, “Tafilalet,” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman Stillman et al., 445–447 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010). 20. Personal communication by Mardochée. 21. Charles de Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc (Paris: Challamel, 1888) ; André de la Porte de Vaux, “Notes sur le peuplement juif du Sous,” Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc 15 (54–55), (1952). 22. Daniel Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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23. Paul Pascon, Daniel Schroeter et al., La maison d’Iligh et l’histoire sociale du Tazerwalt (Rabat: Société Marocaine des Éditeurs Réunis, 1984). 24. Daniel Schroeter, “La découverte des Juifs berbères,” in Relations JudéoMusulmanes au Maroc: Perceptions et réalités, ed. Michel Abitbol, 169–187 (Paris: Stavit, 1997). 25. Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence. 26. Emily Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); Shlomo D. Goitein, Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Haim Z. Hirschberg, “The Jewish Quarter in Muslim Cities and Berber Areas,” Judaism 17: 405–421, (1968). 27. Aomar Boum, “Schooling in the Bled: Jewish Education and the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Southern Rural Morocco, 1830-1962,” Journal of Jewish Identities 3(1): 1–24 (2010). 28. Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez 1450-1700: Studies in Communal and Economic (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 29. Flamand, Diaspora en terre d’islam; Abdellah Larhmaid, Yahud mintaqat Sus, 1860-1960: dirasa fi Tarikh al-maghrib al-ijtima‘i (Rabat: Manshurat dar abi-raqraq, 2016). 30. Aomar Boum, “From ‘Little Jerusalems’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism and Rural Jewish Emigration,” The Journal of North African Studies 15 (1): 51–69 (2010).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abitbol, Michel. Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb. Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982. ———. “Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien au Moyen-age.” In Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, edited by Michel Abitbol, 229–251. Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982. ———. “On Jews and Judaism in Black Africa–Rabbi Mordekhai Abi Serour’s: Notes on His Travels.” Peˤamim 67: 5–24, 1996. Aby Serour, Mardochée. Les Daggatoun: Tribu d’origine juive demeurant dans le désert du Sahara. Paris: Bulletin A.I.U., 1880. ———. “Premier établissement des Israélites à Timbouctou.” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 19: 345–370, 1870. Bar-Asher, Moshe and Daniel Schroeter. “Tafilalet.” In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, edited by Norman Stillman et al., 445–447. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010. Boum, Aomar. Muslims remember Jews in southwestern Morocco: social memories, dialogic narratives and the collective imagination of Jewishness. Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Arizona, Tucson, 2006.

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———. “Daggatoun.” In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, edited by Norman Stillman et al. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010. ———. “From ‘Little Jerusalems’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism and Rural Jewish Emigration.” The Journal of North African Studies 15 (1): 51–69, 2010. ———. “Schooling in the Bled: Jewish Education and the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Southern Rural Morocco, 1830-1962.” Journal of Jewish Identities 3 (1): 1–24, 2010. ———. Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Camps, Gabriel. “Réflexions sur l’origine des Juifs des régions Nord-Sahariennes.” In Communautés Juives des marges Sahariennes du Maghreb, edited by Michel Abitbol, 57–67. Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982. de Foucauld, Charles. Reconnaissance au Maroc. Paris: Challamel, 1888. de la Porte de Vaux, André. “Notes sur le peuplement juif du Sous.” Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc 15 (54–55), 1952. Flamand, Pierre. Diaspora en terre d’Islam: Les communautés israélites du sud marocain. Rabat: Dar al Aman, 2016. Gerber, Jane S. Jewish Society in Fez 1450-1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Goitein, Shelomo Dov. Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Goldberg, Harvey. “The Mellahs of Southern Morocco: Report of a Survey.” Maghreb Review 8 (3–4): 61–69, 1983. Gottreich, Emily. The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Hallamish, Moshe. The Kabbala in North Africa from the Sixteen Century: A Historical and Cultural Survey. Tel Aviv: Ha-Qibbus ha-Me’uhad [Hebrew], 2001. Hirschberg, Haim Z. “The Jewish Quarter in Muslim Cities and Berber Areas.” Judaism 17: 405–421, 1968. Hunwick, John. Jews of a Saharan oasis: Elimination of the Tamantit Community. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2006. Jacques-Meunié, Djinn. Le Maroc saharien des Origines à 1670, 2 vols. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1982. Larhmaid, Abdellah. Yahud mintaqat Sus, 1860-1960: dirasa fi Tarikh al-maghrib al-ijtima‘i. Rabat: Manshurat dar abi-raqraq, 2016. Levtzion, Nehemia. “The Jews of Sijilmasa and the Saharan trade.” In Communautés juives des marges sahariennes du Maghreb, edited by Michel Abitbol, 253–264. Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982. Miège, Jean-Louis. “Les Juifs et le commerce transsaharien au dix-neuvième siècle.” In Communautés Juives des marges Sahariennes du Maghreb, edited by Michel Abitbol, 391–401. Jérusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1982.

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Monteil, Vincent. “Les Juifs d’Ifran (Anti-Atlas Marocain).” Hespéris 35: 151–162, 1948. Morais, Henry Samuel. The Daggatouns: A Tribe of Jewish origin in the Desert of Sahara. Philadelphia: Edward Stern & Co., 1882. Morokvasic, Mirjana. “‘Settled in Mobility’: Engendering post-wall migration in Europe.” Feminist Review 77 (2004): 7–25. Oliel, Jacob. Les Juifs au Sahara: le Touat au Moyen Age. Paris: CNRS, 1994. ———. De Jérusalem à Tombouctou, l’odyssée saharienne du rabbin Mardochée. Paris: Editions Olbia, 1998. ———. Les Juifs au Sahara: une présence millénaire. Canada: Editions Elysée, 2007. Schroeter, Daniel. Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. “La découverte des Juifs berbères.” In Relations Judéo-Musulmanes au Maroc: Perceptions et réalités, edited by Michel Abitbol, 169–187. Paris: Stavit, 1997. ———. “On the Identity of Indigenous North African Jews.” In North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, edited by Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ——— and Paul Pascon. La maison d’Iligh et l’histoire sociale du Tazerwalt. Rabat: Société Marocaine des Éditeurs Réunis, 1984.

Chapter 5

Jewish Bodies, Muslim Bodies, and French Medicine in Morocco Jonathan G. Katz

MEDICINE AND THE FRENCH CIVILIZING MISSION With doctors considered the vanguard of French influence, the introduction of Western medicine was among the principal rationalizations for France’s mission civilisatrice in Morocco. Recourse to medicine first began as an instrument of diplomacy at the turn of the century under foreign minister Théophile Delcassé who, as an advocate of what was euphemistically called “peaceful penetration,” authorized sending humanitarian doctors to Morocco.1 The policy continued during the forty-four years of the Protectorate (1912–1956). Among the most oft-cited bons mots attributed to Hubert Lyautey, who served as France’s first Resident-General (1912–1925), was his remark to General Gallieni with whom he served in Madagascar, “If you could send me four doctors, I’ll return you four battalions.”2 As Resident-General, Lyautey made good his promise with the creation of mobile military medical units that roved the countryside as part of the campaign of pacification.3 Initial medical efforts were epidemiological, focusing on mass vaccination campaigns against communicable diseases that were endemic to the country. Later, the emphasis of French health officials turned from prevention to individual treatment. As a consequence, the decade following World War II saw a threefold increase in the number of hospital beds bringing them to a grand total of 15,432 in 1955.4 Despite the ever-increasing medicalization of Moroccan life, progress in public health and hygiene was never as significant nor as successful as apologists for colonial rule have claimed.5 In many instances, the purpose of medicine was arguably not so much the alleviation of individual suffering as the eradication of diseases that threatened to spill over to European settlers from the native population. Nor were government funds for healthcare equitably distributed. To cite just one example, in 1932, when only 4 percent of the total 119

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population of Morocco was French and another 1 percent “other” European, a loan was contracted from the French government for the purpose of financing schools and hospitals to be repaid out of taxes and the profits of the phosphate industry. In each of the three predominantly Muslim cities of Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknes, European hospitals were allocated between four and five million francs, while hospitals designed to serve Moroccans received 500,000, 800,000, and 500,000, respectively.6 In this chapter our concern is not the efficacy of French biomedical practice in Morocco or its role as an instrument of colonial policy. Rather I want to consider, with reference to their own writings, the attitudes of French physicians in Morocco toward their patients, whether Arab, Berber, or Jew. I recognize that this approach inevitably privileges the voice of the colonialist at the expense of the colonized. One hears the doctor’s voice and not the patient’s. That said, our ultimate goal is not the representation of the individual doctor-patient relationship but rather an understanding of the vocabulary by which members of the politically and socially dominant group objectified those “beneath” them. I also consider why Jews, despite the evident disparagement with which they were viewed by French physicians, were nonetheless disproportionately the beneficiaries of European medicine in Morocco. BERBERS, ARABS, AND JEWS AS DEPICTED IN FRENCH MEDICAL LITERATURE French physicians typically differentiated between Arabs, Berbers, and Jews. While these ethnicities were sometimes ranked in a hierarchy, the physicians’ attitudes were predominantly based on perceptions of cultural and environmental considerations rather than a rigid biological determinism or scientific racism.7 A variety of factors played a role in shaping French physicians’ attitudes: the lingering adherence to neo-Lamarckism in France with its belief in the heritability and transmission of acquired characteristics, the presumed “lessons” of prior ethnographic experience in Algeria, a preoccupation with socio-cultural decline and the effects of modernity in the métropole, and, with regard to Jews, the impact of the Dreyfus Affair. Arabs and Jews, in the eyes of French physicians, each evinced distinctive pathologies, but these were due to cultural and environmental factors rather than an underlying essentialism. This is not to say that the attitudes and policies inherent in the Protectorate were not without their contradictions. On the one hand, Lyautey’s Berber Policy assumed racial differences between Arabs and Berbers and treated Arabs and Berbers differently for purposes of administration.8 Likewise, a judicial system intended to promote autonomy for religious groups only served to reify social, political, and legal differences between Jews and

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Muslims.9 Yet, in contrast, the universalism implicit in the mission civilisatrice to a large degree militated against doctors applying strict racial categories or interpreting race as the primary explanation for the prevalence of any one disease. The doctrine of assimilation previously espoused in Algeria had been formally repudiated in Morocco in favor of association, at least initially during the Residency of Lyautey. This ideological shift had little impact on physicians. Assimilation maintained that colonial subjects could—and should be encouraged to—“evolve” to the civilizational level of Frenchmen and women; association took the opposite tack, purportedly advocating a respect for indigenous customs and practices.10 For French physicians, who took professional pride in the scientific nature of their medical practice, there could be no question of condoning indigenous medical practices, however much the French residency advocated respecting indigenous traditions. Consequently, French physicians’ writings are peppered with diatribes against the toubibs and qablas, the local medical practitioners and midwives, and traditional methods of healing are invariably described as superstitions. The medical success of French efforts depended not merely on pills and syringes but on changing or replacing a whole constellation of behaviors. Among the ethnic and linguistic groups of Morocco, Berbers or Amazigh stood at the apex. Repeating the stock sentiments of Algerian ethnography enshrined in what Patricia Lorcin has called the “Kabyle myth,” doctors viewed Berbers as vigorous mountain folk and indifferent Muslims.11 They were considered to be as distinct from Arabs as Scandinavians, for example, were from the “Latin” races. Accordingly, Berber moral character was allegedly superior to that of the lowland and urban Arabs who were subject to all manner of vice, particularly of a sexual nature. For example, Émile Mauchamp, whose posthumous La Sorcellerie au Maroc appeared in 1910 three years after his death in Marrakesh, saw homosexuality and sexual perversions as rife among Morocco’s Arabs. Pederasty, he wrote, was “a veritable national institution.”12 In contrast, Berbers, who tended not to practice veiling, which allegedly contributed to sexual deviance, were generally exempt from these vices. This was similarly true for Jews, according to Mauchamp. Moreover, as another physician noted, Berbers, along with rural Arabs, were accustomed to long journeys on foot or horseback and enjoyed a more salubrious and active lifestyle than their sedentary urban counterparts.13 The alleged moral depravity of Moroccans was assumed by some as a given. In his 1902 account of the state of medicine in Morocco, Lucien Raynaud wrote that, “If one is to believe [the geographer Auguste] Mouliéras, Morocco is the country with the lowest form of debauchery and most unmentionable mores.”14 Writing in a 1920 guide for prospective doctors in Morocco, A. H. Millet wrote of the Moroccan male that, “Sexual passions dominate all others. Prudish, he wallows in the practice of all the vices in

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secret groups. Pederasty is much honored, preceded in puberty by bestiality.” In addition Millet listed what he called the “capital faults” of the typical Moroccan whom he characterized as being lazy, a thief, a liar, a glutton, and dirty. And if that weren’t enough, the Moroccan was vain (vaniteux), improvident (imprévoyant), a gambler (joueur), and wasteful (gaspilleur). And yet despite these flaws, Millet also enumerated a long list of positive qualities. The Moroccan was “resistant,” a remarkable marcher, very sober, intelligent, desirous of instruction, adroit, a good cultivator, gay, spiritual, satirical, and, as a soldier, a remarkable warrior.15 Writing in yet another Protectorate-era manual for prospective doctors, Charles Bouveret, a physician renowned for his work in Mogador/Essaouira, and his co-author André Pouponneau likewise provide a similar list of negative and counterbalancing positive Moroccan traits. Despite their flaws, Moroccans were religious, sober, had good stamina, and were polite and hospitable, good fathers, intelligent and adroit.16 Citing a common refrain about Muslims in general, the military doctor Henri Thierry acknowledged the supposed fatalism of Moroccans. Nonetheless, they were not hostile to European medicine, he opined, often having recourse to it alongside traditional methods of healing. And despite the strictures of their faith, Thierry saw alcoholism as a common problem.17 Similarly, while noting that alcohol consumption was less prevalent in Morocco than Algeria, Raynaud claimed that half the population in Mogador [Essaouira], and Marrakesh drank, especially Arab and Negro women.18 Raynaud was writing at the turn of the century when wine and spirits production was in the hands of local Jews. Later, “once Morocco was given protectorate status, a low tax threshold on the importation of hard liquor from France led to a surge in the consumption of hard liquor.”19 A NOSOLOGY OF “ARAB” AND “JEWISH” DISEASES French physicians at the the turn of the century and the start of the Protectorate noted a number of diseases endemic to Morocco. These included smallpox, the plague, typhoid, typhus, and cholera, in short, diseases that could be combatted by innoculation campaigns and the epidemiological efforts of Pasteur Institute.20 But one disease stood out among all others for French doctors as characteristically Moroccan. This was syphilis, or more specifically “Arab syphilis,” which was understood to be a particular strain, prevalent in Algeria and Tunisia as well and distinct from the disease in Europe, a disease with its own semiology and nosology. That most Moroccans were believed to suffer from syphilis seems to have been a truism. In 1913, Pierre Remlinger, head of the Pasteur Institute in Morocco, wrote that:

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Venereal diseases, against which there does not exist any measure of prevention or sanitation outside the zones of French occupation, constitute the basis, the very essence, of Moroccan pathology. . . . Syphilis is naturally the most widespread malady. It is the malady par excellence . . . among Muslims, it is the rule.21

Writing twenty-five years after the inception of the Protectorate, the colonial publicist J. Goulven repeated the oft-cited figure that 80 to 90 percent of the indigenous population was affected.22 The prevalence of the disease was certainly exaggerated. The focus on syphilis clearly reflected not uncommon European anxieties about interracial sexual contact between colonizers and colonists.23 Retrospectively, it is impossible to determine from what illnesses patients may actually have suffered. Many alleged sufferers were asymptomatic, and the Bordet–Wassermann reaction used to diagnose the disease was unreliable and prone to false positives. Ellen Amster, who has written extensively on French biomedical practice in Morocco, argues that the etiology of “Arab syphilis” was unique in its social construction and racist underpinnings. “Syphilis was not merely a disease of Muslims, Muslims were syphilitic because they were Muslims; doctors argued that Islam produced syphilis . . . ‘Arab syphilis’ was the corporealization and pathologization of Islam on the biological body.”24 Amster cites the views of Émile-Louis Bertherand, a Bureaux arabes doctor in Algiers and the author of an 1855 treatise on Islamic medicine. According to Amster, Bertherand argued that the indigenous peoples of Algeria “were unassimilable to France because Islamic despotism, law, polygamy, laziness, sexual perversion, and the African climate had deformed the physical and moral organism.”25 In her study of Georges Lacapère, a specialist in venereal disease, HannahLouise Clark provides an alternative understanding of how the disease was conceptualized. With encouragement from Lyautey, Lacapère headed a clinic in Fez from 1916 to 1919. His book La Syphilis arabe: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (1923) and subsequent publications made him the leading authority on the subject. Lacapère argued that there was only one kind of syphilis virus and that “it had to be the individual sufferer that determined the kind of infection.”26 Puzzled by the young age of many of his patients, he presumed that in many instances the disease was non-genital in nature. At one point, Lacapère hypothesized that the virus was borne by mosquitoes, a hypothesis later rejected in favor of more quotidian modes of transmission: visits to the barber, circumcision, tattooing, the sharing of contaminated drinking vessels, and so on. “In sum, the potential for contagion was found in the most mundane Moroccan daily practices.”27 Clark argues that Lacapère “was not denying the existence of race, but he was disputing its power to determine disease morbidity. Syphilis in Morocco

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was Arab rather than Berber because he believed it was fostered by risky behaviors that originated in the Arab urban culture.”28 Lacapère’s ideas about Moroccan otherness were certainly embedded in a belief in European superiority. However, what struck Lacapère most during his time in Fez was not his patients’ physical traits or color, but their alien ways of living, praying, working, eating, and relaxing. He created a diagnostic category in which not race but civilization defined the “Other,” accounting for the expression of disease and its transmission.29

Writing as late as 1949 in a thesis on childbirth in Morocco, the French researcher Pierre Escourrou again noted the supposed prevalence of syphilis, and cynically imagined it to be something of a desideratum. “In the Jewish milieu, as in the Muslim milieu, it is a glory to have syphilis, and whoever doesn’t have it here below will have it in a better world [to come].”30 Yet at approximately the same time, as Amster has documented, “clinical statistics of Muslim births proved the extremely low serological prevalence of syphilis.”31 Over time the notion of a distinctive “Arab syphilis” was eventually abandoned, but Lacapère’s view that eradication of the disease ultimately depended on changing cultural behaviors continued. As Eugène Lépinay, a public health official and dermatologist, put it in 1950, “complete prophylaxis could be achieved only if every Moroccan were ‘grounded in the comprehension of the benefits of western civilization.’”32 Somewhat ironically, while the supposed prevalence of syphilis in Morocco was viewed as a consequence of that country’s primitiveness, French doctors at the fin-de-siècle saw the prevalence of the disease back home in the métropole as a consequence of modernity and the challenges brought on by industrialization and urbanization.33 The joie de vivre of the belle époque notwithstanding, French intellectuals fixated on themes of degeneration and decline, citing, among other things, increasing rates of alcoholism, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and declining rates of natality.34 In this regard, the presumed backwardness of North African society served as a cautionary tale for the French. As Raymond Parks has recently pointed out in his monograph on the colonial “regeneration” of the Jewish community in Tunis, “Degeneration described and explained the social upheavals provoked by the Industrial Revolution and settler colonialism, both situations in which the society’s elites had daily contact with the inherently degenerate masses.”35 SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND RACIAL TROPES Contemporaneous with the theory of societal degeneration, the Dreyfus Affair served as a lightning rod for what Christopher Forth has called the

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“crisis of French manhood.” The trial of the Jewish captain provoked fierce debates in France among Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards alike regarding the alleged effeminacy of Jewish men and what constituted masculinity.36 Assumptions about Jews formed in the métropole inevitably spilled over into Morocco and can be seen reflected in French physicians’ writings about Jews. Moreover, as Sander Gilman among others have pointed out, anthropologists and physicians had long considered the “Jew’s body” a walking catalog of supposed physical defects.37 The tenets of scientific racism reified assumptions regarding Jewish difference and inferiority, and even European Jewish physicians and anthropologists embraced the notions of race science, espousing views that eventually led to calls for the creation of Muskeljudentum and the Zionist “New Jew.”38 The emergence of scientific racism notwithstanding, France contributed comparatively little to the discourse on the Jewish race. According to John Efron several factors account for this. First, the nature of anti-Semitism differed in France from that of Germany and Austria. In France it was linked to larger political causes rather than serving as “the sole aim of combatting Jews.” Moreover, following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, “the enemy across the Rhine displaced the Jews as the principal target of French hostility.” Second, the Jewish community enjoyed a more secure position in French society than elsewhere in Europe, this despite the anti-Semitism aroused by the Dreyfus Affair. According to Efron, “French Jewry’s confidence in the institutions of the French state to ensure the community’s security was unshakeable.” In short, “a consequence of the more secure position Jews enjoyed in French society was that they were not a focus of French race science, as the people in the French colonies were.”39 French anthropologists did occasionally turn their attention to Jews, as indicated by the text of a lively debate “On the Jewish race and its pathology” published by the Anthropological Society of Paris.40 The conversation began with Gustave Lagneau (1827–1896), a venereologist turned anthropologist and demographer, who cited the supposed superiority of Jews in certain regards: lower rates of illegitimate births, earlier marriage for men, lower infant mortality, and more rapid population growth. But alongside these positive traits, he noted the alleged frequency of diabetes, nervous disorders, mental illness and, according to some observers, an increased immunity to certain epidemic diseases such as the plague and typhus. Finally, he reported the observation of a medical colleague in Constantinople that leprosy there was exclusively a disease of Sephardic Jews, attributable to heredity and indicative that the Sephardic Jews and the indigenous Karaite or Crimean Jews were two separate races. Lagneau’s colleagues weighed in on the question of Jews’ racial identity, making a distinction between “pure” Jews of Syrian-Arab or Semitic origins

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and “Judaized” individuals, the product of conversion and proselytization. The archeologist Gabriel de Mortillet offered a neo-Lamarckian explanation. Whether “juifs annexés” or “juif d’origine,” Jews come to resemble one another owing to the adoption of a standard way of life. Mme. Clémence Royer, not surprisingly for Darwin’s French translator, argued that despite racial differences, the historic persecution of Jews allowed them to preserve acquired characteristics; this supposedly explained their subsequent success in the liberal professions now that modern laws protected them. Regardless of whether Jews were racially pure or not, their alleged characteristic behaviors and pathologies made them immediately recognizable. Subsequently, French physicians in Morocco readily borrowed the tropes and conventions of the métropole in depicting Jews. Moreover, much as French writers often depicted Moroccan Arabs in unflattering terms, seeing them as mendacious, lazy and debauched, they similarly subjected Moroccan Jews to stereotypes. Most frequently Jews were depicted as cringing, irrationally fearful and obsequious. According to one observer, a knock on the door provoked in Jewish households extreme anxiety and long discussions—“Who is it?”—before the door opened.41 These traits were attributed to centuries of inferior status from which they were emerging only now, thanks to the supposed beneficence of the French Protectorate. MANUALS FOR PROSPECTIVE PHYSICIANS IN MOROCCO The two manuals cited above, designed to offer advice for doctors planning to come to Morocco and both written in the early 1920s, expand on these themes. The first, written by Charles Bouveret and André Pouponneau, depicted Jews as highly emotional, if not hyperchondriacal. According to this characterization, Jews lacked proportion in all things. They were polite to the point of obsequiousness, while the least thing caused fear to the point of fainting. “For the least ‘booboo,’” Bouveret and Pouponneau write that “the entire [Jewish] family is agog: two three four emissaries hurry to your residence, coming sometimes even into your private quarters; one would think all was lost, you rush and find a patient who has indigestion from having eaten too much ‘shikhina’ (a dish made on Friday for Saturday).”42 According to this description, Jews were in general intelligent and remarkable polyglots without the benefit of formal study, but nonetheless tricky and money-loving. While noting that many had adopted European dress and that some had even lived in Europe and had a modern education, they had only reached a stage of imitation [mimétisme] and not yet true assimilation.

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Thanks to the laudatory efforts of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Jewish school children read French textbooks [“Les Gaulois nos ancêtres…”]. “In twenty years they’ll believe it!”43 And yet despite this faint praise, elsewhere they note that Jews were in no way superior to Muslims from a moral or social point of view and that their “progress” remained superficial. “If they in general have a more developed practical spirit than the Muslims, they remain no less prisoners of habits, prejudices and superstitions all deeply rooted and all opposed to our influence.”44 Bouveret and Pouponneau cautioned the doctor coming to Morocco to maintain his professional dignity. He should be aware that Moroccans regard the doctor’s care as a commercial commodity, and that the Jews, in particular, changed doctors frequently and took advantage of them.45 Some twenty years earlier, Felix Weisgerber, a French doctor who had established a practice in Casablanca in the years before the Protectorate, complained that Jews tended to pay for their families’ medical care in advance at a low yearly rate, thus assuring for themselves “the most for their money.” “As for the Muslims,” he added that, “they were still little accustomed to using the European toubib [physician] and still less to paying for it.”46 Somewhat tongue in cheek, Bouveret and Pouponneau characterize three kinds of patients whom the doctor in Morocco was likely to see. The first were the “curious,” those who wanted to see what a Christian doctor looked like and had no real ailment. The second were the “idlers,” mostly Jews, who have nothing better to do on their Saturday day of rest than to visit the hospital. “And hence the parade of Jewish women with their thick ankles [sag smin], a sign of supreme beauty among the Jews, complaining of the most strange ailments.” The third type was “the truly sick.”47 A second guide for physicians, written by August-Henri Millet, was further tinged with misogyny.48 The Jewish woman, if she happened to be rich, set herself up as a European (“especially as if she were brought up in England”). Her beauty was fleeting; she got fat the moment she married. She dressed richly without taste; elsewhere he says Jewish men dress simply, reserving all the luxury for their wives. The rich Jewish woman lacked energy, was always fatigued and complaining. As for the impoverished Jewish woman, given the sordid environment that surrounded her, she aroused “a little sympathy.” She often had a little education, especially in the coastal cities, but she was “less interesting than Moroccan women, more debauched [dévergondée] and more prudish [pudibonde], more vicious, more perverse, trying perpetually to compromise you.”49 French travelogs similarly noted the supposed vulgarity of Tunisian Jewish women. Richard Parks writes that, “The gaudiness and impropriety of these unacculturated women, who clung to ‘Arab’ ways and failed to accept and practice French ‘good manners,’ shocked elite Jews and colonial officials.”50

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Despite Millet’s prejudices with regard to Jews and particularly Jewish women, he nonetheless found them as patients to be “very interesting from a pecuniary point of view.” The Jew, “always afraid to die, will call you in every circumstance and every emergency. When you arrive the entire family is in fright over a trifle. Among rich families, [the Jew is] an excellent client, on condition that you have the patience of an angel.”51 Jews may not have had to endure the indignity of having a disease named after them, but they too were associated with an emblematic Jewish disease, namely, tuberculosis.52 Raynaud, writing at the turn of the century, noted that even in Mogador [Essaouira], despite its salubrious climate, tuberculosis was seen in all its forms among the Jews.53 Eugénie Delanoë, a Russian-born French-trained physician, in 1947 reflected upon her three decades of service in the hospital in Mazagan [El-Jadida]. According to her, tuberculosis was particularly prevalent among the Jewish population, and she noted that while a great effort was put into saving syphilitic babies, no resources were devoted to tubercular infants. Characterizing tuberculosis as an urban disease, she thought it was especially prevalent among Jewish families of Andalusian descent in Fez. “With a very light complexion, often obese, the Fassis seem to be bereft of all resistance in regard to this disease; they pay a heavy tribute to it.”54 The distinctions French physicians drew between Muslims and Jews in terms of their character and pathologies were physically manifest in the creation of separate treatment facilities. Partially this was a consequence of Lyautey’s doctrine of association whose avowed purpose was to preserve traditional customs and maintain the autonomy of religious communities. In practice, it tended to reify the differences between Jews and Muslims, and as a consequence, separate hospitals, or at a minimum separate wards, were built to serve Jews and Muslims as well as Europeans.55 But segregation was not entirely a function of policy stemming from the Residency. Jews themselves advocated for separate facilities, often with encouragement and support from the AIU. For example, in 1921, Joshua Corcos, the head of the Jewish community in Marrakesh, sent a letter through the auspices of the AIU to Baron Robert de Rothschild in Paris soliciting funds for a Jewish hospital.56 The hospital was never built, but the idea that the Jews of Marrakesh should have medical facilities separate from their Muslim countrymen persisted. Following the February 1926 visit to Marrakesh of Jacques Bigart, the AIU Secretary General, Jewish community members renewed their demand for an independent maternity hospital that would exclusively serve the Jewish community.57 Citing the costs of duplicating efforts and the expense of maintaining separate facilities and laboratories, the Protectorate officials preferred installing a Jewish ward adjacent to the planned “native” maternity. When the new maternity ward in Marrakesh opened in 1927, the Jewish pavilion

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was named for Narcisse Leven, one of the founders and a former president of the AIU.58 The demand for separate facilities was ostensibly motivated by the question of kashrut and preserving ritual purity, but social factors were also in play. In his manual Millet noted that Jews seldom came to the “native clinics,” a reluctance he characteristically attributed to a fear of lancets and hypodermic needles.59 Bouveret and Pouponneau advised having separate waiting rooms for Jews and Muslims and preferably a separate room for Muslim women. “You should start as much as possible to examine the Muslims before the Jews if you are the only doctor; they [the Muslims] will appreciate your ‘qauïda’ [sic] [following custom].”60 The hospital should likewise have separate pavilions for Muslim men and women and a separate pavilion for Jews if the local population was sufficiently large to merit it.61 Other considerations also figured in the authors’ recommendations. “Because of the racial hatred that still vibrantly exists in this country,” they write, “you cannot put an Arab, especially a rustic, in the same ward as a Jew. First, the latter will be molested at every turn, the personnel would only be able to care for him with constraint, and moreover your Muslim apprentice will earn there unfortunate renown.”62 THE JEWISH AFFINITY FOR EUROPEAN MEDICINE Bouveret and Pouponneau conclude their manual with the admonition that physicians should strive to create a positive impression that would reflect well on the Protectorate.63 From the start, the intention of France’s medical efforts was to win the support of Moroccans, the vast majority of whom were Arabs and Berbers. Nonetheless, the results were not what they intended. Hospital and maternity statistics indicate that Jews were in fact disproportionately patients relative to their numbers in the general population. At its height in 1947 the Jewish population was approximately 250,000 out of a total eight million, that is, a mere 3 percent.64 Moreover, as statistics indicate, Jewish women, who were not necessarily the primary or intended targets of French medical attention, in fact seem to have been especially eager to benefit from it.65 Arguably, Jewish women had more agency and were, therefore, more responsive to the attractions of European medicine than their Muslim sisters.66 For example, for November 1923 Dr. Eugénie Delanoë reported that the hospital in Magazan saw 935 Jewish women and 1,130 Jewish infants or 33 percent out of 6,222 consultations overall.67 According to the 1944 report of the Mauchamp Hospital, the Jews of Marrakesh, while they accounted for only 10 percent of the population, nonetheless counted for 41 percent of all

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consultations.68 Likewise, statistics compiled for maternity hospitals in other cities for 1947 show disproportionate recourse to them by Jewish women.69 A variety of reasons account for the Moroccan Jewish affinity for European medicine. The activities of the AIU certainly played a role in the “Europeanization” of the urban Jewish population. Moreover, Jews in coastal towns and in some interior cities already had a history of access to European doctors prior to the establishment of the Protectorate. To cite one example, at the turn of the century the Jews in the Marrakesh mellah had recourse to the German-trained physician Judah Holzmann as well as the British Protestant missionary Alan Lennox and the French doctor Émile Mauchamp. The personal charisma of Françoise Légey, who arrived in Marrakesh in 1910 as Mauchamp’s replacement, was also likely a factor in attracting a Jewish clientele. In addition, a number of local Jewish women’s organizations such as the Association de Secours de Dames Israëlites de Marrakech and the Assemblée Générale de l’Aide Maternelle de Marrakech emerged in the twenties. Led by French-acculturated Jewish women, the organizations forcefully advocated on behalf of their coreligionists. A final, additional consideration as to why Jews gravitated toward European medicine is the possibility that they were in fact sicker than their Muslim compatriots. Physicians and other European observers frequently noted the close proximity to one another in which Jews lived in the mellah and the overall lack of sanitation and hygiene there. All this is not to say that Jews were “better” patients than Muslim Arabs and Berbers. Moroccans, for example, historically practiced variolation for smallpox and on the whole showed a readiness to participate in inoculation campaigns. Often they resorted to European medicine after having exhausted traditional methods of healing.70 As one physician cynically observed, Moroccans were interested in their health but were lazy, non par vice, mais par constitution.71 Other doctors reported that Moroccans were impatient, unable to comprehend that a treatment requiring a series of three shots could not be performed in a single day.72 Regardless, the prejudices and stereotypes displayed by French physicians did not seem to deter Moroccans from turning to them for care. THE SELF-IMAGE OF FRENCH PHYSICIANS For their part French doctors tended to paint their efforts in heroic and selfcongratulatory terms. This is evident in the titles of subsequent memoirs: I Was Doctor to a 100,000 Berbers, Bush Doctor, and I Was a Doctor in Morocco.73 Indeed, serving as a physician in Morocco was not without risks. The list of doctors who died of contagious illnesses contracted while working in the public health service is long. Early in the Protectorate the French

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residence created a “Gold Medal for Epidemics” to be awarded to doctors and health workers—in some cases posthumously—for their having suffered typhus and other diseases while in the public health service.74 Marie-Claire Micouleau-Sicault, the daughter of Georges Sicault, Director of Public Health in Morocco from 1946–1956, wrote a history of Protectorateera medicine with an eye to defending the reputation of French physicians. “Colonialism wasn’t only a matter of economic interests and strategic manipulations for power,” she wrote. “For the young people who were entering life, it was also the fulfillment of destiny that they devote themselves to a people consumed by anarchy and tribal struggles, decimated by epidemics and infant malnutrition.”75 Similarly, Pierre Charbonneau, a former physician in Morocco, reminisced that, “As young doctors, having just finished our studies in hospitals in the métropole, we were hardly prepared for this medicine, but we had no desire to abandon it. We thought ourselves so responsible, excessively so for sure, but useful, effective, perhaps a bit exhilerated by the power we had to treat and heal! This is the paternalism for which we were reproached, but how could it be otherwise?”76 In retrospect, it seems inevitable that French physicians, overly confident in their own abilities and the efficacy of their medicine, should regard their patients with condescension. The image of the cowardly and hypochondriacal Jew, formulated in France and honed by the Dreyfus Affair, transferred seamlessly to Morocco and the mellah. Even more grotesquely, commonplace wisdom held that the Moroccan population as a whole and not just individual Arabs harbored the potential for disfiguring and debilitating disease. Whatever their sense of mission and high purpose, the doctors who came to Morocco brought with them in their medical kits the prejudices and stereotypes of their times. From their perspective, Morocco’s Jews and Muslims would only be cured of their ills when they ceased to be Moroccan. CONCLUSION The Jewish proclivity toward European medicine was one in a constellation of symbolic and material changes that Moroccan Jewish society underwent in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the repeated complaints of Moroccan traditionalism and recalcitrance voiced by AIU instructors in their reports to Paris, Moroccan Jews experienced dramatic alterations in their occupation, education, dress and—for those individuals who left the mellah—residence. José Bénech, who sensitively documented Jewish life in the Marrakesh mellah in the 1930s, depicted Jews as “early adopters”—to use a contemporary phrase—in Moroccan social life. In their capacity as merchants and sellers, for example, Jews introduced European mass-produced cloth and

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other goods to their Muslim customers. Bénech further cites the example of Émile Mauchamp, the French doctor who met his violent death in 1907. “When Doctor Mauchamp opened his clinic, he only succeeded in drawing Muslims there when, having given Jews the permission to be cared for there, the latter gave [Muslims] the example.”77 Whether Muslims took their cues from Jewish precedents is an interesting proposition. Bénech makes the case that despite being despised for their social inferiority, Jews were respected by Muslims for their supposed expertise in certain matters, among them money, goods, and writing amulets. The ability of Western medicine to attract Jewish patients received a picturesque treatment in a report sent to AIU offices in Paris by Berthe Camhy, an AIU instructor and a native of Marrakesh. Writing in 1929, she described how on Saturdays Jewish women would promenade with their infants outside the city’s newly built maternity hospital and goutte de lait. “Not long ago [the women] were afraid of doctors and only consulted charlatans who claimed to heal their ills,” she wrote; “now, before the illness worsens, they go to the doctor.” “Monsieur le Président,” she concluded, “great progress has been accomplished since the French occupation.”78 Great progress, indeed, but was it the progress French Protectorate authorities had anticipated or desired? The Moroccan Jewish population was certainly not the desired target or intended beneficiary of French medical policies. Why then were Jews disproportionately patients in the newly built hospitals and clinics provided by the French? As with the ever-increasing enrollments of Moroccan Jews in the AIU schools, the patronage of French doctors and French-trained Jewish midwives could be seen as a sign of progress and assimilation. Bénech and others saw the Jewish embrace of Western culture as an example of “evolution” and a cleaving to the French. But the attraction of European medicine to Jews was also an assertion of Jewish difference. The insistence on segregated facilities went beyond a simple preoccupation over the preparation of kosher food. As the boundaries of the Marrakesh mellah literally eroded in the 1920s under the Protectorate, an uneasiness arose among Jews as to the status of their relationship with the majority Muslim population. In short, the adoption of Western medicine by Moroccan Jews arguably had less to do with their assimilation to French culture and everything to do with a reassertion and maintenance of cultural boundaries—both metaphorical and physical—with Muslims. Bénech wrote in his study of the mellah that, “We shouldn’t deceive ourselves: the walls of the mellah represent in [the Jews’] eyes as much a symbol of privilege as a sign of servitude. Sheltered by these ramparts, he can remain a Jew practicing his law in complete freedom.”79 But as the physical walls of the mellah came down, Morocco’s Jews compensated

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by erecting new metaphorical ones. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth once observed, it is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”80 NOTES 1. Jonathan G. Katz, Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Ellen J. Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Jeanne-Marie Péraud, La femme médecin en Afrique du Nord, Son rôle d’éducatrice (Bordeaux: Imprimerie de l’université, 1932). 2. Jacques-Max Doumic, L’action médicale sur l‘indigène au Maroc (Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine, Faculté de médecine de Paris, Paris: Lapied, 1939), 17. 3. Paul Chatinières, Dans le Grand Atlas Marocain: Extraits du carnet du route d’un Médecin d’assistance médicale indigène, 1912-1916. Introduction du Général Lyautey (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1919). 4. The percentage of the total Protectorate budget devoted to public health remained relatively stable, vacillating from a low of 5.9 percent in 1928 to a high of 7.9 percent in 1945 and settling at 6.8 percent in 1951. Nonetheless, the emphasis changed. In 1926 there were 2,100 hospital beds in Morocco, 4,950 in 1939, and as many as 15,432 in 1955. “As for the number of consultations delivered by the hospital and medical units of the public health service, it swelled almost proportionally. Infinitesimally small in 1912, it reached a million in 1917, burst through to 10 million in 1941 and soared to almost 20 million in 1955.” The numbers of medical personnel also grew. By 1956 there were upwards of five hundred doctors attached to the public health service [Daniel Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V: le double visage du Protectorat (Paris: Denoël, 1999), 298]. 5. See Amster, Medicine and the Saints; Abdelmounim Aissa, “La santé publique au Maroc à l’époque coloniale: 1907-1956 (PhD diss., Université de Paris I—Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1997); Daniel Rivet, “Hygiénisme colonial et médicalisation de la société marocaine au temps du protectorat Français (1912-1956),” in Santé, Médecine et Société dans le Monde Arabe, ed. Elisabeth Longuenesse (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 105–128; Jim [James Albert] Paul, “Medicine and Imperialism in Morocco.” MERIP Reports 7 (September 1977) and idem, “Professionals and Politics in Morocco: A Historical Study of the Mediation of Power and the Creation of Ideology in the Context of European Imperialism.” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975). For a celebratory account of France’s medical effforts in Morocco see Yvonne Knibiehler, Geneviève Emmery and Françoise Leguay, Des Français au Maroc: La présence et la mémoire. (Paris: Denoël, 1992). 6. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 194–195 and 195, n. 19. Data are drawn from the Bulletin Officiel (Protectorat du Maroc), supplement to No. 1027, July 1, 1932, 14,

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as cited in Melvin Knight, Morocco as a French Economic Venture (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937), 105. 7. Richard Fogarty and Michael A. Osborne, “Constructions and Functions of Race in French Military Medicine, 1830-1920,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 206–237. 8. Edmund Burke, III, “The Image of the Moroccan State in French Ethnological Literature: A New Look at the Origin of Lyautey’s Berber Policy,” in Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (London: Duckworth, 1973), 175–200, and Katherine E. Hoffman, “Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930–1956,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 851–880. 9. Jessica M. Marglin, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Jonathan G. Katz, “Conversion, intermarriage and the legal status of Jews in Protectorate Morocco,” Journal of North African Studies 23 (2018): 648–674. 10. Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) (reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005). 11. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial North Africa (London: I. B. Taurus, 1995). 12. Émile Mauchamp, La Sorcellerie au Maroc (Paris: Dordon-Ainé, 1910), 166. Thought to be a spy, Mauchamp was murdered by a mob on March 19, 1907. See Katz, Murder in Marrakesh and idem, “The 1907 Mauchamp Affair and the French Civilizing Mission in Morocco,” Journal of North African Studies 6 (2001): 143–166 [reprinted in North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith (Frank Cass: London and Portland, OR, 2001)]. 13. Lucien Raynaud, Étude sur l’hygiène et la médecine au Maroc (Algiers: S. Léon, 1902), 23. 14. Ibid.,10, citing Auguste Mouliéras, Le Maroc inconnu: étude géographique et sociologique (Paris: Joseph André, 1895). 15. A.-H. Millet, Au Maroc: Ce que tout officier ou médecin doit savoir (Paris: Henri Charles Vavauzelle, 1920), 24–25. 16. Charles Bouveret and André Pouponneau, Le Médecin d’Assistance au Maroc (Paris: A. Maloine et fils, 1922), 42–48. On Bouveret see Eleanor Elsner, The Magic of Morocco (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1928), 75–77. 17. Henri Thierry, Étude sur Les Pratiques et Superstitions médicales des Marocains et sur l’influence de la médecine française au Maroc (Paris: Librairie le François, 1917), 12–24. 18. Raynaud, 94. 19. Hannah-Louise Clark, “Civilization and Syphilization: A Doctor and His Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (2013): 106. 20. Francisco Javier Martínez, “Double Trouble: French Colonialism in Morocco and the Early History of the Pasteur Institutes of Tangier and Casablanca (18951932),” Dynamis 36 (2016): 317–339.

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21. From Pierre Remlinger, “Essai de nosologie marocaine,” Annales d’Hygiène Publique et de Médecine Légale, series 4, no. 20 (August 1913): 129–167, quoted in Amster, “The Syphilitic Arab,” 322. 22. Joseph Goulven, La France au Maroc: Vingt-Cinq Ans de Protectorat (19121937), Preface du Général Noguès (Paris: Publication du Comité de l’Afrique Française, 1937), 88. 23. Clark, 87. 24. Amster, “The Syphilitic Arab,” 322–323. 25. Ibid., 323. 26. Clark, 101. 27. Ibid., 103. 28. Ibid., 105. 29. Ibid., 111. 30. Pierre Escourrou, Accouchements et Maternités au Maroc (Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine, Faculté de médecine de Paris, 1949), 42–43. 31. Amster, “The Syphilitic Arab,” 338, and idem, Medicine and the Saints, 194–195. 32. Eugène Lépinay, “La lutte contre les maladies vénériennes au Maroc,“MarocMédical 29, no. 292 (1950): 129, quoted in Clark, 113. 33. Robert Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 34. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: the Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11–83. 35. Richard C. Parks, Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 1. 36. Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 37. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). 38. Parks, 98–101. 39. John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 10. Parks, 16, cites a similar “gulf” between the French and Anglo-German theorists of race regarding the nature of inheritance and eugenics. 40. Gustave Lagneau, “Sur la race juive et sa pathologie,” Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, IV° Série. Tome 2 (1891): 539–549. https://doi​.org​/10​ .3406​/bmsap​.1891​.7566. 41. Bouveret, 52. 42. Ibid., 52. 43. Ibid., 53. 44. Ibid., 89–90. 45. Ibid., 89–90. 46. Félix Weisgerber, Au Seuil du Maroc Moderne (Rabat: Éditions la Porte, 1947), 46.

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47. Bouveret, 104. 48. Millet, 25. 49. Ibid., 35–36. Millet continues in this vein. “Insinuant, chicaneur, ayant pour l’argent un goût immodéré, méchant quand il est plus fort ; dans le cas contraire, d’une politesse, d’une humilité, d’une platitude qui le rendent méprisable, parlant toutes les langues, mais sans instruction générale, ni musicien, ni artiste ; débrouillard à l’excès, complètement immoral, on peut tout demander à un juif, à une famille juive ; dans les villes, vous traversez la salle à manger où la famille prend le repas, introduit par le fils de la famille et vous vous isolez avec la fille de la maison: c’est tout naturel.” Ibid., 38. 50. Parks, 121–122. 51. Millet, 39. 52. On tuberculosis and Jews, Eugénie Delanoë, Trente années d’activité médicale et sociale au Maroc: Histoire du premier Hôpital régional construit au Maroc sur l’ordre du Maréchal Lyautey (Paris: Librairie Maloine, 1947), 131. In contrast, British doctors noted that “at different times cancer, syphilis, and tuberculosis consumption have been put forward from which Jews are free. This is by no means the fact…”, SB Atkinson, “Tuberculosis Among Jews,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 2469 (April 25, 1908): 1000–1002. On the prevalence of tuberculosis among the expanding urban Muslim population, see Amster, Medicine and the Saints, 178–181. 53. Raynaud, 195 54. Delanoë, 131. 55. Marglin, Across Legal Lines; Katz, “Conversion, Intermarriage and the Legal Status of Jews.” 56. Corcos, Communauté Israélite, Marrakesh, to Baron Robert de Rothschild, Paris, 27 Juillet 1921, Alliance Israélite Universelle [AIU] Maroc II B 9.52 (stamped 19 Oct 1921). The director of the Bureau d’Hygiène in Marrakesh wrote that budgetary constraints had made a dispensary devoted to Jews prohibitive. Le Fevre, Directeur, Bureau d’Hygiène, Services Municipaux, Marrakesh, to Baron Robert de Rothschild, 26 Juillet 1921, AIU Maroc II B 9.52 (stamped 19 Oct 1921). 57. Jacques Bigart, “Une mission au Maroc,” Paix et Droit (April 1, 1926), 5–8. 58. Messoda Dray, President, and [illegible], Secretary, Association de Secours de Dames Israëlites de Marrakech, to AIU, Paris, April 9, 1926; Handwritten draft, Bigart [?] to Mme. Dray, AIU Maroc II B 9.49 (stamped April 14, 1926); Handwritten draft, Bigart to Joseph V. Israel, Marrakesh stamped 20 April 1926, AIU Maroc II B 9.50; Joseph V. Israel, Marrakech to Bigart, Secretary General, AIU, Paris 13 April 1926, AIU Maroc II B 9.50; Columbani, Directeur de la Santé et de l’Hygiene publiques to Bigart, Sec. Gen. AIU Paris 2 June 1926 [stamped 8 June 1926] AIU Maroc II B 9.51. 59. Millet, 39.  60. Bouveret, 106. 61. Ibid., 120. 62. Ibid., 120–121. 63. Bouveret, 122–123.

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64. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, eds., A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 301; André Chouraqui, La Condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain (Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle and Presses du Livre Français, 1950), 213. 65. Aissa, 221. 66. In contrast, Richard Parks argues that in Tunisia, Jewish women were the specific objects of French medical attention. “Muslim women were generally ignored or excluded from metropolitan efforts to export modernized maternity to the colonial setting.” Parks, 120. 67. Delanoë, 59. 68. Rivet, 300 and 448, n. 52. 69. In Casablanca, the maternity ward of the Jules Mauran Hospital was overwhelmingly frequented by Jewish women. Of 10,650 consultations. 3,750 were Muslim women, 6,900 were Jews. Of 1,523 deliveries in 1947, 561 were those of Muslim women and 962 were those of Jewish women, some 63%. Escourrou, 65–67. 70. Clark, 95, discusses the enthusiasm for which Lacapère’s syphilis clinic in Fez was received; Amster, Syphilitic Arab, 331. 71. Doumic, 41. 72. Knibiehler, 201. 73. Nicolas Dobo, J’étais le médecin de cent mille Berbères: Un Médecin français dans le bled marocain de 1955-1958 (Paris: Éditions du Scorpion, 1964); Maxime Rousselle, Médecin du bled (Talence: M. Rousselle, 1990); Henri Dupuch, J’étais médecin au Maroc, 1942-1958 (Paris: France-Empire, 1985). 74. Knibiehler, 195. 75. Micouleau-Sicault, 28. 76. Quoted in Knibiehler, 205. 77. José Bénech, Essai d’explication d’un mellah (Ghetto marocain) Un des Aspects du Judaïsme (Paris: Éditions Larose, 1940), 75. 78. B. Camhy, Marrakesh, to Président, AIU, Paris, December 13, 1929 AIU Maroc II B 9.37 [incorrectly catalogued as March 30, 1930]. 79. Bénech, 76. 80. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998), 15.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Aissa, Abdelmounim. “La santé publique au Maroc à l’époque coloniale: 19071956. PhD diss., Université de Paris I—Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1997. Amster, Ellen J. Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Archives, Alliance Israélite Universelle, Maroc II B.

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Atkinson, SB. “Tuberculosis Among Jews.” The British Medical Journal 1 (2469): 1000–1002, April 25, 1908. Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. Bénech, José. Essai d’explication d’un mellah (Ghetto marocain). Un des Aspects du Judaïsme. Paris: Éditions Larose, 1940. Betts, Raymond F. Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 18901914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961 [reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005]. Bigart, Jacques. “Une mission au Maroc.” Paix et Droit, April 1, 5–8, 1926. Bouveret, Charles and André Pouponneau. Le Médecin d’Assistance au Maroc. Paris: A. Maloine et fils, 1922. Burke, III, Edmund. “The Image of the Moroccan State in French Ethnological Literature: A New Look at the Origin of Lyautey’s Berber Policy.” In Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, edited by Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud, 175–200. London: Duckworth. 1973. Chatinières, Paul. Dans le Grand Atlas Marocain: Extraits du carnet du route d’un Médecin d’assistance médicale indigène, 1912-1916. Introduction du Général Lyautey. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1919. Chouraqui, André. La Condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain. Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle and Presses du Livre Français, 1950. Clark, Hannah-Louise. “Civilization and Syphilization: A Doctor and His Disease.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87: 86–114, 2013. Delanoë, Eugénie. Trente années d’activité médicale et sociale au Maroc: Histoire du premier Hôpital régional construit au Maroc sur l’ordre du Maréchal Lyautey. Paris: Librairie Maloine, 1947. Dobo, Nicolas. J’étais le médecin de cent mille Berbères: Un Médecin francais dans le bled marocain de 1955-1958. Paris: Éditions du Scorpion, 1964. Doumic, Jacques-Max. L’action médicale sur l‘indigène au Maroc. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine, Faculté de médecine de Paris. Paris: Lapied, 1939. Dupuch, Henri. J’étais médecin au Maroc, 1942-1958. Paris: France-Empire, 1985. Efron, John M. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-desiècle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Elsner, Eleanor. The Magic of Morocco. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1928. Escourrou, Pierre. Accouchements et Maternités au Maroc. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine, Faculté de médecine de Paris, 1949. Fogarty, Richard and Michael A. Osborne. “Constructions and Functions of Race in French Military Medicine, 1830-1920.” In The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, 206–237. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Forth, Christopher E. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Gilman, Sander L. The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge, 1991. Goulven, Joseph. La France au Maroc: Vingt-Cinq Ans de Protectorat (1912-1937), Preface du Général Noguès. Paris: Publication du Comité de l’Afrique Française, 1937.

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Hoffman, Katherine E. “Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930–1956.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52: 851–880, 2010. Katz, Jonathan G. “The 1907 Mauchamp Affair and the French Civilizing Mission in Morocco.” Journal of North African Studies 6: 143–166, 2001 [reprinted in North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, edited by Julia Clancy-Smith. Frank Cass: London and Portland, OR, 2001]. ———. Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ———. “Conversion, Intermarriage and the Legal Status of Jews in Protectorate Morocco.” Journal of North African Studies 23: 648–674, 2018. Knibiehler, Yvonne, Geneviève Emmery and Françoise Leguay. Des Français au Maroc: La présence et la mémoire. Paris: Denoël, 1992. Knight, Melvin. Morocco as a French Economic Venture. New York: D. AppletonCentury, 1937. Lagneau, Gustave. “Sur la race juive et sa pathologie.”  Bulletin de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, IV° Série. Tome 2 (1891): 539–549. https://doi​.org​/10​ .3406​/bmsap​.1891​.7566. Lorcin, Patricia M. E. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial North Africa. London: I. B. Taurus, 1995. Marglin, Jessica M. Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Martínez, Francisco Javier. “Double Trouble: French Colonialism in Morocco and the Early History of the Pasteur Institutes of Tangier and Casablanca (1895-1932).” Dynamis 36: 317–339, 2016. Mauchamp, Émile. La Sorcellerie au Maroc. Paris: Dordon-Ainé, 1910. Meddeb, Abdelwahab and Benjamin Stora, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Millet, A.H. Au Maroc: Ce que tout officier ou médecin doit savoir. Paris: Henri Charles Vavauzelle, 1920. Nye, Robert. Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of Decline. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Parks, Richard C. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Paul, Jim [James Albert], “Professionals and Politics in Morocco: A Historical Study of the Mediation of Power and the Creation of Ideology in the Context of European Imperialism.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975. ———. “Medicine and Imperialism in Morocco.” MERIP Reports 7 (September 1977). Péraud, Jeanne-Marie. La femme médecin en Afrique du Nord, Son rôle d’éducatrice. Bordeaux: Imprimerie de l’université, 1932. Raynaud, Lucien. Étude sur l’hygiène et la médicine au Maroc. Algiers: S. Léon, 1902.

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Rivet, Daniel. “Hygiènisme colonial et médicalisation de la société marocaine au temps du protectorat Français (1912-1956).” In Santé, Médecine et Société dans le Monde Arabe, edited by Elisabeth Longuenesse 105–128. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. ———. Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V: le double visage du Protectorat. Paris: Denoël, 1999. Rousselle, Maxime. Médecin du bled. Talence: M. Rousselle, 1990. Schneider, William H. Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Thierry, Henri. Étude sur Les Pratiques et Superstitions médicales des Marocains et sur l’influence de la médecine. Paris: Librairie le François, 1917. Weisgerber, Félix. Au Seuil du Maroc Moderne. Rabat: Éditions la Porte, 1947.

Section 2

CULTURAL COMMONALITIES

Chapter 6

Sebaa Ouled Ben Zmirou in Jewish and Muslim Contexts Return to the Dead and Encounters after Death José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim

INTRODUCTION The Ouled Ben Zmirou are among the best-known hagiographical figures in the Jewish Moroccan universe.* They are seven brothers buried together on the outskirts of Safi. The Ben Zmirou family migrated from the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco and served as leaders of the Jewish community in Portuguese Safi, beginning in the 1530s. Their social position as communal leaders was well documented and subsequently forgotten by generations of Moroccan Jews and Muslims alike, a phenomenon we shall refer to as “return to the dead.” Greater importance has been attached to the seven brothers as miraculous figures, a feature outside a Portuguese mindset, rather than as the true leaders they were. Their miraculous qualities within post-mortem cultural and religious context can be considered “encounters after death.” In this chapter we will explore the process of religious empowerment that occurred after the death of the Ben Zmirou. THE EXPULSION OF JEWS FROM THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THEIR REUNION IN MOROCCO In December 1496, King D. Manuel I (r. 1495–1521) decreed the expulsion of all Jews living in his realm, be they Jews born in Portugal or those who had taken refuge in Portugal after their expulsion from Spain in March 1492. The main impetus for this expulsion decree was Manuel’s desire to marry Princess 143

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Isabel, the heiress to the Spanish Crown. The Catholic monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, demanded Portugal align its policies with Spain if Manuel wanted to marry their daughter. However, King Manuel’s expulsion decree was also rooted in a general aversion to and rivalry with the Jews that was widespread among the aristocracy and merchants of Portuguese society. The Jews, alongside the remaining Moorish population, were obliged to leave Portugal by October 1497.1 At the time of departure, however, the bulk of the community was forcibly converted to Christianity. If D. Manuel successfully rid his home country of Jews, he soon gained new Jewish subjects with the Portuguese expansion in Morocco. The Portuguese conquest in Morocco gave rise to the creation of “Jewish Quarters” (Judiarias) in Safi and Azemmour, two ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, conquered in 1508 and 1513, respectively. Some Jews expelled from Portugal were already living in Safi before 1508 and played a significant role in helping the Portuguese to conquer the town. Their rabbi, Abraão [Rute], acted as interpreter for Diogo de Azambuja, the captain of Mogador and later the first governor of Safi. Abraão informed his employer of a Muslim plot to kill him, and was instrumental, in his role of courtier, in helping the Portuguese capture Safi. Diogo de Azambuja even distributed weapons to the Jews—if we are to believe a “memoir” written by Rabbi Abraão.2 D. Manuel granted privileges to the Jewish community of Safi following the medieval pattern of royal letters addressed to Jewish communities in Portugal. In the case of Safi, we are aware of the existence of three such letters; one from 1509 and the other two from 1512. In the first letter, dated May 4, 1509, King D. Manuel I promised never to expel its present and future Jewish inhabitants, nor to force them to be baptized. If, however, the Jews wanted to leave, they could do so and take all their property with them unhindered.3 The other two letters protected the Jewish presence through a special tax status negotiated in Portugal by Mail Benzamerro in 1511.4 In a personal royal letter dated May 3, 1509, a contemporary of Rabbi Abraão, a Jew named Isaac Benzamerro, was honored by King Manuel I with permission to visit Portugal, accompanied by two servants, in return for services rendered during the conquest of Safi.5 The letter dated January 2, 1512, granted the community a household tax cap of 320 reais as of January 1, 1513, and exempted widows completely. D. Manuel, aware of the existence of poor Jews in Safi, allowed the community to allocate the total sum to be paid according to income. The same royal letter allowed for the same taxation on the commercial goods of the Jews of Safi as was levied on non-Jews.6 The corollary of this policy, probably recognizing the crucial role played by the Jewish community, was the issuance of a new letter of privilege on April 20, 1512, in which D. Manuel allowed all Jews living in Safi to exit and enter the town whenever they wished. He

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also sought to attract Jews who wanted to live in the city by increasing their protected Jewish community.7 RETURN TO THE DEATH: THE BENZAMERRO OF SAFI The Benzamerro family of Safi belonged to a dynasty of tax collectors and physicians who lived in Seville between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. In 1492, for instance, Isaac Benzamerro, then living in Badajoz, Estremadura, wanted to recover the money he had lent Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon for the conquest of Granada. Another branch of this family lived in Évora, Portugal, during the fifteenth century. It is documented that both branches of the family were wealthy; their holdings included businesses in Morocco, tax farming, management of the customs in the Portuguese Moroccan enclaves of Azemmour and Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer (Agadir), and payment of the wages of the local garrisons.8 Safi was the site of a dramatic confrontation between two leading Jewish families for the office of rabbi. One contestant was the Rute family, who had lived there before the Portuguese conquest; the other was the Benzamerro family, who came to Safi from Azemmour. We have already seen that Rabbi Abraão Rute, the interpreter and physician of Diogo de Azambuja, was one of the first Jews mentioned in Portuguese sources in connection with his services in the conquest of Safi. However, during his sojourn in Portugal in 1509, Isaac Benzemerro was appointed rabbi of Safi by D. Manuel I. The king, however, was unaware that Abraão Rute had been confirmed as rabbi by Diogo da Azambuja. Rute, to recover his position, went to Portugal to argue his case. D. Manuel had no option but to reinstate him as rabbi. Isaac Benzamerro considered Rute’s appointment an insult to his family as all the Jews of Safi would henceforth follow Rabbi Abraão’s rulings. The Benzamerros never forgave Rabbi Abraão Rute for his boldness and initiated a long-lasting and bitter dispute with him.9 The new Portuguese sovereign, D. João III (r. 1521–1557), issued a letter of privilege on June 9, 1523, addressed to the “Benzamerro Jews of Safi,” ordering that all internal Jewish judicial matters would be judged according to Jewish Law.10 The implication here is that Rabbi Abraão Rute was not judging exclusively according to Jewish Law. Rabbi Abraão tried to plead his case to the king, arguing that the Benzamerros sought to avoid his jurisdiction, as Rabbi Abraão did indeed adjudicate according to Jewish Law.11 In the end the Benzamerros succeeded in convincing D. João III that Rabbi Abraão had become his enemy. On May 12, 1524, the king issued another letter of privilege addressed to Abraão Benzamerro exempting him, his relatives, and his servants from Rabbi Abraão’s jurisdiction. Abraão Benzamerro

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convinced the king that Abraão Rute was his chief enemy, and so D. João III ordered Captain Gonçalo Mendes Sacoto to appoint another Jew to judge the Benzamerros in the future.12 Rabbi Abraão was unable to resist the long and protracted revenge exerted by the powerful and numerous Benzamerros, spearheaded by the cunning and resourceful Abraão Benzamerro. Abraão Benzamerro managed to overshadow the rival Rutes by moving money between the Portuguese strongholds in Morocco through his network of relatives and dependents, and by profiting from the trade between Portugal and Morocco.13 He, like other members of his family, traveled frequently to Portugal on business. A royal letter dated May 8, 1524, authorized Abraão Benzemerro to come to Lisbon whenever he wished, accompanied by two Jewish servants.14 He was probably in Lisbon in October 1524. A document dated from the seventeenth of that month, attests to his dealings with the king of Portugal in connection with some loans he contracted in the Portuguese strongholds in Morocco for the payment of wages and grants and other business with royal officials in Safi.15 In August 1533, for example, D. João III warned his chief minister, D. António de Ataíde, Count of Castanheira, that the “Jew” had requested the delivery of Indian lace to fulfill the payment of contracts in North Africa.16 The Benzamerros emerged victorious from this fight, taking advantage of a new political situation favorable to them. On the one hand, Abraão Rute had enjoyed close relations with D. Manuel and his court, particularly with the Secretary of State António Carneiro. On the other hand, the Benzamerros would eventually reap benefits from his successor, D. João III, who replaced his father’s bureaucratic elite with his own men. Until his death in 1537, Rabbi Abraão Rute was forced to accept the outrage of the presence of a powerful family exempted from his jurisdiction in Safi. His son, Jacob Rute, who worked as an Arabic translator in Safi in 1523, must have found the situation sufficiently intolerable to prompt him to move to Fez in 1536 where he became an advisor to the king. His brother, Moisés Rute, left Safi for Asilah, perhaps that same year. As for the Benzamerros, their consecration came after the death of Rabbi Abraão Rute and the departure of his sons. At that time D. João III officially appointed Abraão Benzamerro, who enjoyed the privileges of a knight,17 to the position of rabbi of Safi.18 We know of several of Abraão Benzamerro’s faithful agents who acted on his behalf in various businesses he had in Morocco, namely: a) Jacob Daroque, who served in Azemmour collecting the taxes due the customs office and local cathedral, as well as providing lodging and meals to the envoys of the sultan of Fez and the sharif of Marrakesh. He was also appointed customs collector of Mazagan, where he also worked as a translator on behalf of Benzamerro.

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b) Judas Budarão, or Abudarham, who paid the wages of the garrison in Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer, and also supplied the emissaries of the Sharif of Marrakesh. c) David Cint, who was his agent in Fez. The presence of Abraão Benzamerro in Portugal was not always so straightforward. We know, for instance, that he acted on behalf of the Sharif of Suz in a matter of great importance to the Jews; the arrival of the celebrated David Reubeni to Portugal in 1525.19 Reubeni recounted that he had been sent to Portugal from the kingdom of Habor, by order of his brother Joseph and sixty of his elders, and that he was the son of the deceased King Salomon. He traveled through Ethiopia spreading the message of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and visited Palestine where he became aware of the political balance of power in the Middle East, before arriving in Rome, where he presented Pope Clement VII (1523–1534) with a plan to defeat the expanding Ottoman Empire that threatened Europe and held sway over the holy places of Judaism and Christianity.20 Abraão Benzamerro returned to Safi in 1525, from whence he wrote a letter to David Reubeni mentioning his conversations with Sharif Mawlay Ahmad Shaykh (r. 1524–1557) about the Habor desert.21 We also know that Abraão Benzamerro was connected with the trials of Rui Dias and Leonor Mendes by the Lisbon Inquisition. The New Christian Rui Dias was a confectioner who confessed to the Inquisition that one “Abraam Memzimeiro,” a Jew who came to Lisbon, was among those who had taught him Jewish ceremonies.22 Leonor Mendes, who was an Old Christian, was the mistress of Abraão Benzamerro. He tried to help her flee to Morocco with the assistance of his relatives.23 The freedom of movement that Abraão Benzamerro enjoyed in Lisbon, despite being a Jew, was due to his privilege to travel without donning a distinguishing sign, unlike other visiting Jews. D. João III renewed the mandatory use of a sign for all Jews entering Portugal in a law dated February 7, 1537, in which all Jews visiting Portugal were obliged to wear a visible six-pointed star of red cloth over the right shoulder.24 In the trial of Leonor Mendes, however, there is a marginal note stating that Abraão Benzamerro “had no sign and was not known as a Jew.”25 Other evidence further reveals his privileged social status. For example, in the anonymous sixteenth-century book of anecdotes entitled Ditos Portugueses dignos de Memória it is written that: “Walking through Lisbon, a certain Jew named Abraão Benzamerro, to whom King João III permitted to go around without a sign, as he was a very wealthy and discreet merchant [. . .].”26 We even know how he would circulate in Lisbon surrounded by his many Moorish and Jewish servants, wearing an “aljaravia” (djellaba) and Cordoba shoes, according to a letter sent by D. João Coutinho to the king in 1538.27 These were the worldly ways of

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a man who, as we have seen, was behind many important dealings between Portugal and Morocco, had businesses with the governors of the Portuguese strongholds in Morocco and some of its inhabitants, had the status of a knight, was an interpreter in Mazagão (El Djadida) since 1527, and was involved in the peace negotiations with the Saadian Sharifs.28 One reason for the success of this family was, needless to say, the number of its blood relatives. We know that Abraão Benzemerro had a large family which acted as an intelligence and business network. In addition to his already mentioned brothers, Isaac and Mail or Ismael, who left Azemmour to help the Portuguese during the siege of Safi in 1510,29 we have data on other Benzemerros. There was Aaron, who lived in Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer (Agadir);30 Yahûda, Chamwâl, Mas’ûd, Chichir, who probably lived in a Portuguese stronghold, and Salomão, who lived under Muslim rule. Yahûda is known through a letter addressed to his brothers Chamwâl, Mas`ud, and Chichir, his mother, and his wife. In this letter, studied and translated by Georges Colin, Yahûda mentioned the meeting of two Muslim horsemen with nomadic Jews living in Gourara, in the Sahara.31 Salomão Benzamerro, mentioned in Leonor Mendes’s trial as one of her possible hosts in Morocco,32 would play a key role in the diplomatic relations between D. João III and Mawlay Muhammad Shaykh (r. 1524–1557), when the latter was still the Sharif of Marrakesh and Fez. Furthermore, Salomão also spied for the Portuguese.33 We also know of a Joseph (José), probably belonging to the same generation as Abraão Benzamerro, who was mentioned in a letter of Nuno Fernandes de Ataíde, captain of Safi, to D. Manuel I in 1514.34 Judah or Judas, another contemporary of Abraão, had business with the Royal Factor of Azemmor between 1514 and 151735, and signed a Royal Contract in 1524 to supply the House of Mina with Moroccan cloth to be sold in Arguin, and to export lac and bordates (North African cotton tissues) to Safi36. ENCOUNTERS AFTER DEATH: SEBAA OULED BEN ZMIROU IN JEWISH AND MUSLIM CONTEXTS The first mention of the death of Abraão Benzamerro—the true leader of his family—is on October 15, 1540, when his heirs came to Lisbon to pay off his debts.37 What happened after his death? Much has been documented about the successes of the Benzamerro family,38 but we now turn to another type of record, one perpetuated in memories. With the passage of time the memory of this Jewish family intensified in the popular religious imagination. Jews and Muslims in and around Safi sanctified the memory of these sixteenth-century men. The Jews considered the Benzamerros to be extraordinary ancestors,

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whose memory was deemed fit to be perpetuated in the realm of the sacred. In time, Muslims also appropriated their veneration, evoking them in the realm of Islam. When the Portuguese left Safi for good in 1541, in face of the victorious Saadian Sheriffs,39 a new situation took root in this (now restored) Islamic town, with the Benzamerro family starting its life outside Portuguese rule. The Portuguese era was ostensibly forgotten, or even nullified, as it was no longer relevant in the new context or in the new socio-religious traditions. It was, following Jocelyne Dakhlia’s conceptualization, a “produced” oblivion, one which does not mean disappearance.40 In the case of the Benzamerros, we are dealing with the phenomenon of the appropriation of significant traits of a bygone reality, devoid of its original historical context, incorporated into the contemporary cultural traditions of Jews and Muslims alike. The standing walls and fortifications of the town of Safi are the sole reminders of the presence of the former Christian colonizer.41 Simon Lévy, in an article concerning possible Portuguese echoes in the memory of the Moroccan Jews, writes that: And, of these four centuries of Hispano-Luso-Moroccan wanderings, and beyond evictions, wars and military occupations, what the popular memory has eventually preserved is the good (pallebe—pão lêvedo, leavened bread), the useful (garfo, fork) and the wonderful (Oulad Ben Zmerro). It is ­reassuring. 42

There seem to be two misconceptions here. One is the inclusion of the word “Hispanic,” referring to a wider and more inclusive cultural circle in the Moroccan Jewish heritage. The other is the reference to the “wonderful phenomenon” of the Oulad Ben Zmirou as one of the rare elements that persists in the memory of those Jews of the “Spanish-Moroccan-pilgrimages.” Since this memory integrates them into the cultural and religious sphere without any Portuguese reference, the “Oulad Ben Zmirou” have become an “exclusive” element of the internal memory of the Moroccan Jews and Muslims alike, with no fundamental connection to Portugal. It is Simon Lévy himself who suggests that: If it is the same Ben Zmirou—there is no original tombstone with their names [. . .] but a sort of cave—it is necessary to accept the fact that the historical memory of the people depends [. . .] on current concerns. Actually, five centuries later, we have no memory of who is the Oulad Ben Zmirou in Safi. The Jews are unaware of any facts about them, such as the role of Abraham Benzamerro in the days of the Portuguese. Because nothing else “meaningful” of Portuguese Safi is left, except for its magnificent strongholds.43

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The Ouled Ben Zmirou is one of the many Jewish marabouts of Morocco. It is also venerated by Muslims. Simon Lévy says, with some humor that, “An old nationalist from Safi has even wondered whether they were not resistance fighters, like so many Mrabetin saints buried in mausoleums all along the Atlantic coast.”44 Let us continue to use Simon Lévy, who knew this reality so well, as our guide. According to Levy, the seven siblings of the Benzamerro family, Oulad Ben Zmirou (or Ben Zamirro), are known as Oulad Mezmerro by the Jews, and Ulad Ben Zmirou Seba by the Muslims. What we see here is the porosity of popular religion between Jews and Muslims, a phenomenon alien to the stricter frameworks of theological rules, pointing most likely to the evolution of ancient local cults before the establishment of Judaism and Islam. This umbilical cord ‟on the ground” is also tangible in a fascinating piece of information transmitted by Simon Lévy. According to the official minister of the Synagogue of Safi in 1973, the “Jewish saints” recognized as such by the Muslims, may have delegated the power of healing to a Muslim intermediary named Hacmi Baghogh (i.e., “the fox”) and his female descendants.45 This datum is consistent with Issachar Ben-Ami’s information that a Muslim ‟individual” could fulfill the functions of shaliah (emissary).46 This point of contact between Jews and Muslims in the veneration of local holy men is not restricted to the Benzamerros. Issachar Ben-Ami, for instance, points to ninety similar Jewish holy men venerated by Muslims (who Islamized them); to thirty-six claimed by Jews and Muslims alike; and to thirteen Muslim holy men venerated by Jews (who considered them to be of Jewish origin). This shared veneration, according to Ben Ami, is due to the millennial co-existence between these two religious communities.47 The Sebaa Ouled ben Zmirou is a sanctuary built on the outskirts of Safi, in Diebel Lakhdar, at the top of a slope that is situated alongside the southern part of the Marrakesh road. Louis Voinot reported that the sanctuary was just a small white house in 1948, with tiny windows and a door which opened onto the road. Its floor was paved, and the internal walls were covered with tiles. On the wall opposite the door, there was a niche where candles were lit. Numerous glass lamps were suspended from the ceiling with chains. Two of its external walls had a wooden porch built to welcome the pilgrims. It also contained a cabin for the guard’s use. Around the building were masonry surfaces surrounded by small walls, traditionally designated as tombs. The surrounding field was strewn with rocks whitened with lime by the Jews. According to popular belief, this was the place of an old graveyard.48 Nowadays the sanctuary of the Sebaa Ouled Ben Zmirou covers 8,000 square meters. The complex comprises an ancient door, a synagogue, and space where seven fictitious tombs of the holy men are arranged in the shape of a menorah, with the main tomb in the middle (the alleged tomb of Abraão

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Benzamerro), and three smaller ones on each side. Around the wall, twentyseven memorials representing holy men of Israel are illuminated by oil lamps. The complex also houses some tombs of “saints.” At the entrance, a ballroom with a capacity for 1,000 people was built in 1990 to accommodate the hilloula pilgrims. It included a kitchen, a garden, and a parking lot. The complex is gated as well. Ralph Toledano, who visited the site accompanied by the Ohana brothers in 2000, published a commentary concerning the current space: This fundamental change of the sanctuary makes me regret the loss of the piety and modesty evoked in Voinot’s lines, but its general design—a combination of Andalusian and Portuguese architecture—is graceful, the maintenance impeccably provided by a family of Muslim guardians, and its sight a delight in this beautiful day.49

Despite the continuous association of Muslims with this Jewish sanctuary, its modern reconstruction implies an enclosure and structuring of the interior according to Jewish religious requirements, thereby blurring the possibilities of openness to other forms of popular religion. Let us return to Voinot’s testimony. Seven scholarly and pious brothers lived in Safi, according to the legend associated with the monument. One day a Spaniard who heard the brothers conversing entered their house; the brothers dug a hole from which water gushed, and the brothers vanished. An edict was later found after their occultation, according to which the seven brothers announced that they were hidden underneath the house. Afterward, an oratory was built on that site and, according to legend, the seven brothers never stopped performing miracles. Another tradition claims that the Ouled Zmirou were Jews from Granada, who migrated to Safi at the time of the expulsion. The head of the family, Rabbi Abraão Benzamerro initially lived in Fez after leaving the Iberian Peninsula, but they all moved to Safi in 1499, where R. Abraão Benzamerro gained ascendancy over Jews and Muslims.50 However, as we have seen, the chronology and the geography of the Benzamerro’s diaspora fail to match this narrative. The various witnesses contacted by Issachar Ben-Ami spoke about tombs and the buried men as if the seven Ben Zmirou were alive, had just dug a hole and disappeared and were not truly dead; “The earth had opened its mouth and engulfed them.”51 They were, therefore, characters acting in a thaumaturgy. This explains the expectations of a response to supplications. However, in order to be effective it was necessary for the supplicants to meet the Ben Zmirou in their home, that is, in the cave where they lie buried. According to one testimony: “He who stays there for seven days and seven nights sees the

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fulfillment of his wishes,”52 the number of days matching that of the brothers. Seven is also the number of days a dying person is prescribed to live near the Ouled Ben Zmirou to be cured. On the seventh day, a bearded man wearing a khaza (headgear) and holding a knife is said to appear to the supplicant in a dream, instructing the patient to place the knife in the place of the ailment and, on the following day, the patient would awaken healed.53 Surely this insistence on the number seven—even the seven presumed Ben Zmirou—is related to an old and composite symbology referring to that number (like the seven days of the week, the seven celestial spheres, etc.), associated with a complete cycle and dynamic perfection. In Morocco, sterile women would wrap their belt seven times around the trunks of certain trees, then attach the belt to one of the seven cords attached to the tree.54 The Ouled Ben Zmirou are active “intermediaries” in many ways. They respond to pilgrims’ petitions by speaking to them, “Go, your request has been granted!”55 by healing them, and by suggesting other “saints,” like Rabbi Abraham Moul Niss (or Annes) of Azemmour, to whom the devotee can turn when the matter is beyond the Ben Zmirou’s capabilities. According to the testimony transcribed by Issachar Ben-Ami: And the Ben-Zmirou, they are also seven. One of them said to me: “Why do you bother me for the sake of this girl when I have no solution for it?” I answered him: “If you have no cure, send me to someone else!” He sent me to R. Abraham Moul Niss.56

The Ouled Ben Zmirou were said to be incapable of acting in the case of matchmaking and love affairs. These problems fell under the jurisdiction of Rabbi Abraham Moul Niss of Azemmour. This testimony is evidence of distributed holiness, where each “saint” has specific areas of “service.” Jewish pilgrimages were frequent, especially on the Sabbath. The sick, including the demented and epileptics were transported to the Ouled Ben Zmirou shrine. The Ben Zmirou are also well known for neutralizing the effects of sorcery.57 This “special” area of intervention by the Ben Zmirou is probably associated with their reputation for common sense and equity, especially as relates to Abraão Benzamerro.58 Every year, the Jews held a great festival, a Hilloula, on the eighteenth and nineteenth days of the month of Iyar, lasting for two days and one night to commemorate the anniversary of the (pseudo) death of the Ouled Ben Zmirou. The devotees would light candles, deposit bottles of water and oil in the tombs, and drink lots of brandy to celebrate the seven “saints.”59 The Muslims also have great confidence in the Ouled Ben Zmirou. In times of drought, they would come to pray for rain together with the Jews. In the days of Louis Voinot, the Muslim devotees of the “saints” were mostly

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women who wanted to get pregnant or to find a husband. They would come to pray, often secretly, and ask for cures for their sick children.60 According to Mohammad Menis, the president of the “Mémoire de Safi” Association, Muslims also came to the sanctuary during bouts of whooping cough, meaning that, for them, the field of intervention of the Ben Zmirou was generally different from the Jewish followers.61 Moreover, the variations of the thaumaturgical virtues of each saint refer not only to the religious identity of the supplicant but also to other factors, namely the distance of the patient. For example, in the testimonies collected by Issachar Ben-Ami in Azemmour, concerning the “alternative saint” Rabbi Abraham Moul Niss mentioned before, none of the witnesses—Jew or Muslim—considered that they would address this particular saint to solve their romantic problems, but turned to him regarding the ailments of the body, as was the case of the Ouled Ben Zmirou of Safi.62 Therefore, we must emphasize that the relationship between Jews and Muslims should always be seen in relation to their respective approach to a common saint, taking into account specific local contexts. SOME FINAL REMARKS “It should be noted that the veneration surrounding most of the Jewish saints in Morocco was granted to them posthumously after they had given evidence of an exemplary life or an exceptional skill demonstrated during their lifetime.”63 These words of Issachar Ben-Ami are applicable to the case of the Sebaa Ouled Ben Zmirou of Safi. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Abraão Benzamerro appears to have been an extremely ambitious and hedonistic character, rich and close to power, and not a very humble man. The Benzamerros have been mythologized and elevated in their new context: they have been included in a “miraculous world” devoid of Portuguese references within a contemporary cultural and religious spectrum (what we call “the encounters after death”). The development of the Benzamerro myth entails several stages: first is the creation of worship in a sacred “locus,” as if men and time were appropriated within a circumscribed space. There then follows the thaumaturgical transformation of the past, as the Benzamerros dug a hole in the ground and disappeared, and water gushed forth; manifestations that allude to a true hierophant. The miracle that would occur, the transformation of material power into spiritual power, constituted an eruption of sacredness in everyday life, compelling the devotees to respond in exceptional ways, evidenced in the importance of the Hilloula in terms of pilgrimage, and performances/ miracles “à la carte.” The cathartic nature of this phenomenon also extends to the Muslims, for whom the Ouled Ben Zmirou are invoked inter alia by barren women.

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As Issachar Ben-Ami remarked, this act of memory and appropriation is a “living process” in all its dimensions. The encounter after the alleged death is a complex and ambivalent process. The zaddik (“saint”) may appear in a dream to a devotee visiting the shrine or sleeping at home. But veneration, respect, and total compliance are coupled with haggling, disagreement, and even menacing threats. The zaddikim are sensitive, so it is better not to offend them since they can punish the offenders. But they can also forgive upon receiving offerings of olive oil or candles, or after a ritual meal. The corresponding Hilloula serves as the greatest moment of this fraternization (after the earthly life of the saints). The act of traveling to the tombs, and the ceremonies and rituals performed there—reciting prayers, reading Psalms, singing and dancing near the tombs, lighting candles—reveal a process of encounter often leading to a perceived apparition of the sainted figure. Or, as Issachar Ben-Ami says: “All these actions contribute to an atmosphere imbued with holiness that leads to almost physical contact with the zaddik, and the purification of the pilgrim’s soul.”64 Or, as an informant expressed to Norman Stillman, “Saddiquim do not die, they keep on living.” A Muslim devotee would express similar reverence with Arabic terminology; as Wali (friend of Good), Salih (the Pure One), Siyyid (Lord), or Mrabit (A man bound to Good).65 In this context, only the historian will be interested in meeting the dead as documented people. If once human, they are no longer such in a Jewish and Islamic context: wonder and miracle are the rules. However, in this new dimension, the perceived post-mortem personalities are more powerful than the original human beings who embodied them. That is why one can speak of “encounters after death.” NOTES * I am very grateful to Dr. Drora Arussy and Professors Jane Gerber and João Teles e Cunha for harmonizing the text in English. ** This work is financed by national funds through FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P, in the scope of the projects UIDB/04311/2020 and UIDP/04311/2020. 1. Maria José P. Ferro Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição. Estudos (Lisbon: Presença, 1987), 29–37. 2. “Memory of Rabbi Abraão” [Safi, 1510], pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 4. 3. “Cartas patentes de D. Manuel (Privilege to the Jews of Safi)”, Évora, 4.5.1509, pub. by Cénival, in Les Sources, 174–176. 4. “Letter of rabbi Abraão to the Secretary of State António Carneiro ”, (Safi), 26.3. (of 1511), in ANTT, CGA, nr 19. 5. “Letter to Isaac Benzamerro to be able to negotiate Portugal”, Évora, 3.5.1509, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 1.

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6. “Letter of Privilege for Jews living in the city of Safi”, Lisbon, 2.1.1512, see Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 6. 7. “Letter of Privilege for Jews living in the city of Safi”, Lisbon, 20.4.1512, see Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 7. 8. José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, “Abraão Benzamerro, ‘judeu de sinal’, sem sinal, entre o Norte de África e o Reino de Portugal”, Mare Liberum 6 (December 1993): 119–120. 9. “Letter of mercy and confirmation of the office of chief Rabbi of the Jews of Safi to Rabbi Abraão”, Almeirim, 5.6.1510, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 3. 10. “Letter of privilege to the Benzamerros Jews of Safi”, Almeirim, 9.6. 1523, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 15. 11. “Request from Rabbi Abraão to the king on how to judge the Benzamerro”, s.l., s.d. (Safi, about 1523), pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 16. 12. “Letter of privilege to Abraão Benzamerro, other members of his family and servants, to not obeying Rabbi Abraão”, Évora, 12.5.1524, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 18. 13. Tavim, “Abraão Benzamerro”, 125. 14. “Letter to Abraham Benzamerro, to come to these kingdoms”, Évora, 8.5. 1524, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 17. 15. “Order of the clerk and officers of the House of Mina for the factor of the city of Safi to take into account of Abraão Benzamerro the 1,000 cruzados of a contract that they had done in this city. Brás Reinel was his attorney”, w.l. (Lisbon), 17.10.1524, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 19. 16. “Letter of King João III to his Minister António de Ataíde, Count of Castanheira”, Évora, 8.8.1533, pub. by Ford, in Letters, 118–119. 17. “Letter to Abraão Benzamerro, a resident in Safi, to enjoy the privileges of the knights”, Coimbra, 21.8.1527, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 21. 18. “Letter of mercy from the position of Rabbi of the Jews of Safi to Abraão Benzamerro”, Évora, 24.5. 1537, pub. by Tavim, in Os judeus, Appendix 7, doc. 30. 19. Elkhan Nathan Adler, ed., “David Reubeni´s Diary”, 251–328. In Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages. 19 Firsthand Accounts (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1987), 296. 20. The bibliography about David Reubeni is extensive. See, for example, Ervin Birnbaum, “David Reubeni`s Indian origin”, Historia Judaica 20 (1958): 3–30; Miriam Eliav-Feldon, “Invented Identities: Credulity in the Age of Prophecy and Exploration”, Journal of Early Modern History 3, no. 3 (1992): 203–232; idem, “Portugal, Prester John and the Lost Tribes of Israel”, in Vasco da Gama. Homens, Viagens e Culturas. Actas do Congresso Internacional, edited by Joaquim Romero de Magalhães (Lisbon: CNCDP, vol. 1, 2001), 301–337; José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, “David Reubeni: um ‘embaixador’ inusitado”, In D. João III e o Império. Actas do Congresso Internacional comemorativo do seu nascimento, edited by Roberto Carneiro and Artur Teodoro de Matos (Lisbon: CHAM, 2004), 683–715; Moti Benmelech, “History, Politics, and Messianism: David ha-Reuveni`s Origin and Mission”, Association for Jewish Studies Review 35, no. 1 (2011): 35–60.

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21. Adler, “David Reubeni´s Diary”, 295–296. 22. ANTT, IL, proc. 3853, fol. 8vº. 23. ANTT, IL, proc. 2714. 24. Leão, Leis Extravagantes, Quarta Parte, título 5, lei 8, 122. 25. ANTT, IL, proc. 2714, fol. 158. 26. Saraiva, Ditos, 160. Original text: “Andando em Lisboa um judeu chamado Abraão Benzemerro, a quem el-rei D. João, por ser mercador muito rico e mui discreto, deu licença que andasse sem sinal …” 27. “Letter of D. João Coutinho, captain of Asilah, to King João III”, Asilah, 18.3.1538, pub. by Lopes, in “Suplemento”, 289–290. 28. Tavim, “Abraão Benzamerro”, 121–122. 29. Mendonça, Jornada, 90. See also Meyer Kayserling, História dos judeus em Portugal, transl. Gabriele Borchardt Corrêa da Silva and Anita da Novinsky, edited by Anita Novinsky. S. Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1971, 136–137; Joseph Goulven, Safi au Vieux Temps des Portugais. Lisbon: I Congresso de História da Expansão Portuguesa no Mundo, 1938, 45–46; Haim Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa (Leiden: E.J. Brill, vol. 1, 1974), 420. 30. “Dununcia de Gutierrez Pacheco”, Las Palmas de la Gran Canaria, 3.3.1530, pub. by Wolf, in Jews, 89–90. 31. “Letter of Yahûda ben Zamîrro sent to his brothers Chamuwâl, Mas`ud and Chichir, to his mother and to his wife”, w.l., 25.2 (1527?): Georges Colin, “Des Juifs Nomades retrouvés dans le Sahara au XVIe siècle”, in Mélanges d’études luso-marocaines dédiés à la mémoire de David Lopes et Pierre de Cénival (Lisbon: Editora Portugália; Paris: Institut Français au Portugal, 1945), 53–66. 32. ANTT, IL, proc. 2714, fol. 38. 33. On Salomão Benzamerro see Hirschberg, A History, 436; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Professing Jews in Post-Expulsion Spain and Portugal”, In Salo Wittmayer Jubilee Volume, edited by Saul Lieberman. (New York and London: American Academy for Jewish Research- Columbia University Press, vol. 2 - English Section, 1974), 1026–1049; Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição, 389. 34. “Letter of Nuno Fernandes de Ataíde to King Manuel I, King of Portugal”, Safi, 12.10.1514, Lopes, in Textos, 95–100; by Baião, in Documentos,120–124, and Cénival, in Les Sources, 631–637. 35. “Letter of acquaintance to Lourenço de Freitas, knight and factor of Azemmour”, Lisbon, 3.12.1517, see Freire, in “Cartas”, 239–240. 36. “Letter of acquaintance to Judas Benzamerro”, Évora, 26.6.1524, in A. Braamcamp Freire, in “Cartas de quitação del Rei D. Manuel”, Archivo Historico Portuguez 8 (1910): 412–413. 37. “A letter by which the King commands his accountants to pay to the heirs of Abraão Benzamerro 60,000 reais of what they owe to the account of the treasurer of Azemmour”, Lisbon, 15.10.1540, in ANTT, CC, II, 233, doc. 102. 38. In addition to the works cited by Hirschberg and Yerushalmi, see for example David Corcos, “Benzamero”, in The Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, vol. 4, 1971 ), 571–572; Abraham

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Laredo, Les Noms des juifs du Maroc: essai d’onomastique Judéo-marocaine (Madrid: CSIC, 1978), 550–552, and Tavim, “Ben Zamiro”. 39. Fontoura, Otília Rodrigues, Portugal em Marrocos na Época de D. João III. W.l: Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico, 1996; see, also Bernard Rosenberger, Le Maroc au XVIe siècle. Au seuil de la modernité (W.l: Fondation des Trois Cultures, 2008), chap. 3. 40. Jocelyne Dakhlia, L`oubli de la cité. La mémoire collective à l’épreuve du lignage dans le Jérid tunisien (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1990), 5. 41. José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, “O Castelo abandonado. Percepções do passado português no discurso patrimonial dos judeus de Marrocos (século XX)”, in Castelos a Bombordo, Etnografias de patrimónios africanos e memórias portuguesas, ed. Maria Cardeira da Silva (Lisbon: CRIA, 2013), 107–123. 42. Simon Lévy, “Quatre siècles plus tard, quelles traces portugaises?”, In Os judeus sefarditas entre Portugal, Espanha e Marrocos, edited by Carmen Ballesteros and Mery Ruah (Évora: CIDEHUS-UE, 2004), 238. Original text: “Et au fond, de ces quatre siècles de pérégrinations hispano-luso-marocaines, et par delà expulsions, guerres et occupations militaires, ce que la mémoire populaire a conservé c`est finalement le bon (pallebe), l`utile (garfo,) et le merveilleux (Ulad Ben Zmerro). C´est rassurant”. 43. Lévy, “Quatre siècles”, 237–238. Original text: “S`il s`agit bien des mêmes Ben Zmerro - il n`y a pas de pierre tombale d`origine avec noms... mais une espèce de grotte - il frauda bien accepter le fait que la mémoire historique des peuples dépend ... des péocupations du moment. (...)”. En fait, cinq siècles plus tard on a oublié, à Safi, qui sont les Oulad Ben Zmerro. Les juifs ignorent tout d`eux, comme du rôle d`Abraham Ben Zamirro au temps des Portugais. Car de la Safim des Portugais seules restent parlantes les magnifiques fortifications". 44. Lévy, “Quatre siècles”, 238. Original text: “Un vieux safiote nationaliste se demandait même s`il ne s`agissait pas de résistants, à l`instar de tant de saints mrabetín enterrés sous des mausolées tout au long de la côte atlantique”. 45. Lévy, “Quatre siècles”, 237–238. 46. Issachar Ben-Ami, Culte des Saints et pèlerinages judéo-musulmans au Maroc (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1990), 114. 47. Ben-Ami, Culte, 111–114. 48. Voinot, Pèlerinages, 47–48. 49. Toledano, Voyages, 121. Original text: "Cette restructuration fondamentale du sactuaire me fait regretter la piété et la modestie qu`évoquent les lignes de Voinot, mais son dessin général - un compromis entre l’architecture andalouse et portugaise est élégant, l`entretien impeccablement assuré par une famille de gardiens musulmans et la vue un ravissement par cette journée splendide". 50. Louis Voinot, Pèlerinages Judéo-Marocaines au Maroc (Rabat: Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines – Editions Larousse, 1948), 48. 51. Ben-Ami, Culte, 198. Original text: “la terre avait ouvert sa bouche et les avait engloutis”.

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52. Ben-Ami, Culte, 198. Original text: “Celui qui séjournait là-bas sept jours et sept nuits, voyait la réalisation de ses voeux”. 53. Ben-Ami, Culte, 198. 54. Jean Chevalier et Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des Symboles. Mythes, rêves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1982), 860–865. 55. Ben-Ami, Culte, 198. Original text: "Va, ta demande est exaucée!" 56. Ben-Ami, Culte, 199. Sur R. Abraham Moul Niss or Annes, Ben-Ami, Culte, 145–147. Original text: “Ben-Zmirrou aussi, ils sont sept. L’un d’eux m’a dit:— "Pourquoi, pour cette fille, me casses-tu la tête avec un remède que je n’ai pas? Je lui ai répondu:—Si tu n’as pas de remède, envoie-moi chez quelqu’un d’autre! Il m’a adressé à R. Abraham Moul Annes”. 57. Alfred Goldenberg, “La hiloula”, in Images du Maroc. Images & Textes, ed. Alfred Goldenberg (Paris: Éditions du Scribe, 1992), 126. 58. Goldenberg, “La hiloula”, 120. 59. For a definition and general description of the Hilloula performances, see Haïm Zafrani, Deux mille ans de vie juive au Maroc (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998), 116–117. The author notes that the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohay dates back to the old Palestine, being celebrated precisely in 18 Iyar. 60. Voinot, Pèlerinages, 47–49. 61. “Ouled Ben Zmirou: The Shrine of the Seven Brothers”. 62. Ben-Ami, Culte, 145–147. 63. Ben-Ami, Culte, 23. Original text: “Il convient de noter que la vénération vouée à la majorité des saints juifs du Maroc, leur a été accordée à titre phostume, aprés qu`ils eurent fait preuve au cours de leur vie d`une conduite exemplaire ou d`une science exceptionelle”. 64. Issachar Ben-Ami, “Beliefs and Customs”, in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in modern times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier and Sara Reguer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 202–203 (citation of this last page). 65. Norman A Stillman, “Saddiq and marabout in Morocco”, in Jews among Muslims. Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, ed. Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner. (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996), 121.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Elkan Nathan, ed. “David Reubeni´s Diary”. In Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages. 19 Firsthand Accounts, 251–328. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1987. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon) (ANTT): Cartas dos Governadores de África (CGA), nr. 19. Corpo Cronológico (CC), Part 2, batch 233, doc. 102. Inquisição de Lisboa (IL), processes (proc) 2714, 3853.

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Baião, António, ed. Documentos do Corpo Cronológico relativos a Marrocos (1488 a 1514). Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade – Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, 1925. Ben-Ami, Issachar. “Culte des Saints et pèlerinages judéo-musulmans au Maroc. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1990. ———. Beliefs and Customs”. In The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in modern times, edited by Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier and Sara Reguer, 180–204. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Benmelech, Moti. “History, Politics, and Messianism: David ha-Reuveni`s Origin and Mission”. Association for Jewish Studies Review 35, nr. 1 (2011): 35–60. Birnbaum, Ervin. “David Reubeni`s Indian origin”. Historia Judaica 20 (1958): 3–30. Cénival, Pierre de, David Lopes and Robert Ricard, eds. Les Sources Inédites de l`Histoire du Maroc - première série: Dynastie Saˤadienne, Archives et Bibliothèques du Portugal. Paris: Éditions Paul Geuthner, vol. 1, 1934. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionnaire des Symboles. Mythes, rêves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres. Paris: Robert Lafont, 1982. Colin, Georges. “Des Juifs Nomades retrouvés dans le Sahara au XVIe siècle”. In Mélanges d’études luso-marocaines dédiés à la mémoire de David Lopes et Pierre de Cénival, 53–66. Lisbon: Editora Portugália; Paris: Institut Français au Portugal, 1945. Corcos, David. “Benzamero”. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder, 571–572, vol. 4. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971. Dakhlia, Jocelyne. L`oubli de la cité. La mémoire collective à l’épreuve du lignage dans le Jérid tunisien. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1990. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. “Invented Identities: Credulity in the Age of Prophecy and Exploration.” Journal of Early Modern History 3, nr. 3 (1992): 203–232.  ———. “Portugal, Prester John and the Lost Tribes of Israel”. In Vasco da Gama. Homens, Viagens e Culturas. Actas do Congresso Internacional, edited by Joaquim Romero de Magalhães, 301–337, vol. 1. Lisbon: CNCDP, 2001. Fontoura, Otília Rodrigues. Portugal em Marrocos na Época de D. João III. W.l: Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico, 1996.  Ford, Jeremiah D.M., ed. Letters of John III, King of Portugal, 1521-1557. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931. Freire, A. Braamcamp, ed. “Cartas de quitação del Rei D. Manuel”. Archivo Histórico Portuguez 4, no. 1–2 (1906): 237–240; 8, no. 1–2 (1910): 391–414. Goldenberg, Alfred. “La hiloula”. In Images du Maroc. Images & Textes, edited by Alfred Goldenberg, 123–129. Paris: Éditions du Scribe, 1992. Goulven, Joseph. Safi au Vieux Temps des Portugais. Lisbon: I Congresso de História da Expansão Portuguesa no Mundo, 1938. Hirschberg, Haim Z. A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 1. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974. Kayserling, Meyer. História dos judeus em Portugal, translated by Gabriele Borchardt Corrêa da Silva and Anita da Novinsky, edited by Anita Novinsky. S. Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1971.

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Laredo, Abraham. Les Noms des juifs du Maroc: essai d’onomastique Judéomarocaine. Madrid: CSIC, 1978. Leão, Duarte Nunes de. Leis Extravagantes e Reportório das Ordenações, presentation of Mário Júlio de Almeida Costa. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1987. Lévy, Simon. “Quatre siècles plus tard, quelles traces portugaises?”. In Os judeus sefarditas entre Portugal, Espanha e Marrocos, edited by Carmen Ballesteros and Mery Ruah, 233–238. Évora: CIDEHUS-UE, 2004. Lopes, David. “Suplemento”. In Bernardo Rodrigues, Anais de Arzila, ed. David Lopes, 276–293. Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, vol. 2, 1919. ———-. Textos em Aljamia Portuguesa – Estudo filológico e histórico. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1987. Mendonça, Jerónimo de. Jornada de África. Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1607. “Ouled Ben Zmirou: The Shrine of the Seven Brothers”, in YouTube, Marocopedia English, pub. on 20/01/2019, accessed on 20/04/2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​ /w​​atch?​​v​=wfw​​AZSlR​​ZDU​&l​​ist​=P​​LaPVr​​eiC7t​​p7S9o​​Zguvo​​G23sh​​N​_Pbh​​​wU2​&i​​ ndex=​​5​&t​=0​​s. Rosenberger, Bernard. Le Maroc au XVIe siècle. Au seuil de la modernité. W.l: Fondation des Trois Cultures, 2008. Saraiva, José Hermano, ed. Ditos Portugueses Dignos de Memória. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, n.d. Stillman, Norman A. “Saddiq and marabout in Morocco”. In Jews among Muslims. Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, edited by Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner, 121–130. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996. Tavares, Maria José P. Ferro. Os judeus em Portugal no século XV, vol. I. Lisbon: FCSH-UL, 1982. ———. “Judeus de sinal em Portugal no século XVI”. Cultura – História e Filosofia 5 (1986): 339–363. ———. Judaísmo e Inquisição. Estudos. Lisbon: Presença, 1987. Tavim, José Alberto R. Silva. «Abraão Benzamerro, ‘judeu de sinal’, sem sinal, entre o Norte de África e o Reino de Portugal ». Mare Liberum 6 (December 1993): 115–141. ———. Os judeus na Expansão Portuguesa em Marrocos. Braga: APPACDM Distrital de Braga, 1997. ———. “David Reubeni: um ‘embaixador’ inusitado”. In D. João III e o Império. Actas do Congresso Internacional comemorativo do seu nascimento, edited by Roberto Carneiro and Artur Teodoro de Matos, 683–715. Lisbon: CHAM, 2004. ———. “Ben Zamiro (Zamerro) Family”. Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, edited by Norman Stillman, Leiden: Brill, 2010, https​:/​/re​​feren​​cewor​​ks​ .br​​illon​​line.​​com​/b​​rowse​​/ency​​clope​​dia​-o​​f​-jew​​s​-in-​​​the​-i​​slami​​c​-wor​​ld (accessed in 18/4/2019). ———. “O Castelo abandonado. Percepções do passado português no discurso patrimonial dos judeus de Marrocos (século XX)”. In Castelos a Bombordo. Etnografias de patrimónios africanos e memórias portuguesas, edited by Maria Cardeira da Silva, 107–123. Lisbon: CRIA, 2013.

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Toledano, Ralph. Voyages dans le Maroc juif. Paris: Somogy Éditions, 2004. Voinot, Louis. Pèlerinages Judéo-Marocaines au Maroc. Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines – Editions Larousse, 1948. Wolf, Lucien, ed. Jews in the Canary Islands. Being a Calendar of Jewish Cases extracted from the Records of the Canariot Inquisition of the Marquess of Bute. London: printed for The Jewish Historical Society of England by Spottiswood, Ballantine & Co. Ltd., 1926. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. “Professing Jews in Post-Expulsion Spain and Portugal”. In Salo Wittmayer Jubilee Volume, edited by Saul Lieberman, 1026–1049, vol. 2 English Section. New York and London: American Academy for Jewish ResearchColumbia University Press, 1974. Zafrani, Haïm. Deux mille ans de vie juive au Maroc. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998.

Chapter 7

Invisible Neighbors Demonology between Jews and Muslims in Morocco Noam Sienna

INTRODUCTION: JEWS, MUSLIMS, AND DEMONS IN MOROCCO A professor once told me that writing good history is like writing good mystery: both should always start with a dead body. In our case, the dead body is that of Rabbi Ya‘aqov Wazana, a healer from the Western Atlas Mountains in central Morocco. The scene of the crime: the small village of Agouim, “on a sizzling day in the month of Tammuz,” sometime in the early 1950s.1 Early one morning, the local Jews were awakened by “three blood-curdling screams that could be heard from one end of the village to another”; rushing to the scene, they found the swollen body of Rabbi Wazana, soaked in blood, sprawled across the floor. The cause of death, at least in the opinion of everyone involved: demons. This is just one illustration of how demonology was not a theoretical issue of philosophy or theology, but an aspect of reality that had material effects for Jews and Muslims in the Maghreb, even to the point of life or death. We will return to Wazana later on, but first, some context: in this chapter I illustrate some of the ways that demons provided a space— sometimes productive, sometimes dangerous—for Jewish-Muslim encounter. Drawing from a larger project on Jewish demonological practices in North Africa, I suggest here that demons can help us think through the complexities of the neighborly relationship, one that involves a community of diverse and unassimilable others.2 The historical importance of demonology in the Jewish world is well attested. The rabbis of the Talmud were not afraid to discuss the nature and origins of demons, and while they developed a variety of practices and rituals aimed at 163

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keeping them away, in other places the Talmud records that rabbis communicated with demons and attempted to control them, suggesting that they can be sources of information, subjects of rabbinic law, or even household companions.3 Demons were capricious beings, who could be organized, understood, managed, and even controlled through the authority of Torah and halakha. The legacy of both textual and material practices of ancient Jewish demonology remained central throughout Jewish history.4 Magic manuals of late antiquity and the Middle Ages hint that magical practitioners sought not only to ward off evil spirits, but also to gain power over the invisible world. The Cairo Geniza has preserved an incredible assortment of magical recipes, segulot, divinatory instructions, and amulets, the vast majority of which remain unpublished and unstudied; what is clear is that Jews in the Middle Ages were not only heirs to the rich Jewish tradition regarding demons but also deeply engaged with developments in Christian and Muslim demonology.5 The majority of medieval rabbis were not only comfortable asserting the reality of demons, but also engaged with philosophical, legal, and theological questions about their nature.6 And in the early modern period, the Kabbalah left a deep mark on Jewish demonology in both the Christian and Islamic worlds, from incantations and formulae to the nomenclature and iconography of demons, to even the physical presence of the Zohar itself as protection against demons.7 As in Judaism, the history of demonology in Islam is deeply rooted in the core of the discursive and textual tradition. Drawing on the descriptions of jinn in the Qur’an and ḥadith—the Divine revelation is in fact addressed to both humans and jinn—Islamic societies developed a rich corpus of demonological literature, exploring a wide variety of theological, legal, and ethical questions relating to the imaginary world.8 The jinn inhabit a world parallel to our own, and while they are normally invisible and intangible, they can nonetheless enter the human realm in a variety of ways. Sometimes helpful, sometimes seductive, and sometimes hostile, encounters with the jinn could be a source of power but could also lead to illness and madness.9 While religious scholars often strongly disapproved of particular practices they deemed ‟magical” or ‟superstitious,” the reality (and danger) of the jinn was a fact of social life across the Islamic world.10 The involvement of the jinn in human society can range from the most ordinary events of daily life to the most dramatic spectacles of public exorcisms or healings. The spirits are always seen as potentially dangerous, although not evil—in Michael Lambek’s words, “not immoral so much as amoral,” or in Naveeda Khan’s words “[with] a certain unintentional malevolence, existing alongside generosity”—and they can never be fully trusted.11 Within the Maghreb, magic was strongly associated with various social groups on the periphery (especially Jews, Imazighen, black Africans, and

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women), although magical and demonological practices were widespread regardless of community affiliation. The Maghreb itself, on the periphery of the larger Islamic world, is associated with magic in the Levant and Central Asia, a tradition that dates back at least to the Moroccan magicians of the Kitab alf layla walayla [A Thousand and One Nights].12 The French sociologist Edmond Doutté, for example, observed that “magicians are most often foreigners. . . . Among the Muslims of the East, a magician, if they are not Jewish or Christian, must be North African.”13 The association of magic with the power of the Other, whether with a positive or negative valence, has long been noted as a feature of perceptions of magical practitioners across the world. In both Jewish and Muslim communities in North Africa, therefore, it is not surprising that it was members of the other group who were portrayed as the main players in demon-related activities (even if, in practice, demonology was equally shared among them). In the writings of Moroccan rabbis, the origin of Jewish magic itself is treated as inherently foreign; Rabbi Yosef Messas, for example, recorded in a 1928 responsum his disapproval of using laḥashim [incantations] in healing, even though this was a practice approved (somewhat begrudgingly) by rabbinic authorities.14 Messas explained that this was a practice borrowed from ancient neighboring peoples, and reassured his readers that what seemed like rabbinic endorsement of magic was only a temporary concession to the local environment, intended to contrast the truth of Judaism with the falsity of magic: Can you imagine that prayer for an ill person before the revered and awesome Holy One could compare to a laḥash to shedim?15 Regarding those laḥashim, I was asked about this some time ago, and I responded that it was because the Jews who were in the land of Shinar and Bavel16 learnt this from their Arab and Persian neighbors. Therefore in order to calm the patient’s heart so that he would not worry, the [rabbis] permitted him to say those laḥashim, for the sake of piquaḥ nefesh [saving a life] . . . and having whispered the laḥash in its exact form without any benefit they would realize that it was all falsehood and uselessness. . . . This is the opinion of our rabbis who transmitted laḥashim, and they certainly did not believe in them.17

Messas merges the contemporary demons of his Maghrebi surroundings with the ancient demons of Talmudic Babylonia, linked equally by their origin in the surrounding non-Jewish society and by the use of laḥashim. To engage with demons is to engage with one’s neighbors, ancient and modern, visible and invisible. Jews saw Muslims as the most powerful and skilled interlocutors with demons, and drew on that power in certain contexts, while Muslims thought the same of Jews. As we will see, dealing with demons was not only

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about the imaginary; demons provided a site for Jewish-Muslim encounter, both figuratively and literally. MOROCCAN DEMONOLOGY AS SHARED PRACTICE I am wary of analyzing Jewish magical practices or beliefs as simply “borrowed” from similar practices and beliefs among Muslims—a stance which has a long historiographic legacy. In this chapter, I take the position that it is context, not necessarily content, which is the most salient feature of Jewish culture. The emphasis on Muslim-Jewish ‟syncretism” or uncovering the Muslim ‟origins” of Jewish practice, I would argue, elides the ways in which those practices were seamlessly woven into the fabric of Jewish life and experience. The assertion that Jewish superstitions come from Muslims is found throughout the literature on Moroccan Jewish culture, whether written in French, English, or Hebrew, and whether by rabbis, educators, or ethnographers. In the colonial context, separating ‟truly” Jewish tradition from ‟adopted” Muslim practice emerged out of the lachrymose perception of Jews as victims of the crude and barbarous nature of Muslim society, and the hope that with colonial intervention they could leave their borrowed superstitions and move toward European modernity. Similarly, colonial ethnographers often sought to find and document ‟pre-Islamic” beliefs among Amazigh populations, part of a larger project to separate, classify, and control the various Maghrebi social and ethnic groups according to their receptivity to French influence and civilization.18 Joseph Goulven, a civil administrator working under the high commissioner of the newly established French Protectorate, Louis Hubert Lyautey, began his ethnographic study, Les Mellahs de Rabat-Salé, in 1913, but did not publish it until 1927—a period during which Moroccan Jewish society underwent massive cultural transformations. Goulven himself acknowledges that “we could have revised this book from 1920 to 1924 to record the progress of civilization among the Jews. But we abstained, because those observations would have changed, in some chapters, our primitive impressions. . . . It is not our fault if certain beliefs or customs are lost today: this is the price of progress.”19 For Goulven, the importance of his study was in recording the primitive superstitions of Moroccan Jews for the benefit of science (in order to better understand the distinction between true Judaism and indigenous syncretism) while the project of modernization inevitably continued apace.20 Many educated Moroccan Jews also adopted this dichotomy of heterodox folklore vs. ‟true orthodoxy,” and positioned themselves as modern Jews, free from irrational superstitions and the primitive Oriental past. For example,

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the Sephardi educator Abraham Ribbi, director of the AIU school in Tétouan, attributed the belief in demons to Jews having blindly copied “the customs, flaws, and superstitions of the Muslim population in the midst of which they live . . . the coarse Islamism of the crowd . . . a veritable paganism under the auspices of the God of Sinai and the Decalogue!” He concludes by declaring that “a nice job it will be to ‘convert’—the word is not too strong—these Jews to real Judaism.”21 The historical contact between Jewish and Muslim communities over centuries is thus blamed for the existence of these magical beliefs and practices; Jews wouldn’t be involved with demons, this stance implies, if it weren’t for their encounters with Muslims. While we might reject the colonial binary of superstition/religion, hybrid/ pure, and so on it is true that countless Maghrebi Jews turned to their Muslim neighbors, and vice versa, for help in navigating the world of demons, hoping to ward off dangerous jnun, placate angered ones, and entreat friendly ones. The world of the jnun was associated with a vast body of shared beliefs, practices, objects, and rituals, that moved between Jewish and Muslim communities. In many cases, it would be difficult to tell whether a given khmissa (‟little hand”) or amulet, a candle lit at a local shrine, or a pile of henna powder on a doorstep belonged to a Jew or Muslim.22 In the case of Jews struck by demonic illness, the identities of the afflicting jnun are not substantially different than those who appeared in the Muslim community, sharing the same associations, colors, camps, and even names.23 So too, the healers shared much of their arsenal of techniques—the writing of sacred names, fumigation with cloth and herbs, and negotiation with the injuring demon—with their Muslim colleagues. However, the religious premises of these healing rituals among Moroccan Jews emerged completely within a Jewish context, and they drew their strength from the authority of Jewish tradition. Choosing Moroccan Islam as the primary referent for Moroccan Jewish practice erases the possibility of seeing how Jewish texts and rituals are integral to the emergence of local Jewish culture. At the same time, focusing only on its universal ‟Jewishness” ignores the central history of encounter and conversation to which local Jewish culture testifies. Ultimately, my goal is not to emphasize either the ‟similarity” or ‟difference” between Jewish and Muslim interactions with demons, but to highlight how the world of demons was for both Jews and Muslims a site of encounter, not only with their invisible neighbors but with their human ones as well. Another AIU teacher, Moïse Nahon, wrote that “it is impossible to imagine a more perfect harmony than the one that reigns, in the realm of superstition, between Jews and their fellow citizens,” describing how “the old Moorish woman . . . gifted with the buena mano, the yed messaouda, lends her ministry to Jewish families to conjure charms, chase away the evil eye with her

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amulets, her mystical washing of doors, and her fumigations; the Soussi casting horoscopes finds, in Fes and Tangier alike, convinced Jewish clients anxious to ask the Khat Znati to predict their future.”24 In his observation of the “numerous beaches, grottos, and rocks where Jewish and Muslim candles burn side-by-side,” Nahon reinforces the rhetoric of a common substratum of hybrid ‟indigenous” belief, but also acknowledges the realities of how Jewish and Muslim practices were intertwined, each relying on the presence of the other.25 The “realm of superstition” was not only a result of Jewish-Muslim interaction; it also produced it. JEWISH CLIENTS AND MUSLIM PRACTITIONERS Numerous sources testify to the regularity with which Jews turned to Muslim practitioners of magic, for a wide variety of demonological needs. In some instances, it appears that Jews considered Muslims simply more effective when dealing with demons than their coreligionists. The French ethnographer Pierre Flamand records that the Jews in the town of Demnate, in central Morocco, would turn to Muslim magicians for a variety of situations which were also generally the domain of Jewish magicians: “[The Jews] would voluntarily have recourse to old women reputed to know the formulae of exorcism, and to Arab magicians, who were the owners of charms against diseases, beneficial recipes for finding lost objects, discovering thieves, etc.”26 André Chouraqui writes similarly that Jews would call upon Muslim magicians “to dispense love potions and invocations, spells and counterspells, to tell fortunes and make sacrifices and offerings to the djnun.”27 While (as we shall see) Muslims would regularly turn to Jewish magicians for the very same complaints, in this case for Jews it was the Muslim magician who offered the superior service. The emphasis of these observations on the hybrid, ‟Judeo-Muslim” nature of local practice no doubt emerges from the historiographic concern with emphasizing the non-Jewish roots of magical practices; at the same time, they also testify to the relationship in the Jewish imagination between the world of Muslims and the world of the jnun. In another work, Flamand observes that “[Jewish women] resort to the services of Muslim sorcerers rather than their co-religionists. This latter practice clearly emerges from the common belief that no one is a prophet in their own country.”28 Why turn to a Jew, when a Muslim had not only the same qualifications to manage demons, but additionally the magical power of the Other? Of course, this also carried the potential risks of leaving your own community and acknowledging another as superior. In 1980, Daniel Schroeter met a Muslim fqih [scholar] in Iligh, in the Atlas Mountains, who remembered how Jewish clients would visit him for amulets;

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Jews from Iligh later denied having done this, seemingly embarrassed about the crossed social and religious boundaries that it implied.29 In some cases, it seems clear that Muslim specialists had unique skills unavailable among Jews. Fortune telling, in particular, seems to have been associated with Muslims by Jews in the Maghreb. The French Catholic scholar Eusèbe Vassel recorded that most of the various magical professions common in Tunis in the early twentieth century were practiced by both Jews and Muslims, but the khattat—who “foretells good fortune by means of a bed of sand on which he traces magical lines,” reminiscent of the Khat Znati mentioned by Nahon—was always Muslim.30 Yosef Bennaim records a story of the eighteenth-century Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka of Agadir who consulted a Muslim fortune teller to have the future revealed (and confirmed his prediction with his saintly prophetic insight).31 Similarly, Noam Stillman records that during their fieldwork in Sefrou, “a Jewish girl we knew went to a Muslim shewwafa (a female seer) to learn whether her impending marriage would be auspicious,” although she may have been disappointed by the negative answer.32 One particular instance when Muslim magicians were called upon was to facilitate ceremonies of reconciliation with an offended jinn. These ceremonies were known by a variety of names, including ḥadra, zar, salḥa, rebaybiya, and stambeli, and were performed across the Maghreb for Jewish and Muslim clients alike when a possessing jinn was causing a serious illness requiring professional intervention.33 The musicians responsible for these ceremonies were most often members of Sufi brotherhoods of sub-Saharan descent like the Gnawa or Bu Sa‘diyya; in Jewish memories, they are usually described simply as ‟blacks.”34 The Tunisian Jewish linguist David Cohen, for example, defined the stambeli orchestra as “composed of black musicians playing a large tambourine, castanets and a bagpipe.”35 Chouraqui writes that at the rebaybiya “some Arab or black musicians would form an orchestra comprising bagpipes, a Basque tambourine, and sometimes a flageolet,” going so far as to call it “a scene of Negro-Berber magic.”36 Albert Memmi, in an evocative chapter on the dance-exorcism of his Aunt Maissa, remembers the players as “terrifying Negro musicians . . . from some tribe of the deep South, a strange offshoot of Negro Africa sent out towards the Mediterranean.”37 For Jewish writers living under French colonialism such as Chouraqui and Memmi, the presence of these Others was a reminder of the ambiguity and complexity of their Maghrebi Jewish identities; the persistence of these encounters threatened to undermine the work of aligning themselves with Europe and modernity rather than the ‟Orient” and the Islamic world. While ordinarily, Jews may have had sufficient ritual and magical knowledge to deal with their jinn neighbors, in these cases the severity of the illness meant that the additional power and authority of Muslim ritual experts was

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welcomed. In oral histories of Jewish women from Constantine (in northeastern Algeria), one remembered the salḥa as led by “Black musicians [who] played a highly rhythmic, broken, rough piece of music . . . swirling around, hammering on their drums with a metal hook,” and added that “only Blacks could take the evil spirits upon themselves.”38 Another recalled the importance of the Muslim ritual leader in managing the trance: “We would lose everything. We didn’t know where we were, really, not at all. . . . And this black man would [also] go into a trance, and dance, and then he would faint. When he fainted, we would say, ‘This is it, the jnun have left.’”39 The mastery of the rhythms and chants and the ability to safely handle interactions with powerful jnun was a highly specific body of knowledge, which necessitated the involvement of non-Jewish magical professionals.40 In Jewish memories, it was only these ‟Black” musicians, both religiously and ethnically Other, who had sufficient power to overcome the danger of invoking the world of the jnun so directly. It is also possible that the situation of possession, involving a jinn who has already crossed the human-demon boundary to impact a human so seriously, may have facilitated the degree to which these ceremonies were also allowed to cross communal and confessional boundaries. It was not only as clients or patients that Jews encountered Muslims when dealing with jnun; there were also times when they saw each other as colleagues. Jewish healers and magicians desiring knowledge sometimes turned to the world of Muslim magicians for qualifications unavailable in their own community. For the most part, however, Yoram Bilu observed that magical practices learned from Muslim colleagues “constituted only a modest part of the healer’s curing arsenal,” and some “refrained altogether from using such methods, strictly retaining the Jewish character of their practice” with remedies from within the Jewish tradition, such as ketiva [writing Kabbalistic amulets], or remedies found in books of segulot and refu’ot.41 One figure illustrates the usual limits of Jewish-Muslim encounter through his extraordinary defiance in blurring all distinctions and contrasting social categories, and it is here we return to our opening: Rabbi Ya‘aqov Wazana. Born in Assarag around the turn of the twentieth century, Wazana was a descendent of a venerated lineage of pious rabbis and saints.42 After his father died in Wazana’s childhood, he threw himself into mastering the profession of healing and specifically sought out Muslim sheikhs renowned for their ability to work with jnun. One interlocutor described Wazana’s first meeting with one of his teachers, a Soussi tolb43 to whom Wazana offered a sack of sugar in exchange for an apprenticeship: The Arab ordered his wife to prepare tea for the young Jew who had come so far, and then asked her to bring in a jar of oil. Saying that Jews are careful about the cleanliness of their food, he asked Wazana to examine the jar. . . . As he

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peered into the jar, the room vanished, “and he was under the ground, among the demons. He thought he was there for four years and that he had married and raised children.” He returned to find himself still in the sorcerer’s house. . . . [The tolb] explained: “The pot of tea you left still stands on the stove, see, it has not yet been poured… I just wished for you to learn that the sugar you gave me was not wasted.”44

This demonstration of power convinced Wazana that this magician was truly a master of the demonic world, beyond the skill of any Jewish colleague, and Wazana studied with him for six months. At the end of his apprenticeship, the tolb set three conditions for Wazana: to keep himself clean, to faithfully recite Muslim prayers daily, and to marry “one of them from under the ground,” that is, to take a jinniyya wife.45 These latter two conditions represent the two foreign worlds—Muslim and demonic—into which Wazana had to cross in order to obtain the power he sought. Obviously, Wazana’s identity was unique for its incorporation of the performance of Muslim prayers; Bilu’s interlocutors recalled Wazana’s involvement in other areas uncommon among Jews, including knowledge of the Qur’an and literacy in classical Arabic.46 And while Maghrebi Jews encountered jnun in a variety of contexts, the extent to which Wazana was to enter their world was unprecedented; very few Jews managed to go through the long and perilous process of gaining full control over the demon realm, and marriage to a jinniyya was almost unknown in the Moroccan Jewish community.47 But while Wazana represents an extreme example, his life story illustrates the general principle that engaging with the jnun was also an encounter with Muslim society—and vice versa. According to Bilu, Wazana’s powers led to his becoming “the greatest healer in the mountains of southern Morocco,”48 honored by both Jews and Muslims. In fact, Pierre Flamand mentions Wazana as an example of a Jew who was consulted equally by Jews and Muslims, in describing how Muslims would visit Jewish magicians: The Chleuh and Draoui women act similarly [in seeking out magicians of the other religious group], asking the Jews for talismans that ensure them of being desired and loved by the man of their choice. However, some sorcerers recruit their clientele among [all] the different ethnic backgrounds: in the administrative district of Taliouine, the Muslim Si Ahmed Aznag of Izider, in Azilal, and the Jew Yacoub ouAzana [sic] of Assareg, in Tifnout, are both consulted by Jews and non-Jews alike. Considered agents of the Devil, they have the frightening power to see demons and deal with them.49

Wazana’s association with Muslim clients (and with jnun), in fact, was what led to his death (according to the stories), when he dramatically rescued a

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local sheikh’s daughter from the possession of powerful jnun despite their warnings that this would cost him his life.50 To this day, Wazana is remembered fondly not only by his coreligionists in Israel, but also by local Muslims in Agouim who gratefully recall his intercession and healing, and the powers that his marriage to a jinniyya granted him.51 At the same time, his involvement with jnun and Muslims earned him the disapproval of other rabbis (notably the Abuḥaṣera dynasty) and contributed to his continued marginalization in the Jewish community.52 Wazana was exceptional both in the degree to which he was involved in the world of the jnun, and in the degree to which that involvement also necessitated his liminal placement on the border between Jewish and Muslim social orders. But he was exceptional only in degree: there were many Jewish healers, magicians, and other ritual experts who worked with jnun. It may be assumed that beyond their Jewish clientele, they attracted Muslim clients not only through their own individual expertise but also through their power as Jews. As the only surviving indigenous community of non-Muslims in the Maghreb, Jews were the quintessential Others of Muslim society, whose presence was indicative of “a crucial relationship that defines the nation writ large.”53 Thus it is not surprising that just as Jews imagined their Muslim neighbors to have a special relationship with the world of the jnun, so too Muslims saw their Jewish neighbors. MUSLIM CLIENTS AND JEWISH PRACTITIONERS Ya‘aqov Wazana was far from the only Jewish magical practitioner to develop a following among Muslim clients in Morocco. As noted above, Jews have long been associated with magical power across North Africa. Many popular legends, for example, are attached to Dar al-Magana, a fourteenth-century water clock in Fes opposite the Bou Inaniyya mosque, claiming that it was built by a Jewish sorcerer, perhaps even Maimonides himself, and/or that it was silenced by a Jewish sorcerer; as one traveler concluded, after summarizing the various legends associating Jewish magicians to Dar al-Magana, “a Jew is always the moving spirit.”54 One of the earliest examples of Moroccan Muslims turning to a Jewish magician might be the case reported by the sixteenth-century Moroccan Kabbalist Yehuda Ḥallewa, who described how a young maidservant was possessed by a spirit, which belonged, as it turned out, to the deceased Iberian Kabbalist Yosef Della Reina.55 Her family “finally sought out a certain Jew, from those who know how to adjure demons, spirits, devils, and destructive beings,” who succeeded in identifying the spirit although he was unable to persuade him to leave the girl’s body.56

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This association continued well into the twentieth century. In 1940, José Bénech recorded that “the Jewish sorcerer is, still nowadays, literally besieged by a crowd composed almost exclusively of fatmas that suppose him to have more power than his Muslim colleagues.”57 Similarly, Chouraqui remembered that “Muslims and even Christians frequented the Jewish healers in the mellah,” and suggests that Muslims sought out amulets and talismans written by rabbis, rather than a Muslim fqih or marabout, because they were “rarer” and thus had greater value and power.58 According to the French doctor Émile Mauchamp, even a qa’id of southwestern Morocco, Si Aïssa Ben Omar, had recourse to a Jewish sorcière when he was imprisoned in Marrakech; she sent him a talisman containing a hoopoe’s crest, which he continued to wear at all times after his release.59 Jews continued to hold power even after their death; many Muslims venerated Jewish saints and visited their tombs, which was noticed with surprise by colonial ethnographers, and formed a central feature of early studies of ‟Judeo-Muslim pilgrimage,” such as Voinot.60 As an example, Mauchamp writes that “[Muslim] parents whose children die of the ‘touch of the Devil,’ or Assleï, must go on pilgrimage to the tombs of two saintly Jewish brothers, Rabbi Raphael Cohen and Rabbi Moïse Cohen, buried near Marrakech. . . . The Arabs guard these tombs, respecting these Jewish marabouts even more than do the Jews themselves.”61 While it is true that in the case of saint veneration, the saint’s religious identity may not be the only (or even primary) motive for visits and offerings, it should still be noted that at least in some cases, the Jewishness of Jewish saints held additional power for Muslim pilgrims, forming part of the larger relationship between Jews and control over (or contact with) the invisible world. A related observation is the Muslim belief in the efficacy of Jewish prayers, particularly for rain, and the practice during times of drought of having Jews perform the istisqa’ prayer for rain, a custom which was already noticed during the eighteenth century and which continues to this day.62 There are also indications that the power of Jewish Otherness could be transferred to objects by contact or association; Gottreich records that Muslims would enter the mellah of Marrakech to perform magical rites or to obtain substances connected to Jews: earth from the Jewish cemetery, fabric torn from a Jew’s clothing, ashes from a Jew’s oven—Mauchamp specifies that the ashes from the day of Yom Kippur were in particular demand63—and even Jewish bodily excretions, which were seen as valuable and powerful (even lethal) ingredients in magical potions.64 Similarly, amulets made for Muslims could include inscriptions with an arcane alphabet derived from Hebrew letters, Divine Names from the Jewish tradition, or magical number squares with Kabbalistic significance, even when made by Muslims themselves.65 Like the alien ‟nonsense” words common in magical formulae in

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other traditions, these point toward a world both parallel and foreign to that of the client’s reality.66 However, Moroccan Jews did not belong to a world completely alien to Muslims, but rather one which was adjacent, accessible, recognizable, and understandable (if perhaps strange); they were, in a word, neighbors—with all the productivity, ambivalence, and tension that the term implies. Even with the absence of Jews from most of contemporary Morocco, the association of Jews and magic continues to this day. Spadola begins and ends his study of possession and exorcisms in contemporary Morocco with the account of a “Jewish jinn,” whose expulsion and conversion “eliminates the jinns as both absence and difference; it removes this ambiguity to make it fully present and accountable.”67 Daniel Schroeter recalled seeing a long line of Muslim women in El Jadida in 1980 waiting to visit a Jewish magician for amulets and talismans.68 One of Deborah Kapchan’s interlocuters, an ‟aṭṭar” [herbalist] in the town of Beni Mellal in the Middle Atlas, reported to her the story of a Muslim client, married for twelve years to a Jewish woman (who converted to Islam); the husband still suffers from the magic done by the angry Jewish parents. Kapchan further notes that there was still (at least in 1996) a Jewish ‟sorcière” in Beni Mellal “whose powers are both solicited and feared by the [Muslim] community.”69 Due to the diminished Jewish presence in contemporary Morocco, any remaining Jewish magicians must work, by necessity, largely or exclusively with Muslim clients, as described by Kosansky: The few Jewish magicians who remained in Fez during my research retained a predominantly Muslim clientele. For the most part, however, Muslims remembered Jewish magicians more than they hired them. Some even mocked the abilities of one current Jewish practitioner, noting that the real magic was taken with those of previous generations who had left Fez years ago. For still others, the magical power of Jews found its last remnant in [an] elderly ironmonger who stood in her stall in the mellah. To speak jovially with her was considered entertaining, but I was warned not to raise her ire. She knew how to speak, and her words had dangerous power.70

Cory Driver notes that to this day, many of the fortune tellers working in Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech claim to be “the daughters of mixed JewishMuslim unions . . . [but] their mixed parentage ensured that they could never marry a Muslim or a Jew. . . . [Nonetheless] their spiritual power for seeing the future is double that of the other fortune tellers who can channel ‘only Muslim baraka.’”71 The ambivalence that Kosansky, Kapchan, and Driver observe is an important aspect of the relationship between Jews and magic —as seen from the life-story of Wazana, being associated with the world

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of the jnun is not always fully positive, and is ultimately always dangerous. Westermarck noted that the curses of Jews are seen as “more fearful” than those of Muslims, and described several circumstances in which Jews were believed to spoil food, dry up wells, bring ill fortune, and generally take away baraka, due to their position as not just ‟non-Muslim” but ‟anti-Muslim,” in the sense of being a Muslim’s opposite.72 Just as from a Muslim perspective, things associated with Islam (the Qur’an, saints, the hajj, etc.) attract baraka and keep jnun away, Jews and things associated with them can attract jnun and take baraka away. Of course, the reverse was true for the Jewish community. Finally, the realm of demons and magic was the site for both literal and figurative encounter between Jews and Muslims. Just as some historians have attributed the presence of magical and demonological practices among Moroccan Jews to their social proximity to Muslims, some colonial writers made the same argument in reverse, concerning the presence of demonological magic in the Muslim community. Émile Mauchamp, for example, argued that since magic was forbidden in the Qur’an, its wide acceptance in Morocco must be due to Jews and their ancient magical tradition, drawing especially on the figures of Jewish/Biblical ‟magicians” such as Moses and Solomon: Sorcery reigns as a glorious mistress, popular and despotic, thanks to the Jewish influence. Solomon is considered in Morocco as the father of magicians, the one who built that Temple of Jerusalem by spirits. . . . Rabbinic grimoires already prescribe the perfuming of objects before invocations, the use of incense and spices at fixed times and days, ligatures, the formulae of exorcism and appeal that we find with only slight adaptations or modifications in Moroccan sorcery . . . . Moses, the last adept and vigorous magician gave his proceedings a scale which are no longer present in the incantations of his miserable descendants, the Moroccans.73

Similar arguments are to be found in scholars such as Doutté, Vassel, Goulven, and Legey, who emphasize throughout their studies the relationship of Moroccan practices not only to their (supposed) precedents in ancient Judaism and elsewhere in Semitic antiquity.74 In unknowing accord with Yosef Messas, Vassel argues that “the spirits of Tunis and Baghdad alike have the same source as those of the Zohar, namely that they all come from Sumer, Chaldea, and Persia, and were passed by the Jews through rabbinic traditions drawn from Babylonia . . . and to which, in turn, Muslim belief responded in the Middle Ages.”75 Even the anthropologist Edvard Westermarck, who argued against the general characterization of the jnun as “survivals of ancient Semitic religion” and believed that they were originally spirits of ancient Arabia,76 nonetheless concluded that “it is highly probable

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that Jewish, Phoenician, and Carthaginian beliefs and practices relating to the evil eye have exercised a considerable influence on the Muhammadans of the Mediterranean.”77 Just as some perceptions of Jewish magic saw it as inextricably dependent on Muslim beliefs, so too Muslim magic was apparently dependent on Judaism. CONCLUSION Jews, Muslims, and demons were all tied together by a web of practices and beliefs, each relationship both a product and producer of encounter with the other. Jews and Muslims each called upon magical professionals of the other confessional community, drawing on the associations between magic and foreignness that lent extra power to religious Others to engage with the world of the jnun. In each group, the practice of magic itself was seen as linked to the presence—sometimes literal, sometimes figurative—of the Other. In some contexts this led to Jewish-Muslim co-operation, as Jews and Muslims each believed the other to have special access to the world of the jnun; in other contexts, the Jewish association with demons led to a demonization of the Jews themselves. In both cases, the operative paradigm for understanding both Jewish-Muslim relations and Jewish-demon relations seems to that of ‟neighbors”—a protean and ambiguous state of encounter that grants each party separate autonomy while acknowledging their interdependence, and that carries the potential for both conflict and co-operation. In the end, what were the jnun? To be honest, I cannot fully say. Like the Jewish community’s Muslim neighbors, their spirit neighbors played a complex and ambivalent role: sometimes friends and at other times antagonists, sometimes doing favors and at other times causing pain, sometimes entirely understandable and at other times completely foreign. The jnun may be intangible (at least for the scholar), but for the Jews who feared, respected, and placated them they had very real and material effects: the inexplicable symptoms of demon-caused illness or the equally inexplicable event of healing, and then the actions rippling out of the social afterlives of these events: writing amulets, offering foods, visiting shrines, or collaborating with one’s neighbors. Encompassing all these varied modes of experience, the Maghrebi Jewish imagination was a nuanced perspective that “ruptures binary outlooks and invites us to think beyond the present and the visible,” toward a widened understanding of the geography of social responsibility.78 What does it mean to build an ethics of neighborliness that is responsible to the broadest set of Others? What does it mean to build a community that includes the invisible? This is only a subset, I believe, of the larger question of what it means to

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build a community of diverse neighbors—a question which today grows only more pressing.

NOTES 1. This quote and the one that follows are from Yoram Bilu, Without Bounds: The Life and Death of Rabbi Ya’aqov Wazana (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 138 and 113. 2. For the full project, see Noam Sienna, Neighboring Imaginaries: Jews and Demons in the Maghreb (MA thesis, University of Toronto, 2015). 3. See, e.g., BT Pesaḥim 110a, BT Ḥullin 105a, and BT Gittin 68a. Meir BarIlan, “Exorcism by Rabbis: Talmudic Sages and Magic,” Da‘at 34 (1995), 17–31; Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sara Ronis, “A Demonic Servant in Rav Papa’s Household: Demons as Subjects in the Mesopotamian Talmud,” in The Aggada of the Bavli and Its Cultural World, eds. Geoffrey Herman and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 2018), 3–22. 4. Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari, and Shaul Shaked (eds.), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Yuval Harari, Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017). 5. For an early example of published magical material from the Geniza, see Gershom Scholem, “Some Sources of Jewish-Arabic Demonology,” Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1965), 1–13. For more recent scholarship, see: Jonathan Seidel, “Possession and Exorcism in the Magical Texts of the Cairo Geniza,” in Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Matt Goldish (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 73–98; Gideon Bohak, “Reconstructing Jewish Magical Recipe Books from the Cairo Genizah,” Ginzei Qedem 1 (2005), 9–29. 6. Yuval Harari, “Leadership, Authority, and the ‘Other’ in the Debate over Magic from the Karaites to Maimonides,” Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry 1 (2007), 79–101; Aviezer Ravitzky, “‘The Ravings of Amulet Writers’: Maimonides and His Disciples on Language, Nature and Magic,” in Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, eds. Kanarfogel, Ephraim and Moshe Sokolow (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2010), 93–130. 7. Joseph Dan, “Samael, Lilith, and the concept of evil in early Kabbalah,” AJS Review 5 (1980), 17–40; Yoni Garb, “Magic and Mysticism: from North Africa to the Land of Israel,” Pe‘amim 85 (2002), 112–130. 8. Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009). 9. Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Emilie Savage-Smith, ed., Magic and Divination in Early Islam (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

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10. Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Gerda Sengers, Women and Demons: Cultic Healing in Islamic Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Mohammed Maarouf, Jinn Eviction as a Discourse of Power: a multidisciplinary approach to Moroccan magical beliefs and practices (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Barbara Drieskens, Living with Djinns: Understanding and Dealing with the Invisible in Cairo (London: Saqi Books, 2008). 11. Michael Lambek, Human Spirits: a cultural account of trance in Mayotte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 104; Naveeda Khan, “Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship during Uncertain Times,” Cultural Anthropology 21:2 (2006), 248. 12. Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London, 1836), 267–268; Carl Benjamin Klunzinger, Upper Egypt: Its People and Its Products (New York, 1878), 384. 13. Edmond Doutté, Magie et Religion dans l’Afrique du Nord (Alger: Typ. A. Jourdan, 1909), 49–50. 14. E.g. even Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Avoda Zara 11:11-12. See the entry on “Incantations” in Fred Rosner, Encyclopedia of Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 2000), 172–173. 15. The Hebrew shed (first appearing in Deut. 32:17) is the most common term for ‘demon’ in the Talmud, and continued to be used in Hebrew literature; in North African contexts, it is usually used synonymously with the Maghrebi Arabic jinn (plural jnun; cf. Classical Arabic jinni, jinn). 16. Biblical connotations for Mesopotamia (Genesis 10:10), here referring to the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BCE. 17. Yosef Messas, Mayyim Ḥayyim (Fes, 1934), siman 51. 18. George Trumball, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria 1870-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in 19th Century Algeria (2nd edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 19. Joseph Goulven, Les Mellahs de Rabat-Salé (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1927), ix. 20. The construction of Jews (and similarly, Imazighen) as ideal assimilatory subjects, against the innately barbaric and hostile Arab Muslims, was participating in the French colonial strategy of playing social groups against each other, something that dates back at least to the Cohen-Altaras Report of 1845: Pierre Birnbaum, “French Jews and the ‘Regeneration’ of Algerian Jewry,” in Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88–103; Joshua Schreier, “‘They Swore Upon the Tombs Never to Make Peace with Us’: Algerian Jews and French Colonialism, 1845-1848,” in Algeria & France, 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia Lorcin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 101–116. 21. Abraham Ribbi, “Les juifs de Marrakesch,” Bulletin de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle (January 1, 1900), 99. Ribbi (1861-1928) was born in Smyrna (Izmir),

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like most early AIU teachers, 60% of whom came from the Ottoman Empire (see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), 73–74. Thus, there is a complex layering of self-representation among AIU teachers as Sephardi but non-Moroccan Jews, and representatives of French civilization, describing their Moroccan coreligionists. 22. On the variety of apotropaic and co-operative demonological practices among Maghrebi Jews, see Sienna, Neighboring Imaginaries, 72–110. 23. See Yoram Bilu, “The Moroccan Demon in Israel: The Case of ‘Evil Spirit Disease,’” Ethos 8:1 (1980), 24–39; and Bilu, “Dybbuk, Aslai, Zar: The Cultural Distinctiveness and Historical Situatedness of Possession Illnesses in Three Jewish Milieus,” in Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Matt Goldish (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 346–365. 24. Moïse Nahon, “Le Mauvais Oeil,” Revue des Écoles de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle 3 (1901), 198. Nahon (1870-1928) was born in Tangier and taught in AIU schools in Fes and Casablanca before being sent to Algiers in 1900. For an analysis of Nahon’s ethnographic eye, see Susan Gilson Miller, “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghrebi Jew,” in French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, eds. Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 293–319. 25. A similar dynamic may be noted with the Mimouna festival, where the first piece of bread post-Passover is brought by Muslim neighbours and eaten immediately after the end of the holiday: that is, the form of the celebration required one to live alongside Muslims; see Aharon Maman, “Mimuna: Explanation of the Name and the Customs of the Holiday,” in Meḥqarim betarbutam shel yehudei ṣefon afriqa, ed. Issachar Ben- Ami (Jerusalem, 1991), 85–95. See also Oren Kosansky, All Dear Unto God: Saints, Pilgrimage and Textual Practice in Jewish Morocco (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2003), 102–103. 26. Pierre Flamand, Un mellah en pays berbère: Demnate (Paris : Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1952), 96. 27. André Chouraqui, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord: marche vers l’occident (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), 68. 28. Pierre Flamand, Quelques manifestations de l’esprit populaire dans les juiveries du sud-marocain (Casablanca : Imprimeries réunies, 1958), 55. 29. Daniel Schroeter, personal communication, May 2020. 30. Eusèbe Vassel, La litterature populaire des israélites tunisiens: avec un essai ethnographique et archéologique sur leurs superstitions (Paris: E. Leroux, 1907), 123. 31. Yosef Bennaim, Malkhei Rabbanan (Jerusalem: Defus Ha-Ma‘arav, 1931), 80a. 32. Norman Stillman, “Saddiq and Marabout in Morocco,” in The Sepharadi and Oriental Jewish Heritage: Studies, ed. Issachar Ben-Ami (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1982), 494. 33. These rituals form a family of ‘possession cults’ found across Africa and Western Asia. In Morocco, it is most commonly practiced by the Gnawa and the Ḥamadsha: see, inter alia, Vincent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A Study in

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Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and Christopher Witulski, The Gnawa Lions: Authenticity and Opportunity in Moroccan Ritual Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018). However, while there is ample documentation of ceremonies of trance healing among Maghrebi Jews in Algeria and Tunisia (see Sienna, Neighboring Imaginaries, 102–110), I have not found explicit documentation of Jewish participation in such ceremonies in Morocco, and there are only a few hints describing a “Jewish Gnawa” lila [evening ritual] with a different repertoire: Bertrand Hell, Le tourbillon des génies: au Maroc avec les Gnawa (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 272–273; Witulski, The Gnawa Lions, 55–56, 72–73. My conversations with contemporary Gnawa musicians confirm that the “Jewish lila” today is Jewish only by association (e.g. invoking Jewish saints and biblical figures), but without Jewish involvement. Why this is the case, and why Morocco appears to be unique in this respect, remains an important issue for further study. 34. Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters; Witulski, The Gnawa Lions; Richard Jankowsky, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 35. David Cohen, Le Parler arabe des juifs de Tunis (Paris : Mouton, 1964), 171. 36. Chouraqui, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord, 290. He is quoting a “unpublished report” on the Jews of Tunis by a certain M. I. Shebaho. 37. Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt (New York: Criterion Books, 1955), 159–160. His account of his maternal aunt, possessed by a jinn, is tied up with his representation of his mother, her closeness to what he perceives of as Maghrebi/Arab superstitions, and his own growing sense of alienation. 38. Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, “The Rites of Water for the Jewish Women of Algeria: Representations and Meanings,” Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law, ed. Rahel Wasserfall (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 209. 39. Noam Sienna, Old Patterns, New Skin: Jewish henna ceremonies and the politics of heritage (BA thesis, Brandeis University, 2011), 95. 40. In Israel and France, these ceremonies are now performed for Jewish clients with all-Jewish musicians; similarly, today in North Africa, Muslim musicians recall with nostalgia being called to perform for Jewish clients but no longer invoke specifically ‘Jewish’ spirits, because of the absence of Jews in contemporary ceremonies. See Eli Somer and Meir Saadon, “Stambali: Dissociative Possession and Trance in a Tunisian Healing Dance,” Transcultural Psychiatry 37:4 (2000), 580–600; Sylvaine Conord, “Itinéraires de femmes juives d’origine tunisienne fréquentant le quartier de Belleville: trajectoires visuelles,” in Sud-Nord: cultures coloniales en France, ed. Colette Zytnicki (Paris: Privat, 2004), 146–147; Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters, 235; Jankowsky, Stambeli, 63–64 and 209. 41. Yoram Bilu, “Rabbi Yaacov Wazana: A Jewish Healer in the Atlas Mountains,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12 (1988), 121. 42. My biography rests on the work of Bilu, Without Bounds.

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43. A colloquial term for a magician, from the Arabic ṭalib, literally “student [of magical arts].” 44. Bilu, Without Bounds, 65. 45. Bilu, Without Bounds, 65–66. 46. Bilu, Without Bounds, 71. 47. Bilu, Without Bounds, 68–69. Tamar Alexander notes a story told by a Moroccan Jew of “the brother of the rabbi in Casablanca [who] was married to a demon who helped him in his work and made him successful,” but this might in fact refer to Wazana himself, who briefly worked in Casablanca; the unnamed man in the story is described as living with his mother and unable to marry a human woman, both important elements of Wazana’s life story: Tamar Alexander, “Theme and Genre: Relationships between Man and She-Demon in Jewish Folklore,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 14 (1992), 59. 48. Bilu, Without Bounds, 90. 49. Flamand, Quelques Manifestations, 55–56. This is, to my knowledge, the only mention of Wazana in any primary document outside of oral narratives. 50. Bilu, Without Bounds, 108–118. 51. Daniel Schroeter, “The Curse of the Saint,” Judaism 50:2 (2001), 185. 52. Bilu, Without Bounds, 136–147. 53. Oren Kosansky, “The Real Morocco Itself: Jewish Saint Pilgrimage, Hybridity, and the Idea of the Moroccan Nation,” Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, eds. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel Schroeter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 353; compare Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 148–162; Daniel Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9–10; Emily Benichou Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2007), 1–2. 54. John Horne, Many Days in Morocco (London: Philip Allan, 1925), 45–46. These legends have remained popular until the present day; I myself heard similar stories in Fes in 2014. 55. Yehuda Ḥallewa immigrated to Palestine, where he composed his work Ṣafnat Pa‛neaḥ in 1545 in Safed. See Moshe Idel, “R. Yehuda Ḥallewa veḥiburo Ṣafnat Pa‘neaḥ,” Shalem 4 (1984), 119–148. 56. Ḥallewa, Ṣafnat Pa‘neaḥ, as quoted in Moshe Idel, ‘Iyyunim be-shiṭato shel ba‘al sefer ha-meshiv,’ Sefunot 17 (1983), 229–231. Ḥallewa describes the story as happening in “the West” (ma‘arav, or perhaps Maghreb), and other aspects of the text point to Della Reina’s context in pre-expulsion Spain, so some scholars have placed the whole story in Spain: Joseph H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 26, and cf. Idel, who locates it in Fes: “The Kabbalah in Morocco: A Survey,” in Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land, eds. Daniel Schroeter and Vivian Mann (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2000), 115. 57. Jose Bénech, Essai d’Explication d’un Mellah — ghetto marocain (Paris: Larose, 1940), 74.

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58. Chouraqui, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord, 129–130. 59. Émile Mauchamp, La Sorcellerie au Maroc (Paris : Dorbon-Ainé, 1908), 292. 60. Louis Voinot, Pèlerinages judéo-musulmans du Maroc (Paris: Larose, 1948), which is analyzed thoroughly in Kosansky, All Dear Unto God, and “The Real Morocco Itself.” 61. Mauchamp, Sorcellerie, 177–178. 62. Louis Chenier, The Present State of the Empire of Morocco (London, 1788), 345–346; Kenneth Brown, People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City, 1830-1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 91; Rosen, Bargaining for Reality, 64; Gavriel Fiske, “Mohammed VI demande aux juifs de prier pour la pluie,” The Times of Israel Français, January 15, 2014. 63. Mauchamp, Sorcellerie, 149. 64. Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakech, 74–75. One is reminded of the inclusion of the “liver of blaspheming Jew” in the witches’ brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, IV.i.26. 65. Mauchamp, Sorcellerie, 208, 276; Doutté, Magie et Religion, 158, 196. 66. H. S. Versnel, “The Poetics of the Magic Charm: an Essay on the Power of Words,” in Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, eds. Paul Allan Mirecki and Marvin W. Meyer (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 105–158; Gideon Bohak, “Hebrew, Hebrew Everywhere? Notes on the Interpretation of Voces Magicae,” in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, eds. Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, and Brannon Wheeler (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 69–82. 67. Emilio Spadola, The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–2, 132–136. 68. Daniel Schroeter, personal communication, May 2020. 69. Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 247–249. 70. Oren Kosansky, “Reading Jewish Fez: On the Cultural Identity of a Moroccan City,” The Journal of the International Institute 8:3 (2001), 8–9. 71. Cory Driver, Muslim Custodians of Jewish Spaces in Morocco: Drinking the Milk of Trust (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 72. Edvard Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco (2 vols, London: Macmilan, 1926), I: 491, II: 229–231. 73. Mauchamp, Sorcellerie, 204–206. 74. Doutté, Magie et Religion, 48–50 et passim; Vassel, Litterature, 133; Goulven, Les mellahs, 68–69; Françoise Legey, Essai de folklore marocain (Paris : Geuthner, 1927), 125. 75. Vassel, Litterature, 144. 76. See Westermarck’s first publication on Morocco: “The Nature of the Arab Ginn, Illustrated by the Present Beliefs of the People of Morocco,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29:3/4 (1899), 252–269. 77. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief I: 476, and compare Ritual and Belief I: 382–390.

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78. Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Tamar. “Theme and Genre: Relationships between Man and She-Demon in Jewish Folklore.” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 14, 56–61, 1992. Allouche-Benayoun, Joëlle. “The Rites of Water for the Jewish Women of Algeria: Representations and Meanings.” In Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law, ed. Rahel Wasserfall, 198–216. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999. Bar-Ilan, Meir. “Exorcism by Rabbis: Talmudic Sages and Magic.” Da‘at 34, 17–31, 1995. Bénech, José. Essai d’Explication d’un Mellah — ghetto marocain. Paris: Larose, 1940. Bennaim, Yosef. Malkhei Rabbanan. Jerusalem: Defus Ha-Ma‘arav, 1931. Bilu, Yoram. “The Moroccan Demon in Israel: The Case of ‘Evil Spirit Disease.’” Ethos 8:1, 24–39, 1980. ———. “Rabbi Yaacov Wazana: A Jewish healer in the Atlas Mountains.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12, 113–135, 1988. ———. Without Bounds: The Life and Death of Rabbi Ya’aqov Wazana. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000. ———. “Dybbuk, Aslai, Zar: The Cultural Distinctiveness and Historical Situatedness of Possession Illnesses in Three Jewish Milieus.” In Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Matt Goldish, 346–365. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Birnbaum, Pierre. “French Jews and the ‘Regeneration’ of Algerian Jewry.” In Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, 88–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Bohak, Gideon. “Hebrew, Hebrew Everywhere? Notes on the Interpretation of Voces Magicae.” In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, edited by Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, and Brannon Wheeler, 69–82. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. ———. “Reconstructing Jewish Magical Recipe Books from the Cairo Genizah.” Ginzei Qedem 1, 9–29, 2005. ———. Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. Yuval Harari, and Shaul Shaked, eds. Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Brown, Kenneth. People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City, 18301930. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976.

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Chajes, Joseph H. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Chenier, Louis. The Present State of the Empire of Morocco. London, 1788. Chouraqui, André. Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord: marche vers l’occident. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1952. Cohen, David. Le Parler arabe des juifs de Tunis. Paris : Mouton, 1964. Conord, Sylvaine. “Itinéraires de femmes juives d’origine tunisienne fréquentant le quartier de Belleville: trajectoires visuelles.” In Sud-Nord: cultures coloniales en France, edited by Colette Zytnicki, 146–147. Paris: Privat, 2004. Crapanzano, Vincent. The Hamadsha: a study in Moroccan ethnopsychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Dan, Joseph. “Samael, Lilith, and the concept of evil in early Kabbalah.” AJS Review 5, 17–40, 1980. Dols, Michael. Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Doutté, Edmond. Magie et Religion dans l’Afrique du Nord. Alger: Typ. A. Jourdan, 1909. Drieskens, Barbara. Living with Djinns: understanding and dealing with the invisible in Cairo. London: Saqi Books, 2008. Driver, Cory. Muslim Custodians of Jewish Spaces in Morocco: Drinking the Milk of Trust. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. El-Zein, Amira. Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009. Fiske, Gavriel. “Mohammed VI demande aux juifs de prier pour la pluie.” The Times of Israel Français, January 15, 2014. Flamand, Pierre. Un mellah en pays berbere: Demnate. Paris : Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1952. ———. Quelques manifestations de l’esprit populaire dans les juiveries du sudmarocain. Casablanca: Imprimeries réunies, 1958. Garb, Yoni. “Magic and Mysticism: from North Africa to the Land of Israel.” Pe‘amim 85, 112–130, 2002. Gottreich, Emily Benichou. The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Goulven, Joseph. Les Mellahs de Rabat-Salé. Paris: Paul Geuthner. 1927. Harari, Yuval. “Leadership, Authority, and the ‘Other’ in the Debate over Magic from the Karaites to Maimonides.” Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry 1, 79–101, 2007. ———. Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Hell, Bertrand. Le tourbillon des génies: au Maroc avec les Gnawa. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Horne, John. Many Days in Morocco. London: Philip Allan, 1925. Idel, Moshe. ‘Iyyunim beshiṭato shel ba‘al sefer hameshiv.” Sefunot 17, 185–266, 1983. ———. “R. Yehuda Ḥallewa veḥiburo Ṣafnat Pa‛neaḥ.” Shalem 4, 119–148, 1984.

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———. “The Kabbalah in Morocco: A Survey.” In Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land, eds. Daniel Schroeter and Vivian Mann, 105–124. New York: The Jewish Museum, 2000. Jankowsky, Richard. Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Kapchan, Deborah. Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. ———. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Khan, Naveeda. “Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship during Uncertain Times.” Cultural Anthropology 21:2, 234–264, 2006. Klunzinger, Carl Benjamin. Upper Egypt: Its People and Its Products. New York, 1878. Kosansky, Oren. “Reading Jewish Fez: On the Cultural Identity of a Moroccan City.” The Journal of the International Institute 8:3, 8–9, 2001. ———. All Dear Unto God: Saints, Pilgrimage and Textual Practice in Jewish Morocco. PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2003. ———. “The Real Morocco Itself: Jewish Saint Pilgrimage, Hybridity, and the Idea of the Moroccan Nation.” In Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel Schroeter, 341–360. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lambek, Michael. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lane, Edward. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. London, 1836. Legey, Françoise. Essai de folklore marocain. Paris : Geuthner, 1927. Lorcin, Patricia. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in 19th Century Algeria. 2nd edition. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Maarouf, Mohammed. Jinn Eviction as a Discourse of Power: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Moroccan Magical Beliefs and Practices. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Maman, Aharon. “Mimuna: Explanation of the Name and the Customs of the Holiday.” In Meḥqarim betarbutam shel yehudei ṣefon afriqa, edited by Issachar Ben-Ami, 85–95. Jerusalem, 1991. Mauchamp, Émile. La Sorcellerie au Maroc. Paris: Dorbon-Ainé, 1908. Memmi, Albert. The Pillar of Salt. New York: Criterion Books, 1955. Messas, Yosef. Mayyim Ḥayyim. Fes, 1934. Miller, Susan Gilson. “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghrebi Jew.” In French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, edited by Lorcin, Patricia and Todd Shepard, 293–319. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Mittermaier, Amira. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Nahon, Moïse. “Le Mauvais Oeil.” Revue des Écoles de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle 3, 198–202, 1901. Pandolfo, Stefania. Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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Ravitzky, Aviezer. “‘The Ravings of Amulet Writers’: Maimonides and His Disciples on Language, Nature and Magic.” In Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, edited by Kanarfogel, Ephraim and Moshe Sokolow, 93–130. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2010. Ribbi, Abraham. “Les juifs de Marrakesch.” Bulletin de l’Alliance Israelite Universelle (January 1, 1900), 95–99. Rodrigue, Aron. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Ronis, Sara. “A Demonic Servant in Rav Papa’s Household: Demons as Subjects in the Mesopotamian Talmud.” In The Aggada of the Bavli and Its Cultural World, edited by Herman, Geoffrey and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, 3–22. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 2018. Rosen, Lawrence. Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Rosner, Fred. Encyclopedia of Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 2000. Savage-Smith, Emilie (ed.). Magic and Divination in Early Islam. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Scholem, Gershom. “Some Sources of Jewish-Arabic Demonology.” Journal of Jewish Studies, 16, 1–13, 1965. Schreier, Joshua. “‘They Swore Upon the Tombs Never to Make Peace with Us’: Algerian Jews and French Colonialism, 1845-1848.” In Algeria & France, 18002000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, edited by Patricia Lorcin, 101–116. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Schroeter, Daniel, “The Curse of the Saint.” Judaism 50:2, 178–187, 2001. ———. The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Seidel, Jonathan. “Possession and Exorcism in the Magical Texts of the Cairo Geniza.” In Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Matt Goldish, 73–98. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Sengers, Gerda. Women and Demons: Cultic Healing in Islamic Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Sienna, Noam. Old Patterns, New Skin: Jewish Henna Ceremonies and the Politics of Heritage. BA thesis, Brandeis University, 2011. ———. Neighbouring Imaginaries: Jews and Demons in the Maghreb. MA thesis, University of Toronto, 2015. Somer, Eli, and Meir Saadon. “Stambali: Dissociative Possession and Trance in a Tunisian Healing Dance.” Transcultural Psychiatry 37:4, 580–600, 2000. Spadola, Emilio. The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014. Stillman, Norman. “Saddiq and Marabout in Morocco.” In The Sepharadi and Oriental Jewish Heritage: Studies, edited by Issachar Ben-Ami, 485–500. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1982.

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Trumball, George. An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria 1870-1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Vassel, Eusèbe. La littérature populaire des israélites tunisiens: avec un essai ethnographique et archéologique sur leurs superstitions. Paris: E. Leroux, 1907. Versnel, H. S. “The Poetics of the Magic Charm: An Essay on the Power of Words.” In Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, edited by Mirecki, Paul Allan and Marvin W. Meyer, 105–158. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Voinot, Louis. Pèlerinages judéo-musulmans du Maroc. Paris : Larose, 1948. Westermarck, Edvard. “The Nature of the Arab Ginn, Illustrated by the Present Beliefs of the People of Morocco.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29:3/4, 252–269, 1899. Westermarck, Edvard. Ritual and Belief in Morocco (2 vols). London: Macmillan, 1926. Witulski, Christopher. The Gnawa Lions: Authenticity and Opportunity in Moroccan Ritual Music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Chapter 8

A Common Language Popular Music in Morocco Vanessa Paloma Elbaz

INTRODUCTION Morocco’s population has used music for generations to transmit unofficial and unwritten knowledge. It is the medium par excellence that has been mobilized to express the ideas of the masses or to shape desired intellectual trends historically and until today. This form of mediated communication cuts transversally through boundaries of gender, linguistic, and minority societal frontiers. The title of this chapter elicits many questions, among them, is Moroccan Jewish popular music a common language with Moroccan Muslims? Is there then, a sonic perception of commonality? What could be the difference between the popular music written and sung by a Jew and that by a Muslim after Independence in 1956, if any? This chapter will explore the manner in which Moroccan popular music, otherwise known as chaˤbi and the Jewish version which has been recently labeled chgouri, function as a common language between Muslims and Jews in contemporary Morocco. Focusing on the period after the Arab Spring and Morocco’s constitutional referendum, I will develop the manner in which music has been deployed for the cementing of commonality within diversity and the intrinsic belonging of Jews to the contemporary Moroccan state.1 My research on the musical repertoire of the remaining Jewish community of Morocco has found the contemporary political environment around the issues of cultural diversity in Morocco itself, to be extremely rich.2 Jewish Moroccan musical repertoires are varied, multilingual and highly porous; they embody a phenomenon which is diametrically opposed to nationalistic tropes of monolithic identities which might lack suppleness and movement. These repertoires tell a story that is not linear nor binary and which has a center of gravity which functions through music to ensure the continuity of the specificity of this 189

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minority while placing itself at the center of a tangible patriotic marocanité,3 as Moroccanness is called within the contemporary discourse, and all the while continuing their multi-layered identities. As previous studies of Maghrebi music have shown, music genre, social position, and expressive behavior are a common principle in the Maghreb and have social and political meaning in relation to one another.4 One can thus conclude that public sphere repertoires, which I name below as “external” are crucial in informing and influencing social and political meanings around Jews within the nation. CEMENTING A COMMON BUT DISTINCT IDENTITY Morocco’s national anthem finishes with the same words that are carved into mountainsides throughout Moroccan roads: Allah, Al-Watan, Al-Malik (God, the Nation, the King), denoting the tripartite pillar of belonging and allegiance in Morocco. This triple description of the foundations of the Moroccan nation first made an international musical hit in 1956 with Sami ElMaghribi’s 45 rpm Allah, Ouatani ou Soultani,5 placing the Jewish voice at the center of a crucial juncture in the declaration of allegiance to God, King, and Nation. This performative sonic allegiance during independence shows how Morocco’s Jews have multiple manners of performing and ensuring their intrinsic belonging to the nation, even while maintaining clear boundaries around religious practice and family. Their simultaneous belonging and externality has also facilitated the creativity that is described as “revolutionizing Moroccan music by fusing the rhythms of the gharnati qsida with Moroccan popular musical art, all without losing its original flavor.”6 The negotiation of context-specific multiplicity of identities is explained in the introduction to Simon Bronner’s volume Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations when he states in modern heterogenous societies, people make sense of their social environment by dividing it into various scenes and situations in the course of daily life. People therefore adjust their behavior accordingly to their ideas about ways to communicate in these various scenes and the symbols or inferences of the communication in them.7

The mechanism that Bronner describes as adjustment to context to communicate symbols of belonging are an important part of Moroccan life, Jewish and not. Jewish musicians navigate these public signs of marocanité as representation of their belonging to the group of the nation in addition to serving as the public face to the masses. A semiotic analysis of the manners and moments in which songs are used to establish belonging responds to a semiotic complex that elucidates “the socially situated, relationally understood sign, be it sung,

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spoken, written, performed or embodied.”8 In other words, it is not only the text of songs that merits analysis, but the signs of behavior and perception surrounding the song, including but not limited to the moment and context of its creation and performance, the performer, the perceived audience, the implied messages, and spoken and unspoken reactions. These semiotic signs demonstrate what Suzanne Cusick has explained as the acoustic as a force field of power . . . human subjectivity is produced through the interaction of sensory reception and sensory perceptible response . . . . Thus do we turn space into place, and place into intelligible, navigable worlds . . . we are interpolated in a symbolic order, into language and into social relations.9

This chapter demonstrates the multiple manners in which through the acoustic establishment of Moroccan Jewish belonging and participation, the reception of this sonic allegiance helps build the symbolic order which establishes the intrinsic relation of the Jew to the Moroccan nation, in a language of their commonality. In the examples presented in the last third of the chapter, the integrationist versus conflict model of Jewish musical engagement in the Maghreb10 is further complicated by simultaneous overlapping of belonging, tension, celebration, rejection, and appropriation. The socio-pragmatics interpretive model developed by Joseph Chetrit for the Moroccan Jewish context is key when analyzing the use of song. It helps define the socio-cultural “habituses,” that insufflate their ideological and mythical values, and the symbols of their behavioral routines and creation into lexical items and texts, as well as the internal and external parameters, taking into consideration the diverse languages and diverse “lects,” sociolects, polylects, and dialects, performed by the language users.11

During the early years of King Hassan II’s reign, a crisis around Jewish belonging came to the fore: the Minister of Islamic affairs, Allal el Fassi made public declarations to the press on the non-equal citizen status of Morocco’s Jews, saying that they were dhimmis before the Protectorate and should and would remain as such, in the post-colonial state. This was occurring during a campaign of kidnapping and forced conversion of young Jewish adolescents which was supported by Istiqlal12 and published in their newspaper Al-Alam.13 It seems that Al Fassi took an opportunity to test the young king’s views regarding a diverse Morocco. At a moment of pan-Arabist expansion, Al Fassi’s declaration stated that Moroccans could only be Muslim: “He who says Moroccan, says Muslim. Moroccan nationality was created by the French Protectorate. All Moroccans are Muslim: the ‘Moroccan’ Jew is only a dhimmi.”14

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The next month’s issue of the Voix des Communautés, the monthly newspaper of the Jewish Community Council which was edited by Victor Malka, had a respectfully scathing response on its first page for the Minister with statements assuring the full Moroccanness of the Jews from two sovereigns, King Mohammed V and his son Hassan II, still a prince when the archival statement they printed was made. Their words were in capital letters and boldly presented.15 In March 1963, the controversy was still unresolved, and the Voix des Communautés published again on the front page, a recent declaration of King Hassan II (see figure 8.1) stating the complete equality of Moroccan Jewish

Figure 8.1  Mohammed V’s declaration was “Nos sujets Israélites ont toujours joui, en tant que citoyens Marocains, de leurs droits et ont en tout temps, exercé librement leur culte.” Hassan II’s was “Je ne veux pas entendre parler de Musulmans et de Juifs mais uniquement des Marocains.” La Voix des Communautés (Septembre 1962, No. 17).

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citizens to their Muslim counterparts.16 This issue became so tense that it caused the folding of the newspaper and the exile of Victor Malka for many years.17 Since then the Jewish Community has not had its own newspaper. This chapter in Morocco’s history around the negotiation of complete official belonging of the Jews to Morocco must be understood through the semiotic impact created for a religious minority by a struggle of this sort during the pan-Arabist movement. Additionally, it was soon after independence and in the early years of the young monarch’s reign. This underlines the impact bearing messages of belonging that were being performed in common popular culture spaces, context, and media, such as cabarets, radio, television, and films. These have then developed in ever more spaces reaching into private spheres through today’s internet and social media. MAROCANITÉ AND SONG Historically, marocanité was explicitly demonstrated through symbolically charged nationalistic songs or the renaming of a musician with the epithet Maghribi, creating a boundedness between male Jewish singer and Moroccan patriot as in this multiplicity of examples of its usage: Ana el Maghribi18 (I am Moroccan) crooned the octogenarian Haim Botbol, otherwise known as Morocco’s Jewish Frank Sinatra on the CD included in a special magazine edition of VH in November 2013, “the Moroccan men’s magazine.” Maxime Karoutchi, the currently popular Jewish music star, sings the El Massira el Khadra at practically every concert and television appearance. El Massira el Khadra, which means the Green March, is a song that celebrates Morocco’s march in 1975 of 350,000 people into the Western Sahara to retake control from Spain and re-establish Morocco’s “territorial integrity”19 from the Strait of Gibraltar to Mauritania. Similarly, in the 1950s, Sami El Maghribi chose to record under the name Sami the Moroccan instead of his given name Samuel Amzallag, at the behest of a friend, establishing him, a Moroccan Jewish cantor and popular singer, as “the first patriot”20 in the words of singer Maxime Karoutchi. In the 1960s and 1970s, other singers such as Felix El Maghribi, also known as le petit Felix (d. 2008) and Victor El Maghribi (le petit Victor) capitalized on this epithet around Sami’s unquestioned Moroccanness, in an effort to legitimize their own Moroccanness for Muslim-majority Moroccan audiences, especially during moments of political tension with Israel. However, Felix El Maghribi’s son, Victor Wizman, currently lives and performs in Tel Aviv. He continues the family’s tradition of performing the Moroccan repertoire, but not in Morocco.21

Morocco’s Jewish public musicians are often ready to confirm their loyalty to their inherent Moroccanness, their belonging to the post-independence

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state and their unquestionable patriotism. When Moroccan Jews compose and sing patriotic songs, it responds not just to their condition as a Jew, or a member of a religious minority, but to a national cultural form of musical expression to denote love, commitment and regard for the king and the nation as a whole, indexing the last two elements from the national anthem’s final proclamation of allegiance. This same nationalistic impulse appears in the 2016 film L’orchestre des aveugles, The Blind Orchestra by Mohamed Mouftakir, with a sequence around the composition and aborted recording of a patriotic song during the 1960s, in the early years of King Hassan II’s reign. The composition is a joint work by two of the movie’s main characters: a police commissioner and his associate, an illiterate violinist who leads an orchestra accustomed to playing ˤaïta22 at weddings and circumcisions. The song was to be dedicated to the sovereign as a show of appreciation. In this case, there are no Jews in the plot, but the desire to record a patriotic hit is presented as an appropriate expression of allegiance to the monarchy, a common language among all Moroccans. Just as liturgical poems such as kinot23 on historic moments of Jewish life form part of the liturgy for Tishˤa B’Av,24 Jewish singers have written songs to commemorate tragic and difficult moments of the Moroccan nation. The Qsida has been used by Jewish authors since the mid-nineteenth century to commemorate various difficult or humorous moments of local histories.25 The popular Jewish singer Albert Suissa sang Qasidat Agadir to commemorate and lament the devastating earthquake in Agadir on February 29, 1960 that destroyed the city and killed close to 12,000 of its residents.26 Most recently, on April 12, 2020 Mike Chriqui, a young singer based in Casablanca (b. 1985), uploaded a patriotic song to YouTube, not in qsida form, but composed with Cipriano Oloi, a Romanian pianist who lives in Casablanca. The song, Le Maroc et ses héros, in French, celebrates Morocco and its heroes at the height of the Moroccan Jewish community’s COVID-19 crisis.27 At its heart is an image of Chriqui with the Moroccan flag superposed over him singing. In one month, the video had accumulated 19, 941 views on YouTube. At a virtual Ramadan break-fast ftour of three religions28 on May 11, 2020, Mike Chriqui’s video and song were played toward the end of the three-hour gathering, serving as a climactic moment when Moroccan Jews and Muslims were in lockdown, but still celebrating their shared commonalities. This Ftour pluriel which is a yearly tradition of the association Marocains pluriels often finishes with the El Massira el Khadra song rallying around the Sahara. In 2020, because of the crisis around Covid-19, the rallying patriotic song was replaced by this new composition by Mike Chriqui and Cipriano Oloi. I asked Chriqui if he had composed a version in darija and he answered that he had not yet but would start working on it. His answer hints that his experience

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of nationalism remains limited within the elite urban milieu of Casablanca, contrary to that of older Jewish singers. One week later he sent me the link to his new version in darija, accessible only through his Facebook account.29 JEWS IN THE BLED The popular history magazine, Zamane reiterated the integrality of Jews to Morocco’s land with their May 2013 issue called Maroc: Terre Juive, Morocco: Jewish Land.30 Jewish Moroccans today stress their belonging to the bled and the national narratives of territoriality through language and most dramatically, through music. This is one of the convincing ways of establishing their commonality within post-Independence Morocco. Lawrence Rosen aptly describes Moroccan society when he writes that, ‟Territory is deeply intertwined with social identity, bled is not just physical territory, however regionalized, but a terrain of interaction, a domain of complex and crosscutting social relationships.”31

The concept of bled (land) is deeply rooted in Moroccan society. Anyone from the bled is part family and requires respect and protection. Anyone who is foreign, barrani, can be tricked or taken advantage of, without any major moral consequence,32 as they are not part of the inner sanctum. As hinted at above, Jews have occupied a complex and often contradictory position in relation to this concept of rootedness—while ‟of the land,” they are often demarcated as barrani because they may have additional allegiances to other lands (Israel, France, Canada, and Spain being the most common). By the 1930s, Moroccan Jews ‟forced questions about how the boundaries of the national community should be drawn.”33 In 1947, with the passing of the United Nations General Assembly’s Resolution establishing the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, some Moroccan nationalists perceived Moroccan Jews as Zionists first and Moroccans second.34 Moroccan independence in 1956, the government has been campaigning to establish the concept of a national belonging for all Moroccans, not just one that is connected to individual cities and local communities. Until then, most Moroccans’ affiliations were limited to their family, city, and at most, region. The Moroccan Jewish writer Carlos de Nesry published his book Les Israélites marocains à l’heure du choix in 1958, when Moroccan Jews were confronted with the choice to stay and contribute to the building of the post-independence nation or leave. He succinctly stated the question at the heart of many Jews “We speak a lot now about patriotism. Is it again a patriotism ‘of the moment’? A nation is a soul, as Renan said. Do Moroccan Jews have the Moroccan soul?”35

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It is telling that precisely during this period Sami El Maghribi was declaring his ‟Moroccan soul” and singing Allah Ouatani oua Soultani, God, my Nation, my sultan for Mohammed V and his son Crown Prince Hassan and their guests at the Palace, teaching it to the Guard and Royal Army to play in marches and selling the record throughout Morocco, France, and Algeria to great success.36 However, only a year after De Nesry’s book stated the question of choice, El Maghribi and his family chose to emigrate. He returned eight years later for a concert tour in 1967 and his first answer to a journalist upon arrival was, of course that he was “first of all, a Moroccan.”37 Meanwhile Salim Halali, the Algerian singer who rose to Moroccan fame exhorted his listeners to return to their homeland in the song Arjaˤ Le-bladek in the 1960s. However, his text is unclear, implying that he is singing as a Muslim himself to Moroccan Muslims, whereas the Muslim emigration had not yet begun in earnest, and he was Jewish, creating confusion about his own positioning.38 A recent example of this public-facing marocanité is that of Coco Diams, a businessman turned musical public symbol who presents his urban Moroccanness in a popular music video medley produced in 2018.39 His video, produced by the Moroccan Jewish director, Reine Danan, has garnered 105,869 views on YouTube less than two years after its launch. In this video, Coco performs from his apartment on the seafront of Casablanca singing Tetuani composer Abdessadek Chekara’s popular song Ya Ḥbib elQalb, while looking out toward the Hassan II mosque. The next scene shows him relaxing in the Saharan Tuareg traditional clothing, while being served Moroccan tea and dates. The superimposition of these elements: a popular song with the iconography of Moroccan Islam and Saharan belonging demonstrate the use of a popular music video to establish the commonality and shared language that Jews and Muslims have in contemporary Morocco. These decisions demonstrate just the sonic and aesthetic similarities of Jews and Muslims, but the political and socio-religious understanding and intimacy that Jews have within Moroccan society. The territorial integrity of Morocco, with the inclusion of the Sahara in the internationally recognized national territory, is one of the most important and sensitive issues in Moroccan politics. The Jewish community has been very vocal in their complete support of Morocco’s Saharan policy through international lobbying and demonstrations of national solidarity throughout both the country and internationally. Coco Diam’s symbolic show of Saharan solidarity is an implied demonstration of this solidarity with the general Moroccan population from within the Jewish community. The iconography of both Sahara and Islam are seen once again together with popular music for a younger, urban generation. Malca is a Paris-based electro singer who grew up in Casablanca and whose compositions and music videos show his rootedness in urban contemporary Casablanca.40 Malca’s

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music is aimed at an international audience, with English language lyrics and electronic loops, but the same tropes of urban Casablanca’s iconic architecture and the Sahara appear within the cuts, visual filters, and computer beats. Malca is positioning himself as an icon for urban Maghrebi youth, Arab or Jewish. Most younger Muslim Moroccans do not come into contact with the remaining Jewish community, and this makes many Jews feel out of touch with the national social and political dynamics. The younger generation has only seen Jews on television, as Israeli soldiers within the context of the Middle East conflict.41 Zamane’s Maroc Terre Juive issue’s introductory paragraph summarizes it thus: For the young generations of Moroccans, the image of the Jew is reduced to that of the arrogant, unjust and brutal Israeli soldier. And however, during centuries things were different. For Moroccan Muslims, the Jew was not a stranger, a caricature or a ghost. He was a neighbor, a friend, a jeweler, Sultan’s trader, dweller of the mellaḥ. Moroccan Jews had a face and a physical presence.42

Today’s Jews are often represented in the empty spaces that they once inhabited. Places like mellaḥs, empty synagogues, or cemeteries throughout the country resound in the silence of previously heard Jewish languages and music. This spatial vacuum is only recently being filled in sonically, thus giving a sonic embodiment to the absence that the departure created within the lived experience of most Moroccans. Rosen states that, ‟a fog of unremembrance had become to cloud any specific way of recalling the Jews. They have begun a phantom memory, the felt presence of an absent limb.”43 Many Muslim and Jewish Moroccans have heard their family’s stories of the Jewish neighbors or business partners who left. They try to piece together the stories of this shared life between Muslims and Jews in a Morocco which seems to appear more open, more tolerant, and more inclusive than the one which decades of pan-Arabism has created. The sonic embodiment has been driven by the Moroccan makhzen’s44 support and stimulation of public discourse about Morocco’s Jews through festivals, film, television, and the popular press. In this climate, one of the principal ways in which this layered identity is methodically integrated into Moroccans’ experience of their full marocanité is through the representations of music as a tool for cultural diversity. Since 2007, I have observed the exponential growth of the public presence of Jewish Moroccan music on a national level. After the historic declaration of diversity within the preamble of the 2011 Constitution, many government-sponsored festivals began including Jewish music as one of the obligatory elements in musical performances of the variety of national

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music. By 2013, not only government-supported events and spaces were actively programming concerts of Jewish music, but private individuals and associations began a trend of including Judeo-Moroccan repertoire and performers. Musical television reviews have run specials on Judeo-Moroccan music including both Jewish and Muslim singers that sing popular Jewish musical repertoires. A new term has been coined for this music in the last decade: chgouri. Surprisingly, even though older performers of this repertoire such as Haim Botbol say they never heard the term chgouri until recently, it has begun to appear in classificatory descriptions of the urban-rural split of Morocco’s popular chaˤbi music.45 It remains to be determined if the term appeared as a consequence of the Constitutional referendum of 2011 and the legal placing of Jewish secular identity within Moroccan national identity. THE JEWS, THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM, AND THE DIVERSE NATION The establishment of a Moroccan national identity, which brought all Moroccans under one banner, went through various stages. The relationship of Morocco’s Jews to the national identity and its construction has been written about most recently from historic and political angles.46 The debate has varying perspectives: Daniel Schroeter states that neither Jews nor Muslims felt that the Jews belonged completely to the new nation state in postindependence Morocco.47 Alma Heckman’s work shows that for political inclusion within the nationalist system, Jewish Moroccans found themselves pushed almost completely into the more radical fringes and out of the central space of political debate, clinging to a dream of a Morocco that does not exist in the manner they would hope.48 Whereas Christopher Silver posits that notwithstanding the founding of the state of Israel, Moroccan independence, and massive Jewish emigration, a Moroccan musical nationalist had a moment of intrinsic belonging during the formative years of Moroccan nationalism.49 This complexity of realities demonstrates that the inclusion of Moroccan Jews in the post-colonial national narrative was bumpy and multi-faceted. Jewish musicians played an important part in crossing the socio-political boundaries put in place by international politics such as Zionism and panArabism. However, the Jewish soundscape goes almost completely silent with the emigration of many of the most famous performers. It is only after the ratification of the new constitution that there is an unabashed national comeback of Jewish sonic presence. It is as if the nationalistic inclusion from the 1950s could only be upheld in contemporary Morocco by legally ratifying diversity within the Moroccan fabric after the Arab spring revolutions throughout the Maghreb and Middle East. In the 2011 constitution, the

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diverse elements forming Moroccan identity-composition are thus specifically named and ratified plunging Morocco into a new self-definition of what and how to construct marocanité. The constitutional referendum was voted with an overwhelmingly positive yes vote on July 1, 2011. This overwhelming yes was not surprising because it had been supported and even urged by the national news media and was omnipresent with banners throughout cities and towns urging Moroccans for its support. But it was nevertheless revolutionary, and its consequences have rippled into many levels of public and private life. On the official website of the House of Representatives, an excerpt from the constitution is put on display in English, establishing the importance of the plurality of Morocco as well as its priority toward human rights, obviously as a window for foreign readers. The Jewish Museum of Casablanca placed a marble plaque at its entrance in 2013 in Arabic, English, and French, with the text inscribing Moroccan Judaism into the integral influences on national identity. Interestingly, the English text is the one chosen to be exactly at eye-level. This constitutional text is repeatedly evoked at official events relating to Jewish contributions to Moroccan culture, as well as at musical events and in television programs where multiple Moroccan musics are presented as part of the country’s rich heritage. It is the following core which constitutes the central piece: the key words that play over and over in Jewish circles are: territorial integrity (relating to the Western Sahara); Hebraic influences; and values of openness, moderation, and tolerance. The constitutional text reads as follows: (I italicized the key words which reiterate the governmental tropes that the Jewish community has reacted to positively):50 The Kingdom of Morocco is a sovereign Muslim State that is attached to its national unity and its territorial integrity and committed to preserve in its fullness and diversity its national identity, one and indivisible. Its unity is forged by the convergence of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean influences. The preeminence accorded to the Muslim religion in the national reference goes hand in hand with the attachment of the Moroccan people to the values of openness, moderation, tolerance, dialogue and mutual understanding between all the human cultures and civilizations.51

Of the many elements that this constitution addressed I want to focus most specifically on its articulation of what constitutes Morocco’s pluralistic identity. Even further, I mean to examine what the inclusion of “Hebraic” as one of the rubrics designating Moroccan identity has meant both for Moroccan Jews as well as for the national discourse around Morocco’s historical

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complexity and the reiteration of its traditional diversity. What is probably most dramatic is that one of the main vectors for this expression by both Jews and Muslims from Morocco in the last five years is its performance through music in various manifestations throughout the country for both official and non-official occasions. In its introduction, the Constitution establishes what and how Moroccan national unity is forged: National unity is forged through its Arabo-Islamic, Amazigh and Saharo-Hassani components and is nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean affluents. Principally defined with three pillars (Arabo-Islamic = Muslim; Amazigh and SaharoHassani = Saharaoui) Moroccan national identity established the Muslim, Amazigh and Saharan “ownership” of general and basic “Moroccanness” or as it’s called in French “la Marocanité.” It is in the specification of the nuances of this three-pillared general national identity that my analysis resides: Hebraic is third in a list of four elements (African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean) which are “affluents” and which are assumed to have come to Morocco through migration or through some movement which emanates externally and settled in Morocco in the near (Andalusian) or distant (African) past. Interestingly though, time and again the Jewish presence is reiterated as being one of the most ancient in Morocco, having arrived before Islam, as much as 2,500 years ago.52 Stated in the Constitution as a Hebraic affluent, not only was the word Jewish not chosen, but Jews are referred to by a reference to the Hebrew language and not the previous historically used “Israelite” nomenclature, which was established during the Protectorate and which is still used to denote Jewish communal organizations: Conseil des Communautés Israélites du Maroc and Communauté Israélite de Casablanca, two of the most common usages from the twentieth century. This choice of wording plunges us into the heart of one of the inherently tense situations of Jews living in a Muslim country in a post-1948 world. How does a proud Moroccan pluralistic identity own its Jewish components or “affluents”? Not by stating Juif or Yahoud as part of its intrinsic affluents—both of those words are charged with historically negative connotations having a history of being used as insults until the mid-to-late twentieth century.53 Not by saying Israélite: this evokes the colonial name for the Jewish community as well as the unwelcome presence of the wars between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East into the national discourse where it has no binding effects to forge national unity. The least controversial nomenclature becomes then “Hebraic” or “Hebraïque” which places an inordinate focus on the Hebrew language, but consequently strips Jews of a secular identity. In Morocco, Hebrew is almost exclusively the language of the liturgy and religious study. Jewish Moroccans have sung, written and lived in

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Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Amazigh, Haketía (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish), French, and Spanish. Most Jewish women do not speak or read Hebrew, and many Jewish men know Hebrew well enough for the uttering of prayers and proverbial formulas, but not for any significant conversational exchange and even less for the expression of identity. Thus, Jewish and Muslim Moroccans were plunged into a “defining” of what “Hebraic” means as part of Moroccan identity. This definition has taken a secular and cultural position, establishing what defines Moroccan Jewishness and what is specifically Moroccan about this Jewishness. It is a subtle dance of definition between culture, identity, and religion within the larger project of defining an enlarged and inclusive national identity. In the defining of what a Moroccan Jew or a Jewish Moroccan is, the question of language has been paramount. Jews who speak Darija, Moroccan Arabic, are considered today to be there “most” Moroccan of all. The few Jews that are still living in Morocco who speak Judeo-Berber are considered to be the remnants of a time past, when the Jews and the Muslims were almost indistinguishable from each other, and who are most often called to memory in a nostalgic manner through photographs of the early twentieth century or in the evoking of the empty Jewish spaces in Amazigh communities such as in Kamal Hachkar’s film from 2013 Les Echos du Mellaḥ or the black and white photographs of Elias Harrus from the 1950s. The “least” Moroccan of the languages is generally perceived to be Haketía, even though it is a language heavy with Moroccan Arabic on a base of Medieval Spanish, with elements of Hebrew. However, most of the contemporary Moroccan Jewish community living in Morocco today communicates mostly in French, while remaining connected to Darija for the outside world and Hebrew only for synagogue, home rituals, and for those who do speak it, the occasional Israeli visitor. LAYERS OF REPERTOIRE LEVELS It is within this context of integral diversity within the fabric of Moroccan society, that Jewish music interacts on the public stage. However, the music of Morocco’s Jews has layers of repertoires and popular Moroccan music occupies one of its many layers. Having analyzed the contemporary state of repertoire and its confirmed cosmopolitanism, I was interested in understanding if this cultural layering was a mere product of modernity and the ruptures and migrations of the recent past? Or has this been the manner in which Moroccan Jews have and continue to negotiate their identity transmission in an inclusive manner which absorbs elements of the surrounding cultures while protecting the boundaries of their group?

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The graph in figure 8.2 explains the onion-like layers of Moroccan Jewish musical repertoires, which are performed at specific moments and contexts of their lives in Morocco today.

Figure 8.2  Jewish-Moroccan Musical Interactions. Created by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz.

1. Core level—Intra community and feminine (wedding songs) + Paraliturgical songs and satirical and historical songs 2. First/Second frontier—General Jewish repertoire (liturgy) 3. Second/First frontier—Moroccan popular repertoire (melhoun, ˤaïta, chaˤbi, gharnati, hip hop, etc.) 4. Third frontier—Repertoire of cultures of contact (Edith Piaf, Sarita Montiel, Flamenco, Billy Hallyday,54 Julio Iglesias) 5. Fourth frontier—Miscellaneous repertoires (Latin, Israeli, American, British)

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The musical repertoire of Moroccan Jews reflects the full spectrum of simultaneous cultural and linguistic affiliations which is transnational and highly mobile. It is in their temporal and contextual use which indicates the manner in which they use these varied repertoires to negotiate their belonging to a virtually impermeable internal hermetic local community, the larger Moroccan Jewish community, the general Jewish world, the Moroccan national identity, an affiliation with Spanish and French culture, and the general de-territorialized world. To establish discrete spaces of musical belonging, I have named these repertoires “external” and “internal.” However, it is useful to bear in mind that the boundaries between these categories are blurry, and often can be highly mutable. Despite these caveats, I have found time and again that Moroccan Jews classify their musical repertoires along lines of belonging and exteriorization. These bands of sonic-belonging become a form of constructing the space of Jewishness and its gradations within Moroccan society through sound, song, and context. “External” repertoires are those which are perceived to “belong” to the surrounding cultures. “Internal” repertoires are those which have been appropriated as “belonging” to the Jewish community itself. However, the lines between the two get blurred in cases when the “external repertoire” shifts the original “external” message to an “internal” Jewish function, only understood by the inside group. It is this sort of oscillation between internal and external messages and repertoires that aids Moroccan Jews in the cementing of their cultural specificity and identity. Through the oscillation from “external” repertoires into internal moments of intimacy and “internal” repertoires to public and semi-public moments of life cycle rituals, contemporary Moroccan Jews seamlessly navigate through their multiplicity of communities and affiliations, while protecting their very own cultural specificity. They layer on every new language and identity, integrating its repertoire in some manner, while remaining attached to the “internal” songs that, for them, denote their historical, linguistic and geographical particularities. This chapter focuses on the third level of this graph, that of a vocal national affiliation which is celebrated both in the public sphere and during semi-public moments of communal celebration such as pilgrimages and bar mitzvahs. SONIC PRESENCE AS JEWISH MUSICAL COMMONALITY The negotiation around who is a Moroccan Jew and what constitutes a Moroccan plural identity has been increasingly performed in concerts throughout the country in both intimate and grand festival settings between

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2013 and 2020. In February 2013 Simon Levy’s life’s project was launched posthumously, the opening of the synagogue Slat El Fassiyin in the mellah of Fez. It was a highly symbolic moment which I believe launched the current moment of Jewish cultural flourishing. The opening ceremony included members of the Moroccan government, European Parliament, and diplomatic corps, as well as members of the cultural and academic elites of Morocco. The highlight of the ceremony included a speech by King Mohammed VI, delivered by the Islamist PJD party Head of Government, Abdelilah Benkirane, which was broadcast live on the national airwaves. The King’s words, through an Islamist party leader’s voice, paved the way for the array of cultural events celebrating, invoking, probing, and studying Jewish aspects in Moroccan culture. Following is a selection of the many events that occurred in festivals, cultural centers, privately produced concerts, and on television between 2013 and 2020: In December 2013, the Villa des Arts in Rabat,55 presented a soirée of chgouri music performed by an Andalusian music ensemble headed by Abdeslam Sefiani.56 The style of music is explained in the website as JudeoMoroccan music which is based on traditional Arabo-Andalusian style with local rhythms incorporated and made famous by El Maghribi, Zohra El Fassia, Botbol, and others. In 2014, the chaˤbi legend Haim Botbol gave a concert in Casablanca at the Megarama 800-seat theater to a half-empty hall. Even though he is a national icon who is recognized wherever he goes within Morocco, the audience did not come out en masse. Some weeks later the magazine Zamane dedicated an article to Judeo-Moroccan popular music saying that it is “in rare occasions that fans of Jewish chaabi music can attend a concert. They are very often absent from cultural agendas” (Zamane, April 11, 2014).57 However in early 2014, interestingly enough, when it was available, the audience did not always react. In June 2014, the Sacred Music Festival in Fez presented for the first time in its largest stage of Bab Makina, with close to 5,000 people in attendance, a concert of Judeo-Moroccan music. Soloists Lior Elmaliah (an Israeli of Moroccan background) and Françoise Atlan (French singer of Algerian and Moroccan background) were singing with Briouel’s orchestra from Fez performing in Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic. In this case, by the end of the concert half of the audience seats were empty as people were walking in and out during the performance. Some months after this, on the occasion of the Moroccan exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Chorale Kinor David, founded in 2008 by a small group of Moroccan Jews was invited to perform, as a Jewish representation of Morocco, accompanied by the same orchestra, that of Mohammed Briouel from Fez. Kinor David Maroc was formed by a

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group of paytanim58 and has been led by Michel Abitan from 2007 to 2020, with a three-year hiatus between 2017 and 2020. They perform Andalusian repertoire as well as Gharnati and popular Judeo-Moroccan compositions (Qsidas, Melhoun, and Chgouri). The singers of Kinor David Maroc as well as their board members were honored to be representing Morocco’s plurality through music. However, the reality of the performance of a Jewish group in a European Arab cultural space demonstrated that a great distance still existed between the ideal representation of seamless plurality and the lived experience of performing with a Jewish group on a Saturday night in Paris. The performance was difficult musically because, occurring just hours after the end of the sabbath, no member of the Jewish choir was able to participate in the sound check that afternoon and thus the microphones and stage monitors were not correctly balanced, having only been balanced for the instruments, thus creating a sort of musical chaos on stage during the performance. Michel Abitan, the leader of the choir wore a traditional Moroccan djellaba in the colors of the Moroccan flag and the group presented a coherent image of patriotic Moroccans who were Jewish and erudite in Andalusian music: al-ˀAla. However, there was a flattening of the particularities of Jewish performance of this repertoire. The Hebrew textual portions of the repertoire were kept to a minimum and the traditional Jewish melodic inflections were eliminated from the performance. After the concert both Muslim and Jewish audience members commented to me on how unsatisfactory the performance had been, but that visually it was beautiful. During the spring of 2015, a new association of Andalusian music lovers was formed called Diapason. Some singers from Kinor David Maroc and some Moroccan Muslims who had been meeting to sing Andalusian music formed an association together in the interest of sharing the music in a diverse group. One of their opening concerts took place in June 2015 at the Studio des Arts Vivants in Casablanca. Both Coco Diams and Daniel Afriat who were soloists from Kinor David Maroc, were featured singing in both Hebrew and Arabic. In October 2015, those same singers were joined by Daniel’s older brother, Jo Afriat, to perform as the featured Jewish singers at the Festival des Andalousies Atlantiques in Essaouira, presided over by André Azoulay, the counselor to the king of Morocco. For the first time non-professional singers were being featured in the press and media as authentic representatives of the Judeo-Moroccan musical tradition from Morocco in Morocco. The repertoire they sang was all in Judeo-Arabic and was mostly a chgouri repertoire, considered traditionally as popular Moroccan Jewish music. Kinor David Maroc prepared a grand soirée at the Hyatt hotel in Casablanca, where, in collaboration with Dar al-ˀAla and the Andalusian orchestra of Tetuan, directed by M. Amine Akrami plus guest soloists, they presented an evening of “duos.” The concept was that there would be a Muslim and a

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Jewish singer singing the duos of popular music. It was a sold-out affair with over 500 people in attendance for the concert and dinner. Rehearsals had taken place over the course of three months, mostly in synagogue halls (not in the sanctuary)59 and the choir from Dar al-ˀAla was primarily formed by young women, whereas Kinor David is mostly older men. This public performance of Moroccan Jewish sound has also been used for the showcasing of Moroccan diversity as in the environmental COP22 meetings in November of 2016 in Marrakesh. This event constituted a moment of great national pride. The Moroccan Parliament organized a private gathering which included a concert that showcased the diversity within Moroccan music. The performance of Moroccaness in front of parliamentary leaders from the world stage included the five elements that often present Moroccan diversity to national and international audiences: Andalusian music, Amazigh music, Hassani music, Gnawa, and Haketía. In April and May 2017, the Ḥafla concert series presented performances which included gharnati and chgouri performances, climaxing at the end of the last concert in a series when the Muslim singer Omar Chahid sang a song on a Moroccan Jewish saint Rebi Itzhak Abehsera in Judeo-Arabic. Haim Botbol stood next to him wearing a kippah (skull cap), playing the bendir and joining in the song to the Tsaddik (the saint) while Omar reiterated the praises to the Moroccan rabbi. An older Jewish woman sitting next to me asked me if the younger singer was Jewish. When I answered that he was not, she asked: “Why is he singing the song to the Tsaddik then?” It seemed impossible that a Muslim would sing a song to a Moroccan Jewish rabbi, thus crossing into the boundary of inner repertoire which had not been breached until recently. These last examples show a further development of the musical exchange between Muslim and Jewish Moroccans. The boundary of religion which until very recently was absolutely unpassable has become another place of musical convergence. Ten years ago, a Muslim Moroccan would probably not have sung a song about a Moroccan Jewish rabbi saint on a public stage as an expression of his pride in being Moroccan, just as many Moroccan Jews would not have sung the phrase Allahu Akbar, considering it an exclusively Muslim religious statement. Since it is the final text in the song El Massira el Khadra, commemorating the march into the Sahara, it is the song with which many of these concerts finish, and the Jewish singers proclaim their patriotism by singing it on public stages as well as in private Jewish communal celebration. In 2018 and 2019, Kinor David Maroc performed ˀAla and chgouri for an after-hours evening musical celebration of Ramadan organized by one of the promoters of Dar al-ˀAla, the foremost Andalusian music association in Casablanca, Mounir Sefrioui. On both evenings classical Andalusian nuba was performed, followed by a selection of popular Judeo-Moroccan music.

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One telling moment occurred when Jo Afriat sang Tlata Ṣḥab, the melhoun qsida about three friends who complain about their married life, garnering roaring laughter from the mostly Muslim audience, as the generally hermetically impenetrable unity of the Jewish couple was exposed as fractured in the same manner that it might be for the Muslim men. The final concert of the Andalousies Atlantiques festival in Essaouira in 2018 was performed by Raymonde El Bidaouia and Hajja El Hamdaouia, two larger-than-life Moroccan divas of chaˤbi popular music singing, to a packed standing room only crowd of more than 4,000. These strong, older feminine figures singing on the same stage remains an emotionally charged moment that is revisited on the official YouTube channel of the Festival, exceeding one million views.60 In January 2020, a television program on the Al Aoula television station was dedicated completely to chgouri repertoire. It featured both Jewish and Muslim performers: Haim Botbol, Maxime Karoutchi, Suzanne Harrosh, Sanaa Jabrane, Ghita Berrak, Dalila Maksoub, and others. Al Aoula is a completely Arabic-language channel, thus the audience that their programming is aimed toward is the general non-elite population. Some performers’ perception of the appropriateness of the text for their intended audience have been found to vary significantly from the Jewish originals, often omitting mention of liquor consumption and overt sexuality or the complex musical ornamentation in the mawwal.61 This entangles the perception of Jewish culture with the view of Jews as sources of debauchery in conservative Muslim circles.62 Judeo-Arabic, Haketía, and Hebrew language Moroccan music are increasingly presented as a part of general Moroccan culture and history. However, Judeo-Berber music is glaringly absent from this public demonstration of pluralistic identities through music. One of the main reasons for this could be that most of the Jewish Amazigh population no longer lives in Morocco. Many Judeo-Amazigh songs were sung by women and Amazigh Jewish women singers are usually older and religiously observant, precluding them from performing on stage. However, the fact that Judeo-Spanish, which is generally a women’s sung tradition has consistently been presented together with Andalusian and chgouri repertoires (both in Judeo-Arabic and male repertoires) in the representation of Judeo-Moroccan music can imply that the principal performance of Judaism through music corroborates the cultural hegemony of the Arabo-Andalous tradition in Morocco. Judeo-Spanish music is assimilated to the co-existence and convivencia inherent to al-Andalus, a moment of Muslim political, intellectual, and cultural power as well as diversity of religions within the population. This sonic representation of Moroccan Jews maintains Arabo-Andalusian cultural and political hierarchy within the politics of national diversity. However, as Hisham Aidi points out, even some cultural elites frown upon the celebration of popular Jewish musicians such

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as Salim Halali who “is still a pop singer, not to be compared to giants like Abdelkrim Rais, who memorized and transmitted dozens of medieval nuba”63 and would like the revival of Moroccan Jewish music to concentrate on figures such as Sami El Maghribi or Lili Labassi. It remains to be seen what direction this musical commentary on the national identity will take in the years to follow, but it appears to me that a blurring of boundaries has commenced around certain cultural religious texts in songs and that will possibly allow for further collaboration in religiously charged moments and spaces. The consistent and accelerated pace of Moroccan Jewish presence in public musical life has consistently brought forth what the 2011 constitution stated: National unity is forged through its Arabo-Islamic, Amazigh, and Saharo-Hassani components and is nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean affluents. CONCLUSION Daniel Schroeter’s statement that ‟scholarship has all but ignored new patterns of co-existence, modern developments that enabled new encounters and a common ground to develop between Jews and Muslims in the period before the mass exodus that began in the late 1940s”64 has been addressed with this chapter. The ‟social glue” of music65 operates between these populations that are disconnected either by social or religious laws. This ‟glue” that creates the common language between Muslim and Jewish Moroccans demonstrates alternate patterns of co-existence, outside the marketplace and the legal political realm, the usual areas of scholarly focus. Using traditional, popular, and contemporary music, audiences are presented with a variety of musical situations in which Muslim and Jewish performers and audiences interact with music as the recurrent connecting element between them. However, it is not so much the sound of this music that creates the connection as the very embodiment of music, its quasi-corporeality: the songs themselves, the tangibility of the spaces and experiences created while performing, the embodiment of the shared sonic reality of the semiotic expression of marocanité, Moroccanness, through music. Music thus represents vitality, health, happiness, and the non-fractured state of Moroccan national unity. This musically embodied national unity is what drives the supra-narrative of Jewish commonality within contemporary Morocco. It is the entity of music itself that lives in the spaces and moments inhabited by Jews in Morocco. This very entity continues to exist even after the quasi-disappearance of the Moroccan Jewish community—the phantom limb. The new national reality of institutional pluralism and post-constitutional reform allows not only Jews living in Morocco, but also those who emigrated

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to participate in renewal of the public sonic celebration of intrinsic belonging, repairing years of silence within the acoustic public sphere within Morocco.

NOTES 1. This chapter was written while Research Associate of the European Research Council’s funded project: Past and Present Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar (MESG_758221) based at the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. It contains elements from papers presented at both a June 2017 conference at INALCO, Sorbonne Paris Cité Evolutions ou révolutions? Musiques du Moyen-Orient et du Sud de la Méditerranée à l’époque contemporaine – les traditions et les nouvelles tendances, and the American Sephardi Federation’s June 2019 conference at the Center for Jewish History Uncommon Commonalities: Jews and Muslims of Morocco. 2. See Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma, "Judeo-Spanish in Morocco: language, identity, separation or integration?," in La Bienvenue et l'adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe au XXe siècle), ed. Frédéric Abecassis, Karima Direche et Rita Aouad, 103–112. (Casablanca: La Croisée des chemins, 2012); idem, “Muslim Descendants of Jews in Morocco: Identity and Practice,” The Journal of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Crypto-Jews, 7 (2015): 41–60; idem, “De tu boca a los cielos: Jewish women’s songs in Northern Morocco as Oracles of Communal Holiness,” (Hesperis-Tamuda, LI, 3 (2016)): 239–261; idem, “Kol B’Isha Erva: The Silencing of Jewish Women’s Oral Traditions in Morocco,” in Women and Social Change in North Africa: What Counts as Revolutionary?, eds. Doris Gray and Nadia Sonneveld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 263–288; idem, “Connecting the Disconnect: Music and its Agency in Moroccan Cinema’s Judeo-Muslim Interactions,” in Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions across the Performing Arts in the Maghreb and France, 1920-2020, eds. Samuel Everett and Rebekah Vince (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 202–233. 3. Marocanité can be defined as the combination of elements that confirms that you are truly Moroccan: your cooking, your music, the way you dress, the way you deal with medical issues, how you carry on a conversation, the weight you put on family relationships etc... Facebook has four different groups each with close to 20K members called “Tu sais que tu es Marocain quand” You know that you are Moroccan when... The postings on these group pages describe material culture, music, behavior regarding health, family matters, cooking etc... 4. See Langlois, Tony, “Music and Politics in North Africa,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Laudan Nooshin, 207–227 (SOAS Musicology Series, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 227. 5. El Maghribi’s hit was called Allah, Ouatani ou Soultani. This declaration has subsequently been refined to Allah, El Watan, El Malik, changing the language from a possessive expression to a more general open belonging. 6. “[El Maghribi] a révolutionné la musique marocaine, en fusionnant les rythmes de la qasida gharnatie avec l’art musical marocain populaire, sans toutefois

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leur faire perdre leurs saveurs originelles.” Mohammed El Haddaoui, La musique judéo-marocaine: Un patrimoine en partage (Casablanca: Editions La Croisée des Chemins, 2014), 91. 7. Simon Bronner, ed., Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 6. 8. Paja Faudree, "Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography." Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 530. 9. Suzanne Cusick, “Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the ‘Global War on Terror’,” in Music Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born, 275–291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 277–278. 10. See Jonathan Glasser, “Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond,” Anthropological Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2017): 139–166. 11. Joseph Chetrit, “Textual Orality and Knowledge of Illiterate Women: The Textual Performance of Jewish Women in Morocco,” in Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean, ed. Fatima Sadiqi, 89–107 (London: Routledge, 2013), 92. 12. Istiqlal was the party of Moroccan independence, and Islamist at its core, which made a difficult situation for nationalist Jews, who could not be a part of this party because of their religion. 13. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, “Muslim Descendants of Jews in Morocco: Identity and Practice,” The Journal of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Crypto-Jews 7 (2015): 48–50. 14. « Qui dit marocain, dit musulman, La nationalité marocaine a été créée par le protectorat français. Tout marocain est musulman: le juif “marocain” n’est qu’un dimmi [sic] ». (L’Avant-Garde, 11 Août, 1962). 15. Mohammed V’s declaration was “Nos sujets Israélites ont toujours joui, en tant que citoyens Marocains, de leurs droits et ont en tout temps, exercé librement leur culte.” Hassan II’s was “Je ne veux pas entendre parler de Musulmans et de Juifs mais uniquement des Marocains.” La Voix des Communautés (Septembre 1962, No. 17). Front page. http:​/​/www​​.jpre​​ss​.nl​​i​.org​​.il​/O​​live/​​APA​/N​​LI/​?a​​ction​​=tab&​​tab​=b​​rowse​​ &pub=​​VDC&_​​ga​=2.​​22777​​5455.​​33534​​8736.​​15893​​13174​​-1455​​97988​​​7​.158​​93131​​74​ #pa​​nel​=document accessed May 22, 2020. 16. “Je tiens à souligner le caractère marocain, et marocain à part entière, de la population israélite vivant dans le Royaume. A ce titre, ces Israélites ont les mêmes droits que leurs frères de confession musulmane, et il n’y a pas de différence entre eux.” Les Israélites Marocains Citoyens à Part Entière, La Voix des Communautés, March 1963, Vol 23. Front page. http:​/​/www​​.jpre​​ss​.nl​​i​.org​​.il​/O​​live/​​APA​/N​​LI/​?a​​ction​​ =tab&​​tab​=b​​rowse​​&pub=​​VDC&_​​ga​=2.​​22777​​5455.​​33534​​8736.​​15893​​13174​​-1455​​ 97988​​​7​.158​​93131​​74​#pa​​nel​=document accessed May 12, 2020. 17. This information was relayed to me during an interview with Victor Malka himself in one of his last visits to Casablanca in 2016. 18. Even though readers might think that the Maghribi reference is a connection to Jewish-Moroccan singer Sami El Maghribi, in this case it just means ‘I am Moroccan’. 19. This term is often used in Morocco’s national discourse and is even part of the Constitution of 2011 as will be further explained later on in this chapter.

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20. A description of this moment was expounded by Maxime Karoutchi in front of a group of Muslim Moroccans meeting for a ‘tea of Friendship’ at the SOC Simon Pinto organized by Association Marocains Pluriels in Casablanca to denounce recent attacks of anti-Semitism in France on Sunday 24 February 2019. 21. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, “Connecting the Disconnect: Music and Its Agency in Moroccan Cinema’s Judeo-Muslim Interactions,” in Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions across the Performing Arts in the Maghreb and France, 1920-2020, eds. Samuel Everett and Rebekah Vince, 202–233 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 203. 22. ˤAita/ˤAyta means “call, cry or lament” and is a musical style that originates from the countryside of Morocco. ˤAita contains seven main sections: Marsawi, Hasbawi, Hawzi, Zaari, Khribgui, Jebli, Mellali. ˤAita sings about the realities of life: the land, nature, wars, mountains, crisis and love and is often accompanied by the dance of sheikhats, women performers. 23. Kinot are lamentations, generally in Hebrew, but sometimes in judeo-vernacular languages, commemorating tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people as a whole or a specific community. 24. The fast day on the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av that marks the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and many other tragic incidents. 25. Joseph Chetrit, “Music and Poetry as a Shared Cultural Space for Muslims and Jews in Morocco,” in Studies in North African Jews, eds. Moshe Bar-Asher and Steven Fraade. (New Haven: Center for Jewish Languages and Program in Judaic Studies, 2011), 97–99. 26. This Qsida was written by Hanania Cohen, a Moroccan Israeli living close to Haifa. It is popular in the Moroccan-Israeli community. Issachar Ben-Ami, “La Qsida chez les Juifs Marocains,” in Studies in Aggadah and Folk-Literature, eds. Joseph Heinemann and Dov Noy (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1971), 9. 27. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=S2m​​XsvJw​​KGs​&f​​eat​ur​​e​=emb​​_logo​ accessed May 12, 2020. 28. The Ftour Pluriel has been organized in the last eight years during Ramadan with Muslims, Christian and Jewish participants and musicians. 29. https​:/​/ww​​w​.fac​​ebook​​.com/​​mikec​​hriqu​​ioffi​​cial/​​video​​s​/679​​2​5194​​95284​​40/ accessed May 18, 2020. 30. https://zamane​.ma​/fr​/maroc​-terre​-juive/ May 2013, Vol 30, accessed May, 11, 17:38. 31. Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 7. 32. I first encountered the changing relationship towards barrani when traveling in the Todgha Gorge area in August 2012. When I stopped for a tea on the side of the road, the owner of the café asked me where I lived. Upon answering in Arabic, “Casablanca, I’m a barrania but please give me the local price”, he repeated over and over, oh you are not a barrania. Now all of the Maghreb is one, and there’s no more barrani from other villages or cities. ‘Koulna Mgharba’, we are all Maghrebi.

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33. Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 217. 34. Samir Ben-Layashi and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9 (2010): 98. 35. “On parle beaucoup ce temps-ci de patriotisme. S’agitait-il encore d’un patriotisme “de conjoncture”? Une nation est une âme, disait Renan. Les juifs Marocains ont-ils l’âme marocaine?” Carlos de Nesry, Les Israélites marocains à l’heure du choix (Tanger: Editions Internationales, 1958), 29. 36. Chris Silver, “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy ElMaghribi,” IJMES, (2020): 2. 37. Silver, Sounds of Nationalism, 25. 38. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014), 321. 39. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​time_​​conti​​nue​=4​​1​&v​=o​​Bf78d​​dq​-4U​​&​feat​​ ure​=e​​mb​_lo​​go accessed April 27, 2020. 40. Casablanca Jungle, uploaded in October, 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​time_​​conti​​nue​=1​​07​&v=​​YLcnd​​KedLb​​s​&f​ea​​ture=​​emb​_l​​ogo has 266, 097 views and Shalom, uploaded May 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=jUO​​​Qa4i2​​1cA with 87,890 views as of April 28, 2020. 41. See Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 42. “Pour les jeunes générations des Marocains, l’image du juif est réduite à celle du soldat israélien arrogant, injuste et brutal. Et pourtant pendant des siècles les choses étaient différentes. Pour le Marocain de confession musulmane, le juif n’était pas un étranger, une image caricaturale ou fantasmée. Il était le voisin, l’ami, le médecin, l’orfèvre, le commerçant du sultan, l’habitant du mellaḥ mitoyen. Le juif marocain avait un visage et une présence physique...” 43. Rosen, Bargaining for Reality, 103. 44. Literally means ‘warehouse’ in Maghribi Arabic (from khazana ‘to store up’ and ‘ma’ the prefix for places), where the King’s civil servants used to receive their wages; but this usage of the word became in Maghribi Arabic synonymous with the elite. It refers to the governing institution in Morocco, centered on the King and consisting of royal notables, top-ranking military personnel, landowners, security service bosses, civil servants, and other well-connected members of the establishment. The term ‘Makhzen’ is also popularly used in Morocco as a word meaning ‘State’ or ‘Government’ or indeed used more pejoratively to imply ‘system’ with all of its implications in a post-2011 context (the so-called Arab spring was also prominent in Morocco). 45. « On utilise au Maroc le mot chaâbi, qui signifie « populaire », pour parler de deux styles musicaux différents : l’aïta, qui est un chant rural spécifiquement marocain, et le chgouri, qui est une forme de chaâbi principalement citadin, provenant notamment de la région de Casablanca.  » http:​/​/mon​​doram​​a​.poi​​ntcul​​ture.​​be​ /mu​​sique​​s​-pop​​ulair​​es​-le​​-chaa​​bi​-de​​s​-vil​​les​-e​​t​-l​e-​​chaab​​i​-des​​-cham​​ps/ accessed May 12, 2020.

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46. See Daniel Schroeter, "The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities," Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (2008); Eric Calderwood, Colonial alAndalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Wyrtzen, Making Morocco; Silver, Chris, Sounds of Nationalism; Alma Rachel Heckman, “Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography,” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 3 (2018). 47. Such sentiments, however, were clearly not shared by the masses of Moroccan Jews who, though attesting their unwavering loyalty to the king (which for the Jews legitimated their very existence from time immemorial on Moroccan soil), did not imagine themselves as part of the larger body politic of Morocco. Nor did the Muslim masses see them as "Moroccan," despite efforts during the independence movement to sway the Jews to the nationalist cause, and despite the symbolic appointment of Leon Benzaquen as minister of post and telegraph in the first government after independence in 1956, a post he held until 1958. Schroeter, Shifting Boundaries, 159. 48. Heckman, Jewish Radicals, 74. 49. “...hopeful for a Morocco that does not exist and yet rejected from the Morocco that came to be. El Maleh once said: ‘I often think that I’m the only existing Moroccan Jew. There are a few of us who think this way, Serfaty, Simon Lévy. . . . We swim in antonyms, in contradictions: an absence of physical presence on the land and at the same time the permanence of something.’” Heckman, Jewish Radicals of Morocco, 74. 50. Royaume du Maroc, Chambre des Représentants, ‘Constitution 2011 of Moroccan Kingdom’. Available at http:​/​/www​​.cham​​brede​​srepr​​esent​​ants.​​ma​/en​​/cons​​ titut​​ion​-2​​011​-m​​o​rocc​​an​-ki​​ngdom​ accessed July 25, 2019. Author’s italics; modified translation. 51. « Etat musulman souverain, attaché à son unité nationale et à son intégrité territoriale, le Royaume du Maroc entend préserver, dans sa plénitude et sa diversité, son identité nationale une et indivisible. Son unité, forgée par la convergence de ses composantes arabo-islamique, amazighe et saharo-hassanie, s’est nourrie et enrichie de ses affluents africain, andalou, hébraïque et méditerranéen. La prééminence accordée à la religion musulmane dans ce référentiel national va de pair avec l’attachement du people marocain aux valeurs d’ouverture, de modération, de tolérance et de dialogue pour la compréhension mutuelle entre toutes les cultures et les civilisations du monde. » Royaume du Maroc, Secrétariat Général du Gouvernement (Direction de l’Imprimerie Officielle), ‘La Constitution: Edition 2011’, http:​/​/www​​.sgg.​​gov​.m​​a​/Por​​ tals/​​0​/con​​stitu​​tion/​​const​​ituti​​o​n​_20​​11​_Fr​​.pdf accessed July 25, 2019. 52. The Moroccan popular history magazine Zamane published an issue which was entitled: Morocco: Jewish Land (Maroc: Terre Juive). 53. In an interview with Levy A. in March 2008, he mentioned how Muslims would push their donkey by calling it yahoudi - Jew, in northern Morocco. An interview with Rivka M. in Oujda on December 13, 2014 revealed that until today in the market place they hear khedmat al-yahoud – Jew’s work, to describe products of bad quality. 54. French pop singer, not to be confused with the American blues singer Billie Holliday.

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55. The Villa des Arts have antennas in Rabat and Casablanca and are funded by the Fondation ONA, which is connected to the Palace. 56. http:​/​/www​​.fond​​ation​​ona​.m​​a​/fr/​​nos​-a​​ctivi​​tes​/s​​oiree​​-chgo​​uri​-a​​vec​-a​​bdess​​lam​-s​​ efi​an​​i​-et-​​son​-e​​nsemb​​le accessed May 13, 2020. 57. « C’était le 27 mars dernier. Haim Botbol, légende vivante de la musique chaâbi se produit ce soir-là à Casablanca. L’occasion pour de nombreux nostalgiques de la chanson judéo-marocaine d’assister à un évènement que beaucoup attendent depuis très longtemps. C’est qu’à de rares exceptions près, les concerts de musique chaâbi juive sont très souvent absents des agendas culturels. » “Ces juifs chanteurs du chaâbi” Zamane, 11 avril, 2014. 58. liturgical singers. 59. The mixing of Muslim and Jewish men and women singing within the sanctuary would cross boundaries of religious and gender norms for both. 60. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/r​​esult​​s​?sea​​rch​_q​​uery=​​haja+​​hamda​​​ouia+​​raymo​​nde+ accessed May 13, 2020. 61. Eric Petzoldt, “Performing chgoury Today: The Repertoire of the Contemporary Casablanca Revival Orchestra Angham Zamane,” (unpublished paper delivered at the 12th ICTM Mediterranean Music Study Group, Essaouira June, 2018), 2 62. The historian Mohammed Hatimi presented a conference at the SOC Simon Pinto Jewish Club on the Muslim views of the mellaḥ March 30, 2017 where he referenced multiple early sources on the ‘impurities’ found in the mellaḥ such as liquor and prostitution. It caused great distress to the Jewish audience members and subsequently the lecture series saw its attendance drop dramatically. 63. Aidi. Rebel Music, 323. 64. Daniel J. Schroeter, “The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa,” in Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, eds. Murre-van den Berg, Heleen and Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah, 39–68 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 43–44. 65. Thomas Solomon, “Theorizing Diaspora and Music,” Urban People 17 (2015): 201–219.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aidi, Hisham. Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 2014. Ben-Ami, Issachar. “La Qsida chez les Juifs Marocains”. In Studies in Aggadah and Folk-Literature, edited by Heinemann, Joseph and Dov Noy, 1–17. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1971. Ben-Layashi, Samir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman. “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community”. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 9 (2010): 89–106. Boum, Aomar. Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

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Bronner, Simon, ed. Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014. Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Chetrit, Joseph. “Music and Poetry as a Shared Cultural Space for Muslims and Jews in Morocco”. In Studies in North African Jews, edited by Bar-Asher, Moshe and Steven Fraade, 65–103. New Haven: Center for Jewish Languages and Program in Judaic Studies, 2011. ———. “Textual Orality and Knowledge of Illiterate Women: The Textual Performance of Jewish Women in Morocco”. In Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean, edited by Sadiqi, Fatima, 89–107. London: Routledge, 2013. Cusick, Suzanne. “Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the ‘Global War on Terror’”. In Music Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience, edited by Born, Georgina, 275–291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. "Judeo-Spanish in Morocco: Language, Identity, Separation or Integration?" In La Bienvenue et l'adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe au XXe siècle), edited by Abecassis, Frédéric, Karima Direche et Rita Aouad, 103–112. Casablanca: La Croisée des chemins, 2012. ———. “Muslim Descendants of Jews in Morocco: Identity and Practice.” The Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto-Jews, 7 (2015): 41–60. ———. “De tu boca a los cielos: Jewish Women’s Songs in Northern Morocco as Oracles of Communal Holiness”. Hesperis-Tamuda, LI, 3 (2016): 239–261. ———. “Kol B’Isha Erva: The Silencing of Jewish Women’s Oral Traditions in Morocco”. In Women and Social Change in North Africa: What Counts as Revolutionary? edited by Gray, Doris & Nadia Sonneveld, 263–288. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ———. “Connecting the Disconnect: Music and Its Agency in Moroccan Cinema’s Judeo-Muslim Interactions”. In Dynamic Jewish-Muslim Interactions across the Performing Arts in the Maghreb and France, 1920-2020, edited by Everett, Samuel and Rebekah Vince, 202–233. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Faudree, Paja. "Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography". Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012): 519–536. Glasser, Jonathan. “Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond”. Anthropological Quarterly, 90, no. 1 (2017): 139–166. Heckman, Alma Rachel. “Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography”, Jewish Social Studies, 23no. 3 (2018): 67–100. Langlois, Tony. “Music and Politics in North Africa”. In Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, edited by Nooshin, Laudan, 207–227. SOAS Musicology Series, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Nesry, Carlos de. Les Israélites marocains à l’heure du choix. Tanger: Editions Internationales, 1958. Petzoldt, Eric. “Performing chgoury today: The repertoire of the contemporary Casablanca revival orchestra Angham Zamane”, unpublished paper delivered at the 12th ICTM Mediterranean Music Study Group, Essaouira June, 2018.

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Rosen, Lawrence. Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Schroeter, Daniel J. "The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities." Jewish Social Studies, New Series, 15, no. 1 (2008): 145–164. ———. ‘The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa”. In Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, edited by Murre-van den Berg, Heleen and Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah, 39–68. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Silver, Chris. “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy ElMaghribi”. IJMES, (2020): 1–25. Solomon, Thomas. “Theorizing Diaspora and Music”. Urban People, 17 (2015): 201–19. Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Chapter 9

The Aḥwash Jewish and Muslim Articulations of a Shared Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Tradition in Morocco and its Diaspora Sarah Frances Levin

INTRODUCTION The aḥwash, a collective and ceremonial Amazigh (Berber) dance, is a unique practice through which to explore the multidimensionality—affinities and differences, connection and separateness—of Jewish-Muslim relations in the southwestern High Atlas Mountains and Anti-Atlas Mountains in the first half of the twentieth century. Moroccan journalist Abdeljalil Didi remarks that “[t]he aḥwash is a foundation of cultural identity for the Amazigh communities.”1 In fact, the aḥwash was one of the most significant shared cultural traditions of Atlas Mountain Jews and Muslims until the mass departure of Jewish villagers in the early1950s and 1960s, primarily to Israel. While the aḥwash was communally practiced, it also provided an accepted, formal structure within which to play out differences. That said, the interreligious aspects of the aḥwash have hardly been addressed by scholars,2 particularly, for example, when compared to the attention given to the shared tradition of saint venerations.3 In this chapter, I address that gap.4 The chapter begins with a short description of the aḥwash and its functions and a brief background on Jews in the Atlas Mountains. I then discuss changes in the performance of the aḥwash in Israel and Morocco after the departure of Jews from the Atlas. I conclude with interlocutors’ memories of Jews and Muslims performing the aḥwash together over half a century earlier. Several questions guide this exploration of the role of the aḥwash as a tradition shared by Jews and Muslims in the performance of Berber identity. How has the performance of these ceremonies changed since the Jews’ 217

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departure from the Atlas villages, both for Jews in Israel and Muslims in Morocco?5 Why was it that the moshavim (cooperative agricultural villages; sing. Hebrew moshav)—in the literal and figurative margins of Israeli society—are the only place in any Moroccan diaspora (Jewish or Muslim, to my knowledge) that the aḥwash tradition continued with any consistency?6 What role does context play in continuity, and what are the contextual similarities or differences in Israel and Morocco? THE AḤWASH: A THUMBNAIL DESCRIPTION Aḥwash is the overarching term used in the southwest High Atlas and northwest Anti-Atlas Mountains (i.e., in regions where the Tashelḥit dialect of the Berber language is spoken) for a variety of collective and ceremonial dances.7 The aḥwash is usually associated with joyful events, accompanying life-passage celebrations (particularly weddings, and, for Jews, also bar mitzvahs marking “adulthood” for boys), events of the agricultural calendar, and many other occasions. Solaika, a seventy-something Jewish woman now living in the development town of Kiryat Shmona, Israel, related that in her natal High Atlas village of Sor “we would do aḥwash even if just guests came from this village, or from that village.”8 While the aḥwash could also be tied to religious holidays, whether Jewish or Muslim, and the poetry might invoke “God,” the ceremony itself was secular. According to Kelthuma, a seventysomething Muslim woman still living in that same village, “A holy day went by, another holy day followed, but aḥwash always blossomed.”9 The term aḥwash refers to the entire ceremony that unites dance, music, and sung poetry in a fixed structure and order: Village music . . . can be divided into a number of genres and styles too numerous to examine. The epitome of village music, however, is the aḥwash (lit.: dance), which is found in one form or another all over the High Atlas and Sus. The details of performance vary from village to village, but in general the aḥwash is sung and danced by two large antiphonal choruses, accompanied by an ensemble of frame drums. . . . The performance emphasizes successively improvised poetry, choral song, dance, and drumming.10

When Jews still lived in the Atlas, an aḥwash often consisted of Jews and Muslims participating jointly, or, as in the case of a wedding, they might attend each other’s performances as invited spectators.11 The village square where the aḥwash was performed was typically shared by both Jews and Muslims. But even if a Jewish quarter was set apart with its own square, mixed (Jewish and Muslim) aḥwash groups might exist, as in Ihukaren, a tiny

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Anti-Atlas village. The chief (called raïs or sheikh) of this particular mixed band was a Jewish man. His talents were so renowned that he was often invited to perform at celebrations of tribal and regional leaders.12 Today, as in the past, the aḥwash’s chief, an eminent drummer and improvisational poet, is in charge of keeping all participants and the moving parts of the complex performance running smoothly. Both men and women participate in the aḥwash—dancing, singing, and clapping according to specific structures and formations—but they dance in separate lines, facing each other, and the chief and drummers are typically men. Since an essential function of the aḥwash is to provide social cohesion and build community, the significance of these cultural occasions shared by Atlas Jews and Muslims cannot be overstated, as ethnomusicologist Philip Schuyler observed in his fieldwork in the same regions where I conducted mine: “Among the tashlḥit-speaking Berbers (Ishlḥin) of south-western Morocco, the performance of music is both a favourite form of entertainment and a socially significant act.”13 Similarly, Moroccan journalist Abdeljalil Didi describes the aḥwash as “a communion where the individual merges into the collective.”14 Solaika, whom we met above, concurred: “What’s special is that it’s everyone as one—it’s a celebration of joy.” Sarah: Are men and women together? Solaika: Yes, both men and women. Sarah: And Muslims and Jews together? Solaika: Yes. Among the women, Jews and Muslims mixed, and among the men, mixed. Everyone together, no one cares. Everyone dances. Solaika: Have you ever seen one? It’s so beautiful! Sarah: Do Muslims and Jews perform it the same way? Solaika: It’s the same thing.

In their comparative study, Mohamed ElMedlaoui and Sigal Azaryahu concur with Solaika, writing that, “[c]oncerning aḥwash in particular, no specific feature distinguishes its performance among Jews and Moslems with respect to its musical modes, its staging or its dancing choreography.”15 BRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND It is unknown precisely when Jews first arrived in Morocco. However, by the time of the Arab-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, Jewish populations were well established in the Atlas Mountains, where they lived among the indigenous Berbers. Some Jews may have converted to Islam, as did the majority of non-Jewish Berbers. However, a small

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population of practicing Jews continued as the only religious minority among a Muslim majority, participating fully in Berber cultural life, yet simultaneously maintaining their own identity. Life for both groups was a continual negotiation of multi-layered identities and interreligious boundaries, vividly reflected in the humor and creativity of the material I recorded from Muslims still living today in Atlas villages and from Jews in Israel, who had emigrated from those same villages over half a century earlier. It is this ethnographic fieldwork that I draw upon for this chapter. Despite late nineteenth-century migrations of both Jews and Muslims to cities and larger population centers as a result of economic factors—such as undermined trade routes resulting from European intervention in West Africa and Morocco and famines caused by droughts—significant Jewish communities (about ten percent of Morocco’s Jewish population) still lived in Atlas Mountain villages up until their departures, mostly to Israel, in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli immigration authorities turned to North Africa (where Morocco had the largest Jewish population, around a quarter million) to supply an “unskilled” Jewish labor force for the new state, as well as to populate the less desirable peripheral zones and sometimes dangerous border zones (which were often one and the same).16 For Jewish Atlas Mountain villagers, unaware of these motives but enticed by the emissaries’ promises of a better life in “their own” country, emigration was an appealing option in the face of diminishing economic possibilities in the countryside and overcrowding and poverty in the cities due to the migrations. Although the resulting mass immigrations to Israel effectively ended communal Jewish life in the Atlas Mountains, they did not necessarily sever the Atlas Jews’ connections to Berber traditions. AḤWASH IN ISRAEL: PERFORMANCE OF BERBERNESS IN A NEW CONTEXT Atlas Mountain Jews continued to perform the aḥwash to varying extents following their immigration to Israel. Interlocutors in moshavim such as Tirosh and Aderet reminisced that in years past, prior to my fieldwork in 2011 when performances were rare, the celebration occurred more regularly: “We had an aḥwash for my son’s bar mitzvah.” “We’d do it Saturday evening [i.e. after the Sabbath].” “We did it for happy occasions.” As noted above, the practice of aḥwash has not been observed in any other Moroccan diaspora. So, how is it that residents of several moshavim in Israel kept up the practice for decades? This continuity of practice can be argued to be an unintended consequence of a combination of two Israeli immigration

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policies, as shall be discussed below: a general one that settled immigrants, particularly from North Africa and the Middle East, first in transit camps, then in remote moshavim or development towns on the peripheries of Israeli society; and particularly, the so-called “Ship to Village” policy, in which immigrants were taken directly upon arrival to a predesignated moshav or development town. On the one hand, these policies had “gave rise to a more profound socio-ethnic disparity,”17 yet, on the other, many of the newly arrived Moroccan village communities were kept somewhat intact, which had its benefits (as will be discussed below). This “Ship to Village” policy was initiated only after the failure of the “melting pot” policy of the early 1950s.18 According to the Zionist rhetoric of “melting pot,” the dispersion of Moroccans—as well as of other immigrant groups—throughout moshavim and development towns of mixed national origins would encourage them to abandon their cultural identities and become part of an idealized Israeli (read, Ashkenazi) culture based on European customs and values.19 However, by the mid-1950s, “it became clear that forced integration created serious . . . tensions and arguments along ethnic lines,”20 leading the authorities to implement a new policy of establishing homogeneous communities.21 Particularly under the “Ship to Village” policy, immigrant groups were sent without any choice in the matter to new moshavim or development towns intentionally located on the country’s peripheries and/or along borders where security conditions were poor, due to infiltrations of fighters from hostile neighboring states or of forcibly displaced Palestinians.22 In addition to the security issues of these placements was their geographic isolation, their poor housing conditions, and a paucity of basic services.23 “Most immigrants thus arrived . . . without prior knowledge of their destination, often misled by those who had organized their transport to the desert and their arrival there timed for the dark of night.”24 Despite the fact that the new arrivals put up a certain amount of resistance, such as refusing to get off the buses or trucks onto which they were loaded like cattle,25 leaving was not a realistic option because “immigrants who would not go where the state and the Jewish Agency sent them would not receive housing, employment, and financial support” that they had been promised, even if those promises were not always fulfilled.26 Marginalization and Denigration of Berberness Along with the geographic isolation, Israeli policy makers’ discriminatory attitudes relegated many of the marginalized immigrant communities to other peripheries: economic, social, and cultural, a phenomenon in Israel called “the Peripheria.” While Moroccans were not the only immigrants sent to

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desolate moshavim and development towns,27 they came to constitute the largest community from any MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) country, as well as the lowest end of the socio-cultural, economic, and political hierarchies of these Jewish populations.28 This discrimination manifested in lower-quality housing and less arable land, as well as stereotypes such “as ‘primitive,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘difficult material.’”29 Moroccans originating in the Atlas Mountains (“Berbers”) were further relegated to the bottom of the Israeli hierarchy, pejoratively called “Shleuhim” in Hebrew (sing., “Shleuḥ”)—although this distinction is mostly relevant among Moroccans themselves; “Shleuḥ” could also be used by Israelis to mean any Moroccan or even North African.30 For Jews who emigrated from the Atlas Mountains to Israel, “Berberness” has been experienced both as heartfelt connection and as a source of stigma and internalized shame. The term “Shleuḥ” is also sometimes appropriated with pride by Atlas Jews in both Israel and Morocco; the opening of Morocco to Israeli tours in the 1990s led to “heritage trips” that helped reinstate pride in their identity as Moroccan, as well as, in many cases, Berber. These trips had an empowering effect for the Moroccan diaspora in Israel . . . [and] a deep personal significance for travelers who were able to reconnect with their previous lives, memories, language and traditions. Israelis with no roots in the Arab world suddenly realized how emotionally and culturally invested members of the Moroccan diaspora were in Morocco. This realization was understood (and still is) as an antithesis to the hegemonic Zionist discourse of “negation of the diaspora,” a dogmatic concept that was advanced by certain Ashkenazi Israelis who reject any affinities with their countries of origin, and was imposed on other diasporas.31

Mordecai, a native of Tifnout of the High Atlas, now living in Tirosh, told me of the first return visit he and his wife made to Morocco in 2007: We got a letter from the National Social Security Service saying, “We heard you were in Morocco. How did you have the money to go there?” My wife’s brother had paid for everything. So, he wrote a nice letter like that explaining that he gave us the money. So, I went to talk to the guy at the National Social Security office, explaining that it was a “roots” trip for us. The guy asked me where I was from in Morocco. I said, “I’m from the mountains.” Wow, he was pleased. He said, “Good for you!” Why? Because many Shleuḥim will say they’re from Casablanca or Marrakesh [i.e., the cities]. They won’t say where they’re from. I’m not ashamed, what do I have to be ashamed of? That’s where I’m from, I’m from the villages, from the mountains. I’m proud of it.

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The Tifnout River valley was actually one of the few places in the Atlas where the majority of Jews spoke Berber as their first language (rather than Moroccan Arabic). For, by the twentieth century, most Atlas Jews in Morocco spoke Moroccan Arabic as their first language, although they were often bilingual in Moroccan Arabic and Berber (or trilingual, in the case of most men who knew Hebrew for religious texts).32 Even these Berber-speaking Jews often began to learn Moroccan Arabic during temporary moves to larger urban centers (a step arranged by the Israeli immigration agency in bringing Atlas Jews to Israel) where Arabic was the more commonly spoken language. Once in Israel, most spoke Arabic with their children (which is sometimes also the case among Berber Muslims in Morocco after moving to Arabic-dominated towns or cities). Additionally, most immigrants to Israel also learned to converse in Modern Hebrew. None reported having passed on Berber to the next generation, though some of the Israeli-born generation recalled that their mothers had sung lullabies in Berber.33 Yet, even Jews speaking Arabic as their first language maintained oral traditions (folktales, jokes, songs, poetry duels) in Berber. I suggest that the reason for this is the range of registers, aesthetics, and repertoires that the Berber language affords Atlas Jewish villagers, for regardless of whether Jews spoke Berber as their primary language when in Morocco, they consistently participated in Berber cultural traditions. Whenever I asked Atlas Mountain Jews what language was used in the sung part of the aḥwash, they expressed shock at the very question that it could be anything other than Tashelḥit. As one woman (originally from Amassine, Morocco, now living in Aderet, Israel) declared that, “We spoke Moroccan Arabic at home. But we knew Tashelḥit because the songs are only in Tashelḥit.” A Fortuitous Consequence of the Periphery The extent to which Berber cultural traditions, and particularly the aḥwash, persisted in Israel is, therefore, noteworthy both because of the denigration associated with Berber culture and because Jews who immigrated to Israel rarely if ever kept up Berber as a spoken language, even though the language is essential for the performance of traditions such as the aḥwash. Paradoxically, the discriminatory immigration policies that isolated Moroccan immigrant communities in moshavim on the peripheries of Israel appear to have yielded an unintended yet significant consequence: perpetuation of Amazigh/Berber cultural traditions, in particular, the aḥwash. The phenomenon of the conduciveness of the periphery to maintaining diasporic traditions has been developed by Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli and Yigal Nizri and Haviva Pedaya for aspects of Moroccan and MENA Jewish cultures more generally, respectively. “[T]he peripheralization of the Moroccan

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diaspora in Israel had eventually contributed to the preservation of an independent Moroccan identity in terms of language, music, and culture, and it was the geographical periphery of Israel that provided the launching pad for this identity to powerfully manifest itself several decades later.”34 In her essay evocatively titled “The City as Text and the Margins as Voice: Exclusion from the Book (sefer) and Rerouting to the Periphery (sfar)” (my English translation), Pedaya writes of the cultural advantages of the policy of marginalization more generally (not the specific “Ship to Village” policy), “i.e., that the periphery, which allows for a symmetry between a territorial community and a memory community, constitutes an incubation of complex and challenging identity and creativity. . . . The periphery dismantled the community structure less,” allowing for the maintenance “of mental and cultural patterns that immigrants in large cities had long since erased.”35 However, neither Pedaya nor Ouaknine-Yekutieli and Nizri include Berber traditions among the cultural forms they discuss. Azaryahu and Elmedlaoui are the exceptions who focus, as I have here, on the aḥwash: “As an unexpected result and byproduct, that quartering permitted, or even caused, the Berber-Jews to maintain some of their cultural traditions in a communal framework.”36 For Atlas Jews, these marginalizing policies thus had the effect of maintaining the “context” for the ongoing practice of the aḥwash. Performance of Berber Identity in the Israeli Context Of course, the isolating factors described above were not the only reasons for the perpetuation of the aḥwash. While the tradition was not maintained in every Atlas Mountain majority moshav, the force of individual personalities and the strength of the practice of the aḥwash in the original Moroccan village likely contributed to its perpetuation in several discrete moshavim.37 An example of the correspondence between natal Atlas villages and moshavim is that of the Moroccan Tifnout River valley cluster of villages (all of which were so small that Jews considered themselves part of a larger Tifnouti community) with Tirosh in Israel. Muslim elders remembered a particular Jewish patriarch who was talented as an aḥwash (particularly as a drummer and improvisor of poetry). This man was settled together with his family and several others from Tifnout in the moshav Tirosh, where they continued to perform the aḥwash for decades. Other such correspondence between natal Moroccan villages with a strong practice of aḥwash and moshavim that were central to its continued practice include Amassine in the High Atlas with the moshav Aderet and the Anti-Atlas village of Taznakht with the moshav Dovev.38 As the aḥwash was performed in fewer and fewer places in Israel, people would travel to attend, whether as participants or observers. Although such

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occasions were already rare in Israel in 1999, I was able to attend an aḥwash in Aderet, following the occasion of a wedding that united two of the moshavim mentioned above, Aderet and Dovev, as well as the two Moroccan villages from which their families originated, Amassine and Taznakht.39 The wedding itself took place in a large hall in the development town of Kiryat Gat. During the wedding dinner, a man in his late fifties looked out over the reception hall full of members of both moshavim with a big smile, and exclaimed in amazement, “We’re all Shleuḥim here.” While neither Berber nor even Moroccan music was played at the reception, this man and others later performed the aḥwash on the front patio of the groom’s father’s home in Aderet, starting at two a.m. and lasting until nine a.m. During the course of the night, someone explained to those of us watching that the performers were not supposed to stop between songs because it broke the trance that usually builds throughout the night. However, in this case, since it had been so long since they had performed an aḥwash, they had to keep stopping to figure out which song to do next. They also took advantage of the breaks to tighten the skins of the frame drums by heating them over fire pits built in the yard for this purpose. “This is the first time they’re doing it in a long time,” said the brother of the groom, the only member of the bride and groom’s generation in attendance (himself a musician who also participated in the drumming for some songs). When he was a kid, he added, the parents performed aḥwashes all the time, sometimes inside the house, and that the little ones would not be able to sleep. Sadly, as the “custodians of this tradition” have passed away, so too has the performance of the aḥwash almost completely disappeared today.40 Israel has seen cultural “revivals” of other Moroccan and Mizrahi traditions but unfortunately not (yet!) of Berber ones.41 This highlights the issue of BerberJewish culture being at periphery within a periphery. AḤWASH IN MOROCCO, PRESENT AND PAST: SHARING COMMONALITIES, CELEBRATING DIFFERENCE In Morocco, the local collective practice of aḥwash has also substantially diminished, although for different reasons than in Israel. Traditionally, neither the dancers nor musicians were professional, but recent decades have seen a proliferation of commercial groups and performances even as the local practice has become rarer. Schuyler wrote in the 1970s that, “A performance by professional musicians can never have quite the emotional impact of a good aḥwash.”42 Abdeljalil Didi deplores the unfortunate fact that the aḥwash, “once a living tradition, today has been reduced to a folkloric dance

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for tourists . . . that is viewed out of [its] context.” He continues that: “This illconsidered/short-sighted exploitation of one of the pillars of Moroccan heritage has transformed the aḥwash into an artificial spectacle. . . . The aḥwash as danced today has been completely stripped of the codes of the culture and civilization that gave rise to it.”43 According to Aomar Boum, the process of commodifying the aḥwash actually began shortly after Moroccan independence from France in 1956. Although the government proclaimed the country’s Arab identity while excluding mention of its Berber one, Berber “folk” dances and music were recognized for their commercial potential—particularly for tourism—if incorporated as a part of Moroccan national identity. “Berbers were the central commodity in this commercial package. Aḥouach, Aḥidous and other ‘Berber’ folk dances were taken from the villages in the Atlas Mountains and commoditized for an (inter)national arts market.”44 More recently, as Morocco has been promoting a national “ethos” of ethnic pluralism, the dances have been “implemented as a significant tool in this performance of nationalism.”45 For example, among the annual national festivals is the “Aḥouach Festival” in Ouarzazate.46 Yet, even with these strides toward promoting Amazigh culture and language, the discrimination continues: “In contrast with this aforementioned exotic image of the Berbers, Berber cultures, languages and customs have been marginalized in the Moroccan national, political, cultural and educational agenda.”47 Furthermore, the general governmental neglect remains particularly harsh for the rural villages of the Atlas Mountains,48 underlining the corresponding marginal sociocultural and economic positions of rural Berber Muslims in Morocco and Atlas Mountain Jews in Israel. Thus, while in Morocco, the aḥwash has been largely decontextualized, in Israel it has been practiced mostly in context, that is, within the community and for the community. Although, in the 1960s, it was on occasion performed as a folkloric event in cultural centers and public places. However, even at these events the majority of attendees were not “outsiders” but immigrants from the Atlas Mountains. During my fieldwork in the Tifnout Valley in 2011, I had the opportunity to attend an aḥwash in the village of Assarag. This particular aḥwash followed the Īd al-ʾAḍḥā (Festival of the Sacrifice).49 Traditional village performances were increasingly rare, and none of the surrounding villages held aḥwashes for that year’s holiday. Earlier in the day, as my host family and I walked through the almost empty square where the aḥwash was to take place, a couple of men were hanging up flags and streamers. After my hosts introduced me, the men asked me not to photograph or record the first night of the three-night event because they had not performed it in such a long time and would have to “get used to it again.” They added that it would be fine, even welcomed, for me to film the second night.

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The square buzzed with excitement that first night from what appeared to be the entire village packed tightly around the edges to create a large circular space for the performers in the center. Dressed in their holiday finery, families sat on the ground on blankets or little stools brought from home. The male dancers wore white jellabas, the women and children bright colors and shimmering fabrics. Rather than dancing at the same time (as some interlocutors had described), the line of male dancers alternated with the line of women, and then with a line of young girls. The aḥwashes that night and following nights were more organized than the one I had attended in Israel in 1999. But, alas, there were none of the sung poetry duels that I will describe in the following section. Aḥwash Memories: Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Admiration I have written above of the aḥwash that Jews took with them to their diaspora in Israel, but what did they leave behind in the Atlas Mountains? Muslim village elders hold fond memories of their former Jewish neighbors, often preserved in the form of jokes, stories, and fragments of the poetry duels that were an integral part of the aḥwash. With regard to my interlocutors’ memories of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Atlas, various aspects of the contemporary political situation appear to filter their nostalgia. They often react to the dichotomy-based contemporary socio-political discourse (Jews versus Muslims, Jews versus Arabs, Israelis versus Palestinians) by idealizing the past, in which the now-absent “other” has become a major element in its nostalgic reconstruction for older Jews and Muslims.50 This reconstruction is also perceived through the filter of a less-than-ideal present, as mentioned previously of the marginalization both groups have experienced in their respective countries. The abruptness and totality of the rupture instigated and implemented almost entirely by external forces may also contribute to each group’s romanticization of the past. Of course, the memories and nostalgia of each religious group are characterized by the inherent asymmetry of the distinct experiences of Muslim villagers who remained and Jews who left for a new country and, not insignificantly, for a new language. For Jews, there is the heightened nostalgia of having left their natal land: expressions of attachment to their villages, its landscape and local traditions, surfaced with poignancy. For Muslims, there is the nostalgia of a dominant group for its departed minority, experienced as the exotic “other” within—yet imbued with intimacy: typically, the first thing interlocutors would do is rattle off the first names of their former neighbors and then list the foods they had shared, reveling in their knowledge of Jewish dietary laws and holiday specialties. In Ouanzert (mentioned above in connection with the moshav Tirosh in Israel), Muslim elders reminisced about Jews’ weekly performance of the

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aḥwash at the end of the Sabbath day. When I asked an elder Muslim woman if the Jews’ aḥwash differed from that of Muslims, she answered, “For aḥwash, they don’t have things belonging to them only.” Among the most poignant memories of my Muslim interpreters were the sung poetry duels between Muslim and Jewish poets.51 Sung poetry duels are a prevalent and highly developed form of Berber oral tradition in the Atlas Mountains. The poetic dueling sung during the aḥwash is the oral form par excellence, by means of which differences between individuals or groups are expressed and somewhat defused. The dueling individuals or groups were not necessarily demarcated by religion, but rather, might be by tribe, village, or gender. The poetic duel is an essential part of what makes a “good aḥwash,” and, of course, a large part of the sung duel’s function is performative, intended for entertainment. For the audience, the more “bullying,” the more entertaining, as “each poet plays on the specific weaknesses or failures of the Other.”52 To wit: “When a poetic competition is created between two lead singers, this raises the level of the singing, and thus the enjoyment that the musicians and the audience feel.”53 Humor plays an important role, and a witty response earns admiration not only from the audience, but from one’s rival, not to mention the greater likelihood of being preserved in the collective memory. The fragments of Jewish-Muslim duels that my interlocutors recited typically contained a provocation and its retort, with the latter serving as a reconciliation, and thus serving the aḥwash function of providing social cohesion. These remembered fragments were likely part of longer poetic exchanges, which characteristically progressed from conflict to resolution and often seemed to be lines that encapsulate the longer exchange.54 However, while a particular poetry duel might have ended in reconciliation, the reprieve might last only until the next meeting, or the next aḥwash, if the rivalry was ongoing. For an example of a provocation and a retort, let us look at an exchange between an unnamed Muslim man and Hannah, a Jewish woman, at an aḥwash, as recounted to me by Omar, the ninety-seven-year-old patriarch in whose home I lodged in Amssouzert, in the Tifnout River valley in 2011. Amssouzert is nestled on the banks of the river just across from Ouanzert, where the river winds its way down through the southern flanks of the High Atlas Mountains. The villages dotting either side are still today accessible only by dirt roads. Villagers cultivate small terraced plots for subsistence farming, but, as throughout the Atlas Mountains, Jewish men had worked as peddlers, blacksmiths, saddle-makers, tailors, or cobblers, rather than as farmers (as was expected of those who were settled on moshavim). According to village elders, no Jews ever actually lived in Amssouzert,55 but Omar related that Hannah would on occasion come by foot from her village of Assarag, which, while considered close by local standards, is an

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hour-and-a-half walk downriver. Hannah was widowed at a young age and made her living baking bread for special occasions in villages throughout the river valley. Hers was, Omar explained, simply the best. “Wherever there was a wedding,” he told me, “she would be asked to come bake the bread. . . . She would come alone and stay here, just like you.” Omar recalled a particular aḥwash at which Hannah was present and a sung poetic duel that was likely a fragment of a longer exchange. Omar described the way Hannah stood behind the row of dancing Muslim women, watching carefully, as if studying their moves. A Muslim man from among the row of male dancers asked her [in song]: “Hannah, is happiness on your right that you are looking at the shoulder of your elder?”56

Hannah sang back: “God has separated us by religion, but for happy occasions we come together.”

Preserved in this fragment of the exchange is Hannah’s asserting herself as a worthy participant, signifying that the traditions, as well as the occasions, were shared. To perform in a public duel, the poets must be adept at the rhythm and rhyme schemes, and must have the ability to improvise with wit and spontaneity, while adhering to the constraints of the form. The framework of the poetry duel and Hannah’s competence as a poetic rival—both in form and content—allowed her to challenge the various boundaries of difference (social hierarchy, gender, religion, village).57 “Indeed, speaking in public during an aḥwash, that is, singing solo, is an important act that isn’t given to just anyone. If in the Atlas the music or dance is collectively performed, the poet-singer’s performance is generally limited to only a few.”58 Hannah’s response that there was no religion in the aḥwash acknowledged that the man was not so much accusing her of copying as he was teasing her for her difference: as a Jew and as a resident of a different village, Hannah was an “outsider,” yet her very participation was an act of community and even bespeaks the stature she must have held. While poets improvise in Berber poetry duels, they also exploit known— and accepted—expressions. Performances like the one Omar recounted would thus have been a mix of improvisation and established phrasings, this combination of the familiar with an element of wit and surprise being an ideal audience pleaser. For example, I heard very similar phrasing to Hannah’s retort, “Religion is divided by my God, but for happy occasions we come together,” from several Muslim interlocutors over a wide geographic

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area, always recounted as a Jewish poet’s response to a variety of one-line provocations by a Muslim poet. This suggests the pervasiveness of such sung duels in the past, and also suggests that Hannah may not have invented her response. My final examples include two similarly widespread tropes among remembered duel fragments. The first is an apology to God for having been so enraptured with the aḥwash that both Jewish and Muslim participants forgot to stop for prayers, as explained by Kelthuma, a Muslim woman in Sor: “If there’s the first call to prayer, then the second call, and nobody gets up to pray, that’s it!”59 The second trope expresses the idea that, at least in the liminal space of the aḥwash, Jews and Muslims “are one/the same,” as recounted by an elder Muslim man in the town of Amizmiz: When the Muslims go to sing with Jews in the aḥwash, they sing: “May God pardon us.”

The rabbi sings [in response]: “The aḥwash makes us forget everything We also forgot to pray— We are all one/the same.”60

Similarly, Khalid, a Muslim man in Tifnout, who at forty-something was too young to have known Jews himself but as a youngster had listened to the elders talk about their former neighbors, reported the following excerpt: O you who are here gathering, be my witness that we are all one. It is time for praying and neither of us prayed, are we not one?

The assertions of these poets, one Jewish, one Muslim, that “we are all one/the same,” actually appear in other forms of Berber poetry and between Muslims of different tribes. As noted in the introduction of this chapter, an essential function of an aḥwash was to build community, so refrains of commonality were characteristic of the sung poetry at these often intertribal or inter-village occasions. The weddings that an aḥwash accompanied frequently united members of villages or tribes in conflict, thereby constituting the ultimate occasion to simultaneously celebrate unity while enacting difference. Conflict over scarce resources such as water and grazing rights was rife, yet these same harsh and precarious climatic and geographic conditions made interdependence between communities all the more crucial. Indeed, Schuyler asserts that the reason song texts accompanying an aḥwash “often glorify communal unity” is that “in a subsistence economy, cooperation between

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neighbouring families and villages is necessary.”61 Such reasoning applied to Jewish-Muslim interdependence as well. Katherine Hoffman writes that “a concern with maintaining security through interdependence between social groups and villages tends to be articulated explicitly”62 in tizrrarin, another genre of Berber poetry that also accompanies weddings uniting two tribes, as in the following example: We are one, me and you (plural), we share walls Our fields share boundaries and springs as one they are irrigated from our channels we water yours. 63

The opening line “We are one, me and you” is analogous to the line “We are all one” seen above in the Jewish-Muslim duels. Hoffman observes that this unity is not without qualifications, and notes the ambivalence about the interdependence, as suggested in the exchange with Hannah above. “For Anti-Atlas women, being ‘one’ means sharing the very stuff of life—land and water. But it also means sharing boundaries. ‘We are one’ not because we are friends, or because we are from the same lineage, village, or tribe, but because our plots ‘share walls.’”64 That is, acknowledgment of clear boundaries, literal or figurative, goes hand-in-hand with the interdependence. Thus, we can see how Jewish and Muslim poets may have adapted prevalent, already constituted Berber cultural forms that negotiated affiliation and separation and applied them to their interreligious interactions.65 In some of the “apology” tropes, the apology was explicitly voiced by Muslims for celebrating with Jews, rather than for not praying. These couplets reflect ambivalence, for example, Keltuma from Sor recounted how a Muslim poet sang: “We share this gathering with Jews, We ask God for forgiveness.”

Aberrahmane Lakhsassi reports a similar exchange between Muslim and Jew, in which the ambivalence is mixed the Muslim interlocutor’s admiration for the Jew’s retort: “In Duggana . . . they told us that during one of these sessions a female Muslim poet asked for divine forgiveness for celebrating in mixed company [Jews and Muslims], to which the male Jewish poet retorted that the Muslim woman could rest assured on this matter given that God had created for each community its own religion!”66 thus delineating the clear, if symbolic, boundaries allowing them to celebrate together.

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CONCLUSION: “WE ARE ONE/THE SAME,” AND . . . WE ARE DIFFERENT This chapter illuminates how Berber cultural traditions functioned in the past—and continue to function in present-day reminiscences—as forms of creative acknowledgment of both difference and affinity between Jews and Muslims. There is much to learn from these infrequently heard voices. Muslim and Jewish Berbers of the Atlas Mountains negotiated difference with poetry, humor, and irony, a process instructive in viewing difference as a source of creativity, learning, entertainment, and even celebration.

NOTES 1. Abdeljalil Didi, “Aḥwach, l’art traditionnel phare de Ouarzazate.” Sud Est Maroc, March 7, 2019. https​:/​/su​​destm​​aroc.​​com​/a​​hwach​​-art-​​tradi​​tionn​​el​-ph​​are​-o​​​ uarza​​zate/​. All translations are by the author of this chapter unless otherwise stated. Amazigh, sing. and Imazighen, pl. (of unconfirmed origin or meaning), are the official terms for the indigenous peoples of North Africa, as both noun and adjective. I also use the term “Berber” for the people and language as the more familiar word in English, without the negative connotations it holds in French (Fatima Sadiqi, “Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge,” in Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean, ed. Fatima Sadiqi (Routledge, 2012), 121n1). 2. The notable exceptions are Sigal Azaryahu, “The Process of Preservation and Change in the Music of the Jews of the Atlas in Israel: The Aḥwash Ceremony” (Hebrew). (Master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1999)—the only study of the aḥwash in Israel to my knowledge—and Mohamed Elmedlaoui and Sigal Azaryahu’s article, “The ‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony Shift from Morocco to Israel: An EthnoMusicological Approach,” Études et Documents Berbères 334 (2014): 171–186. 3. See, for example: Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco (Wayne State University Press, 1998), and Oren Kosansky, “All Dear unto God: Saints, Pilgrimage and Textual Practice in Jewish Morocco,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 2003). Louis Voinot attempted to present a comprehensive list of all the shared or overlapping shrines in Pèlerinages judéo-musulmans du Maroc (Paris: Larose, 1948). Mimuna, the jointly-celebrated Moroccan holiday following the Jewish holiday of Passover, also has been the subject of several articles, such as Harvey Goldberg’s “The Mimuna and the Minority Status of Moroccan Jews” (Ethnology 17, 1978: 75–87), and Joseph Chetrit’s “Judeo-Moroccan Mimuna Festival,” in Jewish Folklore and Traditions: A Multi-Cultural Encyclopedia, eds. Haya Bar-Itzhak Daphne Patai, Jennifer Patai Schneider (ABC-CLIO Publisher, 2012). 4. The aḥwash itself has been studied since colonial ethnography, but these studies ignored the interreligious aspects, focusing only on Muslim Berber performances.

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5. I discuss this in general terms, but for a technical comparative discussion of aḥwash performances in Morocco and in Israel in the 1990s, see Azaryahu, “Process of Preservation.” 6. Atlas Jews remaining in Morocco after having moved to urban centers have not continued the practice. Yet, gatherings in Morocco occasionally spark singing in Berber, such as at hillulot (saint pilgrimages; sing. hillula) and Passover celebrations, both of which attract significant numbers of Moroccan Jews from their various diasporas. 7. Tamazight is the umbrella term for all Berber dialects, as well as (somewhat confusingly) for the specific dialect of Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains and northeastern High Atlas Mountains. The term for a variety of collective dances in Tamazight-speaking regions is aḥiddus. On differences between the aḥwash and aḥiddus, see Miriam Rovsing Olsen, Chants et Danses de L’Atlas, Maroc (Paris: Cité de la Musique/Actes Sud, 1997), chapter 4. 8. Interview, Kiryat Shmona, Israel, Hebrew, 2011. Throughout this chapter, I use pseudonyms for my interlocutors, unless they requested that their names be used. All interviews were in person, conducted by me, unless otherwise stated. All Hebrew and French translations to English are mine. My conversations with Moroccans in Israel were mostly in Hebrew, peppered with a bit of Moroccan Arabic. For the translations from Tashelḥit, I had help from Mustapha Akhoullou, Nourdine Alhyane, Zahra Baaki, Aicha Idmessaoud, and Abderrahmane Lakhsassi. 9. Interview, Sor, Morocco, Tashelḥit, 2011. 10. Philip Schuyler, “Rwais and Aḥwash: Opposing Tendencies in Moroccan Berber Music and Society,” The World of Music 21 (1979): 66. 11. For descriptions and analysis of shared cultural elements in Jewish weddings in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, see Joseph Chetrit’s several chapters, as well as Yehuda Dari’s in the same volume, Ha-ḥatuna ha-yehudit ha-mesoratit be-Maroqo: Miqqedem Umiyyam VIII (University of Haifa, 2003). 12. Following this chief’s death, his younger brother took over the position until his immigration to Israel. There he lived in the desert development town of Yeruham, where he had menial jobs and, unfortunately, did not have the means to travel to any of the moshavim where the aḥwash tradition continued. This was reported to me in person by the chiefs’ grandnephew and grandson (now living in Israel), as well as by Muslim elders still living in Ihukaren. 13. Philip Schuyler, “Rwais and Aḥwash: Opposing Tendencies in Moroccan Berber Music and Society,” The World of Music 21 (1979): 65. 14. Abdeljalil Didi, “Aḥwach, entre tradition et mémoire collective,” Sud Est Maroc, March 14, 2019. https​:/​/su​​destm​​aroc.​​com​/a​​hwach​​-entr​​e​-tra​​ditio​​n​-et-​​memoi​​re​​ -co​​llect​​ive/. 15. Elmedlaoui and Azaryahu, “‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony,” 176. 16. “In a speech to the foreign volunteers of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] on November 13, 1948, David Ben-Gurion asserted Israel’s need to establish settlements along the borders as a defense from outside attacks, emphasizing that it would be best achieved ‘not through fortification by stone, but by an organic human wall that is working and productive’” (Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land [Stanford,

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CA: Stanford University Press, 2019], 278, her emphasis added). See also Avi Picard, “The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project: The Ship to Village Plan in the mid-1950s,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 1 (January, 2013): 30–33. 17. Avi Picard, “Reluctant Soldiers,” 29. Israel’s “development towns” are urban centers in remote areas with public housing projects (cheap, mass-produced and densely populated, concrete block-shaped buildings) and few economic, educational, or cultural opportunities. While the majority of Moroccans were sent to development towns, over eighty moshavim were specifically designated for Moroccan immigrants, some of which, to varying degrees and for a variety of reasons were able to overcome the early hardships and attain comfortable lifestyles. 18. Avi Picard, “The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project: The Ship to Village Plan in the mid-1950s,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 1 (January, 2013): 29–46, and Olim bi-meśurah: mediniyut Yisraʼel kelape ʻaliyatam shel Yehude Tsfon Afriḳah, 1951-1956 (Ben-Gurion University Press, Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2013). For in-depth accounts of Moroccan immigrations to Israel, see Yaron Tsur, “Carnival Fears: Moroccan Immigrants and the Ethnic Problem in the Young State of Israel,” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 18, no. 1 (1997): 73–103, and Ḳehilah ḳeruˤah: Yehude Maroḳo ṿe-haleʼumiyut, 1943-1954 [A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943-1954, Hebrew] (Am Oved, Tel-Aviv, 2002); and David Deri, Doron Galezer, and Ruth Yuval’s documentary, Sallah Po Ze Eretz Yisrael [The Ancestral Sin], directed by David Deri. D.D. Productions, 2017. 19. As Ben Gurion said in 1962: “The question is what kind of Jews they will be. Will they be the Jews we want them to be, or will they be like the Jews of Morocco the way they were?” cited in Gidi Weitz, “Newly Released Documents Show a Darker Side of Ben-Gurion,” April 24, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.haa​​retz.​​com/.​​premi​​um​-th​​ e​-dar​​ker​-s​​ide​-o​​f​-ben​​-gur​i​​on​-1.​​53541​​47. Israeli statespersons Abba Eban and Golda Meir made similarly denigrating statements. 20. Arie (Lova) Eliav, “The Absorption of One Million Immigrants by Israel in the 1950s,” Refugees 14, no. 6 (1994): 11–14. For example, Anita Shapira writes: “Moshavim that included people from different backgrounds never became cohesive, and in the end, some settlers left. Those who remained tried to bring in new settlers from their own families . . . the kinship unit became the glue of the new moshav” (Shapira, Israel: A History [Brandeis University Press, 2012], 235). 21. This homogeneity was “in regard to the countries and regions of origin, type of settlement in the previous environment (rural versus urban) . . . or religious commitments, etc.,” Moshe Shokeid (Minkovitz), “Old Conflicts in a New Environment: A Study of a Moroccan Atlas Mountains Community Transplanted to Israel,” The Jewish Journal of Sociology 9, no. 2 (1967): 207n8. 22. Indeed, many moshavim were “built on the ruins of Palestinian villages to prevent the original inhabitants from coming back” (Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017], 65). Two such “Atlas Mountain” moshavim are Dovev, near the Lebanese border, built on the lands of the Palestinian village of [Bi’ram, and Tirosh, near the pre-1967 border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, built on the land of the Palestinian village

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of ‘Ajjur (Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 [Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992], 207). For more on returns, and fears of returns of, Palestinians to their villages, see Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948 (Indiana University Press, 2015), 78; and Laible Hoffmitz, The Other Side of Israel (Tel Aviv: Nateev, Printing & Publishing, 1978), 169. 23. See, for example, Shapira, Israel, 234. Even today, many of the moshavim have little to no bus service (Aderet and Tirosh, respectively, for example), although Israel has an extensive and well-developed bus system. 24. Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land, 115. 25. Arie “Lova” Eliav, a Labor leader in charge of settling immigrants in the Negev (desert) in the mid-1950s, remembered that “[t]here was nothing there . . . thorns and arid land. And they [the Moroccan immigrants] did not want to get off [the truck], and for good reason.” So, the driver would raise the truck bed on a slant “and they were poured to the ground” (Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land, 117, citing Roger Alpher’s interview with Eliav in the early 1980s). The moshav was ˤOtzem, the year 1955. Its residents came largely from the High Atlas Mountain village of Ayt Bugmaz (Hoffmitz, Other Side, 171). 26. Picard, “Reluctant Soldiers,” 41. 27. For recent scholarship on moshavim in the immigration of other Middle Eastern and North African groups, see Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, and Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land. 28. Telling of the long-term effects of discrimination in Israel is the comparatively high level of achievement in all aspects of society of Moroccan Jews in France (Daniel Ben Simon, The Immigrant: From Morocco to Israel [Kotarim International Publishing, Ltd., 2018], 7–8). This gap appears even between sibling pairs, one of whom went to Israel and one to France (Michael Inbar and Chaim Adler, Ethnic Integration in Israel: A Comparative Case Study of Moroccan Brothers Who Settled in France and in Israel [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977]). 29. Weingrod, Alex and André Levy. “Paradoxes of Homecoming: The Jews and their Diasporas,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2006): 695. 30. In Hebrew, “Shleuḥ” is sometimes confused or conflated with the slang “schlok,” from Yiddish for a sloppy person or dresser. “Shleuḥ” is also considered pejorative in Morocco. For an in-depth exploration of the etymology of “Shleuḥ” (or “Chleuḥ”) see Rachid Agrour, “A Contribution to the Study of an Itinerant Word: Chleuh,” Cahiers d’études africaines 208, no. 4 (2012): 767–811. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cai​​rn​ -in​​t​.inf​​o​/rev​​ue​-ca​​hiers​​-d​-et​​udes-​​afric​​aines​​-2012​​​-4​-pa​​ge​-76​​7​.htm​. I do not engage with the problematic question of whether Jews were “ethnically” Berber (see Daniel Schroeter, “On the Origins and Identity of North African Jews,” in North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, eds. Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause [Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007], for a comprehensive discussion of the scholarship on this issue), but what is true is that Jews were immersed in Berber/Amazigh culture for generations, if not millennia.

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31. Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli and Yigal Nizri. “‘My Heart is in the Maghrib’: Aspects of Cultural Revival of the Moroccan Diaspora in Israel.” Hespéris Tamuda 51, no. 3 (2016), 177–178. 32. For an in-depth discussion on Atlas Jews’ use of languages, see Joseph Chetrit, Diglossie, Hybridation et Diversité Intra-Linguistique: Études SocioPragmatiques Sur les Langues Juives, le Judéo-Arabe et le Judéo-Berbère (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), especially chapter 5, and Sarah Levin, “Narrative Remembrance: Close Encounters Between Muslims and Jews in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley), chapter 2. During the time period that corresponds to my interlocutors’ memories—that is, the late 1940s to early 1960s—Moroccan Arabic and Berber were the two main spoken languages in the Atlas. 33. However, some vocabulary has been transmitted, and several writers who immigrated at a young age or are second-generation in Israel include Berber terms in literary writings (for example, Sami Shalom Chetrit in poetry; Uziel Hazan in novels) or in academic texts (for example, Meir Amor). 34. Ouaknine-Yekutieli and Nizri, “‘My Heart is in the Maghrib’,” 171. 35. Haviva Pedaya, “Ha-ˤir ke-text ve-ha-shulayim ke-qol—ha-hadara min hasefer ve-ha-nituv el ha-sfar,” in Where, Here: Language, Identity, Place, eds. Israel Katz, Zeev Degani, and Tamar Gross (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 2008), 136. 36. Elmedlaoui and Azaryahu, “‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony,” 180. 37. Also, a few key participants joined regularly from outside the moshavim (such as David Ben Barukh, a native of the Tifnout region who lived in Petah Tikvah, Israel). 38. Jewish women in Taznakht were so renowned for their dancing talents that they were often called upon to perform before Berber and colonial French authorities (personal recollections from Jewish and Muslim interlocutors). 39. That summer I had been conducting research for the exhibitions and book featuring the photographs of Elias Harrus of Jews of the Atlas and Sahara from the 1940s to the 1960s, and had found that one of Aderet’s residents—in fact, the brother of the father of the groom who hosted this particular aḥwash—had been photographed by Harrus fifty years earlier (Sarah Harel Hoshen, ed., Juifs parmi les Berbères: Photographies d’Elias Harrus [Paris: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, 1999], 27). 40. Elmedlaoui and Azaryahu, “‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony,” 173. 41. Ouaknine-Yekutieli and Nizri, “‘My Heart is in the Maghrib’” and Pedaya, “Ha-ˤir ke-text.” 42. Schuyler, “Rwais and Aḥwash,” 73. 43. Abdeljalil Didi, “Aḥwach, l’art traditionnel.” 44. Aomar Boum, “Dancing for the Moroccan State: Berber Folkdances and the Production of National Hybridity.” In North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, eds. Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 231. 45. Ibid., 237.

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46. The 2019 event was featured in the online Morocco Jewish Times: Simo Benbachir, “700 Artists to Perform at the Ahouach Festival In Ouarzazate,” June 26, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mor​​occoj​​ewish​​times​​.com/​​en​/20​​19​/06​​/26​/7​​00​-ar​​tists​​-to​-p​​erfor​​m​ -at-​​the​-a​​houac​​h​-fes​​​tival​​-in​-o​​uarza​​zate/​. 47. Boum, “Dancing for the Moroccan State,” 216. 48. There is significant scholarship on this topic; see, for example, Katherine Hoffman, We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco (Blackwell Wiley Publishers, 2008), particularly the introduction; Bruce MaddyWeitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); and Sadiqi, “Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge.” 49. Also called Īd el Kabir (the Great Holiday) in Morocco, it is one of the two largest holidays in the Islamic year, celebrating Abraham’s willingness to obey God to the point of sacrificing his son (and God sending Abraham a lamb to sacrifice instead). 50. Here one sees the overlay of political and nationalist identities onto what were viewed by my interlocutors as solely religious identities prior to the dominance of Jewish and Arab nationalisms. 51. To my knowledge the only published poetic exchanges between Jews and Muslims other than mine (Levin “Wit, Ruse, Rivalry” and “Narrative Remembrance”) are in Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, “Pourquoi la langue première des juifs berbères n’est pas Amazighe?” in Le Maroc aujourd’hui, ed. Paola Gandolfi (Bologna, 2008)— where, in addition to citing from my article, he mentions two other song excerpts recorded from a Jewish informant by Joseph Chetrit, as well as one from a Muslim informant from his joint fieldwork with Daniel Schroeter and Chetrit, 1999–2001— and Norman Stillman, The Language and Culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco: An Ethnolinguistic Study (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988), and Norman and Yedida Stillman, “The Art of a Moroccan Folk Poetess,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 128, no. 1 (1978): 65–89. Elmedlaoui and Azaryahu, “‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony,” cite the examples in Levin, “Wit, Ruse, Rivalry,” and Lakhsassi, “Pourquoi la langue.” 52. Mohamed Elmedlaoui, personal communication, 2012. 53. Azaryahu, “Process of Preservation,” 18. 54. Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, personal communication, 1999. 55. Village elders reasoned that this was probably due to the dense trees and foliage along the myriad streams of Amssouzert that offered cover for bandits. Jewish men as traders or craftsmen typically had more goods or money when traveling than did Muslim men, and thus were more attractive targets for such bandits. This echoed the refrain I heard often that Jews typically lived in “safe” areas, near centers of authority and away from “lawless” areas, and then, ironically, being settled in “dangerous” areas in Israel. 56. Shoulder movements are the essence of women’s dance in the aḥwash. 57. What Deborah Kapchan writes of the function of the rural Moroccan marketplace applies to the aḥwash as “festive ‘time out of time’” in which “relations of

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social hierarchy are equalized if not actually inverted” (Deborah Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996], 42, 47). 58. Rovsing Olsen, Chants et Danses, 28–29. 59. Observant Jews pray three times daily; observant Muslims pray five times. 60. The Berber word “yan” literally means “one,” but my research assistants typically translated it in the duels as “the same.” Perhaps the sense is “one and the same.” 61. Schuyler, “Rwais and Aḥwash,” 72. 62. Katherine Hoffman, “Generational Change in Berber Women’s Song of the Anti-Atlas Mountains, Morocco,” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 33 (2002): 517. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 519. 65. Of course, given how long Jews had been living in the Atlas, it is also possible that it was the other way around: that is, perhaps the verbal traditions in the duels started as interreligious ones and then were applied to intertribal relations. As is the nature of oral traditions, determining origins is not only impossible, but futile. 66. Lakhsassi, “Pourquoi la langue.”

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Weingrod, Alex and André Levy. “Paradoxes of Homecoming: The Jews and their Diasporas,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2006): 691–716. Weitz, Gidi. “Newly Released Documents Show a Darker Side of Ben-Gurion,” April 24, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.haa​​retz.​​com/.​​premi​​um​-th​​e​-dar​​ker​-s​​ide​-o​​f​-ben​​-gur​i​​on​ -1.​​53541​​47. Yiftachel, Oren, and Erez Tzfadiya. Between Periphery and ‘Third Space’: Identity of Mizrahim in Israel’s Development Towns.” In Israelis in Conflict: Hegemonies, Identities, and Challenges, edited by Adriana Kemp, David Newman, Uri Ram, and Oren Yiftachel, 203–235. Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Zerubavel, Yael. Desert in the Promised Land, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Section 3

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AND HALAKHIC DEVELOPMENTS

Chapter 10

Liturgy An Overlooked Space in the Moroccan Jewish Musical Map Edwin Seroussi

Do research interests mirror political and social concerns? This is a legitimate question that I would like to delve into by questioning why studies of the Moroccan Jewish liturgical practices remain strikingly underrepresented in the musicological literature in comparison to their other musical repertoires.1 As elsewhere in the Lands of Islam, Jews in Morocco shared with their Muslim compatriots diverse repertoires at various registers of musical production developing what Glasser called a “musical intimacy.”2 This sharing was evident in Moroccan urban hubs where Jewish musicians played a prominent role in the chain of music supply on behalf of their society’s majority, sharing with their Muslim coreligionists repertoires and performing spaces.3 At the same time, Moroccan Jews have also maintained discrete musical practices within their private spaces, namely their homes and synagogues. The boundaries between the external and the intra-communitarian performative spaces were, to be sure, porous throughout history and most especially in the modern period. Yet, certain areas of the private Jewish spaces of musical performance in Morocco remained remarkably immune to such interdenominational sonic permeability.* Scholars, including the present writer, have been attracted to the first part of the equation, namely to those shared spaces where Jewish musicians played an important role within the Muslim society. They have interpreted the particular social status of Jewish musicians under Islam either from a harmonicist perspective that celebrates sharing4 or from a rejectionist approach that emphasizes separation, marginalization, and even debasement of Jewish musicians.5 A general remark by Gottreich and Schroeter in their introduction to a volume of studies on Jewish culture and society in North Africa fairly 245

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summarizes these conflicting perceptions of the Judeo-Muslim encounter in Morocco and the exceptionalism of music as a field of exclusive positive sharing: Close cultural affinities and convivial personal relations existed between Muslims and Jews simultaneously with the recognition of religious limits and even alongside the collective disdain for the other, a mutual ambivalence that remained a constant theme throughout the history of the Maghrib and that cannot be whitewashed or willed away. Yet the contributions of Jews to the Maghribi musical tradition have endured, both in the Maghrib and in the diaspora communities where North African Jews continue to produce music in the Maghribi style. The incontestable Jewish element in this profoundly North African musical tradition stakes perhaps the strongest claim in Muslims’ collective memory of Jews.6

Lately, scholars have suggested more nuanced interpretative approaches to this musical encounter, stressing paradoxes deriving from continuously shifting power relations. Glasser pertinently proposed that “understanding Jewish–Muslim musical relations requires attention not only to the broader field of Muslim–Jewish interaction but to questions of musical hierarchy as well, both at the level of the relations of musical production and at the level of genre.”7 We may add to this observation that hierarchies of musical genre have made inroads into music scholarship. As an indirect or perhaps unintended corollary of this process, the prestige of scholarship authority affected musical production when scholars and their institutions promoted in their writings, teaching and academic events one space of Moroccan Jewish musical activity at the expense of another. To understand how this hierarchy of musical genres emerged a brief survey of Moroccan Jewish soundscapes is called for. Jews in Morocco commanded, and still command in their diasporas of Israel, France, Quebec, New York, or Caracas a variety of musical repertories. The most prestigious among these layers is the “classical” music of Morocco, that is, Al-Ala, a.k.a. Moroccan Andalusian music. This repertoire has accumulated in the course of the modern era a noteworthy status through the agency of colonial proxies and the native elite, a prestige that the post-colonial Moroccan national state has eventually harvested for its own purposes. Al-Ala is performed in Morocco not only on state-sponsored occasions and contexts but also in special festivals, religious gatherings and international academic conferences.8 Expert Jewish performers of this repertoire were and still are capable of rendering sections of Al-Ala in Arabic. However, the Hebrew adaptations of this venerable repertoire represent the lion share of their performances that take place in synagogues, family festivities, and pilgrimages to the mausoleums

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of tzaddikim. Even when Moroccan Jewish musicians are occasionally invited to perform in Morocco for a Muslim public, the Hebrew repertoire prevails. Catapulting this prestigious repertoire of “art music” to promote the contemporary interests of Moroccan-Jewish relations or even encourage Moroccan-Israeli relations after the 1993 Oslo Accords is patent in the activities of cultural organizations and in the production of public events. For example, the first conference of the Centre de Recherche sur le Judaïsme Marocain, a French-based association established by the late Robert Assaraf (1932–2018), a Moroccan-Jewish businessman and researcher who served as King Hassan II’s counselor, was held in Marrakech and Paris in 1995. Its main title was “The relationships between Jews and Muslims in Morocco.” The topic of the session in Marrakech was “Andalusian music as a common heritage of Jews and Muslims.” Later on, in 2003, personalities of the cultural sector in Morocco established the Festival des Andalousie Atlantiques Essaouira as a platform for the joint performance of Andalusian music by Muslims and Jews. In Israel, the Israel Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod has intermittently invited Moroccan Muslim performers to appear in its concert series. This shared Andalusian musical space, in all its modern permutations, is the one that has been and still is hailed with superlatives by political interests as well as by the scholarly community.9 However, Al Ala is not the only genre facilitating this politically prized Judeo-Muslim interaction. Moroccan Jewish musicians also commanded lighter urban genres in vernacular Arabic, most prominently malhun and Algerian Cha‘bi songs (i.e., derivate from the Andalusian traditions of that country, usually under the label of djiri) in their traditional and modernized formats.10 Even in the more remote areas of the inner southern lands of Morocco, one finds Jewish performers of Amazigh genres such as ahwash.11 This sharing of musical repertoires encompass male and, to a lesser degree, female ones as well. Moreover, as modern Moroccans, Jews of Morocco were also open to other styles of Arabic music that entered the local scene throughout the first half of the twentieth century, such as popular Tunisian songs or the Egyptian ughaniyyah. The chanson Franco-Arabe was another sphere of close Judeo-Muslim contact in Morocco. Jewish musicians were, especially after the establishment of the French protectorate and the accelerated urbanization of the Jewish population of Morocco, at the forefront in the promotion of some of these genres, a trend that continued (for a very short period) in the early years of independence.12 Put differently, Jews in Morocco were not a minority of passive recipients of the music of the majority but active agents of musical production and distribution supplying music for the Muslim majority and sharing with it musical spaces.

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Following the logic of this hierarchal scale of music genres that favors those that reflect Jewish integration in Morocco, research of Moroccan Jewish religious music has been largely, if not exclusively, dominated by the singing of paraliturgical Hebrew (and at times Judeo-Arabic and Aramaic) poetry.13 This poetry is set to Andalusian musical genres, not only to selections of Al-Ala, but also, as we have already noticed those from Western Algerian urban music called djiri or ghrnati from Oudja, Tlemcen and Wahran. Among these paraliturgical practices, the repertoire of the early morning winter vigils called bakkashot received particular attention in research as well as, as already observed, in the public projection of Moroccan Jewish music in Israel and international festivals. This process was mediated by the Israel orchestras specializing in Andalusian music or by projects based on the academia, such as the Tzfon-Ma‛arav Ensemble affiliated with the University of Haifa or the Piyut Ensemble associated with the Ben Zvi Institute.14 The allure of the bakkashot repertoire is clearly due to its deep historical connections to the prestigious Andalusian repertoire and thus its embedment in a shared Muslim-Jewish musical experience in Morocco. The emphasis of the community members on the prestige of this repertoire set the agenda of the extensive research on the music of the Moroccan Jews.15 In other words, the paraliturgical Hebrew song set to Andalusian music is emblematic of the deeper layer of the Jewish musical embedment in Moroccan society through its most valued repertoire, Al-Ala.16 No surprise then that this repertoire is also the easiest one to deploy as a signifier of late-day Jewish-Muslim convivencia in Morocco. This shared musical space is also projected from the present into the past, as an heir to the idealized “golden age” of Judeo-Islamic (and Christian) life in medieval Al-Andalus.17 It is clear then, why the performance of the liturgy, that daily, weekly, and yearly spiritual diet that is the duty of any observant adult male Jew, was consigned to the second tier of Moroccan Jewish music research. Although liturgical issues emerged during early fieldwork among Moroccan Jews in Israel, it was always a peripheral topic, and mostly focused on the slippage of paraliturgical music into the liturgy. Yet, the historical awareness of few scholars led them since the mid-1960s to the intermittent recording of complete Moroccan Jewish liturgical services in Israel. Carried out by researchers associated with and sponsored by the Jewish Music Research Centre and the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, these precious recorded documents are nowadays mostly located at the Sound Archives of the National Library of Israel. Conversations about liturgical issues, not only services, were included in some of these recordings. These priceless oral sources return now to our analytical table, as an indispensable tool for the study of what turns out to be a most significant component of the Moroccan Jewish musical experience. In

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spite of its intra-Jewish context, liturgical music is also part of the musical negotiation with the Muslim space that lies outside the very intimate walls of the Mellaḥ’s synagogue (Ṣla in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic) and batei midrash (study halls). To be sure, the span of Moroccan Jewish liturgy documentation and study has wider implications for any serious ethnomusicological and historical study of the subject. A short review of extant sources is thus a necessary introduction to the subject. PREVIOUS STUDIES AND DOCUMENTATION OF MOROCCAN JEWISH LITURGY As hinted above, recorded and printed sources of Moroccan Jewish liturgical practices, some of them of extreme historical value, are extant. Of unique importance, in spite of its many shortcomings, is Abraham Z. Idelsohn’s volume 5 of his Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies.18 Idelsohn based his anthology on two informants from Fez and Essaouira (Mogador at that time), covering most of the entire liturgical year cycle. The uniqueness of this testimony is the degree to which simple recitatives and melodic formulae account for the vast majority of the repertoire. Put differently, Idelsohn’s testimony presents a rather “unmusical” liturgy, from the Andalusian musical perspective. On the other hand, his transcriptions of these melodic materials reveal a remarkable continuity in some basic patterns of liturgical music between what he heard around 1910 from displaced Moroccans in Ottoman Jerusalem and what can be heard in Israel a century later from the descendants of a new generation of relocated Moroccan Jews. Idelsohn’s volume remained unique for almost half a century, until Isaac Levy renewed the documentation (even if haphazard and fragmentary) of Moroccan Jewish liturgy in his monumental ten-volume anthology of Sephardic liturgical music.19 He included transcriptions of melodies collected from various Moroccan cantors living in Israel.20 Descendants of Moroccan Jews, some of whom also wrote academic theses, carried out field recordings and publications in Canada, the United States, and Israel since the 1970s. Classical musician Abitbol-Mayost transcribed from his memory the musical traditions of his family from Fez, many years after he left Morocco.21 Dina Sabbah carried out pioneer fieldwork among Moroccan Jewish immigrants to Israel, at a time when memory of the old country was still very vivid.22 Tasat focused on Tangier, carrying out his work among the Moroccan Jewish enclave in Argentina whose membership is heavily based on the northern tip of Morocco.23 Seroussi described the main features of Jewish liturgical music in general by using the Moroccan tradition as a case

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study.24 Most recently, Thomas’s comprehensive work delved into a detailed analysis of the liturgical performances in one Moroccan synagogue, Netivot Israel in Brooklyn, New York while Paloma Elbaz has offered alternative readings of Jewish liturgical practices in Tangier from the perspective of gender studies.25 In the field of sound documentation a notable enterprise, still unexplored by scholars to this day, is the circa 1960 recording of the entire liturgical year cycle by cantor Haim HaCohen from Tangier. Initiated and financed by the businessman Abraham Pinto, the collection, titled Seder tefillot kol hashanah ‘im pizmonim, piyyutim ve-kinot noʿam ke-minhag kehillot ha-kodesh Tánger ve-Tetuán, comprises 25-inch tapes (about twelve hours of sound). Haim HaCohen was cantor of the ‛Etz Haim Synagogue (aka Esnoga R. Mordecai Bengio) in Tangier.26 In addition Pinto also recorded in 1960 two 7-inch tapes of unedited recordings by the renowned payytan R. David Buzaglo (c. 1903–1975), many of which are liturgical pieces, a testimony that this towering figure of Andalusian Hebrew music was a no less distinguished synagogue cantor.27 Although HaCohen’s recordings represent the northern Judeo-Spanish-speaking Moroccan traditions, they confirm the impact of this minhag (local custom) on the practices of Casablanca, the main colonial hub where a pan-Moroccan liturgical style crystallized.28 Commercial enterprises also contributed greatly to the documentation of the Moroccan Jewish liturgy. The great singer and cantor Samy Elmaghribi, just to mention one notable example, recorded liturgical music quite extensively. This important aspect of his oeuvre has been obscured by his stardom in the field of Arabic popular music and Andalusian music in Hebrew. Elmaghribi recorded for the Azoulay Brothers label seven LPs in a series titled Va-ani tefillati, out of which five are dedicated to the Sabbath and High Holidays liturgies. Elmaghribi was not only a renowned cantor, but also a teacher whose lore remains in the practices of the generation of Moroccan cantors that followed him in Canada and Israel. Renanot, the Institute of Jewish Music in Jerusalem, issued several productions of Moroccan liturgy at the initiative of its director, Ezra Barnea. These publications, based on selections from the institute’s extensive unpublished archive, were conceived as materials for the instruction of young cantors of Moroccan origin. Thus, they have acquired a canonizing status within the ecology of Moroccan Jewish liturgy in Israel. Renanot published a set of the complete “musicalized” sections (for this concept see below) of the High Holidays liturgy according to the mainstream Moroccan minhag with a group of cantors, most of them raised and educated in Morocco, led by the late Isaac Revah (from Rabat and later a teacher in Jerusalem, d. 1999) titled ‘Et Sha‘are ratzon. It also issued recordings of daily services conducted by Revah and the entire Sabbath liturgy recorded by members of the new

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generation of Israeli Moroccan cantors, Maimon “Meny” Cohen and Shimon Iluz under the title of Hanitzanim nir’u ba-aretz. Other initiatives such as the Center for Andalusian Culture and the Piyyut in Israel based in Ashdod, south of Tel Aviv contribute to the institutional transmission of uniform Moroccan liturgical practices. The Institute of Hazzanut functioning within this Center (that also houses the Israel Andalusian Orchestra) offers a two-year curriculum of training in scriptural cantillation, prayer chanting and piyyut. A notable feature of this school is that candidates do not need to be of Moroccan pedigree to register. Moreover, the school also offers training in the Eastern (“Jerusalemite-Sephardic”) maqam tradition, contributing therefore to the blurring of the imaginary sonic boundaries that had maintained the Moroccan liturgical traditions discrete. Finally, the new era of social media has created in the last decade an additional space for the transmission and documentation of music of the Moroccan Jewish liturgy.29 For example, the WhatsApp group of the Moʿetzet ha-piyyut ha-maroka’i (The Moroccan Piyyut Council) offers a stream of information about liturgical practices, repertoires, and performers. Characteristic of this medium is the real-time dissemination of discourses about origins, genealogies, and conceptualizations of liturgical music. Among the various examples of such interactions, we find the rapidly growing use of maqam terminology derived from Middle Eastern music traditions applied to the Moroccan liturgy. This terminology appears in the disguise of the aforementioned “Jerusalemite-Sephardic” liturgical tradition whose dominant, even hegemonic, status in Sephardic synagogues in Israel cast a big shadow over the potential continuity of the Moroccan liturgy in Israel. In these conversations the sharqi concept of maqam and its accompanying weltanschauung is indiscriminately extended to the ṭubu‘ (musical modes) of the Moroccan Andalusian music. BASICS OF MOROCCAN JEWISH LITURGY: ANALYSIS OF A SERVICE In spite of the documentation described above, the Moroccan Jewish worship, namely daily, weekly, and holiday prayers, has hardly been analyzed contextually. Unlike the prestigious paraliturgical piyyut, liturgical repertoires mark sonic difference between Jews and Muslims in Morocco. They comprise an intimate space of Jewish sound that links the Moroccan Jewry not so much to its immediate Muslim neighbors but rather to the diasporic Jewish commonwealth of Sephardic and Oriental pedigree and, to a certain measure, to modern colonial contexts, mostly French-Jewish. Intimacy should be taken literally too. Synagogues in Morocco were traditionally

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very small physical spaces, sometimes serving only an extended family. These reduced spaces enhanced the sense of sonic intimacy and local identity. Yet, this intimate musical space of the Moroccan Jews still bears some traces of the non-Jewish surrounding, as we shall see. It is not deprived of “musical Andalucianisms” at different levels, some at the level of voice production only, others much deeper that comprise, in my opinion, a modern development. There are of course aesthetic reasons too for the lack of emphasis on the liturgical repertoires of the Moroccan Jews among the contemporary agents of musical production and music scholars. This music is highly functional; it is generated by the structures and contents of sacred texts whose ceremonial performance and clear-cut pronunciation precedes musical concerns. These texts are an assortment of very diverse sources and registers: biblical and oral law passages, post-biblical prayers in poetic prose and poems (piyyutim) spanning almost a millennium of literary history. This textual mixture creates a sonic tapestry that moves between fast non-metered mumbling on a single recitation tone to clear-cut florid melodies with fixed meter with various permutations of melodic and rhythmic formations in-between these two extremes. Performances include a prayer leader (sheliaḥ tzibbur) and one or more assistants, Torah readers, soloists from the congregation and the whole congregation as a choir or even a separate children’s choir. Solo pieces alternate with choral ones, including call and response sections as well as songs interspersing stanzas performed by soloists with refrains sung by the public. Analyzing synagogue services in detailed manner is the only method with the potential to unravel the mechanisms generating Moroccan Jewish liturgical performances. The following analysis of a weekly evening prayer shows some analytical parameters designed to interpret the structure and aesthetics of these liturgical performances as well as the social mechanisms that generate them. I recorded this service in Tiberias on February 4, 1981, the eve of the New Moon (‛Erev Rosh Ḥodesh) of the month of Adar Alef, 5741.30 By extrapolating the deep structure of this performance as well as its surface idiosyncrasies one is able to start understanding how each discrete liturgical performance relates to widespread communitarian practices. On the idiosyncratic end of this service, it is important to note that the leading cantor, Hanania Waqnin, was an expert payytan. He headed in Tiberias an association called Ḥevrat David Hamelekh dedicated to the maintenance of the tradition of Moroccan bakkashot in the city. Thus, his above average musical capabilities in comparison to other Moroccan shliḥei tzibbur (prayer leaders, lit. “delegate of the congregation”) finds expression in this performance. Yet, in spite of Waqnin’s musicality, this recorded service, with its shifting rhythms, is archetypal of the daily and weekly liturgical practices of

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Moroccan Jews as these are practiced with exemplary consistency in Israel to this day. The timing indications at the beginning of each section in the analytical chart below provide a reference as to the proportions of each section within the whole service. After commenting on the content of this service, we shall conclude with some general observations regarding the crystallization of the performing style that it typifies and how this performance practice developed in Morocco and was transplanted to Israel. Opening Section (Total Duration 8:22) 0:00 “Leshem yiḥud,” is a short kabbalistic prayer originating in the circles of the mystics of Safed. It proclaims the intention of performing the mitzvah, in this case the evening service “that Jacob our father instituted,” with the goal of stimulating the union of the spheres or emanations of the Godhead. In spite of opinions against its recitation, Moroccan Jews punctually perform it, an indication of the noticeable kabbalistic influences of their liturgical practices.31 The leader of the service (or of its opening section, as in this case) usually says it in a whispering recitation, almost like an incantation, around one tone and in a very fast tempo in a rather soft dynamic. 0:18 Barekhi nafshi et Adonay (Psalm 104) is the special Psalm for the eve of the New Moon according to the Sephardi liturgical usage. Verse 19 of this psalm, “He made the moon to mark the seasons,” is the justification for its inclusion in this service. The whole congregation sings it in unison with a two-part psalmodic formula, that is, a musical phrase consisting of two halves is repeated with each verse, its length depending on the number of syllables of each verse. There is a steady pulse and rhythm is determined by the difference between short and long notes corresponding to accented and unaccented syllables.32 The rather slow tempo gradually accelerates (2:04, 3:19). This melodic and rhythmic formula is identical to the one used to sing the special psalms that open the eve service of each Holiday according to the Sephardic tradition. By performing this psalm with this musical technique, the Moroccan community aligns itself with the general pan-Sephardic practice although the specificity of its intonation marks it as unequivocally Moroccan. 5:09 Adonay tzeva’ot ‛immanu (Psalm 46, 8; 84, 13; 20, 10). These three psalm verses comprise the opening formula of the daily evening prayer. They are performed with the same psalmodic formula as the previous psalm. 5:55 Half qaddish, performed by the cantor. The first part of this prayer is sung to the melody of the piyyut Lindodkha, yedid naʿalah by Israel Najara. This piyyut is included in the compendium Shir Yedidut, in the chapter corresponding to the Sabbath of the parashat Vayeḥi in the tbaʿ (mode) Rasd dhil. This melody is a favorite one among Moroccan Jews and is applicable

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to other piyyutim as well as sections of the Sabbath and holidays’ services. At 6:54 the public recites the congregational response Yehe shemeh raba, each individual with his own tempo and rhythm, thus creating a loud “sonic cloud.” The continuation of this qaddish by the cantor is performed in the customary fast non-metric recitative formula used daily, as are the other qaddishim below. 7:30 Ve-hu raḥum (Psalm 78, 38; Psalm 20, 10). Two psalm verses that engulf the qaddish with the previous set of psalm verses. The first of these two verses, is a long one and is sung to the melody of the previous qaddish, the one belonging to the piyyut “Lindodkha,” by the entire congregation, while the second verse, “Adonay hoshi‛ah,” is sung by the cantor in a melismatic melody without clear beat that functions as a transition to the next section. Core of the Service (Total Duration: 9:50) 08:22 Barekhu et Adonay hamevorakh. The call to public prayer sung by the cantor alone in slow tempo, without clear beat or meter. The entire congregation responds with a clearer beat, still without meter. The cantor then repeats the response solo, leading without any interruption to the next blessing. 08:42 Birkat ha-ma‛ariv ‘aravim, first blessing before Shemaʿ. Fast recitation of the cantor in loud voice, with special stress on the key words ma‛ariv ‛aravim. The phases Umsader et hakokhavim, U-mavdil bein yom u-bein layla Adonay tzeva’ot shemo and the blessing formula itself (Barukh Atta Adonay . . .) are intoned by the entire congregation with a special melodic formula spanning a perfect fourth, in a call and response pattern with the cantor repeating the same words following the congregational response. This is a distinctive liturgical practice of many Moroccan Jews in Israel probably originating in the circles of the Ecole Normale Hébraïque of Casablanca since the early 1950s.33 09:32 Ahavat ‘olam, second blessing before Shemaʿ. The congregation intones the phrase U-bahem nehege yomam valayla in responsorial manner with the same pattern as the repeated words by the congregation in the previous blessing. 10:00 Shemaʿ Yisrael, a dense “sonic cloud” that overlaps with the last words of the previous blessing ohev ‛ammo Yisrael that are unheard due to the congregational irruption of the Shemaʿ prayer. The cantor takes the lead back from the congregation on “ve-ahavta” singing the text loudly according to the cantillation signs. A much-elaborated ornamented performance of the ṭa‛am, (Masoretic accent) shnei gereshin, is characteristic of the Moroccan cantillation system and is emphasized by the cantor by a slowing of the tempo. In the background, the congregation whispers the prayer parallel to the cantor.

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12:36 Adonay elohekhem/Emet ve-emunah, last two words of Shemaʿ are repeated by the cantor in a melismatic solo leading directly into the next prayer, the first blessing after Shemaʿ that is performed by a second cantor in fast tempo recitation within a narrow tonal range. 13:07 Ra’u banim, a section of Emet ve-emunah, is sung mostly by the children of the congregation as a choir with the rhythmic melody of the Arab song Ya um al-‘abaya (‫ )يا أم العباية‬that was made famous in a Cairophone 78rpm recording by the singer and movie actress of Syrian-Lebanese origin Siham (or Seham) Refki (1922–2007). The song is attributed to the Syrian composer Abdel Ghani al-Sheikh (1900–1970). However, it belongs to a genre of popular songs that draws heavily from folk styles from the Greater Syria region. It is widespread in Baghdad too, and even appears, by mistake, in the song catalogue of the Iraqi-Jewish musicians, the Al-Kuweity brothers, Daud and Salaḥ. The section Mi kamokha (14:10) is also sung to the same melody by a child soloist. This Arab song is obviously a latecomer to the Moroccan Jewish repertoire. It may have entered the Jewish repertoire through a para-liturgical piyyut, after its Egyptian commercial recording.34 14:35 Malkhutkha, the second cantor returns to a fast recitation mode for the ending part of Emet ve-emunah. At 14:45 the words U-ge’alo mi-yad ḥazaq mimenu are sung in a congregational response that is repeated by the cantor in the same manner as in the repeated words endowed with special kavvanot in the first and second blessings before Shemaʿ. 14:52 Hashkivenu, the second blessing after Shemaʿ is sung to the tune of the Eastern Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish song La rosa enflorece (aka “Los bilbilicos cantan”) by the children and the congregation up to ve-hagen ba‛adenu (15:46). At this point, the cantor takes over in a fast recitation that includes the final blessing (Shomer et ‛ammo Yisrael laʿad) that leads into next section. The use of the Judeo-Spanish tune is most probably a recent musical acquisition that took place in Israel. The song was made famous by its recording by the popular singer Yehoram Gaon, whose family is of Eastern Sephardi origin. It is also widely sung, following a Jerusalemite custom, with the text of Tzur mishello akhalnu, a piyyut for the Grace of the Meal. I have heard the tune of another famous song from Gaon’s repertoire, “Morenica” (“Sheḥarḥoret” in its Hebrew version also by Gaon), in Moroccan synagogues in Israel. 16:06 Yirʿu ‛eineinu, a special third blessing after the Shemaʿ in the evening service. Rabbinical authorities contest its inclusion in the liturgy. Most, but not all, Sephardim include it in their services. Moroccans have a special version of it. The entire congregation recites this prayer with a short melody associated with the Judeo-Arabic song “Arsl ya lwaḥad waḥdani” a poem by the early seventeenth-century Moroccan-born Rabbi Fradgi Shawat from Béja in Tunisia. This song is included in Shir Yedidot in chapter belonging to

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the Shabbat of the parashat Beshallaḥ. It has a characteristic hemiola metric pattern of twelve beats divided in 2+3+3+2+2. 17:11 Half qaddish, set to El shokhen shamayma by the cantor in the same musical mode as the previous piece. At 18:14 the congregational response Yehe shemeh rabba mevarakh generates another “sonic cloud effect,” that is followed by the last verse of the text recited by the cantor with a slight slowing down in the tempo. The qaddish is followed up by a public delivery of a short verse recited at this specific point only on the eve of the New Moon, Rosh ḥodesh li-vrakha le-ḥayyim tovim ul-shalom (“A New Moon for blessing, good life and peace”). This verse echoes in its wording the Blessing of the Month, to be recited in full during the following morning prayer. Core Prayer: Silent ‛Amidah (partially recorded, probably lasting about three to four minutes) Ending Section of the Service (total duration 2:34) 18:56 Yehi shem Adonay Mevorakh meʿatta veʿad ‛olam (Psalm 113, 2–4; Psalm 8, 2) cantor sings this psalm verses solo in fast recitation, without prosodic pauses between verses, unlike the psalm at the opening of this service. 19:05 Qaddish titkabbal , extremely fast recitation by cantor and congregation without clear beat. 19:43 Shir ha-ma‛alot essa ‛einay el he-harim (Psalm 121), very fast recitation by whole community. Unlike the festive opening Psalm and other psalm verses throughout the service, in the present recitation there are no pauses between verses (let alone between the two halves of the verses) or a defined rhythmic pattern. Thus, the performance generates a “sonic cloud effect.” 19:54 Qaddish yatom, another extremely fast recitation by cantor and the mourners of the congregation replicating the sound effect of Qaddish titkabbal. 20:35 Barekhu, ‛Aleinu le-shabbeaḥ, closing prayer of the service. The cantor opens but only the first two words of the prayer are heard as the whole congregation joins the fast recitation of this text, creating a “sonic cloud effect.” 21:03 Half qaddish, extremely fast recitation by cantor and congregation, fading out (or rather dissolving) into the end (21:30). ANALYSIS OF THE SERVICE Let us now summarize the detailed analysis of this service, starting with the human composition of the performers and moving into the sounds they generate. The performers were immigrants removed from their original habitat in Morocco where they were born and educated. Originating in diverse settlements in Morocco, many of them had experienced a transitional period in

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their lives when they moved to Casablanca and, to a lesser extent, other cities such as Rabat-Sale, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, Essaouira, Tetuan, and Tangier on their way to immigration to Israel. They were joined in the performance by a new generation of Israeli-born and Israeli-educated Moroccan Jews, the offspring of a still largely endogamous community.35 Thus, one can assume that the performing style and content of this service still reflect practices firmly rooted in the mother community in Morocco. My long-term fieldwork experience in Moroccan synagogues shows that this service is a clear instance of an extremely consistent pattern of prayer performance that goes back to the synagogues of large cities in the 1940s and early 1950s. The historical recording by Paul Bowles of an evening service in Meknes, 1959, (Library of Congress, Bowles collection, PFB 54A–54B) attest to this remarkable consistency.36 Only the use of a tune from an Eastern Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish song discloses the specific spatial context and time of the service’s performance, Israel, 1981. This consistent pattern of Moroccan Jewish prayer includes five distinctive genres of non-verbal sound patterning: 1) extremely fast non-metrical recitations on a very narrow range; 2) biblical cantillation with unclear beat and great contrast between fast recitation on a narrow range and lyrical isles of ornamented sound on a wider range; 3) psalmody with clear beat but no steady meter in a narrow range with intermittent heterophony; 4) metric melodies; and 5) the “sonic cloud” effect. Performance includes solo singing alternating between two leading cantors, responsorial singing, and choral singing (of adults and children). This variety of sonic genres and manners of performance creates a dynamic stream of sound characterized by abrupt shifts in all the parameters, that is, range, presence or absence of clear beat, density of texture, dynamics, and performing voices.37 While most of these sonic shifts mark the boundaries of the literary sections of the service, that is, different sound structures correspond to defined liturgical units, others reflect either older kabbalistic practices or modernizing trends. Kavvanot (“intentions”) embedded in certain passages or in specific words may receive a special musical treatment (see Haim Vital, Sha‛ar ha-kavvanot, Derushei tefillat ‛arvit, darush 1). On the other hand, the choral responses by the congregation in our recording, in a suspiciously Ashkenazi-tinged tonal structure, most probably derive as we have seen from much more modern traditions imported to Casablanca through the agency of renovating educators

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from Wahran. The absence of this distinctive feature from the Paul Bowles recording of Meknes, 1959, reveals how recent such musical innovations took roots in the liturgical practices of Moroccan Jews relocated in Israel. This detailed analysis, rarely attempted before (with the exceptions of Idelsohn and Thomas mentioned above), reveals the striking amount of historical, social, and aesthetical information one can gather from a short, daily twenty-two-minute service. Starting with the text of the service, one can observe unique textual additions (and omissions) that singles out the Moroccan practice not only musically but also textually. Put differently, the sense of liturgical belonging is reflected also in the use of specific editions of the prayer book that are still maintained in Israel. In this sense, there is a liturgical resistance to the hegemony of a state-sponsored Sephardic rabbinical establishment overwhelmingly dominated by rabbis of Iraqi and Syrian origin, most notably by the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.38 Thus, the use of a particular liturgical formula is already a form of Moroccan (and more broadly Maghrebi) resistance to centripetal forces affecting the religious culture of the Jews from Islamic countries in Israel. However, it is in the performance practice of this service, which includes its musical component, but not only it, that its Moroccaness is located. This sonic distinction, expressed in the specific sonic genres described above as much as in a particular selection of melodies, reproduces venerable practices from “the old country” as much as the taste of the specific performing community and its leaders whose voices were caught in a specific recording. The singing of the opening festive Psalm 104, for example, is quintessential to the Moroccan Jewish soundscape but also links it to a broader Sephardic custom. This liturgical music genre has no parallel in the Moroccan Arab repertoire and thus it is a marker of sonic Jewish difference. Yet, the choral performance with its intermittent split of voices in fortuitous polyphonies recalls the performance practice of choral singing in the Al-Ala repertoire. The performance of this festive Psalm, including the additional verses from other Psalms that follow it lasts for more than five and a half minutes, or a quarter of the entire service. Thus, this is a musical moment when the Moroccan Jewish synagogue reveals itself as a singular singing community. This participatory aspect is a staple of the Moroccan liturgy in comparison to other traditional Jewish communities where a soloist ḥazzan stands out. Singing of specific texts to melodies adopted mainly from the non-liturgical repertoire comprise another notable feature of the Moroccan Jewish liturgy. I have called this slippage of the Moroccan bakkashot repertoire into the liturgy “Andalusianation.”39 This deeply rooted practice is audible in the service analyzed here in the application of the melody of the piyyut “Lindodkha” to the opening qaddish of the service. The musicalization of this specific qaddish,

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unlike most other qaddishim in the service that are pronounced in a very fast recitation formula (as in the ending section of this service), is customary on Holidays and other special occasions. In this entrenched Sephardic practice, melodies of piyyutim related to the occasion are recruited for the opening qaddish as if announcing musically the themes of the Holiday. For example, the melody of the piyyut Aḥot qetannah that opens the evening service of Rosh Hashanah is also applied to the opening qaddish of this Holiday. The reservoir of melodies borrowed for liturgical purposes, be it the qaddish or any other text that is traditionally musicalized (set to a distinct musical unit) such as Ra’u banim in the evening service, is not limited to those of liturgical or paraliturgical piyyutim. Arabic melodies such as Qum tara, a popular inqilab from nawba dhil of the Algerian ghrnati repertoire popularized among Jews by the recording of Reinette l’Oranaise, with the khruj (“exit,” fast ending) from the insiraf (fast section) of the Moroccan mizan quddam (rhythmic phase) of the nawba Istihilal, is a favorite piece of Moroccan cantors.40 It is adopted to liturgical texts such as the aforementioned Ra’u banim or El adon ʿal kol hamaʿasim from the Sabbath morning service.41 We have also seen how in our service the Moroccan liturgy is also “painted” with pan-Sephardic sounds by applying a melody of a song from the Judeo-Spanish repertoire of the Eastern Mediterranean that became familiar to Moroccan Jews through the mass media. It is worth noting that the Moroccan practice of musicalizing liturgical “stations” can be attested to in written sources since at least the late eighteenth century.42 The important manuscript Oxford, Bodleian, Heb. F. 49 (no. 2838 in Neubauer’s Catalogue) is exemplary in this regard.43 Dated at the earliest in 1796 and compiled by Maimon ben Yaakov Kadosh from Demnate with later additions by his disciple Rabbi Shlomo Cohen of Marrakesh, a master of the Andalusian Hebrew repertoire, this manuscript contains a large collection of piyyutim arranged in twenty-four ṭubu‛. Fundamental to our argument is the index of noʿamim (“melodies”) appearing at the beginning of this manuscript. Here the compiler assigns names of melodies of piyyutim included in his compendium to liturgical texts. This rich cross-reference between liturgy and the paraliturgical piyyut indicates the extent to which the Moroccan Jewish liturgy was musicalized already in the “old country” more than two centuries ago. Moreover, another practice of Shlomo Cohen reflected in this and other of his manuscript compendia, the inserting of a triq a brief “movement” from the Andalusian Hebrew repertoire in key liturgical locations, such as immediately prior to the opening qaddish, appears in the Paul Bowles recording. In our recording however only the musicalization of the opening qaddish with the melody of a piyyut remains as an echo of a more developed liturgical music practice.

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Finally, the analysis of the service shows that there is an “economy of liturgical time” in this performance. It means that there has to be a balance between musicalized and non-musicalized sections in order not to extend the services to extremes. The “price” paid for the extended musicalized sections in our service, such as the opening Psalm, the opening “Qaddish” or “Ra’u banim,” is compensated by the flying speed of the closing section, in which three qaddishim and two substantial texts, an entire Psalm and the important prayer ‛Aleinu le-shabbeaḥ are all squeezed in two and a half minutes (!). This balancing of richly musicalized sections of the service with “nonmusical” sections recited in a fast pace is yet another staple of the Moroccan Jewish liturgy. CONCLUSION In 1981, when I made the recording analyzed here, Moroccan Jews had been living in Israel for an average of twenty-five years. This means that the musical formation of most participants in the service aged forty years or more took place in Morocco. As we have noticed earlier in this chapter, by the time of the major waves of immigration in the mid-1950s to early 1960s, a large proportion of the Moroccan Jewry has been living or transiting through Casablanca and few other major cities such as Meknes. Urban synagogues and educational institutions such as the aforementioned Ecole Normale Hébraïque consolidated the liturgical performing style and repertoire that obliterated earlier local practices and was transplanted to Israel. In other words, the service analyzed here is a fair specimen of the liturgical soundscape of Casablanca and the other urban centers from where Jews departed to Israel. Noteworthy, the predominance of this meta-Moroccan Jewish liturgy was not embraced without resistance. Anthropologist André Levy relates how his father, native of Marrakech, was appalled upon immigration to Ashdod in the 1960s by the liturgical “Sepharadization” of synagogues and by his inability to find one that would maintain the discrete liturgical soundscape of his hometown. He eventually settled for the least conceding option: a synagogue of immigrants from Meknes.44 The impressive presence of children in our recording explains why, even today, the sound of Israeli synagogues whose congregation consists mostly of descendants of Moroccan Jews still resonates with the same musical style of at least two generations ago. One can agree with Thomas when he claims that a layered “diaspora consciousness” results from the incorporation into the liturgy of traits from multiple diaspora identities through active processes of retention and development.45 Our claim is, however, that also Israel is, from the perspective of Morocco, a diasporic periphery and not

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“the center” as Thomas’s analysis may seem to imply. For how long this distinctive “liturgical Moroccaness” will subsist in Israel is hard to tell. The shift toward a sharqi (Middle Eastern) maqam–oriented aesthetics found in the speech about liturgical music among young cantors serving Moroccan “ethnic” congregations in addition to ubiquitous processes of socialization, mobility, and intermarriage suggest that its survival in Israel cannot be taken for granted. One should not however overemphasize this process of sharqization. Sharqi musical elements found their way into the Moroccan Jewish repertoire already in Morocco, as we have seen in the case of the song “Ya um al-‘abaya.” The integration of the Maghreb into the pan-Arab soundscape dominated by Egypt and Lebanon exposed its Jewish communities to this transnational Arab sound via new technologies of musical reproduction and broadcast.

NOTES *. Please see website for audio samples of the pieces mentioned here. 1. The author acknowledges Profs. Joseph Chetrit and Jonathan Glasser for their thoughtful readings of an earlier version of this paper. 2. Jonathan Glasser, “The News from al-Andalus: Muslims, Jews, and Musical Intimacy in North Africa,” Ethnoscripts (Musikethnologie) 13, no. 1 (2011): 43–56. 3. Issachar BenAmi, “Jewish Musicians and Folk Bands in Morocco,” Tazlil 10 (1970): 54–58. (In Hebrew) 4. Mohamed El Haddaoui, Symbiose judéo-arabe au Maroc; la contribution des Juifs marocains à la culture de leur pays; Samy El-Maghribi sa production poétique et musicale (Université Paris VIII, Doctorat de 3e cycle en Etudes Hébraïques, 1987). (In Arabic); Haïm Zafrani, Traditions poétiques et musicales juives en Occident musulman (Paris: UNESCO, 1999); Joseph Chetrit, “Music and Poetry as a Shared Cultural Space for Muslims and Jews in Morocco,” in Studies on North African Jews, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Steven D. Fraade (Jerusalem and New Haven, 2011), 65–103. 5. Jonathan Glasser, “Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond,” Anthropological Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2017): 139–166. 6. Emily Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 17.  7. Glasser, “Musical Jews,” 160. 8. Carl Davila, The Andalusian Music of Morocco: Al-Āla: History, Society and Text (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013). 9. For example, Paul Fenton, “La place de la musique andalouse dans le vécu du juif marocain.” Horizons maghrébins: Le droit à la mémoire 43 (2000): 82–86; Haïm Zafrani, Traditions poétiques et musicales juives en Occident musulman (Paris: UNESCO, 1999).

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10. Joseph Chetrit, Written Judeo-Arabic poetry in North Africa (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1994); Melanie Magidow, Multicultural Solidarity: Performances of Malhūn Poetry in Morocco (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013), 42–50; Meir Nezri, The prosody of the Hebrew kasida in "Shir yedidot" according to the Arabic kasida (al-Malhun) in Morocco. Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 1997; Muḥammad Ṣiqillī, Al-Yahūd fī l-ghinā’ al-mughārabī wa-l-‘arabī (Jews in Maghrebi and Arab Music). (Marrakesh: Ittiṣālāt Sabū, 2008). 11. Mohamed Elmedlaoui and Sigal Azaryahu, “The ‘Aḥwash’ Berber Singing Ceremony Shift from Morocco to Israel: An Ethno-musicological Approach.” Etudes et Documents Berbères 33 (2014): 171–186. 12. Christopher Benno Silver, Jews, Music-Making, and the Twentieth Century Maghrib (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2017). 13. Ephraim Hazan, Hebrew Poetry in North Africa (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995, in Hebrew). 14. On the Israel Andalusian Orchestra Ashdod see, Merav Aharon, “Riding the Culture Train: An Ethnography of a Plan for Social Mobility through Music,” Cultural Sociology 7 (2013): 447–462. On Tzfon-Ma‛arav Ensemble, see: http:​/​/jos​​ ephch​​etrit​​.haif​​a​.ac.​​il​/tz​​fon​-m​​aarav​​/​inde​​x​.htm​. On the Piyut Ensemble see, https:// www​.olamale​.com​/piyut​-ensemble. 15. Abraham Amzallag (Eilam), “The Qasida in ‘Shir yedidot’: Sources, Texts and Music,” Pe‛amim 19 (1984): 88–112 (In Hebrew); idem, Modal Aspects in the Singing of Bakkashot by Moroccan Jews (Ph. D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986, in Hebrew); idem, Prakim ba-musiqa shel yehudei Maroco (Tel Aviv: Brit Yotzei Maroco, 1986); idem, “‘Shir yedidot’ and the Poetry of the Bakkashot,” Pe‛amim 32 (1988): 94–116 (In Hebrew); idem, “Recent Change in Moroccan Jewish Music,” Miqqedem umiyyam 4 (Tradition and Change on the Culture of Moroccan and Oriental Jewry, ed. Joseph Chétrit, 1991), 145–164 (In Hebrew); Joseph Chetrit, Shirat ha-piyyutim ve-shirat ha-bakkashot shel yehudei maroko (The Singing of Piyyutim and Bakkashot of Moroccan Jews), (Tel-Aviv: Moreshet Dorot, 1992); idem, Piyyut and Hebrew Poetry in Moroccan Jewry (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1999) (In Hebrew); “Les pratiques poético-musicales juives au Maroc et leurs rapports avec les traditions andalouso-marocaines,” Confluences Méditerranée 46, no. 3 (2003): 171–179; Alexis Chottin, Tableau de la musique marocaine (Paris: Geuthner, 1939), 149–153; Paul Fenton, “Les baqqašot d’orient et d’occident,” Revue des Études Juives 134 (1975): 101–121; Amnon Shiloah, “La Nuba et la célébration des bakkashot au Maroc,” Judaïsme d’Afrique du Nord aux XIXe-XXe siècles: histoire, société et culture, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1980), 108–113; Edwin Seroussi, Old and New in the Singing of Bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel (M.A. thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981, in Hebrew); idem, “Politics, Ethnic Identity and Music in the Singing of Bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel.” Asian Music 17, no. 2 (1986): 32–45; idem, “La música arábigoandaluza en las baqqashot judeo-marroquíes: Estudio histórico y musical,” Anuario Musical 45 (1990): 297–315; Tali Turel (Gilead), The music in the custom of the bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel (M.A. thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1981, in

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Hebrew); Haïm Zafrani, Traditions poétiques et musicales juives en Occident musulman (Paris: UNESCO, 1999). 16. The most comprehensive attempt to set the Al-Ala repertoire in Hebrew is Meir Elazar Atiyah, Meir ha-shaḥar. 2 vols. (Yerushalayim, Hedera: Keren Ahavat Kedumim, 1993). 17. Samir Ben‐Layashi and Bruce Maddy‐Weitzman, “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community,”  Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 89–106. 18. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Hebraisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, Vol. V: Gesänge der marokkanischen Juden (Jerusalem, Berlin, and Wien: Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1929). See, Edwin Seroussi, “A Pioneer Publication in Context: Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s Gesänge der Marokkanischen Juden (1928/9).” The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands, ed. Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan T. Levenson (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015), 168–184. 19. Isaac Levy, Antología de la litúrgia judeo-española, 10 vols. (Jerusalem: The Author, 1964–1980). 20. Some were distinguished representatives of various local traditions, such as Leon Mergui (b. 1907 in Acilha/Arzila near Tangier), Yehudah Koriat and Rafael Ben Simhon (both b. 1920 in Meknes), Shimon Levy (b. 1919 from Casablanca), Makhluf Dahan (b. 1915 from Oujda) and many others from Fez, Marrakesh and Waharan. According to the information provided by Levy, most of these cantors held in Israel other professions (clerks, tailors, teachers, etc.). Many of them were educated in schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle network. 21. Sam Abitbol-Mayost, The Jewish Music of Fez: Synagogue Liturgy and Family Piyyutim (Ottawa: The Author, 1992). 22. Dinah Sabbah, Le chant religieux chez les marocains d’Israel (M.A. thèse. Montréal: Faculté des études supérieures, 1980); idem, La pratique de la musique liturgique et paraliturgique des Juifs originaires du Maroc à Montréal (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1990); idem, Ne‛im zemirot: 102 Selections of Sephardi Jewish Music (Montréal: Centre communautaire juif, 1991). 23. Ramon Alberto Tasat, The Cantillations and the Melodies of the Jews of Tangier, Morocco (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Texas, Austin, 1993). 24. Edwin Seroussi, “La dimensione del suono nelle sinagoghe del Marocco.” EM - Rivista degli Archivi di Etnomusicologia dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2, no. 2 (2006): 109–125. 25. Samuel R. Thomas, Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices of Moroccan Jews in Brooklyn (Ph. D. dissertation. City University of New York, 2014); Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, “Judeo-Spanish Melodies in the Liturgy of Tangier, Morocco; Feminine Imprints in a Masculine Space,” in Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas, ed. Ruth F. Davis (London: Rowman & Little, 2015), 25–44. 26. Personal communication of Mr. Moshe Ponte from Madrid, May 19, 2020. 27. The Pinto recorded collection at the Sound Archive also includes later recordings of Moroccan Jewish Liturgy sung by Haim Ponte carried out in Madrid in 1978. On Buzaglo see, Joseph Chetrit, “L’œuvre poétique de Rabbi David Bouzaglo et les

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traditions musicales judéo-marocaines,” in Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc: perceptions et réalités, ed. Michel Abitbol (Paris: Stavit, 1997), 319–363. 28. Mr. Pinto endowed copies of this precious collection to three institutions at once: the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the National Library of Israel (then Jewish National and University Library at the Hebrew University), and Yeshiva University. On the Jewish community of Casablanca, see, Yaron Tsur and Hagar Hillel.  The Jews of Casablanca: A Study of Modernization in a Colonial Jewish Society (Tel Aviv: The Open University Press, 1995) (In Hebrew) 29. I refer here only to Israeli initiatives. There are other social media outlets as well as YouTube channels fully dedicated to the Moroccan Jewish liturgy stemming from communities outside Israel such as the work of Rabbi David Kadosh from Toronto and Rabbi Moises Nahon from Gibraltar. These initiatives are too many to enumerate here but they definitely contribute to the global dialogue about this subject. 30. National Library of Israel, Sound Archive, Y 01682. 31. On this subject see, Mosheh Halamish, Ha-Kabalah bi-Tsfon Afrikah le-min ha-meʼah ha-16: sekirah historit ve-tarbutit (Tel-Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-meʼuhad, 2001). 32. This genre has been referred to as “Hebrew psalmody.” See, Reinhard Flender, Hebrew psalmody: a structural investigation (Yuval Monograph Series, 9) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992). 33. Founded immediately after the war in 1946 under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, this school envisioned a regenerative process geared to create a new generation of educators and spiritual leaders for the Moroccan Jewry in Morocco. Its founders, and most especially its first director, Rabbi (aka “Commandant” due to his military career) Isaac Rouche, arrived to Morocco from Wahran with a modernizing vision that included the transfer of innovative liturgical practices en vogue in the great synagogue of their city of origin in Algeria. The three hundred or so graduates of the Ecole in Casablanca spread through Morocco and disseminated this practice that later reached Israel. I thank Prof. Joseph Chetrit, a graduate of the Ecole, for pointing out to me to this educational establishment as the possible source for this liturgical music practice. The revered Rabbi Baruj Benito Garzón Serfaty, who was a young instructor at the Ecole in the 1950s, kindly provided me with a copy of his unpublished memories on the Ecole. He also asserted that this was the practice at the Ecole’s sanctuary. 34. The identification of this melody and its possible authorship was facilitated, among others, by Yaacov Osadon, moderator of the Whatsapp group “Moroccan Piyyut Council” in Israel and Dr. Dafna Dori, specialist on Iraqi Jewish musicians at Uppsala University. 35. Moshe Shokeid and Shlomo Deshen, The Generation of Transition, Continuity and Change among North African Immigrants in Israel (Augmented edition. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1999) (In Hebrew) 36. These recordings were released in Edwin Seroussi and Meir Elazar Atiyah, Sacred Music of the Moroccan Jews . 2 CDs with notes, Rounder Records (82161-5087-2) (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 37. Compare with Thomas, Redefining Diaspora, who uses a vaguer Americanized terminology such as nussaḥ and ḥazzanut, or the musicological term contrafactum.

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38. Nissim Leon, “The Ethnic Structuring of “Sephardim” in Ḥaredi Society in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 22, no. 1 (2016): 130–160; Joseph Ringel, “The Construction and De-construction of the Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic/Mizrahi Dichotomy in Israeli Culture: Rabbi Eliyahou Zini vs. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,” Israel Studies 21, no. 2 (2016, Special Section—Dislocations of Immigration): 182–205. 39. For the concept of “Andalusianation,” see, Seroussi, “La dimensione del suono,” 109–125. 40. Abraham Amzallag (Eilam), “The Ghrnati Modal System in Moroccan Jewish Music,” in Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman and Zvi Zohar (Bethseda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2013), 13–32; Jonathan Glasser, The lost paradise: Andalusi music in urban North Africa (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 41. Samuel R. Thomas, Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices of Moroccan Jews in Brooklyn (Ph. D. dissertation. City University of New York, 2014), 238–245. 42. On the concept of “music stations” in the Jewish liturgy, see, Edwin Seroussi, “Judeo-Islamic Sacred Soundscapes: The “Maqamization” of the Eastern Sephardic Liturgy,” in Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, eds. Bernard Dov Cooperman and Zvi Zohar (Bethseda, MD: University of Maryland Press, 2013), 279–302. 43. Edwin Seroussi, “La musique andalouse-marocaine dans les manuscrits hébraïques,” in Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc - perceptions et réalités, ed. Michel Abitbol (Paris: Editions Stavit, 1997), 283–294. 44. André Levy, Return to Casablanca: Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli anthropologist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 45. Thomas, Redefining Diaspora Consciousness, 356.

REFERENCES Abitbol-Mayost, Sam. The Jewish Music of Fez: Synagogue Liturgy and Family Piyyutim. Ottawa: The Author, 1992. Aharon, Merav. “Riding the Culture Train: An Ethnography of a Plan for Social Mobility through Music.” Cultural Sociology 7 (2013): 447–462. Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam). “The Qasida in ‘Shir yedidot’: Sources, Texts and Music.” Pe‛amim 19 (1984): 88–112. (In Hebrew) Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam). Modal Aspects in the Singing of Bakkashot by Moroccan Jews. Ph. D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986. (In Hebrew) Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam). Prakim ba-musiqa shel yehudei Maroco. Tel Aviv: Brit Yotzei Maroco, 1986. (In Hebrew) Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam). “‘Shir yedidot’ and the Poetry of the Bakkashot.” Pe‛amim 32 (1988): 94–116. (In Hebrew) Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam). “Recent Change in Moroccan Jewish Music.” Miqqedem umiyyam 4 (Tradition and Change on the Culture of Moroccan and Oriental Jewry, edited by Joseph Chétrit, 1991), 145–164. (In Hebrew)

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Amzallag, Abraham (Eilam) “The Ghrnati Modal System in Moroccan Jewish Music.” In Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, edited by Bernard D. Cooperman and Zvi Zohar. Bethseda, MD: University of Maryland Press, 2013, 13–32. Atiyah, Meir Elazar. Meir ha-shaḥar. 2 vols. Yerushalayim, Hedera: Keren Ahavat Kedumim, 1993. (In Hebrew) Ben–Ami, Issachar. “Jewish Musicians and Folk Bands in Morocco.” Tazlil 10 (1970): 54–58. (In Hebrew) Ben‐Layashi Samir and Bruce Maddy‐Weitzman. “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010​):  89​–106.​  DOI:​  10.1​080/1​47258​80903​54929​3. Chetrit, Joseph. Shirat ha–piyyutim ve–shirat ha–bakkashot shel yehudei maroko (The Singing of Piyyutim and Bakkashot of Moroccan Jews). Tel–Aviv: Moreshet Dorot, 1992. (In Hebrew) Chetrit, Joseph. Written Judeo-Arabic poetry in North Africa. Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1994. Chetrit, Joseph. “L’œuvre poétique de Rabbi David Bouzaglo et les traditions musicales judéo-marocaines.” In Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc: perceptions et réalités, edited by Michel Abitbol, 319–363. Paris: Stavit, 1997. Chetrit, Joseph. Piyyut and Hebrew Poetry in Moroccan Jewry. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1999. (In Hebrew) Chetrit, Joseph. “Les pratiques poético-musicales juives au Maroc et leurs rapports avec les traditions andalouso-marocaines.” Confluences Méditerranée 46, no. 3 (2003): 171–179. Chetrit, Joseph. “Music and Poetry as a Shared Cultural Space for Muslims and Jews in Morocco.” Studies on North African Jews, edited by Moshe Bar-Asher and Steven D. Fraade, 65–103. Jerusalem and New Haven: Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yale University Press, 2011. Chottin, Alexis. Tableau de la musique marocaine. Paris: Geuthner, 1939. Davila, Carl. The Andalusian Music of Morocco: Al-Āla: History, Society and Text. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013. El Haddaoui, Mohamed. Symbiose judéo-arabe au Maroc; la contribution des Juifs marocains à la culture de leur pays; Samy El-Maghribi sa production poétique et musicale. Université Paris VIII, Doctorat de 3e cycle en Etudes Hébraïques, 1987. (In Arabic) Elmedlaoui, Mohamed and Sigal Azaryahu. “The ‘Aḥwash’ Berber singing ceremony shift from Morocco to Israel: An ethno-musicological Approach.” Etudes et Documents Berbères 33 (2014): 171–186. Fenton, Paul. “Les baqqašot d’orient et d’occident.” Revue des Études Juives 134 (1975): 101–121. Fenton, Paul. “La place de la musique andalouse dans le vécu du juif marocain.” Horizons maghrébins: Le droit à la mémoire 43 (2000): 82–86. Fenton, Paul. “Essaouira, foyer de la musique judéo-andalouse.” In Mogador – Essaouira : Une ville océane du sud marocain, edited by Lucette HellerGoldenberg, 171–174. Koeln, 2002. (Cahiers d’Etudes Maghrébines no. 16–17)

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Flender, Reinhard. Hebrew Psalmody: A Structural Investigation (Yuval Monograph Series, 9). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992. Glasser, Jonathan. “The News from al-Andalus: Muslims, Jews, and Musical Intimacy in North Africa.” Ethnoscripts (Musikethnologie) 13, no. 1 (2011): 43–56. Glasser, Jonathan. The lost paradise: Andalusi music in urban North Africa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Glasser, Jonathan. “Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond.” Anthropological Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2017): 139–166. Gottreich, Emily, and Daniel J. Schroeter. Jewish culture and society in North Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Halamish, Mosheh. Ha-Kabalah bi-Tsfon Afrikah le-min ha-meʼah ha-16: sekirah historit ve-tarbutit. Tel-Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-meʼuhad, 2001. Hazzan, Ephraim. Hebrew Poetry in North Africa. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995. (In Hebrew) Idelsohn, Abraham Z. Hebräisch–orientalischer Melodienschatz, Vol. V: Gesänge der marokkanischen Juden. Jerusalem–Berlin–Wien: Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1929. Leon, Nissim. “The Ethnic Structuring of “Sephardim” in Haredi Society in Israel.” Jewish Social Studies 22, no. 1 (2016): 130–160. Levy, André. Return to Casablanca: Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli anthropologist. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Levy, Isaac. Antología de la litúrgia judeo-española. 10 vols. Jerusalem: The Author, 1964–1980. Magidow, Melanie. Multicultural Solidarity: Performances of Malhūn Poetry in Morocco. PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013. Nezri, Meir. The prosody of the Hebrew kasida in “Shir yedidot” according to the Arabic kasida (al-Malḥun) in Morocco. Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 1997. Paloma Elbaz, Vanessa. “Judeo-Spanish Melodies in the Liturgy of Tangier, Morocco; Feminine Imprints in a Masculine Space.” Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas, edited by Ruth F. Davis, 25–44. London: Rowman & Little, 2015. Ringel, Joseph. “The Construction and De-construction of the Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic/Mizrahi Dichotomy in Israeli Culture: Rabbi Eliyahou Zini vs. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.” Israel Studies 21, no. 2 (2016, Special Section—Dislocations of Immigration): 182–205. Sabbah, Dinah. Le chant religieux chez les marocains d’Israel. M.A. thèse. Montréal: Faculté des études supérieures, 1980. Sabbah, Dinah. La pratique de la musique liturgique et paraliturgique des Juifs originaires du Maroc à Montréal. Ph.D. Dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1990. Sabbah, Dinah. Ne’im zemirot: 102 Selections of Sephardi Jewish Music. Montréal: Centre communautaire juif, 1991. Seroussi, Edwin. Old and New in the Singing of Bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel. M.A. thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981.

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Seroussi, Edwin. “Politics, Ethnic Identity and Music in the Singing of Bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel.” Asian Music 17, no. 2 (1986): 32–45. Seroussi, Edwin. “La música arábigo-andaluza en las baqqashot judeo-marroquíes: Estudio histórico y musical.” Anuario Musical 45 (1990): 297–315. Seroussi, Edwin. “La musique andalouse-marocaine dans les manuscrits hébraïques.” In Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc - perceptions et réalités, edited by Michel Abitbol. Paris: Editions Stavit, 1997, 283–294. Seroussi, Edwin. “La dimensione del suono nelle sinagoghe del Marocco.” EM - Rivista degli Archivi di Etnomusicologia dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2, no. 2 (2006): 109–125. Seroussi, Edwin. “Judeo-Islamic Sacred Soundscapes: The “Maqamization” of the Eastern Sephardic Liturgy.” In Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman and Zvi Zohar. Bethseda, MD: University of Maryland Press, 2013, 279–302. Seroussi, Edwin. “A Pioneer Publication in Context: Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s Gesänge der Marokkanischen Juden (1928/9).” The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands, edited by Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan T. Levenson, 168–184. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015. Seroussi, Edwin and Meir Elazar Atiyah (eds.) Sacred Music of the Moroccan Jews . 2 CDs with notes, Rounder Records (82161-5087-2). Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000. Shiloah, Amnon. “La Nuba et la célébration des bakkashot au Maroc.” Judaïsme d’Afrique du Nord aux XIXe-XXe siècles: histoire, société et culture, edited by Michel Abitbol, 108–113. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1980. Shokeid, Moshe and Shlomo Deshen. The Generation of Transition, Continuity and Change among North African Immigrants in Israel. Augmented edition. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1999. (In Hebrew) Ṣiqillī, Muḥammad. Al-Yahūd fī l-ghinā’ al-mughārabī wa-l-‘arabī (Jews in Maghrebi and Arab Music). Marrakesh: Ittiṣālāt Sabū, 2008. Silver, Christopher Benno. Jews, Music-Making, and the Twentieth Century Maghrib. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2017. Silver, Christopher. “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy Elmaghribi.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 1 (2020): 23–47. Tasat, Ramon Alberto. The Cantillations and the Melodies of the Jews of Tangier, Morocco. Ph.D. dissertation: University of Texas, Austin, 1993. Thomas, Samuel R. Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices of Moroccan Jews in Brooklyn. Ph. D. dissertation. City University of New York, 2014. Tsur, Yaron and Hagar Hillel. The Jews of Casablanca: A Study of Modernization in a Colonial Jewish Society. Tel Aviv: The Open University Press, 1995. (In Hebrew) Turel (Gilead), Tali. The Music in the Custom of the Bakkashot among Moroccan Jews in Israel. M.A. thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1981. (In Hebrew). Zafrani, Haïm. Traditions poétiques et musicales juives en Occident musulman. Paris: UNESCO, 1999.

Chapter 11

The Image of Morocco in the Poetry of R. David Ben Ḥassin (1727–1792) André E. Elbaz

R. David Ben Ḥassin is certainly the best-known Hebrew poet in North Africa. He was born in Meknes in 1727, lived his whole life in the same city, where he died in 1792. Two editions of his 244 poems were recently published in Israel and in Canada.1 Many of his piyyutim—or religious, liturgical poems—are still very popular in Moroccan and Oriental Jewish communities. They are overwhelmingly present in all poetic anthologies from the Maghreb, whether in print or in manuscript form. Some have been included in prayer books, and have become part of religious rituals, for example the brit-mila (circumcision) ceremony, the beginning of the Passover Seder, or the festival of Sukkot. The great popularity of R. David Ben Ḥassin suggests that his piyyutim represented the mental outlook and emotions of his audience. Thus, his depiction of Morocco certainly reflects the perception of his contemporaries, who considered him as their spokesman, and it may continue, to a certain extent, to influence the historical outlook of Moroccan Jews, two centuries after his death. R. David Ben Ḥassin’s poetry, like the poetry of other Hebrew poets in North Africa, is essentially centered on religion. In 1712, R. Moshé Abenșur, another Moroccan poet from Sale, clearly stated that the main objective of an authentic poet is to glorify the Creator.2 In old Morocco, Hebrew poets were nourished by the Bible, the Talmud, the kabbala, rabbinic literature, and Jewish liturgy. Their piyyutim were, and are still sung today, during Jewish festivals, either in the synagogue or at home, at traditional collective or family events. They constitute an integral part of Jewish culture in the Maghreb. In fact, the Moroccan Jewish community, to this day, considers the piyyut as an important constituent of its cultural identity. 269

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In spite of this religious orientation, R. David’s poems are a mine of information not only on the poet’s pious beliefs, but also on his life, his family, and his community, with its joys and miseries. They also tell us, unexpectedly, about his deep love of nature. However, readers familiar with his poems cannot escape their unmistakable duality, whenever R. David Ben Ḥassin mentions his experience in Morocco. R. David b. Ḥassin is probably the only North African Jewish poet who composed a few of his lyric pieces in order to express his love for the beauty of his native country, especially the glory of its scenery and its natural sites. As a gifted paytan, as a professional singer of piyyutim, he was regularly invited by Jewish communities far and wide, in Fez, Marrakesh, Tetouan, el-Ksar, and as far away as remote, isolated villages in Tafilalet, in southern Morocco. On one occasion, he even sailed on the Mediterranean Sea to Gibraltar, where he was fascinated by the novelty of European musicians playing their instruments while reading the musical score.3 I’ll speak now, I will not be silent: Who led me to Edom, While I was navigating the abyss of the raging sea, in a ship? Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! Indeed, the Living God [was at my side]. He is the one who traces in the sea A way through the rushing waters, a safe road.4

In one of his pastoral poems, he describes his happiest moments during a trip to Tafilalet, by the river Ziz, in Southern Morocco. He thanks God, who let him “discover and enjoy the wonders of its luxuriant vegetation, the myriads of palm-trees growing by the flowing waters.”5 Overwhelmed by emotion before the beauty of the scene before him, and by “the majesty and the splendor of the glorious palm-trees,” our pious poet-rabbi can’t help but proclaim his enthusiasm: “How fine is this tree!”6 thus becoming oblivious to the rabbinic injunction not to travel alone, and not to interrupt one’s devotions for mundane aesthetic reasons. At the end of this poem, R. David confesses a secret: “to sages [like him] are revealed the sweet language of angels, the meaning of the whisper of palm-trees, and of the chirping of little birds!”7 Recognize God, who does great wonders, Who creates paths in the desert, In rugged routes, In narrow and difficult passages.

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He split rocks open in the wilderness, And mighty waters flowed freely For all passers-by. They could drink from the stream on their way.8

In another intimate poem, R. David cannot hide his exhilaration and his sheer delight during his journey, when he encounters “extraordinary landscapes, high mountains overflowing with cascading rivers and torrents, the bubbling springs of sparkling water, . . a land teeming with gazelles, deer, lions with their cubs, and all kinds of animals.”9 In a poem written while he was sailing to Gibraltar, R. David Ben Ḥassin, facing the Mediterranean for the first time, is awed by the powerful swelling of the waves in a raging storm, the howling winds, and the mystery of the deep sea. Once again, he is overwhelmed by his sense of wonder and his keen emotional response before the grandeur and the immensity of the ocean. He seems to have enjoyed traveling extensively throughout Morocco, despite the hardships and insecurity prevalent at the time. Naturally, on several occasions, he moderates this somewhat un-rabbinical artistic fervor by exalting the greatness of God, who created the beauty and magnificence of the Universe.10 However, living in eighteenth-century Morocco, R. David Ben Ḥassin could not escape the lawlessness and tyranny of local rulers, and the poverty and violence everywhere. Thus, he bears witness to the ill-treatment of his fellow Jews. In many of his poems, his love for his native land does not translate into a similar passion for its political leaders and its population. The protagonists of his poems, the notables whom he flatters in his eulogies, his colleagues and his friends, his neighbors, the people who consider him as a popular spokesman, because he writes about their joys and their suffering, are not his Moslem compatriots, but, exclusively, members of the Jewish community. Let us remember that David Ben Ḥassin lived during the chaotic and lawless times that followed the death of Mulay Ismaʿil, from 1727 to 1757,11 and the calamitous reign of Mulay Elyazid (1790–1792),12 that he lamented in a mournful elegy.13 Even the relatively quieter reign of Sidi Moḥammed ben ʻAbd-Allah was a period of oppression, fiscal exploitation and humiliation for Moroccan Jews.14 How could the fairest [city], the apple of our eye [Meknes], see her splendor vanish in the month of Ziv [April], On Wednesday, the day of the Second Passover reserved for impure people? The brigands were authorized by the authorities To act as they please. They indulged in all excesses.

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Like lumberjacks, with axes, they demolished everything, tore down walls. They discovered our most secret hiding places. Nothing escaped their rapacity. They plundered day and night, devoured Israel with open mouths. The bandits came to desecrate the Torah of Moses, our heritage.15

In his piyyutim, R. David shows no interest for the life of his Moslem neighbors, nor for their culture, their beliefs, their literature, or their poetry. He mentions his non-Jewish compatriots only when he condemns their hostility toward the Jewish community. He refers to Morocco as a foreign country, a paradigm of the Galut —the Exile, where “the people of Israel . . . yearn to be freed from their subjection to ‘foreign nations,’16 from the yoke of this ‘harsh nation.’”17 It is a lawless “land of chaos and anarchy,”18 where his people live in abject poverty, “humiliated, despised and disgraced.”19 The poet complains that such a country does not deserve to become the resting place of a grea ̣ṣaddiq—a holy man—like R. ‘Amram [ben] Diwan, a collector of funds for the Hebron yeshiva.20 From East and West, from Edom and Arabia, Bring together our poor and dispersed people to [Jerusalem], the city of the great king, I yearn to be freed from subjection, And to return to my country, and to my native land. Grant Your boundless mercy to the heartbroken and the wretched. Proclaim liberty to the captives. It will be a great favor.21

Here, he writes, Jews are powerless captives, ill-treated and enslaved by “cruel enemies,” who victimize, exploit, pillage, and abuse them, or murder them at will. They are like “sheep hounded by a pack of seventy wolves. How can a lamb who dwells among them resist such terror?”22 In 1783, the poet composed an elegy on the slaughter of seven Jewish hawkers, “butchered like cattle.”23 He similarly laments the murder of a well-known Jewish merchant,24 and that of an innocent and righteous young man.25 He appeals to God: “Come to my rescue! My enemies beat me, wounded me, they made me drink a full cup of poison.”26 In April 1790, David Ben Ḥassin was deeply affected by the sacking of the Mellaḥ of Meknes by the soldiers of sultan Mulay Elyazid, which he witnessed personally, and described in his long elegy: El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a– I’ll call out to passers-by:

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The Governor let the looters do as they pleased. . . . Nothing escaped their cupidity. . . . Day and night they plundered and devoured Israel. They desecrated the Thora of Moses. . . . Mothers were trampled with their children. . . . Torah scrolls were strewn on the ground . . . with our holy books. . . . They beat us to death, mercilessly, cruelly. . . . The leaders of our community, in irons, were put to shame and thrown in prison. . . . I mourn the destruction of the writings of our sages, an invaluable loss. . . . The sultan [Mulay Elyazid] hanged several of our leaders, such a cruel death! . . . In all the cities of Morocco. . . . Jews were in such distress that some of them converted [to Islam], others died as martyrs. . . . The rioters dug out the dead in the cemetery [of Fez].27

R. David b. Ḥassin implores God to deliver him “from slavery, so that I may return to my country, my native land!”28 However, this “native land” is not Morocco, but the City of Zion, in the Promised Land, where the people of Israel will return in Messianic times. Returning from one of his journeys to what he calls “my home, my destination and my country,” he makes it clear that “my home, my country” does not mean Morocco at all, nor even the city of Meknes where he was born, and where he lived all his life, but only its Jewish quarter, the Mellaḥ.29 In his famous hymn Oḥil yom yom eshtaeh—Every day, I feverishly wish—he fervently expresses his “yearning to go and visit the holy land of Tiberias,”30 and he prays for the “reuniting of the scattered and exiled [children of Israel] . . . so that they may return to their frontiers.”31 For You, my God, who dwells in the heavens, I want to sing a poem, a psalm. My eye is looking for You. Silence is a tribute to You, O God, in Zion. Protect Your unfortunate vine [Israel], beaten by the storm, moaning in the desert! Gather my dispersed, my expelled people, Almighty God, who determined the course of history since the beginning of the generations! And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. Please console us! Show mercy to Your children, who dwell in the darkness of exile, By sending them the Liberator, “Menaḥem,” crowned, and consecrated by an oil of joy! He will tell us: “God shall fight for you, and you hold your peace!” Like a river of peace, like the waters of the Pishon, The heavenly spirit will spread over him. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots.32

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However, in his despair, R. David realizes that there is no escape: In several piyyutim, he uses the metaphor of Morocco as a prison, “a jail house, a detention camp” for the tormented Jews.33 “O God, how long will You tolerate to see Your son in captivity, in distress, dying, broken, or in chains?”34 Embittered by the intolerable torment and degradation of his people, he calls upon God to explain His apparent apathy: “God, why are You asleep? Arise and rescue Your scattered sheep! Listen! Hear the cry of the children of Israel!”35 We hear the same cries of anguish in other piyyutim: “Holy God! God of Abraham, why would You remain like a bewildered man?”36 How long will God tolerate evil people defiling His name and His temples?37 “How long will You tolerate enemies dancing in Your Temple?”38 “I appeal to You, O God! When will You judge my tormentors, who scorn my statutes, my divine laws, and mock my prophets? . . . They even pretend that God has delivered His children into their hands. . . . And how long, Master of the Universe, will You remain silent before these evildoers?”39 R. David Ben Ḥassin becomes even more pressing: “God Almighty, do not be indifferent! Do not remain silent! The enemy crossed Your frontiers!”40 “Remember, O God! Do not break Your Alliance !”41 Hopeless and angry, the poet finally appeals to God’s vengeance and malediction on the oppressors: “Vengeance, O God! . . . Pay back our neighbors sevenfold for the suffering that they inflicted on us! Avenge the blood of Your servants! . . . Make their looters and their murderers drink a cup full of poison!”42 I appeal to You, O God! When will You intervene, and judge my tormentors Who scorn my statutes, my divine laws, and mock my prophets and my seers? To describe their shame, my Scriptures [Ezekiel 23: 20] say That “their emission is like that of horses, and their member is like that of asses.” Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! I was tired to endure their enticement. They were pressing me To follow their ways. They yelled at us all day long.43

This depressing picture of the suffering of Moroccan Jews in the piyyutim of R. David Ben Ḥassin constitutes an additional source for the study of relations between Moslems and Jews in the Maghreb, up to the nineteenth century. It confirms countless eyewitness descriptions and documentation left by travelers, diplomats, chroniclers, and historians, as well as recent scholarly publications on Jewish history and literature in North Africa.44 In conclusion, R. David Ben Ḥassin, a sensitive and talented poet, glorified the beauty of his country, Morocco, in his piyyutim. On the other hand, with an equal emotional charge, he also painted a poignant picture of the tragic condition of Moroccan Jews, agonizing under the yoke of tyranny.

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Fortunately, those evil times are now gone, but so is the ancient Moroccan Jewish community, that chose to leave its native land in the second part of the twentieth century, after nearly 2,000 years of existence. The multitude of Jewish tourists of Moroccan origin who are now flocking back to Morocco for nostalgic visits may be somewhat reminiscent of the divided frame of mind of our great poet: they are certainly in love with Morocco’s sunny beaches and welcoming resorts, but their past history led them to abandon their country en masse, as soon as they were able to do so. The distressing historical memories engraved in their collective consciousness, so powerfully evoked in R. David’s poems, certainly played a decisive role in the advent of this mass migration. While all of us can only applaud the openness of present-day Morocco, this historical reality cannot be negated, and should not be concealed, or distorted. In this regard, the rehabilitation of the role of Maghreb Jewry in recent historical research and academic publications in Moroccan universities is a positive sign of inclusiveness, which could, and should lead to the recognition of poets like R. David Ben Ḥassin, as an integral part of the Moroccan cultural and historic heritage. Such a step would certainly send an unmistakable message to all Moroccans, and to Moroccan Jews in particular, that they and their culture do indeed represent a constituent part of this heritage.

ADDENDUM: 7 PIYYUTIM OF RABBI DAVID BEN HASSIN TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH Piyyut 1: El ḥaviv li ḥibbato I composed this piyyut when I was in a great danger, in the midst of the ocean, and I was saved thanks to God who watched over me. My beloved God I wither away in His absence. My soul yearns for Him. I seek His proximity, Wherever He is. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! When His love strays, it burns in me Like the fire that sets the forest ablaze. Love is as powerful as death. It filled me with joy. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her!

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O God, how long will You endure seeing Your son in captivity, in distress, Dying, broken, or in chains? Please, O God, heal our affliction! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! The slave [Israel] can no longer bear His exile. Scattered like a flock of stray lambs, He lives like heather in the moors. He has become the fable and laughing stock of all. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! And if not now, then when Will You rebuild our ruins? Oh my God ! When will You crush [our enemies] wherever they are? Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! I’m tired of sighing, I suffered too much torment. My eyes burn with misery, without possible consolation. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! Heal and save from its enemies A sheep surrounded by seventy wolves! How can a lamb that dwells among them resist such terror? Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! Gather Your scattered herd, Wandering at the four cardinal points, West, East, South and North! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! My honor and my vigor are gone, While, in front of me, my oppressors prosper, They who live in the darkness of evil! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her!

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I’ll speak now, I will not be silent: Who led me to Edom, While I was navigating the abyss of the raging sea, in a ship? Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! Indeed, the Living God [was at my side]. He is the one who traces in the sea A way through the rushing waters, a safe road. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! You who search hearts, provide for my needs, As You nourish dogs and crows, With Your open and generous hand! Please support me! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! [My God!], who are my light and my Salvation! How long will You refuse to forgive my sins? Accept my prayer! Listen ! Please, God, listen! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! I implore You, I ask You To fulfil my wish to go to the Holy Land, To contemplate that pleasant country, and the hill of frankincense [Jerusalem]. Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! The posterity and memory of Amaleq [our enemies], May You consume with fire and brimstone! May You annihilate men and women, obliterate their names! Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her! Holy God, powerful, Most High, Announce the good news to Zion! “Exult and rejoice! I am coming soon to reside among you!” Please, O God! Come to our rescue! Take pity on Zion, the time has come to forgive her!

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Piyyut (Qina) 2: El ʻovrei derekh eqre’a Rabbi David Ben ῌassin composed this elegy in 1790, when several Moroccan cities were plundered on the orders of the new sultan Mulay Elyazid (1790–1792). The persecution of his community, the sack of his own town, Meknes, and the execution of its Jewish leaders, left a deep impression on the poet. I appeal to you, passers-by! Who ever heard of such an abomination? Who ever saw such ignominy coming? Men never experienced such a calamity. How could the fairest [city], the apple of our eye [Meknes], see her splendor vanish in the month of Ziv [April], On Wednesday, the day of the Second Passover reserved for impure people? The brigands were authorized by the authorities To act as they please. They indulged in all excesses. Like lumberjacks, with axes, they demolished everything, tore down walls. They discovered our most secret hiding places. Nothing escaped their rapacity. They plundered day and night, devoured Israel with open mouths. The bandits came to desecrate the Torah of Moses, our heritage. They deemed that we deserved the severe penalties and confiscation Due to vandals and saboteurs, as well as consumers of non-kosher food. The prophecies of Prophet Elijah in the Land of Israel [on the punishment of idolatrous king Aḥ’av], God inflicted all of them all on us, without exception. Why this great anger against us? Looters in successive waves Sheared us like we shear year-old goats and sheep. Our loved, gracious women, fled naked in the streets, Terrorized by the furious enemy. Mothers were crushed with their children. They broke down all the doors, tore them to pieces. Torah scrolls littered the ground, thrown like doormats. Yes! We saw it all with our own eyes! They shared our clothes.

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We were reduced to begging them for bread, if only a bite! They retorted furiously that they had nothing to give us. What a disgrace! What a shame! Woe to the eyes that saw this horror! Streets littered with holy books! They were loading the loot on their shoulders until they succumbed under the burden. They beat us to death, contemptuously, deliberately. Great cruel blows! Our wounds were neither cleaned nor bandaged. Community leaders, men of distinction, were thrown in prison, Loaded with chains, exposed to contempt and humiliation. We cried bitterly on the fate of rich and eminent men, Now reduced to misery. We were left with nothing! I regret the loss of the deceased, more precious than silver, gold and emeralds. They left us in mourning. After the weak, leaders were eliminated! I will remain disconsolate for the [destroyed] writings of our sages Priceless exegetic and homiletic works. They tear their hair out, the authors of [destroyed] books. A scholar can understand the extent of such a loss. Wisdom had become superfluous, degraded. With the scrolls of the Torah, they sewed bags. For this havoc I’ll be in mourning, I will roll myself in ashes. Fire devoured our noble people, it consumed everything, did not stop. Almighty God, why was this country treated like this? Donkeys kicked the sacred Menorah, frightened Israel. They demanded a heavy ransom, without any moderation. Evoking these memories, my soul is depressed. I wandered, distressed, without a gesture, dazed. We were hoping to be happy, but were plunged into misfortune, So we let our hair grow [in mourning]. [God] pronounced His verdict, which was not overturned, and our woes spread.

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After that, we went through great trials. Misfortunes assailed us from all sides. No more food in the pots, No more clothes to protect us from the cold. Beautiful precious carpets, suits, dresses in large numbers, They took everything, household items and chest contents. The judgment [of God] is just and fair, because our sins tipped the scales. Too often we have sinned, and our chastisement is fatal. God extended His mercy upon us, so that none of us was killed [at the start]. Our wives and our virgins were not violated. No woman was made unclean. After several days of suffering, the sultan’s anger was kindled. He hanged several men at the gates [of the mellaḥ of Meknes]. An atrocious death, so cruel! I pour tears over the devastated cities, Treated like huts in vineyards, like lodges in cucumber fields. In all Moroccan cities, a poisonous snake, a scorpion, wreaked havoc. Their light was enveloped in darkness, they were the laughing stock of their enemies. Misfortune and affliction struck [the Jews] hard, so that many gave up their faith. Others died as martyrs to sanctify the Almighty. I will cry and mourn on Tetuan, the queen city, Where our misfortunes started. From there, the fire spread across the country. I scream bitterly over the city of Fez. Her glory is gone, her majesty vanished. [It has become] a polluted spring, a muddy fountain, for [its Jews] were exiled. Let mourners cry over her, over her synagogues! Mourning and lamentation have invaded its doors. I’ll raise my complaint like a grieving widow. Their light have been veiled [in the synagogues] transformed into stables for horses. Beautiful [Jewish] houses are now hangars for plows. Our enemies spoke with arrogance, repudiating any constraint. They roared like the raging ocean: “Let us take possession of the pastures of Jacob!”

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Their fatal fury spread like a pernicious plague, Even unashamedly ravaging our cemeteries. They overturned head-stones, dug graves from top to bottom, To get the dead out of their tombs. Shame broke my heart, I was in despair. In their writings, our sages say that a man must implore divine mercy Until he is completely buried. We beseech God to grant us this favor. Let us multiply supplications and petitions to have our dead get decent burials, To avoid shame and deserve atonement! Blessed are those who are honored in this ritual! Could anyone conceive that God would exercise His wrath On dead people? Have not their sins been atoned for? Yes, I grieve bitterly for all righteous and pious men who died. How was it possible to disturb their tombs? This cruelty exceeds all others! May the living God, exalted above all, do a miracle for these deceased! May these bones come back to life, and join together! I wish them a speedy recovery. May they be covered with flesh and nerves! Let breath come into them! Let them become new living creatures! We have seen the torments that precede the Messianic era, but the Messiah did not rush to come to us. We had been waiting for him every day, with love, with passion. Remember, [O God!] Do not break Your Alliance! Save! Save Your people! In the name of Your Torah, pure and sacred! Most Holy! God of Abraham! Why do You remain like a baffled man? When will our King roar like a lion? Aren’t you our Most High and Supreme God? We have an obligation to pray for our king [the Messiah?]. His prosperity will bring us joy, delight and happiness! This is the day which God has made. Send our zealous defender, Elijah [the prophet]! May I witness his arrival with my own eyes! Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.

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May the Holy One of Israel, our protector, send us His Messiah without delay! The righteous will see him and rejoice, and the wicked will be put to silence.

Piyyut 3: Eleikha Șuri, shokhen ʻaliyya R. David Ben Ḥassine presents this piyyut as the first of the “sumptuous songs that I composed for the . . . coming of our Messiah of justice, incessantly, in our lifetime, Amen! . . . ‘Menaḥem,’ ‘Shilo,’ ‘Yinnon,’ ‘Ḥanina,’ . . . these four names [of the Messiah] are all mentioned in this poem. And at the end of the piyyut, I devoted a stanza to . . . the duration of Messianic times: according to some, 40 years, according to others, 70 years, according to still others, three generations [cf. T.B. Sanhédryn 99a].” For You, my God, who dwells in the heavens, I want to sing a poem, a psalm. My eye is looking for You. Silence is a tribute to You, O God, in Zion. Protect Your unfortunate vine [Israel], beaten by the storm, moaning in the desert! Gather my dispersed, my expelled people, Almighty God, who determined the course of history since the beginning of the generations! And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. Please console us! Show mercy to Your children, who dwell in the darkness of exile, By sending them the Liberator, “Menaḥem,” crowned, and consecrated by an oil of joy! He will tell us: “God shall fight for you, and you hold your peace!” Like a river of peace, like the waters of the Pishon, The heavenly spirit will spread over him. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. O God, remember Your covenant with David! Give him the gift of life he asked for! And fulfill Your promise: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, until the arrival of ‘Shilo.’” From the enemy who strikes and brutalizes me, I will shake off the yoke. He will not live after his fall. A rain of brimstone will fall over his domain. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. [The Messiah] will raise the standard of the camp of Judah, and he will reign over us.

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When he comes, riding a swift cloud, his name, “Yinnon,” will grow in the face of the sun. In East and West, North and South, [the wicked] will tremble and be quiet before him. Then we will free ourselves from their rule. He will pour out his anger and his wrath on them. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. On him will rest the spirit of God, a spirit of wisdom, a spirit of intelligence, Of strength against our oppressors, of indulgence and mercy [“ḥanina”] for his people, A spirit of science and fear of God. I will contemplate his beauty. He will educate the nations with justice and conviction. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. He will punish exploitation, and protect the weak, the poor and the unhappy. He will wash away the filthy stain of the daughter of Zion, and restore vigor to the powerless. The walls of the Temple, inside and out, he will cover with gold and precious stones. May he quickly bring us back to life, like seasonal rains [revive plants]. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. House of Jacob! Let’s go up to Mount Zion, to our Holy Temple, More precious, more valuable than pure gold, than all gems! Blessed are those who will see all of these wonders! Glory to this day of good news! Day of joy for the Jews! Even rain will cover us with its blessings. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. [God!] Put on the cloak of vengeance and resentment! Pour Your wrath on [ungodly] nations! And, like the days when I left Egypt, guide Your people with Your scepter! Then I will triumph over my enemies, I will raise my standard in front of those who insulted the footsteps of Your Messiah. Pursue them promptly with Your storm, like one who hunts the partridge! And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots.

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Aharon, sanctified by God, will rejoice, wearing again the crown of priesthood. His scepter will flower, buds will sprout. He will put on the eight [priestly] garments. He will put on his forehead the golden diadem and the plate. On his heart, he will display the precious stones of the breastplate, Named after the tribes of Israel, a total of twelve commemorative gems. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. The son of David is coming in order to remove [the impure] and bring [the pure] together, and to reign over Israel, his sacred dominion. During his reign, the wisdom of the Torah will spread. His word will be heard all over the world. And nation shall not lift up sword against nation. These are his wonders, his exploits! He will kill the wicked with the breath of his lips, and be strong as a well-rooted tree. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. How long will our [Messiah] of justice reign? A time longed-for, evaluated with passion! Scholars looked into their calculations, based on the Holy Scriptures. Some believed that he will reign for forty years, others for seventy years. We already presumed that he reigned in the time of the chief shepherd, King Ḥizqiyyahu, guide to justice. And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots. [God!] Hasten his arrival, even before his time, to save repentant sinners! Thanks to the merit of [Abraham], the father of many nations, of Isaac, his son and of Jacob, a righteous man who dreamed of the [celestial] ladder. May our ears hear the good news! Then the children [of Israel] will return to their frontiers. To David and his posterity, forever, the Creator decided to be propitious. Let every living creature praise the Creator of the universe! Is there a guide comparable to Him? And a shoot shall grow out of the stem of Yishay, and a branch shall sprout from his roots.

Piyyut 4: Matay tekhonen ʻir Șion? The poet asks God to hasten the Gé’ulah, the messianic times when the children of Israel are liberated from their exile and return to Jerusalem in the Holy Land.

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When will You rebuild the city of Zion, the royal city? I rejoiced when they said to me: Let us go to the House of the Lord. This is the day we were yearning for. The sound of joy is heard in our borders. It will be heard in our land, in every city and every province. From East and West, from Edom and Arabia, Bring together our poor and dispersed people to [Jerusalem], the city of the great king, I yearn to be freed from subjection, And to return to my country, and to my native land. Grant Your boundless mercy to the heartbroken and the wretched. Proclaim liberty to the captives. It will be a great favor. David composed in Your honor pleasant songs and praises, As he was yearning to hear God announce: “Be strong [Israel] my dove! Take heart! Fear not! Do not be ashamed! I will uphold your righteousness, and the days of your mourning will come to an end.”

Piyyut 5: Atta Ha-Shem, ʻad matay? David Ben Ḥassin: I composed this poem on the exile of Israel among the nations. I appeal to You, O God! When will You intervene, and judge my tormentors Who scorn my statutes, my divine laws, and mock my prophets and my seers? To describe their shame, my Scriptures [Ezekiel 23: 20] say That “their emission is like that of horses, and their member is like that of asses.” Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! I was tired to endure their enticement. They were pressing me To follow their ways. They yelled at us all day long. Let their eyes darken and be blinded! Let them be like the company of Qoraḥ! Let leprosy afflict them, and cover their whole body! Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! The Almighty has made my life very bitter. I was enslaved by four kingdoms: Babylon, Greece, Media and the evil empire of Edom.

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God was a little angry with me, those nations made our suffering even worse. They even pretend that God delivered us into their hands! Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! A royal proclamation was issued, and a command was given To Abraham, the father of many nations. [Our Patriarch] chose for Israel, His children, slavery [and exile in Egypt]. God agreed that it was a better fate Than the damnation He had prepared for them. Thus [Abraham] saved the wicked of Israel from Hell’s furnace. Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! And how long, Master of the universe, will You remain silent before these evil doers? Punish them as they deserve for all their deeds! A thorough condemnation, that will bring their very end! Not one of them should remain, so that no one would remember them! Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! He who can bring His universe to an end, let Him end our affliction! Let Him hasten our liberation, because all forecast dates [for the Redemption] have passed. God, in whom we trust, will mercifully turn to His people. The holy God of Israel, who glorifies His people, will speedily build His Temple. Let the earth open and swallow up their creed, and bury their leaders! We hoped for the time when we would be freed from the Angel of Death And from the shadow of death, and when the dead would come back to life. [The community of Israel] yearns to be freed from the yoke of nations. And as in former years, Your sons will return to their city For Your sake, Heavenly God, who chose Abraham.

Piyyut 6: Odeh be-fi va-avarekh In this piyyut, R. David Ben Ḥassin praises God who guided the children of Israel during the exodus from Egypt, and who now protects him during his dangerous travels in the Moroccan countryside. He ends up with a prayer “to be freed from the yoke of nations” and for the return of the exiled to Israel. I will thank and bless God, before whom every knee shall bow. He saved His people from oppression, And He was by my side when I travelled.

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Proclaim the wonders of the living God! Sing a psalm of thanksgiving! Cheer loudly For the Lord, who rescued a people wandering In the wilderness in the desert! All living creatures give thanks to Him And glorify His greatness in a congregation. Ten people [at least], two of whom being Upright Sages. Recognize God, who does great wonders, Who creates paths in the desert In rugged routes, In narrow and difficult passages. He split rocks open in the wilderness, And mighty waters flowed freely For all passers-by. They could drink from the stream on their way. If a man goes directly To his home and country, Justice will march before him. Righteousness will tread in his steps. [Another version:] Righteousness will protect him that is upright. Your graciousness, O God, is always with me, Because You shelter me from danger. Make me good and upright, You who teaches sinners the right way. Remember Your son caught in the trap [of exile]. Let him blossom and bud like a palm tree. May he hear a voice announcing the good news: “Build up a highway! Clear the way!” Bring Your children together. Their teeth are on edge In a land of chaos and anarchy! Let them return to their country! Show them the way!

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Piyyut 7: Ha-Shem davqa le-ʻafar nafshi In this piyyut, R. David Ben Ḥassin prays God to have mercy on the children of Israel, and to hasten the coming of His Messiah in order to end the humiliation and the misery of exile, and renew the glory of Jerusalem. O God, my soul cleaves to the dust. Waters flowed over my head. I said: You are my refuge. Turn to me, and be merciful to me! Listen to me, O God, and answer my prayer, For I am poor and needy. A prayer of David. Consider that this nation, Your people, Is impoverished, despised , dishonored and disgraced. How long will You allow her suffering? Do not reject Your anointed! The scepter of Your kingdom is a scepter of equity. Once You spoke in a vision to Your devoted one. God made then a solemn promise to David. A bear is waiting for me in ambush, harassing me. Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? How long will You let Your name be defiled among the nations? Our taskmasters are pressing on, Without giving us any guidance. If we are lacking in good deeds, remember the merits of David. Strengthen Zion, the city where David encamped! The great city among the nations became like a widow. Weak, storm-tossed, she refused to be comforted. Rescue her from the hands of a ruthless nation, And bring forth the glory of Israel! For the sake of our three Patriarchs, and of King David!

NOTES 1. André E. Elbaz and Ephraïm Ḥazan, Poèmes de David Ben Ḥassine / Shirato shel R. David Ḥassin (Lod: Orot Yahadut Ha-Maghreb, 1999); André E. Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque au Maghreb (Montreal: Editions du Marais, 2015).

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2. Moshe Abenșur, Șilșeleh Shamaʿ (Alexandria: Dfus Fraj Ḥayyim Mizraḥi, 1992), Introduction. 3. “When I came to the city of Gibraltar ... I saw there Europeans playing their melodies all day long, according to the art of music. They place before their eyes a sheet of paper inscribed with lines and dots ... And the musician keeps his eyes upon the dots and the lines on the paper, and plays and sings accordingly. And the sound is very pleasant ... All this depends on the dots and the lines ... The sound follows the music coming out of the instruments ...”, in David Ben Ḥassin, Tehilla le-David (Amsterdam: Proops. 1807), 7a. 4. “El ḥaviv li ḥibbato” - My beloved God - Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque, 238H–239H, v. 20-22. 5. “Asapper pela’eikha” - I’ll recount Your wonders – Ibid., op. cit., 240H–242H. 6. “Ilan ha-zeh, ma na’eh!” in ibid., 241H, verse 47. The talmudic treatise Pirqei Avot - Ethics of the Fathers - 3: 9, states: “If one is studying [Thora] while travelling on the road, and he stops studying and says: How beautiful is this tree, how beautiful is this field, he is considered as having compromised his own life.” 7. “Ḥakhamim lahem niglim noʿam siyyaḥ er’ellim ve-siḥat deqalim, siḥat șipporim”, in Ibid., 242H, v. 80-82. 8. “Odeh be-fi va-avarekh” - I’ll thank and bless God -, Ibid, 21H-22H, v. 34. 9. “Shir ha-shirim la-el temim deʿot” - A Song of songs, to omniscient God -, in Ibid., 244H–245H. 10. “Lekhu ḥazu mifʿalot dar Shamayim” – Consider the masterpieces of He who resides in Heaven -, in Ibid., 243H. 11. After the death of Mulay Ismaʿil in 1727, a bloody civil war opposed several pretenders to the throne until 1757. One of them, Mulay ´Abdallah, massacred ten thousand soldiers of the Royal Guard in 1735, and was deposed five times between 1727 and 1757 (Aḥmed Ben Khaled Ennaciri Es-Slawi, Kitab Elistiqsa Li Akhbar Duwal El-Maghrib El-Aqsa / Chronique de la dynastie alaouite du Maroc, vol. IX, translated by A. Graulle et al. [Paris : Archives Marocaines, 1906], 188; ´Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib [[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977]], 275). In his chronicle, Rabbi Eliahu Mansano writes that, in 1737, “there is no more any king, and everyone acts as he pleases. And they [our Moslem neighbors] are busy plundering everywhere”, in Meir Benayahu, ed., Divrei ha-yamim shel Fas / Chronicles of Fez (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press, 1993), 133. R. David Ben Ḥassin’s city, Meknès, is sacked repeatedly in 1736, 1737, 1740, 1746 and 1757. On August 3, 1728, his own quarter, the Mellaḥ of Meknès, is attacked by pillagers who rape women and massacre 180 Jews.  12. In April 1790, Mulay Elyazid ordered the persecution of Moroccan Jews throughout the country. In his own city of Meknès, R. David Ben Ḥassin witnessed the pillage of the Mellaḥ, where several community leaders were tortured and executed. In June 1790, the sultan had the Jews of Fez thrown out of their homes. He seized their property and utterly destroyed their synagogues and their ancient cemetery. In February 1792, he similarly ravaged the Mellaḥ of Marrakech. All contemporaries condemn Mulay Elyazid, whom his own secretary, historian Abulqasem

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Ezziani, found unintelligent and unnecessarily cruel (Le Maroc de 1631 à 1812, translated by Octave Houdas [Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1886]), 157–168. 13. “El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a” - I’ll call out to passers-by -, in Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque, 282H–286H. The sultan’s dire oppression inspired other contemporary poets (Ibid., 129, note 157). 14. Even when they recognize that Sidi Moḥammed ben ʻAbd-Allah (1757-1790) was less cruel than his predecessors, historians and European visitors to Morocco condemn his greed, his corruption and his oppressive despotism. They describe him as the most arbitrary tyrant, who was the absolute master of the life and property of all his subjects (William Lempriere, A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogadore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant, and Thence Over Mount Atlas to Morocco [[London: J. Walter, 1791]]; Louis Chénier, Recherches historiques sur les Maures et l’histoire de l’Empire de Maroc [[Paris: Bailly, 1787]]; Pierre Grillon, Un chargé d’affaires au Maroc: La correspondance du consul Louis Chénier [[Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1970]]). 15. “El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a” – I’ll call out to passers-by –, Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque: 282H–286H. 16. “Mit’avveit ḥerut mi-shiʿbud malkhiot” - [the community of Israel] yearns to be freed from the yoke of nations -, in “Atta Ha-Shem, ʿad matay?” - When will You intervene, O God? - (Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque: 277H–278H, v. 28). 17. “Umma qasha” - A harsh nation –, in “Ha-Shem davka le-ʿafar nafshi” - O God, my soul cleaves to the dust -, Ibid., 11H, v. 22. 18. “Ereș tohu va-vohu” - A land of chaos and anarchy -, in “Odeh be-fi va-avarekh” - I’ll thank and bless God -, Ibid., 21H–22H, v. 34. 19. “ʿAmkha ... dal ve-nim’as, neḥpar ve-nivzeh” - Your people ... is impoverished, despised and disgraced -, in “Ha-Shem davqa le-ʿafar nafshi” - O God, my soul cleaves to the dust -, Ibid., 11H, v. 7-8. 20. “Șaddiq tamim, eikh niqbar be-ereș ha-ʿammim?” – A peerless holy man, how did he end up being buried in a foreign land? -, in “Azil dimʿa” - I’ll shed a tear -, Ibid., 209H–210H, v. 34. 21. “Matay tekhonen ʿir Șion?” - When will You rebuild the city of Zion? -, Ibid., 315H, v.7-8. 22. “Pedeh me-oyvim șon bein shivʿim ze’evim. Kamma gadol koḥah shel kisba beineihem ḥona?” - Save from its enemies a sheep surrounded by seventy wolves. How can a lamb who dwells among them resist such terror? -, in “El ḥaviv li ḥibbato” - My beloved God -, Ibid., 238H–239H, v. 20-22. 23. “Arim qol yelala” – I’ll scream my lamentation -, Ibid., 214H–215H. 24. In 1763, the murder of the great merchant Moshe Ben Maman, a benefactor of R. David Ben Ḥassin, was probably instigated by the sultan, in “Dimʿa teredna ʿeineinu” - We’ll shed tears -, Ibid., 189H–190H. 25. “Aḥeinu beit Israel heililu”- Let us start mourning, brothers of the House of Israel -, Ibid., 194H–195H. 26. “Lemaʿan oyvay pedeni! Hikkuni, peșaʿuni, ve-kos laʿan va-rosh hirvuni” Rescue me from my enemies! They beat me, they wounded me, they made me drink

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a full cup of poison -, in “Im amarti asappera bilshoni” – If I consider to tell [Your wonders] with my own words -, Ibid., 15H–16H, v. 31-32. 27. “El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a” – I’ll call out to passers-by –, Ibid., 282H–286H. 28. “Meʿavdut eṣe ḥofshi, ve-ashuva el arși, ve-el moladeti elekh!” - I yearn to be freed from subjection, and to return to my country and to my native land! - in “Matay tekhonen ʿir Șion?” - When will You rebuild the city of Zion? -, Ibid., 315H, v.7-8. 29. “Mekhoni, meḥoz ḥefși ve-arși” - My home, my destination and my country –, in “Likhvod Malki, konen darki” - In honour of my King, Who led me to safety -, Ibid., 22H–23H, v. 5-6. 30. “Eʿbera na ve-er’eh admat qodesh tebarya” - I yearn to go there and behold the holy land of Tiberias –, in “Oḥil yom yom eshtaeh” - Every day, I fervently wish -, Ibid., 268H–270H, v. 1-2. 31. “Qabbeș nefușay, gam megorashay ... Ve-yashuvu banim ligvulam” - Reunite my scattered people and my exiled ... Then my children will return to their frontiers –, in “Eleikha Șuri, shokhen ʿaliyya” - To you, my God, Who resides in high heaven -, Ibid., 329H–331H, v. 4, 48. 32. “Eleikha Șuri, shokhen ʿaliyya” - To you, my God, Who resides in high heaven -, Ibid., 329H–331H, v. 4, 48. 33. “Beit keleh u-ma’asar” - a jail house, a detention camp –, in “Divrei emet, katuv yosher” - Words of truth, written in proper form -, Ibid., 311H–312H, v. 13. 34. “Ha-Shem, kamma tir’eh binkha ba-shevi, nikh’eh u-met, o nishbar, o nishba?” - O God, how long will You tolerate to see Your son in captivity, in distress, dying, broken, or in chains? - In “El ḥaviv li ḥibbato” - My beloved God -, Ibid., 238H–239H, v. 8-10. 35. “Lamma tishan? ʿUra lifdot seh pezura! ... Qadosh! ... Qeshov! Shemaʿ șaʿaqat benei Israel!” - Why are You asleep? Arise and rescue Your scattered sheep! ... God! Listen! Hear the cry of the children of Israel! –, in “Abbiʿa renanay, ashir be-hegyonay” - I’ll perform my melodies, I’ll sing thoughtfully -, Ibid., 302H–303H, v. 12, 19. 36. “Qadosh! Elohei Abraham! lamma tihyeh ke-ish nidham?” - Holy God! God of Abraham! Why would You remain like a bewildered man? -, in “El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a” – I’ll call out to passers-by –, Ibid., 282H–286H, v. 95. 37. “ʿAd matay shimkha ba-goyim mitḥallel?” - How long will Your name be defiled among the nations? -, in “Ha-Shem davqa le-ʿafar nafshi” - O God, my soul cleaves to the dust –Ibid., 11H, v.15. 38. “Kamma tir’eh oyvim meraqqedim be-veitekha?” - How long will You tolerate enemies dancing in Your Temple? -, in “Bekhi tamrurim” - Bitter weeping –, Ibid., 127H–129H, v. 32. 39. “Atta Ha-Shem! ʿAd matay taʿaseh mishpat be-rodfay, bozim ḥuqotay, torotay, malʿigim be-ḥozay? ... be-omram Ha-Shem hisgiram ... Ve-ʿad matay, El ḥay ʿolam, teḥerash ve-tishqot lahem?” - I appeal to You, O God! When will You judge my tormentors, who scorn my statutes, my divine laws, and mock my prophets? ... They even pretend that God has delivered His children into their hands ... And how long, Master of the universe, will You remain silent before these evildoers? -, in “Atta

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Ha-Shem! ʿAd matay?” - I appeal to You, O God! When will You intervene? -, Ibid., 277H–278H, vs. 1-2, 13, 18. 40. “Elohim! Al domi lakh! Al tishqot! Al teḥerash! Oyev ba bigvulakh!” - God Almighty! Do not be indifferent! Do not remain silent! The enemy crossed Your frontiers! -, in “Arim qol yelala” - I’ll scream in sorrow -, Ibid., 214H–215H, v. 3-4. 41. “Zekhor! Al tafer et beritakh!” - Remember, O God! Do not break Your Alliance! -, in “El ʿovrei derekh eqre’a” – I’ll call out to passers-by –, Ibid., 282H–286H, v. 93. 42. “Neqamot, Ha-Shem! ... Ve-hashev lishkheneinu shivʿatayim el ḥeiqam ... Mehem tinqom naqam ... Dam ʿavadeikha yuqqam ... Ve-kos raʿal tashqeh le-sholelehem horgeihem” - Vengeance, O God! ... And pay back our neighbors sevenfold for the suffering that they inflicted on us! Avenge the blood of Your servants! ... Make their looters and their murderers drink a cup full of poison! -, in “Arim qol yelala” I’ll scream in sorrow -, Ibid., 214H–215H, v. 11, 27, 29-30, 36. 43. “Atta Ha-Shem! ʿAd matay?” - I appeal to You, O God! When will You intervene? -, Ibid., 277H–278H, vs. 1-2, 13, 18. 44. See Benayahu, ed., Divrei ha-yamim shel Fas, op. cit. Chénier, Recherches historiques sur les Maures, op. cit. Grillon, Un chargé d’affaires au Maroc, op. cit.; Joseph Chetrit, “Shirim iru’iyyim historiyyim be-shirat yehudei Marocco” - Occasional historical poems in the poetry of Moroccan Jews -, Moreshet yehudei Sefarad ve-haMizraḥ – The Heritage of Sephardic and Oriental Jews -, edited by Issachar Ben Ami (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982), 330–333; Joseph Chetrit, “Shirato ha-Ishit ve-ha-ḥevratit historit shel R. Shelomo Ḥalewa, Meknas.” - The Personal, Social and Historical poetry of R. Shelomo Ḥalewa, of Meknès -, Mi-Qedem u-mi-Yam, no. 4 (1991): 25–111. Elbaz, David Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque, 36–45, 128–129, 260– 266, 281–283, 214H–215H, 282H–286H; Paul Fenton and David Littman, L’Exil au Maghreb. La condition juive sous l’Islam, 1148-1912 (Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2010); Shelomo Halewa, Elegies on the persecutions of 1790, Mss. 1237 and 1319 (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary Library); William Lempriere, A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogadore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant, and Thence Over Mount Atlas to Morocco (London: J. Walter, 1791); Norman A. Stillman, “Two Accounts of the Persecution of the Jews of Tetouan in 1790.” Michael, no. 5 (1978): 130–142.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abenșur, Moshe. Șilșeleh Shamaʿ. Alexandria: Dfus Fraj Ḥayyim Mizraḥi. 1992. Benayahu, Meir, ed. Divrei ha-yamim shel Fas / Chronicles of Fez. Tel-Aviv: TelAviv University Press, 1993. Ben Ḥassin, David. Tehilla le-David. Amsterdam: Proops, 1807. Chénier, Louis. Recherches historiques sur les Maures et l’histoire de l’Empire de Maroc. Paris: Bailly, 1787. Chetrit, Joseph. “Shirim iru’iyyim historiyyim be-shirat yehudei Marocco” Occasional historical poems in the poetry of Moroccan Jews. Moreshet yehudei

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Sefarad ve-ha-Mizraḥ – The Heritage of Sephardic and Oriental Jews -, edited by Issachar Ben Ami. Jerusalem: Magnes Press: 330–333, 1982. ——. “Shirato ha-ishit ve-ha-ḥevratit historit shel R. Shelomo Ḥalewa, Meknas.” The Personal, Social and Historical poetry of R. Shelomo Ḥalewa, of Meknès -. Mi-Qedem u-mi-Yam, no. 4: 25–111, 1991. Elbaz, André E. and Ephraïm Ḥazan. Poèmes de David Ben Ḥassine, Le chantre du judaïsme marocain / Qoveș Shirato shel Rabbi David Ben Ḥassin zș’l, Paytanah shel Yahadut Maroqo. Lod, Israel: Orot Yahadut Ha-Maghreb, and The Jamie Lehmann Chair for Piyyut Studies and Research. 1999. ——. R. David Ben Ḥassine et la poésie hébraïque au Maghreb. Montreal: Editions du Marais. 2015. Ennaciri Es-Slawi, Aḥmed Ben Khaled. Kitab Elistiqsa Li Akhbar Duwal El-Maghrib El-Aqsa / Chronique de la dynastie alaouite du Maroc, vol. IX, translated by A. Graulle et al. Paris: Archives Marocaines, 1906. Ezziani, Abulqasem. Le Maroc de 1631 à 1812, translated by Octave Houdas. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1886. Fenton, Paul and David Littman. L’Exil au Maghreb. La condition juive sous l’Islam,1148-1912. Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. Grillon, Pierre. Un chargé d’affaires au Maroc: La correspondance du consul Louis Chénier. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. 1970. Halewa, Shelomo. Elegies on the persecutions of 1790. Manuscripts 1237 and 1319. New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary Library. Laroui, ´Abdallah. The History of the Maghrib. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Lempriere, William. A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogadore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant, and Thence Over Mount Atlas to Morocco. London: J. Walter, 1791. Stillman, Norman A. “Two Accounts of the Persecution of the Jews of Tetouan in 1790.” Michael, no. 5: 130–142, 1978.

Chapter 12

Muslims and Christians in the Writings of Twentieth-Century Ḥakhamim of Morocco David Moshe Biton

INTRODUCTION From 1940 to 1942, in the midst of World War II, several delegations of the Moroccan Jewish communities were sent to beseech Sultan Muhammad V to protect the Jewish community against the dangers and anti-Semitic decrees of the Vichy regime.1 Those events took place thirty years after the establishment of the French Protectorate in Morocco, which had been perceived by the Jewish community and its rabbis as a liberation from the degraded status of the Jews under Moroccan Islam. And now, just a generation later, the Jews were asking to return to “dhimmi” status under the same Islamic dynasty. With their survivalist exilic intuition, the Jews realized that though France had emancipated its Jews more than a century earlier, the Jews of Morocco were much safer with the “unenlightened” sultan.2 The above text illustrates the uniqueness of Jewish existence in Morocco under two different regimes and cultural systems. At the turn of the twentieth century, and more so with the onset of the French Protectorate, Moroccan Jews moved between their identity as indigenous Jews living in an ArabBerber region and various newly arrived identities: French, Christian, and nationalist (whether Moroccan or Jewish/Zionist). This anomalous situation created a conflicted search for “home.” On the one hand, there was a feeling of belonging to a number of “homes” simultaneously, while on the other, there was a sense of alienation, emanating from a lack of true belonging to any one home. Ḥakhmei Morocco3 experienced this challenging web of identities along with their community. They analyzed and interpreted the historical, social, and cultural realities they encountered, and reexamined the political, cultural, 295

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and inter-faith relationships they faced. In this chapter we will focus on the discourse of Ḥakhmei Morocco concerning Islam and Christianity during this period.4 As we will see, rabbinic writings and rulings concerning other religions were influenced by the political reality of the Jewish status. A dual ethos concerning the relationship between Jews and Muslims is reflected in the writings of Ḥakhmei Morocco. Scholars describe a symbiotic relationship and shared fate between the Jews and their neighbors, but there are also accounts of a harsh existential reality, filled with experiences of inferiority and humiliation.5 This duality may be considered from a number of perspectives. From a legal point of view, the status of Jews was indeed inferior. From a social perspective, the economic prosperity and political participation of the Jews fluctuated over time, whereas at a cultural level, a profound commonality was formed between Jews and the Muslims around them. The depth of this common language was expressed in the many shared beliefs, worldviews, sacred rituals, saint worship, music, art, folk sayings, and popular culture.6 In this chapter we will follow the historical axis of the twentieth century over four periods: the period preceding the French occupation, the Protectorate period, Morocco’s independence, and the emigration to the State of Israel. We will look at changes in the positions of Ḥakhmei Morocco over time, examining the interface between the political and the cultural, and between memory, myth, and history.7 We will focus on assorted rabbinic writings of Ḥakhmei Morocco including halakhic teachings, sermons, Piyyutim (liturgical poetry), and historical chronicles. By including these rabbinic sources, we obtain a more complete picture of the historical period. We will see that even though Morocco was a Muslim country, the inter-religious discourses of Ḥakhmei Morocco focused mainly on Judeo-Christian discourse and less on Judeo-Muslim discourse. THE MOROCCAN SULTANATE PERIOD Before we explore the twentieth century, some background on the long Sultanate period that led up to it is necessary. The period from the time of the Almohad Caliphate in the twelfth century until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912 is described by most historians and contemporaries as a period of ongoing instability. Jews during this time were engaged in daily survival, and their economic status and physical security were dependent upon the mercy, arbitrariness, and succession struggles of their rulers. There were some periods of economic prosperity and political stability, but these were short and depended on the character of the specific ruler, his power, and his generosity. During this period, the rest of the Moroccan

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population was also beset by uncertainty and instability, but the Jews were the first victims of any upheaval. The rabbinic sources during this era reveal an internalization of the harsh and fickle reality in Morocco. For example, Rabbi Raphael Berdugo (1747– 1821), in a 1790 text written amid anti-Jewish violence during the rule of Sultan Mulay Yazid,8 characterized Jewish existence as: “All day long we are ridiculed, we are asked for the whereabouts of our longed-for savior . . . until people say that there is no one on earth more wretched than the Jews.”9 Rabbi Raphael’s nephew, Rabbi Petahya Berdugo, also describes Judaism under attack.10 Rabbi Petahya recounts how: I was asked by one of their intelligent and distinguished gentlemen: “Ought you not believe in our religion seeing that everyone who approaches it is elevated and achieves tranquility. . . . I answered him saying that . . . if great success testifies to religious truth, then the Children of Edom [Christians] whom you view as apostates and worshippers of the idol, have now even more victories and successes.”11

Rabbi Petahya’s words here, besides indicating the continued disdain that the local population had for Judaism, also display an awareness of the growing shift of power concerning Morocco. In speaking about how Christianity had bested Islam, Rabbi Petahya gives us insight into the increasing European (Christian) influence upon Morocco. A new Moroccan Jewish elite was emerging as many Jews sought and came under the protection of European countries. In order to improve their situation, this elite was in touch with the European powers directly or via European Jews.12 Even before the French occupation in 1912, therefore, the Jews of Morocco were negotiating from their position between two parallel political forces: Moroccan and European. THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE For the Moroccan rabbinical scholar, the Protectorate symbolized not only the principles of the French Revolution but also the Christian identity of the French. Until the advent of European influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there had been almost no Christian presence in Morocco since the Almohad Caliphate in the twelfth century. The emergence of Christianity in Morocco in its new, modern, and liberating guise challenged the Ḥakhamim both conceptually and halakhically. The “new religion” created a blurring of boundaries in all aspects of life, ranging from theological questions about the status of the Christian faith through questions of modern dress, education, and

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Western culture to that ultimate inter-faith “blurring,” questions of conversion and intermarriage.13 Exposure to countries in which Jews had equal rights, even partial ones, gradually influenced Ḥakhmei Morocco. Initially, however, they did not understand the new European category of citizenship and its implications. For example, the Jews of the British Colony of Gibraltar wondered whether state funds could be used in their children’s Jewish education system, as they were essentially a reallocation of money taken from them through taxes: A third of the expenses may be accepted for teaching the children, what is known as “education,” in exchange for the taxes that they take for every little thing. . . . This is what they do in public school.14

They contacted Rabbi Yitzchak Ben-Walid of Tetouan who replied that money should not be accepted for Torah study but only for secular studies. He based his ruling on a midrash that says that receiving money from gentiles for Torah study empowers them and extends the exile.15 He rejected the claim that the money is simply appropriated Jewish tax money, based on the arbitrary nature of the relationship between taxes and allocation of funds. Rabbi Yitzchak had not yet internalized the economic approach of the democratic state in which taxes are returned to the public and any arbitrariness arises from changing decisions of the public will. Maybe such an approach can be attributed to a generation of Moroccan Ḥakhamim who supported the Alliance school system, where the French Protectorate funded Jewish education. In 1916, Rabbi Rafael Ankawa from Salé, in a responsum to the town of Al-Ksar,16 ruled similarly concerning accepting public funds for Jewish education. However, three years later, he seems to have looked favorably on the fact that the Jews are part of the state system. In response to the Rabat community over a financial dispute between the community and a judge who was appointed by the French government, he speaks quite highly of the Protectorate. He is impressed by the bureaucratic systems that brought order, cleanliness, and regulation to the system of kosher meat slaughtering and the religious courts: The shining of the mighty royal sun in the West, the kingdom of France, brought with it fine repairs in fixing the roads and markets and streets so that they are free of dirt and debris, and also put the abattoirs along the Mediterranean Sea. . . . And from among the fine measures that it has taken, it has established Jewish religious courts in every city and has allocated to them monthly funds for their work.17

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Rabbi Rafael here is paraphrasing the words of Rabbi Yehuda Bar-Ilay from the Babylonian Talmud, which praised Roman rule in the land of Israel for setting up markets and for building bridges and baths for the benefit of the local population.18 Rabbi Raphael did not shy away from using this Talmudic description for the French. Indeed, he went one step further by praising them not only for improving the public space but also for improving the quality of religious life of the Jews in Morocco. It seems that in his political consciousness, Rabbi Raphael viewed France as a kingdom of grace that improves Jewish life. In contrast to his “protected” status in a Muslim country, under the French, the Jewish rabbi could be integrated into the governing system and become a French Moroccan civil servant. In the introduction to his major work Toˤafot Re’em (1930), Rabbi Raphael expanded on his positive attitude toward the protectorate. He thanked the French governors who had appointed him chief rabbi of Morocco and who had decorated him with the Medal of the Legion of Honor, and prayed for France that “its star will rise ever higher,”19 all the while completely ignoring the ruling sultans, Mulay Yusuf and his son Muhammad (future Mohammad V): “Please my God hear my prayer and request. Raise up and exalt the kingdom of France higher and higher and may all its enemies and haters fall before her.” One can thus see that within a generation, a dramatic change had transformed the attitudes of Ḥakhmei Morocco concerning the status of Jews in the modern state. Whereas Rabbi Yitzchak Ben-Walid rejected government funds for Torah study, in Rabbi Raphael’s tenure during the Protectorate, Ḥakhamim actually became part of the colonial government system, and received government wages for being judges in a Jewish religious court (Beit Din). Rabbi Raphael internalized the concept of the emancipated modern state system in which service to the citizen is not considered charity but part of the state’s use of tax monies. While the Jizya (head tax) paid by Jews for their protected status in Muslim countries helped perpetuate their inferior status, French taxes were designed to develop the country, including its Jewish population—and Rabbi Raphael appreciated this. Rabbi Shaul Ibn Danan of Fez (1882–1971), in a historical chronicle that he wrote, added to France’s praise by lauding its military and cultural prowess. He attributed French supremacy to the adoption of technology and results-oriented thinking, as well as restraint, order, and discipline—all of which he felt did not characterize Muslims in Morocco. However, he did appreciate the willingness of the Moroccan tribes to make great sacrifices for their religion. Rabbi Shaul contrasted the new French order and Morocco’s old ways of doing things. France is depicted as the most exalted nation in terms of politics, science, education, health, transportation, law, and modern education. On the other hand, the old situation in Morocco is presented as

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dark and based on bribery, oppression, and ignorance. Rabbi Shaul blamed the local leaders and not the people. It should be noted that he does not make any direct contrasts between Christianity and Islam, but between the Moroccan tribes and the French colonialists. And they [the French] placed battalions of armies in every village, and they enacted many repairs and worked for the success of the inhabitants. They established schools in every single village to instruct the children concerning what they need to learn and to do in order to succeed and to brighten their darkness, to remove the rocks of pestilence and obstacles that folly has placed in their way, and to open their blind eyes that are closed to all science and wisdom.20

Rabbi Yosef Messas of Meknes (1892–1974) similarly looked with great interest at the processes taking place before his eyes and was able to describe them with a sharp and comprehensive socio-historical perspective. He reviewed the results of the transition to the modern era and sorted out its pros and cons. He did not rule out modernity per se, but he sought to warn of its dangers. On the one hand, he pointed to the abundance and security that created social mobility, equal opportunity, and a shift in the status of women. On the other hand, he pointed to the restlessness of the affluent society, which causes perpetual dissatisfaction and a pursuit of worldly goods. According to Rabbi Messas, the process of breaking down the old frameworks eliminated both the bad and the good of the old society: The Frenchman, who ushered in modernity, is seen as a messenger of God, pursuing justice, caring for others, fighting ignorance, and spreading education. With his French Revolution heritage, the Frenchman is seen as a liberator and not a conqueror—and not just of the Jews, but of the entire human race. In another context, Rabbi Yosef contrasted the French people with other peoples (Russian, Polish, Romanian, and especially German), in whose lands “the Dove of Israel did not find rest.”21 He praised “that great nation, the nation of France, may its glory rise and its majesty be exalted.” The contrast sharpens still further in his description of the situation in Morocco: Especially the Jewish residents of the Maghreb22 who did not see favor ever since their exile from Babylon, and especially from the beginning of the current millennium—a time in which our fathers told us that there was no day when there was not a curse of sword, pestilence, and famine.23

In order to balance the picture, we note that these Ḥakhamim were very alert to the ills of modernity, including the decline of religion, the abandonment of customs and manners of the traditional family, rebelliousness of the young, uninhibited consumerism, and so on. We will not discuss this at

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length because these problems were not specifically blamed on the French state, although certainly the negative changes associated with modernity in Morocco were due to the freedoms brought by the French. The political and social attitudes of the Ḥakhamim in relation to France also had implications for their intellectual and halakhic discourse concerning Christianity. The most distinct example of their conceptualization of Christianity is expressed in Rabbi Yosef Messas’s examination of Christianity’s status as a monotheistic religion. Contrary to many religious rulers in the Middle Ages and modern times who stated that in the Christian faith there is a foundation of idolatry, Rabbi Yosef argued that in our day “all the world knows the Creator Blessed is He.” He held to a position reminiscent of Isaiah’s “and the world will be filled with a knowledge of God” (Isaiah 11.9). Rabbi Yosef re-examined the history of the people of Israel. He drew a clear distinction between the hatred of Israel in the past and the situation of his day when for all peoples of the world “the truth is loved by them.” He even interpreted the phenomenon of Jewish exile and dispersal among the peoples as a historical mission of the Jewish people to spread the Torah to the gentiles. He approached the issue from the tradition of Moroccan halakhic rulings, in a spirit of curiosity and innocent discovery. As I was still considering the matter of the Christians and their worship, I pleaded with a Jew, who was acquainted with a great, pious, and respected priest, to introduce me so that I could ask him about his faith . . . . And I asked the priest in a clear voice: “To whom do you worship and to whom do you pray in this place and in all places,” and he expressed great surprise at this and said: “What is this question? We are all everywhere worshipping and praying to the one and fundamentally unique God.”24

The position that contemporary Christianity is not idolatrous has halakhic implications. Thus for example, in a 1951 halakhic question concerning whether Jews are allowed to donate organs to non-Jews, Rabbi Yosef answered in the affirmative based on utilitarian considerations (Jews stand to greatly benefit from gentile organ donations but this might be jeopardized should it become known that Jews do not donate to gentiles), general ethics (all human beings are created in the image of God), as well as faith (most people in the world believe in one God). Rabbi Yosef did not distinguish between Muslims, who are widely considered in Jewish law to be monotheists, and Christians, who were often looked upon as “close to” but not as distinct monotheists. And even if something was taken from the eye of a dead Israelite and put into the eye of a living gentile, that’s not bad, because today or tomorrow things

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will repeat themselves but in the reverse, and there will be reciprocation, and it is simple and clear that they [the gentiles] will donate more because they are the many, and in this the love of man for man without distinguishing between religions will become evident. Because all are God’s creatures, and it is as if God is sorry even for the blood of an idolater that is spilled . . . in order to establish in our hearts the love of man for man, gentiles and brethren alike, and in particular that all nations now faithfully know God and believe in His unity and providence.25

Rabbi Shalom Messas of Meknes (1909–2003) followed in the footsteps of his cousin Rabbi Yosef claiming that today’s Christians are not idolaters. Thus, Rabbi Shalom ruled concerning a rabbi who received a medal from the Pope inscribed with the Pope’s image, that the rabbi was permitted to keep and enjoy the medal with certain restrictions. Rabbi Shalom said that many Christians of his time are rationalists and not fundamentalists in their beliefs “and it would not occur to them to worship an icon on coins.”26 Similarly, he ruled for an Orthodox community in the United States that they could donate money to a church that was maliciously burned down by bigots and that there was no concern that it might amount to participation in idolatry.27 He also ruled concerning Alliance schools, at a time when bibles were scarce, that they were permitted to use bibles bought from a Christian religious press and included the books of the New Testament. He testified that he himself did so when he ran a Talmud Torah in Meknes.28 He thus relied on the tradition used in Meknes, and ignored Rabbi Rafael Ankawa’s ruling that these books should be burned.29 Rabbi David Ovadia of Sefrou responded to the same question and presented a reverse position in 1960. His position was that these bibles should be burned as their intent was to attract Jews to Christianity.30 The daily encounter with Christianity and Christians created close contact between women and men and also led to romances and a desire for marriage. This was a new issue that, due to social taboos and Muslim religious prohibition, had not come up before in Morocco. As a result, the Ḥakhamim began to receive requests to convert the Christian spouse. The traditional halakhic position was that this type of conversion should be avoided, as it was for the purpose of furthering personal relations and not out of theologically informed will. Rabbi Raphael Ankawa laid the foundations for the halakhic change in the attitude of Moroccan Ḥakhamim to conversion. He was asked by the Pará community in Brazil about a Jewish man who fell in love with a Christian girl and wished to convert her, threatening suicide if he was not allowed to do so. Rabbi Raphael’s ruling allowing for the conversion was based on halachic precedents and considerations of “risk of life,” both physical (as he might commit suicide) and spiritual (as he might convert to Christianity

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instead).31 This ruling set a precedent among twentieth-century Moroccan Ḥakhamim and established two principles: one, that the definition of “risk of life” included the risk of converting out of Judaism, and two, that each rabbinic court has the authority to assess the specific case before them and judge as they see fit.32 Rabbi Yehoshua Maman argued against this reading of Rabbi Raphael and showed that in other cases he was against conversion for personal (rather than theological) reasons.33 In 1965, Rabbi Yosef Messas surveyed the previous decades’ development of the halakha concerning the conversion issue. He wrote that because of his service as a rabbi in Algeria, he encountered many conversions due to the many Christians who lived there and the possibility of civil marriage. He related many instances where opposition to such marriages led to illness, violence, grief for the families, religious defamation, pretense (feigning), and conversion out of Judaism. Because of all of these factors, he preferred the acceptance of converts and even came out against those rabbis who delay or reject conversions: “and who is to blame for all this, the sanctimonious rabbis, who are not wise enough to foresee what will come to pass and the results of time.”34 From his account, it is clear that many Ḥakhamim in Algeria and Morocco opened the door to converts as he did. He viewed conversions not as a matter that was a fait accompli, but in the hope of bringing many souls to God: “And we have seen many people whose conversions were only for the sake of marriage become true, honest, and pious converts.”35 Rabbi Yosef argued that in the history of the Jewish people, there were many converts and among them those who rose to prophecy, kingship, and priesthood. INDEPENDENT MOROCCO AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL Morocco’s independence in 1956 led to different approaches to the historical relationships between Jews and Muslims. For example, both Jewish and Muslim writers started to speak of an ethos of symbiosis between the recent kings of Morocco and its Jews.36 As part of the transition from a French Protectorate to an independent country, the Beit Din Dayanim received the status of judges in the Moroccan legal system. Because of the high salary and prestige, several Moroccan rabbis even delayed their ‛Aliyah to Israel and did not leave Morocco with their Jewish communities. A unique situation thus existed in Morocco: It was the only country in the world where Jews were obligated by state law to appear before a Beit Din concerning matters of inheritance. This uniqueness is reflected in a legal discussion between Rabbi Shalom Messas and Rabbi Moshe Malka in Casablanca in the 1960s. The debate revolved around

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two wills written by the same Jew, one written in Morocco and the other in France. Rabbi Shalom believed that the will written in France was binding, even though it came through a gentile court, since it was the later will and the most recent time that the deceased had expressed his opinion. Rabbi Moshe believed that the Moroccan will should be followed, since it was the one given in a Beit Din. Rabbi Shalom demonstrated the absurdity of Rabbi Moshe’s position in his rhetorical question: Given that Morocco is the only place in the world that provides legal autonomy for Jews in inheritance law, perhaps this should require all the world’s Jews to come and be judged in Morocco? He pointed out the absurdity in the argument by positing that apparently this would include the Jews of Israel, since even though there is a Jewish majority in Israel, the state does not require Jews to go to a Beit Din, but “Morocco is the one place left in the world where Jews are judged according to the laws of the Torah, and miraculously the exalted government put these things under the authority of Ḥakhmei Yisrael.”37 The sense of honor and respect with which Rabbi Shalom was accorded in Morocco was reflected in his description of his immigration to Israel and his appointment to be Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. After being elected to office, his friends tried to stop him from returning to Morocco to say goodbye to the community; they feared that he would be harassed by the authorities and perhaps not be allowed to leave again. Rabbi Shalom insisted on returning to Morocco and saying a proper farewell. He described the special relationship he had with the Moroccan people and its king: Many times a year I would go with a large delegation before his royal highness the King to greet him. He would receive my blessing with open hands and holy trembling and perfect faith. I am blessing him in the holy city of Jerusalem as I was asked. I pray that the merit of the people of Israel, who live amongst his people, and the merit of the good that he does the Jews should protect him and watch over him. . . . And all the Moroccan people heard via radio and television that I was elected Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and no chicken screamed nor did a bird peep [i.e., no protest was voiced], and the Ishmaelites and the journalists all knew this and welcomed it happily, and they told me publicly that it is a great joy for them, that their Chief Rabbi who was born in Morocco was privileged to rise up to the Chief Rabbinate of Jerusalem, may it be rebuilt, and it is a great honor and glory for them.38

This description creates a harmonious continuum between Rabbi Shalom as the seal of the “Golden Age” of the modern Moroccan rabbinate and between Rabbi Shalom that carries on naturally to the Holy City of Jerusalem. Both Judaism and Islam speak a common religious language in which Jerusalem is sacred to everyone, and the blessing of the Jewish rabbi

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is also considered to be of religious significance to the Muslim sultan, “Amir al-Muˀminin.” This idyllic picture stands in contrast with Rabbi Rafael Ankawa’s descriptions of French rule two generations earlier, which we described above. Rabbi Raphael congratulated the French government for the improvements that they made in Morocco, and he felt that the security of his people was in good hands with the French. Rabbi Shalom goes back to the roots of JewishMuslim existence in Morocco. He writes from Jerusalem, looking back upon his native land. Rabbi Shalom makes no reference here to the less savory aspects of Moroccan Jewish-Muslim life; instead, he creates a religious and cultural narrative that retrospectively harmonizes his Moroccan identity. From the vantage point of their new home in Israel, Ḥakhmei Morocco were usually inclined to be quite nostalgic toward their native land. Removed from the daily contact and competition with their Muslim neighbors, they had a greater ability to appreciate Morocco and even to yearn for it. For Moroccan Jews as well as their Ḥakhamim, there is, paradoxically, an ease and willingness to embrace Moroccan identity they did not easily assume when they actually lived in Morocco. The ‛Aliyah of the Moroccan Ḥakhamim to the State of Israel challenged them vis-à-vis the Arabs in the land of Israel both politically and culturally. In Israel the power balance was reversed between Jew and Muslim, between the ruler and the ruled, and between the majority and the minority. It is interesting to consider this reversal in Jewish-Muslim relations and to examine trends of continuity and transformation.39 One can find rabbinical references to tension with the Arabs of Israel in sermons, halakhic opinions, and even in Piyyutim in honor of triumphs or in lamentations following tragedies.40 In general, it can be seen that the Ḥakhamim do not speak about Islam as a religion but address the Arab national as an enemy or a party to conflict. Even when political questions surfaced in halakhic queries, the response remained national rather than inter-religious. Rabbi Shalom Messas and Rabbi Moshe Malka were asked about the halakhic position regarding the handover of territories from the land of Israel in exchange for peace with Arab states and the Palestinians. Both responded similarly that territories should not be turned over as long as there is no willingness on the part of the Arabs for peace.41 Rabbi Shalom referred to the Oslo Accords, to the schism they created, and to the murder of Rabin, as follows: Gentlemen, there is no doubt that this man who killed Rabin (of blessed memory) violated “Thou Shalt Not Murder” and deserves punishment, but I see cause to criticize Rabin and Peres for giving territory to the gentiles. God gave us the Land of Israel to be free to practice the religion properly, but he saw that

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at least a third of the populace did not go the right way concerning religion and faith, so God returned a third of our land to the Gentiles.42

Although he opposed the Oslo agreements, Rabbi Shalom strongly condemned the violent resistance to them. Post facto, he considered the Oslo Accords to be under divine providence and a result of the woeful state of Judaism in Israel. He depicted Rabin and Peres as heavenly emissaries sent to punish the people for their sins. We will conclude with the Piyyutim of Rabbi David Buzaglo (1903–1975) whose content embraces the entire historical cycle that we have reviewed. At the beginning of his career, Rabbi David wrote Piyyutim using the medieval themes of exile and salvation. With the establishment of the Protectorate and later in independent Morocco, he wrote about the harmony between Jews and Muslims in his Piyyut “You Who Come from the West [Morocco]”: “And the Hebrew is not set apart from his brother the Hagarite, whether metropolitan or countrified. The spirit of them both is willing. There the boundaries were blurred. Between Israel and the nations.” The Piyyut describes these blurred boundaries between Jews and Muslim as commonalities in the belief in one God, in dress, in music, in poetry, in common food, and in aromas. This poem, which ranges from the actual to the utopian, has shaped and continues to shape a memory of a serene Jewish existence in Morocco.43 This orientation is echoed in another Piyyut by Rabbi David, “Consider this, Oh Rebels,” which he wrote in Morocco in the 1950s.44 The text of the poem, set to music by Shmuel Freshko that was originally composed for Chaim Guri’s poem “Bab al Wad” [Gate of the Valley]. Meir Buzaglo, son of Rabbi David, claimed that the words of the Piyyut should be read as an implicit response to Guri. While Chaim Guri focused on native Israeli friendship and the memory of the fallen as crucial to the Israeli ethos, all the while ignoring divine providence and its values, Rabbi David placed the value of peace and divine providence at the center of the Piyyut. He also stresses in the Piyyut the ability to forget, to heal, and to bring peace between husband and wife, and between Jacob and the sons of Esau and Ishmael. Honest Jacob sought peace softly and gently Peace with his brothers and peace with his haters We were strangled in days of hatred and fury But we have always pursued peace, we, his descendants.45

With his ‛Aliyah, Rabbi David wrote the poem “But You, My Homeland” out of salvific religious experience. He set his words to a Moroccan instrumental piece. The Piyyut consists of seven stanzas in the form of a dialogue between the returning son and the long-awaited land, which asks him to tour

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the land and establish a faithful home. The speaker refers to threats from the children of Hagar and Ishmael (who are identified in the Jewish-Muslim tradition as Arabs): “Upon those who breach and bereave me I will throw my shoes and my chamber pot at the Hagarites.” The use of the word “Hagarites” here contrasts with the use of the same word in “You Who Come from the West.” Whereas before, the use of this noun denoting Arabs and Muslims was positive, here there is no longer a blurring of identities but rather, a struggle for survival. CONCLUSION We saw that Moroccan Ḥakhamim in the twentieth century adopted a pattern that was familiar to them in their dealings with a foreign ruling religion, thus continuing the accepted paradigm of Jewish submissiveness in exile. They recognized the governing power and acknowledged its authority and patronage, even at the cost of constant humiliation. The twentieth century introduced two new governmental structures; French occupation and modern independence. The Ḥakhamim were forced to negotiate the many differences between the two: secular vs. religious, modern vs. traditional, Christian and Muslim, and colonial and native. In the writings of the Moroccan Ḥakhamim, the new political and legal developments posed halakhic implications. Whereas the Protectorate initiated a new Jewish-Christian discourse, Moroccan independence restored the traditional Jewish-Muslim discourse; the establishment of the State of Israel sharpened the nationalist Jewish-Arab discourse. The concept of “patronage” in the relations of Islam toward its Jews was transformed and reinterpreted in the independent state of Morocco: from a position of dependence and inferiority toward the Jews it became a stance of dialogue with the Jewish community. If in the past the sultan’s treatment of his subjects was that of a king’s treatment of his subjects, the kings of independent Morocco spoke to the Jews in a paternal language. The turn of the twenty-first century is marked by a desire on the part of both Muslims and Jews to create a harmonious image of Jewish life in Morocco. This attitude is evidenced in the words of Rabbi Shalom Messas (whose life coincided with almost the entire twentieth century), and we see this attitude enshrined in the Moroccan Constitution, which refers to Hebrew culture as an “extension” of Morocco’s national heritage. At the time of the ratification of this constitution in a public referendum in 2011, there were approximately 2,500 Jews in Morocco, down from a peak of over 250,000 in the late 1950s. While we have seen how the parallel encounter in the twentieth century of Jews and Muslims in Morocco with Western culture produced a shared ethos

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and mutual admiration, it is important to bear in mind the important role of absence in this relationship.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank Dr. Teddy Weinberger for his editorial suggestions and translation of this article. I would also like to thank Prof. Moshe Amar and Dr. Samir Ben-Layashi for their insightful remarks, and last but not least, Ms. Yael Ben Shimon for translating the texts from the French. May they all be blessed. 2. For scholarly literature on the meeting of June 1942 see: Haim Zafrani, Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco (New York: Ktav Publishing, 2005); Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War, translated by Catherine Tihanyi Zentelis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Daniel Schroeter, "Vichy in Morocco: The Residency, Mohammed V, and His Indigenous Jewish Subjects," in Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 215–250; Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc: Des Origines à Nos Jours (Paris: Tallandier, 2016) [French]. 3. Literally, “the wise men of Morocco”; i.e., the rabbinical leadership. 4. For general background on this issue, see Eliezer Bashan, The Moroccan Jewry: Its Past and its Culture (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2000), 65–66; Shlomo Deshen, The Mellaḥ Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 21–29; Shalom Bar-Asher, "The Social Relations between Jews and Their Environment: A Chapter in the History of the Jews of Morocco in the 18th Century," In Anti-Semitism Through the Ages, edited by Shmuel Almog (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1980), 217–249 [Hebrew]. 5. See Mark Cohen, "Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History," in Jews among Muslims Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, edited by Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 50–63; A parallel discussion that addresses the uniqueness of the Moroccan situation may be found in Haim Zafrani’s Two Thousand Years, which speaks about the arrival of Jewish refugees into Morocco after the collapse of the Almohad Caliphate as ushering in a “golden age.” It was in Zafrani’s wake that Mohammed Kenbib wrote his Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc. On the other hand, Littman and Fenton depict a very difficult Jewish existence in Morocco, among the most difficult of the Jewish communities in Islamic countries; see Paul B. Fenton and David G. Littman, Exile in the Maghreb: Jews Under Islam (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). Norman Stillman presented a similar but softer position; see Norman Stillman, “The Moroccan Jewish Experience: A Revisionist View.” The Jerusalem Quarterly 9 (1978): 111–123. Michel Abitbol presented a more complex position in Michel Abitbol, ed., Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc: perceptions et réalités (Paris: Stavit, 1997), 11–13, 149–167. 6. Daniel Schroeter, "The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa," in Modernity, Minority, and the Public

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Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, edited by Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah, and Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 39–67. 7. See Samir Ben-Layashi and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, "Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community," Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2010). 8. Concerning Sultan Mulay Yazid and his treatment of the Jews, see: Haim Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, translated by M. Eichelberg (Leiden: Brill, 1974). Also see the kina (lamentation) "I Call Out to the Passers-By,” composed by Rabbi David Hassine following the violence. It is interesting that Rabbi David ends the kina with an anticipation of redemption that does not seek revenge. See Ephraim Hazan and David Eliyahu (André) Elbaz, Tehilla Le David - Poems of David ben Hassine, the Poet of Moroccan Jewry, Critical Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary (Lod: Orot Yahadut Hamagreb, 1999), 44–45 [Hebrew]. 9. See Raphael Berdugo, Me Menouhot (Jerba: Boaz Haddad and Partners, 1941), 98–99. We find such descriptions by many Ḥakhamim of the time, as Rabbi Ḥaim Ben Atar wrote in his Torah commentary Or Ha-Ḥaim: "Because the sons of injustice tortured us and anguished us with the violence of revenge and especially the sons of the internal west—there is no bitter cup that we were not always drinking.” (Venice: Meir Ben Moshe Hayim de Zara, 1741), 9:2. [Hebrew]. 10. The controversy between Judaism and Islam was not as intense as between Judaism and Christianity; see: Moshe Perlman, "The Controversy between Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages," in Muslim Writers on Jews and Judaism, edited by Hava Lazarus-Yaffe (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1956) 145. 11. See Petahya Berdugo, Nofet Tsufim (Casablanca: Y. Razon Publishing, 1937), 12–13. [Hebrew]. 12. A case in point concerned the tragic story of Sulika Hatschwell in 1834. See Juliette Hassin, Sulika the Righteous Martyr, edited by Ariel Shaveh, (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012). Thirty years later Montefiore’s visit to Morocco aimed of gaining emancipation for the Jews; see Eliezer Bashan, Moses Montefiore and the Jews of Morocco, According to New Documentation from 1845-1885 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2008). The Alliance Archive has many documents written by Ḥakhamim seeking outside help for their community to reduce the humiliation of Jews as well as such matters as security, housing, and employment; see Fenton and Littman, Exile; David Moshe Biton, “The Tree of Life by the Tree of Knowledge: Ḥakhmei Morocco and the Alliance” (forthcoming). 13. Concerning the Christian presence in Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see: Jamaa Baida and Vincent Feroldi, Présence Chrétienne au Maroc: XIXème-XXème Siècles (Paris: Bouregreg, 2005). [French]. Also see: Eliezer Bashan. The Anglican Mission and Moroccan Jewry in the Nineteenth Century (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999) [Hebrew]. 14. Yitzḥak Ben-Walid. Vayomer Yitzḥak (Livorno: Elijah Benamozegh Publishing, 1875), 99. [Hebrew]. 15. See Talmud Bavli, Bava Batra 10.b, and Shulḥan ˤAruch, Yoreh Deˤah, section 254.

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16. Rafael Ankawa, Toˤafot Re’em (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom Publishers, 1999) § 56. 17. Ibid, § 115. 18. Talmud Bavli, Tractate Shabbat 33b. 19. Ankawa, Toafot Re’em, introduction. 20. Shaul Ibn Danan, Ha-gam Shaul (Fez: Masˤud Sharvit and Amram Hazan Publishers, 1959), 210. [Hebrew]. 21. Joseph Messas, Ner Mitzva (Fez: Masˤud Sharvit and Amram Hazan Publishers, 1935), 133. [Hebrew]. These words are part of a 1935 homily concerning the "yoke of exile." He later mentioned the appointment of the Jewish Leon Blum as Prime Minister of France as proof of the sincerity of the French belief in the equality of the human race. 22. Literally, “West”; i.e., Morocco. 23. Joseph Messas, Otzar Hamikhtavim (Jerusalem: Defus Hama‘arav, 1998), §191. 24. See: Joseph Messas, Mayim Hayyim, edited by Shelomo Dayan (Jerusalem, 1985), II, §108. [Hebrew]. 25. Ibid, § 109. Also see David Asulin and Tzvi Zohar, “Halakha, Medicine, and Morality: A Study of the Halakhic Perspective of Rabbi Joseph Messas,” Ihud Shivat Tsiyon—Religious Youth (2001), 74–102. [Hebrew] 26. Shalom Messas, Shemesh u-Magen, III, Part Yoreh Deˤah, § 21. [Hebrew]. He based his answer on a responsum of Rabbi Joseph Messas, who allowed Jewish goldsmiths to use crosses in their jewelry: "It seems that according to Christians and their scriptures the cross is just a reminder”; see: Mayim Hayyim, II §, 74. 27. Messas, Shemesh u-Magen, III, Part Oraḥ Ḥayim § 30. 28. Messas, Shemesh u Magen, II, Part Oraḥ Ḥayim, § 66. And also see Rabbi Shalom’s comment to the Rabbi of Be’er Sheva, Eliyahu Katz, that today one does not have to worry that Jews will buy the New Testament from those stores. Messas, Shemesh u-Magen, III, Introduction. 29. Raphael Ankawa, Karne Re’em, (Jerusalem, Hotsa’at Ahavat Shalom,1999), § 110. [Hebrew]. Rabbi Raphael, based on a responsum of Rabbi David Ben-Shimˤon, decided that the books deserved to be burned and that they could not be used for taking oaths. 30. David Ovadia, Natan David (Jerusalem: Ismaḥ Lev, 1996), § 33. The questions were addressed to Rabbi David and Rabbi Shalom by Yosef Madioni and Avraham Hazan, respectively, two rabbis of the French army who came from Algeria to Morocco and established the Alliance Teachers Seminary. 31. Rabbi Raphael argued that from a halakhic point of view the prohibition concerning gentile women is a cautionary decree rather than a complete prohibition. He likened the situation to the law about the “beautiful woman captive,” concerning whom it was said that “it is better to eat properly slaughtered meat rather than to eat non-kosher meat” (Tractate Kiddushin 21.b). He also based his ruling in this matter on one of Rabbi Rafael Berdugo’s famous responsa where he permitted a Pilegesh (Concubine) for a man who had converted to Islam (the man was allowed to remarry his divorcee, after she was engaged but subsequently divorced from a different

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man without sexual consummation). See: Raphael Berdugo, Mishpatim Yesharim, (Kraków: Joseph Fischer, 1891), § 170. [Hebrew]. 32. See: Masˤud Ha-Cohen, Pirḥei Kahuna (Casablanca: Yehuda Razon Publishers, 1949), Even Haˤezer, 10. 33. Yehoshua Maman, ˤEmek Yehoshua (Jerusalem: Imray Shalom Institute, 2001), Yoreh Deˤah, 17. [Hebrew]. 34. Mayim Hayyim, II 1985, § 109. 35. Ibid. 36. Robert Assaraf, Mohammed V and the Jews of Morocco (Tel Aviv: Maskal Publishing, 1997). [Hebrew]. 37. Shalom Messas, Tevuot Shemesh, IV, § 33. [Hebrew]. 38. See Tevuot Shemesh, I, § 23. 39. For a reading of Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco among Moroccan immigrants in Israel, see: Yoram Bilu and André Levy, “Nostalgia and Ambivalence: The Reconstruction of Jewish-Muslim Relations in Oulad Mansour,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, ed. Harvey E Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 288–311. Bilu and Levy spoke with Moroccan Jews who lived in a rural area not far from Marrakesh and asked them about the nature of their ties with their Muslim neighbors. The researchers concluded that although Jewish-Muslim ties had their ups and downs, they were usually marked by good neighborliness, especially during French rule. Also see Yochai Oppenheimer, Remembering the Diaspora in Hebrew Literature (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2015), 314–318. [Hebrew]. 40. See Ephraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah, “The Piyyutim ‘Who is Like unto Thee’ for the Redemption of Israel in the Six Day War: Form, Style, and Language,” Mayim Medalyo, 22–23 (2011), 153–185. [Hebrew]. 41. Messas, Shemesh u-Magen III, § 24. 42. Messas, Shemesh u-Magen, IV, § 4. 43. Yossi Ben-Shabat, David’s Song: A Literary Introduction and Part of the Scholarly Edition of the Poetry of Rabbi David Bouzaglo, the Great Poet of TwentiethCentury Moroccan Jewry (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2015) [Hebrew]; Joseph Chetrit, Hebrew Poetry in Morocco: Studies on Poems and Poets (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1999). [Hebrew]. 44. Chetrit, Hebrew Poetry, 322, note 22. 45. Meir Buzaglo, "Salim, Haim, and David: Variations of Forgetfulness." Teoria U-Bikoret 22 (2003): 171–184; Shimon Biton, "Wise up: Between Haim Guri and Rabbi David Buzaglo," published on the Piyyut website: http:​/​/www​​.piyy​​ut​.or​​g​.il/​​ artic​​les​/2​​​82​.ht​​ml. Accessed 18 February 2008.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abitbol, Michel. The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War, translated by Catherine Tihanyi Zentelis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

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———, ed. Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc: perceptions et réalités. Paris: Stavit, 1997. Ankawa, Raphael. Karne Re’em. Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom Publishers, 1999. (Hebrew) ———. Toˤafot Re’em. Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom Publishers, 1999. (Hebrew) Assaraf, Robert. Mohammed V and the Jews of Morocco. Tel Aviv: Maskal Publishing, 1997. (Hebrew) Asulin, David and Tzvi Zohar. “Halakha, Medicine, and Morality: A Study of the Halakhic Perspective of Rabbi Joseph Messas.” Iḥud Shivat Tsiyon—Religious Youth: 74–102, 2001. (Hebrew) Baida, Jamaa and Vincent Feroldi. Présence Chrétienne au Maroc: XIXème-XXème Siècles. Paris: Bouregreg, 2005. Bar-Asher Shalom. “The Social Relations between Jews and Their Environment: A Chapter in the History of the Jews of Morocco in the 18th Century.” In Antisemitism Through the Ages, edited by Shmuel Almog, 217–249. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1980. Bashan, Eliezer. The Anglican Mission and Moroccan Jewry in the Nineteenth Century. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999. (Hebrew) ———. The Moroccan Jewry: Its past and its culture. Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 2000. (Hebrew) ———. Moses Montefiore and the Jews of Morocco, According to New Documentation from 1845-1885. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2008. (Hebrew) Ben-Atar, Ḥayim. Or Ha-Ḥayim. Venice: Meir Ben Moshe Ḥayim de Zara, 1741. (Hebrew) Ben-Layashi, Samir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman. “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2010): 89–106. Ben-Shabat, Yossi. David’s Song: A Literary Introduction and Part of the Scholarly Edition of the Poetry of Rabbi David Bouzaglo, the Great Poet of TwentiethCentury Moroccan Jewry. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2015. (Hebrew) Ben-Walid, Yitzḥak. Vayomer Yitzchak. Livorno: Elijah Benamozegh Publishing, 1875 (Hebrew). Berdugo, Petahya. Nofet Tsufim. Casablanca: Y. Razon Publishing, 1937 (Hebrew) ———. Me Menouḥot. Jerba: Boaz Haddad and Partners, 1941. (Hebrew) Berdugo, Raphael. Mishpatim Yesharim. Kraków: Joseph Fischer, 1891. (Hebrew) Bilu, Yoram and André Levy. “Nostalgia and Ambivalence: The Reconstruction of Jewish-Muslim Relations in Oulad Mansour.” In Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, edited by Harvey E. Goldberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 288–311, 1996. Biton, David Moshe. (forthcoming). “The Tree of Life by the Tree of Knowledge: Ḥakhmei Morocco and the Alliance”. Biton, Shimon. “Wise up: Between Haim Guri and Rabbi David Buzaglo.” Published on the Piyyut website: http:​/​/www​​.piyy​​ut​.or​​g​.il/​​artic​​les​/2​​​82​.ht​​ml. Accessed 18 February 2008. Buzaglo, Meir. “Salim, Haim, and David: Variations of Forgetfulness.” Teoria U’Bikoret 22: 171–184, 2003.

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Chetrit, Joseph. Hebrew Poetry in Morocco: Studies on Poems and Poets. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1999. (Hebrew) Cohen, Mark R. “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History.” In Jews among Muslims Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, edited by Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner, 50–63. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Deshen Shlomo. The Mellaḥ Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fenton, Paul B. and David G. Littman. Exile in the Maghreb: Jews under Islam, Sources and Documents, 997-1912. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016. Ha-Cohen, Masˤud. Pirḥei Kehuna. Casablanca: Yehuda Razon Publishers, 1949. (Hebrew) Hassin, Juliette. Sulika the Righteous Martyr, edited by Ariel Shaveh. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012. (Hebrew) Hazan, Ephraim and David Eliyahu (André) Elbaz. Tehilla Le David - Poems of David ben Hassine, the poet of the Moroccan Jewry, Critical Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary. Lod: Orot Yahadut Hamagreb, 1999. (Hebrew) Hazan, Ephraim and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah. “The Piyyutim ‘Who Is Like unto Thee’ about the Redemption of Israel in the Six Day War: Form, Style, and Language.” Mayim Medalyo, 22–23: 153–185, 2011. (Hebrew) Hirschberg, Haim Z. (J. W.). A History of the Jews in North Africa. Translated by M. Eichelberg. Leiden: Brill, 1974. Ibn Danan, Shaul. Ha-gam Shaul. Fez: Masˤud Sharvit and Amram Hazan Publishers, 1959. (Hebrew) Kenbib, Mohammed. Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc: Des Origines à nos Jours. Paris: Tallandier, 2016. (French) Maman, Yehoshua. ˤEmek Yehoshua. Jerusalem: Imray Shalom Institute, 2001. (Hebrew) Messas, Joseph. Ner Mitzva. Fez: Masˤud Sharvit and Amram Hazan Publishers, 1935. (Hebrew) ———. Mayim Hayyim, edited by Shelomo Dayan. Jerusalem: Dayan Publishers, 1985. (Hebrew) ———. Otzar Ha-Mikhtavim. 1986–2007. 3 volumes. Jerusalem: Defus Ha-Ma‘arav, 1998. (Hebrew) ———. Shemesh u-Magen (Four parts). Jerusalem: 1986–2007. (Hebrew) Messas, Shalom. Tevuot Shemesh (Four parts). Jerusalem: 1979–1981. (Hebrew) Oppenheimer, Yochai. Remembering the Diaspora in Hebrew Literature. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2015. (Hebrew) Ovadia, David. Natan David. Jerusalem: Yismaḥ Lev, 1996. (Hebrew) Perlman, Moshe. “The Controversy Between Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages.” In Muslim Writers on Jews and Judaism, edited by Hava Lazarus-Yaffe. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1956. Schroeter, Daniel. “The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa.” In Modernity, Minority, and the Public

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Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, edited by Goldstein-Sabbah, Sasha, and Heleen Murre-van den Berg, 39–67. Leiden: Brill, 2016. ———. “Vichy in Morocco: The Residency, Mohammed V, and his Indigenous Jewish Subjects.” In Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Katz, Ethan B., Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, 215–250. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Stillman, Norman. “The Moroccan Jewish Experience: A Revisionist View.” The Jerusalem Quarterly 9: 111–123, 1978. Zafrani, Haim. Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 2005.

Chapter 13

Traveling between Place and Faith Moroccan Jews Migrating to the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century Michal Ben Ya’akov

A Moroccan folktale, The Spirit and Fragrance of Jerusalem, tells of Rabbi Hanina Yogel, a rabbi and wonder-worker in Morocco: He had a great love for the city of Jerusalem and yearned to go there. As he himself was not able to go, he saved money for a whole year and gave it to his father so that he might go there. When his father came to Jerusalem, he found it difficult to accustom himself to the conditions and so, after a short stay, he returned to Morocco. When he came back, he told his son why he had left the Holy City. Rabbi Hanina was very chagrined and said: “What a pity, Father. It was not the climate that did not suit you, nor the fragrance or the spirit of Jerusalem—Jerusalem needs the heart. If your spirit had cleaved to the spirit [ru’aḥ] of Jerusalem, you would have been inspired by the fragrance [re’aḥ] of Jerusalem.” The words of R. Hanina struck deep in his father’s heart, and that selfsame year he returned to Jerusalem where he lived for the rest of his life.1

As Rabbi Hanina’s tale clearly demonstrates, space and faith are intertwined. In Judaism, as in other religions, religious practice and perceptions of social and geographic place are as important in creating sacred space as are written texts and legal codes, and at times even more significant.2 During the nineteenth century a variety of names were used for the area which is more or less Israel today. In Jewish literature it is Zion, the Holy Land (Eretz HaKodesh), the Land of Israel (Eretz-Yisrael), or in short, the Land; for the purpose of this chapter, I will use all the terms interchangeably. Beginning in the seventeenth century Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron (the 315

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city of the patriarchs), later joined by Tiberias, became collectively known among Jews as the Four Holy Cities. The deep attachment of Moroccan Jews to the Land of Israel and its Holy Cities has been studied primarily through the written corpus of legal and philosophical writings of Jews in the Maghreb.3 However, by examining the interaction between the religious climate of various communities and the personal characteristics of those Jews who journeyed to sites they considered holy, other aspects come to light. Social and religious mores imbued with love of the Land of Israel and its venerated pious men created cultural capital and social legitimacy for geographic mobility otherwise limited in Maghrebi Jewish society. Changes in personal status, particularly for women, often triggered the decision to visit sites the Jews considered holy in the Maghreb and ultimately to emigrate to the Holy Land, the supreme manifestation of their traditional Love of Zion. In this chapter I examine the interaction between concepts of sacred space in traditional texts with those of religious practice among Moroccan Jews in the nineteenth century, utilizing geographic mobility as my field of inquiry. I argue that not only did specific religious beliefs and practices influence Jews in their decisions to make the difficult journeys, but individual and group perceptions of holiness also determined their destinations. This specific case study on the sanctity of space in religious texts, in popular practice, and in religiously motivated journeys takes all three aspects under discussion virtually to the extreme, as Moroccan Jews imbued with religious belief traveled well over 3,000 miles to settle permanently in the Holy Land, which at the time was a peripheral and undeveloped area of the Ottoman Empire in the province of southern Syria. (See figure 13.1.) I have embedded the following study within the field of humanistic and cultural geography, and in particular, “geopiety”—the reverence for and

Figure 13.1  Travel routes from Morocco to the Holy Land in the late nineteenth century. Map belongs to the author, Michal Ben Ya’akov.

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veneration of a particular place, as advanced by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.4 This approach stresses cultural and religious values and beliefs as components of human actions, and their reciprocal relationships with physical space and place. Sacred space, as Robert Sack has noted in an early work on Conceptions of Space in Social Thought (1980), is “a system which is conceptually, [but] not actually, separable from facts and their relationships.”5 Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel (see figure 13.3 on website). With the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, many scholars found new avenues to study history, literature, and culture. By analyzing the interrelated concepts of memory, place, space, and territory on the basis of the Bible and postbiblical writings of the Jewish sages, Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, for example, asserts that a group’s cultural identity shapes territory and vice versa.6 Other scholars of medieval and modern times have noted various ways in which throughout the centuries these concepts continued to grasp the minds of Jews, who were influenced by various groups and streams of thought, including their visual representations.7 In tandem with these trends in cultural geography, migration studies are emphasizing individual and collective attitudes, perceptions, and values as important subjective, non-qualitative factors in determining migration decisions, destinations, and expectations of what would be found at the end of their journey.8 At times these cultural and subjective perceptions overshadow external events and objective opportunities as motivating factors in the various stages of migration. As such, concepts of sacred space should be examined as significant variables for migration theory. Religiously motivated journeys to specific sites, whether temporary pilgrimages or permanent migrations, are simultaneously primary forces in reinforcing beliefs and their territorial relationships, as well as creating the holy spaces themselves.9 The dynamics of migration do not break down into neat theoretical dichotomies. As Kathie Friedman-Kasaba has so eloquently illustrated, neither the historical–structural theory of migration in a world system nor the “push/ pull” or modernization approach can, by itself, fully explain the immigrants’ experience. Only a “both-and” approach can enable us to perceive the complexity of individual lives and decisions.10 The religious experience of Jewish immigrants and their acclimatization to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century did not suffer neat distinctions: the earthly was sacred, and the spiritual was physical. The “fragrance of Jerusalem” is a condition of the mind and heart as much as a physical condition. It has also been found that migration as an expression of religiosity and in conversation with sacred space takes different forms depending on gender. As will be shown through a variety of historical sources, a significant proportion of those undertaking journeys from Morocco to the Holy Land in the

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nineteenth century were women. In this context, a prism of gender studies will further illuminate this chapter in “geopiety” and migration. The spatial mobility of women, motivating factors for their long-distance migrations, and the selectivity of female migrants are often determined by the relational position of women within their families and communities.11 Mirjana Morokvaśic concludes that the marginality of women increases their inclination to migrate.12 Among those women migrating from Morocco to Eretz-Yisrael in the nineteenth century were many widows, functionally marginalized in their families and communities. Any discussion of the migrations of Moroccan Jews to Eretz-Yisrael, as well as their contributions to the creation and development of sacred spaces in nineteenth-century Palestine, must therefore take into consideration the “Heavenly Jerusalem” and the “Earthly Jerusalem” as inseparable elements and not as separate or contrasting factors. The inseparability and interplay of secular, physical space and spiritual, religious concepts, as discussed by Tuan, Sack, and others, are illuminated by Rabbi Hanina’s tale and illustrated in widely distributed traditional maps and views of Eretz-Yisrael. All of these portray the religious imagination embedded in the physical space of the Holy Cities and sanctified sites. Any study of this Land must therefore “be approached . . . through the byway of attitudes, beliefs, and values.”13 (See figure 13.3 on website.) THE HOLINESS OF ERETZ-YISRAEL AND ITS SITES Attachment to the Land of Israel and the Love of Zion permeate all facets of traditional Jewish life, both in the Holy Land and in the Diaspora. Jerusalem is remembered in daily prayers and at special events; the timing of festivals is calculated according to the agricultural cycle of Palestine; laws specific to the Land are remembered. Sites mentioned in the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud are held in special esteem, although it is more often the events that are commemorated and not the place.14 While it is undisputedly the Holy Land, its sanctity is interpreted in various manners and degrees. Within normative Jewish tradition, scriptural interpretations differed, based on the philosophical leanings of various sages and the emphases placed on different aspects of Jewish law and communal traditions, including attitudes toward Eretz-Yisrael.15 In Jewish law the holiness of the Land is defined by laws and commandments, generally applying to its whole rather than specific places. There are laws applicable exclusively to the Holy Land, such as special regulations for cultivating the land, the sabbatical year, and portions in the fields left for the poor (Lev. 19:9–10, 25:2–7) and laws regulating life in walled cities as opposed to open towns (Mishnah, Tractate Bava Batra 2:1–5, 2:7–12). In Maimonides’s (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam,

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1138–1204) codification of the commandments of the Torah, settling the Land of Israel is an all-inclusive value, equivalent to the sum of all the commandments of the Torah. Elaborating on this interpretation, Nahmanides (Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman, the Ramban, 1194–1270) enumerated the basic precept of settling in the Holy Land as a separate religious commandment,16 having further ramifications. The mystical tradition within Judaism known as the Kabbalah, emerged after the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and flowered in the Galilee, especially in Safed and later, to a lesser degree, in Tiberias. Among the Kabbalistic customs practiced was the veneration of the many rabbis and sages buried in the Galilee, or reputedly buried there, from the postbiblical period onward. Jews visited their graves—a custom known from the early Middle Ages—not only as an act of piety, but also to commune with the departed tzaddik (righteous person), to request his intervention, and to absorb some of his qualities.17 The mystical doctrines emanating from Safed found fertile ground in North Africa in general and in the central and southern towns of Morocco in particular. Many Moroccan sages devoted themselves to studying the writings of the Kabbalah. Community members participated in ritual readings of its classic text, the Zohar (Book of Splendor), popularly believed to have been written by Rabbi Shimˤon bar Yoḥai (the Rashbi) in Meron near Safed during the second century. Traditional ties to Eretz-Yisrael became imbued with mystical beliefs, notably “the sparks of the Divine” which gave every man and woman an active part in the coming messianic redemption.18 Particularly strong bonds, both spiritual and material, were developed between the Land and its cities and the Jewish communities of North Africa. In the royal city of Meknes, for example, Zion was a vibrant factor in daily life. Sermons and writings emphasized its special, sacred status, meshing standard traditional terms and Kabbalistic concepts. Rabbi David Ben Hassin (1727–1792), the popular eighteenth-century paytan (liturgical poet) of Meknes, for example, wrote piyutim (liturgical poems) in honor of Tiberias and Safed that were adopted in synagogues in North Africa and Eretz-Yisrael and for special occasions.19 During the nineteenth century pictorial maps were created, adapted, and copied, noting the four Holy Cities as well as such coastal towns as Acre, Haifa, and Jaffa, mountains and seas, and various holy sites. These were not modern geographical maps but conceptual views of the Holy Land. In a popular 1875 edition of one of these “maps,” Safed is clearly depicted through the houses of the Jewish quarter and the fortress on the hilltop, however, special prominence is given to the sixteenth-century graves of R. Isaac Luria (the Ari), R. Yosef Karo (the Beit Yosef), and many others, as well as the gravesite of R. Shimˤon bar Yoḥai in nearby Meron.20 (See figure 13.2.)

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Figure 13.2  Sfat and its surroundings, a section of a pictorial map, the image of the Holy Land and its borders. By Haim Salomon Pinia of Safed, c. 1875. From the collection of the National Library of Israel.

Shadarim, pious rabbis traveling from the Holy Land as emissaries primarily to collect funds, were a functional connection between the Land and the Jews of Morocco. They transmitted the sanctity of the Holy Land, which enhanced their authority, bringing Torah mi-Zion, the word of the Torah from Zion. In addition, they brought current news, both factual and perceived, from the cities and towns of Palestine, recalling mystical events and miracles that took place in the Land. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an ever-increasing number of emissaries visited Morocco, taking advantage of the already strong ties, both spiritual and worldly and strengthening them. Between 1837 and 1900, for example, of the twenty-seven emissaries who traveled to the Diaspora representing Tiberias, twenty went to Morocco, two to Tunisia and Algeria, and five to the rest of the Jewish world.21 While Jerusalem retained its centrality in Jewish prayer and thought, and in fact became a synonym for all of the Land of Israel22 and a symbol of the ultimate return of Israel from Exile, for the Jews of Morocco it was detached from the earthly city. Safed and Tiberias, however, were “real” in their perceptions. Concepts of space and sanctity became intertwined in their minds in relation to these two Kabbalistic centers, to which they became ardently attached through word and picture, emissaries’ stories, and piyyutim. In fact, the sights and sounds of Safed and Tiberias were often more familiar to them than those of nearby towns in Morocco. These mystical ties, together with the intense attachment to Zion that permeates normative Jewish tradition, were expressed in spiritual yearnings and monetary contributions to the Holy Cities. However, they did not usually culminate in migration to a land fraught with earthly poverty, insecurity, and general neglect.

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CREATING HOLY SITES Over the centuries, beginning in the Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier, the dynamics of religious behavior, geographic mobility, and access to places of the perceived past created and sanctified specific sites in the Maghreb as well as in Eretz-Yisrael. As noted above, among the Kabbalistic customs practiced was the veneration of the many rabbis and sages reputedly buried in the Galilee and the custom of praying at their graves. Over time, such gravesites themselves became sacred spaces.23 During the nineteenth century, particularly in the central and southern towns of Morocco, informal charismatic social forces grew markedly at the expense of formal and institutionalized elements, and alternative modes of religious behavior arose outside the normative practice of Judaism. Popular mystical customs developed—customs which were not always sanctioned by the rabbis and often at variance with the normative Jewish legal code.24 Practices such as pilgrimages to visit saintly men and women in Morocco, living and dead, and to make supplications for their divine intervention transferred Kabbalistic customs associated with the Holy Land to sites in North Africa and reinforced popular belief in supernatural powers.25 The graves of those shadarim who died while traveling in Morocco were endowed with an additional aura of sanctity, and in fact became new religious sites attracting the devoted. These pilgrimages in Morocco thus created hundreds of sacred spaces, conceived to be similar but inferior to those in the Holy Land. Many were perceived to have a close geographic proximity to the Holy Land, irrespective of the actual physical distance. Pious men living and dead were purported to have traveled from their homes or graves directly to Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias in a matter of hours.26 Migration to Eretz-Yisrael The Hebrew term for the migration of Jews to the Land of Israel is ‛aliyah, literally “going up” or “ascent.” The term expresses intrinsic merit and virtue in this migration, not only physical movement, migration from one place to another, as expressed by the Hebrew term hagira. Interestingly, ‛aliyah has not been defined as a religious commandment in itself, but can be understood as a means to fulfill those commandments which can be performed only in the Holy Land. As such, ‛aliyah is both a physical and spiritual means to attain greater accessibility to the holy. According to tradition, this elevated level of sanctity promises the inhabitants of the Holy Land special benefits: health, longevity, an easier entry into the world to come, and more.27 However, these virtues themselves illustrate the gap, and even the contradictions, between the perceived notions of sanctity and the reality of poverty-stricken,

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disease-ridden Ottoman Palestine, in which a speedier entry into the world to come was the only attribute that could be assured. Just as the traditional maps and views often ignored physical geographic realities, so the “fragrance and spirit of Jerusalem,” a condition of the mind and heart, often ignores the physical attributes of place. Despite its holiness and the enduring link between Jews worldwide and Eretz-Yisrael, most Jews did not live in the Land. They fervently declared “Next Year in Jerusalem” and many dreamed of migrating, either in their lifetime or in the messianic age, but in practice, political and economic factors aside, not all Jews were actually interested in ‛aliyah. To bridge the distance between the Diaspora and the Land in both geography and sanctity, Jews characterized noted centers of Jewish learning as local versions of Jerusalem: Fès was the “Jerusalem of the Maghreb” and Tétouan “Little Jerusalem.” Over the centuries Jews in the Diaspora found other ways, both spiritual and physical, of bridging this distance. On one hand, they reinterpreted commandments connected to the Land on a purely spiritual level, detached from its territorial reality. On the other hand, ‛aliyah was not totally forsaken, and a Jewish presence in the Land waxed and waned. Those men and women living in the Land became emissaries for their respective families and communities, as well as for the Jewish people as a whole. Through these few, others were able to fulfill religious commandments in the Holy Land in abstentia. This mission not only added special status and sanctity to those living in Zion, but also had monetary benefits. To participate in life in the Land, Jews living outside the Land sent contributions to the Holy Cities to sustain the communities in their continually distressed circumstances. In this way, the funds collected abroad for Jews living in the Holy Land were not conceived of as charity, but also as a token of this participation. From the 1830s onward, there was a dramatic increase in the migration of Moroccan Jews within the country. This internal migration was due to economic, political, and social upheavals and physical insecurity, exacerbated by periodic havoc wrought by drought and famine. From towns and villages in rural areas, Jews gravitated toward the larger interior cities and from there to the coastal cities where they hoped to find economic opportunities and personal security under the aegis of foreign powers. Some continued their search for a better life in French Algeria, in Europe, or in South America. Throughout all this change and increased mobility, Moroccan Jews remained meticulous in their religious observance, which included holidays commemorating past events in the Holy Land and emphasizing the spiritual commitment to remember Jerusalem. Once migrations began, ‛aliyah too became a realistic option and their long dormant desire to “go up” to the Holy Land was awakened. The directions of migration were determined by individual

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aspirations and perceptions of improved conditions, together with such practicalities as means of transportation and personal finances. The journey to the Holy Land became a more viable option after 1830 when transportation and communication links began to improve and political changes in Palestine began to be more lenient toward non-Muslims. Steeped in Jewish scholarship, many Jews, especially from the traditional centers of Jewish life in the interior, were more familiar with the conditions, or rather the perceived conditions, in Tiberias and Safed than with those in the expanding cities of Rabat and Tangier. Some immigrated to Eretz-Yisrael to fulfill religious aspirations; some sought spiritual solutions to the mounting pressures caused by political and social changes. Others followed prominent rabbis, such as Rabbi David Ben Shimˤon who immigrated to Jerusalem from Rabat in 1854. Such decisions were generally encouraged by the rabbis and supported by their communities. Sermons and teachings in study groups emphasized the Land’s special holy status and obligations, both in normative traditional terms and in Kabbalistic concepts. Judicial decisions of the rabbinical courts favored those immigrating. In 1831, for example, after the French conquest of Algeria and the eradication of piracy in the Mediterranean, Rabbi Ya’akov Berdugo stated that the “certain and great personal danger” of travel to the Holy Land no longer applied, and therefore no longer justified preventing ‛aliyah.28 The religious atmosphere, bolstered by the local rabbis and shadarim from the Holy Land, meshed with perceived mystical ties to increased sanctity and created an environment that was fertile for ‛aliyah, the “ascent” to the Holy Land. Families and widows joined in groups and set forth dreaming of a more fulfilling and holy life in Eretz-Yisrael. In the introduction to his religious tract Otzar ha-Mikhtavim (A Treasury of Letters), Rabbi Yosef Messas details the trials and tribulations of generations of his family and members of his community in Meknes in their attempts to reach Eretz-Yisrael during the nineteenth century.29 As ‛aliyah increased, social networking encouraged others and facilitated all stages of the journey—from the decision-making process through the journey itself and initial months of acclimation in their new homes.30 Many later migrated to join members of their families already settled in the Land. With the increasing numbers of Moroccan Jews in Safed and Tiberias, social factors snowballed, and these destinations became even more attractive. Tiberias was in fact known to them as the “Meknès of the Land of Israel.”31 The number of ‘olim (immigrants to the Holy Land) from North Africa, and Morocco in particular, increased dramatically. Nineteenth-century census lists from Eretz-Yisrael confirm the extent of the trend noted in individual cases and anecdotal evidence: from the 1830s until the last decade of the century

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hundreds arrived annually. Approximately one-quarter of all the Jews residing in the Holy Land had immigrated from the various communities of North Africa, primarily from Morocco. Although their numbers were negligible in relation to the thousands in their home communities, some two to three percent at most, their impact on the demographic development of the relatively small Jewish communities of their destinations was clear. The perceived spiritual attributes of Tiberias and Safed directed them to these specific destinations. During the nineteenth century the Jewish population of Safed grew from some 2,000 to 6,000 and that of Tiberias from about 1,000 to 4,000. Maghrebi Jews constituted well over a third of the Jewish population of each of these cities. In Jerusalem their impact was less significant, for reasons related to a dearth of economic possibilities and internal communal affairs: fewer than eight percent of the Jews in the city were North African. The Jewish communities in the nascent ports of Haifa and Jaffa grew at a much faster rate, and until the 1880s over half of the Jews in these coastal cities were North African, most of them Moroccan.32 (See figure 13.4 on website.) Approximately a fifth of all North African immigrants in nineteenthcentury Eretz-Yisrael came from Meknes alone, a proportion that is even more striking when taking into consideration the modest size of the Jewish community in this city, compared to the other cities of Morocco at the time.33 More set out for the Holy Land from Meknes but were prevented from completing their journeys by illness and death, financial worries, and other problems.34 The intense preoccupation with the Holy Land in Meknes contrasts not only with that of Jewish communities in other countries but also with neighboring communities, in spite of the continuous ties between them. In nearby Sefrou, for example, a patron of the community was successfully influenced not to make ‛aliyah, in order to continue to support the activities of the community and its poor.35 In Tétouan in the north, the illustrious Rabbi Isaac Ben Walid was pressured to stay to help the community and its institutions cope with the increased pressures of modernization and rising population, and to make a brief pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1877 in lieu of settling there permanently.36 Women and ‘Aliyah One of the dominant characteristics of ‛aliyah from North Africa to EretzYisrael in the nineteenth century, as of Jewish migration in general, is its pattern of family migration.37 Family cohesion and continuity supported the immigrants while they made the long journey and adjusted to a new environment and society after their arrival. Rabbinical court decisions, presenting instances of family discord, indicate that the decision to migrate to EretzYisrael was a family decision. Women were active participants, and their

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wishes were usually honored.38 An 1858 judicial court case brought before Rabbi Raphael Moshe Elbaz (1823–1896) in Sefrou, for example, affirmed the right of women to immigrate to Eretz-Yisrael.39 ‘Aliyah offered women active, functional ways to express their spirituality and fulfill their aspirations for higher levels of personal religiosity. While in their home communities most avenues for increased religiosity in the synagogues or study halls were barred to them, the sanctity of living in the Holy Land has no gender bias, and women too have access (even if not equal access) to the sacred. Some women sought to enhance their lives through nonformalized, non-institutional behavior. Others hoped to fulfill personal vows to visit the graves of the pious, vows usually made together with prayers and supplications for aid in times of stress. Family obligations, daily concerns, and social restrictions on mobility were obstacles for women in fulfilling these aspirations.40 Women generally had to make do with local pilgrimages unless their husbands also endeavored to immigrate. ‘Aliyah became possible for the great majority of women only through associational migration, with their nuclear or extended families, accompanied by their fathers, husbands, or sons. However, a significant number of widows also immigrated to Eretz-Yisrael. It seems that women, more than men, chose to spend their final years in the Holy Land, and this applied especially to widows. Widowhood, while tragic and traumatic, presented new opportunities for women. These women who had been integrally involved in communal activity via their families and held a measure of status via their husbands were often marginalized almost immediately upon the death of a spouse. Though they may have had enhanced status as matriarchs, they were likely to become a burden upon their families or communities, both financially and socially.41 At the same time, however, once widowed they were free to act upon their own religious inclinations and migrate to the Holy Land, provided they had the economic means to do so. This type of geographic mobility for women in this traditional society was not only allowed by rabbinical authorities and social attitudes but was officially sanctioned as a good deed and even encouraged, although not for spiritual reasons alone.42 Widowhood was effectively a “passport to freedom,” an idea elaborated on by Ruth Lamdan in her study of sixteenth-century Jewish women in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.43 Women who had previously been under the jurisdiction of their fathers, brothers, and husbands became legal entities in their own right, able to make their own decisions and manage their own affairs, at least theoretically. Using gender as a variable in the study of migrations has also suggested that certain categories of women are in fact “selected out” for migration, or actually pushed out. Although older widows were the matriarchs of their families, and as such assumed an elevated status, this status must be

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distinguished from their often-marginal functions in daily life, creating potential conflict with the younger generation. Jewish families may have recognized this distinction, and thus accepted and even encouraged the decision of their mothers and sisters to migrate, often assisting them financially. Their marginality and relative autonomy meshed together and bolstered their ‛aliyah. Whether rich or poor, windows were required to examine their lives and reevaluate their future. They were in a unique position and their “passport” gave them greater flexibility with regard to geographical mobility. Their religious traditions served as cultural capital for their empowerment and allowed them to stretch the limits of women’s spatial mobility. Should they so decide, these widows could finally fulfill their desires and dreams and migrate to Eretz-Yisrael, sanctioned by both family and community. Such women had the possibility of developing independent lives, even if this “perceived independence” arose from, or was circumscribed by economic necessity.44 However, such autonomy was often limited by their own economic resources or those made available to them by their families. Reliable statistical information gleaned from an analysis of a series of five censuses enumerating the Jews in the Holy Land, initiated by Sir Moses Montefiore in the mid-nineteenth century, indicate the extent of the phenomenon. Although it is not always possible to ascertain which of the women listed as widows at the time of the census arrived as such, it is significant to note that twice as many women as men over the age of sixty arrived in the country from North Africa. This created a distinct gender imbalance—there were twice as many adult women as men in the North African communities of the Holy Land, one widow for every married woman.45 Although the social implications of such communities blessed with women and the challenges they presented for the communal male leadership are beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be mentioned that the same ideals and empowerment embodied in the decisions of these women to migrate continued to fortify them after their arrival and gave them strength to cope with the severe poverty and enormous problems of daily life in nineteenth-century Eretz-Yisrael. PILGRIMAGES, SAINT VENERATION, AND ‘ALIYAH Less extreme than ‛aliyah is women’s participation in the phenomenon of local pilgrimages and saint veneration in Morocco, which became increasingly popular from the mid-nineteenth century onward and continued under French colonial rule after 1912.46 In his work on saint veneration and its psychological influences, Yoram Bilu notes that “generally, the presence of the saints was a given in the social reality of Moroccan Jews, a central idiom for articulating a wide range of experiences” and “strongly felt in daily routine, as people would

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cry out his name and dream about him whenever facing a problem.”47 Although local pilgrimages are beyond the scope of this chapter, they must be mentioned within the context of women’s geographical mobility and as motivating and contributing factors for ‛aliyah. Women as well as men, and in fact more than men, believed in the special powers of the saintly and pious, visited their gravesites, and participated there in public celebrations. “Significantly, Jewish women seem to have actively adapted and benefited from these new customs to construct a new kind of spiritual authority for themselves.”48 In nineteenthand twentieth-century Morocco, this could be expressed in short pilgrimages to local holy sites and participation in devotions at the tomb sites there. (See figure 13.5 on website.) Rabbinic literature and ethnographic studies document women initiating such pilgrimages as well as their participation in annual hilulot, celebrations on the anniversaries of the deaths of these tzaddikim.49 For Jewish women in Morocco, as for those in early modern Spain, “religious devotion . . . most certainly provided an opportunity for self-expression in a society that rarely allowed female voices to be heard.”50 In late nineteenth-century Morocco, Rabbi Hayim Messas of Meknes even ruled that a husband is obligated to take his wife to visit the graves of the righteous, or allow her to go, although rabbis in Fès and Sefrou often had reservations.51 Visits to the sites of revered rabbis and tzaddikim emphasized each individual’s personal participation in the process of redemption, regardless of gender, a concept integrally associated with the Holy Land.52 Pilgrimages to and hilulot at gravesites thus reinforced North African Jewish women’s traditional Love of Zion and personal link with the Land, as well as strengthening forms of religious expression for women outside the established rituals of the community.53 Both pilgrimages, as temporary or seasonal migrations, and ‛aliyah, a form of permanent migration, are manifestations of religious or spiritual aspirations. In light of the important links between North African saints and Eretz-Israel, both reflect a deep physical as well as emotional connection with the Holy Land. Once these practices became accepted forms of behavior, and technology provided ever-improving forms of transportation, ‛aliyah seems to have become a realistic as well as an emotional extension of the pilgrimages, empowering women both geographically and spiritually. Locales identified with holy rabbis, as Safed (or nearby Meron) is with Rabbi Shimˤon Bar Yoḥai and Tiberias is with Rabbi Meir Baˤal Ha-Nes, became choice destinations in Eretz-Israel. CONCLUSION What caused static religious ties and a traditionally passive Love of Zion to evolve into a radical, active expression of religiosity in the form of ‛aliyah?

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Although the timing of ‛aliyah may have been set by external factors, creating waves of migration, the immigrants’ choice of destination was eminently connected to their own perceptions and their religious and social aspirations. Perceptions of place influenced potential immigrants not only in their decision to migrate but also in their expectations of what they would find at the end of their journey. These perceptions are vital in understanding the migrations of Jews to the Holy Land, traveling long distances to a less-developed country, with fewer economic opportunities than at home. ‘Aliyah can be used both as a measure of religious activity and as an expression of individual and group perceptions of sacred space. Overall migrations within Morocco created fertile ground for the decision to immigrate to the Holy Land, but individual beliefs and popular practices seem to have led to the specific choice of destination. For Maghrebi Jews steeped in Kabbalistic traditions, attracted to the Galilee because of its aura of sanctity together with perceived information on the possibilities available to them in the cities of Safed and Tiberias, destinations were almost preordained. At any rate, should they encounter difficulties there after their arrival, they believed that venerated men in the area, especially Rabbi Meir Baˤal Ha-Nes in Tiberias, Rabbi Shimˤon bar Yoḥai in Meron near Safed, and even Elijah the Prophet on Mount Carmel near the port of Haifa, would come to their aid.54 With the expanding numbers of Moroccan Jews in Safed and Tiberias, primarily from the central cities of Meknes, Fès, and communities in the southeastern area of Tafilelt, social networking intensified, and these destinations became ever-more attractive. Although it is impossible to determine the motivations for each ’oleh, this chapter sheds light on subjective factors of belief, the religious imagination, imagined space, and sacred sites. It seems to be individual, personal interpretations of economic, political, and social change and their construct of space that culminated in the decision to settle in the Holy Land rather than migrate to another destination or, alternatively, to remain and cope with hardships at home. Although external pressures often trigger migrations, subjective and perceived variables usually determine their direction. For many, these external factors triggered the long-dormant desire to “go up” to the Holy Land, and further defined their specific choice of destination, eminently connected to their own perceptions of sanctity of place and its part in their spiritual and worldly lives and aspirations. Given the Kabbalistic tendencies of community members, the religious commitment to the Holy Land fostered by its spiritual leaders, and the increased mobility of Jews, perhaps we should ask why there weren’t more immigrants to the Holy Land. Many Jews, particularly young men, sought economic opportunities in the coastal cities of Tangier and Tétouan, and later Casablanca. However, at least until the mid-twentieth century, the majority

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of Jews, consciously or unconsciously, made the decision to remain in their home communities and in regions familiar to them in Morocco, even if not in their original hometowns. In traditional societies, like the Jewish community of nineteenth-century Morocco, religion and religiosity figured prominently in the decisionmaking process of potential immigrants. An especially vibrant atmosphere propounding the Love of Zion and encouraging ties with the Holy Land in traditional normative terms, together with intensifying mystical tendencies, created unique perceptions of sacred spaces and their functions in daily life. Individual and group pilgrimages to holy sites and, above all, ‛aliyah to the Holy Land became active expressions of belief, creating popular traditions and reinforcing them, even if these traditions were sometimes at odds with normative texts. Ever-increasing numbers of Jews, especially from central and southern Morocco, settled in the Holy Land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and had a significant impact on the religious landscape of the country. NOTES 1. Adapted from Dov Noy, introduction and notes, Moroccan Jewish Folktales, (New York: Herzl Press, 1966), 95. 2. Yoram Bilu, “Saint Veneration and Pilgrimages to Holy Sites as a Universal Phenomenon,” in To Saints’ Graves: Pilgrimages and Hillulot in Israel, ed. Rivka Gonen (Jerusalem: Israel Museum–Yediot Aharonot, 1998), 11–25 (Hebrew); Idem, “Moroccan Jews and the Shaping of Israel’s Sacred Geography,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, eds. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 72–86. 3. For selected studies, see: Henry Toledano, "The Attachment of Moroccan Jewry," in Ḥacham Gaon Memorial Volume, ed. Marc D. Angel (Brooklyn NY: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1997), 197–221; Eliezer Bashan, “On the Attitudes of Moroccan Sages,” in Vatikin, eds. Haim Zeev Hirschberg and Yehoshua Kaniel (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press), 35–46 (Hebrew); Shalom Bar-Asher, “The Jews of North Africa,” in The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), 297–315; Zvi Zohar, “The Meaning of Life in the Holy Land in the Writings of Sephardic Rabbis, 1777-1849,” in The Land of Israel in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Aviezer Ravitsky (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 326–358 (Hebrew). 4. Yi-Fi Tuan, “Geopiety: A Theme in Man’s Attachment to Nature and to Place,” in Geographies of the Mind, Essays in Historical Geosophy, In Honor of John Kirkland Wright, eds. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11–39. John Kirtland Wright first coined the term in an American “pietist” context, John Kirkland Wright, Human Nature in Geography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), chapter 14: “Notes on Early

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American Geopiety,” 250–285. Tuan and other geographers developed it further and differed from the study of the geography of religions, see for example: Robert David Sack, Conceptions of Space in Social Thought, A Geographic Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), esp. 3–8, 167–169; Alan R.H. Baker, “Introduction: On Ideology and Landscape,” in Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective, eds. Alan R.H. Baker and Gideon Biger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–14. 5. Sack, Conceptions of Space, 4. 6. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Identity and Territory, Jewish Perceptions of Space in Antiquity (Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2019), 3–4, 155. 7. See for example: Michael Ish-Shalom, Holy Tombs, a Study of Traditions concerning Jewish Holy Tombs in Palestine (Jerusalem: Ha-Rav Kook Foundation and the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnography, 1948) (Hebrew); Elḥanan Reiner, “Traditions of Holy Places in Medieval Palestine—Oral versus Written,” in Offerings from Jerusalem, Portrayals of Holy Places by Jewish Artists, ed. Rachel Sarfati (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2002), 9–19; Alexandra Cuffel, “From Geographical Migration to Transmigration of Souls, Negotiating Religious Difference between Space among Jews in Early Modern Safed,” in Locating Religions, Contact, Diversity and Translocality, eds. Reinhold F. Glei and Nikolas Jaspert (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 64–93; Rechav Rubin, Portraying the Land, Hebrew Maps of the Land of Israel from Rashi to the Early 20th Century (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2014), 195–210 (Hebrew). 8. Among the many works, see Sergio DellaPergola, “Aliya and Other Jewish Migrations: Toward an Integrated Perspective,” in Scripta Hierosolymitana 30, Studies in the Population of Israel in Honor of Roberto Bachi, eds. Uziel O. Schmelz and Gad Nathan (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), 172–209; Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition,” The Geographical Review 61, no. 2 (1971), 219–249; Aviad Moreno, “Beyond the Nation-State: A Network Analysis of Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco to Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 1 (2020), 1–20. 9. Due to the limitations of this article, I cannot expand upon religious pilgrimages regarding them as temporary, peripheral or liminal phenomena, as defined by Victor Turner, “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973), 191–230; or his critics in regard to the Holy Land, as Thomas A. Idinopulos, “Sacred Space and Profane Power: Victor Turner and the Perspective of Holy Land Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrims and Travelers to the Holy Land, eds. Bryan F. LeBeau and Menachem Mor (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2016), 9–19. 10. Kathie Friedman-Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870–1924 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 11. Mirjana Morokvaśic, “Birds of Passage are also Women,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4 (1984), 886–907; Lin Lean Lim, “Effects of Women’s Position on their Migration,” in Women’s Position and Demographic Change, eds. Nora Federici, Karen Oppenheim Mason and Sølvi Sogner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 225–242; Rachel Silvey, “Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference,” International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (2006), 64–81.

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12. Morokvaśic, “Birds of Passage,” 896–898. 13. Tuan, “Geopiety,” 11. 14. David Newman, “Metaphysical and Concrete Landscapes: The Geopiety of Homeland Socialization in the ‘Land of Israel’,” in Land and Community: Geography in Jewish Studies, ed. Harold Brodsky (Bethesda, MD: University of Maryland, 1997), 157. 15. On the various attitudes towards the Holy Land and holy places in early Jewish sources, see: Ben-Eliyahu, Identity and Territory, esp.111–130; for a more general discussion, see: Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), esp. 11–15, 59–60. 16. For sources and a discussion of them, see: Haim Dov Cheval, Maimonides’ Sefer Ha-Mitzvot with the Criticism of Naḥmanides (Jerusalem: Ha-Rav Kook Institute, 1981), 244–246 (Hebrew). For an overall discussion of the issue, see: Aviezer Ravitsky, “A Land Adored Yet Feared: The Land of Israel in Jewish Tradition,” in Homelands and Diasporas; Greeks, Jews and Their Migrations, ed. Minna Rosen (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 2008), 183–210 and notes 376–388. 17. Pinhas Giller, “Recovering the Sanctity of the Galilee: The Veneration of Sacred Relics in Classical Kabbalah,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994), 156–158; Yoram Bar-Gal, ‘The Subjective Significance of Landscape for Man in Safed,” in The Lands of Galilee, eds. Avshalom Shmueli, Arnon Sofer and Nurit Kliot (Haifa: University of Haifa and the Ministry of Defense, 1983), 361–368. (Hebrew) 18. Issachar Ben-Ami, "Folk-Veneration of Saints among the Moroccan Jews," in Studies in Judaism and Islam, Presented to Shelomo Dov Goitein, eds. Shelomo Morag, Issachar Ben-Ami and Norman A. Stillman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981), 343–344. 19. Efraim Hazan, Ha-Shira Ha-ˤIvrit bi-Tzfon Afrika (La Poésie Hébraïque en Afrique du Nord) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995) 115–118 (Hebrew). 20. Many have examined this map; for a discussion of this map and others within a broader context of nineteenth century tableaux, see: Rubin, Portraying the Land, 195–210. 21. Abraham Ya’ari, Shluḥei Eretz-Yisrael [Emissaries of Eretz-Israel] (Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1977), 630–660 (Hebrew); see also: Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1998), 41–45. 22. Ya’akov Moshe Toledano, Otzar Genazim [An Archive of Treasures] (Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1960), 164–196. (Hebrew); Henry Toledano, "The Attachment of Moroccan Jewry to the Land of Israel According to Rabbinic Literature," in Ḥacham Gaon Memorial Volume, ed. Marc D. Angel (Brooklyn, NY: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1997), 197–221. 23. Elḥanan Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael, 1099–1517 (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 252–271 (Hebrew); Giller, “Recovering the Sanctity,” 156–158; Bar-Gal, “The Subjective Significance,” 361–368. 24. Shlomo Deshen, The Mellah Society, Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 83–85. 25. This saint veneration is often compared with Moroccan Muslim practices, although clear distinctions and differences arise from these comparisons.

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For discussions, see: Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration, 131–170; Norman Stillman, “‘Saddiq and Marabout,” in The Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage Studies, ed. Issachar Ben-Ami (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982), 489–500; Deshen, The Mellah Society, 102. 26. Examples cited by Kenneth Brown, “Religion, Commerce and the Mobility of Moroccan Jews,” Pe‛amim 38 (1989), 95–108 (Hebrew); Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration, 43, 48, n. 23. 27. Zohar, “The Meaning of Life," 326–358. 28. Ya‘akov Berdugo, Shufreh deYa‛akov [The Best of Ya‛akov] (Jerusalem: Shmuel Halevy Zuckerman Printing, 1910), 52b (Hebrew); for a discussion, see: Bar-Asher, “The Jews of North Africa,” 300–306; H. Toledano, "The Attachment," 206–218. 29. Yosef Messas, Otzar ha-Mikhtavim (A Treasury of Letters) (Jerusalem: Maˤarav Printing, 1968–1975), vol. 1, 11–20 (Hebrew). 30. Michal Ben Ya’akov, “Triple Marginalization: Widow, Immigrant and North African Women: On the Fringes of Jewish Society in 19th century Eretz-Israel,” in Immigrant Women in Israel, ed. Pnina Morag Talmon and Yael Atzmon (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012), 28–38. (Hebrew) This phenomenon is now being studied within a broader sociological context of social networking, see for example: Moreno, “Beyond the Nation-State,” 1–20. 31. Ya’akov M. Toledano, Otzar Genazim, 165; Michal Ben Ya’akov, “‘Little Meknes’: the Jews of Meknes in 19th century Tiberias,” in Research on the Maghreb, Festschrift in Honor of Rabbi Prof. Moshe Amar, eds. Moshe Bar-Asher, Elimelech Weintreich and Shimˤon Sharvit (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2018), 286–307 (Hebrew). 32. Michal Ben Ya’akov, “The Immigration of North African Jews to Nineteenth Century Eretz-Israel: Origin and Destination,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies (June 1993), Division B, vol. III (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1994), 208–214. On the statistical sources, see: idem, “The Montefiore Censuses as a Source for the History of North African Jews in Nineteenth Century,” Pe‛amim, Studies in Oriental Jewry 107 (2006), 117–149 (Hebrew). 33. Ben Ya’akov, “‘Little Meknes’,” 291–296; Y. Messas, Otzar ha-Mikhtavim, part 1, 11–17. No clear data on the size of the Jewish population in Morocco are available for the nineteenth century. Based on communal records, travelers’ reports and other estimates it seems that the population of Meknès during nineteenth century grew to approximately 6,000 souls in 1901. Deshen, The Mellah Society, 31–32. 34. Y. Messas, Otzar ha-Mikhtavim, part 1, 11–17. 35. David Ovadia, Kehilat Sefrou (The Community of Sefrou) (Jerusalem: The Institute for Research on the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1975) vol. 1, 154, document 125 (Hebrew); and discussed by Deshen, The Mellah Society, 66. 36. Un Vieux Tétouanais, “Souvenirs d’un Vieux Tétouanais,” Revue des Ecoles de l’Alliance Israelite 6 (1902): 387–398. 37. DellaPergola, “Aliyah,” 172–209. 38. Bashan, “On the Attitudes of Moroccan Sages,” 37–41; H. Toledano, "The Attachment," 206–216; with primary sources cited in both articles.

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39. Raphael Moshe Elbaz, Sefer Halakha le-Moshe (The Book of Laws of Moshe) (Jerusalem: Azriel Press, 1911) section 7, 12b; section 8, 13a. (Hebrew). 40. Michal Ben Ya’akov, “‘Aliyah in the Lives of North African Jewish Widows: The Realization of a Dream or a Solution to a Problem?” Nashim 8 (2004): 8–9; Shlomo Deshen, “Women in the Jewish Family in Pre-Colonial Morocco,” Anthropological Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1983): 137–138. 41. On the status of widows in various Jewish societies, see, among others: Ruth Lamdan, A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2000), 196–201; Renee Levine Melammed, “Sephardi Women in Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 122–126. For nineteenth century Morocco, see Deshen, “Women in the Jewish Family, 138–140;” Doris Bensimon Donath, “Sephardi Women in Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 109. In contemporary Jewish life in Israel, see: Susan Sered, Women as Ritual Experts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 103–120. 42. Ben Ya’akov, “Aliyah in the Lives,” 5–12. 43. Lamdan, A Separate People, 196. For a popular discussion of the same concept in contemporary Jewish life in Israel, Moti Benozin, “Widows: A Taste of Freedom,” Na’amat, 164 (July 1994), 26 and 28 (Hebrew). 44. Pamela Sharpe, “Survival Strategies and Stories: Poor Widows and Widowers in Early Industrial England,” in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (London: Longman, 1999), 220–239. 45. For various aspects, see: Ben Ya’akov, “Women’s Aliyah, 12–14;” idem, “Aliyah in the Lives,” 7–10; idem, “Space and Place: North African Women in 19th Century Jerusalem,” HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 10 (2012), 37–38, 42–42. Widows also appeared prominently on charity lists, tax records and in reports of economic transactions; see, for example: Jacob Barnai, “The Names of Jews in Jerusalem (1760–1763).” Cathedra 72 (1994): 163–168 (Hebrew); Vaˤad ˤAdat ha-Maˤaravim (The North African Jews’ Committee). Ha-More le-Tzedaka [The Guide to Charity]. (Jerusalem: Ha-Levy Zuckerman Press, 1903), 25–32. (Hebrew) 46. Deshen, The Mellah Society, 83–85; Harvey Goldberg, “The Zohar in Southern Morocco: A Study in the Ethnography of Texts,” History of Religions 29, no. 3 (1990): 233–258; Emily Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 115–119; Oren Kosansky, "The Real Morocco Itself, Jewish Saint Pilgrimage, Hybridity, and the Idea of the Moroccan Nation," in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, eds. Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 341–360. 47. Yoram Bilu, “Moroccan Jews and the Shaping of Israel’s Sacred Geography,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, eds. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 75. For a broad

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discussion, including the relationship between ‛aliyah and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, see: Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration, 41–45; Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage, 14–19, 217–251. 48. Cuffel, “From Geographical Migration,” 86. 49. Haim Messas, Nishmat Ḥaim [Soul of the Living] (Lekaḥ ha-kemaḥ [The Gathering of the Flour]) (reprint: Jerusalem: Bnei Issachar Institute, 1996), 183 (Hebrew); Yoram Bilu and Henry Abramovitch, “In Search of the Saddiq: Visitational Dreams Among Moroccan Jews in Israel,” Psychiatry 48, no. 1 (1985), 85; Ben-Ami, “FolkVeneration,” 293–298, 306–307; Deshen, The Mellah Society, 83–84 and esp. 134, n. 15. 50. Melammed, “Sephardi Women”, 127. Weissler makes similar conclusions in her work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish women in Europe, Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 51. H. Messas, Nishmat Ḥaim, 183; Bashan, Moroccan Jewry, 128. 52. Ben-Ami, “Folk-Veneration," 344; idem, Saint Veneration, 43–44. 53. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, discusses Ashkenazi women’s ceremonies in cemeteries as a similar avenue for non-formal religious expression. Many of their prayers also had messianic overtones. 54. Bilu, “Moroccan Jews,” 75–76.

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Silvey, Rachel. “Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference.” International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (2006): 64–81, https​:/​/do​​i​ .org​​/10​.1​​111​/j​​.1747​​-7379​​.2006​​​.0000​​3​.x. Stillman, Norman. “Saddiq and Marabout in Morocco.” In The Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage Studies, edited by Issachar Ben-Ami, 489–500. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982. Toledano, Henry. “The Attachment of Moroccan Jewry to the Land of Israel According to Rabbinic Literature.” In Ḥacham Gaon Memorial Volume, edited by Marc D. Angel, 197–221. Brooklyn, NY: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1997. Toledano, Ya’akov Moshe. Otzar Genazim [An Archive of Treasures]. Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1960 (Hebrew). Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Geopiety: A Theme in Man’s Attachment to Nature and to Place.” In Geographies of the Mind, Essays in Historical Geosophy, In Honor of John Kirkland Wright, edited by David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden, 11–39. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Turner, Victor. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191–230. Un Vieux Tétouanais. “Souvenirs d’un Vieux Tétouanais.” Revue des Ecoles de l’Alliance Israelite 6 (1902): 387–398. Vaˤad ˤAdat ha-Maˤaravim (The North African Jews’ Committee). Ha-More leTzedaka [The Guide to Charity]. Jerusalem: Ha-Levy Zuckerman Press, 1903 (Hebrew). Weissler, Chava. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Wright, John Kirkland. Human Nature in Geography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Ya’ari, Abraham. Shluḥei Eretz-Yisrael [Emissaries of Eretz-Yisrael]. Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1977 (Hebrew). Zelinsky, Wilbur. “The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition.” The Geographical Review 61, no. 2 (1971): 219–249. Zohar, Zvi. “The Meaning of Life in the Holy Land in the Writings of Sephardic Rabbis, 1777-1849.” In The Land of Israel in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Aviezer Ravitsky, 326–358. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998 (Hebrew).

Chapter 14

Takkanot of the Moroccan Rabbis Concerning the Inheritances of Wives and Daughters in the Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries Moche Amar

INTRODUCTION Rabbis both in the East and in the West dealt with the issue of the inheritance of a wife. Starting in the twelfth century, rabbis in Northern Europe and in Spain began to pass various communal ordinances (takkanot) in order to reduce the feelings of deprivation felt by the wife’s parents upon her demise. This chapter will focus upon the takkanot passed by Spanish exiles in Morocco at the end of the fifteenth century that remained unopposed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were then replaced with the Takkana of Choice in the city of Meknes. This chapter will describe the takkanot promulgated by the Spanish émigrés, the critique leveled against them by Rabbi Raphael Berdugo, and his Takkana of Choice, including the difficulties he confronted in its adoption, and the nature of his arguments. A short summary of inheritance in Jewish law is order. Jewish law confers bequests to sons only, and where there are no sons then daughters will inherit. Should there be no children, then the deceased’s father inherits, and should the father have died also, then his brothers inherit. If there are no brothers, then his sisters inherit. The wife is missing from this list of those entitled to inherit, that is, a wife is not her husband’s heir. In contrast, the husband inherits his wife’s possession upon her death.1 While the laws of inheritance apparently discriminate against women, both against the wife and the daughters where there are sons, this is only “apparently.” The sages ensured the wife’s rights by formulating a law that should her husband die, as a widow, she has the right to retain from the estate the 339

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same economic status concerning food, clothing, and shelter as she enjoyed during the marriage. If the estate is small, then she can preempt the rights of all others to the estate to ensure her rights to food, clothing, and shelter, and his heirs will receive nothing. This right is limited to her widowhood, and she cannot remarry as long as she enjoys the benefits of the estate. Should she want to remarry, then she has the right to collect the amount of the ketubah (marriage contract) from the estate.2 In most cases, whether she lives off the estate or she collects her ketubah, she takes most of the estate, if not all of it. After the inheritance of the widow had been resolved, the next in line to enjoy the benefits of the estate are the single daughters. They receive their livelihood from the estate until they come of age or until they marry. Moreover, each daughter is entitled to 10 percent of the remaining estate at the time of her marriage for her dowry and wedding.3 Since married daughters received large sums for their dowries and weddings from their parents, they are not entitled to an inheritance. To summarize, Jewish inheritance law provides for the needs of the wife and daughters prior to distributing the bequest to the sons. In most cases, after the wife and daughters have claimed their rights, nothing is left for the sons. Admon pointed out in the Mishnah dealing with this issue that in truth this is discrimination against the sons (M Ketubot, 13,3; M Bava Bathra 9,1). However, a wife’s limitation in inheritances is most prominent when she dies soon after her marriage. According to Jewish law, the husband inherits her estate. In such a case her parents may feel they have been stricken twice: First they lost their daughter, and then all the money and possessions they gave for her dowry. This sentiment permeated many families during the Middle Ages for the death of women soon after marriage was a common phenomenon due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth, especially during the first birth. PRE-NUPTIAL AGREEMENTS CONCERNING INHERITANCES Jewish law does not oppose financial agreements between the parties before the marriage so that inheritance issues are settled from the outset. In the Talmudic period different formulae existed in contracts in different parts of the Land of Israel, such as the stipulation that should the wife die without children, the husband is obligated to return the dowry to her parents.4 Nonetheless, since it was unpleasant to talk about death and estates at the onset of the marriage, and especially at the wedding celebration, many refrained from making such financial stipulations.

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French, German, and Spanish Takkanot Concerning Inheritance Laws In order to mitigate the feelings of injustice felt by the bride’s parents as well as to adjust to the ever-changing socio-economic circumstances of the Jews in the Diaspora, the rabbis throughout the Diaspora passed halakhic decisions, known as takkanot, concerning the inheritance of a wife. Among the known takkanot addressing this issue were those passed in Troyes, France, at the beginning of the twelfth century. The rabbis of Troyes determined that should the wife die without children within the first year of her marriage, the husband must return the dowry to her parents.5 At the beginning of the thirteenth century, a synod of Jewish communal leaders in Germany, passed a number of takkanot relating to a widow’s inheritance known as takkanot shu”m.6 Those takkanot state that “should the wife die without children within the first year [of her marriage], [her husband shall return to her parents] everything, and in the second year, he shall return half.”7 The underlying premise of these takkanot was that if the daughter had children, the grandchild of the wife’s parents would benefit from the property. Within the second year the parents’ sense of loss is lessened, and after two years it is minimal, and in effect, they have forgotten the dowry. SPANISH TAKKANOT DEALING WITH THE INHERITANCE OF WIVES The Toledo Takkanah In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, a takkanah was passed in Toledo, Spain, that limited the rights of a husband to inherit from his wife—a restriction without any time limits. The takkanah stated that should the wife die during her husband’s lifetime, and she had children with him, her estate is divided between the husband and her children. Should there be no children, it is divided between the husband and her heirs from her family.8 Additional takkanot concerning inheritances for wives were passed in various Jewish communities throughout Spain. The Toledo takkanot spread to other Spanish communities. Following the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and the expulsion in 1492, they were brought by Spanish exiles to various communities in North Africa and in the Near East.9 The Absorption of the Spanish Émigrés in Fez With the Spanish expulsion in 1492, Spanish and Portuguese Jews began to stream to Morocco until circa 1500. Many of them settled in Fez, preferring

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this city because it was a central city at this time, a capital having economic and political significance. Furthermore, the warm relationship that King Abu Zakariya Muhammad al-Sheich al-Mahdi (1472–1505) had with the émigrés strengthened their feelings of security, thereby fostering preference to live in Fez.10 In spite of the aid they received from the native Jews and the government, they were not well off. In the first years there, until 1498, they suffered from natural disasters: drought, famine, and pandemics which decimated the population. Due to these disasters, many of them could no longer suffer living in Morocco, and they continued their wanderings to Near Eastern countries, and some even returned to Spain. From 1498 onward, their situation steadily improved both economically and culturally, as noted by Rabbi Haim Gaguine:11 From the year 1498 God blessed us with His blessings, until we built large decorated homes, and we were blessed with yeshivot (rabbinic academies), students, and beautiful synagogues with fine architecture, and Torah scrolls dressed in fine silk with woven designs, with silver crowns, until the fame of the mellaḥ (the name for the Jewish quarters in Morocco) spread throughout all the lands of Ishmael to this very day.

One should note, to the merit of the rabbis of these émigrés, that despite their suffering, within two years of their arrival in Fez they began to organize the independent communal life of the exiled Jews, rebuilding the communal infrastructure and strengthening the moral fiber of the Jews, repairing cracks in their traditional lifestyle resulting from their trials and tribulations. In 1494 they passed their first takkanot which had many novel and bold elements, and thereby laid the foundations for properly regulating the life of the community based upon Jewish law, while honorably dealing with new challenges. By means of these takkanot they met the difficult challenges in family law that arose in the wake of the expulsion from Spain. These takkanot also served to unite the émigrés who came from different regions of Spain into one united community. Originating with the first generation of Spanish émigré rabbis, each consecutive generation added to the takkanot of Fez. The original takkanot were from 1494 and the last one from 1750.This corpus has served until today as the basis for the legal decisions of Moroccan rabbis in many realms of Jewish Law.12 The Takkanah of Fez Concerning Inheritance—The Primary Takkanah Until the arrival of the Spanish émigrés, the Jews of Morocco followed the laws of inheritance found in the classical sources of Jewish Law. Among the

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first takkanot of 1494 instituted by the rabbis of the expulsion were those that treated the issue of estates. The following are the essential points.13 1. Should the wife die before her husband, and had children from him, the husband and those children divide the estate equally. If she did not have children from him, then the husband divides the estate with her primary relatives (e.g., a son, daughter, father, brother, or sister). 2. Should the wife die before her husband and did not have children from him, nor does she have any primary relatives, then the husband takes two-thirds of the estate, and her more distant, tertiary relatives receive one third, and should there be no such relatives, then the husband receives the entire estate. 3. Should the husband die, and the widow has children from him, the widow and these children divide the estate equally. 4. If the husband had no children, but has primary relatives, then the widow receives half the estate, his heirs the other half. If there are no primary relatives, then the widow gets two-thirds and his distant tertiary heirs one-third of the estate. Should there be no such heirs, then the widow receives the entire estate. 5. Single daughters inherit with the sons while married daughters do not inherit at all. 6. When one of the couple dies, the burial expenses are taken from their common property. 7. If there are outstanding debts, if the wife died first, the debts are collected from their common property. If the husband died first, and he has children from her, the debts are collected from their common property. If there were no children, the debts are collected from the portion of the estate given to his heirs. 8. Should the widow be pregnant or nursing, she should be supported from their common property. The period of nursing is 24 months, and the widow is obligated to nurse. In other words, when the wife dies first, the entire division is undertaken in her estate only; likewise, should the husband die first the entire division is undertaken only in his estate. Besides what the widow receives from her late husband’s estate, she retains her entire property. What the widow receives from her husband’s property is in lieu of her being supported by the estate or the right to collect her ketubah. The basis of these takkanot is the Toledo takkanot as well as Algerian takkanot, with changes and additions made for the benefit of the widow. There are no extant legal decisions or responsa dealing with these takkanot from which one could derive any exegesis which would expand or limit these takkanot.

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The Second Takkanah from 1545 The 1494 takkanah was authoritative for about fifty years. In Nissan (April) 1545, a synod of Fez rabbis assembled to deliberate and “we saw that there was a need to adjust some items in the takkanah of the émigrés.”14 In other words, the original takkanah of 1494 no longer answered all the needs of the times, and hence adjustments had to be made (in their diplomatic language). But, in effect, they constituted profound changes. The following are the new regulations. 1. Should the wife die in her husband’s lifetime, leaving children by her husband, the husband and their joint children equally divide all the property of the husband and wife. Should she have no children from him, then the husband and her heirs (her children from previous marriages, or her father or brothers) shall divide the property equally. 2. If she has no primary heirs, then the husband receives two-thirds and her distant heirs a third. 3. Should the husband die first, if he had children from her or any other wife, then all the property shall be equally divided between the widow and his children. 4. If he had no children, then their property shall be divided between the widow and his primary heirs. Should there be no primary heirs, then the widow takes two-thirds and the other heirs a third. 5. If there are outstanding debts at the time of the death of one of the spouses, then they shall be collected from the entirety of all the property, and the remaining assets shall be divided among the heirs. 6. The children shall inherit equally, including non-married daughters, with the exception of the first born who gets a double portion of the inheritance. 7. As mentioned, non-married daughters inherit, but this right only exists once, with the death of either their father or mother, who ever should die first. In contrast, married daughters do not inherit at all, since they received large sums from their parents for the wedding and dowry. 8. The takkanah defines that children who are heirs to their mother refers to children who are at least thirty days old, even if they will continue to live only more hour, they inherit their mother. These takkanot contain many novel aspects, but they cannot be discussed within the framework of this chapter. THE MOTIVE FOR CHANGING THE INHERITANCE LAWS The rabbis of Fez did not reveal their motives for implementing these changes which enhanced the wife’s rights in inheritances, but it would appear that

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a new wave of émigrés from Portugal who began to arrive in 1497 were the catalyst for updating the takkanot. The Jews of Portugal had practiced the laws of inheritance in accordance with local Portuguese practice which viewed the married couple as partners in the estate. Thus, with the death of one of the parties, the remaining spouse received half of the joint property with the remaining half going to the deceased’s relatives. This was described by Rabbi Joseph ibn Lev of Salonica, another hub which attracted thousands of émigrés and crypto-Jews.15 Our rabbi should teach us: In the kingdom of Portugal there is a law and custom that the widow receives half of the property of her husband’s estate, whether she had had a large or small dowry. This practice arouses halakhic problems dealing with things that don’t exist yet, or acquiring them without a formal act of acquiring (kinyan), although they write a marriage contract (ketubah) which is upheld in the Gentile civil court, and this is also part of their customs. Some of these [Portuguese] Jews died in that kingdom, and then their widows and heirs came to Turkey. Will His Honor please render a decision if these widows are entitled to half of the property as was practiced in that place where they got married, or perhaps they are not entitled to half, and they are entitled only to their original dowry?

In his response Rabbi Joseph decided that they are entitled to their part of the estate as was practiced in Portugal. The Logic of the Takkanah Most scholars understood that these takkanot were extreme in granting rights to the widow and single daughters. However, it would appear that the Fez takkanot in most cases limited the rights of the wife and unmarried daughters usually found in Jewish Law. The takkanot were issued to address the injustices stemming from a strict reading and interpretation of Jewish Laws of inheritance, and to find the proper balance between all the heirs in order to achieve a just division of the estate. Since the widow receives half of all the joint property, she cannot continue to receive a stipend from the estate if the other heirs oppose it, nor can she demand payment for her ketubah. Likewise, the single daughters who receive their portion of the estate are no longer eligible to receive stipends or a dowry from the estate. This second set of takkanot by the rabbis of Fez is identical in content to a takkana that was in force in a Spanish community as found in the responsa of Rashba16 concerning a case where one of the spouses died and had a child from the remaining spouse. Rashba also explains the decision that the sons should also receive their share in their father’s inheritance.

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The second Fez takkanah is not limited to any time and takes into consideration the widow even if the dead husband did not have any children from her. This takkanah has no parallel in any other Jewish communities in the East or in the West after the Spanish expulsion, including the Ottoman Empire where most of the Spanish émigrés settled. When Does the Partnership of a Couple Begin? In the case of Fez, the partnership of a couple begins immediately with their marriage, even if the union lasted a very short period of time. The bride’s dowry, whether large or small, also did not play a part in the implementation of these takkanot. At the beginning of the eighteenth century an incident occurred in the city of Meknes when the groom died on the evening of the marriage after the wedding ceremony, and an argument broke out among the families whether in such a case the takkanah applies. The groom’s family claimed that such a short marriage which had not been consummated should not be considered a marriage for the estate’s determination. It would appear that the groom’s dowry was greater than that of the bride. The rabbis of Meknes found it difficult to render a decision, and they referred the query to the rabbis of Fez, who decided that even such a short unconsummated marriage, as in this case, is considered a marriage and the estate regulation applies.17 These takkanot spread to most of the Moroccan Jewish communities and were practiced for about 200 years without any objections. Until recently, it was thought that the first objection to the regulation of Fez regarding bequests had been lodged by Rabbi Raphael Berdugo in 1814, and that until then they were practiced without any objections or limiting interpretations. However, upon editing the responsa of Rabbis Judah ibn Atar and Elijah ha-Zarfati,18 this author discovered that already in the second half of the eighteenth century undercurrents of objections began and interpretations that would limit the application of the takkanot of Fez were applied. For example, when one spouse dies within the first year of the marriage, then the takkanah does not apply, and the remaining spouse and the deceased’s heirs each receive what they had contributed to the marriage.19

RABBI RAPHAEL BERDUGO’S CRITIQUE OF THE TAKKANAH ON INHERITANCE Rabbi Raphael Berdugo was born in 1747 and at a young age began to author important works on the Bible and Talmud, deliver sermons, and decide questions

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of Jewish law, demonstrating an original and bold approach to commentaries and legal decisions. He was the spiritual leader of Meknes until his death in 1821. He sharply and vocally criticized the estate takkanah. In his view, the regulation had “strange and difficult things in it, as harsh as vinegar to the teeth” and he demanded a return to the Takkanah of Toledo. His criticism included: 1. The takkanah that should the wife die, her widower and her heirs divide all the property is astonishing, for why should he divide his own property with the wife’s heirs, especially since the Torah mandates that he inherits his wife’s, and now they inherit his while he is still alive. 2. It could very well be that the rabbis who passed this regulation were referring to their own time, when in most marriages the wife’s dowry was greater than the property brought by the husband. Thus, when they divide the property upon the death of one of them, the law that the husband inherits his wife is still fulfilled. However, if the husband’s property is greater than his wife’s dowry, “From where can one derive that we must obligate the husband to give his property to his late wife’s father, and this is outright robbery without any permit at all, and God forbid that the angels of God, the authors of these takkanot, should agree to robbery!”20 3. The Toledo takkanah is based upon a firm foundation so that others should not take the entire dowry given by the father, but part should be given to him to alleviate his grief, and even with this, they observed the Torah law that a husband inherits his wife and gave the husband half of the dowry. His own property was not included in the division of the estate, for there is absolutely no reason that the wife’s heir should take anything from the husband’s property. 4. The takkanah stating that should the husband die, the wife gets half of the property, even if it is worth more than her ketubah, is also astonishing, for he is obligated to give her a 100 and she takes 18,000, and this is unreasonable. Some explain that when there is a small amount of property, the wife takes half and loses part of her ketubah. However, this explanation is baseless, for this is similar to someone who was robbed, and then the victim goes and robs someone else. 5. Sometimes the takkanah causes injustice to the wife, such as when her dowry is large and the husband’s property, in contrast, is quite small. In such a case the husband’s heirs receive half of the dowry, and in lieu of her receiving the amount of her ketubah for his property, his heirs take her property. Likewise, if the husband had debts and he did not have much property, then according to the takkanah the debts are paid from her dowry. For all these reasons Rabbi Berdugo thought that if all the rabbis in his generation were to agree, one should void the Spanish émigrés’ inheritance

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ordinance, and in its place adopt the Toledo takkanot, for in his opinion the Toledo ones were better formulated. This suggested change of inheritance regulations occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the rabbis with whom Berdugo apparently consulted did not agree with his ideas. Nonetheless, the injustices of the estate regulations continued to disturb him. Furthermore, personal tragedy also contributed to his views, for he buried at least three wives. He describes the injustices quite despondently: Consider a man who marries, and his wife dies childless, the takkanah decides that he divide his property with her heirs. And should he remarry, and his second wife should die childless, again he must divide his remaining half of his property with her parents, and now he is left with a quarter of his original property. And if he should marry a third time and she should also die childless, he will remain penniless. He further noted that this was a common occurrence in Morocco during his lifetime— many wives died during their husbands’ lifetimes and he cites himself as an example:21 This happened to me, as a result of [my] sins and my wife of my youth died and thank God she left children and I did not need recourse to the takkanah. I then married two wives, one after the other and they died childless, and were it not for my wisdom that I had made a [pre-marital] stipulation I would have been left penniless.

In other words, after the death of his first wife, as a wise man who understood the law and considered all the ramifications of his actions, he drew up financial pre-nuptial agreements with his succeeding wives. While most of the Jews remarried a second or even a third time, according to the prevalent custom, should the wife die, they would find themselves in dire straits: “What will feeble minded people do when they are caught in these evil traps, not knowing how to save themselves, continuing innocently along this tortuous path?”22 The Takkanah of Choice in Meknes In order to remedy this unfortunate situation, Rabbi Raphael decided to institute a new set of inheritance laws in 1818 for his city, Meknes, known as the Takkanot of Choice, to replace the order of inheritance practiced by the Spanish émigrés. He did not pretend to be capable of authoring such a regulation for all the Jewish communities of Morocco. The takkanah stated that: When one’s wife died, the right was given to the husband or his heirs, to choose to give his wife or her heirs, either the sum in the marriage contract or half of the estate, and, they would always choose what was better for them:

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1. If the wife should die, the husband can choose to give the children of their union her marriage contract or half of the estate. If there are no children, then he can give her heirs what remains from her dowry. 2. The takkanah grants the wife or her representatives the right to take what remains from her dowry or half of the estate. Should there be no children, then the husband can give her heirs what remains from her dowry. 3. Should there be debts, they cannot be collected from her marriage contract or from her dowry.23 In other words, this new regulation preserved both the wife’s and husband’s rights. When Rabbi Raphael first promoted this takkanah, a majority of the community and the city rabbis were opposed, preferring to continue applying the old regulation drawn up by the Spanish émigrés, on the grounds that the original takkanah had been established by great rabbis and therefore, this generation cannot void it. Furthermore, the old law does allow for prenuptial agreements. In the meantime, another extraordinary case was brought to Meknes, impelling Rabbi Raphael to actively pass his regulation. Rabbi Yechiya Lachreif, a rich and wise Jew who became a widower, married a poor woman, who then died after childbirth, leaving a baby girl less than thirty days old. It was feared that his daughter would also die before she was thirty days old, and that he would then have to divide his property with his late wife’s parents. This case apparently convinced Rabbi Raphael to put pressure on the community to accept his Takkanah of Choice, and hence, on the Day of Atonement of 1821, at the Neˤila service, Rabbi Raphael stood on the podium of the synagogue and read the text of the takkanah before the congregation. The community heard the decree, but remained silent, and Rabbi Raphael thought that their silence was acquiescence. After the Day of Atonement, the community informed him that they did not agree to the regulation and the reason they were silent was that they did not want to argue with the rabbi on the Day of Atonement. Unfortunately, two weeks later on Hoshaˤanah Rabba, Rabbi Raphael passed away. Thereupon, his disciples began to argue that acceptance of the takkanah was Rabbi Raphael’s last will and testament. After many months of lobbying and persuasion, the communal rabbis and the community itself were convinced to accept the regulation with minor changes. The agreement was passed retroactively and applied to couples who married before the agreement had been passed, and this itself was part of its novelty. The Takkanah of Choice in Fez In 1856, there was an outbreak of plague in Fez, resulting in the death of many men. As a result of the inheritance takkanah their wives received

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half of the estates, while the other half was generally divided among many sons, each receiving a relatively paltry sum. However, with the property that they inherited, some of the women remarried and subsequently abandoned the young orphans, leaving them bereft of all property. This moved the rabbis of the city to assemble and deliberate the situation, resulting in a takkanah similar to the Takkanah of Choice, with the following points.24 1. Should the husband die, his children have the choice of giving the widow her ketubah or half of the estate. 2. Only his children have this right, but should there be no children, then according to the Spanish émigré’s estate takkanah the wife is entitled to half of the estate.25 At this opportune time the rabbis of Fez revisited the above controversy between Rabbi Elijah Ha-Zarfati and Rabbi Matitya Serero concerning the death of a spouse within the first year of marriage, and determined that in such a case, the estate takkanah is void and each party is left with the property that each brought into the marriage, as decided by Rabbi Elijah Ha-Zarfati. The rabbis of Fez also applied their takkanah retroactively to couples who married before the regulation had been passed. Thus, in the nineteenth century three customs of inheritance prevailed among Moroccan Jewry. There were places where the custom of inheritance was according to original Jewish Law, including in Marrakesh and the surrounding areas in the Atlas Mountains, the regions of Tafilelt, and the Sahara Desert, where not many Spanish émigrés arrived. There were places which practiced the laws of inheritance according to the inheritance law of the Spanish émigrés. Finally, there were places such as the cities of Fez and Meknes where the laws of inheritance were carried out according to the Takkanah of Choice. These changes in the laws of inheritance did not interfere with the daily life of Moroccan Jewry and were hardly felt. Since Morocco was a large country and the distances between the cities were great, movement between these areas was rare, for transportation was ancient and difficult, and marriages generally took place between couples from the same region. TAKKANOT INSTITUTED BY THE RABBINIC COUNCIL In 1912 France took Morocco under its hegemony, and the French succeeded in developing the country economically, building roads and laying railroad tracks throughout the entire country. As a result, a wave of migration between the different regions ensued, resulting in conflicts in practice, including

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inheritance customs, as well as in other areas of Jewish law. Thus, a need arose to unify all the various Jewish legal decisions and practices so that there would be a unified law for the entire country. The French government also introduced changes in the structure and authority of the rabbinic courts and established state rabbinic courts in each large city, as well as a supreme rabbinic court of appeals in the capital city of Rabat. The president of the court also served as chief rabbi of Morocco, a new position that had never existed before in Morocco. Furthermore, as a result of the spread of modernity and French secular culture, and a decline in observance of the Torah and its commandments, new issues in family law arose which did not have any solutions in the framework of classical Jewish law. Thus, it was decided in 1947 that the renowned senior rabbis of the country should assemble each year to deliberate and decide various issues.26 They formulated the following objectives of these assemblies: 1. To retain the purity of the laws and customs uniformly throughout Morocco. 2. To issue takkanot and practices according to the situation in order to foster Jewish religious practice and the quality of life. In the second assembly of 1949, the issue of estates was raised, and it was decided to conduct a referendum among the communities to unify the laws of inheritance throughout all of Morocco. Indeed, the majority voted to unify the laws of inheritance and after deliberations a new set of takkanot was passed that obligated all of Moroccan Jewry:27 1. With the death of the husband, the widow inherits just like a son—up to five sons. Should there be more than five sons, then the widow receives 20 percent of the estate and the remainder would be divided among the heirs. 2. Should the husband have no children, the widow receives half of the estate and the rest of the heirs the other half.28 3. Should the wife die in her husband’s lifetime, he can give the ketubah to her heirs, or give them 20 percent of the common property. 4. Single sons and daughters inherit equally the property of their parents.29 5. Married daughters do not inherit. Even according to this new takkanah the widow is not entitled to collect her ketubah or to receive a livelihood from the estate. Moreover, the widow’s rights were reduced where the husband had children. They gave the rationale for this stipulation that there was a feeling of injustice to

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grant the widow half of the estate and the children the other half when there are many children: “should there be ten children they only get one portion out of twenty in their father’s property and the wife takes an amount equal to theirs.”30

CONCLUSION To give all the details of each takkanah and to emphasize all the novel aspects of them would be beyond the scope of this chapter. Moreover, this chapter could not offer a comparison to the Spanish diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean. The Spanish émigrés in the eastern Mediterranean were quite removed from the incessant deliberations, novel rulings, and open approaches, as undertaken by the rabbis of Morocco, both in the issue of inheritance as well as in other areas of Jewish law. In Morocco from the sixteenth until the twentieth century, there were many stages of interpretation, developments, creativity, and use of earlier takkanot dealing with the inheritance of women. This was a singular phenomenon, unheard of in any other Jewish community, both in the East and in the West, in Europe (Ashkenaz) or in Spain, in the last 500 years.

NOTES 1. The source of the laws of inheritance is Num. 27, 8–21, and most are discussed in the Mishnah and Talmud in tractate Bava Bathra, chapter 8, and in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Nachalot, and the Tur and Shulchan ˤAruch, Choshen Mishpat, chapters 276–289. 2. BT, Ketubot 52b, Tur and Shulḥan ˤAruch, Even ha-ˤEzer, chapter 69, paragraphs 93–94. 3. BT Ketubot, 53b, Maimondes, Hilchot Ishut, chapter 19, Tur and Shulḥan ˤAruch Even ha-ˤEzer, chapter 112. 4. See BT Bava Bathra, 8, 5. These stipulations found their way to countries neighboring the Land of Israel. In the Cairo Geniza there are marriage contracts containing a stipulation that should the wife die without children the husband would return half the dowry to her parents. This custom and these stipulations are also mentioned in the responsa of Maimonides, edited by Yehoshua Blau (Jerusalem, 1989), no. 374, and see there fn. 1 for more sources. 5. The takkanot can be found in the R. Jacob Tam’s Sefer ha-Yashar, Ḥelek ha-Ḥidushim, ed. S.S. Schlesinger (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1959), 465. See Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Feldheim, 1964), 163–164. 6. A Hebrew acronym for the tri-communities: Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.

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7. R. Shlomo Luria, Yam Shel Shlomo, Ketubot, Chapt. 4, Siman 2 (standard editions). On takkanot shu”m, see Israel Schepansky, “The Takkanot of Spires, Worms, and Mayence,” HADAROM, 177–192 (Hebrew); Israel Schepansky, The Takkanot of Israel, vol. 4, Communal Takkanot [henceforth: Schepansky, Communal Takkanot] (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 2004), 129–141 (Hebrew); Yedidia Cohen, “The Inheritance of a Wife of Her Husband in the Communal Enactments,” Shenaton ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri: Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law 6–7 (1979– 1980): 133–176 (Hebrew);  Israel Y. Yovel, “Ha-Hesderim ha-Caspiyim shel haNissu’in be-Ashkenaz be-Yemei ha-Beinayim,” Dat ve-Calcalah, edited by Menahem Ben Sasson (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1994), 191–207 (Hebrew). I have dealt with the R. Tam and the takkanot Shum and their influence on Moroccan rabbis elsewhere. 8. The Toledo takkanot were publicized and discussed at length in R. Asher ben Yeḥiel’s (Rosh), Responsa, klal 55, simanim 1, 9–10. R. Asher was rabbi of Toledo from the beginning of the 14th century until his death in 1327. See also Shraga Abramson, “On the Takkanah of Tuletula (Toledo) Regarding the Husband’s Inheritance of his Wife’s Estate,” Zion 60, no. 2 (1995): 201–224 (Hebrew); Aharon Shweka, “The Controversy About the Marriage Statute (Takkanat ha-Nissu’in) of Toledo,” Tarbiz 68, no. 1 (Fall, 1998): 87–127 (Hebrew). 9. Concerning the ordinances that were accepted in various communities, see Simcha Assaf, “Ha-Takkanot ve-ha-Minhagim be-Yerushat ha-Baˤal et Ishto,” Madaˤei ha-Yahadut (Jewish Studies), I (1926): 79–94 (Hebrew); Schepansky, Communal Takkanot, 134–154. There are other studies on this subject, but most do not discuss the laws of inheritance in Morocco, and the few that do lack a thorough examination of the entire subject matter or the developments there. 10. Consequently, in contemporary chronicles he is remembered by Jews as a benevolent ruler. See Sefer ha-Kabbalah, 1979, 38; Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, edited by Azriel Shochat (Jerusalem: Schoken, 1947), no. 54, 123 (Hebrew); Haim Z. Hirschberg, History of the Jews in North Africa: from Antiquity to Our Time, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1965), 298–324 (Hebrew); Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez 1450-1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 40–51. Concerning the suffering of the émigrés see the above sources. See also Rabbi Haim Gaguine, ‘Etz Haim, edited by M. Amar (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1987), chapter 1 (Hebrew); Abraham Zacuto, Sefer Yuchasin haShalem, edited by Zvi Filipowski. (London: Ḥevrat Meˤorerei Yeshenim, 1857), 227 (Hebrew). 11. ‘Etz Haim, 68–69. Rabbi Haim Gaguine was a native of Fez and went to Spain to study and returned with the expulsion of 1492. He became the spokesman of the native Jewish citizens of Fez against the Spanish émigrés, especially in the polemics surrounding whether meat that is not glatt (a slaughtered animal tested to discover if it has lesions in the lung) is kosher or not. Such meat was eaten by the émigrés. 12. The takkanot were first published in: Rabbi Abraham Ankawa, Kerem Hemer, vol. 2, (Livorno, 1871) (Hebrew) [henceforth: Takkanot Fas]; second edition with takkanot from the Rabbinic Council of Morocco in M. Amar, ed., Ha-Mishpat

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ha-ˤIvri be-Kehilot Maroco (Jerusalem: Ha-Machon le-Moreshet Yahadut Maroco, 1980) (Hebrew). See Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), 652–654 (Hebrew), M. Amar, “Takkanot Fas veTakkanot Moˤetzet ha-Rabbanim,” Ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri Be-Kehilot Maroco, 9–55 (Hebrew). 13. Takkanot Fas, paragraphs 2–10, which include other details, but this essay only cites the essential takkanot dealing with women’s inheritances. 14. Takkanot Fas, paragraph 19. 15. Rabbi Joseph (Mahari) ibn Lev, Responsa, vol. 2, no. 23 (Hebrew), which discusses Dona Gracia Mendes. Rabbi Joseph (1505-1580) was active in Salonika and Istanbul. Rabbi Samuel de Medina (1506-1589), a contemporary from Salonika, also deals with this issue in his responsa, Ḥoshen Mishpat, no. 327, and arrived at the same conclusion. 16. Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham ibn Aderet (Rashba), Responsa, vol. 3, no. 432. In contrast to the Fez takkanot, should he have no children from her, this takkanah diminishes her rights and those of her heirs. 17. Rabbi Jacob ibn Zur, Mishpat u-Zedaka be-Yaˤakov. (Alexandria, 1903), vol. 2, no. 187 (Hebrew). 18. Rabbi Judah ibn Attar was considered the greatest decisor of Jewish Law in Morocco and served in the Rabbinate in Fez from the beginning of the 18th century until his death on May 22, 1733. Rabbi Elijahu ha-Zarfati served as a judge from 1740 until his death on Sept. 20, 1805 at the age of 90. 19. Rabbi Eliyahu ha-Zarfati, Tanna de-Bei Eliyahu Responsa, edited by M. Amar (Lod: Orot Yahadut ha-Magreb, 2019), Even ha-ˤEzer, no. 15, 22–23 (Hebrew). Unfortunately, due to limited space, the entire debate between these rabbis, their views and actions cannot be recounted in this essay and will be discussed elsewhere. 20. Rabbi Jacob Berdugo, Shufreh de-Yaˤakov (Jerusalem, 1911) vol. 1, no. 26 (Hebrew). 21. Shufreh de-Yaˤakov, ibid. 22. Shufreh de-Yaˤakov, ibid. together with the above quote. 23. The takkanah was published in Rabbi Raphael Berdugo, Torot Emet (Meknes, 1939), 84 (Hebrew). For the background of this takkanah, see idem, Mishpatim Yesharim (Cracow, 1891), vol. 1, no. 269, and vol. 2, no. 22 (Hebrew); Shufreh de-Yaˤakov, Even ha-ˤEzer, no. 26. 24. In 1906, the Jewish community of Sefrou passed the Fez Takkanah of Choice with minor changes. 25. The takkanah was published by Solomon ibn Danan, Asher Le-Shlomo (Jerusalem, 1901), 146a (Hebrew). 26. The assemblies, the deliberations, and the takkanot were republished by Moche Amar et al., Ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri be-Kehilot Morocco, including an extensive introduction dealing with all the issues discussed in this article; Moche Amar, “Hitmodedut Hachmei Morocco ba-Dor ha-Aḥaron be-Baˤyot ha-Shaˤah,” Halakhah u-Petiḥut, edited by Moshe Bar-Yuda (Tel-Aviv: Hoza’at ha-Histadrut ha-Clalit, 1985), 47–71 (Hebrew) idem, “The Rabbinical Council of Morocco and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel,” The Scepter Shall Not Depart From Judah: Leadership,

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Rabbinate and Community in Jewish History, Studies Presented to Professor Simon Schwarzfuchs, edited by Joseph R. Hacker and Yaron Harel (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2011), 385–400 (Hebrew). 27. The takkanot are found in the Ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri be-Kehilot Maroco, 258. 28. This paragraph was influenced by the Takkanah of Choice of Fez. 29. In the émigré regulation a single daughter was given a one-time right of inheritance from her father or mother. 30. Ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri be-Kehilot Maroco, 247.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abramson, Shraga. “On the Takkanah of Tuletula Regarding the Husband’s Inheritance of His Wife’s Estate.” Zion 60, no. 2 (1995): 201–224. Amar, Moche et al., ed. Ha-Mishpat ha-ˤIvri be-Kehilot Maroco. Jerusalem: Ha-Machon Le-Moreshet Yahadut Maroco, 1980 (Hebrew). ———. “Hitmodedut Ḥachmei Morocco ba-Dor ha-Aharon be-Baˤyot ha-Shaˤah.” Halakhah u-Petiḥut, edited by Moshe Bar-Yuda. Tel-Aviv: Hoza’at ha-Histadrut ha-Clalit, 1985: 47–71 (Hebrew). ———. “The Rabbinical Council of Morocco and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.” The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Leadership, Rabbinate and Community in Jewish History, Studies Presented to Professor Simon Schwarzfuchs, edited by Hacker, Joseph R. and Yaron Harel. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2011: 385–400 (Hebrew). Ankawa, Abraham. Kerem Hemer, vol. 2. Livorno, 1871. (Hebrew). Assaf, Simcha. 1926. “Ha-Takkanot ve-ha-Minhagim be-Yerushat ha-Baˤal Et Ishto.” Madaˤei Ha-Yahadut (1926): 79–94 (Hebrew). Cohen, Yedidia. “The Inheritance of a Wife of Her Husband in the Communal Enactments.” Shenaton Ha-Mishpat Ha-ˤIvri 6–7 (1979): 133–176 (Hebrew). Elon, Menachem. Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978. (Hebrew). Finkelstein, Louis. Jewish Self-government in the Middle Age. With a Foreword by Alexander Marx. New York: P. Feldheim, 1964. Gaguine, Haim. ‘Etz Haim, edited by Moshe Amar. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. 1987. Gerber, Jane S. Jewish Society in Fez 1450-1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Hirschberg, Haim Z. History of the Jews in North Africa: from Antiquity to our Time, vol. 1 Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1965. Luria, Shlomo Ben Yeḥiel. Altona, 1740. Schepansky, Israel. Ha-Taḳkanot be-Yiśraʼel. Vol. 4. Yerushalayim: Mosad Ha-Rav Ḳooḳ, 2004. (Hebrew). Shweka, Aharon. “The Controversy about the Marriage Statute (Takkanat haNissu’in) of Toledo.” Tarbiz 68, no. 1: 87–127, 1998. (Hebrew).

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Yovel, Israel Y. “Ha-Hesderim ha-Caspiyim Shel ha-Nissu’in be-Ashkenaz Be-Yemei ha-Beinayim.’ Dat Ve-Calcalah, edited by Menahem Ben Sasson. Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 191–207, 1994. Zacuto, Abraham. Sefer Yuchasin ha-Shalem, edited by Zvi Filipowski. London: Ḥevrat Meˤorerei Yeshenim, 1857. (Hebrew).

Chapter 15

Rabbi Refael ben Dva”sh Precursor of Moroccan Legal Activity Melech (Elimelech) Westreich

INTRODUCTION Rabbi Refael Aharon b. David was born in Morocco in 1846 and emigrated to Jerusalem in the year 1854 with his father, founder and leader of the Maghrebi community of Jerusalem.* R. Refael was educated by his father, participated in his halakhic activity, and was connected to the activities of the Moroccan sages. Later he was appointed the Chief Rabbi of Cairo where he became famous for his legal activism.1 He served as Chief Rabbi from 1890–1920. His legal activity is characterized by strong activism, lack of fear and hesitancy, and a sense of realism regarding the difficulties of the community, all traits that embody the Moroccan rabbinic community of the twentieth century. These elements also existed, to a lesser degree, among the Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities in the modern era. Because of these traits I argue that R. Refael might be considered the precursor of the modern Moroccan tradition. Prof. Zvi Zohar, in his study on the halakhic responses of middle eastern rabbis to modernity,2 focused on environmental factors in distinguishing between the conservative attitude of the rabbis of Syria and the openness of the rabbis of Egypt, where R. Refael and his colleague R. Eliyahu Ḥazan, the Chief Official Rabbi Alexandria, were very active. In this chapter I shall highlight the intellectual biography of R. Refael and the links that might have existed between him and the Moroccan legal tradition. Our discussion will focus on some of the issues with which he was involved in his capacity as chief rabbi of Cairo, including the rebellious wife, circumcision, and marriage traditions. Comparing his approach to that of the sages of Jerusalem where he grew up, I shall present R. Refael’s reasoning and decision-making in the context of his contemporary colleague in Alexandria, R. Eliyahu Ḥazan. 3 357

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The first topic, sucking the blood during the circumcision rite was discussed by Zohar in its Egyptian context. Elsewhere I have compared the attitude of R. Eliyahu Ḥazan to approaches of scholars, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, in central4 and eastern5 Europe, and in some communities along the Mediterranean shores.6 R. Refael introduced his approach in a vast memorandum7 that he sent to the chief of the Mohalim (circumcisers, sing. Mohel) in London, Alexander Tertis, in response to Tertis’s query to many Jewish scholars about the legitimacy of a sucking machine that he had invented.8 R. Refael operated within a global Jewish context so that his opinion can be compared to opinions of other scholars in a variety of centers. Such a comparison will sharpen our understanding of his Halakhic methodology and its uniqueness. The second topic is one of the most complicated topics in Jewish law, the rebellious wife.9 To what extent might the rebellious wife coerce her husband to divorce her and what are the economic sanctions that might be imposed on her? In this case R. Refael acted alone and used a unique legal method, publishing a legal monograph on the topic in order to influence the judicial system. The third topic concerns the procedure of betrothal and marriage. In this case, R. Refael acted together with his colleague R. Eliyahu and legislated a far-reaching enactment. The topic of betrothal and marriage was discussed intensively in the monumental monograph collection of Avraham Chaim Freiman.10 THE UNIQUENESS OF THE MOROCCAN TRADITION The legal approach of the Moroccan sages is illustrated in its coping mechanisms in times of crisis.11 This has been recognized by Prof. Menachem Elon, former vice president of the Supreme Court of Israel, and one of the great scholars of Jewish law.12 In his opinion, however, the Moroccan tradition was part of a Sephardic tradition that handled new problems more successfully than did the Ashkenazi tradition. Admittedly, however, elements that characterize the Moroccan tradition can be found also in the Sephardic tradition and at times even in the approach of Ashkenazi scholars in the nineteenth century, especially in the vast Russian-Polish environment. The main difference between the approaches lies in the intensity of the Moroccan tradition, which makes it so special and unique. Indeed, as more and more original writings of Moroccan sages are published, scholars have begun to realize that the Moroccan tradition constitutes a special sub-stream in the Sephardic tradition. Some scholars described it, in writing, and especially orally, as liberal, open, and tolerant. In my opinion, these categories do not fit the legal activity

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of the Moroccan sages and most certainly do not exhaust it. Therefore, I introduce other categories and discuss them in light of R. Refael’s legal activity. The Characteristics of the Moroccan Tradition In general, we may say that the sages of Morocco looked at reality with open eyes. Their realism is clearly expressed in certain elements of their approach during periods of crisis, from the expulsion from Spain to challenges posed by modernity in the mid-twentieth century. The first element is “halakha without anxiety,” the most representative component of the Moroccan legal tradition and the one that serves as a basis for all other elements. Attempts at legislation under conditions of anxiety may lead to refraining entirely from action, even if such action is permitted by the legal system. Many examples of exercising restraint in the face of a crisis or fear of external threat can be found in nineteenth-century Europe, where halakhic authorities restricted, or even blocked certain permissible activity because they felt threatened by the Reform movement. In some cases, the reluctance to act and change arose from internal considerations, as in matters of marriage and divorce, where sages exhibited the greatest hesitation.13 The Moroccan tradition followed a different course. First, the Reform movement was not a consideration in its legal activity. Second, the Moroccan Jewish legal system was extensively applied in matters of marriage and divorce. For instance, the exiles from Spain in 1494 enacted two important rules:14 (a) cancellation of a betrothal that was conducted not according to their enactment; and (b) forcing a dying husband to give a writ of divorce (get) to his wife.15 The intention of the second rule was to avoid the creation of a levirate bond, which obliged the widow to marry her husband’s brother in case he passed away without descendants.16 Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that “without anxiety” does not mean that the legal authorities were always lenient or that they acted arbitrarily.17 Another characteristic of the Moroccan legal tradition is legislative activity. Both in modern legal systems and in the Halakha, legislation is the way to change the existing law. Several institutions throughout the long history of the Jewish legal system were invested with the authority to legislate enactments. The Moroccan tradition is the most active in this respect, at least in the second half of the millennium. Its activity stands out in the following respects: (a) the influence of the changes created by the legislation; (b) the range of issues the legislation addressed; (c) the widespread scope of the legislation; and (d) the adoption of the enactments by the community and by the scholars. An anxiety-free legislative process is a precondition for legal activism, but not in itself sufficient. A clear expression of the trend toward legislative activity can be found already after the arrival of the Castilian exiles to

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Fez. Their takkanot, or enactments, as well as the later ones, were collected in the corpus Kerem Hemer, regarding which R. Yaakov Toledano wrote that: It became later the cornerstone of Moroccan Jewry and the “Shulḥan ˤAruch” that everyone relied upon . . . and most of the disputes regarding religious and legal matters were decided based on it, without taking into consideration other famous poskim.18

The last takkanot that were added to the collection Kerem Hemer were published a few decades ago. The Moroccan tradition returned to the intensive use of legislative instruments in the mid-twentieth century.19 For legislative activity to succeed, a respectful and fruitful dialogue between the scholars is needed. Such a dialogue is essential because controversial issues must be thoroughly aired to achieve agreement among the scholars and acceptance by the entire community. A good example of this process is the changes that were introduced by the Rabbinical Assembly in the mid-twentieth century on the issue of levirate marriage. The dominant figure in the debate was R. Shaul b. Danan who advocated easing the legal situation of the widow through the imposition of heavy obligations on the brother-in-law. His opponents, the heads of rabbinical courts in certain other communities, however, sharply refused to make changes in the existing law. The issue was discussed in four meetings characterized by mutual respect and intensive negotiations, including consulting R. Uziel, the chief rabbi of Israel. In the end, the dominant stream capitulated and proposed more moderate changes, which were accepted by the conservative minority of the scholars.20 Below we show that R. Refael used a similar strategy when arguing with colleagues and opponents. Moroccan sages were acutely aware of the needs and hardships of the community, which motivated them, as a collective of scholars, to use the tool of legislation without anxiety. They were ready to listen to the criticism of women against some rules of Halakha that discriminate against them and to make appropriate changes, unlike those sages in other regions who resisted any criticism and any change through strict adherence to the traditions of Halakha. The issue of levirate marriage is a good example of the difference in their approach. Moroccan women criticized the laws of levirate marriage, which deprived them of equal rights to men and the freedom to re-marry after widowed.21 At the same time Moroccan women also demanded equal rights in the law of inheritance. The sages listened and acted in both cases in their favor.22 At times, the public voiced no explicit discontent, but the sages identified a genuine need for change in the common Halakha. For example, in the case of sucking the blood by mouth during the circumcision rite. Moroccan

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sages changed the common practice and enacted an obligation to use a tube in performing the procedure. All these changes attest to the unique ability of the Moroccan tradition to respond in situations of crisis. The same sensitive awareness of community hardship in the implementation of the strictures of Jewish law is strongly present in the activity of R. Refael, who reacted similarly to the sages of Morocco in the case of sucking the blood, albeit by interpretation and not by legislation. RULING WITHOUT ANXIETY: THE CASE OF SUCKING THE BLOOD DURING CIRCUMCISION At the turn of the twentieth century, R. Refael, like many other scholars in various countries, was asked by Alexander Tertis, the Chief Mohel of London, for his opinion about the device he invented to substitute for the traditional practice of sucking the circumcision blood by mouth. R. Refael wrote a comprehensive response, analyzing the halakhic sources that were available to him. From this detailed discussion and his conclusion, we can glean his approach in decision-making without anxiety. Many other scholars from different Jewish centers responded to Tertis’s request, which Tetris later published in a treatise, making it possible to compare R. Refael’s approach to that of other scholars and to demonstrate its uniqueness. The problem with sucking the blood arose first in the 1830s in Central Europe, and later in the 1890s in Eastern Europe. The shock waves of the polemics in Europe concerning the practice spread to the Mediterranean basin following the emigration of European Jews. We briefly introduce their different approaches as a frame of reference for that of R. Refael. In Relation to Ashkenazi Scholars The first rabbi to address the issue of sucking the blood during circumcision was Eliezer Ha-Levi Horowitz of Vienna.23 Following an appeal by the manager of the Jewish hospital in Vienna, who suspected that sucking by mouth caused infection of Jewish boys, he referred the question to the prominent halakhic authority of his time, R. Moshe Sofer (Chatam Sofer). In his response, Chatam Sofer ruled that if the practice of sucking by mouth might pose a risk to the health of the babies, it is permitted to use substitutes, such as a sponge. A few years later, a conference of the Reform movement in Braunschweig decided to cancel the practice of sucking the blood altogether, igniting a sharp polemic between German and Hungarian rabbis whether to accept the claims of physicians about the danger of sucking the circumcision blood by mouth.

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Leading scholars in these countries, headed by R.Yaˤakov Etlinger, wrote long and detailed responses that became the basis for further deliberations, including by R. Refael and his colleagues in Egypt. The German and Hungarian scholars shared the position that the circumcision blood should be sucked by the mouth of the mohel, not by substitutes. Toward the 1880s, however, following the invention of the tube for sucking the blood by one of the German rabbis, the position of Hungarian scholars deviated from that of their German counterparts. The German scholars accepted both the medical opinion regarding the danger of sucking by mouth and the opinion that sucking should be performed by mouth. They solved the conflict by using a tube, arguing that a tube can be considered as an extension of the mouth.24 The Hungarian sages refused to change their custom and rejected the opinion that using the tube was equivalent of properly sucking the blood by mouth. In his comprehensive treatment of the issue of sucking the circumcision blood, R. Refael addressed these sources. He began by introducing the verdict of Chatam Sofer, as it was cited by R. Eliezer Horowitz, and followed by discussing the approach of R. Ettlinger and other scholars who adopted an extreme position opposing any change in the practice of sucking. R. Refael criticized the position of the latter. In his opinion, the only reason behind the duty to suck is medical, and it remains as important in modern times as it was in the past. In principle, he claimed, we must adhere to the old custom of performing the sucking by mouth. Because of the threat of syphilis, however, and the danger to the baby and to the mohel, it is most important to use alternatives, and the device invented by Tertis is one of the best. In cases, however, where there is no doubt that the mohel is absolutely healthy, he is permitted to perform the sucking by mouth as he himself was doing.25 It should be emphasized that R. Refael’s arguments always focused on the opinion and never on its source, even when he criticized those who denied the essence of the value of sucking altogether. In one case, he even castigated the editor of a periodical for allowing one of the published articles to personally attack a Reform scholar instead of criticizing his opinions, asking “to remove this strange language.” In Galicia, a Polish province that became part of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, the debates on the issue of sucking the circumcision blood were sparked by the debates in German-speaking countries and Hungary. Two main streams of thought were prominent: one influenced by the Kabbalah, insisting on sucking by mouth, and a second inspired by the Enlightenment movement, which accepted the innovations of modern medicine recommended by the Chatam Sofer. In the Russian Empire and its Polish territories, the issue was addressed extensively in the 1890s. The initiator of the debate was the great Sephardic scholar, R. Chaim Chizkiya Medini (Ḥacham), who served as a rabbi in the Crimean Peninsula. He turned

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to famous scholars in the Russian Empire to address the problem of sucking by mouth. Their responses were collected and published in his vast halakhic encyclopedia, Sdei Ḥemed, as it was known in the scholars’ community.26 A wide range of scholarly opinions and attitudes existed in the Russian Empire. At one end of the spectrum were those who considered sucking an inseparable part of the mitzvah of circumcision. Therefore, they opposed any change in the old custom and rejected the position of modern medicine. At the opposite end were scholars who permitted changing the old custom without hesitation and replacing it by a sponge, a tube, or the Tertis device. Between the two extremes can be found various approaches, at times close to one extreme and at other times to the opposite one. R. Refael became acquainted with the attitudes of the Russian scholars through Jewish periodicals and newspapers published in the Russian Empire and in Jerusalem. He referred to the opinions of Russian scholars in his comprehensive discussion, but he did not mention them by name, referencing only those who participated in the initial polemic in Germany.27 In Relation to Sephardic Scholars In the vast territories of Russia and Poland, R. Medini was the only Sephardic scholar actively involved in the debate on sucking. At first, when the problem with sucking by mouth arose in Odessa, he ruled that there was no reason to refuse alternatives. After some time, however, he changed his mind and voiced extreme opposition to any change in the practice, adopting the opinions of the extreme rabbis in Central Europe and in the Russian Empire. In principle, R. Medini based his approach on analyzing the Talmudic texts and at the same time criticizing other commentaries that concluded that alternatives were permitted. This position does not fit the image of Sephardic scholars, who are considered more lenient than their Ashkenazi colleagues. In most Sephardic centers around the Mediterranean, the issue of sucking was not discussed extensively, except for localities where Ashkenazi immigrants arrived. Egypt, the country where R. Refael was active, is a good example of a region with a considerable Ashkenazi presence. Even more significant was the Ashkenazi presence in Jerusalem, where, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Ashkenazi population surpassed the Sephardic one and became the majority of the Jewish community. In 1900, the leaders of the three communities—R. Yaˤakov Shaul Elyashar, the Ḥacham Bashi and head of the Sephardic community, R. Shmuel Salant, the head of the Mithnagdim, and R. Shlomo Zalman Ladier, the head of the Ḥassidic community—upheld a ban against changing the custom of sucking by mouth.28 Another important Sephardic sage in Jerusalem who supported the ban in the mid-twentieth century was R. Ovadia Hadaia, a leading figure in the

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Syrian community and a judge in the High Rabbinical Court. R. Hadaia opposed the lenient attitude of R. Avraham Hacohen Kook, who, after he immigrated to Israel, allowed substitution of the sucking by mouth with sucking by a tube in the 1920s. He argued that the opinion of R. Kook contradicted the attitude of the Kabbalah that sucking should be performed by mouth.29 R. Refael did not address the opinions of the Sephardic scholars in Israel in the memorandum he sent to the Mohel Tertis in London because the ban against sucking was first issued by R. Medini in Warsaw in 1903. It is clear, however, that the approach of R. Refael is different from that of the Sephardic sages, including sources, reasoning, and the operative part. It is especially instructive to compare the approach of R. Refael with that of R. Eliyahu Ḥazan, the chief rabbi of Alexandria and his partner in creating the enactments that regulate betrothal and marriage. R. Eliyahu also responded to Tertis’s request with a detailed memorandum. Initially, in the first stage, he upheld the traditional practice of sucking by mouth, basing his ruling on the opinion of Hungarian sages.30 At the same time, he denied the requests by certain members of the community to make changes, arguing that using safe alternatives was already common in Europe. Later, in the second stage, following the death of several baby boys, which was associated by some community members with the procedure of sucking by mouth, R. Eliyahu established a team of Jewish physicians who produced a report warning that a mohel should not be permitted to circumcise in case he has a sore or infection in his mouth or hand. 31 The third stage began toward 1900. After several baby boys got sick following circumcision, and one died, the doctors prohibited one mohel from sucking by mouth because he had an infection in his mouth. He accepted the restriction and began using alternatives. As he was an expert, many of the members of the community continued to use his services as a mohel, and parents also demanded from other mohalim to perform sucking by alternative means. R. Eliyahu was worried that this group of parents, who did not strictly adhere to religious practices, might give up circumcision altogether. Therefore, he permitted the use of alternatives in cases where parents might avoid circumcising their son; in doing so, he relied on the opinions of the sages who allowed alternatives. Among the arguments mentioned by R. Eliyahu was the fact that there is strong evidence, coming both from doctors and from practice, that the alternatives were as effective as the mouth. At the final stage, however, R. Eliyahu returned to his original opinion. In his response to Tertis, he relied again on the writings of Hungarian sages who vehemently opposed any change in the traditional custom of sucking by mouth, and he, likewise, emphasized the extreme importance of continuing the old custom.

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In a holy community that wishes to perform the mitzvah perfectly with all the holy details and customs as our ancestors did, it is worthwhile, and even a duty, to hold the custom of Israel as it is part of the Torah.

R. Eliyahu expected from the group that he called “holy community” to continue to adopt the idea of loving the mitzvah through the mouth and the lips, which originated in the Kabbalah. For those who would adhere to the tradition he reassured them that “one who keeps the mitzvah would not encounter evil.” Unlike the Hungarian sages, however, he recognized that there was ground for permitting the use of alternatives, especially in order not to drive away those who had weak connections to the religion. In his eyes, it was his responsibility to take into account these groups and to enable them to remain under the sway of Halakhah. There is no doubt that the approach of R. Eliyahu is the best frame of reference to evaluate the approach of R. Refael, as both resided in Egypt at the same time and both were active in the area of Halakhah, especially in regulating the issue of betrothal and marriage. R. Refael proved to be a scholar who accepted the innovations of modern medicine and was not afraid to make changes in old and rooted customs. It is also clear that he wanted to alleviate the hardships of the public, in this case, those of the parents of baby boys regarding circumcision. The change in the existing law was achieved by a theoretical ruling, not by a takkanah. We have no knowledge whether there was any attempt to regulate the issue by legislation, as was done in Morocco half a century later. In Tunisia, in the community on the island of Djerba, R. Chalphon Ha-Cohen was considered the most important sage. In his treatise Brit Kehunah, he summarized the customs of the community of Djerba and wrote about circumcision: And afterwards he performed the sucking by mouth—not by a tube or a device—see Sdei Ḥemed, the memorandum about sucking that ruled that the sucking should be performed by mouth only.32

Thus, four decades after R. Refael wrote his memorandum, the rabbis of Djerba still adhered to the traditional custom, relying upon the encyclopedia Sdei Ḥemed. Against this background, the uniqueness of the Moroccan tradition stands out even more prominently. Anticipating the Moroccan Tradition We discussed at length the issue of sucking the blood during the circumcision rite elsewhere,33 and thus we will provide only a summary here. The

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Moroccan tradition accepted without hesitation the demands of the medical profession. They dealt with the issue by legislating a comprehensive enactment in which the central rule was: “The sucking should be done by an instrument and not by mouth,” although they obligated the mohalim to continue to perform the sucking and ruled that “a mohel who does not perform the sucking will be fired.”34 For the Moroccan tradition, modern medicine was an ally, not an opponent, and Moroccan scholars even invited medical doctors to be present during the circumcision. Indeed, the atmosphere, as it is reflected in the text, was of cooperation and sympathy. The result was a far-reaching modification of the old custom which was still common in Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. An official rabbinical court in Morocco was appointed to supervise the mohalim in medical, professional, and administrative matters. The issue of circumcision became part of Jewish public law, which Jewish legal institutions control and administer. The Moroccan tradition is exceptional in reevaluating the practices of the past and at the same time taking initiatives for the future. The sages of Morocco wanted to ensure the health of baby boys who were circumcised, based on the halakhic principle “and you shall preserve yourself very carefully.” In their eyes, this duty was not cancelled by the centrality of the mitzvah to circumcise, which should be performed in the purest and most perfect way; on the contrary, because of these requirements it is also paramount to perform the mitzvah in the healthiest way possible. The Moroccan tradition entirely identified with the approach that R. Refael voiced half a century earlier. This tradition used the effective tool of legislation to reach its goals, whereas R. Refael limited himself to the memorandum of a posek. R. Refael, however, employed the legislative tool extensively in the case of betrothal and marriage, which was much more critical at the time. A Monograph to Renew the Law of the Rebellious Wife (Moredet) One example of R. Refael’s legal activism is his work Bat Naavat Ha-Mardut,35 which is a monograph—a genre that was not in use by scholars after the expulsion from Spain. The work is dedicated to one of the most complicated issues in Jewish law, “the law of the rebellious wife.”36 A rebellious wife is a woman who refuses to continue to have conjugal relations with her husband. There are two types of rebellious wife: the first type “I loathe you” in which the motivation of the wife is emotional and the second type “I want him, but I shall cause him trouble” in which the motivation of the wife is more practical. The treatise focused mainly on the rebellious wife of the type “loathe you” and not on the type of “I want him, but I shall cause him trouble.” Taking the

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bull by the horns, R. Refael begins the discussion by introducing the problem and his view of it in a clear voice: It is strongly prohibited that the laws of our holy, pure, and merciful Torah, if such cruel and skewed rules were to be found in it, to pour salt on the wounds of the heart of Jewish wives who were unlucky enough to meet a bad and wicked person who caused her to loathe him.37

R. Refael’s sympathy and identification are with the rebellious wife, attitudes which are uncommon in the rabbinical landscape. While his arguments do not reflect a full practical approach, his words cannot be treated as mere rhetoric intended to sway the readers. I believe that these words are full of meaning and that they reflect the deep identification of R. Refael with the predicament of women. Therefore, we expect to encounter a position that benefits the wife, although not going as far as the extreme view of Maimonides, who ruled in favor of coercing a husband to divorce his rebellious wife.38 At the outset of his discussion, R. Refael presents the social and factual background by indicating that many cases of moredet were raised in his time. He connected it to the fact that Egypt was a meeting point between people from different countries, with diverse lifestyles and behaviors. Because of their potential incompatibility, in his opinion it was inappropriate to initiate matrimonial relations between men and women from different countries, as it might result in marriage crises. “Only matchmakers caused it by their falsehoods.”39 Here the author already hints at the essence of his attitude: the rebellious wife should not be considered a criminal deserving punishment but a victim deserving sympathy. The cornerstone of R. Refael’s attitude is the approach of Maimonides, which appealed to R. Refael as a result of its coherence. Maimonides ruled that it was necessary to coerce the husband to divorce his wife who claimed, “I loathe you.” At the same time, Maimonides imposed heavy economic sanctions on the rebellious wife. She lost her main compensation from the Ketubah, the dowry that was not in her possession, and also her maintenance, and the matrimonial bond was irreversibly severed.40 In the opinion of R. Refael, Maimonides’s approach is quite balanced: the wife received her main wish to get rid of her husband by paying a heavy economic price. Over time, Maimonides’s approach underwent significant changes that vitiated his ruling, mainly, by renouncing the basic requirement of mandatory divorce. R. Yosef Karo in Shulḥan ˤAruch ruled against coercing the husband to divorce his wife who claimed “I loathe you,” while leaving the other points unchanged.41 The result was that the wife who claimed “I loathe you” immediately lost most of her economic rights, the matrimonial bond was severed, and the husband had the right to marry another woman. The

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matrimonial bond, however, was not completely severed, and the rebellious wife could not remarry. This situation is similar to that of an ˤagunah (literally chained as the husband has not provided her with a divorce but also does not treat her as a wife), except that the moredet remained stuck with a man whom she hated as opposed to one who was missing. Her legal situation was even worse, compared to that of the rebellious wife who refused to live with her husband not because she hated him, but because she wanted to cause him distress to achieve some gain. According to the law of the Talmud, the second type of rebellious wife (“I want him but I shall cause him trouble”) deserved more severe sanctions. As a result of the position of the Shulḥan ˤAruch, however, she was in a better position than the rebellious wife who claimed, “I loathe him.” According to R. Refael, leaders and judges who wish to make significant changes in a central and sensitive issue in family law, to accommodate changes that occur in the society or even because of their differing personal opinions, should do so by authoring a legal monograph that can be useful for the lawyers. In fact, the aim of the book was to influence the ruling of the courts in this matter in a specific manner and the treatise can be considered a practical handbook for use by legal practitioners, especially judges. Within this framework, R. Refael produced a far-reaching interpretation of the text of the Shulḥan ˤAruch. He argued that the tough position adopted by the Shulḥan ˤAruch against the rebellious wife was not intended to be a practical legal guideline, but rather a theoretical deliberation designed to circumvent the “minefield” in the problem of the rebellious wife. Moreover, R. Refael claimed that had Maimonides lived in Egypt in his day, he would have strongly opposed the position of the Shulḥan ˤAruch and that of its followers.42 The scope of the change that R. Refael had to implement was enormous. According to the Moroccan legal tradition, as expressed in the position of one of the great Moroccan scholars in the nineteenth century, R. Yitzchak ibn Walid, the basic attitude toward the rebellious wife is very harsh. In the words of R. Refael, this tradition “treats the rebellious wife who said ‘I loathe him’ as a woman who converted, therefore she is severely oppressed.”43 Unlike the Moroccan tradition, R. Refael was deeply empathetic toward the rebellious wife, and expressed his desire to bring about a radical change in her treatment and legal position in strong language. The attitude of R. Refael, however, did not derive from sympathy alone, but was also a matter of policy, motivated by fear that the current treatment might push the rebellious wife to immoral behavior or even to completely forsake Judaism. Likewise, R. Refael challenged the positions of the Sephardic scholars in Jerusalem, the environment where he grew up and an important frame of reference during the time he served as the chief rabbi of Cairo. He opposed

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their opinion regarding one of the important matters in the issue of moredet: the duty of the husband to maintain his wife beyond twelve months after the breakdown of their marriage. This was the opinion of R. Yaˤakov Shaul Elyashar and R. Avraham Ashkenazi, both of whom functioned as Ḥacham Bashi of Jerusalem, and of R. Aharon Azriel, one of the important judges in Jerusalem. Also, R. David Fifano, a prominent scholar in the Balkans, the rabbi of Salonika and Bulgaria, agreed with the position of the Jerusalem scholars. According to R. Refael, if the husband were obligated, it would enable the court to control the conflict between the husband and the wife and to exert pressure on the husband to divorce his rebellious wife. Otherwise, he would continue to hold his wife without divorcing her, having been released from paying her maintenance. The Moroccan Jewish legal tradition, on the issue of levirate marriage reveals a similar stance. In the early 1940s Moroccan judges held a position that strongly supported the institution of levirate marriage, as is reflected in the case of the widow Djamilah in the city of Meknes. In this case, the widow was obligated to consummate the levirate bond with the eldest brother of her deceased husband although she agreed to marry the younger brother of her husband. As she refused to comply with the order of the court, she was declared a rebellious wife, with the ensuing economic consequences. About a decade later, a conference of rabbis and judges changed the law of levirate marriage, having realized that in most communities levirate marriage was not practiced anymore, and following the criticism of women who protested that they were treated like war prisoners. In a detailed enactment, the sages ruled that the widow was not obligated to consummate the levirate bond, but the brother-in-law was obligated to disconnect the levirate bond. At the same time, the liberated wife would not be economically fined for her refusal to marry her brother-in-law as prescribed by Jewish law.44 Similarly to R. Refael, the Moroccan rabbis looked at reality with open eyes and coped with demands of the public to improve the situation of women—of the moredet or of the yevamah (one whose husband died without giving her children and who is therefore required to marry the next of kin). Another similarity between R. Refael and the Moroccan scholars is that both came closer to the legal structure that was common in the Ashkenazi tradition. In the case of the yevamah this is obvious, as the Ashkenazi tradition rejected any consummation of the levirate marriage. In the case of the rebellious wife, it was the Chazon Ish who opposed the opinion of the Shulḥan ˤAruch, arguing, similarly to R. Refael, that you cannot accept Maimonides’s position partially, that is, not to coerce the husband to divorce the moredet and at the same time impose heavy economic sanctions on her. Indeed, the Ashkenazi tradition ruled not to sanction the rebellious wife for twelve months, after which she lost her ketubbah but retained her full dowry and

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property. At the same time, the husband was obligated to pay maintenance as long that he refuses to divorce her.45 LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY IN MATTERS OF BETROTHAL AND MARRIAGE Soon after that the first wave of megorashim settled in the town of Fez, they legislated in the year 1494 a body of enactments. In one provision, they ordered a husband close to death to divorce his wife, to prevent the creation of the levirate bond in the event that he dies. In another provision, they arranged the issue of betrothal and voided a betrothal that was performed contrary to the enactment.46 Making changes in matters of marriage and divorce by legislation is a far-reaching step in Jewish law, and its boldness is characteristic of the Moroccan tradition. In the course of the nineteenth century, scholars in Europe and the Mediterranean were challenged by the question of whether contemporary sages had the authority to legislate enactments that nullified betrothal and marriage. The issue was discussed intensively by Freiman in the fourth chapter of his monumental monograph, Seder Kidushin ve-Nissuin,47 as well as by Zohar.48 The debates arose following the intervention of modern European states in matters of Jewish marriage and divorce, which produced a new type of ˤagunah. The discussion began in the Ashkenazi environment in Europe after the French revolution when the parliament canceled Jewish autonomy and imposed French civil law on the Jews. At the same time, Josef II, the emperor of the Habsburg Empire, imposed Austrian civil law on the Jews in all the provinces of his empire. About a century later, this phenomenon spread to the Muslim environment after the enactment of the Cremieux decree, initiated by the French Jewish minister Adolphe IsaacJacob Crémieux, bestowing French citizenship on the Jews of Algeria. The Ashkenazi sages were quite reluctant to cancel betrothal by enactment, and in any case sharply opposed doing it after the marriage had been consummated.49 Sephardic scholars were more willing to annul a betrothal, but they were also hesitant to cancel a consummated marriage. R. Eliyahu Ḥazan represented an exception. He supported the annulment of betrothal and marriage during his stay in North Africa, relying on R. Chaim Palagy,50 the great Rabbi of Izmir, and opposing the position of R. Elyashar and other sages in Jerusalem.51 The scholars in Algeria, however, did not support his approach, and therefore the opinion of R. Eliyahu did not achieve widespread recognition and did not become part of the legal body of the Jewish community in Algeria. When R. Eliyahu arrived in Alexandria, in 1888, he faced similar problems. In Egypt, Jews who possessed European

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citizenship, were excluded from the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts under the system of Capitulations. This enabled them to mistreat Jewish women. R. Refael and another leading rabbi in Egypt, the Ashkenazi rabbi of Cairo R. Mendel Ha-Cohen, joined R. Eliyahu in legislating a comprehensive body of enactments that regulated the issue of betrothal and marriage. Their legislation was distinctive at the time for its three main demands,52 which, if not fulfilled, would result in the annulment of the betrothal and of the marriage. This body of legislation was broadly publicized among the Jewish communities of Egypt and accompanied by an intensive propaganda campaign. The enactments were an impressive success, and in a short time harm was no longer inflicted on wives in Egypt thanks to the determination of the three scholars to solve this problem.53 I believe that R. Refael, the chief rabbi of the capital city of Cairo, was relying on the Moroccan tradition when he provided unreserved support to the initiative of R. Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Alexandria. His support was crucial for the success of the enactment and its widespread acceptance. Indeed, no such successful enactment can be found in any other major Jewish community in the modern period, or at least none that was implemented broadly throughout Jewish society. Consistent with our assumption that R. Refael was influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Moroccan tradition, we should expect to find a similar enactment in Morocco by the mid-twentieth century, especially after such an attempt to legislate took place in neighboring Algeria (although only with minor success). This is not the case, however, and it seems that the geopolitical situation of Morocco and of its Jewish population is the main reason for the absence of any extensive legislative activity on this issue. France occupied Algeria in the 1830s, and in the 1870s imposed French civil law on the Jews, including in matters of marriage and divorce. This imposition created severe friction with Jewish law, in particular the French demand to register with the municipality as a pre-condition for contracting a valid marriage. By contrast, in Morocco, the French presence dated from the 1910s, and the status of Morocco as a protectorate of France did not affect either the authority of its Muslim ruler as a formal sovereign or the existing legal system. Jews continued to be governed by Jewish law in family matters and were subject to the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts in matters of personal status. Nevertheless, Jews who were foreign citizens, mainly, of France, were subject to the law of their country, and not to the rabbinical legal system. But they were a minority group; their presence in Morocco did not make a significant difference, and cases of exploitation of women were few. The Rabbinical Assembly, however, paid attention to this minor group as well, and in its fifth gathering offered a legal formula based on Jewish contract law to address the problem. According to its resolution, at the time of marriage,

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the husband must undertake that if he divorces his wife in a civil court he will support her and provide for her needs, including maintenance, clothing, housing, and so on, until the time he grants her a get (Jewish writ of divorce).54 The spirit of the Moroccan tradition drove R. Refael to legislate in matters of betrothal and marriage elsewhere, but in Morocco these reforms were consequently not needed. CONCLUSION In this chapter I demonstrated that important characteristics of the legal activity of R. Refael Aharon b. David concerning several crucial legal issues can be found also in the Moroccan tradition, especially by the mid-twentieth century. These characteristics included looking at reality with open eyes; approaching Halakha without fear; legislative activism; respectful and fruitful dialogue between the scholars; and listening attentively to the needs of society. Several factors account for R. Refael’s strong connection to the Moroccan tradition—his childhood in Morocco, his education by his father, who was the founder of the Maghreb community in Jerusalem, his participation in the activity of his father’s court, and his publication of the writings of Moroccan scholars. In this chapter, I focused mainly on discovering similar characteristics in R. Refael’s legal method, as manifest in three important issues: sucking the blood during the circumcision rite; the law of the rebellious wife (“I loathe him”); and regulation of betrothal and marriage. At the heart of the case of sucking the circumcision blood stood the question of whether to accept the position of contemporary physicians concerning the danger to the health of the baby and maybe even of the mohel. This issue was treated by R. Refael and the Moroccan tradition extensively. In addition, I was able to compare the Moroccan tradition with the traditions of Ashkenazi and Sephardic scholars in Central and Eastern Europe and in the regions of the Mediterranean basin. The positions of R. Refael and of the Moroccan tradition were to accept the opinion of modern medicine entirely and to change the common practice of sucking by mouth. This approach was in opposition to that of scholars in Central Europe (at least the Hungarian sages), who refused to accept the findings of modern medicine and to change the old custom. Some scholars in Russia and Poland followed the Hungarian approach, whereas others accepted the pronouncement of modern medicine and agreed with the need to change the existing custom entirely; the majority group agreed to implement certain limited changes. The approach of R. Refael and of the Moroccan tradition also contrasted with the position of Sephardic rabbis in the Land of Israel and in Djerba in Tunisia. Likewise, it was different

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from the attitude of R. Eliyahu Ḥazan in Alexandria, who permitted to change the procedure for those who did not strongly adhere to the Jewish tradition while those who were devoted to the Halakha were to continue to perform sucking by mouth. The legislative activism that characterized the Moroccan tradition was manifest also in R. Refael’s handling of the betrothal and marriage issue. The sages of Morocco address this issue in a limited way in the twentieth century. At the head of the movement for change stood R. Eliyahu Ḥazan, the chief rabbi of Alexandria. He failed in his attempt to legislate a similar enactment in Algeria because of strong opposition by local scholars and Sephardic sages in the Land of Israel, all of whom were very reluctant to change the rule of Halakha through a communal enactment. Only when R. Refael joined and actively supported R. Eliyahu, did this legislation come into effect and successfully achieve the goal of protecting Jewish wives against abuse and exploitation. The third issue that I examined is the case of the moredet who claims to loathe her husband. This is one of the most complicated issues in Jewish law. The common attitude that was prevalent in the Sephardic and Oriental environment was consolidated in the Shulḥan ˤAruch, the code of R. Yosef Karo. His position was very harsh toward the wife. R. Refael expressed the opinion that this rigidity toward the wife had to change. To achieve his goal, R. Refael published a monograph, Bat Naavat ha-Mardut, where he offered various options to implement the changes, including a creative interpretation of the text of the Shulḥan ˤAruch. In doing so, R. Refael greatly departed from the position of R. Yitzchak b. Walid, one of the great Moroccan scholars of the nineteenth century, and also opposed the point of view of important scholars in Jerusalem. A similar phenomenon took place when, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Moroccan scholars departed from the current Moroccan tradition in matters of levirate marriage because of modern challenges. Both R. Refael, in the case of the rebellious wife, and the Moroccan scholars, in the case of levirate marriage did not hesitate to move closer to the Ashkenazi tradition, which was more compatible with the modern era.

NOTES * This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 922/16). 1. Biographical information about R. Refael see Moshe David Gaon, Oriental Jews in Eretz-Israel, (Jerusalem: Author’s publication 5698 (1938)), 681. 2. Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Changes – Halakhic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Change (Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920), Jerusalem 1993.

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3. On R. Eliyahu Ḥazan see Gaon, supra, note 1, 246–247. 4. Jacob Katz, Halacha in Straits: Obstacles to Orthodoxy at its Inception (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: The Magnes press, The Hebrew University, 5792 (1992)), 150–183. 5. Melech (Elimelech) Westreich and Roi Westreich, “Halacha and Challenges of Modern Medicine at the Turn of the 20th Century: Sucking of the Blood in the Circumcision Rite in the Lithuanian Environment” (Hebrew), Dinei Israel 34 (2021): 429–483. 6. Elimelech Westreich, "Medicine and Jewish Law in Moroccan Tradition in the 20th Century," (Hebrew), Tel-Aviv University Law Review, ˤIyunei Mishpat 37 (2013): 139–194. 7. Refael Aharon Ben David, Shu”t Umitzur Devash Yoreh Deˤah (Jerusalem: Zukerman Press, 1912), chap. 16–19. 8. Alexander Tertis, Dom Bris: Metzitzah and Circumcision (London: Ginzburg Press, 1900), 46–60. 9. I discuss at length the approach of R. Refael in the issue of the moredet at a conference on the Jews in Egypt that took place in Ben Zvi, Institute Jerusalem, 2004. 10. Avraham Chaim Freimann, Seder Kidushin ve-Nissu’in: after the redaction of the Talmud, (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1945), 337–345. 11. Jewish Law in Moroccan Communities: The Book of Enactments – The Rabbinical Council (M. Amar, E. Azor, M. Gabai editors) 5740 (1980), 39–43 (in the introduction of M. Amar). 12. Menahem Elon, “The Uniqueness of Halakhah and Society among North African Jewry from after the Expulsion from Spain to Our Days,” in Halakhah and Openness: Moroccan Sages and Poskim for Our Generation, ed. Moshe Bar-Yuda (Tel-Aviv: Ha-Merkaz le-Tarbut u-le-Ḥinukh shel ha-Histadrut, 1985), 15–38. 13. Freiman, supra, note 10, 316–323. 14. Supra, note 11, 2. 15. Ibid., 6; Elimelech Westreich, "Historical Landmarks of the Tradition of Moroccan Jewish Family Law: The Case of Levirate Marriage," The Jewish Law Association Studies 17 (2007): 279–322. 16. See below at note 44. 17. Elimelech Westreich, "Jewish Family Law Meets the Challenge of Modernity: The Debate on Levirate Marriage among Moroccan Sages," Dinei Israel, 26-27 (2009–2010): 163–217 (Hebrew). 18. Yaˤacov Moshe Toledano, The Candle of the West: The History of the Jews in Morocco (Jerusalem: A.M. Lenz, 5671/1911), 76–77. 19. Supra, note 11, 211–385. 20. Supra, note 17, 213–217. 21. Supra, note 11, 303. 22. Ibid., 304. 23. Supra, note 4, 152–153. 24. Elimelech (Melech) Westreich, The Response of Jewish Law to Modern Science and State Laws in German-Speaking Countries in the Nineteenth Century

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(Juden und Muslime in Deutschland: Recht, Religion, Identitat, Herausgegeben von Jose Brunner und Shai Lavi), Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte Vol. 37, Wallstein Verlag, Goettingen, 2009), 60–62. 25. Refael Aharon Ben Shimon, Nehar Mitzraim, Jerusalem 5767 (2007), Hilchot Mila, chapter 23. 26. Sdei Ḥemed, Vol. 6, chapters A-C (pp. 1343–1365). 27. For a detailed discussion see Westreich, supra, note 5. 28. Supra, note 26, 2747. 29. R. Ovadia Hadaya, Responsa Yaskil Avdi, vol. 5, Yoreh Deah, chapter 44. 30. R. Eliyahu Ḥazan, Neve Shalom – Minhagei No-Amon (Alexandria, 1894), Yoreh Deˤah, Hilchoth Brith Milah, 9. R. Ḥazan arrived in Alexandria in the year 1888 so that the demand was delivered to him at the beginning of the 1890s. 31. R. Eliyahu Ḥazan, Responsa Taˤalumot Lev, vol. 3, chapter 21. This chapter is the response of R. Eliyahu Ḥazan to the application of the mohel Tertis about his device. 32. R. Chalphon Ha-Cohen, Brit Kehuna, Yore Deˤah, Djerba 1941, 230. 33. Supra, note 6. 34. Ibid., note 13. 35. Rabbi Refael Aharon b. David, Bat Naavat Ha-Mardut, Jerusalem 5677 (1917) (rep. Jerusalem, 5760 (2000)), 3. 36. On the law of the Moredet in the Talmud see Avishalom Westreich, "Coercion of a get in a Case of Moredet in the Mishnah and Talmud," Bar-Ilan Law Studies 25 (2010): 563–591. On the law in the middle ages see Melech Westreich, “The Rise and Decline of the Law of the Rebellious Wife in Medieval Jewish Law”, Jewish Law Association Studies 12 (2002): 207–218. 37. Supra, note 35, 3. 38. Maimonides, Ishut, 14: 8. 39. Supra, note 35, 1. 40. Supra, note 38. 41. Shulḥan ˤAruch, Even ha-ˤEzer, 77: 2–3. 42. This position of R. Refael was strongly criticized by R. Ovadia Yosef. 43. Supra, note 35, 130 44. A summary of this case and enactments see supra, note 17, 213–217. Also in this issue R. Ovadia Yosef opposed strongly the position of the Moroccan scholars. See Elimelech Westreich, “Levirate Marriage in the State of Israel: Ethnic Encounter and the Challenge of a Jewish State," Israel Law Review 37 (2003–2004): 426–499. 45. R. Itzhak Ha-Levi Herzog, The Ashkenazi chief Rabbi of Israel made an attempt to renew the law of the moredet in the 1950s, R. Itzhak Ha-Levi Herzog, Responsa Heichal Itzhak, Even ha-ˤEzer, vol. 1, chapter 2. See also Elimelech Westreich, “Judicial Decisions by Rabenu Asher ben Yehiel in Spain” in Studies in Halakha and Jewish Thought Presented to Rabbi Prof. Menahem Emanuel Rackman on his 80th Anniversary, ed. Moshe Beer (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1994), 166–167. 46. Supra, note 14.

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47. Supra, note 10, 310–397. 48. Supra, note 2, 116–133. 49. Supra, note 10, 316–317. 50. Ibid., 10, 328–329. 51. Ibid., 337. 52. Supra, note 7, chap. 6. 53. Supra, note 48. 54. Supra, note 11, 374–375.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amar, Moche, E. Azor, and M. Gabai, eds. Jewish Law in Moroccan Communities: The Book of Enactments. Jerusalem: Ha-Machon Le-Moreshet Yahadut Maroco, 1980. Ben David, Refael Aharon. Shu”t Umitzur Devash Yoreh Deah. Jerusalem: Zuckerman Press, 1912. Ben Shimon, Refael Aharon. “Hilchot Mila.” Nehar Mitzraim, Ch 23. 2007. Elon, Menahem. “The Uniqueness of Halakhah and Society among North African Jewry from after the Expulsion from Spain to Our Days.” Halakhah and Openness Moroccan Sages and Poskim for Our Generation, edited by Moshe Bar-Yuda, Tel Aviv: Ha-Merkaz le-Tarbut u-le-Ḥinukh shel ha-Histadrut, 1985. 15–38. Freimann, Avraham Chaim. Seder Kidushin ve-Nissuin: After the Redaction of the Talmud. Jerusalem: Mossad Ha-Rav Kook, 1945. Gaon, Moshe David. Oriental Jews in Eretz-Israel, Jerusalem: Author’s publication, 5698 (1938). Katz, Yaʻaqov. Ha-Halakha be-Metsar: Mikhsholim ˤal Derekh hā-Ortodoḳsiya be-Hithawutah = Halacha in Straits Obstacles to Orthodoxy at Its Inception. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992. Tertis, Alexander. Dom Bris: Metzitzah and Circumcision. London: Ginzburg Press, 1900. Toledano, Yaˤacov Moshe. The Candle of the West: The History of the Jews in Morocco. Jerusalem: AM Lenz (Hebrew), 1911. Westreich, Avishalom. “Coercion of a get in a Case of Moredet in the Mishnah and Talmud,” Studies in Halakha and Jewish Thought: Presented to Rabbi Prof. Menahem Emanuel Rackman on his 80th Anniversary, edited by Moshe Beer. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1994. Westreich, Elimelech. “Judicial Decisions by Rabenu Asher ben Yehiel in Spain”, Studies in Halakha and Jewish Thought: Presented to Rabbi Prof. Menahem Emanuel Rackman on his 80th Anniversary, edited by Moshe Beer. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1994. ———. “The Rise and Decline of the Law of the Rebellious Wife in Medieval Jewish Law”, Jewish Law Association Studies 12 (2002): 207–218.

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———. “Levirate Marriage in the State of Israel: Ethnic Encounter and the Challenge of a Jewish State.” Israel Law Review 37 (2003–2004): 426–499. ———. “Historical Landmarks of the Tradition of Moroccan Jewish Family Law: The Case of Levirate Marriage.” The Jewish Law Association Studies 17 (2007): 279–322. ———. “Jewish Family Law Meets the Challenge of Modernity: The Debate on Levirate Marriage among Moroccan Sages.” Dinei Israel 26–27 (2009): 163–217. ———. “The Response of Jewish Law to Modern Science and State Laws.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch Fur Deutsche Geschichte 37 (2009): 60–62. ———. “Medicine and Jewish Law in Moroccan Tradition in the 20th Century.” ˤIyunei Mishpat, Tel-Aviv University Law Review 37 (2013): 139–194. ——— and Roi Westreich. “Halacha and Challenges of Modern Medicine at the Turn of the 20th Century: Sucking of the Blood in the Circumcision Rite in the Lithuanian Environment.” Dinei Israel 34 (2021): 429–483. Zohar, Zvi. Tradition and Changes - Halakhic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Change (Egypt and Syria, 1880-1920). Jerusalem, 1993.

Section 4

MEMOIRS IN WORD AND IMAGE

Chapter 16

Memories of Jewish-Muslim Co-existence in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes and Jewish Heritage Conservation in Post-Colonial Morocco Ahmed Chouari

INTRODUCTION Although Morocco had one of the largest and oldest Jewish populations, internal research on Moroccan Jews is still scant. Studying the cultural heritage of the Moroccan Jews will undoubtedly highlight the important role this population has played in constructing Moroccan history, politics, and culture up to the present day. Thus, the first purpose of this ethnographic study is to explore and understand how Muslims and Jews shared the same space, the New Mellaḥ (the Arabic name for the Jewish district) of Meknes in the postcolonial period, especially after the Moroccan Jews started immigrating to Israel. The second purpose of this study is to examine how the Jewish cultural heritage is preserved in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in twenty-first-century Morocco. To reach these objectives, two qualitative research questions were developed. For data collection, narratives, semi-structured interviews, and pictures were used to answer the first question. For the second question, questionnaires, field notes, and pictures of different sites of the New Mellaḥ were used for analysis. The results revealed that feelings of harmony, tolerance, and acceptance tended to prevail in the Muslim-Jewish relationships in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in post-colonial Morocco. The findings also showed that some historical events, such as the Israeli-Arab conflict, did not have a serious effect on Jewish Muslim co-existence in the New Mellaḥ. Finally, the results revealed that the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes still constitutes an important component of Moroccan cultural identity and history. 381

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I first heard of the Mellaḥ of Meknes as a child from my father who told us about his first visit to the city of Meknes. His father took him to the New Mellaḥ to see a Jewish friend with whom he shared some business. As a sign of hospitality, the Jew offered them tea and sfenj (Moroccan doughnuts). My father told us that he willingly agreed to drink tea, but abstained from any sfenj. When my grandfather asked him why he refused to eat the sfenj, he said: “Of course I can’t eat. It has been prepared by a Jew.” As a child, that story never left my mind as I kept asking myself some of the following questions: “Why did my father refuse food prepared by a Jew?” “Who are the Jews?” and “What makes them different from Muslims?” In 1976 my father rented a small apartment for my brother and me in a quarter close to the New Mellaḥ where I attended a middle school in the center of the Mellaḥ. The school was divided into two sections: one for the Muslim students (called Ibn Othman ELMeknasi Middle School), and the other for the Jewish students. Before its division into two parts, the school’s name was Alliance Israélite Universelle and it was for Jews only. Studying in the New Mellaḥ allowed me to have daily contact with the Jews who were still living in that quarter. Day in, day out, I started learning more about the Jews and their long and deep history in Morocco, in general, and in Meknes, in particular. I noticed that they were living a normal life with the Muslims and shared so many things with them. That experience opened my eyes to another reality about Jewish-Muslim relations, particularly in that space where Moroccan Muslims and Jews lived together side by side in peace and harmony. Today, the New Mellaḥ has lost nearly all of its Jewish residents. Most of the Jews immigrated to Israel or other countries in the 1960s and 1970s. The formerly Jewish houses, synagogues, schools, and the cemetery of the New Mellaḥ all bear witness to that lost population. Many Muslims who shared the New Mellaḥ with the Jews are still living in the same quarters and preserve rich memories of a time when they and the Jews lived together and shared that same space. These memories, as well as the cultural heritage that the Jews left, constitute part of Moroccan history and need to be explored by scholars and academics alike. Despite their importance, memories of Muslim-Jewish co-existence and relationships run the risk of being lost forever if not adequately explored and preserved. There is also a need to conserve the rich cultural heritage that the Jews have left in the New Mellaḥ before it disappears through ignorance and neglect. Literature on the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in particular is still scant as most of the studies that have been conducted thus far either deal with the notion of the Mellaḥ and its roots in general (Chouraqui 1968; Zafrani 1998), or focus on other Mellaḥs, such as the Mellaḥ of Marrakesh (Gottreich 2006), or the Mellaḥs of the south (Goldberg 1983; Boum 2013).

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This chapter has two main objectives. It is first an attempt to explore coexistence in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in post-colonial Morocco based on the memories of the Muslim population. The second objective is to examine the extent to which Moroccan Muslims preserve the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ. Because this study is based on a qualitative approach, two driving questions were developed to frame it: RQ 1: How do Moroccan Muslims remember Muslim-Jewish co-existence in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in post-colonial Morocco? RQ 2: To what extent do Moroccan Muslims contribute to the preservation of the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes today?

THE ORIGINS OF THE MELLAḤ Historically, Moroccan Jews lived for centuries in many regions of Morocco before the creation of several Mellaḥs in various cities of Morocco. Therefore, some of the questions that need to be asked here are: (1) Where had the Jews lived before the creation of the first mellaḥ? (2) What are the origins of the mellaḥ? And (3) what pushed Moroccan rulers to create other mellaḥs in different cities? Various studies on Moroccan Jews consider the arrival of the Arabs and Islam to Morocco in the seventh century as the turning point in the history of the Jews in Morocco. Before the establishment of Islam, Amazigh people and Jews lived together. They also shared the same fate when their land was invaded and fell under the control of different external powers such as the Phoenicians, the Vandals, and the Romans (Chouraqui 1968). However, the life of the Jews took a dramatic turn when Morocco came under the control of Islamic rule. The Jews faced a different fate from that of the Amazigh people as they chose to keep their own faith —Judaism. Islam allowed the Jews to keep their own religion, but in return, they had to pay a poll tax (Jizya) because they are seen by Islam as “People of the Book” or Dhimmis (Chouraqui 1968). Throughout the subsequent centuries of Islamic rule in Morocco, the Jews were subject to “greater and lesser privileges” and “abuses,” which kept changing with the arrival of each new dynasty (Chouraqui 1968; Ben‐Layashi, and Maddy‐Weitzman 2010; Tessler, and Hawkins 1980; Zafrani 1998). However, the status of the Jews as Dhimmis enabled them to preserve their way of life in the different regions of Morocco in urban as well as rural areas. They often shared the same space with both Amazighs and Arabs. Although some Jews lived in the largest cities of Morocco (such as Casablanca, Rabat,

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Fez, Meknes, and Marrakech), an important Jewish population lived in the countryside and enjoyed the protection of the tribal chiefs. Some of the wellknown places of the Jews included regions as far as Aqqa, Ifrane, Agadir, and Debdou. Unfortunately, during the fifteenth century, a Marinid monarch (during the reign of Abd al-Haqq II, who ruled Morocco from 1420 to 1465) decided in 1438 to separate the Jews from the Muslims by compelling all the Jews of Fez to live together in one single quarter, known thereafter as the Mellaḥ (Assaraf 2009; Chouraqui 1968). Later on, other Mellạhs were created, and more Jews were eventually forced to leave their houses in other quarters and live in the Mellaḥ. Gottreich (2007) gave the following bleak and dark description of the Mellaḥ and its inhabitants: Located where the royal stables had once stood., the new walled Jewish quarter of Marrakesh was in fact the second of its kind in Morocco after that of Fez, founded in 1438. Like its predecessor, the new Jewish quarter in Marrakesh was also called a “Mellaḥ,” a name that originally referred to the salt-marsh area to which the Jews of the northern Moroccan capital had been transferred.1

The Mellaḥs were often located in undesirable or unwanted lots of land. However, Mellaḥs were usually established in close proximity to the king’s palace—a warning to all that the quarter fell under the king’s protection and its inhabitants were considered the king’s “protégés.” MUSLIM-JEWISH RELATIONSHIPS IN THE MELLAḤ Muslim-Jewish relationships in the Mellaḥs of Morocco have not been adequately studied. Indeed, the richness of the shared history between the Jews and Muslims since the creation of the first Mellaḥ in the fifteenth century still needs more scientific scrutiny. Nevertheless, literature in the field has unveiled some important facets of this relationship (Boum 2013; Deshen 1984; Gottreich 2003; Levy 2003; Popescu 2013). Studying Jewish life in Sherifian Morocco, Deshen (1984) analyzed “the structure of Muslim-Jewish relations” and the “social contours of Mellaḥ autonomy.” He noted that the relationships between Muslims and Jews during that period were generally based on a “patron-client”2 model in those regions of the country which were under “the immediate and personal authority of the sultan,”1 that is, blad el-mekhzen. Of course, the Mellaḥ fell within blad el-mekhzen since it was often built near the sultan’s palace. Deshen (1984) also explained that the Mellaḥ was never totally contained since its “borders” were porous. Deshen concluded that although the “boundaries of

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the Jewish society” were “theoretically clear and defined,” they remained permeable at the practical level. The concept of “Mellaḥ society,” however, was partially criticized by scholars such as Gottreich (2003). In her article about the origins of the mellaḥ, Gottreich (2003) argued that Deshen’s notion of “Mellaḥ society” was not adequate as it did not consider the historical perspective. For Gottreich (2003), the “historical reality” of the Mellaḥs differs from one mellaḥ to another, which means that understanding the overall Mellaḥ culture of Morocco cannot be done without separately taking into consideration the “historical reality” of each Mellaḥ. For example, the Mellaḥ of Marrakesh was created by the Saadis around 1657; whereas the Mellaḥ of Fez was established in the fifteenth century (in 1438). In other words, the historical realities of the two Mellaḥs could by no means be similar. JEWISH QUARTERS IN MEKNES: FROM THE OLD MELLAḤ TO THE NEW MELLAḤ Until the seventeenth century, Jews and Muslims shared the same neighborhoods in Meknes with no boundaries separating the two communities. However, the situation of the Jews would change when Sultan Moulay Rachid died suddenly. His half-brother, Moulay Ismael, ascended the throne of Morocco. Since Moulay Rachid had several sons, the beginning of Moulay Ismail’s reign was turbulent. As a measure of precaution, Moulay Ismail adopted three measures: (1) he surrounded his capital, Meknes, with transplanted people of Tafilalet, (2) he established an army of foreign fighters (called the Boukharas), and (3) he moved the Jews out of the capital to a nearby neighborhood called Berrima (Assaraf, 2009). It was then that the construction of the original mellaḥ of Meknes began. According to Assaraf (2009), the construction of the Old Mellaḥ lasted three years, from 1679 to 1682.2 At the end of the nineteenth century, the population of the Old Mellaḥ grew substantially. Many Jews from different regions of Morocco, including Agouray, Azrou, and Tafilalet, started moving to Meknes and settling in the Jewish quarter (Assaraf 2009). Life in the Old Mellaḥ, therefore, became unbearable as its space was severely limited. The leaders of the Jewish community began looking for practical solutions and contacted different authorities in the country, including the king of Morocco. They (Jewish leaders) were given several promises for an amelioration of their living conditions, but change never came. In 1912, concrete change and improvements were finally introduced with the coming of the French authorities and the Protectorate.3

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The French authorities offered different solutions to the Jewish leaders concerning the issues of overcrowding in the Mellaḥ. The French initially suggested Jewish settlement in the new city, Hamria, a modern area founded and inhabited by the French residents. Although Hamria offered a good solution, the majority of the Jewish leaders refused to move from the Old Mellaḥ because they thought Hamria was remote. They also argued that living in Hamria would cut them off from their roots in the Old Mellaḥ (Assaraf 2009). After long discussions, the Jewish leaders decided to settle on a small hill in front of the Old Mellaḥ. The proximity of the hill and its size presented an ideal option in comparison with all the other solutions4. By the end of 1926, the New Mellaḥ of Meknes had already been inaugurated. Most of the prominent families, such as Toledano, Berdugo, Mrejen, Benamara, Azogui, and El Krief, moved to the new quarter as it had all the qualities of a modern neighborhood (Assaraf 2009). The New Mellaḥ soon contained several synagogues, a modern school, several bars, a new market, and numerous villas. In 1956, at the end of the French Protectorate and the inauguration of an independent Moroccan state, the Jewish population started shrinking as a result of an unprecedented wave of emigration of the Jews to different destinations, mainly Israel. In the 1960s, some Muslim families came to live with the Jews in the New Mellaḥ for the first time. In spite of the importance of this recent period in the history of the New Mellaḥ and Jewish history in Morocco, no study has been conducted about it until now. A general analysis of the extant literature on the Moroccan Jewish population shows that there are still important aspects that have not yet been studied; all the studies that have been conducted thus far focused either on Jews in Morocco prior to Moroccan independence (e.g., Assaraf 2009; Chouraqui 1968) or on Jewish perspectives of attitudes toward, and experiences with Moroccan Muslims (e.g., Levy 1996; Levy 2001; Schroeter 2008; Wyrtzen 2015). The only exception in this respect remains Boum (2010; 2013), who addressed the Muslim perspectives by exploring Muslim memories about the Jews in the region of Akka in the south of Morocco. METHODOLOGY This section describes the methodology used in this study to explore Moroccan Muslim memories of co-existence with the Moroccan Jews and the conservation of the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. It is organized as follows: research design, sample and sampling procedure, research instruments, and data collection and data analysis This study is based on an ethnographic design. This type of design is deemed more appropriate for this specific topic, the research questions, and

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the data collected. Creswell (2012) reasons that “You conduct ethnography when the study of a group provides understanding of a larger issue.”5 Sample and Sampling Procedure This study began with a sample of ten respondents. Three respondents were subsequently eliminated because they did not provide any substantial information on the issues related to the study. As shown in figure 16.1, the final sample was composed of seven respondents including five males and two females. Demographic data on the respondents shows that they belong to two different generations, have different educational levels, and work in different sectors. As far as the sampling procedure is concerned, “purposeful sampling”6 was used in the selection of the sample. According to Creswell (2012), “purposeful sampling” can be used when the individuals selected in the sample had already experienced the central phenomenon under study. As a matter of fact, all the respondents of this study had direct experience with the issues addressed in this study and all had lived among the Jews in the New Mellaḥ after the independence of Morocco.

Figure 16.1  Demographic characteristics of the interview respondents. Created by Ahmed Chouari.

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Research Instruments The main data collection instrument used in this study is the semi-structured interview (Elliott 2005; Seidman 2006). Gillham (2005) upholds that “it could be argued that the semi-structured interview is the most important way of conducting a research interview because of its flexibility balanced by structure, and the quality of the data so obtained.”7 The interview was divided into three main sections. The first section was meant to make the participants more comfortable and willing to share. It was also used to collect demographic data from the participants. The second section included the main questions of the interview. This section included questions such as: “What can you tell me about your relationship with your Jewish neighbors?” “Do you know why the Jews left the Mellaḥ?” “Should we conserve the Mellaḥ as it was in the past? (Why?).” The last section was left open for extra information and follow-up questions. Data Collection and Data Analysis For the purpose of answering the research questions, data was collected through semi-structured interviews, field notes, pictures (more than 100), and several videos. The respondents were first personally contacted by the researcher for the sake of building rapport and trust. In the second stage, the interviews were recorded and then transcribed for analysis. For data analysis, qualitative content analysis was used as a technique for two reasons: First, content analysis is flexible and sensitive to content. Kyngäs, (2020) upholds that “Content analysis is a useful qualitative analysis method due to its content-sensitive nature and ability to analyse many kinds of open data sets.”8 Second, content analysis is more effective for analyzing the type of data collected in this study as it offers a range of rich and scientific procedures for data analysis. Krippendorff (2004) explains that “As a technique, content analysis involves specialized procedures. It is learnable and divorceable from the personal authority of the researcher. As a research technique, content analysis provides new insights, increases a researcher’s understanding of particular phenomena, or informs particular actions. Content analysis is a scientific tool.”9 Second, Content Analysis Finally, to get a deeper understanding of the data, the responses were coded qualitatively. Coding was done inductively at the beginning, and then some of the emerging codes and sub-codes were merged together. Merging the sub-codes allowed the researcher to reduce the number of codes and to

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make the analysis more practical (Gillham 2005; Glesen 2006; Krippendorff 2004). Findings This section is divided into two subsections. The first section presents the findings related to research question 1. The second section is about the findings of research question 2. Findings related to research question 1. During the analysis of findings on research question 1, co-existence in the New Mellaḥ, several themes emerged. To get a deeper insight of these themes, they were divided into four broad categories: (1) happy memories, (2) tolerance and crossing the religious/cultural borders, (3) violence, and (4) sad memories. Happy Memories All the respondents in this study expressed a feeling of nostalgia, though in different degrees, for the time when they and the Jews lived together in the New Mellaḥ. They still have positive attitudes and retain positive memories about that experience. Different terms such as “co-existence,” “harmony,” “respect,” and “tolerance” were frequently used by the respondents while speaking about their memories of the Jews in the New Mellaḥ. For Abdelilah, for example, that experience was both unique and unforgettable: We all lived like a family. I helped them in Eid Nwala (Sukkot). I helped in building their huts which they usually built on the roofs of their houses. They used canes and palm tree branches to build them. They were so kind and peaceful, and I enjoyed helping them.

While talking about their life with the Jews, some respondents spoke about how Jews and Muslims usually took care of each other and shared many things including food and drinks. These happy moments were frequent during celebrations, feasts and family gatherings. During the interview, Hicham recalled how much Muslims liked Jewish foods: Foods such as rqaqa, skhina, and sfenj were some of the most popular foods that the Jews shared with the Muslims on different occasions. We liked skhina and rqaqa a lot because the Jews were good at preparing them. They also made good maḥya [Alcoholic drink made by the Moroccan Jews]. A lot of Muslims used to buy it from the Jews.

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TOLERANCE AND CROSSING THE RELIGIOUS/CULTURAL BORDERS In post-colonial Morocco, some Jews of the New Mellaḥ dared to cross the cultural and religious borders in their relationship with the Muslims in the New Mellaḥ. One of the stories that Hicham told me in this respect was about a Jew who broke one of the strictest rules in the Jewish community by deciding to get married to a Muslim woman. He chose to wed a Muslim woman “in spite of the risks and the resistance of his family because the Jewish community considered such marriage a sacrilege,” Hicham told me. Another example of crossing the religious/cultural borders is that of Judah, son of Elyaqout. Judah was a mechanic and used to work and mingle with Muslims on a regular basis. He had a lot of Muslim friends with whom he used to share many things, such as spending whole nights enjoying their time and drinking wine together. I was told that Judah later converted to Islam and changed his name to Jawad. To check the reliability of this story, I tried to contact Judah, but he was nowhere to be found in Meknes. Violence When asked about some bad memories with the Jews, different participants talked about some violent and criminal acts. Three specific instances of violence stood out because they culminated in the death of Jewish subjects. The first case happened during the Protectorate on August 3, 1954 (before Muslims moved to the New Mellaḥ). On that summer day, six Jewish merchants were lynched in Sidi Qassem near Meknes by angry rioters who were initially protesting against the French colonizer. The six Jews were (1) Samuel Boussidan (aged forty-five), (2) Abraham Amar (aged fifty), (3) Ellie Toledano (aged fifty), (4) David Toledano (aged sixteen), (5) Chaloum Elfassi (aged fifty-six), and (6) Abraham Elfassi (aged twenty-seven). The only participant who talked about the event of the massacre was Hamid. He cannot remember the event in detail today because it took place in the 1950s when he was still very young: I was still very young when that event happened. At that time, we were still living in the Old Medina. During that day, those Jews were not supposed to be there. They were all shopkeepers and did not want to open their shops because they knew that people were planning to demonstrate against the French Protectorate. The French police asked the Jews to keep their shops open and assured them that they had nothing to fear. When the riots started, the French policemen were overwhelmed by the angry protesters and the riots became violent. The result was bloodshed and several people lost their lives on that day. Six Jews were among the victims.

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The graves of the six assassinated Jews are still there in the Jewish cemetery of the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. They were buried next to each other in the cemetery to keep the memory of their death together alive. The second case of violence is that of an old Jew who was assassinated in the New Mellaḥ in the 1980s. All the respondents agreed that the killing of the old Jew was by accident because the killers were adolescents who were enjoying themselves and wanted to play a “dirty trick” on the victim. While the old Jew was standing at the door of an old bakery (Moroccan traditional Ferran), he was pushed inside (the bakery) by one of the youths. The old man fell down the stairs and died instantly. Recalling this event, a cousin of one of the murderers (Abdelilah) told me that: The three boys were having fun and never meant to kill the old Jew. They were all under the spell of Hashish (a cannabis derivative) and did not really know what they were doing. They pushed him, and he fell inside the bakery and died. After their arrest, the other boys were released! My cousin, Abdelouahed, was the only one convicted. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for that. When he left the prison, he had already lost his mind. He died some years later.

The last criminal case is that of Ellie, a Moroccan Jew who was well known within the Muslim community. He used to practice some sort of witchcraft for a living and had a considerable number of Muslim clients. He was assassinated by a Muslim bodyguard who attacked him for money. One of the respondents (Hicham) explained that in the case of Ellie, “the assassination was a pure criminal act for money. It had nothing to do with religion or politics.” Unhappy Memories The third major theme in the interviews was the sad memories of the departure of the Jews from the New Mellaḥ. Most of the respondents expressed feelings of regret about the departure of the Jews from the New Mellaḥ. The respondents had feelings of deep regret and nostalgia for their way of life with the Jews. For them, the Jews were often good neighbors, friendly, peaceful and, above all, helpful. Until today, for example, Abdallah still has vivid feelings and memories about the departure of his Jewish neighbors: When the Jews next doors left, we were both worried and unhappy. We were worried because we did not know who our new neighbors would be. We preferred to have Jews as neighbors rather than others. We were unhappy because our Jewish neighbors left forever. With the Jewish families as neighbors, we

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felt more secure and at peace. Now that they are gone, all good things are gone with them.

FINDINGS RELATED TO RESEARCH QUESTION 2: PRESERVING JEWISH CULTURE The data collected through interviews, pictures, documents, and numerous visits to the quarter revealed some important issues regarding the conservation of the New Mellaḥ and its cultural heritage. The data analysis shows that there are two contrasting approaches to the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. A Negative Tendency toward the Jewish Cultural Heritage The departure of the Jewish population from the New Mellaḥ had different negative effects on the quarter. Analysis of the data revealed different aspects of these negative effects including threats to the identity of the New Mellaḥ and lack of awareness of the importance of its Jewish cultural heritage. Historically, most of the Jews had left the New Mellaḥ before the end of the 1970s. In the beginning of the 1980s, the authorities made the decision to change the name of the New Mellaḥ, which became Reyad. In addition, they also removed the names of all the streets and alleys and replaced them with names of either Arab places or famous Arab figures. That attempt was viewed by different respondents as “an explicit intention to eradicate the Jewish identity of the New Mellaḥ and replace it by a Muslim/Arab identity” (Rachid). According to Hicham: We were aware of what was going on. Jerusalem Street became AlQuds street. Jerusalem Street had at least three bars; they were all closed after most of the Jews left. Our zenkat was called Cohen, but now it is called Zenkat Hassan ELAnsari. The Jewish school L’Alliance Israélite Universelle was taken over by the Muslims and its name became Ibn Othmane ElMaknassi.

At the present time, the Jewish cultural heritage in the New Mellaḥ seems to be in terrible condition. This condition also reflects a serious lack of understanding of the importance of the Mellaḥ as a component of Moroccan culture, history, and identity. Most of the streets are unclean and in poor condition. Several houses are either run down or in ruins after being desolate for decades. The findings show that, despite some negative views, there is also a positive tendency toward the conservation of the Jewish cultural heritage in

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the New Mellaḥ. This positive tendency is gaining ground and can be seen at different levels today. Respect of the Jewish Cultural Heritage Frequent visits to the New Mellaḥ, my memories, and the data collected about the place are clear evidence that the New Mellaḥ is still largely intact and its identity can be preserved. The streets, alleys, and buildings have kept their old structures and designs. Sacred places for religious prayers, rituals, and education (such as synagogues) are generally respected by Moroccan Muslims. The cemetery of the new Mellaḥ is generally well kept and the graves have never been desecrated or vandalized. Until today, Moroccan Jews, their children, and grandchildren come from Israel, France, Canada, and the United States to visit the graves of their ancestors and celebrate the Mimouna festival every year. The crumbling grave of Rabbi Joseph Boussidan is vivid evidence of the decrepit state of the Jewish cemetery. New Awareness with a Different Policy As a matter of fact, the Muslim inhabitants of the New Mellaḥ have always respected the Jewish holy places and see them as part of the history of the quarter. There has never been any attack on these sites. Inside the cemetery, you can always find members of a Moroccan family who live on the premises and take care of the graves and the cemetery as a whole. This positive attitude of the Muslims can further be seen and felt in the way the Muslims perceive and talk about the New Mellaḥ today. Most of the inhabitants consider the Mellaḥ their home and are proud to belong to a place that they once shared with the Jews. The role of the Moroccan authorities, too, cannot be overlooked in the protection and preservation of the cultural heritage of the Mellaḥ and its holy places. They assume full responsibility for protecting every sacred place by making their presence visible on a regular basis. When tourists, be they Jews or not, come to visit some of the sacred places in the New Mellaḥ, security forces are always present to prevent any misfortune. However, the efforts made by Muslims do not mean that they are the only ones who care about the preservation of the New Mellaḥ. Some of the Jews of Meknes are also very activist in this respect. For example, Haim Toledano, the leader of the Jewish community in Meknes, is a key figure in the conservation of the Jewish cultural heritage. Indeed, he has exerted great efforts in restoring the old cemetery of the Old Mellaḥ, too.

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DISCUSSION This chapter reports the findings on the memories of Moroccan Muslims on Muslim-Jewish relations in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes in post-colonial Morocco and the conservation of the quarter as a cultural heritage site. First, post-colonial life between Muslims and Jews in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes can be seen as a sort of convivencia. It was a concrete example of co-existence, tolerance, harmony, and acceptance of the “other.” Jews were no longer seen as dhimmi because they came to be considered full Moroccan citizens with equal rights (Boum 2013, Schroeter 2008). To be sure, the post-colonial era also marked a radical change in how Muslims and Jews regarded each other. The New Mellaḥ was no longer seen as an exclusive living space for the Jews. By the 1960s, Muslims had already started buying houses from the Jews and the Jews willingly accepted them as Muslim neighbors. By living together in the New Mellaḥ and sharing the same space, the Jews and Muslims of Morocco showed that they were now ready to live together in the same space. Also, in spite of the violent historical upheavals that shook the Middle East in the aftermath of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, the Moroccan Jews continued to actively contribute to the social, economic, and political life of the New Mellaḥ. Most of them had the opportunity to leave the country, but they willingly chose to stay in Morocco as their homeland. The choice of these Jews refutes the claims of the “Solar Model System” as it clearly supports Levy’s (2001) argument that Morocco is the “center,” and not the periphery for many Jews10. Unfortunately, historical events showed that such co-existence between Muslims and Jews was ephemeral. In the 1960s and 1970s, Morocco was in the midst of building a new nation with an “emerging nation-state ideology” (Schroeter 2008) after nearly half a century of French and Spanish occupation (Wyrtzen 2015). Moreover, the Arab-Israeli conflict had some negative repercussions in Morocco that led some activists in the Nationalist Movement to urge Moroccans to boycott the country’s Jewish products. The relations between Jews and Muslims became more strained motivating some of the Jews to leave the country because they no longer felt secure. These events made achieving any kind of a modern convivencia—as suggested by Lovat and Crotty (2015)—in the New Mellaḥ of postcolonial Morocco unrealistic and far-fetched. In other words, the condition in the Jewish quarter lacked the “preconditions for convivencia” (Lovat and Crotty, 2015). For convivencia to take place, Lovat and Croty (2015) argue that there is a need for three preconditions: (1) political stability and economic security, (2) a cultural umbrella available and attractive to the populace, and (3) with these factors in place, religious pluralism is the next step (p. 114). Undoubtedly, the absence of the

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above preconditions contributed to the dismantling of whatever modern convivencia (even at its burgeoning stage) existed in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. Fortunately, after years of neglect and silence, the fate of the mellaḥs seems to be changing. Very recently, King Mohamed VI gave his orders to repair the Jewish quarters in Morocco. The king decided to dedicate a substantial sum of money to the restoration of the mellaḥs and their historical sites, such as cemeteries, synagogues, and religious schools. That decision also meant that the streets and zenkats of the mellaḥs would recover their Hebrew names that were removed when the Jews left Morocco. Some mellaḥs have also been largely repaired and regained much of their lost identity. In 2017, the Jewish quarter of Marrakesh, for example, was restored and regained its original name. Instead of being called Ḥay Essalam, the Jewish quarter bears the name of the Mellaḥ again. Another example is that of the city of Rabat where the Mellaḥ is being reconstructed by partly refurbishing and repairing some of its streets and shops. However, up until now, the two mellaḥs of Meknes (the Old and the New Mellaḥ) have not benefited much from these “winds of change.” For instance, the New Mellaḥ of Meknes is still called Reyad and its streets and “zenkats” continue to bear Arabic names. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH After the independence of Morocco in 1956, the Muslims and Jews of Meknes had a unique opportunity of sharing the same space by living together in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. This chapter revealed important findings of the co-existence of the two communities. The memories of that experience are still very vivid in the minds of the Muslim inhabitants of the New Mellaḥ. Up to the present day, they still retain rich memories of tolerance (such as respect and acceptance of difference at the level of culture and religious beliefs) and co-existence with the Jews in the New Mellaḥ of Meknes. Additionally, decades after the departure of the Jews, Moroccan Muslims have preserved the identity of the New Mellaḥ by protecting its structure, architecture, and religious heritage (see images 16.3–16.10 on website). Sacred Jewish sites, such as synagogues, the cemetery, and religious schools, are still generally intact, well kept, and undamaged. More importantly, there has been a positive change in the attitudes of the Muslims toward the Jewish cultural heritage since the massive departure of the Jews from the New Mellaḥ. This change is manifested in the growing awareness of the importance of preserving the New Mellaḥ and its Jewish cultural heritage as an important component of Moroccan history and national identity. The results further show that there are many other aspects of the New Mellaḥ that need to be explored today. More studies are still required to

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unravel the New Mellaḥ and its deep cultural heritage. There is also a need for the use of other research approaches and methods (mixed-methods approach, for example) to explore this complex issue and excavate its other hidden aspects.

NOTES 1. Emily Benichou Gottreich, The Mellaḥ of Marrakesh (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 12. 2. Robert Assaraf, Eléments de L’histoire des Juifs de Meknès (Rabat: Editions & Impression Bouregreg, 2009), 57. 3. Assaraf, Eléments de L’histoire des Juifs de Meknès, 57. 4. Assaraf, Eléments de L’histoire des Juifs de Meknès, 58. 5. John W. Creswell, Research Design Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012), 462. 6. John W. Creswell, Research Design Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012), 207–233. 7. Bill Gillham, Research Interviewing (Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2005), 70. 8. Helvi Kyngäs, “Qualitative Research and Content Analysis,” in The Application of Content Analysis in Nursing Science Research, edited by Helvi Kyngäs, Kristina Mikkonen and Maria Kääriäinen, 3–11 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 11. 9. Klauss Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2004), 18. 10. Andre Levy, “Center and diaspora: Jews in late Twentieth-century-Morocco,” City & Society 13, no. 2 (2001): 247–250.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assaraf, Robert. Eléments de L’histoire des Juifs de Meknès. Rabat: Editions & Impression Bouregreg, 2009. Ben‐Layashi, Samir, and Bruce Maddy‐Weitzman. “Myth, History and Realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2005): 89–106. https://doi: 10.1080/14725880903549293. Boum, Aomar. “From ‘Little Jerusalem’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan Nationalism, and rural Jewish emigration.” Journal of North African Studies 15, no. 1 (2010): 51–69. ———. Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Chouraqui, André Nathan. Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968.

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Creswell, John W. Research Design Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012. Deshen, Shlomo. “Urban Jews in Sherifian Morocco.” Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 4 (1984): 212–223. https://doi: 10.2307/4283038. Elliott, Jane. Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. London: Sage Publication, 2005. Gillham. Bill. Research Interviewing: The Range of Techniques. Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2005. Glesen, Corrine. Becoming Qualitative Researcher: An Introduction. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006. Goldberg, Harvey E. “The Mellahs of Southern Morocco: Report of a Survey.” Maghreb Review 8, no. 3–4 (1983): 61–69. file:​///C:​/User​s/use​r/Dow​nload​s/Doc​ ument​s/The​​_Mell​​ahs​_o​​f​_Sou​​thern​​_Moro​​cco​_R​​epo​rt​​_o​.pd​​f. Gottreich, Emily Benichou. The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. ———. “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 433–451. https://doi: 10.2307/25470274. Krippendorff, Klauss. Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA. Sage Publications, Inc., 2004. Kyngäs, Helvi. “Qualitative Research and Content Analysis.” In The Application of Content Analysis in Nursing Science Research, 3–11, edited by Helvi Kyngäs, Kristina Mikkonen and Maria Kääriäinen. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020. Laskier, Michael Menachem. North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York: New York University Press, 1994. ——— and Eliezer Bashan. “Morocco.” In The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in modern times, 471–504, edited by Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Levy, Andre. “Center and diaspora: Jews in late Twentieth-century-Morocco”. City & Society. 13, no. 2 (2001): 246–270. https//: doi: 10.1525/city.2001.13.2.245 ———. “Notes on Jewish-Muslim Relationships: Revisiting the Vanishing Moroccan Jewish Community.” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2003): 365–397. https://doi: 10.1525/can.2003.18.3.365. ——— and Yoram Bilu. “Nostalgia and Ambivalence: The reconstruction of JewishMuslim Relations in Oulad Mansour.” In Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, 288–311, edited by Harvey E. Goldberg. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996. Lovat, Terence and Robert Crotty. Reconciling Islam, Christianity and Judaism: Islam’s Special Role in Restoring Convivencia. New York: Springer, 2015. Popescu, Diana I. “The Persistence of Nostalgia? When Poles Miss their Jews and Israelis Yearn for Europe.” Jewish Culture and History 14, no. 2–3 (2013): 140– 152, https://doi: 10.1080/1462169X.2013.805897. Schroeter, Daniel J. Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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———. “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 15, no. 1 (2008): 145–164. https://doi: 10.2307/40207038. ——— and Joseph Chetrit. “Emancipation and its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco.” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 13 no. 1 (2006): 170–206. https://doi: 10.2307/4467761. Seidman, Irvin. Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2006. Simon, Reeva Spector, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer (eds.). The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Tessler, Mark. A., and Linda L. Hawkins. “The Political Culture of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 11 no. 1 (Feb 1980): 59–86. https://doi: 10.2307/162399. Zafrani, Haim. Deux Mille Ans de Vie Juive au Maroc: Histoire et Culture, Religion et Magie. Casablanca: Eddif, 1998. Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity. Ithacan, New York: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Chapter 17

Growing Up in the Mellaḥ of Taroudant Spaces, Time, Acquaintances, and Rupture. A Memoir with Two Poems Joseph Chetrit

June 1961. The community is at a boiling point.1 The families are busy selling their houses and land. The great journey to the land of our dreams is approaching. We, too, are about to set out on this great journey. I returned from Casablanca, where I studied,2 in order to participate in the preparations and join the family. In the meantime, the house where we lived and another house we owned were sold to Muslim acquaintances for ridiculous prices, like all of the houses of the Mellaḥ. The olive trees we owned for years, far away from home on the banks of the Sous River, were also sold, to the sharecropper who took care of them all these years. He also harvested the olives and brought them to the olive press for a share of the olives and oil. At the olive press, my father, my sisters, my brothers, and I, too, waited our turn to watch over the pressing of the olives and the filling of the jugs with the golden liquid. For the modest amount received from selling the property, Mother bought small rugs, tin, and silverware to fill the trunk. Mother was the head of the family at the time due to Father’s illness. Few families managed to leave Taroudant. We were suddenly informed by HIAS officers that the ‘Aliyah was suspended and that a new date for departure was not set. Despair gripped Mother. She refused to leave Taroudant at the outset but had to join the rush of most of the community’s families. In the meanwhile, the two houses were sold, and we were compelled to rent another house, or rather rooms in another house, until the ‘Aliyah resumed. On the day of the departure from the house our family lived in for generations, I went one last time upstairs to all of the rooms on the second floor. I spent a few seconds in each room, went up 399

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to the roof where we would sleep under the stars during the hot summer nights, and said goodbye with restrained emotion. Instead of June 1961, we eventually left Taroudant two years later, in July 1963, on a bus that picked up the last families that remained in Taroudant and in the nearby small communities. Although the semi-official, authorized ‘Aliyah renewed long before, Mother insisted on remaining in Taroudant since, after the crisis of the forbidden departure, her anxiety about the loss of her status in the community increased. She knew that in the new place she would no longer work in her traditional practice of healing babies, and particularly in making her special drink of herbs and spices which she used to soothe babies’ pains. She resigned herself to departing since only one Jewish family remained in the Mellaḥ. That family had orchards and lands that the Muslims desired but were not willing to buy at their market value. The buyers assumed that, sooner or later, Sissou, the landowner, would have to leave, too, and get rid of his assets for a ridiculous sum. But he was not tempted to leave. His family moved to Agadir, and Sissou joined them on the Sabbath and holidays. He spent the weekdays in Taroudant to claim his property and declare his full ownership of his lands, which he later passed on to his offspring. Mother’s disappointments with the ‘Aliyah did not end when we disembarked from the Turkish ship İskenderun in Haifa on July 26, 1963. That evening, we continued to Ashkelon, our first home in Israel. Two months later we moved to Dimona where I found a job teaching French. Our trunk containing all of the belongings we took from Taroudant, arrived months after we did. It was stored, like all of the immigrants’ luggage, in Kurdani-Zur Shalom near Haifa. But alas! When we opened the luggage, it appeared as if it was professionally broken into while it was in storage, and all of the valuables were stolen. Only the rags remained. We were not the only family to experience this type of theft. Many immigrants experienced these sufferings in their first steps in Israel. For them, and for us, it was an unnecessary trauma that added to the hardships of integration and assimilation in the new country. As the head of the family, my Mother, who had reservations about making ‛Aliyah, ultimately made the decision for us not to depart from Taroudant. Unlike her, I was keen on making ‛Aliyah from the moment it became semiofficial in 1961. Even before I was ten years old, I knew the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a significant event for the Jewish people. I was further swept away by the stories of heroism that surrounded Israel, especially during the War of Independence. Since then, I was obsessed with the news from Israel, both while in Taroudant and in Casablanca. Apart from the broadcasts in Hebrew, French, and Judeo-Arabic of Kol Zion La-Golah [A Voice from Zion to the Diaspora] aimed particularly toward immigrants from North Africa, I also received Israeli magazines in Hebrew as a boy. They arrived through France after Morocco’s independence. My Zionist awareness

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increased even more in Casablanca when I was at the school for teachers of Hebrew and French, École Normale Hébraïque, between 1955–1962, where I finished high school and studied pedagogy. The atmosphere at the school, which was also a boarding school, conveyed strong but subtle Zionist messages. I was known at the school as a student who was interested in what was going on in Israel. Every Saturday at the “ˤOneg Shabbat,” I gave a short report of the news from Israel and the Jewish world before the entire student body. When I stayed in Taroudant, the short-wave radio of Kol Israel La-Golah filled the nights with great anticipation and excitement, despite the noise and interrupted connection that made a large part of the broadcast incomprehensible. With our arrival at Dimona, the spaces and landscapes changed completely from what I was used to in Taroudant. I was born and raised in the Mellaḥ that probably existed there from the beginning of the nineteenth century, like many closed Jewish quarters established by the order of Sultan Moulay Sliman (reigned 1792–1821). Jews lived in Taroudant hundreds of years prior to that, perhaps even going back to the Middle Ages. All of the houses in the Mellaḥ had two stories. Their thick walls were made of compressed clay mixed with straw, which consolidated as the construction progressed. They were painted on the inside with whitewash, but the external walls maintained their red loam color throughout the generations. The ceiling, too, was built on top of mostly straight planks and beds of cane reed that held the layers of clay together. All of the rooms faced an open internal courtyard. Only narrow hatches let the air in from outside. There was no running water in the houses. The water was pumped from wells that existed in the large houses and served the extended family, and sometimes also served the neighbors and relatives. In our house, the small yard served as a kitchen. Only after World War II, was a central pump established in the Mellaḥ supplying water to all residents of the quarter. One of the two downstairs rooms served as a shed, while the other served half as a shed and its other half as a place for rest and sleep. The two top rooms served as bedrooms without any separation between the parents and the small children. The houses of the Mellaḥ were crowded together along the narrow streets or alleys that led to them. They were also joined through the rooftops, which were used as meeting places for female neighbors and at times for couples. The rooftops increased the space of the house. They were used as a place to hang laundry and for the weekly Sabbath evening bathing from a bucket of hot water. In a corner selected specially for that purpose, the family Sukkah was built. On Sukkot eve, you could hear from above the Kiddush blessings that jumped from one rooftop to another and transformed the neighborhood into an entirely uncoordinated choir. As children, we competed with one another as to who could identify which house belonged to the voices reaching

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us, near and far. The rooftops also served as the main place for sleep during the long, hot summer nights. For lack of natural and artificial air conditioning, between April and October, the rooms turned into suffocating saunas. In the particularly arid summer months, the rooftops rescued us from the heat and sleepless nights. Blankets and mats were spread under the skies. During the nights of August, our eyes were mesmerized (until they were stricken with sleep) tracking the beautiful paths of meteors that lit up the sky in flashes; we saw them as fragments of shooting stars. As the meteors carved their paths, some sent their silent prayers and blessings to the stars in the sky. Our small house was built in an enclosed street and was used only by our nuclear family. That wasn’t the case with the big houses that were built along the external walls of the Mellaḥ, like the house across the street that belonged to Grandma and Grandpa and housed the families of the uncles and aunts. That house had six large rooms on the bottom floor and six on the top floor. A nuclear family lived in each room. A portable cooking device was set in the upper or bottom corridor in front of the room of each family. In this house, the rooms surrounded a wide yard with a large Sukkah for the members of the extended family. The main yard led to a very wide backyard that served at times as a temporary dairy barn and stable for Father’s and the uncles’ donkeys. The dairy barn had a canopy from the left of the yard, while on the right, a large room with a rooftop was built. In its right corner, the room had large barrels filled with ash and water to soak the laundry and for disinfecting. On its left end, there was a large oven for baking the Passover Matzot and Sabbath bread and for placing the pots of the Sabbath cholent [Schina]. The house’s residents used the barrels while the families of the residents and the relatives that lived in their own houses used the large stove. For years, as a child and as an adolescent, I participated in rolling the dough for Passover Matzot. As a reward for our hard work, we—the children—received pockets of dough filled with dried fruit, that were baked in the large oven after the Matzot baking was over and the oven could be used for daily needs again. The taste of those sweet pockets still moistens my palate, and I still remember their unique name bu‑nǝffäkh. On holidays, during the evening, the inner yard also served as a temporary slaughterhouse for the cow or bull that the uncles and other family members bought together instead of buying meat from the only butcher in the Mellaḥ. After the Shoḥet [ritual slaughterer] slaughtered the cow or bull and the butcher skinned it, he examined the lung and, according to distinct Halachic symptoms, decided whether the meat was kosher or Trefa [forbidden to consume]. Only then were the guts and inner organs removed and split among the participants. Then, the butcher, who was my uncle Yaˤish, started cutting the meat, cleaning the forbidden fat from it, and splitting it among the partners in equal parts. From childhood, I participated in dozens of such slaughtering

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and splitting events, and I even took an active part in them by blowing into and thereby inflating the animal’s skin after the slaughter, to ease the work of its stripping. I describe my grandfather and grandmother’s house in great detail since it was the model for many additional houses in the Mellaḥ that were built along its external walls. Almost all of them were constructed the same way. In addition, all of the orchards and agricultural fields adjacent to the external yards belonged to the Jewish residents. Up until the community’s dispersal, the orchards and gardens surrounding the Mellaḥ were named after their Jewish owners. Throughout the generations, the owners worked them or hired Muslims to work the lands and groom them. Only under French rule did some Jewish owners sell their agricultural lands to Muslims. The fields and orchards near the yards were granted to the Jewish families that initially moved into the houses of the Mellaḥ. This government policy prevailed in almost all of the Mellaḥ quarters established in Morocco. The official goal was to provide the Jews with an independent supply of grains, fruits, and vegetables so that they would not be dependent upon their Muslim neighbors. With the passage of time the agricultural lands surrounding the Mellaḥ decreased in size as the Jewish population increased and construction spread into the agricultural areas. This urban expansion did not occur in Taroudant. Only a few private houses were constructed in orchards after World War II. In contrast to the image of the enclosed, confined space of the Mellaḥ in the writings of European travelers and researchers who took an interest in the lives of Moroccan Jews, the time I spent in Muslim-owned fields and orchards filled a significant portion of my life in Taroudant as a child and adolescent. How? In the mid-1950s, Father became a greengrocer after losing his small fortune working as a butcher and meat vendor after a year of severe drought. Let it be clearly understood that at the time, and in a small community such as Taroudant’s, with only a little over 200 families, amounting to about 1,000 souls, the butcher did not get kosher meat to sell from an external provider. He had to buy the bull or cow himself at the animal market, lead it to the slaughterhouse, coordinate the date of slaughter early in the morning with the Shoḥet, and transport the kosher meat to his shop, where he cut and sold it. In the mid-1950s, there was a very harsh drought in Morocco in general and in southern Morocco in particular, which always suffered almost desert-like weather. When there was no natural grass and feed for the animals, they grazed the earth and swallowed nails and sharp objects that injured their lungs and stomachs and made them Trefa in the eyes of the Shoḥet and the examiner inspecting. That year, four or five of Father’s cows were found Trefa one by one. He lost all his funds invested in the cows. Why didn’t he sell the Trefa meat to Muslims? They knew that Jews could not

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consume Trefa meat. They did the Jewish butcher a favor by taking the meat for a small sum of money. When Father became a greengrocer, all family members took part in his new occupation. Why? If a greengrocer had no field or orchard of his own from which to gather his produce, he had to buy produce from a farmer while the fruit and vegetables were still on the tree or in the earth. He then had to pluck the fruit or gather the vegetables himself and transport them on the donkey to his shop. This is why I spent most of my childhood and adolescent years in nearby and faraway orchards and fields, picking fruit, especially citrus fruit, and vegetables, during the flaming-hot summer days. One of the particularly interesting seasons was that of the date harvest at the end of summer. In Taroudant, like all other cities built according to the traditional Arab city plan of the Middle Ages, agricultural lands were not separated from urban, constructed spaces. On the contrary, they were purposely integrated into adjoining housing and agricultural units. (This was done for the same reason the Jews of the Mellaḥ were allocated agricultural lands next to their houses.) By following this method, a supply of fruit, vegetables, and grains was available and easily accessible to the residents. Many palm trees grew in orchards adjacent to Muslim houses outside the Mellaḥ, and they yielded different kinds of dates—most were ordinary, but some were special. Many times, approaching the festival of Sukkot, I accompanied Father when he visited palm tree owners who were interested in selling him the produce from one or two palm trees. After the price was settled, the best time for harvest was also discussed. When the time came, Father hired a professional Muslim climber who climbed the palm tree, which sometimes reached a height of over 5 meters, and the climber would harvest the clusters of dates and lower them carefully with a rope. The aim was to prevent the fruit from scattering on the ground. On the same day, the entire family—myself included—came to take part in the harvest, collect the dates, load them on the donkey, and bring them to store in one of the rooms of the second house (which we did not use as a residence). Some of the crop was sold as fruit in the shop, but most of it was used to distill the alcoholic beverage Maḥya [life water]. There was not a single Jewish house in the Mellaḥ that did not have a home distillery whose utensils were as old as time. These utensils consisted of a large pot for fermenting the dates (or any other fruit) by soaking them in water for several days, boiling the fermented fruit over a wood and charcoal stove, streaming the steam from the boiling pot through a pipe made of cane reed or steel, which eventually passed through another pot of cold water to condense the vapors and collect it in the form of an alcoholic beverage. The longer the distillation process was, the lower the percentage of alcohol produced. In our house, as was the case in all houses at the Mellaḥ and, in fact, in most of the

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Jewish communities—rural, urban and semi-urban—Maḥya was made in this manner. Instead of dates, some people used grapes, figs, pomegranates, prickly pears, and honeycombs; only in Sefrou did the Jews distil Maḥya from cherries, which grew there in abundance. The French had forbidden the home distillation during their rule in Morocco, but the Jews continued to do so despite the prohibition. Some families were heavily fined for it. Before French rule and afterward, the production of homemade Maḥya was a cause for occasional trouble for Jewish communities. Throughout the generations, the Maḥya attracted some Muslim customers to Jewish houses, the sole place where they could obtain an alcoholic beverage. Some drank too much, behaved wildly in their homes and in the streets, and led the local authorities to punish not only the Jews who broke the law but the entire Jewish community. The Takkanot of Fez contained many regulations prohibiting the sale of Maḥya to Muslims. The repetition of these regulations testifies to the fact that the Jews didn’t always know how to resist the temptation of easy profit, sometimes producing disastrous consequences for their community. Agriculture attracted not only the greengrocers who bought their stock where it was grown, but the entire community at least twice a year. The first occasion was on Birkat Ha-ˀIlanot [=the blessing on trees] that was recited during the final day of Passover. After Minḥa, all the worshippers in the synagogue would go with their children outside the Mellaḥ’s walls to see the bloom on the trees and recite the traditional blessing of the trees. At the end of the ceremony, the community members ended Passover with the traditional saying: “Farewell Passover and come in peace, Shavuˤot.” After this ceremony, many Jews visited homes of Muslim acquaintances, gave them the usual holiday gift, and received butter, honey, flour, eggs (and sometimes, even poultry), fresh branches of fava beans, and fig branches or pomegranates for the Mimuna ceremonies that took place at the end of Passover. I will elaborate on that later. The second time the Jews left the Mellaḥ as a group occurred every year on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. After Minḥa, the worshippers went to one of the springs near the Mellaḥ that flowed to the Sous river to read the prayer ve-Tashlich, “Hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea.” (Michah 7, 19) They threw little rocks to the water to accompany the wish that the prayer would be received. Other than the orchards and open spaces, the majority of the Jews’ professional life took place outside the walls of the Mellaḥ, in markets and commercial centers that Jews and Muslims occupied together. In Taroudant, all jewelry makers, tinsmiths, shoemakers, glaziers, and saddle and mattress makers owned small shops in the city’s commercial streets outside the Mellaḥ. Cloth merchants, who were considered the wealthiest men in the community —or the least poor—had stores in the special inn for the fabric trade. The Jewish cloth merchants employed Jewish seamstresses in their

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homes to sew clothing for their Muslim clients. These professions of commerce and craftsmanship among Jews outside the Mellaḥ peaked during French rule and afterward.3 In contrast to the Jewish space in the Mellaḥ, which included both a confined space inside the Mellaḥ and open spaces outside the Mellaḥ, Jewish time was constructed and experienced based solely on the Jewish rabbinical tradition. This existential time existed in two well-distinguished rhythms simultaneously contrasting and complementary. The first was the weekday, from Sunday morning to Friday afternoon. The second was the Sabbath and the holy days according to a global Jewish rhythm that revolved around an internal Jewish clock. The binary division of internal Jewish time was accompanied by a structured, circular division of the days of Sabbath and other holy days, which differed in prayers, tunes, rituals, and food. The preparations for the Sabbath involved the entire family—the husband, wife, boys, and girls. The husband ceased his day-to-day work, bathed, and changed clothes. The boys first, then the girls after they helped cleaning and cooking, bathed and changed their clothes for the Sabbath, too. As for the housewife, she was busy during the entire day before the Sabbath and holiday (and sometimes even the day before) making the delicacies and special food of each holiday. She baked the bread for the Sabbath and the holiday, prepared the fish that preceded the meal after Kiddush every Sabbath eve [Friday evening], and the meal of meat and vegetables that was special for each holiday dinner, along with salads and additional side dishes according to the season. On Friday, the housewife prepared the unique Chamin-Schina4 with its assorted ingredients and sent it to the family oven until noon the next day, after the Shaḥarit service. Before going to the synagogue with his sons, the father held the kabbalistic ceremony of Boˀi Kalla [=enter, the Bride, i.e., the Sabbath], which included tasting fish and a small glass of Maḥya as an aperitif for the special food served during the Sabbath dinner following the prayer service. In our house, Mother used to make a special frozen delicacy consumed about an hour before the Chamin. It was a dish based on cow thighs cooked in stock for hours. After the stock was chilled, it turned into a kind of jelly. On Sabbath morning, mashing the Chamin’s egg in this jelly produced a real treat. For Sabbath afternoon, Mother used to make dry cookies we ate with tea. After Sukkot, which I will return to below, the yearly culinary celebration began with Purim. We did not have any particular culinary rituals for Chanuka in Taroudant, apart from the couscous stew throughout the holiday, or some of it, and the Sfenj [doughnuts] eaten with tea on holiday mornings. Mother made rolled fabric threads dipped in the oil of the Chanuka lamp, to light the Chanuka candles. We did not celebrate Tu Bi-Shvat, the new year of the trees. Only rabbinical scholars celebrated it in Taroudant. On Purim, two special delicacies were made. One was couscous with thick grains that

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was served with milk and butter. This was the only time of year that we ate dairy—not only in our house but in all of the houses in the community and in other traditional communities in Morocco. In the large cities, too, dairy consumption wasn’t common until the prices of refrigerators dropped and the dairy products could be preserved for several days. The use of refrigerators became more widespread during the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of French modernity. The second culinary ceremony of Purim was the special Purim afternoon meal. This meal included fancy meat dishes with glasses of Maḥya for the Mitzvah to drink alcohol “until one no longer knows the difference between ‘blessed be Mordecai and cursed be Haman’.” The Purim celebration was also rich with cookies, some of which were already consumed on Purim eve with the tea that concluded the Fast of Esther, a fast observed by all community members. Right after Purim, and in some families as early as after Tu Bi-Shvat, Mother and my sisters began turning every closet and utensil in the house upside down to remove any trace of Ḥametz, to make kosher the utensils that were permitted for Passover, and to paint the entire house white. As the holiday approached, we were not allowed to eat in the various rooms so that we would not leave any crumbs of bread and Ḥametz there. Apart from the cleaning of the house and utensils, Mother also had to take care of the wheat that would be used for making the Passover Matzot. Up until the dispersal of the community, only a few families in Taroudant could afford to order manufactured Matzot from Casablanca, which were far more expensive than homemade Matzot. After the cleaning of the wheat of all dirt and moisture, it had to be taken to the flour mill outside the Mellaḥ. Its milling had to be scheduled, and the bags of flour had to be taken back home with no means of transport other than the donkey. Aside from the homemade Matzot, kosher oil for cooking and seasonings also had to be made since it was not available on the market. At our house, the preparations for the holiday included the preparation of Argan oil from the nuts of the Argan tree. This tree grew only in the vast areas of south Morocco near the Atlantic Ocean. After roasting the Argan nuts, Mother milled them in kosher milling stones made for that particular purpose. She then squeezed the pulp to collect the oil. The pulp was like flexible playdough and was used to make miniature animals for toddlers to play with. However, due to its high nutritional value, it was also given to the livestock as feed, especially to calves that were fattened before slaughter. Kosher for Passover sugar was also unavailable in Taroudant. Therefore, throughout the holiday, the tea was sweetened with whole dates. The long preparations for Passover, the rendering of the house and utensils kosher for Passover, the baking of the Matzot, and the challenge of saving sufficient cash to buy the groceries for the holiday, particularly the significant amount of meat for the entire holiday, made Mother—and most of the

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other housewives and husbands in Taroudant and in other communities— extremely anxious. This anxiety was accompanied by great physical fatigue as well, transforming this holiday of liberation into a holiday of enslavement for the community’s women. The stresses and pains are expressed in many proverbs and socio-cultural songs in Judeo-Arabic, some of which I published in the past5 and many more I plan to publish soon. Two additional ceremonies distinguished Passover in Taroudant and other communities. In each of the intermediate days, breakfast included poached eggs and potatoes, as well as Matzot for those who wanted it. Another ceremony connected with Passover celebration was the food made independently by the children of the neighborhood on the intermediate days in special, small dishes. For this meal, each boy and girl brought a different vegetable from home for the stew that the group made together. The ceremony was named ǝn-nzähä in Taroudant and ǝl-mindärä in other communities. The experience would stay with the children for the rest of their lives. The origins of this custom are unknown. As in other diaspora communities, Shavuˤot lasted two days. For the first day of Shavuˤot, the custom in Taroudant and in the other Moroccan communities was to make homemade noodles, probably to mark the consumption of the new crop that was harvested. Apart from this delicacy, the meals included meat, which even the poor made an effort to purchase to distinguish this holiday from other days. An additional custom that was unrelated to food was practiced by children and young boys on the holiday—both in Taroudant and in other communities. The custom involved pouring buckets of water on passers-by in the Mellaḥ and on one another as well. Water plays are very common in the Berber culture that developed in Morocco, and the link between this custom on the Jewish Shavuˤot and the Berber water play is obvious. But, like any cultural ritual that is borrowed from external sources and assimilated into the absorbing culture, the water custom gained its internal Jewish meanings. The explanation for the water play that was common among rabbis, although they opposed this custom since it somewhat desecrated the sanctity of the holiday, is related to Shavuˤot as the Festival of Giving the Torah. The Midrash for the verse “Ho, all who are thirsty, come for water” (Isaiah 57, 1) interprets water as Torah. Thus, an internal rabbinic connection was found between the giving of the Torah and the pouring of water on Shavuˤot. Before the High Holidays and Sukkot, the three weeks (lasting from the fast of the seventeenth of Tamuz until the fast of the ninth of Av) were days of mourning in Taroudant. Any sign of happiness was immediately muted, and utter sadness pervaded the house. Until the dispersal of the community, the older women of Taroudant, Mother included, would mumble, on the verge of weeping, sections from the poems of the destruction of the First and Second Temple and the painful ensuing exile. They also whispered-sang lamentations for deceased relatives. From Tamuz seventeenth to Av ninth,

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fresh meat is forbidden, and only meat that was pre-cooked and preserved is allowed. From the first day of Av and until the day after the fast day of the ninth of Av, meat of any kind is completely forbidden, and so is bathing. Fish substituted for the meat dishes for those who desired them. Anyone who did not follow these dietary and hygienic prohibitions was considered a heathen. These were mourning customs that did not occur in all Jewish communities and were not fixed in Halacha. The pain and grief of Tishˤa be-ˀAv peaked in an extremely difficult but impressive ceremony, held by married women next to the synagogue that had the Judeo-Berber name ägǝzdur.6 After the ˤArvit prayer and the reading of lamentations the women stood in a circle and sang Judeo-Arabic elegies on the Temple’s destruction with intense emotion, as though the destruction had just occurred and directly affected them and their families. Then they sang the mourning laments for family members who had died that year. The singing was interrupted repeatedly by rhythmic screams of pain wuh wuh wuh wuh, beating of the cheeks and even scratching them until they bled. The ceremony was led by old women who had a vast knowledge of the traditional lamentations on the destruction and exile, and private lamentations. The following day, the women went to the cemetery to visit the graves of their loved ones. Some continued singing the laments there, but not in organized circles. By that same afternoon the tension and pain disappeared as if by magic. Some women left the Mellaḥ to buy new chinaware. According to common belief, this custom, which is inconsistent with the harsh rules of mourning that were adhered to up until then, represent a remnant of a rule set by the false Messiah Shabtai Zvi in 1664–1665 prior to his conversion to Islam, in which he prohibited his followers from fasting on the ninth of Av and ordered them to celebrate it as a festival instead. A similar oral tradition was kept throughout the generations in our family explaining that a long time ago the Jews did not fast on a particular Tishˤa be-ˀAv. It is known that many important rabbis in Shabtai Zvi’s time followed the false messiah in Morocco and actively spread his teachings. At the beginning of Elul, the Mellaḥ started preparing spiritually for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Like all the Jews of Morocco, Taroudant’s Jews held the Seliḥot [supplication prayers] ceremony at the synagogue from the start of Elul until Yom Kippur eve. Every night, the men, young men, and even boys woke up at night between 03:00–04:00 a.m., before dawn, to sing the Seliḥot prayers and beg God to forgive the sins of the Israelites. The manager of each synagogue (Gabbay) was in charge of waking up the worshippers at this early hour. He went in the dark with a flashlight in hand, passing each and every house in the neighborhood, loudly knocking on the doors, and calling the residents of the house to wake up for Seliḥot. The Seliḥot prayers were the appropriate introduction both for the rituals and for the key tunes that distinguish Rosh Hashanah’s and Yom Kippur’s

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liturgy. The dramatic sound of the Shofar after the recitation of special texts also set the mystical atmosphere for the prayers. At home, the celebrations of Rosh Hashanah started with a Rosh Hashanah Seder immediately following the Kiddush, while before the Kiddush two special Psalms were read with great emotion. The ritual handwashing and festive meal followed. A special ritual consisting of blessing and tasting of symbolic fruit and vegetables which bore para-liturgical meanings then followed. The sweetness of the apple in honey was intended to convey a blessing for a sweet new year; the head of the lamb represented the binding of Isaac, and led to the prayer that we will be the head, not the tail; the seeds of the many pomegranates echo the blessing of obtaining numerous merits. In addition, the Hebrew names of dates [tamar] and scallions [karti] allude to the prayer for the destruction of God’s enemies (Yittamu and Yikkartu, respectfully). The Arabic name for pumpkin, El-Qarˤa, which may have been in use in ancient Hebrew, homophonically fits the prayer for a reversal of the verdict (Tiqraˤ) that we pray for on the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur prayers. This ceremony of blessings, prayers, and tastings was central for all family members, particularly the wife and daughters, who actively participated. Then, a rich meal was served, which necessarily included meat dishes. On this occasion, as during Passover, some families purchased a large lamb together in remembrance of the lamb in the binding of Isaac; the lamb was slaughtered in one of the yards, and the meat was divided among the families. Other families purchased a calf instead of a lamb, due to the large portions of meat consumed during the two days of the holiday. These two days were sometimes preceded or followed by the Sabbath, an occasion which further increased the meat required. There were mixed feelings at our house on Rosh Hashanah. On the one hand, the impressive, moving prayers at the synagogue and their special holiday tunes that we sang together, the magnificent blowing of the Shofar, and the mystical emphasis in the long prayers for atonement and the cleansing of the soul all left a deep impression on us. On the other hand, the festive, specially prepared meals with their unique delicacies and the tasting ritual of the first and second evening contributed to a culinary euphoria that lasted two whole days for those families who could afford it. The day after Rosh Hashanah, almost all of the men, boys, and women fasted the Fast of Gedalia. Yom Kippur presents a continuation of Rosh Hashanah with its ambivalent atmosphere. Seven days separate the two special days. Together, they constitute ten days of Teshuva [repentance], which rabbinical tradition defined for the Jewish believer as a critical time of prayer and pleas for God to forgive the individual’s sins as well as those of all sons of Israel. However, the participation in the special liturgy did not suffice for redeeming the soul and cleansing the spirit. A thorough conscientious, moral, and religious self-reflection of the Jewish person was also necessary. On the nights between the two special

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days, Jews woke up for Seliḥot with even greater excitement. In addition, the Shaḥarit prayer before Kippur with a special prayer to annul vows was especially intense. On Kippur eve, at noon, one of the seven synagogues of Taroudant held a public ritual of the thirty-nine lashes during which the men received thirty-nine lashes on their backs as preparation for the physical tortures of the long Kippur fast. The lashes also signified the appropriate selfhumiliation for someone who begs to be forgiven for his sins. The special liturgy of Yom Kippur included many choral segments from ˤArvit to Neˤila, the last prayer of Kippur. All of the prayers performed included segments and texts that were specifically chosen or repeated those chanted by the cantor. This structured inclusion of the audience kept it awake and demonstrated for each of the worshippers the responsibility he bore to appeal directly to God’s mercy in prayers and pleas. The women also participated in some of the prayers, either in the women’s section or outside the synagogue. However, their oral tradition was somewhat suspicious of the excited prayers and claimed that they did not really atone for sins committed. One of the proverbs they used to say was: “Yesterday we sinned, today we erred,” that is, yesterday we were at the synagogue to atone for our sins and repeated the prayer starting with the words “we have sinned” and the next day, after Kippur, we behave the same way and act inappropriately. In the houses, the Yom Kippur preparations included first and foremost the purchasing of chickens and tending to them until the Kapparot ritual. The ritual took place on the night before Kippur or the next morning, very early. The Shoḥet went from house to house and slaughtered as many chickens as there were family members. He accompanied the slaughter by saying the traditional prayer stating that the chicken is butchered to atone for the sins of each member of the family. Since there were no refrigerators for storage, the chickens were roasted and skewered on sticks on the walls. The chickens remained hanging in the open air for many days; they were hung high up out of concern that they would be eaten by cats. The chickens’ meat was consumed at the meal that preceded the fast, during the meal that ended the fast, and at the following meals. Some of the meat was also served at the Sukkot meals that took place soon after Kippur. Sukkot was probably the most exciting and beloved holiday in the family. When the worshippers left the synagogues at the end of the Yom Kippur prayers, they found Muslims who sold them bunches of cane reed for building the Sukkah. The cane reed covering some of the top of the Sukkah could not be too dense. Seven sticks were installed like posts in the corners of the Sukkah. The posts are called ‟witnesses” and they symbolized the Ushpizin, the special patriarch guests that symbolically visit the Sukkah according to the kabbalistic tradition (Kabbalah): Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaˤacov, Moshe, Aharon, Yossef, and David. The building of the Sukkah and its decoration

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occupied the adults and the children. On the four days separating Kippur and Sukkot, Muslim farmers brought seasonal fruit and vegetables to the Mellaḥ, for Jewish customers, as they did before Pessaḥ and Shavuˤot. The fruit consisted mainly of dates, grapes, and pomegranates, and the vegetables were lettuce, carrots, turnips, pumpkins, and onions. Some orchard owners also brought ordinary and fine Etrogs [special citrons for the rituals of Sukkot], and the bargaining for their prices lasted a few (good) minutes. Thanks to the fine Etrogs that grew in the mountain area next to Taroudant, named Asats, the city was well-known in the Jewish world and not only in Morocco. They also brought date palms, myrtle branches, and willow branches, which together with the Etrog, form the Sukkot’s Lulav. On the evening of the holiday, one of the most fascinating pastimes took place in our house and in the large Sukkah at my grandfather’s house. It was the decoration of the date palm at the center of the Lulav. The palm was entirely wrapped in magnificent colorful silk and wool threads, and then three or more myrtle branches were tied around it, as well as two or more willow branches. Every adult and adolescent male in the family had a Lulav of his own. They took it the following morning to prayer services in the synagogue and continued doing so for the following six days (excluding Sabbath) until Hoshaˤana Rabba, the seventh day of Sukkot. At our house, Sukkot was also the holiday of fruit and vegetables that we took straight from Father’s shop. On Sukkot eve, too, many families used to jointly purchase a calf and share their meat after slaughtering it according to Halacha. On the final day of the festival, Simchat Torah was celebrated with great excitement as each of the Torah scrolls was taken out of the Holy Ark, on average twelve per synagogue, and decorated with colorful scarves. The scrolls were led in a festive parade inside and outside the synagogue so that the women could also kiss them and join the celebration. I particularly remember two unusual ceremonies that took place on the final day of Sukkot and some weeks after. One of them had sportsmanship in it. When Sukkot ended, adolescents and the older boys passed from one house of the Mellaḥ to another and asked for the cane reed of the Sukkah. The request was made by reciting a short formula which mentioned the name of the house owner and the custom that should be respected. After a significant amount of cane reed was collected, the boys built a large fire in the yard next to the narrow street where we lived. It went up in flames and the excited participants had a competition to see who could jump higher over the flames without getting hurt. The night of this ceremony was called lilt täbǝri̯ännut [=the night of jumping over the bonfire], after the game that was common among Berbers and which the Jews of South Morocco adopted. The second ceremony took place some weeks after Sukkot, in the too frequent dry season of southern Morocco, when rain was slow to fall. Almost all of the children of the Mellaḥ formed a procession and went from house

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to house and knocked on the door, humming many times a loud and clear formula: “O sir . . . grant us respect of the custom” and mentioning the name of the tenant. The husband or the wife finally would come out with a jug of water which they would pour onto the round wooden oven tray equipped with a long handle and held by the first children of the procession. Then the procession went to the next door until the last door of the Mellaḥ. No family shied away from this symbolic act by which the whole community wished heavy rains. Moreover, to this day, in years of drought, Muslims ask the Jewish community to increase their special prayers to make the rain fall. The Shavuˤot water games, Sukkot’s closing fire games, and the rain procession clearly testify to the influence of Berber tribes’ folk and Arab culture on the daily life of rural and semi-urban Jewish communities. The Jews of Taroudant resided in the heart of Berber-speaking areas, such as the Sous Valley. Other than these influences, the encounter between Jews and Muslims in Morocco occurred almost daily, as the Jews’ livelihood was directly dependent on their relations with their Muslim neighbors in the city and in the village. As in other countries, an independent Jewish economy that only relied on the Jewish population never existed in Morocco. For Muslims, Arabs, and Berbers alike, the occupations of Jews and their capital complemented their own occupations and led them to cooperate, particularly in agriculture. My extended family members and my uncles had partnerships with Muslim villagers. In these partnerships, the Jew purchased cows and sheep and gave them to a Muslim acquaintance who had land for farming outside the city, and the latter would take care of and breed the animals. After the cow and sheep calved, the Jewish owner and the farmer divided the calves among them, while the cow and sheep remained under the Jew’s ownership. Jews who owned land in Taroudant next to the Mellaḥ also hired the services of Muslim workers to work the fields. They provided them with seeds and water rights. After the harvest, the worker got his share of the crops, which amounted to 20 or 25 percent. Father had an olive grove and farming land far away from the Mellaḥ, in a place named Oulad ˤAmira. The Sous River flowed not far from there and it frequently overflowed. At times, it even pulled out a few olive trees from Father’s grove, and the Muslim sharecropper came to report it to him. Earlier I recounted our taking turns watching over the pressing of the olives that the farmer who tended the grove brought to the olive press. He also worked the land, where he grew corn throughout the entire year. In the spring, he brought a cargo of corn kernels loaded on the backs of two or three donkeys to our house. I don’t remember an occasion when Father or Mother mentioned anything about the amount of corn that they received from him. They trusted his word.

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A different kind of collaboration took place between the women of our family and Muslim women from wealthy families living in various neighborhoods in Taroudant. Only wives of wealthy husbands could afford to order clothes tailored to their size from Jewish seamstresses. The German Singer sewing machines gained popularity in Jewish houses during the twentieth century. The machines significantly increased the women and girls’ share in their family’s economy. They sewed clothes for Muslim fabric merchants who owned shops in an inn designated for that purpose. However, the seamstresses that had the reputation of being meticulous were lucky enough to receive custom orders from Muslim women of wealthy families. I accompanied my Mother many times on her visits to Muslim clients’ houses. Mother did not sew the clothes herself. My sister Simi was a talented seamstress and would tailor the clothing. As a boy and adolescent, I carried the basket in which Mother placed the finished clothes. When the clients became deeply familiar with Mother, the visits delivering the clothes and taking new measurements lasted many hours since she became a sort of counselor for personal matters. The Muslim clients completely confided in her and even shared their family problems. During the hours that the visit took, the housewife served us tea with mint and bread. My aunt Mamou had a reputation as an excellent seamstress. I joined her, too, for a visit to a client’s house that was not too far from the Mellaḥ. The visit lasted hours there as well. During this visit, the housewife not only served us tea with bread, but also a mixture of ground almonds and olive or Argan oil, a mixture with the Berber name Amlu, which was considered a delicacy among the Muslims. When my Mother and aunt finished the visit, they didn’t leave with only the payment for their sewing but also with gifts: bags of dried fruits, a cone of sugar, and fresh eggs. In our family tradition, the woman who initiated professional and intimate relations of this kind with Muslim families in Taroudant was Father’s aunt Esther. In the 1920s and 1930s she developed close relationships with the wives of the local Pasha in Taroudant, gained their trust, and was almost like a part of their family. She was also the one who recommended Father to the Pasha, who then hired him as an assistant for matters of the house. Father shopped for him in the market and was a sort of inventory keeper. Father was “adopted” by his aunt since she had no children of her own. The mutual relationships between Father and Mother and men and women of wealthy Muslim families in Taroudant, as well as my maternal aunts and uncles, were expressed in an annual ceremony that was important for Jews and Muslims alike. This was the gift-exchange ceremony between the Jew and his Muslim acquaintance on the Mimuna eve. On that evening, even before the end of the holiday of Passover, I accompanied Father or Mother and uncle Yaˤish many times when they took the Passover gift to the houses of their Muslim acquaintances. They delivered Matzot and foods that weren’t

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customary among the Muslims but were common in the Jewish kitchen. These included a large omelet, sometimes with meat, homemade fries, and meatballs. Every year at the same time, the Muslims anticipated the visit of their Jewish acquaintances. If they had not arrived, the Muslims assumed that something bad had happened to them, God forbid. During the visit, we drank tea with sugar for the first time after the eight days of Passover during which we only had tea with dates, for fear of the Ḥametz that may have stuck to the sugar that wasn’t kosher for Passover. When we left, the hosts gave us some flour as they knew Jews could not keep flour during Passover, as well as honey, butter, fresh eggs, and cones of sugar. They also added some stalks of wheat and barley straight from the field, as well as fig and pomegranate branches. All of these products were necessary for setting up the Mimuna table and conducting the principal ceremony, the centerpiece of this special holiday. The ceremony revolved around making the fresh yeast and dough for the new bread to be baked and eaten the following day. It was accompanied by special para-liturgical texts and blessings for the young members of the family including good wishes for finding a fiancé or a fiancée for the singles or having a baby for the newly married. I should note that in Taroudant, the end of Passover wasn’t called Mimuna but Lilt taḥyi l-khmira, that is, the evening of making the yeast and dough for the new bread. Another name that was common in Taroudant was Lilt Shänä Hǝbbä [< Heb. Ha-Shanah Ha-baˀah], that is, the night of next year. The name echoes a para-liturgical poem praising Jerusalem and Israel that was sung during the ceremony of making the yeast whose refrain started with the words “Next year in Jerusalem.” The day after, we had a picnic in gardens outside the Mellaḥ. After returning home, Mother baked fresh bread. I can testify that the taste of this bread, eaten straight from the oven, does not resemble the taste of any other bread I have eaten; a special type of pleasure, like a visit of a dear friend after a long-time absence.7 The economic collaboration between the Jews and Muslims in Morocco, the social life of Jews within the Muslim populations, even in cities which were enclosed in the Mellaḥ’s walls at night, the friendships and even intimacy developed between acquaintances of both populations, have shaped the image of Moroccan Jewry in the city and village. These relationships influenced not only the Jews’ livelihood and well-being but also their sense of time. This influence is prominent in Shavuˤot and Sukkot through water and fire plays. It was felt even more on the Mimuna eve whose ceremonies directly feed on the products the Jews received from their Muslim acquaintances. Joseph Chetrit Taroudant (see website for original Hebrew poem) Its fleeting images sparkle from the depth of oblivion,

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Out of sudden wakefulness or hallucinated dreams. Jews, Muslims, dust storms, places and plays Knock at the imagination as troublesome friends, Drawing for seconds life’s passing, thin trails. For half a year, the scorching heat cast out by night, From torrid rooms to the roofs and obscure corners, Baffled fugitives inhaling flashes of falling galaxies. Its year-long, dry heat ignited our permeable hearts, Defined for us a web of obligations and duties. She delivered from muteness wretched souls, dreamers, Who stayed devoted to their selfness and youth. Kabbalists composed Heichalot, compelled the Messiah, Drowning their sorrow and awaiting with obsessive questions. They did not cease their questioning even from Divine ways. Beggars proud of their faith survived by wondrous prayers. Women conducted song sessions in joys and festivities; They forgot then their misery and escaped their deep despair. Her genuine essence propagated Judaism, humanness and empathy. Her memory always assigns to us compassion and responsibility. Joseph Chetrit Jewish Community (see website for original Hebrew poem) A binary rhythm of dual time, Of the sacred Sabbath and the mundane. An orderly calm in the delusions of small and large trade. A naive faith in the redeemer’s circle, A prayer for the future that passed and that will come. A proclaimed pride of a special fate, Under the grace of God and His salvation. A clustered space within the bounds of the ruler, In the guise of a self-ruling site, Which grovels and survives, suffers and remembers, Unifies and strangles, withdraws and creates, Isolates itself and weaves, complains and protects. A place that knocks on the nomads’ imaginations, shaping and binding A band of stubborn confused people, groups of foolish celebrators, A company of circumcisions and weddings, of burials and rituals. A community imprinted in the enslaved order, which organises life.

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The release has replaced burdens, Scattered the hundreds of communities, Confusing generations, Mixing up the city and village, Shattering and combining traditions. In the place where the experiencers do And the delirious celebrate and sanctify, No researcher stands aside And no offspring excused from asking And uncovering the secret of former generations and life’s chain. We are all embarrassed, we are all in the dark, What path will we favour against forgetfulness. We are all discovering, we are all seeking The way to delay the final annihilation. Fragments of memory rebuild being and arrange the picture, And more so when they are sealed in the rituals of identity And identification year by year. Against the fashions of evasion and egocentricity Tower knowledge and testimony. Against the seduction of renovation and contempt Stand the orders of faithfulness and memory.

NOTES 1. This Memoir was prepared thanks to the grant 1202/2015 of the Israeli Science Foundation. 2. On my scholarship at the primary Jewish school, see Joseph Chetrit, “ Elève de l’Ecole de l’Alliance à Taroudant,” Les Cahiers du Judaïsme no. 28 (2010): 105–113. 3. On the professions of the Jews of Taroudant in the 1930, see Joseph Chetrit, “Les rapports trimestriels des instituteurs de l’Alliance comme source ethnographique sur le judaïsme marocain. Les Juifs de Taroudant, leurs métiers et leurs saints,” Brit 30 (2011): 12–28. 4. On the Chamin-Schina of the Moroccan Jews see Joseph Chetrit, “Délices et fastes sabbatiques. Édition et analyse d’une Qaṣi:da judéo-arabe d’Essaouira/ Mogador sur le repas festif du sabbat,” in Johannes Den Heijer, Paolo La Spisa et Laurence Tuerlinckx, eds., Autour de la langue arabe. Etudes présentées à Jacques Grand’Henry à l’occasion de son 70e anniversaire (Louvain-La-Neuve: Institut Orientaliste, 2012), 87–117. 5. See for example Joseph Chetrit, “The Hierarchy of Jewish Festivals in Traditional Jewish Communities: Poetic and Linguistic Structures in a Dispute Poem between Pesaḥ and Sukkot in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic of XVIIIth Century,” in Malka

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Muchnik and Zvi Sadan, eds., Meḥkarim ba-ˤIvrit ha-Ḥadasha u-vi-Lshonot haYehudim Mugashim le-Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald (Jerusalem: Carmel Editions, 2012), 558–579 (Hebrew). 6. The Judeo-Arabic dialect of Taroudant includes an important Judeo-Berber component. See Joseph Chetrit, Diglossie, Hybridation et Diversité intra-linguistique. Etudes socio-pragmatiques sur les langues juives, le judéo-arabe et le judéoberbère (Paris-Louvain: Peeters 2007), 235–267. 7. On the Mimuna festival see Joseph Chetrit, “Mimuna Festival,” in Haya BarItzhak, ed., Jewish Folklore and Traditions (Armonk, NY and London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2013), vol. 2, 365–367.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chetrit, Joseph. Diglossie, Hybridation et Diversité intra-linguistique. Etudes sociopragmatiques sur les langues juives, le judéo-arabe et le judéo-berbère. ParisLouvain: Peeters, 2007, 235–267. ———. “Elève de l’Ecole de l’Alliance à Taroudant.” Les Cahiers du Judaïsme no. 28 (2010): 105–113. ———. “Les rapports trimestriels des instituteurs de l’Alliance comme source ethnographique sur le judaïsme marocain. Les Juifs de Taroudant, leurs métiers et leurs saints,” Brit 30 (2011): 12–28. ———. “Délices et fastes sabbatiques. Édition et analyse d’une Qaṣi:da judéo-arabe d’Essaouira/Mogador sur le repas festif du sabbat,” in Den Heijer, Johannes, Paolo La Spisa et Laurence Tuerlinckx, eds. Autour de la langue arabe. Etudes présentées à Jacques Grand’Henry à l’occasion de son 70e anniversaire. Louvain-LaNeuve: Institut Orientaliste, 2012, 87–117. ———. “The Hierarchy of Jewish Festivals in Traditional Jewish Communities: Poetic and Linguistic Structures in a Dispute Poem between Pesaḥ and Sukkot in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic of XVIIIth Century,” in Muchnik, Malka and Zvi Sadan, eds. Meḥkarim ba-ˤIvrit ha-Ḥadasha u-vi-Lshonot ha-Yehudim Mugashim le-Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald. Jerusalem: Carmel Editions, 2012, 558–579 (Hebrew). ———. “Mimuna Festival,” in Haya Bar-Itzhak, ed., Jewish Folklore and Traditions, Armonk, NY and London, Eng.: M.E. Sharpe, vol. 2, 2013, 365–367.

Chapter 18

Delacroix and the Jews of Morocco Maurice Arama

“Why, and despite their subjugation, do Jews live in good relations with the Moors?”1 Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) had asked himself this question on several occasions while he was in Morocco in 1832. This question was uppermost in the mind of the painter after he returned to France. He was reminded of his unique encounters every time he leafed through his travel diaries or opened his portfolio of drawings in which pastels, watercolors, and sketches reminded him of the people behind the silhouettes and the faces of those who had so kindly posed for him. He could even cite their names: Benchimol, Azencot, Bouzaglo, Pimienta, Solika, Guimol, Raquel, Préciada, Abraham, Haïm, Moysès, David, Jacob. With friends he would evoke the events he had attended in Tangier or in Meknes through stories and paintings.2 After the capture of Algiers in 1830, France had extended its military occupation to the border provinces of Morocco. Confrontations had multiplied between the two armies. As France did not want to open a new front to the East while its army was bogged down in Algeria, it sent an emissary charged with negotiating a treaty of friendship with the Cherifian kingdom. The mission was assigned to Count Charles de Mornay, for whom it was his first embassy assignment. To conduct the difficult negotiations, the ministry granted its young ambassador only a reduced entourage including an interpreter and a mailman. Mornay asked for the presence of an additional companion to make the trip to unknown and reputedly austere lands more engaging. After several requests, the ministry reluctantly agreed: Eugène Delacroix was invited to join the African adventure. He was granted free passage on the ship, but the painter remained responsible for all his expenses on board and ashore. The French mission landed in Tangier on Wednesday, January 25, 1832. Morocco was then in the process of preparing to enter the month of Ramadan, a 419

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period during which political negotiations were suspended and the hoped-for audience with the Cherifian sovereign was postponed to an unknown future date. The French mission was bogged down in a city that had “no theatre or lounges” and offered only two prominent monuments, the Casbah and the Mosque. Political confusion, diplomatic clashes, and financial annoyances were thus encountered upon arrival and disrupted the French visitors’ itinerary. What to do? Mornay increased his volume of talks with the consuls and his recriminations against the Moroccans. Delacroix, who was not involved in the endless political conversations, sought picturesque subjects to paint. He was strongly advised not to draw in the streets because the animosity was fierce against those who were seen to have enslaved fellow Muslim people in a neighboring country. A Frenchman who writes unknown messages in a notebook was suspect and the slightest altercation could have dire consequences for the French diplomatic initiative. And yet, as a result of these limitations, an exceptional documentary would be created and a humane documentation of a largely ignored population would emerge. Thus began the singular story of the man who, upon his departure from Paris, imagined himself sailing toward the Orient. Delacroix said goodbye to “the Ottoman delights as imagined in Paris.” The Tangier he discovered was just a small town with walls eroded by sea salt, tortuous town planning, lacking street lighting, and “a collection of lodgings comparable to those of the Madmen of Bicêtre.” To this were added the Islamic prohibitions against the representation of the human figure. Where would he be able to find models ready to pose for him? He immediately approached the consulate’s translator, Abraham Benchimol, who in 1820 had succeeded his brother-in-law Haïm Azencot, who risked his life to rescue a French crew in quarantine. The two families, the Benchimols and the Azencots, had been serving France for about thirty years. While the position of translator was generally voluntary, it provided a measure of security and a few honors. The interpreters were placed in advantageous commercial positions with international trading countries; they became lenders, insured the management of the consulates, and provided the consulates with servants, horses, and mules. Translators were very well positioned in Morocco. They had contacts in the ruler’s inner circle, were informed of his movements, knew the decisions on customs rates as soon as they were enacted, followed the moods of governors, Caids and princes, as well as the troubles in the provinces, and kept the religious calendar for each community. They could satisfy the unusual demands of the consuls and often anticipate their needs. Abraham spoke and wrote Spanish and French phonetically. For Arabic, he used the Hebrew alphabet because he was forbidden to use the sacred letters of the Koran. He spoke Ḥaketía inside his home, a Castilian dialect which

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some Sephardic Jews of this land had retained faithfully since the Edict of Expulsion from Spain in 1492. In 1832, the translators of the consulates of Tangier were all Jews: Isaac Abensour who worked for England until recently kept a diary in which the small details that animated the life of the City of the Strait were registered. Jacob Ben Selloum translated for Sweden, Abraham Bendellac for the Netherlands, Abraham Serulla for Denmark, Yahia Sicsu for Spain, Isaac Sicsu for Austria and Hungary, David Hassan for Sardinia, and Isaac Mosès Parienté for the United States. The sovereign favored these appointments as they allowed him to follow the crowd of foreigners in the consulates functioning in Tangier and Mogador. The confidential information conveyed by the interpreters was the source of many reports to Europe. Without their indiscretions, the obsessions of the legations, the behavior of their tenants, and the information on the French mission, hidden at Mornay’s request, the secret chronicles of this journey would have been mundane and inconsequential. “In this country where every consul is obliged to use a Jew as his interpreter, the affairs of all governments are generally known,” Louis-Philippe’s ambassador lamented in letters sent to Paris. How could Mornay explain to the ministry the presence of this Jew in his entourage? Abraham Benchimol had just recently replaced Antoine Jérôme Desgranges, “a secretary translator for the king,” who was unable to understand Moroccan Arabic. The bumbling of Desgranges was comical to the staff of the consulates of Tangier. The correspondence sent to Europe sarcastically reflected on the lack of foresight of the French and the incompetence of the officials of the ministry in Paris. France granted Abraham Benchimol a remuneration of only 320 piasters a year. But the position of interpreter provided a kind of insurance policy taken out with a foreign nation against the possible instances of the denial of justice by his native government. The painter had recorded several of these injustices during his journey, like a Jew being whipped and then condemned to sacrifice a sheep to compensate «the whipper». Delacroix condemned actions such as the encounter of young women “taking off their shoes every time [they walked outside] . . . walking with pain and holding their slippers, their little bare feet resting on the uneven ground and amid the stony ravines that form the streets.” As the companion of a diplomat, Delacroix could not publicly denounce these acts, but he documented them. Since entry to the houses of the Muslims was forbidden for him, the painter invited himself into Jewish mansions every day and established close friendships with the families who opened their doors to him. He enjoyed drawing in homes where the reception was at the same time kind, tolerant, and tinged with exoticism. The noble nature of its hosts toward the

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guest contrasted with the irrational and severe measures that surrounded him. In 1832, according to the memoirs of the consulates, the Jewish population in Tangier represented a sixth of the total estimated city population of approximately 5,500 souls. The small Jewish community was composed mainly of modest families: small traders, craftsmen, and day laborers. The daily life of this population lacked the charm, ease, and colors that Delacroix’s watercolors and sketches suggest. Jewish families from Algeria had recently sought refuge with their relatives in Tangier or Tetouan. Targeted by French troops in Algeria, they had fled Oran, Tlemcen, Mascara. The harsh policy of General Pierre Boyer, the commander of the Oran region, “the burning of crops and huts, razing of villages, and harassing encampments” did not apply only to the Algerian factions. He had added an additional element to this policy of terror: “the deportation of the Jews from the province and eventually from the entire territory,” because, he said, lengthy cohabitation between the two groups generates “a seed of collusion.” The painter’s visit on a Saturday (January 28) to the Benchimol family synagogue, Derb es-Siyaghin [=Jewelers’ Street], did not go unnoticed. It earned Delacroix extra attention. The painter who attended the service had refrained from drawing out of respect for Shabbat. He had just learned that several synagogues in Tangier had been razed two years earlier by imperial order. This building was built on the ruins of one of them. The solicitations of Morocco’s personal representative in Gibraltar, Judah Benoliel, a man to whom “the Emperor could not refuse anything,” made it possible to erect a synagogue from the rubble. The decor there was modest. Only the design of the lamps offered documentary interest on the page of a sketchbook—crystal vases suspended by chains above the heads of the worshippers and in which wicks floated on an oil background. Delacroix sketched it with an almost clumsy pencil, but out of consideration for his hosts and aware of the sanctity that this morning held, he kept the pencil inconspicuous and immediately closed his notebook. He looked at the men seated around him. They had “beautiful faces and above all beautiful eyes.” However, he deplored their “obsequious” airs. At the end of his visit he rationalized the reasons for their attitudes: “They are allowed to breathe the same air as the followers of the prophet only under harsh conditions and their vices are those of all slaves . . . [and] to their credit, bearing a position so constrained and so unhappy only strengthens the powerful bonds that unify this singular nation, still so alive in the midst of the ruins of its tyrants and persecutors.” The morning spent at the Tangier synagogue increased his questions about this people whose difficult daily lives and attachment “to the word received in the past” remained staunch. The painter’s travel diaries are teeming with

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many observations. For the first time, the diaries shed light on Jews whose culture and daily life were completely unknown in Europe. On leaving the synagogue, Delacroix was invited to a lunch hosted by Jacob, the patriarch of the Benchimol family. This lunch was certainly not as sumptuous as Le Repas chez Lévi [a painting of Paolo Veronese] or La Noce de Cana [another painting of Veronese], but it seemed to Delacroix that in Tangier he was following in the footsteps of a Veronese or even a Rembrandt. Both had recruited their models among the Jews, one in the ghetto of Venice and the other in Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam where he had his workshop. In 1844 Delacroix returned to the study of the Jews and to the holiness with which they approached Shabbat in Morocco in an entry in his journal: “Placed outside the common law with these jealous masters, the Jew finds a homeland under his roof, in the midst of his family. The practices of the laws of Moses are strictly observed there, especially the laws of Shabbat. This venerable day is celebrated by universal laziness; men and women, all dressed in their finest clothes, get up, sit down, prowl about their homes or go to neighbors, but without committing any act that might pass for work.” Delacroix certainly attended various Jewish festivities during his stay in Morocco. In Tangier, he closely followed all the stages and preparations of a wedding in a private home. A few notes in the small notebook acquired by the National Museum (Louvre, RF 39050) enabled him to write the article on the wedding which appeared in the Magasin Pittoresque in 1842 [with a Jewish Musician litogravure/lithograph]. We know that a notebook devoted to this event has disappeared. However, a leaflet has miraculously been discovered recently. The painter drew the departure of the procession of the bride toward the house of her husband. The scene drawn with pencil was discovered by Gérard Lévy and donated to the Israel Museum. The submission of the painting La Noce juive dans le Maroc to the Salon of 1841 was a surprise (Cover image). One had rarely seen such representations of “native customs” on the walls of the Salon and even fewer under the signature of a painter whose works of Antiquity had been admired previously (La Barque de Dante et Virgile, in 1822), as well as his works depicting current events (Scènes de Massacres à Scio, in 1824, La Liberté guidant le peuple, in 1830). On his return from Morocco, Delacroix explored new forms of expression for his emotions. His voyage of almost six months in Morocco, with short stays in Andalusia and two stopovers in Algeria, had inspired two paintings which were exhibited at the Salon. A Moroccan painting, Rue à Méquinez (a scene in fact located in Tangier), brought together a Berber, an Arab, and a Moroccan Jewess in the company of a teenager. This Rue à Méquinez was placed next to another major work by the painter, Les Dames d’Alger

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Figure 18.1  Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Musician from Mogador. Lithograph / Lithogravure, Paper, Paris, 1841. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

dans leur appartement [The Ladies of Algiers in their apartment] (Louvre Museum). What judgments would the critics and the public reserve for this Jewish Wedding? The fear of impulsive, even irrational judgments led Delacroix to write a text in which he explained the spirit of his canvas. He recalled that the Jewish families “who live in hard conditions” in this country marked the major events of life through acts which linked them to “their ancient traditions.” La Noce juive dans le Maroc [The Jewish Wedding in Morocco] is now at the Louvre. The painting recounts an event which the painter had attended eleven years earlier. He had been staying for almost a month in Tangier when he entered a house engaged in festive celebrations on Tuesday February 21, 1832. His notes recall the jostling crowds of the curious in the neighborhood to the point “that I had great difficulties entering inside.” Three pages in the Carnet (Louvre, RF 39050) relate the lively atmosphere that reigned in the place; the ululations that burst from the terraces to greet each wave of guests; “The turmoil of a continual ebb and flow of people

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Figure 18.2  Anonymous: Following Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Wedding in Morocco. Oil on canvas, 1850. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

coming in and going out [. . .] in the midst of these songs and dances that go on all day and night.” Delacroix seems to have been charmed by the three musicians standing against the back wall, as well as by the audience arranged around the courtyard, over which a large tarp had been hung. We must constantly remember that a painting is never a photographic snapshot. An artist arranges a composition, integrates into a scene what adds to its balance, accentuates some elements and blurs others, organizes the lighting, highlights fragments which, at first glance, are judged as secondary. The sketches drawn by Delacroix throughout that evening neglected the silhouettes of the consuls, chancellors, and their advisers who were present at the party. The Moroccan singularity of the scene which the painter wanted to convey would have been disturbed by the presence of European figures. “Only the Moors and the Jews” could claim destinies on this piece of land. The artist therefore introduced extra figures who were neither present nor invited. Among the “Moors of distinction” represented were the Commander of the Tangier cavalry who is placed on the right on the canvas. Sidi Mohammed ben Abou was actually moping around at the time in Meknes awaiting his orders to organize the caravan which was to escort the French delegation for

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Figure 18.3  Eugène Delacroix, Musicians, Studies in Jewish Wedding, watercolor on lead mine. Former Gallery Nathan Zurich collection.

its audience with Moulay ˤAbd ar-Rahman. Sidi Larabi Saidi, the Pasha of Tangier, was not there either. This foxy-like character lost no opportunity to harass the Jews and despoil them. Delacroix recalls the greed of this man hated by all. Every time boredom overtook him, the Pasha would invent new prohibitions and bully the Jews. Having judged the Jews “hateful,” he wanted them to go barefoot for five weeks not only in “the sanctified surroundings” of the mosques as was customary, but throughout the city so that “the Supreme Being might restore his health to the Emperor.” When the Jews begged for mercy, the Pasha demanded a payment of 500 piastres from them. After a fifteen-day ordeal, the unfortunate people had to give in and pay. The Pasha then returned the slippers that his guards had seized from the houses. The consuls observed this sad spectacle but refrained from intervening, according to the agreements established between the kingdom and their governments. As for Sidi Ettayeb Biaz, the customs officer responsible for preliminary talks with foreign emissaries, he appears in the painting although he too was absent from this soiree. How would this pious man have come to a Jewish wedding when the solemnities of Ramadan in Hegira 1242 were to begin in less than six days? He avoided any contact with Mornay and his companions, finding himself unable to tell them about the policy his country was pursuing with France.

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Figure 18.4  Eugène Delacroix, Courtyard, Studies in Jewish Wedding, watercolor on lead mine, location unknown.

The courtyard setting of the painting resembles a theater stage with thirtythree participants Jews and Muslims, alternately seated and standing. The scene takes place at night. It was, therefore, lit by Moroccan lamps, fnars, candles which, while burning, make the figures appear to dance, stretch the shadows, and add charms to the evening climate. Tangier had known terrible weather throughout the month of February. Could a simple tarp block the coolness of the night without having braziers installed all around the yard? To paint A Noce with night effects would have been an unanticipated allusion to Rembrandt and his Night Watch. Several years later, the painter evoked nocturnal scenes in two paintings in Chanteurs et bouffons [Singers and Jesters] (1848, Tours Museum) and Camp arabe de nuit [Arab Camp at Night] (1861, Szepmveszh Muzeum, Budapest). Around a fire, between Tangier and Meknes, musicians and actors offered their performances while male and female Jews mingled with spectators. Jewish wedding traditions in Morocco dictated that on the Tuesday evening that precedes the religious wedding ceremony, the guests offer gifts to the new couple or publicly disclose the amount of their gift through a town crier. In the painting, the man seen from the rear in front of a small bench was responsible for noting the names of guests and their gifts. All the extras

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represented on the painting were sketched or drawn in different places, circumstances, and times. This process is usual for all artists. No masterpiece and no pictorial, historical, mythological, or religious evocation departs from this rite. The painter endeavored to reproduce the very sounds and atmosphere characteristic of this evening on canvas. The musicians were playing. Visitors were chatting. The cacophony was general and “the songs called to be shouted,” says the painter. To create this disharmony, Delacroix directed all the eyes of those present in opposite directions, thereby blurring the serenity of the moment. The text submitted to the Magasin Pittoresque in 1842 insisted on the ancient roots and the daily life of the Jews he encountered in Morocco. However, La Noce likely contains a subliminal message launched by the painter after his stay in Algiers. In Morocco, he had come across “humble or important” Muslims and Jews, some dressed in lavish fashion and many others dressed very modestly. The soirées he attended were always held without ostentation, the decorations reduced to the architectural features of the houses in which the servants, without any concern for etiquette, mingled with the guests. Delacroix never painted a replica of La Noce, which, in the inventory of his works, remains a unique “icon.” The painting was hidden in the Dordogne, in the castle of Bétaille when the Nazis desecrated Paris. La Noce was reproduced in lithograph (Adolphe Waquez; Edmond Hédouin) and in engraving (Charles Chaplin). Louis de Planet, one of the collaborators of the master, made a replica in a smaller size than the original (0.85 x 1.15 m). This painting, kept in the artist’s studio, was sold after his death. It was acquired by Louis Auguste Bornot, a first cousin of Delacroix; its location remains unknown. In Meknes, the painter attended other family ceremonies related to weddings as well as another Jewish celebration, the Purim day reading of Esther’s scroll. After an audience with Moulay ˤAbd er Rahman on the Place du Méchouar, he was received by Rabbi Raphaël Ménahem Ha-Serfaty (died in 1843) nagid [leader] of the Jews. The next day, Friday, the Muslim medina was silent. The painter, preceded by a guide, visited the Mellah of Meknes, purchasing copper objects and tobacco. The reading of the book of Esther in Hebrew (translated for the women of the house in vernacular languages) left a strong impression on Delacroix. When his friend [the famous French actress] Rachel (Élisa Rachel Félix) found herself caught in a trap set by religious activists close to the Archbishop of Paris, the great tragedian asserted her Jewishness and publicly recited the prayer of Esther by Racine. This incident shook the Parisian news outlets. Delacroix relived the scene in the Mellah of Meknes. He invited Rachel to pose in his studio and to don the large Moroccan dress (al-Keswa l-kbira)

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Figure 18.5  Eugène Delacroix, Esther and Mordecai (The Arab Merchant), oil on canvas, 1848. Private collection.

brought back from Morocco for the occasion. This Esther et Mardochée painting, long held in a private collection, has borne such absurd titles as Jewish Merchant in Algiers or Arab Merchant. This work adds to the list of evocations of Jewish life left by Delacroix. How to restore the image of “this living people whose solid constitution has already seen many powerful empires vanish? . . . And they are undoubtedly destined, as it so often happened to them [to] survive their persecutors.” The artist borrowed from [François-René de Chateaubriand] the author of Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem: “The Persians, the Greeks, the Romans have disappeared from the Earth and a small group whose origin predates that of these great peoples still exists, unmixed in the rubble of his homeland. If anything among the nations has the character of a miracle, we believe that character is here.”3 Upon his return from his North African tour, Delacroix received his first commission for the decoration of the Palais-Bourbon. This complex commission included coffers for the ceiling, friezes, pilasters, and archivolts above the doors and windows. The fourth pendant of Theology represents Hebrews weeping in Babylon for their lost homeland. In the [journal] Constitutionnel

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of January 31, 1848, Delacroix explained this painting as: “A grieving family seated north of the river painfully contemplates the waves while thinking of the absent homeland. In the countryside, near the walls of the city, the Hebrews dispersed, occupied with base works or succumbing to the sadness. We recognize among the exiles some of the faces drawn in Tangier. A barechested woman holds a child without clothes. Another is lying in the grass; and seated against a tree, an old man whose gaze is a supplication to heaven.” The image of the walls of Babylon recalls the walls the painter walked along during his “triumphal” entry into Meknes. The historian Charles Blanc comments on this Jewish family: “The father, the mother and a child, sitting in a pose of abandonment and despair, on the banks of the Euphrates, in the shade of a willow tree from which a harp hangs. . . . The sun is beautiful, nature is beautiful, the captives seem to say, but this nature and this sun are not the nature and the sun of our homeland. The effect is both splendid and sad; it is melancholy in broad daylight!” On Sunday March 4, 1832 (year 1248 of the Hegira), Delacroix could finally experience the daily life of Muslims. Tangier was emerging from its torpor and celebrating the close of Ramadan. The festivals of Aïd esSéghir (Aïd al-Fitr or Baïram) offered the painter an unprecedented view of Moroccan life. “The end of this important period was celebrated with several festivals [and] one of them attracted the entire population outside Tangier,” writes the painter. “The crowds had converged on the great mosque in the morning for prayers and sermons. The end of the prayer was signaled by a new tumult; people crying out, horse races begun with gunshots, flags flying in the air, and the sounds of drums and fifes. . . . All of the streets were adorned with banners . . . and a great number of riders stood together and let [the bystanders] admire their grace on horseback and their boldness in their exercises.” The painting called Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger (Minneapolis, Institute of Arts) evokes this particular day with the procession, the enormous crowd, the officers in gala dress, and the pacha on horseback at the head of the procession. But why did Delacroix give a painting begun in 1836 and presented at the Salon of 1838 such a surprising title when the painting clearly shows the festive aspect of the day and does not depict a demonstration of the followers of Sidi Aïssa, the Aissaouas?4 The Jews had emerged onto the terraces to see the procession. They had draped rugs on the facades of their houses as an expression of good will toward their Muslims neighbors. Delacroix was eager to convey this other part of the message he had first encountered in the Jewish Wedding: the challenge of showing the links forged between the two communities, even if tensions arose from time to time. The depiction of Jewish women in formal attire is astonishing. Nowhere does it record that the women on the terraces wore

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Figure 18.6  Eugène Delacroix, The Demonstrators of Tangier, oil on canvas, 1838. New York, Collection Jérôme Hill.

such clothes and the preliminary sketches in watercolors brought back from Tangier do not show this. It would have been unreasonable for them to expose themselves in such a manner, flaunting the richness of clothes which as Jews they were forbidden to wear. The Jews at home commonly dressed in cotton skirts and blouses (Chantilly notebook). But the painter seems to have taken it upon himself to present Jewish women in his paintings in flattering poses and outfits. He remembered that this finery legitimized a story that had remained alive for each of them. Fearing that the Western imagination would attach libertine labels to these women, Delacroix showed them in the street and raised a sentimental rampart around them. A chaperone, usually a teenager, escorts each: Rue à Méquinez (Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery); Rachel and Mordecai (private collection); Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger (second version, Toronto. The Art Gallery); Singers and buffoons (1848, Tours Museum); Arab camp at night (1861, Szepmveszh Muzeum, Budapest). Works inspired by the North African journey include paintings such as Les Musiciens juifs de Mogador [Jewish Musicians from Mogador] (Salon of 1842, Louvre Museum). A small orchestra—“the best there is in the empire”—came on Saturday March 24 to give the French a serenade at dawn. Another painting, full of verve, Intérieur d’une Cour au Maroc [Interior of a

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Figure 18.7  Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Musicians from Mogador. A lithograph, France, 1905, etching on paper, Cartoprint. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure 18.8  Eugène Delacroix, Courtyard in Morocco / Preparations for a Journey, oil on canvas, 1833; Salon of 1838, location unknown.

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Courtyard in Morocco] (Fribourg, private collection), describes the preparations for the trip with beasts, mokhaznis [local policemen], and Jews busily preparing in their midst. The painting La Noce juive was preceded by several works on paper, watercolors, and an engraving, Mariée juive à Tanger [Jewish Bride in Tangier], which some stubborn people have long classified as Juive à Alger [Jewish woman in Algiers]. The painter illustrated other moments linked to this event such as the visit of Muslim family friends who came to compliment the bride.

Figure 18.9  Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Wedding in Morocco. Drawing, pencil, and watercolor; Tangier, nineteenth century. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

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This sublime watercolor, together with several works on paper, as well as the Travel Notebooks, provide new information on the clothes worn by the Jews in Tangier. Rigorous drawings and exquisite watercolors describe the clothes of Jewish women “at the same time elegant and pretty, their clothes have a certain dignity which does not exclude either grace or coquetry.” At the end of the Passover celebrations, Sunday April 29, 1832 the family of Jacob Bouzaglo from Tangier received the painter, accompanied by the Comte de Mornay, the Dutch consul Jean Frayssinet and the acting Danish consul Marc Marcussen. Delacroix sketched the scene of the meeting. The watercolor was given the title: Hommes et femmes dans un intérieur [Men

Figure 18.10  Eugène Delacroix, Saada Benchimol and Her Daughter. Watercolor on lead. Donated by Delacroix to Mornay after their trip.

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and Women in an Interior] (Louvre, RF 4,615). The important thing about this particular day was the sight of Jamila, the daughter of the house. The meeting is registered in the painter’s notebook in Judeo-Spanish (Chantilly museum).

Figure 18.11  Eugène Delacroix, Jamila Bouzaglo, Facsimile of « Le voyage de Eugène Delacroix au Maroc », Jamila Bouzaglo, a drawing signed by Delacroix, with a JudeoSpanish text signed by Jamila: Monsieur Delacroix, Monsieur Mornay, Monsieur Fraissinet, Monsieur Marc Ussen, Moussan Ighola, Thanks for your visit to me this Sunday April 28th, Thousand Eight Hundred And Thirty Two. Tangier. Collection DahanHirsch, Bruxelles.

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CONCLUSION The Moroccan works on paper that Delacroix brought back from his Moroccan journey retain the sharpness and freshness of snapshots captured on the spot. All the paintings we love were actually born under the Parisian sky. It would be incorrect to see in every painted scene reality as observed in Morocco. Delacroix recounted stories and impressions. These visual festivals responded to commercial calls as well as political musings. But whenever the subject permitted, the painter injected into his works a special tribute to these populations subjected to the vagaries of history and the violence of power. Like those sketches from the Jewish cemetery of Tangier where Delacroix lingered in the sun, the square adjoining the tannery owned by Abraham Benchimol in association with the Sardinian consul, images that led him to these thoughts: “these graves so close together . . . so tight and entrenched . . . perpetuate after the death of these unfortunate women, the idea of their isolation in this enemy land to form a silent protest.” Two years after the painter’s visit to Morocco young Solika Hatchouel from Tangier was arrested and beheaded in Fez (1834). On the pages which have reached us the painter does not allude to the “trauma” which had shaken the Jews of Morocco. Solika was famous for her great beauty. “A pearl of Eden,” Delacroix described the beauty of the Jewish women of Tangier in his correspondence. The painter Alfred Dehodencq (1822–1882), who stepped into the shoes of Delacroix in Morocco, gave a romanticized portrayal to the martyrdom of Lalla Solika.

NOTES 1. When not authored, the citations of the text are taken from Eugène Delacroix, Carnets de Voyage au Maroc, edited by Maurice Arama, Maurice et Arlette Sérulaz. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1994. 2. See associated website for the images in color. 3. In fact, the author of this saying is not the French author Chateaubriand. The citation was taken from: Mathias Rodriguez Sobrino, Histoire de la Terre Sainte, traduite en français par L. Poillon, tome 2. Paris: H. Casterman, 1857, 367.—The editors. 4. The Aïssawa brotherhood is a mystical-religious order founded in Meknes in Morocco by Muhammad ben Aïssâ (1465-1526), ​​named the “Perfect Master” (alChaykh al-Kâmil). The Aïssawa are famous for their complex ritual ceremony which features symbolic dances bringing participants into a trance and even, in the past, in self-mutilation. See Mehdi Nabti, Aïsawa: soufisme, musique et rituels de transe au Maroc (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2010).—The editors.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Arama, Maurice. Le Maroc de Delacroix, Paris: Jaguar. 1987. –––––––. Delacroix, Le Voyage au Maroc. Catalogue de l’exposition de l’IMA [Institut du Monde Arabe]. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994. –––––––. Delacroix, Un voyage initiatique: Maroc, Andalousie, Algérie. Paris: Éditions Non-Lieu, 111-151: “La romance hébraïque”, 1999. –––––––. Eugène Delacroix, les Heures juives. Éditions Non Lieu, 2012. –––––––, Maurice et Arlette Sérulaz, eds. Les Carnets de voyage de Delacroix au Maroc. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1994.

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Photo Essay

FAMILY AND RELIGIOUS LIFE

Figure PE.1  Jewish wedding, Fez, 1940. Photographer: Bouhssira. Collection DahanHirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

441

Figure PE.2  A circumcision ceremony, Southern Morocco, 1960. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure PE.3  Party at the home of Jacob Bendahan (standing second from left), Tangier, 1954. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

442

Photo Essay

Figure PE.4  Group of Telwat women dancing the Aḥwash, Telwat (High Atlas), 1950. Photographer: Zédé Schulman. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

443

Figure PE.5  Jewish women dancing the Aḥwash, Aït Bu-Ulli, 1950. Photographer: Zédé Schulmann. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

444

Photo Essay

Figure PE.6  Cushion dance, Khenifra, 1950. Photographer: Bernard Rouget. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

445

Figure PE.7  Jewish women, Aït Bu-Ulli, 1950. Photographer: Zédé Schulmann. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

446

Photo Essay

Figure PE.8  Candle lighting at the Hillula of Rabbi ‘Amram ben Diwan, Wazzan, 1958. Photographer: André Goldenberg. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

447

Figure PE.9  Jewish musicians playing at a Hillula, Casablanca, 1960. Photographer: Gabriel Soussan. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

448

Photo Essay

EDUCATION

Figure PE.10  A Talmud Torah School, Marrakech, 1930. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

449

Figure PE.11  A Talmud Torah School, Erfoud (Tafilalet), 1950. Photographer: Zédé Schulmann. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

450

Photo Essay

Figure PE.12  The Alliance Israélite Universelle School—Class of Girls, Fez, 1952. Photographer: Bouhssira. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

451

SOCIAL LIFE

Figure PE.13  His Majesty King Mohammed V receiving Jewish leaders and rabbis of Meknes at his Palace of Meknes, after his return to Morocco from exile. From left to right: Rabbi Raphael Baruch Toledano, Mr. Joseph Mrejen, Rabbi Baruch Toledano, His Majesty King Mohammed V, Rabbi Yossef Messas, and Mr. Eliezer Berdugo Meknes. February 1956. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

452

Photo Essay

Figure PE.14  His Majesty King Hassan II receiving the Jewish community of Rabat (standing on the right with the book is the Ḥazzan reciting the Hebrew blessing of the King). Rabat, 1991. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure PE.15  His Majesty King Hassan II receiving the Jewish Council of Communities, Rabat, 1991. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

453

Figure PE.16  Visit of the Pasha to the mechouar (castle courtyard) at Bab el Makina in Fez (on the left wearing the scarf is Rabbi Haim Serero), mid-twentieth century. Photographer: Bouhssira. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure PE.17  Official visit of the German politician Graf von Tattenback (at the back of the delegation there is a group of Jews sitting on mules), Fez, 1905. Photographer: Hermann Burchard. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

454

Photo Essay

Figure PE.18  Party at the Royal Palace in honor of the German politician Graf von Tattenbach, Fez, 1905. Photographer: Hermann Burchardt. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

455

Figure PE.19  The governor of Rabat visiting the synagogue at Yom Kippur service, Rabat, 1960. Photographer: Niddam and Assouline. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure PE.20  Meeting of Muslim and Jewish notables in Tangier (Mr. Abraham Larédo is seated 3rd on the left), Tangier, 1955. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection DahanHirsch, Bruxelles.

456

Photo Essay

PROFESSIONAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE

Figure PE.21  Jewish coppersmith in the Mellaḥ, Fez, 1950. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

457

Figure PE.22  Maker of buckets and sandals from old tires and innertubes in the Mellaḥ, Fez, 1950. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

458

Photo Essay

Figure PE.23  A Torah scribe, Marrakech, 1930. Photographer: Anonymous. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Figure PE.24  Jews at the cattle market, Skoura, 1958. Photographer: Wronkers. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

459

Figure PE.25  Jew and Muslim in front of a fruit and vegetable store, Casablanca, 1960. Photographer: Claude Sitbon. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

460

Photo Essay

`ALIYAH

Figure PE.26  Jewish women at Arenas transit camp before they leave for Israel, Marseille, 1955. Photographer: Jewish National Fund. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

461

Figure PE.27  Moroccan Jews disembarking at the Port of Haifa, 1962. Photographer: Jewish National Fund. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

462

Photo Essay

Figure PE.28  Construction of buildings in Israel for new immigrants from Morocco, Ashdod, 1964. Photographer: Jewish National Fund. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Photo Essay

463

Figure PE.29  Arrival of immigrants from Morocco to Ashdod, 1964. Photographer: Keren Hayesod. Collection Dahan-Hirsch, Bruxelles.

Index

Abd al-Haqq II, Marinid monarch, 384 ‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Ash‘ash, governor of Tetuan, 43 Abehsera, Itzhak, Rebi, 206 Abensour, Isaac, translator in Tangier, 421 Abenșur, Moshé, Hebrew poet, 269 Abitan, Michel, paytan, 205 Abitbol-Mayost, Sam, musician, 249 Abraham Benchimol and the status of Jewish interpreters in Tangier, 420– 21; Abraham, French Consulate’s translator, polyglot, 420–21; advantageous position of Jewish translators in Tangier, 420–21; composition of the Jewish community in Tangier, 422; numerous Jewish refugees from Algeria, 422 Abraham ibn Ezra, Hebrew poet, 5 Abravanel, Isaac, rabbinical scholar, 22 Abu Dami‘a dynasty/Bou Damia family, 47, 109 Abuḥasera family, 108 Aby Serour [Abisror], Mardochée, 106–107, 110, 112; Aby Serour [Abisror] family, 111; his constant mobility, 106; his description of the Daggatoun as Islamicized Jews, 107; his report on the Daggatoun, 106 Academy, Moroccan Royal, 73

acquaintances, Jewish and Muslim women, 414; Muslim families, 405, 414–15 Acre, 319 Aderet, moshav, 224, 225 Administrateurs provisoires, temporary administrators, 93 Afriat, Daniel, soloist, 205 Afriat, Rabbi Judah ben Naphtali, was burned alive in 1792, 109 Africa: North Africa, 2, 4, 7, 146, 220; West Africa, 220 Afryat, Haim, ḥazzan, 8 Agadir, 27, 82–83, 105, 113, 114, 194, 384. See also Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer, Santa Cruz de Aguer, Agadir Agence Française d’Information (A.F.I.), 81 ägǝzdur, lamenting ritual, 409 Agouray, 385 agunah, 368 Aḥidous, Berber dance, 226 Aḥwash dance, 7, 217–41, 247; building social cohesion, 219; performance arenas and conditions, 218–19; performance of Aḥwash in Moshavim, 220–21; performed jointly by Jews and Muslims in AntiAtlas villages, 218–19; unites dance, music, and sung poetry, 218

465

466

Index

Aḥwash in Morocco: ‘Aḥouach Festival’ in Ouarzazate, 226; Aḥwash fragments, 229–31; continued marginalization of Berber periphery by the government, 226; folklorization and commercialization of Aḥwash after independence, 225– 26; past and present, 225–27 Aḥwash memories: Berber songs, 7, 247; idealization of the shared past life of Jews and Berbers, 227–28; the inherent commonality of Aḥwash for Jews and Berbers (and for Berber clans and tribes), 230–32; memory of poetic duels by Jewish-Berber performers, 229–31; nostalgia for the sung poetry duels of Jews and Berbers, 227–31; provocative songs and their retorts of skilled performers, 228–29; “We are all one/the same”: a mobilizing motto, 231–32 Aḥwash perpetuation in Israel: denigration of Berberness and Berber culture in Israel, 222; isolation of Jews from the Atlas in Moshavim, 221–23; marginalization of the newcomers from the Atlas Mountains, 221–23; migration of Jews to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, 220–21; peripheralization as a trigger for maintaining cultural traditions, 223–24; perpetuation of Aḥwash as affirmation of Jewish Berber identity, 224–25; settlement in new Moshavim, 220–21; settlement of Jews among Berbers from earlier Middle Ages, 219–20; ‘Ship to Village’ emigration policy, 221 Aïd es-Séghir (Aïd al-Fitr or Baïram), 430 aïta, popular musical genre, 194, 194n22 Ait Ba ‘Amran, Berber tribe, 109

Akka/Aqqa, 105, 106, 108–111, 113, 384 al-ˀAla, Moroccan classical music, 7, 8, 206, 246–48; Hebrew adaptations, 246–47. See also music, classical Arabic, components Al Alam, newspaper, 191 Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, 248 Alawid dynasty, 6, 41, 42, 47, 50, 52; Alawid monarch, 52 Alexandria, 354, 357, 370, 371, 373 Algeria, 3, 5, 20, 93, 95, 120–23, 303, 320, 370, 371, 423; Crémieux decree, 370; French civil law imposed on the Jews, 371 Algiers, 80, 123 ‛Aliyah, 303, 304, 323, 399, 400. See also migration al-Jarida al-Rasmiya, Bulletin Officiel, 53 al-Keswa l-kbira, 428 Al-Kuweity brothers, Daud and Salaḥ, musicians, 255 Allah, Al-Watan, Al-Malik, 190. See also Morocco, anthem allegiance, 39; perpetual allegiance, 54 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 46–49, 51, 60, 106, 107, 113, 127– 32, 382; political lobby in Western opinion, 4, 46–49; school network expansion, 4, 47, 56 Allies’ landing, 74, 80 Allouche, [Ichoua Sylvain], inspector, 85 Allougoum, 111 al-Maghili, Muhammad, Muslim scholar, 107 Al-Marini, Abdul Ḥaq, spokesman, 73n3 Almeria, 22 Almohad dynasty (al-muwaḥidun), 4, 5, 9, 20, 296; and Banu Hilal, 7; forced conversions and martyrdom, 4; persecutions, 4–5 the Almoravids, 20

Index

Al-Qsar Al-Kbir, El-Ksar, 10, 27, 30, 298 al-samāˤi, liturgical musical chains, 8 Al-Sheikh, Abdel Ghani, composer, 255 Al-Yahūd, Jews, 43 Amar, Moché, 11, 295n1, 339–56 Amassine, High Atlas village, 224, 225 Amazigh, pl. Imazighǝn, 217, 217n1, 383; Amazigh/Berber traditions, 223; Amazigh culture and language, 226 Amir al-Muˀminin, sultan, 40, 305 Amizmiz, 230 Amssouzert, village in Tifnout valley, 228 Amster, Ellen, scholar, 123, 124 Amzallag, Salomon, 190, 193. See also Sami/Samy El Maghribi Andalusia, 4, 5, 7, 20, 21, 25, 33 Anglo-Jewish Association, 46 Ankawa, Rabbi Rafael, chief rabbi of Morocco, 298–99, 302, 305; his positive attitude toward the French rule, 298–99 Anti-Atlas Mountains, 2, 107, 109 anti-Semitism, 125 António de Ataíde, D., chief minister, 146 apostasy, 5 Arabia, 7 Arabic language, 3, 198; classical, 9 Arab Spring, 189 Aragon, 25 Arama, Maurice, 1, 419–39 Archives, national of France, 75; French Protectorate, 78; US State Department, 94 Argan oil, 414 Armistice, between France and Germany, 75, 79 The ˤār tradition, subordination ritual, 86 Arussy, Drora, 154n* Aryanization, 74, 78, 92–94; the action of Xavier Vallat, 92–93; the opposition of the sultan, 92–94. See also expropriation Ashkelon, 74, 74n7

467

Ashkenazi communities, 357, 358 Asilah, Arsila, Arzila, 23, 27, 146 Assaraf, Robert, businessman and scholar, 247 Assarag, village in Tifnout valley, 228 Assimilation doctrine, 121 Assleï, 173 Association de Secours de Dames Israëlites de Marrakech, 130 Association doctrine, 121, 128 Atiyah, Moshe (Mwizo), 73n2 Atlan, Françoise, singer, 204 Atlas Mountains, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226–29, 232; anti-Atlas, 2, 107, 109, 217, 218, 231; Atlas villages, 218–20, 224; high Atlas, 217, 218, 222; Jews from the Atlas, 217–41 Attar, Rabbi Haim, 8 autonomy, Jewish, 3; limitation to personal status, 4 Azaryahu, Sigal, 219, 224 Azemmour, 16, 27, 144, 146 Azencot, Haïm, translator, 420 Azoulay, André, president of music festival, Essaouira, 205 Azriel, R. Aharon, dayyan in Jerusalem, 369 Azrou, 385 Badajos, 144 Badis, 30 Bagby, Philip, US vice-consul, Casablanca, 86–88 Baghdad, 255 Bambara, Saharan dialect, 106 Banu Hilal, Arab Bedouin tribes, 7 Baqqashot/bakkashot, sing. baqqasha/ bakkasha, 8, 248, 259; para-liturgical events in synagogues, 8, 246, 248 Baraka, 174–75 Barth, Fredrik, anthropologist, 133 Bastinado, 46, 58 Bat Naavat Ha-Mardut, monograph on the law of the Rebellious wife, 366–67, 373

468

Index

Bayezid II, Ottoman ruler, 16 Beinart, Haim, scholar, 30 Belle époque, 124 Ben-Ami, Issachar, scholar, 151–54 Bendellac, Abraham, translator in Tangier, 421 Bénech, José, scholar, 131, 132, 173 Ben-Eliyahu, Eyal, scholar, 317 Ben Ḥassin, David, Hebrew poet, 269–93, 319; his love of nature and landscapes, 270–71; his poetry as a documentary source, 274, 274n44; his popularity and education, 269; specificity of his poetry, 270; spokesman of Moroccan Jewish suffering, 269, 271–75 Ben Ḥassin, David, poems: Abbiʿa renanay, ashir be-hegyonay, 274, 274n35; Aḥeinu beit Israel heililu, 272, 272n25; Arim qol yelala, 272, 272n23, 274, 274n40, 274n42; Asapper pela’eikha, 270, 270n5; Atta Ha-Shem, ʻad matay, 272, 272n16, 274, 274n39, 274n43, 285–86; Azil dimʿa, 272, 272n20; Bekhi tamrurim, 274, 274n38; Dimʿa teredna ʿeineinu, 272, 272n24; Divrei emet, katuv yosher, 274, 274n33; Eleikha Șuri, shokhen ʻaliyya, 273, 273n32, 282–84; El ḥaviv li ḥibbato, 270, 272, 272n22, 274–77, 274n34; El ʻovrei derekh eqre’a, 271–74, 271n13, 72n15, 273n27, 274b36, 274n41, 278–82; Ha-Shem davqa le-ʻafar nafshi, 272, 272n17, 272n19, 274, 274n37, 288; Ilan ha-zeh, ma na’eh!, 270, 270n6; Im amarti asappera bilshoni, 272, 272n26; Lekhu ḥazu mifʿalot dar Shamayim, 271, 271n10; Likhvod Malki, konen darki, 273, 273n29; Matay tekhonen ʻir Șion?, 272–73, 272n21, 273n28, 284–85; Odeh be-fi va-avarekh, 270–72, 271n8, 272n18, 286–87; Oḥil yom yom eshtaeh, 273, 273n30;

Shir ha-shirim la-el temim deʿot, 271, 271n9 Beni Mellal, 173 Benkirane, Abdelilah, political leader, 204 Ben-Layashi, Samir, scholar, 295n1 Ben-Malka, Rabbi Khalifa, 169 Ben Maman, Moshe, murdered, 272n24 Bennaim, Yosef, 169 Benselloum, Jacob, translator in Tangier, 421 Bensoussan, Georges, historian, 74 Ben-Walid, Rabbi Yitzchak, 298, 299, 369, 373 Ben-Ya’akov, Michal, 11, 315–38 Benzamerro, Aaron, Chamwal, Chichir, Joseph, Mas‛ûd, and Yahuda, relatives, 148 Benzamerro, Abraão, 145–50, 153 Benzamerro, Isaac, 144–46 Benzamerro, Mail, 144 Benzamerro, Salomão, 148 Ben Zamiro, Ben Zmirou, 27, 143, 149, 151–53 Berab/Berav, Jacob, rabbinical scholar, 21, 29, 30 Berber/Amazigh: Amazigh/Berber cultural traditions, 223, 225; Berber, language, 223; Berber cultural life, 220; Berber Dahir, 60; Berber dialects, 3, 218; Berber identity, 222, 224–25; Berber Muslims, 120, 121, 124, 129, 130, 223; Berberness, 220– 22; Berber periphery, 86; ‘Berbers’, denigrated Atlas Jews, 222; Berber traditions, 220 Berdugo, Rabbi Petahya, dayyan, 297 Berdugo, Rabbi Raphael, dayyan, 297, 339, 346–49 Berdugo, Rabbi Ya‛akov, dayyan and Hebrew poet, 323 Bernáldez, Andrés, prelate and chronicler, 23–26 Berrima, quarter in Meknes, 385 Bertherand, Émile-Louis, doctor, 123

Index

Betrothal, 358–59, 364–66, 370–73 The Bey of Tunis, 84 Bibliothèque Royale, Rabat, archives, 75 Bigart, Jacques, AIU Secretary General, 128 Bilad al-Sudan, 107 Bilu, Yoram, scholar, 170, 326 Biton, David Moshe, 11, 295–311 blad el-mekhzen, 384 The Bled, rural periphery, Jews of the Bled, 195–98 Boqrat Halevy, Rabbi Abraham, Hebrew poet, 22 Botbol, Haim, singer, 193, 198, 204, 206 Bou Ihlas, 109 The Boukharas, 385 Boum, Aomar, 3, 105–118, 226, 386 Boundaries, religious, 2–3 Bouveret, Charles, doctor at Essaouira/ Mogador, 122, 126–27, 129 Bowles, Paul, musicologist, 257–58 Boyer, General Pierre, commander of the Oran region in 1832, 422 Briouel, Mohammed, musician, 204 British Board of Deputies, 46 Brit Kehunah, 365 Brit-mila, circumcision, 269 Bronner, Simon, author, 190 Budarão/Abudarham, Judas, 147 Bureau of Political Affairs, 85 Bu Sa‘diyya, brotherhood, 169 Buzaglo, Meir, scholar, 306 Buzaglo, rabbi David, paytan and cantor, 250, 306–307; his various Hebrew poetry, 306–307 Cadiz, 22 Cairo, 357, 369, 371; Cairo Geniza, 164 Caliphate, Eastern, 2 Camhy, Berthe, AIU instructor, 132 Canada, 2, 195, 246, 393 Capital declarations, 78, 83 Capitulations, 43, 55, 371 Capsali, Eliyahu, chronicler, 17, 27

469

Caracas, 246 Caravans, trans-Saharan, 105 Carmel, Mount, 328 Carneiro, António, Secretary of State, 146 Casablanca, 83, 84, 87, 113, 114, 127, 194, 195, 250, 257, 260, 303–304, 383, 401, 407; Jewish Community’s Executive Committee, 89 Catalonia, 25 Chaˤbi, 189, 198, 204, 247 Chahid, Omar, singer, 206 Chaldea, 175 Charbonneau, Pierre, physician, 131 Chazon Ish, 369 Chekara, Abdessadek, singer, 196 Chetrit, Joseph, 1, 3, 7, 73–102, 191, 245n, 254n33, 399–418 Chgouri, 189, 198, 204–206 Chief Rabbi of Morocco, 351 Childs, J. Rives, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Tangier, 88–90 Chouari, Ahmed, 1, 6, 381–98 Chouraqui, André, writer, 168, 173 Chriqui, Mike, singer, 194 Christian captives, 17 Christian consuls, 48 Christianity, 15 Christians, 40 Cint, David, 147 circles, nationalist, 77; Vichy circles, 82 civilization, rabbinic, 3; Moroccan Jewish, 3 Clark, Hannah-Louise, doctor, 123–24 Clement VII, Pope, 147 Coco Diam, singer, 196–97, 205 Cohen, David, scholar, 81n26, 169 Cohen, Jeremy, scholar, 18 Cohen, Meny Maimon, cantor, 251 Cohen, Shlomo, Rabbi, editor of piyyutim collections, 259 Coidan, Etienne, Residence’s senior official, 91n56 Colonial presence, French: control of Morocco, 73; cultural influence, 4;

470

Index

limiting legal and cultural Jewish autonomy, 76; transformations and alterations, 4, 11. See also protectorate Colonial rule, Spanish, 4 Commissariat Général of Jewish Affairs, Vichy, 92–93 Commission of control, Italo-German, 79–80; German and Italian Delegations, 75 commonalities, cultural, 1, 295; business partnerships, 19; common Aḥwash performances, 217–41; common formulaic thesauri, 5, 7; common language, 5, 7; common magical beliefs, 5–6, 9, 163–87; common music, 5, 189–216, 245–49; common proverbs, 7; common space, 6, 381– 98; common veneration of Ouled ben Zmirro, 150–53; common veneration of saints, 6, 9–10, 150–51, 173; common women’s poetry, 5; popular music, 189–214 communities, Jewish: under Almohad Dynasty, 4; beginnings, 2; chains of communities in Southern Morocco, 107, 109, 110; in countryside, 6; dispersal in XXth century, 6; marginal Saharan, 105–19; Saharan, Berber origin, 2; traditional, 10–11 Conquy, Joseph, director of AIU school, 51 Constantinople, 125 Constitution, new Moroccan, 198–201, 307–308; Hebraic affluent, influence, 199–201, 307; Moroccan national unity, 200–201; preamble, 197; referendum, 189, 198 Consulate-General in Casablanca, U.S., 88 Consul General in Casablanca, U.S., 80, 84, 85, 87, 88 Contrôleur Civil Général of Casablanca, 84, 89, 91 Contrôleurs civils, 89–91

conversions: under Almohads, 4–5; compulsory conversion to Christianity, 15, 20; forced conversion to Islam, 19; to Judaism, 302–303 Convivencia, 248, 394–95 Corcos, Haim, Jewish leader, Marrakech, 50 Corcos, Joshua/Ichoua, Jewish leader, Marrakech, 50, 128 Corcos, Mardochée, 57 Cordoba, 7, 20 Count Charles de Mornay, ambassador, 419–21, 426, 434, 436; ‘LouisPhilippe’s ambassador’, 421 Courts, rabbinical, 76; limitations to personal status, inheritance, 76 Crémieux, Adolphe Isaac-Jacob, Jewish French minister, 370; Crémieux decree, 53–54, 370 Creswell, John W., scholar, 387, 387nn5–6 Crimean Peninsula, 362; Crimean Jews, 125 culture, Moroccan: Arab culture, 1; Berber culture, 1; Jewish communal, popular, 10; Jewish tapestry, 3; rabbinic learned, 10–11 Cusick, Suzanne, author, 191 Customs, Muslim, 7 Dabda family, 111 Dades valley, 108 the Daggatouns, 105–107 Dahan, Paul, 1, 439–63 Dahir, sherifian, 52, 74; Dahir of January 4, 1941, 77, 85–86; Dahir of August 5, 1941, 76–78, 80, 84–86; discussions about its promulgation, 84; exemption of jewelry, personal residence, and bank account from capital declaration, 89; first Dahir on the status of Jews, 78; first Jewish status law of October 31, 1940, 77; forbidding employment of Muslim

Index

women, 77; harsh regulations in implementation of the Dahir, 88; ‘heated talks’ between Residency and Makhzan, 85; meetings of sultan with Muslim leaders, 84; Nogues and sultan agreed to moderate economic decrees, 88–89; promise of the sultan to moderate the regulations, 88; sultan’s opposition to the persecution, of his Jewish subjects, 90; unfounded accusations, 77; worsening socio-economic Jewish situation, 78 Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 149 Darija, spoken Moroccan Arabic, 7, 194, 201 Darlan, Jean Louis, admiral, 92 Daroque, Jacob, collector of taxes, 146 Da Silva Tavim, José Alberto Rodrigues, 6, 10, 143–62 David Reubeni, 147 Dayyanim, sing. dayyan, judge in rabbinical court, 40, 76, 108; their new status of judges in Moroccan legal status after independence, 303– 6; their special status as government officials under the Protectorate, 298 De Gaulle, Charles, Général, 80; arrest of de Gaulle supporters, 82–83; Gaullist sleeper cells in Casablanca, 83 Dehodencq, Alfred, Painter, 436 Delacroix, Eugène, painter, 1, 419–36; works inspired by his sojourn in Morocco, 431–37; works of Delacroix cited and commented: Article in the Magasin Pittoresque, 1842, with a Jewish Musician from Mogador, lithogravure/lithograph, 423, 424; Camp arabe de nuit [Arab camp at night], 427, 431; Esther et Mardochée (Jewish Merchant in Algiers or Arab Merchant), 428–29; Hommes et femmes dans un intérieur [Men and Women in an Interior],

471

434–35; Intérieur d’une Cour au Maroc [Interior of a Courtyard in Morocco], 431–33; Jamila Bouzaglo, a drawing signed by Delacroix, 435; La Barque de Dante et Virgile, 1822, 423; La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830, 423; La noce juive dans le Maroc, 1843, 424–28; Les Convulsionnaires de Tanger/The Demonstrators of Tangier, 430–31; Les Dames d’Alger dans leur appartement [The Ladies of Algiers in their apartment], 423–24; Les Musiciens juifs de Mogador [Jewish Musicians from Mogador], 431, 432; Mariée juive à Tanger (Juive à Alger [Jewish woman in Algiers]), 433–34; Portfolio, notebooks and carnets of Delacroix, 419, 420, 422, 423, 424, 431, 434, 435; Rue à Méquinez, 423, 431; Scènes de Massacres à Scio, 1824, 423; Singers and buffoons, [Singers and Jesters], 427, 431 Delacroix and the Jews of Morocco, 419–30; conditions of his sojourn in Morocco, 419–20; his encounters with Jews in Tangier, 420; his encounter with Abraham Benchimol, 420–21; visits to Jewish houses, 421–22; visit to a Jewish wedding and its artistic results, 423–27; visit to the Benchimol family synagogue, 422–23; witness of acts humiliating Jews, 421 Delanoë, Eugénie, physician, 128, 129 De Lernonville, Jacques, representative of Xavier Vallat, 93–94 Della Reina, Yosef, Kabbalist, 172 Demnat/Demnate, Jews, 49, 57–59, 168 demonology: ambiguous encounters between Jews and Muslims, 176; in ancient Judaism, 175–76; clients and practitioners, Jewish and Muslims, 168–76; in Jewish world, 163–64; in the Maghreb, 164–65; and music,

472

Index

black music, 169–70; in Muslim world, 164–65; in rabbinic writings, 165–66 demons, 163, 167, 168, 171–72, 175 De Mortillet, Gabriel, archeologist, 126 De Pellepoix, Darquier, 94 Desgranges, Antoine Jérôme, French translator, 421 Dhimmah, Dhimmi: autonomous selfrule and culture for the Jews, 31–33, 384; colonial Dhimmis, 52–59; concept of Dhimmi, 54; de facto revocation, 76; the Dhimma contract, 40; Dhimmi status, 16, 31–32, 40, 43, 48, 49, 53, 54, 191, 195, 383, 394; Dhimmi subjects, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52; framework for co-existence with Muslims, 33; governance strategy, 75–78; inherent ambivalence, 76–77; Jewish fate in Muslim lands, 31–32, 84; ‘king’s protégés’, 384; legal and traditional social status, 3, 31, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46; legal duties of Dhimmis, 31–32, 77; its negative and positive conditions, 31–33; new use by Sultan, 76; our Dhimmisahl dhimmatinā, 49; protection and subordination, 3, 31, 40; royal prerogatives, 2WW, 3; source of European intervention, 3; Sultan imbued jurisdiction of Religious matters, 84; variable application of the status, 32 Diapason, musical ensemble of Jews and Muslims, 205 Dias, Rui, new Christian, 147 Dibrei ha-Yamim shel Fès, 18 Didi, Abdeljalil, journalst, 217, 219, 225 Diogo de Azambuja, 144, 145 dissidence, telegram, 73, 81–83 Djerba, 365, 372 Djiri, Algerian music, 247, 248 Doutté, Edmond, scholar, 165, 175 Dovev, moshav, 224, 225 Draa valley, 107–108

Dreyfus Affair, 120, 124–25, 131 Duggana, 231 Dunash ben Labrat, Hebrew poet, 20 Dutch Republic, 15 Ecole Normale Hébraïque, Casablanca, 254, 254n33, 260, 401 education, Islamic imposed, 5 education, Jewish: in Casablanca, 400–401; European, in Morocco, 11; forbidden under Almohads, 5; in Palestine, 9 Egypt, 2, 7, 363, 370, 371 Eid Nwala, Sukkot festival, not Passover, 389 Elbaz, André E., 8, 11, 269–93 Elbaz, Rabbi Raphael Moshe, dayyan and Hebrew poet, 323 El Fassi, Allal, political leader, 191 El Glaoui dynasty, 57–58 El Glaoui [Glāwī], Thami, governor of Marrakech, 56, 57, 84; instrumental for control of southern Morocco, 57; intercessor between Jews and Muslims, 58; his interests in Demnat Jews petition, 58; interdependency of the Glaouis and the Jews, 58 El Glaoui, Madani, grand vizier, 57 El Hammeda, 107 Elijah the Prophet, 328 Elkaim, David, Hebrew poet, 8 El Khazen Michael, US diplomat, 79, 79n20 Elmaliah, Lior, paytan, 204 El Massira el Khadra, Green March, 193 ElMedlaoui, Mohamed, scholar, 219, 224 El Mokri, al-Hajji Mohammed, Grand Vizier, 56, 84; Grand Vizier, 56, 77; the head of the Makhzan, 84 Elon, Menachem, judge and professor of Hebrew law, 358 Elyashar, R. Yaˤakov Shaul, Ḥacham Bashi, 363, 369 ‛Emeq ha-Bacha, 18 endemic diseases, 122

Index

England, 30 the Enlightenment movement, 362 Eretz Israel holiness, 318–20; in Jewish law, 318–19; in Kabbalah, 319; the role of Shadarim, 320 Erfoud, 108 Escourrou, Pierre, researcher, 124 Essaouira, 6, 8, 17, 42, 48, 50, 60, 205, 249, 257. See also Mogador/ Essaouira Esteva, Jean Pierre, Admiral of Fleet, 93 Etlinger, R.Yaˤakov, dayyan, 362 Europe, 359, 361, 364, 370; Central Europe, 358, 361, 363, 372; cultural influences, 4; Eastern Europe, 358, 361; European Jews, 361; Western Europe, 3 ‘Europeanization’ of the urban Jewish population, 130 European Protection accorded to Jewish merchants, 43–44; complaints against violent treatment of Jews submitted to the sultan, 46–47; consolidation of the alliance with Jews strengths the royal power over country, 46; consular protection as a threat on Moroccan sovereignty, 46; correspondence between the Qa’id of Iligh and the Sultan on Jews’ complaints, 47–48; European Jews’ Protection as a strategy to imperialistic penetration, 44–45; Jewish European organizations pressures on behalf of Morocco’s Jews, 45–46; Jews under the turmoil of the reign, of Mawlay Abd al-Aziz and Mawlay Abd al-Hafiz, 51–52; Mawlay Hassan I’s dealing with Jewish affairs as external and internal strategy, 48–50; Montefiore Dahir as a new national policy on Jewish question, 45; personal Dahirs to royal merchants for counterbalancing foreign ties, 44; the resulting Dahir enjoins the governors to treat Jews

473

with justice, 45; his solicitude toward Jews remained a model, 50–51; source of tensions between Morocco and European powers, 43–44; the Tritel of the Mellaḥ of Fez in april 1912, and the kind gesture of Abd al-Hafiz, 51–52; visit of Sir Moses Montefiore to Sidi Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahman, 45 European settlers in Morocco, 52, 53, 56, 59 Évora, 144 expropriation, 83, 93; position of Resident-General Nogues, 93–94; role of the sultan in preventing, 76, 93–94 expulsion of Jews from Spain, 15, 83, 319; expulsion decree, 15; expulsion from Portugal, 15, 143–44; previous expulsions of Jews in Europe, 15–16; refuge in Morocco, 15–38, 83; refuge in Ottoman Empire, 16; refuge in Portugal, 15, 21–22 false letter, 77, 80–83 Faur, Jose, scholar, 18 Ferran, 391 Fez/Fès, 2, 4–6, 9–10, 18–19, 39, 41, 42, 51–53, 60, 87–88, 120, 123, 124, 128, 146, 147, 168, 172, 174, 249, 257, 270, 299, 322, 343–46, 360, 370, 384; Fez El Jadid, 54; ‘Jerusalem of the Maghreb’, 322; Kingdom, 15; the ‘Medinah,’ the old Muslim quarter, 87; Moulay Abdullah mausoleum, 8; Moulay Idriss Grand Mosque, 87; Tritel of Fez, 51–52 Fifano, R. David, scholar, 369 Flamand, Pierre, scholar, 168, 171 Forth, Christopher, scholar, 124–25 The Four Holy Cities, 316, 319; deep attachment of Moroccan Jews, 316 Fqih, 168 the “fragrance of Jerusalem”, 315, 317, 322

474

Index

France, 2, 15, 39–42, 44, 46, 52, 55, 61, 75, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 129, 131, 195, 246, 297–303, 371, 393, 420; ‘France protectrice’, 52; Free France, 79 Freiman, Avraham Chaim, author of Seder Kidushin ve-Nissu’in, 358, 358n10, 370 French doctors’ prejudices against urban Muslims and Jews, 121–28; its adoption by colonial physicians against Moroccan Jews, 126; ‘Arab syphilis’ as a Muslim inherent disease, 122–24; a medical manual on moral and physical faults of Moroccan Jews, 126–27; metropolitan racism against French Jews and their diseases, 124–26; a misogynistic guide against Jewish women, 127–28; negative appreciations of urban Arab depravity, 121–22; positive attitudes toward rural Berbers, 121; tuberculosis as emblematic Jewish disease, 128 French language, 11, 201 French medicine and Moroccan Jews, 128–33; Jewish affinity for French medicine, 129–30; Jews more sickly because of insalubrious conditions, 130; modern medicine as a new cultural boundary for Jews, 131–33; separate treatment facilities for Jews and Muslims, 128–29 French medicine in Morocco, 4, 119–40; biased French physicians’ attitudes toward ethnic groups, 120–22; colonial contradictions in social policies, 121–22; medicine as emblem of French civilizing mission, 119–20; the sense of pride and self-esteem of colonial physicians, 130–31 French Republic, 41 French settlers in Morocco, Fascist and radicals, 82 Freshko, Shmuel, composer, 306 Friedman-Kasaba, Kathie, scholar, 317

Ftour pluriel, 194 Fulani, Saharan dialect, 106 Gaguine, Rabbi Haim, 342, 342n11 Galicia, 362 Galilee, 319, 321 Gaon, Yehoram, singer, 255 Gaonim, Babylonia, 2 Garcia de Resende, Portuguese chronicler, 25 Garzón Serfaty, Rabbi Baruj Benito, 254n33 Geniza, Cairo, 2 Genoa, 22 ‘Geopiety’, 316–17 Gerber, Jane S., 2, 3, 6, 15–37, 154n* Germans, 74 Germany, 15, 75, 79 Get, 371 Gharnati, Ghrnati, 206, 248, 259; qsida, 190 Gibraltar, 22, 270–71, 270n3, 298 Gilman, Sander, scholar, 125 Giraud, Henri, Général, 80 Glasser, Jonathan, scholar, 245, 245n2 Gnawa, brotherhood, 169 Gonçalo Mendes Sacoto, Captain, 146 Gottreich, Emily, scholar, 173, 245–46 Goulven, Joseph, civil administrator, 123, 166, 175 Graeco-Roman period, 2 Granada, 20, 21, 33; Nasride kingdom, 15 Grand Vizier, 40, 77, 84, 85n35, 88. See also El Mokri, al-Hajji Mohammed, Grand Vizier Great Britain, 44, 55 Guelmim, 105, 108, 110, 113 Guri, Chaim, Israeli poet, 306 Habsburg empire, 362, 370 Hachkar, Kamal, 201 HaCohen, Haim, cantor, 250 Ha-Cohen, R. Chalphon, rabbi in Djerba, author of Brit Kehunah, 365

Index

Ha-Cohen, R. Mendel, Ashkenazi, rabbi of Cairo, 371 ha-Cohen, Yoseph, chronicler, 17–18 Hacohen Kook, R. Avraham, chief rabbi, 364 Hadaia, R. Ovadia, rabbi in Jerusalem, 363–64 Hadāya, obligatory gift, 44 Ḥadith, 164 Haifa, 319, 328 Hajja El Hamdaouia, singer, 207 Haketía, Judeo-Spanish, north Morocco, 6, 11, 201 Hakhamim, Hakhmei Morocco, 295–314; their changing position over time, 296; dealing with conversion to Judaism, 301–302; modernity challenges before and under Protectorate, 297–303; protection of European powers, 297; uncertainty and instability before the Protectorate, 296–97 Halakha, 11, 164 Halali, Salim, singer, 196 Ha-Levi Horowitz, Eliezer, Rabbi in Vienna, 361, 362 Hamria, French quarter in Meknes, 386 ha-noten teshu‘ah la-melakhim, 39 ḥaraka, colloq. ḥarka, military campaign, 47 Harrus, Elias, 201 ha-Sarfati, Avner, rabbi, 18 Hasarfaty, Vidal, rabbi, 39–41 Ha-Serfaty, Rabbi Raphaël Ménahem, nagid of Fez, 428 Ḥashish, 391 Hassan, David, translator in Tangier, 421 Ḥassan II, king, 191–92, 194–95, 247 Hatchouel, Solika, Lalla Solika, young martyr, beheaded in Fez in 1834, 436 Ḥay Essalam, removed name of the Mellaḥ, Marrakech, 395 Ḥayyat, Yehuda, rabbinical scholar, 21, 27–28

475

Ḥazan, R. Eliyahu, chief rabbi, 357, 364–65, 370–71, 373 Ha-Zarfati, Rabbi Elijah, dayyan, Fez, 350 Ḥazzanim, sing. ḥazzan, priests in synagogues, 8, 258 Healers, Muslim and Jewish, 9 Hebrew, 3, 5 Hebron, 315 Heckman, Alma Rachel, 198 Heritage: Moroccan, of Jews, 2 HIAS, emigration agency, 399 High Commissioner of Jewish Affairs, 74, 77 Hilloula/hilula, pl. hilulot, 154, 327 history: Jewish, 1; Moroccan, 2 Hoffman, Katherine, scholar, 231 Holocaust Memorial Museum, 75; archives, USHMM, 75; national archives, National Administration, NARA, 75 Holzmann, Judah, physician, 130 House of Representatives, Morocco, 199 Hybridity, linguistic, 3; cultural, 10; syncretic culture, 10, 11 l’Aide Maternelle de Marrakech, 130 Iberian Peninsula, 2, 6, 15, 30 Ibn Danan, Rabbi Shaul, Chief Rabbi, 299–300, 360; his exaltation of French rule, 299–300 Ibn Danan family, 21 ibn Lev, Rabbi Joseph, Salonica, 345 Ibn Othman ELMeknasi, Middle School in Meknes, 382 Ibn Verga, Solomon, chronicler, 17–18, 24–25 ibn Zimra, David, the RADBAZ, rabbinical scholar, 21 ‛Īd al-’Aḍḥā, 226 ‘īd al-ˤarsh, Fête du Trône, 59–60 Idelsohn, Abraham Z., musicologist, 249 identity: Arab identity, 226; Berber identity, 217, 220, 222, 224; cultural identity and territory, 217, 317;

476

Index

francophone cultural, 4; Moroccan national, 198–201, 224, 226; multilayered Jewish, 4; multiple, Jewish, 190; the new attitude to Moroccan identity, 305; plural, 198–201, 203; web of identities, 295 Iflaḥ, David, connoisseur of Andalusi music, 8 Ifrane [Oufrane], oldest Jewish settlement?, 2, 384 Iligh, Tazerwalt area, 105, 109, 113, 168–69 Iluz, Shimon, cantor, 251 imperialism, 39, 41–43; European, 44 indigenous: Christians, 40; indigenous status of Jews, 53–55; Jews subjects of the sultan, 53–54; Moroccans, 59; populations, 52, 56 inquisition, 21, 30 Institut du Monde Arabe, 204 interaction of Jews and Muslims: common musical corpora, 7–8; common textual and musical corpora, 5; cultural fusion under Almohads, 5; interplay of cultures, 1, 4; shared culture, 1; under Berber hegemony, 3, 7; web of allegiances, 3 Iraq, 2 Irhalan, 110 Isaac al-Fasi, legal scholar, 20 Isaac Luria, Kabbalist, R., 319 Isaac Souissa, 48 Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon, monarchs, 144 Islam: Islamic power, 2; world of, 3 Israel: ancient, 9; Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel (Palestine), 9, 11, 21, 22, 114, 315–39; land of, 2, 315; modern (State of), 1, 195, 246, 249, 303–307, 393 Israˀiliyat, Arabic texts about Jews, 9 Istiqlal, political party, 191 Italy, 15, 22 Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, by the French writer Chateaubriand, 429 Izmir, 370

Jaffa, 319 Jerusalem, 249, 304, 305, 363, 369 Jewry, Islamicate, 2 Jewry, Moroccan, 2, 9, 74, 89; distinctiveness, 2; restoration of communal life, 5 Jews, foreign, 86 Jews, French, 84, 86, 89 Jews, Moroccan: appeals to sultan initiated by Nogues, 85; appeals to Sultan’s support, 76, 78, 80, 84–92; changes in legal status, 76; distance from matters of government, 84; economy and commerce endangered, 83; faithful servants of Sultan’s ancestors, 79; feeble percentage but economic wealth, 79; their good relations with Muslims, 87; ‘loyalty to France and to the Sultan’, 84; loyalty to Sultan, 79; their migration to Holy Land, 315–38; ‘People of the Book’, 383 Jews and the Moroccan Monarchy, 39–72; Jewish allegiance prayer addressed in 1918 to France, 39; Jews seeking French protection before the Protectorate, 40–41; Royal Alliance and Dhimma, 39–41; survival of Alawid dynasty under the French rule, 41; traditional Dhimma contract, 40 Jizya/Jaziya, head tax, 3, 32, 40, 43, 48, 49, 54, 299, 383; practice of delivering a blow to the head, 49; revocation under protectorate, 76 Jnūn, sing. jinn, demons, 9, 164, 167–72, 174–76; their ambivalent role, 176 João II, King of Portugal, 25; “Heavenly Jerusalem” and “Earthly Jerusalem”, 318 João III, king, D., 145–46 Joie de vivre, 124 Judaism, 306; ancient Berber conversions, 2; crypto-Judaism under Almohads, 5

Index

Judeo-Arabic, 5, 7, 11, 18, 201 Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Amazigh, 11, 201 Judeo-Spanish, 18, 201. See also Haketía, Judeo-Spanish, north Morocco Judiaria, Jewish quarter, 144 jurisdiction, of rabbis, 76 Kabbala, Lurianic, 8 Kabbalah, 164, 362, 364 the ‘Kabyle myth’, 121 Kach, political party, 74 Kadosh, Maimon ben Yaakov, editor of piyyutim collection, 259 Kahina, 2 Kairouan, Tunisia, 2 Kapchan, Deborah, 174 Karaite Jews, 125 Karo, R. Yosef, author of Shulḥan ˤAruch, 367–68, 373 Karoutchi, Maxime, singer, 193 Katz, Jonathan G., 4, 119–40 Kavvanot, kabbalistic intentions, 257 Ketubah, Jewish contract marriage, 340, 343, 345, 347, 350, 351 Khan, Naveeda, scholar, 164 Khattat, 169 Khat Znati, 168, 169 Kinot, sing. Kina, 194, 194n23 Kiryat Gat, 225 Kiryat Shmona, 218 Kitab alf layla walayla, 165 Kol Zion La-Golah, 400–401 Kosansky, Oren, scholar, 174, 174n70 Krippendorff, Klauss, scholar, 387n9, 388 Ksar-es-Souk, 108 Kyngäs, Helvi, scholar, 388, 388n8 Lacapère, Georges, specialist of the syphilis disease, 123 Lachreif, Rabbi Yechiya, Meknes, 349 La Courneuve, CADLN archives, 75, 82 Ladier, R. Shlomo Zalman, head of Ḥassidic community, 363

477

Lagneau, Gustave, anthropologist, 125 Laḥash, pl. Laḥashim, incantation, 165 Lakhsassi, Abderrahmane, scholar, 231 Lambek, Michael, scholar, 164 languages, Jewish, 3 La Noce de Cana [a painting of Veronese], 423 La rosa enflorece, Mediterranean JudeoSpanish song, 255 La Sorcellerie au Maroc, 121 La Syphilis arabe: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie, 123 Latin ‘races’, 121 La Vigie Marocaine, French newspaper, 87 La Voix des Communautés, Jewish newspaper, 191 Law, anti-Jewish: of June 2, 1941, 83; Vichy anti-Jewish law of October 2, 1940, 79, 83 Law, Jewish, 4 leadership, Jewish in Morocco, 2; heartfelt letter to Nogues, June 1941, 83; and Moroccan Jews, July 1941, 84; Nogues distinguishing between French Jews and Moroccan Jews, July 1941, 84 Légey, Françoise, doctor, 132 Lennox, Alan, British Protestant missionary, 130 Leo Africanus, 32–33 Lépinay, Eugène, dermatologist, 124 Le Repas chez Lévi [a painting of Paolo Veronese], 423 Les Échos du Mellah, film, 201 letter, anonymous, 77 Leven, Narcisse, President of AIU, 129 Levin, Sarah Frances, 7, 217–41 Levirate marriage, 359, 360, 369, 370, 373 Levy, André, anthropologist, 260 Levy, Isaac, musicologist, 249 Levy, Simon, communal leader, scholar, 149–50, 204 Libya, 4

478

Index

life, Jewish: beginnings, 2; in the Middle ages, 2; vanished, 1 Lisbon, 146 Lisbon Inquisition, 147 liturgical anthologies: ‘Et sha‛are ratzon, 250; Hanitzanim nir’u ba-aretz, 251; Paul Bowles Collection, 257; Seder tefillot kol Hashanah, 250; Va-’ani tefillati, 250 liturgical genres and processes: ‘Andalusianation’, 258; Moroccan Jewish soundscape, 258; musicalisation, 258–59; ‘Sepharadization’, 260; sephardic custom, 258–59; sharqization, 261 liturgical sections and ‘stations’: Adonay elohekhem/Emet ve-emunah, 255; Adonay tzeva’ot ‛immanu, 253; Ahavat ‘olam, 254; ‛Aleinu leshabeaḥ, 260; ‛Amidah, 256; Barekhi nafshi et Adonay, 253; Barekhu, ‛Aleinu le-shabeaḥ, 256; Barekhu et Adonay hamevorakh, 254; Beshallaḥ, pericope, 256; El adon ʿal kol hamaʿasim, 259; Hama‛ariv ‘aravim, 254; Leshem yiḥud, 253; Malkhutkha, 255; Mi Kamokha, 255; Qaddish, 253, 255, 256, 259; Qaddish titkabbal, 256; Qaddish yatom, 256; Ra’u banim, 255, 259, 260; Shema‛ Yisrael, Shema‛, 254; Shir hamaʿalot essa ʿenay el he-harim, 256; Vayeḥi, pericope, 253; Ve-hu raḥum, 254; Yehi shem adonay mevorakh meʿatta veʿad ‘olam, 256; Yir’u ‛eineinu, 255 liturgical studies, 249–51: Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies, 249 liturgy, Jewish, Morocco, 245–68; description of a ‛Arvit service, 249–56; liturgical belonging, 258; liturgical dissemination, 251; liturgical education, 251; musicological analysis of the service,

256–60; para-liturgical Hebrew poetry, 248 Loeb, Isidore, secretary of AIU, 106 London, 361 L’orchestre des aveugles, The Blind Orchestra, film, 194 Lorcin, Patricia, ethnographer, 121 Lucena, 20 lullabies, 7 Lyautey, General Louis Hubert, first Resident-General, 75, 119–21, 123, 128; Lyautey’s Berber Policy, 120 Madrid Conference of 1880, 49; Madrid Convention, 53–54 Maghreb, 3 Maḥya/Maḥia, alcoholic beverage, 389, 404–405 Maimonides, Moses, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam, 5, 20, 172, 318–19, 367; his Iggeret ha-Shemad, 5; his sojourn in Morocco, 20 Majorca, 20–21 the Makhzan, Makhzan government, 40, 44–48, 52, 54, 56–59, 75, 80, 82, 84–86, 92, 94; and Dhimmah, 76; French counselor of makhzan affairs, 57; Makhzan courts, 55–56, 76; Makhzan Pashas, Caids, and Qadis, 80; Makhzan properties, 50; Makhzen and French rulers, 82, 85, 86; Makhzan. Sharifian dahirs, 52; and the sultan, 80 Malaga, 22, 33 Malḥun, 9, 205, 247; corpora of qaṣāˀid, sing. qaṣīda, 9; Judeo-Arabic qaṣāˀid, 9; Qasidat Agadir, 194; Qsidas, 205 Malka, Rabbi Moshe, dayyan, 303–305 Malka, Victor, journalist, 191–93 Maman, Rabbi Yehoshua, 303 Mammeri, Sidi Mohammed, Sultan’s secretary, 79 Mansano, Eliahu, Rabbi, 271n11 Manuel I, king, D., 143–46, 148

Index

Maqam, musical mode, 251 Marglin, Jessica, scholar, 45 Marinid dynasty, 5, 9; their politics of tolerance, 5 Marmol, Luis Carvajal, 32–33 Marocains pluriels, association, 194 Marocanité, Moroccaness, 190, 192–96, 198, 208, 258; ‘liturgical Morocanness’, 261 Marrakech, 4, 6, 8, 42, 48, 50, 51, 56–58, 77, 84, 106, 112, 113, 120–22, 128–32, 146, 150, 173, 206, 257, 259, 260, 270, 384; Jews of Marrakech, 58 Massacre of Jews in Meknes, 271n11 Mauchamp, Émile, doctor, 121, 129–30, 132, 173 Mawlay Abd al-Aziz, sultan, 51, 57–59 Mawlay Abd al-Hafiz, 51–52, 57–58 Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman, 42–43, 45, 426, 428 Mawlay Ahmad Shaykh, Sharif of Suz, 147 Mawlay Hassan I, Sultan, 45–51, 57, 59; petition of the Jews of Essaouira about housing, 50 Mawlid, birth of the Prophet Muhammad, 81 Mazagan [El-Jadida], 27, 128 Medini, R. Chaim Chizkiya, Ḥacham, 362–64 the Mediterranean, 2, 16, 176, 358, 370 Meetings, Jewish, during the Second World War: customary gift, 79; first meeting in October 1940, 77–80; decisive audience of late September 1941, 78; false sultan’s supportive declaration, 81; meeting that did not take place, 80–83; inconsistencies in the described event, 81–82; meetings of spring and summer 1942, 78; meetings with the sultan after sacrifices, 86–90; meetings with the sultan in Fez and Meknes, July 1941, 85; meeting with Jews of Rabat,

479

August 1941, 86–87; meeting with the Jews of Fes, 87–88; promise of the sultan to protect Jewish assets, 88; second meeting with the Jews of Rabat, 88; with the sultan, 74–76, 78–85 Megorashim, 6, 21, 370; émigrés from Portugal, 345; their settlement and initial suffering in Fez, 22–28, 341– 42; Takkanot of Megorashim in Fes, 343–46, 370 Megorashim departure from Spain and arrival to Morocco, 22–28; calculations of local authorities about permission agreement, 26–27; despair of many refugees who returned to Spain and converted, 30; elite Sephardic families settled in Morocco, 23; estimations of their numbers, 22; their faith in imminent redemption, 24; first harsh conditions of the settlement in Fez, 28; inhabitants of Fez refusal to allow entry of refugees, 25; organization of departures, 23; payment of multiple bribes to local tribes, 23, 25–26; points of departure, 22; properties and assets left by the refugees, 24–25; scenes of departure, 22–23; settlement in Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Morocco, 27; some 30,000 refugees departed for Morocco, 25; tragic arrival in North Africa, 23–24; the tragic events of Placencia, 22 Megorashim integration in Moroccan Jewish life in Fez, 28–31; continued arrival of conversos to Morocco in XVIth century, 30; places and conditions of settlement, 30–33; their rapid rise to social, economic, and cultural power, 29–30; their skills and occupations, 29; transmission of their Sephardi cultural heritage, 28–29

480

Index

Meknes, 4, 6, 23, 33, 120, 257, 302, 319, 369, 384 Melech ḥasid, righteous king, 18 Melilla, 48 Mellaḥ, Mellaḥs, 16, 41, 107–14; continuing relations with Muslims, 4; first Mellaḥ in Fez, 4, 384–85; Mellaḥ of Marrakech, 385; rural Mellaḥs, 197; segregated residential area, 4 Mellaḥ of Taroudant, 399–413; cooperation with Muslims, 399–400, 403–404; Jewish professions, 403– 405; its spaces, 399–403 Mellaḥ society, 384–85 Memmi, Albert, writer, 169 Mémoire de Safi, association, 153 Memoranda, diplomatic: of 5.11.1940 sent to States Department, 78; of 17.10.1941sent by U.S. ConsulGeneral, 88; of 10/11/1941 sent by U.S. Chargé d’Affaires, 88–89 memory: shared memories, 1 Mendes, Leonor, 147 Menis, Mohammad, 153 Merchants, Jewish, 3 Meron, in Galilee, near Safed, 9, 319 Messas, Rabbi Shalom, chief Rabbi in Morocco and Jerusalem, 302–306; his keeping his relationship with Morocco, 304–305; his tolerance toward Christian signs, 302 Messas, Yosef, Rabbi, 165–66, 175, 300–303, 323; his ambivalent attitude toward modernity, 300–301; his statement that Christianity is not idolatrous, 301–302 Micouleau-Sicault, Marie-Claire, writer, 131 migration of Moroccan Jews to Eretz Israel, 321–24; dramatic increase of migration from Meknes, 324; the gap between sanctity and harsh conditions of life, 321–22; increase of migration during the XIXth

century to Holy Land, 323–24; internal migration in Morocco, 322; migration of widows, 325; migration to Algeria, Europe and South America, 322; migration to Holy Land as a family decision, 324–25; Saint veneration and Aliyah, 326–27; various motivations of the migration to Holy Land, 323. See also ‘Aliyah migration to sacred space, 315–18; migration of women, 317–18, 324–26; theoretical considerations, 316–18 Millet, August-Henri, writer, 121–22, 127–29 Mimétisme, 126 Mimran, David, 57 Mimuba festival, 405, 414–15 Minhag, local custom, 19, 250 Minḥat Yehudah, 28 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, French, 81; diplomatic archives, 75 Ministry of Information, French, 81–82 Mission civilisatrice, 119 mobile military medical units, 119 modernity, European, 166, 357, 359 Mogador, Foundation, 6, 8 Mogador/Essaouira, 76, 78, 78n18, 105, 109, 122, 128. See also Essaouira Mohammed V, King, 54–55, 192, 195. See also Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, Sultan Mohammed VI, King, 204, 395 Moḥammed ben ʻAbd-Allah, Sultan, 271, 271n14 Mohel, pl. mohalim, 358, 364, 366 Moredet, rebellious wife, 366–69, 373 Morenica, Judeo-Spanish song, 255 Moroccan Jewish Legal tradition: awareness of the needs and hardships of the community, 360; ‘Halakha without anxiety’, 359; intensive legislative activity, 359; its uniqueness, 358–59

Index

Morocco, 2–4, 16, 74, 79, 93, 320; anthem, 190; dual government, 82; economy subordinated to France, 79; ethnic pluralism as national ethos, 226; French Morocco, 79; political life, 84; Sherifian Morocco/Cherifian kingdom, 384, 419 Morocco as a shelter for Jewish refugees, 19–21; brief Hebrew printing industry in Fez, 21; greater mobility after the Muslim conquest of Spain, 20; Iberian Jews refugees in Morocco, 20; migration of Moroccan Jewish talents to Andalusia, 20; migration of Moroccan Jews to Granada after persecutions, 21; refuge in Spain and Morocco, 19–20; a sanctuary for refugees of 1492, 33; shelter for persecuted Jews from Algeria, Tunis and Tripoli, 30–31; under Umayyad Emirate and Caliphate, 20 Morocco’s Jews and Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, 59–61; institution of the throne festival in 1933 and its popular success, 59–60; the new national figure of the sultan during the 1930s, 59–61; veneration of Jews for the sultan reinforced after Vichy rule in Morocco, 60–61 Morocco’s Jews under colonial monarchy, 52–59; the accession of Mohammed ben Youssef to throne greeted by Jews, 54–55; calculations regarding renewal of old protective Dahirs, 56–57; cases of protective Dahirs accorded to Jews of Demnate and Ntifa, 57–59; categorical refusal to grant Jews French nationality, 53; the colonial monarchy as a symbolic legitimation of the colonial rule, 52; complaints of Makhzan and Muslims against the economic promotion of Jews, 56; Dahirs concerning Jews stamped by the sultan and

481

the Makhzan, 54; emphasis of the ‘perpetual allegiance’ of the Jews as subjects of the Sultan, 53–54; Jewish leaders protested in vain against the inequitable Makhzan jurisdiction, 55–56; maintaining the Jews as subjects of the sultan for limiting their aspirations, 52–53; predominance and power of the Glawi in southern Morocco, 57–59; preservation of Alawid monarchy as a necessity for the colonial rule, 52; separation of indigenous Muslims and Jews from European settlers, 52 Morokvaśic, Mirjana, scholar, 318 Moses, prophet, 5 Moses Montefiore, Sir, 45, 326; ‘Montefiore Dahir’, 45–46 Moshav, pl. moshavim, 218, 220–25, 227–28 Moulay Idriss II, founder of Fes, 87, 87n40 Moulay Ismaʿil/Ismael, Sultan, 6, 271n11, 385 Moulay Rachid, Sultan, 385 Moulay Sliman/Mawlay Sulayman, sultan (1792–1821), 42, 401; ordered in 1807 the construction of new Mellaḥs, 42 Moulay Youssef, Sultan, 40, 52, 54, 57, 59 Mouliéras, Auguste, geographer, 121 Muhammad, b. Husayn U Hashim, governor of Iligh, 47–48 Muhammad, prophet, 5, 8 Muhammad al-Nāṣir, Almohad Khalif, 4 Muhammad al-Sheich al-Mahdi, Sultan, 16, 148, 342 Muhammad Bargash, Foreign Minister, 49 Mulay ‘Abdallah, Sultan, 271n11, 271n14; his massacre of thousands of soldiers, 271n11 Mulay/Moulay Al-Yazid/Elyazid, sultan, 41–42, 109, 271, 297; his

482

Index

calamitous reign, 41–42, 271, 271n12, 297; pillaging communities of Tetuan, Fez, Rabat, Marrakech, 41–42; sack of the Mellah of Meknes, 272–73, 273n27 murder of Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, 305–306 museums: Israel Museum, 423; Jewish Museum, Casablanca, 199; National Museum, le Louvre, 423 music, Andalusi, 8, 204. See also music, classical Arabic, components music, classical Arabic, components, 7; Algerian nawba Dhil, 259; Arab, Ottoman melodies, 8; Inqilab, Algerian tradition, 259; mayāzin, sing. mayzān. mizan, 7; mizan quddam, 259; nawba Istihilal, 259; nawbāt, sing. nawba, 7; ṣanāˀiˤ, sing. ṣanˤa, 7; ṭubūˤ, sing. ṭab’, 8, 251; ṭurūq, sing. ṭarīq, 7, 247 music, Jewish, Morocco: chanson franco-arabe, 247; hierarchical scale of genres, 248–49; layers and repertoires, 201–203 musical diversity, Morocco, 206 musical ensembles: Israel Andalusian Orchestra, Ashdod, 247; Kinor David, chorale, Casablanca, 204–306; Piyut Ensemble, BenZvi Institute, 248; Tzfon-Ma‛arav Ensemble, University of Haifa, 24, 89 musical festivals: Festival des Andalousies Atlantiques, Essaouira, 205, 247; Sacred Music Festival, Fez, 204 music as shared spaces of Jews and Muslims, 245–46 music as sonic embodiment of identity, 197–203 music Research Centre, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 248 Muskeljudentum, 125 Mythes, life, 74

Nahmanides, Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman, the Ramban, 319 Nahon, Moïse, teacher, 167 Najara, Israel, Hebrew poet, 8, 253 Nantes, CADN archives, 75, 82 Naples, kingdom, 15 Navarre, Spanish kingdom, 15 neo-Lamarckism, 120, 126 Nesry, Carlos de, author, 195 New Mellaḥ of Meknes, 381–98; expansion through the New Mellaḥ, 386; Jewish society in the Mellaḥs, 384–85; move of prominent families, 386; the Old Mellaḥ of Meknes: its origins, 385; origins of the Moroccan Mellaḥs, 383–84 New Mellaḥ’s ethnological study: data collection and analysis, 388–89; discussion of the findings, 394–96; the memory of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, 389–92; methodology, 386–89; the preservation of Jewish heritage, 392–93; research instruments, 388; sample and sampling, 387 New Mellaḥ’s memories: family ambiguous memory of Jews, 382; memory of co-existence, 389; memory of two Jews converted to Islam, 390; memory of violence, 390–91; Muslim memory of the Jews in Meknes, 381–92; nostalgic memory, 382; unhappy memory, the departure of Jews, 391–92 New York, 246 Night Watch, painting of Rembrandt, 427 Nizri, Igal, scholar, 223–24 Noʿamim, sing. noʿam, supportive melody, 259 Nogues, General Charles, ResidentGeneral, 75, 82, 83, 92; close cooperation with the sultan, 78; cooperation with the sultan to prevent Aryanisation, 94; encouraged

Index

return to Dhimmah, 76; his hesitant allegiance to Vichy, 79, 80; interdependence with the sultan, 79–80; meeting of Nogues and sultan on 2nd dahir, 84; protected by the sultan, 79–81; removed by Giraud and De Gaulle, June 1943, 80 Nouvelles villes, new European quarters, 56; open to Jews and Muslims, 56; tensions about young Muslim women employed by Jews, 56; tensions between Muslims and Jews residing in Muslim quarters, 56 Ntifa of Foum Jemaâ, Jews of, 58–59 Nuno Fernandes de Ataíde, captain of Safi, 148 Ocean, Indian, 3; Atlantic, 6 oral poetry, women, 7; ˤRubiyat, 7 Oslo accords, 247, 305–306 Ottoman Empire, 16, 19, 21–23, 25, 28, 32, 43, 316 Otzar ha-Mikhtavim, 323 Ouaknine-Yekutieli, Orit, scholar, 223–24 Ouanzert, 227–28 Oufrane, 107–109; about fifty Jews were burned alive in 1792, 109 Oujda, 248 Ouled Ben Zmirou, saints, 143–61; their late veneration by Jews and Muslims, 148–53; their portuguese origin, 143–45; their process of mythologizing, 153–54; their role as ‘intermediaries’, 151–53; their sanctuary in Safi, 150–51; variations in their names, 150 Ovadia, Rabbi David, 302 pacification, 52 ‘Pact of Umar’, 40 Palace: close ties of Jews with the palace in Marrakech, 50–51; Jews presenting condolences at the palace in Fez, 54; Jews working in sultan’s

483

palace, 54–55, 60; royal palace as shelter in Fez, 51–52 Palagy, R. Chaim, great Rabbi of Izmir, 370 Palestine, 2; delegates from Eretz Israel (Palestine), 9 Paloma Elbaz, Vanessa, 9, 189–214, 250 Parienté, Isaac Moses, translator in Tangier, 421 Parks, Raymond, scholar, 124, 127 Parliament, Moroccan, 206 Pasha, Marrakech, 77 Paytanim, sing. paytan, 205 Pedaya, Haviva, scholar, 223, 224 peripheralization, 223–24 The periphery, 223–24 Persia, 175 Pétain, Philippe, Maréchal, 79 Philippe, Léon, French meteorologist, 106 Photo essay, 1, 439–63 Pinto, Abraham, businessman, 250 piracy in the Mediterranean, 16 Piyyutim, list: Lindodkha, yedid naʿalah, 253–54, 258; Tzur mishello akhalnu, 255 Piyyutim, liturgical poems, 7, 250–55, 259, 269–93, 296, 305–306; as constituent of Moroccan Jewish identity, 269 pluralism, ethnic, in Morocco, 226 popular music, Jewish, 189; distinct identity, 190; various repertoires, 189 population, Jewish: ancient Israelite, 2; feelings of Berbers, Arabs, Jews, French, 79; Jewish and Muslim, 82; Moroccan, 79; numbers, 1 Portugal, 143–44 Pouponneau, André, doctor, 122, 126– 27, 129 prayers, Jewish, 402, 405–406, 409–413 preservation of Jewish heritage by Muslims, its evolution: eradication of the Jewish identity of the New

484

Index

Mellaḥ, 393–94; new awareness of the Jewish heritage, 393; respect of Jewish religious spaces, 393 Propaganda, Nazi, 73, 80–82 Property, Jewish, 78 Prophet Muhammad, 40, 81. See also Mawlid, birth of the Prophet Muhammad protectorate, 40, 41, 46, 51–54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 73, 76, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126–32, 295–98; anti-Jewish policy, 73, 295; archives, 75, 82; Moroccan religious matters assigned to sultan, 84; new regulations concerning Jewish institutions, 297–303, 350–52; Treaty of Fez, March 30, 1912, 51. See also Colonial presence, French Provence, 15 Qabla, midwife, 121 qā‘id, Fr. caïd, governor, 47 Rabat, 30, 42, 54, 76–78, 86–89, 92, 204, 298, 351, 383, 395 Rabat-Salé, 257 Rabbi Hanina, 315 Rabbi Hayim Messas, dayyan, 327 Rabbi Joseph Boussidan, saint, 393 Rabbi Meir Ba‛al Ha-Nes, saint, 327–28 Rabbi Moïse Cohen, saint, 173 Rabbinical class, 11 Rabbinical Council, or Assembly, 350– 52, 360, 371 Rabbi Raphael Cohen, saint, 173 Rabbi Refael ben Dva”sh and his legal activism, 357–77; his career, 357; his links with the Moroccan Jewish tradition, 357 Rabbi Refael’s approaches to the law of the Rebellious Wife, 366–70 Rabbi Refael’s approaches to the matters of betrothal and marriage, 370–72; preventing levirate marriage like Moroccan Rabbis, 369–71

Rabbi Refael’s topics dealt with: anticipating the Moroccan tradition in banning sucking with mouth, 365–66; attitude toward Ashkenazi scholars, 361–63; attitude toward Sephardi Scholars, 363–65; betrothal and marriage, 358; the rebellious wife, 358; sucking the blood during the circumcision rite, 358, 360–66 Rabbi Shimˤon Bar Yohay, saint, 9, 319, 327, 328 Rabbi Yehuda Bar-Ilay, 299 Rachel (Élisa Rachel Félix), famous French actress, 428 Rahala, 110 Ra’is al-yahud, nagid, head of the Jews, 111 Raïs or sheikh, chief of Aḥwash ceremony, 219 Rashba, 345 Raymonde El Bidaouia, singer, 207 Raynaud, Lucien, writer, 121–22, 127–28 Redemption hope, 11 Refki, Suham, singer, 255 the Reform movement, 359, 361 refuge of Megorashim in Morocco, 16– 19; anarchic conditions, 19; biased European informants, 17; communal ordinances, takkanot, 18–19; the complex story of the refuge, 16; contradictions and ambiguities, 19; crypto-Jews, 16; Jewish chronicles, 17–18; Jewish sources, 17–18; Muslim attitudes toward refugees, 18; number of refugees, 16–17; sources on the refuge, 17–19 Regnault, Eugène, French diplomat, 40 Reinette l’Oranaise, singer, 259 relationship between Jews and Muslims, 18–19; the dual ethos, 295; inferiority and humiliation, 295; Jewish-Muslim interdependence, 231; symbiosis and cooperation, 295

Index

Remlinger, Pierre, head of Institut Pasteur of Morocco, 122–23 Residence-General, French, 73–104, 121, 130–31; residence/residency, 77, 82, 121, 128 Resident-General, 73–102, 119 Return to the Dead, 143, 145 Revah, Isaac, paytan, 250 Revival, cultural, 225 Reyad, new name of the New Mellaḥ in Meknes, 392, 395 rituals, para-liturgical, 5 Rivet, Daniel, scholar, 52 Rome, revolts against, 2 Rosen, Lawrence, 198 Rothschild, Baron Robert de, Paris, 128 Royal Alliance, 16n1, 18n11, 39–69 Royal Alliance and imperialism, 41–52; ambivalent attitude of Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman, 42–43; restored by Mawlay Sulaiman, 42; Royal Alliance transgressed by Mawlay al-Yazid, 41–42 Royer, Mme. Clémence, translator, 126 Rqaqa, 389 Russel, H. Earle, US Consul-General, Casablanca, 85 Rute, Moisés, 146 Rute, Rabbi Abraão, 144, 145 Saadian Sharifs/Sheriffs, Saadis, 16, 149, 385 Saba‛, Abraham, rabbinical scholar, 21 Sabbah, Dina, scholar, 249 Sack, Robert, scholar, 317 sacred space, 315, 317, 321–24; creation of holy sites, 321–24; graves of Shadarim in Morocco, 321; holy gravesites in Galilee and southern Morocco, 321 sacrifice of bulls, 86–92; agreement of the sultan to sacrifices, 86–87; first sacrifice, Rabat, august 1941, 86; management and significance,

485

86; sacrifice in Fès, September 1st, in 4 sites, 87; second sacrifice in Fès, 88. See also The ˤĀr tradition, subordination ritual Safed, 8, 315, 319, 328 Safi, 27, 144–61; privileges under King Manuel I, 144–45 the Sahara desert, 194, 196 Saharan Jews, 105–18; boys’ and girls’ education, 112–13; changes under colonial rule, 113–14; cohesive communal life, 112–13; constant intra-regional mobility, 107–109; family life and survival, 111–12; family networks, 108; housing, 110; Jewish Mellahs in the Anti-Atlas, 109–11; Rabbinical families, 108; trading networks, 105–107; victims of political instability, 109; women and widows, 111–12 Saints, veneration of, 9–10, 153, 173 Salant, R. Shmuel, head of the Mithnagdim, 363 Salé, 30, 42, 298 Salonica, 345 Sami/Samy El Maghribi, 190, 196, 250 Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer, Santa Cruz de Aguer, Agadir, 27, 144, 147 Sarraf brothers, Messaoud and Mardochée, 105, 110; descendants of Saharan Jewish families, 105; Sarraf family, 105, 111 Scandinavians, 121 Schina/Skhina, sabbath food, 389, 406 Schroeter, Daniel J., 3, 39–69, 168, 174, 198, 208, 245–46 Schuyler, Philip, ethnomusicologist, 219, 225, 230 Sdei Ḥemed, Halakhic encyclopedia, 363, 365 Sefiani, Abdeslam, musician, 204 Sefrou, 33, 169, 302 Segovia, 22 Segulot u-refu’ot, 164 Sephardi communities, 357, 358

486

Index

Sephardim, Spanish Jews, in Morocco, 16; commercial elite, 17; Sephardic Jews, 125; translators, diplomatic intercessors, 17. See also Megorashim Serero, Rabbi Matitya, dayyan, Fez, 350 Seroussi, Edwin, 3, 7–9, 245–68 Serulla, Abraham, translator in Tangier, 421 settlement in Morocco, Jewish: diverse, 3; oldest settlement, 2 sexual perversions, 121 Sfenj, doughnuts, 382, 389, 406 Shabtai Zvi, false Messiah, 409 the Shahada, Muslim profession of faith, 4 Shariˤa Law, 75–76; Dhimmah rules, 75 Shawat, Rabbi Fradgi, Hebrew poet, 255 Sheḥarḥoret, Israeli song, 255 Sheḥitah, 19; polemical dispute between Megorashim and Toshavim, 19 Sheikhs, Berber tribal, 3, 6 Shevet Yehudah, 18 Shewwafa, 169 Shir Yedidot, para-liturgical anthology, 8, 253, 255 Shleuḥ, pl. Shleuḥim, 222, 225 Shulḥan ˤAruch, 367–68, 373 Si Aïssa Ben Omar, qa’id, 173 Sicault, Georges, Director of Public Health in Morocco, 131 Sicsu, Isaac, translator in Tangier, 421 Sicsu, Yahia, translator in Tangier, 421 Sidi Ettayeb Biaz, customs officer, 426 Sidi ˤIsha u-Sliman, disputed saint, 10 Sidi Mohammed ben Abou, Commander of the Tangier cavalry, 425 Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, Sultan, 54, 56, 59–61, 73–104; ambivalence of his positions, 75; ‘anti-Nazi fighter’, ‘savior of Jews’, 73; close cooperation with Resident-General, 75, 78; commitment to continue ancestral protection, 77; empathetic position to Morocco’s Jews, 95;

false subversive statements of the sultan, 83; their foundation, 83; humane actions glorification, 74; memorial stone, 74; myths surrounding his character, 73–74; positions about Vichy’s dahirs, 73; reminding Dhimmah duties, 77; ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, 74, 74n6; role in attenuation of antiJewish regulations, 85–92; role in preventing expropriation, 76, 93–95; ‘sole responsible authority in French Zone’, 79; supportive declarations, 77; venerated as protector of Jews during World War II, 60–61 Sidi Muhammad ben ‘Abd al-Rahman (Muhammad IV), 42, 45 Sidi Qassem, 6 Jews from Meknes were lynched there, 390 Sienna, Noam, 9, 163–88 Sijilmassa, 108 Silver, Chris, scholar, 198 Ṣla, Mellaḥ synagogue, 249 Slat El Fassiyin, 204 society, Moroccan, foundations, 2 Sofer, R. Moshe (Chatam Sofer), 361 Sojourn in Meknes and its artistic results, 427–30 ‘Solar Model System’, 394, 394n10 Solika Hatchwell, decapitated martyr, 10 Sor, village of the Anti-Atlas, 218, 230–31 Sound Archives, the National Library of Israel, 248 soundscape, Jewish, 198, 203–208 Sous River, 399, 405, 413 Sous valley, 47, 107–108 Spain, 2, 4, 6, 15, 19–20, 195; Spain’s war against Morocco, 42; Visigothic Spain, 20 Spanish, 201 Star of David, yellow, 74, 74nn8–9 Stillman, Norman (Noam), scholar, 169 Suissa, Albert, singer, 194

Index

Sultanate, 296 Sultan/king: benevolent king, 41; image of protective sultan, 52, 55, 56; solicitous of the needs of poor Jews, 59 Sumer, 175 superstitions, 166–68 synagogues, 4–5 syncretism, Muslim-Jewish, 166–68 Syria, 316 Tabelbelt, 107 Tafilelt, Tafilalet, 6, 107, 108, 270, 328, 385 Tagadirt, near Akka, 108, 110, 111 Tahala, 108 Takkana of Choice in Meknes, 339, 348–50; its adoption with amendment by the Rabbis of Fez in 1856, 349–50; instituted by Rabbi Raphael Berdugo to preserve the husband rights after wife’s death, 348–49; the marriage contract’s sum or the half of the estate attributed to wife’s heirs, 348–49; re-instituted by R. R. Berdugo in Yom kippur of 1821, 349 Takkanot concerning inheritance of wives and daughters, 339–56; inheritance of widow ameliorated by the sages, 339–40; prenuptial agreements on wives accepted, 340; previous Takkanot in France and Germany, 341; Takkanot Fez, 1494c.1750, contents, 18–19, 341–42; Toledo Takkana, 341 Takkanot of Fes concerning inheritance, 1494, 343–46; changes due to émigrés from Portugal with egalitarian tradition, 344–46; changes favorable to widows in second Takkana, 1545, 344; first Takkana of 1494 influenced by Toledo and Algeria Takkanot, 343; frequent deaths of young brides at

487

their delivery, 348; the opposition of R. Raphael Berdugo to the second Takkana of Fez, 346–48 Takkanot of Rabbinical Council, XXth century, 350–52; intensive institution of Takkanot in Morocco unique in Jewish world, 352; new takkanot concerning inheritance reducing previous wife’s rights, 351–52; unifying communal traditions and facing modernity, 350–51 Takkanot shu”m in Medieval Germany, 341, 341n6 Talmud, 163–64 Tamazight, Berber language, 7 Tamdoult, 108 Tamentit, 107 Tangier, 6, 17, 92, 168, 249, 250, 257, 328, 419–27, 430, 431, 433–36; a small and boring city in 1832, 420 Taoourirt, near Akka, 108 Taroudant, 7, 108, 109, 111, 113, 399–418 Tasat, Ramon Alberto, scholar, 249 Tashelḥit, 218–19, 223 Tata, 110 Tavim, José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva, 143–61 Taznakht, 224–25 Tednest, 29, 32 Tefza, 29 Telouet (Telwat), 57 Temples, First and Second, destruction, 2 Tertis, Alexander, Chief Mohel of London, 361, 363–64 Tetouan, Tetuan, 6, 30, 42, 43, 257, 270, 298, 328, 422; ‘Little Jerusalem’, 322 Thierry, Henri, military doctor, 112 Thomas, Samuel R., scholar, 250, 260–61 Throne festival, 76; Fête du Trône, 1941, 81; in lieu of Festival of Mawlid, May 1941, 81

488

Index

Tiberias, 316, 319, 320, 328; ‘Meknès of the Land of Israel’, 323 Tifnout River, valley, 222–24, 226, 228, 230 Timbuktu, 105, 111 time, Jewish, ceremonies and rituals, 406–13; binary division, 406; Chanukah, 406; Passover, Pessaḥ, 269, 407–408; Purim, 406–407; rain procession of children, 412–13; Rosh Hashana, 259, 409–10; Sabbath, 406; Seliḥot, 409; Shavuˤot, 408; Sukkot, 269, 411–12; Tishˤa be-ˀAv, 194, 194n24, 408–409; Tiznit, 48; Tu Bi-Shvat, 406–407; Yom Kippur, 173, 410–11 Tindouf, 105 Tinghir, 113 Tintazart, 110–11 Tirosh, moshav, 220, 222, 224, 227 Tissint, 111 Tizrarin, genre of Berber poetry, 231 Tlemcen, 19, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33 Toˤafot Re’em, 299 Toledano, Haim, communal leader, Meknes, 393 Toledano, Ralph, 151 Toledano, R. Yaakov, dayyan and writer, 360 Torah, 164 Toshavim, indigenous Jews, 6, 18, 21 Touat, 105, 107 Toubib, 121, 127 Touraine, René, reporter, 81 traditions: Arabic and Berber, 2; Popular musical, 7 Tripolitania, 5 Tsaddik, tzaddik, pl. Tsaddikim, tzaddikim, saint, 206, 247, 319, 327 Tuan, Yi-Fu, geographer, 317 The Tuareg, 107 Ṭubū‛, musical modes, 251, 259; ṭabˤ Rasd Dhil, 253 Tujjār al-sulṭān, 44 Tunis, 23, 25, 31, 124

Tunisia, 5, 93, 320, 372 Turmoil, political, 40, 51 Tzfon-Maˤarav, ensemble, 248, 248n14 Ughaniyyah, Egyptian song, 247 ‘Ulama, 42; ˤUlamа̄ˀ [Oulema/Ulama] Council, 84 ˤUmar ibn al-Khattab, Caliph, 40, 84 Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba, 20 uncovering of Muslim scenes, 430–31 United States, 1, 249 Usque, Samuel, chronicler, 17 US States Department: archives, 75 Vallat, Xavier, 92–93; his declaration to the Jews of Fes, 92 Vanikoff, Maurice: Maurice Vanikoff private collection, 75 Vassel, Eusèbe, scholar, 169 Venice, 22 Vichy government, 79, 85, 86; antisemitic laws, 86; decrees on the status of Jews, 82, 83; pressured by Nazi Germany, 83; purging Vichy government collaborators, 80 Vienna, 361 Vital, Haim, kabbalist, 257 Vittoria, 22 Voinot, Louis, scholar, 149–50, 152 Wahran, 248, 258 Warsaw, 364 Washington D. C., 75, 78 Wattasid dynasty, 16, 19; ruler in Fez, 18 Wazana, Rabbi Yaˤaqov, 163, 170–72, 174; his career as healer, 170–72 Weisgerber, Felix, French doctor, 127 Westermarck, Edvard, anthropologist, 175 Westreich, Elimelech, 3, 4, 11, 357–77 Widower, 347, 349 Widowhood, 325, 340 Widows, 111, 280, 288, 326, 339–40, 343–46, 350–52, 359–60, 369–70

Index

Wizārat al-shikāyāt, Ministry of Complaints, 46 Wizman, Victor, singer, 193 women, alcohol, 122; assault, 25–26, 51; clothing, 112, 434–35, 445; dance, 219, 227, 229, 442–43; festivals, 411, 412, 423, 428; Halakhah, 108, 360, 367; inheritance, 339–40, 380, 382; Jews and Muslims, 10, 56, 77, 82, 85, 121, 231, 302, 414, 430; literacy, 113, 201, 428; marriage, 108, 111; migration, 318, 322, 324–27, 460; poetry, 277–278, 416–17; saints and sorcery, 152–53, 165, 168, 170–71, 174, 321; singing, 24, 206–207; status, 110–11, 127–28, 300, 316, 369, 371, 408, 421, 431, 436; yearning for Zion, 408–409 World War, Second, 73–102 Yad Vashem, 74 Yaḥas Fès, 18

489

Yaˤqūb al-Manṣūr, Almohad Khalif, 4 Yehuda Ḥallewa, Kabbalist, 172 Yehuda Jabali, saint, 10 Yeshivot, sing. yeshiva, 112 Yosef, Ovadia, Rabbi, 258 Yosef Karo, R., author of Beit Yosef, 319 Yossef ben Yehuda ibn ˤAqnīn, philosopher, 5 Zacuto, Abraham, chronicler, 17, 22 Zafrani, Haim, scholar, 73, 73n4, 78n19, 81n2 Ẓahīr, Dahir, 40 Zamane, magazine, 195, 197, 204 Zionism, 234, 295, 400–401; Zionist ‘New Jew’, 125; Zionist rhetoric, 221–22 Ziz river, valley, 108, 270 Zohar, 164, 319, 370 Zohar, Zvi, scholar, 357–58 Zohra El Fassia, singer, 204 ‘Zuagga’, [zwāga], ceremony of imploring sacrifice, 87

About the Contributors

Moche Amar is rabbi and associate professor at Ashkelon Academic College, and executive director of Orot Institute of Maghrebi Jewry. Maurice Arama is former director of the School of Fine Arts, Casablanca, and is a recognized specialist of Delacroix in Morocco. His latest work is Le Maroc, le royaume des peintres (2018). Drora Arussy is director of the American Sephardi Federation Institute of Jewish Experience. Michal Ben Ya'akov is a retired associate professor and head of the history department at the Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem. David Moshe Biton is head of Jewish Studies Department at Ono Academic College and head of the Kulna program in Yeruḥam, Israel. Aomar Boum is associate professor at UCLA in anthropology. His current book project, in association with Daniel J. Schroeter, is Morocco and Holocaust: The Story of Mohammed V Saving Jews during WWII, 1940–2019. Joseph Chetrit is professor emeritus of socio-pragmatics, French linguistics, and Judeo-Arabic linguistics at the University of Haifa. Before his retirement, he was dean of humanities and vice rector of the University of Haifa. His current book project is Prolegomenon to the Study of Moroccan Jewry and Its Poetry: Poetic, Linguistic, Socio-Cultural and Historical Studies. Ahmed Chouari is professor at the School of Arts and Humanities, Moulay Ismail University of Meknes, Morocco. 491

492

About the Contributors

André E. Elbaz is professor of French at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and author of studies on Jewish literature and history in France, North America, and Morocco. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is research associate at Cambridge University, UK. She is also director of KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive. Jane S. Gerber is professor emerita of history and founder and director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Jewish Society in Fez (E. J. Brill); The Jews of Spain (Simon and Schuster); and Cities of Splendor in the Shaping of Sephardi History (Littman Library and Liverpool University). She is past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Studies in 1992. Jonathan G. Katz is professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic history at Oregon State University. Sarah Frances Levin is lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project is on Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Daniel J. Schroeter is professor of History at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His current book project, in association with Aomar Boum, is Morocco and Holocaust: The Story of Mohammed V Saving Jews during WWII, 1940–2019. Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre professor of musicology and director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent book is Sound Ruins of Modernity (2019). Noam Sienna is a historian of the Sephardi world. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2020. José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim is senior researcher and professor at the Centre for History, FLUL, Lisbon University. Elimelech Westreich is professor emeritus of law at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.