The only woman in the room that Friday night, I peered through the lace mechitza (partition) to see, hear, and absorb the fast–paced prayer chanting of the ten Moroccan men before me. In the middle of the service, the prayers suddenly began to compete with another intensely familiar sound that blared into the room through the windows. The Hebrew chants grew louder as the men tried to overcome the inescapable, melodic call to mosque for Muslims. The Arabic and Hebrew collided—the poignant force of ten devoted, resilient voices raised in unison. The moment lingered in my mind after the call to prayer had ended, as I began to consider the historical significance of such a clashing of sounds.
A moment later, I again peered through the curtain to examine why a man was standing as the rabbi began to speak. Apparently Josh—a fellow study abroad student and American Jew who had agreed to come with me, a curious American non–Jew—was being scolded during the service. He too had been deeply moved by the competing cadences and had thoughtlessly taken his notebook out to capture the experience. Though a religion major who knew that writing is prohibited on the Sabbath, especially in an Orthodox synagogue, Josh later told me that he couldn’t help himself. He received a stern rebuke. After the 2003 Casablanca bombings, the Jewish communities of Morocco had become deeply suspicious of outsiders coming to their services.
Those bombings, carried out by fourteen Islamic extremists, were indeed cause for suspicion. They targeted a Jewish cemetery, a Jewish community center, and an Italian restaurant owned by a Jewish family, as well as the Belgian consulate and a hotel. Forty people died.
The bombings provoked feelings of insecurity and distrust that had been resisted for so many years by the remaining portion of a rapidly dwindling Moroccan Jewish population. The ten men at synagogue that Friday night represented a handful of the estimated 3,000– 5,000 Moroccan Jews living in Morocco today. In 1947, the population was 270,000. To examine why an Arab country that had once welcomed Jews when others forced them out had undergone such a reversal in just 60 years, I took a train to Casablanca to visit the only Jewish museum in the Arab world.
The Moroccan Jewish Museum, a project of the Moroccan Foundation of Cultural Jewish Heritage, sits on the outskirts of Casablanca in a small, unguarded building. It aims to highlight 2,000 years of Jewish history through a variety of displays: traditional Jewish clothing, marriage gowns, and jewelry from the Moroccan cities of Fes and Essaouira; explanations of how Jewish roles transformed over centuries, from serving as mediators between Arab and Berber tribes to operating as jewelers and merchants; and newspapers of the Moroccan–Jewish community written in Hebrew but with Arabic words/script. Exhibits of photographs of Moroccan Jews from the 1960s and of the mellahs, or Jewish quarters, that are found in almost every Moroccan town are particularly prominent in the museum. Most significantly, Essaouira, one among many Moroccan cities with a large presence of Jews for some time, enjoyed a 50% Jewish population before 1948, a statistic proudly delivered to me many times by Moroccans throughout my semester abroad. Yet the museum neglected two obvious pieces of the community’s puzzling history: Israel and emigration. As a 2007 article in the Jewish newspaper The Forward noted, the Jewish population of Morocco decreased by 98% in half a century. Most émigrés in the early 1950s went to Israel. The Casablanca museum does not address the issue. Indeed, its avoidance of Zionism and Jewish emigration raises questions about whether the Moroccan Foundation of Cultural Jewish Heritage is truly engaging with and accurately preserving Moroccan Jewish history.
Part of the museum’s silence is political. Any discussion in an Arab nation of Zionism and Jewish emigration to Israel after 1948 inevitably leads to contentious debate regarding Palestinian rights. But excising Zionism from Moroccan Jewish history ignores both the significant struggle of Jews to reconcile their nationalism with love and pride for Morocco and millennia of Jewish and Moroccan cultural integration.
According to the General Secretary of the Foundation, Simon Levy, the museum’s avoidance of Zionism and Jewish emigration is in fact a way of reclaiming history. Levy told The Forward that Israel “is a catastrophic aspect of the last century of Judaism, because now [Jews] are fabricating a past in the Holy Land.” He added that “In the Holy Land, you have Jerusalem, but during the past fifteen centuries there was nothing...But here in Morocco, every town has a mellah.” In the interview I conducted with Levy he refused to discuss Israel at all.
Other venues, however, were more willing to address it. Soon after my arrival in February, a movie about Jewish emigration was released as the last in a three–film series on Moroccan Jewish history. Directed by Muhammad Ismail, the movie mixes Arabic and French and was entitled Adieu Mres (Farewell Mothers).
Set in 1960 in Casablanca, the movie is a mélange of stories of Jewish families and their reasons for immigrating to Israel. In one of the over–dramatized stories, a young Jewish Moroccan girl falls in love with a Muslim Moroccan boy, gets pregnant, and considers conversion, sending her mother into depression. The mother then convinces her daughter to go to Israel to hide her pregnancy. In another vignette, a man torn between his Moroccan roots and his duty to Israel leaves his family for the Holy Land, planning for his wife and children to rejoin him later.
The movie suggests that the Moroccan Jews leaving for Israel needed to be convinced— they did not go eagerly. The persuasion comes from the recruiter, a Zionist sent from Israel to pressure Moroccan Jews to leave their homes for a higher cause. The ship the Jewish characters take to Israel, the Pisces, is based upon a real ship that tragically sank in 1961 while transporting Jews to Israel. The movie ends with its fall into the ocean, leaving the audience with a sense of the Moroccan Jewish community’s skepticism toward Zionism. At the end, the recruiter stands defiantly at the synagogue and proclaims that the loss of loved ones on that ship will not stifle the flow of emigration.
Yet the movie tells only a partial tale. It makes only one reference to anti–Semitism, when a character says, “It’s not the same here anymore” with regards to Jewish–Arab relations. And the film makes no mention of how Arab nationalism made Moroccan Jews feel unwelcome after the creation of Israel. I started asking Moroccan friends what they had been taught about why 90,000 Jews left in the early 1950s and another 70,000 left in the 1960s. Their universal answer: Zionist recruitment.
Then, I heard a version of the story I had neither read nor heard before. A friend of mine began to tell me that when King Hassan II took power in 1961, he struck a deal with the Zionist Jewish Agency to allow mass emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel after it had been outlawed in 1956 by Hassan’s father, Muhammad V. This theory of collusion between a corrupt king and Zionist agents reveals the seductive potency of conspiracy in Moroccan society regarding the fate of its former Jewish residents.
Such reliance upon conspiracy masks Moroccan responsibility for the Jewish community’s demise and suggests an unwillingness to confront history with honesty. Even Moroccan Jews to whom I spoke refused to blame Morocco or Moroccans for the mass exodus of their fellow Jews. Instead, they typically placed blame upon the colonial French Protectorate, which exploited ethnic and religious tensions, or mentioned the rumored deal struck between the Zionists and King Hassan II. Though the lament over losing the Jewish community seems sincere among Jewish and non–Jewish Moroccans, their responses minimize the historical impact of anti–Semitism and the repercussions of pan–Arab nationalism. Moroccans tread a thin line between taking pride in their relative tolerance of Jews and ignoring the reality that Morocco never constituted a Muslim–Jewish paradise.
Levy, of the Foundation of Moroccan Cultural Jewish Heritage, wrote in a handout sold at the Casablanca museum that “In 1961–92, when Hassan II came to power, emigration figures soared.” According to him, “the Moroccan government authorized the Jewish Agency to organize large–scale migration.” The Zionism that King Muhammad V had prohibited, probably in an attempt to join his Arab neighbors in boycotting Israel (and maybe to keep the Jews he had called “my children” in 1941), was permitted in the early 1960s by his son, Hassan II. Mr. Levy explained that there were certainly other reasons for the rapid decrease in the population, but that Hassan II allowing “the Jewish Agency to take 100,000 Jews to Israel” in exchange for some unidentified incentive (perhaps money) was a definite source for mass emigration in the 1960s.
Levy also pointed to poverty and lack of economic opportunity to explain the emigration. When the French made Morocco a protectorate in 1912, Moroccan Jews were forced back into ghettos and out of political positions and taught by French Jews to speak only French. Levy maintained that this mandatory separation from their Moroccan heritage was “not what Moroccan Jews wanted” and that it created a divide between Jews and Muslims in Morocco that had not existed before. Indeed, despite bigotry and the ever–looming threat of persecution, Morocco’s Jews had governed themselves in their quarters and traditionally held important roles as merchants in Moroccan society. But after the French left in 1956, the “community’s traditional small trade and peddling circuits” became “obsolete,” driving many Moroccan Jews to search for other economic options, often in Israel.
But Levy admitted that this common anti–colonial refrain did not constitute the whole story. Tensions have simmered between Moroccan Jews and Muslims since the 1400s. Though they often held important positions in Moroccan society, Jews were treated like second–class citizens. In fact, Moroccan Jews did not enjoy full citizenship until Muhammad V granted it after Morocco declared independence from the French.
Levy reluctantly acknowledged that, as is the case throughout the Middle East, Morocco has experienced its share of anti–Semitism in various demonstrations of Arab nationalism and Islamism. He added that these incidents played a part in the community’s mass immigration to Israel, and more recently, to France and the United States. The two worst expulsions of Jews occurred during Israel’s War of Independence and the 1967 Six–Day War. A month after Israel declared its statehood in 1948, violent riots broke out in Oujda and Djerada, two Moroccan cities with high Jewish populations. The pogroms killed 44 Jews and injured many others, souring the reintegration that had begun with Jewish involvement in the Moroccan independence movement. The damage had been done: 90,000 Moroccan Jews left for Israel between 1948 and 1956, and thousands per month left thereafter. King Muhammad V later recognized Jewish involvement in the nationalist movement and granted Jews full Moroccan citizenship, alleviating some of the growing skepticism in Jewish communities after the riots.
The King’s gesture could not undo the harm caused by the Six–Day War and the surge in Arab nationalism surrounding it. Levy wrote in the museum pamphlet, “the Six–Day War caused 40,000 Jews to leave.” Before 1967 there were still 70,000 Jews in Morocco, but the “boycotts, press campaigns, and assassinations” that resulted from the war served as the irrevocable break. “The harm had been done,” Levy noted. “People who had never thought of leaving, decided to emigrate.” In his view, Moroccan Jews felt “as if their community would slowly be annihilated.” The Sahara Liberation Movement— a territorial dispute in the mid 1970s which began after the Spanish withdrew their colonial claim from the Western Sahara and put most of it under Moroccan control— indicated the strength of Moroccan Jews’ nationalist identity. Levy contends that the Jewish community’s involvement in opposing the Western Sahara separatist group, the Polisario, catalyzed their return to “their rightful place as Moroccan citizens, participating in political life, in the elections,” despite the population’s dwindling numbers.
Today, the narratives that mark the relationship between Moroccans and Moroccan Jews are more uplifting. Though the Palestinian Intifada and the rise of Al–Qaeda increased tensions, Moroccans have demonstrated solidarity with the country’s Jews and have joined forces against terrorism. After the 2003 Casablanca bombings, Muhammad VI, the current king, visited each of the targeted Jewish sites, and was greeted by large, cheering crowds of Jewish and Muslim Moroccans. Moroccans then launched a campaign against Islamic extremism called Touche pas á mon pays (Don’t touch my country). The campaign’s symbol—a red hand with white writing inside in French and Arabic, representing Moroccan unity against Muslim extremists who import the Gulf’s fundamentalism—adorns schools and buildings nationwide. The hand is in the shape of a khamsa (literally meaning “five”) —a symbolic hand prominent in both Jewish and Muslim customs that wards off evil. In addition, international media began to discuss the nomination of Muhammad V to Yad Vashem’s (the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, created by the Israeli government in 1953) Righteous Among the Nations, which recognizes non–Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews. The King successfully resisted French Vichy attempts to send Moroccan Jews to concentration camps in 1941, and, if chosen, he would be the first Arab ever to receive the honor.
 The red hand symbol of the anti–terrorism campaign that began after the 2003 Casablanca bombings reads, “Don’t touch my country,” in French and Arabic and represents the unity of all Moroccans against terrorism. The shape of the hand, a hamza, is a common symbol in both Jewish and Muslim traditions. |
Beyond the institutional recognition of Moroccan Jews, I witnessed Moroccan youth personally expressing their appreciation for their nation’s Jewish history and its impact on modern Morocco. My study abroad professor, Said Graiouid, handed us a few essays written by his Moroccan university English–language students, entitled “Who is a Moroccan?” The answers all envisioned Morocco as a type of melting pot in which being Moroccan means recognizing Jewish Moroccans and their contribution to the country’s identity. Also, in a survey I gave Moroccans on what a democratic Morocco would look like, many claimed that Moroccan democracy would be both “Muslim and Jewish.” Though this response is largely sentimental, considering that Morocco’s Jewish population is at most 5,000 in a total population of over 33 million, it seems to suggest that some Moroccan youth are proud to tout Morocco’s Jewish history as part of the country’s rich cultural milieu. This is all despite the absence of a curriculum covering Moroccan Jewish history in the school system, something Levy is attempting to introduce through his Foundation.
Moroccan respect for Jewish history is palpable, despite it being a topic which many Arab nations shun. After the Casablanca bombings of 2003 and the “Don’t touch my country” anti–Islamism campaign began, the strong showing of solidarity among Moroccans was remarkable. A Jewish citizen interviewed by a Toronto–based Jewish group said at the time: “There was recently a huge march of solidarity in Casablanca... It was such a special feeling and really showed the true spirit of Moroccans. The slogan was ‘Jews and Muslims unified—it’s the only solution.’”
Unfortunately, expressions of kinship with the Jewish community may simply be symbolic gestures. With most Moroccan Jews now living in Israel, France, and the U.S., the apparent pride exhibited by Moroccan youth for the Jews seems like a belated nostalgia for which young Moroccans have little real knowledge or personal experience. But in a country that is 99% Muslim and often in the precarious diplomatic position of maintaining strong relations with the United States and with the Arab world simultaneously, Moroccans’ pride for their Jewish history is noteworthy. Maybe the bar is too low for Arab countries and their attitudes toward Jews, but in Morocco, there is no curtain to peer through when it comes to the exuberant expression of the country’s Jewish history. The call to prayer is loud, but in Moroccan society it seems that being Moroccan, whether Jewish, Muslim, Arab, or Berber, may just be louder.
Above: The Mausoleum of Mohammed V in the capital, Rabat, holds the tombs of King Mohammed V and his two sons, Prince Abdallah and King Hassan II. The latter organized the first meeting of the World Union of Moroccan Jews in Marrakesh just months before he died in 1999.
SARAH A. H. MORGAN is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Political Science. She was in Morocco last semester studying migration and Moroccan Arabic. She can be reached at sm2499@barnard.edu.