Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (original) (raw)
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MYTH, HISTORY AND REALPOLITIK: MOROCCO AND ITS JEWISH COMMUNITY
This article is an analytical overview of the history of Moroccan Jewry, from pre-Islamic times to the present day, exploring the themes of myth, memory and political interests in the multi-faceted, continuous interactions between the community and Moroccan society as a whole. In referring to seminal developments in Moroccan political history, it analyses the different ways in which the Jews of Morocco experienced them as an integral part of the larger societal mosaic. This survey of the 2,000-year Jewish presence in Morocco employs a variety of classical and modern sources in order to locate the place of Moroccan Jews within the ebbs and flows of Moroccan dynastic history, particularly following the establishment of the first Islamic dynasty in the eighth century, C.E. It also engages with current historiographical debates on the subject matter. Overall, it provides clarity and order to the subject of Jewish–Muslim inter-communal relations in Morocco over the longue durée, a matter too often shrouded in myths and half-truths.
Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (2015, Cornell University Press)
How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in Making Morocco focuses on interactions between state and society. Jonathan Wyrtzen demonstrates how during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco’s Jews; recent reforms regarding women’s legal status; the monarchy’s multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy’s continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field. "Making Morocco paints a compelling picture of this country's extraordinarily complex twentieth-century history. Jonathan Wyrtzen explores interactions between Moroccan leaders and their colonizers and the responses of subaltern groups, which ranged from anticolonial jihad to individual efforts to exploit contradictions within colonial policy. The book pays special attention to practices shaping the identities of Arab and Berber, male and female, and Muslim and Jew. A work of stunning erudition, drawing on a vast range of archival and original sources, including Berber oral poetry and Arab-language newspapers."—George Steinmetz, Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan "Making Morocco is an imaginative and original analysis of how modern Moroccan identity (or identities) developed between 1912 and 1956. Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the interaction of state and nonstate actors and institutions shaped and politicized what he defines as the 'colonial political field' and continued to influence the formation of Moroccan identity in the postcolonial period. Wyrtzen offers a convincing explanation of how the Alawid dynasty survived the colonial period and regained its position as the center of power after independence. Wyrtzen focuses not only on the nationalist elites but also on rural Berbers, Jews, and women as active participants in the contested field of Moroccan identity. Especially innovative is his use of Berber poetry as a way to understand non-elite identities."—Daniel J. Schroeter, University of Minnesota, author of The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World "This book is a compelling account of struggles over identity during French colonization in Morocco. It is a must-read for anyone in search of a greater understanding of interactions between those in power in the colonial state and marginalized subaltern local groups. Jonathan Wyrtzen combines a rich, well-crafted, finely grained narrative with a rigorous sociological analysis. The Berber oral poetry skillfully discussed by the author speaks volumes on anticolonial sentiments in rural areas and resistance to colonial encroachment. Making Morocco is a major contribution to the study of French colonialism in North Africa."—Mounira M. Charrad, University of Texas at Austin, author of the award-winning States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco "In Making Morocco, Jonathan Wyrtzen takes a refreshing approach within the realm of sociological histories. The sociological concepts and categories he uses are well chosen and deployed with sophistication and a good underpinning theoretical understanding. His use of a variety of archives and archival material is also to be commended, particularly the way in which he draws on oral histories and poetry to build specific understandings of the politics of identity among people less likely to leave behind written records. This book's organization around issues of identity provides a distinctive entry point into the wider debates on state formation."—Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Warwick, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination Jonathan Wyrtzen is Assistant Professor of Sociology and History at Yale University.
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History , 2012
This paper examines current debates on the fate of Moroccan Jews under the Vichy regime and the attitude of the sultan towards his Jewish subjects. Due to wide-ranging contributions by the media and via the internet, these debates are not confined to political or intellectual circles but also involve ‘non-professionals’. My aim is to examine to what extent discussions about the Second World War are relevant in contemporary Morocco, to shed light on how established narratives are challenged by new questions, and to understand the meanings such debates have for the way Moroccans see and position themselves in contemporary Moroccan society.
Remembering the Departure of Moroccan Jews
Education & Research Archive, 2017
Before the end of the Second World War, Morocco’s Jewish community numbered approximately 240,000 people and was one of the largest and oldest populations of Jews in the Arab-Muslim world. Between 1948 and 1968, the vast majority of the Jewish population left the country. As a narrative, the plotline of their departure seems straight-forward: a large group of people who came to see themselves as belonging to one another lived in Morocco and then, over a period of two decades, almost all of them left. It is the question of why they left which gives rise to a multiplicity of competing memories, expressed in three main theatres: the historiography, the testimonies of émigrés themselves, and popular performative media. The main question this thesis answers is how the causality of the departure of Moroccan Jews is remembered in these three domains, as well as how they reference and respond to one another, and why this is the case. This thesis shows that, across these domains, there are seven main narrative forms about the departure and that each of these forms is, most importantly, accompanied by a prelude and a post-script which inform the basic narrative of the cause of the departure in different ways. By examining who remembers what, according to the discursive, ideological environments in which these memories are formed, as well as what is diminished or silenced in each of these memories, this study contributes to a growing body of research on the effect of the contemporary moment on historical memory and popular commemoration.
A New Language of Equality: Jews and the State in Nineteenth-Century Morocco
In the late nineteenth century, the Moroccan government’s concern for its image abroad ushered in a new approach to understanding Jews’ rights. Although the sultans never abandoned the dhimma contract in favor of religious egalitarianism, government officials increasingly adopted a new language of equality to describe how Jewish subjects should be treated. This language of equality borrowed vocabulary from Western notions of tolerance, but did not fundamentally conflict with Islamic ideals of justice. Mawlāy Ḥasan (reigned 1873-1894) refused to declare that Jews and Muslims were equal, but he increasingly insisted that Jews and Muslims must be treated equally before the law. Jews tread a similarly fine line, between pushing the envelope of their legal rights as dhimmīs and affirming their status as the personal protégés of the sultan. Through an examination of correspondence among Moroccan government officials, Jews, and foreign diplomats, this article locates the shifting relationship between the state and its Jewish subjects in the language which the Makhzan used to define justice.
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2021
Nation in Moroccan historiography writings has traditionally been described as culturally, ethnically and racially homogeneous; an all-encompassing discourse that silences episodes about the historical legacy of slavery and racism in the country, and undermines multicultural Morocco. In fact, the history of Morocco’s blacks of sub-Saharan descent remains fragmented, scattered and undocumented – partly because of the scarcity of archival sources. Recent years, however, have witnessed the revival of an ‘African consciousness’ in Moroccan history and in literature. This is also the case of Maghrebi (North African) and Arabic literature from the Mashreq (the Middle East) and the Gulf. In this paper, we consider how two recent Moroccan novels, Le Lutteur [The Wrestler, in French] by My Seddick Rabbaj (2017) and Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil's Memory, in Arabic] by Rachid al-Hachimi (2018), deal with salient moments of trans-Saharan cultural connections. We argue that the historical and the geographical imaginaries connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa compel a discussion of the ‘decolonial’ as outlined by the Moroccan critic Abdelkebir Khatibi, and enforce a rebound on the concept of ‘significant geographies’. In engaging with the narratives’ concern about the construction of racial and cultural identities in Morocco, we consider how these works resonate with the recovery of the subaltern history of black Morocco, and how gender, rural and ethnic identity inform and imbue the texts with a knot of ambivalent discourses.