Remembering the Departure of Moroccan Jews (original) (raw)
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. iii PREFACE This thesis is an original work by Nakita Simona Valerio. No part of this thesis has been published. Why do you want to enter? Simon Levy asked outside the entrance of the Casablanca Jewish Museum he founded and directed as of 1997. An armed Moroccan military officer stood close by, listening to our conversation. When I replied that I wanted to see the Moroccan Jewish artifacts inside, he seemed surprised, and gestured to the hijab covering my head. He said, it is not often that we have your people visiting the museum before waving for me to follow him inside. Five years later, I was sitting in Levy's old office with the new museum director, Zhor Rehihil, who took over primary curatorship after Levy's death. We were talking about my research project and dropping names of historians doing work on the departure. I was explaining my interest in the silences of its memory, particularly the anxieties brought on by the Holocaust and a host of other issues largely absent from both Jewish and Muslim memories. The Holocaust had nothing to do with Morocco, she protested. I let her finish without agreeing or disagreeing, wrapping up our conversation with a promise to keep in touch and update her when my work was completed. As she was walking me out, she looked at my hijab and said, you know, that headscarf will make your research very difficult. Trust, in this field, is a complicated thing. It was only in wading through the multivocal, emotionally-charged and often painful memories of the departure that I would come to recognize the truth of her observation and how my own work might come to be perceived because of my identity. All I have to offer is my participation. All I am able to do is take each voice in the turbulence of remembering and listen to them equally. O Allah, I repudiate my will and power and seek refuge in Your Will and Power for You are the Powerful.