Controlling Space, Essentializing Identities: Jews in Contemporary Casablanca

Abstract

Conceptions of urban space and the daily practices within it, typically demarcate city spaces as “go” and “no go,” as an integral part of the cultural construction of social enclaves. In contrast to studies that demonstrate how powerful social segments utilize cultural demarcations of space as mechanisms of exclusion, this essay shows how spatial demarcations serve, instead, to promote self‐preservation for a politically feeble and marginalized ethnic minority. The case of contemporary Casablancan Jews reveals the underlying logic of the self–enclosure of a politically weak ethnic group undergoing continuous demographic decline. [Ethnic identity, urban space, Jews, Casablanca]