Jewish Morocco

Abstract

Jewish existence in Northwest Africa extends back to antiquity, but the idea of Moroccan Jews and Jewry is a modern phenomenon that crystallized with the ascendancy of European empire and the nation-state as a dominant political form. Exactly when Jews first arrived is subject to debate, with the earliest material evidence dating to the third century ce Roman settlement. Islamic expansion in the region created new conditions for Jewish political and legal existence, rabbinic culture, Arabic linguistic expression, and regional mobility. The Christian reconquest of Spain contributed to the influx of Sephardic Jews into Moroccan North Africa, which subsequently remained independent from Ottoman control. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Jewish urban quarters known as mellahs manifested the dialectics of autonomy and subordination that pertained to Jews, who as “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) were protected as dhimmi within shifting parameters set by Islamic polities. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Jews in territorial Morocco continued to maintain economic, political, migratory, and rabbinic connections with their coreligionists in Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In the modern period, Jews were agents and objects of European hegemony that culminated with the French and Spanish occupation of a partitioned Morocco from 1912 until 1956. In contrast with the Algerian case, Moroccan Jews were never granted French citizenship as a group. It was during this period that a national Moroccan Jewish community was constituted as a cohesive category of representation, diplomatic intervention, and bureaucratic administration. The contradictions of emancipatory liberalism, which fostered hopes of social equality and political citizenship, and colonial domination under European rule were experienced fully by Moroccan Jews, who negotiated fraught affiliations with French modernity, Zionist projects, and anticolonial Moroccan nationalism. The successive waves of 20th-century emigration that attenuated the Jewish population reflected broader patterns of postcolonial movement. International Jewish philanthropy, French colonial schooling, Arab nationalism, Zionist organizing, and regional diplomacy channeled the specific motivations, opportunities, and destinations of Jewish emigrants as part of a broader Moroccan diaspora. The largest waves of migration, directed primarily to Israel, occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Other significant destinations in the decades that followed included points in Francophone Europe and North America. Alongside the small remaining Jewish population in Morocco, the Moroccan Jewish diaspora has emerged as a critical site for the ongoing construction of Moroccan Jewish identity in its intersecting religious, ethnic, and political forms.