Jewish-Muslim Intimacy and the History of a Lost Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter examines mnemonic literature’s depictions of the end of Jewish-Muslim intimacy and argues that these portrayals account for the loss of a community-based citizenship that Jews and Muslims could have forged in their shared life within the same homeland. Through close readings of the mnemonic novels Zaghārīd al-mawt (Trills of Death, 2010), Shāmma aw Shtrīt (Shāmma or Shtrīt, 2013), and Ḥārith al-nisyān (Tiller of Forgetfulness, 2003) against the backdrop of the political turmoil and historical silences that Morocco witnessed between independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999, the chapter reconceives citizenship as intimacy and opens up space for rethinking the broader implications of the Moroccan state’s facilitation of Jewish emigration. Drawing on recent ethnographic work and theories of intimacy and citizenship, the chapter reads intimacy, in the form of Jewish-Muslim border crossings, shared Jewish-Muslim childhoods, and Jewish and Muslim women’s transgressive solidarities, as a nubilous form of local, practical citizenship. Additionally, the chapter articulates the deeper impact that Jewish emigration had on Moroccan temporality, which is now split into a before and after Jewish emigration from the country, and highlights how literature archives loss while also allowing the pursuit of closure.