Remapping ‘tradition’: community formation and spatiocultural imagination among Jews in colonial northern Morocco

Abstract

ABSTRACT For Jews in colonial North Africa and beyond, modernization is often deemed a linear process of physical and cultural disengagement from traditional urban spaces. In contrast, this article portrays the process as dialectical and contextual mental transitions between the oppositional experiences of ‘modern-colonial’ and ‘traditional-communal’ spaces that mutually shape modern Jewish life across real and imagined townscapes. Focusing on one of the most vibrant sites of urbanization in North Africa – the mid-twentieth century international city of Tangier and neighboring Tetuan – I show how this dynamic transition was essential in shaping modernity and ethnic identity among a mobile Jewish middle class.