Urban Jews in Sherifian Morocco

Abstract

Maghrebi studies have been fortunate in recent years. Anthropologists and historians have been attracted to Morocco and have produced a number of fine studies. Jewish Studies have also fared well in this context and Jews figure in the general accounts. Many prominent anthropologists working on the Maghreb Clifford Geertz et al. [1979], Lawrence Rosen [1968, 1972], Kenneth Brown [1981], Moshe Shokeid [1980], Harvey Goldberg [1978] and Dale Eickelman [1983] have done research devoted specifically to Moroccan Jews. Rosen's work in particular has proved seminal in Maghrebi Jewish studies. He has described Moslim-Jewish relations in a Moroccan town in terms of a general thesis that he had articulated, following Geertz [1968], namely that relations between individuals in traditional Morocco were governed to a considerable degree by particular person-to-person ties, and to a lesser degree by abstract social categories into which a person fitted [Rosen, 1973]. Thus, patron-client ties, forged between an individual Muslim and an individual Jew, were resilient and often impervious to the contrasting ethnic and religious categories that crosscut those ties. The Rosen thesis was challenged by Norman Stillman [1977, 1978], a historian, who marshalled literary sources that demonstrate the humiliation to which Jews were categorically subjected in traditional Morocco. Subsequently Allan Myers [1982]1 proposed that Rosen's theory was pertinent in those regions of Morocco where the central polity was weak, whereas in areas where sultanic power was relatively effective, the sociological mechanisms described by Rosen were less potent, and the conditions reflected in the historical sources of Stillman emerged there. Myers' argument though elegant and compelling is based on a limited body of substantive data. I seek therefore to contribute data to this discussion from a virtually untapped source, namely the Hebrew legal correspondence of Moroccan rabbis of the eighteenth to nineteenth century, 'the responsa' literature (for a general overview of this material and of the methodological issues involved in its use see Weinryb [1967]). These data bear on to a virtually classical issue of Middle Eastern studies, namely clarification of the nature of the traditional, so-called 'Islamic city' [Eickelman, 1974]. A large proportion, if not most Moroccan Jews of Sherifian times, lived in the major cities such as Fez, Meknes, Marrakesh and Tetuan. Our comprehension of the traditional city in Morocco will be augmented by extending the scope of research to include urban Jewish communities. In writing about Moroccan towns, Eickelman [1981: 270-3] notes that the space of urban quarters '... is not conceived entirely in a fixed way or primarily by abstract features. How quarters were evaluated depended on what people knew of the social history of their town, which varied with generation and social position, and formative experience..'. However, in summarizing, Eickelman accepts the conventional view of Jewish quarters