Jewish Morocco

A History from Pre-Islamic to Postcolonial Times

Emily Benichou Gottreich

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838603625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The history of Morocco cannot effectively be told without the history of its Jewish inhabitants. Their presence in Northwest Africa pre-dates the rise of Islam and continues to the present day, combining elements of Berber (Amazigh), Arab, Sephardi and European culture. Emily Gottreich examines the history of Jews in Morocco from the pre-Islamic period to post-colonial times, drawing on newly acquired evidence from archival materials in Rabat. Providing an important reassessment of the impact of the French protectorate over Morocco, the author overturns widely accepted views on Jews' participation in Moroccan nationalism - an issue often marginalized by both Zionist and Arab nationalist narratives - and breaks new ground in her analysis of Jewish involvement in the istiqlal and its aftermath. Fitting into a growing body of scholarship that consciously strives to integrate Jewish and Middle Eastern studies, Emily Gottreich here provides an original perspective by placing pressing issues in contemporary Moroccan society into their historical, and in their Jewish, contexts.

1

Malikism

The Jewish Encounter with Islamin the Far Maghrib

(Seventh–Tenth Centuries)

Islam is the religion of the State, which guarantees to all the free exercise of religion.

—Article 3 of the Moroccan Constitution, 2011

It is a national duty and a religious obligation for you to safeguard your identity and remain committed to the Sunni, Maliki rite that the Moroccan people have inherited from their forefathers.

—Mohammed VI, Throne Day speech, July 30, 2015

The adoption of Malikism paved the way for the autonomy and moral unity of all North Africa.

—Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib, 128

lihoud; lmslmine [Jew, Muslim]

—The only words appearing in the glossary of Daniel Sibony, Marrakech, le depart

Introduction: Moroccan Islam

Islam is Morocco’s official state religion, and 99 percent of the country’s populace identifies as Muslim. More than 25,000 Christians live in Morocco, but they are legally considered foreigners.¹ Jews, however, are considered indigenous to Morocco; hence they alone in addition to Muslims are eligible for Moroccan citizenship, a legal category invented in 1880 at the Conference of Madrid.² And once a Moroccan, always a Moroccan: the Law of Perpetual Allegiance stipulates that Moroccans cannot lose their nationality even if they become naturalized to another country. Moroccans’ allegiance is not only to the state, moreover, but extends to the monarch himself. This allegiance is likewise considered permanent and indelible, as the motto inscribed throughout the Moroccan landscape insists: “God, Nation, King.” Although the Moroccan ruler exchanged the title of “sultan” for “king” shortly after independence, he still maintains spiritual as well as political authority, as encapsulated in his role as amir al-mu’minin, the “commander of the faithful,” a title he also claims, and which accords him special powers and duties beyond those of any ruler in the neighboring countries of the Maghrib.³ As amir al-mu’minin, the Moroccan ruler is obliged to protect not only the Muslims of his realm but also, explicitly, the Jews. The ability to provide such protection is in fact precisely how a sultan’s legitimacy can be measured, according to a view attributed to the eleventh-century Andalusian geographer al-Bakri: a sultan is just only if a Jew or a woman can safely walk alone in the streets of his realm at night.⁴

Moroccan officialdom’s protective stance toward its Jewish citizens remains firmly in place today. As we saw in the introduction, the small but highly integrated Jewish community, still the largest in the Arab world, is regularly cited as a prime example of Moroccan “moderation,” “diversity,” and “tolerance,” values that hold great currency at a globalizing moment when the Moroccan state is actively positioning itself as a bulwark against the region’s Islamist movements. As a headline in a recent issue of Morocco World News put it, “Moroccan Jews and Muslims: A Model of Tolerance for the World.”⁵ But it would be a mistake to understand this formulation as merely strategic or exclusively contemporary; even the earliest chapters of Moroccan history reveal an intense intertwining of Jews with the majority inhabitants of the country (keeping in mind that historical populations of Jews were much larger than those of today) and a close vertical relationship with the country’s rulers. With the arrival of the Arabs in North Africa in the seventh century, the intercommunal relationship was transformed through the introduction of the Islamic principle of dhimma, which regulated the lives of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. But it was only in the following centuries, with the institutionalization of the Maliki school of Sunni jurisprudence that Moroccan Islam really began to take form, and with it specific attitudes and guidelines regarding religious minorities. Yet few in-depth studies exist on the history of Malikism in Morocco, and fewer still on the treatment of Jews within its frameworks.⁶

Any discussion of Jewish Morocco must necessarily begin with the question of Jewish origins in Northwest Africa, and it is there, in antiquity, that we begin our story, cognizant of the frequent slippage between history and myth that characterizes these early stages. Jewish Morocco comes into sharper focus with the initial encounter with Islam in the seventh century, a formative moment for both Jews and Muslims in the region. With that scaffolding in place, we will consider a first pillar of Moroccan identity: Malikism, the legal identity based on the school of jurisprudence that first arose in eighth-century Arabia and continued to be elaborated upon as it spread to North Africa, where it became dominant. Malikism is a central pillar of Moroccan identity, as its prominence in the 2011 constitution attests, but what might it count for in the context of Jewish Morocco? The answer lies in how Maliki jurists understood and applied the general legal status of dhimma in specific makan wa zaman—places and times.

Jewish life in pre- and early Islamic Morocco

Jews, regardless of whether we think of them as members of a tribe, a people, a religion, or a “race,” originated in the Middle East, in the place known in antiquity variously as Zion, Cana’an, Eretz Israel, and Palestine, with Jerusalem as its focal point. According to biblical genealogies, the identity that would become Jewishness first began to accrue to a specific group of people after the flood, in which all of humanity was destroyed except for Noah’s line. It is from Noah’s son Shem that the term “Semite” is derived, a linguistic tree that includes both Hebrew and Arabic. A few generations after Shem came Eber, the original Hebrew, as his name implies, and still further on we encounter the father of monotheism, Abraham. It is at the juncture of Abraham’s offspring, Isaac and Ishmael/Isma‘il, that Islamic tradition inserts itself in the story, with its telling of the sacrifice (dhabih) and the establishment of a linkage between Isma‘il and the Arabs, leading eventually to Muhammad himself. In Jewish genealogy, however, Isaac is deemed the chosen one, and it is his line that continues to receive God’s prophecy. God changed the name of Isaac’s grandson to Israel, transforming his descendants thereafter into “Israelites” (a term that is revived in the context of French colonialism, when Jewish/Judaic particularism fell out of favor), with his children constituting the famous twelve tribes. The neo-Assyrian conquest in the eighth century BCE led to the loss of the northern kingdom of Israel, and with it ten of the twelve tribes. This then is the earliest moment that can be proposed for Jewish migration to Morocco: members of the lost tribes of Israel, instead of marching East with the other captives to Mesopotamia, managed to escape Westward, journeying all the way to North Africa. Although lost to history, the mythical reappearance of the ten tribes continues to appear in Jewish historiography, including in Morocco, as we will see.

The Jews—the progeny of the surviving tribe of Judah—enter into historical time after their settlement in the so-called promised land, historical Canaan where they built a Temple in which to perform sacrifices and worship their one God. Twice the Temple was destroyed, first in the sixth century BCE and again in the first century CE, with each destruction resulting once again in the Jews’ forced emigration and correspondingly allowing for the possibility that some Jews fled toward North Africa. Perhaps they traveled there on the boats of the Phoenicians (1500 BCE–539 BCE), who ruled in the territory that is today Lebanon, from which they conducted extensive maritime trade between the Eastern Mediterranean coast and North Africa. The ancient and storied Jewish community of Djerba in today’s Tunisia is thought to have originated in this early period, and that Jews fleeing the Babylonian conquest of 586 carried foundation stones from the Temple in Jerusalem with which to build their new synagogue in the Maghribi diaspora.

It is only in late antiquity that we find incontrovertible proof of Jewish settlement in Morocco, in the form of Hebrew epitaphs etched on gravestones in the Roman town of Volubilis, near modern-day Meknes, along with ruins of a synagogue dating from the third century CE. There is the theory, based on the arguments of the fourteenth-century North African historiographer b. Khaldun, that Jews in fact never “arrived” in Morocco at all but had been there all along; that is, that Moroccan Jews are actually indigenous (i.e., Amazigh) converts to Judaism from the pre-Islamic era. Begging the question of who converted them, this idea has been rejected by most scholars. Yet it continues to hold currency among Amazigh activists who see an alliance with Jews as a means of distancing themselves from Arab hegemony, against which they continue to struggle for rights and recognition to this day (see Chapter 2).⁷ It is also possible, indeed likely, that a looser configuration prevailed, namely that some Jews migrated to Northwest Africa from points further East, bringing with them their Judaism, and upon their arrival encountered a population in which some form of Judaization, or at least monotheism, already had occurred or existed. In any event, Rome annexed northern Morocco in 40 CE, followed by a short Vandal interlude that ended when the Byzantines took over in the sixth century, at which time monotheism of another sort, Christianity, took root in Morocco.

Judaism in pre-Islamic Morocco did not much resemble Judaism as we know it in Morocco or elsewhere today. It may well have been monotheistic, which is to say based on the belief of the existence of only one God, the principle for which Judaism is known. But then again, it is possible that the earliest Moroccan Jews were what are known as henotheists or monolatrists: believers in the existence of many deities over whom one reigns supreme, as some scholars thought was characteristic of Judaism in the time of Moses. Similarly, the nascent Moroccan Jewish community may or may not have had access to the Talmud, the collection and interpretation of Jewish oral law compiled from the third to sixth century CE that lends Judaism its practical and legalistic meaning. After all, Babylon and Jerusalem, where the Talmud was written, are worlds away from Northwest Africa. Elements of Hebrew were probably in North African Jewry’s linguistic repertoire, but it is unclear how much and which ones. Though definitive answers to these questions may ultimately elude us, the earliest history of Moroccan Jewry begins to take shape if we consider when Jews first came to Morocco. Although written evidence for pre-Islamic Jewish Morocco is all but nonexistent, thanks to the region’s strong oral traditions—including legends, myths, folktales, songs, and poems—we are not entirely in the dark with regard to the ancient migrations of Jews to North Africa.

The earliest Jewish communities in Morocco were concentrated in the south, mainly in the Atlas Mountains and pre-Saharan oasis towns of the Sous and Draa valleys. The oldest Jewish community in Morocco is commonly believed to be that of Ifran in the anti-Atlas, which speculatively dates from 361 BCE.⁸ Ifran is located between the towns of Guelmim and Tiznit. Its name comes from the Tamazight word ifri, meaning cave or cavern, which are numerous in the area. Known to Jews as “Oufrane,” it has all the hallmarks of Jewish Moroccan placehood: a remote urban area with its own Jewish quarter (mellah) and a connection to the “holy land” by virtue of its purported founding by the descendants of those who fled the destruction of the first temple. According to local lore, these descendants named their new home “little Jerusalem” in its memory and are believed to have established a kingdom there under King Ephrati of the lost tribe of Ephraim.⁹

The Jews of Oufrane were well integrated and deeply rooted in their land, speaking both Tamazight and Arabic. But they also endured bouts of terrible suffering. In the interregnum between the Sa‘di and Alawi dynasties in the seventeenth century (periods of political instability were usually bad for Jewish communities), a rebellion broke out, led by the “mad sorcerer” Bu Ihlas. He and his followers mauraded through the Sous valley, antagonizing everyone who lay in their path, including a number of Jews from Oufrane. The Oufrani Jews were captured by Bu Ihlas and given the choice of conversion of death, as described below:

Sixty Jews from Oufrane were at a suq. A sorcerer, inspired by Moulay Yazid, arrived along with many armed bandits. The sorcerer wanted to prove his power, to be considered a king. The sorcerer, Bouhalassa, chained up the Jews and tortured them. The local population, who had treated the Jews of the area very well, freed ten of the sixty. Bouhalassa gave the fifty Jews the choice of conversion to Islam or death. He built a great fire. The Jews decided to go as a group into the fire, rather than have even one of them convert. All of them jumped into the fire, one by one. Legend is that a column of fire rose up to the sky. At night, candelabra of fire came down from the sky. Persecutions of Jews stopped. The ten Jews and thirty Muslims gathered up the ashes and brought them to the cemetery in Oufrane.¹⁰

Although Jews are forbidden by their own traditions from entering the section of the cemetery where the “nisrafim” (Heb. “burned ones”) are buried, Moroccan Muslims revere it as a holy place. In so doing, they express the syncretistic religious practice typical of Morocco, embodied by the joint veneration of holy figures like the “saint” R. Yehuda b. Naphtali Afriat, the most famous of the Oufrane martyrs.

The Jewish community of Oufrane survived because a more reasonable sultan, Mawlay Slimane (1792–1822), took over and because the skills represented by this community were essential to the town’s economic health.¹¹ Oufrane was an important center for trade, both for Saharan products like ostrich feathers, which were transported to the north and east, and for the redistribution of products from the Atlantic trade originating from Morocco’s western coast. The city’s economic success continually attracted new immigrants, including Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. By the nineteenth century, Jews dominated Oufrane’s commercial life and began to set up family members in Essaouira and Illigh to facilitate the movement of goods.¹²

Communities like Oufrane existed throughout Morocco’s south. They shared an important characteristic: most were established well before the arrival of Islam in Morocco. As some of the first Jews to interact with members of the new religion, they helped shape the way that Islam would be received in North ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Introduction: Moroccan Themes, Jewish Variations
• 1 Malikism: The Jewish Encounter with Islamin the Far Maghrib
• 2 Amazighity: “Berber” Morocco—A Jewish History
• 3 Sharifism: Religious Authority and the Rise of the Moroccan State
• 4 Europeanization: Imperialism and the Transformation of Muslim-Jewish Relations
• 5 Arabness: Nationalism in an Old-New Key
• Conclusion: Postmodern Jewish Morocco
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint