Jews in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

A conference organized by: 

The Dahan Centre for Sephardic Heritage and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town

Cap town. August, 22-24 2016

The consecration of the ‘Hebraic Tributary’ by the Moroccan Constitution:

Its Background and significance

Mohamed Elmedlaoui*

IUURS / Mohammed-V University - Rabat

Moroccan Jewry’s historical survey [i]

The first appearance of Jewish or Jewish-like groups in North Africa remains subject to controversial hypotheses. Some legends bring it back to the period of the destruction of the 1^st Temple (v. Laredo 1954). More serious texts, Tertullian in the 2^nd c. C.E. for instance (as reported in Chouraqui, 1998. I. p. 63), attest to the fact that some Berber groups of the Roman period in North Africa “did observe Shabbat, feasts, fasting and Jewish food restriction laws”. And, among about 50 words contained in a bilingual Berber-Punic inscription on the mausoleum of the Berber king Massinissa (3^rd c. B.C.E), the term √špt (shophet שופט “ruler/judge”) is mentioned five times in the two texts as a social rank of that king’s ancestors (see Galand 2002, Elmedlaoui 2013).

Islamic historians, including Ibn Khaldun, spoke also vaguely about a ‘Jewish-Berber queen’ they call ‘Kahina’ (“priestess”) from the Jarawa Berber tribe, who opposed the most vigorous resistance to the Arabian Islamic army in North Africa (7^th c. C.E). These historians report also that among the tribes and groups the Idrissid dynasty had to fight, were “some pagan, Jewish or Christian tribes”.[ii] Because of the little academic interest Islamic historians pay to non-Islamic or non-orthodox Islamic political entities in the Maghreb in general, and like the case with the Kahina, all what those historians vaguely report about some Jewish elements in the founding texts and religious features of the Barghwata Berber kingdom (Baccuates macenites) which lasted about three centuries (744 - 1058) in the Tamesna Atlantic coast of Moroccan (from Salé to southern Safi), remains unclear (v. Talbi 1973).

Finally, at the very beginning of the present Moroccan Alaoui royal dynasty, one of the key-measures its effective founder, Moulay Rachid, had to undertake in order to extend his authority all over the country from the East to the West, was to fight against the Jewish feudal-like ruler, Aharon Ibn Michâal, putting end to his prosperous fiefdom in the Taza region.[iii] In fact, according to the socio-economic realities of their places of settlement (cities or countryside, individual or tribal ownership of land), Moroccan Jews could in principle (and in fact, in some places and times) have access to land ownership like the purported case of Ibn Michâl.[iv] However, the case is not effectively pervasive through the Moroccan Jewry’s history (cf. Schroeter 2011). This is due, among other conjunct factors to the general Jewish post-Talmudic cultural and educational endogenous tendency to prefer and value liberal activities and occupations that need qualified skills. According to Bottichini & Eckstein 2016, this general socio-educational and socioeconomic tradition should be traced back to the Talmudic époque. It despises and disdains the so-called status of ‘am ha’arets (עם הארץ), viz. illiterate people who make a living by working the land.

During the last centuries of the Islamic period in Morocco, in parallel, and later, in continuation of what was also the case in Andalusia, many famous Jewish families and individuals played important and influential roles in economy, science, fine arts, culture and politics within the Moroccan State, until our times.

Moroccan Jewry, universal Judaism, political Zionism and French Protectorate

Unlike some other Jewish or Jewish-like communities in Eastern, Western or Southern Africa, the Moroccan and North African Jewry in general has always kept through history strong, systematic and continuous religious and cultural ties (and even human ties through pilgrimage and shadddarim’s missions) with the Levantine Judaism (Babylonian Gaonim in particular; see: 2000 בשן). The Levantine Judaism being always considered through history by the Sephardic Jewry in general, as its ideal and ultimate legitimating reference (see: Elmedlaoui 2008). The major historical, cultural and religious trends and events that take place in the Levant (Caraism, messianic movements,[v] etc.) have always had substantial echoes among this Jewry. The case was not true for those communities with Eastern European Judaism evolution and trends (modern times’ heterodoxies, except Habad Hassidism lately in the mid 20^th c.) until the rise of the modern Political Zionism.

Zionism failed however, at the beginning, to have a significant impact among the Moroccan Jewry, given that movement’s main languages (German and/or Yiddish, See Michel Cohen, Ariel B.). Furthermore, even the French Jewish policy in Algeria (‘Loi Crémieux’ 1870 and ‘Lois de Vichy’ 1940-1941) had no substantial/structural echo in Morocco under Protectorate. It was rather through the educational action of the French speaking organization AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle, launched in the 1860s) that the new ‘reorganized’ “French Morocco” was provided with the majority of its French-speaking indigenous qualified staff, previously formed by the AIU. This socio-educational process brought about, finally, a profound and radical socio-cultural and sociopolitical change among the Moroccan Jewry, allowing it, at the same time, thanks to French as a language and culture, to have a direct and actual access to Political Zionism, among other concepts and frames of modern thoughts in Europe (citizenship, liberalism, enlightening, etc.). On the other side, one of the results of the French colonial experience on the level of collective identity (re)construction, was the fact that Moroccan Jewry began to identify itself as Moroccan, as distinct from Algerian or Tunisian for example, and as opposed to the previous dilution of this Jewry, among the North African Jewry in general, under the labels of ‘Berberiscos’ or ‘Maghrebi’ by the European and Oriental Sephardic communities respectively (v. Schroerter 2012).

Political Zionist action resulted finally, among the Moroccan Jewry, in a new collective political reinterpretation of this Jewry’s very rooted Messianic Zionism. This prepared its great collective movement of migration that began in the fifties of the 20^th century, immediately after the proclamation of the State of Israel. This migration movement was accelerated later from the sixties on, in quite complicated and still unclear terms of negotiation, under the newly Independent Morocco’s authorities through what late Samuel Segev calls ‘Moroccan Connexion’ (v.2008 שגב). From the beginning, the combined action of the AIU and Zionism, in addition to the creation of the State of Israel and the consecutive series of wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973), created a continuous and  profound socio-cultural and socio-political hiatus of fear and rejection within the Moroccan society, that perturbed (among other effects) the general attitude of the Moroccan Jewry, as a whole, vis-à-vis the Moroccan Nationalist Movement in particular, and vice versa.

The Moroccan Jewry Nowadays

Nowadays, despite the drastic decrease of the Moroccan Jewish community, which is reduced to 1 % of its 1950s total number (250.000 on a total of about 8.900.000), this community continues to keep a substantial visibility in different sectors of economy, politics, diplomacy and culture. Abroad, the Moroccan Jewish Diaspora is one of the most structured ones in the world through its numerous federations that keep solid ties with their fathers’ homeland, Morocco. With the last decades’ socio-cultural and socio-political developments of the Moroccan society as a whole, regarding issues of identity, especially after the 2001 promulgation of the royal decree creating the Royal Institute for the Amazighe Culture (Amazighe = Berber),[vi] new socio-political patterns and paradigms are now in elaboration. Significantly in this respect, as explicitly expressed once by King Mohammed VI, Morocco is more and more reluctant to the idea of being diluted, for example, within what the US diplomacy considered in the early 2000s as a GME (Great Middle East) geopolitical entity. Instead, Morocco emphasizes more and more, both in discourse and in practice, its effective African geographic reality and historic roots. In fact, new narratives are now being collectively elaborated in the Moroccan society’s thought through literature, cinema, socio-political discourse and history revisiting. Some aspects of this elaboration hold both in Morocco and among the Moroccan Jewry elsewhere (especially in Israel). In this respect, and at some levels and spheres, a quite new-legendary but efficient move of thought is even in progress, namely through what Maddy-Weitzman (2014) views as a “Berber-Jewish Connexion”. More formally and officially, at home in Morocco, the recent 2011 Constitution reflects all these developments and trends by the fact of consecrating the “Hebraic Tributary” as one of the plural components of the Moroccan nation identity.

The Moroccan Jewish heritage as a basis for a new narrative

With the drastic demographic decrease of the Moroccan Jewry, the Moroccan Jewish heritage became of great interest to different parties. It is no longer taken in charge solely by the Jewish community, who founded for example, among other things, the Musée du Judaïsme Marocain, in Casablanca, the only Jewish museum that exists in North Africa and the Middle East. Several public programs by different ministries (Culture and Islamic Affairs) are accomplished or initiated as projects in order to restore memorial places (synagogues, cemeteries, tsadiqim’s mausoleums, etc.). While the Moroccan academic spheres had already started showing at least individual interest at the Moroccan Jewish heritage (Hebrew language, communitarian history and culture) already before three decades,[vii] the civil society (different kinds of associations) began, these last years, to engage in the same direction. As just a last example: the recent “Association des Amis du Musée du Judaïsme Marocain”, an association whose current founding board counts Moroccan Jews and Muslims in parity.[viii]

In fact, different recent works show that Moroccan culture (folklore, folk representations, patronymics, languages, music, literature, gastronomy, handcraft, fine arts, mysticism, pedagogical tradition, etc.) is profoundly traversed by Hebraic and Jewish cultural elements, more than what is commonly admitted (v. Elmedlaoui 2012 and المدلاوي 2006).[ix] That is, in addition to the above sketched historical survey, what constitutes the background and significance of the consecration by the new 2011 Moroccan Constitution of the “Hebraic Tributary” as one dimension among others of “the Moroccan multidimensional irrefragable identity”.[x]

Conclusion

Moroccan Jewry is thus organically and continuously tied, through history, to universal Judaism. Its proper representations of identity and otherness, as well as its own historical cases of ambiguity and ambivalence vis-à-vis the concept of homeland (especially in its modern nation state sense; v. Schroeter 2012; cf. Benichou Gottreich 2015), are well assumed dimensions as reflected in that community’s own literature and legends (v. Elmedlaoui 1995/2012). Among those legends, for example, the fact of implanting imaginary graves and memorials for some biblical figures in Morocco (cf. Laredo 1954) within the frame of that community’s ancestral shared tradition of saints and ‘tsadiqim’ memorials’ network all over the country (Ben Ami 1990). There is also, on the other hand, the imaginary but significant tradition of referring, in literature, to Moroccan Berbers as פלשתים ‘Philistines’ and to Moroccan Arabs as ארמים ‘Aramaic’ (v. Elmedlaoui 2016).

As a short historical experience, the French Protectorate parenthesis in se does not seem, even during the Vichy period, to have played a direct capital role in the new ideological and political shift and trends that transformed Moroccan Jewry’s thought. It was rather the AIU’s educational and intellectual action that played such a role, which prepared that Jewry to start its collective migration, mainly to Israel thanks to the logistic help of the Jewish Agency and according that agency’s own criteria of selection depending on its established priorities.

Should then nowadays numerical decrease of the Moroccan Jewry be viewed, on the large scale of history, as no more than a ‘parenthesis’ due to modern time’s globalized movements and events such as the interactions between (i) the historical defeat of the Moroccan State from the mid 19^th through the mid 20^th centuries, (ii) the AIU and Zionist combined actions all over that period, and (iii) the Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamist movements? A parenthesis liable of being compared, let’s say, to the Almohad dynasty’s period one, when that dynasty’s rigorist Islamic dogma (against Christians and Jews as well as against Muslim dissidents) interfered, at the time, with a strong messianic movement among the Moroccan Jewry, and resulted finally in a kind of Marranos-like phenomenon of massive conversion among Jews, which lasted for many decades (v. Lévy 2001, 154-164 and Botticini & Eckstein 2016, pp 204-205)?

Tautologically stated, only the future is liable to bring an answer to such questions. However, new modular modes and forms of possible revival or ‘come back’ for that community seem to clock on the horizon. Actually, in addition to the traditional systematic pilgrimage to the Moroccan homeland, on the rhythm of the different Moroccan Jewry’s feasts and from all over the world with a particular intensity this year (2016),[xi] which remains however a sporadic and nostalgic form of affective ‘come back’ proper to elder people, one recent initiative deserves being profoundly considered as for its eventually historic significance: the Moroccan "Ministère chargé des Marocains Résidant à l'Étranger et des Affaires de la Migration", in cooperation with two civilian associations,[xii] has recently invited a group of 17 young Jewish promoters (girls and boys) from Moroccan origin (8 Canadians, 5 French, and 4 Israelis) for a week-stay in Morocco (May 22-28 2016 in Casablanca, Tangier, Rabat, Meknes and Fes) in order to give them “l’opportunité de mieux connaître le Maroc contemporain, un pays confronté aux défis de la modernité politique, économique, sociale et culturelle". “Cette visite avait pour objet de présenter à un groupe restreint, mais représentatif, de jeunes juifs d’origine marocaine les réalités du Maroc d’aujourd’hui afin qu’ils puissent juger par eux-mêmes et débattre de ces réalités avec les représentants des différents organismes publics et privés marocains qu’ils ont rencontrés lors de leur séjour dans le Royaume".[xiii]

References

Ben Ami, Issachar (1990) Culte des saints et pèlerinages judéo-musulmans au Maroc ; Maisonneuve & Larose, Paris

Benichou, Gottrich (2015). Morocco. A Jewish History from Pre-Islamic to Post Colonial Times. I.B. Tauris.

Boum, Aomar (2013). Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford University Press. Stanford.

Botticini, Maristella et Zvi Eckstein (tr. fr. 2016). La poignée d’élus. Comment l’éducation a façonné l’histoire juive. 70-1492. Tr. fr de [The Chosen Few] par Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat. Albin Michel.

Chouraqui, André (1998) Histoire des Juifs en Afrique du Nord. En exil au Maghreb. Tome 1.  Editions du Rocher.

Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2008) "Les deux ‘al-maghribi’, Ben Quraysh et as-Samaw’al (un souvenir refoulé par une mémoire sélective)". Etudes et Documents Berbères. 27 (2008.). pp. 27-46.

Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2012) "Le patrimoine immatériel, lieu de mémoire et de dialogue interculturel" in Abecassis Frédéric, Direche Karima et Aouad Rita (sous la direction de --). La bienvenue et l'adieu. Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe-XXe siècles) ; volume II. Coédition Karthala / La Croisée des Chemins (Casablanca - Maroc). For an open edition of this article, see: http://books.openedition.org/cjb/234.

Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2013) "Les judéo-berbérophones revisités à la lumière du lexique et de la philologie berbère“. Etudes et Documents Berbères; Paris. N° 32 / 2013: 165-192.

Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2016) “Questions on Identity and Otherness Representations among the Moroccan Jewish Community”. A contribution presented at the Jewish-Moroccan Film Week (Berlin, May 8-12 2016). View the text here https://orbinah.blog4ever.com/in-english-questions-on-identity-and-otherness-representation-among-the-moroccan-jewish-community

Galand, Lionel (2002) Etudes de linguistique berbère, Collection linguistique publiée par la Société de Linguistique de Paris; t. LXXXIII, Paris, Peeters.

Kenbib, Mohammed (1994). Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859-1948. Contribution à l’histoire des relations intercommunautaires en terre de l’Islam. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaine de Rabat. Série – Thèses et Mémoires n° 21 1994.

Laredo, Abraham I. (1954) Berberes  y hebreos en Marruecos: sus orígenes, según las leyendas, tradiciones y fuentes hebraicas antiguas; Instituto de Estudios Africanos, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Madrid 1954.

Lichtheim, Miriam (1976) Ancient Egyptian Litterature. Volume II. The New Kingdom. University of California ; Los Angeles ; London.

Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce (2014) "Narrating the Past, serving the Present: The Berber Identity and the Jewish Connection”; in Bruce Maddy-Weitzman and Meir Litvak Ed. Nationalisme, Identiry and Politics: Israel and the Middle East. Studies in Honor of Asher Susser. The Moshe Dayan Center, 2014. Tel Aviv.

Schroeter, Daniel J. (1997) "La découverte des Juifs Berbères". Pp 169-187 in Michel Abitbol éd. Relations Judéo-Musulmanes au Maroc : perceptions et réalités. Editions Stavit. Paris.

Schroeter, Daniel J. (2008). "The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities”. Jewish Social Studies. New Series, Vol. 15, No. 1, Sephardi Identities (Fall, 2008), pp. 145-164.

Schroeter, Daniel J. (2011) “In Search of Jewish Farmers: Jews, Agriculture, and the Land in Rural Morocco,” in The Divergence of Judaism and Islam: Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil, ed. Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), 143-159.

Schroeter, Daniel J. (2012) “Identity and Nation: Jewish Migration and Inter-Community Relations in the Colonial Maghreb,” in La bienvenue et l’adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb (XVe-XXe siècle), vol. I : Temps et espaces, Actes du colloque d’Essaouira: Migrations, identité et modernité au Maghreb, 17-21 mars 2010, ed. Frédéric Abécassis, Karima Dirèche and Rita Aouad (Casablanca: Éditions La Croisée des Chemins/Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2012), 125-139.

Talbi, Mohammed (1973) "Hérésie, acculturation et nationalisme des berbères Bargawata". Pp. 217-233 in Premier congrès des cultures Méditerranéennes d'influence arabo-berbère, SNED. Alger. 1973.

المدلاوي، محمد (2006) "من عناصر الثقافة اليهودية في التمازج الثقافي المغربي محاكاةً وحكيا؛ نماذج للتناصّ بين العبرانية والأمازيغية والعربية". الحكاية الشعبية في التراث المغربي. موضوع لجنة التراث؛ بالمشاركة مع الجمعية المغربية للتراث اللغوي. مطبوعات أكاديمية المملكة المغربية - الرباط. سلسلة "الندوات". ص: 229-264.

المدلاوي، محمد (1995/2012) "صورة المغرب في بعض المكتوبات العبرانية واليهودية". مقال نشر عدة مرات، آخرها في ص: 243-273 من الكتاب الآتي:

المدلاوي، محمد (2012) رفع الحجاب عن مغمور الثقافة والآداب؛ مع صياغة لعروضي الأمازيغية والملحون. منشورات المعهد الجامعي للبحث العلمي- الرباط.

בשן, אליעזר (2000) יהדות מרוקו – עברה ותרבותה. ספריית הלל בן חיים- הוצאת הקיבוץ המאוחד. תל-אביב. 2000.

שגב, שמואל (2008). הקשר המרוקני. המגעים החשאיים בין ישראל למרוקו. יצא לאור ע"י הוצאת מטר 2008

מויאל, אליהו (1984) התנועה השבתאית במרוקו؛ תולדותיה ומקורותיה. יצא לאור ע"י הוצאת עם עובד.

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*Mohamed Elmedlaoui. A micro CV

Mohamed Elmedlaoui is a linguist (phonology). He published in Arabic, French and English about a hundred papers on Berber and Semitic languages and cultures; among them, a dozen in linguistics with François Dell (CNRS-Paris). He published nine books (in Arabic, French or English) including two with F. Dell on Berber phonology, metrics and music. He is a Fulbright alumnus (UMASS Univ. 1990) and had four times a Poste Rouge position as an invited researcher at the CNRS (Paris: 1986, 1991, 1995 and 1999). Before joining the Institut Universitaire de la Recherche Scientifique – Rabat (2006 on) where as a head of the research team ‘Géoplolitique, Identité et Migration’, he taught linguistics (1979-1985) and then Hebrew (1986-2001) in the Arabic and Islamic Departments at the Faculty of Letters – Oujda (Morocco), where he served also as a vice dean (1995-1999) and joined the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe in Rabat as a ‘Directeur de Recherche’ (2002-2006). He won the 2012-Moroccan Book Prize for Language and Literature.

He is a founding member of many civilian and learned societies, among them the Moroccan Fulbright Alumni Association. Currently (2015 on), he is the president of the ‘Association des Amis du Musée du Judaïsm’ (see: http://www.aamjm.org/). For more details, see

https://orbinah.blog4ever.com/m-elmedlaoui-publications-academiques

Personal blog, OrBinah:  https://orbinah.blog4ever.com/articles

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