Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco - Hardcover

Boum, Aomar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804786992 ISBN 13: 9780804786997

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

There is a Moroccan saying: A market without Jews is like bread without salt. Once a thriving community, by the late 1980s, 240,000 Jews had emigrated from Morocco. Today, fewer than 4,000 Jews remain. Despite a centuries-long presence, the Jewish narrative in Moroccan history has largely been suppressed through national historical amnesia, Jewish absence, and a growing dismay over the Palestinian conflict.

Memories of Absence investigates how four successive generations remember the lost Jewish community. Moroccan attitudes toward the Jewish population have changed over the decades, and a new debate has emerged at the center of the Moroccan nation: Where does the Jew fit in the context of an Arab and Islamic monarchy? Can Jews simultaneously be Moroccans and Zionists? Drawing on oral testimony and stories, on rumor and humor, Aomar Boum examines the strong shift in opinion and attitude over the generations and increasingly anti-Semitic beliefs in younger people, whose only exposure to Jews has been through international media and national memory.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Aomar Boumis Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies in the Departments of Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Aomar Boum is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Faculty Fellow at the Université Internationale de Rabat, Morocco. He was born and raised in the oasis of Mhamid, Foum Zguid in the Province of Tata, Morocco. He is the coauthor of the Historical Dictionary of Morocco (2006).

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Memories of Absence

HOW MUSLIMS REMEMBER JEWS IN MOROCCO

By Aomar Boum

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8699-7

Contents

Abbreviations..............................................................
xi
Acknowledgments............................................................
xv
Prologue: "Ariel Sharon" in the Sahara.....................................
ix
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 Writing the Periphery: Colonial Narratives of Moroccan Jewish 
Hinterlands................................................................
11
2 Outside the Mellah: Market, Law, and Muslim-Jewish Encounters............
29
3 Inside the Mellah: Education and the Creation of a Saharan Jewish 
Center.....................................................................
57
4 "Little Jerusalems" Without Jews: Muslim Memories of Jewish Anxieties 
and Emigration.............................................................
87
5 Shadow Citizens: Jews in Independent Morocco.............................
109
6 Between Hearsay, Jokes, and the Internet: Youth Debate Jewish Morocco....
131
Conclusion.................................................................
157
Epilogue: Performing Interfaith Dialogue...................................
161
Methodological Appendix: Generations, Cohorts, Schemas, and Longitudinal 
Memories...................................................................
169
Notes......................................................................
173
References.................................................................
191
Index......................................................................
211
Photographs follow page 76.................................................

CHAPTER 1

Writing the Periphery

COLONIAL NARRATIVESOF MOROCCAN JEWISH HINTERLANDS

Global Links and Jewish Disguises

As a columnist and foreign correspondent working in the early twentieth century,Pierre van Paassen, a Dutch-American writer, worked for a number ofnewspapers, including the Toronto Globe, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, theNew York Evening World, and the Toronto Star. He became one of the best-sellingand most influential authors of his time. In addition to reporting on colonialissues in North Africa, including the slave trade, van Paassen investigatedMiddle Eastern issues and interviewed many key political figures in the regionincluding the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni(1895–1974) in 1929. In 1933, accompanied by a British intelligence officer, vanPaassen visited the Dome of the Rock disguised as an Arab hajj (pilgrim) togather information during the Friday sermon about local views regarding theBritish Mandate and Muslim attitudes toward Jewish migration to Palestine.Despite his wide-ranging activities as a journalist and writer, van Paassengained fame for his reports on the relationship between Arabs and Jews withinthe British and French Middle Eastern colonies.

As a world-famous Unitarian Christian reporter, van Paassen was an ardentsupporter of Zionism and a lobbyist mainly in the United States for theestablishment of a Jewish state. He accused the League of Nations and Britain—inparticular—of betraying the Jewish People, especially after what befellEuropean Jews in the Holocaust. Van Paassen prefaced The Forgotten Ally witha critique of the British Colonial Office in the Near East, highlighting Europe'sfailure to protect Jews and secure a country for the Jewish People in Palestine.Van Paassen stated that "as one who is aware and who feels with a sense ofpersonal involvement Christianity's guilt in the Jewish people's woes and theconstant deepening of their anguish, I could no longer be silent." His politicalzeal for a Jewish state became reflected not only in his call for supporting EuropeanJewries in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but also in facilitating Jewishaliya (immigration to Eretz-Israel) worldwide, even among the Jews of Africa.

On November 7, 1928, as the Paris-based foreign correspondent for the NewYork Evening World, van Paassen wrote an article about what he deemed a smalland remote Jewish community in the heart of the African desert:

Hostile tribes, disease, hunger, poverty and other vicissitudes had interferedwith the ancestral project of reaching the Promised Land, and they had remainedin the desert. But the Jews ... never had abandoned hope altogether ofcontinuing their interrupted migration some day and of ultimately residing inthe land that "that flows with milk and honey."

This passage was written about the Jewish society of Akka—the main ethnographicsite of this book. Van Paassen based his story on an interview with RenéLeblond, whom he presumed to be the French consul of Akka, and who haddescended on the outskirts of the Jewish settlement when his plane developedan engine problem and was forced to land. Leblond was collecting geographicand cartographic data for the colonial mapping of the southern Moroccan territoriesthat the French military had yet to control. By 1928, Sémach, a Bulgarianteacher of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Iraq and Morocco, questionedthe truthfulness of the story, alleging that there was no French consulat Akka and that Leblond did not show up in the registers of the French ForeignMinistry. Yet, van Paassen's story about the presence of "a flourishing andtranquil Jewish community, numbering several thousand souls, in the heart ofthe African desert, surrounded on all sides by savage and semi-civilized Moorand Berber tribes," has become part of an authoritative and institutionalizedhistoriographical narrative about the Jews of Akka in particular and SaharanJewries in general, despite its unsubstantiated sources.

Apart from a few notes about the history and culture of the small Jewishcommunity of Akka, van Paassen simply skipped over many historical datesand events without providing detailed information. He noted that the last Europeanvisitor the Jews of Akka had seen was "an explorer in 1866" and that"since that day no traveler from Europe had been in their midst." Contrary tothis claim, the French traveler Charles de Foucauld visited Akka around 1882with his guide, Mardochée Aby Serour, himself a native Jew from Akka. I donot question here van Paassen's sources; Leblond, if such a name existed, couldhave been told of these events by the Jewish elders of Akka he claimed to haveinterviewed. The inaccuracy of these dates and the vagueness of events reflectthe dilemma of reliability in oral sources that faced European travelers andlater scholars of rural Jewish societies throughout the Middle East in generaland Morocco in particular.

As rural and Saharan Jews were "discovered" by European travelers andare now studied by Moroccan historians and anthropologists, how shouldthese historical and ethnographic accounts be assessed and analyzed? Whatare the biases and agendas of colonial and post-colonial narratives that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804786992
• ISBN 13: 9780804786997
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande