Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco

Driss Maghraoui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815361107
• eBook ISBN: 9781134061747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Exploring the concept of 'colonial cultures, ' this book analyses how these cultures both transformed, and were transformed by, their various societies. Challenging both the colonial vulgate, and the nationalist paradigm, Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco, examines the lesser known specificities of particular moments, practices and institutions in Morocco, with the aim of uncovering a 'new colonial history.'

By examining society on a micro-level, this book raises the profiles of the mass of Moroccans who were highly influential in the colonial period yet have been excluded from the historical record because of a lack of textual source material. Introducing social and cultural history, gender studies and literary criticism to the more traditional economic, political and military studies, the book promotes a more complex and nuanced understanding of Moroccan colonial history.

Employing new theoretical and methodological approaches, this volume encourages a re-assessment of existing work and promotes a more interdisciplinary approach to the colonial history of Morocco. Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco is a highly topical and useful addition to literature on the subject and will be of interest to students and scholars of History, Imperialism and more generally, Middle Eastern Studies.

Part I

Colonialism, spatial configurations and science

1 The mellah without walls

Jewish space in a Moroccan city: Tangier, 1860–1912

Susan Miller

The mellah

In the lexicon of Muslim–Jewish relations in Morocco, no single word is more redolent with meaning than the word mellah, the Jewish quarter of the Moroccan town. In the popular mind, the mellah was synonymous with Jewish society, representing the subordinate and separate status of Morocco’s single largest religious minority. To many European visitors, the mellah evoked an image of the forlorn ghettoes of the Middle Ages. Eugène Aubin,¹ writing at the turn of the century, recognized the distinctions to be made between mellahs of the coast and those of the interior, but he noted that all were similar in one respect: within their walls ‘the great mass of the Jewish population continues to live in poverty and squalor. The Mellahs are overpopulated … [their] filth and stench … make them hotbeds of frequent epidemics’. The Jewish quarter of Mogador (present day Essaouira) was especially shocking, giving the impression of ‘a human anthill … It is a squalid, wretched place, where one does not breathe freely except on the terraces, where a whole regiment of women and children take the air’ (Aubin 1906: 285–95).

Architecturally, the mellah was a unit distinct from the rest of the town, surrounded by high walls and heavy gates. In a city made of enclosures, it was a small enclosure within the greater enclosure of the outer walls. Administratively, it had its own governing hierarchy responsible for taxes, decorum, and public safety, its own shops and markets, its own tempo of social and religious life. The first Jewish quarter was created in Fez in the fifteenth century, but most Moroccan mellahs were constructed during the nineteenth century in varying historical circumstances. What was distinctive about the Jewish quarter, how it fitted into the urban landscape, and what kind of segregation it implied are important questions not yet fully answered. Some historians argue that Jews welcomed the security of a closed quarter, while others cite texts that speak of their forced removal from the Muslim town as a calamity. Whether construed as a prison or a safe haven, or some combination of both, the mellah felt like alternative space, subject to its own rhythms, rules and practices.

In Moroccan parlance as well as in Western minds,² the mellah became a metaphor for a state of isolation of Jews and their removal from the mainstream of social life. Along with distinctive dress, special taxes, and other restrictions, the enclosing walls of the mellah became a signifier of Jewish ‘otherness’, a charged symbol representing the condition of Jews in the wider society. Citing the ‘highly consistent’ testimony of nineteenth-century European visitors, Jewish historian Norman Stillman speaks of the ‘pariah’ status of Jews in pre-modern Morocco and of their ‘highly ritualized degradation in the major towns and cities’ (1979: 84–85). Moroccan nationalist historians adopted a different point of view, arguing that the Jewish exit from the mellah was in fact a revolt against the social compact that traditionally governed Muslim–Jewish affairs. Sociologist Abdallah Laroui, commenting on ‘the end of Islamic sovereignty’ in nineteenth-century Morocco, laid some of the blame for its dissolution at the doorstep of the mellah. The Jewish passion to Westernize, he declared, allowed them to ‘escape from the situation of the Muslims’ and to engage in ‘arrogance and rebellion’ against the ruling authority (1977: 310–11). Whether one rejoiced in Jewish emancipation or lamented it, the underlying assumption was that flight from the Jewish quarter was an inevitable consequence of modernity, a symptom as well as a cause of the widening gulf between Jews and the Muslim majority (Schroeter and Chetrit 1996).

The difficulty with interpretations based solely on Moroccan and European sources is that they reduce the Jewish experience to a subsidiary factor in the evolution of larger issues like the progress of Westernization, or the rise of Moroccan nationalism. The Jewish response to the city becomes enmeshed in historical discourses external to itself, rather than being considered as a component of a central debate within the Jewish community about religiosity versus secularization that was much closer to home. This debate consumed Moroccan Jewish intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century and shaped their attitudes on important issues of the day. Our interest here is in imagining the urban situation from a Jewish perspective: how Jews construed their ties with Muslims, how they defined themselves vis-à-vis the wider society, how external relations were tempered by internal dynamics, how Jews developed their own particular perspective on life in the city.³

Because conditions varied so dramatically across time and place, our topic requires a particular historical context. For that we turn to Tangier, on Morocco’s northern coast, where Jews comprised more than a quarter of the population at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ Because of its proximity to Europe, Tangier was a special case. Visitors noticed that a ‘different breed of Jew’ seemed to walk the streets there: upright, clear-eyed, with an appearance that was ‘sometimes even jovial, and not at all reminiscent of the shocking and servile behavior of their coreligionists elsewhere’ (René-Leclerc 1905: 60). Jews were indistinguishable from Europeans in their manners and dress; most men had already abandoned the black skullcap and caftan-like joha. At home and among themselves they spoke haketiya, a rich and flavorful blend of Hebrew, Arabic and archaic Spanish, but in the street they spoke modern European languages such as Spanish, French, English, and sometimes even Arabic and Berber (Bendelac 1987: 22–23).⁵ There was no official mellah, and one Jewish visitor from abroad noted acidly that the Jews ‘are allowed to dwell promiscuously with the other inhabitants’ (Picciotto 2001 [1860]: 18). The records of the Muslim pious foundation (habus) show that Jews owned property everywhere in Tangier, even in the qasba, or citadel, which was originally a garrison for the sultan’s troops (Michaux-Bellaire 1914: 224). To Europeans dazed by the cacophony of Tangier’s streets, the Babel of languages in its markets, the bizarre costumes and habits of its inhabitants, Jews were simply one more element in a motley urban mix. ‘It is not yet Europe, it is true, but it is no longer Morocco’, says an 1888 tourist guide; ‘it is a mongrelized and neutered city’ (Kerdec Chény 1888: 95).

How this image of Tangier the urbane, Tangier the profane, first arose, how it was propagated and for what reasons, is difficult to say. Perhaps it began among Moroccans in the interior, who both loathed and envied the freewheeling ways of the town, its openness and access to the outside, the mixing and sometimes unholy matching of Jews, Muslims and Christians within its walls. Perhaps it began with foreign tourists, who began to arrive after 1860 to enjoy its wine-like air and sparkling light; they were struck by finding – in this land of supposedly fanatical Muslim orthodoxy – a place where different peoples, colors, and religions mingled in unabashed profusion. Perhaps it began with local business interests and their European allies, who wanted to create a free port where easy profits could be made, and so planted the notion that Tangier was a liminal city – not really part of Morocco, not yet belonging to Europe. Or perhaps it began among the people of Tangier themselves, especially its Jews. Proud that their city had no separate Jewish quarter and that everyone lived, so to speak, cheek-by-jowl, they projected an idea of what life in Morocco would be like if European influence were to become paramount. The Jews of Tangier seemed to be leading the rest of Morocco, in the words of André Chouraqui, in ‘the march toward the West’.

The idea of Tangier the profane clouded in the minds of many the evidence of another Tangier: a city of pronounced religious feeling and spiritual passion, a city of public ritual and private devotion that announced an ardent attachment to matters of faith. This was a Tangier hidden from the gaze of the curious outsider. Access to it came in different ways: by observing changes in its sacred geography, by attending to the symbolic and spatial discourses imbedded in the historical record, by listening to a metadialogue taking place among its various parts. Discovering sacred Tangier means uncovering deeper levels of complexity within the Jewish sphere, as well as more intricate ties between Jews and others. Subtle disharmonies suddenly appear between rich and poor, between native and foreigner, between newcomer and veteran as well as strange alliances across confessional lines. The contours of the religious landscape, as we shall see, were intentional and planned, and a careful reading of them increases our understanding of the Muslim–Jewish encounter. Studying inter-communal relations through the prism of sacred space reinforces the impression that the religious dimension of the shared communal experience did not drive Jews and Muslims apart, but rather, functioned to ensure societal cohesion.⁶

Profane and sacred

Our point of departure is a survey of the social mosaic of late nineteenth-century Tangier. The population of Tangier grew rapidly in the years between 1860 and 1912; the town nearly quadrupled in size. This spectacular expansion was based on several factors, among them the arrival of Europeans of every type, attracted to Tangier because of its proximity to the continent. Before the 1870s, the European colony was made up of a handful of diplomats and their families. The bloody repression of a republican-led insurrection in Andalusia after 1869 marked the beginning of a large-scale migration of Spanish political refugees (Kaplan 1977).⁷ Most were ‘honest men’, according to René-Leclerc: small tradesmen, craftsmen, and farm workers. But mixed among them was ‘a bad element, whose presence contaminates the streets of the town … loafers, jailbirds, deserters, anarchists, all the flotsam of Andalusia and the presidios who have come to Tangier to seek a refuge from justice’ (1905: 72). Another spurt in growth came in 1904, after the signing of the Anglo–French agreement that culminated in a French protectorate over much of Morocco in 1912. Thereafter, according to one contemporary observer, Morocco ‘passed definitively into the French sphere of influence’, and European migrants began arriving

with every postal delivery, from Gibraltar, Cadiz, Malaga, Algeria in search of the El Dorado they read about in their newspapers … Tangier, squeezed on one side by the inaccessible qasba, and on the other by the sands of the beach, has become too cramped to contain all these people.⁸

Along with the newcomers came the auxiliary troops who served them: Spanish dressmakers, Maltese barbers, English photographers, Belgian hotelkeepers, booksellers, pharmacists, teachers and rogues. Europeans lived in all parts of the medina, or Muslim quarter, but especially in the Beni Ider quarter, where they clustered in the protective shadow of the foreign legations. With the influx from Europe, speculation in real estate and a rush to build introduced into the streets of the medina striking elements of European domestic architecture. Windows opening onto the street (as opposed to the blank white exterior of the Moroccan house), lacy iron grillwork, ornate doorways, and brightly tiled entryways made their appearance. Already in the late 1880s, de Kerdec Chény warned that the new buildings were taking over, ‘tainting’ the purity of the local color

with their horrible green shutters and the ungraceful lines of a hybrid architecture; the only thing European about them is their rigidity and banality. For the artist, it is disheartening; the old Tangier has been so disfigured and is about to disappear.

(1888: 95)

There were class distinctions as well among the European colony. While the very rich lived in palatial residences, the working class was concentrated in dense, sprawling, multi-family patios. A Franciscan chapel on the main street served the needs of Catholics, while a newly constructed Anglican church outside the gates ministered to Protestants. Meanwhile, in the small Christian cemetery outside the walls, Papists and Reformers consorted in ecumenical harmony.

The European presence exceeded the confines of the medina and spread into the countryside beyond. Visitors made day trips outside the walls to experience what they believed was the true, untamed Morocco. The mountain west of Tangier became a European preserve, the site of luxuriant gardens and Italian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword by George Joffé
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: locating new layers of Moroccan colonial history
• PART I Colonialism, spatial configurations and science
• PART II Colonialism and nationalism: a social history
• PART III The literary and artistic dimension of colonialism
• Index