Muslim Custodians of Jewish Spaces in Morocco

Drinking the Milk of Trust

Cory Thomas Pechan Driver

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319787855
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319787862
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the roles of Muslim guards and guides in Jewish cemeteries in Morocco, Cory Thomas Pechan Driver suggests that these custodians use performances of ritual and caring acts for Jewish graves for multiple reasons. Imazighen [Berbers] stress their close ties with Jews in order to create a moral self intentionally set apart from the mono-ethically Arab and mono-religiously Muslim Morocco. Other subjects, and particularly women, use their ties with Jewish sites to harness power and prestige in their communities. Others still may care for these grave sites to express grief for a close Jewish friend or adoptive family. In examining these motives, Driver not only documents the flow of material and spiritual capital across religious lines, but also moves beyond Muslim memory of the past on the one hand and Jewish dread of the future on the other to think about the Muslim/Jewish present in Morocco.

© The Author(s) 2018

Cory Thomas Pechan DriverMuslim Custodians of Jewish Spaces in MoroccoContemporary Anthropology of Religionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78786-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Teaching Me How to Pray

Cory Thomas Pechan Driver¹

(1)

Council on International Educational Exchange, Rabat, Morocco

Cory Thomas Pechan Driver

End Abstract

Toward the end of the twelve years of research for my dissertation, I was asked by a colleague at a Moroccan university to give her students a lecture and tour of Jewish sites in Meknes, the smallest of the former imperial cities of Morocco. Because I had concluded my research in Meknes years earlier, I traveled a day before I was to give the tour to make sure that I could easily lead a group of students and professors to the two cemeteries, synagogue and Talmud Torah, without getting lost. I also wanted to verify that the sites were open to visitors in the wake of the acts of terrorism in Egypt, Lebanon, France, and Israel in the preceding weeks and months.

As I entered the “New Cemetery” of Meknes, inside the only mellah, or Jewish quarter, built after the French colonial period, I was met at the gate by the Muslim cemetery keeper, Leila. ¹ We greeted each other, but she was curious to know who I was and what my intentions were. I told her that I would be escorting a group of students to the cemetery the next day, if it was permissible. She noticeably relaxed and asked me to wait at the entrance. She came back seconds later from a small building which serves as her house as well as a tea shack, carrying with her a large book of graph paper. She told me, “I am the best cemetery keeper in all of Morocco. See how I have numbered all the graves and written down all the names, so that when Jews visit, I can show them exactly where their relatives’ graves are?” Indeed, she had indexed the graves both alphabetically by name, as well as by location. She went on, “I learned Hebrew while I worked [as a domestic helper] in the home of a Jewish couple. When they were about to leave for Israel [to emigrate], they asked me to come take care of the graves. I’ve been here for sixteen years now.” I thanked her for her service, and, curiously, I asked if I could take a quick tour of the cemetery to see what she knew about the residents of the graveyard. She was delighted to have the opportunity to demonstrate her knowledge and mastery of Hebrew.

As we were underway, she asked if I needed her to teach me how Jews pray for their dead. As she was asking, I was pulling my kippah out of my back pocket that I keep there for just such occasions. As she saw my head covering, she said, “Baqi ‘arifti/[oh], you already (or still) know.” I asked her to tell me what she knew anyway and asked if she would be willing to tell my students tomorrow as well. She thought for a moment and asked if the students were ajnib/foreigners like me, or if they were Moroccans. I told her it would be a mixed class. She responded that tomorrow would be a big day/nhar kbir because she would be able to show both Moroccans and foreigners that not only do a few Moroccan Muslims take care of Jewish graves, they also know how to pray. All over the country, the gradual evacuation of Jewish life in Morocco that saw a population of over a quarter million Jews after World War II reduced to only a few thousand at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has left Muslims like Leila in charge of Jewish spaces.

Theoretical Grounding

My goal in this work is to provide thick descriptions of practices conducted by Muslim guards and guides at Jewish cemeteries in Morocco and their understandings of the reasons for and outcomes of such practices. The driving question I ask is how Muslims use performances of Jewish ritual and memories of Jewish friends to create and develop their own moral selves. I chose to conduct my research primarily in cemeteries because they offer a material space where performers can mediate issues of loss, nostalgia, friendship, ritual responsibility, authority, authenticity, and cosmopolitanism, along with negotiating financial, moral, and spiritual capital. Although my ethnography describes Pesach seders, synagogue tours, and locations of potent displays of Jewish magic, all conducted outside of cemeteries, performers and performances of selfhood creation by Muslim Moroccans depend heavily on the residual material presence of Jews in Morocco for the effectiveness of their acts. In other words, while the performative acts as well as the agency and motives of performers are my central concerns, the physical setting constitutes a vitally important piece of the performance, which in many ways enables and elicits Muslim performance of Jewish acts in the first place.

The demonstration of Leila’s expertise in instructing both Jews and non-Jews [Moroccans and foreigners] described above is inextricably linked to the process of purposeful recreation of self and identity that is the focus of the people with whom I worked. When I use the term “identity,” I am not talking about a bureaucratic notion of a single adjective, such as Jewish, Muslim, Arab, or Amazigh (I use the term instead of “Berber”) defining a person for the purpose of easy bureaucratic identification. Rather, I use identity to mean both a social sense of who someone is in her community and a personal moral imaginary of the self. ² In both of these cases, the personal and the communal, the sense of the self is shaped by a set of realized, or realizable, potentialities.

In short, the Muslims doing Jewish things in and around Jewish cemeteries understand themselves and are understood by their communities in terms of what they do, what they can do, and what they strive to do. The Muslim subjects of this study differentiate themselves from their community and seek to cultivate their moral selves by means of their performances of Jewish languages, Jewish prayers, recitations of Muslim–Jewish–Moroccan history, and explanations of their own memories of Jewish lifeways before the mass emigration. They undertake these performances to entertain, educate, and economically benefit from tourists and pilgrims, Jewish and otherwise. But they are also performing for themselves, to (re)enact a longed-for time before Jewish mass migration and ethnoreligious strife when the Muslim raconteurs made sense of themselves and their communities by relationships between themselves and Jews.

In performing this creative work, the guides and guards also shape their communities and the visitors who are alternately their guests, patrons, students, beneficiaries of their wisdom, and victims of their ineptitude or deceitfulness. ³ The ability, or inability, of Muslims to use Jewish words and actions to create new understandings of themselves for themselves and for others has broad implications for Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Academic Study of Religion. Aside from the relatively narrow subject of Jewish–Muslim relationships in Morocco, my work should speak to those who study the flow of material and spiritual capital across religious boundaries, the complex social contexts of moral experience, ethnographies of race, rapid demographic change, unusual individuals’ abilities to shape their communities, and the formation of modern Moroccan self-understandings.

Because I consider two units of measurement; performances; and the experiences of the performers, this work stands astride two academic methodologies which, thus far, have interacted far less than they should. The first is the phenomenological school of anthropology of Wikan (1990), Kleinman (1995), Jackson (1998), and Seeman (2010). ⁴ These writers argue that the focus on either abstract culture or specific religious practices by themselves without consideration of the lived experiences of the individual humans with their own hopes, feelings, disappointments, and uncertainties overlooks what is the most crucial task of anthropology: studying the human. At several points in the following chapters, in the cemetery in Rabat and outside Ayyad’s home, I disclose my failures of understanding with people who had already talked with me for years about their actions, due to my fundamental misunderstanding of the identity shaping and deeply emotional power of their work at Jewish sacred sites. What their performances do to, in, for, and through them, accordingly, will be a central concern of the following chapters. It would be irresponsible, as well as misleading, however, to discuss the experiences of performers and audiences without discussing the performances themselves.

Performance theory has been instrumental in helping clarify and buttress indigenous understandings of the creative power of performances of expertise by the Muslims who inhabit, guard, and explain Jewish holy places. Scholars of performance studies have already pointed out how performance can shape new social realities, ⁵ mark ethnicity, ⁶ and be an occasion for a realignment of identities ⁷ ; how performance is especially important for Muslims in cultivating an ethical, moral self, and subjectivity ⁸ ; can be used to reinforce fixed cultural repertoires or stretch ethnopoetic rules constraining behavior ⁹ ; and can allow a performer, with the collaboration of an audience, to borrow ideas from another ethnic or religious group and claim them as one’s own. ¹⁰ Performances, such as an Amazigh Muslim man critiquing and eventually taking over the performance of my Passover seder (see Chapter 4), accomplish all these tasks simultaneously. In the case of Jews paying Muslims to take care of ancestors’ graves, one could use performance studies to focus on the fulfillment of goals of the people paying for the actions—fulfillment of filial piety in honoring father and mother—or how the performance creates new knowledge and possibilities for the tourists, I am most interested in (1) the professional identities created by the performers for themselves, (2) the change in the moral self of the performer, and (3) the ways in which the practices themselves change to accommodate the new practitioners.

Identity Interdependence and “Drinking the Milk of Trust”

Even with my Muslim raconteurs’ desire to focus on their own experiences in the physical remains of Jewish Morocco, the space is not theirs, or at least not theirs alone. One of the key practices of the Muslim guides and guards whom I have worked with is telling stories about the Jewish community and especially telling stories about ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Teaching Me How to Pray
• 2. Orientation: Arrival and Framing the Work of Ethnography
• 3. Moroccan Muslims Locating Moroccan Jews in Time and Space
• 4. Passover Professionals
• 5. Guards—Building Muslim Authority in Jewish Cemeteries
• 6. Drinking the Milk of Trust: A Performance of Authenticity
• 7. Blessings and the Business of Cemetery Tourism
• 8. Conclusion: Changing Flavor of the Milk of Trust
• Back Matter