Abstract
What did it mean to be a Jew living in an international city within a colonized Arab-Muslim majority during a decade fraught with fascist and anti-fascist tensions? This paper focuses on a particularly fraught moment of the twentieth century: the 1930s, a period of political polarization across the globe with distinct ramifications in colonial domains and the minorities living in those domains. Tangier became an international city per the treaties of 1912 that divided Morocco in French and Spanish Protectorates. As a result of this exceptional status, the Jews of Tangier came to occupy a unique political and social position vis-à-vis Moroccan Jews across the three zones. Jews have lived in the area around Tangier for centuries, dating before the Arab Muslim conquests in North Africa of the seventh and eighth centuries. After the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, streams of Jewish refugees fled the Iberian peninsula for safe harbor around the Mediterranean, with vast numbers settling in northern Morocco just a short boat ride away. The Spanish Jews (Sephardim, from the Hebrew “Sepharad” or “Spain”) came to dominate Jewish life in most of northern and central urban Morocco, including in Tangier. They spoke Haketía, a Moroccan variant of Judeo-Spanish more commonly known as Ladino elsewhere where Sephardim traveled. By the time of the protectorate treaties, the Tangier Jewish community had developed deep roots and multiple historical, cultural, and linguistic identities. The convergence of the Spanish Civil War, Italian fascist and Nazi German propaganda, as well as leftist activism, Moroccan nationalism, and Zionism raised political and social anxieties for Jews across Morocco. Through an examination of political ephemera, surveillance reports, and newspapers, this paper examines how Tangier’s unique legal status effected the Jews that lived there during the 1930s as the city served as port of entry and egress for some of the most potent political trends of the day.
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