My paper will examine the operation of a Moroccan trade-union – L’union Cooperative Marocaine – established during World War II and its relation to the local Jewish community. L’union Cooperative Marocaine was founded in January 1941, concurrently with the establishment of the Vichy regime in France. Its members were Moroccan merchants from all major cities aided by a few French consultants. Its declared aim was to remove arbitration fees in the buying and selling of basic commodities for the benefit of the local population. Additional documents make clear that the union's ambition was to buy and sell these products in a collective way in order to avoid the alleged control of the market by Jewish traders who purportedly made their profit at the expense of the local Muslim population. The specific context of this occurrence involves a number of extreme conditions: a country under a colonial situation which inherently and a-priori involves matters of racism, categorization and violence; an extremely deeply-rooted Jewish minority which enjoyed relatively friendly conditions for generations under the ruling Islamic kingdom; world-wide trends of nationalism seeking decolonization; an economic crisis; a global struggle between various political ideologies; and from the Jews’ point of view a constant fear that what was happening to their brothers in Europe might arrive any day at their doorsteps. Building on this story I shall critically discuss matters such as the use of economic issues in the creation of racist logics and the connection between these logics and colonial situations, coexistence under extreme conditions, the memory of World War 2 among Moroccans, and especially Moroccan Jews, and ways of telling these memories in Morocco and France. Consequently the paper's aim is to examine how the encounter between colonialism, racism, and economic objectives manipulated Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco.