World War II was an odd time in Tangier. The city was occupied by Spanish forces without a fight, but it was also characterized espionage, smuggling, and the arrival of refugees from all over. Tangier's unique administrative status compared to the rest of Morocco had already made it more difficult for the city to re-supply with foodstuffs, and the opportunity for smuggling into the French and Spanish zones meant that much of what did arrive did not stay. At the war's close, thousands of Moroccans from the Rif Mountains poured into the city seeking relief from the catastrophic drought and famine facing the region. In this paper, I reconstruct the foodways of Tangier in the 1940s, showing how they were shaped by wartime exigencies and the diverse populations living in the city at the time. The city's Western expatriate community and local populations mixed together in cafes, bars, and restaurants in an emergent dining scene. Rural migrants brought new ingredients and recipes into the city's culinary vernacular. All the while, the challenges of ensuring steady food supplies--caused in part by a weak Spanish administration--made securing basic sustenance difficult. Tanjawi cuisine--from its preferences in tea to the wide availability of alcohol to its fresh seafood--reflect its unique physical and human geography. The direct and indirect effects of the war helped catalyze distinct Tanjawi foodways, many of which continue to this day.

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.

In the early 20th century, Western travelers to Tangier often designated the North African port city as the place “where Europe ends and Africa begins.” Accordingly, their accounts were filled with descriptions of the intense sights, smells, and above all, noises that greeted their border-crossing arrival: yelling crowds, praying beggars, and the clacking castanets of so-called “Gnawi” or Black street performers mixed with the piano emanating from European buildings. Some also heard threats to European hegemony, including Jewish songs in Tangier’s cafes that lamented Moroccan Muslim deaths at the hands of the French; one writer concluded that the French would need to more violently administer their new Protectorate in the face of such shared Muslim-Jewish antipathy. What drove Western visitors to treat Tangier as a metonym for Morocco; and further, how did sound and music serve to formulate these impressions most strongly? This paper will analyze the soundscapes of early 20th-century Tangier, and specifically how race, empire, and resistance were narratively mapped in the city through sound. Using Euro-American accounts of Tangier’s political, physical, and racial landscape between 1900 and 1923 and drawing on both sound studies and histories of race and colonialism in North Africa, it will consider how in the years leading up to the International Zone the city was constructed as both civilizational crossroads and transgressive racialized space, via descriptions of its sound and music. By considering this sensory history of Europeans and Americans encountering Tangier—and behind it, Morocco, the Orient, and Africa—I argue that the broader colonial encounter is brought into sharper focus, and in particular the role of race and ethnicity in Western colonial interventions in North Africa. These themes would gain even greater significance with the development of French and Spanish colonialism in Morocco, as race became a site of strategic intervention and colonial control for both Protectorates, namely in musical and musicological initiatives. This paper will demonstrate how Tangier’s extraordinary status and its unique clamor rendered it an unusually legible site from which to read the colonial racialization of Morocco.

Tangier occupies a curious role in the American jazz imagination. Compositions named for the city abound – Idrees Sulieman’s “Tangier Blues,” Herbie Mann’s “In Tangier,” Randy Weston’s “Tangier Bay,” Ornette Coleman’s “Interzone Suite,” Carol Robbin’s “Tangier,” Hot Jazz Club “Swing de Tangiers." In the mid-1950s, the eminent jazz critic Albert Murray, then a young captain stationed at the Nouasser air base in Casablanca, delivered a series of lectures (in French) on the meaning of jazz. He stressed that the art form was the creation of the “black American” – l’Américain d’Afrique – adding rather cryptically that “jazz in Africa does not exist, with the exception of Lionel or Armstrong, when they come to Tangier, Casablanca or Marrakesh.” What role does Tangier play in the black internationalist imaginary? How did American jazz programming on Radio Tanger differ from French and Spanish jazz diplomacy? Tangier was home to a bevy of radio stations — Radio Tanger International, Radio Africa, Radio Maghreb, Radio Pan-America – broadcasting in Arabic, English, French and Spanish. Concerned about growing Soviet influence in the city, the US had set up a Voice of America relay station in 1949. Tangier’s airwaves transmitted a range of cultural and ideological messages. (Radio Africa, for instance, was founded by the notorious Jacques Trémoulet, who ran Vichy’s radio propaganda during the war and after being sentenced to death in absentia in 1946, fled France to Francoist Spain – where he founded Radio Intercontinental Madrid – and then continued to Tangier.) Radio Tanger and Radio Africa both had jazz programs, led by French radio hosts. How did Moroccan nationalists respond to colonial radio?