Moroccan Jews became “modern” through a complex process of cultural and legal changes resulting in large part from their close encounter with imperial Europe. Institutions like the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the protégé system had an undeniable influence on the transformation of Moroccan Jewish identity and expectations during this period. In order to fully historicize Moroccan Jewish modernity, however, i.e. to locate its beginnings as well as its ending (not to mention its myriad meanings), this paper argues for the broadening of our inquiry to encompass earlier time periods, alternative geographies, and deeper registers of change than those imposed by an exclusive focus on a European impact followed by a local response. To that end, it analyzes a cataclysmic event in Jewish history during the period prior to colonial penetration: the rise and fall of the messianic mystical movement known as Sabbateanism, so-named after its founder, Shabbatai Tsvi the “false Messiah” [1626-1676] of Izmir. Inspired by current trends in Ottoman history, it attempts to locate Sabbateanism within contemporary social and political developments in Morocco during a formative period that witnessed both the integration of the Sephardim and the rise of the Alawi state, the latter often at the expense of certain Sufi groups. Such a contextualization begins sketching the parameters of an early modern period in Moroccan Jewish history at the same time as it compels us to recognize the consistencies in Moroccan Jewish society that survived the subsequent colonial period in North Africa, when seemingly everything changed.

Hardship defined the Tébessa region for four years before the spring of 1869. Drought and locusts destroyed harvests. Disease and migration devastated the population. Factional relations across eastern Algeria and western Tunisia strained under the weight of colonial border enforcement. In the spring of 1869, a caravan of Hammama based on the Tunisian side of the frontier crossed into Nememcha (and French Algerian) territory to buy grain at the Tébessa market. A faction of Nememcha cavaliers slaughtered them, possibly with the approval of the Arab Bureau officers of the region. The authors of this massacre only saw trial after the outcry raised by the colonial press made it impossible for the French military authority to ignore the deaths. There are many interesting facets of what would be called the Scandal of the Oued Mahouïne to consider; this paper is most concerned with why the massacre was not carried out by Ahmed Lakhdar. Head of the Ouled-Sidi-Yahia-ben-Taleb faction, Lakhdar refused the verbal request of the Arab Bureau officer de Boyat to raid the caravan in the days before the massacre, citing the lack of a written command. This paper examines the particular character of modernity in the Maghrib through this instance of colonial audacity: what did it mean for Ahmed Lakhdar to insist on written orders, to insist on the chain of command? What is the relationship between ecology and modernity? Can we arrive at a universal modernism through a history of local contingencies? In the discursive construction of “modernity,” colonial bureaucrats, officers, and writers often appealed to the reasonableness of their exercise of power, in contradistinction to the unaccountable nature of “Arab” authority. The rhetorical distance between despotic power and the rational authority of the French was precisely that putatively temporal dimension named “modernity.” By turning this discursive construction on its head, Lakhdar showed that modernity was always only a local contingency, not a universal, beneficent miasma emanating from imperial agents. The actions of Ahmed Lakhdar help us understand the peculiarly local way that ecology and empire could conspire to create modernity, and how “modern” forms of command, control, and power were understood and (re)produced at the eastern limits of French Algeria.

One of the most powerful factors that triggered socio-economic structural changes in Morocco during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was the expansion of the import of manufactured products from Europe. The diffusion of new items imported from Europe countered the interests of artisans, craftsmen, and merchants who suffered from competition with European goods and prices. In addition, these changes were regarded by some Moroccan ulama among the causes of the weakness of Islam. Suspicion of the population found expression in social unrest and outburst of xenophobic feelings and anti-European protests. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, rumors circulated that Christian manufactured products contained traces of impure substances, and fatwas against European goods were issued in Fez. These preoccupations gave rise to the fatwa, which forms the subject of this essay. The fatwa was written in an unspecified date during the latter part of the nineteenth century by Ja?far bin Idris al-Kattani (d.1905), a prominent Islamic scholar and shaykh al-jama?a, or supreme juridical authority in Morocco. In analyzing this fatwa, I explain al-Kattani’s juristic interpretation and argumentation, while paying close attention to the precedents in Islamic law and tradition that he assembled in order to support his opinion on the permissibility of Christian goods. My interest in this fatwa is as a route into the local content of modern changes, the distinctive nature of the discontent that was derived from these changes, the discursive method and the new consciousness and rationality that accommodated these transformations.

From Paul Rabinow’s French Modern (1989) to Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (2002), a rich vein of scholarship has explored the extent to which North African and Middle Eastern territories, societies, and polities were the testing grounds and showcases for European ideas about modernity, progress, and rationality, ideas which found expression in the Arab world while simultaneously denying Arab societies any possibility of autonomous agency in the production of modernity itself. Intellectual histories of colonial discourse and political histories of the colonial state have shown the transformative effects that colonial forms of knowledge and institutions of imperial rule could have in areas from urban space and the economy, to gender and culture. Building on but also departing from some of the themes of this body of work, recent writing on colonialism and empire has looked more critically at the limits of colonial power and the extent to which imperial rule (often a blunt, “arterial” rather than subtly Foucauldian, “capillary” form of power, to adopt Frederick Cooper’s expression) was frequently unable to impose itself except at occasional moments of—often spectacularly violent—intervention. This paper takes up this theme for the post-1940 French imperial state in North Africa, and particularly in Algeria, where the war years and post-war reinvention and reassertion of empire set the stage for political and strategic calculations that would prove disastrously mistaken as the crises of decolonisation escalated. Looking in particular at the private papers of Robert Montagne (1893-1954), the paper asks how a leading intellectual close to the centres of the late colonial state organised information and produced ideas about Maghribi society and politics, ideas that frequently informed late-colonial policymaking. Montagne, a well-known scholar and Maghribi affairs expert, author of the influential Les berbères et le makhzen dans le sud du Maroc (published by L’année sociologique in 1930), was also successively a naval officer, aviator, administrator, educator, political counselor, founder of the IFEAD (today IFPO) in Damascus, and of the CHEAM (Centre des hautes études d’administration musulmane) in Paris, from 1948 a professor at the Collège de France, and throughout his career an assiduous and well-connected student of Maghribi social change. This paper takes his case to show how strikingly the developments of modernity in Maghribi society could be missed and misjudged by prominent colonial experts, whose own forms of knowledge were much more fragile, and much less powerful, than has sometimes been supposed.