The history of Jews in North Africa has traditionally invoked Jews' role as intermediaries between Europeans and Maghribi Muslims. This panel seeks to add nuance to our understanding of North African history by arguing that Jews were not limited to mediating roles, and that their relations with Europeans and Muslims did not always fit into a neat triangle. In re-examining assumptions about the history of Maghribi Jews and bringing to light previously unexplored episodes in North African Jewish history, the papers in this panel present new directions in the study of the complex relationships between Jews, Europeans, and Muslims in the Maghrib.
Paper A examines the history of North African Jews whose identity was linked with European roots and who played a major role in the trade between Europe and the Maghrib during the eighteenth century. Focusing on groups such as the Livornese in Tunisia and Algeria, this paper uses criteria of ethnicity, class, and sector to provide the first in-depth analysis of these European-Maghribi Jews in the early modern period.
Paper B re-evaluates European interventions with the Moroccan government on behalf of Moroccan Jews in the late nineteenth century. Using correspondence from the Moroccan archives, it suggests that Jews did not see European intervention as their only hope for justice in an Islamic state. Rather, using notions of forum shopping, this paper argues that Jews saw foreigners as only one avenue of appeal among a number of others (including the Moroccan government).
Paper C examines the operation of a Moroccan trade-union established during World War II and its relation to the local Jewish community. The union, made up of Moroccan Muslims and a few French consultants, aimed to prevent the alleged control of the market by Jewish merchants. The paper examines how the encounter between colonialism, racism, and economic objectives manipulated Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco.
Paper D explores an unlikely 1961 incident in which Jews of Oran, Algeria, rioted against their Muslim neighbors in order to examine the varieties of a tense but still diverse late-colonial society. The image of Jews victimizing Muslims contrasted starkly with the dominant narrative that held Jews to be eternal victims of Islamic intolerance. This incident thus inspired competing and politically tinged representations in the international press and among global Jewish philanthropies.
Disciplines
History
Participants
Prof. Susan Gilson Miller
-- Discussant, Chair
Dr. Joshua Schreier
-- Presenter
Dr. Jessica Marglin
-- Organizer, Presenter
Dr. Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli
-- Organizer, Presenter
This paper re-evaluates foreigners’ interventions in the policy of the Moroccan government regarding its Jewish subjects in the late nineteenth century. Drawing mainly on correspondence among Moroccan state officials held in the Moroccan archives, this paper attempts to situate European (and to a lesser extent American) diplomatic pressure on the Moroccan state to reform its treatment of Jews in the context of relations between Jews and the state.
The paper argues that foreigners’ preconceptions about Islam led many consular officials to act on the assumption that Jews were by and large victims of Islamic injustice. This approach often led them to conclude that any Jew punished by the Moroccan authorities was innocent and had not received a fair trial. The Moroccan archives, however, show that often the so-called abuses of the state were in fact the normal functioning of Islamic law. The paper examines a few key incidents as examples of the ways in which the Moroccan state tried to respect the injunctions of Islamic law despite accusations of injustice. Perhaps even more importantly, many Jews recognized the authority of Islamic law, and believed that the Islamic legal system was one which could grant them justice. Jews did not necessarily accept the discourse of Europeans that Western civilization had a monopoly on justice, and thus that Jews’ only path in their pursuit of justice was through European intervention.
Nonetheless, there is no question that some Jews appealed to Europeans to put pressure on the Moroccan government in various instances. However, the evidence from the archives suggests that Jews rarely saw foreigners as their only option to attain redress. Jews sought to maximize their chances in their pursuit of justice, and thus often appealed to diplomats alongside their appeals to Moroccan government officials. Asking foreigners for help did not necessarily mean that the Jews concerned believed the Moroccan state was fundamentally unjust. This study draws on legal theories such as forum shopping in order to help understand Moroccan Jews’ choices about avenues of appeal. Rather than seeing Jews’ relationships with foreign powers as exclusive or ideologically based, this paper attempts to paint a picture of Jews as maximizing their chances of success by simultaneously pursuing multiple courses of action.
This paper explores an unlikely (and almost entirely overlooked) 1961 incident in which Jews of Oran rioted against their Muslim neighbors in order to examine the varieties and nuance of a tense but still diverse late-colonial society. It represents one section of an evolving project that means to complicate the scholarly and popular image of Middle Eastern Jews as a distinct, reified minority in “Muslim” (or “Arab”) lands. If this paper offers a story of violence, it is framed by geographic and cultural proximity between Jews and Muslims, and actually contributes to an evolving scholarship that recalls a relatively recent but largely forgotten religious pluralism and diversity in North Africa.
Prompted by the murder of a Jewish hairstylist, the riot (which several French and Muslim observers labeled a “pogrom”) led to the pillaging of a number of Muslim-owned stores and to the murder of two Muslims. Because the image of Jews victimizing Muslims contrasted starkly with the dominant colonial narrative that held Jews to be eternal victims of Islamic intolerance, it inspired a struggle of competing and politically tinged representations in the international press and among global Jewish philanthropies. The North African Arabic press, for example, saw the episode as sad proof that native Algerian Jews had absorbed the “racism” of their colonizers, and called upon them to recognize that their proper allegiances lay with their Muslim brothers in the struggle for independence. Algerian Jewish organizations such as the Comité Juif Algérien d’Etudes Sociales (CJAES), in contrast, read Jewish violence as the sad and deplorable outcome of fear and desperation caused by terrorism, but nevertheless agreed that it was "racist" and hoped for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims. This paper suggests that such narratives reveal much about a dying pluralism in the last days of France’s colonial order.
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.
