In addition to the European photographers who established themselves in Morocco in the early 20th century, Moroccans also set up photography studios in the early colonial era. Many of these early Moroccan photographers were Jewish, and created images depicting historical events and locations of interest to the Jewish community. These photographers complicate the traditional colonizer-colonized divide within studies of colonial photography and demonstrate the diversity of both the communities being represented and the representations themselves. This paper will focus on the photographer Joseph Bouhsira, who began his career as a professional photographer in Fez in the 1910s, and established studios with family members throughout Morocco. Many of Bouhsira’s photographs challenge the “scène et type” genre of colonial photography (which portrayed generic and stereotypical individuals as representative of entire religious or ethnic groups) through his use of specific captions, outdoor shots, and his focus on the diversity of the Jewish community in Morocco. Since independence, scholarship on Moroccan photography has tended portray the emergence of Moroccan photography as connected to the growing nationalist and independence movement of the country. As a result, Moroccan Jews have been excluded from Moroccan studies of photography that draw a sharp distinction between colonial photography, which is associated with the French, and post-colonial photography, portrayed as Moroccan. This paper seeks to complicate the colonial/post-colonial, French/Moroccan binaries through an analysis of Bouhsira’s works and examine the role of Moroccan Jews in the creation of a Moroccan photography industry.

“Type Indigene” and “Maroc Typique” are two brands of commercial postcards that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of these historical photographs and postcards are housed in many state and family archives around the world. They depicted exotic poses of Jews, slaves, and Berbers throughout French colonial North Africa. In addition to their stereotypical nature and racial features, these postcards present indigenous Jewish populations as isolated social groups and prisoners of “ghettos.” This line of thought follows the descriptions provided by European travellers about these ethnic minorities as territorially demarcated in-groups with distinct cultural values and tribal characteristics. I argue that from a historical perspective the postcard is a colonial photographic document that reinforces the ethnographic themes of the colonial travel narrative of the late nineteenth century. The Jewish neighborhood- mellah- epitomized from the colonial photographer’s perspective the Arab and Islamic oppression of Jews. Jews are depicted inside walled homes and within the mellah. The viewer sees little interaction between Jews and Muslims in the frames of these postcards; and therefore the postcard becomes an undeniable testimony of the miserable experience of Jews in the “Islamic ghetto.” At the same time I contend that Moroccan Jewish photographic collections after WWII demonstrate a different reality in many southern rural regions.

In 1971, Cecile and Henri Boccara took a 16mm film camera from their home in Marrakech to Ntifa in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains. By then, the majority of Morocco’s Jews had already left the country and the community’s disappearance into diaspora loomed on the horizon. Once there, the Boccaras filmed the village’s last seven Jewish families just before they too departed for France and Israel. With its soft colors and over- and under-saturation due to the natural lighting, their silent footage captures a range of people, places, and activities in and around Ntifa and bears traces of the technology of its making. This archive would likely have remained out of view had it not been for the Boccaras’ son, the filmmaker Ivan Boccara, who found the unedited reels in 2000. Since then, these archives have been the foundation for an ongoing artistic and cinematic exploration of the intersection of memory, history, and the emigration of Morocco’s once large and geographically dispersed Jewish community. In “Memoires de Ntifa (Memories of Ntifa),” an art installation created for the 2012 Paris Triennale based on the inherited archives, Boccara juxtaposes the archival footage with a short documentary describing his difficulties finding and filming those whom his parents met in 1971. Many Ntifi Jews, simply, did not consent to appear before his camera. “Memoires de Ntifa” thus raises critical questions about past and present images of Morocco’s Jewish communities in art, visual culture, and their critical reception. Boccara, I contend in this analysis, proposes an alternative aesthetic approach to representing Morocco’s Jewish communities at a time when the complete disappearance from Moroccan soil appears inevitable and with subjects who resist the kinds of public historicization and memorialization such a project would seem to require. In so doing, "Memoires de Ntifa" eschews the Orientalist, colonialist, and nationalist tropes that historically defined visual representations of Morocco’s Jews and it critiques the kinds of visibility and transparency that documentary and ethnographic representation have long purported to provide.

As has been well documented from the early modern period onwards, one distinctive aspect of Moroccan Judaism is the centrality of practices, texts, and materials that focus on exemplary religious figures. Emphasizing the putatively similar forms of religious expression across Jewish and Muslim contexts, colonial scholars labeled this Maghrebi phenomenon "saint veneration" and subjected it to wide ranging historical and ethnographic analysis. This presentation investigates one arena of Jewish hagiographic practice: iconography and its ritual entailments. Differing significantly from the Muslim context, iconography has largely escaped the attention of scholarship from the colonial period onwards. This presentation investigates how iconography in Jewish Morocco is a modern religious phenomenon, depending on technologies of mechanical reproduction and responding to the conditions of colonial empire. Rather than marking a clear break from earlier forms of religious subjectivity and practice, however, I argue that mass images of Moroccan Jewish saints became so important so quickly because they were an extension of ongoing patterns of Jewish piety whose expressions permeate liturgical, pietistic, and other forms of religious practice. In tracing this dialectic of change and continuity, I pay particular attention to how iconography emerged, also, as a critical reflection on the colonial and postcolonial contexts in which is has been produced.