Beyond polarities

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 3 December

IN the Draa Valley, in southern Morocco, flanked on one side by an oasis densely planted with date palms and on the other by the high crumbling mud walls of what had been the Jewish quarters of an old and now abandoned village, I read about the Israeli assault on the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. A residential area had been shelled, and 19 killed, most of them women and children, most of them in their sleep.

Legend has it that the Draa Valley was once home to a mighty Jewish kingdom. Certainly, when the Arab conquerors reached Morocco in 700 A.D., they found among the indigenous Berber inhabitants large and widespread communities of Jews. Their numbers were increased by Jewish refugees from Spain, chased from their homeland as it was reconquered by Christian armies between the 13th and 16th centuries.

Well into the second half of the 20th century, Morocco remained home to a large, distinctive and diverse Jewish community. There were Arab-speaking and Berber-speaking Jews. There were dark and fair skinned, brown and green and blue eyed Jews. Some were wealthy but most were poor. There were Jewish merchants, courtiers and doctors; Jewish barbers, peddlers, peasants and labourers. Jewish artisans – jewellers, metal workers, masons, ceramicists – shaped the country’s rich culture of craft and design. Jewish musicians were conduits for its classical tradition of Andalusian music. Jews in Morocco were scholars, poets, slave traders and bandits. Under the French and Spanish colonial powers, some Jews enjoyed privileged status and acted as agents of the foreign powers; others helped build left wing parties and trades unions.

As People of the Book, Jews in Morocco enjoyed subordinate but protected status. They were subject to restrictions and periodic outbreaks of violence, but for the most part they shared the political and economic fortunes of their fellow Moroccans. They enjoyed autonomy in managing their own community, and as individuals nearly all Jews interacted on a daily basis with the Muslim majority through commercial, civic, family and personal relationships.

Evidence of centuries-long intermingling can be found in religious and secular literature and in the shared custom of saint worship. Uniquely in the Jewish world, Moroccan Jewry venerates wise men, martyrs, and miracle workers by building shrines around their graves and marking their death anniversaries by festivals known as hiloula, when devotees celebrate with singing and feasting. The hiloula is clearly a Jewish counterpart to the Muslim moussem. Indeed, there are a number of saints jointly venerated by Jews and Muslims, and in remote areas Muslims have traditionally acted as the custodians of Jewish tomb-shrines.

During World War II, Jews in Vichy-administered Morocco fared better than Jews in any European country under fascist control – much better than in France itself. The populace resisted attempts to impose anti-semitic regulations, and the Sultan declared, “The Jews remain under my protection and I refuse to allow any distinction to be made among my subjects.”

Yet, within 30 years, Morocco’s Jews had emigrated, en masse, mainly to Israel. At the time of independence in 1956, there were some 250,000 Jews in the country, living in communities in the cities of the coasts and the plains, in the Atlas Mountains and southern oases like the Draa. Today, there remain only about 5,000, mainly in Casablanca.

Not surprisingly, the debate about the causes of the exodus of Morocco’s Jews is coloured by politics. After the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionist organisations mounted well-resourced drives to recruit immigrants to Israel from among poorer Jews in rural areas. The national movement in Morocco – like the national movement in India – was pro-Palestinian, but not anti-Jewish. After independence, the new government sought to prevent Jews emigrating to Israel. The policy was motivated partly by the requirements of solidarity with the Palestinians, and partly by a desire to retain the country’s Jewish population. It backfired, making Jews feel trapped and vulnerable, thus enhancing the allure of Israel. Though the policy was soon abandoned, the sense of insecurity lingered, and was profoundly exacerbated by the trauma of the Israel-Arab war of June 1967.

The ensuing migration was not, however, a response to persecution or specific threats of violence. There was no breakdown in daily relations between Jews and other Moroccans. Village by village, community by community, Jews were induced to leave by Zionist recruiters, aided by the international climate, and, ironically, a mystical and decidedly pre-modern strain in Moroccan Jewry, among whom pilgrimage to Palestine (and the chance to die there) was long established as a Jewish equivalent to the Muslim Haj.

As Haim Zafrani, doyen of Moroccan Jewish studies, wrote, “They went up to Zion in messianic fervour and found no warmth in the welcome they received in the land of their fathers.” In Israel, Moroccan Jews were used as muscle power to build new development towns and re-enforce border settlements. Regarded as second-class Israelis by the dominant Ashkenazi group (from central and eastern Europe), they suffered discrimination, poverty and for many years the denial of their distinctive culture, which has nonetheless survived.

Significantly, Moroccan Jews in Israel maintain links with family, friends and villages in Morocco and regularly visit the old country to take part in hiloulas. In stark contrast, Israelis of Russian or Polish descent would view any return to their roots with chilly trepidation. Again, in contrast to eastern Europe, in Morocco today, the loss of the Jewish population is widely lamented. There is a proud awareness that Morocco is and always has been a composite culture. This was evident in the popular response to the May 2003 terrorist attacks in Casablanca, which targeted Jewish social clubs and restaurants among other places associated (in the minds of the suicide bombers, at least) with “Western” influence. A week later, tens of thousands marched through the city’s streets, chanting “Jews and Muslims united – the only solution”.

Meditating on the past and present of Moroccan Jewry, boundaries melt as surely as the mud walls of the ancient Draa villages. Boundaries between Jew and Arab and Berber; between East and West, between Africa, Europe and West Asia. The polarities of the war on terror, the paradigms that are the great lies of our time, dissolve. The borders of what we call “the Arab world” or even “Islam” appear porous, host to multiple identities, as do the borders surrounding “the Jews”, who until relatively recently were widely perceived – inside and outside Europe – as a non-European people. That they have become arch-representatives of the West, proxies for American power, is a tragic distortion of a complex history, the upshot of the Israel-U.S. alliance and Zionism’s disastrously reductive impact on Jewish identity, locally and globally.