Historical Context

Moroccan Jews

 

Moroccan Jews constitute an ancient community. Before the founding of Israel in 1948, there were about 250,000 to 350,000 Jews in the country, which gave Morocco the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world, but by 2017 only 2,000 or so remain.  

 

Jews in Morocco, originally speakers of Berber languages, Judeo-Moroccan Arabic or Judaeo-Spanish, were the first in the country to adopt the French language, and unlike the general population French remains the main (and, in many cases, the exclusive) language of members of the Jewish community in Morocco still.

 

Jewish History in Morocco from the 18th Century

 

In the 18th century the condition of the Jewish community was unchanged from that of centuries of acceptance under the rule of Mohammed III (1757–89), who distinguished himself by his attempt to introduce European culture into his kingdom. His eldest son, Moulay Ali, governor of Fez, courageously opposed his father's suggestion to impose a tax upon that city in favour of his other brothers, which tax was to be paid by the Jewish community. He stated that the Jews of Fez were already so poor that they were unable to bear the present tax and that he was not willing to increase still further their misery. His minister was the Jew Elijah ha-Levi, who had at one time fallen into disgrace and had been given as a slave to a smuggler of Tunis, but had been restored to favor.  

 

The accession to the throne of Yazid, on the death of Mohammed III in 1789, led to a terrible massacre of the Moroccan Jews, having refused him their support in his fight with his brother for the succession. As a punishment the richer Jews of Tetouan, at his entry into the city, were tied to the tails of horses and dragged through the city. Many were killed in other ways or robbed. Jewish women were raped. The Spanish consul, Solomon Hazzan, was executed for alleged treachery, and the Jews of Tangier, Asilah, and Alcazarquivir were condemned to pay a large sum of money. 

 

Elijah, the minister of the former king, who had always opposed Yazid in the council, quickly embraced Islam to avoid being persecuted. He died soon after. The cruelty of the persecutors reached its climax in Fez. In Rabat, as in Meknes, the Jews were ill-treated. In Mogador, strife arose between the Jews and the city judge on the one hand, and the Moorish citizens on the other; the dispute was over the question of Jewish garb. Finally the Jews were ordered to pay 100,000 piasters and three shiploads of gunpowder; and most of them were arrested and beaten daily until the payment was made. Many fled beforehand to Gibraltar or other places; some died as martyrs; and some accepted Islam. The notables and the Muslim masses then rose to intervene on behalf of the Jews. They hid many of them in their houses and saved a great many others. In Rabat, the governor Bargash saved the community from the worst.  The sanguinary events of the year 1790 have been poetically described in two kinot for the Ninth of Ab, by Jacob ben Joseph al-Mali.

 

From the second half of this century various accounts of travels exist which give information concerning the external position of the Jews. Chénier, for example, describes them as follows:

"The Jews possess neither lands nor gardens, nor can they enjoy their fruits in tranquillity. They must wear only black, and are obliged when they pass near mosques, or through streets in which there are sanctuaries, to walk barefoot. The lowest among the Moors imagines he has a right to ill-treat a Jew, nor dares the latter defend himself, because the Koran and the judge are always in favor of the Mohammedan. Notwithstanding this state of oppression, the Jews have many advantages over the Moors: they better understand the spirit of trade; they act as agents and brokers, and they profit by their own cunning and by the ignorance of the Moors. In their commercial bargains many of them buy up the commodities of the country to sell again. Some have European correspondents; others are mechanics, such as goldsmiths, tailors, gunsmiths, millers, and masons. More industrious and artful, and better informed than the Moors, the Jews are employed by the emperor in receiving the customs, in coining money, and in all affairs and intercourse which the monarch has with the European merchants, as well as in all his negotiations with the various European governments.

 

 

 

There were, indeed, quite a number of such Jewish officials, negotiators, treasurers, councilors, and administrators at the Moroccan court, whom the European is inclined to call "ministers", but whom in reality the ruler used merely as intermediaries in extorting money from the people, and dismissed as soon as their usefulness in this direction was at an end. They were especially Jews from Spain, the megorashim, whose wealth, education, and statesmanship paved their way to the court here, as formerly in Spain. One of the first of such ministers was Shumel al-Barensi, at the beginning of the 16th century in Fez, who opened the "state career" to a long succession of coreligionists ending in the 19th century with Masado ben Leaho, prime minister and representative councillor of the emperor in foreign affairs. It would be erroneous to suppose that these Jewish dignitaries of the state succeeded in raising the position and the influence of their fellow believers, or that they even attempted to do so. They were usually very glad if they themselves were able to remain in office to the end of their lives.

 

Moroccan Jews were employed also as ambassadors to foreign courts. At the beginning of the 17th century Pacheco in the Netherlands; Shumel al-Farrashi at the same place in 1610; after 1675 Joseph Toledani, who, as stated above, concluded peace with Holland; his son Hayyim in England in 1750; a Jew in Denmark. In 1780 Jacob ben Abraham Benider was sent as minister from Morocco to King George III; in 1794 a Jew named Sumbal and in 1828 Meïr Cohen Macnin were sent as Moroccan ambassadors to the English court.

 

Another event caused to a population decrease among the community was the two-year exile of the Jews from the mellah in 1790–1792, during the brief reign of sultan Malawy yazid . The whole community was forced to leave to Qasba Shrarda which was on the other side of Fez. This time the population of the Jews around the mellah was at the lowest stage of all time, and did not manage to "heal" itself. A mosque was built on the site of the main synagogue, under the order of yazid, tomb stones from a near Jewish cemetery was used to built the mosque, and the cemetery itself was moved to the entrance of the Muslim quarter along with the bones of the saintly rabbis. The exile lasted around for two years, and only after the death of yazid, the qadi of Fez ordered the mosque to be torn down and the Jews were permitted to return to their quarter.

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The 19th century, which brought emancipation to the Jews of many countries, failed to fundamentally alter the status of Moroccan Jews, but produced new divisions among them and entailed new sources of trouble. In the mid 19th century, commercial development and European economic penetration brought prosperity to many Jewish merchants in northern Moroccan ports, but cost many Jews in the interior their traditional livelihoods, as industrial imports from Europe drove traditional Jewish crafts out of the market. As a result, Moroccan Jews started migrating from the interior to coastal cities such as Essaouira, Mazagan, Asfi, and later Casablanca for economic opportunity, participating in trade with Europeans and the development of those cities.

 

Some impoverished migrants to overpopulated urban mellahs (Jewish quarters) struggled to survive as shopkeepers, peddlers, artisans or beggars.

 

Morocco's instability and divisions also fuelled conflicts, for which Jews were frequent scapegoats. The First Franco-Moroccan War in 1844 brought new misery and ill treatment upon the Moroccan Jews, especially upon those of Mogador (known as Essaouira). When the Hispano-Moroccan War broke out on September 22, 1859, the Mellah of Tetuan was sacked, and many Jews fled to Cadiz and Gibraltar for refuge.

 

Alliance Israélite Universelle

This incident in the Battle of Tétouan of 1860 was covered by the European Jewish press, which led to an international effort called "The Morocco Relief Fund."[49] The persecution of Moroccan Jews was one of the motives for the foundation in 1860 of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a French-based organisation working for Jewish social and political equality and economic advancement worldwide.

Morocco was one of the countries where the AIU was most active; it opened its first school in Tetuan in 1862, followed by schools in Tangier (1864), Essaouira (1866), and Asfi (1867).  Eventually, it had 83 schools in Morocco, more than in the rest of the world combined.  Over time, the AIU in Morocco was more and more closely associated with French colonial influence; one of its assistant secretary-generals later noted that its "close, even organic relations with the Quai d'Orsay (French foreign ministry) were an open secret."

 

While the AIU failed to achieve much in increasing Moroccan Jews' political status, it did succeed in giving a significant minority of them modern French-language educations and in initiating them into French culture. This included a transformation of many Moroccan Jews' gender and sexual norms. For many centuries, Moroccan Jews and Muslims had shared such customs as polygamy, segregation of the sexes, early ages of female marriage, and a tolerance for men's love of male youths that was in contrast to both Jewish and Islamic scriptural prescriptions.  The AIU set out to Europeanize Moroccan Jews' marriage patterns and family forms, combating prostitution, eliminating Jewish women's traditional head coverings, and reining-in on what it saw as Jewish men's promiscuity and homosexual tendencies.  These changes required, in the words of an AIU alumni association in Tangiers in 1901, that Jewish mores be "disengaged from the Muslim spirit” – thus helping, like the AIU's activities generally, to increase Moroccan Jews' distance from an emerging Moroccan national identity. Levy Cohen founded the first francophone newspaper in Morocco, Le Reveil du Maroc , in 1883 to spread French language and culture among his coreligionists.

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In 1863 Sir Moses Montefiore and the Board of Deputies of British Jews received a telegram from Morocco asking for help for a group of Jews who were imprisoned at Safi on suspicion of having killed a Spaniard. Two others had already been executed at the instigation of the Spanish consul; one of them publicly in Tangier, the other in Safi. Sir Moses, supported by the British government, undertook a journey to Morocco to demand the liberation of the imprisoned Jews and, as he said in a letter to the sultan, to move the latter "to give the most positive orders that Jews and Christians, dwelling in all parts of Your Majesty's dominions, shall be perfectly protected, and that no person shall molest them in any manner whatsoever in anything which concerns their safety and tranquillity; and that they may be placed in the enjoyment of the same advantages as all other subjects of Your Majesty." Montefiore was successful in both attempts.

 

The prisoners were liberated, and on February 15, 1864, the sultan published an edict granting equal rights of justice to the Jews.[58] This edict of emancipation was confirmed by Mohammed IV's son and successor, Moulay Hasan I, on his accession to the throne 1873 and again on September 18, 1880, after the Conference of Madrid.

Pro-Jewish reforms were often not executed by local magistrates in the fragmented sultanate, however, and even if they were they reignited animosity toward the Jewish population. Thus, for example, the sultan Sulaiman (1795–1822) decreed that the Jews of Fez might wear shoes; but so many Jews were killed in the streets of that city as a result of the edict that they themselves asked the sultan to repeal it. According to a statistical report of the AIU, for the years 1864–80 no less than 307 Jews were murdered in the city and district of Morocco, which crimes, although brought to the attention of the magistracy upon every occasion, remained unpunished.

During this century and up to 1910, around 1000 Moroccan Jewish families migrated to the Amazon, in northern Brazil, during the rubber boom.

 

 

 

French Protectorate

The status of Moroccan Jews was not substantially improved by the establishment in 1912 of a French protectorate over much of the country. By contrast with Algeria, where Jews obtained French citizenship en masse with the adoption of the Crémieux decree in 1870, the establishment of the French protectorate in Morocco cost many Jews the forms of European extraterritorial protection they had formerly enjoyed, relegating them once more to the status of indigènes or "natives" along with their Muslim compatriots.

 

In 1912, amid the insurrection that followed the disclosure of the Treaty of Fes, thousands of rebelling Moroccan soldiers entered and pillaged the Mellah of Fez, stopping only after French artillery rounds pounded the Jewish quarter. More than 50 Jews were killed and hundreds of homes and shops were destroyed or damaged. The events were known as Bloody Days of Fes or the "Tritel." 

 

In Casablanca, the Hadida brothers edited Or Ha’Maarav, or La Lumiere du Maroc (1922-1924), a Zionist newspaper written in Judeo-Arabic with Hebrew script, which ran from 1922 until the French authorities shut it down in 1924.  It was followed by L'Avenir Illustré (1926-1940) a nationalist, pro-Zionist francophone newspaper, edited by Jonathan Thurz as well as l'Union Marocaine (1932-1940), a francophone newspaper in line with emancipatory views of the AIU, edited by Élie Nattaf.  L'Avenir Illustré and L'Union Marocaine were both shut down by the Vichy regime.

As a community, Moroccan Jews sent significant numbers of children to study in French, at institutions such as the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a generation or two earlier than Moroccan Muslims.  By the 1930s, however, increasing numbers of Moroccan Muslims had also started graduating from schools taught in French, demanding access to positions previously held by French citizens and by Moroccan Jews in French-owned businesses and in the colonial administration.

 

World War II

In 1940, Résident Général Charles Noguès implemented antisemitic decrees coming from Nazi-controlled Vichy government issued excluding Jews from public functions.   Sultan Mohammed V refused "Vichy’s plan to ghettoize and deport Morocco’s quarter of a million Jews to the killing factories of Europe," and, in an act of defiance, insisted on inviting all the rabbis of Morocco to the 1941 throne celebrations.  However, the French government did impose some antisemitic laws against the sultan's will.  Leon Sultan, of the Moroccan Communist Party, for example, was disbarred.

 

The racist laws had a negative effect on Moroccan Jews and put them in an uncomfortable position "between an indifferent Muslim majority and an anti-Semitic settler class."

In 1948, approximately 265,000 Jews lived in Morocco. Around 2,500 live there now, mostly in Casablanca, but also in Fes and other main cities.

 

In June 1948, soon after Israel was established and in the midst of the first Arab-Israeli war, riots against Jews broke out in Oujda and Djerada, and in Alcazarquivir killing 44 Jews. In 1948–9, 18,000 Jews left the country for Israel. After this, Jewish emigration continued (to Israel and elsewhere), but slowed to a few thousand a year. Through the early 1950s, Zionist organizations encouraged emigration, particularly in the poorer south of the country, seeing Moroccan Jews as a valuable source of labor for the Jewish State. From 1948 on many Jews left Fes. Most emigrated to Israel while others went to France and Canada. In the 1950s and 1960s there were still active Jewish schools and organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle which later closed as the Jewish population decreased.

 

In 1956, Morocco attained independence. Jews occupied several political positions, including three Members of the Parliament of Morocco and a Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. However, emigration to Israel jumped from 8,171 in 1954 to 24,994 in 1955, increasing further in 1956. Beginning in 1956, emigration to Israel was prohibited until 1961, although it continued illegally until it was officially resumed.   In 1961, the government relaxed the laws on emigration to Israel, as part of an agreement with Israel that entailed a payment to Morocco for each Jew that left the country for Israel. When Mohammed V died, Jews joined Muslims in a national day of mourning. But over the next three years, more than 80,000 Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel. By 1967, only 60,000 Jews remained in Morocco.

The Six-Day War in 1967 led to increased Arab-Jewish tensions worldwide including in Morocco. By 1971, its Jewish population was down to 35,000; however, most of this new wave of emigration went to Europe and North America rather than Israel. France for a time was a destination particularly for Moroccan Jews with European educations, who had economic opportunities there; one study of Moroccan Jewish brothers, one of whom settled in France and the other in Israel, showed that 28 percent of the brothers who settled in France became managers, businessmen or professionals (compared to 13 percent of their Israeli brothers) and only 4 percent unskilled workers (compared to over a third of their Israeli brothers).  Moroccan Jews in Israel, far more numerous, enjoyed less upward mobility: 51 percent were blue-collar in 1961 and 54 percent as late as 1981.

 

21st century

Despite their current small numbers, Jews continue to play a notable role in Morocco. The King retains a Jewish senior adviser, André Azoulay. They are well represented in business and even a small number in politics and culture. Jewish schools and synagogues receive government subsidies. However, Jews were targeted in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003. King Hassan II's pleas to former Moroccan Jews to return have largely been ignored.

 

In 2004 Marrakech had an aging population of about 260 Jews, most over the age of 60, while Casablanca had between 3,000 and 4,000 Jews. A 2014 figure says there are about 2,500 Jews still living in Morocco.  As of 2018 the total of Jews in Morocco is 2,200.  Meanwhile, the State of Israel is home to nearly 1,000,000 Jews of Moroccan descent, around 15% of the nation's total population.

 

In 2013, it was revealed that there is a rapidly growing trend of Moroccan-Jewish families sending their sons to study at the Jerusalem College of Technology in Israel. Most of these students opt to take up Israeli citizenship and settle in Israel after graduating.