A community clinging to itself

Anthropologist Andre Levy studies the tiny remaining clan of Moroccan Jews.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Updated: JANUARY 6, 2016 15:52
A view of downtown Casablanca. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A view of downtown Casablanca.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Starting in the 1940s and ’50s, thousands of Moroccan Jews emigrated to Israel, while others moved to France. By the second decade of the 21st century, the number of Jews living in Morocco had dwindled from a peak of a quarter million to no more than 3,000, the vast majority of them residents of Casablanca.
Most researchers, anthropologist André Levy, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, points out, follow the migrants and the challenges they face fitting in to their new societies.
In Return to Casablanca, Levy draws on his extended visits to Casablanca, where he was born, to assess the impact of emigration on those who decide to stay.
His book is marred by occasional excursions into subjects of interest only to specialists in anthropology and critical sociology – and by a failure to measure changes over the last 30 years (during the reigns of Hassan II and Mohammed VI). Nevertheless, the book provides interesting insights about the dynamic and repercussions of “contraction,” especially the establishment of real and imaginary “spatial divisions of spheres in order to obtain better control of interactions with Muslims.”
In response to contraction, Jews in Casablanca confined their residences – and their institutions and organizations – to a small concentrated area. This process, which dramatically reduced contact with Muslims in schools, social clubs, medical facilities and daycare centers, has reinforced isolationist tendencies. The array of services, which have grown as the size and scope of the community has shrunk (offering benefits that sometimes exceed those available in Israel), make it less likely that the Jews in Casablanca will leave. The services raise walls of separation between Muslims and Jews as well, setting in motion a vicious cycle in which detachment generates fear, which in turn accelerates self-seclusion.
On the infrequent occasions that Muslim visitors knock on the door of a Jewish home, Levy writes, “lively conversations abruptly end.” Jewish students learn French as their first language and Hebrew as their second language. Many Moroccan Jews cannot read street signs unless they are translated into French; they do not watch the Arabic news on television because it is broadcast in Fusha. They avoid most areas of the city and many marketplaces and coffee shops where they cannot control their encounters with Muslims (as they can, for example, with the housekeepers they employ).
Card games on the beach between Jews and Muslims, according to Levy, constitute an exception that proves the rule. He speculates that Jews cannot avoid or ignore Muslims in such a small and crowded space without risking a tense or violent incident if the snub seems blatant.
So they play “Rummy Couples,” a game designed for pairs, in a way that “marks a clear border between the sphere of the game and the ordinary world.”
To avoid accusations that run along ethnic lines, Jewish couples never contend against Muslim couples. Nor are the stakes ever significant. While playing cards, Jews can permit themselves to “enter into exciting and emotional interactions,” using epithets such as “sly (or stubborn) Muslim” that in other contexts would be insulting.
They can win, while proclaiming that “it’s only a game.” Because Jews are such a tiny minority, Muslims can allow them to convey these messages “under the cloak of non-seriousness.” Like children playing at the beach, Levy writes, the “Rummy Couples” can build sand castles with no value, “and the waves of the sea come again and again and ruin them.”
Levy’s most provocative claims, it seems to me, are embedded in his analysis of the ambivalence of the Jews of Casablanca toward Israel. Disappointed to learn that Levy intended to return to Israel, a Jewish woman in an old-age home shook her head and said “That is not a good thing...
a man should live in Morocco and die and be buried in Israel.” Her statement, he argues, expresses the tension between “the mythical and utopian vision” of Israel as a homeland and the effort of Jews to embrace Morocco as their homeland.
“A solar system model,” Levy asserts, frames these issues by constructing “Diaspora communities as satellites. Lacking a spirit of their own, their entire existence is dependent on the nurturing radiation of the homeland.”
The majority of Moroccan Jews, then, feel alienated from political Morocco and nostalgic for “Morocco” as a concept; they yearn for the “Land of Israel” without entirely embracing the “State of Israel.”
The culprit, Levy concludes, is a “nation- state discourse” that “demands an exclusivity of belonging.” That explains why his attempt to jump over the hurdle of time by crossing the border in search of his roots failed. It is a discourse, he implies, that is shared, albeit in different ways, by those who left and those of stayed, and by most of the rest of us. ■
The author is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.