Part I Introduction

part i Introduction Copyright © 2011. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Indiana University Copyright Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich, and Daniel J. Schroeter, Indiana University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=731391. Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2019-10-29 17:55:20. Copyright © 2011. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Indiana University Copyright Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich, and Daniel J. Schroeter, Indiana University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=731391. Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2019-10-29 17:55:20. 1 Rethinking• Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter he chapters in this volume grow out of the proceedings of the 2004 annual Tconference of the Ameri can Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), held at the Tangier Ameri can Legation Museum in Morocco. It was co- directed by the editors of this book and included thirty- four participants from Morocco, Alge- ria, Tunisia, Israel, and the United States. Its goal, seemingly simple enough at the time, was to rethink the older work of the first generation of scholars on the Jews of the Maghrib and in the process try to shed light on questions not previ- ously considered. The chapters in this volume do this and much more; if nothing else, they clearly demonstrate that Jewish culture and society in North Africa continue to be a major focus of scholarly and popular interest, not only in France and Israel, where, not coincidentally, the vast majority of Maghribi Jews settled, but also, and increasingly, in North Africa and the United States, where a new generation of scholars from a variety of backgrounds has begun to grapple with the complexities of the Judeo- Islamic experience. Not only do these authors raise new questions, but in many instances they do so by challenging the very cate- gories out of which traditional and even many contemporary scholarly inquiries about North African Jews emerged, causing us to reconsider conceptualizations of identity (“Berbers Jews,” “Arab Jews,” “Sephardim”), historical junctures (pre- Islamic versus Islamic, colonial versus postcolonial), and religious experience (popular versus orthodox) that have all but defined the field to now. The conference in Tangier was an encounter that in itself merits some com- ment. Obviously this was not the first formal academic conference on the Jews of the Maghrib or on Jews of a specific country in the Maghrib to result in the pub- lication of valuable research. The first such meeting, which took place in Jeru- salem in 1977 and was organized by Hebrew University professor Michel Abit- bol, included scholarly contributions in French, English, and Hebrew by (for the 1 Copyright © 2011. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Indiana University Copyright most part) Israeli scholars. Subsequent conferences devoted to the same or simi- 3 Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich, and Daniel J. Schroeter, Indiana University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=731391. Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2019-10-29 17:55:20. 4 Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter lar themes followed over the next several decades, and their proceedings were also frequently published.2 The great majority of the participants in these conferences were Jews from the Maghrib who had emigrated to Israel or Europe. One of the first major meetings to gather both Muslims and Jews (in clud ing scholars and pub lic figures) from Morocco, Israel, and Europe took place in Paris in 1978 and focused on Moroccan Jewry.3 It was organized by Identité et Dialogue, an association of Moroccan Jewish intellectuals, most of whom lived in France, that sought to recover and maintain a Moroccan Jewish identity as an integral part of the Moroccan patrimony and to advance the cause of Jewish- Muslim dialogue and peace. The co- founder and leader of the Identité et Dialogue movement was André Azoulay, who subsequently served as advisor in the Moroccan royal cab- inet, beginning in 1991 under King Hassan II, and currently serves in the same capacity under Mohammed VI. As the most prominent Jew living in the Arab world today, André Azoulay spoke eloquently about his identity as an Arab Jew in Morocco in the opening session of the AIMS conference in Tangier. Because most of the meetings focusing on the Jews of the Maghrib, academic or otherwise, have been held outside the place of origin, often in Israel and France,4 it was particularly meaningful and symbolically important that the 2004 conference was held in Morocco. Though again this was not the first time that an international academic conference on the Jews of the Maghrib was held in a North African country—significantly, one was held in Tunis in 19985—the meeting in Tangier was nonetheless unique in a number of ways. Scholars of the Maghrib from North America, where there has been a small but growing interest in North African Jews in recent years from a variety of interdisciplinary perspec- tives, had been largely absent from previous meetings. Of particular interest in Tangier were the exchanges between scholars from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Israel. This was noteworthy not only for the open and lively discussions that were had on a subject of great sensitivity that all too often becomes entangled in differences over Israeli- Palestinian conflict but also because intra- Maghrib exchanges are surprisingly rare in North Africa, stymied by a history of sensitive borders and po liti cal conflict between countries, most pointedly between Alge- ria and Morocco. No less problematic are the obstacles that stand in the way of exchanges between the United States and the Arab and Muslim world, which have only be- come more daunting in the post- 9/11 era, particularly in light of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Looming even more closely in the background of the conference were the synchronized bombings in Casablanca the previous spring that had targeted Jewish and foreign institutions. And just a few months before our meeting the Madrid bombings occurred, some of the perpetrators of which Copyright © 2011. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Indiana University Copyright were traced back to Tangier, which was being widely reported in the Ameri can Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich, and Daniel J. Schroeter, Indiana University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=731391. Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2019-10-29 17:55:20. Rethinking Jewish Culture in North Africa 5 press as a hotbed of fiery preaching imams and a breeding ground for extrem- ists who used the city as a transit point between the Islamic world and Europe.6 In the wake of these incidents and increasingly dangerous developments in Af- ghanistan and Iraq, the meeting proceeded with some trepidation and concern; a conference on the theme of Jewish culture and society in the Maghrib, symbolically held under the auspices of an Ameri can institution, seemed to some to con- stitute a potential target for the frustrations and discontent brewing in the region and in Tangier specifically. And yet Tangier proved a particularly appropriate setting for such a meeting. Throughout its history, the city has served as a crossroads of cultures, civili- zations, and religions. Its Jewish community reflects the realities of Jewish com- munities elsewhere in the Maghrib: cosmopolitan and local, ambulatory but also rooted in the environment, polyglot yet maintaining the particular linguistic characteristics of the region. Although the Jewish community has always been identified as a distinct religious group from the dominant Muslim majority, this mutually recognized separation, often more symbolic than practical, is what has enabled coexistence in daily life, allowing the culture of the Jews to reflect the larger Maghribi culture, even in its specificities. Tangier, historically and in the contemporary period, exemplifies both the ambivalence and openness, the interconfessional tensions and the cultural hybridity that anchored the themes and debates raised during the meeting. Given the potentially contentious nature of the subject, what was striking was the total absence of rancor, apologetics, or propaganda on a subject that had clearly come of age as an academic field. With the near- total disappearance of Jews from the Maghrib and their rapid fading even from memory, participants, with some objective distance from the subjects, felt no need to rationalize or defend the study of Jews and recognized the in- trinsic importance of understanding the history of the Jewish presence in the Maghrib. Perhaps it is precisely their absence that makes the Jews’ once- integral role in society and culture an important countervailing symbol for conceptual- izing a more pluralistic and progressive North Africa, which is currently threat- ened by forces that reject cross- cultural and interconfessional exchange. Historiographical Considerations The chapters in this volume present new research on topics whose chro- nology stretches from late antiquity to the twenty- first century and that examine the role of memory through out the long Jewish presence in North Africa. Taken as a corpus, they suggest fruitful new directions for research in the history, an- thropology, language, and literature of the Jews of the Maghrib. It is particularly Copyright © 2011. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2011. Indiana University Copyright noteworthy that Maghribi scholars include senior scholars trying out Jewish top- Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich, and Daniel J.

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