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"moroccan identity"
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Making Morocco
How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912-1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in Making Morocco focuses on interactions between state and society.
Jonathan Wyrtzen demonstrates how, during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco's Jews; recent reforms regarding women's legal status; the monarchy's multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy's continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field.
eBook
New voices of Muslim North-African migrants in Europe
\"New voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe captures the experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a comparative, translingual, and supranational project. Cristiâan H. Ricci frames Moroccan literature written in European languages within the ampler context of borderland studies. The author addresses the realm of a literature that has been practically absent from the field of postcolonial literary studies (i.e. Neerlandophone or Gay Muslim literature). The book also converses with other minor literatures and theories from Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asians and Latino/as in the Americas that combine histories of colonization, labor migration, and enforced exile\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
“We Became Religious to Protect Our Children”: Diasporic Religiosity among Moroccan Jewish Families in France and Israel
This article explores the formation and preservation of a distinctive “Moroccan Judaism” ethos, rooted in a connection to the homeland and an idealized Moroccan past. Through an examination of secularism, traditionalism, and modernity in Israel and France, alongside the resurgence of religiosity in secular societies, it assesses the impact of diasporic experiences on the religious practices of Moroccan-origin families in these countries. The argument posits that diasporic sentiments and the allure of Moroccan heritage significantly influence the negotiation and affirmation of religious identities within these families. Rituals and religious practices serve as expressions of this identity, undergoing adaptation and transformation both in Morocco and abroad. Consequently, “Israeli” and “French” approaches to Moroccan Jewish observance reflect distinct socio-political and historical contexts. The analysis draws from five family cases, illustrating a range of experiences within national and transnational frameworks, enriching our understanding of the dynamic interplay between personal narratives and broader social and historical landscapes.
Journal Article
Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi
In their conversation about music, Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss a process of seeking home in music and literature. For Moroccan-Jewish superstar Samy Elmaghribi (Solomon Amzallag), who migrated to France and Israel and then settled for most of his life in Montreal, Canada, the reference to Al-Andalus through the sound of the nouba became his home. Beginning his career in his native country of Morocco as a singer and composer of modern Moroccan music, in Montreal, Samy Elmaghribi became the cantor in the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in Canada. Based on ethnographic research and investigation within the archives of the artist, the authors suggest that Samy Elmaghribi created a sense of home in music, a homeness, one that transcends our present understanding of Arabness and Jewishness, religiosity and secularism, tradition and creativity. Focus on Samy Elmaghribi, an artistic persona emblematic of his generation, demonstrates how the contemporary reassessment of renowned Jewish artists’ North African heritage is often misread in light of the political present. This example encourages us to rethink the musical legacy to which these North African Jews contributed beyond what is labelled Judeo-Arabic, traditional, religious, or secular.
Journal Article
الإبداعات المغربية باللغات الأجنبية بين سلطة اللغة وسلطة الهوية: قراءة تراتبية
أثارت الكتابة الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية العديد من المواقف المتعارضة في الحقلين: الأكاديمي، والثقافي. فقد عرف تاريخ المغرب الحديث سجالاً قوياً بخصوص هوية الكتابات الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية، بين مَن يرى فيها استلاباً ثقافياً، ومَن يرفض ربط الجنسية الأدبية بالانتماء اللغوي، بل وربطها بالمتخيّل الجماعي أكثر من أيّ شيء آخر، ثمّ بالمنتوج الأدبي بوصفه تجسيداً لهذا المتخيّل. فالتعبير عن الذات بلغة أجنبية يطرح للنقاش مفاهيم، مثل: الهوية الثقافية، والسلطة، والخصوصية، والعلاقة بالآخر. وباستخدام القراءة التراتبية التي ظهرت في الدراسات بعد الكولونيالية أمكننا إثبات التلازم بين استعمال اللغة الفرنسية في الإبداع ومسار الفرنكفونية بوصفها إيديولوجيا استعماريةً تفرض لغتها على الشعوب والفضاءات الذيلية.
Journal Article
Selkea! Memories of Eating Non-Kosher Food among the Spanish–Moroccan Jewish Diaspora in Israel
Drawing on life-story interviews and ethnography conducted in Israel from 2009 to 2023, this article examines how members of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan–Jewish diaspora in Israel recalled their habits of eating non-kosher food in Morocco. We explore how these memories emerged in response to commonplace discourses that depict Moroccan Jews as a distinctly religious-traditional ethnic group, untouched by European secular influences, and dichotomous to modern secular cultures in Israel. Contrary to this image, members of the community whom we interviewed highlighted a Jewish Moroccan life that was deeply connected to Spanish colonialism and the broader Hispanic and Sephardi worlds. We focus specifically on the concept of selkear, a Haketia (Judeo-Spanish) term meaning to let something go, make an exception, or turn a blind eye. Our analysis of our participants’ memories provides a nuanced understanding of Jewish religiosity in the context of colonialism and of how Mizrahi–Sephardi immigrants in Israel reclaimed their Judaism. Highlighting the practice of eating non-kosher food is thus a strategy used to challenge dominant notions of rigid religious commitment within the Sephardi diaspora and their interpretation in Israel.
Journal Article
The Montreal Moroccan Diaspora
Abstract Canada's Moroccan Jewish community is the third largest diaspora in the world after Israel and France. This article introduces Sephardi Voices, a project to collect, preserve and archive audio-visually the life stories of Jews displaced from Arab/Islamic lands and in the process sketches an overview of the resettlement of one Sephardi migration community, the Moroccan to Montreal. Featuring scholars like Joseph Levy, Yolande Cohen and Jean-Claude Lasry, the integration experience of Moroccan Jews into the anglophone Ashkenazi community and the francophone Québécois society is presented, along with their efforts to build a French-Sephardi institutional structure to preserve their heritage. The article highlights the role of oral history and the aesthetics of remembrance as important vehicles to depict how memories are imparted and identities formed. Today, the Moroccan Jews of Montreal are transnationals and proud to add Canadian to their identity chain of Jewish, Sephardi, Moroccan and French.
Journal Article
The Ingathering of the Jewish (Moroccan) Diaspora
Abstract Homeland/diaspora dichotomies are emblematic of the Zionist philosophy and, as a consequence, also in the common critical annals of long-lasting diasporic ethnicities among Jewish immigrants to Israel. This observation applies in particular to Jewish immigrants from Islamic countries, whose Eastern pre-immigration cultures conceivably contrast with the Western character of the national-Zionist venture. In this article, I focus on MABAT, an Israel-based hometown association of Jews from the former Spanish-dominated area in northern Morocco which, from its founding in 1979, embraced the Zionist notion of homecoming. I show how they came to form their own singular network in Israel, while appealing to their former hometowns, as well as to their emerging centres of diffusion in the Americas and Europe, thereby challenging commonly held assumptions of Israel/diaspora, East/West dichotomies in the annals of Jewish ethnicities in Israel.
Journal Article