The audiovisual archives preserved by the television networks of the Mediterranean concerning Judaism in Mediterranean Islam are contemporary with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and with the great postcolonial migrations that marked the effacement of the Jewish presence in the Arab-Muslim world. They suggest, more than they actually show, the image of a vanished world, present only through the words of witnesses, of historians, or through archival images. The gaze cast upon Judaism in these films is intimately bound to this context. This gaze is also determined by the geographic and political origin of the television networks that broadcast reportages relating to Judaism or to Judeo-Muslim relations, and it does not escape ideological prisms, nor at times the stereotypes pasted onto the image of the Jews during the colonial period and the one that followed it.
A first part, “The Pillar of Salt,” presents documents ranging from 1952 to 1989. These are all films produced for French television, at the height of this period of migration, which was largely completed by 1975. These films evoke the pain of ruptures and the hope, conceivable only over the long term, of an eternal return. But seen from France, which was, along with Israel and the Americas, one of the favored destinations, the meaning of these postcolonial migrations is implicitly understood as a one-way street. Like Albert Memmi’s beautiful novel, from which it borrows its title, this part bears witness to the passage from an old world to a modern world in which identities are liable to dissolve or to be lost.
A second part, “Andalusias Forever Begun Again,” presents documents linked to the “1992 moment,” at once a memorial reenactment of the 1492 expulsion and — between the Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords — a moment when the hope of peace in the Middle East made it possible to return explicitly to this history, in the hope of moving beyond it. This decade is also the golden age of the Andalusian myth, inaugurated by the Universal Exposition of Seville. Reportages by Moroccan and Jordanian television, but also Catalan and French, each give, in their own way, their vision of history.
The third part, Between Memory, Exiles, and Heritage, presents documents ranging from 2004 to 2012. It is centered on the stakes of heritage, behind which discordances of transmission, identity-based and political conflicts, quickly emerge. The gazes cast upon Judaism by Moroccan, Jordanian, and Palestinian television must be read in light of the failure of the “peace process” and of the political rivalries to appear as the sole legitimate heirs of bygone golden ages.
1. The Pillar of Salt (1952–1989)
The migrations that affect, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean Muslim world are not solely linked to the Israeli-Arab conflict. They cannot be understood without reference to the movement of emancipation in a colonial situation that preceded, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the rise of nationalisms in the land of Islam. This point is all the more important to note in that, with the exception of the reportage on Edmond Jabès, exiled in Paris, the figure of the “emancipated Jew,” living in the Western manner, is totally absent from the films of this first period. The latter instead place the emphasis on Judaism as a religion and on the biblical and supposedly eternal figures of the rural Jewries, whose imminent disappearance one senses.
a) A process of emancipation in a colonial situation
The colonial age, which was also that of liberalism and political emancipation, calls into question Muslim power and the pact of the dhimma on which the relations between power and the Jewish and Christian communities traditionally rested. This status, at once juridical and fiscal, dates back to the time of the Muslim conquest. Belatedly codified in the Abbasid period, it intends to recall that it is the new religion, Islam, that now founds the social and political order. The condition of these protected persons was extremely variable depending on their social category, on places and eras. It oscillates between a benevolent protection exercised by the power and the periodic reminder of their juridical and social inferiority: refusal to incorporate them into the army, prohibition against building new churches or synagogues, obligation to wear discriminatory clothing and to pay a tax marking their submission… European colonial expansion undeniably coincides with a worsening of the situation of the dhimmis. And it is under European pressure that this status is abolished in the Ottoman Empire, in the middle of the 19th century. The principle of equality of all before the law and before taxation feeds resentment against the Jews and Christians who benefit from European protections or seek them out.
Political emancipation finds its culmination with the transformation of the Jews of Algeria into French citizens by the Crémieux Decree in 1870. This collective naturalization comes to reinforce the process of acculturation of the Jews of the Mediterranean to European languages and customs. France could then lay claim to a double tradition: protector of the Christians of the East, it was also the nation that, first in Europe, allowed the emancipation of the Jews. It is above all in the educational domain that the benefits of this protection are proven. Along with the Catholic missions, the Alliance israélite universelle (Universal Israelite Alliance) strongly contributed, from the 1860s onward, to the instruction of the Jewish communities of the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran. By Francizing them, it links them to Western Judaism and ensures the social advancement of their members at a time when French is the dominant language of exchange in the Mediterranean. In fact, Muslim or Christian children were able to attend these schools readily. More belatedly, from the start of the 20th century, the lycées of the Mission laïque (Secular Mission) in the East educated the children of well-off families from all the communities, with a high proportion of Jewish pupils. These establishments represent a path of access to the modern professions: engineers, jurists, and doctors.
Running counter to this evolution, which is far from concerning all the Jewries of the Maghreb and the Mashriq, the reportage by Philippe Este on Djerba, filmed in May 1950 and presented at the Cannes Festival in 1952, gives of the island the image of a place where time has been suspended since the highest antiquity. Filmed before the restoration works on the ancient Roman causeway that linked the island to the mainland, it precedes the massive tourist investment that begins in the 1960s, but it is contemporary with the first waves of emigration, with the appearance of an exodus, that had already by that date affected the Jewish communities of Libya, Iraq, and Yemen.
Postcard landscapes, weavers, potters, and merchants of Houmt Souk, harvesters and threshers of wheat using ancestral methods, make of the island, according to the commentary, “a parcel of living Bible that has remained identical to what it was in the time of Babylon.”
b) The myth of the eternal return
Lord Balfour’s commitment, in 1917, to create a Jewish national home, established in Palestine under British mandate, is itself also the culmination of the policy of minorities that contributed to legitimizing colonization and to weakening the Ottoman Empire. At the moment when the latter is dismembered, at the end of the First World War, old networks of social and commercial relations are severed by the establishment of borders. The new states, compelled to legitimize their power and its foundations, are led to define nationalities that marginalize or exclude their minorities, suspected of being traitors to the nation. Even before the creation of Israel (1948), many Jews had begun to feel like strangers in states jealous of their independence, which assert their Arab or Muslim character. And this, at the very moment when the intensification of Jewish immigration to Palestine, then, after the Second World War, the influx of survivors of the Shoah, is perceived by the Arab world as a colonial enterprise. The 1948 war in Palestine and the abuses that accompany it open a long sequence of Israeli-Arab wars, of which 1956, 1967, and 1973 are the high points. Along with them, the departure of the British from Libya and Iraq, the Algerian war, and the troubles linked to decolonization in Morocco and Tunisia precipitate the departure of entire communities for Israel, Europe, and America, in often difficult conditions.
The departure of the Jews from the Muslim world after the Second World War is part of the great waves of postcolonial migration. The Jews are not the only ones to embark on these migrations, which see other “minorities” depart, but also the lasting settlement in Europe, and notably in France, of Muslim “North Africans.” For the Jews, Israel is likewise not the only destination: the wealthiest and best-educated head toward Europe and the new countries. Many departures, voluntary or forced, are marked by fear, haste, and numerous spoliations, requiring the intervention of international humanitarian associations. At the end of this great migration, which dries up in 1975, only Morocco, Iran, and Turkey still shelter a living Judaism, albeit numerically much weakened. Everywhere else, those who left behind them only relic-communities and an abandoned heritage. (….)
More than thirty years after Philippe Este’s reportage on Djerba, the biblical island, Antenne 2 devoted, in 1984, a long documentary to the revival, four years earlier, of the pilgrimage to the synagogue of the Ghriba. As in the first film, it is by sea that the viewer arrives on the island, but the quays and the beaches are empty and the buildings desolate, while a nostalgic song rises. It is now by road, in tourist coaches, that the pilgrims arrive. Nothing is said about the scale of the departures of the Jews of Djerba and of Tunisia, accelerated over the course of the international crises (Suez, Bizerte, the Six-Day War), and it is rather the idea of a temporary return that marks the reportage, on the occasion of the revival of the pilgrimage to the Ghriba, under the protection of the Tunisian authorities.
c) A migration without return, toward modernity
The end of the 1980s and the beginnings of the Intifada (1987) see every prospect of peace in the Middle East fade away. In France, a decade of crisis has dried up the migratory flows coming from the Maghreb. In the wake of the Marche des Beurs (1983) and the founding of SOS Racisme (1984), a “second generation” takes root in the country, and the “immigrant workers” become “minority communities” to be integrated.
A year before “the Creil Islamic headscarf affair” lastingly inflamed the French mind, laïcité (secularism) inscribes itself in the direction of a history assigned to these communities. The loss of dietary traditions, a question to which FR3 devoted a feature in 1988, appears as the very sign of this assimilation. And it is also the idea of a page definitively turned that marks the very beautiful reportage devoted to the writer Edmond Jabès in 1989. Born in 1912, Edmond Jabès was forced to leave Egypt in 1957. Like him, several thousand Jews of Egypt were expelled in the wake of the Suez crisis, either because they held French or British nationality, or because, settled like him in Egypt for several generations or having come from the Ottoman world but of French language and culture, they had no documents attesting to their Egyptian nationality and were then considered foreigners. Some were forced to sign a renunciation of their Egyptian nationality and became stateless.
2. “Andalusias Forever Begun Again” (1992–2002)
The decade that opens in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR sees the end of the Cold War. The idea that the triumph of liberal democracy would correspond to an insurmountable threshold and would mark “the end of history,” the aspiration, after the Gulf War, to a “new world order” under American aegis, favor the rise of the Andalusian myth as a possible model of living together: the communities, like the nations “awakened” after the breakup of the Soviet empire, find a new visibility and give the impression of having traversed time; they appear as objects having an autonomous existence, whose coexistence must now be organized by good governance. This moment of return toward old experiences constitutes a strong break with the preceding period, in which the (radiant) future was a compass for the present and justified making a clean sweep of the past. The Andalusian experience imposes itself first as the nostalgia for a bygone golden age. But the past also serves as a mode of legitimation, even of justification for a return to a natural order of things. It finally opens the way to a reflection on the brutal end of these centuries-old cohabitations. The latter is no longer solely the doing of French television, but also of television channels in Spain, Jordan, or Morocco: at the same time as the Israeli-Arab conflict, the migration of the Jews and its causes begin to become an object of history.
a) The murmur of ghosts
A few weeks after the opening of the Madrid Conference, which sees Israelis, Palestinians, and Arab countries gathered at the negotiating table, under the dual patronage of the United States and Russia, the opening of the Universal Exposition of Seville, in the spring of 1992, is the occasion to celebrate a golden age of pre-1492 Spain where, according to a somewhat conventional discourse, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in peace. The treasures of the architectural heritage, the gardens of the Alcázar, are moreover enough to attest to the capacity of Arab-Andalusian civilization to radiate and to carry across time and space the thought of philosophers, the arts of engineers, and the melodies of singers. In his closing lecture at the Collège de France, Jacques Berque had called for “Andalusias forever begun again,” specifying that we bear at once “their heaped-up ruins and their inexhaustible hope.” The function of the Andalusian myth is not to cast an indulgent gaze on the past, but to draw from it the conviction, necessary for action, that the bonds between communities and the convivencia among them are not only possible but fruitful.
It is nonetheless a profound nostalgia that is expressed in 1992 in a reportage on the last Jews of Alexandria. The film opens on a few establishing shots of a city “of multiple identities,” revealing an eclectic architecture. This overview is the occasion to evoke the history of a city that entered fully into globalization from the middle of the 19th century, that became an El Dorado on the scale of the Ottoman Empire and of Europe under the dynasty of the khedives, thanks to the cotton boom of the 1860s and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). The city stands as a model of the formation of an urban community at the moment of the clash of imperialisms in the Mediterranean, from the 1880s to the Belle Époque. Structured by their religious affiliation or their national origin, “dozens of ethnic groups enter into amorous or financial commerce. Alongside them, Islam, motionless, tolerates…” (…)
Playing on deceptive appearances and plural identities, the reportage follows the traces of Joe-Joseph Harrari, a modest haberdasher, plying his trade in “a wan-complexioned shop.” The term capharnaüm (a chaotic jumble) used to describe it plunges us into a biblical time and space. And indeed, Joe Harrari is presented as the last Jewish merchant of the city. Speaking in Arabic and joking with his customers, he reverts to French when facing the camera, and it is only little by little that one discovers that this elderly gentleman, known and esteemed in his neighborhood, is the president of the Jewish community of Alexandria, or at least what remains of it. With Younès, “his faithful Nubian servant,” and Lina Mattatia, treasurer, he manages the old people’s home and the heritage of a community reduced to a few individuals, all very elderly. The cheerful character becomes serious and tinged with sadness in the empty premises of the Eliahu Hanabi synagogue, adjoining the seat of the community on Nebi Daniel Street. Built around 1850, it is the last one in operation and the most imposing synagogue of a city that counted a dozen of them, to which must be added no fewer than eight private oratories. While the cited figure of 80,000 Jews is no doubt overestimated — the censuses count 90,000 for all of Egypt at the peak of the curve, in 1947 — the photographs on display attest to the architectural richness of the various foundations, schools, dispensaries, homes, or synagogues of this community “totally disaggregated” in the second half of the 20th century. After a visit to the partly disused cemetery, the reportage closes on a sad Sabbath, failing even to gather the minyan, that is to say, the ten adult men necessary for the celebration of the service.
In less than a quarter of an hour, this moving reportage has managed to capture this particular and troubling historical moment. If the vision of Islam is eminently reductive, that of Judaism is no less so. The beginning of the film plays, like its characters, on the stereotypes attributing to Jews humor and self-mockery, business sense, a taste for power, and a love of money. The rigidity of intercommunal relations and their hierarchy can be sensed in the imperious tone used toward Younès, the Nubian servant. But over the course of their words, it is the humanity of the actors that resurfaces, and of trajectories one senses to be solitary, taking on, willingly or not, the fact of having stayed. Choice or powerlessness to rebuild a life elsewhere? The illusion of being the last representatives of a Hellenism and of “a human group implanted in the city since Alexander the Great,” or else the awareness of being only a community foreign to Egypt, built up over the course of the migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries, as a nostalgic music suggests, drawn not from the Sephardic world but from Yiddish folklore? The will to be “the memory of an entire people, victim of a peaceful and silent exclusion,” or a visceral attachment to one’s city?
b) From sacred rights to necessary political negotiation
The decade of the 1990s is also marked by the hopes raised in the Middle East by the Israeli-Palestinian peace process initiated by the Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords. The two reportages that follow show, in a symmetrical manner, how the religious comes to legitimize the political claim. The anchoring of the history of Palestine in a biblical narration, presented by French television, seems to plead in favor of the legitimacy of Israel and of the recognition of the Hebrew state by its Arab neighbors. At the moment when an opening seems to be taking shape toward peace in the Middle East, the documentary invites us to move beyond the theological perspectives and the memories stratified over several centuries, in order to advance toward political solutions, passing through acceptance of the other and necessary compromises.
For its part, by laying claim to the double heritage of the Arab Revolt and of its sharifian ancestry — that is, of a filiation with the Prophet — the Jordanian monarchy seizes the occasion of an official commemoration in 1993 to signal that it considers Palestine, on the contrary, as a land of Islam. A subtle distinction is established between Jews and Zionists in this space. If “the Zionists” appear there as dangerous adventurers, the Jews, unlike the British, are not considered “occupiers.” This door left ajar in the discourse intends to position the Jordanian monarchy as an arbiter and an indispensable actor in the reconfiguration of the Middle East that was then imagined to be very near at hand. Indeed, peace between Israel and Jordan is signed in 1994.
c) Painful returns to a shared past
The second half of the decade quickly puts an end to these hopes of peace. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv by an ultra-religious student (4 November 1995), then the coming to power of a coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu bringing together the Likud, the far right, and the religious parties (May 1996), mark a brutal halt to the process born of the Oslo Accords. In September 1996, the opening, decided by the municipality, of an archaeological tunnel in the old city of Jerusalem, below the Esplanade of the Mosques, gives rise to deadly clashes.
The Andalusian myth has nonetheless kept all its force. It remains the reference of films by Moroccan or Spanish television that make interreligious cohabitation an object of history and its end a haunting interrogation, placing politicians before their responsibilities. It is at this moment that Morocco chooses to highlight the figure of the writer Edmond Amran El Maleh, born in 1917 in Safi. A figure of militant engagement within the clandestine Communist Party until the country’s independence, also known for his stances hostile to Zionism, it is from 1965 onward that, in exile in Paris, he launched into writing. There he published his notable works, among them Parcours immobile (Motionless Journey) (1980), Aïlen ou la nuit du récit (Aïlen, or the Night of the Tale) (1983), and above all Mille ans, un jour (A Thousand Years, One Day) (1983), a novel written at the time of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, whose title refers to the brutality of the departure of the Jews from Morocco in light of the long duration of their rootedness in the country.
In 1996, it is an established writer who grants two long interviews on his writing, as if the latter formed the link between his youthful commitments and the emotion he intends to convey for contemporary Moroccan painting, of which he is one of the promoters. Unlike Joe Harrari the Alexandrian, Edmond Amran El Maleh is among those who broke “the tacit pact according to which Jews do not engage in politics.” He is representative of a generation of Jewish militants who entered politics thanks to emancipation, from Egypt to the Maghreb, from the beginning of the 1930s, at the same time as the first demands for independence. For many of these militants who came out of the Alliance israélite universelle and were reserved toward the process of assimilation to French culture, the communal institutions were the first mode of access to politics. And it is in this soil that Zionism took root. But other forms of socialization or schooling, marked by an interfaith coexistence, led a certain number of them to commit to the national movements, while Marxist grids of analysis posited the primacy of the social question over national or religious affiliations, explaining the appeal of the Communist Party. (…)
Catalan television is not to be outdone in celebrating the golden age of multicultural Andalusia. A poetic 2001 reportage offers an architectural and art-historical promenade through the Great Mosque of Córdoba and the palace of Medina al-Zahra, which is also a journey through the history of Muslim Spain, from the Umayyads to the Catholic Monarchs. The documentary spins out the metaphor of the garden to celebrate the presence of three cultures and their hybridization, the values of tolerance that made these sumptuous achievements possible. But it is also Tétouan that lays claim to this heritage. A brief reportage devoted by the second Moroccan television channel to the city of Tétouan in 2002 comes to recall, at the moment when the second Intifada is finishing off the burial of the “peace process,” that Morocco too was a land of welcome for the Andalusian exiles, who knew how to rebuild there a city in the image of the one they had just left. It is also an invitation to journey toward this city of northern Morocco, a region that, since the new reign of Mohammed VI (1999), has been the object of important development projects, notably through tourism. The reference to Andalusia remains central, but it is henceforth at a distance from its original space, and all around the Mediterranean, that the states will lay claim to this heritage.
3. Between Memory, Exiles, and Heritage (2004–2012)
The final period of this overview of the gaze of Mediterranean television on Judaism is set in the post–September 11 world, that of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the attacks in Djerba, Casablanca, or Istanbul, which seem to lend their endorsement to the theories of the clash of civilizations. The impossible relaunch of the peace process in the Middle East, the failure of the Union for the Mediterranean, are part of a decade marked by the fiftieth anniversaries of the independences and concluded by the Arab revolutions, which seem to reenact the national epic.
The passing of time poses the question of memory and of its transmission; and the aging or disappearance of the social frameworks of memory, that of the fate of the cultural heritage of the Jews in the land of Islam. Cemeteries, synagogues, books and objects of worship, educational or hospital foundations have often been left abandoned or in the care of the communal bodies that remained on site. Henceforth, actions of heritage-making must engage more fully the political authorities of the country and the communities dispersed abroad. To this is added the permanent quest for patrons and diplomatic supporters likely to initiate an action to rescue or to enhance places or objects of memory. As an expression of dispersed civil societies, a multitude of internet sites, emanating from the most diverse associations, lay claim to this heritage. They are structured both by country of origin and by country of welcome, and they keep alive, throughout the world, virtual communities of Jews originally from Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, or Algeria. Devoted to genealogical research, to the gathering of testimonies, of culinary traditions, of bibliographies, of class photos or of daily life, these sites are an important site of memorial investment.
The documents selected over the course of this period attest to the diversity of the relations that the various Arab states maintain with Judaism, or more exactly, to the image that their regimes intend to give of these relations via television. Among them, Morocco is the one that seems to have the most appeased relationship. The last three documents, which set in parallel recent broadcasts of Moroccan, Jordanian, and Palestinian television, attest to the rivalry and the discrepancies of their memorial regimes.
a) The diversity of memorial policies
More than any other, television is a medium sensitive to the injunctions of the political. It is, from this point of view, not surprising to find in this corpus a particularly rich representation of films coming from Morocco. It only underscores the originality of the kingdom’s memorial policy, which contrasts with the timidity of other states of the southern Mediterranean, most of them absent from this corpus. Morocco constitutes an example perhaps unique in the creation, in 1995, of a foundation intended to maintain a Museum of Moroccan Judaism, established in the Oasis district of Casablanca. The Casablanca attacks of 16 May 2003, which had targeted, in addition to properties belonging to Jews, a community center and the city’s old Jewish cemetery, were followed by an imposing demonstration of solidarity with the victims and of rejection of antisemitism. They were also the occasion for a reminder by national television, beyond mere tolerance, of the principles of solidarity that should preside over relations among the religions of the Book. The constitutional revision that followed the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was finally the occasion to affirm the “African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean tributaries” of Moroccan national identity and “the attachment of the Moroccan people to the values of openness, moderation, tolerance, and dialogue for understanding among all the cultures and civilizations of the world.”
There nonetheless exist today, in the Muslim world, deliberate enterprises to eradicate the Jewish communities, their memory, and the traces they may have left. The development of radical Islamism and of new orthodoxies favors attempts at purification of practices. While the first targets are those of confraternity-based Islam, all those that do not affirm on principle the superiority of Islam become suspect. In Oran, as early as 1971, the great synagogue was transformed by the wilaya into an Islamic cultural center despite the opposition of the Consistory of Paris, which remained responsible for the Jewish communities of independent Algeria. The civil war of the 1990s reawakened wounds going back to the war of independence, and the anchoring of the regime’s legitimacy in this founding episode casts a leaden weight on the possibility of any advance in the recognition of the country’s religious diversity, whether past or present.
It is in exile that the memory of the Jews of Algeria is reconstructed. Largely conflated with that of the pieds-noirs, it struggles to detach itself from it and to assert its anteriority on the territory. The publication of Benjamin Stora’s work, Les trois exils, juifs d’Algérie (The Three Exiles: Jews of Algeria), is the occasion to revisit a two-thousand-year history. The end of the interview evokes the speech of President Bouteflika, on 5 July 1999, which recognized a Jewish component in Algerian identity, quickly belied by the cancellation of Enrico Macias’s tour planned in Constantine. A decade of international tensions and a policy of “national reconciliation” got the better of these inclinations toward openness, at least at the official level. The question of the relationship to Judaism is perhaps emblematic of the gap between Algerian society and its regime, which affirmed to the Arabic-language newspaper Ash-Shorouk, through the voice of its minister of culture, in February 2009, its wish to “de-Judaize Algerian culture.”
b) Morocco: an appeased memory?
It is an altogether different relationship to memory that is expressed and put into practice in Morocco. The policy of development through tourism initiated at the end of the 1990s, which accompanies the democratic transition begun by Hassan II and continued by Mohammed VI, is also a policy of enhancement and recognition of the regional cultures and a drawing upon all the potentialities of the Moroccan diasporas. The city of Fez had opened the movement as early as 1994 with the creation of a festival of the sacred musics of the world, dedicated to interreligious dialogue. But the city already had a universal aura. In this apparatus of development through culture, the city of Essaouira, under the impetus of André Azoulay, advisor to the King of Morocco since 1991, was at once pioneer and model, imitated by Rabat, Agadir, Ben Guerir, and other cities of Morocco that each opened their festival in the 2000s. The arrival of summer has been celebrated since 1998 by the Gnaoua and World Music Festival, which recalls the ties with sub-Saharan Africa and the métis dimension of all musical circulations. The Printemps musical des Alizés has highlighted, since 2001, classical music and the city’s old link with the Europe of the industrial revolution, which was one of its models. Two years later the Festival des Andalousies atlantiques (Festival of the Atlantic Andalusias) is established, which opens in the autumn and seeks to promote the Arab-Andalusian musical heritage, in which Jewish and Muslim artists distinguished themselves. The year 2012 was to see the birth, in the month of August, of the first edition of the festival of street arts.
Beyond the musical heritage, television offers the possibility of exploring the living memory of the country, and notably its Amazigh dimension. Broadcast in 2008 in the program Amouddou (journey), which has been devoted to it since 2002, on the first public Moroccan television channel, a reportage focuses on the Jewish memory of the small town of Ifrane in the Anti-Atlas, which was, in the 19th century, a relatively prosperous oasis at the crossroads of caravan routes. The cemetery, the vestiges of what is considered the oldest mellah (Jewish quarter) of North Africa, attest to an uninterrupted Jewish presence, which oral tradition has arriving in successive waves since the first millennium before our era, even before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.
The walls of the now deserted old synagogue echo, through the magic of cinema, with ancient ceremonies. The elderly inhabitants evoke happy memories of childhood and of good neighborly relations before the great wave of emigration of the 1960s, present in a few archival images. Others, younger, try to spur research and to keep alive the memory of a town that was, in their eyes, a model of sociability and harmony among communities.
This reportage, in Arabic and in tashlihit, is emblematic of the manner in which the Morocco of Mohammed VI has undertaken to explore the memory of its various heritages. It illustrates a will toward a plural writing of the kingdom’s history and a particular attention granted, in this context, to regional specificities and to oral tradition. This at the risk of embellishing certain episodes or of passing over others, darker ones, in silence. From this point of view, the Jewish tradition would not have failed to evoke the troubles that bloodied the Sous at the death of Moulay Yazid (1792), claiming victims among the faithful of both religions. The episode, known as the story of the “burned of Oufrane,” has been transmitted from generation to generation in Moroccan Judaism to illustrate a resistance to conversion unto martyrdom. The absence of the Jews of Ifrane-Oufrane is not only that of former playmates; it is also the possibility of a confrontation of oral traditions that has gone away.
c) The competition of memories:
This last point of our reflection brings together and unfolds two recent Arab gazes on Judaism. It attests to the political stakes attached to memorial conflicts. At the same time, beyond the vicissitudes of conflicts, these two gazes attest to the importance attached to the other as such, in the construction of the image of the self.
A brief reportage made for Jordanian television in 2009 evokes the return to the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Minbar (pulpit) of Salah ad-Din (Saladin), destroyed in the course of the criminal arson of 21 August 1969, shortly after the Six-Day War and the beginnings of the Israeli occupation. As the current mufti of Jerusalem explains in the film, the return of the minbar of Salah ad-Din to its original location after 38 years of absence makes it possible to hope for “an imminent liberation of the city.” Beyond the stake, rendered very sensitive here, of the preservation of heritage, the figure of Salah ad-Din comes to recall that the fundamental stake remains that of the relationship of the political to the religious, and of the furnishing of proof, by any political power laying claim to the religious, that it is the most apt to protect the other religions.
The illustration of this point is given by a reportage of Palestinian television, filmed in 2010, which presents the small Samaritan community implanted near Nablus on Mount Gerizim. It is, according to their tradition, the very place of the sacrifice of Abraham, the one where the Temple stood before its destruction at the end of the 2nd century before our era by the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus, as part of a policy of religious centralization around Jerusalem. The reportage describes, through a series of interviews, the community’s customs, its claimed distinctiveness as the most ancient monotheistic religion descending in a direct line from one of the twelve tribes of Israel, its pride at having known how to preserve and transmit ancient traditions, such as gematria, a divinatory knowledge used live as an aid in the choice of spouses. But the interest of the film lies above all in the political message it delivers. No mention is made of the Samaritan community of Holon, which began to settle in Israel, south of Tel Aviv, from the 1950s onward and progressively acculturated to the new state. The one on Mount Gerizim presents itself as an Arabic-speaking community claiming a continuity of implantation in the West Bank for more than three millennia, and a greater proximity to Islam than to the other monotheistic religions, in which it sees only a succession of deviances and persecutions against it. By displaying intimate ties with their Palestinian compatriots, the Samaritans of Mount Gerizim take on the role of being a guarantor of the Palestinian Authority, which they recognize as a power respectful of the traditions of the true Israel. This reportage, running counter to received ideas, illustrates the complexity of intercommunal relations, the rootedness of beliefs and affiliations. It also reveals, in an implicit manner, the stake of political legitimation that the protection of communities and the recognition of their freedom of worship represent.
Inscribed in most cases within a temporality that far exceeds that of the testimonies, the representations delivered by these various television broadcasts refer more to Judaism as a religion than to a sociology of the Jews in Mediterranean Islam, or to an approach to the past or present relations between Muslims and Jews: no doubt a manner of euphemizing the present-day disputes and of dressing wounds still raw. It is also that the gaze upon Judaism has accompanied the process of nationalization of the societies of the southern Mediterranean; and that this gaze often remains marked by passion. Sometimes a foil for national identities, sometimes mobilized as the justification for a return to the traditions of the pious ancestors, sometimes taken on as a heritage, even a nostalgia, the figure of Judaism continues to haunt, nearly forty years after the last departures, the Arab and Muslim consciences. The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tends to perpetuate a gaze that generally remains hostile: one was able to measure to what extent the discourses of the media were indexed to the avatars of the peace process. But beyond the immediately political stake, one cannot help but think that this hostility serves as an a posteriori justification for a separation that has become effective, and that it allows above all a reading of recent history destined to naturalize the order of the world: in other words, in the words of Jacques Berque, to “prophesy that which has come to pass.”
The memorial approach to which Moroccan or Palestinian television bears witness attests, on the contrary, to the complexity and the richness of Judeo-Muslim relations, including in the most recent past. No doubt one may object that tolerance is not freedom of conscience and that it is never entirely disinterested; but the question raised over the course of these reportages, that of the relation to the other, goes well beyond economic calculations. It concerns the definition of the social bond, of the foundations of power, the construction of a state of law and of a democratic society. Let us hope that, from this point of view, the Arab revolutions are in a position to keep their promises. The second half of the 20th century saw the Jews leave these countries, but also entire swaths of the living forces of these nations, bringing forth, over the age that is now drawing to a close, a gaze without appeal. An Algerian proverb affirms that “a country without Jews is like a courtroom without witnesses.” Perhaps one must draw, from this popular adage, the certainty of an unfinished history and the hope of new forms of solidary guarantees.
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“Abridged version of an article published on the site www.medmem.eu, all rights reserved, and available with archival images at the following link: http://www.medmem.eu/fr/folder/28/les-juifs-dans-laislam-maditerranaen”
Thanks to Maxime Sanson, deputy project manager Med-Mem INA