Dotting Urban Spaces: Jewish survival politics in current Casablanca

This chapter argues that the study of spatial encounters between minority groups and the larger dominant societies frequently focuses on tensions between "White" veteran residents and new migrants, commonly treated as "people of colour". In this chapter, Levy lingers with people of the minority group who, even in the face of a massive migration of its members, stayed put. Therefore, the premise of the strangeness of the newcomer that often feeds suspicion, animosity, or fear is not present in those encounters. The minority group, the Moroccan Jews, and majority group, the Muslims, involved here have a millennium of shared history. Levy argues that this historical given consolidates a unique dynamic between the groups and that, as a demographically insignificant minority, Jews manage to establish cultural enclaves that enjoy surprising success. Although these cultural enclaves are aimed at coping with their inferiority, they allow this minority a sense of control over their encounters with Muslims. That control, within what they perceive as a menacing ecology, is attained by the basic logic underlying the cultural enclaves, which he terms "contraction". This term denotes two interconnected trends in Jewish life: a continuous demographic depletion and a tendency towards self-isolation and detachment from their Muslim surroundings. This chapter argues that as a demographically insignificant minority, Jews manage to establish cultural enclaves that enjoy surprising success. To be sure, the French "Protectorate", the later reinstitution of a Moroccan monarchy committed to an Arab nationalism, and the establishment of the state of Israel a few years earlier all had immense consequences on the Jewish minority living in Morocco. Jews and Muslims have shared Maghrebi spaces since the seventh century, the times when Islam gradually invaded North Africa and met ancient Jewish communities dating back to approximately 300 bce. The fundamental solution to the tension between a strong aspiration for separation and the reality of contact lies in limiting the encounters with Muslims to strictly defined social-territorial areas where Jews estimate that they can gain control. The majority of Jews in Morocco and most of their community institutions are concentrated in the two middle-class neighbourhoods of Anfa and Bourgogne, in the midst of the urban cauldron.