ONE

HISPANIC JEWS IN MOROCCO

“ALL THE JEWS IN THE JUDERÍA speak Spanish and find great joy in speaking to Spaniards.”¹ Antonio J. Onieva used these words to describe, in his Spanish tourist guidebook published in 1947, his experience while visiting the Judería, the Jewish quarter in Tetouan. Scholarship on Spanish colonialism in Morocco has examined how Spain’s policy toward Sephardi Jews as its colonial agents incorporated the idea of “linguistic brotherhood.” Dwelling on cultural and linguistic commonalities between Sephardim and Spaniards, as mentioned in the introduction, Spain justified its colonial expansion by deeming it a reencounter with Jews in North Africa. Few scholars, however, have analyzed the community’s perspective on that reencounter. Furthermore, there has been a paucity of scholarly inquiry into the factors motivating a substantial number of northern Moroccan Jews to embrace the colonial Spanish culture and language, as well as an examination of the boundaries of this attraction and its impact on their perceptions of their ethnic Jewish identities.²

Looking at the colonial urban setting of northern Morocco, where Jews were not just subjects of a literary imagination but actively engaged in day-to-day interactions with Spaniards, this chapter explores how Hispanic identities became entwined with modern Jewish identities, even when they defined the boundaries between the groups in a fundamentally new way.

A JEWISH-COLONIAL LANGUAGE

Modern Spanish colonialism in Morocco commenced in the aftermath of the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60. The agreement that ended the war enabled Spanish citizens to purchase land in Morocco tax-free. As a result, by 1880 Spanish settlers comprised the largest foreign group on Moroccan soil, numbering some sixty-three hundred, or 70 percent of the country’s European population at the time.³

In 1913, a year after the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates, about fifteen thousand of the thirty-six thousand European citizens living in Morocco were concentrated in Tangier. Among them eight thousand Spaniard who preferred Tangier even when Tetouan was declared the capital of the Spanish protectorate.⁴ In late 1924, Tangier was declared an international administrative zone governed by several European powers and administratively detached from the Spanish protectorate zone. An even more dramatic increase of its Spanish population came during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), as many Spanish republican refugees fled there from the Franco-controlled Spanish protectorate.⁵ Alongside these Spanish republicans, Jews fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe also began to arrive. In 1936, the Tangier Jewish community created a special committee to keep track of the increasing number of refugees, reaching about seven hundred by 1939.⁶

The end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 was followed by Franco’s annexation of Tangier during World War II (1940–45), and then by a decade during which it reverted to its international status (1945–56). By the early 1940s, a well-established European community had emerged in Tangier. Many of them were pro-Franco Spaniards, who came to replace republican teachers and administrators who had sought refuge in the French territories of Morocco during the annexation years.

Economically and geopolitically speaking, Tangier’s return to international status in 1945 attracted many laborers and settlers, further reshaping its demographic landscape through migration.⁷ An official census carried out by the international administration indicated that by 1951, out of a total population of 162,000 inhabitants, fourteen thousand were Jews; thirty thousand were Spanish; eleven thousand were other Europeans; six thousand were of non-Jewish, non-European heritage; and the rest were Muslims.⁸ On the eve of Moroccan independence in 1955, some 40 percent of Tangier’s population was considered European. Concentrations were even higher in the city center, where two-thirds of the city’s total European population of sixty thousand resided (see table 1.1).⁹

In the neighboring Spanish protectorate zone, demographic changes were even more dramatic. In the 1930s, the second Spanish republic invested money intended to transform the protectorate from a military outpost into a civilian society.¹⁰ By 1952, some 80,588 Spanish immigrants resided there. They comprised a significant majority of the European minority in that region.¹¹ The Spanish administration also invested large sums in the planning and development of a new, modern part of Tetouan known as El Ensanche (“the extension”).¹²

Table 1.1. The population of Tangier, 1915–60

The influence of Spanish language and culture on the public sphere in the cities of Tangier, Tetouan, Larache, Alcazarquivir), and Arcila, as well as other smaller towns in northern Morocco, should be examined with this demographic balance in mind. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Jews in these urban centers increasingly integrated into the modern Hispanophone world through the language and culture that comprised a significant part of their everyday lives, even as other European influences, most prominently French, simultaneously shaped their cultural and social realms.

Spain’s nostalgic colonial discourse regarding the linguistic brotherhood served as one of the practical strategies for the colonization of northern Morocco. It reflected a persistent effort to propagate Spanish culture, or Hispanidad, throughout North Africa. As Maite Ojeda Mata has argued, the Spanish protectorate authorities explicitly mandated the use of Spanish for the community’s communal records and minutes’ books. This was part of a broader policy aimed at “re-Hispanizing” Sephardi Jews.¹³

This aspiration, however, collided with a multicultural colonial situation in Morocco, particularly in Tangier. During the first decade of Spanish colonialism, intervention in the local education system, for example, was kept to a bare minimum, despite the declared goal of “re-Hispanizing” the Jews and challenging the dominance of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s (AIU) French-language schools. Like the Arab-French schools, the AIU schools were better financed than the Spanish colonial education system and more accessible to the largest urban populations.

Table 1.2. The population of Tetouan, 1913–60

From the opening of its first branches in Tetouan in 1862 and Tangier in 1864, the AIU school system functioned as the de facto mainstream educational framework for local Jews. Before the establishment of the Spanish protectorate in 1912, Spanish was in fact taught in the AIU schools of Tangier and Tetouan. Members of the AIU Alumni Association promoted Spanish rather than Arabic as a Jewish language, seeing the former as the native language of Jews in northern Morocco. Following the onset of Spanish colonialism, however, AIU leaders shifted the schools’ focus to French in light of the increasing colonial competition between the two European powers. Around that time, the AIU Alumni Association made efforts to promote French among alumni in Tangier who were native Spanish speakers.¹⁴

After 1936, Franco implemented a policy that involved greater intervention into the local education system. The policy reflected the regime’s desire to channel Moroccan nationalism against France as a common enemy. The language of instruction in Spain’s colonial schools in Morocco was changed to Arabic and greater emphasis was placed on Islamic studies. Separate colonial schools from those that served Spanish settlers in Morocco, designated as “Hispano-Arab” and “Hispano-Hebrew,” (also knowns as “Hispano-Israelite”) respectively. These schools were created for Muslims and Jews in order to reorient them culturally and politically toward their own communities while maintaining education under the supervision of the Spanish colonial regime. Both types of schools offered a curriculum similar to Spain’s, with additional Jewish and Muslim educational contents. Local religious figures taught these cultural-specific subjects, and the approach was part of a strategy to avoid conflict and encourage voluntary collaboration in the colonial context.¹⁵

Despite Spanish policies and the opening of new Hispano-Arab and Hispano-Hebrew schools in northern Morocco, the French education system continued to play a more significant role in the cultural lives of a large number of schoolchildren in the first half of the twentieth century. The number of Jews in the Spanish education system in the protectorate zone was surprisingly small: just 88 students out of a total of 1,114 during the 1947–48 school year.¹⁶ In 1952, out of 1,533 Jewish students in Tangier, 1,088 attended AIU French schools. In the Spanish protectorate zone that same year, 756 students, a sizable portion of the area’s Jewish youth at that time of considerable Jewish emigration, attended AIU schools.¹⁷

In Tangier, the (non-Jewish) Lycée Français, the network of French state schools operating outside of France, was an option for Jewish parents who believed that their children would receive a better education in French state schools than they would in the AIU network. In 1947 alone, 156 Jewish pupils (along with only 74 Muslims) enrolled at the Lycée Renault, a local French high school affiliated with the Lycée Français.¹⁸ Data from the website Tangerinos, a virtual community maintained by natives of Tangier around the world, demonstrate the popularity of non-Jewish French schools among the Jewish population of Tangier: 274 of the website’s 435 Jewish subscribers (as deduced from their surnames) who listed their educational background stated that they attended non-Jewish European schools, mostly Regnault, Perrier, Saint Aulaire (later Ibn Batouta), and Berchet, all Lycée Français affiliates.¹⁹ The centrality of these schools to the lives of many local Jews can also be inferred from the fact that even the Zionist Federation of Tangier clearly stated in its reports that the Lycée Français should be considered a central local institution from which potential immigrants to Israel could be recruited.²⁰

A memoir published by the Haketia researcher Alegría Bendelac in 1986, some two decades after she left Morocco for the US, offers insight into the way French was regarded as a language of high culture among the Jewish elite of Tangier. Before enrolling her children in the Lycée Français, Bendelac’s mother revived the French that she herself had studied at an AIU school as a young girl and required her daughters to use it at home. As Alegría grew up, she conversed in French with her sisters, reserving Spanish for her parents, particularly her father. The French language was associated with economic success and cultural prestige in Tangier, as French bourgeois residents were generally wealthier than local Spaniards, many of whom were poor.²¹

Historian Mimoun Azziza deemed Spanish colonialism “a poor man’s version of colonialism.”²² Still, Bendelac recalls that the typical mixture of languages spoken among Jews in northern Morocco was nicknamed “Judeo-Frañol.”²³ This mixture can be explained by looking at the prominence of Spanish in the daily lives of many Jews in colonial northern Morocco, including many prominent members of the community. Considered alongside Morocco’s other centers of European influence, there appears to be nothing unique about the spread of French in Tangier at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the development of French education could not overtake the concurrent, rapid spread of Spanish in the urban environments of northern Morocco during the first half of the twentieth century. There, modern Spanish became the most widely spoken European language among both local Jews and Muslims, even as many among the latter barely spoke any French. In 1952, for example, philologist Rom Landau wrote that “the better-class Moor may speak French as well, but your servant, grocer, shoeblack, or waiter will have a smattering of Spanish.”²⁴

There were significant differences between Jews and Muslims in this respect. For many Muslims, unlike their Jewish counterparts, Spanish seemed to represent a foreign medium of communication utilized by the colonial bureaucracy and certain economic and public agencies that in fact excluded them as non-native speakers of Spanish. Data gathered by the Biblioteca Pública Española in Tangier gives one a sense of the relative accessibility of modern Spanish to Jews and Muslims. In 1946, Muslims who subscribed to the library numbered 1,931 as compared to 3,491 Jewish subscribers.²⁵ These numbers suggest that while Muslims were the single largest religious group, only a limited number were interested in Spanish or would meaningfully access it. The Spanish policy of religiously based divisions in education contributed to this gap as well as to low overall rates of schooling among the Muslim population.²⁶

Conversely, Spanish was more accessible for the Jews in the north. Already in 1903, a report by the AIU on the Jews of Tangier mentioned how “the Judeo-Hispanic-Arabic language [Haketia] is spoken by more than two-thirds of the entire community.”²⁷ Using data on religion and linguistic stratification, historian Maite Oujda Mata estimates that in 1914, 80 percent of the Jews in Tetouan used Spanish as their primary language at home, as compared to the extensive use of Arabic by the approximately 12,000 Muslims then living in the city.²⁸

Another indication of the influence of the proximity between Spanish settlers and local Jews was the latter’s increased exposure to Spanish culture, and their development of a taste for Spanish high culture, including literature and history. For example, in the mid-twentieth century, the most widely read periodicals in the city were Spanish, including El Heraldo de Marruecos, which was published in Tangier between 1925 and 1932 by the Hispanist Manuel Ortega with the aim of defending the interests of Spain in Africa. The most popular Spanish daily, España, was established in October 1938 by Alto Comisario (High Commission) of the Spanish colonial authorities and distributed in Tangier until October 1967. As the primary Spanish newspaper in Africa, España had a daily circulation of 50,000 and was read by a great many Jews and Spanish-speaking Catholics alike.²⁹ Not only did local Jewish intellectuals begin to privately write in Spanish, they also became the editors and promoters of some of Morocco’s earliest periodicals, most of which also appeared in Spanish.³⁰

Despite the prestige of French and the circulation of many French-language newsletters and periodicals, the Spanish press seems to have played an increasingly significant role in the integration of wider sectors of the northern Moroccan Jewish society into the colonial world. According to Yvette Bürki, seven of the eleven newspapers published in Morocco were partly or fully in Spanish. Jewish ethnic newspapers exhibit similar proportions: out of eleven periodicals, only three were published in Arabic with Hebrew script.³¹ Moisés Garzón Serfaty, editor of Or-Luz, attended the Spanish high school La Academia la General during his teenage years. There, he became enamored with modern Spanish poetry and literature, which he associated with high Spanish culture and influenced his relationship with the non-Jewish environment in Morocco. He mingled with Spanish poets such as Trina Mercader as well as with Arab Moroccan poets who wrote in Spanish, such as Mohamed Sabak.³² He published some of his own Spanish-language literary efforts in Or-Luz in order to reach a Jewish audience.³³

In 1956, the Tangier Jewish community club, colloquially known as the Casino Israelita, hosted Gerardo Diego, one of the most famous and beloved Spanish writers and poets of the time. A large crowd attended this event, as reported in Or-Luz.³⁴ Such events shed light on an elite class of local leaders, and the growing audiences that followed them, who attached their personal development to the Spanish language and culture. Most striking, however, is how this attachment would manifest as new habits adopted in day-to-day life.

ROUTINELY HISPANIC

In Tangier, one of the most important cultural spaces frequented by Spanish settlers at the time was the Gran Teatro Cervantes, officially inaugurated on December 12, 1913. With a capacity of 1,400, it aimed to promote Spanish culture to the growing Spanish-speaking population of the city. In this famous theater, notable Spanish companies performed many dramatic works, such as La Barraca by Federico García Lorca in 1934. The Cervantes theater hosted renowned Spanish artists like singer-actresses Estrellita Castro, Lola Flores, and Carmen Sevilla, and flamenco musicians Manolo Caracol and Juanito Valderrama. Valderrama’s most important piece was “El Emigrante,” a ballad for the millions of displaced Spaniards who fled the country in the years after the Spanish Civil War.³⁵ Though the theater featured other international artists, it focused on the Hispanophone world, hosting Latin American artists like Cuban musician Antonio Machín; Mexican singer Jorge Negrete; Argentina’s most famous tango crooner Carlos Gardel; and Imperio Argentina, the stage name of Argentinean singer and actress Magdalena Nile del Río.³⁶ Through these and other traveling singers, the rising popularity of tango in Europe in the 1920s also reached Morocco and its Jewish community. This popularity was so influential that boys practicing for their bar mitzvahs, wanting to make their study for the ceremony more enjoyable, used to place the Torah intonation signs on lyrics of popular tango songs.³⁷

A memorable event in the early 1960s was Imperio Argentina’s performance at a verbena, a Spanish summer night fiesta, held at the Casino Israelita in Tangier. Imperio Argentina was accompanied by the famous Spanish pianist Gerardo Gombau. Among those responsible for organizing that verbena were Benjamin Benarroch, president of the Benchimol Jewish hospital in Tangier.³⁸ Jews like Alberto España engaged with Spanish cultural forms such as the zarzuela, a traditional Spanish musical genre.³⁹ Jacques Muyal, a Tangier Jew, became one of the famous jazz artists of that time. As a student at the Lycée Regnault, Muyal was influenced by the performances his parents would take him to at the Cervantes. He was later recruited to produce translations of jazz lyrics from English to Spanish for the Jazz Hour show on Radio Tánger. When flutist Herbie Mann performed in the city in March 1959 with Carlos “Patato” Valdez and Jose Mangual, Muyal was tasked with introducing their concert at the Cinema Alhambra.⁴⁰ Though the Hispanophone diaspora lacked a clear center, as we will see in chapter 3, exposure to Spanish culture helped connect Jews in northern Morocco to Latin American cultures.

Due to their great numbers and political influence, Spanish settlers played a significant role in shaping such local leisure activities that dominated the public sphere. In 1950, la Plaza de Toros, the bullring of Tangier, was inaugurated. Hosting the most important bullfighters from Spain, it had thirteen thousand seats and became a landmark that reflected the Spanish influence on Tangier’s cultural life after the city regained its international status. In addition to the bullring, the following incomplete list of football (soccer) clubs established by Spanish settlers in Morocco illustrates to some extent the importance of football to the settlers’ leisure culture: the regional Club Atlético de Tetuán (founded in 1922); the Alfonso XIII Fútbol Club (1929); the Federación Hispano-Marroquí de Fútbol and Campeonato Hispano-Marroquí (1931); and la Sociedad Deportiva Tánger Club de Fútbol (1941).⁴¹

In the early 1930s, European sports culture was unpopular in the Jewish community, as evidenced by growing concern about the matter in the local Jewish press. Alberto Berdugo, the editor in chief of Adelante, one of the prominent Jewish newspapers in northern Morocco at the time, wrote in a report, “With the exception of football, Tangerine youth in general are not well acquainted with sports like cycling or pedestrian races.”⁴² Grassroots organizations soon began to fill that vacuum. Jewish and Muslim youths frequently played football together on the beaches of Larache, but soon some Jews began to organize themselves into teams based on neighborhoods or even streets. Their patterns of organization resembled the patterns common among non-Jewish football clubs.⁴³

The criticism in Adelante about the lack of sporting activities in fact reflected a growing desire for recreational institutions that would demarcate the Jewish identity of their members against the backdrop of proliferating sport clubs and activities sponsored by Spanish settlers. The first explicitly Jewish local football club was Juventud Judía Deportiva (JID), followed by Macabenos—both founded in Larache in 1930. The Maguen David and Ideal football clubs were established the same year in Alcazarquivir.⁴⁴ In 1930, Adelante reported on the reunion of a group of Spanish Catholic scouts with their Jewish counterparts from Tangier and Larache as part of a festival held in Larache that year. The event started on Saturday afternoon with the arrival of the Spanish group to Larache and included a party on Saturday night and a football match on Sunday.⁴⁵ These teams did not play against Jewish groups in the French protectorate zone but forged a regional network in northern Morocco.

During the 1951–52 season, the Club Atlético de Tetuán football team even managed to compete in Spain’s top league, the Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera División, alongside world-class clubs like Atlético Madrid. In the 1950s, in Tetouan’s Varela stadium (named in 1950 after General José Varela, Franco’s high commissioner in Morocco), Jews and Muslims played together as part of Club Atlético de Tetuán.⁴⁶ Football was not the only sport developed in northern Morocco by Spanish settlers. In 1956, Or-Luz, the Jewish periodical edited by Moisés Garzón Serfaty, published an interview with Samuel Serfaty, a Jew who coached Atlético de Tetuán’s local basketball team. Starting out with El Rayo C.B. (El Rayo basketball club) in 1943, he passed through a number of Spanish basketball teams in Africa, among them Atlético y Union Africa Ceuta, which under his tutelage became Morocco’s leading team in 1950–51.⁴⁷ Two decades later, Samuel Serfaty would become a leader of the new Jewish community in Valencia, Spain.

With the widespread acquisition of modern Spanish by northern Moroccan Jews and the growing dominance of Spanish culture in the public sphere, daily contact with non-Jewish Spanish speakers increased. Casual encounters between children in the street, interactions with neighbors in shared apartment buildings, and other forms of social mingling became habitual in a way that shaped the “re-Hispanization” of local Jews in northern Morocco from the bottom up, rather than just by means of direct colonial impositions.⁴⁸

One of the prominent symbols of the re-Hispanization of local Jewish culture is the Hispanization of typical Jewish names since the mid-twentieth century. These names were often spelled, pronounced, or translated into non-Hebraic forms: Abraham frequently became Alberto, Yehuda was Leon, Baruch was Beniro, and other Jewish names simply adapted Spanish sounds; Moshe was Moisés, and Shlomo was converted into Salomón.⁴⁹ In addition, local Jews began to adopt the Spanish custom of using two surnames, those of the paternal and the maternal sides. Dual versions of prenames, both Hebraic and Hispanic and used by the same individuals, were no less emblematic of cultural transformation, representing a parallel need to define the boundaries of Spanish and other sources of European influence.⁵⁰

SETTING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES

The new lifestyles that arose out of daily interactions and engagement in leisure activities alongside the settler populations did not necessarily contradict traditional Judaism and its behavioral codes.⁵¹ Since Judaism as it existed in colonial northern Morocco was an orthopraxy, it attached importance to the daily observance of religious laws in a way that could promote communal segregation for various community members. Already in the early 1930s, Adelante, the top Jewish newspaper circulating in northern Morocco at the time, reflected concern among local Jewish community leaders about the lack of Sabbath observance on the part of the younger generation of Tangier’s Jews, some of who chose to work and send their children to school on the Jewish day of rest.⁵²

Beyond the lack of religious observance, the Jewish landscape was also characterized by new practices alien to the traditional Jewish religious habitus. Calle Sevilla in the heart of Tangier was the main site of Christmas and New Year’s celebrations among Spanish immigrants in the 1940s and 1950s.⁵³ The participation of Jews in such popular Spanish public celebrations of Christmas clashed with Jewish religious etiquette in the eyes of many. Simi, who grew up in the Judería of Tetouan, recalled a dispute with her father over her desire to attend a popular street parade (La Comparsa) on New Year’s Eve. During our interview, she showed me a picture of her young uncle at such a festival, stating: “He was not like my father. . . . My father did not even allow me to eat a grape [referring to the Spanish custom of eating twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve].”⁵⁴ This remark echoes ongoing notions about a new generation of Jews who felt more attached to colonial culture in northern Morocco and associated their attachment with intergenerational gaps.

Another custom that some Jews embraced was the Noche de Reyes, observed on January 6 to mark the Epiphany. On this night, children throughout the Spanish-speaking world expect to receive gifts delivered by the Three Kings who visited Jesus just after his birth.⁵⁵ In her 1987 memoir, Alegría Bendelac recalls how this custom penetrated her own Jewish home.⁵⁶ The widespread exposure to Christian customs among local Jews was indicated in a tape recording from a group trip by Tangier natives residing in Israel to their hometown in 1987. While sitting in a café in the heart of Tangier, the travelers spontaneously and joyfully began to sing Spanish Christmas songs. The performance erupted in response to an offhand remark by one of the participants about romantic relationships between Jews and Christians.⁵⁷

As Nina Pinto Abecasis has shown, the phenomenon of piropo, the Spanish equivalent of catcalling, was also commonplace in northern Morocco. She notes that the piropo had sexual overtones, indicating a close observation of the female body that, to some extent, violated the norms of respect and honor that were the customary attitudes toward Jewish women.⁵⁸ The performance of piropo, at least as reflected in the oral traditions that Pinto Abecasis studied, may suggest to some extent intimate relationships between Jews and Spaniards—relationships that were not acceptable in the more formal discourse of the community. An indication of other sorts of informal relationships between Jews and Christians comes from the circumcision notebook of Rabbi Yamín, who operated in Tangier: 24 out of the 543 Jewish boys circumcised between 1929 and 1950 were born to a mother who had converted to Judaism from Christianity. Remarkably, four children had a Christian mother who had not converted, a fact that Rabbi Yamín did not attempt to conceal when he documented their circumcision.

More frequently, Jews would attend local bars and eat nonkosher food in violation of Jewish dietary laws that were otherwise usually obeyed.⁵⁹ An unexpected indication of the demand for nonkosher foods, typically Spanish dishes, appeared in the northern Morocco Jewish periodical Or-Luz. It was an advertisement for Bar Sevilla, an establishment in Tetouan, which clearly stated that it specialized in gambas pil pil—Spanish-style prawns. The fact that the editors had agreed to publish the advertisement, or that Bar Sevilla’s owners thought to appeal to a Jewish audience through Or-Luz, suggests that nonkosher dining was probably not a rare occurrence among local Jews in Tetouan. The advertisement nonetheless seems to have been met with ambivalence among Or-Luz’s editors, as evidenced by their repeated decision to publish it upside down.⁶⁰ While it is hard to know the true intention behind the decision to publish the ad upside down, one reasonable interpretation is that it reflected the gap between the day-to-day lifestyles and religious ethics of Jews in Tetouan—both key aspects of their unique ethnicity in Morocco.

To understand how cultural boundaries worked, we also need to consider that by the early 1900s Jewish society in northern Morocco had become almost entirely urban, with rising numbers of immigrants coming into the larger urban centers of Tangier and Tetouan from smaller towns and villages in the Spanish protectorate zone and French-ruled southern Morocco. By the 1930s, Tangier’s urban space was divided into two zones representing the “old” and “new” parts of the city. The old medina, situated on a hilltop next to the port in the northeast corner, overlooked the Bay of Tangier and was protected by a city wall. The newly built European section extended westward and southward from the medina. The layout of its broad commercial boulevards suggested a strong element of urban planning. Plaza de Francia, situated just a few minutes’ walk south of the medina, marked the heart of the European area and the cosmopolitan cultural traits it represented. An impressive villa situated within the plaza and occupied by the French consulate symbolized the dominance of the European presence over the townscape. The Marchán, a luxurious suburban zone that extended westward from the medina, constituted another such cosmopolitan symbol. On the other hand, the Emsalleh area, referred to on the British admiralty map of 1942 as the “native quarter” within the new European city, resembled the medina with its large concentration of Muslims.

A central border zone architecturally separating the medina from the newer parts of European Tangier was nicknamed the Zoco de Fuera or Zoco Grande in Spanish—literally, “outer market” or “big market”—and colloquially was referred to as the Souk el-Kbir in Arabic or Le Grand Socco in French. From there, one would enter the old medina through the Beni Idar quarter, home to a concentration of historic Jewish institutions: ten synagogues, a yeshiva (religious seminary), and other communal facilities including a relatively large cemetery. Established in the nineteenth century, these institutions were still functioning as late as the 1950s.

By the mid-twentieth century, the linguistic shift from Haketia to Spanish that characterized most of the generation born around the early 1900s, was integrated into a socio-spatial divide between residents of newer and older parts of the city. Hélène recalled how her parents would berate her when she used Haketia words she had picked up from members of the community who still spoke it. Often when she used a word or an intonation that sounded like Haketia, her parents would say, “Stop! You speak like a girl from the ‘Fuente Nueva’”—a site in the Jewish district of the medina.⁶¹ The archaic way of speaking Spanish among the generation born in the nineteenth century was by and large interpreted by their children, Hélène’s parents for example, as a sign of underdevelopment and even lack of urban mobility.

But the medina and the cultural world it represented in fact played a meaningful role in shaping communal heritage in the modernizing urban setting. For example, marriage ceremonies took place under the traditional chuppah, or wedding canopy, and were usually performed in one of the small synagogues there, followed by a celebration at home. In Tangier, the congregation occasionally accompanied the bride in a traditional parade through the streets of Beni Idar on their way to the synagogue ceremony.⁶² Even though the Jewish part of Beni Idar had long ceased to function as the city’s major Jewish population center, it nonetheless became a spatial emblem of Jewish heritage amid dramatic changes in the cityscape and their day-to-day routine.

In fact, demographically, the Beni Idar quarter was far from predominantly Jewish and was anything but ghetto-like. Writing in 1947, Onieva characterized the medina as a mosaic of ethnicities: a Spanish café next to a mosque, a Catholic church or a synagogue next to an Arab bazaar, a Jewish moneychanger’s hut next to a shipping company.⁶³ Tangier, however, did not have many of the distinct religious or colonial divisions found elsewhere in Morocco.⁶⁴ The Jewish quarter, therefore, was no different from the entire medina as far as demographic diversity was concerned. In fact, the Jewish quarter bordered the area that the Spanish community considered its own historical site in the medina, where the Spanish Catholic Cathedral was located. The Spanish community in the 1940s and 1950s concentrated itself around the Calle Sevilla neighborhood, and the Gran Teatro Cervantes was a major meeting place for Jews and Spaniards there.⁶⁵

This description demonstrates that dialectical and contextual mental transitions between the oppositional experiences of modern-colonial and traditional-communal spaces mutually shape modern Jewish life across their real and imagined townscapes. The establishment and active engagement with these boundaries became a defining practice of modernity for Jews in the region, more so than concepts like assimilation, integration, or tradition adherence. These boundaries were also crucial to facilitate coexistence between Spanish-speaking Jews and Catholics. Despite certain cultural commonalities, these two groups maintained their distinct identities, delineated by contrasting practices and beliefs, whose significance was amplified in the context of the actual reencounter.

Figure 1.3 illustrates how sites like the Gran Teatro Cervantes, which were otherwise associated with modern Spanish culture, could be repurposed and invested with traditional Jewish meanings in certain temporal contexts. It shows Jewish women dressed in traje de berberisca (“Berber dress”) in a scenic representation of the alheña (henna) ceremony, associated with their Jewish ancestry in Spain. On the night before a wedding, celebrants would mark Noche de Berberisca (literally “Night of the Berber,” also known as Noche de Novia)—the night of the henna ceremony, as it is better known among other communities in Morocco. The traditional traje de berberisca worn by northern Moroccan Jewish brides had equivalents in the Sephardi communities of Turkey, Greece, Algeria, and Bulgaria, with roots reaching back to fifteenth-century Spain.⁶⁶

Images of wedding parades in the Alley of the Synagogues in Tangier or chuppah ceremonies at local synagogues across northern Morocco or even in private homes can stimulate our historical imagination regarding the sense of such semi-public spaces and the kinship networks they could generate. Participants exchanged their everyday social practices—dress codes, verbal mannerisms, and patterns of food and musical consumption—for new ones that would associate them more closely with their community. Matrimonial ceremonies constituted emblematic moments in which Jewish culture took on new meanings in the changing urban setting of colonial northern Morocco.⁶⁷

This sensitivity to community time and space help to contextualize the emergence of institutionalized practices of community building that, in the context of Spanish colonialism, were mediated both by the state through Spanish schools and by the community through organized social activities and changing everyday habits. While Haketia and the culture it began to represent in the early 1900s was deemed archaic by the modernizing elite, it is important to highlight that the Spanish spoken by the mobile Jewish middle-class in the northern Morocco urban spaces was not uniform, and it retained Haketia influence depending on the social, temporal, and geographic contexts of speech. Relatedly, members of the Jewish elite also thought to leverage this language for modern ethnographic projects, which became essential to community building in light of major cultural shifts in colonial northern Morocco after 1912 and even more so after World War II, as the next chapter further explores.