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Return to Casablanca
Jews, Muslims, and an Israeli Anthropologist
By André Levy The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29269-4
CHAPTER 1
An Anthropological Journey to My Birthplace
"This book is an outgrowth of my ongoing interest in Morocco." or possibly:
"This book is an outgrowth of my ongoing interest in anthropology."
While I was trying to define the basic idea of this book, the above pronouncements were some thoughts I jotted down for myself, but there they remain, as indecisive doodles. Readers may be wondering at this time if this book is properly prepared and edited, complete with a linear and continuous argument, as befits a serious scholarly work. Well, to be honest, no, this book presents no such argument; it does not need to. This is a book about a journey, and travelers have no interest in behaving like tourists who travel on the beaten path; travelers strive to walk on unfamiliar roads, which curve and fork into many different directions. This book is about a Moroccan journey. It is about an anthropological voyage. This book is about my explorations.
At the time the journey took place, it was fraught with unpredictable twists and turns. As I look back, it seems (how unsurprising!) to have, like any story of a journey, not only parallel paths but also twisted ones, some going toward "Morocco" and others directed to "anthropology." Yet, it also makes claim to a clear shape, content, and direction, and in retrospect it seems to have possessed a solid logic entirely its own. It is similar in this way to the twists of the arabesque: at any point in the journey, at any time or place, it seemed to turn and twist without following any logic or order. However, from a distance, one may see a clear geometric and symmetrical pattern. This journey ended up being so logical and structured that it seemed (how depressing!) that there could not have been any other path to begin with. In retrospect, it seems that though there may be freedom of choice, everything is preordained. Like so many other travelers, I realized retrospectively that I was a tourist.
For this reason, and in order to make things clear to the readers from the beginning, I will start from the end. I will begin from the point where one may see a recurring pattern from a distance: a retrospective reflection of both time and space. From the point where the beginning and end of time and space connect, but possibly don't, where they converge after having been separated. I will start from my anthropological journey to my place of birth, to Morocco, the place where things are meant to become clear, the place of the beginning and the place of the end. This journey was an initiation of sorts for me; it took place more than two decades ago, in the summer of 1990, and transformed me from being a student into being an anthropologist. In those days, many thought my plan to do fieldwork for my doctoral research in Morocco was unrealistic, not to mention dangerously foolish. Officially, I worded the research objective (wording that hid more than it revealed) as the desire to understand the way Jews in Casablanca live, with the clear undisputed awareness that they, as a collective community at least, are approaching their end. Following a period in which they numbered a quarter of a million people, their numbers had diminished to three thousand or so. They are demising demographically and they are aware of this.
My plan was seen as unrealistic, in part, because at the time there were no formal diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel. Morocco was (and still remains) a member of the Arab League, and the Moroccan king — as the Amir al-Mouaminin ("Commander of the Faithful"), a title he awarded himself by virtue of his alleged lineage from the prophet himself — headed the Al-Quds Committee, a committee charged with safeguarding the interests of the Muslim nation in Al-Qouds/Jerusalem. Despite these formal positions, Morocco's foreign policy and its then head, King Hassan II, were, for a variety of complex reasons, in practice almost neutral to things concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the public expressions of this somewhat aloof policy was revealed in a statement the king made in an exclusive interview that he granted the state television channel in Israel (the only channel at the time). In addition to the irregular and highly exceptional conception of the idea of consenting to an interview on Israeli national television, which constituted a true breaking of taboos, the contents of the interview were in themselves surprising. In the interview, the king invited natives of Morocco to return home. Despite a rather wide dispersion of Moroccan-born Muslims throughout the world, he directed his words to Jews living in Israel. Formally, this statement was based on the concept of Moroccan nationalism, which combines the central principle of citizenship by virtue of kinsmanship ("Blood Rights," or Jus sanguinis) with the secondary principle of staying within the territory ("Rights of Soil," or Jus soli). In practice very few Israelis returned to settle for good or even for a long period of time in Morocco. However, this statement paved the way for organized travel arrangements for Moroccan-born Israelis to their birthplace.
These trips had been the focus of my graduate studies (master's program) some years earlier. Beyond my intellectual curiosity (to understand issues concerning the Mizrahi identity in Israel), I chose to conduct this study specifically because I desired to see this place that I had heard so many stories about as a child: most of which, I embarrassingly admit, I did not believe. I joined one of the first organized tours to Morocco and asked my mother and older sister to join me. They responded with great enthusiasm. I thought that the idea behind the invitation was clever; since the trip was for a short period of time it would be necessary to win the trust of our fellow passengers quickly. From my failed attempts to interview some of them before the trip, I knew that because of the semi-legitimate feelings surrounding the trips to Morocco, I would find it difficult to achieve cooperation quickly (the trip was to last only three weeks). I could not wait for a long-term confidence-building process. I thought that the fact that my mother was with me would help to break the ice quickly. I wanted my sister to come for two reasons: first, to serve as another pair of eyes and ears and to help in the research. The second and main reason was that she would serve as a buffer between my mother and me when I would need to meet the demands of my research. My mother quickly located childhood friends, and my fears proved childish.
Integrated as part of the trip's itinerary were ten free days. During this time, my mother, sister, and I went to Casablanca to look for the house we used to live in, prior to my family's immigration to Israel. I knew the house was on rue de Longwy, a street with mostly private homes of middle-class families, petit bourgeois. During those days, few Jews lived there; the majority were the colons, or the French settlers' (colonialist) families, and one Italian family. I hoped that the encounter with the house I lived in as a young child would arouse dormant memories. After all, most of my time at that age was spent at home. I wasn't convinced of the reliability of those dim memories that I had. I suspected that I didn't really remember characters such as Monsieur Block (a Frenchman converted to Judaism, who would probably be called "Bloch" in Israel), the tall, overweight neighbor who scared us children. I feared that my memory of him, like other memories of sight, color, and taste, was more a fabrication that was built later than it was a memory from that time and place. I was consumed with doubt lest those evenings with family members telling stories and reminiscing about life in Casablanca had become lodged in my mind and now functioned as my own memories. The lower-class neighborhood where I grew up in Israel (later incorporated in "Project Renewal"), which was mostly made up of Moroccan immigrants, also reconstructed through language, holiday celebrations, customs, and games a Moroccan past. Like any act of reconstruction, it was a commentary of the present on that past. Indeed, this reconstruction intensified the differences between the different neighborhood residents — the "chelohim" (Amazighs speaking tachelhit) from the high Atlas Mountains as opposed to the city dwellers — among whom there were often disagreements. I remembered stopping by with my father on Shabbat and holidays at the synagogue, which was only a few steps away from our house. My father was not meticulous about keeping the commandments, and in fact, only after we immigrated to Israel did he begin following the religious rules more strictly. As part of this change, he began to frequent the synagogue on Friday evenings, Shabbat, and holidays. In Morocco, he used to work on Saturdays. On one of these occasions, I think it was during the month of the Tishre festivals, the cantor of the synagogue opened services with a speech where he stressed that all those coming to pray must remember that this was a "Sephardi" synagogue, that is to say, a synagogue of "deportees" who arrived in Morocco following the Alhambra Decree. My father was offended and decided then and there to leave the synagogue and join the synagogue belonging to the people of Meknes. This while sharing his dissatisfaction that there was no "Marrakechi" (of his hometown, Marrakech) synagogue within reasonable walking distance. The encounter in Israel between different groups of Moroccan immigrants sharpened the differences between them, some of which were taken seriously and some with humor. Occurrences such as this event in the synagogue became for me a part of the Moroccan reality, of Morocco in Israel. This to such an extent that I had suspicions that my memories of walking as a child from my house to the playground in the center of Casablanca, of going to Vivoli, the ice cream parlor at the end of the street, were tinted by stories and events of my childhood in Ashdod. These memories were, furthermore, affected by pictures taken by my grandfather, who was a talented amateur photographer. Through his pictures, photographed with an 8 mm movie camera, he brought the images I imagined from the neighborhood in Morocco to life even stronger.
The visit to Morocco, as a roots travel meant to arouse dormant memories and confirm existing ones ended in bitter disappointment. Our home was destroyed and in its place stood a commercial bank. My mother, in her bitter disappointment, let out a cry in Maghrebi Arabic of "Allah have mercy, our house," as if saying that our house had died. This disappointment was not unique to us; it was the lot of the majority of travelers to Morocco. Perhaps, and not surprisingly, one of the outcomes of the journey to find roots in Morocco was the increasing feeling that things about the past remained unresolved, a bothersome nuisance, a project waiting to be completed. There were many who hoped that these same missions would be resolved in the next trip (be it the second, third, or even fifth). There were those who hoped that next time they would find the burial place of their father or mother; there were those who hoped that in the next trip "they would bring back to Israel the lost sister they left in Morocco who married an Arab"; those who wanted to restore the remaining fragments of the grandfather's grave; or those who wanted to find their old house or the neighbor who lived next door. Part of the disappointment relates, of course, to the illusiveness of the "home" toward which they yearned to return. Often both the concrete and metaphorical home exists in more than one place. Thus, as soon as you reach it you find that it is already somewhere else; upon arriving at one "home" you disturbingly discover that this just inundates you with memories of and glorifies the other that is left behind.
Following this journey-research trip, which examined the social and cultural meanings of Israelis' journey to their roots in Morocco, one of my supervisors, Harvey Goldberg, titled me "Hajj André." In his style of doing things, this crowning had multilayered meanings. I will risk interpreting his words and state that except for the obvious fact that he imagined a trip to a Muslim country would be interspersed with Jewish and Muslim holy sites, a pilgrimage in fact, he apparently wanted to indicate that I was essentially conducting my own professional pilgrimage (an anthropological rite of passage, if you wish). I assume he also wanted to congratulate me on my private-collective pilgrimage as a native of Morocco. My journey to my roots in Morocco planted within me the desire to designate Morocco as the research site (my "field," as anthropologists call it) for my doctoral studies. As mentioned above, almost anyone I told of my intention to conduct extended fieldwork in Morocco expressed the fear that I was going on an unnecessary escapade. One of the few who stood out in their optimism was Clifford Geertz, who himself conducted research in the city of Sefrou, Morocco. During his visit to Israel he encouraged me to go without asking too many questions or without asking permission from the Moroccan authorities to carry out research. "If you ask permission, you will run into bureaucratic obstinacy," he said. However, unlike him, the majority were pessimistic. Some were especially dramatic: "What if war breaks out?!" I was asked defiantly. (To my complete surprise this speculation proved correct. I left for Morocco in early July 1990, and a few days later (on August 2, 1990) Iraq invaded Kuwait. On January 7, 1991, the Allied countries opened a war against Iraq.) Most of my interlocutors were a bit more correct minded and asked: "What if they don't allow you to enter Morocco?" Fortunately, this possibility did not materialize.
At the time though, the second possibility seemed to be the more realistic one. In spite of the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries, winding paths that would allow visits to Morocco did exist, though their legitimacy was not always evident to the participants. The most common point of entry to Morocco was by means of the Moroccan consulate in Malaga, Spain. Travelers were required to deposit their Israeli passport, and in return they received a laissez passer (transit visa), a document that would accompany the visitor throughout the entire period of their visit. The document was a plain piece of paper bearing a photo of the document holder, in which the Spanish authorities were requested to assist in passage to Morocco. In addition, the document declared that the original nationality of the document holder was Moroccan, while the "Current Nationality" section usually remained blank, apparently to avoid mentioning the name of Israel on an official document of the Moroccan kingdom. For reasons incomprehensible to me, in this section my current nationality was written as Moroccan.
The choice of the Moroccan bureaucracy to grant a document such as this one was not coincidental. A transit visa is a document issued by a government requesting from other countries that they permit passage into their country, while being assured that the visa holder will return to the country that issued the visa and won't stay in the transit country. In this way, the Moroccan kingdom declared that I, like any other traveler from Israel to Morocco, was defined as a returning subject and not as a visiting tourist. This declaration was consistent with the Moroccan interest at the time not to declare to the world, and especially to the Arab world, that Israelis were welcome tourists in Morocco. Because I entered Morocco with this document as opposed to a tourist visa, my stay there was not limited in time. As a researcher this was a significant advantage for me, because I didn't have to justify that the length of my stay in Morocco was for fieldwork; after all I was Moroccan. This enabled a period of research time of fourteen consecutive months in Casablanca.
Because this document was not widely familiar, many people were bewildered by the transit visa, and there were many misunderstandings when I needed it to serve as an ID card: such that when I wanted to convert US dollars to Dirham, the local currency, senior officials at the bank branch were required to intervene in order to allow me to do so. However, the greatest difficulty that this document raised for me was that of finding an apartment. Landlords had difficulty understanding the legal status of the document and feared getting into trouble with the authorities. They were afraid mainly because they knew, although I did not volunteer this information, that I was from Israel. For this and other reasons that I won't go into here, involving how Jews relate to Muslims in Morocco, Jews that I met in Casablanca recommended that I contact only Jewish real estate agents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Return to Casablanca by André Levy. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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