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Muslim-Jewish Relations in a Moroccan City1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Lawrence Rosen
Lawrence Rosen
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced StudyPrinceton, New Jersey
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Extract

In the present political climate of Arab-Israeli relations, arguments are frequently brought forth by disputants on each side concerning what each regards as the fundamental relations between Muslims and Jews, not as political but as social communities. Muslims insist that Jews who have lived in their midst have always fared better than those living in Europe and that their opposition is not to Jews as a religious, but as a distinct political, grouping. Zionists, on the other hand, consider as humiliating the treatment Jews have received in the Muslim countries from which most of them have emigrated, and often regard the Muslims as fundamentally anti-Semitic despite the latter's protestations to the contrary. Fact and myth, particularly in the hands of each side's propagandists, have become inextricably tangled, and attempts to tease them apart often fall victim to accusations that the author is less interested in a judicious presentation of the data than in serving some private and ulterior motive. Indeed, since most of the Jews have either left their homes in the Arab nations or found their positions drastically altered by the present conflict, it has become almost impossible to study first-hand the ways in which Muslims conceive of and relate to the Jewish minorities living in their midst as part of that society and not just as an extension of the Israeli nation or the community of world Jewry.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , October 1972 , pp. 435 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

page 436 note 1 The following figures show the approximate number of Jews still living in each of the Arab countries. Figures in parentheses, where available, refer to the Jewish populations in these countries around 1948. Morocco: 45,000 (225,000); Tunisia: 12,000—14,000 (100,000); Lebanon: 4000; Syria: 2500–4000 (30,000); Iraq: 3500 (130,000); Algeria: 2000 (140,000); Egypt: 1000 (80,000); Yemen: 1000 (70,000); Libya: nil (35,000). The figures used here are cited by Tuohy, William in The Washington Post on 3 November 1969.Google Scholar The number of Jews in Syria around 1948 is cited in Sachar, Howard, The Course of Modern Jewish History (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1958), p. 547.Google Scholar

page 437 note 1 Llewelyn, Karl N. and Hoebel, E. Adamson, The Cheyenne Way (Norman, Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 23.Google Scholar

page 438 note 1 I am indebted to Professor Clifford Geertz for the phrasing of this point.Google Scholar

page 440 note 1 Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers, 1 (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 15–19;Google Scholar and The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, Northwestern Universty Press, 1967), pp. 139–214.Google Scholar

page 440 note 2 Geertz, Clifford, Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis (New Haven, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies. Cultural Report Series No. 14, 1966), pp. 42–3.Google Scholar

page 442 note 1 Bell, Daniel, ‘Sociodicy: A Guide to Modern Usage’, The American Scholar, 35, 4 (autumn 1966), p. 697.Google Scholar

page 443 note 1 For a more detailed discussion of this problem see my paper ‘The Social and Conceptual Framework of Arab-Berber Relations in Central Morocco’, in Micaud, Charles A. and Gellner, Ernest (eds.), Arab-Berber Relations in North Africa: A Study in Ethnic Group Relations (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., in press).Google Scholar

page 447 note 1 For a detailed description of the impact of the June war on Muslim-Jewish relations in this community see my article ‘A Moroccan Jewish Community During the Middle Eastern Crisis’, The American Scholar, 37, no. 3 (summer 1968), pp. 435–51.Google Scholar