The “Jewish Question” in Postcolonial Moroccan Cinema

Abstract

In this historically and anthropologically oriented article, we situate the recent wave of Jewishthemed Moroccan films within the context of the liberalizing transformations and associated nationalist narratives promoted by the current Moroccan regime. Reflecting Mohammed VI's commitment to widening the space of civil society, the task of enacting these transformations and producing these narratives devolves increasingly to nonstate agents in the public sphere. Previously monopolized and managed more comprehensively by the state, the "Jewish Question"-that is, contestations over representations of Jews as authentic members of the Moroccan body politic-is now taken up in a range of public media less subject to direct government control. We demonstrate that the role of cinema in this process reflects the shifting relationship between state and civil society in the late postcolonial period. More specifically, we argue that the production, circulation, and reception of Jewish-themed films is diagnostic of the state's ability to open new spaces of public representation and debate that foster precisely those images of the state and nation promoted by the current regime in regional and global contexts.Oren Kosansky is an Associate Professor in the

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“…As the only non-Muslim group, Jews were and still are an essential symbol of a more open and progressive Moroccan civil society. In this sense, Jews are natives of Morocco, "neighbors" for whom there is still a place (Kosansky and Boum 2012). The disagreement and discussion about this topic are particularly intense when it comes to answering the question of why Jews left Morocco (Meyers 1996;Bin-Nun 2014).…”

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“…In Morocco, where they were classified by the colonial state as subjects of the sultan, many also emigrated, but tens of thousands stayed through the 1960s. Up through the present, Morocco retains the largest Jewish population in the Arab world, and Morocco’s Jewish minority (and, perhaps more importantly, the memory of Morocco’s Jews), constitute an integral component of a state-sponsored multi-cultural conception of national identity [Boum 2013; Kosansky and Boum 2012].…”

Kasstan, Ben. Making bodies kosher: the politics of reproduction among Haredi Jews in England. xiv, 272 pp., illus., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. £99.00 (cloth)Kravel‐Tovi, Michal. When the state winks: the performance of Jewish conversion in Israel. xvi, 310 pp., bibliogr. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2017. £58.00 (cloth)

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