Modernity and the Jewish Question: Perspectives on Jewish Modernity in Moroccan before and during Protectorate
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Date
2015-06
Authors
Reeves, Michael
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
As the European population in contact with Moroccan Jews began to grow, most noticeably from 1862 when the country’s first Alliance Israélite Universelle school was founded, European culture and a conceptualization of what modernity entailed was projected onto the native Jewish population and emulated in real ways by that same population. The accounts of Europeans having visited or lived in Morocco dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries afford this study capacity to analyze how modernity as a concept was employed in the imagining of a vaguely national Jewish character and in the creation of an imagined ethnic hierarchy within Morocco.
Into the period of the French Protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956), the Jewish “question” remained on the minds of colonial administrators and Zionist leaders increasingly in contact with Morocco’s urban Jewish elite. Accompanying modernity during the protectorate were questions of national destiny and identity, most vividly in the accounts of native Moroccan Jews. In this context, the Casablanca journal L’Avenir Illustré was a crucible for the fermentation of a new Jewish character in Morocco under the auspices of Europe, one devoted to debating modernity under colonialism.
Description
83 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of History and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Spring 2015.
Keywords
History, France, Morocco, Jewish Studies, French Colonialism, Modernity, l'Avenir Illustre