Une etude sur l'influence et la maniere dont le colonialisme fut percu par les communautes musulmanes et Juives presentes a Tanger du point de vue culturel et religieux.
L'article est en anglais et je place certains morceaux tout de meme car tres interessants.

Apportioning Sacred Space in a Moroccan City :
the case of Tangier, 1860–1912
SUSAN GILSON MILLER
Harvard University



Synagogue de Rabbi Mordechai Bengio a Tanger





In late 19th century Morocco, ideological issues such as nationalism, secularization, and colonialism came to bear on urban society and on the relations among ethnic groups in the city. This study focuses on inter-communal relations in the coastal city of Tangier, the main port for European entry into Morocco, as an example of a “traditional” Islamic city undergoing rapid modernization. Using archival sources and contemporay ethnographic studies, this article examines how the Muslim and Jewish communities of Tangier responded to the coming of modernity by articulating zones of ethnically and religiously marked space that came to be perceived of as critical to each group’s expression of self-identity. [Colonialism, sacred space, Morocco, Muslim-Jewish relations]


The Mellah

IN THE LEXICON OF MUSLIM-JEWISH relations in Morocco, no single word is more redolent with meaning than the word mellah, the Jewish quarter of the Moroccan town. In the popular mind, the mellah was synonymous with Jewish society, representing the subordinate and separate status of Morocco’s single largest religious minority. To many European visitors, the mellah evoked an image of the forlorn ghettoes of the Middle Ages. Eugène Aubin, writing at the turn of the century, recognized the distinctions to be made between mellahs of the coast and those of the interior, but he noted that all were similar in one respect: within their walls “the great mass of the Jewish population continues to live in poverty and squalor. The Mellahs are overpopulated . . . [their] filth and stench . . . make them hotbeds of frequent epidemics.”
The Jewish quarter of Mogador (present day Essaouira) was especially shocking, giving the impression of “a human anthill . . It is a squalid, wretched place, where one does not breathe freely except on the terraces, where a whole regiment of women and children take the air” (Aubin 1906:285–95).


Profane and Sacred

OUR POINT OF DEPARTURE IS a survey of the social mosaic of late nineteenth century Tangier. The population of Tangier grew rapidly in the years between 1860 and 1912; the town nearly quadrupled in size. This spectacular expansion was based on several factors, among them the arrival of Europeans of every type, attracted to Tangier because of its proximity to the continent. Before the 1870s, the European colony was made up of a handful of diplomats and their families. The bloody repression of a republican-led insurrection in Andalusia after 1869 marked the beginning of a large-scale migration of Spanish political refugees (Kaplan 1977).5 Most were “honest men,” according
to René-Leclerc: small tradesmen, craftsmen, and farm workers. But mixed among them was “a bad element, whose presence contaminates the streets of the town . . . loafers, jailbirds, deserters, anarchists, all the flotsam of Andalusia and the presidios who have come to Tangier to seek a refuge from justice” (1905:72). Another spurt in growth came in 1904, after the signing of the Anglo- French agreement that culminated in a French Protectorate over much of Morocco in 1912. Thereafter, according to one contemporary observer, Morocco “passed definitively into the French sphere of influence,” and European migrants began arriving “with every postal delivery, from Gibraltar, Cadiz, Malaga, Algeria in search of the El Dorado they read about in their newspapers . . . Tangier, squeezed on one side by the inaccessible qasba, and on the other by the sands of the beach, has become too cramped to contain all these people.”6
Apportioning Sacred Space.


Separate Zones

AT THE END OF THE century, Jews and Muslims engaged in complex maneuvers that eventually led to the creation of separate zones of ethnically marked space. At first look, the town seemed to be homogeneous, but a closer inspection revealed a distinct pattern of settlement along lines of class and ethnicity.
Better-off Jews concentrated in the Beni Ider quarter, the southern section of the medina, although it was by no means exclusively Jewish (Fig. 1). Among the advantages of this quarter was its proximity to the main shopping district, to the covered market, and to the kosher butchers. Close to the main gates of town, it had easy access to the countryside on one side, and to the customhouse and the port on the other. It was also served by fountains at both ends, an advantage in
this town where a scarcity of water was a perennial problem. Moreover, from its rooftops there was a splendid view of the bay. The only major Muslim monument in the quarter was the lodge (zawiya) of
the Wazzaniya brotherhood, traditionally friendly to Jews (Michaux-Bellaire 1927). There were class differences within the quarter: Budgett Meakin noted that “the upper fountain” where the wealthiest Jews lived “is more respectable than the lower one.” At the lower end, the curving streets degenerated into a morass of alleyways, ending in “a fearfully odiferous drain” known as Hufrat bin Sharqi, or “the hole of the son of the East,” a hangout for prostitutes, transients, and low-lifes (Meakin 1889).
Within this quarter, Jewish life was most intensely lived. Here were the synagogues, the mikveh, and the bread oven around which communal
activities revolved. In the Street of the Synagogues in the middle of the quarter were concentrated eight houses of worship, each one only a few steps from the other.
Their simple, unadorned doorways made them indistinguishable from the houses alongside. The street itself was about fifty meters long and looked like the familiar derb (alley) of the Muslim city. It was a private way that led nowhere, a self-contained neighborhood where a man could leave his shop and step next door to pray, where a woman could enter the street without covering her head with a shawl.17 In 1860, Moses Picciotto, a Londoner sent by Jewish philanthropists to report on the condition of Moroccan Jews, reported that the synagogues were days the services are repeated at different hours, to supply the deficiency.




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