Abstract
Jews have lived in comparative peace with their neighbors in North Africa for millennia. In the past century, however, political forces have altered an ancient live-and-let-live ethos. A Peace Corps volunteer who began work at the Museum of Moroccan Judaism--the only Jewish museum in the Arab world--just before the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York describes the shock waves engulfing her small museum and the Jewish communities whose artifacts it shelters.

Introduction
On a spring afternoon in 2001, my daughter, son-in-law, and two small granddaughters trudged with me through the torpid calm of a suburban Casablanca neighborhood in search of the Musée du Judaïisme Marocain de Casablanca. It was the last day of their visit with me; a year earlier I had begun a two-year stint with the Peace Corps, teaching English at a college near Casablanca, and my daughter and her family had taken the opportunity to see this unfamiliar land.

I had learned of the existence of the Jewish Museum from a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, and my curiosity was aroused. I love museums and have spent years thinking and writing about them reflectively as a teacher of aesthetics. In fact, I had just completed a book on museums before leaving Boston to begin my Peace Corps service, and I have worked in various capacities at several different types of museums. But this one--the only Jewish museum in the entire Arab world--held particular interest for me, a German-born, Jewish-American professor of philosophy. Evidently, though, it was considered less noteworthy by its immediate neighbors. None of the workmen, delivery people, shopkeepers, or local residents we met on the street seemed to understand what I was talking about when I asked for directions, and the problem didn’t seem to be my fractured French. That day we returned, disappointed, to the college town where I was living and teaching.

My daughter and her family went home to America without seeing the museum, but I tried again, this time guided by my Peace Corps friend, an American librarian who is also Jewish. In addition to her regular Peace Corps assignment, she had volunteered to train the Jewish Museum's small staff how to catalogue their book collection, and had been working with them for almost a year. Arriving with her, it was easy to see how I had missed it the first time: the museum does not advertise itself. There was no plaque or banner to identify the premises, nor is it mentioned in any of the guidebooks I had consulted. We rang a bell at the gate and were admitted by a somnolent guard. Visitors, my friend told me, rarely arrived without prior appointments.

Within the walls, a lovely serpentine walkway leads to the museum's entrance. In between is a spacious garden with fig and apricot trees. The museum shares the building--but not its mailing address--with its parent organization, the Foundation for Judeo-Moroccan Cultural Patrimony (known by its French initials, FPCJ). Initially it housed a Yeshiva (a Jewish religious school) and later, during World War II, served as an orphanage for Jewish children. Because of its location in this quiet, formerly French-occupied residential section of Casablanca, the museum gets little foot traffic and almost no casual visitors.

We entered the museum, which struck me as nicely proportioned and well illuminated. My friend introduced me to the director, Simon Levy, who was happy to tour me around the exhibits. He led me past photographs of reconstructions-in-progress of ancient Jewish sacred sites around Morocco and showed me the museum's replicas of traditional dwellings, workshops, and salvaged sections from historic synagogues. One room was filled with the authentic furnishings of an entire Casablanca synagogue, and in another stood the bima (the pulpit) from the synagogue of Meknès. Other rooms featured several circumcision chairs, a replica of a typical domestic bedchamber, and a model jeweler's shop circa 1939. Around their circumference were glass cases containing mannequins dressed in the outfits of a Talmudic student, a well-to-do urban couple, and a rabbi, all surrounded by their religious and secular accessories.

Simon Levy also showed me the remnants of a recently opened exhibition depicting the costumes traditionally worn by Jews in different provinces of Morocco. Working from illustrations by the French ethnographer and photographer Jean Besancenot (Costumes du Maroc, 1942), a woman of the Casablanca Jewish community had sewn miniature replicas that were displayed on small dolls in glass cases. Most of the artifacts in the museum were less than a century old; older objects had long since been removed from Morocco, taken by emigrants, pillaged by looters, or salvaged in the Jewish museums of London, New York and Paris.

The collection was modest, but I particularly liked the everyday items--jewelers, and saddlers, tools, a wine press, couscous pots, books printed in the vernacular Judeo-Arabic, and the crudely made Torah covers and wine cups preserved from remote synagogues--that had formerly served tiny communities. Then and there, I conceived the idea that I might take the place of my Peace Corps friend at the museum, since she was about to end her term of service in Morocco. I later arranged an interview with Simon Levy, who gladly accepted my proposal; this small museum, like its counterparts around the world, needed what help it could get. My decision to volunteer at the museum was to transform my sojourn in Morocco and, just possibly, my life. It introduced me to a new world of human relationships, but also caused me to reassess my own history against the larger network of histories that shadowed and illuminated it.

The Aftermath of 9/11
I needed no particular job description. In this fledgling museum, roles were not compartmentalized and the chief requisites were energy and imagination. I began working early in the fall of 2001, helping with whatever needed to be done. My first assignment was to prepare a brochure for an exhibition of photographs of Jewish sacred sites in Morocco by Canadian photographer David Cowles. (A selection of his photographs accompanies this article.) He had visited the museum some months earlier and had left a few photographs behind, along with a small amount of biographical and technical information about his work. My job was to extract something publishable from these materials.

I also began to get to know my fellow workers, with whom I communicated in faltering French and the few words of Arabic that I had acquired. The staff is composed entirely of Moroccans, most of whom have no prior acquaintance with museums. Only the director, appointed by the FPCJ, and the librarian are Jewish. A small contingent of caretaker/guards lives on the museum grounds and is responsible for maintenance. There is also a secretary, whose brothers arrive on-call as part-time carpenters, electricians, or plumbers. Everyone regularly sits down together for the mid-day meal.

The director, Simon Levy, is in his mid-sixties and is descended from a prominent rabbinical family from Fes. He is a professor of Spanish and linguistics at the Faculté des Lettres in Rabat and the author of many books and articles on linguistics and on the history of Jews in Morocco. He had no professional museum experience when appointed to lead the museum, but was deeply committed to preserving Jewish culture and its specifically Moroccan tradition. In the early days of Moroccan independence he had been an upstart political activist, and for nearly fifty years served on the Central Committee of the Socialist Party. Now he was being squeezed out and rejected by a younger, Muslim cohort that looked upon his religion as one among other disqualifications.

Simon (for we were quickly on a first-name basis) found an able assistant in Zhor Rehihil, a young Muslim woman with degrees in anthropology and in ethnographic film production. Zhor was uniquely qualified, having devoted her dissertation to the unlikely subject of Jewish sainthood in Morocco. This research landed her a position with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Rabat, which, in turn loaned her to the FPCJ. As curator at the Jewish Museum, she assumed responsibility not only for the collection but for all events and public relations, as well as for helping the museum meet international standards of quality and become recognized within and beyond the museum community.

Zhor's sole professional associate was the part-time curator of the book collection, Albert Bitran, a francophone Moroccan Jew who had worked as a student in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. It was Albert whom my Peace Corps friend had been assisting, but I was assigned to work under Zhor's direction. I soon became attached to her both as a colleague and as a friend.

I had barely begun assembling information on the upcoming photographic exhibition when everything was stopped in its tracks by the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. I was in Rabat to see off a visiting friend when the news reached us. Needless to say, her flight home to the U.S. was cancelled. We remained in the capital for several days, waiting around in hotel lobbies or standing in front of television sets in furniture store windows to catch what comprehensible news coverage we could from the BBC. In the days of shocked uncertainty that followed, the exhibition was postponed indefinitely while we took stock of our situation.

The impact of 9/11, even in Morocco, was stunning. All U.S. government operations, including the Peace Corps, were placed on high security alert, and most of my fellow volunteers prepared for emergency evacuation. I responded to concerned messages from home, reassuring friends that I was perfectly safe--if anything, safer than they were. Meanwhile, the outpouring of sympathy from ordinary Moroccans was phenomenal: friends and even acquaintances I hardly knew called to comfort me and inquire as to the safety of my family. In those days immediately after the attack there was no doubt of Moroccan support for America and consternation over the acts of terrorism, regardless of who was responsible for them. Few people thought Osama bin Laden capable of such a coup; some blamed the CIA; others believed in a Zionist conspiracy.

In the weeks that followed, while American attention and then retaliation focused on Afghanistan, the Palestinian uprising in the Middle East became the primary preoccupation of Moroccan Arabs. Our daily television fare was stone-throwing boys pitted against lines of Israeli tanks, and anger against the U.S.-Israeli alliance soon eclipsed the earlier feelings of friendly sympathy. I was never subjected to personal attacks as a Jew or an American, but some Peace Corps volunteers did experience verbal assault and rejection in their host communities. Some who were Jewish met with suspicion when they sought to join Jewish congregations for High Holiday services that September. As fear of terrorism became more pervasive, everyone felt compelled to re-assess who their friends were and where their own loyalties lay. Divisions hardened, and the American "War on Terrorism" began, from the Moroccan perspective, to look like a war against Arabs and Muslims.

In the ensuing months, Simon Levy played a dual role as museum director and public figure. He was constantly beleaguered by journalists and asked to participate in public discussions of current events. Defensive of his Judeo-Moroccan heritage, yet truly sympathetic to Arab interests, he had not supported the post-1948 exodus of Moroccan Jews to Israel and the West, and now he grieved over the continuing Middle East conflict and its repercussions throughout the world. As the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and the Palestinian conflict blended together in the minds of Moroccans, the Jewish Museum became a symbolic center of personal and political conflict--a role not without its real impact and dangers. None of us could be unaffected; I felt keenly the ambiguities of my identity in this historic place and time, and spent long moments of introspection. There was a lot of history to think about.

Jewish Roots in Morocco
No one seems to know exactly how the first Jews came to Morocco, but they have been a presence in Northern Africa longer than the Arabs. Possibly some came westward out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, and there is evidence of trade during King Solomon's reign in the ninth century B.C. Many Jews came with later waves of refugees from European expulsions and persecutions. They survived throughout the centuries in comparative harmony with their neighbors, interlaced with Berbers and Arabs, their fortunes sometimes prospering and sometimes waning under the variable protection of dynastic Islamic rulers.

The customs and traditions of Jews and Muslims were different, but not incompatible: both religions are monotheistic, their followers "people of the Book" descended from the same patriarch, Abraham, whose near sacrifice of his son still represents a pivotal tale of faith-testing for both religions. Jewish communities faced heavy taxation as the price of retaining a separate identity and the right to maintain their religious integrity and educational institutions, but Jews dominated certain artisanal and economic occupations and were entrusted with important commercial and diplomatic functions.

Repeatedly in times of trouble--as in their expulsion from Spain in 1492--Jews found a haven in Morocco. Older European Jews today still express gratitude and reverence toward Mohamed V, grandfather of the present King, Mohamed VI, for having refused to hand over Moroccan Jews to the Vichy French government during World War II, which would have destined them for concentration camps. These are "my subjects," Mohamed V declared, thereby acknowledging Jews as Moroccan citizens with full political equality. Moroccan Jews often point out that, historically, they have fared better at the hands of their Muslim neighbors than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

However, in the 20th century the condition of Moroccan Jews changed drastically. The French occupation, lasting from 1912 to 1956, when Morocco won its independence, accelerated an effort already underway to bring Morocco into the sphere of European influence in order to exploit its excellent strategic and commercial position. Jews played an important catalytic role in this European effort precisely because of their history of transition and marginality. They were the middlemen, the agents of import and export, the linguists, diplomats, and financiers; because of their constant travel and communication, they were well connected with negotiating partners throughout the secular modern world. Morocco maintained its own government structure under the French Protectorate, but Jews were encouraged to affiliate with Europe. Jewish children attended schools where they learned Hebrew and French but not Arabic or the local Berber languages. As they grew wealthier, they turned away from the crafts and trades that had bonded them to traditional communities and pursued more urban and international enterprises. Leaving behind a scattering of sacred sites and small synagogues throughout the countryside, they established autonomous central communities in a few cities--Fes, Marrakesh, Rabat--where those few Jews who have remained in Morocco now live.

The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967 profoundly affected the Moroccan Jewish population. Many left to plant new roots and prospered; others returned to Morocco disappointed. But the traditional links were broken, and even within Morocco Jews were increasingly isolated as hostility between Arabs and Jews intensified. The Jewish population declined from its high point of 300,000 people (out of a total of seven million) in 1950 to less than 5,000 (out of thirty-five million) today. Most of these Jews are old and live in Casablanca. Many are survivors cared for by the Jewish community.

Since the end of World War II, Arabs and Jews have lived such segregated lives that they rarely encounter one another. Although no longer confined to ghettos, Jews tend to live in their own, often affluent neighborhoods, and send their children abroad to complete their education. Many can neither read nor speak Arabic. Correspondingly, Arab children have no experience of Jewish culture. Those who came of age at the end of the 1980's are shaped by the Middle East conflict, and especially by the massacres of Sabra and Chatila. To them, Jews are an abstraction. The state of Israel and all of its cognates (including, in their view, the U.S.) means one and only one thing, and that is enmity. Moreover, the distinctions between religious and secular Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, moderates and extremists are meaningless to them.

In that context, the need seemed pressing to create an institution that would rectify Morocco's history and stand as testimony to its tradition of pluralism and tolerance. In 1996, with the support of the Moroccan Ministry of Culture, the FPCJ declared its intention to found a Jewish Museum that would preserve the remnants of Jewish culture in Morocco and teach Arabs and Jews about their historic co-existence. Related to that project was a plan to find and restore the multitude of Jewish sacred sites, synagogues, cemeteries, and shrines that had long been neglected and abused throughout the country.

Immediately upon their appointments as director and curator of the new museum, Simon Levy and Zhor Rehihil crisscrossed Morocco together, energetically seeking out the sacred sites, taking photographs and oral histories, and collecting books, manuscripts, costumes, ritual and secular objects, and whatever traces of Moroccan Jewish history they could assemble. With these artifacts and stories, the Jewish Museum of Casablanca saw the light of day in 1997. It opened with the declared mission to collect and preserve the artifacts of a proud Moroccan heritage that is swiftly disappearing, and to teach its traditions and values to contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

Politics at Home
But now, only four years later in the troubled winter of 2001, no one at the Jewish Museum was in a mood for public declarations. The museum stood in suspended animation while we burrowed into the refuge of busywork. Not all of our problems were global. Political conflicts within the Moroccan Jewish community interfered with financial support of the museum, compounding our despair over the situation outside. Insufficient resources, threats to security--there was hate mail--and a palpable depression among members of the staff combined to curtail all public projects. We forged on with daily tasks, identifying and cataloging objects, repairing exhibits, writing labels, and occasionally escorting visitors; but the atmosphere was tense.

There was also a generational struggle and a clash of professional values. While Simon fought to preserve and valorize an embattled tradition, Zhor had high professional ambitions for the museum and its standards. She was trained to treat objects with rigorous care, to maintain accurate records of provenance as well as physical preservation, and to build collections, encourage scholarship, and develop exhibits and public programs. These ambitions were frustrated at every point. She and I were reduced to cutting labels to half-size in order to economize on materials, handwriting copies of documentation forms, and training a staff unaccustomed to the very idea of museums to handle worn, apparently useless, and fragile items with tender care. I spent days in the climate-controlled salle des reserves sorting and marking pottery, pictures of venerated rabbis, artisans’ tools, ritual instruments, household and synagogue furniture, and clothing.

Yet, in these anxious times, my personal friendships were deepening as I came to know and respect my colleagues. Zhor took me to galleries and symposia where I met intellectuals whose interests mirrored my own. I discovered a cultural life in Casablanca of whose existence I had been ignorant. She also brought me home to her more traditional family. I met her parents, who were preparing to make the obligatory haj to Mecca, her engineer husband and three-year old daughter. Often I spent the night in their home.

As the U.S. was bombing Afghanistan, Ramadan came and went, accentuating the differences among us. On one occasion, Simon and I, exempt as Jews from the Islamic rule of fasting during daylight hours, holed up in his office and feasted on pâté de campagne--a macabre profanation of our own dietary tradition that marked a spiritual low point for us. For the first time, Simon expressed fear, not for his own survival but for that of Jewish civilization everywhere in the world. The sympathy that Moroccans had initially extended toward America after September 11 had turned to anger against a perceived U.S./Jewish alliance that threatened all Arabs. Caught in the middle, what was a Jewish museum in an Arab country to do?

Realizing that we had to pull ourselves together, we planned a weekly afternoon lecture series for January 2002. Since guest speakers would have been both expensive and unpredictable, we decided upon a program of four lectures by Simon on the history of the Jews in Morocco. Press releases were distributed and academics invited, in addition to the Jewish community that was normally notified of our events. To our surprise, they came. The audiences were not large--twenty to thirty for each lecture--but they were interested. They listened avidly, joined vigorously in discussion, and asked good questions; best of all, they were a mix of Muslims and Jews, mostly Arab. And they came back repeatedly as the lecture series progressed. A few newspapers published stories, and we all felt heartened for having made this small effort at reconciliation.

Not long afterwards we benefited from another lucky chance. The city of Casablanca was planning a cultural festival that included shows and events at a number of museums, and the organizers invited the Jewish Museum to participate. It happened that one of the guest artists at the festival was a French video and filmmaker, Robert Cahan, who was strongly identified with Jewish causes. He agreed to give an illustrated lecture-demonstration on his avant-garde video techniques at the museum, and we organized an evening performance. This one attracted a younger, more media-oriented audience composed chiefly of artists and students who would have been less inspired to visit by ethnographic or historical artifacts alone. It was satisfying to associate the Jewish Museum with other institutions of contemporary art and with living cultural explorations that weren't limited to ethnic and political crises. Cahan himself was gratified by the occasion; he spoke warmly to the small but enthusiastic audience and went away with a favorable impression of the museum, promising to help arouse international interest in it. In spite of our limited resources and depleted energy, we were beginning to look like a "real" museum and to take ourselves seriously as such.

Recognition also began to arrive from other sources outside the Jewish community. More people wanted to interview Simon and Zhor, and even I was drafted to handle some of the overflow. Researchers, journalists, filmmakers, foreign professors with groups of students in tow, and individual students with study-abroad projects appeared with requests for information. All were given careful attention, and they often left with further referrals and reading matter after a guided tour of the city as well as the museum premises. I accompanied some of these tours, visiting synagogues, hospitals, sport and recreation centers, a home for the elderly and abandoned, the Jewish cemetery, and the impressive nexus of all these institutions, the Center of the Jewish Community of Casablanca.

Some of these new visitors represented other Jewish museums in Europe and America, with whom our museum had been connected mostly through catalogues and other published correspondence. In the Fall of 2000, the Jewish Museum in New York had mounted an exhibition on the "Jews of Morocco," and its curator, Vivian Mann, had made a trip to Casablanca to meet with members of the Moroccan Jewish community and consult with Simon and Zhor. Their exhibition was well-received by New York audiences, and one consequence of its success was an invitation that Zhor now received to participate in a month-long seminar for "foreign curators of Jewish museums" to be held in New York in the spring of 2002.

She was thrilled to be invited, and I urged her to attend the seminar. But this was no simple matter. For Zhor, it concentrated all the complexities of her own situation as through a burning glass. One issue was cost: housing and tuition were to be provided by the Americans, but funds for transportation would have to come from Zhor's Moroccan sponsors, and the FPCJ was not wholly supportive. Not everyone saw, or valued, the educational and professional benefits of the journey; to some, it seemed frivolous or downright offensive.

More importantly, Zhor herself was torn by feelings of personal and political disloyalty: Would a visit to the U.S. at this time betray her own Moroccan and Berber heritage? Would it concede legitimacy to American/Israeli ambition? Then too, there was fear; for would she not be in the belly of the beast, a Muslim woman at Ground Zero? She decided to attend; but, having surmounted the practical obstacles and swallowed her own misgivings, she arrived in New York to be greeted by a huge, unnerving, Israeli flag at the entrance of the Jewish Theological Seminary dormitory where she was to be housed during the program. Moreover, she turned out to be the only "foreign curator" attending the seminar.

In the end, however, despite its inauspicious beginning, Zhor's experience in America, like my own in her country, turned out to be a happy displacement. She was given a custom-tailored seminar program and warmly received by Jews in New York, who introduced her to many of the city's cultural splendors. Her courses and meetings with museum people, not to mention the heady New York atmosphere itself, left her with a more positive impression of America than she had anticipated. Like me, she found that direct personal acquaintance transcends ideological fixation: call it micro-level intervention. Zhor returned to Morocco as a kind of emissary, hopeful of inspiring others to make the same discovery.

Upon her return, we set to work with renewed energy and commitment. Now the postponed exhibition of photographs by David Cowles was actually going to happen. It was scheduled for the summer of 2002, just a few weeks away! The prospect set off a vigorous campaign of spiffing up the entire museum, involving a great deal of labor for all of us. Abandoned exhibits were completed, new labels composed, storage areas cleared, and the grounds manicured. The outcome was stunning. Then, when the artist arrived with crates of photographs, there was more to do: framing, hanging and labeling the exhibition. Titled Pierres de Memoire (Stones of Memory), the collection of large-format, black and white or sepia-toned photographs was magnificent, evocative aesthetically as well narratively. It filled the museum and well merited the festive opening celebration that attracted a large crowd of visitors. The Jewish community came out in force, along with a solid representation of Casablanca's cultural intelligentsia and many newcomers who had never visited the museum before. They stayed and mingled, talked to each other, contemplated the pictures, and enjoyed themselves. It was a joyful moment of hope, as meaningful to me, I realized, as for my friends at the museum.

Questions and Answers
Not long after this triumphal show, my Peace Corps service ended. My second daughter joined me to help pack my belongings and travel to some of the far-flung points in Morocco that I had yearned to see. To my delight we were able to join Raphael El Maleh, the man in charge of restoring the sacred Jewish sites, and travel with him to visit some of the spots that I had come to know through Zhor's photographs and those by David Cowles. This final adventure was a high point of my two years in Morocco, made all the more meaningful by the connection with centuries of history that I could now experience directly and with enriched personal understanding.

The Jewish Museum closed for the summer soon afterwards, but we paid a final visit to leave behind a bit of Peace Corps in-kind largesse and to say our sad goodbyes to my friends. Simon asked me what I would remember most from my time in Morocco. I answered without hesitating: working in the museum. I think he didn’t believe me, but it was true.

Coming back to a traumatized America, I puzzled over the first anniversary of September 11, then watched with horror as the war clouds gathered over Iraq. In Morocco, as elsewhere, extremism was growing and mutual mistrust displacing tolerance. My Moroccan friends and I commiserated electronically. I learned that the Jewish Museum remained open but received few visitors and announced no exhibitions or public events. Overseas Jews did not return to celebrate the holidays with their Moroccan families or to remind their children of their heritage. Religious observances were carried out in familial seclusion reminiscent of the ghetto. Jews avoided calling attention to themselves. I could not avoid contemplating the possibility that centuries of Moroccan diversity had run their course, ceding the field to monotone extremists on the one hand and to a sanitized secular globalism on the other.

During and since my sojourn in Morocco, and especially as a result of my experience at the Jewish Museum, I have posed many questions to myself. Some are personal, but many have a political cast. I had anticipated uneasiness about being an American, knowing that, like it or not, I was going as a representative of the U.S. and would be perceived as such. That, however, turned out not to be a terrible handicap. Being a Jew, on the other hand, was more problematic, especially since, in America, my religion had not been a preoccupation for me. I was thoroughly secularized and thought of all religions, including my own, as largely of sociological interest.

But that conviction, or rather lack of conviction, was put to the test in Morocco, where religion is inescapable. In a country where Islam permeates every conceivable facet of public and private life, I discovered how Jewish I am. I found that not only the rational and ethical principles I hold dear, but even some of my irrational affinities, are grounded in cultural sources I had not acknowledged. I learned that I had been drawn to the Jewish Museum because it mattered to me. And so, now, does its preservation.