HEBREW SPACES IN MOROCCO DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

This article contributes to scholarship on Jewish spaces, most of which has explored Jewish communities in Europe. Beyond a preliminary discussion of the Mellah, the Jewish quarter of Morocco, research on Morocco’s Jewry has produced no studies about its other Jewish spaces from the spatial turn perspective. Here, I discuss the spaces in which modern Hebrew culture developed during the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that Hebrew activities in Morocco took place in three kinds of spaces: physical spaces, both traditional and new; textual spaces, in the local Jewish press, which serves as a platform, a display window, or a meeting place; and imagined diasporic Hebrew spaces, with Palestine at their heart. I aim to highlight the pendulum movement between the physical spaces, which one could inhabit in person, and the imagined spaces, to which Hebrew devotees viewed themselves as belonging or aspired to belong. Hebrew spaces in Morocco were related to Hebrew spaces in Europe, Palestine, and the Americas through varying means of contact, immigration, inspiration, or imagination.