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got along before their good relations were ruined by Western powers. Starting in the 1980s, a
generation of historians began to draw extensively from the Moroccan state archives to write the
history of Jews in Morocco. 40 These scholars focus largely on the role of the state, in part
because of the nature of the archives (which consist mainly of official correspondence). They
adopt a narrative in which Western interference—which they see as beginning in the nineteenth
century and culminating in colonization—was largely to blame for dealing the death blow to the
harmonious coexistence of Jews and Muslims. 41 Such an interpretation fits well with a
nationalist narrative that pinpoints Western imperialism as the source of Morocco’s troubles.
This Moroccan historiography is distinct from that of Arab authors writing in the Mashriq who
largely blame Zionism for disrupting the good relations among Jews and Muslims. Nor do
Moroccan historians incorporate anti-Semitic stereotypes into their scholarship. 42 While there is
no question that Moroccan scholars of Jewish history have made significant contributions to the
field, this historiography nonetheless perpetuates the view that tolerance more or less reigned
supreme among Jews and Muslims in early modern Morocco until it was ruined by an outside
force. 43
40
See especially Germain Ayache, “La recherche au Maroc sur l’histoire du judaisme marocain,” in Identité et
dialogue : Juifs du Maroc (Paris: La pensée sauvage, 1980), 34-5, where Ayache both calls for more researchers to
use Moroccan archives in studying the history of Jews in Morocco and asserts that doing so will present a counternarrative
to the neo-lachrymose histories of Moroccan Jews.
41
See esp. Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans; idem, “Muslim-Jewish Relations in XIXth Century Morocco: A Historical
Approach,” in Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinarity, and the University, ed. Mohamed Dahbi, Mohamed Ezroura, and
Lahcen Haddad (Rabat: Publications of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, 1996); ‘Umar Afa, Tārīkh al-
Maghrib al-Mu‘āṣir : Dirāsāt fī al-maṣādir wa-’l-mujtama‘ wa-’l-iqtiṣād (Casablanca: Maṭba‘at al-najāḥ al-jadīda,
2002), 189-92; ‘Abdallāh Laghmā’īd, “Jamā‘āt yahūd Sūs : al-Majāl wa-’l-tamaththulāt al-ijtimā‘īya wa-’l-siyāsīya,
1860-1960” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Mohammed V, 2002), e.g. 4-6, 128; Ben-Srhir, Britain and Morocco,
158-66; Aḥmad Shaḥlān, Al-Yahūd al-Maghāriba : min manbit al-uṣūl ilā riyāḥ al-furqa : qirāʼah fī al-mawrūth
wa-’l-aḥdāth (Rabat: Dār Abī Raqrāq lil-Ṭibāʻah wa-’l-Nashr, 2009), 82-9. For a similar argument concerning
Egyptian Jews, see, Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a
Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
42
On this, see Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 6-8.
43
See also Abdelhamid Larguèche, Les ombres de la ville : pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis, XVIIIème et
XIXème siècles (Manouba: Centre de publication universitaire, Faculté des lettres de Manouba, 1999), 347-92.
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