The American publishing house Rowman & Littlefield has just announced the release of a new book dealing with political and social interactions between Jews and Muslims in Morocco, entitled “Jews and Muslims in Morocco Their Intersecting Worlds”.
In a new attempt to answer the question “how to explain the tolerance between Jews and Muslims in Morocco? », A new book enriches Judeo-Muslim literature.
Edited under the direction of the Moroccan linguist, Joseph Chetrit, born in Taroudant in 1941, specializing in the study of the Jewish heritage in North Africa, this collective work attempts to understand the creative interaction of the Moroccan Jewish community with Arab and Berber cultures.
An interaction at work, it should be remembered, since the 7th century and long before which had been consolidated by the end of the 15the century when the descendants of Jews and Muslims were together expelled from Spain (1492).
The proof is, according to the authors of this work, are the multiple traditions of Jewish origin in Morocco which underline the distinctive character of the Moroccan Jewish community as indigenous of the region, rooted in its first colonies and possessing links and deep associations with the historic peoples of the region.
But also the use by the Jews of the multiple languages and dialects of Morocco, poetry and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and their popular texts and proverbs.
In “Jews and Muslims in Morocco: their intersecting worlds (or their intersecting worlds)”, historians, anthropologists, musicologists, rabbinical scholars, Arabists, Muslim scholars and linguists have lent their pens to analyze this culture, in all its complexity and its hybridity.
The book covers political and social interactions across history, cultural commonalities, traditions and Halachic developments.
As Jewish life in Morocco has dwindled, much of what remains are the traditions maintained in Moroccan expat communities and the memories of those who stayed and those who left, can be read on the website of the editor.
The volume concludes with shared memories from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual from Morocco, a Moroccan Muslim scholar, an analysis of a visual memory painted by the 19th century artist, Eugène Delacroix, and a photographic essay of the world. disappeared from Jewish life in Morocco, specifies the same source.
Note that Jane S. Gerber, professor of Jewish history, as well as the director of the American Sephardi Federation Institute of Jewish Experience, Drora Arussy, assisted Joseph Chetrit in the direction of the book.
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