Amsterdam – Unique photographs of Jewish life in southern Morocco in the 1950s are on display at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Today, only dilapidated synagogues and empty cemeteries are the reminders of what was once a vibrant community. The photographer Elias Harrus (1919-2008) took pictures portraying Jewish life in southern Morocco in the 1950s, before most of the country’s Jews migrated en masse to Israel. The Dutch photographer Pauline Prior travelled to the same locations last year to photograph what remains of this heritage. Her photos provide a dramatic contrast.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
“My grandmother told me that Jewish and Berber women used to work the land together,”
says the secretary of Amsterdam’s district council of Zeeburg, Fatima Elatik, at the opening of the exhibition.
“They spoke the same language, had the same culture and sang the same songs. I always found it a very special story.”
The Jews lived around 2,000 years in Morocco, usually in harmony with their Berber neighbours. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948 most of the 270,000 Moroccan Jews have emigrated to the Jewish state. Only a small community remains. Today most Jews live in the large cities in the north of the country. The first wave of migration was underway when Elias Harrus took his photographs.
Harrus worked for much of his life for schools founded by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Jewish educational organisation dedicated to the emancipation of Jews in Muslim countries by advocating a modern, secular education. As an insider his photographs document the daily life of the Jews of southern Morocco in intimate detail.
The organiser of the exhibition, Sulimat Cohen, says Eliat Harrus’ photographs form a unique testimony.
“They recorded the life of a community just before it disappeared.”
Silver ornaments
The photographs testify to the good relations between the Jews and the Berbers. They had daily contact and depended on one another financially. You see Jews working in the trades in which they specialised, such as tanning leather and jewellery making. They fashioned the famous silver ornaments which Berber women in southern Morocco would wear on their wedding day.
Merchants
There are also portraits of Sunday markets where Jews and Muslims would work side by side. Sulimat Cohen:
“The Jews often worked as merchants who would travel through the mountains from market to market.This would have been very dangerous for the Berbers, since the different clans were often at odds. However the Jews enjoyed protection from everyone due to their important economic function.”
Cohen points to comments made by a Berber merchant in southern Morocco which were cited by English writer John Waterbury:
“Before the arrival of the French we were always fighting one another. However there were two rules which everyone abided by. We did not tolerate prostitution among our women. And whatever we did to one another, we would never touch a hair on a Jew’s head.”
Abandoned cemetery
What is left of the Jewish presence in southern Morocco? In 2008 the Jewish Historical Museum sent the Dutch photographer Pauline Prior to the Atlas mountain range and the Sahara to look for traces. Her photographs are on display alongside those of Harrus. Harrus’ portraits are full of people, while those of Prior are silent and empty. You see dilapidated synagogues, a desolate Jewish neighbourhood and an unused cemetery.
However the cemeteries – especially the graves of holy rabbis – are the most lively places photographed by Prior. Moroccan Jews revere holy men who worked wonders during their lives the same as Moroccan Muslims do. The graves of holy men are scattered across Moroccow, many of them Jewish. Moroccan Jews who live in Israel frequently visit some of them.
Amsterdam district council secretary Fatima Elatik says most young people of Moroccan origin in the Netherlands have little knowledge of the close contact which Jews and Muslims once had in Morocco. She hopes that many children of Moroccan origin will visit the exhibition.
If not for the zionists, there would still be a buetiful jewish community in Moroccow. All those that were transported to Israel were forcefully removed from their frum past.
The Moslem residents of Morroco were so upset about the Israelis taking the “Palestinian” land in 1967, that they went back in history and killed 6,000 Jews in Fez in 1033. Yes, you read it correctly, they slaughtered 6,000 Jews in Morroco before they ever had the Palestine excuse, 976 years ago.
wow 1100 years ago jews in fez were massacred. i am sure you come from europe where pogroms took place on a regular basis. but thats ok now because those same european christians (especially the brits and french} gave us a piece of land that didnt belong to them in exchange for the rothschilds funding ww1. the jews left morocco because israel has a reputation of trying to recruit arab-jewish spies and using them to execute domestic terrorist operations to rile up aliyah. {operation susanna for example and the attacks on iraqi shuls in the 50’s}. zionism made us best friends with the true people who have been killing us for centuries, the christians and made enemies out of our real friends, the muslims. most of the arab jews didnt leave for israel until many years after its creation.