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18 • “Les Temps Héroïques” The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Marrakesh on the Eve of the French Protectorate Jonathan G. Katz In 1998, at the age of 91 Alfred Goldenberg published a memoir recounting the decades he spent in Marrakesh as an Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) teacher and school director. The AIU had operated in the city for almost thirty years by the time of Goldenberg’s arrival in 1927. In part owing to his efforts, the AIU’s presence over the next three decades expanded from a pair of boys’ and girls’ primary schools in the mellah, the traditional Jewish quarter, to include a school for boys and girls in the ville nouvelle and an agricultural training center.1 Despite these accomplishments, there is a clear sense of nostalgia and regret when Goldenberg writes of Marrakesh before his arrival. For Goldenberg and other relative “latecomers,” the pioneering aspect of the AIU’s mission—what its teachers referred to as l’Oeuvre—had long passed. During much of Goldenberg’s tenure , the AIU was a relatively uncontroversial fixture of Jewish life in Marrakesh and an institution deeply rooted in the French protectorate. Goldenberg’s experience is not irrelevant to my purposes here. To borrow a phrase from José Bénech’s Essai d’explication d’un mellah, AIU activities in Morocco before the establishment of the protectorate in 1912 constituted les temps héroïques.2 Drawing on reports sent to the AIU’s Central Committee in Paris, this chapter offers a microhistory of the AIU’s operations in Marrakesh during the volatile first decade of the twentieth century. The chapter illustrates how, in a period characterized by po­ liti­ cal turmoil, economic dislocation, and famine, the AIU’s emissaries attempted to negotiate a path between the factions of the local Jewish community and at the same time meet the demands and constraints placed upon them by the AIU’s Central Committee and local Moroccan au­ thorities. Even in Goldenberg’s narrative one sees glimpses of continuity from that earlier time. At the start of his career, Goldenberg had an opportunity to reenact the heroic days of the AIU when he was called upon to establish a new school in 282 The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Marrakesh 283 Demnat, some eighty kilometers from Marrakesh. In many ways, the year Goldenberg and his wife spent among the Berber Jews of the Atlas Mountains resembled the pioneering experience of the olden days, but one particularly telling episode illustrates the entirely different sense of esprit that characterized this later venture. As a bemused Goldenberg remembered it, a local Jew approached him bearing gifts in an effort to induce the school director to intervene on his behalf with the authorities. The man’s son had been arrested for fishing before the season had officially opened. Could Goldenberg ask the French hakim or official to release his son in time to attend the Passover Seder? Goldenberg declined, saying it was beyond his authority, and the man reclaimed his gifts.3 How unlike the response we might have anticipated from a pugnacious AIU teacher during the so-­ called heroic times. As the examples in this chapter demonstrate , AIU teachers during the pre-­ protectorate phase of its mission did not hesitate to challenge existing po­ liti­ cal and institutional authorities, whether they were qa’ids of the makhzan, French consular officials, or members of the local Jew­ ish council. This was not the case thirty years later when Goldenberg was given the opportunity to test his mettle. Goldenberg saw it as beyond his job description to argue the case of an individual Jew’s plight before French officialdom. Indeed, with the creation of the protectorate and the AIU’s gradual institutionalization within it, the role of the AIU director was transformed. Directors in the field were no longer by definition intermediary figures between local Jews and external authorities. Joan Gardner Roland describes the transition to the protectorate as follows: “As the French now protected all Moroccan subjects , the Jews, as a community and as individuals, had less need for the AIU representatives to defend their rights.”4 Roland attributes these changes on the ground to a change in policy at the top. With the establishment of the protectorate , the AIU pursued—albeit without success—a campaign to award Morocco’s Jews French citizenship, as had occurred with Algerian Jews in 1870 with the Crémieux ­ Decree.5 While Moroccan nationalist historians might portray...

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