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Agadir is a southern Moroccan Atlantic resort city with a predominantly Berber population. The Jewish community has dwindled to less than two hundred and its synagogue during most the months of the years rarely has more than a handful of congregants. But during the summer, Moroccan Jews from many countries vacation in Agadir and elsewhere in the country. In August 1997, during the Shabbat morning prayers, the synagogue was filled with visitors, many of whom were en route to pilgrimage sites. During the service, the rabbi asked in which language he should deliver his sermon: French, Hebrew, or Arabic? In response, the congregation cried out practically in unison: “bi-l-‘arabiyya,” [in Arabic]. Almost everyone there would have been comfortable in French or Hebrew. Many had left Morocco at a young age and regarded their new countries as home. And regardless of where they lived, Israel represented to them the Jewish homeland. But Moroccan Jews, including those living in Israel, are living in a kind of exile. Morocco is also home, but for them, a country without borders, a diaspora. These observations show how difficult it is to define the identity of Jews from Morocco. What is home? What is Diaspora? The conventional response is that Jews living in Morocco were in exile, and the “return” to Israel constituted a homecoming. Yet despite decades of living in Israel, connections to the language and culture of their original home remain strong. This continued attachment to another homeland does not imply dual loyalties to separate nation states. The affiliation of Jews to Morocco is not the patriotism implied by citizenship to a nation state, but rather it constitutes identifying with a Diaspora culture that transcends national boundaries. These remarks about Jews from one Arabic- and Berber-speaking country complicate the more conventional understanding of Jewish identity in the modern world. Interpretations of Jewish history often stress emancipation 150 6 A Different Road to Modernity Jewish Identity in the Arab World Daniel J. Schroeter and citizenship in the modern nation state as the catalyst for transforming Jewish identities. With the emancipation of the Jews in western Europe and the challenges of citizenship, new ideologies and identities in the Jewish world emerged. Michael Meyer argues that the experience of enlightenment , antisemitism, and Zionism were three forces that “shaped Jewish identity more than any others.”1 Although these generalizations might be applied to Jews in Europe and the United States, they tells us little about the Jews of Asia and Africa, who experienced a different set of forces affecting the modern world: colonialism and Islam. It is the clash of different forces shaping modern Jewish identities in the Diaspora that has caused ongoing ethnic tensions in Israel and elsewhere in the Jewish world. The identities of the Jews of what later became known as the Arab world escape easy definition. Although immersed in the Arabic language and culture , most Middle Eastern Jews did not define themselves as “Arabs.” Besides , the concept of the Arab in a secular and national sense is a construct of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 For Jews in Muslim countries , their formal place in society was well defined before the modern era. They were a kind of corporate entity, a religious group that was granted a large measure of self-governing authority and the protection of the state in exchange for an annual capitation tax and the acceptance of a range of legal disabilities defined by Islamic law to underline their inferiority to Muslims . This was known as dhimma [protection], and Jews and other legitimate religious groups were called dhimmis [protected people].3 All members of society belonged to a religious group and were governed by their own laws. Their formal status was also not territorially based: Jews and Muslims, for example , could cross political boundaries, but would still be ruled by the same law.4 The universal status granted to the Jews by the Islamic state also served to reinforce bonds between different Jewish communities, frequently over great distances. This system based on the free practice of religion and on the relative freedom of movement is probably one reason why the Talmud and the halakhah were so widely disseminated and accepted in the Middle Ages. The Arab empire was created in the seventh century, a century after the Babylonian Talmud was completed. The Babylonian academies relocated in the eighth century to the newly created city of Baghdad, the flourishing capital of...

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