Jewish Spain by Linhard Tabea Alexa

Author:Linhard, Tabea Alexa [Linhard, Tabea Alexa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Four

History’s Patio

Spanish Colonialism in Morocco and the Jewish Community

Toward the end of Ángel Vázquez’s 1976 novel, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni, the protagonist reflects on Tangier, the city where she was born and which she would never leave. For Juanita Narboni, Tangier is “a city where we are not completely Christian, not completely Jewish, and not completely Moorish. We are what the wind wants us to be. A mélange” (378). Juanita continues pondering on the culturally diverse city, which, with the exception of Spanish occupation from 1941 to 1945, maintained an international status until Moroccan independence in 1956: “We had Jewish friends, who asked Saint Anthony for a boyfriend when they were single, and Muslim friends who talked about Miriam—the Virgin Mary—and the Archangel Saint Gabriel, and Christians . . . who invoked Aixa Kandisha because they wanted to kill their husbands” (378).1 The character’s reference to the wind (“we are what the wind wants us to be”) evokes a whimsical relationship with cultural and religious identity, but throughout the novel the Tangier wind constantly aggravates Juanita, suggesting that interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Tangier are not merely the result of chance. The second part of the quotation intimates that among the women in Tangier a gender-based affinity mitigates religious and cultural difference. But both Vázquez’s novel and Farida Benlyazid’s 2005 film version show that, in spite of Juanita’s fond memories of Tangier’s golden era of cultural and religious pluralism, these differences remained in place for the duration of the colonial rule, administered by Spain, France, and Britain between 1923 and 1956.2

The characters in the novel and in Benlyazid’s film are trapped in the interstices of the colonial relationship that Morocco and Spain shared in the past and that in the present remains unresolved. The Jewish community in the Protectorate, the northern Moroccan zone that Spain would control between 1912 and 1958, forms part of this relationship.3 In literary representations of the Protectorate, a tension between philo-Sephardism, which defined Spanish colonial attitudes toward Moroccan Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and anti-Semitism, which would rise during World War II, becomes evident. This tension and its impact on both contemporary meanings of “Jewish Spain” and the debate on the “recovery of historical memory” will be explored in the pages that follow.

The first part of this chapter centers on the depiction of the Protectorate in an issue of the magazine Vértice (a publication of the Falange Española de las J.O.N.S.) from August 1938, during the Spanish Civil War.4 Although the bulk of the magazine portrays an idealized Spanish-Muslim brotherhood in Morocco, rationalizing Spanish colonial rule and the participation of Moroccan soldiers in the Civil War on the Iberian Peninsula, one story, Luis Antonio de Vega’s “Itinerario lírico de Sultana Cohén,” focuses on the Jewish community, specifically on a Jewish woman, in the Moroccan city of Tétouan. The appearance of Vega’s piece in one of the Falange’s publications certainly determines the ideological inclination of the text. Despite the

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