Open Research Europe
Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165 Last updated: 29 SEP 2023
ESSAY
“You left a void that we will never be able to fill”: The legacy
of Edmond Amran El Maleh in a contemporary Moroccan
novella [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]
Fernanda Fischione
SARAS, University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Lazio, 00185, Italy
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First published: 29 Sep 2023, 3:165
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Abstract
The sudden depart of a large portion of the Moroccan Jewish
population between 1948 and 1967 left a void in Moroccan society, to
the extent that some scholars account for the existence of a “double
trauma” – a trauma for both those who left for Israel and the
Moroccan society at large. This profound social wound has never
healed. The Moroccan Jewish intellectual Edmond Amran El Maleh
(1917-2010) is the hero of the novella Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ
(The riddle of Edmond Amran El Maleh, 2020) by Mohammed Said
Hjiouij, which this article analyses. In this novella, Hjiouij stages the
double trauma of Jewish and Muslim Moroccans by giving voice to the
liminal character of El Maleh, a harsh critic of Zionism and French
colonial ideology. A metaphor for the marginal writer and a symbol of
collective trauma, the figure of El Maleh is re-employed and loaded
with new functions and meanings in a contemporary work of fiction
with a post-modern aesthetics.
article can be found at the end of the article.
Keywords
Moroccan Jews, Maghrebi novel, Edmond Amran El Maleh, JewishMuslim relations, postmodern Arabic literature
This article is included in the Marie-SklodowskaCurie Actions (MSCA) gateway.
This article is included in the Transnational
Literature collection.
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Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165 Last updated: 29 SEP 2023
Corresponding author: Fernanda Fischione (fernanda.fischione@uniroma1.it)
Author roles: Fischione F: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing –
Review & Editing
Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No [101027040].
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Copyright: © 2023 Fischione F. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
How to cite this article: Fischione F. “You left a void that we will never be able to fill”: The legacy of Edmond Amran El Maleh in a
contemporary Moroccan novella [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review] Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165
https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16430.1
First published: 29 Sep 2023, 3:165 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16430.1
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Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165 Last updated: 29 SEP 2023
Jews and Muslims in Morocco: a (hi)story of
absence and trauma
In December 2020, the Kingdom of Morocco and the State
of Israel signed the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements
through which the two countries ratified their decision to
openly engage in diplomatic relations, economic cooperation,
and cultural exchanges2. In addition, the USA recognised
Morocco’s contested sovereignty on Western Sahara, arousing the wrath of many who saw the treaties as an umpteenth
violation of human rights and another step towards the erasure
of both Western Sahara and Palestine from the map3. However, the Abraham Accords have just made visible and
normalised the backroom relationships the two countries have
maintained for decades4.
Muslims and Jews in Morocco can claim a long history of
coexistence, but what used to be the most populous community
of Mizrahim – i.e., Oriental Jews5 – is reduced to around
3,000 people today, mainly due to emigration to Israel, France,
and Canada, or other countries. What were the consequences
for Moroccan society of such massive drainage of people?
Besides the historians who have retraced the history of
Moroccan Jews from antiquity to the present mainly relying
on archival materials6, other scholars (e.g., Levy, 2001 and
Levy, 2003; Trevisan Semi, 2010, and Boum, 2013, among
many others) have tried to answer this question from a more
subjective or ethnographical point of view, by analysing
the way both Muslim Moroccans and Jewish Moroccans
or Jews of Moroccan origin perceive this phenomenon. Despite
their different stances and perspectives, they all agree that the
departure of a significant portion of the Moroccan population
was a unique and traumatic historical process since it was
sudden, semi-secret, or at least surrounded with mystery,
and it “was not mourned or ritualized in any way” (Trevisan
Semi, 2010: 118). In a few years, spanning from the second
half of the Forties to the end of the Sixties (Giardina, 2018:
36–46), centuries of interreligious and intercultural coexistence
seemed to be effaced.
2
For an overview of the content, context and significance of the Abraham
Accords, see Singer, 2021.
3
For example, echoing the critics of the Abraham Accords, Dachtler
(2022: 2–3) highlights how “the prospect of normalising relations with the
Arab countries [has] never been an incentive attractive enough for Israel
to seek conflict resolution with the Palestinians”. Moreover, she observes
that the US recognition of the Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara
reduces “the readiness of Rabat to seek compromise within the framework
of the United Nations-led [peace] process” (Dachtler, 2022: 6).
4
See, for example, Abadi, 2000; Laskier, 2000; Laskier, 2004.
5
In Hebrew, the term edot ha-mizrah (Jewish communities of the Orient)
designates the non-Ashkenazic (namely, hailing from central and eastern
Europe) Jews who moved to Israel from the Muslim-majority countries of
the Middle East and beyond. Mizrahi Jews are often alternatively named
‘Sephardic’ (Jews coming from Islamic Andalus), following “an Ashkenazic
‘Orientalism,’ meaning a reassertion of European Jewry’s own superiority”
(Cohen, 2005: 36). To avoid the orientalist background of this word, some
scholars prefer using the expression ‘Arab Jews’ (Trevisan Semi & Rossetto,
2012: 2).
6
For an overview of the main historical works on the Maghrebi Jews,
see Giardina, 2018.
This effacement, however, left traces that have never stopped
haunting Moroccan society and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora
until today. As André Levy highlights, the peculiarity of this
effacement challenged the “‘solar system model’ of homelanddiaspora relationships” (Levy, 2001: 246), allowing room for
multiple sites of nostalgia and making the relationship between
the homeland and the exilic space more complex and multifaceted than ever. The awkward ghosts of these former fellow
countrymen fluctuate above present-day Morocco. To quote Levy
(2003: 365–366),
I t is as if the Jews continued to exist [in Morocco] but
as a shade, a feeble yet lingering national and personal memory. Those Jewish individuals who do remain
seem to embody the past. There is an irony here, in that
Morocco’s Jewish absentees remain present in the
landscape, whereas present-day Jews appear to be absent.
While we can rely on a rich scholarly literature on the
Moroccan Jewry in the 20th century that digs into the Jewish
archives (e.g., Laskier, 1983 and Laskier, 1994), and explores
the life of these communities both in Morocco and in Israel
(e.g., Benichou Gottreich & Schroeter, 2011; Zohar, 2005), we
know less about the perspective of Muslim Moroccans and,
more specifically, how they took the evaporation of around
2.7% of the population between the 1950s and the 1960s
(Boum, 2013: 1). Some scholars, however, have recently begun
to focus on the subject in their ethnographic works and to
understand how the Moroccans’ collective memory deals with
it. For instance, by researching the archives of Jewish and
Muslim (and mainly Amazigh) families in Southern Morocco
and interviewing their members, Aomar Boum (2013) provides
a unique insight into the memories of the people who witnessed the disintegration of their communities after the Jews’
departure. Interviewing four generations of male respondents in ʿAqqā, Boum sheds light on how the memory of
Jewish-Muslim coexistence has changed over time, influenced
by the unfolding of different historical events and processes,
from the French Protectorate to the post-Oslo agreements era.
As Boum admits, on a few occasions, the local people he met
during his fieldwork considered his ethnographic research
suspicious. An insider of the communities he was studying,
he felt his position was awkward. Moreover, his interviewees
found it weird that a native Muslim anthropologist working
for a US university was researching Southern Moroccan Jews.
This anecdote is symptomatic of what Boum describes as an
actual taboo surrounding the Jewish presence-absence in
Morocco.
An open discussion on the fate of the Moroccan Jewish
community would be relevant for the local society to process
the trauma and build a more equal and plural community. However, the relatively sudden disappearance of thousands of
Moroccans did not leave any trace in the public debate for
many years. As Trevisan Semi (2010: 122–123) highlights, the
traumatic, painful, and unexpected departure of one of the
historical components of Moroccan society has long been
denied and concealed. It neither sparked a debate on the status
of minorities within Moroccan society nor stimulated a discussion around the integration of the Jews in a new Arab nation-state.
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Moroccan Muslims – according to Trevisan Semi – buried
the trauma caused by the Jews’ departure under thick layers
of denial and discharge of responsibility. Such denial was also
possible thanks to conspiracy theories, according to which the
Jews did not flee the country by their own will, but the
Mossad forced them to do so7.
Jews in Morocco have a long history, dating back to the
pre-Islamic period (4th Century B.C.). Before World War II,
at its peak, the community counted around 240,000 people
(2.7% of the total population), most of them living in the
main urban centres of the Kingdom but also in the Southern
regions of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. Despite sometimes facing
distancing (above all in urban environments) and discrimination
and occupying a weak position within the country’s political
and demographical balance, Moroccan Jews lived relatively
well compared to European Jews. As Boum (2013: 15) shows,
for example, the social and economic ties between the
Amazigh tribes of the South and their Jewish protégés were so
tight that only a small number of Moroccan Jews of the
Bled (namely, the hinterland) applied for the French
protégé-status from 1933 onwards, being afraid of losing the
protection of local tribes.
Things changed with the arrival of the Alliance Israelite
Universelle (founded – among others – by Adolphe Crémieux,
the proponent of the 1870 Crémieux Decree in Algeria), which
took over the affairs of local Jewish communities in Morocco,
providing them with schooling and other services. Since then,
the destiny of Moroccan Jews has become more closely linked
with Zionism and Israel8. Following the Zionist propaganda,
Moroccan Jews began to emigrate to Israel upon the foundation
of the State, but in 1958 independent Morocco adhered to the
Arab League and cut ties with Israel, curbing the emigration
of Moroccan Jews (Abitbol, 2014: 666). Emigration could
not be stopped, though: between 1956 and 1961, the Mossad
smuggled over 12,000 Moroccan Jews to Israel, followed by
another 80,000 between 1961 and 1964 (Laskier, 1989).
Despite all the controversial aspects regarding this “internal
other” to Moroccan society, the Jewish component is recognised
as constitutive of Moroccan identity at large, as the Preamble
to the 2011 Constitution reads:
and indivisible national identity. Its unity, is forged by
the convergence of its Arab-Islamist, Berber [amazighe]
and Saharan-Hassanic [saharo-hassanie] components,
nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic
and Mediterranean influences [affluents]9.
The enshrinement of a Jewish component into the constitution
is only the culmination of a long-lasting process aimed to
reformulate a multifaceted Moroccan identity able to cope
with the trials of the 21st century. As Emily Gottreich (2020: 3)
highlights, “these days it is rare to open a newspaper or watch
Moroccan television without seeing a ‘Jewish’ story”, and
the Jewish past of Morocco constantly resurfaces in the form
of freshly rebuilt synagogues, restored cemeteries and saints’
tombs, museums and other public-space landmarks.
If the reasons for such interest on an institutional level are to
be found in the internal and external challenges the Sharifian
Kingdom must address – and especially the necessity to
counter radical Islam and strengthen its position on the
geopolitical arena – cultural actors show that the interest in
unpacking and reviving the multireligious history of the
country is deep and authentic, as I will highlight in the next
section.
Reconsidering the multicultural past of the Maghreb in
fiction
As mentioned above, scholars have only recently begun
to shed light on the subjective memories of Moroccan Jews
and Muslims. Surprisingly, despite what Trevisan Semi and
others argue about the collective undoing of these painful
and socially disruptive memories, a growing number of works
of fiction published in the last few years in Morocco deal
with the relationship between Muslims and Jews and the
history of Moroccan Jewry.
In an interview with the newspaper al-Quds, however,
Muḥammad Saʿīd Iḥǧīwiǧ (from now on, Mohammed
Said Hjiouij) – author of the novella I analyse in this article –
highlights how it is not easy for potential readers to find
such works:
When I was looking for Moroccan novels dealing
with the theme of Judaism, I only found two novels,
most probably because of the poor capillarity of the
distribution. One was penned by a young writer, and,
despite its weaknesses, it had some hidden strengths
waiting to pop up. The author of the other novel was
a famous writer, but I could not read more than a few
pages because of his mediocre prose and superficial
thinking10.
sovereign Muslim State, attached to its national unity
A
and to its territorial integrity, the Kingdom of Morocco
intends to preserve, in its plentitude and its diversity, its one
7
The Mossad and other international Jewish organisations heavily spread
Zionist propaganda in Morocco and they are largely responsible for
the hasty and often dangerous emigration of Moroccan Jews. As Israeli
historians also admit nowadays, between the foundation of the state of
Israel and the Six-Day war Moroccan Jews were not in danger and they
were not suffering any major issue (Bin-Nun, 2014). Nonetheless, isolated
incidents of harassment took place – such as the stabbing of two young
Jews in 1967 in Meknes – and contributed to the increasing sense of
vulnerability experienced by Moroccan Jews, who fled en mass after such
episodes (Trevisan Semi, 2010: 116–117).
8
For a history of the AIU in Morocco, see Laskier, 1983.
9
An English translation of the Constitution is available at the
webpage
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Morocco_2011,
accessed 20/08/2023.
10
2021.
11/05/2021,
https://www.alquds.co.uk/
Here and elsewhere, translations are my
own unless otherwise noted in the References.
Al-Quds
al-arabi,
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Besides his considerations on the aesthetic value of the two
novels, it is interesting to note how the writer constantly
addresses the problems that affect the Moroccan book industry
both in his fiction and his epitexts, as I will explain later.
Reflecting on the surfacing of Moroccan Jewry in recent
works of fiction, Brahim El Guabli frames such works within
what he calls “other-archives”, namely “texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited
memories where stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the
forgotten live in a ghostly state, ready to articulate loss even
as they are situated outside the margins of what is considered
canonical” (El Guabli, 2023: 1).
Unlike official, top-down archives, other-archives consider
not only what is there but also what is missing, as loss and
absence are inherent to their essence. This aspect is crucial to
affirm the right to the memory of neglected subjects invisibilised
by the official narratives and, subsequently, to expand and
democratise the archive concept. El Guabli places the novels
tackling the issue of Moroccan Jews under the category of
mnemonic literature, which “unlike historical fiction, addresses
a situation in which both absence and silence are the norm”
(El Guabli, 2023: 63). Among them, he includes novels in
both Arabic and French, such as Le captif de Mabrouka
(Mabrouka’s Captive, 2009) by Hassane Aït Moh, Šāmma
aw Štirīt (Šāmma or Štirīt, 2013) by Ibrāhīm Ḥarīrī, Anā al-mansī
(I Am the Forgotten, 2015) by Muḥammad ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Tāzī,
Zaġārīd al-mawt (Ululations of Death, 2015) by ʿAbd al-Karīm
al-Ǧuwayṭī, Kāzānfā (Casanfa, 2016) by Idrīs al-Milyānī,
and Sīntrā (Cintra, 2016) by Hasan Awrīd. To these titles,
I add the short story Tawārīḫ ummī (The Stories of My
Mother, 2005) by ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Šantūf, the historical
novel Asfār Yaʿqūb al-arbʿa (The Four Books of Jacob, 2017)
by Ḥasan Riyāḍ, and the novella Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ
(The riddle of Edmond Amran El Maleh) by Mohammed Said
Hjiouij (2020).
It is interesting to remark that, in the past few years, Maghrebi
fiction in Arabic has been reconsidering the legacy of an
authentically multicultural and multireligious past, based on a
long history of common fears and threats of cohabitation,
but also peaceful coexistence and positive interactions among
Muslims and Jews.
Pluralism was particularly meaningful in the postcolonial
intellectual debate in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia (see,
e.g., Aoudjit, 2015: 92; Marzouki, 2014: 55). It was an antidote
for the nationalist discourses prevailing at that time, whose
authoritarian, violent, and one-dimensional features were
already visible the day after the Maghrebi states achieved
independence. Several Maghrebi intellectuals such as
Abdelkébir Khatibi, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Mouloud
Mammeri, Kateb Yacine, Albert Memmi, and many others
deeply reflected on the idea of a plural society able to value
and include its whole multifaceted heritage (Harrison, 2015).
“The Maghreb as a horizon of thought” – as Khatibi called
it in an article that appeared in a special issue of Sartre’s
Les Temps Modernes in 1977 – was supposed to counter a
monocultural and authoritarian idea of the nation-State, as it
was the one conveyed by pan-Arabism and imposed on the
post-independence Maghrebi states through vigorous projects
of Arabisation11. According to Khatibi (1977), the Maghreb
itself represents a blank space to rethink, starting from the
periphery and not the centre, from the difference and not the
uniformity. As Idriss Jebari (2018: 58) puts it, “the Maghreb
is a name for the ‘unthought’ margin, a space of generative
pluralism, and an opportunity for a radical subversion of the
limits placed by centralising force and metaphysics of the
nation-state”.
An emergent Moroccan writer and a postmodern
novella
Mohammed Said Hjiouij was born in 1982 in Tangier, the
city where he still resides and which provides the setting for
most of his fictional works. In 2004 he founded the monthly
literary magazine Ṭanǧa al-adabiyya (Literary Tangier), which
was issued for a couple of years, although sporadically. Hjiouij
debuted with the short story collection Ašyāʾ taḥduṯ (Things
that Happen, 2004), followed by another short story collection
titled Intiḥār murǧaʾ (Postponed Suicide, 2006). After a stop
of more than ten years due to his career in the field of blogging and technology, he made his comeback in 2019 with the
short novel Layl Ṭanǧa (In Tangier by Night), awarded with the
Ismaʿīl Fahd Ismaʿīl Prize in Kuwait and followed by
another short novel titled Kāfkā fī Ṭanǧa (Kafka in
Tangier, 2019). In 2020, Hjiouij issued Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān
al-Māliḥ, the novella I will analyse in this article. Finally,
Sāʿī al-barīd lā yaʿrif al-ʿunwān (The Postman Does Not
Know the Address) – a short novel exploring the world of
international espionage and the 1973 Lillehammer affair in
particular – came out in November 2022.
Despite its brevity, Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ has a
complex and multi-layered plot, which holds together several
sub-plots, styles and literary genres, following a postmodern
fragmentary aesthetics remindful of the experimental Arabic
prose of the 1960s and the 1970s. Hjiouij defends his style
choices quite polemically, stressing how experimental writing
is still marginalised in the field of Arabic literature despite
its long tradition:
y novels feature some postmodern elements I
M
have purposedly planned to use, while others – such
as metafiction and the intertwining of reality, fantasy,
and different levels of consciousness – appear unintentionally and effortlessly. […] In the last two years,
I discovered Arabic novels from the 1960s and 1970s
displaying many postmodern features. I found them
mind-blowing. How is it possible that such experimental
11
Arabisation is a language-policy programme implemented in Morocco,
Algeria and Tunisia in the aftermath of national independence from France.
It aimed to replace French with Arabic as the official language of education
and other State institutions. For an overview, see Grandguillaume, 2004.
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novels have been there for decades and, nonetheless, the
Arabic novel has not developed yet, remaining frozen in
a quite classical style? How is it possible that readers and
writers still consider Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ the emblem of the
Arabic novel?12
Narrated by a third-person narrator who embodies death, the
novella’s plot revolves around two main characters – one
historical and one fictional – named Edmond Amran El Maleh
and Franz Goldstein. The character of El Maleh is inspired by
the homonymous, well-known Moroccan Jewish leftist intellectual born in Asfi in 191713. His family was originally from
the Southern region of Sous and belonged to those “berberised” Jewish tribes that Aomar Boum describes in his Memories
of Absence (2013). As the novella highlights, the Moroccan
political police persecuted El Maleh due to his activity within
the banned communist party, his criticism against Hassan
II, and the repression the latter unleashed in the Rif (p. 37).
In 1965, when he was accused of instigating the revolt of
Casablanca, his life in Morocco became impossible, and he
was forced to expatriate. He moved to France, where he started
writing fiction at a quite old age and worked as a journalist and a professor of philosophy. In 2000 he moved back to
Morocco and settled down in Rabat, where he died ten years
later (Keil-Sagawe, 2011).
Conversely, Franz Goldstein – a French Jew of German
origin – is a fictional character acting as an Ashkenazi counterpart to the Mizrahi Edmond. One of the narrative functions
of Franz’s character is to help the differences between the two
Jewish communities emerge, especially concerning the alleged
antisemitism of the Arabs and the Jews’ (dis)identification
with the Zionist ideology.
There is much in common between Amran, the hero of the
novella, and the actual Edmond Amran El Maleh: both fled
Morocco for France; both are journalists; both vocally oppose
Zionism. The fictional Amran is portrayed as a journalist
working for the books section of Le Monde and writing a
novel that he is struggling to complete. Moreover, he is a jury
member of an independent literary prize. At the beginning of
the story, he meets with Franz Goldstein in a café in France.
Goldstein, who owns and manages a publishing house
named Éditions de Sable, wants to convince Amran to award
the prize to a novel titled The Holy Day and published by
his company. Attempting to corrupt Amran, Goldstein offers
him a good amount of money, promising to publish his novel
once he finishes writing it and reward him with an extra sum.
Amran is reluctant and initially refuses. In the end, however,
Goldstein succeeds in his attempt since Amran takes the
money. Nevertheless, Amran eventually boycotts the conspiracy
orchestrated by Goldstein, who begins to persecute and threaten
him for not sticking to their agreement.
At the end of the novel, the plot gets less and less structured,
and dreams and reality become almost indistinguishable until
Amran ends up locked in a psychiatric hospital in Casablanca,
forgetful of his identity and trying to recollect his vanishing
memories. Individual memory is perhaps unreliable, as El
Maleh’s fragmentary and contradictory reminiscences seem
to warn us at several points of the novella, but recording it as
fictional writing is sometimes the only way to resist “to the
amnesia fostered by official history” (Vogl, 2003: 77). By
embracing this point of view, Hjiouij departs from the grand
narratives of the historical novel and allows a more subjective,
plural and fragile understanding of memory.
Around this main storyline, at least three other sub-plots
unfold: one concerns Amran’s past and his reflections about
his plural identity; another one revolves around the imaginary
character of Aunt Maymūna, Amran’s old aunt, who appears in
his dreams and tells him old stories drawn from the Moroccan
(Jewish and Amazigh) folkloric heritage; and the last one
is a nightmarish stream of consciousness unravelling as
Amran progressively loses his sanity. The novella also features some metafictional reflections, ranging from the material
process of writing to the corruption of the book industry and
the downsides of literary prizes, as I will highlight in the
following section.
Despite its short length, Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ
mixes many styles, moods, and sub-genres using a pastiche
technique. For instance, as the story retraces the history of
Moroccan Jews and the narrator mentions historical events,
dates, names, and figures, the style and content are close to those
of an essay (for example, p. 27–28). Nonetheless, from time to
time, the reader finds “stories within the story”, shaped either
as dreams, stories of magical realism, or tales drawn from the
Amazigh repertoire, such as those collected by Émile Laoust14.
Moreover, the narrative pact between the author and the
reader is constantly broken. For example, when the reader is
convinced that he is reading a historical account of El Maleh’s
vicissitudes, his belief is shaken by nightmarish scenes where
Amran is portrayed as a madman in the hospital who does
not remember whether the episodes of his life he has previously
narrated did indeed happened or not.
The reader also finds a lengthy summary of the novel Amran is
writing (p. 29–33), an apocalyptic dystopia inspired by Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and titled Barzaḫ al-ḥikāyāt
14
12
13
My interview with the author, 07/10/2022.
On the life, works, and influence of Edmond Amran El Maleh, see Akhrif
et al., 1994.
The French orientalist Émile Laoust (1876–1952), specialising in the
Amazigh language and culture, was the editor of the collection of Amazigh
tales Contes berbères du Maroc (1949), which also contains some stories
about the Jews. One of these tales is quoted at length in the novella
(p. 20–21) and displays a pretty hostile bending in the relationships between
the Amazigh and the Jews.
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(The Limbo of Tales). Moreover, in the second part of the
novel, Franz Goldstein tells the story of the killing of his
family, and the narration changes to horror and pulp.
Therapeutic history and the Moroccan Jew as a
metaphor of the marginal writer
In an interview I had with him recently, Mohammed Said
Hjiouij said that in his novella Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān
al-Māliḥ, he wanted to explore the topic of the emigration
of the Moroccan Jews and especially the secret operations
through which the departures were arranged (see underlying
data):
I wanted to write about the ship Egoz, which Mossad
employed in its secret operations to move the Jews from
Morocco to Gibraltar and from there to Israel. On
January 11th, 1961, on its thirteenth journey, the ship
sank along with its 44 Jewish passengers, half of whom
were children15.
The sinking of the Egoz was a turning point in the life of
Moroccan Jews, marking the beginning of systematic, secret
cooperation between Israel and Morocco. From that moment
onwards, it became clear that it was not possible anymore to
leave emigration in the hands of the smugglers working for
the Misgeret (an emigration agency established by Mossad).
As a result, King Hassan II secretly ratified Operation Yakhin,
letting 50,000 Jews leave Morocco between 1961 and 1964
(Giardina, 2018: 43–44). Not only was the Moroccan State
aware of the intense (and officially illegal) displacement of a
part of its population, thus, but it also received money from
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society as compensation for the
administrative costs. By 1964, Morocco counted less than
80,000 Jews, decreasing in number until they reached the
meagre figures of today (Giardina, 2018: 44).
Telling this story today has both educational value and a
critical function, especially when the media and the world of
politics enthusiastically celebrate the normalisation of the relations between Israel and Morocco. By recalling such dark
episodes from the history of Morocco and especially from
Hassan II’s reign, Hjiouij acts as a helpful killjoy. Leaving
aside easy enthusiasm, in fact, he warns us against the
danger of forgetfulness and reminds us that the history of
Moroccan-Israeli relations has gone through a painful and
deadly secret path before resulting in today’s open agreements.
Preserving the memory of Muslim-Jewish coexistence in
Morocco is much needed today. For various reasons, the transitional justice and reconciliation process that King Mohammed
VI launched at the beginning of his reign does not include
the question of Moroccan Jews. Despite all the predicaments
they went through, the latter were able to exert their agency
and were not powerless victims (Trevisan Semi, 2010). They
15
My interview with the author, 07/10/2022. The Egoz affair appears in the
novel at pages 18–19 and 27.
sold their goods and fled the country willingly, confident they
could rely on Israeli aid and a vast network of transnational
institutions (Bin-Nun, 2014: 204). However, there is still an
awkward aura of suspension surrounding their disappearance.
In her analysis of 1986 El Maleh’s novel Mille ans, un jour,
Ronnie Scharfman (1993: 140) argues that
he politically motivated emigration of the MoroccanT
Jewish population is only metaphorically an ethnocide,
of course, […], but in the universe of this novel, its
inscription on the body of the exiled Jew is as indelible
and as violently wrought as the Nazi’s tattoo or the
slave’s brand. The departure, en masse, of this community
has left a void that can never be filled, and the
consequences for El Maleh are that he textualizes this
exodus as, ironically, an exile to “The Promised Land”.
Therefore, if not the State reconciliation procedures, literature
– as a form of “therapeutic history” (Jebari, 2018) – can at
least track such an uncomfortable feeling of loss and the collective trauma that caused it. “What remains untold in the
national archives has been voiced through a collective process of memorialisation”, as Cristina Dozio (2024) puts it, and
literary fiction is a privileged site for such a process to unfold.
Mohammed Said Hjiouij chose Edmond Amran El Maleh
as the protagonist of his short novel for several reasons16, the
first of which has to do with the writer’s fictional needs:
The hero of a novel about the Jews must be Jewish. I did
not know about any other Jewish personality except
Edmond Amran El Maleh, an opponent of the Zionist
movement (and the State of Israel itself) and a political
dissident of Hassan II’s regime. […] However, I departed
from the well-known clarity of El Maleh, and I depicted
him as someone who constantly has doubts and
questions, even about his own memories17.
Another reason is more closely related to sociological issues
that run through the whole novella and concern the status and
position of the writer. Through El Maleh’s character, in fact,
Hjiouij also wanted to explore the marginal position of young
Moroccan writers today:
nother feature of El Maleh is his clashes with the
A
French publishers over his literary choices and the
marginalisation he went through due to his critical
stance towards Israel. This is a crucial aspect of his
persona. It is also an issue that involves me personally
since I live on the margin and observe the corruption of
literature from a distance. That is why I did not find any
difficulty in mixing the history of Moroccan Jews in
16
In our interview, Hjiouij admitted that he knew little about El Maleh
before writing his novella. Moreover, he said that he read some of El
Maleh’s works only after the publication of Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ,
due to the difficult to find El Maleh’s oeuvre in Morocco.
17
My interview with the author, 07/10/2022.
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Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165 Last updated: 29 SEP 2023
Israel and the moral decline of the cultural environment
and the literary prizes18.
Franz Goldstein – a character embodying the evils of Zionism,
Israeli colonialism, and the mafia in the book industry
at once – represents the corruption of the literary prizes
and the publishing sector, with which the writer polemises.
As his production makes clear, Hjiouij specialises in short
fictional formats, an aspect which he embraces as a crucial
part of the aesthetics and politics of his writing. As he declares
in an interview with Yāsīn ʿAdnān (Yassine Adnan),
e must acknowledge that the length [of a novel] is not
W
everything. We need literary prizes to take into account
the category of the novella or even new awards where
novellas only are listed. I feel frustrated when I am told
that one of the conditions a novel must satisfy to compete in a literary prize is a length of at least 25.000
words. It is even more frustrating that the Ismaʿīl
Fahd Ismaʿīl Prize for the short novel has been cancelled
this year, apparently for good19.
The influence of literary awards on Moroccan (and Maghrebi)
literature in Arabic is quite heavy since awards are one of
the very few channels through which such literature can be
circulated both within the Arabic-speaking region and
worldwide in English translation and grant its authors recognition, readership, and material gains. Opening up to the global
markets is vital for young writers who do not have sufficient
social and economic capital within their respective national
fields. Moreover, local book industries in the Maghreb
are hindered by a systematic lack of structure, piracy, and
underinvestment (Pickford, 2016: 80–81). As Pickford (2016)
highlights, despite a gradual improvement of the situation over
the years, Maghrebi literature still represents a niche within
the niche of Arabic literature in the anglophone book industry
and academia. While francophone literature from the Maghreb
benefits from its commodification as a “postcolonial [good]
produced for French readers” (Laroussi, 2003: 88) and has
partially gained a place in the Parisian literary establishment,
Maghrebi literature in Arabic still suffers from a great degree of
marginalisation. Thus, Maghrebi authors writing in Arabic
have essentially two ways to try to reach the anglophone market: either they are awarded (or at least shortlisted for) a prestigious international prize, such as the IPAF, or they get
consecrated through French translation and eventually make
it to the UK-US market. In both cases, the writers can hope
to succeed only “as long as they wrote in accordance
with reader expectations” (Pickford, 2016: 87).
Reluctant to purposely adopt a specific novel format and
a writing style only to please the public, Hjiouij experimented
18
My interview with the author, 07/10/2022.
with an original translation and distribution plan for his
2019 novel Kāfkā fī Ṭanǧa. US translator Phoebe Bay Carter
translated the novel into English, and the unedited draft
translation was distributed in weekly instalments through a
newsletter to which anyone could subscribe on the author’s
website. The goal of the project was to find a publisher interested in editing and commercialising the novel while at the
same time trying to widen the distribution network and the
author’s readership.
The interest in reaching the anglophone readership also
lies in the rising importance of English among the younger
generations. According to a survey by the British Council
(2021: 6),
young Moroccans believe it is more important to learn
English than Arabic or French. 40% of respondents
believe English is the most important language to learn,
compared with only 10% for French. English is
considered slightly more important to learn than Arabic,
with 65% and 62% respectively believing each language
is either the most important or an important one to learn.
Finally, the non-neutral ideological status of French in
today’s Morocco should also be considered when attempting
to understand why English seems to be a more appealing
language to be translated into. When I asked Hjiouij whether
he was interested in entering the francophone field, he answered
that
o me and my generation, French represents a
T
colonial language. By colonial, I do not mean the military
occupation our grandfathers suffered, but the economic
colonialism represented by the control that certain
Moroccan families exert over the local economy by
collaborating with some French enterprises. It also
gives me a feeling of alienation since French is the
language of administration and economy despite Arabic
being the country’s official language. It is as if I was not
in my own country. […] French in Morocco represents
corruption in all fields – administrative, political, and
economic. It represents all my stolen rights as a Moroccan
citizen20.
According to Hjiouij, French is the language of the older
generations. Therefore, it does not mean much to the
young writers today, who have been exposed to the US media
through the Internet and have found a chance to set themselves
free from what he calls “the prison of French ‘excellence’”.
The Moroccan Jew as the other within: double
critique and disidentification
Interestingly, Amran and Franz – the story’s two main
characters – represent two sides of the Jewish identity.
Edmond Amran El Maleh is a Moroccan Jew who did not
experience the Holocaust and had the chance to observe
19
2020. Maǧallat
al-Šāriqa al-ṯaqāfiyya, 01/12/2020, https://alshariqa-althaqafiya.ae / ?I=q0%
2B%2F5549yk4%3D&m=vF8qXhonlDQ%3D
20
My interview with the author, 07/10/2022.
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Open Research Europe 2023, 3:165 Last updated: 29 SEP 2023
Israel’s birth and development from a relatively privileged
standpoint – a standpoint of “double critique”, to name it
with Abdelkebir Khatibi. According to Khatibi (2019: 26),
double critique is a mission of Arab sociology consisting of
two tasks:
1. a deconstruction of logocentrism and ethnocentrism,
this speech of self-sufficiency par excellence that the
West, in the course of its development, developed on the
world […].
2. […] a critique of the knowledge and discourses
elaborated by different societies of the Arab world about
themselves.
Double critique addresses a society’s outside and the
inside, but it does it in a non-oppositional and non-essentialist
way. The Jew is not “the Other” as opposed to “the Self”:
it is the Other within the Self. The “privilege” El Maleh enjoyed
was this liminal position between worlds, implying both
the fragility and the strength of those who embrace it. On the
one hand, El Maleh was an insider of the Jewish community
and was aware of the transnational ties that bounded Moroccan
Jews living in Morocco and Moroccan Jews living in Israel.
On the other hand, as a Moroccan Jew, he feels part of
another history that has little to do with the history of the
Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
Much of El Maleh’s intellectual effort was devoted to
“disproving the myth of a timeless and intrinsic Jewish-Muslim/
Arab enmity” (Harrison, 2015: 129). Moreover, according to Harrison, in his works of fiction – especially Mille ans,
un jour – El Maleh attempted to draw a comparison between
the oppression of Palestinians and the oppression of
Arab Jews who fled their countries and emigrated to Israel
just to find themselves uprooted, discriminated, and forced to
live in miserable conditions. Israel, thus, produces colonial
injustice not only against the Muslims but also against the Jews
that it claims to protect. Israel has adopted discriminatory
policies towards the Jewish communities of the Maghreb
since its foundation. As the journalist Arieh Gelblum wrote
about Mizrahi Jews in 1949, less than a year after the
establishment of the state of Israel: “from the standpoint of
their primitiveness, their level of education and their
ability to absorb anything spiritual, [the Maghrebian Jews]
are even worse than the Arabs in Palestine” (Hochberg, 2007:
95). And as the fictional El Maleh observes:
he pride of Israel nestled in my soul […] began to
T
fade away on the very first day of my arrival in Israel
when I found myself in a rigid religious school.
I also found myself obliged to work in agriculture
instead of [embracing] the future I had been expecting, the future I was awaiting and hoping and craving for,
in the world of culture and journalism. (p. 13–14)
In the novel, Amran seems to be disidentified with both Israel
and Palestine because he does not recognise the necessity of
building an identity-based homeland for the Jews anymore:
efore moving to Israel, I remember being sympathetic
B
toward the Palestinians and understanding their right to
defend their land. Still, at the same time, I sensed that Israel
was my land and I was ready to defend it from the Arab
army. However, I have changed my mind in front of
these blank pages on which my pen moves as fluid as a
stream of consciousness. I am not supportive of the
Palestinians anymore (how could I be supportive of the
remnants of a people torn apart by internal fights for a
delusive power?), and I do not consider Israel my land
anymore, nor do I see the necessity of having a special
State for the Jews. But, at the same time, I understand
the right of the Sabra Jews [i.e., the Jews living in
Palestine before the foundation of Israel] to find a home
in the land they live in, whether they call it Palestine
or Israel. (p. 23)
Furthermore, caught between his Moroccanness and his
Jewishness, Amran adds:
I confess that I used to consider myself Jewish in
the first place and Moroccan in the second or third
place for years. But now I hate this expression that
Franz keeps repeating: al-yahūd al-maġāriba [Jewish
Moroccans]. What is wrong with al-maġāriba al-yahūd
[Moroccan Jews]? (p. 26)
These words summarise the argument El Maleh made in his
article “Juifs marocains et marocains juifs” (El Maleh, 1977).
Here, he prioritises belonging to Morocco – which, in
his case, is not an abstract belonging but a concrete one,
linked to places and human relations – over belonging to
Israel – an abstract community where the place for Mizrahi
Jews is already set.
However, Amran knows that Morocco could not be a permanent land for him and the other Moroccan Jews since he is
“the internal Other”. He recalls an episode of his youth, for
example, when he was beaten and humiliated by some
Muslim guys who found him guilty of asking for the hand of
Iman, a Muslim girl he fell in love with (p. 34–35). Amran is
stuck in a paradoxical position where his identities crosscut
each other, and he cannot choose one over another. Wondering
which land he sees for himself, Amran asks:
I s it Morocco, although I had known for a long time that
it only represented a temporary phase, a gateway to
France after the diploma? Or is it Israel, which
attracted us out of pride after its victory at the Six Days
war and, in a few years, closed upon us like a prison
full of corruption and greed? We discovered that
we were only numbers useful for the elections over
there, numbers that the political parties competed for
during the elections and eventually threw away.
We had always known that our presence in Morocco was
temporary and that upon our graduation, we would move
out and never return. Not necessarily to Israel, about which
we did not know anything then, but also to France, of which
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we spoke the language and in whose schools we used to
study together with French students. (p. 44)
in all his details: his clothes, food, drinks” (p. 38).
El Maleh wonders whether the Jewish community has
contributed to its own isolation within Moroccan society:
Unlike Amran and as a German Jew, Franz has a different
standpoint on these issues: he thinks that being a Jew like him,
Amran must have gone through the same antisemitism and
that the Muslims have a big responsibility in the depart of the
Oriental Jews. However, as a European Jew, Franz has a
different life experience than Edmond. He publicly presents
himself as a survivor of the Holocaust whose family was
exterminated in Auschwitz and has also written a memoir
about this experience. However, in one of those nightmarish
subplots scattered in the novella, Franz eventually confesses
to Amran that he killed his whole family and made up his life
story. He has never been in a concentration camp, and
he tattooed the number on his wrist by himself. Before escaping to France, he poisoned his sisters, knocked out his mother,
and set fire to the house. As far as his abusive and alcoholic
father is concerned, Franz confesses that he had provided him
with some fake documents to let him leave Germany,
which was forbidden for the Jews at that time, and had reported
him to the Gestapo so that he got arrested.
ow that I think about the language issue, I reflect on
N
the fragility of our peaceful coexistence with the
Muslims and how we contributed to this situation
ourselves. How can we expect our Muslim neighbours
to trust us when we do not attend their schools or
speak their language? Maybe it has not always been
like this, though. Maybe they ousted us from their schools.
(p. 38)
Franz’s belief in the antisemitism of the Arabs is the opposite
of El Maleh’s stances about this issue. In his “Juifs marocains
et marocains juifs”, El Maleh (1977: 497) states:
henever – willing or not – a Jew emigrates, public
W
opinion immediately raises a fuss about the existence of
antisemitism. According to it, it is a self-evident truth,
a universally recognised postulate that does not
require any demonstration. No one would dare question
that history has known tragic persecutions of which
the Jews were the victims, genocides as is the case
for Hitler’s Germany. However, the scandal starts
when, in the name of something that truly happened in
some specific historical conditions, we mix everything
up and, behind that mask, allow blatantly ideological
manipulations.
The objective of the manipulations, concludes El Maleh, is
“to justify the existence of the State of Israel and its
annexationism and imperialism” (El Maleh, 1977: 497).
The novel also contains a third Jewish character, briefly
sketched on page 43. It is Šimʿūn Dankūr, a fictional Iraqi Jew
who ran away from the persecution the Baath Party unleashed
against him due to a trivial love skirmish between him
and an official of the army. Šimʿūn, a friend of El Maleh, is a
professor of Arabic language and a passionate admirer of the
poet Badr Šākir al-Sayyāb, whose poem Unšudat al-maṭar
(The rain song, 1960) he knows by heart. Šimʿūn highlights
the complexity of Jewries’ mosaic and touches upon the
language question, a particularly thorny issue for Hjiouij’s
El Maleh. The latter is fluent in Moroccan colloquial
Arabic thanks to his mother and owes his knowledge of
French to his father, who “considered French the language of
sophistication and civilisation and looked like a Frenchman
Šimʿūn is also an allusion to the Arabisation process of the
Maghreb, which took place starting in 1958 when the
Moroccan government called several teachers from Syria,
Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq to teach Arabic in Moroccan schools
(Grandguillaume, 1983: 71). As some testimonies highlight
(Levy, 2003: 373; Trevisan Semi, 2010: 115), such a process
was traumatic for the Jews. The latter used to receive French
education in Moroccan lycées and suddenly found themselves
forced to switch to a language and a curriculum they
felt alien to the Moroccan culture. Arabisation increased
the feeling of isolation of Moroccan Jews while forcing
Moroccan culture at large into a monolingual cage and
jeopardising its diversity.
Nevertheless, as its members became fewer and fewer,
the Jewish community increasingly shut itself off from the
outside world. Scholars have shown that the progressive
isolation the Jews went through was a result of both
Arabisation and the centralising policies of community
institutions such as the Jewish Community Council, active in
Casablanca. As André Levy (2003: 373) stresses,
the community’s educational system actively contributes
to this isolation by ignoring the instruction of Arabic.
[…] it is quite striking that practically all Jews (except
a tiny layer of intelligentsia) do not comprehend the
news on national TV […]. Practically all Jews do
not speak, let alone read, fusha (“classical” Arabic)
and most Jewish youth speak darija (indigenous “dialect”)
poorly.
Moreover, Moroccan Jews living in Israel also seem doomed
to aphasia, as the fictional El Maleh notices. When he visits
Israel, he finds that Moroccan immigrants have reconstructed
their original village communities there, where they are once
more forced to speak a “foreign” language (Moroccan Arabic)
since they do not know Hebrew (p. 38).
Conclusion
In 2016, Houria Bouteldja, a French-Algerian political
activist from the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR),
published a pamphlet titled Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. Vers
une politique de l’amour révolutionnaire. In the third chapter
of this brief essay, characterised by harsh and passionate tones,
Bouteldja (2016: 59–60) acts as a spokesperson for the Arabs
and addresses the Jews with the following words:
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nti-Semitism is European. It is a product of modernity.
A
[…] It has confined you to the lower echelons of the
hierarchy of honors, but it is not universal. It is circumscribed
in space and time. […] You who are Sephardic, you can’t
act as though the Crémieux Decree hadn’t existed. You
can’t ignore the fact that France made you French to tear
you away from us, from your land, from your Arab-Berber
identity. If I dare say so, from your Islamic identity. Just as
we have been dispossessed of you. If I dare say so, of our
Jewish identity. Incidentally, I can’t think about North
Africa without missing you. You left a void that we will
never be able to fill, and for that I am inconsolable. Your
alterity becomes more pronounced and your memory
fades.
According to Bouteldja, the Jewish-Muslim enmity is a
colonial invention that sowed discord between two communities that could live together before the French and the
Zionists disrupted their coexistence. In his “Juifs marocains et
marocains juifs”, which I mentioned above, El Maleh vehemently
opposes Albert Memmi’s position on Israel, according to which
Zionism is an anticolonial liberation movement, and claims that
“no Arab country […] has ever known such an extermination
policy as Germany’s” (El Maleh, 1977: 498). Several years
apart, El Maleh and Bouteldja – a Moroccan Jewish man and
an Algerian Muslim woman – call for the deconstruction of
the allegedly universal category of antisemitism and the
acknowledgement of the colonial nature of the wound left by the
emigration of the Jews from North Africa.
As I have highlighted in this article, the novella Aḥǧiyat
Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Mālih repurposes the figure of El Maleh
as a metaphor of the young writer’s marginality in Morocco
and a catalyst for the collective debate about the Maghreb’s
plural identities. Author Mohammed Said Hjiouij embraces a
counterhegemonic aesthetic recalling the experimental Arabic
novel in the 1960s and 1970s, going against the grain of
commercial Arabic literature and preferring the fragmentary
and tentative style of postmodern fiction over the grand
narratives of historical novels. By making such a choice,
Hjiouij deliberately devotes himself to minor literature, a
site whose “cramped space forces each individual intrigue to
connect immediately to politics” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986: 17).
In my interview with him, Hjiouij expressed this imbrication
of the individual and the political by declaring that he did not
“want to write a boring novel presenting an important question.
The challenge was to attempt to write a ‘personal’ novel mixed
with a ‘plot’ novel. To combine a novel loaded with profound
intellectuality while featuring dynamic and exciting events”.
While rejecting the stiffness of engaged narratives, Hjiouj
draws the reader’s attention to crucial issues such as the
corruption of the publishing industry, the marginalisation
of the intellectuals who propose counternarratives, and the
problematic disappearance of the Moroccan Jews.
The question of Maghrebi Jews in contemporary Arabic
fiction is still understudied and deserves to be explored more
in-depth. Although limited in scope, this article is just a first
step towards this objective.
Ethics and consent
The author has received written informed consent for the
individual to be identified by name as the focus of this
study and for any data from the interview conducted to be
published.
Data availability
Underlying data
All data and materials are available on Zenodo.
DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7339646.
This project contains the following underlying data:
docx. (consisting of the interview with the author
conducted on 07/10/2022.)
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International Public License.
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