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When Jews Speak Arabic: Dialectology and Difference in Colonial Morocco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2016

Oren Kosansky
Oren Kosansky*
Affiliation:
Lewis & Clark College
*
kosansky@lclark.edu
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Abstract

This article explores how Judeo-Arabic and its speaking population were constituted as objects of research and reformation in colonial Morocco. I argue that the colonial project of dialectology, which emphasized the differentiated linguistic terrain of indigenous society, operated at two opposing levels. On one hand, the study of Judeo-Arabic contributed to the idea of homogeneous orality attributed to native languages, which despite their diverse relationships with literate textuality were made to appear divorced from locally established systems of writing. On the other, the historical and affective relationship between Jews and their Arabic dialect was figured in terms that stressed Jewish alienation from their mother tongue and thereby cast native Jews as differentiated objects of francophone linguistic reform. I pay particular attention to the material mechanics of ethnographic methodology, orthographic entextualization, and editorial arrangement through which colonial dialectologists rendered the Jewish dialect as an essentially oral and Arabic dialect, despite the countervailing circulation of Judeo-Arabic texts written in the Hebrew script. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how dialectology operated as a colonial science through which the hierarchical social categories of colonial rule were established, sustained, and manipulated against the backdrop of linguistic practices that never fully conformed to their colonial representation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 5 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

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References

1 M'Hamed Jadda, Bibliographie Analytique des Publications de l'Institut Des Hautes Etudes Marocaines (Rabat: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1994), 48.

2 For example: Eusèbe Vassel, Littérature Populaire de Juifs Tunisiens (Paris: Leroux, 1906); Marcel Cohen, Le Parler Arabe des Juifs D'alger (Paris: Librairie Ancienne H. Champion Éditeur, 1912).

3 For a historical survey of dialectology, see J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

4 Errington, Joseph, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 19–39, 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For the most extended consideration of the issues to date, see Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008).

6 Yosef Tobi, “The Flowering of Judeo-Arabic Literature in North Africa, 1850–1950,” in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

7 Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Paul V. Kroskrity, ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2000), 35–83.

8 Hoffman, Katherine E., “Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 724–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The mediating role of native Jews in the colonial projects of North Africa is, by now, a well established historiographical theme. See Schroeter, Daniel and Chetrit, Joseph, “Emancipation and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies 13 (2006): 170–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

10 For key statements in this vein, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

11 Orienting discussions of colonial approaches to language are found in Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

12 Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329.

13 A comprehensive bibliography of dialectological studies produced in colonial Morocco can be found in Jadda, Bibliographie Analytique, 67–68, 189–207, 405–12.

14 See Hoffman, “Purity and Contamination,” for general consideration of the issue in Morocco. Virtually all of Brunot's publications invoke the premise that language, mentality, and stage of civilization are intimately connected. For example, see his “L'action Coloniale et les Mentalités Inigènes au Maroc,” Congrès International et Intercolonial de la Société Indigène, tome I, 5–10 Oct. 1931, 475–88, 482.

15 For considerations of vernacular nationalism in the colonies, see: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006, rev. ed.); Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

16 Brunot, Louis, “Etat Actuel des Études de Dialectologie Arabe au Maroc,” Bulletin de L'Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines 1 (1920): 91–106Google Scholar. For further discussion of Renan's role in establishing evolutionary language taxonomies, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 139–40.

17 For summaries of this convergence, see Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, ch. 3; and Johannes Fabian, “Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading,” in Jonathan Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 80–97.

18 Modern Jewish textual cosmopolitanism in the region is surveyed in Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Matthias B. Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

19 For important surveys, see Haim Zafrani, Littératures Dialectales et Populaires Juives en Occident Musulman: l'Écrit et l'Oral (Paris: Geuthner, 1980); Joseph Chetrit, The Written Judeo-Arabic Poetry in North-Africa: Poetic, Linguistic, and Cultural Studies (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1994); and Joseph Tedghi, Le Livre et l'Impremerie Hébraïques à Fès (Jerusalem: Institute Ben-Zvi, 1994). On the Moroccan Jewish press, see Pierre Cohen, La Presse Juive Editee Au Maroc: 1870–1963 (Rabat: Editions & Impressions Bouregreg Communication, 2007). On the global scope of modern Judeo-Arabic writing and literature, see Levy, Lital, “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History: The View from the East,” Prooftexts 29, 2 (2009): 127–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 St. Matthew's Gospel in Moorish Colloquial Arabic (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1920). Errington has brought attention to the religious significance of Latin orthography as an index of the sacred language of the Church in Catholic missionizing (Linguistics in a Colonial World, 30–34). This case demonstrates that other sacred orthographies were also available when colonial natives where Jews.

21 Khbarat ‘ala Khwana b-Eretz u-b-geulah (Casablanca: Qeren qayyemet le-Yisrael, 1950–1956).

22 Louis Brunot and Elie Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes de Fès: Textes, Transcription, Traduction, Annotée (Rabat: Ecole du Livre, 1939); and Glossaire Judéo-Arabe De Fès (Rabat: Ecole du Livre, 1940).

23 Marcel Cohen, Le Parler Arabe, 13. This comparative formulation, of course, implied an erasure of its own by suggesting the complete absence of vernacular writing among Muslims. Cf. de Prémare, Alfred L., “L'expression Littéraire en Langue Régionale Au Service de Causes Politiques ou Religieuses Contestaires dans le Maroc d'autrefois,” Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 51 (1986): 121–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Cohen, Le Parler Arabe, 14. For discussion of similar “problems” faced by colonial linguistics in East Asia, see Bolton, Kingsley and Hutton, Christopher, “Orientalism, Linguistics, and Postcolonial Studies,” Interventions 2 (2001): 1–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Cohen, Le Parler Arabe, 15.

26 Louis Brunot, Introduction à l'Arabe Marocain (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve & Cie, 1950), 2.

27 The Latinization of Moroccan Arabic thereby mitigated the colonial paradox observed by Stephen Greenblatt: “To learn a language may be a step towards mastery, but to study a language is to place oneself in a situation of dependency to submit” (Marvelous Possessions, 104).

28 Errington develops a similar argument with respect to Tagalog in Linguistics in a Colonial World (p. 30). In light of Errington's more extensive discussion, it bears remark that this religious dynamic was likely peripheral to the case of Moroccan Arabic. Christian missionizing was never a systematic component of the colonial project in Morocco, which in fact stifled such activity. See Robin Bidwell, Morocco under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas, 1912–1956 (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 19–20, 54.

29 For example, the classical Arabic letter ذ (dh) is included in the Arabic transcription, even though the phoneme it represents is assimilated as د (d) in spoken pronunciation in the dialect.

30 For example, the demonstrative ال (al) is rendered in the French transliteration as “l.”

31 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 12.

32 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979); Mitchell, Colonising Egypt.

33 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, 308.

34 Surveys of these genres are found in Haim Zafrani, Littératures Dialectales; and Haya Bar-Itzhak and Aliza Shenar, Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). Numerous examples can be consulted online at The Rabat Genizah Project (http://library.lclark.edu/rabatgenizhproject/).

35 Scholarly attention to these written genres has grown in recent decades. See notes 19 and 34. A recent example is Moshe Bar-Asher, “A Maghrebian Sharḥ to the Hafṭara for the Minḥa Service on the Day of Atonement,” Journal of Jewish Languages (2013): 123–34.

36 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, 158–67, 358–64.

37 Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, 44.

38 Brunot, “Etat Actuel,” 105.

39 Brunot made good on his promise, both in acknowledging the work of named research assistants and partnering with native co-authors. For an early example, see Louis Brunot and Mohammed Ben Daoud, l'Arabe Dialectal Marocain (Rabat: Félix Moncho-Éditeur, 1927).

40 Brunot, “Etat Actuel,” 98.

41 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, i.

42 Ibid., vi.

43 Ibid., iii.

44 Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 120–61.

45 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, iii.

46 Ibid., ii–iii.

47 Ibid., iii.

48 Ibid., iv.

49 This was a common theme in justifications of French imperialism. See Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith.

50 On the Jewish involvement in the Moroccan nationalist movement, see Simon Levy, Essais d'Histoire & de Civilisation Judéo-Marocaines (Rabat: Centre Tarik Ibn Zyad, 2011), 63–77.

51 See especially Brunot and Malka, Glossaire.

52 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, iv.

53 See Chetrit, Written Judeo-Arabic Poetry. Classical Arabic also operated as a language of modern Jewish expression, though more so in the Middle East than in North Africa. See Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs.

54 For an accounting of the multiple religious and secular genres of modern Hebrew produced in Arabic contexts, see Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs.

55 Brunot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, i.

56 On the complex negotiation of Jewish racial and ethnic difference in France during this period, see Malinovich, Nadia, “Between Universalism and Particularism: Discourses of Jewish Identity in France, 1920–32,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32, 1 (2006): 143–63Google Scholar.

57 Brunot and Malka's brief gloss of the situation fails to recognize post-enlightenment efforts to recuperate Hebrew itself as the language of rational modernity. For discussions focused on Morocco and its Sephardic contexts, see Andrea Schatz, “Detours in a ‘Hidden Land’: Samuel Romanelli's Masaʼ Ba‘Rav,” in Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow, eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 164–84.

58 The “artificiality” of Hebrew as a modern language reflects one dominant nineteenth-century view of Hebrew in Europe. See Grossman, Jeffrey, “Herder and the Language of Diaspora Jewry,” Monatshefte 86, 1 (1994): 59–79Google Scholar.

59 The modern revival of Hebrew had religious and secular entailments in both Europe and its colonies. See Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Lital, “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History.”

60 The historiography on Zionism in Morocco includes Mohammed Hatmi, “Al-Jama'at Al-Yahudiya Al-Maghribiya Wa-Al-Khiyar Al-Sa'b Bayn Nida' Al-Sahyuniya Wa-Rihan Al-Maghrib Al-Mustiqill: 1947–1961” (PhD diss., Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah-Fes, 2007); Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948: Contribution à l'Histoire des Relations Inter-Communautaires en Terre d'Islam (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines-Rabat, 1994); Yaron Tsur, A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism, 1943–1954 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001, in Hebrew).

61 Malinovich, “Between Universalism and Particularism.” In Morocco, too, the relationship between the assimilationist AIU projects and separatist Zionist projects was not always antagonistic, especially in the late colonial period. Tsur, Yaron, “L'AIU et le Judaïsme Marocain en 1949: L’émergence d'une Nouvelle Démarche Politique,” Archives Juives 34 (2001): 54–73Google Scholar.

62 For an account of these historical dynamics, see Kenbib, Juifs et Musulmans; Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

63 Meakin, J. E. Budgett, “The Jews of Morocco,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4, 3 (1892): 369–96, 370CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 For a discussion of European language ideologies pertaining to Jews, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

65 On the liberal elaboration of the distinction between Israélite and Juif, see Phyllis Albert, “Israelite and Jew: How Did Nineteenth-Century French Jews Understand Assimilation,” in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On the application of this distinction in the AIU project, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 18–20.

66 Cf. Shreir, Arabs of the Jewish Faith. For comparative perspectives on Jewish “emancipation” in North Africa, see Reeva S. Simon, Michael M. Laskier, and Sara Reguer, The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

67 Daniel J. Schroeter, The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

68 Mohammed Kenbib, Les Protégés: Contribution À l'histoire Contemporaine du Maroc, Theses et Memoires (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, 1996).

69 Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).

70 Laskier, Alliance Israélite Universelle.

71 Leff, Lisa Moses, “Jews, Liberals and the Civilizing Mission in Nineteenth-Century France,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 32, 1 (2006): 105–28Google Scholar.

72 Bronot and Malka, Textes Judéo-Arabes, v.

73 Ibid.

74 Cf. Schroeter and Chetrit, “Emancipation and Its Discontents.”

75 Daniel J. Schroeter, “From Dhimmis to Colonized Subjects: Moroccan Jews and the Sharifian and French Colonial State,” in Ezra Mendelson, ed., Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Jerusalem: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115.

76 Indeed, Brunot's other native collaborator in Arabic dialectology, Mohammed Ben Daoud, authored ethnographic and linguistic publications of his own. For citations, see note 39, and Jadda, Bibliographie Analytique, 457.

77 For discussion of this period, see Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).

78 Berbers were likewise positioned as natural allies within the French colonial endeavor. See Paul A. Silverstein, “The Kabyle Myth: Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity,” in Brian Keith Axel, ed., From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

79 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 50.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 The issue is also raised by Stoler (ibid., 20). For consideration of the Moroccan context, see Aomar Boum, “Southern Moroccan Jewry between Colonial Manufacture of Knowledge and Postcolonial Historiographical Silence,” in Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, eds., Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 73–92.

83 Irvine and Gal, Language Ideology, 36.

84 Haim Zafrani, Littératures Dialectales, xii.

85 Norman Stillman, The Language and Culture of the Jews of Sefro, Morocco: An Ethnolinguistic Study (Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 1988), 7.

86 For example, Moshe Bar-Asher, “Couches linguistiques dans le Šharḥ marocain,” in Nicole S. Serfaty and Joseph Tedghi, eds., Présence juive au Maghreb (Saint-Denis: Editions Bouchene, 2004), 245–58.

87 Jonathan Boyarin, “Introduction,” in J. Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4. Moshe Bar-Asher's recent work (“A Maghrebian Sharḥ”) suggests possibilities for further investigation.