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Aomar Boum . Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco . Redwood City, CA : Stanford University Press , 2013. 240 pp.
Book Reviews: Modern Jewish History
Morocco's Jewish past has long provided historians with magnificent stories--stories of kabbalists, diplomats, mountaineers, and merchants, all interacting closely with their Muslim counterparts. A sense of Morocco's Jewish present, however, has proved somewhat harder to grasp. Some see Moroccan Jewish history as having ended with the emigration of most of the country's Jews during the last century. Yet the physical near-absence of Jews from today's Morocco--a population once numbering a quarter of a million, now in the low thousands--has done surprisingly little to diminish their significance in national narratives. While this situation is not unique to Morocco (see how antisemitism outlasted Jews in parts of Eastern Europe), the particular texture of the memory of Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco, and the history from which it derives, may be.
Aomar Boum's Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco sets out to account for why, after years of collective amnesia, Moroccans are now beginning to remember their Jewish population. In pursuit of this project, Boum traces the way that Moroccan perceptions of Jews have changed (and continue to change) over time, between generations, and according to the imperatives of a deeply-rooted monarchy. The book is highly original in part because the author has chosen to focus on the post-independence period, and so provides valuable insights into the construction of the Moroccan nation during the anticolonial struggle and its aftermath. Work on the post-independence...