Some History On The Emancipation of Moroccan Jews

An excerpt from, “Europe and the Islamic World: A History” By John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens; Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Princeton University Press, 2013, Pg. 303 – 305:

In Morocco, where the large Jewish community played an essential role in commercial transactions with Europe, the sultan attempted to ban consular protection for these traders, which would have removed them from his authority and tax system. France and Great Britain opposed him and did not hesitate to use naval demonstrations accompanied by the bombing of Moroccan ports, in 1851 especially. The Moroccan authorities were forced to give in and, at the same time, to accept a capitulary system similar to that which existed in the Ottoman Empire. The Anglo-Moroccan treaty of December 1856 enshrined that change, since it granted the Europeans freedom of commerce, set customs duties at 10 percent ad valorem, dispensed with all other taxes, and established a consular justice system.

As a result, the protected Jews (about three thousand of them, or 1 percent of the Jews of Morocco), benefiting from a sort of reverse discrimination, played the role of mediators between Europe and Morocco and became the agents for European penetration. The Spanish-Moroccan War over Tétouan in 1859- 1860 precipitated the shift, which produced strong tensions between communities, similar to those that existed in the Levant. The sultan of Morocco, without going so far as an edict of emancipation, pledged in a rescript of 1864 to treat the Jews fairly: “To apply to them, in the administration, the same scales of justice as to those who are not Jewish, so that none shall be a victim of the slightest injustice, so that no ill shall afflict them, and so that neither the agents of the Makhzen [administration] nor anyone else shall harm them in their persons or in their property.”

The European powers, soon joined by the United States, seized on the rescript and congratulated the sultan for having granted full equality to his Jewish subiects. At the same time, they made themselves its guarantors and thus granted themselves the right to protect the Moroccan Jews as a whole, a right of intervention avant la lettre. That protection was in turn limited by the powerlessness of the Moroccan state to impose its authority on part of its territory.

Unlike the Ottoman Empire, which was undergoing recentralization, the Sharifian empire was weakened by its contact with Europe.

After the taking of Algiers, Tunisia found itself in a position of semivassaldom vis-à-vis France, which guaranteed its independence from the Ottoman Porte. The bey of Tunis took advantage of that situation. refusing to apply the Edict of Gülhane as well as the principal reforms of fthe Ottoman authority. He attempted to create a modern state and army, but the reforms, poorly planned, failed miserably. Taxes became even more burdensome as the agricultural economy declined. Following the execution of a Jew for blasphemy in 1857, France and Great Britain, by means of a naval demonstration, imposed reforms. The fundamental pact of September 9, 1857, reiterated the terms of Gülhane and of the Hatt of 1856, and proclaimed the security of the life and property of residents of the regency, equality before the law and with respect to taxes, and the abolition of the Muslims’ privileges, of restrictions on commerce, and of monopolies. Furthermore, it granted foreigners the right to own property and to practice any trade. A constitution founded on these principles was promulgated in 1861 with Europe’s boisterous approval. It was suspended in 1865 following an uprising of tribes, primarily against taxes. Although the revolt was harshly repressed, the Tunisian state found itself in debt for a long time. It declared bankruptcy in 1867, and a foreign financial commission (France, Great Britain, and Italy) was imposed the next year to manage the resources of the Tunisian state.

In Tunisia and Morocco, the semi-emancipation of the Jews came about thanks to the tireless actions of representatives of the Jews of Great Britain and France, Claude Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux in particular. In addition to the humanitarian aspect, which garnered them the support of the chancelleries in their home countries, the demand for reforms, backed by gunboat diplomacy, served to assure European economic penetration and to establish increased dependence on the Concert of Europe.

Perhaps the only person in Europe who understood the anomaly of emancipating non-Muslims while proceeding to subjugate Muslims within the colonial framework was Napoleon III. Aided by enlightened advisers such as Ismail Urbain, he attempted to alter the course of the process under way in Algeria, with his famous policy of an Arab kingdom. That kingdom was supposed to be associated with France more than subject to it. As shown by his famous leter to Marie-Edme MacMahon of June 20, 1865, he wanted to make treatment of the Muslims in Algeria the new mode of influence for French policy in the East:

France, which sympathizes everywhere with the ideas of nationhood, cannot, in the eyes of the world, justify the dependency in which it is obliged to hold the Arab people if it does not summon them to a better existence. When our manner of governing a defeated people is an object of envy for the 15 million Arabs spread throughout the other parts of Africa and Asia; the day our power, established at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, appears to them as an intervention of Providence to elevate a fallen race; on that day, the glory of France will ring out from Tunis to the Euphrates and will assure our country the kind of preponderance that cannot rouse anyone’s jealousy because it rests not on conquest but on the love of humanity and progress. An effective policy is the most powerful vehicle for commercial interests. And what more effective policy for France than to give the Muhammadan races, so numerous in the East and so unified with one another despite the distances, unimpeachable guarantees of tolerance, justice, and respect for the difference in mores, faiths, and races within its own states?

That policy failed because of the resistance of administrative and military circles and the opposition of liberals and republicans to an enterprise too closely linked to personal power and dynastic activities. At the very end of Napoleon III’s reign, French policy turned toward supporting Ottoman reform measures with, in particular, the creation of the imperial secondary school of Galatasaray in Constantinople to train the new Ottoman elites. 

Napoleon III’s discourse can be understood within the context of the transformations of space and identity proper to the 1860s.