Muslim Women Working in Jewish Homes in Colonial Morocco

In the mid-1930s, a group of Moroccan Muslim notables in the coastal city of Salé petitioned the Grand Vizir to take action against a troubling trend in their city: the employment of Muslim women as domestic servants in Jewish households. Rumors swirled about the types of behavior these women engaged in while residing in Jewish homes. Citing “deplorable conduct” such as prostitution and drinking alcohol, they demanded state intervention, which eventually came in the form of a 1941 viziriel complete ban on Muslim women in the mellahs, or Jewish quarters, of Morocco. In this paper, I examine how Moroccan Muslim elites and French Protectorate authorities attempted to simultaneously police women’s physical bodies and the physical boundaries of the community of believers.

First, I place the tension over the movement of these women through the city in the context of rising Muslim-Jewish tensions in the mid-1930s, a period of economic decline and general unrest throughout Morocco. Several cities witnessed an uptick in intercommunal violence in this period, and colonial authorities were at great pains to explain their cause. More often than not, their response, although weakly implemented, was to formalize spatial divisions between groups. Colonial authorities viewed these supposed transgressions of communal space as new developments, but they were instead part of everyday life in Moroccan cities. Second, the demands made of the colonial state here reveal the fluidity of colonizer-colonized distinctions, as Moroccans worked within and adjacent to Protectorate institutions to defend their social interests.

Emily Gottreich has described the mellah of Marrakesh as “fully invested with meaning as Jewish space and just as fully integrated into its urban setting.” These twin dynamics were both at play in the 1930s as French and Moroccan officials struggled to fully separate the mellah and its residents from the wider city.