Celebrating a city’s Islamic-Jewish heritage with abundant detail challenging many stereotypes

Viewing daily the heartbreaking conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, it is all too easy to think that hostility between Jews and Muslims is endemic, inevitable.

It may be a good moment, then, to remember the many periods and places where these two great cultures generally have coexisted peacefully, and at times even convivially.

There can be few better places for such remembrance than Bayt Dakira, also known as La Maison de la Mémoire, in Essaouira, Morocco. This initiative is the brainchild and passion of a remarkable man, André Azoulay, a Jewish Berber born and bred in the city, and veteran economic adviser to King Muhammed VI of Morocco.

“I like to tell people I’ve been here for 3,000 years,” he says wryly.

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It’s his way of asserting the often forgotten fact that Jews have been an essential part of Moroccan culture for millennia, establishing communities among the Berbers long before the Arabs brought Islam this far west. Later, of course, many thousands more Jews found refuge in the country, along with their Muslim neighbours, after both communities were expelled from Al Andalus, now southern Spain, in 1492. Some of their descendants populated Essaouira. Azoulay is the ninth Essaouiran Jew to be a senior counsellor to a Moroccan ruler since the city was established, as a very prosperous “royal port”, in 1760.

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Today it is a Unesco World Heritage Site for many good reasons. But its most unique feature is that, from its foundation through much of the 19th century, it was the only city ever in the Islamic world where there were more synagogues than mosques.

In 1850 it was home to 16,000 Jews, 6,000 Muslims and smaller European and sub-Saharan African communities. It must have looked, and felt, something like the great multicultural cities of Al Andalus a millennium earlier.

However, very few traces of this diversity were still visible to the casual visitor even five years ago. Many Jews left in the 1890s, as the French Protectorate downgraded the city in favour of Agadir, and many more emigrated to Israel after 1948.

Essaouira became a kind of historical palimpsest. You needed an excellent guide book, De Bab en Bab by Hammad Berrada, to peel back layers there and see that the building facing you on a dilapidated street had once been a thronged synagogue or an elegant consulate. You needed a sharp eye to spot the mezuzah parchment that survives on the doorway of a humble home, formerly Jewish, and is retained respectfully by today’s Muslim owners.

“Every stone here tells a story,” says Azoulay. “We must allow these stones speak to us.”

Bayt Dakira did just that, very eloquently, for 88,000 visitors last year. It is situated in a Jewish merchant’s former palatial home and includes a small domestic synagogue, exquisitely restored. It celebrates the city’s Moroccan-Jewish heritage through rich displays of precious secular and religious artefacts, and abundant information that challenges many stereotypes.

Azoulay demurs gently when I refer to it as “a Jewish museum”.

“I’d rather prefer you described it as part of Morocco’s national heritage,” he says.

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His point is, again, that Jews should not be thought of as a separate entity in Morocco, but rather as an essential strand in its fabric.

“As for ‘museum’, that suggests only the past,” he continues, “but Bayt Dakira is a living centre for research, and celebration, in the present and for the future.”

He says hundreds of Moroccan schoolchildren visit the centre weekly. Jewish and Muslim scholars use it as a resource to resume the robust but respectful debates, once habitual in the city, between the Kabbala and Sufi traditions of their respective religions.

Azoulay adds that thousands of Muslims and Jews (including many Moroccan-Israelis) flock annually to the Atlantic Andalusian Festival, which aims to connect cultures through music, with Bayt Dakira a central venue.

“We are trying to keep this spirit of bridging cultures alive,” he says, “faced not only by what is happening today in the Middle East, but also by the spirit of confrontation that is springing up between so many communities across the world.”

His thoughts echo the declaration of King Muhammed V, the current king’s grandfather, to Moroccan Jews in the year of independence, 1956, prominently displayed in Bayt Dakira: “All Moroccans, Muslims and Jews, are subjects of the same country... I know that your Muslim compatriots and brothers share your festivals and that our festivals are yours.”

In that context, so rarely reflected in today’s darkening world, Bayt Dakira is a small but hopefully significant beacon of light.

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