Rural Moroccan Jews and the Colonial Postcard: a Review Essay

• Aomar Boum ^[1]
  1. [1] University of California System

     University of California System

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Hesperis Tamuda, ISSN 0018-1005, Nº. 55, 2, 2020, págs. 461-488
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • By the late nineteenth century, the camera eclipsed the Orientalist painting in terms of the visual ethnographic production of North Africa and its Indigenous communities. The colonial photograph, poster and postcard emerged as central modes of colonial representation and portrayal of North Africa’s racial “types.” Colonial French “ethnological” photographers photographed without permission what they conceived as “prototype” images of “the authentic” Indigenous “black/slave,” “Jew,” “Berber,” and “Moor.” In this context, the idea of a Moroccan Jew is partly constructed through postcards and photographs by French photographers during the 19th century and the first part of 20th century. In describing Moroccan Jews and rural communities in particular, the French colonial postcard aesthetically uses rural Jewish men and women as a contrasting measurement to the “natural” enlightened European Jew. By allowing the camera to exhibit rural Jews as captives of “uncivilized” social, political and economic environments, France colonial photographers tried to present an image of a Moroccan society where Jews were captives. In this paper I revisit these colonial visual ethnographies by re-reading them against the photographs of Indigenous Moroccan Jews captured by the cameras of two native Moroccan Jewish photographers Joseph Bouhsira and Elias Harrus between the 1920s and 1950s