Jews, Berbers, and a secret love
A couple of days ago I met with a Moroccan man to prepare some materials for my fieldwork in Morocco. I won’t say too much about him as to keep his identity concealed, but I’ll just say that he’s an Amazigh (a.k.a. Berber) from Beni-Mellal. I told him what I was going to do in Morocco and recorded him, and then the conversation drifted to more personal stuff. When I told him I was Israeli, he talked about the great ties that Arabs, Berbers, and Jews all had before the great Jewish immigration to young Israel at the end of the 1940s and during the 1950s. He said that Morocco suffered economically and culturally after most of the Jews left because they constituted the middle class of the country.
Then he told me that his first love was a Jewess from his town. Their parents knew about their love but chose to overlook it. In high-school the man left for an exchange program for a year in the US, and when he came back to Morocco, his beloved had already gone to France to study medicine. I asked him if he’d ever seen her again, but he smile in resignation and said no. His eyes went glossy when he wondered out loud if they would have married had their lives not drifted apart.
And I tried to imagine their not-so-secret, yet covert and restrained love affair. I wonder if their parents had conversations about it into the night, whispering as not to be heard by the children in the other room, the fathers thinking how to sever this tie by sending their children away, the mothers secretly touched by their child’s innocent love. I can see in my mind’s eye the smitten teenagers stealing glances on the street, meeting for a short, blissful minute at the store or the school’s courtyard. And the tearful farewells when the guy left for the US, the painfully long year away, and the realization that she’s gone forever when he got back to Morocco.
These stories happen all the time, and some love stories do culminate in a life-long companionship against all odds. But the emotional effect that such stories have is always greater in societies where love is a contract, a transaction conducted by two families. If this story hasn’t made you sad enough, listen to Act One of This American Life’s episode Matchmakers (click on Full Episode to stream it).
