What Muslims remember of the Jews of Morocco? Insights from a fieldwork in Meknès (2005-2010) Prof. Emanuela Trevisan Semi (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

The talk will deal with the presence of the Jews in Morocco and with their sudden disappearance and absence after almost two millennials of cohabitation with Muslims in the country. This issue lies at the core the fieldwork research conducted in collaboration with a Moroccan colleague, Hanan Sekkat Khatimi, in the Moroccan city of Meknès between 2005 and 2010. During the talk we will examine the reasons of this research (might an ‘absence’ have an impact on a society and how?), the organization of the fieldwork and the framework of this research. The results which have been published in a book (with Hanan Sekkat Hatimi) “Mémoire et représentation des juifs au Maroc: les voisins absens de Meknès”, Paris, Publisud, 2011 and in many articles, will be discussed and illustrated in detail.

Emanuela Trevisan Semi is professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and has been coordinator of the European MA Erasmus Mundus in Crossing the Mediterranean towards investment and integration (MIM). She has published many books and articles about contemporary Jews, Karaites, Ethiopian Jews, Moroccan Jews, Judaizing movements and about memory and diaspora issues. In recent years she did research about contemporary lifewriting of Moroccan Jews. She has published, among others: Les caraites un autre judaisme, 2013; (with Dario Miccoli, Tudor Parfitt) Memory and ethnicity, Ethnic museums in Israel and Diaspora, 2013; Conversioni all’ebraismo, 2016; Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish intellectual, between colonized and colonizers, 2018.