Retracing my roots David Legmann

Over the New Year, I finally got round to doing something I’d long wanted to do: revisit my maternal grandmother’s ancestral city of Fes, in Morocco. While my trip also involved a broader exploration of the city, my focus here will be on its familial and Jewish dimension; the most important aspects of my visit.

Only 75 years ago, Fes’ Jewish population was at its peak, counting over 20,000 inhabitants. As Zionism made its way into the collective consciousness of the community while antisemitism rose and France ended its colonial rule, this number would rapidly dwindle during the 1950s and 1960s, with major Moroccan-Jewish migrations to France, French-speaking Canada (Quebec) and Israel.

Among those Jews from Fes who ultimately immigrated to France was my grandma. Like many Fessi Jews born in the 1930s, she grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood of what was the French colonial district at the time, still known today as “Ville Nouvelle”, or New Town. Over preceding decades, many Fessi Jews had moved out of the more impoverished traditional Jewish quarter, known as the “mellah” (loosely the Moroccan equivalent of European ghettos), into Ville Nouvelle. These mainly ended up migrating to French-speaking countries (France and Canada), while the poorer Jews that had remained in the mellah mainly moved to Israel.

In contrast to their Muslim counterparts, the socioeconomic ascen- sion of some Fessi Jews into Ville Nouvelle was partly facilitated by the greater cultural and economic ties Moroccan Jews had to Europe (enhanced by the post-Inquisition influx of Iberian Jews 500 years prior and broader intra-Jewish diaspora ties), as well as their relatively good French-speaking proficiency. The latter is largely creditable to the establishment of Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) schools set up by French Jewish educators and philanthropists since the 1860s. Determined to piece together my own family story within the broader context of Fessi and Moroccan Jewry, the first task I gave myself during my short trip was to find my grandma’s old childhood homes, using two street addresses she had given me. Unsurprisingly however, Ville Nouvelle had changed a lot since the 1950s. With post-colonial depopulation of my grandma’s old neighbourhood and subsequent pressures of urbanisation, the “beautiful villas with orange groves” my grandma had described to me, as I discovered, had long since been replaced by apartment blocks. Next on the familial agenda was retracing my ancestry going further back in time. This involved visiting the mellah where my ancestors likely once lived prior to moving into Ville Nouvelle, before visiting the “Cimetière Israélite” just adjacent to it, Fes’ stunningly large Jewish cemetery. Touring the crumbling mellah, now without Jews and much of it depopulated or in disrepair, set the stage for the sprawling cemetery I subsequently wandered around in; a moving symbol of everything that used to be. Prior to visiting, my grandma had given me two family names to look for. One of them was Joseph Devico (one of my great-great-grandfathers), who I had been told by my family was one of Fes’ best known spices sellers back in his day. Nonetheless to my surprise, the otherwise niche “Devico” name turned out to be among the most prominent and high- ly esteemed surnames in the cemetery. The surname of the other family name my grandma had told me about, Elie Attias (one of my great-grandfathers), had a more common and less prominent status there, though it goes without saying that finding the tombs of my ancestors from either side of that part of the family felt just as moving and significant. Beyond immediate family retracing, I cannot end this article without mentioning the experiences I had with ordinary Moroccans during my brief visit. Without even mentioning the fact I was Jewish, so many people I came across in Fes would mention, often with a mixed sense of pride and nostalgia, the history of the Jewish community. When I not only mentioned I was Jewish but also brought up my grandma’s Fessi origins, so many of their faces would brighten up in a way I’d never quite seen from any stranger before. While it would be a disservice to historical memory to ignore the legacy of antisemitism in Morocco (I also found out one of the Devicos buried in the Fes Jewish cemetery had been killed in a pogrom in 1912), it is certainly fair to say that most Moroccan Jews alive today have generally fond memories of their ancestral land, my grandma among them. After this trip, I can gladly state the same is true of many of today’s Moroccans towards their old Jewish neighbours and their descendants, and can leave full of hope that the future between Moroccans and Jews appears bright as ever.