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AIU School, Oulad Berhil, Morocco

Description

The Setting of the Site:

The city of Oulad Berhil is in the Souss-Massa region, formerly known as the Souss region. Oulad Berhil sits north of the Anti-Atlas Mountains, a part of the extensive Atlas Mountain range. Today, the city is on the outskirts (forty-five miles east) of Taroudant, and the nearest city, Agadir, is seventy-seven miles away on the country's western coast. However, during the establishment of the AIU school, the southern Moroccan region operated under the umbrella of the Marrakesh AIU branch, which was 111 miles north of Oulad Berhil. The town is known for The Shrine of David Ben Barukh, and is a major pilgrimage site on the eighth day of Hanukkah.²

On September 8, 2023, the region suffered an immense earthquake (6.8 magnitude); the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Oulad Berhil was in ruins.³

Alliance Israélite Universelle Historical Background: 

Founded in 1860 in Paris, the Alliance Israéltie Universelle served as a leading international Jewish organization looking to imbue Jews in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa with values of the French Revolution –la liberté et l’égalité.⁴ As expressed in their manifesto, Appel de 1860, the organization’s aims were: "to work everywhere for the emancipation and moral progress of the Jews; to offer effective assistance to Jews suffering from antisemitism; and to encourage all publications calculated to promote this aim.” ⁵

AIU’s involvement in the education of Moroccan Jewry stemmed from France’s larger civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice). Jonathan Wyrtzen, historian of Colonial Morocco, discussing the negotiation of Morocco’s “Jewish question,” states that the French invasion in Algeria in the 1830s sparked increased interest in the “emancipation” and “moral progress” of Jews living in North Africa.⁶ The first AIU schools opened in the 1870s and 1880s in major cities across Morocco. In the early twentieth century, following the establishment of France’s protectorate in 1912, Moroccan Jewry faced a tenuous legal situation. While the majority of Algeria’s Jewish population had been granted French citizenship under the Crémieux Decree in 1870, Morocco’s Jewish inhabitants had not received similar legal protections. Rejecting pleas from AIU’s president Narcisse Leven, the French Resident-General of Morocco Hubert Lyautey denied placing Moroccan Jews under the jurisdiction of French courts. In 1918, following years of back-and-forth restructuring by the French colonial administration, Sultan Moulay Yusef ben Hassan (r. 1912-1927) signed a reform written by the French colonial government placing Jewish communities under the joint jurisdiction of rabbinic and Moroccan courts.  ^{7 8 9}

Despite disagreements with the French over Moroccan Jews’ legal status, the AIU network spread significantly under the protectorate with the encouragement of the French administration. In 1924, the AIU made several concessions to the French; as part of these concessions, the French administration would occupy a supervisory role in the AIU. This guaranteed the continuation of AIU activities in Morocco and solidified its collaboration with the colonial regime.¹⁰ The AIU remained largely reliant on French subsidies between the end of World War I and the conclusion of World War II.¹¹ After 1945, The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) began covering AIU expenses, reducing AIU reliance on French government funding.¹²

Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Morocco experienced a mass exodus of Jews to Israel, North America, and France. Undeterred, the AIU continued to open new schools through the 1950s, although dwindling population numbers in the hinterland led to a decreased need for AIU presence. After gaining independence from France in 1956, migration paused due to new laws banning Jewish emigration to Israel.^{13 14} In the 1960s, newly independent Morocco decided to integrate any remaining AIU schools into its national school system while allowing the AIU to continue overseeing the schools under the new name “Ittihad-Maroc.”¹⁵ After the lifting of the emigration ban in 1963, over 100,000 Moroccan Jews made Aliyah to Israel.¹⁶

The Jewish population in Morocco has significantly declined from 265,000 in 1948 to 2,100 in 2019. ¹⁷

Oulad Berhil and the AIU’s Southern Moroccan Expansion: 

The schools of southern Morocco were opened as an initiative by Elias Harrus, director of the AIU’s École Professionnelle Agricole, the Professional Agricultural School in Marrakesh, and representative of AIU activities in the Atlas Mountains and southern Morocco.¹⁸ The set of schools in Southern Morocco aimed to combat high illiteracy rates in rural populations. 

Elias Harrus, born in Beni Mellal in the Middle Atlas Mountains, attended AIU primary and secondary school in Morocco before studying at the AIU training school École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris to train as a teacher. A leading figure in the Southern expansion, Harrus’ upbringing and previous experience as director of the AIU school in Demnat, a town 64 miles east of Marrakesh, afforded him with a personal understanding of local religious sensibilities and customs.¹⁹ Before opening any school, Harrus worked closely with the community, local rabbis, and elders to determine their needs. To conduct enrollment for the schools, Harrus would take a census of all of the children in the community before organizing pupils by age and sex, potentially leaving open seats to accommodate those in neighboring settlements.²⁰ Most school buildings in the South were rented from community members to keep operating costs low. 

The school in Oulad Berhil opened in 1952, serving a community of 250 people. The mixed-gender school had 47 students–24 girls and 23 boys aged between six and eleven.²¹ Other small regional schools that opened in the same year include Aït Taguella, Illigh, and Oufrane. Each of these communities had a population of around 200 inhabitants; thus, opening individual schools in each city could address the entire community's primary educational needs. If students desired to continue their education, they moved to larger cities–Casablanca or Marrakesh. The opening of these four schools in 1952 brought the total number of AIU schools in Morocco to 78 out of 128 worldwide–representing the vast majority of the AIU school network.²²

The monthly press bulletin, Les Cahiers de l’Alliance, reported on the progress of AIU missions worldwide. In 1953, alongside updates on each school one year after opening, the AIU briefly explained its decision to push for establishing schools in low-density, rural Southern Moroccan communities. The Cahiers emphasized that access to secular education was extremely limited in the region, noting that boys sometimes received a modest religious education and girls received no education at all. The AIU highlighted the importance of Amazigh culture in these southern and mountainous regions. Jews lived among Amazigh and Arab tribal communities, often constituting up to one-third, or sometimes even the majority, of the population.²³ In 1948, approximately twenty thousand Jews lived in the Atlas Mountains region.²⁴ The AIU emphasized its desire to meet the needs of these small, dispersed Jewish communities, which usually constituted three hundred individuals or less. 

The Cahiers suggest that the push for formal education in Southern Morocco would eventually cause schooling rates (the percentage of the youth population receiving an elementary education) to surpass those of larger communities with established AIU involvement.²⁵ The educational system designed across the South would put students on a six-year track, ending with a French primary school certificate.²⁶ Harrus clearly addressed the entire community’s needs when developing these schools–by ensuring that all children were accounted for in the census or by making room for additional students from neighboring towns without a school. To illustrate how the AIU would make schools meet community needs, in Akka, the number of students exceeded the capacity of the five-room house-turned-school, so Harrus set up the courtyard as an additional classroom with a table, blackboard, and twelve benches.²⁷ 

If this Southern initiative proved successful, a secondary goal was to continue this expansion into the Atlas Mountains northeast of Marrakesh, emphasizing to readers that there remained “around ten thousand souls” and around fifty inaccessible douars, or tent villages.²⁸ However, in the same post-war period, the AIU expressed concern for the longevity of the southern school project because of migration from rural towns to cities. This concern did not deter Harrus’s southern project, despite limited financial support from these impoverished communities and mass migration picking up as many of these schools opened. The AIU framed the continued schooling effort for students who remained in Southern Morocco in the 1950s as an essential step in preparing for emigration. 

In 1953 and 1960, the AIU remarked that gender was a significant barrier to accessing education in the region. The February 1, 1960 publication of Les Cahiers de l’Alliance described the AIU’s role in ameliorating the social situation of young girls in the South through access to education: 

The girl did not count in Moroccan Jewish society; one would rid oneself of girls at the age of ten to twelve, and even eight, by marrying her off before she could give her opinion. She did not even receive the meager religious education reserved for young boys. Once married, the girl remained cloistered at home and, in reality, became the privileged servant of her husband. The action of the Alliance remains instrumental in the fight against early marriage. First, attending school gave the girls meaning and structure to their lives, then the education conferred a certain sense of dignity upon them. The Alliance used its moral influence with the Rabbis to ensure they did not bless such marriages. They even intervened with the administration of the protectorate. Now, the number of early marriages is almost insignificant.²⁹  

Mirroring French revolutionary ideals, the AIU perceived early girls' education as an essential step in both female emancipation and the formation of capable mothers ready to raise the next generation.³⁰ Girls' education often involved instruction on cooking, cleaning, making clothes, and keeping house with a focus on “moral education and manual tasks.”³¹ Despite the gender challenge expressed by the AIU, the publication confirmed their previous claim in 1953 that the schooling rate in many of these smaller southern communities indeed surpassed large community rates.³²  

 The school in Oulad Berhil closed alongside most southern hinterland schools in the early 1960s following mass emigration to Israel. At the peak of AIU activity in 1956, eighty-three schools with 33,100 pupils were operating in Morocco–more than the rest of the AIU network combined.³³ In 1968, the number of remaining Ittihad-Maroc schools was 31, with 8,054 students.³⁴ 

Archival Materials:

Additional photos of the students of the school can be found on the AIU’s online archive at the following links : 

Girls Cohort

Boys Cohort

School Cohort 1955-1956

Young schoolgirl carrying her uniform, 1955

Boys Classroom, 1956

Editions of the Cahiers de l’Alliance specifically discussing Oulad Berhil can also be found on the AIU’s online archive at the links below : 

March 1st, 1953 

June 1st, 1953

February 1st, 1960

 

Contributions by Julia Burgin (jeburgin@utexas.edu) 

Oulad Berhil, Morocco

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