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AIU School, Illigh, Morocco

Description

Illigh n’est pas un lieu fictif, c’est un village du Sud, son mellah est authentique; les acteurs sont les personnages locaux; le directeur de l’école y tient son rôle de tous les jours et se trouve aujourd’hui présent parmi nous. D’autres écoles ont une histoire semblable, celles de Taounza, d’Aït Taguella, d’Oufrane ou de Tinehrir, etc.

Illigh is not an imaginary place, it’s a village in the South, it’s mellah is authentic; the actors are locals; the school’s director plays his daily role and, today finds himself among us. Other schools have a similar story, those of Taounza, Aït Taguella, Oufrane, or Tinehrir, etc.

The Setting of the Site:

Considered one of the most remote schools in the Moroccan AIU network, Illigh was a village with a significant Jewish population closest to the town of Tiznit in the Souss-Massa region, formerly known as the Souss region. In the seventeenth century, this village served as an important stop on trade routes for products moving across the Sahara and from Europe. In 1626, the region's ruler, Ali Abou Hassan As-Semlali, established a palace called Dar Illigh, the House of Illigh, as his headquarters.^{3 4} The town was destroyed in 1668 after an attack by  Moroccan Sultan Moulay Rachid (r. 1666-1672), and upon its rebuilding in 1730, the Jewish population peaked at around 1750 inhabitants.^{5 6}  By 1869, the total Jewish population had decreased to around 500 members, and this steady decline continued through the twentieth century before settling around 250 members in the 1920s.⁷ 

During the AIU’s visit to the remote mellah in 1953 to film a promotional film, visitors described the village’s stark living conditions. Located 34 km (~21 miles) from access to electricity and the nearest postal office, the village is completely isolated from neighboring communities. The mellah housed around 250 inhabitants, 47 of which were children. Compared to the other communities visited by the AIU in the region, the representatives noted the extreme impoverishment of this village. Communal houses were constructed using traditional techniques, but the walls remained unfinished or had only been completed with simple plaster applications. These homes did not have stand-alone furniture; the villagers would sleep on the floor on bug-infested mats. The only community member with a bed was the Chief Rabbi. The visitors noted that the only luxuries in these homes were tools to make mint tea, including beautiful glasses and teapots. 

 Due to its isolation, men needed to commute outside of the community by donkey around 50 km (~31 miles) to sell their wares at neighboring souks, or marketplaces. The most frequent goods sold included sugar, tea, candles, and specialty sweets. 

Today, the mellah’s ruins are accessible by visiting the town of Illigh. The Dar Illigh contains a museum preserving the old palace, documenting the region’s history, and housing a library with manuscripts including military correspondences, contracts, and commercial registers. These documents reflect the diverse perspectives of communities in Illigh, including Jews who worked for the palace or participated in the local commercial economy by commuting from the mellah. Unfortunately, the exact location of the AIU school in the mellah remains unknown.

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.⁸ 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.” ⁹ 

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.¹⁰ 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.^{11 12 13}  

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.¹⁴ The AIU remained largely reliant on French subsidies between the end of World War I and the conclusion of World War II.¹⁵ After 1945, The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) began covering AIU expenses, reducing AIU reliance on French government funding.¹⁶

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 hinterlands led to a decreased need for AIU presence. After gaining independence from France in 1956, migration paused following new laws banning Jewish emigration to Israel.^{17 18} In the 1960s, newly independent Morocco integrated any remaining AIU schools into its national school system while allowing the AIU to continue overseeing the schools under the name, “Ittihad-Maroc.”¹⁹ After the lifting of the emigration ban in 1963, over 100,000 Moroccan Jews made Aliyah to Israel.²⁰

The Jewish population in Morocco has significantly declined from 265,000 in 1948 to 2,100 in 2019.²¹ 

Illigh 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.²² 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 prior 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.²³ 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.²⁴ Most school buildings in the South were rented from community members to keep operating costs low. 

The mixed-gender school in Illigh opened in 1952, serving a community of 250 people and 47 children.²⁵ Other small regional schools that opened in the same year include Oulad Berhil, Aït Taguella, 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. Oufrane was the last of the schools to open in 1952, bringing the total number of AIU schools in Morocco to 78 out of 128 worldwide–representing the vast majority of the AIU school network.²⁶ The AIU noted that the school in Illigh represented an “exceptional interest” to the AIU school system and that it was a “truly extraordinary case” due to the community’s isolation, noting that the community represented the “true bled”, an area of the country untouched by governmental control and still under the protective control of local Amazigh or Muslim tribal leaders. The school’s teacher was highly praised by the AIU for coming into this remote village with a heroic dedication to educating the many young children of the mellah despite its isolation. Much of the discussion from the AIU about this community seems to come from the Orientalist gaze, hailing the teacher as a savior of an uninitiated community. Despite significant praise for the educator who stepped into the “population that appeared outside of space and time”, the AIU did not discuss any specifics on the school's progress or its educational missions. 

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.²⁷ In 1948, approximately twenty thousand Jews lived in the Atlas Mountains region.²⁸ 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.²⁹ The educational system designed across the South would put students on a six-year track, ending with a French primary school certificate.³⁰ 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.³¹ 

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.³² 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.³³ 

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.³⁴ Girls' education often involved instruction on cooking, cleaning, making clothes, and keeping house with a focus on “moral education and manual tasks.”³⁵ 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.³⁶   

It is unknown exactly when the school in Illigh closed, but it can be assumed that it 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.³⁷ In 1968, the number of remaining Ittihad-Maroc schools was 31, with 8,054 students.³⁸ 

AIU film, Ils seront des hommes (1953):

 In 1953, the village of Illigh was selected as the filming location of the AIU’s newest promotional film Ils seront des hommes. In an interview with the AIU periodical publication Les Cahiers de l’Alliance, the director Jean-Claude Huisman described to readers “How I created the newest Alliance film.”³⁹ The film aimed to depict the “true circumstances that usually accompany the creation of a new AIU school in the far away bled.” ⁴⁰ In contrast to the documentary-style portrayal of the school’s establishment, both the school and the circumstances of its opening are entirely fictional. However, the process shown in the film closely mirrors Elias Harrus's actual procedure for opening new schools in remote southern villages. At release, the AIU summarized the overarching plot of the film: 

And so it was that a young teacher made his cheerful ascent to the village of Illigh, where, armed with his diplomas and instructions from Alliance directors, he succeeded in winning the trust of a population stuck in the past, yet quick to be interested in progress. Having built up the class by his own two hands, having triumphed over the doubts and suspicions of some, the obstacles raised by the inertia and destitution of others, and having to overcome his own discouragement, he finally won over the entire mellah. Children and adults alike rallied behind the school, a school of hygiene, health, and of new life.⁴¹

After conducting a ten-day scouting mission across the South with visits to schools in Aït Taguela, Goulimane, and Oufrane, the director, Jean-Claude Huisman, immediately knew that the town of Illigh was the perfect location. Huisman and his filming crew arrived in the remote village in multiple Jeep vans filled with equipment. Elias Harrus joined the group to serve as both a representative of the AIU and an interpreter between villagers and the film crew due to his upbringing in a similar community. They noted that their visit was well received despite many villagers' disinterest in having their community filmed for the movie. Huisman mentioned that many female residents were “violently hostile” to the filming of their community, and even the Rabbi’s wife refused to be photographed. Regardless of those who were disinterested, the Chief Rabbi was extremely in favor of the film’s production in the village, including acting in his own role in the film and offering his home as a filming location. 

Once it was decided that the film would be created in the town of Illigh, Huisman needed to adapt the pre-prepared script to the community according to the locations selected for filming and the villagers selected to serve as actors. Although the Chief Rabbi and many other villagers favored the film's production in the town, securing filming locations proved difficult due to the pushback from the community members who resisted the film. The use of the community’s synagogue encountered resistance, requiring significant persuasion by the director to secure the location for filming. 

Not only did the crews have to manage re-adapting the script, securing community members to serve as actors, and finding filming locations, but the team also faced physical challenges to the film’s production. Huisman recalled a particular day of filming in the synagogue when a heat wave fell over the town, making the already uncomfortable conditions worse due to the heat put off by the large generator. Due to the oppressive heat, the crew drank between ten to fifteen liters of lithia mineral water per day during the days of the heatwave–Huisman recalled that miraculously, no one fell ill. 

The film received critical acclaim upon its release in 1954 and was selected as one of France's top six short films of the year. The film premiered in Casablanca at the Cinéma Triomphe on the 25th of February 1954 to a private audience of governmental elites, representatives of associated Jewish organizations, and powerful AIU members. The AIU president, Jules Braunschweig, opened with remarks about the film’s importance to the overall AIU message–reminding those in attendance that the AIU extended beyond the city centers to rural, isolated Jewish communities. The film experienced worldwide success over the subsequent years, with AIU periodical reports of repeated showings in diverse countries, including Argentina, Israel, the United States, and Algeria. Critics heralded the film as emotionally moving and profound, examining the tension between progress and tradition.⁴²

Archival Materials:

The film Ils seront des hommes can be viewed on the AIU's YouTube channel at the following link:

Ils seront des hommes

Editions of the Cahiers de l’Alliance specifically discussing Illigh, including the interview referenced, can also be found on the AIU’s online archive at the links below : 

1 November, 1952  

1 December, 1953 - Interview with director Jean-Claude Huisman

1 March, 1953 

1 June, 1953

1 April, 1954 - Discussion of the film’s premiere in Casablanca

1 April, 1956 - Opinion piece on Ils seront des hommes

 

Contributions by Julia Burgin (jeburgin@utexas.edu)

Illigh, Morocco

Gallery