Morocco includes Jewish culture in school curricula

Even before announcing the normalization of its relations with Israel, Morocco launched a reform that some called a “tsunami”, which is the inclusion of a relative of the history and culture of the Jewish community in the curricula of the Kingdom.

According to the Moroccan Ministry of Education, the first Arabic language lessons will be given from the next semester in the last year of the primary stage, when the age of the students is about 11 years.

The secretary general of the Jewish community in Morocco said in a telephone conversation with Agence France-Presse in Casablanca: “The inclusion of this, the first in the Arab world, is a tsunami.”

The “Jewish tributary” of Moroccan culture appears in the arts of architecture, cuisine and music, and is now present in the new civic education curricula at the elementary level within a chapter dedicated to Sultan Syed Muhammad bin Abdullah , nicknamed Muhammad III (18th century).

Fouad Chafiqi, director of school programs at the Moroccan Ministry of Education, explained: “Although the Jewish presence in Morocco preceded the 18th century, the only reliable historical elements date back to this period.”

In the Arab world, Morocco remains a rare case, as “this country has never erased Jewish memory,” according to Zohoor Rehihel, curator of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca, which is unique in the region.

Jews have been present in Morocco since ancient times and their number in this country is the highest among the countries of North Africa, and has increased over the centuries, especially with the arrival of Jews expelled by the Catholic kings. to Spain, from 1492.

The number of members of this community reached about 250,000 at the end of the 1940s, and at that time they constituted 10% of the total population. Many Jews left Morocco in 1948, reducing their number to three thousand.

The inclusion of the Jewish heritage in the Moroccan educational curriculum is part of a broad curriculum reform program that began in 2014.

The reform, which received little internal comment, was well received by two US-based Jewish societies, the American “Sephardic Union” and the “Conference of Presidents.”

It should be noted that the Moroccan Minister of Education signed a collaboration agreement with two Moroccan Jewish societies “to promote the concepts of tolerance, diversity and coexistence in school and university institutions.”

In a symbolic gesture, the agreement was signed at the Essaouira House of Memory, a museum dedicated to the coexistence between Jews and Muslims, in the presence of the advisor to the Moroccan monarch André Azoulay, a Jew who dedicated his life to promoting religious tolerance.