Mahia on the Market: On the History of a Moroccan Jewish Commodity

Speaker 1 0:00

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ali bedad, the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies here at UCLA, and on behalf of my colleagues at the center, I would like to welcome you to the second actually, this is the third avarice lecture. It was supposed to be the first, but this is the third. Now this year, before I introduce our speaker and say a few words about the series itself, I would like to take this opportunity to thank a few people, especially Sarah Stein, the director of the levy Center for Jewish Studies, for their co sponsorship and support of these lecture series as well. I would like to thank my colleagues at CNS, especially Omar boum and Asli Bali, for their sort of intellectual leadership in bringing people here in organizing, really the series with Sarah. I also want to give a shout out to Joanna in the back and Christian who help us with organizing these, doing the logistics of this, this, this, this series, those of you who are not familiar with the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA CNES is a research hub where Over 100 faculty from humanities, social sciences, arts and the law school collaborate in a variety of research and pedagogical projects. Founded in 1957 it is one of the oldest and most distinguished UC US Centers for interdisciplinary research on the Middle East, broadly construed, we provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of information within and beyond campus, offering cutting edge research and fresh perspectives on the challenges and cultural richness of the Middle East. We also support graduate and undergraduate instruction over a dozen academic departments give numerous fellowships. We support research by faculty, students and other scholars. Today's lecture, or today's talk, is part of our avarice lecture series that has been underwritten by a generous anonymous donor, and which focuses on the Jewish communities living in Muslim lands. Prior to the 20th century, we have named the series avarice. Actually, the founder of this as I mentioned, is my colleague, Asli Bali, and we called it avarice, the Latin name, as you know, of Ibn Rushd, the 12th century, Andalusian philosopher, polymath whose work integrated Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thoughts. To point to the rich history of cordobas Jewish Muslim relation as a model of coexistence that, unfortunately, in some ways lacking today, as well as the connections between people like avarice and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, both of whom were committed to intellectual exchange and communal life across religious boundaries. Now it is my great pleasure to introduce our speaker Oren kosanski, who is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lewis and Clark University, where he is the founding director of the program in Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Professor kossanski, who also directs the trabajan project, which brings together an international theme of community representatives, scholars, activists and information technologies to develop a digital archive of Moroccan Jewish documents. Professor kozanski's research focused on the Jewish community in Morocco, the historical community, and he has written on a wide range of issues pertaining to this minority community, including the Jewish question in post colonial Moroccan cinema, Judeo, Muslim pilgrimages, questions of hybridity and the idea of the Moroccan nation and the Dialectology and differences in colonial Morocco, especially Jews who spoke Arabic just like as in the Andalusia. His work has appeared in some of the most prestigious venues in his field, including the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, cultural anthropology and comparative studies in society and History. Professor kozanski is also the CO editor of an important volume at Jewish Studies. At the crossroads of Anthropology and History, authority, diaspora and tradition, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 his talk today is titled Mahia on the market, on the history of Moroccan Jewish community. Please join me in welcoming him to the podium.

Speaker 2 5:21

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks to the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the allen d levy Center for Jewish Studies, as we all know. I think since we're here, the coordinated work of these centers has been critical for sustaining Research and Training upcoming scholars who work at the intersection of these two areas. And I'm particularly grateful for the warm welcome that's been extended to me as someone who comes from the more provincial west coast, a little bit north of here. And I've always been really grateful for the warm welcome and the place that people have made for me here. I'm especially honored to be speaking in the averose Lecture Series, and the theme of Muslim Jewish relations is, to be sure, appropriate to my topic today, though the focus is decidedly more contemporary and, one might say, less philosophical. So a few years back, I found myself purchasing a bottle of mehya. This is it at a liquor store not far from the Royal mausoleum in Morocco's capital city of Rabat. Mejia is a brandy which translates from the Arabic as water of life, and is often distilled from dried figs and flavored with anise, as I was just speaking with here. I'll pause here, and I want to also thank those from the community who came today to be with us and to hear what I have to say. I know that the work of the center is directed both at academic college with myself, but the broader community. So thank you all. And as always, when I speak and folks from Morocco show up, I look forward to learning more as well, particularly in the discussion period. Mejia is known among Moroccans as a traditional concoction associated with the country's Jewish population. As a longtime ethnographer within that social milieu, I had ample acquaintance with Mejia, as it had been produced by Jewish artisans, circulated through Jewish networks, used in Jewish liturgical and pilgrimage rituals celebrated in Jewish poetry, documented in colonial ethnography, called up In Jewish memoirs, commemorated in Jewish museums and so forth. Mejia is deeply inscribed in the in Jewish memory and their documentation of Jewish life, although cash often changes hands at some point in the customary economy of Mejia, as I had come to know it, the context of its social life were all the hallmarks of classic, classically imagined gift exchange in my field of anthropology, distilling numerous categories of Jewish social and cultural life against this backdrop. That is the backdrop, an ethnographic backdrop of seeing me here in people's homes, in the context we were spoken about earlier, and I was almost giddy that night when unmistakably I overheard a Muslim customer request a bottle, which swiftly appeared on the counter. Until that point, I was unaware that Mejia was manufactured as an industrial commodity and marketed to a broader, more anonymous Moroccan consumer public seizing the moment, I did what any self respecting ethnographer would do. I asked for a bottle the object lesson proceeded as a clerk responded with his own terse query, one that voiced familiar retail categories when referring likewise, to bottles of Coca Cola or mineral water. Kabira was big or small, he said, finding the shop carried five different brands of Mejia, I brought one. They were small. Of each, the investment was minimal. I would learn that the general popularity of industrial Mejia of the kind on offer was due in part to its unbeatably low price as a matter of calculation towards the objective of inebriation. For this is what Muslim consumption of commercial Maria Mejia is stereotypically associated with today. This was actually a rational choice at the same time, many manufacturers adopted a strategy far from unique to the Moroccan context, of branding their product in terms that evoked qualities and histories that might attract the sympathies of consumers for whom, in this case, the Jewish associations with a beverage would vouch for its authenticity, among other signs, and you can see them here. Here. Many of the bottles had Hebrew on them. It says tough on the bottom as well. If you turn it around, you don't have it in the picture, but kosher. It says that it's kosher and in Hebrew script as well. The relationship I had provisional, the I had provisionally dubbed communal Mejia, the relationship between what I had, provisionally tubbed, communal Mejia and commercial Mejia, the former, an artisanal brew made in homes and workshops that I that I found circulating through an informal economy restricted ideally to Jewish popular consumption, and the latter, an industrial product I only knew to be consumed by Muslims. Was more complicated still. My initial assumption that mass produced meheh was a recent phenomenon proved unwarranted. Up until that time, I had never seen a bottle of Mejia produced from a factory ethnographic and Archival Program probing disclosed what people in this audience know, a longer history of industrialization and its associated modes of commercialization, extending back through the colonial period, which ran formally from 1912 1956 by the time of my own 21st Century encounter the interplay between what's sometimes called homemade mehya, mehya, the Dar, as it's sometimes called in Arabic, and its factory made variant, could not be understood simply in sequential terms. It had been the prolonged coexistence of mehjia and its dual forms, neither one extinguishing the other, that it has determined the full significance of both. Added to this a third kind of mehia has become prominent in public consciousness over over the past several decades. This might be called criminal Mejia, and it circulates in a black market economy populated by non Jewish presume producers and consumers, and has been brought into national prominence in magazine articles, television coverage, newspaper editorials, blogs and so forth in Morocco and in French and Arabic language, this kind of Mejia conjoins the worst connotations of communal and commercial Mejia subverting any of their salutary potentials, if, For example, the Jewishness of Mejia can be made to represent the convivial, interfaith intimacies of a pluralistic national past. The averos theme that includes all Moroccans the same ethnic valence, can stand for the moral marginality of a Jewish population in a Muslim context, Mejia, that is is easily figured as a public danger, prohibited by Islamic law, and gateway to the proliferation of other vices and sins. The ability of availability of factory mehya on the market in no way skirts these these criticisms, and indeed, the idiom of the market itself, self interested, materialistic, cutthroat grounds, the critique of black ground Mark black market criminal Mejia as an emblem of soulless capitalism, where profits Trump consideration of religious, ethnics or social consequences. In these ways, the criminal variant brings into focus a more general feature. The moral resonances of Mejia are, to say the least, multiple and contradictory, ranging on the one hand from extremely positive to the other hand extremely negative. These are the swirling observations that incite the question that motivate the larger project, of which my comments today are a small part, and we'll only get to, as always, a little piece of the puzzle. And that question is, what kind of commodity did Mejia become when it was reconstituted as the object of new modes of industrial production, state regulation, national imagination and market commercialization and conversely? How can tracing the emergence of Mexia on the market help us to better understand those few modes of production, regulation, imagination and commercialization. What I want to share with you today is a brief account of only certain phases in the recent history of Mejia commodification, against the backdrop of the other two modes, which actually won't talk about that much here, one being the continuing modes of communal Mejia, that is to say artisanal production in the house. There's whole ethnography there, and I'll allude to it, but won't get into it here. And then, on the other hand, as a step towards considering this phenomenon of what I'm calling criminal Mejia, which I won't talk about that much either as well, though, both of those I'll allude to, and we'll hear a little bit about, but mostly what I want to trace is just a little bit about this history of industrial commercialization of Mejia as I've come to learn about it, the transformation of Mejia into the kind of commodity. That would end up in in in a 21st Century liquor store, as I found it, reflected the broader ways in which the French colonial project reconfigured Morocco, more generally,

Speaker 2 15:12

Edmund Burke, the third suggestion that the French protectorate operated as an ethnographic state points productively towards the inter time processes by which Mejia became became an object of colonial ethnography and state regulation about the same time, and the ways in which those are actually part of the same process, making Jewish Morocco and Mejia, more generally, into an object of representation for certain purposes related to the protectorate, and then making into an object of new forms of state regulation, as the colonial administrative status was apparatus was set up even prior to the institution of the protectorate in 1912 Mejia appears regularly in European ethnographic literature, like many symbols in the colonial ethnographic repertoire, this One was used in opposing ways and towards contradictory ends. On the one hand, mehia and wine consumption seemed to distinguish Jews from Muslims, and thus provided further evidence of North African social heterogeneity that would be exploited by in colonial strategies that sought to emphasize and exploit exploit the antagonism between the constituents of what was taken to be traditional Moroccan society, the proposition that Jews were oppressed within Islamic society, the anti averos thesis, I guess, relegated in urban contexts to residential quarters known as melas, and subjugated to humiliating restrictions as non Muslim legal subjects. Dhimmis provided part of the pretense by which Jews could be imagined as natural allies of Imperial projects, which cloaked themselves as liberal and emancipatory forces. Mehia, as we'll see, was not necessarily the most salutary form of Jewish distinctiveness in Morocco as understood in French ethnography, but the beverage could nevertheless be included in the much broader way. Array of features that distinguished Moroccan Jews from Muslims. The cultural geography of me here was likely likewise marked in distinctively Jewish terms in urban contexts, the mela, the Jewish Quarter, appeared as the quintessential locus of Mejia production and in rural contexts, where it was also recognized that Mejia was produced Jewish Saint shrines were cast as one of the most characteristic sites of the beverages consumption, both of them marked really clearly in Jewish ways. At the same time, Mejia seemed to represent Moroccan society, more generally, as a backward civilization ripe for European intervention. The relevant ethnography attended comprehensively to the consumption, circulation and production of Mejia, whose intoxicating properties, interfaith distribution and traditional manufacture were elaborated as signature features, even as Jews themselves continued to be identified as the primary social actors associated with me here, both the people and the product came to stand for Morocco writ large, as a place that remained isolated and a languishing medieval past that invited moral reform and required social straightening drunkenness, especially amongst Jews, but also amongst Muslims, was seen as a problem endemic to life in the mellah, where alcohol abuse seemed to indicate the constitutional intemperance of the Jews. And this is how one late 19th century commentator put it, the mela is poisoned by alcohol. Even women and children drink Mejia. Sometimes poor devils come to the school begging for a glass of alcohol, as if for a piece of bread. I saw a baby at its mother's breast swallow a spoonful of Eau de vie, Mejia, water of life, that she laughingly forced upon him, the baby was already emaciated and marked by consumption. Kids between 10 and 1210, and 15 years old, make bets as to who can drink the drink the most in the least amount of time. The flow of alcohol is tremendous. The point, just to be clear, is not to weigh in on the ethnographic accuracy of these comments as a representation of what was going on, although the mellow was defined primarily in Jewish terms. This did not prevent colonial commentators from pointing out that Muslims also frequented Jewish quarters, precisely for the purpose of acquiring and consuming alcohol. Muslim consumption of Mejia was all the more damning, since it represented the double liabilities of both drunkenness itself and the inability to adhere to one's own religious prohibitions. Muslims were implicated in the consumption of Mejia in more indirect ways as well. The Islamic oppression of Jews was also. Cast as one context that made Jewish use of the of the intoxicant, intoxicant as a palliative, inevitable as such, the ostensible prevalence of media served not only as an indictment of its Jewish users, but also of their Muslim overlords responsible for creating the conditions that made drunken escape necessary. Much was also made of the natives use of Mejia as a therapeutic libation and elixir, elixir that, like the snake oil of a charlatan, prevented the local population from seeking scientific medical treatment. Mejia that is stood for the entire complex of magical practices and superstitious beliefs that were held to subuse Moroccan society. More generally, the fact that mehya circulated for such purposes amongst both Muslims and Jews only reinforced its capacity to stand for a more universal Moroccan mentality. Many of these themes, drunkenness, excess, disorder or heterodoxy, superstition overlapped with colonial representations of other cultural of the another cultural institution with which the drink was associated. These events known as hilu Lot, hi Lula is a singular typically entail pilgrimages to, often rural shrines where devotees gather to celebrate and petition sainted rabbis buried therein. And this is how one colonial ethnographer described the scene at a pilgrimage site. And you'll see the resemblance to the first it's difficult to render an account of the kind of frenzy that one sees in this time of major pilgrimage, and with their Bacchic disorder and heavy drinking, do these gestures attest to the woeful inability to appeal to God except with carnal exaltation. A drunkard quivers while performing a grotesque dance in the synagogue attached to the cemetery, the master of ceremonies, wearing a right robe and pointed hat of a carnival barker, auctions the favors of the saint passers by urinate and vomit by the wall without separating themselves from the crowd. Half the people that press against me are drunk. The smell of the bleeding meat resting against the tent poles the door of filth and the distilled liquor Mejia dominate. This is what I saw at the Hulu of draw. I feel compelled, again, actually, to say that the as I read them, they really are dramatic, aren't they? That the big body of my work, just to be clear, is aimed at giving a very different view of what goes on at these these pilgrimages, in a way that that to the say the least, is more sympathetic. Scenarios like this one indicate several of the connections that in colonial discourse pertain between Mahi and hilu Lot, the two cultural phenomenon appear to be functional equivalents, each in its own way, serving as a means to cope, however counterproductively with with the travails of Jewish life in Morocco, as compared with the numbing effects of drunkenness, the belief in the intercessory power of saints to held the hollow promise of a better future together. Meh and pilgrimages were each viewed as signs of social disorder, carnal excess and and filth. And the point of sort of going through that again is to create a stage in which the when the Moroccan, the protectorate, the French protectorate, instituted a set of laws to regulate the production and consumption of Mehl. It did so in with two backdrops. One was the one that I just suggested, which is to say a view that everything in Morocco needed regulation, and that Mejia was a particularly extreme example of what that was. There's another piece which I won't get into here, and I won't be talking that much about the regulations themselves. I'm developing that elsewhere, is that many of those laws, in fact, drew on a different history, which was related to the fact that it was in the 20th century that the alcohol the regimes of alcohol production and economy in Morocco were also being regulated in a similar way, and drunkenness in France was also seen in a similar light. And so what we see in Morocco with this regulation is in many ways, like other facets of the Moroccan legislation under the protectorate is this interesting hybrid between French cosmopolitan laws related to alcohol and this attempt to map that onto a Moroccan environment. Now, Mexia was the object of more than representations under the colonial regime, as I just suggested, like many other aspects of Jewish life in the Mejia, in the mellah, Mejia became the object of new forms of administrative regulation enforced by the colonial state. Mehia had previously been taxed within Jewish communities whose relative autonomy in such matters was a facet of their status as. In these subjects, such arrangements became newly codified under colonial law as relatively informal and decentralized forms of taxation were entered into national legislation.

Speaker 2 25:13

A more radical shift occurred as alcohol production in general and Mahia production in particular came to be regulated at a national level, with the domestic manufacture of liquor, as well as actually the importation of liquor being legally curtailed by restrictions on the private ownership of stills. From the start the relative the relevant regulations were unevenly implemented and often contradictory, leaving local communities and producers to navigate the legal terrain as best they could. None of the developments that it that is would entirely halt the production of artisan Mejia, Mejia, dad and so forth. Indeed, one of the contradictions of colonial legislation was that it allowed only handcrafted Mejia to be used for ritual purposes, while also drastically restricting the artisanal production of the beverage in a move to in an effort to shift the industry into an industrial industry. It's a common pattern in colonial context. It was no secret within Jewish communities that clandestine Mejia production continued both to meet religious requirements and because the quality and the taste of the home view brew was deemed to be superior, and that continues to be the case. That is that view. And in my view that I will weigh in here, I will say it's true, Mejia therefore, emerged as an early site of resistance to the regulatory apparatus of the colonial state, as Jewish producers negotiated the shifting boundaries of their previous autonomy. At the same time, imported liquors from Europe increasingly penetrated the market. Indeed, one colonial commentator noted that whiskey was fast outstripping Mejia as the alcohol of choice in some communities. And just to point out, that's something that I even witnessed in the course of in the course of my research Morocco. And just to give one example, at these hilu Lot, where Mejia is still used for ritual purposes, but you won't get into whiskey, also has a very prominent role. It was in this legal and commercial context that the industrial production of Mejia within Morocco began on a small scale by Jewish entrepreneurs, Jewish consumers, who remained numerous enough to constitute a significant market, were positioned as the commodities target, though never exclusive public. And this industrialization of Mejia is exemplified by one particular brand, which I want to talk about a little bit. We were talking again, sorry, we had a side conversation earlier here. So about some of the the brands of mehia that people remember having having encountered in Morocco. The brand that I want to talk about is, is this one here. You can't really see it here, by a company called and this I was able to find, is a notice of the Constitution of the company in 1929 and and it's and it's registry. It's registration in the appropriate administrative units of the French protectorate. I'm working a little bit on the trying to figure out the history of this company, which, which, as I'm finding in this period, in the in the in in 19, in taurel Tower is one that certainly has the strongest traces in the documentary record. As we'll see, they have advertisements in Jewish magazines and so forth. And then, as I'll mention later, as I've been trying to track, some of the ways in which me here is is remembered nostalgically, particularly among Jews in the Moroccan diaspora. This is the one that is showing up most, it seems, to families of Algerian origin, and that they opened up outfits in Algeria and in France, and only later came to Morocco and the company actually was had a large portion of the market of both the domestic production of alcohol, but also imports of things including whiskey. Mejia taurel represents what might be called the high modern moment of me. Here's commercialization, a successful effort to sustain the communal aura of the beverage within Jewish domains in the context of new legal and industrial regimes. So this is an ad from. Lavoie du communite. Now it's at the end of this period, this period 1961 and as you can see, it's the first item appeared in LA Venere. Illustrate a Jewish magazine. This is another Jewish magazine in which the advertisement appeared and it appears. And I've been able to track advertisements in several in several contexts. The success of mehtael, as I said, is attested to both by the longest longevity of the enterprise and the subsequent nostalgia for the project that's carried over into what our colleague here, Omar has called the Virtual geniza, the different online forums in which Moroccan Jews get together to remember nostalgically life in in Morocco. So I want to talk about this maya Tauro for a bit, and this image and what's going on here. One of the challenges that the project is trying to address is the ways in which, as the there's a shift in this period to industrial Mejia, although there continues always to be this, what I'm calling communal media, being produced, that is how these industries retain, attract and retain a Jewish, a Jewish clientele for whom the move to industrialization might be alienating, might represent something less authentic, as we can see in this image, Mejia taurel foreshadows some of the visual elements, including the use of Hebrew. And then it says in French, la Reine de meha, the Queen of mehills. And we'll see that that item as well. And I just realized now, as I was calling this the high modern moment, something I haven't realized before, but this image itself, in some ways, resonates with what we think of as modern art and certainly modern modern advertising, modern illustration. So and it was these elements that would later be taken up, as well as a sign, a visual sign of authenticity in marketing, Mejia to a predominantly non Jewish clientele. That is my encounter, my own encounter later on, during this earlier period when Judeo, Arabic was still an active language within a substantial Jewish community, the Hebrew, Hebrew script was also used in more extensive marketing, and I want to spend some time talking about that. So this is a pamphlet that I that I came across. It's it was collected by Paul dehon, who has some of, you know, has a really outstanding collection in Belgium of materials. I know it's hard to read that the word, so we'll go over some of them. If you can try to make it out. That's great. If not, we'll go over some of them together. And so this is produced. I'll just go back to this page give you a sense. This is from Maria taurel. It's la Reine de Mejia you can see here. And we'll come back to this page in a moment. But this is where the story starts. So I wanted to start with a story, and I want to just go through the story a little bit to go through some of the elements that situate me here, taurel, in the authenticating spaces of what potential clients. That is to say Jews would likely take to be traditional Jewish life. Again, this is clearly written for a Jewish audience. It's in Judeo, Arabic and in French. The setting is the mela. You can see that clearly by the architecture, whose exterior streets are populated by gelaba garbed old men and whose interiors. And you can see, obviously, the two main characters have jalabazan in the third in the fifth pane, you see there's an old man squatting in the corner. It's all these emblems of Jewish life. And then in the house, actually, you even get some reference to this other domain that I was speaking about, which is that of saints and pilgrimage. In the sixth frame here, this is clearly an icon of a saint. And in that in this context, the two men are sporting these stereotypical, traditional Jewish garbs when they meet on the street. One, I'm just going over the story quickly. You can try to track it visually, one appears to be barely middle aged. The other is white haired, balding, wrinkled and hunched over. The difference between them, they learn in later frames, is not due to their respective ages. They're roughly the same, but to the fact that the younger looking man is on a regime of Mejia taurel, and it's in the final side that we see. It's this bottom one here to see the old man running that one sip of me here is all it takes for the older looking man to straighten up, reject his cane and sprint brightly down the street. And this is something already to keep in mind, is really already quite a dip, quite a stark contrast to colonial ethnography, right where this is celebrating the recuperative healing properties of of mehia. To call this an extension of that, of that of what I spoke about earlier as a rejection of that that. Narrative is something that we can talk about.

Speaker 2 35:03

What's special, what's especially interesting about this modern narrative is how it mediates the challenge of rendering industrialized Mejia as an authentic legacy from the traditional past, while also addressing a modern clientele for whom the full range of mahiya superstitions might be alienating, and that strategy can be observed by looking more closely at the Judeo Arabic and French renditions of the dialog. So I just want to go through some of those. They're here. I couldn't quite get it so that we could track back and forth for between the Judeo Arabic and so forth. But I'll add some, some to what we're going on here. So let's just go through one. This is Judeo Arabic, Mordecai, the young man says, Come to my house with me, and I'll show you. This is Judeo Arabic, and I'll show you the medicine that I drink to stay young and full of energy. And the word here that's used for medicine is dua, which is a word for for for medicine, and it's used both in a modern sense. If one goes to a pharmacy, one buys DOI, although they are more likely to use a French word, but the word DOI has very, very strong resonances in two other contexts. One is in the pilgrimage, st pilgrimage context in which the language of pilgrimage is a language of healing and the language of healing and language of medicine, that's really quite clear. And the other is an associated one in which Jew Jews, for a very long time to the present, were considered to be very powerful. To use a hackneyed English word, shamans, people, magicians and and, and folks who would create herbalists, who would create medicine for that would work both in physical and spiritual ways. So that's a French this team duo, if you notice, in the in the French version the and. So this version of a medicine, again, as I'm saying, is really in stark contrast to the French colonial ethnographies, which would have seen that this whole, this whole complex of practices, is being antithetical to anything called medicine in the French that that's erased. There's no reference to medicine. There's no effort to claim that Mejia operates as DUA and all we have here is come home and I'll explain it to you the it kind of reminds me sometimes when you're watching a movie and you have the subtitles, and there's this long discourse that ends up being reduced to a very short sentence, and you know, you've missed something. So the next one here, Mordecai, speaking to his wife, Mazal look I brought with I brought Samuel with me, sorry about that mistake. Give him a taste of that medicine that has kept me young and full of energy. And then the other one, Margo Shea, Mazel to I bring you Samuel, the agent, explained him the secret of my youth, again erased. And then finally, Mazel Tov, here it is, drink and see what. See the wonder of our master and the wonder of our Master. We'll look at that one in dedeja in a moment to get a sense of the way in which there the marketers are really playing on me here, really as sustaining this medicinal, I'll call it spiritual, magical element, which is erased in the French. And here, the marketers can balance between those, those audience that is a modernist audience that might find the Judah Arabic less inviting. But if you look back here, so there's the we have in the green frame there, the in French, le secret de la jeunesse, the secret of youth. And that is carried over in the language. But the Arabic is lazib de mulano, the wonder of our Master. And this language of azib de Mulana, again, is really drawn from this broader language of we'll call it traditional healing, saints and pilgrimage and so forth. What both versions retain, however, is a fully Jewish frame, a visual and linguistic fully Jewish frame of visual and linguistic references that addresses a distinctively Jewish market that, again, is is trying to navigate this particular moment of this transition to an industrial Mejia and its implications. Okay, I want to finish up by talking a little bit about the post colonial transformation of Moroccan Mejia industry, which coincided with national independence and the area era of mass Jewish migration processes that reduced the Jewish buying public and constrained how Jewish products circulated publicly. Industrial Mejia production has remained in Jewish hands, but for palpable demographic reasons, the market has shifted to an almost exclusively Muslim clientele, while certain. Beliefs have remained from branding strategies established by companies like Mejia taurel, new ones have emerged as well. So we'll go back here. This is that first slide. Hebrew letters, as I mentioned, for example, continue to be a key feature of the label, even though it's reasonable to assume that most buyers can't make out the words, and again, even if this label might have been originally designed in an era where its users might have been Jewish, that's not the case anymore, and the words are still markers that rely on the authenticating of effect of a recognizable Semitic script in an environment where mehjia production remains closely associated with the Jewish community. So I want to talk a little bit about what Jewishness of mehya then suggests for Muslim consumers, and in many ways, the meanings in play are similar to those we've already considered. The story isn't isn't entirely different. Jewish labeling invokes the cultural milieu that once vouched for the product's authenticity. Labels that exploit Hebrew style, orthography and Jewish symbols create the fiction of small bath batch craftsmanship rooted in an authentic Moroccan past the significance of this frame is appreciated even more fully when we consider that contemporary Muslim Consumers also recognize that Jews once dominated in a wide range of crafts, silver work, just to give an example, that define artisanal Morocco. More generally, the consumption of mehya among Muslims can also reflect a pattern of attitudes towards Jewish foods more generally, with Mejia being only one of several Jewish delicacies that Muslims stereotypically desire, and among the most famous of these dishes is Shina or Dafina, a slow cooked Shabbat stew, which Muslims are said to love, both for its taste and for the good fortune it's supposed to provide. And I've witnessed both, by the way, I've been in more than one Moroccan home on a Sabbath eating Sina, and a Muslim neighbor has come and knocked on the door. It's represented in movies, and you see it in all these contexts, and it continues today, the idea that food is a vehicle of ingestible blessings is elaborated in numerous Muslim contexts, pilgrimages included. So, for example, it's not uncommon to on pilgrimage to bring to in rot in Arabic, it would be used to cause to make pilgrimage foods, bringing foods to the pilgrimage site, mehia, in particular, resting it on the on the on the shrine, and then bringing it home with the blessings of the of the saint.

Speaker 2 42:58

Partly, this is in the Muslim context and in the Jewish context as well. Partly this is because Jews have long been, as I've mentioned, closely associated with certain kinds of magical powers. There remains in Morocco, for example, popular interest in potions and fusions, amulets and such, produced by Jewish musicians, magicians and herbalists, as an elixir produced by Jews. Mehya can serve a similar function, and its association with magical powers appears not to be lost on those who have marketed it as a as a commodity. The graphics that adorn another brand of Mejia include, as we've seen, here's this, this one hand, the Fatima hand, the Fatima, which is a well known amulet image in Morocco. We also saw this. I didn't point it out, but in the Mejia taurel advertisements as well. I am now, interestingly, not done, but at the end of my notes, because I think that the printer didn't print out the rest. But fortunately, I'm almost done. So we'll take a look at these last slides together. And that's that's fine in the convivial spirit that Mejia is supposed to is supposed to support. And I want to talk about one last set of emerging associations in industrial production, of of of mehia that I found less in the colonial period and find more now. And that is what I'll call for now the Amazigh or Berber elements of marketing, which we didn't see at all. For example, in Mejia, taurel was entirely set in the medla. The images were, what were urban images? Increasingly, we have a whole set of labels that and marketing strategies that refer to the Berber, the Berber aspects, the Amazigh aspects of of may have production. So here's one tough route. The famous one is some of you know this toponym, a name of a place tafraught beginning with a T ending. And tea would resonate with most Moroccans as representing a Berber area, a rural Berber area, ureca as well. And here's one tower, which towered Thank you, which we've spoken about before. And then just, I'm just back from Morocco, and I always go to stores and see what's what's on, what's on, what's in stock. And so this is a really interesting one that I just bought two weeks ago, that genaua. And so we have this image, which is so starkly, one of a particular rural, semi Berber kind of context, though, we still have the Hebrew, right? The Hebrew doesn't go away here. And so I'll just conclude by speaking a little bit about the some reflections, some initial reflections, on this emergence of this and it's not this revitalization. It's not that the Berber ness of mehya was ever absent, but the ways in which it's been taken up in the labeling. The first point is that the Berber element in no way displaces the Jewishness, and, in fact, could reinforce it. So it's not as though they're necessarily in competition with each other. The idea of there's a figure of the Berber Jew is well known. The notion and what Jews and Berber share, which is actually integral to Mejia itself, is a sense that they represent in conjunction with each other, pre Islamic, pre Arab Morocco. That is a Morocco in which the certain views of alcohol might have been more liberal. Let's say so. The first point is that they're not necessarily in contrast with each other, and they can reinforce each other. Likewise, the that reinforcement points towards much more towards the rural domain than the urban. So what Mejia taurel Did is emphasize the mela as the location of Mejia production and consumption. And I think there's been a shift to emphasizing the rural, and I'm still starting to sort of work that out, because I'm just starting to notice this pattern part of the other at least two things going on. One is, over the past several decades, mellas themselves have been much more come to become much more associated with the criminalization of Mejia for variety of reasons. So the mellah is no longer necessarily where a marketer might want to go to create an aura, a traditional aura of Mejia. So that's one. The other, of course, is that the rural areas now have, particularly as Morocco, as elsewhere, becomes more urbanized itself lends a certain or a naturalness, a certain authentic aura. And so here, by here, for example, the corollary, if I spoke about the idiom of mehyad dar mehya That was made in the house, there's also this idiom of mehd bled of the countryside. So that was always there as a possible authenticating move. The fact that it's being taken up now is really interesting. And I think there might, again, might be a couple of things going on here, and it might point towards an effort to really be thinking creatively about who's buying me here for what purposes. And I'll add here as well, just as an aside, that the people, there are only one or two companies who are doing this now for this kind of market, there's some other markets which I can talk about in the as I conclude, but they've been really creative and very, very prolific in creating different labels, same company, multiple labels. Now that's a common marketing strategy, and global capitalism differentiated marketing figuring out. But they've really experimented with some, for example, that have nothing to do with Jewishness or Berbers. So there's one, for example, that had an American flag on it. American flag on it and that that no longer, I think the idea here is, the question is, is there any longer a need to authenticate in that particular way, or has the market for this kind of Mejia shifted in such a way that the purchasers are not as interested in this authenticating move in so far as they might be the birth that this emphasis of Berber in conjunction with Jewish might suggest that a recognition that for younger generations of drinkers, one there might be less familiarity with the Jewish context, and there might be more ambivalence for what it might mean for contemporary contemporary Morocco, and the future of Morocco. The other things to work out a little bit more. So that's this. Is the final phase that I, that I want to speak about is this, let's call it this berberization of Mejia. And with that, I'll thank you for your attention and look forward to extending the discussion and hopefully learning from some of you as well. Thank you. Applause.

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