with “Ziyara”, director Simone Bitton meets the Muslim guardians of her Jewish memory

In Morocco, Jews and Muslims were so close that they often had the same saints and the same popular pilgrimages. In a return to her native land, documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton collects the words of the last witnesses to the separation of two communities that had coexisted for centuries. A common memory that those who stayed behind relive in emotion. In Ziyara, released on December 1, 2021 in about fifteen cinemas in France, Simone Bitton returns to the footsteps of Moroccan Judaism: synagogues, cemeteries and tombs today preserved and maintained by Muslims who speak to us with emotion about this loss, this separation . Maintenance.

Franceinfo Africa: in “Ziyara”, you film absence, a lost world, a forgotten world …

Simone Bitton: even if we evoke the past and memory, the camera still films the present. I tried to capture the Morocco of today which has kept important traces of Jews and Judaism. It is enough to look well and to listen well to see them appear again. But cinematically, that was it: filming the absence.

Is it the Muslims who have become the guardians of this Jewish memory?

There are hardly any more Jews in Morocco, but what is quite extraordinary is that many of the synagogues, cemeteries, shrines that we have left behind, even if some are in ruins, are perfectly maintained, preserved. by Muslim guards. I call them the Muslim guardians of my Jewish memory.

You recall in your film that Jews and Muslims lived side by side in the same villages. This common history, many seem to have completely forgotten today.

It seems completely anachronistic today, but I feel completely Jewish and completely Arab, it’s a fact, it’s not ideology. I am part of that generation who experienced this in their childhood. Jews and Muslims were so close that they had saints and pilgrimages in common. Our grandparents would visit and meditate on the same tombs as the Muslims. There would be some 150 shared saints, say the anthropologists I have read.

You place yourself more in emotion than in historical understanding …

It is not my emotion that I wanted to express, nor even that of the Jews who left, it is not this trauma that I am filming. It is the emotion of those who remained behind us, it is the emotion of the Muslims, this is what seemed important to me to collect before it is too late. This word, this feeling of loss that they feel. I couldn’t stop hearing: we lost part of our identity, we regret them, why did you leave, we didn’t hurt you. It is these words, their nostalgia to them that I wanted to collect.

This popular and tolerant Islam that you show in this documentary unfortunately seems to be on the decline.

As is this tolerant and popular Judaism. I knew in my childhood two religions at the same time very practicing and very tolerant. It was necessary to practice, but all this was done, it seems to me, in a rather good-natured and welcoming way for the other. And what could be more symbolic than these shared tombs and what could be more comforting than going today to the tomb of a chief rabbi or a sage and that it is a young Muslim woman who hands you a skullcap with respect and who keeps this place perfectly clean every day when we are no longer there. That’s what I went to look for, a sort of consolation for a present that worries me today. I filmed this Judeo-Arab tragedy several times, I am neither naive nor ignorant, but it is today that our graves, our memories are kept by Muslims. And we can say thank you.

Your film comes at a time when many seem to have completely forgotten this common life and history.

I can feel it, I can see it, there is a vertiginous gulf which is widening between Jews and Muslims and it is unbearable for me. I see this chasm widening as we share this same exile in France. It’s something that despairs me and that’s probably why I made this film, even if I didn’t intellectualize it that way since I started it five years ago. I would like this film to be seen a little in order to be able to learn from this past which is not distant and from this common present which continues. There is a sort of Moroccan exception that can serve, I believe, for teaching.

But everything has not always been rosy between these communities, there has been friction and bloody episodes in the past.

I am not longing for a lost paradise. There were moments of tension, blood flowed, but very rarely. We have not at all experienced the terrible suffering of the Jews of Europe, it is important to say that. Life in the Arab world was not a paradise, neither for us nor for others, and still is not. But as a religious minority, we have generally been more than accepted, integrated into Moroccan society. You can tell, when you speak with any Moroccan Jew, nostalgia overwhelms him very quickly.

So why this sudden separation?

It would take more than a few minutes to tackle this difficult question. There was a build-up of reasons which all fell roughly at the same time. There was the creation of the State of Israel, which deteriorated relations between Jews and Muslims throughout the Arab world. There was the Zionist movement which came to seek the Jews in their villages. It was not the Eastern Jews who created the State of Israel. When we arrived, all the bases of the conflict that continues today were already there, the Palestinians were already in the refugee camps. We were the collateral victims of something that was beyond us, we were, as often, pawns in history.

All this was concomitant with the end of colonialism which was a missed date. The Jews could have become free and equal in rights in these new independent countries, but they left. Why ? No doubt, like all immigrants, to give their children a better future. And also because the Jews of Morocco were educated in the French language by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which cut them off from the Arabic language and their origins in barely two generations.