Men’s Laws, Women’s Lives: Marriage Law and Gender-Based Violence in Moroccan Jewish Communities during the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In September 1931 Yossef Abuganam, a Moroccan Jew who worked in Panama, wrote a letter to Yehusua Bardougu, the chief rabbi of Meknes, asking for his help. News about Yossef’s daughter, Margalit, concerned him. Margalit’s husband, Shimoun Ohayon, made her go to the street and beg for food. Margalit suffered so terribly from her husband that she threatened to convert to Islam, among her only means to leave her abusive marriage. A second letter reveals that the situation was not resolved. Yossef described how Shimoun was abusing Margalit physically, hitting her and coercing her to go beg for food and money with no cloths on her body. (CAHJP - MA-Mk-1-28/29)
The French protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956) determined that native groups in Morocco will be left to conduct their personal status (marriage, divorce and inheritance). Yet, in my paper I explore the unstitching of the French formal policy, the places where inconsistencies, contradictions and lack of knowledge dismantle the French position on the separation of personal status law from other colonial issues. The main question of my study concerns the legal-social relations between the French colonizers and the Jewish colonized communities. The paper asks how domestic violence and mixed marriages cases in the Jewish colonized communities effected and were affected by broader social and legal trends? These cases are exposing the holes in the alleged separation between the communities’ personal affairs and the French protectorate legal system. Margalit’s story also highlights the fact that the native communities’ stories exceed the geographical and temporal borders of the colonial period in North Africa. The documents of the Abuganam/Ohayon family that worked in Panama, married in Tiberius, and consulted their rabbi in Meknes, were found in an archive in Jerusalem. The story of this family is just one of many sorties affirming the need for a multi-location study using diverse methodologies.