Going back to Meknes a few years ago, I was struck by the transformation of my grandfather’s little synagogue into a large mosque. Whereas his three-story house bought in 1930 in the Old Mellah, remained the same as in my childhood memory, all the rest, including the century -old synagogue (slat Rabbi Smea’tya), has disappeared as the Jewish population left. The ethnohistory of this house captures many layers of a complex web of relations between Jews and Muslims, during and after the French protectorate. It can shed some new light on various aspects of Jewish departures and exile from Morocco. In this talk, many voices are heard: those of Arabs and Jews who were witnesses to the changes that Noureddine has documented during his field work interviews in Meknes in the last few months; the scattered memories of family members who were there when the house was sold; or those who remembered the house.

I also gathered other family memories and unearthed documents to establish a narrative which is not yet settled, as it is still hard for all of us in the family to understand the traumatic processes of departure and loss. And in the course of this return to the Old Mellah, the exchanges I had with Noureddine allowed us to establish an informal system of communication between Jews and Muslims, bridging yesterday and today (and rooted in different places of the colonization experience), at the heart of the processes of suppressing the memory that this revived interchange suggests. Beyond the immediate research encounter, the story of this house also highlights the dynamics of exchanges between Jews and Muslims at two moments of their shared history, during and after colonization.