All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [112]
We took a boat to Tangier. It was a stormy crossing, and I got the worst case of seasickness of my life. I told myself it was a punishment. I never should have left Saragossa.
I was dazzled by the subterranean nightlife of Tangier, a cosmopolitan city of countless entrepreneurs, from the most honest to the shadiest. My impressions and memories would later go into The Town Beyond the Wall Tangier by night, the soco chico—thieves were so resourceful it was hard to get angry at them. They were just doing their job. There were kids offering you all the gold of the Orient for a few francs; fire-eaters; smugglers trying desperately to pick up easy money; adventurers eager for dangerous missions in lands that often existed only in their imagination. There were Arab storytellers entertaining ecstatic crowds, arousing emotion, admiration, for a few pennies. Tangier, for me, was Pedro, my friend, the man who to me embodies the ideal of friendship, as much madman as sage, as brave as he was philosophical, as sad as he was triumphant over all sadness. I created Pedro because I missed him. I still do.
We crossed Spanish Morocco at breakneck speed and, arriving in Casablanca, encountered a blinding but somehow soothing whiteness. There were mischievous little shoeshine boys, and blanket merchants who stared at us openly.
It was 1950 and I was too ignorant to notice the tensions dividing the various communities. Foolishly, I was convinced that everyone respected and liked everyone else. National and ethnic identity, the right of self-determination—these ideas were not yet current. What was current was much poverty.
My traveling companions had contacts within the Jewish community. A young man, in tattered clothes, offered to serve as my guide. His name was Ifergan. He knew rabbis, merchants, and Jewish activists. All doors were open to him. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to be introduced to rabbinical masters. “Are you a journalist,” he asked, “or a yeshiva student?” He wanted me to meet the notables of the community. The erudite old men I met were astonished when I asked them more about their traditions than about contemporary political issues. I accommodated them by asking about the contemporary value of tradition, and their answers, steeped in wisdom, were far more stimulating than any politician’s pronouncements. A dayan (rabbinical judge) showed me some unknown mystical writings attributed to the sages of Fez. A rabbi told me little-known anecdotes about Maimonides’s years in Morocco. Here, as in Spain, the Jewish past was pervasive.
The Jews in Morocco seemed attached to their soil and to their sovereign. I was surprised at their praise for the sultan, Mohammed V, but I should have known better. The sultan had protected his Jewish subjects during the war, standing up to Vichy and the Germans alike. Not a single Moroccan Jew was deported. Rich Jews maintained friendly relations with rich Muslims. And yet. Many Moroccan Jews planned to make aliyah, to “ascend” to the Holy Land, because the future was uncertain. Signs of dislocation were appearing in this energetic, exuberant community. My companion, the emissary of the Jewish Agency, predicted that few of its 250,000 souls would remain. But if things were so good in this beautiful land, why would the Jews want to confront the unknown? Ifergan’s answer: “For a Jew Israel is never the unknown.” I recalled the Jews of my city. How was it that the Moroccan Jews were more perspicacious and audacious than those of Sighet in 1940–44? And thanks to the World Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Agency, nearly the entire Moroccan Jewish community emigrated to Israel between 1952 and 1956.
I became attached to them—not surprisingly, since I love the Sephardim. As a child I pictured the Messiah with dark skin, a black beard, and dark eyes—in a word, a Sephardi. (May the Ashkenazis forgive me, and if the Messiah is an Ashkenazi, may He forgive me as well.) I also loved the familial, patriarchal spirit that governed their relations. On Friday night the synagogue