At the start of the twentieth century, on the eve of colonial conquest, Moroccan Jewry made up the largest Jewish community in Arab lands, numbering about a hundred thousand. The Jews were deeply integrated into the country's economy. They lived in virtually every principal location, playing a vital role in the trades and in commerce. Culturally, too, they were an integral part of their neighborhoods – with the exception of the religious sphere. Language – which was the main barrier between ethnic and religious groups in the premodern period – posed no impediment. Jews spoke the languages of their surroundings: mainly Arabic, but in some regions a Berber or Spanish local dialect as well.

Given this background, the salient social boundary concerned economics: there were large, even huge, differences between rich and poor of the same religion, whether Muslims or Jews, alongside close relations between individual Jews and Muslims of the same economic status. But in terms of collective identity, the religious barrier was the foremost social boundary, and the line dividing Muslims and Jews was noticeable. Both religious groups believed in their essential difference and their superiority over members of other religions, while the religious laws of each required zones of social distance and segregation. This similarity aside, there was a hierarchy that came to the fore in the dominant position of Muslims. Jews were of a protected status – dhimmis – which entailed subordination to the faithful (i.e., the Muslims). Jewish subordination had a number of external, visible expressions. Chief among these was the Koranic jizia or poll tax, but there were also various signs of discrimination, which I will not discuss here.

Nonetheless, by the end of the Muslim period, new models of collective identity penetrated the Jewish communities. These were introduced by Jewish movements and organizations from abroad: the Hebrew Haskalah or Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), on the other, neither of which lowered the religious barrier. Both declared outright that the Moroccan situation was no longer normative in Europe or in progressive Muslim lands, such as the Ottoman Empire, where the official ideal was Jewish equality. Moreover, in the 1880s, the Hebrew Haskalah started to carry a Jewish-national message, which only reinforced the boundaries of the old religious community with the added element of nationalism.