Int. J. Middle East Stud. 44 (2012), 421–442 doi:10.1017/S0020743812000402 Oren Kosansky and Aomar Boum THE “JEWISH QUESTION ” IN POSTCOLONIAL MOROCCAN CINEMA Abstract In this historically and anthropologically oriented article, we situate the recent wave of Jewish- themed Moroccan films within the context of the liberalizing transformations and associated nationalist narratives promoted by the current Moroccan regime. Reflecting Mohammed VI’s commitment to widening the space of civil society, the task of enacting these transformations and producing these narratives devolves increasingly to nonstate agents in the public sphere. Previously monopolized and managed more comprehensively by the state, the “Jewish Question”—that is, contestations over representations of Jews as authentic members of the Moroccan body politic—is now taken up in a range of public media less subject to direct government control. We demonstrate that the role of cinema in this process reflects the shifting relationship between state and civil society in the late postcolonial period. More specifically, we argue that the production, circulation, and reception of Jewish-themed films is diagnostic of the state’s ability to open new spaces of public representation and debate that foster precisely those images of the state and nation promoted by the current regime in regional and global contexts. In his influential essay “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx instigated a way of interro- gating the relationship between the state and civil society. Marx insisted that the Jewish Question in 19th-century Europe extended beyond the relationship between religion and the state to encompass the relationship between secular difference, in all its forms, and the pretense of universal citizenship. Marx disclosed how the invention of formally equal men (represented by the emancipated Jew as citizen) across axes of parochial difference (represented by the emancipated citizen as Jew) was predicated on and defined against the persistence of social difference, power, and inequality, which would not be threatened in the emerging civil society. 1 Civil society, Marx argued, was established as the protected terrain within which the class interests of the bourgeois-dominated state could freely flourish through the legal enshrinement of private property and the egoistic effects of religion. The state’s retreat from direct control over religion, property, family, labor, and so forth—which is to say the creation of civil society as such—was less an abdication of state power than its restructuring within the enduring capitalist order. Oren Kosansky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Ore.; e-mail: kosansky@lclark.edu. Aomar Boum is an Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.; e-mail: bouma@email.arizona.edu © Cambridge University Press 2012 0020-7438/12 $15.00