On matching unmatchables: soccer games between Jews and Muslims in Casablanca

Morocco was decolonized in 1956, after a forty-four-year, and by some accounts painless, period of French rule. To be sure, decolonization did not mean an abrupt and simple termination of external domination, but a continuing “dialogue with the colonial past.”¹ And that dialogue added special fuel to the fire by virtue of the fact that various groups were differently exposed to the colonial force, and either suffered from it, or enjoyed its fruits, according to their socioeconomic, cultural, and political situation. As I discuss below, Jews, as a subordinate religious minority, had much to gain from French rule.