Playing for control of distance: Card games between Jews and Muslims on a Casablancan beach

As part of their effort to cope with their future dissolution as a diasporic community (due to a constant demographic decrease), members of the diminished Jewish minority in Morocco try to contain their relations with Muslims within well-defined and controllable sociocultural enclaves. In this article, I examine one such enclave - a private beach named "Tahiti" - where Jews and Muslims engage through card games. I argue that as non-serious and rigidly patterned behavior, card games offer a protective social frame, allowing Jews and Muslims to interact freely. Moreover the games provide Jews a legitimate opportunity to convey critical messages and to maintain an open dialogue with Muslims without feeling exposed to danger. These very constrained and controlled enclaves, however, also provide Jews with an opportunity to construct and underline strangeness in a society that has hosted them for two millennia. This strangeness in turn, fortifies the enclave's boundaries. [enclave culture, diaspora, religious minority group, demographic decrease, Moroccan Jews, Jewish-Muslim relations, card games].