1941-1943: years of rupture

The history of a building sometimes crosses that of the laws. At the beginning of the 1940s, what one could inhabit in Casablanca ceased, for part of the population, to depend on one's means.

1941: the ville nouvelle forbidden

In 1941, the Vichy legislation was applied in Morocco. Among its provisions was a measure of urban policy with direct consequences: Jews were forbidden to reside in the ville nouvelle, the European-planned new town, with the exception of the villa suburbs.

Its reach is considerable if one remembers the road travelled: since the 1920s, thousands of families had left the mellah, the walled Jewish quarter, for those very districts, and Jewish clients were among the principal owners there. The measure covered the ville nouvelle as a whole — the very one where the Art Deco blocks of the centre stand.

November 1942: the landings

The situation turned on 8 November 1942, with the Allied landings. Casablanca then ceased to be a city far from the war and became one of its bases.

Two months later, in January 1943, it hosted the Casablanca Conference, where part of the rest of the conflict was decided. That same year, the film that bears its name finished turning the word “Casablanca” into a stage set of the world's imagination — at roughly the moment when the real city was living through its most strained hours.

1945-1956: picking up the thread

The end of the war opened a decade of intense building activity. The building sites started up again, a new generation of architects made its mark — Zevaco, Azagury — and vast housing programmes came into being, notably for the poorest families.

Then came 1956 and the independence of Morocco. The Jewish community of Casablanca, which numbered nearly 75,000 people in 1952 and in 1960 represented some 45% of the country's Jewish population, then began a movement of emigration that would lastingly transform the face of the city.

Those years explain in part why the built heritage of Casablanca needs, today, to be protected and to have its story told.

Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, “Casablanca la juive: Public and Private Architecture 1912-1960”, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (Fondazione CDEC).