The Jewish commissioning clients of Casablanca

A city is usually read through its architects. Casablanca can also be read through its commissioning clients — and, in the modern centre, many of them bear the names of Moroccan Jewish families.

How one becomes a builder

That role was not built in a day. Long established in international trade, these families had the languages, the networks and the usages needed to deal with foreign merchants. The system of consular protections, in force since the eighteenth century, had moreover encouraged the emergence of a bourgeoisie possessed of capital and exempt from certain dues.

One obstacle remained: in the mellah (the walled Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city), land could not be held beyond one's own dwelling. In the 1920s it was the move to the ville nouvelle, the European-planned new town, that lifted this ceiling — and turned merchants into landowners, and then into builders.

The blocks of the city centre

The phenomenon quickly gathered scale: in the ville nouvelle, Jewish owners became one of the principal landholding groups. The façades still bear the trace of those decisions.

Lévy et Bendayan entrusted Marius Boyer in 1928 with a landmark block on a boulevard. Seven years later, in 1935, Haim Bendahan had Edmond Brion raise the building we came across among the neighbours of the Assayag. And, between the two, Moses Assayag commissioned from Boyer the three towers on boulevard Hassan Seghir.

What such a decision costs

It is worth pausing on the nature of the commitment. To commission a ten-storey block in 1930 was to tie up considerable capital for years, in a city where nothing guaranteed that the growth would continue. It also meant accepting a long building site, technical hazards — the concrete, the water, the lifts — and commercial uncertainty over future rents.

These clients were not patrons of the arts: they were investing. But their choices — verrières (the tall glazed screens that light and ventilate the stairwells), terraces, communal services — show that they were not looking solely for the maximum return per square metre.

The villas: the other side

The same movement can be read in the residential districts. In 1928 Boyer signed a villa for Raphaël Bénazéraf — now gone — while the Benzaken, Coriat, Ettedgui and Tolédano families turned to the Suraqui brothers, architects from the same community.

Where the block displays modernity to the city, the villa often expresses a more intimate relation to local culture: Moses Assayag would thus have Boyer build him a villa with a neo-Moroccan patio.

After the war: a new generation, a new language

After 1945, the commission changed hands and changed style. The physician Gaston Brami had Gaston Jaubert build him, in 1952, a block of sculptural expression. Sami Suissa entrusted his villa to Jean-François Zevaco in 1947; the Schulmann family turned in 1952 to Élie Azagury; the grain merchant Maurice Varsano called on Wolfgang Ewerth in 1954.

A generation earlier, Art Deco had been commissioned from architects who had come from Europe. Now commissions go to practitioners born in Casablanca, who speak the international language of modernity.

What a list of names tells us

Set out in this way, these names say three things. First, confidence: one does not commission a ten-storey block without believing in the future of a city. Second, exacting standards: these clients chose the best practitioners of the day. Finally, continuity: from one decade to the next, the same families come back, change architect, follow the evolution of styles.

It is this collective energy, more than any isolated talent, that produced the Art Deco and modern landscape of Casablanca — of which the Immeuble Assayag remains one of the most visible landmarks.

Frequently asked questions

Who were the principal Jewish commissioning clients in the ville nouvelle?

Among others: Moses Assayag, Haim Bendahan, Lévy et Bendayan, Raphaël Bénazéraf, together with the Benzaken, Coriat, Ettedgui and Tolédano families.

Why were these families able to build on such a scale?

Because the ville nouvelle allowed them, unlike the mellah, to acquire land and to build freely — and because international trade had given them the capital and the networks they needed.

Were these commissions limited to blocks of flats?

No: villas, schools and social housing belong to the same movement, with architects such as the Suraqui brothers, Zevaco, Azagury and Ewerth.

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