Antisemitism Theme Analysis

Orwell visits the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, recognizing the historical legacy of restrictions placed on the city’s Jewish people and hearing “dark rumours about the Jews” from both Arabs and “poorer Europeans.” These observations, given in a travel narrative published in 1939, allude to Hitler, whose “Final Solution” would soon engulf Jewish and other marginalized populations in Europe. Highlighting the ethnic divisions that someone like Hitler drew in the 1930s, Orwell shows how this kind of hateful and scapegoating rhetoric fuels tension between similarly disenfranchised groups—in this case, between impoverished Arab people and impoverished Jewish people in Marrakech. Orwell highlights how, even among the poor in Marrakech, a hierarchy exists that is structured around ethnicity, and he traces the lack of solidarity that might exist among these groups. Those who spread these “dark rumours” all share a place in the grinding poverty that surrounds the inhabitants of Marrakech.

By blaming Jewish people for secretly and cunningly controlling financial institutions, impoverished people in Marrakech (and Morocco more broadly) ultimately obscure the actual conditions that have led to their cultural and economic disenfranchisement: namely, the colonial forces that have taken advantage of what their country has to offer. Arguing that the Jews aren’t hiding behind a façade of poverty, Orwell highlights how they experience the same challenges with the arid climate and extreme poverty. In turn, the antisemitic theories and “rumours” become blatantly absurd. In fact, Orwell devotes much of his travel narrative to anecdotes that dispel these “dark rumours.” Orwell’s evidence of the real poverty of the Jewish people in Marrakech is overwhelming: groups of deprived children, a marketplace filled with cave-like booths, and bodies contorted by physical labor. The tiny streets and near-windowless houses of the Jewish quarters illustrate a history of oppression—a history in which Jewish people have been cast to the margins of this society. As Orwell references the medieval history of the Jewish people in Marrakech, he also explicitly ties these modern antisemitic “rumours” to charges of witchcraft against poor women in the past. As a result, Orwell emphasizes how those in control promote exclusionary behavior among the poor as a way of obscuring their own oppressive tactics.