Preserving the House of the Saint: Religious and Secular Practices of Heritage in the Medina of Casablanca

Abstract

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is a small place of Saint veneration located in the medina of Casablanca. It is situated near a recently renovated area known as the “Triangle of Tolerance”, which comprises a synagogue, a mosque, and a church. This portion of the Old City has been heavily patrimonialized in the last decade and now encloses two museums which host Jewish objects. The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, located in the same area, has not attracted institutional attention. It remains a shared space of veneration and preserves religious objects in a form of insider-led practice of conservation. This article interrogates the different trajectories of religious heritage in the medina of Casablanca, highlighting how State-led projects of patrimonialization have resulted in a form of secularization of Jewish heritage. The study of Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto illustrates how rituality and faith can constitute different forms of motivation for the preservation of Jewish heritage in Casablanca and foster community resilience and transmission. The contribution is based on ethnographic and museological fieldwork within the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto and in the surrounding urban area, coupled with semi-structured interviews with the guardian of the Dar and other members of the Jewish community of Casablanca.

1. Introduction

The idea for this article began on a walk through the medina of Casablanca. In an attempt to reach the newly renovated Ettedgui synagogue, I asked two young men for directions. They agreed to take me to the synagogue but, on the way to my destination, they insisted that I should visit another Jewish space: the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. Haim, the guardian of the Dar, welcomed the two Muslim men and I as if we were a very usual assortment, and began recounting the story of the space. After our visit, we walked the short path to the Ettedgui synagogue, in which I penetrated alone as my companions did not wish to enter. The armed policemen in front of the synagogue, its emptiness, and its silence contrasted with the welcome and company I had experienced a few minutes earlier in the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. I began to think about these concomitant experiences as a physical manifestation of the ambiguous nature of Jewish heritage in contemporary Morocco. The Ettedgui synagogue, with its freshly painted walls, its museum rooms, and its security guards authenticated the narrative of Moroccan Judaism as a thing of the past, acting as a machine for the recontextualization (Ames 1992) of Jewishness in contemporary Morocco. Pieprzak’s (2010) provocative questions came to mind while walking the empty rooms of the Ettedgui synagogue: “What other narratives of art and cultural memory are presented outside the national museum’s often crumbling walls? How are alternative museums constructed, and what is their relationship to dominant national and global discourse of art and culture?”. It seemed, then, that the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto could be an entry point to the exploration of different museological behaviors and narratives that occur at the margins of State-led projects of patrimonialization.

1.1. Scope

The study of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is inserted in the analysis of the urban setting of the medina of Casablanca, where institutional projects have created a normative framework for the patrimonialization of religious heritage. This article aims to analyze the patrimonial trajectory of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto as an example of insider-led practice of preservation of religious heritage. The exploration of the actors, technology and museological choices that characterize the patrimonialization of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto reveal alternative paths to heritage preservation that invite us to consider hybridity and lived religiosity as central to the sustained effort to preserve religious spaces and objects. In the wake of comparative studies that have highlighted the ontological and practical differences between a top-down and a bottom-up approach to heritage (Clifford 1991; Kreps 2003), this article shows that the patrimonial urban ecosystem can host a variety of understandings of religious and minority heritage. The comparison between the institutional patrimonialization of the Ettedgui synagogue, with the museumification of its objects, and the family-based patrimonialization of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto aims to prove that religious spaces can come to be considered heritage while continuing to act as intermediaries between communities and the sacred.

1.2. A Brief History of the Saint(s)

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is located in a cul-de-sac that can be accessed from the Rue Mohammed El Hansali, formerly Rue du Commandant Prevost, a long street that crosses the medina of Casablanca from the old clock tower in the east to the western Rue de la Marine. The entrance of the Dar can easily be missed by those unfamiliar with the medina’s layout, but the visitors can rely on a plaque that bears the inscription “Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, 1895” in Arabic, Hebrew and Latin characters. The history embodied by the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is a family history of sainthood and migration.

Having escaped the Portuguese persecutions of the XIV Century, the Pinto family settled in Damascus before arriving to the Moroccan coast, in the city of Agadir. After the closing of the port of Agadir in 1761 by the Sultan, the first Haim Pinto known as “Hagadol”1, himself a highly regarded Jewish Saint, settled in Essaouira. There, he became known for his erudition and miracles. The Saint’s offspring perpetuated the family’s fame of righteousness in the decades to come, remaining attached to the synagogue founded by the Saint and involved in his veneration. Until today, to varying degrees according to the perceived level of safety for the Jews of Moroccan descent, the hillula2 of Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hagadol” is celebrated yearly on his tomb by hundreds of pilgrims.3

In 1855, ten years after the death of Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hagadol”, Rabbi Yehouda Pinto, son of the Saint, had himself a son who was named Haim after his grandfather. This second Haim will become known as Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan”—the smaller—and regarded as righteous and Saint. His life path is closely linked to the history of the Jewish communities of Morocco at the turn of the XIX Century. Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan” was known in Essaouira, where he enjoyed the privileges and performed the religious duties of the family of the Saint. But in the 1860s and 1870s, Essaouira was losing much of its economic and cultural splendor, progressively supplanted by other, newer coastal cities such as Casablanca. It is there that the novelty of the XX Century brought with it the load of economic opportunities that attracted populations from all over Morocco. Among these populations were the Jews, who formed in the white city the biggest and most prosperous Jewish community of modern Morocco.

Like many others, Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan” moved to Casablanca in the mid-1870s, where he established his Yeshiva4, which attracted students from all over Morocco and beyond. Soon, Rabbi Haim’s fame became deeply entangled with prophecies and charity. He was known to redistribute money from the community’s wealthiest to the poorest thanks to the regard in which he was held by Jews and Muslims alike in the medina of the burgeoning economic capital. His prophecies included foreseeing births and deaths and predicting economic success, and he is believed to have performed miracles, namely the healing of the sick. Upon his death, in 1937, Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan” had witnessed the beginning and evolutions of European colonization over Morocco, as well as the start of the nationalist struggle for independence. His body was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Casablanca, where his tomb is now visited yearly on the day of his hillula by pilgrims from all around the Jewish-Moroccan diaspora. Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan” lived in a three-story house in the medina of Casablanca, which today is known as Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto.

2. Materials and Methods

This article is the result of a preliminary fieldwork in the medina of Casablanca, which is inserted in a broader investigation of the politics and religious implications of the patrimonialization of Jewish heritage in contemporary Morocco. The retrieved data rely on a combination of discourse analysis of official documents, archival sources (namely of the National Archives in Rabat), visits of heritage spaces, and semi-structured interviews.

The archival work was conducted, for this article, in the National Archives located in the capital city of Rabat. These host the Fonds Simon Lévy, a documentary collection donated by the Jewish-Moroccan activist and professor Simon Lévy. As Simon Lévy spent the last twenty years of his life advocating for projects of patrimonialization of Jewish heritage, the documents contained in this collection, covering a wide range of decades (1960–2000s), allow to reconstruct the Jewish community’s internal debates with regard to heritage preservation, national belonging, and community representation.

The visits of museums and heritage spaces follow an experimental approach, outlined by Guidi (2022), which emphasizes the importance of repetition. Several visits of the same space allow for the identification of most prominent features, urban and patrimonial environment, policies, and audience. Thus, the three spaces featured in this article—namely the Ettedgui synagogue with its El Mellah museum, the Museum of the Center for Heritage Interpretation, and the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto—have each been visited at least twice. The methodology implied an observational time, aimed at gathering first impressions on the heritage site, and a subsequent visit which included interviews, note-taking, pictures, and the identification of the audience.

The interviews featured in this article consist mainly of three semi-structured conversations with Haim Pinto, the guardian of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, held between 2021 and 2025. These allowed for reconstructing the personal and familial history of the descendant of the Saint, as well as investigating his personal motivations to settle back in Morocco, move into the Dar, and set up an open expository space. It is thanks to Haim’s decision to maintain the devotional character of the space and enrich it with objects on display that the Dar is today a hybrid space, unique in the urban setting of Casablanca. Haim’s perception of the space and its visitors is complemented by a semi-structured interview with a member of the Casablanca-based organization “Casamémoire”, which has inserted the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto in the circuit of its visits of the Casablanca medina, hoping to encourage locals to visit the Saint’s house. Further information was retrieved through semi-formal interviews with two members of the Jewish community of Casablanca who regularly visit the Dar and who shared their view on the space’s religious and patrimonial meaning, as well as their understanding of the practices and behaviors to be kept within it. Two Muslim inhabitants of the medina of Casablanca also helped complexify the understanding of this space by explaining their personal and family connection to the Dar, as well as the practice of veneration of Jewish saints among Moroccan Muslims.

The reflection on the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto as a hybrid space, attracting pilgrims and tourists of diverse origins, ages, and backgrounds, also stems from the data retrieved from the visitor’s book contained in the Dar. The wishes, prayers, comments, and contacts left by the visitors at different times (in 2022 and, later, in 2025) allowed for the gathering of information on the characteristics of the audience, namely their country of origin and their religious affiliation, and for detecting their evolution.

3. Urban Space, Heritage, and the Sacred

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto exists in a highly patrimonialized portion of the medina of Casablanca, one where religious buildings dominate, through height and size, the neighborhood’s outline. In 2010, under the patronage of King Mohammed VI, the medina of Casablanca was the object of three programs aimed at its modernization. The medina, long forgotten by public policies, was characterized by a general abandonment that hindered the safety of its population and heritage. Program I, initiated in August 2010 and whose completion was inaugurated by the King himself in April 2014, focused on works that included urban sanitation, installation of public lighting, the repaving of roads, and the relocation of populations living in the dilapidated houses of the medina. A second and subsequent Program (2014–2019) aimed to identify decaying structures and assess the property value of the medina’s buildings. The cost of two thirds of these works was covered by the Ministry of Interior, and the remaining third by the Fonds Hassan II, a private foundation owned by the King, for a total of 330 million dirhams (around 33 million euros)5. A third program, whose implementation took place between 2018 and 2023, had the goal of boosting the economic development and fostering the tourist attractivity of Casablanca, a notoriously little-visited city in Morocco, through the promotion of artisanal production as well as the rehabilitation of heritage sites. Through this last phase of the urban management plan for the medina of Casablanca, two tourist circuits came to life. One is centered around the commercial alleys of the medina; another includes the old city’s monuments and the “Triangle of Tolerance”.

3.1. Patrimonializing Religious Heritage

The “Triangle of Tolerance” is a portion of the western part of the medina of Casablanca, delimited by the Ould el-Hamra mosque, the Ettedgui Synagogue, and the Buenaventura Catholic Church. These three religious buildings constitute the edges of the imagined perimeter, the intersection of Christian, Muslim and Jewish religioscapes (Hayden and Walker 2013) in the medina of Casablanca. Albeit not an official name for the area, the designation “Triangle of Tolerance” is employed by local tourist guides, by government documents, and most notably by the museum of the Heritage Interpretation Center of the Old Medina.

The museum is located on the premises of the old Abdellaouia private school, founded in 1941 by Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef, and adjacent to the Ould el-Hamra mosque. The interior of the building, renovated during Program II of the previously described rehabilitation projects initiated by King Mohammed VI, presents the typical architectural features of a Moroccan madrasa, and hosts both the offices of the Institute as well as four museum rooms, whose expository goal is to reconstruct the history of the medina of Casablanca from prehistoric to contemporary times. Within the reconstruction of the history of Casablanca, the museum hosts one room that is entirely dedicated to the religious heritage of the medina. The visit of this room begins with an introduction to XX Century urban history of the medina: the growing number of inhabitants, the overpopulation, and the increased porosity between Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods. The rest of the room is dedicated exclusively to religious heritage or, as the museum panels brand it, “the heritage of religious diversity in the old medina”.

The means of display of religious heritage in the museum is varied and engaging. A wide glass box contains Jewish religious objects—among which a Torah scroll, a lamp, a shofar6—found in the synagogues of the medina of Casablanca or loaned from the Museum of Moroccan Judaism located in the outskirts of Casablanca. On the other side of the room, visitors can watch a 4 min video introduction to religious heritage in the medina, which includes photographs and descriptions of the Ettedgui synagogue, Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, Buenaventura Catholic Church, Saint John’s Anglican Church, and the five mosques of the medina. Around the screen, two objects hang side by side from the roof: a bell taken from the Buenaventura Church and a candle from the Ettedgui synagogue. Although the panel describes the content of the video as a summary of the “Triangle of Tolerance”, the idea of the “Triangle” extends beyond the sacred geography of the medina to embrace a wider array of religious buildings and spaces that are invested with the symbolic power of representing the religious diversity of Casablanca. The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is in fact located outside the imagined perimeter, and Saint John’s Anglican Church stands outside the walls of the medina.

The patrimonial effort displayed and embodied by this small museum aims to conserve objects and rehabilitate and restore religious buildings in the urban space. Jewish heritage, above all others, has been the focus of a series of patrimonial policies that began at the end of the XX Century and whose evolutions can be witnessed until today. The mass departure of the Jewish community of Morocco, which took place in different waves from the 1950s to the 1980s, led to the community’s numerical and behavioral contraption (Levy 2024) which prompted a shift in the understanding of religious objects and spaces within the remaining Jewish community. Its institutions, namely the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco (the Council)—the elected body charged with representing the regional Jewish Committees—began discussing the preservation of Jewish heritage as a matter of communal survival. The debates of the 1980s, very much influenced by the socialist activist and professor Simon Lévy, promoted “a heritage-based approach to cultural management” (Rey 2020) and led to the birth of the Foundation for Judeo-Moroccan Cultural Heritage (the Foundation) in 1995. The role of the Foundation, as per its statute, is to work for the preservation of Jewish material and immaterial heritage, and to make it accessible to the public through museums, digital dissemination, and academic research7. The first years of the Foundation’s life were characterized by an effort of systematic identification of religious and community buildings throughout Morocco, in the cities as well as in the country, and the gathering of the objects left behind in Jewish sites and in private homes. Many of these objects were transported to Casablanca, where the Museum of Moroccan Judaism opened its doors in 1998. Often labeled as the only Jewish museum of the Arab-Muslim world8, this institution was directed by Simon Lévy until his death in 2011, and subsequently by his student and assistant Zhor Rehihil, a Muslim woman with a background in museum management and Jewish-Moroccan heritage. In parallel to the creation of the museum, the Foundation prompted the renovation of synagogues—namely in Fes—and Jewish cemeteries, ensuring their upkeep through the appointment of local personnel.

In the 2000s, what began as a communal effort witnessed a diversification of actors who saw Jewish heritage preservation as a means to articulate narratives about the Moroccan nation. The Moroccan State, in particular, became involved in the projects of Jewish heritage preservation through Ministries, King-owned Foundations, and King representatives. In this patrimonial frenzy, aided by a relative opening of national politics under the new King Mohammed VI (1999-), synagogues were renovated all around Morocco, cemeteries cleaned and restored, and mellah-s9 were renovated and their buildings refurbished. Marrakesh constitutes the best-known, albeit not the only, example of the State’s rapid investment in the renovation of Jewish heritage sites and spaces. Since 2017, the mellah of Marrakesh and its sacred spaces have been entirely rehabilitated and inserted in the project of renovation of the whole medina of Marrakesh. It is thanks to this project that visitors can now pleasantly walk through the doors of the mellah, whose original street names have been restored, and reach the Jewish cemetery through renovated markets and fonduq-s10. In 2022, the mellah’s Lazama synagogue, which used to host a small photographic museum, was refurbished and the expository space enlarged. In the process, access to the space became possible through the payment of a ticket, and the chosen museography now aims to inform the visitor about the history of the city’s community as well as the Atlas Jews’.

Similarly, adopting a “toponymical display of identity” (Rey and Pascoe 2020), a series of other regional Jewish museums opened in renovated synagogues in the Assayagh synagogue of Tangier, in the Meier Toledano di Tanja synagogue of Meknes, and within the Ettedgui synagogue in the medina of Casablanca. In 2020, Bayt Dakira, a museum and cultural center founded by André Azoulay, Jewish native of Essaouira and counselor to the King, was inaugurated in Essaouira by Mohammed VI himself. A year later, the project of a national museum of Jewish culture in Fes, fully funded by the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication, was announced; this site, bound to be the largest and richest in objects, has not yet been opened to the public.

The conjoint efforts of the Jewish community, Jewish institutions, State actors, NGOs, and international sponsors have led to an unprecedented movement of patrimonialization of Jewish Moroccan heritage in the last half-century. This movement can be understood as a means for the deployment of a strategy of symbolic and practical reconstitution of Moroccanness and, through it, of the relationship between the different Moroccan identities. Through the reactivation of urban spaces and places as a physical testament to the tradition of Moroccan diversity, an unproblematized reading of the past is put forward by a plethora of actors, whose investment in heritage results in the redefinition of community, national, and interreligious memories attached to heritage. Heritage, and material heritage in particular, serves for institutional patrimonial actors as an immutable vessel for the propagation of a specific idea of the Moroccan nation which, albeit changing, remains controlled by State institutions and, most notably, by the Palace. In this contemporary understanding of Moroccanness, ethnic and religious cleavages are naturalized and neutralized through the lionization of the peaceful coexistence that would have characterized the country’s history, providing the basis for today’s Moroccan model of tolerance. Nevertheless, Jewish heritage spaces continue to be dissonant (Hayden 2002), for their mere existence has the potential to encapsulate different narratives, reflect historical injustices, and challenge official histories. The definition of an official memory of Judaism and its manifestation through heritage in the urban space of the medina of Casablanca was accompanied by the adoption of official museumification practices and codes, which manifest both in the space of the museum and in the space of the Ettedgui Synagogue.

3.2. Secularization of Heritage or the Centrality of Religion

The Ettedgui synagogue, one of the angles of the “Triangle of Tolerance”, underwent a process of renovation that led to the restoration of its rooms—the praying spaces and the adjacent offices—within the programs of rehabilitation of the medina. The synagogue, built in the 1920s by a wealthy Jewish family of Casablanca, was partly destroyed during the American bombing of the city in 1942 and later inserted into the plan of heritage preservation of the medina’s religious buildings. The works, which took place between 2010 and 2016, were pursued in cooperation with the Foundation, who provided a series of photographs from the Museum of Moroccan Judaism to be displayed in the rooms adjacent to the praying space of the synagogue. These expository rooms became known as the El Mellah museum, and their content, although very similar to the one in the bigger Museum, includes a small selection of photographs that relate specifically to Jewish life in Casablanca. One of these photographs depicts an undated royal visit of king Mohammed V to the Jewish community’s youth groups. The synagogue walls, completely empty, are home to a plaque commemorating the King’s visit to the renovated synagogue in 2016.

The Ettedgui space underwent a radical change after its patrimonialization: the synagogue, through its integration in a larger museal space, lost its ability to be used as a space of worship for the local and visiting Jewish communities. Even if the synagogue continues to host the Torah scrolls, an essential feature for some Jewish religious celebrations which include Torah reading, its role has shifted from one of lived religion to one of visit and tourism. Indeed, the presence of the Torah scrolls, enclosed in the Aron Kodesh, suggests that the place still possesses the ability to host religious life for the local community and the visitors; nevertheless, the absence of seating areas—for both men and women-, siddur11, and kippot for the visitors suggest that religious celebrations are not held in the Ettedgui synagogue12.

The patrimonialization of the synagogue–museum has also led to the adoption of official practices of access to the space. A ticket of 50 dirhams (approximately 5€) is needed to enter the premises of both the synagogue and the El Mellah museum; security agents patrol the perimeter of the sacred space and oftentimes ask the visitors to prove their identity; the gate, only way of entering the premises, is always closed and the intervention of a security agent is needed to access the museum-synagogue. Visitors of the Ettedgui synagogue are themselves asked to perform a secular identity (Duncan 1995) in a sacred place, through the technology of this patrimonial site but also through the preclusion of the possibility of worship.

The reconfiguration of the Ettedgui synagogue through official patrimonial policies signal a shift from Jewish sacredness to Jewish representation, from use to observation, from self-definition to State display of religion. This shift begs the question of the underlying process of secularization of religious spaces by means of patrimonial policies in Morocco. The contemporary debates on the concept of secularization tend to highlight the diversity of secular practices within States and societies, and their constant reconfiguration in response to both internal and international challenges. Although secularism is nowhere to be found in its ideal type, the concept proves useful to understand the relationship between the modern State and religious groups. If, in a strict understanding of secularism, the State is the grantor of the total separation between its institutions and religion, a widely spread, neoliberal conception of secularism tends to sanction the centrality of the State in the establishment of normative relations between religious groups (Bender and Klassen 2010).

Museums and heritage sites serve as both vessels and mirrors for the definition of the role of the State in society’s religious life (Guidi 2022): they reflect the State’s ambition of being the sole negotiator of norms and values attached to religion, and they act, through their legal and expository means, as instruments of the definition of religious identities. Thus, Jewish museums in Morocco have been understood as instrumental in branding “convivencia” (Boum 2020), or peaceful coexistence, as a constitutive element of Moroccan tradition. The trope of an Andalusian harmonious coexistence between religions that would have found its way to Morocco after the Christian reconquest of Andalusia continues to be discursively promoted in Morocco (Calderwood 2018) also through the investment in Jewish heritage sites and objects, and the consequent representation of interreligious history through the definition of a local, Moroccan Islam characterized by moderation and tolerance.

Placed in this analytical framework, the transformation of the Ettedgui synagogue suggests that patrimonialization can be considered as a tool to achieve secularization, one where Judaism is not erased but re-centered, displayed in glass boxes, and assigned a memorial value that comes to strengthen the narrative of coexistence. In parallel, the State’s investment in the definition of the representation of Judaism in Moroccan museums points to the need to consider patrimonial projects as arenas of affirmation of power by the State: the power to grant patrimonial existence to religious communities.

In order for sacred spaces to become suitable vessels for the promotion of values and models of the secular, State-led museum projects tend, through the set of rules that they impose, to secularize the space and experience of the sacred. “No touching, no spitting, no praying” is the provocative title chosen by Mathur and Singh (2015) for their study of South Asian museum practices. The museumified Ettedgui synagogue in the medina of Casablanca also demands from its visitors that they acknowledge the secular character of the space by abstaining from performing religious rites, and by admiring, in silence and without touching, the objects and photographs in the adjacent El Mellah museum. The secularization of sacred spaces through their museumification is a process that has interested the religious spaces as well as the objects that they hosted. The parallel process of spoliation of spaces of worship and the placing of their religious objects in museum glass boxes (Cirianni Salazar 2020) has shifted the possible relation of communities to their material heritage and substituted the mediation of the sacred with museal panels, descriptions, and normative technologies of display.

In the museum, Jewish religious objects lose their ability to act as intermediaries between the faithful and the sacred and are presented as defining features of a largely disappeared Moroccan community. Deprived of their original function, Jewish objects in glass boxes acquire an instructional role. The descriptions attached to the objects in the museums explain their use and significance to a non-Jewish audience while providing little or no justification as to why they were deemed important to be preserved. At the same time, the display of Jewish religious objects in Moroccan museums tends to present the Jewish community as purely religious, inserting its existence—past and present—into the framework of a possible interreligious dialog while relegating its social, political, and heterogeneous dimensions to the margins, unworthy of patrimonialization.

The effort to secularize sacred spaces has often resulted in the sanctioning of the centrality of religion in public policies. As the State cannot enact a strict understanding of secularism, it embraces models of religious management in which the State itself acknowledges and creates specific spaces for religions (Todd 2010). In so doing, Judaism and Islam become, in the eyes of State institutions, “sealed religious traditions” (Mittermaier 2010) whose evolutions, internal heterogeneity, and diverse approaches to sacredness are sidelined in the normative representation of their communal existence at the State level (Mahmood 2016). Additionally, this management of religious identities through normativization and immutability sanctions acceptable interreligious behaviors—related to sexuality, love and marriage, or religiosity and worship—that “divert attention from the way many traditions are already mutually constitutive” (Mittermaier 2010).

The patrimonialization of Jewish material heritage through State institutions embodies a tension towards the secularization of religion and its national memory, thus legitimizing the centrality of sacred heritage and its role in society through norms and rules. In spatial proximity to the patrimonialized “Triangle of Tolerance”, the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto offers a counter-model, one where heritage classification and practices emerge within the framework of the sacred.

4. Non-State Heritage and Its Practices

If the Ettedgui synagogue and its adjacent space were deemed worthy of State investment—both material and symbolic—the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto has witnessed a patrimonial evolution through other actors, motivations, and tools. The Council, the Foundation, State representatives, Ministries, and even supranational organizations such as the World Monument Fund13 have taken the lead of the patrimonialization of Jewish heritage, making insider-led practices of conservation and use of religious heritage much harder to find. The small museum located in the old Em-Habbanim school, accessible within the perimeter of the Jewish cemetery of Fes, has also had the ambition to offer an expository space where religious and museal practices could be layered by the pilgrim-visitor. Created in the early 2000s by Edmond Gabbay, guardian of the cemetery, the small museum hosts a variety of objects left behind by the Jewish community of the city’s mellah, “mixing ritual, museal, funerary, and tourist practices” (Melloul 2026). In the museum, the experience of the community’s heritage was de-normativized through the possibility of touching the objects, and sometimes even purchasing them. The Fes cemetery’s museum was a private initiative aimed at preserving the urban Jewish heritage within a sacred space and allowed for the emergence of practices of sacred and heritage that were not mutually exclusive and provided room for the coexistence of diverse motivations to visit the space, and of different museological behaviors. In this sense, Gabbay’s museum had a lot in common with the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. Nevertheless, the small museum of the cemetery of Fes has closed its doors in 2020, further shrinking the landscape of privately led hybrid Jewish spaces.

The aim of this section is to retrace the history of the patrimonialization of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto and to highlight the ways in which sacred spaces, without being invested by the State, are museumified in the medina of Casablanca.

4.1. Patrimonialization from Within: Community, Museology, and Technology of Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is composed of two areas, only one of which has witnessed a patrimonial trajectory. The space that has been the object of a patrimonial project is located on the ground floor of the Pinto home. The two floors above remain inaccessible to the visitors and constitute the home of the grandson of Rabbi Haim Pinto “Hakatan”, himself named Haim. Like many Jews of his generation, Haim left Morocco in 1967 with his brothers and mother and settled in Montreal, where he became an accountant. The Dar was guarded by his two uncles, who refused to leave Morocco. But Haim’s family and the Jewish-Moroccan diaspora in Montreal continued to celebrate the Saint in their new home. A picture of the Saint in the Pinto home in Montreal served and continues to serve as a shrine and place of veneration for the migrant community. The mobility of the Saint and the continuation of his veneration in Canada participated greatly in the mobilization of resources for the patrimonialization of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto.

The path to the patrimonialization of the Dar began around 30 years ago in a fortuitous manner. Indeed, Haim explains, after the death of his uncles in 1980, he had hired a Muslim neighbor to keep the keys to the Dar, provide basic maintenance, and open the door for the local pilgrims. Nevertheless, while in Montreal, Haim was paid a visit by a friend, a Jewish man who had just been to Casablanca, who told him that the chosen key-keeper was unreliable and that he could help find a more suitable man for the job. Haim agreed and, knowing his visitor was bound to Paris and New York, he asked for his help in raising funds to renovate the old Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. To encourage members of the Jewish Moroccan communities to donate for the renovation, and to assure them of the legitimacy of his request, Haim gave his visitor a letter describing his project of rehabilitation and embellishment, which he signed with his own name, inevitably the same name as the Saint.

The visitor kept his word and gathered a rather large sum of money from the Jewish-Moroccan communities in New York, Paris, and Montreal. Eventually, the man returned to Casablanca, where holding Haim’s letter, he went to the Beth El synagogue—one of the most active synagogues of Casablanca—and managed to gather donations from the Casablanca Jewish community. Among the witnesses at the temple was Haim’s maternal uncle, Alain. During his first visit to Casablanca, some years earlier, Haim had asked him for help in renovating the Dar, which he had conveniently avoided to provide. When the letter was read by the visitor at the Beth El synagogue, nevertheless, the uncle called Haim’s mother, claiming that he had dreamed about the Saint Rabbi Haim Pinto sitting beside his grandson, Haim, and that he had taken it as a sign to contribute to the renovation of the Saint’s home. Dreams are not an uncommon catalyzer of heritage preservations, as analyzed by Bilu (2005) in the case of the creation and patrimonialization of sacred spaces within the Jewish-Moroccan community in Israel. Like his counterparts in Israel, Alain did not only donate, but he also set up a whole group of Jews of Casablanca who followed the works of renovation and participated in the gathering of materials needed for its embellishment. New chandeliers, blue tiles for the walls, tables, and cabinets were donated by the city’s community; the names of the benefactors were inscribed on a sign that hangs on a wall of the renovated Dar. As Haim specifies, nevertheless, this sign should have included all the forgotten names of those Moroccan Jews abroad who donated in the initial phases of the fundraising for the Dar. Alain also digitalized and printed the few available images of the Saint, and decorated the walls with the photographs, on which he consistently added his own name.

The space of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto that can be visited is relatively small. The walls, between the large-scale prints of the Saint, are decorated by a collection of diverse photographs. In many of these photographs star Haim and his family members, including his grandmother Messaouda, his brothers, and his parents. These pictures were taken either inside the Dar, or on the tombs of the Saints in the Jewish cemeteries of Casablanca and Essaouira. One picture features Haim sitting in his home in Montreal with a wall-size picture of the Saint. Others depict his Bar Mitzvah, his parents’ wedding, family celebrations of hillulot, and the Saints’ tombs. Under the wall, large cupboards contain dozens of religious books, mainly written in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, some of which recount the history of the Saints and their miracles. In between the two cupboards, a tall display cabinet hosts the jellaba14 worn by the Saint “Hakatan” in the last years of his life. The only glass box of the Dar contains the original letter, signed by himself, through which he solicited donations around the world. On its side, a donation box, prayer books, and a few oil lamps with their wicks inhabit the space formerly occupied by the Saint’s bed. Two tables, several chairs, a fridge, and an old printer complete the decor of the Dar.

When Haim moved back to Casablanca, some fifteen years ago, he renovated the upper floors of the Dar and made these his home. But he also set up rules and technologies to help him welcome an increasing number of visitors from Europe, North America, and Israel. Thus, even if the Dar is not easy to find, the visitor will find that the rules of the experience of the Dar are clear since before entry: a set of expected behaviors is posted on the Dar’s door. The main request is a contribution of 50 dirhams (approximately 5€) per visitor, which is allocated to the renovation and “various expenses” of the Dar. The rule is signed “Haim Pinto, Grandson of the Tsadik15 Rabbi Haim Pinto, living actually on the premises”. Another notice asks the visitors to ring the doorbell in order to access the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. Usually, it is Haim himself who comes down the stairs to open the door for the visitors; at times, his assistant does it for him; rarely, nobody is home, and the visitors must patiently wait for their return. Furthermore, Haim has installed a camera through which he can observe the entry to the space and the visitors even when he is not home. The fridge allows him to preserve the food that is donated to the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, and the printer is a necessary tool for him to continue working with his Canadian clients, by sending and receiving documents through fax. It is through this printer that he had asked his assistant in Montreal to send him pictures of his life in Morocco, and of his family, to hang on the walls of the Dar. These technological choices participate in the creation of a museum-like environment, yet one that remains deeply embedded with sacred practice and lived religion.

The patrimonialization of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is the result of a communal, Jewish-Moroccan desire to preserve the space and make it accessible for visitors and pilgrims alike. This process reflects the attachment of the Casablanca Jewish community to the Saint, which survives through family in migratory contexts, as well as the community’s ability to diversify their approaches to sacred heritage. The museological choices, technology, and actors of Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto confer to this space the ability to sustain different practices, motivations, and expectations. As a space that can be visited as much for heritage reasons as for religious ones, the Dar is the hybrid result of community involvement which, combined with Haim’s presence, have patrimonialized the space outside of the State’s practical and symbolic presence.

4.2. Hybridity and Practices of Heritage in the Sacred Space

The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is a space within which different practices of religious heritage have materialized through community, movements of money, museology, and visits. These practices can complexify the understanding of patrimonialization, a process in which different modes and motives for the preservation and opening of sacred spaces coexist. Several characteristics of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto can be analyzed as elements of enlargement of the definition of heritage practice.

First, the Dar offers an example of community-based practices of heritage conservation that extend beyond the placing of objects in glass boxes and the ensuring of their physical survival. Indeed, in the Dar, visitors are encouraged to pray and ask for miracles from the Saint, not only through words, but through the act of lighting a candle. They are allowed to open the cabinet and touch the Saint’s jellaba, believed to possess itself a power of mediation between the faithful and the Saint. The Dar also regularly hosts times of food sharing, namely during the hillula or after a miracle has been attributed to the Saint, during which several meals, generally couscous, are donated by the faithful to the family of the Saint. Haim explains that, in typical Moroccan fashion, the quantity of the food always exceeds the needs of the family and the pilgrims, thus the neighbors are invited to join the food-sharing practice (seudah) related to the Saint’s veneration.

The Dar is a place where the conservation of the object and the space is less about the possibility for visitors to look and admire, and more about the possibility to experience sacredness through touching, praying, and eating. This understanding of heritage as a space of experience rather than one of admiration participates in the re-definition of the role of patrimonialized religious heritage. Jewish material heritage is, in the Dar, a home for the performance of religiosity, faith, and sacredness, where Jewish and Moroccan traditions are lived and transmitted through—and thanks to—the renovated space of the Dar. The Dar is nevertheless also a space where the desire to preserve, albeit in a way that is compatible with the practice of the sacred, is omnipresent. The documentary effort put forward by Haim to identify and display objects and photographs of the Saints and their family is combined with his attention towards the upkeep of the space and the objects—even the ones that can be touched such as the jellaba, which is protected by a door that, while unlocked, prevents the unnecessary contact of the garment with air, dust, or reckless touch. In this sense, the patrimonialized Dar acts as an ideal “new museum”, tasked with “represent[ing] a community’s past, but also vital elements of its living culture and its continuing development” (Kreps 2003), or a context-based museum which exists as a counter-model to an artifact-based institution and whose value is practical as well as patrimonial (Mbarek 2018).

Haim claims that the Dar is a “historical monument”, just as much as the nearby Ettedgui synagogue. Indeed, it seems that in the medina of Casablanca, two understandings of religious heritage coexist. One gains legitimacy from State investment in the preservation of a symbolic container of Judaism, and the relocation of its objects outside of the sacred space, in the museum; another possesses a religious and patrimonial legitimacy through the Saint’s name and genealogy. Similarly, two different approaches to the narrative of patrimonialization materialize in these heritage sites. The Ettedgui Synagogue does not contain the story of its patrimonialization; the Museum of Heritage Interpretation, while retracing the steps of the rehabilitation of the medina and of his sacred spaces, does not provide details on the actors, logic, or material investment in the patrimonialization of the synagogue. Differently, the history of the patrimonialization, of its actors, its steps, and its logic are omnipresent in the Dar: Alain’s name on every wall-size print of the Saint; the plaque commemorating those who, in the Jewish community of the city, participated in the renovation; pictures taken in the Dar before and after the works; and the framing of the letter written by Haim which led to the collection of the first donations. Haim’s stories, told to the visitors of the Dar, consider the work of patrimonialization as an integral part of the life of the Dar and of the preservation of religious value in the space. The coexistence of heritage and meta-heritage is an unproblematic aspect of the space’s history, embodying the idea of heritage as a process (Smith 2015) that can be displayed and recounted to the visitor.

Indeed, the practice of heritage mediation within the Dar differs greatly from the ones of the El Mellah museum and the Museum of the Center for Heritage Interpretation. The absence of panels, explanations, videos, or engaging means of transmission of knowledge is compensated by the presence of Haim. He is used to welcoming visitors from all around the world, sitting down on a chair, and recounting the story of the Dar. Depending on his audience, he will spend more time detailing the story of his family and its Saints, or the story of the space and its renovation, acting as a qualified caretaker and storyteller of Casablanca’s Jewish heritage. He does not shy away from talking about miracles, people, and lived experience in the Dar. This process of personal mediation acts as a generator of “potential history”, or a counterweight to the object-center museumification of tradition, in which “transmission itself is the tradition, and not the objects” (Azoulay 2019). In this process of transmission, the visitors ask questions and often call on Haim to perform a prayer for them, which he never refuses. The memory that Haim attaches to this space serves as proof of the intertwinement of life, death, and sainthood in the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto. Indeed, the Dar is also the place where Haim was born on the day of the Saint’s hillula, the celebration of his death. It is thus a home for the deceased Saint as much as a home for his living grandson, whose very life and work in the Dar embody the mediation between the Saint and the visitor, the dead and the living, and heritage and religion. The visitors of the Dar also contribute to the practices of lived religiosity within the space.

Visitors of the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto are not simple passersby. Jewish tourists often visit the space as part of a tour of the old medina of Casablanca, but most of them acknowledge the sacredness of the space on top of its historical significance in patrimonial terms. Indeed, the visitors of the Dar are required and allowed to perform a series of acts that are themselves a mix of religious and patrimonial. The Dar’s policy regarding the 50-dirham donation can be analyzed as a continuation—or reactivation—of a traditional practice which was common when the Saint was alive. The wealthy miracle-seekers used to leave money in the Dar, which the Saint would then redistribute through the less advantaged strata of the medina’s population. Today, Haim does not receive enough money to continue the practice of redistribution, and the collected donations are used to pay for the maintenance of the site. Nevertheless, the same logic governs the imperative of donations, which remains a flexible practice in the Dar. The wealthy tourists are expected to pay a minimum of 50 dirhams in order to visit the site and use the Dar’s intercessory powers. The devotees of Casablanca who wish to pray for a miracle in the Dar do not always have to pay 50 dirhams and continue to donate what they deem to be enough: food, candles, and decorations in addition to smaller sums of money.

The Dar has also adapted to foster practices of visitor participation which are rare to find in State museums in Morocco. Haim has placed a notebook in the Dar, allowing visitors to leave a message, or simply write their name and phone number. Most messages left by visitors are in Hebrew as, Haim explains, the influx of Israeli tourists was significant before October 2023. Other countries of origin include Morocco, Tunisia, the United States, and France. Among the visitors are Jews and Muslims alike, testifying to the possibility of tourism as an event where religions coexist through the promotion of religious sites as heritage (Isnart et al. 2018). In the Dar, visitors are not only allowed to make decisions—with regard to the amount of the donation, their prayer, and their participation in the visitor’s book—but their agency is needed to sustain the material and spiritual life of the Dar. In this sense, tourists are not only consumers of heritage and sacred, but they form part of a network composed of Haim’s family, the local Jewish community, and Muslims whose shared belief in the Saint and in the necessity to preserve his home sustains the continuation of sacred and patrimonial practices in the Dar. Indeed, at various times in the life of the Dar, the strength of lived religiosity manifests in and around this sacred space, creating an occasion for the continuation of ancient practices of shared belief in the Saint’s powers. The Saint’s power, recognized by both Jews and Muslims, is invoked by both communities, and his life is celebrated in a manner deprived of symbolism or explicit identity claims. If the museums of the medina wish to present the “convivencia” that would have characterized the history of the two religious communities, the veneration of the Saint and the heritage practices that take place in the Dar, particularly on the day of the hillula, exist on another, practical level.

The simultaneous existence of Muslims and Jews in the Dar, their shared veneration of the Saint, their common belief in his power, and their lived respect for the patrimonial value of the Dar do not necessarily lead to dialog or a refashioned representation of “convivencia”, but rather to a silent understanding of the local, shared tradition of Saint veneration. In this sense, the religious space of the medina of Casablanca comes to constitute a “religious heritage complex” (Isnart and Cerezales 2020) where traditional practices of conservation of religious spaces coexist with policies of recognition and representation of the past through material heritage. The Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, located right outside the framework of the State’s and community’s policies, continues to offer a space for the simultaneous performance of heritage and sainthood, all while acting as a “shared locality” (Couroucli 2012) for Muslims and Jews of the medina. The aim of the Dar is less to re-present Jewishness, the Jewish history of the medina of Casablanca, or interreligious coexistence—for that, the Ettedgui synagogue with its museum and the Center for Heritage Interpretation suffice; it is rather to continue presenting an opportunity to engage with the Saint through materiality and human mediation for the old and the newer generations of devotees.

5. Conclusions

Jewish studies have produced categories to describe the difference between the Ettedgui Synagogue and the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto, suggesting that Jewish topography can be distinguished with regard to the happening of “Jewish things” within it (Waligórska and Wagenhofer 2010). A Jewish place has specific coordinates, as do a museum or a memorial site, and can be charged with representing or translating Jewishness in a specific context, through the allocation of values and memory. Jewish space, on the other hand, is not only a background, but a changeable “mode of representation”, where Jewishness continues to exist and evolve through the topography of the city, the movement of people, and the multiplication of carriers of memory.

Haim takes pride in explaining that most pictures on the walls depict events that happened around the Jewish spaces: the Dar, the cemeteries, the home in Montreal, the medina. The topography of saint veneration serves to create a moveable landscape where Jewish and interreligious things happen. This space is defined more by the people who make things happen, rather than by the material acknowledgment of its intrinsic value. Nevertheless, Haim and the visitors alike agree that the Dar Rabbi Haim Pinto is worthy of preservation. It is this home that possesses the closest connection to the Saint; it is in the Dar that his power is stronger. This belief is legitimated by the presence of Haim, by both his contemporary and past existence in the space—birth, Bar Mitzvah celebration, teenage life—and his bearing of the Saint’s name. Deprived of State and institutional legitimacy, the Dar found in family transmission, memory, community, and lived religion the legitimating forces to undergo a process of patrimonialization that allowed it to be inserted once again in the religioscape of the medina of Casablanca.