A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912 r 315Valadji’s point of view, these thirty duoros were a wise investment in the
future of Meknes’s Jews. By supporting the AIU school, the community
would enable their children to receive a modern education, one that pre-
pared them for success in an increasingly European-oriented Morocco.
The AIU camp believed firmly that education and regeneration would
solve the problem of poverty in Meknes, as opposed to merely relieving it
through handouts.^113
The communal leaders of Meknes, on the other hand, understood the
role of the AIU school very differently. They, too, saw the school as a
way to relieve poverty in their community.^114 Yet their idea of helping the
poor followed the contours of the kind of poor relief they had previously
overseen in Meknes. They expected the AIU to send financial help from
Paris—immediate relief rather than long-term structural reforms. They
believed that their investment of 30 duoros would literally be returned to
them many-fold.^115 These two views of charity—the community leaders’
focus on immediate financial relief and the AIU’s push for modern educa-
tion—were seemingly irreconcilable, and the school was closed only six
months after it opened.
Meknes’s Jewish leaders resisted AIU-inspired strategies of poor relief
out of ideological convictions about what was best for the poor of their city.
Yet their opposition was no doubt compounded by the desire to maintain
their control of communal charity and thus to preserve existing structures
of authority. The fact that the 30 duoros had previously been designated
for scholars no doubt amplified the threat of the AIU’s encroachment on
communal administration. The scholars, many of whom served on or had
close ties to the ma ̔amad, saw the positions threatened by the partial
loss of their weekly allotment. The council also worried about being seen
as indifferent to the suffering of their poor, a perception that would have
thrown their legitimacy into question. Communal leaders’ refusal to pay
the 30 duoros and the subsequent shuttering of the school marked their
retention of control over the organization of charity in Meknes.
Nonetheless, Meknesi Jewish leaders’ unwillingness to compromise
with the AIU did not mean they resisted all possibilities of change. Like
Muslim authorities in Egypt, Jews in Meknes introduced new innovations
in poor relief that reflected the growing influence of European ideas, such
as opening a hospital and taking sanitary precautions. Although the AIU
school failed in 1902, by 1911 Meknes’s leaders had invited the AIU for
a second try; the school opened in that year was a success.^116 Meknes’s