Until the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish children in Morocco were educated in traditional one-room schools where pupils of all ages were taught together and memorization of texts was the sole pedagogical method. The situation began to change in 1862, when the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened Morocco’s first modern Jewish school. By 1912, when the Alliance had twenty-five schools in thirteen towns with more than five thousand students, a new school system began, named Em Habanim, that was more specifically Jewish and Moroccan in its orientation and curriculum.

The new sch…