Ruben Tajouri was a central figure in the development of the Alliance Israelite Universelle system in Morocco. Born in Libya in 1895 and educated at the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris, he began his career in 1918 as a teacher in the AIU school in Meknes and the Franco-Israelite school in Salé. (While in Salé, he published an ethnographic study of Jewish marriage customs there.) From 1926 to 1939 he was director of the Narcisse Leven School group in Casablanca. After the death of Yomtob Sémach in 1940, he became the AIU delegate in Morocco. Despite the restrictive polices of the Vichy…