Tabrdouhte & Tabbnoute

INDIGO-DYED BERBER SHAWLS OF THE MIDDLE ATLAS

Tabrdouhte and tabbnoute constitute a small group of flatwoven women’s shawls from the northeastern parts of the Middle Atlas region. They offer significant evidence of the extent to which the textile culture of Morocco’s Berber tribes was influenced by the professional skills of itinerant Jewish dyers. The traditional ‘secrets’ of such dyers were largely lost to Morocco following the emigration of many Jewish families to the newly-founded state of Israel.

Along the arid eastern flank of the northern Middle Atlas Range live a series of Berber tribes whose women’s flatwoven shawls – called tabrdouhte or tabbnoute in the regional Tamazirt dialect and handira in Arabic – display great similarities both in colouring and in their simple structure. However, the dominant colour in these textiles, variations of deep indigo blue, was created not by the Berber women themselves but by travelling Jewish blue dyers who were based in settlements along the Moulouya Valley east of Berber territory. The high quality of this group of textiles is the result of a symbiosis of the weaving skills of the Berber women and the knowledge of these specialist dyers, while a marked decline in production – which occurred at different times in different regions – followed the departure from the area of the local blue dyers.

The importance of Jewish craftsmen and dyers in Morocco has been mentioned in the literature on several occasions over the past few years. In From Sign to Image,¹ Ali Amahan describes Jewish spice traders and dyers as being responsible for the decline of natural dye methods in Moroccan tribal carpets and textiles. While there is an element of truth in this, the situation, as always, is a great deal more complex. At the 1995 ICOC regional meeting in Marrakesh, Wilfried Stanzer made reference to the connection between superior quality Berber textile culture and the Jewish population in the district of the Ait Ouaouzguite, while at the same conference Ori Soltes discussed the influence of Jewish motifs on Moroccan textiles.²

Before the coming of synthetic dyes, home dyeing was the norm. Only the more complicated procedures such as indigo dyeing were left to professional dyers, who expected to be paid accordingly. As the rural nomadic population generally could not afford to purchase their services on more than a very modest scale, in old pieces blue or dark green usually appears only as a secondary colour. For the dyers, in turn, this meant that such commissions brought relatively little income, and consequently Jewish dyers were also usually active as spice traders, travelling from souk (weekly market) to souk and offering their dyeing services alongside their wares. A further consequence was that these traders introduced synthetic dyes into their stock, which being much more affordable sold extremely well. Yet we should not overlook the fact that the much more expensive indigo dyes were still available. In the case of Outad Oulad el Haj this was true until around 1967.

The true role of Jewish dyers was therefore thoroughly ambivalent: on the one hand they enabled the rapid spread of synthetic dyes through their well organised trade; on the other hand they must simultaneously be regarded as the last ‘Keepers of the Holy Grail’ with regard to high-quality natural dyestuffs. We were able to document in the course of our fieldwork that in Taourirt in the lower Moulouya Valley, following the departure of Jewish dyers’ families around 1950, at least ten Moroccan families attempted unsuccessfully to continue their activities. We were told that knowledge of the old dyeing methods, traditionally passed from one generation to the next, was generally lost with the emigration of the last Jewish dyer. Only in Missour did one old woman succeed in continuing the dye-work for some fifteen years until the late 1960s, having been initiated into the secrets of indigo dyeing by the former craftsman.

In view of this background, and independently of the fineness of the old pieces, blue-ground shawls or capes from the eastern Middle Atlas must be regarded as particularly significant purely on the basis of the expensive dyes used in their production. The main area of distribution of such textiles begins with three eastern tribes of the Beni Ouarain Confederation and extends as far as the Ahel Tsiouant, a small eastern neighbour of the Marmoucha. It is possible, however, that even the shawls of the Ait Haddidou and neighbouring groups in the northeastern High Atlas share a common origin with this group of textiles, or were subject to some degree of influence from them during the course of their historical development. For many years the shawls of the Ahel Tsiouant were described incorrectly in the trade as ‘Ait Haddidou’.

The tabrdouhte of the Ahel Telt and Ahel Taida (1), the two northeasternmost tribes of the Beni Ouarain Confederation, have long been the best-known type and have been published many times.³ The proportion of blue in the textiles varies, depending on the extent to which the weaver’s family was able to afford the services of a professional dyer. While tabrdouhte heavily decorated with design panels usually appear to have a dominant blue ground, the everyday shawls known as tabbnoute, which are decorated only with wavy white lines or simplified design variants, are dominated by dark brown, the natural colour of the undyed wool. The design canon used in the white bands of motifs on tabrdouhte varies only very slightly from piece to piece; the layout is symmetrical along a motif band, always the same, in the middle of the textile. In the regional Tamazirt dialect, tirkaze means ‘pole’ or ‘pillar’ – a term also used for the two central tent-poles – and it surely cannot be mere coincidence that this motif band, consisting of double cones and flat bridging elements, resembles a skeletal spinal column. When the shawl is worn, the motif lies exactly over the wearer’s spine.

Whereas tabrdouhte, even old examples, use cotton (or in rare early examples linen) to achieve higher definition in the drawing of the pattern, in simpler versions wool spun by the weaver herself was most commonly used. It is noteworthy that the white threads, worked in a combination of weft wrapping and floating wefts, are taken to the back of the textile in loops, giving the design panels a cushion-like pile on the back. The fine yellow lines that demarcate the motif stripes are usually of silk in early examples. Older pieces produced before 1920 can achieve a fineness of up to 50 wefts per cm.

Directly south and east lies the territory of the Beni Jelîdassen, a tribal group whose textile production was until recently almost unknown.⁴ Here one type of shawl (2) is of particular interest, although several other forms woven by various sub-groups of the Beni Jelîdassen are also known (3, 4). These blue-ground textiles – of which so far fewer than twenty pieces have come to light – are extremely finely woven (again, up to about 50 wefts/cm). Apart from the coloured stripes, the drawing is limited to nine or eleven very fine, design bands with floating wefts of highly spun white wool. Different gradations of the basic blue are skilfully interwoven at intervals into the overall visual composition.

With very few exceptions the known examples of this type were produced before 1930.

The second textile type of the Beni Jelîdassen (4) was only found in the villages around the Ait Abdellah and Beni Smint, south of the Jebel bou Iblane Range.⁵ Here again blue is the characteristic colour, even if it is not as dominant as in the above-mentioned groups. The design panels are reminiscent in their motifs and technique of those of the central tribes of the Beni Ouarain to the north and northwest. The pattern is generally produced with floating wefts, but individual stripes in a diagonal weft-wrapping technique, producing a three-dimensional effect, also occur in more elaborately worked pieces. The white motifs and parts of the basic weave are executed in cotton, although silk was also used for small design details or the occasional decorative knot.

The third shawl type known in the region of the Beni Jelîdassen (3) was also found among the Oulad Ali, their neighbours to the south. This tribe does not belong to the Beni Ouarain Confederation, nor is it directly related to the Oulad Ali located in the central territory of the Beni Ouarain. The simple layout of stripes in red, violet, white and blue is reminiscent of shawl types of the Ait Haddidou, and particularly of the Beni Said who live in the Rif,⁶ but should not be confused with them. Presumably these textiles were used among both the Beni Jelîdassen and the Oulad Ali as everyday wear in former times. Old pieces achieve the fineness of density of the blue-ground shawls of the Beni Jelîdassen; again, no more than some fifty examples of these textiles are known.

The blue-ground shawls of the Oulad Ali (5), with white sections executed without exception in cotton, form a geographical and creative bridge between the Beni Jelîdassen to the north and the Ahel Tsiouant to the south.

The textiles of the Ahel Tsiouant (7, 8) played a key role in opening up this eastern sector of the Middle Atlas. Although an example of this group, correctly attributed, has been on display in the Musée des Ouadaias in Rabat since the 1920s, such pieces only arrived on the market in more significant numbers at the end of 1994. As mentioned earlier, the shawls of the Ahel Tsiouant were initially attributed to the Ait Haddidou or even to the Beni Snassen, who live far to the east near Oujda.⁷ Strong market demand soon led to increased attention being paid to these isolated regions of the eastern Middle Atlas so that relatively complete descriptions and attributions are possible today.

The special feature of the Ahel Tsiouant textiles within the blue-ground group is the midnight-blue pile on the back, as much as 7cm deep when the textile is new. Executed in the symmetric knot, this pile almost completely covers the red and yellow strips of colour between the individual rows of knots. Only when the textile – worn at warmer periods of the year with the pile facing outwards – encases the wearer’s body cylindrically do the colour accents in the depths of the pile become visible. During the cold winter months, which the tribe used to spend in settlements at an altitude of around 1,800 metres, the shawls were worn with the warming pile on the inside.

The simple elegance of all these shawls, or capes, is based on a harmonious interplay between a delicate, unobtrusive pattern and the nuances of the colouring – deep blue tones contrasted with red and yellow stripes. This regionally specific weaving tradition developed exclusively in the catchment area of the blue dyers of the Moulouya Valley. The dyers relevant to the groups discussed here were settled in Missour, Outat Oulad el Haj, Mahirija, Debdou and Taourirt. Since their zone of activity was limited essentially to the regions mentioned, blue occurs relatively rarely in textiles produced by the tribes found west of the main chain of the Middle Atlas – the Ait Youssi, Ait Serrouchène, Beni Alaham, Marmoucha and the central tribes of the Beni Ouarain. An exception to this is the Oulad el Farh group, whose tabrdouhte (6) are among the finest known of the delicately patterned capes of the Beni Ouarain.⁸ Old pieces in this group contain a blue that is almost black: only after intensive examination is it shown to be very high quality indigo. The Oulad el Farh (‘sons of fortune’) owned the best summer pastures on the northern slopes of the Jebel bou Iblane and were correspondingly wealthy, while their winter pastures in the region of the Beni Jelîdassen also provided access to the markets in the lower reaches of the Moulouya Valley.

The knowledge we have so far is insufficient to permit any firm conclusion as to whether there is some kind of a connection or common origin between the shawls of the blue-ground group and those of the Ait Haddidou⁹ and their neighbouring tribes. However, various structural details, and the similarity of rituals associated with the weaving process strongly suggest a relationship.

The production of shawls of this type came to a sudden end with the waves of emigration of Jewish families to the newly founded state of Israel, first in the early 1950s, and then at the end of the 1960s following the Yom Kippur War.

The dependence of the Berber weavers of Morocco on highly skilled Jewish dyers is also reflected in the still largely unknown pile-weaving tradition on the eastern side of the Middle Atlas,¹⁰ and in the technically advanced pile-weaving culture of the Beni Bou Yahi and neighbouring eastern Moroccan and Algerian Zenata Berber groups.¹¹

Over and above their subtle beauty, therefore, the blue-ground shawls of the eastern Middle Atlas can be regarded as probably the most explicit textile documentary evidence for a past cultural co-existence in North Africa.

Notes see Appendix