EPILOGUE

ON THE MOVE AGAIN

The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed new developments that significantly influenced the environments in which major hubs of the global Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community appealed to their existing members and attempted to attract new ones. Following the election of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in 1998 and the inauguration of the Fifth Venezuelan Republic in December 1999, Venezuela witnessed what is considered one of the worst economic crises in modern Latin American history. According to the International Monetary Fund, local gross domestic product declined by 35 percent between 2013 and 2017. The economic crisis led to unprecedented political instability and a strong sense of personal insecurity, resulting in the emigration of millions of Venezuelans in the largest exodus South America has witnessed in the twenty-first century. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between 2015 and 2017, the number of Venezuelan nationals living abroad increased by 900 percent.¹ The first to leave the country were the upper class, intellectuals, and professionals, followed by the middle class in the 2010s. Consequently, the number of Jews in Venezuela shrunk from around 22,000 in 1999 to roughly 9,500 in 2011, although exact figures are difficult to ascertain.²

Despite some variations in motivations for emigration, the exodus of Venezuelan Jews ought to be understood as part of the broader tragic exile of Venezuelans. Together with their fellow compatriots, Jews have been relocating to the US—mainly to the southern Floridian area, with its clear Hispanic presence—and to destinations in Europe and the Caribbean, most prominently Spain and Panama. Those who stayed on suffered from devaluated properties and often relentless fear from criminal attacks. In 2016 alone, tens of thousands of Venezuelans fled to Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru; Peru even offered a special visa plan for Venezuelans. While most Venezuelan Jews who left at first preferred the US and Panama, Israel was a destination uniquely accessible to them via the country’s Law of Return, which since 1950 has granted the right to immigrate and acquire Israeli citizenship to Jews worldwide. Those who moved to Israel were also entitled to financial assistance from the government for six months through an immigration “absorption package.” In 2017, Israel began to treat Venezuelan Jews as a Jewry in distress (see chap. 5) and therefore sent emissaries to facilitate their immigration, though not without a tight background check of their Jewish origins.³

For those Hispanic Moroccan Jews who resided in Venezuela before leaving for the US and Israel, while more space has been made for their Venezuelan and Latin American identities, the Moroccan and Sephardi components of their identities have been reduced to the performance of religious rituals and the recounting of historical anecdotes. Hispanic Moroccan Jews immigrating from Venezuela are now being perceived and treated in their destination countries, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as ethnically Latinx.⁴ Even in Israel, where a large Moroccan community exists, the community of Moroccan Jews from Venezuela is organized first and foremost around their shared experience of displacement from Venezuela and their concerns about the crisis in that country.⁵

In Miami-Dade County, Hispanic Moroccan Jews share space with thousands of other Moroccan Jews. Originally from the southern parts of Morocco, approximately ten thousand Moroccan Jews and their descendants migrated to Florida since the 1960s from Canada, France, Israel, and Morocco itself. Scattered across multiple sites in Miami-Dade and beyond, Moroccan Jews lack a central community body like the one they used to have in Venezuela, for example, and they tend to affiliate with one of the ten small Moroccan synagogues or with other synagogues nearby their place of residence. Some choose to affiliate with a synagogue based on the primary languages spoken by the majority of its members—French, English, Hebrew, or Spanish—rather than basing their choice on traditions or rites.⁶

In Miami, even the synagogue where older Moroccan rituals are usually preserved has become a “melting pot” for Latin American Jewish identities, including Venezuelans, Mexicans, Argentinians, Colombians, and Cubans, in a way that both sharpens national differences and highlights regional commonalities. Miami’s Jewish Community Center and its Hispanophone Skylake Synagogue, a majority of whose members are Venezuelan Jews, are two prominent examples of sites where a variety of religious rituals originating in different European and Middle Eastern communities of origin, including Morocco, are often melded into a single Latin American identity.⁷

While what it means to be Hispanic for Moroccan Jews in the US, Europe, and Israel has shifted at the turn of the century, the communal consciousness, organizations, and state-led projects that, since the early twentieth century, helped develop the unified story of origins in Spain still persist and evolve. As always, hypermobility can work both ways, strengthening one’s northern Moroccan identity in a specific context and making it completely invisible in another. In 2018, for example, representatives from Sephardi communities in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Miami, Peru, and Venezuela gathered for a FeSeLa reunion in Miami to pay tribute to Moisés Garzón Serfaty’s activity on behalf of “Sephardi and Zionist” cultures in Latin America. Garzón Serfaty, the longtime leader of the Sephardi-Moroccan community in Venezuela, whose activities have been discussed throughout this book, resettled in Panama in 2016. At the FeSeLa meeting, Panama was added to the continental organization for the first time, in part because of his relocation there.⁸ While the meeting focused on expressing solidarity with Venezuelan Jews, it also served as a platform to plan celebrations for the State of Israel’s seventieth anniversary and the 120th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress, and to promote “heritage trips” to Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula.⁹

Moreover, even as new nodes in the diasporic network develop in Panama and Miami, Caracas has not become irrelevant. While many Venezuelan Jews have left their country, the Centro de Estudios Sefradíes de Caracas (Center for Sephardi Studies of Caracas) (CESC) is still producing an impressive amount of material on the history and culture of Hispanic Moroccan Jews and their attachments to Morocco, Spain, and Sepharad. In 2013, for instance, the Museo Sefardí de Caracas, established in 1999 with funds from Morris E. Curiel of Curaçao, held an exhibition entitled “De Noráfrica Venimos: Judíos de Marruecos en Tierra de Gracia” (“From North Africa We Came: Jews from Morocco in a Land of Grace”) in collaboration with the CESC. The “land of grace” refers to Venezuela, as a country conceived in the collective narrative—from the early twentieth century onward—as a haven for Jews in distress (see chaps. 3, 5, and 6).

Unlike in previous decades, however, this exhibition was cosponsored by the Moroccan embassy in Caracas, which saw the Moroccan community in Venezuela, even as it was undergoing tremendous displacement, as one of its most significant diasporic agents in Latin America at the turn of the millennium. At an event held at the Maripérez Synagogue, the guest of honor was Ibrahim Musa, Morocco’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

In the post-September 11, 2001, era, marked by increased discourse divisions between “Western” and “Islamic” civilizations, this new connection between the Moroccan kingdom and the Jewish Sephardi community in Venezuela emerged within the broader global trend of renewed fascination with the myth of interfaith coexistence in Al-Andalus as a form of resistance to Western, particularly American, imperialism. This revival gained popularity among marginalized groups in the West and across the postcolonial world, with Venezuela standing out as a particularly notable example. To demonstrate his solidarity with the modern Arab world in the aftermath of September 11, Chávez embraced the narrative of historical connections between indigenous Venezuelans, who fell under the dominion of white European Spanish colonialism, and the Andalusian Arabs expelled from Spain. This resonance extended beyond specific segments of Venezuelan society, including mestizos and Blacks, and allowed Chávez to establish stronger political and economic ties with non-Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA) nations, such as Iran.¹⁰

However, it is essential to acknowledge that the political realities and interests in Latin America and the MENA region are far from homogeneous and simplistic, as exemplified by the strengthening ties between Morocco and the Venezuelan Jewish Sephardi community. In fact, Morocco had pulled out its ambassador to Caracas in 2009, after Venezuela’s overt support for the Polisario’s nationalist claims over the Western Sahara. Perhaps in reaction, cultural ties with the Moroccan monarchy were still considered significant in the eyes of the Hispanic Moroccan community’s leadership in Caracas, who continuously claimed Jewish roots in Iberia (see chap. 6). Remarkably, they were also deemed valuable in the eyes on the Moroccan state, which sent its diplomatic representatives to an event preserving the culture of the Jewish community outside of Morocco and even helped sponsor the event in a country with which it had cut diplomatic ties.¹¹

THE RETURN OF SPAIN, AGAIN

The persisting cultural production in the Caribbean region, even when circumstances of migration have been significantly altered by political and economic turmoil, ought to be explained by probing—once again—regional and global developments in the community network of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

Concurrently with the mass emigration of Venezuelan Jews and the creation of new hubs, on the other side of the Atlantic, Spain underwent significant political changes that further enhanced the traditional role played by this country in the formation of the global Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community. A series of events following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in April 2004 spotlighted Jews as emblematic of the country’s post-Franco democratic and multicultural development since 1975. This was reflected in the emergence of a number of new Spanish publishing houses, including the Hebraica Madrid association, the Spinoza Foundation, and the Hebraica Bookshop-Editorial, among others.¹²

One of the most active participants in those developments was Jacobo Israel Garzón. Born in Tetouan in 1942, Garzón moved to Madrid in 1965, where he became a businessman. As the editor of Raíces from 1994 to 2005, and the president of la Federación de Comunidades Judías de España from 2003, he produced a great deal of material that was disseminated through the global network of scholars and community leaders. Between 2003 and 2018, he published some of the most important books on the history of Jews in Spain and northern Morocco.¹³

As Venezuela’s role in the community’s cultural production has declined over the past twenty years, Israel-based writers have, since the turn of the millennium, produced some of the most prominent literary and academic works on Hispanic Moroccan Jews, including but not limited to those of the Tetouan-born, Jerusalem-based writer Mois Benharroch and the folklorist Nina Pinto-Abecasis.¹⁴ The work in Israel was directly connected to the founding of new institutions in Spain that were aimed at advancing collaboration on Sephardi matters between the countries. The 2006 founding of the Casa Sefarad-Israel (the Sepharad-Israel House) in Madrid by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs illustrates how the impetus for publishing in Spain coincided with the creation of new official institutions connecting the two major hubs of Hispanic Moroccan Jewry.¹⁵ Beyond linking Spain and Israel, Casa Sefarad-Israel has promoted international initiatives to help maintain and disseminate the story of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora through a global Sephardi network. The Erensya (Heritage) Summit, sponsored by Casa Sefarad-Israel and organized every two years in a different Sephardi hub—including Sophia, Istanbul, Madrid, Mexico City, Seattle, and Washington—has become an important new network in the twenty-first century. The Caracas-based Néstor Garrido, current editor of Maguén, and Solly Lévy from Montreal have taken on the role of representing Haketia and Hispanic Moroccan culture at the Erensya summits.¹⁶

Beyond the creation and dissemination of new material, the global reach of Spain’s efforts to reinvigorate Sephardi culture has had an important influence on the community’s ability to appeal to new members. In December 2015, the Muslim population of Spain, many of whom were Moroccans, was 1,887,906 people, or 4 percent of the country’s total population. The Jewish population was much smaller—somewhere between 12,000 and 40,000 people in 2011.¹⁷ Jacobo Israel Garzón estimated that between 60 and 65 percent of Spanish Jews are of northern Moroccan heritage, and 30 percent have a Latin American background. Comprising a tiny fraction of Spain’s roughly forty-seven million inhabitants, Hispanic Moroccan Jews as an ethnic-religious group in Spain are practically invisible, and, as Martina L. Weisz has noted, they are still typically viewed, as any other Jewish group in the country, as an “abstract element belonging to a distant past.”¹⁸

This perception culminated in a 2015 nationality law that granted the right of full citizenship to Sephardi Jews worldwide as a means of “historical reconciliation.” The same right was pointedly not granted to North African Muslim descendants of Iberian expellees.¹⁹ Similar to Israel’s Law of Return, the Spanish law took ethno-national background as a criterion for immigration and citizenship, which, in this case, also conferred European Union citizenship. Coinciding with the Venezuelan economic and political crisis and the mass departure of thousands of Venezuelan Jews, the 2015 law provided a practical impetus for “acting on” one’s Sephardi roots in Iberia, just as the Israeli Law of Return motivated many unaffiliated Jewish Venezuelans to act on their Jewish backgrounds while considering migration.

In 2015, Venezuela, where most Sephardim were of Moroccan heritage, was second only to Mexico in the number of applications for Spanish citizenship under the new law (6,601 Venezuelans versus 6,975 Mexicans).²⁰ The pursuit of Spanish citizenship dominated the agenda of old Sephardi networks like FeSeLa, which now worked as avidly to help Moroccan and other Sephardi Jews acquire Spanish passports as it did to promote immigration to Israel.²¹ Spain found itself again in the early twenty-first century in a position of casting its political authority to defend the interests of Sephardi Jews in the diaspora, and its agents for that matter were prominent members of the global Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community who helped individuals acquire Spanish nationality.

Back in Venezuela, new figures such as genealogist Blanca de Lima; José Chocrón Cohén, a lawyer of Moroccan descent; and Saadia Cohén Zrihen, a businessman of Hispanic Moroccan Jewish heritage, began to lay the groundwork for this new reaffirmation of Sephardi roots, even a few years before the 2015 law was passed. In 2009 and 2010, Casa Melilla (discussed in chap. 7) prepared Spanish naturalization charts for Hispanic Moroccans Jews. Around four hundred people received Spanish citizenship through its mediation.²²

In Israel in particular, Sephardi origins were broadly defined for the purpose of the law. Jews whose lineage traced back to a variety of MENA countries, and who had maintained Sephardi rituals or surnames, including many from “southern Morocco,” became eligible to apply. Thus, the law did not officially distinguish between Jews from northern Morocco and those from other parts of the country. It did, however, define Sephardi origins through cultural continuity, measured by proficiency in a (Judeo-)Spanish language. In Israel, then, many applicants from non–Spanish speaking backgrounds were required to pass a “Spanish test.” For that reason, many who wished to apply only for the purpose of acquiring an EU passport pursued the “Portuguese alternative,” which did not require any knowledge of Portuguese.²³ While passing the Spanish test was a nonissue for the first generation of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Venezuela, many of whom had a non-Sephardi parent, it was more of an obstacle for the second and third generations in Israel and for Sephardim who did not come from a Hispanophone background.

The Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain eventually reached an agreement with certain activists and academic institutions in Israel to aid applicants looking to prove their Sephardi origins and acquire basic knowledge of Spanish (or Ladino or Haketia). Responsibility for teaching Haketia was assumed by academic centers that had long encouraged its study in Israel, including the Salty Center and the Gaon Center, whose Haketia programs predated the enactment of the law. The first Israeli recipient of Spanish citizenship was a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Tetouan.²⁴ In fact, the main person responsible for promoting and mediating applications was Rabbi Benito Garzón, a Tetouan native and the former chief rabbi of Spain (mentioned in chap. 6), who moved to Israel in 2013. From his new place of residence, Rabbi Garzón helped facilitate applications alongside other members of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community in Israel. In Jerusalem, the World Sephardi Congress, created and financed by a simultaneously Moroccan, Venezuelan, and Floridian donor, also processed applications.²⁵

As the Hispanic Moroccan centers of global activity shifted at the turn of the millennium, the community in Brazil also began to play a growing role in preserving Hispanic Moroccan Jewish heritage. In April 2002, journalist and cantor David Salgado founded in Belém Amazônia Judaica, a community newsletter that transformed in 2010 into a mouthpiece of the Centro de Estudos Judaicos da Amazônia (CEJA). Run by Elias Salgado, David’s brother, much of the center’s activity is placed on setting archival collections for the histories of Jews in the Amazon basin, with a focus on northern Moroccan Jews.²⁶ A specific focus is placed on Haketia preservation, as exemplified by the 2021 Haquitìa Festival, Zejút Abot, organized by the center. The twentieth anniversary of the foundation of Amazônia Judaica was marked by a special Haketia Corner, “El Rincón de la Haquitìa,” led by Yehuda Benguigui, a physician who dedicates much of his time to Haketia preservation.²⁷ With the issuing of the 2015 laws, the CEJA became a small bridgehead for those Jews seeking to stress their Sephardi roots. Paulo Valadares, member of the CEJA committee and coauthor of the Dictionary of Sephardi Surnames, provides genealogical information that helps prove Sephardi origins for the purpose of the law.²⁸

In Morocco, the Cervantes Institute in Tangier has played a prominent role in the resurgence of Hispanized Haketia cultures since the 1990s, though not without local challenges. In 2014, in collaboration with the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid, Cervantes in Tangier organized an exhibition titled “Los Hispano judíos de Marruecos.” This event, intended to celebrate the cultural ties between Moroccan Jews and Spain, encountered protests. The central issue arose from the event’s perceived pro-Israel sentiment, but also from the portrayal of Hispanic Moroccan Jews as being more akin to Europeanized Spaniards than North Africans. The latter categorization in particular was viewed by some Moroccan activists working to preserve Jewish Moroccan heritage as misplaced and an affront to these Jews’ deeply rooted North African identities.²⁹ This evolving dispute over the (self-) categorization of Hispanic Moroccan Jews reveals the intricate interplay of identity, culture, and geopolitics at the turn of the millennium, and the persisting challenges in defining and preserving cultural identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The question of how this community is labeled within the context of Spanish cultural institutions not only influences the community’s self-perception but also highlights the complex relationship between Moroccan and Spanish heritage as it has evolved in the twenty-first century.

Finally, on the cusp of concluding this book project, in the summer of 2022 I was invited by Paul Dahan, for decades an enthusiastic collector of archival material on Moroccan Jews, to participate in the creation of a new center for the research of northern Moroccan Jews, tentatively titled Centre de Recherche et Archives sur le Judaïsme du Nord du Maroc. Founded in Tangier with the explicit aim of making the city its primary hub, this center aims to forge a new network of Jewish and Muslim scholars and community leaders from various parts of the northern Moroccan Jewish diaspora. This project serves as another example of the evolving role of historical centers within this diaspora and its networks, continually generating new initiatives to foster stronger connections between the community and its Moroccan homeland in the twenty-first century.³⁰

These developments on both the local and global scale, particularly the migration of Venezuelan Jews to Israel in recent decades (some of whom are my family members), and the growing academic interest in Haketia at the turn of the millennium—still strong at the moment of this book’s completion—have played a role in shaping this book. They helped me appreciate how the local and the global, the individual and the macropolitical, research and community, are all concepts mediated by networks and practices that perpetually strive to make sense of modern diasporas. These ideas and their implications for scholarship will be addressed in the next section, Conclusions.