INTRODUCTION

“UNLIKE OTHER SEPHARDIM AROUND THE WORLD, we [the Jews from northern Morocco] . . . have been Spanish once again for over 130 years [as the result of modern Spanish influence in North Africa]. We are therefore in a better position than anyone else to promote this reunion [between modern Spain and the Jews at the quincentennial anniversary of the 1492 Alhambra Decree], and to actively collaborate [internationally] in the demonstrations of rapprochement that will take place in 1992.”¹ With these words, Abraham Hassan Cohen gave a new twist to the overall tendency of Sephardi communities to romanticize the Jewish past in pre-1492 Iberia. His words came at a time when many Sephardi groups worldwide were preparing for the quincentennial commemoration of the 1492 Alhambra Decree, which led to the conversion and expulsion of non-Catholic minorities from Spain, and the simultaneous “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.² Hassan Cohen spoke these words in a speech at the Spanish embassy in Paris on July 5, 1990, during a planning session for the upcoming Sepharad ’92 conference, a part of the international quincentennial celebrations.

Hassan Cohen was then serving as president of France-MABATT, an association in France of Spanish-speaking Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco. France-MABATT derived its name and organizational motivation from its Israeli counterpart, MABAT, the Hebrew acronym for Mifgash Benei Tanjir (Reunion of Tangier’s Natives), founded in Tel Aviv in 1979.³ France-MABATT not only drew inspiration from its Israeli equivalent but was forged through concrete transnational ties with the Israeli organization, after the latter had called upon Jews from northern Morocco to establish communities around the world commemorating lo nuestro (our thing), an expression in Spanish that indicates the cultural traits of Spanish-speaking Jews from “Spanish” or “northern” Morocco, mostly vis-à-vis the Arabic-speaking Jews from “the south” of Morocco.⁴

In his speech at the embassy, Hassan Cohen further emphasized the common denominator of lo nuestro and how it marked the differences between Jews from the north and the south of Morocco according to his observation: “We [from the north] continue to live like Spaniards [around the world]. In Israel they [fellow northern Moroccan Jews] are today still called Spaniards rather than just Sephardim.⁵ In Spain we are totally Spanish and in the rest of the world we are Spanish emigrants.”⁶

For Hassan Cohen, however, being “totally Spanish” did not mean shying away from his Moroccan or Jewish background—quite the contrary. “MABAT means in Hebrew: a gaze . . . onto everything that is Jewish, Hispanic, and Oriental,” he explained as he continued to mark the differences, as he saw it, between Hispanic Moroccan Jews from northern Morocco and other Moroccan groups. Celebrating his modern Spanish identity entailed a celebration of the historic symbiosis between the three cultures, or, to use his own words, a “wonderful amalgam of East and West” in which both Jewish and Moroccan identities play an essential role in the shaping of world Spanish culture. According to Hassan Cohen, this unique combination was encapsulated by Haketia, a communal dialect, distinct from European languages like French or English, adopted by Jews elsewhere across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in light of modern colonialism in the nineteenth century. Developed in northern Morocco immediately after the 1492 expulsion, Haketia was an amalgam of pre-1492 Iberian Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew mixed with words in Moroccan Arabic and Tamazight dialects that were added to it after the settlement of Jews in northern Morocco in the fifteenth century. Haketia marked the centuries-long attachment of Jews in northern Morocco to Spain, even when that country that expelled them continued to officially reject their right to form a new community in its mainland territory well into the twentieth century. Other groups of expelled Jews from Iberia who moved further south into Morocco stopped speaking a dialect whose main morphology and vast vocabulary was based on Spanish and adopted Arabic dialects instead.⁷

The diaspora of Jews from northern Morocco had another characteristic whose exploration adds complexity to the analysis of their community building over the last century and a half. They were among the pioneers of international migration from Morocco already in the early nineteenth century. Their main hubs were in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, most typically in Venezuela, Argentina, and the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. With roots in the early nineteenth century, the diaspora of Hispanic Moroccan Jews became very mobile in the twentieth century, establishing formal communities in Spain and Venezuela as well as in Israel, France, the United States and Canada. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the vast majority of Jews from the MENA region, including about 80 percent of all Moroccan Jews, made Israel their home, about two-thirds of Hispanic Moroccan Jews then still living in northern Morocco chose instead to immigrate to South and North America and Europe.⁸ Together they constituted a Spanish-speaking diaspora that included intra-African migrants to Melilla, a Spanish territory on African soil that still constitutes one of the largest Jewish holds on North African soil, though it is geopolitically part of Spain.⁹ Their immigration to Spain, a country with which they identified their ancestry, also marked a unique story of postcolonial migration.

In examining these and other underexplored synchronic and diachronic developments in the global diaspora of Jews from northern Morocco, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas offers a new framework for analyzing diaspora-making among Sephardi and MENA Jews in modern times. Hassan Cohen’s expression of both a pre-1492 and modern Spanish identity, as a Moroccan Jewish immigrant leader in France heading an émigré organization formed through direct transnational connections with counterparts in Israel, represents this book’s case well. However, it is only one among multiple examples showcasing how hybridity and interconnectivity continued to evolve and characterize the diaspora across postcolonial and national contexts in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the following sections, I will further elaborate on the innovation that lies in this study.

SPAIN, AN OLD/NEW JEWISH “HOMELAND”

Focusing on Hispanic Moroccan Jews, this book is among the first to explore Jewish dispersion in the context of Spanish colonialism, rather than in the more familiar context of postcolonial migrations from French and British dominated MENA countries to Israel, West Europe, and North America. This history is essential for understanding their sense of diaspora in the twentieth century, even among the members of the community who stayed in northern Morocco until the mid- or late-twentieth century.

A major trigger for the process of diaspora formation, at least in cultural and discursive terms, among Hispanic Moroccan Jews came with the 1859–60 Spanish-Moroccan War, in which Spain occupied Tetouan for a year and a half. The occupation dramatically influenced the relationship between modern Spain and the Jews of Morocco, including the ways in which each side publicly described the other. Following the Spanish occupation of 1859–60, Spanish politicians and colonial agents began to characterize the colonial mission as a “reencuentro”—a nostalgic “reencounter” between Jews, Muslims, and Christian Spaniards on Moroccan soil, marked by an expressed desire to “return” to the golden age of the Convivencia, when the three communities were said to have lived in harmony in medieval Spain.¹⁰ Inspired by these earlier descriptions, Spanish senator Ángel Pulido (1852–1932) cultivated new forms of historical imagination at the beginning of the twentieth century. Captivated by the linguistic proximity of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) across the Sephardi diaspora and the Castilian Spanish spoken in modern Spain, in 1905, Pulido published a book that carried in its very title the notion that members of the “Sephardi race” were in fact Españoles sin patria (stateless Spaniards).¹¹ Pulido was among the most enthusiastic advocates of a group of Spanish intellectuals and liberal politicians who came to be known as the Philo-Sephardi Movement. This group imagined the reencounter of Jews with Spain as a means of righting the injustice of the 1492 Alhambra Decree.

It is worth noting that, despite the historical circumstances in which the Spanish state officially continued to exclude expelled Jews and Muslims from mainland Spain, the same Spanish state actively promoted the concept of a Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood—based on kinship for Muslims and linguistic ties for Jews—when colonial interests were at stake. Drawing on Philo-Sephardi ideas, in Morocco more than elsewhere, this concept of brotherhood served clear political and practical purposes, which became even more evident after 1912, when Spain and France signed the Treaty of Fez and most of northern Morocco was officially declared a Spanish territory.¹² This state of affairs would continue under Spanish dominion until Morocco’s independence in 1956.

Spain’s colonial expansion into Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century followed the decline of its global empire, including the momentous loss of its last remaining American and Pacific colonies during the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led in turn to a long period of internal instability in Spain. A dispute over the merits of a new colonial campaign in Africa arose between the Spanish liberals and the so called “Africanists”—generals who advocated for colonial expansion to restore Spain’s lost pride and economic prestige. Despite clear ideological differences between the parties, the Africanistas also embraced a discourse that justified the occupation of Morocco as a historic interfaith reunion. They emphasized the historical racial fusion between Iberians and North Africans in pre-1492 Iberia, along with the geographical and cultural proximities, including their linguistic ties with Sephardi Jews.¹³

The 21,243 square kilometers occupied by Spain in northern Morocco were rich in natural resources. But for Spain, fulfilling its colonial dream came with a particularly heavy price tag. The Spanish army encountered logistic hardships as well as severe resistance and significant loss of life. The Rif War, led by Abd al-Karim between 1920 and 1926, set back Spanish control in northern Morocco and exposed its military vulnerability vis-à-vis the French protectorate in the south.¹⁴ At the time, several Spanish colonialists believed that Spanish-speaking Jews in the north could somewhat help Spain spread its influence and regain its erstwhile glory.¹⁵

This local aspiration was linked to ongoing efforts to engage with the broader Sephardi diaspora across the Mediterranean. In 1924, during the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30), a naturalization law set a period of six years during which Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire were eligible to apply for Spanish citizenship. When the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39) was founded more than half a century after the Spanish Restoration (1874–1931), the new republic, which advocated for religious tolerance in Spain, continued to promote the idea of Jews as beneficial agents of Spain through nostalgic narratives about the renewal of the Convivencia. In 1935, on the occasion of the eighth centenary of the birth of Maimonides, and in the atmosphere of severe political instability, the Spanish government organized a series of events throughout the communities of the Mediterranean aimed at bringing Jews closer to the Spanish state.¹⁶

Many scholars have emphasized the cynical motivations, ambiguity, and hypocrisy associated with the Spanish continuous Philo-Sephardi discourse and related narrative about the “stateless Spaniards,” pointing to the political and economic self-interest of the Spanish imperialists who fueled this campaign beginning in the nineteenth century.¹⁷ This became even more apparent with Francisco Franco’s rise to power following the military coup that marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. After the end of the civil war in 1939, the Francoist regime conceived of Spanish colonialism as a process of isolating Spain from the rest of Europe. This led to the reinforcement of what anthropologist Gustau Nerín has called Hispanotropicalism. According to this notion, Spanish colonialism since the eighteenth century, unlike other European colonial projects, was based on affinities between the colonizer and colonized rather than the cultural superiority of Spain and its wish to exploit the colonies. High rates of miscegenation were understood as proof that Spanish colonizers were guided by the religious idea that all of humankind was created in God’s image. While this discourse led to actual miscegenation in the Latin American context, in Morocco, it perpetuated narratives of a historic reencounter and portrayed Spain’s intervention as an altruistic duty to protect its younger North African brethren.¹⁸

For Jews in northern Morocco, one of the most lasting aspects of that perceived reencounter was, as mentioned, its linguistics. Haketia, widely used by Jews in the area until the twentieth century, consisted mostly of Spanish words. Unlike their Jewish counterparts in southern Morocco, who spoke in local (Jewish) dialects of Arabic and Tamazight, the ethnic language of most Jews in the north distinguished them, at least linguistically, from the larger non-Jewish environment. In some ways, the process resembled the function of Ladino in non-Spanish-speaking environments across the Mediterranean and beyond, or the linguistic self-segregation of Yiddish speakers in non-German-speaking regions of Europe and the Americas. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of Arabic by northern Moroccan Jews in everyday interactions with their non-Jewish environment was fairly widespread, as is evident from the penetration of numerous Arabic words into Haketia.¹⁹ Following the reencounter with Spain, however, many local Jews who were still familiar with Arabic began to treat it as a more marginal language, modifying their manner of speech to better resemble modern Spanish. In an academic article published in 1945, the philologist Paul Bénichou, speaking of Haketia, remarked that “the dialect, or great parts of it, is no more than a mere memory, which continues to exist only among people from the earlier generation.”²⁰

Given the context of Spanish colonialism, this, perhaps somewhat dramatized, observation reflected a much more complex process of self-conscious linguistic transformation. On the one hand, the Jewish middle and upper classes of northern Morocco, and particularly those among them who developed an exceptional sense of kinship with modern Spain and the Hispanophone world, deemed Haketia too “archaic” and even a sign of underdevelopment, and as such a source of shame among the generation born around the early 1900s.²¹ On the other hand, it was exactly this notion that motivated a strong impulse to document their dying Hispano-Arab heritage among the modernized intellectual elite. Fueled by academic studies, an intellectual elite imbued Haketia with a certain degree of expressed nostalgia for pre-1492 Jewish Spain. Groundbreaking efforts in this direction were undertaken by, among others, Pinhas Asayag, a Jewish journalist from Tangier and member of the local Jewish community council; José Benoliel, a philologist, poet, and teacher from Tangier; and Zarita Nahón, a disciple of the forefather of modern anthropology, Franz Boas.²² Nahón’s 1929 ethnographic account of romancero, a collection of Sephardic romances or Spanish ballad songs performed in Haketia in her community as a living link to its medieval Iberian roots, heralded a conceptual “sealing off” of Judeo-Spanish communities concentrated in northern Morocco from the rest of Morocco.

While local conditions under colonialism in Morocco were significant in influencing the encounter of Hispanic Moroccan Jews with the Hispanophone world and their Sephardi roots, they were also closely linked to global developments in the main Hispanic Moroccan Jewish hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and the US. Crucially, these destinations also shaped their new diasporic map. Moreover, political changes during the last fifteen years of Franco’s regime (1960–75) and the post-Franco era that followed, as well as an unprecedented wave of Jewish migration from Morocco to Spain, elevated Spain’s role as an epicenter for the production and dissemination of shared narratives of the community’s ancestry in Spain.²³ Associated developments—ranging from the establishment of bilateral relations between Israel and Spain in 1986 to a series of transnational collaborative projects in 1992 marking five hundred years since the expulsion of Jews from Spain—affected Israel as well. From the 1980s onward, Israel became a small but vibrant hub for the dissemination of nostalgic narratives about Spain and Morocco as entwined homelands. Notably, Israel also became a major hub for Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the twentieth century. Considering Israel’s historic and modern appeal to Jews across the world, this history thus has implications for the way we study diasporas.

REFRAMING MENA JEWISH DIASPORAS

Despite the vast and growing body of research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century MENA Jews, the existing scholarship is not oriented toward an understanding of these Jews as members of multipolar global diasporas, with transregional power relations and networks of communal solidarity. Until the 1960s, the conventional (nationalist) wisdom was that homeland and diaspora (often capitalized at the time) are fixed spatial categories, with homeland representing the ultimate place of origin from which an ethnic diaspora has dispersed and to which the latter’s core identity is attached. The general spatial separation between homeland and diaspora was not thoroughly challenged until the 1990s,²⁴ when grand narratives that were once conceived as encompassing definitive histories of people and nations and their relations to geography—as in the Zionist nationalist understanding of the Jewish diaspora’s return to the Land of Israel—were increasingly reconceived as cultural constructions that served political projects.²⁵ At the time, the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences accompanied a series of other turns, for example, the transnational and hybrid turns in postcolonial criticism. These turns further challenged nationalist and colonialist concepts of space and dispersion by highlighting multiculturalism and syncretic identities that bore affinities to multiple nations and sites.²⁶ Against this backdrop, scholarship in Jewish and Israel studies has come a long way from the traditional understanding of the Jewish diaspora and homeland as dichotomous categories.²⁷

However, the field of MENA studies, often labeled “area” studies, has until very recently generally neglected questions related to global migration and multi-sited diaspora-making.²⁸ In addition, a significant and groundbreaking scholarship over the past decade has focused on contextualizing Jews within their respective MENA societies, as opposed to perceiving them as self-contained and isolated Jewish communities.²⁹ When it comes to the study of Jewish diasporic groups from the MENA region in the twentieth century, however, the recent tendency in this field has been to study them within competing bipolar national (e.g., Moroccan or Zionist Israeli) contexts. This orientation echoes in part what Jessica Sperling defined as the swap of methodological nationalism for methodological bi-nationalism.³⁰ Many of the important historical studies that offer a critical view of Jewish national identities, in fact have highlighted the trends of integration of Jews into the national elites of newly independent MENA countries in the latter half of the twentieth century. These studies have only infrequently addressed the transregional links created through migration outside of the “region” as a way of decentering Zionism.³¹ In doing so, they align with the pioneering generation of Mizrahi Studies scholars, who, by overdetermining MENA Jewish experiences in Israel according to their marginalization by the Ashkenazi elite, have similarly perpetuated the tendency of differentiating the Israeli case from contemporary Jewish migrations from the MENA region to Europe and the Americas.³²

In addition, despite the preoccupation of Jewish studies with the concepts of diaspora and exile, when it comes to MENA Jewish diasporas, much of the scholarship ends in the mid-twentieth century, just prior to the “great rupture” that is said to have separated Jews from their pre-migration environments during and in the aftermath of colonialism.³³ Consequently, little attention is given to the study of transnational MENA/Sephardi diaspora networks, in which Israel is one important hub by no means isolated from the rest.³⁴ The existing scholarship that goes over the mid-twentieth century dividing line concentrates on MENA Jewish migrations to France, Spain, and North, Central, and South American countries—where North African Jews are often referred to themselves as Sephardim. While this existing scholarship has made groundbreaking contributions in analyzing the transnational aspects of MENA and Sephardi Jewry, it has primarily focused on assessing their impact within regional and national contexts, with limited attention given to the broader synchronic consequences of transnationalism.³⁵

Continuing a long legacy of methodological separation from the late nineteenth century onward—between the study of the golden age in Sepharad and the study of the post-expulsion Sephardi diaspora that resettled in the Orient, the Levant, and the Maghreb—much of the sub-field of Sephardi studies has sought to distinguish itself from modern MENA histories.³⁶ While recent works in Jewish studies have begun to bridge Sephardi and MENA diasporas, a tendency to study the migrations and transnational networks of Sephardi and MENA Jews only before the mid-twentieth century remains typical of this field.³⁷

A budding corpus of studies do explore the post-1948 immigration of Jews to Israel in the wider context of modern Jewish migrations—especially during the period when the demographic centers of Jewish life shifted from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe to the Americas, Western Europe, and Israel. Yet, these studies leave aside the MENA region and tend to focus instead on Jewish migration from Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the US.³⁸

Recent studies, mostly by Italian scholars, have begun to explore ties between specific hubs of MENA Jews, conceived as a diaspora that spans multiple postcolonial Mediterranean contexts in the second half of the twentieth century.³⁹ But few monographs today are dedicated to a single diasporic group with one or several defined homelands.⁴⁰ The diaspora of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, with their attachment to two historical homelands and to multiple global hubs throughout the twentieth century, offers a more transregional approach to MENA and Sephardi hometown diasporas. Nonetheless, the most up-to-date account of Spanish colonialism’s attitude toward Jews in North Africa has been explored in a localized context, looking specifically at encounters between Spain and Morocco and leaving aside the European, Israeli, and South and North American contexts.⁴¹

Drawing on the case of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, this book offers insight into the way processes of diaspora formation interact with international migration patterns and the associated intra-diasporic hierarchies and global networks over the twentieth century and beyond. It delineates how a small group of generally first-generation migrants who shared the same urban space in northern Morocco’s small cities and towns forged narratives of shared ancestral roots by referring to a multiplicity of historic and modern homelands alongside Spain, as a source for community empowerment.

THE BOOK’S CHAPTERS

Spanish colonialism in Africa, as historian Mimoun Azziza observes, was “a poor man’s version of colonialism.”⁴² The loss of Spain’s global empire in the Americas and the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, and the resulting economic downturn and political instability of the twentieth century, stood in contrast with the colonial expansion of neighboring Western European powers like France and Great Britain. This gap between Spain and other Western European nations widened even further during the period of economic rehabilitation that followed World War II. While France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium together attracted around 350,000 Moroccan immigrants in the decade from 1965 to 1975, less than 10,000 Moroccans resided in the more geographically proximate Spain in 1975.⁴³ The encounter with modern Spain was thus largely realized through the process of Spanish settler immigration and the way it came to shape a new concept of community belonging among the Sephardim in northern Morocco. As a result of the exposure of Jews to Spanish settlers, the popularity of modern Spanish language fed, in a dialectical way, their self-definition via linguistic, social, and cultural “boundary work” designed to define their nuanced position in the Spanish colonial project vis-à-vis Spanish settlers.⁴⁴

This book’s two opening chapters sketch the way affinity to Spain was integrated into modern Jewish narratives of belonging in northern Morocco as both a colonial power and an imagined place of ancestry that supported community building. In chapter 1, I show how Tangier and Tetouan, the major urban centers where most Hispanic Moroccan Jews lived in the first half of the twentieth century, became hubs where Jews intermingled with Spanish colonial settlers in the domestic and leisure spheres on the basis of shared language. Social codes were significantly altered by colonial expansion and related intra-urban migration, which in turn also affected the everyday lives of northern Moroccan Jews as well as their desire to differentiate themselves by associating with the circles of the Jewish community.

In chapter 2, I explore how actors within the Jewish community facilitated the notion of Jewish ancestry in Spain by forging new institutions and ties with French, American, and Spanish ethnographers, and philologists of Haketia. This chapter delineates how ethnic formation accompanied the expansion of global networks of heritage preservation from the outset of colonization and through Franco’s reign and Moroccan independence in 1956. Colonialism that could have been seen as a challenge to community identity in fact reinforced it. Taken together, chapters 1 and 2 serve as a foundation for understanding how Jewish communities in northern Morocco developed a strong affinity with the Hispanic world and entwined it with their modern Sephardi identities, even as other colonial influences—primarily French—were increasingly becoming part of their identities.

Chapter 3 addresses the influence of Jewish migration on the hometown awareness of Hispanic Moroccan Jews abroad as well as on the increasing prominence of South America in the formation of local Hispanic Jewish identities in northern Morocco in the 1920s through the 1950s. Shaped by circular migration ties and transnational hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, the notion of a unique connection to Latin America impacted community building, becoming a mythical reference point for Jewish Hispanic identity in Morocco. Significantly, I demonstrate how these dynamics unfolded in the context of a growing awareness that shared global Hispanic origins and could serve as a source of local empowerment.

Chapter 4 recounts how the rise of Zionism in northern Morocco, beginning in 1900, was consistent with the growing identification with Spanish culture and the global dispersion of Hispanic community networks until the mid-twentieth century. By exploring the development of Zionism as a tool for community interconnectivity from the early 1900s through Morocco’s independence in 1956, the chapter challenges prominent studies of Jewish migration from the MENA region. Such studies view the development of Zionism, on the one hand, and the construction of diasporic consciousness or local (non-Israeli) national identities, on the other hand, as opposed or contradictory processes.

Further developing the idea that the influence of Zionism did not run counter to international migration to destinations other than Israel, and to Jewish community building worldwide, chapter 5 looks more closely at the construction of Hispanic Moroccan identities in the 1960s and 1970s. I begin this chapter by showing how community building among Moroccan Jews in Venezuela, one of the most prominent hubs of Hispanic Moroccan Jews after 1948, was entwined with the growing influence of Israel as a source of solidarity across the Jewish diaspora and, more particularly, among Sephardi Jews. As I show, such a notion of solidarity was entwined with new hierarchies that conceived of Moroccan Jews as “Jewries in distress.” To position themselves in a conceivably upper-hand position vis-à-vis other groups of Moroccans on the move, leaders in Venezuela appealed to their histories of international migration. Through that process, new interpretations of Zionism as well as Moroccan and Latin American identities, as recounted in the previous chapters, were formed to empower the local hub of the diaspora.

Focusing on postcolonial developments after Morocco’s independence from Spain in 1956, chapter 6 looks at how the notion of the community’s ancestry in Spain traveled to the renewing hubs, primarily to Spain and Venezuela. Drawing on communal sources, I show how narratives of ancestry in Spain, originally created to serve Spanish colonialism, were employed by Jewish leaders to empower their local diaspora communities in both countries. In Spain they helped them integrate into a new national discourse that was designed to rebrand the country as democratic and thus historically tolerant to Jews (and Muslims). Traveling to Venezuela, the notion of ancestry in Spain, and the merging of Moroccan identities into that notion helped the community integrate into Venezuelan narratives that bridged Latin America with Spain, including with its pre-1492 legacies.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the several thousand Spanish Moroccan Jews who emigrated to Israel. In the late 1970s, they began to distinguish themselves from the larger Moroccan community in the country. While this differentiation had deep roots in pre-immigration Morocco as well as in the newer global hubs outside of Israel, the fact that the Israeli establishment stereotyped Moroccans as culturally backward intensified the construction of a separate narrative emphasizing the cultural difference of Moroccans with an ancestral connection to Spain. The community in Israel began to elevate the Hispanic part of its identity, including a connection to modern Spain, in order to emphasize how it was distinguished from (Arabic-speaking) Moroccan immigrants, who were negatively stereotyped in Israel. Yet in this process, Haketia, with its Arabic component and origins in Morocco, was employed to portray the community as authentically Moroccan with deeply rooted Spanish traits, demonstrating that, unlike their southern counterparts, Hispanic Moroccan Jews’ European roots were not artificially imposed by modern (French) colonialism.

Local developments in Israel influenced the global network of advocates dedicated to spreading the nostalgic narrative about the community’s origins. Chapter 8 recounts how the Israeli group of community leaders directly influenced the creation of sister organizations in the smaller hubs in France, the US, and Canada. This chapter exemplifies the connections between the local communities in the non-Spanish-speaking world and how they sought to use those links to strengthen their connection to the Hispanophone world.

To achieve this, it borrows the concept of the Global Hispanophone, addressing the ties between regions of the world that were bound by the Spanish Empire beyond Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula itself—namely, North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines and other regions that scholars rarely study alongside one another. Placing the Global Hispanophone paradigm in the context of postcolonial migration from Morocco in this chapter advances the study of local contexts hitherto marginal to major historical centers of Spanish influence, transcending existing boundaries and bringing the past and present of these far-flung regions into dialogue with others.⁴⁵ In all, this book focuses on the Spanish linguistic heritage and capabilities that enabled Jews in Spain and Latin America, but also in Israel, Morocco, and the non-Spanish-speaking countries of North America and Europe, to build connections and empower themselves as a diaspora.

THE MECHANISM OF DIASPORA MOBILIZATION

The history of Hispanic Moroccan Jews and their globalizing diaspora in the twentieth century bears implications for the study of diasporas beyond the Sephardi and Jewish contexts. To avoid the over-essentialization of diaspora as an analytical term, Rogers Brubaker insisted that three core elements define diasporas, even in times of globalization and multicultural and hyphenated experiences: dispersion, homeland orientation, and boundary maintenance. These three characteristics, in his mind, distinguished diasporas from other dispersed groups.⁴⁶ Rubin Cohen later described Brubaker’s intervention as “the consolidation phase” of diaspora studies, stressing that this observation is not intended to maintain that diasporas are not socially constructed or to reembrace nationalist ideas about simplistic links between land, people, and culture—prominent until the 1960s—but rather to “find some dialogical possibilities between diaspora scholars and their social constructionist critics.”⁴⁷ From this perspective, with the opening up of global space and hyphenated experiences, the relationship between diaspora and homeland may at times be “reversed,” as when members of ethnic diasporas enact “homecomings” to historical centers of diaspora life.⁴⁸ More significantly, while previous approaches exclusively connected immigrants’ place of origin with the new homeland or host country, this new literature conceives of transnational experiences as multi-sited and multi-directional.⁴⁹

Combining the analysis of such multilayered experiences with the Spanish, and mostly the myth of a reencounter with Spain—embraced by a group of Jews that maintained their Iberian identities in Morocco and eventually came to represent one of the prominent Jewish communities in Spain and Israel in the last third of the twentieth century—raises more nuanced questions for the consolidation phase as defined by Cohen. Under such circumstances, what goal did a declared attachment to multiple ancestral centers serve in the identity construction of a small diaspora whose members predominantly migrated from a small territory in northern Morocco?

As many diaspora scholars have argued in recent years regarding the social structure of diasporas, diaspora formation and maintenance require a significant number of scattered individuals who adhere to the diaspora idea, even situationally, as the construct develops over time.⁵⁰ In other words, it is not enough to merely be from a specific place of origin to become a member of a diaspora—you also need to act on that awareness to become a member, to accept the collective narrative and often further disseminate it through networks and institutions. Or, as diaspora scholar Brian Keith Axel inquires, “Who in the most quotidian of ways, claims to be the subject of diaspora? . . . What are the everyday conditions for the identification of a subject of diaspora?”⁵¹ As I maintain relatedly throughout the book, modern diasporas are “mobilized” by interpersonal, semiformal and formal associations, organized events, and means of communication that mediate shared conceptions about roots and home.⁵² Individuals actively develop their sense of being a diaspora through unifying narratives that flow within those networks and make sense of their collective “duty” to use those narratives to maintain connections and set boundaries with other groups.⁵³

As the research for this book evolved, the centrality of this notion became increasingly clear. I began my research on the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora in 2009 by conducting twenty-seven interviews with men and women who immigrated to Israel from northern Morocco. For this preliminary research, I simply engaged two of my own interpersonal networks at the time. The first stemmed from my own family: my father, a native of Tangier, connected me with a distant relative with whom I had not previously been familiar. The second network was based on the professional connections of my former MA adviser, Prof. Tamar Alexander, then head of the Gaon Center for the Study of Ladino and Its Culture. During my studies for my master’s degree in 2008, Prof. Alexander put me in touch with immigrants from northern Moroccan who had been active “preservers” of the community’s heritage in Israel. After several interviews, my two initial networks—familial and professional—eventually merged, as exemplified by an interview I conducted with my adviser’s colleague, who turned out to be a distant relative of mine.

The way in which I witnessed the networks blend into a single web of connections came to influence my approach to studying Hispanic Moroccan Jews and their diasporas in the twentieth century. I began to realize that common and repeated expressions recurred throughout the narratives about the community’s past in Spain and Morocco and slowly revealed the structure of a popularized collective narrative that was deeply rooted in the diasporic experiences of these individuals and their relationships with the place I had come from—academia. The following anecdote may capture my point. Following my interview with Sara, an immigrant from Tetouan who resided in Beer-Sheva at the time of the interview, she offered to lend me an academic book authored by Shoshana (Susana) Weich Shahak. The book, En Buen Siman! Panorama Del Repertorio Musical Sefaradí, explored the romancero (Spanish ballad song collections) traditionally sung by Jews in northern Morocco.⁵⁴ When I opened it, I found between its pages an invitation to Sephardi Jews in North Morocco: Music, Language, and Culture, an academic event hosted by the Gaon Center in Beer-Sheva. The event had taken place in March 2006 with the participation of Profs. Alexander, Weich Shahak, Jimmy Weinblatt (then rector of Ben-Gurion University), and Yaakov Bentolila. Esti Keinan Ofri of the Kol Oud Tof Trio had performed northern Moroccan wedding melodies.

I attended the next Gaon Center event dedicated to northern Moroccan culture and history in March 2009, called Haketia Evening. Haketia was a key and repetitive topic in these collective stories told by community members, even when few of the people I met spoke it fluently. Some of those immigrants actually stressed overtly that they “did not speak Haketia [in Morocco],” hinting at the complexity of everyday life experiences in northern Morocco in their childhood, where their parents replaced Haketia with contemporary Spanish and other European languages, thus deeming Haketia archaic and even a source of shame. But paradoxically, these individuals were some of the most enthusiastic preserves of Haketia, as I learned. Estrella Jalfón de Bentolila, an enthusiastic documenter of Haketia in Israel, expressed this notion in the prologue to her 2011 memoir: “Prof. Jacob Bentolila . . . said in a conference in Ben-Gurion University ‘when a language is only used in humorous writings it is because the language is in the agony of death pains.’ It must be true, but it pained me. . . . The essay I wrote in 1992 [to commemorate the five hundred years of the Expulsion of Jews from Spain] had only few words in Haketia . . . but over the years I began to expand the vocabulary list. . . . At night when I had trouble sleeping, words came to me.”⁵⁵ A number of proactive individuals stressed the importance of their (our) duty to salvage the community heritage that was considered dead in the modernizing urban spaces of northern Morocco, and in the contexts of their migration from Morocco. The salvage of Haketia was imbued with a sense of a nostalgic passage to forgotten shores.

Ultimately, the interviews I conducted in 2009 and 2010 do not provide much of the content of this book. Yet collecting those stories was an essential step in understanding the community’s social dynamics and developing the project’s theoretical framework and for tracing an array of more traditional and less conventional archival sources. Focusing on such community perspectives helped me shape the main questions of this book and sharpen my understanding of the global proliferation of community networks through the twentieth century.

The role of community networks in the construction of attachment to multiple homelands, and the way this multiplicity of attachments serves to hold the hubs of a small diaspora together and differentiate it from other groups as a source for empowerment, also lies at the heart of the book’s methodological approach. Throughout this book, I analyze an abundance of ethnographic publications and the institutions that produced and stored them—institutions that, beyond merely providing information for my research, serve as sites of community formation. The sources include numerous records; more than 150 interviews, events, and radio shows recorded in multiple locations, including but not limited to Morocco, France, Canada, Venezuela, Spain, Israel, Portugal, and Switzerland; personal and community correspondence; and understudied community periodicals. The periodicals include, for example, some of the first Jewish Spanish periodicals in Morocco: Adelante (1929–31/32), and Or-Luz (1956). In the chapters on events in Venezuela, I analyze for the first time the long-running publication Maguén-Escudo, founded in Caracas by Moroccan Jews in 1970 and still in production today. I examine MABAT Revista (Mabat Review) and the circulars of the main organization of Hispanic Moroccans Jews in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s. I also utilize a wide array of ethnographic works and memoirs written about and for the community in Morocco, Venezuela, Israel, Spain, the US, and France.

Notably, many of these sources were accessible to me thanks to the desire of devoted individuals and community leaders who comprise the networks detailed in this book. They saw me and my research as a bridgehead for disseminating the community’s own account of its history.⁵⁶ Albeit composed in specific geographical and temporal contexts, those networks reflect the dynamics that incubated the formation of a global community. Hassan Cohen’s words at the opening of this chapter are, too, a single manifestation of a worldwide project undertaken by Hispanic Moroccan Jews and the monumental efforts they expended to bridge vast distances, real and imagined—efforts that this book hopefully does some justice.