FOUR

ZIONISM AND THE HISPANIC MOROCCAN DIASPORA

IN 1951, A SPANISH-LANGUAGE ARTICLE ENTITLED “Folklore” appeared in Noar, the newspaper published in Casablanca between 1945 and 1952 by a group of Jews originating in northern Morocco. Noar was one of the most prominent Jewish newspapers in Morocco at the time, and probably the most widely circulated Zionist newspaper in North Africa.¹ The author of the article, Joseph Tapiero, shared with Noar’s readers some Spanish romances, or folk ballad songs that his mother had taught him as a child in Tangier. Tapiero was one of the readers who had responded to a call issued by the paper’s editors to share such romances in “ancient Spanish”—that is, in Haketia.² The next issue of Noar included a call to assist scholars investigating the Judeo-Spanish dialect of Morocco, which, despite being “the closest to Spanish among all Judeo-Spanish dialects,” was the most understudied, according to the author.³ These articles were published in a small Spanish-language section in Noar called “El Mundo Sefardí” (“The Sephardi World”). As noted in the announcement that preceded the initiation of this section, one of its purposes was to demonstrate the loyalty of Sephardi Jews worldwide to their “ancient patria,” Spain.⁴

While this connection between Spain and Jews from northern Morocco should come, by now, as no surprise, its expression in Noar should not be taken for granted. The initiative to publish Noar came from the ranks of the Charles Netter Zionist youth movement, whose leaders—Alfonso Sabah, Daniel Levy, Maurice Timsit, Raphaël Benacerraf, and Joe Lasry—belonged to the religious conservative camp of Zionism that strongly supported the immigration of Jews to Israel after 1948.⁵

Moreover, the use of Spanish in this otherwise Francophone newspaper had no practical linguistic rationale, as its readers were typically fluent in French. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that many of its readers, coming from the interior communities of Morocco, did not even read Spanish fluently, if at all. Shortly after the establishment of the protectorate in 1912, Casablanca evolved from a small fishing village into a commercial metropolis, attracting waves of internal migration from across the country that included all ethnoreligious groups. In some respects, Casablanca surpassed Tangier as the main commercial center in Morocco. Against this backdrop, a large number of Jews from northern Morocco moved southward in search of new economic opportunities as northern Morocco entered a period of internal warfare and saw an influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War.⁶ Jews from all over the country and not just from northern Morocco increasingly made “Casa” their home, and the Jewish population numbered around eighty thousand in 1950, around a third of the country’s Jews.⁷

A good explanation for Noar’s call to embrace a Spanish identity would thus have to consider the way Jews from the north formed their own ethnolinguistic community in Casablanca while capitalizing on their editorship of this prominent Zionist periodical. For example, the “Sephardi World” section of this newspaper published in Casablanca occasionally ran news from northern Morocco. Attachment to the “Sephardi World,” then, served the self-affirmation of Spanish-speaking Jewish immigrant communities from the north who resettled in Morocco’s biggest city, Casablanca.

In this context, nostalgia for the mythological Spanish “fatherland” among Noar’s editors did not contradict their devotion to the Zionist cause, even when it reflected more concrete ties with the Spanish state and the Francoist colonial regime after 1948. In 1952, Noar’s editors reproduced an article published earlier in the Francoist periodical España detailing Spanish Senator Ángel Pulido’s Philo-Sephardi activity on behalf of the world’s Sephardim, which it referred to as his “admirable endeavor for the Jewish people.”⁸ The author, Rahma Toledano, a well-known journalist from Tangier and a former president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) Alumni Association, maintained regular contact with Pulido. In 1955, she joined a delegation headed by S. D. Lévy, the representative of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Casablanca, that traveled to Madrid to commemorate Pulido’s death some twenty-three years earlier. On that occasion, Lévy expressed his dual devotion to the Zionist cause and to the Philo-Sephardi campaign when offering to commemorate Pulido by planting trees in the Haruvit Forest in the Lachish area of southern Israel. The idea was realized a year later, on June 1, 1956, in the midst of the Moroccan struggle for independence. The JNF invited official guests from Spain to Israel for the first time, and the Spanish flag was flown in Israel.⁹

The link between Jewish affinities for Spain and activities to promote Zionism in Morocco by a network of devoted Zionist leaders in the early 1950s is striking, especially given the state of diplomatic relations between Israel and Spain at the time. In 1948 and 1949, Franco attempted to establish ties with Israel, but Israel demurred, mainly due to the Spanish regime’s relationship with Nazi Germany. This incident in turn shaped Spain’s engagement with the Arab world in the 1950s and the declaration of a “Spanish-Arab friendship”; however, in 1956, Spain rejected Israel’s request to establish full diplomatic relations.¹⁰ None of this changed prominent Moroccan Zionist activists like S. D. Lévy’s affinity with Spain, or its deployment by community leaders in the course of building Zionist institutions in Morocco.

Looking at such developments, this chapter explores the way community-building processes among the leadership elite of Hispanic Moroccan Jews were intertwined with their growing identification with Zionism, Israel (after 1948), Spain, and Latin America, as well as independent Morocco. While diversity within the modern Zionist project is often attributed to regionally based differences—such as between North African and Eastern European Zionism—in this chapter I argue that to understand the complexities of the Hispanic Moroccan case, greater attention to transregional communal networks that served as tools for community building and empowerment is essential.¹¹ Highlighting forms of interconnectivity as a way to understand the reception and interpretation of Zionism across Hispanophone and Hispanophile networks from the early 1900s through 1956 helps us rethink scholarly descriptions of Morocco exclusively in terms of national or regional analyses.

A NEW ZIONIST DIASPORA

To understand the dynamics that fueled the enmeshment of Zionism and Sephardi attachment to Spain in the mid-twentieth century, we must first examine the regional and global development of the community from the turn of the century, when Zionism in northern Morocco was a weak idea with few adherents. In the late nineteenth century, Argentina became a hub for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, some of whom brought with them Zionist ideas. Through their activities, Argentina soon became a prominent center for Zionism in Latin America and the broader Hispanophone world. In 1897, Argentina was home to a local branch of Hovevei Zion (The Lovers of Zion), an early Zionist group first established in Eastern Europe in 1881. While Moroccan Jews in Argentina were not among the forerunners of Zionism, they would soon integrate Zionism into their organizational strategies. In 1904, some individuals of Moroccan descent participated in Argentina’s first Zionist Congress, and in 1907 Moroccan immigrants founded their own Zionist groups in Vila Mercedes, Margarita, and Rosario.¹²

Through new émigré newspapers, Moroccan Jews came to play a role in a spread of Zionist ideas across Latin America that was disproportionate to their relatively small representation in local Zionist organizations. Established in Buenos Aires in 1917 by Jacobo and Samuel A. Levy, two immigrants from Tetouan, Israel was the first Spanish-language Zionist newspaper worldwide. Its appearance in Spanish—unlike most Zionist periodicals at the time, which were in Yiddish—was motivated by its Moroccan founders’ alienation from the local Zionist scene. This scene was then dominated by networks connecting Eastern European immigrants with their hometowns. Israel’s presentation of Zionist ideas facilitated the integration of the small Moroccan Jewish community into Argentina’s Jewish immigrant society by helping readers sharpen their identification with a shared country of identification that helped unite them.¹³ In its first year, Israel had about ten thousand subscribers from across Latin America, including individuals who were not necessarily of a Moroccan Jewish background or Jewish altogether. According to its first issue, it also maintained twenty correspondents in seven Argentinean provinces, six in Morocco, two in Brazil, and one each in Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, the US, and Spain.¹⁴

The founding of Israel reflected the more globalized character of Moroccan Zionism that began to emerge out of the hubs of Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco, similar to other Zionist organizations in the twentieth century but with its own distinctions. In Brazil, as in Argentina, Zionism helped Moroccan Jews integrate into both the local Jewish and broader Brazilian societies. In 1916, David Jose Peréz, a Moroccan Jew from Tangier whose family settled in northern Brazil, joined with Alvaro Castilho, a non-Jewish Zionist sympathizer, to found the first local Zionist newspaper in the country, A Columna (The Column). Like Israel in Argentina, A Columna was the first Jewish Brazilian newspaper to appear in Portuguese, the national language. Unlike other Zionist activities taking shape in the country among Eastern European Jews, A Columna targeted Jews who were scattered across Brazil.¹⁵

The rise of Zionist activity in Latin America paralleled that in Morocco. Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) had long been a point of reference in Jewish liturgy, and the Jewish communities in northern Morocco were no exception. This traditional connection manifested as established networks of fundraising, correspondence between rabbis, and even travel to Palestine.¹⁶ The characteristics of traditional attachment to Eretz Israel, however, changed dramatically with the growing influence of European Zionism at the outset of the twentieth century. Influenced by the same spread of European Zionism, just three years after the establishment of Hovevei Zion in Argentina, the first modern Zionist group in Morocco appeared in Tetouan, in September 1900. Rabbi Yehuda León Jalfón (also spelled Halfon), president of the High Rabbinic Tribunal of Tetouan, together with Dr. Y. Berliavski, a Jewish Russian physician who had immigrated to Morocco, started in Tetouan a small Hebrew-language study club called Shivat Zion (Return to Zion). Shaarei Zion, or Gates of Zion, was established the same month in the southern port city of Mogador. A decade later, new clubs appeared throughout Morocco, including Havaad Hazioni in Tangier, Shaare Zion in Ceuta, Bonei Yerushalaim in Larache, and Magen David in Casablanca. At the time of their establishment, these institutions were too small and marginal to stir opposition in and beyond the community. If anything, they had to combat the vast majority of northern Moroccan Jews’ apathy toward the Zionist movement, as they saw it.¹⁷

ZIONISM AND SEPHARDI ANCESTRY, A PRACTICAL MARRIAGE

It may seem remarkable that Zionist activism among Hispanic Moroccan Jews took place almost concurrently with the “reencounter” between Spain and Morocco, but in fact, as already shown above, these two processes were often promoted by the same individuals as a joint project of communal revitalization. Rabbi Jalfón, one of the staunchest supporters of the Philo-Sephardi movement, is a prime example, as evidenced by a series of eighty-nine letters he exchanged early in the twentieth century with Manuel Ortega, the aforementioned enthusiastic proponent of the Philo-Sephardi movement in Spain and editor of the Philo-Sephardi bulletin La Revista de la Raza.¹⁸

In response to his link with Jalfón, Ortega himself mentioned Zionism, as a momentous movement of Jewish renewal, in the same book in which he discussed the role of Sephardi Jews as Spain’s most loyal diasporic agents.¹⁹ Earlier, in his canonical 1905 book Stateless Spaniards, Ángel Pulido, the forefather of the Spanish Philo-Sephardi movement, declared Spain “a second Zion” for Sephardi Jews.²⁰ While seemingly contradictory, there was a wider intellectual basis for this intertwining of Zionism and affinity to Spain. In the aesthetics of nineteenth-century Jewish life, pre-1492 Spain was deemed a model for maintaining Jewish particularism beyond the confines of the ghetto. That idealized image of Sepharad shaped the reclaiming of Hebrew and biblical texts as much as they shaped the appeal of Judeo-Spanish literature.²¹

Beyond any literary imagination, in colonial northern Morocco the entwining of Sephardi and Zionist identities also had political and pragmatic added value. The fact that European Zionism was embraced and developed by enthusiastic followers of Philo-Sephardism like Jalfón may have softened the attitude of Spanish colonial authorities after 1912 or diminished suspicion about possible disloyalties to Spain, contrary to the French colonial context. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 significantly aroused the French colonial authorities’ suspicions about Zionist activities, fearing that they might stir disloyalty to French rule and evoke nationalist spirits. In this atmosphere, the intertwining of Philo-Sephardism and Zionism as two forms of Jewish renewal in northern Morocco continued to develop in the 1920s, as a sign of dual loyalty.

In the context of early Spanish colonialism, claiming a connection to Spain also had a practical organizational motivation. As his correspondence demonstrates, Rabbi Jalfón, for example, received Zionist material from Avraham Shalom Yahuda, the (then) Madrid-based biblical scholar, and from Ignacio Brauner, the head of Spain’s Jewish community. In 1920, Zionist activists in northern Morocco had institutionalized transregional networks by incorporating themselves into the Spanish Zionist Federation established in Madrid that year. In 1922, to mark the collaboration, the federation changed its name to Federación Hispano-Marroquí Sionista and summoned representatives from both locations, including Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews residing in Casablanca, to join this transregional Zionist federation that connected Spain and Morocco.²²

In the 1920s and early 1930s, when Zionism became more acceptable among community leaders to promote international Jewish solidarity, it was not rare for Zionist activists to openly show strong affection for the Spanish state as a practical tool for promoting the global spread of modern Zionism. Dr. Ariel Bension is a case in point. As the son of a Moroccan immigrant to Palestine in the nineteenth century, he became a delegate of the JNF, for which he hoped to collect funds from the less active Sephardi communities worldwide. After serving as a JNF representative in Latin America, in 1932, just before his untimely death, Bension became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He had started his journey in 1921 in Spain and continued on to Portugal and Gibraltar, meeting a number of leaders from the globalizing community of northern Moroccan Jews. According to Bension, in Spain, the “Casa Sefarad” (the Sepharad House), an association initially established to promote the “reencounter” and return of Sephardi Jews to Spain, also became a base for promoting Zionist activity in the country.²³ Rabbi Jalfón was in touch with Bension prior to his trip to Argentina, where he would encourage the local Moroccan community to found local branches of the Zionist group Bene Kedem.²⁴ While on the eve of colonialism foreign European Zionist ideas were not embraced by the elite of the Jewish communities as smoothly as the Philo-Sephardi campaign, already by the 1920s the two projects were complementing one another.

Small wonder, then, that in the late 1920s the periodicals El Renacimiento de Israel and Adelante, despite their different orientations, both represented the interests of the Philo-Sephardi campaign while simultaneously including Zionist content. Adelante, which presented itself as “Africa’s top Spanish newspaper,”²⁵ even marked its own first anniversary with a special issue in honor of Theodor Herzl. In that issue, next to a photo of Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, the editors placed a photograph of José Benoliel, the well-known philologist of Haketia, and of M. André Pierre, president of the Press Association of the High Commissioner of Spain in Morocco.²⁶

While the intertwining of Sephardi and Zionist identities became acceptable, they did not advance without difficulties. In 1929, the community council of Tetouan subscribed to the Tangier-based Renacimiento de Israel. In 1931, four out of six members of that council voted in favor of canceling that subscription due to financial issues, causing Jaime Vidal Israel, one of the enthusiastic supporters of Zionism in the council, to quit his membership in protest.²⁷

Moreover, the marriage between Zionism and Sephardi identities must be further contextualized in terms of the emerging ethnic rift between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews over the influence—or lack thereof—of Sephardim in the Zionist movement, as it gained further momentum after the Balfour Declaration. In general, many Sephardi advocates of Zionism, including Moroccans, felt excluded from the more comprehensive, Yiddish-speaking networks of the Zionist movement. The Israel and A Columna newspapers, established by Moroccan Jews, ought to be understood as essential vehicles for empowering Sephardim in the global institutions of the Zionist movement, as explicitly described in a 1917 article in A Columna.²⁸ The establishment of the World Sephardi Federation (WSF) in 1925 marked the culmination of that tension as well as a shift in the ability of Sephardi communities to organize separately within the global Zionist movement. This initiative arose out of the Jerusalem-based Sephardi Community Council (SCC) in its struggle for the equal representation of Sephardim in the World Zionist Organization.²⁹

One of the advantages of gathering a variety of communities, ranging from Ladino-speaking Jews from Turkey to Arabic-speaking Jews from Syria, under the Sephardi-Zionism banner was the ability to create umbrella organizations that empowered each community. In Argentina, for example, immigrants from across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Ladino-speaking world began to unify in the 1920s under the framework of Sephardi Zionism and, as Adriana Brodsky has shown, to highlight the status of Spain as a secondary Jewish homeland alongside Israel.³⁰ The pragmatic organizational benefits afforded by unification can be distinguished from the ideological Philo-Sephardi discourses taking shape elsewhere throughout the Sephardi world. Samuel A. Levy, editor of Israel in Buenos Aires, used the Zionist periodical to promote attachment to Spain. In one article he even refers to Senator Ángel Pulido as a “Second Herzl.” Pulido himself mentions Levy in Stateless Spaniards, referring to him as a prominent agent of Philo-Sephardi ideas worldwide.³¹ On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the editorial board of El Renacimiento de Israel in northern Morocco suggested honoring Pulido in the JNF’s “golden book.” In a follow-up article, noting that the idea to recognize Pulido had come from the Moroccan community in Argentina, the editors included a copy of a report on the subject that had been previously published in Israel in Buenos Aires.³²

HISPANIC ZIONISM AND COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT IN CASABLANCA

In the early twentieth century, new forms of communal organization among Jews in Latin America paralleled community-building processes among Hispanic Moroccan Jews—not only in northern Morocco but also in the country’s rapidly developing commercial center, Casablanca. In the nineteenth century, several Spanish-speaking Jewish families from northern Morocco had been among the first Jews to settle in Casablanca. In 1880, they established the Junta, a community council that resembled in its name and organizational codes the modern Jewish community councils in their northern Moroccan hometowns. This Spanish-speaking leadership also lobbied for the founding of a Casablanca branch of the AIU, which would eventually open in 1897.³³ In 1898, Jewish immigrants from Tangier in Casablanca established their own synagogue, Shevet Achim, at 8 Dar el-Makhzen Street, in front of the Great Mosque. The synagogue was located in the heart of Casablanca’s commercial district, where a number of northern Moroccan families had settled. By 1912, and until its closure in 1940, Shevet Achim served a nearby community center for immigrants.³⁴ As a minority group, northern Moroccan immigrants to Casablanca continued to use Spanish as their internal language of communication.³⁵

As in Argentina and Brazil, Zionist activism played a strategic role for the leaders of the Jewish community in Casablanca. One of the major figures in the local Zionist scene, who would soon become a leader in the broader nationwide Zionist movement in Morocco, was S. D. Lévy, who appeared at the beginning of this chapter as the Zionist leader promoting ties between Israel and Spain in 1955. An AIU graduate, Lévy developed his teaching career at various branches of the AIU school system—first in Tunisia in 1894, then from 1894 to 1900 in Tangier, and finally as principal of the Casablanca branch from 1900 to 1902. In 1903, Lévy joined the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) and spent the next ten years as principal of the school at the JCA’s colony in Mauricio, Argentina. As an AIU representative, he helped recruit students from North Africa to the JCA. In Argentina, he worked closely with refugees from Russia until 1913, when he returned to Morocco and resettled in Casablanca. Lévy engaged in all of these activities despite the fact that the AIU and JCA maintained a general opposition to immigration to Palestine.³⁶

In Argentina, Lévy was exposed to Zionist organizational practices, as recounted above. After his return to Casablanca in 1913, he imported some of those ideas back to Morocco and became a pioneering Zionist organizer together with Spanish-speaking émigrés from northern Morocco like Yaacov Raphaël Benacerraf, a wealthy tea merchant with whom Lévy established the first Zionist group in the city. In 1927, Lévy was elected president of both the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Magen David association. He later became the president of the Moroccan branch of the French Zionist Federation. In 1926, Lévy was among the most prominent writers for L’Avenir Illustrée (1926–40), a Zionist periodical founded by Jonathan Thurscz, a Polish Jewish immigrant to Casablanca with strong ties to European Jewish communities and a command of French, German, Polish, and Yiddish.³⁷ L’Avenir Illustrée would prove to be one of Morocco’s longest-standing Jewish publications. Zionist activity in Morocco in the 1920s and 1930s was largely characterized by the tight collaboration between Lévy, his colleagues in Casablanca, and other European Jews like the Polish-born Solomon Cagan.

This group represented a small network who struggled to bring Zionist ideas to North Africa against the resistance of local Jewish leaders. In 1932, Elie Nataf, former principal of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and secretary of the Jewish community of Casablanca, established the Jewish newspaper L’Union Marocaine to counteract the Zionist-oriented L’Avenir Illustrée. He represented an educated elite of “integrationist” Moroccan Jews who were influenced by the Jewish-Arab riots in Palestine in 1929, rising Arab nationalism in the 1930s, and the Berber Dahir of 1930. Beyond Zionism, L’Union Marocaine countered L’Avenir Illustrée on many other issues, including, for example, education, communal administration, and the legal status of Moroccan Jews. L’Avenir Illustrée ceased publication in 1940 after the French authorities deported Thurscz due to his illegal Zionist activity.³⁸

The remaining Zionist activists who had founded L’Avenir Illustrée went on to establish a successor publication, Noar, which appeared from 1945 until 1952. The new newspaper reflected a major shift in attitudes toward Zionism in Casablanca and across the country. Still, as demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, despite its appeal to the local Francophone audience in Morocco, Noar mirrored the transregional network that its founders had initiated in the late nineteenth century with the establishment of the global Spanish-speaking Moroccan community and its affinity for Spain.

POST-1948 DEVELOPMENTS

Despite their global reach, until the mid-1940s, Zionist networks in Morocco were small and monitored by the authorities, and exerted only minor influence on the majority of Moroccan Jews. Zionism in that period was not oriented toward emigration to Palestine as much as it was toward fundraising and providing an intellectual-organizational framework for Jewish communities worldwide. Even as late as 1944, S. D. Lévy, one of the most prominent leaders of Moroccan Zionism, did not see emigration as a fruitful solution for Moroccan Jews, preferring to invest in community developments in his Moroccan homeland.³⁹ But due to the momentous impact of events after World War II—most prominently the founding of the State of Israel in 1948—Zionist migration subsequently became far more influential among a much wider swath of the Jewish population and leadership. Between 1948 and 1956, 98,243 Jews, more than a third of the country’s entire Jewish population in 1948, left for Israel.⁴⁰ This came at a time when, paradoxically, the State of Israel determined that Jewish immigration from North Africa was not a matter of urgency, prioritizing other communities in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya that became independent earlier than Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. In November 1951, Israel even approved a “selection” policy that limited Jewish immigration based on age and medical condition as well as their ability and willingness to work in agricultural settlements.⁴¹

Israel’s restriction on Jewish immigration from North Africa, effective since November 1951, began to loosen in light of the local struggle for Moroccan independence, which became increasingly violent in the summer of 1954. Though Jews were not often explicitly targeted in the struggle, they sometimes fell victim to the rising violence, as when seven Jews in the town of Petitjean were killed by a mob on August 3, 1954. The situation further deteriorated with anti-French riots in the summer of 1955 after Sultan Mohammed V was exiled to Madagascar by the colonial administration. The number of immigrants to Israel increased from 2,996 in 1953 to 8,171 in 1954 before soaring to 24,994 in 1955. That year, the Mossad founded Hamisgeret (“The Framework” in Hebrew), an organization responsible for recruiting and training agents to undertake secret emigration operations in Morocco.⁴²

On January 10, 1961, a smuggling ship carrying forty-three illegal Jewish Moroccan migrants sank alongside the northern shores of Morocco. All on board drowned. This unfortunate incident sparked a sequence of events, which together led local Jewish leaders, Israel, and world Jewish organizations to pressure the Moroccan government to alleviate the 1956 emigration ban on its Jewish citizens. In May 1961, Abd-el-Kader Benjelloun and Moulay Ali Alaoui, representatives of the recently crowned King Hassan II, and Alex Gatmon, the top envoy of the Misgeret, held secret negotiations in Europe concerning that issue. By July that year, they reached an agreement. According to the agreement, the Jewish humanitarian association United Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) would open offices in Morocco, and under its patronage Israel would organize migration. Morocco was required to issue collective passports to Jews wishing to leave the country. In return, Morocco would receive a down payment of $500,000 and indemnities of $100 per capita for the first fifty thousand Jews choosing to depart, and then $250 per capita for the rest. The implementation of this agreement came to be known as Operation Yakhin. From November 28, 1961, through December 31, 1964, planes and ships from Casablanca and Tangier transferred olim, via southern Europe, to Israel.⁴³ During the operation, 89,742 Jews immigrated to Israel from Morocco. By the end of 1971, 114,158 people, 70 percent of the Jewish population in Morocco in 1961, would eventually immigrate to Israel as result of this undertaking.⁴⁴

To understand how this development, from 1948 to 1961, strengthened the link between immigration to Israel and Zionist activities, we need to consider developments outside of Morocco, among European Jews, from the early 1940s. As mentioned, at the outbreak of World War II, a few thousand Jewish refugees arrived from Europe and settled in Tangier. Although this influx constituted a financial drain on the Jewish community council, it still evoked a spirit of Jewish solidarity. After the war, this spirit did not come to an end but intensified. For instance, in December 1947, Tangier’s Jewish community, as an independent entity within Morocco (due to Tangier’s international status), joined as the sixty-first member country affiliated with the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The collaboration would take place in the context of expanding local and global Zionist networks. At the time, new international Jewish organizations had begun to express a growing interest in the Jewish communities of Asia and Africa, whose relative demographic significance had been augmented because of the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

In 1948, several such organizations, which had initially been established to assist European Jews during wartime, sensed they had accomplished their original missions and began searching for new “Jewries in distress,” mostly in Africa and Asia. In this context, a few of the major Jewish bodies operating in Morocco, most prominently the AIU and the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), began to change their pre-1945 orientations. Though they did not always outwardly acknowledged it, they began to imbue their philanthropic and educational activities with Zionist activism as a way of preparing the ground for mass immigration to Israel.⁴⁵

These events on the global Jewish diaspora front coincided with a significant wave of Jewish migration to Tangier, taking place against the backdrop of more localized post–World War II developments. The Tangier International Zone, which returned in 1945 after five years of annexation by Franco’s Spain, rejuvenated the city’s appeal among immigrants. Representatives of the JDC in Tangier reported to the Casablanca office in November 1954: “It is believed that more and more children will come to the Jewish schools, because, as you know, more and more people come from the Spanish Zone to Tangier, or at least send their children, even if they cannot come themselves yet.”⁴⁶ The same report indicated that some 60 percent of those joining the new Association for Professional Training, organized in postwar Tangier by the JDC, came from the Spanish protectorate zone, rather than from Tangier itself.⁴⁷

Together with the demographic shift, a new political reality began to set the ground for a new form of Zionist activity designed to promote immigration to Israel. During the Spanish annexation of Tangier by Franco between 1940 and 1945, Zionist activities were restricted as, in contrast to earlier Spanish attitudes, Franco associated European Zionism with alien socialist ideas. However, when the international administration resumed between 1945 and 1956, Zionist groups and activities revitalized themselves, enabling the world Jewish organizations and, after 1948, the new State of Israel to invest in Zionist institutions. In the late 1940s, there emerged various Zionist-oriented youth movements, including Bnei Akiva and Bachad (the Alliance of Religious Pioneers), which had a religious orientation; Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, which had a socialist orientation; and Habonim, Gordonia, and the scouts group Éclaireurs Israelites (also known as the Charles Netter youth group), which was more oriented toward France—all of which provided new frameworks for Zionist activities among the Jewish youth of Tangier and its environs. The Youth Department of the Jewish Agency took advantage of these groups to recruit suitable youngsters for immigration to Israel.⁴⁸

An increasing number of high school students from local middle-class families in northern Morocco were affiliated, at least formally, with Zionist youth movements.⁴⁹ The local Zionist Federation viewed the Lycée Français, which represented the successful incorporation of local Jews into the non-Jewish educational environment, as an institution where potential immigrants to Israel should be sought.⁵⁰ Similarly, the list of donations to Magbit, a Zionist fundraising organization supporting immigration to Israel, included a sizable amount donated by individuals from Tangier. Some donors were affiliated with the Casino Israelita, a cornerstone of local Jewish life that was strongly associated with the wealthier, pro-European elements of Tangier’s Jewish society. Notably, they donated even though they themselves would probably never seriously consider immigrating to Israel.⁵¹

Emigration was also grounded in political changes on the domestic Moroccan front. In May 1955, by which time the local Aliyah Office, serving Jews who wished to immigrate to Israel, had been forced to shut down by the Tangier International Zone administration, an exhibition of Jewish books, including books in the Hebrew language, took place at the Casino Israelita. A report by the Jewish Agency’s Department of Education and Culture in Exile described how the organizers could “barely shut the doors of the hall,” as it was packed with curious people. Over the course of the exhibition, the Zionist Federation of Tangier racked up numerous new subscriptions. Radio Tangier, a popular local radio station in Spanish, promoted the event, and it was even covered in the most widely circulated local newspaper in Spanish, España, whose reporters made no reference to the exhibit’s Zionist character.⁵²

At the time, Zionist activities were not defined as such, but new terminology, including Jerez, emerged. Jerez (pronounced “Kheres,” in a way that resembled the pronunciation of the Spanish city Jerez) became a well-known abbreviation for Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) and was commonly used in an attempt to avoid using the word Israel, so as not to attract unwanted attention.⁵³

Despite the growing interest in Zionism, northern Morocco produced among the smallest numbers of immigrants to Israel. During Operation Yakhin, only 17.9 percent of the Jewish population of Tangier emigrated to Israel. In neighboring Tetouan—the second largest city in northern Morocco—only 20.5 percent of Jews left for Israel. These relatively low percentages contrast sharply with the 77.2 percent of Jews who left Marrakech and the 54.5 percent who left Casablanca for Israel. By the end of 1972, when 70 percent of Moroccan Jews had immigrated to Israel, only 30.4 percent of the local Jewish population of northern Morocco had done the same.⁵⁴ To understand this gap between Moroccan communities, we need to consider developments in the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora after 1945, which channeled migration aspirations and even Zionist activism elsewhere than Israel.

THE OLD/NEW LATIN AMERICAN CONNECTION

As in the earlier stages of the twentieth century, dramatic developments on the domestic front coincided with changes in migration policy elsewhere in ways that significantly influenced the community of Spanish-speaking Jews.⁵⁵ During the 1940s and 1950s, Venezuela experienced an unprecedented economic boom, mostly due to its flourishing petroleum industry. Venezuela’s economic and political stability contrasted starkly with the insecurity and unrest in much of the rest of South and Central America to such an extent that its national discourse described the country’s economic progress as “magical.” Channeling this economic success to industrialization, between 1949 and 1958, when many Jews from northern Morocco immigrated to Israel, Venezuelan authorities began to encourage the permanent settlement of Europeans. Laborers from southern Europe flooded the country under Venezuela’s bilateral agreements with Spain (its former colonizer), Italy, and Portugal.

Between 1951 and 1959, some 131,995 Spanish immigrants settled in Venezuela, constituting the single largest ethnic group among the 318,959 immigrants who entered the country during that period. These events coincided with Franco’s policy to promote emigration as a means for reducing social turmoil in Spain after 1956. By 1961, Spanish nationals comprised some 31.4 percent of the entire population of foreigners in Venezuela, where immigration authorities facilitated family reunification and the permanent settlement of new immigrants. To that end, they required that migrants’ relatives already living in the country confirm that their own economic situation was stable and that they were willing and able to assist their immigrant relatives.⁵⁶

These shifts in Venezuela’s immigration policy, which paralleled dramatic events in Israel and Morocco, were recognized by world Jewish organizations operating in Morocco as providing momentum to the promotion of Jewish emigration. In October 1955, Raphael Spanien, co-director of the European headquarters office of HIAS, prepared a report on Morocco’s Jewish society with the aim of assisting Jewish emigration from the country as it approached decolonization. After wrapping up its operations among Jewish refugees in Europe, HIAS’s focus shifted to North Africa, which was deemed a place from which Jews needed to be rescued in light of rising Arab nationalism. The main concern of HIAS as the struggle for independence from Spain and France was gaining momentum in the 1950s, as we saw earlier, was to find alternative migration routes for North African Jews, other than the Israeli option, as a way of avoiding clashes with Moroccan and colonial authorities. A search for alternative destinations also came as result of HIAS’s view that middle-class or Westernized Jews from northern Morocco and Casablanca were not suitable for immigration to the young and underdeveloped State of Israel.

Spanien’s work in Morocco began in 1941 when he worked for HICEM, a body created through the merger of three Jewish migration societies: the New York-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), and Emigdirect, based in Berlin. HICEM’s acronym reflected this institutional merger. As the head of the HICEM’s Marseille headquarters, Spanien helped organize the escape of Jewish refugees from Europe to the Americas through Casablanca.⁵⁷ Thirteen years later, his conclusion after visiting Tangier and Casablanca, and after looking into various migration alternatives including Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Australia, and Canada, was that Venezuela would be the most suitable destination for Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews. In his report to the main HIAS office following his visit, he explained his choice of Venezuela by pointing out that, in the north of the country, many Jews already had kinship links to the country and thereby better than average chances of receiving visas to settle in Venezuela. Spanien wrote, “My belief is that we should avail ourselves of the good will gesture shown by the Sephardi community of South America for the salvation of part of the Jewish population, closer to them [in terms of kinship and culture] than were the victims of European events since 1933.”⁵⁸

Spanien’s conclusion should come as no surprise given the scale of migration from Morocco to Latin America over the previous century. Spanien was aware of the historic connections between the communities in northern Morocco and Latin America and wanted his organization to leverage them to facilitate migration at a time when organizing Jewish emigration from the MENA region was a top priority.

A bigger surprise is the group of people Spanien planned to enlist for support—namely, prominent Zionist activists who had set up bases in Tangier and Casablanca early in the century with the aim of bringing Zionist activities to lower-class Moroccan Jews. These leaders included Alfonso Sabah, a major figure leading the AIU’s softening position toward Zionism after World War II, and Paul Calamaro, the former president of the Zionist Federation in Morocco, who replaced S. D. Lévy after his resignation in 1944 and who continued to serve as a prominent leader of Moroccan Zionism well into the 1950s. By 1955, these prominent Zionists were deeply involved in facilitating immigration to Israel and forging connections with emissaries from the Jewish state.⁵⁹ Spanien first worked with Calamaro, who, according to Spanien, realized in 1954 that putting all his efforts into promoting Jewish emigration to Israel would not prove feasible due to Israel’s selective immigration policy, which had been in effect since late 1951. Calamaro’s modus operandi matched that of Spanien and HIAS: to help any Jew get out of Morocco, regardless of his or her final destination. Supportive of this agenda, Calamaro gladly referred to Spanien a number of candidates for whom the process of emigration to Latin America would run smoothly due to their kinship ties to Venezuela.

As mentioned earlier, the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel increased significantly in the summer of 1954 and soared in 1955, due to changing immigration policies in Israel. Spanien and his Zionist collaborators in Morocco were still determined to work on the Venezuelan option even as Israel had become a favorable destination for Moroccan Jewish migrants, since they saw the local Jewish population as culturally unsuited for and uninterested in immigration to Israel. For example, Alfonso Sabah, the prominent Zionist leader mentioned earlier, had considered joining his brother, Leopoldo Sabah, who had recently settled in Venezuela. The siblings had another brother, Jack (a former editor of Adelante), who moved to Argentina in the 1940s.⁶⁰ Alfonso’s brother-in-law, Jacobo Bentata, had also recently left for Venezuela. As mentioned in Spanien’s report, Sabah was in favor of emigration to Venezuela as long as it did not “counteract the Zionist ideal and, in his mind, the religious one.” Sabah endorsed Spanien’s idea of prioritizing Venezuela as a destination for Spanish-speaking Jews and referred potential immigrants to Spanien in Tangier and Casablanca. According to Spanien, through his kinship networks, Sabah maintained good contacts in Venezuela, in particular his relative Léon Taurel, a wealthy businessman who headed the country’s Moroccan-led Sephardi community.

In Tangier, Spanien also met with Carlos Albo, the Moroccan-descended Venezuelan ambassador to Tangier who, as honorary consul of Venezuela, had the legal capacity to issue immigration visas. Albo helped simplify the legal procedures for Jewish Moroccans seeking to immigrate to Venezuela.⁶¹ To facilitate immigration to Venezuela, Calamaro put Spanien in touch with a lawyer and human rights activist named Nelly (Helen) Cazes Bénatar, a Tangier native who resided in Casablanca, where she organized relief plans for Jewish refugees in Morocco who had fled Nazi Germany. In 1944, Bénatar was chosen as one of Morocco’s representatives for the WJC meeting in Atlantic City. Seeing itself as responsible for relieving the torment of world Jewry after the Holocaust, the WJC assumed the task of resettling displaced Jews. After the war, Cazes Bénatar worked with the JDC to prepare Jews for emigration to Israel.⁶² With her help, Spanien used the JDC offices in Tangier and Casablanca to interview candidates, and their completed files were sent by Albo to the Moroccan community in Venezuela, since most had relatives there or were simply “of the same origin as Jews at the head of the Sephardi community of that country.”⁶³ Remarkably, Spanien notes at the end of his report that not only did his suggestion of promoting Jewish immigration to Venezuela not create hostility among prominent Zionists in Morocco, but they in fact fully collaborated with him.⁶⁴

The described incident demonstrates an interpretation of Zionism as a tool for global networks among Zionist leaders of a highly mobile Hispanic Moroccan diaspora that had an established transnational awareness already in the early twentieth century. Yet, it may also reflect a more lenient approach toward the incorporation of Jews as minorities in postcolonial Morocco.

REAFFIRMING MOROCCO AS A HOMELAND

With the formal end of the Spanish and French protectorates in Morocco, the year 1956 marked a major shift in the political situation of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora. Moroccan independence was followed by about eighteen years of political and economic turmoil and then a series of coups and conspiracies in the early 1970s that ended with the 1973 constitutional revolution. During those years, national considerations led to the neglect of the northern region, a relatively poorer territory than the ex-French zone. Foreign embassies were moved to Rabat, the new national capital. Many of the buildings erected in the north during the construction boom of the 1940s were left empty. The fledging nationalist regime saw Tangier, in particular, as the symbol of the old colonial order and worked to change its character. Subsequently, the city began to attract large numbers of Muslim peasants from the Rif area, a migration that, over the next five years from Morocco’s independence, changed what had been Tangier’s strong European character.

From 1956 to 1961, the Moroccan government enforced a ban on the emigration of Jewish Moroccan citizens. Liberal circles within the Moroccan leadership feared that if Jews left the country, the nation’s economy would suffer. Pan-Arabists in the nationalist Istiqlal Party, for their part, feared the possible contributions of Jewish immigrants of Israel at a time when this country was at war with its Arab neighbors. However, the catastrophic forecasts made by Israeli and world Jewish organizations in in the early 1950s as to the future physical, political, and economic security of Jews in independent Morocco failed to materialize.⁶⁵ Immediately following Moroccan independence in March 1956, many Jews received Moroccan citizenship, and the process of their incorporation into the new nation-state soon began. An emerging elite within Jewish society in Morocco enjoyed the new atmosphere, which promoted incorporation of Jews into the Moroccan state, some even ascending to positions in the new government. This included Jewish communists, who already in 1947 considered anti-Zionism an expression of their Moroccan patriotism. In 1956, Jewish militants in the Parti Communiste Marocain (the Communist Party of Morocco, or PCM) maintained this strong rejection of Zionism and especially of those who worked with the Jewish Agency to promote migration to Israel. Among these activists was Abraham Serfaty, a Marxist political activist whose family was from Tangier. Nonetheless, identification with the Moroccan nationalist movement did not always preclude additional national affinities. Léon Benzaquen, a Tangier native, had served as the Moroccan president of Keren Hayesod in the 1940s and also became the first Jewish minister to serve in Morocco’s independent government in 1956.⁶⁶

Alongside Casablanca, Tangier became a major hub for such Jewish integrationist activities and aspirations. Abraham Laredo, an enthusiastic Hispanophile mentioned in chapter 2, is a prominent example. In 1956, he was appointed president of the Junta of Tangier and took on other communal positions as well, such as president of the local branch of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a humanitarian Jewish organization. Concurrently, Laredo was one of the most enthusiastic activists in al-Wifaq, an association of Muslims and Jews founded in February 1956. This association aimed to promote interfaith coexistence based on ideals of equal citizenship and civic participation in the public affairs of what they envisioned as secular and democratic Morocco. Al-Wifaq organized numerous events with the goal of fostering an interfaith foundation for Moroccan national solidarity. Alongside al-Wifaq, another initiative called Les Amitiés Marocaines (1950–1956), a multifaith association encompassing Christians, Jews, and Muslims, emerged as an early endeavor to reshape the Moroccan state. It’s goal was to extend the benefits of Morocco’s independence to the Jewish and Muslim communities, advocating for innovative legal approaches to integrate Europeans who opted to stay in postcolonial Morocco.⁶⁷

As the political developments were taking place in the aftermath of World War II and the decolonization of Africa and Asia, the affinity for Spain that had flourished under Spanish colonialism did not decline and in fact contributed to the enrichment of postcolonial Zionist and local Moroccan identities in a unique way. As noted by Alma Rachel Heckman, the 1956 edition of al-Wifaq’s magazine featured photographs of its interfaith events as well as full-page images of the Sultan Mohamed V and the Crown Prince Mulay Hassan. The article included some content in praise of the Convivencia, interfaith coexistence in Al-Andalus, as a model for the new Jewish-Muslim relations under the Moroccan national banner. This perspective, at least during the initial months of Morocco’s independence, resonated with the notion of a Hispano-Arab brotherhood developed by Spanish colonialists.⁶⁸

Carlos de Nesry, the famous Jewish intellectual, lawyer, and member of the Junta of Tangier, who also became a senior activist in the nationalist Parti Démocratique de l’Independence (PDI), provides insights into the discourse of the city’s integrationist elite. In his book Le Juif de Tanger et le Maroc, published in 1956, de Nesry maintained that the feeling of Jews for Israel was not a problem of dual loyalty but rather an expression of historic attachment.⁶⁹ Moreover, as Brahim El Guabli showed, as part of his reenvisioning of the new postcolonial Moroccan state, “He [de Nesry] argued in the clearest terms that it was possible for Moroccan Jews to remain Westernized culturally and linguistically while also participating fully in the new state.”⁷⁰ As historian Maite Ojeda Mata has described, de Nesry made clear through his actions that, in addition to his affinities for Morocco and Israel, Spain was also close to his heart. His incorporation into the Hispanophone elite of northern Morocco in the 1940s and 1950s is evidenced also by his hispanized first name and surname: de Nesry was the son of Rabbi Yahia Nezry, who came to Tangier from the southern parts of Morocco. In a pivotal role, in 1948, he mediated between the newly formed Israeli government and the Francoist regime, making sure that Spanish interests in Jerusalem were maintained.⁷¹ His multifaceted identity and diplomatic efforts further illuminate the intricate dynamics of this historical period.

While Moroccan Jewish participation in the anticolonial movement coalesced around antifascist activism, the anti-Zionist tendencies in al-Wifaq and assertions of Moroccan nationalism, for the community leadership in northern Morocco they did not seem to sharply contrast with their pro-Zionist expressions nor with affinities toward Spain, the former colonizer of northern Morocco.⁷² As the political status of Jews in independent Morocco became a topic of interest in the local Jewish press, the Hispanic-oriented and pro-Zionist periodical Or-Luz was no exception.⁷³ On the occasion of Moroccan independence, Sidi Embarek Bekkai, the Moroccan prime minister, sent a telegram to the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in New York. In the telegram, issued after Bekkai’s meeting in November 1954 with representatives of the AJC, he declared the commitment of the Moroccan authorities to equality of rights for all Moroccan Jews. Or-Luz’s editorial board reprinted the telegram on the front page of its February 1956 issue.⁷⁴

In April 1956, Sultan Mohammed V (appointed king in 1957) and two of his sons paid a historic visit to northern Morocco, attending one of the galas organized by Al-Wifaq at the Casino Israelita in Tetouan. The main aim of their visit was to promote the reunification of the two formerly separated French- and Spanish-dominated regions of the country. Or-Luz covered the visit in detail and attached great significance to the event, which it marked by placing a full-page portrait of the Sultan and the Crown Prince Mulay Hassan on the cover of the magazine.⁷⁵ Or-Luz covered the gala in detail and noted that it was attended by Mulay Hassan; the deputy prime minister; and five other ministers, including Dr. Leon Benzaquen. As the report related, members of the Istiqlal Party stood as guards of honor at the entrance. Mulay Hassan emphasized in his speech, according to the report, his father’s commitment to equality of rights for Muslims and Jews. The report added that, later in the evening, many Muslim and Jewish men and women joined the festivities. As late as four in the morning, “no one hastened to leave the club.”⁷⁶ Or-Luz ran photographs from the event and described a group of Muslim and Jewish women awaiting the landing of the sultan’s airplane at the local Sania-Ramel Airport.⁷⁷

Or-Luz reflected a tripartite attachment that dwelled strongly on the romanticized refences to the Convivencia in al-Wifaq’s magazine. In 1956, the year of Moroccan independence, it was the only Spanish-language Jewish newspaper that appeared in Morocco and thus provided the main platform for promoting Jewish affinity with Spain and its culture. Like many of its predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s, Or-Luz did not miss the opportunity to promote the legendary image of Senator Ángel Pulido, describing him in 1956 as “a famous and venerated Gentleman in all Jewish homes.”⁷⁸ Another example is an Or-Luz article entitled “Let’s Get Familiar with Our Past,” which praised the tenth-century revival of Hebrew poetry (piyyut) and philological and literary traditions in Iberia, focusing on two tenth-century Jewish writers, Menahem Ben Saruk and Dunash Ben Labrat. The author, Solomon Bensabat, posited a continuity between the Jews of medieval Iberia and contemporary Jewish life in northern Morocco, envisioning “a Moroccan Jewish cultural renaissance grounded in the revival of the heritage of medieval Sepharad,” as Eric Calderwood put it. Bensabat described pre-1492 Jewish history in Sepharad as no less important for Jewish life than Jewish history in the holy land at the time of the Bible.⁷⁹

Bensabat was a rabbinic scholar who helped spread these ideas in a number of lectures and articles, particularly after 1948, when he was appointed as the academic director of the Maimonides Institute in Tetouan (see chap. 2). While his Philo-Sephardism comes as no surprise, a less acknowledged fact in the relevant literature about Bensabat’s biography is his concurrent nomination as one of the five Jewish members of the Moroccan National Assembly in November 1956. Another lesser-known fact, highlighted by the historian Yigal Bin-Nun, is that Bensabat also provided assistance to the clandestine Israeli immigration organization Hamisgeret after it was established in 1956 to help Jews leave the country illegally for Israel.⁸⁰

Bensabat, like de Nesry and other Jewish figures from northern Morocco, represented a complex amalgam of national affinities and their associated communal and intellectual networks, even during a period of heightened nationalist sentiments, Zionism included. Alongside Moroccan, Spanish, Sephardi, colonial, and other global affairs, Or-Luz covered Zionist affairs and even Ashkenazi Jewish history. It reported on a scholarly lecture about the lives of Jews in Europe, held at the Casino Israelita in Tetouan, the same place Bensabat delivered his talk about the Jewish past in Iberia, and where al-Wifaq organized its gala. This lecture was seemingly formulated to evoke feelings of Jewish national solidarity in the audience. As at the al-Wifaq’s gala, here too the reporter pointed out that the hall was packed with locals, mainly women. Or-Luz ran an article entitled “Great Jewish Figures,” which dealt with nineteenth-century Jewish painters, among them Mark Chagall.⁸¹ Another article dealt with Albert Einstein as a subject of national Jewish pride.⁸²

Among the diversifying local and global identities, Or-Luz included Zionist-oriented articles among its wide range of topics, despite the clandestine nature of Zionist activity in 1956, the year that Or-Luz first appeared. Many articles reflected a clear interest in the newly formed State of Israel.⁸³ For instance, to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat, its cover page included an illustration of young field workers wearing round, brimless hats in what appeared to be a typical Israeli countryside landscape (fig. 4.1).⁸⁴ Some of the “great Jewish figures” mentioned above were figures from modern Hebrew culture, such as Hana Szenes, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and Shaul Gutmanovich Tchernichovsky. The last two were famous national Hebrew poets.

In the same month as Moroccan independence, Or-Luz published a love song dedicated to the gulf of Eilat composed by Solomon Medina, who had expressed his yearning for the Judería of Toledo in a previous issue. The song was a promotion for Medina’s forthcoming book, The Yearnings of a Jew. It was followed by an article about fishermen in the Sea of Galilee, and the subsequent issue featured a piece about the actor Danny Kaye’s visit to Israel.⁸⁵

As Moroccan Jewish identity diversified, Or-Luz’s cover pages marking Tu Bishvat stood in seeming contradiction to other cover images that expressed an integrationist orientation, such as an image depicting the Grand Mosque that the sultan had begun constructing in Casablanca, or a photograph of Sultan Mohamed V with Prince Muley Hassan during their visit to Tetouan (see fig. 4.2).⁸⁶ Rather, both Moroccan and Zionist issues represented aspects of Moroccan Jews’ diversifying Jewish lives—lives that had both local and global dimensions and that featured a mixture of affinities with Spain, Latin America, and now, in the context of rising nationalisms, the new states of Morocco and Israel.

These seemingly contradictory nationalist expressions could coexist because, in the eyes of the editors and perhaps many readers, they were more closely associated with an enduring globalization of communal culture than with emigration to Israel and related calls to negate their “exilic” past, as some political Zionists would advocate for Jewish life in Morocco. In the end, many of the Zionist activists mentioned in this chapter did not emigrate to Israel, even if they were often active in facilitating the emigration of other members of the community.

S. D. Lévy, one of the earliest advocates of the Zionist project and who, after 1948, called for Jews to emigrate to Israel, died in Casablanca at the age of ninety-five in 1960, twelve years after the founding of Israel. Lévy was conceivably too old to emigrate, but other activists like Rahma Toledano moved to Spain, where she lived until her death in 1971.⁸⁷ Moisés Garzón, Or-Luz’s founding editor, ended up in Venezuela in 1958, where he continued to promote Zionist ideas in the evolving Hispanophone diaspora late into the twentieth century (see chap. 5).

Looking at the perspective of community actors, the critical conclusion of this chapter—which has explored interconnectivity between the hubs of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora as a major factor in the development of Zionism among this community—also lies in the argument that the pre-1948 mode of Zionism as a tool for community empowerment developed well into the second half of the twentieth century, even when Israel’s state agencies worked to leverage Zionism for mass immigration projects. Even in 1956, the year of Moroccan independence, when several leaders of the Hispanic Moroccan community expressed their commitment to the Moroccan national project, this earlier mode of pre-1948 Zionism continued to evolve and coexist with new nationalist ideas while preserving a profound and enduring connection to Spain as a historical Jewish center. This attachment to Spain played a pivotal role in shaping the perception of Zionism as an integral part of a mosaic of ethnonational identities rather than a monolithic one. In chapter 5, I look at how the immigration of most Moroccan Jews to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s continued to shape the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community’s attitude toward Israel and Zionism and integrate it into their amalgam of identities in Venezuela.