CONCLUSIONS

IN BOTH ACADEMIC AND POPULAR NARRATIVES, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks have long served as archetypal diasporic communities, characterized by the prevailing myth of returning to their ancestral homeland from various locations. Nevertheless, the contemporary histories of these diasporas, as of most modern diasporas, reveal significant phenomena of hybridization and internal divisions, shaped by the increasing interactions among different communities and underscored by their connections to multiple centers and global networks. Their processes of “homecoming” have also given rise to intricate intra-diaspora hierarchies, exemplified by instances such as the discrimination Mizrahi Jews faced in Israel or the challenges the Akhpars who were “repatriated” to Soviet Armenia experienced.¹

Related key ideas shaping this book’s analytical approach have been that increasing mobility and the related breaking of the “ghetto’s walls” among organic communities who shared a common space brings about a propensity to reorganize based on nostalgic and romanticized appeals to a communal past, and that growing global solidarity and interconnectivity also create and foster new intra-diasporic hierarchies. As I have shown, these processes worked together to restructure the mechanism of diaspora-making among the small region-of-origin community of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the eras of colonialism, increased migration, and nationalism.

As I argued, the disadvantages of being and becoming a small and distinct group in the context of colonialism and migration were proactively turned into advantages through the search for border-crossing comradeships and related narratives about shared pasts in multiple places. From this perspective, this study has attempted to advance a nuanced understanding of multilayered and multi-sited diasporas and their mechanism of mobilization, with specific implications for the research into Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Jewish and Sephardi diasporas.

Despite the vast and growing body of research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century MENA Jews, the relevant scholarship has not been oriented toward an understanding of MENA Jews as members of transregional diasporas, and even less as members of multi-sited diasporas that persisted beyond the middle of the twentieth century, with the evolving implications of nationalism and global migration. More specifically, Zionism and immigration to Israel are too often treated separately from analyses of the global Sephardi and MENA diaspora in their various regional hubs outside of Israel. Most studies that address the dynamics of diaspora-making and the related multiplicity of homelands look at the transformation of contemporary migrant flows into bipolar “transnational diasporas” that usually leave migrants suspended between two homelands, in the Zionist case as a result of homecoming to Israel.

Looking across time and space at a specific community of Moroccan Jews—the majority of whom once shared the same urban spaces in northern Morocco, and who distinguish themselves from the larger Moroccan Jewish community by adopting a Hispanic identity—the questions and critical approach of this book are different and more comprehensive as far as the search for a sound definition of diaspora is concerned. This book has demonstrated how this process of diaspora-making coalesced smoothly with the dual appeal of Israel and Spain as mythological centers. Community leaders even leveraged the support of both states from afar as a source of community empowerment in the various contexts where Hispanic Moroccan Jews constitute a demographic minority.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 illustrated different aspects of Sephardi life under Spanish colonialism in North Africa up to the mid-twentieth century, and how the intense encounter with Spain, despite its threat to the Jewish community’s precolonial, traditional habits, became a source of community empowerment. Focusing on Tangier and Tetouan, the major urban centers of most Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, chapter 1 delved deep into how Jews shaped their Hispanic identities through day-to-day interactions with Spaniards and the Hispanophone world. The Jews in the north thus reacted differently to the literary and colonial imagination developed in the Philo-Sephardi discourse than did Sephardi communities in the areas that did not come directly under Spanish colonialism, as in the Ottoman Empire. The intermingling with the Spaniard settler community exposed Jews to modern forms of Spanish, influencing their literary and cultural preferences and, in some cases, even what they ate, how they spent their leisure time, and with whom they engaged in romantic relations, among other aspects. While other European colonial traits, such as French, Italian, and English, were also influential, as a native Judeo-Spanish community, their collective attachment to the Hispanophone world was much simpler and helped them to differentiate themselves from non–Spanish speaking communities.

Nonetheless, colonialism among northern Moroccan Jews launched a dialectical process that helped reaffirm their Jewish Sephardi identities through a form of boundary setting and self-segregation from what was perceived as “too Spanish” or “too colonial.” Matrimonies and Jewish dietary laws, for example, helped reaffirm community boundaries vis-à-vis an unprecedented exposure and strong association with Spanish society that, after all, was essentially non-Jewish and threatened Jewish communal traits. With regards to their increased awareness of Sephardi roots, this dialectic boundary-setting process came to reinforce older Hispanic Sephardi identities among northern Moroccan Jews in the context of Spanish colonialism. Looking at developments from the inception of colonialism through Franco’s era of fascism and Morocco’s independence in 1956, chapter 2 explored the motivations for an associated impulse to document Jewish ancestry in Spain. This process created the notion of a genuine Hispanic Jewish identity that was separate from the non-Jewish Hispanic world and yet celebrated interfaith coexistence. This process was not purely local. Rather, it was instigated by a global network of active community members, ethnographers, and philologists of Haketia invested in these Jews’ past in pre-1492 Iberia.

Adopting a global network approach to heritage formation, chapter 3 explored how Jewish migration between northern Morocco and Latin America, beginning in the early nineteenth century, shaped a transregional hometown awareness among Hispanic Moroccan Jews. The first section of the chapter explored nostalgic attachment among Hispanic Moroccan Jews abroad to their hometown communities in northern Morocco and simultaneously their developing of a sense of Moroccaness vis-à-vis other immigrant communities. The next section then offered a new perspective on the way this migration increased the prominence of Latin America in the formation of local Hispanic Jewish identities in northern Morocco from the 1920s through the 1950s. Shaped by transnational ties with the hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, the notion of a successful migration increased the unique connection of the community to Latin America as a source for local empowerment. Influencing community memory in northern Morocco, “Spanish America” soon become a mythical reference point and a source of pride among Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Morocco. The proliferation of networks between Morocco and Latin America, also became a factor influencing the self-understanding of communities in northern Morocco, as Jews with “ancestry” in Spain and as agents in the modern Hispanophone world, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2.

By uncovering such developments, this book is among the first to explore the globalization of Moroccan Jews in the context of the Global Hispanophone rather than in the more familiar context of postcolonial migrations from MENA countries to Israel, Western Europe, and North America. With this approach, chapters 4, 5, and 6 continued to challenge the trend in studies of Jewish migration from the MENA region to view as opposed processes the development of Zionism and immigration to Israel on the one hand and the construction of Sephardi diaspora networks and non-Israeli national identities on the other.

In chapter 4, I showed how the rise of Zionism in northern Morocco, beginning in 1900, was consistent with the global dispersion of Hispanic community networks between Morocco and Latin America, as well as in the new hub of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Casablanca. In all those places, embracing Zionism helped Hispanic Moroccan Jewish leaders consolidate their leadership and empower themselves within global Jewish activism. In northern Morocco under early Spanish colonialism in the 1920s, the entwining of Hispanic identities, including the notion of Sephardi ancestry in Spain, had additional pragmatical motivations: it improved organizational ties with mainland Spain, expanded intracommunal networks of support, and even softened resistance by the colonial regime who, otherwise, like in the French zone, might have treated Zionism as a source for ethnonational disloyalty.

While the first section explored pre-1948 developments, the second part of the chapter turned to forms of continuity. Even when Israel’s state agencies worked to leverage Zionism for mass homecoming projects, northern Moroccans left for Israel in the smallest numbers in Morocco, less than a third in the 1960s. As I explained, the long-established interconnectivity between the hubs of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora continued to characterize the development of Zionism as a source for community empowerment and connectivity as late as the 1970s. Moreover, in 1956, the year of Moroccan independence, many leaders of the Hispanic Moroccan community who stayed in Morocco expressed their commitment to the Moroccan national project, further stressing in practice how their commitment to Zionism coexisted with other national loyalties, as well as with Philo-Sephardism and affinity to Spain. Crucially, entwining these national identities together helped affirm a sense of continuity in community organization.

In the 1950s through the 1970s, Israel and the Americas had gradually replaced Eastern European, Asian, and African countries as the most prominent demographic and cultural centers of world Jewry. An imagined hierarchy of the Jewish world—built on nineteenth-century divisions of the Jewish (colonial) world into affluent philanthropic Western Jews on the one hand and Eastern Jewries in distress on the other—led to efforts by Israel and North American organizations to “rescue” Jews from Morocco as French and Spanish colonialism drew to a close. The Zionist project at the time was increasingly informed by this ethos that saw Israel as responsible for the fate of world Jewry who “remained” in the diaspora.

Chapter 5 looked at Venezuela, the most prominent postcolonial hub of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community in the 1960s and 1970s, to understand how that process affected global northern Moroccan community solidarity. The chapter showed how a new Venezuelan Hispanic Moroccan Jewish narrative placed Venezuela Moroccans higher on the imagined hierarchy, ranking them vis-à-vis Moroccans in Israel and those who stayed in Morocco. Earlier narratives of nineteenth-century economic migration to Latin America and the successful integration of Moroccan Jews in Venezuela continued to serve late twentieth-century intra-diaspora politics and practices of local empowerment. This process also evoked nostalgia for Jewish life in northern Morocco prior to the country’s independence and the mass departure of Jews in the aftermath of colonialism. The focus on Venezuela also helped me elucidate how the evolving character of Zionism at the time did not run counter to migration to destinations other than Israel, and to Jewish community building worldwide.

Chapter 6 looked at how the notion of the community’s ancestry in Spain permeated these processes of identity construction and globalizing hierarchies in the 1970s through the 1990s. My analyses began by showing how narratives of ancestry in Spain, originally created to serve Spanish colonialism in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, were continuously used by Franco and the post-Francoist Spanish state, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, to rebrand Spain as democratic and thus historically tolerant to Jews (and Muslims). This rebranding helped the Spanish state to strengthen its cultural influence on the Sephardi diaspora outside of Spain—Israel included. The local Jewish leadership in Spain, dominated by northern Moroccans, capitalized on that narrative maintained by the state to smoothen their integration into a new Spanish national discourse but also to reach out to the global community.

At the same time in Venezuela, this updated narrative of Sephardi ancestry in Spain incorporated into Moroccan identities, helping the local Moroccan-led community integrate into the Venezuelan cultural elite who dwelled on related narratives that bridged Latin American and Spanish histories. Altogether the chapter showed how notions of ancestry in Spain continued to interconnect the diaspora, even when the local meanings of being Hispanic Moroccan changed dramatically after most Jews and Spanish settlers had left northern Morocco following independence.

This interconnectivity proved essential for community empowerment, not only among Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Spain and Venezuela but in additional hubs where Spanish culture was less prominent. Chapter 7 was dedicated to the several thousand Spanish Moroccan Jews who emigrated to Israel, where Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Amazigh, and Maghrebi Francophone cultural traits were far more prominent. While the cultural divides between Hispanic Moroccan Jews and southern Moroccan Jewish communities had roots in pre-immigration Morocco, the fact that the Israeli establishment stereotyped Moroccans as culturally backward intensified the construction of a separate narrative emphasizing ancestral connection to Spain among the Jews of the north.

In Israel, immigrants from northern Morocco were not concentrated in any single location. Scattered throughout the country in dozens of urban and rural sites, leaders of the community appealed to academic institutions to help organize communal events. Through this process, Haketia, with its Arabic, Spanish, and Hebrew components, was employed to portray the community as authentically Moroccan with Spanish traits. It also served to argue that, unlike their southern counterparts, Hispanic Moroccan Jews’ European roots had not been artificially imposed by modern French colonialism. As the last section of the chapter showed, this amalgam of identities created a unique transnational tie to contemporary northern Morocco. For instance, the return trip to their hometowns in 1986, as well as projects of preservation undertaken between members of the communities in Israel and those who stayed in Tangier and Spanish-ruled Melilla, all included clear references to modern and pre-1492 Spain as their additional homeland.

While influenced by developments on the global diasporic front, as recounted in chapters 6 and 7, local developments in Israel came to influence the smaller hubs of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora as well. Chapter 8 recounted how the Israeli group of community leaders directly influenced the creation of sister organizations in smaller hubs in France, the US, and Canada. Considering transregional hierarchies between the hubs, as exemplified in chapter 5, international collaborations could help the community show that its Moroccan identity was not solely defined by, and in fact went far beyond, the Israeli context.

This chapter also addressed globalizing ties from the perspectives of smaller communities in Europe and North America, stressing how connections between communities in the non–Spanish speaking world benefited the communities in Europe and North America locally. Building on chapter 5, chapter 8 illustrated how a continuous interpretation of Zionism as a global network that benefited community construction also affected MABAT’s activity to forge ties with the non-Israeli hubs. By viewing Israel as just one of many prominent nodes on the dynamic map of the globalizing Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, chapters 7 and 8 add to the literature on transnational Jewish communities in Israel and places them in a closer conversation with Sephardi and diaspora studies alike, rather than exclusively with Jewish and Israel studies.

Altogether, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas has challenged the conventional wisdom that distinguishes the Sephardi diaspora in the Americas from the immigration of North African Jews to Israel, and the related separations between Sephardi (Judeo-Spanish) studies and Mizrahi (including North African) studies, and between modern colonialism and pre-1492 histories in Iberia. In examining the benefits in the multiplicity of homelands for a small, dispersed group, this book advances scholarship on ethnic diasporas. By offering a nuanced perspective on an organic community on the move, particularly in the modern Jewish context, it is among the first studies to draw connections between synchronic and diachronic developments affecting the hubs of micro (hometown) diasporas across a range of sites across the world.

Finally, as many diaspora scholars have argued in recent years, diaspora formation and maintenance require a significant number of scattered participants who adhere to particular logic, even if situationally or in an ad hoc manner. It is through the adherence and devotion to proactive and often highly mobile individuals who assume the task of producing and disseminating a collective story of shared origins that a diaspora is created and maintained.²

While looking at how the local hubs engaged with one another, this book’s chapters also stress how those engagements were made possible thanks to mobile individuals who traveled between the hubs and to northern Morocco, helping disseminate the narrative about its past. In this book, I showed how multiple stories of shared origins in Israel, Spain, and Latin America, produced in various geographical hubs over the course of a century, became a crucial material that flew through global networks. While read differently across the various diasporic hubs and through the years, those stories served to empower and interconnect a global community and—no less important—differentiate it from others.

This book has focused on histories of the twentieth century and thus excludes many individuals who have taken on the role of generating and disseminating this shared story in the last two decades. However, composed in the twenty-first century, this book has crystalized against the backdrop of international developments and a worldwide communal network that have continued to reshape the global community of Hispanic Moroccan Jews and enhance its interconnectivity, as recounted in the epilogue. Those twenty-first century developments directly affected my own family members who emigrated from Venezuela to the US, as well as the professional networks I have participated in while working on this research since 2009 (see the acknowledgments). These ongoing developments in the new millennium would merit their own research.