FIVE

MOROCCANS IN VENEZUELA: A NEW GLOBAL HIERARCHY

BETWEEN 1948 AND 1970, ISRAEL TRANSFORMED from a small demographic hub with approximately 650,000 Jews—out of a total world population of 11.5 million—into a significant demographic center of Jewish life, with a total population of more than 2.5 million Jews out of a global 12.6 million Jews. By 1968, some 71 percent of the Jews who had immigrated from Asia and Africa had migrated to Israel. In the post-Holocaust era, about 80 percent of the immigrants from Eastern European countries, excluding Jews from the Soviet Union, also made Israel their new home. Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries and their descendants came to constitute about half of the Jewish population of Israel in the 1950s, even when Israel was home to only about a fifth of world Jewry, and regardless of the small fraction they composed of the total estimated population of Jews worldwide.¹ In the 1970s and in the aftermath of Operation Yakhin, during which most remaining Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel, Moroccan Jews and their descendants came to constitute the largest country-of-origin group in Israel until the mass migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.²

In the nineteenth century, mainstream narratives of Jewish solidarity, like the one introduced by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), began to divide the world into Jewries “in distress,” residing in countries or regions characterized by anti-Jewish persecution, and Jewries in the “developed” world, charged with responsibility for the well-being of their persecuted brethren. In fact, organized transnational Jewish solidarity networks have long existed, but in the nineteenth century these networks became inextricably intertwined with modern colonial regimes.³ In the postwar period, after Israel and the Americas had replaced Eastern European, Asian, and African countries as the demographic and cultural centers of world Jewry, these new centers of Jewish existence were invested with responsibility for new “Jewries in distress,” even as Israel itself relied heavily on external support. This imagined hierarchy of the Jewish world led to efforts by Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and other Jewish organizations, some of them Zionist and others not, to “rescue” Jews from Morocco as French and Spanish colonialism drew to a close by facilitating their migration to Israel and the West, as noted in the previous chapter.

Against the backdrop of this turn of events, in the 1960s Israel became a prominent point of reference in shaping modern concepts of Jewish migration and solidarity worldwide. Long-existing hierarchies between “Eastern” (Asian, African, and East European) and “Western” (American and Western European) Jews informed the Zionist project with an old-new purpose that saw Israel and Zionist activities as responsible for the fate of world Jewry who remained in the diaspora. In this context, Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion divided world Jewish populations between “Jewries in distress,” who conceivably or visibly required the immediate assistance of the Jewish state, and Jews in “affluent countries,” whose migration to Israel was not expected to occur in the foreseeable future, due to the comfort and stability of their communities. “Western aliyah,” including the Jews from Latin America, was perceived by prominent Zionist leaders as an “Aliyah of choice.” Unlike the rescue Aliyah designed for Jewries in distress, immigration from the West required more investments in easing the economic and social integration of migrants to make the process cost-effective. Western Jews—first and foremost US Jews, then the largest Jewish demographic concentration—were expected, at the very least, to support the Zionist project from afar. Considering their perceived assimilation into their broader non-Jewish societies, a main concern in the efforts to convince these affluent Jews to immigrate entailed, according to Ben-Gurion’s strategy, the development of their Jewish identity and a sufficient knowledge of Hebrew.⁴

In the early 1970s, the approximately 2.2 million Soviet Jews came to the forefront of this global salvation narrative as representatives of the largest immobile Jewish hub behind the Iron Curtain and outside Israel. An international solidarity campaign on their behalf was sparked by the 1970 Leningrad trials, at which nine defendants, seven of whom were Jews, were convicted of attempting to hijack a Soviet airliner. Under the banner of “let my people go,” many Jews worldwide called on the Soviet Union to grant Jews equal civil rights and religious freedom or allow them to leave the country, while lobbying the US government to pressure the Soviet Union. This call for freedom was influenced by contemporary political realities, such as American sparring with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in which the treatment of Soviet Jews became a symbol of Communism’s “moral bankruptcy.”⁵

The strategy of rescuing Soviet Jews by encouraging American intervention was developed from 1953 through the 1970s, when the Israel-based Zionist Nativ office worked with Jewish organizations in the US to lobby for the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel and North America.⁶ Transnational collaboration between Israel and other influential Jewish hubs on behalf of oppressed Jewries was not limited to Soviet Jews. Syrian Jews, for example, were acknowledged in 1971 by the World Jewish Congress, headquartered in Paris, as “our No. 2 problem.” In Canada, for instance, the country’s Zionist Federation, the National Council of Jewish Women, and Hadassah-Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) sent resolutions, statements of concern, and telegrams to Canadian, United Nations, and Syrian officials.⁷

By the 1970s, Venezuela constituted one of the prominent hubs of the global diaspora of Hispanic Moroccan Jews after 1948, numbering, according to some estimates, around 6,000 immigrants and their descendants, and around 12,000 by the early 1990s.⁸ Between the early 1970s and the 1990s, the ratio of Sephardim (most of whom were Moroccans) to Ashkenazim gradually increased among Venezuela’s Jews. In 1998–99, the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (AIV) and its Ashkenazi equivalent, the Unión Israelita de Caracas (UIC), recorded an almost equal number of registered members: 2,160 Sephardim as compared to 2,493 Ashkenazim. The Sephardim in Venezuela, mostly immigrants from northern Morocco and their descendants, were slowly becoming more prominent among Venezuelan Jewry.⁹ As a community, the social and economic situation of Moroccan Jews in Venezuela was far better than the situation of most newcomers in Israel at the time.

How, then, did the community of Moroccan Jews in Venezuela fit into the described global dynamics and Jewish hierarchies after 1948? What meaning did Hispanic Moroccan Jewish leaders in Venezuela attach to their Moroccan identity in this context? To answer these questions, this chapter shows how an attachment to multiple hubs, as well as new interpretations of Zionism, served as a discursive tool for empowering the Venezuelan Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community in the 1960s and early 1970s vis-à-vis Jews in distress. My analysis also builds on the previous chapter to demonstrate how the evolving character of Zionism as a segment of the broader Hispanic Moroccan Jewish mosaic and as an organizational framework for community-building not only survived the post-1948 process of migration to Israel but in fact played a role in consolidating new global power dynamics among Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the 1960s and 1970s.

A TROPICAL “MELTING POT”

As described in chapter four, the large waves of Jewish emigration from Morocco to Israel in the 1960s were relatively small in northern Morocco compared to the rest of the country. Whereas for less mobile communities Israel was often the only migratory option, for a community that had established international hubs already in the nineteenth century, Israel was a less attractive migration destination. This general observation needs to be examined against Venezuela’s post-1948 national immigration policies and the local conditions of integration experienced by Moroccan Jews.

Due to Venezuela’s relative prosperity in the aftermath of World War II and the new open-door policy adopted by dictator Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez (1952–1958), this country increasingly began to receive a more diverse set of immigrants, most prominently from Europe.¹⁰ The Jewish population of Venezuela was a marginal minority, amounting to some twelve thousand in a total population of approximately eight million in the 1960s. Venezuela’s most prominent and visible cultural and economic elite came from Europe, particularly Spain. At the national level, since Venezuela’s independence from Spain in 1810, and even before, “modernization” was strongly associated with the cultural and racialized “blending” of the creole, mestizo, and indigenous people with the population of Europeans. New immigration policies preferred European immigration as a way to whiten the country’s already mixed population, thereby “cleansing” the negative influence of non-white traits.¹¹

By virtue of their native tongue, Spanish-speaking Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco had a historic advantage over other immigrants from Europe and the Middle East in their smooth assimilation in the country, which continued into the mid-twentieth century. Unlike in France, where the North African population comprised a large Muslim immigrant society and a smaller but diverse Jewish one, Spanish-speaking Jews from northern Morocco comprised the majority of the Moroccan group in Venezuela. In their attempts to assimilate, they could make themselves ethnically or racially invisible among Venezuela’s large Catholic Spanish population. Like Spaniards, they were southern European in appearance, and despite some differences in dialect they spoke Castilian Spanish fluently both within and outside of their ethnic immigrant community. By contrast, Jews from Eastern Europe tended to maintain their native languages—usually Yiddish, Hungarian, or German—for the purposes of internal communication.¹²

Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews in Venezuela also took advantage of their connections to a community of trailblazers who had successfully adapted to the local economy. Visitors’ accounts recall that among Moroccan descendants, there were several bankers, import-export agents, and insurance agents as well as representatives of other independent professions, and a report by Israeli officials lists the names of some Jewish Moroccan millionaires in Caracas in the early 1950s.¹³ By the 1960s and 1970s, a number of Moroccan immigrants and their descendants had successfully incorporated themselves into local politics, journalism, intellectual life, and industry. One outstanding example was Gustavo Pinto Cohen, the country’s minister of agriculture from 1975 to 1979. Another example is Dr. Alfonso Benzecri Benmergui, minister of health and social assistance from 1978 to 1981.¹⁴ Moroccan Jews were also present in Venezuelan academia.¹⁵

The history of relatively smooth integration, which had helped to fuel Jewish immigration to Venezuela from northern Morocco beginning in the late nineteenth century, had the paradoxical effect of diminishing efforts at communal organization until the 1960s. Despite significant immigration from Morocco during the 1950s, by 1959 the AIV—the country’s main Jewish communal organization, founded in 1930 by Moroccan immigrants and dominated by them ever since (see chap. 3)—claimed only around fifty members.¹⁶ A general atmosphere of apathy toward Israel and even to larger questions of Jewish identity more broadly characterized Venezuelan Jewish society as other forms of ethnic affirmation became prominent.

Neither this reality nor the fact that most Jews from northern Morocco in Venezuela had not immigrated to Israel meant that their histories were completely detached from the rising global influences of Zionism and related forms of Jewish solidarity after 1948. In November 1947, Venezuela voted in favor of UN Resolution 181, which approved the partition of Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. This support can be attributed to the work of the Comité Venezolano pro-Palestina Judía (the Venezuelan Committee for Jewish Palestine), established earlier that year by eighteen Venezuelan intellectuals and writers, among them the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco, the diplomats Mario Briceño Iragorry and José Nucete Sardi, and the novelists Antonio Arraiz, Lucila Palacio, and Miguel Otero Silva. The “Jewish ambassador” to the committee’s meetings was Moisés Sananes, a Jew of Tetouani origins who was well known as the founding editor of El Mundo Israelita, a mainstream Jewish Venezuelan weekly at the time.¹⁷

As in Morocco, the utilization of Zionism as a means for increasing Jewish solidarity in Venezuela significantly proliferated after the founding of Israel, as world Zionist organizations transmitted Zionist ideas to the grassroots of the community and became prominent on the local Jewish scene. Only through the increasing intervention of Israeli diplomats and Zionist emissaries would Zionism establish a durable base in Venezuela. As in many countries, Israeli emissaries tied the revitalization of Jewish communal life to the community’s general identification with Israel and Zionism. Unlike in Morocco, they could even use leftist values like socialism, common to both modern socialist Zionism and the local Venezuelan political arena in the 1960s, to convince local Jews to connect to the political Zionist cause.¹⁸

Within the Zionist Federation of Venezuela (FSV), several branches of international Zionist organizations—including the local Jewish National Fund (JNF), the United Israel Appeal (UIA, or Keren Hayesod in Hebrew), WIZO, and the Unión de Jóvenes Hebreos youth movement—cooperated with one another. Hashomer Hatzair, Maccabi, Bnei Akiva, and B’nai B’rith América, with their 150 registered members as of 1966, composed the Zionist youth network operating in Caracas.¹⁹ In 1961, some seventy young members between the ages of twelve and seventeen joined the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement.²⁰

A shared pro-Zionist approach and Zionist-oriented activities soon became a prominent glue holding together the local multiethnic Jewish community, including the large Moroccan segment. In 1961, an Israeli envoy to Caracas reported that the number of Jewish students in the Herzl-Bialik School, whose Zionist orientation is already embedded in its name, was constantly on the rise, and it was becoming the central Jewish institution in Caracas.²¹ In fact, by 1969, some 95 percent of local Jews had enrolled their children in the school. Herzl-Bialik offered sixteen instructional levels, or grades, beginning with kindergarten and continuing through high school. Classes were made up of pupils from a variety of Jewish ethnic backgrounds, Moroccan Jews included.²² While not officially part of a Zionist organization, in practice, any local Jew who wanted to enroll his children in the Herzl-Bialik School had to contribute dues to the UIA fund, reflecting an intertwining of communal and Zionist activities.²³

A few attempts to launch extramural, Moroccan-oriented Jewish educational initiatives fell short, including the Cultura-Tarbut School and the Bambi private kindergarten, both of which operated in the Maripérez neighborhood, home to many Moroccan immigrants to Caracas.²⁴ Beside the Herzl-Bialik School, the Club Hebraica, a social, recreational, and cultural center, encompassed the vast majority of Jewish activities. Hebraica was the initiative of two siblings of Moroccan descent, John and Gonzalo Benaím Pinto, the latter then serving as vice president of the AIV.²⁵

This organizational unification in the 1960s reflected a major shift in the general attitude of the community toward Zionism as a tool for Jewish unification. While earlier attempts to unite the Jewish community under umbrella organizations in the 1940s fell short, in the 1960s and 1970s they succeeded thanks to the engagement of local branches of global Zionist organizations.²⁶ In this context, in 1966, all of the small local Jewish organizations, including the AIV, the Ashkenazi UIC, and the country’s Zionist organization, united under a single umbrella known as La Confederación de Asociaciónes Israelitas de Venezuela (CAIV), the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela. The CAIV’s official mouthpiece was the Nuevo Mundo Israelita, which openly declared its Zionist orientation. This weekly was founded by Rubén Mérenfeld and the Tetouan-born Moisés Garzón Serfaty, the aforementioned editor of Or-Luz also serving as the CAIV’s president. Nuevo Mundo Israelita was distributed door to door for free to registered Venezuelan Jews.²⁷

SEPHARDI ZIONISM IN MOTION

Despite the prominence of a national Jewish “melting pot” strategy that aimed to homogenize Jewish cultural life in Venezuela, the Moroccan-led Sephardi organizations were not weakened or negatively affected. In fact, they used the momentum of the country’s revitalized Jewish life to develop their own particularistic activities like never before. In the AIV’s bulletin of April 1967, the group’s leadership congratulated some sixty new members who had recently joined the organization. The leaders expressed satisfaction with the fact that, prior to becoming members, several had been among “those who remain at the margins of communal activities.”²⁸

Joining the AIV was an act of ethnic identification that not only boosted membership numbers but also validated the importance of its work. The AIV sent two subscription forms to each of its members, hoping they would spread the word about the social benefits of joining the association. This effort lasted well into the late 1960s. By May 1971, the one-thousandth member had subscribed, and by September 1972 nearly a hundred children were attending a variety of courses offered by the AIV. The organization, of course, hoped to continue expanding.²⁹

While joining Jewish institutions cannot be inherently considered proof of Zionist solidarity, Zionist affiliation and organizations facilitated and enriched social activity among Moroccan Jews in Venezuela, as well as their connections with Moroccan Jews elsewhere. Such was the case with the AIV’s El Grupo Herzl, founded in 1970, and the private Hebrew lessons that the AIV designed for children who had difficulties acquiring the language or wished to advance further.³⁰ These activities supplemented normal recreation on Saturdays and the more traditional historical rituals that Moroccan Jews observed through the AIV, such as the hilula (public commemoration of a saintly rabbi) of Rebbi Shimon Bar Yochai in the Moroccan synagogue Tiferet Israel and the hilula of Rebbi Meir Baal Hanes in the Club Israelita—both well-known annual gatherings for Moroccans Jews.³¹ On another occasion, the Zionist Federation of Venezuela invited Jo Amar, a popular Moroccan musician in Israel, to sing in the Moroccan synagogue on the anniversary of Israel’s independence on May 7, 1971.³² Zionism and community development among Sephardi Jews went hand in hand also in the establishment of transnational ties between Moroccan Jews in Caracas and in Israel, as well as with their reference to their roots in Morocco and the creation of an amalgam of historic and contemporary identities.

These developments on the local Venezuelan front were connected to a broader shift in Sephardi Zionist activism occurring around the 1960s and 1970s. Already in the early twentieth century in Argentina (see chap. 4), Zionism was used as a pragmatic tool for consolidating Moroccan leadership and as a source for empowering their agency in global Jewish activism. Immigrants from a variety of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries also began to unify under the framework of Sephardi Zionism and to lobby for a stronger position in the World Zionist Organization. Unlike earlier in the century, however, the 1960s and 1970s had a different political and demographic context. By the mid-1960s, as mentioned, most Jews from Muslim majority countries and groups of Jews from Eastern Europe had moved to Israel, while Soviet Jews were largely immobile behind the Iron Curtain. Many of the remaining Jews in the world had concentrated in the Americas and Western Europe, considered to be relatively welcoming environments.

In Venezuela, Moroccan Jews were building a community that in general identified with Israel and collaborated rather smoothly with Ashkenazi immigrants in their shared efforts to invigorate Jewish life in the tropical country. In Israel, however, Moroccan Jews were having a very different migration experience as they attempted to integrate into the Jewish state. Many Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries encountered significant hardship integrating into the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli society. After their arrival to Israel, many Moroccan Jews were placed in impoverished urban areas and later in “development towns” in the geographical periphery of the country (see chap. 7). Memorable events that shaped a shared sense of marginalization in Israel include the shooting in July 1959 of a Jewish Moroccan resident of the Haifa neighborhood of Wadi Salib, which sparked a series of ethnic demonstrations across Israel; and the 1971 Black Panthers protests, in which working-class Jewish immigrants from Morocco attempted to draw attention to their economic distress.³³

Aligning with the perceptions of world Jewish hierarchies between affluent Jews and Jewries in distress, the earlier form of Zionist Sephardi solidarity widened the perceived global hierarchies within the world Sephardi diaspora. In 1958, the Sephardi Community Council (SCC) in Jerusalem established a new periodical titled BaMa’aracha (Hebrew for In the Battle), which focused on ethnic discrimination in Israel. BaMa’aracha brought to the awareness of its Israeli Mizrahi and Sephardi readerships the communal development of Sephardi centers in the Americas and Western Europe as a way of calling upon them to join forces with their more economically affluent brethren abroad.³⁴ Reports on these communities increased at the beginning of 1971 against the backdrop of the Black Panthers demonstrations in Israel, which demanded an end to government’s social and economic marginalization of Mizrahim. The common belief was that by drawing the attention of these affluent communities to the “social problems” in Israel—namely ethnic discrimination against MENA Jews—a new “Sephardi” solution would emerge.³⁵

In their narratives about Jews from MENA countries, the World Sephardi Federation (WSF) and other world Sephardi bodies distinguished between the different regional situation of MENA Jews: those who remained in the “old world”—that is, in Muslim countries—and therefore might experience physical danger; those who moved to Israel and experienced economic distress and cultural marginalization; and those who immigrated to the West and therefore might experience the “spiritual danger” of assimilation.³⁶ On May 25, 1972, as a response to the Israeli Black Panther protests, the World Zionist Organization formally included the WSF in its organizational framework for the first time. As a result, the Department for Zionist and Social Activity among Sephardi and Mizrahi Communities was established. In 1974, this department created the journal Hedim: Kehilot Sefaradiyot Ba‘Olam (Echoes: Sephardi Communities of the World) to familiarize Israeli readers with the growing interest of Sephardi communities worldwide in Israeli affairs—itself an outgrowth of the department’s activities.³⁷

In February 1972, the WSF gathered together 280 representatives from Sephardi communities across the US in the Shearith Israel synagogue in New York City to establish the American Sephardi Federation (ASF). Later, on October 26, La Federación Sefaradí Latinoamericana (the Latin American Sephardi Federation, or FeSeLA) was founded in Lima, Peru, as an umbrella organization for the Sephardi communities in Latin America within the WZO.³⁸

The main objective of FeSeLA in Latin America, the Jewish Agency’s Sephardi affairs department, and the other newly established branches of the WSF was to strengthen Sephardi communities facing "spiritual danger" while incorporating their communal activity and leadership into the global decision-making body of the Zionist movement. It also sought to enrich and transmit Sephardi culture as a way of raising the self-esteem of Sephardim as a group and strengthening their contributions to Jewish life in Israel and elsewhere. Struggling against discrimination in Israel and “rescuing” Jews from Muslim lands were thus seen as ways of contributing to the unity of the Jewish people and strengthening the Zionist cause.³⁹ This interpretation of Zionist activism by Sephardi leaders worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century reverberated in the local perceptions of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Venezuela as they came to establish their own separate institutions.

BECOMING VENEZUELAN MOROCCANS

Despite the relatively smooth integration of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and the overall community’s integration in Venezuela more broadly, Moroccan Jews in Venezuela increasingly participated in the global trend of reclaiming Sephardi origins in Spain as a political and organizational tool. Just two years before the founding of FeSeLA, a new Moroccan-run periodical marked the first step in an awakening of Sephardi consciousness in Venezuela that coupled Sephardi identity with northern Moroccan hometown nostalgia. It was Maguén-Escudo (hereafter Maguén), a combination of the Hebrew word maguén (shield) and its Spanish equivalent, escudo. In the early 1970s, Nuevo Mundo Israelita, a newer edition of Mundo Israelita, began to appear as a joint venture of the AIV, UIC, and, later, B’nai B’rith. The editors of Maguén, Moisés Garzón Serfaty and Rubén Mérenfeld, both fervent Zionists, were also the founding editors of Nuevo Mundo Israelita. The latter was a unification project that integrated into its editorial board a representative from the FSV, B’nai B’rith, and the CAIV. The mouthpiece of the AIV, Maguén came into being at Garzón Serfaty’s initiative in January 1970.⁴⁰

Garzón Serfaty became one of the most prominent figures promoting a global Sephardi consciousness, even as he coedited Nuevo Mundo Israelita, which represented a united Venezuelan Jewish community. Previously the editor of El Diario de Africa, a Spanish-language newspaper in Morocco, and of Or-Luz, Garzón Serfaty’s biography following his immigration to Venezuela reflects a rather smooth assimilation into the national environment. Garzón Serfaty graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a degree in economics and continued his education at the Catholic University of Caracas. In 1980, he was a staff member at two local colleges. However, his integration into Venezuela’s labor market did not diminish the active role he had been playing in the local Moroccan Jewish community almost since the time of his arrival.⁴¹ Garzón Serfaty dedicated much of his activity in the new country to promoting Maguén as a Sephardi periodical with strong connections to Morocco, Israel, Spain, and Venezuela, just as he had with Or-Luz but in a different context.

Maguén’s very first editorial remarks, which laid out the publication’s raison d’être, identified loyalty to both Venezuela and Israel as major factors comprising their identities as Moroccan Jews in Venezuela: “We wish to deliver a fraternal greeting to all our co-religionists in Venezuela and to our sister [mainly Ashkenazi] organization, who, in one way or another, are guided by the same noble purposes . . . [namely,] working for the aggrandizement of Venezuelan Jewry and for this broad, open, honest, and generous homeland [Venezuela] in which many of us were born and to whose historic hospitality we are all witnesses. We also want to express our salutation to the dignified diplomatic representative of the State of Israel, with which we undoubtedly identify.”⁴² Many of Maguén’s numerous articles dealing with Israeli history and culture focused on Latin American connections and the role of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in mediating them. For example, one such article touted the respectable place of Latin American Jewry in donating to the JNF and reported the long list of forests in Israel named after Latin American figures like Simón Bolívar from Venezuela, as well as early nineteenth-century figures from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama.⁴³ Another article mentioned the AIV’s efforts to publish a book in Hebrew about Bolívar to spread his legacy in Israeli academic and public discourse.⁴⁴

The Sephardi community of Venezuela, comprised mainly of northern Moroccan Jews, maintained a collective memory of its status as pioneers among the country’s Jewish settlers, arriving long before the Ashkenazim.⁴⁵ This narrative framed the history of Jewish migration by focusing on early Sephardi history in Latin America and integrated numerous archival documents from the founding of the AIV in 1930.⁴⁶ The overall tendency to focus on earlier Sephardi migration to Venezuela characterized references to the emigration of Moroccan Jews in Maguén.⁴⁷ While this framing had additional motivations related to the integration of Sephardi Jews into Venezuelan society, as I will show in the next chapter, it was also useful in structuring a unified communal narrative that connected them to the historical Sephardi diaspora. By employing this narrative, Moroccan Jews in Venezuela could position themselves differently from the way they conceived of Moroccan Jews who migrated to Israel or even Jewish societies in Eastern Europe. They viewed and represented themselves not as Jews in distress or physical danger but instead as part of the empowered segment of world Jewry that bore responsibility for aiding those in need.

The global proliferation of Jewish narratives of distress and solidarity in the aftermath of the Holocaust strongly reverberated through Maguén. From its earliest issues, the periodical’s calls to “free” Jewries in distress included references to Jews in Iran and Arab countries, as well as the Soviet Union, that were all placed under the same banner.⁴⁸ The “let my people go” slogan appeared in a number of reports on Iranian and Syrian Jews in the early 1970s.⁴⁹ One such report graphically tied the destiny of these distressed Jewries in Morocco to the recent memory of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, as figure 5.1 shows.

Coinciding with the final stages of Jewish migration from Muslim majority countries, the Israeli-based World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) was established in 1975 by the then–vice chair of the Knesset, Mordechai Ben-Porat, to promote the legal right to restitution of Jews from Arab countries. Supported by the Jewish Agency and Israel’s Foreign Ministry, WOJAC established branches in New York, London, Rome, and Zurich.⁵⁰ The organization promoted the idea that Jews in Arab countries shared a unified destiny in the mid-twentieth century: distress and expulsion.

In the backdrop of this atmosphere of activism, one of the first articles in Maguén about the history of Moroccan Jews appeared under the title “An Unknown Future for Moroccan Jewry” in the winter of 1972. It depicted an atmosphere of anxiety among the Jews of Morocco in light of the recent political instability in the country following attempts to assassinate King Hassan II.⁵¹ This story and the discourse that framed it did not originate in Maguén’s pages, which merely replicated the more general discourse of the AIV regarding the precarious situations of Jewish communities in Muslim majority countries like Morocco, which were generally deemed hostile to Jews. This narrative enabled the community of northern Moroccan Jews in Venezuela to define their new status also vis-à-vis Jews who still lived in Morocco, many of whom were their relatives.

Earlier, in 1966, the Club a de Venezuela organized a Purim Festival and dedicated all of the proceeds to the communities of northern Morocco. The invitation explained this act of generosity by stating that “as you [local Jews] know . . . they [the communities in northern Morocco] are in an extremely precarious situation. . . . We need to tie our community organization to the imperative goal of supporting these brethren.”⁵²

In February 1969, Gonzalo Benaím Pinto, the president of the AIV, sent several dispatches to the leaders of the Jewish communities in Tangier and Tetouan with an offer to purchase religious artifacts from the synagogues and transfer them to Caracas for safekeeping.⁵³ By these acts and statements, northern Moroccan Jews in Venezuela positioned themselves as the elite of their diaspora, responsible for the well-being not only of their compatriots in Israel but of those who stayed in Morocco.⁵⁴

This paternalistic approach to Morocco and other Jews in distress on the part of Venezuelan Jews mixed with nostalgic representations of their Moroccan hometowns to forge a complex perspective on their vanished histories in Morocco in the early 1970s. In fact, alongside the small number of references to the contemporary Moroccan nation-state that appeared in Maguén, a different kind of reference began to appear around that time, imbuing the connection to Morocco with a strong sense of nostalgia for a Jewish hometown life that had come to an end with Morocco’s independence. For instance, one of the first articles in Maguén to reference Morocco was entitled “Memories from Tangier.” It included nostalgic musings by Isaac R. Toledano, who mentioned that he had spent most of his life in Morocco, particularly in Tangier.⁵⁵ This short essay began with a “reminiscence” about Jewish Tangier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before Toledano was born, in which he described the origins of the Jewish communal leadership and the foundation of local synagogues “before the declaration of independence in Morocco, which put an end to the protectorate.”⁵⁶

The final words of Toledano’s essay support the idea that many Jews experienced alienation following Moroccan independence, when immigration began, and the nostalgic narrative came to an end: “These memories always result in melancholia for those who lived in the city. . . . That [i.e., Jewish] Tangier permanently disappeared [after Moroccan independence].”⁵⁷ Toledano’s focus on Jewish lieu de memoir prior to 1956 helped him shape his memories to fit the narrative of immigration from Muslim countries to the safe haven in Venezuela as a way of reaffirming his new status as a Moroccan Venezuelan Jew. In a subsequent article entitled “What I Have Done for Israel,” Toledano also tied this notion to his local Zionist identity, noting that, due to his advanced age, he could not join the large number of Tangier Jews who had fulfilled their duty by returning to Israel. He maintained, however, that his inability to immigrate to Israel in no way diminished his lifelong support for the State of Israel from afar, which was part and parcel of his commitment to the Jewish people.⁵⁸

Against the backdrop of postcolonial Jewish migration to Israel, such narratives of Jewish persecution expressed nostalgia for a lost Moroccan golden age, as well as a sense of pride in being affluent Jews in the new Venezuelan homeland. Both homelands were linked in the collective story of Hispanic Moroccan Jews as international developments shifted their Jewish affinities. It was against the backdrop of mass immigration to Israel in the 1960s, the geographical distancing from their place of origin, and the buzz created by Zionist organizations and Israeli emissaries worldwide around immigration to Israel that Zionist affinities and attachments to Morocco, Spain, and Venezuela coalesced more harmoniously than ever before, changing the connotations of these places in the communal narrative as it developed in Venezuela in the 1960 and 1970s.

Writing about Tangier as a Jewish lieu de memoir whose history ended in the mid-twentieth century facilitated the inclusion of elements from medieval Spain. Toledano even dedicated one of his two nostalgic accounts of his city of origin, Tangier, to the Spanish senator Ángel Pulido and his campaign to revive Spain’s Jewish past.⁵⁹ The link between nostalgia for Morocco and the Iberian past is at the heart of the next chapter.