SIX

SPAIN AND THE POSTCOLONIAL DIASPORA

IN THE EARLY 1970S, SEPHARDI COMMUNITIES across Europe and the Americas joined the WSF and launched a number of local branches, including the ASF in New York City, FeSeLa in Latin America, and the Canadian Sephardi Federation. About three years later, on January 23–25, 1976, representatives from across Spain were summoned by the WSF to a summit in Málaga, where the country’s Jewish community joined the WSF. Sephardi representatives from across Spain signed the branch’s founding document, including David Ventura from Barcelona, Philippe Halioua from Madrid, Menáhem Gabizón from Ceuta, Simón Hassan from Seville, León Shriqui from Málaga, Leon Levy from Melilla, and Samuel Serfaty from Valencia.¹ Mauricio Hatchuel Toledano was nominated chair of the Spanish branch, Samuel Toledano became one of its senior executive board members, and Rabbi Baruj (Benito) Garzón Serfaty was its secretary. Later, Serfaty became Spain’s chief rabbi.² A native of Tetouan, Rabbi Garzón Serfaty collaborated with his brother Moisés Garzón Serfaty in Venezuela who had participated in the creation of FeSeLa a few years earlier.³ Almost all of the members of this new community leadership in Spain were originally from northern Morocco.⁴ From May 23 to 27, 1979, the WSF held a world summit in Madrid, attended by two hundred representatives, including some from Tangier and Israel.⁵

These events in the mid- through late 1970s represent a milestone in the overall transformation from the colonial context in which Hispanic Moroccan Jewish identities developed and thrived to a new postcolonial reality that endowed these identities with new national and transnational meanings. Originally developed by Philo-Sephardi advocates and Spanish colonialists to promote colonial expansion, as shown in chapter 2, the notion of ancestry in Spain among the community leadership not only survived postcolonial migration to Spain, as I argue in this chapter, but even intensified as Hispanic Moroccan Jews made Spain their new principal hub. As it made new organizational sense in multiple additional hubs from the late 1960s through the 1990s, the notion of ancestry continued traveling across the diaspora, strengthening the ties between its hubs.

To explore how the notion of ancestry in Spain buttressed community formation after most Jews had left northern Morocco in the last third of the twentieth century, I will begin by setting a historical background for understanding Spain’s changing attitude toward the Sephardi diaspora, including that of northern Moroccan Jews, in the new postcolonial context. I will then address how this shift manifested in transnational ties forged by the Hispanic Moroccan community in Spain, with additional hubs in the US and Israel. Finally, paying special attention to the global community’s most prominent center in the Americas, Venezuela, I will show how postcolonial attitudes toward Spain and the ties they generated from afar helped Moroccan Jews integrate into Venezuelan society by virtue of their globalizing community.

A REVIVAL FROM ABOVE

Usually, scholars of migration identify collective nostalgia and ethnic preserving among a diaspora as an outcome of physical distancing from their imagined or real homelands.⁶ Adopting a more transregional network approach to analyze diaspora-making, my discussion in the following section demonstrates how a nostalgic approach for Spain, and a related salvage ethnographic discourse toward its past, from the late 1960s, intertwined with the building of a new geographic base in that country.

Despite the centrality of Spain to nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives about the shared origins of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, it was not until the 1960s that mainland Spain became a prominent base for Jews from northern Morocco. Spain differed in that regard from the other hubs of Jews from northern Morocco in the Iberian Peninsula, British-ruled Gibraltar and Portugal. Cities in southern Spain like Seville, Málaga, Tarifa, Cadiz, and Algeciras indeed attracted, among other sorts of migrants, refugees from the 1859–60 war, but Spanish authorities at the time encouraged their return to Morocco rather than their permanent settlement in the region.⁷ From the perspective of the Jewish communities, a herem, or a rabbinical ban placed on Spain for expelling Jews in 1492, also set back immigration for religious reasons.⁸

The concept of Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood, which portrayed Jewish and Muslim North Africans as part of the Spanish family, was primarily employed to justify colonialism rather than to encourage the immigration of Muslims and Jews from these territories to Spain or to foster genuine interfaith coexistence within mainland Spain (see chap. 2). Despite a series of legislative changes, including the abolition of inquisition tribunals in 1834, the repeal of “purity of blood” statutes in 1837, and the enshrinement of religious freedom in the 1869 constitution, the Spanish government continued to perceive Spain as a predominantly Catholic nation while regarding religious minorities within its territories as foreigners.

While Jews from northern Morocco did migrate to mainland Spain in the early decades of the twentieth century, the country witnessed more significant waves of Jewish migration from elsewhere. The Balkan Wars (1912–13) and the disintegration of the Ottoman, Austro–Hungarian, and Russian Empires following World War I provoked the immigration of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews to mainland Spain. Moroccan Jews were barely represented in these waves. During World War II, Spain allowed only a few thousand Jewish refugees from Eastern and Southeastern Europe to pass into its territory. In an attempt to distance itself from Nazi Europe and appeal to the Western Bloc after the defeat of Italian and German fascism, the Spanish government sought to more meaningfully contribute to the rescue of Jews during the remainder of the war. After the war, the Francoist regime justified these efforts to influential Catholic conservatives through an appeal to the Christian value of “love for all the races,” as argued by a 1949 pamphlet produced by the government.⁹

By its own declaration, post–World War II Franco’s Spain also shared with Israel the post-Holocaust aspiration to “rescue” Jews from the Muslim world, placing a special emphasis on Sephardi Jews in Egypt. Between the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s rise to power in 1952, and the 1956 Suez crisis, the prospects of Jews in Egypt were worsening. Wishing to portray itself as a savior of the Jews as a means of warming relations with the West, Spanish diplomats denied Egyptian national narratives about Jewish-Muslim fraternal relations. They did so even at the expense of their relations with Egypt and other Arab countries that developed narratives regarding Jewish emigration as an outcome of Zionist manipulation. Spain also enabled the world bodies that organized Operation Yakhin in the 1960s to use its territories in Africa. Spain never held a clear policy to organize the emigration of Moroccan or Egyptian Jews but rather engaged in sporadic initiatives by diplomats who collaborated with American-based Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders.¹⁰

Against this backdrop, in the mid-1950s, Moroccan Jews appeared in greater numbers than ever before in several cities in southern Spain—cities like Málaga, Seville, and Valencia. A few thousand Moroccan Jews—most from middle-class families—were estimated to have been living in Spain by the 1960s, usually in Madrid, comprising some 65 percent of the country’s small Jewish population. Although Spain did not automatically offer nationality to citizens of the protectorate, the populations from northern Morocco were among the foreigners who gained easiest access as a result of prior residency in the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, or through ad hoc letters of naturalization that Spain granted individuals who served its interests.¹¹ The majority of Moroccan Jews in Spain originated from northern Morocco, as Spain was more accessible to them both geographically and, as indicated in chapter 1, culturally. For example, the Or-Luz Jewish newspaper, which announced the weddings of local Jews in Tetouan, noted in 1956 that Spain was a popular destination for Jewish honeymooners from northern Morocco.¹²

The migration of Jews from Morocco to Spain took shape against the backdrop of the postcolonial atmosphere that spurred migration from Morocco in the 1950s. Not only Jews but also Muslims—particularly those from northern Moroccan cities and towns, including Tetouan, Nador, Huceima, Larache, and Chefchaouen—began to immigrate to Spain in increasing numbers by the 1960s.¹³ However, beyond the relatively higher percentage of Jews among the several thousand Moroccan immigrants in Spain, Moroccan Jews were distinct from their Muslim immigrant counterparts in other ways. Forty percent of Moroccan Muslim immigrants in Madrid were registered as laborers, whereas Moroccan Jews dominated the field of administration, which their Muslim counterparts rarely entered.

Conversely, the field of nonprofessional petits commerçants and artisans was dominated by Moroccan Muslims and included hardly any Jews. Differences in the age of immigrants were also evident. While many Muslims were in their thirties, the Jewish migrant population was more multigenerational.¹⁴

Still, the migration of Moroccan Jews to Spain up until the late 1960s was not organized, and the Jewish institutions remained underdeveloped by the immigrant community. For example, Jews who kept kosher relied on the supply of kosher meat from nearby Gibraltar. Spain’s Jewish communal organization at the time was in fact dominated by Ashkenazi Jews. Max Mazin, a Lithuanian Jew, was the president of the Jewish communities of Spain from 1961 to 1970. The lack of official Sephardi organization can be attributed to the general aspiration of the fascist regime to build the Spanish nation around Catholic values.

Unlike in other countries of Moroccan Jewish immigration, the major shift that drove the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community to organize in Spain came from above, through unprecedented efforts by the Spanish government to restore the country’s Jewish communal life in the context of the withdrawal from Morocco, and even more so following Franco’s death in 1975.

To understand this shift, we need to consider that the late 1950s saw a change in Franco’s overall economic policy, marked by dramatic social and cultural transitions. Responding to a severe economic crisis and worker and student strikes in 1956—partly resulting from Spain’s unsuccessful colonial campaign in Morocco—Franco issued a series of plans designed to modernize the economy. Consequently, Spain entered its desarollismo, or “development” years, from 1960 to 1975, marked by considerable urbanization, economic mobility, the expansion of the industrial and service sectors, and a major increase in secondary and higher education attendance. The number of students in Spanish universities for example, grew from sixty thousand in 1961 to about four hundred thousand in 1976.¹⁵

The social changes reflect Spain’s emerging strategy in the 1950s to integrate into the Western Bloc without renouncing the principals of its authoritarian regime. Granting credibility to a national elite of technocrats who acquired their training from abroad, Franco sought to modernize the economy by investing in human capital and education. World organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, UNESCO, and the US government collaborated, as this model of authoritarian modernization was designed to prevent communist influence on the economy. It was argued that developing a consumer society and a business sector and training skilled workers would improve living conditions and help the regime survive without leaving room for social protest. Spain’s economic opening to the West was met with global recognition and accompanied by new pedagogical methodologies that replaced the prevailing nationalist and Catholic ways of teaching.¹⁶

Spain’s opening to the West coincided with the development of world Sephardi organizations and cultural activism in the 1960s through the 1980s. In 1968, Yeshiva University was the first American academic institution of higher education to incorporate a Sephardi studies program, which began to issue a new journal called The American Sephardi.¹⁷ These developments were part of a trend in American Jewish studies toward integrating Sephardi studies in broader curriculums.¹⁸

Influenced by its strengthening ties with—and pressure from—world Jewish organizations and world Sephardi communities, the Francoist regime in the late 1960s began to change its earlier attitude toward Jewish minorities on the ground.¹⁹ In 1967, a new “religious freedom” law was passed by the Spanish parliament, marking a separation of church and state after more than thirty years of dependence on the Roman Catholic Church. A year later, Jews in various Spanish cities were officially permitted by the government to organize into local communities that would be recognized as official representatives of the country’s Jews.

On December 16, 1968, the Beth Yaacov Sephardi synagogue was inaugurated by Moroccan immigrants on Balmes St. 3 in Madrid and became the first synagogue to be officially recognized by the Spanish monarchy since the Alhambra Decree. That same year, a Sephardi Museum was created by royal decree at the ancient Samuel Halevi synagogue in Toledo’s Judería. The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the emergence of a new Jewish leadership in Spain dominated by immigrants from northern Morocco. Born in Tangier on August 15, 1929, Samuel Toledano graduated from the law faculty at the University of Paris and moved to Spain in 1959. In 1968, Toledano received from Spain’s Minister of Justice Antonio Oriol a proclamation formally revoking the Catholic monarchs’ Expulsion Decree of March 31, 1492.²⁰

Even with these significant milestones, it was only with the death of Francisco Franco on November 20, 1975 that Spain truly entered a new political era characterized by more tolerance for democratic and pluralistic rhetoric. Unlike the weak tone that characterized the opening of new institutions in Franco’s late years, following his death the new government wished to rebrand Spain by distancing itself, de facto and de jure, from the former authoritarian regime. For example, in an important symbolic move in 1976, Spain’s Queen Sofía attended a Friday night service in Madrid’s new main synagogue, Beth Yaacov. As noted in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the momentous political events in Spain coincided with major events on the global Sephardi-Zionist front in the 1970s, which further shaped the characteristics of the Moroccan-led Jewish community in Venezuela and in Spain.

The representation of the Moroccan-led Jewish community in Spain in those global Sephardi networks coincided with a change in local Jewish demography. The year 1973 saw the establishment of a military dictatorship in Argentina, an event that encouraged emigration from that country to Spain. This led to joint communal activities between old and new immigrants. For example, in 1986, a group of immigrants from northern Morocco and Latin America came together in Madrid to establish a new periodical called Raíces: Revista Judía de Cultura (Roots: A Jewish Review of Culture). Raíces became the forerunner of a range of organizations that produced intellectual writing about Sephardi Judaism in Spain. The periodical’s director was Jacobo Israel Garzón, who immigrated from Tetouan to Madrid in 1959, and among the founding members was the Ceuta-born Moroccan Jewish philologist Iacov Hassán.²¹ They collaborated with other immigrants from Latin America, many of whom were of Ashkenazi origin, including Horacio Kohan, Esther Gordon, Liliana Kohan, Uriel Macías, Manuel Aguilar, Arnold Liberman, and later Abrasha Rotenberg.

A survey of the early issues published between 1986 and 1992 reveals that they featured the writings of many world figures responsible for the revival of Jewish heritage in Spain: Marcos Ricardo, a Jew of Syrian descent who immigrated to Madrid from Buenos Aires; Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s ambassador to Spain; philologist Ana María López Álvarez, who worked at the Museo Sefaradí; and Rabbi Jacobo Israel Garzón. In the spirit of national reconciliation with the Jewish past, Raíces reached an audience far beyond the local community; its writers included Jews and Christians and hailed from a variety of countries and professional backgrounds. According to Raíces’s official website, as of 2011 it was distributed to all the Jewish communities of Spain, Portugal, and the Americas and had subscribers throughout Europe, much of Latin America, and the US. In Spain, subscriptions reached every province through bookstores.²²

While local events in Spain aligned with the post–World War II trend of multiculturalism in Europe, Spain’s approach was notably distinct. As Spain aimed to align itself with Western Europe, it also distanced itself from the historical narrative of Hispanic Moroccan brotherhood. This created a paradox, as Spain also sought to integrate Moroccan groups as immigrant minorities while considering the global discourse of postcolonial multiculturalism. Clearly, community building on the domestic Spanish political front was intertwined with the proliferation of global networks that worked to integrate narratives of Jewish ancestry in Spain. This process would also have implications for the globalizing Hispanic Moroccan community in Israel.

SPAIN, ISRAEL, AND THE EVOLVING SEPHARDI DIASPORA

During Franco’s reign, there was a general political preference for establishing relations with world Jewry over Israel, for fear of ruining delicate relations with Arab countries. With the death of Franco, the new king of Spain, Juan Carlos I (reign 1975–2014), revised the country’s diplomatic strategy and called for Spain to establish ties with “all nations.”²³ This change seemingly set the ground for official relations with Israel. On December 21, 1977, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013), then the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel (also known as the Rishon LeZion), met with the king of Spain and Cardinal Marcelo González in the royal palace.²⁴ In 1979, Spain was incorporated into the World Jewish Congress, and an Israel-Spain Friendship Association was established in Spain to promote collaboration with the State of Israel.²⁵ Spain soon began to recognize the advantages of reaching out directly to the population of Judeo-Spanish speakers in Israel as cultural proxies. In 1985, Spain’s royal radio granted “Kol Yisrael in Ladino,” the Judeo-Spanish section of Israel’s national radio service, an award for its activity.²⁶

Almost a decade later, in 1986, formal bilateral ties between Spain and Israel were finally established. In the 1980s, Spain reassessed its reliance on the Muslim world at the expense of ties with Israel. As it completed its incorporation into the international community by joining NATO in May 1982 and the European Economic Community in January 1986, ties with Israel served the goal of rebranding Spain as a Western European power.²⁷ In this process of reconciliation with Israel, Spain also relied on cultural affiliation that relied on Hispanic Moroccan Jewish agents (see chap. 7). One of the prominent figures who helped establish the new relationship was the Tangier native Shlomo Ben-Ami (formerly Benabú), who immigrated to Israel in 1955 and eventually joined the faculty of Tel Aviv University as an expert on Spanish history. He would serve as Israel’s ambassador to Spain from 1987 to 1991, the most momentous years in the budding diplomatic relationship between the two countries.²⁸

The cultural ties that resulted from the warming relations between Israel and Spain culminated in the year 1992 with the marking of the quincentenary of the Alhambra Decree. The international ties of Spain’s Jewish community, already expanding in the 1980s, further expanded in that context. In 1990, a Spanish-language radio program called Aadas y Adafinas, produced by immigrants from northern Morocco in Paris for the Radio de la Communauté Juive, hosted Ben-Ami. The show concentrated on the preparation for the upcoming quincentenary. Ben-Ami used the occasion to explain, from his own perspective, how Spain viewed the celebration as a way to reconcile with the Jewish people rather than to just promote diplomatic ties with the State of Israel. He specifically declared that Israel would feature in the global celebration only as a hub for a significant Sephardi “community,” rather than as the Jewish nation-state. According to Ben-Ami, the prominent role of Yitzhak Navon, then Israel’s minister of education and culture, in the preparations was due not to his position as an Israeli politician but rather to his identity as a Sephardi Jew.²⁹

This statement by an Israeli diplomat of Hispanic Moroccan origin in Spain suggests the complexities that characterized the emergence of bilateral relations between Spain and Israel as epicenters of the Sephardi diaspora, and as homes to new Sephardi communities. Spain continually saw itself as having major influence on the Jewish world, even as it forged ties with Israel. In 1990, Spain bestowed its highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, on Sephardi Jews worldwide. In the broader geopolitical context, 1992 marked the high point of Spain’s democratization process in the years following Franco’s dictatorship. With Madrid declared the cultural capital of Europe and Barcelona hosting the Olympics, Spain’s international status and global recognition as a democratic state reached new heights. In addition, the Universal Exposition of Seville, or Expo ’92, also held in 1992, was themed “The Age of Discovery.” From the government’s perspective, the quincentenary was indeed an opportunity to strengthen its ties with the power centers of the free world by demonstrating its tolerance for and connection to the Jews that resided there.³⁰

On March 4, 1987, a working group called Sefarad ’92: El Redescubrimiento de la España Judía (Sefarad ’92: The Rediscovery of Jewish Spain) was established by Luis Yánez Barnuevo, the first person to be appointed as Spain’s secretary of state for Iberia-America and the Caribbean International Cooperation. The working group was appointed directly by the king of Spain and constituted a section within the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a unit within the larger National Commission for the Commemoration of the Fifth Century since the Discovery of America.³¹

Responsible for the commemoration of both the five hundred years since the “discovery” of America and the Alhambra Decree, Barnuevo worked with the Tangier-born Samuel Toledano, then president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain. On December 2, 1990, the Jewish community of Spain launched the Comisión Nacional Judía Sefarad ’92, a separate international Jewish body designed to work with the state-led Sefarad ’92 committee. This Jewish body was headed by Mauricio Hatchel and included additional members such as the aforementioned Samuel Toledano, Isaac Querub, and David Grebler, president of the Jewish community of Barcelona. Their main international collaborators were Israel’s Yizhak Navon, who represented the Jerusalem-based Sephardi Community Council (SCC) and the New York City–based ASF.³² The US was also represented among the leaders promoting the Spanish government’s Sefarad ’92 program worldwide. Hal Lewis of the ASF was appointed as the project’s international director general.³³ The 1992 quincentennial commemoration, which coincided with a new kind of attention to Spain’s multicultural past, led to a torrent of new publications and served community leaders’ and intellectuals’ calls for greater pluralism.³⁴

But while the Sefarad ’92 project embodied the spirit of multiculturalism and reconciliation, it was not untouched by intercommunal politics and global hierarchies within the Jewish world. Though led in Spain by many Jews of northern Moroccan origin, the influence of community organizations representing the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora elsewhere was relatively minor. In an interview for the radio show Aadas y Adafinas, Solomon Momy Benayoun, president of Mifgash Benei Tanjir (MABAT, Reunion of Tangier’s Natives), the main body representing Jews from northern Morocco in Israel (the focus of the next chapter), described how his organization was excluded from planning the quincentennial due to Israeli domestic politics. Benayoun accused Yitzhak Navon of disconnecting the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community from the larger Sephardi diaspora due to its background in an “Arab country,” Morocco. Benayoun’s comments reveal the complexity of adding Jews from northern Morocco (in Israel) as a hub to the global effort to link a Sephardi diaspora that increasingly branded its Iberian past as a patrimony that separated them from Mizrahi and Arabophobe Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.³⁵ Shlomo Ben-Ami, as an Israeli representative, encapsulated this imagined separation in his radio interview for Aadas y Adafinas, marking the difference between the revival of Sephardi Jewish and Andalusi-Muslim revivals, deliberately disassociating the new community in Israel from the Andalusi-Muslim world. He deemed Toledo the capital city of Sefarad, whereas Granada was the capital of Al-Andalus.³⁶

MOROCCO AS SPAIN IN VENEZUELA

The struggle for the inclusion of Israeli Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the Sephardi revival of the 1990s is only one example of how the global community sought to merge their Moroccan past with their notion of being a Sephardi diaspora and take advantage of the international ties this union would offer. In the 1970s, amid a significant postcolonial migration that had weakened concrete ties between Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Morocco and their worldwide hubs, a different form of blending Moroccan and Hispanic identities had emerged. In that process, references to modern colonial encounters between Hispanic Moroccan Jews and colonial Spain were minimized to make more room for mythologies of Iberian ancestry.

In Venezuela, a new cultural boom in the 1970s marked this process. From the earliest issues of Maguén in 1970, its editor and contributors pursued a tendency to selectively reconstruct the image of northern Moroccan townscapes as Jewish-Sephardi lieux de memoir. They very often attempted to impart academic validity to their constructions by supplementing them with scholarly essays reproduced from academic journals in the field of Hispanic and Sephardi studies. One article in Maguén, entitled “Romanceros de Marruecos,” offered readers select passages from an academic study by Harvard University’s Paul Bénichou (see chap. 2), who had collected the romances during his field work in Morocco.³⁷ Remarkably, out of seventy romances, the romance chosen to represent Morocco in Maguén was “El Sevillano” (“The Man from Seville”). A number of other articles in Maguén likewise conveyed to the paper’s Moroccan Jewish readers that Spanish romances had been a significant part of their collective past.³⁸ Another article in Maguén, one of the publication’s first, dealt with the etymology of Jewish surnames in northern Morocco, asserting that even those with “Berber and Arabic roots” were no less Sephardi due to the coexistence of Arab and Hispanic cultures in pre-1492 Iberia.

The idea derived from academic research published in The American Sephardi, which had begun to appear a few years earlier.³⁹ The US-based publication gave Maguén editors access to valuable historical narratives that they could utilize for their own purpose of establishing a unified communal narrative in Venezuela. It also served their declared objective of constructing a narrative that would appeal to a wider Sephardi audience. In the 1970s, world centers of Sephardi studies in US academia limited their attention either to the study of Jewish roots in Iberia or to the early modern Sephardi diaspora elites whose presence in the West stretched from Amsterdam and Hamburg to colonial America.⁴⁰ Scholars became attracted by the ancient texts, liturgy, and linguistic heritage of Sephardi Jews in Sepharad as well as the experiences of early modern Marranos, whose hybrid religious character in fact connected the Jewish with the non-Jewish.⁴¹

In Venezuela, where Moroccan Jews were the most prominent component of the local Sephardi community, nostalgia for northern Moroccan hometowns was slowly becoming intertwined with their appeal to their collective past in medieval Spain, as exemplified by many of Maguén’s articles. For instance, the framing of the history of Morocco as linked to premodern Iberian history helped develop the idea that a shared Hispanic civilization historically, rather than just culturally, united Spain and the Americas. At the same time, it also helped reshape nostalgia for Morocco and reframe Moroccan Jews’ collective migration story as it was still unfolding.

Recent postcolonial migration from Morocco was seen as less relevant than the narrative of displacement from Iberia in 1492. One article by Abraham Botbol Hatchuel focused on “The Sephardim and their contribution to the economic and cultural development of Venezuela.” It was based on a lecture he delivered on September 22, 1992, at an event marking the eightieth anniversary since the founding of the Venezuelan Spanish Chamber of Industry and Commerce. The event included an exhibition of photographs titled “Jewish Roots in Spain,” sponsored by Iberia Airlines. Botbol Hatchuel, who attended as a representative of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (AIV) and the Centro de Estudios Sefradíes de Caracas (CESC, Center for Sephardi Studies of Caracas), noted, “Today when the barriers of religious intolerance have finally been lifted, in democratic Spain, one cannot seriously talk about the history of that nation . . . without seriously taking into account the contribution of Sephardi Jews. . . . Similarly, even today in Venezuela, it is impossible to study the history of its independence and the evolution of its development as a free nation, without the names of Jews who came to these Caribbean lands, with the desire to give the best of each of them in favor of this country.”⁴² A notion of “Sephardi supremacy” in pre-expulsion Iberia dominated his account, which credited Jews with carrying the intellectual spirit from medieval Baghdad to golden age Córdoba and focused on well-known Jewish figures who had contributed to the development of Spain: Ibn-Gabirol, Maimonides, Yehuda Halevy, Benjamín de Tudela, and many others.⁴³ Remarkably, Botbol Hatchuel tied his narrative about the Sephardi ancestry in Spain to academic research and provided further support through the Bible. He wrote, “Spanish historians, such as the Jesuíta Juan de Mariana, among others, confirm that the Jews arrived in Spain for the first time with King Nebuchadnezzar on one of the trips he made to the (Iberian) peninsula. . . . This chronicle should not be very far from reality, since in the Bible, in the book of Obadiah . . . the name of Sepharad [indeed] appears. . . . There we may read verbatim (textualmente) one of the prophecies: the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad will possess the cities of the Negev.”⁴⁴ Later, Botbol Hatchuel turned to the Dutch Jews of the Western Sephardi diaspora as a driving force behind financial and commercial development from Brazil to New England. He described their settlement in the Caribbean Island of Curaçao as a momentous event in Venezuela’s economic history due the thriving community of merchants and bankers these migrants established before many of them relocated to mainland Venezuela. He concluded by referencing the “no less important” branch of Sephardim who had recently arrived in Venezuela from North Africa, as if this was a coherent continuation of previous Sephardi migration to the Caribbean.

Against the backdrop of the growing global awareness of Sephardi issues, the early 1970s witnessed the publication of major works on the Judeo-Spanish dialect of northern Morocco by Hispanic Moroccan Jewish leaders in Venezuela, which lucidly associated local Moroccan Jews to premodern Iberia and entwined this attachment with their Moroccan background. Isaac Chocrón’s novel Rómpase en Caso de Incendio (Break in Case of Fire), published in 1975, included a chapter written entirely in Haketia, marking the first time the Judeo-Spanish dialect was presented to the wider Venezuelan public.⁴⁵ The following year saw the release of the novel La Vida Perra de Juanita Narboni by the non-Jewish Tangier native Ángel Vázquez (1929–80), in which he uses Haketia to describe his childhood memories of living alongside Jews in northern Morocco.

In 1977, a new edition of José Benoliel’s landmark dictionary of Haketia was published by the CESC. The main goals of the CESC, according to its founders, were (and still are) to recover, research, preserve, and transmit the heritage of Sephardi Jews. Alegría Bendelac, a native of Venezuela who spent most of her childhood in Tangier, began her academic career at Pennsylvania State University after moving to the US with her family in 1963. A specialist in French literature, she began to focus on her ethnic background only in the 1980s, writing about the Jews of northern Morocco as part of a fellowship she received from the National Endowment for the Humanities.⁴⁶ In 1989, the AIV and CESC helped publish her first monograph in Spanish, Voces Jaquetiescas, which was dedicated to preserving the community’s cultural and spiritual life. The following years saw renewed interest in the role of Haketia as the unique spoken language of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, a testimony to their long-lasting attachment to Spain, as they saw it. The CESC became at the time the most prominent communal institute publishing new works on Haketia worldwide.⁴⁷

In 1995, Manuel Alvar of the Royal Spanish Academy was invited to attend the Semana Sefardí, or Sephardi Week, in Caracas, where he presented the dictionary of Haketia.⁴⁸ In a piece for Maguén on the occasion of the book’s release, the New York-based Alvar explained the importance of investing in research about Haketia. According to him, the common practice of agglomerating any Judeo-Spanish dialect under the umbrella term Ladino is a modern (post-1940) innovation. It captures only its historical usage in religious practice but misses regional diversities among the Judeo-Spanish-speaking communities. Haketia thus offers a gaze into the historical and regional varieties of everyday speech in the North African Judeo-Spanish world that disappeared in the aftermath of mass emigration.⁴⁹

The academic project of salvaging Haketia was encouraged during the seventh annual Semana Sefardí event in Caracas by a conversation that took place in Haketia between several prominent members of the community, including Moisés Garzón Serfaty, Sara Fereres de Moryoussef, León Bengio, Isaac Benjamín Nahón, Aharón Cohén Serfaty, and Lucy Garzón de Benarroch. The report in Maguén mentioned that several hundred people had attended the event at the AIV building.⁵⁰

This network of scholars and community leaders who have been working globally to revive Haketia since the late 1970s contributed much to the tendency of Jews from northern Morocco in Venezuela to merge their identification with Morocco with their identification with Spain. However, they often did this while pushing aside many of their modern experiences, particularly those under Franco and experiences related to the twentieth-century colonialization of Morocco and particularly their postcolonial migration.

During the first Semana Sefardí event in Caracas in June 1982, Abraham Botbol Hatchuel made one of the very first academic references to Haketia.⁵¹ Botbol Hatchuel also authored one of the first volumes issued under the imprint of the CESC’s Biblioteca Popular Sefardí. Published in 1989, the book was titled El Desván de los Recuerdos: Cuadros de una Judería Marroquí (The Attic of Memories: Pictures from a Moroccan Jewish Neighborhood). Its first chapter, “Judaism in Sepharad,” included a map of the Jewish communities of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, clearly illustrating, from the outset, Botbol Hatchuel’s propensity to entwine the geographical borders of his hometown in colonial Morocco with the imagined borders of medieval Spain. In this way, nostalgia for the physical space that he had, in fact, left in the twentieth century was reduced to a mythological space that helped generate a collective story. Along these same lines of mythologizing Morocco’s space, a chapter entitled “La Judería Encantada” (“The Enchanted Judería”) focused on events in the nineteenth century.

In fact, Botbol Hatchuel referenced Vilar’s book, Tetuán, en el Resurgimiento Judío Contemporáneo (1850–1870), as a means of imparting validity to his own descriptions of Jewish life in Tetouan prior to his birth. Vilar’s book, published with the sponsorship of the AIV four years earlier, helped Botbol Hatchuel reconstruct the geographical boundaries of Jewish life in the Judería of Tetouan, where he had spent his childhood years. Botbol Hatchuel was an economist, insurance agent, poet, and journalist who was born in 1935 in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. He moved to nearby Tetouan with his family when he was still a toddler and spent most of his youth there. He moved to Caracas in 1964 after earning a graduate degree in economics from the University of Geneva in Switzerland.⁵² These sights and memories from Morocco prior to his emigration to Switzerland—for example, how and why he decided to study in this country—were effaced or deemed irrelevant to his efforts to advance the integration of Moroccan Jewish immigrants into the broader Venezuelan community.

Following his arrival in Venezuela in 1964, Botbol Hatchuel took on several communal roles, including secretary of the AIV, founder and director of the Hebraica Club, and general secretary and later director of the Confederación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela, the framework that unified Venezuela’s Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities. In 1984, Botbol Hatchuel was appointed president of the new Comité Venezolano de Asociación Sefarad-España, an association established to strengthen the cultural ties between Sephardi Jews in Venezuela and modern Spain in light of the Sephardi revival promoted by the latter. In a 1987 issue of Maguén, Botbol Hatchuel described to Venezuelan readers the efforts by the Spanish government and its Jewish community to promote the commemoration of the Sephardi past through worldwide events, mentioning the advocacy of Rabbi Baruj Garzón, Mauricio Hatchuel Toledano, Moisés J. Bendahán Israel, and Saadía Benhamú Guanich.⁵³ To further understand how and why Sephardi activists in Venezuela worked to infuse their Moroccan identities with a strong reference to premodern Iberia, let us turn to how the Sephardi diaspora came to impact Venezuela’s cultural elite in the 1970s through the 1990s.

DIASPORA FORMATION AS A MEANS FOR INTEGRATION

In 1970, the year of its founding, Maguén brought to its Venezuelan readers a number of articles by Moroccan Jews in Spain. One of these seminal articles was “La Real Academia Española y Los Judíos” by Carlos Benarroch, president of Amistad magazine in Barcelona (Spain), in which he discussed the newly positive attitude of Hispanic studies scholars toward Jewish subject matter.⁵⁴ Beyond curating content, the AIV disseminated the story of the community’s Spanish origins through public events that made use of its global networks. In June 1972, the AIV in Caracas invited Rabbi Benito (Baruj) Garzón, a leader of northern Moroccan Jews in Spain and the brother of Moisés Garzón Sefarty, to deliver a series of lectures to the city’s Sephardi community. He lectured on political aspects of Jewish life in Spain, and his talk was followed by another lecture by Elías Benaím from the AIV, entitled “Judaism in Spain: Past, Present, and Future.” The events were well attended and made a positive impression on the audience, according to Maguén’s reports.⁵⁵

Interest in the history of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish origins in Iberia culminated in the 1980s with the establishment of landmark institutions for the study of Sephardi Jews in both Venezuela and Spain. For example, Maguén reappeared in 1981 after a seven-year hiatus.⁵⁶ June 1982 witnessed the celebration of the first Sephardi Week, an event designed to spread the communal narrative within and beyond the Jewish community, even at the national level in Venezuela. The AIV organized the event in collaboration with the Venezuela committee of FeSeLa, the regional network of Sephardi Jews that was affiliated with the WSF.⁵⁷

The summer of 1982 was a milestone in that regard, as it also witnessed the grand opening of the CESC, founded two years earlier in June 1980 as part of the AIV’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. Dr. Jacob Carciente, a historian of northern Moroccan descent, was the Center’s chairman and served in that capacity from its establishment until the year 2000.⁵⁸ The president at the time was Moisés Garzón Serfaty, founder of Maguén, and the vice president was Amram Cohén Pariente.⁵⁹ The CESC organized academic seminars, including in the classrooms of Universidad Central de Venezuela after the former was able to reach an agreement with the university to offer courses in Sephardi studies. The CESC collaborated with other academic institutions worldwide, efforts that were reflected to some extent in Maguén and other publications.⁶⁰

In the Caracas-based CESC’s charter, its founders announced their desire to develop Sephardi culture as a way of strengthening ties between Jewish communities worldwide, “as well as with the peoples with whom we largely share a common cultural heritage, [such as] the peoples of Spain, Latin America, and Portugal.” The academic institutions mentioned in the document were the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Yeshiva University of New York, the Sephardic Educational Center of Jerusalem, the Arias Montano Institute in Spain, and the Center for Research and Dissemination of Sephardi Culture of the FeSeLa, based in Buenos Aires. In these institutions, scholars of Latin America and Iberian Studies could serve their goal of strengthening their international Hispanic network.⁶¹ Given this global reach, it is not surprising that the CESC ended up funding and publishing a Spanish version of Rabbi Mitchell Serels’s book in 1996, the same year he was knighted by the king of Spain. Rabbi Serels, born in Tangier, was one of the leading advocates for the Spanish-speaking Moroccan community in New York and then in Ontario, Canada, in the 1980s and 1990s.⁶²

In fact, much of the CESC’s activity was oriented toward the construction of nostalgic connections to Jewish Iberia that also strengthened the attachment of Sephardi Jews to their new country of residence, Venezuela. Along these lines, in 1985 Moisés Garzón Serfaty, then the president of FeSeLa, encouraged communities across Latin America to appeal to their governments to name urban sites after Maimonides, following Caracas’s example. The AIV successfully requested that a new avenue and plaza in East Caracas be named after Maimonides, and the inauguration took place on June 10, 1990.⁶³

This development should be understood against the backdrop of a variety of applications of “Sepharadism” to local and global contexts, ranging from nineteenth-century Germany to postmodern literary imaginings of Sepharad among MENA Jews worldwide, occasionally overshadowing their more recent histories and origins in the Arab and Islamic realms.⁶⁴ In Canada, for example, Francophone Moroccan Jews imagined their Sephardi origins as rooted in France and Francophone culture, a story that helped them identify with Quebec’s Francophone Canadian “Quiet Revolution” in the late 1960s.⁶⁵ In contrast to the Canadian context, in which Francophone North African Jews were at a disadvantage in the Anglophone communal structures operated by Quebec’s Ashkenazi Jewish community, in Venezuela, due to their larger numbers and early arrival in the country, Moroccans more rarely felt excluded from Jewish activities by the country’s small Ashkenazi elite. As we saw in the previous chapter, Sephardi Jews from Morocco participated in all of Venezuela’s mainstream Jewish organizations and even led them.

The creation of the CESC and the Sephardi revival it promoted saw Spain as a source of cultural empowerment and even Europeanization, and it was motivated by a process of self-representation vis-á-vis Venezuela’s national (non-Jewish) elite more than vis-à-vis other Jews. As Edna Aizenberg has shown, the identification of Hispanic Jewish influence in Latin American literature by way of a focus on the Sephardi past served as a strategic tool that helped Jews integrate into Spanish-speaking Catholic countries despite religious differences.⁶⁶ Toward that end, the Moroccan community sought and received recognition from local national elites.

During the first Semana Sefardí in June 1982, the AIV headquarters was visited by well-known Venezuelan professors, intellectuals, writers, and artists, including, for example, the playwriter and novelist Isaac Chocrón, the director and actor Enrique Porte, the writers Fausto Masó and Salvador Garmendia Graterón, and the Italian Venezuelan novelist Victoria De Stefano. They all actively participated in an event celebrating the Sephardi roots of local Jews, which included, among other things, traditional piyyutim, a Sephardi food festival, television screenings, and even an Israeli folk-dancing performance. Isaac Chocrón was in fact among the leading writers in the country whose work Aizenbeg has identified as promoting the “re-Sepharadization” trend.⁶⁷

Despite strategically using their Jewish roots in Spain as a means of Europeanization, an example of how the identification of Moroccan Jews as Sephardi served to distinguish them from Ashkenazi-European Jews comes from Isaac Chocrón’s aforementioned 1975 novel Rómpase en Caso de Incendio. In this novel, he dedicated a chapter to Haketia, mediating this dialect to the Venezuelan reader and delving deep into the meaning of being a Venezuelan Jew of Moroccan descent. His character Daniel Benabel, an economist in the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decides to undertake a trip to his ancestral hometown of Melilla, and then to Tangier, after he loses his father, wife, and son in the earthquake that struck Caracas in 1967. In the novel, the protagonist writes to a friend in New York, “So you think it’s funny that a Jew like me would want to live among the Moors? You forget that I am a Sephardi Jew: so African, so Spanish, and so Venezuelan that the Yiddish-speakers in Brooklyn would consider me a heretic.”⁶⁸ Explicitly differentiating his hybrid identity from North American or other expectations of separation between Jews and Muslims, Chocrón appealed to Venezuela’s national hybridization ethos, the mestizaje, which accepted the blending of African and European identities.

Recognition from the Venezuelan elite increased the motivation of many unaffiliated Moroccan Jews, as well as other Jewish groups, to join the global “Sepharadization” trend emerging in the US and Spain. A month after the Semana Sefardí in June 1982, Moisés Garzón attested that the event was among the first to truly attract “people who hardly ever attend community events” and that it yielded the first expressions of interest in the Spanish origins of the Venezuelan Jewish community at the national and international levels, including among the diplomatic representatives of Israel and Spain and the national Venezuelan press. As Garzón noted, more than 1,100 people signed the visitors book that the organizers made available to guests.⁶⁹

This notable degree of interest in the event relates to the way Iberian origins contributed to the assimilation of Jews into the Venezuelan cultural elite. For example, a major topic of focus with respect to the Sephardi past was folklore, especially musical traditions. In 1985, an article in Maguén reproduced from the newsletter of the American Jewish Committee described how Spanish ballads from before “the Discovery of America” and “the Expulsion Edict of 1492” continued to appear in Latin American songbooks after the conquest of the Americas, as indigenous populations were influenced by Iberian Portuguese settlers. According to the author, “Much of the culture of medieval Spain would be carried from the Iberian Peninsula in two different directions: to the Near East by the Sephardim and to America by the conquerors, among whom it is very probable that there were Spanish Jews.” The author went on to explain how the shared origins of Latin American Spaniards and Sephardi Jews eased the integration of the latter in Latin America.⁷⁰

In 1987, Maguén opened its sixty-fourth issue with three essays that linked local Sephardi heritage with the Spanish ballad tradition. One article mentioned a cultural event dedicated to Hispanic romances that took place at the Caracas-based (non-Jewish) cultural center PRISMA from May 28 to June 7, 1987, in which Jewish and non-Jewish artists, intellectuals, and musicians participated, including singer Ana Fernaud, musicians Rafael Benatar and Fernando Silva, and actors José Serrano, Diana Peñalver, Marcos Moreno, and Alfredo Sandoval. On that occasion, Moisés Garzón Serfaty delivered a lecture on “Romancero Sefardí.”

Another example of the forging of meaningful connections between a Venezuelan Jewish identity and the Sephardi past in Iberia comes from an essay by Eduardo Gil, a Venezuelan actor and theater director of national renown, who also participated in the event at PRISMA. Gil repeated a similar idea: “The romancero is like a bridge through which the old poetic essences of the Middle Ages traveled until the 16th and 17th centuries. . . . In its moment of greatest diffusion, it accompanied the conquerors on their journey to America . . . and the Jews who were expelled from Spain to Asia Minor and to the coasts of Africa.”⁷¹

Continuing along these lines, in another essay, Moisés Garzón Serfaty treated romances as a symbol of Spanish, Latin American, and Sephardi world heritage, a genre of folksong that celebrates the Hispanic-Jewish connection. He wrote, “In many places in Spain and even Latin America, but especially in Sephardi Jewish communities, little-known romances, or new versions of them, are collected and saved from oblivion through the enormous work carried out by scholars and researchers over the years.” He then offered a list of Jewish and non-Jewish scholars who had contributed to that effort worldwide.⁷² Documenting the affinity between the old and new worlds of Spanish influence served to incorporate northern Morocco into the Venezuelan narrative in a smooth way but also dwell on its connection to a global diaspora of Hispanic Moroccan Jews who had been investing in similar efforts of salvage ethnography.

In chapter 2, I showed how the developing field of Jewish studies in Spain, France, and the US came to shape the self-consciousness of the Jewish community in northern Morocco as a separate Moroccan community with origins in Iberia. Starting in the 1920s, scholars such as Zarita Nahón, Robert Ricard, Paul Bénichou, Iacov Hassán, José Benoliel, and others helped formulate this narrative with works on Haketia and the romanceros that came to influence and shape the community in colonial Morocco. By the late 1970s, these prolonged scholarly efforts had come to serve northern Moroccan Jews in their postcolonial hubs.⁷³ In those hubs, following the end of Spanish colonialism in Morocco, new ideas of affinity with Spain and their intertwining with Moroccan histories have emerged, as I will further show in the final two chapters of the book.