TWO

IN (RE)SEARCH OF ORIGINS

“THE COLLECTION OF ROMANCES [IN HAKETIA] in this study was really begun long before I was aware of it. As a girl in Tangier . . . I heard many of them from my mother, singing them as they had been passed from generation to generation since the Jews were driven from Spain. . . . It was only during visits to Tangier, after I graduated Columbia [University], where I had done work in Romance philology, that I understood what Haketia was.”¹ These words come from the prologue to an ethnographic work by Zarita Nahón, a native of Tangier who was one of the first Moroccans to graduate from Columbia University in 1929, as a student of the “father of American anthropology,” Franz Boas. Studying in the department of anthropology, Nahón was a pioneer in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Tangier and recorded Judeo-Spanish ballad songs.² Returning to her community in 1929, Nahón not only documented the ethnic heritage of the community; she also evoked it in a meaningful way. As she wrote in the prologue to her study: “Only by becoming one of them, could I get an old member of a family to talk, to reminisce, to open wide old archives. . . . They entrusted to me the romances that are no longer heard, in a language no longer spoken. . . . Their legacy lives again in these pages.”³

I return here to Brian Keith Axel’s wise questions: “Who in the most quotidian of ways, claims to be the subject of diaspora? [And] what are the everyday conditions for the identification of a subject of diaspora?”⁴ This chapter draws on Axel’s elemental questions in an attempt to explain how the diaspora of Hispanic Moroccan Jews, with their narrative of ancestry in Iberia, took shape amid the dramatic cultural changes that emerged from the encounter between Jews and Spanish settlers in northern Morocco from the outset of colonialism until its end in 1956.

My focus on northern Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century in this chapter has implications for the broader scholarship on ethnic heritage formation among diaspora groups, which is typically conceived of as a process that emerges in response to their emigration and displacement.⁵ Understood as a “border line” between “pre-migration” and “post-migration” histories, migration among Jews from Islamic countries in the second half of the twentieth century is particularly considered to have brought about the “silencing” of pre-immigration traditions in new lands, followed, after a generation or two, by their “revival.”⁶

Nahón’s work and biography as an ethnographer offer a different view on ethnic heritage formation prior to the mass departure of Jews from Morocco and other Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries in the mid-twentieth century. Her work demonstrates how those processes developed among a population that remained in its place of origin while interacting with both local and global trends of heritage preserving. The chapter explores an impulse to document the community’s origins in Spain, as it developed not only against the backdrop of Spanish colonialism but also through scholarly ties between northern Morocco and the Americas, and the development of Jewish cultural ethnography in Europe and North America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

THE FORMALIZATION OF SEPHARDI HERITAGE

In the previous chapter, I described how the berberisca became an emblem of community life in an urban society that experienced strong outside influences on its culture. In fact, the tradition of wearing the berberisca dress on the night before the wedding was popular among Jews elsewhere in Morocco, where it was more typically known as keswa el-kbira, the Great Dress. Still, the community in northern Morocco stood at the heart of ethnographic works regarding this custom. Already from the mid-eighteenth century, Jewish weddings in Tangier and the musical traditions that accompanied them began to fuel the ethnographic imagination of European travelers, writers, and artists such as Samuel Aaron Romanelli, Eugène Delacroix, and Alexandre Dumas, whose 1849 book, Le Veloce en Tanger, Alger et Tunis, was perhaps the first literary work to rely on members of the northern Moroccan community to collect information about the wedding ceremony and interpret it.⁷ Later, in his 1919 book Los Hebreos en Marruecos (The Hebrews of Morocco), Hispanicist Manuel L. Ortega mentions a traditional wedding parade that was accompanied by the singing of Sephardi ballad songs and religious piyyutim.⁸ Other Hispanists, such as Jan Jouin, attributed the berberisca dress to the pre-expulsion traditions that Jews had brought with them from Iberia. The curiosity about the berberisca constitutes only one example of how ethnographic intellectual networks began to feed a process of community building by integrating new imaginaries of Jewish origins in Spain.⁹

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a few local Jews in northern Morocco began to adhere to the Philo-Sephardi ideas developed by liberal Spanish intellectuals and politicians a few decades earlier. Among the few pioneers was Pinhas Asayag, a Jewish journalist from Tangier and former member of the junta, the local Jewish community council. In July 1904, he sent Senator Ángel Pulido a letter praising the role of the Royal Spanish Academy, which since 1917 had aimed to ensure the stability of the Spanish language, in bringing Jews closer to their Spanish “fatherland.”¹⁰ In his book The Spanish Israelites and the Spanish Language, Pulido acknowledges Asayag as a central figure in the promotion of Philo-Sephardi ideas among the Jewish community in northern Morocco and describes Asayag’s connection with other enthusiastic supporters of the Philo-Sephardi campaign, among them Rabbi Mordojay Bengio, Tangier’s chief rabbi at the time.¹¹

To be sure, this kind of collaboration with the Philo-Sephardi campaign was not limited to Sephardi intellectuals in northern Morocco. The Philo-Sephardi movement aspired to promote the concept of an affinity with Spain across the Sephardi Mediterranean diaspora, including the substantial Ladino-speaking communities in the Ottoman Empire.¹² Nonetheless, the reaction of native Spanish-speaking Jews in northern Morocco to the Philo-Sephardi atmosphere differed from that of Ladino-speaking Ottoman Jews in one major aspect: their direct experience of Spanish colonialism and its tremendous cultural, economic, and political impact on their day-to-day lives, as we saw in the previous chapter.¹³ In the context of early Spanish colonialism, the growing perception of Spain as a Jewish fatherland in fact reflected the adaptation of Jewish community leaders to the changing imperial setting that saw the rise of Spain as the dominant power in northern Morocco.

Already at the outset of the twentieth century, intellectual writing about the origins of the Jews in pre-1492 Iberia had begun to enrich and motivate Jewish communal gatherings and organizations in northern Morocco. On May 11, 1912, just a few months before the establishment of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco on November 27, a group of Moroccan Jews and Philo-Sephardi Christians in Tangier established the first Asociación Hispano-Hebrea, or the Hispanic-Hebrew Association, during a meeting at the Spanish Chamber of Commerce Hall. In the following months, similar associations were established in Tetouan, Ceuta, Larache, and Alcazarquivir. Though not officially a Spanish governmental initiative, the main goal of these institutions was to promote identification with Spain among Jews in northern Morocco by dwelling on the common linguistic denominator.

From a community leadership perspective, expressed nostalgia for Spain also entailed some very concrete advantages, as the associations were designed to promote commercial ties and charity projects while Spain was cementing its political and economic influence in northern Morocco. As part of the ongoing struggle between France and Spain over the influence on the communities of the north, the Hispanic-Hebrew associations lobbied for the creation of libraries, organized conferences, and awarded academic prizes to those promoting knowledge of Spanish among Jews in Morocco.¹⁴ This activity aimed to disseminate Philo-Sephardi discourse among the grassroots of the community, particularly among the local Jews who preferred to identify with French colonialism.

Consider, for example, the lectures of Dr. Avraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), delivered in Tangier during that early period under the sponsorship of the local branch of the Hispanic-Hebrew Association. Yahuda was a biblical scholar appointed Special Numerary Chair of Rabbinical Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of Madrid. Yuval Evri, Allyson Gonzalez, and Michal Rose Friedman each explain Yahuda’s motivations for engaging in this activity locally and globally, as an emissary from Palestine.¹⁵ Less explored are the motivations of community leaders for hosting him and the impact of his mission on community building in northern Morocco. In 1914, according to one report, a crowd of more than 1,500 Spanish settlers and Jews gathered in Tangier to hear Yahuda lecture on the Jewish past in Spain.¹⁶ While the associations had delegates throughout the Americas as well as in Paris, London, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Berlin, according to Ortega’s 1919 book, only in northern Morocco did the brunches of the Hispano-Hebrew Association attract hundreds of affiliated associates who saw the immediate benefit of expressing affinity with imperial Spain after it had become a colonial power in the region.¹⁷ Philo-Sephardi activities in northern Morocco further developed where Spanish colonialism met local Jewish community building. It is in this context that the linguistic revival of Haketia, and the intensifying interest in documenting literary and oral traditions that attached Jews in northern Morocco to pre-1492 Iberia, needs to be analyzed.

As mentioned earlier, following the establishment of the Spanish protectorate in 1912, the rapid transformation of Haketia into modern Spanish precipitated the disappearance of Haketia as a vernacular. This transformation was viewed by Jewish intellectuals in the community as the re-Hispanicization of Haketia: the purification of a Spanish idiom that had been degraded by the admixture of Arabic (and Tamazigh) words over the years. Others, however, came to perceive Haketia, and particularly its Arabic elements, as the most authentic indication of Jews’ primordial origins in Iberia, requiring preservation through the mediation of the older generation of native speakers. These advocates constituted a dense network of Haketia speakers who would soon become ethnographic subjects for those seeking to document the community’s dying linguistic (and musical) heritage. The fact that the entomology of the name Haketia was explained by some scholars at the time as stemming from the Arabic root Kh.K.Y (referring to speech) helped imbue it with a sense of precolonial Iberian coexistence between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Al-Andalus/Sepharad.¹⁸

According to Gladys Pimienta, the first intellectual work to mention the word Haketia was Manuel L. Ortega’s 1919 book Los Hebreos en Marruecos (The Hebrews of Morocco). Prior to that work, the Jewish-Spanish dialect was simply referenced in communal sources as Español—Spanish—which was perceived as a Jewish Moroccan language.¹⁹ The academic definition of the dialect as Haketia in ethnography helped demarcate it as a “private” communal asset in contrast with Spanish, which represented the colonial sphere that seemingly threatened Haketia’s survival in the modern urban context. This dynamic in fact began to elevate the academic status of Haketia, which had until then been regarded as a low status, incorrect, and colloquial form of Spanish spoken by the older generation of the Judería.

A central community figure promoting the preservation of Haketia was José Benoliel, a philologist, poet, and teacher from Tangier, who was nicknamed el sabio (the wiseman) by members of the community elite. Developing an academic career as a professor of Romance philology in Lisbon in 1881, Benoliel was one of the mobile individuals from the northern Moroccan Jewish elite who helped renew the Jewish community in Portugal in the late nineteenth century, several decades before a community was officially established in Spain. While serving as leader of Tangier’s Jewish community between 1921 and 1929, following his return from Portugal, he became one of the first academics in the world to publish scientific articles on Haketia, many of which appeared in the bulletin of the Spanish Royal Academy.²⁰ José Benoliel’s correspondence with Ángel Pulido played a pivotal role in shaping the field of Philo-Sephardi scholarship. Angel Pulido, in his letter to Benoliel, requested materials to be sent to the renowned philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal. These materials, composed of Sephardi romances from Tangier, were instrumental in Menéndez Pidal’s compilation of Moroccan Judeo-Spanish repertoire, and this collaboration marked the beginning of a much more comprehensive and enduring relationship between Spanish scholars and Moroccan Judeo-Spanish culture throughout the twentieth century.²¹

The dynamics that helped the Jewish communities of northern Morocco reaffirm their collective primordial attachment to Spain as part of the unique precolonial amalgam constituting their northern Moroccan identity were not detached from broader developments in world academia. This is also implied by Zarita Nahón’s graduation from Columbia University, referenced at the beginning of this chapter. Nahón’s interest in the Hispanic musical traditions of Jews in northern Morocco developed amid the growth of broader scholarly interest in Hispanic culture on the other side of the Atlantic, detached from the local context of Spanish colonialism in Morocco. For example, in 1920, Maír José Benardete, professor in the newly established Spanish and Sephardi studies program at Brooklyn College in New York City, engaged in scholarly collaboration with Federico de Onís, the founder (also in 1920) of the Hispanic studies program, Casa Hispánica, at Columbia University.²²

As a student at Columbia, Nahón became part of an international academic network whose work bridged Jewish studies, African studies, and Hispanic studies by adopting ethnographic techniques, long before the hybrid or transnational turn in the humanities. As Nahón testified in the prologue to her work, it was Professor Franz Boas—the leading figure in the development of cultural anthropology and the concept of cultural relativism—who called her into his office to explain the “urgency” of her return to Tangier to conduct ethnography, as long as the romances “still existed” there among the people.²³

While Boas’s cultural approach to anthropology was not necessarily rooted in his own Jewish origins, he did indeed work with many Jewish students at a time when Jewish studies was infused with an “ethnographic impulse,” to use Jeffrey Veidlinger’s phrase. That period was characterized by a growing number of “salvage ethnography,” missions undertaken by Jewish intellectuals hoping to study and document the Jewish heritage of “the people” living in the Russian Pale of Settlement. These missions shaped the broader field of ethnography and later cultural anthropology. In Kiev, for example, Moyshe Beregovski and Zalmen Skuditski performed ethnographic fieldwork on Jewish musical traditions, just as Nahón’s work did.²⁴

Nahón’s pioneering ethnographic fieldwork in northern Morocco introduced Tangier to that burgeoning scholarly network, especially after Columbia’s Federico de Onís followed in her footsteps with his own fieldwork in Tangier. Initiated in 1930 and lasting eight years, de Onís’s fieldwork hinged on his connection to Suzanne (Simy) Nahón de Toledano, a relative of Zarita Nahón. While it took Nahón months to “induce a significant part of the community to participate” in her project, many eventually collaborated; some even continued to send her material in New York after her return to Columbia.²⁵ Despite the generally philological orientation of (mostly German Jewish) scholars of the pre-1492 Sephardi heritage, Nahón reflected a trend among Sephardi intellectual and community leaders who began to apply ethnographic methods in their search for the “remnants” or “living roots” of Jews in pre-expulsion Iberia, rather than searching for them in texts.²⁶ Luna Benaim Boaknin, for example, compiled a series of local Judeo-Spanish melodies from 1919 to 1959. Her daughter recalled assisting Boaknin with her compilation work during the month of Ramadan, transcribing the lyrics her mother would sing in the community’s age-old vernacular.²⁷

The impulse to document the community’s linguistic and folkloric practices would play an important role in defining the community’s boundaries vis-à-vis Spanish colonialism while passing along uniform images of its precolonial origins in Spain. To further explain how this process developed, a survey of the emergence of a local Hispanophone Jewish press in the late 1920s and early 1930s is essential.

NEW MEANS OF DISSEMINATION

The local Jewish press was one of the most effective and practical tools for disseminating standardized intellectual concepts of the community’s past to a broad audience. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth, Tangier Jews played a significant role in the establishment of the first newspapers in Morocco, including Le Reveil du Maroc, El Diario de Tánger, and others. The first Jewish Moroccan newspapers appeared in reaction to the growing European presence and represented an attempt to differentiate the community’s unique Jewish characteristics from the rest of Moroccan Jewry. These included Le Mebasser Tob (1894–95), Kol Israel (1914), and El Horria (1915–17), which appeared in Judeo-Arabic, and La Liberté (1915–22), published in French, prior to the creation of the international administrative zone of Tangier in late 1924.

Under Spanish colonial rule over much of the rest of northern Morocco after 1912, seven new Jewish newspapers were published in Spanish, including El Eco Israelita (1915), Renacimiento de Israel (1924–33), Kol Hanoar: Órgano de la Unión Universal de Juventudes Judías (1927), Adelante (1929–31/32), Crisol Judío (1931), and Or/Or-Luz (1956).²⁸ To this we can add the community’s Boletín Oficial (1949–52). The prominence of the Spanish language reflects the community’s increasing tendency to hispanize community documents following Spanish colonization, both in the protectorate region and in Tangier.²⁹

The bimonthly Spanish-language publication Renacimiento de Israel (or Hatehiya, the word for “revival” in its Hebrew name) was one of the prominent ones.³⁰ But it was issued by Asher Perl, a Polish Jew who moved to Palestine and then resettled in Algeciras, Spain. Despite being printed in mainland Spain, the paper presented itself as the “defender of the political and national interests of the Jewish collectivity in Morocco.” While Perl single-handedly wrote and edited all the articles, he relied on a network of collaborators to distribute the journal, not only in Tangier but in other towns in both Spanish and French Morocco as well as in Gibraltar, Buenos Aires, and Salonica.³¹

Unlike Renacimiento, Adelante was issued by a group of young local Jews who aspired to revitalize Jewish cultural and spiritual life in northern Morocco in the context of growing European cultural influence, as discussed in the previous chapter. The paper came into being primarily at the initiative of Jack (Jacobo) Sabáh Nahón, its managing director and main founding editor. Isaac Bendayan Benayoun was its first editor in chief and was replaced after about a year, in October 1929, by Alberto Berdugo. Isaac Elbaz served as honorary president. Adelante was in fact bilingual, integrating some French articles that enabled a wide range of intellectuals to read and contribute to it. However, Adelante’s founders and writers, many of whom graduated from Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) schools, still represented a generation of Sephardi leaders who welcomed stronger ties between Spain and northern Moroccan Jews. Consequently, they did not necessarily conceive their adoption of the modern Spanish language as contradictory to their French orientation.

The Spanish-language press exemplifies the way community narratives of ancestry in Spain were shaped in conversation with developments in Spanish colonialism and its reception in the late 1920s and early 1930s. While disseminating information to the community in a novel way and reflecting the smooth adoption of modern Spanish by local Jews and their more general upward social mobility, these newspapers worked simultaneously to strengthen the impulse to locate Sephardi origins in medieval Spain that helped generate a notion of long-lasting attachment already from the fifteenth century.

In January 1931, for example, selected students from the Hispano-Israelite and Hispano-Arab schools participated in an annual trip to mainland Spain under the sponsorship of the Spanish government. One of them was Alberto Lascar, a student from the Seminario Rabínico, a religious school in Tangier established by the Hispanicist and community leader José Benoliel. Lascar’s impressions from his visit were published in Adelante as part of the newspaper’s effort to encourage readers to contribute letters to the editor. In his report, he described the trip as a dream come true, one that allowed him to experience, on Spanish soil, the ancestral connection to Spain that his parents had long spoken about. Lascar opened his article by describing how the idea of visiting Spain came about: “I am a Jew, and considering this, gentlemen, [you may] appreciate the joy that filled me when the venerable Father Antonio communicated the good news [about the upcoming trip] to us . . . : ‘Boys, the Honorable Mr. Manuel Aguirre de Cárcer [de Tejada], has obtained for you, from the Spanish government, that a trip be made annually to our beloved homeland, so that in this way, you, Spaniards of Morocco, awaken your affection for that homeland that you do not know and that was the cradle of your parents and grandparents.’”³² While we do not know the specific motivations for Lascar’s descriptions, its publication indicated the existence of initiatives by the Spanish government to appeal to Tangier’s Jews as well as the positive reaction those initiatives occasioned in Tangier’s Jewish press, which, as mentioned, was not subject to the direct censorship of the Spanish state.

The framing of communal genealogy and history around the community’s shared roots in pre-1492 Spain helped strengthen the community’s collective story in a way that also aligned with community leaders’ political aspirations of remaining loyal to the Spanish colonial campaign. While similar ways of imagining the Sephardi past characterized some of the venerable families in central Morocco—especially in Fez and Meknes—the north’s geographical proximity to Spain helped Jews in that region connect this mythical imagination of pre-1492 Spain with the modern Spanish state and its colonial project.³³ A visit to modern Spain was the ultimate opportunity to experience the connection between the old and new Spains—or at least to start expressing such a connection in the community press.

Despite the occasional polemics that Adelante’s writers directed against Perl’s outsider meddling through his foreign newspaper, Renacimeinto, and his criticisms of Tangier’s Jewish community leaders and the AIU school system (which Perl saw as impeding Zionism), Adelante’s editors praised Perl for two reasons: the latter’s enthusiastic support of the Zionist cause (discussed in chap. 4) and the Jewish community’s growing affinity with Spain. Even as Adelante’s editors viewed Renacimiento as a competitor, they announced with a certain degree of pride that it was the first and only Jewish newspaper in modern mainland Spain, a fact that marked the revival of Spanish Jewish life following centuries of absence. Adelante’s editors were proud of their success in becoming, over a period of just half a year, one of “Africa’s top Spanish newspapers” and appealing to a readership of hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish subscribers (including Muslims), thereby serving the “reencounter.” They decided to celebrate the accomplishment with a festive banquet in February 1930 at Hotel La Palmera.³⁴ Adelante’s editors also described how Dépêche Marocaine, one of Morocco’s most prominent periodicals at the time, put its printing press at their disposal.³⁵ Furthermore, a series of non-Jewish periodicals in northern Morocco, including El Porvenir de Tánger, L’Echo de Tánger, El Eco Mauritano de Tánger Heraldo de Marruecos, El Estatuto de Tánger, El Popular de Larache, and Diario Marroquí de Larache acknowledged Adelante’s importance in reviving the connection between Moroccan Jews and Spain in a series of letters sent to its editorial board on the occasion of its first anniversary.³⁶

Adelante’s editors described their goal as relieving the “pain of the misunderstanding and separation between peninsular Spaniards and Sephardi Spaniards.” Some of the newspaper’s articles thus reflected an inherited tension between nostalgia for and alienation from pre-1492 Spain, the fatherland that had expelled them. However, they also reflected the active desire to heal that painful wound through calls—often with a highly critical tone—to repeal the Alhambra edict of 1492.³⁷ The appeal of narratives of Spanish ancestry among northern Moroccan Jews would be put to one of its biggest tests from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s.

SEPHARDISM UNDER FASCISM

The political situation in the years when Pulido, Ortega, or the editors and contributors of Adelante and Renacimieneto spread their Philo-Sephardi narrative drastically changed by the mid-1930s and 1940s. The early 1930s saw the rise of Pan-Arab and Jewish nationalism in Morocco in light of Jewish-Arab clashes in Palestine, first in 1929 and then in the Arab Revolt of 1936, which inspired regional turmoil reaching as far as Morocco. A series of anti-French strikes were also sparked by the Berber Dahir, or Berber Edict of May 16, 1930, which sought to separate the Arabic- and Tamazight-speaking Muslim groups in French colonial Morocco into distinct legal systems.³⁸ These and other, related events taking place across the Middle East and North Africa manifested locally in northern Morocco in the mid-1930s.

To strengthen his hold on Spanish Morocco, Franco disseminated what Eric Calderwood calls “the Andalus-centric narrative of Moroccan history” as a strategy to strengthen his colonial hold. Franco’s conservative Catholic regime somewhat paradoxically promoted the discourse of “Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood”—the idea that North Africa was a historic extension of Spain and the aspiration of returning Spain to the age of the Convivencia. According to this narrative, the culture of Al-Andalus did not disappear in 1492 with the Christian reconquest of Muslim Granada; rather, it migrated to Morocco, where it continued to thrive until the present day. This discourse was promoted not only by the Francoist regime but also by Muslim nationalists, as in the case of M’hammad Binnuna, who nicknamed Tetouan “the daughter of Granada.” But this discourse only reflected Franco’s efforts to maintain peaceful relations with the Moroccan Muslim elite. Relying on that narrative, Franco managed to recruit some seventy thousand Moroccan troops in his rebellion against Spain’s second republic.³⁹

Double standards were no less apparent in the case of Jews. Amid the antisemitic winds blowing from Eastern Europe in the pre-Holocaust years, antisemitic expression in Spain took the form of accusations that Jews sought to stir disorder. Franco and his nationalist supporters railed against the so-called Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy, blaming world Jewry for Spain’s deterioration into civil war.⁴⁰ Franco’s anti-Jewish expressions contradicted his regime’s declared commitment to Philo-Sephardi objectives and revealed how cynical his discourse was. In Franco’s mind, a cultural separation between Sephardim and Ashkenazim became essential for colonizing the Jewish communities of Morocco. With the victory of Franco’s nationalist military regime in northern Morocco in July 1936, the Andalus-centric narrative of Moroccan history became entwined with Philo-Sephardism, fueling the emergence of new local institutions that helped further disseminate the idea with Franco’s support. The founding in 1938 of the General Franco Institute for Hispano-Arab Research was a landmark event in that regard. The institute published dozens of works emphasizing the historical and cultural connections between Al-Andalus, Morocco, and Francoist Spain.

Moreover, some community leaders and members of the Jewish intellectual and economic elites continued to support the Philo-Sephardi philosophy even when it was imbued with strong fascist spirits. These supporters recognized that as long as Franco’s fascist aspirations did not result in tangible and direct anti-Jewish violence, collaborating with his Philo-Sephardi narrative about the distinctiveness of Sephardi Jews in fact remained a valuable source of stability, both for individuals and the community. The motivations behind their stance remain a subject of ongoing debate and speculation, but the financial support extended to Franco by Jewish bankers like the Hassán family in Tangier and Jacob Benmamán in Tetouan serves as a clear example of the existence of such a collaboration.⁴¹ No less evident is the influence of Franco on the development of the communal narrative of ancestry in Spain.

Franco’s cultural campaign unexpectedly bolstered the community’s ancestral narrative through the institutions it established. In January 1938, Jewish leaders from Tetouan sent a letter to Juan Beigbeder, the high commissioner of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. The letter expressed support for a proposal to establish a center for Talmudic studies in Tetouan, which would eventually be known as the Maimonides Institute. A year later, Sefarad was established as the mouthpiece of the Instituto Arias Montano de Estudios Árabes y Hebreos (Arias Montano Institute for Arabic and Hebraic Studies), established by the Francoist regime in 1939 and named after Benito Arias Montano, the sixteenth-century Spanish Bible scholar.

Jewish leaders and intellectuals from the community used these Francoist-funded institutions to advance and disseminate literary knowledge of the community’s origins, ranging from biblical studies to Sephardi culture and linguistics. Sefarad ran articles by the writer Abraham Isaac Laredo with titles like “El nombre de Sefarad” (“The Name Sepharad,” 1944), “Sefarad en la literatura hebraica” (“Sepharad in Hebraic Literature,” 1944), and “Las Taqanot de los Expulsados de Castilta: Marruecos y su matrimonial and sucesorial regimen” (“The Taqanot [Halakhic enactments] of the [Jews] Expelled from Castilla: Morocco and Its Matrimonial and Successor Regime,” 1948). Laredo was among the Arias Montano Institute’s first collaborators.⁴² Another prominent figure in that regard was Rabbi Salomon Benshabat Benarroch, the head of the Maimonides Institute in the 1940s. He published a variety of articles and books that were designed to draw a connection between rabbinical studies in Morocco and the study of biblical literature in medieval Spain.⁴³

The notion of Sephardi exclusivity extended beyond the confines of the Spanish colonial perspective on Sephardi Jews. In the late 1930s, a few thousand Jewish refugees arrived from Europe and settled in Tangier. Although this influx constituted a financial drain on the Jewish community council, from 1939 local leadership worked closely with world Jewish organizations, such as the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to provide them with asylum. While expressing solidarity, the encounter with Ashkenazi refugees also provoked a sense of estrangement that strengthened Sephardi identities. Exemplifying this sense of intra-Jewish estrangement upon the intensifying encounter with European Jewish refugees, Carlos de Nesry, a local lawyer and member of the Junta of Tangier, wrote, “Never has the Jew of Tangier felt more Spanish, more Sephardi. Never has he so much felt so strongly the powerful lifeblood of his heredity.”⁴⁴

As in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Philo-Sephardi discourse was disseminated to the broader community, in the 1940s and early 1950s too, Jewish institutions continued to bring the ideas about Jewish roots in Spain to lay community members. The Círculo Recreativo Israelita, known colloquially as the Casino Israelita, regularly hosted series of lectures on Jewish affairs.⁴⁵ Using the space of Tetouan’s Casino Israelita in 1948, Rabbi Salomon Benshabat Benarroch explained to a large audience the connection between Jewish life in tenth-century Córdoba and their own present lives as Sephardi Jews in twentieth-century Morocco, declaring that for Moroccan Sephardi Jews, medieval liturgy from Iberia is almost as sacred as the Bible.⁴⁶ In this vein, an overview of communal life in Tetouan subtitled “A Brief Historical and Sentimental Overview of the Jewish Community of Tetouan,” published in 1954 by León Coriat, started its narrative in the year 1492, right after the expulsion.⁴⁷

IN LIGHT OF POSTCOLONIALISM

World War II sparked a wave of nationalist activity across the European colonies in Africa and Asia. On the one hand, this period of growing expressions of global Jewish solidarity manifested in the work of world Jewish bodies such as the JDC. On the other, it increased a sense of disparity among Jews and Muslims based on separate national aspirations (see chap. 4). In Morocco, 1943 saw the founding of the Istiqlal Party, the principal Moroccan nationalist movement. In April 1947, the Sultan of Morocco, Mohamed ben-Yousef, visited Tangier and delivered a speech that would become a landmark in the Moroccan struggle for independence. Four years later, in April 1951, the Istiqlal Party joined forces with two other local nationalist parties operating in northern Morocco: the Parti Démocratique de l’Independence (PDI) and the Moroccan National Front in Tangier. Amid this proliferation of nationalist movements, segments of Moroccan society were becoming alien in the eyes of local Jews, most of whom had developed a pro-European orientation during the colonial era.

On March 2, 1956, the French protectorate came to an end, and Morocco became an independent constitutional monarchy. On April 7, the Spanish protectorate ended as well, and in October Tangier was integrated into the new monarchy. With the formal end of the Spanish and French protectorates in Morocco, the year 1956 marked a major shift in the political situation of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora. As Chris Silver has noted, the scholarly emphasis on Jewish Moroccan outmigration after 1956 has pushed aside research on forms of continuity in Jewish lives in the postcolonial context.⁴⁸

Relatedly, Jewish solidarity on the one hand and postcolonial struggle against Spain on the other did not put an end to local Sephardi cultural activism. Or-Luz, a newspaper published in 1956 in northern Morocco, continued to serve as a mouthpiece for Philo-Sephardi discourse even after the Spanish protectorate was coming to an end as Morocco’s independence was achieved in February 1956. In the volume that appeared that month, Yosef D. Benmaman published an article about the “symbol of Sefardism, the man who is known and appreciated in every Jewish home: Doctor Pulido.”⁴⁹ The narrative was also fed by articles about the “Chuetas en Mallorca” (on the history of Majorcan Crypto-Jews and Conversos); by an article from Dr. Medina Wahnon about Maimonides; and by an article entitled “Imágenes de Sefarad” (“Images of Sepharad”), all published in May 1956, two months after Spain’s protectorate ended in the region.⁵⁰

Concrete encounters with the physical space of modern Spain, which became more frequent as the postcolonial twentieth century unfolded, combined with the imagination of Spain as a Jewish place of origin to engender some fascinating literary constructions of northern Moroccan urban space. One example is an article from Or-Luz entitled “Añoranzas de un Sabbat” (“Longing for a Sabbath”), in which the author, Salomon Medina, a Jewish physician from Tetouan who resided in Seville in 1956, fused his yearning for the Sabbath atmosphere of his childhood in Tetouan with a description of the alleys of the ancient Judería of Seville.⁵¹ He wrote, “I daydreamed of those alleys [in Seville] that [resemble the ones] my eyes saw as a child [in] the Jewish quarter of Tetouan.”⁵² “Remembering” or referring to that section of the city helped evoke a nostalgic narrative that detached the narrators as well as the readers from their concrete spatial and temporary contexts, attaching spatial meaning to tradition.

Writing under the pen name MOGAR some twenty-five years after Alberto Lascar’s 1931 description of his journey to Spain in Adelanate, and only two months after Morocco’s independence from France and Spain, the editor of Or-Luz, Moisés Garzón Serfaty, described his own impressions from a visit to the Spanish city of Cadiz—a city where “there is no reminder left of the existence of Spanish Hebrews” but to which a new wave of immigrants from Tetouan was then arriving to study. He started his account with an allusion to the major change that had occurred in the ability of Jews to settle in Spain since 1492, comparing the medieval expulsion with the more pleasant and exciting contemporary journey in the opposite direction, from Morocco back to Spain, as colonialism ended. More importantly, MOGAR expressed his great curiosity about the Jewish past in Cadiz and how, during his trip, that curiosity led him to the local library and into conversations with local people who he suspected might “remember” Jewish life in Spain.⁵³

The academic and cultural production of communal origin stories continued during and long after most Jews had begun to emigrate. Jews in Morocco and beyond continued to consume and create a discourse that connected them to Spain, whether in independent Morocco, in Israel, or in Spain itself. Ethnographic projects focusing on the Hispanic roots and language of the northern Moroccan community, such as Manuel Alvar’s field study in Tetouan, Larache, and Melilla in the period from 1949 to 1959, and the fieldwork undertaken by Samuel G. Armistead, Joseph H. Silverman, and Israel J. Katz across northern Morocco in 1962–63, testifies to a cooperation among researchers and local residents, or at least an awareness of a powerful narrative of shared communal heritage.⁵⁴

Alberto Pimienta, a Tangier Jewish musician, remarked in a 1987 interview conducted in Tangier, “I have a lot of respect for all these scholars who worked hard to record and document the romancero or Spanish ballad songs, but for me, as a musician in Tangier, it wasn’t a major part of my musical repertoire.” Pimienta asserted that Spanish ballad songs were stylistically foreign to the space of Tangier. However, while sharing his experience, Pimienta also recalled how he had engaged in documenting Spanish ballad songs in Tangier in 1959, as it was part of his community’s spirit.⁵⁵ This anecdote helps reframe my discussion in the context of Axel’s questions: “Who in the most quotidian of ways, claims to be the subject of diaspora? [And] what are the everyday conditions for the identification of a subject of diaspora?”⁵⁶ This chapter has revealed a network of heritage commemorators who helped produce a standardized story of Jewish ancestry in Spain that made sense of community renewal under colonialism and the vast Hispanicization of the Jewish communities in northern Morocco. This story of shared origins in Iberia would further extend its reach through transnational migration and rising Jewish and Moroccan nationalisms. While the intensifying impulse to document Jewish ancestry in Spain was a result of Spanish colonialism, it would survive regime changes, decolonization, and migration, as we shall see in the following chapters.