SEVEN

HISPANIC MOROCCANS IN ISRAEL

“WE CERTAINLY HAVE THE OBLIGATION TO increase the awareness of the Israeli public to the fact that not all Jews of Moroccan origin are of a Magrebi [North African] culture [as is typically thought in Israel].”¹ With these words, Dr. Amada Nahón Avital, one of the founders of Mifgash Benei Tanjir (MABAT, the Reunion of Tangier’s Natives in Israel), mentioned in the introduction to this book, explained one of the principal motivations for the creation of this organization in Israel. Established in 1979 in collaboration with Yona Benchimol and Alfonso Sabah, a Moroccan Zionist leader (see chap. 4), MABAT would serve as the principal association of Jews from northern Morocco in Israel until it ceased activity in the mid-1990s.² At the time of MABAT’s founding, Israel had already become a hub base for the global community of northern Moroccan Jews.³

As a self-defined Jewish nation-state and the mythic holy land of Jewish collective memory, Israel was distinguished from other hubs of Hispanic Moroccan Jews. The narrative of homecoming was embedded in the state’s creation. Yet, the Israeli experience was also distinguished by the well-known hardships associated with the immigration and integration of its immigrant populations, particularly Moroccan Jews. By the 1970s, in the aftermath of Operation Yakhin, during which most remaining Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel, Moroccan Jews and their descendants came to constitute the largest country-of-origin group in Israel, lasting until the mass migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.⁴

Both terms that have served to categorize Moroccans as Jews from Muslim countries in Israel—“Mizrahim” (literally “Orientals”) and the earlier “Edoth Ha-Mizrah” (“Communities of the East”)—reflected and reinforced their experience of absorption in Israel as disadvantaged minorities. While Jews from northern Morocco and the rest of their Moroccan compatriots in Israel were generally treated by the Israeli establishment and the public as a unified group from a single country of origin, the community of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews came to constitute a separate cultural and linguistical minority within the population of Jewish Moroccan immigrants. MABAT’s Spanish name, Asociación de Oriundos de Tánger, Tetuán y demás Ciudades de la ex-Zona Española de Marruecos, Ceuta, Melilla y Gibraltar, demonstrated the organization’s aspiration of resisting the state classification by forming a separate Moroccan community based on shared Hispanic language, culture, and history in northern Morocco. The boundaries of the reimagined global community in fact exceeded Morocco, as Ceuta and Melilla were officially Spanish territories on African soil rather than parts of the Spanish protectorate. Similarly, Gibraltar was dominated by immigrants from northern Morocco and their descendants but was not itself part of the protectorate.

Looking at these occurrences, this chapter traces how northern Moroccan Jews in Israel separated themselves from other Moroccans and how they utilized their global networks to reinforce this separation. When taken at face value, Avital’s attempt to negate the community’s Maghrebi origins might be seen as a form of Europeanization. I argue that we might also interpret it as a way of bridging North African and Hispanic traditions as the community sought its rightful place within Israel’s broader Mizrahi or, more specifically, North African cultures. To demonstrate why northern Moroccan Jews sought to conceptually differentiate themselves from the rest of Moroccan Jewry, I will explore their efforts to build a centralized communal body, preserve Haketia, and create connections to Spain and northern Morocco as a means for self-empowerment in Israel.

JEWISH COMMUNITY BUILDING IN ISRAEL

Jacobo Israel Garzón remarked that despite an elite of Zionist bourgeoisies from northern Morocco in Israel, this country attracted the “less accommodated” population from the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community.⁵ While this might reflect a broad division within the global diaspora, this data cannot sufficiently explain the internal divisions among Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Israel. Jewish Agency records from 1972 on the occupations of immigrants from northern Morocco to Israel prior to their immigration reported an extraordinary 28.6 percent as white collar or free professions. This was almost double the national percentage for all Moroccan Jewish immigrants, at a time when Moroccans comprised 17.6 percent of all immigrants to Israel considered of “working age.”⁶ According to other figures, northern Morocco also produced the highest ratio of wage earners—one per every 4.5 immigrants. In Casablanca, the ratio was one to 5.6.⁷

While figures concerning pre-immigration background do not fully represent post-migration developments, some figures regarding their integration in Israel may explain the continuing gaps between the communities of the north and the national average for Moroccans. In the 1970s and 1980s, Moroccan Jews were concentrated in development towns on the geographical periphery of Israel or in particular neighborhoods in Israel’s large cities. This distribution reflected the segregation of most Moroccan Jews in Israel’s geographic and economic peripheries, often far from the country’s major centers.⁸ However, a 1985 MABAT membership roster listing some 769 individuals indicates that several cities were home to a relatively large proportion of immigrants from northern Morocco. The five cities with the largest populations of MABAT members were Jerusalem (seventy-two members), Netanya (forty-nine), Bat Yam (forty-two), Petah Tikvah (thirty-eight), and Ashdod (thirty-five), all located in central Israel. The latter four cities tended to be comprised of lower-middle class immigrants and became destinations for upwardly mobile immigrants from Muslim countries from the late 1960s, but more evidently in the 1990s.⁹

While this information might reflect representative concentrations, the remaining 533 registered MABAT members dwelled in sixty-five other Israeli cities, towns, villages, and kibbutzim. Considering the different neighborhoods within each locality, including the five large cities mentioned above, we can infer that the community was not concentrated in any single area. Some towns in Israel, including Azur, Or-Yehuda, Kfar Shmariyahu, Atlit, Netivot, Mizpe Ramon, and Sderot, had only one MABAT member each. The latter three communities were home to typical Moroccan concentrations, and the small number of members might indicate a tendency of Jews from northern Morocco to associate with the wider Moroccan population, dwelling on shared histories and Francophone and Arabophone backgrounds.¹⁰

The list of places of residence, ranging from the affluent town of Kfar Shmariyahu to the more impoverished town of Sderot, in fact reflected a more diverse socioeconomic structure characterizing the immigrants who arrived from northern Morocco and joined community organizations in Israel in the 1970s through the 1990s. Unlike many immigrants from the southern parts of Morocco, who in the 1950s were channeled by Israel’s political establishment into the southern and northern peripheries according to development plans, the smaller number of Jews from northern Morocco immigrated to Israel later, beginning in the mid-1960s, and tended to spread throughout the country. Consequently, despite some concentrations, Jews from northern Morocco lacked a well-defined geographic center that would have enabled them to organize strong and stable communal bodies capable of influencing the daily lives of community members. In 1990, for example, there were only seven specifically northern Moroccan synagogues across the entire country.¹¹ MABAT’s Hebrew name—which includes the word Mifgash, meaning encounter or reunion—demonstrates the desire of its founders and members to reunite the community dispersed across the country.

The experience of YOMAS, the Hebrew acronym for Yotsei Maroko ha-Sefaradit, or émigrés from Spanish Morocco—a short-lived organization founded in 1993—reveals the difficulties imposed by the demographic reality on organizational capabilities. The founder, Dr. Joseph Bengio, who served as president of MABAT in the mid-1980s, designed YOMAS to serve as an organization for northern Moroccans from southern Israel. Members came from Ashdod, Ashkelon, Dimona, Eilat, Kiryat Malachi, and Sderot, among other places. In 1993, YOMAS had 298 registered members.¹² There were also more localized attempts to gather Jews from northern Morocco in the cities where they comprised larger communities, as in the case of the Colonia Española de Ashdod.¹³

These organizational dynamics were not unusual in an immigrant-absorbing country like Israel. From the 1970s through the 1990s, newly formed immigrant organizations of Middle East and North African MENA Jews in Israel thrived. Some patterns of gathering were characterized by differentiation based on town of origin, as indicated by the hometown newsletters that immigrants circulated, such as Minhat Ashur for Jews from Mosul, Iraq; Neharde’a for Baghdadis; and Brit for Jews from Mogador, Morocco. Beyond groups based on immigrants’ hometowns, new forms of cultural and regional identification less common in their countries of origin helped set the stage for novel partnerships in Israel. For example, a common denominator of ethnic bulletins was their editors’ and readers’ place of residence in Israel such as the Yemenite community bulletins Hadre Teman in Nahariya and Mipa’ate Teman in Kedummim. Like YOMAS, which split from MABAT, groups like the Alliance of Tunisian Immigrants in Beersheba and the South (1990) and MATAN—Netanya Tunisian Club (1995) indicated similar patterns of local organization in the 1990s.¹⁴

Linguistic background also formed the basis for new partnerships. Unlike in the major demographic hubs emerging in Latin America and Spain, in Israel, Spanish-speaking Jews from northern Morocco encountered a new linguistic milieu in which their native Spanish language was marginal and associated at the time with Latin American immigration rather than their North African heritage. While most Jews from northern Morocco commanded French and occasionally Arabic, their Moroccan origins could go unnoticed. On the institutional level, MABAT organizers sought to partner in Israel with the larger Organización Latinoamericana en Israel (OLEI), an umbrella organization intended to unite Spanish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Latin America and Spain scattered throughout Israel.¹⁵ According to Salomon Benhayon, MABAT’s president in 1989, OLEI, which included mainly Ashkenazim from Latin America, was a natural ally due to the two organizations’ shared linguistic Hispanic heritage. For example, in expressing solidarity with MABAT, the chair of OLEI’s Committee for Aliyah and Absorption referred to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 as a “second Holocaust,” painting a shared history of suffering experienced by Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews alike.¹⁶

MABAT’s collaboration with OLEI, however, was based on more practical motivations: OLEI’s country-wide branches in Israel, which were more developed than its own, could help MABAT disseminate “Haketia culture” and the northern Moroccan narrative of ancestry in Spain.¹⁷ MABAT hardly aspired to become Latin American or even Spanish but rather to underscore its members’ unique Moroccan traditions through networks accessible to them.

MOROCCANS, BUT DISTINCT

Given the organizational particularities of northern Moroccan Jews, the establishment of MABAT needs to be understood as part of a boundary work taking shape in Israel vis-à-vis Jewish communities that came from southern Morocco, deemed by MABAT’s founders as “forasteros,” foreigners, or simply “Moroccans from the south.” From the 1970s through the 1990s, in addition to the social protests organized along ethnic lines by Israel’s Black Panthers movement (see chap. 5), other expressions of cultural identity emerged via popular music, public assertions of ethnicity, and intellectual debates. Poets, musicians, and writers deployed a vocal ethnic discourse that accentuated the uniqueness of the Moroccan experience and became one of the most recognizable features of the cultural conflict between “European” Ashkenazi Jews and “Oriental” Mizrahi Jews.¹⁸

Notably, the Mimouna celebration, a religious and communal ritual marking the end of Passover among Jews in Morocco, gained a high public and political profile in Israel. Already in the mid-1960s, Shaul Ben-Simhon, a native of Fez who became a member of the Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael (MAPAI, translated as Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel) party, helped raise that profile by organizing a public Mimouna event in his capacity as a leader of Brit Yotsei Maroko—the Alliance of Moroccan Jews in Israel. What started as a small gathering of some three hundred Jews from Fez in a public park in Jerusalem became, from the 1970s onward, a massive, carnivalesque celebration with tens of thousands of participants. The raucous style of the Mimouna celebration in Israel in those years led to increased stereotyping of North African cultures by the rest of the Israeli public and drew criticism from the ranks of the Sephardi and Moroccan intellectual elite for how it flattened the diversity of the Moroccan community and its pre-immigration history.¹⁹

MABAT’s founder made a clear effort to distinguish the Spanish-speaking community of northern Moroccans in Israel from the negative image of Moroccans that dominated the Israeli discourse, joining in the criticism of the boisterous atmosphere of the Mimouna celebration. In MABAT Revista, a booklet summarizing the association’s activities during the 1980s, Avital openly acknowledged that her decision to found MABAT was in part a reaction to the Mimouna phenomenon and her resulting “dissatisfaction” with the emerging stereotype of Moroccan culture in Israel. The new type of Mimouna celebration was, according to Avital, a “pseudo-folkloric tradition [that had] little in common with our [Hispanic Moroccan] tradition.”²⁰ MABAT consequently set out to preserve the community’s unique cultural, religious, and folkloric patrimony. This involved collecting cultural material from the community and working for the preservation of Haketia and other traditions as distinctly more authentic, and thus more valuable, North African patrimony.²¹

During the 1980s, MABAT circulated among its members a number of brochures and letters containing announcements, articles, and summaries of its cultural activities, such as the aforementioned MABAT Revista on the occasion of its tenth anniversary (1989–90). Through its publications, MABAT presented itself as the most relevant framework for organizing a unified and separate Hispanic Moroccan community in Israel. A circular summoning people to participate in a hilula included the slogan “MABAT is the hyphen uniting past and present; MABAT is you!”²² In one case, the hilula of Rabbi Mordejai Bengio—the legendary Great Rabbi of Tangier’s community toward the end of the nineteenth century—was broadcast on a national radio program narrated by Moshe Shaul, the head of the Ladino Section of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.²³

The hilula was a typical North African tradition involving a pilgrimage to the tomb of a saint on the anniversary of their death, an occasion on which miracles were said to occur. Ironically, this tradition was distinct from and irrelevant to the preservation of Ladino, as would be any tradition associated with North Africans.²⁴ Nonetheless, drawing on the cultural and linguistic connections between Haketia and the wider Judeo-Spanish domain, MABAT organized activities that bridged North African and Ladino cultural traditions for their own organizational benefits. To further understand these dynamics, we need to consider how academic studies of Jews from the Islamic world, including Ladino studies, gained momentum in Israel at that time.

THE ROLE OF ACADEMIA

Researching the evolution of the study of Moroccan Jewish history and culture in Israel, Daniel Schroeter has concluded that until the late 1970s, the subject remained largely outside secular academia and was confined to the domain of rabbinical scholars.²⁵ In the early 1970s, when Israel witnessed an ethnic revival, a momentous change occurred in domestic attitudes toward the study of Jewish history and culture in Muslim countries. In tandem with the global rise of Sephardi studies and the founding of local and international Sephardi studies centers, in 1972, Misgav Yerushalayim, the Centre for Research and Study of Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage, was founded through a joint initiative of the Hebrew University, the Zionist-oriented World Sephardi Federation (WSF), and the Sephardi Community Council (SCC) in Jerusalem. Viewing the study of the Sephardi past as a national priority, in 1977 Israel’s Ministry of Education created the Center for Incorporating the Heritage of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewries and allocated unprecedented funds for scholarly research on the topic. The year 1979 witnessed a number of pioneering academic conferences in Israel, as well as the appearance of the journal Pe’amim.²⁶ In this context, Ladino and Moroccan cultural traditions both became hot topics of investigation in the humanities in Israel.

Unlike elsewhere, in Israel there was a significant population of Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries who prioritized this topic. The increased prominence of Mimouna and other North African celebrations in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s motivated top anthropologists and folklorists to research their origins through fieldwork, prioritizing ethnography over textual scholarship.²⁷ Many of these studies noted either directly or indirectly how dramatically Israeli Mimouna celebrations differed from the traditional rituals that took place in Morocco. Many of the scholars who devoted their careers to the study of Jewish communities in Muslim countries were themselves immigrants from those countries, combining their newfound interest in their own ethnic identities with the rise of this new scholarly field.²⁸ The appeal to the Jewish past in Morocco and its binding with the present had a similar objective to efforts expended elsewhere in the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora (see chap. 6). It reflected a cultural resistance designed to help the community reclaim its own history while still adjusting to the Israeli national discourse.

MABAT’s founding came about during that academic revival, and it too invested in academic research. In MABAT Revista, it hailed the activity of the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University, which offered a course on the affection for saintly rabbis among North African Jews.²⁹ On the same page as this announcement, MABAT published a “traditional story,” written in Tangier in 1964 by Sarita Benzaquen, that recounted a miracle performed by a local saint. According to the writer, the story represented the unique heritage of the north.³⁰ At the initiative of one of its founders, Alfonso Sabah, MABAT created the Yona Benchimol Scholarship at Bar-Ilan University for the study of the cultural heritage of northern Moroccan Jewries.³¹ MABAT later established two additional scholarship funds specifically earmarked for students of northern Moroccan origin and funded by Agudat Sabah, the Sabah family’s foundation.³² These projects became part of a well-established network that could efficiently and systematically disseminate shared narratives and guarantee proactive individuals the resources to produce them.

For MABAT, scientific support for the communal narrative and their dissemination was one of the principal roles of academia. In Israel, Gladys Pimienta, a prominent member of MABAT, started a project to preserve Haketia at the Ma’ale Adumim Institute for the Documentation of Judeo-Spanish Language and Its Culture, affiliated within the Sefarad Society. In 1982, using this academic infrastructure, she called on other MABAT members to submit photographs and essays in order to create an archive of historical sources and testimonies about Jewish life in northern Morocco. MABAT announced an essay contest whose winner would be determined by an academic jury and then published.³³ In 1983, Beit Hatfutsot organized an exhibition of photographs in association with several of MABAT’s most prominent members: Amada Avital, Gladys Pimienta, and Joseph Bengio. The exhibition, which traveled across Israel for the next two years, was also sponsored by the Center for the Integration of the Oriental Jewish Heritage, an affiliate of the Ministry of Education and Culture.³⁴

Scholars who conducted field research, regardless of their ethnic origins, helped revive MABAT’s ethnic networks. For instance, MABAT collaborated with the scholar Shoshana Weich Shahak, who since 1973 has been recording and studying Sephardi musical traditions at the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University. Weich Shahak used MABAT Revista to call on members to collaborate with her research on northern Moroccan Jewish melodies.³⁵ Her eventual fieldwork took place in Tel Aviv, Bat Yam, Holon, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Jerusalem, and Ramat Eliyahu in Rishon le-Tzion throughout the 1980s and 1990s, enabling MABAT’s members to experience and act on their ethnicity, and to forge or strengthen communal networks—all as the result of growing scholarly efforts.³⁶ Weich Shahak’s research yielded several academic publications.³⁷ She also participated in several academic conferences at the time, where she presented her work on Hispanic Moroccan musical traditions. Her academic activities sought to cultivate—mostly among established Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community members—a sense that northern Moroccans in Israel comprise a singular ethnicity. Weich Shahak helped women from northern Morocco express their ethnic voice—literally—through an audio cassette recording of life cycle songs.³⁸

MABAT encouraged the use of different media to commemorate the ethnic past within academic circles. In September 1985, the organization called for video recordings of testimonies about the Jewish community in Morocco. The announcement emphasized that the testimonies would be evaluated by an academic team.³⁹ In 1986, MABAT collaborated with Beit Hatfutsot at Tel Aviv University to present Florilegio, a collection of recorded romances from northern Morocco, some of which were later broadcast by Kol Yisrael. MABAT also issued an audio cassette containing twenty-five of these romances.⁴⁰

These projects and their participants understood themselves as playing a proactive role in promoting a united communal narrative that still needed further exploration. As mentioned in the introduction and in chapter 2, the Haketia dialect had been declared a “dead idiom” by Spanish and French philologists who came to Morocco to document what remained of it in light of modernization and the adoption of modern Spanish since the 1920s. In Israel, MABAT was one of the main body that triggered Haketia’s revival in a postcolonial context. It has since been followed by other initiatives, including academics who have sustained the revival project over the past decade.

Significantly, the Haketia revival project tended to mask the fact that modern Spanish was more commonly spoken in pre-migration Morocco. Prof. Yaakov Bentolila, a Tetouan native who became the leading scholar in the field, asserted that he began thinking about Haketia only in the 1980s, when he launched his research into the idiom.⁴¹ Remarkably, the trigger for his academic interest in Haketia was MABAT’s gathering in 1983, to which he had been invited to lecture on the dialect as a philologist who was also a Tetouan native.⁴² As in pre-migration colonial northern Morocco, the Haketia idiom was then still perceived by many immigrants from northern Morocco and their descendants as an inferior and archaic form of Spanish. It was thus treated with a certain ambiguity; most identified Haketia with a collective past rather than with their own personal history. Nevertheless, the idiom eventually took on a more unifying role for Hispanic Moroccan Jews in the process of defining their unique Hispanic identity during Israel’s ethnic revival and distinguishing themselves vis-à-vis other Moroccans whose European—mainly French—identity was allegedly more recent and thus more artificial.

This reclaiming of Haketia required the suspension of memories from colonial spaces in northern Morocco, as was the case in Venezuela, but with nuances specific to the Israeli context. For example, the MABAT Revista published an article by Gladys Pimienta, a Tangier native, concerning a “traditional” custom among the Jews of Tetouan to place a matesha, a swing, on their patios after Passover. According to the article, the custom had a social function, enabling young, unmarried girls to meet potential husbands. The article was accompanied by the publication of romances, known as “the matesha songs,” which, according to MABAT’s article, were commonly sung in Tetouan.⁴³ In an interview with Gladys Pimienta, she remarked that “many of the songs I have collected here [namely, in Israel], including this one, I had never heard of in Morocco, nor did my mother, I think [smiling].”⁴⁴ Like many of her proactive counterparts, she learned about many traditions through her participation in academic activity. Clearly, the “Matesha” and other romances were not fictional, yet they represented marginal aspects of the memories of middle-class immigrants who had integrated into the colonial scene, held over from previous generations in Morocco. In another interview with Pimienta, she mentioned how, as a teenager in Tangier, she had attended the Lycée Français, the non-Jewish French schools in Tangier, and that she had dwelled in the city’s western neighborhood, densely populated with Spaniards and Frenchmen, and with relatively few Jewish inhabitants. In 1968 she left Tangier to study psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, from where she eventually immigrated to Israel in 1977.⁴⁵

MABAT’s founders, regardless of their diverse personal experiences with Haketia before and after their immigration to Israel, described its preservation as one of their central goals, alongside its aspiration to reunite the community in Israel. It encouraged immigrants from northern Morocco to recall and document memories involving Haketia. For example, during a recipe contest, MABAT specifically asked the participants to recount anecdotes about the dish using Haketia, rather than “modernized” Spanish variants.⁴⁶ The focus on Haketia also meant that MABAT began to incorporate the other North African, including the Arabic, components of Haketia into the broader field of Ladino studies, bridging what until then had been two separate entities.

Viewing these developments from a broader perspective, it becomes clear that a new global network has emerged since the 1970s to connect Israeli academia with institutions at the forefront of Sephardi studies elsewhere in the world, a process mediated in no small part by the northern Moroccan community elite in Israel.⁴⁷ As discussed in previous chapters, the tendency had long existed to separate the study of Judeo-Spanish philology from the more recent history of MENA communities. The focus on premodern traditions helped reaffirm the myth of pre-1492 “Sephardi supremacy” over post-1492 MENA cultures. This distinction remains crucial to a formerly Haketia-speaking community that asserted their own cultural distance from the bulk of Moroccan Jews, perceived as Arab Jews or more commonly Mizrahim, who cannot claim the same linguistic pedigree.⁴⁸

Such ideas shaped MABAT’s ties with the emerging field of Ladino studies in Israel, even as they maintained their Moroccan origins. Moshe Shaul, chair of the Sefarad Society and former head of the Ladino Section of Kol Yisrael, praised MABAT’s mission of spreading their unique Moroccan Judeo-Spanish culture.⁴⁹ The partnership with Ladino study networks has helped MABAT members shape their unique identity as Hispanic Moroccans separate from the broader North African population, while still emphasizing a distinct identity rooted in the historic North African Arabic milieu.

Several academic or semi-academic Sephardi studies journals helped disseminate the ethnic narrative in Israel. One example is Aki Yerushalayim, issued since 1979 by the Sefarad Society for Preserving and Cultivating the Judeo-Spanish Heritage, which has dedicated, from time to time, a special section to articles on Haketia and northern Morocco.⁵⁰ At the turn of the twenty-first century, after MABAT had ceased its activities, other academic institutions continued its mission of maintaining the ethnic narrative. Since 1997, the National Authority for Ladino has provided academic support for the Sefarad Society in light of a new law aimed at promoting the preservation of Judeo-Spanish culture in Israel.⁵¹

Another example is the El-Prezente journal, issued by the Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at Ben-Gurion University.⁵² Founded in 2004, the Gaon Center, headed by Professors Tamar Alexander and Yaakov Bentolila, both members of the National Authority for Ladino, is one of the most prominent institutions dedicated to the preservation of Haketia. A few of the Gaon Center’s academic events have been dedicated to northern Moroccan culture and history (often nicknamed Haketia Evenings). A list of invitees to an event celebrating the issuing of the second volume of El-Prezente in March 2009 reveals that the 179 invitees came from thirty-eight cities, towns, and villages throughout Israel.⁵³ The word Haketia itself has continued to be an emblem of the broader ethnic narrative connecting North Africa to Spain via shared origins, as the name of the Gaon Center’s Haketia Evenings indicates.⁵⁴

The siblings Sidney and Gladys Pimienta continued to dedicate time to the collection of documents and artifacts related to the Jewish community in Morocco. The Pimientas eventually created a private collection of material in their home, which has attracted researchers such as the author.⁵⁵ Sidney’s projects included transliterations of manuscripts in Solitreo (traditional Sephardi handwriting), photographing and mapping the Jewish cemetery in Tangier, and genealogical surveys. With the assistance of another sibling, their brother Jimmy in Belgium, one major project to which Sidney and Gladys were especially dedicated was the transliteration of the minutes of the Junta—a thick manuscript compiled into a book, the work of more than two decades from the late 1980s until 2010.⁵⁶

A RETURN TO TWO HOMELANDS

While Hispanic Moroccan identity was constructed through an attachment to historic representations of the past, more concrete transnational ties connecting modern-day Spain, Israel, and Morocco also helped define the community vis-à-vis “other Moroccans,” or the forasteros from the south. A thorough discussion of the phenomenon requires an examination of MABAT’s peak period of activity in the mid-1980s.

The year 1986 was a momentous one in the history of bilateral relations between Israel and Morocco, and between Israel and Spain. In July 1986, Israeli prime minister Shimon Pères visited Morocco for the first time to meet with King Hassan II. One of Pères’s achievements during this visit was winning the Moroccan government’s agreement to allow Israeli passport holders to enter the country. That agreement led to visits by organized tour groups from Israel, usually composed of close friends or family members who visited typical tourist sites as well as family graves, saints’ tombs, and other Jewish sites in Morocco.⁵⁷ In July 1987, MABAT members in Israel organized their own group trip to their Moroccan cities of origin, taking advantage of the new agreement.

The MABAT trip included, in addition to the usual shopping and entertainment, encounters with Jewish community leaders, prayers, visits to Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, tours of the former Jewish neighborhoods of Tangier, Tetouan, and other cities in the north, and brief stops in Casablanca and Rabat. In attendance was musicologist Shoshana Weich Shahak, who used the trip as an ethnographic opportunity to record participants outside of Israel—for example, at the Casino Israelita in Tangier (see fig. 7.1).

This return trip in July 1987 resembled many of the “heritage trips” undertaken by Moroccan Israelis at the time, and yet it was one of a kind, since it served in practice to combine both nostalgia and contemporary attachment to two home countries: Spain and Morocco. The unique encounter was enabled not only by the geographical proximity of Spain and Morocco but also by recent diplomatic developments in the biliteral relationship between Israel and Spain. In the 1980s, as post-Franco Spain struggled to rebrand itself as a liberal democracy, tourism was seen as a major means of promoting multiculturalism and marketing the country to the world. Policymakers invested in marketing medieval Spain as a paragon of interfaith coexistence.⁵⁸ These developments coincided with warming relations between Spain and Israel, which culminated in the establishment of official diplomatic ties in 1986, the same year as the agreement between Israel and Morocco. Given this confluence of events, it was only natural that Spain would arouse curiosity among Jewish Israelis, who hoped to explore the country’s historic Jewish sites and visit the birthplace of the great Sephardi figures whose names appeared prominently in Israeli public discourse.

MABAT’s tour lasted thirteen days, from July 13 to July 25. It began in Spain, in Torremolinos, where the participants met with members of the northern Moroccan Jewish community from Málaga and Marbella. For MABAT members from Israel, visiting Spain was not just a matter of searching for their Sephardi origins but also a momentous event that enabled them to reunite with their kin in one of the larger hubs of Hispanic Moroccan Jews at the time. The second day was dedicated to traveling from Spain to Morocco through Ceuta, where again the group met with local Jewish community members. Following a ten-day visit to Morocco, the final days of the trip were devoted to a visit to Gibraltar and its Jewish community, also of northern Moroccan descent, and then to historic sites in Seville, Cordoba, Toledo, and Madrid.

The practical logic behind the inclusion of Spain as part of a heritage tour to Morocco was that Spain was a convenient geographical entry point to Morocco, given the absence of direct flights between Israel and Morocco. Yet the historic sites they visited in Spain also encapsulated much about the way Hispanic Moroccan Jews understood their past in Morocco and as a global diaspora. This was particularly salient given the revival of interfaith discourses in Morocco in the 1980s. At the time, pilgrimages of former Jewish residents of Morocco to saintly tombs in their hometowns was propagated by the Moroccan state to argue for its historic inclusiveness of Jews and their loyalty to the Moroccan monarchy.⁵⁹

Despite the pragmatic cause, Abraham Benabu, MABAT’s treasurer, in fact described the visit to Spain in MABAT Revista as the beginning of “the encounter with our origins.”⁶⁰ Reports about the trip and the return of Tangier’s Jews to their motherland made it into the Spanish press. One report mentioned that in Torremolinos, forty-five Tangier Jews met with the Moroccan consul in Málaga and representatives of Moroccan Airlines and Morocco’s Ministry of Tourism.⁶¹ In the communal imagination, Spain seemingly served as a geographical extension of Morocco, even when Morocco had been an independent state for more than three decades in 1987.

The unusual entwining of Spain and Morocco was also a result of the unique geopolitical position of Ceuta and Melilla. While the major urban centers that had been home to Hispanic Moroccan Jews for centuries witnessed their almost complete disappearance of their Jewish communities, the same was not true for parts of the northern coastal region.

Unlike mainland Spain, the two Spanish enclaves on African soil, Ceuta and Melilla, have a different history of welcoming Jewish migration. During the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60, Ceuta and Melilla served as military outposts for Spain’s colonial expansion into Africa, and in 1863, right after the war ended, Spanish authorities declared them duty-free ports in order to populate them. In 1887, a customs office was established in Melilla, the new center of Spanish dominance in Africa, and all restrictions on the residence of foreigners, including Jews from nearby Moroccan cities, were revoked. By 1921, more the 3,000 Jews, most of them from nearby Tangier and Tetouan, had settled in Melilla alongside 300 Muslims and about 42,000 Catholic settlers who immigrated from mainland Spain.⁶² In 1940, 2,410 Jews were still living in Melilla, and by 1991 their number declined to about 1,000. In 1991, Jews lives in that city together with 37,467 Spaniards and about 26,000 Moroccan Muslims.⁶³

Melilla, one of the hometowns represented by MABAT, still had a thriving Jewish community at the turn of the twentieth century, which in fact constituted one of the largest urban concentrations of Jews on North African soil, albeit geopolitically a Spanish territory.⁶⁴ Though Melilla is an integral part of the Spanish state, the Moroccan Jews who live there are not recent immigrants but a community residing in its North African place of origin as full Spanish citizens.

This reality produced some vibrant transnational ties, forged as smoothly as with any other community in mainland Spain. On October 2, 1995, about 550 Jews from the city of Melilla reunited in the Ram Hotel in Jerusalem for the First Melillian Congress. Most of them were living in Israel, but some visited from Spain and Venezuela. The group was led by Rabbi Shlomo Wahnon and was distinguished from MABAT by its overtly religious orientation. At the gathering, they read a blessing sent by Ignacio Velázquez Riviera, the acting mayor of Melilla, and screened a video from the city. Three weeks later, on October 23, a similar rencounter of about forty Melilla natives took place in Madrid, inspired by the Israeli event. They met at the Madrid Bet Yaacov synagogue for a screening of the same video from Melilla, which they had received from the community in Jerusalem. A third such encounter took place on November 14 in Barcelona, where Rabbi Shlomo Wahnon again presented the video. Other events followed in Caracas and Melilla.⁶⁵ A weeklong visit to Melilla then took place in March 1996, including a seminar at a hotel and a visit to Rabbi Saadia Hadati’s tomb in Nador in northern Morocco.

This unique transnational pattern challenges the traditional geopolitical dichotomy between Europe and North Africa and once again complicates the idea that nostalgia among Jewish immigrants from Morocco was formed through a process of distancing from one’s homeland. In fact, it illustrates that movement between multiple homelands—places that were also geographic hubs for the northern Moroccan Jewish diaspora—was central to expressing and developing a communal nostalgia for a diasporic past. The next chapter will further explore the role of one of those hubs—Israel—in generating the global story of the community, with a specific focus on smaller hubs in France and North America.