EIGHT

A GLOBAL HISPANOPHONE DIASPORA

IN SEPTEMBER 1981, JUST TWO YEARS after the founding of Mifgash Benei Tanjir (MABAT, Reunion of Tangier’s Natives) in 1979, its board declared its intention to launch an international congress in Tel Aviv that would bring together Jewish immigrants of northern Moroccan origin from across the world.¹ The congress, scheduled to take place in Tel Aviv in August 1983, carried such great importance in the eyes of MABAT’s organizers that as early as January 1982 they circulated a call among Israeli members to hurry and register for the event. They wrote, “Our first affiliated [community] in the ‘golah’ [diaspora], as well as other interested individuals in Europe and America, insistently demand that our reunion take place.”² A list included in one of the organization’s internal unpublished documents reveals how MABAT planned to appeal to the worldwide diaspora, mentioning the major hubs where Jews from northern Morocco resided, such as Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as the smaller hubs in France, the US, Switzerland, and Canada.³

As we saw in chapter 7, the emergence of a community organization among immigrants from northern Morocco in Israel must be understood within the context of Israel’s domestic ethnic revival in the 1970s and 1980s. Representing a local branch of a transregional diaspora, however, the community’s establishment in Israel was also influenced by the global Sephardi revivals and the interpretation of the community’s Spanish origins in the new major hubs in Spain and Venezuela (see chap. 6). At the same time, MABAT’s records reveal that the immigrant community in Israel actively worked to influence the global diaspora abroad by helping establish sister organizations in countries with smaller concentrations of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews in France, the US, and Canada. As the 1983 congress approached, MABAT established a committee for international affairs called the Comisión de Organización Internacional that was specifically designed to work toward that goal.

Important studies on the Moroccan-led Mizrahi ethnic revival and formation in Israel tend to view these phenomena as local manifestations of a broader minority rights protest movement that swept throughout the postcolonial world in the 1960s and 1970s (see Introduction).⁴ However, these studies hardly address the global dynamics of ethnic formation among Sephardi and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Jewish populations outside of Israel and how they engaged in conversation with events in Israel. In this chapter, I show how MABAT’s global activities and the transnational connections it forged may help fill this methodological gap separating the study of MENA Jewish migration and Mizrahi ethnicity in Israel. Continuing the narrative developed throughout the previous chapters of this book, this chapter challenges the conventional understanding that postcolonial immigration to Israel from Morocco inevitably marks the endpoint of Jewish Moroccan global diaspora-making, or otherwise contradicts it.

To further analyze the postcolonial dynamics in the proliferation of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, here I suggest adapting a recent scholarly concept by proposing “the Global Hispanophone.” This category of analysis echoes the more established concepts of the Global Lusophone, Francophone, and Anglophone. It incorporates regions of the world that were bound by the Spanish Empire beyond Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula itself—namely, North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines, and other regions that scholars rarely study alongside one another. The Global Hispanophone paradigm advances the study of local contexts hitherto marginal to major historical centers, transcending existing boundaries and bringing the past and present of these far-flung regions into dialogue with each other.⁵ I employ this concept to analyze the ties between hubs of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora in non–Spanish-speaking countries in which Hispanic Moroccan Jewish communities were established in the 1970s through the 1990s. I show how through this process the preservation of Haketia and other Hispanic patrimonies came to be a synergic source of empowerment for smaller hubs, Israel included.

ZIONISM IN ISRAEL, A CONTINUING DIASPORIC HERITAGE

A first step toward understanding MABAT’s motivation in its global outreach, as well as the dynamics of trinational ties between Israel and other hubs, is to discuss the way they formulated their Zionist identities. As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, the endorsement of pro-Zionist ideas by community leaders in Morocco and Latin America did not necessarily lead to their immigration to Israel, partly because some interpreted Zionism as a cultural movement that served to help define and strengthen local Jewish communities, along with other affinities. This function of Zionism as an ethnic diaspora movement continued to shape the community in Venezuela as late as the 1970s, when immigration from Morocco to Israel reached its final stages. As Zionism blended with community building in Latin America, similar cultural-organizational dynamics characterized MABAT in Israel when it began to incorporate Zionist ideas into its shared origin story.

MABAT Revista provides evidence for that process. The first essay that appeared in that bulletin was a love song for the State of Israel composed by MABAT’s founder Amada Avital. Its cover page was dedicated to announcing that “MABAT salutes the State of Israel.”⁶ This should come as no surprise considering that one of MABAT’s founders, Alfonso Sabah, was a prominent Zionist activist in Morocco (see chap. 4). MABAT Revista reproduced a series of documents—including reports from Adelante, La Liberté, and El Eco Israelita, periodicals that had appeared in northern Morocco in the early twentieth century—to reassure readers that Zionism was part of MABAT’s identity as a community. Alongside references to the participation of Jews in northern Morocco in Zionist youth movements and Zionist clubs like Maguen David, MABAT emphasized the generous financial contributions of the northern Moroccan community to the shekel (originally a biblical Hebrew coin) enterprise.⁷ In this context, purchasing a shekel was the practice of paying membership dues to the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which since 1897 conferred the right to elect delegates or be elected to the World Zionist Congress. In practice, the shekel served as a donation to the WZO.

The connection that MABAT drew between the material wealth of the community and its devotion to Zionism was not incidental. This connection served to develop a broader sense of pride among MABAT members as part of a Moroccan group that could actually enrich the Zionist project through its historical and contemporary prosperity in the diaspora. In other words, the founders of MABAT maintained that contemporary Zionism could benefit from the presence of northern Moroccan Jews in Israel, as a community that has been relatively prosperous outside of the country. Following the logic of this narrative, the first section in MABAT Revista was titled “What was our community like?” The title was followed by a subheading: “What were its concerns, and what have we been able to reproduce, here [in Israel], today?”⁸ The next thirty-seven pages provided the anticipated answer to these questions. Among other things, MABAT included its plans to resume the tradition in northern Morocco of donating to the Jewish National Fund by planting a forest in Israel in MABAT’s name during 1989.⁹

The next page listed the wealthiest local contributors to the Oeuvre de Nourriture et d’Habillement, the charitable Feeding and Clothing Project for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) schools in Tangier in 1931; and included an article concerning La Cantina Sarita Sagues, a soup kitchen founded in 1934 for the benefit of the needy in the community.¹⁰ Seeking to demonstrate a continuation of communal wealth in Israel, Mosad Alazrachi (later known as Bet Elazraki), a home for children at risk, was inaugurated in Netanya in the 1960s through the generosity of Victor Alazrachi, a northern Moroccan donor. The Sabah family, to which the aforementioned cofounder of MABAT belonged, promoted this social welfare project in Israel.¹¹ MABAT presented the initiative as a clear continuation of the spirit of the Laredo-Sabah home, established with communal funds in Tangier in the early 1900s, and more generally of the overall generosity of the community. While philanthropy has been an important factor in the formation of ties between Jewish communities worldwide throughout the modern period, philanthropy was used here by MABAT to demonstrate the economic status of Hispanic Moroccan Jews in Israel.¹²

MABAT’s invitation to its brethren abroad to come to Israel in the summer of 1983 and celebrate their Hispanic Moroccan Jewish identity was related to these dynamics of self-assertion in Israel. MABAT’s publication reiterated the idea that Israel, as a developing country, relied on affluent Jews from around the world to assist it in becoming a strong nation. One essay in MABAT Revista, published in 1990, was headlined “Zionism in Transition—we cannot pretend that everything is working out well for our Israel this year.”¹³ The four-page essay concluded that “Israel needs [the diaspora’s] assistance, and its Aliyah.”¹⁴ The same idea had appeared five years earlier in a circular that laid out MABAT’s raison d’être as an organization, when MABAT presented itself as a diaspora group capable of improving the social status of Moroccan Jews in Israel.¹⁵ MABAT’s self-positioning echoed a similar discourse characterizing diaspora-based immigrant associations from “affluent countries” (to use the Zionist terminology, as presented in chap. 5) that claimed a philanthropic position in the Zionist project. These organizations included, for instance, the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel.¹⁶

MABAT’s interpretation of Zionism conjured a nostalgia for the perceived devotion of Jews in northern Morocco to the well-being of the state of Israel. In support of its argument that MABAT was one in a line of northern Moroccan associations that had contributed to Israel’s well-being, the organization offered biographical anecdotes about successful Jews from northern Morocco who, it claimed, played a role in Israel’s establishment. These included, for example, biographies of Jacob Salama (who, after his immigration, changed his name to Yavin), an immigrant from Tetouan in 1956 who overcame harsh assimilation difficulties to become a thriving Israeli industrialist. Another example was a published interview with Knesset member Daniel Levy, a native of Ceuta. Newspaper items reproduced by MABAT confirmed his success in Israel. The editors of MABAT Revista evidently sought to highlight success stories to discredit the negative image of North African immigrants in Israel as underprivileged Mizrahim.¹⁷

As we saw in chapter 6, since the Israeli Black Panthers demonstrations of the 1970s, Zionist-oriented Sephardi organizations had paid greater attention to social problems in Israel and developed a global philanthropic system for supplying financial and moral support. They created a solution to what was seen by Israeli scholars and policymakers and the broader Israeli public as the “ethnic problem”—that is, the socioeconomic gaps separating Jews from Asian and African backgrounds and Jews from Europe, collectively “Ashkenazim.” In that context, MABAT leaders saw a great advantage in partnering with their more affluent northern Moroccans abroad, who had already gained a different reputation in Israeli public discourse as better off but less organized (see chap. 5).

Beyond stimulating excitement at the opportunity to reunite with old friends and relatives from around the world, the 1983 congress was thus aimed at promoting awareness among MABAT’s members that they were part of a global community, not just a small, marginalized Moroccan group in Israel. This can be seen as a response to world hierarchies between “affluent Jews in the West” and “Eastern Jews in distress.” This attitude aligned with the view of critics who claimed that the raucous Israeli Mimouna celebrations disrespected the historical and present-day traditional practices of Moroccan Jews outside of Israel. A few years later, in his interview for the radio show Aadas y Adafinas, Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israel’s ambassador to Spain who was himself regarded as a success story of the Tangier Jewish community, explained the important role of Hispanic Moroccan communities outside of Israel in helping Moroccans in Israel take pride in their past. By enhancing international research into that past, the community could show that its Moroccan identity was not solely defined by, and in fact went far beyond, the Israeli context.¹⁸

MABAT’S GLOBALIZING NETWORK

The motivation for maintaining transnational collaboration can also be analyzed from the perspective of domestic organizations in the other destination countries that began to work with MABAT in the 1980s. Unlike in Israel, North African immigration to France was more diverse and included both Muslims and Jews. The May 1968 student riots across France brought new awareness and sensitivity to the diversity of ethnic and cultural groups in French society, as well as to political activism. One of the first associations established in France by Algerian Jews demanded rapid integration into French society. The same was not true, however, for the smaller groups of Jews from Tunisia and Morocco, among whom a large number of hometown associations arose after World War II. For example, among Tunisian Jews, former residents of Sousse (1979), Béja (1980), La Goulette (1984), Ariana (1985), Jerba (1986), Bizerte (1993), Le Kef (1994), Gabès (1994), Nabeul (1994), and Sfax (1995) established new organizations.¹⁹

In postcolonial Francophone communities, the term Sephardi was broadly defined to include the Judeo-Arab, Berber, and even Francophone colonial cultures of North African Jews as part of the construction of nostalgic narratives intended to unite these groups as a community. In Francophone communities, the term tended to include Sephardi rites and Mediterranean folkloric traditions such as the hilula that were seen as the post-1492 traditions of expelled Spanish Jews, as opposed to the concrete connection to contemporary Hispanic culture we have seen among northern Moroccans.²⁰ However, as early as the 1920s, French scholars had played a role in establishing the nostalgic attachment of Sephardi Jews in northern Morocco to Judeo-Spanish culture, despite French colonialism’s competition with the Spanish colonial project in Morocco. As mentioned previously, Robert Ricard published one of the earliest works on the emigration of Jews from northern Morocco to Latin America in 1928,²¹ and Paul Bénichou (1908–2001), a French writer, critic, and literary historian, studied Haketia among native speakers in the 1940s.²² Other prominent scholars included Ladino studies scholar Haim Vidal Sphiha²³ and prominent members of the Hispanic Moroccan community including Philip Abensur; Sara Leibovici, a researcher of northern Moroccan oral traditions; and Raphaël Benazeraf, who had been a prominent Zionist leader in Morocco. These figures all continued to engage in academic activity in the aftermath of significant migration from northern Morocco to France.²⁴

While the Sephardi revival in France was different from that in Israel and Spain, all three revivals occurred in a similar time frame and were unmistakably connected to one another. Founded two years earlier in Israel, MABAT served as the main inspiration for France-MABATT, which added a second T to demonstrate that their organization also represented Tetouan, the second largest urban center in northern Morocco. The French group hoped to strengthen the attachment to Spain, conceptually and concretely, and to promote social networking among northern Moroccan Jews. France-MABATT declared its aspiration to forge new contacts between the scattered Spanish-speaking Moroccan immigrants not only in France and the Iberian Peninsula but also in Israel.²⁵

The link between France-MABATT and MABAT in Israel was based not only on the shared historical circumstances of ethnic revival in both countries but also on concrete transnational kinship ties that facilitated the connection and culminated in the founding of France-MABATT. France-MABATT’s eventual creation in 1983 was also partly motivated by the Spanish language radio show Aadas y Adafinas, mentioned above. In 1981 the recently created RCJ, a Jewish radio station broadcasting in the Paris area, launched a program dedicated to Jewish languages. Aldo Altit, then a director for French national television and originally from the northern Moroccan city of Alcazarquivir, hosted a one-time program for the station dedicated to the community of Jews from northern Morocco. In planning the show, he reached out to Jimmy Pimienta, an immigrant from Tangier, for help collecting cultural material on the community. Based in Paris, Jimmy was strongly influenced by the work that his two siblings in Israel, Gladys and Sidney, were undertaking at the time. Gladys was then working on “Proyecto Folklor” for the Israeli national radio station Kol Yisrael, and Sidney was collecting material for a genealogical project. Jimmy took advantage of his occasional family and professional trips to Israel, Spain, and Morocco to conduct a series of interviews. His extraordinary endeavor eventually yielded almost 300 hours of unique recordings spanning, among other places, Paris, Madrid, Caracas, Tel Aviv, and even Tangier itself—the vast majority of them in Spanish (see Introduction).

France-MABATT was eventually established in 1983 by Aldo Altit, Philip Abensur, and Jimmy Pimienta as they headed to Israel to participate in MABAT’s congress. In the same year, France-MABATT issued its first publication, the anthology Nuestras Bodas en Tetuán, edited by Sara Leibovici in the preparation for the 1983 congress in Tel Aviv. It is a compilation of historical essays, ranging over a century and a half, that treat the topic of wedding traditions celebrated in Tetouan.²⁶ While the founding of France-MABATT was explicitly dependent on the ethnic circumstances that led to the founding of MABAT in Israel, it also came to enrich the Israel-based organization through the transnational ties both organizations forged.

AS FAR AS THE NORTH AMERICAN EDGE

Though effectively functioning as hubs for world Jewry in the late twentieth century, Canada and the US were among the last countries incorporated into the global network of northern Moroccan Jewish activism. A relatively large population center began to take shape in Montreal against the backdrop of developments in Israel and France. In Montreal, Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews were a smaller minority of only a few hundred families within a larger Sephardi community of almost twenty thousand Jews in the 1980s, still the largest concentration of MENA Jews in Canada, of which North African Jews comprised a majority. In the Francophone province of Quebec, the French rather than the Spanish component of North Africans’ pre-immigration colonial history dominated their immigration and integration experiences.²⁷

Like other Francophone immigrants, immigrants from northern Morocco found themselves participating in the local struggle between Anglophones and Francophones over the cultural identity of Quebec. Since the late nineteenth century, the Jewish community had been led by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, who adopted English as their main language of communication outside of the community. The arrival of Francophone Jews in the 1960s began to split the community on linguistic-cultural issues, in addition to intensifying the Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide. A minority of Francophone Jews began to share the views of Quebecois nationalists that saw Quebec as the home of a Francophone nation under British and American imperialism.²⁸ Most saw Quebec’s nationalist Francization project as beneficial to them, even if they did not support the goal of Quebec’s separation from Canada. The Moroccan communal institutions mostly used French as their language of communication, and Francophone culture was integrated into Sephardi identity.

Among postcolonial Francophone Jews, the term Sephardi was broadly defined to include the Judeo-Arab, Amazigh, and Francophone colonial cultures of North African Jews. For example, the local version of the Semana Sefardí developed by the Latin American branch of the World Sephardi Federation (WSF) was called Semaine Sépharade and later Quinzaine Sépharade, which, in Montreal, included a variety of cultural orientations that incorporated Sephardi traditions and Francophone culture. The Soirée Orientale, for example, was a gala benefit for a synagogue or community center that featured popular Middle Eastern music.²⁹

It was in this diverse ethnic context that activities in Montreal emphasizing the separate Hispanic identity of Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco took shape. The native Spanish language of Jews from northern Morocco came to represent a unique lieu de memoire for hometown memories, often reverberating in the form of musical performance and intellectual inquiry into Hispanic-Iberian origins via the study of Haketia and Judeo-Spanish romances. La Voix Sépharade (known as Présence between 1969 and 1978), the main Sephardi publication in Canada since its inception, was issued in Montreal. The journal was intended for MENA Jews and the wider audience of Quebecois readers and was the only platform through which northern Moroccan Jews could reach the community.

As mentioned in chapter 2, Zarita Nahón was among the first to collect Spanish ballad songs from the community after graduating from Columbia in 1929. Some forty-six years later, another community member, Oro Anahory Librowicz, also a Columbia graduate, was doing the same thing, exemplifying the continuity of colonial practices of Sephardi revival well into the postcolonial era. Born in Tetouan in 1948, Anahory Librowicz enrolled at Columbia in 1970, where she received her PhD from the Spanish and Portuguese Department four years later. Supervised by Hispanist Samuel G. Armistead, her research focused on romances—much like the work of Zarita Nahón, who had made a similar journey to Columbia University in 1929. Between 1970 and 1973, Anahory Librowicz retraced the footsteps of Spanish Moroccan immigrants who had resettled in Caracas, Madrid, Málaga, Marbella, Montreal, and New York. This project yielded a collection of 292 texts. In 1973, Anahory Librowicz moved to Montreal, and from there she continued her fieldwork, collecting traditional Judeo-Spanish songs in Spain, Venezuela, Canada, New York, and Israel.³⁰

Another prominent figure in the ethnic revival of Canada’s Hispanic Moroccan Jews was Solly Lévy from Tangier, Anahory Librowicz’s teacher from the AIU in Tetouan. Another mediator between academic research and community formation was Judith Cohen, an Ashkenazi Montrealer then working on a dissertation about Sephardi ballad songs. In 1981, Anahory Librowicz and Lévy teamed up in Montreal. Together with Cohen and Kelly Sultán Amar, originally from Melilla, they formed a musical group called Gerineldo. The name of the group came from the Sephardi version of a Carolingian ballad in which a royal page sleeps with the king’s daughter. The page’s good luck gives rise to the uniquely Moroccan Sephardi expression “El mazal de Gerineldo” (“The luck of Gerineldo”). In addition to playing music, Gerineldo staged original plays in Haketia written by Solly Lévy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Gerineldo performed several times a year for community institutions and Hispanic studies departments in North America, Israel, Spain, France, and Latin America, coupling the performances with academic sessions led by Anahory Librowicz and Cohen.³¹ The Hispanic dialect of Haketia was thus presented to the larger Moroccan community even in Francophone environments where Spanish was not widely spoken. Lévy translated stories into a “Haketizied” French in order to capture the humorous characteristics of Haketia. A small but enthusiastic group worked to disseminate Haketia culture within Montreal’s Sephardi community and beyond.

As in France, here too, local activities among the northern Moroccan community in the 1980s were influenced by global development abroad, primarily in Israel. One of few articles concerning the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community in La Voix Sépharade’s addressed the establishment of a new organization of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews in Canada in preparation for the MABAT congress in August 1983. The author, Clémence Lévy, reported that 150 people from Argentina, Venezuela, Canada, France, Spain, and Switzerland, as well as some 400 Israelis, had gathered in Israel for an “unprecedented assembly” of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews. The event was described both as an emotional personal encounter with kinsmen who were now scattered across the globe and as an expression of the global strength of a unified Hispanic Moroccan community. Lévy summarized, “We gathered in Tel Aviv with the aim not only of maintaining and strengthening contact with friends and relatives scattered around the world, but also preserving and salvaging the beautiful linguistic, cultural, liturgical, and folk traditions of our ancestors; fighting together for the migration (of Spanish Moroccan Jews) to Israel; creating a MABAT House in Jerusalem; organizing a scholarship fund for students; [and] creating MABAT groups in different countries or cities worldwide.”³² Lévy then focused on the exhibition held at Beit Hatfutsot during the MABAT congress in Tel Aviv, recalling how it featured lectures on “Spanish romances of the golden age” and Haketia. She ended her essay by urging the Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews from Toronto and Vancouver who had come together on Israeli soil to join with the Montreal group and form what she explicitly called “MABAT-Canada.”³³

An article in La Voix Sépharade titled “Gerineldo en Israël” reported on the group’s performance during the MABAT congress. The concert took place at the Ramada Continental in Tel Aviv and was attended by a large audience that included the Canadian consul and his wife. Gerineldo also performed a farewell play at Tel Aviv University’s Bar Shira Amphitheater. A letter in Haketia read by Solly Lévy brought forth fits of laughter, and the event concluded with an authentic Sephardi wedding. Lévy remarked that after performing in Tel Aviv, Gerineldo planned to continue to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and Geneva.³⁴ Visiting Israel for the 1983 congress, Anahory Librowicz used the time to conduct additional interviews in Israel, which became a node on her global fieldwork map. The community in Israel was influenced by the development in Canada but also had its own influence on the development of the activities among their brethren in Montreal.

A body called MABAT-Canada has never been officially established, but as in France, transnational ties with the Israeli group were established around the 1983 MABAT congress and continued well into the 1990s. Gerineldo returned to Israel in 1992, for example. The Sephardi Educational Center of Jerusalem, created by a Los Angeles–based businessman, sponsored another performance at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. This episode, just one among many, demonstrates how Sephardi songs traveled across the global diaspora and assumed a transnational quality even as their circulation was occasioned by activity in the Israeli hub.³⁵ The way that smaller organizations and individuals on the move transmitted the community’s heritage across North America can be illustrated by developments in New York and in Toronto.

In Toronto, home to about five thousand Jews from Tangier, the northern Moroccan community revolved mainly around religious activities and less with other forms of folkloric practice, even though the number of Tangier natives in Ontario was greater than in Montreal. The Ontario Sephardi Association, in collaboration with the Canadian Sephardi Federation (Fédération Sépharde Canadienne), organized the first Ontario Sephardi Week in Toronto from June 18–24, 1984. A performance of Judeo-Spanish songs by the Montreal-based Gerineldo group was included alongside a variety of representations of other MENA cultures, together with a lecture by Sara Leibovoci on her 1983 book issued by France-MABATT.³⁶

As for New York, one of the pioneering institutions promoting the incorporation of Sephardi studies into Jewish studies in the US during the 1960s was the Edmond Safra Institute of Sephardi Studies at Yeshiva University, directed by Rabbi Mitchell Serels, one of the leading advocates for the Spanish-speaking Moroccan community in New York. Originally from Tangier, Serels also became the founding rabbi in 1984 of the Magen David Sephardic Congregation in New York, a synagogue serving Tangier Jews.

In 1985, Serels teamed up with John Stern, a German Jew who had found refuge in Tangier as a child during World War II. Together they founded a small New York–based organization informally known as MABAT-USA (though officially it was called Aficoman).³⁷ Alia Stern, John’s spouse and the daughter of Rebbí Moshé Azancot, who served the Jewish community of Tangier until the 1990s, produced nostalgic writing about her hometown.³⁸ MABAT-USA, as it was called in unpublished documents, held occasional meetings and followed in the footsteps of its Israeli and French counterparts by hosting academics like Susan Gilson Miller. Rabbi Serels then relocated to Toronto to serve as rabbi of Petah Tikvah Anshe Castilla Synagogue, a newly established Sephardi synagogue in the Downsview neighborhood that conducted services in both Spanish and English.

ENTWINED HOMELANDS

In 1986, amid the geopolitical developments that would enable the return trip undertaken by MABAT members in 1987, Gladys and Sidney Pimienta traveled back to their hometown of Tangier in preparation for their final immigration to Israel. They eventually decided to stay in Tangier until 1989, when they finally left for Israel.³⁹ Having already engaged in heritage preservation activities in Israel for MABAT and the Ladino section of Kol Yisrael they continued to work in Tangier for Beit Hatfutsot in Tel Aviv, collecting and preserving Spanish ballad songs, this time on Moroccan soil. Tourists from Israel and elsewhere who visited Tangier, since its opening to Israeli passport holders, and were interested in the Jewish community would pay them a visit, including scholars like Harvard’s Susan Gilson Miller and Alegría Bendelac. In July 1987, when the MABAT group traveled to Morocco accompanied by musicologist Shoshana Weich Shahak, they reunited with the Pimientas. Weich Shahak used the trip as an ethnographic opportunity to record participants. Jimmy Pimienta, who at the time served as France-MABATT’s vice president, also used his trips to Tangier to reunite with old friends and family and to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, producing hours upon hours of recordings.⁴⁰

At the crossroads of global events during the 1992 quincentennial, Spanish diplomats helped disseminate the call for “reconciliation” to the small Jewish community that remained on Moroccan soil. A circular issued by the community council in 1991 announced that Spain’s consulate in Tangier had reached out to the Jewish community to inform them that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would provide fifteen scholarships to Sephardi individuals interested in pursuing advanced studies in the history of Spain. The circular instructed interested parties to obtain more information from the Jewish community’s central office. Even in the absence of a youthful population and an actual congregation, Abraham Azencot, last president of the community, devoted himself to preserving the attachment to Spain as the global network of the community was gaining momentum elsewhere.⁴¹

By then, France-MABATT’s place in the globalizing network of preservation organizations had become more prominent as it prepared to present an exhibit as part of the Sefarad ’92 project, the event that opened this book. Planning to tour the exhibit throughout France and Switzerland, the organizers teamed up with Momy Levi. Jimmy Pimienta had moved to Brussels by then but continued to work closely with his partners in Israel to launch additional projects.⁴² These and other active members of the diaspora were highly mobile individuals whose movement helped crystallize and fortify a communal network that transcended national and regional borders, as well as ethnic and linguistic contexts, using their Spanish background to define the uniqueness of their Moroccan Jewish identities.

In closing, let me refer to the words presented in the introduction to this book, by Abraham Hassan Cohen, France-MABATT’s president, in his speech at the Spanish embassy in Paris on July 5, 1990. During a planning session for the upcoming Sefarad ’92 conference, a part of the international quincentennial celebrations, he maintained that Jews from northern Morocco in their global diasporas are in “a better position than anyone else to promote this reunion.” This twist to the overall tendency to romanticize the Jewish past in pre-1492 Iberia cannot be fully explained without considering the matrix of international links that shaped the new diaspora and the mutual influences of local and global developments through their hubs in the twentieth century.

We must consider additionally the Hispanic cultural traits and linguistic capabilities that enable Jews in Spain and Latin America, but also in Israel, Morocco, and the non–Spanish-speaking countries of North America and Europe, to build connections with contemporary Spain and utilize Spanish as a lingua franca to forge their distinct global network that connects them as Spanish-speaking Jews. At the same time, we must also consider Hassan Cohen’s assertion that dwelling on their Hispanic identity did not mean they should shy away from their Moroccan background, but only imbue it with complexity—an amalgam of identities that transcended regional and national identities such as Israelis, Spaniards, or Moroccans.