THREE

MOROCCO IN LATIN AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA IN MOROCCO

BY THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY, INTERNATIONAL migration had become an important feature of Jewish life in Morocco. Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco were recorded during that period in mainland England, Bukhara, Sudan, Palestine, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and other more distant destinations, including parts of the United States, the Caribbean Basin, and the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon basin.¹ Moroccan migration unfolded against the backdrop of intensifying international migration in the nineteenth century, including from the Middle East and North Africa. For example, in Syria and Lebanon, both wellsprings of emigration from the Ottoman Empire at the time, we observe the tendency of various non-Muslim minorities—Maronites, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Druze, and Jews—to migrate to the Americas.² However, in Morocco, emigration to Latin America, which was associated with the Spanish-speaking Jews of northern Morocco, was generally a Jewish phenomenon.³

The first periodicals in northern Morocco to discuss Jewish migration to South America were associated with the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and appeared in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, serving as functional reports on its development in real time. Such sources have been widely employed by scholars since the 1980s to characterize this migration as a form of Jewish emancipation, distinguished from other forms of international migration among Moroccan Muslims and the circular patterns that characterized it.⁴ To offer a different view, in this chapter I examine how Jewish migration to Latin America came to shape one of the first transnational Moroccan communities at the beginning of the twentieth century, one dominated by Hispanic Moroccan Jews. I demonstrate how in the first half of the twentieth century, migration began to shape the diasporic consciousness of Hispanic Moroccan Jews living in northern Morocco. Crucially, through transregional links with Latin America, these Jews began to evince a sense of collective belonging to the Hispanophone world and used it as a source of local empowerment. Beyond the specific questions of community formation in Latin America, this chapter speaks to the broader question of how international migration affects identities among populations that do not themselves emigrate—in this case, the majority of Hispanic Moroccan Jews who remained in northern Morocco until the mid-1900s.

EARLY ROOTS, GLOBAL ROUTES

In the seventeenth and more extensively in the eighteenth century, a handful of Jewish Moroccan merchants played significant intermediary roles in trade between Morocco and Europe.⁵ Some Moroccan trade networks, mostly based in Tetouan, were part of a broader Sephardi trade diaspora across much of the western Mediterranean until the nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, Jews from Tetouan settled in London and Amsterdam, for example.⁶ In 1729, a British-Moroccan treaty provided for the tax-free import of water, food, and other goods into Gibraltar by Moroccan Jews. Consequently, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Moroccan Jews, mainly from the north of the country, established immigrant colonies in Gibraltar, situated only a few miles from Tangier. Close rabbinical ties were maintained between Tetouan and Gibraltar, as evidenced, for example, by Yitzhak Ben-Gaulid’s responsa with the community in Gibraltar. In 1843, Moroccan Jews in the British colony issued Esperanza (also known as Tikvat Israel), among the oldest newspapers in the Jewish world. Portugal and its Atlantic colonies also attracted Jewish merchants, who established their communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁷ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Oran, in French-occupied Algeria, was a significant immigration destination for Moroccan Jews, again mostly from the north. In Oran, Jewish immigrants from Tetouan established one of the first Moroccan newspapers to appear outside of Morocco, Maguid Micharim (Heb., The Preacher of Righteousness). Edited and published by Eliyahu (Eli) Karsenty, it was initially called Le Tétouanais and appeared in Judeo-Arabic between 1895 and 1896.⁸

Emigration from Morocco to the Mediterranean colonies in Gibraltar and Algeria at the time can by no means be understood as a strictly Jewish phenomenon. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Muslim merchants from Fez, for example, also moved to West Africa and Egypt-Sudan, mostly to Cairo. Others resettled in Manchester and Marseille. Oran also became a site of significant Moroccan Muslim immigration around that time, largely from neighboring northern Morocco. The immigrants were natives of the Rif area who moved to work on French colonial projects in Algeria.⁹

International labor migration, both to and from Morocco, was deeply rooted in the country’s changing bilateral relations with colonial European powers. Following Spain’s defeat of Morocco during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60, Moroccan policymakers implemented a set of military, economic, and political reforms that, among other things, led to rapid urbanization. These included the opening of the country’s coastal towns to European immigration. A central case in point was the city of Tangier, which, as we have seen, became one of the main European concentrations in Africa at the time, situated just a few miles from European shores. Tangier’s urbanization in the mid-nineteenth century brought large waves of internal Muslim migration into the city, from the inland and the surrounding rural Rif area. The latter was among the poorest parts of Morocco. Waves of Jewish immigration to Tangier also began with the arrival of politically and economically notable families from nearby Tetouan and from Meknes and Sale in Morocco’s interior.¹⁰

From the second half of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, emigration from Morocco entered a new phase. In those years, tens of millions of people moved within Europe and, from there, to Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. On the eve of World War I, some thirty thousand North Africans, many of whom were Moroccan Muslims, were working in the metallurgical industries and the mines of mainland France.¹¹

Dramatic political, social, and economic changes were taking place simultaneously in different parts of the world, leading to a global rather than exclusively European age of mass migration. Brazil and Argentina, two major immigration destinations in Latin America, as well as Venezuela had recently gained independence from Portugal and Spain. In the course of developing national aspirations for economic expansion, coupled with the need for a steady labor supply, these countries and others adopted liberal immigration policies. Some of them set up immigration agencies in Europe for the express purpose of achieving their economic aims.¹²

The end of the nineteenth century was also marked by the “rubber boom” in the Brazilian Amazon. The Brazilian government published pro-immigration propaganda in Europe and offered foreigners government labor contracts with benefits, including free transportation and often free land. The Amazon River and its tributaries were opened to foreign shipping, attracting a variety of European-owned shipping companies such as the Red Cross Line and Hamburg-America. These companies would link Belém do Pará and Manaus with Lisbon, and Barcelona with the Azores, Marseille, Genoa, and Tangier.¹³

THE TRANSATLANTIC MOROCCAN JEW

The emigration of Moroccan Jews to Latin America began as early as 1810, when a few Jews from northern Morocco began to work as regatões (Amazonian River peddlers), traveling between towns and cities across the Brazilian Amazon. During the 1870s, after the demand for rubber from that region increased, Moroccan Jews, regardless of their relatively small numbers—just several hundred in the overall migratory process—became a significant element in the economic life of the Amazon. Joining European, Syrian, and Lebanese businessmen, they became rubber traders, regatões, and aviadores (owners of shipping houses and import-export traders) that scattered themselves across the Amazon until they reached its western terminus in the Peruvian city of Iquitos.¹⁴ In 1910, Professor Isaac Pisa, a traveling teacher for the AIU schools in Morocco, visited Iquitos and reported that out of a population of about three hundred Jews, two hundred were former students of the AIU in Morocco. Typical names seen on storefronts along the city’s main thoroughfare included, according to Pisa, “Cohen, Toledano, Benmergui, Delmar, Serfaty, Benassayag, Elaluf, Pinto, etc.; exactly as in Morocco.”¹⁵

After sojourns in Brazil or the more established communities of the western Mediterranean, some Moroccan Jewish migrants began to regard Argentina as a viable alternative for establishing themselves in commerce. Moroccan Jews in Argentina started out as peddlers, and of these, some became petits commerçants, many of whom opened small shops specializing in clothing and fabrics, while others established large businesses, mainly as textile manufacturers. Whereas other Jewish immigrants to Argentina tended to concentrate in the capital city, Buenos Aires, Moroccan Jews spread across the country. As early as the 1880s, Moroccans were the first Jewish settlers in many interior cities. According to a census undertaken in 1909 by local authorities, the interior of Argentina was home to 358 Moroccans.¹⁶ Moroccans in Argentina were scattered in one of the smallest Jewish hubs that even in 1900 was ranked twenty-fourth in size. As a place that had just begun to attract Jewish immigrants, Argentina lacked an established Jewish elite and much of the socioeconomic gaps and related paternalist and arrogant attitudes toward newcomers that might have placed Moroccans in the lower ranks of Jewish society.¹⁷ For non-Jewish Argentinians, the “Spanish” appearances of Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco and their fluency in Spanish often masked their religious or ethnic origins in Morocco. The average Argentinian tended to associate them with non-Jewish Spaniards rather than with the two other communities of Jewish immigrants to the country—the Turcos (meaning “Turks,” though in fact they were Arabic-speaking Jews) and the Rusos (Jews from Eastern Europe), who had become a main target for xenophobia in Argentina.¹⁸

In Venezuela, the first signs of a Jewish Moroccan presence date back to the 1880s.¹⁹ Jews from northern Morocco, many of whom had resettled in southern Spain, joined larger waves of Spanish emigration to Venezuela from the provinces of Andalusia and Galicia, as well as the Canary Islands.²⁰ These pioneering individuals concentrated in the eastern part of the country, mainly in Barcelona, Carúpano, and Cumaná, while others settled in the center, in La Victoria and Villa de Cura. Nevertheless, the majority of Venezuelan Jews were concentrated in Caracas and surrounding areas like Los Teques and La Guaira. According to Carciente, by 1907 there were 207 Moroccan Jews living in Caracas alone.²¹ As in other Latin American destinations, most Moroccan Jews in Venezuela started out as itinerant peddlers, moving up within a generation or two into the ranks of merchants and bankers. Many chose to work in the textile industry. Small wonder, then, that two of the six most important textile firms in the country, La Casa Benatar and Bendelac y Cía, were owned by Jews from northern Morocco. Northern Moroccan Jews even participated in the establishment of the first Commercial Bureau in the country.²²

Despite the relatively small number of people who emigrated from northern Morocco, the influence of emigration on the region’s small communities was disproportionately significant. As mentioned, the first branches of the AIU schools were opened in Tetouan and Tangier in the early 1860s. The worldwide AIU school system was a direct outcome of a refugee crisis in which displaced members of northern Morocco Jewish communities resettled among fellow community members in Gibraltar during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60. The AIU was seen by both local leadership and European philanthropists as part of the rehabilitation of these communities. The founding of the AIU represented a new hierarchization in which western European and North American Jews treated the Jewish communities of the east, including East European Jews and Maghrebi Jews, as Jewries in distress (see chap. 5 about this twentieth-century development). But this new global dynamic also gave rise to local community-building efforts in northern Morocco managed by the newly founded community council in Tangier that promoted the opening of the AIU schools.²³ The AIU network then became crucial to facilitating the incorporation of its hundreds of graduates from northern Morocco into the Hispanophone and Lusophone world.

In June 1879, the AIU board in Paris asked school directors to list all of the pupils who had passed through their schools since they opened. The list from the Tangier school, covering the period between 1864 and 1879, shows that out of 403 graduates, 143 (35 percent) indeed had emigrated.²⁴ In Tetouan, emigration rates were slightly higher: of 420 pupils who had graduated from the local AIU boys’ school between 1862 and 1869, 162 (38.5 percent) had emigrated.²⁵ Over the following decade and a half, migration increased. In 1885, an inspector sent by the AIU in Paris reported that “the school in Tetouan produces [pupils] only for export . . . it supplies ninety-five percent of the students sitting on its benches to emigration . . . especially to Latin America.”²⁶ Meir Levy, director of Tetouan’s AIU school at the turn of the twentieth century, explained the change in migration destination preferences in a “Report Concerning Emigration”: “With the progress that has been made in navigation, the distances have become shorter. One sets sail for Caracas as easily as one went to Gibraltar or Oran twenty-five years ago. I know some of these emigrants who have made the transatlantic crossing as many as six times.”²⁷

One might assume that their Sephardi origins eased the acceptance of Moroccan Jews in their Latin American destinations. Yet until 1912, Moroccan Jews traveling overseas usually did not declare their Jewish Moroccan origins and occasionally used European passports—typically Spanish, British, or French—upon entry.²⁸ Different from its policy toward Moroccans in the Spanish mainland, in 1875 Spain authorized the granting of Spanish citizenship to all Moroccans living in Venezuela, practically all of whom were Jews.²⁹ In the remote places where they scattered in search of livelihoods, the earliest pioneers found the maintenance of traditional Jewish communal practices almost unmanageable. Those individual migrants who worked the Amazon River in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, were not financed by any specific Jewish émigré organization, even less so by well-established Jewish communities. They were entrepreneurs mostly supported by interpersonal networks, including connections with local indigenous rubber tappers in the Amazon.³⁰

These developments were not just an outcome of Jewish emigration from northern Morocco to far-flung destinations but also a product of the migrants’ prior ties with non-Jews in their places of origin. Following the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60, northern Moroccan coastal cities attracted a growing number of Europeans, Spaniards in particular.³¹ Modern Castilian Spanish was then spoken by growing numbers of bourgeois Jews in northern Morocco, learned in the course of their evolving commercial and social connections with Spaniards, which rapidly multiplied following the Spanish-Moroccan War and were mediated by the AIU school system prior to the establishment of the protectorate in 1912 (see chap. 1). Globalization, which in this context involved Spanish settlement in both northern Morocco and Latin America, reduced to some extent the cultural, psychological, and physical distance between the two regions. Acquiring proficiency in Portuguese—linguistically similar to Spanish—was also manageable for many Spanish-speaking Jews.

Paradoxically, the establishment of the AIU, the groundbreaking Jewish-French educational project grounded in ethnic solidarity among Western European and “eastern” Jews, would in fact play a part in generating strong connections with non-Jews, and not necessarily Francophones. European languages, as well as the new professional skills and worldviews acquired or enriched at these schools, increased their graduates’ mobility and tendency to form networks that went beyond their local communal circles.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an increasing number of Moroccan Jewish immigrants were engaging in community organization as a result of their migratory experiences. Some helped found communal infrastructure including synagogues, ethnic clubs, and other more global institutional structures. On November 5, 1891, the Sociedad Israelita según Ritual Sefardíta (Israelite Society according to the Sephardi Rite) was founded in Buenos Aires. Moroccan immigrants were concentrated in the southern part of the city (the San Telmo, Monserrat, and Constitución neighborhoods), where they established the synagogue Ets Haim. Another synagogue, Chaar Hashamayim, was built nearby.³² Several other communal bodies were designed to serve the Moroccan Jewish community in the city: Guemilut Hasadim was founded in 1897 and then a new organization called Hesed ve-Emet in 1905, dedicated to “the proletariat class of Buenos Aires,” which challenged the former organization’s standing. Moroccans were not the only immigrant Jews to establish communal institutions at that time. In 1909, for example, Sociedad Israelita de Socorros Mutuos Varsovia (after 1927, the name was changed to Zwi Migdal after one of its founders) was established in Buenos Aires by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. A year later, they set up Hevra Kedusha Ashkenazi, the burial society for Ashkenazi Jews. Jews from Damascus established Bene Emet in 1915 and Hesed Shel Emet Sefaradit, the burial society for Jews from Aleppo, in 1929.

Adriana Brodsky has explained the sociopolitical dynamics that gave rise to multiple Jewish organizations in the city. The newly established communities did not come into being merely to fulfill religious or communal needs but also for the purposes of self-esteem and boundary maintenance between different ethnic groups that shared the same space. By 1905, there were three thousand non-Ashkenazi Jews in Argentina. Breaking with the earlier tendency of Moroccans to scatter throughout the country, 750 Jewish immigrants now concentrated in Buenos Aires, almost all of them from northern Morocco, mostly from Tetouan. Preferring to socialize among their own, most immigrants from northern Morocco in Buenos Aires did not join the Congregación Israelita, the central official Jewish communal organization established by Jewish immigrants from Europe. Rather, they gathered for prayers in private homes.

The Sociedad Israelita según Ritual Sefardíta, established in 1891, became known as the Congregación Israelita Latina in the twentieth century. This designation lasted until 1976, when it changed its name to Asociación Comunidad Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires. For purposes of ethnic self-assertion, Moroccan Jews in Buenos Aires collectively described themselves as Latin. The choice was likely based on their imagined Hispanic origins and corresponding language and used to differentiate themselves from the ethnic cultures and languages of Ashkenazi Jews—but not only them. They also sought to differentiate themselves from Syrian and Ladino-speaking Jews from the Ottoman Empire, who used Sefaradí more frequently to describe their particularistic organizations.³³

Although most Spanish-speaking Moroccan immigrants to Latin America were not strictly subordinated to ethnic communal frameworks in their daily lives, they, like many other groups of immigrants, began to develop nostalgic attachments to their places of origin, designating times and places at which they could express their unique connection to Morocco, and northern Morocco in particular. This hometown consciousness was based on their Sephardi and even more clearly on their Latin Jewish origins as symbols of their particularistic local Jewish identity. In Venezuela, too, the Centro Hispano-Israelita (Hispanic Israelite Center) recreational club, operated by Moroccan Jews in Caracas between 1931 and 1935, identified as Hispanic, whereas the Eastern European community adopted the name Sociedad Israelita Ashkenazit de Venezuela to indicate its own distinctiveness.³⁴

This process of community differentiation in Argentina and Venezuela began to shape the way Latin America was perceived in the Jewish communities of northern Morocco, where, by the end of the nineteenth century, a new sort of ethnic migration agency had emerged. Leon Serfaty, a Tetouan native, was nominated by the director of the AIU school in Tetouan to promote the work of the AIU among his fellow immigrants in Buenos Aires, where a branch of the AIU had been established in 1892. In 1899, for the first time, the AIU Graduates Association in Tangier subsidized the emigration of twelve recent graduates to Latin America, marking a break from the recent past, when migration was facilitated by less formal ties among graduates.³⁵ By 1899, the AIU in northern Morocco had taken on an active role as an agency of specifically Jewish migration to Latin America. The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), based in Argentina, provided the social framework for Jews wishing to migrate to Latin America.³⁶ The AIU promoted the relocation of teachers from northern Morocco to JCA colonies in Argentina. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were twenty schools operating in these colonies, all directed by AIU graduates.³⁷ The character of the networks facilitating Jewish emigration from northern Morocco to Latin America thus changed as the identities of the migrants changed. Through these evolving ethnic networks, teachers sent to work in Jewish schools, rather than just recent AIU graduates and their friends, began to join the migratory trend.

Subsequently, transnational connections between home and abroad were strengthened on the basis of remittances that helped establish new institutions in Morocco. In the late nineteenth century, the AIU Alumni Association in Tangier, established in 1893, made special appeals to its overseas graduates, who would respond with generosity that far outweighed their numbers. For example, as Susan Gilson Miller has shown, the contribution of overseas alumni for the period 1895–1900 totaled 30 percent of all donations, even as they comprised only 13 percent of the AIU graduates. In 1898 alone, émigrés contributed 40 percent of the total while comprising only 16 percent of donors.³⁸

Once the benefits of maintaining ties with émigrés became understood, the Jewish community council of Tangier established an Emigration Fund “to assist in the emigration of youth who have an aptitude for salesmanship, or who know a trade.” The fund was announced in local synagogues, along with the application criteria: applicants aged eighteen to twenty-two years old had to submit a letter of recommendation and promise to use the money for passage only. Once the announcement was made, a steady stream of requests began.³⁹ Synagogues in Tangier and Tetouan thus became places where local Jews learned to attach their understandings of migration and their migratory aspirations to their religious Jewish background, and where they could access the resources needed to realize those aspirations.

THE BIRTH OF A LEGEND IN MOROCCO

A report in 1901 noted how the “Americans” (referring to Moroccan émigrés in the Americas) offered proof to their compatriots back home that hard work in one’s AIU studies paid off.⁴⁰ Later that year, Isaac Pisa, deputy of the AIU in Morocco, traveled to Iquitos and wrote, “In Tangier, they speak of Iquitos as if [it were] a fabulous city with streets of gold. It is typical of [a] Tangierian to make his fortune in Iquitos. That is the vision and the dream of young people. [Yet] you must know without doubt that the road is long and [the] climate is harsh. . . . The first years for immigrants are terrible. They have to adapt to climate, customs, and commerce.”⁴¹ Pisa’s words reflect a legend in the making among Jews in northern Morocco, one in which migration was seen as a process of deliverance from poverty and a passage to paradise.

Migration had a tremendous influence on economic life back home as hundreds of families in Tangier and Tetouan relied on remittances for their livelihood. The standards of living of the families of expats were impacted not only by remittances from Latin America but also by the new businesses opened in northern Morocco by prosperous returnees. One of these businesses was La Grand Bazar La Caraqueña, or The Caracas Native’s Grand Bazaar, which operated on La Luneta Street, adjacent to Tetouan’s poor Jewish neighborhood.⁴²

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 interrupted this relative prosperity and the age of migration. Beginning in the 1920s, many countries throughout the world witnessed high rates of inflation followed by a severe economic downturn in the 1930s—the Great Depression. Consequently, two of the three million immigrants who had settled in Argentina and Brazil during the 1920s would return to their places of origin. Immigration to Argentina between 1914 and 1929 fell by about half compared to the period between 1900 and 1914.⁴³ In Venezuela, the economic hardships of that era also negatively influenced immigration policy. As a result, Jewish emigration from northern Morocco to Latin America dwindled.⁴⁴

The circumcision notebook kept by Rabbi Vidal, who worked in Tetouan from 1880 to 1940, illustrates the dramatic decrease in Jewish emigration from Tetouan to Latin America following the war. Between 1888 and 1897, an average of around one father each year was recorded in Rabbi Vidal’s notebook as residing abroad (and thus possibly returning to Tetouan for the circumcision ceremony). Reports of migratory flow for those years reveal an average of 2.2 emigrants per year. In the subsequent period, from 1900 to 1912, migration continued at a slightly increased but still modest pace, boosting the annual number of emigrant fathers who sought Rabbi Vidal’s services to 3.15. However, the period between 1913 and 1940 marked a clear decline, with the total number of emigrants over this twenty-eight-year period totaling only eleven and producing an annual average of just 0.4 emigrants who availed themselves of Rabbi Vidal’s services.⁴⁵

The change in migration trends is indicated by the number of returnees. Records show that in 1912, there were 161 Argentine nationals in Morocco, all of whom were returning Jewish expatriates: sixty-one of them returned to Tetouan, twenty to Tangier, and twenty-one to Larache, and forty-eight resided in Casablanca. In 1927, the Argentine consulate in Rabat reported that seventy-nine Argentinean nationals then living in Morocco were naturalized Moroccan natives who had returned to their homeland that year.⁴⁶

In addition, many members of the freemason lodges of the Gran Logia Regional de Marruecos were returnees from Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela; they belonged to Latin American lodges before joining the Moroccan ones and many were in fact Jews, including Samuel M. Nahón, member of Harmonía y Fraternidad de Brasil, and Leon Cohen Sedero, the founder of freemasonry in Tetouan who had begun his fraternal activity in Brazil. A. Samuel Chocrón and David Wahnon, from the Victoria Lodge No. 9 in Caracas, also visited the Melilla lodge in 1934.⁴⁷

The returnees, as well as those who stayed in Latin America, soon became objects of communal pride and a reliable source of moral support. For example, the Hahnasat Orhim (Welcoming Guests) society was a communal institution originally established in 1911 in Tangier for the purpose of lodging visiting rabbis and communal figures. The society’s existence depended upon the flow of charitable donations, including those from overseas. In its first three years of operation (1911–13), the society derived its income from members in Tangier and representatives abroad, the latter spread across some seventeen cities throughout the world, among them Iquitos, Caracas, Buenos Aires, and the three Brazilian cities of Itacoatiará, Manicoré, and Parintins.⁴⁸ The total contributions collected from overseas during the Jewish calendar year 5672 (1911–12) nearly equaled the amount collected in Tangier itself.⁴⁹

Over the following eight-year period (1913–21), the welcoming society ceased to meet and publish bulletins due to the political and economic hardships caused by World War I. Remarkably, however, the influx of donations from abroad did not stop.⁵⁰ The society was even able to purchase land in Cuesta de Marchán, a luxurious part of Tangier, where forty guest cabins for use by out-of-town visitors were built.⁵¹ When publication of its bulletin resumed in 1921, the society’s first issue indicated that “various donations” had been collected abroad.⁵² It was even possible to establish a special fund for the construction of a new hostel and synagogue solely from the contributions of the Moroccan émigré community in Caracas, which raised the significant sum of 3,011.50 francs.⁵³

Overall, the number of donors living abroad was not much larger than the number living in Tangier. But the former seems to have been comprised of businesspeople who were more active in the communal life of their country of residence. In this period of global depression and declining migration, their participation distinguished their names in the history of their communities. As part of the rising hometown consciousness of Moroccan Jews living in Argentina, those in the province of Córdoba campaigned to raise significant amounts to help the poor in Tetouan and for the Benchimol Hospital in Tangier. In 1926, they raised funds to help build the walls of the Jewish cemetery in Alcazarquivir. In 1931, the Jewish community of Tetouan requested that money be raised to build the walls of the Jewish cemetery in that city. To that end, commissions were formed in Buenos Aires and the interior provinces of Argentina.⁵⁴

In 1930, an announcement in Adelante greeted the “Peruvians in Morocco” on the anniversary of Peru’s Independence Day (June 21, 1821). The message is one among many that attests to the fact that, after World War I, with transatlantic migration on the wane globally, communities in Morocco had among them Jews of Latin American origin who continued to maintain a sense of attachment to their former countries of residence in the New World, even after their return.⁵⁵

An examination of the few available issues of Renacimiento de Israel reveals evidence of expatriate remittances in the local discourse on Latin America as a source of local empowerment. In an article entitled “Our Compatriots in Buenos Aires: Philanthropic Gestures,” the author wrote, “Not a single year passes without clear proof of their [that is, the Moroccan Jewish community in Buenos Aires’s] immense kindness, and their profound and nostalgic love for their city of birth: Tetouan. . . . These beloved sons . . . do not merely remember their [biological] fathers and brothers, but the entire population, especially the poor and the needy [of the community in northern Morocco]. Do we have in Tetouan a philanthropic society or institute that is not lavished upon and generously assisted by these very noble compatriots?”⁵⁶

A report in Adelante referred to a significant donation by Léon Taurel, a wealthy businessman and one of the leaders of the Moroccan community in Venezuela, who had visited Tetouan around the time of the 1929 report, which recounted Taurel’s impression that the synagogues of the city were not spacious enough and not suitable to modern needs. He thus decided to donate money to build a large synagogue for Tetouan. The report ended with a question from the paper’s editor as to whether something similar might happen in Tangier.⁵⁷ In another article, the newspaper announced the publication of a new book by Samuel J. Benchetrit, a young man from a poor Tangierian family who had moved to Argentina, describing him as an intellectual source of pride for the entire community.⁵⁸

The editorial boards of both Adelante and Renacimiento covered trips to northern Morocco by eminent Jewish visitors from Latin America, such as Don Savador Essayag and Don Samuel Benattar from Venezuela, Ramón Benchaya and Isaac García from Argentina, and many others.⁵⁹ These Spanish Moroccan émigrés became subjects of interest in the pages of Jewish periodicals, and their visits helped to perpetuate the discourse on migration to Latin America as a financial asset and a source of pride long after transatlantic migration had declined, even among those local Jews who had no direct connections with émigré businesspeople.

As we saw in the chapter 2, in the 1920s the emerging scholarly interest of Hispanists and Philo-Sephardi advocates in the Iberian roots of the Jewish population of northern Morocco led to the development and dissemination of a communal narrative of ancestry. One of the first Philo-Sephardi advocates to draw cultural connections between the immigrants’ roots in pre-1492 Spain and their migration to Spain’s former colonies was in fact Ángel Pulido in his famous book Stateless Spaniards. There, he stressed that, being part of the “Spanish race,” Jews were in fact part of a global Hispanophone diaspora. He reproached the AIU leadership for prioritizing the study of French over Spanish among the Jews in northern Morocco, arguing that AIU was missing an opportunity to use their natural proficiency in Spanish, which would also prove more useful for successful migration. Pulido compared the then fifty-eight million native French speakers worldwide with the eighty-five million Spanish speakers to make his point about the advantages of investing in Spanish-language education for Jews.⁶⁰

Advancing a similar argument, Hispanicist Manuel L. Ortega claimed in his book Los Hebreos en Marruecos that the journey to Spanish America so improved the command of modern Spanish among Jewish immigrants from northern Morocco that the locals mistakenly saw them as Spaniards rather than Jews.⁶¹ Pulido and Ortega were followed by Robert Ricard (1900–84), who wrote one of the earliest academic essays on the migration of Jews from northern Morocco to Latin America in 1928.⁶² Born in Paris, Ricard completed his PhD at the Sorbonne in 1933, focusing on the Spanish religious influence on Mexico in the sixteenth century. A 1926 visit to Morocco, where he delivered a series of lectures, made him aware of the connection between Morocco and his scholarly interest in Spanish Central America.⁶³ Two years later, in a pioneering article, he described the success of Hispanophone Moroccan Jewish émigrés in Argentina and Brazil and the wealth that some of them had brought back to their Moroccan hometowns.⁶⁴

Ricard’s academic work came at a time when the Jewish community in northern Morocco was increasingly emphasizing its communal connections to Latin America, and it is reasonable to believe that he was influenced by his encounter with community members during his 1926 visit to Morocco. Indeed, in his 1928 article, Ricard thanked Mr. Y. D. Semach, secretary general of the AIU in Morocco, for sharing with him information about Jewish migration to Latin America. While Semach wrote and compiled those reports for the practical use of the AIU rather than for ethnographic purposes, the Philo-Sephardi campaign used them for their own purpose of expanding Spanish influence.

Pulido’s, Ortega’s, and Ricard’s interests in the connection between Spanish Latin America and the post-1492 Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean did not develop in a vacuum and in fact reflected broader contemporary efforts to draw such connections. Rodolfo Gil Torres-Benumeya, one of the most enthusiastic advocates of Andalusian nationalism, is a good example. He used the Africanist periodical La Revista de Tropas Coloniales (known since 1926 as África: Revista de Tropas Coloniales), which circulated in Morocco, mainland Spain, and Buenos Aires, to issue a call for the Spanish authorities to reach out to the (mostly Christian) Arab Siro-Lebanese communities in Latin America—which he saw as part of Spain’s historic Andalusi diaspora—in order to promote Spain’s mission to spread its influence worldwide.⁶⁵ However, Spain’s influence on the eastern parts of the Mediterranean were limited, unlike its colonial influence in northern Morocco. As almost all North African immigrants in Latin America were Jews, the mission to spread Spain’s culture and commercial influence in the diaspora became associated with the Jewish communities in northern Morocco. The connections to Latin American destinations were mediated by evolving self-perceptions about their roots in Iberia. Small surprise, then, that one Adelante article, for example, drew an explicit connection between the “discovery of America” and the Jewish community’s roots in Spain.⁶⁶

A TRANSATLANTIC COMMUNITY, A PROLONGING PRIDE

The relationship between Morocco and Latin America extended beyond the mere literary constructions of Jewish origins in Iberia and in fact shaped living connections with those who had undertaken the transatlantic journey. Given the extent of the almost half-century-old migration from Morocco to Latin America by the mid-twentieth century, many Jews in northern Morocco had acquaintances or family members living in the New World. Beyond any shared ancient histories, their connections to Latin America were fueled by the legends they would hear in their family circles about relatives living abroad and sometimes leading adventure-filled lives in the Americas. One example is the story by Abraham Pinto, who had returned to Tangier from the Amazon rubber trade (probably around the turn of the twentieth century) and finally agreed, at the age of 83, to share his adventures with his closest family members. These memories were written down by Pinto’s nephews at his request in Tangier on November 12, 1945.⁶⁷

Here again, however, the scholarly institutions developed by Spanish colonialism in Morocco, particularly by the Francoist regime (see chap. 2) facilitated the transmission of these stories and their standardization as part of a collective communal narrative. For instance, the General Franco Institute for Hispano-Arab Studies published Indianos Tetouaníes in Tetouan in 1951. The book was part of a trilogy, El Indiano, al Kadi y la Luna, authored by Isaac Benarroch Pinto, the son of a returning migrant from Latin America.⁶⁸ In his novel, Benarroch Pinto recounts the thrilling story of a young man from the lower classes of Tetouan’s Jewish society who immigrates to Argentina in 1867 with the aim of alleviating his family’s economic burdens. His success overseas changes the economic destiny of his family, enabling his father to quit his job as a tinsmith and “live as the father of a rich trader from overseas.” The novel ends with the protagonist returning to his hometown to attend his sister’s wedding and donating money to the needy of the Jewish community there.⁶⁹ Benarroch Pinto’s narrative processed historical events into a story to which Jews could relate based on their understandings of Latin American migration as they were conveyed in popular communal narratives and family stories.

These ties were reflected in a few contemporaneous publications. In Venezuela, still one of the major migratory destinations for Jews in the Spanish protectorate in the 1940s, El Mundo, a recent but important Jewish periodical edited by Jews from Tetouan, published material indicative of the ties between Jewish communities in northern Morocco and Venezuela. It published the first chapters of Indianos Tetouaníes in 1949, even prior to the novel’s appearance in Tetouan.⁷⁰ That same year, it also published a report on the establishment of Or Hayeladim, an educational institution in Tetouan, noting that the Moroccan community in Caracas had financed its inauguration. The authors sent a copy of the article for republication in the northern Moroccan journal España, a Spanish-language newspaper read by northern Moroccan Jews and non-Jews alike.⁷¹ In her report about Spanish Morocco for the 1953 edition of the American Jewish Yearbook, Hélène Cazes Bénatar described Or Hayeladim as the principal charitable institution of the Jewish community of Tetouan.⁷²

In 1949, the official bulletin of the Tetouan Jewish community reported on a ball organized by Jacobo Bentata, a wealthy Jew from Venezuela. In 1956, two months after Morocco’s independence, Or-Luz published an interview with a descendant of the community living in Argentina who had visited Tetouan for the first time in his life that year. The main impression conveyed by the interview was that “Tetouan preserves most purely its traditions and costumes.” The interviewee was presented as a successful pediatrician who never forgot his ancestral origins in Tetouan.⁷³

Remarkably, Moroccan Jews in Venezuela started to organize themselves communally only in the early twentieth century. They were scattered across towns such as La Guaira, Puerto Cabello, Maracaibo, and Los Teques, where they gathered in private homes for weekly Sabbath prayers and other religious obligations.⁷⁴ It was only in 1907, in Caracas, that a group of immigrants from Morocco founded the Sociedad Sefardí de Beneficencia, a Sephardi welfare society with 178 members. The organization lasted for only two years. Another attempt was made in 1919 with the Sociedad Israelita de Venezuela, which aimed “to improve the moral and intellectual level of Jews in Caracas” and lasted until 1923.⁷⁵ Then, in 1930, a group of prominent Moroccan immigrants founded the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (AIV), the central communal organization of Sephardi Jews in that country. Its goal, to establish a central Sephardi synagogue to replace the numerous small private ones, was finally realized in 1939, when members inaugurated the El Conde synagogue in Caracas.

The legendary quality of early migration to Latin America continued to reverberate in the stories of northern Moroccan Jews throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In her memoir, published in the US in 1987, Alegría Bendelac describes her father’s migration to Venezuela as an adolescent, recalling how, unlike those who had preceded him, he had returned home with a little bundle of gold coins.⁷⁶ Bendelac’s description echoes the way migratory experiences to “America” were typically narrated to the younger generation, whether in the first or third person, thus fueling the imaginations of many youngsters in Tangier and Tetouan, their family circles, and their Jewish friends. These and other narratives were alive in Tangier in the 1980s, in Venezuela in the 1990s, in the United Stated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in Israel as late as 2010, continuing to shape the collective story of dispersion among Hispanic Moroccan Jews well into the twenty-first century.⁷⁷

In an interview I conducted in 2009, Perla, then in her seventies, recalled hearing Brazilian songs in her grandmother’s house growing up and recounted anecdotes about the Amazonian way of life that she had heard about from her husband’s family.⁷⁸ Daniel, whom I interviewed in Israel around the same time, shared memories of a visit by his Argentinian aunt to Tangier in the 1950s. For him, then only ten years old, her visit produced an exciting encounter with the “Americas” and its “aristocratic lifestyle,” at least as he recounted it in the interview.⁷⁹ In another interview, Clarice reminisced about her relatives’ earlier migration to Latin America and recalled a story about “Los Peruanos” (the Peruvians), a Jewish family who returned to Tangier from Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. This story triggered her memories of additional stories about another uncle who had emigrated to the Amazon and made a fortune. In the following chapters, I will discuss how this prolonging legacy of migration, and the affinities to the broader Hispanophone world it created, interacted with the development of Zionism in northern Morocco and Latin America from the early through the mid-twentieth century.